The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

by Harlan Ellison

  This is the wonderful brew twenty-four years later. It has undergone changes and refinements, but remains a particular favorite of the many guests at Ellison Wonderland. Ben Bova, Robert Silverberg, Richard Dreyfuss, Norman Spinrad, Carl Sagan, Edward Bryant, and others have begged like children when they came to visit. Susan thinks it’s too sweet, but then she’s a Brit who takes tea in the morning, with milk. This is why we won the Revolutionary War.

  1997 footnote: Since the heart attack in April of ’96, I’ve had to reorder my diet extensively. I still do the coffee every morning, but now I use nonfat or 2% milk instead of whipping cream. Don’t cry for me, Argentina; it’s little enough price to pay in exchange for being permitted to see your happy, shining faces. Sharing these golden moments with you is my greatest joy. And thank your mother for the chicken soup.

  INSTALLMENT 6 | 7 DECEMBER 72

  THE TYRANNY OF THE WEAK, AND SOME FORESHADOWING

  Quite a lot lately, I’ve been accused of being a rotten sonofabitch. Well, actually, the parties relaying the appellations haven’t called me that, they’ve merely said they’ve heard me called that by others. Now I don’t mind people thinking I’m dumb…what I resent is when they talk to me as if they think I’m dumb. It’s like the woman who confronts the psychiatrist at a cocktail party and says, “I have this friend who wants to have an extramarital affair, and she…” Up front, the shrink knows she’s talking about herself; or more accurately, about her other self, her secret self, her wish-fulfillment self.

  So, up front, I know when Janet Joiner of San Diego writes me and says I’m supposed to be a rotten sonofabitch—which she’s heard through the jungle telegraph—what she’s saying is: I think you’re a rotten sonofabitch, but I’m afraid you’ll cut me up verbally if I step out and tell you to your face.

  Which would have derived for her more pleasure, had she done it without hypocrisy, because the penalty of talking to me as if she thinks I’m too dumb to understand the obfuscation, is that I’ll cut her up right here in print, rather than writing a letter. And in the process, because this is a relatively lightweight indictment against me, I’ll make some generalized comments about the benefits of being a rotten and thoroughly calloused sonofabitch with strangers.

  The background is quite simple, actually. Ms. Joiner is a young woman who bopped into my life one day many months ago, wholly uninvited. She had read my work and wanted to meet me. Now that’s terrific for my ego, and I hardly discourage such worshipful pilgrimages, but sometimes I’m busy writing, or I’m feeling generally all-around shitty and rude, and when a body manifests itself on my doorstep I’m as likely to bury a Viking battleaxe in the visitor’s head as I am to invite the waif in for café ellison diabolique and whatever else might develop.

  Well, Ms. Joiner spent some small amount of time (judged on the cosmic scale) with me, and we parted friends. She went back to San Diego with my best wishes and that, as the OXFORD DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS puts it, was that.

  Came the night of the KROQ concert, a Saturday night, I believe, and I was home alone working, thoroughly enjoying the solitude and the flow of backlog mail being cleared off my desk. (As a societally crippled child of the Puritan Work Ethic, there are times when I really jubilate behind the act of working my ass off.) The phone rang, and it was Ms. Joiner, in town with her gentleman friend. He had gone off to do some sort of football spectator number, and she was looking for diversion. Without pejorative, both Ms. Joiner and I (and certainly you, gentle reader) knew what form of diversion she was seeking. She advised me she was in for the concert but it looked to be a charnel house scene, festooned with fuzz, and having called out from beneath every slippery rock in the Southern California landscape a full complement of the Lizard People. She said she was holding some prescription medicines but didn’t have them in the legit bottles with physicians’ labels thereon, and she was twitchy she’d get busted.

  “Well,” said I, being polite, “if you want to go to the concert and call me when it’s over, I’ll see how caught up on work I am, and maybe we can have a cup of coffee later, but frankly, I’m not too hot for any company tonight.” I went on in that vein for a few more beats, making it abundantly clear that I was enjoying my ascetic retreat from the hurly-burly world of social intercourse. The call was terminated, but a short time later she called back and told me again that she was holding. I advised her if she was nervous, to get the hell out of there, but that I’d decided I was one with Greta Garbo, that I vanted to be alone. She seemed bugged by that information, and rang off. Frankly, in two minutes Ms. Joiner was out of my mind as I threaded my way through the intricacies of a series of letters from an English solicitor I’d engaged to sue the London publisher of one of my books.

  Today, I received the letter. On orange stationery. Four space-&-½’d, elite-typed pages of rebuke and condemnation. On what grounds? Well, I’ll copy off some of it for you, and then we’ll get into the subject of who should have a claim on your emotions and guilt as you trudge down Life’s foggy highway.

  Ms. Joiner says, in part:

  “Don’t panic…I realize that you don’t give even the tiniest shit, I just want to tell you anyway…Okay, I assume you have probably heard more about the incredible fiasco of the KROQ concert than I [an Ellisonian aside: take note of the many assumptions Ms. Joiner makes; on these assumptions hinges the totality of her accusations]. I assume that you can imagine the scene…Little Miss (Almost) Innocent, scared out of her wits, tearfully pleading with the Yellow Cab dispatcher to please make an exception, finally having her agree to send a unit, but that it would be about fifteen minutes. Since you knew how exceedingly frightened I was, naturally all I wanted to do was get the hell out of that place. Twice stopped by The Man, who dumped out my sack of tangerines and cheese, then passed on. All I had in my (stupid, unknowing) mind was getting my young ass the other side of that goddam cyclone fence.

  “Now here is where I get just a leedle pissed: it seems to me that, being such a great cosmopolite, the ultimate Angeleno, that you would think to tell an out-of-town Dodo…that this was not, absolutely no way, the sort of place where unescorted white chicks stand around on curbs.”

  Ms. Joiner then diverged for a page and a half to relate how she had once been raped by some black men while stationed with her husband-at-the-time at a military base. It was a particularly ugly story and one she related in the letter with more rationality and understanding of what had happened than I think I’d be capable of summoning had it been someone close to me. It is a story Ms. Joiner tells, free of racial prejudice but understandably filled with horror at what happened, and how her life was demolished as a result of it. One cannot read the story without feeling her panic at being set adrift on a street corner in Los Angeles in an area where she felt threatened. Had I known any of this, I’m sure her situation that evening would have impinged more acutely on my consciousness. Being gang-raped and brutally beaten is about the ugliest fate I can think of, even from a man’s viewpoint, or maybe particularly from a man’s viewpoint. Scenes in Dickey’s DELIVERANCE do not go unnoticed. But I knew none of this, and contrary to Ms. Joiner’s assumption I didn’t perceive her terror. Perhaps her attempts during our telecon to sound cool succeeded better than she might have wished.

  In any case, on to her letter again.

  “Okay, it was probably a naive assumption that LA would be similar [to San Diego’s “safer” concert areas], but surely if the area were that dangerous, and an unsuspecting chick called a resident and talked for awhile, and indicated her intention of leaving, and of leaving by cab (which an Angeleno would know always involves a certain curbside wait), and that if this were not a safe thing for her to do, that a knowledgeable resident of the city would at least have the basic decency to tell her, right? I mean, if it is so bad out there, don’t you warn people? Or were you chuckling as you hung up, ‘Well, that silly bitch won’t annoy me again! They’ll fix her ass. Tee hee…etc.’ Was it that I am so goddamned dumb that I deserve
d it or something? If so, you are a worse bastard than they all say you are. (Hah! Chew on that one a while…T. Hee.) I choose not to tumble my idol just yet, however, and have managed to convince myself that you either a) didn’t know what the streets around the Coliseum are like at night (which I very much doubt) or that b) the dangers are so well known to you that you assumed they were well-known to all, even out-of-towners.”

  I’ve skipped most of the personal vilification in the letter, but I think this sums it up on Ms. Joiner’s part:

  “What I’m talking about is just the kind of concern which one ordinarily manifests simply by virtue of his humanity toward another human simply by virtue of his. So I’m puzzled, and kinda sad, and well…your halo has slipped just a little.”

  Well, Ms. Joiner, and all of you out there waiting to find out what this is in aid of, I’m gonna solve the puzzle for you. And you can stuff that halo up your nose.

  First of all, I’ve never, to my recollection, been to the Coliseum. Now I may have been, but if I ever was, nothing happened in the vicinity to conjure up the dark and Jack-the-Ripper-like visions Ms. Joiner derived from the locale. In point of fact, to demonstrate just how disinterested in her call I was, I thought she was calling from the Hollywood Bowl, which is where I’ve attended most concerts. If this tells you I wasn’t aware of what was happening, so be it. I knew very little about the KROQ concert, then or now, and I couldn’t have cared less. Rock concerts are uniformly downers, as far as I’m concerned, and I would sooner take a bath in lye than go to one. Shit, I have trouble dragging myself to snake pits like the Troubadour when I have passes and there’s someone I want to see.

  Second, I am a man, and try as I may, even with my belief in, and support of women’s liberation, I still, dammit, think like a man. I don’t think of people standing on a well-lit street corner of L.A. in peril of being raped by hordes of slavering Mamelukes or Ethiopians. Now maybe that’s divorced from reality, living in the times around us, but L.A. hasn’t yet become New York, as far as I can tell, so…no, it never crossed my mind.

  Further than that, I won’t defend myself against what is clearly a paranoid-fantasy-trip on Ms. Joiner’s part. I find it impossible to conceive of myself as kin with, for instance, the people who watched Kitty Genovese getting knifed to death in New York streets, and did nothing to help her. For my own sleeping benefit, I have credentials as one who gives a damn, as well as scars to attest, so I won’t take on that bum rap.

  But the deeper issue here is one deserving of comment.

  To be unwittingly elevated to the role of “hero” by a stranger is to have one’s humanity denied almost as specifically as ignoring another human’s plight in moments of stress and danger. I never asked to be your goddam hero, Ms. Joiner! I am no one’s fucking hero. I am merely a writer who sets down some stuff, usually from the gut, occasionally from the head, and that doesn’t make me Simón Bolívar or Jomo Kenyatta or Richard Motherfuckin’ Nixon! Toulouse-Lautrec once said, “One should never confuse a writer with what the writer writes.” That is as true of me as it was with Scott Fitzgerald or Fyodor Dostoevsky, both of whom were failures as human beings.

  By what right do you presume to drop into my existence, puddle around on a superficial level, and then make demands of my time or emotions? And when I politely choose to ignore those demands, try to whip guilt on me? This was your trip, from start to finish. There’s nothing wrong with building dream castles in the air, lady; the derangement comes when you try to move furniture into them!

  Rotten bastard? You betchum, Red Ryder. The world is filled with two kinds of people, basically: those who can sustain themselves, and those who sustain themselves by sucking on others. That’s called vampirism.

  Jewish mothers do it, ex-lovers do it, employers do it, losers do it, and those who live lives they detest do it. And theirs is the tyranny of the weak.

  As a published writer I receive hundreds of letters and phone calls from people imposing on my life and my work-time with demands that I find them agents, read their novels for comment, tell them where conventions are being held or—most hideous of all—merely that I notice their letters and write them a response to let them know they’ve been heard. Sure, we all want to be noticed, we all want to stand on some far peak in Darien and scream into the wind, “I’m here! I exist! I’m important, I live, I breathe, I need!” And in our own ways we all do it incessantly. My way is this column and my books. Your way is to dream a dream of heroes, and then slide into hatred and paranoia when the call goes unheeded.

  Rotten bastard? Try tough bastard. It fits better. If “they” say I’m rotten, I smile. If “they” say I’m a mean and selfish sonofabitch, I jubilate. There is love in me, Ms. Joiner, and there is caring, but I will pick the receptacles into which to pour it, if they are willing; I will say with whom I spend my days and nights and moments of meaning.

  And not strangers or relatives or charisma-hustlers will get a drop of it, not a speck of it, if I’m unwilling to give it.

  My advice to all of you out there, and to all the Janet Joiners swilling the cheap muscatel of hero-worship, is to find your own reality and cease these vampiric attempts to suck meaning from wish-fulfillment and pointless fantasy.

  HARLAN’S LINEN…

  DEAR EDITOR:

  WHY MUST THE READERS OF THE FREEP BE INSULTINGLY SUBJECTED TO WRITER HARLAN ELLISON’S AIRING OF HIS DIRTY LINEN IN MATTERS OF HIS PRIVATE SEX LIFE QUARRELS WHICH SHOULD BE HANDLED ON A STRICTLY PERSONAL, CONFIDENTIAL LEVEL?

  WHILE I SYMPATHIZE WITH HIS NEED FOR FREEDOM, INDEPENDENCE, HIS REJECTION OF THE ROLE OF HERO OR SUPERSTAR, AND HIS COMMENDABLE REJECTION OF WOULD-BE OR REAL VAMPIRES, HERO WORSHIPPERS, OR GROUPIES, MUST HE MENTION THE NAME OF THE YOUNG LADY WHO PRESUMABLY WROTE TO HIM IN CONFIDENCE AND DESERVES THE COMMON COURTESY OF A CONFIDENTIAL REPLY?

  MR. ELLISON COULD HAVE DISCUSSED THE SUBJECT OF HUMAN PARASITISM AND EXPLOITATION, AND MADE HIS QUITE VALID POINTS, WITHOUT PUBLICLY EMBARRASSING THE YOUNG LADY IN QUESTION. AFTER ALL SHE DID NOT WRITE HER LETTER TO THE FREE PRESS AND PUBLICLY SLANDER MR. ELLISON. SHE WROTE DIRECTLY TO HIM.

  DOES THE EDITOR OF THE FREEP WRITE ARTICLES DETAILING HIS INTIMATE SEX LIFE AT HOME WITH HIS WIFE AND PUBLISH SUCH DEEPLY PERSONAL MATTERS FOR MASS PUBLIC CONSUMPTION? NO, THE EDITOR HAS BETTER JUDGMENT, DISCRETION AND TASTE! IT IS MOST UNFORTUNATE THAT MR. ELLISON’S SENSE OF PRIVACY AND CONFIDENCE IS DEMANDED RIGHTFULLY FOR HIMSELF, BUT APPARENTLY THE SAME RIGHTS ARE NOT RESPECTED BY HIMSELF FOR OTHERS.

  THE GOLDEN RULE, IF IT IS TO HAVE ANY VALIDITY, MUST BE MUTUALLY APPLICABLE, VIOLATIONS OF WHICH ARE NOT MUTUALLY PERMISSIBLE FOR VENGEFUL OR SPITEFUL PURPOSES.

  RESPECTFULLY YOURS,

  CARL MICHAEL

  VROOMAN

  PASADENA, CALIF.

  HARLAN ELLISON REPLIES

  DEAR ART:

  …AS TO MR. VROOMAN’S LETTER, I CAN ONLY AGREE. THE GENTLEMAN HAS WRITTEN A RATIONAL AND KIND LETTER, POINTING UP A FLAW IN MY CHARACTER THAT I WOULD BE A HYPOCRITE TO DENY. PERHAPS THE NAME OF THE YOUNG LADY WHO WROTE THE LETTER THAT FORMED THE BASIS FOR LAST WEEK’S COLUMN SHOULD HAVE BEEN OMITTED. PERHAPS NOT. THE POINT OF THE COLUMN WAS THAT ONE SHOULD DEFY ATTEMPTS BY STRANGERS TO WHIP GRATUITOUS GUILT ON US. IT SEEMED TO ME AT THE TIME I WROTE THE COLUMN—AND STILL DOES—THAT THE ONLY WAY TO DE-FANG SUCH VAMPIRISM IS TO BRING IT OUT INTO THE LIGHT OF DAY. A PERSONAL LETTER IN RESPONSE TO THE LADY IN QUESTION WOULD ONLY HAVE PERMITTED HER MORE ROOM TO RATIONALIZE THE SITUATION. PUBLIC DISCLOSURE IS FINAL, EVEN THOUGH IT MAY SERVE TO TARNISH MY PERSONAL COURTLINESS. BUT TO DISABUSE MR. VROOMAN OF THE IDEA THAT I AM A STRANGER TO GOOD MANNERS, HE SHOULD KNOW THAT BEFORE THE COLUMN WAS PUBLISHED, A COPY OF SAME WENT TO THE LADY, WITH MY URGINGS THAT IF SHE WANTED TO REBUT, THE PAGES OF THE FREEP WERE OPEN TO HER.

  AS TO THE “AIRING” OF PRIVATE LIVES, THAT IS A MORE BASIC CARP, AND ONE I CANNOT REMOVE FROM MR. VROOMAN’S VIEW SHORT OF CEASING TO WRITE THE COLUMN. ON THAT SCORE, IF THE TENOR OF THE HORNBOOK COLUMNS CONTINUALLY AFFECTS OTHERS AS
STRONGLY AS IT DID MR. VROOMAN (WHO ADMITS, IT SEEMS TO ME, THE RIGHTNESS OF THE POSITION I TOOK), AND AFFECTS THEM WITH NEGATIVITY, THEN READERS SHOULD MOST CERTAINLY WRITE THE EDITOR OF THE FREEP AND TELL HIM SO. HE IS NO FOOL. IF HE’S PUBLISHING SOMETHING THAT ANNOYS HIS BUYERS, HE WILL DISPENSE WITH IT. BUT THE HORNBOOK IS CLEARLY A “JOURNAL,” IN MANY WAYS A MEMOIR, FOR BETTER OR WORSE…AND THAT’S THE WAY I INTEND IT.

  HARLAN ELLISON

  INSTALLMENT 7 |

  Interim Memo

  I went. I finally picked up and went to Scotland, and came back sadly knowing I was not meant to live in that fine place. It had nothing to do with Scotland; it was me. I was by that time a thing unfit for peace and solitude.

  But I found the dream. Not as I expected, and perhaps only in a way that borders on some psychic foreshadowing that led me there, that prevented me from summoning up the self-examination that would have told me to stay home.

  I went to Scotland; several times; and it was there that I found the dream.

  I met my wife in Glasgow in 1985. She isn’t Scottish, she’s English, but she came north to hear me lecture, and I came a long way east to intersect my destiny.

  Could I have known that? Well, not unless I’m also ready to believe that Shirley MacLaine is the reincarnation of Ankhesenamun (as opposed to some slave who schlepped stones up a ramp building the Great Pyramid of Cheops), that Elvis frequents 7-Elevens after midnight, that space-traveling aliens have nothing better to do with their time than butcher cows and give Whitley Strieber a hard time, and that “pro-lifers” actually give a shit about the value of life. But it sure is poetic, ain’t it?