Some of the best literary news to come my way near the end of last year was that my Richard Matheson tribute anthology, He Is Legend, will be reprinted by Tor in trade hardcover and paperback in the fall of 2010.

For those who don’t know, this is a big deal. Tor—a division of Macmillan—is one of the biggest publishers of genre fiction in the country. Go to any bookstore and take a look at how many titles in the science fiction and horror sections are published by them. Add in their sister imprint, Forge, and check out the mystery section. Tor/Forge is huge.  No better reprint deal could possibly be made for He Is Legend—having Tor do it guarantees a major bookstore presence for the book everywhere. As such, it will be my first book published by anything other than a small press—my first book that will be able to be reliably found in a large percentage of brick-and-mortar stores. Naturally this is very happy-making for me.

It’s happy-making for my friends, too, of course. But I’ve noticed a similarity of response with a few people on He Is Legend. Basically it goes like this: “That’s great, but you didn’t write it, right? You only edited it.”

To which I respond:

Only?

I only edited it?

As far back as my first original anthology, Poe’s Lighthouse, I discovered that many people—even some writers—don’t really understand what an editor does. The general feeling seems to be that he’s simply “the guy who chooses the stories,” as if an editor takes a couple of hours one morning and says, “Okay, I like this one, this one, and this one,” and proceeds to send a list to his publishers, who then undertake the labor of turning those selections into an actual book.

That’s not how it works.

Let me stipulate here that I’m talking about editing original anthologies—that is, collections of new works which are, generally speaking, written specifically for a given book. Reprint anthologies—collections of previously-published pieces—are different. (Naturally a writer might sell a new story to an original anthology that wasn’t written specifically for that book, but in the case of my anthologies that would be difficult because they have highly specific themes and requirements. All the stories in both Poe’s Lighthouse and He Is Legend were written specifically for those volumes.)

How does an original anthology happen? How does a collection of all-new stories by different writers come to be sitting on the shelf of your local bookstore?

Lean close and I’ll tell you.

The editor does it.

The editor does everything.

At least it was that way with my two anthologies, and it’s that way with my current anthology-in-progress too (poems focused on Alfred Hitchcock).

It all comes from the editor—from initial concept to the final form of every story in the book.

The idea for Poe’s Lighthouse was an offshoot of my teaching. For several years I had an in-class game with one of the stories we read—“The Lighthouse,” a completion of an Edgar Allan Poe fragment by Robert Bloch. The game was to read the story and then try to guess exactly where Poe’s words stopped and Bloch’s began. The winner would get some sort of Poe-oriented prize—Poe stamps, a Poe action figure, something like that.

One day after class I found myself musing on the subject of Bloch’s interesting but not completely convincing completion of Poe’s story (his version reads far more like Lovecraft than Poe). I began to wonder if anybody else had ever tried to finish the Poe fragment.

An idea was born. Why not invite a bunch of contemporary writers to complete the fragment, each in his or her own way? And publish the results as an original anthology?

Well, that’s exactly what ended up happening.

It was similar with He Is Legend. I knew that William F. Nolan had edited a tribute anthology to Ray Bradbury in which writers chose a favorite Bradbury story and wrote something inspired by it—a sequel, a prequel, a variation of some sort. It seemed to me that Richard Matheson deserved a similar sort of tribute—in fact, it was surprising to me that one hadn’t already been published.

Both were valid ideas, and I knew both could make publishable books. So what was the next step?

It’s obvious that an anthology has got to have writers. But how do you get writers if you don’t yet have a publisher?

On the other hand, it’s obvious that an anthology has got to have a publisher. But how do you get a publisher if you don’t yet have any writers?

It’s possible that there are some editors in this field sufficiently well-known to sell an anthology project to a publisher with no pre-set writers, but that’s not the position I was in.

So I began to contact writers. At this point the contact was  “unofficial”—that is, the communication basically took the form of, “I have an idea for an anthology, and here it is. If I can get a contract from a publisher for this idea, would you be willing to write a story for the book?” In the case of Poe’s Lighthouse I had a collection of about a dozen names who indicated a willingness to be a part of the project before I even started contacting publishers. (What’s more—and I really must take a moment to point this out—my friend Earl Hamner took it upon himself to go ahead and write a story for me, even without a contract, so that I might use the story as a kind of sales document. He did this despite the fact that there was no guarantee I would ever obtain any contract at all from anybody, and so no guarantee he would ever be paid for the story or see it published. Such generosity is, to put it mildly, rare.)

Armed with a list of interested writers, I began to contact publishers. Eventually Cemetery Dance said yes—and Poe’s Lighthouse was on its way to becoming a reality.

The process was simpler for He Is Legend, because the prospective publisher was obvious. I never approached anyone about the project except Gauntlet Press—they had published at that point something like twenty Matheson limited editions. They worked with him constantly, and happily, so Gauntlet was a clear first choice. And they quickly agreed, provided I could get Matheson’s own permission for the volume (which was quickly granted). So here too, we were off and running.

Okay—so you have an idea for an anthology. You contact some well-known writers who say they’ll send you a story if you get a publishing contract. And you get a publishing contract. What’s next?

Well, if things are going as they should, what happens next is that the publisher sends you money. A little bit of it is for you, but most of it is to pay the writers as they send you stories and you accept them. If you’re smart you deposit this money in a separate bank account so you don’t accidentally spend it on drugs and prostitutes, or whatever it is you spend your money on.

Eventually stories begin arriving at your doorstep, or in your in-box. It’s your job to read them. Some of the stories will be easy, obvious acceptances—the kind of story you’re going to love to publish in your book. You send the good news, along with a contract for the writer. (You and the publisher will have already agreed on what goes into this contract.)

Other stories will be just as easy and obvious rejections. You send off the bad news and go back to your drugs and prostitutes.

But what about submissions that aren’t so easy? What about stories that are pretty good, but not as good as they should be? What about stories that have a really solid basic idea but which aren’t written very well? What about a ten-page story which contains nine great pages only to have everything fall apart at the end?

Ah, now we’re getting to the nitty-gritty. The editing.

Depending on the writer you’re working with, this can be a very pleasant and interesting process. You send your suggestions, they thank you for them, and a few days later you receive a revised draft. With any luck it’s acceptable, and you accept it. Maybe it still needs some more work, so you ask for it. With luck the story comes back in great shape on this second revision.

On the other hand, revisions can be—again, depending on who you’re working with—unpleasant. Writers are not a group of people generally known for their undersized egos (neither are editors), and to suggest that their latest masterpiece is anything less than the most timeless of timeless literature is enough to send some writers into what might politely be called a tizzy. Some scream at you (usually via e-mail), then settle down and revise the story. Others scream at you, call you an idiot, take their story-marbles and go home.

Anyway, at some point you have enough stories to finish the book. You decide on the order they will appear in (this is more difficult than it seems), format the manuscript for the publisher (also more difficult than it seems), create the front matter (including copyright notices, acknowledgements, introduction), and send the whole thing off.

Eventually the publisher sends back, usually via e-mail, “galley proofs”—a mock-up of what the book will look like in print, for final proofreading.

The editor has to be careful here. Generally writers are given their proofs to go over themselves, but any editor who has worked with very many writers knows that a surprisingly high percentage of them are terrible proofreaders. Thus, even if the author is officially his/her own proofreader, the wise editor completes a version himself as well, melding his version and the author’s together for the best, most thoroughly “proofed” version, which is then returned to the publisher.

Finally, months or years later, the book appears in the world at last.

You’ve built this book from the ground up. It’s your concept. You chose the writers. You negotiated with the publisher. You worked with (sometimes fought with) the writers on necessary rewrites, which can sometimes be quite extensive. You’re the one who dealt with contracts and paid everybody. You’re the one who dealt with each writer’s issues—proofreading issues, contract complaints, personal neuroses, whatever. You’re the one who tried his best to keep those couple of dozen egos properly stroked—a task that’s quite easy in many cases, but damnably hard in others. (Some writers are dreams to work with. Some are not.)

If your publisher is considerate—and both Cemetery Dance and Gauntlet were, on this point—you probably had input on the book’s final design, too. The cover art, the layout.

The resulting book therefore bears the editor’s stamp on every page, in every line. In all ways the book reflects the editor’s judgment, his literary values, his sensibilities. The book may very well have taken longer to put together, and required more man-hours, than a book of similar length the editor might have written himself.

All for what?

All for people to say, “That’s great, but you didn’t write it, right? You only edited it!”

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I’m happy to announce that I’m this month’s featured writer at Mark Sieber’s estimable Horror Drive-In website. A visit to the link below gets you a brand-new, previously-unpublished short story of mine, “Grace,” as well as an extensive interview and a bibliography of my genre-oriented publications. Some nice graphics, too. All for the price of...well, nothing! Just go here:

http://www.horrordrive-in.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/260-GRACE,-by-Christopher-Conlon.html

(If you have any trouble with the link, simply go to horrordrive-in.com and click on “Fiction.”)

Hunger and Thirst by Richard Matheson. Gauntlet Publications, 2000.

Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. Citadel Press, 2007 reprint edition. Originally published 1939.

Two books I re-read over the holidays were Richard Matheson’s unpublished-for-fifty-years first novel Hunger and Thirst and Dalton Trumbo’s anti-war classic Johnny Got His Gun.

I made no conscious connection between them when deciding to pull them from the shelf and give each a second go. They were simply two novels I’d read in recent years that made powerful impacts on me—novels I’d decided on first reading that I must read again in the not-too-distant future. I had time over the holidays, and no new releases seemed to be beckoning too insistently, so I decided it was time.

It wasn’t until I got to the Trumbo—I re-read Matheson first—that I realized the books, as very different as they are, have a significant similarity.

They both feature “still heroes.”

A still hero is literally that: a protagonist (hero or anti-hero) who, for whatever reason, is more or less incapable of physical movement. In the case of Matheson’s Erick Lindstrom, it’s because he’s been shot and his spine severed. For Trumbo’s Joe Bonham, a soldier in World War I, he’s lost everything—arms, legs, vision, hearing—in a battlefield explosion.

Their situations are far from identical. Erick Lindstrom, after all, still has his sight and hearing, as well as his arms and legs—even if they’re useless to him now (all except his right arm, which he eventually is able to move somewhat). But both Erick and Joe are trapped in bodies that have become, for the most part, unresponsive prisons. The only thing they have remaining that truly works—that works, in fact, all too well—is their minds.

It’s a powerful dramatic conceit, and when I noticed the coincidence between my two reading choices I began to think about other instances I knew of in this mini-subgenre. The first that came to mind was the Hitchcock film and Cornell Woolrich story Rear Window—a compromised example, to be sure, since the James Stewart character is hardly immobilized (he’s confined to a wheelchair due to a leg injury). Still, his ability to move is limited, and that fact drives the entire plot—from creating the boredom which causes him to begin spying on his neighbors to his inability to physically escape the villain at the climax. Similarly, the Lucille Fletcher radio play and movie Sorry, Wrong Number feature a bedridden woman (Agnes Moorehead on radio, Barbara Stanwyck on film) who overhears her own murder being plotted on the telephone and is helpless to stop it.  There is an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Breakdown,” in which a callous businessman (Joseph Cotten) is paralyzed in an auto accident and believed to be dead by everyone who handles his body. Finally, Richard Matheson himself revisited the still hero in his somewhat gimmicky 1994 novel Now You See It..., narrated by a paralyzed ex-magician known as The Great Delacorte. I’m sure there must be many more examples.

Matheson’s Hunger and Thirst, written in 1949-50 but not published until 2000, received, as far as I could see, mostly lukewarm to negative reviews when it finally appeared, and many horror fans who knew the author entirely from such genre classics as I Am Legend and The Shrinking Man were harshly dismissive. The book was “unreadable,” “dull,” “really, really bad.”

Actually, Hunger and Thirst is not only not “really, really bad”—it’s really, really good, with moments that come close to greatness.

What it’s not is any kind of a suspense story, which is no doubt what people were expecting it to be.

No, Hunger and Thirst is a literary novel, and a very ambitious one, with the clear influences (in plot) of Dostoyevsky and (in style) the James Joyce of Ulysses.  Clocking in at some 574 small-print pages, it’s the longest novel Richard Matheson ever completed.  It’s told largely in flashbacks, as young Erick Lindstrom lay dying from a gunshot wound; his mind spirals back over everything that has ever happened to him, focusing primarily on three distinct periods: his time in war and his tortured relationships with two young women he met in college, Sally and Leonora.

This is very much a young man’s novel in its scope and ambition, as well as in its youthful main character’s self-absorption. (In his Afterword, Matheson himself refers to the “selfishness” and “almost total self-involvement” of his younger self, on whom he admits Erick Lindstrom is based.) As a result, the protagonist of Hunger and Thirst is rarely “likable,” but that doesn’t make him any less interesting. (The whole question of “likability” in fictional characters is a much-misunderstood one. Does anyone find Hamlet or Lear or Macbeth “likable”? Would anyone willingly have dinner with Blanche duBois, Willy Loman, or George and Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? How about the Tyrone family, from perhaps the greatest of all American dramas, Long Day’s Journey Into Night—anybody want to spend a weekend with them? Likability is irrelevant as long as a character is vivid and compelling.)

Hunger and Thirst shows us a young, raw Matheson, before his talent was to some degree reshaped by the dictates of commercial markets. Make no mistake, this young man is playing for keeps: Hunger and Thirst is as blatant an attempt to write a masterpiece as Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel was—a novel with which Hunger and Thirst shares some qualities, by the way, as well as some flaws. Did Matheson achieve it? No, but if the novel had been accepted by a major publisher back in 1950 or 1951, he might have. What he needed was what Thomas Wolfe had: a superb editor (in Wolfe’s case, Maxwell Perkins) to help the young writer give sharpness and shape to what was a somewhat unwieldy and often unfocused manuscript. In that sense, Hunger and Thirst reminds me somewhat of Wolfe’s posthumously-published O Lost, the original unedited—and indisputably inferior—version of what became Look Homeward Angel.

Still, whatever its troubles, Matheson’s first novel is a compelling read. His renderings of battle (taken from his own experience) ring true. His psychological insight, particularly in the sections with his on-again, off-again girlfriend Sally, is impressive; their tormented relationship will look familiar to anyone with one or more complicated college romances in their past. And, like him or not, Erick Lindstrom is a superbly delineated character—we see him in all his anger, his resentment, his ambition, his youthful cynicism and sentimentality. He is, in his way, nearly as vivid a character as Wolfe’s Eugene Gant.

Readers who come to Hunger and Thirst looking for a page-turning genre novel in the vein of Hell House or Stir of Echoes will be disappointed. And yet the Matheson of this early effort is not entirely unrecognizable. Consider the opening lines:

When he woke up he couldn’t move.

Not a shoulder, not a limb, not a finger. Every muscle felt paralyzed, useless. There was no sense of body.

He lay there on the bed and stared up at the ceiling and tried to remember. What had brought him there, where he was and, even, who he was. His brain was a sluggish current that slid like lava over the effort to know. He could almost feel it shift and slough like a turgid river against the walls of his brain.

Silence.

It was quiet outside. It was almost never quiet outside. Not in the city, not where he lived. He wondered where the elevated trains were and the trucks and the cars and the people hurrying.

Silence. His brain tried to work.

It was an effort. It was like standing in sweating impatience over an obdurate machine, cursing it, kicking it, trying to get it running. And, all the time, the lump of an engine sat there like a stubborn mule and refused to turn. It mocked. The very lack of motion was an insult flung in the teeth. That was what his brain was like then. He could not know. Where am I? What day is it? What time? Why did he feel as though encased in cement? (3-4)

Why indeed? This superdramatic opening could well be from one of Matheson’s scripts for The Twilight Zone, and the story’s overall structure—a man alone, isolated in a hostile world—reflects the same theme that would figure prominently in much of his later genre work.

But at the time the novel was not published—the author gave up on it after his agent pronounced the book “unpublishable,” despite Matheson’s writer friend Henry Kuttner telling him that the agent was “a damn fool.” The ever-adaptable Matheson adjusted his sights to more commercial markets, thus setting in motion his career as one of America’s greatest fantasists—which did not, for Matheson, represent a compromise, since as he writes in his Introduction to this book, “I have loved fantasy literature since I was a child.”

Well and good. But Hunger and Thirst offers us a tantalizing look at another Richard Matheson—one who, if things had worked out a little differently, might now be talked of not in the same breath with Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, but rather with the likes of Saul Bellow and John Updike.

Hunger and Thirst, then,  makes highly effective use of the still hero. But there are numerous examples to show that anti-war stories can give the device an even deeper poignancy.

Born on the Fourth of July and Coming Home both offer heartrending accounts of still heroes. For me, however, the greatest single use of the still hero—and he is truly the stillest of all—comes in Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, later remembered as one of the “Hollywood Ten” and the author of the screenplays for Exodus, Spartacus, Roman Holiday, and many other classic films (often under pseudonyms, due to his blacklisting in the 1950s).

Telling an entire novel from the point of view of someone who cannot hear, speak, or move might seem impossible, but Trumbo creates an unforgettable protagonist in his Joe Bonham, a man who answered the call to join “the last of the romantic wars,” as Trumbo in his Introduction calls World War I. “Somebody said let’s go out and fight for liberty,” Joe Bonham thinks—but he asks the necessary questions only after it’s too late:

Then there was this freedom the little guys were always getting killed for. Was it freedom from another country? Freedom from work or disease or death? Freedom from your mother-in-law? Please mister give us a bill of sale on this freedom before we go out and get killed. Give us a bill of sale drawn up plainly so we know in advance what we’re getting killed for and give us also a first mortgage on something as security so we can be sure after we’ve won your war that we’ve got the same kind of freedom we bargained for. (116)

Johnny Got His Gun is as much an anti-war polemic as a novel, and at times—particularly near the end—this works to the book’s disadvantage, leading to a shrill quality and some degree of repetitiveness. The style, too, is sometimes too much indebted to Hemingway—as if Hemingway had suddenly decided to abandon the macho heroics of A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls in order to, for once, tell the truth about war. Even so, Trumbo’s book is undeniably a searing experience, with any number of unforgettable moments—the horrific one when Joe receives a medal, for example, or the euphoric one when he finally breaks through and manages to communicate with someone. (If you can read that scene without tears springing to your eyes, you’re a stronger person than I.) And in its best sections, even the most propagandistic lines ring true.

You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else’s life. They’re plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congresses. That’s their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously. They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead.

Hmmmm.

But what do the dead say?

Did anybody every come back from the dead any single one of the millions who got killed did any one of them ever come back and say by god I’m glad I’m dead because death is always better than dishonor? Did they say I’m glad I died to make the world safe for democracy? Did they say I like death better than losing liberty? Did any of them ever say it’s good to think I got my guts blown out for the honor of my country? Did any of them ever say look at me I’m dead but I died for decency and that’s better than being alive? Did any of them ever say here I am I’ve been rotting for two years in a foreign grave but it’s wonderful to die for your native land? Did any of them say hurray I died for womanhood and I’m happy see how I sing even though my mouth is choked with worms?

Nobody but the dead know whether all these things people talk about are worth dying for or not. And the dead can’t talk. So the words about noble deaths and sacred blood and honor and such are all put into dead lips by grave robbers and fakes who have no right to speak for the dead. If a man says death before dishonor he is either a fool or a liar because he doesn’t know what death is. He isn’t able to judge. He only knows about living. If he is a fool and believes in death before dishonor let him go ahead and die. But all the little guys who are too busy to fight should be left alone...Because the guys who say life isn’t worth living without some principle so important you’re willing to die for it they are all nuts. (119-20)

With this country currently embroiled in not one but two seemingly endless wars, Dalton Trumbo’s Joe Bonham is as relevant today as ever. That’s the tragedy of it. And that’s why Johnny Got His Gun should be considered required reading for, well, everyone.

Erick Lindstrom and Joe Bonham are, in their differing ways, two of fiction’s most compelling still heroes.

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2.  I believe that Larry David is one of the few authentic geniuses American television has produced—Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm are, at their best, as sophisticated, and as funny, as anything ever written by Oscar Wilde or directed by Preston Sturges. This makes me wonder why I so totally fail to embrace the films of Woody Allen, who is clearly, at least in spirit,  David’s comedic mentor. (The George Costanza character in Seinfeld sometimes seemed to be almost channeling Woody Allen, especially in the early seasons.) But Allen’s own onscreen persona is simply unbearable to me—a thousand fingernails scraping down a hundred chalkboards. The no-doubt-quite-real qualities of films such as Annie Hall and Manhattan are therefore, alas, closed to me.

3.  Heresy, I know, but I find Adrian Lyne’s film of Lolita to be vastly superior to Stanley Kubrick’s in every respect (but one—I’ll admit that as Charlotte Haze Shelley Winters was preferable to Melanie Griffith). This is doubly puzzling to me, since otherwise I have little use for Lyne’s movies—yet I generally love Kubrick’s. Lyne’s Lolita was mostly slagged by the critics when it appeared in 1997, but for me, the experience of watching it was to finally behold one of my favorite novels translated to the screen with a high degree of accuracy.

4.  Though I love virtually everything else he ever wrote, Mahler’s 7^th Symphony leaves me cold. I believe that I’ve only actually listened to it all the way through perhaps three times in my life. Some Mahler pieces affect me more deeply than others,
of course, but even those I respond to less strongly (“Songs of a Wayfarer,” for instance, or the 8^th Symphony) invariably contain moments of sheer Mahlerian insight and joy. Not so with the 7^th Symphony, which, despite my repeated efforts at listening to it and reading about it, is to me as dead as a mackerel.

5.  I admire William Faulkner’s writing very much, but if I were to compile a list of my fifty favorite books, there wouldn’t be a single Faulkner title on it. I love a lot of the Southern Gothic writers who came along in Faulkner’s wake (Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, the early Capote), but not—other than a few of his short stories—the man himself. I have no idea why.

6.  I’ve always preferred the music of the Sammy Hagar-era Van Halen to that of the David Lee Roth era.

7.  Paranormal Activity may be the single worst film I’ve ever seen—certainly it’s one of the two worst I’ve paid to see in a movie theater. (The other would be Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho.) I’ve never been so baffled by an audience’s response to a film—not the audience I was with, which laughed all the way through it, but the big box office and all the splendid reviews Paranormal Activity garnered. I still find myself wondering if what I was shown wasn’t some sort of joke reel run in place of the actual film. What I saw amounted to a five-minute YouTube gag stretched—interminably—to ninety minutes. Quiet, atmospheric horror is exactly what I love—Ringu, A Tale of Two Sisters, The Innocents, all those wonderful Val Lewton films—and I have no problem with the kind of shaky-cam employed here; I liked both The Blair Witch Project and [REC] very much. But Paranormal Activity?

8.  While we’re on the subject of films, I’ll admit that I’ve always found Hitchcock’s Vertigo to be slightly overvalued. It’s a haunting and beautiful movie, surely; but I can’t quite see it as the masterpiece that others do. For one, the plot is filled with obvious absurdities (really, just imagine trying to implement in real life the kind of plan Gavin Elster has up his sleeve), and the dialogue is sometimes laughable—as when Scottie implores “Judy” to change the color of her hair, pleading, “It can’t matter to you!” (Sure, hell—what woman has ever cared what color her hair was?) Finally, though I know many people love them in these roles, for me both Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart are inadequate to this material. (For the latter, try mentally substituting Montgomery Clift.)

9.  I love Remembrance of Things Past (a.k.a. In Search of Lost Time) above all other books, but—and this is a kind of sacrilege to many Proustians—I believe that its 3000+ pages could be cut by as much as a quarter without losing anything of real importance. In fact, I suspect that the last three sections—The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained—actually benefitted from the fact that the author died before he could revise (read: endlessly expand) them.

10.  My favorite Beatle was Paul.

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Though I spent much of my youth reading genre fiction, by the early 1980s I’d exited the worlds of mystery, horror, and SF almost completely.

Oh, if pressed, I’d still have admitted that Twilight Zone was my all-time favorite TV series, and 2001: A Space Odyssey one of my top-ten films. But those were different—well-established mainstream classics beloved by millions of people who would never have gone near a copy of F & SF or a cheesily-covered horror paperback. There was no disgrace in loving them.

Not that my shutting the door on genre fiction had anything to do with feelings of disgrace. It happened because of  my wild passion for the new reading I’d discovered: writers like Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote and James Baldwin and Joyce Carol Oates were revelations to me, their plays and novels and essays so much more consciously and completely written than anything I’d encountered before. They made the books I’d loved earlier, by people like Asimov and Simak and Matheson, seem pale and skeletal by comparison—more like outlines for books than the real thing.

Well, my exodus from the world of genre fiction lasted well over ten years—a decade in which I obtained a BA in English, spent two-and-a-half years in Botswana with the Peace Corps, taught in the Washington, D.C. public schools, received a Master’s degree in American Literature, got married and divorced and then married again (to the right woman this time). I was past thirty when I began to feel nostalgic for those genre writers I’d once loved, and picked up copies of Matheson’s I Am Legend and Pohl’s Gateway as starting points for what turned out to be a permanent re-emergence in worlds I thought I’d left behind forever.

Of course, more than ten years on, I read those books—and lots of other genre titles—with somewhat different eyes. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed a lot of these fast-moving, plot-oriented yarns (I recall being shocked at how fast I could zip through one, compared to the time it took to read, say, the latest Norman Mailer—even if the page counts were similar). But I was aware too of their many deficiencies: in style, in characterization, in overreliance on clichés at every level. The constant need of these writers to keep the plot rushing forward pell-mell was a distraction to me after years of Styron, Flaubert, Proust; I sensed a thinness, an undercooked quality in most of these books now. (There were exceptions: Alfred Bester’s phenomenally brilliant The Stars My Destination comes to mind—surely an American masterpiece, if any novel is—along with some of Harlan Ellison’s and Ray Bradbury’s best stories; also the mysteries of Chandler, Hammett, Spillane, and Crumley.) Still, my enjoyment was just as real as my criticism, and after a while it became apparent that I had once again become a devotee of genre fiction, even if it would now represent a smaller percentage of my overall reading than it once had.

In the ensuing years I’ve gotten over most of my general reservations about this kind of writing, too. Keeping the plot moving, for example, is simply the way that genre writing works; for elaborate stylized language or extended meditations on historical and philosophical issues one must, for the most part, look elsewhere. (There are exceptions, of course, as there are to everything I’m saying here.) Characterization is usually simple in genre writing; often, alas, it’s crude and one-dimensional. There are prose stylists in genre fiction, yes—I’ve already named some—but few writers publishing in science fiction or mystery or horror can legitimately be called stylists. The vast majority of writers in these fields are storytellers, pure and simple. “Not,” as Jerry Seinfeld once put it, in a drastically different context, “that there’s anything wrong with that.”

Indeed there isn’t. And since my rediscovery of genre fiction I’ve spent many pleasurable hours with the works of writers who simply tell good stories, no more and no less. It’s a hell of a tough skill to master, you know. If you don’t believe me, try it yourself.

But I’ll confess that there are a few niggling habits of some genre writers that drive me crazy.

The one I’m thinking of today is a word, or “word,” unique to genre fiction, which I see countless writers, even very good ones, using.

The word is “Noooooooooo!”

You know what I mean. At the climax of so many horror stories, so many thrillers, so many sci-fi epics, this odd coinage appears, generally from the mouth of the hero (if he is about to die) or the villain (if he is about to die). As in, “Percival, no! Don’t! No! Noooooooooo!”

Why is this unreal word a very real problem?

Because it isn’t pronounced the way the author obviously thinks that it is.

Any writer who uses this invented word clearly believes that it represents an extension of the word “No.” Say n. Then say oh, and extend it for a good long time. Result: “Noooooooooo!”

Uh, no.

In fact, there is no way in the English language for “Noooooooooo” to be pronounced except to rhyme with the verbal effusion of a cow. The letters “oo” at the end of a word simply must be spoken as a long o, rhyming with boo, coo, goo, poo, too, woo...and, yes, moo.

The problem, of course, is in the spelling of “No.” If the language had any consistency at all, its spelling would conform to that of “Oh.” The word would be spelled “Noh.”

And if it were spelled like that, then the superdramatic extended vowel sound could be rendered correctly: “Nohhhhhhhhhh!”

But, alas, it’s not spelled like that. And yet writers—genre writers—insist on using this silly coinage in story after story, novel after novel. And every time I see it, it pulls me straight out of the story I’m reading and makes me think of—well—cows. Big brown ones standing in green fields, chewing lazily away at grass.

I don’t wish to overanalyze this, but it does seem to me that writers who would use a nonsensical phrasing of this sort may be guilty of, at the very least, inattention to the language. One needn’t be a high-level literary prose stylist to realize that “Noooooooooo!” simply doesn’t work on any level except that of unintended comedy.

So what’s the solution? How can a writer indicate an extended “No” without resorting to cow-talk?

Well, there is no way.

It’s as simple as that. It can’t be done. As a result of the eccentricities of English spelling, the “oh” sound in “No” can’t be extended in print. A writer’s only option is to change the dialogue, perhaps to a quick series of repetitions of the word rather than a single extended use: “‘No!’ she cried. ‘No, please! No! No! No!’” Sometimes an indirect account of the use of the word might be possible, too: “I listened as his final screamed ‘No’ seemed to reverberate its ‘o’ forever throughout the cavern.” Something like that.

But “Noooooooooo!”?

No.

Please. Just no.

#

The Golden Age of Television. 3-Disc DVD Set. The Criterion Collection.

Studio One Anthology. 6-Disc DVD Set. Koch International.

I’ve always wanted to know everything.

Well, let me amend that. I’ve always wanted to know everything about the things I care for deeply.

When I was young it never ceased to amaze me that other people didn’t have that same raging hunger to learn, to know. Or maybe it was just that they didn’t care about the same things I did.

As I’ve written before, I fell in love with storytelling and poetry at an early age. The result of this love was, for me, an incessant drive to read everything: everything, at least, within the fields that I was passionate about. Poe himself, at first—I obtained a second-hand copy of his Collected Works and read it cover-to-cover, even the essays, which at age eleven or twelve I didn’t really understand.

The same thing happened slightly later, when I discovered Sherlock Holmes. A collected edition. I read every single story.

As I slowly began to understand the concept of genre, that there were other writers “like” Poe and other characters “like” Sherlock Holmes, I soon wanted to read every horror story and every detective story ever written. I made a pretty good run at it, too, for a twelve-year-old.

Science fiction was next, and in many ways it was the biggest and deepest obsession of all. From the ages of twelve or thirteen to seventeen I read almost nothing but SF; the key is, though, that I wasn’t merely reading the newest titles, the currently popular writers—I was haunting used bookstores looking for old anthologies, copies of Astounding and Galaxy and Fantasy and Science Fiction from decades before. I would order everything I could get my hands on through the local library. Other SF-oriented kids were reading Orson Scott Card; I read him too, but I was also ferreting out old, half-forgotten writers of decades past like Raymond Z. Gallun and Mark Clifton and Henry Kuttner. One way or another, I wanted to find it all, read it all, know it all.

And in fact, it’s the book-finding and thinking and reading that I did at that age which set up the rest of my life in terms of literature. Much of what I know about Poe, about horror fiction, about science fiction, I learned then, when one’s mind is wide open to information and stimuli in a way that it never is again, once youth has caught its speedy bus out of town.

This desire to know everything filtered out into other fields besides writing. When I discovered old-time radio, it wasn’t enough for me to collect a few cassettes of X Minus One or Suspense or Lights Out. I had to have it all—something that wasn’t financially feasible for quite some time, but by God I tried. By the age of fifteen I owned hundreds of OTR tapes.

It was the same with silent films, which I encountered first with a PBS showing of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis when I was a teenager. Soon afterward I was able to see Chaplin’s The Gold Rush in a theatre with live organ accompaniment, and I was hooked forever—which meant that I had to see every Lang film, every Chaplin, every silent film I could possibly access, and read every book I could find about them.

Another field of fascination for my younger self was the now almost-forgotten world of live dramatic television.

This was definitely a strange preoccupation for a seventeen-year-old boy in the late 1970s, but in fact I was fascinated by the history of TV even before I’d seen any of the old live shows. I was already an inveterate viewer of The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits, and Thriller, all of which I watched in syndicated reruns. But I’d read of earlier shows with names like Playhouse 90 and Studio One, dramatic anthologies which actually broadcast their episodes live, like stage plays. What’s more, writers whose works I loved—Rod Serling first among them—had written for these shows. I learned too that these programs, some of them at least, did still exist, preserved in a primitive form of video recording called kinescopes (produced basically by aiming a film camera at the picture tube of a TV). But although I read everything about these shows that I could, even going so far as to collect long-out-of-print books of early television scripts (I remember one in particular, a paperback called Best TV Plays), my chances of ever actually seeing any of the shows seemed remote.

But in 1981, PBS rescued me. The Golden Age of Television was a limited series of eight re-broadcasts of those old kinescopes, including the very programs I’d read so much about—Marty, Days of Wine and Roses, Bang the Drum Slowly, and others, including Rod Serling’s legendary trio of classics: Patterns, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and The Comedian.

The Golden Age of Television represented one of the first sustained jobs I gave to my RCA top-loader VCR.

For me, at least, these early—and in some technical ways crude—live broadcasts were utterly compelling. They were theatrical in a way that later television was not: the limited sets and camera work, the necessity of telling most of a story through dialogue, made these shows, in fact, very much like plays. I suppose for many viewers today (or even in 1981) they might seem artificial, “stagey.”

But what writing! What acting! What direction! Simply to glance down the credits of these eight plays is to behold a who’s-who of American film and television from the 1950s through the ’80s: Rod Serling, Paddy Chayevsky, J.P. Miller. John Frankenheimer, Delbert Mann, Daniel Petrie. Paul Newman, Mickey Rooney, Julie Harris, Piper Laurie, Cliff Robertson, Kim Hunter...and on and on.

As the bonus interviews on the new Criterion Collection Golden Age of Television set make clear, producing a live TV play was a frantic, nearly mad enterprise. Three or four weeks of rehearsal (if you were lucky) and you were on the air—live, to an audience numbered in the millions. This wasn’t film, where any fluff is easily covered by a retake. It wasn’t Broadway, where an actor forgetting a line or a bit of scenery falling down is unfortunate, but there’s always tomorrow night to make it better. With live television, there was literally no tomorrow. And the actors and directors and technicians were broadcasting to an audience larger than the total number of people who had ever seen any production of any Shakespeare play since the day they were written.

To put it mildly, live television was not for the faint-of-heart.

If you want to know where television’s Golden Age got its name, you need look no further than the best this newly-issued DVD issue of the series has to offer. These are superb dramas by any standard, and still powerful today if you can readjust your viewing lens to something rather closer to theatre than what we today think of as TV drama. Switch on Marty for a 50-minute lesson in pitch-perfect dialogue and flawless dramatic structure courtesy of Paddy Chayevsky—not to mention a master class in acting from Rod Steiger. Or try Days of Wine and Roses, J.P. Miller’s astoundingly candid examination of the effects of alcoholism on two young people—said people embodied by two more master-class actors, Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie. Want a story as flat-out heartbreaking as any you’ll ever see? Arnold Schulman’s baseball drama Bang the Drum Slowly, starring a very young Paul Newman, won’t just break your heart, it will rip it out of your chest and stomp on it. And to behold the depth, scope, and staggering technical accomplishment of which live TV was capable, look no further than Rod Serling’s The Comedian, brilliantly directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Mickey Rooney—in a performance that is nothing less than astonishing.

Of course, the interested viewer needs to bear in mind the limitations of the source material. Kinescopes were a low-quality way of preserving broadcast content, primarily for legal reasons; they were never meant for rebroadcast. The typical kinescope looks basically like a somewhat tired, washed-out print of a black-and-white film from the 1930s or ’40s. The contrast is generally poor, and the sound is thin; in fact, this is a disappointment in the new Criterion Collection release of the series. Digital technology could easily have been used to correct some of the more glaring flaws in these old recordings, but little seems to have been done to the shows since their original 1981 Golden Age of Television showings (I still have some of my old VHS recordings for comparison). That’s too bad.

Still, The Golden Age of Television was, in 1981, a wonderful start to reclaiming TV’s earliest period. But it was only a start. Since then, various vendors have sold copies of different series (sometimes of dubious copyright legality) on videocassette and DVD. Interested viewers can find copies of Suspense, Lights Out, Tales of Tomorrow, and other early anthologies easily enough. But early-TV fans have long hungered for more high-end releases from the very best of these programs—and we’ve finally gotten some satisfaction, with Koch International’s boxed set of Studio One.

Unlike The Golden Age of Television, the Studio One Anthology focuses entirely on selected episodes from a single series (which was also known as Westinghouse Studio One). But like Golden Age, the list of participants is jaw-dropping. Consider just a few of the actors here: Art Carney, Robert Cummings, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Charlton Heston, Jack Lemmon, Sal Mineo, Eva Marie Saint. Franklin Schaffner directed a large portion of the plays. And the writers? How about Rod Serling (again), Gore Vidal, Shakespeare (a one-hour condensation of Julius Caeser), and, most of all, Reginald Rose—including the original live TV production of his jury-room classic, Twelve Angry Men?

It’s notable, by the way, that so many of the kinescopes here were later turned into films—sometimes very good films, and occasionally classics. In the 1950s the film industry was reeling from the siphoning-off of its audience due to television, so (in the spirit of keeping friends close and enemies closer) films were often made of the better-received live plays. The comparisons can be interesting, and revealing: in some cases the original play is unquestionably superior (as with Days of Wine and Roses), but sometimes the film has the edge (Twelve Angry Men). Occasionally it has to be called a draw, as with Marty and Requiem for a Heavyweight. But fans of any of these movies owe it to themselves to seek out the always-fascinating original productions.

The glory of the Studio One set (other than its pristine restorations of these old kinescopes, far more impressive than those of Golden Age) is clearly the productions by Reginald Rose, at one time considered one of America’s finest dramatists but who is now sadly relegated to the status of a one-hit wonder (but then again, Twelve Angry Men was a hell of a hit). Five of the seventeen dramas here are by Rose, and serve as an invaluable reminder of the very great talent of this unjustly-neglected writer. In particular, The Death and Life of Larry Benson (with its echoes of Arthur Miller’s classic All My Sons), Dino (focused on juvenile delinquency and starring Rebel Without a Cause’s Sal Mineo), and the powerful Remarkable Incident at Carson Corners should serve as reason enough to reevaluate Rose’s contributions to television and drama.

Taken as a whole, The Golden Age of Television and the Studio One Anthology sets make a superb introduction to this little-remembered era in television history. Of course there are gaps; how could there not be? I would particularly have welcomed more of Chayevsky’s early work (Marty is the only example here), and it’s distressing to see than absolutely nothing has been included by the great Horton Foote—despite his having penned some of the most memorable works of the era, including The Trip to Bountiful (Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse) and the superb Faulkner adaptation Tomorrow (from Playhouse 90). At least expanded versions of both of these scripts were later made into easily-available films. Both are classics.

Referring to the early TV writers, John Franknheimer once said: “They defined a time that will never come again.” Indeed they did—as did the directors and actors and technicians and everyone else who toiled in the hectic, crazy world of early live television. Anything that hard, that panic-inducing—and, alas, that relatively unprofitable—was doomed to fail. And live dramatic TV did, soon enough.

But these invaluable DVD sets prove that there was a time in American TV history when at least some of what was being broadcast over the airwaves most emphatically did not deserve television’s later, mostly accurate nickname: “the boob tube.”

#

There are writers whose works you like, and there are writers whose works you love. Then there are what I call “DNA writers.”

DNA writers are, simply, those whose works are so central to you—to your own writing, to your understanding of what writing is, to your consciousness of the world, your very sense of self—that it’s as if they’re somehow imprinted on your DNA. Their words and worlds exist in a very private place within your mind and soul, one that has permanent meaning and relevance to you. Of DNA writers you don’t think, “I’d write differently if I hadn’t found them”; you think, “I’d be a different person if I hadn’t found them.”

It’s possible that someone has had another kind of experience, but it seems almost inevitable that you find your DNA writers when you’re young—when you’re still creating yourself. Some DNA writers arrive during childhood, some in adolescence; all have arrived by the conclusion of your young adult life—certainly by the end of your twenties. After that, you’re too experienced, too formed, to be hit so profoundly, so deeply, by another’s talent.

There can still be writers whose works you fall in love with, of course. It still happens to me with pleasing regularity. But, as great as some of these folks are, I know that they won’t live within me the way that my DNA writers do. I might enjoy these newer (to me) writers, appreciate them deeply, learn from them—but my essential sense of self will be unaffected. I’ll recognize them as great writers, that’s all. Not as part of myself.

A list of one’s DNA writers won’t necessarily be a list of the greatest writers in the history of the world. It will simply be a list of those whose works you found at the right time, under the right circumstances, for their words to sink into you in a different, extraordinarily profound way—a way that continues to develop and change and ramify throughout your life, even if you never read a particular writer again after that initial DNA-altering exposure. Often such writers are relatively minor, in the general scheme of literary things. The giants, the Shakespeares and Miltons, are generally too utterly colossal to be DNA writers. I love Lear above all plays, for instance, but it feels dishonest to list Shakespeare as one of my DNA writers. He’s too formidable, too awe-inspiring; and too many of his works, especially the early comedies, leave me cold. Shakespeare is one of the world’s greatest writers, and a handful of his works are among my lifetime favorites; but he’s not quite what I mean by a DNA writer. At least not for me (he certainly could be for others).

A DNA writer is one who, to quote Yeats completely out of context, lives in the deep heart’s core.

So who are my DNA writers? Here are the ones who spring to mind. (To keep the list manageable, I’ll limit myself to prose writers—poets would require another list entirely.)

Edgar Allan Poe. As I’ve often said, Poe was my first favorite writer; but my response to “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Raven” (the Poe works I encountered first) went far beyond that of most grade-school students, who enjoyed the creepiness well enough but who weren’t moved and shaken by Poe’s language and his extraordinarily modern sense of what might be called homegrown fear: the concept that horrors can exist within one’s own house, side-by-side with you—beating hearts under the floorboards, bodies walled up in the cellar, ominous birds flying in and delivering messages of doom. It was a message and a sense of the world that a young boy growing up with two alcoholic parents took very much to heart. Poe, I thought, understood me—knew me. He felt, across the chasm of centuries, like the most secret of secret friends. He still does.

Rod Serling. Fast on the heels of Poe I discovered The Twilight Zone and its creator/host/main writer, Rod Serling. At age eleven or twelve it seemed that I’d found Poe’s lost spiritual son—his stories were in some ways similar to Poe’s, though less overtly ghastly for the most part. Still, Twilight Zone did in a more contemporary context what Poe had done in his nineteenth century fashion—reflect the strangeness and ever-threatening disequilibrium of so-called “normal” life. Writers Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson, and Earl Hamner were all part of the show’s overall gestalt, and were—and have remained—important to me. But it was Serling, the guiding spirit and the first writer I was able to actually see and hear, who seemed to be speaking straight to me, saying in essence: “You’re not wrong. Life really is as frightening and unpredictable as you think it is.” The fact that Serling recognized this, and shared this knowledge with me, was as comforting and validating as having Poe as my secret friend.

Anne Frank. A different category here, surely—a teenaged diarist hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam during World War Two. But like any number of boys who first read the diary when they were too young to have yet had a girlfriend, I found reading the book an astonishingly intimate experience. Since I had no sisters, I’d never been on close terms with any female my age. For the first time in my life it seemed that I felt what it was like to be close to a girl, if only on paper—to share her excitements and intimacies and insecurities. I loved her, as much as a boy can love the images and emotions his brain processes from words on a page. Re-reading the diary as an adult was also a revelatory experience, if in a completely different way—when I was young I’d loved the book for Anne herself, the thrill of knowing her, listening to her most private thoughts. As a grown-up I was instead overcome by a shattering sense of loss, a realization of just how young she had truly been, of how truly brief a life she’d been allowed to live.

Tennessee Williams. I wish I could recall my first experience of Williams—it may have been in high school, when I was too raw and inexperienced to grasp his mastery of language, of form, his profound connections of desire, loss, and mortality, his unequaled ability to take material which in lesser hands would have been luridly grotesque and turn it into (to quote one of his published letters) “pure art, which is pure light.” I believe that The Glass Menagerie must have been the first for me, with Tom’s remarkable opening and closing monologues—surely two of the most pitch-perfectly beautiful speeches in the English language, on a par with Shakespeare’s. But it was A Streetcar Named Desire that sank Williams into my DNA forever—perhaps the harshest and most nightmarish of all modern tragedies, yet written in language that, while it admittedly bears no resemblance to actual human speech, soars on its own rhythms to create a kind of heightened poetic realism. His understanding of “the wild at heart that are kept in cages” informs all his great plays, as well as the less famous great stories (“Desire and the Black Masseur,” “One Arm,” a dozen more). Any writer—that is, any whose writing is organic and honest and not merely commercial hack work—is an outsider; Williams wrote about them, about us, better than anyone.

Truman Capote. I found Capote’s work at the perfect time—just as I was broadening my horizons past the genre fiction I’d spent most of my young life reading. His early Gothic stories—“Miriam,” “Shut a Final Door,” “The Headless Hawk”—had sufficient horrific content to appeal to my still-unformed sensibilities, but these pieces were written on a completely different level than the kind of thing typically found in the genre sections I frequented at bookstores. The prose was intricate, subtly shaded, vivid, alive; his rhythms made the language itself an integral part of the experience, rather than simply being the necessary delivery system for “the story.” In Capote, the language is, in some sense, the story. Other Voices Other Rooms, A Tree of Night, and his masterwork, In Cold Blood—certainly one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read—completely altered my conception of what prose is and what it does, or can do. A bit like Serling, too, Capote was there—present on countless talk shows of the era, another model for what a writer could be: in this case flamboyant, witty, outrageous, unforgettable.

Anton Chekhov. Just as I was discovering via Williams and Capote how literary fiction could take tropes familiar to me from horror pulp magazines and turn them inside out, make them into another kind of vastly heightened reading experience, I discovered (through Capote’s published recommendation) the world of the great Russian master Chekhov. At first stories like “A Calamity” and “The Lady With the Pet Dog” puzzled me—they seemed to have no point, in the sense that I’d grown to expect short stories to have a point. But the more I read The Portable Chekhov, which I purchased in the Humboldt State University Bookstore in 1986 or 1987, the more his world opened to me. It was an ordinary, human world, yet within it the events of regular people lives took on a kind of mystical significance that could leave me dazzled and nearly in tears. This was, simply, life—life as it’s lived, portrayed in words with a deeper and more moving sense of reality than any writer I’d ever encountered. Chekhov’s plays are wonderful, but for me it’s the short stories which are his true masterworks.

William Styron. As a young writer in college it didn’t take me long to begin thinking big—to conclude that short stories and poems were fine, but that the serious writer, the real writer, thought in terms of large-scale projects. Nobody thought larger than William Styron, whose novels The Confessions of Nat Turner and, especially, Sophie’s Choice were revelations to me. Here was a writer as surefooted within the labyrinths of the English language as Capote, but who applied his supple prose not to private, inwardly-drawn narratives, but to some of the biggest themes of all. Slavery. The Holocaust. Yet the stories themselves were intimate, first-person tales, offering an unprecedented sense of the individual within the whirlwind of a larger history. Styron brought an intellect and philosophical bearing to his highly emotional, gorgeously written, brilliant novels.

Marcel Proust. Sequentially speaking—in terms of my own life, that is—Proust is the last of all my DNA writers. I read Remembrance of Things Past in its entirety during my off-hours as a teacher as Tsabong Community Junior Secondary School in Tsabong, Botswana, which is in the middle of the Kalahari Desert. I was twenty-eight. Perhaps nowhere else on earth could I have found the time and the quiet, steady focus which Proust’s writing, even in translation, requires. (Years later I read the whole again, and lived to tell the tale: see “Proust in Africa,” available for perusal on my website, http://christopherconlon.com.) Yet Proust’s massive (3000+ pages) novel with its hundreds of characters is at its core an intimate tale of just one person, in this case the unnamed Narrator. A sensitive would-be writer on the one hand, a social snob on the other, he ascends through the artistic and social world of nineteenth- and early-twentieth century France. No one ever understood time and its effects on the human psyche better than Proust, or wrote about it more powerfully. This may sound almost masochistic, but really: the novel is even better the second time, when the characters are already clear in your head and you understand the grand architectural scheme of the entire narrative. I don’t know if Remembrance of Things Past (or as it’s translated now, In Search of Lost Time) is the greatest novel ever written, since I haven’t read every novel ever written; but it’s the greatest novel I’ve ever read.

Though neither was primarily a writer, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also name Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. Both of these narrative artists (narratives on film rather than in print) affected me as deeply and profoundly as anyone on this list; Hitchcock for some of the same reasons mentioned for Poe and Serling, Welles because...hell, because he’s Orson Welles. What more need be said? Hitchcock I found first through his TV series, shortly thereafter through Psycho; Welles I discovered after learning that the obese gentleman on all the TV talk shows was in fact the same man who had directed a film I’d read a great deal about called Citizen Kane—a film I proceeded to tape off late-night TV, and which proceeded in turn to change my life.

This is an eccentric list, as you can see. It’s not a list with any particular consistency or coherence, and it certainly isn’t balanced—ten people, nine male, one female, all white. But DNA writers are about emotional responses, not rational ones. These are the writers who live in a place in my brain and imagination that no one else has ever touched, or ever will.

These are my DNA writers.

Who are yours?

I hereby confess that I’m an inveterate viewer of CNN.

This embarrasses me a little, because so much of CNN is really nonsense: the hyped-up “Special Reports,” the meaningless onscreen countdowns to mostly insignificant events, the cringe-inducing Lou Dobbs, the endless Whack-a-Mole appearances of a ragtag collection of talking heads the network forever trumpets as “the best political team on television,” as if sheer repetition will somehow make it so. Certainly CNN has its value, particularly in covering sudden major crises in real time; but on a slow news day, lo! the brainless infotainment takes over, to the detriment of the network’s credibility and the audience’s senses.

A couple of weeks ago, however, on the fortieth anniversary of the first communication between two computers—a milestone that would ultimately lead to the World Wide Web—Jack Cafferty, another cringe-inducer, offered a question to his viewers on one of his frequent “Cafferty File” appearances: “How,” he wanted to know, “has the Internet affected your life?”

I realized that I’d never really thought about it.

Not, at least, in those terms. I’ve certainly growled enough over the years about the Internet, about teenagers spending their lives sitting before computer screens, about the unreliability of Internet connections, about the increasing difficulty of protecting copyrights in the Internet age...But to ask me, simply, “How has the Internet affected your life?”

It’s an interesting question.

I grew up, of course, not only well before the Internet, but even before PCs. There was an old Royal electric typewriter in our house, which I used to finger-stab experimentally from time to time; but I actually learned to type as a high school freshman, sitting day after day in front of a rather battered Olympia manual machine in Mrs. Mercure’s Typing 1A class along with some 25 other students. To be honest, I remember virtually nothing about Mrs. Mercure. I can’t picture what she looked like. Can’t recall her voice. Can’t think of a single pearl of wisdom she ever offered me.

But she taught me how to type. And so, by any practical measure, she was the most important teacher I ever had.

Simply put, typing made it possible for me to become a writer. It set me free. It pulled me away from scribbled sheets of schoolboy notebook paper and allowed me to take my work and myself seriously. It gave me the grounding I needed to be able to present professional-style manuscripts which I soon began submitting to real magazines—and which just as soon came right back to me, but at least they’d been read. Occasionally an editor or editorial assistant even offered an encouraging scribble on the rejection slip I invariably received. In that small way, then, I was in the game. I was a writer, if only an unpublished one. And all because of my newfound skill at typing.

I don’t remember the first PC I ever saw, but I know that I first became truly aware of PCs in college. My girlfriend of the time had one, and would occasionally make efforts to teach me to use it; but it seemed impossibly complicated and brain-busting to me, with all sorts of strange codes that had to be memorized to even get the damned thing to work. (This was long before Windows would make computers comprehensible to virtually anyone.) In those years—the mid-’80s—I made no headway with the newfangled technology, which seemed pretty much irrelevant to me anyway. Two years with the Peace Corps, in a remote village in the Kalahari Desert, did nothing to improve matters; a computer would have been impossible there for any number of reasons, including a notable lack of electricity. I was happy enough with the Sears portable typewriter I’d purchased shortly before heading overseas. In fact, though I haven’t tried to use it in fifteen years, I still own that machine today.

It was around Christmas 1990 that I returned to the States, and what I immediately noticed was that in my absence computers had become ubiquitous. Even my terminally unhip father had a Mac of his own, which I—slowly, hesitantly, grudgingly—began to learn to use, though I still held to my Sears typewriter for most of my writing. But when my father died a year and a half later, I inherited the Mac...and the jig was up.

I was forced to enter the modern age.

I still vaguely recall how odd it felt to write on a computer—to not have an actual sheet of paper in front of me, and to constantly see that blinking cursor waiting for my next word (just as it does now, as I write this). At first I wasn’t sure I could handle it. But after a few false starts, I got going on a story called “The Unfinished Music” (you can find it in my collection Thundershowers at Dusk) which seemed good—as good as something I would have written on a typewriter. I was off and running!—and, truly, never looked back.

The arrival of the Internet not long thereafter was something of a blow to me. After all, I was feeling pretty spiffy about my grand technological knowledge—I’d even survived my first system changeover, as my wife (we got together in 1995) convinced me we needed a more contemporary machine than my dad’s now-ancient Mac, and so we switched to some sort of IBM-compatible device.

I can recall first hearing about the Internet in a series of TV commercials narrated by Tom Selleck. “Have you ever sent a letter—without a stamp?” he asked. “You will! And the company that will bring it to you is...” Was it AT & T? Anyway, I didn’t really know what he was talking about. But I learned soon enough.

It took us a long time to get around to going online. Again, I was resistant. What was the point? I remember seeing the Internet on a computer at work, and a few times in the local library; it seemed a sort of amusing toy, nothing more. Someone—it may have been my wife—showed me what Google was, and how you searched out information using it; naturally one of the first searches I ever did was on the words “Christopher Conlon,” and when I found nothing, it was obvious that this great new technological marvel wasn’t worth much.

Still, the Internet slowly took over the world—our world, at least—and in 1999 we purchased a modem and got ourselves a dial-up Internet connection at home. We’ve modernized again and again since then, of course, but as with learning to use a computer in the first place, once we had the Internet available to us, there was no turning back—neither of us would ever dream of suggesting that we disconnect ourselves, certainly. And of course it would be all but impossible for a writer today to not be connected to the Internet, if for no other reason than e-mail.

E-mail! That was one aspect of the World Wide Web which I embraced from the very first time I used it (in an e-note to the poet Lyn Lifshin). For years I’d mourned the loss of the kind of correspondences I’d enjoyed in the Peace Corps, and even earlier, with friends—old-fashioned letters written (or typed) on old-fashioned paper, put in an envelope, stamped, and mailed in a process that back then no one ever thought to prefix with the word “snail.” No one wrote to each other anymore, I groused—now it was all just phone calls. But, at least for me, e-mail quickly proved to be the rebirth of personal correspondence, with the added benefit of undelayed delivery of message. While some claim that it’s impossible for a lengthy, seriously considered, revised letter to be written as an e-mail, I’ve never found this to be true; indeed, some of my personal e-letters are as long as some of my current blog entries, as a few of my (possibly unfortunate) correspondents can attest. All it takes is a liberal use of the “Save” button, after all.

I loved e-mail right from the beginning. I still do, even as new communications technologies threaten its dominance and force me to begin grumbling again about changing things that already work just fine.

The Internet certainly altered some of my shopping habits as well, if not as profoundly as some of the early Silicon Valley gurus said it would. (Remember the wild claims that brick-and-mortar stores would soon be a thing of the past?) It’s an enormous boon to the book collector; before, if one wanted to find an out-of-print book, there were few alternatives to simply searching for it in shop after shop. There were “book finders” who advertised in the pages of Harper’s and the like, and I used them occasionally, but I discovered that they typically charged four times the volume’s market value. As a result, there were countless books I’d wanted for years that the Internet allowed me to find with a point and a click. It was wonderful.

But it didn’t feel right, and quickly enough my wife and I discovered that, while the Internet was a superb tool, it was only a tool. There’s no substitute for actually walking into a bookstore and browsing the shelves. None. It’s how the magic happens for us book people. Even the most sophisticated Internet “browse” feature is a feeble substitute for actual hold-it-in-your-hands book shopping.

But I think the way that the Internet has most affected me is how it’s affected my use of time.

Like millions of others, I spend too much time in front of the computer—and I’m online virtually all of that time. For all its valid and practical uses, the Internet is surely the greatest time-waster ever invented by mortal man—far greater than television, exactly because of the Internet’s “interactive” nature. It’s truly frightening to think of how many hundreds—thousands?—of hours I’ve spent simply clicking on things, following links to no real purpose, Google-searching information of no importance (including, inevitably, about myself). Early on, before I learned to discipline myself at least somewhat, I would sometimes get ready to leave the computer, thinking I’d been staring at the Internet for twenty or thirty minutes, only to realize that I’d been there for over two hours. There’s always something new to see and discover in the Wild West of the World Wide Web.

I don’t worry about this too much in connection to myself—as I say, I got a handle on “Internet time” early in my discovery of the Web. But I do feel concern about younger people, those who never experienced an unwired life. If the Internet is the greatest source of information on the planet—and it is—it’s also the greatest attention-buster, the profoundest source of young people’s fragmented and incomplete focus. I worry that they may not ever know the pleasures of sinking deep into a long novel for hours and hours on a summer’s afternoon, or of going for a long walk in autumn woods with the earthy smell of fallen leaves rich around them. It’s so very difficult to be here when the Internet, now accessed by tiny handheld devices most kids use incessantly, so enticingly beckons us to be somewhere else—anywhere but here, now, which is the only place and moment any of us ever really have.

How has the Internet affected my life? Very profoundly.

But the more important question may be how it will affect the lives of those who’ll never know a world without it.

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In response to a friend’s request, here’s an updated list of my forthcoming publications.

The major project right now is, of course, A Sea of Alone: Poems for Alfred Hitchcock, the original poetry anthology I’m editing for Dark Scribe Press, which is scheduled for release in 2010. We’re open for submissions right now—interested parties should visit http://alfredhitchcockpoems.blogspot.com for details.

As for my own writing, I have four anthology appearances coming up in the near or not-so-near future.

The one that will most likely appear first is Apparitions, an original anthology of stories on the theme of hauntings. This book, edited by Michael Kelly, will be a trade paperback published under the new imprint of Undertow Books. My story “A Certain Slant of Light”—a long one, over 8000 words—is in the book, along with new tales by Gary A. Braunbeck, Barbara Roden, Gemma Files, and others. This looks to be a very fun collection. Check out all the details, including a look at the lovely cover illustration, at:

http://www.undertowbooks.com/

The Bleeding Edge, edited by William F. Nolan and Jason Brock, is also due in the next month or two. It’s an original hardcover anthology of dark fiction from Dark Discoveries Publications, and includes unpublished work by such luminaries as Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Joe Lansdale, John Shirley, Earl Hamner, and Norman Corwin, among many others. My own contribution, “Triptych: Three Bon-Bons,” is a group of three very brief, very strange short-shorts—little finger exercises in fantasy and surrealism which I write when the mood hits, and which I call my “bon-bons.” Few of these miniatures have ever been published, so I’m delighted to bring this trio of them forth into the world. Learn more about The Bleeding Edge here:

http://www.jasunni.com/shop/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=1

I got involved with Rich Ristow’s poetry anthology Death in Common (Daverana Enterprises) through my friend Marge Simon, who urged me to write something for the book. Death in Common has a very intriguing premise—all the poems focus in one way or another on the victims of a (fictional) serial killer. My own contribution is called “He Goes to Funerals”; other writers in the book include Michael Arnzen and Steve Vernon. The last I heard, this trade paperback was virtually done—so it should be appearing soon, too.

http://www.daverana.com/book.php/death_in_common

My single anthology appearance which won’t be showing up in the next month or three is “Christmas Night,” a short-short story that will be published in Tasmaniac Publications’  Festive Fear 2, edited by Steve Clark and scheduled for release around Christmas 2010. It’s a collection of holiday-themed horror and suspense tales. The book hasn’t even been open for submissions for long yet, but some preliminary information about it can be found here:

http://tasmaniacpublications.com/Annual.htm

Finally, I hope that folks have also noticed that a video podcast of a brief interview with me, conducted by Judy Comeau last month at the Horrorfind Convention in Hunt Valley, Maryland, has gone up at the Count Gore website. Anyone who hungers to behold my screen-star good looks or hang on every mellifluously-intoned word from my mouth should visit:

http://www.countgore.com/gore/vault.htm 

What’s next? As I mention in the video interview, I’m writing a novel, provisionally titled Lullaby for the Rain Girl; it’s an ambitious project, much longer and more complex than Midnight on Mourn Street, and will include several of my previously-published works as stories (and poems) within the story. I’m perhaps two-thirds finished, and hope to have a complete (first) draft completed by the end of next summer. But I’ve learned over the years that these things happen on their own schedule, not on mine.

It will be finished when it decides that it wants to be....

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The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps by William Styron. New York: Random House, 2009.

When news of William Styron’s death came in November of 2006, some of us who had loved his writings for decades but who had never known the man himself felt a distinct sense of anticlimax, as if the announcement were a mere redundancy—an unnecessary reconfirmation of something we had already known for a very long time. After all, Styron the man departed this world three autumns ago; but Styron the writer had already left the building many years earlier.

Writing was never easy for William Styron. He was one of the least prolific of all major American literary figures—in terms of authors who enjoyed similarly long lives (Styron was 81 when he died), only Ralph Ellison and the still-living Harper Lee come to mind as writers with less actual finished, published work to their credit. (History has yet to judge whether J.D. Salinger will be accorded the status of “major writer” or instead be considered a minor one who happened to pen a single freakishly popular novel.) Ellison and Lee, however, were essentially one-book writers. Styron, indisputably a major voice from the day Lie Down in Darkness was published in 1951, had much more to say, and said it in a string of highly popular and critically-respected works including The Long March (1953), Set This House on Fire (1960), the explosively controversial Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), and finally the novel universally regarded as his masterpiece, Sophie’s Choice (1979).

It’s an impressive resume, yet it’s hard not to notice that in twenty-eight years Styron managed only four full-length novels (The Long March is a novella). There was also an indifferently-received play, In the Clap Shack (1973), a few abortive screenplay projects, and the occasional stray essay, but in terms of sheer volume, Styron’s collected works were dwarfed by those of his contemporaries John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, and Norman Mailer, among others. But Styron remained a heavy hitter his entire career, each of his books heralded as a major publishing event. The Confessions of Nat Turner won him the Pulitzer Prize and made him genuinely famous—famous, that is, outside the narrow world of people who read serious fiction—and the celebrated Sophie’s Choice cemented his status as a modern literary icon, especially after the Academy Award-winning film version with Meryl Streep appeared in 1982.

Oddly, however, this literary lion would all but cease to roar after the fabulous success of Sophie’s Choice. Thereafter his work surfaced occasionally in magazines, and throughout the 1980s and 1990s he became an increasingly familiar figure on television, being interviewed by the likes of Charlie Rose and hobnobbing with the Clintons on Martha’s Vineyard. But those of us who waited for the next Styron novel were doomed to disappointment. Though he lived for nearly three decades after the appearance of  Sophie, no new full-length fiction ever materialized. Styron nonetheless managed to keep afloat his reputation as a major figure with one more work, the nonfiction Darkness Visible (1990), an account of his experiences with depression—a powerful and memorable piece, certainly, but at a mere 88 pages—very small pages with very wide margins—it hardly qualified as a book at all. A final volume, a slender collection of stories called A Tidewater Morning, appeared in 1993. And that was the end.

Throughout this post-Sophie period, however—and, in fact, even before it—Styron insisted he was hard at work on another novel, this one to be based on his experiences in the Marines and titled The Way of the Warrior. He began this project, he said, in the early 1970s, and worked at it for some two or three years before breaking off from it to write Sophie’s Choice; after that novel was completed and published, he returned to Warrior, talking it up in interviews all the way through the 1990s.

Now, in the posthumously-published The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps, we have some of the tattered remains of the never-completed Way of the Warrior. The subtitle of the collection is misleading, for none of these works are truly “tales”; with one exception, they are all extracted from various versions of Styron’s unfinished novel. (That single exception is “Blankenship,” an early long story which, according to Styron biographer James L.W. West, is an unfinished fragment—though nowhere in the text of The Suicide Run is its incomplete nature acknowledged.)

Reading The Suicide Run—as with a lot of posthumously-published books—is occasionally moving, but mostly, alas, depressing. The experience rather reminds me of Truman Capote’s early “lost” novel, Summer Crossing, found a few years ago and finally published: Capote himself had referred to the supposedly destroyed manuscript as “thin, clever, unfelt,” and to actually behold the thing itself was only to realize what a perceptive judge the author was of his own work (though to be honest I failed to find Summer Crossing particularly clever). So too with Hemingway’s posthumous books: Scribner’s managed to cobble together a fragmented but engrossing work in Islands in the Stream, but later published something called The Garden of Eden, purporting to be a novel by Hemingway but in fact stitched together from fragments of a much larger project—reports have it that fully two-thirds of Hemingway’s material was deleted. An even later Hemingway publishing project, True at First Light, appears to have gone much further in editing and altering the actual material Hemingway left behind—all for a result that received uniformly poor reviews, but which will certainly make a great deal of money. As will, one assumes, The Suicide Run.

From the evidence in this book, it appears that Styron worked seriously on at least two different versions of The Way of the Warrior over the years. The first, from the early ’70s, is represented here by the fragments “Marriott, the Marine” and “The Suicide Run.” Both are first-person narratives from the point of view of an unnamed World War II veteran who is recalled to active duty with the coming of the Korean War. The narrator is mostly indistinguishable from Styron himself; he has even written a novel which arrives in galley proofs during his initial officer training and re-orientation, just as happened with Styron and his Lie Down in Darkness. There is a great deal of powerful and specific writing in “Marriott, the Marine” (originally published in Esquire in 1971), and even some good humor, as in the narrator’s reaction to the first review—a bad one—his novel receives, from a trade journal unnamed in the story but clearly intended to be Publishers Weekly, in which the biggest compliment that the anonymous critic, identified only as ‘L.K.,’ can muster is to grudgingly call the narrator a “skilled wordsmith”:

“...I had been cruelly clobbered. I can remember every nuance of my misery and mortification, even—even today—recall each raw detail of my thoughts as they sought to liberate me from this outrage, strove to diminish the intensity of the hurt. ‘L.K.’ Who the fuck was ‘L.K.’? Lydia Kerr, surely—some smart-ass twenty-three-year-old Vassar graduate, an English major with a fabricated passion for medieval poetry looking down her snoot at every American novelist since Melville, a parched little dyke with blotched skin living in a Village walk-up filled with Partisan Reviews, Agatha Christie mysteries, and annotated editions of Piers Plowman—but no, a Vassar graduate wouldn’t write ‘wordsmith,’ or, well, would she? A hater of southerners, then, Leo Kolodny, some failed writer turned hack reviewer, a CCNY type with a heart murmur, piles, and joyless Talmudic eyes, probably teaching a seminar in modern lit at a dismal uptown night school, where he purveyed muddy wisdom about Bellow, Malamud, and the Jewish renaissance. Leo Kolodny would use ‘wordsmith.’”

Anyone who has ever been “cruelly clobbered” by a review in PW can only laugh in complete understanding of this narrator’s impotent, spluttering rage.

Yet despite some strong characterizations and finely-wrought descriptions (the narrator summarizes his brief glimpse of General Douglas MacArthur by writing that “his eyes appeared as glassily opaque and mysterious as those of an old, sated lion pensively digesting a wildebeest or, more exactly, like those of a man whose thoughts had turned inward upon some Caesarean dream magnificent beyond compare”), neither “Marriott, the Marine” nor “The Suicide Run” satisfy as fiction, precisely because, despite the publisher’s identification of them as “tales,” they simply don’t go anywhere. “Marriott” in particular seems as if it might have made a fine beginning to The Way of the Warrior—but after he’d broken off for several years to write Sophie’s Choice, Styron clearly reassessed his Marine novel and decided on some fundamental changes.

When he returned to the material, it was very different. The first glimpse the world received of Styron’s new approach came with his novella “A Tidewater Morning” (included in his collection of the same name), a gorgeous piece about a young boy, Paul Whitehurst, growing up in the Tidewater Virginia of the 1930s and trying to comprehend the fact of his mother’s imminent death. When “A Tidewater Morning” originally appeared in Esquire in 1987, it was billed as the opening chapter of The Way of the Warrior—just as “Marriott, the Marine” had been sixteen years before. In this period he was also discussing the novel in highly altered terms. Instead of it being a story set during the Korean War, now it took place at the end of World War II: “What it’s about,” Styron told interviewer Georgann Eubanbanks in 1984, “is the last military engagement in World War II and the last man who died in combat, that is, outside of the bombs that were dropped on Japan...the book ends when the atomic bomb drops.” This plot outline bears no resemblance whatsoever to the material in “Marriott, the Marine” and “The Suicide Run.”

Well and good; it’s the wise writer who realizes when a project isn’t going as it should, and who has the courage to stop, reconsider, and start all over again, even if it means sacrificing years of effort. But this new version of The Way of the Warrior was doomed to suffer the same fate as the first. Curiously, the publishers of The Suicide Run never admit that the book’s major novella “My Father’s House” was ever intended for The Way of the Warrior at all; they claim the piece was the opening section of a different, unnamed novel. But this cannot possibly be correct, as everything in “My Father’s House” is completely consistent with “A Tidewater Morning”: the same Paul Whitehurst as narrator, with the same father, same house, same bedroom, same housekeeper (“Flo”). Moreover, the piece was written in the exact same period as “A Tidewater Morning.” The difference is that “My Father’s House” is set much later, a year after Paul has returned from service in World War II. It’s possible that Styron had decided to cut “A Tidewater Morning” from the novel and open instead with “My Father’s House,” but they are certainly both part of the same project—which was The Way of the Warrior.

Unfortunately, “My Father’s House” has little of the power of “A Tidewater Morning,” and it’s obvious why Styron elected not to publish it separately in magazine form, as he had with the other story. In fact, despite some typically lush and lovely writing here and there, “My Father’s House” is disorganized and clunky, with virtually no transitions at all between his narrator’s various disconnected thoughts and a tendency to allow characters to jump in and out of the piece with little apparent rhyme or reason (this is especially disappointing with the sudden reappearance of Flo, vivid and memorable in “A Tidewater Morning,” uncomfortably close to a black servant cliché here). It’s possible that some of this would have been clarified in the later chapters of the revised version of Warrior, but Styron was unable to bring the novel anywhere near completion.

The Suicide Run ends on the most discouraging note of all: a very brief “sketch,” as the publisher calls it, titled “Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco,” said to have been written in 1995—as such, surely one of the last pieces Styron managed to complete. Yet the writing in this brief sketch, which focuses on Styron’s narrator thinking of his stamp collection and the faraway places depicted therein as he is on the island of Saipan, is aimless and ineffective. It’s difficult to believe that Styron would ever have wanted these few feeble paragraphs published.

But then that’s the issue with the whole of The Suicide Run, just as it is with Capote’s Summer Crossing and the various posthumous Hemingway projects. If the writing is bad—and in The Suicide Run some of it is, bearing the unfortunate hallmarks of Styron at less than his best: the bloatedness, the obscure show-off vocabulary, the general sense of a pretentious windbag at work—it can hardly be blamed on William Styron, who, except for the two pieces which first appeared in magazines, never authorized the publication of these writings at all.

Yet, though even the best of the material here is second-rate, Styron fans everywhere simply must read The Suicide Run. The book shows us clearly—all too clearly—how the author’s talents declined in his later years, but there are moments of beauty and clarity in the writings here which could have been achieved by no one but William Styron. Consider the opening of the one non-Warrior piece here, the 1953 fragment “Blankenship.”

“Amid the smelly stretch of riptides and treacherous currents formed by the confluence of the upper East River and Long Island Sound stands a small low-lying island. Surmounted for most of its length by ancient prison buildings, it is an island hardly distinguishable, in its time-exhausted drabness, from those dozen or so other islands occupied by prisons and hospitals which give to the New York waterways such a bleak look of municipal necessity and—for some reason especially at twilight—that air of melancholy and erosion of the spirit. Yet something here compels a second glance. Something makes this island seem even excessively ugly, and a meaner and shabbier eyesore. Perhaps this is because of the island’s situation; for a prison island it just seems to be in too nice a place. It commands a fine wide view of the blue Sound to the east and the white houses on the mainland nearby—houses which, though situated in the Bronx, are so neat and scrubbed and summery-looking as to make New York City seem as remote as Nantucket. One passing by the island might more logically envision a pretty park here, or groves of trees, or a harbor for sailboats, than this squalid acre of prison buildings. Yet perhaps it’s the buildings themselves which make the place look more than ordinarily grim and depressing—so that the cleanly utilitarian, white marble structures on the other of the city’s islands seem, by comparison, almost beguiling sanctuaries. These date back nearly a century, soot-encrusted brick piles of turrets and fake moats and parapets and Victorian towers. With these, and with their crenellated battlements and lofty embrasures and all the sham artifices of fortressed power, the buildings possess a calculated, ridiculous ugliness, as if for someone locked within the walls they must add to the injury of simple confinement the diurnal insulting reminder—in every nook and cranny unavoidable and symbolic—of his incarceration.”

That voice—commanding, portentous, profoundly in tune with the words and rhythms and subtle shadings of the English language—is magnificently William Styron’s.

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