An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  But…

  Like the charming little pack rat that leaves something behind when it steals some bright object, I will give you a dream in exchange for your time and attention. (Actually, this “trade” accredited to pack, or wood, rats is more a matter of Disneyesque anthropomorphism than zoological fact. There is good in the most evil of us, and contrariwise, what seems to be ethic may be only circumstance. To wit: the little fellers can only carry one thing at a time; so if it sees some nifty object near your campfire, and it lusts for it, then it drops what it was carrying. Thus was promulgated the legend of the equitable behavior of pack rats, based almost entirely on a pack rat having carried off a vial of botulism, leaving behind the Koh-i-noor diamond, which was later presented to Queen Victoria after the annexation of the Punjab.)

  The dream is this: a dream of mine, but I’ll share it.

  It was in the early Forties. See now this kid, Harlan, eleven or twelve years old, riding in the back seat of his mom and dad’s green Plymouth, on a Sunday late afternoon. In those days the family “went for a ride.” Nowhere special, just out for a leisurely spin to buy an ice cream cone, to drive into Mentor, Ohio where a certain ice cream parlor carried comic books the kid couldn’t get in Painesville. See them, the three of them, Mom and Dad and the kid, driving along a country road in Ohio…listening to the radio.

  In those days wonders came across the airwaves. I’ve written about those wonders in “Jeffty Is Five.” Adventure with Jack Armstrong and Capt. Midnight and Terry & the Pirates. Comedy with Jack Benny and Easy Aces and Eddie Cantor. Drama with Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater, Lux Presents Hollywood and the Molle Mystery Theater where I first heard Robert Bloch’s name, and his terrifying story “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” that led, years later, to my writing my own Jack the Ripper story, “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World.”

  Wonders that taught me how to think visually.

  If it had not been for listening to radio drama, I would never have been able to write motion pictures; and the stories I’ve written would not be quite so clearly viewable on the screen of your mind. Imagination is served wonderfully by sound. One can create in the theater of thoughts sets and artifacts that it would cost Hollywood billions to actualize. And I was a child of radio dreams.

  See then: this kid Harlan and Mom and Dad, driving down Mentor Avenue, on a Sunday afternoon early in the Forties. And the radio spoke:

  “Quiet, please.” A pause, heavy with expectation. Then, again, “Quiet, please.”

  The voice of Ernest Chappell. One of the great radio voices. A sound that combined urbanity with storytelling wisdom. And the show was on the Mutual Network; it was, of course, the legendary Quiet, Please, created by Wyllis Cooper.

  I begged my mother and father to leave it on, not to change over to one of the more popular Sunday comedy shows; and they left the dial where it was, and I heard something that I have never forgotten, something I will share with you now.

  Ernest Chappell narrated Wyllis Cooper’s scripts. The programs were backed up by sound effects and music (the theme was the 2nd movement of Franck’s Symphony in D Minor, a work I cannot listen to, even today, without being thrilled to my toenails), but essentially it was Chappell, just speaking softly. Quietly. Terrifyingly.

  What I heard that Sunday afternoon, so long ago, that has never left my thoughts for even one week, through all these years, was this:

  “There is a place just five miles from where you now stand that no human eye has ever seen. It is…five miles down!”

  When I heard that, and even now when I say it at college lectures, even when I simply type it on a page, a chill takes possession of my spine.

  And the story was wonderful. (I’m sure if I were to hear it now, forty years later, it might be woefully thin and unworthy of the weight I have put on it…but I’ve managed to obtain recordings of the five or six shows that are still extant, and they are superb…so memory, this once, probably serves me well.)

  It concerned a group of men working in the deepest coal mine in the world. (Coal mine? It’s been forty years; it may have been a tin mine, or a diamond mine.) And they break through the floor of the mine and it turns out to be the ceiling, the roof, of the biggest cave in the world. I mean big! So gigantic that even the most powerful searchlights can’t penetrate the darkness through that hole. Nothing can be seen down there. It just goes down and down. A stone, dropped through the hole, keeps falling…there is no sound of its having landed.

  So they rig up something like a bathysphere, and a couple of guys are lowered in it and…they’re attacked by pterodactyls before they can reach the bottom!

  Now that’s all I remember of the plot; but tell me something, troops: how many stories you heard or saw or read fifteen years ago, ten years ago, even five years ago…do you remember that clearly today? And I heard “Five Miles Down” at least forty years ago. And it’s still with me.

  Still with me to the extent that very soon now I will be writing a story titled “Down Deep,” which will open with Wyllis Cooper’s basic idea, and go from there. Still with me to the extent that I have always loved the sound of dramatic readings and have learned my lessons well from Orson Welles and Wyllis Cooper and Ernest Chappell.*

  * The poet Olin Miller has told us, “Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory.” It was not till years after I had written that heartfelt encomium to “Five Miles Down” that I obtained a copy of the November 1948 issue of Mysterious Traveler Comics. You may be old enough to remember hearing the radio show “The Mysterious Traveler,” but it’s not likely you ever saw the comic book. It only lasted that one issue. I had been looking for it for many years, because “The Mysterious Traveler” was one of my favorite radio shows when I was a kid, but primarily I wanted that comic because it featured the artwork of Bob Powell who—though reputedly an anti-semite—had a style that was most reminiscent of the great fantasy artist Edd Cartier, and so I collected as many examples of Powell’s profusion as I could. You may well imagine the lub-dub of consternation I felt when, upon opening the package containing that long-sought comic, I was confronted by a title-box at the bottom of the Powell cover that read: FIVE MILES DOWN. It was the story I’d been hunting forever.

  I was, of course, wrong in ascribing to “Quiet, Please” the 1940s presentation of that story. My memory was, as Olin Miller noted, so smooth and convincing that I had made the integration and crossover without a seam or bump or flow. And just a few years ago—as I write this footnote in January of 1999—one of my good friends sent me the actual radioplay. It was written by Robert A. Arthur, one of the best storytellers of the golden ’40s. And it was as terrific as I’d remembered it.

  No, I still haven’t found an actual recording of that show, even though Maggie Thompson and others devoted to radio drama have combed the boonies trying to turn up one. It may be lost forever. If so, what a loss. It was, and remains, even on the page, an absolutely riveting piece of fantasy. But keeping history straight demands that I correct one of my dearest memories. It wasn’t a “Quiet, Please” episode, it was a tale introduced by the great radio voice of Maurice Tarplin, “The Mysterious Traveler.”

  Which brings me to the commercial aspect of this part of the column. My public readings started drawing some small attention a number of years ago; and I was approached to put some stories on record. I did so. They sold out. Now, because I love reading my stories, and I cannot be in every middlesex village and farm where someone might like to hear me read a story, I have initiated The Harlan Ellison Recording Collection.

  This will be real nifty, gang. It is a sorta kinda record club that will publish a regular Newsletter with information about my college appearances, upcoming publication of new stories, ongoing reports of the progress of my film work—even the unlikely possibility that I, Robot might get made at last—and pieces of unpublished works, inside stuff…be the first on your block to be bored silly!

  But the best part, the really sna
zzy part, is that you will have a chance to buy records as we release them, in signed and numbered editions, at prices lower than the few specialty bookstores we’ll be using as outlets will be selling them for. The first record is already available, a reissue of the album Harlan! Ellison Reads Ellison. This record includes complete versions of “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” and “Shatterday.” The first edition of this record, long unavailable, is selling through antiquarian book dealers for fifty bucks a shot.

  The way to join the Collection is simple. Eight bucks gets you a membership and the Newsletter. Send the eight dollars in check or money order to: The Harlan Ellison Recording Collection, P. O. Box 55548, Sherman Oaks, CA 91413. (This information is current as of October, 1995!)

  And yes, this is a commercial venture, and I don’t want to lead you astray by trying to imply that someone else is behind this Collection. It’s my money backing it, and I stand behind every record.

  But the dream I’ll be sharing with those of you who enjoy my work is the dream I got that Sunday afternoon in Mentor, Ohio, when I heard Ernest Chappell say…five miles down!

  And next time I’ll finish off the current screed against the Moral Majority, and get into the subject of knife-kill movies.

  Till that time.

  Interim memo

  Only those who have been so petrified by Nuclear Holocaust Paranoia that they have taken up permanent residence in useless backyard bomb shelters installed by their parents in the Fifties are unaware that since this tenth column was written, the Religious Far Right has expanded its efforts. Like all demagogues from Torquemada to Hitler to Senator Bilbo and Father Coughlin and Joe McCarthy, they have waved the tattered flags of God and patriotism, and their benighted forces now attack on all fronts: political, academic, sociological, scientific. And People For The American Way, praised in this column, has fought back. It is still in operation, gathers more support each year as Falwell’s Fools overstep the bounds in more and more people’s personal lives. I urge your attention to this column, and recommend that you get involved. People For needs your support. Like the ACLU and a few other organizations dedicated to the First Amendment, they are all that stand between us and the intellectual Dachaus wherein the tunnel-visioned would have us take up residence; a neighborhood that makes the bomb shelters look cozy by comparison. Oh, and Jimmy Doohan is fully recovered.

  INSTALLMENT 10: 5 JUNE 81

  PUBLISHED 21 JULY 81 FUTURE LIFE #29 COVER-DATED SEPTEMBER

  So here I am last April 21st, round about midnight, sitting in the studios of radio station WMCA in New York, doing “The Candy Jones Show” with a dude named Richard Viguerie. Jot the name on the slate of your brain. Mr. Viguerie has made millions with a direct-mail operation that circularizes advocates of the aims of The Moral Majority. If your local school board currently sports a couple of whackos who want to pull CATCHER IN THE RYE or ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST from the library and you enlist the aid of your senator to put pressure on the rest of the school board not to bow to pressure from the narrowminded and subliterate, all the whackos have to do is get in touch with Mr. Viguerie’s Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress and—as in 1978 when the CSFC spent over $400,000 to help elect 31 conservative candidates in both houses—within mere hours the desk of that hapless senator will be a veritable Sargasso Sea of apoplectic screeds accusing said public servant of being a perverter of the young, a willing handservant of the pornography cabal, a crypto-Commie and an individual who would, no doubt, pimp out his / her children for a few filthy pfennig.

  If your senior senator looks on the Human Life Bills sponsored by Senator Jesse Helms as scientifically corrupt, morally reprehensible, criminally irresponsible and just downright unenforceable—Senate Bill 158 and House Resolution 900 will outlaw abortion by amending the 14th Amendment with these words: “Human life shall be deemed to exist from conception, without regard to race, sex, age, health, defect or condition of dependency”—then Dick Viguerie’s computers go to work sorting and culling just the right geographic and demographic segment of the New Moral Right to start inundating said senior senator with enough hate mail to repaper his office.

  Mr. Viguerie, who has called himself “politically Christian,” which seems to me to fudge more than a little with the idea of the separation of Church and State, has grown slick and financially fat by bringing to the arena of political demagoguery a wizardly wiliness with the ways of microcircuitry that makes the special effects of George Lucas look like Edison’s earliest experiments with tungsten filaments.

  So there I am, sitting behind a microphone on WMCA, with this great gray eminence of the New Anal Retentive Right, and he is crowing about how these conservative activists are something new, something fresh and original.

  And I cut in on his self-aggrandizement by saying, “I beg to differ. The New Right isn’t original; we’ve had its like at least once before. Except that time they called it The Spanish Inquisition.”

  Candy Jones told me, after the program, that WMCA’s computerized phone system had logged in over eight thousand calls waiting to be heard; far and away the largest number of call-ins the show had ever experienced.

  Bringing me, at last, to my closing remarks (for the time being) about The Moral Majority.

  The Moral Majority abhors sex outside of wedlock. But they are solidly behind no gun control. Not to be crude about this, but they want to make sex illegal, yet they don’t mind if every self-styled vigilante packs a .357 Magnum.

  The Moral Majority wants sex education in schools abolished so the herpes epidemic can go unchecked, yet they want prayers in schools to be reinstituted. Religious training is, to them, a state matter, rather than a parental choice; but sex education is a parental choice but not a state matter. Government intrusion is welcome when it serves their Fundamentalist ends, but verboten when their bluestocking prejudices are challenged.

  The Moral Majority really believes God has a political position on the Panama Canal.

  The Moral Majority really believes gays and young people are a menace that must be met with stern action. If you fought in Vietnam you’re a patriot…as long as you don’t stage a sit-in on the lawn of the VA hospital and demand to know why you’re rotting away or going insane from exposure to Agent Orange. At that point you become a freako troublemaker. If you’re a woman who got raped and knocked up and want the fetus aborted, well, that’s sad as hell, sister, but your womb has citizenship according to Holy Hallelujah Helms and his senatorial nightriders, so have the kid, even if it’s born without a nose…and shut your mouth, bitch.

  According to Judith Krug, director of the Office of Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, attempts to censor books in the nation’s libraries have more than tripled since last November’s election of Reagan. “We have been averaging over the past several years three to five reports of attempted censorship a week,” Ms. Krug said in an interview with Publishers Weekly (2/20/81). “The first two weeks of November, there were about that number per day.”

  So if all of this about which I’ve written for three installments scares the bejeezus out of you; if the fact that over sixteen million dollars worth of advertising has been pulled from television shows rumored to be on The Moral Majority’s forthcoming hit list; if you cannot believe lunacies such as that contained in a letter to Christian Life magazine by a woman who wrote ecstatically that her six-year-old daughter was “born again” after hearing Lynda “Wonder Woman” Carter’s “testimony of faith” in the March 1980 issue read to her; if you stand dumbfounded when Secretary of the Interior James Watt tells a Senate subcommittee he doesn’t feel any guilt about denying future generations all the parklands he wants to pave over and condo-ize because, “We don’t know how many future generations there’ll be before the coming of the Lord, anyhow”; if you wonder what the hell pinstriped Jerry Falwell is doing out in Louisville, Nebraska, with his thirty-three-member, squeaky-clean “I Love America Singers,” putting up the
money to back a church school that refuses to comply with the licensure requirements of the Nebraska State Department of Education, and telling his audience, “We’re here to stay! You [meaning the government] can’t control us”; if all of this seems ominous as a cancer specialist suggesting you stop into his office to discuss your biopsy report…then I urge you to jot another name on the slate of your brain. The name is Norman Lear.

  And he personifies the philosophy that the only reason to become famous and rich and powerful in these parlous times is to use that fame, wealth and power to help make this a slightly better world in which personal freedom as a concept is not perverted to the debased uses of an unholy alliance of tv evangelists, amoral politicos bent on climbing higher, direct-mail hustlers, milk-the-ignorant fund raisers, hate-spewers, gun-lovers and sociosexual repressors. He is a man who very clearly sees the dangers to all of us in the twisted coupling of Fundamentalist crackpots and amoral politicians.

  Norman Lear has caused to be born an organization that answers the question we all ask: what can I do? The organization is a non-profit, tax-exempt entity called PEOPLE FOR THE AMERICAN WAY. It’s on-line already, it’s working, it’s in Washington and it’s a clearinghouse, fighting-mad organization that is dedicated to taking back the American flag from the direct lineal descendants of Cotton Mather and Father Coughlin and Senator Joe McCarthy.

  Here are a few facts that explain why People For The American Way had to come into existence today:

  Religious broadcasters now own over 1400 radio and tv stations outright. In addition, hundreds of hours are purchased weekly by electronic ministries on independent secular stations. They reach over 130,000,000 Americans weekly.