I thought that would do it, and would get him off the hook. I thought anyone of even passing intelligence would understand and be content. I thought I was dealing with a rational human being. What I was dealing with, sadly, was a stone science fiction fan.
"Well, I still think you shouldn't have written it wrong," he said, and sat down heavily, to a tsunami of hisses and catcalls. Realizing I could do no better, I threw up my hands and went on with the evening's presentation.
Perhaps medium long was inaccurate, because all of the foregoing is merely backstory for the punchline of the anecdote.
I thought no more about that interchange, returned to Los Angeles, and was startled a week later when I received a most troubled phone call from the then-fiction editor of Omni. (I hasten to advise that the fiction editor at that time was, and remains, a superlative writer, as well as a friend of many years. It was not the current fiction editor, Ellen Datlow, who has been at her post with distinction for quite a few years. The editor of whom I speak knows I bear him illimitable affection, and we have laughed over this anecdote many times. It is not told to embarrass him, or to make him seem less worthy an editor than he proved himself. It just happens to be one of those dopey things we all do every once in a while, and I need it to make my point, so don't go looking for anything malicious, because it ain't there.)
Anyhow. He called, and he said, "Listen, we got a letter in the office the other day, from a guy who heard you read 'On the Slab' at NYU, and he's pointed out a lot of errors in the story, and we'd like you to rewrite them to take care of it."
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "You're putting me on!" I cried. "You mean to tell me that humorless dweeb wrote you a letter?!?!"
"Uh-huh."
"And you actually are taking it seriously, about a story that hasn't even been published yet, and you're asking me to honor the imbecile nitpicking of some yotz with a flat affect who may, for all I know, believe Bacon wrote Shakespeare's stuff, who may, for all I know, think Stephen Crane had no right to do a Civil War novel because he wasn't in the fight, who may, for all I know, interpret everything so literally that he wonders if the light goes out in the refrigerator when he closes the door? Is that what you're telling me?!"
My friend the editor fumfuh'd for a moment, and then said in a smaller voice, "Well, he said in the letter that it would embarrass us at Omni if readers thought we didn't know it was Prometheus's liver, and not his heart, that was eaten . . . "
"Send back the story!" I howled. "I'll return your fucking check! This is unconscionable! It's deranged! I'm going to kill you!"
Well, it worked out just fine. I calmed down after the fourth phone call—yes, we discussed this hot and cold and tepid for more than a week—because he refused to send back the story (demonstrating a lot more good sense than previously), and at one point I said something like, "Look, kiddo, myth and legend are plastic, they're fluid, they're malleable. They belong to whatever culture takes them up. And we, as Artists, are required to examine and retool not only myths and legends, but all variations of those myths, and all commentaries on those myths and legends and variations! It is our bloody job, fer crissakes!" And along about the fifth or sixth phone call he came on the line and said, with awe in his voice, "How did you manage to do that?"
"Do what?"
"Get that into the book."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"You telling me you haven't seen William Irwin Thompson's book, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light! Mythology, sexuality, and the origins of culture? Everybody's reading it; it's knocking people on their asses; it's the cutting edge of new thinking about mythology."
I had not, at that moment, even heard about the Thompson book though now, six years later, I must have given away at least a dozen copies to other writers. And if you haven't found it yet, run don't crawl.
"So what's all this about me being in the book, or whatever?"
"No, you geek," he said, happy to turn it all back to me, "it's what you said that's in the book."
"And what wisdom is that, may I ask?"
I heard him riffling pages. "Listen to this: it's from the prologue." And this is what he read to me:
The structural anthropologist urges us to ignore the orthodox who labor so patiently trying to eliminate the apocryphal variants from the one true text. The priests of the temple of Solomon worked to construct the canon of Biblical literature, and in this work the dubious folktales of the peasantry were dismissed, but for us a legend or midrash (a folktale variation on Biblical stories) may be a greater opening to the archetypal world than the overly refined reactions of the urban priestly intelligentsia.
(He stopped there, but the very next paragraph—page 11 of the St. Martin's Press hardcover edition—was even better:)
Once we are freed from the quest for the one true version of a myth, we are also freed from the concern for determining the exact provenance of the variant. How can one tell where a myth comes from? A midrash from the Middle Ages may go back as an oral tradition into the darkness of time. Where do children's rhymes come from? What ancient motif is simply reclothed in a modern story or a children's skip-rope song? Can one really claim that the date of the singing is the date of the song? . . . Libraries have been burnt and whole religious movements wiped out because their belief and myths have been considered to be of dubious origin by the upholders of orthodoxy; yet it is sometimes precisely the heretical myth that opens a doorway into the archetypal world . . . But there are other reasons why all the version of a myth must be considered . . .
. . . and he goes on brilliantly for another two hundred and sixty pages—including feetnotes but excluding index—to codify them reasons for my not having to rewrite "On the Slab" to satisfy the witless pecksniffery of a stone science fiction fan. But had 1 not worked my magicks and caused William Irwin Thompson to write that book overnight so that St. Martin's Press could print it the next day and get it into the editor's paws by the following afternoon, I'd have had to return a check I'd long-since cashed and turned into groceries.
End of anecdote the second.
I approach the subject of this dissertation which is, in truth, a film review, as well as a discussion of one of the truly Forbidden Topics one does not broach with those who read magazines such as this one.
I won't keep you in suspense any longer. The thread that links my opening anecdotes is an obvious one: the prime mover in each is a person demonstrating boorishness posturing as wit. Narrowness of vision coupled with a literal-mindedness that is insensitive to a jocular interpretation. Both are so concretized in egocentrism that they have been walled off from recognition of the truth that insufficient knowledge has turned them into a parodic absurdity. They come to this unfortunate state, I submit, because they are devoid of true wit. And that, I further submit, as the core of my argument, is a widespread condition among science fiction readers and fans.
(Before I go on, let me state for the record that this is not a universal flaw in sf readers and fans. I speak here not of all, but of most.) If you take instant umbrage at this essay, consider for a moment that those who do not credit this absence in their own makeup will not be bothered. They will chuckle and murmur, "How true, how true." But those who twitch may well perceive a node of familiarity, and will rush to accuse the messenger of garbling the communique; for them, the self-examination may founder on guilt (however mild) and the potential revelation of this Forbidden Topic will be obscured by subconscious self-serving. For every Sidney Coleman and Mike Glyer, every Lee Hoffman and Mick Glicksohn, there are a hundred Marley E. Bechtels and Jacopo Madaros, two hundred Gerald B. Storrows and George Sokols.
The former group are well-known and unarguably funny men and a woman who also happen to be sf readers and fans; the latter group are sf readers who are, in my view, at one with the largish young man from the NYU audience. It is not important for our purposes here that you know the former group, or what it is they have said and written over the years
that marks them as witty. They are offered as palliatives for those who will forget that I carefully said most, not all.
But the latter group are paradigms I need to press my premise that most readers of science fiction, and most fans, are devoid of true wit. So here is the litany of unbreathing metal that passes for sensibility in these (otherwise probably wonderful) stone science fiction fans.
• In a clearly antic short story I wrote that appeared in Asimov's in December 1986, a fantasy titled "Laugh Track," the protagonist, a man given to first person recollections presented much in the manner of Damon Runyon, muses about his employment with a despicable tv producer named Bill Tidy. I wrote:
Each of us has one dark eminence in his or her life who somehow has the hoodoo sign on us. Persons so cosmically loathsome that we continually spend our time when in their company silently asking ourselves What the hell, what the bloody hell, what the everlasting Technicolor hell am I doing sitting here with this ambulatory piece of offal? This is the worst person who ever got born, and someone ought to wash out his life with a bar of Fels-Naptha.
But there you sit, and the next time you blink, there you sit again. It was probably the way Catherine the Great felt on, her dates with Rasputin.
Bill Tidy had that hold over me.
In the September 1987 issue of Asimov's, Marley E. Bechtel of Kenmore, N Y had a letter published. The salient sections for our interest here are these:
"Dear Dr. Asimov:
"In the mid-December issue, there seem to be at least a couple of mistakes that should have been caught in the editing. First, in 'Neptune's Reach,' we are told . . . "
[And Bechtel goes on at some length to fault the story's author on what may well have been a valid technical point. Bechtel then gets to the second dire "mistake":]
"In Harlan Ellison's 'Laugh Track,' he comments that 'It was probably the way Catherine the Great felt on her dates with Rasputin.' How could they have dated, as she died in 1796 and he was not born until around 1871?"
To which one should properly respond, in the original Prometheus legend the line read "It was probably the way Fay Wray felt on her dates with King Kong."
Literalmindedness, pecksniffery, sententiousness; the egocentrism of needing to demonstrate a humorless familiarity with data that contravenes the purpose of an attempt at wit. The mark of the cloven hoof of the stone sf fan.
• In a recent installment of this column, I eased into a seminal discussion of Woody Allen as a consummate director of fantasy—an obviousness that seemed to me to have escaped the notice of most critics—with a completely hoked-up bit of tomfoolery that had me and Allen in a bathyscaphe at the bottom of the Cayman Trench, eating hot fudge sundaes. As almost everyone was aware, Woody had received both the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1974 for Sleeper, but in my thesis that sf aficionados had overlooked much more significant fantasywork by Allen, I employed the literary contrivances known as absurdity, engrossment, farce and sarcasm, which included Allen's inquiring if he had never been awarded a Hugo (clearly untrue) because he was Jewish. I then cited as refutation the fact that I, as a Jew, had been so honored, as well as Silverberg and Asimov and others, and included in the list of prominent Jews who owned Hugos the well-known Mormon, Orson Scott Card. If those lunacies had not tipped off any but the dullest intellects that this was a bit of vaudeville, surely having Woody Allen get the bends as we surfaced in our bathyscaphe should have.
Yet the editors of this magazine (and I personally) received about a dozen letters protesting the content of that essay, all of them reading that crazy stuff as absolutely true!
A Gerald B. Storrow wrote, in part: " . . . are we to gather that Ellison considers it a worthwhile use of your pages to seriously ask [sic] ourselves if there is truly anti-Semitism in Hollywood?" Apart from splitting the infinitive, Mr. Storrow went on at some length seriously accusing me of "name-dropping" because I used Woody Allen's name. (How he expected me to talk about Allen without using his name is a manifestation of paralogia that amazes even one as jaded in these matters as I.)
When I made the error of responding to Mr. Storrow's letter, I wrote: "I have long said that readers and fans of science fiction are as devoid of wit as cardboard; and sadly, sadly, my theory keeps reproving itself.
"A sense of humor isn't what counts. Everyone has some sort of rudimentary sense of humor. Hell, lizards, puppies and potato bugs have a sense of humor. It is wit that is in such short supply. And nowhere more tragically than among those who preen and strut with false pride that they are Slans, drenched in the ability to 'understand' science fiction."
I then pointed out all the glaring tip-offs that the essay had been written in an antic manner, suggesting that he might not really be as perceptive as his insulting letter contended. And I concluded as follows: "Yet this condition of yours does trouble me. While I'm not licensed to practice medicine, I would suggest a double-dose daily of James Thurber, Peter De Vries, Will Cuppy, Max Shulman, S. J. Perelman, Dave Barry and Daniel Manus Pinkwater. Stay away from fried foods and Henry James."
(Courtesy with the humorless, however, is a mugg's game, and it became obvious when this attempt to uncloud Mr. Storrow's mind produced further egregiously crabby letters, that the gentleman merely craved attention. This will be the last of that, you may be sure.)
• George Sokol of Montreal sent a letter alternately praising and vilifying me, to what end I'm not sure even after rereading the letter several times. But the gist of it (though he obviously understood the bathyscaphelbends business was a put-on) was this: "Why . . . why would you want to include that ghastly bit about Mr. Allen getting the bends (oh, Godly ghosts, that awful desease [sic] dreaded by all bathyscaphers!)?
"The very purpose of the bathyscaphe was so that the need for gradual decompression could be eliminated, thus eliminating the risk of getting the bends. The bathyscaphe is a pressurized, navigable underwater ship, or vehicle! Please, I would think you would know that whenever a writer is being cute while writing, he should try and be as sincere and real as possible, and not just pile on the 'style' for style's sake."
Well, Mr. Sokol is certainly being sincere and real, and in his sincerity and realoidness he reaffirms the thesis of this discussion. And he's one of the good guys who seems to be enjoying the columns! So I hope he'll believe I'm sincere and real when I tell him though I'm bewildered by the s&r of his letter, and consider him a nice fella for not being mean to me in his communique, I will raise this matter of liver versus bends, and eagle versus bathyscaphe on my next date with either Fay Wray or Catherine the Great, whoever comes first.
• And finally, we come to Jacopo M. Madaro of East Boston who took the following offhand drollery from my July column as matter for umbrage . . . I wrote:
The potty is the last private place for a reader in the world. No one bothers you. Unless you live in a large Italian family, which is another sociological can of worms entirely.
Jacopo responded to my larking as follows: "It just happens that I am both Italian (a bona fide alien) and a sociologist. I am not aware of any sociological taxonomy based upon national or ethnic 'cans of worms.' Therefore, I have to conclude that your statement is well worthy its excretory context. Cordially yours, worms notwithstanding, Jacopo M. Madaro."
You think you get weird mail!?!
(Pause. I had not, in fact, planned for the preamble to my thesis and review to go on at this length. Honest. But once I got into it, the floodgates opened. And during the days through which I have been writing this, I have had occasion to read the preceding sections to a fairly large number of professionals in the sf field. Just to make sure that what I was saying here was not merely a product of my meanspirited nature. Was I bumrapping fans without cause? Does anyone else feel as I do about this subject, that fans in the main are a humorless bunch who could drive you crazy if you try to write funnystuff? So I called F——, and I called M—-, and I called W——-, and I called A—-long distance, and a couple o
f others, and everyone of them whooped and laughed and said, "True! How true! Oh, yeah, ain't that true!" And then they told me their proofs of the thesis, and then they egged me on to sic'm, to write it all, and then they made me promise I wouldn't use their names because if anyone was going to get killed for this, as much as they loved me, they'd rather it was I, not them. So okay, B & N & D & D, I won't used your names, you buncha pork scraps, you! And I make this pause, and tell you all this, because each of the above initials said I had to include my reply to Dr. Jacopo M. Madaro, which I hadn't intended to do because it was what he wrote that counts, not what I replied. But since they all made such a who-struck-John about it, I've decided to include the response here; but I feel I am trying your patience with these many side-channels to the main stream, and I want to spare those of you who grow weary. So. My letter of response to Dr. Madaro follows. It will be set in smaller type so you can identify where it starts and ends. If you wish to skip it, feel free. If not, read on.)
Harlan Ellison's Watching Page 48
