"You've written a fine book," he said. "I've just become the lead book reviewer for Tomorrow magazine, and yours will be the first book that I review."
A few months later, Isherwood called to say that the celebrated English philosopher Gerald Heard wished to come meet me.
"He can't!" I cried.
"Why not?"
"Because," I protested, "we have no furniture in our new house!"
"Gerald Heard will sit on your floor," said Isherwood.
Heard arrived and perched on our one and only chair.
Isherwood, Maggie and I sat on the floor.
Some weeks later, Heard and Aldous Huxley invited me to tea, where both leaned forward, one echoing the other, and asked:
"Do you know what you are?"
"What?"
"A poet," they said.
"My god," I said. "Am I?"
So we end as we began, with one friend seeing me off and another taking me in from a journey. What if Norman Corwin had not sent me or if Walter I. Bradbury had not received me?
Mars might never have gained an atmosphere, and its people would never have been born to live in golden masks, and its cities, unbuilt, would have stayed lost in the unquarried hills. Much thanks to them then for that journey to Manhattan, which turned out to be a forty-year round trip to another world.
July 6, 1990
ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS
DUSK IN THE ROBOT MUSEUMS: THE REBIRTH OF IMAGINATION
For some ten years now, I have been writing a long narrative poem about a small boy in the near future who runs into an audio-animatronic museum, veers away from the right portico marked Rome, passes a door marked Alexandria, and enters across a sill where a sign lettered Greece points in across a meadow.
The boy runs over the artificial grass and comes upon Plato, Socrates and perhaps Euripides seated at high noon under an olive tree sipping wine and eating bread and honey and speaking truths.
The boy hesitates and then addresses Plato:
"How goes it with the Republic?"
"Sit down, boy," says Plato, "and I'll tell you."
The boy sits. Plato tells. Socrates steps in from time to time. Euripides does a scene from one of his plays.
Along the way, the boy might well ask a question which hovered in all of our minds the past few decades:
"How come the United States, the country of Ideas on the March, for so long neglected fantasy and science fiction? Why is it that only during the past thirty years attention is being paid?"
Another question from the boy might well be:
"Who is responsible for the change?
"Who has taught the teachers and the librarians to pull up their socks, sit straight, and take notice?
"Simultaneously, which group in our country has backed off from abstraction and moved art back in the direction of pure illustration?"