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I am lying on a couch, in that stage of food poisoning where one lies on a couch and looks wan and pale, the stage where I feel as though I am probably on the couch for dramatical reasons until I try to get up and realizes that the whole thing, sadly, has nothing to do with drama. This makes it a decent time to write about Tanith Lee, who didn't, as far as I am aware, actually write any stories in which somebody owns a genuine fainting couch, but I would not remotely have put it past her.
I can't remember when I first read Tanith Lee. That is literal. I can't remember not having read any Tanith Lee. She's one of the writers I can trace swiped phrases from in the early, derivative, plotless stories I scribbled in notebooks when I was seven. Heinlein, Andre Norton, E. E. "Doc" Smith, Tanith Lee. She's also the only one of those writers whom I must have found for myself, because my father's SFF collection is encyclopedic and exhaustive until Dangerous Visions (1967), in which year he gave up in annoyance. (He and I have our... differences in this matter.) Lee is too late a writer for him to have collected, so I must have come across her on my own, in one of the sneaky forays into the adult half of the library which occupied so much of my time as a child. I simply can't recall how I did it, or when, or what caused me to pick up something of hers, much less what drew me back to her repeatedly over years and years before I could understand ninety percent of what was going on in her work. She was just always there. I always had some book of hers floating around the house, but she was so prolific that there was always something new to find, a trait she shared with Norton. If I bounced off one of her pieces, I could move on to the next, and then try again in a year, or two years, or never, and not worry about running out.
I am now worried about running out.
The interesting thing is that, unlike many of the writers I read when I was extremely young, or the ones I imprinted on when I began to develop selectivity, I have never been aware of Lee as a writer I particularly love. I am also, most of the time, not aware of my own DNA as something governing the expression of certain physical and mental traits. It underlies a great deal of my life, but something has to point it out to me. This may be because I couldn't understand so much of her when I started; I do remember the dawning, gradual awareness that if I had no idea what was going on, the story was probably about sex.
As Lee was one of the last and greatest of the Decadent writers, her stories are very frequently about sex. Lee's work is one of the reasons I was always confused by the sexual conservatism of entire chunks of SFF as a field in about, oh, the early oughts-- not the people who were making conservative arguments, but the people who were tentatively and slowly making moves towards putting in genderfuck and occasional gay people and heterosexual kink, and I was sitting there going, look, I know Delany is an outlier and I should expect the world to be twenty years behind him, but I don't hear much about Tanith Lee as a radical force and she did all this in the eighties and y'all are therefore just behind. It turns out that what this means is that Tanith Lee was a quietly radical force. You can be incredibly transgressive if everyone thinks of you as a Decadent writer, because the assumption tends to be that your narrative is going to come down on the side, whether intentionally or otherwise, of condemning the transgressive things you write about, and that if your narrative doesn't do that sufficiently, your life will do it for you. It's true that Baudelaire and Rimbaud and Verlaine etc. led extremely disorganized and frequently unhappy and dysfunctional lives, but one reason the anecdotes about said unhappiness and dissipation have gained such currency in the public imagination is as an Object Lesson against any radical politics with which their readers might come away. Look-- their lives are so awful that their ideology must be on faulty grounds! (Whereas a lot of the awful actually comes from being gay, and/or kinky, and/or radically eccentric, while living in a society set up to quash all that sort of thing.) And there Tanith Lee was, being alive and prolific and not making any tabloid headlines, and in her work everybody (especially women) has sexual agency, queer people exist, gender roles range from oppressively enforced dystopian nightmares to optional playthings, and when rape culture and sexual brutality exist they are damaging and destructive to everybody involved with them. Lee has characters who are asexual and characters who are cheerfully promiscuous; who are monogamous in orientation and who are all shades of otherwise; who are abused and abusers and who are neither; happy endings and the reverse for the good, the bad, and the everything in-between. It is a foundation of the human and diverse supporting trappings so Gothicly lush that the complexity and fundamental empathy of it all are, apparently, not obvious.
And, above that basic foundation, which was formational for me on deep levels, I have spent much of my life arguing with Tanith Lee as a writer. I disagree with her about the proper construction of a plot, the emphasis which ought to be put on character, the rhythm of scenes, how foreshadowed an ending ought to be and how foreshadowing should work at all, when a happy ending is and isn't appropriate, the number of adjectives it is useful to have piled all over everything... I could go on. And on. Her work draws me back and back and back to yell at her. The Book of the Dead: STOP THAT THAT IS COLONIALIST BULLSHIT and also these aren't even stories this is literally a collection of images you have thrown at the page in hopes that some of them stick oh wait apparently that one did as it has appeared regularly in my dreams for years now DAMMIT Tanith. Black Unicorn: there is no other book in the world as charming and perfect as the first about fifty pages of this novel, and I will now proceed to read it fifty jillion times in order to figure out EXACTLY how the ending of this book and the ENTIRE REST OF ITS SERIES go COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY OFF THE RAILS and I can now pinpoint to within a sentence where it goes wrong, but not, so far, why and how, DAMMIT, TANITH. (When I was interviewed for my high school yearbook they asked about my pet peeves and I said that peeves are too high-maintenance to make good pets and nobody got it.) 'Elle Est Trois, La Morte': that is BAD FRENCH POETRY and also this entire story is such a ripoff of de Quincey that you have cited him to make sure people know about it, and I have had the verse of I repeat BAD FRENCH POETRY stuck in my head since approximately 1992, dammit, Tanith, why are you doing this to me. The Gods Are Thirsty: wow, it's amazing how much you can make specific historical figures fit your particular archetypes for characters as opposed to, you know, resembling what those figures were actually like, but also, wow, it's amazing how well a book works when you very carefully select the historical figures to work with based on the ways you know you will deform them into the archetypes you always end up using, this is authorial jujitsu against yourself on a level I don't even know how or whether to complain about, damn it, Tanith.
Also, as I believe I have stated elsewhere, she and I would get on much better if only she didn't hate the color blue.
Hadn't hated. This is the problem and the glory of an author being so mentally integrated into my understanding of the universe. I don't have to stop explaining to her in my head that she is WRONG, but I am never going to get to do it in person, and she's never going to write a book fixing any of these things, or elaborating on them, or making them even more wrong. Dammit, Tanith.
Anyway, the masterpieces, as far as I'm concerned, at any rate the ones I recommend to people, are Black Unicorn, and Faces Under Water (about which I do not want to yell at her even a little bit!), and The Book of the Mad (though you should probably read the other Secret Books of Paradys too for context, and they're good but not as good), and The Silver Metal Lover, and the Biting the Sun duology, and the short story 'The Devil's Rose' (the single cruelest piece of fiction I have ever read, due its distressing plausibility and significant chance of having happened at some point). But everyone who reads Lee has a different list. It's time, now, to start the work of keeping her read, of keeping her in the conversation, of not letting that quietly radical force go silent. Apparently she had trouble being published towards the end of her life, and now, when her ideas are starting to have some wider cultural weight and currency, is exactly the wrong time for that to become an issue.
Please read Tanith Lee.
I can't remember when I first read Tanith Lee. That is literal. I can't remember not having read any Tanith Lee. She's one of the writers I can trace swiped phrases from in the early, derivative, plotless stories I scribbled in notebooks when I was seven. Heinlein, Andre Norton, E. E. "Doc" Smith, Tanith Lee. She's also the only one of those writers whom I must have found for myself, because my father's SFF collection is encyclopedic and exhaustive until Dangerous Visions (1967), in which year he gave up in annoyance. (He and I have our... differences in this matter.) Lee is too late a writer for him to have collected, so I must have come across her on my own, in one of the sneaky forays into the adult half of the library which occupied so much of my time as a child. I simply can't recall how I did it, or when, or what caused me to pick up something of hers, much less what drew me back to her repeatedly over years and years before I could understand ninety percent of what was going on in her work. She was just always there. I always had some book of hers floating around the house, but she was so prolific that there was always something new to find, a trait she shared with Norton. If I bounced off one of her pieces, I could move on to the next, and then try again in a year, or two years, or never, and not worry about running out.
I am now worried about running out.
The interesting thing is that, unlike many of the writers I read when I was extremely young, or the ones I imprinted on when I began to develop selectivity, I have never been aware of Lee as a writer I particularly love. I am also, most of the time, not aware of my own DNA as something governing the expression of certain physical and mental traits. It underlies a great deal of my life, but something has to point it out to me. This may be because I couldn't understand so much of her when I started; I do remember the dawning, gradual awareness that if I had no idea what was going on, the story was probably about sex.
As Lee was one of the last and greatest of the Decadent writers, her stories are very frequently about sex. Lee's work is one of the reasons I was always confused by the sexual conservatism of entire chunks of SFF as a field in about, oh, the early oughts-- not the people who were making conservative arguments, but the people who were tentatively and slowly making moves towards putting in genderfuck and occasional gay people and heterosexual kink, and I was sitting there going, look, I know Delany is an outlier and I should expect the world to be twenty years behind him, but I don't hear much about Tanith Lee as a radical force and she did all this in the eighties and y'all are therefore just behind. It turns out that what this means is that Tanith Lee was a quietly radical force. You can be incredibly transgressive if everyone thinks of you as a Decadent writer, because the assumption tends to be that your narrative is going to come down on the side, whether intentionally or otherwise, of condemning the transgressive things you write about, and that if your narrative doesn't do that sufficiently, your life will do it for you. It's true that Baudelaire and Rimbaud and Verlaine etc. led extremely disorganized and frequently unhappy and dysfunctional lives, but one reason the anecdotes about said unhappiness and dissipation have gained such currency in the public imagination is as an Object Lesson against any radical politics with which their readers might come away. Look-- their lives are so awful that their ideology must be on faulty grounds! (Whereas a lot of the awful actually comes from being gay, and/or kinky, and/or radically eccentric, while living in a society set up to quash all that sort of thing.) And there Tanith Lee was, being alive and prolific and not making any tabloid headlines, and in her work everybody (especially women) has sexual agency, queer people exist, gender roles range from oppressively enforced dystopian nightmares to optional playthings, and when rape culture and sexual brutality exist they are damaging and destructive to everybody involved with them. Lee has characters who are asexual and characters who are cheerfully promiscuous; who are monogamous in orientation and who are all shades of otherwise; who are abused and abusers and who are neither; happy endings and the reverse for the good, the bad, and the everything in-between. It is a foundation of the human and diverse supporting trappings so Gothicly lush that the complexity and fundamental empathy of it all are, apparently, not obvious.
And, above that basic foundation, which was formational for me on deep levels, I have spent much of my life arguing with Tanith Lee as a writer. I disagree with her about the proper construction of a plot, the emphasis which ought to be put on character, the rhythm of scenes, how foreshadowed an ending ought to be and how foreshadowing should work at all, when a happy ending is and isn't appropriate, the number of adjectives it is useful to have piled all over everything... I could go on. And on. Her work draws me back and back and back to yell at her. The Book of the Dead: STOP THAT THAT IS COLONIALIST BULLSHIT and also these aren't even stories this is literally a collection of images you have thrown at the page in hopes that some of them stick oh wait apparently that one did as it has appeared regularly in my dreams for years now DAMMIT Tanith. Black Unicorn: there is no other book in the world as charming and perfect as the first about fifty pages of this novel, and I will now proceed to read it fifty jillion times in order to figure out EXACTLY how the ending of this book and the ENTIRE REST OF ITS SERIES go COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY OFF THE RAILS and I can now pinpoint to within a sentence where it goes wrong, but not, so far, why and how, DAMMIT, TANITH. (When I was interviewed for my high school yearbook they asked about my pet peeves and I said that peeves are too high-maintenance to make good pets and nobody got it.) 'Elle Est Trois, La Morte': that is BAD FRENCH POETRY and also this entire story is such a ripoff of de Quincey that you have cited him to make sure people know about it, and I have had the verse of I repeat BAD FRENCH POETRY stuck in my head since approximately 1992, dammit, Tanith, why are you doing this to me. The Gods Are Thirsty: wow, it's amazing how much you can make specific historical figures fit your particular archetypes for characters as opposed to, you know, resembling what those figures were actually like, but also, wow, it's amazing how well a book works when you very carefully select the historical figures to work with based on the ways you know you will deform them into the archetypes you always end up using, this is authorial jujitsu against yourself on a level I don't even know how or whether to complain about, damn it, Tanith.
Also, as I believe I have stated elsewhere, she and I would get on much better if only she didn't hate the color blue.
Hadn't hated. This is the problem and the glory of an author being so mentally integrated into my understanding of the universe. I don't have to stop explaining to her in my head that she is WRONG, but I am never going to get to do it in person, and she's never going to write a book fixing any of these things, or elaborating on them, or making them even more wrong. Dammit, Tanith.
Anyway, the masterpieces, as far as I'm concerned, at any rate the ones I recommend to people, are Black Unicorn, and Faces Under Water (about which I do not want to yell at her even a little bit!), and The Book of the Mad (though you should probably read the other Secret Books of Paradys too for context, and they're good but not as good), and The Silver Metal Lover, and the Biting the Sun duology, and the short story 'The Devil's Rose' (the single cruelest piece of fiction I have ever read, due its distressing plausibility and significant chance of having happened at some point). But everyone who reads Lee has a different list. It's time, now, to start the work of keeping her read, of keeping her in the conversation, of not letting that quietly radical force go silent. Apparently she had trouble being published towards the end of her life, and now, when her ideas are starting to have some wider cultural weight and currency, is exactly the wrong time for that to become an issue.
Please read Tanith Lee.
