The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

by Harlan Ellison

  3) In each classroom of another school at which Shelley taught, there was a tv set, mostly unused save for an occasional administrative announcement; the sets had been originally installed in conjunction with a Ford Foundation grant to be used for visual training. Now they’re blank and silent. When Shelley had trouble controlling the class, getting them quiet, she would turn on the set and they would settle down. The screen contained nothing, just snow; but they grew as fascinated as cobras at a mongoose rally, and fell silent, watching nothing. Shelley says she could keep them that way for extended periods.

  Interestingly, as a footnote, when Shelley mentioned this device at lunch, a chemistry professor said he used something similar. When his students were unruly he would place a beaker of water on a Bunsen burner. When the water began to boil, the students grew silent and mesmerized, watching the water bubbling.

  And as a sub-footnote, I’m reminded of a news story I read. A burglar broke into a suburban home in Detroit or some similar city (it’s been a while since I read the item and unimportant details have blurred in my mind) and proceeded to terrorize and rob the housewife alone there with her seven-year-old son. As the attacker stripped the clothes off the woman at knife-point, the child wandered into the room. The burglar told the child to go in the bedroom and watch television till he was told to come out. The child watched the tube for six straight hours, never once returning to the room where his mother had been raped repeatedly, tied and bound to a chair with tape over her mouth, and beaten mercilessly. The burglar had had free access to the entire home, had stripped it of all valuables, and had left unimpeded. The tape, incidentally, had been added when the burglar/rapist was done enjoying himself. All through the assault the woman had been calling for help. But the child had been watching the set and didn’t come out to see what was happening. For six hours.

  Roy Torgeson, Shelley’s husband and producer of my records, reminded us of a classroom experiment reported by the novelist Jerzy Kosinski, in which a teacher was set to speaking at one side of the front of a classroom, and a television monitor was set up on the other side of the room, showing the teacher speaking. The students had unobstructed vision of both. They watched the monitor. They watched what was real.

  Tom Snyder, of the NBC Tomorrow Show, was telling me that he receives letters from people apologizing for their having gone away on vacation or visiting with their grandchildren, or otherwise not having been at home so he could do his show…but now that they’re back, and the set is on, he can start doing his show again. Their delusion is a strange reversal of the ones I’ve noted previously. For them, Snyder (and by extension other newscasters and actors) aren’t there, aren’t happening, unless they are watching. They think the actors can see into their living rooms, and they dress as if for company, they always make sure the room is clean, and in one case there is a report of an elderly woman who dresses for luncheon with “her friends” and sets up the table and prepares luncheon and then, at one o’clock, turns on the set for a soap opera. Those are her friends: she thinks they can see into her house, and she is one with them in their problems.

  To those of us who conceive of ourselves as rational and grounded in reality (yes, friends, even though I write fantasy, I live in the real world, my feet sunk to the ankles in pragmatism), all of this may seem like isolated, delusionary behavior. I assure you it isn’t. A study group that rates high-school populations recently advised one large school district that the “good behavior” of the kids in its classes was very likely something more than just normal quiet and good manners. They were too quiet, too tranquilized, and the study group called it “dangerous.” I submit that the endless watching of tv by kids produces this blank, dead, unimaginative manner.

  It is widespread, and cannot possibly be countered by the minimal level of reading that currently exists in this country. Young people have been systematically bastardized in their ability to seek out quality material—books, films, food, lifestyles, life-goals, enriching relationships.

  Books cannot combat the spiderwebbing effect of television because kids simply cannot read. It is on a par with their inability to hear music that isn’t rock: turn the car radio dial from one end to another when you’re riding with young people (up to the age of fifty); you will perceive that they whip past classical music as if it were “white noise,” simply static to their ears. The same goes for books. The printed word has no value to them, and carries no possibility of knowledge or message that relates to their real world.

  If one chooses to say, as one idiot I faced on the 90 Minutes Live talk show over the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation said, people don’t need to read, that people don’t like books, that they want to be “entertained” (as if reading were something hideous, something other than also entertainment), then we come to an impasse. But if, like me, you believe that books preserve the past, illuminate the present, and point the way to the future…then you can understand why I seem to be upset at the ramifications of this epiphany I’ve had.

  Do not expect—as I once did because I saw Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin unmasked on television—that tv will reveal the culprits. Nixon lied without even the faintest sign of embarrassment or disingenuousness on tv, time after time, for years. He told lies, flat out and outrageously; monstrous lies that bore no relation to the truth. But well over half the population of this country, tuning him in, believed him. Not just that they wanted to believe him for political or personal reasons, or because it was easier than having waves made…they believed him because he stared right at them and spoke softly and they could tell he was telling the truth. TV did not unmask him. Television played no part in the revelations of Watergate. In point of fact, television prevented the unmasking, because Nixon used tv to keep public opinion tremblingly on his side. It was only when the real world, the irrefutable facts, were slammed home again and again, that the hold was loosened on public sentiment.

  Nor did television show what a bumbler Gerald Ford was. He was as chummy and friendly and familiar as Andy Griffith or Captain Kangaroo when he came before us on the tube. Television does not show us the duplicitous smirk, the dull mentality, the self-serving truth behind the noncommittal statement of administration policy. It does not deal in reality, it does not proffer honesty, it only serves up non-judgmental images and allows thugs like Nixon to make themselves as acceptable as Reverend Ike.

  And on the Johnny Carson Show they have a seven minute “author’s spot,” gouged out of ninety minutes festooned with Charo’s quivering buttocks, Zsa Zsa Gabor’s feelings about fiscal responsibility, John Davidson on recombinant DNA and Don Rickles insulting Carson’s tie. Then, in the last ten minutes they invite on Carl Sagan or Buckminster Fuller or John Lilley to explain the Ethical Structure of the Universe. And they contend this is a rebirth of the art of conversation. Authors of books are seldom invited on the show unless they have a new diet, a new sex theory, or a non-fiction gimmick that will make an interesting demonstration in which Johnny can take part…like wrestling a puma, spinning a hula hoop or baking lasagna with solar heat.

  All this programs the death of reading.

  And reading is the drinking of strange wine.

  Like water on a hot griddle, I have bounced around, but the unification of the thesis is at hand.

  Drinking strange wine pours strength into the imagination.

  The dinosaurs had no strange wine.

  They had no imagination. They lived 130,000,000 years and vanished. Why? Because they had no imagination. Unlike human beings who have it and use it and build their future rather than merely passing through their lives as if they were spectators. Spectators watching television, one might say.

  The saurians had no strange wine, no imagination, and they became extinct. And you don’t look so terrific yourself.

  APPENDIXES

  Interim Memo to Appendixes

  The six full-length essays that follow were not a part of the cycle now gathered as THE HARLAN ELLISON HORNBOOK. Two were
written for Los Angeles magazine, two for Playboy, one for ALL IN COLOR FOR A DIME, a long out-of-print volume about comic books, and the last an unpublished piece written for the defunct Show magazine. They total about 27,000 words of non-fiction.

  They represent the level of “serious” at which I work, as parallel to the level of “serious” when I’m doing fiction.

  They are included here to show the fruits of the Hornbook labors, and for several other imperatives. Only “Comic of the Absurd,” written in 1969 and published in 1970, and “Dogging It in the Great American Heartland” (1970), predate these columns.

  While it is not strictly echoic of the Hornbook métier, “Comic of the Absurd” informs and links with the herein-included longer piece I did last year on comic books for Playboy. And I don’t want it lost in the files; Geo. Carlson deserves at least this much attention.

  As for “Dogging It…” being included, well, I always like to include something in every book that has never been published. There aren’t many of those, so I usually wind up writing something brand-new. In this case, the article extended the range of what I wanted to exhibit as subjects that drew my attention during the general period of the years of the Hornbook columns. Also, the essay fleshes out background to oblique references in several of the installments.

  But the other four articles tie in directly with what I did in the Hornbook columns. They are the adults that grew from the children who present themselves in forty-six installments. What I learned from writing the Hornbook manifests itself in the later, more exhaustive pieces. Three of them were written only last year, and they are (at least in my view) Major Work.

  They are included as lagniappe. A little something extra.

  They serve to advise the curious reader what the Author is up to right now, how the talent fares; an updated interim memo.

  APPENDIX A

  Interim Memo

  George Carlson is dead, he apparently died some years even before this piece appeared. But when it was published—the first piece on this extraordinary “lost American original”—I heard from his daughters, who were in their early forties. They were pleased, as you might imagine, that their father was not wholly forgotten. They sent me many pieces of his work, in hopes that I might find a museum or archive that would preserve them (oh, how I tried, and tried, and tried…unsuccessfully). And if I had been impressed by Carlson strictly by way of “The Pie-Face Prince of Pretzleburg” and the “Jingle Jangle Tales,” I was stunned by the range and importance of work he had done outside the world of comics.

  Did you know that George Carlson did the booklet that was issued to everyone on the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary?

  Did you know that George Carlson did the original dust jacket art for GONE WITH THE WIND?

  Did you know that George Carlson was the first illustrator of the Uncle Wiggily books written by Howard R. Garis, a series among the most famous and longest-extant of children’s standards? And though the publishers, Platt & Munk, have kept these books in print since the Thirties, nowhere on the books is George Carlson given credit (unless one scrutinizes the corners of the art and sees his name neatly printed, or finds the initials G.C.), leading the casual to believe Garis did the art, as well. And if one compares the tone and style of the Uncle Wiggily stories (which almost always end something like this; “And, if the loaf of bread doesn’t get a toothache and jump out of the oven into the dishpan I’ll tell you about how Uncle Wiggily Learns to Dance”), to the tone and style of the inspiredly whacky Jingle Jangle Tales

  (“The Sea-Going Rajah and the Milk-Fed Fraction”

  (“The Musical Wifflesnort and the Red-Hot Music Roll”

  (“The Self-Winding Organ-Gander and the Overstuffed Bull-Fiddle”

  (“The Sea-Seasoned Sea-Cook and the Heroic Pancake”

  (“The Toothless Scarecrow and the Tamed Wildflower”

  (“The Very Fair Weatherman and the Clock-Less Cuckoo”), you may surely be convinced—as I am, thoroughly—that the absurdist touches in the Garis stories (so unlike the mundane stories themselves), the touches that have made these books perennials, were the unsung contribution of Carlson’s miraculous mind, and not those of Garis, who got rich off the books.

  A few years ago, an art gallery owner in New England called, saying he knew of my admiration for the work of Geo. Carlson, and recently into his possession had come three splendid watercolors Carlson had done for some long-forgotten children’s book. Would I be interested in purchasing them? Would I?!? They hang in my home now, and I tell you truly that no one can pass those lovely animals dressed as pirates, framed as a triptych, without pausing and smiling.

  I’ve lost touch with Carlson’s daughters. The artwork was all returned. Some years later a “middleman” of dubious credentials surfaced, offering for sale the original Jingle Jangle Comics pages, at exorbitant prices, with questionable provenance. Several of us tried to get the two Museums of Comic Art, one on the East Coast, the other in care of Bill Blackbeard in San Francisco, to purchase these priceless artifacts, so they could be preserved. For one reason or another, no sale was effected; and those originals have, likewise, vanished.

  And though my little essay on Carlson circa 1970 raised the prices of the original comics in the Overstreet Guide from pennies to many dollars (Jingle Jangle #1, February 1942, goes for $141.00 as of Overstreet’s 19th edition), when Arlington House published “Comic of the Absurd” in hardcover—as a selection of ALL IN COLOR FOR A DIME, edited by Richard Lupoff and Don Thompson—and Ace reprinted it in paperback, almost twenty years ago, they didn’t even bother to reproduce a page of Carlson. They picked a cover at random from the forty-two-issue run of the magazine, and it was a cover by Dave Tendlar. Aaaarghhh! Also, grrrr!

  Not even when his name had a scintilla of chance of being saved from utter obscurity, did Geo. Carlson catch a break.

  And so, in this book, for the first time in more than forty years, you can read a complete Carlson Jingle Jangle Tale.

  That is, for the first time in forty years, unless you happen to own the prestigious volume, A SMITHSONIAN BOOK OF COMIC-BOOK COMICS, edited by Michael Barrier and Martin Williams (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1981), in which Carlson is elevated to classic stature by inclusion as one of the “greats” with such few as Carl Barks, Walt Kelly, Basil Wolverton, Jack Cole and C.C. Beck.

  When Barrier contacted me late in the ’70s, and told me that the Smithsonian had elected to preserve the names and work of these few—Sheldon Mayer, and the creators of Superman and Batman—and that Carlson shouted to be among the Best of the Best, I thought it might serve to draw the work of this wonderful, lost satirist to the attention of an art world so easily dazzled by the derivative swipes of the Lichtensteins and Warhols.

  But it didn’t happen.

  Somewhere out there, hundreds and hundreds of Geo. Carlson originals lie moldering, while gallery owners and the heirs of the estates of fripperish Pop artists grow fat selling the transitory fad-pieces of lesser lights to Museums of Fine Art that pay lip-service to “the preservation of American artists.”

  Excuse my grrrr. But now, for certain, you understand why I stretched the parameters to include this little essay. If we must remember Dachau and the Palmer Raids and John Fante and The Book of Kells, because to forget them costs us more than merely ignorance, then we must remember and honor George Carlson, as well. We need the light of his buoyant spirit.

  APPENDIX A | 1969/1970

  COMIC OF THE ABSURD

  When the aliens come from Tau Ceti in 2755 a.d. and begin scrabbling like dogs digging bones, in the rubble that is left of Civilization As We Know It, they will surely unearth the finest works of the geniuses of Art. They will discover Bosch, and van Gogh, and Vermeer, and Monet, and Dali, and Wyeth, and Rembrandt, and Picasso. They will also discover George Carlson.

  Beg your pardon? Who?

  I said: George Carlson.

  I sense your outrage. This unknown, in company with these undisputed greats.
I hear your question. I see your sullen, reproachful mien. You want to know, who the hell is George Carlson? And, by what right do you presume to link him with the greatest masters of Art?

  Who is George Carlson? I’m glad you asked. It’s about time someone did.

  George Carlson is Samuel Beckett in a clever plastic disguise. He is Harold Pinter scrubbed clean of the adolescent fear and obscurity, decked out in popcorn balls and confetti. He is lonesco with a giggle. He is Genet without hangups. He is Pirandello buttered with dreamdust and wearing water wings. He is Santa Claus and Peter Pan and the Great Pumpkin and the Genie in the Jug and what Walt Disney started out to be and never quite made.

  George Carlson is…

  Or, rather, he was. He’s still alive; I have it on good authority, though I’ve been unable to track him down. (And in a way, am rather glad. I once received a letter from Edward Gorey, and considered going to meet him, but decided it was better to let gods live in their Valhallas, and not muck them about with the realities of acquaintanceship. The same goes for George Carlson.) But Carlson is no longer an “is.” He’s a “was.” He doesn’t do that any more.