He has brought something to read to me, possibly a bit of the unfinished novel "The Pressures of Time," or some new beginning. In subsequent weeks one of his great stories, "The Asian Shore," takes form before my eyes. He'll go away for a day or two, turn up at my flat in late afternoon with new pages.
He removes a slice of toast from the toast rack. Crumbs fall onto the pages. He reads through them as I pour our tea.
Pictures on cave walls, fiction of both low- and highbrow caste, history, opera and musicals -- it's all a way of remembering, which is all we can do, finally. It's what I've been doing since learning of Tom's death. Both difficult people, we moved and grew apart; the braid of our lives unraveled. I thought of him often, read virtually all his books as they came out, fondly knew how important he had been to me.
Here's what else I know: He was a great writer.
Outside the science fiction world, little notice seems to have been taken of Tom's death. Not that he fit at all comfortably in that world either, mind you. He was one of a kind, possessed of a particular, quirkily American genius, forever on the fence between the literary and the pulpish, poetry and fiction, realism and the fantastic, genteel and aggressive, uptown, downtown.
He wrote some of the best short stories ever put to page. A lot of the best short stories ever put to page. And his novels, especially "Camp Concentration," "334" and "On Wings of Song," for their quality and their influence, merit a place among the classics of SF. Add reams of astute criticism, hundreds of poems, marvelous romps like "Black Alice."
Making their way to the inmost chambers of caves, bypassing other interiors that seem to us just as suitable, our ancestors covered walls with their paintings. We've little idea what purposes (social? religious?) the chambers served, all those detailed renderings, those grand animals. But there in privacy a few invented, for us all, the entire vocabulary of our arts: image, narrative, celebration, form. They speak to us still: We were here. This is what we saw. This is how we experienced our world.
So it is with each individual writer or artist today.
Style is not about word choice, cadence, sentence structure, point of view, momentum; finally, it's not even about writing well.
Style is, finally, the direct reflection of how the writer connects with his or her world, the way in which he or she lets us see our world anew, new perspectives, new visions, new glimmers of comprehension here in darkness.
Tom has left the cave.
