The Nail and the Oracle Read Free Page A

certain, seeing in him where I was bound and who I would be in my later years, which are now. We were foreshadow and
déjà vu
. We were chained to each other, in more a creepy than an Iron John way.
    I had watched him from afar, before I met him, when I reviewed the just published
More Than Human
in the May-July issue #14 (1954) of my mimeographed fanzine,
Dimensions
. I was an extremely callow nineteen, Ted was only thirty-six and married to Marion, living back East in Woodstock, I think; Noël still had two years to go before she could get borned.
    With all the imbecile
sangfroid
of, oh, I’d say, an O-Cel-O sponge mop, I pontificated the following comment on Sturgeon at his most exalted best:
    Book reviewers, like Delphic Oracles, are a breed of individuals self-acknowledged to be authorities on everything—including everything. Thus it is with some feelings of helplessness that a reviewer finds he is totally unprepared or capable in describing a book.
    It happens only once in every thousand years or so, and is greater tribute to any book than a word of praise for each of those years. So enjoy the spectacle, dear reader.
    Theodore Sturgeon has expanded his Galaxy novella “
Baby Is Three”
into a tender and deeply moving chronicle of
people
, caught in the maelstrom of forces greater than any of them. The book, in case you missed it above, is
More Than Human
, and insures the fact that if Ballantine Books were to cease all publication with this volume, their immortality would be ensured.
    We have dragged out more than we thought we could. Sturgeon is impeccable in this novel. Unquestionably the finest piece of work in the last two years, and the closest approach to literature science fiction has yet produced.

    We watched the hell out of each other. After we met, if I remember accurately, in the autumn of 1954, I remember taking offense at a remark the late Damon Knight had made about Ted’s story “The Golden Egg” (he opined, the story “starts out gorgeously and develops into sentimental slop”), and Ted just snickered and said, “Damon can show a mean streak sometimes.”
    Later in life, one day I remembered that and chuckled to myself and thought, “No shit.”
    Ted called me one time, before he lived here, and sang me the lyrics to “Thunder and Roses.” I wrote them down, ran them in
Dimensions
, in issue #15, and when next Ted called me, we sang it together. Ted wrote quite a few songs. They were awful, just awful. What I’m trying to vouchsafe here is that in terms of songwriting, both Pinder and Cole Porter felt no need of stirring in their respective graves at the eminence of Sturgeon’s lyricism. He was superlative at what he did superlatively, but occasionally even Ted pulled a booger.
    Oh, wait a minute, I have just
got
to tell you this one …

     … no, hold it, before I tell you
that
one—Ted and the guy reading
The Dreaming Jewels
—I’ve got to tell you
this
one, which Noël just reminded me of, he said ending a sentence with a preposition.
    One early evening, I was rearranging a clothes closet, and I unshipped a lot of crap that had been gathering dust on a top shelf. And Ted was just hanging out watching, for no reason (we used to talk books a lot but I don’t think on that particular evening he was again driving me crazy in his perseverance, trying to turn me on to Eugene Sue’s
The Wandering Jew
or
The Mysteries of Paris
). And I pulled down this neat tent that I’d used years before, when I was a spelunker; and Ted got interested in it, and he unzipped and unrolled it, and of a sudden this nut-case says to me, “We should go camp out.”
    Now, two things you should know, one of which Noël remarked when she reminded me of this anecdote. “The two
least
Boy Scouts in the world!” And she laughed so hard her cheek hit the cancelbutton on her cell-phone, and that was the end of
that
conversation. (Which is a canard, because I was, in fact, an actual Cub and Boy Scout, WEBELOS