I’ve always said being Jewish doesn’t necessarily make a person eligible for 2000 years’ retroactive persecution, but recent events are just too come on, world, gimme a break!
No sooner do I cease writing The Glass Teat for the Los Angeles Free Press and get set to start writing The Harlan Ellison Hornbook for that outlet, when Brian Kirby and all the people I knew split, and started The Staff. So I held off with this column’s inception and did some writing for The Staff. For which I never got paid. When it became apparent to me that my love of the “Movement” is only twice as strong as my love of being paid for what I write—even if it is only a token sum—when it became clear to me that in the name of “love” I (like many others) was being ripped-off by the Movement—I stopped writing for The Staff. Then Judy Sims of Rolling Stone was assigned to put together the L.A. Flyer insert section for Stone, and she asked me if I’d revive The Glass Teat. I was less interested in going back to a column that I’d mined for 2½ years than in starting a fresh one, but Judy is a friend and the pay was nice, and I’d always wanted to be in Rolling Stone, so I did it. After three issues under Judy’s superlative editorship, the farseeing Stone entrepreneurs in San Francisco killed what had become a fascinating section, Judy became L.A. Bureau Chief, and The Glass Teat was dead again after a two-installment revival. Peace and quiet and an absence of deadline-scurrying reigned in Ellison Wonderland till October of 1972 when Art Kunkin and I agreed that I’d return to the Freep, this time with The Hornbook. Through trial and tribulation and the ineptitude of various production personnel, the column went 29 installments over nine-plus months of Freep. I missed a lot of deadlines because of lecture tours, the serious illness of my Mother in Florida, and the horrors of getting my NBC series The Starlost ready for airing next month, but I returned to L.A. at the end of July and was getting settled down to a regular schedule again…when Kunkin was fired.
Which is why, gentle readers, you find Installment 30 of The Harlan Ellison Hornbook in something called The Weekly News (which ain’t nearly as dramatic a title as, say, The Daily Planet or The Underground Crusader or The Illustrated Press, but since Kunkin isn’t Morgan Edge or Perry White or even Steve Wilson, and since L.A. isn’t Metropolis or even Big Town, I suppose it’ll suffice). It is my hope and fervent desire that you all support the hell out of The Weekly News, because I’ve worn holes in my soles and my souls, lugging this farrago of peripatetic reportage and reminiscence from scandal sheet to scandal sheet.
For the nonce, in any case, here is home. I have a new, bright piece of logo art done for the column by Hugo award-winning fantasy artist Tim Kirk, I have my scatterdemalion self together, my act ready to display, and I hope those of you who read me in other printed media will let your friends know where I am now. Whenever I missed a few weeks in the Freep, a flood of ugly and berserk letters washed over the Freep desks, and it would only be a kindness to advise those maniacs that their connection and supply can now be found nestled in these pages.
In short, we’ve all suffered enough, so let’s settle down to a smooth time of regular columns and please! don’t nobody make no sudden moves. Hello, again.
What my house is like, is a big elephant flophouse. I moved out of the tree house in Beverly Glen in March of 1966 when I married The Carnivorous Plant, Lory Patrick, my third ill-starred attempt at being A Nice Married Person, and moved in here, to what has come to be known as Ellison Wonderland. (I will not apologize for the play on words.) The Asp, Ms. Patrick, lasted forty-five days and was sent on her pillaging way, and I’ve been living here “alone” in these nine rooms and two-and-a-half baths for seven years. Some other time I’ll describe the joint room by room—they tell me it’s a rare playpen that Better Homes and Gardens would greatly desire to photograph—and when I recover my sanity from those 45 days of horror with The Dragon Lady Patrick, I’ll do a novel about it (to be titled TAKEN, as in “patsy”)—but at the moment, what I want to illuminate is the procession of friends, writers, lady friends (which is a more weighted term than simply “friends,” if you ken my meaning), deadbeats, criminals, revolutionaries, neurotics, flippos, random psychopaths and celebrities who use this house as a way-station on the underground railroad or as a brief stopover in the erratic progress of their spotty lives.
Because the truth of the matter is that during my seven years here in Ellison Wonderland I’ve lived strictly alone for only five months.
There are always at least two or three other residents in the house. I’m told it is a happy place (except when I’m behind deadlines and being pressured by lunatics from 20th Century-Fox, at which time, I’m told, the place bears a closer resemblance to the locale described by Dante Alighieri) and the Blue Bedroom has marked residence for such notables as Norman Spinrad, Theodore Sturgeon, Daphne Davis who started the N.Y. newspaper Rags, Edward Bryant, Prof. Darko Suvin, Bantam Books editor Sharon Delaney, ex-Doubleday editor Judith Glushanok, English writer Mary Ensor, Ben Bova who edits Analog, novelist Richard Hill, sf author Keith Laumer, feminist Vonda McIntyre, an ex-con who is currently doing smashingly well as a novelist, Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones, and so many others I go into Cheyne-Stokes breathing when I try computing the numbers of the horde.
And that’s just the blue bedroom.
Not a week passes in which other parts of the house are not festooned with sleeping bags, sheets and blankets on the sofa, pishy-pads on the waterbed, dining room carpet set up with pillows as mattress. Come summer, and the requests pile in from my ex-students at the various Clarion Writers’ Workshops for snooze space whilst they pass through the City of the Angels. I just got rid of Robert Lilly, Gus Hasford, two young women whose names I never learned, and Arthur Byron Cover, well-known Tazewell, Virginia, layabout and incipient novelist. Tim Kirk will be living here next week while he completes the illustrations for my Harper & Row anthology, THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS; Lisa Tuttle is supposed to be coming from Dallas or Houston or some Texaswhere; Ben Bova will be back so we can work on our ABC-TV Movie of the Week, Brillo; Susan C. Lette has wangled a couple of weeks off from her husband and kids so she can come here to write; Judith Glushanok will be returning from London and need a place to flop; and when David Wise returns from Seattle I’m terrified to learn that Arthur Byron Cover will be back here with his mismatched argyle socks and his nine hundred and seventy-two thousand comic books. My milk bill is staggering.
My attitude toward all this is an oddly ambivalent mixture of feelings ranging from joy and pleasure at being surrounded by quick, clever and witty people whom I love and admire…to utter loathing of their presence when I want to work or be alone with a woman. From moment to moment it changes: my soul leaps with pride that I’m able to repay some of the kindnesses that were visited on me by writers and friends when I needed help, when I was getting started…and my brain burns with unreasoning annoyance that they take up space, kill my privacy, eat me out of house and home, and break my Looney Tunes drinking glasses. I vacillate between affection and gratitude that they are around to help me out when the workload gets unbearable or watch the house when I’m on tour…and rage when they don’t take out the garbage or wash the dishes and I have to spend valuable writing time being a housekeeper. My philosophy of life is that the meek shall inherit nothing but debasement, frustration and ignoble deaths; that there is security in personal strength; that you can fight City Hall and win; that any action is better than no action, even if it’s the wrong action; that you never reach glory or self-fulfillment unless you’re willing to risk everything, dare anything, put yourself dead on the line every time; and that once one becomes strong or rich or potent or powerful it is the responsibility of the strong to help the weak become strong. In this way, opening my home to those who—in my view, because I’m a selfish sonofabitch and I have no time for lames and whiners—have strength that merely needs time and circumstance to ripen, is a way of paying back dues to a world that has been very good to me. I am seldom disappointed in my choices of those helped in this way. Once or twice I’ve had people I loved dearly, who lived here, slip away into lives that creamed them: doping to destruction, running with killers of the soul, demeaning their talent, living lightless days and nights of sorrow and hopelessness. But for the most part, everyone who came here has gone away strengthened, their wings repaired, their egos inflated and toughened, and from those enrichments I’ve sustained my own feelings of worthiness. It’s a selfish practice, hardly one of nobility and humanitarianism.
So even when I bitch about returning home from a month on the road to find a freezer-full of steaks eaten, I know in a special part of my heart that it was money well spent.
Which doesn’t keep me from pissing and moaning about it, of course. If you want consistency, look for it in the graveyard; I’m a flawed, miserable human being and I’m not responsible for my lunacy or my contradictions.
Nor am I responsible for the madness that goes on in this house. Steve Herbst from Chicago going out one day and coming home with an electric piano which he set up in the living room and on which he drove us all mad playing the six repetitious barrelhouse riffs he thought would make him a rock star. For days!
Deborah Kenworthy writing from Buffalo that she wanted to get away from her family and she’d work as secretary for me in exchange for room and board, and then driving me up the wall with a personal manner that was a cross between Queen Victoria and Ilse Koch. (Ilse Koch was the lady who made lampshades out of Jews at Buchenwald.)
Ed Bryant coming for a weekend and staying three years, off and on, hoarding away cookies and peanut butter in the Blue Bedroom against, I suppose, the Apocalypse; squirreling away so many cases of diet cola that poor Jim Sutherland (about which loon more at another time) fell over them and banged his head on the wall, knocking loose the framed portrait of Ellison the Good, inscribed, “From your friend and mine, God.”
(I can’t resist.) Jim Sutherland, current resident of Blue Hell, who goes out early in the dawn and crouches by the rear wall of the garden, waiting to catch a breakfast of fresh gecko as the little lizards come out to sun themselves. You should see his tongue. Ukh. Sutherland, turning himself into a turnip for the delight of Roz’s children. Sutherland, killing my tropical fish; Sutherland, swearing his bedroom is occupied by a giant chicken.
Oh god…Sutherland!
Gus Hasford, refusing to bathe. Cindy Dwan being saved from death by a mad dash to UCLA Emergency. Phil Mishkin appearing at the door in the wee hours, needing a bed till Julie would let him back in the house. Thirteen kids and their teacher from the Dayton Living Arts Center appearing with sleeping bags in a van that blocked the entire street. Robert Sheckley hiding out from publishers. Ted Sturgeon making paella with his hands. Sutherland’s Sure Death chili. Carol Botwin and her imbroglio with Adele Davis, right before my very eyes.
Yes, life here at Ellison Wonderland is a constant joy.
Something like traveling through Transylvania in the company of Genghis Khan, the Marquis de Sade, Little Nemo and Conan the Musclebound. I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea…that I don’t like all this company, but if you want a clearer, more detailed picture of what life is like here in these nine rooms and two-and-a-half baths, I refer you to “The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.”
God, and Arthur Byron Cover, willing, I’ll return next week for another report from the Country of the Blind.