The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

by Harlan Ellison

  A year later, when it was in paperback, a friend called me and said, “Hey, did you know there’s a character in this cheap sex novel, THE MOVIE MAKER, who’s a dead ringer for you? Do you know a guy named Herbert Kastle?”

  I sat down and read THE MOVIE MAKER.

  Yes. Herb Kastle had taken me as the model for Lars Wyllit, the driven, feisty, cunning, moderately talented sexual profligate with hangups about his height. As I’ve said in this column many times, none of us cares to cop to our true face.

  Eichmann never thought of himself as a human monster, merely as a man doing his job. Capone never sat beside a swimming pool in Miami Beach, his brain rotting away from tertiary syphilis, saying to himself, “I’m a gangster.” He surely thought of himself as a businessman. I’ve never known a hooker who thought of herself as anything different from a clerk in a Woolworth’s. The image of me that had been filtered through Herb’s mind struck me as being too blatant, too shallow, too easily dismissed, too cartoony, really to touch anywhere near the complex wonderfulness that I knew was my real self. (He said, humbly.)

  Even so, Lars Wyllit was the only character in the book for whom the author showed any genuine love or caring. Cheap as that little fucker was, Lars Wyllit comes off well in the novel. A lot better than the Herb Kastle surrogate, the ostensible hero of the novel, Charley Halpert, in whom Kastle displays a sort of pity and hopeless nobility.

  I called Herb in New York, we talked, he asked if I was pissed-off at the way he’d portrayed me, I said no, he was more than entitled to write it any way he saw it…and we promised to get together when next he came West.

  Some time later, he did, and we got together at MGM where I was working. At that time, Herb talked about having done the Geis novel, and I ventured the opinion that it was not a particularly healthy book, from the outlook of a writer’s self-analysis. It was a book of self-loathing. Herb didn’t talk about that too much.

  But the money was rolling in, the book had freed him of the rigors of his past and his unsuccessful marriage, and he was now in the process of reaching maturity; adjusting to a lifestyle that included fame, money and women. Lots of women. In a strange sort of way, I think I now see, Herb Kastle had come relatively late to success, and he was trying to live the life he thought I lived. In some ways he had perceived correctly about me, for I, too, have always been cannibalistically hungry for serious recognition, but he had overlooked a core truth. I had always been poor and driven, he had had critical acclaim and middle-class comfort; when I began to “make it,” it came slowly, in gradual stages, like taking immunization shots of rattlesnake venom so when the big bite came, I sickened, but did not die. Herb, on the other hand, was trembling with the venom from a massive overdose all at once.

  On the inside cover of my Bantam paperback copy of CAMERA, he wrote this, in 1969: “Harlan: Here are a few beasts who cried sex at the heart of love. You could say this novel was the first step away from KOPTIC COURT toward MOVIE MAKER & the three Bernard Geis novels that will follow. Wonder if I’ll ever turn back again. Best wishes, Herb Kastle.”

  It was a turn away from the heart of love about which Herb Kastle had written so feelingly. THE MOVIE MAKER had a raw and bloody fascination, but it was a book of self-hate and the horror of self-discovery. I could only hope Herb would find his way out of the swamp.

  We didn’t see each other again for some years. His next novel, MIAMI GOLDEN BOY, was published with the same hoopla as THE MOVIE MAKER and, the wheel turns, the wheel turns, it came my way as a review assignment for the Los Angeles Times Book Review section. I read the book, and thought it was rather undistinguished, the sort of thing one comes to expect from Bernard Geis sexploitation writers, hardly the gleaming jewel Herb Kastle had proffered in years past. I reviewed it honestly, but not harshly. I did a full takeout on “schlock” novelists, rating them from the best of the species—with Herb, James Michener and David Slavitt (Henry Sutton) at the top, down through Irving Wallace, Herman Wouk, Leon Uris, Harold Robbins and others in the mid-rank to “troglodytes” like Jacqueline Susann and Taylor Caldwell in the sub-cellar—and apparently, again without meaning to do it, I influenced Herb’s life because the review caused MIAMI GOLDEN BOY to sell better in Los Angeles than anywhere else in the nation. Pickwick could not keep it in stock.

  And Herb read the review. He read it and he heard the tone of sadness for the Kastle-who-had-been.

  We talked of it on several occasions. And he told me MILLIONAIRES, the third of the big-money books he’d “gone into business” to write so he could break free of his old life, was a better book. He hoped I’d like it.

  I did. It was strong, determined, honest, and yet held all the commercial elements that mean big paperback reprint sales, movie deals, attraction for the under-the-hair-dryer set.

  He had taken a direction with his talent he knew was dangerous, but apparently he had come back from the edge at the final tick of midnight. Herb Kastle has always seemed to me a writer who possessed that rare inner vision to know truly what he’s writing, how good or bad it is, what its worth to posterity and to his own self-esteem is, and to thank god not even the $100,000 rolls in the hay of success could take that from him.

  Now it’s 1973, and Herb lives out here. He’s writing movies, he’s living in a beautiful home, he has the lifestyle his adolescence demanded and his maturity finds supportable. He went into and came out on the other side of a mutually destructive love affair with a woman who forms the model for Ellie in the new novel. He wrote the book with ferocity and the need for purification of system one gets from a sauna bath, and it reads with the drive and fire of a man who has glimpsed a personal hell and decided not to burn.

  But he walks in here and tells me I’m the one who brought him to this place, at this time; and I shudder to think he genuinely believes it.

  I am not his god, or his mentor, or his stalking horse. I did whatever was done without even thinking of the life and soul of Herb Kastle. And that’s the bottom line about elevating mere mortals to godhood: gods are as liable to hurt as help, and because they do not understand the enormity of their power, they make no distinctions between the two.

  And so, even as Herb wrote ELLIE as an open letter to be read by that one woman, as I wrote last week’s column on friendship for that one friend to read, so I write these words about the folly of ever letting oneself be totemized by one’s friends or fans or acquaintances. And I tell you to your face, Herbert D. Kastle, I reject the office. Keep it for yourself.

  And since I’ve run out of space this week, I’ll resume the chronicle of godhood, and about how I made the mistake Herb made in worshipping another human being, the week after next. Next week I want to talk about the animated film festival at the L.A. County Museum of Art, since it opens next week and if I wait it’ll be dated. But come back for some light chatter next week, and the week after that I’ll tell you how my personal god shoved a flaming stick up my ass.

  INSTALLMENT 23 | 19 APRIL 73

  BLESS THAT PESKY WABBIT

  Sitting in a screening room at the L.A. County Museum of Art several weeks ago, I had this swell time. I’m out on the road as I write this, explaining the ethical structure of the universe to college students from Wisconsin to Hanover, New Hampshire—students who couldn’t give a shit—and since I don’t even understand how to operate my ten-speed, you can imagine how perceptive and pithy are my observations about the universe—so the students are absolutely correct in their apathy—and my thoughts keep pulling back to that darkened screening room and the swell time I had, so I’ll tell you about it, in hopes you’ll go to the Museum and have a swell time yourself. Watching cartoons.

  Perhaps, for a fantasist, which I like to call myself, the Eighth International Tournée of Animation at the Museum (13 April—5 May) transcends the massmind definitions of animated film: escapist entertainment for children and the bored. Perhaps I’m a fantasist today because of the cartoons I saw when I was a child. Perhaps neither is strictly true,
only partially…and the real truth is that as an observer of the film medium I adore the animateds because they seem to me the products of delightfully fevered brains, that they display a much freer sense of imagination than movies as a whole, that they are a kind of adytum of the mind’s secret lusts and peculiarities, that at core the basic nature of comic art is to inform a special deranged rigadoon of Freudian/Jungian catharsis. Or perhaps it’s just that I love cartoons a whole lot.

  The nice thing about animated films is that even if they’re esoteric images laid end-to-end, you don’t have to worry about understanding what’s happening, the way you do with live-action films, because you are permitted by history to dig them solely as cartoons. Thus, the intellectual pressures are removed; Sisyphus can, for once, not only let the boulder roll assoverteakettle down the hill, but can lounge around chucking pebbles after it.

  Something occurs to me. Before I get into the lovely specifics of the Tournée (as run for me in extract by Ron Haver of the Museum), I’d like to pounce back on that offhand remark about who I am today being at least partially (but probably significantly) as a result of cartoons. And therein, to find a “meaningful” reason why you should scamper like a roadrunner to the Museum to catch the festival of animation.

  I’ve written about it elsewhere, in stories and essays and suchlike, but never really in this column…but my childhood was singularly fucked. (Which should come as no surprise to those who view me today as singularly fucked.)

  We lived in Painesville, Ohio, a dreadful little hamlet thirty miles northeast of Cleveland, my Mother, my Father, my sister Beverly and myself. I was always alone. (Beverly, with whom I no longer have even minimal human congress, is eight years older than I and represents virtually everything in this life I find detestable in human beings. She married and went away from Painesville pretty quickly, so much of my childhood was spent without even her shrike presence in my Weltansicht.)

  There were very few Jews in Painesville. For the initial, formative years of my youth at Lathrop Grade School there were no other Jewish kids my age. It made a helluva difference in the way I grew up; one wouldn’t expect it, necessarily, but anti-Semitism was an ingrained attitude in Ohio in those days, the Forties. Kids really believed what their parents told them: that Kikes Killed Gentile Babies and ground them up to make matzohs for Passover. (Not true.) (Or if we do, we always remove the U.S. Keds before cooking them.) So the kids were ruthless to me. Utterly bestial. Of course, I didn’t help engender much affection in them, I was a snotty punk of a kid who thought he was infinitely brighter than even the best of them. (True.) (With or without U.S. Keds.)

  So I had no friends: was always alone. And when they got around me, they liked nothing better than to beat the shit out of me. Some time in this column I’ll go into the specifics of all that, and I’ll tell you about Kenny Rogat and Jack Wheeldon and my friend Tony Brown and Leon Miller and the birthday party no one came to, and the big pond down behind the Colony Lumber Company, and the nature of revenge…don’t forget to remind me to tell you about that one day real soon.

  But anyhow, I had no friends. Not for the first six or seven years in Painesville, till other Jewish families either moved in or began copping to their Semitic origins. So I was alone. In a world that I felt hated me, that held nothing but animosity for me. Add to that loneliness the random factors that I was a very tiny kid, a Munchkin really, that I was already reading the classics and AN INTRODUCTION TO GENERAL SEMANTICS by Lord Alfred Korzybski (introduction by S. I. Hayakawa) while the rest of my classmates were heavy into LAD: A DOG and STAR THIRD BASEMAN by John R. Tunis, and you can easily perceive that I had need to find a better world into which I could flee.

  The world I made for myself was bounded on all four sides by fantasy. On the North, it was old-time radio programs—Jack Armstrong; The Shadow; Lux Presents Hollywood; Quiet, Please; Fred Allen; Land of the Lost—on the South it was pulp magazines—G-8 and His Battle Aces; The Avenger; Doc Savage; Blue Book; Argosy; Startling Stories—on the East by comic books—Airboy; Plastic Man; The Spectre; Hawkman; The Pie-Face Prince of Pretzleburg; Capt. Marvel—and on the West by movies—Val Lewton’s terror films; Wild Bill Elliott as Red Ryder with Robert Blake as Little Beaver; Laird Cregar as The Lodger; William Eythe and Veda Ann Borg and June Preisser and Don “Red” Barry and Lash La Rue…that whole crowd.

  And very particularly, the cartoons.

  No week was complete without a Saturday afternoon matinee marathon of two “B” features, a singalong, a newsreel (“the eyes and ears of the world”), an Edgar Kennedy or Pete Smith specialty, maybe a James Fitzpatrick Travel Talk and…six cartoons. Popcorn, a Sugar Daddy and a Tootsie Roll the size of a massage parlor cordless vibrator (not the shriveled weenie they offer for 25¢ today, mere adumbration of the glories of old)…those were my staples through the wondrous worlds populated by Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, Yosemite Sam, Daffy Duck (who was my particular favorite) and an endless pride of shrieking, scuttling, mayhem-prone cats and mice. Not to mention (from later, from 1956) that sensational frog who was entombed in the cornerstone of a Warner Bros. cartoon building till the day he was released by a poor schlep of a construction worker and leapt forth singing, “Hello mah baby, hello mah honey, hello mah ragtime gal…” His name was Michigan J. Frog.

  Cartoons were a universe wherein the natural laws of physics did not apply. They were a pre-Tolkien Middle Earth in which the lesson could be learned, that if you walk out over the edge of a cliff, you can continue walking or even stand suspended in midair, as long as you don’t look down…suddenly realize there is nothing under you…and don’t panic. In its cockeyed way, it was an unforgettable lesson about the nature of fear; I always knew, in the Abbott & Costello films, that as long as Lou Costello didn’t know he was afraid, the monster killer would not attack him; from the moment of having learned that lesson in movies, I have always known nothing could hurt me if I wasn’t afraid of it—street thugs, mad dogs, poisonous snakes, intimidating salesmen, the whole gamut of terrifiers who can reduce us to jelly.

  They were a Narnia, an Erewhon, a Lilliput of bright colors and simple ethics. They made clear and telling points about greed, venality, courage, friendship, self-sacrifice, casual injustices of regimented systems and, for better or worse, they helped form the exoskeleton of my attitudes toward life, success, my friends and myself. Cartoons, the animated morality plays of my childhood, helped forge me in the furnace of escape from a bitter and insupportable reality.

  Is it any wonder, then, that I plead with you to go to the L.A. County Museum, to the Leo S. Bing Theater (Fridays at 8:00 P.M., Saturdays at 2:00 & 8:00 P.M., Sundays at 3:00 P.M.), to witness in all its magnificence and lunacy just how far the genre of the animated fantastical has come since I sat in the darkness of the Lake Theater in Painesville, Ohio…is it any wonder indeed?

  (Admission is $2 a throw for kids, students and both Museum and American Film Institute members, $2.50 for anyone else coming in as general audience, and worth every krupnick of it.)

  For the record, the fact sheet Ron Haver gave me says this: “The International Tournée of Animation is a non-profit endeavor on the part of film makers involved in various aspects of producing animated films. Their goal is to expand the audience for this art form and to provide the bridge between the public that wants to see new horizons in film and the film maker who wants his ideas seen and heard…

  “The nature of conventional film exhibition stacks the cards very much against short films. The full-length single feature consumes all the program time in theaters. The double feature squeezes the short film out as well. What shorts do survive in theatrical exhibition are too often innocuous trivia, sports exhibitions, travel and adventure provided by travel and tourist agencies.

  “The serious film, the experimental film, the way-out art film are left adrift in a confused distribution sea.”

  So if you’re a lover of the animated film—and only a soulless beast could be otherwise—the Museum of
fers an opportunity to climb into that beautiful pea-green boat adrift on the confused distribution sea, to squiggle down in a comfortable musty seat in Mr. Bing’s theater, to delight and revel in a twenty-film program of 101½ minutes’ duration, to view again with the eyes of a child, yet the mind of an intellectual, the splashcolors and freak images of the animators, before the Tournée ends its run here in May and goes on the road (American Film Institute Theatre in Washington, D.C., Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Chicago Film Society, San Francisco Museum of Art, Stanford University and the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley).

  Merely to lure and totally capture me, merely to turn me into a slobbering proselytizer, Haver ran 65 minutes out of the total 101½ and I commend to you the following:

  The Mad Baker (USA, 9½ minutes) by Ted Petok; an unforgettably hilarious send-up of all Frankensteinian mad scientist films. “They said I was deranged at Escoffier when I tried to graft a chocolate chip cookie on a hot cross bun…they said there were things Man was never meant to know…experiments better left to God…well, I’ll show them…have a Girl Scout cookie…I don’t think you need to ask what they’re made from…heh heh heh…” If I get back to Elay before the Tournée ends, I’m going back to see that one: I was laughing so hard through most of it, I missed half the funnies. Oh, do see it, it’s worth the price of admission all by itself. Petok is a goddam certifiable furry-eared madman with a talent for transmogrifying cliché to his own nefarious purposes that borders on genius—a border separating the nations of genius and berserkdom. In the future, I would walk a mile, scamper two miles, drag myself on broken and bleeding stumps ten miles, not to miss a Petok cartoon.

  The Candy Machine (USA, 4 minutes) by George Griffin; a paranoid trip into subway surrealism with a lurking figure who is the archetypical molester, a carnivorous candy machine, a brilliant technique of animation that looks like crazed Crayolas run amuck, and a subcutaneous ominousness that pervades whole areas of the Tournée.