I took this photo of Brian Aldiss the last time I saw him, at the
World Science Fiction Convention in London, three years ago this summer.
He was busily signing books at the PS Publishing table (alongside Paul
McAuley, in the background), at the head of a very long line of
supplicants, so I didn't think I'd get to chat with him at all. But
Brian's partner, Alison Soskice, saw me lurking about, hailed me, and
brought me behind the table, where she and I yakked happily for several minutes.
Brian chatted with the customers
the whole time, seemingly oblivious to us. But then he slowly reared
back in his swivel chair, putting his large head beside ours, and
gruffly asked Alison, "What do you mean, talking to this rogue?" Then he
twinkled at me, rocked forward again, and greeted another customer.
When done with her, he reared back again and asked me, with a hopeful air, "Where's Sydney?" (meaning my wife, of course). "She's at home, I'm afraid," I replied. His face darkened
comically, like a panto villain's. "What good are you, then?" he
snarled, then twinkled, and sat forward again.
That's how it went for the next
half-hour or so. Between customers, he'd rear back, say something
cheerfully insulting to me, then twinkle, and sit forward again. This
photo is of one of the twinkles.
Of
the many obituaries, I best liked Christopher Priest's in The Guardian.
"He wrote lively, intelligent prose, shot through with subversive
humour, linguistic novelty and human observation. ... One of the most
exhilarating aspects of reading Aldiss is the
diversity of his imagination." Priest also notes, "All his working life
he did much behind the scenes to encourage, support and promote younger
writers." I can attest to that personally, and I'm sure Priest can as
well.
I tried to describe what Brian
meant to me in my introduction to his collection Cultural Breaks
(Tachyon, 2005), but it deteriorated into mere anecdote, as usual. Here
are some relevant, slightly revised, excerpts from that essay.
I loved Brian W. Aldiss the
writer for most of my reading life, but in the 1990s I came to love
Brian W. Aldiss the person as well. I met Brian through an annual event
we both attended, the International Conference for the Fantastic in the
Arts. Note the aplomb with which I toss off "we both attended," as if we
were peers, old cronies from New Worlds before that kid Moorcock took
it over. In fact, Brian was a living legend, with the ICFA title of
Permanent Special Guest, when I first showed up as a graduate student.
I had read and admired his books
since I was a kid, when I first plucked them off the shelves of the
public library in Batesburg, South Carolina, where the librarian
helpfully stamped each one -- even Billion Year Spree, which I read with
delight, cover to cover, at age twelve -- with the little red
rocketship that meant "science fiction." So being in his presence as an
adult still reduced me to awe, to the level of the whining schoolboy,
with his satchel.
My letter of transit to Brian was
my then-girlfriend, now wife, Sydney, whom he promptly recruited, on
sight, into the unofficial stock company that peopled the one-act plays
he staged at ICFA each year. One year, I remember, there were several
rehearsals, and at each rehearsal Sydney's role got bigger. Some of the
script pages were handwritten. Brian was going back to his hotel room
and writing whole monologues just for Sydney. "If Sydney's in it," Brian
liked to say, "it's fireproof!" Since I was hanging around anyway,
Brian was good enough to toss me a role occasionally. As a result,
Sydney and I got to play the robot child's troubled parents in Brian's
own stage version of "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long," years before
what's-her-name and what's-his-face played the roles in Spielberg's A.I.
One of Brian's ICFA plays was Drinks with the Spider King. Brian and I both were typecast, he as the
Spider King and I as a brainless minion. My role was to sit at his
feet, gnaw an imaginary haunch of meat and gaze up at him with fearsome
adoration. This I found easy to do. I had ample time -- for it was a
rather long play -- to study, up close, Brian's marvelous face. I was
fascinated by its creases, jowls, and bristles, and the zest with which
Brian animated them. It was an old vaudevillian's face, a face that
could be instantly read from the cheapest seats in the house. It had
many stories yet to tell, that face.
In later years, Sydney spent
several summers at Oxford University, as a teacher and administrator in
the Alabama at Oxford program. Oxford was, of course, Brian's hometown,
so Sydney and I were fortunate enough to visit him repeatedly in much
more congenial settings than a convention hotel. When we went to dinner
or to a pub, we didn't even wear name tags! How liberating. On a number
of memorable occasions, Brian was the most welcoming and gracious host
one could imagine, and a marvelous tour guide to his beloved
Oxfordshire.
With Brian, we lounged on the
lazy banks of the Windrush in the ragged shadow of the dismantled
Minster Lovell Hall, where a vault once was opened to reveal a skeleton
sitting upright at a writing-table, surrounded by books. (No wonder
Brian loved the place.) With Brian, we navigated country lanes to the
old stone village of Langford (in which, Brian joked, Dave Langford had
no economic interest), and a fabulous pub called the Bell Inn, where the
lamb was divine and the conversation even better. With Brian, we had a
long and luxurious cream tea at a sidewalk cafe in Burford, which
Brian's then-young son, in the wake of Brian's 1969 novel Barefoot in
the Head, christened Burford-in-the-Head. ("I thought that was rather
good," Brian said, still the proud papa thirty-six years later.) Our
Burford tea party was so lush and attractive, we actually drew bees. We
also attracted a passer-by who asked, "Excuse me, aren't you Brian
Aldiss?" -- a first in my writerly experience, and an instance of
Brian's celebrity in his homeland.
On another occasion, as he and I
sat side by side on a rough-hewn bench in an extraordinary Oxford
seafood restaurant called Fishers, as the two of us munched fistfuls of deep-fried whitebait, with lemons and sea salt, Brian delighted me with a long, impassioned, funny, profane denunciation of a new critical anthology. I
had contributed a chapter to that wicked anthology, hence my delight. I
wonder whether Brian really had forgotten that I had helped write the
book, or only pretended to forget.
Best of all, I think, was our chance to see Brian's house, his study, his library
(which was pretty much coexistent with his house), and his amazing
garden -- a vast, lovingly tended tangle full of surprises, into which
the wanderer quickly disappeared. Goldfish thrived in the murk of what
only a soulless cynic would call an abandoned pool.
Speaking of pools, in closing, I
offer an ICFA anecdote that Brian doubtless did not remember, as it
occurred before I met Sydney and before he even knew my name. Late one
night, I sat poolside with a group of my fellow graduate students. By
ones and twos, the group drifted off to bed, leaving only two of us, a
young man and a young woman, deep in a high-octane critical conversation
about something or other. We both gradually became aware of the sound
of someone in the pool, gently swimming toward us -- at 2 a.m. We looked
up. Bobbing there, a few yards away, was the conference's distinguished
Permanent Special Guest, gray hair plastered across his head, beaming
at us. When he spoke, his voice was barely a murmur, but the acoustics
of the pool ferried it directly into our ears, like a confidence. "Come
on," Brian cooed. "Don't be shy. Come in. Come into the water." He then
winked, turned, and glided away, as graceful and amoral as an otter.
