“And, sure enough as Stuart watched, leaning on his broom, the furtive first nut of the day sidled guiltily toward the psychiatrist’s office.”
This is our initial glimpse of Dr. Bloodmoney: through the eyes of a man pushing a broom. I am with the man pushing the broom, here at the beginning of the novel and all the way to the end. Stuart McConchie is an astute man, and in seeing Dr. Bloodmoney he has experienced a moment of instant insight that Bonny Keller in her years of personal, intimate knowledge lacks. I admit to prejudice, here. I think the first response by the man pushing the broom can be trusted. Doctor Bloodmoney is sick, and sick in a way that is dangerous to the rest of us. And much of the evil in our world now emanates from such men, because such men do exist.
So in writing Dr. Bloodmoney in 1964 I may have erred in many of my predictions, but upon rereading the novel recently I sensed a basic accuracy in it — an accuracy about human beings and their power to survive. Not survive as beasts, either, but as genuine humans doing genuinely human things. There are no supermen in this novel. There are no heroic deeds. There are some very poor predictions on my part, I must admit; but about the people themselves and their strength and tenacity and vitality. . . there I think I foresaw accurately. Because, of course, I was not predicting; I was only describing what I saw around me, the men and women and children and animals, the life of this planet that has been, is, and will be, no matter what happens.
I am proud of the people in this novel. And, as I say, I would like to number myself as one of them. I once pushed a broom on the sidewalk of Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley and I felt the joy and sense of busy activity and industry that Stuart feels, the excitement, the sense of the future.
And, as the novel depicts, despite the war — the war that did not in fact happen — it is a good future. I would have enjoyed being there with them in their microcosm, their postwar West Marin world.
“Introduction” to The Golden Man (1980)
When I see these stories of mine, written over three decades, I think of the Lucky Dog Pet Store. There’s a good reason for that. It has to do with an aspect of not just my life but with the lives of most freelance writers. It’s called poverty.
I laugh about it now, and even feel a little nostalgia, because in many ways those were the happiest goddamn days of my life, especially back in the early fifties, when my writing career began. But we were poor; in fact, we — my wife, Kleo, and I — were poor poor. We didn’t enjoy it a bit. Poverty does not build character. That is a myth. But it does make you into a good bookkeeper; you count accurately and you count money, little money, again and again. Before you leave the house to grocery shop you know exactly what you can spend, and you know exactly what you are going to buy, because if you screw up you will not eat the next day and maybe not the day after that.
So anyhow there I am at the Lucky Dog Pet Store on San Pablo Avenue, in Berkeley, California, in the fifties, buying a pound of ground horsemeat. The reasons why I’m a freelance writer and living in poverty is (and I’m admitting this for the first time) that I am terrified of Authority Figures like bosses and cops and teachers; I want to be a freelance writer so I can be my own boss. It makes sense. I had quit my job managing a record department at a music store; all night every night I was writing short stories, both SF and mainstream. . . and selling the SF. I don’t really enjoy the taste or texture of horsemeat; it’s too sweet. . . but I also do enjoy not having to be behind a counter at exactly 9:00 A.M., wearing a suit and tie and saying, “Yes, ma’am, can I help you?” and so forth. . . . I enjoyed being thrown out of the University of California at Berkeley because I wouldn’t take ROTC. . . boy, an Authority Figure in a uniform is the Authority Figure! — and all of a sudden, as I hand over the thirty-five cents to the Lucky Dog Pet Store man, I find myself once more facing my personal nemesis. Out of the blue, I am once again confronted by an Authority Figure. There is no escape from your nemesis; I had forgotten that.
The man says, “You’re buying this horsemeat and you are eating it yourselves.”
He now stands nine feet tall and weighs three hundred pounds. He is glaring down at me. I am, in my mind, five years old again, and I have spilled glue on the floor in kindergarten.
“Yes, sir,” I admit. I want to tell him, Look: I stay up all night writing SF stories and I’m real poor but I know things will get better, and I have a wife I love, and a cat named Magnificat, and a little old house I’m buying at the rate of $25-a-month payments, which is all I can afford. But this man is interested in only one aspect of my desperate (but hopeful) life. I know what he is going to tell me. I have always known. The horsemeat they sell at the Lucky Dog Pet Store is only for animal consumption. But Kleo and I are eating it ourselves, and now we are before the judge; the Great Assize has come; I am caught in another Wrong Act.
I half expect the man to say, “You have a bad attitude.”
That was my problem then and it’s my problem now; I have a bad attitude. In a nutshell, I fear authority but at the same time I resent it — the authority and my own fear — so I rebel. And writing SF is a way to rebel. I rebelled against ROTC at U.C. Berkeley and got expelled; in fact, told never to come back. I walked off my job at the record store one day and never came back. Later on I was to oppose the Vietnam War and get my files blown open and my papers gone through and stolen, as was written about in Rolling Stone. Everything I do is generated by my bad attitude, from riding the bus to fighting for my country. I even have a bad attitude toward publishers; I am always behind in meeting deadlines (I’m behind in this one, for instance).
Yet — SF is a rebellious art form and it needs writers and readers and bad attitudes — an attitude of “Why?” or “How come?” or “Who says?” This gets sublimated into such themes as appear in my writing as “Is the universe real?” “Are we all really human, or are some of us just reflex machines?” I have a lot of anger in me. I always have had. Last week my doctor told me that my blood pressure is elevated again and there now seems to be a cardiac complication. I got mad. Death makes me mad. Human and animal suffering make me mad; whenever one of my cats dies I curse God and I mean it; I feel fury at him. I’d like to get him here where I could interrogate him, tell him that I think the world is screwed up, that man didn’t sin and fall but was pushed — which is bad enough — but was then sold the lie that he is basically sinful, which I know he is not.
I have known all kinds of people (I turned fifty a while ago and I’m angry about that; I’ve lived a long time), and those were by and large good people. I model the characters in my novels and stories on them. Now and again one of these people dies, and that makes me mad — really mad, as mad as I can get. “You took my cat,” I want to say to God, “and then you took my girlfriend. What are you doing? Listen to me; listen! It’s wrong what you’re doing.”
Basically, I am not serene. I grew up in Berkeley and inherited from it the social consciousness that spread out over this country in the sixties and got rid of Nixon and ended the Vietnam War, plus a lot of other good things, the whole civil rights movement. Everyone in Berkeley gets mad at the drop of a hat. I used to get mad at the FBI agents who dropped by to visit with me week after week (Mr. George Smith and Mr. George Scruggs of the Red Squad), and I got mad at friends of mine who were members of the Communist Party; I got thrown out of the only meeting of the CP-USA I ever attended because I leaped to my feet and vigorously (i.e., angrily) argued against what they were saying.