Bright Segment

Theodore Sturgeon with his third wife, Marion Sturgeon. Halloween, 1961 or 1962, in the Streibel House, Woodstock, New York.

T
HEODORE
H
AMILTON
S
TURGEON
was born February 26, 1918, and died May 8, 1985. This is the eighth 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 eighth volume contains stories written in 1953, 1954, and 1955. The last two (short-short) stories were written in 1946 and 1947, and are out of chronological sequence because copies of them have only recently been found.

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, William F. Seabrook, Phil Klass, the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust, Marion Sturgeon, Jayne Williams, Ralph Vicinanza, Jennifer Privateer, Paula Morrison, Alan Bostick, Eric Weeks, Robin Sturgeon, Kim Charnovsky, Cindy Lee Berryhill, T. V. Reed, and all of you who have expressed your interest and support.

By Philip Klass (William Tenn)

I first met Ted Sturgeon in 1939 in an all-night cafeteria in New York City. The place was on West 57th Street between Eighth Avenue and Broadway, and around 2
A.M.
served as a hangout for what might be called the midtown Bohemians. These were indigent writers and artists and actors and students, as well as many of the orators from Columbus Circle. The Circle, in its very close proximity to Central Park, was then pretty much the American version of the London’s debaters’ heaven, Hyde Park.

I met his slightly older brother, Peter, at the same time. I called Peter, who had just returned, utterly disillusioned and spent, from fighting on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War, I called Peter “the real Sturgeon.” I called Ted “the improbable Sturgeon,” why I didn’t know right then. But as I got to know him, I realized my original instinct had been exactly right.

My friend Rouben Samberg brought me over to meet him. Rouben was a very, very indigent painter who was just then about to give up the easel for the camera and was thereby to find enormous riches in advertising. He knew I was trying to write science fiction.

“Listen, Phil,” he said, grabbing my arm and pointing me at a table in the rear of the cafeteria. “Your ambition is very clear and simple: You aspire to starve for art in the pulps. I want you to meet someone who’s already made it. This is Ted Sturgeon, a successful, selling pulp writer. He’s starving.”

I shook hands with Ted and his brother, Peter, sitting beside him. Peter was thin and gloomy, prematurely slightly bald and slightly gray. Ted was thin and vibrant, with dancing eyes under a head of surprisingly curly hair.

Both of them had half-filled cups of coffee in front of them, cups which they raised to their mouths from time to time but from which they were careful not to drink. (The deal was simple: If you had some coffee left in the cup, you were still a customer who was finishing his meal and the management would not ask you to leave the steam-heated cafeteria and go outside into the ice and snow of 57th Street. Therefore I had carried my own half-filled cup of coffee over to the Sturgeon table, and—as I sat down—I carefully put it in front of me as a token of cafeteria respectability.)

While Peter spoke gloomily and bitterly of his experiences in Spain (he had gone there to fight the fascist Franco on behalf of the Spanish Republic, had become a POUMist, and therefore had been treated with careful viciousness by the Stalinist-dominated Loyalists), Ted lifted the neck of a nonexistent guitar with his left hand and began fingering its chords. After a while, he picked up an imaginary pick with the other hand and carefully and intently played the imaginary guitar. And then, as Peter spoke of specific battles and intricate left-wing Spanish politics, Ted, still strumming the imaginary guitar, began singing in a very low voice, providing an unmistakable musical background to Peter’s what-should-I-call-it?—to Peter’s
documentary
.

He sang “Los Quatros Generales,” the original Spanish version of a song much sung in those days by intellectuals who saw themselves as on the side of the hard-pressed Loyalist government of Spain, the government fighting for its very existence against Francisco Franco and the powers of fascism. I had only heard it up to then in its English version, “The Four Insurgent Generals.”

When Ted had finished singing—still in a very, very low voice, for why irritate the management or the busboys of the cafeteria?—and Peter had paused in his tale of a bloody night along the Ebro, I asked Ted with a bit of a chuckle why he didn’t get himself a real guitar.

“I have a real guitar,” he said. “But it’s in hock right now. If Campbell buys my new story for
Unknown
, I’ll get it out. Then you must come and visit me, and I’ll play for you.”

He phoned me two weeks later and told me the story had sold.
He gave me his address and asked me to come to his furnished room that evening. By then I had read his first sale to
Astounding
, “Ether Breather,” and not thought too much of it. But I was terribly impressed with the fact that he was truly a published writer, and, above all, a published writer in my favorite magazine, Street & Smith’s
Astounding
.

He played a lot of wonderful stuff for me, but I’m afraid I was a wee bit snotty about his performance. After all, I told myself, I had recently heard both Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie in the same room, taking turns: Leadbelly on his twelve-string guitar, playing his own “It’s a Bourgeois Town”; Guthrie in his cowboy hat, playing his own “Talking Dust Bowl.”

This, of course, was years before Sturgeon came back from a disastrous couple of years in the tropics with a quiverful of wonderful songs which I and others would beg him to play again and again at parties and science fiction conventions.