Which is why, gentle readers, you find Installment 30 of The Harlan Ellison Hornbook in something called The Weekly News (which ain’t nearly as dramatic a title as, say, The Daily Planet or The Underground Crusader or The Illustrated Press, but since Kunkin isn’t Morgan Edge or Perry White or even Steve Wilson, and since L.A. isn’t Metropolis or even Big Town, I suppose it’ll suffice). It is my hope and fervent desire that you all support the hell out of The Weekly News, because I’ve worn holes in my soles and my souls, lugging this farrago of peripatetic reportage and reminiscence from scandal sheet to scandal sheet.
For the nonce, in any case, here is home. I have a new, bright piece of logo art done for the column by Hugo award-winning fantasy artist Tim Kirk, I have my scatterdemalion self together, my act ready to display, and I hope those of you who read me in other printed media will let your friends know where I am now. Whenever I missed a few weeks in the Freep, a flood of ugly and berserk letters washed over the Freep desks, and it would only be a kindness to advise those maniacs that their connection and supply can now be found nestled in these pages.
In short, we’ve all suffered enough, so let’s settle down to a smooth time of regular columns and please! don’t nobody make no sudden moves. Hello, again.
What my house is like, is a big elephant flophouse. I moved out of the tree house in Beverly Glen in March of 1966 when I married The Carnivorous Plant, Lory Patrick, my third ill-starred attempt at being A Nice Married Person, and moved in here, to what has come to be known as Ellison Wonderland. (I will not apologize for the play on words.) The Asp, Ms. Patrick, lasted forty-five days and was sent on her pillaging way, and I’ve been living here “alone” in these nine rooms and two-and-a-half baths for seven years. Some other time I’ll describe the joint room by room—they tell me it’s a rare playpen that Better Homes and Gardens would greatly desire to photograph—and when I recover my sanity from those 45 days of horror with The Dragon Lady Patrick, I’ll do a novel about it (to be titled TAKEN, as in “patsy”)—but at the moment, what I want to illuminate is the procession of friends, writers, lady friends (which is a more weighted term than simply “friends,” if you ken my meaning), deadbeats, criminals, revolutionaries, neurotics, flippos, random psychopaths and celebrities who use this house as a way-station on the underground railroad or as a brief stopover in the erratic progress of their spotty lives.
Because the truth of the matter is that during my seven years here in Ellison Wonderland I’ve lived strictly alone for only five months.
There are always at least two or three other residents in the house. I’m told it is a happy place (except when I’m behind deadlines and being pressured by lunatics from 20th Century-Fox, at which time, I’m told, the place bears a closer resemblance to the locale described by Dante Alighieri) and the Blue Bedroom has marked residence for such notables as Norman Spinrad, Theodore Sturgeon, Daphne Davis who started the N.Y. newspaper Rags, Edward Bryant, Prof. Darko Suvin, Bantam Books editor Sharon Delaney, ex-Doubleday editor Judith Glushanok, English writer Mary Ensor, Ben Bova who edits Analog, novelist Richard Hill, sf author Keith Laumer, feminist Vonda McIntyre, an ex-con who is currently doing smashingly well as a novelist, Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones, and so many others I go into Cheyne-Stokes breathing when I try computing the numbers of the horde.
And that’s just the blue bedroom.
Not a week passes in which other parts of the house are not festooned with sleeping bags, sheets and blankets on the sofa, pishy-pads on the waterbed, dining room carpet set up with pillows as mattress. Come summer, and the requests pile in from my ex-students at the various Clarion Writers’ Workshops for snooze space whilst they pass through the City of the Angels. I just got rid of Robert Lilly, Gus Hasford, two young women whose names I never learned, and Arthur Byron Cover, well-known Tazewell, Virginia, layabout and incipient novelist. Tim Kirk will be living here next week while he completes the illustrations for my Harper & Row anthology, THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS; Lisa Tuttle is supposed to be coming from Dallas or Houston or some Texaswhere; Ben Bova will be back so we can work on our ABC-TV Movie of the Week, Brillo; Susan C. Lette has wangled a couple of weeks off from her husband and kids so she can come here to write; Judith Glushanok will be returning from London and need a place to flop; and when David Wise returns from Seattle I’m terrified to learn that Arthur Byron Cover will be back here with his mismatched argyle socks and his nine hundred and seventy-two thousand comic books. My milk bill is staggering.
My attitude toward all this is an oddly ambivalent mixture of feelings ranging from joy and pleasure at being surrounded by quick, clever and witty people whom I love and admire…to utter loathing of their presence when I want to work or be alone with a woman. From moment to moment it changes: my soul leaps with pride that I’m able to repay some of the kindnesses that were visited on me by writers and friends when I needed help, when I was getting started…and my brain burns with unreasoning annoyance that they take up space, kill my privacy, eat me out of house and home, and break my Looney Tunes drinking glasses. I vacillate between affection and gratitude that they are around to help me out when the workload gets unbearable or watch the house when I’m on tour…and rage when they don’t take out the garbage or wash the dishes and I have to spend valuable writing time being a housekeeper. My philosophy of life is that the meek shall inherit nothing but debasement, frustration and ignoble deaths; that there is security in personal strength; that you can fight City Hall and win; that any action is better than no action, even if it’s the wrong action; that you never reach glory or self-fulfillment unless you’re willing to risk everything, dare anything, put yourself dead on the line every time; and that once one becomes strong or rich or potent or powerful it is the responsibility of the strong to help the weak become strong. In this way, opening my home to those who—in my view, because I’m a selfish sonofabitch and I have no time for lames and whiners—have strength that merely needs time and circumstance to ripen, is a way of paying back dues to a world that has been very good to me. I am seldom disappointed in my choices of those helped in this way. Once or twice I’ve had people I loved dearly, who lived here, slip away into lives that creamed them: doping to destruction, running with killers of the soul, demeaning their talent, living lightless days and nights of sorrow and hopelessness. But for the most part, everyone who came here has gone away strengthened, their wings repaired, their egos inflated and toughened, and from those enrichments I’ve sustained my own feelings of worthiness. It’s a selfish practice, hardly one of nobility and humanitarianism.
So even when I bitch about returning home from a month on the road to find a freezer-full of steaks eaten, I know in a special part of my heart that it was money well spent.
Which doesn’t keep me from pissing and moaning about it, of course. If you want consistency, look for it in the graveyard; I’m a flawed, miserable human being and I’m not responsible for my lunacy or my contradictions.
Nor am I responsible for the madness that goes on in this house. Steve Herbst from Chicago going out one day and coming home with an electric piano which he set up in the living room and on which he drove us all mad playing the six repetitious barrelhouse riffs he thought would make him a rock star. For days!
Deborah Kenworthy writing from Buffalo that she wanted to get away from her family and she’d work as secretary for me in exchange for room and board, and then driving me up the wall with a personal manner that was a cross between Queen Victoria and Ilse Koch. (Ilse Koch was the lady who made lampshades out of Jews at Buchenwald.)
Ed Bryant coming for a weekend and staying three years, off and on, hoarding away cookies and peanut butter in the Blue Bedroom against, I suppose, the Apocalypse; squirreling away so many cases of diet cola that poor Jim Sutherland (about which loon more at another time) fell over them and banged his head on the wall, knocking loose the framed portrait of Ellison the Good, inscribed, “From your friend and mine, God.”
(I can’t resist.
) Jim Sutherland, current resident of Blue Hell, who goes out early in the dawn and crouches by the rear wall of the garden, waiting to catch a breakfast of fresh gecko as the little lizards come out to sun themselves. You should see his tongue. Ukh. Sutherland, turning himself into a turnip for the delight of Roz’s children. Sutherland, killing my tropical fish; Sutherland, swearing his bedroom is occupied by a giant chicken.
Oh god…Sutherland!
Gus Hasford, refusing to bathe. Cindy Dwan being saved from death by a mad dash to UCLA Emergency. Phil Mishkin appearing at the door in the wee hours, needing a bed till Julie would let him back in the house. Thirteen kids and their teacher from the Dayton Living Arts Center appearing with sleeping bags in a van that blocked the entire street. Robert Sheckley hiding out from publishers. Ted Sturgeon making paella with his hands. Sutherland’s Sure Death chili. Carol Botwin and her imbroglio with Adele Davis, right before my very eyes.
Yes, life here at Ellison Wonderland is a constant joy.
Something like traveling through Transylvania in the company of Genghis Khan, the Marquis de Sade, Little Nemo and Conan the Musclebound. I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea…that I don’t like all this company, but if you want a clearer, more detailed picture of what life is like here in these nine rooms and two-and-a-half baths, I refer you to “The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.”
God, and Arthur Byron Cover, willing, I’ll return next week for another report from the Country of the Blind.
INSTALLMENT 31
Interim Memo
It’s worse now. Horribly worse. It’s been eight years of Reagan. That drove the spikes home. Susan and I were doing a lecture gig at State University of New York, Stony Brook, oh, maybe a year ago. And during a midnight session—packed to the wall—I was babbling on about something or other, and I said:
“Blah blah blah blah Dachau blah blah blah somethingorother.” And I went on. But after a few seconds, a young woman—maybe nineteen, twenty, like that—raised her hand. I said, “Yes?” She said, “Who was that person you named?” I was confused; I hadn’t named any person. “Which person?” I asked.
“That dak-ow person.”
(To their holy credit, about half the students in the auditorium turned around and stared at her, their hair on end, disbelief on their faces.)
“Do you mean Dachau?” I asked. She nodded, bewildered at the stares of the assembled. The other half of the audience kept quiet, but it was apparent they didn’t know who that “dak-ow” guy was, either.
Utterly unmanned, I sighed, and felt such a pain in my chest that tears started to well up. I said, very softly, “Dachau wasn’t a person, Miss. It was a death-camp where they cremated millions of people. World War Two.”
It’s worse now. I know it’s not all students, it’s not all teenagers. But it’s oh so damned damned many of them. They seem to know nothing earlier than last week. And they’re smug about it. As if the essence of cool is to be tabula rasa. I’ve made gags out of it: they listen to rap music…which is an oxymoron; for them, nostalgia is breakfast; they’re the clone-children of Dan Quayle, the first Stepford Wife vice-president in the history of the United States. But the tears well up.
I am hardly the model of moral exemplar. More the crank, if truth be known. But I live by pride in reason, even when reason makes no practical sense. David Denby wrote a sentence in a film review in New York magazine last year, that says it best: “He can be petulant and whiny, a hero who is also a pain in the ass.”
And Hunter Thompson summed up my kind of fool when he referred to “…the dead-end loneliness of a man who makes his own rules.”
So I don’t hold myself up as the intellectual conscience of rats and mice, much less the human race.
But the tears do, yes they do, they do well up.
INSTALLMENT 31 | 16 AUGUST 73
WHY I FANTASIZE ABOUT USING AN AK-47 ON TEENAGERS
When I go out to lecture at colleges, I’m constantly amazed and saddened at the crippling apathy and lassitude of the vast majority of the student populations. They come slouching in to classrooms where they unexpectedly find me perched like a troll on a desk, their dulled and passive expressions momentarily raised to the level of comatose. I’m not talking about lecture halls or auditoriums where I’ve been publicly announced as a guest lecturer, but classrooms where my appearance has been at the whim of a professor who has read my stories and thinks I’d be a treat for his students. So I’m sprung on them without warning. Most of them have never read anything I’ve written. (That doesn’t distress me. Most of them have read nothing beyond that which is forced on them as classroom fodder; the obligatory pornobacks; LOVE STORY, THE OTHER; a little Tolkien or Heinlein’s STRANGER so they can carry their end of the conversation or, if it’s a guy, get laid; THE HAPPY HOOKER, something by Harold Robbins; a surfeit of Marvel comics.) So they wander in, find this creature recently fallen off the Moon, and they slump into seats, staring out from under lowered lashes, wary, semi-surly, daring me to bore their asses off, as do many of their professors.
No, I’m not disturbed that they’ve never read my work, most of them: go into the street and buttonhole any random dozen pedestrians, and ask them to name ten writers and, if you’re lucky, they’ll name Mickey Spillane, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and William Shakespeare. If you’re unlucky, they can’t even remember those bestselling names. The American reading public seldom notices that books are written; they seem, to them, to be artifacts that magically appear on newsstands, in Greyhound waiting rooms, left on top of the dryers in laundromats, underfoot in university common rooms. They don’t seem to realize there are human beings that sat in front of typewriters, even as I do now, and wrote those books. Even popular trash is all of a piece: zip, they just happened! THE GODFATHER, THE LOVE MACHINE, THE BETSY, LOVE STORY. Were it not for the manifest wonders of late-night talk shows, bombarding us with the likes of Jacqueline Susann, Erich Segal, Rex Reed and whatever “movie star” has recently had a biography ghost-written, they would not even know those names as being attachable to living (?), breathing (?) human beings. I take it in stride, truly. My teeth grind only occasionally. Just a little. My lectures draw large audiences and there is a sizeable group of people who actually look for my name on books. I’m hardly unknown. It’s an easily supportable existence.
But, with rare exceptions, a few minutes into my “presentation” and they come awake, watch, listen, ask questions, join in with the gags, the insults, the random bits of proffered information, and I do very nicely in classrooms, thank you.
Now if you’ve never attended one of my public gigs, you will have to take this on faith (or ask a friend who has been there when I’ve run my demented thought-processes past a crowd), but my “lectures” are enormously successful. As proof, just to get you on my side in this discussion, and to lay a groundwork of trust for what I’m about to say here, if I weren’t a good and stimulating lecturer, I wouldn’t be called on to play all the college dates I handle every year…something well over 200 speaking engagements in the last five years. And I wouldn’t command the speaking fees I get, which are usually many thousands a night, plus expenses.
So, if you’ll accept that I do happy numbers on a college audience, and do those numbers effectively, you’ll understand my sadness at the disenchantment engendered by the weary demeanor and dulled sensibilities of vast hordes of college students I confront annually. Please excuse my unbecoming modesty.
I used to be utterly gung ho behind the belief that “the Youth of America” will save us. Boy, did I learn my lesson. They are no better or nobler than my generation, which was the Silent Generation of the Fifties that scraped its hind legs together like Buddy Holly and the Crickets, served their time in the post-Korea ROTC, polluted the ecology without regard to the future and in general sat by and let Senator Joseph McCarthy spread his pall of paranoia, fear and Com
mie-hatred across the land. Kids today are just as fucked as we were. Maybe more so, because kids today at least had ten years of the Sixties to see what significant changes could be wrought by a tenor of revolution. (Case in point: yesterday morning, driving over to Warner Bros., I saw a girl about seventeen, wearing the “uniform,” pre-faded jeans, bare-midriff shirt permitting her protruberant gut to bulge visibly, capacious shoulder bag, deck platform hooker shoes…an ecology patch on the seat of her ass…standing a foot and a half in front of a litter basket on the corner of Ventura Boulevard and Laurel Canyon…hitchhiking…throwing filter-tip cigarette butts onto the sidewalk. When I yelled, “Litterbug!” at her, she gave me a killing look: how dare I put her down! Flipped me the bird. Nobler than my screwed-up generation, and all the ones who pummeled the world before me? Hell, no, Sunny Jim. Just as selfish, thoughtless, grungy and hypocritical.)
Maybe it’s because they do come out of those ten years of riot and carnage, Kent State and Jackson State, Vietnam, LBJ, Nixon, the assassination of King, the ecology awakening, the monstrousness of the political conventions, the supersonic jet boondoggle, the marching, the demonstrating, the Chicago Conspiracy Trial…all of it. Maybe they’re entitled to be apathetic, deadass uninvolved, sluggardly and concerned with Number One. Maybe all they have to look forward to each day is gutless rock, bad dope, inept sex, vegetarian astrology and the time-clock boredom of their classes. Maybe.
But maybe not.
I’ll tell you why I think maybe not.
When I’m lecturing, inevitably some clown gets personal and wants to know how much bread I make a year. I try to be very candid when I speak publicly—I’ll answer any question, to the best of my recollection, Senator—and I tell the pinhead I make in the neighborhood of a hundred grand a year.