Why I Write: Getting ready not to be

7 hen I was twenty or twenty-­one (and had already written and sold five books and was in the midst of yet another) I said to myself, “I write the books or stories I want to read but can’t find on a library shelf or bookstore rack.” In the midst of writing my first published book, The Jewels of Aptor, I realized, one evening when I was trying to be overly modest during an eagerly awaited dinner visit by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, that the book I was in the midst of writing was actually essay Why I Write Getting ready not to be Samuel R. Delany W 8 | Samuel R. Delany the most important thing I had undertaken. A little later, when I was still nineteen, I sat in the wood-­ framed red easy chair my mother-­ in-­ law had sent down with a lot of chipped and cracked china as a house gift for my young wife and me. Marilyn was out at work that day, and I was home. I remember thinking of the various people who, only a few years before, were constantly coming around to my parents’ apartment in Morningside Gardens and saying they would be willing to get me really good-­ paying jobs. All I had to do was knock on their office doors or give them a phone call and set up an appointment. Many of them were fairly successful black businessmen who felt it was their responsibility to help out the new generation of young marrieds. I also realized it was very likely that if I did take them up on any of those offers, I would be on my way to a ten-­ thousand-­ dollar-­ a-­ year job in a decade or so, the equivalent of around a hundred thousand today. I mumbled to myself loud enough so that somebody in the room with me would have heard me, “I am never going to make that kind of money. I will be lucky if I make enough to survive.” Aptor was sold that March to Ace Books for a thousand dollars ; at that time, our rent on the four-­ room apartment in the East Village on the dead end of East 6th Street was fifty-­ two dollars a month. Marilyn had a job in which she was making approximately eighty dollars a week as an assistant editor at the paperback publishing company that had accepted my first novel as an anonymous submission. That was a livable wage. I managed to lose three of the first five hundred in a way that I am still too embarrassed to talk about, but within a year, I sold another novel—the first of a trilogy that was completed before my twenty-­ first birthday—and I had learned never to leave the house with more money than I could afford to lose.§2. a lot of my writing was done to stimulate myself sexually. This could be an entire book in itself: A poet whom I greatly respected, W. H. Auden, and whom Marilyn and I even invited to dinner in those early years when we were still living together Why I Write | 9 (and who came with his life partner, Chester Kallman), had written that he found pornography interfered with the aesthetic effect of a narrative. (His rather glib description of pornography was, “That’s easy. It gives me an erection.” He himself, however, wrote, I think, a very fine pornographic poem, very well observed and stimulating enough, I’m sure, at the time it was written, called “The Platonic Blow,” which he never owned up to, but which is still available online.) I don’t feel that way: I think the erotic response can be worked into the aesthetic response, and I think the history of nudes in painting and sculpture is probably proof of that in the classical pictorial and plastic arts. Anything written with care can be publishable under your own name.§3. early on, i wrote because I began to realize (to borrow William Blake’s words from Proverbs of Hell), “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” It keeps producing them—and it...