One of my favorite examples of Sturgeon prose-poetry occurs when Leo asserts his reality by describing memories he carries around that are “intimately my own.” At my suggestion, Charlie Brown published this alongside Sturgeon’s obituary in Locus (“The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field”). Inevitably, some of Leo’s “memories” seem to be drawn from his creator’s own memory banks. Sturgeon was indeed “on the beach” in Port Arthur, Texas during his Merchant Marine days in 1937–39. He “pulled ropes” for the Barnes Circus in the summer of 1934. He did play guitar, though not professionally. The memories from Jamaica and Puerto Rico are presumably from the author’s experiences when he lived on those islands in the early 1940s. And he did have a brother, Peter, who was slightly older than he.
In a letter (written but not sent) to his ex-wife soon after writing “It Wasn’t Syzygy,” Sturgeon said, I was in love last December—hurriedly, deeply in love, with an urgency that was new to me. Perhaps this brief relationship, with a woman named Marcia, played a part in inspiring this story.
When the story first appeared in a Sturgeon collection, E Pluribus Unicorn, in 1953, TS restored his original title in place of “The Deadly Ratio,” which had been imposed against his will.
“The Blue Letter”: unpublished until now. Written January-February 1947, during a productive month at a friend’s home in Newcastle, Pennsylvania. On March 10, 1947, the day he got the exciting news that his 1939 story “Bianca’s Hands” had won the thousand-dollar Argosy prize, TS wrote his ex-wife, Dorothe: I spent a month away from New York, being by myself and writing. I wrote “Wham Bop” and “The Blue Letter” and “Thunder and Roses” [which he’d begun before leaving New York] and “It Wasn’t Syzygy” and “The Place,” and got a good start on the dog story. Two of these have sold; the rest are slicks [aimed at non-science-fiction, better-paying markets] and my agent [Scott Meredith, as of 1/47] tells me they’re sure things. But they haven’t sold yet. I got so I couldn’t write, for waiting. Later in the same letter he said, I have written well since then [last December]—better than ever, notably in “Thunder and Roses” and “The Blue Letter,” just because “Bianca’s Hands” had been rewritten.
The manuscript for this story was in the cache of papers Noël Sturgeon and I found in Woodstock in 1993, amidst a set of story fragments and pages on which TS talked to himself trying to develop story plots. The manuscript is untitled (but I feel certain it is the story referred to in the letter quoted above), and has pencil notes on the back indicating TS was considering rewriting or extending the story (Tomorrow nite is different). Amongst the many notes in this set of papers is one that says: Work the Blue Letter into a yarn: the guy, in this hassle, is thrown into a different moral matrix … maybe made to explain his emotions to aliens. Sturgeon did successfully rework another 1947 mainstream story, “Hurricane Trio,” in this manner in 1954.
(No manuscript for or other trace of “The Place” has yet been found.)
In spring 1945 Sturgeon did indeed receive an unexpected letter from his wife, after a separation of eight months and two thousand miles, asking for a divorce.
In Sturgeon’s papers is a 15-page manuscript for an unfinished, untitled story about a man named Hamilton who, like Sturgeon, decided it would be a good idea to go back East and get a job, and then send for his wife.… In the first week of the eleventh month of their separation, he got the short note asking for a divorce. Also like Sturgeon, he moves into the apartment of a friend who is a ham radio operator. The unfinished story does introduce alien observers who are attempting to understand the paradoxes in the moral code of earthlings. One plot thread involves the mysterious atomic blasting of Newcastle, PA, which suggests the fragment was written during or after Sturgeon’s month in Newcastle. Hamilton is described as going to pieces not just because of the divorce but because of his paralysis and that fact that he would have to live with the memory of doing nothing about it.
“Wham Bop!”: first published in Varsity (“the young men’s magazine,” published by Parents Institute, apparently for high school boys), November 1947. This is its first book publication. Special thanks to Kyle McAbee who located this very rare Sturgeon story in the Library of Congress. Written January-February 1947.
This was the first (and one of the few) Sturgeon stories published in a non-science-fiction-or-fantasy magazine other than the early McClure Syndicate stories. He did sell a story called “Clock Wise” in early 1946; I believe this is probably the story published in Calling All Boys, apparently in 1948, under the title “The Clock.” I have been unable to locate a copy of this or “Smoke” (which also appeared in Calling All Boys). If anyone is able to supply either of these stories, or any other story that seems to have been overlooked in these volumes, please do send us a copy and it will be included, out-of-chronology, in a future volume.
In April 1946 in a letter to his mother, TS wrote, I met a fellow in Puerto Rico [in 1943–44] called Jeff. I picked him up because he played exquisite swing trumpet to my electric guitar.
Magazine blurb: MANUEL HAD EVERYTHING IT TAKES TO BEAT THE SKINS IN THE BIG TIME—AND HE WAS SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW THAT YOU CAN’T GET AHEAD PLAYING SOMEONE ELSE’S DRUMS.
“Well Spiced”: first published in Zane Grey’s Western Magazine, February 1949. Written in mid-1947.
Don Ward, in his introduction to the 1973 collection Sturgeon’s West, wrote: “When I suggested to a leading practitioner of science-fiction and fantasy that he write a Western story little did I suspect what would result. At the time I was editing Zane Grey’s Western, a monthly magazine that enjoyed a substantial acceptance among the followers of the genre. I was also an enthusiastic reader of science-fiction. One night I read a wondrous tale, ‘Maturity,’ and its author was Theodore Sturgeon. I liked the humor and the significance, and, above all, the sheer humanity of it, so much that I wrote a letter to Sturgeon. I told him how much I enjoyed ‘Maturity’ and made that suggestion, wistfully—it would be a special pleasure for ZGW readers if he would do a story with some of those elements for that magazine. Several weeks later, the mail brought to my desk a Western story by Theodore Sturgeon: ‘Well Spiced.’ ”
On July 4th, 1947, TS wrote to his mother: I have just sold a swing-music story to a new Parents’ Institute rag called Varsity and, at editorial request a western story to Zane Grey Western Magazine. I am very pleased with these two sales, as they represent complete departures from the sci-fantasy field. And about time. Don’t worry—I shall never stop writing fantasy. But at the same time I am a commercial writer with enough on the ball, I think, to be able to write bread-and-butter stuff for many other markets. It’s the only way I can stop living hand-to-mouth, and the only way I can hit the slicks, even though my friend Heinlein has sold four stf numbers to the Satevepost at something over a thousand per each.… In short, I think I am due for a flock of sales.
“Hurricane Trio”: first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1955. Substantially written in summer or fall 1947; later revised and expanded, probably in 1954 or early 1955.
In a letter to his mother, Jan. 2, 1948, TS wrote, Margaret Cousins of Good Housekeeping, which pays a minimum of $750 per story, has been profoundly impressed by my work. “The Professor’s Teddy-Bear,” a horror story which my agent sent to her for fun, scared the hell out of her; it was followed immediately by a slick story called “Hurricane Trio,” which had three characters, two women and a man, and the entire action took place in bed … all in the best of taste, of course, and very lushly written. She wanted to meet me after that, and did; I had a nice long chat with her; she gave me a collection of twenty-five Good Housekeeping stories and begged me to write something for her.
Good Housekeeping never did buy a story from him; unfortunately. Ray Bradbury’s prediction that TS would soon start selling a lot of stories to “the slicks,” the high-paying magazine markets—see “Maturity” notes—never came true, despite Sturgeon’s frequently expressed desire for success of that sort. Scie
nce fiction critic and author James Blish alluded to this frustrating circumstance in a 1961 review of Sturgeon’s novel Venus Plus X by saying, “[the] short sketches of contemporary life [included in the novel] are good enough to show, as did ‘Hurricane Trio,’ how expertly Sturgeon could write mainstream fiction given just one editor in that field with the wit to recognize the fact.”
In his introduction to Sturgeon’s 1955 collection A Way Home, Groff Conklin wrote: “The author has said that in its original form this story [‘Hurricane Trio’] contained no element of science fiction, and perhaps some will consider that it should finally have been written that way. Mr. Sturgeon’s point, however, is not that he used an alien deus ex—or rather, in—machina to resolve his plot, but rather to heighten the basic reality of the terrible human dilemma with which the story is concerned and its slow solution by the three people involved.”
Science fiction author and anthologist Judith Merril, in her forthcoming memoir Better to Have Loved (quoted here by kind permission of the author), speaks of her affair with Sturgeon in the early months of 1947 and the week when he (and Merril) met Sturgeon’s future wife Mary Mair: “On the 15th, Ted wrote to tell me Mary was still there, and he had made love to her. He was big on monogamy in those days and could hardly believe he now wanted both of us. He was, actually, in torment.”
Poet Ree Dragonette, a childhood friend of Sturgeon’s who lived with him in New York in 1946, told me in an interview in 1976 that a difficult moment in their relationship occurred when they were visiting Cape Cod in the summer of 1946 and found themselves confined indoors by the wind and rain of a nearby hurricane.
“That Low”: first published in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, October 1948. Written in summer or fall 1947.
Fowler’s need to chip, chip, chip for a long, long time before he could ever call himself honestly broke again is an echo of TS’s own financial circumstances at the time. He wrote his mother in 1/48: Mary and I want to marry. We decided at first to wait until my debts were paid, or at least until I was within a thousand or two of being honestly broke.
“Memory”: first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1948. Written in summer or fall 1947.
“There Is No Defense”: first published in Astounding Science Fiction, February 1948. Written in summer or fall 1947.
In the “In Times to Come” section in Astounding for 1/48, editor Campbell wrote, “The feature novelette next month is by a fellow we’ve heard from before—Ted Sturgeon. It’s called ‘There Is No Defense,’ but it is not about atomic bomb warfare. It does contain a nice proposition, and it makes a fascinating yarn. There’s an old saying ‘It takes two to make a quarrel’; that isn’t so at all. The fact that it takes only one to make a quarrel is proven in the beginning of this yarn—and in the end they find it takes nobody at all to make a quarrel!”
Sturgeon was not a newcomer to issues of militarism versus pacifism. In 1975, in a talk at a Unitarian church, he said: Back in the late ’30s, when I was a high school kid, I was organizing peace marches and condemning the armaments maker and so on. We used to march around to [the song] “Joe Hill” all the time.
“The Professor’s Teddy Bear”: first published in Weird Tales, March 1948. Written in fall 1947.
The first piece of “horror” fiction written by Sturgeon after his long-rejected early story “Bianca’s Hands” won the $1000 first prize in a prestigious short story contest in England in March 1947.
“A Way Home”: first published in Amazing Stories, April 1953 (under the title “The Way Home”). Written in fall 1947.
In his 1/2/48 letter to his mother quoted in the “Hurricane Trio” notes, TS said that the Good Housekeeping editor had also been shown: another of my stories called “A Way Home,” which was written immediately after the “Teddy Bear” to prove that one person could write two stories so extremely different from one another that they couldn’t possibly have been written by the same person.
This became the title story of Sturgeon’s 1955 short story collection A Way Home. In his introduction to that collection, Groff Conklin wrote: “There is one tale in this book that is not science fiction at all. The title story, ‘A Way Home,’ originally appeared in a science-fiction magazine, but it is in reality a poignant study of boy psychology. Since boys and girls are by nature spinners of fantasy, dreamers by day as well as night, the story carries with it an atmosphere of fantasy, but closer examination will reveal that it is a thoroughly real incident in a child’s development.
The About the Author page in the back of the book concludes: “Of his writing, Mr. Sturgeon says, I write what I write to find a way home. “Home” in this sense is what one wants. It is what one wants to be. In one context it is love; in another, truth. It can twist itself about and simply be an other-place; a place any time away from here. A way home can be a long way or a very short way. Sometimes it is a long way of finding out what the short way is. Home is also what one believes, and those very other things, what one believed and what one is coming to believe now, for later. So I write long stories and short stories and angry stories and funny ones so that they can be homes for me, that I had, that I have, that I wish.”
Corrections and addenda:
The story “August Sixth, 1945” included in Killdozer!, Vol. III of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon was described in the Story Notes for Vol. III as “unpublished.” This is incorrect. I have since learned that the full text was published as a letter from Theodore Sturgeon in the “Brass Tacks” letter column in the December, 1945 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction. My thanks to Charles Morris for providing this information.
Appendix
The Original Second Half Of “Maturity”
[BECAUSE THE SECOND half of “Maturity” was substantially rewritten for Sturgeon’s first book in 1948, the original text is made available below. There are no significant changes in the book version prior to the paragraph that begins this appendix (see this page in the rewritten version).]
But not from the thoughts of a few people. Drs. Wenzell and Warfield compiled and annotated Robin English’s case history, with as close a psychological analysis as they could manage. Ostensibly, the work was purely one of professional interest; and yet if it led to a rational conclusion as to where he was and what he was doing, who could say that such a conclusion was not the reason for the work? In any case, the book was not published, but rested neatly in the active files of Mel Warfield’s case records, and grew. And then there was one Voisier, himself a mysterious character about whom little was known except his aquiline features and unbuttoning eyes and his wealth, all of which were underestimated. Voisier thought about Robin a great deal; and because he was Voisier, he was able to gain scraps of information not available to most people. The conclusions he drew from two or three of these, one afternoon, led to the ringing of Peg’s phone.
“Dr. Wenzell?”
“Yes?”
“Voisier speaking. Do you know Robin English?”
“Voisier, the producer? Oh, how do you do? Yes, I—have met Robin English.”
“Do you happen to know where he is?”
“Does anyone?” she countered. “I understand that his lawyers—”
Voisier’s soft chuckle slid over the wire and came out of the receiver like little audible smoke rings. “I have encountered his lawyers. Dr. Wenzell, I have to find out where he is.”
“What has that to do with me?” Peg asked cautiously.
“There is some connection between you and Robin English,” said Voisier smoothly. “Just a moment—I’m not trying to find out what it is, and I don’t care. I know only that it is a matter of professional interest to you and a Dr. Mellet Warfield; and I don’t care what it is. I’ll be frank with you; I must see him purely on a business matter. It will be to his advantage—all of his dealings with me have been, you know. After all, I discovered him.”
“You discovered him the way the atom bomb was discovered by the mayor of Hiroshima,” said
Peg tartly.
Voisier laughed urbanely. “Very good.” Peg was figuratively conscious of the swing of his boom as he changed his conversational tack. “Please, Dr. Wenzell—let’s not get off on the wrong foot. I’m sorry if I seem to pry. Will you take lunch with me tomorrow?”
“I’m sorry. I’m busy tomorrow.”
“Dinner this evening, then. That would be better.”
“I am completely tied up, thank you,” said Peg, over the rustle of silk in his voice. “And besides, I do not know where Robin English is or what he is doing. Goodb—”
“I know what he is doing,” said Voisier quickly.
“You—”
Through a smile, Voisier’s easy voice said, “Of course. I don’t know where he is, that’s all. I thought that with what I know and what you know we might be able to locate him. For his own good, of course. I gather that you would like very much to know where he is.”
“What’s he doing?”
“I can’t tell you over the phone!” he said, in the voice in which one says “You mustn’t play with Daddy’s watch!”
“I wish you—” said Peg sharply, and then sighed. “When can I see you?”
“Thank you very much, doctor,” he said abjectly, and was that a touch of relief in his voice? “Dinner tonight, then—unless you are busy, in which case … ah … cocktail time is practically here. I could meet you this afternoon, if you could—”
“Thank you,” she said, and startlingly, she blushed at the eagerness she heard in her own voice. “How soon can you get here?”
“Very soon. I know where it is. I’ll see you in a moment. And thanks again.”
Thunder and Roses Page 41