She smiled up at me as I entered the tiny office, cleared a stack of manuscripts from a chair, and said, “I'm sorry, Harlan.”
It was not the happiest day of my life.
We commiserated for a while, and I hung around the office doing some publicity work for the book with Henry Durkin. As five o'clock approached, I walked through the crowded passageway of the editorial offices to gather my coat and attaché case, when I heard someone call my name. I looked up and saw Sam Walker.
The president of Walker & Company is Samuel S. Walker, Jr. He is a tall, elegant man with fine manners, soft voice and too much gentlemanliness to ever permit him to become the sort of rapacious publisher who winds up with a corporate octopus like, for instance, Doubleday. We had never exchanged many words.
He motioned me to join him in his office, and when I'd entered, he closed the door and turned to me. His expression was sober and concerned. “I want you to know,” he said, very gently, “that I know you aren't responsible for what has happened on this book. It's too common a practice in this business to blame a writer for what's gone wrong on the production end of a project. I want you to know that I'm aware we'll lose money on this book, but the fault does not lie with you. And I'd consider it a privilege to publish you again, if you'll trust us a second time.”
He did not say: What did you do to get them mad?
He did not ask me why my clothes were ripped and my nose bloody and one shoe gone. He said he knew I was innocent of all wrongdoing.
It was a ten year old child getting an apology from an adult; the state bringing in “no true bill” and dismissing all charges; the hospital calling to say they'd mixed up the biopsy reports and someone else was dying of cancer; a page one retraction. It was one of the kindest, most sensitive things anyone had ever done for me, and it had occurred in an industry not overly burdened with thoughtfulness and kindness.
Sam Walker could not possibly have known what his words meant to me, nor with what echoes of my childhood they reverberated.
But because of those three minutes of concern, I wrote this book, and Sam Walker has published it. So if it pleasures you… the thanks go as much to Sam as to me.
Originally, this was to have been a collection of already-published stories from several out-of-print books I'd written years ago. Larded in with the reprints were to have been three or four new stories. But as time progressed, I grew more and more disquieted with the idea of such a collection. In 1971, Macmillan published Alone Against Tomorrow, a collection of my stories that spanned the years from 1956 to 1969; though the pivot of all the stories in that collection was the theme of alienation, the book was also intended as a small, narrow retrospective of my work.
But a peculiar thing happened. It was one of the rare occasions on which I did not overblow my reputation, one of the few times my ego did not swell out of proportion to my worth. I had not gauged the popularity my stories had achieved in the three years preceding the publication of Alone Against Tomorrow, and was alternately delighted and dismayed by the letters I received praising the book but denouncing me for gathering together under a fresh title a group of much-reprinted stories.
It decided me without doubt that never again could I permit a supposed “new” collection to contain stories available in my other collections.
Approaching Oblivion was originally intended to gather together stories from out-of-print collections like A Touch of Infinity, Ellison Wonderland and Gentleman Junkie, with one or two stories available only in anthologies done by other editors.
The contracts were signed in November of 1970 and the book-which should have been no trouble to assemble-was supposed to be in Helen D' Alessandro's hands no later than six months thereafter. But the letters were starting to come in on Alone Against Tomorrow, and I began to procrastinate. Months, then years, went by, with polite notes of inquiry from Walker & Company. First, from Helen and then, when she departed the playing fields of literature to marry the brilliant poet, teacher and writer Anthony Hecht, from Lois, from the ineffable and indefatigable Hans Stefan Santesson, from Tim Seldes, from Henry Durkin, from Dedna Bryfonski who was my editor after Lois became swamped with other projects, and finally (though I may have missed a baton-passer or two in the whirl of personnel at Walker), from Ms. Evy Herr, my current shoulderer of anguish.
It is now four years after the original contracting for Approaching Oblivion. And the book is finished. It contains no stories ever included in my collections…though some of them have appeared in anthologies elsewhere. But that doesn't count. This book has my name on it. It is the product of my labors since 1970, with few exceptions. (If you're curious as to when a particular story was written, I've included the date of original emergence and the location[sJ in which I wrote it, at the end of each piece.) So if I get letters complaining that these new stories are familiar, it's got to be from righteous Ellison buffs who buy every obscure magazine published, because these stories come from sources as diversified as Penthouse magazine, Crawdaddy, Galaxy and the August 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. One of the stories has never been published, though it's supposed to be included in a massive art/text history of the Sixties as interpreted through comics, to be edited by The National Lampoon's Michel Choquette. (If Michel ever gets the book finished, don't miss the splendiferous drawings done by Leo & Diane Dillon — who did the cover of the book you now hold — to accompany the text. I'm talking about “Ecowareness,” incidentally.)
I'm glad I waited and let the contents of the book change. For several reasons. First, because most of the collections from which I'd have cannibalized stories are now coming back into print. Several paperback houses will be releasing almost all of my older titles in the next few years, thus hopefully ending the plaintive cries I hear at college lecture appearances, from my readers (each one with impeccable taste) who wail they cannot find my books on the newsstands.
Second, because now Sam and Evy (and Lois and Helen and all the other good people who were so incredibly patient) have a new book, instead of a Frankenstein creation cobbled-up from spare parts and dusty remnants.
And third, because the Harlan Ellison who signed those contracts in 1970 is not the same Harlan Ellison who writes these words today, in September of 1974.
Which brings me full circle to the schoolyard of Lathrop, and reaping the whirlwind.
In 1970, when I conceived the theme of this book-cautionary tales that would warn “this is what may happen if we keep going the way we're going”-I had just emerged from a decade of civil unrest and revolution. I was far from alone in passing through that terrible time. My friends, my country, my world had also gone through it. I believed in certain things, and I had gut-hatreds I thought would never cool. I had been in riots against the Viet Nam war that had netted me time in jail and broken bones; I had been on civil rights marches and demonstrations that showed me the depths of inhumanity and craziness to which normal human beings could sink; I had lost many friends to dope and death; I had gone through an intellectual inferno that burned me out so I could not write for nearly a year and a half…and I was tired.