Case and the Dreamer (48 page)

And, like most of Sturgeon’s best stories, and unlike most of the rest of postwar literature, it is heavy on plot: a real story is unfolded, the kind that sucks you in and glues your mind to the page, and all the other good stuff the storyteller offers is thrown in as a bonus and never allowed to get in the way of the story itself. Indeed, the bonus material—ideas, insights, detailed descriptions (the hero of “Maturity” compares his surprised doctor/lady-friend to a taffy-pulling machine, and launches into a tour-de-force description of how said machine operates and why it’s so beautiful), charm—is all integral to and indistinguishable from the telling of the story; Sturgeon indulges himself constantly, wonderfully, and yet never wastes a word.

“Maturity” was followed by a succession of fine stories—notably “Thunder and Roses” (a sad, poetic yarn in which the United States
is destroyed by atomic bombs but refuses to retaliate), “It Wasn’t Syzygy” (a love story, written in magnificent metered prose, in which the horrified narrator discovers he’s a figment of his girlfriend’s imagination) and “The Perfect Host” (a tale of possession, built around a unique and powerful idea and told in a manner that breaks all the rules of storytelling—successfully). Each story was different, was brilliant in a whole new startling way. No one could guess what the man would do next.

Sturgeon became a superstar.

Now, in terms of the money to be made and the size of the audience, being a star in the science fiction world in the late ’40s was a little like being a big frog in a rather small glass of water. But it was a respectable glass of water, from the point of view of the people inside it (outsiders, of course, considered science fiction worthless trash). Science-fiction people felt like they knew something everybody else didn’t know.…

Sturgeon had dreams of glory. He would complain about being stuck in the science-fiction ghetto, but he never made any real effort to break out. For one thing, it was very comfortable there in the ghetto—he could write whatever he wanted to and be almost certain of selling it; editors knew him and would give him advances, his stories were read and praised by his peers, including all the writers he himself admired and respected … and there was a freedom in the science-fiction field that did not and does not exist elsewhere, an openness to new ideas, unusual or shocking subject matter, innovative language or story structure. Sturgeon may have known intuitively that he would never enjoy such freedom in any other paying market.

But there was something else, too. Sturgeon had a great desire for success. Like any kid who’s taken a career his parents don’t approve of, he wanted
to show them …
but he was blocked, there was something very strong inside him that told him he didn’t deserve success, he didn’t deserve his talent or the love of his friends or anything else good that seemed to come his way.

And he couldn’t overcome this. He has not overcome it to this day. He still doesn’t feel secure even about his own status within the
science-fiction field! He reads the reviews, he hears the accolades, but he forgets them immediately. He lives in a world of his own, a world where he nurtures his own enormous self-doubt for his own impenetrable reasons.

“I’m not a writer,” he told Judith Merril in 1947. “A writer is someone who has to write. The only reason I write is because it’s the only way I can justify all the other things I didn’t do.”

Robert Heinlein, who started writing science fiction at the same time Sturgeon did, came back from the war and started selling stories to
The Saturday Evening Post
(the number-one market for fiction at the time) and then wangled a contract with a major book publisher to do science fiction novels aimed at teenagers. Sturgeon had the same opportunity to break into the big time—in fact, in March of 1947, he won a $1,000 short-story contest (Graham Greene took second place) sponsored by the British magazine
Argosy
, with a story called “Bianca’s Hands.” He exulted in this success, but made no serious attempt to use it as a steppingstone to broader commercial or literary acceptance. Indeed, he only submitted “Bianca’s Hands”—a story he’d written before the war and had never been able to sell; one editor told him he’d never buy any story from a person who could write such a monstrous thing—to
Argosy
because it had been rejected by every other possible market. He’d have gladly given it to anyone for a quick $50; and indeed there were many stories he sold for $50 or $100 that could have gone to much better markets, but were never sent around because Ted needed the money right away and couldn’t afford to wait or take a chance on rejection.

So, in 1948, when he needed more money than the science-fiction world could offer him, he went to work for Time, Inc., writing direct-mail copy for
Fortune
magazine. He was very good at it. (“Direct mail for Time, Inc. paid off at 2.3%. I wrote three 4% letters, and became a local hero.”) He all but stopped writing stories. And he might have spent the rest of his days in the comfortable confines of Time, Inc., had it not been for a young woman named Marion McGahan.

For thirty-eight years, Theodore Sturgeon has been trying not to write. He does everything in his power, leaps at any distraction, places every possible obstacle between himself and his typewriter and has indeed succeeded in damming the flow for weeks or years at a time. But always in the end his defenses fail him and a new flood of stories bursts through.

He won’t admit it, but the real reason Ted doesn’t write is that he doesn’t want to. His stories, the good ones, are like demons; they possess him. He admires and takes pride in the finished product, but mostly he resents the intrusion. He wants to be left alone.

The ’50s saw a burst of great stories from Sturgeon unlike anything before or since. Month after month brought miracle after miracle, like a pressurized can of genius letting go of its contents. It was an incredible performance. Sturgeon’s defenses against writing had been utterly superseded, and it took him years to get them in place again.

This all started in the spring of 1952, after the birth of his first son, Robin.

Sturgeon fell in love with Marion McGahan in 1949; he was thirty-one, and she was eighteen. They lived together in Brooklyn for a while—he worked at Time, Inc. in Manhattan, and she worked in the Brooklyn Public Library. They were married in 1951. (Marion was Ted’s third wife. He had been living with a singer named Mary Mair since 1947, and had married her in 1948; but by the time of the marriage their relationship was already shaky, and they soon went their separate ways.)

Ted was content to go on doing what he was doing, tossing off occasional stories for the less demanding science fiction magazines
(Fantastic Adventures, Planet Stories)
, secure in his job (by now he’d been transferred over to the promotion department of Time International), and enjoying his central role in the active social life of the science-fiction world in New York City. His current stories were unimpressive, but he was lionized for his past achievements and his ever-present charm.

But Marion had had this dream, for a long time, of living in the country with a writer, and she prevailed on Ted to make it come true for her. He dragged his feet, but … “She wasn’t happy with me working for a big, patronizing company—also she wanted to be near her mother, who lived upstate—there were a lot of reasons like that. More than anything else, I hadn’t written for quite a while, and it was time I got back to my own work.”

So they moved to a little stone house back in the woods in Congers, New York, and Marion gave birth to a boy named Robin (after the hero of Ted’s story “Maturity”), and Ted wrote a story called “Baby Is Three,” which later became the centerpiece of his novel
More than Human
.

In the next fourteen months he wrote, among other things: “A Saucer of Loneliness” (his classic story about a lonely girl, and the message she receives from a flying saucer), “The Clinic” (another story about loneliness and communication and love, an incredible tour de force in which he creates not only two unforgettable people but a whole new language—

I say, “What’s this?” and I move the arms
.

He say, “Violin?”

I say, “Yes. Make one noise, a new noise—one and one and one. Now,” I say, “what’s this?” and I move again. “Banjo,” he say. “Guitar, maybe.”

“Make many noise, in set. Make a new set. And a new set. Yes?”

“Yes,” he say. “It’s played in chords, mostly. What are you getting at?”

I bump on side of head. “You have think word and word and word and you make set. I have think set and set and set.”

—that makes more sense than our own), “The Touch of Your Hand,” “Mr. Costello, Hero,” “And My Fear Is Great” (three unforgettable characters this time, including an old woman who knows about yoga and yin and yang, but has a hard time learning that her powers are limited by her Victorian view of sex), “The Silken Swift” (a beautifully written fable about two women, a man, and a unicorn), “The Sex Opposite” (there are androgynous creatures among us), “The World Well Lost” (a taboo-breaker about homosexuality),
“The Fabulous Idiot” and “Morality” (the two other sections of
More than Human
) and “A Way of Thinking” (another classic Sturgeon tale, about a voodoo doll and a man who just doesn’t think the way everyone else does—another one of those stories that makes you wonder where this guy learned to write like that, which is a question that has no answer).

Sturgeon’s career was taking off like a skyrocket, again. His first books—a short-story collection in 1948, and a novel,
The Dreaming Jewels
, in 1949—had been published by small presses specializing in science fiction. Now he was getting contracts from respected “mainstream” publishing houses. Farrar, Strauss published
More than Human
in hardcover, and it got terrific reviews (“One fears to toss about words like ‘profundity’ and ‘greatness’ in connection with the literature of entertainment; but it’s hard to avoid them here.”—
New York Herald Tribune
). BMI asked him to write a science fiction opera. Opportunity was knocking everywhere.

But there were some problems in paradise. Ted tended to spend money as fast as it came in—sometimes faster—and so even at the height of his productivity he was always strapped for funds and looking around for more ways to make money. This got him involved in television—as early as 1952 he did a Studio One script and then complained to a friend afterwards that, although the money was good, it was a tremendous amount of work and the final results were unsatisfying. But he continued to take TV work whenever he could find it.

Another bad habit he got into about this time was the contract dilemma. This is a horrible thing writers and publishers do to each other, where you sign a contract to write a book, and get some money, and then you have to write it. Sturgeon’s success with
More than Human
enabled him to get a contract for a novel he wanted to write about a galactic supermind that swallows the human race. The book was due in October 1954, at which point Sturgeon would get the second half of his advance. Trying to write the novel kept Sturgeon from getting much other work done. Failing to write it—sometimes an idea just won’t come when you push at it—meant the money he was counting on didn’t materialize. Financial pressure, guilt, a bad
reputation among publishers … This particular book project sat on Sturgeon’s back (his editor was once heard to remark, “I know Sturgeon can write a novel in three days, but which three days?”) for four years—it was finally completed in early 1958, and published as
The Cosmic Rape
. It was the first of many such problem contracts, most of them compounded by Sturgeon’s ability to get further advances on already overdue books by describing some (always authentic) unexpected financial emergency.… Sturgeon got into this writer’s quicksand early, and what’s amazing is that it took him so long to go down.

1953 was a high point, but Sturgeon continued to produce extraordinary stories in 1954 and the next few years. Many of his very best works—“Bright Segment,” “When You’re Smiling,” “And Now the News,” “To Here and the Easel” (a story about a painter who can’t paint), “Hurricane Trio,” “The Other Man”—date from this period. One such story a year would more than justify a $20,000 annual survival grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, if there were such a thing, and Sturgeon was turning out four or five major works a year.

Until 1958.

Tandy was born in 1954, and Noël (Ted and Marion’s second daughter, and Ted’s fourth) in 1956. In 1957 Ted decided it was time to leave Congers, and he and the family moved to a house in Truro, Massachusetts, near the tip of Cape Cod. (He became friends with Kurt Vonnegut at this time; and later Vonnegut used him as a partial model for his character Kilgore Trout.)

Ted finally wrote
The Cosmic Rape
that year on the Cape, along with several short stories, one of which, “The Comedian’s Children,” about a manipulative TV personality, was another impossible triumph—that story tore me into little pieces when I was twelve years old, and it remains one of the most powerful pieces of fiction I’ve ever read.

But the Cape was cold and lonely, and the Sturgeon family decided they could live cheaper and happier in the West Indies. Ted’s mother was teaching on St. Vincent, and she found them a place on the island of Bequi. They arrived—three kids, possessions, etc.—and the house
was too small, noisy, no privacy … so they began months of island-hopping, searching for a home. They ended up on Grenada. Ted had no place to write during all this, but he kept trying. He was working on a story called “The Man Who Lost the Sea.”

At the end of 1958, he finished the story. It was the only thing he’d written all year. The money was long gone, patience was gone, the romantic dream of living in the West Indies was gone. Ted’s agent sent back the story, saying he couldn’t understand it. Eventually it sold to
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, but by that time the Sturgeons were back in Congers, at Marion’s mother’s house, trying to sort things out, looking for a place to settle down. Ted had finally done it: spent an entire year working on one twelve-page story. Wrecked by the tropics again.