In Mimosa 22, we were privileged to publish Walt Willis' very last original
fanzine article. With Chicon 2000 coming up later this year, it seems appropriate
to close this issue with some classic Willis -- a narrative from his visit to the
1952 Chicon, reprinted (slightly abridged) from The Harp Stateside and the
7th issue (Winter 1952-3) of Slant. We will very much miss him -- he was a
link to fandom's Golden Age; he was our friend.  As the night wore on, the party stayed
very close to our ideal -- not too many people and all of them conscious. The only
noise seemed to come from the pros round the bar, where for a while I got caught up
in a crowd which seemed to consist mainly of Mack Reynolds, though one caught
glimpses of Tony Boucher, Poul Anderson, and Jerry Bixby roaming around his
outskirts. I scored an almost fatal success with a couple of limericks they hadn't
heard before. "This Willis is a well," announced Mack reverently. "A
well, that's what he is!" It wasn't that I didn't enjoy the present company,
but I wanted to get back to Max Keasler and Lee Hoffman; god knew when us three
would ever meet again. But Mack would have none of it. "Willis is a well,"
he insisted to the crowd at the bar. "We can't let our well get away," he pleaded,
pressing another drink on me to make sure I didn't run dry. Finally, I promised to
mail him a complete list of all the limericks I knew and escaped, followed by
resentful rumblings of "I tell you the man was a well! A positive
well!"I went back to the window ledge where
I'd been sitting between Lee and Max. We spent the rest of the night there, holding
court with various people who dropped by. Mack Reynolds made occasional sorties out
of the bar to beg for more limericks. I would dredge the resources of my memory and
he would retire again, shaking his head and muttering to no one in particular, "A
well!" Poul Anderson came along wanting to be taught some Irish drinking
songs. I sang him as much as I could remember of "The Cruiskeen Lawn" and promised
to mail him the rest. Max was dispensing No-Doze tablets to everyone. He had been
living on them himself for days and was beginning to feel very odd indeed.Time went by and things got quieter
and quieter until we seemed to be the only ones who were fully awake. As the dawn
broke, the three of us were quietly very happy and talked about how wonderful it had
all been, and how much we were going to miss each other and how we must meet again
some time. As for me, I was as happy as I'd ever been in my life. I had now been
just seven days in America without even having had time to think about it, but now a
feeling of utter exaltation swept over me to realize that here I was sitting between
Lee Hoffman and Max Keasler at the top of a Chicago skyscraper, watching the sun
rise over Lake Michigan. Life can be wonderful. It was one of those moments that
has to be broken while it's still perfect, and when the sun was fully up we went
down to have breakfast.# # # #
I came home from my U.S. trip to find
that half of you good people didn't know I'd been away, and the rest had written
anyway. I'm sorry I haven't replied to your letter or appeared in answer to your
writ, or whatever it was, but for the last six months I've either been getting ready
to go over America, been over in America, or been getting over America. And believe
me it's a hard place to get over. People keep asking me what I thought of it. Well,
that's a good question; I wish someone would hurry up and tell me a good answer.
There were some things I liked a lot. Malted milk, the Okefenokee Swamp, orange
juice, the Gulf of Mexico, hamburgers, the Rocky Mountains, pastrami, the Grand
Canyon, fried chicken, the New York skyline -- subtle nuances like that in the
American scene which the less perceptive tourist might pass unnoticed. What really
did impress me was the American small town, which seemed to me the nearest thing to
the ideal place to live in that has appeared so far on this planet. Pleasant houses,
tree-lined streets, young people in summer clothes, and warm evenings filled with
the crepitation of crickets and of neon signs -- symbolically indistinguishable in
sound. Title illustration by Diana Harlan Stein |
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