An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  A letter follows this column. It has nothing to do with this column. It has to do with Installment 14. So why do I reprint it here? Because this was the issue in which it appeared, and I make reference to it in Installment 30, coming up.

  “Madge, is this guy anal retentive, or what?”

  “Don’t ask me. Does he have to tell us everything?”

  “I didn’t need to hear there’s no Easter Bunny.”

  Letters published with permission from the L.A. Weekly

  INSTALLMENT 27: 1 MAY 82

  Once more into the mailbag, dear friends.

  Bearing in mind two quotes that keynote what this is about each week. The first, from Voltaire, who said, “My trade is to say what I think.” The second, from William Blake: “Always speak your mind and base men will avoid you.”

  But before we get to the current batch of screeds and missives, a message from the author.

  Fair is fair, and right is right. Those who have read my columns over the years, in a variety of printed media, know that while I frequently display a nauseating sanctimoniousness, when I later discover that I have been in error, I do a mea culpa that would put to shame a former Nazi prison guard trying to escape an Israeli firing squad. Thus, once again, as it falls to all of us made of mere mortal clay, I have been apprised of incorrect statements I made on the basis of inadequate information.

  In my column of March 19-25, wherein I answered the first batch of mail directed to this forum, I took to task a young woman who goes by the name of “Spock,” who had sent an anonymous letter of random testiness. In the course of replying, I operated off misinformation imparted by a source that bamboo slivers under my fingernails will not get me to reveal. Notwithstanding the “privileged communication” aspect of this exchange, I was given erroneous data, and I said “Spock” had (a) been fired from an unnamed firm here in Los Angeles and (b) had swiped an envelope from that firm to send me the anonymous letter. I was wrong. In fact, she could not have been fired from said firm…because she never worked for said firm; and she did not swipe the envelope, because it was available in the office of the firm for which she now does work.

  This is an apology. It emerges not from fear of reprisal, legal or otherwise, but out of a sense of rectitude. Fair is fair, and right is right. I was in error, and I want anyone who read that column, who might have believed those misstatements were true, to know that I was flying blind. I will work harder to ensure errors do not again appear in this peripatetic congeries of casual, personal observations.

  Later this week I will divest myself of the shirt of thorns I presently wear.

  One caveat to all of you out there, the foregoing as a prologue: except for the occasional instances when space or forgetfulness lobby against its inclusion, each of these columns concludes with a statement that approximately every six weeks I will publicly answer mail received. That notice, in law, is an instrument serving the doctrine of “Fair Comment.” It is a First Amendment defense of opinion that speaks to the agreement we enter into when you write and I respond. It says you do so, whether anonymously or with signature, with full awareness that your words can and may appear in print. The legal precedent usually cited in this respect is the instance in which the political cartoonist Paul Conrad did a drawing of ex-Mayor Sam Yorty in a straitjacket, and Yorty sued. And lost.

  So understand that if you toss me a question, a comment, some praise or a brickbat, you’re fair game for publication. The only exception to that is if you clearly indicate in your letter that what you’ve written is, as we say, DNQ. Do not quote. I will protect your desire in this respect as ruthlessly as I will attempt to track down those who send scurrilous notes without a signature, an act I consider extremely cowardly. A week or so ago, I received an excellent letter from a local writer, commenting on the paperback publishing columns I wrote; a letter filled with useful data. But the writer asked politely that I not reprint the letter or reveal from what source I’d gotten my information. I like that writer for the trust demonstrated; and the confidence is sacrosanct. If you tell me something off the record, it stays that way. If you want to tip this column off to someone or something that ought to have its covers yanked, the source stops here. You are protected.

  Now to the mail.

  Skip Press of Los Angeles wrote, “In response to [the two articles on Bill Starr and the lack of promotion his book CHANCE FORTUNE received at the hands of Pinnacle Books], I think if a writer’s book isn’t being promo’d enough to suit him, he should schlep it himself, à la Wayne Dyer and YOUR ERRONEOUS ZONES. Period. P.S. I’m a writer.”

  You may be a writer, but you’re certainly not a pragmatist. Nor, obviously, have you ever tried to get yourself on a talk show with a straight novel. As far as the bookers for these shows are concerned, they don’t want the garden-variety writers who will hype their work. They want someone like Charles Higham, who will hawk a piece of sleaze such as his meretricious exposé of Errol Flynn that advances the theory that Flynn was a Nazi spy. They want peddlers of sensationalism or fad diets, purveyors of Hollywood gossip or theorists who swear the world is ending next week. They want freaks and authors of non-books. They do not care to discuss Freudian symbolism in THE WHITE HOTEL with D. M. Thomas; instead they prefer a little sexual titillation by way of Alexandra Penney and her HOW TO MAKE LOVE TO A MAN.

  Further, most writers are not good talkers. They are not trained talk show fodder, prepared to put on a dog&pony act for the likes of those who think tv chat formats are “the rebirth of salon conversations.” Hell, I did more interviews with Snyder on the NBC Tomorrow Show (I was once told) than anyone else…and it was murder trying to get on simply to promote my latest book. There always had to be a “hook.”

  So when you make a seemingly uninformed declaration that if a writer who got $5500 for a novel isn’t getting it hyped by his / her publisher, s/he ought to spend $10,000 taking it from town to town across the United States, hoping s/he can get airtime, doing what the publisher is supposed to be doing, you reveal a total lack of perception of the realities that obtain.

  F. A. “Tony” Bird of N. Hollywood sent me a postcard on which he printed, “Dear, poor, merry Harlan, Ye waxeth raspy. If you live on the second floor or higher, why don’t you drop that typewriter on something hard? Then go surfin’. It’s a fine world out there, somewhere—I’ve seen it.”

  To Tony, and all the others who seem to believe that I enjoy this condition of perpetual anger from which emerge the words I write, who somehow manage to stumble through the noons and midnights of their lives without accepting any responsibility for the human chain of which they are nominally a part, who don’t wanna be brought down, like, and who would advise the rest of us who have to clean up their mess that we shouldn’t be such Gloomy Guses and to go surfin’, I offer by way of explanation the following famous quote from Pastor Martin Niemöller:

  “In Germany they first came for the Communists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me—and by that time no one was left to speak up.”

  Going to bed angry and getting up angrier every morning is a filthy way to live, Tony old bird; and while I might not find my joy in surfin’ or gettin’ loaded, I can think of half a hundred other ways of letting light into my life that would enrich my spirit better than posing here each week with my gardyloos and look-outs about pernicious maggots like Jerry Falwell and John Schmitz and Brian De Palma and Phyllis Schlafly. But, as it has been said, it’s a grungy job…and someone has to do it. Those of us who are prisoners of our ethics have no choice. As release, occasionally, I’ll write a lightweight, funny column. Just to stay sane. But if you’d take some of this crap on your suntanned shoulders, Tone m’man, then maybe I could take a month off and go clim
b Kilimanjaro.

  But as long as you keep doggin’ it, dear curl-rider, I have to pack my load…and yours. Further, deponent saith not.

  Peter Hankoff of Hollywood sent along a snippet of movie review from the L.A. Times of April 16th in which film reviewer Linda Gross, while commenting on a film titled Battletruck, went into left field to say, “The unpleasant brave new world conveyed is Harlan Ellison sci-fi.” Peter was not the only one to bring my attention to Ms. Gross’s reference to me. Since I am not now, nor have I ever been a writer of “sci-fi” (whatever the fuck that is), despite persistent mythology to that effect, I was forced to presume Ms. Gross was making allusion to my story “A Boy and His Dog”—or more likely, the film of the same name, which was the splendid work of Writer-Director L.Q. Jones. As Ms. Gross clearly did not know what it was I did write, I took this opportunity to send her several of my books. She said she’d read them at her convenience and get back to me. As of this date I have not heard from her.

  But while I’m at it, I’d like to point out to my readers that while the philological construct “sci-fi” is in wide and common use, mostly for the convenience of bored city desk headline writers who save space and wearying cerebration with the five letters and hyphen, instead of the fourteen letters and mid-space of “science fiction,” this is a label that many, of those of us who work in the genre, despise. They compare it to calling a woman a “broad,” a black man a “nigger,” a Latino a “spick” and a Jew a “kike.” Use it at your peril. And, hi, Forry; that’s one helluva idiot legacy you’ve left us.

  Thankyous to Fran Alstrom, Cynthia Zamperini, Grayson Jordan, Kevin Brennan, Richard Paschal, Christopher Herron Lee (who I’d like to get in touch with me so I can renew an old acquaintance), Jeff Miller and Janice Guffan—all of whom sent informational cards with nice words of praise. As for Joseph Bleckman, your most recent note was as filled with swamp gas as an earlier communiqué, but the stamp hadn’t been canceled, so thanks for the 20¢ postage, thereby proving good can come from evil.

  There’s more, but I guess I’ll save it till next time. Gee, I wish I had a terrific punchline.

  —————LETTERS—————

  Nobody Is Worth Watching

  Dear Editor:

  Allow me to congratulate you for having the sensational taste to include a weekly column by Harlan Ellison. I followed his column regularly when it was being published in Future Life, which was almost the only reason I ever bought the magazine, and I was rather upset when I couldn’t find it on the stands anymore. Naturally I was delighted when I discovered that the only L.A. paper worth reading anyway had added even one more excellent reason for roaming the city on Thursday evenings trying to find a copy.

  Now allow me to explain why I feel Mr. Ellison has succeeded in making a complete ass of himself. It centers around his feelings toward the films of Brian De Palma. Now, I will be the first to admit that Mr. De Palma has a rather perverse sense of humor and his films may be rather violent at times, but to put Blow Out in the same class as Friday the Thirteenth and The Omen is going a bit too far.

  A few years back one of the most cynical and insulting movies I have ever seen was voted “Most Outstanding Motion Picture of the Year.” I speak of The French Connection. The reason I detest this movie so much is not that it is poorly made, or that it is gory, or that it is violent. The movie is actually quite an impressive piece of film craftsmanship; the editing is excellent, the staging of the action scenes is very well done, and so on. No, I hate this film because the film-makers have presented us with a world in which nobody is capable of recognizing the individual humanity of other people. In short, nobody cares.

  At one point the hero steals the car of a bystander by force (I won’t say an innocent bystander, because in this movie, innocent people simply don’t exist) and drives through the city, chasing after the villain, crashing into other cars, and judging from the severity of some of the crashes, possibly killing people along the way. Furthermore, this man is not presented as the exception to the rule, he is presented as a rather typical human being. To borrow a phrase from Harlan Ellison, the human species presented in this story would not be capable of painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or of putting a man on the moon. The world presented in this film is a world in which nobody, and I mean Nobody is worth anything.

  What kind of world does Brian De Palma create in such films as Blow Out? I’ll agree it is a somewhat cynical vision, a world where innocent people are attacked and killed without reason or warning, a world where nobody is safe from a ruthless murderer, a world that would have tested the patience of Job. The difference between this world and the world presented in The French Connection is that the characters are capable of recognizing tragedy when they see it. Even in Dressed to Kill, a film which is much harder to defend, the look on Nancy Allen’s face when she discovers the body of Angie Dickinson told me that she saw beyond the blood to the body of a human being whose life had just been taken. Unlike Popeye in The French Connection, she saw the tragedy of senseless murder, as did John Travolta when he discovered Nancy Allen’s body at the end of Blow Out.

  Harlan Ellison defended the showing of an occasionally gory movie, Wolfen, at the Writer’s Guild screening because the film was “about something,” and, having seen it recently, I’ll agree with him completely, but I must protest that Blow Out is also “about something.” It is about the pasteurized America presented to us by the media, and about the real America hidden underneath. Harlan Ellison doesn’t know that, because he is so blind to De Palma’s films that he walked out early and missed the movie’s most important scenes.

  And while we are discussing storytellers and their visions of humanity, what kind of world view does Harlan Ellison present in such stories as “A Boy and His Dog” and “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”? I’ll leave that for you readers to decide.

  —Miguel Munoz-Perou

  L.A.

  Interim memo

  Things started getting scary. Back in February of that year I’d done a column on the attacks being leveled against Ed Asner by Reagan’s White House through the gawping yapper of Charlton Heston (Installment 18). By May, the Lou Grant show had been summarily dumped and there was abroad in the land—in the words of Tennessee William’s Big Daddy—“a pow’ful stench of men-dacity” as CBS gibbered and babbled how un-co-opted they were. I was outraged and, in one of those calls-to-the-bastions that went out of style in the mid-Seventies, I pleaded for warm bodies to picket. To my amazement, over two thousand readers and members of the ACLU showed up. Things started getting scary. Far-famed as I am for my puckish wit and disingenuous humility, I beg you to believe that this response, the first touch of actual naked power I ever experienced, scared the crap outta me. I had a taste of what it must have felt like for presidents, dictators, evangelists and rabble-rousers. And I was delighted to feel an utter abhorrence for such power. I shied back from it as from the pox. And realized that there were actually people out there paying attention to what I was writing; and thus I could not simply run amuck and indulge myself without considering the responsibility. It became a strain: thinking things out before I wrote them. Presenting sides of arguments I loathed but had to consider openly. Trying not to smartass when logic was needed. But things got scarier, as you will see in the next installment, if Uncle Wiggly doesn’t get it on with Mrs. Bow-Wow, contract herpes, stave in her head with an andiron, and get twenty-to-life up at Q.

  INSTALLMENT 28: 7 MAY 82

  Last week I told some dude who wrote in telling me to go surfin’ and not to let the bad old nasty world get to me, that if he would accept just a smidge of the burden of the world, that I could knock off and have a vacation. The subtext, my blossoms, was that a teensy demonstration of courageous commitment would help detoxify my overweening need to get involved in so many “causes.” Courage and commitment are topical threads that run through these columns, have you noticed that?

  Well, this week I offer you a painl
ess way to put your suntanned carcasses on the line without danger. All it’ll take is two hours of your time next Monday night. Monday nights are dead, anyhow.

  I won’t ask you to hike down through 120° heat to the Mexican border to support Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers. I won’t ask you to brave National Guard rifles legging it from Selma to Montgomery. I won’t ask you to mass in front of the Century Plaza Hotel to protest Johnson’s war in the Nam and risk getting a ’tac squad baton up your nose, like we did back in 1967.

  All I’ll ask is that you join with hundreds—maybe thousands—of us who will be picketing in front of CBS Television City on the corner of Fairfax and Beverly in Hollywood, between 9:00 and 11:00 at night, this coming Monday the 17th, to protest CBS’s cowardly cancellation of the Lou Grant series.

  Photo: Gary Leonard

  This protest is being jointly sponsored by Americans for Democratic Action and the American Civil Liberties Union.

  You will be in good company.

  The company of those of us who understand that the ratings on Lou Grant was not the reason CBS canned what is, unarguably, one of the finest and most relevant shows ever to emerge from that charnel house of ashen cowardice and embalmed ideas known as the television industry. You will be in the company of those who can sweep away all the Uriah Heep disingenuousness of the spineless network executives who bowed to Falwell’s Moral Malignity and Wildmon’s pernicious Coalition for Redneck Television, and Reagan’s all-star hit squad of Chuck “El Cid” Heston and little Bobby Conrad, the town bully. You will be at one with those who are determined not to let the shadow legions take from us everything we prize by way of freedom of thought and speech, without one helluva fight.