speak the way he writes; in long, complex, deeply erudite sentences. He doesn’t. He speaks plainly and respectfully, and accords worthiness to everyone at first blush. I would later learn that he doesn’t suffer fools, but his bluntest of ripostes are delivered as though to an equal.
The same personableness is evident in the five letters which comprise this book. The strongest impression I came away with from reading it; Chip likes people. He cares deeply for his friends, lovers, family, students, and strangers. He loves watching his friends fall in love. He loves cooking for them. He loves talking with his daughter, and has done since she was a child. He has long conversations with strangers he meets on public transit. That’s a difficult thing for me to do.
I very much enjoyed reading his stories about meeting and falling in love with his partner Dennis. I knew bits of them already, from having read the autobiographical comic he did with artist Mia Wolff, yet I was delighted to read some of the same words I’d read in the comic:
And held each other.
—for a couple of days.
Yep, still gets me all verklempt. Chip and Dennis are from such very different walks of life. “Common wisdom” tells you that that kind of relationship can never work. Apparently, in this case, common wisdom has its head up its ass.
The five chatty and compelling long letters were written during the years 1988 to 1991, to Robert Bravard, Kate Spencer and Erin McGraw. Chip talks frankly about life and teaching and falling in love, moments of sadness, moments of joy, world affairs; the kind of stuff you’d expect from letters. He also discusses opera, the theatre, and cuisine, reminding me what a Renaissance man he is. They all feature his delightful habit in his writing of folding into the narrative sensory specifics of his surroundings; the ambient temperature and sounds, someone making coffee, etc. The second strong impression I came away with—it’s one I’ve had before—is how generously Samuel R. Delany shares the realness of his life with his audience. It is a great gift to those of us who encounter him. When I was an emerging writer, I was desperately afraid that to have my work published would be to call down upon my head massed disapproval from certain communities of mine which default to heteronormativity. But I developed a tonic against the fear. Whenever timidity made me reluctant to put fingers to keyboard, especially when I was writing explicitly about queerness, sex, and sexuality, not to mention alternative relationship structures and their intersections with race and gender, I would half-humorously ask myself, “What would Chip Delany do?” From reading Chip’s bold, frequently transgressive fiction which explores similar topics, I felt I already knew the answer. But simply asking the question in those circumstances would shore up my faltering boldness. I’d be able to let the words out of my head and commit them to paper without shame. For that, Chip, and for so many other things, my deepest gratitude.
LETTERS FROM AMHERST
1
TO ROBERT BRAVARD
February 21, 1989
• • •
Dept. of Comp. Lit.
South College Building
U. of Mass., Amherst
Amherst MA 01003
February 21, 1989
Dear Bob,
Well, here I am—at last with a little time to write.
Spent the morning at home, making out checks for $316.89 worth of bills. At the cafe on the corner, ran into our department’s junior-faculty-genius, Peter Fenves. At 28, he’s a respected and widely published Kantian and deep into a book on Kierkegaard. One of my graduate students, a 31-year-old Lesbian named Mel, with peach-colored hair, a couple of years his senior, said of him recently: “It’s really nice to have someone on the faculty who actually lives in ancient Greece.” Peter’s dark, skinny, bespectacled, tiny-fingered, distracted, curly-haired, delicately opinionated, and very good-hearted. Mel’s description is pretty accurate—though Peter’s Greece probably grants Walter Benjamin and Hölderlin honorary citizenship. He came here the same time I did, from Johns Hopkins. I’m in the midst of reading an article he published last year on George Eliot’s first book, Scenes of Clerical Life. Writing a bit clunky, but content fine.
Eliot’s monster, Dempster, is Peter’s antihero—because Dempster tells perfectly absurd and baseless stories and insistently sticks to them in the face of truth, the French encyclopedia, common sense, and everything!
A couple of nights ago, I took him and Don Levine (another professor) to dinner, and we’d yakked about Proust and Madame Bovary and modernism and drank Irish coffees till two in the morning in the lounge of a place whose name I can’t remember. Apparently a comment I dropped that evening sent him home to reread Hiawatha (I found out this morning). So we discussed boredom in poetry, in a most unboring fashion, in the crowded restaurant, while I drank decaf and he had coffee.
Then I bundled into my winter coat, while Peter went off to collect his laundry down the road.
Now I’m sitting in my university office on some mid-February holiday—I’m not even sure which one it is. The squirrels are running over the roof. Creatures whose identity I don’t want to speculate on rattle around in the walls. And the hallway outside my office is more or less deserted.
My classes are notably better this than last term. I guess people are beginning to hear I’m here—maybe some of last term’s students actually talked. At any rate, this time classes were preceded by half-a-dozen calls from particularly interested students who wanted to study with me. In general, the ambition and intelligence—and energy level!—of the classes is so much higher. Last term, though opened to graduate students, my modernist novel class (513) attracted only juniors and seniors. This term, I’ve got half a dozen graduate students. And the undergraduates who’ve enrolled seem a lot more there.
It’s strange to think that I’m here, already sunk in the second term of the rest of my life; the first was, if I’m honest, grim; though—as I look back—not grim in any surprising ways. Half of it was (as I knew it would be) just that the landscape was so new.
By “landscape” I mean something more complex than the physical layout of the town, with its central graveyard [around which my end of Amherst is built], or of the U. Mass. campus, ten minutes down the road from my house. But the bureaucratic landscape, coupled with the psychological landscape [and the social landscape on top of that—the place, as best I can figure out, doesn’t have a sexual landscape (at least not so’s you’d notice)]—has just been annoying, irritating, maddening to learn my way around in. But how could it be otherwise for someone who’s spent thirty years basically self-employed in NYC?
My 2nd floor apartment on Cowles Lane is still bare enough to make (my very rare) visitors, when they come in, look about a bit askance. There’s a bed in the main room. A large study table and a couple of benches are almost lost in the front room.
No rugs. No wall decorations. No other objects to speak of—oh, yes: three mismatching kitchen chairs1 move desultorily through the four low-ceilinged rooms. But that’s it. Books are worming their way along the baseboards, having overflowed the two built-in bookshelves.
Still, when I got back after intersession in New York, I actually had a surge of good feeling over the town; coming in my front door, I felt I was coming home. (Thank the Lord, since, for better or worse, it’s
