Immediately following this column, you will find the text of a letter written to the Los Angeles Free Press (heretofore and hereinafter abbreviated as Freep). It takes me to task for bad behavior. Throughout this book, and with the permission of the journals in which such letters were first published, I’ve included pertinent reader reaction. What I haven’t included, usually, are all the letters of praise. That’s self-serving and doesn’t throw much light. Hell, there are even people who admire the manifestos of skinheads or Phyllis Schlafly. There’s no accounting for taste, however warped. So what you’ll encounter are those followup comments by strangers who’ve savaged me. And any reply I made to such letters.
For those who get itchy when they confront others’ “dirty linen,” I have to declare as follows:
The tradition of “confessional writing” is a long and honorable one; Washington Irving, Cervantes, Thomas De Quincey, Shaw, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Mailer…all of them, like Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin and Mark Twain, were driven to write of the human condition as viewed through the most perfect lens available to them: their own experiences.
It makes people uncomfortable, this public exposure of the moist throbbing within. But as Mario Vargas Llosa has said, “The writer is an exorcist of his own demons.” And I have seen more clearly than often I wished to see it, that those who write so glowingly and passionately of love, truth, honor, courage and friendship do not necessarily demonstrate such a passionate glow in real life. There are columns to come in this book that deal precisely with this dichotomy. There are writers who lie to themselves, and to their readers. Lying to readers in fiction is probably okay, because what is fiction but the well-constructed lie? Yet I believe to the shoe-tops that a writer should not lie to him/herself. Because that corrupts the writing.
Because of the kinds of fiction I choose to write, I feel the necessity to examine every facet of my life, my actions, what I’ve experienced and what I believe. In that way, I can write absolutely without restraint, without the self-censoring that is usually only a dodge to keep hidden that which I fear to reveal. We are all flawed, and we rearrange the past to make ourselves look better in the retelling.
The poet Olin Miller wrote, “Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory.”
I cannot do that. It isn’t any great nobility on my part, it is an inescapable dedication to the Work. And that means that when I write essays, introductions, comments on the Work, I tell it all.
Any number of writers now include introductions to their stories, but when I started doing it back in the Fifties, it was looked on as an egomaniacal intrusion. (In England, they still insist on dropping the introductions when they republish my books. They contend—and I think they’re correct in their appraisal of the U.K. readership—that a more reserved nation is affronted by such confessions.) I think it’s necessary to commit such material to print. It keeps the reader aware of the simple truth that writers are just men and women, with a certain talent, but nowhichway different from other men and women, and subject to the same fears. It creates, I believe and I hope, a bond between the artist and the audience.
Apparently, it works. The introductory material in my books seems to fascinate and edify the readers, and I get too much mail that says something like, “Gee, I like your introductions better than the stories.” Well, that doesn’t actually drive me coo-coo with joy, but I get the sense they’re trying to convey.
And so, columns such as this one.
Which does, as I admit in my reply to the letter that came after the publication of the column, demonstrate at least questionable ethics on my part. I don’t try to weasel out of it, but the column was sent to the subject in plenty of time prior to its publication, for her approval or cease & desist. She allowed it to appear in print, and I submit that I extended exactly the right courtesy, however ill-advised may have been the writing of the column in the first place.
What the piece says about those who brutalize us with their weakness, however, stands unaltered. I am nailed to that theory and not twenty years under the bridge alters my position. Last week one of those leaners tried to eat up several days of precious time I was spending with old friends I hadn’t seen in ten years. They are ever with us.
And one last note.
The recipe for café ellison diabolique mentioned en passant is as follows:
CAFÉ ELLISON DIABOLIQUE
freshly ground coffee (see note below)
El Popular Mexican-style brick chocolate
1½tsp. C&H Hawaiian washed raw sugar (or equivalent brand)
¼tsp. nutmeg
¼tsp. cardamom
raw honey
whipping cream (not milk, not half-&-half)
water (boiling)
12-ounce coffee mug
mortar and pestle
NOTE: Any good coffee will do. But by “any” I mean any whole bean or freshly ground, not canned. Jamaican Blue Mountain, Kona, Celebes Kalossi, Guatemala Antigua, Honduras Estrieta, Sumatra Mandheling, as well as any medium-dark Brazilian will serve. Do not use flavored coffees—with chocolate or vanilla or macadamia or suchlike. But if you wish to duplicate the original, the recommended blend is as follows:
70% Mexican Coatepec
20% Colombian Supremo
10% French Roast
Into a 10-oz. coffee mug spoon the raw sugar, cardamom, nutmeg, and a drizzle (about ½ a teaspoon) of raw honey (more or less, to taste).
With a mortar and pestle break off and pulverize sufficient El Popular Mexican chocolate from the brick cakes in the 15-oz. package to produce 2 full teaspoons of finely crushed grind. Add it to the contents of the mug.
Get the coffee into the mug. Preferably a drip method, a Melitta filter cone, or one of the European small pots that doesn’t produce an acidic residue or oily film, such as one gets with a percolator. Use rapidly boiling water. Leave about an eighth of the mug empty for the addition of enough cream to produce a golden hue. Stir like crazy.
This is my personal coffee recipe, refined over the last thirty-plus years to produce a cuppa that can be slogged away all day. For those who need their coffee dead-black and harsh, forget this. For those who truly like the taste of coffee but don’t want heartburn or the jangles, who take cream and sugar…welcome home. This one produces a balance between the harsh, often unpleasant taste of regular coffee and the cloying sweetness of hot cocoa. While it bears lineal ties with Russian Coffee and Café Chocolat, the addition of nutmeg and honey give it a special piquancy all its own. I find that coffee prepared in this fashion early in the morning soothes the jangled stomach lining, yet furnishes the push to get to work at whatever’s in the typewriter from the night before. During the day, it can be sipped even when cold, almost like an iced dessert coffee. At night it is companionable, and not to be dismissed in its estimable service as a mild aphrodisiac. (Thus the adjective in its title.)
An earlier version of this recipe appeared in the 1973 edition of Cooking Out of This World, a wonderful Ballantine Books original paperback created and edited by my longtime friend, Anne McCaffrey. This is the book that included Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s excellent recipe for Gopher Stew, the very same recipe I included with the dead gopher I mailed by 4th Class Mail to the comptroller of Signet Books when he wouldn’t release the rights to one of my books. That story, like the recipe for coffee here proffered, has become legend. (An updated version appeared in the 1992 expanded and revised Wildside Press edition.)
This is the wonderful brew twenty-four years later. It has undergone changes and refinements, but remains a particular favorite of the many guests at Ellison Wonderland. Ben Bova, Robert Silverberg, Richard Dreyfuss, Norman Spinrad, Carl Sagan, Edward Bryant, and others have begged like children when they came to visit. Susan thinks it’s too sweet, but then she’s a Brit who takes tea in the morning, with milk. This is why we won the Revolutionary War.
1997 footnote: Since the heart attack in April of ’96, I’ve had to reorder my diet extensively. I still do the coffee every morning, but now I use nonfat or 2% milk instead of whipping cream. Don’t cry for me, Argentina; it’s little enough price to pay in exchange for being permitted to see your happy, shining faces. Sharing these golden moments with you is my greatest joy. And thank your mother for the chicken soup.