Photo: Watson Perrygo. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archive, via Wikimedia Commons.

My first encounter with Paulé Bartón’s folktales came in the unlikeliest of places: trawling through the deep wilderness of HTML on the back end of The Paris Review’s website. I was an intern, dutifully scanning the archive for stories that had stumbled slightly on their way from print to the Web. Long before my time at the magazine, an error-prone computer program had been used to expedite the digitization process—a necessity for such a small staff and such a trove of pages. But the program occasionally made mistakes, and many stories and poems and essays, long forgotten to most readers, hung imperfectly online. The trick was to read a sentence on the page, then read the very same sentence on the screen, then return to the page. You could spend hours like this, swiveling your head, attempting to achieve parity between these warring formats, constantly searching for hiccups.

The discrepancies I found were usually minuscule: an extra space, a repeated word, an errant line break in the midst of a Merwin poem. There were those rare pieces, though, that looked like they’d passed through a cheese grater. Wading into the text, I’d find that every t had been replaced by an f, or vice versa; fhes and ots abounded. Spaces appeared at random, as though an ostrich had stood on the keyboard. Bartón’s “The Woe Shirt,” buried in the recesses of the Summer 1980 issue, was one such piece—or so I thought at first.

The story begins: “Bélem did tinker repair his bicycle by the stink-toe tree. Better to work there it smells so bad, work gets done no lazy quick.” I remember tracing these words with my cursor over and over, letting their music carve grooves in my head. What’s a “stink-toe tree”? Why the double verb in that first sentence? “Lazy quick”? And yet the printed page confirmed that all of this was correct, intentional. I read on. Despite initial appearances, most of it was intact. A few minutes later, as I arrived at the end, my eyes welled with tears. In the middle of a quiet, cold office in New York, in a matter of minutes, a Haitian folktale had leaped out of history, stolen my heart, and vanished. Read More

On the day of my induction by, and first visit to, the august institution of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, I was shown to the literature section of the portrait gallery and left there alone among the giants. This may have been a kind of hazing ritual, like abandoning someone at the entrance to a corn maze. Cheever. Baldwin. Roth. Faulkner. James. Welty. Morrison. It was overwhelming. I felt like I needed a ball of string to keep from getting lost amid the glory. So I started searching the grid of framed photographs, from the pince-nez era to the present day, for writers of science fiction and fantasy. I’m not sure why my thoughts went in that direction, exactly. Maybe I felt a little guilty about belonging to a club to which many of my personal literary heroes and influences–John Collier, Jack Vance, H.P. Lovecraft, Cordwainer Smith–had not been admitted. Above all I was looking for Ursula K. Le Guin.

I found James Branch Cabell: yes, arguably a fantasist. Stephen Vincent Benet, who wrote a seminal postapocalyptic short story that is indisputably science fiction, “By the Waters of Babylon.” William S. Burroughs? I couldn’t honestly say if he counted as a science fiction writer or not; I’ve never been able to make head nor tails of the guy. And then there was good old Kurt Vonnegut, imaginer of dystopias, deviser of the global pandemic ice-nine, charter of the planet Trafalmadore. But as I stopped before his photo, I wasn’t at all sure he wouldn’t prefer that I just keep moving. That would have been the case with all these dudes, I reflected. Great American writers, if they happen to write science fiction and fantasy, rarely attained the highest honors. They were denied—they were not even considered for—the most prestigious prizes. They were not, finally, taken seriously. As Vonnegut once put it:

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labelled “science fiction,” and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

A writer’s surer, easier path to prizes (and who doesn’t like prizes?) is to steer clear of the genre gutter entirely, and if it can’t be avoided—if one was “born there,” so to speak—to repudiate or renounce it. Ursula K. Le Guin did it the hard way. For decades she consistently produced masterpieces, works of immense thematic, stylistic, structural, conceptual, and psychological sophistication and depth, intricately patterned, vividly imagined, intensely felt, beautifully written, that were also avowedly and unashamedly works of fantasy and science fiction. She rarely strayed beyond the boundaries of genre; instead she expanded them. She never repudiated the genre gutter that had fostered her ambitions and fired her imagination; instead she confirmed Oscar Wilde’s surmise that there is no better vantage than a gutter for looking at the stars.

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