The osmotic experience

“When I was a kid, I was a science fiction freak,” Jimmy Webb says in an interview in the book Songwriters on Songwriting. Webb, who is best remembered today for writing “Wichita Lineman” and “MacArthur Park,” tells the interviewer Paul Zollo:

I remember one Sunday that I was sitting in my dad’s church. He was a Baptist preacher. I was sitting about halfway back and I had a science fiction novel snugged up under my Baptist hymnal and I was reading away. My dad was preaching a mighty sermon. He looked back and I guess the sight of me in this pious pose must have struck him as altogether unlikely. He said, “Jimmy, what are you doing back there? Come down here right now.” So I took that long walk down the aisle of the church to the front. He said, “Stand up right here.” I turned around and faced the congregation. He said, “Tell this congregation what you’re reading.” So I had to say, “Martian Chronicles, sir.”

And what I like best about this story, which dates from around 1958, is that there isn’t anything about Webb’s career—aside from the song “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” which he admits he took directly from Heinlein—that would particularly stamp him as shaped by science fiction. He might have been changed by it in ways that aren’t immediately visible, but then again, he didn’t need to be. Unlike the readers of an earlier period, to be a science fiction “freak” in the late fifties, you didn’t need to be an obsessive outsider living in a city big enough to sustain a vibrant fan community. You could just be a twelve-year-old kid from Oklahoma.

As it happened, I didn’t go looking for that anecdote from Webb—I found it while I was randomly browsing in a book that I already owned. Just a few hours later, I came across a reference to the pulps in another unlikely place, the “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. The speaker is the Reverend James E. Post, a chaplain who served as a character witness for the killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock in 1960. After the jury retires to deliberate, the Reverend Post says to a handful of the other attendees:

“Sometimes I despair. Sometimes I think old Doc Savage had the right idea.” The Doc Savage to whom he referred was a fictional hero popular among adolescent readers of pulp magazines a generation ago. “If you boys remember, Doc Savage was a kind of superman. He’d made himself proficient in every field—medicine, science, philosophy, art. There wasn’t much old Doc didn’t know or couldn’t do. One of his projects was, he decided to rid the world of criminals. First he bought a big island out in the ocean. Then he and his assistants—he had an army of trained assistants—kidnapped all the world’s criminals and brought them to the island. And Doc Savage operated on their brains. He removed the part that holds wicked thoughts. And when they recovered they were all decent citizens. They couldn’t commit crimes because that part of their brain was out. Now it strikes me that surgery of this nature might really be the answer to—”

At that point, the jury returns to sentence Smith and Hickock to death by hanging, so we don’t know what else the Reverend Post might have said about Doc Savage, whose creator, John Nanovic, worked out of an office at Street & Smith Publications next to the one occupied by John W. Campbell.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve repeatedly found myself coming across this kind of material, usually while thinking about something else entirely. While reading Saul Bellow’s Herzog, I found a reference to Isaac Asimov; shortly afterward, I opened my copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to a random page and saw a mention of Stranger in a Strange Land, which I’d completely forgotten was there. You could say that these are instances of the synchronicity that Robert Graves describes in his account of researching The White Goddess: “Though I had no more than one or two of the necessary books in my very small library the rest were soon sent, unasked for, by poet friends or tumbled down into my hands from the shelves of a secondhand seaside bookshop.” If that’s the case, it’s a somewhat cruel sort of coincidence, since it’s too late in the publication process for any of it to end up in Astounding—unless I manage to sneak it into the paperback. But it isn’t all that mysterious. All of these examples date from a window of roughly a decade in which science fiction was quietly embedded in the mainstream, either through the memories of the fans who had encountered it at a younger age, like the Reverend Post, or because contemporary readers were discovering authors like Asimov or Bradbury. A while back, in my discussion of Charles Manson, I wrote that he was influenced by Heinlein and Hubbard only in the sense that he was “influenced” by the Beatles: “Manson was a scavenger who assembled his notions out of scraps gleaned from whatever materials were currently in vogue, and science fiction had saturated the culture to an extent that it would have been hard to avoid it entirely, particularly for someone who was actively searching for such ideas. On some level, it’s a testament to the cultural position that both Hubbard and Heinlein had attained.” And that’s true of all the examples that I’ve just mentioned.

But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t significant, or that they aren’t clues to a larger pattern that I’m just starting to grasp. I still think that science fiction has influenced the inner life of our culture in ways that aren’t always obvious, and that the full picture can only be glimpsed by assembling such pieces. While I was writing Astounding, I often thought back to a passage from On the Road, another work from the same period, which I once seriously thought about using as an epigraph. It’s from the sequence in which Sal and Dean wander into an all-night movie theater in Detroit, where they end up repeatedly watching a singing cowboy picture and Background to Danger with George Raft, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre, until the double feature takes up permanent residence in Sal’s brain:

We saw them waking, we heard them sleeping, we sensed them dreaming, we were permeated completely with the strange Gray Myth of the West and the weird dark Myth of the East when morning came. All my actions since then have been dictated automatically to my subconscious by this horrible osmotic experience.

For me, this is the most—and maybe the only—authentic passage in the entire book, in that it hints at the way in which such stories can seem more real than our own lives: “I heard big Greenstreet sneer a hundred times; I heard Peter Lorre make his sinister come-on; I was with George Raft in his paranoiac fears; I rode and sang with Eddie Dean and shot up the rustlers innumerable times.” I think that we all know what Kerouac means, even if we don’t often speak of it. There’s an entire secret history of America to be constructed out of these fragments. And in the meantime, all I can do is gather the evidence.

Quote of the Day

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

—Attributed to Truman Capote

Quote of the Day

We must be on our guard against that feverish state called inspiration, which is often a matter of nerves rather than muscle. Everything should be done coldly, with poise.

—Truman Capote

Quote of the Day

What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter’s evening.

—Truman Capote

Yes, that’s really me

Two weeks ago, in what felt like an important milestone, I finally had an author photograph taken for The Icon Thief. The photographer, Brian Kinyon, is a very smart and talented guy from Oak Park who took the pictures for my own wedding, and whom I knew could be counted upon to make me look fairly presentable. Before the photo shoot, I half-seriously sent him a link to the website of Marion Ettlinger, generally considered to be the Rembrandt of author headshots. Brian said that he loved Ettinger, but cautioned me that I shouldn’t expect to look quite like her picture of Truman Capote. I agreed. After all, that’s a face you need to earn.

We began with some informal shots around the house, which my wife insisted we get. In my favorite photo, I’m holding my Pantone mug, which I bought at the Art Institute here in Chicago. (The color of the mug is Columbia blue, or Pantone 292, which should ring a bell to fans of the Magnetic Fields.) This mug, which has contained something like two thousand cups of green tea over the past couple of years, has been my constant companion, and I’m glad it’s in this shot. And among the books visible on the shelf behind me is Illuminatus! by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, to which I owe a great deal. The Phantom Tollbooth is also there. So while I don’t think this picture is going to be my official photo, I’m glad to have it.

With that, I changed into my official suspense novelist’s uniform, mandated by law, which consists of a blazer, dress shirt, and dark jeans. (A turtleneck, I’m relieved to say, is optional. But have you ever seen a thriller writer wear anything else?) It was a nice day, so Brian and I went out to explore my beautiful neighborhood of North Center, heading up toward Lincoln Square. We took shots at the Sulzer Regional public library, at Cafeneo coffee shop, where Brian used to hang out when he lived in this area, and under the El tracks, which is the picture I’ve ultimately chosen. (“The steel girders make you look like a tough thriller writer!” my wife said.)

All in all, we took more than nine hundred shots, of which Brian ultimately sent me close to two hundred. And although I reserve the right to change my mind, I’m pleased by the one I’ve chosen. This is pretty much how I look, at least on a good day, and I’m grateful to Brian for doing such an inspired and professional job. The result, greatly reduced, will probably end up on the inside back cover of my novel, my publisher’s website, and various other places. And hopefully I’ll still look more or less the same when the novel comes out in April 2012, recently pushed back two months from its original date of February. (But that’s a story for another day.)

Quote of the Day

That’s not writing, that’s typing.

—Truman Capote, on Jack Kerouac