The House of Rumour (41 page)

Set in a parallel world where the Missile Crisis has escalated into all-out nuclear war, a disparate bunch of survivors find themselves stranded on an idyllic island in the Caribbean. American embassy staff and their families, a detachment of Cuban women’s militia and a group of Russian technical advisors overcome their initial hostilities and attempt to build a new world together. They find traces of a long-dead culture on the island: the circular ruins of some kind of temple that becomes the focus of the emerging community. At the end, just after one of the militia women has given birth to a mutant baby of uncertain paternity, a unit of US Marines arrives and promptly kills all the Cubans and Soviets. ‘Hey!’ their captain calls out to reassure his now hysterical fellow Americans. ‘It’s all right! You’re safe! Didn’t you hear the news? We won! Yeah, we really clobbered the bastards!’

In September 1964, Larry attended the Twenty-Second World Science Fiction Convention in Oakland and met Philip K. Dick for the first time. They indulged in a long and drug-addled conversation concerning Dick’s most recent book
Man in a High Castle
, a counter-factual novel where the Nazis and the Japanese have won the Second World War. Zagorski had assumed that this had been influenced (as his own first novel had been) by
Swastika Night
. Dick assured him that he had in fact been guided by the ancient Chinese book of divination, the
I Ching
.

It seems clear that this is what inspired Larry to start work on what was to become
The Quantum Arcana of Arnold Jakubowski
(1966), a cycle of twenty-two interconnecting stories structured around the trump cards in the Tarot deck. Zagorski spent longer on this novel than any other and he was never happy with it.

It started with such promise, I mean it just seemed to write itself until I got up to the sixteenth card, and then – wham! It was the Tower! I was back at my first story, back trying to find my lost father. I felt that I was being led into a hall of mirrors, stuck in some awful time warp. I’d been doing primal therapy, rebirthing, stuff like that, and, of course, ingesting huge quantities of LSD. I used Crowley’s Thoth pack, which is pretty psychedelic anyway – and there it was: the ego, the phallus, that vision of authority I could never overcome, plus I’d just learnt that I was infertile so I felt emasculated and cut off from fatherhood at both ends of the continuum. I found myself wandering up and down Venice Broadwalk, muttering, ‘The tower must fall, the tower must fall.’ I had an overpowering sense of doom – after all, the Tower represents ruin and catastrophe. I got through it but after that it was a hard book to finish.9

Now the Tower had perhaps become a symbol of an existential despair in the midst of apparent success. As Blaise Pascal had written: ‘We burn with a desire to find a secure abode, an ultimate firm base on which to build a tower which might rise to infinity; but our very foundation crumbles completely, and the earth opens before us unto the very abyss.’

The critical reception of
The Quantum Arcana of Arnold Jakubowski
was mixed.
Village Voice
declared it a ‘meta-fictional masterpiece’;
The New York Times
called it ‘a confused and self-indulgent mess’. It was joint winner of the Hugo Award for best novel awarded at the SF Worldcon in Cleveland, Ohio in 1966.

Much of Zagorski’s work was now being hailed as part of the ‘New Wave’ of SF writing. Larry certainly liked to be seen as radical and he pushed the idea of an ‘alchemical reaction between pop culture and the avant-garde’. His stories found their way into Michael Moorcock’s militantly
nouvelle vague
journal
New Worlds
and he was asked to contribute to Harlan Ellison’s seminal anthology
Dangerous Visions
(1967). But already one can detect an uneasiness concerning the permissive age in Zagorski’s writing. His
Dangerous Visions
story, ‘The Crazy Years, Mass Psychosis in the Sixth Decade’ (named after Robert Heinlein’s uncanny prediction for the 1960s in his 1941 ‘Time-Line of Future History’), depicts an increasingly barbaric youth cult called the Subheads, whose idea of liberation is to progressively burn out their brains with highly potent hallucinogens. It was also a desperate reflection of his fears concerning his own drug addiction.

In 1968, Larry married Wanda Ferris, a sculptor aged twenty-eight who had been a long-time resident of the commune in Venice. They moved into a beach house in Malibu together. Wanda recalls:

We’d had this freewheeling kind of affair for years. Larry was great company, so full of ideas, funny and charming. To be honest I was happy with an open relationship. But he was never any good with the free-love ethic. Oh, he wanted to be but he just couldn’t do it. Basically he craved emotional security. He kept on at me about living as a couple, just the two of us. He made it sound like a wonderful dream and I knew that the idea of it would make him happy so in the end I agreed. But it was a big mistake.10

As the sixties drew to a close Larry became more and more paranoid. He was convinced that he was being watched by the FBI and the Church of Scientology. He had a high-security fence rigged up around the beach house and began to amass a small arsenal of firearms. Wanda remembers asking him: ‘ “What’s all this really about, Larry?” and he replied: “Guilt”. “Guilt, what about?” “I don’t know, everything”.’ In 1969, during the Tate/LaBianca murder investigation, it was revealed that the Manson Family used names and rituals from
Stranger in a Strange Land
as part of their cult, and a heavily annotated copy of
American Gnostic
was also found in their Spahn Ranch headquarters.

The Peregrinations of Percival Pluto
(1970) was completed during a sustained LSD binge that was excessive even by Zagorski’s standards of the time. Despite the gruelling complexities of his last novel, Larry was determined to continue to stretch the boundaries of the SF form by attempting what he explained as ‘a science fiction version of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s
Parzival
’.

I’d thought long and hard about the term ‘space-opera’ and how it’s a pejorative term, but I thought what if you wrote something truly operatic? So
Peregrinations
became this Wagnerian project. It was insane! It was this interplanetary quest and I really did want to explore spirituality and symbolism on some deep level but it ended up in a whole series of psychological dead ends. And yes, Childe Larry to a dark tower came once more. This time it was the Grail Castle with its castrated king. I didn’t have any answers. I’d forgotten what the question was.11

Despite being scarcely readable, the novel sold steadily throughout the 1970s. It was thought to contain many hidden messages and references to self-awareness and spiritual growth. ‘It was a mess,’ was Larry’s later verdict on it, ‘but its success had a woeful effect upon me. For a while I was convinced that I had this visionary gift so the writing really suffered.’

From Here to Alternity
(1972) features a time-travel organisation called the Office of Counter-factual Affairs, which intervenes at volatile moments in history such as the Battle of Hastings or the Third Crusade of 1198. The novel’s protagonist, Baxter Brahma, jumps from one unstable jonbar point to another, occasionally falling into an alternate universe that he has to escape from. Brahma holds the key to
scientia media
, or middle knowledge, a concept devised by the sixteenth-century Jesuit, Luis Molina, to reconcile divine providence and free will: that God has prevolitional knowledge of all conditional contingents and possible counter-factual worlds.

‘I spent most of the 1970s doing a lot of coke and developing a warped understanding of Renaissance philosophy and particle physics.’ Larry became convinced that alchemy and astrology had a deep connection with quantum mechanics and believed that occult and hidden traditions could provide some unifying theory. In 1973 he experienced a series of hallucinations that elemental forces were attempting to contact him with the information that God existed on a subatomic level. In
The Hieroglyphic Monad
(1974), Zagorski uses Elizabethan magician John Dee’s universal symbol of the cosmos, a unifying motif that attempts to connect a series of discursive stories set in a twenty-second-century Europe where the Enlightenment never happened.

Wanda Ferris left Larry Zagorski in 1976. ‘He was a pharmaceutical mess, yes, that was for sure; he was slowly but surely killing himself. But the worst thing was that he’d lost all his charm. He’d become grandiose and insufferable.’ By the end of the decade he had descended into near madness and degradation. His old friend Mary-Lou Gunderson was shocked when they met in April 1978.

I’d just got a new job as a television producer at one of the main studios and suddenly science fiction was on the rise again after the massive success of
Star Wars
– there was big money ready to finance TV franchises like
Battlestar Galactica
and
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
. So I took a meeting with Larry, which I thought would be fun, imagining that we’d catch up on the past and talk about rehashing all the pulp and space-opera ideas from when we’d started out. But it was awful. Larry was this jibbering wreck, constantly wandering off to the restroom, obviously to take drugs. He kept muttering that this heretic monk had been in touch and had a message for me.12

In June, Zagorski was admitted to Los Robles Hospital with diluted cardiomyopathy. He was told that if he did not change his lifestyle he would be dead within six months. ‘I’ve not much to live for,’ he wrote in a letter to a friend, ‘so I guess I should prepare myself for death.’

Then in November came the appalling news of the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana. Larry’s first wife Sharleen had been a resident of the Peoples Temple community and was one of the 918 victims. ‘Utopia turned into a death-camp,’ Larry later commented. ‘Jim Jones twisted idealism, calling mass-murder “revolutionary suicide”. But out of the darkness came one small spark of hope.’

Martin Stirling Johnson, Sharleen’s son by Cato Johnson, was among the few survivors. Earlier in the year Larry had joined the Concerned Relatives group that had voiced fears about the welfare of family members in Jonestown and he now involved himself directly in the care of the twelve-year-old orphan.

It took a lot of work convincing the social workers that I was up to it but, after an initial period of fostering under supervision, the California Department of Social Services authorised my legal guardianship of Martin. Of course I had to turn my life completely around and the irony is that it was my own life I was saving. At last I had a purpose. All those years of feeling sorry for myself and thinking that the universe was out to get me had been a complete waste of time.13

Zagorski got a part-time job lecturing on science fiction at UCLA as part of their creative writing programme and devoted the rest of his time to the challenging task of raising a deeply traumatised adolescent. Beyond the obvious psychological problems Martin had to contend with, Larry noted that the young man had ‘lost a normal capacity for imagination; in warding off nightmares he cannot permit himself dreams’. In trying out many types of play and art therapy, Larry noticed that his own faculties had somewhat diminished. ‘I realised that since the mid-sixties my work had become increasingly pompous. I’d lost so much of the capricious energy that had drawn me to SF in the first place. Luckily I wasn’t too old to learn from the young.’

And it was not only watching Martin grow up that gave him inspiration. He was picking up new ideas from his students at UCLA and other young Turks on the SF scene. He appeared on the now notorious Cyberpunk Panel at the 1985 North American Science Fiction Convention in Austin, Texas, sporting a shaved head and mirror shades, declaring: ‘I’m a punk. I’m an old punk but a punk nonetheless.’ It’s fair to say that his two subsequent attempts at the form,
The Cut-Throat Laser
(1987) and
Zap-Gun Boogie-Woogie
(1990), rather fall short of cyberpunk. They do, however, conjure a sharp and highly entertaining pastiche of mid-twentieth-century futurism.

In 1996, Zagorski provided an introduction to
Beach 16
by Nemo Carvajal, a SF novel set in Cuba during the ‘Special Period’ of post-Soviet austerity. In his preface to Carvajal’s book, Zagorski uses the term ‘post-utopian’ (first coined by art critic Gerardo Mosquera) as a way of describing the theme of the novel and also as a possible new point of departure for SF: ‘What then is the future of the future? If, as Fukuyama insists, we are at the end of history, how can we think about tomorrow? What is the point of any fiction, let alone speculative fiction, unless we can find new ways of dreaming, new ways of imagining the universe?’14 In 1998, Zagorski co-edited with Carvajal an anthology of new short stories by writers from North and South America, titled
Post-Utopian SF
. A second collection was planned but abandoned after Carvajal’s death in 1999.