Case and the Dreamer

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Edward Waldo’s father, who was in the paint, oil and varnish business, left his mother when Edward was five. Five years later she remarried, and Edward (along with his older brother Peter) was adopted by his stepfather and his name was legally changed to Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon because that was the stepfather’s name—he was a professor of modern languages at Drexel Institute in Philadelphia—and Theodore because Edward was the boy’s father’s name and the mother was still bitter and anyway young Edward had always been known as Teddy. (To this day, libraries all over the world list “Theodore Sturgeon” as a pseudonym for “E. H. Waldo,” which is incorrect; Sturgeon is his real name.)

  At the age of thirteen, Theodore became a star athlete. He’d had to do something. His stepfather had arranged for him to enter high school at the age of 11—he went from the fifth grade to the ninth grade with nothing in between but eight weeks of summer school—and naturally he was the smallest kid in the class. “I was pretty well brutalized by the whole thing. I had to figure out different ways to walk to school every day, because kids would lay for me on the way. I had curly golden hair and was very thin and kind of wheyfaced and—pretty. And I was just an absolute target.”

  “While I was in high school I discovered apparatus gymnastics, and that became my total preoccupation. In a year and a half I gained four inches and sixty pounds, and I became captain and manager of my gym team, which is literally a transfiguration. I was totally born again. The very kids that used to bully me would follow me around and carry my books. And then when I was fifteen, I came down with acute rheumatic fever.”

  “By this time I had a two-year scholarship already at Temple University, an athletic scholarship; and my whole life was blueprinted. I was going to get my degree in physical education and spend a year teaching, and then I was going down to Florida and join the Barnum & Bailey Circus and become a flyer. However, acute rheumatic fever and six months flat on my back took care of that. My heart was so enlarged, it squirted up between my ribs where you could see it beating from outside. Inside of a year I had a fantastic recovery—but no more gymnastics, ever. It was a shattering experience.”

  Sturgeon left high school a few weeks before graduating. He went to sea for three years. And then he became a writer.

  III

  Sturgeon’s best-known work is a novel (actually three interconnected stories) called More than Human. It’s about five children with unusual psychic powers who are able to “blesh” their talents together so that they become a single functioning organism, homo gestalt, the next step in human evolution. This novel contains some of the most memorable characters and extraordinary passages of writing (“The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear. His clothes were old and many-windowed. Here peeped a shinbone, sharp as a cold chisel, and there in the torn coat were ribs like the fingers of a fist. He was tall and flat. His eyes were calm and his face was dead.”) in modern fiction. It won the International Fantasy Award in 1954, has sold over a half-million copies in paperback, and both directly and indirectly has had a huge impact on the ideas and values of several generations of young Americans.

  When a friend of mine, in 1964, asked David Crosby about the new rock group he was performing in, he said, “We blesh.” Crosby, like most mid-Sixties’ rock musicians (and underground press editors, political activists, dope impresarios, etc.), was an avid reader of science fiction in general and Sturgeon in particular; and he realized early that the Byrds and other rock groups were living examples of Sturgeon’s idea that a group of humans could function as more than the sum of the individuals involved … not just more, but mystically more, so that the group took on its own personality and created things that none of its individual members could even have imagined. Chester Anderson wrote in the San Francisco Oracle in 1966, in a widely reprinted analysis of the new rock or “head” music, “Rock is evolving Sturgeonesque homo gestalt configurations.…” The Merry Pranksters were another example of the same phenomenon, as were all the nameless groups that came together to organize political or cultural events and then disbanded and vanished when the work was done.

  The “counterculture,” in retrospect, was heavily modeled on a handful of science-fiction and fantasy novels: Childhood’s End, Dune, The Lord of the Rings, Stranger in a Strange Land and More than Human. The ideas expressed in these books hit home for a lot of impressionable adolescents, who later tried hard to transform their yearnings into changed lifestyles and new realities.

  And a new set of values. Sturgeon, in More than Human and throughout his work, is a moralist as well as a visionary. Not the kind of moralist who knows what’s right and what’s wrong and tells you in so many words, but the kind who is searching for the answers and shares his search with his readers. In More than Human, the problem faced by homo gestalt is, “Now that you’re superman, what do you do with your powers?” Sturgeon’s answer is awkward and incomplete, but, for our generation, much more appropriate than Nietzsche’s.

  We have to live our lives, he says, constantly refining and acting out a definition of morality that goes beyond individual survival and even goes beyond survival of the social unit. He is reaching constantly for a higher sense of the human role on this planet, and in that he is very much in touch with his postwar readers.

  Sturgeon has an ambivalent attitude towards his own work, his career, all that sort of thing. He wants success desperately, and avoids it like the plague. Late one night, puttering around the kitchen (it was probably 3 AM, and he was probably getting ready to feed the rabbits or wash the dishes), Ted told me he’s been hearing this voice inside him all his life which says, in response to whatever is or seems to be expected of him by the outside world, “I won’t do it.” Only recently, he said, he’s realized that there’s another half to the sentence, and what he’s really saying, deep in there somewhere, is, “I won’t do what they want me to do.”

  And, God knows, he doesn’t.

  Sturgeon does not do what the world expects him to do. He resists mightily. He always has. When he was in high school there was a regulation that, when the weather got warm, if you came to school wearing a sweater you had to take it off. So Ted would show up at school wearing a sweater but no shirt.

  “He has this need to do it backwards.…” Betty Ballantine, Sturgeon’s editor on a number of his best books, was talking about Sturgeon’s approach to a novel or short story (like when he wrote a western in which the hero loses the girl, or portraying Mr. Costello via an admiring observer); but as soon as the words were out of her mouth we both realized it was a perfect description of Sturgeon’s approach to everything in his life.

  In his own funny way, Theodore Sturgeon is one of the contrariest people I’ve ever met. This makes him hard to work with and helps keep him away from success. But it’s also a significant part of what makes his stories so special. Sturgeon consistently sees things as though he were looking from the other side.

  He turns things around and inside out at the same time, without letting go of your hand. It’s a neat trick if you can do it.

  IV

  Q: How did you get started as a writer?

  A: “I was in the merchant marine, working on a coastwise tanker, and I worked out a way to rob the American Express Company of several hundred thousand dollars. I did my homework: I wrote to the company and found out precisely how they shipped this and that and the other thing, got it all worked out and then wrote it as a short story because I didn’t have quite the guts to do it myself.

  “And one magical day, when I was picking up my mail at the Seaman’s Institute in New York, I got a letter that said I’d sold the story. I’d sold it to a newspaper syndicate, the McClure Syndicate, and I was so excited I quit my job, I went ashore and I was going to be a writer.

  “Well, I sold the story for five dollars, payable on publication. It had taken me three months to research it. And they were willing to buy one story, sometimes two, a week. No more.
So for almost six months, I lived on five or ten dollars week. I lived on West 63rd Street, where Lincoln Center is now, and it cost me seven and a half dollars a week for the room; and I ate on whatever was left.”

  So in 1938, at the age of 20, Theodore Sturgeon quit the merchant marine and became a full-time writer. He’d been at sea for three years, starting with six months on a school ship, the Penn State Nautical School, which was just like going back to the ninth grade and getting brutalized (new cadets were hazed mercilessly by upper-classmen) all over again. “I remember the first shit session I was in. One of the officers came up from aft, and started to walk forward, and walked right past this line. And I greeted him with—silently, of course, but I thought, ‘Oh thank God! Here comes an officer. This is going to stop.’ And I could not believe it when he walked right through without looking. We were getting brutalized and beat on and kids were passing out, it was just ghastly. And the guy did nothing to stop it; he smiled slightly and walked on. That was so bloody unfair—” Ted says this like it was yesterday; after forty years, you can still hear the anger in his voice.

  “I could not bring myself to quit while this was going on. But the very minute I completed my first term, and was no longer on the bottom …” He dropped out of nautical school, just like he’d dropped out of high school, and used his cadet credentials to get an Ordinary Seaman’s Ticket, and shipped out with a steamer outfit called the Merchant and Miners Transportation Company.

  The short stories Sturgeon wrote for the newspaper syndicate, in his room on West 63rd Street, were not science fiction—they were human-interest vignettes, boy-meets-girl or sailing stories or whatever, but always with some kind of little clever twist that gave them their charm. Like the girl gets the guy by putting vanilla extract on her ear lobes, so every time he gets near her he thinks about cookies and yellow curtains in the kitchen.

  Sturgeon wrote these stories, and other odd assignments when he could get them, and then one day when he’d walked over to Brooklyn to see his brother, or maybe late one night nursing a five-cent cup of coffee in Martin’s 57th Street Cafeteria, somebody showed him a copy of a new fantasy magazine called Unknown, and said, “Hey! This is what you ought to be writing for.…” Sturgeon went to see John Campbell, the editor, who also edited a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction and ended up selling him twenty-six stories in the next year and a half. It was 1939.

  Science fiction was not a new discovery for Sturgeon. Like most of us, he started reading the stuff when he was twelve or thirteen. His stepfather—always the autocrat—took one look at Ted’s copies of Amazing and Astounding and forbade him to bring those pulp magazines into the house. The Sturgeon family lived in a fourth-floor apartment, top of the building, and the closet in Ted’s room had a hatch that led to a crawlspace under the roof. Ted took his magazines up there and dropped them behind the fourth rafter back, where they couldn’t be seen even by somebody standing on a chair looking in with a flashlight. “So it’s a mystery to me how that man was ever able to discover them.…”

  But he did. “One time I came home, and he says, ‘There’s a mess in your room. I want you to clean it up.’ I walked in there, and that room was nearly ankle deep in tiny little pieces of paper no bigger than postage stamps. He had torn up my entire collection of science-fiction magazines. It must have taken him hours—I guess his hands must have ached for days. I can remember I was sobbing, just crying, sweeping up those little pieces of paper, and looking at one every once in a while, wondering what story that was. And I had to clean it all up. Which may well be why I’m a science fiction writer today.”

  Ted’s brother went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and Ted stayed in New York, writing his stories. He married his high school sweetheart—her name was Dorothy, and she changed it to Dorothe so it would be the same as Theodore—and they had a baby girl, Patricia, and then Ted—who’d written his best-received story to date, a tale of eldritch horror called “It,” in ten hours on his honeymoon, and then followed it with a little epic called “Microcosmic God,” which made such an impact that decades later it was voted one of the top five sf stories of all time by the Science Fiction Writers of America—Ted turned his back on his growing reputation as a writer and got a job managing a hotel in Jamaica.

  Sturgeon was twenty-two years old. He’d thought he could turn out stories fast enough—at a penny a word—to support his new family, but it wasn’t working out; in fact lately the stories had stopped coming altogether. This hotel gig would take care of immediate needs, and then maybe the change of scene would get his creative juices flowing again.…

  It didn’t work out that way. In the next five years, Sturgeon wrote exactly one story, right in the middle of this period; the rest of the time, though he tried and tried, nothing happened. The war came, the hotel closed down—Sturgeon became a bulldozer driver, a heavy equipment operator (he was not a big man, but he was good with machines, and it was wartime)—they moved to Puerto Rico, and then St. Croix. A second daughter, Cynthia, was born. Eventually Ted quit his other jobs and just worked full time at trying to write—but apart from his classic short novel “Killdozer,” written in nine days in 1943, no stories came. He just didn’t understand it. It was like something had broken inside him, and he couldn’t put it together again.

  V

  “No living writer has quite Sturgeon’s grasp on horror and hilarity, nor knows quite so many kinds of people so well.”—Groff Conklin

  “Perhaps the best way I can tell you what I think of a Theodore Sturgeon story is to explain with what diligent interest, in the year 1940, I split every Sturgeon tale down the middle and fetched out its innards to see what made it function. I looked upon Sturgeon with a secret and gnawing jealousy.”—Ray Bradbury

  “Theodore Sturgeon has made himself the finest conscious artist science fiction ever had.”—James Blish

  “I think the corpus of Sturgeon’s stories ranks with de Maupassant’s. I think it is superior to O. Henry’s, superior to Damon Runyon’s, superior to Ring Lardner’s, you know, the great short-story writers of … I think it is superior to Hemingway’s short stories (if you take the Hemingway novels, you may be into something else). I think one is dealing with a writer of that stature. To the extent that the short story is an art, Sturgeon is the American short story writer. The fact that he happens to be writing in science fiction is a glorious accident.”—Samuel R. Delany

  In pursuit of a hero.

  It was his daughter Tandy—the fourth of Ted’s seven children—who gave me the word for what kind of a hero Theodore Sturgeon is. She said she’s had this vision, since she was a small child, of “a society that works”—maybe a small village—not a conscious model, but something she’s picked up from dreams, or by osmosis. “A place I know as the society that should be. And the storyteller is central to that society. He—Homer—is the cement that holds society together. They need to go and listen to him. Now people don’t ask. They’ve forgotten, they don’t have time to listen. But they still need it. And they like him because he makes them want to listen.”

  Storyteller. That’s the word.

  Tandy’s vision reminds me of a Sturgeon story called “The Touch of Your Hand.” It takes place in a small village, and there’s a wise old man who the people go and listen to—but he’s a musician—but the story’s about an angry young man, who wants to take these sleepy villagers and teach them to struggle and hate, so that they can build cities and glorious machines and become real men … and about a beautiful young woman, who doesn’t understand, but who loves him and tries to help. Like most Sturgeon stories, it has powerful characters and some very surprising twists in the plot line. And the story, which manages to show at the same time much of what is ugliest and most beautiful about human beings, is also memorable for introducing one of Sturgeon’s most original and challenging ideas on the subject of how to improve human nature.

  The same idea in a somewhat different form crops up in a later story, “
The Skills of Xanadu.” (“Touch” is from 1953; “Xanadu” from 1956.) In both instances Sturgeon suggests that human beings, or creatures like them, will develop a form of telepathy within a social group (a village, a nation) which allows each person to automatically draw on the group’s collective reservoir of knowledge and acquired skills whenever he or she needs to know something. In other words, if you need to sew a buttonhole and you don’t know how, you just concentrate and the way to do it will come to you from someone who does know will come to your fingers, and you can just start to do it and feel how it should be and which motions are right.

  “We are telepathic, not in the way of conveying details, but in the much more useful way of conveying a manner of thinking.” (“The Touch of Your Hand.”) “He knew without question that he had the skills of this people, and that he could call on any of those skills just by concentrating an a task until it came to him how the right way (for him) would feel. He knew without surprise that these resources transcended even death; for a man could have a skill and then it was everyman’s, and if the man should die, his skill still lived in everyman.” (“The Skills of Xanadu.”)

  Above and to the left of the sink in Sturgeon’s kitchen is one of those crowded bulletin boards where odd items accumulate and stay in place for years. My eye was caught one night by a postcard bearing a line from Karl F. Gauss (German mathematician, 1777–1855), and I mentioned it, and Ted said it was one of his favorites, and from that time forward the quote has become a kind of touchstone in our conversations, we’ll just naturally arrive at it in the course of what we’re saying, look at each other, mumble some obeisance to “that line from Gauss,” and move on from there. We can almost hear the theme music in the background.…