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As James notes, Delany’s memoir The Motion of Light in Water is an essential companion text to In Search of Silence. In this volume (and the forthcoming Autumnal City, Volume II), James has sifted through Delany’s papers - once housed at Boston University’s Mugar Memorial Library, and now housed at Yale’s Beinecke Library - to produce a representative record of Delany’s note-taking and drafting practices. In the introduction to In Search of Silence, James explains the formidable task of curating the notebooks. Delany, Gentleman we see Delany (known to his friends and family as “Chip”) as the hyper-intellectual flâneur who seems to be everywhere at once, meeting everyone at once, reading everything at once, and who somehow spins all of these experiences into the beautiful sentences flowing through his ever-present, spiral-bound notebook. In the 2007 documentary film The Polymath, Or the Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany’s award-winning 1988 memoir The Motion of Light in Water covers his childhood in Harlem and the early years of his writing career. The 1979 memoir Heavenly Breakfast reveals some of the inspiration for Dhalgren in Delany’s experiences living in a rock-band commune in the East Village in 1967.

Today there is much more public information available about Delany’s life than in 1975 when Dhalgren first appeared. In Search of Silence helps us to see how the Kid’s notebook exemplifies Delany’s composition methods, and how it explains the reflexive autobiography that permeates all of the author’s work. It is a defining theoretical statement about the possibilities and limitations of the mimetic representation of life from an artist who has meticulously documented his own life experiences and transposed them into an impressive bibliography of writing across genres from science fiction to pornography to literary criticism.

Delany, Volume I, 1957–1969, we can now see how this passage in Dhalgren illuminates the Kid’s artistic process, and also functions as an autobiographical commentary on Delany’s own writing practices. Thanks to the work of independent scholar Kenneth James, editor of In Search of Silence: The Journals of Samuel R. What is down, then, is a chronicle of incidents with a potential for wholeness they did not have when they occurred, a false picture, again, because they show neither the general spread of our life’s fabric, nor the most significant pattern points. I can think of four things that have happened in the nest I would like to have described when they occurred, but they so completed themselves in the happening that even to refer to them seems superfluous. When something really involving, violent, or important happens, it occupies too much of my time, my physical energy, and my thought to be able to write about. Frankly, that is too stupid to write about. We sit most of the time, watch the dull sky slipping. Most of what happens hour by hour here is quiet and dull.

The falsification of this journal: first off, it doesn’t reflect my daily life. Describing this notebook, the Kid writes: Dhalgren eventually splinters into a metafictional narrative in which the Kid appears to be composing the very novel itself in the notebook, which he also uses to sketch poems and journal entries. DELANY’S best-selling masterpiece Dhalgren, the amnesiac protagonist known only as “the Kid” arrives in the strange, dystopian American city of Bellona, finds a notebook, and begins to add his own writing to it.