The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

by Harlan Ellison

  He’s called me several times on the same subject. He ain’t happy out there in the rain with that pole over his shoulder. I feel for him. But not much. He wants the gravy, even when he says he never asked to be a member of the Guild, that he was forced to join to write for tv (which, surprise, surprise, is the nature of a union), but he won’t give even a few hours of his life in the common cause.

  So it goes sour.

  I see him as a man who can’t be depended on when the crunch sets in. And if he trembles in a lightweight breeze like this, how dependable can he be when a hurricane hits?

  What kills a friendship? Seeing the flaws in someone you thought was golden, and knowing those same flaws are in yourself; but knowing that having seen them there, they will not be permitted here.

  The terrible part of losing a friend, the most terrible part, is seeing one you loved turn, like Jekyll into Hyde, from a friend into a hideous example.

  Beware, I warn you, between meeting and parting, of confusing an acquaintance with a friend. They are two very different species. And for pete’s sake, learn which you are!

  INSTALLMENT 22 |

  Interim Memo

  This essay and installment 24 pose the greatest personal problems for me, of all the material in this book. These columns were written twenty years ago. Things have changed a lot. I reread this installment and cringe at the self-serving arrogance and unvarnished, indefensible rudeness of many of the throwaway remarks I made. Perhaps it is because marriage to Susan has made me a more decent (I hope), more gracious person. Perhaps it just took me longer than it should have to shuck off the posturing of the smartass adolescent. Whatever.

  And I thought long about how I presented myself here, and about how I presented someone else in Installment 24; and for a time I rested with the decision to drop these two. But for bad or good, this was what I was in 1973; and what I wrote I believed. Much of it I still stand by. But things have changed.

  Nonetheless, if this Hornbook is to be taken as an accurate diary of the period, then I cannot comfort myself with the ease of just letting these two pieces “vanish.” I may, as often as any of you, be deluded, but I struggle mightily against being a hypocrite. I’ve talked about that in an earlier Interim Memo.

  Installment 24 will bear its own Interim Memo, so I’ll address the second part of these ruminations on “godhood” there; but in this installment two things need to be addressed:

  The first is a sense of chagrin at the posturing of the twerp who wrote these words in 1973.

  The second is to report that Herb Kastle died on October 19th, 1987; and to report that the end of his life was not the note of triumph I wished for him.

  He wrote many more books in the years following this piece. Some were good, some were slightly less than that. None were bad. He wasn’t capable of writing badly, so they were just less worthy than others. But his vogue passed, he found it hard to get work, he had a number of cruel relationships that took the starch out of him, some leaners got to him financially, and he sank deeper and deeper into a crushing, solitary depression.

  He stopped calling. Not just me: anybody. He became a kind of hermit up there in the Hollywood Hills; and one day in ’87 he died. It got to me so much that I didn’t really want to hear the details, particularly after I heard he’d been dead some days before anyone found him. It may have been his heart, or his heart in that other way we used to call broken-hearted, but he’s gone, and he can’t update himself as these columns finally reach print.

  But after I wrote this piece, Herb and I spent a lot more time together, after he read it and we could declare our friendship on a more realistic level. I made the mistake of buying the new BRITANNICA (that virtually useless thing with the Macropedia/Micropedia setup that makes it impossible to find anydamnthing) and I sold him my 11th edition—which was the last really wonderful edition of the Britannica—for something like forty bucks, because he coveted it. And when he died, I tried to buy it back—at any price, because it had been mine, and it had been his, and we were still linked by those volumes—but the woman who answered the phone at the last number I had for him gave me such a vague, such a hard, such a flat-affect time about it, that I said ah t’hell with it.

  So Herb is gone now, and if he found peace anywhere along the way, it certainly didn’t come during those last isolated years. I keep thinking that if I’d been able to track him down (because he kept changing his phone number and never replied to bread & butter notes suggesting dinner), if I’d been able to get to him, to let him know how much he was still admired and loved, that it might have come out differently.

  But then, we always think that, don’t we?

  INSTALLMENT 22 | 6 APRIL 73

  TROUBLING THOUGHTS ABOUT GODHOOD, PART ONE

  They’re truly touching, the little fools. They can’t seem to differentiate between the stories they admire and the writer who wrote them. No, you bright-eyed little students and fans of Greatness, not me! It’s not me you love, it’s the talent. I have nothing to do with that: I’m the vessel into which the wine was poured, but the crockery has no sweetness, it merely suffers itself to be carried about and used, at the whim of the talent.

  I stand up there and tell them, over and over again, “Toulouse-Lautrec once said, ‘One should never meet an artist whose work one admires; the artist is always so much less than the work.’” I tell them that in lectures at high schools, in rap sessions at colleges, in essays accompanying my short stories, in person and in print. They refuse to listen. You refuse to listen!

  Dan Blocker, who died, who used to be on Bonanza, once told me of a woman he encountered when he was putting in a personal appearance at a rodeo.* She was a sweet, motherly old lady who came up to him and began talking to him as though he were Hoss Cartwright. “Ma’am,” Dan said, stooping down to smile at her, “Hoss Cartwright is just the character I play on teevee; I’m Dan Blocker.”

  She smiled at him with one of those aw g’wan with you smiles, as though charmingly chiding him for thinking she was such a penny fool. And then she went on, “Yes, I know. Now…Hoss, when you get home to the Ponderosa tonight, you tell your daddy, Ben, to fire off that old Chinese man who’s been doing your cooking! You and your brother Little Joe need a good woman in there to cook you some decent food…”

  Nothing strange. Nothing out of the ordinary. She was a product of her times, her culture, and her inability to separate fantasy from reality; precisely because everything is done, every waking and sleeping moment of the day, to eradicate that important boundary from your minds. Where does shadow and image leave off and substance begin? None of us can tell any more. We really believe it matters what the car we buy looks like. We really believe there is “honor” in what happened in Vietnam. We really believe growing old is terrible.

  You believe it. I don’t.

  And you really believe that there are living gods whom you can elevate to pedestals—famous writers, talented actors, adroit painters, dissembling politicians, slick columnists, guitarists and Fender bass players and mumblers of doggerel you delude yourselves into thinking are poets merely because their soggy images are shouted at 350 decibel amplification, their right hands grip a microphone, they sweat a lot, their bellies are flat, their clothes are sequined, and they’re so hip they won’t rhyme “June” and “Moon,” but the banality of their lyrics is as awful as a bulbous-eyed Keane waif, as empty of depth of originality as the iconography of Elvis on black velvet.

  You cannot separate a talent from an individual. And so you raise to godhood those whom, were they not gifted with that special ability, you would deride and pillory and cast into prisons for their selfishness, evil, rapacity and lack of humanity.

  This week: the subject is godhood. I suppose, in some ways, an extension of last week’s thoughts on friendship. And since I’m clearly the only one among you pure enough, noble enough to discuss the subject critically, I’ll cop to having been on both sides of the godhood scene—as god and worshipper—and te
ll you about two famous men I’ve known.

  The first one is Herbert Kastle. He may not be famous to you nits who don’t even know the names of the actors who strut for you, or the writers who scribble for you, or in fact the names of anyone failing to appear on the Johnny Carson Show, but around Dell and Avon paperbacks’ publishing offices, around the money coffers of Great American Literary Houses like Bernard Geis and Delacorte, Herbert Kastle is famous as hell. You don’t make $150,000 from THE MOVIE MAKER, $100,000 from MIAMI GOLDEN BOY and $100,000 from MILLIONAIRES (with the total far from registered) without becoming famous as hell. Not to you mud-condemned slugs who read books and never look at the names of the authors, but to the fat old tigers and their sleek editorial cubs who give out one hundred and fifty grand advances to authors who can come away from their own books with hundred thousand dollar royalties. (As a comparison, ninety percent of the writers in the world never make a dime beyond the advance money they receive for a book, and the advances are usually about three thousand dollars. Now lay those figures against what Kastle carts off, and you’ll realize how much greater must be the slice of the pie enjoyed by the publishers.)

  Herb Kastle is famous. He’s also likeable. He looks like a cuddly Jewish teddy bear, all the best kinds of character lines in his face, San Andreas crinkles radiating from the corners of his eyes, no-shape comfortable body in which one could easily live if one’s head was straight.

  More important, Herb Kastle is a fine writer. His first few books, KOPTIC COURT (1958), CAMERA (1959), COUNTDOWN TO MURDER (1960), THE WORLD THEY WANTED (1961), THE REASSEMBLED MAN (1964) and HOT PROWL (1965), drew him to my attention as a man who wrote in that special cathartic style that spoke to Irwin Shaw’s contention, “He is on a journey and he is reporting in: ‘This is where I think I am and this is what this place looks like today.’” A writer does not write one novel at a time or one play at a time or even one quatrain at a time. He is engaged in the long process of putting his whole life on paper. For Herb Kastle—who, when he started, was a nice Jewish boy with a wife and a family and all the middle-class twitches to which we are all heir—writing was clearly a way of purging his soul, and the struggles with his identity were clear in every novel he wrote.

  (That struggle is nowhere more evident than in his new novel, ELLIE, published by Delacorte Press on March 21st. It is very likely Kastle’s finest work to date; a searing and unrelenting study of a man obsessed by that sex object most destructive to his nature. It will sell like orangeade at the final truck stop before the Gobi Desert. In publishing circles it is the Last Tango of the contemporary sex novels. I strongly urge you to slither out and buy it. It is guaranteed to mess your mind.)

  The other day, Herb Kastle wandered into my house and finally, after fourteen years of what I’d taken to be a casual acquaintanceship, laid on me the crushing revelation that I had been a profoundly important influence on his life and his success. In some strange Vonnegut karass way, we are linked, and I’d never realized it. And in the moments after he blurted that linkage, I understood that I had been elevated to godhood.

  And could not handle it.

  I first met Herbert D. Kastle in New York, in 1959. We met in the offices of Theron Raines who, at that time, was agenting for both of us. But I’d already (apparently) had an effect on Herb. I’d been writing professionally for three years, was at that time in the Army and had come into New York on leave, to try and scare up some money. My first wife had run off again, for the millionth time, taking with her the furniture, all my clothes, and every cent in the bank account. I had decided to divorce her and was desperately trying to find the pennies to get back into civilian life.

  I’d read KOPTIC COURT the year before and, without knowing Kastle, had fired off a letter to him through his publisher, enthusing about the vigor and honesty of the book. (It’s recently been reprinted by Avon in paperback, and I re-read it a while ago; miraculously, it holds up as well as when I first came to it. It’s another one I commend to your attention.)

  The letter had been a casual thing for me. I’m inclined to revel in the utter craftsmanship of other writers, and like to let them know, since it so seldom occurs. But for Herb, I learned later, it was a seminal communication. One of the things I’d talked about in glowing terms was that the novel had a last line punch like a short story, a very rare and difficult thing in this universe. I couldn’t have known of it, of course, but Herb had worked on that ending for a week. He was justifiably proud of the effect it had produced, and usually it’s not the sort of thing readers notice. So here came my letter, out of nowhere, fastening on that certain special act he had performed with clean hands and dedication and composure…and someone had noticed.

  When we met in Theron Raines’s office, we immediately liked each other: I was thrilled to meet a man who’d given me hours of fine reading, he was pleased to meet a writer who had been deeply enough affected by his life’s work to send out a cry across the emptiness in which most writers work.

  I can’t recall meeting Herb again until almost ten years later, when I was already an established Hollywood writer, and his life and writing had taken a different, to me ominous, turn. (Although we almost shared a book once. Walter Fultz, the man who bought my first novel, back in 1956, was editing for the now-defunct paperback house, Lion Books. He wanted to put together a co-authored volume of stories by Herb and me: my stories of the street gangs of Brooklyn, Herb’s stories of the uptown young Jewish thugs. It never came off, and Lion Books had to close down when they got caught in a distributors’ crunch. And Walter Fultz, just a few years ago, died suddenly and under mysterious circumstances; one of the finest men I have ever known. As a sidelight to tragedy, Walter’s emotional problem is one that, today, would be acceptable. Had he lived today instead of fifteen years ago, he would never have had to exist in the shadows of closets, would never have had to struggle with his life; to seem to be that which he wasn’t; would never have had to be ashamed of what he was; and he would be with us today. I miss him.)

  Ten years later, I was working on The Oscar at Paramount for Joseph E. Levine. Herb had come out to California for a visit. His marriage of many years was on the rocks and he was putting a continent between himself and his pain; yet another foolishness: the shimmering interface between oneself and one’s bad karma defies space-time equations: a continent is no thicker than a membrane when one carries the misery inside: there is no escape, no Cloud-Cuckoo Land, no place to hide; literally no doors and no windows.

  Herb came to have lunch with me at the Paramount commissary. We were never alike. He was always subdued, cool, interiorly directed, polite, charming. I was always a street urchin, quick to anger, quicker to cool down, rabidly enthusiastic about everything, flaming, loud, crude. Each has its merits and flaws. But we weren’t alike. And it was the difference between us that drew us together. He liked my raw style, I envied his ease in moving through the world like a phantom cat burglar turned novelist. But there was no competition between us. Writers who are good are never in competition; each has a corner on the market for the special product each produces; no writer can write another’s book, not really.

  Yet I think only in the most recent past has Herb come to know something about me that functions as my driving force: I consider myself an Artist, not merely a scribbler. When we sat across from each other in the Paramount commissary, with actors and producers waving and me digging the shit out of it—a little kid from Painesville, Ohio, playing at being in the magic land of Hollywood—Herb clearly saw me as a surrogate Sammy Glick, a moderately talented writer who had used charisma and drive to cash in on the big time. He was wrong about that, but he had no way of knowing it.

  And again, without my knowing I was doing it, I steered Herb’s life in a direction that would shape all the rest of his days. Or so he tells me.

  I had been offered a job writing a B flick for Bert I. Gordon, a very decent and charming man who made low-budget thrillers that could always be counted on to do
well at the saturation booking level. I didn’t have time to do it, I was scheduled for another Levine film after The Oscar, and so I suggested to Herb that I recommend him to Bert Gordon for the project. It was, again, a casual thing, and I didn’t even remember having done it until Herb reminded me the other day. It’s the sort of kindness one does for one’s friends without thinking in terms of coin returned.

  I lost track of Herb; but what happened is that he got the assignment, wrote the screenplay for The Museum of Dr. Freak (which was shelved and never filmed for reasons probably having nothing whatever to do with the script), and from there moved on to scripts for the Bonanza and Honey West television series.

  But from that lunch meeting, and from the tunnel vision through which Herb saw me…saw what he thought was me…he began to make notes on a Hollywood novel. He called before he flew back East with the outline for the book, and told me that he was about to change his life, that for the space of three books he was “going into business” and that he’d keep in touch. Then he went away.

  In 1968 Herb sold THE MOVIE MAKER to the Mike Todd of the publishing world, Bernard Geis—he who gave us Jacqueline Susann—and it was an instant financial success. It was a splash book.

  I bought a copy but didn’t get around to reading it. On looking back, I think there was an ambience to the work that put me off, made it easier for me to rationalize why I didn’t have the time to read this latest book by a writer whose words I’d anxiously absorbed (sometimes only minutes after they’d come into my possession). It had the unsavory feel of something left too long in the greenhouse. The scent of decaying orchids came off that book. It was probably my imagination.