Since I’ve invoked Auden, I must go on to agree with his observation that a writer cannot read
another author’s things without comparing them to his own. I do this constantly. I almost always come out feeling weak as well as awed whenever I read the works of three people who write science fiction: Sturgeon, Farmer and Bradbury. They know what’s sacred, in that very special trans-subjective way where personal specifics suddenly give way and become universals and light up the human condition like a neon-lined Christmas tree. And Philip Jose Farmer is special in a very unusual way . . .
Everything he says is something / would like to say, but for some reason or other, cannot. He exercises that thing Henry James called an “angle of vision” which, while different from my own a.v., invariably jibes with the way I feel about things. But I can’t do it his way. This means that somebody can do what I love most better than I can, which makes me chew my beard and think of George London as Mephistopheles, back at the old Metropolitan Opera, in Gounoud’s Faust, when Marguerita ascended to heaven: he reached out and an iron gate descended before him; he grasped a bar, looked On High for a moment, averted his face, sank slowly to his knees, his hand sliding down the bar: curtain then: that’s how I feel. / can’t do it, but it can be done.
Beyond this, what can I say about a particular Philip Jose Farmer story?
Shakespeare said it better, in Antony and Cleopatra:
Lepidus. What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?
Antony. It is shaped, sir, like itself; and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it; and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates,
Lepidus. What color is it of?
Antony. Of its own color, too.
Lepidus. ‘Tis a strange serpent.
Antony. ‘Tis so. And the tears of it are wet.
(Act II, Scene VII.)
Indeed, Sir, they are. It is the skill that goes with the talent that makes them so. Each of its products are different, complete, unique, and this one is no exception. I rejoice that such a man as Philip Jose Farmer walks among us, writes there, too. There aren’t many like him. None, I’d say.
But read his story and see what I mean.
Now it is a cold, gray day in February and its Baltimore. But it doesn’t matter. Philip Jose Farmer, out there somewhere West of the Sun, if by your writing you ever intended to give joy to another human being, know by this that you have succeeded and brightened many a cold, gray day in the seasons of my world, as well as having enhanced the lighter ones with something I’ll just call splendor and let go at that.
The colors of this one are its own and the tears of it are wet. Philip Jose Farmer wrote it. There is nothing more to say.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Baltimore, Md.
UNDER A GREEN SKY and a yeliow sun, on a black stallion with a crimson-dyed mane and blue-dyed tail, Kickaha rode for his life.
One hundred days ago, a thousand miles ago, he had left the village of the Hrowakas, the Bear People. Weary of hunting and of the simple life, Kickaha suddenly longed for a taste—more than a taste—of civilization. Moreover, his intellectual knife needed sharpening, and there was much about the Tishquetmoac, the only civilized people on this level, that he did’not know.
So he put saddles and equipment on two horses, said goodbye to the chiefs and warriors, and kissed his two wives farewell. He gave them permission to take new husbands if he didn’t return in six months. They said they would wait forever, at which Kickaha smiled, because they had said the same thing to their former husbands before these rode out on the warpath and never came back.
Some of the warriors wanted to escort him through the mountains to the Great Plains. He said no and rode out alone. He took five days to get out of the mountains. One day was lost because two young warriors of the Wakangishush tribe stalked him. They may have been waiting for months in the Black Weasel Pass, knowing that some day Kickaha would ride through it. Of all the greatly