The Ultimate Egoist (54 page)

Ironically, “Rene Lafayette” was a pseudonym of a writer who was to become science fiction’s most notorious example of the Messiah complex, L. Ron Hubbard. In a letter in the August 1941 issue of
Unknown
, Sturgeon says that “The Ultimate Egoist” was inspired by a line in “Lafayette” ’s story
in which the hero, finding himself able to breathe underwater, wonders if he himself is a figment of his own imagination
.

The second Sturgeon introduction (or “rubric,” a term he was fond of) to “The Ultimate Egoist” was written in 1979 for his collection
The Golden Helix:

This is a very early one—one of the first I ever sold—and that must be very clear to the critical sophisticates among you. Yet there is a wonderful freshness about the ignorance of a beginning writer, who has yet to learn the fine points of plot and characterization, and the technicalities of “crisis” and “climax” and “denouement” and all that, and tumbles ahead, writing any damn thing that comes into his head
.

This was fun to do. So much of what I have written may have been illuminating and instructive (especially to the author), but it wasn’t joyful. This is
.

On the assumption that Sturgeon read
Unknown
in those days almost as soon as the first copies arrived in Campbell’s office, I’m dating the composition of “Egoist” as late February or early March. Sturgeon was about to be married. In a 1944 letter to his mother he describes his wife Dorothe as “a strawberry blonde, five two barefoot, with the proportions of a scant de Milo, green eyes which are really blue with a corona of yellow around the pupils …”

And in a 1947 letter (9/25) to his mother, he wrote,
A collection of my works is scheduled for next year. Tentative title:
Bianca’s Hands and Others.
Any better suggestions? I’m willing to use any other of my titles but “The Ultimate Egoist.” I think that’s a little too close to home …

Magazine blurb (title page): IT’S A BAD IDEA, PERHAPS, TO QUESTION TOO CLOSELY THE REALITY OF THE WORLD ABOUT YOU. MAYBE IT ISN’T—

“It”:
first published in
Unknown
, August 1940. Written March or April 1940. TS and Dorothe Fillingame were married March 17, 1940. Moskowitz reports, “In ten consecutive hours of inspiration, on their honeymoon, Sturgeon wrote the nightmarish masterpiece that created his first reputation, ‘It’.”

In the introduction to his collection
The Golden Helix
(1979), Sturgeon
talks about his lifetime of writing stories:

Funny ones have been written with pressure and terror all around, strictly laugh-clown-laugh. Frightening ones have been written in peaks of joy. (The horridest horror story I ever wrote was done on my honeymoon. Catharsis works that way too.)

Sturgeon’s introduction to “It” for
Without Sorcery
(1948):

I have been asked repeatedly how this story was written, or how one gets ideas like this, or what one has to be or go through to be able to write such a horror
.

I can only answer that it wrote itself. It unfolded without any signal effort on my part from the first sentence. The names of the characters were taken off my ubiquitous coffee-maker. I was supremely happy as I wrote it—no twistings, no warpings, no depression. Possibly it was catharsis—in other words, I was feeling so good that I took what poisons were in me at the moment and got rid of them in one pure plash of putrescence. It was very easy to do and I wish I could do it again
.

The note about the names of the characters explains why the name “Cory Drew” is also the name of the central character in a completely unrelated, untitled, unfinished story found in Sturgeon’s papers that seems to date from earlier in 1940.

“It” was also included in the last Sturgeon collection published during his lifetime,
Alien Cargo
(1984). Sturgeon’s introduction reads in part:

In 1975 I accepted an invitation to the San Diego Comic Convention, all expenses. I thought it was kind of them, but was mystified, for though I had written instructional comics just before this country entered WW II, and a couple of issues of something called
Iron Monroe [sic],
derived from a John Campbell series back in the ’30s, I had no track record in comics; nor was I a fan or collector. At the banquet, Ray Bradbury was giving out awards and uttering verbal bouquets about the recipients, in one case gracefully calling another writer ‘teacher,’ and I suddenly realized, with a sweet and shocking clutch of the gut, that he was talking about
me.
I rose to go up front and accept the award—it was the Convention’s highest, the Golden Ink Pot, the same award they gave Siegel and Shuster for
Superman—
and for the first time in my life I faced an audience and couldn’t think of anything to say beyond two words; one was ‘thank’ and the other was ‘you.’

Subsequently I learned for the very first time that my story “It” is seminal; that it is the great grandaddy of
The Swamp Thing, The Hulk, The Man Thing,
and I don’t know how many other celebrated graphics
.

(There was at least one comic book version of “It,” published long after the original story had influenced comics writers and screenwriters of the 1950s and 1960s. It was adapted by Roy Thomas and drawn by Marie Severin and Frank Giacoia, and was published by Marvel Comics under the title
Supernatural Thrillers
, Vol. 1, No. 1, December 1972, “featuring IT! from the world-famous chiller by: Theodore Sturgeon.”)

William F. Nolan in his 1968 anthology
3 to the Highest Power
quotes Sturgeon as saying to him, in a 1967 phone interview,
My first really successful story was “It,” a horror tale set in the woods of my childhood
. Sturgeon lived on Staten Island for the first ten and a half years of his life, before moving to Philadelphia. There were certainly woods on Staten Island, and more of them in the 1920s than now, but probably the setting of the story also reflects Sturgeon’s farm experiences, as described in his 1965 essay published (in 1993) as the pamphlet
Argyll
:

In 1931, ’33, and ’35 Mother and Argyll went to Europe for the summer. In ’31 they boarded us on a farm in Vermont where they worked us like slaves. In ’33 we worked on a farm in Bucks County
[Pennsylvania]. Sturgeon speaks of the latter farm’s owner as
an amazing guy, a White Russian prince, who could do anything with his hands. He rebuilt an absolutely ruined house and barn all by himself; I once watched him saw through a 12×12 with a handsaw without stopping; it took him an hour and forty minutes
.

Angelina and Tyler Counties are in eastern Texas, not far from Port Arthur, which Sturgeon frequented as a merchant seaman. I do not know where he and Dorothe went on their honeymoon.

The blurb on the title page of the story in
Unknown
read: IT WASN’T VICIOUS; IT WAS SIMPLY CURIOUS—AND VERY HORRIBLY DEADLY!

“Butyl and the Breather”:
first published in
Astounding Science-Fiction
, October 1940. Probably written spring 1940. This is one of the very few instances of Sturgeon writing a sequel to an earlier story, or a series. The only other example I can think of, other than the stories he wrote in order to expand “Baby Is Three” into
More than Human
(and the sequels he announced but never wrote, for “When You Care, When You Love” and “Tandy’s Story”), is a pair of stories late in his career, “The Country of Afterward” (1979) and “The Trick” (1983). (In a December 1940 letter to his mother TS mentions that Campbell recently rejected a novelette he wrote, and says:
it was a sequel, and so can’t be sold to any other rag
.

He doesn’t say what story it was a sequel to.)

The blurb on the magazine title page read: THE ETHER BREATHERS RETIRED, AND THE PERFUME MAGNATE WANTED TO SMOKE ’EM OUT. HE DID. A REALLY GOOD PERFUMER OUT TO MAKE A FOUL ODOR CAN ACCOMPLISH MIRACLES!

Theodore Sturgeon