Authors: Theodore Sturgeon
Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: GERARD’S PROBLEM WOULD DISMAY ANY PSYCHOTHERAPIST. HE KNEW HIS NAME WITHOUT KNOWING HIS IDENTITY; WHAT HE DID, BUT NOT WHAT HE WAS. WORSE YET, HE DIDN’T KNOW HOW MANY OF HIM THERE WERE!
Corrections and addenda:
Some intriguing comments by TS on “Hurricane Trio” (Vol. IV) have come to light. In a letter to Anthony Boucher at the
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
in May 1956 accompanying a submission (“And Now the News”), Sturgeon wrote:
If you really feel this yarn is not close enough to conventional science fiction, I can … put the story in the near future and therefore in the s-f matrix. I did this kind of job only once before, adding a space ship to “Hurricane Trio” to get it into
Galaxy;
it was a slick before that, rejected all over … Eleanor Stierham: “The woman doesn’t exist who would take such a risk.” Bull’s balls! HT was a true story and I was there!
Two Autobiographical Essays
“Author, Author”
by Theodore Sturgeon
from
Fanscient
, Spring 1950
T
HEY SAY
I make puns, which I deny; it’s only that typos creep in and I have an aural word sense. I’ll demonstrate that later; it means that what I read and what I write, I hear.
I was born on Staten Island, which is populated mostly by the dead and people from Brooklyn. This birth occurred 2/26/18, according to the records. I went four years to a veddy social Staten Island private school, two weeks to a public school, thence to Philadelphia where I was two weeks in the fifth grade and got shoved into the sixth. This one I completed, and then went to a boarding school in Pennsylvania where in a year I learned how to smoke, drink, gamble, swear and swim. After six weeks in the eighth grade in summer school, I was dumped into an enormous education factory in Philadelphia at the age of twelve. I weighed 95 pounds and was utterly bewildered, but anyway I was a high school student. I was a high school student for six solid years. I never took a subject I didn’t flunk at one time or another. Like someone named Robin English, I was released. That was in ’36.
I don’t seem to be able to recall the process of living my life in a particularly consecutive order. Things happened at various times. I put in six months as a cadet on a training ship. She had been with Dewey at Manila. She was 135 feet at the waterline and had 160’ masts. She had steel sides and a wooden bottom, and a loosefooted rig because her sails were so near the deck that booms would have swept off the deck housing. We tacked her by taking in all sail and dragging it across the deck by hand while we turned her with the
engines. She was painted all white and burned coal. I didn’t like her much. There were 173 people aboard. After that I cut loose and went to sea on my own account—coastwise freighters, then tankers.
I worked in a glass factory once, taking silver off mirrors with fuming acid. Drove a tractor-trailer truck between Philadelphia and Albany. Worked in an oil refinery, hoeing grass between tanks in a storage farm. Had a job once with a crew who came north by train and brought Model A Fords all the way back to Greensboro. Pulled rope with a circus—the Al G. Barnes show in Canada. Ran a luxury resort in Jamaica. It was wonderful. We had 17 servants, and except for weekends we had them mostly to ourselves. During the war I operated 17 quarters and barracks, three messhalls and a food warehouse for the Army, which qualified me to run the specialized lubrication disbursement, from which I naturally began to operate heavy equipment. For that I got flown to Puerto Rico to run bulldozer and power shovel for the Navy. I loved it, though ten hours a day, seven days a week for nearly three years makes you sort of lose track of things. But if you know anyone with an inferiority complex you can cure him by perching him in the saddle of a Caterpillar D-8 for a few months. When the day arrives that behind all that Diesel and racket, you suddenly are aware that your nerve-endings are up there on the blind side of your blade, you gain something that you’ll never lose. It does to you what marriage does, in that respect. It doesn’t matter whether you ever pull another steering clutch. It’s a thing that’s built.
Meant to mention that I had a rugged bout with acute rheumatic fever when I was 15. It left me with a 16% enlargement. My heart used to push out between my ribs when it beat, which for a while it did reluctantly. It got better year after year until now only a specialist can detect that slight squish in the beat if I lie in a certain position after heavy exercise. But it kept me out of the Army during the war. Cardiac cripple. They wouldn’t let me man a typewriter, let alone an armchair. But 70 hours a week under that sun was fine. Yours not to reason why.…
I played guitar with a square-dance orchestra once, in the Poconos. They had a 35-foot diving platform at that resort. I used to do 2½
somersaults off it. Once someone put an overflow board in the dam during the night and the lake rose 18 inches and I didn’t know it. I hit the water face first and flattened my eyeballs. Couldn’t see a thing for a whole day.
I lived in Brooklyn for a while with an Englishman who was writing confessions. He prided himself on being a word-rate writer who didn’t give a damn for art. I did, at the time. But I meant no insult at all when I said casually that he was a hack. He got no end insulted. So to settle the argument we looked it up in his dictionary, which was an English publication. In it I found one of the most pathetic lines I have ever read. It said, “HACK, n. A literary drudge; as one who compiles dictionaries.”
I shipped out one time with a guy named Kelley. He’s around in some of my copy. He was one of the most amazing people I have ever met. He’s in Atlanta now, I think, but he was like one of those creatures JWC’s always trying to goad us into writing about, which thinks as well as a man, but not like a man. I was sitting in a honky-tonk in Port Arthur, Texas, one night. There was a girl called Bernice who had taken quite a shine to Kelley and they’d been pretty thick at the south end of our trips. Bernice had just gotten wind of the fact that Kelley was sporting a girl down the street at Pete’s Place, and she didn’t like it at all. So when Kelley walked in, Bernice reached behind her and pulled an electric fan off the shelf and threw it at his head with the same motion. It was a big electric fan and it didn’t have any guard on it. Kelley ducked it, seeming to move much more slowly than he actually did. He didn’t move his feet, but sort of bent his head aside and turned his shoulders and let the fan go by. It hit the wall and chewed up the partition. Nobody said anything. Now anyone else in the world who believed in do-as-you-would-be-done-by would have thrown the fan back at the girl. Not Kelley. He walked over and picked her up over his head and threw her at the fan. She slid on out the door and down the stairs. Kelley went out after her, taking his time, stepped around her where she lay halfway down the flight, and went on back to Pete’s Place.
I was profoundly impressed—not by what he’d done, but by the way he thought. I’ve used that kind of reversal in plot treatments
many times. It’s one thing to turn front to back. It’s something else again, just as logical but much more rare, to make a mirror image.
I’d rather be writer than a human being. Wrote a story for WEIRD once and put a lot into it. It was real good catharsis and it did me good. A few days after it was published I got a letter from South Africa. There was a girl in the story who died, and this letter contained a poem which was an epitaph for her. As poetry it was so-so. But I had to reread it a half-dozen times to find out why it struck me as vaguely familiar. Then I got it. It was composed entirely of lines picked up here and there through the story, with only an occasional slight alteration to fit the form.
Thoughts are cloud-shapes, formless, without size or any particular hue. But code them—make words of them—and they take on some fraction of what they mean to you. Recode those words into typescript; they’re read, printed, proofed, distributed. Suppose, then, another mind half a world away decodes that type into words and those words into thoughts and from that multiple fractionation finds it in him not only to create, but to re-create some of the particular pulse-pound and gland-squirt that went into it … that makes me humble. I’m ashamed of that story. I wish I’d polished it until it was worth having that effect on someone. You can kid around about the writing racket from now till then, but you can’t get away from the fact that if writing can do a thing like that, a writer undertakes a truly awesome responsibility.
I said at the start that my puns and perhaps a suspicion of what’s called a style have their source in the fact that I hear what I read. I hear what I write, and I don’t think it hurts what comes out. There are times when the mood of narration dictates a more conscious approach to the words that you use and their order. It’s easy to prove that the treatment’s unseen, but it yields an incredible smoothness of flow to your work.
There probably wouldn’t be one reader in a hundred thousand who would realize that the above paragraph is written most laboriously in anapestic feet; that is, there are two unaccented syllables followed by a strong accent, but with most of the sentences beginning and ending in the middle of the foot so that the thing doesn’t
get sing-song. This happens to be my prime kick in writing. It’s a thing you don’t dare do very often; but when you apply it lightly and briefly, you find yourself woven into your copy with a completeness that can’t be approached in any other way that I know of. But be careful; the trick’s more dangerous than opium. There are a zillion different kinds of feet you can use. The largest charge of it I ever put into a story was in one of my WEIRD TALES, or proving grounds, yarns, when I used a monster that changed its meter every time it changed its mood. That went on for three thousand words. Have fun, chillun.
Men behind
Fantastic Adventures
Theodore Sturgeon
from
Fantastic Adventures
, August 1951
I don’t know who’s going to find out more about Ted Sturgeon by what follows—you or I. In any case, I appreciate this opportunity to sound off. There is no one who doesn’t dote on capital “I”—if not as a subject, then at least as a theme.
I was born overseas, on February 26, 1918, which makes me older than I ought to be according to the way I act. Place: Staten Island, which is Richmond County and the forgotten borough of New York City, on which, to this very day, you can milk a cow and get lost in the woods. My mother is the end-product of years and years of high-church Anglican functionaries; my great grandfather was Bishop of Quebec, my maternal uncle, the Archbishop of the West Indies, and there are a baker’s dozen of ministers in my immediate family. My father is a businessman from a clan which settled in this country in 1640.
I went to school for my first four years in a veddy social private school on Staten Island, then went to Philadelphia where I was advanced half a year in a public school there. I finished the last half of the fifth grade and the first half of the sixth fairly honestly, and then went to a boarding school in Gettysburg, where in a year I learned how to smoke, swim, gamble, and cuss. Then I finished the last half of the eighth grade in summer school and was deposited, trembling, bewildered, underweight and aged twelve, in an enormous education factory called Overbrook High School. Its 4700 students were processed on three shifts, and the organization of classes and subjects was a direct carry-over from the grade schools which I had not attended. Everybody knew what to do about everything, except for me, and I was no end astonished. I remained astonished for six years.
I managed to flunk every single subject I ever took at one time or another, without exception. I had a sole interest—apparatus gymnastics. I was going to finish school and get an athletic scholarship to Temple, and would do p.g. work in physical education at
Springfield, and then I would go down to Sarasota and work out with Barnum and Bailey until I got to be a high-horizontal performer. It made like a blueprint. I went out for the gym team and gained sixty pounds in the first year. I became captain and manager and got my Temple scholarship and an honorary membership in the Philadelphia Turngemeinde and fourth place in the East Coast Championships in the AAU for horizontal bar. They all said I was a natural for the City Championship.
Then along came acute rheumatic fever, a 16 per cent heart enlargement, and the information from a specialist that there wouldn’t be any more gymnastics for Sturgeon—not in the last season or ever.
I suppose I took it as hard as anyone might who had spent a third of his lifetime with a single aim which was suddenly to be denied. I went into a major flat spin. I finished school and won a scholarship in the Pennsylvania State Nautical School and lied to the medical examiners and spent six months being a cay-det on a ship which had been with Dewey at Manila. She had steel sides and a wooden bottom. We tacked her by taking in all sail and turning her with the engines and putting the sails out on the other side. She was painted white and burned coal, and most of the seamanship we learned was with holystone and soojy-rag. I quit after six months and got a job as a bonafide sailor on a coastwise freighter for fifty-five bucks a month.
I went to sea for almost three years. One day I worked out a way to cheat the express company out of a few thousand clams but, lacking the moral character to pull the job, I wrote it into a story instead. It sold on sight, and I was so delighted to have my name in print that I quit my job, went ashore, and became a professional. They paid me five dollars for it. I sold the same outfit—a newspaper syndicate—one and sometimes two stories a week at the same price for about four months. That was my sole income, but I made it. Ever make a vegetable stew out of six cents worth of soup greens?
Then somebody brought me Vol. I No. I of
Unknown
, and I realized that this magazine and I had places to go. I sold my first magazine story there, and when I had about filled its inventory, branched out to its sister magazine
Astounding Science Fiction
. Since then I
have sold to practically every magazine in the field. My current effort is neither my first nor my last for
Fantastic Adventures
.
In 1940, after a half dozen sales, I figured I was ready to be a pillar of society, and I got married. In mid-’41 I went to Jamaica in the West Indies to run a luxury resort hotel. In December, this country found itself at war, and in February I was working as Assistant Chief Steward at the U.S. Army air base there. Late that year I was flown to Puerto Rico to run bulldozers and power shovels in a rock quarry at a Naval base. In ’43 the bases all closed down and, having been rejected for the third time by the service, I settled down to write again. Nothing happened.
I have two daughters; one was born in the first year of my marriage, and the second in ’43, in Puerto Rico. Came the end of current resources, and I made a quick ten-day trip to the States to fire my agent, see some editors, and get a much-needed slant on markets. My ten-day trip extended to eight months and wound up in a divorce—and Flat Spin Number Two, which went on for about three years.
Now, I’m employed by Time Inc., and I’m the entire advertising-promotion department of all four editions of
Time
International. Where to from here, I can’t say. Wherever it is, I’m sure it’ll be interesting.
So much for the highlights. Now a word about what this has meant to me and my work.
I’m a blond blue-eyed Aryan Protestant with a profound distaste for the privileges extended to anyone for these accidents. I have experienced a sense of worship—lying under the stars in the Yucatan Channel—watching a rainbow by moonlight—watching a certain sunset in the Gulf of Mexico—in many diverse places, but never in a church, and I have seen some beauties.
I think that no one can achieve the stature of a man unless he has been unjustly hurt.
I think that the only important things are basic things; that basic things are always simple things; and that therefore complicated things may be exciting, or frightening, or amusing, or instructive; but if they’re complex, by definition they’re not important.
I believe in marriage, and see it as a sharing of everything capable of being shared, the stature of the marriage depending upon the number of things shared. But I also believe that where sharing is not possible, privacy is imperative.
I believe that the most constructive force in human thought is laughter
with
, and that the most destructive one is laughter
at
.
And I most sincerely believe that I am a member of humanity; that humanity’s mistakes and stupidities are mine and have their weight on my conscience, and that by the same token humanity’s achievements are mine; that therefore I deserve the privileges and am bound by the duties of this extraordinary species.