Tweet
Samuel R. Delany has conjured distant worlds and bizarre societies, alien beings and unfathomable futures, but few of them are as strange and wondrous as his own life.
Born to a prominent Harlem undertaker, he was schooled alongside the children of New York's elite. At Horace Mann and Dalton, one of his classmates was Wallace Shawn, son of The New Yorker's editor and later a famous playwright. The grandson of an emancipated slave, Delany had an extended family that included judges and civil rights activists; his paternal aunts, Sadie and Bessie, were immortalized in the 1993 memoir Having Our Say, published when both were over 100 years old.
Delany himself took a different path to prominence. Dropping out of City College shortly after his father's death, he married high school classmate Marilyn Hacker, who then worked at a paperback science fiction publisher and later became a poet. (The couple was married for 19 years, though Delany was openly gay for most of their relationship. They divorced in 1980.) Inspired in part by Hacker's complaints about the low quality of submissions, Delany wrote his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor, which Hacker submitted as a slush-pile find. It was published within a year, when Delany was 20. Eight more novels followed over the next six years, beginning a career that would establish Delany as one of the great living science fiction writers — and, some would argue, one of the great American writers, period.
With the publication of his autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water (Masquerade Books), and the book-length essay Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, an ode to the joys of cruising porno theaters for public sex before the area's suburb-friendly makeover, Delany found himself turning up more frequently on college reading lists, with the growth of queer studies as an academic discipline. His books have been the subjects of innumerable critical articles and a goodly number of book-length studies, and he has been teaching in the English department at Temple University since 2001.
Although Delany's multifaceted life defies easy encapsulation, Fred Barney Taylor's documentary, The Polymath, or The Life and Opinions of Samuel Delany, Gentleman, does an admirable job of cramming it into a brief 75 minutes. The movie will have its Philadelphia premiere on July 18 as part of the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, and Delany is scheduled to attend the screening.
Delany once described the central project of his writing as "trying to promulgate — and develop — a more and more sophisticated notion of discourse." His novel Dhalgren takes a number of cues from James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and still others from French structuralists like Alain Robbe-Grillet. Upon its publication in 1975, the book was hailed as a masterpiece and denounced as impenetrable and pornographic, two complaints rarely lodged against the same work.
What upset the novel's critics, Delany says, was not the presence of gay love scenes, but the fact that the novel's sexual encounters were too diverse to allow it to be pigeonholed as a gay novel. "A gay novel was OK if the gay sex replaced the heterosexual sex," he recalls by phone from his New York apartment. "But this one had both heterosexual sex and gay sex in it, and they sat side by side, in the same discourse. That was the part that was upsetting."
Although Dhalgren's sex scenes occupy a relatively small portion of the novel (Delany once counted 36 pages out of the original printing's nearly 900), their inclusion polarized even Delany's supporters. Harlan Ellison, who had published Delany in his 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions, wrote a review for the Los Angeles Times in which he described being so exasperated by the book that he was unable to finish it. "I think he said he got to page 340 or 360 and threw the book across the room," Delany recalls. "It was only about six months ago that I looked at the review and thought, 'Well, what's on page 340?' And of course what's going on is a gay sex scene."
Art, Delany says, "tends to be defined for any particular time by what it excludes. You read the 18th- and 19th-century canon of the novel, and they give these wonderful social portraits of English society, but they simply do not mention that people have sex or reproduce. Eventually James Joyce or D.H. Lawrence comes along and says, 'These are too important to exclude from the world of art, so we'll include them.' This is a constantly moving process, and never completed. The idea of welcoming in new things, new kinds of experiences that were thought to be marginal or not important or just in bad taste, this constant movement is the movement of art through time. So I wanted to put in something that had seemed important in my own life."
Although the worlds Delany invents are fantastic, their terrain is familiar at times. Bellona, the surreal, bombed-out city where most of Dhalgren is set, was based on Delany's memories of Harlem, a fact that was not lost on many of its readers. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand envisions a society spanning thousands of worlds where lobotomized slaves toil in filth and grime and a person's desirability can be calculated to seven decimal places, but the scene where one of the main characters drifts between sexual encounters at a grungy way station could just as easily be set at a highway rest stop as on a distant planet.
Stars contains one of Delany's most elemental experiments with language. In the book's universe, the pronouns "he" and "she" have radically different meanings. "She" is any human, male or female, while "he" is reserved for beings whom the speaker desires. The building blocks of language are not essential but relational.
One of Delany's most enduring ideas is the importance of cities, and particularly the interactions between people of different social and economic backgrounds that living in the city facilitates. In Times Square Red, he writes, "Life is at its most rewarding, productive and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of goodwill."
That these thoughts appear in a book whose first half is dedicated to Delany's memories of cruising movie theaters in Times Square's glory days is no accident. The ability to reach out and touch someone across the lines that usually keep the classes separate is, he says, "one of the most important things about gay sex, particularly in its aspect of public sex." In The Polymath, he recalls taking a break from his writing routine to have sex with a New York City garbage man in a darkened movie theater — not the kind of thing you can imagine James Joyce doing on his lunch hour.
By Delany's estimate, he would have sex with as many as 10 or 15 men in the course of a normal day, while still logging a full day's work at the typewriter. He puts his lifetime total at something on the order of 50,000 partners. "I don't know whether it resolves any particular conflicts," he says. "You learn a lot about different people, different groups — and it's a lot of fun." Although he does not practice safe sex, he has remained HIV-negative, in part because he engages only in nonpenetrative sex.
Now that Delany is, as he puts it, "notably closer to 70 than I am to 60," the opportunities are less. "When all is said and done, sex is still a young man's or a young woman's game. It would be nice if there was a little more of it available for us older folks, but we make do."
Delany's long-term project of changing the discourse is all about giving his readers, and his students, the tools to facilitate such interactions, sexual or otherwise.
Delany says that his fiction, nonfiction and academic writings tend to spring from the same interests and impulses, but that fiction is a particularly useful tool for putting ideas into practice. Rather than simply advancing the notion of a different kind of language, he allows the reader to live with that idea, experiencing how it affects the workings of daily life, how it infiltrates every minute interaction. In fiction, Delany says, "You can give a much richer portrait of the whole of someone's life. You can look at some of the things that affect the individual, in the way that someone talks about or responds to a given situation. That's one of the glories of fiction. That's how fiction contributes to the process."
The ideas that animate his books, Delany says, are the kind that anyone could have walking down the street, although he probably overestimates the caliber of most people's idle thoughts. "These are thoughts that everybody has all the time," he says. "They just don't then turn around and write a 350-page novel about it. If they did, the world would probably change a little more quickly than it's been changing."
Born to a prominent Harlem undertaker, he was schooled alongside the children of New York's elite. At Horace Mann and Dalton, one of his classmates was Wallace Shawn, son of The New Yorker's editor and later a famous playwright. The grandson of an emancipated slave, Delany had an extended family that included judges and civil rights activists; his paternal aunts, Sadie and Bessie, were immortalized in the 1993 memoir Having Our Say, published when both were over 100 years old.
Delany himself took a different path to prominence. Dropping out of City College shortly after his father's death, he married high school classmate Marilyn Hacker, who then worked at a paperback science fiction publisher and later became a poet. (The couple was married for 19 years, though Delany was openly gay for most of their relationship. They divorced in 1980.) Inspired in part by Hacker's complaints about the low quality of submissions, Delany wrote his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor, which Hacker submitted as a slush-pile find. It was published within a year, when Delany was 20. Eight more novels followed over the next six years, beginning a career that would establish Delany as one of the great living science fiction writers — and, some would argue, one of the great American writers, period.
With the publication of his autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water (Masquerade Books), and the book-length essay Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, an ode to the joys of cruising porno theaters for public sex before the area's suburb-friendly makeover, Delany found himself turning up more frequently on college reading lists, with the growth of queer studies as an academic discipline. His books have been the subjects of innumerable critical articles and a goodly number of book-length studies, and he has been teaching in the English department at Temple University since 2001.
Although Delany's multifaceted life defies easy encapsulation, Fred Barney Taylor's documentary, The Polymath, or The Life and Opinions of Samuel Delany, Gentleman, does an admirable job of cramming it into a brief 75 minutes. The movie will have its Philadelphia premiere on July 18 as part of the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, and Delany is scheduled to attend the screening.
Delany once described the central project of his writing as "trying to promulgate — and develop — a more and more sophisticated notion of discourse." His novel Dhalgren takes a number of cues from James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and still others from French structuralists like Alain Robbe-Grillet. Upon its publication in 1975, the book was hailed as a masterpiece and denounced as impenetrable and pornographic, two complaints rarely lodged against the same work.
What upset the novel's critics, Delany says, was not the presence of gay love scenes, but the fact that the novel's sexual encounters were too diverse to allow it to be pigeonholed as a gay novel. "A gay novel was OK if the gay sex replaced the heterosexual sex," he recalls by phone from his New York apartment. "But this one had both heterosexual sex and gay sex in it, and they sat side by side, in the same discourse. That was the part that was upsetting."
Although Dhalgren's sex scenes occupy a relatively small portion of the novel (Delany once counted 36 pages out of the original printing's nearly 900), their inclusion polarized even Delany's supporters. Harlan Ellison, who had published Delany in his 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions, wrote a review for the Los Angeles Times in which he described being so exasperated by the book that he was unable to finish it. "I think he said he got to page 340 or 360 and threw the book across the room," Delany recalls. "It was only about six months ago that I looked at the review and thought, 'Well, what's on page 340?' And of course what's going on is a gay sex scene."
Art, Delany says, "tends to be defined for any particular time by what it excludes. You read the 18th- and 19th-century canon of the novel, and they give these wonderful social portraits of English society, but they simply do not mention that people have sex or reproduce. Eventually James Joyce or D.H. Lawrence comes along and says, 'These are too important to exclude from the world of art, so we'll include them.' This is a constantly moving process, and never completed. The idea of welcoming in new things, new kinds of experiences that were thought to be marginal or not important or just in bad taste, this constant movement is the movement of art through time. So I wanted to put in something that had seemed important in my own life."
Although the worlds Delany invents are fantastic, their terrain is familiar at times. Bellona, the surreal, bombed-out city where most of Dhalgren is set, was based on Delany's memories of Harlem, a fact that was not lost on many of its readers. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand envisions a society spanning thousands of worlds where lobotomized slaves toil in filth and grime and a person's desirability can be calculated to seven decimal places, but the scene where one of the main characters drifts between sexual encounters at a grungy way station could just as easily be set at a highway rest stop as on a distant planet.
Stars contains one of Delany's most elemental experiments with language. In the book's universe, the pronouns "he" and "she" have radically different meanings. "She" is any human, male or female, while "he" is reserved for beings whom the speaker desires. The building blocks of language are not essential but relational.
One of Delany's most enduring ideas is the importance of cities, and particularly the interactions between people of different social and economic backgrounds that living in the city facilitates. In Times Square Red, he writes, "Life is at its most rewarding, productive and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of goodwill."
That these thoughts appear in a book whose first half is dedicated to Delany's memories of cruising movie theaters in Times Square's glory days is no accident. The ability to reach out and touch someone across the lines that usually keep the classes separate is, he says, "one of the most important things about gay sex, particularly in its aspect of public sex." In The Polymath, he recalls taking a break from his writing routine to have sex with a New York City garbage man in a darkened movie theater — not the kind of thing you can imagine James Joyce doing on his lunch hour.
By Delany's estimate, he would have sex with as many as 10 or 15 men in the course of a normal day, while still logging a full day's work at the typewriter. He puts his lifetime total at something on the order of 50,000 partners. "I don't know whether it resolves any particular conflicts," he says. "You learn a lot about different people, different groups — and it's a lot of fun." Although he does not practice safe sex, he has remained HIV-negative, in part because he engages only in nonpenetrative sex.
Now that Delany is, as he puts it, "notably closer to 70 than I am to 60," the opportunities are less. "When all is said and done, sex is still a young man's or a young woman's game. It would be nice if there was a little more of it available for us older folks, but we make do."
Delany's long-term project of changing the discourse is all about giving his readers, and his students, the tools to facilitate such interactions, sexual or otherwise.
Delany says that his fiction, nonfiction and academic writings tend to spring from the same interests and impulses, but that fiction is a particularly useful tool for putting ideas into practice. Rather than simply advancing the notion of a different kind of language, he allows the reader to live with that idea, experiencing how it affects the workings of daily life, how it infiltrates every minute interaction. In fiction, Delany says, "You can give a much richer portrait of the whole of someone's life. You can look at some of the things that affect the individual, in the way that someone talks about or responds to a given situation. That's one of the glories of fiction. That's how fiction contributes to the process."
The ideas that animate his books, Delany says, are the kind that anyone could have walking down the street, although he probably overestimates the caliber of most people's idle thoughts. "These are thoughts that everybody has all the time," he says. "They just don't then turn around and write a 350-page novel about it. If they did, the world would probably change a little more quickly than it's been changing."
Comment