Samuel R. Delany

KB

You’ve been regarded by others as a social critic. Does this label resonate?

SRD

In books like Times Square Red/Times Square Blue, there’s a bit of social history mixed in with an ethnography narrating some of what went on in the [pornography] theaters themselves. Eventually, in October 1995, they were physically shut down, with chains around their ticket booths. That’s become my second most popular book after Dhalgren (1975). And Dhalgren itself was definitely based on a sociological situation, which, for thirty or so years, was visible in pretty much every major city, whether East Coast or West Coast, and many in between.

Twenty-four years later, people are still asking me about my thoughts on Grindr, Scruff, Tinder, and the rest—none of which I’ve had very much experience with. It strikes me as rather comic.

KB

In the two decades that have passed since the publication of TSR/TSB, how do you reflect on the life that it has taken on, and its public reception?

SRD

The book’s popularity pleases me, but as more and more time intervenes, I wonder just how clearly people who never experienced that reality can really visualize the situation. The use of dating apps does not produce the same sex or the same urban reorganization as cruising sites in neighborhoods that have been marked to contain certain kinds of activities.

KB

[Laughs.] Though I wasn’t around during the 1970s and ’80s, I agree—the use of dating and sex apps surely presents a markedly different reality, creating an almost robotic, affected feel, compared to the organic communing that you describe in TSR/TSB.

I’ve always been deeply moved by your assertion that “People are not excess,” and that our lives are most rewarding when lived through democratic and interclass contact. But today, even living in New York—an epicenter of human crossover—can feel stratified. What advice do you have for a younger generation deprived of this kind of social fulfillment? Or has this mode of urban living been lost? Can it be found again?

SRD

I don’t have advice for people. The world as it existed between the 1950s and 1980s is the one I knew, and the one we live in now is so radically different it would be absurd for me to suggest ways for them to live or to enjoy their art or just their life. Goethe remarked, back in the eighteenth century, that a man of fifty knows no more than a man of twenty; they just know different things. Well, I’m a man of eighty-one, and the things I know are extremely different from people who are forty or under. The best I can do is wish them luck and, if I’m lucky, get a chance to listen to them and possibly learn a little bit about the world I live in.

KB

Do you have any rituals? What do you hold sacred in your day-to-day life?

SRD

I have habits, not rituals. I go along with Gass in his essay "What Is Worthy of Worship?" in which he concludes that basically nothing is worthy. I enjoy reading—though, for five or six years, I was not able to because I was sleep-deprived. There are a few memories I return to precisely because I cannot figure out how to actually describe them so that someone who has never experienced them can picture them—the shadows from various types of woven wire gates on a stretch of city grass, or, indeed, a place where people have thrown a lot of garbage they shouldn’t: all the things you can suggest but never truly describe accurately. These failures, probably I shall die thinking about . . .

KB

What creatively propels you while writing a fictional character, or when occupying a narrative voice?

SRD

To produce an effect with words, you basically have to leave the feeling out. You have to concentrate on how the feeling affects the character and write about the material world they are moving through in that state. You mention all the things that impinge on their consciousness or leave out the things they are ignoring. The result is that, when the reader reads it, there is space for him/her to feel the same sort of things. In the words of Theodore Sturgeon, not to mention Anton Chekhov, who also had characters talk about it in his third play, Ivanov: "Though the scene the reader imagines will not be the same as yours, it will be just as meaningful as yours was to you."

KB

What do you want from writing? Do you give yourself prompts, or mantras?

SRD

Mantra is too kind a word. Writing, for me, is a matter of sitting down and cussing myself out at my own verbal clumsiness: "You fucking idiot. That’s not English! . . . What in the world made you think you could write a sentence if you come out with something like that . . .?" Learning how to teach was a matter of realizing I couldn’t say that to my students, and I never figured out how to make them say it to themselves—which is why, I suspect, I was not a very good teacher. I’ve never felt I was a good writer. For many years, I thought I was a fairly good rewriter, and those are the years that produced the work that’s found itself into books and, in some cases, is still in manuscript.

There is a whole book—whose topic is “Why I write”—which is called Of Solids and Surds, which merely means, in my case, “of simple and complex answers.” Read it. Sadly I am too old to repeat myself endlessly in more and more distorted language.

Perhaps you know the endlessly fecund work of my favorite American writer, Guy Davenport (November 23, 1927, Anderson, SC–January 4, 2005, Lexington, KY) whose sixty-six stories are all brilliantly "engineered"—his term in a letter to me from the mid-'80s.

KB

I read Tatlin! a few years back, and I’m familiar with his practice of orienting his fiction writing around historical events. I’d like to hear more about the impact his work has had on your own writing. What makes him your favorite American writer? Do you draw any parallels between your own work and his?

SRD

When Martin Last recommended Guy Davenport to me in the early 1980s, I went immediately to the 8th St. Bookstore and bought Eclogues, The Da Vinci Bicycle, and his essay collection, The Geography of the Imagination, took them home and read them, and I believe found a few more early pamphlets with some of his stories (i.e., “Trois Caprice” and “The Antiquities of Elis”). Very soon after that, I got the John Hopkins UP reprint of Tatlin! . . . At any rate, there was a craft and immediacy to the stories’ surface, which is all one sees during first or second reading, that I found deeply engaging. With rereading, I began to glean some of the stories’ complex structure . . . I was really taken with the historical range, care, and intensity with which his stories struck me. In 1982, I did a workshop for Lance Olsen in Idaho, who, I discovered, was also an enthusiast and correspondent of Davenport’s, who urged me to write him, and so, when I came home to New York, I wrote him a letter dated May 4th, 1983, which began:

Your stories have given me more pleasure in the past year and a half than those of any other recent fiction writer. For that, I had to write and say thank you. Like many of your current readers, I suspect, I didn’t encounter you ’till late ’81, after Ecologues appeared. But I’ve gone back to read Tatlin! and Da Vinci’s-Bicycle, as well as your Greek translations and your essays. This past October, after too many deaths among family and friends had kept me very sober-faced a while, I read “Pyrrhon of Elis” in Trois Caprices and had my first full and open laugh for months. That deserves special thanks. Among the stories, “Robot” is up there in my four/five favorites, but it is constantly jostled at its near-pinnacle position by “Au-Tombau-de-Charles-Fourier” and “Apples and Pears,” from Conjunction 3. Though, honestly, watching myself trying to pick and choose, I realize you’ve become for me one of those writers among whose texts I no longer need to find favorites, because the texture and richness of the entire fabric precludes cutting it up like that, unless I am simply using the titled distinctions you’ve already imposed to introduce you to some new reader among my friends. (“Knowing your tastes, you might try this one first. But perhaps you should stay away from that one—though it’s among the best— till you’ve more of a feel for what he’s doing . . .”—things like that.)

Is that criticism? Well! I also sent him two of my own books: my monograph Wagner/Artaud and Atlantis: Three Tales, which had just come out. We exchanged seven letters, four from him and three from me. Very soon, I began to realize there were a lot of fairly subtle modernist games in his texts, lurking below the immediate surface. One of his stories, “O, Gadgo Niglo,” about two boys who spend a lot of time masturbating together and, when one of them runs away to join the Gypsies, is both extremely moving and, at the same time, is written without a single comma in such a way that you read the story without noticing it. (There is a second story, “Rivers,” where he uses the same constraint.) He only wrote sixty-six of these works when he got both a MacArthur [and] was diagnosed with lung cancer, which eventually killed him . . . I only wrote one piece on him, “The Gay Writer”/“Gay Writing . . .?,” a very mild piece on the reception of Guy Davenport and Martin Duberman in the Sunday Times Book Review, which I presented at a conference on gay literature, which you can find in my collection, Shorter Views (1996).

KB

Hearing you describe Davenport’s work mirrors my own experience with your body of work—there’s such a tangible feeling of being fully immersed in your distinct and specific creative universe, or a sense of expressive continuity. I’m curious how the building of this creative world—autobiographically and fictionally—has served to better understand your own life, as both a writer and a person. What does writing provide you with?

SRD

I never built a career. I wrote what I wanted and published what I could. Meanwhile, manuscripts got lost and destroyed. People who were interested decided that other people were interested in this, that, or the other, none of which had anything to do with me or what had happened to me. I live on the inside of my life, and others see the parts that manage to survive or get written about here or there—thus, I feel relatively lonely inside the bubble of my own memory, which will probably pop for good fairly soon.

Writing provided me with something to do up until maybe two years ago. Since then, it hasn’t, so I think of myself as someone who used to be a writer, not as someone who is a writer with a very leaky collection of memories.

KB

What have you compromised, creatively or otherwise?

SRD

Almost nothing, as far as I know. I did have to give up most of my library. That was about as painful as a lobotomy, and more than once I cried because of it. But I seem to have gotten beyond it, at this point . . . at least I think so.

KB

If you don't mind me asking, why did you have to give up your library? Was this during your move from New York to Philadelphia?

SRD

It is not that I mind your asking, but that it would take a short book to detail with any real accuracy. The quick answer to the second part of your question is no. It was during the time of my move from Wynnewood to Fairmount, a.k.a. the Museum District.

KB

You've spent a considerable amount of time teaching and working as a professor—from 1975 to 2015—alongside writing. How has your time in academia shifted (or reinforced) how you thought about writing and creativity?

SRD

Teaching takes time—and thought—away from writing. As I’ve often said, they draw from the same wells. (And yes, Bateson taught me to distrust all such hydrolic metaphors.) Still, I suspect I might have gotten at least one or two more fairly sizable novels completed if I hadn’t been teaching.

KB

In the past, you’ve identified your work as “paraliterature.” Can you define this, specifically in how it relates to marginality? Do you locate yourself as an outsider?

SRD

I don’t believe I can define, but I can describe it functionally so that some readers may recognize what I meant. Up until the success of the first Star Wars trilogy changed the movie industry and, with it, the entire country’s sense of what was and wasn’t science fiction—that is to say, it brought a new understanding of what science fiction was.

In 1926, Hugo Gernsback coined the term “scientifiction” (not “scientification”!), and one or another of his many letter-writing fans used the term “science fiction” in their endless colloquies with him in Amazing Stories. This was sixteen years before I was born, but I have always felt that it is silly to use the term “science fiction” for anything before this time. Between 1926 and 1977, if you asked anybody on the street whether Buck Rogers, Flash Gordan, or even Superman was literature or not, they would probably tell you no, it wasn’t. A few professorial sorts might say well, yes, but it’s very bad literature, but I’m not talking about academic discourse; I’m talking about popular discourse. They would say the same about comic books in general and even about pornography as they usually understood it, though it was much harder to get ahold of then than it is today, and written pornography was far more important than the endless film clips you can find on the internet, which officially only came in thirty years ago (April 30, 1993).

“Paraliterature'' is the term I used up until 2012 to talk about all those things that your average man or woman on the streets of New York would have dismissed as “not literature” purely on the strength of hearing the genre: comic books, [science fiction] magazines, pornographic magazines or the text accompanying the endless photographs of naked men and women sometimes alone and sometimes involved in sexual activity—nothing more, nothing less. Some of my own work, specifically six titles, was released in this period: Equinox (1973, under the title “Tides of Lust” from Lancer Books), Hogg (written in 1969 and published in 1995 by Black Ice Books), The Mad Man (1994 by Rhinoseros Books), Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012 by Magnus Books; a corrected edition self-published by the author in 2019), and Shoat Rumblin (2020, self-published). Written toward the end of the last century, a chapter of another book called This Short Day of Frost and Sun appeared in the Georgia Review Summer 2022 issue. At the time I wrote these, I would have considered them paraliterature, as well as Dhalgren (1975), which appeared first as a mass market paperback and only had a very expensive and error-ridden hardcover in 1977, which is now a collector’s item.

KB

Your 1968 novel Nova is currently being adapted by Neil Gaiman for an Amazon television show. What has this experience been like? Have you been hands-on in the adaptation process? Did you ever write with the hopes of having your work be translated into a film or show?

SRD

This was mentioned in the New Yorker profile on me a few months ago, and probably shouldn't have been. Basically I am not involved in this, and there's nothing I can really tell you about it.

It's a rare writer who doesn't think of a good film or theatrical version of her or his one tale or another—though lots of writers who have gone through the process have been desperately unhappy with the results (e.g. Alan Moore). The films that were made from Moore's brilliant comic series, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell, have got to be among the worst films ever made and truly shame their titles and the concept(s) behind them.

KB

What has kept you returning to literary storytelling as your primary expressive form? Say, compared to screenwriting or playwriting?

SRD

Energy, and the ability to organize internally, which I no longer have.

KB

You briefly taught Octavia Butler at a writing workshop, and the two of you were featured on many writing panels together, despite both your work being distinct from one another. How did it feel to be frequently paired with other Black writers under the category of Afrofuturism, though your writing varied drastically in tone and style?

SRD

Well, we eventually became friends—and she underwent an incredible change. When I first met her at Clarion, she was clearly very smart but also pathologically shy—there were several other students in that class, who were more memorable.

She later wrote an essay that began, “Shyness is shit!” And by the time I saw her next, she had gotten over it. But if she hadn’t, I doubt seriously if we’d have ever heard of her.

KB

You have a prolific Facebook and Twitter presence, with fairly regular posts of friends and your partner, the books you’re reading, the meals you’re cooking—an act you’ve described as “promiscuous autobiographizing.” Can you go more into this? Does this kind of digital interaction feel archival to your life?

SRD

It’s interesting you ask about that. Just about two months ago, those daily posts suddenly ceased. The only meal I ever cook is oatmeal, and, frankly, little is going on in my life other than trying to find TV shows or films to watch or, more likely, rewatch. I take lots of screengrabs, but most of the time, recently, I don’t bother to even review them.

I’m fortunate that I have a few younger friends who come by to see me, and I have a young assistant who allows me to do things such as respond to this interview, but even the visits of friends or old students average fewer than once a week. I made two major attempts to write about sections of my life, and in one of which, I left out the most important figure, a mentor of mine named Bernard K. Kay, whom I saw two or three times a week whenever I was in New York from the time I was seventeen until his death from lung cancer in 1982. Because he’s largely missing from my autobiographical essay, The Motion of Light in Water, were he there, the book would have been twice as long.

KB

I actually first encountered your work as an undergraduate with The Motion of Light in Water. The lecture dealt with the questions of visibility and power, and how different uses of this pairing can be harnessed towards freedom, or, alternatively, as a repressive tool. I was assigned a passage describing your experience of a police raid on a cruising spot between the trucks at the Christopher Street docks, where you witnessed a mass, fleeing exodus (and a social uncovering) of the men around you. You described this moment—however exposing—as creating the conditions for a “sexual revolution [to] come precisely because of the infiltration of clear and articulate language into the marginal areas of human sexual exploration.”

In our current moment, where very little is private, do you still hold that visibility (and articulation) are the primer for freedom, sexual and otherwise? Or has it become the inverse?

SRD

In large, urban populations, where there are many strangers together, people find themselves able to be more open speaking and writing about sexuality. In sparse, rural populations, where there is a lot of religious pressure (i.e., the laws of Leviticus), all such rebellions have to be personal and are usually carried on with one person in one’s mind. That makes for very slow social changes, though literature and films sometimes push in what I would consider the right direction. Even so, I am very much a city product, and I notice that in more than half the films I look at, neither homosexuality or bisexuality are even mentioned or seem to exist in the world’s portrayal.