6. Moorcocks coming over here for dinner tonight with John Sims: Cream of Leek soup, Roast Beef, Fried Eggplant, Rice (possibly a risotto with almonds? How many stuffed mushrooms are left over from the Landrys yesterday? And will they do, reheated, for starters?); an American Salad (get some Avocado, Bacon, Butter-lettuce, Chicory, Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Carrots, Celery, Mustard, Lemons); to follow: Baked Bananas flamed in brandy. (Don’t use the mushrooms: John doesn’t like them!)
7. For Sturgeon essay: The material of fiction is the texture of experience.
8. Re Dhalgren… I think Marilyn is depressingly right about the psychiatric session with Madame Brown and the Calkins interview… which means more work; and after I’ve just rewritten the whole last chapter! With Calkins, the historical must be made manifest. With Madame Brown, she must realize that the dream is not a dream, otherwise she comes off just too stupid. It is so hard to control the outside view of my material, when I am standing on the inside. It’s like clutching a balloon to shape from within.
Friday night and to the Moorcocks for dinner with Emma Tennent.
9. Got a letter from R. E. Geis today, asking to reprint my Letter to a Critic from The Little Magazine in The Alien Critic. Am very dubious. First of all, some of the facts, as John Brunner so succinctly pointed out over the phone a fortnight back, are just wrong. More to the point, the section on science-fiction publishing isn’t really a description of the current sf publishing scene at all. Rather, it’s a memoir of what the publishing situation was like in that odd period between 1967 and 1971. Odd, too, how quickly the bright truths of twenty-six (by which age the bulk of my notoriously unbulky sf oeuvre was already in print) seem, six years later, rather dated. What to do? Get ever so slightly looped and write a polite letter?
Or take a walk up Regents’ Canal and go browse in Compendium Book Store? Sounds better.
10. What a tiny part of our lives we use in picturing our pasts. Walked to the Turkish take-away place this evening with John Witton-Doris: consider the number of incidents he recalls from our months in Greece together, nine years ago, involving me, that I can barely remember! Biography, as it approaches completeness, must be the final fiction.
11. Alcohol is the opium of the people.
12. Science fiction through the late sixties seemed to be, scientifically, interested in mathematics segueing into electronics; psychiatry, in all its oversimplified clumsiness, has been an sf mainstay from The Roads Must Roll, through Baby is Three, to The Dream Master.
Science fiction from the past few years seems to be interested in mathematics segueing into contemporary linguistics/philosophy (e.g., Watson’s The Embedding); biology — particularly genetics — has replaced physics as the science of greatest concern [Cf. the ‘clone’ stories over the past few years, from Kate Wilhelm’s and Ted Thomas’s The Clone, through McIntyre’s The Cage (and Ms. McIntyre is a trained geneticist; where do we get all this about people interested in science not getting into science fiction anymore!?!), to Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus]; and anthropology (reflected even in books like Effinger’s What Entropy Means to Me and Toomey’s A World of Trouble) seems to be replacing psychiatry as a prime concern.
I think I approve.
13. “You science-fiction writers always criticize each other in print as if the person you were criticizing were reading over your shoulder,” someone said to me at the Bristol Con last week — meaning, I’m afraid, that the majority of criticism that originates within the field has either a “let-me-pat-your-back-so-you-can-pat-mine” air, or, even more frequently, a sort of catty, wheedling tone implying much more is being criticized than the work nominally under discussion.
No, the sf community is not large
Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent just over a decade making my living within it, but I feel all criticism should be written as if the author being criticized were — not reading over your shoulder — but written as though you could stand face to face with her and read it out loud, without embarrassment.
I think this should hold whether you are trying to fix the most rarefied of metaphysical imports in some Shakespearean tragedy, or writing a two-hundred word review of the latest thriller. Wheedling or flattery have nothing to do with it.
Among the many informations we try to get from any critical model is the original maker’s (the artist’s) view of the original work modeled. If the critics do not include, in this model, an overt assessment of it, we construct it from hints, suggestions, and whatever. But we are at three removes from the author: and the critic is at two (as the critic is one from the work): In deference to that distance, I feel the critics must make such assessments humbly. They can always be wrong.
But only after they, and we, have made them (wrong or right), can we follow the critics’ exploration of the work’s method, success, or relevance. The critic can only judge these things by his own responses; in a very real way, the only thing the critic is ever really criticizing — and this must be done humbly if it is to be done at all — is the response of his own critical instrument.
All criticism is personal.
The best is rigorously so.
14. Yesterday, Joyce Carol Oates sent Marilyn a copy of her new book of poems Angel Fire (with a letter apologizing for taking so long to answer Marilyn’s last letter etc., and dense with North American weather). This morning, in Compendium, I saw the new Oates book on D. H. Lawrence’s poetry, The Hostile Sun, picked it up, took it (in its bright yellow covers) home, and have, minutes ago, just finished it.
After going through three novels, a handful of essays, and a few crunches into the Collected Poems (and most recently, the Frank Kermode book on), Lawrence has tended to be for me a clumsy, if impassioned, writer purveying a message I find almost totally heinous. The most generous thing I could say for him till now was, with Kenneth Rexroth, “His enemies are my enemies,” but even here I always found myself wondering, wouldn’t he do better on their side than on mine? Lawrence-the-outspoken-sexual-revolutionary has always struck me a bit like those politicians who, in their support of the War in Vietnam, eventually went so far as to use words like “hell” and “damn” in their speeches — then quickly looked at their fellow party members who dared disapprove of their “too strong” language and labeled them conservatives. Though Lawrence’s novels sometimes refer to sexual mechanics, his overall concept of sex seems institutionally rigid: Everyone must fulfill his or her role, as assigned by Divine Law. The heroes of his novels go about brow-beating everyone who happens to stray from his (usually her) divinely ordained role, back into it. For, after all, it is Divine Law. And anyone who still strays, after having been told that, must be sick unto damnation. I wonder if Lawrence was aware that his real critics simply found him, in his ideas (rather than in the “strength” of his language, or the “explicitness” of the scenes he used to dramatize his points), an absolute prig?