Two weeks ago, before I left on the lecture tour that finds me tonight, writing this in Philadelphia, I was talking about friendship and the perverse ways in which we raise friends to godhood, and expect from them a nobility we do not ourselves possess; and then how we bleat and cry when they turn out to have feet of fecal matter.
I talked about how it had happened to me, how I’d been put in that position of obligation, and how I hated it. At that time I promised to tell you about the reverse, about the time I raised a friend to the holy state and how he fucked me over. From this story, one would hope, you will derive a valid object-lesson that will save you from the same pain. Maybe not. None of us excels in remembering our mistakes. We keep making them over and over, like brute beasts, somewhichway in this area dumber than the lowest paramecium that, if burned, will shy away from fire for the rest of its brief life.
It begins in the early Fifties, when I was a high-school student in Cleveland, having just discovered science fiction and realizing that all the other gigs at which I had played—acting, singing, stealing—all of them were five-finger exercises for me, that I wanted to be a writer, wanted very little else than to be a writer, would settle for no other life than that of a writer. A number of professional writers became my friends, and several of them were extraordinarily kind to me, “taking me under their wing,” so to speak.
One of those writers became a close friend, in the way an acquaintance of nearly the same generation can best become a close friend: as an older brother. As I had no brothers, and my Father was dead by that time, the guy filled a very particular need in my life. Someone older, more experienced, kind but watchful, someone who was a perfect role model. He was a fine writer, in the early stages of his career but already widely published and highly respected. He had a fascinating family background, had been on the road and adrift in the world long enough to be streetwise, yet cynically optimistic. And he seemed to love writing as much as I did. He talked writing, lived the life of a writer (as I’d always seen it in my fantasies), and wrote like a demon. He was clearly on his way to a brilliant and long career. But he was only a few years older than I, and so I was able to relate to him not as a distant and Olympian literary figurehead the way I viewed the imposing literary bulk of a Salinger or a Hemingway—but as, well, what I said: a knowledgeable and witty older brother.
He came to visit in Cleveland and we chummed around; I went to New York to visit him and stayed in his apartment and was introduced to other writers, even attending a gathering of the now-legendary Hydra Club, New York’s professional sf society. I met the late Willy Ley and Robert Sheckley and Fletcher Pratt and Katherine MacLean and H. L. Gold, who was at that time the editor of Galaxy magazine, and Phil Klass, who is “William Tenn,” and Harry Harrison. It was a stellar crowd, and I confess to feeling that I had at last found my people. I was hooked; it was the life of a writer for me, just as soon as I could get through college and blah blah blah.
You may be wondering why I haven’t used the name of my friend thus far. Did it on purpose. Shadow of bad things to come. Let’s call him Scarff, just for the sake of convenience: those who knew us then, and know me personally now, will know to whom I refer. The rest of you need never know. He’s still around, and as the finale of this epic will demonstrate, there is no further need for either of us to know the other, so there’s no purpose served in offering him up as gossip.
Well. I went off to college, still writing, still pulling rejection slips from editors. But Scarff was handy when I needed reassurance. I’d write a story and send it to him and he’d do a heavyweight criticism of the attempt, and not once did he reply with a letter from which I failed to gain some sensible, workable data. Not silly literary theory, but hardcore writing information, like “You can’t cheat a reader’s need to feel you’ve actually created a whole character by describing him as ‘looking just like Cary Grant, except with bigger ears.’”
I’ve saved those letters. They are some of the best teaching I ever had.
Is it any wonder, then, that I worshipped him? He was the perfect role model. His ethics were unshakeable—he told me so himself. His skill and talent were obvious. His kindness was second only to his personal strength and willingness to share what he knew with a rank novice. He was, to me, an heroic figure. Competent as a Heinlein protagonist, knowledgeable as an Asimov technician, warm and funny as a Sheckley character, handsome and charismatic as one of Chad Oliver’s pipe-smoking archaeologists. And his girl friend was sensational.
Things went badly for me in college. I was a restless and distracted student, garnering grades so low they made a .083 average; the creative writing classes at Ohio State were virtually nonexistent and what there was, was so out of touch and off the wall it bore no relation to the real world of writing and selling. When I would be at my lowest ebb, I would call Scarff and he’d try to cheer me. And finally, when it became clear to both of us that college held no light for me, nor that it could inform in any way the career I had chosen for myself, he advised me to split and come to New York.
Shortly thereafter I did just that. I was thrown out of OSU for several good reasons which I’ll detail another time, and after a few months of regrouping my emotional forces, I went to New York. To become a writer, yuk yuk.
I mooched room and board for a while from Lester del Rey and his late wife Evelyn, two of the kindest people I have ever known; and stayed a while with Scarff in his tiny bachelor apartment in the West 30s. But he was pressed for space and so I moved out, moved uptown to West 114th Street off Broadway, and for the next few years we saw each other only intermittently.
His writing had slowed. Both in total output and in number of product. He had always been close to poverty—despite the excellence of his work—and he was forced to take on other kinds of jobs to keep going.
Time passed rapidly for both of us. I got married the first time in 1956, he married his sensational girl friend somewhat earlier, I got drafted in 1957 and wound up in Chicago in 1959, working for a publisher who oddly came to have an almost Satanic hold on me. I didn’t see or communicate with Scarff very much. I had been a selling professional for almost five years at that point, though I’d hardly begun to write what I’ve come to think of as my “serious” work; to that time, I’d been merely a journeyman, writing hundreds of thousands of words of pulp stories, learning my craft, finding my own voice. Scarff had virtually ceased writing. An occasional piece would surface, but nothing very long or very unified or very startling. It was sad-making, but hardly my place to pass any value judgments about the reasons he had slowed and stopped. He was working in advertising at that time, I believe.
Chicago was a bad time for me. My four-year marriage to my first wife, Charlotte, was coming to a terrifying and lunatic conclusion. I divorced her, went through six months of pure effort in an attempt to flush myself down a toilet, got my head straightened by a friend named Frank Robinson, himself a good writer, and returned to New York to pick up the pieces. Not yet sane, I met a lady, married her on the rebound, and found myself in 1961 back in Evanston, Illinois, working for the same publisher; but this time as editor of a line of paperback books I’d created.
When I finally came out of the fog Charlotte’s descent into the maelstrom had visited on me, I looked around, found myself working for a man I despised, married to a marvelous woman whom I did not love, father of a thirteen-year-old son from her first marriage many years before, desperately unhappy with myself, and simply desperate to free myself so I could put myself back together.
I had, shortly before this point, come back into contact with Scarff. As editor of the Regency Books line, I felt an obligation to certain writers whose work I’d admired and felt had not been widely enough circulated. To the end of providing good books to a wide audience by these writers, I published B. Traven, author of TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, Philip José Farmer, Lester del Rey, Clarence Cooper and, naturally, myself. And I contacted Scarff. He was living in dire financial straits in New Jersey with his wife and several kids, scuffling to make ends meet. He had declared bankruptcy and everything was in her name. I called him one day and reminded him of two books he’d done. The first was a realistic novel that had predicted the fall of the cities within the next fifty years. It had first seen print in a small edition from Lion Books, a now-defunct paperback line, in the mid-Fifties. I suggested he add the several subsequent stories that he’d written in the same world-scene, pad it with some new linking material, and I’d publish it as a new novel. The second I’d only seen as the first thirty pages of a manuscript about a prison break. It had haunted me for years. I offered him contracts on both books, at the top figure my publisher would permit.
He was effusively grateful, saying I was a godsend, and had come along at just the right moment. His family was hungry, the rent was unpaid, he was bogged down and disconsolate. I felt wonderful! I was able to help out the man I most respected and admired in the world. It was like paying back some of the joy and help he’d given me when I’d needed it.
He said he was coming out to Evanston, to see me, and he’d put the first book together before my very eyes. I felt that was a salutary attitude on his part. Perhaps at my house, seeing work and life going on apace, he would start writing again. I sent him the advance for the first book, and he came to Evanston.
Scarff stayed with me for many weeks. We assembled the first book and started to put it into work for the printer. He talked the second book. I pried the advance for the second book loose from the publisher, with great effort.
Then the fog lifted, and I decided I not only had to divorce my second wife, but had to flee Chicago-Evanston entirely. I arrived at that conclusion secretly, but during a long bus ride to Seattle, with my second wife, Billie, asleep some rows in front of us, during the darkest hours of the night, I confided the decision to Scarff. (We were on our way to the World SF Convention, 1961; Scarff had taken only part of the money I’d thought was “desperately needed by his family to live on” and sent it to them; the rest he was to spend at Seattle, using it to fête fans and strangers in an act of profligacy that unsettled me enormously, though my thoughts, clearly, were elsewhere. But it was then, cloaked in darkness aboard a Greyhound rushing through silence, that I set out the lures that were to show me how foolish I had been to visit on merely another flawed human being the responsibilities of godhood.)
I told Scarff of my intentions, and set about convincing him that he should take over my job at Regency Books. It was a well-paying job, several thousand dollars a month, a steady kind of artistically connected work that could provide for him not only a stable and financially solid situation for his family, but the kind of scene that might get him back to writing with self-assurance. He seemed reluctant, and tried to dissuade me. But not very hard, I realized later. He finally said if I could convince the publisher to accept him in my place, he would take the job. He then admitted that he thought my leaving Billie was a good idea. I swore him to secrecy, particularly from my publisher, because I knew I would need at least one month’s wages to sustain both Billie and myself through whatever was to come in the next few months. He promised to say nothing. I felt secure; now I had a way out, a friend whom I could trust, a plan that would minimize hurt all around, and I was repaying my friend with a secure future for the help he had proffered in my past.
So I will not look like a bad guy, I will gloss over what next happened to me.
I was committed to severing the marital ties with Billie, and I became involved with a woman from my past. It was a stupid and weak thing to do, and I bear the guilt for it with little pleasure. But Scarff knew about it, because I told him, and when Billie came to him, he told her, precipitating a series of scenes and passion plays that came close to destroying Billie and myself.
While trying to handle that aspect of the separation—and I freely admit I handled it badly—I was trying to convince my publisher to hire Scarff as my assistant. He didn’t want any part of it. He didn’t like Scarff, felt Scarff had the wrong background for the job, was irresponsible…in short, it was an uphill fight.
Finally, I got him to agree.
At that point, I feared Billie might tell my employer that I was planning to leave in a month. Scarff spent quite a lot of time playing to that paranoia. So I went to tell my publisher that I was going, that I had brought Scarff in to take over for me so there would be no break in the publishing schedule, and that I wanted a month on the job to train him. My publisher agreed.
I was slow coming to this conclusion, but I now feel I was handily manipulated by Scarff. From the moment he knew I was jumping out, from the moment he realized he might at last have the financially and prestigiously secure future that had eluded him all his days, he set about running me through a series of mazes, like a frantic rat. Telling Billie about the other woman; playing on my fear of being fired before I had the funds to cut out and still provide for the needs of Billie and her son; staying sweetly out of it save to move me closer and closer to the final decision.
And when it was all settled that Scarff would take over for me in a month, I was clubbed with just how far he would go to secure the position for himself:
The Regency Books office was one room in a professional building in downtown Evanston. I had set up a small table on which Scarff would work during that month. When I came into the office the first working day of the week after I’d told my publisher, I found Scarff had moved all my papers off my desk, to the little table.
He had set up the editorial desk for himself. Phone calls would come in and be greeted as follows, by him: “Is this a business call or a personal call for Mr. Ellison? I’m the new editor here now, my name is Scarff.” If it was a personal call, I was permitted to take it; if it was business—even if Scarff had no idea what it was about—he intruded himself and handled the call. All of my projects were re-shaped to his own designs.
For those who ask, why did you put up with it, I can only suggest that I was in a state of shock that he had even done such a thing, was rewarding my friendship with such a blatantly anarchistic maneuver, that I was being fucked over by someone I’d treasured and loved as a man of high ethic and purpose. Add to it that I was in a personal quandary about my wife and the other woman, and there was much of the somnambulist about me. Also, much of the weak and cowardly. It isn’t always possible to look good when retelling the pivotal incidents of one’s life.
I took it for less than a week, and quit.
Because of not having the money I needed, four years of bitter struggling and poverty lay ahead for me, and for Billie. I arrived in Los Angeles with her and her son, with ten cents in my pocket. It was a period of pain and scuttling like an animal to keep her in decent surroundings (we had separated and I had to come up with the rent on two separate apartments), while trying to break into films and television.
Everyone survives. Somehow, even if they suicide, everyone survives. I came through it and made a career for myself in the visual media, Billie remarried, to a fine man who has made her happy, and Scarff went on from Regency Books to a job at Playboy and then on into public relations work. He still lives in Chicago, with his family.
There’s a punch line, however. It keynotes what happens when a god turns to a monster for one who stupidly worships.
Many years later, when editing an anthology, I contacted Scarff for a story. Though I despised him, I had lost no respect for his work as a writer. (Again, I reiterate, one should never confuse the artist with the artist’s work.) He promised to do a story for the book, said he needed some money, and if I’d send him an advance of $100 he’d write the piece in the next few weeks and I could send the balance of the payment when I accepted the story. It had been so long since Scarff had written anything except PR puff for a pickle manufacturer, I sent the $100 immediately.
He never wrote the story.
The book went to press and he never returned the $100, money that was taken from the pockets of other writers who could have realized greater advances on the work they had produced for the book. Again, I was bitterly disappointed, and again I felt like a patsy.
I never worked very hard at trying to get the hundred back. I confess to a sickness of soul that made me turn away from all thoughts of Scarff, who now loomed as large in my world as a detestable example of a man who would sell out his friends for security as he had loomed in godlike adoration.
I did hold back some small royalties on a story we had written together, many many years before, a story published in a book of collaborations I’d done with fourteen other writers, but it was pennies and would never total the hundred he’d taken. And besides, it was too late to use the money for the other writers in the anthology.
That was the way it stood till several weeks ago.
A writer of my acquaintance contacted me for Scarff’s address. Said he wanted to buy one of Scarff’s earlier novels for a possible movie deal. I told him to hold off for a few days, that I’d get the address to him but I had an old score to settle and wanted to use the deal as a lever.
Then I called Scarff and told him about the movie deal, about the potential money involved, and told him if he wanted me to make the connection he had to write the story he’d promised me years before, to be included in the final volume of the anthology, that had grown out of proportion into three big books.
He said I was blackmailing him. I said he was correct.
There was a protracted silence on the line between Los Angeles and Evanston. And then that familiar bemused snicker I knew so well.
“This is really ugly,” he said.
“Isn’t it?” I said.
“I really can’t believe you’d do this,” he said.
“I learned from the master,” I said.
Then he began talking about the first fifteen pages (or some lie like that) of the story he’d started for me, years before. He said he’d go down into his basement office and dip the dust off them, and try to finish it for me. I was very polite, I think. I said that was swell, and I’d be happy, on seeing and accepting the story, to pay him at a handsome rate, any amount beyond the initial hundred he’d already gotten, so he’d make the full advance payment.
“Why don’t I just send you the hundred back?”
“Because I don’t want the hundred, Scarff. Money isn’t what’s between us and you know it. I want you to have to anguish to write that story.”
(Now I wonder if I wasn’t still trying to save him from pickle publicity…but that’s a nobler instinct than I care to ascribe to what I was doing. I wanted revenge, and I wanted him in pain.)
“I’ll get back to you,” he said, and hung up.
I was both sickened and joyous. It was one of the ugliest things I’d ever done.
Several hours later he called back.
“I don’t want any part of this; it stinks,” he said.
“That’s right, it does.”
“I’d rather pass on the movie deal…if he wants the book badly enough he’ll find me,” he said. “I’m sending you a check for a hundred dollars.”
“Very noble,” I said. “Floating ethics serve you well.”
I hung up.
The check came in last week. I’ll cash it and put it to work on the anthology Scarff would have appeared in. It’ll pay some other writers who can write. I don’t take Scarff’s revulsion at the blackmail proposition as an act of purity on his part. I take it as a reluctance on his part to assume responsibility for the monster he created in me that would permit such a ghastliness even to be considered.
But the lessons I’ve learned—that I hope this story teaches you—are many. And valuable. Incredibly valuable. They’ve made me, in some ways, a tougher and less likeable fellow. They’ve made me become very realistic about what it takes to buy someone’s soul. They’ve strengthened my resolve never to sell out a friend, no matter what the price.
And the sad part about it is that Scarff still doesn’t know what kind of a human being he was dealing with. I never would have kept him from that deal. I never intended to, not for a moment. But I knew he would think I would. Because that’s where his gut is at.
The writer who wants to buy your book is Stephen Kandel, Scarff. He can be reached either through my agent, Martin Shapiro of the Shapiro-Lichtman Agency in Los Angeles, or through the Writers Guild of America, West, in L.A. I gave him your address after I spoke to you the first time.
Good luck, little godling; because god knows you’ll need it. I’m going to take a shower.