If Ever A Wiz There Was —

RIP GENE WOLFE

Gene Wolfe once told me, “You’ve never tasted a potato chip, until you’ve bitten into a Pringles fresh out of the oven.” (An oven he engineered.) This is my also experience of reading a Gene Wolfe story. It changes what you thought stories can do.

I wrote this years ago to try to uncover the beautiful mystery of Gene Wolfe. I consider him the best writer I’ve ever read. And certainly one of the best men I ever met. We were friends. I loved him and I think he loved me. But what I wish I could share with you all is the laughs he gave me. He would get an elfish/devilish twinkle in his eyes and he’d say something so perfect, so impeccably timed, you would fall over. Yeah, he was a genius. Yeah, he could be cranky. But, man oh man, that guy was a stitch. Like in one of his last interviews when he was told that he had fans all over the internet. Pause. “If only I could get them to wear uniforms,” Gene said.

“Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, 
one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named.” 
 — Willa Cather

“Now, Dorothy, dear, stop imagining things. You always get yourself into a 
fret over nothing.”

Like most of us, my family had an annual tradition of watching The 
Wizard of Oz. We relished this improbable concoction of vaudeville and 
pop, Broadway and Hollywood, classic Children’s Lit and MGM’s formidable 
showmanship. Only problem was my family didn’t own a color TV 
until 1975. For years, I didn’t know Munchkin Land had all those colors. 
I didn’t know what I was missing. When I learned that most of the film 
was in color, I filled in the blanks. In either case I never felt like I was 
shortchanged. That is, until I had grown up and finally saw the film as it 
was intended to be seen.

For me, that was the equivalent of discovering Gene Wolfe.

Gene Wolfe is the Best Writer Alive. Let me attempt to explain why.

I can’t.

“Because, Because, Because, Because, Because…”

Because what makes him great is simply not on the page. It is somewhere 
tucked inside the heads of the people he has enchanted. There in 
those unreachable reaches of the psyche and the soul, you will find new 
landscapes, unapproachable by any other route. You will find terrible beauty 
and beautiful terror, mystery and comfort, hilarity and tricks and truth. 
You will find the ineffable.

“This is a highly irregular procedure! This is absolutely unprecedented!”

What Wolfe does for me more than any other storyteller is provide that 
magical moment when your face passes through the membrane of a book 
and you are inside the story. Through the looking glass. Into OZ. How he does this is the subject I’m tackling here. It a complicated if not impossible question to answer, because his craft is so transparently perfect that its effects are almost invisible on the page.

You could say this is because Wolfe’s work is rich and he operates on 
many levels: symbolism, suspense, hidden motifs like depth charges, slight-
of-hand plotting where we have been directed away from something very 
important by the dazzling surface of the tale — misdirection if you will. 
The oldest conjurer’s trick. You could also say that this is because Wolfe 
hides his climaxes offscreen, or he throws them casually away, or he does 
them in a whisper, so that they are easy to miss. This is a writer who 
delights in defeating expectations while, paradoxically satisfying our hunger 
for narrative. No one mystifies and charms like Wolfe.

“Now, you’d better close your eyes, my child, for a moment — in order to be 
better in tune with the infinite.”

And yet. And yet. I will venture into dangerous territory and say part of 
the reason why we put up with this shell shuffling is because of something 
else. Something deeper. Wolfe always hides his story below the story. By 
never telling us directly what he is talking about, he plants the true superstructure of the tale in our minds. It is almost a sketch artist’s trick, drawing the shadow not the form. And the shadow, which is to say, the surface, the thereness of the lead on paper is so vivid and enchanting that the true shape of the work often escapes us. The portrait suggested by this dazzling outline is not on the page. It is in our imagination. And when we’ve read well (and Wolfe does demand we read him well) we often find the afterimage of the 
tale rising up from our mind’s eye like a monster emerging from its hiding 
place beneath a swamp, or the photograph taking shape in the red light of 
the developing room, seeming to coalesce from a sunken flat bottom of pure 
whiteness. Most stories end and, if they’re good, we’re left with a powerful 
memory. Wolfe’s stories seem to linger. Days later we still smell them on our 
clothes. And it dawns on us that we are still reading them.

“I, your Wizard…am about to embark on a hazardous and technically unexplainable journey into the outer stratosphere.”

And yet. And yet there is more. For the story behind the story is not 
what is really happening in a Gene Wolfe story. What is really happening 
is something much deeper. Something I don’t think I can talk about without 
sounding silly. I think, to paraphrase Johnny Rotten, “He means it, man.” The true story of Wolfe’s work is always under the apparent story and still below 
the uncovered story. He is trying to tell the truth and any one who has tried to will tell you, it is the hardest thing in the world to tell. Which is simply to say he is a moral writer.

It is easy to take that for granted. Most popular art tells us what we 
want to hear, appeases us, entertains us with cotton candy notions which 
go down easy and will never disturb our most unconscious and 
unexamined values, as well as our most dearly held prejudices. Wolfe 
forces us to look at the unthinkable. His work is never simply comforting, 
never simply amazing. It does that rare challenging thing: holds up 
a mirror and dares us to see ourselves in it. Under the Gee-whiz special 
effects of speculation, under the impressive virtuoso techniques, and still 
under the deep and rich and satisfying pleasures of a sublime fiction 
narrative, Wolfe is playing for higher stakes. He is daring us to examine 
our lives. Or do we think he is talking about dragons and aliens, witches 
and demons?

This is the ineffable shape of the hidden book in every Gene Wolfe 
Story. It is risky stuff, for like any true work of art it carries the promise of 
catharsis, and it hides the virus of change: the chance to enlarge ourselves. 
His work demands a response so different than tears or laughter, surprise 
or contemplation — it requires neither an audience or a critic. It requires a 
soul reaction.

This is why I believe that his work, while resembling other fictions of 
various genres and often crazy quilting a pastiche of tried and true forms, 
is a new thing in and of itself. He is creating original experiences you 
cannot get in any other medium while masquerading under the guise of 
speculative fiction.

“Oh, we dream lots of silly things…”

Perhaps the art of his stories cannot be translated because it is essentially 
dream stuff — personal, intimate, woven from the private fabrics of 
our individual unconscious, and it cannot survive the transition into waking. 
It will unravel. Because the most important things are what cannot be 
said. Once cast into the spell of words, they are not on the page; they are in 
you. You are the manuscript; you hold the secrets and the treasures and 
you are the map. In the realm of the fantastic the only exchangeable currency 
is wonder. And wonder isn’t something you can buy; it’s something 
you must invest in.

So. Let’s take a journey.

You are dreaming. You are transported to a realm where the impossible 
occurs daily. And you believe it. You can’t help it. Your eyelids are 
pressed open, which is to say: closed. Not always a pleasant experience, 
but it definitely takes you somewhere. And you rediscover the power of the only medium that is truly internal. There is no separation between what you’re seeing and what you’re experiencing.

Dreams are you.

Here’s what you see (The Sword Of The Lictor):

You see a man being held upside down by the ankles over a terrifying 
gorge. The camera pulls back to reveal a two-headed monster is gripping 
him. Pull back further to reveal the held man is hanging like a tear in the 
corner of a huge empty stone eye, pull back further to reveal this eye resides 
in an enormous stone face, and further until it crowns a mountain: a 
gigantic carved portrait of one of the monster’s two heads. 
Take a bow. That was nice camera work. Wolfe didn’t do it. You did.

Do you see?

Here’s another (“A Cabin on The Coast,” Endangered Species):

A man is standing in the doorway of a cabin on the Pacific. He is soaked 
in saltwater. He has spent 20 years in hell — one paragraph that feels like a 
novel — and he has finally returned to claim his love, the one he rescued 20 
years before, the one he has dreamed about for two decades. He has lived 
for this moment. She hasn’t aged a blink. She is naked on the bed. She 
doesn’t recognize him — which shocks. She takes him for his father — which 
horrifies — imagine if your lover took you for your mom… And he has no 
words for all of this; she does all the talking.

“Oil can what?”

The scene is about misunderstanding. And what makes it so powerful 
are the looks on the man’s face. Now get this: Wolfe never describes them! 
He has put a description of a man’s face on paper in three lines of dialogue 
that say nothing about how he looks. The only way we know is by his 
lover’s reaction to him. The reader must create the man’s face, the shock, 
and the overwhelming heartbreak. And what we come up with in our own 
imaginations will be much more powerful, will invest us in the story much 
more vividly than any eloquent description Wolfe might write. Do you 
suppose he knew that?

“Why, it’s just like you could read what was inside of me.”

But wait there’s more. The tale has ended. Yet it’s not over. It has what 
Kim Stanley Robinson has dubbed the prototypical Wolfean “slingshot” 
ending. Here’s what happens next: The man now must tell his lover an appalling story, a story impossible to tell, and, once told, all but impossible to believe. And in the end there are no guarantees that his lover, the one whose absence has sustained him during his long and lonely journey, will be his lover any more. And all of this, remember, is off the page. Wolfe did not write it, but it is crucial to the story. Do you see?

“Of course, I don’t know, but I think it’ll get darker before it gets lighter.”

Wolfe is about moments, moments that take you off guard. 
Imagine a child in a house about to be burned down by rioters, going 
upstairs to his bedroom, knowing he must escape but needing to put on 
(you see, he’s a good boy and has been taught well) his coat and boots 
against the winter outside. And, as if that weren’t sad enough, he insists 
on taking the most impractical toy available: a helicopter. (“And When 
They Appear,” Strange Travelers).

It is in these surprising moments of gentleness or violence, or sudden 
swings into desire and love that Wolfe captures that happenstance flavor 
of reality; where people do not act as characters in stories but as humans in 
life. These glancing, spontaneous, real moments that show us ourselves 
and say this is truth, this is what would happen. Do you see?

Here’s another (“The Map,” Endangered Species):

A man finds a corpse floating on the river at night.

“It was a woman, naked and not long dead. Her staring eyes…her teeth 
gleamed faintly through half-parted lips. He tried to judge her as he had 
judged the women whose compliance he had secured for coins, to weigh her 
breasts with his eyes and applaud or condemn the roundness of her belly; he 
discovered that he could not do so, that in the way he sought to see her she 
was beyond his sight, unreachable as the unborn, unreachable as his mother 
had been when he once, as a boy, happened upon her bathing.”

Something truly strange is happening here. Wolfe is describing a state of 
mind that is not happening, that cannot happen, a potential paradigm, if you 
will, that cannot be described, because the character cannot experience it. 
And he is describing something else. A hunger for something that isn’t there. 
Desire, in other words. An emptiness longing to be filled. Do you see?

“Come out, come out, wherever you are….”

Now understand all the while all these moments are happening, great 
prose is streaming along, wonderful images are cracking us on the head, 
witty puzzles are presented and solved, living characters are saying fascinating 
things, and, perhaps, more importantly, all this takes place somewhere 
which exudes context. Possibilities almost as vivid as actualities are 
trembling along the margins of the tale, like actors waiting for their cue 
offstage — you can feel them, you can almost smell them — anything is possible 
in a Wolfe tale. Because it has so much of the texture of life, we expect 
things to pop out of closets and truth to emerge at the most unexpected times. He is telling the tale of our lives which, truth to tell, might be and frequently is, interrupted. This sense of potential lurking is what I find missing in most of what I read. And it is something that Wolfe has in spades.

“I can’t come back! I don’t know how it works!”

There are no maps to this treasure. There are only rumors and words. 
Most of the poetry I read seems to make this mistake — it takes the words 
for the poem. A type of literary fundamentalism/idolatry which regards 
language as sacred in and of itself. So you get all these “word objects” 
twirling on ego, waiting to be admired, insulated in excellence. Wolfe 
isn’t fiddling with words. He never forgets that he is talking to a human 
who just changed the baby’s diapers, fantasized killing their boss with a 
hatchet, remembered the smell of burning leaves, forgotten how to love 
their children, admired their mate’s rump, sweated over the electric bill 
and had a flashback about the time they were slapped by someone they 
trusted. So much depends on that. If these precious words on paper share 
no connection to the real world of pain and joy we swim in everyday — 
they will not work. They cannot gain entrance. The reader will not swallow 
their magic. They are a banging gong or a clanging cymbal.

“Ooo — We — Owe! We -OWE — her! Ooo — WE — Owe! We — OWE — her!”

Any musician knows that space is both the true medium and the most 
critical element of music. Not sound. Not what you play, but what you leave 
out. In the same way you have to see past Wolfe’s words to find out what 
he’s doing. You can’t read the notes of the score and forget you’re listening 
to music. It is as if Wolfe were playing a different sort of instrument than 
everyone else which nonetheless uses the same materials (metal, wood, skin 
and bone) and the same scales (do re mi…) and looks almost exactly like any 
other instrument (ink, pulp, typesetting and cardboard.) But he is playing an 
entirely different ballgame. When you get that, you get Wolfe, I think.

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”

Gene Wolfe is the Great and Terrible Oz. Approached with a trembling 
enthusiasm he gets cranky: “How dare you presume to question me! I will 
send you on a perilous journey and set for you an impossible task: to confront 
the most horrible creature, and I want you to steal her Volvo and 
bring it back to me!” And this terrible fantastic green god is, of course, 
like any storyteller, a fraud. He is, as we all are, a contract actor playing 
multiple roles: a fortuneteller with a heart of gold stuck in a godforsaken 
gulch in Kansas. He is a forgetful, sentimental gatekeeper of the Emerald 
City who cries a river at the drop of a hat. He is a cabby whose horse changes colors when you blink — not something you see every day. He is a great and powerful Martian apparition of smoke and flame and death — he knows why you’ve come! He knows all! He is a whimpering engineer behind a curtain: constructing wonder while covering his ass: hiding his true nature: letting us see, finally, the mechanism of his divinity. He is a marooned human being using all the showbiz tricks up his sleeve to get through his day, to live up to the impossible expectations of his followers. He is something like a university president addressing new graduates. He presents us with what we’ve possessed all along — now that is genius: a salesman who satisfies customers by giving them symbols of their most common possessions: hearts, heads, souls and homes. Ourselves, in other words. And last we see him he is floating clumsily away on a balloon of hot air.

“No, Aunt Em, this was a real, truly live place. And I remember that some of 
it wasn’t very nice — but most of it was beautiful.”

Imagine a writer who writes children’s books in disguise, because he 
has absolutely nothing to say to grownups. For, after all, what can you say 
to someone who has never seen the foggy figure of a ghost disappear at 
the head of the stairs, never felt the wet velour of a curious dinosaur tongue 
on their cheek, never played scrabble with an alien, never danced with a 
leprechaun, never fucked an escapee from Hell, never made a devil’s bargain 
with a vampire, never juggled in zero gravity, never been possessed 
by a very bad god, never wept for a blind robot, never lost a golden book 
that changed their lives, never been haunted by the forgotten memory of a 
stained-glass window, never tortured the woman they loved, never floated 
on a dirigible over a volcano whose yawning mouth resembles a lamprey?

Grownups know: these are just stories. Impossible. Ridiculous. Useless

. 
Like this one: a story which isn’t on the screen in black or white or 
color. When they were preparing costumes for the MGM movie of The 
Wizard of Oz they found the perfect Ring Master’s coat for Professor 
Marvel. In its pocket they discovered a dry-cleaning receipt made out to 
the costume’s original owner: Frank L. Baum.

Children know: There is another world. It isn’t far. It is as close as your 
own backyard. And it isn’t like school or church. Attendance isn’t mandatory. 
But, once you’ve entered, you will be changed.

This is what Gene Wolfe isn’t telling us: We already live there.

“But nobody can see the great Oz! Nobody’s ever seen the Great Oz! Even I’ve 
never seen him.”

“Well then, how do you know there is one?