Approaching Oblivion

by Harlan Ellison

  Otherwise, just look on the following introduction as the bleat of pain from a guy who had just spent ten years in an unlovely universe. I feel okay today, and tomorrow night I get to see a funny movie, so maybe everything’ll work out okay. But I sure wish the Clark Bar was still made with real chocolate…how about you?”

  HARLAN ELLISON

  12 September 84

  INTRODUCTION by Harlan G OBLIVION

  Reaping the Whirlwind

  If it hadn’t been for my getting beaten up daily on the playground of Lathrop Grade School in Painesville, Ohio—this book would not be what it is. It might be a book with my stories in it, but it wouldn’t be this book, and it wouldn’t be as painful a book for me as it is.

  You’ve noticed, of course. Everyone finally realizes it as an inescapable truth. Nothing we do as adults is wholly based on our adult reactions; it’s always—to greater or lesser degree depending on how deep go our roots to the past—an echo of our childhoods. Your politics are either mirror images of your parents’ politics when you were a kid, or they’re rebellions against those politics. Somewhere in the physical makeup of the love-partners who turn you on are vague shadows of the high school cheerleader or basketball center who made your little heart go pitty-pat when you were dashing past puberty. If you were accepted and admired by your teenage peer group, you don’t have the same gut-wrenching fears about going to parties where you don’t know anyone as someone who was an outsider. If you had religion pounded into your head when you were young, chances are pretty good even if you’ve renounced formal church ties, you still carry the guilts and fears around in your gut. Or maybe you’ve come full-circle and have become a Jesus Person, if you’ve been disillusioned enough by the world.

  No one escapes.

  Our childhoods are sowing the wind, our adulthoods are reaping the whirlwind.

  As true of me as you. No better, no nobler, no stronger, no freer of the past. Just like you.

  In Painesville, I was a card-carrying outcast. “Come on, Harlan!” the kids would yell across Harmon Drive. “Come on, let’s play at Leon’s!” And like a sap, I’d clamber up from between the huge roots of the maple tree in our front yard, drop my copy of Lorna Doone or Lord Jim (or whatever other alternate universe I’d fled to because I hated the one I was in) and run after the gang of kids streaking for Leon Miller’s house. I was a little kid, smaller than any other kid my age, and I couldn’t run nearly as fast. That was always part of their equation, of course. And just as I’d reach the front steps, they’d all dash inside Leon’s house, slam and latch the screen door, bang shut the front door with its big glass panes, and crowd behind the front window, sticking their tongues out at me and laughing. How I longed to enter that cool and dim front room where they would soon be playing Chinese Checkers and Pick-Up-Sticks.

  Instead, their rejection always drove me to fury. I would slam my hands against the wooden frames of the screen windows and kick the glider on the front porch, always being careful not to tear the screens or damage the glider for fear of the wrath of Leon’s grandmother. Then, when they tired of baiting me, and retreated into the dimness beyond to play, I would return to my book, where I could be brave and loved and capable of dueling Athos, Porthos and Aramis all in one afternoon.

  On the schoolyard at Lathrop, I fared considerably worse than D’Artagnan. There, I was the accepted punching bag of bullies-in-training, whose names appear every now and then in my stories as characters who come to ugly ends.

  I won’t go into the reasons; they’re all thirty years out-of-date and relevance. Suffice it that a gang of them would pound me into the dirt. And with a pre-Cool Hand Luke persistence, I would pull myself up and jump one of them, bury my teeth in his wrist and wrestle him to the ground. The others would kick me till I let loose. Up again, more slowly a second time, with a wild roundhouse at a thick, stupid face. Sometimes I’d connect and savor the eloquent vocabulary of a bloody nose. But they’d converge and plant me again. And it would go that way till I was unconscious or until Miss O’Hara from the third grade would dash out to scatter them.

  But it wasn’t the beatings that most dismayed me. It was having to go home after school with my clothes ripped and bloodied beyond repair. You see, I was grade school age only a few years after the Depression, and my family was anything but wealthy. We weren’t destitute, far from it; but things were as tight for us as for most families in the Midwest at that time, and my parents could not afford new clothes all the time.

  When I walked home from school, I would take the longest way around, often going to sit in the woods on the corner of Mentor Avenue and Lincoln Drive till it grew dark. I was ashamed and filled with guilt. And when, at last, I could stay away no longer, I’d go home and my Mother—who was a kind woman suffering with a troublesome child—would see me, she would cry and clean me up with mercurochrome and Band-Aids, and she would say (not every time, but even once was enough to make an indelible impression), “What did you say to get them mad?”

  How could I tell her it was not only that I was a smart aleck? How could I tell her it was because I was a Jew and they had been taught Jews were something loathsome? How could I tell her it was easier for me to carry a broken nose and bruises than for me to act cowardly and deny that I was a Jew? The few times she had heard their anti-Semitic remarks, she had gone to school, and that had only made it worse. So I let her think I had started it. And swallowed the guilt. And built a reaction to bearing the blame that grew as I grew.

  Now, as an adult, my reaction to being blamed for something I did not do is almost pathological.

  Now, as an adult, I don’t give a damn if I do tear the screens or damage the glider. I can think of nothing more horrible than what is done to Joseph K. in Kafka’s The Trial.

  Which brings me to why this book exists, and why it is the book it is. Preceding was preamble.

  In 1971 the original publishers of this book, Walker & Company, published my collection of collaborations with other sf writers, Partners in Wonder. It was a lovely book but because of the ineptitude of Walker’s then-art director, it was a book hideously overpriced. It seemed certain Walker & Company would lose a potload.

  On the day the first copies came back from the bindery, I happened to be on a business trip to New York. My editor at Walker at that time was Helen D’Alessandro, a charming and talented woman who had tried to watchdog the Partners in Wonder project, who had been hamstrung by the excesses and inefficiences of a man who had mastered the art of passing the blame for his errors to others. Helen called me first in Los Angeles, to advise me the books were in, and finding out I was in New York, tracked me down and invited me to come in to the Walker offices. She knew all too well the horrors that had served as midwives to the birth of that book: galleys set so badly by computer that I had had to spend nine full days correcting them…insane typography that had jumped the cost of the book from a reasonable (at that time) $5.95 to an impossible (at that time) $8.95…layout so berserk that it killed a certain reprint sale to the SF Book Club. She wanted me to see the book first.

  I arrived at the offices of Walker & Company and Helen came out to the reception area to take me back to her office. When she came into the reception foyer, I was standing with a copy of Partners in Wonder in my hands. The woman on the switchboard had removed a copy from the carton when it had been delivered and had put it out on one of the display shelves as a gesture of kindness to an author she knew was soon to arrive. Helen’s smile faded as she saw me standing there forlornly, leafing through a book twice the size and twice the price it might have been.

  I looked up and saw her. She tried to smile again, but it wouldn’t come. “Oh,” was all she said.

  In silence, we walked back to her office.

  At that time, Helen shared editorial space with Lois Cole.

  Lois Cole is one of the finest editors, one of the kindest persons, one of the most intelligent and charming people I have ever known. She was Margaret Mitchell’s editor o
n Gone with the Wind and it was she, in part, who convinced Margaret Mitchell to change the title of that book from Mules in Horses’ Harness to Gone with the Wind. She is a woman of uncommon perception and empathy.

  She smiled up at me as I entered the tiny office, cleared a stack of manuscripts from a chair, and said, “I’m sorry, Harlan.”

  It was not the happiest day of my life.

  We commiserated for a while, and I hung around the office doing some publicity work for the book with Henry Durkin. As five o’clock approached, I walked through the crowded passageway of the editorial offices to gather my coat and attaché case, when I heard someone call my name. I looked up and saw Sam Walker.

  The president of Walker & Company is Samuel S. Walker, Jr. He is a tall, elegant man with fine manners, soft voice and too much gentlemanliness ever to permit him to become the sort of rapacious publisher who winds up with a corporate octopus like, for instance, Doubleday. We had never exchanged many words.

  He motioned me to join him in his office, and when I’d entered, he closed the door and turned to me. His expression was sober and concerned. “I want you to know,” he said, very gently, “that I know you aren’t responsible for what has happened on this book. It’s too common a practice in this business to blame a writer for what’s gone wrong on the production end of a project. I want you to know that I’m aware we’ll lose money on this book, but the fault does not lie with you. And I’d consider it a privilege to publish you again, if you’ll trust us a second time.”

  He did not say: What did you do to get them mad?

  He did not ask me why my clothes were ripped and my nose bloody and one shoe gone. He said he knew I was innocent of all wrongdoing.

  It was a ten-year-old child getting an apology from an adult; the state bringing in “no true bill” and dismissing all charges; the hospital calling to say they’d mixed up the biopsy reports and someone else was dying of cancer; a page one retraction. It was one of the kindest, most sensitive things anyone had ever done for me, and it had occurred in an industry not overly burdened with thoughtfulness and kindness.

  Sam Walker could not possibly have known what his words meant to me, nor with what echoes of my childhood they reverberated.

  But because of those three minutes of concern, I wrote this book, and Sam Walker published it. So if it pleasures you…the thanks go as much to Sam as to me.

  Originally, this was to have been a collection of already-published stories from several out-of-print books I’d written years ago. Larded in with the reprints were to have been three or four new stories. But as time progressed, I grew more and more disquieted with the idea of such a collection. In 1971, Macmillan published Alone Against Tomorrow, a collection of my stories that spanned the years from 1956 to 1969; though the pivot of all the stories in that collection was the theme of alienation, the book was also intended as a small, narrow retrospective of my work.

  But a peculiar thing happened. It was one of the rare occasions on which I did not overblow my reputation, one of the few times my ego did not swell out of proportion to my worth. I had not gauged the popularity my stories had achieved in the three years preceding the publication of Alone Against Tomorrow, and was alternately delighted and dismayed by the letters I received praising the book but denouncing me for gathering together under a fresh title a group of much-reprinted stories.

  It decided me without doubt that never again could I permit a supposed “new” collection to contain stories available in my other collections.

  Approaching Oblivion was originally intended to gather together stories from then-out-of-print collections like A Touch of Infinity, Ellison Wonderland and Gentleman Junkie, with one or two stories available only in anthologies done by other editors.

  The contracts were signed in November of 1970 and the book—which should have been no trouble to assemble—was supposed to be in Helen D’Alessandro’s hands no later than six months thereafter. But the letters were starting to come in on Alone Against Tomorrow, and I began to procrastinate. Months, then years, went by, with polite notes of inquiry from Walker & Company. First, from Helen and then, when she departed the playing fields of literature to marry the brilliant poet, teacher and writer Anthony Hecht, from Lois, from the ineffable and indefatigable Hans Stefan Santesson, from Tim Seldes, from Henry Durkin, from Dedria Bryfonski who was my editor after Lois became swamped with other projects, and finally (though I may have missed a baton-passer or two in the whirl of personnel at Walker), from Ms. Evy Herr, my current shoulderer of anguish.

  It is now four years after the original contracting for Approaching Oblivion. And the book is finished. It contains no stories ever included in my collections…though some of them have appeared in anthologies elsewhere. But that doesn’t count. This book has my name on it. It is the product of my labors since 1970, with few exceptions. (If you’re curious as to when a particular story was written, I’ve included the date of original emergence and the location[s] in which I wrote it, at the end of each piece.) So if I get letters complaining that these new stories are familiar, it’s got to be from righteous Ellison buffs who buy every obscure magazine published, because these stories come from sources as diversified as Penthouse magazine, Crawdaddy, Galaxy and the August 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

  I’m glad I waited and let the contents of the book change. For several reasons. First, because most of the collections from which I’d have cannibalized stories are now coming back into print. Several paperback houses will be releasing almost all of my older titles in the next few years, thus ending the plaintive cries I hear at college lecture appearances, from my readers (each one with impeccable taste) who wail they cannot find my books on the newsstands.

  Second, because now Sam and Evy (and Lois and Helen and all the other good people who were incredibly patient) have a new book, instead of a Frankincense creation cobbled-up from spare parts and dusty remnants.

  And third, because the Harlan Ellison who signed those contracts in 1970 is not the same Harlan Ellison who writes these words today, in January of 1974.

  Which brings me full circle to the schoolyard of Lathrop, and reaping the whirlwind.

  In 1970, when I conceived the theme of this book—cautionary tales that would warn “this is what may happen if we keep going the way we’re going”—I had just emerged from a decade of civil unrest and revolution. I was far from alone in passing through that terrible time. My friends, my country, my world had also gone through it. I believed in certain things, and I had gut-hatreds I thought would never cool. I had been in riots against the Vietnam war that had netted me time in jail and broken bones; I had been on civil rights marches and demonstrations that showed me the depths of inhumanity and craziness to which normal human beings could sink; I had lost many friends to dope and death; I had gone through an intellectual inferno that burned me out so I could not write for nearly a year and a half…and I was tired.

  In Alone Against Tomorrow, I had included as a dedication for a book of stories about alienation, these words:

  This book is dedicated to the memory of EVELYN DEL REY, a dear friend, for laughter and for caring…

  And to the memories of:

  ALLISON KRAUSE JEFFREY GLEN MILLER WILLIAM K. SCHROEDER SANDRA LEE SHEUER

  four Kent State University students senselessly murdered in their society’s final act of alienation.

  The list is incomplete. There are many others. There will be more.

  And among the letters I received on that book, was this one, reproduced exactly as I received it:

  June 10, 1971

  Dear Mr. Ellison,

  For your dedication of Alone Against Tomorrow, you mention the “four Kent State University students senselessly murdered…” Please be informed that these hooligans were Communist-led radical revolutionaries and anarchists, and deserved to be shot, whether by a firing squad or by the National Guard. Your remarks ruined an otherwise good book. Nevertheless, I am happy for th
e opportunity to correct your thinking.

  Sincerely yours,

  ————————

  I receive a lot of mail these days. Time prevents my answering very much of it—if I did, I’d have no time for writing the stories that prompt the mail in the first place. Some of the mail is pure, hardcore nutso. I roundfile it and forget it. More of it is reasoned, entertaining, supportive or chiding in a rational tone, and I read it and consider what’s been said and usually reply with a form letter I’ve had to devise simply as a matter of survival.

  Occasionally I get a letter that gives me pause. Mr. Chambers’s letter was one of those. If I didn’t know purely on instinct that he was running off jingo phrases that he’d swallowed whole, if I didn’t know he was wrong purely on gut instinct or by my association with student movements for ten and more years, the reopening of the Kent State Massacre case by the Attorney General would convince me. So it’s too easy merely to disregard a letter like that, and say, “What an asshole.” But consider the letter. It isn’t illiterate, it isn’t rancorous, it isn’t redneck or written on toilet paper. It is a simple, polite, straightforward attempt to straighten out what the correspondent takes to be incorrect thinking on my part. One cannot dismiss this kind of letter. It is from an ordinary human being, speaking about extraordinary events, and genuinely believing what he writes. Chambers really does believe those poor, innocent kids were Communist tools who deserved to die.

  Now that scares the piss out of me.

  That is approaching oblivion. It is reaping the whirlwind of half a decade of Nixon/Agnew brainwashing and paranoia. It is a perfectly apocalyptical example of the reconditeness to which The Common Man in our time clings with suicidal ferocity. I won’t go into my little dance about the loathsomeness of The Common Man, or even flay again the body of stupidity to which “commonness” speaks. I’ll merely point out that the Ellison who believed in the revolutionary Movement of the young and the frustrated and the angry in the Sixties, is not the Ellison of the Seventies who has seen students sink back into a charming Fifties apathy (with a simultaneous totemization of the banalities and mannerisms of those McCarthy Witch-Hunt Fifties), who has listened long and hard to the Chambers letter and hears in it a tone wholly in tune with the voice of the turtle heard in the land, who—when the defenses are down in the tiny hours after The Late Late Show—laments for all the martyrs who packed it in, in the name of “change,” only to turn around a mere five years later and see the status returned to quo.