Can and Can'tankerous (7 page)

I could have sustained any indignity. The other women, the deterioration of our love, the going-away and the coming back, knowing that she…or he, sometimes…had lived whole lives in other times and other lands. With other women. With other men.

But what I could not bear was knowing the child was not mine. I gave her the best eternity of my life, yet she carried the damned thing inside her with more love than
ever
she had shown me. As it grew, as
it
became the inevitable love-object, I withered.

Let her travel with them, whatever love-objects she could satisfy, with whatever was in that dirty paper bag, and let them wail if they choose…but from this dream neither he nor she will ever rise. I am in the green light now, with the machete. It may rain, but I won’t be there to see it.

Not this time.

Afterword

I had no idea where I was going. I let the voice that was narrating—it was first-person—narrate until I got halfway through. Then I sat back and thought,
When you read a story, you read it in a man’s voice.
There’s no reason for that. Unless it’s Anne of Green Gables, or Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, or it’s a YA novel where they give you Katniss Everdeen, it’s automatically a man’s voice. 

This sounded like a man, a hard-boiled detective. Let’s cross this audience up. 

Right in the middle, you realize it’s a woman. You have to go back to the beginning and read it all over again, not because anything was any different but it was a different person talking to you now. I wrote myself into a position where I had nowhere to go. So I turned left…and went where no man had gone before.

Apparently, some time prior to 2014,

I had had a minor stroke on the left side.

I don’t know when. 

Two years ago,

five years ago,

ten years ago? 

Twenty years ago? 

But like the Energizer Bunny, I just kept 

going 

and going 

and going…

L
ike you, I have no doubt, I cannot forget what I was doing the day that Harlan Ellison was killed. We knew it was coming, of course. We simply didn’t know when it would happen, or how many of them Harlan would manage to take with him. “He died,” as Lenny Bruce, who came back from the dead for one unique CNN interview, explained, “so that the rest of us could live.”

Still, in the months and years that have followed Harlan’s burial and subsequent explosion, the world has seen an astonishing outpouring of Ellisonia: his collected letters, his unfinished stories, his unfinished letters, the astonishing Helmut Newton photographs, and the Scent for Men he was working on shortly before he announced that he was “A Cranky Old Jew Who Was Going To Do Something About It” (as the ABC biopic title had it. Richard Dreyfuss in the starring role made, perhaps the best Ellison of all the network “Harlan Ellisons,” although no one, not even Dreyfuss, was able to complain when Margaret Cho, virtually unrecognizable under the prosthetics, took home the Oscar for her role as Ellison in Quentin Tarantino’s life-affirming biopic
Harlan? Put Down the Pineapple Harlan).

Still, we knew there was one thing more. The novel. The rumored hard science-fiction novel, which Harlan had been working on since 1958. Robert Silverberg (now Saint Robert Silverberg) reported having read a 300,000-word draft in 1962, which Ellison had pronounced “Not quite ready.” In 1975 Norman Spinrad mentioned in an interview that he had read the novel, which had now reached a length of 2,000,000 words spread over an impressive seventeen volumes.

It was at this point that Harlan famously began trimming the book down to its essentials. Troy Newsome’s early days (covering volumes one to four) were simply discarded (indeed, Ellison was rumored to have burned them during the official opening of Disneyland’s short-lived “Mass of St. Secaire”). Between 1978 and 1982 Ellison made tremendous progress: he removed the entire “love interest” plot, the stuff about aliens in Studebakers, the vast right-wing conspiracy, the vast left-wing ditto, Gordon Mushbaum, all references to Liechtenstein (except for the unavoidable description of Liechtenstein Public Library on pages 991–1021) and many adverbs.

By 1983 progress had slowed, although Harlan succeeded in leaving Chapter 31 on a bus in Tulsa. In 1984 he actually began restoring adverbs to the text, which was, he claimed, now hopelessly corrupt (and would in fact be briefly imprisoned during May 1985 for attempting to sleep with a uniformed member of the Los Angeles police force).

As the years went by, Ellison continued to chip away at his novel, paring away a sentence here, a scene there, a character elsewhere. It became a passion, a crusade, a calling. One night Harlan telephoned me triumphantly at two thirty AM (I was still living in the UK at the time, and it was, in his defense, only tea-time in Los Angeles) to tell me that he had managed to reduce the entire dolphin subplot to half a chapter.

“Is that good?” I asked, groggily.

“Good?” he said. “Why, you philistine! In 1966 the Dolphin Revolution took up volume fourteen of the novel, and was widely believed to have been uncuttable. Dorothy Parker read it and said it was the best thing she had ever read, and could I get her a packet of Chesterfields and a bottle of Johnny Walker?”

“But if it was so good, why did you cut it?”

He said, quietly, as if speaking to a small child, “Because it could be better.” Then he put down the phone.

Who can forget the party Harlan threw when he got the manuscript down to 15,000 words? Ed Bryant was allowed to read it and he said it was the best thing anyone had ever written that there was not a word in the text that should not have been there. There were no adverbs. It was a triumph of concision. The partygoers threw their hats into the air with joy at the news. The celebration lasted for months. There are photographs that still turn up on the Internet from time to time. Yet even then, Harlan was not happy. “Shorter,” he said to me over the dessert tray. “Shorter is better. Trifles make perfection, but perfection is no trifle.”

“Actually.” I said, dipping my spoon into my bowl, “This is a pretty much perfect trifle. Not too much sherry, perfect custard, really good sponge, and as for the pineapplargh.”

It was then that I resolved not to give Harlan further literary criticism. The world was not ready. Anyway, the trifle was really only so-so.

He pared his novel down to two hundred-word sections before he died. Had he survived another decade, he might have got it down to fifty.