reading Russ: "Nor Custom Stale" (1959)

reading Russ table of contents

     It was the night after Harry's retirement party that something first went wrong. They had all been talking about something scientific that Freda did not understand, with Wilberforce from Harry's job insisting that life meant risk and Harry insisting no, and then Harry saying that the life-lengthening properties of Houses were due to the fact that they never changed.
     "Why," he was saying, "change a person's life and right away they have to change. They have to make decisions. They have to age. Thing to do is not change, not a particle, not a molecule." And Wilberforce (whom Freda had always thought far too rugged) had gotten angry and shouted that Monotony is Death and Harry had shouted Monotony is Life, so the end of it was they got very angry and Wilberforce said he hoped Harry would have a real dose of Monotony soon to make him see how fast he'd age. The guests had been getting into their cars at the extra Car Port in the basement, when Freda noticed what was wrong and came over to her husband, down the basement stairs.
     "Harold," she said, "there's something wrong with the House." But Harold was busy telling Wilberforce that Change was Death and the highest human wisdom was to find the perfect moment and live it over and over.

Faced with a passage such as this one, which comes early on in Russ's first "professional" science fiction story (Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1959), most readers, trying quickly to assimilate the story to what they know about writing, would probably reach either for the category "satire" or for the category "metaphor," or for both. Certainly most science fiction critics would. The story, they'd tell themselves (and then they'd tell us), satirizes, and/or is a metaphor for, midcentury middle-cass suburban life, with its middlebrow intellectualism, its monotony (or Monotony), its trivialization and imprisonment of women. The metaphorical reading can be quickly dismissed by pointing out that the story, like most sf of its era (and that of any era up until the past decade or two), simply is not metaphorical; it presents us not with a metaphor for suburban life but with suburban life itself, albeit displaced quite a large number of centuries. All right, then, satire. This would seem to be a safer bet; after all, much of the story is clearly humorous, and clearly targeted at something its writer had A Problem with. Having categorized the story, we can finish reading it, laughing and nodding if and when we agree that Russ's targets deserve targeting and that she has aimed well, shaking our heads and muttering if and when we disagree, and move on. That's taken care of.

Except I don't think so. Kingsley Amis's drivel notwithstanding, I think satire, much like metaphor, is seldom a fruitful way to read sf, and that sf is often poor sf to the extent that it can be reduced to mere satire (or, again, mere metaphor). Which is not to say that sf never satirizes; clearly the story at hand does. But isn't there anything more that can be said about it? Is the experience that is "Nor Custom Stale" dispatched so easily?

In The American Shore, Delany asserts — repeatedly — that science fiction "can only give us apotheosis, not history." Let me say right off that I'm not entirely sure I understand what he means. Delany is steeped in modes of thought (critical theory, structuralism and everything that has come in its wake, etc) that I'm simply not well versed in (and am often somewhat suspicious of); in any formal sense I'm a theory nincompoop. There are probably shades of meaning behind his use of "apotheosis" and "history" (and, hell, all of his other words, as well) that go zooming right over my head. Even beyond that, Delany's criticism always fills me with a multitude of conflicting feelings; at times I'll find it revelatory, at times gratifying confirmation of what I'd suspected, at times incomprehensible, at times nonsense, at times desperately wrong. The American Shore is his most complex, sustained work of criticism. I've only read it once. I don't even begin to know how to feel about it, let alone what it "means."

But to whatever extent I could be said to understand what Delany means, I find the assertion suggestive, and I wonder if it might be a better lens through which to look at "Nor Custom Stale," indeed at much of sf. Rather than metaphorically "standing for," rather than (or in addition to) satirizing the banal monotony of suburban life, Russ, it might be possible to say, is presenting us with its apotheosis. Now a lot of the elements of the story that had to be ignored in order to sustain a satirical reading can come back into play. The "immortality for Houses," which strikes me as at best irrelevant to satire (and which another common model for reading sf, that of extrapolation or prediction, would force one to dismiss as "inaccurate" — failing as it does to foresee planned obsolescence), now makes much more sense. More specifically, a satirical reading of "Nor Custom Stale" would have to work very hard not to notice that, in the passage I quoted above, Wilberforce is in fact wrong, Harry in fact right — and indeed this same reading would not, could not realize that the millions of years that Freda and Harry live their monotonous, repetitive, day-in-day-out lives, are literal millions of years.

Most importantly, the story's awe-inspiring ending, with its startling motion that I can only begin to describe by calling it the inverse of bathos (though this is terribly incomplete, because even this anti-bathos contains its own...batheticization?...within itself), is revealed in its full science-fictionality, in its necessity. Without an understanding of science fiction in its specificity — this mode of writing that is so tied to the literal, to the prosaic (more on that link and how I'm willfully misusing it hopefully to come, soonish) while simultaneously reaching for the mystical and the transcendent — one might misread this ending as merely ironic, a sort of reductio of the motionlessness of suburbia into the heat death.*

*In this case not quite literally.

It is this. But it is more: because at the same time as the reductio is reducing, the apotheosis is...apotheosizing. To read the ending of this story as science fiction — sf that is commentary, to be sure — rather than as commentary that "uses" the "tropes" of science fiction is to feel what sf readers and critics once felt less embarrassed referring to as "the sense of wonder," a feeling that has come in for a great deal of (at times justified) criticism in recent decades — it is juvenile, it is simplistic, it is irresponsible — but which I think is widely misunderstood (including by many of its proponents) and long overdue for a re-evaluation. In the sense of wonder as I understand it, one is in a state of profound awareness of conflict, of the irreconcilable and the irreducible: the universality of transcendence and the specificity of that which is — of life and the body — try, and fail, to coexist.

Russ, here, is not merely satirizing a mode of life. She is exploring it as a mode of life: criticizing it, yes, of course, and urgently so (Russ was always a propagandist, always a skilled one, almost always using her skills for The Forces Of Good), but criticizing it not as if it were an object that simply exists, a thing you can pick up and look at from all sides and then put down again, but as life, as part of the world, part of the universe. Suburban life, and everything that goes with it and everything else Russ so ably targets, is banal, does reduce those who live through it to triviality, but it is also a part of something larger, simply because everything is. On the page I quoted him from before, Delany continues: "The reason," he says, that sf gives us apotheosis in place of history, "is that apotheosis is, indeed, the case. What science fiction can do, however, is analyze the workings of that case with an extreme precision." To a large extent I don't understand what he's talking about. But to the extent that I do, this is what Russ has done. And as she does so, her story — like all good science fiction stories — invents science fiction anew.

     The window cleared. Freda began to tremble.
     She found herself looking at a wall of snow. Perpendicular, straight as steel, it towered above the house and way above it, way past the very top of the window, were stars in a nighttime sky. The sky was so very black and the stars so very bright that they lanced through Freda's eyes and made her lower her gaze to the wall of snow again.
     Even without the light from the House she could have seen the snow, for the light of the stars seemed as intense as moonlight, and it spilled down the sides of the wall of snow. The wall was some twenty feet from the side of the House; it stood impenetrable, terrifyingly solid, but there at the edge of the wall where the heat from the House had cleared a space around it, a very strange thing was happening. The snow melted but it did not melt; it exhaled, it breathed white vapor, it boiled, it whirled and writhed upward in a hundred fantastic shapes, hurrying swiftly into the black night sky above. On the top of the wall (barely seen from the House) were shining, sparkling pools of liquid, pools that moved sluggishly this way and that.
     Behind Freda the House spread its usual rosy warmth, noon in the kitchen, afternoon in the living room, twilight in the dining room, but here spring, summer, fall and even winter had died. For this immortal cold was a sun away from winter. ...
     Harry came out of the bedroom, yawning as he always did at the time he always came out every morning, and as he looked and saw, Freda turned. The Panel near the window glowed with its five ruby eyes. Five? No, six. Twelve. Twenty. Then more and more until the whole panel glowed red as a cluster of cherries. In case of failure of Air, she thought, throw open the door and admit Natural Air into the House. "Oh Harry, what shall we do?" she said, but there was no particular need to answer; the cherries dimmed, darkened, and then became green, green as beech leaves, green as the young green on hedges.
     Freda had time only to say, "Oh, Harry!" and he, "Freda, what—" when the house gave a little tentative shake and then another and then shivered into a hundred — no a million — no many, many more atoms, atoms that threw the airy snow up in a great billowing rise. ... But not into the air, rather into the space above the air, and then it settled down on the frozen air, on to the sluggishly living pools of liquid hydrogen, bounced a little, billowed a little, and finally lay quietly, invisibly, over a radius of some hundred miles.

reading Russ: "The Wise Man" (1955) and "Martyr" (1957)

reading Russ table of contents

The young Joanna Russ, it seems, felt Wagnerian certainties to be a force she needed to counter; and the second of her three Cornell Writer stories, "The Wise Man" (November 1955, later appearing in revised form in the October 1970 Cimarron Review, never collected or anthologized) begins much in the way that "Innocence" did before it — with some playful fiction-calling-attention-to-itself surrounding an invocation of the name Siegfried:

All characters are purely coincidental, and to prove it, her name was not Sigrid or Ingrid or even Siegfried, but very simply Jennifer (abominable, lacy name!) — Jennifer Valerian in Chicago, but that was not her real last name.

(I am quoting from the significantly cleaned-up Cimarron version.)

That "Innocence" was science fiction where "The Wise Man" is not is in part signaled, I think, by the fact that in the earlier story the character's name was not Siegfried but could remain "something like that," while here the non-Siegfried in question must have her name, or at least her first name, reduced to an abominable, lacy mundanity. Indeed both "The Wise Man" and the last of the early stories, "Martyr" (in the April 1957 Cornell Writer and, as far as I can tell, never reprinted in any form, anywhere) are much more what I expected from the teenage, Cornell-going Russ than was the surprising "Innocence": awkward attempts at entirely ordinary stories that earn the tendentious term some in sf circles use, "mundane fiction." Despite the unusual opening of "The Wise Man" (and the story settles down considerably as soon as that unsettled sentence has passed), these stories are pretty much exactly what you'd expect of a young white Jewish American woman writer in the latter half of the 1950s, beginning to chafe against most of those adjectives, the noun, and the time, but as yet knowing no alternative and so throwing herself into a received understanding of all of them.

"The Wise Man" is, in most technical terms, the "better" of the two stories, but for me is marginally the less interesting; it attempts to be a witty tale of a masculine-leaning "college girl" from a working-class ethnic-white background in frustrating but mutual love with an un-self-consciously effeminate college boy ("I keep telling him You have an Oedipus complex and he keeps saying So what" — rather startling and not particularly believable in 1955) but, though there are flashes of Russ's later wit and many precursors to the particular tics and techniques she would use to great effect later on (the parenthetical commentary in the opening sentence, the unpunctuated dialogue-in-dialogue of the sentence I just quoted), the story mostly succumbs to a kind of undifferentiated quirkiness, and at any rate is so firmly beholden to a form (the standardized American short story form, already well-established, about to be endorsed, promoted, and ossified by the CIA through the academic creative writing programs it would soon begin fostering) in which any given work can only distinguish itself by technical virtuosity — the skill with which the form is filled in — that this story, written by a woman who has not yet developed anything approaching viruosity, is ultimately forgettable even in its own terms.*

* "Innocence," though better-written by my lights, is also far from virtuosic, but both in its science-fictionality and in its own specific terms it does not need to be.

Perhaps a feminist scholar with a focus on this particular time, place, and milieu would be interested in the story. Certainly, a biographer looking for evidence of the young Russ's psychosexual development or sociopolitical awareness levels or whatever would find many passages ripe for underlining, but ultimately they reveal nothing Russ doesn't tell us herself in any number of essays (and in much of the later fiction). One point of minor interest for me is that, given the timing of the story's second appearance in 1970, it seems likely that Russ would have been doing the necessary revisions (substantial but not transformative) for that publication very shortly before beginning work on "When It Changed" and The Female Man; with this in mind, it is tempting to wonder if she came across her by then fifteen-year-old sentence, "She had often thought how pleasant the world would be if it consisted entirely of her and men," and felt the need to...revise it. But this is merely a curiosity. Even if we could say with certainty that yes, this is one of the roots of Whileaway,* I don't think it has much power to shed any light on the works set there that they don't already shed on themselves.

*And it could only be one of many, especially given the prevalence of women-only societies imagined in men's sf. Russ's own "Amor Vincit Foeminam: The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction" is the classic survey of such stories.

"Martyr" would no doubt possess similar mild scholarly or biographical interest to the right researcher. Its attempt to portray a woman stifled is palpably important to its writer, but as with "The Wise Man" it, and its main character, end up lapsing more into mere quirkiness. Part of the problem, I think, is that Russ has yet to figure out just what is being stifled. Of course this is itself a symptom of the problem she's trying to get at, but where "Innocence" and the soon-to-come "Nor Custom Stale" (not to mention much of her life's work!) would address themselves directly to these kinds of foundational difficulties (How is one to understand a problem from inside of it? How can one portray what was never allowed to exist? What am I doing, writing?), "Martyr" just as much as "The Wise Man" is so devoted to the merely-given form of the American short story as Russ found it in the 1950s that all she can do is try to "straightforwardly portray" even though she has no way of knowing what to portray.

But that she seems to come close to understanding these problems is what makes "Martyr" ever so slightly the more interesting of the two to me. Throughout the story, the viewpoint character Judith (another of Russ's many J-named woman protagonists) thinks about "the novel she was going to write," which sounds like a kind of Gothic, Gormenghastian kind of thing (he said, never having read Gormenghast), about "beautiful people" who "lived in a house on a marsh, lived there eternally and could never come out of that prison," people who, variously, have visions, live in the tower, have "eyes that could catch on fire" and suffer beautifully in their sexy-sensitive-youth sweaters, and so forth. "They were all trying to get out and they never would," we're told, in a line that would be far too on-the-nose, too much an amateurish attempt at self-awareness — in this story of a woman trapped by marriage, by academic "friends" and community, by being a woman in a world belonging to men — were it not for the fact that Judith does not know how to write her novel.

Did Russ realize this yet? Judith's unwritten novel, about a group of people trapped in a shared situation but each suffering individually, mirrors her own (naïve) sense of herself as individually different, individually stifled, underneath it all individually superior (particularly superior to other women, at whom she frequently lashes out in her mind) — a sense common to many women in many times who have understood that they live in a society that seeks to rob them of their life but who have been denied the resources and perspective to see that they are not the only one so dispossessed — sort of the women's counterpart to the Angry Young Man.

Is Judith's inability to write at all a sign of what's been suppressed in her, or is her inability to write that novel a sign that what has been suppressed is beginning to come to light? Or is it both? Is not-writing the antithesis of writing, or are they more closely linked than that? Is the absence of writing in itself a kind of writing (or vice versa)? In Russ herself we can see the act, even the fact of writing to be inextricable from these questions (even when, much later, she will come quite firmly to answer some of them), which indeed will contour the remarkable story of stasis and entropy that is soon to come. "Martyr" is ultimately not a particularly good story, nor a particularly interesting one. But that such questions can even be asked of it is, perhaps, a sign that the writer of "Nor Custom Stale" — the writer we know as Joanna Russ — is about to come into being.

reading Russ: "Innocence" (1955)

reading Russ table of contents

Though I can’t quite place where, I'm almost certain that I’ve seen not only people writing about Joanna Russ but Russ herself as well say that it didn’t occur to her, early on, that she could write science fiction — that she had always read it, but that it wasn’t until 1959’s "Nor Custom Stale" that she realized she could do it herself.* I know I’ve seen people, and I would have sworn her, saying that writing science fiction at Cornell seemed impossible. So imagine my surprise when I first read "Innocence" and discovered that her first published prose work — appearing originally in The Cornell Writer of May 1955 — is nothing if not science fiction. So much so, in fact, that it was republished in almost identical form** twenty years later in the February 1975 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

*That she was only twenty-two in 1959 should have suggested to me that this lateness is exaggerated at best, but somehow it didn’t.
**The later version has some minor changes in punctuation, one or two of which create mildly interesting changes in effect but most of which are insignificant; two definite articles are added where their previous absence was slightly awkward; and two sentences toward the end are excised, in what I suspect was an editorial decision whose sole purpose was to make it fit on the page; the story is better with these sentences but their loss does not make any large impact.

Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that the story could be reprinted twenty years later at all. February 1975 was the same month that The Female Man appeared; one assumes that the completion of We Who Are About To… had to have been somewhere around this same time. This was the period I might hesitantly call her "peak" — only in the sense that by then she had figured out what she needed to do in her writing, and illness and time constraints had not yet slowed that writing to a trickle (or stopped it entirely, as they eventually would). But had I not known that “Innocence” was where she started, had I just come across it in F&SF, I would have had no trouble believing that it belonged to this period. Which is not to say that it’s some lost (or at least never collected) masterpiece; it’s a quick, lightweight piece (this post is about four times its length), almost like a joke, though it does have a seriousness to it; it's very good, but minor. What surprises is that it has none of the awkwardness that permeates the poetry and the other two Cornell-years stories (which I will be covering in another post, if at all), and to my eyes at least none of the writing-to-received-notions-of-acceptability that destroys those two other stories; meanwhile, many of the concerns that the later Russ would devote much of her life to are already present here.

I must be the last one in the world, because nobody else understands. Siegfried, for instance — well, his name was something like that. He had learned nothing but facts from his cradle and that made him very proud. He was a big, fair man and he drove us from here to there among the stars.

Already in these opening lines of her first story the troubling of the authoritative status of the speaker — which I am accustomed to think of as a concern that grew over the course of Russ's writing life — is here, strong (as is the humor that for Russ always accompanies it: his name was "something like" Siegfried, indeed). The narrator never quite comes out and says what "nobody else understands," but it becomes clear that what is meant is storytelling: Siegfried, or whatever his name is, proud in his facts, listens to what for the narrator is "just a story for diversion," but cannot understand:

      "Did you get that out of a book?" I shook my head. "Then you must have been there."
      "No, of course not," I said.
      He came back again to hear more. Then he said "It must be in the past. I've never seen a place like that and I've been all over the galaxy, you know."

And so forth. And here we begin to see, intimately tied to the foregrounding of the act of telling, another of Russ's characteristic concerns, albeit less explicit here: the pedantic literalism, and obsesssion with a certain narrow kind of expertise, of men. The narrator's gender is never specified, and while the introductory blurb that accompanies the F&SF version casually refers to "a story-teller of the future and his audience," the difference in status between the two is so clear, and for me at least so clearly tied up with a subtext of sexual power imbalance and potential violence ("He told me how innocent I was and how I ought not to be let out alone") that it is difficult for me not to read the narrator as a woman. The story hints at other reasons for the power imbalance, as in the sentence immediately following the description of Siegfried, prototypically Aryan, as "big and fair": "I was a passenger — that's all — and dark as a mole, but he was polite and made nothing of it." This suggests both a class difference between passengers and pilots*, and a privileging at some unspecified level of formality of certain types of appearance over others.** This alone, though, does not for me account for the type of tension in the story; and when by the end the narrator is referring to Siegfried as "the stupid hero" it seems clear to me what is going on here, even if it was not necessarily yet clear to Russ herself.

*A notion that would be immediately familiar to the average sf reader of the time, though maybe not to the average Cornell Writer reader — which is perhaps why the F&SF version replaces the dashes setting off "that's all" with subtler commas.
**If I understand the racial and gendered language of the white American 50s, "dark as a mole," especially in contrast to "big and fair," more likely indicates a white woman or possibly white man with brown hair and eyes than any man or woman of color.

It is intriguing, too, both in this story considered on its own and in the context of Russ's later work, that these two issues, the concerns with telling and with male stomping-about, are tied up with yet a third: the denial of death. As soon as he hears about this (totally made-up) place the narrator describes, with "Grassy hills around central fountains where jets of water shine," with "yellow flames that they used for beauty, to look transparent against stone," a place which "still exists," though it is "very old," Siegfried is obsessed with literally, physically finding it. At first it seems merely to be the way that men's curiosity can turn quickly into the demand for conquest — and it is this — but late in the story he confesses another, closely related reason:

"You know," he said in a low voice, "I think I might not die there. See, that's how I feel. That's what you've done."

Where the narrator is content that things — real and imagined — simply be what they are (or are not), Siegfried demands they be given him on his own terms; where the narrator is clear about what stories are and do (though still irresponsible with them, as I will discuss in a moment), for Siegfried these issues are, and must remain, mystifed. Both of these are illusory forms of mastery over the world — and both are necessary to Siegfried's effort to distance himself from death. Later this false mastery, in these three aspects (storytelling, male domination, denial of death) and others, will be one of Russ's central concerns — most explicitly in We Who Are About To..., but in many other works as well.

It occurs to me that "Innocence" is in a way the inverse of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Quest of Iranon," one of his so-called "dream cycle" stories that reads, as many of them do, like a wordier, more sentimental version of a Kafka parable.* (Russ's story too, in addition to being sf, is clearly cast in the parable mold). In that story Iranon is a beautiful young man driven by vivid memories of the idyllic city Aira, which he is certain is his home, where he is a prince; in certain ways, though, his memory of Aira is vague, and he spends his life in search of it. His obsession with it, and his retention of its (uncomplicatedly sketched-in) poetic values in the face of the utilitarian values of the world he sees around him, keeps him young even as those around him age and die — until, eventually, he discovers that Aira never existed, that it was simply a story he made up when he was a child on the streets; realizing this, he becomes an old man and dies. Though "Iranon" has points of interest, and though at the time he wrote it Lovecraft seems to have viewed it as something of a breakthrough, he himself later recognized it, correctly, as being overly "mawkish".** The innocence of youth and the enchantment of story, though common themes in Lovecraft, are far more simplistic and idealized here than in most of his work; and though he is right to try to evoke a sense of loss in the face of adult (and modern) knowledge and disenchantment, the story is so certain of its values and so heavily rigged in their favor that it feels almost smug in its sentimentality. "Innocence", precisely by undoing this confidence in its own premises, seems almost a corrective to these problems.

*I am not an expert on Lovecraft's convoluted print history and have no idea if Russ could plausibly have known the story at this point, though we know definitively that later on at least she was interested in the dream cycle stories, and that she read some Lovecraft as a teenager. At any rate my interest is not in tracing influence per se so much as noting that even this early on her work is already in considerable sympathy with Lovecraft's — though, as would always be the case, pointing in quite a different direction.
**I take this information from S.T. Joshi's brief introduction to the story in its appearance in The Complete Fiction. Whether "mawkish" is Lovecraft's word or Joshi's paraphrase is unclear.

The comparison with "Iranon" helps me to understand what Russ is getting at with her use of the word innocence, which at first I found bewildering. Not only is it the title of the story, not only does the narrator early on, as I have quoted before, tell us that Siegfried finds her (for convenience I will use the female pronouns) so innocent that she "ought not to be let out alone", but the concept of innocence returns at the very end of the story. After Siegfried tells the narrator that he thinks he "might not die" if he can live in the city she describes, and particularly in the face of the accusatory "That's what you've done" (which this next passage immediately follows), she finally realizes the seriousness of the issues at hand and tries to undo the damage by at last giving the true answer to Siegfried's repeated demands to know where this city is (brackets indicate portions not present in the F&SF version):

      [He looked so earnest and bewildered that I couldn't look anything but frightened.]
      "It isn't anywhere," I said. "I made it up out of my head, every bit of it. It doesn't even exist."
      [He turned very calm.]
      "You've forgotten," he said, "Because you're a fool, but I'm going to get a ship and travel around and back and forth until I find it. I'm no fool. I'm going to find it." Then he went steadily out of the room.
      He did that, too; the stupid hero is out there now, between Antares and Deneb or somewheres — nobody has any sense. I must be the last one because nobody but me understands. Innocents! The universe is full of them.

It is, I believe, to the innocence of Iranon and those like him that Russ refers: but unlike the Lovecraft story, Russ's understands that the belief that all things can be treated in rationalized, "factual" terms (which understanding in "Iranon" is precisely the loss of innocence) in the face of a universe that cannot be so constrained (as Blanchot has it, "putting a term on the interminable") is itself a mirror-reversed form of this innocence — which, "Iranon" and etymology notwithstanding, is painful, and which, far from meaning "not guilty" as the now-common sense of the word would have it, can all too easily coexist with guilt in the sense of moral culpability.

But the guilty innocence here does not belong solely to Siegfried. Though the narrator understands what story is, what telling is, she does not include this understanding in her story (the one she tells Siegfried, that is, not the one she is telling us) and thus shares in the culpability for the distortion of the world that such telling enables. She correctly ascribes innocence to Siegfried, the "stupid hero", but she is unable to recognize her own. When Siegfried, as quoted above, tells her that she is too innocent "to be let out alone," she is right to chafe against the paternalism, but the way in which she denies the charge is telling: "That's not fair," she tells us; "I'm just not interested, that's all." My first several times through the story I found this "not interested" perplexing; it is difficult to read it in any terms other than the sexual, though even then it's hard to know quite what to make of it. And I do still think that there is a heavily sexual element to this story, but conceptualizing it also as a sort of mirror image of "Iranon" allows me to understand "not interested" as a confession, though not a deliberate one, of the narrator's own guilt: that is to say, despite all the knowledge that should lead her to a sense of her responsibilities as a storyteller, she nevertheless somehow fails to understand them — and in her failure to understand, in her lack of interest, in her innocence, she abdicates these responsibilities (whether she has taken them up again by the time she tells us the story is another question; I'm not so sure I know the answer). The deeply-felt need not to so abdicate will be central to Russ's practice as a feminist and as a writer of fiction, and it is fascinating to see it present so strongly, in so multifaceted a fashion, in so small and so early a work.

reading Russ: The early poetry (1954-1957)

reading Russ table of contents

I am not, perhaps, the best person to discuss Joanna Russ's early poems. My knowledge of and ability to write about poetry are limited at best, and certainly I am not competent to talk about these works in the context of their time and place, as I have next to no idea of what that context was. What poetry were people writing and reading in America's mid-1950s? I know there were the beats; I think Black Mountain and Denise Levertov's move to the United States were about this time; but that's about it, and at any rate would the teenage Russ have been familiar with this work? I don't really know. But context or no, I've read these poems, out of a general interest in Russ-the-writer, and I'd like to talk about them.

When I speak of the "early poems," I'm referring to a body of work consisting, to the best of my knowledge, only of fifteen short poems published between 1954 and 1957 (when Russ was between the ages of 17 and 20) — twelve in the student-run Cornell Writer and three in Cornell's more official literary journal Epoch.* I have these poems, thanks to the intrepid ILL efforts of a certain lezbrarian without whom I shudder to think, on a number of photocopied sheets stapled together. Some of these pages — all from The Cornell Writer — include other poems from some of Russ's classmates, none of whose names are familiar to me (no surprise Thomas Pynchon juvenilia, say, though he did work on the journal for part of the time Russ was at Cornell and might well have some work elsewhere in it), and judging from these her poetry was largely of a piece with that of her cohort. It's mainly free verse tending to the formally conservative, with self-consciously elevated and historical (if not pretentious) vocabulary and imagery; in all one gets much more of a sense of "I want to be a poet" than of poetry actually occurring in these pages. Which is, of course, fine; I hate to think what anyone might make of anything I wrote between 17 and 20, and I can hardly claim to have reached the level Russ would attain even just a few years later!

*I know there are a few other poems from this period theoretically available, but I have limited myself to published works for this read-through (not that I wouldn't be interested in reading unpublished works! — but travel to archives is not, alas, always feasible). Several of her later works could also be considered poems — "It's Important to Believe" and "A Short and Happy Life" come to mind — but these are so far as I know the last of her readily recognizable verse poems.

Brit Mandelo, in the only study of these poems that I know to exist, points out that "[t]heir significance as poetry is tied inextricably to their significance as early works of a major writer." This is true, but I must say that at least at this early stage of my familiarity with these poems I do not see the bulk of them as being particularly significant even in these terms. Stilted poems like 1954's "Autumn" — as uninspired a bit of seasonal description as any wannabe poet ever wrote — are perhaps mildly interesting in the sense that it can be heartening to see that even the best writers have also written awkward trivialities, but for me, at least so far, they provide essentially no insight into those of Russ's works that matter.

However! I agree with Mandelo that a small handful of these poems show the young Russ to be a writer with something going on; indeed there are some moments here that I think rise above specialist-only interest. Surprisingly, one of these is the first — to my knowledge the very first work Russ ever published anywhere: 1954's "Some Day Again." After a somewhat embarrassing excited-to-be-at-college opening ("this ivied corner"), the first stanza deals nicely with an imagined reappearance of Saint Francis in the modern world. He, "Perhaps some day again,"

Trembling with wings and bright eyes,
Will walk into the sunlight and the gray stone
Bearing silently the silent wound of hard beaks on calloused hands,
Bearing corn in his saint's hands, corn and a slower time.

The language here interests me, particularly the "Bearing silently the silent wound," with its interplay of different but overlapping silences (which then feeds into the further interplay created by the repetition in slightly different contexts of the words "bearing" and "hands"). And the portrayal of Francis as sort of uncomfortable and frightening — wounded by his birds, his being surrounded by them not idyllic but strange, "trembling" — is intriguing. I admit I don't actually know enough about the saint to judge whether he's being deployed to any meaningful advantage here, but the difference between the sort of vaguely soft and nice received image of him I usually have and the much more worrisome picture called up here reminds me, perhaps idiosyncratically, of Buffy Sainte-Marie's astonishing "Mary," in which the listener is made by both word and sound to consider not the joy or the tranquility but the terror that also comes with knowing that one must become the mother of God.

The second stanza shifts to a consideration of what Mandelo describes as "the dangers of the well-lit empty rooms of a home," while the third and last stanza, which even visually is startlingly brief in comparison with the first two, shifts again to speak of the seasonal changes implicit even in a tree dormant in winter. The connection between the stanzas at first seems tenuous at best. Mandelo criticizes the disjunction, but for me it is useful to focus on the last word of the first stanza, "time," to see what, I believe, Russ is going for here. For the entire poem is concerned with time, and not just time as a singular thing but the different kinds of time, and different motions within them. The first stanza begins by bringing the past (Francis) into the present, or more particularly into a hypothetical future ("some day"), and closes with the invocation of "a slower time"; indeed it is the figure of the past that comes "bearing" this slower time, along with corn — which, as I read, suggests that the "slower time" is that cyclical time in which there is not onrushing linear progress but return ("some day again"), the seasonal time in which crops like corn are sown, grown, harvested, and sown again. But then the opening of the second stanza brings into play a second meaning of the phrase "a slower time" — that is, the commonly-held notion of a past time in which life was slower, a time we have lost in exchange for Progress (a time, of course, in which people's lives were more bound up in the other sense I have ascribed to "a slower time"). That stanza in its entirety, coming immediately after the phrase ("bearing...a slower time") that I have singled out as the poem's hinge:

Oh we are wiser now, or know at least
Not to look for witches in the outside wind
Or in the massy midnight under trees
But in a lit and empty room, unshadowed,
Knowing well the heart-land where the Black Sabbath lies.

We are wiser now, perhaps; but what has progress gained us? We may know better where to look for them, but there are still witches (on which more in a moment) — the techno-scientific eradication of shadows has not eradicated the "Black Sabbath" of the heart. But perhaps even progress is not so all-consuming as that ambiguously lamenting "Oh" might suggest — for just as some day again Francis might return, so will the spring:

Still reaches (not quite to the sky
Not quite past a quiet wall)
Willow yellow willow in January,
A premonition of flowers.

Much is going on here, from the way the parenthesis interferes with the completion of the thought begun with "Still reaches" (so that grammatically the willow ends up reaching neither "to" nor "past" anything, but simply reaches; of course as we read all three of these overlap) to the way the word "premonition" casts us back over the entire poem, nearly every line of which resonates with it in one way or another. I am fond too of the way the "not quite"s of the parenthesis seem to be echoed by the poem's (I think deliberate) refusal to conclude with anything, well, conclusive.

To be sure, Russ does not yet seem to know quite what to do with all of this play with time, with the cycle of the seasons and with linear progression — but that she knows, this early on, that it is important to summon these things up is remarkable.

One thing I must remark on, that I so far have obscured by speaking only in the terms set up by the poem itself, is the figure of the witch. Here that figure seems to stand simply for evil, especially in opposition to the Christian goodness of Saint Francis (though of course, just as that goodness is shown in a complex and uncomfortable way, so too is the evil). To begin with, this heavily Christian-moralistic figural system is somewhat surprising coming from a writer with so secular-Jewish a background as Russ's (which makes me suspect that, as good as the poem is in many ways, it comes not so much from a place of artistic need as of received notions of what a poem can be about). More than that, though, it is a reminder that we are here reading work that predates Russ's awareness of and engagement with a feminism capable of reclaiming the witches, interpreting them not as evils (real or imaginary) but as a lineage of wise women whose knowledge and power had to be destroyed to make way for the further entrenchment of patriarchal power that came with the advent of capitalism. Those witches we are too clever to look for in the dark of nature knew things that the young Russ could have benefited from knowing, had there not been such a wholesale destruction of that knowledge.

Interestingly, though Russ did not yet know about the erasure of these traditions and knowledges, she nevertheless seems to feel the lack, as we see in 1955's "To R.L.". (Full disclosure: I don't know who "R.L." is, and I also don't know if I'm supposed to or not.) It begins with what I have not been able to resolve into anything other than a muddle, a sort of canned-"exotic" midcentury colonialist fantasy ("You were a captive prince, an African"), but then, a little before the halfway point, there is a startling moment where either Russ or the poem's speaker identifies herself with an ancient, forgotten (indeed forcibly erased) "evil", and it is in this moment that the poem really begins for me:

I felt like an ice-born saint, not one of heaven's.
One of the devil's, maybe, I never knew.
I have no soul; I never was a Christian.
I had a God once, but they broke off both his horns
And shut him in a tapestry. So he died.

The death of the speaker's god is an interruption in the transmission of the tradition, the ways of knowing that would have enabled the speaker to know her own nature ("I have tried to raise an image of myself/In vain out of the cloudy, northern sky.") — and yet, in the face of impossibility, the speaker nevertheless declares herself to be something, even if only "something": "I am something left from a much earlier time./I am one of earth's saints."

But even if we don't stop to wonder if the earth can have saints at all and what this might mean, this declaration is not so solid as it may seem — for at the word "earth" the poem immediately pivots again, mid-line: "I am one of earth's saints. The earth is running down/But it never ends; the universe unreels/Forever...". The speaker had a past, but that past died in the permanence of a tapestry; she thought to forge an identity out of the earth, but the earth, though it never ends, has no permanence and so no future: these are the two sides of a tragic paradox. As with "Some Day Again," there is a sense of the poem pulling past and future around itself in the present, but this time the history is not one of life but of death, the premonitions not of flowers but of ice — a sort of romantic stand-in for the heat death, prefiguring the more ironically bathetic-but-sublime deployment of similar images at the climax of the soon-to-come "Nor Custom Stale," the story that marks the real beginning of the Russ we know. The poem ends:

Each flake will be a century of time
And time will slide beneath our feet like snow
And still we ride and still the snow comes down
And still we never reach the line of trees,
The pine-tree woods where nothing living stirs.
Now is left us only what there was
And the world is running down. The snowflakes fall
Slower and slower in frozen time. So we.

And speaking of prefiguring Russ's entry into sf proper, the last of the poems that I find merits serious consideration on its own terms (though it again suffers from the immaturity of its writer), 1957's "The Queen at Ur," wouldn't be at all out of place in a current edition of, say, Strange Horizons, or any of the other poetry-oriented sf magazines. For better or worse, I should add — because when I say it would not be out of place, I mean that it really would fit right in; for me, in my admittedly limited exposure to it, there is a great deal of sameness to contemporary sf poetry, and "The Queen at Ur" feels just like it in everything from its sometimes dime-a-dozen lyrical loveliness-and-melancholy to its body-as-universe images. I don't mean to be entirely negative. I am interested in this poem — I largely agree with what Mandelo writes about it toward the end of her study, and have little to add to that, except to say that I find the poem much less extraordinary than she evidently does.

But at any rate this is full-fledged sf ("I feel with fleshless hands the rigid pattern/Of stars, order, law"), and in its unexpectedly sharp (or blunt?) last lines even seems to point to some of the uses the mature Russ would find for sf.

She speaks:
Daughter, train your soul for the gracious amenities
That come finally with death. Emulate my corpse.

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The rest of the poetry is, or at least thus far strikes me as, fairly trivial,* though there are intermittent moments of interest. The poem beginning "Beautiful naked bodies walk across", after its, ahem, unconvincing adolescent-fantasy eroticizing of the men of ancient poetry (much more believable when Pier Paolo Pasolini does it early on in his "The Religion of My Time") moves quickly to a genuinely disquieting finish — all the more disquieting because it is so inconclusive — with a distinctly unappealing Pan (or satyr?), "half in rut," nervously crying "Madam!...Madam!" in his "rusty squeak." "Death and the Gentleman," one of Mandelo's favorites but not one of mine, is at times quite effectively funny in its way ("When I am dust — /More's the pity — /The worms that eat me/Will all turn witty."). "The School Teacher's Daughter Speaks", with its closing scene of (what on the surface reads as) explicitly homoerotic male beauty (much more convincing here!), is reminiscent-in-advance (preminiscent?) of Russ's much later non-fiction writing on a similar subject, in her classic essay on K/S. And the last two poems, "Family Snapshot — Botanical Gardens" and "A la mode" (published together in a 1957 Epoch) are a major departure from the other poems, freer and more formally odd, if still not too unusual; they strike me as semi-successful attempts at the kind of dark levity now associated with Sylvia Plath, pointing at the horror in the quotidian with fractured humor (they're either that or they just completely miss me).

*I always feel the need to make this sort of disclaimer when writing about those of Russ's works I don't care for, as she like no other sf writer I know resists the reader's easy grasp. Are these poems trivial or do I just not know how to read them? In this specific case the first possibility seems the more likely, but better perhaps to play it safe.

These flashes aside, though, the rest of the early poetry for the most part is a collection of awkward juvenilia, hardly even illuminating when considered as the early work of a great writer. Even the three poems I have singled out as worth more consideration, despite what I would insist are their intrinsic strengths and interest, are far from major works. As I mentioned before, this is not at all unexpected; there are not many people whose teenage writings would stand much scrutiny — not everyone can be a Rimbaud, and I doubt we'd want it that way. What is startling, though, is to realize that only two years (and no published writings) separate the publication of the last of these poems and the first of Russ's main body of work, the aforementioned "Nor Custom Stale," which is a fully-realized, mature work. To be sure, there are three short prose works I have yet to read that were published during the same period as the poetry (also in The Cornell Writer), and perhaps I'll find a clearer preparation there for the leap into "Nor Custom Stale," but it is nevertheless remarkable to read these tentative, bumbling efforts, and know that it is not long at all before something entirely different will emerge.

Chronologically reading Joanna Russ

I'm planning on doing it! Based on the bibliography I made! And hopefully I will periodically be writing about it. I'll be tagging these posts "reading Russ," and this post here, which I will link back to in each post, will also serve as a table of contents. BEHOLD:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. The early poetry (1954-1957)
2. "Innocence" (1955)
3. "The Wise Man" and "Martyr" (1955, 1957)
4. "Nor Custom Stale" (1959)
5. "Come Closer" (1965)