The Ultimate Egoist (52 page)

The temptation to edit and rewrite and undate and polish has been enormous, but after torturous consideration I have decided to give you what John Campbell read—and liked, and didn’t buy—so you can share for a moment his eyes and his reaction. For me, it has brought him back for a moment. It may for you, too
.

“Helix” was apparently written just before Sturgeon went to sea for the first time in almost seven months. (The “Seaman’s Church” address was one he consistently used on his manuscripts when he was in New York as well as while he was at sea; it was a convenient maildrop.) On August 28, 1939, while at sea, he wrote his mother:
Sure my cat has a name. Monkeyface, not because of its originality, but because of the delightful way Achille
[his Italian roommate]
says it. My really pet cat is “Helix,” the spiral-tail egocentric of my
Unknown
novelette, whose fate is still undecided. There’s $110 in that, by the way
. In this letter to his mother, and in another to Dorothe August 16, he makes it clear that he has done no writing at all aboard ship, where he has been since late in July. However, Sam Moskowitz in his book
Seekers of Tomorrow
, working from his notes of a 1961 interview with Sturgeon, writes, “It was while trying to find a ship out of a Texas port that Sturgeon made a deal with a small-town politician who owned a general store to write his campaign speeches for him. In payment, Sturgeon received day-old cupcakes, literally all that stood between him and starvation at the time. The politician won the election. Sturgeon did write one science fiction story at this
time, ‘Helix the Cat,’ about a scientist and his cat, but the story was never sold and the manuscript has been misplaced.” (No doubt the speech-writing incident happened, but not in August 1939, and not in conjunction with the writing of “Helix.”)

After selling Campbell “A God in a Garden” in late April and “Ether Breather” at the end of May, Sturgeon struck out with “Helix” and with another story, written in June, called “Guy’s Eye.” On June 25, he wrote Dorothe,
“Guy’s Eye,” although as good as anything I have written, is not as admirably suited for Campbell as the other two—not by a long shot. If he buys it, I’ll be lucky as hell. If he doesn’t, there is no other market—nobody else will. That’s the main trouble in writing for that kind of a market
. Later in the letter he reports,
Owah! I’m in a terrific slump, darling … the same kind I was in just before I wrote “Ether Breather” … I fear the handwriting on the wall … If “Guy’s Eye” comes back it’s a ship for mine … dammit, I have a thousand and one swell ideas and no way of putting them over … If I don’t turn in something sensational by Tuesday to McClure I might as well forget to eat for the next month or so … dammit again, why does this have to happen to me at a time like this? … Oh for a break—just one teensy weensy break … enough of this nonsense. Please do what you can in the various ways I’ve suggested—especially in prayer and concentration toward Campbell … dammit
dammit
DAMMIT .…

June 30:
You were wrong; the prayers, tho appreciated, had little affect
[sic]
on Campbell. “Guy’s Eye” came back. J.C. wrote a very nice little note, which doesn’t put any money in my pocket. It’ll go out again Monday to one of the Thrilling group. McClure’s bought “Contact!” as I knew they would. I was sorry to see it go … My weekly releases and chex will continue, by the way, until July 15. After that—well, I’ll most likely go in hock. If I’m still in New York
.

In his August 28 letter to his mother, TS says,
After making a very comfortable amount of cash in the writing racket I went into a slump—the first of any real consequence. I guess you know what it is; you can’t get a decent plot to save your soul, and when you do you can’t write it; it won’t jell
.

The title “Helix the Cat” has a bit of personal significance: the creator of the very popular cartoon “Felix the Cat,” Pat Sullivan, was a friend of Sturgeon’s mother when she was doing public relations work in New York in the 1920s, and it was through that friendship that she acquired her nickname, “Felix.”

“To Shorten Sail”:
syndicated by McClure, September 9, 1939. See comment under “Ex-Bachelor Extract.” TS to Dorothe, July 18, 1939:
Wrote, delivered and sold a story to McClure’s today, just like that … a nice little number about a yacht race … had a swell time doing it too … the editor and the big boss were both out, and the secretary and the bookkeeper and I had a two-hour gabfest in the offices … most hilarious, with the radio just a-jammin’ away … nice way to run a staid and conservative old newspaper syndicate … found out, incidentally, what they get for my stories. A paper subscribes for six stories a week at about $2.50 … you can see how many times they must sell them to make a profit, since it costs them nearly a hundred a week … also why they can’t pay any more than they do …

“Thanksgiving Again”:
unpublished. Sturgeon received the following rejection letter from McClure, dated July 28, 1939:

Sturgeon did apparently try other markets, unsuccessfully. In a letter to his mother, November 11, 1939, he complained that President Roosevelt had changed the date of Thanksgiving, spoiling the gimmick of the story, that there are 52 days between Canadian Thanksgiving and the U.S. holiday:
Brilliant notion, but Franky made it 45 days, so
Collier’s
tossed the yarn, worth $650
.

Reading the story, I’m not surprised at Sturgeon’s inability to sell to “the slicks” (the high-paying fiction markets) at this time. Like many
another first-rate writer, when he tried to prostitute himself he ended up with flat, uninteresting (uninspired) material. The craftsmanship he sometimes boasted of in his letters to his mother is not in evidence here. The high literary quality of his later work makes one think that his rejection by mainstream publishers and his need to take refuge in the science fiction world must have been due to prejudice and ignorance on the part of those publishers; but perhaps it was also due to a tendency, for whatever reason (resentment of and discomfort with formula seems one likely factor), to put his worst foot forward.

The big surprise in the story is the early appearance of the poem “Thunder and Roses,” which plays a central role in his well-known 1947 story of the same name.

“Bianca’s Hands”:
First published in
Argosy
(U.K.), May 1947. Probably written between May and July, 1939.

This is Sturgeon’s first major work, and the mystery of its vast stylistic superiority to almost everything else he wrote at the time makes it worthwhile to take a close look at the available evidence as to when it was written and how much revised. First, the basic history of the story. Sam Moskowitz gives this account (based on his 1961 interview with Sturgeon) in his book
Seekers of Tomorrow
:

“While trying to write more stories for Campbell [after “A God in A Garden”] Sturgeon found himself persistently distracted by a bizarre notion that kept creeping into his thoughts. Unable to continue with his regular work until he disposed of it, he interrupted the story he was working on and in four hours wrote ‘Bianca’s Hands.’

“… Through the years, Sturgeon had tried to sell the nightmarish ‘Bianca’s Hands,’ which he had written compulsively when he was 21. Agents, editors, friends were horrified by the concept. An editor told him he would never buy from an author whose mind could conceive notions like that. An agent told him he didn’t want to be associated with an author whose bent carried him in such directions. Every magazine it was submitted to rejected it.

“Impelled by his recent good fortune in selling to new markets, Sturgeon mailed the story to the British
Argosy
, through which a prize of $1,000 was being offered for the best short story submitted before a certain date.

“It won the prize—Graham Greene took second place—and was published in
Argosy
for May, 1947. More than just money was involved here.
The various ups and downs of his literary career had severely shaken Sturgeon’s estimate of himself. One of the most accomplished stylists in the field, he still doubted whether he could actually write well enough to be a sustained success at writing. The bull’s-eye scored by this story, written at a very early stage in his career, convinced him that he had always possessed the qualifications to be a good writer. His work immediately began to reflect his new confidence.”

In a 1983 interview with the Science Fiction Radio Show, Sturgeon recalled:
When I first started to write I was in New York and I needed money badly and I went to see an editor. He gave me an assignment for a sports story, and I’ve never been a sports addict. It had to do with basketball; I didn’t know basketball at all, but he had given me the assignment and I was going to get my forty dollars, which is what they paid in those days. I was hard at work at it and the idea for “Bianca’s Hands” came in slant-wise and I said, in effect, “Go away, I’m busy.” But the idea came back again. I finally said, “Oh, all right,” and I wrote it in about three hours, that’s all, just to get it out of my way. Then I finished the sports story, which I sold, eventually. I put that manuscript in my bottom drawer. I knew I had a very unusual story here and I kept it like one of the family jewels. In about three years I got hungry enough to say, “Well, I’ve got to sell the family jewels,” but I found to my amazement I couldn’t give the story away
.

Sturgeon repeated in this interview the story about an editor and an agent who reacted to the story with extreme revulsion. In the introduction to his 1964 collection
Sturgeon in Orbit
, he wrote,
Once I had an editor push a whole pile of manuscripts back at me: his lips were rage-white and he was trembling, and he said he would never buy a story from a man who wrote the likes of “Bianca’s Hands.”

Moskowitz’s account of the effect the
Argosy
prize had on Sturgeon is echoed in a letter TS wrote (but did not mail) to his ex-wife Dorothe on March 10, 1947, the day he got the cablegram from England saying he’d won the prize:
It’s more than a thousand dollars. The curse is off me with it. My faith in its quality and in my own is restored, and I don’t think that I shall ever again experience that mystic diffidence and childish astonishment when one of my stories sells or is anthologized. I know now why they do, and I’m proud of it, and I know how to use it
.

From the same letter:
I’ll tell you about that story. I didn’t want to write it because I knew it wouldn’t sell. But I nearly starved because it kept getting between me and what else I tried to write. I set it down in
sheer self defense. I kept it for a long time and finally submitted it because I was forced to—I needed money badly enough that I was willing to soil it by selling it. My preciosity took quite a blow by its definite rejection. It’s bounced ever since
.

And then he tells a remarkable story of rewriting fifteen hundred words of “Bianca’s Hands” from memory, in the West Indies where he was unable to write, on an evening (February 10, 1942) that was most traumatic to him for reasons he doesn’t reveal, but that had to do with his relationship with his wife. He rewrote the story, without a copy of the manuscript, apparently to calm and distract himself.
I chose that because it was the story I loved the best. I got interested enough in it to forget the time … After that, to try to write was to find myself all too vividly back in the verandah of HM-1. To try to write anything … but to try to write “Bianca’s Hands” was inconceivable
.

The first mention of “Bianca’s Hands” that I have found in TS’s surviving correspondence is in a June 16, 1939 letter to his mother:
Al Gellman was here night before last … In the course of the evening my unfinished symphony—“Bianca’s Hands”—was brought out. It’s a fragment, a mere beginning and a mood, which actually haunted me and wouldn’t let me do anything else until I wrote it. It won’t be finished for months, and I don’t want it to be. I’m going to polish every syllable of it. I don’t care how long it takes—it’s mine, you see, and not for any market I ever heard of. Anyway, Al stopped his bluster long enough to read two or three paragraphs, suddenly began to read as if he was drinking a long draught of something strange, finished the six short pages and sat for ten minutes looking at me as if he had never seen me before.… Never have I been so gratified, so sincerely complimented by anyone
.

June 25, 1939, to Dorothe:
As far as Joseph is concerned, I believe I have a solution which may get me farther along than any demonstration of my ability to “slant” my plots and change my style. It is “Bianca’s Hands,” still unfinished. That is really fine writing—the finest I have ever done—and when it’s finished I am sure it will sell
Unknown.
But before it goes there I’m going to give it to Joseph. The story is really a magnificent work—the hell with false modesty. I know good writing when I see it. If Joseph can place it—if she does, it’ll be somewhere where the editor is willing to depart completely from any known formula—I’ll be in the money. If she can’t, then Campbell will buy it. And Joseph will have found out that I really can write. But it’ll take time. “Bianca’s Hands” will
not
be rushed or forced. I don’t care if it takes two years
.

July 18, 1939, to Dorothe:
That wasn’t a bad suggestion about the “Hands” … if it
comes
that way, I’ll do it that way … you must remember though that that yarn is the result of a haunt, and I must be haunted again to do any more … and it has to be done the way the haunt dictates … it may be days or years before it’s finished, and who cares?