Letters from Amherst. Samuel R. Delany
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wound round my nose, against the January chill.
The eggs themselves were simply scrambled in a double boiler with butter, fresh chives, and a dash of Worcestershire. But the fish and bagel and champagne accoutrements were something.
We sat down to the table at nine-thirty and “breakfasted” till noon.
Iva was at her most mature and charming—finally to go off to a Saturday morning baby-sitting job towards eleven.
Judy left from breakfast, an hour after Iva, to go meet Tom Disch for lunch.
It was all quite fun.
Now one of Judy’s reasons for coming down through New York was that her grandson, Kevin, at twenty-four, was expecting his first child. The last time I’d seen Kevin was well over a dozen years ago, when I’d visited his mother, Merril, in Milford PA, back when Kevin was a rambunctious moppet of eight. Judy had timed her trip through the city on the off chance it would take in the new baby’s birth and she might drop down to Philadelphia to see them. (“But it’s their first kid, and first children are always two weeks late. So I don’t really have much hope.”) Sure enough, however, twenty minutes after she’d left to meet Tom, there was a phone call from a very tired and precise sounding young man: “Is Judith Merril there …?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “She just left for lunch. You missed her by about twenty minutes.”
“Well,” he said. “This is her grandson, Kevin. Could you please give her a message for me. Now be sure she gets it exactly: ‘Happy Birthday, Great Grandma!’”
Well, of course I exploded with congratulations and good wishes (and the obligatory, “I know you don’t remember me, Kevin, but the last time I saw you was …”), then had a chat with Merril, his mom, who was there. And whom I hadn’t talked to for a decade. (The last time I actually saw her was when she came to New York and picked me up at the Heavenly Breakfast, to drive me down to Milford, and we had an interesting encounter with some high school drop-out toughs in a diner where we’d stopped for coffee. One came up to me in what was clearly an attempt to start trouble and asked: “Hey, fella. Who does your hair?”—as it was all over my head in a very long proto-Afro [also I wore an earring at the time, back then when everybody else didn’t], the part that wasn’t in a very bushy ponytail.
(In perfect innocence I answered, ‘Oh, I do it myself,’ and went back to my coffee, while Merril—who was rather heavy and more familiar than I with the mores of the area—held her breath on the counter stool beside me, waiting for the first punch … which never flew. Because it never occurred to me that the guy with the denim jacket, pimply chin, open sweatshirt, and the tattoos showing over his t-shirt collar wasn’t perfectly serious. Back in the car Merril and I laughed about it for the rest of the trip down.) At any rate, Judy’s new (and first), great-grandchild was a girl, five-and-a-half pounds, named Kelly Nichole. Mother and daughter were both fine. (It’s quite astonishing to think of Merril, who’s only a couple of years older than I am, as a grandmother!) And when I got off the phone, I called Tom, who hadn’t left to meet Judy yet, and conveyed the message. “Now be sure to get it right,” I said. “‘Happy Birthday, Great Grandma!’”
As pleased as I was, Tom assured me he would.
That evening when she came in, Judy filled me in on the rest of the story. Tom had waited till she was seated at the restaurant table before he’d reached across, taken her hand, and given her the message. The waitress had just come up to take their order, and overheard it.
So when desert time came, she brought two, both with candles, and the whole restaurant sang Happy Birthday. Twice. Telling me all this, Judy sat back on the couch, laughing. “It was really the most wonderful 67th birthday present anyone could possibly have!”
Over a couple of gossip sessions Judy told me things about her life—and the SF world—that were just fascinating. In this tiny circle in which I’ve made my living for so many years, much of the gossip about Judy has the quality of legend already. And the first evening she was there, David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer came over—and David tried, not very subtly, to prompt her into writing an autobiography; an idea she likes, I think. If she does it, it will be quite wonderful for any of us sunk in the field’s mythology.
She told us about her early affair with the legendary John Michel, a Futurean who never really wrote any SF but who was the acknowledged genius of the bunch, the mentor of Pohl and Kornbluth and Asimov as well as of Judy. (“My first half-dozen sales—mysteries and westerns, all—were just a case of writing down what John told us to write. Then revising them the way he told us to revise them. It was pretty much the same with Fred and Ike too, I guess.”) She told us the perfectly hysterical story of how Donald Wollheim finally told Michel that he could no longer see Judy because she had been a Trotskyite (Wollheim was a Stalinist; none of them were over twenty-one) and tried to expel her from the group; and how she and Virginia Kidd had gotten the rest of them together and expelled them from the Futureans in return.
“Where was Sam Moskowitz in all this?” I asked.
Judy laughed. “Off in New Jersey, I suppose, writing The Immortal Storm.”
She told us about her first meeting with Ted Sturgeon, who was rooming down the street from her with Jay Stanton at the time in the late ’40s when her Fuller Brush Man informed her that there was an SF writer living in the neighborhood—and Judy, already a Sturgeon fan, sent Ted a fan letter and was invited to come over.
She also spoke of her equally legendary affair with Walter O. (“Darfsteller,” Canticle for Leibowitz) Miller, from half a dozen years later. And how, with their combined five children, they fled about the country, now to Texas, now to Chicago, now to Florida, to escape hounding X-es. (“For better or for worse, it really was the passion of my life. I remember once, in some hotel, we were in bed together. And in the dark, after we’d just finished making love, Walt said to me: ‘We’re both wonderful performers. And we’ve both found the perfect audience. I wonder if we’ll ever perform for anyone else?’ But really, that was the level the whole thing happened on—” she chuckled, sitting back on the green couch Big Del Gaizo Fellow had given me the month before, raising the general designer standard of the living room by a good three-hundred percent—“or almost all of it, anyway.”) In the course of the story, she recounted a harrowing scene, when, in some shack in Florida, long, lanky Fred Pohl showed up to physically wrest back his and Judy’s mutual daughter, Ann, at which point Walt came in with a gun. (“Fred, with impressive bravery—he really didn’t know it wasn’t loaded—grabbed the thing by the barrel and yanked it out of Walt’s hands!”) The two men ended up rolling all over the kitchen floor (“… while I stood there like a ninny, crying, ‘You can’t do that in here! If you’re going to do that, take it outside! Go on, don’t fight in here! Fight outside’”). Fred’s glasses got broken. (“That was really the end of it, because without them he was perfectly blind—only Walt didn’t know that!”) Three-year-old Merril came running up to her 26-year-old ex-stepfather with all the fragments—Fred was still searching around for them on the floor—and said: ‘Here they are, daddy!’”
The story went on, tense with out-of-state phone calls and advice from Milt Amgott (up until half a dozen years ago my own aging lawyer, but back in the late-’40s the entire science fiction community’s legal eagle), and climaxed in the custody trial at which Judy lost Ann to Fred and at which, quite to Judy’s astonishment, Walt’s refined, southern Gentle Woman mother testified on Judy’s behalf. (“Ah can think of no home in which Ah would prefer to see my grandchildren raised.”) I was impressed, Judy told me. The judge was impressed. But then, Mrs. Miller was a very impressive woman!
Still, the verdict went against Judy—since it was nineteen fifty and she and Walt were unquestionably “living in sin”; also Fred had now married Carol, and thus had an unstained home for the kids to come to.
That custody trial polarized the whole SF community. It is actually the explanation—I’ve known this for years—for the perfectly mindless selection of SF writers cited in Kingsley Amis’s