I've had the good fortune to live in that country, where Avram also lived for a time, and although I may not have walked in the exact places where he walked, although I can’t absolutely guarantee that, say, a certain one of his fictional towns is, in fact, the real town of Orange Walk, I’ve gone down similar roads in similar towns, and have seen sights and heard musics that resonate with those he saw and heard. It was a beautiful place, British Honduras, an old colonial state, and vet lacking to a large degree the impotent rancor that typically pervades colonies. Avram says of it, “… more than colony but not yet a country, and often left off maps because its name seems larger than itself.” There was about its people (and what a various people they were, in heritage African, East Indian, Anglo, Spanish, Middle Eastern, Arawak, Caribe, etc., etc.) a sweet spiciness of character and a lucidity of soul that a casual observer might have characterized as “innocence,” but was, in truth, nothing of the sort. Villains of every stamp have abounded in Belize during every era, and the earliest of them soon learned how to exploit those who had crossed the ocean to exploit them. The people of British Honduras were not innocent, then, but were infected by the vivid personality of the land that bred them, stained with its macaw and parrot colors, imbued with a gravitas by the power of the sea that hemmed them in against the savage modernity of Guatemala and sanguinary Mexico. Their violence, too, was of the land, steeped in a piratical tradition (many of the citizens of the country could trace their ancestry back to Kidd and Lafitte and divers lesser men who sailed the waters of the Caribbean beneath a black flag), and though to say other than that violence is violence, no matter its tradition, would be implausibly romantic, I will assert that in the main their violence lacked the mad dispassion of contemporary atrocity. Slaughter for them was a family thing, an occupation to which they were bom.
Unfortunately, the country that inspired the Limekiller stories no longer exists. The colony has become a full-status nation and in its nationhood has fallen prey to the great afflictions of the past century. Its fabulous creatures, manatees and tapir and jaguars and such, are dwindling toward extinction, and the mahogany forests, mentioned as depleted in the text, have now been decimated. AIDS is everywhere. Street crime is endemic. Belize City, formerly the capitol, is a sewer crawling with drug dealers. No longer can you take a night stroll without experiencing anxiety in Orange Walk or Buttermilk Cay. And where there is no crime, no drugs, no filth and disease, there is a plague of Americans. Much of Belize has been sectioned off into tourist-friendly enclaves, environments in which some aspect of the land has been preserved, albeit in a cultivated fashion, dappled with bars and hotels whose ambiance — fishing nets and floats, lots of Ye Oldes, pirate chic, etc. - has been designed to conjure (yet serves merely to parody) the quaintness of colonial days. Thus, the ragged, blustery, charming spirit of the land has been deracinated and, rather than the pungent accents and eighteenth century idioms that pepper the speech of the indigents, now you are more liable to hear flattened Midwestern vowels and Tennessee drawls. One of the only places where you still can find the country that — once — was a place well worth a visit, lies here within these pages, as witnessed by the fictive eyes of Jack Limekiller and recorded by the peerless unorthodoxy of Avram Davidson’s talent and vision.
For the term of our acquaintance, spanning his last thirteen years, Avram posed the image of a diminutive, acerbic grand- fatherly man with an untidy gray beard. On the surface, he was a crusty fellow. He did not suffer fools gladly and was frequently impatient with and demanding of his friends. Like all truly committed writers, artists who live through their work, he displayed a mixture of arrogance and insecurity toward his stories (how else can one feel about something upon which one labors to distraction?), but although his arrogance was often visible, he rarely put his insecurity on public exhibition. He told jokes whose involute form and Classical references more often than not puzzled those who heard them, and he was given to quoting passages from Virgil in the Latin whenever exasperated. In many regards, he was a man of unbending principle. For instance, being a Jew, he would never sell his books to German publishers, even when he was having serious money troubles. In his personal relationships, principle would sometimes gave way to childishness. He could be vastly self-pitying and was often verbally abusive to those whom he believed had slighted him. Doubtless all these characteristics were integral to his person, yet he was a man whose mental life was vastly separate in tone from the face he presented to the world. And beneath that surface, still vital inside his (by the time I met him) infirm body, resided a soul unalloyed in its questing nature and relatively undamaged by his service as an infantryman in World War II, by divorce, financial difficulties, poor health, by the thousand disappointments and shocks that attend all but the quickest of lives. I could never clearly gauge the shape or colors of that soul, but I imagine it as a colorful mist swirling within a glass globe that is itself held by an ornate bronze claw, rather like an object that might advance some narrative function in one of Avram's fantasy stories concerning Vergil, a spiritual artifact of unknown antiquity and unfathomable purpose, having a value that the world would someday recognize and understand and celebrate more fully than ever it did when it was housed in the flesh.
That soul was, quintessentially, the soul of a recluse. I usually picture Avram alone in a darkish room made claustrophobic by tumbled books and stacks of yellowed newspapers and magazines, old tins stuffed with whatnots, and a track winding through them that allowed access to other, equally cluttered rooms. The dank basement apartment in Bremerton, Washington, where he spent the final years of his life, was devoid of natural light and devoid, also, of any bright color, of television, of all but the most basic modernities. Like a wizard’s cell, it stood in relation to Avram’s person as did his body to the soul that hobbled about inside its own teetering house. He lived, you see, mostly far from Bremerton, amid mostly unreal kingdoms of his own device, one of which — British Hidalgo — was slightly less unreal than the rest and added a crucial touch of the material to the lively next-to-nothingness contained in that glass globe. But for all the limitations of his physical existence during his later years, Avram traveled widely, as he did for all his years, through the borderless countries of his brain and brought us back his stories for souvenirs.
I first met Avram some twenty years ago at the Clarion Workshop at Michigan State University, where he was a teacher for one week and I was a student. Avram was ill and taking various medications, thus not at his best. The teaching of writing is an elusive process; indeed, there are those who claim it can’t be taught. During his time at the workshop, Avram — by virtue of his illness — did little to disprove this. That said, if he had not taught at Clarion, I doubt I would have become a writer. He validated me in a way I needed, treating me less as a student than a colleague, encouraging me to challenge myself, to explore and not exploit my gift. Yet in his encouragement there was ever a cautionary note. Once while we were going over a manuscript of mine, he said, “This is very good.” Then, giving me a deadpan look, he added, “Are you sure you want to be a writer? You’d make more money as a podiatrist.” He was a walking life lesson relating to the potential hardships of a writer’s life. One day at lunch, we (the students) were gathered at table in the cafeteria when Avram approached, cane hooked over an arm, carrying a tray laden with four entrees, two salads, several desserts, innumerable rolls. We gaped at him, wondering first how this smallish man was planning to consume so much food, and, secondly, wondering why he would attempt such a monumental consumption. He took a seat, hung his cane on the edge of the table, unloaded the tray, arranged his utensils, taking an inordinately long time to accomplish this. Finally, he looked at us and pointed to the banquet in front of him. “Why all this?” he said. “Next week, it’s back to soupbones.”