Orson Card - Maps in a Mirror - The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card

Not every reader had to feel that way about my stories. Not even many readers. If only a few were transformed, then it would have been worth it. And some of those would go on to tell their own tales, carrying part of mine within them. It might never end.

Only a couple of months before writing this essay, I was talking to an audience about “Tunesmith,” telling them essentially the story I’ve told you so far. I began to speculate on influence. “Maybe that’s why I kept writing so many stories about musicians early in my career,” I said. “Songmaster, of course, and ‘Unaccompanied Sonata.’”

Then I remembered that only a few minutes earlier I had mentioned that “Unaccompanied Sonata,” probably the best short story I have ever written or will ever write, was one of the few works that came to me whole. That is, I sat down to write it (having made one abortive attempt a year or two before), and it came out in one smooth draft in three or four hours. That draft was never revised, except for a little fiddling with punctuation and a word here or there. When other writers talked about stories being gifts from a Muse, I imagined that experience was the sort of thing they were talking about.

But now, thinking of “Unaccompanied Sonata” in that double context, as a story that came whole and also as a story about music, probably influenced by “Tunesmith,” it suddenly occurred to me that maybe “Unaccompanied Sonata” didn’t come from a Muse at all (I’ve always been skeptical about such things anyway), but rather from Lloyd Biggie, Jr. After all, though the world in which “Unaccompanied Sonata” takes place is completely different from the milieu of “Tunesmith,” the basic structure of both stories is almost identical.

A musical genius, forbidden to perform, performs anyway, and his music has far-reaching effects, even though he is snatched away without ever having a chance to benefit personally from what he achieved. And at the end, he comes to the place where the music is being played and takes his unrecognized bow. Anyone who has read both “Tunesmith” and “Unaccompanied Sonata” recognizes the pattern. It is not all that either story is about—but it’s a vital part of both.

So of course “Unaccompanied Sonata” came whole. I knew how the story had to go; I knew how it had to end. After all, when I was eight years old, Lloyd Biggie, Jr., showed me how. The story felt so true to me and dwelt so deeply inside me that entirely without realizing it—at a time, in fact, when I didn’t remember “Tunesmith” consciously at all—I was reaching down into myself, finding the mythic elements of “Tunesmith” that felt most true and right to me, and putting them into my strongest and truest tales.

There’s more to the essay than that, but that’s the part that talks about the origin of “Unaccompanied Sonata.” I hope you will lay hands on the Tor double of Tunesmith and Eye for Eye. Even though my novella “Eye for Eye” is also included in this book, I hope at least some of you will read “Tunesmith,” partly because of the great debt I owe to the story, and partly because it’s still every bit as good as I thought it was when I was a kid.

There’s a perverse part of me that, when it’s in vogue to hate somebody, makes me want to say, “Isn’t there another way to look at this?” The national hatred of Richard Nixon during the 1970s particularly bothered me, mostly because it was so completely out of scale with anything he actually did. At no point did he distort or endanger the constitution of the United States as much as it was distorted or endangered by his two immediate predecessors; indeed, they were clearly his political school in just how vile a politician can be and still become president. I concluded at the time, and still believe, that Richard Nixon was hated for his beliefs; and even though I share almost none of them, I find I have at least as much contempt for the hypocrites who attacked him in the name of “truth” as for the man himself. In particular I think of Benjamin Bradlee, one of the “heroes” of Watergate, who brought a president down in the name of the public’s right to know the truth—the same Benjamin Bradlee who, as a reporter, was fully aware of and, according to some reports, complicitous in John Kennedy’s constant adulteries in an era when, if the public had known of this trait in the man, he would never have been elected. Indeed, the political life of Gary Hart should inform us that times may not have changed all that much! Somehow, though, the people didn’t have a right to know the truth about a man when he was a presidential candidate with views Bradlee approved of. The people only had a right to know when Bradlee hated the candidate and his views.

Still, finding Nixon’s political executioners with dirty hands doesn’t cleanse his own;

he did what he did and was what he was; and I for one am sorry he was president. Nevertheless, in the late 1970s I was constantly disturbed by the virulence of the hatred poured out on the man. It wasn’t Nixon who was poisoning America; it was the hatred of Nixon that was hurting us. That hatred was spilling over into hatred of anyone who sought public office; I think now it was the disrespect for the office brought on by both sides in the Watergate affair that destroyed the presidency of Jimmy Carter, probably the most decent, altruistic man to hold that office since Herbert Hoover. Heaven knows our system doesn’t often bring altruistic people into high positions in America….

So I wrote a story about healing. Not excusing Nixon, but not accusing him beyond his actual offenses, either. A vision of how to make America whole.

My wife, Kristine, lay in bed and playfully asked me to tell her a bedtime story. I thought of a disgusting animal to spin yarns about, but then proceeded to make a fairy tale out of it anyway. Later I sent it as my Christmas card to friends who would understand not getting a real card with four-color printing and all. It was next published in my collection Unaccompanied Sonata and Other Stories, and again in my limited-edition collection Cardography. Few have read it, but those who have often declare it to be among my best stories. That makes me very glad, because the story, one of the briefest I’ve ever written, encapsulates some of the most important truths I’ve tried to tell in my fiction. If my career had to be encapsulated in only three stories, I believe I would choose “The Porcelain Salamander,” “Unaccompanied Sonata,” and “Salvage” as the three that did the best job, together, of saying all that I had to say.

In editing my anthology of dragon stories, which was published in two volumes, Dragons of Darkness and Dragons of Light, I knew all along that I would be including a story of my own, one called “A Plague of Butterflies.” But in the process of editing other people’s works, an idea came to me quite independently. What if somebody were given three wishes and never used the third one? What would that do to the wishgiver? Because I had dragons on my mind, I thought of having a dragon be the wishgiver, and then, because I had been surprised at how few of the dragon stories were set in China (we Eurocentric Americans forget who invented dragons), I decided to set my story there as well. The idea of making my main character a middle woman came from the idea that she had to be, not a hero, but the opposite of a hero—which is, not an antihero, but the commonest of the common folk. When the anthology appeared, there was “Middle Woman,” a story I’m still very proud of in part because fables are so damnably hard to write. But I couldn’t very well have two stories by me in my own anthology, could I? And “A Plague of Butterflies” had already appeared in print under my name. So “Middle Woman” got the pseudonym—Byron Walley, a name I had used several times before when stories of mine were published in the LDS press.