|
Steve
Izma
-- Who was Judith Merril?
Emily
Pohl-Weary --
Judith Merril was my grandmother -- a science
fiction writer and editor, feminist, cultural
theorist, and anti-war activist. She grew up among
the Jewish intelligentsia in Boston and then moved
to New York City to become a writer. Her mother,
Ethel Grossman, was a suffragette, who ran the
Bronx House, a halfway house for homeless kids.
Judith believed that her mother raised her to be a
man, to be intelligent, not pretty. She didn't
teach her how to use makeup, but rather how to
engage people intellectually. Ethel wanted her to
be a writer of great literature, just as her
father, Shlomo Grossman, had been. Shlomo was a
writer who translated the works of Sholem Aleichem
and committed suicide during the Depression (Judith
was seven) by jumping out the window of his
publisher's building.
During the 1940s, 50s and 60s Judith wrote three
novels, dozens of short stories, and edited twelve
years of “Best Of” anthologies, which
acted catalytically and launched the careers of
many important science fiction writers. England
proclaimed her the American prophet of the
avant-garde, helping foster a British new wave in
science fiction. Canadians may remember the
documentaries she made for CBC Radio, and Dr Who
fans will likely recall the mini-documentaries she
did for TVOntario, which followed Dr. Who and
featured her social and cultural discussions.
Her relationship with SF was described in 1992 by
J. G. Ballard (author of Crash and Empire
of the Sun):
“Science fiction, I suspect, is now dead, and
probably died about the time that Judy closed her
anthology and left to found her memorial library to
the genre in Toronto. I remember my last sight of
her, surrounded by her friends and all the books
she loved, shouting me down whenever I tried to
argue with her, the strongest woman in a genre for
the most part created by timid and weak
men.”
Judith Merril was also an influential public figure
and cultural critic, who wrote non-fiction articles
and frequently spoke for current affairs shows. Her
life story not only chronicles the birth of science
fiction, but many of the important radical cultural
and political movements spanning three-quarters of
a century: the Depression, the Second World War,
the McCarthy era, the Vietnam War, emerging
feminism, and corporatization and globalization of
the late twentieth century.
SI --
What were her major works of science fiction and
why were they important?
EPW
-- Judith's most significant contributions to the
genre were: Daughters of Earth, That Only
a Mother, and Shadow on the Hearth. The
last two were written during the McCarthy era in
the U.S. They explore the unknown and the terror of
nuclear holocaust, and they reflect the oppressive
weight that American citizens carried under that
political regime.
The alien in her work often represents the
other from the point of view of American culture:
those who don't fit into the mainstream, or into
the conventional American "dream'' of what is good
or what is right. In fact, growing up Jewish in
America with a Zionist suffragette mother and no
father, Judith said that when she was writing her
stories she connected with the alien.
SI
-- What brought Judith to Toronto in the late
1960s?
EPW
-- In 1968, Judith moved to Canada partly because
she could no longer accept the realpolitik of the
American citizen; and partly because she needed to
escape her power role in New York’s literary
ghetto of science fiction. She came to Toronto to
join Rochdale College, an experimental student-run
university, where she became a resource person in
writing and publishing. Also influencing her move
was Chandler Davis, a science fiction writer and a
mathematician; and Dennis Lee, a poet, who was
involved with Rochdale at the time.
Better To Have Loved includes a chapter
entitled “Toronto, Tulips, Traffic, and
Grass," which is essentially her impressions of
Toronto in the early 1970s. Here she discusses why
she decided to come to Toronto, and what she saw as
a hopeful difference between Canada and the U.S.
For example, she describes a demonstration in
Toronto, around 1972, that reminds me of a
present-day Ontario Coalition Against Poverty
demonstration that I attended. She describes the
same tension and dynamics that exist now.
Judith’s love for Toronto eroded over the
years, and that contributed to her pessimism at the
end of her life. Her vision of the future became
Mad Max-like: where those who controlled
technology enslaved the rest of the
world.
SI
-- Why did she describe her life as a "history of
subversive, alternative movements''?
EPW --
Judith was raised to think outside the box --
radically. She discovered Communism and Trotskyism
during high school, and she joined the Young
Communist League. As a young woman, she fell in
love with emergent science fiction, which she
believed was her only forum to speculate the
future, critique the American society, and evaluate
foreign affairs. Remember that in the McCarthy Era
anyone who voiced opposition to the regime was
treated as a traitor. However, science fiction was
not considered defiant. It was pigeonholed as
made-up stories about the future, distinguishable
from society’s daily reality.
Until the day she died, Judith's views were shaped
by her political views. She passed these ideas to
my mother, who then imbued me and my siblings with
them. Judith didn't limit herself to what was, but
rather what should be.
SI --How
would you describe Judith’s relationships with
other women?
EPW --
Judith's relationships with other women (including
her mother) were often tumultuous. She found
herself isolated from women, as none were willing
to engage in the kind of intellectual, political,
and speculative discussions she preferred.
However, toward the end of her life most of
Judith’s friends were women. And she was
influenced by emerging women science fiction
writers, such as Nalo Hopkinson and Octavia Butler.
Critical discussion about women science fiction
writers and the utopian imagination, suggests that
the dawn of women science fiction writers took
place twenty-five years after Judith’s main
works. She continues to be a strong influence.
SI --
Emily, you’ve spent four years completing your
grandmother’s autobiography. Why was the
project so important for you?
EPW
-- Judith began to work on her memoirs in the early
1990s, but experienced great difficulties in
pulling things together. She found it nearly
impossible to conceptualize finishing her
autobiography, because once she was done what could
she possibly do next? Together we tried to capture
as many of her stories as possible. We even
recorded two tapes filled with descriptions of all
the sections of "the book" that she wanted to
include. I promised her that if, someday, she was
unable to finish, I would take on the job. In
September 1997, Judy passed away, leaving me with a
partially completed manuscript, twelve tapes of
interviews we’d conducted during her last
year, and complete instructions about everything
she wanted me to include in the finished book.
In my family, as in many families, each generation
has been a variation of the one before, shaped by
known and unknown ancestors as much as through
daily experience. This condition fascinated Judy.
Many of the stories she wrote were concerned with
the kinds of change that happen throughout
successive generations of women. After Judy died I
found myself rereading stories like "Daughters,"
trying to better understand my grandmother, my
family, and myself. I listened to our taped
interviews and eventually started to complete her
autobiography.
Putting the book together has been a learning
experience, which isn't exactly "fun" but is
nevertheless a good thing to do. My family's legacy
of intense, strong women is now much easier to
understand and accept. I can see clearly how
patterns repeat themselves, bind with individual
spirits and mutate. My grandmother fought injustice
until the day her heart gave out, and she demanded
that the people she loved do the same. I'm positive
she's up there somewhere, among the stars, looking
down at me and watching that I don't step out of
line. I owe it to her spirit to present the world
with her incredible, unique, and amazing life
story.
Emily
Pohl-Weary
is the granddaughter of Judith Merril. Quickly
becoming a major figure in the indie culture world,
Emily has excelled at finding success on her own
terms. She co-edits Broken
Pencil
magazine as well as her own magazine called
Kiss
Machine.
Her writing has appeared in Shift,
Lola, Taddle Creek, Fireweed,
This, and Now magazines. She is
currently at work on her first novel Sugar's
Empty.
|
