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CONTENTS
Dale Bailey: In His Dominion
Barry N. Malzberg
The Resurrection Man's Legacy
Death and Suffrage
The Anencephalic Fields
Home Burial
Quinn's Way
Touched
The Census Taker
Exodus
Cockroach
Sheep's Clothing
In Green's Dominion
Story Notes
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Dale Bailey: In His Dominion
I thought this would be easy.
Well, why not? I have done my fair share of this kind of polar writing over the
decades, starting almost thirty years ago with some remarks in Science Fiction Review on
Gene Wolfe's short story "Cues," know the turns, the byways, the happenstance and
controlled clamor of this matter as well as anyone in the room. Rounds are rounds: earlier
this year when Karen Joy Fowler asked me what I was writing I said, "Oh, introductions,
commentaries, afterwords, columns, the usual employment of the living dead," which is
another way of saying that there is something of a life when the torrent of creation is no
more. But this introduction - which I more or less requested, which I would have fought
to write had it not been offered - this introduction has not been at all easy. "Daunting" is
the word; the days and weeks have eroded immediacy; now the end of the year and the
publisher's urgency portend and this seemingly easy work has become monumental to
contemplate: I want to do this remarkable writer, probably the finest fantasist to have
entered the genre in the 1990s, his full due and yet how, outside the context of the stories,
can I do this?
What I want to say, all that I need to say in effect is "Read this collection. It is
absolutely signatory; like John Varley's The Persistence of Vision in 1979 or Theodore
Sturgeon's Without Sorcery in 1948, it announces a completely formed, irreplaceable
talent at the beginning of a remarkable career. There is nothing unpolished, nothing
unformed in this work; Bailey arrived virtually complete and these novelettes, glittering
and exquisitely transmuted, are their own introduction and assurance." That would be a
sufficiency.
But it would probably not be a sufficiency for the publisher who has the right to
expect a little more. So the days and weeks have expanded to months and into the full
sprawl of belatedness and now I must try to say more or give it up. I do not wish to give it
up; there are certainly people who could write a more eloquent introduction but none -
outside of his immediate family, I shakily announce - who have for the novelettes of
Dale Bailey the admiration that I do. Primacy of place; fervor should count for
something. Fervor is not contemptible as John Calvin probably said. Sometimes it can be
the making of a man.
But give the author the voice. Here is just a little bit of what Bailey can do:
«#
Higher still, the hawk might have seen the town entire: a small place fast in its
bowl of hills, tethered to the bustling world beyond by a few narrow strands of
gray concrete, cracked and weather pitted, rent by the deep-thirsting roots of the
great trees, the wild wood, the ancient forest rising up to hem the town in, to
surround it, to envelop it with the threat and promise of an older world, the powers
and dominions of a world that could be beaten back, cut down, that could be paved
over and driven into submission with enough vigilance and determination, but that
would ever and again reassert its presence, in the shriek of the hawk itself
maybe-
-come to me-
-drifting down the wind, or in the first blade of grass to thrust through the frost-
heaved macadam of some abandoned parking lot; and, yet higher, reaching now to
the very limits of its great wings and peering down through shreds of thin high
vapor, might have seen even this disappear, might have seen the very curve of the
Earth, might have seen all this and more and still not seen the lie in the old
woman's heart. ("In Green's Dominion")
«#
And here a closing peroration:
«#
They demand nothing of us, after all. They seek no end we can perceive or
understand. Perhaps they are nothing more than what we make of them, or what
they enable us to make of ourselves. And so we go on, mere lodgers in a world of
unpeopled graves, subject ever to the remorseless scrutiny of the dead. ("Death
and Suffrage")
«#
Raymond Chandler noted in a famous letter (and here I will paraphrase) that
editors object to lines in a detective story such as: "Then, as he walked across the street,
the sun cast its broken light through the buildings until it pooled into shadows on the
concrete" because such sentences in no way seemed to advance the plot. To the contrary,
Chandler wrote, it was just this kind of writing which however unknowingly the reader
did want . . . fiction lived through its background, through details not directly connected
to plot. Any writer who did not understand this was something less than a writer.
And these stories, of course, are precisely to that point; they live, they are flooded
by the light of circumstance. It is this circumstance which becomes inextricably bound to
characters and situation, which cannot be disentangled. "In Green's Dominion" makes
remarkable use of those Andrew Marvell lines - "green thought in a green shade" -
and what is perhaps most interesting here is that Walter Tevis's great novel, The Hustler
(1959) uses those lines as epigraph and grafts them to the center of narrative as Dale
Bailey has done here, no less compellingly. "Touched" is one of the very few stories I
know - Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych" in fact may be the only comparison -
which trembles with uncertain and terrible implication all the way to its last paragraph,
furnishes a last paragraph then which, if it were only one line longer, the reader (or at
least this reader) thinks would somehow explain everything . . . but holds back on that
line, plants it instead by retrospect in the body of the story so that somehow that true
meaning must be extracted by the reader rather than given by the writer. Tour de force? I
know of nothing quite like this in the literature of modern fantasy. Nor do I know
anything like "Cockroach" which as an anatomization of the anxiety of parturition (I
refrain from saying any more) is unduplicable.
Flabbergasting.
Like Buddy Glass faced in Salinger's Seymour: An Introduction with the task of
somehow explaining his brother, a kind weakness overcomes me; not so much a
dereliction or flagging as an utter insufficiency. I withdraw from what Buddy would have
called this little whore's cubicle of the introducer, like a stagehand I drag that cubicle
from the line of sight. The rest of this volume is not but Dale Bailey's; he is nothing like
anyone who has come before and everyone who comes after will be in his penumbra.
Like The Persistence of Vision this is a first collection which could be the collection of a
lifetime . . . but how wonderful to know that it is not and that the author was not thirty-
four when the contents were completed. Oh, the places he (and we) will go!
Barry N. Malzberg
Teaneck, New Jersey
December 2002
Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Science fiction, American, Fantasy fiction, American