Tertius: after the cops left, I laid down the law. No more Incidents. Put the fuck some clothes on, Ted! I don’t care if it’s SCUBA gear, mukluks and a fur parka, a suit of body armor, but you will henceforth go forth avec apparel!
So he started wearing a tiny fire-engine red Speedo.
I cannot begin to convey how disturbing that was, mostly because the li’l pot belly overhung that sexe-cache the way the demon Chernabog overhung the valley in Disney’s Fantasia.
Avon has never sent a rep to my house since that day, decades ago. Also, Pizza Hut will not deliver. Go figure.
And so it went on with us for more than thirty years. Ted growing more ensnared by a received universe that was both too small to contain him while simultaneously telling him he was a titan. It is hideously bifurcating to go among one’s readers, many of whom look upon you as the mortal avatar of The Inviolable Chalice of Genius, having had to borrow the bus-fare to get cross-country to the convention. He grew more and more careless of what his actions and life-choices would do to those he left behind, yet to those who met him casually he was more charming than a cobra at a mongoose rally.
And we continued to watch each other; sometimes to watch over each other. I have a letter I’d like to insert here. It was written during that very tough time in 1966–67 I mentioned earlier in this jaunt.
Thought it may not seem so, this long in the wind, this exegesis is not about me. It is about the trails Ted and I cut with each other. The other guest introductions are variously great, good, okay and slight; but this one is the only one that minutely tries to codify the odd parameters of an odd friendship, a human liaison. So I’ll not go into particulars about the shitstorm under which I went to my knees in ’67–’68, save to tell you true that I was neither feckless nor freshly kicked off the turnip truck.
Nonetheless, I got hit hard, and Ted wrote this to me, dated April 18, 1966:
Dear Harlan:
For two days I have not been able to get my mind off your predicament. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that your predicament is on my mind, a sharp-edged crumb of discomfort which won’t whisk away or dissolve or fall off, and when I move or think or swallow, it gigs me.
I suppose the aspect that gigs me the most is “injustice.” Injustice is not an isolated homogeneous area any more than justice is. A law is a law and is either breached or not, but justice is reciprocal. That such a thing should have happened to you is a greater injustice than if it happened to most representatives of this exploding population.
I know exactly why, too. It is an injustice because you are on the side of the angels (who, by the way, stand a little silent for you just now). You are in the small company of Good Guys. You are that, not by any process of intellectualization and decision, but reflexively, instantly, from the glands, whether it shows at the checkout in a supermarket where you confront the Birchers, or in a poolroom facing down a famous bully, or in pulling out gut by the hank and reeling it up on the platen of your typewriter.
There is no lack of love in the world, but there is a profound shortage in places to put it. I don’t know why it is, but most people who, like yourself, have an inherent ability to claw their way up the sheerest rock faces around, have little of it or have so equipped themselves with spikes and steel hooks that you can’t see it. When it shows in such a man—like it does in you—when it lights him up, it should be revered and cared for. This is the very nub of the injustice done you. It should not happen at all, but if it must happen, it should not happen to you.
You have cause for many feelings, Harlan: anger, indignation, regret, grief. Theodore Reik, who has done some brilliant anatomizations of love, declares that its ending is in none of these things: if it is, there is a good possibility that some or one or all of them were there all along. It is ended with indifference—really ended with a real indifference. This is one of the saddest things I know. And in all my life, I have found one writer, once, who was able to describe the exact moment when it came, and it is therefore the saddest writing I have ever read. I give it to you now in your sadness. The principle behind the gift is called ‘counter-irritation.’ Read it in good health—eventual.
… and in case you think you misheard me over the phone, I would like you to know that if it helps and sustains you at all, you have my respect and affection.
Yours, T. H. Sturgeon
Accompanying the letter was number 20 of Twenty Love Poems Based on the Spanish by Pablo Neruda, by Christopher Logue, from Songs (1959). And then, quickly, Dangerous Visions was published, Ted’s marriage to Marion underwent heartbreak, Ted and I talked cross-country virtually every day, and in the wake of the notoriety of DV and his story, “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” which I had chivvied him into writing after a protracted writer’s block dry spell and financial reverses, Ted came to live with me.
It was 1966, ’67, and at various times I think it was for a full year, at other times memory insists it was longer, but separate inputs staunchly declare it was only six, eight, ten months. I can’t recall precisely, now more than forty years later, but it seemed to go on forever.
I have all of Ted’s books, of course, but the only two he ever signed were my copy of Dangerous Visions with all the authors logged on—a rare artifact existent in the universe, as I’ve said, in the number of one—and my personal library copy of his first collection, Without Sorcery, Prime Press 1948, for which I paid a buck fifty (marked down from $3.00) in 1952. Here is what he wrote on the front flyleaf in May of 1966 during my birthday gathering:
To Harlan Ellison –
Who has, at an equivalent stage in his career, done so much more—so much better.
Theodore Sturgeon
That’s gracious crap, of course, but what I did do was get Theodore Sturgeon writing again.
In the wake of my own day and night hammering on one of the half dozen or so Olympia office machines (never mind how many Olympia portables I had stashed), Ted grew chagrined at his facility to talk new story-ideas but not to write them, and I rode him mercilessly. The phrase “your fifteen minutes of fame has drained out of the hourglass” became taunt and tautology. I showed him no mercy; and with so many other younger writers passing through the way station of my home, all of them on the prod, worshipful but competitive, Ted ground his teeth and set up shop in the blue bedroom, and began writing.
I’d long-since gotten him inside Star Trek, but now—for the fastest money in town—I opened the market at Knight magazine. Sirkay Publications. Holloway House. The low-end men’s magazines: Adam, Cad, Knight, The Adam Bedside Reader. Two hundred and fifty, three hundred, sometimes a little more, each pop … paid within 24 hours. Sometimes we’d kick the story around at the breakfast table; sometimes he’d come into my then tiny office at the front of the house, dead of night, as I was pounding away under the unrelenting pressure of studio or publication deadlines, and we’d noodle something out. Sometimes it was a snag in one of my stories, sometimes it was a glitch in his.
And we wrote “Runesmith” together. And he wrote or plotted or set aside a snippet of the following, here at Ellison Wonderland: “The Patterns of Dorne,” “It Was Nothing—Really!” and “Brownshoes,” “Slow Sculpture,” and “Suicide,” “It’s You,” and “Jorry’s Gap,” “Crate,” and “The Girl Who Knew What They Meant.” Maybe others, I can’t remember. But most of the stories that he finished when he was living with Wina about a mile away from me down the hill at 14210 Ventura Boulevard, La Fonda Motel, he plotted and started here before I threw him out.
Here’s the flat of it, friends.
And Ted would understand this.
Most of what I know about Theodore Sturgeon I cannot tell you.
We watched each other. He looked after me. I tried to help him. And then came out Sturgeon Is Alive and Well …
Many of the stories from that last, final collection of (almost) new fictions, got born here. Right downstairs in the blue bedroom. And I harassed
my buddy Digby Diehl, the now-famous editor, who was at that time the editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review section, to let me review Alive and Well. And he did, beneath the copy editor’s headline “Sturgeon’s Law Overtakes Him.”
No good deed …
Here, reprinted for the first time, is that review, from the April 18th, 1971 Los Angeles Times.
You will kindly note the cost of this 221 page hardcover in the early Seventies. This will give you an idea of the kind of money a writer as excellent as Sturgeon had to subsist on, it will also inform your understanding of the love-hate attitude even as lauded an artist as Sturgeon had with his work environment.
Sturgeon Is Alive and Well
A new collection of stories by
Theodore Sturgeon
(G.P. Putnam’s Sons—$4.95)
Alive and well, yes definitely. But up to the level of his past brilliance, no I’m afraid not.
Theodore Sturgeon, you see, is without argument one of the finest writers—of any kind—this country has ever produced. His novels More Than Human, Some of Your Blood, and The Dreaming Jewels stand untarnished by time and endless re-readings as purest silver. His short stories have so completely examined the parameters of love in a genre of imagination woefully shy in that particular, that the words love and Sturgeon have become synonymous. The word syzygy also belongs to him.
He is also much-quoted as the author of Sturgeon’s Law, a Deep Thought that suggests 90% of everything is mediocre … puddings, plays, politicians; cars, carpenters, coffee; people, books, neurologists … everything. A realistic assessment of the impossibility of achieving perfection that, till now, has applied to everyone and everything save Sturgeon. Sadly, and at long last, his own Law has caught up with him. Ninety per cent of this new collection of stories is mediocre.
After a long and painful dry spell in which the creative well seemed emptied, Sturgeon began writing again three years ago, and eleven of the twelve stories herein contained date from this latest period of productivity. Only two of them approach the brilliance of stories like “The Silken-Swift,” “A Saucer of Loneliness,” “Killdozer,” or “Bianca’s Hands.” It has been said time and again about Sturgeon, that had he not suffered the ghastly stigmatizing ghettoization of being tagged a “science fiction” writer, he might easily surpass John Collier, Donald Barthelme, Ray Bradbury, or even Kurt Vonnegut as a mainstream fantasist of classic stature. Yet here, freed of that restriction, the fictions seem thin and too slick and forgettable; stories that could have been written by men not one thousandth as special as Theodore Sturgeon.
“To Here and the Easel,” a 1954 novelette printed here in hardcover for the first time (and the only story to have a previous publication), is the longest, and the dullest. A fantasy of schizophrenia in which a painter who can’t paint swings back and forth between his life as Giles, helpless before his empty white canvas, and his life as Rogero, a knight out of Orlando Furioso, this overlong and rococo morality play seems embarrassingly reminiscent of the kind of pulp writing typified by L. Ron Hubbard’s Slaves of Sleep, a novel bearing almost exactly the same plot-device Sturgeon employs.
Of the remaining eleven tales, five are straight mainstream, four are clearly s-f oriented, and two are borderline. However, only two crackle with the emotional load aficionados have come to revere in Sturgeon’s work. In “Take Care of Joey,” a man whose world-view is built on the concept that no one performs a seemingly unselfish act “without there’s something in it for him,” finds just such a situation operating. A nasty, troublemaking little bastard named Joey is watched over by a guy named Dwight, who obviously hates the little rat. He goes way out of his way to keep Joey from getting the crap kicked out of him, up to and past the point where Dwight himself gets stomped. The narrator of the story has to find out why, and he does, and he finds out something else that makes this eleven-page short a stunning example of Sturgeon’s off-kilter insight and humanity.
“The Girl Who Knew What They Meant” is the other winner and it is so carefully-constructed, so meticulously-spun that not until the last twenty-seven words, the final three sentences, does the reader know he has had his soul wrung like the neck of a chicken. It is Sturgeon transcendent. And if Martha Foley’s Best American Short Stories overlooks it this year, surely there is no justice.
On sum, though the book is weak and for the most part a terrible disappointment, merely having Sturgeon writing again—and being able to prove it with slugs of type—is a blessing. And even with typographical errors rampant (a felony heretofore difficult to charge to Putnam’s) it is a book well worth having done. Not just for those two incredible little short stories but by the same rationale that insists we preserve every letter and laundry list written by a Lincoln, a Hemingway or a Melville.
What I’m trying to say, is that Sturgeon is one of our best. He will be read and enjoyed a hundred years from now. So we must see it all, even the least successful of it.
This has been a difficult review to write.
Ted never told me what he thought of that piece. We had no bitterness over it, but we never sat down to bagels and lox about it, either. We were friends, and both of us knew that meant unshakeable trust in the truth that we loved each other, that we respected and admired the best of each other’s work in such a way that to blow smoke and/or sunshine up each other’s kilt would have been to poison that trust. Unlike many writers who expect their friends to write blurbs and dispense encomia on the basis of camaraderie rather than the absolute quality of the work, Ted and I understood that we could lie to others that way, but never to each other.
So. Enough.
I have more, endless more that I could set down about Ted, about abiding with Ted, about the chill wind blowing through the burlesque houses of both of our lives, but enough is enough.
Noël has suggested that I take the eulogy I wrote for Ted in 1985, that appears near the beginning of this essay, and move it back here, because every time she reads it, she cries.
And she thinks it is a proper end for this love letter to my friend now dead more than two decades.
No, dear Noël, it has to stay where it is; and I’ll tell you my thinking here.
Ted wanted me to write his eulogy. He made me promise. And I did it. But I was so wracked by loss at the time, it was brief, far briefer than this eulogy. And thus I left out most of what’s set down here in print for the first—and last—time. It is the for-real eulogy Ted probably wanted, and which I have perceived is being read over my shoulder as I’ve written it, by Ted’s ghost. Not for you, Noël, not for any of Ted’s other kids, not for Marion, not for the publisher who is herewith getting a major piece unexpectedly, and sure as hell not for admirers, fans, readers of Ted’s work.
I have written this because Ted needs to read it, and because it is a picture of The Great Artist that cannot exist via hoi polloi. It had to be done by me, kiddo; and if you think this is all of it …
Most of what I know about Theodore Sturgeon I cannot tell you. I haven’t told you about the two times we fought, the first being the imbroglio over that meanspirited piss-ant, the toweringly talented British novelist Anthony Burgess, who was a nasty little shit; and the second time subsequent to Ted doing one of the most awful things I’ve ever known of a human being doing to others, resulting in my telling him to get the fuck outta my house, now, tonight, this minute!
I haven’t told you about Ted and the Meatgrinder; Ted and the Tongue-Tied Germans; Ted and the Apollo Trip; Ted and Chuck Barris in Movieland; Ted and the Wing-Walker; Ted and the Naked Monkey. Oh, trust me, I could go on for days. But …
Enough.
I would have liked to’ve written more extensively about how Ted and I wrote together, but Paul Williams has covered some of that in the story-notes, and the rest is whispers and memories. So, at last, after more than twenty years, Ted, I’ve kept my promise. In full.
To say, at finish, only this. I miss my friend. I miss Ted’s charm, his chicanery, his talent,
his compassion. I miss them because they will never, not ever, not embodied in anyone or anything, never ever exist on any plane we can perceive. Those of you who never met him, who have only read him, can know what an emptiness there will forever be in your life. Because I know the emptiness in mine.
Harlan Ellison®
30 January 2007
Sherman Oaks, CA
Ride In, Ride Out
Beware the fury of a patient man.
—John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel
Midafternoon and he came to a fork in the road. Just like the rest of us in all our afternoons, whether we know it at the time or not.
Younger Macleish liked the left fork. His horse’s sleepy feet preferred the right, a bit downgrade as it was, and Macleish thought what the hell, he was ready to like the right fork too. He liked the country right, left, and whatever, from the white peaks feeding snow water to high timber and good grama range, across and down through the foothills where the low curly bunch-grass grew, and on to the black-earthed bottomland. But then it didn’t need to be all that good to please Younger Macleish today. He was of a mind to like salt-flat or sage, crows, cactus or a poison spring, long as the bones lay pretty there.
Around the mountain (right fork, left fork, it’s all the same) and three hundred miles beyond lay fifteen thousand well-fenced acres and a good warm welcome. Ninety-nine times Younger Macleish had said no to his cousin’s offer, for he had some distances to pace off and some growing up to do on his own. Now he’d said yes and was ambling home to a bubbling spring and an upland house; not too far away lived a pair of the prettiest blue-eyed sisters since crinolines were invented, while down the other way—if a man found he couldn’t choose—lived an Eastern school-marm with a bright white smile and freckles on her nose. Right now he had four months pay in his poke, his health, a sound horse, a good saddle, and no worriments. If a man likes where he’s been and where he’s headed, he’s fair bound to like where he is.
The Nail and the Oracle Page 3
