Read The Nail and the Oracle Online
Authors: Theodore Sturgeon
The Nail and the Oracle (2 page)
In preparation for this endeavor, I have gone back and done my homework: I have reread all the guest forewords in the ten previous volumes: all twelve in ten big fat wonderful congeries of Ted’s phantasmagoria—twelve in ten? Yeah, there were three in volume one—and let me assure you: this will not be a learned, long-bearded exegesis such as Chip Delany’s, even though both Chip’s and Ted’s beards have inspired awe. Ah, but that’s just splitting hairs. Nor will it be a charming and pop-pastoral reminiscence overflowing with the chirrups of songbirds reeling through Disneyesque delusions courtesy of LSD, à la Dave Crosby’s piece that leads off Volume VI (though both of these friends of mine downed more acid than your local neighborhood hiatic hernia) …
a pause, if you’ll indulge me. I never did drugs. Probably because I was on the road at an early age and saw what it could do to the creative process. But Ted did stuff, and I have neither the inclination nor the information to comment on what effect it had on him. But what I wanted to tell you was a sweet little moment tangential to the whole substance thing, and it was this:
Ted and I were at a party thrown by a brilliant young poet named Paul Robbins; something like in 1967. Everybody was toke’n and somebody passed me a doob the size of a stegosaurus coprolith, and I passed it on to Ted, sitting next to me. And, naturally, some yotz, whose paranoid orientation conned him into a sense of an ill wind blowing in the room, snarked at me, “Whassamatter, you don’t want a hit?” And before I could tell him to mind his own, Ted said (in that lovely tenor), “Harlan won’t use till he comes down.”
I couda kissed him. And years later, Ted, commenting on how my stories could seem so hallucinatory when I’d never done drugs, told an interviewer, “Harlan is the only person I know who produces psilocybin in his bloodstream.” Couda kissed him again.
Uh, for the record, Ted and I never kissed.
Although two men kissing is fine, just fine. Just saying.
… and this foreword will not be a well-intentioned and elegant homage to someone never met by the Introducing Entity, such as Jonathan Lethem’s nice piece of Volume X; and it sure as hell isn’t going to be a noblesse oblige accommodation such as the one my old chum Kurt Vonnegut proffered in Volume VIII.
It will no doubt upset the faithful, dismay the shy, outrage the punctilious, and get both Publisher and Series Editor to get off the trolley at downtown nose-outta-jointville. Complaints; oh yes, there will be complaints. I get a lot of complaints about my manner.
Yeah, well, if Ted or I had ever given much of a foof about the penalties pursuant to living our lives by our own manner, we sure as hell wouldn’t have behaved the way we did, and still do.
But it is the eleventh attempt to climb this Nanga Parbat, in for a penny is in for a pound, either I do it or I don’t. Had I my druthers, I wouldn’t. But since Ted called me before he died to say he wanted
me
to do his obit …
… since we’re in it together at this point, let me pause again to reprint some words. This is what I wrote for
Locus
an hour and a half after Ted died. It was on the first page of that “journal of record” of the science fiction world, June 1985, issue #293 if you care to check.
Theodore Sturgeon Dies
It began raining in Los Angeles tonight at almost precisely the minute Ted Sturgeon died in Eugene, Oregon. Edward Hamilton Waldo would have cackled at the cosmic silliness of it; but I didn’t. It got to me; tonight, May 8th, 1985.
It had been raining for an hour, and the phone rang. Jayne Sturgeon said, “Ted left us an hour ago, at 7:59.”
I’d been expecting it, of course, because I’d talked to him—as well as he could gasp out a conversation with the fibrosis stealing his breath—early in March, long distance to Haiku, Maui, Hawaii. Ted had written his last story for me, for the
MEDEA project, and we’d sent him the signature plates for the limited edition. He said to me, “I want you to write the eulogy.”
I didn’t care to think about that. I said, “Don’t be a pain in the ass, Ted. You’ll outlive us all.” Yeah, well, he
will
, on the page; but he knew he was dying, and he said it again, and insisted on my promise. So I promised him I’d do it, and a couple of weeks ago I came home late one night to find a message on my answering machine: it was Ted, and he’d come home, too. Come home to Oregon to die, and he was calling to say goodbye. It was only a few words, huskingly spoken, each syllable taking it out of him, and he gave me his love, and he reminded me of my promise; and then he was gone.
Now I have to say important words, extracted from a rush of colliding emotions. About a writer and a man who loomed large, whose faintest touch remains on everyone he ever met, whose talent was greater than the vessel in which it was carried, whose work influenced at least two generations of the best young writers, and whose brilliance remains as a reminder that this poor genre of dreams and delusions can be literature.
Like a very few writers, his life was as great a work of artistic creation as the stories. He was no myth, he was a legend. Where he walked, the ether was disturbed by his passage.
For some, he was the unicorn in the garden; for others, he was a profligate who’d had ten hot years as the best writer in the country, regardless of categorizations (even the categorization that condemned him to the ghetto); for young writers he was an icon; for the old hands who’d lived through the stages of his unruly life he was an unfulfilled promise. Don’t snap at me for saying this: he liked the truth, and he wouldn’t care to be remembered sans limps and warts and the hideous smell of that damned grape-scented pipe tobacco he smoked.
But who the hell needs the truth when the loss is still so painful? Maybe you’re right; maybe we shouldn’t speak of that.
It’s only been an hour and a half since Jayne called, as I
write this, and my promise to Ted makes me feel like the mommy who has to clean up her kid’s messy room. I called CBS radio, and I called the
Herald-Examiner
, and that will go a ways toward getting him the hail-and-farewell I think he wanted, even though I know some headline writer will say SCI-FI WRITER STURGEON DEAD AT 67.
And the kid on the night desk at the newspaper took the basics—Ted’s age, his real name, the seven kids, all that—and then he said, “Well, can you tell me what he was known for? Did he win any awards?” And I got crazy. I said, with an anger I’d never expected to feel, “Listen, sonny, he’s only gone about an hour and a half, and he was as good as you get at this writing thing, and no one who ever read
The Dreaming Jewels
or
More Than Human
or
Without Sorcery
got away clean because he could squeeze your heart till your life ached, and he was one of the best writers of the last half a century, and the tragedy of his passing is that
you
don’t know who the fuck he was!” And then I hung up on him, because I was angry at his ignorance, but I was
really
angry at Ted’s taking off like that, and I’m angry that I’m trying to write this when I don’t know what to write, and I’m furious as hell that Ted made me promise to do this unthinkable thing, which is having to write a eulogy for a man who could have written his own, or any other damned thing, better than I or any of the rest of us could do it.
—Harlan Ellison
®
… and since Noël won’t spill the beans in
her
tureen, yet expects
me
to do it—“Get in there and suck up them bullets!” she said sweetly—even though she knows most of what I know—though not even between us can we seem to make the dates properly coincide—at least I have a living witness that what I write here is true. Ted’s daughter and the Trustee of his Literary Estate; she has read this and vetted this.
Other forewords in this series have brilliantly dissected Ted’s style, analyzed his widening circle effect on other writers …
When I encounter the encomia of other writers about Sturgeon, and they gush something like, “I learned so much from him,” or “his work taught me how to write,” I think they are either fools, or they’re lying. No, wait, that’s unfair: not lying … deluding themselves; so stunned by what Ted could do seemingly effortlessly, oblivious to what agony accompanied the doing of it, that they’ve become tropes of what Stephen King noticed about writers, if you leave sour milk open in the refrigerator, pretty soon
everything
in the box takes on the smell.
Yes, he certainly laid down a new architectural elevation every time a story left his nest (onward, madly onward flew the farraginous metaphors); and to be sure, any scribbling idiot can perceive his facility with language, like a pizza chef whirling that expansible crust aloft; and no question that there are glimmers of Ted’s auctorial seminar
every
where these days; nonetheless, you
cannot
learn to write from Sturgeon any more conveniently than one could learn how to dance by studying Fred Astaire.
Ted was among the very best there ever were. And the way we’re going, he may be among the very best there ever
will
be. He loved the sound of words the way trees love the wind, the way yin loves yang, the way the halves of Velcro love their mate (and Ted often contended that he had “invented” Velcro in one of his stories). Ted played and sang not only with the guitar, but with words like the best chum you ever had, like dopey kids drunk on the summertime, careering through an empty lot. Words were, to Ted, the best chums possible.