The Engines of the Night (15 page)

Mark Clifton: 1906–1963

K
UTTNER DIED OF A HEART ATTACK IN HIS SLEEP,
Kornbluth died of either a massive cerebral hemorrhage or a heart attack (depending upon whose version you accept), Clifton had had a bad heart for a long time. It drove him out of industry and undid him at a relatively young age. But I think that the death certificates of all three should have listed
science fiction
under cause of death. H. Beam Piper, our only suicide, blew out his brains with a shotgun in the fall of 1964, but it did not appear to be the field itself that had done it to him: the sudden death of his agent, monies tied up, depression, a big gun collection. Kuttner, Kornbluth, and Clifton took it straight.

Cause of death:
science fiction
. You bet, Mark.

* * *

Kuttner and Kornbluth remain fairly prominent more than two decades after their passage (Kornbluth largely through the collaborations with Frederik Pohl and Pohl’s devoted effort to keep his collaborations and collaborator in print; Kuttner because enough contemporary writers and editors remember his ten best stories enough to constantly anthologize them), but Clifton is a lost figure and it is he who needs an
amicus curiae
, court of last resort or not. His 1956 novelette “Clerical Error” was reprinted in
Neglected Visions
(and I should say they were and are; the book did not do well but the title was self-fulfilling prophecy), a Doubleday anthology coedited with Martin H. Greenberg, and under Greenberg’s aegis and my own his first collection of short stories in his own language has recently been published by Southern Illinois University Press, but these frail attempts at restoration are absolutely on the margin. Clifton is unknown not only to the contemporary science fiction audience but to its writers and editors; most editors under thirty have never heard of him, most writers under forty have never read him. This is unpleasant—who of us could find this a reasonable outcome? Even
Amazing
’s mid-fifties stable of space-typists had their pride and reasonable ambitions and some fulfilled them—but it becomes genuinely wrenching when it is stated flatly (and the old-timers will verify) that for a period of four years Mark Clifton was perhaps the most prominent and controversial science fiction writer through the entire range of the magazines . . . and the early fifties for science fiction was a magazine market.

Clifton retired in 1951 after two decades as a practicing industrial psychologist (he did employment interviews and did interviews of recalcitrant workers as part of management’s attempt, apparently, to control unionism), partly because of precarious health after an early heart attack and partly out of a genuine desire to not only be a writer but a science fiction writer. Between May 1952 and his death Clifton published three novels and about twenty-five short stories in the science fiction magazines, nearly a third of them written in collaboration with Frank Rylovich and Alex Apostolides. (There is some question as to how much input the collaborators really had; Rylovich published a few stories in
Worlds of If
, one of which was in a best-of-the-year collection, but Apostolides, at least under that name, published nothing elsewhere before or since.) The first of the novels,
They’d Rather Be Right
(published later by Gnome Press as
The Forever Machine
) in collaboration with Rylovich, won the second science fiction novel Hugo awarded in 1955 at the Cleveland World Convention; the other two,
When They Came from Space
(1962) and
Eight Keys to Eden
(1960), were hardly as successful.

Most of the short stories upon which his reputation was based were published in the first four years of Clifton’s career. Over his last six years only a few stories saw print (none in
Astounding
, his major market), along with the unsuccessful later novels. Well before his death, in other words, Clifton had ceased to be a major figure. Diminished output was certainly the reason but whether the output was truly diminished or whether Clifton was merely being heavily rejected is speculative. It is possible (I have no direct evidence but private correspondence to another writer which I have seen may indicate) that as with Cyril M. Kornbluth, Clifton’s increasing ambition and sophistication caused him to write himself clear out of the magazine markets of his time . . . which were in the later fifties in a period of attrition and eventually collapsed anyway.

Long divorced and with a daughter who is (to this day) unlocatable, Mark Clifton died intestate. This made it impossible for publishers or anthology editors to negotiate for his work for years, and by the time that the newly formed SFWA and Forrest J. Ackerman had gotten some hold on the situation by the late sixties many years had passed and Clifton’s time was lost. “What Have I Done?” in the Harrison-Aldiss
Astounding
/
Analog Reader
and “Clerical Error” in
Neglected Visions
are two of the very few reprintings of his work in the seventies and although the Donning Company, a small publisher, has announced its intention to republish
The Forever Machine
, that novel has, at this writing, been out of print in this country for at least two decades.

This litany, a
Yizkor
chant, which with minor revisions could be said over the graves of most of us (and in due course, I can assure, will be said over all of us), is what the writing of popular fiction is all about, to be sure. It would be easy to reel off the names of twenty science fiction writers almost as prominent as Clifton in his decade who are similarly unknown today. But what makes Clifton’s topple from the center so painful is that within the context of the field in his time he had far to fall and it must have been extremely painful for him because it all happened during his lifetime. By the end of the fifties, barely able to write, hardly able to sell, he had already lost the entire sense of his career.

And he was good.

He was, in fact, in a particular way the best of them all. Clifton knew what technology was going to do to people; he spotted the fifties as the decade when those effects would become institutionalized, and he wrote about angst, the alienation effect, and the seepage of the human spirit through the machines with detachment, precision, and a good deal of control. Never better than an adequate stylist, he painfully improved his technique through the years and by the mid-fifties was writing quite well, far above the range of most contributors to
Astounding
. It was at that point that he began to get into sales trouble.

What the private correspondence indicates is that Clifton, a pained and sophisticated man who came into science fiction as an artistic naïf seeing it as the medium which would change the world, and who went out of it a decade later bitterly convinced that the nature of its editors and its audience forever delimited the field and made it beneath contempt as a serious means of social or political thought . . . what this correspondence indicates is that Clifton, whose career paralleled the decade in its collapse from optimism to despair, understood everything that had happened to him and would not have been surprised at all by his subsequent obscurity. What comes off in those letters is a powerful sense of disgust and self-loathing—Clifton hated himself for ever having invested science fiction with expectation. In the early fifties he saw it as mutant literature for mutant, special types who bound together would order the cosmos, and by the mid-fifties he was railing about the parasitic behavior of the West Coast fans who attached themselves to a notably immature and unsophisticated literary agent, all of them calling for the return of science fiction to the creed of adventure.

The letters are extraordinarily interesting in their portrait of a first-rate mind of mature wisdom proceeding very rapidly from self-delusion to existential despair. It is a sad thing—but in honoring the dead also, perhaps, an act of great compassion—that they must never be published.

Like virtually every science fiction writer of his time—
The Science Fiction Encyclopedia
points this out in an alert essay on Cyril Kornbluth—Clifton showed a curious inability to do his best work at novel length. This may have had to do with the exigencies of the magazine market or with the fact that virtually all of the science fiction of the fifties was conceived and written for magazine publication and subsequently pushed and pulled, manipulated into novel length; it may have had to do with the fact that science fiction at that time was a medium most adaptable to the short story, the single extrapolation worked to a single point. Whatever the reasons, they applied in Clifton’s case. His first novel (with Riley),
The Forever Machine
, an outright padding of thin material, was based upon short story characters and situations which had run in 1953 in
Astounding
. Even by the less than rigorous standards of those times, this work must be recognized as seriously attenuated. The short stories on the other and were thoughtful and controlled; the later ones quite poised and graceful and at least “Clerical Error,” “What Have I Done,” and “What Now, Little Man?” must be regarded as central to the literature. They were endlessly influential and imitated; they live on even as do “Vintage Season” or “All You Zombies” as the basis of further work by writers less original.

* * *

Despite the understated and occasionally clumsy style, Clifton was as innovative as Cyril Kornbluth or Alfred Bester in what he did for the field: he used the common themes—alien invasion, encroaching technology, revolution against impenetrable bureaucracy—but he brought to them the full range of psychological insight available to a trained and sophisticated mind. His view of how individuals would deal with the institutions and devices of the technological night was never optimistic (his very first story, “What Have I Done?”, depicts humanity as inalterably vile) but became steadily blacker as the decade and his own career progressed, and “Hang Head, Vandal!”, his last published story, is a vision of appalling bleakness. The vandals who wrecked Mars were all of us and Clifton, putting his last two novels on the market shortly thereafter, proceeded, it would seem, not to write. He died less than two years later. The correspondence to which I have referred ceased . . . his correspondent stopped answering his letters.

There is more to be said of Clifton and someday someone will say it (those letters might be published), but here is the last to be said of him here: Mark Clifton, a major writer of his time, protégé of Campbell, Hugo winner, master of psionics, envy of the fans and colleagues for his shotgun career . . . Mark Clifton, that innovator and man of wisdom, earned for all of his science fiction in his lifetime something considerably less than twenty thousand dollars.

1980: New Jersey