Harlan Ellison: No Doors, No Windows

(And I won’t have to argue with Tom Snyder that when I do the Tomorrow Show he shouldn’t have a flash-card overprinted on my beaming image that says HARLAN ELLISON, SCI-FI GUY.)

Where was I? Oh, yeah. A book of suspense stories, and how nice it is to finally get noticed as a writer who’s written lots of other things than fantasy.

It began, I suppose, when the Mystery Writers of America awarded me the Edgar Allan Poe statuette last year for the Best Mystery Story. The funny thing is, the story isn’t even a mystery. Not in the terms usually associated with mysteries. The yarn is the lead-off piece in this book, “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.” And for those of you who bought THE OTHER GLASS TEAT [Pyramid A3791] and who read a script I wrote for the now-defunct TV series, The Young Lawyers, a script with the same title, be advised they have no connection. I just liked the title, “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.” The story is … well, I’ll hold off on that till I hit the section of this introduction where I tip you to the background or impetus that caused me to write the various pieces included here.

In any case, what I was getting at is that “Whimper” is a fantasy, not a mystery. In the usual sense. Though I guess there must have been a sufficiently weighty suspense element in the story to convince the judges of MWA that it belonged on the ballot. (One tiny horn-toot: I beat out a story by Joyce Carol Oates for the award. Hot diggity!)

So here we have twenty years’ of my writing, all across the board from western stories and mystery fiction to critical literary essays and occasional columns of contemporary events, and they keep labeling me a “science fiction writer.” Very frustrating, particularly when my compatriots in the literature of the fantastic keep pointing out, “Ellison isn’t a science fiction writer,” and they’re right; and there’s no reason why they should have to suffer denigration because they’re held responsible for the berserk stuff I write. Also, my books shouldn’t have to suffer the kind of dumb reviews from the hinterlands — such as the New York Times — that say, “Well, this was a good book, but it certainly isn’t sf,” not to mention the treatment anything labeled sf gets from “serious” reviewers who will wax ecstatic about the nine millionth nostalgic novel dealing with Jewish or Italian home life in the poorer sections of Brooklyn or tike Bronx, in the late Thirties, but who turn up their patrician noses at anything with fantasy in it. Unless it’s by an accepted “serious” writer. Like Ira Levin or Fred Mustard Stewart or one of the many other nameless (and frequently talentless) clowns who’ve just last week discovered such fresh and untapped themes as exorcism, cloning, diabolic possession or reincarnation. If I had a dime for every half-assed novel published in hardcover since 1967 when Levin stumbled across ROSEMARY’S BABY, that deals with a supernatural or fantasy theme in cornball terms that would get it rejected from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, I’d have a lotta dimes to make obscene phone calls to the know-nothing publishers who lay out fifty grand a whack to reprint them in paperback.

But then, I’m just an unhappy, bitter, sour grapes writer who resents the hell out of popularizers who get fat on worn-out themes sf / fantasy passed by twenty years ago, right?

So how come I ain’t pissed at John Fowles or John Barth or Vladimir Nabokov or Michael Crichton or Jorge Luis Borges or even Ira Levin? Answer: because they’re writers, dammit, and they bring freshness and talent even to tired ideas.

Thass why!

This has wandered rather far afield, I now realize. (If you want an eight-hour diatribe on the state of the market situation for a writer today, just drop in a slug, wind me up and aim me in the direction of The New York Literary Establishment.) Suffice to say, it ain’t all as terrific as it looks from the outside. Being labeled a science fiction writer today guarantees you a certain amount of readership, but it denies you an even larger group. For a writer who cares about what work comes out with his or her name on it, who fights to keep expanding his or her talent, and who wants freedom to experiment while making a decent living and providing entertaining books for as wide an audience as possible, having a category tag slapped on can be pure death.

So. A book of suspense stories. Filled with visions of murder, mayhem, deceit, fear, psychopathia, crime and rotten interpersonal relationships. Your basic light-time reading fare. Something to make you laugh at your own nasty life struggles. No matter how bad you’ve got it, believe me, you haven’t got it as tough as Beth O’Neill in “Whimper” or poor old Mr. Huggerson in “Status Quo at Troyden’s” or quick-tempered Hervey Ormond in “Ormond Always Pays His Bills.”

I’ve been talking a lot lately about the condition of fear by which many of us judge the value of our existences. In THE DEADLY STREETS (last month’s Pyramid paperback offering of the Ellison-of-the-Month Club) I did an introduction touching on the subject, and I’d like to share with you a letter I received yesterday that speaks to the same situation.

A word about my mail. There’s an ever-increasing amount of it these days, which is nice on the one hand because many people feel so comfortable in these books that they take the introductions and the comments as an invitation to chat; but it’s a drag on the other hand, because I’m averaging about 200 pieces a day, and even with two associates helping me out, just opening the mail has become a long, arduous chore each day. I tried sending out a long form letter for a while, but that was costing a fortune and it only encouraged the correspondents to write another letter. I read everything, but I’ve just simply decided to hell with it: I can’t reply to all that mail and still keep writing. And since it’s the stories and comments that make people want to write in the first place, that’s where my writing time should be spent, not in responding to questions about writing, my life, the correspondent’s life, how to write a teleplay, how to get an agent, where the Clarion Writers’ Workshop will be this year, why more of my books aren’t available in Kankakee or Billings, what my sexual proclivities might be, or why and how the letter-writer feels we are simpatico because the both of us hate a) Richard Nixon, b) Rod McKuen poetry, c) the military-industrial-CIA-FBI-IRS complex and / or d) movies starring Cybill Shepherd. I refuse to read stories submitted for my august opinion. For a lot of different reasons, but most prominently because I’m too deep into my own stuff to play teacher to amateurs. I used to send the following rejection note, but I don’t even do that any more:

A CHINESE REJECTION SLIP

Illustrious Brother of the Sun and Moon:

Behold thy servant prostrate before thy feet! I kowtow to thee and beg that of thy graciousness thou mayest grant that I may speak and live. Thine honored manuscript has deigned to cast the light of its august countenance upon me. With raptures I have perused it. By the bones of my ancestors, never have I encountered such wit, such pathos, such lofty thought! With fear and trembling I return the writing. Were I to publish the treasure thou hast sent me, the Emperor would order that it be made a standard of excellence and that none be published except such as equaled it. Knowing literature as I do, and that it would be impossible in ten thousand years to equal what thou hast done, I send thy writing back by guarded servants.

Ten thousand times I crave thy pardon. Behold! My head is at thy feet and I am but dust.