Thunder and Roses (50 page)

The first 60 percent of Sturgeon’s 1979 Introduction to his book
Maturity
(the balance concerns the other two stories) follows:

“Maturity” was written in 1946, and appeared in
Astounding Science-Fiction
under the editorship of the great John W. Campbell, Jr. It was preceded by two years of research—research which consisted of asking everyone I met—young people, old ones, rich, poor; strangers, loved ones, even faceless voices over the telephone: “What is maturity?”

This story was, I think, the emergence of the “thing I say.” James Blish and Damon Knight once produced the hypothesis that every writer has a thing he says, and he says it over and over again (in different ways, of course) every time he writes. I think they were right. Though I have since rephrased and refocused the “thing I say,” this story is a good beginning. I’ll tell you at the end of the book what it is now
.

One interesting aspect my research unearthed is that a certain category of human beings backed off from my question. They were women over thirty-five. It wasn’t until I pushed one of them into a wall and demanded to know where the reluctance came from that I learned that it had leaked out from ads in the newspapers and women’s magazines. “For the mature figure” meant either fat, or old, or both
.

The story tumbled into being without much effort until I was about two-thirds through, and then I began to have some doubts about my own definition of maturity. For a while I bogged down
completely, and at last just finished writing the story, because by then I knew how to finish writing a story. But I was profoundly dissatisfied with it
.

It appeared in the magazine in ’47. In 1948, along came Jim Williams of Prime Press, wanting to do a collection. It would be my first, but the chief reason I jumped to say yes was that it would be a chance to rewrite this story. I did, and was better pleased, but not altogether
.

In 1952 I became father of my firstborn son, and so I named him Robin, after the protagonist of this story; he is my “second rewrite.” I thought he would either mature in ways where I could observe him, day by day, or he would not, and I’d find out why; either way, I could refine my concept of the nature of maturity. I write this on Robin Sturgeon’s 27th birthday, and I can say with pride that the second rewrite is better than the first one. Tall, strong, talented, with a fifty-thousand candle-power smile, he plays guitar and trumpet, sings, composes, arranges, in and around Woodstock, New York. He is self-actualized and very alive, and he has done this for my definition of maturity: it isn’t a condition, it isn’t a place-to-arrive; like everything else in this universe, it’s a way of going rather than a way of being. It’s movement, flux, growth, change, development. This is the one thing that the first Robin couldn’t quite grasp
.

The relevant paragraphs of Sturgeon’s Postscript to the 1979 book follow:

Maturity is not, after all, the name of my quest, the “thing I say.” I look rather for the nature of the optimum human being—not a freak like Robin English or Superman, engaging as they may be, but humanity with a spleen and eyeballs and eardrums and all the other parts each working at the top of its capacity and in absolute harmony—a kind of perfect internal ecology. And along with that, of course, goes the optimum brain; and I deeply believe that there is no upper limit there
.

Only the optimum human can save the species and populate the universe
.

When Sturgeon spoke with David Hartwell in 1972 about his
“preoccupation with the optimum man,” he affirmed that:
“Maturity” is the blueprint for this whole thing I’ve been talking about
.

In view of the plot of “Maturity,” it is interesting to note that on April 29, 1938, noted bacteriologist Paul de Kruif wrote to Theodore Sturgeon (clearly in response to a letter from the young man), “Dear Mr. Sturgeon: Your spirit is certainly a laudable one, but at the present time I know of no institution which could avail itself of a human guinea pig for any of the diseases you mention.” (Source: the papers of Theodore Sturgeon in the possession of his Literary Trust)

On Feb. 3, 1947, just after “Maturity” was first published, Ray Bradbury wrote TS a letter that began: “Ted, I hate you! Having just read your story ‘Maturity,’ I have every reason to hate you. It is a damned nice story. Your sense of humor, sir, is incredible. I don’t believe you’ve written a bad story yet; I don’t think you ever will. This is not log-rolling, by God; I only speak the truth. I predict you will be selling at least six stories a year to
Collier
’s and
The Post
before long. You have the touch.”

Also on Feb. 3, 1947, Robert Heinlein wrote, “Ted, my respectful congratulations on ‘Maturity.’ I recognized some of the autobiographical touches. You are probably the most accomplished Peter Pan ever to have survived three decades, more or less (except me, maybe, he added with a churlish pout). But don’t let anyone monkey with your thymus gland; we like you the way you are. No kiddin’, it was a swell story.” One autobiographical touch: the biographical note in the back of Sturgeon books published by Ballantine in the 1950s says Sturgeon spent six years in high school and quotes him as saying, “I didn’t graduate; I was released”—precisely what Robin tells Peg in “Maturity.”

Two years after reading “Maturity,” Heinlein began working on the novel that would become
Stranger in a Strange Land
. It is not difficult to see traces of Robin English’s influence in the character of Michael Valentine Smith.

Sturgeon wrote to his mother (Christine Hamilton Sturgeon) on Feb. 9, 1947:
I am sending you the current
Astounding
and the current
Weird [with his story “Fluffy”].
Both yarns have received quite
a flurry of comment. I would particularly like a careful comment on “Maturity” from you. I’ve quite lost perspective on the yarn, and rather urgently want it back. (The perspective, not the magazine!) Maturity is, as I may have remarked to you before, a thing on which I am qualified to make objective observations
.… (He also asked his ex-wife for her written comments on the story.)

Clifford Simak, a great science fiction writer who had been writing longer than Sturgeon, wrote TS on 2/14/47, “I’m sorrier than I can tell you, but I didn’t care for ‘Maturity.’ … The idea was a honey. It developed well up to about the middle of the yarn, although it seemed to me that you were holding yourself back, that you were positively laboring to make it subjective, determined that you would allow no dramatics and no overtones.… And the ending. By God, Ted, you didn’t believe that yourself. A mature man, a really mature man would have done something other than follow the footsteps of normal humans.… I hope you aren’t angry with me.…” A further letter from Simak indicates that TS responded immediately, although no carbon survives in his papers.

Philip Klass (William Tenn) wrote TS on 12/30/48: “I have just finished reading the rewritten version of ‘Maturity’ which appears in your book.… Ted, accept my congratulations on your masterpiece.”

Noted SF anthologist Groff Conklin wrote in 1954, about the second version of “Maturity”: “In [my] opinion, this is one of the most poignantly real stories about the tragedy of a superman in our midst that has ever been written.”

John W. Campbell’s blurb on the first page of the story in
Astounding:
IT’S BEEN SAID THAT A MAN NEVER GROWS UP. THERE’S CONSIDERABLE EVIDENCE FOR THE LITERAL TRUTH OF THIS—AND A FASCINATING PROBLEM IN WHAT THE BEHAVIOR OF A TRULY MATURE HUMAN BEING WOULD BE.

“Tiny and the Monster”:
first published in
Astounding Science-Fiction
, May 1947. Probably written in the fall of 1946 (judging from the amount of time that usually elapsed between
Astounding
buying a story and getting it into print) or in February and March 1947 (based on a comment in a March letter that he “got a good start on the dog story”).

In an interview with Paul Williams in February 1976, Sturgeon said,
“Tiny and the Monster” came out of a weekend I spent with
[science fiction writers]
Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, and that was the house that I visualized
[in that story].
It was up in Hastings-on-Hudson. I really loved that house; I thought that was such a nice place to be. And the mother-in-law, who kind of took over the story … she was a subsidiary character who took the bit in her teeth and just ran away with it. It’s one of the many instances where one of my subsidiary characters has become so dimensional that I can’t change it or eliminate it, and I’m not going to waste 6000 words of hard-earned copy, so I have to march up and down the road for a couple of weeks or months, or whatever it takes, to readjust the entire story to embrace this character without changing it. Which is nice, because if the author doesn’t know how a story’s going to come out, a reader couldn’t possibly know. But that old lady and her little blue car, that was my mother and her funny little blue car that she had down in Jamaica. It was a fun story … and it really had something to say, too, about ugliness as such. The monster itself was so hideous, and knew it, and didn’t show itself, not only for reasons of security but because it knew the human reaction to it would be so violent
. [Arthur C.]
Clarke has used that
[in
Childhood’s End
, written five years later, where the aliens hide themselves because they look like devils].

In July 1947, TS wrote his mother about showing an old friend his “treasures”; first on the list were:
the
[Edd]
Cartier originals
[drawings done to accompany the story in
Astounding] for “Tiny and the Monster.”

Of course, the St. Croix elements in the story derive from Sturgeon’s residence on St. Croix in the Virgin Islands in 1944.

Magazine blurb: TINY WASN’T TINY—BUT THE MONSTER WAS DEFINITELY HORRIFIC. TINY, ON THE OTHER HAND, DISPLAYED A QUITE INCREDIBLE INTELLIGENCE FOR A DOG, AFTER ONE ENCOUNTER—

“The Sky Was Full of Ships”:
first published in
Thrilling Wonder Stories
, June 1947. Probably written in the fall of 1946. This has also been published (in
The Ancient Mysteries Reader
, 1975, and
Encounters with Aliens
, 1968) under the title “The Cave of History.”

A radio adaptation of this story was broadcast on the
Beyond Tomorrow
program, April 11, 1950, under the title “Incident at Switchpath.”

Your editor can’t resist noting that it seems possible Bob Dylan read this story (or heard it on the radio) as a young man, which would explain the closing image in his 1968 song “Drifter’s Escape”: “Just then a bolt of lightning struck the courthouse out of shape/And while everybody knelt to pray, the drifter did escape.”

“The Sky Was Full of Ships” can also be seen as a precursor of and possible influence on Arthur C. Clarke’s 1951 story “The Sentinel,” which in turn became the basis of
2001: A Space Odyssey
.

The angry prospector at the end of the story who says,
“I have a kid reads that kind of stuff, an’ I never did like to see him at it. Believe me, he’s a-goin’ to cut it out as of right now,”
is reminiscent of Sturgeon’s often-told-tale of his stepfather’s hostility to science fiction. TS to Williams, 11/75:
My stepfather regarded them
[science fiction magazines]
with total scorn, and finally he forbade me to bring those things into the house
.

“Largo”:
first published in
Fantastic Adventures
, July 1947. Probably written late 1946.

The setting of this story is drawn from Sturgeon’s experience at age 20 working for a month at a summer resort in Andover, New Jersey. His job and some things that happened to him there turn up in Vernon Drecksall’s saga. On June 13, 1938, TS wrote to his mother (from the Hudson Guild Farm):
I am working as pot-walloper, vegetable groom, fire-tender, and general kitchen and dining-room factotum, from 6:15
A.M.
until 7:30
P.M.
… The pay is microscopic, but all in all I don’t care. I have a splendid opportunity to regain and improve on my swimming, diving and tumbling; I have time to write, and best of all I can observe and enjoy a thousand and one types of the human animal
.

A month later, back in Manhattan, he wrote his mother about the people he met at the Farm, including
Patsy Freeman, the darkest white girl alive, and with the reddest cheeks and the blackest eyes, with whose understanding and whose casualness I fell in unprecedented violent love, so that I could hardly bear to be near her or touch her or speak to her … who, when she left me, cried openly and unashamed, and then climbed into the truck and was gone, and I plunged off into the woods in an agony of emptiness with my guitar, and lay on the reservoir dam and beat the strings and played as never before; played her into a moaning swing composition I have called “Slip into a Minor Key” and another which is exactly suited to the phenomenal piano-style of her friend and, I think, fiancé; a Hungarian, Otmar Gyorgy, a man I am proud to know, and who led me to an immense emotional-ethical battle through the strength of my friendship for him and that of my love for Pat; his style … rolling minor basses, treble cascading poundingly; that which I composed for him I doubt that he will ever play, for it is so much mine
.…

Lucy Menger, in her biographical/critical chapbook
Theodore Sturgeon
(Ungar, 1981) cites “Largo” in a discussion of Sturgeon’s “love of the English language,” pointing out examples of “poetic devices” such as alliteration, consonance, assonance, and repetition in the paragraph that begins “Each night after Drecksall had scoured the last.…”

Gretel in “Largo” bears a distinct resemblance to Cordelia in Sturgeon’s 1948 story “The Martian and the Moron.”

“Thunder and Roses”:
first published in
Astounding Science-Fiction
, November 1947. Written in January and February 1947.

TS wrote an introductory note called “Why I Selected ‘Thunder and Roses’ ” for an anthology titled
My Best Science Fiction Story
(Margulies, Friend, editors, 1949):