Delany autobio
Sep. 17th, 2010 02:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishSamuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water
I'm not sure what I was expecting from the autobiography of a gay black New York SF writer, but this wasn't it. Although in retrospect it should have been.
Mostly this is a chronicle of New York in the sixties, of Delany's troubled marriage to poet Marilyn Hacker and his own sexuality. (They followed the traditional arc of "close friends in high school, fooled around once or twice in college, got her pregnant, got married and dropped out of college, made each other sometimes quite happy and often moderately unhappy." That Delany was gay seems to have not been much of an impediment to the formula: the way he tells it, having to drive to Michigan for their then-mostly-illegal interracial marriage was more of a hassle.)
There's a bit about growing up, and a lot about sex, and some amount of science fiction and writing, and a great deal of just living and thinking about living. It's all quite well-written as you'd expect from Delany, and compulsively readable, which you might not.
It's very much a book that no one else could have possibly written. He opens with "My father died when I was seventeen," and proceeds to reminisce about his father's death and the events of the preceding six months or year. Then he mentions that he'd prepared a biographical sketch some years earlier and started with that sentence, and one of the publishers had called him apologetically to let him know that, given his year of birth and the year of his father's death, at no time during that year was he ever seventeen years old. Memory is a tricky thing, and all stories are subjective recollections of events. In the same way, he occasionally stops to reflect on the events he's just written about, and the process of recalling and writing about them.
(ETA: Delany was-- is-- a brilliant prose stylist, but he feels his poetry left something to be desired. Hacker agreed:
I'm not sure what I was expecting from the autobiography of a gay black New York SF writer, but this wasn't it. Although in retrospect it should have been.
Mostly this is a chronicle of New York in the sixties, of Delany's troubled marriage to poet Marilyn Hacker and his own sexuality. (They followed the traditional arc of "close friends in high school, fooled around once or twice in college, got her pregnant, got married and dropped out of college, made each other sometimes quite happy and often moderately unhappy." That Delany was gay seems to have not been much of an impediment to the formula: the way he tells it, having to drive to Michigan for their then-mostly-illegal interracial marriage was more of a hassle.)
There's a bit about growing up, and a lot about sex, and some amount of science fiction and writing, and a great deal of just living and thinking about living. It's all quite well-written as you'd expect from Delany, and compulsively readable, which you might not.
It's very much a book that no one else could have possibly written. He opens with "My father died when I was seventeen," and proceeds to reminisce about his father's death and the events of the preceding six months or year. Then he mentions that he'd prepared a biographical sketch some years earlier and started with that sentence, and one of the publishers had called him apologetically to let him know that, given his year of birth and the year of his father's death, at no time during that year was he ever seventeen years old. Memory is a tricky thing, and all stories are subjective recollections of events. In the same way, he occasionally stops to reflect on the events he's just written about, and the process of recalling and writing about them.
(ETA: Delany was-- is-- a brilliant prose stylist, but he feels his poetry left something to be desired. Hacker agreed:
There was a young man named DelanyIt doesn't "end" so much as "find a decent stopping place." Which is fitting enough for a book that's one perspective on one part of one man's life.
whose verse wasn't overly brainy.
When you start to get with him,
he completely drops the concept of rhythm
and after a while doesn't even bother to rhyme.)
no subject
Date: 2010-09-18 12:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-18 02:41 am (UTC)