Reflections of A.E. van Vogt

A.E. van Vogt Reflections of A.E. van Vogt (1975)
A.E. van Vogt was one of a number of persons interviewed as part of an oral history project undertaken by three universities - Colombia, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. This lengthy interview was eventually edited and published as Reflections of, which is as close as we'll ever get to a van Vogt autobiography. By this point, I think there are three van Vogt novels that I still haven't read - out of God knows how many - so it's probably fair to say that I'm very much a fan. Accordingly, I've found this to be a fascinating read.

Here Alfred Elton talks about growing up in Saskatchewan, his first writing sales to the magazines, Dianetics, the development of his technique and his theories about writing, particularly what he tries to do in his science fiction; and somehow I'm left with even more questions.

As you may know, van Vogt cultivated a particular style which, for want of a better description, seems to do to the page what German expressionism did to the cinema screen. You have to hold on tight because it can be disorientating, confusing, and dreamlike, often with the most confusing elements left deliberately bereft of explanation. My first reaction to van Vogt was this guy can't write, which changed to drunk in charge of a typewriter, until I realised the disorientation was on purpose and the result of a very specific methodology. As an aside, it's therefore probably a good thing that his just about an autobiography came from a series of lengthy interviews rather than more directly from the man himself.

As I expected, he was never shy when it came to blowing his own trumpet - much of which is admittedly justified - but it's particularly interesting that he should have also been so finely tuned as to his own failures, stories which didn't quite hold together - which is a relief because I've often thought it was just me. I suspect that these days we would describe him as having been somewhere on the spectrum, but I won't because I remain unconvinced of such a term being truly helpful. Aside from his occasionally startling directness, van Vogt comes across as an autodidact, although I suspect some of the grammatical eccentricities may stem from his having spoken Dutch until the age of four. Yet the image he presents of himself is itself contradicted by his views on L. Ron Hubbard, and on other authors he admires, and on what he tried to do with his own writing. I'm still not sure I fully understand what he tried to do with his own writing, although it refers to Marshall McLuhan as well as Korzybski and entails use of fictional sentences, whatever they are. Of course, it may all be word salad and inherently batshit, but the fact of van Vogt's greatest successes working just as well in the world inhabited by the rest of us support the idea that he may have been onto something.

Above all, Reflections leaves one with the impression that while A.E.'s Venn diagram - or Van diagram if you like - may not always have intersected tidily with the planet upon which the rest of us live, he seems like an incredibly nice guy, and one whom it would have been fun to hang around with.