How Precious Was That While, page 33
In due course Penny set up her own establishment near Tampa, where she kept goats and geese as well as dogs and cats. Later she moved to Oregon, taking the animals along and adding new ones. I had told her the stories of my early life on a goat farm, and she had read Bio of an Ogre, and something must have made an impression. The goats had kids, so she had the pleasure of getting to know them too, as I had. I would report in my monthly family letter with my usual whimsy that Penny had two more kids. So the tradition of animals continued.
Fifteen
INCIDENTALS
I have tried to cover major aspects of my continuing life with some subject grouping for clarity, but there remains a huge collection of fragmentary episodes that don’t readily fit into the existing structure. This is the nature of human life. This chapter consists of selections from that collection.
Over the years certain songs have become associated with particular novels of mine. This usually happens when a popular song is playing on the radio—I always have it on when I’m working, as background company—at the time I’m doing creative work on a particular scene. Those incidental associations remain indefinitely, and later when I hear those songs, I think of the relevant novel. One example is “My Heart Belongs to Me,” which must have been playing in 1977 when I was working on the second Xanth novel, The Source of Magic. The nymph Jewel happened to be in the vicinity when Bink inadvertently drank from a love spring, and she was the first woman he saw thereafter. He was married to Chameleon, but love elixir takes no note of marital status; he loved her as well as his wife, and constantly sought to get closer to her, to her discomfort. But gradually he won her over, and she came to love him too. Then the Time of No Magic wiped out the spell on him, and he lost his love for Jewel. But Jewel’s love for Bink was natural, not magical, and did not fade. That was her tragedy, which she bore gracefully. And there is the association with the song, actually in reverse: Jewel’s heart has been lost, though Bink is no longer chasing her. So I am always sad when I hear the song, remembering Jewel and the unfairness of it. Fortunately, another man took a liking to her, and came after her with a love spell, so in the end she was happy and married. In fact she was the mother of Tandy, who was patterned after my daughter Cheryl, and later grew up to marry Smash Ogre.
Two songs associate with the third Mode novel, Chaos Mode. I was long familiar with both, but they are still occasionally played on the radio, and when I had a relevant scene for Colene, the feisty depressive fourteen-year-old heroine, those songs joined in. Colene, then thirteen, was trying to get close to her ninth grade science teacher, on whom she had a crush. She hummed the songs “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” and “Why Was I Born Too Late?” Finally, she found a pretext to kiss him, and was thrilled when she realized that he had had time to dodge away, but had allowed her to score. No, he was a good man, and never took advantage of her, and was quite helpful in saving Burgess, her ailing alien friend.
Another song, “Eternal Flame,” associates with Colene in the first novel of that series, Virtual Mode, when she lands a man she can keep. I tried to get permission to quote thirteen words of it in the Author’s Note, but they demanded payment of thirty dollars per word, so I dumped that. But I still think of Colene taking his hand and holding it to her bosom, longing for his love.
I had reference to a folk song in the first Incarnations of Immortality novel, On a Pale Horse, in a scene where lovely Luna is suffering the recent death of her father: “Come Let Me Hold Your Hand.” The lines were “It’s a long time, girl, may never see you, come let me hold your hand.” But the editor mistook the song for the Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” and took it out. Since it was well integrated with its scene, as my elements normally are, he took out the whole scene. I protested, and he allowed the scene back in if I substituted other words. He couldn’t admit his error, and that attitude was soon enough to destroy our relationship. I was one of several of that publisher’s best-selling writers to depart, because I am not the only one who can’t stand to have good text destroyed by bad editing. The song signaled the coming mischief.
In the third volume in that series, the song was “Believe in Me,” wherein a young man is wishing that the woman he loves would truly believe in him. That associates with Cedric, who as a youth of sixteen was married to Niobe, a woman of twenty-one, the most beautiful of her generation. He stands in complete awe of her, while she regards him as like a gangling puppy and wonders whether he will grow into his huge hands and feet. Yet he is far more man than she dreams, as events prove. But at the time of the marriage she doesn’t truly believe in him. And this story, interestingly, derives from another song, “The Bonnie Boy,” which dates from a prior generation. I heard it on a record by Mary O’Hara, an Irish singer. For years I searched for her music, and finally on a visit to New York around 1960 we found a store which carried her records. Later that song, with a fifteen-year-old man marrying a twenty-two-year-old woman, and soon dying, inspired the situation of my novel. I believe Joan Baez recorded it too, but I worked from the earlier version. It is ironic that I came to associate my scene with a different song, but these things don’t necessarily have much logic. In fact, there is a different song quoted in the scene, which Cedric sings to Niobe, trying belatedly to court her: “Come Live with Me and Be My Love,” which dates centuries back. Here is how it happened:
And we will sit upon the rocks.
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks.
As he sang, he reached forth to take her hand.
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
At his touch, something happened. Suddenly there was music, as of a mighty orchestra, filling the forest with the power of its sound. His voice seemed to become amplified, magnificent, evocative, compelling, beautiful. She sat stunned, mesmerized by his amazing presence, by the phenomenal music, and she only came out of it when the song ended.
If these delights thy mind may move.
Then live with me, and be my love.
As he stopped singing, the grand music also died away.
For that was his magic: to be accompanied by the unseen orchestra when he sang, making his untrained voice become wonderful. It was the beginning of love for Niobe. I still like the scene, though today I wince at one line, which should be “and she came out of it only when the song ended.” The placement of the word “only” is one of those nuances I picked up on too late for this novel.
The fifth novel in my Incarnations series, Being a Green Mother, associates with a hymn. I needed one as the theme for Orb’s wedding to Satan, and couldn’t find anything suitable. I was about to buy an album of something like a hundred hymns and listen to them all, searching for the right one. But then my wife and I returned late to our house, I think from a local speaking engagement I had had in Inverness, and turned on the TV, and caught the last two minutes of Cheers, a favorite program. It seemed an acquaintance had died, and nobody much had liked him, so they would not do him honor in a memorial service. Then the woman, Diane, stood alone and began singing “Amazing Grace,” and the men, shamed, came back in and joined her in a kindly memorial. I was long familiar with that song, but I had never heard it quite that way before. “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saves a wretch like me”—“That’s it!” I thought, and so it entered my novel.
Then there was “Islands in the Stream,” sung I believe by Dolly Parton, that I came to associate with the second Space Tyrant novel, Mercenary, wherein the protagonist Hope Hubris marries a fiery and beautiful pirate lass named Roulette for political reason, and soon loves her, and in time she loves him too. But circumstances force them apart, and he has a vision of the two of them being on separate islands, which are inexorably separating. A second song associates with her, “Rue,” which I remembered from my collection of folk songs. Key lines are “And when your thyme is past and gone, he’ll care no more for you, you; And every day that your garden is waste, will spread all over with rue, rue.” It uses garden analogies with a social point, warning women of the fickle ways of men.
When I started that series, I wrote the first novel, Refugee, in pencil in the winter, because my typewriter was in the study, too cold to use. Then I set it aside and wrote the first Incarnation novel, On a Pale Horse similarly in pencil. When spring came I typed them both, and both were similarly strong fiction, with similarly broad themes that the critics wouldn’t admit existed, though it was the latter that made the best-seller lists. Next winter I wrote the second novel in each series, and the odd thing was that when I finished Mercenary I suffered awful pangs of separation from it. Since the first novel in the series was the more savage of the two, I’m not sure why, but I hated to leave this one. I don’t always understand my own feelings.
Then there was the song “Remember Me,” also called “The Girl in the Wood,” which is both the earliest and the latest, and associates with two of my novels. In 1956, the year I was married, I heard it once, and it inspired a sequence in my first published novel Chthon, as described in Chapter 3. Then about thirty-five years later, readers identified it for me, and I wrote another such sequence into the eighteenth Xanth novel, Geis of the Gargoyle, which was not far short of my hundredth published novel. Ah, that lovely girl in the wood! The song described a boy who went into the wood and saw there a beautiful woman, who told him that he would never see a girl as lovely as she was. Her eyes were as green as grassy pools, looking right at him, and her hair was red as autumn leaves, and she completely enchanted him. And me. He never married, because no woman measured up to that image; fortunately I was already married when I heard it. It wasn’t until I recovered the song, in the 1990s, that I realized that the girl in the wood was a dryad, a spirit of a tree. No wonder she had so fascinated me! I remember being a bit disappointed on the first hearing, when the girl moved her tiny hands and made a little turn, because she was obviously showing off, diminishing my impression of her as serious. But I did remember her, for all that time, and memorized the song when I recovered it. I always liked trees, and lovely women, and magic, and stories, and songs, and there they all were in one.
Songs aren’t the only things with associations for me. There was a movie about an American nuclear bomber gone awry, and it destroyed a Russian city. The Russians were naturally upset, and World War III threatened, but it was diffused when the Americans agreed to bomb an equivalent city. How would the Russians know when that had been done? By having a phone connection to that city; when the bomb detonated, the phone would be vaporized, and there would be a shrill whine. Now when our phone changes over to receive a fax, it makes a sound just like that, and I always think of the phone vaporizing. It’s a bit unnerving.
Often I need to go to a dictionary to check a word. I try to use words precisely, and if I am in doubt about a nuance, I look it up. I have four major dictionaries: the Oxford English Dictionary, in the condensed form, with the update supplement that makes it current to 1987; I have to use a magnifying glass to make out the tiny print. The 1913 Funk & Wagnalls I got for my tenth birthday in 1944. The 1945 Webster’s New International I inherited from my wife’s father. And the 1987 Random House. All are unabridged, ranging from 2,500 pages to 5,000—or 20,000, if you count each compacted page of the OED. I love them all. I also have a big fake 1973 Webster that I don’t respect. I made up a list of test words that defeat some dictionaries, thus rating them in my own fashion. The updated OED is the only one that has all eleven test worlds: neoteny, bindlestiff, phthore, tesseract, parsec, googolplex, fart, ouroborus, eidetic, geis, and menarche. Random comes second with eight, missing phthore, ouroborus, and geis. Webster is third with six; it gets tesseract, but misses googolplex and fart, but those are forgivable because the one is too recent, and the other is dirty. Funk gets only four, which is a shame, because it’s always been my dictionary, but it suffers because of the number of words that simply didn’t exist in its day. And the fake Webster is last with only two: bindlestiff and parsec. So I generally use Random, and go to OED if I have to, because it’s less convenient. But here is where the association comes in: in the U.S. Army Artillery training we had to judge how far away a particular target was. One was deceptive; it looked reasonably close, but wasn’t, so our figurative rounds kept falling short. The lesson: always bracket your target. Put one shot beyond it, one before it, then close in. I use that when I look for a word in my dictionaries, because otherwise I can turn pages wastefully. So when I look up a word like kris, a Malay dagger, I bracket it, going back and forth: I, M, K L, KA, LA, and finally KR. Only Funk and OED have it. And I think of that Army lesson, ranging with the artillery shells. Every time. And wonder whether there’s a better way to zero in. Actually, a late development produced one: Infopedia, mentioned in Chapter 9, jumps to your likely word as you type it in. It scores 8 on the word list, missing on the archaic terms. That’s not bad.
Incidentally, I have an objection to the definition of googolplex. A googol is ten to the hundredth power, or a 1 with a hundred zeros following it. It seems to me that a googolplex should be a googol to the googol power, but according to the dictionaries it is a relatively puny ten to the googol power. Maybe we need a new term for my concept: goOogol. That’s one big number!
There was one more song association, minor yet enduring. I was hitchhiking north to Vermont in 1953, and a song played on the radio of a car that gave me a ride. I remember the words of the refrain, which experience has taught me not to quote directly: he was glad he had kissed other lips first, so that he knew how different it was this time. Years, maybe decades later I saw Eddie Fisher sing that song on TV, so I realized it was his. It wasn’t that it was an especially great song, just that it associated with that time in my life, coincidentally between the first lips I kissed as man/woman at Goddard in 1952, and the second, in 1954, and there was a difference, and I married the second. So I sought that song, and couldn’t find it. Finally I prevailed on my wife to buy me a $100 book for my sixtieth birthday, Lissaur’s Encyclopedia of Popular Music in America, 1688-1989, and there at last I found it: “Many Times,” Eddie Fisher, 1953 hit song. But when I finally heard it—it wasn’t the song, so it’s still missing.
Which reminds me of another book Cam gave me: Woods Unabridged Rhyming Dictionary. Sometimes—rarely—I try to versify, and it’s frustrating to get stuck on a missing rhyme. I can go through the alphabet in my head, searching: ale, bale, dale, fail, gale, hale, jail, kale, mail, nail, and so on, but I’m apt to miss ail, Braille, flail, frail, regale, hail, and similar. So she got me the book, and it remains precious to me, including her dedication in front: “To Piers—This dictionary,/ As you can see,/ Is meant for rhymes/ Like me, be, thee.// But’cause the book/ Is just for you,/ I will not look/ To make this work. Your Cam, Christmas 1960.”
My collection of dictionaries, of various types, is just part of my interest in books. I have about twenty atlases, the first major one being the National Geographic Atlas of the World, which Cam gave me for Christmas in 1970. And of course now I have a whole small library of research books, mostly on history and the nature of mankind, shelved and indexed according to the system used by the Library of Congress. Affluence has allowed me to acquire any good book I want, and there are more and more good books. Now I have three thousand reference books. But those early gifts are the treasures.
But about songs: I always loved them, and used to sing them to myself, though I learned to do it only when alone, because of ridicule by family and other children. I collected my favorite songs, memorizing them and writing them out. Once at Goddard I came across a book of songs in a lounge, and exclaimed with delight as I recognized old favorites, such as “Lady of Spain.” “Lady of Spain,” a girl echoed derisively. It was as if she resented my delight in finding a song. Some folk are like that. They remind me of reviewers.
There is another bemused memory of a song associated with Goddard College. There were two girls, close friends, who I think were unrelated but they looked almost like twins. One was dark brunette, the other pale blond, both with long straight tresses, if my errant memory doesn’t deceive me. They went everywhere together, these slender, pretty creatures. Then something changed, and the brunette discovered sex. She indulged in it wildly, seeming to want to seduce as many of the boys as she could, just for the challenge of it, and succeeding often. One boy was said to have had sex with her six times in one night. I know she had a way about her, because once she was standing near me as I sat in a chair, and she sort of nudged close, silently hinting at what she had, and she did have it; I felt the gravitic pull of it as I saw the clothed outline of her breast near my face. But I had my own girlfriend and wasn’t looking for anything on the side, so I ignored her, and she moved on, leaving me with a memory of that revelation: that girl was a woman, physically. She took no precautions at all against VD or pregnancy, and the other girls in her dormitory became so alarmed that they scheduled a session on the use of contraception, so that the one among them who needed the information most, without knowing that she did, could be educated without being pointed out. The faculty adviser adamantly opposed that, so they weren’t able to do it, which shows the folly of such “adult” attitudes. If the girl had gotten pregnant by an unknown man, much of the blame could have been laid to the faculty member. But the girl was lucky, and escaped mischief, as far as I know. Meanwhile her friend the blonde was left out in the cold, as it were. They remained close, but the blonde did not go the sexual route. Instead she became obsessed by a song, which she was always singing to herself, whose words were “I wish I were a fascinating bitch,” with verses going on to all the things she would do, such as taking a holiday once a month and driving her customers wild. It finished “I wish I were a fascinating bitch—Instead of a motherless child.”
