Read The Nail and the Oracle Online
Authors: Theodore Sturgeon
The Nail and the Oracle (3 page)
Inspirational, but out of reach. What he did, he did like Blackstone or Houdini, with lock-picks and escape engines from flaw-free fetters under his tongue, in his butt, up his nose. Ted was, in the purest sense of the word, a runesmith. (Yeah, that’s the title of the story we wrote together—at least the one you know about—and it’s in this very book if you want to pause and go read it and come back here …
Don’t say I’m not considerate of your feelings.)
Anyone who misbelieves that they learned to write by deconstructing a Sturgeon story—try it with “A Way of Thinking” in Volume VII, I double-dog-dare you!—is not only building castles in the air, he or she is trying to move furniture
into
it. Sturgeon was what he called me once:
rara avis
. Weird bird, existent in the universe in the number of one.
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.