How Precious Was That While, page 23
And there is where it impacted me. Because others got it confused, and accused me of being the convention ogre. I had this direct from a fan who met me. “You don’t seem like an ogre,” he remarked. I inquired, and he explained about the stories circulating about me at conventions. “I have never been to a convention,” I said. He looked at me, surprised. It was true; from the time I attended the Milford Conference, which was a private gathering of writers, to my first science fiction convention, was seventeen years. Even then, I was always well behaved at conventions, as I was elsewhere; compared to some other writers, I am a model of decorum, as anyone who has actually met me knows. I don’t get drunk, or use foul language, or grab for women; instead I try to meet and talk with all those who wish to meet me, trying to relate to their interests. People had confused one genre writer for another. Yet that story was to dog my entire career. I made something of it by becoming the ogre: I titled a Xanth novel Ogre, Ogre, and it become my first national best-seller. So now there was ample evidence that the Piers Anthony ogre was not the kind that disrupted conventions. Yet it seemed that many folk out there clung to the false stories, not much interested in the truth. Even in 1992, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Orlando, Florida, when I met Jerry Pournelle, he accused me of something Laumer had evidently done: writing him a letter when he was SFWA president, castigating him as a Nazi. I never did anything like that, to anyone. Pournelle would not accept my denial, and would not apologize when it became evident that what he said was false. (I had SFWA look up the correspondence records, showing that there was no such letter to be found.) This is one root for my gradual and increasing contempt for fandom, and for some pro writers too. I am not much interested in those who have agendas other than fairness. It all started with Keith Laumer, but maybe it was carried on by others, who didn’t have the excuse of suffering strokes.
Laumer’s life after the stroke was not good. His family avoided him. As far as I know, he wrote very little after that, but he wanted to consider himself the genre’s finest writer. He suffered outbursts of scatological swearing in the middle of ordinary conversations. He wanted female companionship, but he was too grabby and abusive, and women were wary of him. I had vivid descriptions from two of my correspondents who had interacted with him. A simple trip to a gas station with him could become a scene that no woman would care to repeat. He could control himself when he chose to, but seldom chose to unless there was something he very much wanted from a person, and he could be insidiously cruel. It was as though the stroke had severed his conscience. One woman called him “an evil man.” I lived about forty miles from him, but never sought to renew our acquaintance, because I knew that he would deeply resent me for replacing him as the best-known genre writer of the area. Yet that isn’t what he said. I was told that he cursed me for offering him advice on landscaping. Huh? I don’t know what he was thinking of, unless he confused me with someone else. So finally he died, and his long travail was done. Yet the meetings and correspondence I had with him were positive, and I think is only fair to put the good on record with the bad. Perhaps the best way to give those who never knew him an image is to mention the movie Scent of a Woman, wherein Al Pacino played a blind man who was embittered and cutting toward others. I was not the only one who thought of Laumer when I saw that characterization. But in the course of the movie, the man’s better characteristics gradually emerged, until at the end he came across with stunning brilliance, redeeming himself and the young man he sought to help. Laumer might have been that way, had it been his sight instead of his conscience destroyed by the stroke. In his heyday, Keith Laumer was an exciting writer and a winning personality, and perhaps his faults were no worse than those of others. It’s just that the stroke made his faults become glaringly obvious, and destroyed a career that might have become what mine did become. He was well started on such a career, at the time we met. What might have happened, had he turned his narrative talent to fantasy? It was a tragedy, and surely what I suffered from his deeds was only a shadow of what he suffered himself. May he rest in peace.
I mentioned Gordon Dickson, one of Laumer’s friends. Back when I did my first year’s effort of writing, I read widely and studied the work of successful writers. I also worked on an index of reviews, and listed the authors of stories in the several genre magazines. Damon Knight had remarked that Poul Anderson was probably the genre writer with the most stories in print. My survey confirmed that, and indicated that Dickson was #3. I forget who was #2. I met Poul Anderson and his wife Karen in New York, and we rode the bus together to Milford, where I met many others, including Dickson. Dickson was like Bacchus, the god of wine, and I don’t mean that in an unkind sense. He was convivial, the center of the party, and yes, he drank, but he was a great person to know. He was smart, too, perceptive and considerate. We had had some slight correspondence before; he had enclosed a note with one of his SFWA-distributed novels saying that writers needed more feedback, so he was inviting comment on his book. I sent in comment, and then did the same with my first published novel, Chthon. At the conference he read my entry, and took extra time to consider his response, so as to make the nature of his comment amicably clear; he was a thoughtful person. Dickson was later to become president of SFWA, and his motives and courage were good. But he tended to delay on things. When my novel Macroscope was excluded from the ballot for Nebula, because members had been waiting for free distribution from the publisher, which was late so that it missed the nomination deadline, I wrote to Dickson, asking him to allow write-in ballots. He declined. He read the novel, and said he did consider it good enough to nominate, but he did not feel that the existing policy should be changed. I disagreed with this, and it resulted in a major contender—Macroscope came in #3 on the Hugo Award ballot for that year, and at the time the Nebula and Hugo normally went to the same novels—being unfairly denied consideration. But Dickson was forthright, and that I can respect. When I had my problem with the publisher, Dickson suggested that SFWA mediate the issue. I agreed. But then he took so long to get around to it that the matter died unfulfilled, and I had to get a lawyer instead. So again, Dickson’s neglect cost me heavily, because I got blacklisted when I should have been vindicated. But he was not a bad man. I liken it to the cop on the beat who is looking the other way when a mugging occurs; he should be more alert, because if he’s not there to stop crimes, what’s the point? Dickson was a prolific writer, but also a good one; I loved his Dorsai! series. In 1976 his fantasy novel The Dragon and the George was published by Ballantine (Del Rey), wherein the dragons were the heroes oppressed by charging human knights. I read it and liked it, though I could see where he had used a loop—that is, an inserted episode that didn’t relate to the rest of the novel—to lengthen it to exactly 100,000 words, to make Lester del Rey’s minimum for the fantasy line. It won the British Fantasy Award for that year. The following year my A Spell for Chameleon won the same award, and the year after that Stephen Donaldson’s massive Unbeliever series with the same publisher won it. Donaldson and I moved right ahead with our fantasy, doing sequels, becoming best-sellers, but Dickson waited fourteen years to do the sequel to his fantasy. The course he might have followed can be seen by mine, riding fantasy to the top. But as time went on, he faded, and when I met him again years later at a convention, I saw why: his glass of whiskey was constantly with him, and he sipped continuously. I sat beside him on a panel, and he kept right on drinking. Now he is gone, his work unfinished, and I regret that.
Jack Williamson was an old-time writer of special significance to me. When I first discovered science fiction as a genre, in the form of a copy of Astounding Science Fiction magazine left in my mother’s office in 1947, it was a Jack Williamson story titled “The Equalizer” that led off the issue and captivated me. A space mission returned to find the moon base deserted, and Earth rendered back to a nontechnological culture. What had happened? I never reread the story, and no longer have the magazine—it was the March 1947 Issue—so the details fog, but the magic of it remains with me forever. So it was really Jack Williamson who hauled me into the genre, and I never really left it. My own world of the time was not very interesting or joyful, and the stories in the magazine gave me endless new worlds in which to dwell. I think science fiction was a significant buttress for my sanity.
I was eager to find the next magazine, which was April 1948, a year later. No, I hadn’t waited a year; I had been in my mother’s office around the Christmas season, so it was an old magazine, and in the three months it took to discover that these things were sold at newsstands and such, that became the current issue. There was part two of a serialized novel by Jack Williamson, And Searching Mind. It was absolutely compelling. Later it was published in book form as The Humanoids—a worse title, I think, as the original had been a novelette followed by the novel, the set titled “With Folded Hands … And Searching Mind.” But editors change titles all the time, usually for the worse, I think; it’s their way of showing their power. This novel introduced me to the wonders of Psi power, wherein a man could move mountains by the force of his thoughts alone. Glorious! There was a nine-year-old girl in it, and when my daughter was nine I read that novel to her. That was in 1976, and as I have mentioned, my taste in fiction had matured since 1946, and I found it less compelling than I remembered. But it remained a good novel, and I was glad to share the experience with my daughter. Along the way I had the chance to meet Jack Williamson himself; in fact Joe Green brought him to my house for an evening in 1969, when he attended the Milford Conference that had moved to the local Florida beaches, and I was able to show him my collection of magazines, and the original Astoundings with his material, and tell him how important it was to me. He said he would have to have his head shrunk after all that praise. He met my daughter Penny, who was then only two years old. It is one of the gratifications of my life that I was able to have Williamson over and entertain him for that evening; it would be hard to think of a writer I would rather have had there. Later yet, in 1987, when I was Guest of Honor at the World Fantasy Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, Williamson was another guest, and I was able to tell him again of his importance to me, in public with an audience of a couple of hundred, gaining him applause. “Thanks for bringing me into this world of wonder,” I said. So it’s not that I think that Williamson is the greatest writer ever, but he is a good one, and he was the one who captured the thirteen-year-old who was to become Piers Anthony. Without him it might never have happened.
Theodore Sturgeon was I think generally conceded to be the finest stylist in the genre. Certainly I considered him so. His life, I learned in due course, had been unkind. When his stern stepfather discovered his collection of science fiction magazines, he cut them into pieces. There could hardly be a worse, or less deserved, punishment for a child. Yet that same stepfather, as I understand it, also drilled him in proper English usage, so may be part of the source of Sturgeon’s marvelous ability to express himself. But only part, for Sturgeon’s imagination and sensitivity were phenomenal. Unfortunately, he didn’t like to write. So if someone were to ask me what a hack like me ever had that Sturgeon didn’t, I could give two answers, either of which would have sufficed: discipline, and a love of writing. When I decide to do something, I do it—but I don’t need that discipline when it comes to writing, because I love the process of writing. It was said that Sturgeon lost his status as a writer when he became a good convention man. I think that’s reversed; he attended conventions because he couldn’t stand to apply himself to the lonely writing exercise. I wanted to say to him, “Ted, you write so well; why don’t you go home and do it?” But I didn’t, knowing it was pointless. I did, later, write him a letter, and send him a novel notion that a fan had sent me, because I believed he could do a better job of it than I could. But he didn’t like to write letters either, and didn’t reply. So Sturgeon, who could have been phenomenally successful as a writer, was instead a writer’s writer, admired by other writers, but not well-known beyond the genre. What a waste.
When I was invited to attend the 1982 SFRA (that’s Science Fiction Research Association, different from SFWA) meeting, and I saw that Sturgeon would be there, I decided to go. Actually I wanted to meet the proprietor, James Gunn, too, for he had written one of my all-time favorite stories, that had transfixed me in 1953: “Breaking Point.” So I went, and took my younger daughter Cheryl, who was then just twelve years old. I did meet Sturgeon, and talk with him, and got him to autograph my copy of More Than Human, which I had read in the magazines as “Baby is Three,” and that was nice. We sat beside each other on a panel, and there was a surprise: Cheryl was in the audience, and Sturgeon focused on her the entire session, somewhat to her discomfort. In due course I figured it out: some called Sturgeon the Apostle of Love, because he often wrote sensitively about love. Cheryl was just then coming into womanhood, and was the very image of a nascent maiden. That’s what Sturgeon saw, and he was right. Later I met his daughter, and no, I didn’t stare at her; at one point she and I might have collaborated on a project, but I turned that down for different reasons. I was sorry when Sturgeon died, but glad I had taken the chance to meet him when I could.
Harlan Ellison, as others know, is a case unto himself. I met him, also, at the 1966 Milford Conference. He was small in physical stature but large in presence. I had felt that his fiction tended too much to the grotesque, wherein men found themselves mired in garbage. But I was interested in him, partly because he was about my age, being three months older. I like to think that those of my generation, which means for this purpose within a year or so of me, are making their mark on the world. Ellison was making his mark. He was a showman, and he evidently felt a compulsion to make himself known in any group in which he found himself, even if it was simply a matter of telling one dirty joke after another. He took his work with him, and he had his typewriter set up in one of the rooms, with his story in progress there for anyone to see. At other times he would write a story while in a store window. He had a chip on his shoulder about the way the establishment had treated him, and I think it was justified. I learned that James Blish, a respected writer and fine critic (I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but a literary critic in the pure sense can have genuine perception, and he was on occasion that type), had in a prior year told Ellison that he would never sell a thing. How wrong (and wrongheaded) he was on that score! So Ellison repeated that, then said, “Well, here I am.” He proved his point; in the course of his career he won many awards for his fiction. I liked his attitude in that respect, though I had my differences with him. I noticed how he would courteously wait his turn as each manuscript traveled around the circle for comment, then make his own comment, which was generally thoughtful, then depart. He wasn’t interested in whatever anyone following him might say. That seemed somewhat self-centered to me. Yet he was always generous to James Blish, oddly, treating him with deference, and arranging for extra money to be paid to his widow when Blish died. So Ellison was a man of contrasts.
We interacted brightly at Milford. I described some of his work as being like vomit flying through the air toward the reader’s face, and I didn’t think much of his story “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” either; it was, as I think another writer commented, dollar writing for a dime theme. Then when I was commenting on another writer’s story, Ellison made a show of ridicule for my comment, finally fetching a fly swatter as if to deal with me. He was mistaken, as were others who agreed with him; they thought I was confused about a character in the story that I thought was female when it was actually male. It was Joanna Russ who told me it was a male character. No, it turned out that the author had done two versions of the story, and in one she had changed the gender of that character. The version I read had the woman comparing the size of her breasts to that of another woman’s: something hard to confuse, genderwise. This messed up Chip Delany too, who then said that his entire commentary should be discarded. Delany certainly was aware of the distinction, as he is gay. So, for that matter, is Russ, if others interpreted her subsequent statement on the matter correctly. I have wondered since then just how apt a story is, if a female character can be changed to a male one, without otherwise affecting the story. The distinction between male and female is far more significant than that, to me. But it seemed that few others thought of it that way. This was one of two cases where I differed from most or all of the other writers, and where I feel I was right and they were wrong. Ellison was not only extremely discourteous, he gave me no credit for correctly reading the version of the story I had seen.
But when he submitted a second story for consideration by the group, “I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream,” I said that I knew this was going to make trouble, but I had to speak my mind: I liked that story. Then I ticked off why I liked it. This was exactly the kind of stick and carrot commentary that Ellison has done to others; I do at times use folk’s own techniques against them, which may account for some of my unpopularity in some quarters. Ellison made a show of sinking in his chair, as if reprieved from execution. My judgment was vindicated by the public; that story went on to win an award. I made it a point to join his table when we had a banquet-style meal. That’s when he learned that I was a vegetarian. I believe it was Norman Spinrad who asked me about things like shoes, and I showed my cloth shoes. Ellison later commented in print on being impressed at the way I handled the matter. So our association, after a mixed start, was amicable.
