Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed

by Harlan Ellison

  Many people believed it.

  None of them bothered to ask why the police hadn’t been called, or how I’d managed to get the elevator doors open when the cage wasn’t there so my victim could be tossed down a shaft; or whether the victim had died; and if he had, was the body still lying down there at the bottom, broken and beginning to smell bad, or had it been spirited away by Ellison’s troglodyte minions, and why hadn’t Ellison been arrested?

  They simply believed it. They don’t know me, and I don’t want to know them.

  And just to deny the rumor-mill any fresh material (not that it needs actual material when it works so well from whole cloth), let me tell you where the three new stories in this issue of F&SF came from. In that way, at least, I’ll save myself from having to endure the boring recitations in half-witted fanzines that purport to be knowledgeable analyses of what I really meant, analyses of the twisted psycho-sexual references that fill the stories. I’ll free myself of having to bear that silliness, at least for these three stories. Which means all the rest are still fair game for the functional illiterates who do most of the fanzine critiques.

  “Working With the Little People” was written in one straight stretch of effort in the front window of a bookstore on Charing Cross Road in London, Tuesday 20 July 1976. The bookstore was Words and Music, and I was reprising my sitting-in-a-bookstore-window-writing-a-story-a-day number as explicated more thoroughly in F&SF last October. It is not a representation of myself, in any way. It is, I suppose, an open letter to a famous fantasy writer on whose wonderful stories I grew up. This writer is a person who has become a good friend, someone I love. And because of my respect and affection for this writer, and because of the germinal effect on my writing that the body of this writer’s work had on me during my formative years, it is impossible for me to say to this writer, you stopped writing your best work over twenty years ago. It is impossible for me to take this writer aside and say, “Just for a moment let’s forget that we’re both eminently successful, that we’re canonized by fans and critics. They don’t know! But we know. We know what each of us is writing, and we know when the time has come that we’re only indulging ourselves because our fame is such that they’ll buy whatever we write, no matter how effective or slapdash. For just a moment let’s forget we’re who we are, and just look at what you’ve been doing for twenty years!” No, it’s not possible for me to tell this writer of classic stature that somehow the publicity and the fame and the totemization have gotten in the way of writing the stories that made the fame in the first place.

  Ego forms the greater part of whatever nameless amalgam it is that sustains a writer. We live off it, every one of us, no matter how ostensibly humble or arrogant we may seem to our readers. The mildest of us, nonetheless, has an ability to sustain himself through sheer will, through sheer belief in the cosmic correctness of what we do. Every word we set down, every choice of line and color and structure is surfeited with that ego. I cannot tell this writer that the vision has grown dim. The talent is still there, as rich and as dark as before. But the world and its praise, its wonders and treasures, has gotten in the way. I may be wrong. The later stories may be the best this writer has ever produced; but unless I read all the critics wrong, and unless I read the tenor of this writer’s audience wrong, and unless I read my own loving perceptions of this writer’s work wholly incorrectly…the main path has been abandoned.

  So this story is my gentle way of speaking to this writer.

  Perhaps the writer will recognize what I’m doing in “Working With the Little People.” And perhaps I’ll get a phone call and this writer, with whom I talk frequently, will say, “I read your story. Did you mean me?” And I’ll say, fearfully, “Yeah.” And perhaps the writer will say, “Let’s talk. I’m not sure you know what the hell you’re talking about, but at least you cared enough to say it and risk my wrath and the loss of my friendship; so at least let’s sit down alone and thrash it out.”

  I hope that’s what will happen.

  As for the second story, “Alive and Well and on a Friendless Voyage,” well, that one seems to distress my friends a bit. Arthur Cover says he thinks it may be self-pitying. Richard Delap wonders if I’m not exploiting my own life. Geo. Alec Effinger thinks it’s one of my most important stories. But most of my friends who’ve read it refuse to talk to me about it. I can understand that.

  This is one of those few stories I’ve written not only to write a story, to provide an entertainment, but as personal therapy. I wrote it during the period after the breakup of my recent marriage. It was my fourth marriage, and not one I entered into lightly.

  You see, you don’t know me. Many of you think that four marriages is an indication of frivolity or confusion or bad judgment. They may be all of those, but as far as I’m concerned, they are also indications that I’m alive. Everyone wants action, adventure and danger in their life…but no one wants risk. Everyone wants guarantees of security.

  Friends, there is no security this side of the grave.

  I’ve said that before.

  I say it again.

  I married in June of 1976 and I separated on November 20th of 1976. She was sleeping with another man. That seems pretty slim reason for dissolution of a marriage, particularly in my case, because I’ve never felt that merely because you marry someone that your mate’s body belongs to you. Slavery went out of fashion a long time ago. But there was lying, duplicitousness, insincerity, and a great many other elements that destroyed trust. And without trust, without friendship, there is nothing. One is left with dust.

  I loved her. In the words of one of the characters in the story, “Without reserve. I showed it in a million ways, every hour of the day that we spent together.” But love is hardly enough to sustain a relationship, dear friends. And it fell apart, and so did I.

  And one night three or four months after I had asked her to leave, and she had gone to live with her paramour, I was sitting in the darkness of my living room watching the American Film Theater’s production of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris on our Los Angeles unedited-movie channel, and something I cannot even remember in that production, some moment of melancholy as expressed through Brel’s exquisite songs, sparked the basic idea for this story.

  I’m frequently asked where my ideas come from. I usually can remember where the story was written, and under what special circumstances; but less often I’m able to recall just what precise elements came together in my mind to form the basic concept of a given piece of writing. That’s the case with “Alive and Well and on a Friendless Voyage.” All I know for certain is that I went in and sat down at the typewriter and did the first two pages of the story.

  And I realized from the start that it was my way of writing out my pain and loneliness.

  You see, you don’t know me and I don’t know you. The ways in which you bring your pain under control, the ways in which you maintain your sanity…they are not mine. I live in another world; each of us does. But I know this of myself: I can keep going. That’s one of the things life is all about…maintaining. And that is what the story is about.

  In the space of three or four months toward the end of last year—the most terrible period in my entire life—my mother died, my wife cuckolded me and left, I suffered staggering financial difficulties, endured personal illness, went more than a little crazy…but maintained. Now I’m on the other side of it all. And that’s what the story is about. It is the grail I have brought back from that awful place. It is the artifact that shows I felt the fire but did not let it destroy me.

  All of the foregoing, sententious though it may read, is straight from where my thoughts lie, to you. Take it or leave it. It’s not as if none of you had ever asked.

  But my favorite of the three stories in this issue is the one called “Jeffty Is Five.” I began this story during a New Year’s party at the home of my friend Walter Koenig. We were all sitting around in Walter & Judy’s living room, and there was a group of pe
ople who were mostly the Koenigs’ friends, not mine. Nice people, I just didn’t know them very well. And I was sitting there sorta kinda doing and thinking nothing, just goofing and relaxing, playing with Walter’s kids, when I intentionally mis-overheard a line of conversation.

  Let me explain that.

  Quite a lot of the time (probably more of the time than a psychiatrist would consider sane or rational), I intentionally hear things wrong. If someone says, “I went to the Chinese hand laundry this afternoon,” I visualize it in my mind as an enormous, steamy plant where they launder Chinese hands. Or how about this one: the other night I was talking to Nancy Schwartz and one or the other of us mentioned tubal ligation. I chose to hear it as tubal libation and proceeded to run half a dozen horrendous puns on the historic precedent of magic being attendant on the drinking of menstrual blood. Don’t be shocked, dummies, Sturgeon once wrote an entire novel on the theme. Then Nancy did tubal legation, I did tonal relation, she did tribal locution and we were busy for half an hour being as improbable as possible.

  Because of this flaw in my nature, this desire to hear things a little stranger than the speaker intended, I heard a snatch of perfectly ordinary conversation as something like this, “So I went to see Jeff, and he was five…he’s always five…” and my mind flashed on a little boy who has been snared at the age of five, who never gets any older. And I asked Walter for a typewriter, and he brought me a portable, and I set it on a chair and did the first several pages of the story in this issue. (Except I rewrote those first two hurried pages considerably.) But the story would go no further.

  It wasn’t till I came down here to New Orleans that I discovered what my story was about. From New Year’s till February it just festered and simmered. But then, while talking to George and Beverly last evening, while talking about how times have changed and about how we’re losing so many wonderful things that meant so much to us and which we took so much for granted, did I understand what Jeffty and his story was all about. And so today I’ve been sitting here writing this introduction, and when it gets too boring I stop and work on Jeffty a little.

  And Jeffty is so real to me, so important to me, that I’m writing about him very slowly. I don’t want the story to be ended. I want Jeffty to go on forever.

  Because you don’t know me, and you don’t know that there is a part of Jeffty that is me, very much me, achingly me.

  Which brings me, I suppose, to the end of this introduction that poor Ed Ferman so foolishly suggested I write.

  I swear to you: I had intended only to say thank you very much for coming this evening, folks, and it’s been a terrific pleasure writing for you. I intended to be brief and very gracious. But who the hell would I be kidding? I’m not that gracious, and if I’d ever wanted to be brief I’d have either become a poet or taken up selling Fruit of the Loom underwear.

  So, six thousand words later, I tag off mumblingly, wondering precisely what I had to say that was endemic to this special issue of F&SF; probably nothing of any consequence. Except to point out that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, and all the academy’s critics and all the establishment’s analysts, and all of fandom’s turkeys and all of their fanzine editors cannot fathom or reconstruct the mind that writes these stories. Nor the minds that write Leiber’s stories and Sturgeon’s stories, or Borges’s stories and Vonnegut’s stories, or Wilhelm’s stories or Effinger’s stories. We are all alone, each of us, existing in worlds we make fresh each day. And those of you who are granted the views into our worlds are like tourists going into Terra Incognita after we’ve blazed the trails.

  But don’t ever fool yourselves. Not even those of you who make your living from literary analyses. Don’t for a second fool yourselves into thinking you’ve got our number.

  Because even if I reveal some small truth about the human heart in my work, strictly serendipitously, strictly by chance, I really don’t know you, and that’s the way I want to keep it, because I subscribe to what H. L. Mencken said: “It is precisely at their worst that human beings are most interesting.”

  I want to keep being surprised by all of you.

  How boring it would be if all of you were as predictable and dull as so many of you seem to be.

  Those of you out there whom I’ll meet and write about one day: I don’t know you.

  And for all the rest of you…

  Believe it, kiddo: you don’t know me.

  STEALING TOMORROW

  The following appeared as the introduction to a 1974 reprint of Harlan’s short story “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” in Tom Reamy’s fanzine Trumpet. Because it was written to segue into the story it may seem to tail off rather awkwardly but it begs nevertheless to be reprinted here.

  My soul would be an outlaw. I can do nothing with it.

  The coward body my soul inhabits has pleaded with the renegade, has cried for pity, has implored the pistolero, my soul, to live safely, to observe quietly, to live in peace, with a degree of contentment.

  My soul curses like the guttersnipe it is, and hurls another molotov cocktail at my complacency. So I am doomed. My soul will be an outlaw. It will be Zorro, dressed in black, carving its initials in the sane and the rational. It will be Jean Lafitte, stalking through the Louisiana swamp of my days and nights, prepared to defend my cringing, cowardly self from the invaders called compromise. It will be a coocoo Charlie Chaplin, hurling a pie at whatever it takes to live quietly, sensibly, safely.

  And here am I, trapped in the body with this dangerous, unpredictable outlaw, who seems determined to alienate, to upset, to annoy, to harass and chivvy and unsettle me.

  I lust for the day when soul transplants come to be.

  For my soul, the masked bandido, is a dreamer. He is engaged in the biggest caper of them all. I take this moment while the soul is out on one of its forays against the decent and proper folk of the world, to set down and relate its plans. To apprise you that the outlaw Attila Genghis Khan John Brown marauder is planning the greatest theft of all time.

  My mad soul would steal tomorrow.

  He would wrest tomorrow from the jaws of today and turn it topsy-turvy. He would come lumbering into town on a pink-and-yellow elephant, fast as Pegasus, and throw down on the established order. At gunpoint, the depraved and lunatic soul would order that tomorrow be handed over, and then, wheeling, gallop off, back to his lair in the Rainbow Plaid Mountains, where he would hold tomorrow hostage, raping and pillaging her, till her brains turned to cotton candy.

  I hasten to assure you, I am no party to this depravity. I am a quiet country boy merely trying to make a peaceful way in the world. It is this outlaw soul of mine who is the troublemaker.

  And I can only repeat what he says about his motivations, in hopes someone can arrive in time to thwart his nefarious plans.

  What my soul says is this:

  Anthropologists tell us that from what they have been able to ascertain, from skulls found in the caves at Baden, Germany, that the “reasoning” section of man’s brain, the cerebellum of modern man, is many times larger than that of the primates. But the area that contains the emotions, the medulla, is precisely the same size. We have become creatures capable of sending rockets to the Moon, capable of probing the bottom of the oceans, capable of computing and assaying and estimating and dreaming, but we are still naked apes when our emotions are excited.

  My soul says, tomorrow cannot be trusted to naked apes. My soul seems to think he is Robin Hood, stealing from the ill-equipped to give to the as-yet-unborn. I cannot argue with my soul, it will hear no counter-suggestion. And what can I do? I’m trapped in here with the lunatic.

  My soul says he has received “The Call.” That he has been touched by the Maker. (And I fear to ask him which Maker, or what Maker, for fear he will tell me…and I don’t want to know, not really!)

  My soul, in his more rational moments, tells me that he will cease raiding when, and only when, men come to realize that all other men are nobl
e. He tells me he will lay back and let the world handle itself only when color and creed and race and religion cease being interfaces between other men. He says he has had “the call” and his mission is to keep the posse out looking for him, because that will keep them aware of the fact that not everyone can be sold into slavery quite so easily.

  You can see my situation. My problem is one of helplessness. I mean no ill, I mean no offense. It is this carnivorous soul, this Mr. Hyde in my eminently sane and rational Dr. Jekyll body.

  If you want my opinion, my soul is crazy. I don’t think charmingly crazy, like one of the Marx Brothers, I mean stoned righteously crazy, with a lack of humility, without a vestige of reverence, without a response in him that would keep him in line and safe and following along the way others would follow. I think he ought to be locked up. I hope to God the posse catches him. That’s what I hope.

  But he’s cunning, you see. He comes equipped with dreams, and they are weapons of frightful potency. He uses them shamefully, if you ask me. He rails against the most sensible directives from the world, he curses those who set the rules, he refuses to listen or accept even the most rational reasons for the most sensible acts.

  Let me give you a for instance.

  My soul is never on time.

  If my soul tells you he’ll be there at seven o’clock, look for him next Thursday. He flouts the rigors and rules of punctuality, and when I insist that he is once again shaking up the natural order of things, he unleashes one of his dreams on me, saying Thoreau was right when he wrote: “He serves the State best who opposes the State most.” (If you want my opinion, Thoreau’s soul was an outlaw, too.)

  DOWN THE RABBIT-HOLE TO TV-LAND

  The following three essays present a fascinating study of the evolution of Harlan’s views on television. “Down the Rabbit-Hole to TV-Land” was written for Cad magazine in 1967 while Harlan was actually working in the medium. “Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don’t Look So Terrific Yourself” is a slightly-shortened version of the Introduction to his 1978 fiction collection Strange Wine. “Epiphany” was a 1982 guest editorial for Video Review magazine. None of these essays is drawn from his weekly columns on television which appeared in the Los Angeles Free Press from 1968 to 1972 and which are collected in The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat (Ace, 1983).