The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (79 page)

The “beautiful trick” that van Vogt would pull off in
Slan
was to tell his story from the point of view of an isolated, ignorant and immature superman—a young and vulnerable boy on the run, seeking to learn more about himself and his kind.

And this was something that John Campbell could accept. Not only would he be willing to concede that a superman who wasn’t very old and didn’t know all that much might be within the power of ordinary human beings to comprehend, but he would be thoroughly delighted with van Vogt for demonstrating the insufficiency of an accepted truth. There was nothing Campbell liked better than that.

So much did Campbell like it, in fact, that he would adopt the narrative argument of
Slan
as his own and attempt to pass the lesson he’d learned on to others. Here is how Campbell would phrase that lesson in a letter to Clifford Simak:

The super-
man
can’t be fully portrayed. But since ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, a super-human must, during boyhood and adolescence, pass through the human level; there will be a stage of his development when he is less than adult-human, another stage when he is equal to adult-human—and the final stage when he has passed beyond our comprehension. The situation can be handled, then, by established faith, trust, understanding and sympathy with the
individual as a character
by portraying him in his not-greater-than adult human stages—and allow the established trust and belief to carry over to the later and super-human stage.
⁶⁴⁴

This Campbell-eye view of
Slan
would be accurate and perceptive—but only as far as it went. For instance, it would be quite true that van Vogt would portray his superman, Jommy Cross, at different moments in his early life—in boyhood, in adolescence, and as a young man. But to van Vogt, these different points would not represent a series of discrete stages, climaxed by a leap to some single final stage of supermanhood in which Jommy passes beyond our power to understand. Rather, they would delineate a steeply rising curve of growth that might well continue on to even higher levels.

For van Vogt, being a superman was a relative condition, not an absolute one. Because he was more able and together than an ordinary human being, Jommy Cross would be
a
superman. But he wouldn’t be
the
superman—the one and only kind of superman there could be—in the old Techno Age sense.

Again, Campbell would be perfectly correct in noting that trust and belief in Jommy’s motives and behavior were established when it was easiest, while he was a helpless, hunted, innocent kid. There can be no doubt that van Vogt, the writer who had evoked empathy with blobby creeping androids and id-thirsty tentacled cat-monsters, spared no effort to hook the reader into making an emotional identification with his nine-year-old telepathic boy with golden tendrils in his hair, separated from his mother on a city street and forced to flee for his life.

What’s more, he would make the boy an unflagging idealist as well, and completely convince the reader of Jommy’s constant desire to find out the truth and to do right.

Where Campbell would be mistaken, however, would be in thinking that Jommy Cross’s innocence and idealism were only a narrative ploy, a device to gain reader identification and sympathy. In fact, Jommy Cross’s purity would have its own reason for being. It would be the very essence of what van Vogt was attempting to express in this novel.

The central plot-problem of
Slan
would be young Jommy’s struggle against all the old Techno Age stereotypes which insisted that the superman must be a remote, unfeeling, hyper-intellectual—Big Brain’s younger brother. Jommy would be told that this was the true nature of his own kind, the tendrilled slans. Again and again he would be offered reason to perceive them as utterly cold and ruthless and cruel.

In the meantime, however, through his own maturation and gradual self-discovery, Jommy would demonstrate what it really might be like to be a superior human being. We’d see for ourselves that a superman didn’t necessarily have to be brainy, heartless and amoral, because Jommy himself would not be at all like that.

Jommy Cross would be the first example of a new and radically different sort of Earth-born superman—good and noble and altruistic.

It was van Vogt’s holistic sense of an organic, evolving, inter-connected universe that permitted him to reconceive the superman in these terms. More than permitted him—compelled him.

If the universe was indeed a whole and not merely a jumble of unrelated parts, then it was obvious to van Vogt that true superiority must consist in being relatively more in tune with the purposes of the whole. To be superior was to be more integrated and less partial. To better approximate the wholeness of the whole.

However, it would be one thing for van Vogt to come to an apprehension of this
gestalt
—to have a sudden gut awareness that there was a novel demanding to be written about a superman whose superiority ultimately lies in his relatively greater integration with the purposes of the universe—and another to actually write the story. Like most of van Vogt’s work,
Slan
was completed only with considerable effort.

Because van Vogt was so often vague and implausible and had so little concern for exact factuality, there would be those among the readership of
Astounding
who would take him for a hasty and careless writer. That wouldn’t exactly be the case, however.

The truth of the matter was that A.E. van Vogt toiled endlessly over the stories he wrote. He wasn’t facile—anything but. It was often difficult for him to find any words, let alone the right words set down in the right way to express the images and relationships that came to him in dreams or sudden flashes.

Like a Romantic of the previous century, he struggled to express the all-but-inexpressible: his sense of where transcendence was to be found. And with his eye fixed on the whole of things, he was always capable of tripping over the English language and taking a header.

It wasn’t that van Vogt had no ear at all for the language. One of his real pleasures in writing lay in coining names like Coeurl and Xtl and Jommy Cross. And he loved what he liked to call “the great pulp music,”
⁶⁴⁵
and aimed to emulate it, most successfully in his ringing final lines.

But the truth must be admitted—his prose wasn’t as consistently clear as Asimov’s, as consciously clever as Heinlein’s, or as exquisitely cadenced as Theodore Sturgeon’s. Van Vogt was capable of bashing words together in the most dismaying manner without seeming to take any notice of the damage he was inflicting. One example of this is the phrase “ ‘fix-up’ novel”—but there have been and will be others that we may quote without lingering over.

At the some time, however, it is also true that a considerable portion of what looked to be clumsiness on van Vogt’s part was in fact deliberate and hard-won technique: A word used more deliberately for its sound value than for its meaning in order to set up some subliminal resonance. Or a provocative vagueness introduced in order to prevent his readers from understanding too clearly and exactly what was happening and thereby losing their sense of mystery. As van Vogt would eventually say:

Each paragraph—sometimes each sentence—of my brand of science fiction has a gap in it, an unreality condition. In order to make it real, the reader must add the missing parts. He cannot do this out of his past associations. There
are
no past associations. So he must fill in the gap from the creative part of his brain.

On several different occasions, van Vogt would offer this passage as an example of what he meant by this kind of writing: “The human-like being reached into what looked like a fold of skin, and drew out a tiny silver-bright object. It pointed this shining thing at Hagin.”
⁶⁴⁶

But so difficult and trying did van Vogt find it to write in this way—in dream-born, emotion-charged, headlong sentences, each with its own special element of oddness or not-thereness—that there were times when he would more than half-envy those SF writers like L. Ron Hubbard who could just sit down at the typewriter and bang out finished story copy as fast as they could type.

He would think of writers like that as intuitional—and himself as not. Indeed, van Vogt’s own self-description would be: “The writer with the slowest natural intuition—meaning the least naturally talented, in terms of normal creativity availability—of any successful writer that I, personally, have ever met.”
⁶⁴⁷

It was van Vogt’s firm belief that it was only his systems for contacting his unconscious processes and for writing stories that allowed him to produce science fiction at all. He would say: “People do not seem to realize that form does not bind. It frees. If your form seems to constrain you, learn others. . . .”
⁶⁴⁸

We should also take note, however, that at another moment he would say: “I mean, I’m always trying to write by methods, see. I’m mad about methods and I sometimes feel that’s the only thing that makes my stories worth it, but it’s really not true. There is a place for method in writing, but I’ve overdone that many times and had to back away from it and start all over.”
⁶⁴⁹

So here we have A.E. van Vogt, for whom words always came with a certain difficulty, systematically at work on his first novel, the revisionist superman story
Slan.
It would take considerable self-alignment and constant self-monitoring to produce this story. But, with the aid of his methods for contacting his creativity and engaging the intuition of his reader, and the further systems he used to guide him in the construction of his stories, science-fictional sentence by science-fictional sentence and scene by scene, van Vogt would inch his way along, only occasionally having to back away and start over.

Making
Slan
go slower, however, was the fact that van Vogt was a part-time SF writer who had to steal his moments to work as best he could. Most of his attention was required elsewhere.

Until two months after the publication of “Black Destroyer,” van Vogt still continued to write trade paper interviews for the likes of
Hardware and Metal, Sanitary Engineer
and
Canadian Grocer.
But then, in September 1939, Hitler’s armies invaded Poland and World War II began, and Canada was carried into the war along with the rest of the British Empire.

Poor eyesight rendered van Vogt unfit for active military service. But the Civil Service, rummaging through its files, recalled him as someone who had worked on the census eight years before. A telegram was sent to van Vogt offering him a job as a Clerk II in the Department of National Defence.

In his heart, van Vogt didn’t really want to take this job. Working as a low-level paper-pusher once again felt like taking a big step backward. But he thought that everyone should try to be of some use in the war effort, so he accepted the offer.

He traveled to Ottawa by bus, leaving Edna in Winnipeg to pack, sell their furniture, and follow. It was November by then, and the newspapers told them there were only fourteen apartments to be had in the entire city. They felt highly fortunate to locate a nice place to live, even though the monthly rent was $75 and van Vogt’s take-home pay was just $81.

The gap between his pay and their actual living expenses could be made up for a time out of the money for the furniture they had sold back home. But it was evident that if they wished to eat, to meet the time payments on their new furniture, and to have such amenities as a phone, a working stove, or lights, it was going to be necessary for van Vogt to push ahead and finish that novel of his and bring home some writing income.

But the new job didn’t leave him very much time for it. Van Vogt had his Sundays free, and half a day on Saturday, but for the most part he did his writing in the evenings, when he wasn’t too tired. He’d come home from the job, eat dinner, take a short nap, and then press on with
Slan
until eleven at night.

At the times when it was going well, he could complete a scene in longhand during a single writing session. And sometimes, especially toward the end when the narrative had gained a momentum of its own, it might be two scenes. Then, the next day while he was off at work, Edna would transcribe what he had written.

It took six months for van Vogt to write his story, all the time existing in such a state of tension that he was constantly waking and worrying over his novel in the middle of the night. Somehow, however, between Campbell’s pronouncements, his own vision of things, his conscious methods for writing, his dreams, his urgent need for money, and the ever-dwindling amount of time he had in which to write, he finally managed to complete
Slan
in the late spring of 1940.

Van Vogt rushed his novel off to John Campbell, who not only received it with considerable pleasure but backed his enthusiasm with a swift check which included a highly welcome quarter-of-a-cent per word bonus.

Van Vogt says: “Checks from Campbell were always prompt. He evidently knew writers starved, because you could send him a story and, apparently, he’d read it almost immediately, and put the check through.”
⁶⁵⁰

Slan
would be serialized in
Astounding
from September to December 1940, and would be far and away the best-liked story published in the magazine that year—more popular than either Robert Heinlein’s story of the overthrow of the Prophets, “ ‘If This Goes On—,’ ” or L. Ron Hubbard’s endless war story,
Final Blackout.

But what a completely unusual story
Slan
actually was! The more closely it was examined, the stranger and more elusive it had to seem. Like all of van Vogt’s early stories, except for his most recent, “Repetition,” it had that bizarre, intense, dreamlike quality—but this time at the extended length of a novel.

At the outset of
Slan,
nine-year-old Jommy Cross and his mother are on a city street, surrounded by an unseen but mentally sensed circle of hostile humans. People blame the slans for their use of the mutation machines of ancient scientist Samuel Lann, which have caused ordinary humanity to give birth not only to slan babies, but also to grotesque failures and botches. They aim to exterminate the tendrilled telepaths.