The Ultimate Egoist

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “A Noose of Light”: unpublished. This was rejected by A.P. Waldo (no relation to Sturgeon’s father E. M. Waldo, as far as I know), fiction editor of the McClure Syndicate. There is also some indication that it was submitted to Weird Tales in 1940. The address on the first page of the manuscript dates it as a 1938 or 1939 story.

  “Strangers on a Train”: unpublished. The untitled manuscript has been given a title by the editor.

  “Accidentally on Porpoise”: unpublished. Written December 1938. Another story Sturgeon was fond of; he was frustrated by his agent’s inability to sell it, and fired her. In a letter to his fiancee Dorothe Fillingame, January 10, 1939, he says, Sure, it’s got enough for a novel, and I’ll do it that way some day. In fact, there is a clear link between this story and “When You Care, When You Love” (1962), which was intended as the first section of a never-finished novel, The Tulip Tree. The Unbegotten Man, the title of a novel Sturgeon announced as forthcoming circa 1950 but never wrote, is another indication of his lifelong interest in writing a novel-length story about the re-creation of a human being.

  “The Right Line”: unpublished. The oil town honky-tonk setting is based on TS’s days on the beach in Port Arthur, Texas, on the Gulf Coast, home port for the tankers he shipped on. He did work very briefly as a “sandwich man” there, in the summer of 1938.

  “Golden Day”: syndicated by McClure, March 4, 1939. Sturgeon cites this as an example of “unique short-story technique” (see notes on “One Sick Kid”). He wrote to Dorothe, March 6, 1939: Prepare yourself and Co. for latest release, sent to your home very soon … story was the kind of inspiration I’d be happy to get twice a year … it’s one of the reasons McClure is so picky with my stuff; they want them all to be as good … you heard about the poor — that wrote “Pigs Is Pigs”; well, “Golden Day” is mine … (ellipses and dashes in original)

  The McClure Newspaper Syndicate short-shorts were sent out to newspapers on 8½″ × 15″ sheets of paper, with the slug “DAILY SHORT STORIES” and little subheads partway through the stories to break them into sections. (In this case the subheads are Accident after “an awful thing to carry around with you” and Anniversary after “she was terribly pleased.”) The sheets are dated—evidently one story was provided for each day—and the author is credited.

  “Permit Me My Gesture”: syndicated by McClure, March 10, 1939. TS to Dorothe, April 22, 1939: When you come to New York I want you to sit in on a plotting session and see how it goes. Doesn’t matter who with; Boord [sometime agent] or Hatch [roommate and fellow writer] or both. What I’m desperate for, as I’ve told you, is short, uncomplicated young love notions with a gag or gadget. “Heavy Insurance,” for instance, is a gag (fool the reader) idea. So is “Golden Day.” “Permit Me My Gesture” and “Watch My Smoke” are gadgets. Three, possibly four, but in preference two characters. No crime, gangsters, rackets, or any suggestion of such. You begin to see now how rigid formula can be? TS to D, February 27, 1939: Speaking of plotz, please send some … don’t mull over them so … don’t polish them … when Hatch and I are tops we have turned out six plotz in two hours … and they’re always better than those we spend a day on … ’struth, because they’re so easily molded into formula … not more than three main characters, and a gadget; telephones, by the way, and counterfeit money, and twins are rejected on sight as gadgets … so that’s the layout; please help, not so much because I need anyone’s help but because I want yours …

  “Watch My Smoke”: syndicated by McClure, March 13, 1939. This was also published in England, in the Guide and Ideas newspaper, May 13, 1939, Sturgeon’s first UK publication.

  The following letter, from a British literary agent to “Miss Baker,” evidently one of Sturgeon’s editors at McClure’s New York office, understandably excited the young author and (temporarily) raised his hopes almost painfully:

  CECIL BROOKS, LTD.

  London, England

  May 13, 1939

  Dear Miss Baker

  I am arranging to have a copy of the “Guide and Ideas” sent to you containing Theodore Sturgeon’s story WATCH MY SMOKE.

  My own opinion is that this boy can write and that his stuff will sell in this country.

  You know as well as I do that the quality of your short stories, like the quality of everybody else’s, varies considerably. Some are the type which would never sell in this country; others have possible sales, and others have strong sales potentialities, and I would say that Sturgeon’s work comes into the last-named classification.

  Now that we have sold one of his stories we are taking out of our files all material we have of his. Our next step will be to push his stuff as much as ever we can, and endeavor to build up, step by step, a reputation here for Theodore Sturgeon’s short stories, so that as time goes on, each new one he writes will be regarded by editors as “worthy of immediate consideration.”

  What does he do apart from writing short shorts? Does he write any longer stories—three, four or five thousand word stuff? If so, get him to let you have it and pass it over to us and we will endeavor to sell it, through you, of course.

  Sincerely,

  June 6, 1939, TS wrote Dorothe: Best news in the writing racket is that McClures is drawing me up a contract to begin middle of next month … I am to get 50% of McClure’s profits on all my foreign sales … as I live and breathe, Dorothe—as I love you—that letter from Brooks Ltd. was straight stuff. It burned me up when I read that the Babe, Inc., [D’s mother] doubted it … I don’t know if you realize it, Toots, but that is without exception the biggest break and the finest build-up that we have had so far. Do you realize what it means? I know you don’t bother much with short fiction; but if you ever read the full-page stories in the Sunday papers, you’ll notice that a very large percentage of them are written by English authors—Belloc-Lowndes, for instance. Why? Certainly not because they are especially fine literature. But it seems that editors on both sides of the water are deeply impressed by the fact that they can print an overseas writer. The fact that I have sold American newspapers doesn’t cut an awful lot of ice here. But it does in England—plenty. And—now get this—as soon as my stuff is pushed over there, it will be in increasingly great demand here. Remember how Orson Welles crashed the Abbey Theater? He claimed he was in the New York Group Theater, which was not true. But it got him in Abbey, and when he got back it got him in the Group.

  “Watch My Smoke” had its origins in a visit Sturgeon made to Canada in the summer of 1934, when he was 16. He was spending a month or more with his uncle and aunt (his mother’s sister), “recuperating” from acute rheumatic fever while his parents and his brother went to Europe (he has written that in fact he exerted himself as excessively as possible, by way of protest). In an interview in April 1978, Sturgeon described the place to me, his voice still full of the wonder and awe he must have felt at 16 when he heard about the local “bush pilots”:

  This was up in northern Quebec. It was very wild at that time. The town had duck-board sidewalks and dirt streets, it was really going back, and there were virtually no roads up there at all. There was a railroad that went up there, but everything was flown in and out with these Balanca [?] monoplanes … I’ve written some about those guys, those bush pilots. They are a breed of their own, they were really fantastic people, full of tricks. I remember coming in— They were all seaplanes, because there’s nothing up there but lakes and there was no flat ground whatsoever.

  Sometimes coming into those lakes at dusk, you couldn’t see the surface of the water—it just started to flare out, it could have been 15 feet under you, five feet under you, 30 feet under you, you couldn’t see. So they all used to carry a roll of toilet paper up there in the cockpit, and they’d come down just as close to the water as they could figure, and they’d stream out a whole length of toilet paper, and then they’d go around again and come in and land on that, because that would float on top of the water, they could see where the surface was. Otherwise they woul
d stall out or fall in or dive in or whatnot.

  They were full of tricks like that. One guy got out of a very very narrow lake, he flew some serum up to a guy who had a dangerous disease in a mining camp, and he had to land on this funny crooked little lake that was full of stumps and stuff. Well, he got in all right, but it looked like there was no way to get out. So he tied a rope to the tailskid of the plane and pulled it above the shore, and he tied it to a tree which was bent over a log. And he had an Indian standing by with an axe. He revved the thing up until it was screaming, you know, and then he waves his hand and the Indian hits the rope and bang! he takes off. He managed to get up over the treetops and skid out between the mountains and stuff and get up in the air again. They were certainly marvelous.

  “The Other Cheek”: syndicated by McClure, April 10, 1939. The Milwaukee Journal, the only U.S. newspaper from which Sturgeon had clippings of some of these stories (though certainly not the only paper they appeared in), did not use the subheads provided in the release, but did break up the stories at the same places, using a line space with three asterisks centered in it.

  Sturgeon spent his adolescence in Philadelphia; when he wrote this story his fiancée was still living there. As a merchant seaman, he would stay in the waterfront district (at the Seamen’s Institute) when he visited her.

  “Extraordinary Seaman”: syndicated by McClure, circa June 1939. Sold February 27, 1939; probably written that month. This is the only longer story Sturgeon sold to McClure, although he made many attempts. He was paid $25 for it.

  TS to Dorothe, June 25, 1939: Glad, and a little surprised, that you so liked “Extraordinary Seaman” … the editor at McClure didn’t think so much of it, and neither did I … she bought it only because it was the first tanker story I had submitted and she is in favor of my using my various backgrounds … the dialogue is A-1, and the plot is very stupid; but she liked it for exactly the opposite reasons, which only shows to go you … at any rate, it sold, and bought me my new suit, so what the hell … but if you liked it so well, then I’d better not send you “A God in a Garden,” on account of because you might not be able to stand it, so superior is it to the “Seaman.” “Ether Breather” is almost as good.

  The story was sent out by McClure on a galley sheet, 15″ × 22″, with a large illustration, designed to take up a full newspaper page.

  “One Sick Kid”: syndicated by McClure, April 29, 1939. Although he again got to use his tanker background and mention Tortugas (an occasional TS nickname, presumably because of its anagrammatic similarity to his surname), Sturgeon did not like this story. To Dorothe, March 30, 1939: I sold McClures again, which means five bucks at the end of April … I submitted three really brilliant stories to them, and one very mediocre one whose two selling points were its sickening flag-waving and its idea. The latter is as weak as my stomach just now (epsom, iron, quinine, strychnine) but I got it from a newspaper article and the clipping was attached to the MS. I have rarely been so discouraged; the sale contributed rather than cheered me. McClure’s also rejected a story written on the editor’s plot, in the editor’s way; yet they bought, last month, a story which is against the policies they stated before I wrote it [“Permit Me My Gesture”?] … damn them! To make you slog and slog for the miserable delayed pennies they pay? What right have they to be so _______ picky? …

  Mom of course knew just what to say, when she finally commented on a batch of the McClure short-shorts. Sturgeon quotes her (she was a dedicated and productive, though not much published, story writer herself, and he respected her opinions tremendously) in his reply letter: “The newspaper things are decent quality for newspaper things. The one I liked best was the piece about the seasick lad and the coastguard cutter.” And: “I’d love to see some of your good stuff.” That provoked this outburst (TS to Christine Hamilton Sturgeon, February 2, 1940):

  Naow mum: I appreciate your appreciation of me as a rising literary star. I mean that; I’m not being sarcastic. But you must realize that my philosophy of life is an egoistic (not egotistic, n.b.) one. Self-advancement, self-development, self-gratification. I think I told you that it seems to me there are only two ways to achieve happiness in this our life, and one is to adjust the world to suit oneself, and the other, to adjust oneself to suit the world? And that I frankly consider myself not big enough for the former job? It is in that honest conviction that I avoid egotism … I know just how much I have to be proud of, no matter what I tell other people. And my writing adheres to that philosophy. I told you above that the new “comic” field has just saved my life and my hopes. [TS had gotten an assignment writing continuity for a Street & Smith comic strip called Iron Munro, included in Shadow Comics magazine.] Proof enough that for me there is no such thing as prostituting my art. I am a writer and I am a good one. I have an artistic approach toward things which afford me, personally, amusement, but I do not regard my writing as an art, but a craft. I will succeed faster and better in the only way which means anything to me just now, as a craftsman, than I ever could as an artist. I will never write a Grapes of Wrath or a Gone With the Wind or an Appointment at Samarra because I have no message, no ardor, no lessons to teach. I am a teller of tales, and in telling tales I find my delight. I tell the tales that people want to be told, and no others, because I am not egocentric but just egoistic. That is called writing formula. I write formula. I know you didn’t mean the line about “good stuff” as such, but it was the deadliest of insults. Why? Because when I write I do the very best I know how! Good stuff? You have it. A story is good if it sells; it is of “great” material if it gets audience huzzas. All of those stories were stories the people asked me to tell them. That I sold them means I did my job capably. That “Ether Breather” was not only voted the best story in the issue but the most entertaining story of the year proves to my satisfaction that it was near-great. Now listen to me very, very carefully, oh most wonderful of mothers. I do not know if I will ever write novels. If I do, they probably will not be great. But if one or some are great, then it will be only because they are the most magnificent pieces of escapist hedonism ever to see print. And don’t throw Bodenheim at me. I know him now; as a matter of fact I threw him out of this very room two nights ago because he was objectionably drunk. That is his trouble. You told me once that he was a fine poet, and that he degenerated by way of large checks, Replenishing Jessica, and A Virtuous Girl.

  You’re wrong, Mum. Maxwell Bodenheim is a great poet. He is touched by a Power greater than men or Man. He is an instrument. He is a voice for a Great Thought. I know because I’ve seen that ordinary-looking sandy-haired little man be that voice. He is a poet and he is an artist and he has gained, not lost, in his art. And I want no art like Bodenheim’s. I have a life to live and a girl to marry and children to bring into the world—a life of me, outside of me. Let the Bodenheims and the Joe Goulds and the Linc Gillespies and the John Rose Gildeas live out their infernos of beauty. I’ll feed what pap to fools I’m paid for, and live a clean life on their stupidity.

  But I don’t write down! I can’t, and sell stories. Be proud of my doing the impossible. I have sold thirty-two stories and a poem in a year of writing—and five months of that year I was, for some reason or other, hors de combat. I have made a living out of writing. I have only done it by working like hell when I worked. Be proud of me, then, for that; but oh, mum, don’t you know by this time that there is little lofty about young Ted? I’m no Wells or Welles; Shaw or Shakespeare. I give humor and originality and the utmost in refined horror (that’s “He Shuttles,” due out in 60 days—my novelette) to people who need it. I’m no uplifter. I repeat: I’m a craftsman … what was it Pete [his older brother] once said— “I respect a good whore more than a lousy bishop”? There you have it. Literary snobbishness is for people who sell Story after twelve tears [sic] of trying, during which they lived on relief or off friends. Not for me.

  I mentioned the story you lauded—“One Sick Kid,” it was called—because I was completel
y dumfounded that you should pick that, of all those releases, to like … Mother, are you sure it’s not because you’re a little prejudiced in favor of the sea? That story was ding-dong stuff; it had a shot of supersuperpseudo-patriotism in it to make it sell, the way you put—well, you don’t, but some do—a shot of baking-powder in flapjax. That story was a crime against literature—even my kind. It was surpassed only in sloppy sentimentalism by “Some People Forget,” the Memorial Day number, for which I take no responsibility—it was an ordered story, as are all those having to do with specific dates. I can’t excuse “One Sick Kid” on those or any other grounds. But there are, I think, some excellent stories there. Did you know that as short-story technique, “Golden Day” is unique? “Watch My Smoke” and “Cajun Providence” are good enough for any slick mag … sold them to McClure when I needed five sure dollars quickly faster than $250 maybe sometime. I never mind doing that on occasion because there’re always more where they came from … wonder if you’ll like the next lot better? I’ll send them over after “He Shuttles” is released. In the next lot will be what I think is the most powerful little short short I’ve yet done: “Turkish Delight” to McClure’s. Also the most whimsical: “Derm Fool,” Unknown. And the novelette.

  (Note that at the time of writing, the author of this epistle was two weeks short of his 22nd birthday, and six weeks shy of marriage and the tremendous financial responsibilities he imagined—correctly—it would bring. Unfortunately, the issues stirred up here continued to swirl unresolved in him throughout his lifetime.)