The following tributes to founding editor R.D. Mullen appeared in
SFS #76 (November 1998).
R.D. Mullen died peacefully at 82 on August 8, 1998 in Terre
Haute, Indiana. He founded SFS in 1973 and, since 1990 when he
rejoined a newly revamped editorial collective, he has been our
wisest counsel, our most incisive historical memory, and our most
loved and respected colleague. It is with a deep sense of sadness
that we mark his passing here, a quarter of a century after the
founding of the journal for which he cared so passionately. We will
always miss him.
Since 1990, when Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr, Arthur B. Evans, and
Veronica Hollinger formed a new editorial board under Dale Mullen's
guidance, SFS has undergone a series of transformations which,
we like to believe, has kept it abreast of aesthetic, critical,
political, and philosophical developments in the field. Dale, more
than any other individual, helped to anchor these transformations in
a firm sense of history, tradition, and committed scholarship.
In a note written the first time he retired from editing
SFS (crustily citing "advancing age and declining energy" as
long ago as 1978), he defined the editor's task as a minute
inspection of all ideas, all sentences, to detect and extirpate
faulty scholarship: "having in my time seen the publication of much
too much bad scholarship, I was determined that each article for
which I was responsible would be read not simply by editorial
consultants but in each case by someone thoroughly familiar with the
primary works being discussed. In most cases that someone turned out
to be myself" (SFS 5 [November 1978]: 303). Dale checked every
bibliographical entry and every quoted passage against the original
edition cited for every essay he edited for SFS. He owned many
of the necessary books himself, but one reason he retired last year
as coeditor was that it was becoming too difficult for him to make
the frequent trips to the library that his editorial conscience
demanded. For him, literary scholarship was a shared search for
truth. It required patience, insight, and above all intellectual
rigor. But it also was a collective quest: each scholar was a valued
member of a larger and mutually-supportive community. He expressed
these views perhaps most succinctly in an editorial note in the
November 1998 issue of SFS:
I have written on several occasions that literary
scholarship is an ongoing cooperative endeavor that provides not
final answers but materials for and leads to further study, and that
work that does not cite its sources, no matter how extensive and
careful the research behind it, is not scholarship at all. ...
[L]iterary scholarship is an ongoing cooperative endeavor in which
resources are shared... [It is not] a competition in which each
competitor hoards his or her resources as a capital asset. (532)
If, as we believe, SFS remains the best journal in its
field, it is largely because of its continuing commitment to these
standards of scholarly integrity. Dale loved science fiction, but his
love was not blind; love of the field made his critical edge sharper
and finer. He did not tolerate fannishness or special pleading. Dale
was tough on sf scholars because he knew that sf--with its network of
tangled cultural roots in popular literature and technological angst,
the pulp marketplace and the doubting (and hoping) human
spirit--requires an especially disciplined critic. He hated our sf
community's tendency to hype itself. In fact, he hated
sentimentality, and we can only fear that he would view this
collective homage to his memory with severe disapproval. But our
sense of what we have lost demands expression.
Dale tended to send two types of e-mail message: the swift and
tart critique and (rarely but intermittently) the stanza from lyric
poetry, sometimes followed by a brief comment. When he returned home
after being hospitalized early this year, we received one of that
second type of message: "I strove with none, for none was worth my
strife./Nature I loved, and next to nature, art./I warmed both hands
before the fire of life;/It sinks, and I am ready to depart." But he
then stoutly rejected the highminded resignation of Walter Savage
Landor's lyric, adding: "That's a crock of course. I strove with some
that were worth my strife, and I never cared much for 'nature,'
preferring cities and air conditioning." It was characteristic of
Dale that he signaled to us his latest recuperation by reassuming a
hardheaded critical stance.
We have all learned much from him over the years and we are
committed to maintaining the standards to which he held us during the
course of our work together. No one was more terrifying to deal with
when the work was shoddy; no one was more supportive when the work
was difficult; no one was warmer with congratulations when the work
was successful. Rob Latham and Carol McGuirk both joined our
editorial collective during 1997 and now we are five. We are well
positioned to carry on the work that Dale began in 1973.
We thank Dale Mullen for starting us up, for keeping us going, and
for helping to shape our sense of the future. We thank him for
providing a model of scholarship that would be impossible to imagine
if he had not himself demonstrated it for us. We hope to make the
next 25 years of SFS a fitting tribute to his memory.
--The Editors
Remembrances
Childhood memories can be sharp and clear, and at the same time,
vague. My early memories of Uncle Dale are of a gentle, kind man who
lived in a pink house with many books. Teenage memories are of a
gentle, kind man who lived in a third floor apartment with many more
books. Later, my relationship with Uncle Dale was limited to
Christmas cards and visits at family funerals. In the last year, I
was blessed with the opportunity to know my uncle on a deeper level.
As Mother and I visited with him, our conversations jumped from his
childhood memories to his service in World War II, from literature to
movies, and from politics to history.
Dale Mullen spent his childhood in Blue Mound and Topeka, Kansas
as the second son of a newspaper editor and commercial printer. His
favorite relative was his grandmother, Bethana Mullen, who "always
wore black with skirts long to the floor and was a great baker." He
loved her cinnamon and Parker House rolls.
As a youth, he was bored with Boy Scouts, Sunday school and
church. But reading was encouraged in his home and was his favorite
pastime. The first science fiction he remembered reading was The
Gods of Mars, which he found in the Blue Mound Library at age
ten. In 1927, for 50-cents, Dale purchased his first copy of
Amazing Stories, which he had seen in a Topeka drugstore
window. After starting to work in 1928, he spent most of his money on
magazines and books--a life-long trait. Dale read little science
fiction, however, between 1933 and the end of World War II. During
those years, he lived with his family in Oxford, Mississippi, where
his father owned the local newspaper, The Oxford Eagle.
In the fall of 1933, Dale entered the University of Mississippi
and became interested in publishing a literary magazine. There were
many young writers in the area, and in 1934 he published their work
and his in three issues of The Oxford Magazine. Those issues
included an article by Phil Stone on William Faulkner and five poems
by Shelby Foote. Dale left "Ole Miss" after two years, to work full
time as bookkeeper for The Oxford Eagle. In 1937, he published
three issues of another little magazine entitled River, which
included short stories by Eudora Welty and Peter Taylor's first
published work. Dale's work in this area is well documented in "Dale
Mullen and Modern Mississippi Literature" by Frank Smith, published
in the November 1986 issue of The Journal of Mississippi
History.
While attending business school in Memphis in 1938, Dale met and
married Laoma Burmmett. He returned to his bookkeeper position at The
Oxford Eagle and remained there until he joined the Army in 1942. An
artillery forward observer in the Third Infantry Division, he was in
heavy combat at Anzio and in France and Germany. He was awarded the
Silver Star and Bronze Star for heroism.
After the war Dale completed his degree in English and History at
the University of Alabama, his Masters at the University of
Mississippi where he held a teaching assistantship, and his Doctorate
in Elizabethan Drama at the University of Chicago. The fall of 1956
found him at Indiana State University (ISU) where he remained until
his retirement in 1980. During his ISU years, he returned to his
early love of science fiction and founded the journal
Science-Fiction Studies.
In the past year I have learned that my Uncle Dale idolized his
older brother, had compassion for his younger brother, and was his
sister's big brother, not just her older brother. He had a difficult
time asking for help but loved to be waited on. Of the three
brothers, I feel he was the most like his father. He loved his
mother's coconut cream pie and Mounds candy bars, and like a child,
wanted to play with his "Happy Meal" toy first.
While delaying medical tests and surgery, so he could attend his
"last hurrah" [our first SFS editorial "summit" at DePauw on
July 23-25--ed.], he called his sister to "hold my hand." His last
two weeks gave him both of these and he was content. As was fitting,
his was a gentle death.
This year Mother and I were able to touch the past with him and
bid him farewell. At his death, my uncle was a gentle, kind man who
lived in a small apartment filled with books, but, oh, how much
sharper and richer are the memories.
--Thana White Cottrell
[Dale once jokingly said to me that I might pronounce his
laudation at the funeral. Alas, our viscous existentiality made any
such thoughts impossible in August 1998; but I hope his shade will
accept this surrogate, and smile at me from his poker party with Gene
Debs and Sir Thomas More in Elysium.]
My first vivid memory of Dale is sitting one afternoon in 1972 in
a crepuscular bar on or near the campus of Drake University in Des
Moines, where the SFRA was having one of its early yearly meetings.
It was if not the heyday then the last fling of the Tolkien craze; it
was before the widespread of sf teaching in academia; and the papers
we had heard for the last couple of days seemed to have none of the
excitement of early fandom (which Dale knew better from having
followed it at first hand than I knew it from the gosh-wow books by
its early chroniclers and the hints by Fred Pohl in Trieste and Red
Bank); and they also lacked the precision and proper critical
distance of what we both thought of as scholarship. So we had fled to
that dim bar for consolation and were commiserating with each other
about these standards. We thought this mainly extended to the extant
issues of Extrapolation too, which had all kinds of missionary
merits perhaps but mostly sounded like a gang of overaged fans
attempting to keep up the glow of their teenage illusions, what Dave
Samuelson would, in the first article of Science-Fiction
Studies and punning on Clarke's Childhood's End, call "A
Median Stage of Adolescence." At some point Dale broke the gloom by
announcing that he felt that he should set up another, more serious
journal for sf studies, that he had some money saved up, and that he
was prepared to devote a portion of it to financing that journal. I
immediately rippled with enthusiasm and said I'd like to help and
participate in whatever way I could; my imagination caught fire, and
I started spinning out loud proposals for possible types of
contributions. Probably they included working not only on the
post-1945 moment but also on pre-1945 and non-English sf and sf
criticism as well as going through all the extant Ph.D.s on it, since
that's what I proceeded to do (and Samuelson's work, for one,
resulted from soliciting him to turn a part of his Ph.D. into that
article), but I really forget. The discussion ended in Dale's
appointing me there and then as associate editor of what came to
be--after further consultations in Des Moines and later--called,
precisely, Science-Fiction Studies (Dale was great on precise
things such as the hyphen making the difference between adjectival
and nominal forms of "sf"). The name was, I'm confident, his
invention, I would have probably picked something more flamboyant and
Greek-sounding. I'm not sure of many similar details: unfortunately
there seems to be little record of letters between us in those
pre-computer days, I tended to use the phone an awful lot and charge
it to the abundant grants I received in those blessed Welfare-State
days. I do clearly remember that I then started bombarding Dale with
suggestions and materials. At some point before the first issue he
told me, with his characteristic acute sense for fairness, that I had
already done so much he'd install me as co-editor. And that is how
the SFS team got formed. I never contributed a cent to it
(except maybe indirectly, by using my research assistants), until his
resignation announced in the last 1978 SFS issue.
Of course this was not the first time I had met Dale. I was at the
time in the throes of a crazy (but not yet totally impossible)
encyclopedic ambition to read all that was ever and anywhere written
about sf, so that I had read with appreciation his three major early
essays, the Riverside Quarterly ones on E.R. Burroughs and on
"Blish, Van Vogt, and the Uses of Spengler," as well as the
Extrapolation one on Wells and V.R. Emmanuel. I had
particularly liked the Spengler essay: here was a critic who was not
only a philologist of the old-fashioned precise kind--which I
liked--but had also the interest in theory of history so rare on a
continent that seemed to run, not excluding my New Left friends and
hippie students, on Henry Ford's slogan "History is bunk." (Jim
Blish, whom I'd met in 1966 and visited almost each year after that
in England, no mean critic himself, told me he was so impressed by
that essay that he changed some dates in his Okie series to fit
Dale's critique.) I surely also met Dale before 1972 at some previous
SFRA or MLA meeting, but memory fails me.
At any rate, we were exchanging materials about our common
interests in Thomas More and H.G. Wells much before Des Moines: I
sent him for example some roneotyped pages on analyzing Utopia,
multiplied for class use, and his comments were detailed, most
knowledgeable, precise, and to the point. Thus it was logical to
invite him to an international symposium on Wells and sf at McGill in
October 1971. It was the only time I had the pleasure of seeing Dale,
already heavy on his feet (which would later trouble him a lot and
practically confine him to Terre Haute), at the place I lived. And
conversely, it was only once, risking limb and life amid Reaganite
deregulation in the little propeller plane from Chicago and the
hurricane season, that I visited Dale and his wife in Terre Haute and
beheld the impressive rows of prewar sf journals waiting for the
definitive overview which he'll now not give us.
Our approach or stance as editors was obviously different but it
proved complementary. I very dimly remember that Dale told me he
served in the Second World War, because we discovered we may have
been in Italy at the same time. But he didn't expatiate upon it, and
he had not undergone the life-and-death political radicalization of
the European intelligentsia in the pressure-cooker of Fascism and
war. Therefore, Dale had much more the demeanour of a tolerant
gentleman than I did at the time--though I trust both of us conducted
SFS affairs with maximum philological openness available to
us. He didn't suffer fools any more gladly but his stoicism and
reticence foregrounded it less. Yet I may disappoint some acidulous
poormouthers of this "High Modernist" moment in sf criticism by
saying that, having been clear at the outset about what we wanted to
avoid (which included Fantasy "except for purposes of comparison and
contrast"), there was extremely little discussion of overt
ideological or political nature between us. So far as I could gather
from his laconic self-references (I think he held to Pascal's theory
of "the hateful I" in criticism, as refracted through the Positivist
scholarship of his formative years), Dale was a "Midwest atheist" not
too far from--though much less strident than--the Colonel Ingersoll
stamp, and indeed a Debsian, that is a very anti-elitist or populist
socialist. Debs's great maxim "I want to rise with the ranks, not
from the ranks" seems to me to have been an overriding maxim for
Dale's professional life too. Thus we were both to the Left of the
professional "mainstream" in academia and certainly (with a few
exceptions such as Bruce Franklin, in those years having just been
kicked out of Stanford) in sf studies so far, and I think we had
similar reactions of practical solidarity but also theoretical
skepticism in relation to the Marcusean campus New Left. And I surely
must have learned from Dale ideologically or politically too, though
I can remember only one instance clearly. At some point, I think in
drafting my essay on Philip Dick, I slipped in some disparaging
adjective (most likely "petty bourgeois") about shopkeepers to which
Dale objected--what's wrong with shopkeepers, he asked me? Reflecting
on this, I recalled that my favorite grandfather was a shopkeeper of
"colonial goods" (I still remember the yummy smell of the jute
bagfuls of raisins and other nuts and fruits in the corners of his
small shop), and that my family has always been proud of the probity
which led his guild to appoint him the fire-damage appraiser for the
whole city (I guess it had circa 20-30,000 inhabitants then).
Modifying the quasi-Leninist cliché I'd unthinkingly used, I
decided then and there that indeed nothing was wrong with shopkeepers
who fulfilled their proper distributory function without exploiting
workers. This example may sound faintly ridiculous in today's
subsumption of small shop-keepers under big chain-store conglomerates
rather than under socialist co-operation, but I give it here as a
chronicler of how Dale's apparently commonsense queries could bring
critics striving for overarching views, who nonetheless also had
ambitions to fuse this with precise interpretation, down to earth;
and I'm sure I wasn't the only one to profit.
Thus, I find an inner logic in Dale's publication record, those
wonderfully precise and thorough surveys of both primary and
secondary literature (on Wells, Haggard, various sf reprint series,
etc.). When I was writing my book on Victorian sf in 1980/81, one of
the principal critical sources I used were his pithy but pitilessly
precise annotations to some of those series. I tried to convey the
importance of such work to various SFRA award-giving committees
through the years but obviously failed. If I'm not forgetting
somebody, he may be the only major name among the Great Ancestors of
sf criticism missing from the list of Pilgrim or similar awards,
leaving the SFRA with a blot on its escutcheon. This was due to an
unfortunate reinforcement between the unquestioned norm of the
younger colleagues making up those committees that nobody without a
major book is worth a glance, and this (how shall I call it?) modest
pseudo-inductivity of Dale's, which hid the light of his general
critical positions--for of course he had them--under the bushel of
the seemingly pedestrian work; for example, of annotating sf fiction
and criticism mainly from the 19th and the first half of 20th
Century.
In fact, with the modesty characteristic not only of him but also
of his scholarly cohort before the "publish-or-perish" years, I
suspect a major part of Dale Mullen's submerged huge influence in sf
studies was the correspondence he kept up with dozens of people in
the field. The cohort-- people who studied in the 1930s, in the
whirlpool of the New Deal--must have been an interesting one: Dale
had learned at the university not only French (and he knew his
Aristotle well) but also German! There was a stubborn, pre-admass
independence to Dale, which one could also call lack of political
realism but then one would in the same breath have to add
imperviousness to modish sycophancy: our only major clash came when I
urged him to apply for a State grant and even supplied the proper
papers, and he replied I could resign forthwith if I meant to insist
on it... (I didn't.) I have not met anybody more emancipated from our
quantitative reification, necessary for fame in the cruel nowadays of
accelerated circulation (I was told in Paris you're nobody if you
don't produce one book per year: there's a Derrida or Kristeva 1989,
1990, etc., as there is a Ford 1989, 1990, etc.). I have also met
very few people more resistant, in his courtly and exemplary rather
than proclamatory way, to the ultra-Formalism dominant in critical
studies since the 1920s-30s, from New Criticism and the belatedly
digested Russian Formalists through the Structuralists to the
various self-referential schools of the present.
In that sense, risking again risibility, and begging the reader's
indulgence for comparing small matters to large (which is allowable
if we take the large matters as illuminating exemplars), I've always
thought of Dale Mullen's position in sf criticism as analogous to
Socrates' in Hellenic philosophy. Socrates left even fewer writings,
to be precise none. All that we know about him is what a few admiring
pupils left on record; he had luck, for one of them was a great
poetic narrator and myth-spinner called Plato. But through such
pupils, and then the pupils of his pupils (he had luck again, for one
of them was Aristotle), his limning of concepts and dialectics of
inquiry became all-pervasive in this tradition of "loving wisdom"
(philosophein). The analogy with the pupils is not to be
sustained: strictly speaking, in these impious and narcissistic days,
very few of us have pupils--so much the worse for us and them. But
inescapably, some wise people--and my memory of Dale is one of a
thoughtful, soft-spoken, often wryly chuckling sage--continue (as
Brecht put it) thinking on in other people's minds.
In the last communication I had with Dale, by e-mail, I asked his
opinion-- as I used to about so many things--about the title I had
excogitated for my forthcoming book on sf and utopianism (where the
"Deluge" is meant to represent our present ruling dispensation of
Post-Fordist systematic anti-utopianism). Dale's answer of July 13
ran: "Darko. Arguing with the Deluge is a brilliant title." I like to
think this possibly overgenerous judgment defines (as always) the
judge, and that the title is what finally his work, persuasive in its
quiet brilliance, actually amounts to. And that this has much to do
with the reason he will go on thinking in our minds.
--Darko Suvin
I first met Dale Mullen at a symposium on H.G. Wells that Darko
Suvin put together in 1971. We subsequently conversed face to face on
only two or three occasions, the last of them more than 20 years ago.
Like most of my--and, I believe, his--SFS friendships in those
days, ours relied on the typewriter (later, the word processor) and
the telephone; also, on our respective publications.
Given the nature of our friendship, I can't offer much by way of
purely factual biography. I know, for example, from what he told me
at the first or second SFRA Conference (at Penn State, in 1972, if
recollection serves) that he was contemporary with J. O. Bailey in
his academic interest in sf; but I've forgotten whatever details Dale
may have given me on that subject. What I can, perhaps, testify to,
however, are certain features of his psychological makeup, albeit at
the risk of repeating what others will say.
What most impressed me about Dale, virtually from the start, was a
kind of magnanimity that exceeded his physical bulk. Even if
generosity were in long supply among academics (which it isn't these
days), Dale would stand out as extraordinarily generous. Beyond his
unstinting encouragement of others, he not only shared information
with them (often taking the pains to write several thousand words
often better than what they were responsive to), he even lent books
from his extensive library--by mail, no less. And he had plenty of
information to share, being among the most knowledgeable of people
about English-language sf from the late 19th century through the pulp
era.
That he was a workaholic's workaholic I didn't fully realize until
sometime into my editorship of SFS. Even before my back
rebelled at the demands of the job, I often found myself wondering
how Dale had managed in the first five years of SFS's
existence. After all, I had a part-time assistant to help prepare
copy for the printer, keep track of subscribers, etc. Dale, on the
other hand, did all that labor himself--and in those days, without a
computer. And while Darko Suvin did much of the work of rounding up
publishable contributions, Dale (at least in my experience) did much
of the copy-editing (while also serving as managing and book-review
editor). And did it meticulously. I take his thank-you "for the
rescue job you did on my little essay" (letter of Dec. 19, 1973) as
high praise indeed. Also revealing of his attitude toward his
editorship is his remark in his previous letter to me: "I have wept
all I can weep about the typos in [SFS] #2."
Dale did have one large fault though: he was overly modest. I
don't, for example, remember precisely what "little essay" he was
referring to in the snippet I quoted above; but it was probably the
one that appeared in H.G. Wells and Modern Science
Fiction--which remains a solid contribution (and also the
earliest) to the understanding of "late" Wells. Nor can I think
offhand of anything he published that was not a solid contribution,
mostly to the literary history or bibliography of sf. But trying to
reciprocate his encouragement was definitely uphill work: repeatedly,
especially in the 1980s, he would say he wasn't in the frame of mind
to do anything; or if he did write something, he would subsequently
jettison it.
It thus came as a surprise to me that he volunteered to join the
team of editors I was recruiting to replace me. Especially inasmuch
as a decade earlier--which also means when he was a decade younger,
albeit in his late 60s--he had written to tell me that "I am simply
not able to do the kind of sustained work required" (this in 1980,
when I was contemplating resigning as editor after a mere two years
on the job, though mostly because I didn't relish having to devote an
upcoming sabbatical to SFS). That from 1990 until almost the
moment that death made his recent retirement the final one, he took
on as much and worked as hard as he had in the 1970s, should perhaps
not have come as a surprise to me. Being paired with Dale as
co-recipient of the 1996 Milford Award for "Lifetime Achievement in
Science Fiction ... Editing" does me proud. But then people like Dale
do all of us proud.
--Robert M. Philmus
I cannot claim to have known Dale well but we did meet on a number
of occasions, and over a period of twenty-seven years we
intermittently corresponded and telephoned one another about matters
related to Science-Fiction Studies. Our exchanges were always
most cordial and positive. I was saddened to hear of his sudden
death.
One of my meetings with Dale was in October 1972 in Des Moines,
Iowa. It was at the third (and last) Secondary Universe Conference
(henceforth, with the formation at that conference of the Science
Fiction Research Association, it would be known as the annual SFRA
Conference) and Science-Fiction Studies was then a glint in
Dale's eye. I recall sitting with Dale over lunch or a drink (I'm not
sure which) and listening to his argument that Tom Clareson's
Extrapolation need not be the only game in town. There was
room for another rigorous--perhaps more rigorous--academic journal
devoted to sf. He mentioned Studies in Science Fiction as a
possible title. I remember pointing out that such a title would share
an acronym with Studies in Short Fiction; perhaps
Science-Fiction Studies would be the best solution?
In February this year, Dale and I chatted for what, it is now
apparent, was the last time. He had telephoned me and at the time I
was still a little preoccupied by the fact that, during the
catastrophic ice storm of the previous month, I had slipped on an
ungritted, level, iced pavement and sprained my wrist. It's one of
the perils of living through a Montreal winter. It took over thirty
years for that routine accident to befall me, but much the same thing
happened to the unlucky Dale during what, for all I know, was his
first visit to Montreal. It was 1971 and Dale was attending a
conference on H.G. Wells that Darko Suvin, then Dale's co-editor of
SFS, had organized at McGill University. That was when I first met Dale.
His contribution to the conference--a representative
example of his solid scholarship--is preserved in the conference
volume that Darko Suvin and Robert Philmus co-edited, H.G. Wells
and Modern Science Fiction (1977). One evening after that
conference day, Dale, Darko, and I (and perhaps others) were walking
down a sloping, icy street. Dale, a big man, slipped and, although he
made light of it at the time (to the best of my knowledge he never
did burden anyone with his problems), he had in fact broken his
ankle. I reminded Dale of this accident during our telephone
conversation because of the common ground of my much less serious
accident, one from which I seem now to have completely recovered.
Dale, however, did not make so complete a recovery. He told me,
characteristically without complaint, that he had suffered twinges
ever since.
Dale was not a young man when he had that accident; he was more or
less the age that I am this year. Science-Fiction Studies, now
his legacy, was the creation of his later middle age. Since my last
publication in SFS--one accepted by Dale who claimed to have
liked it--was a note on Hillyer, hills, slants, and slopes in The
Time Machine, I cannot help but relate that note, which is about the
hill shape described by the rise and fall of life and human history,
to the sloping street in Montreal and to Dale's death in August. At
age 56, what is to me most inspiring about Dale's life are the
sterling accomplishments of the downward slope of his later
years--his foundation of SFS and his late taking-up again of
SFS as an editor.
But that is not all. Dale was a low-key, modest, dogged,
insightful, and courageous man. I never heard anyone speak ill of
him. He was a true gentleman. He was a fine editor and a careful and
judicious scholar. He was also a pillar of integrity. I, for one,
shall miss him.
--David Ketterer
In my usual manner of postponing until late in life what most
people do as adolescents (Asimov's "Golden Age"), I happen to have
been reading the older Dumas this summer as I learned sadly of Dale
Mullen's final illness and death. So now that we must face the
reality of his passing, I am reminded of the immense, almost
Romantic, fecundity of his life. It occurs to me that there must be a
common Victorian origin shared by benevolent individuals from
Christians to Marxists that proclaims the truth of the old adage, "To
whom much is given much is expected." Dale probably had a darker,
more competitive side to his nature; but the face he always showed to
me and that shown through all the collaborative work, the
"collective," of SFS was the generous face of the reformer
determined to shine down his light on the seedtime of a better world.
He encouraged me. He helped me in my work, almost anonymously, as he
did for countless would-be writers on sf. In the images of Dumas,
Dale was a big man, wealthy in mysterious ways, and above all he was
generous. He organized his own group of "musketeers" to defend the
honor of his sovereign sf and inspired in them the collaborative
spirit of "all for one, one for all." Indeed, there certainly was
something wounded, Byronic, and grand about Dale that has left us all
richer. And I am equally certain that if he could write more
backmatter for SFS, he would both scoff at my excessive
romanticism and correct the imprecision of my history of ideas about
his life. So Dale Mullen has left us late in this cynical century in
the Byronic manner, richer for his reforms and marveling at the
generosity of nature.
--D.M. Hassler
I never met Dale Mullen in person, but I have known him as a
presence since the first issue of SFS when he and Darko Suvin
plucked a chapter from my dissertation to be revised as the lead
article and my first publication. From our correspondence over the
years, I gather that he never liked teaching in a formal structure
and had little patience with sloppy writing and thinking, i.e, much
of sf and sf scholarship, yesterday and today. Yet he taught for many
years at Indiana State and I know from personal experience that he
labored unstintingly for SFS, attending tirelessly to its
broader, informal kind of education. In a gentlemanly way, he "kept
us honest" as the managing editor, responsible for the overall
package, its look and its accuracy. With the loss of Tom Clareson,
Sam Moskowitz, and now Dale, the pioneering era of academic research
and criticism in sf is over; making its professionalization an
improvement is up to us as their heirs.
--David N. Samuelson
I met Dale Mullen only once, in 1971, at the first of
International Wells Symposia. When it was Dale's turn to speak, he
passed up notice of Wells's literary fame and championed Wells's
wisecrack that manifestly his epitaph must be "I told you so!" Well,
one had to enjoy this partisanship because the qualities Dale was
admiring in Wells one could see were also his own: a surveyor's eye,
a sceptical brain, and in the end the belief that sweet reason is
worth the trouble. Later, I would find in Dale's reviews and articles
proofs that he was a retentive lover of every book in his life that
ever had set him to thinking.
Meanwhile, off-podium, Science-Fiction Studies was in
gestation, though unhatchable had not Dale agreed to join in the
editorship; and this mostly invisible, Herculean labor he performed
twice. One can only imagine the invisible part of it, such as the
holding of contributors to accountability and the standard matters of
annotation and explication. What is plain is the result: SFS
has been a forum and colloquy with Dale as referee and, in his
unselfish way, instigator, often simply by proposing areas still
awaiting research. For it was his hope, often realized in practice,
that "gentle controversy rage unchecked" with the same facts and
files open to everyone. And the doors, too. It became the amazing
policy of Science-Fiction Studies that unsolicited reviewing
be no impossibility.
Dale truly dignified the field of science fiction. It was his
love--his avowed mistress, at least when she wasn't commercial--and
the equal of any other fiction. He favored the term "Anglophone" for
English-language sf in order to emphasize its reach, but he believed
really that sf is international and need only respect its
double-barreled name. It was also his belief that criticism of sf is
on a par with any other criticism and should not be founded on sf
alone, even assuming a comprehensive knowledge. So, setting the
example, his own essay-reviews--printed as a rule in the most modest
of type--are at home with parallels and sources far afield.
If Dale shunned the "completist" school of sf criticism on
principle, it was also in modesty. He knew sf in breadth and in
depth. He grew up with it with Gernsback and Burroughs; he renewed it
with Asimov and Heinlein; and he kept up with it. Nobody could spot a
canned account of it more quickly. But if he never set out to be
encyclopedic, as he easily could have, he did know the value of a
personal anecdote. Whether the story was that he nearly forestalled
the bombing of the Monte Cassino abbey that Walter Miller would carry
out and recollect in writing A Canticle for Leibowitz, or that
at age 14 he found, in a Gernsback magazine, a mysterious letter he
never wrote printed over his name, or simply that he once solicited
and received a tale from Lovecraft--such incidents woven into context
bear a special authority, not to mention wry wittiness.
Finally, I most gratefully acknowledge that Dale was a stout
friend to me professionally, as he was to so many others.
--David Hughes
Early in my career at Indiana State University, Dale Mullen
invited me to help him with Science-Fiction Studies. Although
we both taught in the same English department, at that time we knew
each other primarily because we played poker together. I was merely a
substitute, playing only when one of the regulars couldn't make it,
but I was generally appreciated because on any evening when I started
out playing poorly, I would drink too much beer and play worse still.
Dale, on the other hand, was one of the founding members of this
monthly game that has now continued for over forty years; he lived to
be the last original member still playing.
Even then, everyone at the game deferred to his opinion when an
issue of rules or etiquette came up. One of his rules was that "a
gentleman" would never check and raise--that is, not trap another
player by, after first refusing the opportunity to initiate the
betting, raising the bet that someone else had tossed into the pot.
This particular rule was a matter of etiquette rather than Hoyle, but
coming from someone who grew up in Mississippi, the idea of
conducting yourself like a gentleman carried substantial force.
Another rule, this time of the operational variety, was that "the
cards call themselves." It would make no difference what you
announced you were holding; even if you managed to overlook a winning
combination you laid on the table at the end of the hand, it counted
for you: the cards call themselves.
Dale was a straightforward, old-fashioned player, calculating odds
rather than worrying about his opponents' psychology. He liked to
say, "I never bluff," but of course, like a lot of Dale's final
pronouncements, that wasn't always true--just almost always. I assume
that it is because of Dale that we play mostly five-card draw and
five- and seven-card stud, and never allow any kind of poker that
includes wild cards. Indeed, I suspect that split-pot games became
allowed over his protests--but that would have been ten years before
I joined the game.
Now that I have written it, the pattern of all this in Dale's life
begins to come clear to me, like footprints in pond mud after you
wade through it and the water settles: a dislike of slickness and
deception, a feeling strong enough to deny some of the subtleties
that might appear in other poker games. Dale had values and
principles, and he left his imprint on the rest of us.
Dale was straightforward in other ways as well. He might have been
described as abrupt; he was certainly bluff and gruff. If arguments
about politics or anything else distracted us, he would protest, "I
came here to play cards." Or between hands: "Cut the crap and deal
the cards!" Occasionally he would reach the limit of his patience and
get as close to cross as he ever let his temper get, grunting in the
imperative: "Deal!" His phone calls were legendary--and not just
about poker, but those will stand in for all the others. If the game
was to be at his place, I would be one side of the following
conversation:
