EDGEWORKS 3:
INTRODUCTION:
THE HARLAN ELLISON HORNBOOK
HARLAN ELLISON'S MOVIE
xv 1 1
Dedication
In 1946 I was still eleven years old when, in March of that year, I read my first science fiction story. "Twelve Hours to Live" by a writer who had been born in 1908, had been publishing since 1927...seven years before i first opened my eyes. i remember that startling story and the day it filled me with thrilling wonder...as if it were this morning.
now, to my great honor, 1 have been friends with that writer for more than forty years. just the setting-down of those words is one of the best things in my life; and at long last, long overdue, the sweet payoff...dedicating a book to him, that Grand Master of most excellent prose, the still-publishing author of "twelve hours to
L,VE»-MYFRIEND JACJ< WILUAMS0N
XIII
X I V
Introduction
"...AND NOW, BATTING IN THE DBS SLOT..."
I don't think I've told you this one.
When I was a kid—and we're talking the early 1940s which may seem like antediluvian or at least antebellum to some of you who think of the last season of Cheers as an event lost far behind us in the mists of time—I was going to grade school at Lathrop in Painesville, Ohio. I was regarded as, well, not to put too fine a point on it, I was looked upon as my generation's Bart Simpson. In Yiddish, I was a tsatske.
To seek recourse in Authority, we turn to the recently gone Leo Rosten, that exquisite lexicographer and wit of all things Jewish, who passed on only last month—February 19th, 1997—who explained tsatske in THE JOYS OF YIDDISH like this:
Pronounced TSAHTS-keh, to rhyme with "Tosca".. .From Slavic: shalet: "to play pranks." And then there are nine different meanings for the word, as is usual in such a polyglot parlance as Yiddish. We can ignore the first four and the last four, they don't pertain here. The fifth exegesis is set forth by Rosten, as follows: A misfit, an unadjusted child, a problem and a burden to one and all.
I was a tsatske, my generation's Bart Simpson; a pain in the ass, a Dennis the
X V
Menace; a whirling, twitching, howling, farting, dervish of unending blether and mischievous misadventures. Do not ask me whyfor I was like that. It's a story I've told many times in many venues, and I'm not going to get into that here. Suffice to accept that I was not intentionally a bad kid. In truth, I had a good heart and never had opportunity to be mean to kids smaller than I (because there weren't any kids smaller than I), nor to do the usual shitty things that little boys do, like stomp ant hills flat or set fire to kitties, or tie tin cans to puppydogs' tails. I never shot a sparrow with my Red Ryder B-B gun, I never made fun of an arthritic old man, I never pissed in a kid's orange drink during recess. But I was smart, and restless, and had learned about being an Outsider right from the git-go, and so I was forever getting into bizarre scrapes, demented activities, odd situations. If there was an excavation, I was in it. If there was a forbidden location, I explored it. If there was a way to spend the day doing something dangerous, as opposed to spending the day in rational enterprise...well, what're the odds?
In major league baseball (at least in the American League) they have had, for a while now, a grotesquerie called the DH. The "designated hitter." I despise it, so don't ask me to explain it, save to say that it means there's one guy to whom you can point, and he'll heft a bat and go out there and swing; and every time you point, it'll be that guy.
When I was a kid, I was the DBS.
Not a Designated Hitter. I was the Designated Bad Seed.
If there was a busted window, they'd point at me. If there was a candy machine broken into, they'd point at me. If there was a library book defaced, a teacher's desk chair set on fire, a trail of mud tracked in, a dirty word scrawled on a study hall blackboard, a dead rat in somebody's locker, a defamatory blind item in the school paper, a little girl whose pigtail had been dunked in an inkwell, a bully's gym shoes with the laces knotted like the Worm Ouroboros, a hole dug where one could fall into it, a pencil flung upward to stick like Zorro's rapier in the acoustical tiling, twenty pencils hanging from the acoustical ceiling, fifty-seven no. 2 Ticonderogas festooning the tiled up-there like golden, slim stalactites...I was the DBS. And they pointed at me. And every time someone pointed, it was at me.
There are those who think DBS stands for Designated Black Sheep. They are wrong. To be a "black sheep" one must be scorned and disowned by one's entire family. Since my mother and father loved me a lot, and never disowned me (though they had to go away from time to time.. .to get a little peace of mind and an oil change), I was never actually a black sheep, no matter what the rest of the
X V I
family says, even today. But as DBS, Designated Bad Seed (and I trust that you grok that literary allusion to the 1954 William March novel, later dramatized by Maxwell Anderson for the stage, and which two years later became a semi-terrific movie with a bullshit ending tagged on), I was properly disowned by the rest of the world. I just wanted to get that straight.
One simply must live up to one's reputation, particularly when it preceedeth one. There is an African tribal saying: "It's not what you call me—it's what I answer to."
Yeah! Specifically!
So, now here I am, this little kid; and I'm not using the word as euphemism, I was little. My mom and dad worried about that, and they had me injecting myself three times a week with something called Antuitron-S (if I recall correctly) but, apart from having a constantly black-and-blue cheek on one side of my ass or the other, it didn't do squat. That is to say, I stayed squat.
Little kid, but quick and cynical and devious. Not a snitch—I hate snitches— and, yeah, I know we need those who will rat out gangsta spraycan sociopaths and other human embolisms such as the cold fucker who shot Ennis Cosby or those sweaty skinhead sheep-shit pithecoids who bomb churches and synagogues and health centers—I do truly understand the necessity in these complex days of darkness for the sort of person who'll drop the dime on miscreants—but personally I hate snitches, the sort of little rodenta who rush home after class to tell Mommy-of-the-PTA that Miss Dexter was espousing something other than "Christian values" in European History today. It's a thorny issue, for true. On the one hand, you've got a righteous whistle-blower who turns in some giant corp that's polluting the waterways; and on the other, you've got Elia Kazan, who narked on his betters to the House Un-American Activities Committee pissants back in 1952. •
• I continue to be startled with dismay at the depth and degree of cultural amnesia, general free-floating ignorance, bland and often arrogant dismissal of the past and history, that rises in miasmic stench from the general American mass. If idiots who wish to delude themselves that, for instance, the Holocaust never happened, set out to disseminate such a clearly evil misrepresentation of the facts everyone ought to know.. .they find fertile soil for their seeds of corruption in the cow-pies that serve for brains in the many illiterate and ignorant and just plain stupid folks who abound in Our Great Republic these days. As a writer who struggles mightily to keep somewhere near courant'm terms of current events, popular culture, the arts, the pulse of everyday life.. .it becomes ever harder and harder to write of anything without having to stop and explain momentous events (casually dropped in the course of making a point) that in times past everyone carried as shared knowledge. So, now, if I drop a mention of Elia Kazan, the film director, and you don't know that he was an unrepentant, even subsequently fatuous,
XVII
Where was I... ?
Oh, yeah. I remember. Little kid. Always in trouble. Designated Bad Seed. Not knowing what it is he's correct in saying, or what is courteously out of bounds. Never learning about propriety. And so, always getting into trouble. And that brings me to that anecdote I was going to impart when I began this introduction (which, if I am to believe my editor, Anna Branscome, is so overdue that if I don't end it fast, they'll go to press with the damned thing ending in the middle of a sentence).
So here 1 am in 19-Fortysomethingorother, and I'm living in Painesville, about thirty miles northeast of Cleveland, and I'm going to Lathrop Grade School, about two blocks from our little house at 89 Harmon Drive, and it's long after the school day has ended, and everyone's gone, and even the pick-up softball game is over, and the groundskeeper has taken off to get a cup of coffee or a T-bone for $1.25 (the going price in them days) at Jerry & Bert's, and I'm still hiding out in the bushes behind Richard Plummer's house that have grown through the hurricane fence at the far right field edge of Lathrop's grounds. I'm still hiding, three or four hours after school has let out, because Jack Wheeldon and David Jividen and a few of their pals are still waiting for me to surface so they can resume kicking the shit out of me.
But now it's much later, almost dusk, and everyone's gone, and maybe I fell asleep in the bower, I don't remember, but I crawl out, stiff and scared, and I look around. And it's dead quiet the way small towns were in those days, with only the wind and the far-off, sad sound of a B&O freight train heading out somewhere beyond the Great Lakes. It's cool, as evening is coming on; and I know my mom will be worried that I haven't come home yet, but I also know that she's had this worry so many
snitch who "named names" and thereby ruined lives, well, then all I'm producing is white noise.
And it's not just in casual conversation that this amnesia takes its toll. Nor is it just in the "chill" it puts on a writer when s/he's sitting composing, fearing that the readership doesn't know this fact, or that allusions, or this referent, or that metaphor. It manifests itself everywhere. I was one of the panelists on the tv show Politically Incorrect with BillMaheru couple of months ago (as I write this in March of 1997). I've done the show a number of times, both when it was on Comedy Central, and now that it's on ABC network late-night. So they raise the topic of the HUAC blacklist, and Elia Kazan's part in it as an informer, and I find myself fending off the non sequitur gibberish of a lady named Star Parker. (Now, before I say this wrong, and get bruised for being Politically Incorrect which is, honestly folks, mostly the way I respond these days when one is forbidden to call a piece of human offal a Piece of
XVIII
times that she'll fume and fret but not call out the militia. I'll get yelled at when I finally drag my can in, and my dinner will be cold, but I'm feeling so damned lonely and miserable that I cannot bring myself to do the rational thing, to scoot for home as fast as my legs will carry me. (As we used to say, commonly, in those days.)
And for no reason I can now codify, I walk toward the school, which is a fairly new one in that early year of the nineteen-forties. (I wonder if Lathrop is still there? I haven't been back anywhere near Painesville in a very very long time, but I wonder if it's still there. I can see it so clearly in my shadowed place of memory.) It's two-storey, and it's red-orange brick, and it's square in all its sections, and sitting right there on the half-mown grass of the front yard of the school—not the dirt and pebble, ball diamond, swing and teeter-totter, slide and monkey-bar playground at the rear—is the first motorized lawnmower I have ever seen.
Now understand this, o ye of the tekno age: there was a time in this land when people mowed their lawns with a hand-pushed implement of revolving blades and rubber or steel wheels that had no seat upon which to ride, was not bright red or in George Barris candycolors, that did not sport logos with names like Toro Groundmaster 220 Riding Mower, Husqvarna GT200 with a 20hp Kohler Command® OHV twin cylinder engine, Scag TurfRunner (with the convenient single lever hydraulic dump valve control to move the machine when not under power), SSZ Zero-Turn Rider, Honda Harmony 2013 with adjustable anti-scalp rollers, or SnapperZ-Rider Turf Cruiser with the 61" Outfront Cutting Deck and the Single-Lever Joystick Control, and could be pushed with great sweating anguish all through a summer when a kid had to earn his own allowance for the purchase of that month's supply of Captain Marvel comics, Big Little Books, Popsicles, Baby Ruth Bars, and Saturday matinees at the Lake Theater. Not to mention Fleer's
Human Offal if s/he is the wrong ethnic this or the wrong religious that, despite the demonstrable reality that this piece of human offal is, indeed, a Piece of Human Offal.. .before I get pilloried for my rude remarks, let me impart to you what I learned about Ms. Parker offer the show. Naturally, they weren't going to impart these salient facts before we went nose-to-nose. Ms. Parker, who was identified as we went on the air as a right-wing ideologue, was tagged as "the brightest intellect of the Conservative radio cadre" by no less than that tub of Human Offal, Rush Limbaugh. What we weren't to\A, nor was the studio nor home-viewing audience apprised of, were the facts that Ms. Parker had been so praised by Limbaugh in his introduction to her book, which was titled something polite and reserved and in good taste like PIMPS, WHORES & WELFARE BRATS.. .that Ms. Parker had, herself, been a welfare cheat who had been caught, or renounced that condition of life, or somewhichway got herself off the dole and, with the compassion that we see demonstrated by such pillars of the
x i x
Double Bubble and the occasional Captain Midnight Secret Squadron Decoder Badge.
It was called, simply, a lawn mower. Or, sometimes, a lawnmower, no space between the words.
Everybody had one. It was standard gear in every garage. And on virtually any night in Spring or Summer or Fall, one would not have to strain one's ears overmuch to hear the sound of someone on the next block, mowing his lawn. Nothing sexist in the use of the masculine, there. Women just didn't do it. At least not usually. They knew it was backbreaking, thankless labor, and if they didn't have a peon son or guilty husband to do the onerous job, they could always hire me. I loved Baby Ruth Bars. And Captain Marvel. Also Kid Eternity, but that's another story, for another time.
Right now, I want to carry you back to that innocent time of my cradle years, as I stood there staring openmouthed at what may well have been the first motorized lawnmower in all of Painesville, Ohio. I had never seen such a wonder before.
It was as though I were the humble Java Man, looking for the first time on a videotape of Bette Midler in Las Vegas. Wonder of wonders! Object omniscient! Bless my soul.
I walked around the implement as if it were a Kubrick-Clarke monolith, and I the hairy primitive. Well, yes, I knew what it did, I could figure that much without a codex. But how did I start it, how did I push it, where could I take it, how much havoc could I wreak with it, what obscene word could I swath-cut in Lathrop's lawn with it, would they catch me, was the grounds guy returning sooner than I wished?!?!?
What I'm describing to you is that which you know in your blood and bones: the
community as 0 J. Simpson—a man who shunned all things African-American once he got out of the ghetto, and who is, by most standards of judgment, whiter than I, until he needed to win the gullibility of decent people who mistakenly take him as a response to the rampant bigotry and racism in our land, and which point he shamelessly and cynically turned that community into a claque for his perfidious behavior—Ms. Parker got herself a rabid rightist radio show (how sane is that: a black woman in this day and age, siding with the Republican Party of Strom Fucking Thurmond and Jesse Rotting Corpse Helms? Ask those two how many times they've used the N-word in the last ten years!) and began ratting out others, like her, who subsisted on Welfare.. .that Ms. Parker had turned her nasty behavior into a sinecure that allowed her to squeal on others, enabling her to dress as fastidiously and fashionably as she did that night on Politically Incorrect.. .but that it also sorta kinda invalidated Ms. Parker's championing of those who "named names" before HUAC, onaccounta she was, herself, a
x x
instant thoughts of a male adolescent. Since the dawn of time, that has been the pattern. You went through it, and all I ask is that you listen to the beating of the child tide in your brain, go back, go back I say, go back in memory and remember yourself sodden in that thought pattern as you embarked on Causing Trouble for no reason other than the siren call of the racial memory of all DBSes since the first pithecanthropoid tsatske gave a raptor a hotfoot and then ran like hell. (Yes, I know they were separated by eons, the kid and the saurian, shut the fuck up and let me play!)
I was standing in the presence of the most—what they call in civil law— Attractive Nuisance I'd ever encountered. But the question was: how do I make the absolute MOST of this lovely opportunity for DBS mischief?
I won't keep you in suspense.
I've taken, heaven knows, long enough to get to the point.
The groundskeeper had left the door of the school unlocked. This was, I have to keep reminding you, Ohio in the innocent Forties. Folks did that kind of thing. Hell, we never locked our front door at 89 Harmon Drive. You could've walked right in, helped yourself to everything in the fridge, including my dear long-gone mom's sensational icebox cake made with chocolate Jell-O pudding, and left the dirty dishes, and crept out again; and we'd never have known till next morning when my mom would point at me, the DBS, and accuse me of having made the mess.
The door was unlocked. The motorized lawnmower, this huge goddam behemoth (remember, I was a little kid), weighed, hell I don't know, maybe three hundred pounds, maybe more...and I somehow, magically, inexplicably, don't ask me to tell you how I did it now, more than fifty years later, I savaged and manhandled and
stoolie. And in the course of her mouthing opinions that bore absolutely no relation either to truth or history, I asked her from what book she had gleaned this pool of idiotic dribble, and she said with cocky resolve, "I've never read a book on the Blacklist." I went, how shall I put this, fuckin' ballistic! "How dare you come on national tv, in front of millions of people, and pretend to know what the hell you're talking about, when you're mud-ditch ignorant of the barest scintilla of actual knowledge?" And she got pissed at me (no shit, sherlock) and AAaher said, "Hey, you shouldn't talk to her that way!" and /said, "Why? Because she's a black woman? If it were a white guy saying these stupid things you wouldn't be on my case about it!" Well.. .naturally, they cut the tape short, and all of that never went on the air—which you can detect if you catch the show in rerun, because it goes to credits at the instant I leap out of my chair and go for her. So here we come full-circle back to where I was trying to make the point about how goddam dumb we are as a nation, and how we spend time listening to
x x i
dragged and pushed and inched that great Greyhound Bus of a lawncutting Goliath, up the front stoop and up the eight or ten concrete steps to the doors of Lathrop. I ask that you picture this pint-sized Bazooka Joe schlepping a four-, maybe five-hundred-pound motorized lawnmower up over the sill, into the school through a narrow door, and somehow bumping it up the short access flight of stairs to the first floor of the grade school, pulling it up arduously as he stumbles backwards up that first flight, till he's sweatily, gaspingly gained the hallway. Over there on the left, down the hall, just before you get to that opposite staircase, is the kindergarten I had attended, what, three years ago, four? I have no idea how old I was, maybe third grade, because here to the right is where Miss O'Hara taught me.
Okay, okay, I'm moving.
There are two staircases leading to the second floor. One way over there at the other end of the hall, and this one right behind me. It is steep, it goes up maybe thirty-and-a-few steps, a landing for the turnaround, and then another flight equally as steep and high. I dragged the lawnmower behind me, and started climbing. All this takes maybe an hour, maybe less. I don't recall. But I do remember getting to the top floor, where the 7th, 8th and 9th grades were situated, a mysterious Shangri-la where kids who weren't required to wear knickers disappeared into the stratosphere for three years before they magically vanished forever, never to be seen again, unless you happened to be riding past Champion Junior High School with your mother late in the afternoon. But that was all the way across town, and right now I was high in Lathrop.
That is to say, I was ascendant in the grade school, as contrariwise from being loaded, which no one was in those dear departed days, because such stuff didn't even exist in tiny American hamlets just thirty miles from Cleveland.
jerks like Star Parker, with their secret agendas, and we're no smarter than she was on that show, ignorantly defending a creep like Elia Kazan, when she had no more idea of what HUAC was, nor who J. Parnell Thomas was, nor how the HUAC hearings differed in time and content from the McCarthy Probes years later, nor why Kazan remains today—forty-five years later— an icon of unacceptable ethical behavior. And just so you'll understand why I used Kazan as a referent, way back when this humugus footnote began, here is a terrific extract from a great book, Victor Navasky's NAMING NAMES (Viking, 1980):
A story is told that in 1955, after Arthur Miller had finished A View from the Bridge, his one-act play about a Sicilian waterfront worker who in a jealous rage informs on his illegal immigrant nephew, Miller sent a copy to Elia Kazan, who had directed his prize-winning smash Broadway hits All My Sons (1947) and Death of a
XXII
There were these kind of casement windows. Not actually French doors or anything, but just big side-opening, tall windows that could be sprung to allow a breeze to waft through on hot spring days. Outside the windows was a mock balcony. Not a full-fledged balcony, the kind of thing the Queen would step out onto so she can wave at her loyal subjects; or even the kind of balcony at the Warwick, in New York, where Cary Grant stayed, a balcony onto which he could step through a convenient low-sill window, to gaze raptly at the lights of the Great White Way.
No, nothing that elegant.
This was a little pisher of a balcony, maybe two or three feet out, with a wrought-iron railing around it.
Don't ask me how I did this. Don't expect me to be able to explain why I did this. It must have seemed, to a DBS, like a really cool idea at the time.
I worried and cajoled and hefted and blustered that nine- or ten-hundred-pound lawnmower up onto the railing of that pisher balcony, having gotten it over the sill and into the air about two feet above the floor, and out there on the narrow ledge, up onto the wrought-iron railing...
And 1 left it precariously balanced there. Trembling.
And I ran back downstairs and admired my handiwork.
And then, in the gathering darkness, I ran home.
Leaving the lawnmower to be found either by the absentee groundskeeper, or the entire student population of Lathrop Grade School the next morning. Probably the former, because when he got back from that coffee and/or T-bone, the poor guy would've gone bugfuck trying to locate the putatively "stolen" motorized one- or
Salesman (1949), but had broken with him over the issue of naming names before HUAC. "I have read your play and would be honored to direct it," Kazan is supposed to have wired back. "You don't understand," Miller replied, "I didn't send it to you because I wanted you to direct it. I sent it to you because I wanted you to know what I think of stool pigeons."
Apocryphal? Perhaps. But the story had credibility and currency because after Kazan's April 1952 testimony before HUAC, Miller and Kazan, once the closest of collaborators and the best of friends, no longer spoke. Kazan was not asked to direct Miller's next play, The Crucible (1953), and as Sam Zolotow delicately reported, "It is known that a disagreement nothing to do with the play, though—exists between them that would make their further collaboration incompatible." They had planned to collaborate on a movie about the waterfront to be called "The Hook," but now Kazan
XXIII
two-ton lawnmower, probably the very first one in all of Painesville, Ohio, if not the Western World. Oh, it was big.
Was I punished? If Helen Keller falls in the forest, is there a sound? Of course I was punished, you idiot! In those days the O.J. Simpsons and Marge Schotts and Susan Smiths and Tonya Hardings of the world got punished. Crime didn't pay, in those days. Daredevil (the original one, the Lev Gleason one drawn by Chas. Biro) was good, and The Claw (created by Jack Cole) was bad. If you chivvied a two-to-three-ton lawnmower into a building you weren't supposed to be in, which was trespassing and vandalism, and then you acted like a real smartass by balancing it timorously on a wrought-iron railing two storeys up.. .well, as sure as YouKnowWho makes little green apples, you got major punished.
I can still taste that bar of Fels-Naptha.
And, if I recall correctly, this was the straw that finally broke the patience of my mom and dad, and it was—I think I'm correct in this recollection—the one and only time my dad gave me a licking. Of which I've written elsewhere. And which I richly deserved. It became a cause celebre in Painesville. Mothers dragging their runny-nosed urchins down the street would point to me and warn the little tykes that if they didn't stop making ka-ka in their jumpers, they'd wind up like the Evil Ellison Child. I was the definitely Designated BS. Forget what it was like in school. No heroic image there. No indeed not. I was a pariah. And sank further into books and swaggering aloneness and getting the crap beaten out of me on a daily basis. It was such a regular ordeal, I gave serious thought to selling season tickets to me, just to make it more economical for Wheeldon and his incipient Quantrill riders.
And that's that little anecdote, told in twice the space required. So now, you ask, on this our third gathering here in the land of Edge works.. .why have you regaled us at such mind-deadening length, on such a seemingly unrelated topic?
To which I reply, o ye of petulant impatience, Ihave told you this to establish— as does the barrister in a court of law—the character of the Accused. You best know
went on to do his own waterfront picture, On the Waterfront, in which Terry Malloy comes to maturity when he realizes his obligation to fink on his fellow hoods. And Miller wrote View, which tried simultaneously to understand and condemn the informer. Kazan emerged in the folklore of the left as the quintessential informer, and Miller was hailed as the risk-taking conscience of the times.
XXIV
what you're getting into, if you first know the cut of the the miscreant's jib.
Which is to say, we have here two complete books as EDGEWORKS 3. The first of which is an assemblage of testy essays by the kid who schlepped a 4V2-ton lawnmower up to...well, you know.
The essay is a remarkable literary construct. I was engaged in the high-wire act of writing them even before I knew that was what I was doing. I'd written many magazine and newspaper articles during the first years of my career, but it wasn't until I started doing introductions to stories, and longer introductions to entire story collections, that I developed the quite different voice I seem to employ when writing essays; different, that is, from my voice in straight fiction, and very much apart from the voice I employ when writing screenplays—as you will see when you get to book two of EDGEWORKS 3, which is the full text of a motion picture I was hired to write almost twenty-five years ago. (When obsessed fans of my work, or when pecksniffian academics check out the "book page" at the front of my tomes, they note a gap in the regular one-or-two-books-a-year metronomic regularity of my output. That gap comes during mid-1972 to early 1973. And they conclude— most incorrectly—that I had a block during that period, or I went fallow, or I was burned out, or I was engaged in some silly love affair that demanded my attention. That is because they are cursed with a kind of tunnel vision that permits of their recognizing only that work which appears in a form and a venue they respect as Serious. So the time I spent creating the CD-ROM of J Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is "lost" time to them. The months I spent writing the 33 new stories in my 1994 collaboration with the magnificent Polish surrealist, Jacek Yerka, the spectacular coffee-table volume called MINE FIELDS, is virtually unknown to many of my readers. In fact, I had a maddening time getting most readers—and all the yearly anthologists—to understand that these were new stories, all new stories, written specifically around the 34 Yerka paintings in the book. What they thought they vvere, reprints or whatever, I have no idea. But it was a long stretch of new writing, and frankly, one of my three favorite of my own books. But it seemed to bewilder the poor categorizing souls of the sf/fantasy press, who couldn't quite figure out which little tidy niche they might use to consign this hybrid. Thus, it was "lost" time, despite the excellence of the stories and the loveliness of the book-—which I urge you to locate—published by Morpheus International and readily available— and the fact that none of those 33 stories appear in any other book I've written. So it is with that "lost" period in 1972-73...which wasn't lost at all, it was merely being spent in another art-form. I was at work in the movie business. I was writing
XXV
HARLAN ELLISON'S MOVIE, which was not, I'm sad to report, ever produced and filmed. It was an unpublished, book-length manuscript, in screenplay form, that didn't see print till 1990. But it was written close to twenty-five years ago, and its appearance here in EDGEWORKS 3 is its first trade-book appearance, having only previously been available as one of two volumes in a $100 boxed, limited edition.)
But, as I was saying.. .the essay:
I have had remarkable success with the form, by normal standards of the kind of attention most essays garner. I've won a Silver Pen award from P.E.N., the international poets-essayists-novelists organization, for a series of essays I did on the First Amendment, and it is an accolade I cherish above many many other seemingly more prestigious or notable awards. And my essays in book form have sold well; nearly as well as my books of fiction.
And all that before I actually realized I had become an essayist.
It just sort of happened.
One day the voice changed, as if I'd reached puberty, and I was speaking in a conversational manner about things that mattered to me: courage, personal integrity, revenge, civil rights, social conscience, encroaching cultural illiteracy, the Viet Nam war, corruption in high places, the evil of Richard Nixon and Charles Keating and Daryl Gates, the tragedy of John Lennon's death, the weird world of television.
And the next thing I knew, I had half a dozen books of occasional pieces, columns, incunabulae, portraits, and essays in my backlist. I was an essayist. (Now, if only the editors of the yearly "Best Essays" volume would notice me, my cup would runneth over.)
So, to fulfil my obligation to EDGEWORKS 3, I've penned a few ruminations on the equity and equanimity of the essay.
An associate of Sartre—one of the first to perceive racism as a result of socioeconomic factors and political oppression rather than as (in the mid-Fifties, a view much in vogue) a psychological aberration—the late Martiniquan psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon completed, just months before his death from leukemia in 1961, a classic volume on oppression and violence titled THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH.
Essayists are the literary Wretched of the Earth. Those who write essays of "confessional literature"—defined as a "type of autobiography involving the
XXVI
revelation by an author of events or feelings which normally are discreetly concealed"—find themselves in short order the target of calumny, social ostracism, print retaliation, personal umbrage, death threats, challenges to come onto the schoolyard to duke it out with loudmouth bullies long on meanspiritedness but short on intellectual skills...and lifelong enemies whom they have never met, nor who have ever met them.
Rousseau's CONFESSIONS, Ralph Waldo Emerson's ESSAYS, Michel de Montaigne's ESSAYS, the writings of Mencken, Karl Kraus, Ring Lardner, E.B. White, Mary McCarthy, FPA, Dorothy Parker; the essays on journalism by A.J. Liebling and the exquisitely phrased literary comments of Cyril Connolly; Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf and Rebecca West and Pauline Kael; Bernard Shaw's Introductions (frequently more inspired than the plays they introduced), Graham Greene's ruminations on lost childhood (far more passion-evoking than even the best of his "entertainments"), Stephen Jay Gould's science columns (a rock in the surging river of scientific illiteracy and religion-based obscurantism that threatens to swamp us).
The essay, the column of personal opinion, the closely reasoned argument of special pleading. The form that more often sways the minds and hearts of masses than a hundred thousand more-praised novels or short stories.
Yet the essayist is despised.
Enemies beset the commentator from the moment the first line of opinion is written. Not only from the Right, and its boneheaded belief that "conservatism" means "concretization," but from the Left, as well, where equally boneheaded parvenus and adherents of paralogia insist that Political Correctness is more important than a good heart and a sane mind.
No writing is more evanescent than what the essayist brings forth. It is valuable—usually—only for the moment in human history where the terminology is au ourant. Use the word "keen" or "nifty" and the piece is automatically fodder for the dustbin of arrogant youth a mere twelve months later. What is "bad to the bone" today is "bitchin" tomorrow and "narrow" or "proper" or "fly" the day after. Word!
The essay is not a piece of journalism. The essay is not a journal. The essay is not panegyric or screed. Nor is it a piece of thinly disguised fiction, a representation of history, or item on a secret agenda intended to masquerade special pleading as common sense. Yet, because we are the most duplicitous species ever mutated, it can be all of the above. And there be classic examples of the essay one could easily
XXVII
identify as subscribing to the above-noted conceits. Yet the essay, in its most translucent form, is reason and rationality and high honor set to the music of flowing language. Words are the river, and the accomplished essayist knows how to ford every sand bar, shoot every rapid, backwater around every hidden snag so that the journey down that river is a song sans cacophony.
But even given the skill and the tempered self-confidence of a hotshot essayist, more is required. Because essayists are the wretched of the literary world, they must be gunslingers. Never sit with your back to the door, never play into a straight line, never respond to a phone call in which the mysterious communicant says, "I can't talk to you on the phone.. .meet me at the corner of Hudson and Christopher, and I'll bring the black bird with me." Never draw to an inside straight. Never pause long enough in a supermarket check-out line to let an Enquirer headline register on your consciousness. Never mistake vanity for heroism.
Essays tell the truth. As the essayist perceives it.
That doesn't mean they're always accurate, or realistic, or proper, or courteous, or even—simply—right. What it means is: the essayist is out there, his or her visceral material exposed, vouchsafing this or that belief, and willing to take the lumps for having said so. Anyone who is afraid of being reviled should seek a job in Kansas City writing for Hallmark, and never ever undertake an essay. As Lawrence Durrell wrote, "Trivial or impure dreaming literally rots the fabric of the future." The sullied truth stinks from the head, like a week-old grouper.
The essayist is, in some ways, though 1 just said s/he is not.. .a journalist. And (he dropped quote again) as Joseph Pulitzer assured us decades ago, "the purpose of journalists should be to afflict the comfortable."
What joy! What bad cess to those who hog the mike and own the marketplace and whine when anyone dares to point out their lack of savory or flavorful existence. The essayist goes after them. And, if done properly, there is the rending of flesh, the ripping of garments, the woebegone tugging of forelocks as the once-mighty crawl around on hands and knees bleating how unfairly they've been treated. Case in point (though even this example will out the slavering beast):
Couple of California brothers, both Atheists, family is of the Atheist persuasion, refused to swear allegiance to god, or to be precise in the terms of the Boy Scouts oath, to God...no wait, make that GOD...urn...G*0*D!! So the BSA gave them the boot. For having a belief different from that of the owners of the mike, the hoggers of the dais, the mouth that speaks for All of Society. So the father of these kids, who just happens to be a lawyer, takes the Boy Scouts of America chapter in
XXVIII
Garden Grove, or Anaheim, or La Puente, or wherever the hell it was, takes them to court. And here it is, going up the ladder from court to appellate court to maybe even the Supreme Court. And at every step, the BSA, espousing the name of GIOID! by God, is heaving its bosom and carping that it's not getting equal time to present its side of the question. Sanctimonious blaggards!
As if there hasn't been something like two thousand years of proselytizing, inveighing, Inquisitioning, missionarying, and just all-around free-floating espousal of God As The Answer. (You'll notice that on Sunday morning, amid all the 700 Clubs and Crystal Cathedral importunations, there ain't The Hour of Atheism on any cable or network channel.)
Well, the essayist would write about that sort of thing. The essayist would step up to the plate, all innocence and dimples, and suggest, well, maybe there ought to be a little Equal Time for the right of whoever desires it so, to be free from religion for a while, as opposed to the standard freedom of religion, which is nice, too, I suppose. The essayist would suggest coyly that such a consistent presentation of the bent of the majority is as religiously fanatic as the most demented Fundamentalist bomb-thrower. Because neither cares to permit anyone else to have a differing point of view by which they can exercise their right to free choice.
The essayist is the one who talks about such matters.
The essayist takes chances.
The essayist hammers the blinders from your eyes.
The essayist speaks to you in languages you've never heard.
The essayist goes logically from presumption to inescapable truth you refuse to accept.
The essayist won't take anything on faith.
The essayist is a practitioner of guerilla warfare.
And for this, the essayist, the columnist, the setter-down of personal—informed— opinion is treated like a mangy dog.
But as Super Chicken said to his crony, Fred, "You knew the job was dangerous when you took it."
Any writer worth his or her salt and/or cayenne, who seeks succor and approbation and nights of sweet sleep, should book passage on the Trans-Continental Dirigible for Kansas City, where greeting-card doggerel awaits him or her who cannot stare down the barrel of the assassin's rifle and delude him- or herself into believing s/he can catch that damned bullet between adamantium teeth.
/
XXIX
I dropped an African tribal aphorism some ways earlier in this introduction. Now I give you another, an Ashanti proverb from the Gold Coast:
The biting fly has no one
to come to his aid in trouble.
Ohurii nni gyamfo.
Thus, we come full circle. By now, those of you who've been with me through the first two volumes of EDGEWORKS understand that I am a creature of whim and puckishness. I cannot order where my thoughts go, cannot regiment my bizarre views or odd observations, cannot curb my waspish tongue, and mean no harm to any but the genuine rapscallions of the world. So when I tell you that 1 am the DBS, that I come to bat in the slot reserved for reavers and demons, you will understand that I am planting apologia for my obstreperous behavior in a book of essays that snarl and snap and sometimes sing out of tune, in a wanton and devil-may-care screenplay that is the visual novel I always wanted to write, always wanted to see filmed.
I need to make apologies in front—as I do to Kate Worley of Omaha fame in Appendix E of the Hornbook—and I need to assure you that I will ignore your outraged cries of political incorrectness. I am the biting fly, and I know there will come no aid when the mob comes for me. But I also know that as Designated Bad Seed I have been privileged to lead an absolutely singular life; its like denied to those who pointed at me when the teacher asked, "Who broke the window?" Thanks for coming, I'll see you in the next volume, and—as always—thank your mother for sending me the chicken soup.
XXX