An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  Something about being morally blackmailed into placing oneself deep in frivolous debt for the five months following December 25th has turned me, over the years, into a cheery Scrooge.

  The preceding Novembral remarks function both as preface to my annual Decembral Fuck Xmas column (I’ll warn you again several times before it appears…contrary to Accepted Wisdom I do not write these screeds intentionally to piss you off…unless you were one of those who voted against Prop. 15 in which case bad cess to you…and so the warnings will serve to help you avoid that particular upcoming polemic) and as apologia for interdicting my own non-Xmas-gift giving policy.

  Or as Walt Whitman put it: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes).”

  Which is to say, if you must give a gift this year, there is a way you can do it elegantly, spectacularly, intelligently…and stay solvent. I have come up with two gifts of such uncommon wonderfulness, so reasonably priced, that in service of the commonweal I must bring them to your attention. I do so in mid-November because you may have to order ahead, and if you want to have the goodies on hand at the Yule moment, I must tell you about them now. Stop backing & filling, Ellison, and get to it!

  Both gifts are intended to uplift and enrich the recipients; and both have that ambience of being selected with painstaking care marked by rare good taste and awesome intelligence. They are that special gift that says not only did you care enough to send the very best, but you are innovative enough to know what is the very best.

  The first is a book. The gift of art and literature.

  The University of California Press has published a popularly priced edition of the absolutely stunning Barry Moser-illustrated ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND based on the $1,000 per copy Pennyroyal Press (of Northampton, Mass.) limited edition. It can be purchased for $19.95 until December 31st ($24.95 thereafter) and mere words cannot convey the joy of leafing through this magnificent version of Prof. Dodgson’s immortal rampage in the world of the Mad Hatter, the Dormouse, the Cheshire Cat and the Red Queen’s race. Unless one were to indulge oneself by shouting “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”

  If you ask yourself—and do try to answer without spilling your tea—how long it’s been since you reread ALICE, actually sat there smiling and chortling with glee at “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! How I wonder where you’re at!”—then you can make book (this one, I hope) that the person you decide to treasure this year hasn’t gone back to Wonderland too recently, either.

  And what a good time it is to fall down that rabbit hole all in the golden afternoon. If the year has been as burdensome for you as it’s been for John DeLorean and the NFL and tourism in Lebanon and the makers of Tylenol, then a verdict from a jury composed of a deck of cards, no matter if they’re screaming off with her head, is a lark by comparison; and so condign for that treasured one who managed to get through 1982 without the loss of mind or having to file in Chapter 13 bankruptcy court. It is a time when the inspired jabberwocky of a Lewis Carroll seems a linchpin between us and sanity.

  And oh what a splendid edition. No, make that a!

  Though I have in my library copies of ALICE illustrated by Tenniel and Ben Shahn and Dali and Ralph Steadman and Arthur Rackham, none of them, not even the traditional Tenniel versions, surpasses Barry Moser’s seventy-five miraculous engravings. His Caterpillar on page 68 is aloof, elitist, urbane and bears a marked resemblance to William F. Buckley. The monocle’d March Hare on page 85 is a portrait of every slightly wonky college professor you’ve ever had to suffer with.

  If you dash out now and invade your nearest good, well-stocked bookstore—Book Soup on Sunset or Westwood Book Shop seem good bets—you will fall so in love with the U. of C.’s edition that all in a moment your gift needs for those treasured few will be satiated.

  It’ll be nice having you owe me one, because you’ll thank me for apprising you of this frabjous delicacy. Ignore this advisement only if you cannot bear the thought of your friends covering you with gratitude and sloppy kisses.

  The second gift you may have to order (though the classical music annex of Tower Records on Sunset has a good selection). It is the gift of fine music.

  Each of you must have one dear friend on the gift-buying list who is a killer to shop for. Mostly because that sole atavistic personage claps his / her hands over his / her ears when you put on the latest aural gangbang by Missing Persons or The Human League or Roxy Music. For that dear lover of what we used to call “good music,” I have the perfect answer to your conundrum.

  If those worthies really enjoy classical music, they have no doubt already discovered the cornucopial wonders of the Nonesuch and Musical Heritage Society catalogues. But they are less likely to have been exposed to the Louisville Orchestra First Edition catalogue. Beginning in 1954–55, as a result of innovative policies that saved the Louisville Orchestra from bankruptcy and dissolution, this series of over 150 discs (110 hours of new, specially-commissioned modern classical works, 356 compositions by 233 composers), is as splendid a treasure trove of rare finds as anything you might dream in a laudanum fog.

  Just selecting at random from the dozen or so First Edition albums at hand as I write this column, I can recommend the light-as air architecture of Hector Tosar’s Toccata, to be found with other modern pieces by Ernst Toch, Jacques Ibert, Yoav Talmi and Camargo Guarnieri on LS 702. I’ll wager you’ve never heard any of these pieces, the Miniature Overture, Tres Dansas Para Orquestra, Overture on Mexican Themes, the lyrical Bacchanale by Ibert. And if you, quixotic and ever-seeking as you are, have never heard them, think of the pleasure your aurally cognizant friend will have.

  Or venture into uncharted territory with Gene Gutche’s Genghis Khan, Op. 37 (LS 722), or Karel Husa’s Music for Prague 1968 on the same album. If this latter composition does not make you wonder where, in fact, John Williams came up with his score for Star Wars, then you’ve lost the ability to spot grand larceny.

  We’re talking here Villa-Lobos and John Addison (LOU-695); Ibert’s heartrending Ballad of Reading Gaol based on Wilde’s poem (LS-736) coupled with the banquet of Charles Koechlin’s Partita for Chamber Orchestra; Jolivet and John Vincent (LOU-572) with Suite Transocéane and the Symphony in D. We’re talking contemporary classical music that surges and enthralls, that uplifts and demands, that restores to your technopop-blasted brains the sense of what is immortal in music, not merely that which can be pushed by a billboard on the Sunset Strip.

  This is a catalogue of wonders, every disc an open sesame of intelligence and wit and manifestations of the highest musical ambitions of the human race. It is, in short, the perfect way to demonstrate respect for those who expect a gift at the end of December.

  At $7.98 per disc, ordered directly from The Louisville Orchestra, Inc. West Main Street; Louisville, Kentucky 40202), you can consider yourself a sumptuous gift-giver, and you won’t have to take up lodgings in Tap City. I suggest you send them a fast letter asking for the catalogue. Or take a run over to Tower Classical on Sunset and see what they have in stock. I don’t think you’ll be upset to pay the slightly higher price (they charge $7.99 per disc) for the availability of these titles. But I’d make the move soon: when I stopped by Tower the other night, their stock was low on First Edition releases. But if you can’t get what you want, well, at least I’ve given you the address in Kentucky.

  In a world where the plastic fripperies we’re told via tv and four-color lithography are the ne plus ultra of what we need this second, persiflage that lies dusty and unused three weeks after the holiday, these two gifts I suggest will bring repeated pleasure to the one or two people you really think deserve something special.

  For the rest of them, there’s always a McDonald’s gift certificate for a Toadburger and Fries, all those swell Judith Krantz and Sidney Sheldon paperbacks, the new Bruce Springsteen album, botulism, herpes, canker sores, chaffed thighs, Monsignor starring Christopher Reeve, and a parsnip in a pear tree.
r />   —————LETTERS—————

  Go To Your Room

  Dear Editor:

  I do not feel that expressing an opinion on an issue of public concern to your paper ought to subject me to unreasoned, personal attack by Harlan Ellison on its pages [Oct. 25-Nov. 4].

  Mr. Ellison really broke the rules of civilized debate when he moved from discussing the issues raised in my (and another) letter, to snide character defamation. He has never met me. How dare he imply that I support advertising concepts too absurd and inhuman to bear repeating? I remind you that these atrocities sprang from Mr. Ellison’s mind, not mine. This man is on such an emotional hair-trigger, no wonder he wants laws to protect him from himself.

  The next time you allow Mr. Ellison to respond publicly to letters from your readers, you might remind him to address the issues broached in the letters, and not to take potshots at the characters of people he neither knows nor has researched. Otherwise, you should spank him soundly and send him to his room without supper.

  —Michael Lawler

  Echo Park

  INSTALLMENT 52: 16 NOVEMBER 82

  By the time you read this I’ll be back from a lecture gig at Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana. As I prepare to fly out tomorrow afternoon, going into a state that failed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment for the first time in, oh, maybe six years—save for those occasions when, under the aegis of NOW, I made forays into unratified territory to promote the ERA—I sit here commencing my fifty-second conversation with you, deep in a brown funk at the demise of the Amendment; and knowing you’ll be reading this on Thanksgiving Day or shortly thereafter, I wonder just what there is to give thanksgiving for.

  And because it’s that kind of a night, and because the mail has been a bit too full of the sort of people who like to pick nits, I choose to flee the present. I choose to tumble back into the past to remember moments that shine, therein to find cause for a smile. To find reasons for thanksgiving. The memory mist parts and if you like, I’ll take you with me…

  Eight or ten years ago, as winter slunk in across the Eastern seaboard, I was reluctantly called to New York on some business now forgotten. I do not return to the Apple with much enthusiasm these days, and it has been so for almost fifteen years. A very small part of the malaise that settles over me when it becomes inescapable that I must return to Manhattan, is that bi-coastal rivalry…more regional chauvinism than pragmatic assessment of relative merits. No, I suffer trepidation about my feet touching the pavements of NYC more out of a Proustian sense of loss than fear of lurking dangers. The City seems so sad these days. There are lines in the faces of the people and the buildings. A weariness. A stolid clinging to survival against a soulfire-leaching winter perpetually slinking in.

  And so it was, eight or ten years ago, that I checked into my hotel, called some friends as midnight descended, and asked if they wanted to come out for a late evening snack. Several old buddies thought that would be pleasant, and they named a small restaurant on Lexington in the lower Fifties. I said I’d meet them in half an hour, wrapped myself in muffler and topcoat, and went out into the street. I decided to walk. Cold, nasty wind wielding its scythe up Lexington, snow beginning to float down to melt instantly on my shoulders. At half past midnight the Avenue was almost deserted. The halated dimness of shop lights left burning as futile deterrent to smash&grabbers seemed like wan beacons of some lost and sunken undersea civilization. Winter in New York produces in me all the worst attributes of bad poetry.

  I began walking up Lexington, hunched over against the wind that drove snowflakes past the muffler and down my neck.

  Between 44th and 45th Streets, huddled on the steps of the huge Lexington post office substation, was a pile of debris from the center of which a pair of eyes marked my passage. No more startling a creature than one of the city’s shapeless bag ladies, swaddled in sweaters, pages of the Post laid against her skin as insulating layers. No feet, no hands, no shoulders or thighs. A mound of dark fabric from which wariness radiated.

  Her eyes followed me as I passed her, perhaps my stride breaking just barely as a vagrant thought occurred to me; but I was walking, and the thought had no form. I knew that she would observe only till it was obvious I was not going to stop or accost her. The sensitive antennae of the survivor.

  I walked another block. And stopped. The wind picked at my hair. The thought had firmed at the edges. It was that terrible scene from the film Zorba the Greek in which the sweet old Lila Kedrova character is dying, and the shrikelike Greek women from the town, all swathed in black, crouch around the perimeter of her room, waiting for the final exhalation of breath so they can divest the bedroom of its furnishings. It was a scene that had repelled me when I’d first viewed the film, and so profoundly had it affected me—I do not know why—that it had soured me on ever visiting the wonders of that gorgeous and terrible land. And now I stood in the middle of Lexington Avenue, seeing that tableau in my mind.

  I turned and went back a block to the woman in the rag heap. She had moved slightly. I could now see the outline of a lower leg, a knee. I stood at the edge of the sidewalk, leaving safety space between us so she would understand I was no jackroller, come to take her secrets from their plastic shopping bags. She seemed not to be aware of me; but I knew that was not so.

  Over the sound of the wind, I said, “May I help you?”

  And reply there was none.

  “It’s beginning to come down,” I said. She knew that. “They say it’ll be freezing by morning.” And she knew that, too. “Let me help you,” I said again.

  There was no movement from the pile, and had it not been that her eyes were open—staring away into the mid-distance—I would have thought she was sleeping.

  I moved closer, stood near her, looking down. Though ill and living in Florida, my mother was still alive in that year; there was no resemblance.

  “Here,” I said, extending the twenty dollar bill I had taken from my pocket as I’d walked back that long block, “here, take this and get yourself a room at the Y. A couple of meals.”

  She made no move to take the money. I felt the fool.

  I felt, suddenly, a diminution of the pity that had overcome me. In its place was an equally saddening respect for her sense of self-possessiveness. Perhaps it was only that she had been too dulled by too many years on concrete to accept the gesture; but perhaps it was that she was self-contained and needed no cheap offerings intended to balm my soul. She would not take the money. Choosing to believe it was pride that kept her motionless, I laid the bill on the shape of knee and smiled and said, “It’ll be warm again soon.”

  And I walked away. She had not moved once.

  I met my friends at the restaurant, we drank coffee and talked about another world than the one in which the shape with eyes lived. At two-thirty I took my leave, and pulled my collar up, and went out to retrace the path to my hotel.

  When I passed the post office, she was still there, in the same position. She had not moved, but her eyes watched me again. The twenty dollar bill was still there on her knee, now wet from the snow.

  It would be there tomorrow morning when she chose to change her locale of residence. Or it would have been plucked from her knee by a passing stranger. Or it would fall off and lie there when she stood up, and she would walk away from it.

  But I knew she would not put it in her pocket.

  There is a liquid moment in our life when all that torments us solidifies in reality, like a fly imbedded in amber; and we understand that there are those without hope, without limbs, without beginnings and endings that matter. A moment when we fly out of our dominating thoughts and the shell of our body, and look down from a great height at the rest of the world.

  In those moments, even if we do not believe in deities, we hear the hushed whisper, “Thank God,” and we slip like smoke back into ourselves, and move on, smaller and safer and quite ready to accept the paper cuts and stubbed toes the universe does not know we su
ffer.

  In those moments we give thanks.

  At this contemplative time of the year, a year that has not been as kind as we might have wished but that nonetheless has been a year through which we maintained, I wish you some peace, an hour or two of ease, and the hope that you have had a liquid moment looking down at the rest of your kind.

  INSTALLMENT 53: 29 NOVEMBER 82

  Letters reprinted with permission from L.A. Weekly

  I have seen the light. The logic of his arguments has just turned me around and opened my eyes. Ronald Reagan emerges as one of the Great Thinkers. The worldwide Nuclear Freeze Movement is a Communist Conspiracy. He said so. He did, he really did; and I believe it. You’re all Reds, every one of you.

  It’s all part of the Commie takeover through the use of fluoridation of the water and questioning Bill Buckley’s syntax.

  You think I’m kidding, don’t you? A lot of you think I say some thing for effect when I mean just the opposite, don’t you? You think I’m using satire as a literary device, right? How quick you all are to spot it when I do it. (Which is why I get some of the dumbest correspondence ever penned by paw or claw.) Well, this time I’m being real serious. I’ve come to adore Ronald Reagan, purely on the basis of his illuminating the dark side of this mass social movement.

  I never understood, during all the years I was part of the Anti-War Movement, that I was nothing but a well-meaning, deluded Pawn of Moscow. My thinking was all wrong. I hated J. Edgar Hoover and General Westmoreland and even Barry Goldwater (who was recently proclaimed a saint). Little did I suspect I was aiding the International Bolshevik Menace.

  Fortunately, I heard our President in one of his recent fireside chats, and he made it all clear to me…about the Communist influences in the Nuclear Freeze Movement, that is.