Authors: Dan Simmons
By summer of 1987, the new editorial suggestion was—“Rewrite it as two books.”
I might have done that if I could, but the break between the two would have been artificial and false. It would have felt like one of the old Saturday movie serials from the era before me, one which always ended in a fake cliff-hanger. I simply couldn’t do it.
At the end of the summer of 1987, events threw a new curve at me. The school district administrators in order to show (in their words) that “
all teachers were interchangeable
” and “
it doesn’t take a gifted person to teach gifted kids
” announced that they were going to rotate APEX designers/ curriculum writers/coordinators/teachers back to the regular classroom and select their successors more or less at random.
I loved teaching. I’d loved teaching in the regular classroom. But I knew a simple secret that the district administrators didn’t— namely that it
did
require gifted people to teach profoundly gifted kids (and to write the appropriate curriculum for them)— so I knew that APEX, the most profoundly creative and successful thing I’d ever accomplished, would die when they brought in teachers not able or willing to put in the time and creativity to keep it going.
So Karen and I made perhaps the riskiest and boldest decision of our life together: I would resign from teaching and write full-time. True, we didn’t seem any closer to that elusive $6,500 for the accepted
Carrion Comfort
than we’d been a year earlier and my constant rewritings to please the unpleasable female editor were keeping me from beginning other novels or even writing many short stories, but if I were to
write full-time.
. . .
It was an insane choice. So we made it. That autumn, for the first time since I’d gone off to kindergarten in 1953, I didn’t go to school come September. It was, to put it mildly, a traumatic separation.
And into September and October the waiting for clear editorial direction went on. It began to dawn on me that this new publisher had little or no vested interest in
Carrion Comfort
; they hadn’t selected it, hadn’t paid for it, but had merely inherited it as a sort of payment from a defunct, short-lived house that owed them money. Nor did the young editor who’d sent me so many (incomprehensible, undo-able) single-space pages over the last fourteen months have much vested interest in
Carrion Comfort
. Her job was to remake the entire field of horror fiction and make her house the preeminent purveyor of the new genre, not “fix” this long, sprawling almost-unknown writer’s huge manuscript.
In late October of 1987, I panicked. Even though school had started more than two months earlier, I flew out to Massachussetts— one of the few states that takes gifted/talented education seriously— and looked for G/T-coordinator jobs in the Boston area. The competition for such jobs there was cutthroat. Teachers and administrators with Ph.D.’s routinely competed for such positions
After getting three offers of coordinator positions in districts around Boston, I returned to Colorado. Karen and I decided that since it seemed that I
could
get better employment than my old teaching job if necessary, I should defer that lifeboat for now and concentrate on getting
Carrion Comfort
published and on writing more novels.
We began living on our meager savings and then on our PERA— teacher retirement money. I remember the early winter day when we celebrated, dancing around as if I’d sold another book, when I found a couple of hundred dollars of mine in old Missouri and New York teacher retirement funds.
In the truest sense, we were eating our seed corn.
Early in 1988, more than eighteen months after the editorial relationship began, my editor sent me her final suggestion on the matter— “
Keep the title
Carrion Comfort,
throw everything else out. Start over from scratch
.”
That was it.
I’d wasted a year and a half of my writing time and lost half of my teacher’s pay and left my real profession. For nothing.
I called my agent Richard Curtis and said that I was going to buy my book back from this publisher. I didn’t have any money at the moment, but I was making arrangements to sell our house so that I could write a check to buy the book back and. . . .
Richard explained that I wouldn’t be writing any check. He’d arrange the buy-back contract for
Carrion Comfort
so that the bulk of the $12,500 we’d repay would come only after I found a new publisher for the book.
It was a temporary relief.
Of course, I didn’t believe I’d ever find a new publisher for the book.
Dalton Trumbo, author of the ultimate antiwar novel and movie
Johnny Got His Gun
, didn’t live to finish his last novel,
Night of the Aurochs
.
Trumbo was born in 1905 and grew up in Grand Junction, Colorado, a town I know pretty well. Inspired by a newspaper article about a British officer who was horribly disfigured in the Great War, Trumbo managed to get
Johnny Got His Gun
published in 1939. (Ironically,
Johnny Got His Gun
, perhaps the most unrelenting antiwar novel to that time or since, was most popular in Japan right before World War II, even as that nation gave itself up totally to militarism and aggression. Perhaps for this reason, Trumbo himself later said that he was happy his little book had gone out of print by the time the United States entered the war. He then wrote the script for
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
, the story of Jimmy Dolittle’s April 1942 raid, starring Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson.)
In 1943, Trumbo joned the Communist Party but was soon too busy to go to meetings or take any active role. That didn’t help when he refused to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee and he became one of the infamous “Hollywood Ten.” In 1950 he went to jail for a year.
There are only two things that I imagine I have in common with Dalton Trumbo. First, we were both fast writers. (He churned out
Roman Holiday
using writer Ian McLellan Hunter as a “front” name and Hunter won an Oscar for the script. Trumbo went on to write
Spartacus
,
Exodus
,
Papillon
, and many other award-winning movies under his own name.) The second thing I believe Trumbo and I had in common was a fascination with the kind of evil and violence that comes from exerting one’s will over another person.
Trumbo’s unfinished
Night of the Aurochs
, which was published posthumously and that I read only after writing
Carrion Comfort
, was his attempt to explain the darkest parts of human nature that led to the Holocaust (and to the inevitable future Holocausts we’re hurtling toward). Aurochs were a now-extinct shaggy, stupid, wild European ox.
Night of the Aurochs
is written, at least partially, in the form of a first-person autobiography of a young Nazi named Grieban who eventually becomes the commandant at Auschwitz.
Grieban, as is true of most monsters, does not consider himself a monster. Much of his first-person narrative is an attempt to defend the Third Reich’s Final Solution as something no more sinister than the Confederate States attempt to prevent racial miscegenation. He sees himself as a sort of Robert E. Lee in the cause of defending racial purity.
In truth, of course, Grieban is a mind vampire. It’s not racial purity that he seeks, but power over other people. And nowhere in the recent history of our species has the scourge of mind vampirism spread so quickly and completely as it did in Europe from 1936 to 1945.
It’s been decades since I’ve read
Night of the Aurochs
but I remember one scene early on where Grieban, narrating, tells of the time when he is a young teenager and he takes his innocent, blonde, Aryan, sweet little female cousin out into the woods. Once there, Grieban realizes he has total control over his little eight-or nine-year-old cousin.
Crouch, he orders her. Frightened, she crouches. Take your under-pants off, he orders her. She complies. Now, pee, he commands.
Eventually, terrified, she does.
Grieban is sexually excited as he watches his little girl-cousin urinate in front of him, not because of her exposure, but because of his power over her. He realizes then that under the right circumstances, a person can make other people
do anything you want them to
. The idea excites him to orgasm, both then and later in Auschwitz.
It’s a sick idea. It’s also— I believe— an important truth.
Absolute power does more than corrupt us absolutely, it gives us the blood-power taste of total control. Such control is more addicting than heroin. It is the addiction of mind vampirism.
When I read the unfinished first draft that was Trumbo’s
Night of the Aurochs
, I knew that it had been worth it to write and to fight for
Carrion Comfort
, even if my own book would never be published.
When I realized that my editor and publisher in 1986–1987 were never going to get around to figuring out or publishing my novel, I got busy.
Even before arranging to buy back
Carrion Comfort
from them, I’d started writing my brains out. The hardest part that first solo autumn of 1987 was simply realizing that I was technically
unemployed
. The thought made me crazy. I’d worked my way through college and graduate school and worked as a teacher ever since. The idea of having no job to go off to, no income to depend on— none at all— was terrifying. (Karen remained calmer than I did, even as we ate up our last seed corn in terms of our PERA retirement money. Knowing that there are fewer than five hundred full-time writers— writers who actually make a living just on their writing of fiction— out of a population of 300
million
Americans, she still remained confident that things would work out for my writing career and us. Or at least she said she did . . . and she convinced me.)
With Richard Curtis looking for another publisher who might want a thousand page (in print) major horror novel about violence from a relatively unknown writer, I simply kept writing new fiction.
I wrote
Phases of Gravity
, a novel about the philosophical and epistemological midlife crisis of a former Apollo astronaut who’d walked on the moon but realized now that it had felt like just another simulation.
I wrote the SF novel
Hyperion
— an expansive, big-canvas, Jack Vanceish science fiction tale written in the decade when SF had gotten small and tight and noir and cyberpunkish.
I knew that the full tale of
Hyperion
would be another fifteen-hundred-page book but I decided never to go through that struggle for publication again, at least not until I had some clout behind me as a writer to get it published in one volume. I immediately began the second part of the tale in a “sequel” I called
The Fall of Hyperion
.
I wrote two more stories for
OMNI
and four stories for a three-writer anthology from Dark Harvest Press called
Night Visions 5
— an anthology I shared with two guys named George R. R. Martin and Stephen King.
And while I was writing, both
Hyperion
and
Phases of Gravity
sold to Bantam, the former as an SF novel and the latter as a mainstream novel, the first in a new series of “near-SF-mainstream” books under an imprint they were calling Spectra. (They later rebadged
Phases of Gravity
, perhaps the favorite novel I’ve written, as SF, but it isn’t.)
And then . . .
Carrion Comfort
sold.
The advance was low, not enough to pay back the publisher I’d taken the book away from, but I could make up the difference now with money from the other advances. The new publisher was a specialty, limited-edition publisher— Dark Harvest Press, the guys who’d sandwiched my three stories in between George Martin’s and Steve King’s— and the press run for
Carrion Comfort
would be small, only about three thousand hardcovers total.
I didn’t care. It would be
published
. Finally.
Again, there was no real editing or copyediting. I remember the total copyediting suggestions of the two guy-publishers: change “mantle” to “mantel,” and drop the “e” in “adrenaline.” (Actually, “adrenalin” would have worked.)
They sent me proof pages with three days to copyedit
Carrion Comfort
myself when I was writing the final pages of
Hyperion
. It was a mess.
Then they showed me the only artist they could afford— for cover, color frontispiece, and about ten interior illustrations. (Illustrations for
Carrion Comfort
? The idea struck me as odd, but it
was
a limited-edition volume and I knew nothing about such things.) But I did know that I didn’t like the artist’s work.
So with about five weeks to go before the art deadline, I got a local artist friend Kathy— Kathleen McNeil Sherman— to do the cover, frontispiece, and ten interior pieces with me.
For some reason, Kathy and I decided on scratchboard as our common technique. Now, scratchboard is fun— it’s working on a large, inked panel with a razor blade, simply scratching away the highlights and crosshatchings and stuff to expose the white beneath the black ink. But it’s a tricky technique working in reverse like that, rather like backing a car and trailer down a curved alley, and neither Kathy nor I had worked in it for many years. It made it more fun.
And it
was
fun. After fifteen hours a day of working on my new novel upstairs, I’d go down into our little basement to the jury-rigged drawing board I’d cobbled together and scratch away on the interior illustrations for
Carrion Comfort.
For the cover, I did the drawing and Kathy laid down the oil paint. I did the frontispiece with scatchboard and colored ink.
The illustrations— at least
my
contributions— were crude, but strangely powerful. Or at least satisfying. (For those readers who might want to see this original
Carrion Comfort
cover and some of these scratchboard illustrations, please feel free to visit my Website at
dansimmons.com
and specifically this URL for the artwork—http://dansimmons.com/art/dan_art3.htm.)