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Flowers for Daniel
(Daniel Keyes)

Most of us, sooner or later, come to understand the nature of the human condition . . . that slow stalk from darkness to light, from ignorance to at least a tentative understanding, from helplessness to accommodation . . . and then the slow or accelerating slide into extinction, incapacity, the darkness from which we struggled that was always our condition. For some, disaster or genetics speeds or suddenly truncates that journey, for others the slow procession toward understanding is impossible. But the traversal is generic; the greater number understand. Ecclesiastes, and so on.

That knowledge being so close to general, why does Flowers for Algernon, that encompassing story, that narrative of grief beyond metaphor, move us so? Why are the last pages of the novelette and the novel which is its expansion so shattering? "It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell," Oscar Wilde said of Dickens, but no such judgment has yet been made of the extinguishing of Charlie Gordon. Unbearable and yet—as art will permit—cathartic.

Why so moving? The narrative premise, perhaps—never before evoked, I am fairly sure. The story is framed as Charlie's diary, he speaks to us directly and his voice shifts through the situation. His voice is the situation. No mute, inglorious Milton here seen externally but the living, breathing, suffering thing itself, and, somewhere around the two-thirds point of the narrative, the stunned, then poised awareness of doom; the incalculable price of that acceptance. Nothing like this, really. The novel is successful, the details of Charlie's childhood, of filial shame and rapprochement, are touching . . . but the novelette is incomparable. It needs no further detail. It is stark, yet lush in its traversal of that disaster which the philosophers instruct us is the "human condition."

Flowers for Algernon was only the fifth or sixth story published by Daniel Keyes, who gives autobiography and the link between autobiography and this story in his memoir, Algernon, Charlie, and I very well. There was only one Keyes story in the science fiction magazines after the appearance of the novelette. In 1968, three years after publication of the novel, his only other novel published in his country, The Touch, appeared, and in the early 19705 a nonfiction biography of ESP and telekinesis, The Minds of Billy Milligan. The Touch, a curiously prescient novel of breakdown in a nuclear installation and the disastrous effect fear of contamination has upon its employees, was undervalued; published a little more than a decade before Three Mile Island and the movie The China Syndrome (and a decade and a half before the film Silkwood), it is a brilliant adumbration of issues which had not until that time entered the general consciousness. Alas, for all its great merit, the novel failed to find any support from its publisher, failed then to reach its intended audience.

This is not true of Flowers for Algernon. It found its intended audience, that audience being everyone. The novelette became a novel, television adaptation, feature film, musical, other adaptations, television series in Japan, most recently a new film for television. Keyes, as he writes in Algernon, Charlie, and I, became the man who hit the lottery, made the jackpot, scored the Ultimate Tip and thus brought home the big winner, but he did so not through the exercise of chance but, one might theorize, through the avoidance of chance; there were a hundred ways in which Flowers for Algernon could have gone wrong, could have collapsed into sentiment or fakery, but craft took Keyes the right way, every time.

And the power, the beauty, the absolute effectiveness of this work also say something about science fiction, our dear old field which we often painfully, but always earnestly celebrate in these volumes.

Note this: of the five most famous and influential stories in the corpus of what we call modern science fiction* (SF published subsequent to the first issue of Amazing Stories dated April 1926), two of them are by writers who are known to the general public and largely within the field itself only by those stories, writers whose careers without those stories would, however honorable, be modest. What does this mean?

 

Here is what I think it means: that voice, the great voice of science fiction, the power of our medium, its resonance, vision, possibility, has created a body of literature which at its best could have been told in no other way. This great task, great burden, alchemy of spirit and machine, manages to somehow have subsumed all of its creators, has opened the way to the final mystery and its power to us all. We are made one with Algernon and Charlie Gordon before and after, yes certainly after, that great fall itself.

 

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