The Ultimate Egoist (53 page)

In the summer of 1993 Noël Sturgeon and I found a cache of Theodore Sturgeon manuscripts and papers in the house where he once lived in Woodstock, New York. Among them was a manuscript of “Bianca’s Hands.” It is thirteen pages long, with a title page. The title page is on Sturgeon’s 1946 letterhead, typed in a standard typeface. There is a typed notation, “(About 5000 words)”, and the 5000 has been crossed out in pencil and 3500 written in, suggesting the manuscript was cut down after the page was typed.

The rest of the manuscript, except for the last three lines and an inserted replacement paragraph on page 11, is typed in the italic face Sturgeon used from 1937 to 1941. The first regular page has the notation “about 5000 words” in the upper left. In the upper right, below the name “Theodore Sturgeon,” is a cut-out piece of paper with TS’s 1946 address typed on it in standard type (it may date from 1945, since it includes the apartment number, which Sturgeon only used on correspondence when he was new to the apartment in fall 1945).

Behind the cut-out piece of paper are two addresses: the “Seamans Church Inst.” which he used until the end of 1939, x-ed out, and below it a Staten Island address that was effective from August 1940 to June 1941. There is no evidence of editing on the manuscript except for the taped-on insert paragraph on page 11, which judging by the typeface is from 1945-46, and the ending—the last page is cut, two sheets taped together, and the bottom sheet has most of the last sentence of the story (beginning “but they hanged”) in the new typeface. This and the pencilled-in “3500” suggest that the story was longer in its prewar form, perhaps quite a bit longer. An anomaly is that the last page is numbered “14” in italic, but there is no page 13, and no easy way a page 13 could have been cut out if the italic typewriter was not available, because we go from page 12 to page 14 in the middle of a sentence. My guess is that the last page was misnumbered by mistake—possibly in the process of retyping a new ending in 1939 or 1940.

This is not the manuscript of the finished story. There are minor (word choices, a few changed phrases, no actual changes of content) differences throughout between manuscript and published story. [I have not actually
seen the May 1947
Argosy
, but I believe the text of the story in the 1953 Sturgeon collection
E Pluribus Unicorn
is taken from the magazine version, possibly by way of the 1951 Groff Conklin anthology
In the Grip of Terror
, the story’s first US publication.] Some of these may have been done by the copy editor at British
Argosy
(the store-owner’s name was originally “Guttstardt”; the “man” who married them was a priest), but by the nature and quality of other changes it seems quite clear that Sturgeon retyped and improved the story himself before sending it to
Argosy
. (In the Science Fiction Radio Show interview he said:
A friend of mine wrote me from England and said there was a literary contest … The deadline was New Year’s Eve. Well, I got this letter Christmas Eve, so I dug this thing out of the trunk and ran it through the typewriter without changing anything and sent it off and it must have arrived within minutes of the deadline
. In the unsent letter to Dorothe he said:
I was in love last December—hurriedly, deeply in love, with an urgency that was new to me. I dragged out “Bianca’s Hands” with a kind of defiance and sent it off. It must have arrived in London mere hours before that deadline. It did me good. I have written well since then—better than ever, notably in “Thunder and Roses” and “The Blue Letter,” just because “Bianca’s Hands” had been rewritten. I had no hopes for it, mind you. But I had achieved something great by rewriting it without flinching. Oddly enough, that love lasted just long enough for the purpose. And now, with no end of fine competition, in a high-quality market, it has walked off with the prize.)

The manuscript with the multiple addresses and the 1939 letters quoted above suggest that “Bianca’s Hands” was finished in its “5000 word” form after July 18, 1939 and before the end of that year, and that it was sent out, or more probably sent out again, in late 1940 or early 1941 in the same form. That the manuscript contains alterations in a new typeface suggests that some changes were made in 1945/1946,
after
the manuscript had been sent out at least once in that era (or the title page word count would have reflected the altered length to begin with). It may or may not have been sent out (again) in the altered form, but the cleanness of the alterations suggests it was.

We still don’t know when the first part of the story was written (the reference to “six pages” in the June 16 letter gives support to the idea that the original burst of writing was incomplete, although they could well have been single-spaced pages—Sturgeon did use single-space on some of his first drafts from the period—containing most of the story as
we know it). It could conceivably have been as early as spring 1938, when Sturgeon may have been doing some kind of writing-for-hire, although it’s far more likely that it was during the first six months of 1939, quite possibly as late as May or even early June. The only reference in the 1939 correspondence to any kind of writing-for-hire is the February contract with McClure to rewrite other people’s rejected short stories. But it is possible TS preferred not to talk about stray jobs like basketball articles or confession stories.

What seems more likely to me is that the “basketball story” is a red herring, and that much or most of “Bianca’s Hands” was written on or about May 31, 1939, when TS wrote Dorothe the words quoted above under “Ether Breather”:
Now I’m writing again, and well, but I don’t know … it’s a kind of writing I haven’t done before; it’s writing because I have to write, because there are stories within me that have to be told but which cannot be slanted at any market, because they are as they are. I must write them before I can clear my mind for more pen-prostitution …

Judith Merril, in an article entitled “Theodore Sturgeon” in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, September 1962, recalls Sturgeon showing her the carbon copy of the “Bianca’s Hands” manuscript at the beginning of 1947, while he was waiting to hear from
Argosy
. She didn’t like it. “Ted, perhaps defensively, explained it had been written many years earlier, and that he had showed it to me for one section, just redone: several paragraphs of deliberately constructed poetry, highlighting an emotional crisis, but spelled out like prose, so that it did not appear to break into the narrative. And it was in pointing this out (I had missed it, as he expected) that he stopped, astonished, and said he had just realized how much he did know about how to write—that it was a skill, with him, not just a talent.”

The replacement paragraph in the manuscript I’ve examined—the only part of the text that could really be described as “just redone”—is the paragraph that begins “He left them and returned to the shop,” describing Ran’s ecstatic afternoon in nature after his marriage and before the nuptial dinner. Apart from this, it seems reasonable to assume, on the evidence of the manuscript as well as Sturgeon’s comments, that the entire story as we know it was written in 1939, with only slight changes afterward (and one possible major change: the discarding of a long section of text after the end of the story as we know it).

Theodore Sturgeon recorded “Bianca’s Hands” on a 1976 album issued
by Alternate World Recordings, entitled
STURGEON: Theodore Sturgeon Reads
. At one point he considered titling his first story collection
Bianca’s Hands and Others
, but the story was left out of the collection because British
Argosy
wouldn’t release U.K. rights.

“Derm Fool”:
First published in
Unknown
, March 1940. Written fall 1939. Sturgeon loved puns and verbal sight gags
(I found my slippers. My feet were still in them)
and clearly had a lot of fun with this story. The idea had come to him near the beginning of his summer dry spell, and apparently stayed around till he was ready to write it. June 30, 1939, to Dorothe:
I am teased by several notions for Campbell, who wants more whimsical stuff, like the “God,” from me. Among them are: A man who sheds his skin like a snake; a man who captures a human soul in a little box; and an affliction whereby the face is turned into a pliable medium like putty. But none of them are crystallizing. I have been going over my rejects and by Wednesday of next week should have at least six stories out—among them, possibly, my grand oeuvre, “Bianca’s Hands.”

The original blurbs: (table of contents) AFTER PEELING THE FINGERS OFF THE PIANO, AND THE HAND OFF THE BUREAU DRAWER, HE DECIDED TO LEAVE THE TORSO IN THE CLOSET … And (start of story): IT WASN’T EXACTLY A DISEASE—BUT IT WAS ANNOYING TO HAVE TO COLLECT THE ARMS AND LEGS AND TORSOS EVERY DAY—

“He Shuttles”:
First published in
Unknown
, April 1940. Written fall 1939. In correspondence Sturgeon spoke with pride of having sold a “novelette,” meaning a short story whose length qualified it to be thought of as something longer than a short story (but shorter than a novella, or short novel). He also identified “He Shuttles” as being a story of horror (as distinct from the whimsical stories he had previously sold to John Campbell).

Campbell thought enough of the story to herald it in “Of Things Beyond,” a small column describing the lead stories for next month’s magazine: “Theodore Sturgeon has a novelette in the April issue that is his own curious blend of the oppressive inevitableness of Greek tragedy and completely modern lightness. ‘He Shuttles’ is both an answer and a title. It’s about a very, very clever man who had three wishes—just any three he wanted …”

“He Shuttles” is an early example of Sturgeon as author breaking the
“fifth wall” to speak directly to the reader as writer rather than narrator. (Later, more striking examples are “The Perfect Host” and
Some of Your Blood
.)

Title page blurb: A VERY LOGICAL—AND VERY UNPLEASANT—LITTLE STORY BASED ON THE OLD FAIRY TALE. HE HAD THREE WISHES. HE WAS VERY CLEVER. HE WOULD ESCAPE ALL PENALTIES …

“Turkish Delight”:
syndicated by McClure, November 18, 1939. The Dodecanese are Greek islands in the Aegean Sea, off the southwest coast of Turkey, but Sturgeon’s travels had not yet taken him outside the Western Hemisphere.

“Niobe”:
unpublished. This uncharacteristic piece is I believe the only unpublished work in this volume that is not from the trunk left behind in Staten Island. It was found among Sturgeon’s papers in the house in Woodstock. (Clearly there were a number of unsold manuscripts that Sturgeon put in storage or brought with him when he left New York for the West Indies in June of 1941, including “Fluffy,” “Cellmate,” “The Heart,” and “Bianca’s Hands.”) It can be dated by the original return address on the manuscript, “161 West 63rd St, New York, N. Y.”, where Sturgeon lived from late December 1939 to mid-March 1940. It was his brother Peter’s apartment, but there’s no evidence TS used it as a mailing address except when he was living there. This address is crossed out on the manuscript and “209 Pelton Ave., West New Brighton, Staten Island, N.Y.C.” typed below it, Sturgeon’s address from approximately August 1940 to June 1941.

A hint of the origin of this story can be heard in Sturgeon’s comment to David Hartwell in 1972, when asked what he was reading before he started to write:
I was reading H.G. Wells and Lord Dunsany, and the Pre-Raphaelites, whom I absolutely adored as a 13-, 14-year-old kid. I was so caught up in William Morris and the Rossettis, and Thomas De Quincey, and that was the whole area that I was most deeply soaked in. I loved that stuff, it was poetic and it was cadenced and it was full of color and it was—you know, the magic land of Somewhere Else
.

“Mahout”:
syndicated by McClure, January 22, 1940.

“The Long Arm”:
syndicated by McClure, February 5, 1940.

“The Man on the Steps”:
syndicated by McClure, February 22, 1940.

“Punctuational Advice”:
syndicated by McClure, February 29, 1940.

“Place of Honor”:
syndicated by McClure, March 18, 1940.

“The Ultimate Egoist”:
first published in
Unknown
, February 1941. Probably written March 1940. Sturgeon wrote at least two introductions to this story. The first accompanied its appearance in his first story collection,
Without Sorcery
, 1948:

The Messiah complex has been responsible for much unhappiness, much friction, possibly a few great fortunes, and perhaps a messiah or two …

This yarn sprang fully-armed from the rather low brow of a story by a
per se
non-extant writer named Rene Lafayette. I hurled his story away from me and leapt to the typewriter, finishing the opus in one sitting and seven cups of coffee. Then I finished Rene’s novelette. May it be immortal. It was called “The Indigestible Triton.”

It might be of interest to point out that even as “The Ultimate Egoist” had its nascence in the work of a figmentary individual, its author is also a figment. The original byline was E. Hunter Waldo
.

This was indeed the first Sturgeon story to be published under a pseudonym. The impetus was that John Campbell, editor of
Astounding
and
Unknown
, was buying Sturgeon stories faster than he could print them, particularly when
Unknown
changed from a monthly to a bimonthly format. With the help of the new pseudonym, two Sturgeon stories appeared in the February 1941
Unknown
, and two each in the June 1941 issues of
Astounding
and
Unknown
. Sturgeon was becoming a dominant voice in the two most popular and influential magazines of (respectively) science fiction and literary fantasy.

The pseudonym was partially based on Sturgeon’s birth name, Edward Hamilton Waldo. This name was legally changed when young Ted was adopted by his stepfather William Sturgeon; unfortunately there was some confusion about this when the publisher of
Without Sorcery
filled out the copyright forms for that book, as a result of which (TS, 1972)
“Theodore Sturgeon” winds up as a pseudonym; and in libraries the world over, if you look up Sturgeon you are referred to Waldo. And if they don’t happen to have that cross-filing then my books cannot be found in library catalogs
.