The Ultimate Egoist

by Theodore Sturgeon

  The manuscript with the multiple addresses and the 1939 letters quoted above suggest that “Bianca’s Hands” was finished in its “5000 word” form after July 18, 1939 and before the end of that year, and that it was sent out, or more probably sent out again, in late 1940 or early 1941 in the same form. That the manuscript contains alterations in a new typeface suggests that some changes were made in 1945/1946, after the manuscript had been sent out at least once in that era (or the title page word count would have reflected the altered length to begin with). It may or may not have been sent out (again) in the altered form, but the cleanness of the alterations suggests it was.

  We still don’t know when the first part of the story was written (the reference to “six pages” in the June 16 letter gives support to the idea that the original burst of writing was incomplete, although they could well have been single-spaced pages—Sturgeon did use single-space on some of his first drafts from the period—containing most of the story as we know it). It could conceivably have been as early as spring 1938, when Sturgeon may have been doing some kind of writing-for-hire, although it’s far more likely that it was during the first six months of 1939, quite possibly as late as May or even early June. The only reference in the 1939 correspondence to any kind of writing-for-hire is the February contract with McClure to rewrite other people’s rejected short stories. But it is possible TS preferred not to talk about stray jobs like basketball articles or confession stories.

  What seems more likely to me is that the “basketball story” is a red herring, and that much or most of “Bianca’s Hands” was written on or about May 31, 1939, when TS wrote Dorothe the words quoted above under “Ether Breather”: Now I’m writing again, and well, but I don’t know … it’s a kind of writing I haven’t done before; it’s writing because I have to write, because there are stories within me that have to be told but which cannot be slanted at any market, because they are as they are. I must write them before I can clear my mind for more pen-prostitution …

  Judith Merril, in an article entitled “Theodore Sturgeon” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1962, recalls Sturgeon showing her the carbon copy of the “Bianca’s Hands” manuscript at the beginning of 1947, while he was waiting to hear from Argosy. She didn’t like it. “Ted, perhaps defensively, explained it had been written many years earlier, and that he had showed it to me for one section, just redone: several paragraphs of deliberately constructed poetry, highlighting an emotional crisis, but spelled out like prose, so that it did not appear to break into the narrative. And it was in pointing this out (I had missed it, as he expected) that he stopped, astonished, and said he had just realized how much he did know about how to write—that it was a skill, with him, not just a talent.”

  The replacement paragraph in the manuscript I’ve examined—the only part of the text that could really be described as “just redone”—is the paragraph that begins “He left them and returned to the shop,” describing Ran’s ecstatic afternoon in nature after his marriage and before the nuptial dinner. Apart from this, it seems reasonable to assume, on the evidence of the manuscript as well as Sturgeon’s comments, that the entire story as we know it was written in 1939, with only slight changes afterward (and one possible major change: the discarding of a long section of text after the end of the story as we know it).

  Theodore Sturgeon recorded “Bianca’s Hands” on a 1976 album issued by Alternate World Recordings, entitled STURGEON: Theodore Sturgeon Reads. At one point he considered titling his first story collection Bianca’s Hands and Others, but the story was left out of the collection because British Argosy wouldn’t release U.K. rights.

  “Derm Fool”: First published in Unknown, March 1940. Written fall 1939. Sturgeon loved puns and verbal sight gags (I found my slippers. My feet were still in them) and clearly had a lot of fun with this story. The idea had come to him near the beginning of his summer dry spell, and apparently stayed around till he was ready to write it. June 30, 1939, to Dorothe: I am teased by several notions for Campbell, who wants more whimsical stuff, like the “God,” from me. Among them are: A man who sheds his skin like a snake; a man who captures a human soul in a little box; and an affliction whereby the face is turned into a pliable medium like putty. But none of them are crystallizing. I have been going over my rejects and by Wednesday of next week should have at least six stories out—among them, possibly, my grand oeuvre, “Bianca’s Hands.”

  The original blurbs: (table of contents) AFTER PEELING THE FINGERS OFF THE PIANO, AND THE HAND OFF THE BUREAU DRAWER, HE DECIDED TO LEAVE THE TORSO IN THE CLOSET … And (start of story): IT WASN’T EXACTLY A DISEASE—BUT IT WAS ANNOYING TO HAVE TO COLLECT THE ARMS AND LEGS AND TORSOS EVERY DAY—

  “He Shuttles”: First published in Unknown, April 1940. Written fall 1939. In correspondence Sturgeon spoke with pride of having sold a “novelette,” meaning a short story whose length qualified it to be thought of as something longer than a short story (but shorter than a novella, or short novel). He also identified “He Shuttles” as being a story of horror (as distinct from the whimsical stories he had previously sold to John Campbell).

  Campbell thought enough of the story to herald it in “Of Things Beyond,” a small column describing the lead stories for next month’s magazine: “Theodore Sturgeon has a novelette in the April issue that is his own curious blend of the oppressive inevitableness of Greek tragedy and completely modern lightness. ‘He Shuttles’ is both an answer and a title. It’s about a very, very clever man who had three wishes—just any three he wanted …”

  “He Shuttles” is an early example of Sturgeon as author breaking the “fifth wall” to speak directly to the reader as writer rather than narrator. (Later, more striking examples are “The Perfect Host” and Some of Your Blood.)

  Title page blurb: A VERY LOGICAL—AND VERY UNPLEASANT—LITTLE STORY BASED ON THE OLD FAIRY TALE. HE HAD THREE WISHES. HE WAS VERY CLEVER. HE WOULD ESCAPE ALL PENALTIES …

  “Turkish Delight”: syndicated by McClure, November 18, 1939. The Dodecanese are Greek islands in the Aegean Sea, off the southwest coast of Turkey, but Sturgeon’s travels had not yet taken him outside the Western Hemisphere.

  “Niobe”: unpublished. This uncharacteristic piece is I believe the only unpublished work in this volume that is not from the trunk left behind in Staten Island. It was found among Sturgeon’s papers in the house in Woodstock. (Clearly there were a number of unsold manuscripts that Sturgeon put in storage or brought with him when he left New York for the West Indies in June of 1941, including “Fluffy,” “Cellmate,” “The Heart,” and “Bianca’s Hands.”) It can be dated by the original return address on the manuscript, “161 West 63rd St, New York, N. Y.”, where Sturgeon lived from late December 1939 to mid-March 1940. It was his brother Peter’s apartment, but there’s no evidence TS used it as a mailing address except when he was living there. This address is crossed out on the manuscript and “209 Pelton Ave., West New Brighton, Staten Island, N.Y.C.” typed below it, Sturgeon’s address from approximately August 1940 to June 1941.

  A hint of the origin of this story can be heard in Sturgeon’s comment to David Hartwell in 1972, when asked what he was reading before he started to write: I was reading H.G. Wells and Lord Dunsany, and the Pre-Raphaelites, whom I absolutely adored as a 13-, 14-year-old kid. I was so caught up in William Morris and the Rossettis, and Thomas De Quincey, and that was the whole area that I was most deeply soaked in. I loved that stuff, it was poetic and it was cadenced and it was full of color and it was—you know, the magic land of Somewhere Else.

  “Mahout”: syndicated by McClure, January 22, 1940.

  “The Long Arm”: syndicated by McClure, February 5, 1940.

  “The Man on the Steps”: syndicated by McClure, February 22, 1940.

  “Punctuational Advice”: syndicated by McClure, February 29, 1940.

  “Place of Honor”: syndicated by McClure, March 18, 1940.

  “The Ultimate Egoist”: first p
ublished in Unknown, February 1941. Probably written March 1940. Sturgeon wrote at least two introductions to this story. The first accompanied its appearance in his first story collection, Without Sorcery, 1948:

  The Messiah complex has been responsible for much unhappiness, much friction, possibly a few great fortunes, and perhaps a messiah or two …

  This yarn sprang fully-armed from the rather low brow of a story by a per se non-extant writer named Rene Lafayette. I hurled his story away from me and leapt to the typewriter, finishing the opus in one sitting and seven cups of coffee. Then I finished Rene’s novelette. May it be immortal. It was called “The Indigestible Triton.”

  It might be of interest to point out that even as “The Ultimate Egoist” had its nascence in the work of a figmentary individual, its author is also a figment. The original byline was E. Hunter Waldo.

  This was indeed the first Sturgeon story to be published under a pseudonym. The impetus was that John Campbell, editor of Astounding and Unknown, was buying Sturgeon stories faster than he could print them, particularly when Unknown changed from a monthly to a bimonthly format. With the help of the new pseudonym, two Sturgeon stories appeared in the February 1941 Unknown, and two each in the June 1941 issues of Astounding and Unknown. Sturgeon was becoming a dominant voice in the two most popular and influential magazines of (respectively) science fiction and literary fantasy.

  The pseudonym was partially based on Sturgeon’s birth name, Edward Hamilton Waldo. This name was legally changed when young Ted was adopted by his stepfather William Sturgeon; unfortunately there was some confusion about this when the publisher of Without Sorcery filled out the copyright forms for that book, as a result of which (TS, 1972) “Theodore Sturgeon” winds up as a pseudonym; and in libraries the world over, if you look up Sturgeon you are referred to Waldo. And if they don’t happen to have that cross-filing then my books cannot be found in library catalogs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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