Letters from Amherst. Samuel R. Delany
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me a hug, just bubbling: “Isn’t it wonderful that she exists, Chip?”
And I had to allow that it was.
But everyone was simply babbling on about how moving she had been.
As I said to Peter Klappert when we found ourselves lingering together outside: “Talk about American Ecstatics …! Richard’s got a real live one, right here!”
Really, if she ever passes within a hundred miles of you, you must catch her. For someone under twenty-five years old, I wouldn’t be surprised if a single reading by Sanchez might change their lives forever.
That evening, when we were all gathered downstairs again, drinking and making friendly, I hunted out the burly Walter, still in jeans and his sweater, and, between buying each other far too many drinks, we got into a very interesting conversation about his work, about mine. The conversation continued through a banquet dinner (which ended in a sing-a-long with Allen Ginsberg and the Fugs [“And all the hills echoèd …” I sang into Ed Sanders’ mike as he roamed the hundred in the hall], who’d been reconvened by the AWP Program Director to entertain: it was nice to see Ed Sanders again, who’s on the Governing Board with me at New York Foundation for the Arts) in a homage to Blake, and on into the party afterwards.
Mr. Mead (Walter) is a very smart 35.
At one point when some of the other panelists had joined us, he explained that, as a political writer, people are just starting to call on him to testify in political hearings. He’s gay—and he’s wondering whether he should come out publicly or not. The general opinion was that he should probably not rush that, but that we couldn’t really advise him till we knew better what exactly his situation was.
Eventually the conversation thinned down again to the two of us. And then I did something that I have never done before at any SF con or academic convention of any sort. I asked him if he’d like to go to bed. He smiled and said: “Oh, I’d like that very much.” Then he asked me: “Is it my hands?” (He’d already mentioned that he’d read everything I’d ever published.)
I laughed. “No. It’s just you. But it’s a little odd to meet 50 perfect strangers who are quite so privy to all your sexual particularities.”
“I would probably have said something to you, first,” he said. “But because I don’t bite my nails, I figured you probably wouldn’t be interested.”
“Come on,” I said.
And we had a very pleasant night of it.
The next morning, after he showered, I took him to breakfast in the hotel’s overpriced mezzanine restaurant, then sent him off to his train back to whatever university he hails from. He’s not Maison Bailey, but it was still very nice.
A couple of hours later, when I was in the waiting room at the 30th Street Station, I struck up a conversation with a black poet also down at the AWP program, named Walter Mosley, who’d gone to U. Mass., and who recommended several restaurants to me in my own neighborhood I’d never heard of before.
The next three issues of the New York Review of Science Fiction will see the “Intro to Deconstruction” (my Lowell/Erie lecture) serialized in three parts. It’s kind of fun. I’ll send on copies, when I get some.
A couple of nights back, I stayed up till all hours reading René Daumal’s Mount Analogue, its completion interrupted by Daumal’s death in 1944. Then I started on his earlier, completed book, A Night of Serious Drinking. (My journal says: “Finally—after how many years [finding it first on the shelf in San Francisco’s City Lights in ’69]—read Mount Analogue.”) What an eccentric and interesting little book. A mystical tract almost wholly without God. Only one of the editorially appended notes gives in to a “Being that holds each thing accomplished,” residing at the mountain’s peak.6 But even that’s only a mountaineer’s song, which Daumal finally decided not to include in the book. In its incomplete and fragmentary form, it seems largely of the Novalis / Heinrich von Ofterdingen or Oberman tradition. Can’t think of another book that comes apart less into its respective sentences. A good book to read on a day when you’ve got a hangover [I’d overindulged at dinner the night before.] … The novel proper ends, mid-sentence, in the midst of an ecological parable that is eminently completable on the ideational level; and mentally completing it is one of the most seductive pleasures of the text.
I’d recently recommended it to our department professor who specializes in mystical literature, Lucian Miller (who’d never heard of it! Which gives you an idea of the quality of some of these guys); but I thought I’d really better read it myself before I handed it over. It quite lives up to its reputation.
Then, day before yesterday I got a call from Frank—down in New York. He’d gone over to the apartment, checking for mail in the mailbox. (Can you imagine. Three years after our break-up, he’s still getting mail there!) Because it was kind of stuffed, he took everything out and called me up to find out if I wanted him to read any of it to me over the phone. Among the stuff there was a new copy of the Australian SF Review; they just devoted an entire issue to me. He says he’s going to get the mail back to the house, but, though I know he has the best intentions, I suspect I’ll never actually see any of it again. But that’s just Frank.
Still, I’d rather like to find out what Russell Blackwell had to say about me. He’s really the best critic yet (present company excepted!) who’s written about me. Too bad he’s down under.
But that more or less brings you up to date.
I wish there was that much to tell you about the work. But I’m not even going to try.
Well, this is about half the letter I should write you! And I have not even started to respond to your letters. But I want to get this off, just so you’ll know I haven’t forgotten you.
Someone is supposed to show up here at ten to start giving me lessons in American Sign Language7 (which I know a little bit of already), and there is an Undergraduate Studies Committee Meeting at noon. And someone just printed up and distributed a poster for a guest speaker (Henry Sussman), that apparently has the wrong date on it, about which various people are running around and being mildly hysterical.
My love to you and yours.
Really, I still owe you a letter in which I actually answer yours! (I ought at least to mention that the awful situation with Michael P. is one I’ve encountered a couple of times in the last year. Larry McCaffery just went through his own version of the same thing, when a young graduate student brought charges of sexual harassment against him [from what I know of both the man and of such situations, it’s equally as unlikely as it was in Michael’s case] that flowered into something truly unpleasant. I wonder what this is indicative of?) But that will have to wait till the next moment I get some time.
All good thoughts
for more good things,
Samuel R. Delany
1. Lent to SRD by SF writer and translator for the deaf Geary Gravel.
2. “Neither the First Word nor the Last on Deconstruction, Structuralism, Post-structuralism, and Semiotics for SF Readers,” in Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary, by Samuel R. Delany (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1999).
3. A dozen years after Ginsberg’s death, SRD would teach at Naropa for fifteen summers in their Summer Writing Program.
4. “Anthony Davis—a Conversation,” in Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics, by Samuel R. Delany (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 289.
5. “Gay Writers / Gay Writing.”
6. This, of course, is discourse; though it is not a being, it is a process entailing brains and a world—the ones that are the cases (Wittgenstein).
7. Geary Gravel—see