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Contents copyright 1997 The Nutmeg Point District Mail and assigned
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TEMPORARY CULTURE
P.O. Box 43072
Upper Montclair, NJ 07043-0072
Electronym: wessells@aol.com
Use the electronic address for requests to be added to or dropped from the mailing list.
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ROGER BACON AND VERGIL MAGUS : Notes toward a discussion of Doctor Mirabilis and The Scarlet Fig
Your editor recently (and after long searching) found a copy of Doctor Mirabilis by James Blish (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1971). This hard science fiction novel treating the life of Roger Bacon and the roots of the scientific method is the most interesting book encountered in a year filled with many books. Doctor Mirabilis was actually written a decade before, and seems to offer some interesting connections with Avram's life and work. Several observations and conjectures will be raised in these paragraphs, which will in fact serve as a request for concrete information from any who can shed light on the subject. It seems clear from the timing that Blish's fictional treatment of the polymath Roger Bacon is connected with Avram's decision to embark upon an even more ambitious project concerning Vergil Magus.
Three points:
As is the case for both Vergil Magus and Roger Bacon, there is an extensive corpus of legend and fact concerning. Where Blish concentrated on the factual for his novel, Avram drew upon the legendary aspects for the Vergil Magus novel.
Both figures are connected with alchemy, sorcery, and scientific invention. For each, the protoscientifc enquiries are part of a broader attempt to gain knowledge of the functions of the universe. (Talking heads figure directly and indirectly in each author's work -- the Aquinas legend and Vergil's household guardian.)
In Doctor Mirabilis, Bacon suffers a mind-shattering thirteen-year imprisonment; in The Scarlet Fig, or Slowly through a Land of Stone, Vergil loses several years in a drug-induced stupor after being marooned in the land of the Scarlet Fig. For each of them, the world after this period has changed dramatically and irreversibly.
On to the conjectures:
It is essential to a clear-headed assessment of Avram's career to look at why he embarked upon so vastly ambitious a scheme (in the early 1960s, Tolkien's trilogy had yet to sweep through the American popular imagination, and the endless stream of posthumous material was in the unforeseeable future).
The life of Roger Bacon and his vast and ultimately unfinished ambitions to write a book summarizing all scientific knowledge seems relevant here. In a spare, brutal chapter, Blish recount's Bacon's imprisonment and its toll on his intellect. There is a clear parallel in the concluding movement of The Scarlet Fig.
On page 327 of the Dodd, Mead edition of Doctor Mirabilis, there is a passage where Thomas reads in Bacon's later manuscript, and understands that Bacon has forgotten some of the fundamental premises of his initial work -- and cannot regain them -- and yet it is a brilliant and major achievement. The Scarlet Fig is such a work. It concludes on a note wholly inconceivable in terms of The Phoenix and the Mirror, and only barely to be glimpsed in Vergil in Averno. And yet because of what the Scarlet Fig of the title is, the grim, stony conclusion is entirely consistent with the earlier passages of the novel. The devastating sense of loss engendered by the conclusion as Avram wrote it is the terrible fruit that grew during Vergil's lost years "on the nod" in the land of the Scarlet Fig.
How this relates to the events of Avram's own life is another point still to be determined.
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RECENT PUBLICATIONS OF INTEREST
"The Career and Writings of Avram Davidson" by Henry Wessells appeared in AB Bookman's Weekly for 20 October 1997. This is a comprehensive bio-bibliographical treatment, and includes a previously unpublished portrait photograph of Avram (probably dating from the late 1960s or early 1970s).
Available for $10 postpaid from:
Henry Wessells, P.O. Box 43072, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043-0072
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Answers to WHERE? WHICH? from the ninth issue
Stories by Avram Davidson in which species of the genus Felis appear include:
(An editorial harrumph is in order, dear readers.)
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Next issue will appear in late December 1997
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