The Ultimate Egoist (49 page)

That leaves “Cellmate,” and “Fluffy” (which is not on Moskowitz’s list, although it appeared in
Weird Tales
in the issue after “Cellmate”). Sturgeon told me in 1975 that “Fluffy” was a prewar story. I don’t consider that definite proof, memory being what it is, but for the purposes of this collection, which attempts to present stories in chronological order of composition, these two stories are being grouped with Sturgeon’s earliest work.

“Fluffy”:
first published in
Weird Tales
, March 1947. Sturgeon himself had a fair amount of experience as a house guest after his parents moved to Scotland while he was at sea in 1937. On shore he stayed with various relatives, family friends, and new friends that he’d met on his travels.

The protagonist, Ransome, is a stock Sturgeon character: the glib, utterly self-absorbed male (he usually comes to a bad end). TS to his mother, October 31, 1938:
My best stories are those in which I play up and magnify my own weaknesses. Contrary to the psychology of, say, Burroughs, who was a frail tubercular and thus created the immortal Tarzan, my best pieces are those which deal with those parts of my own make-up which are highly undesirable and unlikeable and inadmirable, as you will see for yourself soon
.

“Alter Ego”:
unpublished (the unpublished manuscripts and fragments from this period are almost all from a trunk that was left in Staten Island, as described in the notes on “Helix the Cat”). This may have been written in fall 1938, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, or any time in the following year.

“Mailed through a Porthole”:
unpublished. Written November 1938. While many of the early stories here are efforts at writing to formula that Sturgeon was embarrassed by even as he worked on them, this is one that he was proud of. He told his mother (May 13, 1939):
I went up to see the editor of
Unknown
which is a new Street and Smith book. He liked me. He told me what he wanted and I liked the idea of it because I thought he was right when he said he had no formula. I gave him a
story without a plot called “Mailed through a Porthole” which was very beautiful. He rejected it. I wrote another story which he liked but said it had “Purely intellectual appeal” which was true. It was called “Sudden Death?” and had to do with a hypothetical acceleration of the perceptions when anyone is killed suddenly, so that the thing is slowed interminably to him. It was about a man getting run over by a subway train and dying slowly in horrible agony and someone on the platform says “He never knew what hit him.” It was cold and scientific and very horrible and it was rejected
.

(“Sudden Death?” is not included here because no manuscript for it has been found. Every Sturgeon story that the editor knows of and has been able to obtain a copy of is or will be included in these volumes.)

In the same letter Sturgeon describes going to see the editor of
Adventure
(which he calls
the oldest pulp magazine there is
), who rejected “Porthole,” then asked to see it again, and eventually rejected it again.

The story derives from Sturgeon’s experience on the tanker
W.W. Mills
, waiting out one hurricane and having a near miss with another. To his mother, August 26, 1938:
A hurricane considers no man’s plans; that’s what we’re hove to for. I’m going to write this trip up some time—it’s been quite an experience. Not that anything has happened; it’s just the tension aboard, wondering whether we’ll miss it or not
. To his mother, October 15, 1938, referring to the great September hurricane:
We met it when it was a baby down off the Bahamas; and a large-sized baby it was too. The engines broke down when we were directly in the path of it, off Miami; fortunately for us it took a freakish turn north and came near depopulating Connecticut … A hurricane may be exciting and mildly fictional; but it may strike anywhere, and if it comes around the one who scoffs, he scoffs no longer—if he’s alive. No fun
.

“A Noose of Light”:
unpublished. This was rejected by A.P. Waldo (no relation to Sturgeon’s father E. M. Waldo, as far as I know), fiction editor of the McClure Syndicate. There is also some indication that it was submitted to
Weird Tales
in 1940. The address on the first page of the manuscript dates it as a 1938 or 1939 story.

“Strangers on a Train”:
unpublished. The untitled manuscript has been given a title by the editor.

“Accidentally on Porpoise”:
unpublished. Written December 1938. Another story Sturgeon was fond of; he was frustrated by his agent’s inability to sell it, and fired her. In a letter to his fiancee Dorothe Fillingame, January 10, 1939, he says,
Sure, it’s got enough for a novel, and I’ll do it that way some day
. In fact, there is a clear link between this story and “When You Care, When You Love” (1962), which was intended as the first section of a never-finished novel,
The Tulip Tree. The Unbegotten Man
, the title of a novel Sturgeon announced as forthcoming circa 1950 but never wrote, is another indication of his lifelong interest in writing a novel-length story about the re-creation of a human being.

“The Right Line”:
unpublished. The oil town honky-tonk setting is based on TS’s days on the beach in Port Arthur, Texas, on the Gulf Coast, home port for the tankers he shipped on. He did work very briefly as a “sandwich man” there, in the summer of 1938.

“Golden Day”:
syndicated by McClure, March 4, 1939. Sturgeon cites this as an example of “unique short-story technique” (see notes on “One Sick Kid”). He wrote to Dorothe, March 6, 1939:
Prepare yourself and Co. for latest release, sent to your home very soon … story was the kind of inspiration I’d be happy to get twice a year … it’s one of the reasons McClure is so picky with my stuff; they want them all to be as good … you heard about the poor — that wrote “Pigs Is Pigs”; well, “Golden Day” is mine …
(ellipses and dashes in original)

The McClure Newspaper Syndicate short-shorts were sent out to newspapers on 8½″ × 15″ sheets of paper, with the slug “DAILY SHORT STORIES” and little subheads partway through the stories to break them into sections. (In this case the subheads are
Accident
after “an awful thing to carry around with you” and
Anniversary
after “she was terribly pleased.”) The sheets are dated—evidently one story was provided for each day—and the author is credited.

“Permit Me My Gesture”:
syndicated by McClure, March 10, 1939. TS to Dorothe, April 22, 1939:
When you come to New York I want you to sit in on a plotting session and see how it goes. Doesn’t matter who with; Boord
[sometime agent]
or Hatch
[roommate and fellow writer]
or both. What I’m desperate for, as I’ve told you, is short, uncomplicated young love notions with a gag or gadget. “Heavy Insurance,” for instance, is a gag (fool the reader) idea. So is “Golden Day.” “Permit Me My Gesture”
and “Watch My Smoke” are gadgets. Three, possibly four, but in preference two characters
. No
crime, gangsters, rackets, or any suggestion of such. You begin to see now how rigid formula can be?
TS to D, February 27, 1939:
Speaking of plotz, please send some … don’t mull over them so … don’t polish them … when Hatch and I are tops we have turned out six plotz in two hours … and they’re always better than those we spend a day on … ’struth, because they’re so easily molded into formula … not more than three main characters, and a gadget; telephones, by the way, and counterfeit money, and twins are rejected on sight as gadgets … so that’s the layout; please help, not so much because I need anyone’s help but because I want yours …

“Watch My Smoke”:
syndicated by McClure, March 13, 1939. This was also published in England, in the
Guide and Ideas
newspaper, May 13, 1939, Sturgeon’s first UK publication.

The following letter, from a British literary agent to “Miss Baker,” evidently one of Sturgeon’s editors at McClure’s New York office, understandably excited the young author and (temporarily) raised his hopes almost painfully:

CECIL BROOKS, LTD.
London, England

June 6, 1939, TS wrote Dorothe:
Best news in the writing racket is that McClures is drawing me up a contract to begin middle of next month … I am to get 50% of McClure’s profits on all my foreign sales … as I live and breathe, Dorothe—as I love you—that letter from Brooks Ltd. was straight stuff. It burned me up when I read that the Babe, Inc.
, [D’s mother]
doubted it … I don’t know if you realize it, Toots, but that is without exception the biggest break and the finest build-up that we have had so far. Do you realize what it means? I know you don’t bother much with short fiction; but if you ever read the full-page stories in the Sunday papers, you’ll notice that a very large percentage of them are written by English authors—Belloc-Lowndes, for instance. Why? Certainly not because they are especially fine literature. But it seems that editors on both sides of the water are deeply impressed by the fact that they can print an overseas writer. The fact that I have sold American newspapers doesn’t cut an awful lot of ice here. But it does in England—plenty. And—now get this—as soon as my stuff is pushed over there, it will be in increasingly great demand here. Remember how Orson Welles crashed the Abbey Theater? He claimed he was in the New York Group Theater, which was not true. But it got him in Abbey, and when he got back it got him in the Group
.

“Watch My Smoke” had its origins in a visit Sturgeon made to Canada in the summer of 1934, when he was 16. He was spending a month or more with his uncle and aunt (his mother’s sister), “recuperating” from acute rheumatic fever while his parents and his brother went to Europe (he has written that in fact he exerted himself as excessively as possible, by way of protest). In an interview in April 1978, Sturgeon described the place to me, his voice still full of the wonder and awe he must have felt at 16 when he heard about the local “bush pilots”:

This was up in northern Quebec. It was very wild at that time. The town had duck-board sidewalks and dirt streets, it was really going back, and there were virtually no roads up there at all. There was a railroad
that went up there, but everything was flown in and out with these Balanca
[?]
monoplanes … I’ve written some about those guys, those bush pilots. They are a breed of their own, they were really fantastic people, full of tricks. I remember coming in— They were all seaplanes, because there’s nothing up there but lakes and there was no flat ground whatsoever
.

Sometimes coming into those lakes at dusk, you couldn’t see the surface of the water—it just started to flare out, it could have been 15 feet under you, five feet under you, 30 feet under you, you couldn’t see. So they all used to carry a roll of toilet paper up there in the cockpit, and they’d come down just as close to the water as they could figure, and they’d stream out a whole length of toilet paper, and then they’d go around again and come in and land on that, because that would float on top of the water, they could see where the surface was. Otherwise they would stall out or fall in or dive in or whatnot
.

They were full of tricks like that. One guy got out of a very very narrow lake, he flew some serum up to a guy who had a dangerous disease in a mining camp, and he had to land on this funny crooked little lake that was full of stumps and stuff. Well, he got in all right, but it looked like there was no way to get out. So he tied a rope to the tailskid of the plane and pulled it above the shore, and he tied it to a tree which was bent over a log. And he had an Indian standing by with an axe. He revved the thing up until it was screaming, you know, and then he waves his hand and the Indian hits the rope and bang! he takes off. He managed to get up over the treetops and skid out between the mountains and stuff and get up in the air again. They were certainly marvelous
.

“The Other Cheek”:
syndicated by McClure, April 10, 1939. The
Milwaukee Journal
, the only U.S. newspaper from which Sturgeon had clippings of some of these stories (though certainly not the only paper they appeared in), did not use the subheads provided in the release, but did break up the stories at the same places, using a line space with three asterisks centered in it.

Sturgeon spent his adolescence in Philadelphia; when he wrote this story his fiancée was still living there. As a merchant seaman, he would stay in the waterfront district (at the Seamen’s Institute) when he visited her.

“Extraordinary Seaman”:
syndicated by McClure, circa June 1939. Sold February 27, 1939; probably written that month. This is the only longer
story Sturgeon sold to McClure, although he made many attempts. He was paid $25 for it.