Straits of Messina Samuel R. Delany Preface To read writers writing about their own work is to watch often intelligent and graceful men and women stumble between the pompous and the pitiful. The spectacle is so disquieting I’ve sometimes suspected the benighted folk requesting these displays must do so in happy anticipation of the too-frequent clown show that results. A simple “No” to such requests, it might then seem, should staunch the idiocy. And for many writers constrained by a larger sense of decorum, it does. For many years it did for me. Why then, knowing better, does a writer from time to time to such a request say, “Yes”? There probably are some overwhelmingly popular writers who receive so many demands for self- explication that they are simply worn down by the onslaught. But that is not most of us. I can think of two other reasons, however, that cover much. One is, oddly, the “fascination of what’s difficult.” Having watched so many other writers fail to negotiate the waters between the Scylla of overweening self-importance and the Charybdis of childish self-deprecation, the prose writer is drawn to take up the challenge in much the same way as the poet is sometimes tempted to wrestle something interesting into some particularly complex form—canzone, rondeau, or chant royal—which seems, by the very intricacy of its structure, restricted to the trivial. The pieces in this book signed by me grow largely from that fascination— although what made the task of self- criticism difficult was often more difficult than I suspected; thus, on that count, they fail more often than they succeed. Still, save their occasional headnotes, I don’t believe they need further explanation. The second reason, however (to which the second set of pieces cleaves), is that desperate human failing, wishful thinking: “Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone say all the fine and brilliant things about my work I so desperately would like to hear ...?” Out of such wishfulness the “author” of five of the pieces, K. Leslie Steiner, was born. Ms. Steiner is a product of pure excess desire. Her specific point of genesis was London, in the winter of 1973, when I was finishing up a late draft of a pornographic novel, Hogg. The book had already produced a writer’s preface, signed by me, “The Scorpion Garden.” But at that time there was still rampant a tradition that the only recently legalized erotic text carry as much apparatus as possible, in the form of scholarly exegeses, medical disclaimers, and apologiae—many of them, of course, bogus. So “K. Leslie Steiner” sprang full-formed from the writer’s head with her initial critical offering, “‘The Scorpion Garden’ Revisited: The Anti- Pornography of Samuel R. Delany.” Her ruminations are what it would have been utterly wonderful to have discovered someone else had written about my recent effort. No, I wouldn’t have agreed with Steiner’s assessment or analysis, even at the time. (My real opinions are still to be found in my own piece on the novel, which opens this book.) Yes, it would have been nice. But Steiner’s piece—as do all her offerings—gives not so much an insight into the text it purports to consider, in this case Hogg itself (still, at this writing, unpublished), as it gives a view into the dreams a writer must dream in order to write at all. If there is anything instructive in them, I suspect it is what troubles in them rather than what reassures. Back in New York City in 1975, after a term teaching at SUNY Buffalo, I was seeing a long and somewhat controversial SF novel through its first half year of publication, when an invitation arrived from Tesseraci, the SF Society of the University of New Hampshire, to address them on the book and take part in a discussion of it. The critic within rose up to respond with the letter/essay, “Of Sex, Objects, Signs, Systems, Sales, SF, and Other Things.” But I was halfway through the dozen notes about which my dis-tractionary essay on the semiology of cities centered when more notes began to collect on other pages of the same notebook. Wouldn’t it be grimly satisfying if someone did say about the book ... ... and Ms. Steiner, unthought of more than a year, rose, shaking her hair and eyes, from the slough of desire, with “Some Remarks toward a Reading of Dhalgren.” For at least another year I didn’t show the piece to anyone. I must have mentioned it, however, because at one point someone busily writing an article on me asked to see it. With trepidation, I consented—and discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that Steiner was “alive” enough for me to put the opening pages through the typewriter again, updating the various facts about sales, etc. And careful readers will realize that Ms. Steiner has taken the opportunity of this publication to update her first footnote on textual matters right to the present day. At about the same time as I was first writing “Sex/Objects” and “Remarks,” I was also seeing through publication another novel I’d completed just before my return from England during the Christmas season of 1974. The book had been conceived, written, and sold under the title Trouble on Triton. I thought of it as a far-future comedy of manners, and I was fond of its name. A friend had looked it up in the Day SF Index for me, and I’d learned that there had been two insignificant short stories with the same title in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Also, it recalled Simak’s The Trouble with Tycho as well as a Henry Kuttner tale, “Trouble on Titan”—all of which were resonances I was pleased with, since one of the protagonist’s problems is that he lives his life by certain cliches he has not developed the ability to question or deal with historically. But even more strongly, at least to me, Trouble on Triton whispered of Leonard Bernstein’s 1952 opera, Trouble in Tahiti. Bernstein’s seven-scene opera takes place largely in a generalized suburban America. In the course of it, a trio of radio voices from time to time connects the audience and the characters to the escapist world of art, represented by the technicolor musical movie, Trouble in Tahiti, showing a little ways down the road—an alternative world of romance, adventure, and fulfilled desire. I was much drawn to the irony. In one sense, the Triton of my novel is to Earth very much as the Tahitian never-never land of Bernstein’s opera is to U.S. suburbia— at least in terms of general (American) associations: both Tahiti and Triton are imagined as places of comparative sexual and spiritual freedom vis-à-vis the repressions and constraints of Earth in general and suburban America in particular. Looked at in terms of the opera’s structure, at the end of the novel the trouble on Earth plays an ironically contrasting role in the lives of my Tritonians similar to the role the distanced Tahitian movie construct plays in the lives of Bernstein’s despair- ridden suburbanites—all of which is to say that, in terms of what I took to be its ironies and associations, I liked my title. “Try and think of another one, Chip,” editor Fred Pohl said to me one afternoon when we were returning to the Bantam offices after lunch. “Whatever for?” I wanted to know. First, Bantam had recently published a blockbuster bestseller called Jaws, and the current theory reigning in the Bantam offices was that one— word titles were a priori a Good Thing (i.e., commercial). Second, as Fred put it so succinctly, “It sounds too much like too many other SF stories. People will think they’ve read it before.” I said: “But—” “No ‘buts,’” said Fred. So much for ironies and associations. But while I was making the painful transition in my mind between Trouble on Triton and the final, published, one- word (ho-hum ...) Triton, something happened within me: desire asserted itself again, excrutiatingly, insistently, uncontrollably. In this case, it was the desire to read a positive, intelligent review, perhaps in a better fanzine, of a book called Trouble on Triton—my book called Trouble on Triton. And Ms. Steiner was once again at work. Steiner ‘s briefest and penultimate offering emerged several years later, when, from the West Coast, a fanzine called Venom appeared. More accurately, Venom was a “killer review- zine.” Indeed, it shouldn’t be called a “fanzine”: despite its mimeographed fanzine format, it was published by professional SF writers and its contributors were limited to people like Marta Randall, Robert Silverberg, Ursula Le Guin, and Vonda Mclntyre. Venom encouraged SF writers to produce scathing reviews of their colleagues’ books, publishing them under pseudonyms. The price of admission, however, was a pseudonymous review of one of your own books—equally scathing—that appeared in the same issue. It was great fun since there was at least a fifty-fifty chance that the writer of any book reviewed was also a contributor. From there on, the game was to try and spot which reviews were mock self-put- downs and which were, however tongue in cheek, the product of long-held critical grudges. Before I reached the end of the first Venom, Steiner’s ectoplasmic emanations had begun to re-cohere. This seemed Steiner’s perfect vehicle. Here were people actually asking for a pseudonymous review of Delany by Delany.