The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

by Harlan Ellison

  The trouble with young writers, however, is that they are amateurs, many of them, and amateurs are all paranoids. They believe myths and legends passed on by generations of other amateurs who never made it as professionals, and they never get to check out the accuracy of the myths, so they react to the legends as though they were reality.

  Well, today, kiddies, Unca Harlan will set to rest one of the great untrue myths of the writing game: that editors steal stories submitted for publication.

  Amateurs frequently ask me, “How do I keep Them from stealing my story or story idea when I send it in to a magazine with a stamped self-addressed envelope in case it’s rejected?” By Them, I presume they mean the faceless, nameless Powers the uninformed think of when they refer to editors and publishers. I seldom deign to honor such questions with anything more than a cursory, “Don’t worry about it.” Not only because the question-asker’s manuscript is probably on an intellectual level with the question itself, but chiefly because: in seventeen years as a freelancer, I have never known a reputable, or even semi-reputable editor to cop someone’s plot. There are cases where it looked like theft or plagiarism, but when investigated it always turned out to be an extenuating circumstance compounded of lousy office procedure, righteous circumstance, inept communications with the author and that aforementioned healthy dose of paranoia on the part of the one who submitted the manuscript. Again, to the last item, usually an amateur.

  Oh, there are endless instances of a writer sending in a story similar to one an editor had already bought, and thinking, when the other appeared, that the editor had ripped off the idea and farmed it to another contributor, and I choose to think that’s just rotten timing, but in all the years I’ve worked for, submitted to, hustled after and been rejected by magazines from the best to the worst—and pay-scale or reputation frequently did not decide which was which—I’ve found the men and women behind the editorial desks to be scrupulous about such matters to the point of anal retention.

  Your ideas are safe. At least ninety-nine point something infinitesimal percent of the time. I won’t say it can’t happen (this being a big and constantly surprising universe), but the chances are so slim it ain’t worth fretting over.

  On the other hand, getting robbed outright is quite another matter. I don’t mean just losing an idea, I mean actually having your manuscript stolen, filched, purloined, palmed, spirited away, published. And you did not receive a penny. Not a sou. Not a krupnik. Not even Blue Chip stamps. To which situation applies Ellison’s First Law of Literary Brigandry:

  If your manuscript was stolen and published and you didn’t get paid, it was not the fault of the editor, it was solely and wholly the fault of the publisher.

  Editors are good people. Some are cranky, and some are cavalier in their treatment of writers; some are inept, and some have no talent; some are out of touch with the times, and some were never in touch. But all of them are honest. Most of them were writers at one time or another, so they understand. Their reasons for leaving the honest life of the writer and entering the damned brotherhood of the blue pencil are multitudinous, but none of them is a crook.

  Publishers, on the other hand, are frequently not only schlockmeisters of the vilest sort, upon whom used car dealers would spit, but they are equally frequently ex-manufacturers of piece goods, gadget salesmen off the Jersey Turnpike, defrocked carnival pitchmen, garment center gonifs whose idea of creativity is hiring a pistolero to break not just someone’s tibia, but fibula as well. While this cannot be said for Saints like Nelson Doubleday or Charles Scribner, there are at least half-a-dozen guys I would gladly name right here (were it not for the Freep’s adolescent fear of lawsuits) whose connections with The Mob, whose pokey-pocked pasts, whose absolute lack of even the vaguest scintilla of ethic or morality or business decency marks them as men unfit for human congress. They are, truly, the Kings of the Pig People. And they operate some of the biggest publishing outfits in New York.

  I will, however, tell you a fascinating story about how I got stiffed once during those seventeen years; an anecdote that may provide a few moments of horrified distraction while you work out the ending of that short story for Ellery Queen’s (a very reputable periodical, I hasten to add).

  All in all, I’ve been rather lucky. Also damnably cunning and persistent, which is the key to how to avoid most of what I’m about to lay on you here. I’ve only been taken half-a-dozen times in seventeen years, with sales upwards of eight hundred in magazines, and something like twenty-five in books. That isn’t the worst batting average in the world, but each one of those six sticks in my craw like a boa constrictor trying to swallow the Goodyear blimp.

  The only time it mattered, though, was with a short-line publisher who used to have his offices on lower Madison Avenue, in the Mosler Safe Building. Along about 1960, when I’d been released from the Army with relieved sighs (theirs and mine), when I was just starting to get back into free-lancing and was hurting for money, a dear friend who was working as editor on the chain of seamy periodicals with which this Jesse James of the Publishing World festooned the newsstands, called me and asked if I had a story for one of their detective magazines. The only unsold manuscript I had at the time—and there was some urgency to the request—was an absolutely dreadful piece of dreck (and I use the ethnologue specifically) about a guy who murders another guy and disposes of the body by grinding it up like a pound of ground round and flushing it down the toilet…all but the teeth and suchlike, which he threw in the Hudson. He gets caught when the toilet backs up. It was titled (and I trust you’ll forgive me for this: I was younger and less a credit to my race in them days) “Only Death Can Stop It.”

  Despising myself for even submitting it, I sent it on over to the editor and was mortified, chagrined and delighted when he called the next day to say he’d buy it. Thirty-six hundred words, thirty-six dollars, a penny a word. At that low ebb of financial tide, I was overjoyed to take a penny a word. Particularly for that specific thirty-six hundred words, arranged abominably in that fashion.

  I was supposed to have been paid on acceptance, but when the money didn’t materialize in a few days, I called my friend the editor and made mewling sounds. He was genuinely unhappy about having to tell me the “policy” of the magazine had changed slightly: they were now paying on publication. He wasn’t happy about it, but he said the Publisher was adamant on the point. I swallowed hard and said, “Wow, I really needed that money.” My friend (who remains a dear friend to this day) offered to pay me out of his own pocket, but I’d heard through the Manhattan jungle telegraph that the Publisher hadn’t paid him in several weeks, so I refused the offer. Like a jerk, I decided to wait. People in the Publishing Industry are all gentlefolk, right? Till that time, I’d never had cause to think otherwise.

  Two weeks later, my friend was “let go.” Sans a month’s wages.

  Still I waited, feeling certain no Publisher could actually print something he hadn’t paid for. I mean, after all, there is a law in such matters!

  From afar, even today, come the sounds of the Muses, wailing, “Naïve child, gullible waif, moron!”

  Finally, the magazine hit the stands, and I waited very patiently for three weeks for the check. No such creature surfaced. I began calling. The Publisher was invariably 1) out to lunch, 2) in conference, 3) out of town, 4) at a distributors’ convention, 5) in the bathroom, 6) tied up with affairs of state, or 7) none of the above, under the general heading “unavailable.”

  I talked to my friend, the ex-editor, who was also starving, who advised me sadly that we’d both (and many others) been taken, and he was truly sorry he’d ever hyped me in the first place. I could not find it in my heart to blame him, or conceive of redress where he was concerned.

  The Publisher, however, was another matter.

  So one afternoon, I put on my one and only suit, a charcoal gray item in those days, and I took the IRT down to the Thirties, from whence I sojourned forth to the Mosler Safe Building. When
I reached the offices of The Great Cosmocockik Publishing Corporation, I was confronted by a cubbyhole arrangement of open-fronted offices known in the trade as a “bullpen.” In each cubby a young woman sat madly blamming away at a typewriter or adding machine. It seemed to me that surely in one of those dingy cells some bright young lady might have been put to productive use typing up my lousy thirty-six buck check. But by then the cunning of the beast had come to the fore, and I knew such was not the case. I also knew, from the unflagging regularity with which calls from “Mr. Harlan Ellison” had been refused, that I would get no action if I used that name.

  “May I help you?” asked the receptionist.

  “Yes,” I replied, giving her a steely, no-nonsense look. “Mr. Attila B. Hun is the Publisher here, is he not?”

  “Uh…yessir.”

  “Fine. Would you please tell him Mr. George Knowlton of the Manhattan Central Division of the Bureau of Internal Revenue would like to speak to him.” It was an order, not a question. It was also a name I had made up on the spot, as is Mr. Hun’s at this moment.

  The young lady blanched, shoved back her caster chair and careened into Hun’s lair. In a moment she was back, pressing the buzzer to release the gate that afforded me entrance, and she ushered me into the sonofabitch’s office.

  He started to get up, and I leaned across the desk and blathered, “I’m Ellison, you eggsucking thief, and you owe me thirty-six bucks, and if you don’t lay it on me right now I’m gonna strangle you with that Sulka tie around your wattled neck!”

  He started screaming for help instantly.

  I panicked.

  I saw a door at the side of the office, and bolted through it, just as the office help came crashing through the other door. They were all going in one direction and I was going in the other, around into the corridor, around behind them, and past all those little cubbies…now empty. In a blind stagger, but still possessed of a demonic singularity of purpose, I grabbed an enormous L.C. Smith typewriter—five thousand pounds, one of those old office standards, impossible to lift, much less carry, much lesser at a full gallop, for anyone save a madman on the verge of being apprehended and thwarted in his revenge—and I bounded down eighteen flights of fire stairs without even seeing the EXIT door through which I’d burst.

  I hit Madison and ran like a kindergarten teacher who’s mistakenly answered a casting call for a porno flick.

  Sometime later, and many blocks farther crosstown and uptown, I hocked the behemoth for seventy-eight dollars.

  A clear profit of forty-two bucks.

  So, like I said, don’t worry about it.

  INSTALLMENT 6 |

  Interim Memo

  Immediately following this column, you will find the text of a letter written to the Los Angeles Free Press (heretofore and hereinafter abbreviated as Freep). It takes me to task for bad behavior. Throughout this book, and with the permission of the journals in which such letters were first published, I’ve included pertinent reader reaction. What I haven’t included, usually, are all the letters of praise. That’s self-serving and doesn’t throw much light. Hell, there are even people who admire the manifestos of skinheads or Phyllis Schlafly. There’s no accounting for taste, however warped. So what you’ll encounter are those followup comments by strangers who’ve savaged me. And any reply I made to such letters.

  For those who get itchy when they confront others’ “dirty linen,” I have to declare as follows:

  The tradition of “confessional writing” is a long and honorable one; Washington Irving, Cervantes, Thomas De Quincey, Shaw, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Mailer…all of them, like Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin and Mark Twain, were driven to write of the human condition as viewed through the most perfect lens available to them: their own experiences.

  It makes people uncomfortable, this public exposure of the moist throbbing within. But as Mario Vargas Llosa has said, “The writer is an exorcist of his own demons.” And I have seen more clearly than often I wished to see it, that those who write so glowingly and passionately of love, truth, honor, courage and friendship do not necessarily demonstrate such a passionate glow in real life. There are columns to come in this book that deal precisely with this dichotomy. There are writers who lie to themselves, and to their readers. Lying to readers in fiction is probably okay, because what is fiction but the well-constructed lie? Yet I believe to the shoe-tops that a writer should not lie to him/herself. Because that corrupts the writing.

  Because of the kinds of fiction I choose to write, I feel the necessity to examine every facet of my life, my actions, what I’ve experienced and what I believe. In that way, I can write absolutely without restraint, without the self-censoring that is usually only a dodge to keep hidden that which I fear to reveal. We are all flawed, and we rearrange the past to make ourselves look better in the retelling.

  The poet Olin Miller wrote, “Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory.”

  I cannot do that. It isn’t any great nobility on my part, it is an inescapable dedication to the Work. And that means that when I write essays, introductions, comments on the Work, I tell it all.

  Any number of writers now include introductions to their stories, but when I started doing it back in the Fifties, it was looked on as an egomaniacal intrusion. (In England, they still insist on dropping the introductions when they republish my books. They contend—and I think they’re correct in their appraisal of the U.K. readership—that a more reserved nation is affronted by such confessions.) I think it’s necessary to commit such material to print. It keeps the reader aware of the simple truth that writers are just men and women, with a certain talent, but nowhichway different from other men and women, and subject to the same fears. It creates, I believe and I hope, a bond between the artist and the audience.

  Apparently, it works. The introductory material in my books seems to fascinate and edify the readers, and I get too much mail that says something like, “Gee, I like your introductions better than the stories.” Well, that doesn’t actually drive me coo-coo with joy, but I get the sense they’re trying to convey.

  And so, columns such as this one.

  Which does, as I admit in my reply to the letter that came after the publication of the column, demonstrate at least questionable ethics on my part. I don’t try to weasel out of it, but the column was sent to the subject in plenty of time prior to its publication, for her approval or cease & desist. She allowed it to appear in print, and I submit that I extended exactly the right courtesy, however ill-advised may have been the writing of the column in the first place.

  What the piece says about those who brutalize us with their weakness, however, stands unaltered. I am nailed to that theory and not twenty years under the bridge alters my position. Last week one of those leaners tried to eat up several days of precious time I was spending with old friends I hadn’t seen in ten years. They are ever with us.

  And one last note.

  The recipe for café ellison diabolique mentioned en passant is as follows:

  CAFÉ ELLISON DIABOLIQUE

  freshly ground coffee (see note below)

  El Popular Mexican-style brick chocolate

  1½tsp. C&H Hawaiian washed raw sugar (or equivalent brand)

  ¼tsp. nutmeg

  ¼tsp. cardamom

  raw honey

  whipping cream (not milk, not half-&-half)

  water (boiling)

  12-ounce coffee mug

  mortar and pestle

  NOTE: Any good coffee will do. But by “any” I mean any whole bean or freshly ground, not canned. Jamaican Blue Mountain, Kona, Celebes Kalossi, Guatemala Antigua, Honduras Estrieta, Sumatra Mandheling, as well as any medium-dark Brazilian will serve. Do not use flavored coffees—with chocolate or vanilla or macadamia or suchlike. But if you wish to duplicate the original, the recommended blend is as follows:

  70% Mexican Coatepec

  20% Colombian Supremo

  10% French Roast

  Int
o a 10-oz. coffee mug spoon the raw sugar, cardamom, nutmeg, and a drizzle (about ½ a teaspoon) of raw honey (more or less, to taste).

  With a mortar and pestle break off and pulverize sufficient El Popular Mexican chocolate from the brick cakes in the 15-oz. package to produce 2 full teaspoons of finely crushed grind. Add it to the contents of the mug.

  Get the coffee into the mug. Preferably a drip method, a Melitta filter cone, or one of the European small pots that doesn’t produce an acidic residue or oily film, such as one gets with a percolator. Use rapidly boiling water. Leave about an eighth of the mug empty for the addition of enough cream to produce a golden hue. Stir like crazy.

  This is my personal coffee recipe, refined over the last thirty-plus years to produce a cuppa that can be slogged away all day. For those who need their coffee dead-black and harsh, forget this. For those who truly like the taste of coffee but don’t want heartburn or the jangles, who take cream and sugar…welcome home. This one produces a balance between the harsh, often unpleasant taste of regular coffee and the cloying sweetness of hot cocoa. While it bears lineal ties with Russian Coffee and Café Chocolat, the addition of nutmeg and honey give it a special piquancy all its own. I find that coffee prepared in this fashion early in the morning soothes the jangled stomach lining, yet furnishes the push to get to work at whatever’s in the typewriter from the night before. During the day, it can be sipped even when cold, almost like an iced dessert coffee. At night it is companionable, and not to be dismissed in its estimable service as a mild aphrodisiac. (Thus the adjective in its title.)

  An earlier version of this recipe appeared in the 1973 edition of Cooking Out of This World, a wonderful Ballantine Books original paperback created and edited by my longtime friend, Anne McCaffrey. This is the book that included Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s excellent recipe for Gopher Stew, the very same recipe I included with the dead gopher I mailed by 4th Class Mail to the comptroller of Signet Books when he wouldn’t release the rights to one of my books. That story, like the recipe for coffee here proffered, has become legend. (An updated version appeared in the 1992 expanded and revised Wildside Press edition.)