Encountering Harlan Ellison

Writer Harlan Ellison, the guest of honor at the Heroes Comics Convention at the Charlotte Convention Center Friday through Sunday, is famous not only for his more than 72 books and 1700 stories, his scripts for Star Trek, Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits, but also for his flamboyant personal appearances.

Ellison is a dynamo at conventions, and passes like a storm front on his way to readings or appearances, leaving you with the palpable feeling you're on the edge of a whirlwind. As guest of honor at the World Science Fiction Convention in Phoenix, Arizona years ago, Ellison stayed in a glass pyramid rather than the convention hotel to protest the state's failure to ratify the equal rights amendment. In 1974, he engaged in a legendary mock verbal dual with the equally witty Isaac Asimov at the World Con held in Washington, DC. Later at the same con kept thousands of restless fans entertained with nonstop jokes and stories as technical difficulties slowed showing of the rough cut of the film version of his story "A Boy and His Dog," into an after midnight four-hour ordeal.

While Ellison's powerful voice in stories such as "Repent Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman," has made him one of the most reprinted short story writers of our time, his powerful personality creates a wake of Harlan Ellison stories that follow the writer like the doom in some of his fiction. Nearly 30 years ago, I found myself caught up in a Harlan Ellison drama, swept up by that wake of personal mythology trailing him. But let me tell you more about Ellison before I tell that story.

Although best-known for his work in what the French call the fantastique, from his Hugo and Nebula-winning short stories to his stint as conceptual consultant on the TV series Babylon Five, Ellison hates being called a "science fiction writer." Rightly so, too, for his work, like that of his colleague Ray Bradbury, transcend genre labels.

In addition to multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, the writer won two Mystery Writers of America Edgars, the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award, the Silver Pen for Journalism from PEN, and many other honors. Ellison's short story "The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Home," was included in The Best American Short Stories. The Encyclopedia Americana Yearbook of 1988 called his collection Angry Candy one of the 24 considered works of Major American Literature that year.

Ellison shares a number of traits with Bradbury. Both writers made reputations primarily on short fiction, both established Hollywood reputations, and both loved comic books since childhood and encouraged graphic adaption of their stories in comic books. Eventually, both had comics named for them. Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor appeared in 1995 and for a handful of issues the top names in comic illustration and script writing adapted many of Ellison's best known stories along with new stories.

When Ellison began professional writing in the mid-1950s, he wrote science fiction and fantasy for pulp magazines, but also started an almost dual career doing gritty realism. In his twenties, but looking like a teenager, Ellison in a proto-Hunter Thomson/Hell's Angels move, joined a New York City street gang in the days of switch blades and black leather jackets. He mined that experience for a novel (Web of the City), short stories (Gentleman Junkie, Children of the Streets, and The Deadly Streets) and a memoir in Memos From Pergatory, adapted as an Alfred Hitchcock hour show.

This early word drew the praise of none other than the famous Dorothy Parker in Esquire, who called Ellison "a good, clean, honest writer, putting down what he has seen and known and no sensationalism about it." While true of his stories of hustlers, street gangs, and New York City life, the plug may be the last time anyone said Ellison's work or life lacked sensationalism. Both Ellison himself and his friends and enemies sensationalized his life, while his language often carries hyperbole, or exaggeration for effect, into the realm of high art. In a letter to the author quoted on the flyleaf of a paperback edition of his collection, Paingod, Robert Heinlein said of his work, "This stuff is raw corn liquor." That quote more nearly captures the effect of both Ellison's stories and his personality.

Ellison contributed to his personal mythology, the phenomenon known in science fiction and fantasy fandom as Harlan Ellison stories, and not referring to his fiction, by relating many of his adventures in the introductions that wrap his work like gift paper. Those introductions, with glimpses into Ellison's dramatic personal life, first drew me into his work as they were intended to do. He wrote about his adventures as an armed body guard, his multitude of girl friends and many wives, his adventures among the Hollywood philistines, and his travels giving lectures or researching stories.

I remember picking up the first Ellison collection I ever read and being charmed by those early introductions, which began as story blurbs not unlike those which preceded the fiction in the pulp magazines such as Amazing, Fantastic, and Fantastic Universe, where his early work appeared.

The first Ellison story to really grab me, though, was the famous "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." I still have the paperback copy with its black and whilte Leo and Diane Dillon cover. I was still just a wanna-be writer then, the mid-1960s. But I remember how I admired his opening sentence and read it repeatedly seeking the secret of its power: "Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported--hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern."

I began voraciously reading all the Ellison in print at the time and haunted secondhand stores where I discovered his early uncollected work in 1950s pulp magazines and 1960s men's magazines.

I first saw Ellison after moving to the New York City area in the early 1970s. He was at the height of his popularity then. At a Lunacon, a science fiction convention held in New York City, I witnessed Ellison's dynamic personal style. He showed "Demon with a Glass Hand," an episode of the 1960s black and white series The Outer Limits, Ellison wrote. But his commentary on the Hollywood script-writing experience entertained the crowd as much as the film.

I was teaching English in New Jersey public schools at the time, and still trying to write every day. I ran into Ellison again at a New Jersey college affair where he mentioned the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy workshops held at Michigan State University for six weeks each summer. Even then, the workshops had a reputation for smoothing some of the rough edges from beginning writers' stories and helping them cross over into professional status. Since then a significant number of the science fiction and fantasy field's new writers get their start at Clarion.

In 1974, I submitted a story and the other paperwork and was accepted for that summer's workshop. Ellison was to be one of the professional workshop leaders, each of whom spent a week in close contact with the 25 or so students. I was accepted, and when I arrived, on the very first day, the most popular topic of conversation was Harlan Ellison stories.

Now just before I left for the workshop, an English professor I knew professionally told me a Harlan Ellison story as true. When the round of Ellison stories began at the workshop, I retold it. As I often do to this day, I personalized the story rather than telling it secondhand. It goes this way:

Harlan Ellison steps into an elevator at a convention. Across from him is a tall, voluptuous and beautiful blonde. Ellison, who is short of stature if not otherwise and was famous for keeping the company of many beautiful women, looks at the blonde and says, "Hey babe, what do you say to a little fuck?"

Ellison's colleagues Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon both told version of this story in print, clearly labeled as "apocryphal," and commented it was in that category of stories which "if they are not true, should be."

Okay, so Ellison shows up, and knowing from long experience what has preceded him, asks, what stories have you heard. Mine, which got the biggest laugh, quickly came to his attention. Unfortunately, confronted by the ire of one of my literary idols, a person who was an icon to me and to many others, I floundered at simply confessing I'd heard the story from someone else and retold it as a joke. For a short time I maintained the truth of the tale. Mea culpa.

I had been na�ve enough to think it was true, knowing Ellison primarily through the outrageous stories about him. Those ranged from his allegedly shoving a two-by-four through one of the window's of Damon Knight's car to tales of his exploits with numerous attractive women.

Ellison argued that such stories damaged his ability to meet us on fair ground. For one thing, that particular story, he said, really didn't reflect who he was at all. He was an ardent supporter of feminism, for instance, which led to his pyramid sitting to protest Arizona's failure to ratify the ERA at a later convention. I should make it clear that I have no doubt whatsoever that Ellison is far too sophisticated to fall for such a set-up line and really didn't after meeting him.

Ellison raised some hell with me over the whole business, including dragging out of me the name of the person who told me the story, whom he reached following his week at Clarion and harassed. In a tape-recorded report about that which he sent back to Clarion, he said, "You probably think I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill�" which indeed, I did.

Now I admit, I waited with trepidation for Ellison's comments on the story I submitted that week. It came back with compliments penned in the margins, ranging from "nice" to an underlined passage to a note saying "you show real talent here." In the workshop itself as well as dealing with my story or with me personally, Ellison showed only the highest professionalism. Although he did seem to make a big deal of the incident and quite literally it created a lot of distracting drama, I was impressed by his keeping it virtually separate from the workshop itself.

I saw Ellison buy Bruce Sterling's first novel, Involution Ocean during a workshop session. Sterling, who is known as one of the founders of the science fiction school of cyberpunk, was there because Ellison, recognizing his talent, had paid his tuition.

We also heard Ellison perform a reading of one of his stories, an experience I sought out thereafter, for he is so skilled you find yourself as entranced as a child listening to a bedtime story and one right up there with the force of the real Brothers Grimm tales to boot. Ellison worked as a professional actor and still does Hollywood voice over work.

When I returned to the New York area after the convention, I discovered that nothing travels faster than a Harlan Ellison story. The first thing my friends in the New York City publishing world asked me was what happened between me and Ellison at Clarion.

The 1974 workshop was one of Clarion's most successful. Students included the since much published Sterling, Al Sarrantonio, P.C. Hodgell, Bill Wu, James Patrick Kelly, and others. Although I sold a few SF stories and joined the Science Fiction Writers of America for a while, I found my real talent was for journalism and wrote about science on monthly contract for OMNI's Continuum department.

I met Ellison at a time when I had not acquired enough life experience to know all heroes have proverbial feet of clay, so Ellison turning into a Golem did disturb me in ways I think were unnecessarily volatile and disruptive. On the other hand, I never lost my love of his work and to this day, if someone tells me they like Harlan's stories, I know we have something visceral in common. My encounter with Ellison sliced away some of the illusions of my youth, but nothing could erase the way his fiction etched itself into my soul.


	Soul Etching: Encountering Harlan Ellison By Allan Maurer First published in Creative Loafing. Copyright, 2003 Allan Maurer Writer Harlan Ellison, the guest of honor at the Heroes Comics Convention at the Charlotte Convention Center Friday through Sunday, is famous not only for his more than 72 books and 1700 stories, his scripts for Star Trek, Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits, but also for his flamboyant personal appearances. Ellison is a dynamo at conventions, and passes like a storm front on his way to readings or appearances, leaving you with the palpable feeling you're on the edge of a whirlwind. As guest of honor at the World Science Fiction Convention in Phoenix, Arizona years ago, Ellison stayed in a glass pyramid rather than the convention hotel to protest the state's failure to ratify the equal rights amendment. In 1974, he engaged in a legendary mock verbal dual with the equally witty Isaac Asimov at the World Con held in Washington, DC. Later at the same con kept thousands of restless fans entertained with nonstop jokes and stories as technical difficulties slowed showing of the rough cut of the film version of his story "A Boy and His Dog," into an after midnight four-hour ordeal. A Trail of Stories While Ellison's powerful voice in stories such as "Repent Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman," has made him one of the most reprinted short story writers of our time, his powerful personality creates a wake of Harlan Ellison stories that follow the writer like the doom in some of his fiction. Nearly 30 years ago, I found myself caught up in a Harlan Ellison drama, swept up by that wake of personal mythology trailing him. But let me tell you more about Ellison before I tell that story. Although best-known for his work in what the French call the fantastique, from his Hugo and Nebula-winning short stories to his stint as conceptual consultant on the TV series Babylon Five, Ellison hates being called a "science fiction writer." Rightly so, too, for his work, like that of his colleague Ray Bradbury, transcend genre labels. In addition to multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, the writer won two Mystery Writers of America Edgars, the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award, the Silver Pen for Journalism from PEN, and many other honors. Ellison's short story "The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Home," was included in The Best American Short Stories. The Encyclopedia Americana Yearbook of 1988 called his collection Angry Candy one of the 24 considered works of Major American Literature that year. Ellison shares a number of traits with Bradbury. Both writers made reputations primarily on short fiction, both established Hollywood reputations, and both loved comic books since childhood and encouraged graphic adaption of their stories in comic books. Eventually, both had comics named for them. Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor appeared in 1995 and for a handful of issues the top names in comic illustration and script writing adapted many of Ellison's best known stories along with new stories. Gritty Realism to Fantasy When Ellison began professional writing in the mid-1950s, he wrote science fiction and fantasy for pulp magazines, but also started an almost dual career doing gritty realism. In his twenties, but looking like a teenager, Ellison in a proto-Hunter Thomson/Hell's Angels move, joined a New York City street gang in the days of switch blades and black leather jackets. He mined that experience for a novel (Web of the City), short stories (Gentleman Junkie, Children of the Streets, and The Deadly Streets) and a memoir in Memos From Pergatory, adapted as an Alfred Hitchcock hour show. This early word drew the praise of none other than the famous Dorothy Parker in Esquire, who called Ellison "a good, clean, honest writer, putting down what he has seen and known and no sensationalism about it." While true of his stories of hustlers, street gangs, and New York City life, the plug may be the last time anyone said Ellison's work or life lacked sensationalism. Both Ellison himself and his friends and enemies sensationalized his life, while his language often carries hyperbole, or exaggeration for effect, into the realm of high art. In a letter to the author quoted on the flyleaf of a paperback edition of his collection, Paingod, Robert Heinlein said of his work, "This stuff is raw corn liquor." That quote more nearly captures the effect of both Ellison's stories and his personality. Ellison contributed to his personal mythology, the phenomenon known in science fiction and fantasy fandom as Harlan Ellison stories, and not referring to his fiction, by relating many of his adventures in the introductions that wrap his work like gift paper. Those introductions, with glimpses into Ellison's dramatic personal life, first drew me into his work as they were intended to do. He wrote about his adventures as an armed body guard, his multitude of girl friends and many wives, his adventures among the Hollywood philistines, and his travels giving lectures or researching stories. I remember picking up the first Ellison collection I ever read and being charmed by those early introductions, which began as story blurbs not unlike those which preceded the fiction in the pulp magazines such as Amazing, Fantastic, and Fantastic Universe, where his early work appeared. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream The first Ellison story to really grab me, though, was the famous "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." I still have the paperback copy with its black and whilte Leo and Diane Dillon cover. I was still just a wanna-be writer then, the mid-1960s. But I remember how I admired his opening sentence and read it repeatedly seeking the secret of its power: "Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported--hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern." I began voraciously reading all the Ellison in print at the time and haunted secondhand stores where I discovered his early uncollected work in 1950s pulp magazines and 1960s men's magazines. I first saw Ellison after moving to the New York City area in the early 1970s. He was at the height of his popularity then. At a Lunacon, a science fiction convention held in New York City, I witnessed Ellison's dynamic personal style. He showed "Demon with a Glass Hand," an episode of the 1960s black and white series The Outer Limits, Ellison wrote. But his commentary on the Hollywood script-writing experience entertained the crowd as much as the film. I was teaching English in New Jersey public schools at the time, and still trying to write every day. I ran into Ellison again at a New Jersey college affair where he mentioned the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy workshops held at Michigan State University for six weeks each summer. Even then, the workshops had a reputation for smoothing some of the rough edges from beginning writers' stories and helping them cross over into professional status. Since then a significant number of the science fiction and fantasy field's new writers get their start at Clarion. In 1974, I submitted a story and the other paperwork and was accepted for that summer's workshop. Ellison was to be one of the professional workshop leaders, each of whom spent a week in close contact with the 25 or so students. I was accepted, and when I arrived, on the very first day, the most popular topic of conversation was Harlan Ellison stories. Telling Tales Now just before I left for the workshop, an English professor I knew professionally told me a Harlan Ellison story as true. When the round of Ellison stories began at the workshop, I retold it. As I often do to this day, I personalized the story rather than telling it secondhand. It goes this way: Harlan Ellison steps into an elevator at a convention. Across from him is a tall, voluptuous and beautiful blonde. Ellison, who is short of stature if not otherwise and was famous for keeping the company of many beautiful women, looks at the blonde and says, "Hey babe, what do you say to a little fuck?" The woman looks Ellison up and down and says, "Hello, Little Fuck." Ellison's colleagues Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon both told version of this story in print, clearly labeled as "apocryphal," and commented it was in that category of stories which "if they are not true, should be." Okay, so Ellison shows up, and knowing from long experience what has preceded him, asks, what stories have you heard. Mine, which got the biggest laugh, quickly came to his attention. Unfortunately, confronted by the ire of one of my literary idols, a person who was an icon to me and to many others, I floundered at simply confessing I'd heard the story from someone else and retold it as a joke. For a short time I maintained the truth of the tale. Mea culpa. But you know, Ellison of all people should have some tolerance for writers who tell tales. I had been na�ve enough to think it was true, knowing Ellison primarily through the outrageous stories about him. Those ranged from his allegedly shoving a two-by-four through one of the window's of Damon Knight's car to tales of his exploits with numerous attractive women. Ellison argued that such stories damaged his ability to meet us on fair ground. For one thing, that particular story, he said, really didn't reflect who he was at all. He was an ardent supporter of feminism, for instance, which led to his pyramid sitting to protest Arizona's failure to ratify the ERA at a later convention. I should make it clear that I have no doubt whatsoever that Ellison is far too sophisticated to fall for such a set-up line and really didn't after meeting him. Ellison raised some hell with me over the whole business, including dragging out of me the name of the person who told me the story, whom he reached following his week at Clarion and harassed. In a tape-recorded report about that which he sent back to Clarion, he said, "You probably think I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill�" which indeed, I did. Ellison Comments Now I admit, I waited with trepidation for Ellison's comments on the story I submitted that week. It came back with compliments penned in the margins, ranging from "nice" to an underlined passage to a note saying "you show real talent here." In the workshop itself as well as dealing with my story or with me personally, Ellison showed only the highest professionalism. Although he did seem to make a big deal of the incident and quite literally it created a lot of distracting drama, I was impressed by his keeping it virtually separate from the workshop itself. I saw Ellison buy Bruce Sterling's first novel, Involution Ocean during a workshop session. Sterling, who is known as one of the founders of the science fiction school of cyberpunk, was there because Ellison, recognizing his talent, had paid his tuition. We also heard Ellison perform a reading of one of his stories, an experience I sought out thereafter, for he is so skilled you find yourself as entranced as a child listening to a bedtime story and one right up there with the force of the real Brothers Grimm tales to boot. Ellison worked as a professional actor and still does Hollywood voice over work. When I returned to the New York area after the convention, I discovered that nothing travels faster than a Harlan Ellison story. The first thing my friends in the New York City publishing world asked me was what happened between me and Ellison at Clarion. The 1974 workshop was one of Clarion's most successful. Students included the since much published Sterling, Al Sarrantonio, P.C. Hodgell, Bill Wu, James Patrick Kelly, and others. Although I sold a few SF stories and joined the Science Fiction Writers of America for a while, I found my real talent was for journalism and wrote about science on monthly contract for OMNI's Continuum department. I met Ellison at a time when I had not acquired enough life experience to know all heroes have proverbial feet of clay, so Ellison turning into a Golem did disturb me in ways I think were unnecessarily volatile and disruptive. On the other hand, I never lost my love of his work and to this day, if someone tells me they like Harlan's stories, I know we have something visceral in common. My encounter with Ellison sliced away some of the illusions of my youth, but nothing could erase the way his fiction etched itself into my soul. Revised version copyrightallanmaurer2003.