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The whole notion of autobiography: Samuel Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water

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Published on January 7, 2010

The first time I read The Motion of Light in Water, Delany had been one of my favourite writers for at least ten years, but in that time I had known almost nothing about him. I remember going “Wow” a lot the first time through. I was expecting an autobiography that covered 1960-1965 to talk about how he wrote the spectacular early novels, and it does, and wow. But also wow, he’s black, wow, he’s gay, wow, he’s dyslexic and most of all, wow, in writing an autobiography he’s examining the entire concept of what it’s possible to remember and retell. This isn’t a memoir like Pohl’s The Way the Future Was which is essentially a charming retelling of fascinating anecdotes. This is a memoir that questions the very possibility of memoir, a memoir that makes you feel as if you’ve been turned upside-down and the contents of your brain and your pockets have all fallen out and been rearranged in different places. It questions the concept of memory and the way we remember and rearrange and reassess, and the way we make our own lives into stories.

Reading it now, I’m still impressed with how candid it is. It’s not that Delany talks about the details of sex, though he does, so much as that he talks about the nuances of how he felt about his sexuality, of his disintegrating relationship with poet Marilyn Hacker, of his chagrin at having his self-deprecating boasts repeated. This is a book about learning to write and learning to be grown up. It’s about negotiating the world, and it’s about being Delany in a much more internal way than most memoirs are about being their authors.

The subtitle is “East Village Sex and Science Fiction Writing 1960-1965.”

As with all Delany the prose is wonderful, coming out in characteristic rushes and hesitations and very specific details. I’m always especially conscious of it here because this is where he talks about learning to do that—suddenly, between one page and another how he caught the underlying rhythm of the way it goes, so that he could play with and against that, play harmonies and glissandos with it. If you like Delany’s early fiction—the last book he talks about writing here is Babel 17—there’s a lot here about how he came to write it, where the ideas came from and how he wove them into science fiction. This is absolutely fascinating. There’s a lot here about how he developed his style, how he read science fiction and other things, how he began to take his writing seriously, how he almost fell into publication. These days his first novel would still have been waiting in the slush in the timespan that, for him, he’d written and published three more. If he hadn’t had that early success he’d probably have done something other than write SF—he was also singing in coffee houses and still thinking he’d be a scientist. There are a lot of directions his life could have gone, so it’s wonderful that Wollheim bought The Jewels of Aptor and kick started his career.

The bits about writing science fiction are all bound up in the rest of it, becoming independent in New York, the burgeoning sixties, his sex life, his emotional life—meeting Auden and worrying that he’d like him more than he liked Marilyn, how Marilyn lost her fluency and could only speak to him with a stutter, and how they both discovered that men’s jeans have bigger pockets than women’s jeans.

The sex stuff is very explicit, and can be hard to take not because it’s gay sex but because of the incredible level of promiscuity available in those pre-AIDS days in New York. He also talks about a lover who used to break into houses and rape old women, and while he’s disapproving he’s not half as horrified as I am. My general reaction to his descriptions of all this is a combination of envy (I don’t think this sort of thing would work for me, but it’s never been available to me to find out) disbelief (I have no problem with it in fiction, but for reality it’s hard to suspend my disbelief) and general bemusement. At least it’s never boring.

There’s not all that much about Delany’s family or his experience of race—he touches on it but doesn’t go into it all that much here, it’s a long way from the focus of the book. What there is is very interesting, but I’m sorry there isn’t more. Delany’s passage here about the way he views definitions of identity and the space between them is wonderful. There’s also a description of how he went with a cousin to a Happening, one of the first Happenings of the sixties, and they were certainly the only two non-white people present and probably the only two who didn’t know the artists. That Happening is central to the book, because he talks about it questioning the whole notion of art and identity as he is questioning the whole notion of autobiography and identity.

Re-reading this book after twenty years, it’s still thought provoking, still fascinating, and still not like anything else.

(I wish Delany would write more science fiction. I know I always say that at the end of posts about his books, but that’s because that’s when my yearning for more Delany science fiction is strongest. I have no economic leverage because I’ll buy whatever he writes, so all I can do is express my longing to the ether.)


Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode, and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.

About the Author

About Author Mobile

Jo Walton

Author

Jo Walton is the author of fifteen novels, including the Hugo and Nebula award winning Among Others two essay collections, a collection of short stories, and several poetry collections. She has a new essay collection Trace Elements, with Ada Palmer, coming soon. She has a Patreon (patreon.com/bluejo) for her poetry, and the fact that people support it constantly restores her faith in human nature. She lives in Montreal, Canada, and Florence, Italy, reads a lot, and blogs about it here. It sometimes worries her that this is so exactly what she wanted to do when she grew up.
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