Well, that was the beginning of an uphill climb; a climb that took two years and had some backsliding but finally took me out of the toilet; a climb that produced SPIDER KISS and MEMOS FROM PURGATORY and, happily, GENTLEMAN JUNKIE.
Which brings me to the circumstances that produced the second time this book altered my life. And the second time dear Frank Robinson saved my soul. I wrote about it in brief in the introduction to another collection of my stories, but sequentially that segment comes right here in the story, so I’ll just quote the part that fills the gap. Just remember these items: after being in New York for eight months, I remarried and was offered another job by the same creep I’d worked for in Evanston; this time editing a line of paperbacks. I took the job, though I loathed the man, because I had a wife and her son from a previous marriage and I thought I was whole and rational (but wasn’t), and a steady job seemed the thing to go for. Friends, that is never a good reason! Take it from me…I’ve been in that nasty box.
Anyhow, here’s what happened:
It was September, 1961.
It was one of the worst times in my life. The one time I’d ever felt the need to go to a psychiatrist, that time in Chicago. I had remarried in haste after the four-year anguish of Charlotte and the army and the hand-to-mouth days in Greenwich Village; now I was living to repent in agonizing leisure.
I had been crazed for two years and hadn’t realized it. Now I was responsible for one of the nicest women in the world, and her son, a winner by any standards, and I found I had messed their lives by entwining them with mine. There was need for me to run, but I could not. Nice Jewish boys from Ohio don’t cut and abandon. So I began doing berserk things. I committed personal acts of a demeaning and reprehensible nature, involved myself in liaisons that were doomed and purposeless, went steadily more insane as the days wound tighter than a mainspring.
Part of it was money. Not really, but I thought it was the major part of the solution to the situation. And I’d banked on selling GENTLEMAN JUNKIE to the very man for whom I was working. He took considerable pleasure in waiting till we were at a business lunch, with several other people, to announce he was not buying the book. (The depth of his sadism is obvious when one learns he subsequently did buy and publish the book.)
But at that moment, it was as though someone had split the earth under me and left me hanging by the ragged edge, by my fingertips. I went back to the tiny, empty office he had set up in a downtown Evanston office building, and I sat at my desk staring at the wall. There was a clock on the wall in front of me. When I sat down after that terrible lunch, it was 1:00…
When I looked at the clock a moment later, it was 3:15…
The next time I looked, a moment later, it was 4:45…
Then 5:45…
Then 6:15…
7:00…8:30…
Somehow, I don’t know how, even today, I laid my head on the desk, and when I opened my eyes again I had taken the phone off the hook. It was lying beside my mouth. A long time later, and again I don’t remember doing it, I dialed Frank Robinson.
I heard Frank’s voice saying, “Hello…hello…is someone there…?”
“Frank…help me…”
And when my head was lifted off the desk, it was an hour later, the phone was whistling with a disconnect tone, and Frank had made it all the way across from Chicago to Evanston to find me. He held me like a child, and I cried.
That was the second time for this book. It was the sorry little helpless weapon the human monster used to send me right to the edge. But the book was published, to very little fanfare. Oh, notables like Steve Allen and Charles Beaumont and Leslie Charteris praised the hell out of it, but those were in prepublication comments that were used on the splash page of the book itself. There were virtually no reviews.
Frank’s comment in the Foreword that this was the verge of the Big Time seemed a hollow bit of reassurance from a friend. Nothing much happened with the paperback. It sold well, but made no stir among the literati. And my hopes sank that I’d ever be anything more than that commercial hack who’d starved in New York in 1955. You can go on ego and self-hype only so long. Then you need something concrete.
Which brings me to the third time this book changed my life. In a way so blindingly clear and important that it has colored everything since.
I left Evanston and Chicago and the human monster, and with my wife and her son began the long trek to the West Coast. We had agreed to divorce, but she had said to me, with a very special wisdom that I never perceived till much later, when I was whole again, “As long as you’re going to leave me, at least take me to where it’s warm.”
But we had no money. So we had to go to Los Angeles by way of New York from Chicago. If I could sell a book, I would have the means to go West, young man, go West. (And that was the core of the problem, not money: I was a young man. I was twenty-eight, but I had never become an adult.)
In a broken-down 1957 Ford we limped across to New York during the worst snowstorm in thirty years.
Nineteen hundred and sixty-one was the year the bottom fell out of a lot of lives, mine among them. And when I walked into the New York editorial offices of Gold Medal Books, the paperback outfit to which I’d sold SPIDER KISS, the outfit I was going to try flummoxing into buying a book I hadn’t written yet, just so I could stay alive and try to salvage my sanity, it was with the sure sense of being only moments away from the unincorporated limits of Tap City. I’d been writing short stories and stuff for maybe a half-dozen years, and a writer—no matter how pouter-pigeon-puffed his ego—can go only so long on self-esteem. He has to have someone with clout say, “Boy, you got a talent.” No one had said it to me, though editors had given me money and published what I’d written.
When I walked into those offices, suddenly all the doors to the cubicles where galley slaves pored over galley proofs slammed open, and I was surrounded by people slapping me on the back and shouting things like, “Well done,” and “You lucky SOB,” and finally Knox Burger, the senior editor, ploughed through and demanded to know, in his crusty but loveable manner, “How much did you pay her to write that?”
Write what, I asked, looking more pixilated than usual. The Parker review, of course, he responded. What Parker review? The one in the January Esquire, you lox, he said. A snake uncoiled in my stomach. Ohmigod, I thought, Dorothy Parker has said something terrible about me in her book review column. It was as close as I have ever come to fainting.
I dashed back into the corridor, and unable to wait for the elevator, took the stairs three at a time, down the fourteen floors to the lobby, where I caromed off two patrons leaving the newsstand, and dragged a copy of Esquire from the stack.
There, on page 133, the great (and I do not use the adjective lightly) Dorothy Parker, the literary colossus whose works were already legend, whose most pointed mˆots had long since become aphorisms to be collected by Auden and Kronenberger, whose style and taste had helped make the New Yorker and the Algonquin Round Table focal points for the literarily aware, there, on page 133, Dorothy Parker had taken 86 lines to devastate Fannie Hurst’s “God Must Be Sad” and 25 lines to praise an obscure little book of short stories by a twenty-six-year-old paperback writer.
“Mr. Ellison (she wrote) is a good, honest, clean writer, putting down what he has seen and known, and no sensationalism about it.
“In the collection is a story called ‘Daniel White for the Greater Good.’ It is without exception the best presentation I have ever seen of present racial conditions in the South and of those who try to alleviate them. I cannot recommend it too vehemently…Incidentally, the other stories in Mr. Ellison’s book are not so dusty, either.”
That, from the author of “Arrangement in Black and White,” one of the earliest and, even today, one of the most perceptive fictional studies of racial prejudice.
Sometime later I came unfrozen, unstuck, and almost unglued. Can you understand what that kind of praise does for a writer who (like Willy Loman)
has till then been out there on only a smile and a shoeshine? Ray Bradbury can tell you; he got his from Christopher Isherwood, and it made his reputation. It’s like the first time a girl says yes. It’s like the first time a female realizes she doesn’t have to be some guy’s kitchen slave to lead a fully-realized existence. It’s like Moses getting the tablets.
This book, through the medium of Dorothy Parker, a writer whose credentials were so unassailable, not even the ugliest academic cynic could contest them, had altered my life. I was no longer all alone in my opinion of my worth. I was no longer a writer ambivalently torn between the reality of being a commercial hack and the secret hope that he was something greater, something that might produce work to be read after the writer had been put down the hole. GENTLEMAN JUNKIE, for the third time, had worked a kind of magic on my existence.
But there was more.
James Goldstone, a Hollywood director, read “Daniel White for the Greater Good” and took an option on it for a film. The money helped get us out of New York, and start toward the West Coast.
Several months after the review appeared—and to this day I have no idea how that ineptly-distributed paperback from a minor Chicago house, the only paperback she ever reviewed, came into her hands—I came to H*O*L*L*Y*W*O*O*D to live, if one can call Olympian poverty living. And several months after that I met a chap who said he knew Charles MacArthur, who knew Alan Campbell, who was married to Dorothy Parker, and I fell to my knees begging for an introduction. So the jungle telegraph sent out the pitiful plea, and in short order the word came back that Mrs. Campbell would be delighted to have me call at her residence on such-and-such a Sunday afternoon.
Was there ever a supplicant who trembled more in expectation of burning bushes or mene mene tekels scrawled on a wall? Literally festooned with rustic bumpkinism (bumpkishness? bumpkoid? oh dear, how he does go on!) I took along my copy of the Modern Library edition of her collected short stories. In a probably vain attempt to save myself from the total appearance of a brain damage case bumbling down the road of Life, I hasten to add that not even when I was in the presence of John Steinbeck or Jacqueline Susann did I ever contemplate asking for an autograph.
But this was, after all, Dorothy Parker, for God’s sake!
I was received in the little house on Norma Place, just off Doheny, where Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell were entering (what no one had any way of knowing was) their last years together, with a warmth and affection seldom found even in acquaintances of long standing.
Miss Parker was small and lovely and a trifle wan-looking. She engaged me in conversation that lasted well into the evening. (She was also quick to point out that Norma Place had been named after Norma Talmadge, and though it doesn’t bear much relevance to anything in this introduction, she seemed to want me to know it, and I feel compelled to pass it on to you.)
I was certain her invitation and her friendliness were the sort of grand gestures offered by the great to the nongreat and that she had surely forgotten what it was I’d written that had first set me onto her, but in the course of discussion she remarked on my paperback at considerable length, quoting entire paragraphs that had stuck with her. I was tangle-tongued and drunk with awe. She really had liked the book. In a burst of exploding chutzpah that (as Miss Parker would have put it) belonged on display in the Smithsonian, I asked her if she would autograph her book. She smiled softly and said of course. And she did. And it was not till I was all the way home later that night that I opened the flyleaf of the book and read: “To Harlan Ellison—with admiration, envy, and heartfelt wishes that I could be as good a writer as he is—”
Dorothy Parker died a year later. I’m not sure. I think it was only a year; maybe it was a little more.
I can only remember that day on Norma Place, with the shadows deepening—for the day and for that little woman—and think of how she took a moment out of her life to validate mine. Dorothy Parker and this collection of stories. They have put their mark on me. We pass through numberless moments of life, all but a few of them mere time-marking: and occasionally something happens, or something is said, or a face turns toward you, and everything is different. The world is a strange and gorgeous realm you’ve never seen before. This book has done that for me three times.
I owe this book a great deal. It came from me, it comes back into me, it is my fiber and my courage and the stamp of approval that carries me through bad reviews and shitty times and all the anguishes to which we are heir.
And now it is back in print. I have removed the introduction I wrote to the first edition, because it simply doesn’t hold any more. This introduction is the one that fits this dear little book now. (And I’ve removed one story from the original, “The Time of the Eye,” because it’s available in another collection and I don’t want you to feel fleeced in even the smallest particular. But I’ve substituted “Turnpike,” which is a nice little yarn, and you can’t find it anywhere else, so you don’t even lose the wordage.)
Like my other books—but especially with this one that means so much to me—I offer these thoughts and dreams for your pleasure. These stories are my children of the nights. The nights all alone at the typewriter.
HARLAN ELLISON
Los Angeles
Final Shtick
SHTICK: n.; deriv. Yiddish; a “piece,” a “bit,” a rehearsed anecdote; as in a comedian’s routine or act.
I’m a funny man, he thought, squashing the cigarette stub into the moon-face of the egg. I’m a goddam riot. He pushed the flight-tray away.
See the funny man! His face magically struck an attitude as the stewardess removed the tray. It was expected—he was, after all, a funny man. Don’t see me, sweetie, see a laugh. He turned with a shrug of self-disgust to the port. His face stared back at him; the nose was classically Greek in profile. He sneered at it.
Right over the wing; he could barely make out the Ohio patchwork-quilt far below, grey and gun-metal blue through the morning haze. Now I fly, he mused. Now I fly. When I left it was in a fruit truck. But now I’m Marty Field, king of the sick comics, and I fly. Fun-ee!
He lit another, spastically, angrily.
Return to Lainesville. Home. Return for the dedication. That’s you they’re honoring, Marty Field, just you, only you. Aside from General Laine, who founded the town, there’s never been anybody worth honoring who’s come from Lainesville. So return. Thirteen years later. Thirteen years before the mast, buddy-boy. Return, Marty Field, and see all those wondrous, memorable faces from your oh-so-happy past. Go, Marty baby. Return!
He slapped at the button overhead, summoning the stewardess. His face again altered: an image of chuckles for replacement. “How about a couple of cubes of sugar, sweetheart?” he asked as she leaned over him, expectantly. Yeah, doll, I see ’em. Thirty-two C? Yes, indeed, they’re loverly; now get my sugar, howzabout?
When she dropped them into his hand he gave her a brief, calculated-to-the-kilowatt grin. He unwrapped one and chewed on it, staring moodily out the port.
Think about it, Marty Field. Think about how it was, before you were Marty Field. Thirteen years before, when it was Morrie Feldman, and you were something like a kid. Think about it, and think what those faces from the past recall. How do they remember it? You know damned well how they remember it, and you know what they’re saying now, on the day you’re returning to Lainesville to be lauded and applauded. What is Mrs. Shanks, who lived next door, remembering about those days? And what is Jack Wheeldon, the childhood classmate, thinking? And Peggy Mantle? What about Leon Potter—you used to run with him—what concoction of half-remembered images and projections has he contrived? You know people, Marty Field. You’ve had to learn about them; that’s why your comedy strikes so well…because you know the way people think, and their foibles. So think about it, baby. As your plane nears Cleveland, and you prepare to meet the committee that will take you to Lainesville, dwell on it. Create their thoughts for them, Marty boy.
MRS. SHANKS: Why, certa
inly I remember Marty. He was always over at my house. Why, I believe he lived as much on my front porch as he did at home. Nice boy. I can remember that little thin face of his (he was always such a frail child, you know), always smiling, though. Used to love my Christmas cookies. Used to make me bake ’em for him all year ’round. And the imagination that child had…why, he’d go into the empty lot behind our houses and make a fort, dig it right out of the ground, and play in there all day with his toy guns. He was something, even then. Knew he’d make it some day…he was just that sort. Came from a good family, and that sort of thing always shows.
EVAN DENNIS: Marty always had that spark. It was something you couldn’t name. A drive, a wanting, a something that wouldn’t let him quit. I remember I used to talk with his father—you remember Lew, the jeweler, don’t you—and we’d discuss the boy. His father and I were very close. For a while there, Lew was pretty worried about the boy; a bit rambunctious. But I always said, “Lew, no need to worry about Morrie (that was his name; he changed his name, y’know; I was very close with the family). He’ll make it, that boy. Good stuff in him.” Yeah, I remember the whole family very well. We were very close, y’know.
JACK WHEELDON: Hell, I knew him before. A lot of the other kids were always picking on him. He was kinda small, and like that, but I took him under my wing. I was sort of a close buddy. Hell, we used to ride our bikes real late at night, out in the middle of Mentor Avenue, going ’round and ’round in circles under the street light, because we just liked to do it. We got to be pretty tight. Hell, maybe I was his best friend. Always dragged him along when we were getting up a baseball game. He wasn’t too good, being so small and like that, but, hell, he needed to get included, so I made the other guys let him play. Always picked him for my side too. Yeah. I guess I knew him better than anybody when he was a kid.
PEGGY MANTLE: I’ve got to admit it. I loved him. He wasn’t the toughest kid in school, or the best-looking, but even then, even when he was young, he was so—so, I don’t know what you’d call, dynamic…Well, I just loved him, that’s all. He was great. Just great. I loved him, that’s all.
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