The House of Rumour (40 page)

It was probably the recognition he received for
Lords of the Black Sun
that gained him entry to Robert Heinlein’s celebrated SF salon in Los Angeles – the Mañana Literary Society. In Anthony Boucher’s
roman-à-clef Rocket to the Morgue
(1943), based on the Mañana group, Zagorski is clearly identifiable as Matt Duncan, the ‘up-and-coming young science-fictioneer’, alongside fictional versions of Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, Williamson and the rocket scientist Jack Parsons. There was much interest in alternate realities among this circle, as well as in the exploration of propagations of influence and even complex quantum notions like backward causation. In Boucher’s novel, Austin Carter, Heinlein’s alter ego, writes a story that proposes a world where far-left democrat Upton Sinclair wins in California while Roosevelt loses in 1936, causing a schism in the nation, civil war and the eventual ‘establishment on the West Coast of the first English-speaking socialist republic’. It was to be called ‘EPIC’ (with a nod to the End Poverty in California campaign that Heinlein had been part of).

‘Heinlein was something of a radical back then,’ Zagorski was to recollect in the 1960s. ‘I don’t know what happened to him later.’ It was at Heinlein’s salon that he first met friend and erstwhile collaborator, the Cuban SF writer Nemo Carvajal. ‘Interesting times for American science fiction,’ notes Carvajal. ‘The future was bound up in ideology, so even the space-opera writers could scarcely avoid a political critique in their work.’6 Indeed, the genre itself was ideal for geopolitical speculation and there emerged a collective and progressive approach to a world-view made possible by projections in time and space.

Larry was in love with Mary-Lou Gunderson, a fellow writer (later director, producer and television executive), but it remained unrequited. The year 1941 saw the emergence of jonbar points, in Zagorski’s life as well as that of the planet. ‘He was a shy and sensitive kid,’ remarked Gunderson, ‘the last person you would imagine going to war.’7 Yet the day after Pearl Harbor, that great point of divergence in American history, he signed up with the USAAF for combat duty.

Zagorski served as a radio operator in a B-24, flying bombing missions over Germany and occupied Europe. It was a harrowing experience as the conditions under which the air war was fought were extremely harsh. The long-range sorties were exhausting, some lasting over eight hours and in sub-zero temperatures with the crews wearing electrically heated suits and oxygen masks. Larry was to describe the experience as a ‘lethal parody of all my childhood dreams of flight and space travel’. Any simple technical malfunction could prove fatal and frozen oxygen lines could cause death from hypoxia. Then there were the swarms of enemy fighters and the flak from 88mm anti-aircraft batteries or the 108mm radar-controlled guns. The chances of surviving the thirty-mission requirement were very slim indeed.

‘Along the azimuth arc, from zenith to horizon flew death, and down below we saw planetary destruction, cities turned to moonscape, and we smiled.’ So begins ‘Fee, Fi, Foo, Fum’, one of the few stories he wrote that directly recall his experience of the war. The crew of a B-24 witness strange craft in the stratosphere:

‘Foo! Foo!’ went the call on the intercom. That nonsense word from some alien dialect. But the radioman knew what it meant. He had tuned himself in to them, ignoring all the arguments about whether such things were hallucinations, Nazi prototypes, or from another world. He knew what
foo
meant: it meant the future. Something had broken through the space–time continuum; that’s what they were seeing. A vision of what was to come, of the even greater terrors that awaited them in the heavens.

Returning home, Larry took his share of a collective post-war trauma. For a year or so he lived with his mother, supporting them both on his GI Bill allowance. And for some time he turned away from SF. All its predictive powers seemed used up, its dread fantasies of power made real. The future seemed a bleak choice between unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.

Between 1946 and 1947 he attempted a mainstream novel.
The Attendant
is set in an unspecified institution where the protagonist Tommy Buhl works, having been invalided out of the military following a nervous breakdown. He tries to make sense of what has happened to him as he plods through a dreary daily schedule. In a series of recollections, he is constantly in search of the point in his life where it all went wrong.
The Attendant
meanders aimlessly in its surviving 436-page draft, though it features several strong supporting characters, most notably the Mexican fortune-teller Angel Fernandez and the army air force chaplain Ignatius Creed. Zagorski failed to find a publisher for it.

It was during a trip to Mexico in 1948 that Nemo Carvajal and Larry came up with the story that was to become the script idea for the film
Fugitive Alien
. Directed by Mary-Lou Gunderson, starring Trey Anderson and Sharleen Stirling,
Fugitive Alien
(1950) is one of the many B-movies that cashed in on the flying saucer craze. It was cheaply made and rich in the Cold War atmospherics of paranoia and suspicion. Unlikely stories about its production persist to this day, most notably the rumour that there are references in the dialogue to an actual secret air force memorandum on UFOs.8

What is certain is that Nemo and Larry argued quite vehemently over proposed script changes during the shooting. Larry fell in love with the leading lady. He married Sharleen Stirling on 4 October 1951. Nemo Carvajal went back to Cuba that same year.

The 1950s were an extremely productive time for Larry, though not all of his work saw the light of day. In a decade he wrote nineteen novels (five of which were published), fifty-seven stories (twenty-eight of which he managed to sell), and eleven scripts for the
Dimension X
radio programme (two of which were made).

Larry found something of a champion for his work in Anthony Boucher, whom he had known from the Mañana days and who had begun editing
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF)
in 1949. Urbane and generous of spirit, Boucher was to nurture many of the more left-field SF writers, most notably the young Philip K. Dick. Boucher favoured intelligent fantasy over the ‘hard-science’ school and was keen to promote a more literary style within the genre. He had, after all, produced the first English translation of Borges and sold it to what was more or less a pulp magazine (his rendering of ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ appeared in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
in 1948).

F&SF
was an ideal home for Larry’s work at this time. His stories had become increasingly fractured and recursive. Zagorski insisted to Boucher that he was no longer interested in prophecy, but rather ‘prodrome, that is, the early symptoms of an oncoming disease, an aura of disquiet’. He never liked to distinguish between what was ‘fantasy’ and what was ‘science fiction’. He confided to
F&SF
’s editor that the stories he placed with them were ‘inner projections of character, memoirs of the imagination’. In ‘Dummy’ (1954), a prisoner convicted of an unnamed crime and convinced of his innocence digs a tunnel via the ventilation grille in his cell. He makes a dummy to leave as a decoy for when he escapes. The construction of the mannequin starts to obsess him, particularly the sculpting of the face, which takes on a ‘lurid grimace that seemed to mock his protestations of guiltlessness’. One morning the guards search his cell. The tunnel is revealed but the dummy is missing. It has escaped, and in the months that follow the prisoner begins to hear of ghastly misdeeds committed by his puppet doppelgänger.

The other main market for Larry’s work in the 1950s was Ace Books, where they were a good deal less sensitive with his material. One of the editors there, Donald A. Woolheim, a science fiction fan and veteran of the pulp years, would publish SF in ‘Ace Doubles’, a cheap format that bound two novels together, head to toe, with lurid covers on both sides. Titles were regularly changed to match the glib and sensationalist cover art, so that Zagorski’s
Parker Klebb’s Purgatorio
became
A King of Infinite Space
(1955) and his
With Splendour of His Precious Eye
was transformed into
The Prophet from Proxima 6
(1956). One of Woolheim’s fellow editors at Ace, Terry Carr, is reported to have remarked: ‘If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double, it would be cut down to two twenty-thousand-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as “Master of Chaos” and the New Testament as “The Thing with Three Souls”.’ By the end of the decade, professionally at least, things were looking up.  In 1957, Larry secured a two-book deal with the prestigious hardcover publisher Doubleday, the second of which was to prove his breakthrough novel. But in the meantime his private life was falling apart.

All through the 1950s his prolific output was fuelled by a considerable intake of amphetamines. This was augmented by a heavy barbiturate habit that Larry relied on to bring him down from all the uppers he was taking, and a steady recreational use of marijuana and alcohol. Consistently existing in an altered mental state often inspired astonishing bursts of creativity, but it proved profoundly destructive in his emotional relationships.

He had married Sharleen Stirling in haste, after a brief but intense infatuation. ‘She had an unearthly, ethereal beauty,’ he recalled. ‘If I’m honest she reminded me of those beautiful alien girls I’d gawped at as a teenager on the cover of
Wonder
or
Planet Stories
. I loved her but I was still emotionally immature and weighed down with psychological problems I hadn’t dealt with.’ Sharleen herself had long-term mental health issues and her once promising acting career was falling apart. ‘She believed what I wrote was real and I fed off her psychosis as inspiration for my characters. It was parasitical.’

The Translucent Man
(1957), the first of his books for Doubleday, was indifferently received but
American Gnostic
(1958) achieved considerable critical acclaim and went on to become a paperback best-seller. This success, however, coincided with Sharleen’s mental breakdown and their subsequent divorce in 1960.

A harsh satire on the nation’s perverse relationship with both materialism and spirituality combined with a dystopian vision of the near-future,
American Gnostic
is an exemplar of what Kingsley Amis described, in his 1962 critique of SF,
New Maps of Hell
, as a ‘comic inferno’. Set in a twenty-first century where religion and culture are based on a ‘pulp mythology’ (fictional entities like Doc Savage and Batman are accepted as historical figures, while real people such as John Wayne and Greta Garbo have been transformed into deities), the established church is the Cult of Futurology founded by SF writer Lucas D. Hinkel. The economy is centred on sacramental consumerism and an overambitious space programme that is not only draining industrial and natural resources but is in stasis due to technological shortcomings (spacecraft landings on other planets are faked in ‘holovision’ studios). There is a growing faith in the coming of a being from outer space to save a polluted and overpopulated world, and fraudulent appearances are reported every week. John Six, a real extraterrestrial, finally does appear and, after a brief spell as the ‘Space Messiah’, elects to become the host of the holovision game-show
All-American Alien
.

The success of the novel crossed over into mass consciousness, particularly among younger readers, and it became a cult book of the 1960s. Overnight Larry Zagorski was hip, and
American Gnostic
, like
Stranger in a Strange Land
and
Naked Lunch
, became one of the iconic SF titles talked about in coffee bars and passed around college campuses.

Three novels with Doubleday followed:
Stupor Mundi
(1960),
Psychopomp
(1961) and
Laugh at This Hereafter
(1962). Zagorski was adopted by the nascent hippie movement and he rapidly adopted their style. Despite having just turned forty, he moved into a shared house in Venice Beach and began what was to be an eight-year stint of communal living. He weaned himself off the uppers and downers; he began experimenting with mescaline, LSD, counter-cultural pursuits and radical politics.

Soon after the terrifying jonbar moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, he attempted to set up the Non-Aligned Science Fiction Writers Association with his old friend Nemo Carvajal. The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem rejected an invitation to join because of his extremely low opinion of American SF. The proposed NASFWA did not last very long in any case. Zagorski quickly fell out with Carvajal who, in accordance with the principles of the Posadist Fourth International of which he was a member, believed that nuclear war could be a good thing in that it might ‘finish off capitalism for good’. Larry was horrified by Nemo’s insistence that the NASFWA should issue a statement, declaring that ‘Atomic War is inevitable, humanity will quickly pass through this necessary stage into a new society – socialism.’ He swiftly disbanded the association and responded with the story ‘Sycorax Island’, which appeared in
Galaxy
magazine in 1963.