by Anthology
But collaborating is generally a dismal chore, fraught with such traps as conceptual disagreement, clash of styles, incipient laziness, verbosity, confusion and simple bad writing. How Pratt & De Camp or Nordhoff & Hall did it, I will never fully understand. Yet with two writers I have been able to collaborate easily, and the products have been something more than either of us might have attained singly. The first is Joe L. Hensley, who appears elsewhere in this book, and of whom there is much to say; but in another place. The second is Henry Slesar, of whom there is much to say here. I am delighted at the opportunity to say these things, for they have been in my mind many years, and since they verge on being a poem of love, they are obviously not the kind of thing one can say to a man’s face.
(The concept of affection between men has been so emasculated—literally—that to display any sign of joy at the presence or companionship or understanding of another man is taken, by the yahoos, as a sure sign of faggotry. I choose not to dignify the implication, yet will state bluntly that I do not subscribe to the snide theory there is anything between Batman and Robin but big-brotherliness. Some folks just have a one-track gutter.)
I think the operable element in any successful collaboration is friendship. Based on respect and admiration and trust in the other man’s morality, sense of craft and sense of fairness. To accept another writer’s judgment on the form and direction of a story, one must first respect and admire what the other has done on his own. He must have paid his dues. Then, it must be unconsciously safe for one to go with the other man’s instincts as to what the story is saying in larger terms, in terms of ethic and morality. Only then does one feel safe in allowing the unformed creation to be molded by other hands. And finally, by the extensions and implications of friendship, one knows the other man wants a unified whole, a product of two minds and individual talents, rather than one story that has been stolen from another man’s store of minutiae. Yes, I think friendship must be present if the collaboration is to succeed. Henry Slesar and I have been friends for over ten years.
I first met Henry after a lecture I delivered at New York University in 1956. The presumption of me telling a class on creative writing how to function in the commercial arena, after only one year of professional work, was staggering. But apparently (Henry has told me many times) up till that time the class had been fed gross amounts of the usual literary horse manure, a great deal of theory culled from inept texts, but very little practical advice on how to sell what the class had written. Since I was a selling writer—for however short a time, at that time—I felt justified only in telling them where to get the best buck, and how to keep from being shafted, rather than how to pick up the mantle of Chekhov. (Comment: as demonstrated by the preponderance of writers in this volume alone, memorable writers are born, not trained. I believe this firmly. Oh, it’s possible to learn how to handle the English language in a competent manner, it is even possible to learn how to plot like a computer. But that is something else: it is the difference between being an author and being a writer. The former get their names on books, the latter write. Of all the writing courses I have known—as class member, guest lecturer, auditor or interested listener—I have encountered only one that seemed to know where it was at. That was the series of classes given by Robert Kirsch at UCLA. He laid it on the line in the first ten minutes that, if they couldn’t write already, they’d better sign up for another subject, because he was ready and able to teach them the superficialities, but the spark of creativity had to be there or they’d wind up merely masturbating. Born, not made, despite what the reading-fee agencies tell their poor befuddled victims.)
After the class, Henry and I got together many times. He was at that time creative director for the Robert W. Orr advertising agency. (Henry is the man who created the Life Saver advertisement that was merely a page of candies laid out in rows, with the inked-in words, “Don’t lick this page.” It was an award winner, and so is Henry.) But aside from Bix Beiderbecke records, Henry’s driving urgency was for writing. I have never met a man who so wanted to set words on paper and who, from the very first, had such a sure, talented manner of so doing. Within the first year of his career he sold to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Playboy and over a dozen other top markets. We would get together of an evening, either in my tiny apartment on West Eighty-second Street off Amsterdam, or his sprawling residence overlooking West End Avenue, and after a few hours of chitchat between us and our wives (I was, at that juncture, married to Disaster Area No. 1), we would vanish into Henry’s office and do a short story. Complete in one evening. Usually science fiction or detective stories: “The Kissing Dead”, “Sob Story”, “Mad Dog”, “RFD No. 2”, “The Man with the Green Nose”. We worked well together, though not entirely rationally. Sometimes I would start with a title and a first paragraph, writing something so off-beat and peculiar that there was no place to go plot-wise. Or Henry would open the story and write a thousand words of devious plot threads, leaving off in mid-speech. Once in a while we plotted the whole thing out in advance. But whichever form or direction was used, we always got a salable story from the collaboration. We sold everything we ever wrote together. It was a parlor trick, a party game, a hobby that paid for itself in enjoyment and cigarette money.
Henry Slesar was born in 1927 in Brooklyn. He is the personification of quality and tact and honor in a field singularly spare in such qualities: he is an advertising man. He has been vice-president and creative director of three top New York agencies and is now president and CD of his own: Slesar & Kanzer, Inc., founded 1965. As a writer he has published over 600 stories, novels, etc., to such markets as Playboy, Cosmopolitan, Diners Club Magazine, all of the men’s magazines, mystery magazines and most of the science fiction magazines. He has been anthologized fifty-five times, has written three novels including The Gray Flannel Shroud (Random House), which won the 1959 Mystery Writers of America Edgar as Best First Mystery Novel. He has had two short-story collections published, both introduced by Alfred Hitchcock, who looks with great favor on our Henry, who has written over sixty television scripts, many of which were for the Hitchcock half-hour and hour series. He has also written for 77 Sunset Strip, The Man from UNCLE, Run for Your Life and half a dozen of the coveted high-paying pilot film assignments. He has written four motion pictures for Warner Bros.
Henry is married to one of the loveliest women any writer possesses—the O. in his pen name O. H. Leslie—and has one daughter—the Leslie of the pseudonym. They all live together in New York City, which is a pleasant arrangement.
The Henry Slesar story in this anthology is only 1100 words long. About half the length of this introduction, I now realize. There are two comments to be made on this bizarre fact. First, my admiration and friendship for Slesar know no bounds—not even the simple bounds of conversation of verbiage. The second is more important. Henry Slesar is a master of the short-story story. He can kill you with a line. He takes 1100 words to do what lesser writers would milk for 10,000 words. If there is a better short-story writer working in America today, I can’t think of his name, and I’ve got a helluva memory.
Ersatz
There were sixteen hundred Peace Stations erected in the eighth year of the conflict, the contribution of the few remaining civilians on the American continent; sixteen hundred atomproofed shelters where the itinerant fighting man could find food, drink, and rest. Yet Sergeant Tod Halstead, in five dreary months of wandering across the wastelands of Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, had relinquished hope of finding even one. In his lead-lined aluminum armor he appeared to be a perfectly packaged war machine, but the flesh within the gleaming housing was weak and unwashed and weary of the lonely, monotonous task of seeking a friend to join or an enemy to kill.
He was a Rocket Carrier, Third Class, the rank signifying that it was his duty to be a human launching pad for the four hydrogen-headed rockets strapped to his back, their fuses to be ignited by a Rocket Carrier, Second Class, upon command and countdown by a Rocket
Carrier, First Class. Tod had lost the other two thirds of his unit months before; one of them had giggled and slipped a bayonet in his throat; the other had been shot and killed by a sixty-year-old farm wife who was resisting his desperate, amorous advances.
Then early one morning, after he was certain that the burst of light in the east was the sun and not the enemy’s atomic fire, he trudged along a dusty road and saw beyond the shimmering waves of heat a square white building set amid a grove of naked gray trees. He stumbled towards it, and knew it was no mirage of the man-created desert, but a Peace Station. In its doorway a white-haired man with a Father Christmas face beckoned and smiled and helped him inside.
“Thank God,” Tod said, falling into a chair. “Thank God. I’d almost given up. . . .”
The jolly old man clapped his hands, and two young boys with hair like eagles’ nests came running into the room. Like service station attendants, they set about him busily, removing his helmet, his boots, unhooking his weapons. They fanned him, chafed his wrists, put cool lotion on his forehead; a few minutes later, his eyes closed, and with sleep approaching, he was conscious of a gentle hand on his cheek, and woke to find his months-old beard gone.
“There now,” the station manager said, rubbing his hands in satisfaction. “Feel better, soldier?”
“Much better,” Tod said, looking about at the bare but comfortable room. “How does the war go with you, civilian?”
“Hard,” the man said, no longer jolly. “But we do our best, serving the fighting men as we can. But relax, soldier; food and drink will be here soon. It won’t be anything special; our ersatz supply is low. There’s a new chemical beef we’ve been saving, you can have that. I believe it’s made of wood bark, but it’s not at all bad on the tongue.”
“Do you have a cigarette?” Tod said.
He proffered a brown cylinder. “Ersatz, too, I’m afraid; treated wool fibers. But it burns, anyway.”
Tod lit it. The acrid smoke seared his throat and lungs; he coughed, and put it out.
“I’m sorry,” the station manager said sadly. “It’s the best we have. Everything, everything is ersatz; our cigarettes, our food, our drink . . . the war goes hard with us all.”
Tod sighed and leaned back. When the woman came out of the doorway, bearing a tray, he sat up and his eyes were first for the food. He didn’t even notice how lovely she was, how her ragged, near-transparent gown hugged her rounded breasts and hips. When she bent towards him, handing him a steaming bowl of strange-smelling broth, her blonde hair tumbled forward and brushed his cheek. He looked up and caught her eyes; they dropped shyly.
“You’ll feel better after this,” she said huskily, and made a movement with her body that dulled his appetite for food, created a different kind of hunger. It was four years since he had seen a woman like this. The war had taken them first, with bombs and radio-active dust, all the young women who remained behind while the men escaped to the comparative safety of battle. He dipped into the broth and found it vile, but he downed every drop. The wood-based beef was tough and chewy, but it was better than the canned rations he had grown accustomed to. The bread tasted of seaweed, but he slathered it with an oily rancid oleo and chewed great mouthfuls.
“I’m tired,” he said at last. “I’d like to sleep.”
“Yes, of course,” the Peace Station manager said. “This way, soldier, come this way.”
He followed him into a small windowless room, its only furniture a rusty metal cot. The sergeant dropped across its canvas mattress wearily, and the station manager closed the door quietly behind him. But Tod knew he wouldn’t sleep, despite his sated stomach. His mind was too full, and his blood was streaming too fast through his veins, and the ache for the woman was strong in his body.
Then the door opened and she came in.
She said nothing. She came to the bed and sat beside him. She leaned over and kissed his mouth. “My name is Eleanora,” she whispered, and he seized her roughly. “No, wait,” she said, wriggling coyly out of his grasp. She got off the cot and went to the corner of the room.
He watched her slither out of her clothing. The blonde hair slipped as she pulled the dress over her head, and the curls hung at a crazy angle over her brow. She giggled, and put the wig back into position. Then she reached behind her and unhooked the brassiere; it dropped to the floor, revealing the flat slope of the hairy chest. She was about to remove the rest of her undergarments when the sergeant started to scream and run for the door; she reached out and held his arm and crooned words of love and pleading. He struck the creature with all the strength in his fist, and it fell to the floor, weeping bitterly, its skirt hoisted high on the muscular, hairy legs. The sergeant didn’t pause to retrieve his armor or his weapons; he went out of the Peace Station into the smoky wasteland, where death awaited the unarmed and despairing.
Afterword
“Ersatz” is a rejected story. It was returned to me by an editor who simply said, “Don’t like future-war stuff.” He isn’t the only one with the attitude. Several editors feel that future wars don’t really constitute a “dangerous vision,” and prefer their authors to steer clear of the subject. Atomic conflicts are “trite.” Postatomic holocausts are “cliché.” Armageddon is “overdone.” In the world of fiction, at least, there is some opinion that our case of atomic jitters has been cured, and that readers would rather do without reminders of ruin and radiation. But the playing field of science fiction is the future, and the future has to be extrapolated from the ingredients of the present. And if you don’t think that those ingredients of doom are still with us, your radio needs tubes, your prescription needs changing, and you have wax in your ears. Personally, I hope our authors, particularly the science fiction writers who have special privileges and talents, continue to barrage the world with fresh words on the subject, to make us continually afraid of what might be, and continually concerned with prevention and cure. To me, the most dangerous vision of all is the one that’s rose-colored, and I’m grateful that the editor of this volume has spectacles of clear glass.
GO . . . SAID THE BIRD
Sonya Dorman
Introduction
To know Sonya Dorman is to love her, if you’ll pardon the mickey-mouse on my part. Also, it might bug her husband Jerry, who has very powerful forearms, and with whom Sonya Dorman raises and shows Akitas (a kind of Japanese baby pony of a dog that looks as if it should want to tear out your jugular but generally only wants to slobber drool all over you in slaphappy friendliness) at their Parnassus Kennels in Stony Point, New York, which has got to be the most strictured syntax since Victor Hugo did a twenty-two-page sentence in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which is the shape this sentence is in.
She writes, in reply to a request for autobiographical goodies: “My auto, story is so preposterous I hardly know what to tell you. I did not have a classical education. I went to private schools (progressive) in New England, with the result that I have very little education but am just crummy with culture. I grew up around horses but can’t afford them now, which is why I raise and show Akitas— the perceptive dog for sensitive people—in between writing poems and stories. Have been a cook, receptionist, riding instructor, flamenco dancer and married. I like speculative fiction because I believe art and science should be lovers, not enemies or adversaries.
None of the foregoing, of course, will prepare you for the genuine horror and immediacy of the story kindly little Sonya has written. A story that can only be compared, and then only remotely, with the work of the late Shirley Jackson. It also says nothing about the substantial reputation she has acquired in the last few years as a contributor to magazines as various as Cavalier, Galaxy, Redbook, Damon Knight’s excellent Orbit I anthology of originals, The Saturday Evening Whateveritis and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
You can read Leigh Brackett or Vin Packer or C.L. Moore and think jeezus, the muscularity of the writing, and when you find out they are women, you say, jeezus, they write like
men, with strength. Or you read Zenna Henderson and think, jeezus, she writes just like a woman, all pastels. Or you can read Ayn Rand and think jeezus!
But that’s another line of criticism.
But when you read Sonya Dorman you don’t think of the muscularity of male writing. You read it as written by a woman, but there is no pretense. There is no attempt to emulate the particular strengths of male writing. It is purely female reasoning and attack, but it is strong. A special kind of tensile strength. It is what is meant by something turned out by a potent woman. It is a kind of writing only a woman can do. Carol Emshwiller, who is elsewhere in this book, has something like this strength, but most perfectly germinated is S. Dorman’s development. It deals with reality in the unflinching way women will deal with it, when they are no longer shucking themselves or those watching. And I submit it is all the more teeth-clenching for the relentless truth it proffers.
This is a memorable story, and provides merely one more facet of the talent that writes under the drab by-line S. Dor-man. It’s a by-line you might watch for.
Go . . . Said the Bird
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
T.S. Eliot
Seizing the shriek in her stained teeth, she ran away, in spite of the voices crying after her from every crevice and glittering façade. Faces at the broken windows became a collage of grins as she ran, still holding the shriek between her teeth, determined not to let it escape. Her heels ached from pounding down the concrete highways, leaping over cracks and gaps in what used to be the most traveled road in the country.
“Oh no, no,” she sobbed as she ran.
Bindweed grasped her ankles and she tore it loose with frantic fingers and ran on.
Choices appeared at the roadside, the entrances to burrows, underground shanties. Once some thing flew down and landed near her, beckoning, but she shut her teeth on the writhing shriek and looked straight ahead, down the length of the cracked roadbed, with its overgrown promenades at each side. She would continue on the obvious path, for fear of being lost beyond help.
