Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,2
entire physical solidity of the self he presented in adulthood, to his reaction against such reflexively thoughtless opposition, but Karl was more complicated than that. In any case, the stories collected in In a Lonely Place demonstrate in paragraph after paragraph how closely he attended to the nuances of ordinary, daily behaviors, how much he observed and took into himself.
I mention the collection called In a Lonely Place because of all his books it was the only one I was able to read. By the time I met Karl, nearly all of contemporary fantasy literature, except for its capacious subgenre known as horror and the work of extraordinary wild cards like Angela Carter and a very few others, had come to seem so unrelated to my own concerns as to belong to another world, like that of science fiction, another field I had long ago found unreadable. That I saw Tolkien as a miraculous storyteller of enduring importance did not make the work of his imitators compelling, and heroic fantasy written under the influence of Robert E. Howard was so distant from what interested me as to be unapproachable. I didn’t get it, and I still don’t. The adventures of muscular heroes in ahistorical but presumably ancient times equipped with invented cultures and landscapes struck me as belonging to a variety of literature best suited to adolescents. I realize that this is a limitation, a kind of flaw, but it is not one I can correct. Like jazz musicians, painters, dancers, composers, poets and every other sort of artist, writers are subject to those specific blind spots inevitably caused by their continuous investigations of the seams they find richest. What Karl found most suited to his particular talent never spoke to me, which does not mean that I dismissed it—the work of many wonderful writers forbids me entry, and I don’t dismiss them either, I just can’t read them. This is not a matter of choice. Karl must have known that I was not likely to be attuned to his Kane fictions, and one demonstration of his great awareness was that he never pressed the issue. However, when his collection of contemporary horror stories was accepted by Warner Books, he asked me if I would write an introduction, and I was delighted to do so.
The overture first came through Kirby McCauley, who was our mutual agent and friend through the end of the 1970s and all of the 1980s and a great supporter of Karl’s work. By then, my respect for Karl was such that I would have agreed to do an introduction for a sword-and-sorcery collection from the point of view of a one-eyed cat and written in rhymed couplets if the stories had his name on them (come to think of it, as long as he could keep himself sufficiently entertained, Karl could probably have pulled it off!), but of course In a Lonely Place was nothing like that. Neither was it very much like anything else, either—I mean, the stories resembled no one else’s. Their radical originality was largely a matter of structure, the way the narratives kept breaking out of themselves, shifting ground and relocating themselves in entirely unforeseen territory. At some point after Kirby had sent along the manuscript, Karl telephoned to thank me for taking on the job, and he listened to my effusions with his usual good-humored grace. The same quality came into play after the book was published, when it became obvious that my admiration had not rescued me from overlooking a crucial, explanatory detail in one of the stories.
I was blissfully unaware of my mistake until the Wagners and I met at a vast, hectic party in a suite the size of a bowling alley that Kirby had rented during a World Fantasy Convention not long after the book came out. Barbara eventually drifted off deeper into the throng, and Karl thanked me for what I had written about him. Then he mentioned one of the stories I had liked most and asked if I had noticed the moment in its beginning paragraphs when the protagonist catches sight of his reflection in a window. Yes, I said, I did remember that section... and suddenly understood what it meant. Oh, I said, Yes. I see. He nodded, and, satisfied that I had seen the point at last, went on to talk about something else. If that was a rebuke, it was certainly the most diplomatic I’ve ever been given.