From The Land Of Fear
11 Side Trips To The Dark Edge Of Imagination
Harlan Ellison
FROM THE LAND OF FEAR
Contents
Foreword In Praise of His Spirits Noble and Otherwise
Introduction Where the Stray Dreams Go
The / One / Word / People
Moth on the Moon
Snake in the Mind
The Sky Is Burning
My Brother Paulie
The Time of the Eye
Life Hutch
Battle Without Banners
Back to the Drawing Boards
A Friend to Man
“We Mourn for Anyone…”
The Voice in the Garden
Soldier
SOLDIER
ACT ONE
ACT TWO
ACT THREE
Foreword
In Praise of His Spirits Noble and Otherwise
Here sighs, plaints, and deep wailings resounded through the starless air: it made me weep at first.
Strange tongues, horrible outcries, words of pain, tones of anger, voices deep and hoarse, and sounds of hands amongst them,
made a tumult, which turns itself unceasing in that air for ever dyed, as sand when it eddies in a whirlwind.
Inferno (Canto III, 22—31)
PREAMBLE
Harlan Ellison wrote the stories in this book, and they come from all over that strange thing we call a writing career. When a man is a writer and writing means as much to him as it does to some of us, his career and his life are pretty much inseparable things. He is what he is because of everything he’s been up until the Now that equals the current Is, and the writing is an integral part of the Now of its composition and the Is of that time’s being for him. I don’t know how else to put it without breeding a Sudden Metaphysic.
Now, many of these stories come from Nows long gone by and from many an Is which has since become a Was.
In other words, they’re from all over that thing we call a writing career, and because of this they differ from one another—which is a good thing indeed for those of us who would, in a way, observe a pilgrim in his progress. They differ, because of a thing called growth.
About growth: It means getting bigger, one way or another. Now forget essential biology and switch to the psyche: The voice you will hear in such things as Battle Without Banners is the voice of a bigger man than Time of the Eye. Why? That man knows more because he’s lived more, is more. What’s why. And growth operates on many levels: One, of course, is that of technical competence. Another, and I think more important one, is insight/outsight/hindsight/foresight. This capacity increases as one gets bigger. What would Thomas Mann or Hokusai be like if they’d lived to be a hundred and fifty and remained in full possession of this capacity? I wish I knew. I love them both. After reading Harlan’s Introduction to this volume, I hope that he makes it at least that far, for he made a promise in there, knowing it or no, and he’s a man who keeps his promises.
Harlan is around my age, and he was born in Painesville, Ohio, like twenty-five miles east of Euclid, Ohio, which is where I’m from, and we grew up that close to one another without ever running into each other and saying, “Hi! You want to write, too! Huh?” I wish I had known him in those early and, I suppose the word is “formative,” days. I wish I had known him then, because I like him now.
Harlan, I am happy to say, is a man free of influences. He is his own man, come hell or high water, and that’s one of the things I love about him. He will freely acknowledge a debt to such an humane and exceedingly capable writer as Lester del Rey—but this will be in the way of a journeyman’s compliment to the man who taught him how to use certain tools, because he and Lester del Rey really have very little in common in the way of style and thematic materials. Harlan is eclectic when it comes to subject matter, autodidactic when it comes to what he knows, offensively personal (in a military, not pejorative, sense) when it comes to telling you about it and, to use a Henry James term because it applies here, he is possessed of his own “angle of vision.” Whatever he sees, he sees. It is never anybody else’s borrowed view of the subject that informs his materials. He is his own camera. Period.
And in all these respects, he has grown, is growing, will—I feel—continue to grow, because he’s got something inside him that won’t let him rest until he says what he must, at any given moment, say.
Okay, so much for uniqueness. I call him unique and I mean to honor him by it.
End of Preamble
BEGINNING OF AMBLE
What does it take to be a writer and why? The quotation from Dante which I stuck at the head of this piece contains the answer. There are these sounds, this tumult, turning in that air for ever dyed, eddying in a neat simile and beginning with that all important word “Here.” Everybody hears the sounds, some people listen and a writer, for some damfool reason, wants to put them down on paper and talk about them—here, right now. So that’s the answer to the question: “Some damfool reason.” It’s why Dante wrote, too. My damfool thing, the thing inside me that makes me say what I have to say, is a thing that I don’t understand at all, and sometimes I curse it because it keeps me awake at night. So I can’t tell you what Harlan’s is, but go look at those nine lines of Dante’s once more.
They’re filled with spirits making the kinds of sounds you will hear in this book. That’s why I put them there. Harlan writes about sighs, plaints, deep wailings, strange tongues, horrible outcries, words of pain, tones of anger, voices deep and hoarse and the sounds of hands moving to do many things. It’s been around four years since I last read the Inferno, but when I sat down to write this piece, those lines suddenly came into my head. Because of the fact that I trust my personal demon when it comes to matters such as this, they’re valid.
Listen to the sigh in My Brother Paulie, just there at the end, the plaint in A Friend to Man, the deep wailings in Battle Without Banners, the strange tongues in Life Hutch, the horrible outcry of “We Mourn For Anyone…”, the words of pain in Time of the Eye, the tones of anger in Back to the Drawing Boards and the voices deep and hoarse in The Sky Is Burning. And there are hands moving everywhere, slapping, poking, gesturing hands.
I think Harlan Ellison is a pilgrim, and in this book we have a chance to observe his progress. These stories are culled from Nows as far back as 1957 and as current as Our Now, ten years later. What does it take to be a writer and why? Maybe a pilgrim instinct, a thing akin to the sentiments of all those dead lemmings, is a part of it. Any writer from Daphne Du Maurier to Joseph Heller is an idealist. Idealists are always turned-on and hung-up, and if they write, they turn themselves on, wring themselves out, and hang themselves up to dry where everybody can see. I suspect Harlan is a naked pilgrim. He’s always turning on, wringing out and hanging up in public, sans clothing. He is a wise guy who insists on telling you the whole story. So, okay. The form he will insist on exhibiting is always interesting. You may disagree like all hell with him, but as with Jacob’s Angel, you’ll know you’ve been in a fight. He’s that kind of writer. He’s busy surviving, so if you get a knee below the belt—well then, the pilgrim profession is kind of rough. That pacifist he thinks he might be is quite willing to rabbit punch you to get his point across. I don’t see any contradiction in that. I won’t hit you with a word like enantiadromia, but I will suggest the anecdote of the old Bishop who had taken a vow not to draw blood and so rode off to the Crusades bearing a smooth mace.
End of Amble
BEGINNING OF SPRINT
The Circle is drawn, the words will now be spoken and the spirits will then appear, one by one, from out That Dark Land. It remains only for you to learn where some dreams stray and the ones that di
dn’t will pass then before you. Be prepared. Be Prepared. Here’s Harlan.
End of Sprint
BEGINNING OF FLIGHT
FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS PLEASE
Roger Zelazny
Baltimore, Md.
Introduction Where the Stray Dreams Go
Andy Porter put together this special issue of his science fiction fan magazine Algol, and he called it the “Ellish,” which meant it had a transcribed and edited version of a speech I’d made at a convention, and half a dozen articles by and about me. I can’t deny I was flattered and even a little embarrassed by the honor. Particularly by the articles Andy had commissioned to be written by Ted White and Lee Hoffman and Robert Silverberg, three friends who have known me both wearily and well for many years. They had remembered things I’d done and things I’d said and places I’d been that I had long since forgotten. And their views of me were more honest than I’d care to admit.
Silverbob, in particular, reminisced about an incident that took place in 1953 in Philadelphia. He recalled the episode in which three rather heavy lads braced me, for some now forgotten insult I’d leveled at one of them. Bob wrote:
“Any sensible man would have disappeared at once, or at least yelled for the nearest bell-hop to stop the slaughter. But Harlan stood his ground, snarled back at Semenovich nose-to-nose, and avoided mayhem through a display of sheer bravado. Which demonstrated one Ellison trait: physical courage to the verge of idiocy. Unlike many tough-talking types, Harlan is genuinely fearless.”
Courage, to me, is one of those dormant qualities one never knows one possesses until the pressure is applied. I have known many television producers, for instance, with weighty claims to courage who, when the screws were put on them by networks or studios, folded instantly. The one time I made an idol of someone—a man who professed to being a pillar of courage—he turned out to be as weak as any other man, when the pressure was laid on him. (More the fool me, for having demanded anything more of him, or of anyone, than that they be merely human, with all the attendant foibles and feet of clay.) To be courageous when all that is at stake is talk—parlor liberals take note—or a few dollars, is not to be courageous at all. Hemingway, I suppose, knew where it was at. He was never satisfied with the shape and substance of the courage he found within himself. He continually tested it, setting himself in positions of untenability and danger, merely to find out if the courage was still with him, if it still seemed adequate for the life he was compelled to support. I am for larger and more frequent tests of courage.
Not until I was boxed in totally, in situations where there were no other exits than through the mouth of danger with courage the only weapon, did I satisfy myself that I did, indeed, possess what Silverberg calls “courage to the verge of idiocy.”
Bob has told of one such instance.
Avram Davidson may recall yet another.
Gay Talese reported on a third.
And so I find at thirty-three, that fear and I mix as well as oil and water. It is not that I am fearless, it is simply that there is nothing I fear. (Let me correct that: I am petrified of wearing contact lenses. My brother-in-law Jerry attempted once, to get me to wear contacts, and when the oculist set a test glass in my eye, the hair went straight up on my head, I wet my pants, the blood drained out of my face, and I was covered with sweat till he got it out Ridiculing myself for this adolescent behavior, I demanded the oculist try again. He was reluctant, but I insisted. It was worse the second time. I still wear my glasses on the front of my head, and I can say with great certainty that I am afraid of things being put into my eyes.)
Yet I do not fear lizards, or drowning, or dark rooms, or rats, or high places, or death, or poverty, or needles, or deep personal involvements, or the wrath of the gods. I choose not to think of this as something deserving of applause. There is no control over it—just as there is no control on my part of an absence of a time sense [see “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman]—and so it is as lofty an ability as a good bowel movement. Reflex action (Audie Murphy notwithstanding) is not deserving of the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Ah, but there is a fear I fear. A major fear, and one that propels me like a 30.06 slug through life.
I am desperately afraid I will die before I’ve written all the stories I have in me.
Self-analysis grows chancy, but each man decides at various times in his life who he is, where he’s going, what he stands for. Perhaps not in so many words, but in a kind of subconscious codification that enables him to stop the action at any given point and say, “This is good, this is evil; this is right, this is wrong.” We call it a sense of morality or ethic. We call it a conscience. We call it maturity or a relation to the universe. But whatever it is—even if it goes by the name of love—it helps a man know what his potentialities may be.
For some time now I have been agonizingly aware that I am a talent of considerable dimensions encased in a man of very limited possibilities. The talent that is Me and the Man that is Harlan Ellison are two very separate and distinct entities. That the Man lugs around the Talent becomes at once a blessing and a curse. Consider: a woman may find me inordinately involving, and an affair begins. Through it all, through all its stately progressions, I wonder: is it me or is it the talent she is in love with?
Why must it be me, this puny Ellison, that has to carry the Talent like Quasimodo’s hump? Why cannot this Talent be deposited within, say, Cary Grant or Kirk Douglas or even something that looks like Doug McClure. They’re beautiful people, they wouldn’t have to be jealous of the Talent. Why must it be me that wakes in the early morning because the ideas are fermenting, bubbling up in the mental mire? Why must it be me that has to write television to support the needs of a body that demands comfort and luxury; if it were Steve McQueen, he could write only the great ones, and not have to do the slavey labor.
And because of this jealousy, this rivalry between the Talent that need prove nothing to anyone—and the body that is Harlan Ellison that must prove itself over and over again, the treacherous fifth columnist of the body keeps putting the Talent in jeopardy: risking its neck, taking dangerous stands, getting involved in relationships that promise nothing but flameout, stretching the abilities to the breaking point.
Thus, all the “harlan ellison stories” that are told, all the weird anecdotes, they are the cartoon capers of the pack mule, braying for attention, while the stories merely exist, without side comment or need for defense. They speak for themselves. They are complete and whole and self-contained.
And thus, again, the body that seeks to prove its worth entirely independent of the Talent, is forced to live with the fear. By subjecting the Talent to unnecessary risks, it brings down upon its head the torment and terror of the one big fear: that the body of Harlan Ellison will succeed in destroying itself before the Talent of Harlan Ellison gets said all it has to say.
For the first time I’m beginning to think Geminis may be schizoid, after all.
So…
To get it all said. To wind out all the stories on silver threads. To relate all the relationships of all the people, each with its own tiny death interwoven with the comedy and shadows. So many stories. They now total over six hundred, not counting the novels.
But what of the ones started, and never completed? All the false starts? All the bits and pieces that began well and toured midway through? What of the night flashes that woke me from sleep and toward which I crawled on hands and knees, to the typewriter near the bed, so nothing escapes, even in half-sleep? What of those? What of the vagrant thoughts, the stray dreams, the incomplete fractions of ideas?
Silverbob’s reminiscences of me and my courage, and my subsequent analysis of it all—as set down here rather nakedly, I’m ashamed to say—set me to rummaging through the “idea file” I keep, that I suppose all writers keep. And I came up with snippets I knew instinctively I would never ever manage to get into stories. And I was afraid.
Afraid they would die.
Even as bad stories die.
But at least they deserve a chance to live, these stray dreams. So, with your permission, let me offer a few of the ones that seem good even after the long periods since they were written. And if any of them touch you, if any of them seem worthy, perhaps you might drop me a line and let me know, and it might stir me to take them up again, and order the bones and flesh onto them, making stories of them. And if only one or two come from it, then you will have been an important part of the creative act, and we will both be richer for it.
The / One / Word / People
There are some that can be met, strange and twisted ones you know by an aura, a scent, a feel about them, that if you had one single word—like “junkie” or “nympho” or “hooker” or “Bircher”—a key word that labeled their secret bit, you would understand all the inexplicable, off center things about them. Like the girl you meet, and start to date, who can’t see you on Thursday nights, but makes weak excuses as to where she goes on Thursday nights. If you had the word “diabetic” you would understand that every Thursday her doctor’s appointment keeps her out of circulation, and that’s why she doesn’t drink, and spends long minutes in bathrooms, shooting insulin. But she’s ashamed—don’t ask why, people do kookie things—so she just has that one soft foggy spot in her reality, and you wonder what the hell the story is.
Or your friend who picks fights with Italians, and aside from not telling you what his real name is, couldn’t be a better drinking buddy. If you had the word “deportee” you’d understand that he was picked up for anarchist reasons in Italy, and deported, and is in the country illegally.