The Nail and the Oracle Read online

  Do I interrupt myself? Very well then, I interrupt myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.

  Here’s what Ted wrote in 1967 as an introduction to my book of short stories, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream. It goes here, correctly, because it was one of the spurs that moved and shook him to come stay with me. I was in deep anguish in 1967, some of the toughest times of my life, and Ted wrote this, in part:

  … You hold in your hands a truly extraordinary book. Taken individually, each of these stories will afford you that easy-to-take, hard-to-find, very hard-to-accomplish quality of entertainment. Here are strange and lovely bits of bitterness like “Eyes of Dust” and the unforgettable “Pretty Maggie Money-eyes,” phantasmagoric fables like “I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream” and “Delusion for a Dragon Slayer” …

  There are a great many unusual things about Harlan Ellison and his work—the speed, the scope, the variety. Also the ugliness, the cruelty, the compassion, the anger, the hate. All seem larger than life-size—especially the compassion which, his work seems to say, he hates as something which would consume him if he let it. This is the explanation of the odd likelihood (I don’t think it’s every happened, but I think it could) that the beggar who taps you for a dime, and whom I ignore, will get a punch in the mouth from Harlan.

  One thing I found fascinating about this particular collection—and it’s applicable to the others as well, once you find it out—is that the earlier stories, like “Big Sam,” are at first glance more tightly knit, more structured, than the later ones. They have beginnings and middles and endings, and they adhere to their scene and their type, while stories like “Maggie Money-eyes” and “I Have No Mouth” straddle the categories, throw you curves, astonish and amaze. It’s an interesting progression, because most beginners start out formless and slowly learn structure. In Harlan’s case, I think he quickly learned structure because within a predictable structure he was safe, he was contained. When he got big enough—confident enough—he began to write it as it came, let it pour out as his inner needs demanded. It is the confidence of freedom, and the freedom of confidence. He breaks few rules he has not learned first.

  (There are exceptions. He is still doing battle with “lie” and “lay,” and I am beginning to think that for him “strata” and “phenomena” will forever be singular.)

  Anyway … he is a man on the move, and he is moving fast. He is, on these pages and everywhere else he goes, colorful, intrusive, abrasive, irritating, hilarious, illogical, inconsistent, unpredictable, and one hell of a writer. Watch him.”

  Theodore Sturgeon Woodstock, New York 1967

  And as I wrote for Ted’s attention in a 1983 reprint of the book, for which I refused any number of Big Name offers to supplant Ted’s 1967 essay: “Ted Sturgeon’s dear words were very important to me in 1967 when they were shining new and this collection became the instrument that propelled my work and my career forward. To alter those words, or to solicit a new introduction by someone else, would be to diminish the gift that Ted conferred on me. This book has been in print constantly for sixteen years.… Only this need be said: I have learned the proper use of ‘lie’ and ‘lay,’ Ted.”

  “Watch him,” he said. That was the lynch-pin of our long and no-bullshit, honest-speaking friendship. We were a lot alike. (Noël’s son, age 16, has also read these pages and he declares I’m “a fantastic writer, and arrogant as hell.” You just described your grandfather, kiddo.) A lot alike, and we watched each other. Avis to avis, two bright-eyed, cagey, weird birds assaying a long and often anguished observation of each other—Ted, I think, seeing in me where and who he had been—me, for certain, seeing in him where I was bound and who I would be in my later years, which are now. We were foreshadow and déjà vu. We were chained to each other, in more a creepy than an Iron John way.

  I had watched him from afar, before I met him, when I reviewed the just published More Than Human in the May-July issue #14 (1954) of my mimeographed fanzine, Dimensions. I was an extremely callow nineteen, Ted was only thirty-six and married to Marion, living back East in Woodstock, I think; Noël still had two years to go before she could get borned.

  With all the imbecile sangfroid of, oh, I’d say, an O-Cel-O sponge mop, I pontificated the following comment on Sturgeon at his most exalted best:

  Book reviewers, like Delphic Oracles, are a breed of individuals self-acknowledged to be authorities on everything—including everything. Thus it is with some feelings of helplessness that a reviewer finds he is totally unprepared or capable in describing a book.

  It happens only once in every thousand years or so, and is greater tribute to any book than a word of praise for each of those years. So enjoy the spectacle, dear reader.

  Theodore Sturgeon has expanded his Galaxy novella “Baby Is Three” into a tender and deeply moving chronicle of people, caught in the maelstrom of forces greater than any of them. The book, in case you missed it above, is More Than Human, and insures the fact that if Ballantine Books were to cease all publication with this volume, their immortality would be ensured.

  We have dragged out more than we thought we could. Sturgeon is impeccable in this novel. Unquestionably the finest piece of work in the last two years, and the closest approach to literature science fiction has yet produced.

  We watched the hell out of each other. After we met, if I remember accurately, in the autumn of 1954, I remember taking offense at a remark the late Damon Knight had made about Ted’s story “The Golden Egg” (he opined, the story “starts out gorgeously and develops into sentimental slop”), and Ted just snickered and said, “Damon can show a mean streak sometimes.”

  Later in life, one day I remembered that and chuckled to myself and thought, “No shit.”

  Ted called me one time, before he lived here, and sang me the lyrics to “Thunder and Roses.” I wrote them down, ran them in Dimensions, in issue #15, and when next Ted called me, we sang it together. Ted wrote quite a few songs. They were awful, just awful. What I’m trying to vouchsafe here is that in terms of songwriting, both Pinder and Cole Porter felt no need of stirring in their respective graves at the eminence of Sturgeon’s lyricism. He was superlative at what he did superlatively, but occasionally even Ted pulled a booger.

  Oh, wait a minute, I have just got to tell you this one …

  … no, hold it, before I tell you that one—Ted and the guy reading The Dreaming Jewels—I’ve got to tell you this one, which Noël just reminded me of, he said ending a sentence with a preposition.

  One early evening, I was rearranging a clothes closet, and I unshipped a lot of crap that had been gathering dust on a top shelf. And Ted was just hanging out watching, for no reason (we used to talk books a lot but I don’t think on that particular evening he was again driving me crazy in his perseverance, trying to turn me on to Eugene Sue’s The Wandering Jew or The Mysteries of Paris). And I pulled down this neat tent that I’d used years before, when I was a spelunker; and Ted got interested in it, and he unzipped and unrolled it, and of a sudden this nut-case says to me, “We should go camp out.”

  Now, two things you should know, one of which Noël remarked when she reminded me of this anecdote. “The two least Boy Scouts in the world!” And she laughed so hard her cheek hit the cancel button on her cell-phone, and that was the end of that conversation. (Which is a canard, because I was, in fact, an actual Cub and Boy Scout, WEBELOS and all, with merit badges, when I was a kid, so take that, Ms. Smartass Sturgeon.) And the second thing you should know is that my home, Ellison Wonderland, aka The Lost Aztec Temple of Mars, sits at the edge of two hundred acres of watershed land and riparian vegetation, high in the Santa Monica Mountains, facing what is known as Fossil Ridge—two million year old aquatic dead stuff in the rocks—now part of what the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy has designated Edgar Rice Burroughs Park because the land that Carl Sagan and Leonard Nimoy and I saved from developers is exactly where the creator of Tarzan and Barsoom used to have picnics, back in the early 1900s.r />
  Okay, so now you know that, and now you know why this resident nut-case Sturgeon is saying to me, “Let’s go and camp out.”

  Which—don’t ask me why, it seemed like a good idea at the time—is why I found myself the next night in a tent, outdoors, in the middle of a very humid spring night, with semi-nekkid Sturgeon, eating gypsy stew out of a tin can that fuckin’ exPLOded, festooning the inside of the tent wherein I slept till the mosquitoes and no-see’ms gorged on my flesh and I crawled moaning back to the house at three a.m.…

  Here’s the one I was going to tell you before I got feetnoted: Ted had a surfeit of hubris. Every good writer has it, especially those who scuff toe in the dirt and do an aw-shucks-ma it weren’t nothin’. (John Clute, the critic, just calls it “shucksma.”) False humility is bullshit or, as Gustave Flaubert put is much more elegantly, “Modesty is a kind of groveling.”

  But Ted had that scam down pat. He could act as shy as the unicorn in the garden, but inside he was festooned with bunting and firecrackers for his talent. One would have to be in a coma to be as good as he was, as often as he was, not to revel inwardly at the power. He was selfish and self-involved, even as you and I. He was also generous, great-hearted, and loyal.

  Yet in all the analyses I’ve read in the previous ten volumes, no one else seems to have perceived that Ted—who was touted, by me as well as others, as knowing all there was to know about love—was a man in flames. He had loathings and animosities and an elitism that ran deep. He knew genuine anguish. But he also knew more cleverly than anyone else I’ve ever met, that it was an instant turnoff; if he wanted to get what he wanted, he had to sprinkle dream dust; and so he filtered his frustration and enmity like Sterno through a loaf of pumpernickel, distilling it into a charm that could Svengali a Mennonite into a McCormick Thresher.

  From the starting blocks, Ted had been lumbered with the words “science fiction,” and unlike Bierce or Poe or Dunsany, he never got out of the ghetto. Dean Koontz and Steve King know what I’m talking about; and so does Kurt, who created Kilgore Trout, who was Sturgeon. He wanted passionately to get out of the penny-a-word gulag, and he knew he was better than most of those who’d miraculously accomplished the trick.

  Ted had gotten into writing because he understood all the way to the gristle the truth of that Japanese aphorism: The nail that stands too high will be hammered down. And while I’m citing clever sources, Ted also got into the writing in resonance to Heinrich Von Kleist’s “I write only because I cannot stop.”

  But he also knew it was a gig. It was a job. Masonry and pig-iron ingots and pulling the plough. Not a lifetime job for guys like Ted and me, weird ducks who’d rather play than labor. A kind of frenetic, always-working laziness. Tardy, imprecise, careless of the feelings of others, obsessed and selfish. He was, I am, it’s a fair cop. So he and I have produced enough work to shame a plethora of others, enough to fill more than a dozen big fat Complete Sturgeons or Essential Ellisons. What no one ever realizes is that it’s all the product of guilt and laziness, guilt because of the laziness.

  We know what we can be, but we cannot get out of our own way. Ted was the king of that disclosure. He could not cease being Sturgeon for a moment, and he was chained to the genre that was too small for him.

  (Ted once told me, and everyone I have dealt with since has told me I’m full of shit and lying, that he hated the title, “A Saucer of Loneliness” that Horace Gold attached to the story before he’d even finished writing it—because UFOs were “hot” and “sexy” at that time—and that he’d originally wanted to call it just “Loneliness” and sell it to a mainstream, non-sf market. Apparently he wrote it as a straight character study, couldn’t move it—same with “Hurricane Trio” he said—and did it as Gold had suggested.)

  (Had a helluva fight with the brilliant Alan Brennert over titling “Saucer” when Alan wrote his teleplay for The Twilight Zone on CBS in 1985 when we worked the series together.)

  No matter how congenial, how outgoing, how familial, Ted knew way down in the gristle what Hunter Thompson identified as “… the dead end loneliness of a man who makes his own rules.” And it made for anguish because he was imprisoned in a literary gulag where there was—and continues to be—such an acceptance of mediocrity that it is as odious as a cultural cringe. And Ted wanted more. Always more.

  More life, more craft, more acceptance, more love, more of a shot at Posterity. Not to be categorized, seldom to be challenged, just famous enough that even when he wasn’t at top-point efficiency everyone was so in awe of him that they were incapable of slapping him around and making him work better. That kind of adulation is death to a writer as incredibly Only as was Theodore Sturgeon. He hungered for better, and he deserved better, but he could not get out of his own way, and so … for years and years …

  He burned, and he coveted, and he continued decanting those fiery ingots, all the while leading a life as disparate and looney as Munchausen’s. He knew love, no argument, but it was the saving transmogrification from fevers and railings against the nature of his received world. And this anecdote I want to relate—as funny as it tells now—was idiomatic of Ted’s plight.

  Here’s what happened.

  What we were doing in a Greyhound bus station, damned if I can remember. But there we were, about five of us—I think Bill Dignin was one of the group, and I seem to recall Gordy Dickson, as well. But Ted and I and the rest of these guys were going somewhere chimerical, the sort of venue my Susan likes to refer to as Little Wiggly-On-Mire. And there we sat at a table waiting for our bus, chowing down on grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches, or whatever, and one of the guys nudged Ted and did a “Psst,” and indicated a guy at the counter, who was (so help me) reading the Pyramid paperback reissue of Ted’s terrific novel, The Dreaming Jewels (under the re-title The Synthetic Man). And it just tickled Ted, and he came all a-twinkle, and whispered to us, “Watch this, you’ll love it.”

  And Ted got up, sidled over to the dude, slid onto the stool next to him and, loud enough for us to hear, cozened the guy with the remark, “Watchu readin’?” and the dude absently flashed the cover, said it was something like a fantasy novel, and Ted said archly, “How can you waste your time reading such crap?”

  And we waited for the guy to defend his taste in reading matter to this impertinent buttinski. We held our breaths waiting for the guy to correct this stranger with lofty praise for what a great writer this Theodore Sturgeon was.

  The guy looked down at the book for a scant …

  Shrugged, and said, “Y’know, you’re right,” and he flipped it casually across the intervening abyss into the cavernous maw of a huge mound-shaped gray trash container. Then he paid his coffee tab, slid off the stool, and moto-vated out of the Greyhound station.

  We knew better than to laugh.

  Ted came back; and he had the look of ninth inning strike three. None of us mentioned it again.

  It seemed funny at the time. Not so funny when I write about it.

  Here’s a funny one. I don’t have this authenticated, that is to say, I (thankfully) have no photos, but I sort of always knew that Ted had an inclination toward, well, not wearing clothes. Your doctor would call it nudity. Now, as I say, I don’t know if Ted was a card-carrying nudist at any time in his life, but around here he started walking around sans raiment. I could not have that. Not just because we had studio people and other writers and girl friends and the one or two people who made up my “staff” also in situ, but mostly because bare, Ted was not any more divine an apparition than are each of you reading this. He had blue shanks, scrawny old guy legs, muscular but ropey; he wasn’t inordinately hairy, but what there was … well … it was disturbing; a little pot belly that pooched out, also mildly distressing; I will not speak of his naughty bits. But there they were, wagglin’ in the breeze. I am, I know, a middle-class disappointment to Ted’s ghost, that I am thus so hidebound, but I simply could not have it. Particularly, especially, notably after The Incidents:
r />   Primus: he decided to make Paella for me and a select group of dinner party favorites. So we got him this big olla, and amassed for him the noxious ingestibles (did I mention, I not only hate this olio, would rather have someone hot-glue my tongue to a passing rhino than to partake of Paella), and off into the kitchen went the naked Sturgeon. A day he took. A whole day. No one went near the kitchen. I sent out for my coffee. And here’s what is the Incident aspect of it: as he mish’d that mosh, he used his hands, alternately digging into the heating morass and then occasionally scratching his ass. I am not, I swear on the graves of my Mom and Dad, not making this up. I have no idea if others in the house saw it, but I did, and I got to tell you, had I not loathed Paella out of the starting-gate, that tableau from The Great Black Plague would have put me off it at least till the return of the Devonian.

  (Another footnote within an anecdote inside a reminiscence: Ted was impeccable. Clean. This was a clean old man I’m talkin’ here. Not obsessive about it, not some pathological nut washing his hands every seven minutes, but clean. So don’t get the idea that the horror! the horror! of The Paella Incident stemmed from Sturgeon uncleanliness, it was just straightforward here-is-a-dude-slopping-his-claws-in-our-dinner-and-then-maybe-skinning-a-squirrel-who’s-to-know.)

  Secundus: he liked being helpful; little chores; nice short house-guest strokes that won one’s loyalty and affection. Did I mention, Ted used charm the way Joan of Arc used Divine Inspiration. He could sell sandboxes to Arabs. Charm d’boids outta the trees. Devilish weaponry. So: little aids and assists. Such as answering the doorbell every now and then. Which was all good, all fine, except most of the time he forgot he was bareass nekkid! Capped as Incident on the afternoon, as god—even though I’m an atheist—is my witness, he answered the door and the Avon cosmetics lady in her Ann Taylor suit and stylish pumps gave a strangled scream, dropped her attaché sample case, her ordering pad, her gloves (I think), and flailed away down the street like a howler monkey.