Ah, well, so it goes.
INSTALLMENT 43 |
Interim Memo
Just when you thought it was safe to hang your balls again…
Remember Installment 9, in which I offended both heaven and earth with my “Fuck Xmas” screed? Well, by the time I’d been doing the Hornbook for a year, that column had become, er, uh, sorta infamous. Art Kunkin, publisher of the L.A. Weekly News, to which the column had been moved from the Freep, decided it would be a big seller, so he featured it on the front page (on bilious green newsprint) and called it “Harlan Ellison’s Famous Christmas Carol,” accompanied by a rough line-drawing of Scrooge and the words (of course) “Bah! Humbug!”
Now you may think this is a cheap way to include yet another column, when in fact all we’re doing is reproducing the first one—like an Andy Warhol painting—but it isn’t a cheap dodge, it is a semi-cheap dodge. I actually wrote a new introduction to this second appearance of what was intended as an annual event; and there was one paragraph changed that updated it in relation to the Watergate mess, then fully in blossom. So the two installments are not the same. Close, but not exactly.
And besides, think how annoyed you’d be if you got to the second page of this piece, found a lot of blank space, and the command to turn back to page such-and-such. This becomes the lesser of two conundra.
There is, however, a perplexment pursuant to this column.
This was the last piece I wrote for the L.A. Weekly News. The Hornbook abruptly ends in that journal, without announcement of termination, or explanation. I don’t remember why.
Between this installment and the next, three years elapsed; and the last three essays would never have been written had not I received a call from John Heidenry, an excellent writer and editor, then living in Missouri, who was contemplating starting a monthly tabloid-style review of literature, politics, and the arts. He asked if I’d be interested in reviving the Hornbook on a monthly basis, and for reasons that now elude me, I agreed to undertake the chore.
But why had I stopped writing the column for Kunkin?
I called Art today, in aid of jogging his/my memory, but good old Kunkin is living way up in Topanga, and he hadn’t bothered to pick up his messages by the time it was necessary to send this manuscript to Jack and Otto. So your guess is as good as mine. The best I can recall, is that I simply grew weary of exploding in print every week. I was working on a number of books, a movie, a tv series…the workload was starting to get to me…and though I didn’t know it at the time, I had begun to develop the progressively more pronounced symptoms of a malaise now known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (formerly the Chronic Epstein-Barr Virus). It was getting harder and harder for me to work the twenty-hour days I’d put in since I was in my teens. But that’s another, by-now-boring, story.
(Although it goes right to the heart of why it took twenty years to get these columns into hardcovers.)
And so, the Hornbook ended its second incarnation, and there were only three more essays to come.
INSTALLMENT 43 | 13 DECEMBER 73
OH, DEAR, HE’S NOT GOING TO DO XMAS AGAIN, IS HE?
Last year, in the ninth installment of this column (when it was appearing in another newspaper), I did a long essay on my true feelings about Christmas as a holiday institution. It was in the H. L. Mencken-Alexander Woollcott-Oscar Levant stream of curdled curmudgeonry. I don’t like Christmas. No, strike that, I loathe Christmas. It is an utter phony, as removed from the hypocritical lip-service of paying homage to Christ and fellowship as George Wallace’s blattings of states’ rights is removed from the simple reality of his being a racist.
Frankly, I anticipated that column’s drawing terrible hellfire down on me. To my amazement, hundreds of people felt the same way. They had been nursing hatred of Xmas equally as strong as mine own. Some of them were even more violent about the senseless proliferation of expensive cards whose massed cost could feed starving children or build schools. (And don’t give me none of that shit about hearing from people once a year and ain’t that sweet…I didn’t want to hear from most of those dips anyhow, and if they really had something to say to me, they should have sent me a postcard for 6¢ that said I’m dying of leukemia, or Your undershorts are on fire, or whatever the hell it was that was relative to me, instead of some nonsensical Hallmark copywriter’s effusions. I got one today that measured 10” × 7” and almost made me snow-blind with the gold raised lettering and the silver globes on it. The only thing that keeps me from going over and punching the sender of that embossed abomination is that he’s a sweet, dear man and I admire both him and his wife. But he only lives across town, and we talk twice a week, and if I didn’t already know he loves me and wishes me well without a “Happy Holiday” the size of a Foster & Kleiser billboard, I’d be a pretty damned insensitive friend to begin with, in which case he should know better than to send me a card at all!)
The violence from my correspondents re Xmas encompassed the moral blackmail of having to buy gifts they couldn’t afford; the way greeting cards fucked up the mail deliveries of important communiqués; the toadying false camaraderie of salespeople working on commission; the ripoff of businessmen who spend all year selling borax furniture to blacks and at holiday time suddenly burst into ho ho ho’s of goodwill, with a 22% markup on shit merchandise; the senselessness of cutting down trees that wind up in the gutter on January 2nd, lying there with their tinsel spaghetti twined among brown pine needles, like the skirts of a rape victim bunched up around her hips; the cost of hauling away all that garbage…
And this year we can add to it the energy drain from Santa Claus Lane parades, tree lights burning throughout the night, outdoor decorations in neighborhoods with “display” contests, the high cost of everything and…worst of all…the multiplied feelings of have-not burned into the breasts of the poor, who couldn’t afford last year’s frivolities, when we didn’t have a recession and an energy crisis.
So I’m re-running my column from last year. I’ve decided to make it an annual event.
But add to it, this year, that I also despise the concept of the Christmas Bonus, a filthy extortion that ennobles neither the giver nor the taker. Bonus for what? For being there when Christmas rolls around? For having done a job one was hired to do? That’s bullshit! My secretary Mariana got her bonus in August. She got a raise. She got it for doing such a fine job that she was worth more money, not because she’s a Christian. There’ll be no bonuses around here. And for all of you con artists out there waiting to see what kind of freebie ripoff you can expect in your pay envelope from the boss, consider that you ought to give him a bonus at Christmas—for providing you with a job all year.
No bonuses, no false spirits, not even a wassail. And if you send me a greeting card, I’ll only roundfile it and call you an asshole. Save your money. Send it to The Salvation Army or the American Civil Liberties Union or some worthy charity. Or go get drunk on it. But don’t lumber me with your artificial emotion.
And, for your reading pleasure, here’s the annual FUCK CHRISTMAS column of your old friend, Scrooge Ellison.
First of all, let’s exclude the Prince of Peace. None of what I’m about this week has anything to do with him. From what I’ve read, he was an okay sort of guy on whom has been laid more superhero tripe than any one social malcontent should have to cope with.
What I’m concerned with here is how much I, and most of you, whether you will cop to it or not, have come to hate, loathe, despise and revile Christmas.
Not even the obvious cliché Scrooge anti-commercialized Christmas denigration that berates greedy shopkeepers for stringing plastic holly in the middle of August, that castigates even worthwhile charities for their shameless whipguilt hustling for funds, that chides average citizens for falling for the okeydoke and going in hock to BankAmericard to buy gifts they can’t afford for people they don’t give a damn about. That facet of the problem is so much an obviousness that everyone has learned to live with it, pays it lip-serv
ice the way lip-service is paid to horrors such as “everyone knows politicians are crooked,” and does nothing to revise the situation. Amazing how much shit folks can learn to eat.
No, I’m finally going to come out of the closet and openly state in print how much the entire concept of the “holiday” horrifies me. If I touch a shuddering chord here that resonates in tone with what you’ve been concealing in your heart of hearts, then consider me only as the fatmouth willing to suffer the brickbats of Jesus Freaks, et al., who’ll surely burn a cross on my lawn for putting down their be-all/end-all’s natal day. I’m willing to stand the gaff, gentle readers, if you will merely turn to the East and say to the sunrise, “God forgive me, I’ve had the same thoughts.”
Consider: the following items came over the news on December 24th and 25th: four men in San Francisco abducted two young girls off the streets in broad daylight; a young woman whose estranged husband showed up at her door with presents for their kids was shot to death by the wife, who then put the pistol in her mouth and blew her head off; a 65-year-old man in Manhattan threw himself off the Brooklyn Bridge with a note (apparently written with a ballpoint so it wouldn’t smudge in the water, which is really forethought of a high order) saying he couldn’t make it through another Christmas alone and unloved; a sniper in downtown Chicago knocked off four people on Christmas Eve, and was never located; a noted psychologist released a statement that suicide rates go up to triple normal during the holidays; police in Los Angeles and San Francisco agreed, with some consternation, that crime doubles during Christmas. There’s more, much more, but why belabor the point? The only good news during Christmas this year is that they may impeach Nixon after all.
Christmas is an awfulness that compares favorably with the great London plague and fire of 1665–66. No one escapes the feelings of mortal dejection, inadequacy, frustration, loneliness, guilt and pity. No one escapes feeling used by society, by religion, by friends and relatives, by the utterly artificial responsibilities of extending false greetings, sending banal cards, reciprocating unsolicited gifts, going to dull parties, putting up with acquaintances and family one avoids all the rest of the year…in short, of being brutalized by a “holiday” that has lost virtually all of its original meanings and has become a merchandising ploy for color tv set manufacturers and ravagers of the woodlands.
Look: I dig my privacy. 364 days out of the year I can think of nothing more pleasant than being left alone of an evening, working at writing a story, watching some television, making a small meal, smoking my pipe, just swimming along softly behind an ambience of aloneness. There is nothing of loneliness in all that, but aloneness, which is something else altogether, something fine and rewarding and filled with restoking the internal fires, coming to grips with myself, perceiving my directions and my place in the universe.
But on Christmas Eve I was alone, and I wanted to slash my carotid artery. (And when I read the foregoing to the two young ladies who are secretarying for me, they stared at me with undisguised loathing for my rottenness and countered with the arguments that a lot of people like Christmas a bagful, and they offered as their reasons that many people dig it because they don’t have to work, and others adore it because they get bonuses.
(Had I the sense of a maggot, I’d rest my case right there.
(But for the sanctimonious few who would revile the ladies for their opinions, only slightly less than they will me for mine, I press forward, bearing in mind Dickens’s remark that “…every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”
(And did you ever notice, the only one in A CHRISTMAS CAROL with any character is Scrooge? Marley is a whiner who fucked over the world and then hadn’t the spine to pay his dues quietly; Belle, Scrooge’s ex-girl friend, deserted him when he needed her most; Bob Cratchit is a gutless toady without enough get-up-and-go to assert himself; and the less said about that little treacle-mouth, Tiny Tim, the better. No, Dickens knew what he was doing when he made Scrooge the focus of the story. My only disappointment in him is that he let himself be savaged by those three dumb Ghosts. God Bless Us, Every One indeed! Not even at Christmas would I God Bless Nixon or the terrorists who machine-gunned the Olympic athletes or the monkey-trial reactionary fundamentalists who bludgeoned the California State Board of Education into stating in all future textbooks that Darwin’s Theory is an “unproved theory” as valid as the “special creation” nonsense. Bless ’em? I’d like to boil them in their own pudding and bury them…but you know.)
Christmas is constructed and promulgated in such a way that to defy it or ignore it makes one a monster. To refuse to send cards, to toss the ones received in the wastebasket, to refuse to accept gifts and refuse to give them, to walk untouched through the consumer-crowds and never feel the urge to buy Aunt Martha that lovely combination rotisserie-&-bidet, to maintain one’s sanity staunchly through the berserk days of year’s end makes one, in the eyes of those who lack the courage to eschew hypocrisy, an awful heretic, a slug, a vile and contemptible thug.
But consider the millions who are alone on Christmas. All the divorcées, all the kids on the road, all the septuagenarians in the Fairfax retirement homes, all the parents who lost kids in ’Nam, all the truck drivers who take Christmas schedules so they won’t have to sit around and brood on how miserable they are. Think of the poor sonofabitch glimpsed through the front windows of an Automat, sitting there by himself eating the $1.79 Xmas Special w/giblet gravy.
And don’t give me any of that bullshit about how we must take these poor unfortunates to our Christian bosoms and make them welcome at this wonderful time of the year.
Half of them are rapists and ax murderers, and they’ll eat your dinner, knock you in the head with a candlestick and steal all the presents from under your tree.
What they want, flat truth, is to be left well alone, to get through this horrendous sorrow-show as quickly as possible.
And when I read all that to one of my secretaries—the other having resigned and stalked out of the house muttering Antichrist—she snottily advised me she didn’t mind anyone’s not liking Christmas, what she resented were loudmouths like me who talked about it. Which is a terrific Silent Majority attitude, paralleling the Administration’s attitudes about civil disobedience and vocal dissent. They don’t mind your thinking it (at the moment), but god forbid you should try to do something about it.
It never occurs to her that the pro-Christmas lackeys bombard the rest of us through every possible medium of mass communication from Muzak wassail wassails in the elevators to White Christmas and Miracle on 34th Street all over the tube for two weeks prior and a week post. That every nit one encounters in banks or bakeries, who snorted and snarled and dealt you inept service all the rest of the year suddenly blossoms forth with a phony “Merrrrry Christmas” in hopes of a Yuletide giftiepoo. That even the blasphemy blasphemy curse blasphemy telephone company answers its phones with, “Merry Christmas, may I help you?”
“Yes, I’d like you to check out an address for me, please.”
“Merry Christmas, we are not permitted to check addresses.”
“Yes, but, er, I’m a paraplegic cancer victim in an iron lung and the house is on fire and I’d like you to check out my address because I’m blind and the fire department needs it to locate me before I’m incinerated.”
“Merry Christmas, I’m sorry, sir, but you’d better fuck off.”
“Thanks. And a Merry Christmas to you.”
What I’m saying, in sum, dear friends, is that it is all hopelessly artificial. That people are no better at Xmas time than any other time, and by spouting platitudes in the name of a scrawny prophet who got hammered in place for saying stuff a lot more radical than what I’m saying here, none of those Yule-nuts become brighter or more sanctified or even a tot kinder.
And weighed against the people who suicide out of loneliness and misery, all the sales of Timex
watches don’t mean a goddam thing.
So next year, to all my friends, and particularly to my enemies, take your pointless and money-wasting Hallmarks and jam them up your pantyhose.
Next year, time and finances permitting, I will cause to have erected on the roof of my home, a ten-foot-high neon sign that blinks on and off in blood-red and cash-green, BAH! HUMBUG! and any little clown who comes caroling at my door is going to have boiling pitch dumped on him.
And fuck you, Tiny Tim!
INSTALLMENT 44 |
Interim Memo
John Heidenry—Jack to his friends—came to my ken early in the 1970s, when he submitted a short story to the then-in-progress anthology I was editing, AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS. He wrote a wonderful piece that I used as the opening of that elegant and still-in-print sequel to 1967’s DANGEROUS VISIONS, labeling it the “keynote entry.”
Over the next few years, after A, DV was released in 1972, I exchanged a few letters with Jack; and when he asked me to resume writing the Hornbook for his fledgling Saint Louis Literary Supplement (first issue dated November 1976) I resolved to write the essays in a more structured way. Not so much consciously “literary” in style, but with greater care and at more substantial length. These were, in fact, the training-ground pieces I wrote that informed the technique I would later apply to my film essays in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. (Those film critiques are collected, with the balance of twenty-five years’ worth of film criticism, in a volume called HARLAN ELLISON’S WATCHING.) The three final columns of the actual Hornbook cycle were watershed writings for me.
The Supplement didn’t last very long, as I recall, but for its brief life it was a superlative journal. Jack Heidenry, last time we talked, was working for the Penthouse International organization in New York.