Forget it.
Days, weeks, not even a feeble storyline came to me. All that was in my mind was the horde of invisible hornets in my face and thoughts like why the doc forgot to sew up the inside. And the difference between me and Sonny Lis ton.
Now do I hear somebody saying, There
are
heroes even if you aren’t one, creep, and heroes are interesting?
Or, well, sure, but in
fiction
you keep things moving, it’s that surmounting violent damage is a symbol—
Of what?
Well, here I offer the one little insight that crept to me.
The day after my happening a friend who is a genuine Tough Guy fell off a power pole onto a rock. He wasn’t seriously damaged and he’d piled himself up before. But this one
hurt
him in a new way. When he got out of the hospital he sat telling how he’d been unconscious, frowning in a puzzled way. Then he’d hold up one big hand and look at it, and look at his legs. I think I know what he was discovering.
How fragile we are. Fragile!
Compared to almost everything around it your body is as frail as a soap bubble. The chair you’re sitting in can break your leg, the edge of the table can crack your skull. The steering wheel of your car can crush your precious guts out. We’re bags of Jell-O, mostly water held up with goo and a few frail sticks, a pulsing mass of vulnerability in which everything depends on everything else working—and no replacements. We can be pierced, fried, crushed, broken, mutilated, and killed in a million ways by practically everything in our environments. And we run around manipulating chain saws and bulldozers and nuclear fusion… for an average of sixty-seven years. Incredible!
What agility!
And what a fantastic self-image!
A “tough” man? An eggshell. A grape in a concrete mixer. One slip with that axe and your foot’s gone. One misstep and tap your skull on the curb—cracked egg.
But we manage to skip through it for sixty years, roaring past each other in lethal missiles, playing with power mowers and welding arcs.
Astounding.
You can’t think about it, either. Not and go on doing it. Once you watch your hand whisk back from the crunch of the car door you’ve had it. Let your automatic reflexes alone. Keep up the myth. Bury deep down the knowledge of how vulnerable we are.
Heroes help us do it.
Heroes get squashed and sliced and dismembered and burnt and they shed torrents of blood—but they’re all right! They may hurt, but they go on acting furiously, thinking brilliantly.
They keep us from realizing that we’re surrounded by instant obliteration. The absolutely necessary myth.
Who needs realism?
Well, there’s my great ten-cent insight. It has a small corollary, too: When you consider the fantastic unconscious skills we and the other animals have developed to handle our dangerous environment on this planet, isn’t it possible that man is going to have some pretty hard times when he really starts living in zero-gee? We’ve seen astronauts playing with plastic bags and very carefully handling lock covers and so on. Paying attention every minute. But when you start
living
you start depending on your reflexes, on your built-up feeling of how all those hard heavy lethal things are going to behave. When they start behaving differently while still keeping their lethal mass—oops.
Ouch!!
We’ll make it, though.
Now I’ll go chew on a milkshake. Screw Sonny Liston. My next hero who shows up with his teeth on his chest and his shattered kneecaps tied up in his girl’s brassiere… and starts deciphering the riddles of the alien technology… is going to bed first.
Alone.
At least until I see my dentist.
Fflthh.
—September 20, 1971
In the October 1971
F&SF,
Baird Searles complains (gently) about a book because it must be read twice for “complete clarity.” That is, some of the references in the early part aren’t fully understandable until you’ve read the whole thing, he says, and that’s “a lot to ask of any reader.”
This startled me out of my granola.
Hey, Baird:
What????
You mean this isn’t good? But… but… what about all the sweat I’ve spent trying to build my stories so there
is
stuff that will only come out on second reading? I always thought you owed that to the reader, that a story without it was boring.
Now Baird says this is bad?
Startled, I immediately begin to look inwards. (This is my usual reaction when startled, it is sometimes criticized in traffic.)
My first observation, which we won’t even discuss, is that I really don’t know how to write. Leaving that aside as irrelevant, since I
am
writing, what’s with this reading-twice thing? Why do I feel that readers have a right to complain if there isn’t a bit of mystery, an angle or insight tucked away under the surface, like a thingie in a cereal box?
I feel this so deeply I never even knew I felt it, see. There’s this invisible face behind my shoulder, watching, waiting… it wants what it wants… if it doesn’t get it I feel it fading back disgusted, sighing, “Is that all? Cheap, Tiptree.”
All right, Face. Face it. We could be insane. Do we really believe somebody’s reading twice?
Do I read twice?
Hmmm. Wellllll… no. Be honest, I don’t, at least not read all the way through again. Not right away. What I do with one I like is immediately turn back and investigate chunks and bits, places where a sort of rich puzzlement set in. (I know this means
something,
but what?) Or I verify suspicions which in the light of the ending become delightful certainties, Oho, now I really dig it… wow! At the very least, since you can easily get me to admit I have good short-term recall—like most of you reading this, I’d guess—I brood. (Also criticized in traffic.)
No, I don’t read twice. But I can say this: If somebody snatched the pages out of my hand when I came to the final period, I’d hit him. I’m not
finished,
see… I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do with it, but judging from my library it seems to produce a lot of soup and peanut butter stains.
Doesn’t everybody?
I mean, like the guy with the trunk full of pancakes, am I alone? Is it just read-read-read, up and down the roily coaster, faster and higher, ending with a four-beat spasm on the final sentence—and then, Goodbye, thank you, ma’am? Drop the book, it’s dead?
Wait. (I’m starting to look outward now.) Stories differ as to reread-ability. First, you have the so-called conventional mystery stories in which the whole point is the artfully planted misdirection and concealed clues, so you really have to go back to verify that the sweet little child
was
left alone with the future corpse. (Trivial puzzles, I hate ‘em.) Then there’s the trick-ending stories where, say, the narrator turns out to be the villain, or writing from the moon, or whatnot, so you have to at least think back and reinterpret. (I can’t think of any examples because I just wrote one like this.) It’s also a trivial trick, except for a few grand old startlers.
This brings us to a type you get much of in SF, the story told by an alien or a child or a crazy who doesn’t grasp the meaning of what he’s telling, but you, the reader, see beyond his stammering words to What Really Went On.
Flowers for Algernon
did this at the start and end where the hero was stupid; when he says how his friends kidded him,
we
know they were being cruel. And
1984
comes to mind, at the end where the brain-stomped hero
accepts.
I think of these as the “It’s a nice world, Jack” type. Also included here are the stories where you catch on that the narrator is part of the problem, he’s spreading the plague he doesn’t understand, or he’s ripping the world off while thinking he’s just protecting himself. A lot of great stories here, if the characterization (I guess you call it) is rich. But thinking back, these aren’t the ones I reread much; usually you get it all as you go (slowly) along.
What I really dig is the story that’s like being plonked down in an alien scene, the future or whatever, and the strange stuff comes by naturally. Like watching unknown life through a peephole. You understand just enough to get into it and then more and more meanings develop as you go, until at the end you suddenly get this great light on cryptic bits right back to the beginning. (Hey, Baird?) Lots of Phil Dick is this way. I go back and reread big chunks of Dick, snuffling lustfully. Or take Le Guin’s
Lathe of Heaven.
I rooted around in that for days, savoring the sprig of white heather in the glass and the jellyfish and specially shivering about what the hell
really
happened on that ghastly April fourth. (I still don’t know and I love it.)
Is this kind of thing a trick too? No! It strikes me as a way of being like life. Life plunks you amid strangers making strange gestures, inexplicable caresses, threats, unmarked buttons you press with unforeseen results, important-sounding gabble in code… and you keep sorting it out, sorting it out, understanding five years later
why
she said or did whatever,
why
they screamed when you—
You reread life, Oh man, do you…
So why not make stories like that?
(Of course, you can overdo it. I wouldn’t want
all
stories like that. A lot of, say, Sturgeon or Ellison isn’t that way. But it’s one good way of making stories.)
But I’m forgetting one more type of rereadability thing. I guess you call it… ellipsis? The story told with omitted statements, or with action touched in so compactly you can’t hardly get all of it first time over. I mean like mentioning the hero is “picking up his buttons,” thereby revealing that when whatever it was happened a few paragraphs back all his buttons fell off. (This is done a lot in fight scenes; by this time everybody feels that there has been some repetition of the standard blow-by-blow.) In fights it’s trivial, but with Human stuff and big happenings it’s
interesting.
(To me.) I
like
the feel of this continual little loop in time, the illumination playing back on what went just before. When the wind-up events do this for the central plot, that’s when I reread avidly.
But it’s always on the verge of being a trick. It can give puzzle value to a bunch of nothing. I mean, if it’s so great, why not come out and tell it? I reproach myself here. Because, see, for some reason probably including innate furtiveness, this is my
natural
way of telling a story. Like, say, “Beam Us Home”: you aren’t supposed to catch that the program the boy was addicted to was
Star Trek
until well along in the tale. Why? Well… did I feel that telling it straight would turn people off before they found out how significant et cetera things would get? Yeah, I know now I did. Not at the time. (A voice from under my pancreas dictated the first five pages while I was washing a car.) But—I say in justification—the puzzle wasn’t the
story.
It was just an angle.
Or take “The Last Flight of Doctor Ain.” That whole damn story is told backward. (Incidentally, I reread it the other day because somebody wants it and I threw up… what I remember as clean prose comes on like bubble gum. A good story and I
raped
it.) It’s a perfect example of Tiptree’s basic narrative instinct. Start from the end and preferably five thousand feet underground on a dark day and then
don’t tell them.
Straight from behind the pancreas… But there’s one conscious item, which ties up with what we’re talking about. I had to give Ain a first name.
Charles.
So that makes him C. Ain, see, CAIN. His brother’s murderer.
Would you believe I assumed everybody—everybody!—would pick that up afterward and use it to verify the plot (he really
did
kill everybody) and also extract a little irony (Cain as savior of life)???
Because to me everybody naturally rereads… insists, like the Face, that it be worth rereading or reinvestigating in part. Wants there to be thingie in the box. But do they? Do you?
Ha-ha-ha.
Oh, Baird, thou hast confronted me with reality.
But I can’t change. Reality, go away.
Now before I really quit, two things. We’re not talking about stuff so great, so beautiful, so interesting that you read it again and again, maybe at intervals all your life. All we’re at is rereading-for-complete-illumination, to get the fullness of the story itself. Rereading-as-a-part-of-the-original-experience. A
technical
matter, not the genius aspect.
(By the way, I reread Huxley’s
Brave New World
the other day and cringed for us all, my god the people who have been eating for years by mining his subplots.)
The other thing is that the story Searles was talking about is Kit Reed’s
Armed Camps,
and he thought it was, overall, great. Reed is a pet of mine. Now
there’s
a closemouthed storyteller for you! You sidle in to find out what this kind of tense quiet scratching sound is and she zaps you… oh gee, do it again. I can’t figure out why Searles had to rereread
Armed Camps-,
I only went back once (to check the Captain White button on Hassim’s bikini). About as obscure as being shot out of a cannon.
Ah well, wavelengths differ.
May 1972 be good to you. My next communication, if any, will be by forked stick from a jungly place in the Quintana Roo.
—January 7, 1972
Phantasmicom
9 was handed to me on an airstrip yesterday, along with the 2 January and 6 Feb
New York Times.
I read
PhCom.
Man, did I. Grateful. Remind me—no, you won’t, I’ll try—to reimburse you for the roll of stamps.
My agent thinks I’m hard at work on lots of new stories I promised. Well, I do have a couple, handwritten on weird Spanish kids’ schoolpaper, which the Red Baron finally produced. But I’d rather write you. I just connected with my typewriter last week, it arrived at Belize, Honduras, via Spitzbergen and has green fuzzy stuff on it. This is a very active climate; if you put something down it either grows roots or becomes an informal demonstration of electrolysis or turns into low-grade beer or ten thousand palmetto bugs rush out of it. The palmetto bug is to all intents a German cockroach and they breed like they were burning up. Mother cockroaches are full of eggs. It sounds silly, but
don’t
put this manuscript in with other papers and forget it. Put it in a sealed baggie or spray it or both if you want to keep it. I stick anything too delicate to boil in the freezer for a month or so when I come out of here. Or in a snowbank. Including, especially, dirty laundry. Books get sprayed page by page and left in a sealed case full of spray for a couple of days. The palmetto bug is not vicious or icky, it is just hungry and a good mother. It also grows as big as a mouse but the young are transparent little blips and
very
fast. The thing is, if the letter or envelope has eggs on it you won’t see anything for a while but about September you’ll wonder why your library or Ann’s underwear is in pieces.