A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (24 page)

In June of 1973, then, I signed my first contract for a novel; my delivery date was September 15, 1973, but I probably overshot it: Jeri delivered our daughter, Stephanie, before I delivered my novel. When I did get the book in to Betty and her assistant, Judy-Lynn del Rey (née Benjamin), they agreed that reading it was like watching a colorful alien pageant “through a waterfall.” Revisions seemed called for.

In either late 1973 or early 1974, Betty Ballantine flew down to Athens from New York to talk with me about the novel. Jeri and I put her up in our drafty rented house on Virginia Avenue. For one long weekend, with a welcome break for a catfish or barbecue dinner at an outlying eatery known as the Swamp Guinea, we pored over the manuscript. Betty explained why Gunnar Balduin could not—
should
not—be the cynical backstabber that I’d made him and how to remove the verbal waterfall veiling the novel’s events.

After reviewing my book chapter by chapter in New York, Betty wrote one or more typed pages detailing the problems with each one. I kept these pages with me when she left Athens and did my damnedest to comply with her instructions to turn
Funeral
into an interplanetary thriller with a strong anthropological dimension and a pervasive aura of neo-Shakespearean tragedy. In fact, almost from the first, I had seen my novel as an Elizabethan drama in tie-dyed pulp clothing.

About a year after Betty’s visit, after we Bishops had moved to a Victorian house in Pine Mountain, Georgia, the novel appeared. Square on its paperback’s cover stood a gem-eyed alien, nude but visible from only the waist up. The faceted green jewels of its eyes gave it the look of a
humanoid BEM, or bug-eyed monster, and the “vestigial scar” replacing its evolutionarily obsolete mouth curved upward in a dismaying grin-cum-smirk. Also, Gene Szafran, the artist, had depicted this alien as pink-skinned as any card-carrying Caucasian. The sky above this naked humanoid creature was a somewhat darker pink. Behind the smirking creature, a V of plant-lined terraces balanced on its shoulders like out-of-focus wings.

I didn’t hate the cover, but I knew that in this gaudy guise—a package altogether suited to the product—
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
would never bump
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
or
Sons and Lovers
from any university’s course syllabi or recommended reading lists. To me, the paperback looked like the sort that a teenage boy would thumb through under his bedcovers with a flashlight.

I was at once proud and chagrined.

Where did I get my title? The Ballantine edition of
Funeral
contained four epigrams, the first from
The Making of a Counter Culture
by Theodore Roszak: “The Shaman, then, is one who knows that there is more to be seen of reality than the waking eye sees. Besides our eyes of flesh, there are eyes of fire that burn through the ordinariness of the world and perceive the wonders and terrors beyond.” The quotation is from Chapter VIII, “Eyes of Flesh, Eyes of Fire.” In an Author’s Note to my reworked novel, published by
Pocket Books as
Eyes of Fire
early in 1980, I termed Roszak’s chapter “a trenchant essay on the conflict between the world views of the shaman and the technocrat.”

The other three epigrams in the 1975 Ballantine edition come from
On Aggression
by Konrad Lorenz, Vittorio Lanternari’s
The Religions of the Oppressed
, and
African Genesis
by Robert Ardrey. All throw light on my novel’s major themes, but I booted them out of the front matter of
Eyes of Fire
because they, like my chapter titles, now struck me as overexplicit or pretentious. Even so, the one from Lanternari may warrant repeating, for my reading of
The Religions of the Oppressed
, along with that of Le Guin’s
The Left Hand of Darkness
, prompted the line of thought underlying the moral dilemma in both versions of the book:

“In the final analysis, all the endogenous messianic movements, regardless of their cultural level, are impelled by their nature to escape from society and from the world in order to establish a society beyond history, beyond reality, and beyond the necessity of fighting to bring about change and improvement.”

In the Ballantine edition of
Funeral
, this messianic movement comprised the intuitive Ouemartsee, resistors of the technocratic Tropemen who rule the planet at large. In
Eyes of Fire,
these sectarians are the Sh’gaidu, a group of introspective, feminine, and mystical beings in contrast to the extrovert, masculine, and literal-minded rationalists who rule the continent Trope from Ardaja Huru, their capital. In short, although
Eyes of Fire
was a wholesale
reimagining
of my first novel, with new names, settings, characters, and complexity, it retained the thematic thrusts suggested by the discarded epigrams. But did the presence of these epigrams in the Ballantine original prove helpful to anyone? Did anyone care?

A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
sold poorly. It received six recommendations over the Nebula year, but did not make the final ballot. Attention in both the general press and the review columns of SF specialty magazines was at best spotty; notices that did see print were, generally, either mixed or noncommittally descriptive. Or so I remember the bulk of them today.

One review did make made a lasting impact. It appeared in the Books column of the August 1975 issue of
F&SF
. In this column, Alexei and Cory Panshin called
Funeral
“the most impressive first novel so far seen in the Seventies” and its author “one of the new and still rare breed of [sf] writer attempting to produce art without rejecting the pulp vigor that is science fiction’s continuing strength. If the cover blurbs of his book are to be believed
, A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
is just so much pulp trash. But the blurbs are a lie. Bishop is attempting to use undiluted science fiction to present a tragic action of Shakespearean dimension, a disintegrating situation comparable in its mindless destructiveness and pain to our conduct of the Vietnamese war.”

The Panshins followed this praise with a plot summary and then a rigorous catalogue of the novel’s failures and their likely causes: 1) The book’s basic situation was a “set-up”—because, wishing to write tragedy, I had designed this situation to facilitate my goal. 2) The first-person narrator existed “without knowledge, sincerity, history, or personal characteristics.” He was a “cypher whose eloquence and special vision are not his own, but Bishop’s,” for I had chosen the “safety and ease of first-person narrative” when I could have elected to view my protagonist “from the outside.”

The Panshins’ second point struck a telling chord. I
did
find first-person narration more natural and easier than third, and I feared the work I had done at Betty Ballantine’s request to make my protagonist seem less a villain than a dupe had turned him into, yes, a cypher. I began hoping that I could revise the book. After all, Arthur C. Clarke had turned
Against the Fall of Night
into
The City and the Stars
, hadn’t he? At least one precedent existed.

Precedent be damned. As an upstart SF writer struggling with Jeri’s help to stay out of debt and raise our two children, I could not afford the luxury of revising old work. The only royalty checks I had seen thus far had stemmed from the reprinting of my short fiction in best-of-the-year anthologies, and if I wanted to make a living, I had to do new work at novel length. And so I produced
And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees
(1976),
Stolen Faces
(1977),
A Little Knowledge
(1977), and a series of stories—the Urban Nucleus sequence—that I had planned, almost from the beginning, to yoke together in a noveloid “fix-up,” as Bradbury had assembled
The Martian Chronicles
, James Blish
The Seedling Stars
, and Clifford D. Simak
City
. The resultant book was
Catacomb Years
(1979), followed that same year by
Transfigurations
, and suddenly I had come to the end of a fairly sustained run and had no clear idea of what to do next.

My editor at Berkley/Putnam had been David Hartwell. When Buz Wyeth at Harper & Row declined
A Little Knowledge
, David had accepted it; he later stood behind me on the projects that became
Catacomb Years
and
Transfigurations
. But, in 1978, David left Berkley/Putnam to edit the SF program at Pocket Books, and I had to complete
Transfigurations
without his input or help. Finished, I was at an impasse. Hartwell—as he had
done before and as he did many times later—came to my rescue. Although
Funeral
still had not recouped its $2,500 advance from Ballantine, David offered me twice that sum to pull an Arthur C. Clarke. Rewrite
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
just as you’ve wanted to, he said. Go on, he urged: Get to it.

I responded with incredulity, gratitude, and hard work.

I’d learned a lot over the past four years, and Pocket Books, at Hartwell’s behest, would pay me to put that savvy to work doing something I would have jumped to do for free—if, that is, paying utility bills and keeping milk in the fridge had not loomed as major priorities.

During the late winter and the spring of 1979, I thoroughly revised
Funeral
and turned in the result before the first of June. Gunnar Balduin became Seth Latimer. The planet Glaparcus was now Gla Taus. The Ouemartsee were now the Sh’gaidu. My first-person narration had metamorphosed into third-person. And when my revision hit the bookstores, its Pocket Books paperback boasted two maps, a list of characters, and a division into books meant to reflect the five-act structure of an Elizabethan play. But its cover bore the same painting that had marked the Ballantine edition . . . except that Pocket Books had reversed it, getting it
right
for the first time. Also, the emerald eyes of the Ballantine alien had become yellow chrysoberyls. Again, only a slim chance that Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, or Susan Sontag would expatiate about my novel in the
New York Review of Books
.

Well, so what? It
was
a reprint, wasn’t it?

No. No, it wasn’t. It was a top-to-bottom revision of a
paperback space opera that had sold, like, seventy-four copies on its initial go-round. Besides, we had dropped that upsetting word
funeral
from the title, amputating it to the brief—albeit, to my mind, derivative and undistinguished—
Eyes of Fire
.

Why had we done that?

It would have been foolish to release the novel under its first title, David Hartwell had said, because a few potential purchasers—
eight
, I thought—would mistakenly assume they had already read our new version. Contrariwise, it would have been unfair to release our novel under a
totally
fresh title—my choice had been
The Isohet—
because
a few who put out cash for the Pocket Books version would think they’d paid for an alternate-universe text of the old Ballantine edition. In the first case, David said with off-putting logic, we’d cheat ourselves; in the second, our readers.
Eyes of Fire
as a title, then, was our middle course between the self-destructive white lie of
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
and the wrath-provoking deceit of
The Isohet
.

Arrrggggh, thought I.

In 1981, Pocket Books reprinted
Eyes of Fire
,
the Authorized Version. This time the novel had a bright blue jacket, and the Szafran cover painting had shrunk to a detail of the alien’s face the size of an extra-large postage stamp. (Maybe, by downplaying the creature’s nudity, Pocket hoped to attract demographic groups in addition to randy teens with flashlights.) Still, it would be a lie, and more than a white one, to hint that my novel ever threatened to become a best seller. It didn’t, and it remained out of print for a good while until a new edition appeared in England in 1989. (I wrote the first version of this afterword in June 1988.) And when Jim Goddard of Kerosina approached me about doing a limited-edition hardcover, we briefly considered calling it
The Isohet
. But I still liked
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
, and when, in a letter to Ian Watson, I alluded to our drift toward
The Isohet
, he replied frankly, zapping that title’s “unapproachability” and raising another troubling question:

“I, um, don’t care for it much, if you don’t mind my saying. Also, I think it’s a bit unfair on one’s fans & buyers to possibly confuse them thus. Okay, well, many people will buy it as a first world hardcover, a collector’s item, so they won’t worry, but suppose I was an innocent Bishop-fan who heard of a new title and I laid out the bread on getting it from a foreign land to find that I had already read it, I’d be peeved. Don’t feel so cold shouldery about . . . FUNERAL FOR THE EYES OF FIRE. It was pretty good.” He ended self-effacingly, “However, however, not my business; shut up, Watson.”

But it was his business, for he and I are comrades, even if an intervening ocean has kept us from meeting face to face. Also, Ian’s candor made me realize that the only suitable title for a new edition of my first novel—or, rather, of this re-revised version of the first one, which became the seventh—is, well,
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
. After all, from my youthful love of Bradbury to my mature appreciation of Ballard, bravura titles and bardic language played a big role in hooking me into SF writing, and it would have been a sad
self
-deceit to rebaptize the novel that solidified my early commitment to sf with a title as cold and lacking in referents as
The Isohet
.

So I didn’t.

As for the heart of this novel, the meaning of the story that grew grudgingly from a single haunting visual image, I have nothing else to say. The novel—in what I now consider its most likely final text—requires each reader to reach a private accommodation with its characters, events, and meanings. May your journey to that end prove gratifying.

— Revised December 2014

Pine Mountain, Georgia