Michael Bishop: Ancient of Days

When volume thirteen of Universe , Terry Carr’s highly respected annual anthology series, appeared in the summer of 1983, Michael Bishop’s novella “Her Habiline Husband” occupied its lead-off spot and encompassed over a third of the anthology’s total length. Other stories in its line-up were by such science-fiction luminaries as Ian Watson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lucius Shepard, and Bruce Sterling, but many readers considered Bishop’s novella the stand-out story not only of Universe 13 , but of that entire year. This assertion is supported by the fact that the following year “Her Habiline Husband” placed first in the novella category in the readers’ polls of both Locus and Science Fiction Chronicle magazines.

Michael’s fellow writers must have also liked the story. “Her Habiline Husband” was a finalist for the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America. But just as had happened a decade earlier when Michael’s “Death and Designation Among the Asadi” and “The White Otters of Childhood” knocked each other out of contention, he had another story (“The Gospel According to Gamaliel Crucis”) of novella length on the Nebula ballot in 1984, resulting in a likely splitting of the Bishop vote. In any case, neither of his two finalists won the award.

In an email exchange about the novella, Michael revealed that its title owes an obvious debt to John Collier’s short novel His Monkey Wife , and that the ending mirrors that of William Faulkner’s “Dry September,” a Mississippi-noir short story about an unorthodox variety of lynching.{Email from Michael Bishop to Michael H. Hutchins, July 9, 2012.}

Writing “Her Habiline Husband” as a stand-alone story, Michael had no early plans to expand it into a novel. Only later did he decide that there was “more story to the story” and sit down to write two additional parts to complete the novel, with the original novella as its opening section.

“I’ve never altogether trusted the idea of expanding a story to novel length by injecting a metaphorical air hose and inflating it from within,” Michael responded when asked about the “expansion” of the novella into Ancient of Days . “Instead, I believe in expansions that grow from the kernel of the original story and then unfold in a more organic way. I should quickly add, however, that I may not always succeed in effecting a satisfyingly organic novelization because of this philosophy and this approach.”

(In this regard, I, and many other readers, believe that Bishop does succeed in that very aim in Ancient of Days .)

Bishop’s first attempt at this form of expansion has its embodiment in the 1979 novel Transfigurations , which grew from the excellent, often anthologized 1973 novella “Death and Designation Among the Asadi.” The lightly revised novella became the prologue of the novel, much in the same way that “Her Habiline Husband” serves as the opening section of Ancient of Days .

I think it illuminating to note that this form of expansion exactly follows the pattern of Theodore Sturgeon’s 1953 novel, More Than Human , a work that Michael and many others in the science-fiction community recognize as a masterpiece. The basic structure of Ancient of Days , the foundation on which Sturgeon and Bishop build their novels, is identical to that of More Than Human . Like Sturgeon’s opening novella (“Baby Is Three”), Bishop’s “Her Habiline Husband” is a self-contained story, with the latter two novellas being dependent on the preceding ones to fulfill their respective author’s narrative and thematic aims.

In addition to acknowledging John Collier and William Faulkner for influencing the original novella, Michael credits several writers of hard-boiled detective fiction for shaping the substance, style, and format of the resulting novelization: “Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald go almost without saying, but I must also point to the popular series that I was reading in the early 1980s, namely, the Jacob Asch novels by Arthur Lyons and the Spenser novels by Robert B. Parker. Incidentally, I’ve always felt that Lyons’s work, in particular, never garnered the acclaim that it deserved.” This influence manifests undeniably in the second section of the novel, “His Heroic Heart,” where the story shifts from Beulah Fork, the bucolic small west Georgia town setting of “Her Habiline Husband,” to the bustling “mean streets” of Atlanta with its art-gallery and nightclub scenes.

Concerning the novel’s title, Michael admits, “Once I’d finished the writing and most of my revisions, I had no idea what to call the entire book, but David Hartwell, who often came to my rescue while editing my work, suggested Ancient of Days , a venerable Hebrew name for God and the title of a powerful Christian hymn, and I told him that the only thing wrong with it is that I hadn’t thought of it myself. David laughed ruefully and said something like, ‘Yes, well, there’s that.’”

So what about the novel itself?

It begins in a peaceful pecan grove in the rural South and ends on the serene beach of a remote Caribbean island. In between, important questions are asked by the central character, and by extension, the author. What does it mean to be human? Is our humanity in our genes or in our actions? Does every living creature have a soul? Is that soul a gift from a divine spirit, or is it simply biological?

In a 2003 public radio interview, Michael said, “What I was attempting to do with Adam [the novel’s central character] was to show, in some respects, through a single individual, the evolution of an entire species, an entire race of creatures who are moving towards both sentience and spirituality. How did it happen that human beings came to have a sense, a feeling of connectiveness to the Sacred? I wanted to take a look at a creature who came out of a background that many of us would consider primitive and deprived, and yet, at the same time, show that there is something in that individual that is yearning toward something else. When he finally reaches a situation where he has a degree of safety, these questions come to the fore in his own mind. How can one person go through life never asking these questions at all, and another person spends his or her entire life asking them? Adam was one of those individuals for whom these questions had a great deal of significance. And until he could answer them to his own satisfaction, he didn’t feel that he had completed himself as an authentic creature, whether that happened to be a creature of God or a creature of Nature.

“Adam evolves during the course of the novel from being a very primitive creature to [becoming] perhaps the noblest individual in the whole book. He attempts to confront all of the aspects of contemporary society and to incorporate those things in himself, to judge them, to test them, and to evaluate them. His nobility arises from actually transcending some of the faults that we have as a society now, but he does that consciously, and not as a completely primitive individual.”{ Cover to Cover: Ancient of Days . Broadcast on Georgia Public Radio, September 28, 2003. Interviewer: St. John Flynn.}