The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

by Harlan Ellison

  As Dorothy Parker said, “Living well is the best revenge.”

  This has been in aid of asserting that I am a self-made man…thereby demonstrating the horrors of unskilled labor.

  INSTALLMENT 37 | 25 OCTOBER 73

  COLLEGE DAYS, PART ONE

  (Pant! Pant!) I’m back.

  Okay, I apologize. It couldn’t be helped. I was out on the road, lecturing in Ohio, a 21-day block-booked tour of ten colleges and universities, plus (momentary sanity lapse) a Star Trek convention in Detroit. And I had to drive an Avis an average of 200+ miles a day, give a three-to-four-hour lecture every night (plus speak to a scattering of classes during the day at some schools), go back to whatever dorm or Holiday Inn at which I’d been billeted and write the rewrite of the treatment for an ABC Movie of the Week I’m doing, get what sleep I could, then get my ass up the next morning and motor another 200+ miles to my next gig…and start all over again.

  So I missed my deadlines on the column. I apologize.

  But I’ve come back with some new stories that I think will make the empty spaces acceptable.

  The most significant story, I’ll tell you now.

  After my Father died in 1949, we moved from the little provincial enclave of Painesville, thirty miles northeast, and I finished high school in Cleveland. I did very badly in school. But my Mother wanted me to go to college, and I wanted to write, so it seemed the logical thing to do, to go to college. Bad grades: all we could afford was a state college. I was admitted to Ohio State University in September of 1953.

  I was thrown out in January of 1955.

  In the seventeen months of my “college career” some of the most pivotal and formative experiences of my life transpired, and I suspect for many of you, the same applies. So, in the noble and lofty pursuit of stirring the alluvial layers of your memory, and to reinforce my contention that revenge is an enriching act, the beginning-middle-and-end of a collegiate tale of revenge that I’m sure will strike a sympathetic resonance in each of you.

  At “State” (as its inmates refer to it), I was not terribly enthusiastic about football. Instantly, that made me an alien. Ohio State had, at that time, a student population of something over 33,000…virtually all of whom were pigskin freako-devo-pervos. (Today they have 48,000, of whom most are the same types as in 1953. They killed the big DNA biochemistry program at State, but they built a bigger stadium. Sort of gets you right here, don’t it, this lemming-like pursuit of the Amurrican Way.)

  But I was rushed and pledged by Zeta Beta Tau (sometimes chucklingly called Zeta Beta Tomatah) (sometimes referred to as the ZBT baby powder fraternity), a gathering of Jewish gentlemen dedicated to the principles of fire-engine-red Caddy convertibles, torment of pledge “brothers” and the indiscriminate fucking of as many Tri-Delts as they could locate. My weird and their weird reasons for accepting me into ZBT will have to wait till next week, when I do the rap on my brief and unseemly fraternity days; but let it suffice for now, that I was only in the frat for a few months before being bounced as “not really fraternal material.”

  So I moved to a rooming house where I lived with a guy named Don Epstein—whose story I will tell in a later column, as well, when I get into the subject of Midwestern Ohio anti-Semitism. (Oh, there are such goodies upcoming in the next few installments!)

  While living in the rooming house, in abject poverty, I worked at various menial jobs to supplement my Mother’s support for tuition, books, pizza, etc.

  But I couldn’t afford luxuries…like music…and non-textbook reading material…and clothes. So I shoplifted. Under no circumstances am I advocating such a practice; but it seems to me that if your soul truly cries out for music and books, and you cannot afford them…steal them. And repay society later.

  So I shoplifted.

  And was arrested. For boosting a 45 rpm album of Oscar Peterson. It was an RCA album featuring Peterson doing “Poor Butterfly,” a song that, even if I hear it today, sends chills of terror down my spine. I was sent to the Columbus, Ohio, jail, where I languished for a time, till Don Epstein bailed my poor ass out.

  That was reason one for my dismissal from OSU.

  Reason two was that I punched a professor. I don’t even remember now why or who, but it was a happy foreshadowing of my reactions to this day when confronted with the arrogance and cavalier nature of many authority figures. Tv producers have, of late, become my prime martial arts targets. But, anyhow, that was the second nail in my collegiate career coffin.

  Reason three was that one night, using the car I had borrowed from my Mother for a prom called The Military Ball, I drove up The Long Walk of the main campus, and directly onto the statue of William Oxley Thompson—a gentleman famed for some obscure deed years before my arrival—and with considerable difficulty circumnavigated the plinth. An aged and crepuscular security guard came after me on a scooter, if I recall correctly, and chased me off. We had a French Connection chase and I eluded him, but he got my license number.

  That was reason number three.

  But the big reason, number four, the one that altered my life more assuredly than anything else before or since, was my encounter with the “teacher” of Creative Writing, one Professor Robert Shedd.

  I was, even then, obsessed with the desire to be a writer. No, erase that: I was obsessed with writing. I felt talent and ideas and creativity bubbling in me like lava, and wrote relentlessly. Every story I submitted to Dr. Shedd was turned back with denigrating comments scrawled in an illegible hieroglyphic that would have been intelligible only to a medieval alchemist. Shedd should have been an apothecary. He ridiculed and demeaned my work mercilessly. But without the clear evidences of affection and caring that good teachers demonstrate when they perceive a student has talent and needs uncompromising, harsh criticism. Shedd’s comments were merely exercises in viciousness.

  Now, you must understand that in this student population of 33,000 inquisitive souls—all shrieking for the point after TD—there were only four people in Shedd’s creative writing section. Two aged ladies who wrote astrological poetry, and over whom Shedd fawned with a sickening obsequiousness, a young and extremely attractive young lady who, to my certain knowledge, never spoke a word aloud and never submitted any work for criticism…and myself. Handing in one science fiction story after another.

  Shedd obviously felt all that bullshit about flights to the Moon, manipulation of chromosomes, Malthusian overpopulation and studies of the interface between mankind and machines was drivel. He said as much. “Garbage,” I recall he summed up one story I’d submitted for critical attention.

  Finally, I felt pressed to confrontation.

  As you may have gathered from your encounters with me, friends, I am a congenital confrontationist, not an avoidist.

  “Dr. Shedd,” I said, one morning after class, as he was gathering his papers into his satchel, “I get the feeling you don’t like what I write. Would you care to expound on that position?”

  (Now understand, also, that at this point I was neither Chekhov nor even Clarence Budington Kelland, but as subsequent events proved, I was close to professional level in what I was writing. Maybe not the reincarnation of Chas. Dickens, but certainly not a total dub.)

  He mumbled something I couldn’t understand. Something politic. He had, after all, only four students.

  “Dr. Shedd,” quoth I, “what I’m asking for is an honest appraisal of my worth as a writer.” At that stage I had not yet learned that you don’t ask those who can’t write for shit themselves, how good you are.

  “Mr. Ellison,” he finally said, drawing himself up to his extremely heighty height, “you cannot write. You have no talent. No talent whatsoever. No discernible or even suggestible talent. Not the faintest scintilla of talent. Forget it. If you write, you will never finish what you write. If you finish it, you’ll never submit it for publication. Should you submit it, no one will buy it. Should some deranged editor go thoroughly mad and publish it, no one will read it. If a miracle
were to be passed and someone read it, no one would remember it. And even if, flouting all the laws of probability in the universe, someone should remember it, your miserable and demented work could not stand the test of time. I understand you are minoring in Geology. Why not go back to that…because obviously you have rocks in your head to begin with.”

  (I have enhanced the above diatribe considerably. Shedd was never capable of such outstanding rhythm and invention.)

  I listened to all this, nodded soberly, smiled and said, “Dr. Shedd, why don’t you go fuck yourself.”

  Thus, reason number four for my expulsion from OSU.

  We won’t even bother with reason number five, that I had the lowest grade point average in the history of the University: .086 out of a possible 4.00—an average never before or since equalled for minusculeness. It meant a total of four Fs, three Xs, two Incompletes…and a question mark.

  I left OSU; standing out on North High Street in the wee hours after midnight, my little cardboard mailing box of dirty laundry beside me; and I shook my fist at the silent institutional bulk of the school, and like Napoleon on Elba, I screamed, “I’ll be back, you motherfuckers! I’ll be back and make you sorry you ever told me I’d be a failure! I’ll be back and make you pay for it!”

  I then went back to Cleveland, and soon thereafter went to New York to commit myself to a full-time professional career writing. In the first year, I sold only two stories. In the second year I sold one hundred stories and my first novel.

  It went on that way, without break, from that time to this. And that’s almost twenty years.

  But so enraged was I at Shedd’s dismissal of my talent, that I sent him a copy of every single story that ever appeared in print. Every article. Every book. Every essay. Every film and tv script. And when I began getting good reviews, I had them Xeroxed and sent them to him. Every time I won an award I had a photo taken of me with it…and sent that to him. And when WHO’S WHO listed me for the first time, I had a copy PermaPlaqued and sent that to him.

  In my idle waking moments I would envision the Harlan Ellison Annex Shedd must have had to build to house all that material…a bulk of material that would one day develop a sentience of its own, like the Swamp Thing, and begin oozing and slithering and extending oily black tentacles that would slimily slip across the greensward to Shedd’s home, crawl like ivy up the night-shadowed walls, insinuate themselves through the screens of his bedroom windows and, with a suitable and happily ironic verve, choke the cocksucker to death in his bed!

  I never heard from him. He never responded. Whether he actually received what I sent, I don’t know, though none of it was ever returned by the post office.

  And still my revenge was incomplete. We are all the same: inside each of us walking tall and straight, is a crippled child. We carry the past on our backs like the chambered nautilus. I still wanted a physical revenge!

  And two weeks ago, I got it.

  The tour from which I just returned was booked by Creative Entertainment Associates. They booked it early in the year. Ohio, they said, and named the schools that wanted me. Quite an impressive list: Bowling Green, Findlay, Wilmington, Wooster, Steubenville, others. And Ohio State.

  Dum de dum dum!

  “Sure, Steve,” I told my booking agent, “I’ll speak at State, but they have to pay more for me than any other school on the circuit. Personal matter.”

  So they did, and on Thursday night, October 4th, 1973, almost twenty years later, I returned to Ohio State University. At the entrance to the Main Campus there was an enormous billboard that had been erected: COME HEAR HARLAN ELLISON SPEAK! it shouted. And that night, before a huge audience in Mershon Auditorium, I delivered a three-hour presentation that released all the pent-up hatred and frustration and desire for revenge that had been festering in my gut for two decades.

  I was a hit. I have the clippings from the Columbus Dispatch to prove it. The headline in the OSU newspaper said: “Ellison Mocks OSU!”

  One of the requests I made of State, when they booked me, was that they cut a series of cassettes of the evening’s presentation. I have it here. You ought to hear it. It’s eerie: I started out telling about Don Epstein. Not one single laugh. You’ll understand why when you read that column in a week or two. Then I went through what I’ve set down here. A few laughs, but not many. Then I did a number on how the frat boys used to fuck a sad little townie girl who was a bit slow in the head. No laughs. Then random anger and viciousness. No laughs. Then pathetic and saddening stories. No laughs.

  It was not my usual happy-go-lucky madhouse presentation.

  And, as you can hear on the tape, suddenly, in the middle of it all…I was purged.

  I listen to that tape, and I hear my voice break. I hear silence and a cough from the audience. An embarrassed, hushed expectancy as students who’ve come up from Wooster and down from Steubenville, who laughed and enjoyed my raps at their schools, realize they are getting something quite different. And then I hear myself, like a stranger, softly and much more sanely than at any other place on that tape, murmur, “Dear god, I’m freed.”

  And you know…I am.

  INSTALLMENT 38 |

  Interim Memo

  Just on the off-chance that the tone and content of this one strikes you as no more than a childish fit of pique, I urge you to recall how you felt the last time some shop, bank, state or government office, credit card representative, billing officer for the phone company, Civil Service slavey, college, or IRS agent gave you a hard time over some incredibly simple matter.

  If, after you’ve gone through what I report here, you didn’t feel like raping their cattle and sowing salt on their loved ones, then you deserved every bit of frustration and humiliation you got.

  The American Film Theatre folded very quickly. If I recall correctly, it managed to float for only two seasons, and then sank without a trace, taking vast sums of debt with it.

  Eventually, when it was released to television, I saw the AFT production of The Iceman Cometh. Jason Robards, Jr. was marvelous, as always. But the production was no more unusual than any of the many previous stagings of that O’Neill standard.

  Hardly worth all the good intentions I expended in its behalf.

  INSTALLMENT 38 | 1 NOVEMBER 73

  THE DEATH-WISH OF A GOLDEN IDEA

  It was my intention this week to run that nostalgic Ohio State fraternity story, but something happened a few days ago that demands instant spleen-venting, because it’s current, so I’ll beg your indulgence and promise to import the promised intelligence in the next installment. But this time, I want to comment on the death-wish of a golden idea.

  Half a bunch of years ago, here in Clown Town, we had the same spate of discothèques all major American cities endured. We had our bucket shops and our kiddie havens, we had our posheries and our High Exclusives. One of the last group was run by several well-known, well-connected gentlemen who sank sizeable chunks of their personal fortunes in the joint. Trembling with crystal and scintillant with chrome, the fruggery was instantly the in-spot at which to be seen. The hoi and the polloi came out five nights of the week just to show off their razor cuts, their silicone injections, their poorboy sweaters and their Dr. Parks noses. The money fled from their pockets with a life all its own, and the gentlemen who had funded this sanctuary as a prime example of social work among the very hip, began to see themselves as direct lineal descendants of Croesus.

  They were momentarily raised to the level of guru by the slithering shadow of ennui always just abaft the cruising pattern of the Beautiful People. They were offering a 100% guaranteed, diamond-encrusted, for-dead-sure in spot, and no worry about maybe it is or maybe it ain’t and maybe there’s a superkickier scene on the next block: this was the place to be, where Rona Barrett would find her scabrous items for the next day’s column. It was Valhalla, and the keepers of that swinging gate felt like something out of a late Thirties’ Universal horrorflick, with the electricity running up out of their wall
ets, through their groins, down their arms and out their fingertips! They had The Power!

  So they skinned away their Via Veneto pimp altarboy smiles like copperheads shedding their hides, like high-platform gigolos dumping one withered Topeka widow for a tonier one, and they became the rapacious creeps they had always been, but had never had the clout to be openly. They began saying no entrance to this one, no table on the dance floor to that one, do you have a reservation to another, only members allowed to yet another one. And the rumbles began sub-strata. The little annoyances of the rabble. But…what the hell…hey, fuck’m, what do they matter!

  And one night, passing the joint, I heard a Pittsburgh matron scream from the sidewalk, from above her Emba Cerulean carapace, from the Outer Dark to which she’d been consigned with her balding hubby, the well-known advertised-on-tv credit orthodontist with five handy locations throughout Pittsburgh to serve your 24-hour chomper needs, I heard her shriek like an Arctic Tern seeking smorgasbord, “You snotty punk sonofabitch, you just wait till you need customers!”

  Well, gentle readers, there is a God, and one day soon thereafter He wasn’t busy backstopping the fortunes of the Mets and He dumped a load of poetic justice on them there glossy gentlemen, and another disco opened and, overnight, their boîte was as empty as an Egyptian threat.

  The dance floor reflected back no forty-dollar boots, the canapés went unscarfed, the noise level of The Grateful Dead served to deaden no semicircular canals save those of the maître d’ and when Gay Talese came to Hollywood he went elsewhere.

  Because the best those two nerds had to offer, at the height of their most golden moments, was nothing more than an upholstered box to hold the Chanel-sweating bodies of bubble-heads happily kept off the city streets for a few hours.

  But the American Film Theatre has something truly lovely to offer, and for the Ely Landau Organization (who lie behind the AFT concept) to practice the same sort of arrogant, swinish, supercilious, cavalier, common garden variety rude behavior, is tantamount to a naked death-wish.