Readers of Commentary magazine in the 1950s were treated to a series of finely observed vignettes about life in Israel, written by an American Jew who had emigrated (so an editor’s note informs us) to the young Jewish state. The author published half a dozen columns in the magazine, portraying a gallery of Israel’s immigrants, its North African Jews and Bukharans, its Hasidim, its veterans of the War of Independence and Holocaust survivors (often the same), its Arabs, Christians, and Druze. He noted the petty corruptions of its political life, the bloviating of its socialist apparatchiks, the dismissive attitude among its elites toward the Moroccan Jewish underclass. His writerly touch is seen when, for instance, he visits an acquaintance from France:
He was staying in a typical Tel Aviv house: two stories high, cement blocks overlaid with peeling plaster, washing strung across the court, shingles advertising Diplomated teachers of all languages, and every bit of electrical and plumbing installations visible on the outside in a variety of pipes and tubes and discolored leaks.
And his understanding of how much needed to be explained to Amercan Jews about Israel, then as now, was conveyed with humor:
to most American Jews, Israel consists of vague, exotic areas called Tel Aviv, The Negev, and The Kibbutz—all of which consist of little white houses surrounded by orange trees. . . . Jerusalem my reader nods. He knows all about it. The Wailing Wall is there—surrounded by little white houses and orange trees, and overlooking The Kibbutz.
The author was Avram Davidson (1923-1993). At the centennial of his birth, Davidson is today remembered as a venerated if never widely read writer of science fiction and fantasy literature, an editor and recipient of the genres’ awards, including the 1986 World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement. But his earliest publications reflected a Jewish journey that began in a non-observant family in Depression-era Yonkers, and was sparked by a Jewish awakening that led him to adopt Orthodox Judaism in his teens. During World War Two he served in the Pacific in the Navy’s medical corps, and struggled to keep his relatively new commitment to Jewish religious law. After the war, he returned to Yonkers and took a fiction writing class at Yeshiva University. (From a detailed biographical essay composed by Eileen Gunn, a science fiction writer who knew Davidson toward the end of his life, we learn that another student in the YU class was Chaim Potok.)
Before his Commentary debut, Davidson had already been writing for the rather less prominent Orthodox Jewish Life magazine. His contributions there, stories and poems, show a young man eager to discover and embrace Jewish tradition. (His writing for both publications, as well as the biographical essay just mentioned, has been collected in Everybody Has Somebody in Heaven: Essential Jewish Tales of the Spirit, edited by Jack Dann and Grania Davidson Davis.) Davidson swam against the acculturating American Jewish mainstream by seeking to expand his horizons through Judaism, rather than assuming that intellectual broad-mindedness and spiritual depth required an abandonment of it. While he hardly seems to be the Talmudic scholar that some well-meaning tributes have made him out to be, he managed to acquire a level of Jewish literacy unusual among American Jews in the 1950s. Science fiction writer Frederik Pohl recalls Davidson driving a sick child to a hospital on the Jewish sabbath—the orthodox prohibition on driving during the sabbath is suspended in cases of medical emergency—and then walking the many miles back because the allowance for sabbath travel was no longer applicable.
This Jewish seriousness led Davidson to Israel in 1948, where he also served in that country’s medical corps. For several years he divided his time between Israel and America, returning to the United States to study animal husbandry in hopeful preparation for agricultural work in the Jewish state. But when he left Israel again in 1952 this would be the end of his sojourn there. His last piece in Commentary appeared in 1957. This story depicts his Israeli army experience, its utter randomness and disorganization, as well as the bafflement he encounters from everyone he meets as to why an American would want to move there. In this, it reminds one of the novel Refiner’s Fire by Mark Helprin, another American Jewish writer of the fantastic who also considered moving permanently to Israel.
In 1956, Davidson shows up in the letters section of Time magazine, taking issue with an earlier correspondent who complained about the Israeli ban on Christian missionizing in the Jewish state. But by this point, Davidson was turning to genre writing, his first stories appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, a periodical he would later edit for two years. And from here on, Jewish content and concerns would all but disappear from Davidson’s published writing, the numerous stories and dozen or so fantasy, science fiction, and alternate history novels that followed.
A rare exception to the absence of Jewish content in Davidson’s fiction is his often anthologized story “The Golem,” first published in 1955. The story is borsht belt comedy, in which a golem tries unsuccessfully to intimidate an elderly Jewish couple who, with Yiddishisms and mundane preoccupations, talk too much to register the portentous monster in their midst.
“All mankind—” the stranger began.
“Shah! I’m talking to my husband… . He talks eppis kind of funny, Gumbeiner, no?”
While the story has a certain Mel Brooks charm, it is also a come-down from the expansive promise of Davidson’s earlier Jewish writing, a return precisely to the bagels-and-lox ethnic Judaism of Davidson’s Yonkers childhood, and that he had seemed to want to escape in Israel. Lenny Bruce golems were, fortunately, not a vein Davidson sought to mine further.
His first published novel, co-written with the (also Jewish) science fiction writer Ward Moore, was Joyleg, about a backwoods Tennessean who has been alive since the American Revolution (bathing in whiskey makes him immortal) and the Democratic and Republican politicians who attempt to exploit him for partisan gain. It’s a canny Mark Twain-esque satire, and one could imagine it as a film by Frank Capra or Preston Sturges.
This was followed by a number of space opera novels—Mutiny in Space (1964), Rork! (1965), The Kar-Chee Reign (1966), Rogue Dragon (1966), and others—raising, amid the spaceships and bug-eyed monsters, acerbic questions of empire, colonialism, racism, and exploitation, rather like the darker end of the Star Trek episodes of the time. In Rork!, for instance, a planet is adminstrated by starfaring human government in order to extract its resources. The planet’s “natives” are descendants of long-ago human settlers who, in their present state of technological backwardness and colonial control, are treated with racist contempt by their governors. A search for meaningful connections in these novels to Davidson’s Israeli years goes unrewarded. They instead reflect Viet Nam era critiques of America and the West, as well as Davidson’s new addresses in Mexico and Belize. In the course of the 1960s Davidson also produced Ellery Queen crime novels and, under a different pseudonym, what must have been bill-paying erotica.
But most indicative of the subsequent direction of Davidson’s fiction, thematically and stylistically, was 1965’s Masters of the Maze, a science fiction novel in which a network of interdimensional portals allows various historical characters—Ambrose Bierce, Benjamin Bathurst, Elias Ashmole, and others—to travel through time and interact with the labyrinth’s secret guardians. It is a book that reflects on Davidson’s experience of the sometimes dismal and ridiculous world of pulp fiction publishing. One of the characters, Nate Gordon, is a competent hack who can produce cheap magazine pieces (“Rasputin Raped My Aunt”) in his sleep, but finds “that he no longer wanted to write such easy, profitable crap. He wanted to write things harder, better, with his own name on them, things that would be a pride and a comfort.”
Whether or not they were a pride and a comfort, signal characteristics of Davidson’s writing from the late 1960s on are seen in Masters of the Maze. One is his growing focus on alternate history, mash-ups of real and imagined events and personae. A second is his interest in esotericism, particularly connected with the syncretic, still-pagan world of Mediterranean antiquity. One notices even in his space opera novels Mutiny in Space and Rork! a repeated, if passing reference to a planet or star known as “distant, distant Trismegistus” and “solitary, solitary Hermes Trismegistus,” the name a central figure in the western esoteric tradition. Masters of the Maze gives us such alchemical and esoteric luminaries as the biblical Enoch, Appolonius of Tyana, and—most importantly, as we will see later on—“Vergil the Nigromancer.”
Third, there is the style. Masters of the Maze has a plot; in fact, a relatively conventional plot about the threat of an alien invasion. But straightforward narrative is occluded, perspective is passed around among the various characters, digressions are pursued, obscure facts and obscurer terms thrown about like rice at a wedding. Here is our frustrated writer Gordon deciding where to visit on a trip to Europe:
Which way? To the east, the picturesque and unpeopled…comparatively…by tourists…the Balkans? Oots and sooks and slivova. Pre-Sarajevovan inns in hidden valleys. Dollars stretching endlessly. Glagolitic alphabets, glades buried in attarous roses plucked by half-naked and lascivious xenophile peasant girls. Black lambs and gray falcons. And also: political police, mass calisthenics, fleas, fierce scowling knife-bearing xenophobic peasant men. Or to the west, the familiar, the necessary, the source and fount, the tamed and undangerous, the tourist-swarming, expensive, dollarophagic, accessible…
There is a zesty, showily encyclopedic energy in the best (and worst) of Davidson’s prose that is all too happy to forget that it is, supposedly, telling a story.
Yet Davidson has been praised above all for his stories. The Avram Davidson Treasury, a labor of love spearheaded by his ex-wife, the writer Grania Davis, includes a generous selection of Davidson’s stories, as well as short tributes, remembrances, and commentaries by an all-star roster of SFF’s writers and critics: Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, Peter S. Beagle, William Gibson, Michael Swanwick, and others equally distinguished. So why does this collection of praise feel at times like a Fitzcarraldo effort to haul a steamship over a mountain? One notices a recursion in these tributes to phrases like “one-of-a-kind” and “unique.” How good are the stories?
Davidson’s short fictions tend to hang on a little nugget of surprise, a clever idea—children’s playground rhymes work as magical incantations, safety pins are the larval form of clothes hangers, an anonymous traveler is Gavrilo Princip on his way to Sarajevo—which he then overlays with dollops of indirection, digression, and rendered speech. (“Led’m,” said Goltz, briefly. “C’mon where’s the money, ladies. Where ya goddit stashed away?”) In an afterword to the collection, Ray Bradbury writes:
Many of these stories are complete mysteries, puzzles. Avram Davidson starts us in a fog and lets us orient ourselves slowly. He tosses us bits of information. We do not know where we are, who the characters are, or what they are up to. Slowly we begin to find our way toward the light, with Mr. Davidson always a few quick steps ahead, calling us, as a good storyteller calls: This way, now this, over here, now up, now down, now to one side, come along!
If this drill sergeant technique sounds exhausting, it can be. Here is the opening paragraph of “Naples,” one of the better stories in the collection:
It is a curious thing, the reason of it being not certainly known to me—though I conjecture it might be poverty—why, when all the other monarchs of Europe were still building palaces in marble and granite, the kings of that anomalous and ill-fated kingdom called Of Naples and the Two Sicilies chose to build theirs in red brick. However, choose it they did: These last of the Italian Bourbons have long since lost their last thrones, no castrato singers sing for them from behind screens to lighten their well-deserved melancholy anymore, and their descendants now earn their livings in such occupations as gentlemen-salesclerks in fashionable jewelry stores—not, perhaps, entirely removed from all memory of the glory that once (such as it as) was theirs. But the red-brick palazzi are still there, they still line a part of the waterfront of Naples, and—some of them, at least—are still doing duty as seats of governance. (Elsewhere, for reasons equally a mystery to me, unless there is indeed some connection between red bricks and poverty, buildings in the same style and of the same material usually indicate that within them the Little Sisters of the Poor, or some similar religious group, perform their selfless duties on behalf of the sick, the aged, and the otherwise bereft and afflicted; and which is the nobler function and whose the greater reward are questions that will not long detain us.)
Garrulous, curious, attentive to the out-of-the-way (Neapolitan brick, not Roman marble), Davidson’s fictions nevertheless undercut their own strengths by foregoing the virtues of structure, economy, and readerly sympathy. Giving free rein to his erudition without directing it toward a meaningful human system in which it counts for something, Davidson too often ends up sounding like a cut-rate Thomas Pynchon.
Yet I would make a case for one of Davidson’s novels as a top-notch work of fantasy, a landmark book in which Davidson’s strengths and his compulsions both align neatly with the matter at hand. The Phoenix and the Mirror, published in 1969, features as its hero Vergil Magus—that is, the medieval transformation of the Latin poet into a legendary magician—referenced above in the earlier Masters of the Maze. Rather than draw directly on the medieval corpus of Vergil legends, though, Davidson places his scholar-hero in an imagined antiquity, a pre-Christian Roman empire in which sects and saints, Phoenicians and Jews, Greek mythology and Enochian mysteries all rub shoulders.
This is what we might call Mediterranean fantasy, in contrast to the more familiar Northern European contexts of Tolkien and much epic quest fantasy. Mediterranean fantasy has more Alexander Romance and Pliny than King Arthur and Eddas in its DNA, and Davidson’s is a precursor to sun-baked fantasies of the middle sea by writers from Jo Walton to Gene Wolfe. “Smoke of wood and charcoal drifted up to Vergil leaning over the parapet on his roof,” writes Davidson. “Fish and squid, lentil and turnip, bread and oil and garlic, and a little meat—Naples was having its supper before retiring for the night.”
The Phoenix and the Mirror is as close as Davidson gets to a return to Israel in his fictions. Yet his book forgoes travel to land of the Jews, its itinerary comprising Naples, Cyprus, and Africa. It is one of Davidson’s increasingly frequent visits to the empires of his imagination, multi-national and culturally syncretic—and often absurd—geographies in which his heroes embark on adventures through the picaresque of his reading. Others of Davidson’s tales are set in alternate-history Hapsburg Empires, or “the Triune Monarchy of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania”; his 1971 novel Peregrine: Primus is a fantasy Renaissance Europe in a not-entirely-Christianized Roman empire.
The Mediterranean of The Phoenix and the Mirror is pre-Christian, though one sect worships “our Lord and Savior Daniel Christ, who gave His flesh to be eaten by lions and His blood to be licked by them, in order that we might be saved and have everlasting life.” In the novel’s kaleidoscope of mythoi, Davidson turns the Trojan War into the Tyrean War, with the son of the King of Tyre approached not by three goddesses, as was Homer’s Paris, but by “the Great Elim—Mikha-El, Gavri-El, Raphoy-El and Ori-El,” who ask him “to decide which among them was the wisest,” and for a reward he is given “the love of the most beautiful woman in the world—Eleana,” betrothed of Alexander the Great, who (like Menelaus in the Homer) besieges Tyre for many years.
But this is all background, delicious and playful color but entirely peripheral to the novel’s plot. That plot concerns Vergil, who is forced by a noblewoman—she magically holds his manhood ransom—to construct a “major speculum,” a mirror “of virgin bronze, prepared according to the Great Science.” This process can only be undertaken by master alchemists and requires a year of meticulous work, with outcome uncertain. Key ingredients are pure ore of both copper and tin, in order to make the bronze. This is, then, not only a Mediterranean fantasy, but an alchemical fantasy, governed thematically by the planetary influences of copper (the metal of Venus) and tin (the metal of Jupiter): eros and empire, feminine and masculine.
What happens? Very little, in terms of conventional narrative. Various interferences keep Vergil in Naples until the middle of the book, and further delays and setbacks keep him in Cyprus (the “copper island,” where Venus is worshipped) far longer than he wants. And no little part of the book is devoted to the specifics of the mirror’s creation, including, for instance, the building of the alchemical furnace:
a hearth was laid of Babylonian clay well-kneaded with horse dung, three fingers thick, in a circle, punctured with holes by a round stick, and left to dry. Around and up from this hearth, of the same clay and of small stones, a wall was built up in modum ollae, in the form of a pot. . . .The clay was macerated and triturated and washed and strained, believe me, fully an hundred times. The horses were all maiden mares, pure white in color, fed upon mallows and apples and grass plucked—plucked, mind you, not cut—from rocky hilltops such as we might be perfectly sure had never been tilled, for three days, after which we might be certain that they had thoroughly passed all gross fodder. As for the four iron bands binding the outside of the furnace, they were, needless to say, newly forged.
Quest narrative is arrested througout the novel by a (dare I say, halakhic?) focus on ritual, on recipe, on detail, on fashioning. The book needs almost to be annotated rather than page-turned, and Vergil, thwarted and betrayed at key points, is perpetually returned to the square one of his tale.
In fact, he ultimately realizes that the noblewoman who has commissioned him to make the mirror in order to learn the whereabouts of her daughter, desires not to rescue this daughter but to ensure her convenient death. As Vergil’s friend worries, the whole plot appears to be “a wild goose chase—an elaborate, though mystifying, hoax.”
This friend isn’t wrong. The plot in its bare bones—a man hired by a wealthy woman to find a daughter she purports to love but wants bumped off—is straight out of noir detective fiction, including the requisite double-crosses, false identities, and femme fatale. I have read the plot before in one of Ross MacDonald’s Los Angeles noirs, and I am sure that he is not the first to make use of it. Underneath all of the alchemical symbolism and alternate-history geography, Davidson has cleverly smuggled his crime fiction into his fantasy here, turning hardboiled lead into fantasy gold.
The transmutation works here, but such alchemical success elsewhere eludes Davidson. He sought to make the book the first of a trilogy. The second book, Vergil in Averno, seems also to be a hardboiled crime novel (Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest comes to mind) turned Mediterranean fantasy. It is murky reading, even in comparison with the allusion-layered first, and the third book in the series, not completed in Davidson’s lifetime, looks as if it were already collapsing back into his huge stacks of reference cards, like a good deal of Davidson’s work.
Davidson is remembered as difficult and cantankerous, yet the very friends who describe him thus seem to have been extremely fond of him. He and his wife Grania Davis divorced in 1964, but continued to work together on stories, and the raising of their son, and Davis worked devotedly after Davidson’s death to collect, edit, and publish his work. By the 1970s, Davidson had become a practitioner of Japanese Tenrikyo, a spiritual discipline that does not seem to have displaced his sense of himself as a Jew. Beset with health and financial problems, he lived for a time in a Veterans home in Washington State, and died in Bremerton, Washington in 1993.
John Clute, the Samuel Johnson of science fiction criticism, has described Davidson as “an anomaly in the field, a veined and porcelain monster as immodest as any of the monsters he created.” This memorable characterization indexes Davidson’s peculiar combination of earthiness and fragility. The porcelain monster, disdaining the strictures of plot, of character, and ultimately, tragically, of audience, was wont to break itself. But the shards shine.
investigations and fantasies 