Just when you thought it was safe to hang your balls again…
Remember Installment 9, in which I offended both heaven and earth with my “Fuck Xmas” screed? Well, by the time I’d been doing the Hornbook for a year, that column had become, er, uh, sorta infamous. Art Kunkin, publisher of the L.A. Weekly News, to which the column had been moved from the Freep, decided it would be a big seller, so he featured it on the front page (on bilious green newsprint) and called it “Harlan Ellison’s Famous Christmas Carol,” accompanied by a rough line-drawing of Scrooge and the words (of course) “Bah! Humbug!”
Now you may think this is a cheap way to include yet another column, when in fact all we’re doing is reproducing the first one—like an Andy Warhol painting—but it isn’t a cheap dodge, it is a semi-cheap dodge. I actually wrote a new introduction to this second appearance of what was intended as an annual event; and there was one paragraph changed that updated it in relation to the Watergate mess, then fully in blossom. So the two installments are not the same. Close, but not exactly.
And besides, think how annoyed you’d be if you got to the second page of this piece, found a lot of blank space, and the command to turn back to page such-and-such. This becomes the lesser of two conundra.
There is, however, a perplexment pursuant to this column.
This was the last piece I wrote for the L.A. Weekly News. The Hornbook abruptly ends in that journal, without announcement of termination, or explanation. I don’t remember why.
Between this installment and the next, three years elapsed; and the last three essays would never have been written had not I received a call from John Heidenry, an excellent writer and editor, then living in Missouri, who was contemplating starting a monthly tabloid-style review of literature, politics, and the arts. He asked if I’d be interested in reviving the Hornbook on a monthly basis, and for reasons that now elude me, I agreed to undertake the chore.
But why had I stopped writing the column for Kunkin?
I called Art today, in aid of jogging his/my memory, but good old Kunkin is living way up in Topanga, and he hadn’t bothered to pick up his messages by the time it was necessary to send this manuscript to Jack and Otto. So your guess is as good as mine. The best I can recall, is that I simply grew weary of exploding in print every week. I was working on a number of books, a movie, a tv series…the workload was starting to get to me…and though I didn’t know it at the time, I had begun to develop the progressively more pronounced symptoms of a malaise now known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (formerly the Chronic Epstein-Barr Virus). It was getting harder and harder for me to work the twenty-hour days I’d put in since I was in my teens. But that’s another, by-now-boring, story.
(Although it goes right to the heart of why it took twenty years to get these columns into hardcovers.)
And so, the Hornbook ended its second incarnation, and there were only three more essays to come.