The Essential Ellison Part 35

Why try to find complex reasons? They are all there, in ninety minutes of prurience and debas.e.m.e.nt, as the bastion of Democracy works its way on its young.

Channel 11 has asked me to point out that it did not originate this show, that it merely carried it through the facilities of the Universal Television Network, that it is responsible for such excellent shows as 1985 and the upcoming special, I'm 17, Pregnant and Frightened. That it will be broadcasting, in stereo, Midsummer Rock on Wednesday, September 2nd, at 7:00 PM.

Okay, I've mentioned it, and I spread praise to them for their good works. Now tell the ladies how good you are, KTTV; I can dig it, but what about "Our Little Miss"?

Did someone mention p.o.r.nography?

A Love Song To Jerry Falwell

First, let us sit in the dark, as they sit in darkness, and hear words from writers. Don Marquis said: "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you." Geoffrey Wolff said: Writing has nothing much to do with pretty manners, and less to do with sportsmans.h.i.+p or restraint [...] Every writer begins as a subversive, if in nothing more than the antisocial means by which he earns his keep. Finally, every fantasist who cannibalizes himself knows that misfortune is his friend, that grief feeds and sharpens his fancy, that hatred is as sufficient a spur to creation as love (and a world more common) and that without an instinct for lunacy he will come to nothing.

Arthur Miller said: "Society and man are mutually dependent enemies and the writer's job [is] to go on forever defining and defending the paradox lest, G.o.d forbid, it be resolved." And, finally, Robert Coover has said: The best social orders run down with time, and so occasionally you have to tear it all apart and start over. Primitive societies set aside a time each year to do this on a ritual basis. Get drunk, break all the rules, commune with the primordial chaos and the dream-time of the civilizers, recapture the sense of community and thus of order. Anyway, good excuse for a party [...] [...] it's the role of the author the fiction maker, the mythologizer, to be the creative spark in this process of renewal: he's the one who tears apart the old story, speaks the unspeakable, makes the ground shake, then shuffles the bits back together into a new story.

But they are writers. What else would they say to defend themselves? They are professional liars. And has not one of their own, Pushkin, said: "Better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths"?

So what are we to make of the mind of the writer? What are we to think of the purgatory in which dreams are born, from whence come the derangements that men call magic because they have no other names for smoke or fog or hysteria? What are we to dwell upon when we consider the forms and shadows that become stories? Must we dismiss them as fever dreams, as merely expressions of creativity, as purgatives? Or may we deal with them even as the naked ape dealt with them: as the only lies. Are they not evil, these liars? Consider their aberrations!

Who will be the first to acknowledge that it was only a membrane, only a vapor, that separated a Robert Burns and his love from de Sade and his hate?

Is it too terrible to consider that a d.i.c.kens, who could drip treacle and G.o.d bless us one and all, through the mouth of a potboiler character called Tiny Tim, could also create the escaped convict Magwitch; the despoiler of children, f.a.gin; the murderous Sikes? Is it that great a step to consider that a woman surrounded by love and warmth and care of humanity as was Mary Wollstonecraft Sh.e.l.ley, could produce a work of such naked horror as FRANKENSTEIN? Can the mind equate the differences and similarities that allow both an "Annabel Lee" and a "Masque of the Red Death" to emerge from the same churning pit of thought-darkness?

Consider the dreamers: all of the dreamers: the glorious and the corrupt: Aesop and Amado; Borges and Benvenuto Cellini; Chekhov and Chang Tao-ling; Democritus, Disraeli; Epicurus and Ralph Ellison; Faure and Fitzgerald; Goeth, Garibaldi; Huysmann and Hemingway; ibn-al-Fabrid and Ives; Dalton Trumbo and Mark Twain; and on and on. All the dreamers. Thos whose visions took form in blood and those which took form in music. Dreams fas.h.i.+oned of words, and nightmares molded of death and pain. Is it inconceivable to consider that Richard Spek-who slaughtered eight nurses in Chidcago in 1966, who was sentenced to 1,200 years in prison-was a devout Church-going Christian, a boy who lived in the land of G.o.d, while Jean Genet-avowed thief, murder, pederast, vagrant who spent the first thirty years of his life as an enemy of society and in the jails of France where he was sentenced to life imprisonment-has written prose and poetry of such blazing splendor that Sartre called him "saint"? Does the mind shy away from the truth that a Bosch could create h.e.l.l-images so burning, so excruciating that no other artist has ever even attempted to copy his staggeringly brilliant style, while at the same time he produced works of such ec.u.menical purity as L'Epiphanie? All the dreamers. All the mad ones and the n.o.ble ones, all the seekers after alchemy and immortality, all those who dashed through endless midnights of gore-splattered horror and all those who strolled through suns.h.i.+ne springtimes of humanity. They are one and the same. They are all born of the same desire.

Speechless, we stand before van Gogh's Starry Night or one of those h.e.l.l-images of Hieronymous Bosch, and we find our senses reeling; vanis.h.i.+ng into a daydream mist of what must this man have been like, what must he have suffered? A pa.s.sage from Dylan Thomas, about birds singing in the eaves of a lunatic asylum, draws us up short, steals the breath from our mouths; and the blood and thoughts stand still in our bodies as we are confronted with the absolute incredible achievement of what they have done. The impossibility of it. So imperfect, so faulty, so broken the links in communication between humans, that to pa.s.s along one corner of a vision we have had to another creature is an accomplishment that fills us with pride and wonder, touching us and them for a nanoinstant with magic. How staggering it is then to see, to know what van Gogh and Bosch and Thomas knew and saw. To live for that nanoinstant what they lived. To look out of their eyes and view the universe from a never-before-conquered height, from a dizzying, strange place.

This, then, is the temporary, fleeting, transient, incredibly valuable, priceless gift from the genius dreamer to those of us crawling forward moment after moment in time, with nothing to break our routine save death.

Mud-condemned, forced to deal as ribbon clerks with the boredoms and inanities of lives that may never touch-save by this voyeuristic means-a fragment of glory...our only hope, our only pleasure, is derived through the eyes of the genius dreamers; the genius madmen; the creators.

How amazed...how stopped like a broken clock we are, when we are in the presence of the creator. When we see what singular talents-wrought out of torment-have proffered; what magnificence, or depravity, or beauty, perhaps in a spare moment, only half-trying; they have brought it forth nonetheless, for the rest of eternity and the world to treasure.

Ah, but using an artist's life to judge his work is a childish habit, and anything that helps kick it out of us does us good. (It's a mean-spirited practice, as well, since it's used only by people who want to sneer at the artist. Do these high-minded types ever say how marvelous it is that such exquisite work could rise out of a sordid life? Do they eagerly pick up a dull book when they learn that its author had a beautiful soul?) As for the hero wors.h.i.+p, that's childish and unfair as well. Why does the creation of a work of art impose on the artist the obligation to lead an exemplary life? Why do we demand an unreasonable n.o.bility that none of us possesses? The artists have fulfilled their contract with us by producing work that gives us pleasure or insight or both. Why hold them to an unwritten morals clause?

And how awed we are, when caught in the golden web of that true genius-so that finally, for the first time, we know that all the rest of it was kitsch; it is made so terribly, crus.h.i.+ngly obvious to us, just how mere, how petty, how mud-condemned we really are, and that the only grandeur we will ever know is that which we know second-hand from our d.a.m.ned geniuses. That the closest we will ever come to our "Heaven," while alive, is through our unfathomable geniuses, however imperfect or bizarre they may be.

And is this, then, why we treat them so shamefully, harm them, chivvy and hara.s.s them, drive them inexorably to their personal mad-houses, kill them? Lock them away in darkness? Cell doors slam, and the dream light goes out.

Who is it, we wonder, who really stills the golden voices of the geniuses? Who turns their visions to dust?

Who, the question asks itself unbidden, are the savages and who the princes?

Fortunately, the night comes quickly, their graves are obscured by darkness, and answers can be avoided till the next time; till the next marvelous singer of strange songs is stilled in the agony of his rhapsodies.

On all sides the painter wars with the photographer. The dramatist battles the television scenarist. The novelist is locked in combat with the reporter and the creator of the non-novel. As Voltaire has said, "Despite the enormous quant.i.ty of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day." On all sides the struggle to build dreams is beset by the forces of materialism, the purveyors of the instant, the dealers in tawdriness, the tunnel-visioned censors, the Authorities, the jailers, the preservers of the Public Morality. The writer, the creator, falls into disrepute. Of what good is he? Does he tell us useable gossip, does he explain our current situation, does he "tell it like it is"? No, he only preserves the past and points the way to the future. He merely performs the holiest of ch.o.r.es. Thereby becoming a luxury, a second-cla.s.s privilege to be considered only after the newscasters and the s.e.x images and the "personalities." No one calls for his release; no one wishes to hear his bad news. The public entertainments, the safe and sensible entertainments, those that pa.s.s through the soul like beets through a baby's backside...these are the hallowed, the revered. How many noted that John Gardner died in a motorcycle crash mere blocks from his home, on the day Grace Kelly died and commanded all the headlines?

And what of the mad dreams, the visions of evil and destruction? What becomes of them? In a world of Tiny Tim, there is little room for Magwitch, though the former be saccharine and the latter be n.o.ble.

Who will speak out for the mad dreamers? Who will open their cells?

Who will ensure, with sword and s.h.i.+eld and grants of monies, that these most valuable will not be thrown into the lye pits of mediocrity, the meat grinders of safe reportage? Who will care that they suffer all their nights and days of delusion and desire for ends that will never be noticed? There is no foundation that will enfranchise them, no philanthropist who will risk his h.o.a.rd in the hands of the mad ones.

And so, till they go to prison or madhouse, they go their ways, walking all the plastic paths filled with noise and neon, their multifaceted bee-eyes seeing much more than the clattering groundlings will ever see, reporting back from within their torments that Reagans cannot save nor Falwells uplift. Reporting back that the midnight of madness is upon us; that wolves who turn into men are stalking our babies; that trees will bleed and birds will speak in strange tongues. Reporting back that the gra.s.s will turn blood-red and the mountains soften and flow like b.u.t.ter; that the seas will congeal and harden for iceboats to skim across from the chalk cliffs of Dover to Calais.

The mad dreamers among us will tell us that if we take a woman (that most familiar of alien creatures that we delude ourselves into thinking we rule and understand to the core) and pull her inside-out, we will have a wondrousness that looks like the cloth-of-gold gown in which Queen Ankhesenamun was interred. That if we inject the spinal fluid of the dolphin into the body of the dog, our pet will speak in the riddles of a Delphic Oracle. That if we smite the very rocks of the Earth with quicksilver staffs, they will split and show us where our ghosts have lived since before the winds traveled from pole to pole.

The geniuses, the mad dreamers, those who write of debauchery in the spirit, they are the condemned of our times; they give everything, receive nothing, and expect in their silliness to be spared the gleaming axe of the executioner. How they will whistle as they die!

Let the rulers and the politicians and the financiers throttle the dreams of creativity. It doesn't matter.

The mad ones will persist. In the face of certain destruction they will still speak of the unreal, the forbidden, all the seasons of the witch.

They will end unnoticed like Gardner, or humiliated even in death as was Garcia-Lorca. They will write from inside prisons and read their thoughts to rats. But they will persist.

They have no choice.

One of their number, Mario Vargas Llosa, has said, "Writers are exorcists of their own demons." And as mirrors of their species, they will continue to deliver the good news and the bad news, that We are G.o.d, that We possess in language-the one tool that enables us to grasp hold of our lives and transcend our Fate by understanding it-the means to reach the center of the universe and, our salvation, the center of our hearts.

For this, they live forever in darkness.

Telltale Tics And Tremors Under the pseudonym "Frederick R. Ewing," the late, multifarious Theodore Sturgeon once wrote a serio-comic historical romp t.i.tled I, LIBERTINE, the protagonist of which had an interesting character trait. The novel was a swashbuckler, and the hero was a much-vaunted swordsman. The only trouble with him was that when he was in a dangerous situation, he became petrified with fear. When that happened, his mouth went dry and his upper lip invariably stuck to his teeth, forcing him to draw his mouth up to loosen it. It was a nervous tic, but the effect it had was to make him appear to be smiling. He became famous, therefore, as a man who " smiles in the face of danger." This minor infirmity was taken for what it was not, he was counted fearless, and frequently escaped being killed because it generated a wholly undeserved reputation for his being foolhardily dangerous to the point of lunacy; and it terrified the bejeezus out of his attackers.

Scott Fitzgerald foreshadowed the totality of the basic theme of THE GREAT GATSBY in his portrayals of Tom and Daisy Buchanan as people who"...smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their vast carelessness...and let other people clean up the mess they had made..." The concept of" careless people" is one that applies perfectly to whole groups of young people one meets today. For instance, the wife of a friend of mine has managed to acc.u.mulate one hundred and thirteen parking tickets in a year in Beverly Hills alone. Most of them have even gone to warrant. Unlike New York City, where, if you are a scofflaw and have a pile of tickets, they settle with you annually...or states where they refuse to renew your license until you clean up your outstanding tickets...in California, they simply bust you and toss you in the tank till you're paid up. So last week, when this woman' s husband was himself stopped for some minor traffic infraction, the Highway Smokey ran the car's registration through the computer, found there were warrants outstanding, and tossed him in the slam till several thousand dollars were sh.e.l.led out. He spent the night in the Beverly Hills penal pen, with other high-end felons, and the next day they started to s.h.i.+p him off to one jail after another in the jurisdictions where she had picked up bad paper. Her carelessness caused an entire cadre of us, their friends, to waste an entire day, and many dollars, trying to pry him loose from the coils of the Law. And she just laughed it off. Careless. And that's the key to her character. She is a woman terrified of growing up, of becoming an adult who must accept responsibility not only for her own life, but for that part of the lives of others that is involved with hers.

Pinocchio's nose grows when he tells a lie.

Archy the c.o.c.kroach avers he is the reincarnation of a vers libre poet.

Uriah Heep wrings his hands, dissembles, and deprecates himself when he is being disingenuous.

Scarlett O'Hara captures the totality of her character, in the denouement of her story, in the microcosm of a single phrase as she keeps repeating, "I'll think of it all tomorrow...After all, tomorrow is another day."

Chaucer's pilgrims all have mannerisms and physical attributes that speak to their basic nature. The wife of Bath, as an example, is gap-toothed, meaning l.u.s.ty. She has had five husbands.

In the series of novels about the actor-thief Grofield, Donald Westlake (writing under the name Richard Stark) has his bemusingly melodramatic hero hearing film background music as he has his adventures. He'll be going into a dangerous caper and the sound track in his brain is playing, say, the Korngold theme from the Errol Flynn film, The Sea Hawk. It is a mild and antic way of showing how Grofield is able to laugh at himself, even at a precarious moment; and it explicates his character fully.

Grofield's interior sound track, Uriah's dry-was.h.i.+ng, Scarlett's refusal to deal with pragmatic reality when it soils her fantasies, Pinocchio's priapean proboscis, the Buchanans' (and my friend's wife's) amoral thoughtlessness, the swordsman's daunting grin...they are all examples of a writing skill that must be present in the work of anyone who wishes to create characters that live. They are the minute mannerisms and attributes that create an instant flare of recognition in the reader. They are the core of character delineation; and writers who think they can deal only with gimmicks and sociology and gadgets and concepts, without breathing life into the players on whom gimmicks, sociology, gadgets and concepts have their effect, are doomed to frustration...and worse, shallowness.

I've quoted this before, and will no doubt quote it many times more, but for me the most basic thing ever said about the important material for stories was said by William Faulkner in his n.o.bel Prize acceptance speech. He said: "...the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat."

What I've just said is so obvious to any professional, that it must seem a ludicrous redundancy. Yet my experience with young writers has shown me that an astonis.h.i.+ng number of talented people conceive of the writing of a story as an exercise in conundrum: a problem situation that, like a locked-room mystery, must be solved. They relate to the work the way computer programmers relate to an "heuristic situation." They simply do not comprehend, as each of you reading this must comprehend, on almost a cellular level, so it becomes basic nature with every story you attempt, that the only thing worth writing about is people.

I'll say that again. The only thing worth writing about is people. People. Human beings. Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, insight by insight. If you do not do it, the story is a failure. It may be the most innovative sociological insight or scientific concept ever promulgated, but it will be a failure. I cannot stress this enough. Doesn't matter if it's a novel or a hundred-word short-short: no character that breathes...you got no story. There is no n.o.bler ch.o.r.e in the craft of writing than holding up the mirror of reality and turning it slightly, so we have a new and different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the "normal," the obvious. People are reflected in the gla.s.s. The fantasy situation into which you thrust them is the mirror itself. And what we are shown should illuminate and alter our perception of the world around us. Failing that, you have failed totally.

Melville put it this way: "No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it."

I had not meant, in this brief exegesis, to get too deeply into the arcane philosophy of writing. I leave that to pedants and academics who all-too-often worry such concepts into raggedness, like a puppy shaking a Pooh cuddly. Nonetheless, I am pressed to it; there is such a fractionalizing of the genre currently, with many writers opting for obscurantism and convoluted, insipid cleverness in aid of the smallest, most familiar point...or wallowing in smug arrogance that they write "heroic" fiction that masters mind-numbing concepts, but does not reveal the presence of a single living, identifiable human being...that I find I must belabor the people concept a moment longer.

One of the least defensible rationales for the "validity" of science fiction as a worthy genre of literature, handed down to us from the 1920s, is that it is a "problem-solving fiction." This bogus apologia, handservant to the more exploitable (but no less phony) a.s.severative justification that sf predicts the future, is a bit of paranoia left over from a long-gone time when the writing and the reading of sf was considered tantamount to being certifiably tetched.

But those days are far behind us. The sophistication and craft-upgrading that has come to sf through the works of writers such as Silverberg, Disch, Wilhelm, Wolfe, Harrison, Moorc.o.c.k, Tiptree and Le Guin has put it forever out of the line of contempt of all but the most purblind and reactionary critics. (This does not save us, however, from the moronic effusions of Time's Peter Prescott, or the lamebrains who work on rural dailies, who think they're being hip when they call it "sci-fi." Nor does it filter any light into the murky caverns wherein dwell holdovers from the " Golden Era" who are now counted as great historians and critics of the field, who continue to suck up to every pitiful monster flick or limp-logic deigning of notice from Establishment journals, chiefly because their lack of ego-strength refuses to permit them to understand that sf has long-since arrived. We must suffer with these benighted few, but we need not allow their hangups to be our hangups.) Summation, then: outdated att.i.tudes continue to prevail throughout the genre. Bad writers justify their work and the Brobdingnagian publisher's advances they get by puffing up with a.s.sertions that they write "true science fiction." Well, they're welcome to it, if they believe the value of the work lies in nothing but thunderous concepts flung through enormous vistas of s.p.a.ce, sans emotion, sans people, sans wit, sans anything but necromancy and/or hardware. It is writing more allied with the preparation of technical journals than it is with the heritage of Melville, Twain, Sh.e.l.ley, Kafka and Borges.

I urge all of you seeking careers as writers to eschew this dead end. Leave it to the amateurs who make their livings as technicians or engineers, with an occasional foray into fiction that is merely the mythologizing of their current "heuristic situation." Ten years from now their stories will be as forgotten, as unreadable, as the entire contents of issues of 60s and 70s Campbell a.n.a.logs are today.

The only stories that live on, that are worth " the agony and the sweat" of writing, are the ones that speak with force to the human condition. Star Wars is amusing, but please don't confuse it with Citizen Kane, Taxi Driver, or The Conversation.

Writing about people should be your mission.

Which brings us back to the proper place for this essay, after a digression informed more by anger and impatience than a sense of propriety. I beg your pardon.

If you'll accept my messianic fervor as regards the reason for writing, then it follows that creating (not real, but) verisimilitudinous people-go look up the word verisimilitude now-is mandatory. It also requires very nearly more art than any other aspect of writing. It entails keen observation of people, attention to detail, the eschewing of cynicism, the total flensing from your mind of any kind of bigotry, wide knowledge of habit patterns and sociological underpinnings for otherwise irrational or overfamiliar habits, cultural trends, familiarity with dress and speech and physical attributes, fads, psychology and the ways in which people say things other than what they mean.

It devolves upon being mature enough, and empathic enough, and tough enough to be able to encapsulate a human being of your own creating, in a line or, at most, a paragraph. A single act or habit would be ideal. Lean! Lean and fatless, a minimum of words! The fewest possible words, where more would obfuscate that moment of recognition. The writing must be lean and hard!

Read this: A man has a shape; a crowd has no shape and no color. The ma.s.sed faces of a hundred thousand men make one blank pallor; their clothes add up to a shadow; they have no words. This man might have been one hundred-thousandth part of the featureless whiteness, the dull grayness, and toneless murmuring of a docile mult.i.tude. He was something less than nondescript-he was blurred, without ident.i.ty, like a smudged fingerprint. His suit was of some dim shade between brown and gray. His s.h.i.+rt had gray-blue stripes, his tie was patterned with dots like confetti trodden into the dust, and his oddment of limp brownish mustache resembled a cigarette-b.u.t.t, disintegrating shred by shred in a tea-saucer.

That was the late Gerald Kersh, my favorite writer, now-forgotten giant of great, great storytelling ability, describing the indescribable: a man with no outstanding characteristics, a plain man, an invisible man, a little soul never examined and a presence instantly forgotten. The words sing the song, of course, but consider the images. Precise. Lean. Hard.

Not cynical, but utterly pragmatic. Confetti in the dust, a smudged fingerprint, a cigarette b.u.t.t disintegrating in a saucer. Exact. Evocative. And in sum the images and the choice of words-self-censors.h.i.+p at its most creative and intelligent and productive level-give us a description of that which cannot be described. The only other example of this I've ever encountered was Coppola's cinematic characterization of the professional electronic b.u.g.g.e.r, Harry Caul, in The Conversation. As critic Pauline Kael described him, he is "a compulsive loner (Gene Hackman), a wizard at electronic surveillance who is so afraid others will spy on him that he empties his life; he's a cipher-a cipher in torment. There's nothing to discover about him, and still he's in terror of being bugged." Coppola's writing, combined with Hackman's subtle sense of his own anonymity, described the indescribable: a man who is a shadow. And both Kersh and Coppola did it with the barest possible delineation. Lean, hard, precise!

Get it: what I'm suggesting as an imperative for the writer who wishes to create stories of power and immediacy is the tough and unrelenting process of describing characters in a few words, by special and particular attributes. The swordsman's grin, Heep's hand-was.h.i.+ng, Scarlett's interior will to survive even in the face of consummate disaster. I'll give you a few more examples.

In Edmund Wilson's justly famous story "The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles" we have a character named Asa M. Stryker (note the name as descriptive tool) who is obsessed with the predatory chelonians that lurk in his pond and drag down the little ducklings he admires. The obsession grows until Stryker goes into the turtle soup business. He becomes more and more snapperlike until his movements and manner become paradigmatic of the very creatures he has devoted his life to vanquis.h.i.+ng. Here is a bit from the story: ...Stryker at ease in his turbid room, upended, as it were, behind his desk, with a broad expanse of plastron and a rubbery craning neck, regarding him with small bright eyes set back in the brownish skin beyond a prominent snout-like formation of which the nostrils were sharply in evidence...

Wilson uses the device of direct a.n.a.logy to demonstrate the subtext of the story: Stryker became what he beheld. It is one method of characterizing a player. It is a variation of the Disney Studios manner of humanizing animals or inanimate objects like pencils or garbage cans by anthropomorphizing them. Wilson's technique, technically known as anthroposcopy, character-reading from facial features, can be used as straight one-for-one value-judgment or as misdirection, where precisely the opposite of what a person looks like indicates his or her nature. Take Victor Hugo's Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame, as an example.

Chekhov once admonished young playwrights, "If, in act one you have a pistol hanging on the wall, be a.s.sured it is fired before the end of act two." The same goes for character traits.

Take the gorgeous novella BILLY BUDD, FORETOPMAN, for instance. Herman Melville tells us that Billy stammers. But only at certain times. When he is confronted by mendacity, duplicity, evil. Symbolically, we can take this to mean that Billy, as a corporeal manifestation of Goodness in a Mean World, is rendered tabula rasa by Evil Incarnate. That would be the academic view. But as a writer ensorcelled by "process," I choose to see the stammer as a plot-device. The inability to defend himself verbally is used near the climax of the novella as the mechanism by which Billy's fate is sealed. Herman Melville was a great writer, but he was a writer first. He knew how to plot. He knew the pistol had to be fired.

Historically, such physical infirmities were used by writers such as Hawthorne to indicate inner flaws. The Reverend Dimmesdale, in THE SCARLET LETTER, has a burning scar on his chest. He is an adulterer. The scar is the outward manifestation of what he feels is his inner sin. When he bares his bosom to the entire congregation, it is a shocking moment. The pistol has been fired.

Shakespeare goes even further. Probably because his talent was greater than anyone else's. More than merely using physical mannerisms or frailties, he uses the forces of Nature in all their unleashed pa.s.sion to reflect the viewpoint character's state of mind. In Act II, scene iv of King Lear, at the very moment that he wanders out onto the heath, having renounced his power while trying to retain his t.i.tle, having been driven to the point of madness by his daughters, who have thrown him out of their homes, we find the following: LEAR.

...You think I'll weep; No, I'll not weep: I have full cause of weeping; But this heart Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws, Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!

At which point the storm and tempest break. Shakespeare mirrors Lear's instant of pa.s.sing through the membrane into insanity with Nature's loosing of all its mad pa.s.sion. He tells us that Lear realizes, in that moment of final lucidity before the plunge into madness, that in this life there can be no separation of t.i.tle from power. That to retain the former, one must have the latter to b.u.t.tress it. He is alone, beaten, tragic, defenseless before Man and Nature.

It is mythic characterization on a cosmic level.

Less grand in its scope, but as revealing in its placement of a human being within the context of his society, is the little trick Turgenev uses to show us that Paul Petrovich of FATHERS AND SONS feels discontiguous. The novel was written at the fracture-point in Russian history when the serfs were in revolt, and it is a time of ambivalence; dichotomous; vacillating between the traditions of the aristocracy and the pull of rule by the common man. To demonstrate Petrovich's uncertainty, Turgenev has a meeting between Petrovich and his young adult student nephew, after many years, containing a moment in which the elder not only shakes hands in the "European" manner but kisses him "thrice in the Russian fas.h.i.+on, that is to say, he brushed his cheeks thrice with his scented moustaches, exclaiming, 'Welcome home!'"

Alfred Bester's THE STARS, MY DESTINATION is a cla.s.sic novel to read and re-read for such minutiae of characterization. Gully Foyle, the protagonist, for instance, has his progression and growth of character from near-b.e.s.t.i.a.l lout to cultured avenger epitomized by his language and manner of speech. At first he speaks only the gutter slang of the future invented by Bester to micromize the era, but as Gully grows and buys himself an education, he declares himself in very different, more cadenced patterns. This is paralleled by the visibility of the "tiger mask" that covers his face. When he is a beast, it shows easily; later, it becomes almost invisible, manifesting itself only when his rage makes him revert for a moment. Literary resonance in simple impossible-to-misinterpret, dramatic imaging: show, don't tell. Heinlein's DOUBLE STAR is another limitless source-reference, jam-full of this kind of technique. Which is why these two books continue to be thought of as "cla.s.sics" long after books that made bigger initial splashes have faded from memory.

Algis Budrys once wrote a story, the t.i.tle of which escapes me right now, in which a very fat man, an official of some bloated interstellar military-industrial organization, stuffs his mouth with candy bars all through conversations with the hero. Thus, by miniaturized example-arguing from the smaller to the greater-Budrys led us to a perception of the fat man in paradigm, as one with the fat organization.

A horde of examples from my own work pops to mind, but a sense of propriety prevents my dealing with them in detail. I use a hare-lip sometimes to indicate that a character is a born victim; and men who are punctilious about their hair and clothes usually turn out, in my stories, to be men who get their comeuppance or who are shallow. "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" has two characters I think are well formed using the techniques I've enumerated here, and if you get a moment you might look it up.

In the script I wrote for Blood's a Rover, the 2-hour pilot movie for what was to have been an NBC series, based on the novella and the film of "A Boy and His Dog," I introduce a female solo who is as tough as the amoral Vic. Her name is Spike, and at one point in the film she joins up with the dog, Blood. Vic returns, after having split up with Blood, and wants to get together again as partners. But the Spike character is now Blood's partner. To demonstrate that she thinks very little of Vic, when she gets angry, she never talks to him, she talks to the dog. "Tell it to shut its mouth before I blow its head Off," she says to the dog, referring to Vic. Blood then repeats what she's said to Vic, who has heard it, of course. This goes on till Vic is driven into a rage. It is a mannerism that will be a continuing in-joke for the film pilot and the series. By talking to a dog about a human, and referring to the human as "it" instead of the animal, I hope to make a point about the way in which men treat women as objects. This, done subtly, because the networks would never permit it if they knew what I was doing...that is, actually putting in a sub-text and symbolism, heaven forbid...will serve to deepen the subject matter as visually presented.

I've offered all these examples of minute character traits-tics and tremors-in an attempt to demonstrate that it is possible with extreme economy to create a fully fleshed player, even if that player is only a walk-on. And when you're getting into the story, touches like these can set up the reader through many pages of plot and concept, action and background, permitting the reader to identify with the viewpoint character. It is a tone that will inform the story throughout.

As a final note, let me hit once again at the core fact that no matter what it is you think you're writing about, the best and most significant thing to write about, what you're always writing about, is people!

Building people who are believable, verisimilitude being the operative word, not real people but believable people, is a product of the touches and techniques discussed here.

Or, as John le Carre, the novelist who wrote THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD and THE LOOKING GLa.s.s WAR, among others, has said, "A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger."

Whether pounced upon by a giant cat, explaining why a coward's smile makes his enemies flee, how a careless person can destroy those around her, what hypocrisy lies in an idle drywas.h.i.+ng motion of a sycophant's hands, or how a beautiful and kindly man can condemn himself to death because he stammers, if you intend to write well, and write for posterity, or even simply to entertain, you must remember...

Fire the pistol.

True Love: Groping For The Holy Grail I have this terrific theory. It's all about how we stop schlubs like Son of Sam or Richard Speck or Charlie Manson or William Calley or the Hillside Strangler from killing people.

It goes like this: We live in a kind of berserk, wonky Show Biz Society. For the ma.s.s of people living ordinary, just-let-me-make-it-through-the-week lives, the denizens of the flash&glitter set who appear on the Johnny Carson show are more substantial, more real, than their neighbors or their families.

Whom Jackie-O is dating this month has more relevance to readers of the Star or People than the fact that their butcher was recently admitted to the Carrville Leprosarium with Hansen's Disease. Zsa Zsa Gabor on fiscal responsibility and Debbie Boone on pollution have more impact than the most recent thoughts of Nader or Bucky Fuller. Every woman sees Mr. Goodbar as George Segal or Paul Winfield or Clint Eastwood or a phosphor-dot variation therefrom emanating; every man is seeking Ms. Juicy Fruit in the image of Raquel Welch or Farrah Whatserface or Donna Summer. Or etcetera.

So here's a pudgy, bland little doughnut like Son of Sam, drudging away his life in the Post Awful (which sinecure would drive even a well-adjusted person out of his brain), and day by day, night by night, he's drenched with celebrities, none of whom have opinions or de facto worth any more valid than his own. But he's a cipher, a nothing, a n.o.body; he can't escape that realization. He's a doughnut, and no one will pay any attention to him; n.o.body'll throw a party or a parade for him. Frustration, lack of self-esteem, the pressure of everyday life, and he simply ain't making it. Hey, look at me! he screams silently. But all he gets is jostled and shoved on the crowded sidewalks. So he goes out and gets some attention...by blowing people away.

No need to say he's an exception, the manifestation of a " disturbed" personality. Whaddaya think, I'm a dummy? I know he's disturbed. But if you gave him ten minutes of late night prime-time on Carson, he'd never kill anybody. He'd feed off that notoriety for years. It might not turn him into Albert Schweitzer, but at least he wouldn't be out there fracturing the peace and sanity of the world.

Being on teevee is the secret l.u.s.t-dream of the American People. Television is, in sad fact, the new reality. What happens on the tube really happens...what goes down in the perceived world is iffy: maybe it's real, maybe not.

And that's one of the most important reasons why a videotape dating service like Great Expectations is so d.a.m.ned successful and does such a good job of bringing people together in what we laughingly term The Dating Pool.

My friend Sherry, the Sherry who runs the bookstore, not the Sherry who can't get a steady job or the Sherry who is an interior decorator, said to me one day about a year ago, "I joined a videotape dating service; it' s really terrific; I've met a gang of interesting men. You ought to go over there."

My first thought was that she was making what I took to be a not-so-subtle chop at my not having found a steady lady friend since the most recent divorce. But as it turned out, she only wanted me to indulge my curiosity. She thought I'd find it interesting. Well, I uttered the expected "yucchhh" at the thought of signing up for some artificial system of companion-procurement, and that was that.

Couple of weeks later I received a letter from something called Great Expectations. It was a form letter headed THE END OF THE BLIND DATE... and it suggested that if I had sated myself wasting away my life looking for love-mates in singles bars, groups or parties, I might be ready for Great Expectations.

But since I don't drink, I have never been in a singles bar (yes, my guilty secret is out at last). Belonging to groups makes me nervous (I can barely handle my members.h.i.+p in the Book-of-the-Month Club). And as for parties, ever since the ma.s.s of my friends discovered dope (which nasty substances will never pollute my precious bodily fluids), I haven't been invited to a get-together. I'm sure that's the reason.

And I was about to roundfile the letter, along with the bulk mail that offered me parcels of land in the more remote areas of Tannu Tuva or the Orinoco Basin, come-ons to buy vegetable choppers, and the possibility of subscribing to a magazine concerned solely with bathroom equipment, when I noticed a handwritten addenda at the bottom of the form letter. It read, "We invite you to a free, private viewing of our program...& members...It costs nothing!"

Some weeks later, I had occasion to find myself at Sherry's bookstore, which is on Westwood Boulevard, which is just up the street from the address where Great Expectations said True Love, The Holy Grail, waited for me and, well, one thing and another, with an hour to kill, so why the h.e.l.l not, you know how it is, er, uh, mmmm...

And I walked down to Great Expectations at 1516 Westwood Boulevard; and it was there, oh moment of karmic destiny, that I found the most perfect device ever conceived in aid of one's groping toward The Holy Grail, sometimes mugged and printed under the AKA, True Love.

Great Expectations is not a computer dating service. It is not a photo dating service. It is not a referral service. And it sure as h.e.l.l isn't your tante Sophie fixing you up with this "very cute girl with a swell personality." It is the very apotheosis of the Age of Emotional Technology. It is selecting a companion from a videotape interview and a written profile, and though it may be as flawed a system for finding True Love as the ancient and venerable art of the shadchen or Chinese marriage contracts between infants, as far as I can tell, it cuts down the potential for catastrophes in a big way.