Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed

by Harlan Ellison

  Silverberg went out on the land and saw the audience he had idealized in his mind and in his Art, and they were demeaning themselves gladly with “sci-fi” and drivelbooks one notch up from comics. With Star Trek and Perry Rhodan and the blather of functional illiterates. Shaking his head in consternation and dismay, he stopped writing. And he was gone.

  He has often been pilloried by the unperceptive for being slick, one who frequently dealt with gimmicks. But in his 1958 story of cannibalism, “The Road to Nightfall,” he was already probing at the essence of the human spirit. In “The Man Who Never Forgot” he spoke to the condition of alienation with which we all suffer. “To See the Invisible Man” meant much to its readers; so much, in fact, that it has been widely reprinted in high school text-anthologies; it is a universal story. “Passengers” was an early warning shot in the battle against the Anita Bryants of the world. What is your favorite…run off the names:

  Nightwings, “Going Down Smooth,” Tower of Glass, The World Inside, “Ishmael in Love,” Downward to the Earth, “After the Myths Went Home,” “The Fangs of the Trees,” “The Feast of St. Dionysus,” Son of Man, The Masks of Time…my God, how the list goes on. There hasn’t been a year for almost two decades that the writer has not had final nominations in two and three categories of Nebula and Hugo awards. Is it any wonder that Barry Malzberg echoes those who know when he calls Silverberg “the best of us all.” No, it’s no wonder. And he may well be.

  And he is gone.

  Well, shit, that isn’t so. He’s alive and very well; perhaps weller than he’s been in a long time. He lives high in Oakland, dines well, moves around and sees brightly, and his personal life is no less tangled than it ever was, but there may be light at the end of his perceptions. One can only hope. And he’s entitled, fer chrissakes! Twenty-some years working behind a typewriter, a body of work most writers couldn’t parallel for quality and mass if they worked night and day for fifty years, a contribution to our cultural self-awareness that few other fantasists can equal…he’s done it. He’s entitled to stop, or rest, or pack it in entirely, without rancor, without being chastised. The gift has been given; accept it without greedily demanding more. He’s entitled. To live his life as he chooses. The work, once written, belongs to the reader. The writer belongs to himself.

  Peace and time are commodities we all find in short supply. Bob has decided to take his full measure. He’s entitled.

  Anybody messes with him has to go through me.

  And the one thing I am, that Siblerverg ain’t, is mean.

  He was naked beside the pool. So were the ladies. I had white ducks on. I didn’t want to make him feel inadequate. It was the day before New Years Eve. The annual Terry & Carol Carr Eve party, to be followed by the annual New Years Day party of the Silverbergs. I was staying in the guest bedroom with the water bed. We were beside the pool, eat your heart out Kalamazoo and New York and Pittsburgh. End of December, beside the pool. Voe doe dee oh doe.

  “Bob, take a look at this story.”

  “Not now, I’m being sybaritic.”

  “C’mon, man, just read the goddam thing. I know all the stuff is here, but it’s gone and went wonky on me. It doesn’t sing.”

  “It doesn’t soar?”

  “It doesn’t swell with pride.”

  “It just lies there.”

  “Sucks is, I believe, the proper terminology. Take a look, willya. Tell me what I can do with it.”

  He read it. Then he held it over the water with thumb and forefinger. “This is what you should do with it.”

  He dropped it. On the poolside. I went red with anger. Cannot remember when I’ve been angrier. I grabbed it up and went to the guest bedroom where my typewriter was set up. I’d been working on that story for two years. That miserable sonofabitch! I’ll show him!

  I wrote all through the day, part of that night; started again the next day with the TV in the guest bedroom blaring the Rose Bowl behind me, with Terry and a dozen other partygoers yelling and drinking and in no way interfering with my concentration.

  I reworked the story, snipped apart the sections, rewrote whole episodes, added eight thousand words, finished it the next day. He read it again.

  “Not bad,” he said. He isn’t that high on most of my work.

  “It’s bloody dynamite,” I said, with touching humility.

  “Wrong. It’s still wonky.”

  “It’s a classic. It’ll win a Hugo.”

  “No way.”

  The story was “The Deathbird.” Eat your heart out Silverbug.

  I never had a brother. I have a sister, but with only two moments of pardonable insanity when I forgot how much I disliked her, I haven’t spoken to her in eleven years. But if I’d had a brother, he wouldn’t have been like Silverberg. Bob and I are too different; very few points of similarity. Yet we are linked. Don’t ask me why, don’t ask me how. It just is. He doesn’t know it, but he’s the executor of my estate. If I went tomorrow, I’d go secure in the knowledge that Bob would tend to every little detail of my demise. He’d grumble about it, and think ill of me for inconveniencing him by being hit by a truck or getting myself defenestrated, but he’d do it. Ours is a peculiar and disparate friendship, almost a quarter of a century concretized. But we are so dissimilar that I sometimes wonder what it is we have in common. Clearly, what we have in common, is each other.

  In repose, his face resembles a Quechuan stele of the sleeping philosopher-soldier, something carved from the black rock of the steep slopes of the Cordilleras. His walk is easy; neither reminiscent of the cat nor of the rolling gait of the sailor, but loosely from the hips and the lower back. A textbook example of the laughter being primarily in the eyes; the mouth is often questionable. His lips are thicker than might be considered esthetically correct for the face. He has small ears. I remember him before the beard.

  Women tell me he is good in bed. I think he is probably even better with women out of bed. That is a terrific thing to be able to say.

  Politically, he would like to be more conservative than he is permitted to be, because of his constant exposure to those of us, his friends, who are wild-eyed radicals and knee-jerk liberals. I’m sure it causes him difficulty. He overintellectualizes too much sometimes. That is, no doubt, because he is an intellectual. He is also an elitist, but is too smart to flaunt it. His manner is quiet, and so his elitism seems acceptably patriarchal.

  He seldom uses coarse language. He keeps cats.

  His work will be read and admired fifty years from now. I’d make book on it.

  Appreciation? How do I express appreciation for a man who has been part of my life since the days through which we marched as fans, he with his magazine Spaceship, me with Dimensions?

  He wrote an appreciation of me for a recent issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction that ended with a sentence I found making me cry. Not bawling, you understand, just sort of welling up a bit. There was love and bemusement and tolerance and amazement and frustration in that last sentence, and it was a genuine treasure.

  If all of the above emotions and attitudes toward him, on my part, don’t surface in this “appreciation,” then either you as reader or I as writer failed in doing our job.

  But for a parting shot, I’m forced to go to another writer for splendid words. It is a piece of an article about film director Sam Peckinpah, written by one of my few friends who is an actor: Robert Culp. You may not have known that Bob Culp is a brilliant writer, but to inform your awareness, here is this snippet of appreciation, written when Culp and Peckinpah were on good terms. I’ve been saving it for myself. If I could have anything ever said about anyone, said about me, as my epitaph, I would want it to be something like this.

  It wasn’t written about Silverberg, but you’ll allow for the discrepancies, because the tone and the substance go right to the heart of my feelings about Silverberg.

  “The similarities in character between Peckinpah and [John] Ford are not exactly lost on those who kno
w them. He is Ford, come again just as mean, a little more mad, a little angrier, a little more vulnerable, perhaps a little more valuable to the people around him now, since he is absolutely the last of the breed. With him the line runs out. He is not the technical master of the form that Ford was, but his vision is greater and he is bolder, infinitely more reckless and self-destructive, and as a consequence very precious since he will be with us only a short time. And the body of his work will be smaller. It is very difficult for him to, in his incessant phrase, ‘just get it on!’ It costs him more to get the job done than any of the rest of us, and there’s only so much currency, only so many feet and inches of entrail. [Robert Silverberg] is all alone just like the rest of us. Except that he knows it. He knows how terribly cold it is out there and he cannot come in. But he sends messages.”

  This appreciation is available in mono and compatible eight-track stereo. Voe doe dee oh doe.

  ROBERT SILVERBERG: AN APPRECIATION

  Same subject, six years later, and Harlan was in a different mood. This thoughtful piece accompanied the publication of several of Silverberg’s stories in The Best of Omni No. 5. In a recent conversation, Harlan noted that this is the last tribute to Bob he intends to write. As with the Leiber essay (see “A Few Too Few Words”) Harlan feels that one’s credibility is strained by declaiming the virtues of one’s friends time after time, so this is probably his last word on the subject of Silverberg.

  More brightly than any other writer working in the genre of imaginative literature, Robert Silverberg reflects the conscience of our times.

  Beginning his career in the fifties, Silverberg was a perfect manifestation both of the emergence of science fiction as a legitimate art form and the prevailing attitude of young people in America that success was the primary goal for an artist. If his early work is marked by a cool intelligence and an emphasis on solving the puzzle-problems set up by plot, it is likely as much a resonance with that period in our recent history when distancing from social commitment was the order of the day as it was the influence of John W. Campbell, who, as the most prominent editor of his era, set the parameters of the genre as consistent with his own concerns.

  But in the mid-to late-sixties, beginning with such novels as Thorns, Nightwings, The Masks of Time, Up the Line, and The Man in the Maze, Silverberg’s legendary prolificity was turned almost feverishly to reinterpretations of the effects on human beings of runaway technology in a worlds whose soul was in peril. In those novels and the uncounted short stories that filled the chinks in the wall of oeuvre he was creating, Silverberg began to reach out through the veil of his intellectual solitude to touch that universal human spirit all serious artists must, inevitably, come to grips with.

  From 1970 to 1974, a time of upheaval and metamorphosis in America, Silverberg’s work reflected the angst and mortal dreads of the world around him. Massive changes over a decade had altered his view of his species, and of himself; and the work dealt more impressively than that of any other writer of the time with the great questions we had begun to ask ourselves. Downward to the Earth, The World Inside, Tower of Glass, Son of Man, A Time of Changes, Dying Inside, and The Stochastic Man—among a flood of others—became deeply troubling icons for a generation of readers learning not only to live decently in their own skins, but who were at last coming to realize they were part of a human chain, each link of which was commanded to ask for whom the bell tolls.

  In 1974 Silverberg was lashed into a realization that being point man for the human condition can be dangerous in the extreme. With the end of the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, the years of civil unrest rumbling to a close, America sought surcease. Weary from a decade of trying to reestablish pride in being a nation flawed but essentially humane, exhausted from the day-after-day struggle to banish the monsters in our midst, America fell gladly into the arms of trivial art; and the fickle audience decided it could not handle the deep-breathing demands Silverberg’s uncompromising work placed on them. Turning their eyes back to what seemed (foolishly) an idyllic time, the audience wallowed in escapism of a sort that excluded the nourishment of spirit, the demand for personal responsibility, Silverberg proffered.

  And so he went away. For five years he was not heard from, and the empty dreams of elfin creatures and unicorns held sophomoric sway over Silverberg’s former constituency.

  Those who knew him intimately were not insensitive to his pain. He went to the earth and he dined well and he maintained close friendships; but despite the sheen of complacency and comfort, it was obvious the surface was pitted with anguish. Beyond the gate there was only silence.

  But as the times send some great artists underground to replenish their energies—often against their will—so the pressures of a changing world call those readers of the runes back when their time is come again. And as the eighties dawned, Silverberg made his resurgence. Invigorated, renewed, at once more thoughtful and more vulnerable, perhaps more human at having discovered he was not beyond the reach of rust, he has returned to the world of imaginative literature stronger and more important to our needs.

  Reflecting in his ipseity† a thirty-year history of science fiction, and the scarred American character, Robert Silverberg returns to us larger than at his beginning or his leave-taking; wiser and more decent. Able to tell us that even when dark wings close down the sky the human spirit will prevail…if we but accept our kinship with seas and stones and the ghosts of our past.

  CHEAP THRILLS ON THE ROAD TO HELL

  This famous essay on The Common Man was written on assignment for the Los Angeles Times and appeared as a 1982 New Year’s editorial. It was as a result of this piece that the publisher first approached Harlan with the idea of gathering his essays into the collection you’re now reading.

  We felt so good after seeing Fonda and Hepburn and Fonda in On Golden Pond that a bunch of us said, what the hell, let’s cripple the exchequer and have dinner at Lawry’s. Waitress named Ms. Anacker worked our table. Nice person, and responded well to our high spirits and dumb humor. She said it was a pleasure to have some well-meaning nut cases to wait on instead of all the sourpusses she’d been getting. She said it had been one mean Christmastime working this year’s crowd. A lot of surly, a lot of cranky, much prunefaced snottiness.

  We asked her why did she think it’d been like that? Why were folks so downcast and wrongheaded? She said, “Because they were angry they didn’t have money to buy their kids toys this year.” And she served the salad with the chilled forks.

  Having been asked by the good gray Times to make some observations on the future roaring toward us down the Freeway of Life, vehicle number 1982 having just rear-ended and whiplashed us, I find myself with mind a-whirl and nails bitten to the quick. I am much like you. In the mistaken belief that just because I occasionally write fantasy stories extrapolating some bizarre future America I am privy to Delphic insights, the editors of the Times have asked me to unleash wry conceits about what we can expect. Little do they understand that writers are merely paid liars and we know no more than the rest of you. Nonetheless, noting that the last guy to tell you the truth—that Reagan’s economic policies are a Balinese fire&boat drill—was David Stockman, and remembering what happened to him, I look backward in order to look forward.

  Dr. Doolittle called such an animal the Push-Me-Pull-You.

  We come out of 1981 and into the new year still paying the price for Vietnam and a plethora of assassinations. I hold Lee Harvey Oswald directly responsible for Richard Nixon, and I hold Nixon directly responsible for Carter and Reagan. Some small amount of bitterness attends these observations.

  Mr. Reagan has spent a year carefully dismantling all the gains in civil rights it took two decades to push through. He goes to retreat in the beautiful land above Santa Barbara but gives the rest of us the dubious gift of James Watt who seems hellbent on turning every available inch of watershed land into condos at a million-five per unit. He plays to insular fears and regional prejudices and that
poisonous racism we cannot seem to boil out of our national character, and the ERA is in trouble, labor is unhappy, the Post Office raised its rates again when they were told not to, there’s no money to clean the streets, and somewhere out there a crazed killer is lurching toward us to make us another point in the slaughter statistics because Mr. Reagan won’t buck the National Rifle Association.

  And you ask me to look toward the future and tell you that the tin woodman will get his heart, the scarecrow his brains, the lion his courage and that Dorothy’s red pumps will get new halfsoles? Wrong and wrong. I cannot do that.

  What I can do is tell you that this early in the Eighties we must come to accept some hard truths that fly in the face of what we have always believed about the American Character. Because, it seems to me, only by what Mr. Reagan calls “agonizing reappraisal” can we forego the cheap thrills and destructive mythology that have directed our steps down the road to Hell which is paved, as we all know, with unenlightened self-interest.

  First off, he said, going for the jugular, we must get rid of the concept of the nobility of the Common Man (and Woman). In times past that stereotype was seen as Jimmy Stewart, stopping the mad dog lynch-mob from killing an innocent man. But as the late critic John Mason Brown once observed, “The Common Man is dangerously too common.” The reality is that the Common Man was part of that lynch-mob. It was the UnCommon Man, the courageous and intelligent taker-of-risks, who was best personified by Stewart and Gary Cooper and Spencer Tracy.

  It is the Common Man one hears eviscerating the English language during KNX’s periodic opinion-in-the-street programs. The dull voices of those who, during the baseball players’ strike, thought it was just awful, just terrible for those guys to be denying fans the pleasure of rooting for the team just because they wanted more money. Voices of those who, did they not get their contract demands at the plant or in the office, would have been on the pavement with placards in a hot second.