18 Clifford Simak – Time Is The Easiest Thing.

I once wrote that I have little interest in SF from before I was born.  I know that’s hardly fair on the Bester’s and the Cordwainer Smith’s that were busy then, but really I have no time for Van Vogt, Anderson and co. 

Simak, however, is a different matter.  This 1961 novel is quite dated in many ways, stylistically, and in its characterisation, yet it has a charm that many of its contemporaries never had.  As in his classic (and actually far better) Way Station Simak is able to offer a satisfyingly alien entity, an affectionate but honest portrait of the Midwest, and intriguing social commentary too.

It is impossible to read a 1961 novel which includes ‘paranormals’ (or parries) being persecuted, lynched and segregated without thinking of the Civil Rights movement.  Perhaps wisely Simak doesn’t labour his point, just allows us to identify warmly with the ones who prove to be the victims. 

The initial premise of Time is of an alien Pinkness trading minds with paranormal explorer Shep so that he returns with a little bit of alien in his mind.  The day after I read this, I was shown a poem by Langston Hughes, ‘Theme for English B’ with its lines

You are white---
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that's true!

I have no idea whether Simak knew of Hughes poem, but the sentiment seems to be one at the heart of Time Is The Easiest Thing.

“A half-century after he found love nibbling pig knuckles down at the end of Clinton Street, Orlo Pound’s ashes lay in a candy tin the scavenger had rescued from the mud room of a Holy Land rowhouse.”

By the end of those thirty-seven words, the first sentence of ‘Down At The End Of Clinton Street’ I was hooked on this collection of stories illustrating the secret love affair of Orlo and Leini.  Their cross-cultural affair, she Greek, he of Anglo-Irish stock, lasts fifty years, survives her forced marriage to the misfortunate George to become, finally an open secret.

Alvarez finds poetry in the everyday, beauty in the mundane, and as much as this charming book is about the instant, deep and permanent love of two people for each other, it is also about his love for his hometown, and that fifty year span allows him to show its changes and its survival too.  How its people have sometimes and somehow interacted across the races and the classes to make their way.

There is a rawness of style to this memoir that gives it a voice in keeping with its subject matter, recalling spoken word, in slang, digression, and attitude.

It is the autobiography of a young woman from Baltimore, daughter of a crack addict, fostered almost from birth.  She learns the ways of the street, is aggressive, fearless and wild.  Until the night she is attacked and her only defense is shooting the woman she thought was about to kill her.

Out of jail after 5 years she tries to get out of ‘The Life’ to go straight.  A relationship (with one of her farmer prisoner warders) goes sour.  She gets a job, then loses it despite working hard, because of her record.  This happens again.  And again.  So back running corners she runs into the actor Michael K Williams in a gay club, he gets her a screen test.

Snoop, under her real name, makes her debut in Season 3 of The Wire and becomes a prominent figure in Seasons 4 and 5.  For part of this time the real Snoop still ran her corner, was still ‘in the game’ but eventually she makes her choice.

As an account of how an intelligent young person can get caught up in trouble even whilst trying to keep her head down, and how there is a way out, Grace After Midnight is an important book,  As Snoop says “Acting feelings showed me how I hadn’t been feeling anything” and that’s a key insight.

When jazz trumpet star Joss Moody dies the world learns that he was really a woman, spending over 40 years with his breasts bound, in men’s clothing,.and avoiding situations where he might be discovered.

Trumpet however isn’t his story, of how he lived that way.  It is the story of those around him, particularly his widow, Millie, and his adopted son, Colman.  It is the story of how people identify, and are identified.  Joss was black, Millie white, both Scots, their son brought up in London.

Jackie Kay, herself a Scot of mixed parents and openly lesbian, does several things in her debut novel.  Most movingly she gives a potent, elegiacal voice to Millie.  None of the rest would work if Millie’s grieving didn’t carry the reader.  Equally she conveys the anguish and rage of Colman who feels betrayed by both his parents.  (Millie of course knew Joss’ secret.)  Kay also unsentimentally addresses aging through Millie and through Joss’ mother.

In Colman’s reflections on hi experiences growing up as a young black man Kay manages the delicate balance of showing both actual racism and how the insidious presence of racism leads to anticipation of racism even when it isn’t there. 

In another strand an unscrupulous self-absorbed journalist seeks to write an expose best seller about Joss the woman.  In one telling chapter the drummer Big Red tells her bluntly that he never suspected anything: “Women think that men spend all their time gawking at the size of each other’s pricks in the bogs.”  In one neat sentence Kay has pointed up one notorious failing of some male writers attempting to write women.

What Trumpet finally asserts is that Joss is his real identity.  The strength of this beautifully told tale is not its analysis of grief, race, gender, age, nationality, sexuality or love.  It is how she sensitively expresses all of these things and conveys the fundamental truth that identity is what we choose it to be, not what others seek to impose upon us.