Robert Pope

The Golden Slave

When I was very young I read quite a bit but never really noticed it. I read all kinds of things, including Hardy Boys and a series of blue biographies in early years at school. I read indiscriminately. We had a nice illustrated hard-bound copy of John Steinbeck's The Red Pony at home which I read repeatedly. We also had The Winter of Our Discontent, My Chinese Wife, The Good Earth, Please Don't Eat the Daisies, Mister Roberts, The Human Comedy, and quite a few others I also read because they were available. I remember a book by Jim Kjelgaard called Fire Hunter, published in 1951, which excited me more than most books. I checked it out of my school library. I spent some time wandering through the public library reading science fiction books while sitting in the aisles of the stacks. One of my favorite was Martians, Go Home! by Frederic Brown. I hadn't really entered the world of great literature yet, or even the popular favorites of the day. I just read whatever caught my eye or my imagination.

One day I went into the basement of the house we lived in that year--we moved so many times I only remember it by the boxes still sitting around. Even though I recall this as happening when I turned twelve, I must have been fourteen, because the book came out in 1960. Even though I recall this as happening in the house in Virginia, it must have been Frankfurt, Germany because that's where I lived at the time. I pulled a paperback out of a box, The Golden Slave, and started reading--though it might have been a hardback. I saw the paperback years later, so I might have replaced the hardback with paper--if there was a hardback. Within the first few pages--as I recall--the Romans, I think it was, invaded and a mother dashed her infant's brains out against a rock rather than have him taken into slavery. If I am not mistaken, the golden slave went around the world he knew as the world searching for his wife, from whom he had been separated, and performing feats and tasks for kings who rewarded him, at least once--this sticks in my mind--with the lovely woman for his bed pictured on the cover.

I had never read anything like this, and it changed my notion of what a book could do. My eyes were opened. It was a book by Poul Anderson, and once I had read it the world was not the same. It was better and more awesome than it had been before, and the promise of books had grown in the afternoon it took to read it, sitting alone in our basement, on the wooden steps, among the boxes that had not been unpacked. This, I knew, was my father's book, a book he never would have told me about, and I wondered if this didn't indicate the life he lived as a military officer traveling about the world, sometimes with a family, sometimes not. The world promised more than it had ever promised. Literature opened to me as a world with at least as many dangers as the one in which I lived, and far greater rewards. I went after it more actively after this experience.