“It is not much good copying science out of a textbook onto your manuscript page. The bare bones show. It is not much good transcribing part of your autobiography into your story either, it seldom fits, the ends don’t mesh; but what you have read and what you have done and what you have felt and what you know are, after all, the only things you as a writer have to sell, and in some way they gurgle through the sloshy pipes of the brain, losing an amino acid here and picking up an enzyme there, and what emerges is part of you. Probably the best part of you. The best part of all of us is in what we write.”
– Frederik Pohl, from ‘ragged claws,’ in Hell’s Cartographers
I stumbled across a very battered paperback edition of Hell’s Cartographers in the December book fair at Café Oto, at the Books Peckham stall. I hadn’t heard of Kingsley Amis’ critical book on SF writing, New Maps of Hell, but the cover and title caught my eye. As did the subtitle: ‘The personal histories of science fiction writers.’
Admittedly, the list was frustratingly male, male, male, which is not to say they’re all hideous patriarchs – some Jewish, some working class – but the represented boys’ club does lean toward a certain kind of confidence and discourse, most apparent in their willingness to network with the male editors running New Wave SF in the US. The book’s 1970s origins is a clue to the kind of occasionally racist or misogynistic language, but these are clearly woke-for-their-day men, so they mostly make such comments in context of satirising racist right wing politics, or to be self-deprecating about their relationship failures (which, frankly, doesn’t always cut it).
Pohl’s quotation is one of many, many soundbites throughout the book that zero in on writing craft, amid the personal histories of the subtitles. I was less enamoured of, say, the fact that they all built their publication histories by sitting down for drinks with all-powerful editors, like John W Campbell.[*] Although the club was open-minded in some ways, women, even editors, rarely feature except as wives or peripheral members of the main group. If you squint hard enough, you might occasionally read through to recommendations of interesting women writers and their books, like Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, which, although it’s had some mixed reviews, appeal to my interest in post-apocalyptica.
In the quotation, it’s the specificity I like, the covert appeal to context and the aspiration to quality, to giving the best of yourself to writing. Good writing isn’t merely collaged from other writing. You have to earn the way it lands on the page, and in the reader’s mind.
I’d say the same is true of collage poetry, even if it sounds obtuse. Collaging in poetry depends on the contexts that form within the space of the given canvas. There’s an assumption that there’s nothing more to work with beyond what’s there in front of you. The right source choices can create sparks and frisson, but the specifics of how you then associate those elements are what matter.
This is a technical point I find doesn’t get explored much in discussions of experimental technique. There’s a line in an interview with Robin Blaser (probably in The Astonishment Tapes) where he talks about the world filtering through the alembic of the poet’s body, like an alchemical reaction. What we see is uniquely attuned through our memories and physical make up, the “sloshy pipes” as Pohl puts it, to come out as an expression of ourselves as only we can feel it.
It’s as true in the act of transcribing – the way our tendencies to make mistakes, or misread words cause errors, create ‘foul papers’ – as it is in attempts to write pure self-expression, which invariable pick up traces of influences, other things we’ve read, sometimes whole phrases from other writers. Writing is always be modulated by an outside and an inside of experience. And because it’s impossible to not be yourself, even in the act of transcribing science, it’s important to recognise your selfhood as an idea in the expression, allow it to emerge, even if it’s because you want to escape from it, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot (which is itself a feeling).
I wouldn’t go so far as to say the ‘best’ part of myself goes into my writing. As much as I respect the aspiration to write better, I don’t like to let in a trace of objectivity that might trip me up. Better to say that I accept myself as an inescapable presence in my making and by embracing that I can better convey something worthwhile to others about my experience of self, so others can decide if they like it.
Not that this hasn’t gone on too long, but I’m also reminded of something Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge said once, when asked about her use of source texts and collage in her poetry. She admitted to being so generous with her appropriation, there was very little of her own language on the page, but the act of editing, the choices of what she put on the page, exposed some sense of self at a deep level.
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[*] There’s an absolutely hilarious account of meeting Campbell in Alfred Bester’s contribution, too long to extract, but ending with, “It reinforced my private opinion that a majority of the science fiction crowd, despite their brilliance, were missing their marbles.” This follows Campbell trying to convert Bester to Scientology.