I fell hard for Harlan Ellison stories as a teenager. Not an uncommon thing. I scoured my high school library for anything with his name on it, then hunted places like Uncle Hugo's. If you wanted Ellison you had to learn a new love for used copies, yellowing pages, torn covers.
His publication history was as patchwork and chimerical as his reputation. He was world-famous, he was obscure. He was ubiquitous, he was a distant fluttering heat mirage. He was an angel, he was a sentient hemorrhoid. He was impossible to work with, he was the Pro of Pros.
When I was hunting his stuff, in the hazy pre-eBay paleolithic, it seemed like God's own shotgun blasted his work out to the bookstores of the world at random intervals, to no discernible ballistic pattern.
This is a thread. Part 3/a big question mark.
This is a thread. Part 3/a big question mark.
In my late teens and early twenties, I hero-worshipped the guy. Hero-worship is damned ridiculous and unfair to everyone involved. You build someone into something they can't be, in your own head, without their permission. Then you take it personally when they let you down.
Some things about Harlan never let me down. He wrote too many good stories, too many angry, toothsome, sparking classics. He poured too much raw humanity, sense, outrage, and awkward naked love into his work, for that work to not mean something. Something above and beyond him.
He could be a quiet salvation to people in dire straits. I personally know a pile of people who were touched by his generosity, even saved from disaster by it. He could be an abominable shit. I know a roughly equivalent number of people who mostly received that side of him.
I never met him, but I felt like I'd met his outrage. I felt like he'd taught me that it was okay to refuse to cordially suck down each spoonful of vicious shit the world holds up to our faces. "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs," the Glass Teat essays, his cold fury over Kent State.
I also feel like I've met his smallness, like it reached out and touched my community and took something in proportion to what he left. His public groping of Connie Willis. His four decades of blowing smoke about THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS. His absorption in his own persona.
The way he crawled inside his own story at the end, performed it to exhaustion in public, made it a shell, made himself into some sort of cantankerous were-anecdote... it was his life to fossilize, but it was still uncomfortable and sad to watch.
I both admired and cringed at the way he poured his life into TV. Cringed, because it was obvious he hated the environments he worked in, the people who ran them. Admired, because he candidly admitted that he stayed in that hell because there he MIGHT reach the biggest audience.
Harlan, passionately decrying the dumbed-down anti-history of smug 1960s war movies. Harlan, on stage decades later, stating that he had taken a scriptwriting job for a show he hated because he wanted to sleep with the lead actress. Harlan mighty and true. Harlan small and venal.
It's okay to be sad for him and treasure the things he left us. It's okay to be angry at him and the other things he left us. They all came from the same guy. It's okay to feel awkward and frustrated about him. He was superb. He was a fuck-up. He spread love. He caused pain.
He talked ten miles of bullshit about himself but one thing I'm fairly confident of is that whenever he talked about the kindness of others (such as the time Steve McQueen apparently saved his life in a desert) he spoke only truth.
He stretched details like taffy for effect, but that's just a thing writers do. Smear the details like a Dali landscape but keep the essential truth pristine. I think he was really onto something, venerating kindness in others, even when he neglected to hand it out himself.
I kind of hope he was kidding when he claimed his wife was supposed to tip his private papers into a fire when he died. I also have to admit that would be the HARLAN ELLISON SHOW (TM) way to go.
I never really liked that show.
I have a lot of feelings about the guy who played the title character, though.
I have a lot of feelings about the guy who played the title character, though.
