Partners in Wonder

by Harlan Ellison

  I was hooked. I read ceaselessly about the slayings. And without my even knowing it, I began to form my own conclusions as to who Jack might have been.

  The concept of the “invisible killer”—an assassin who could be seen near the site of a crime and not be considered a suspect—stuck with me. The audacity of the crimes and their relatively open nature—in streets and courts and alleys—seemed to insist that an “invisible killer” was my man. Invisible? Why, consider, in Victorian London, a policeman would be invisible, a midwife would be invisible, and…a clergyman would be invisible.

  The way in which the poor harlots were butchered indicated two things to me: a man obviously familiar with surgical technique, and a man addicted to the concept of femininity prevalent at the time.

  But most of all, the pattern and manner of the crimes suggested to me—over and above the obvious derangement of the assassin—that the clergyman/butcher was trying to make a statement. A grisly and quite mad statement, to be sure. But a statement, nonetheless.

  So I continued my reading with these related facts in mind. And everywhere I read, the name of the Reverend Samuel Barnett appeared with regularity. He was a socially conscious man who lived in the general area, at Toynbee Hall. And his wife had circulated the petition to Queen Victoria. He had the right kind of background, he certainly had the religious fervor to want to see the slums cleared at almost any cost.

  My mind bridged the gap. If not Barnett—to which statement, even in fiction, about a man long since dead, would be attached the dangers of libel and slander—then someone close to Barnett. A younger man, perhaps. And from one concept to another the theory worked itself out, till I had in my Writer’s Brain a portrait of exactly who Jack the Ripper was and what his motives had been.

  (I was gratified personally to read Tom Cullen’s book on the Ripper, after this theory had been established in my mind, and find that in many ways—though not as completely or to the same suspect—he had attached the same drives to his Ripper as I to mine.)

  Now began a period of writing that stretched out over many weeks. This was one of the hardest stories I ever wrote. I was furious at the limitations of the printed page, the line-for-line rigidity of QWERTYUIOP. I wanted to break out, and the best I could do was use typographical tricks, which are in the final analysis little more than tricks. There must be some way a writer can write a book that has all the visual and sensory impact of a movie!

  In any case, my story is now told.

  The Jack I present is the Jack in all of us, of course. The Jack that tells us to stand and watch as a Catherine Genovese gets knifed, the Jack that condones Vietnam because we don’t care to get involved, the Jack that watches the genocide of the Black Panthers with righteous unconcern, the Jack who accepts a My Lai slaughter as the “fortunes of war,” the Jack that we need. We are a culture that needs its monsters.

  We have to deify our Al Capones, our Billy the Kids, our Jesse Jameses, and all the others including Jack Ruby, General Walker, Charles Manson, Adolf Hitler, Charlie Starkweather and even Richard Speck, whose Ripper-like butchery of the Chicago nurses has already begun to be thought of as modern legend.

  We are a culture that creates its killers and its monsters and then provides for them the one thing Jack was never able to have: reality. He was a doomed man who wanted desperately to be recognized for what he had done (as consider the notes he wrote), but could not come out in the open for fear of capture. The torn-in-two directions of a man who senses that the mob will revere him, even as they kill him.

  That is the message of this story. You are the monsters.

  INTRODUCTION

  Avram Davidson and Harlan Ellison

  UP CHRISTOPHER TO MADNESS

  Scherzo for Schizoids

  Notes on a Collaboration

  by Harlan Ellison

  ’58 was a helluva year. I was midway through my Army service, separated from the nut I was later to divorce, going through a strange phase in my writing, hating every minute of the waking hours.

  I had this buddy, I’ve written stories about him: he was (and is) a fantastic character. His name was Derry. We called him the Tiger. He was a millionaire. A PFC like me. A similar kook. We got in lots of trouble. Double-dated (until the gay husband of the Louisville poetess he was balling got hip to me sleeping on the stairs as watch-dog while Derry was updecks stoking the Antic Arts), fought the military to a standstill with our goldbricking (until my C.O. found out that Tiger and I were sharing expenses on an off-post trailer so we could seed the Kentucky female population, despite the fact that we weren’t entitled to live off-post), helped each other out (he sent me Mars Bars while I was waiting for the C.O. to figure out how to court-martial my ass into Leavenworth), and in general made the scene together.

  Derry and I decided to take a three-day pass one Thanksgiving and skim up to Worcester, Mass., which his family owned. His last name was Taylor, and it is an indescribable sort of mind-boggle to drive down a New England street and see the Taylor Building, the Taylor Bank & Trust, Taylor Savings & Loan, Taylor Automotive, Taylor Theater…

  We stopped off in New York for the night, before hopping on up to Boston (some time I’ll tell you about that two days in Worcester, with the Tiger’s mother packing us a “box-lunch” for the Dartmouth-Harvard game that consisted of Lachryma Christi, individual guinea hens and hot clam chowder…oh, those rock-ribbed Yankee moneyfolk sure as hell know how to live!) and we were invited to a party at the home of Horace L. Gold, then editor of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine.

  In the crowd at that party was a chick I had known some years before in San Francisco. She was easily the most twisted lady I’ve ever met (with the exception of my first and third wives, who had a corner on the market), and when it came to sex, she knew more tricks with a bar of soap than the Marquis de Sade and Leopold Sacher-Masoch combined. The Tiger and I spent the night before Boston at her pad…but that’s quite another story.

  Also attendant at the party was a howitzer-shell-shaped man with a truly overwhelming hirsute appearance. He wore a yarmulkah, a skullcap, for all you goyim, and when I made to light one of the ten thousand cigarettes he smoked that night, he cleverly cupped one hand around it in case I had the ineptitude to set his beard on fire. This was Avram Davidson.

  When I was preparing the notes for this article, in 1965, it dawned on me that I had known Avram so long, I’d forgotten just when and where we had first encountered one another. I wrote to him in Berkeley, California, where he was living at the time, and asked him. I print herewith, his reply in toto:

  “We first met at a party in Horace G’s home that time you were in the millatree with Derry the Tiger. You tried to feel me up and I knocked you on your ass. Is there anything else you wanna know, snotnose?”

  Years later, circa 1961, when I was long-since free of The Nut and living in Greenwich Village, Avram and I renewed acquaintances, and we chummed it up middlin’ fair. We used to go down to the Paperbook Gallery (now vanished, woe to us all) on the corner of West 10th Street and Seventh Avenue, to play skittles. Skittles is a game of skill whose Welsh origins are shrouded in secret, much like those of Stonehenge (remember “beer & skittles”—1680?), and is played with a box-like playing-field just somewhere short of four feet long, using a top spun through a series of connected chambers, knocking down pins in those chambers to accumulate points.

  One night Avram and myself, and half a dozen others, including several comely wenches, were skittling, when a group of Bleecker Street teddy-boys descended on the scene and began using profane language in the presence of our damsels. “Cease and desist such coarse badinage,” I instructed them in my most vibrant Robert Ruark voice, “or I will come up there and kick the piss outta you.” They scoffed, heretical little twits, and so I bade a tiny urchin, clumped adoringly to the right of my Thom McAn, “Hie thee hence to the open-air market yonder dorten, and fetch me a crate box of purest wood.” The tot scampered, returned with the crate, and as the j.d.�
�s watched in awed silence, I proceeded with half a dozen karate-cum-kung-fu chops to render it into a tidy pile of kindling. Fear lay like a patina of dust across their acne-pocked countenances (counteni? countenubim?). They scuttled away, crablike, in the night. I puffed up like a pouter pigeon, having saved the scene from the ravages of the street gangs.

  They returned, doubled in number. One of them had a tire iron. One of them had a broken quart bottle of Rheingold Beer. One of them had a ball-peen hammer. One of them had a bike chain. One of them had a zip gun. One of them had a 12” Italian stiletto which he used to clean his fingernails. It was the kid with the hammer I felt most uneasy about. He kept grinning. At me.

  Everyone vanished. Remaining: Avram, myself, and the half dozen clingers-on, who felt they’d best hang close for protection. Fat chance. We decided to start walking. We moved out, and the horde followed us. As they tracked us slowly (“Don’t turn, kemo sabe, if they see fear in your eyes, they’ll attack.”) down Seventh Avenue, and up Christopher Street to the corner of Bleecker, Avram nudged in close and in true 007 style mumbled out of the corner of his mouth, “Now see what you’ve gone and went and done, stupid!?!” I threw him a withering F. Van Wyck Mason hero sneer, straight out of an historical novel. When we got to the corner, I sent the women away; as the gang had followed us, they had whistled up friends from cubbyholes and niches along the street, till now the horde was close to fifty kids, all of whom outweighed, outheightened, outferocious’d me. There I stood, virtually alone before a latter-day Attila’s horde. The street had grown silent and chill with the expectant air of a neighborhood holding its breath for the gentle sound of blood drip-drip-dripping onto the cobbles. I turned around, and there was Avram, at a street sanitation waste basket, methodically twisting a piece of rope from a grocery on the corner into a thuggee strangle-knot. My eyes widened. Was this the gentle, restrained, holy man, but lately descended from his Ivory Tower of literary purity? I was damned if I’d be upstaged by a man twice my age.

  I walked into the center of the throng, picked one of the pock-marked punks, and jabbed a finger in his chest. “You,” I snapped in my best Raymond Chandler manner. “You’ve been mouthing-off pretty good. I’m not worrying about the rest of these guys, I want a piece of you, busymouth.” The crowd suddenly backed off, leaving punkie and me in the center. It was an official sort of challenge. (In case you’re wondering, I was scared witless.)

  But at that single moment in time, as it must come to all men, I received proof positive of whether I was cowardly or something else. At least, I was not a coward. It helps me through my declining years, that knowledge.

  We squared off, and at that moment an ex-member of the gang, graduated to the Better Life—boosting cars, robbing pharmacies, mugging homosexuals, et al—made the scene, demanded to know what was happening, and before any of the young punks could say anything, I dove in with, “They’re trying to clutter up a nice Saturday night with a bop.” He dispersed them, shook my hand, and with Avram riding shotgun—still dangling that killer-rope from his meaty paw—we located the chicks, and lived to fight another day.

  This story was written in the December and January of 1961-2 in a New York just starting to tremble with the underground temblors of a racial volcano that has since erupted. I was living uptown with two dear friends, Leo & Diane Dillon (who illustrated “Up Christopher to Madness” in its original magazine appearance, incidentally, and who did the dust wrapper of this book). They had put me up temporarily, because I was midway between Chicago and Hollywood. (Kindly be good enough not to ask how New York came to be midway between Chicago and L.A.)

  Anyhow, there I was sleeping on their sofa, and they were sleeping on the floor (define the nature and limitations of love-friendship; I can’t) and Avram came over. He was living across from Columbia University in a great echoing apartment building where little old ladies went to die, and there was a deli around the block that had the grooviest rye bread you’ve ever eaten.

  I don’t remember who first said, “Let’s collaborate on a story,” but one of us did, and we started writing. We had no title, we had no plot, and we had no market in mind. Which is possible why this story is the most offbeat one either of us has written. It is in neither of our styles, yet it is both our styles.

  It was written over a period of a week, with one or the other of us trotting to the other’s residence, typing a few paragraphs, leaving the plot in an insoluble condition, smirking at the pickle we had left the other in, and skulking out again. I must have eaten a dozen loaves of rye bread.

  “Up Christopher to Madness” is a funny story. I tell you this in front, if you’re reading the article first, so you’ll know. And afterward, in case you read the story first, so you’ll feel dense at not having gotten the humor. Either way, you can’t win.

  It is written in a pseudo-Ring Lardner style, and if, as you read it, you hear it being spoken by, say, Sheldon Leonard, you will get more out of it. It is based upon a much-loved memory of Greenwich Village days in which there was a sight-seeing train that roamed the Village streets, in the shape of a long caterpillar. It was a groove. The fellow who piloted it was dressed like a clown, and tourists used to ride it with gay abandon. We took that as the opening element of the story, and sort of freewheeled from there.

  The story is filled with subtle literary allusions (we like to think). I will try and explain some of the more obscure of these.

  •The Oliver was a “typewriting machine.” The “typewriter” was the girl who operated it. She wore shirtwaists and her name was Fannie, or maybe, Hattie.

  •A six-for-fiver is a guy who lends you five bucks today and you pay him six back tomorrow. You’d damned well better.

  •The Edsel was a myth perpetuated by the Ford Motor Company. It falls into the category of other mythological creatures like unicorns, hippogriffs, beatniks, leprechauns, elves and Governor George Wallace. There were only two of these beasts sold in the United States. What’s that? You bought the other one?

  •Hitchcock made a movie called The Birds. It was for the.

  •Coproliths are fossilized pre-cow cow-pats, as it were. Curators of Vertebrate Paleontology hoard them like jewels, now and then locking the museum doors so that they can gloat and titter over their hoard like mad, fiendish misers. You or me—they’d lock us up.

  •“The Peat Bog Soldiers” is one of the two English language phonograph records owned by Radio Moscow. The author and composer would be rich by now, if Radio Moscow paid royalties.

  •Gefilte fish is a little difficult to try and explain. It is a Semitic provender composed (as stated in the story) of various bits of fish. It has a taste somewhere between heavenly and ghastly, depending on your ethnic heritage and the resiliency of your inner plumbing. Best source of reference is your nearest delicatessen. If you live in Chitling Switch, Montana, you are probably out of luck, and will have to take our word for it.

  •Base canard is the bottom duck in a beachside pyramid of athletic French ducks. You believe that, you’ll believe anything.

  •Miltowns are tranquilizers. Lead Miltowns is gotta be bullets. Permanent tranquilizers. That’s called a clever use of language.

  •Old Rite Amishmen do not have their pictures taken. They do not dance. They do not drive around in fast cars. They do not covet their neighbor’s wives, daughters, oxen or television sets. Their neighbors are also Old Rite Amish and so have no television sets. They do not sing except in Church. They do not smile very much. The way they tell it, they’re leading the pure good life. That’s their story.

  •A pothead is another name for a teahead is another name for a grasshead is another name for a weedhead is another name for one’a them dudes what smokes them funky little brown cigarettes and gets that funky grin on his funky face.

  •Countess Mara ties are usually worn by mobsters. You can spot them: the Good Countess has her crest on the front of the tie, which strikes me as being a pretty blatant and successful attempt at free advertisin
g. They are worn with white-on-white shirts, white-on-white suits, white-on-white faces.

  •The Red & Blue Networks were divisions of CBS way back when. Or was it NBC? It was the one that brought you The Shadow, sponsored by Blue Coal. And I Love A Mystery. Remember Jack, Doc & Reggie? Know who played Reggie? Tony Randall. Now how’s that for knocking you off your pins!

  •Felucca: a small coasting vessel propelled by oars or lateen sails, or both; used chiefly in the Mediterranean. And you thought this book was just filled with dumb stories. Don’t say we don’t got educational information.

  •Allan Bloch makes sandals in the Village. He makes ’em good like a cobbler should. Unpaid advt.

  •The reference to windmills quivering in relation to Cozenage, refers back to Don Quixote. If you never read the book, the allusion is wasted on you, illiterate! Javert was the police inspector who hounded Jean Valjean in Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. If you never read that one, what are you doing reading something what ain’t a Giant Golden Book?

  •Bawdy-Lair was a depraved French poet who wrote Les Fleurs du Mal which means “Flowers Of Evil.” He was depraved cause he was deprived. A word to the wise…is usually pointless….

  •Stagecoaches. Technically and legally, all buses in New York City are still stagecoaches. Sonofabitch!

  •“…stone that puts the stars to flight,” i.e., the sun, you dopes, according to the Quatrains of Omar Khayyam.

  •Old 96, viz. Old 97: Mr. Ellison knows nothing of folksongs, nothing of railroading: also he can’t count. The foregoing was a Davidsonian put-down. Well, screw you, fuzzy!