The Ultimate Egoist (50 page)

TS to Dorothe, June 25, 1939:
Glad, and a little surprised, that you so liked “Extraordinary Seaman” … the editor at McClure didn’t think so much of it, and neither did I … she bought it only because it was the first tanker story I had submitted and she is in favor of my using my various backgrounds … the dialogue is A-1, and the plot is very stupid; but she liked it for exactly the opposite reasons, which only shows to go you … at any rate, it sold, and bought me my new suit, so what the hell … but if you liked it so well, then I’d better not send you “A God in a Garden,” on account of because you might not be able to stand it, so superior is it to the “Seaman.” “Ether Breather” is almost as good
.

The story was sent out by McClure on a galley sheet, 15″ × 22″, with a large illustration, designed to take up a full newspaper page.

“One Sick Kid”:
syndicated by McClure, April 29, 1939. Although he again got to use his tanker background and mention Tortugas (an occasional TS nickname, presumably because of its anagrammatic similarity to his surname), Sturgeon did not like this story. To Dorothe, March 30, 1939:
I sold McClures again, which means five bucks at the end of April … I submitted three really brilliant stories to them, and one very mediocre one whose two selling points were its sickening flag-waving and its idea. The latter is as weak as my stomach just now (epsom, iron, quinine, strychnine) but I got it from a newspaper article and the clipping was attached to the MS. I have rarely been so discouraged; the sale contributed rather than cheered me. McClure’s also rejected a story written on the editor’s plot, in the editor’s way; yet they bought, last month, a story which is against the policies they stated before I wrote it
[“Permit Me My Gesture”?]
 … damn them! To make you slog and slog for the miserable delayed pennies they pay? What right have they to be so _______ picky? …

Mom of course knew just what to say, when she finally commented on a batch of the McClure short-shorts. Sturgeon quotes her (she was a dedicated and productive, though not much published, story writer herself, and he respected her opinions tremendously) in his reply letter: “The newspaper things are decent quality for newspaper things. The one I liked best was the piece about the seasick lad and the coastguard cutter.” And: “I’d love to see some of your good stuff.” That provoked this outburst (TS to Christine Hamilton Sturgeon, February 2, 1940):

Naow mum: I appreciate your appreciation of me as a rising literary star. I mean that; I’m not being sarcastic. But you must realize that my philosophy of life is an egoistic (not egotistic, n.b.) one. Self-advancement, self-development, self-gratification. I think I told you that it seems to me there are only two ways to achieve happiness in this our life, and one is to adjust the world to suit oneself, and the other, to adjust oneself to suit the world? And that I frankly consider myself not big enough for the former job? It is in that honest conviction that I avoid egotism …
I
know just how much I have to be proud of
, no matter what I tell other people.
And my writing adheres to that philosophy. I told you above that the new “comic” field has just saved my life and my hopes
. [TS had gotten an assignment writing continuity for a Street & Smith comic strip called
Iron Munro
, included in
Shadow Comics
magazine.]
Proof enough that for me there is no such thing as prostituting my art. I am a writer and I am a good one. I have an artistic approach toward things which afford me, personally, amusement, but I do not regard my writing as an art, but a craft. I will succeed faster and better in the only way which means anything to me just now, as a craftsman, than I ever could as an artist. I will never write a
Grapes of Wrath
or a
Gone With the Wind
or an
Appointment at Samarra
because I have no message, no ardor, no lessons to teach. I am a teller of tales, and in telling tales I find my delight. I tell the tales that people want to be told, and no others, because I am not egocentric but just egoistic. That is called writing formula. I write formula. I know you didn’t mean the line about “good stuff” as such, but it was the deadliest of insults. Why? Because when I write
I do the very best I know how!
Good stuff? You have it. A story is good if it sells; it is of “great” material if it gets audience huzzas. All of those stories were stories the people asked me to tell them. That I sold them means I did my job capably. That “Ether Breather” was not only voted the best story in the issue but the most entertaining story of the
year
proves to my satisfaction that it was near-great. Now listen to me very, very carefully, oh most wonderful of mothers. I do not know if I will ever write novels. If I do, they probably will not be great. But if one or some are great, then it will be only because they are the most magnificent pieces of escapist hedonism ever to see print. And don’t throw Bodenheim at me. I know him now; as a matter of fact I threw him out of this very room two nights ago because he was objectionably drunk
. That
is his trouble. You told me once that he was a fine poet, and that he degenerated by way of large checks
, Replenishing Jessica,
and
A Virtuous Girl.

You’re wrong, Mum. Maxwell Bodenheim is a great poet. He is touched by a Power greater than men or Man. He is an instrument. He is a voice for a Great Thought. I know because I’ve seen that ordinary-looking sandy-haired little man
be
that voice. He is a poet and he is an artist and he has gained, not lost, in his art. And I want no art like Bodenheim’s. I have a life to live and a girl to marry and children to bring into the world—a life
of
me, outside of me. Let the Bodenheims and the Joe Goulds and the Linc Gillespies and the John Rose Gildeas live out their infernos of beauty. I’ll feed what pap to fools I’m paid for, and live a clean life on their stupidity
.

But I
don’t write down!
I can’t, and sell stories. Be proud of my doing the impossible. I have sold thirty-two stories and a poem in a year of writing—and five months of that year I was, for some reason or other, hors de combat. I have made a living out of writing. I have only done it by working like hell when I worked. Be proud of me, then, for that; but oh, mum, don’t you know by this time that there is little lofty about young Ted? I’m no Wells or Welles; Shaw or Shakespeare. I give humor and originality and the utmost in refined horror (that’s “He Shuttles,” due out in 60 days—my novelette) to people who
need
it. I’m no uplifter. I repeat: I’m a craftsman … what was it Pete
[his older brother]
once said— “I respect a good whore more than a lousy bishop”? There you have it. Literary snobbishness is for people who sell
Story
after twelve tears
[sic]
of trying, during which they lived on relief or off friends. Not for me
.

I mentioned the story you lauded—“One Sick Kid,” it was called—because I was completely dumfounded that you should pick that, of all those releases, to like … Mother, are you sure it’s not because you’re a little prejudiced in favor of the sea? That story was ding-dong stuff; it had a shot of supersuperpseudo-patriotism in it to make it sell, the way you put—well
, you
don’t, but some do—a shot of baking-powder in flapjax. That story was a crime against literature—even my kind. It was surpassed only in sloppy sentimentalism by “Some People Forget,” the Memorial Day number, for which I take no responsibility—it was an ordered story, as are all those having to do with specific dates. I can’t excuse “One Sick Kid” on those or any other grounds. But there are, I think, some excellent stories there. Did you know that as short-story technique, “Golden Day” is unique? “Watch My Smoke” and “Cajun Providence” are good enough for any slick mag … sold them to McClure when I needed five sure dollars quickly faster than $250 maybe sometime
.
I never mind doing that on occasion because there’re always more where they came from … wonder if you’ll like the next lot better? I’ll send them over after “He Shuttles” is released. In the next lot will be what I think is the most powerful little short short I’ve yet done: “Turkish Delight” to McClure’s. Also the most whimsical: “Derm Fool,”
Unknown.
And the novelette
.

(Note that at the time of writing, the author of this epistle was two weeks short of his 22nd birthday, and six weeks shy of marriage and the tremendous financial responsibilities he imagined—correctly—it would bring. Unfortunately, the issues stirred up here continued to swirl unresolved in him throughout his lifetime.)

“His Good Angel”:
syndicated by McClure, May 12, 1939. Also published in England, in
Guide and Ideas
, May 20, 1939, under the title “An Answer Has Been Arranged.”

“Some People Forget”:
syndicated by McClure, May 30, 1939. As noted in the letter quoted under “One Sick Kid,” “Some People Forget” is a story written (at the request of the syndicate) to be released on a particular day, in this case Memorial Day (for non-U.S. readers, it’s a holiday on which soldiers who died for this country in past wars are to be honored and remembered).

TS to David Hartwell, 1972, regarding his childhood experience with bullies:
I was very underweight and undersized and a natural target for everybody around me. I was pretty well brutalized by that whole thing. I had to figure out different ways to go to school each day, because kids would lay for me on the way
.

“A God in a Garden”:
first published in
Unknown
, October 1939. Written April 1939. This was Sturgeon’s first sale to John W. Campbell, Jr., editor of
Astounding Science-Fiction
and
Unknown
. It was his first story sale to anyone other than the McClure Syndicate (though there is some suggestion in his correspondence that he may have written or ghost-written “confession” stories in 1938 and/or 1939), and in fact he would not sell a new story to a market other than Campbell or McClure until 1946, though not for lack of trying. It was probably not the first fantasy story he wrote (we don’t know for sure when “Fluffy” or “Cellmate” was written, but there is evidence that some of the early stories he wrote to try to sell in 1938 and the beginning of 1939 were horror fiction of some kind).
It is however the story whose sale marks his entrance into the science fiction and fantasy field, which would be his home as a writer for better or worse for the rest of his life. (“Ether Breather” was his first
published
story in the field, but not his first sale.)

TS to his mother, May 13, 1939:
I wrote another story called “A God in a Garden” which is a nice euphonious title, and he
[Campbell]
liked it very much and asked me to rewrite it. I did. He bought it last week. This morning I got a check for eighty dollars
.

TS to Dorothe, August 16, 1939 (at sea):
This letter has been stretched over a week. Know how I write to you? By the page. I hate to take a half-filled page out of the mill
[typewriter];
I almost invariably write right down to the bottom before quitting. Sometimes that leaves me in the middle of a sentence, and two or three days may pass before I get to my predicate. But I can almost always recapture the mood just by rereading what has gone before, something I would like to be able to do with my work. If I don’t finish a story at one sitting it is liable to be patchy. A notable exception was “A God in a Garden”; I was really in the groove then. I had such perfect control over it that each of twenty-eight pages began with a new paragraph—a godsend when I had to rewrite it, for I slipped many pages of old ms. into the new draft simply by changing the page numbers!

“A God in a Garden” was also the first story of Sturgeon’s to be anthologized. (He would in time become one of the most anthologized living story writers in the English language.) Phil Stong purchased it in August 1940 for an anthology entitled
The Other Worlds, An Omnibus of Imaginative Stories
, published by Wilfred Funk, Inc., in 1941. Sturgeon to Williams, 1975:
I remember I went around to the publisher, after I’d signed the agreement and everything else, and met receptionists and typists and people and said, “Where’s Mr. Stong?” “Oh, he’s not
here,
of course, he’s in—” and I timidly asked for my ten dollars, and they said, “Oh well that you know has got to wait until the book is published …” And I recall I really needed that money, oh boy did I need that money
.

Between April of 1939 and June of 1941 Theodore Sturgeon sold 26 stories to John Campbell, 10 for
Astounding
and 16 for
Unknown
. Sturgeon had read
Astounding
as a high school student, and
Weird Tales
, and H. G. Wells and E. R. Eddison. He had a fondness for science fiction and fantasy, but there’s no indication that he ever thought of himself as wanting to be a science fiction writer as such. Instead, he became one because that was the only market that welcomed him as a writer.

But he did have a special resonance with
Unknown
, a brand new magazine when Sturgeon beached himself in Brooklyn at the beginning of 1939 and threw himself full time into the writing racket. He told David Hartwell:
Somebody brought me a Volume I, Number 1 of
Unknown
and said, “Boy, this is what you ought to be writing.” And I was absolutely thrilled with the magazine
. It appealed to him as a writer as well as as a reader. To Dorothe, February 10, 1939:
Have you seen Street and Smith’s new sheet
, Unknown?
They have no policy except that the stories be of the Unknown in any aspect, and must be entertaining. As an escape from that bedevilling incubus, formula, it is a godsend. I’m submitting a story to them next Tuesday
.

Unknown
is still regarded by those who read it during its brief five-year existence, and those who have discovered it since, as the quintessential fantasy magazine and one of the most memorable runs of any American fiction magazine. It is certainly possible that without it Theodore Sturgeon would not have had his career, and we would not have his stories, any of them. In a 1946 letter to his mother (March 25) he described it as
the most remarkable fantasy magazine ever published—pure Dunsany, Eddison, Wells and sometimes even Cabell-style stuff. Believe me: fifty years from now some bright young anthologist will unearth the files of
Unk.,
and make the contemporary literary lights look to their laurels. There has never been a magazine quite like it. I hope I live to see its counterpart, but that’s asking an awful lot
.