Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “Granny Won’t Knit”: first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1954. Written winter 1954.

  In his introduction to “Granny Won’t Knit” in the 1979 collection The Stars Are the Styx, Sturgeon wrote: This story had, for me, a most unusual nascence. Usually my stories emerge from hidden convolutions of my gut—my very own personal gut. In this case, a time arrived when Horace Gold, having saved space for me in an upcoming issue, called to ask, as politely as possible, “Where the hell is the novelette?” and I answered with perfect truth that although my gut was in perfect operation, it hadn’t taken that certain turn just yet. So he put me on hold, and called another writer with whom he had discussed an idea, but who had later said he had decided to do nothing with it, and asked him if he would mind his passing the idea over to Sturgeon. The writer said go right ahead; he’d never do anything with it himself. The basic idea was this matter transmission thing. So I wrote Granny, hardly getting up from the typewriter, at about the time the other writer changed his mind and wrote The Stars My Destination. I do indeed love Granny, but I wish I’d written the superb novel Alfred Bester did.

  Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: WHEN PRIMLY STARCHED BOY MET UNPRIM AND UNSTARCHED GIRL, IT WAS REVOLT AT FIRST SIGHT, FOR GRANNY DIDN’T KNIT—SHE WOVE!

  The speech and behavior of the authoritarian father in this story are clearly derived from Sturgeon’s childhood experiences with his stepfather, as described in his autobiographical essay “Argyll.”

  “To Here and the Easel”: first published in Star Short Novels, a book edited by Frederik Pohl and published by Ballantine Books in September 1954. In an appreciation published in the July 1985 Science Fiction Chronicle, publisher Ian Ballantine recalled: “… Ted was now ready to take on commissions. Having been brought up in Woodstock, New York, I had an interest in the artistic creative process. I asked Ted for a short novel that gave the reader insight into the creative process. Ted wrote ‘To Here and the Easel,’ published in Star Short Novels, edited by Fred Pohl.”

  In an essay in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1962, science fiction author James Blish described this as his “favorite Sturgeon story.” In the version of this essay included in More Issues at Hand, a 1970 collection of Blish’s sf criticism, published under the pseudonym William Atheling, Jr., Blish wrote: “All of Sturgeon’s major work is about love, sexual love emphatically included.… Directly under this heading belongs Sturgeon’s love affair with the English language, which has been as complicated, stormy and rewarding as any affair he has ever written about. He is a born experimenter, capable of the most outrageous excesses in search of precision and poetry; people who do not like puns, for example, are likely to find much Sturgeon text almost as offensive as late Joyce (and I am sorry for them). Nobody else in our microcosm could possibly have produced such a stylistic explosion as ‘To Here and the Easel,’ a novella based in language as well as in theme on Ariosto’s 16th-Century epic Orlando Furioso, because in fact nobody else would have seen that the subject couldn’t have been handled any other way.” Orlando Furioso, an epic poem by Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto, was published in 1516; Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature says it is “considered the finest expression of the artistic tendencies and spiritual attributes of the Italian Renaissance.”

  Damon Knight, science fiction author and critic, in his book In Search of Wonder, said: “ ‘To Here and the Easel’ was written at the very top of Sturgeon’s range, on the same level as More Than Human and ‘Saucer of Loneliness’ and a few others—a breathtaking display of sustained brilliance, all glitter and pop, never holding still an instant, with the velvet-covered fist hanging, hanging … here a pun with a bawdier one on top of it, here a sudden unexpected gallop of blank verse … until that damned fist comes down and squeezes the whole thing so tight that there’s nothing more to say about it.”

  No reader of “To Here and the Easel” will be surprised to learn that around the time he wrote this story Sturgeon was himself suffering from a bout of “writer’s block” comparable to the “painter’s block” suffered by its protagonist. On June 2, 1955, Sturgeon wrote to Anthony Boucher: I’ve been terrified for a long time now. A year ago April I dried up, and though I’ve done four or five shorts since, they were hard and squeezed out with the sensation of working out a vein; every word closer to the last I could ever do. In June [1954] I accepted a very large advance from Dell and found I couldn’t write the book it was for, not a word of it. Sturgeon in his 1962 Guest of Honor speech at a science fiction convention referred to this same time period by saying, I went into a terrible dry spell one time. It was a desperate dry spell and an awful lot depended on me getting writing again. In another letter to Boucher, Feb. 4, 1956, he said, Fact is I’ve been battling my Beast, the paralysis of the typewriter which has beset me often on for the past fifteen years but ever so much worse in the last three. I still haven’t identified this monster, but I’ve made this much progress: I know when it’s working on me. That’s small progress, but it’s something.

  TS included “To Here and the Easel” in a 1971 collection called Sturgeon Is Alive and Well … which was otherwise completely dedicated to eleven stories he wrote in the summer of 1969, suddenly ending another dry spell as the result of the arrival in his life of a female admirer of his work who traveled 6,500 miles with the intent of meeting him and encouraging him to write. In his foreword to that collection, he wrote, I was living at the bottom of a mountain in Neverneverland, far under a rock … unaware of just how far I had crawled and how immobile my crouch. Suddenly one day there exploded a great mass of red hair attached to a laughing face. Her name was Wina … She crawled way in under that rock and hauled me out. (She became the mother of his seventh child, Andros.)

  “When You’re Smiling”: first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1955. Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: YOU’VE NEVER READ SCIENCE FICTION LIKE THIS BEFORE. IT’S A SHOCK WAVE OF TERROR—WITH A JOLTING, BLINDING CONCLUSION. IT’S STURGEON!

  Introducing this story in his 1979 collection The Stars Are the Styx, Sturgeon wrote: It must be apparent by this time that I tend to write about nice guys. But I also believe (as you will discover later on) that I believe in the yin and the yang, and that from time to time one must turn the coin over and investigate what lives under the sun-warmed rock. I also believe that although ultimate justice will be done (even if only statistically, even if later than sooner), it is, as often as not, done for selfish reasons and benefits the universe by accident.

  “When You’re Smiling” is the title of a song recorded by Louis Armstrong in 1929.

  Among the “maundering” pages (efforts to develop story ideas) found among Sturgeon’s papers is one that suggests Sturgeon may have had the opening page or two of this story long before he wrote the rest of it or knew where it was going. The maundering page says: Use that Henry copy—my God, it’s the start of something. Whoy! There’s the good seed of a regeneration story in it, implicit in the News feature writer. Another page includes these lines: So we meet Henry again. His key is empathy—loads of it, more of it than he needs or should have. Somehow I have to introduce this other character, the man with no empathy at all.… I feel that once I get him and Henry together I’ll charge right ahead. Another page, that possibly precedes the writing of that Henry copy, contains some of the story’s elements but with the personalities of the characters seemingly reversed: If Henry is happy with things as they are, who better to elucidate the virtues of our method? He would rush to the e-t as to a vacuum, this e-t suffering, as he does, a torture from excess empathy; Henry’s joy derives from real egocentricity, turned on its head and looking like altruism. So start off with reminiscences of school and what a happy underdog Henry was, and meet him again years later; go from joy to disgust and finally lash out at him.…

  To me, one remarkable aspect of “When You’re Smiling” is its powe
rful portrayal, in the form of a first-person narrative, of the modern archetype described in Alan Harrington’s 1972 book Psychopaths and William and Joan McCord’s 1964 book The Psychopath. Harrington’s book begins: “ ‘There walk among us men and women who are in but not of our world,’ wrote the late Robert Lindner. ‘Often the sign by which they betray themselves is crime, crime of an explosive, impulsive, reckless type. Sometimes the sign is ruthlessness in dealing with others socially, even commercially.’ ” Charles Manson is one of the examples Harrington cites. A significant passage in “When You’re Smiling” (referred to by Sturgeon as “the empathy story” in his maunderings before he wrote it) is this monologue: “I’m different, Henry. I’ve always known I was different.” I poked my finger toward him and he curled from its imaginary touch. “You, for example—you have, like nobody else I ever met, that stuff called ‘empathy.’ … Now me, I have as much of that as my armadillo-cat has fur. It’s just not in me. I have other things instead. Do you know I was never angry in my life? That’s why I have so much fun. That’s why I can push people around. I can make anybody do anything, just because I always have myself under control … You’ve seen me operate. You going to call a man like me human?”

  William Atheling, Jr., in The Issue at Hand (1964), wrote: “ ‘When You’re Smiling’ is a hate-piece, but it is never out of the author’s control for so long as three words. Ted’s portrait of the man who enjoys causing pain is that of a man who thoroughly deserves the author’s loathing. But by taking the pains to tell the story from that man’s point of view, and to convey some of the man’s enthusiasm for himself and his researches, Ted has made sure that his evil character does not emerge as an unbelievable caricature. The deeply subjective approach unfolds on the page with an air of pure objectivity, as though the author were simply presenting the character as he is, with an invitation to the reader to pass his own judgment; the author is loading the dice, to be sure, but entirely below the level of the reader’s attention.”

  “Bulkhead”: first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, March 1955, under the title “Who?” Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: NO MAN COULD MAKE THE LONG HAUL ALONE AND SO THERE HAD TO BE SOMEBODY BEHIND THE BULKHEAD—BUT THE ENORMOUSLY IMPORTANT QUESTION WAS: WHO?

  In a 1979 collection of three stories called Maturity, TS wrote in the book’s introduction: “Bulkhead” was written in 1954, and appeared in Horace Gold’s Galaxy. A few months before I wrote it I ran across a statement by Philip Van Doren Stern: “Never set pen to paper until you can state your theme in one single, simple declarative sentence.” This really intrigued me, and I began to look for it in every story I read. Well, it is not as simple as it seems, nor so obvious. I found few of these ‘single, simple declarative statements’ anywhere. So I began to look for them in my own writings, and couldn’t find them there either. But about a year and a half after “Bulkhead” appeared in print, I reread it, and I found that theme in the simplest words. Can you? The discovery qualified this story for this book: a further advance in understanding the nature of maturity. I’ll tell you this in the postscript. In the book’s postscript, TS wrote: A single, simple declarative statement: A man doesn’t grow up until he can come to terms with his early self.

  The text of this story as it appears in Judith Merril’s widely read anthologies SF: The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy and SF: The Best of the Best is different from the text of this story in Sturgeon’s own collections A Way Home (1955) and Maturity (1979). This is because the Merrill books reprint the story as it ran in Galaxy. Uncharacteristically, Sturgeon provided the publisher of A Way Home with the carbon of his original manuscript of this story rather than a copy of the published story, possibly because he was not happy with H.L. Gold’s editing of the story for Galaxy, but probably also because the book (which was published in May 1955) went into production before a copy of the printed magazine was available. The Theodore Sturgeon papers in the Dept. of Special Collections, Spencer Library, University of Kansas, include Sturgeon’s original manuscript for “Bulkhead” as line-edited by Gold and sent to Galaxy’s printer. An examination of this “setting copy” shows that Gold, for example, changed the opening words of the story’s third paragraph from Which, of course, eliminates to Naturally, that eliminates and added the sentence You have a shipmate, but even so, you’re alone. after the opening sentence of the fifth paragraph (Then there’s this: You’re alone.). In the Galaxy text, in this same paragraph, in the sentence that begins Psychodynamics has come a long way, Gold cut the following phrases: it hasn’t begun to alter the fact that human beings are the most feral, vicious, destructive, and self-destructive creatures God ever made. Close examination of the Spencer Library’s copy of the (marked-up by Gold) original manuscript further reveals that Sturgeon did make some small changes of his own (possibly in response to suggestions from the book’s copy editor) to the story before A Way Home went to press.

  In her introduction to “Bulkhead” in the first volume of her annual Year’s Best anthologies, Judith Merril called Sturgeon “The Man With The Golden Pen; for my money, the top writer among established ‘names’ in sf.” She notes that the U.S. Air Force is currently (1956) studying a problem central to “Bulkhead” and another story in her anthology: “They call it ‘Space Medicine’; their object is to make certain that human minds and bodies will be able to survive the Big Jump, when we make it.”

  The reference late in the story to Dell’s hypothesis (promulgated ’way back in the 1960’s by a lay analyst named Dudley Dell, who was, as I remember, the editor of a love-story magazine) is an in-joke. H. L. Gold had used the pseudonym Dudley Dell on occasional features he wrote in Galaxy. And Gold was certainly prone to articulating his own psychological theories in conversations with and letters to Sturgeon and other Galaxy writers. In the original manuscript of the story and as it appeared in Galaxy, Dell’s hypothesis was formulated way back in the middle of the 20th century by Dudley Dell, which was one of the pseudonyms of a magazine editor. As I remember it, he later became a lay analyst and—

  On one sheet of the “maunderings” in which Sturgeon typed notes to himself exploring story ideas, he seems to arrive at the idea of reviving his unpublished 1947 story “Hurricane Trio” by interpolating a science fictional element. He did this, and the story was published in Galaxy in the April 1955 issue, and included in his 1955 collection A Way Home. At the bottom of this sheet, after an asterisk, the following note appears:

  Coexistence of older-younger entities in a person: psychiatric treatment separates entities which would otherwise be in conflict, so that a man has company on a space trip. He doesn’t know, of course, that he’s talking to himself, and the similarity-conflict factor will be just ideal to keep him alert. Title: BULKHEAD. denouement when he’s shown the bulkhead, the too-small-for-a-passenger space behind it, then the psych snaps fingers and commands him to remember—his own memory—some preoccupation of the junior member.

  It is of course quite unusual, and just the sort of stunt that Sturgeon would undertake and succeed at, for a story to be written entirely in a second person narrative voice (“You’re alone. You crouch in this little cell in the nose of your ship”). It is possible that this aspect of this story had a significant influence on Rod Serling’s use of a similar narrative technique on many scripts for his popular television series “Twilight Zone.”

  The protagonist’s ruminations Nobody but a cadet deserves a ship!… Why did you hold still for Base routines, for the hazing you got from the upper classmen? derive partly from Sturgeon’s experiences at age seventeen on a school ship, the Penn State Nautical School, which included being “brutalized and beat up” (he told me in 1976) along with other new cadets in routine hazings conducted by upper classmen.

  “The Riddle of Ragnarok”: first published in Fantastic Universe, June 1955. Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: IT WAS A WORLD OF GIANTS AND OF WOMEN WHOSE LI
MBS WERE MAGIC—AND FABULOUSLY STRANGE WERE THE WEAVING STRANDS OF ITS DESTINY. Also on this page was another editorial note, which said: “Theodore Sturgeon, who recently won the International Fantasy Committee Award for the most distinguished SF novel of the year, is probably the most versatile of the scant dozen writers who have compelled the moulders of our literary climate to take science fiction seriously as an important branch of imaginative fiction. We are happy to welcome him to our pages for the first time with this glowingly fanciful saga of a realm enchanted.”

  The details of the events in this unusual Sturgeon story seem to be consistent with the story of the death of Balder or Baldur as it is often told in Norse mythology—particularly as recounted circa 1225 in the Prose Edda by Icelandic poet and historian Snorri Sturluson (Saxo’s Danish account differs)—with the exception of the twist of Loki’s possible innocence and the non-weeping giantess as a figure other than Loki in disguise. These elements and the remarkable conversations (and ultimate reconciliation) between Memory and Thought appear to be Sturgeon’s inventions. (A Guide to the Gods by Richard Carlyon, 1981, and Encyclopedia of Gods by Michael Jordan, 1993, were helpful to me in this determination.)

  “Twink”: first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, August 1955.

  In his 1984 collection Alien Cargo, Sturgeon said of “Twink”: This is the one and only time I used this particular writer’s trick in narrative. I wonder if you can divine what it is. Otherwise, I must express pride at the insightful look at society’s insensitivities toward the unusual person. The disabled are unusual; special gifts are unusual; too many people don’t know the difference. The slow learners are unusual; psychopaths are unusual; too many people think they’re suffering from the same thing. These, among other things, are what this story’s about, so I hope you will forgive the trickery.