Baby Is Three

Theodore Sturgeon, Congers, New York, 1952.

T
HEODORE
H
AMILTON
S
TURGEON
was born February 26, 1918, and died May 8, 1985. This is the sixth of a series of volumes that will collect all of his short fiction of all types and all lengths shorter than a novel. The volumes and the stories within the volumes are organized chronologically by order of composition (insofar as it can be determined). This sixth volume contains stories written between 1950 and 1952. Two have never before appeared in a Sturgeon collection. The title story, “Baby Is Three,” is the original text of one of Sturgeon’s most-loved stories, as it appeared in a magazine before he significantly reworked its ending for the purposes of
More Than Human
, the novel he wrote by adding extensive material about what happened to Homo Gestalt before and after the events described in “Baby Is Three.”

Preparation of each of these volumes would not be possible without the hard work and invaluable participation of Noël Sturgeon, Debbie Notkin, and our publishers, Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger. I would also like to thank, for their significant assistance with this volume, David Crosby, the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust, Emily Weinert, Marion Sturgeon, Jayne Williams, Ralph Vicinanza, Ron Colone, David Hartwell, Tair Powers, Eric Weeks, Bill Glass, Dixon Chandler, Gordon Benson, Jr. and Phil Stephensen-Payne, Paula Morrison, Catherine Campaigne, T. V. Reed, Cindy Lee Berryhill, The Other Change of Hobbit Bookstore, and all of you who have expressed your interest and support.

by David Crosby

I’
M AN INVETERATE LOVER
of science fiction. I always have been and still am. I read it constantly. I started as an early teenager—long before the Byrds, or Crosby, Stills & Nash, even before I became a musician—back in the mid-1950s. I started with Robert Heinlein’s juvenile novels,
Rocket Ship Galileo
then
Red Planet, Farmer in the Sky, Between Planets, Space Cadet …
I read them all. They were my escape. I was a little chubby kid in a high school, not at all popular, and lonely, and this was a world where I could … I could
really
dig it. Then it just progressed, the natural steps you would expect, Clarke and Van Vogt, Campbell,
Analog …
and I just went right into it from there.

Then somebody passed Theodore Sturgeon’s
More Than Human
to me. And that novel—which of course is built around the title story of this collection, “Baby Is Three”—was the standout for me. The relationship described in that story, people transcending the lacks in themselves and making a whole that’s greater than anybody else could be because of it … There was a perceived lack in me and I felt sort of like a person that wasn’t gonna … So there was a strong emotional resonance for me—and for every other little lonely kid—with those people, because they were different too. They didn’t fit in either. But when they
linked
, they were this awesome being …

Paul Williams tells me my friend Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead has described “Baby Is Three”/
More Than Human
as the only model he and his bandmates had to understand what was happening to them when they began playing together. He might have been more conscious about that than I was, but it affected me in the same place.
There is a thing that happens in a band, where these diverse human beings link up, through this language that they’re speaking together, this music.

They create a thing where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And there springs into existence over them another being. So if there’s four of them, there’s a fifth being, or if there’s five there’s a sixth being, that is a composite of them, and that is bigger than all of them. And if they understand what they’re doing, they submit to this personality, they give up their individuality for this unity. And they create this new being that can make the art of the instant, that can make the magic happen when you’re playing live.

That’s how it feels. And it requires a—if it isn’t telepathic, it’s certainly
em
pathic—link-up and union. And the relationship described first by Theodore Sturgeon in “Baby Is Three” really hit all of us that wanted that kind of “above the family,” taking the idea of a family to a new place, to a new level.

It really rang
my
bell. When I was a child my favorite comic book was one about a whole group of very different orphans who got together and somebody let them live together on a ranch, and they ran this ranch together. And when I read
More Than Human
, I—and all the other kids who were loners and didn’t really fit in—said, “I could fit in
there
. I would love to be part of that kind of incredible link-up where people really understand each other and love each other and have a unity of purpose.” It was a high thing to do. And bands emotionally so closely resembled that, that it was inevitable that we musicians would love that story.

Although I loved the story
before
I became a band member. But once I became a band member I had this whole resonant blueprint in the back of my head about what that was. And so I understood what it was and I submitted to it, and I have always loved being a part of that, more than being a solo … I like union so much more than autonomy that there must have been some basic tilt in me towards it. I think “Baby Is Three” was a large part of me having that tilt. It just rang my bell. Big time.

That
homo gestalt
experience of creating a fifth entity by forming
a four-person unit is such a startling thing, it’s very hard to explain it to people who haven’t played music with other people or done some kind of unity-forming for a purpose. I’m sure a group of Amish farmers getting together for a barn-raising have some of the same thing. But with a band, the thing that you’re trying to create is so ethereal, and so hard to put salt on its tail, that it’s very difficult to explain to people when it’s there and when it’s not there. Too many people think that it’s just about turning up and striking a pose. Trying to do the other thing is intricate, and requires people with enough ego to go on stage who are also over here to dissociate from the ego and disassemble it, in order to create this other thing. It’s a rare deal. Anybody, any really good band, particularly a band that improvises together—the Grateful Dead for absolute sure, they were built on it, it was their lifeblood—any band that improvises together and tries to push the envelope (which of course is where the best shit is), they know this thing. Anybody from a band like that would read “Baby Is Three” and say, “Oh yeah! Yeah!!” and recognize it right away.