Samuel Delany: The Motion of Light in Water

[bibliogramma]

Samuel Delany's memoir, The Motion of Light in Water: East Village Sex and Science Fiction Writing 1960-1965, is as much an exploration of memory and the processes of representation of both memory and thought as it is traditional (or rather, non-traditional) memoir. As Jo Walton says in her review,

The first time I read The Motion of Light in Water, Delany had been one of my favourite writers for at least ten years, but in that time I had known almost nothing about him. I remember going “Wow” a lot the first time through. I was expecting an autobiography that covered 1960-1965 to talk about how he wrote the spectacular early novels, and it does, and wow. But also wow, he’s black, wow, he’s gay, wow, he’s dyslexic and most of all, wow, in writing an autobiography he’s examining the entire concept of what it’s possible to remember and retell. This isn’t a memoir like Pohl’s The Way the Future Was which is essentially a charming retelling of fascinating anecdotes. This is a memoir that questions the very possibility of memoir, a memoir that makes you feel as if you’ve been turned upside-down and the contents of your brain and your pockets have all fallen out and been rearranged in different places. It questions the concept of memory and the way we remember and rearrange and reassess, and the way we make our own lives into stories. [1]

Delany begins by talking about his father's death - an event which falls near the beginning of the chronological period covered by the memoir. It's clearly significant moment for him - but as soon as he has penned the story, he speaks of the unreliability of his memory of it, of how in a later set of biographical notes prepared for researchers writing about his work, the factual details he includes about this event are incorrect, even to the age he remembers he was and the year in which his father died.

Having made this initial point about the unreliable narrator - a theme he refers back to and riffs upon throughout the work - Delany proceeds with his story, which is that of selected incidents in the life of a young gay (although not yet identifying as such despite an awareness of homosexual desire since early adolescence) black (but just light enough to pass sometimes as white) middle-class man growing up in New York who wanted to be a scientist but became a writer, who married young because of a pregnancy from his first heterosexual experience with a gifted young poet, Marilyn Hacker (who miscarried shortly after their marriage).

Delany is frank in discussing all aspects of his life - emotional, intellectual, creative, sexual. He and Marilyn had an open marriage, in which both had other relationships with men and women, sometimes sharing lovers, and for a period of time living in a triad with a young working class man. Their friendship and shared intellectual delight in literature was ultimately not sufficient to make their marriage work for them, and the memoir ends with Delany, having turned in the manuscript of his classic novel Babel-17, leaving Marilyn in New York as he heads off to spend seven months in Europe.

There is so much packed into this narrative - not just the key elements of Delany's life and his development as one of the great writers of his time, but also social history, sociological observation, meditations on race, gender, intimacy, commitment and representation... It's a rich and valuable work.

True to his argument that memory is fluid and personal, Delany intersperses his recollections with selections from Marilyn's poems written at the time, thus declining to privilege either his memories or his chosen mode of expressing them. As he notes at one point, after a section of the memoir in which he attempts to record every detail he remembers,

But no simple, sensory narrative can master what it purports—whether it be a hitchhiking trip to Texas or the memories that remain from such a trip twenty-five years later. That age-old philosophical chestnut, the Problem of Representation (in its twin forms, the Problem of Verification and the Problem of Exhaustiveness) makes mastery as such a non-problem, with no need of haute théorie. Theodore Sturgeon’s fine insight is perhaps germane here: the best writing does not reproduce—or represent—the writer’s experience at all. Rather it creates an experience that is entirely the reader’s, forged and fashioned wholly from her or his knowledge, of her or his memories, by her or his ideology and sensibility, and demonstrably different for each—but which (according to the writer’s skill) is merely as meaningful (though not necessarily meaningful in the same way) as the writer’s, merely as vivid.

As Constant Reader is surely aware, Samuel Delany is one of the writers I have the highest regard for, and whose works I consider to have had a significant influence on my own development. Reading his thoughts about his life at the time he was writing the early works that influenced me the most was a fascinating experience. I'm thinking that once I finish my Hugo reading, I need to revisit those books.

[1] http://www.tor.com/2010/01/07/the-whole-notion-of-autobiography-samuel-delanys-lemgthe-motion-of-light-in-waterlemg/