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  Praise for Limbo

  ‘To my mind, Bernard Wolfe remains one of the most remarkable original writers of the 20th century’

  Harlan Ellison®

  ‘Shrewd, and sometimes profound, comments on Western civilisation’

  Observer

  ‘Deep, strange, and wonderful, LIMBO represents a straight arrow pointing from the cautionary dystopias of Orwell and Huxley to the postwar absurdist mode of CATCH-22, Pynchon, and Philip K. Dick’

  Jonathan Lethem

  ‘As to the books of Bernard Wolfe, his extraordinary imagination, his range of styles and genres, should alone qualify him for a conspicuous role in 20th century American literature’

  Thomas Berger

  MASTERWORKS

  Limbo

  BERNARD WOLFE

  To the Boss

  CONTENTS

  Praise for Limbo

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction to Bernard Wolfe by Harlan Ellison®

  Introduction to Limbo by David Pringle

  Acknowledgements

  1. Tapioca Island

  From Dr Martine’s Notebook (Mark II)

  2. To the Inland Strip

  3. The Immobs

  4. Dodging the Steamroller

  From Dr Martine’s Notebook (Mark I)

  5. Love and Columbium

  From Dr Martine’s Notebook (Mark II)

  6. Games

  7. The Mandunji, Meanwhile . . .

  Also by Bernard Wolfe

  About the Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION TO BERNARD WOLFE

  by Harlan Ellison®

  Here’s how it began for you, how you came to realize Bernard Wolfe is one of the finest writers this country has ever produced, how you came to share the years with him.

  In 1952, you were still in high school and very impressed with Salinger, Hemingway and Shirley Jackson, taking inordinate pride in having read Moby-Dick in its entirety, even the sections describing the riggings of the Pequod. Then, one day, quite by accident, while looking for a new book of science fiction you’d somehow missed in your voracious reading, you came across something called Limbo by someone named Bernard Wolfe. And you bought it, or borrowed it, or perhaps even shoplifted it, because even at that tender age you sensed the secret – books held it all – and reading books was more important than being well-liked or being able to shag flies in center field.

  And you read it; and your reading was difficult because every once in a while you’d realize that you hadn’t been breathing, that this Wolfe person was so good at what he was doing you had forgotten to take care of even the unconscious business of systole-diastole. And when you finished reading that big novel, you sat back and savored the heat this Wolfe had put into you. Yes, this was what reading was all about! You had to have more, had to have periodic transfusions from this man’s supply of imagination.

  One year earlier, 1951, just making a buck freelancing, Wolfe dipped merely a toe into the digest-sized-magazine (sf genre) with a remarkable novelette – “Self Portrait” in Galaxy magazine, and with rare good sense, foresight of literary “ghetto” imprisonment limitations (like Vonnegut, years later), scampered for dear life and a reputation in “the Mainstream.”

  Yet despite Wolfe’s fleetness of foot, the rapid eye-movements of perceptive readers caught the slamming of the door, and having been dazzled by “Self Portrait” they began asking, “Who the hell was that?” They found out in 1952, when Wolfe’s first novel, Limbo, was published by Random House; and for the first time insular fans who had been cringing with talented dilettantes such as Herman Wouk sliding into the genre to proffer insipid semi-sf works like The Lomokome Papers, now had a mainstream author of stature they could revere. Preceding by almost twenty years “straight writers” like Hersey, Drury, Ira Levin, Fowles, Knebel, Burdick, Henry Sutton, Michael Crichton and a host of others who’ve found riches in the sf/fantasy idiom, Bernard Wolfe had written a stunning, long novel of a future society in purest sf terms, so filled with original ideas and the wonders of extrapolation that not even the most snobbish sf fan could put it down.

  They did not know that six years earlier, in 1946, Bernard Wolfe had done a brilliant “autobiography” with jazz great Mezz Mezzrow, called Really the Blues. Nor did they suspect that in the years to come he would write the definitive novel about Broadway after dark, The Late Risers, or a stylistically fresh and intellectually demanding novel about the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico, The Great Prince Died, or that he would become one of the finest practitioners of the long short story with his collections Come On Out, Daddy and Move Up, Dress Up, Drink Up, Burn Up. All they knew was that he had written one novel and one novelette in their little arena and he was sensational.

  In point of fact, the things science fiction fans never knew about Bernard Wolfe would fill several volumes, considerably more interesting than many sf novels. Of all the wild and memorable human beings who’ve written something, anything on which the “sf” label has been slapped, Bernard Wolfe is surely one of the most incredible. Every writer worth his pencil case can self-aggrandize on the dust jacket of a book that he’s been a “short order cook, cab driver, tuna fisherman, day laborer, amateur photographer, wrestler, horse trainer, dynamometer operator” or any one of a thousand other nitwit jobs that indicate the writer couldn’t hold a job very long.

  But how many writers can boast that they were personal bodyguards of Leon Trotsky prior to his assassination (or prove how good they were at the job by the fact that it wasn’t till they left the position that the killing took place)? How many have been Night City Editor of Paramount News-Fawcett Publications, specializing in technical and scientific reporting? How many have been editor of Mechanix Illustrated? How many appeared in The American Mercury, Commentary, Les Temps Modernes (the French existentialist journal whose first director was Jean-Paul Sartre), Pageant, True, Esquire and, with such alarming regularity, Playboy? How many have worked in collaboration with Tony Curtis and Hugh Hefner on a film named Playboy (and finally, after months of hassling and tsuriss, thrown it up as a bad idea, conceived by madmen, programmed to self-destruct, impossible to bring to rational fruition)? How many were actually Billy Rose’s ghostwriter for his famous gossip column Pitching Horseshoes? How many writers faced the Depression by learning to write and composing (at one point with an assist from Henry Miller) eleven pornographic novels in eleven months (memorialized in his great semi-autobiographical novel Confessions of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer)? How many have ever had the San Francisco Chronicle hysterically grope for a pigeonhole to clutch up some singular appellation of “Wolfe” in their own frustrated style and finally could helplessly only come up with “…Wolfe writes in a mixture of the styles of Joyce and Runyon …”?

  Bernard Wolfe was not a “science fiction writer.” I am not a “science fiction writer.” We both have used the tropes of that genre to create memorable fiction. To my mind, Bernard Wolfe remains one of the most remarkable original writers of the 20th century.

  Sherman Oaks, CA

  December 2014

  Excerpts of this Introduction originally appeared in Again, Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison®, (Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1972) Copyright © 1972 by Harlan Ellison®; renewed 2000 by Harlan Ellison®. All rights reserved. Excerpts of this Introduction originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times (September 23, 1974) Copyright © 1974 by Harlan Ellison®; renewed 2002 by Harlan Ellison®. Harlan Ellison® is a ® registered trademark of The Kilimanjaro Corporation. All rights reserved.

  INTRODUCTION TO LIMBO

  by David Pringle

  If Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are the two great dystopian visions in modern British fiction, then Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo has
some claim to being their closest American equivalent. Yet, curiously, it has failed to exercise that claim, either in the popular imagination or in the literary-critical consensus. I think it is a masterpiece, although I must admit that it has been a sadly neglected one. Perhaps its central image—of a near-future society in which men cut off their own limbs to prevent themselves from waging war—is too disturbing, too crazed, to make for ready acceptance. It is easier to imagine us succumbing to the ‘feelies’ and soma, or indeed to the everlasting boot in the face, than it is to project ourselves into Wolfe’s limbless, lobotomized world of 1990.

  But what a grand cornucopia of a book Limbo is! It is big (413 pages in the Ace paperback edition), blackly humorous, and full of a passionate concern for the problems of its day—particularly the problems of war, institutionalized violence, and humanity’s potential for self-destruction. It is a novel which goes gloriously over the top, replete with puns, philosophical asides, satire on the American way of life, comments on drugs and sex and nuclear war, doodles and typographical jokes, medical and psychoanalytical jargon—a veritable Tristram Shandy of the atom-bomb age. In an afterword the author pays tribute to Norbert Wiener, Max Weber, Dostoevsky, Freud and, surprisingly, the sf writer A.E. van Vogt. ‘I am writing,’ he continues, ‘about the overtone and undertow of now—in the guise of 1990 because it would take decades for a year like 1950 to be milked of its implications.’

  Bernard Wolfe (born 1915) earned a B.A. in psychology from Yale University, and for a short time he worked as a bodyguard to Leon Trotsky in Mexico, though he was not present when Trotsky was eventually assassinated. His first book, Really The Blues, was about jazz music, and he went on to write a variety of novels and non-fiction works. Evidently a man of parts. Except for a few short stories, Limbo remains his only venture into science fiction, yet it gives ample proof that he understood the form better than most. ‘The overtone and undertow of now’ is precisely the subject matter of all the most serious sf.

  The plot concerns the travels and travails of Dr Martine, a neurosurgeon who in the year 1972 fled from a limited nuclear war to the haven of a forgotten island in the Indian Ocean. He has spent eighteen years there, performing lobotomies on the more antisocial of the simple natives (this is a humane continuation of the natives’ ancient practice of mandunga, or crude brain surgery). In 1990 Martine sets out to rediscover the world. He finds a partially destroyed North America in which the ideology of ‘Immob’ holds sway. In this grotesque post-bomb society men have their arms and legs removed and replaced with computerized prosthetics, in the belief that self-mutilation will prevent the recurrence of world war. It is a faulty equivalent of the islanders’ mandunga, the lobotomy which cuts away aggressive urges. Martine is horrified to discover that much of the inspiration for ‘Immob’ comes from a diary which he himself wrote and lost in that fateful year of 1972. He is the unwitting prophet of this nightmarish state; his jokes of eighteen years ago have been taken all too seriously. In any case it has all been in vain, for things are falling apart and a new war is about to begin. The story ends with Martine fleeing to his peaceful island as the bombs fall once more on the cities of America. It sounds grim and fatalistic, but in fact the novel is enormously funny and invigorating, and in the end holds out a kind of hope. Rich with ideas, all-embracing in its references, it is a book which uses the science and psychology of 1950 to grapple with the largest issues of our century. It is time that Limbo was recognized for what it is: the most ambitious work of science fiction, and one of the most successful, ever to come out of America.

  © David Pringle, 1985

  Since all the characters in this book are real, any resemblance between them and imaginary persons is entirely accidental.

  Raymond Queneau

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The quotation on page 53 is from Cybernetics, by Norbert Weiner (The Technology Press and John Wiley & Sons Inc.), copyright 1948 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  The quotation on page 104 is from The Selected Writings of Henri Michaux, published by New Directions. Translation by Richard Ellmann.

  The quotations from Norbert Wiener on pp. 187–190 are from The Human Use of Human Beings (Houghton Mifflin Co.), copyright 1950 by Norbert Weiner.

  The quotation on pp. 188–189 from John McDonald is from Strategy in Poker, Business and War (W. W. Norton & Co.), copyright 1950 by John McDonald and Robert Osborne.

  The chart on page 397 is from The Battle of the Conscience, by Edmund Bergler (Washington Institute of Medicine), copyright 1948 by Edmund Bergler.

  The quotation on pp. 410–411 is from Thomas Mann’s introduction to The Short Novels of Dostoevsky, copyright 1945 by The Dial Press.

  . . . Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

  Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven . . .

  Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire.

  St Matthew, 18

  Bah! Let’s make all sorts of faces.

  Rimbaud (who became as a little child,

  and had his foot cut off, and died).

  Part One

  TAPIOCA ISLAND

  chapter one

  “MUCH PROGNOSIS today,” the old man panted.

  The climb up the mountain was hard for him, several times he had to lean against the trunk of a raffia palm and try to catch his breath. With each halt he went through the same ritual of malaise. Removed from his head the green-visored tennis cap (found in a well-preserved Dutch sporting-goods shop in Johannesburg). Unwrapped from his emaciated middle a delicately figured silk paisley scarf (from the intact shelves of an excellent London haberdashery in Durban). Mopped brow with loincloth. Then reached down to massage his feet through the cricket sneakers (souvenir of the Cape Town country club, rescued from a locker which had belonged to the last naval attaché stationed at the British consulate there).

  He knew he was not supposed to tax himself (“Without much care,” Dr. Martine had told him bluntly, “prognosis unfavorable”) but he would not take time out for a real rest, much less turn back. From his knobby shoulders hung the only native garment he could boast at the moment, a loose chieftain’s robe made of pounded bark and decorated with neat alternating rows of stylized parakeets and cacao flowers; he hitched it to his knees as he picked his way through the brush, arthritic ballet.

  The jungle was noisy today, fidgety as an insomniac (he had been suffering from insomnia lately, Dr. Martine had been treating him for it), fronds rasped against each other, trees creaked, mynah birds shrilled nasal obscenities at the sun, marmosets jibbered in falsetto. He disapproved of this order of sounds, they were symptomatic of hyperthyroidism, hypertension, hypertonus. He frowned upon such tension, in Nature as in himself. Better to be like the slow loris, heavy-lidded, tapioca-muscled. Lately, though, he had been very tense.

  Each time he interrupted his climb toward the Mandunga Circle he looked down in the direction of the village. Silly, of course, there was no chance of his being followed. As for the villagers, nobody was allowed to approach the Circle except the troubled ones and those who had business with them; and as for strangers, well, none had been seen on the island in his lifetime. Ever. None except Dr. Martine, Still, he kept looking back over his shoulder.

  His intelligent deep-amber face, shining with sweat under a thatch of crinkly white hair, was fixed in a scowl now, muscles coagulated in ridges—welts left by some whip of woe. It felt as though he were wearing some sort of mask, he was not used to worry or the crampings of worry and the knots around his mouth and in his forehead quivered. Insomnia, bunched-up muscles, tremors, worry—it almost looked, he thought, as if he had developed some of the signs of the troubled ones. Unpleasant notion. He w
ished he had a bowl of tapioca, it relaxed the bowels.

  “Mandunji most mild people,” he said half-aloud in English, remembering with irony a remark Dr. Martine had once made. “With us musculature rejects tonus like eye of owl rejects light. We sag very much, bristle never.” Immediately he corrected himself: “Are. The musculature rejects tonus like the eye of the owl.” It annoyed Dr. Martine to hear his language spoken without the silly, unnecessary words he called articles and verbs and so on.

  A tarsier peered down at him from a branch and hiccupped dementedly.

  A moment later, puffing hard, he had reached a small clearing on the crest of the mountain, bare except for a scattering of yuka and cassava plants. Memorable spot. Here was the center of the Mandunga Circle, here, eighteen and a half years ago, he had first set eyes on Dr. Martine. Looking down over the carpet of pinnate leaves thrown up by the raffias, he could see the saw-tooth cliffs on the perimeter of the island—island which by some miracle, Martine liked to say, had never been charted on any map by any cartographer—and the glinting waters of the Indian Ocean beyond. The sky was without a trace of cloud, a flawless impermeable blue—“as dazzling,” Martine sometimes said of it, “as a baboon’s ass,”

  It was on just such a day eighteen years ago, as the sun was heaving up over Sumatra and Borneo (Martine insisted there were such places to the east: called them the islands of Oceania), that the doctor had been tossed out of the sky onto the mountain top. What more ominous bundles was that cobalt vacuum preparing to sprinkle over the island today?

  “Tomorrow sunny and continued warm,” he said to himself, still in the doctor’s language. “Prognosis for weather, anyway, favorable.” Added, “The prognosis. For the weather. Is.”

  Shading his eyes with a bony hand, he began to search the ocean for ships. It would be suicide, he knew, for mariners not familiar with these waters to attempt a landing anywhere on the island’s coast because of the treacherous reefs and the razor-backed cliffs which jutted out into the surf. Nevertheless, he looked. Ships could carry planes. It was possible these days for strangers to come by air as well as by sea. Dr. Martine had come by air.