The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

by Harlan Ellison

  Yes, things are different now; and I do not envy in the tiniest degree any writer starting his or her career as the new decade rises from the dust-heap of the Nixon and Reagan years.

  These moguls and their representatives are not the sort of whom I wrote in 1972. They are on a moral plane of commerce where terms like “crook” and “schlockmeister” are no more than archaic white noise. The marketplace is all, for them; and such a chill sensibility of amorality obtains that they truly seem astonished when they are brought to the bar for their actions.

  But like the passel of mooks of whom I wrote in that 1972 essay, they are just a part of the publishing world. A large part, but not the totality.

  My friend, my Publisher, had every right to feel I was blowing hard with hyperbole. There were decent publishers back then, and there are men and women I trust implicitly in the business today. Yet one expects—however foolishly—one takes as the norm, the righteous. It is the encounters with the thugs and the arrogantly stupid and the cavalier that make the deepest, most hurtful impressions. And so, perhaps too often, and too flamboyantly, we who do the work out here report only of the barbarians, and insufficiently extol the virtues of the ladies and gentlemen who struggle against the system as hard as some writers.

  This has been an update from the battlefield.

  INSTALLMENT 8

  “Begin with either a Chi-Chi cocktail or a margarita,” I wrote. But a page earlier I remarked, “There’s a bar, though beer and wine are all you can get.” It has been pointed out to me that these are incompatible realities. I have been asked to explain.

  I wish I could. But I can’t.

  Not being a drinker, I have never had a margarita, but I do know that the potable is made with 2 oz. of tequila, 2 tsp. of Cointreau, 1 tbsp. of lime juice and ½ a lime, combined and shaken well, strained and served straight up.

  I’m sure there’s a simple explanation for this seeming incongruity. I would give at least half a buck to be able to present that explanation to you here. Unfortunately, it’s an answer almost twenty years and a defunct restaurant lost in the mists of time and memory. I doubt that I got it wrong, because I sent the column over to Roberto Rivera for fact-checking, and he never called me on it. Nor did anyone remark on this “error” when the column appeared. So there has to be a fact missing, such as, maybe, that Los Angeles liquor licensing authorities permitted tequila as a liqueur back in 1972. The Chi-Chi cocktail was probably made with wine, and maybe possibly dining establishments waiting for their liquor license—as was the case early on with El Palenque—managed to slip tequila through. Or maybe it was some kind of weird hybrid margarita made with something other than tequila, though when I suggested that to one of my tosspot friends, he winced and left the room.

  Thus, I cannot reconcile the anomaly. But at least you know we didn’t ignore the problem. Big fat consolation.

  INSTALLMENT 10

  Here’s where a picky picky editor can make you nuts. On this page I said, “I’ve never been one for cooking for myself.” In the preceding installment I wrote, “I can think of nothing more pleasant than being left alone of an evening, working at writing a story, watching some television, making a small meal…”

  One of the editors who worked on this manuscript felt that was inconsistent. Okay. It’s inconsistent. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

  In fact, it parses. I don’t like cooking for myself. That doesn’t mean I’m incapable of doing it. And doing it once in a while, on an otherwise unstressful, pleasant evening, is hardly traumatic. I was a bachelor for the greater part of my life, and I do know how to dine elegantly; but preparing a full meal for myself is a pain in the ass, and I’d sooner go without or simply fling together a grilled salami sandwich on corn rye. Bachelors will understand.

  Nag, nag, nag. You’d think with the world in the state it’s in, that some pecksniffian editor could find better things to do with his time, wouldn’t you?

  INSTALLMENTS 11 THROUGH 20

  In late 1972 and early 1973 I was engaged in the writing of a screenplay for a man named Marvin Schwartz. He was a terrific guy, and a wonderful motion picture producer; and he is the only film executive in my almost thirty years as a screenwriter to give me full and total freedom to write what I wanted to write, no interference. Consultation, yes; guidance when sought, yes; harsh criticism when he thought it appropriate, yes. But mostly the respect one gives to a laborer when one trusts his abilities and inventiveness. Marvin insisted we call it HARLAN ELLISON’S MOVIE. We both knew it wouldn’t hold that title if it ever got made, but what the hell…it was fun while it lasted.

  Because I was hip-deep in that primary project, all those long months, my newspaper column became a problem. So with Marvin’s approval—an unheard-of act of courtesy and friendship—he let me serialize the entire screenplay in the Hornbook. Ten columns, smack in the middle of the run.

  That screenplay, those columns, do not appear in this book.

  Before you start screaming, “I been robbed!” let me assure you it is only because of my stupidity and lousy memory that you have been denied that stretch of Hornbook entries.

  What happened was this:

  I sold this book to a guy named Jack Chalker twenty years ago, as I’ve reported any number of times in these pages. At that time it was the kind of book no mainstream publisher would touch. It wasn’t a book of my stories, it wasn’t a novel, and it was off-the-wall comment by a writer unknown as an essayist. So I jumped like a hammerhead shark at a severed leg when Jack offered to publish the Hornbook as a small press specialty item under his Mirage Press imprint. The pay was not large (if I recall, not much more than three or four hundred dollars), but that was then, and we both figured if the book did well in the limited edition market, well, we’d both be recompensed.

  Two decades passed. I was busy elsewhere. Don’t ask. But, finally, years later I finished the book. And because, during those intervening years, I had almost always sold the limited edition rights to books intended for trade distribution to a larger, general market, I sold the Hornbook to Otto Penzler, thus fulfilling a promise to do something for him that had existed between us for almost ten years.

  I didn’t bother to go back and check that ancient contract with Jack. Careless. Just stupid.

  Otto purchased the trade rights for a lot of money. He knew Jack was doing a signed/numbered limited edition prior to the Penzler Books release of the Hornbook in the larger general market. Jack thought Otto was going to do a trade paperback. He assumed—because he had it in his twenty-year-old contract—that he had the right to do both the limited and the trade editions.

  By the time we were into early production, I realized what a schmuck I’d been. It was a very nasty situation. And all of my own making; no one else was responsible.

  Jack and Otto bailed me out. I didn’t deserve it, but they did it.

  I really didn’t deserve it; but when I said in a previous dingbat footnote that my Publisher is a gentleman, I wasn’t just whistlin’ “Dixie.” Otto suggested that we yank out the only part of this book that could be withdrawn comfortably and still not short the readers of the trade edition, and let Jack use it in his limited edition. A large and interesting chunk that would give Mirage Press something they could make a buck with, while not impeding the flow of material in the trade edition.

  Most of you won’t miss it.

  It was long, and it wasn’t written in straight narrative form. It was a screenplay, and most of you don’t read those, don’t ask me why. You didn’t avoid TRISTRAM SHANDY or ULYSSES or William S. Burroughs’s THE TICKET THAT EXPLODED because it was written in a different format…but screenplays somehow seem to daunt so many of you.

  Neither here nor there. You’ll not have to lay out a hundred bucks to read that movie script. White Wolf is giving it to you here in EDGEWORKS, VOL. 3. It’s never been in an available trade edition, or trade paperback, or mass market paperback, either. Only that one, very expensive Limited Edition. (Copies
of which I have for sale. Write HERC.)

  HARLAN ELLISON’S MOVIE has been scrupulously reproduced here in EDGEWORKS 3 in screenplay form just as I wrote it at 20th Century-Fox, and just as it was serialized in the Hornbook newspaper column. Drop HERC a line. If you are the sort of reader who collects First Editions, I can only suggest with humility that you solicit purchasing information from HERC (P.O. Box 55548, Sherman Oaks, CA 91413).

  And all posturing aside, you are reading the words of one lucky chap. I committed a publishing crime that usually results in the fumblefooted author hoist lithely on his own petard, or by the nape of the neck, whichever is handier. Otto and Jack acted like a pair of mensches, and I escaped with my skin intact. My composure is somewhat frazzled, but then, from the resigned sighs issuing from the Publishers, I suspect they chalk it up to the occupational hazards of working with an extremely flawed fella.

  When I offered to make it up to them by doing another book with each of them, imagine my surprise when they bolted and dove through closed windows.

  INSTALLMENT 22

  In 1973, in those halcyon days before people like Judith Krantz began getting multimillion-dollar contracts for utter twaddle, the kind of advances for a book that Herb Kastle was pulling in were considered heavy sugar. Today, it’s chump change. Which says a great deal about what has happened to American publishing with the taking-over of the cathedral by the Trump Tisch Helmsley mentality. I could have upgraded the amounts in that installment to make them consistent with the equivalents today, but every word of these columns has been left in situ, as they appeared originally. (Except for what I’ve updated or corrected for this preferred text edition.)

  INSTALLMENT 24

  “Somehow, even if they suicide, everyone survives.” This epigraphic sentence seems to have troubled some readers.

  Perhaps it’s because I didn’t write it as “commit suicide.” Or perhaps it’s because I’m suggesting that there might be a case made for snuffing oneself as an acceptable survival answer to anguish so profound that continued life becomes the act of suicide. It’s intended as a surreal remark. I don’t recommend it.

  INSTALLMENT 25

  Devotees of the best work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. will instantly recognize the word foma as one of the delightful concepts to be found in CAT’S CRADLE, Kurt’s best book in my opinion (with THE SIRENS OF TITAN, MOTHER NIGHT and the out-of-print paperback collection originally titled CANARY IN A CATHOUSE close behind). Kurt explained that “foma” are harmless untruths. Little lies or embellishments or exaggerations used to make life smoother, warmer, moister and generally more susceptible to smiles. Santa Claus is a foma. So is the Loch Ness Monster. So is the saying, Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining. They don’t hurt anyone.

  INSTALLMENT 37

  One of the problems of living past the absolute outside time in which you can have a zit, is that you know a lot of stuff all the johnny&jill-come-latelies never even heard of, much less remember.

  Go try to convince some hotshot baby-boomer stocking up on CDs that there was a time before the LP was devised in which one went out and bought a packet of ten needles for one’s Victrola, and if you were flush they were steel needles, good for maybe a dozen plays before getting dull; but if you were a poor kid who had only a buck or two for the whole week, the proceeds of your paper route or selling Grit or working a shoeshine spot on the corner of State and Main on a Saturday night, then you laid out a nickel or a dime for a packet of phonograph needles made from either wood or cactus needle, and they were serviceable only for two or three plays. Take a poll, and see how many yuppies can identify the Burma Surgeon or Laird Cregar or Senator Bilbo. Suggest to the average product of the American Educational System that the word “bazooka” wasn’t invented by a bubblegum company, that it didn’t originate with the World War II weapon, and that it had something to do with a bucolic radio and film personality named Bob Burns, who made music on an instrument of his own devising, that he dubbed the bazooka, and clock the look s/he whips on you.

  A younger person, working on this manuscript, appended via Post-it the following observation:

  Manuscript p. 422, par. 5: A “45 rpm album”?

  I think he means an LP, which is 33 rpm.

  Gee, and I’ll bet next you’ll be trying to convince me the Earth is round, right?

  Well, kid, I mean just exactly what I said. A 45 rpm album. They had such things back there in the old days, when we only got a chance to listen to our moldy-fig music when we weren’t trying to escape the fangs of the stray dire wolf or Smilodon.

  As I write this, I am looking at a 45 rpm album, containing eight cuts on a two-record double-sleeve package. Shorty Rogers and His Giants. Cool and Crazy, it’s called. West Coast jazz. Reissued later on an LP. Or how about this single-sleeve album, one disc (with that big hole in the middle) with four tracks, two to a side: Harry James and his Orchestra, featuring Helen Forrest singing “Skylark” (the best rendition ever cut, after Jackie Paris’s version on an old Wing Records release) (Wing was a subsidiary label of Mercury, back there when we had to watch out for invasions from Atlantis or Lemuria) and also singing “I Don’t Want to Walk Without You” and…well, you get the idea.

  File this one under: Don’t try to teach your old granny how to suck eggs, kiddo. Play your cards right, and maybe I’ll let you listen to all those swell Bobby Sherman sides I’ve got put away till the day they’re collector’s items.

  APPENDIX E

  (memo updated 12 September 1996)

  Responsible is as responsible does. Also: no good deed goes unpunished. When I first wrote this essay, for Playboy, it contained all the material you find here. When it was published in Playboy, however, it was (first) retitled “It Ain’t Toontown!” (The film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? had recently opened to smash box office and the editors at Playboy—who sometimes delude themselves that they are anywhere within hailing distance of “the cutting edge” of popular culture—had opted to dump my title, which made sense and was original, in favor of a cornball, old-fart-pretending-to-be-cool reference to the movie. Everywhere I went, for the next year and a half, people chided me and laughed at “my” moronic and embarrassingly inappropriate title to an otherwise laudable article.) It was (second) also chopped pretty heavily to fit space limitations. In defense of Playboy on this latter depredation, I did write it longer than they’d anticipated, requested, or contracted for. Nonetheless, they lopped here and they lopped there, and many nifty references were left on the cutting-room floor, so to speak. One of those chops, less salutary than most of the others, was the dropping of one or another name when it came to who was responsible for this or that comic creation. Kate Worley, the superlative author of Omaha, was one whose name was excised. I never noticed it when I corrected the galleys of the magazine version. I should have, but I didn’t. Dumb me. But when it was published, Kate called me, understandably annoyed (and a lot more courteous than I’d have been had the roles been reversed), and wanted to know if I’d truly lost all touch with Reality, and if not, why had I consigned her to Oblivion? I was chagrined, to say the least. I tugged my forelock, crawled on my belly like a reptile, and shrived myself a-plenty. And I assured Kate that when the article was reprinted—at full length—in my book, THE HARLAN ELLISON HORNBOOK, I would make sure the wrong was righted. I assured her. I gave her my word, is what I did. And, of course, when the HORNBOOK came out in hardcover in 1990 for the first time…I completely forgot to add Kate’s name. That was twice. I had not only hit her with a brick, I had followed it up by dropping an anvil on her head. On my desk, just to the right of my typewriter, for the past seven years, I have had a handwritten note glued to the face of the bookshelf right at eye-level. It says: Add Kate Worley’s name to Hornbook article…or book passage to Zamboanga.

  There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or
by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Foreword: “The Cricket Beneath the Hammer,” by Robert Crais, copyright © 1990 by Robert Crais.

  Author's Note and Introduction: “The Lost Secret of East Atlantis,” copyright © 1990 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  Los Angeles Free Press, Los Angeles Free Weekly News and Saint Louis Literary Supplement “Hornbook” columns, copyright © 1972, 1973, 1976 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 2000, 2001, 2004 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  Supplementary letters to the columns used with permission of the Los Angeles Free Press.

  “Comic of the Absurd,” copyright © 1970 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  “Dogging It in the Great American Heartland,” copyright © 1990 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  “Darkness Falls in the City of the Angeles,” copyright © 1988 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  “Lenny Bruce Is Dead,” copyright © 1986 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  “Did Your Mother Throw Yours Out?” (under the title “It Ain't Toontown”), copyright © 1988 by the Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  “The Song the Sixties Sang” (under the title “Hail the Light”), copyright © 1987 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  Copyright © 1991 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation

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