Avram Davidson: A Reminiscence of the End

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Updated September 5:

Some may wonder about the Avram Davidson link on the sidebar. Avram (Dave) Davidson was a famous science fiction writer who was a friend of my family, and a friend of mine. The last time I met him, he was near death, so unfortunately, this eulogy is going to deal with those difficult days. I understand that there are folks out there on the Net trying to put together biographies of Avram, so in towards that effort, I offer this.

My father met him in WW2 and they kept up a friendship throughout life.

Davidson visited me in the Central Valley just before he died. He had heart failure and diabetes at the time, and he was drinking several good strong drinks a day, which is not a smart thing to do, but he was always sort of like that.

He was looking for a place to live in Fresno, but we could not seem to find him one. The one place we found that seemed right had young, rather ghetto Blacks in it, and I think he was terrified of them. I think he felt that they would victimize him. He saw the Blacks and said no way.

Avram could be a very difficult person, but he was one of the smartest people I've ever known. Just to know him and have a glimpse at that incredible mind of his was an amazing experience.

And yes, he was Jewish, as you might have guessed from the name. I remember once my father screaming at me when I dissed Israel in his presence, but he really wasn't all that involved in Jewish politics, at least when I knew him.

His writing is really incredible stuff, if you can get through it and make sense of it. He's operating on a James Joyce-type level, so his work is going to be inaccessible to a lot of people. Further, he wrote in the science fiction and fantasy markets, and he did not sell well even there, so he was sort of doomed to obscurity.

I read Virgil in Averno, but I'm not sure if I understood it. I thought he was riffing off The Inferno, which is one of my favorites books. You almost need a guide to these books so you can figure out what's going on. He gave The Phoenix and the Mirror as a gift to my folks, but both of them said they couldn't really get into it or figure it out. One either had a taste for Avram's stuff or you did not.

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says, "He is perhaps SF's most explicitly literary author." That sounds about right to me. I did read one of his last short stories, (I think it was Go Forth, Thou Grore) and it was pretty cool when I finally figured it out. It was definitely a work of genius.

I realize I may be tainting his memory by accusing him of racism as I did in my other post, but Avram definitely had some racist tendencies, albeit of an integrating type. He was also very liberal, even socialist, politically. Religiously, he abandoned Judaism and took up Shintoism, or Tenrikyo actually.

He lived in Israel for a while, but left because he said he missed the New York Times. He also lived in Belize for a while.

He lived in Haight-Ashbury in the middle of the hippie revolution. I asked my father if he got high, being a head myself, and my father said proudly, "No, he was never a doper." Later I asked Avram about the era and he admitted that he had taken "mescaline" once at the time (probably LSD) but he didn't like the experience.

Handrolled unfiltered cigarettes and booze, preferably whiskey, and food were his vices. Avram was the poster boy for the anti-health food, anti-healthy living set while still retaining a bohemian class and without being a serious degenerate.

I met him once in the early 1970's when he was living in Sausalito in a small, dumpy, messy flat with another writer.

There were papers, books, coffee cups and clothes scattered everywhere, and the other writer was kind of a strange guy, with an odd, distracted stare in his eyes you see in a lot of out of lunch genius types wandering around the world's great campuses.

I was a teenager, and I asked, "Who is that guy?" and my father said, "Oh, he's another writer," and then it all made sense. Avram always loved to live in rather dumpy places. I don't know what he would have done if he had gotten rich and bought a mansion. Probably trashed the place so he could feel more at home.

He showed up at my house in Orange County in 1981. I was shocked to see him. He was dressed like a street bum! If you saw him on the streets, you might think he was a wandering homeless guy.

I had a Kabbalah Tree of Life poster in my room, and Avram came down to look at it. This was long before Madonna made it hip, but Avram really appreciated that - it went right back his Jewish and Talmudic scholar roots. Most everyone else thought it was either bizarre or downright evil. Avram was the only person who ever liked that poster, because he knew what it really was.

Avram was a really interesting guy, and although he was difficult at times, as a lot of writers are. He could also be very warm and delightful, and he always had a good, chuckling kind of sense of humor. When he was happy or joking, he had a wonderful little twinkle in his eye. He always got a joke, too, no matter how clever or obscure - actually, I think he liked those jokes best of all.

He could also be generous. On the last visit, he found out I liked bird-watching, and he bought me several nice bird books.

In addition to being so smart he almost seemed to be another species, he also had a lot of wisdom in areas that most non-specialists never seem to get, so in that way, he transcended the ignorance of the typical American, even the typical American intellectual.

We drove him back to San Fransisco in January 1992. On the way over there, we stopped in Herndon at a store and he went in to get something. He took like 10 minutes to walk across the parking lot (heart failure), and I remember this Hispanic guy just stopped and freaked on that, his mouth hanging open. When I saw that, I figured Avram didn't have long.

But even when obviously on his last legs with not much to live, Avram didn't seem depressed particularly, or not how most folks would be. He'd gotten a bit more cynical and hard, but he always loved life, even at the end.

I'm not sure Avram was ever depressed in his life. I think he had too many interests. He never seemed the type who wouldn't want to get up in the morning. Some people are sad. Avram never seemed sad, even at the end, when, admittedly, that delightful twinkle in his eye was less evident than before.

In San Fransisco, we dropped him off in some flophouse type hotel south of Market Street. He was always most comfortable in dumps like that; I don't know why, but he never cared anything for money in his life. I think he was going to meet up with his son, Frodo (named after the Hobbit character), who was living in San Fransisco.

He wasn't in a very good mood when we dropped him off and he didn't say goodbye very nicely; in fact, he was downright hostile, but I really didn't care. He was old and sick, and I figured what the Hell. I said goodbye warmly, shook his hand, and we left him.

We were walking down the hallway and my Mother said to me with a hard look of determination and foresight, "That's the last time we'll ever see him." The sentence ended like a pound on a table, a hard finality. That made me sad. I asked rhetorically, "What do you mean?" She said, "He'll be dead before we see him again."

He was. It was 1½ years later, in May 1993, and we heard he was dead. I saw my Mom and she said, "What did I tell you?."

I'm not sorry I knew him.

How many people get to be good friends with a world-famous writer? He could be mean and nasty, screaming, yelling, philosophical, warm, friendly, kind, laughing, joking and delightful and loving. A mere conversation with him was an incredible experience, like a visit to a great library. But he was always sui generis.

Wikipedia on Avram. Ray Bradbury, one of my favorite writers (and highly recommended) in a two-page tribute to Davidson, compared him to the greats Saki, G.K. Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling and John Collier, who I just now learned about. He's also been compared to Laurence Sterne and William Gaddis. Good company. Nice appreciation of Avram's work here.

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