On Feb. 9, 1947 Sturgeon wrote to his mother about his new association with still another agent, Scott Meredith: In my files was one 5000 worder called NOON GUN, written during that desperate period in early ’45 when I was starving in New York and my family likewise in St. Croix. Scott was mightily pleased with it. I had given it to my current agent, a sweet old has-been called Ed Bodin, and he had mismarketed it dreadfully. Since its one or two submissions it had lain in the files. (Two others he had had, I sold instantly when I picked up my stuff from him last spring.) So I rewrote NOON GUN, making only slight changes in the dialogue which referred to the war (the magazines don’t know there was a war any more!) and gave it to him. It’s been out for quite a few weeks, and Scott says that’s good.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if that story, of all stories, should be my first slick sale! If it had sold when written, I wouldn’t have been stuck in New York. I’d have been home (St. Croix) for Christmas with my pockets bulging and my faith in myself (which later took such a dreadful fall) intact and blooming!
Magazine blurb: AS THEY WALKED, HE TRIED TO ENVISION THE BIG GUY GROVELING—BUT ALL HE COULD SEE WAS THAT KID WAITING FOR THE CANNON TO FIRE.
“Bulldozer Is a Noun”: unpublished. Again, the St. Croix address on the manuscript shows it was written before June 1945, perhaps in spring ’45 when Sturgeon briefly held the first office job of his life. On August 3, 1945, TS wrote his mother: Finally in March met some people in the Biltmore Bar and found myself Copy Director of Advertising Division of a big electronics firm. $85. [ellipses his] … something happened. I didn’t send any money south. I didn’t know why. Fifty bucks just then would have saved the whole situation. I went psychotic over food. I couldn’t get enough to eat. I ate five, six meals a day; cost me $30, $40 a week to eat. I put money into insurance, things like that.
No title on surviving manuscript; this title assigned by PW.
“August Sixth 1945”: unpublished. Probably written soon after. The authorial address in the upper right corner of the first page suggests TS did consider this something to be submitted for possible publication; whether and where it was submitted is not known.
“The Chromium Helmet”: first published in Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1946. Written at the end of 1945. Sam Moskowitz in Seekers of Tomorrow reports what TS told him in a 1961 interview: “Sturgeon returned to New York … He was in a daze for months. John Campbell befriended him, inviting him as a house guest for periods as prolonged as two weeks at a stretch. Gradually, Campbell coaxed him out of his depression, until one day, in the basement of the editor’s home, Sturgeon sat down at a typewriter and wrote ‘The Chromium Helmet.’ Campbell read the first draft straight from the typewriter and accepted the story.” In 1972 TS told David Hartwell, I was really in a zombieish condition. Gradually I began to write again, and finally I wrote a story called “The Chromium Helmet” in John’s cellar out in Westfield, New Jersey. And that was really the first of these so-called “therapeutic” or optimum humanity stories. And they just went on from there. However, an undated (probably mid-’46) fragment of a letter from TS to a friend found in Sturgeon’s papers complicates things by saying, … began to write again, and sold “The Chromium Helmet,” four thousand words of which had been done for a year or more. That broke the ice, and I began to pull out of it. Could this possibly be “the Campbell inspired yarn anent polarized fields of rotators” Art Kohn mentioned in his 12/44 letter (see “Crossfire” note)? Regardless of when Sturgeon began it, finishing and selling the story in Campbell’s cellar was certainly an event, a breakthrough, TS long remembered and recounted.
Your editor, who’s done much of the research for these notes in Sturgeon’s daughter’s cellar, wishes to report that he now considers “The Chromium Helmet” a major and surprising and visionary story, even though other readers including the estimable Mr. Silverberg, and myself two decades ago when I first read it, have failed to appreciate it. Sturgeon almost alone among modern writers seems to have some insight into the psychological and cultural significance of the technological advances being made in the realm of “wish fulfillment” in the Media Age. I missed this story’s allegorical power until now, even though TS told me in 1975: “The Chromium Helmet,” according to that man I told you about [a renegade therapist who treated Sturgeon with LSD in 1965 at the therapist’s country home over a period of weeks, just like a character in a Pynchon novel] is the first of my “therapy” stories—it’s not too exceptionable as a story, but it does have that component, as does everything else that I’ve ever written since then. And from then on, I started turning out a tremendous amount of stuff, and finally busted it wide open.
He was able to point out to me that the nature of my work changed so drastically between 1940 and 1946, that they were not wasted years, that clearly something was going on all the time. There was an evolution towards something infinitely more important and infinitely more serious than anything I’d ever done before. And that there was no break, there were no “wasted years.” This was a tremendous comfort to me, it is to this day as a matter of fact. And now, when I go through long periods, which I do, when I’m not writing anything, I don’t panic.
Hartwell (’72): “You’ve said that love is the principal theme of practically everything you’ve ever written. Have you ever written anything that it wasn’t?” Sturgeon: No, except that my preoccupation in a larger sense is the optimum man. The question of establishing an internal ecology, where the optimum liver works with the optimum spleen and the optimum eyeball and so forth. Now, when you get to the mind—not the brain, but the optimum mind—then you have the whole inner space idea; my conviction is that there’s more room there than there is in outer space, in each individual human being. Love of course has a great deal to do with that, as a necessary coloration and adjunct to everything that we do—to love oneself, to love the parts of oneself, to love the interaction of the parts of oneself, and then the interaction of that whole organism with those of another person. Which is as good a definition of love as you can get, I think.
And to PW in 1975: It wasn’t until comparatively recently, before I discovered that there is a common denominator in all my stories, and that is, the search for the optimum human being. This was pointed out to me by a therapist many years ago, when I was bemoaning the fact of a time when I would let six years go by without writing anything. He said that the stories I’d written before that hiatus were good enough in their way, and brilliant in some ways, but they were entertainments. And the ones I wrote after that six year period were all—well, we all take our own specialty, you know, and graft it onto what we’re talking about—but he said they’re all therapy stories. In the sense that they are almost always about somebody who is no good who gets good, somebody who is good who gets better, somebody who is sick and gets well, somebody who gets well and turns into a super-person, and so on. “The Other Man,” “Maturity” and all these different stories are very much obsessed with the search for the optimum human being. Not the superman … PW: “We’re talking here about human potential.” TS: That’s right. And everything that I’ve ever done since then has been—well, the one that I won all those awards for, “Slow Sculpture,” is purely and simply a description of that search. Not only for the optimum human being but for human acceptance of the optimum human being.
Magazine blurb: THIS ISN’T THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS—BUT IT WAS NO HELP TO FIVE REASONABLY COMFORTABLE PEOPLE TO ENCOUNTER THE STRANGE EFFECTS OF THE ‘CORMIUM HEMLET.’
“Memorial”: first published in Astounding Science-Fiction, April 1946. Written January ’46?
Sturgeon’s story introduction from Without Sorcery (1948):
It could happen. it really could.
It might happen. It really might.
It can be stopped. It’s up to you.
On the Science Fiction Radio Show in 1983, Sturgeon made a comment on “Thunder and Roses” (written or finished 1947) that seems more applicable to “Memorial”: It’s
probably the first “atomic doom” story that was written after the bomb was dropped. It was written in late 1945 and was looked at with considerable passion. There wasn’t anybody in the world who understood what had happened, except the people in the science fiction fraternity and one or two rather forward-thinking scientists at Oak Ridge and in the state of Washington. The rest of the world thought it was just another big bang. In science fiction, John Campbell had been publishing atomic power and atomic war stories for fifteen years before that. We all understood what had happened; every single person who had been writing or reading science fiction understood precisely what had happened and what it meant to the world. Now, of course, it is very much in the forefront. But we all saw it coming, a very bad and ugly situation.
“Memorial” was translated into the proposed “world language” Esperanto by Forrest J. Ackerman, and published in Heraldo de Esperanto, a newspaper published in the Netherlands, May 25, 1946. Magazine blurb (from Astounding): HIS PLAN WAS TO CREATE A CRATER THAT WOULD WARN ALL MEN TO AVOID ATOMIC WAR FOR FIVE THOUSAND YEARS TO COME, A MEMORIAL THAT WOULD SPIT LAVA AND DEADLY RAYS FOR FIVE MILLENIA. PART OF HIS PLAN WAS FULFILLED—THE WRONG PART.
“Mewhu’s Jet”: first published in Astounding Science-Fiction, November 1946 (cover story). Written early 1946.
Although I don’t know of Sturgeon ever commenting on the subject, it’s hard not to think that “Mewhu’s Jet” was a significant forerunner of and inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s 1982 film E.T.
TS to his mother, July 4, 1947: Now, about kids in general. You, and quite a few other people, keep spotting my kids in my stories. Not so. I can’t explain it at all. One of the big reasons for kids appearing at all is that when a story dies in my arms, I can invariably inject a kid and make it go again. I not only don’t know why this is, I don’t know how I do it; for never in my life have I been associated with the seven-to-ten-year-old girl children who pop up in my copy. I have been told repeatedly that they are real in action and in dialogue, but so help me, I don’t know where they come from. I should mention one other phenomenon: when I use a kid in a story this way, for this reason, the little devil invariably takes the bit in her teeth and walks off with the plot, turning out to be the kind of character who would under no circumstances act the way I have laid the narrative course. So, after writing six or eight thousand words, which I’ll be damned if I’ll do again, I have to figure out some way to rationalize the plot with the characterization. It comes to me eventually, and accounts for the readability of much of my stuff—the reader can’t possibly know how it’s going to turn out because the author didn’t …
Magazine blurb: MEWHU CAME FROM—SOMEWHERE. HE WRECKED HIS SPACESHIP ON LANDING, BUT THE ‘PARACHUTE’ HE HAD WAS SOMETHING DECIDEDLY SUPER—AN ATOMIC JET JOB! THE PROBLEM WAS TO GET INTO COMMUNICATION—THEY THOUGHT.
I found six pages stapled together among Sturgeon’s papers left in Woodstock, numbered 46 to 51 that give every appearance of being the last pages of a 51–page manuscript. It seems reasonable to assume that they are the original manuscript ending of “Mewhu’s Jet” that was cut by the author because he ran out of inspiration (the bottom two-thirds of the last page is blank, and does not say “end”), or by the editor to strengthen the story.
Text of the unpublished original ending of “Mewhu’s Jet”:
The following three weeks were the fullest, the most exciting, and the most infuriating of Jack Garry’s life. Jack was a family man, and in his own argumentative, bull-headed way he loved his wife. Mewhu’s arrival had completely turned over and shaken up his way of life—even his thinking. He had enough to do to adjust himself to this fantastic series of events, and to worry about Molly and her new strangeness, and to worry even more about Iris. Iris was outraged at the change in Molly, and at the same time was deeply troubled about Mewhu. Iris wanted, with everything in her vitriolic nature, to blame someone, but her native intelligence made it impossible for her to hang the culpability on anyone, except for brief periods.
Yes indeed, it was enough to drive any man frantic; but Jack Garry was not permitted to stay home and let things there get him frantic. He was suddenly a public figure. “Do you realize,” strange voices would say to him over the telephone in his city apartment, “that Zincus’ No-Phlegm Trokeys are the only product which contains every palliative and preventive against the common cold?”
And Jack would roll his eyes up and say, “No, I hadn’t realized. So what?”
And the voice would say, “Since you have gone on the record as wanting to protect the Man from Mars in every possible way, you cannot afford to overlook this remarkable—”
And Jack would say, “Exactly what do you want?”
And the voice would say, “Would you consider five thousand dollars to sign a small testimonial?” and Jack would bang down the receiver; and the phone would ring again …
There were people outside. There were always people outside, hanging around in the lobby of the apartment house when they could get in, lounging outside. Autographs. Sometimes pickets carrying signs denouncing him for bringing new terror to the world. Once somebody shot at him. Most of the loungers just gawked.
And the mail! Checks and dollar bills. Threats. Appeals for money, made apparently for no other reason than that Jack had had his name in the papers. “Dear Mr. Garry, at last I know that there is a man alive with enough foresight, enough breadth of vision, to understand me and my work, for only such a man would have been chosen to receive a distinguished visitor from another world. I have a theory for the development of a space-warp generator, and if you can get backing to the extent of fifty thousand dollars, we can collaborate on the beginnings of this amazing—” “Dear Sir you are a crimnell and a thief you shud of kild that monster insted of takin him into your midst. aint we got trubl enough.” “Dear Mr. Garry, Let us face it. Small considerations, magnified by the conventions, are not important to people like you and me. It is our duty to found a super-race together. My background of deep study into esoteric matters has convinced me that the only thing that can save the race is to people the world with the superior strain evident in both of us. I enclose a nude photograph of myself and will appreciate it if you will do likewise. I am thirty three years old and have kept myself sacrosanct awaiting this great moment.” “Dear sir: My most sincere congratulations to you and your co-workers on your execution of the most magnificent hoax since the Cardiff Giant. It is evident from the extent of the publicity you are receiving that you have the backing of the Jews and the international bankers. I hereby serve notice on you that you are being carefully watched by the Blood-Brotherhood of the Sons of Caesar. You will not get away with it.”
And yet Jack Garry stayed by the telephone, leafed through all the mail, went out constantly to get any possible reports of Mewhu. For Mewhu was alive.
It was incredible. A human being could not possibly have survived that crash. If Mewhu had not cut the ignition, he would not have lived either. The list of his injuries was frightening, and, due to his alien structure, it was impossible to determine their true extent. As for treatment, that had to be a guess-and-prayer operation. He lost a good deal of his purplish blood before they dared to give him a transfusion. Two Red Cross surgeons and an Army man had a violent altercation over the first-aid substitutions in plasma which they had concocted to approximate the first rough analysis of Mewhu’s blood. They chanced it, finally, because they had to. Jack Garry, in one of the few moments he had to reflect about anything, was amused by the attitude of the medical mind. Like Iris, when she had used her nurse’s training to set Mewhu’s broken arm while refusing to admit Mewhu’s existence, these doctors had done everything in their power to save Mewhu’s life without daring to cogitate on what he really was.
But after he was whisked away to a Naval hospital, under careful guard, the controversies started. Mewhu was accused of being a Russian, a Japanese, a Turk, an Atlantean, and the Devil. He was credited with being homo superior, a secret weapon, a
nd the Messiah. The one thing that infuriated Garry the most was that the newspapers called him “the Man from Mars,” the public insisted that he was from Mars, newspapers whose editorial policy included headlines in red published diagrams of the orbit of Mars and monosyllable rewrites of weighty words on the subject of Mars originally composed years ago by theoreticians specializing in Mars. The careful series of tests of Mewhu’s blood, bones, nerves and organs which was conducted for the purpose of saving his life, was violently attacked in the press by the anti-vivisection bloc, who took the position that the Man from Mars should be permitted to die in the established Martian fashion. Garry reached a point where he would have given anything in the world to feel free to run down the street shouting “He’s not from Mars!” But he had family considerations …
When they had first returned to the city, Iris had stood over Molly like a tigress, refusing to let the child be questioned by anyone, including Jack.
“But honey,” he pleaded, “Molly may know things that can change the face of the Earth! She’s been subject to a degree of telepathy unheard of before. She’s had the chance to see, through Mewhu’s eyes, a totally new civilization, infinitely farther advanced than ours. She has the only key to it, and you won’t let us get to it.”
“As long as she cries when she’s questioned—no! Let Mewhu do his own press-agentry.”
“He can’t even talk yet—not even in his own language. You wouldn’t either, with a busted jaw. He might even die before we can get anything out of him.”
“Molly’s going to have trouble enough getting over this,” said Iris firmly. “Better drop the subject, Jack.”
Mild words, but the set of her red head and the tied-in look of her mouth told him that she was right—it would be better to drop it.
Killdozer! Page 41
