Remembering Gerald

by James Sallis

Cold in Phoenix, and raining for two days. I've been sitting here for some time with tears in my eyes staring out the window. It's 3 A.M. Steam rises from the cup of tea on the desk beside me, another breath alternate to my own. My cat lifts her head to look around from her favored position at the back of my desk, on a mattress of manuscript there. I'm supposed to be sleeping beside my wife, or finishing a book. But I'm thinking of Gerald.

I heard of it first from his friend Hassni - then a deluge of messages, one after another, spillage from small continents like my own, all these desks and lamps and stacks of paper throughout the UK, in Bastrop, Texas, Brooklyn, downtown New York. On my last visit to London, the three of us, Gerald, Hassni and myself, sat in a modest café off Trafalgar Square for more than an hour before I had to break off to keep an appointment at the BBC studios half a mile or so away. It was the first time I'd actually met Gerald. He took me to task, I remember, for my championing of American Beauty. Did I not find it at best cliché-ridden and misogynist? and agree that all its best moments were stolen from Atom Egoyan? A great favorite of Gerald's and my own.

Gerald had died, Hassni told me, last Wednesday. For some weeks a naggingly persistent cold rode him. Nothing remarkable; it hadn't even kept him off work till that Monday. He was getting dressed to keep an appointment with his doctor, needing a medical certificate for his job, when he called out to his parents that he couldn't breathe. They hurried down the hallway (I know nothing of their home, but imagine them moving along a narrow hallway, past the kitchen, to his bedroom) to find him collapsed and seizing on the floor. No one's sure just where and when he died. Gerald's brother Richard believes it was at the hospital, his mother that it was in the ambulance. The presumed cold, apparently, had been flu, ushering in unsuspected complications, putting a strain on his heart, filling his lungs with fluid. How does a 35-year-old die of heart failure? Hassni asked.

Through the service, off and on during the rest of the day, Gerald's mother held onto Hassni's arm. Some of Gerald's favorite music was played: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, the Pet Shop Boys. He would have been quietly pleased, Hassni said, at the way his two worlds, family and friends here in his hometown and writing friends from that larger world beyond, finally came together - quietly pleased, and amused.

Gerald and I got to know one another by e-mail. Interviewing me for The Edge, Gerald eased his foot into the door. A dozen or so messages went back and forth between Irthlingborough and west Phoenix before we ever got down to it. As a writer, over the years I've formed many long-distance relationships, some of them close, with people I've never actually met: editors, other writers, readers whose tentative letters of appreciation precipitated years of correspondence. Gerald's and my correspondence, I realized early on, was something apart. I'd come upon a new friend.

The interview took perhaps three weeks, a scurry of messages passing back and forth. First thing each morning I'd brew up a cup of tea, settle in there on that continent, in that office where lizards crisscrossed the wall outside my window, to read Gerald's latest, then spend an hour or so responding. After which I'd turn to whatever novel (Bluebottle, I think) and whatever other work (I seem to recall a number of introductions and critical pieces) awaited me.

Once it was done, the final clarification achieved, I expressed to Gerald my sadness, saying how much I would miss our daily sessions. What? he replied - playing at being horrified. It sounds as though you want to be interviewed for the rest of your life!

Well....

Instantly a short story leapt into my mind.

And just behind that, steaming into port, recognition of the importance of this dialog Gerald and I had struck up. Of how much it meant to me. And of how much I wanted to continue our conversation.

We did continue it, though haphazardly and never again as intensely. Gerald had articles on deadline, movies and books and music to review; I moved along to my next four or five new books. E-mails fluttered their ghostly way back and forth, as though neither time nor the Atlantic nor all these miles and months between were real.

"The friendship he had with you was a source of great joy to him," Hassni wrote when he told me of Gerald's death. "He never did many interviews, but the one he did with you was something that was a cornerstone for him as a writer and personally. Your books were things he would refer to often, picking out particular lines and scenes, mulling over them and re-considering them. So to have you as someone to discuss things with was something he was proud of."

The day of the service, back at the house, Gerald's mother turned over to Hassni a packet Gerald had been assembling those last days. He'd just got it all together, in fact, and taped it up to be posted. For almost fifteen years he and Hassni sent such packets to one another virtually each week: cassettes of new records or radio documentaries they'd come across, enormous rambling letters, pictures, toys, all manner of strange oddities.

I had no last letter from Gerald. Looking through my files, I find my final communication from him to have been news of a pending BS Johnson biography and a Johnson website he'd come across. The note was written hurriedly. I responded, I'm sure, just as hurriedly. We always think there's plenty more time.

But then the foot comes down too fast.

Outside my window a lizard dashes into bright sunlight atop a wall, pauses there a moment and speeds away, into the hollow interior of a cinder block. We've lost a fine critic at the height of his powers, a rare intelligence. Many of us have lost a friend. And all our lives, small enough at best, immeasurably smaller without friends, without the arts that meant so much to Gerald, are ever so much smaller now. We were all family, you see, all of us who loved him.

__________

Christopher Fowler
Very sorry to hear about Mr. Houghton's demise - in a world of thin carbon-copies he was a true original, and the literary world is a less interesting place without him.

__________

Michael Moorcock
I had just wanted to say that I only knew Gerald via the internet and that I enjoyed what little correspondence we had. I will mainly remember him for his wonderful intelligence, his eclecticism. He had an outstanding mind, was an educated critic of anything he chose to write about.He was a thoroughly civilised human being, with enough anger and edge to power his persuasive polemic.