Baby Is Three (59 page)

Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: GERARD’S PROBLEM WOULD DISMAY ANY PSYCHOTHERAPIST. HE KNEW HIS NAME WITHOUT KNOWING HIS IDENTITY; WHAT HE DID, BUT NOT WHAT HE WAS. WORSE YET, HE DIDN’T KNOW HOW MANY OF HIM THERE WERE!

Corrections and addenda:

Some intriguing comments by TS on “Hurricane Trio” (Vol. IV) have come to light. In a letter to Anthony Boucher at the
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
in May 1956 accompanying a submission (“And Now the News”), Sturgeon wrote:

If you really feel this yarn is not close enough to conventional science fiction, I can … put the story in the near future and therefore in the s-f matrix. I did this kind of job only once before, adding a space ship to “Hurricane Trio” to get it into
Galaxy;
it was a slick before that, rejected all over … Eleanor Stierham: “The woman doesn’t exist who would take such a risk.” Bull’s balls! HT was a true story and I was there!

Two Autobiographical Essays

“Author, Author”
by Theodore Sturgeon
from
Fanscient
, Spring 1950

T
HEY SAY
I make puns, which I deny; it’s only that typos creep in and I have an aural word sense. I’ll demonstrate that later; it means that what I read and what I write, I hear.

I was born on Staten Island, which is populated mostly by the dead and people from Brooklyn. This birth occurred 2/26/18, according to the records. I went four years to a veddy social Staten Island private school, two weeks to a public school, thence to Philadelphia where I was two weeks in the fifth grade and got shoved into the sixth. This one I completed, and then went to a boarding school in Pennsylvania where in a year I learned how to smoke, drink, gamble, swear and swim. After six weeks in the eighth grade in summer school, I was dumped into an enormous education factory in Philadelphia at the age of twelve. I weighed 95 pounds and was utterly bewildered, but anyway I was a high school student. I was a high school student for six solid years. I never took a subject I didn’t flunk at one time or another. Like someone named Robin English, I was released. That was in ’36.

I don’t seem to be able to recall the process of living my life in a particularly consecutive order. Things happened at various times. I put in six months as a cadet on a training ship. She had been with Dewey at Manila. She was 135 feet at the waterline and had 160’ masts. She had steel sides and a wooden bottom, and a loosefooted rig because her sails were so near the deck that booms would have swept off the deck housing. We tacked her by taking in all sail and dragging it across the deck by hand while we turned her with the
engines. She was painted all white and burned coal. I didn’t like her much. There were 173 people aboard. After that I cut loose and went to sea on my own account—coastwise freighters, then tankers.

I worked in a glass factory once, taking silver off mirrors with fuming acid. Drove a tractor-trailer truck between Philadelphia and Albany. Worked in an oil refinery, hoeing grass between tanks in a storage farm. Had a job once with a crew who came north by train and brought Model A Fords all the way back to Greensboro. Pulled rope with a circus—the Al G. Barnes show in Canada. Ran a luxury resort in Jamaica. It was wonderful. We had 17 servants, and except for weekends we had them mostly to ourselves. During the war I operated 17 quarters and barracks, three messhalls and a food warehouse for the Army, which qualified me to run the specialized lubrication disbursement, from which I naturally began to operate heavy equipment. For that I got flown to Puerto Rico to run bulldozer and power shovel for the Navy. I loved it, though ten hours a day, seven days a week for nearly three years makes you sort of lose track of things. But if you know anyone with an inferiority complex you can cure him by perching him in the saddle of a Caterpillar D-8 for a few months. When the day arrives that behind all that Diesel and racket, you suddenly are aware that your nerve-endings are up there on the blind side of your blade, you gain something that you’ll never lose. It does to you what marriage does, in that respect. It doesn’t matter whether you ever pull another steering clutch. It’s a thing that’s built.

Meant to mention that I had a rugged bout with acute rheumatic fever when I was 15. It left me with a 16% enlargement. My heart used to push out between my ribs when it beat, which for a while it did reluctantly. It got better year after year until now only a specialist can detect that slight squish in the beat if I lie in a certain position after heavy exercise. But it kept me out of the Army during the war. Cardiac cripple. They wouldn’t let me man a typewriter, let alone an armchair. But 70 hours a week under that sun was fine. Yours not to reason why.…

I played guitar with a square-dance orchestra once, in the Poconos. They had a 35-foot diving platform at that resort. I used to do 2½
somersaults off it. Once someone put an overflow board in the dam during the night and the lake rose 18 inches and I didn’t know it. I hit the water face first and flattened my eyeballs. Couldn’t see a thing for a whole day.

I lived in Brooklyn for a while with an Englishman who was writing confessions. He prided himself on being a word-rate writer who didn’t give a damn for art. I did, at the time. But I meant no insult at all when I said casually that he was a hack. He got no end insulted. So to settle the argument we looked it up in his dictionary, which was an English publication. In it I found one of the most pathetic lines I have ever read. It said, “HACK, n. A literary drudge; as one who compiles dictionaries.”

I shipped out one time with a guy named Kelley. He’s around in some of my copy. He was one of the most amazing people I have ever met. He’s in Atlanta now, I think, but he was like one of those creatures JWC’s always trying to goad us into writing about, which thinks as well as a man, but not like a man. I was sitting in a honky-tonk in Port Arthur, Texas, one night. There was a girl called Bernice who had taken quite a shine to Kelley and they’d been pretty thick at the south end of our trips. Bernice had just gotten wind of the fact that Kelley was sporting a girl down the street at Pete’s Place, and she didn’t like it at all. So when Kelley walked in, Bernice reached behind her and pulled an electric fan off the shelf and threw it at his head with the same motion. It was a big electric fan and it didn’t have any guard on it. Kelley ducked it, seeming to move much more slowly than he actually did. He didn’t move his feet, but sort of bent his head aside and turned his shoulders and let the fan go by. It hit the wall and chewed up the partition. Nobody said anything. Now anyone else in the world who believed in do-as-you-would-be-done-by would have thrown the fan back at the girl. Not Kelley. He walked over and picked her up over his head and threw her at the fan. She slid on out the door and down the stairs. Kelley went out after her, taking his time, stepped around her where she lay halfway down the flight, and went on back to Pete’s Place.

I was profoundly impressed—not by what he’d done, but by the way he thought. I’ve used that kind of reversal in plot treatments
many times. It’s one thing to turn front to back. It’s something else again, just as logical but much more rare, to make a mirror image.

I’d rather be writer than a human being. Wrote a story for WEIRD once and put a lot into it. It was real good catharsis and it did me good. A few days after it was published I got a letter from South Africa. There was a girl in the story who died, and this letter contained a poem which was an epitaph for her. As poetry it was so-so. But I had to reread it a half-dozen times to find out why it struck me as vaguely familiar. Then I got it. It was composed entirely of lines picked up here and there through the story, with only an occasional slight alteration to fit the form.

Thoughts are cloud-shapes, formless, without size or any particular hue. But code them—make words of them—and they take on some fraction of what they mean to you. Recode those words into typescript; they’re read, printed, proofed, distributed. Suppose, then, another mind half a world away decodes that type into words and those words into thoughts and from that multiple fractionation finds it in him not only to create, but to re-create some of the particular pulse-pound and gland-squirt that went into it … that makes me humble. I’m ashamed of that story. I wish I’d polished it until it was worth having that effect on someone. You can kid around about the writing racket from now till then, but you can’t get away from the fact that if writing can do a thing like that, a writer undertakes a truly awesome responsibility.

I said at the start that my puns and perhaps a suspicion of what’s called a style have their source in the fact that I hear what I read. I hear what I write, and I don’t think it hurts what comes out. There are times when the mood of narration dictates a more conscious approach to the words that you use and their order. It’s easy to prove that the treatment’s unseen, but it yields an incredible smoothness of flow to your work.

There probably wouldn’t be one reader in a hundred thousand who would realize that the above paragraph is written most laboriously in anapestic feet; that is, there are two unaccented syllables followed by a strong accent, but with most of the sentences beginning and ending in the middle of the foot so that the thing doesn’t
get sing-song. This happens to be my prime kick in writing. It’s a thing you don’t dare do very often; but when you apply it lightly and briefly, you find yourself woven into your copy with a completeness that can’t be approached in any other way that I know of. But be careful; the trick’s more dangerous than opium. There are a zillion different kinds of feet you can use. The largest charge of it I ever put into a story was in one of my WEIRD TALES, or proving grounds, yarns, when I used a monster that changed its meter every time it changed its mood. That went on for three thousand words. Have fun, chillun.