The Nail and the Oracle (5 page)

And so it went on with us for more than thirty years. Ted growing more ensnared by a received universe that was both too small to contain him while simultaneously telling him he was a titan. It is hideously bifurcating to go among one’s readers, many of whom look upon you as the mortal avatar of The Inviolable Chalice of Genius, having had to borrow the bus-fare to get cross-country to the convention. He grew more and more careless of what his actions and life-choices would do to those he left behind, yet to those who met him casually he was more charming than a cobra at a mongoose rally.

And we continued to watch each other; sometimes to watch
over
each other. I have a letter I’d like to insert here. It was written during that very tough time in 1966–67 I mentioned earlier in this jaunt.

Thought it may not seem so, this long in the wind, this exegesis is not about me. It is about the trails Ted and I cut with each other. The other guest introductions are variously great, good, okay and slight; but this one is the only one that minutely tries to codify the odd parameters of an odd friendship, a human liaison. So I’ll not go into particulars about the shitstorm under which I went to my knees
in ’67–’68, save to tell you true that I was neither feckless nor freshly kicked off the turnip truck.

Nonetheless, I got hit hard, and Ted wrote this to me, dated April 18, 1966:

Accompanying the letter was number 20 of
Twenty Love Poems Based on the Spanish by Pablo Neruda
, by Christopher Logue, from
Songs
(1959). And then, quickly,
Dangerous Visions
was published, Ted’s marriage to Marion underwent heartbreak, Ted and I talked cross-country virtually every day, and in the wake of the notoriety of DV and his story, “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” which I had chivvied him into writing after a protracted writer’s block dry spell and financial reverses, Ted came to live with me.

It was 1966, ’67, and at various times I think it was for a full year, at other times memory insists it was longer, but separate inputs staunchly declare it was only six, eight, ten months. I can’t recall precisely, now more than forty years later, but it seemed to go on forever.

I have all of Ted’s books, of course, but the only two he ever signed were my copy of
Dangerous Visions
with
all
the authors logged on—a rare artifact existent in the universe, as I’ve said, in the number of one—and my personal library copy of his first collection,
Without Sorcery
, Prime Press 1948, for which I paid a buck
fifty (marked down from $3.00) in 1952. Here is what he wrote on the front flyleaf in May of 1966 during my birthday gathering:

That’s gracious crap, of course, but what I
did
do was get Theodore Sturgeon writing again.

In the wake of my own day and night hammering on one of the half dozen or so Olympia office machines (never mind how many Olympia portables I had stashed), Ted grew chagrined at his facility to
talk
new story-ideas but not to
write
them, and I rode him mercilessly. The phrase “your fifteen minutes of fame has drained out of the hourglass” became taunt and tautology. I showed him no mercy; and with so many other younger writers passing through the way station of my home, all of them on the prod, worshipful but competitive, Ted ground his teeth and set up shop in the blue bedroom, and began writing.

I’d long-since gotten him inside
Star Trek
, but now—for the fastest money in town—I opened the market at
Knight
magazine. Sirkay Publications. Holloway House. The low-end men’s magazines:
Adam, Cad, Knight, The Adam Bedside Reader
. Two hundred and fifty, three hundred, sometimes a little more, each pop … paid within 24 hours. Sometimes we’d kick the story around at the breakfast table; sometimes he’d come into my then tiny office at the front of the house, dead of night, as I was pounding away under the unrelenting pressure of studio or publication deadlines, and we’d noodle something out. Sometimes it was a snag in one of my stories, sometimes it was a glitch in his.

And we wrote “Runesmith” together. And he wrote or plotted or set aside a snippet of the following, here at Ellison Wonderland: “The Patterns of Dorne,” “It Was Nothing—Really!” and “Brownshoes,” “Slow Sculpture,” and “Suicide,” “It’s You,” and “Jorry’s Gap,” “Crate,” and “The Girl Who Knew What They Meant.” Maybe
others, I can’t remember. But most of the stories that he finished when he was living with Wina about a mile away from me down the hill at 14210 Ventura Boulevard, La Fonda Motel, he plotted and started here before I threw him out.

Here’s the flat of it, friends.

And Ted would understand this.

Most of what I know about Theodore Sturgeon I cannot tell you.

We watched each other. He looked after me. I tried to help him. And then came out
Sturgeon Is Alive and Well
 …

Many of the stories from that last, final collection of (almost) new fictions, got born here. Right downstairs in the blue bedroom. And I harassed my buddy Digby Diehl, the now-famous editor, who was at that time the editor of the
Los Angeles Times Book Review
section, to let me review
Alive and Well
. And he did, beneath the copy editor’s headline “Sturgeon’s Law Overtakes Him.”

No good deed …

Here, reprinted for the first time, is that review, from the April 18th, 1971
Los Angeles Times
.

You will kindly note the cost of this 221 page hardcover in the early Seventies. This will give you an idea of the kind of money a writer as excellent as Sturgeon had to subsist on, it will also inform your understanding of the love-hate attitude even as lauded an artist as Sturgeon had with his work environment.

Sturgeon Is Alive and Well
A new collection of stories by
Theodore Sturgeon
(G.P. Putnam’s Sons—$4.95)

Alive and well, yes definitely. But up to the level of his past brilliance, no I’m afraid not.

Theodore Sturgeon, you see, is without argument one of the finest writers—of any kind—this country has ever produced. His novels
More Than Human, Some of Your Blood
,
and
The Dreaming Jewels
stand untarnished by time and endless re-readings as purest silver. His short stories have so completely examined the parameters of love in a genre of imagination woefully shy in that particular, that the words
love
and
Sturgeon
have become synonymous. The word
syzygy
also belongs to him.

He is also much-quoted as the author of Sturgeon’s Law, a Deep Thought that suggests 90% of
every
thing is mediocre … puddings, plays, politicians; cars, carpenters, coffee; people, books, neurologists … 
every
thing. A realistic assessment of the impossibility of achieving perfection that, till now, has applied to everyone and everything save Sturgeon. Sadly, and at long last, his own Law has caught up with him. Ninety per cent of this new collection of stories is mediocre.

After a long and painful dry spell in which the creative well seemed emptied, Sturgeon began writing again three years ago, and eleven of the twelve stories herein contained date from this latest period of productivity. Only two of them approach the brilliance of stories like “The Silken-Swift,” “A Saucer of Loneliness,” “Killdozer,” or “Bianca’s Hands.” It has been said time and again about Sturgeon, that had he not suffered the ghastly stigmatizing ghettoization of being tagged a “science fiction” writer, he might easily surpass John Collier, Donald Barthelme, Ray Bradbury, or even Kurt Vonnegut as a mainstream fantasist of classic stature. Yet here, freed of that restriction, the fictions seem thin and too slick and forgettable; stories that could have been written by men not one thousandth as special as Theodore Sturgeon.

“To Here and the Easel,” a 1954 novelette printed here in hardcover for the first time (and the only story to have a previous publication), is the longest, and the dullest. A fantasy of schizophrenia in which a painter who can’t paint swings back and forth between his life as Giles, helpless before his empty white canvas, and his life as Rogero, a knight out of
Orlando Furioso
, this overlong and rococo morality play seems embarrassingly reminiscent of the kind of pulp writing
typified by L. Ron Hubbard’s
Slaves of Sleep
, a novel bearing almost exactly the same plot-device Sturgeon employs.

Of the remaining eleven tales, five are straight mainstream, four are clearly s-f oriented, and two are borderline. However, only two crackle with the emotional load
aficionados
have come to revere in Sturgeon’s work. In “Take Care of Joey,” a man whose world-view is built on the concept that no one performs a seemingly unselfish act “without there’s something in it for him,” finds just such a situation operating. A nasty, troublemaking little bastard named Joey is watched over by a guy named Dwight, who obviously hates the little rat. He goes way out of his way to keep Joey from getting the crap kicked out of him, up to and past the point where Dwight himself gets stomped. The narrator of the story has to find out why, and he does, and he finds out something else that makes this eleven-page short a stunning example of Sturgeon’s off-kilter insight and humanity.

“The Girl Who Knew What They Meant” is the other winner and it is so carefully-constructed, so meticulously-spun that not until the last twenty-seven words, the final three sentences, does the reader know he has had his soul wrung like the neck of a chicken. It is Sturgeon transcendent. And if Martha Foley’s
Best American Short Stories
overlooks it this year, surely there is no justice.

On sum, though the book is weak and for the most part a terrible disappointment, merely having Sturgeon writing again—and being able to prove it with slugs of type—is a blessing. And even with typographical errors rampant (a felony heretofore difficult to charge to Putnam’s) it is a book well worth having done. Not just for those two incredible little short stories but by the same rationale that insists we preserve every letter and laundry list written by a Lincoln, a Hemingway or a Melville.

What I’m trying to say, is that Sturgeon is one of our best. He will be read and enjoyed a hundred years from now. So we
must
see it all, even the least successful of it.