The Avram Davidson Treasury (78 page)

Yellow Rome.

I turned and urged on my horse. It was a long way to Naples.

Afterword to “Yellow Rome; or, Vergil and the Vestal Virgin”

BY
R
AY
N
ELSON

All the Vergil Magus stories together are only the tip of an iceberg the size of a rather large universe, as I realized when Avram allowed me to browse the boxes containing the detailed notes on fact, myth, and fantasy upon which they rest. Here’s a glimpse into the Vergil Magus Cosmos, a tiny bright diamond in which the infinite whole is reflected.

“The Affair at Lahore Cantonment” first appeared in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
, June 1961

“And Don’t Forget the One Red Rose” first appeared in
Playboy
, September 1975

“Author, Author” first appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, July 1959

“Crazy Old Lady” first appeared in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
, March 1976

“Dagon” first appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, October 1959

“Full Chicken Richness” first appeared in
The Last Wave
, vol. 1, October 1983

“The Golem” first appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, July 1958

“Goobers” first appeared in
Swank
, November 1965

“Goslin Day” first appeared in
Orbit 6
, 1970, ed. Damon Knight

“Hark! Was That the Squeal of an Angry Throat?” first appeared in
Fantastic
, December 1977

“Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper” first appeared in
Galaxy
, July 1957

“The Hills Behind Hollywood High” (with Grania Davis) first appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, April 1983

“The House the Blakeneys Built” first appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, January 1965

“The Last Wizard” first appeared in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
, December 1972

“Manatee Gal, Won’t You Come Out Tonight” first appeared (as “Manatee Gal, Ain’t You Coming Out Tonight”) in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
April 1977

“My Boy Friend’s Name Is Jello” first appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, July 1954

“Naples” first appeared in
Shadows
, ed. Charles L. Grant (Doubleday, 1978)

“The Necessity of His Condition” first appeared in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
, April 1957

“Now Let Us Sleep” first appeared in
Venture Science Fiction
, September 1957

“Ogre in the Vly” first appeared (as “The Ogre”) in
Worlds of If
, July 1959

“Or All the Seas with Oysters” first appeared in
Galaxy
, May 1958

“Or the Grasses Grow” first appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, November 1958

“Polly Charms, The Sleeping Woman” first appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science, Fiction
, February 1975

“The Power of Every Root” first appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, October 1967

“The Price of a Charm; or, The Lineaments of Gratified Desire” first appeared (as “Price of a Charm”) in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
, December 1963

“Revenge of the Cat-Lady” first appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, January 1985 (1,700 words)

“Revolver” first appeared in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
, October 1962

“Sacheverell” first appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, March 1964

“Selectra Six-Ten” first appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, October 1970

“The Slovo Stove” first appeared in
Universe 15
, ed. Terry Carr (Doubleday, 1985)

“The Sources of the Nile” first appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, January 1961

“The Spook-Box of Theodore Delafont De Brooks” first appeared in
Tomorrow
, July 1993

“Take Wooden Indians” first appeared in
Galaxy
, June 1959

“The Tail-Tied Kings” first appeared in
Galaxy
, April 1962

“Where Do You Live, Queen Esther?” first appeared in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
, March 1961

“While You’re Up” first appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, November 1988

“The Woman Who Thought She Could Read” first appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, January 1959

“Yellow Rome; or, Vergil and the Vestal Virgin” first appeared in
Weird Tales
, no. 305, Winter 1992–1993

NIGHT TRAVEL ON THE ORIENT
EXPRESS, DESTINATION: AVRAM
R
AY
B
RADBURY

There are several risks connected with writing an Afterword to another writer’s works.

One, you may overpraise, in which case the reader turns off, saying: He can’t be that good. The reader then approaches all the stories with a chip on his shoulder, daring the writer to be as fine as he has been told.

Two, you may underpraise. In an effort to be fair and unassuming, you may hold back. In which case the reader says: How peculiar. This critic seems dreadfully quiet. The stories that follow, then, can’t really be worthwhile.

And so the book is shut.

I would like to balance myself somewhere between the two extremes.

Let me plunge right in, then, looking neither to right nor to left, ahead nor behind.

Avram Davidson, to me, combines many talents and attributes, including imagination, style, and, perhaps above all, wit.

Many of these stories are complete mysteries, puzzles. Avram Davidson starts us in a fog and lets us orient ourselves slowly. He tosses us bits of information. We do not know where we are, who the characters are, or what they are up to. Slowly we begin to find our way toward the light, with Mr. Davidson always a few quick steps ahead, calling us, as a good storyteller calls: This way, now this, over here, now up, now down, now to one side, come along!

And he knows exactly how much information to give us any one second. He knows how to pay out the rope, inch by inch. Too slow and we would fall asleep. Too fast and we would miss the point. His knack for a proper pace is that of a true teller of tales.

A teller of tales. The designation is almost an insult in our time. We have been sore put upon by your
New Yorker
slice-of-life writer and all of the other non-talents of our age appearing in magazine after magazine, so that when we come upon such as Avram Davidson we go into a mild shock of surprise. For this is what story writing once was, and can be again, if we leave it to more-capable hands.

Reading through his collection, a number of storytellers’ names leaped to mind. I hope that Mr. Davidson will approve this list that tossed itself up, now here, now there: Rudyard Kipling, Saki, John Collier, G. K. Chesterton.

I could make the list longer, but those must do for now.

I can imagine nothing better than taking a long train journey, oh, let us say, on the old Orient Express with good food and good wine waiting in the diner, and seated across from me, the personification of their books, such as Mr. Kipling, Saki, Collier, Chesterton, and, holding his own, amid them all, Avram Davidson in high good humor.

I realize that is a rare fine company I have put him in, but I have always been one to stick my neck out through affection and admiration. If I would not say he measures completely to their height, I
do
say this: On such a train, on such a sweet night journey, these men would gladly listen to Avram Davidson and read and enjoy him. You would find his stories in their book bags, even as you would find theirs in his. If their abilities differ, as do tastes, we know they are good companions, and similar people who would travel well because of their knack for the agreeably strange, the small truth that becomes a lie or the lie suddenly revealed as truth.

I would gladly ride with these and stay up half the night training across Europe in the dark, and even keep my mouth shut, to hear their tales.

The shadow of Kafka might fall across their night-traveling talk, here or there.

And outside of Budapest, through some whim of impossible geography, Dickens’ phantom signalman might flag the train to a ghost stop for some while.

Avram Davidson is not like any of these, and yet, as I have said, their night company was made for him. They would ask him in out of the corridor, even if he were simply passing, disguised as ticket agent, covered with strange punched-out confetti left over from most peculiar destinations.

There is a bit of the scalawag in Avram Davidson. He can be wrongheaded, but it is the sort of wrongheadedness we did not tolerate in Bernard Shaw so much as delight in. We enjoy an outrageous person, for so many puritan radicals among us wouldn’t know how to radicalize a mole, much less outrage a snail. Davidson, no less than John Collier, is a maker of gyroscopes that by their very logic of manufacture
shouldn’t
work but—lo! there above the abyss they
do
spin and hum.

A final warning, not repeated often enough: Collections of short stories, like vitamins, should be taken, one or two a night, just before sleep. It will be a temptation, but don’t gorge yourself on this book. Easy does it, and much affection for this teller of tales Avram Davidson will be the healthy result.

At the end of a week of such nights, you will have developed a proper appetite for further journeys to that strange, wild country of Avram in all the years ahead.

—R
AY
B
RADBURY
Los Angeles, California
November 18, Apollo Year Two.

TURN OUT THE LIGHTS
³
H
ARLAN
E
LLISON

(
Harlan Ellison has written or edited seventy-three books; in his bibliography, more than seventeen-hundred stories, essays, articles, newspaper columns, motion pictures, and teleplays. Among his many awards and honors, he has won the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award, the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award twice (he came in second on his third nomination), the Horror Writers of America Bram Stoker Award five times (including a Lifetime Achievement honor), the Nebula three times, the Hugo 8½ times, the Writers Guild of America Most Outstanding Teleplay Award for solo work an unprecedented four times, the Silver Pen for Journalism from PEN, and the universal opinion that he is the most contentious person now walking the Earth. He is still delighted to recall the day in 1962 when he finally managed to sell a short story to Avram Davidson at
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction:
“Polly Charms the Sleeping Woman,” which appeared in August of that year.
Slippage,
Ellison’s latest story collection and seventieth book altogether, was published in Fall 1997.
)

On the day I sit down to write this note, ruminations meant to add a grace note to an event, a publication, a fervent wish, a vain hope I’ve harbored for thirty-eight years (since I sold my first story at the end of 1955)—I have just hung up the phone, having been informed that my pal, the most excellent and virtually unremembered master talent, the great Avram Davidson, has died.

And I am suddenly more concerned with stealing a moment here to honor him, than I am with blowing my own horn about how clever I was to have written “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore.” Because, you see, for all the hot air and Monday-morning-quarterback deconstructionist horse puckey that writers and academics like to slather on the subject, there are only a couple of genuine Secrets about writing.

The first has to do with the
why.
And most of what is said and written is sententious claptrap, intended to buy us a shot at posterity by providing untenured educationists drivel for their treatises. Quentin Crisp once observed that “Artists in any medium are nothing more than a bunch of hooligans who cannot live within their income of admiration.” Oh, how we want that assurance that once we’re gone, no matter that we were as specialized a savory as Nathanael West or as common a confection as Clarence Budington Kelland, that we will be read fifty years hence. Because the
why
is as simply put as this: “I write only because I cannot stop.” Don’t credit that one to me, I’m not that smart. It was Heinrich Von Kleist. And he nailed it; what he suggests, in literary terms, is the equivalent of the answer to
most
of the stuff that we do: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

But West is barely read today, not to mention Shirley Jackson (who was the inspiration for “The Man Who Rowed—”), or James Agee, or William March, or Jim Tully, or even John O’Hara or Zoë Oldenbourg. Or Avram Davidson, who was one of the most stylish, witty, erudite, and wildly imaginative writers of our time. Author of more than twenty-five books. Only one of them in print.

He died in a VA hospital’s liaison “recuperation facility” called Resthaven; in Bremerton, Washington; all alone save for a compassionate nurse who knew his name as a superior fantasist; penniless, unknown to a nation of readers though he was working right up to the end; seventy years old and cranky as a screw being turned against its threads; a man who wrote like a wonky, puckish, amusing Henry James, sans the stick up his butt.

Avram dies, and like Kelland, who was as commercially successful in his time as Stephen King is in his, or Jackson, who was never higher than “mid-list,” gone is gone, and Posterity is busy figuring out who among today’s Flavors-of-the-Month will bring in the most money by going “interactive.”

On this day that I sit down to write my note to accompany (finally, after thirty-eight years of dreaming about it, lusting after it) my inclusion in
The Best American Short Stories,
all I can think about is Avram, and how he deserved many times to have been included here over the years, how he never got that notice, how posterity may have escaped him entirely, and I keep returning to this damned question of why we miss going to the movies, or attending a concert, or spending a quiet evening with a loved one, or taking that trip to the Great Barrier Reef…because we’ve got yet another deadline, yet another story to write, yet another idea burning to be slammed onto paper. It’s far far less, I think, of Mario Vargas Llosa’s “The writer is an exorcist of his own demons,” than it is what Von Kleist and Quentin Crisp said.