Harlan Ellison
Approaching Oblivion: Road Signs On the Treadmill Toward Tomorrow
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I didn’t do it alone. Others helped. Some in tiny ways they won’t even remember. Others with encouragement, assistance, research and love. They will remember. Robert Silverberg, Jack Dann, Vicky Schochet, Stephanie Bernstein, Steve Herbst, Andrea Hart, Ben Bova, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, Joe Haldeman, Ed Bryant, Jim Sutherland, Sam Walker, Helen D’Allesandro Hecht, Leo & Diane Dillon, Lynn Lehrhaupt, Art Frankel, Jim Wnoroski, Ed Ferman, Toby Roxburgh, Tim Seldes and Mike Seidman. And Leslie Kay Swigart, because I forgot to acknowledge her help with Again, Dangerous Visions. And, of course, as always, Bob Mills, and Marty Shapiro, who are due for sainthood momentarily. Gypsy da Silva copy edited this book in its manuscript stage with grace and insight and an attention to the primacy of the writer’s creation that is rare as black diamonds in the publishing industry; and I love her shamelessly for it. Special thanks are due Lynda Mitchell, but that’s none of your business.
APPROACHING ELLISON
Soon after I came to Los Angeles in 1970, I was called by a producer who offered me a job writing a science fiction screenplay. I was tied up with a book at the time; the producer asked me if I could suggest another writer for the project. I suggested Harlan Ellison.
There was a long, chilly silence at the other end of the phone. Finally the producer cleared his throat and said, “Do you, ah, know Harlan Ellison?”
No, I said, I didn't. I knew him only through his work. I had read some of his stories, and seen some of his television scripts.
“Umm,” the producer said. “Well, let me tell you something-” and he launched into a short, energetic, and wholly unprintable description of his feelings on the subject of Harlan Ellison. The outburst ended as abruptly as it began, and he got off the phone leaving me completely mystified. I could only assume that Ellison and this producer had had some acrimonious dealings in the past. But that is hardly a rare event in Hollywood, and I thought no more about it.
As time went on, I ran into many people who had had acrimonious dealings with Harlan Ellison. There was an odd sameness about the way all these people talked. “He's very inventive, very enthusiastic, very talented,” they would begin, “but-” and then they'd launch into a long and heated harangue, cataloging what they regarded as the innumerable abuses they had suffered at his hands. I was told that Ellison was a perfectionist; that he cared too much about his work; that he fought for his ideas; that he was demanding and quick to pull his name from any project which did not go as he intended-always substituting the sarcastic pseudonym, “Cordwainer Bird.”
None of this elicited much sympathy from me. I saw nothing wrong with caring about your work and fighting for your ideas. I had been doing the same thing, and for my trouble I had been fired by Universal and then sued by that company. So I was in the position of admiring Ellison more with every new complaint I heard about him.
The people who spoke so bitterly about Harlan Ellison all mentioned something else, too. At the end of their diatribes, they would pause to catch their breath and then conclude with. “ And besides, did you see what Gay Talese said about him?.
Gay Talese had written an Esquire piece called “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” which reported an encounter between Ellison and the singer. Ellison comes off as disrespectful, witty, and refusing to be bullied. It is hardly the portrait of a blackguard and cur. which his critics felt it to be.
In the end, I suppose what impressed me most about these Ellison stories was the strength of feeling with which they were told. The facts-so far as they could be determined-were never very remarkable, but the emotional content was always fierce and highly charged. Somehow. Ellison had really gotten to them, and they would never forget it.
Some time later, this same Harlan Ellison began to attack me in print. His argument was that I wasn’t writing good science fiction. which was fine by me-I didn't think I was writing science fiction at all-but it was irritating to be placed in an unwanted category and then told I didn’t fit it well. I was back at Universal by then, and one day I was complaining about his attacks on me when a secretary looked up and said, “Do you, ah, know Harlan Ellison?”
No, I said, I didn't.
“Well,” she said, “I used to be his secretary and I know him very well. Would you like to meet him?”
Harlan Ellison lives in the Los Angeles foothills, in a perfectly ordinary-appearing house, in a quiet suburban neighborhood. The inside of the house is as remarkable as the exterior is mundane; Ellison himself seems to take a certain pleasure in the unobtrusive outward appearance he presents to the community.
Inside, the feeling is sensual, almost sybaritic, with a quality of tension that comes from a barely controlled chaos. There are books everywhere, thousands of books, lining walls, tucked above doorways, filling closets, threatening to spill out and consume the living space. There are bizarre juxtapositions at every turn: signed Wunderlich prints, Soleri notebooks, sculpture from Mozambique, psychedelic book art set side by side in confusing profusion. It takes enormous energy to hold all this together, and Ellison himself appears to have boundless energy. He moves restlessly, talks non-stop, jumping from books to television to politics to sex to movies, taking up each new subject with considerable humor and aggressive enthusiasm.
He is not an easy man. His opinions are strongly held and his feelings strongly felt; he is not tolerant of compromise where it affects his life and his work. In someone else, this obstinacy might appear petty or fanatical, but in Harlan it is natural and attractive. It is simply the way he is.
Most strikingly, he is a genuine original, one-of-a-kind, difficult to categorize and unwilling to make it any easier. He demands to be taken on his own terms, and that aspect of his personality and his work is, I suspect, what has engaged both his critics and his large and passionately loyal following. He seems to be a kind of energy focus and no one who brushes against him comes away with an indifferent response. His advocates are every bit as vehement as his critics. Other writers have readers; Ellison has fans who will get into fistfights with anyone who says a word against him.
He doesn't write like anybody else. The same paradoxes and odd juxtapositions which appear in his house and in his casual speech, are present in all of his writing. What emerges is a surprising, eclectic, almost protean series of visions, often disturbing, always strongly felt.
In the end, these strong feelings drive Hollywood producers crazy but make extraordinary stories. After a long hiatus, there are eleven here, in top Ellison form-uncompromising, individual, and exactly as he wants them to be.
Hollywood
29 January 74
REAPING THE WHIRL WIND
If it hadn't been for my getting beaten up daily on the playground of Lathrop Grade School in Painesville, Ohio-this book would not be what it is. It might be a book with my stories in it, but it wouldn't be this book, and it wouldn't be as painful a book for me as it is.