"Judith Merril - The Best of Judith Merril" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

CONTENTS

Introduction by Virginia Kidd
That Only a Mother
The Shrine of Temptation
Whoever You Are
Daughters of Earth
Stormy Weather
Dead Center
The Lady Was a Tramp
Wish Upon a Star
The Lonely
Auction Pit
In the Land of Unblind

WARNER BOOKS EDITION
First Printing: January, 1976
Copyright ┬й 1976 by Judith Merril All rights reserved
Warner Books, Inc., 75 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10019
CIA Warner Communications Company Printed in the United States of America
Not associated with Warner Press, Inc. of Anderson, Indiana


Introduction
1тАФMemoir

Most of the writers I know came to New York City like Moslems to Mecca; Judith Merril was born
there. She was the only child of two early Zionists. Her mother had been a suffragette and was a founder
of Hadassah, a liberated female frustrated at every turn by the world in which she found herself. The
father was active in the group that founded the Yiddish Art Theatre, and was a writer in the Jewish
educational field; at some lonely moment his problems loomed larger than his hopes, and he opted for
death. His suicide left his widow with no legacy but his papers and a small child. Judith was unable for a
long long time to accept the fact of his death. Her handsome, creative father was not only the person for
whom she was searching, but alsoтАФinevitablyтАФthe model she was striving to emulate.
Judy wrote. She read and wrote omnivorously, compulsively, probably brilliantly. Her particular form
of teenage rebellion sprang from the realization when she was fifteen that it was her "mother's ambition for
her to be a Certified Intellectual"тАФat which point she stopped writing, for some years. High school
radicalism occupied her attention. She married a fellow activist and bore her first daughter. Comfortably
sure that she was her own woman, fulfilling a woman's destiny, and free of the unending pressure at home
to be what someone else wanted her to be, she discovered her own early inclinations surfacing again. She
finally knewтАФand when Judy Merril knows something, she knows it with her whole flaming selfтАФthat
what she wanted to be was, after all, a Writer.
It was 1945. Wartime. Her husband was in the navy; mine was in the army; and both were overseas.
I had come to New York from the South: Mecca, where I intended first to have a child and then be a
writer. Judy was a little bit ahead of me. She usually is. Within a few days of meeting, we decided to join
forces and rented two cold-water railroad flats side by side in the West Village, with one adjoining wall
demolished, giving us in effect an eight-room apartment with total privacy for both occupants. We shared
a very active social life (our New York was full of writersтАФand almost every one of them wrote science
fiction); our domestic life consisted of alternate responsibility for the two daughters and such details as
emptying the always-full drip pan under the icebox. It overflowed a lot; so did the little girls, but we had