Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
Seattle: Aqueduct Press, 2010; $21.00 tpb; 362 pages
These days few general readers know the Chandler Davis name. His main involvement in American popular fiction fell more than half a century ago; his nonfiction, while it includes works of more currency, has tended to appear in smaller-circulation or professional publications.
Davis in the 1940s and ’50s chose science fiction as a field of endeavor, although his contributions ended up being few enough to leave him largely unremembered in reference works. All the same, he occupied a place among the more politically conscious writers of science fiction in the troubled years after World War II. He pursued, too, mathematics and teaching and in the educational realm learned what others had learned earlier—that those “who advocated change and proposed to revise antiquated forms were called again and again ‘enemies of the University,’” in the words of Ortega y Gassett. After the Red Scare, Davis cut short his career at University of Michigan, opting to leave the United States and reestablish himself in Canada.
In recent years I encountered the “Chan Davis” name in connection to Milt Rothman and James Blish, two of his correspondents. When I was writing about Cyril Kornbluth, I imagined mine would be one of the few science fiction histories to spend much time on several interesting writers and enthusiasts who played parts in the earlier days of science fiction but who have been regarded as minor players and largely if not wholly forgotten. Those figures included two who went on to careers in the sciences: Jack Rubinson, known later as Jack Robins, and Rothman. Davis, as I had not known at the time, might have fallen within this group, although his involvement in science fiction circles began a bit later, for his mathematical interests led him to identify himself with the sciences. Did he contribute substantially to science fiction? With this volume we may begin answering that for ourselves.
Davis has strengths as a writer, foremost his adherence to his sense of conscience, an adherence that has made not just his writings but his life notable. Related to this, he views his world in political terms and sees the political as his worthiest subject, and he embraces his own experiences as part of the political sphere worthy of attention. Although Davis’s writings reflect his engagement with the situations of others, he brings his own situation and story to the table without distracting himself from that outward focus. The care he displays in maintaining this balance and in explaining his perspective helps keep him from the strident buzzing of the preacher or the dry rattle of the summer-insect pedant. His voice carries quietly and reasonably but earnestly; these qualities lend his nonfiction a continuing freshness.
The Red Scare, the firing of professors, the insults to individuals who express social responsibility in unfashionable ways . . . yes, we know about these matters, to one degree or another; and we could ignore them, yes? Fortunately, we do not, thanks to spirits such as his.
Davis’s forthright honesty, unembarrassed self-assessment, and enthusiasm for the truth animate pages 52–119 of this book, where a miscellany of provocative articles appear. They relate in part to Davis’s experience with the House Un-American Activities Committee, the house in which so many Americans lived that it seems strange Congress felt so strongly about that “Un-.” Davis argues effectively that what the censored and expelled educators lost may matter less than society’s loss of its elements of dissent.
Many of Davis’s writings prompt the happy response of “Go, Brother!”—his effectiveness lies in the fact that he can present a specific wrong or specific incident and make it universal to the degree that it can sustain a short article or a letter written in response to another writer the reader has likely never heard of and never will again. It prompts this response, for Davis engages in the Good Fight (or one we are willing to grant Goodness) for the length of an essay. His opponents to some degree fade in significance, for what we are reading here are words of a spirit, a conscience, not words that exist only because the opponent exists. We are reading words that have not been shrunken and desiccated by his experiences with the HUAC hunt and expulsion, nor by his chosen life-environment of academia, which has had the effect of making some intelligent writers express themselves impenetrably.
Davis would seem an ideal professional educator, for his expert knowledge qualifies him to teach, and his conscience makes him lean toward social engagement not only within his academic community but within general society. He can speak as a qualified individual before his colleagues and as a university-dignified and popular culture–enriched figure outside it. The ease with which he expresses his thoughts suggests a confidence born of actually having listeners, a situation not always true of professors. Some experts so enjoy the prestige bestowed by their profession that they need hypertrophied, intellectual adornments in their speech and in their writing, the way the military general needs his ribbons and badges even when speaking to civilians.
I find it particularly remarkable that when addressing colleagues at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as Davis does in a speech included in this volume, he speaks of events that occurred in his country of birth, of ethical concepts, of emotion, of life choices; and he does so with candor and simplicity, recognizing that his audience members are human beings first and members of scientific professions second.
The nonfiction in It Walks in Beauty seems particularly important for the mosaic portrait it presents of the Red Scare years, as seen by one who was not one of the scared but the hunted. Davis points out that U. S. universities have never made amends for their missteps and mistakes of the 1950s, and that they failed and apparently still fail to realize what they did to the spirit of dissent while supposedly standing stalwartly as bastions of free learning and intellectual exploration. Davis feels “the loss of a healthy heresy is much more serious than the loss of so many individual scholars.” The scholars who were “accurately accused of the heresy of Leftism,” once removed from the education system, could make none of the intellectual contributions that might have been theirs to make, and they could exert no direct influence upon the new generations of students, whose prospect for a complete education would seem to have been compromised by administrative fiat in the Truman and Eisenhower years. At one point, Davis writes that the now-exiled teachers “were accused of influencing students. A shocking thought!”
Davis addressed the following remarks, written in 1959 and first published in 1960, toward U. S. universities:
For our own sake, for the universities’ sake, you must face what happened. More than you need the exiles in particular, you need dissent in general, a profusion of ideas richer than you have seen before. You must welcome dissent; you must welcome serious, systematic, proselytizing dissent—not only the playful, the fitful, or the eclectic; you must value it enough . . . to refuse to have it torn from you by outsiders. You must welcome dissent, not in a whisper when alone, but publicly so potential dissenters can hear you.
What potential dissenters see now is that you accept an academic world from which we are excluded for our thoughts. This is a manifest signpost over all your arches, telling them: Think at your peril. You must not let it stand.
Davis, in his post–U. S. career as a mathematician, hoped to avoid taking work with military applications. His perceptions about the ill possibility of doing so shed light on an unstated relationship between the U. S. military and the purging of the country’s universities. Had the Left been allowed to remain, and had it exerted a continuing influence on public thought and public decision-making, a stronger cultural response might have remained possible against the industrialist and militarist juggernaut, the immensely powerful megamachine of whose existence social critic Lewis Mumford had been trying to warn the educated public, over the course of decades.
Davis and others received no invitation back. Universities seemingly made no effort to repudiate their mistakes, and the inescapable thought is that we will never know what U. S. culture lost as a result of these acts by its universities. Cultural acceptance of military influence seems to have become a given after the expulsion of the old Left, for the universities, by participating in the Scare, showed they favored their feelings, whatever those feelings might have been, patriotic or simply frightened and cowed, and not their thoughts, even though they were institutions dedicated, we might suppose, to the cultivation of those thoughts.
For me the sign that the universities had made a conscious decision to cut off the past humanistic heritage of U. S. college and university education appears in a fact Davis records. In 1953 the Association of American Universities decided “that Communists must be eliminated.” Given events of previous decades the “Communists,” of course, were being heralded with a fanfare that resounded with red-devilishness, so that the public heard not only the gun salutes and air-raid sirens of militarism but the sounds of eastern-hemisphere governments shattering and toppling. Yet in the U. S. intellectual tradition, a tradition apparently not seen worthy of guardianship by this country’s learned institutions, ideas of communism and humanism were often seen as coming toward us out of the past hand-in-hand. In 1910, for instance, Wellesley College professor of economics and sociology Katharine Coman identified the arrival of “communist” Robert Owen to these shores in 1825 as the point when the “Humanistic movement” began in this country, a movement having not only long-term implications but, from our present vantage point, permanent ones. Despite Owen being in practical terms a failure in the establishment of idealistic communities, he was an unquestioned success in teaching us the idealistic antiphonal questions and responses that led U. S. citizens to actually attempt social revolution in a positive direction on a small scale, time and again. His ideas nourish the thinkings that continue to underlie our society, including the university system that sprang into being later in that century. Even if an 1825 “communist” visitor from England and the “Communist Party” might have had only weak ties to one another, although this seems not at all certain, U. S. universities clearly were not cleansing themselves solely of members of the Communist Party; in its self-purging, the Association of American Universities was dedicating itself to digging the sand out from under its own foundation stones.
At the time of the purge, that wonderfully inclusive category of educational pursuit, the “Humanities,” would seem to have suffered a painful contraction or perhaps an alcoholic pickling prior to scientific preservation in a jar.
The Star System
Davis’s essays, letters, and talks share a quality of personal engagement, a quality he is able to introduce without seeming self-serving and without sounding like a martyr lamenting, and this makes them attractive to the reader. Davis experienced and survived his exile with his humanistic balance intact if not strengthened. As he observes, “The experience of marginality is good for the soul and better for the intellect.” He seems to have started into these life-changing events with an internal voice of conviction—a youthful conviction, given the timing of events—that vibrated in tune with his true conscience, enough so that the voice of the latter could assert itself and offer it consolations in his maturity.
Davis’s fiction, in contrast, lacks this element of personal engagement. I suspect that Davis wrote too few pieces of fiction to begin feeling the tidal pull that one’s own personality can exert in made-up narrative, even when the fiction is not autobiographical; and I suspect he never learned the sense that the page can draw out and then contain a vitality that has little to do with sentence construction and rigor of thinking and much to do with the irrepressible soul and its need for outward-directed expression. Those who begin plumbing their own selves through their fiction find it a difficult form to give up once they have found it, but Davis felt at ease with his decision not to remain a science-fiction writer. Though his writings had enjoyed some success, he felt willing to end them.
All the same, Davis’s fiction does have that clarity and directness that helps make his nonfiction effective, and it shares the same philosophic stance, influenced by humanist and communist thinking. Had Davis decided to continue as a science fiction writer, he might well have thrived over the long run. He felt an admirable allegiance to what he felt was his calling in mathematics and teaching and came under question for his loyalties as a consequence. But had his soul yearned above all for expression through fiction, his interest in a pulp genre might well have yielded him a career, and he might have evaded questioning, imprisonment, and exile. Two whose influence in science fiction became prominent in the 1960s and ’70s, Donald A. Wollheim and Frederik Pohl, emerged from the same Communist Party background Davis did, albeit slightly earlier, and they may well have helped boost him to success. Since Pohl did serve as his agent for a time and then editor, that association had already begun. Interestingly, Davis did establish close ties to second-generation members of the Futurian Literary Society of New York, including Judith Merril, Virginia Kidd, and James Blish, all of whom felt various Leftist leanings, although he did so after the split that ended the Futurians as a formal group. As a result he likely had little or no interaction with Johnny Michel, who had sided with Wollheim in their feud with Judy Merril. With Michel, Davis might have found much in common.
What does give full weight to the fiction portion of this volume, which includes five stories out of the perhaps dozen he published, is the title story, which first appeared in its original form in 2003 in Ellen Datlow’s online magazine Scifiction, thanks to Josh Lukin’s vigilance and efforts, and which here finds its first print publication. Explaining this odd situation Lukin notes,
“It Walks in Beauty” was written, under the title “The Star System,” in 1954. A substantially different version, under the current title, was published in Star Science Fiction, in January 1958; editor Frederik Pohl, without telling Davis, dramatically altered the story, changing its humane tone to one of misanthropic irony.
The original version of this story carries itself well. If not of masterwork status it ranks as notable, for it imagines a future Western society that recognizes the pronouns “she” and “it” for women, with the “she” being applied to stage-elevated and conventionally hyper-sexualized women, and the “it” being applied to career-oriented and, to our eyes, more socially normal women. On the other hand, the story presents men as being of a single, fairly adolescent type. These men do have some instinctive sympathy remaining in their heavily conditioned brains for the “it” women, although their cerebrums seem incapacitated by the “she” variety. As a critical expression of the human soul subjected to top-down imposed social roles, the story has distinct value: for even if it renders its male characters as imbeciles, it does offer the split between socially acceptable female types as a conundrum of a certain complexity. During the story’s unfolding the dichotomy creates appealing effects, as in the following exchange. Paula, not present in this passage, is the “it,” while Max, the first speaker, is the sympathetic male character.
“Paula’s always been very decent to me, and I think it’s a nice girl, that’s all.”
Something else for Jim to pounce on. “‘Nice girl’? It’s grown up now! It’s not a little girl any more, it’s a full-grown career.”
Max knew the career girls themselves didn’t like to be called simply “careers,” but he accommodated. He went back to, “It’s a nice guy.”
Besides the adolescent behavior of the males, an element compromising the story’s power appears in the scene when Paula, the “it,” tries to impress Max, to win his love, an emotion that for him ranks above any other. Paula takes on the trappings and stage allurements of a “she,” since the role of the “she” had been open to “it” earlier in Paula’s life, although eventually rejected, making her an “it.”
This role-playing dichotomy has some degree of the arbitrary about it, since it offers only the polar opposites of sex dancers and “guy”-dressing “career girls.” That very artificiality, however, works in the story’s favor: for these extremes help move the story beyond false realism and into symbolism. The interlocked trio of He, She, and It become the true, composite central character of the tale. The story succeeds as well as it does, in fact, because of this symbolic presence. Davis’s language lacks any particularly evocative power, since the poetic seems not to be a literary mode that comes readily to his pen; and the chronological story movement comes across with some flatness and dullness—impressions that are not necessarily out of place, this being a flat and dull society that Davis offers. Even so, the lack of narrative flair would have rendered “It Walks in Beauty” unmemorable were it not for the presence of the He-She-It trio.
Davis’s story might have been well served by having had its original title, “The Star System,” restored, even if that name might be less poetic than the published one. “It Walks in Beauty” plays on a famous Byron title; and, nicely, its “It” suggests the objectification of the female in a society dominated by mechanical operations. All the same, this change may well have been as cynical as were others made to the story. Davis’s original title had specific relevance, suggesting Hollywood and the fabrication of images that stood in for human ideals. The story itself offers the reader the mass-market transformation of the female into sexual commodity through the manufacture of desirability. The story’s male protagonist reacts to a noncommodity “it” as an unconventional attraction in his life but not as a provocation that might cause him to alter his attitudes and emerge, as in Byronesque Romanticism, as the transformed individual whose consciousness transcends society. “The Star System,” moreover, may have had a minor association with Davis’s friends Merril and Kornbluth, whom he admired: for the Kornbluth-Merril novel Gunner Cade features a political system of “Stars” as well as a woman who appears in dichotomous guises. The strongest argument in the original title’s favor, however, remains its pertinency.
Another short story, “Adrift on the Policy Level,” has for its central symbolic presence “The Corporation.” The protagonist, a man of science, and his sidekick, a salesman, attempt to climb upward through its levels to convince its leaders about a particularly worrisome danger; this climbing serves as the story’s action. The chronological movement has brightenings in character sketches and in its ending with a woman executive’s performance, when she performs the “brushoff” that ends the duo’s hopes and ambitions. Again the story gains strength from its central symbol of this society’s monolithic and centralized power. While this symbolic presence had no particular freshness even in the 1950s, it serves its function adequately even now.
The ascendance of Davis’s political vision and the absence or eclipse of his personal experience may account for the inconsequential men that appear often in these stories: for the political vision and the communal wisdom implicit in it, may stand in for any expression of mature male experience through the fictional male characters themselves. In contrast, Davis seems to let his expressions of female experience arise more naturally from within his fictional women characters.
Davis’s most complex work, “The Names of Yanils,” offers a pseudo-anthropological vision, not science fictional in its nature, describing events in a society that holds tenaciously to its symbolic rituals albeit with some changes to meet changing circumstances. The society suffers a severe setback when an incident out of its control or even purview alters its living environment. Later it feels rewarded for its conservative retention of symbolic practices when another incident, again outside control or purview, restores prior conditions.
The events and interpersonal relationships have interest even if set out in dry explanatory prose. The story reflects a maturity marked by the letting-go of the practice Davis employed in earlier stories: here he relaxes his political grip. In having the story’s problem and resolution take the nature of coincidence, however, it seems a measure of objectivity has replaced the prior intentional impulse. While Davis’s most fully realized of the five here, “The Star System”/“It Walks in Beauty” and “Adrift at the Policy Level” remain more compelling. Another later story, “Hexamnion,” may have given further example of new development in Davis’s fiction but is left out of this collection.
As I noted above, Davis might have found his audience over time had his muse called him first to fiction and not mathematics. His humanistic sensibility would have won him sympathetic readings. He seems to have been outgrowing the tendency, moreover, to put in the fictional foreground men less balanced in their maturity than he himself seems to have been as a writer.
This book accomplishes its mission of reintroducing Davis as a writer worth preserving, particularly with its last offerings: the speech “‘Shooting Rats in a Barrel’: Did the Red-Hunt Win?” and the excellent, lengthy interview conducted by Josh Lukin. These offer the reader a biographical picture of Davis within which both political activism and writings begin to have their natural places alongside one another.
I find it telling, by the way, that at one point in the interview Davis spontaneously refers to “The Star System” by that name.
Framing Material
The openness and directness of Davis’s expression bear emphasis as being characteristic because this volume gives quite the opposite impression, initially. While the back cover gives an open and direct response from Eleanor Arnason that begins, “This is a terrific book. I can’t remember the last time I have seen fiction, especially science fiction, put so richly in context,” the reader finds that the context emerges from within the university; that sense of intellectual privilege overwhelms the sense of the words, at least for so average a reader as I am. Those of us outside the university, whether or not we feel as strongly as did Edmund Wilson about its obfuscations and aridities, find ourselves sooner or later in these pages being talked past.
When Aqueduct’s L. Timmel Duchamp handed me this book as a potential item for review, I was deluged in reading for the World Fantasy Award, yet I truly hoped to do some constructive work and thought I was being handed a fine opportunity. I began reading it that evening. While reading the introduction, I began wondering why Timmi thought this book would be for me. For if these matters were what the book was about, I lacked interest. I set it aside. Soon I picked it up again with a feeling of hope and again set it aside. At some point, since a deluge of books was arriving at my doorstep, the volume disappeared from sight. I found it not quite three years later. My reading habits had changed in the meantime: often these days I skip introductions and proceed to the book itself. If I already plan to read a book, I would rather avoid being influenced or put off or even bored by an introduction or on the other hand being instructed or enriched, for many introductions, if good ones, make as much or more sense when read afterwards. I remember coming across Judy Merril’s statement in an introduction that she never read introductions, which at the time struck me as a little arbitrary but now as merely sensible.
This time I read the book with enjoyment, although I bogged down in an explanatory article by the editor between the nonfiction and fiction sections then at the afterword, also by Lukin although not marked as such on the contents page. In both of these pieces, I had the same experience of having words go past me. At the end, I went back to the introduction, expecting to find the going easier for having read, enjoyed, and thought about the book. After several attempts, however, I gave it up. After writing and revising this essay I made the attempt one last time, and forced myself to within a few pages of the introduction’s end.
Strangely, the editor offers a perfectly wonderful introduction late in the book: “‘Trying To Say Something True’: The Paradoxa Interview with Chandler Davis.” Lukin also precedes each of Davis’s offerings with brief introductory paragraphs that I found invariably clear, interesting, and useful. These makes me think Lukin felt the need to take a particular rhetorical stance in these three pieces at beginning, middle, and end. Whatever stance that might be, it has the effect of shutting away the very items the book aims to rescue from oblivion, for they seem to relegate them to academia. Lukin himself notes “the anti-elitist position, explicitly in most of Chandler Davis’s stories,” yet dusts them with dry showers of academic jargon.
Lukin does note that this volume is the first by a male writer to appear in the Aqueduct line, a fact that understandably must have put him on the defensive. He does, indeed, spend the many pages of the introduction justifying Davis as someone congenial to and conversant with feminist notions. My reaction may arise simply because I am not the intended audience, being more a general humanist who does not presume, as a man, to truly understand feminism, for while I may be congenial, and somewhat conversant, I am a him. I suspect, too, that the introduction stagnates and stultifies because Lukin is belaboring points that hardly need stating at all, given Davis’s own words, and Lukin, subconsciously recognizing this, substitutes gray, academic, paper foliage for the sparser verbiage of necessity. A few notes added to his lucid introduction to the interview would have covered the points he covers here, and that wonderful interview itself would have served as the perfect introitus to the quite interesting book that it is.
Take lines such as this one: “I propose that one might distinguish the two forms of legitimation in part by the tone used by their victims: universalization is more often expressed in a rational or cognitive register, while naturalization has a more emotional or affective thrust in its expression.” While I think I understand it, I would rather not. It seems designed to alienate me, the reader. And to what purpose?
Today, in pushing through the introduction one last time, I found myself thinking, “I obviously do not want to read this book,” even though I had already done so and with pleasure. I find this a sad reaction, especially since Lukin elsewhere proves himself able to write to the point with the clarity and directness Davis plainly prizes highly.
A few notes about the physical book itself, which is agreeable to behold and hold. The format is 5 by 7.5 inches; the paper, cream; the cover, a coated flexible stock. Australian writer and artist Anna Tambour created the cover illustration, which I find delightful, as I do the overall cover design. The price is low enough to be afforded, so you should. It will grace your shelves unlike the many current books that so lack in that obsolescent virtue.
Mark Rich lives in Cashton, Wisconsin.
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