Harlan Jay Ellison died on June
28h,
2018. He went to sleep beside his wife Susan in his home in Los
Angeles and never woke up. He was eighty-four years old. He
survived coronary bypass surgery in the late nineties, a stroke in
2007, and a crippling bout of depression in the first half of this
decade. In his last interactions with the public some ten years ago
he was as spry, as ornery, as irascible as ever – snow-haired,
pale, and cavernously wrinkled, bent a bit at the waist and about as
slow as you'd expect an octogenarian to be, but...still Harlan.
Always Harlan to the end. Now the terrible day has come and gone.
Now I can finally write that piece I tried so many times to write.
And now I understand why those old pieces died in the womb, all
tin-eared, and pointless: because I had written them in a world where
Harlan Ellison was alive, before the universe became the smaller,
colder, less interesting place it is now that he is gone...before his
departure broke my heart in two and left me nothing but words –
his, artifacts of bygone brilliance, and mine, clunky and inadequate,
squeezed out in a vain attempt to staunch the wound left in his
absence. Words were always enough for Harlan. For me they seem
woefully inadequate. But I'm in front of the computer, which for
Harlan was always nine-tenths of the battle: get your butt in the
chair and do the work. So for him, I will.
So...Harlan and me.
My first experience was in grade
school. My library had a still-picture paperback of the Star
Trek episode 'City on the Edge
of Forever' – literally a collection of glossy screenshots taken
directly from the episode, arrayed in sequence with dialogue boxes
superimposed over the pictures like a live-action comic book. I was
a budding nerd and my library had precious little in the way of
sci-fi, so that smudged and crinkled little volume was my constant
companion between lunch and dreaded gym class. I didn't know at the
time I was reading Harlan Ellison's work, wouldn't know until many
years later he was the author of the most universally acclaimed Star
Trek episode of all time. It
would be years more before I would learn the full story behind that
episode, how Ellison's original version was much darker and subject
to heavy censor by the studio. In my twenties I had the joy of
reading the unaltered script, when I could actually appreciate the
brilliance of the initial vision and the frustration he felt at
having his work be so criminally defanged by skittish executives. At
the time I only knew that torn and greasy paperback seemed pretty
damn cool (and gee, it had
to be the only episode of original Trek
where McCoy went bonkers from a drug overdose, right?!). It was the
first of countless times Ellison's imagination would succor me.
I could not say when it was that I
read my first Ellison short story, but I do recall when I began
pursuing his stories because they were his. See, I'd heard his name bandied about by
the comic book and sci-fi communities, often spoken with a mixture of
hushed reverence and a kind of bloviating envy/scorn by other writers
who knew him by reputation. I knew him to be one of the giants of
speculative fiction's “between” period (as Neil Gaiman refers to
it), after the golden age of legends like Asimov and Bester but
before the so-called “modern” age that gave us William Gibson,
Gaiman, a slew of others. I told myself I'd try him one day, but I
was too into my Star Wars novels and my first tentative steps into
High Fantasy to think much on it. Then my cousin began lending me a
steady supply of VHS tapes full of Babylon 5.
And there in the credits, week after week, was 'Conceptual
Consultant: Harlan Ellison'. That tented an eyebrow. Him again.
Here was a guy without a hard science background (hell, without a
college degree!) consulting on a space-drama that prided itself on
realism, the anti-Star Trek, there
simply to serve as a narrative oracle advising on matters of plot,
pacing, character, and arc. I would later learn that creator J.
Michael Straczynski, himself no slouch in the plotting department,
deferred to him regularly during his unprecedented (and still
unmatched) marathon penning of nearly 100 episodes of his series. He
wanted wisdom from the best; in Ellison he got the best of the best.
Babylon 5 remains the
greatest long-form science fiction TV show ever created, and
Straczynski would tell you in a heartbeat (or a tweet) that Ellison
had a great deal to do with it (even if the crew found him to be a
prickly, excitable bastard most of the time). That “him again”
moment is what tipped the scales for me. I knew I loved Babylon
5, so it jolly well stood to
reason the sage whispering sweet story advice into JMS's ears would
be worth a real read. I pursued Ellison from there on, and I was
never the same.
Over the years I seasoned my other reading with collections of
Ellison stories. I devoured Over the Edge, Angry Candy, and
Slippage, each of which contained one or two of his 'classic'
works, including “Repent, Harlequin Said The Ticktock Man”, “I
Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”, and “Demon With a Glass Hand”.
A friend lent me the long-shuddered original I, Robot
screenplay, penned by Ellison in the late '70s, shelved by the
studio, and never produced (the Will Smith abomination released years
later was a different, infinitely inferior, animal). That was my
first foray into Ellison the scene-designer. As a short story writer
he was brazen and aggressive, the literary equivalent of a clump of
dirt in your eyes followed by a shot to the crotch. Imagine my
surprise, then, when Ellison the screenplay writer proved a
meticulous fuss-budget, describing his scenes in exacting, almost
painful detail, including beat counts, pan angles, lens effects, and
even lighting suggestions. I, Robot was deemed un-filmable at
the time in part because Ellison's descriptions called for effects
that would have been impossible at the time, both a testament to his
imagination and his gave-no-shits attitude toward the storytelling
limits of cinema in the pre-CGI era. It was also the impetus for one
of Ellison's most famous dust-ups with a studio executive: upon
realizing the stuffed shirt slated to produce the picture had never
read the screenplay, Ellison reportedly dove across the table and
throttled the man, telling him he “had the intellectual and cranial
capacity of an artichoke.” Alas, studios high on Star Wars'
success wanted their sci-fi to have 'cute' robots and swashbuckling,
of which Ellison's piece had not a wit. It was, however, a
masterpiece of science fiction, a layered, profound, deeply moving
rumination on the nature of consciousness, humanity's place in the
distant future, and Asimov's sacred Three Rules of Robotics.
Ellison's short fiction was a revelation. He was as articulate, as
careful, and as brilliant with his words as any of the greats of the
medium, but he narrated with such a a singular energy, such punchy,
cocksure drive and poise regardless of subject matter. Every clause
was a one-two attack, every sentence a parry-riposte of crackling
linguistic know-how. Here was a man who wrote as much for love of
the words themselves as the stories the words told, and wrote them
without pretense or any sense of having grasped for it. I always
imagined he rarely if ever used a thesaurus (though I'm sure he
probably did), because his modus operandi was to spin adjectives out
of slang and artful, off-kilter sayings, hyphening compound nonsense
terms together into gorgeous descriptors that said things in ways
that said it all but in a way you were never likely to hear
again. Yet he did it while weaving together some of the most inspired
speculative concepts ever conceived. Look at the Hugo-nominated “The
Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore”, told as a series of
daily log entries in the life of a divine being who cavorts through
time and space performing acts of mischief and compassion in equal
measure (including the titular rowing act, and a heartwarming
interlude in which he saves a young prostitute in the 1880s by
tasering a man with a stun gun). In that, and so many others,
Ellison showed me the power of voice, that elusive quality of
a narrator who speaks with a life and a character all his – or her
– own, engaging the reader through sheer force of personality. One
did not have to be a constipated word-slave to write well; the layout
of the words, the delivery method of storytelling was every bit as
important as the story itself. Every story, regardless of topic,
read like an Ellison story, and every narrator was a shade of
the man himself. He wrote with a deliberate insistence, a haughty,
prideful imposition that forced you into uncomfortable corners,
tripped you up, challenged you, and goaded you to keep going.
I met Harlan in the fall of 2000. It was New York City at the Fifth
Avenue Barnes and Noble, and the man was on hand to sign the
newly-released and expanded edition of the seminal sci-fi anthology
Dangerous Visions, of which he had been the longtime editor.
I was a sophomore at Marist College and could hardly think of a
better use of a dull Saturday and my meager funds than to grab a
train south to meet the man who had become my writing idol (Metro
North, of course – no Amtrak for me; I wasn't made of money!). I
remember it was a cold, wet, lousy day in the city. The steel-lined
streets acted like wind tunnels, compressing the bitter air into a
semisolid freight train that cut through my layers and smattered my
glasses with grungy city-spray. And B&N, in their infinite
wisdom, decided to queue us up outside. It wasn't bad. In
fact, it was joyous – every single person, more than a hundred in
total, was there for the same reason, after all. We passed the time
merrily, talking all things Harlan with complete strangers.
Passersby on the street stopped to ask us who we were waiting for,
perhaps wondering if it was a celebrity of sorts, someone famous.
When we said “Harlan Ellison!” most people simply crooked an
eyebrow, muttered a terse “Oh” and moved on. We didn't care. We
loved it. They would never understand. And Harlan wasn't here for
them. He was here for us.
Harlan arrived, and I was instantly struck by how unbelievably
ordinary he looked. Just a white-haired old man in a plain,
fire-engine red sweatshirt, all five feet and five inches of him,
cutting a swath through the PR folks and the handlers like a literary
alpha dog. God, how my heart jumped! When he saw that his adoring
public had been corralled outside he pitched a fit, berating the
staff for leaving his fans out in the cold. Then he gave the
crowd the thrill of their lives by walking out of the building and
down the entire line, first person to the last, all the while
lambasting the staff for a pack of whoreson miscreants for abusing
his readers like that. The star-dazzle that had briefly left us all
mute dissipated quickly as we all began to hoot with laughter. Hey,
it had only been ten seconds, but here already was Harlan being
Harlan, exactly what we expected and still more than we could
have ever hoped for. Already it was the best signing ever.
I can't remember the entirety of what I said to him. It was
probably something stupid. I do remember I said “Hello” and
something asinine about how great it was to meet him and blah blah.
I wasn't there to leave an impression; I knew it was folly to try.
But as he signed the book I did have the presence of mind to tell him
that I had just finished reading An Edge in My Voice, the
collected edition of columns he wrote in the early eighties on a
litany of topics from Reaganomics to slasher films. I'll never
forget the pause in his pen-stroke when I told him that, how he had
to stop and actually think about which one that was. “Oh,
yeah,” he said, musing. “Yeah, boy that was a while ago.” I
was floored. Here was the man who'd penned one of the most
thought-provoking and inspiring selections of non-fiction I'd ever
read and he had to try to remember having written them! I
told him I loved it. “Well, good!” he said, finishing his
signature. My companion took our picture. I was smiling a lot
bigger than Harlan, but I think he smiled, too. A little bit. After
I shook his hand – warm, firm, dry – I stood back and watched my
friend make an appropriate ass of himself. My companion, see, was an
Ellison neophyte at the time (he's since done his penance and become
a true believer), but he knew of Ellison the Legend and was eager to
begin his journey with a bang by meeting the man himself. I
cautioned him about not 'saying something stupid', that Ellison was
no shrinking violet and would happily seize upon anything he saw as
low hanging fruit to skewer him, a perfect stranger, because that was
what he did. My friend, predictably, did the opposite. And Ellison
obliged.
“I have to say,” my friend began, “I haven't really read you
yet, but after today, I'm going to start.”
Ellison responded as only he could. He gaped incredulously at my
friend and said, “Well, you lying sack of shit! What the hell do I
care if you've never read my stuff?! Think that matters to me?!”
Everyone in the room laughed, my companion included. What a treat –
not merely to meet the Man but to see a live demonstration of his
famous fuck-you disposition on full display! I giggled for twenty
blocks, and have thanked Harlan every day for the extra little treat
he gave me free of charge. Dangerous Visions, signed by
Harlan, remains on my shelf in a place of honor. I don't think I've
ever read it – not that edition, anyway.
In recent years I have partaken of The Glass Teat and The
Other Glass Teat, the series of columns Ellison wrote in the late
'60s-early '70s for the Los Angeles Free Press. I recommend this to
anyone even if you have no interest in Nixon-era TV (ostensibly to
focus of the columns) for everything else Harlan rapped about during
those impossibly turbulent times, including news suppression,
censorship, government propaganda, the entertainment industry's
slavish kowtowing to middle America (the 'vast plains of
scuttlefish', as he called the folks in the fly-over states), endless
lies about Vietnam, race conflicts, and the youth movement.
Turbulent also was Harlan's own life back then, finding himself at
the epicenter of campus demonstrations, student riots, and a
proactive campaign by Spiro Agnew to quash his work (in brief,
Ellison questioned the size of Agnew's manhood; later the second Teat
volume's release was delayed years due to an Agnew-driven
intimidation campaign against book sellers and Ellison's
distributors). That the then-Vice President of the United States
would resort to strong-arming a publisher who had profited mightily
selling Harlan's books into reneging on a contract speaks volumes of
Ellison's power as a writer, the reach he enjoyed during those heady,
bile-filled days, and the weight the printed word carried back then.
Ellison, after all, never tweeted a word in his life, had no social
media platforms or YouTube channel to puff up his profile. He had
2000 words a week in the L.A. Freep, a suitably quaint soapbox
by today's standards. Back then? It was as grand a pulpit as he
needed (though surely smaller than he wanted) to speak his mind and
piss off a lot of people in the process. Indeed, during his run with
Teat Harlan's columns cost him several prominent writing jobs,
most of his allies in the industry and more than one friend (his
chronicling of the single episode he wrote of The Young
Lawyers is a slow-motion train wreck of dashed hopes, missed
chances, and a hundred awful pitfalls of writing in Hollywood). Yes,
he was a prick to most people who knew him and a bastard prick
to those unlucky enough to be counted among his (many) enemies...but
everyone read him, dammit, and no one who did put his stuff
down who wasn't left feeling engaged, motivated, angry, and, yes,
inspired.
Ellison wrote with a courage I don't have, and may never acquire.
He mocked the rules of the trade by inventing his own and showing up
his contemporaries on a regular basis. He gave exactly zero shits,
tackling the hardest of contemporary issues while simultaneously
launching himself at the most whimsical of dalliances and turning
them into astounding, thrilling, life-affirming stories. His mind
was an overclocked idea factory, ceaselessly creating, musing,
speculating. I loved that about him because I want more than
anything to be like that, and I fear with each passing day
that I'm losing that magic he managed to cling to his entire life. I
watch old interviews with him, I read his words, I see the brains and
the fury in equal measure, the mischief he made and the honestly with
which he presented it all and I just stand in awe. How...how did
he stay so damn good for so long? He was brash but he was true,
he was smart but he was grounded, angry but hopeful, all armor and
thorns on the outside but (and this is true) mush on the inside, the
classic shattered idealist-turned-reluctant cynic. I flatter myself
when I say I saw much of myself in him; perhaps only the palest of
shades, a glimpse of what I could be if only I had the guts,
the grit, the sheer cajones he had when he put his butt in
front of that typewriter every SINGLE FREAKIN' DAY. As a man he was
far from perfect. But as a writer he was, and will remain, my Ideal.
For more than a decade now I have pecked away at The Essential
Ellison, the 50-year retrospective mega-anthology that is a
marvelous cross-section – though still only a sampling – of
Ellison's entire career. To date I still have, I think, just three
or four more pieces to read until I am finished. I know I held off
reading those last pieces as part of the same superstitious ritual
that kept me from writing this reminiscence. The thought of
completing that mighty tome just had such an air of finality
to it, like I'd seen the best and all the would left for me was...the
rest (though with 1700 stories and non-fiction pieces to his name, I
doubt I shall ever truly finish 'the rest'). Yes, my reticence
stemmed from a reluctance to let go, an unwillingness to accept that
Harlan Ellison could ever 'end'. Vainly, childishly, I suppose I
felt that if there was at least something left I hadn't read, he'd
simply have to keep on living, keep writing, keep being
Harlan...hopefully forever.
I learned of his passing at work. I checked the Ellison Facebook
page and there on the banner was the simple announcement. I silently
thanked the Universe that I had decided to stay late that night, then
I leaned forward in my chair and, with an utter absence of pretense
or shame, put my head gently down on my desk and cried for ten
minutes, letting the sadness and shock and the guilt of feeling
relief – yes, relief – wash over me in slowly diminishing
waves, tears flowing freely, my heart in a vise but, weirdly, a smile
on my face, too. Here now was that thing I'd been dreading
for so long, but...Jesus, some part of it actually felt good.
I wrestled for a long time with how that could be. I think it was
because I was finally able to admit that Harlan had done everything
he was ever going to do on this Earth and by dammit, he had earned
his rest. No amount of wishing or ritual or superstition was going
to keep him here...and that was okay. He gave us an entire universe.
We could ask no more of him, and it was fitting that he should leave
before he overstayed his welcome. Acknowledging that, and the onrush
of unfiltered feelings that came immediately after – sorrow, joy,
gratitude, finality, mortality – amidst the boring beige walls of
my office at the end of a dull week was like being knocked down by a
cold wave while wading in shallows: surprising and unnerving for a
moment, but invigorating, too.
Harlan is gone now, a reality that I'm sure would bemuse and tickle him to no end (once, reflecting on the decline of integrity in America, he said "I tell ya, thank God I'm gonna die soon."). He left behind a lexicon of work few will
ever surpass, not in quantity or quality and certainly not in both.
He was not the man who inspired me to become a writer. He was the
man who inspired me to keep trying, who showed me what a writer could
do with just a stab of wit, a love of language, a gut full of bile,
and a willingness to do the damn work. I quit a hundred times. I
wanted to quit a hundred more. I want to quit still. Then the tome
comes out, and for a few minutes or a few hours I read the words and
I remember...it is possible. It is still possible. A simple lesson,
inelegant and understated, two things he was not. But it was the
lesson Harlan Ellison gave me, and I will cherish that
forever.
I remember now one last thing I said to him when he passed his
signed book back to me and I shook his hand. It wasn't “thank you”
as I often recall; it was “thank you for everything”.
And he said to me, “You got it, kid.”
 |
| The Author and the author (of this piece) in Autumn, 2000. |
