Case and the Dreamer

by Theodore Sturgeon

Tandy was born in 1954, and Noël (Ted and Marion’s second daughter, and Ted’s fourth) in 1956. In 1957 Ted decided it was time to leave Congers, and he and the family moved to a house in Truro, Massachusetts, near the tip of Cape Cod. (He became friends with Kurt Vonnegut at this time; and later Vonnegut used him as a partial model for his character Kilgore Trout.)

  Ted finally wrote The Cosmic Rape that year on the Cape, along with several short stories, one of which, “The Comedian’s Children,” about a manipulative TV personality, was another impossible triumph—that story tore me into little pieces when I was twelve years old, and it remains one of the most powerful pieces of fiction I’ve ever read.

  But the Cape was cold and lonely, and the Sturgeon family decided they could live cheaper and happier in the West Indies. Ted’s mother was teaching on St. Vincent, and she found them a place on the island of Bequi. They arrived—three kids, possessions, etc.—and the house was too small, noisy, no privacy … so they began months of island-hopping, searching for a home. They ended up on Grenada. Ted had no place to write during all this, but he kept trying. He was working on a story called “The Man Who Lost the Sea.”

  At the end of 1958, he finished the story. It was the only thing he’d written all year. The money was long gone, patience was gone, the romantic dream of living in the West Indies was gone. Ted’s agent sent back the story, saying he couldn’t understand it. Eventually it sold to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, but by that time the Sturgeons were back in Congers, at Marion’s mother’s house, trying to sort things out, looking for a place to settle down. Ted had finally done it: spent an entire year working on one twelve-page story. Wrecked by the tropics again.

  (It was a beautiful story, and Martha Foley later selected it for her Best Short Stories of the Year anthology. But it didn’t pay the rent, even in Grenada.) The years of high productivity had come to an end.

  There were more great works to come, of course—two superb novels (Venus Plus X, 1960, about a world where the two sexes have merged into one; and Some of Your Blood, 1961, a fictionalized case history of an authentic vampire, due someday I think to come into its own as one of the finer short novels of the century) and a handful of major stories (“Need,” “Tandy’s Story,” “When You Care, When You Love,” “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Want One to Marry Your Sister?” and “Slow Sculpture”) spread out over the next ten years. But the floodgates weren’t open anymore; instead we have the occasional burst of genius slipping through. There was a minor breakthrough in 1969–1970, after Sturgeon’s marriage to his fourth wife, Wina, which resulted in the Hugo and Nebula awards winner “Slow Sculpture,” plus several other stories I liked, and several I didn’t like, and a beautiful but unfinished (and unpublished) novel called Godbody. Still, looking at the total picture, it seems fair to say that Sturgeon’s desire not-to-write has been pretty solidly in control for the last fifteen years or more.

  The question everybody asks, of course, is will his genius break free again, will there be more great stories from Theodore Sturgeon?

  I’m here to tell you I’ve studied this matter very carefully, and I think it makes no difference. Don’t worry about it. Everything’s all right.

  VIII

  “They didn’t sing? Oh, you’ve got to hear them sing together.…”—Theodore Sturgeon, talking to me on the phone, 1976

  My search for the man who wrote those stories has taken me many places—but never have I felt closer to the mystery than I did one very cold, exciting evening, after a blizzard, last February 2nd, in a small two-room apartment in the middle of Woodstock, New York.

  Robin Sturgeon (age 24) works in a paint store Tuesday through Saturday, and plays (guitar) in Jerry Moore’s band on weekends. So Monday was the day for me to see him, and it didn’t matter that the Monday I chose it was snowing, with winds so wild they closed the New York Thruway.… I just waited in the Port Authority terminal from six in the morning ’til three in the afternoon and when I finally got off the bus that evening into the zero-degree weather and friendly stillness of a small town after a storm, well, I felt very pleased to be there.

  I found Robin’s apartment after a minute or two—he greeted me warmly, made a pot of coffee and a telephone call—and we started talking. A few minutes later the others arrived: Tandy (then a senior at college, a poet), Noël (a freshman at the same college, a would-be law student) and Timothy (still in high school, a hiker and mountain climber). I hadn’t expected to meet all four of Ted and Marion’s children—and I wouldn’t have, except for that blizzard. A lucky break. The next three and a half hours of excited conversation and collective attention—focusing conjured up the real Theodore Sturgeon more clearly and solidly than if he’d been sitting in the room.

  (We were in Woodstock because that’s where Ted and Marion finally settled, in 1959; and when Ted left and moved to California in 1966, the children stayed with Marion. Now Robin has his own apartment, and the two girls are off at college; but Woodstock is “home.”)

  Early in this article I mentioned that Theodore Sturgeon and I have been “friends of a sort” for two or three years now; and now I have to explain why I chose those words. It’s because of something Ted said to me several times (he never says anything just once), notably last December.

  “You ask me who to speak to; well, Wina makes the point that I don’t have any friends. I know lots and lots of people, and lots of people know me—lots of people feel they are my friends, and although I welcome them, when I see them, I still don’t feel … I don’t seek anyone out. When people come to me, that’s fine. But I really don’t reach out to anybody.”

  Ted is a slippery person. People who know him casually are dazzled by him, because he seems so interested in them, so caring. People who know him or have known him well invariably express strong feelings of resentment mixed in with whatever else they feel towards him—basically, I think, because they feel rejected, he doesn’t seem to care about them anymore, and it hurts. The only exceptions, the only people I talked to who did not radiate powerfully mixed feelings about Ted, were his children. Because they are the only people I talked to who do not feel separated from him.

  And that isn’t because they’re flesh of his flesh (we all know that the separation and resentment between parents and children can be awesome). No, I think it’s because they’re the only people who have accepted Theodore Sturgeon on his own terms. They’re hardly unaware of his weaknesses—but, collectively at least, they accept them; they’re capable of seeing things his way.

  That evening in Robin’s apartment I began to comprehend what had been staring me in the face all along: that Sturgeon’s different way of seeing things is the key to all his problems and miracles. He’s aware of this difference, proud of it, eager to share it with the rest of us (there’s an evangelistic or “world-saving” current that runs through a lot of his writing)—but he’s also ashamed of his gift, because he learned very early that the world doesn’t like people who are different. And so he’s been trying all his life to convince himself that he’s really just like everybody else.

  Praise him for his talent, and he’ll be pleased, on the surface; but deep inside, you’ve reopened an ancient wound.

  So he does things backwards, partly because he sees things backwards, and inside out, and partly because he has to protect himself from a world where pleasure is pain. He writes because his stories bring him acceptance, and attention, and love, and like most of us he wants these things. But like many of us, he also fears these things, and so in his skillful and perverse way he tries not to write. And the result of these two contrary streams eddying and flowing against each other is something rich and strange.

  The next day (after the blizzard), I talked with Marion, and she gave me a new perspective on Ted and his procrastination. We were talking about how maybe he would have been happier if he hadn’t had the talent to write, and had spent his life doing something else, like fixing toys, instead. But then it occurred to Mari
on that it was the same thing with the toys—he loved to fix the children’s toys, and he did a beautiful job of it, but over the years his office became filled with boxes and boxes of broken toys waiting to be fixed. You could go in and pick up a fire engine covered with dust and he’d tell you to put it down because he was just about to get around to it. And he believed it. “It has something to do with time in some way,” Marion said. “It’s as though everything is always in the present.”

  That’s it. The children grow up and don’t need their toys anymore, but Ted is living—not in the past, but in an eternal present, where a moment ago this toy was brought to him, and in another moment, just as soon as he takes care of one or two other things, he’s going to fix it better than new.

  What is special about this man is that he cares so much about the people and things that exist inside his moment. If you’re not in front of him right now, you’re out of his mind completely; but the world that is before his eyes excites him, delights him, astounds him, always—he has a sense of wonder about everything he sees that is childlike but all the more intense because it’s coming from an adult. He radiates enthusiasm, and as perhaps you can imagine, he was a very wonderful father to his children.

  And as you can also imagine, he is one of the world’s worst businessmen; and he doesn’t know it and won’t admit it and he’ll be furious with me for writing this sentence. He still feels his manhood is on the line here. Contracts go unsigned, letters go unwritten, he has this master plan that he does little to implement but meanwhile he tries to prevent his books from being reissued so they won’t interfere with the plan. He relishes the dream of having all his work available in a uniform edition. But deep inside him, I have to believe, there’s something that feels much safer knowing people can’t read what he’s written.

  I’m impatient, obviously, with Ted and his eternal present. But it’s him. It’s his curse and the source of all his pain; but it’s also his gift, the source of all his pride and accomplishment.

  This is where Sturgeon’s miracles come from: they come from his ability to take the ordinary world and see it from a different point of view, stand it on its head and make it fascinating without taking away its palpable reality. They come from the empathy he feels for all people who have a different way of seeing things, and his ability to heighten the reader’s empathy to an astonishing degree, until we are forced to agree with the Roman playwright Terence: “I am a man: nothing human is alien to me.”

  Most of all, his stories come from his ability to care about the people in front of him—that is, the characters in whatever story he happens to be working on. When he writes, he lives in the eternal present of those people and that place and time. And when he solves the central problem of the story, or rather when the characters he has created solve it for him, the sensation for the reader is overwhelming, because Sturgeon has in fact solved all the problems of the world at that moment. He gives himself entirely to each real story he writes, and when he arrives at his solution, the reader, who has also given himself to the story, experiences a moment of overriding intensity and liberation—regardless of whether the resolution of the story is horrifying or beautiful (it’s usually a little of both).

  And that’s the other thing. There is someone else, other than Ted’s children, who accepts Sturgeon completely on his own terms, and that’s the person who is reading a Sturgeon story. The essence of reading fiction is, as Coleridge suggested, “a willing suspension of disbelief.” We are seduced; we give ourselves to the storyteller. We see things his way. And if his way of seeing things is truly different, and truly uplifting, then we experience something greater than ourselves each time we listen to his stories.

  “I was embarrassed as a kid—he had this beard and everything—I wanted him to be straight and drive a fire truck. Later I realized I got much more than most kids did: a sense of wonder, and the courage to use it.”—Robin Sturgeon

  IX

  Theodore Sturgeon, best living American short story writer, was also the first person in the history of the Philadelphia school system to do a back flyaway dismount. But he worked so hard to prove himself as a flyer, an athlete, that he disabled himself (or you could say he was struck down by the gods, if that’s how you want to look at it). He has a history of trying too hard.

  Theodore Sturgeon is a success. He has more great stories in him, and he may or may not get around to writing them sometime in the next few decades. But it doesn’t matter. The man is capable of stretching out a day’s postponement into a twenty-year sidetrack, or of compressing a lifetime into six hours of writing. We need not concern ourselves with trying to determine exactly where on his immeasurable time scale he happens to be right now. What’s important to us, his readers, is that he’s already written more heart-shaking, earth-changing great short stories than most of us will ever have time to read.

  And even if he has completed this stage of his career—which I doubt—what of it? What has he got to prove? Is it a tragedy not to be able to do back flyaway dismounts forever?

  The best thing the public can do for a writer is leave him alone. In which case, you ask, why have I written this essay? I didn’t do it to call attention to the writer. I did it to call attention to the stories.

  Our heroes have to have feet of clay, not so we can bring them down to our level but so we can rise to theirs. We have to become our own heroes; and if it’s true that these stories, “Bright Segment” and More than Human and “The Comedian’s Children” and all the rest of them, were written by a human being, then I think there’s hope for all of us.

  Meanwhile, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, Andros Sturgeon (age 6) has brought his father a toy to be fixed; and sometime before he goes to sleep tonight, Ted’s going to feed the rabbits.

  Story Notes

  Noël Sturgeon

  The stories in this last volume of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon were written between 1973 and 1983, with the exception of “Tuesdays are Worse,” published in 1960. In 1973, Sturgeon was living in Los Angeles with his then-partner, Wina Sturgeon, and their son, Andros. The relationship was rocky, however, and Sturgeon left the house and began living in a one-room basement apartment on Vendome Street in the Silverlake District of Los Angeles. Throughout his writing career, Sturgeon preferred small, crowded and often, underground spaces in which to write, but the Vendome basement apartment was the epitome of the cave-like spaces he loved. Part of its address was the designation 1/4, indicating its size, and it had a hobbit-like door only one-half the size of a normal door. The apartment especially delighted Sturgeon, and he kept it as an office for many years after he ceased living there full-time. During this period, he was still trying to find work as a screenwriter, and to sell his own work to filmmakers. More Than Human (1953) was optioned by different parties, including Orson Welles, from the early 1970s until about 2000, but a film has not been made to date. In 1974, a French film was made of Sturgeon’s short story, “Bright Segment,” (Volume 8) directed by Christian Chalonge. Parcelles Brilliante aired that year on the French TV series Histoires Insolites, and the film was often used by Sturgeon in his writing classes.

  In 1975, he won the Inkpot Award from the San Diego Comic Convention, in recognition of the influence of his story, “It,” on comic-book creations such as The Swamp Thing. In 1977, he won an Outstanding Achievement Award from the International Society of Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy for the Star Trek screenplay, “Amok Time” (one of three Star Trek screenplays he wrote. “Shore Leave” aired on 12/29/66 and “Amok Time” on 9/15/67; this latter episode is famous for giving Spock a sex life and inventing the “Live long and prosper” Vulcan greeting. “The Joy Machine” was never aired but was later expanded by James Gunn and published as a book.)

  From 1969 onwards, Sturgeon had begun to publish both stories and book reviews in a market new for him: “men’s” magazines (Knight, Adam, Chic, Hustler, and Penthouse). Sturgeon had frequently expressed frustration that straitlaced r
ules in publishing prevented him from writing explicitly about sex; now he had that freedom. Since the early 1960s, he had been writing a novel, Godbody, which told a tale of a Jesus-like figure who saw sex as a combination of love and worship. It contained several explicit sex scenes, and he felt unable to publish it (or indeed finish it) as a result. In the middle 1970s, he began working again on the novel, and it was published posthumously in 1986 (despite a persistent rumor, the posthumous work was not rewritten by Robert Heinlein; however, the similarities between Godbody and Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land are noticeable, and not too surprising given that the writing of both stems from the early 1960s). Whether or not this new freedom to write explicitly about sex produced better work is for the reader to judge; several stories written for this market can be found in this volume.

  Around 1975, after his relationship with Wina ended, Sturgeon met Jayne Tannehill Englehart, a teacher and aspiring writer, at a science-fiction convention. As they became partners and began living together, Jayne changed her last name to Sturgeon; to others, Ted always called her “Lady Jayne.” Jayne’s exceptional organizing talents and financial know-how were of crucial assistance to Sturgeon in overcoming crushing accumulated debt, disarray in his business affairs, and unmet obligations to his Woodstock and Los Angeles families. His inability to manage his business affairs effectively had been a longstanding frustration for him; while contemporaries such as Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury became relatively wealthy, Sturgeon had always struggled financially. In 1977, in a letter to his lawyer; his domestic, film and international agents; a new business manager; and Paul Williams (who managed his copyrights), he says:

  I want to be a writer who writes. The purpose of this letter is to bring this about. A year or so I had a blinding insight, brought about by a radio commercial (Brentwood Savings, to give credit where it is due) which contained the line: Fifty-one percent of smart is knowing what you are dumb at. Now, I have lots of documentation that I am real smart, from a shelf full of trophies to listings in Who’s Who and the Hall of Fame, and because of that I have always been certain that I could do anything—once I put my mind to it. Time enough to look at that tax stuff come April 13. Pay that traffic ticket “later.” Things like that. And, insidiously, over the years, I have achieved a towering triumph of mismanagement, and find myself, and my irreplaceable time, concerned with matters I am dumb at, instead of writing. I am now ready to concede and confess this, and to surround myself with the people who, in my most carefully considered judgment, are the best in the world at what they do, to the end that I may become simply and solely a writer-who-writes, while we all benefit.… I cannot close without a mention of my Lady Jayne. Wina and I came to the parting of the ways a year ago last April. In July I met Jayne, and I feel altogether confident in asserting that I have at last found what I have been looking for since I was born—no less than that. Although I refuse to make her my secretary, I will say that she has a solid grasp on reality and reality’s priorities, and will see to it in every way humanly possible that I take care of things in the proper order. She understands taxes and trust funds, investments and banking. And me. I have never been happier in my life, nor had more to work for.