An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  “How’s the powder at Aspen?”

  “I went crazy and bought these new aprés-ski boots at Abercrombie & Fitch.”

  “Fran said Big Bear was heaven last week.”

  “Where were you when Dot and Ferdie got up the party for Snow Summit?”

  You get the idea. Subjects of pith and moment.

  Now, as I listen in to this scintillant rodomontade, my face falling forward into my carrot-and-raisin salad every time I nod off from the sheer excitement of it all, one of the guys calls her by her first name—I’ll call her Denise so they can’t get me for defamation of character even though the best defense, Henry Holmes tells me, is the truth—and the other guy soon thereafter calls her by her last name, “Hey, Kauffman,” another alias.

  So now I know Guido and Enzo are talking to Denise Kauffman and I continue listening. Why am I listening to such banalities, you ask? Perversity? Snoopiness? No, in thunder! Boredom. How excited can one get about carrot-and-raisin salad? I am big-B bored, so I listen to what comes next, never intended for the ears of such as I.

  Denise: I’m going up to Big Bear this weekend.

  Guido: Oh yeah? Who with?

  Denise: David.

  Enzo: Is that the guy we met, the car rental guy?

  Denise: No, he’s the dentist. You know, with the mustache.

  (I hasten to add this is not a description that later we will discover to be that of my dentist, the enormously-skilled and highly ethical Robert P. Knoll, wizard of plaque-removal. This was another dentist entirely. They breed.)

  Guido: Where you staying?

  Denise: He’s got a really terrific cabin up there, a chalet like, you know.

  Enzo: I thought he was married.

  Denise: He is. His wife doesn’t know.

  The conversation moved on apace. But I was caught in the thrall of an opening for play-action danger and adventure. An opportunity to breathe vigor into an otherwise tepid afternoon.

  And so, when I finished my food and had tapped the corners of my mouth with one of Mort’s Deli’s antimacassar napkins, I stood up and stepped sidewise to their table. Looming over her, but looking out the front window of the Deli; addressing the cosmos, as it were, I said in the sort of voice and manner made legend by Dan Duryea in dozens of episodes of China Smith and half a hundred “B” films, “Denise. As of now, David’s wife does know.” And then, very quickly, I motored.

  As I crossed the sidewalk in front of the Deli window, where inside they sat, I was rewarded by a scene of such utter panic and bugfuck terror that it made the rush of the lemmings to the cliff seem like close-order drill in a KKK nursery school.

  In a moment I was gone.

  Leaving behind a social butterfly whose ski-wax had congealed, who would be on the phone to David, D.D.S., in a nanosecond, screaming, “David! David! Your wife’s put a private detective on us! She knows, David! OhMiGod, Daaaavid, what’ll we do!?!” This is a true story.

  You say you’re bored? You say you need excitement? You say you need escape from the closed-in four walls of your drab existence? I commend to your attention the words of the German poet Günter Eich (1907–72) who wrote, “Be uncomfortable; be sand, not oil, in the machinery of the world.”

  On the other hand, this advice and apocalyptic little tale will no doubt convince the woman who wrote in to this newspaper’s letter column recently, “Please edge Mr. Ellison’s voice out,” that I am even more of an unsavory scut than she expected. But then—

  Life is full of unexpected surprises, have you noticed?

  —————LETTERS—————

  Dear Editor:

  What if we like to watch little bunny rabbits being crushed and eaten by big snakes? Are we okay then?

  —Jed (the) Fish Gould

  Interim memo

  The pebble goes into the Pond of Life, and the ripples of Chance go out and out. This one’s gonna be a trifle tricky, so stay with me.

  This was one of the most widely circulated of all the columns: it was picked up as referent by a number of newspapers, and a few syndicated columnists mentioned it en passant. It was reprinted as “Night of the Long Knives” in a “magazine” cover-dated May / June 1984.

  But in March 1983, in issue #80, this same “magazine” reprinted a chronologically-later column which you will find entered here as Installment 30. Both of these columns dealt with Edward Asner—though Installment 30 only mentions Asner in passing. Are we together on this, so far? The later column was reprinted earlier, and the earlier column was reprinted later.

  The later column, Installment 30, was reprinted under the title “Hysterical Paralogia, Part 1,” and drew its share of comments from the readers of the “magazine” but some of them are, uh, how shall I put this delicately, slow readers. Possibly due to overdosing on issues of The Amazing Spider-Man and Dazzler comics. Thus it was, in late August of 1984, after this entire book was completed and was being set in type for publication that I received from Tom Heintjes, news editor of the “magazine,” the text of a letter from one Brian Smith of Marshalltown, Iowa. This letter was scheduled for publication in issue #93 (September 1984) and it was in response to Installment 18 (reprinted, if you are still with me, in issue #90) and Installment 30 (reprinted more than a year earlier). Heintjes solicited my response to the letter, which is a doozy, and I sat down on August 21 to write a brief paragraph of auctorial rebuttal to Mr. Smith’s doozy of a letter.

  2600 words later I had written an unexpected 61st installment of An Edge In My Voice. Twenty months after I’d typed my last column, the fires leapt up and nothing had changed: I was back on the barricades. The “magazine” published the reply to Mr. Smith as an original installment of the column in issue #93 under the title “So Why Aren’t We Laughing?”

  You will find that final, unexpected essay as the final, unplanned Installment 61 of this collection. I make reference to it here—and will again at Installment 30—because chronologically this is where it all started, so you’ll remember where it came from when you get to Mr. Smith’s letter and the 61st Edge at the big ride-out finish of this book.

  INSTALLMENT 18: 21 FEBRUARY 82

  Ed Asner was on the news the other night: the cameras caught him in the parking lot of the Beverly Glen Centre. He had a bodyguard with him. What a punch under the heart of déjà vu I had. All I could think of were recalled images of right-wingers picketing Jane Fonda. And the scroll of memory unwound further and I was in front of the Century Plaza on a night during Lyndon Johnson’s administration, when LBJ was addressing the moneyed Beverly Hills constituency, and we were picketing against the war in Vietnam, trying to get LBJ’s attention, and the late John Wayne came storming out of the hotel, having attended the megabuck-per-plate banquet, and he waded into the protesters, who were at a decent remove from the front doors. And I conjured up the memory of the way it was treated on the video news. Hondo Wayne, the very personification of American macho, in an heroic stand against the unwashed tools of Communist Duplicity.

  (The fact that those protesters were mostly school teachers and pregnant mothers and students and office workers, not lackeys of the Dreaded Red Menace…or that their cause was a concerned and just one…made no difference. Rooster Cogburn was being pluperfectly Amurrican, showing what stern stuff we frontier defenders of the faith were made of.)

  Ed Asner is a public figure. He is the star of one of the three or four series currently on television that is worth one’s viewing time, as opposed to such deifications of imbecility as The Dukes of Hazzard or The Las Vegas Battle of the Showgirls. As Lou Grant—all the way back to The Mary Tyler Moore Show, where he created the character—Asner has been a model of rectitude and humanism for a nation desperately seeking heroes.

  Now, he is also the President of the Screen Actors Guild.

  And he is a private citizen concerned about this nation’s place in specific foreign involvements.

  In all three capacities, he is speaking out. And we are being told there is
some sort of sleazy impropriety in his doing so.

  We are being told by ex-actor Ronald Reagan (out of the mouth of his chum Charlton Heston) that Ed Asner is misusing his position as head of a labor union when he “dabbles in politics.” Amazing. No one bothers to note that Mr. Reagan, when he was President of the very same union, used his position to build a base for his subsequent political career. No one has done a tv commentary recalling Mr. Reagan’s public statement in 1947 that SAG “will not be a party to a blacklist” but under his aegis banned Communists and noncooperative witnesses who appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

  We are being told by ex-actor Ronald Reagan (via the recipient of the Ten Commandments) that Ed Asner is misusing his popularity as an onscreen personality when he makes public statements about our involvement in El Salvador. Amazing. No one seems to remember that Mr. Reagan, when he was doing General Electric Theater, tried to coerce writers into adding to a script a scene in which a Communist mother slaps her child because she catches him praying. There have been no CBS editorial rebuttals to the impropriety accusations dumped on Mr. Asner, in which it is pointed out that Mr. Reagan, in every political campaign he has waged, has offered as his credential for “understanding the common laborer” the fact that he headed up a union.

  One need not comment too ironically that being the President of SAG bears little relation to ramrodding unions whose members toil in mineshafts or sweep city streets. But that’s just picking a nit off one already heavily festooned with the critters.

  We are repeatedly bludgeoned with the specious logic, “What does an actor know, anyhow? He may be a crusading newspaper editor on television, but he’s just playing the part.” It is to giggle, friends. If actors don’t know shit about the Real World, then what do we make of ex-Senator George Murphy, ex-U.N. Ambassador Shirley Temple Black, Ambassador to Mexico John Gavin and, er, uh, dare I think the unthinkable, the old Gipper hisself?

  I realize this is a concept that may jangle the nervous system of those who think all actors have the intellectual capacity of, say, the characters Billie Burke used to play, but I would trust the judgment of Ed Asner or Robert Culp or Katharine Hepburn or Jane Fonda a lot further than that of Justin Dart, an industrialist, William Bradford Shockley, a physicist, or Jerry Falwell, a fund-raiser for censorship. Dart believes “home-rule” means bigger and more soulless multinational corporations; Shockley can “prove” through his theory of dysgenics that blacks are inferior to whites; and Falwell knows for certain that anyone in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment is going straight to Hell. Tell me that these three dabblers in politics are any wiser than Ed Asner and I’ll tell you your head ought to be rented out for the National Hot Air Balloon Races.

  It appears the only opinions that have merit, the only ethical stands one can take, are those that agree with the administration in power. Equal time provisos are not served by Big Brother having primetime access to all three networks while insurgent opinions get a soapbox on the corner. Only the most naive among us still believe that the CIA had no part in the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile. Evidence to the contrary is so blatantly overwhelming that only those protecting the exchequers of the 3000 U.S. firms doing business with the junta down there could make such a duplicitous assertion. Yet last week Reagan’s front men made a public denial of U.S. involvement in Chile in response to the Costa-Gavras film, Missing.

  And the front men are establishing a pattern of intended destruction toward Asner. It all began when SAG joined with Norman Lear’s People For The American Way in opposition to the Moral Majority. Charlton Heston and Robert Conrad and the rest of that sanctimonius lynch mob were irate. When the Humanitarian Award SAG proffers to a well-known actor every year was denied Mr. Reagan—by an 86 to 12 vote of the SAG Board of Directors—the front men for the White House went looney. Last Sunday a rump meeting was called by these undemocratic forces, to recall Asner and to get SAG Public Relations Director Kim Fellner canned. It’s all a pattern, and we’ve seen its like before. It manifests itself in such vile ways as being confronted at the top of the escalators at LAX by a nitwit wearing a sandwich board that reads NUCLEAR PLANTS ARE BUILT BETTER THAN JANE FONDA.

  We live in a time in which cowardice is garbed in moral outrage. Procter & Gamble bows to the whims of self-styled regulators of public morality like the Rev. Wildmon. School boards ban CATCHER IN THE RYE and CANNERY ROW because one or two semiliterate parents drop into Cheyne-Stokes breathing at the sight of the word fuck on a printed page. Deaths by handgun in 1980 in Sweden were 21, in Canada 52, in Japan 48 and in Great Britain 8: they have strict handgun control. In 1980 the handgun body count in the United States was 10,728. But no one will buck the Gun Lobby and the National Rifle Association.

  And Ed Asner had to hire a bodyguard because the airheads have threatened his life. Because he has had the temerity to point out that the ugliness in El Salvador has the makings of another Vietnam for us. And while we may not care too much for Fidel Castro, I wonder what Cuba and our relations with Cuba might be like today if we hadn’t supported the Batista regime to protect U.S. business interests.

  Men like Ed Asner understand that the responsibility that attaches to becoming famous in their special line of work, whether as artist, actor, writer or scientist, is a serious requirement that they use that power for betterment of our days and nights. Is a perception that bucking the front men and the dark philosophies they serve can only bring disaster down on them. Jane Fonda knew it. Arthur Miller knew it. Lillian Hellman knew it. Cliff Robertson knew it. Shirley MacLaine and Marlon Brando knew it. And now Ed Asner is on the line.

  I met Asner once. We talked for maybe a minute and a half. I do not see him as Simon Bolivar or Jomo Kenyatta or George Washington. He is simply a man with convictions and a good head on his shoulders. But he is on the line at this moment…as visible target and, God forbid, as scapegoat.

  What he is bucking, in the greater sense, is the climate of fear that is so reminiscent of the Forties and Fifties. Mr. Heston (who may see himself as Moses or El Cid, which outpoints a mere crusading newspaper editor in any sweepstakes) seems determined to do Mr. Reagan’s dirtywork in terms of scaring the bejeezus out of us, thereby further deepening the miasma of suspicion and paralyzing terror that permits unlimited arms buildup and greater control of our thoughts through Big Brotherdom. Asner is to be the sacrifice.

  Ed Asner is no hero. He is the essence of the Common Man who, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, serves the State best by opposing the State most.

  I wonder how many of us can be courageous enough to make our voices heard in his defense. What he says and what he does may be sanctified or muddleheaded, but damn it to hell it’s his right to make his position known. And using his clout as a television personality or as an official of a union is no more meretricious than an industrialist, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist or a tv evangelist using their special clout to achieve their ends.

  Ed Asner speaks for many of us. By hard work and excellence of craft he has been put in the position of being heard. That he does it, instead of pretending he’s wallpaper as so many of us do, is a demonstration of that which is most enduring in the national spirit.

  We are all speaking. Ed Asner merely has the mouth.

  Let’s not let them put a gag in it.

  Interim memo

  By March, a number of newspapers in other parts of the country had begun picking up the columns for reprint. It wasn’t as nice as syndication (which, in a world of Erma Bombeck and Heloise columns, is unthinkable), particularly because they weren’t paying me for the usage. In the rarefied world of the Fourth Estate we have a high-tech term for this: rip-off. Nonetheless, these little screeds were being viewed beyond the county limits of Los Angeles (I was soon to find out just how far outside) and my co-defendant in the improbable Fleisher Lawsuit (about which nothing will be said in this book), publisher of a “magazine,” in a vainglorious gesture toward sophistication, began reprint
ing An Edge. Actually, he didn’t begin reprinting till October of 1982, but the first few columns were older ones, of which this item was the second. For that reappearance, he kept mewling till I came up with a “title.” I called it

  Gobbledygook on Olympus

  I mention this purely in a spirit of keeping nothing from you, nothing! You have a bit of spinach caught between your two front teeth. You are adopted. Your mother and I are getting a divorce. There is no Easter Bunny.

  INSTALLMENT 19: 1 MARCH 82

  Gobbledygook on Olympus

  As one with Jacques Barzun, Willard Espy, Edwin Newman and John Simon, long have I confessed to this obsessive love affair with the English language. Fer sure, I rilly love it a whole lot! Long have I inveighed against the incorrect use of “hopefully” and the cretinous “at this point in time.” Oh, wow, I’m rilly into it! Jangling to my delicate nervous system is the pronunciation of noo-cue-lerr.

  Molly Haskell, one of the film critics for the New York Times, has written, “Language: the one tool that enables us to grasp hold of our lives and transcend our fate by understanding it.” Hey, I’ll go for that. Fer sure.

  Well, given all of that, you can just imagine my surprise when I was hit by a falling buzzword the other day. It came out of nowhere; and like a deadly dum-dum, it had my name on it.

  And what it was, was this:

  A representative of a large talent agency called a tv network executive, and when he got the man’s secretary on the line he asked her (direct quote), “Is he speakable?”

  Let us pause for an instant. What is creeping toward us will not be deterred by an instant’s pause. When we get back to it in the next paragraph, it’ll still be slithering ahead. Trust me. But do pause with me for this excerpt from a little book called LANGUAGE IN AMERICA: “Let us define a semantic environment as any human situation in which language plays a critical role. This means that the constituents of the environment are (1) people, (2) their purposes, and (3) the language they use to help them achieve their purposes. Because there are many different human purposes, there are, of course, many different kinds of semantic environments. Science is a semantic environment. So is politics; commerce; war; love-making; praying; reporting; law-making; etc. Each of these situations is a context in which people want to do something to, for, with, or against other people, and in which the communication of meaning (language) plays a decisive role. A healthy semantic environment is one in which language effectively serves the purposes of the particular context in which it is used…. The semantic environment is polluted when language obscures from people what they are doing and why they are doing it.”