Summer 2007 (6 page)

SM:
It would be very
hard on the goats.

JS:
: Yes. It’s just as well the goats weren’t
involved. But because was, as so many science fiction authors were, so hard up
for cash, what he ended up doing – well, we all heard how Robert
Silverberg used to write erotica of some sort or another during his hard-up
days.

SM:
Porn always sells.

JS:
: Porn always sells.
What Godfrey Winton ended up doing was “answer novels.” Now, if you know
anything about music, a song will come out and will be very popular, and then
parodies and responses called “answer songs” will come up and some of them will
be popular too.

NS:
“Sweet Home Alabama” after “Southern Man,” for
example.

JS:
: Right, exactly. Well, there was a small paperback
press called Lactic Press – it was supposed to be “Galactic Press,” I
think.

SM:
Again with the typos that haunted Winton throughout his
career. Thus, the irony of the Best Punctuated Hugo.

JS:
: And
also the Best Enjoyment of Diary Products Hugo.

SM:
Yes.

JS:
: But he wrote answer novels, in which in the case of a very popular
science fiction novel, he would write a novel that was more or less a response
to that. So for example, Stranger in a Strange Land came out in 1961;
immediately after, three or four months after , Winton wrote Stranger Who
Couldn’t Ask for Directions. Later on, 1963, The Man in the High Castle, Hugo
winner, and Winton came up with The Man in a Smelly Tenement; for AE van Vogt’s
Slan, we had Slude, and then Something Wicked This Way Comes and Wants Lunch,
which I believe is a favorite of yours, Nick.

NS:
Yes. Yes it is.
It’s actually one of his best.

JS:
: I think so too. And of course
let’s not forget his short story collection, I Have No Toes and Must Plié.
Which I think personally is one of the most underrated science fiction short
story collections in the world.

NS:
How did Harlan react to that?
Wasn’t there some bitterness?

JS:
: I believe… well. Famously
litigious – both of them famously litigious –

SM:
And
competitive –

JS:
: And competitive. And of course it wasn’t
until the death bed reconciliation where I think everything got settled, or at
least got settled in a financial sense.

SM:
Winton’s great
DeathCon.

JS:
: Yes, DeathCon. Up against, I think, IgunanaCon,
which was very difficult, because Harlan was Guest of Honor at IguanaCon, so he
actually had to catch a shuttle to attend both of those. It was good for Winton
to know that he had that lingering disease. So he had planned it out, well in
advance. And it was coincidental that he did die as soon as the last guest
left.

NS:
It’s like that line in MacBeth: “Nothing became him so
much in his life as the leaving of it.” He did a very good job on the way out.

JS:
: Yes. I do think that one of the great unfortunates is that we don’t
actually have his last words. I believe it was actually Harlan Ellison who shut
the door – actually slammed the door – so the last word were sort
of lost. There was some discussion what they were. As you know, he was a big
fan of Millard Fillmore.

SM:
Yes.

JS:
: And so one of
his great hopes, and wrote about this, I think it was in 1951, was that on his
death bed, he’d be able to recite Fillmore’s last words, which were, as you
know, “The nourishment is palatable.” Because he had been fed a thin gruel just
before passing.

NS:
No, I didn’t hear this at all.

JS:
:
No, this is actually true. Unfortunately, what happens is Harlan Ellison slams
the door. He could have said it, maybe he said it; the people on the other side
of the door, we have conflicting reports.

NS:
See, I’d heard
something, but now that I think about it, I think it wasn’t actually Godfrey
Winton, but I’d heard that his last words were “Quick! Get me money!” But that
didn’t happen.

JS:
: No. And of course he didn’t get the money.
Which was an endemic problem.

NS:
Well, he didn’t have to spend it
at that point.

JS:
: Well, he did have the TV on, so there were
opportunities to call in now.

NS:
Like a Ron Popiel kind of thing.

JS:
: Right. But he wouldn’t have gone for the installment plan.
Now,
Sarah, I know that you’d done some of your doctoral work on some of these
answer novels. And I want you to talk a little about that.

SM:
Well,
I have to admit that my favorite of the answer novels is Night of the Truffles.
Which is, of course, what do you do with a dead triffid. Which is an excellent
question, and I find Winton’s answer compelling. And one thing I have to say
about Godfrey Winton, although goodness knows he had his flaws both as a writer
and as a human being, he was ahead of this time in his interest in and sympathy
for gender issues.

JS:
: Sure.

SM:
And thus, taking
this great work of science fiction horror, and turning it to the topics of
women’s work and women’s concerns, and how do you bake a triffid? In some ways
I think it’s the gentlest of his parodies, and also a moving examination of how
life goes on after a great disaster, and the role that women play in the 50s and
60s nuclear family paradigm, which his later works would begin to contest. But
still, within that paradigm, he was saying that this work was valuable, that
this work was necessary. So that’s my favorite of the answer novels.

NS:
Is it fair to say that the more often he got divorced, the less the focus
on women’s issues?

SM:
Actually it depends. After the third
divorce, there was a retrenchment into the Heinleinian model of women as
sexually available nymphettes. It’s a male fantasy common among middle-aged
science fiction writers.

JS:
: And Winton was getting up there
around that time.

SM:
But the interesting thing is that after the
sixth divorce –

JS:
: The sixth divorce?

NS:
To
Cathy.

JS:
: Second divorce to Cathy. Does that actually count as
a second divorce, an actual divorce?

SM:
It was a second divorce,
once removed.

JS:
: Right. Exactly.

SM:
Well, the
fourth time he had to go through the legal proceeding of a divorce, since that
second divorce to Cathy was in the early 70s, and was in fact part of Cathy’s
sexual awakening, and since he did remain on excellent terms with Cathy and
Cathy’s life partner Jo Elle, through the remainder of his life –

JS:
: Thus occasioning, actually, the third marriage to Cathy, and,
subsequently, the first marriage to Jo Elle.

SM:
Yes. Although we
don’t know for sure because the relevant correspondence was destroyed, it seems
to have been a very flexible and open arrangement. Mercifully not on the
Heinleinian level.

NS:
This might be a good point to point out
that he fancied himself a ladies’ man, of course.

SM:
Yes. You
don’t get divorced that many times –

JS:
: Twelve times?
Twelve? Nine?

NS:
I don’t know, honestly. I know it was a lot.

JS:
: I think he just rolled a 20-sided and let that be the number.

SM:
And remember he was prone to exaggeration.

JS:
: About
everything.

SM:
And especially this. Because he did fancy himself
as science fiction’s Casanova.

NS:
Especially when he drank, and
very few people could drink like Godfrey could drink. I remember these was a
specific dinner party, my mother had taken classes in Chinese cooking and
gotten a lot of people together for this, and Godfrey was famous of wrecking it
by running around to every woman at the table, “Are those Jewish breasts?” It
was just one of those mortifying things. He was obsessed with breasts.

JS:
: And he was obsessed with Jewish women. Strange, because he was Lutheran.

NS:
Yes. It was a forbidden fruit thing.

JS:
: Right. And this was
one of the problems, which was that science fiction in that era was enabling
for, well, let’s face it, completely undersocialized men running around,
grabbing breasts and asking questions about their religious background.

NS:
And yet, with the marriages, especially to Cathy and Jo Elle, there was a
kind of loving quality to that. I remember that he was able to treat really
serious issues with humor. I remember that when Jo Elle had her mastectomy, he
famous for going around and saying he was married to a swinging single.

JS:
: I believe that was the occasion of the divorce, though.

NS:
Well,
no one took his humor in the way that he meant it.

JS:
: What’s
interesting is that what correspondence we do have – Godfrey Winton’s
surviving archives, stored at Edison Community College in Piqua, Ohio –
is that many poems were written to his various wives, and written, to get back
around to this, in the form of Mad Libs, where in fact the rhymes were there,
but many of the relevant nouns and verbs were missing. And I believe the intent
was whatever wife it was that we was with at the time could fill in what it was
that she thought he was feeling at the time. Unfortunately, when he got some of
these back, some of the verbs and nouns weren’t ones that you would want.
Now,
we’ve talked a little bit about the bitter rivalry with Isaac Asimov, a little
bit about Harlan Ellison. But in fact, pretty much at any one time he was
having six or seven bitter rivalries going on with other science fiction
authors. We know that Alfred Bester and he once got into it over a pool table
—

NS:
Right —

JS:
: Not actually about a
pool table, but they were actually standing on the pool table themselves. In a
bar, and I believe it was in Nag’s Head, North Carolina.

SM:
Yes,
and that was at the end of Winton’s experimental phase.

JS:
: Yes.

SM:
Emphatically so.

JS:
: Well, talk about that a little bit.
What about that poolside gathering, so to speak, ended that phase?

SM:
Bester’s right hook.

JS:
: One of the great clarifying things
about Bester, as I’ve heard many times, is that he actually does knock grammar
into people.

SM:
Yes.

JS:
: One doesn’t want to
believe that this is true, but anecdotally it happened to Winton, I believe at
some point AE van Vogt and he went around, and there were others.

SM:
Bester
had the sense, unlike many of Winton’s endemic foes, to realize what was going
on was about Winton’s competitiveness, not any real desire, any enduring
desire, to experiment with typography and –

JS:
: —
Drugs.

SM:
Those too. But that is the bitter rivalry with Philip
K. Dick. Which may be a contributing cause to Winton’s death.

JS:
:
That’s true. Although they did reconcile.

NS:
At the death bed.
But before you get there, I want to touch on this, I had heard rumors and I
wanted to see if they were true –

JS:
: Throw it out –

NS:
That pool table brawl. Was that not in fact the inspiration for an Isaac
Asimov mystery, in which a cue ball is used as a weapon, based on the force and
the velocity? And then he titled it something, and then Godfrey, to try to top
him, said, no, you should have called it “Dirty Pool”? And in the
acknowledgements, Isaac says –

SM:
“To Godfrey, you were
right.”

NS:
Right. Is that true?

JS:
: The rumor is,
not only is that true –

SM:
Well, certainly that dedication
exists –

JS:
: Yes. It’s there. Not only is that true, but I
will counter with another rumor that I believe is also true, which was that
Isaac Asimov bought the pool table that was in the bar. It was a three-quarter
sized pool table, so it could actually fit into his apartment in New York City.

NS:
Huh.

JS:
: Not only did he buy the pool table, he actually had
the pool table bronzed.

NS:
Wow.

JS:
: Yeah.

SM:
And engraved.

JS:
: And engraved.

SM:
Not where
it could be seen. On the bottom. “In memoriam, Alfred Bester’s right hook.”

JS:
: Exactly. It was actually underneath, and rumor has it that whenever Isaac
Asimov was feeling low, he’d crawl under that pool table, and would come out
with a smile on his face. Unfortunately, the pool table has been lost.

SM:
Sadly. As with so much of what would be an extensive collection of Winton
memorabilia, given his propensity for signing other people’s books with his
name. There should be an entire library of them, and yet, only three exempli
remain.

JS:
: It’s a real shame. In fact, a lot of what it came
down to, there is the belief that going back to DeathCon, Ellison slammed the
door. As you know, Winton had a phobia of incandescent bulbs, which meant that
every light in his house was actually a gas wick. So: Door slams, lamp falls
over. Flames. They manage to get his body out in time. Which was good.

SM:
Not realizing that he had already died.

JS:
: Right.

SM:
It was truly a courageous effort on the part of the assembled science fiction
writers. And a great honor, really, for Winton.

JS:
: Yes. They
didn’t let him burn.

SM:
That’s right.

JS:
:
Ironically, he was later cremated.

SM:
Completely different thing.

JS:
: But because of this unfortunate fire, which took up the whole house, so
much memorabilia is lost. The shame is, of course, that the existing material
at the Edison Community College in Piqua, Ohio, is just a shoebox with a few
notes, a figurine of Mickey Mouse from Disneyland and some old candy. Now,
Nick, you know a little about his sweet tooth, because of the parties.