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TEMPORARY CULTURE
Post Office 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.
!!PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THE ORIGINATING ADDRESS!!
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SPECIAL ELEVENTH HOUR BLUE MOON EDITION
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THE INVESTIGATIONS OF AVRAM DAVIDSON
Edited by Grania Davis and Richard A. Lupoff
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999
The Investigations
of Avram Davidson, edited by Grania Davis and Richard A. Lupoff, will be
published in February by St. Martin's Press. The stories travel far and
wide in time and space, from the antebellum slave-owning South of "The
Necessity of His Condition" to 1950s Cyprus in "The Ikon of Elijah"; and
from early nineteenth century New York City in "The Importance of Trifles"
to the idyllic Central American mountain village in "The Third Sacred Well
of the Temple." Richard A. Lupoff notes in his introduction, "Avram Davidson
transcended the usual boundaries of categories, and simply told Avram Davidson
stories." This is a superb collection of first-rank Avram Davidson stories.
"Lord of Central
Park" is a charming and improbable tale that could only have come from
Avram's typewriter, with a richly varied cast of hereditary river pirates,
very, very petty criminals, Balkan terrorists, and a genuine ingenue,
plus a remittance man who is unique in all of literature. It contains some
of Avram's best list poems, from the multitude of titles of the Marquess
of Grue and Groole to the contents of shop-windows and ship's cargoes pilfered
by the Goodecounce family.
Grania Davis
recalls the composition of "A Quiet Room with a View": "How we laughed
when we read the story aloud -- it must have been just before dinner. In
1964, the grim reality of living in a retirement institution seemed very
far away." "Mr. Folsom Feels Fine" is sheer delight, a fantasy of prosperous
retirement in an exotic land, composed when Avram had already begun to
experience the grim reality of life in the V.A. hospital system. While
the story introduction to "The Deed of the Deft-Footed Dragon" emphasizes
how Avram drew upon his experience in China for the portrait of the hatchet-wielding
On Lung, the story is also notable for offering a new interpretation to
the events in the Borden household in Fall River, Massachusetts.
The attractive
black, gold and white dust jacket bears a photograph of a foggy city street
(possibly London) superimposed over a late 18th century map of lower Manhattan.
It carries blurbs from Michael Dirda, Ed Gorman, Joe Gores, Bill Pronzini,
Janwillem van de Wetering, and Rand Lee; the photograph of Avram Davidson
is the well known one of Avram at his most distinguished, a formal pose
in a dinner jacket (from the 1970s), reproduced here inside an oval frame
with a sepiatone effect that gives the portrait the look of an antique
carte
de visite.
-- Henry Wessells
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Immigrant Cultures and Parallel Structures
in the Fiction of Avram Davidson
As I have been
(re-)reading the stories in the recently published Treasury and
the forthcoming Investigations, I have been impressed by many aspects
of Avram Davidson's stories. Perhaps chief among these interesting qualities
are Avram's acute observations of the immigrant milieu (whether the story
calls itself fantasy or space opera or mystery) and his successful use
of a particular form in a series of novelette-length tales written at different
stages of his career.
Nothing demonstrates
Avram's peculiar strengths as a chronicler of the lives of newly Americanized
immigrants more clearly than the happy coincidence that brought together,
side by side in the Treasury, his finest long story, "The Slovo
Stove" (1985) with his finest miniature, "The Last Wizard" (1971). "The
Slovo Stove" is set very specifically in 1950 yet it offers a timeless
picture of the adaptation and abandonment that appear to be part of the
process of Americanization. The gulf that separated Slovo and Huzzuk on
the European landmass is ultimately meaningless in rust-belt Parlour's
Ferry, where they are but two groups among many seeking to establish themselves.
The cultural snobbery of the Huzzuks is rooted in their ties to European
high culture; yet the Slovos preserve an even more ancient (and wholly
science-fictional) heritage in their two-stone stove. The learned Mr. Grahdy,
"with his wife's alexandrines, his violin, Heine, Schiller, Lermontov,
Pushkin, Paganini and the Latin Psalms -- keeps a failing delicatessen
and is, in the end, unable to survive in the melting pot. The Slovo grandmother,
who abandons her stove in favor of the latest electric model, was the last
possessor of secrets preserved in another venerable tradition. What "The
Slovo Stove presents in richly detailed prose, "The Last Wizard" tells
-- uproariously, puzzlingly, and tragically -- in the space of a page and
a half.
Throughout Avram's
career there were instances when he adopted the trappings of a particular
genre or form -- in shorter pieces as well as at novel length -- and created
his own distinctive fiction within that space. Consider, for example, the
short interstellar space fictions, "Now Let Us Sleep" or "The House the
Blakeneys Built," in which Avram built complex morality plays in nine-
or ten-page tales. This capacity is apparent even in the ghost work on
the Ellery Queen novels and in his lesser science fiction and fantasy novels
of the mid 1960s and early 1970s, such as Rork!, The Enemy of
My Enemy, and Ursus of Ultima Thule.
In a 1957 letter
to Frederic Dannay (half of Ellery Queen), Avram wrote that acceptance
of "The Necessity of His Condition" marked a turning point in his writing
career, even before he won the Ellery Queen award. Not long after, Avram
appears to have found one particular form that would prove fruitful: the
medium-length short story or novelette, which Gregory Feeley observes "can
retain the concision and urgency of the short story while permitting more
complex dramatic development."
"Take Wooden
Indians" (1959) was the first of these stories in a mode that Avram returned
to with "The Sources of the Nile" (1961), "Lord of Central Park" (1971),
"The Slovo Stove" and "The Spook-Box of Theodore Delafont De Brooks" (1993),
as well as in the Eszterhazy and Limekiller stories. It is uncanny how
closely "The Sources of the Nile," "The Slovo Stove" and "The Spook-Box
. . ." resemble each other in their structures, pacing and closing cadences
and moods: with an almost mystical fervor, Bob Rosen, Fred Silberman, and
T.D. De Brooks are each in search of something glimpsed and lost, something
unattainable that Avram has nonetheless created in the mind of the reader.
-- Henry Wessells
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THE HOUSE THE JACKSON WHITES BUILT
by Gregory Feeley
"What do you
care about those poor suckers for?" asks an incredulous Peter Martens of
Bob Rosen, whom he has caught reading an article on "Demography of the
Jackson Whites" in a copy of the Journal of the New York State Geographical
Society.
"They don't
buy, they don't sell, they don't start fashion, they don't follow fashion.
Just poach, fornicate, and produce oh-point-four hydrocephalic albinos
per hundred. Or something."
We are in the
opening scene of "The Sources of the Nile," where the subject of Bob Rosen's
reading is mentioned for the first and last time.
Who are the Jackson
Whites? There is no entry for them in any standard reference work, but
Henry Wessells recently sent me two articles describing their history.
And in the story of this unfortunate clan, we find a theme that was to
occupy Davidson repeatedly over the next half dozen years.
Long notorious
as a family of "hereditary degenerates," the Jackson Whites inhabit a remote
region of New Jersey's Ramapo Mountain Region near the New York state line
[Ed.: if, indeed, any actual place in New Jersey can be described
as "remote"]. Popularly credited as the descendants of Hessian troops,
Dutch settlers, escaped slaves, and perhaps Tuscarora Indians, they are
supposed to be inbred to the point of degeneracy. Hakim Bey, who wrote
about seeing them in a short 1990 article in Exquisite Corpse, likens
them to the Jukes and the Kallikaks, "tri-racial isolate communities" widely
supposed to be genetically peculiar. The Jukes and the Kallikaks are familiar
to readers of Finnegans Wake; Joyce scholar John Bishop glosses
them as "a clan of morons, prominent both in Finnegans Wake and
in the press of Joyce's day, whom generations of inbreeding had reduced
to a state of breathtaking feeblemindedness."
In fact, the
Jukes and the Kallikaks turn out to have been families identified by early
twentieth-century eugenicists as cases of genetic criminality, not inbreeding
(Stephen Jay Gould writes interestingly about the pseudoscience used in
the Kallikak case in The Mismeasure of Man); while the Jackson Whites,
who are known today as the Ramapough Mountain People, were in the news
as recently as 1995: they have sought Federal recognition as an Indian
tribe, but their claims were denied (the Federal government classifies
them as black, not Indian). Randy D. Ralph writes that although "their
isolation has resulted in a high degree of intermarriage among the families
which has, on occasion, produced genetic anomalies such as syndactyly (fusion
of fingers or toes), polydactyly (extra fingers or toes), piebaldness,
albinism, sometimes distinguished by a grayish skin color, and mental retardation[,
t]he majority of the members of the extended clan . . . are robust, intelligent
people with striking good looks."
This enlightened
view is relatively modern, however; Mark Moran, co-editor of Weird New
Jersey, detailed in a 1997 issue the various accounts of the Jackson
Whites published between 1872 and 1936, all of them dubious and sensationalistic.
The portrayal of them known to Avram Davidson in 1960 -- of a pathetic
clan of inbred rustics -- was the only one available.
The Jackson Whites
play no further role in "The Sources of the Nile," but the image of the
isolated community, inbred and deteriorating further with each new generation,
recurred in several subsequent Davidson stories, most notably "The House
the Blakeneys Built" and "Bumberboom." Rork!, a minor novel published
the same year as "Blakeneys" and (like it) involving a lost settlement
on another planet, deals similarly with the themes of isolation and consequent
degradation, but its effect -- involving as the novel does an additional
set of standard SF-novel concerns -- is more diffuse. And the image of
the small population, separated from the rest of the world by some calamity
and reduced in time to ruinous degeneracy, recurs through Davidson's later
fiction, most notably in "Manatee Gal, Won't You Come Out Tonight," where
the wretched inhabitants of Cape Mantee are frequently referred to though
never actually shown. But "The House the Blakeneys Built" and "Bumberboom"
concern themselves directly with these unfortunates; their titles refer
to the structures that house them.
"Bumberboom"
is a long and comical tale, rather Vancian in its urbane insincere exchanges
between well-spoken scoundrels. Bumberboom, the terrible cannon wheeled
from one locale to another by its crew of inbred idiots, has long lost
its ability to menace; the hereditary crew continues to be propitiated
by the people whose lands they enter because the people are idiots as well,
unable to see that the juggernaut's masters have decayed worse than the
weapon itself. Something called the Great Gene Shift has afflicted the
world, and the dwerfs and elvers (and, presumably, other-shaped people)
no longer know what indeed was the original bodily form of mankind. The
protagonist's name is Mallian, son Hazelip and his father is High man to
the Hereditor of Land Quanaras. We later learn that Quanaras is a land
afflicted by some malady, but what catches our attention immediately is
the protagonist's name, with its echoes of "Mal" and "hairlip," and the
reminder of hereditary issues. The geography over which the story takes
place is dominated by a region called the Great Rift, which sounds like
an physical manifestation of the Great Shift. Everything about this tale
(which tells the efforts of young Mallian to turn the great gun Bumberboom
to his own purposes and his spectacular failure) bespeaks malformation
and fatuity, which Mallian's relative cleverness only casts into greater
relief.
This rather
sour novelette trifles with its disturbing theme, but there is no trifling
in "The House the Blakeneys Built," which focuses exclusively upon horror
of family degeneracy, as observed from two healthy couples about to start
families of their own. Only a third the length of the longer story, "The
House the Blakeneys Built" can be read (as Ursula K. Le Guin has recently
noted) as a revisionist take on science fiction's long infatuation with
tales of planetary castaways triumphantly recreating civilization from
scratch -- the genre that John Clute has called a "Robinsonade."
Certainly Davidson
had little truck with genre SF's beloved myths of progress; and the horrific
plight of the castaways on Cape Mantee -- they were shipwrecked from a
slave ship, echoing a detail from the popular legend of the Jackson Whites
-- can be read as dark commentary, worthy of Conrad, on the benefits that
European colonizers brought to the people they colonized. But the Blakeneys
suggest a horror greater than a political reading can account for. Davidson
dramatizes them as a perversion of the family, and the family (for all
that intact and happy ones are rarely portrayed) is extremely important
in his fiction, an ideal to which the protagonists at the end of his comedies
aspire and the protagonists of his bitter stories see marred. Feeding cannibalistically
upon itself instead of looking out to the world for sustenance, the inbred
family is a figure, literally, of horror.
Both "The House
the Blakeneys Built" and "Manatee Gal, Won't You Come Out Tonight" are
horror stories, and it is interesting to note that most of Davidson's other
horror stories contain a suggestion of inbreeding: "Naples," the first
story that comes to mind if one is asked to name a classic horror tale
by Avram Davidson, has at its heart the revelation that a man has used
a blood relative for monstrous purposes, holding back for himself what
should be released into the world. (What he arrogates is his kinsman's
death, but the unnatural element of his act seems homologous to sexual
victimization.) And "The Goobers," the other pure horror story, concerns
backwoods squalor, an isolated and unhealthy broken family, and makes a
plain allusion to incest.
"The Tail-Tied
Kings," another story about an isolated community, inbreeding, and degeneration,
differs from the pattern present in the other stories, perhaps because
the protagonists are rats (who regard the humans above as "slaves," since
they labor only to create goods for rats' consumption). As in the other
stories, the stagnant society ends in violence, but two characters -- not
related to each other -- escape, eventually to mate and bring forth healthy
progeny. With humans, however, even calamity cannot produce rebirth from
such abomination.
The image of
the long-inbred family was most powerfully evoked by Davidson when he published
"The House the Blakeneys Built," Rork!, and "Bumberboom" in 1965-66,
but it recurs throughout his work, and the appearance of any of its elements
tugs at other dark strands in other stories. No one has undertaken a structuralist
reading of Davidson's work, but the nexus of incest, place-name titles
(even "Manatee Gal," echoing Cape Mantee, may count as a partial hit),
and slavery might prove fruitful to analysis. Certainly what Anthony Burgess,
discussing the power of incest in Levi-Strauss's theories of Structuralism,
calls "the knot that it is dangerous to untie since, untying it, you are
magically untying the knot that holds the natural order together" suggestively
recalls the knots that join the tails of the "Tail-Tied Kings," disabling
them (as incest disables the society that holds them captive). And the
rats' society is destroyed just as One-Eye bites through the knotted tails;
while his maimed nature (his role in life determined that one of his eyes
be put out in infancy) powerfully suggests the single good foot of Oedipus
-- "swellfoot" -- who was had a spike driven through his foot when he was
exposed on a hill as an infant. To pull free the foot (bite through the
knot; sing aloud the innocently intended Buffalo/Manatee wordplay) is to
call down terrible destruction.
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THE BOSS IN THE WALL
Your editor recently received the long-awaited hardcover issue of The Boss in the Wall, and a very pleasing volume it is. The book is printed on better paper than the paperback issue, in sewn gatherings that are sturdily bound. The dust jacket is a slightly redesigned version of the paperback cover, with a somewhat brighter printing of the cover painting by Michael Dashow. The front of the jacket correctly notes that Avram was "winner of the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement." Pagination follows the paperback, with a limitation sheet tipped in after page 122, the last page of the novel. The limitation sheet states that the first edition consists of 26 signed, lettered copies (not seen), 100 numbered copies signed by Grania Davis, Peter Beagle, and Michael Swanwick, and 1,000 copies of the paperback edition.
Available from:
Tachyon Publications
1459 18th Street, San Francisco, CA 94107
URL: http://www.tachyonpublications.com
Electronym: tachyonsf@aol.com
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The URL of the Avram Davidson Website is:
http://www.kosmic.org/members/dongle/henry/
Submissions of additional material for the Website are welcome.
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Next issue will be published in March 1999.
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