The Stealer of Souls Read Free Page B

most of the Beats, I had met some of them in Paris and had friends who were huge admirers. Later, I did come to know and like Burroughs. I absorbed the ideas of the time as much through conversation as by reading and, when I had gone from editing
Tarzan Adventures
to becoming an editor at Sexton Blake Library (a pulp series that had begun before World War I and that had published many of those Zenith stories before World War II), I had lost my taste for most fantasy fiction. SBL publishers, Amalgamated Press, at that time the largest periodical producers in the world, were horribly overstaffed in those easy years. Editorial offices were full of young men like me who came to journalism through juvenile publishing but who were huge enthusiasts for surrealism and the situation-alists, for Brecht and Beckett and Ionesco. They would go on to do great things, not always as journalists.
    We went to Paris every chance we had. At George Whitman’s Paris bookstore (then called Mistral but now known as Shakespeare & Company) I would busk with my guitar, seated on a chair outside the shop (George didn’t mind since he knew all the money went back to him), and then as soon as I had enough, buy a couple of paperbacks for the rest of the day. It was there, in the shadow of Notre Dame, that I read my first true SF story, Alfred Bester’s
The Stars My Destination
, and wondered what I’d been missing. As it turned out, Bester was one of the few SF writers of his day that I enjoyed. He was a sophisticated, much-traveled man. He was associated with a group who published primarily in
Galaxy
magazine and included Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Philip K. Dick and Robert Sheckley. During the shame of McCarthyism, they were amongst the earliest to raise literary voices to examine modern times often far more rigorously and amusingly than literary writers had done. There were a few brave voices who, like their Russian counterparts, found places to publish and speak to a public who mourned what was going on.
    I wasn’t the only one to see some sort of literary salvation in science fiction. That Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest and Edmund Crispin shared enthusiasm for certain kinds of SF is well-known, but many of us found it sketchy and condescending (Amis hated Burroughs and the Ballard of
Atrocity Exhibition
). But less obvious people, including Doris Lessing (then known only as a realist), were keen SF readers. Considered by many to be the finest literary writer of his day (and a prescient SF writer, as in his
The Old Men at the Zoo
) Angus Wilson had recommended that Sidgwick & Jackson in the UK publish
Tiger! Tiger!
, the original title of
The Stars My Destination
. Wilson, Elizabeth Bowen and an increasing number of writers of social fiction, as well as a surprising bunch of well-known philosophers, were discriminating readers of SF and other kinds of imaginative fiction. They sometimes even wrote it. Although the Amis camp demanded that SF remain a kind of literary ghetto, the rest of us wondered if it was possible, through the genre, for popular fiction and literary fiction to find common ground. At some point in the nineteenth century, perhaps even the early twentieth century, fiction had become the victim of a random kind of snobbery which denied a public to many highly accessible writers of equal ambition and artistic success and thus also discouraged a popular public from reading the established canon (“too highbrow”). My friends—Ballard, Bayley and Aldiss especially—believed much as I did. Quite a bit of our late-1950s and early-1960s conversation envisaged a magazine that would combine the values of the best SF and the best contemporary literature as well as features about what was happening in the arts and sciences.
    You can imagine—with all these glorious ideas of reuniting the values of popular and literary fiction, which we shared with composers and visual artists as well as film-makers—the last kind of fiction I