Customer Reviews

1984

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I came out of this book feeling I know Samuel Delany a little more personally, which I count as a great honour. It's a collection of letters written during 1984 to friends and colleagues. They're highly detailed, witty, sad, bizarre, at times brutally honest about himself and others -- often containing explicitly sexual details of real-life and imagined gay and straight(-ish) encounters that sneak up on you at the turn of a page and quite take your breath away. This is not a book for shrinking violets!

Away from the heat of these sexual excursions, Delany experienced trouble with the taxman during the period in question and the acute frustration he felt in trying to live life with no money to hand, despite having had much success with his novels and academic work, is obvious -- it's hard to imagine just how demoralising it was, but his description of winter in an unheated New York apartment, bundled up in jumpers, jackets and gloves to ward off the biting cold, tapping away at a word processor at 4am trying to finish a final draft of this or that book or article in order to earn some money, only to have it immediately snatched away by the IRS -- this I found particularly poignant. He also writes copiously about the difficulties of getting his then-current projects into print -- fascinating for anyone who has ever wondered what's really involved in getting a book into the shops.

On the positive side though, Delany writes with obvious love and affection about his (then ten-year-old) daughter Iva, product of a well-intentioned but failed marriage; he touches here and there on the deeper aspects of his relationship with Frank, his live-in partner (but I get the feeling much of it is kept private, even from his closest correspondents); his descriptions of the occasional high-flying Manhattan parties and soirees to which he's invited are positively "Dhalgrenesque", teetering on the edge of absurdity; and he writes about the sci-fi conventions he attends (often reluctantly) with deft insight into the natures of the characters involved.

There are references to Dhalgren and the real-life people and places behind some of the characters and locations, and some discussion about the many corrections that have been incorporated into the various reprints over the years; there are several academic discourses about books, music, writers, films and plays that, frankly, went over my head -- but there's enough accessible stuff here to keep an average reader like me absolutely enthralled.

We're now over fifteen years since these letters were written; I can only hope that life for this extremely gifted writer and -- well, a really nice guy, I reckon -- has improved immeasurably (especially financially) since then, because I feel he certainly deserves to have reaped the rewards of what has apparently been a career fraught with difficulties. Delany has provided me with many exquisitely crafted stories to read over the years; 1984 now takes pride of place alongside the other Delany masterpieces on my bookshelf. I only hope there's been enough public interest in this volume to warrant publishing some more of his correspondence. Personally, I can't wait.

For those who have read his The Motion of Light in Water and Heavenly Breakfast, this book of letters from late 1983 to early 1985 provide a very nice extension to what Delany's life has been and how it has influenced his writing, both fictional and otherwise.

As indicated in the introduction, the choice of title for this book is deliberately evocative of Orwell's nightmare vision of that year, both as an indication of where Orwell got it right and where the real world has completely diverged from that vision. Within these letters, Delany shows just how completely draconian and life-meddling the IRS can be, as he finds himself without heat, trying to type with mittened fingers, scavenging cans from the street to get enough money to put food on the table for a day, trying to set his schedule to still provide a nice home for his daughter, where he must have someone else cash his royalty checks so he at least has some money the IRS doesn't immediately grab. And just as nightmarish are his problems with getting his works published, galleys corrected, artwork commissioned and delivered, all under a cloud of mis-information, missed publisher and printer dates, payment contracts that almost amount to slave labor, a phantasmagoric depiction of the Byzantine world of publishing.

On the opposite side of the coin, we see a man who has the freedom to choose a life style that the Ministry of Love would never condone, who can freely publish ideas about politics, sex, and writing that the Ministry of Information would have certainly censored. Delany's ideas in these areas are certainly insightful and he articulates his positions well, even if you don't agree with his conclusions. Some of the material here may not be everyone's taste, as he is occasionally extremely graphic in his depictions of various sexual encounters, but this material shows a Delany who is comfortable with who he is.

About my only real complaint is that we don't get to see the other side of these letters, that we only hear one side of the conversation. And sometimes it is obvious that that other side would be very interesting to be able to read. And a couple of quibbles: there are often references to people obviously known to both correspondents, but who is a complete unknown to the reader (some of these are footnoted as to who they are, but far from all), and, as letters, these works are lacking in the often poetic sense of language that Delany displays in his fictional works. But overall, these letters provide a fascinating look at a fascinating, brilliant, poetic, and sometimes very human person.

Private letters by a living writer, written in a year I actually remember??? The thought alone is drool-producing. And Delany's letters are so thoughtful, incisive, gossipy... why, it makes me never want to write another letter. Please be warned, these are not for the squeamish. Delany is very open regarding his sexuality, and his sexual exploits, occurring during a time when AIDS was not considered the threat it is today. I'd recommend this book to all Delany fans, to everyone interested in gay culture, to all voyeurs, people interested in the politics of publishing, everyone who wants to know what Times Square used to be like... in short, to almost all.

To say that Samuel R. Delany's 1984 is over 300 pages of letters that sprawl across subjects as divergent as pornography and deconstruction, comic books and the finer points of opera, the innards of New York publishing and a high-society soiree at which Umberto Eco gets sloshed on martinis, would be simply to reiterate a few paragraphs of Ken James's introduction. And since the introduction is both brilliantly conceived and elegantly carried off--it alone is worth half the price of the book--let me try drifting with another current. Having read some dozen or more Delany books now, I can say with complete conviction that none provides more compulsive reading than this one (though a couple are pretty much on equal terms). What makes this book unique--beyond Delany's gifted ability to comment intelligently and authoritatively on almost ANYthing--is his voice. One comes to know Delany himself through a voice that is constant enough it could be used in a mathematical equation, whether echoing through the deeply personal missive of a Delany hurt by a close friend or delivering a fascinating lecture on the difference between reference and meaning. The voice is erudite, friendly, comforting--the voice of Jung's Wise Old Man maybe; it is a voice you will want to turn to while sunning yourself on a park bench, while commuting on the bus, while relaxing in a favorite chair in the living room, before turning in for the night. You will want to have this voice--endlessly interesting, tirelessly discursive, extraordinarily compassionate --speak to you from a year that was famous before it ever appeared on our calendars. Through the writer's voice, you will find yourself, whenever you choose, in the inimitable company of Delany in all of his manifold guises--cultural critic, science fiction writer, philosopher, literary analyst, rationalist and most of all, full-fledged member of humanity. For Delany fans, it's a must. If you're not a Delany fan, after reading 1984, you will be.

More than anything, in these letters we are treated to a rich vision of New York City refracted through an admirably refined critical sensibility. For Delany, who navigates cultural and class spaces with a confidence that has become legendary, New York is an endlessly inviting social space under perpetual construction, collapse and reconstitution. Tracing a trajectory that continues the ballistic one of his childhood, Delany finds his way up to Harlem to visit his old home, down to 42nd Street and the gay cruising areas of the porn theaters and across town to upscale publication parties. Armed with the critical tools of modernist flaneurs (Baudelaire, Benjamin) and more contemporary theorists (Foucault, Derrida), Delany traverses a landscape shot through with popular signs of the times (Michael Jackson, Boy George).

But it's not all postmodern fun. Beyond ever-present domestic difficulties-Delany's ongoing battle with severe dyslexia, wranglings with his ex-wife Marilyn over their daughter Iva, and problems with the chronic anxiety of his live-in, Frank-over the course of the year, the Delany household slides into an ever-deepening financial crisis that eventually finds Samuel and Frank scouring the streets for change, and reaches its emotional nadir with Delany's desperate letter to Camilla Decarnin.
But beyond the precincts of this private crisis there is a much larger crisis developing, a political crisis involving ideology, propaganda, censorship and repression of a sort that we might well call Orwellian ...
New York City in 1984 ...?
Read the rest of Ken James's introduction and the letters themselves for the rest of the story.

I am a pretty huge Delany fan, so I think I can say with some confidence that if you're interested in Delany and his work, you have to get this book. This is a collection of letters Delany wrote to friends, fans and business acquaintances in the year 1984. He talks about his interests in post structuralism and how it was informing his work, about what movies and films he is seeing, about problems with his partner and in detail about his incredibly risky sex life at the time.

The parts of the book that document Delany's continued unsafe sex in the cruising scene in New York right when the AIDS epidemic was really getting going are harrowing and Delany should be championed for his honesty in portraying this world. No edits appeared to have been made to these letters, so we get what Delany was thinking about AIDS at a time when no one really knew what it was. He thought for a while he might be immune, he thought maybe you couldn't get it from oral sex, he though a lot of things that turned out to be totally wrong. And reading him talking about how he and his community were thinking about this disease as it was first being discussed gave me chills. With all the unprotected sex Delany had in those days, it is amazing he survived, and we are better off because we have had another twenty five years of a brilliant writer and and we have this book, which is an amazing document of a crazy time in downtown New York and a remarkable look into one of my favorite writer's life.

to read a book of letters is to usually read some dead writers "closet papers". most are disorganized, many are just boring. what struck me about 1984 is the clarity of each sentence, the motion and studied thoughts of a writer who, even in correspondence has something to say. after four or five letters you start to wonder if he is telling you too much, airing the gossip of a famous, but invisible life. he lets you know in another letter that this is not the case, telling one his friends (and us!) that to read the letters as everything in his life would be a mistake. they sparkle in that intimate way.

while Gaye's murder is not mentioned at all, everything else relevant to the fading history of 84 is there; AIDS in its infant and misunderstood phase, the implications of the homophobic rumor that invades the public, the fear touching on the back of many minds, pop culture, the rise of criticism in the vagueness of american thinking life, all color one of the richest pieces of memory/written history to be seen in many years(i have yet to find one before or since).

if you have read anything of Delany's, or are just looking for something without artifice and pomp, this book is for you. if not, you should at least buy it, sit it on your coffee table, or your desk at work, just so friends, and co-workers alike can glance at it and say, "oh, your reading Orwell?" and you can smile and say, "no its Delany.", which will leave them wondering about you and the reason you choose to be so flippy.

r.a. washington