You've noticed, of course. Everyone finally realizes it as an inescapable truth. Nothing we do as adults is wholly based on our adult reactions; it's always-to greater or lesser degree depending on how deep go our roots to the past-an echo of our childhoods. Your politics are either mirror images of your parents' politics when you were a kid, or they're rebellions against those politics. Somewhere in the physical makeup of the love-partners who turn you on are vague shadows of the high school cheerleader or basketball center who made your little heart go pitty-pat when you were dashing past puberty. If you were accepted and admired by your teenage peer group, you don't have the same gut-wrenching fears about going to parties where you don't know anyone as someone who was an outsider. If you had religion pounded into your head when you were young, chances are pretty good even if you've renounced formal church ties, you still carry the guilts and fears around in your gut. Or maybe you've come full-circle and have become a Jesus Person, if you've been disillusioned enough by the world.
No one escapes.
Our childhoods are sowing the wind, our adulthoods are reaping the whirlwind.
As true of me as you. No better, no nobler, no stronger, no freer of the past. Just like you.
In Painesville, I was a card-carrying outcast. “Come on, Harlan!” the kids would yell across Harmon Drive. “Come on, let's play at Leon's!” And like a sap, I'd clamber up from between the huge roots of the maple tree in our front yard, drop my copy of Lorna Doone or Lord Jim (or whatever other alternate universe I'd fled to because I hated the one I was in) and run after the gang of kids streaking for Leon Miller's house. I was a little kid, smaller than any other kid my age, and I couldn't run nearly as fast. That was always part of their equation, of course. And just as I'd reach the front steps, they'd all dash inside Leon's house, slam and latch the screen door, bang shut the front door with its big glass panes and crowd behind the front window, sticking their tongues out at me and laughing. How I longed to enter that cool and dim front room where they would soon be playing Chinese Checkers and Pick-Up-Sticks.
Instead, their rejection always drove me to fury.I would slam my hands against the wooden frames of the screen windows and kick the glider on the front porch, always being careful not to tear the screens or damage the glider for fear of the wrath of Leon's grandmother. Then, when they tired of baiting me, and retreated into the dimness beyond to play, I would return to my book, where I could be brave and loved and capable of dueling Athos, Porthos and Aramis all in one afternoon.
On the schoolyard at Lathrop, I fared considerably worse than D' Artagnan. There I was the accepted punching bag of bullies-in-training, whose names appear every now and then in my stories as characters who come to ugly ends.
I won't go into the reasons; they're all thirty years out-of-date and relevance. Suffice it that a gang of them would pound me into the dirt. And with a pre-Cool Hand Luke persistence, I would pull myself up and jump one of them, bury my teeth in his wrist and wrestle him to the ground. The others would kick me till I let loose. Up again, more slowly a second time, with a wild roundhouse at a thick, stupid face. Sometimes I'd connect and savor the eloquent vocabulary of a bloody nose. But they'd converge and plant me again. And it would go that way till I was unconscious or until Miss O'Hara from the third grade would dash out to scatter them.
But it wasn't the beatings that most dismayed me. It was having to go home after school with my clothes ripped and bloodied beyond repair. You see, I was grade school age only a few years after the Depression, and my family was anything but wealthy. We weren't destitute, far from it; but things were as tight for us as for most families in the Midwest at that time, and my parents could not afford new clothes all the time.
When I walked home from school, I would take the longest way around, often going to sit in the woods on the corner of Mentor Avenue and Lincoln Drive till it grew dark. I was ashamed and filled with guilt. And when, at last, I could stay away no longer, I'd go home and my Mother-who was a kind woman suffering with a troublesome child-would see me, she would cry and clean me up with mercurochrome and Band-Aids, and she would say (not every time, but even once was enough to make an indelible impression), “What did you say to get them mad?”
How could I tell her it was not only that I was a smart aleck? How could I tell her it was because I was a Jew and they had been taught Jews were something loathsome? How could I tell her it was easier for me to carry a broken nose and bruises than for me to act cowardly and deny that I was a Jew? The few times she had heard their anti-Semitic remarks, she had gone to school, and that had only made it worse. So I let her think I had started it. And swallowed the guilt. And built a reaction to bearing the blame that grew as I grew.
Now, as an adult, my reaction to being blamed for something I did not do is almost pathological.
Now, as an adult, I don't give a damn if I do tear the screens or damage the glider. I can think of nothing more horrible than what is done to Joseph K. in Kafka's The Trial.
Which brings me to why this book exists, and why it is the book it is. Preceding was preamble.
In 1971 the publishers of this book, Walker & Company, published my collection of collaborations with other sf writers, Partners in Wonder. It was a lovely book but because of the ineptitude of Walker's then-art director, it was a book hideously overpriced. It seemed certain Walker & Company would lose a potload.
On the day the first copies came back from the bindery, I happened to be on a business trip to New York. My editor at Walker at that time was Helen D' Alessandro, a charming and talented woman who had tried to watchdog the Partners in Wonder project, who had been hamstrung by excesses and inefficiencies during the production stages. Helen called me first in Los Angeles, to advise me the books were in, and finding out I was in New York, tracked me down and invited me to come in to the Walker offices. She knew all too well the horrors that had served as midwives to the birth of that book: galleys set by computer so badly that I had had to spend nine full days correcting them…insane typography that had jumped the cost of the book from a reasonable $5.95 to an impossible $8.95…layout so berserk that it killed a certain reprint sale to the SF Book Club. She wanted me to see the book first.
I arrived at the offices of Walker & Company and Helen came out to the reception area to take me back to her office. When she came into the reception foyer, I was standing with a copy of Partners in Wonder in my hands. The woman on the switchboard had removed a copy from the carton when it had been delivered and had put it out on one of the display shelves as a gesture of kindness to an author she knew was soon to arrive. Helen's smile faded as she saw me standing there forlornly, leafing through a book twice the size and twice the price it might have been.
I looked up and saw her. She tried to smile again, but it wouldn't come. “Oh,” was all she said.
In silence, we walked back to her office.
At that time, Helen shared editorial space with Lois Cole.
Lois Cole is one of the finest editors, one of the kindest persons, one of the most intelligent and charming people I have ever known. She was Margaret Mitchell's editor on Gone With the Wind and it was she, in part, who convinced Margaret Mitchell to change the title of that book from Mules in Horses' Harness to Gone With the Wind. She is a woman of uncommon perception and empathy.