This is Me, Jack Vance!

For memoirists and autobiographers, timing matters. Write your life story too soon, and you might miss that late Nobel. Jack Vance made the other mistake. He waited to write a memoir until he was 92, blind, and no longer much interested in writing. It won a Hugo in 2010, more, I imagine, as a lifetime achievement award than a tribute to the book itself. It reads more like notes from a diary than a connected narrative. His prose in the memoir is transparent and acerbic, sounding nothing at all like his fictional voice, where we can see the influence of some of his early favorites, like P. G. Wodehouse and Lord Dunsany.
His travel writing and the story of his early life in the Depression are worth reading, but I would like to know more show more about his intellectual and emotional life. He was close friends with Frank Herbert and Poul Anderson, but we learn little about what they thought of each other and their work.
He does not discuss his own work or that of his contemporaries. He does mention his early inspirations--P. G. Wodehouse, L. Frank Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Lord Dunsany—but he does not say much about what he took from them.
He tells us: “Talking shop has never much appealed to me, and I have spent most of my career trying to avoid it.” In the last chapter, though, we do learn that he usually wrote handwritten drafts using fountain pens with different color inks. His wife, Norma, was his typist. When his vision failed, he moved to a computer with a text-to-speech synthesizer. For accounts of the science fiction community of the period, memoirs by Fred Pohl, Poul Anderson, and Isaac Asimov are much more helpful. show less

Jack Vance is one of the giants of the science fiction genre, and his autobiography is a pleasant ramble through what seems to have been a pleasant life. Misfortunes - his parents' separation and divorce, years of poverty, a long period of childlessness after his marriage, a beloved daughter-in-law's premature death, encroaching blindness - pass by with scarcely a word of complaint. Instead, the author rejoices in his blessings: over 60 years of marital happiness, a congenial career, travels to exotic lands, a son and grandchildren.

The author is clearly a happy man, and one whose happiness owes much to his own calm determination to see the better side of life. He will, however, disappoint readers who seek insight into his writing. show more Except for a few pages at the end, he barely mentions his literary work. His principal subjects are, in roughly descending order, family, travel, boats, music, carpentry and ceramics.

All in all, I have never before read such an unrevealing memoir. When a man covers his courtship and marriage in a single paragraph, he obviously has no intention of laying bare his soul. He is even less forthcoming about his opinions; the most controversial is his fondness for jazz. And, while the book abounds in anecdotes, almost none of them involves anyone whom any reader will have heard of.

This is not, in short, a deep and penetrating set of reflections. Rather, it is the sunny recollection of a man who has learned how to live. We should all do as well. show less

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1449979.html

I haven't read a lot of Vance's work - just The Dying Earth and The Last Castle - but I've enjoyed what I've read, and considering the fascinating material that 90-year-old Frederik Pohl is putting on his blog these days, I was rather looking forward to reading this volume of reminiscences by Vance, who is a couple of years older.

Unfortunately it's just not a very interesting book. The best bit is the early material about growing up during the Depression (Vance was born in 1916), but apart from that it's a sequence of dinners, holidays, parties, jazz concerts, enumerated in detail without much reflection. To give one example, I have seen the story of the Jack Vance / Frank Herbert / Poul show more Anderson houseboat told in several other places, and told better. To give another, Vance has been blind for the last twenty years (including when writing all his later books starting with Lyonesse), and while I shall bear in mind his extensive listing of mystery genre wriiters whose whork he enjoys listening to on audio, it would have been interesting to read something more profound about the effect of the loss of one of the five senses on the writer. A line about the distinctive smell of Irish peat is used twice. We really don't learn much about Vance the man, and even less about Vance the writer; and those like me who really only know him through his writing won't feel any the wise after reading this. show less