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Authors: Avram Davidson
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articles, cobbled together with paper clips, Scotch or Irish or bicycle tape, surgical sutures, or even wholesome old-fashioned library paste, meet with a gentle but a rather unenthusiastic reception from Mr. Sherman. He wishes this were more widely known. Mr. Sherman is a devout supporter of the United Nations, and it is a source of much anguish to him that he is unable to retype and translate MSS. inflicted by threshing machines on extra-thin onionskin paper, well as he understands how high the postal rates are from Catalonia and Bhutan. He hopes that this inability will not cause political unrest in such renascent nations, for whom he will continue to entertain the highest regards, you should know. During the years 1919 and 1920 Mr. Sherman frequently took off his hat as parades dedicated to the cause of female franchise passed by, and he sincerely trusts that his positive refusal to peruse MSS. on which the baby has wee-weed or the childrens’ luncheon jam been dropped will not incite supporters of the suffrage movement to place bombs in his mailbox or — ” Nate dropped this and continued to shuffle the papers on his desk.
One of his problems seemed to be a growing disorganization of his professional life. Whereas formerly his working day had consisted of five hours of utter togetherness between himself and his typewriter, broken only by occasional trips to the bathroom; followed by a few hours of proofing and correction, note-making regarding the next day’s work, and jotting down of notions for future articles; and at the stroke of five he covered his typewriter, tidied his desk, stacked the outgoing mail, and prepared to go down and celebrate the cocktail hour — but no longer.
Habit or inertia was still strong enough to carry him through a few paragraphs beginning,
“The drums of the drug-Crazed dervishes of Marakesh were getting pretty damned loud now as they approached the stinking hut where I was hidden in the harem of Ibn al-Idd with his half-naked houri, Farina
—
“
but after that things slowed down to a semicolon. Crocodiles continued to lay submerged with only their wicked little eyes showing above the water, and mass gang-bangs in the Sunda Seas never got past the
“Tuan, tonight full moon, more better you and Men take boat and go quick”
stage. He could tell the hawk from the handsaw now, and both were turning rusty … or something.
After a few futile hours of this, he would arise now and make a cup of coffee or tea and ease his fundament and then sit down again, resolved to try good stuff. It is traditional to say that first novels are traditionally autobiographical — though tradition is silent concerning first novels in which the protagonist solves series of murders, which baffle the fuzz, or takes off in his patent spaceship for Proxima Centauri — so Nate dutifully considered novelizable elements in his own background. His paternal grandmother, he reflected, used to go away once a year for two weeks in Bermuda (whatever became of Bermuda?), and this event invariably produced in his mother, who had never been farther offshore than the Philadelphia ferryboat, symptoms of incipient hysteria; the result always being that Nate and his older brother Jerry were packed off to an aunt in Passaic, N.J., regarded by them as the boundary of the known world; and there they once saw a muskrat — or, at any rate a rat … What next? he asked himself, hunched over the mill. Sex, sexual initiation, supposedly either (a) squalid, or (b) glorious. Well. Actually, it had taken place next door on a well-made bed, and lasted about 35 seconds, Greenwich Meridian Time: “
That
wasn’t very zonky,
was
it?” the girl said. And, “I must remember not to believe everything I read … not on the
floor
, for Heaven’s sake! In the
toi
let!”
Nate sighed.
He had been in college and out of college, in the army and out of the army, now he was in love and even if he was to be out of love, still, it wouldn’t be
One of his problems seemed to be a growing disorganization of his professional life. Whereas formerly his working day had consisted of five hours of utter togetherness between himself and his typewriter, broken only by occasional trips to the bathroom; followed by a few hours of proofing and correction, note-making regarding the next day’s work, and jotting down of notions for future articles; and at the stroke of five he covered his typewriter, tidied his desk, stacked the outgoing mail, and prepared to go down and celebrate the cocktail hour — but no longer.
Habit or inertia was still strong enough to carry him through a few paragraphs beginning,
“The drums of the drug-Crazed dervishes of Marakesh were getting pretty damned loud now as they approached the stinking hut where I was hidden in the harem of Ibn al-Idd with his half-naked houri, Farina
—
“
but after that things slowed down to a semicolon. Crocodiles continued to lay submerged with only their wicked little eyes showing above the water, and mass gang-bangs in the Sunda Seas never got past the
“Tuan, tonight full moon, more better you and Men take boat and go quick”
stage. He could tell the hawk from the handsaw now, and both were turning rusty … or something.
After a few futile hours of this, he would arise now and make a cup of coffee or tea and ease his fundament and then sit down again, resolved to try good stuff. It is traditional to say that first novels are traditionally autobiographical — though tradition is silent concerning first novels in which the protagonist solves series of murders, which baffle the fuzz, or takes off in his patent spaceship for Proxima Centauri — so Nate dutifully considered novelizable elements in his own background. His paternal grandmother, he reflected, used to go away once a year for two weeks in Bermuda (whatever became of Bermuda?), and this event invariably produced in his mother, who had never been farther offshore than the Philadelphia ferryboat, symptoms of incipient hysteria; the result always being that Nate and his older brother Jerry were packed off to an aunt in Passaic, N.J., regarded by them as the boundary of the known world; and there they once saw a muskrat — or, at any rate a rat … What next? he asked himself, hunched over the mill. Sex, sexual initiation, supposedly either (a) squalid, or (b) glorious. Well. Actually, it had taken place next door on a well-made bed, and lasted about 35 seconds, Greenwich Meridian Time: “
That
wasn’t very zonky,
was
it?” the girl said. And, “I must remember not to believe everything I read … not on the
floor
, for Heaven’s sake! In the
toi
let!”
Nate sighed.
He had been in college and out of college, in the army and out of the army, now he was in love and even if he was to be out of love, still, it wouldn’t be
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