Back in the Pleistocene Era, something almost happened, supposedly. He talked for fifteen minutes with John Updike at a party. Susan Sontag even remembered his name, Harold Finch, from that spunky piece he had published in some thoughtful journal. (This was a thousand years before he became my editor. This was eight centuries before he caused the sky to open up and drop a bone at my feet, and caused my own unspoken melodic name, Dr. Igor Shatner, winner of the 319th annual Asimov Award for Science-Fiction, to slip, suddenly, knowingly, lovingly, from so many American lips.) Harold Finch was just a little boy, back then, still wet behind the ear with the golden praise of three or four shriveled archivists of the last gasp of English literature. And little boys don’t dream of being editors, any more than they understand yet how to hate the guts of those insects who sit down for a few months and actually finish their transparent novels.
Physiognomy is important to a man who would be king, and Finch was young and he had the aristocratic nose of the kind of writer the country desperately needed, and he was handsome and ready to blossom, he effortlessly believed, into perhaps one of the five best writers in the English language. Certainly, better than Milton. If only he could sit down and type that novel. It only has to be as good as, say, Theodore Dreiser, he tells himself. Posterity would supply the final push. But why should he sit at the electric machine for hours, when it was so much more satisfying for a handsome bee to fly from hyacinth to dandelion? All the lukewarm while, after gravely weighing the charms of onion skin versus durable forty-weight gray, he closes his eyes and manages to bang out three substantial manuscripts, and even keeps these talismanic embarassments in a file cabinet for what-fifteen, twenty years? Flawed as he knows they are, these manuscripts are a portrait of Harold Finch as a Young Man. They protect him not only from the ravages of time, but from his family curse, that knightly imperative to make some little dent in the world.
In his cynical forties, he is not above measuring his options in teaspoons. Eventually he decides upon a warm but rarely ecstatic marriage as the best method of harnessing the creative monster; but then came children, obviously, not manuscripts. Finally, after a period of black madness, of temper tantrums that truly frighten his lovely and much younger and more common wife, who believes in him despite his ferocity, his ugliness, he calls out from the depths, and has a moment, as if divinely scripted, in which the cold bastard comes to his wife angelically, one night, vulnerable, weeping, gushing, laughing. Everything is positively illuminated, he says, and it’s not just one of those moods. He would not have to be a writer, he explains, if he were an important editor. Why be an explorer on a terrible ocean, when he could, at last, become the King of Spain?
And so he became the King of Spain, and the regal editor of a ground-breaking American literary journal. And among his early acts, he knighted me, Dr. Igor Shatner, and published me, and had me set forth on the mysterious ocean we all worshipped, saying a single word, “Onwards!” And while he sat on his comfortable throne, I foolishly knocked over my bottles of ink. And in the black puddle growing there, I discovered great unearthly continents, impudent laughing robots, underground cities, meta-cosmic travellers, a massive inorganic brain, vermiform civilizations older than Andromeda. But even as entire nations scrunched up their eyes as they whispered my name, nothing I brought back was good enough for Harold Finch. “His authors” never could make the man smile, except by making fools of themselves. But then again, it takes even the greatest king decades to know wherein truly lies the pleasure of being king. And above every page of his literary magazine, he unknowingly printed his own eternal rubric: Why be an explorer on a terrible ocean, when you can be the King of Spain?
Twenty-three years later, it would be too simple to say that, resting upon his throne, he enjoys watching ships go down, the hysteria, the bubbles, and the plunge, finally, of the long wooden mast. Always a supporter of the arts, as an editor, he considers the author to be subservient to the super-mind, just as a worker bee, even Melville, even Cervantes, is nothing compared to the beehive, and he treats his writers as a circus director treats his grubby clowns. On those bad days, when every gray editor still wonders if he could ever have actually written his hypothetical novel, this one exquisitely stabs the slush pile a bit with his red pen, knowing that, in life, one really only has the little pleasures, and besides, hasn’t he always known, above all, that it’s his duty not to marry beneath his class?
It’s hard to believe he once wore that salt and pepper hair valiently down his back. He says he hates the Beatles because they ruined jazz. Sixty-five years old, and with a mordant sorrow at the passage of time, he recalls stealing into the family attic with his father’s anatomy books, before pimples and acid and wonder and Buddhism, when he was just a healthy country boy, how, with keen curiousity, appalled, he wondered for hours at the sober, medical-minded, damning, grayish reproductions of male and female genitalia. He hasn’t thought about writing his novel for twenty years. In fact, lately it seems like nothing in the universe could possibly be interesting enough to write about, except, oh, I don’t know, Lesbian bed-death, he murmurs. His conceit is that he has really only been waiting for something of real quality, a movie, a book, anything, to appear in this generation. The funny thing is how he perks up when even a second-rate actor enters the subterranean café where, every morning, dutifully, urgently, fascinated, he pores over the obituaries in the New York Times with a strong Macchiato and a marmelade danish.
Before I am accused of bitter calumny, I will concede, of course, that when Harold Finch puts his personality disorder to one side, and takes out his red pen, he is capable of working his inimitable magic upon the face of contemporary literature. He is, after all, a terrific editor, and as such, his only job is to terrify. Wexler, Chesterman, Margolis, Simak. He has single-handedly lifted all these crusty authors, and a thousand others, from the dungheap of inconsequentiality, scrubbing them just perfectly with his tremendous editorial brush, turning them into household names. And believe me, I understand it must be rough to imagine that you’ve been dealt the King of Spades, only to discover, towards the end of life, that you’ve simply played mid-wife to a thousand royal brats. And how could that bleak discovery fail to show upon the face of a once and future prince?
All the while, despite his horrible exterior, one can somehow see that, yes, good Harold Finch is only that most melancholy prince in all the story-books. Because he conveys all the beauty and dignity of an old horse, everyone tip-toes around the source of his misery-gut: that somehow he got stuck with these commoners. All the while, nobody knows the magic words, which, after a thousand years, would free him from his golden cage. “Cinderella, you’re such a cunt, like the rest of your evil family.”
What does this man know of six billion year old encyclopedias, about incomprehensible atlases, galaxies, dynasties, the grayish-blue chipped titanium of the graveyards of Zeta Reticuli, burning spacecrafts, the ugly and sweet laughter of the toppled kings of Alpha-37, the glum Andromedan poet Zzthifith the Plekanoot and his sonnets about the thousand micro-longitudes that distinguish the original Earth from Mega-Earth, the hierophanies Cleophus Brown experienced upon leaving the Kuiper Belt, those magnificent subtle ironies between spacesuit and spaceskin, the ineffable pleasure of placing your fingers tenderly on a fellow astronaut’s secondary brainpack? Harold Finch is an editor. An American editor. A beast of industry which stands to books as mighty Caesar stands to the thoughtful cosmos of that penniless farmer, Heraklitos: shameless, ignorant, puny, laughing, victorious and satisfied. He is the kind of man who would burn the Library at Alexandria because he calculates that all necessary wisdom is already contained in his stupid little literary magazine. In other words, a nothing, a nobody, a shmuck, a putz. And somebody needs to tell him so. Over and over and over again.
Oh, it’s not that he doesn’t know exactly where to put your uneducated semi-colons. And it’s not that he hasn’t taught you some great things, such as how even a common comma, properly placed, makes taut the wooden bow that shoots a sentence, magically, even farther than the sum of the words. And it isn’t that he can’t wince, and tell you, quite correctly, that he could eat alphabet soup and shit a better ending than that. And it’s not that he can’t blackmail you, because, yes, he knew you a thousand years ago, when you were still wet behind the ears with all those murky and laughable attempts at getting free from your family demons through the clumsy medium of American short fiction, what a joke; and yes, Aristotle says that all human fears can be reduced to the fear of death and fear of the loss of honor; and although he can’t kill you, you know that somewhere on his shelf, he still has a humiliating copy of all your earliest mommy, daddy, baby, doo-doo; and you tremble, because you know that this firm grip upon another’s juvenalia makes every alpha gorilla smile with ideas of revenge and extortion.
Oh, and it’s not that he hasn’t taught you the myriad pitfalls of every young contemporary author. It’s not that he failed to take you by the shoulder, one afternoon, and point to his slush pile, and ask you to count how many stories of a meaningful epic roadtrip across America lay among those thousand manuscripts, how many unreadable stories of two young lovers meeting in a bar, how many excrutiating tales involving a hieroglyphic visit to a gypsy fortune teller, how many rancid versions of the thoughtful gauzy death of a beloved grandparent. He warned you rightly that every young Jewish author feels compelled to rewrite the story of the Golem, almost ritualistically, as if this amateur cantillation would be his authentic Bar Mitzvah, the one without the pimples and the disgusting pickled herring. He warned you that writers, unhappy fools, nurture very strange ideas of what one can accomplish through the medium of fiction. In so many words, this loveless, limp-dicked patron of the arts advised you to go into real estate, and, with his nasty fingers, strangled every fragile instinct you had possessed, because it still had the milky breath of human infancy.
Only such a man could die of hunger and thirst among fountains and pear trees. Do not be fooled by his canny words and cunning eyes. Our editor is the one animal that all other animals pity, because he lacks sound animal sense. He held the globe in his hands, and he chose to envy it. He keeps all his American writers in cages, and wonders why they can’t produce anything but reality televsion. All the while, our melancholy editor is the last to know that, until he lets his writers roam free, his own soul shall be condemned to wander through the heavy galleries of Giovanni Boccaccio, Mary Shelley, among books of all dead great human writers past, where he shall feel that vague horror… ah, but his own most personal sacred horror is still so vague to himself. He hardly knows that he has, with all his might, pushed away even that literary booby-prize, an honorary brief paragraph in some future volume of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. He hardly sees that every hopeful author he has touched, including myself, can, forever onwards, produce only the most mediocre of royal jelly.
So, use him, and his fabulous resources, if you must… But glance upon my own unhealing wounds and be warned. Enter his golden cage as a lion-tamer, and never as his sacred lion.
The following demands are, on this day, made by said author, Dr. Igor Shatner, Winner of both the Asimov and the Asteroid Prizes for Science Fiction, The Galopogan Prize for Unusual Literaure, and Finalist for the New York Speculative Review Prize for Assymetric Books.
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