Introduction to
MONITORED DREAMS AND STRATEGIC CREMATIONS

Rules have been broken for Bernard Wolfe, and frankly, screw the rules. Talk about coups! Can you dig that this book contains twenty-four thousand, eight hundred words of brand-new, never-before-published, never-seen-by-the-eyes-of-mortal-men fiction by Bernard Wolfe, one of the incredible legends-in-his-own-time of Our Times? Can you perceive the magic of that? If you can't, cup your hand around your ear and listen to the West, and you'll hear me going hallooooo among the Sequoias.

I wanted Wolfe in Dangerous Visions and it just didn't work out. But when I knew there would be a second volume, I assaulted his privacy and badgered and cajoled, and stole these two remarkable stories—"The Bisquit Position" and "The Girl With Rapid Eye-Movements"—away from Playboy and other flush periodicals that pay Wolfe three grand per story, and they are here because they were so ordained for publication by a Gracious God who takes time off from being (as Mark Twain called him) "a malign thug" every once in a million years.

Bernard Wolfe edged briefly into the sf field back in 1951 with his Galaxy novelette, "Self Portrait," and with rare good sense (like Vonnegut, years later) scampered for dear life and a reputation in "the Mainstream."

Yet despite Bernie's fleetness of foot, the rapid eye-movements of perceptive readers caught the slamming of the door and, having been dazzled by "Self Portrait," they began asking, "Who the hell was that?" They found out in 1952 when Bernie's first novel, Limbo, was published by Random House; and for the first time insular fans who had had to put up with dilettantes like Herman Wouk sliding into the genre to proffer insipid semi-sf works like The Lomokome Papersi, had a mainstreamer they could revere. Preceding by almost twenty years "straight writers" like Hersey, Drury, Ira Levin, Fowles, Knebel, Burdick, Henry Sutton, Michael Crichton and a host of others who've found riches in the sf/fantasy idiom, Bernard Wolfe had written a stunning, long novel of a future society in purest sf terms, so filled with original ideas and the wonders of extrapolation that not even the most snobbish sf fan could put it down.

They did not know that six years earlier, in 1946, Bernard Wolfe had done a brilliant "autobiography" with jazz great Mezz Mezzrow, called Really the Blues. Nor did they suspect that in the years to come he would write the definitive novel about Broadway after dark, The Late Risers, or a stylistically fresh and intellectually demanding novel about the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico, The Great Prince Died, or that he would become one of the finest practitioners of the long short story with his collections Come On Out, Daddy and Move Up, Dress Up, Drink Up, Burn Up. All they knew was that he had written one novel and one novelette in their little arena, and he was sensational.

In point of fact, the things science fiction fans never knew about Bernard Wolfe would fill several volumes, considerably more interesting than many sf novels. Of all the wild and memorable human beings who've written sf, Bernard Wolfe is surely one of the most incredible. Every writer worth his pencil case can slap on the dust wrapper of a book that he's been "a short order cook, cab driver, tuna fisherman, day laborer, amateur photographer, horse trainer, dynamometer operator" or any one of a thousand other nitwit jobs that indicate the writer couldn't hold a position very long.

But how many writers can boast that they were personal bodyguards for Leon Trotsky prior to his assassination (or prove how good they were at the job by the fact that it wasn't till they left the position that the killing took place)? How many have been Night City Editor of Paramount Newsreels? How many have been war correspondents for Popular Science and Fawcett Publications, specializing in technical and scientific reporting? How many have been editor of Mechanix Illustrated? How many have appeared in The American Mercury, Commentary, Les Temps Modernes (the French Existentialist journal), Pageant, True and, with such alarming regularity, Playboy? How many have worked in collaboration with Tony Curtis and Hugh Hefner on a film tided Playboy (and finally, after months of hasseling and tsuriss, thrown it up as a bad idea, conceived by madmen, programmed to self-destruct, impossible to bring to rational fruition)? How many were actually Billy Rose's ghostwriter for that famous Broadway gossip column? How many writers faced the Depression by learning to write and composing (at one point with an assist from Henry Miller) eleven pornographic novels in eleven months? How many have ever had the San Francisco Chronicle hysterically grope for a pigeonhole to their style and finally come up with, " . . .Wolfe writes in a mixture of the styles of Joyce and Runyon . . ."?

What I'm trying to encapsulate with these mere words is the absolute, utter charismatic hipness of Bernie Wolfe, a man who knows more about everything there is to know about than any other writer I've ever met. What I'm trying to say is that his presence in this book elevates it x number of notches, even as his presence at a dinner party elevates the scene to the level of a special occasion.

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Bernard Wolfe graduated from Yale in 1935 with a B.A. in Psychology and after a year in Yale's graduate school with an eye toward becoming a psychoanalyst, cut out and (not necessarily in this order) acted as liaison man between the Trotsky household and the commission set up by John Dewey and others to investigate the Moscow Trials, spent two years in the Merchant Marine, taught at Bryn Mawr, learned to play a vicious game of tennis, did some time in Cuba where he picked up a taste for thick (he says graceful), nasty-smelling (he says delicious), evil-looking (he says exquisite) cigars, which he can no longer obtain, due to the embargo. (This does not prevent him from constantly impaling his face with substitutes, equally as offensive to onlookers.)

Today he lives and works in the Santa Monica Mountains, overlooking West Hollywood. He lectures at UCLA, writes fiction (his latest project, Working-tided Go to the People, is a 1700 page novel based on/focused on the Delano grape workers and their heroic huelga).

What he has to say for himself he says with uncommon cleverness in the Afterword to these two stories.

And with two stories in a book that was conceived to contain no more than one offering by any single writer, Wolfe broke the rules, and thereby allowed the rules to be broken for the other Wolfe (Gene, that is; sorry Thomas, sorry, Tom) and for James Sallis. But with stories as good as these, damn the rules.

For those purists who will say I've stretched the concept "dangerous visions" to include these Wolfepics, contending they aren't strictly—by the rules—sf . . .well . . .

Damn the rules, here's Bernie Wolfe!