Approaching Oblivion Part 1

APPROACHING OBLIVION.

by Harlan Ellison.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

I didn't do it alone. Others helped. Some in tiny ways they won't even remember. Others with encouragement, a.s.sistance, research and love. They will remember. Robert Silverberg, Jack Dann, Vicky Schochet, Stephanie Bernstein, Steve Herbst, Andrea Hart, Ben Bova, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, Joe Haldeman, Ed Bryant, Jim Sutherland, Sam Walker, Helen D'Allesandro Hecht, Leo & Diane Dillon, Lynn Lehrhaupt, Art Frankel, Jim Wnoroski, Ed Ferman, Toby Roxburgh, Tim Seldes and Mike Seidman. And Leslie Kay Swigart, because I forgot to acknowledge her help with Again, Dangerous Visions. And, of course, as always, Bob Mills, and Marty Shapiro, who are due for sainthood momentarily. Gypsy da Silva copy edited this book in its ma.n.u.script stage with grace and insight and an attention to the primacy of the writer's creation that is rare as black diamonds in the publis.h.i.+ng industry; and I love her shamelessly for it.

Special thanks are due Lynda Mitch.e.l.l, but that's none of your business.

To the memory of WALTER FULTZ,.

the first editor to buy a book from me; a good man, a fine editor, a friend...

Who approached oblivion, pa.s.sed through it, and is gone, for what reasons I do not know...

Though I saw him seldom, I miss him greatly...

With luck, he's found peace at last.

APPROACHING.

ELLISON.

Soon after I came to Los Angeles in 1970, I was called by a producer who offered me a job writing a science fiction screenplay. I was tied up with a book at the time; the producer asked me if I could suggest another writer for the project. I suggested Harlan Ellison.

There was a long, chilly silence at the other end of the phone. Finally the producer cleared his throat and said, "Do you, ah, know Harlan Ellison?"

No, I said, I didn't. I knew him only through his work. I had read some of his stories, and seen some of his television scripts.

"Umm," the producer said. "Well, let me tell you something-" and he launched into a short, energetic, and wholly unprintable description of his feelings on the subject of Harlan Ellison. The outburst ended as abruptly as it began, and he got off the phone leaving me completely mystified. I could only a.s.sume that Ellison and this producer had had some acrimonious dealings in the past. But that is hardly a rare event in Hollywood, and I thought no more about it.

As time went on, I ran into many people who had had acrimonious dealings with Harlan Ellison.

There was an odd sameness about the way all these people talked. "He's very inventive, very enthusiastic, very talented," they would begin, "but-" and then they'd launch into a long and heated harangue, cataloging what they regarded as the innumerable abuses they had suffered at his hands. I was told that Ellison was a perfectionist; that he cared too much about his work; that he fought for his ideas; that he was demanding and quick to pull his name from any project which did not go as he intended-always subst.i.tuting the sarcastic pseudonym, "Cordwainer Bird."

None of this elicited much sympathy from me. I saw nothing wrong with caring about your work and fighting for your ideas. I had been doing the same thing, and for my trouble I had been fired by Universal and then sued by that company. So I was in the position of admiring Ellison more with every new complaint I heard about him.

The people who spoke so bitterly about Harlan Ellison all mentioned something else, too. At the end of their diatribes, they would pause to catch their breath and then conclude with. " And besides, did you see what Gay Talese said about him?.

Gay Talese had written an Esquire piece called "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" which reported an encounter between Ellison and the singer. Ellison comes off as disrespectful, witty, and refusing to be bullied. It is hardly the portrait of a blackguard and cur. which his critics felt it to be.

In the end, I suppose what impressed me most about these Ellison stories was the strength of feeling with which they were told. The facts-so far as they could be determined-were never very remarkable, but the emotional content was always fierce and highly charged. Somehow. Ellison had really gotten to them, and they would never forget it.

Some time later, this same Harlan Ellison began to attack me in print. His argument was that I wasn't writing good science fiction. which was fine by me-I didn't think I was writing science fiction at all- but it was irritating to be placed in an unwanted category and then told I didn't fit it well. I was back at Universal by then, and one day I was complaining about his attacks on me when a secretary looked up and said, "Do you, ah, know Harlan Ellison?" No, I said, I didn't.

"Well," she said, "I used to be his secretary and I know him very well. Would you like to meet him?"

Harlan Ellison lives in the Los Angeles foothills, in a perfectly ordinary-appearing house, in a quiet suburban neighborhood. The inside of the house is as remarkable as the exterior is mundane; Ellison himself seems to take a certain pleasure in the un.o.btrusive outward appearance he presents to the community.

Inside, the feeling is sensual, almost sybaritic, with a quality of tension that comes from a barely controlled chaos. There are books everywhere, thousands of books, lining walls, tucked above doorways, filling closets, threatening to spill out and consume the living s.p.a.ce. There are bizarre juxtapositions at every turn: signed Wunderlich prints, Soleri notebooks, sculpture from Mozambique, psychedelic book art set side by side in confusing profusion. It takes enormous energy to hold all this together, and Ellison himself appears to have boundless energy. He moves restlessly, talks non-stop, jumping from books to television to politics to s.e.x to movies, taking up each new subject with considerable humor and aggressive enthusiasm.

He is not an easy man. His opinions are strongly held and his feelings strongly felt; he is not tolerant of compromise where it affects his life and his work. In someone else, this obstinacy might appear petty or fanatical, but in Harlan it is natural and attractive. It is simply the way he is.

Most strikingly, he is a genuine original, one-of-a-kind, difficult to categorize and unwilling to make it any easier. He demands to be taken on his own terms, and that aspect of his personality and his work is, I suspect, what has engaged both his critics and his large and pa.s.sionately loyal following. He seems to be a kind of energy focus and no one who brushes against him comes away with an indifferent response. His advocates are every bit as vehement as his critics. Other writers have readers; Ellison has fans who will get into fistfights with anyone who says a word against him.

He doesn't write like anybody else. The same paradoxes and odd juxtapositions which appear in his house and in his casual speech, are present in all of his writing. What emerges is a surprising, eclectic, almost protean series of visions, often disturbing, always strongly felt.

In the end, these strong feelings drive Hollywood producers crazy but make extraordinary stories.

After a long hiatus, there are eleven here, in top Ellison form-uncompromising, individual, and exactly as he wants them to be.

Hollywood 29 January 74

Introduction by HARLAN ELLISON

REAPING.

THE.

WHIRL WIND.

If it hadn't been for my getting beaten up daily on the playground of Lathrop Grade School in Painesville, Ohio-this book would not be what it is. It might be a book with my stories in it, but it wouldn't be this book, and it wouldn't be as painful a book for me as it is.

You've noticed, of course. Everyone finally realizes it as an inescapable truth. Nothing we do as adults is wholly based on our adult reactions; it's always-to greater or lesser degree depending on how deep go our roots to the past-an echo of our childhoods. Your politics are either mirror images of your parents'

politics when you were a kid, or they're rebellions against those politics. Somewhere in the physical makeup of the love-partners who turn you on are vague shadows of the high school cheerleader or basketball center who made your little heart go pitty-pat when you were das.h.i.+ng past p.u.b.erty. If you were accepted and admired by your teenage peer group, you don't have the same gut-wrenching fears about going to parties where you don't know anyone as someone who was an outsider. If you had religion pounded into your head when you were young, chances are pretty good even if you've renounced formal church ties, you still carry the guilts and fears around in your gut. Or maybe you've come full-circle and have become a Jesus Person, if you've been disillusioned enough by the world. No one escapes.

Our childhoods are sowing the wind, our adulthoods are reaping the whirlwind.

As true of me as you. No better, no n.o.bler, no stronger, no freer of the past. Just like you.

In Painesville, I was a card-carrying outcast. "Come on, Harlan!" the kids would yell across Harmon Drive. "Come on, let's play at Leon's!" And like a sap, I'd clamber up from between the huge roots of the maple tree in our front yard, drop my copy of Lorna Doone or Lord Jim (or whatever other alternate universe I'd fled to because I hated the one I was in) and run after the gang of kids streaking for Leon Miller's house. I was a little kid, smaller than any other kid my age, and I couldn't run nearly as fast. That was always part of their equation, of course. And just as I'd reach the front steps, they'd all dash inside Leon's house, slam and latch the screen door, bang shut the front door with its big gla.s.s panes and crowd behind the front window, sticking their tongues out at me and laughing. How I longed to enter that cool and dim front room where they would soon be playing Chinese Checkers and Pick-Up-Sticks.

Instead, their rejection always drove me to fury.I would slam my hands against the wooden frames of the screen windows and kick the glider on the front porch, always being careful not to tear the screens or damage the glider for fear of the wrath of Leon's grandmother. Then, when they tired of baiting me, and retreated into the dimness beyond to play, I would return to my book, where I could be brave and loved and capable of dueling Athos, Porthos and Aramis all in one afternoon.

On the schoolyard at Lathrop, I fared considerably worse than D' Artagnan. There I was the accepted punching bag of bullies-in-training, whose names appear every now and then in my stories as characters who come to ugly ends.

I won't go into the reasons; they're all thirty years out-of-date and relevance. Suffice it that a gang of them would pound me into the dirt. And with a pre-Cool Hand Luke persistence, I would pull myself up and jump one of them, bury my teeth in his wrist and wrestle him to the ground. The others would kick me till I let loose. Up again, more slowly a second time, with a wild roundhouse at a thick, stupid face.

Sometimes I'd connect and savor the eloquent vocabulary of a b.l.o.o.d.y nose. But they'd converge and plant me again. And it would go that way till I was unconscious or until Miss O'Hara from the third grade would dash out to scatter them.

But it wasn't the beatings that most dismayed me. It was having to go home after school with my clothes ripped and bloodied beyond repair. You see, I was grade school age only a few years after the Depression, and my family was anything but wealthy. We weren't dest.i.tute, far from it; but things were as tight for us as for most families in the Midwest at that time, and my parents could not afford new clothes all the time.

When I walked home from school, I would take the longest way around, often going to sit in the woods on the corner of Mentor Avenue and Lincoln Drive till it grew dark. I was ashamed and filled with guilt. And when, at last, I could stay away no longer, I'd go home and my Mother-who was a kind woman suffering with a troublesome child-would see me, she would cry and clean me up with mercurochrome and Band-Aids, and she would say (not every time, but even once was enough to make an indelible impression), "What did you say to get them mad?"

How could I tell her it was not only that I was a smart aleck? How could I tell her it was because I was a Jew and they had been taught Jews were something loathsome? How could I tell her it was easier for me to carry a broken nose and bruises than for me to act cowardly and deny that I was a Jew? The few times she had heard their anti-Semitic remarks, she had gone to school, and that had only made it worse. So I let her think I had started it. And swallowed the guilt. And built a reaction to bearing the blame that grew as I grew.

Now, as an adult, my reaction to being blamed for something I did not do is almost pathological.

Now, as an adult, I don't give a d.a.m.n if I do tear the screens or damage the glider. I can think of nothing more horrible than what is done to Joseph K. in Kafka's The Trial.

Which brings me to why this book exists, and why it is the book it is. Preceding was preamble.

In 1971 the publishers of this book, Walker & Company, published my collection of collaborations with other sf writers, Partners in Wonder. It was a lovely book but because of the inept.i.tude of Walker's then-art director, it was a book hideously overpriced. It seemed certain Walker & Company would lose a potload.

On the day the first copies came back from the bindery, I happened to be on a business trip to New York. My editor at Walker at that time was Helen D' Alessandro, a charming and talented woman who had tried to watchdog the Partners in Wonder project, who had been hamstrung by excesses and inefficiencies during the production stages. Helen called me first in Los Angeles, to advise me the books were in, and finding out I was in New York, tracked me down and invited me to come in to the Walker offices. She knew all too well the horrors that had served as midwives to the birth of that book: galleys set by computer so badly that I had had to spend nine full days correcting them...insane typography that had jumped the cost of the book from a reasonable $5.95 to an impossible $8.95...layout so berserk that it killed a certain reprint sale to the SF Book Club. She wanted me to see the book first.

I arrived at the offices of Walker & Company and Helen came out to the reception area to take me back to her office. When she came into the reception foyer, I was standing with a copy of Partners in Wonder in my hands. The woman on the switchboard had removed a copy from the carton when it had been delivered and had put it out on one of the display shelves as a gesture of kindness to an author she knew was soon to arrive. Helen's smile faded as she saw me standing there forlornly, leafing through a book twice the size and twice the price it might have been.

I looked up and saw her. She tried to smile again, but it wouldn't come. "Oh," was all she said.

In silence, we walked back to her office.

At that time, Helen shared editorial s.p.a.ce with Lois Cole.

Lois Cole is one of the finest editors, one of the kindest persons, one of the most intelligent and charming people I have ever known. She was Margaret Mitch.e.l.l's editor on Gone With the Wind and it was she, in part, who convinced Margaret Mitch.e.l.l to change the t.i.tle of that book from Mules in Horses'

Harness to Gone With the Wind. She is a woman of uncommon perception and empathy.

She smiled up at me as I entered the tiny office, cleared a stack of ma.n.u.scripts from a chair, and said, "I'm sorry, Harlan."

It was not the happiest day of my life.

We commiserated for a while, and I hung around the office doing some publicity work for the book with Henry Durkin. As five o'clock approached, I walked through the crowded pa.s.sageway of the editorial offices to gather my coat and attache case, when I heard someone call my name. I looked up and saw Sam Walker.

The president of Walker & Company is Samuel S. Walker, Jr. He is a tall, elegant man with fine manners, soft voice and too much gentlemanliness to ever permit him to become the sort of rapacious publisher who winds up with a corporate octopus like, for instance, Doubleday. We had never exchanged many words.

He motioned me to join him in his office, and when I'd entered, he closed the door and turned to me. His expression was sober and concerned. "I want you to know," he said, very gently, "that I know you aren't responsible for what has happened on this book. It's too common a practice in this business to blame a writer for what's gone wrong on the production end of a project. I want you to know that I'm aware we'll lose money on this book, but the fault does not lie with you. And I'd consider it a privilege to publish you again, if you'll trust us a second time."

He did not say: What did you do to get them mad?

He did not ask me why my clothes were ripped and my nose b.l.o.o.d.y and one shoe gone. He said he knew I was innocent of all wrongdoing.

It was a ten year old child getting an apology from an adult; the state bringing in "no true bill" and dismissing all charges; the hospital calling to say they'd mixed up the biopsy reports and someone else was dying of cancer; a page one retraction. It was one of the kindest, most sensitive things anyone had ever done for me, and it had occurred in an industry not overly burdened with thoughtfulness and kindness.

Sam Walker could not possibly have known what his words meant to me, nor with what echoes of my childhood they reverberated.

But because of those three minutes of concern, I wrote this book, and Sam Walker has published it. So if it pleasures you... the thanks go as much to Sam as to me.

Originally, this was to have been a collection of already-published stories from several out-of-print books I'd written years ago. Larded in with the reprints were to have been three or four new stories. But as time progressed, I grew more and more disquieted with the idea of such a collection. In 1971, Macmillan published Alone Against Tomorrow, a collection of my stories that spanned the years from 1956 to 1969; though the pivot of all the stories in that collection was the theme of alienation, the book was also intended as a small, narrow retrospective of my work.

But a peculiar thing happened. It was one of the rare occasions on which I did not overblow my reputation, one of the few times my ego did not swell out of proportion to my worth. I had not gauged the popularity my stories had achieved in the three years preceding the publication of Alone Against Tomorrow, and was alternately delighted and dismayed by the letters I received praising the book but denouncing me for gathering together under a fresh t.i.tle a group of much-reprinted stories.

It decided me without doubt that never again could I permit a supposed "new" collection to contain stories available in my other collections.

Approaching Oblivion was originally intended to gather together stories from out-of-print collections like A Touch of Infinity, Ellison Wonderland and Gentleman Junkie, with one or two stories available only in anthologies done by other editors.

The contracts were signed in November of 1970 and the book-which should have been no trouble to a.s.semble-was supposed to be in Helen D' Alessandro's hands no later than six months thereafter. But the letters were starting to come in on Alone Against Tomorrow, and I began to procrastinate. Months, then years, went by, with polite notes of inquiry from Walker & Company. First, from Helen and then, when she departed the playing fields of literature to marry the brilliant poet, teacher and writer Anthony Hecht, from Lois, from the ineffable and indefatigable Hans Stefan Santesson, from Tim Seldes, from Henry Durkin, from Dedna Bryfonski who was my editor after Lois became swamped with other projects, and finally (though I may have missed a baton-pa.s.ser or two in the whirl of personnel at Walker), from Ms. Evy Herr, my current shoulderer of anguish.

It is now four years after the original contracting for Approaching Oblivion. And the book is finished. It contains no stories ever included in my collections...though some of them have appeared in anthologies elsewhere. But that doesn't count. This book has my name on it. It is the product of my labors since 1970, with few exceptions. (If you're curious as to when a particular story was written, I've included the date of original emergence and the location[sJ in which I wrote it, at the end of each piece.) So if I get letters complaining that these new stories are familiar, it's got to be from righteous Ellison buffs who buy every obscure magazine published, because these stories come from sources as diversified as Penthouse magazine, Crawdaddy, Galaxy and the August 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

One of the stories has never been published, though it's supposed to be included in a ma.s.sive art/text history of the Sixties as interpreted through comics, to be edited by The National Lampoon's Michel Choquette. (If Michel ever gets the book finished, don't miss the splendiferous drawings done by Leo & Diane Dillon -who did the cover of the book you now hold-to accompany the text. I'm talking about "Ecowareness," incidentally.) I'm glad I waited and let the contents of the book change. For several reasons. First, because most of the collections from which I'd have cannibalized stories are now coming back into print. Several paperback houses will be releasing almost all of my older t.i.tles in the next few years, thus hopefully ending the plaintive cries I hear at college lecture appearances, from my readers (each one with impeccable taste) who wail they cannot find my books on the newsstands.

Second, because now Sam and Evy (and Lois and Helen and all the other good people who were so incredibly patient) have a new book, instead of a Frankenstein creation cobbled-up from spare parts and dusty remnants.

And third, because the Harlan Ellison who signed those contracts in 1970 is not the same Harlan Ellison who writes these words today, in September of 1974.

Which brings me full circle to the schoolyard of Lathrop, and reaping the whirlwind.

In 1970, when I conceived the theme of this book-cautionary tales that would warn "this is what may happen if we keep going the way we're going"-I had just emerged from a decade of civil unrest and revolution. I was far from alone in pa.s.sing through that terrible time. My friends, my country, my world had also gone through it. I believed in certain things, and I had gut-hatreds I thought would never cool. I had been in riots against the Viet Nam war that had netted me time in jail and broken bones; I had been on civil rights marches and demonstrations that showed me the depths of inhumanity and craziness to which normal human beings could sink; I had lost many friends to dope and death; I had gone through an intellectual inferno that burned me out so I could not write for nearly a year and a half...and I was tired.

In Alone Against Tomorrow, I had included as a dedication for a book of stories about alienation, these words: