Harlan Ellison: Shatterday

Why is he telling me all this?

He’s telling you all this because the feeps thought they were getting off a hot one when they accused him of merely writing to shock.

That’s my job. To stir the soup, to bite your thigh, to get you angry so you keep the conversation going. Don’t invite me to parties for pleasant chat. I want to hear the sound of your soul. Then I can translate it into the mortal dreads we all share and fire them back at you transmogrified, reshaped as amusing or frightening fables.

Look, it’s like this: I was in Utah doing some work for the Equal Rights Amendment late last year, and I said some things like this during a radio interview. So the interviewer, who was a very bright guy, pushed at it a little. He asked me to explicate some of these “mortal dreads” that we all share, that I thought I was illuminating by writing such weird and troubling stories. I thought about it a moment, and then in a fit of confession that passes for honesty I told him about writing the title story of this book, “Shatterday.”

“I was sitting in a hotel room in New York in the middle of a January snowstorm in 1975,” I said. “I had to have the story finished by 7:00 that night so I could present it at a reading uptown at 7:30, allowing myself time to get a cab and find the auditorium…and I was writing furiously, hardly thinking about how the story was creating itself —”

The interviewer looked at me oddly.

“It was creating itself? ”

“Yeah,” I said. “I was just the machine that was putting it on paper. That story came out of secret places in my head and ran at the paper without regard for my breaking back or the deadline. It created itself. Well, I finished it barely in time, got downstairs, shoved an old lady out of the way to grab her cab in the snow, and just got uptown in time for the reading. I didn’t even have time to proofread the copy.

“So when I was in the middle of the lecture, reading the section where the lead character is having the argument with his alter ego about his mother, I realized for the first time that I wanted my mother to die.”

The interviewer looked uncomfortable.

“No, wait, listen,” I said hurriedly. “I didn’t mean that I wanted her to die, just to be gone. See, my mother was quite old at that time, she’d been extremely ill off-and-on for years, and in that eerie way we have of exchanging places with our parents when they grow old, I’d become the parent and she’d become the child; and I was responsible for her. I supported her, and tried to keep her comfortable down in Miami Beach where she was living, and that gave me pleasure, to play at being a real grownup son, and like that. But she was just a shadow. She hadn’t been happy in a long time, she was just marking out her days, and I wanted to be free of that constant realization that she was out there. I loved her, she was a nice woman. I didn’t have any rancor or meanness in me…I just had to admit that I wanted her gone.”

The interviewer looked really uncomfortable now.

“Well, oh boy, that was some helluva thing to have to admit to myself. ‘You slimy sonofabitch,’ I thought, and I was still reading aloud to the audience that had no tiniest idea what monstrous and hellish thoughts were tearing me up. ‘You evil, ungrateful, selfish prick! How the hell could you even consider something as awful as that? She never did anything to you, she raised you, put up with your craziness and always had faith in you when everyone else said you’d wind up in some penal colony or the chipmunk factory! You sleazy, vomitous crud, how can you even think of her being dead?’ And it was terrible, just terrible. I thought I was scum unfit to walk with decent human beings, to harbor these secret feelings about a perfectly innocent old woman. And I remembered what Eric Hoffer once wrote: ‘What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people’s faces as unfinished as their minds.’

“But there it was, in the story.I’d written it and had to confront it and learn to live with it.” It was like the line out of another story in this book, “ All the Lies That Are My Life,” where I mention the ugliness of simply being human. But I hadn’t thought of that line then. And the interviewer didn’t quite know what to say to me. What the hell can you say to some dude sitting there copping to wanting his mother to pass away?

Well, it was one of those call-in radio shows, and we started taking calls from Salt Lake citizens who were pissed off at an “outsider” coming in to tell them that Utah’s not ratifying the ERA was a sinful and mischievous act. And then, suddenly, there was a woman on the line, coming over the headphones to me in that soundproof booth, with tears in her voice, saying to me, “Thank you. Thank you for telling that about your mother. My mother was dying of cancer and I had the same thoughts and I hated myself for it. I thought I was the only person in the world who ever thought such an awful thing, and I couldn’t bear it. Thank you. Oh, thank you.”

And I thought of that heartrending scene in Jack Gelber’s play, The Connection, where the old Salvation Army sister who has been turned into a medical junkie by inept doctors says to this apartment full of stone-righteous street hypes, “You are not alone. You are not alone.”

I damned near started to cry myself. I wanted to hug that nameless woman out there in Salt Lake City somewhere, hug her and say you are not alone.

That’s why I tell you all this.

You are not alone. We are all the same, all in this fragile skin, suffering the ugliness of simply being human, all prey to the same mortal dreads.

When I lecture I try to say this, to say most of the fears you invent—atomic war, multinational conspiracies, assassination paranoias, fear of ethnic types, flying saucers from Mars—those are all bullshit. I inveigh against illogical beliefs and say that the mortal dreads are the ones that drive you to crazy beliefs in Scientology, est, the power of dope, hatred of elitism and intellectual pursuits, astrology, messiahs like Sun Myung Moon or Jim Jones, fundamentalist religions. I try to tell you that fear is okay if you understand that what you fear is the same for everyone.

Not the bogus oogie-boogie scares of Dan O’Bannon and Ridley Scott’s Alien, slavering creatures in the darkness that want to pierce your flesh with scorpion stinger tails and ripping jaws, but the fear of Gregor Samsa waking to discover he isn’t who he was when he went to bed; the fear of Pip in the graveyard; the fear of Huck finding his dead father on the abandoned houseboat. The fears to which we are all heir to simply because we are tiny creatures in a universe that is neither benign nor malign…it is simply enormous and unaware of us save as part of the chain of life.

And all we have to stand between us and the irrational crazy chicken-running-around-squawking terror that those mortal dreads lay on us is wisdom and courage.

That is why I tell you all this, and why I write to shock you and anger you and frighten you. To tell you with love and care that you are not alone.

These stories are about the mortal dreads.

Each one is a little different from all the others because, to fall back on words of Irwin Shaw again, “…in a novel or a play you must be a whole man. In a collection of stories you can be all the men or fragments of men, worthy and unworthy, who in different seasons abound in you. It is a luxury not to be scorned.”

And so, with the serious warning that you not try to pick out the pieces of the Author that went into the writing of each of these little cautionary tales, I give you another year or two of my life’s work, all of which say, with love and care, and the intent to anger, shock and frighten you…