Better to Have Loved The Life o Judith Merril

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.While at times her distinctions between the two categories seemed arbitrary to me, anything that got relegated to the latter category was quite simply ignored.In the meantime, unfortunately, Judy didn't sit down nearly enough to write, or even talk, about many of the people who were most important to her.She did the interview about Walter Miller (on which chapter 12, "Walter Miller and the Custody Battles," is based) only five days before she died.I didn't do that interview; it was carried out by Ronald Weihs, of Toronto's Artword Theatre.She had been holding out as long as possible on telling the story on tape because it was heart-wrenching every time the memories came flooding back.Several times, late at night when we were looking through her boxes of yellowing photographs, or when we were sitting together over dinner, she would tell me pieces of the story.The hardest part for her was knowing that Walt had died a couple of years earlier, without trying to get in touch with her.Walter Miller was not the only one she found it hard to think about.She loved many people with an intensity and a strength that seemed larger than life.The actual process of telling her stories was painful for her, and the end of her life was characterized by a tremendous sadness: her lifelong friends, the people she affectionately called "the Crazies," were dying.Each time one of the Crazies passed away, she lost a chunk of herself.She was so alone.We never even got to talk about the people she loved and lost in the later stages of her life—the feelings were still too fresh.The fourth birthday party of Judith's granddaughter Julia Pohl-Miranda, April 5, 1989, Toronto.From left: Judith, Adriana Rapetti, Emily, Tobias Pohl-Weary, Daniel Pohl-Miranda, Julia Pohl-Miranda, Ann Pohl, Tashi Moscovitch.Juan MirandaIn the end she left me with a very incomplete manuscript and thorough instructions about everything she wanted included in the final book of memoirs.By the time of her death she had only completed sections on her early childhood and career ("In the Beginning," "A (Real?) Writer: Homage to Ted Sturgeon," and "Getting Started as a Writer"), as well as parts of the sections on feminism, the 1968Democratic National Convention, and coming to Toronto's free university, Rochdale College.She wrote the introductory essay "Transformations" partly in an attempt to figure out why she was writing this book, and also as part of her applications for grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council.Everything else I pieced together from interviews, correspondence, essays she had written earlier in life, and my own memories.Her relationship with Marian Engel and Gwendolyn MacEwen, for instance, was completely pieced together from correspondence.The section on Fritz Leiber (who died four or five years before Judy) also had to be pasted together by scrounging through files and old interviews.Judy had begun her memoirs by writing in a first-person narrative, and so I decided to maintain her personal voice in the pieces I added.One complicated problem reared its head when I realized that we hadn't captured anything on tape about Judy's everyday life.These things were perhaps too obvious to talk about formally.Because of this, I have had to leave out detailed information about her involvement with the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy, the Performing Arts Lodge, her dear friends Maureen Gaulthier and Valerie Alia, her attempts to reconcile with her oldest daughter, Merril, and the remaining awful rifts between herself and people who were once close friends.I was also not able to include much about her life in Canada, including great stories about founding the Writers' Union and subsequent battles with Joyce Marshall and others against the "evils of bureaucracy " I got little on her stays in Jamaica or her love of jazz music, except a folder of fading photographs, some flyers and posters for concerts, a dozen tourist knick-knacks, and the short piece "Jamaica: A View from the Beach" (chapter 21).Due to my lack of information and planning prior to her death, I was forced to leave out entire sections on people she loved, respected, and sparred with during the last decades of her life—such as the people at the Merril Collection and PAL, John Robert Colombo, Jon Lomberg, Ron Weihs and Judith Sandiford, Stafford Beer, Barry Wellman, Candas Dorsey, Elisabeth Vonarburg, David Hartwell, and Phyllis Gotlieb, along with earlier loves such as J.G.Ballard, Forest Ackerman, and Ted Cogswell.I am sure there's another book (or two) to be written here.In the meantime, I decided that the best way to paint a picture of Judy's later years was to reprint a selection of letters to her best loved and not-yet-lost friends; thus the letters in chapter 24 to Kate MacLean, Virginia Kidd, and Valeria Alia—and beginning with some open letters that Judy wrote about once a year to update family and friends.In the interests of consistency and clarity we have made minor editorial changes and corrections in Judith's unpublished writings and letters, and in the letters of others included here.In some cases, where the material either seemed irrelevant or obscure, we have made cuts in the letters (indicated by [.]).We have also imposed a standard style or format on the dates and addresses given in the letters.For me, putting the book together has been a learning experience (which is what we call everything that isn't exactly "fun" but is nevertheless a good thing to do).To be fair, some of that experience was beautiful.My family's legacy of intense and strong women is now much easier to comprehend and accept gracefully.I can see clearly how the patterns repeat themselves and bind with individual spirits; and how they mutate.But much of the experience was difficult.There was the section on her future predictions, for instance.It was so depressing, I put it off as long as I could.I chopped it up and rearranged it, and then set it straight again.I didn't agree with what she was saying and felt like her words greatly reflected the loneliness of her last years.Still, when I came across her 1973 essay "Toronto Tulips Traffic and Grass: The Love Token of a Token Immigrant," I was dumbstruck by the way in which her political and moral viewpoints had so thoroughly succeeded in bouncing down through my mother's generation into mine.It was as if she were writing my own reactions to the violent June 15, 2001, Ontario Coalition Against Poverty protest at the Queen's Park provincial legislature building.I called my mother up immediately and commented on that fact [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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