jebmo’s posthaven

They married in Detroit, because it was the nearest city where state laws permitted an interracial marriage. They passed their bus trip to Michigan inventing a new language and co-writing a novella—this was the nature of their partnership. Marilyn was—and is—a talented poet. In The Motion of Light on Water, Delany presents her as the leader in their literary relationship. He quotes her poems more than anything he wrote himself in those years, and writes:

Watching this thin young woman in thick glasses write her early poems, being around her while the detritus of daily life was transmuted into lines of dizzying musicality, not to mention being the poems’ first reader, was unspeakably exciting. It made my whole adolescence and early manhood an adventure—an adventure I was thrilled and pleased to be sitting at the edge of.

The reader of In Search of Silence is surprised to find Marilyn relatively absent from Delany’s journals. Certainly she does appear, both as a character in Delany’s thinking and in her own hand—she offers witty, acerbic commentary from the margins. Delany duly records her visit from W.H. Auden; and a vivid description of her miscarriage, in the first year of their marriage, marks one of the dramatic highpoints of the journals. But the impression of Delany we receive is hardly that of a figure “at the edge” of someone else’s life.

He has the casual arrogance of someone fully committed to his own adventure.

Instead, he has the casual arrogance of someone fully committed to his own adventure. He likes to invent imaginary blurbs for his imaginary future publications. Kenneth James, the editor of the journals, includes half a dozen such blurbs from different notebooks. Perhaps the later ones were written for the dustjackets of actual books, or perhaps, like the lengthy, imagined critical essay Delany pens as if from a future critic on his own juvenilia, they simply mark stages in the author’s self-conception. He was always conscious of his talent, and in the journals he frequently compares himself to other literary child prodigies like Chatterton, Rimbaud, and Radiguet. When his career took off, occasionally he felt overwhelmed by work—he once had to spend several weeks in a hospital after a nervous breakdown—but he never seemed to doubt his abilities. Instead, he exhorts himself to relish them. “I must make sure my book does not lack the language gouged from the mouth and heaped on the subject, tongue sprung and magnificent,” he writes. “Mine—my book—can hold torrents.”

The self-conscious young genius of the journals is not the subordinate young husband of the autobiography. Does this make one or the other a truer account? I don’t think so. “‘History’,” says Delany, “is what we create by the scratching, the annoyance, the irritation of writing, with its aspirations to logic and order, on memory’s uneasy and uncertain discontinuities.” Neither version of his life is wrong because neither claims to be complete. Even in his experiments with simultaneous journaling, Delany discovered the inability of writing to fully capture reality: “Prose suffers from the illusion that it parallels, or is capable of paralleling, all of thought.” In his thinking about the representative power of language, his dyslexia speaks to the dilemma:

Since I am “orally regressed” [dyslexic] I think pictorially. In my verbal recount of an image, no matter how complete I make it, I am always aware of having left out some detail. A square inch of white porcelain has details enough to occupy the alert mind for hours. A human action is inconceivable!

Delany’s journals and his autobiography are both inevitably inadequate to the task of reproducing a life. Like the double-sided notebooks of his youth, displacing reality from its margins, they are two halves of an empty picture frame, outlining an absence. “These journals,” he observes, “are not to remember the things I record, but for all the things that pass unwritten, and forgotten.” They leave us not with satisfying answers as to who Delany was, but with greater appreciation for the depth of the question.