Hallo David. Thanks for inserting A Rebours into the, ah, discourse. Leaping back from the world of odd fictions to the lives of real if odd people, we have the assertion about the illustrator and excellent writer Edward Gorey that although his little books referred to some sort of Victorian-cum-Edwardian England, he never saw much of today's England, having gone for a visit and after seeing Bath, which might well have been more agreeable to him than, let us say, Stafford, he decided not to see the Fair Isle in its post-1945 fullness.
For that matter, and here I quote from memory, we have the American travel writer Paul Theroux, who has spent a fair amount of time in England, on why the American humorist S. J. Perelman had first relocated to England then gone back to New York: "Sid was too much an Anglophile to like England very much."
I've never lived in England but I did visit during the 1970s, for the first time in 1970. I have two lines of connection with Ballard and new wave science fiction, so called. One is that I read some of it when young, and one of my college classmates was Robert Silverberg, with whom I was then acquainted. He got himself involved with writing the newer kind of SF and knew his counterparts in England.
The other line of connection was that one of my girl friends of the 1960s, in my native New York, lived in an apartment where her upstairs neighbors included John Clute and his wife, and Tom Disch, who had not yet begun to write SF for publication. To write SF at all. He was a poet to begin with, but during the time I knew him he began writing SF of a kind and found almost instant acceptance and acclaim. Another upstairs neighbor was Pamela Zoline, a studio artist who later wrote a few knockout short stories.
All four of those people moved to England. When I first set foot in London I looked them up and found myself invited to stay, I don't know whether as a bird of passage or as a resident, at Jim Haynes's New Arts Laboratory. I didn't do it and perhaps ought to have. On the Paris side, I am pretty sure I was right to turn down George Whitman's invitation to stay at his bookshop Shakespeare & Co. That would have been a New-Englandish gulag experience, but the New Arts Lab wouldn't have been.
Best not to dwell on either What Might Have Been or what it has all come to.
In the matter of possibly wearing out one's welcome at FPN, do you think all this about the world of English cum American science fiction writers (or in the case of John Clute, editors) may perhaps have wandered too far from the subject of writing with a fountain pen? We might continue this by PM or email, although I imagine there is some saving remnant at FPN that would like to read about Moorcock as remembered forty years on, early Thomas Disch, regrets that Pam Zoline didn't make a career as a writer, and related subjects.
Edited by Jerome Tarshis, 30 November 2012 - 17:00.