The Nail and the Oracle Read Free

avis
. Weird bird, existent in the universe in the number of one.

    Do I interrupt myself? Very well then, I interrupt myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.
    Here’s what Ted wrote in 1967 as an introduction to my book of short stories,
I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream
. It goes here, correctly, because it was one of the spurs that moved and shook him to come stay with me. I was in deep anguish in 1967, some of the toughest times of my life, and Ted wrote this, in part:
     … 
You hold in your hands a truly extraordinary book. Taken individually, each of these stories will afford you that easy-to-take, hard-to-find
, very
hard-to-accomplish quality of entertainment. Here are strange and lovely bits of bitterness like “Eyes of Dust” and the unforgettable “Pretty Maggie Money-eyes,” phantasmagoric fables like “I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream” and “Delusion for a Dragon Slayer”
 …
    There are a great many unusual things about Harlan Ellison and his work—the speed, the scope, the variety. Also the ugliness, the cruelty, the compassion, the anger, the hate. All seem larger than life-size—especially the compassion which, his work seems to say, he hates as something which would consume him if he let it. This is the explanation of the odd likelihood (I don’t think it’s every happened, but I think it could) that the beggar who taps you for a dime, and whom I ignore, will get a punch in the mouth from Harlan
.
    One thing I found fascinating about this particular collection—and it’s applicable to the others as well, once you find it out—is that the earlier stories, like “Big Sam,” are at first glancemore tightly knit, more structured, than the later ones. They have beginnings and middles and endings, and they adhere to their scene and their type, while stories like “Maggie Money-eyes” and “I Have No Mouth” straddle the categories, throw you curves, astonish and amaze. It’s an interesting progression, because most beginners start out formless and slowly learn structure. In Harlan’s case, I think he quickly learned structure because within a predictable structure he was safe, he was contained. When he got big enough
—confident
enough—he began to write it as it came, let it pour out as his inner needs demanded. It is the confidence of freedom, and the freedom of confidence. He breaks few rules he has not learned first
.
    (There are exceptions. He is still doing battle with “lie” and “lay,” and I am beginning to think that for him “strata” and “phenomena” will forever be singular.)
    Anyway … he is a man on the move, and he is moving fast. He is, on these pages and everywhere else he goes, colorful, intrusive, abrasive, irritating, hilarious, illogical, inconsistent, unpredictable, and one hell of a writer. Watch him.”
    Theodore Sturgeon Woodstock, New York 1967
    And as I wrote for Ted’s attention in a 1983 reprint of the book, for which I refused any number of Big Name offers to supplant Ted’s 1967 essay: “Ted Sturgeon’s dear words were very important to me in 1967 when they were shining new and this collection became the instrument that propelled my work and my career forward. To alter those words, or to solicit a new introduction by someone else, would be to diminish the gift that Ted conferred on me. This book has been in print constantly for sixteen years.… Only this need be said: I have learned the proper use of ‘lie’ and ‘lay,’ Ted.”

    “Watch him,” he said. That was the lynch-pin of our long and no-bullshit, honest-speaking friendship. We were a lot alike. (Noël’s son, age 16, has also read these pages and he declares I’m “a fantasticwriter, and arrogant as hell.” You just described your grandfather, kiddo.) A
lot
alike, and we watched each other. Avis to avis, two bright-eyed, cagey, weird birds assaying a long and often anguished observation of each other—Ted, I think, seeing in me where and who he had been—me, for