The Perfect Host, page 2
Interestingly enough, classic detective fiction shares a number of key assumptions with the science fiction field during the period when Sturgeon was writing the stories that appear in The Perfect Host. The most important commonality between these two genres was a faith in the power of men’s minds, disciplined by logic and scientific method, to solve nature’s riddles—and a consequent emphasis on characters and plot lines which embodied this faith. These norms—which had been originally championed by Campbell and had replaced the genre paradigms that had governed science fiction during the rise of the pulps in the 1930s—had helped channel the limitations of sf authors, enabling them to sacrifice a certain amount of wild imagining in order to attain a much greater degree of credibility and conviction in their work. The end result was sf which was more thoughtful and credible, which had better speculative development, and which was more effective as literature as well.
VI. More than Non-Human: Sturgeon Breaks on Through
However, even such undeniable advances within genre sf had a downside, especially for an author like Sturgeon, who was obviously unsuited by temperament to approach the craft of writing from any position requiring him to sacrifice anything, least of all wild imagination. Certainly the stories in The Perfect Host make it clear that Sturgeon had little interest in depicting the usual sort of science fiction characters (courageous, bold, self-restrained, dedicated to applying technology for the betterment of mankind).4 or plot lines. These stories make it equally clear that by now Sturgeon had found a way to present some very radical topics indeed. These include a greater attention to semiology, philosophy, psychology and sexual desire, and a related set of concerns that would later be explored in his greatest work, More than Human, the postulated existence of being without ego, of a movement across the borders of a unified self, and of displacement of physical fusion onto a mental plane.
A different way to put this is that what one finds throughout these stories is a writer grappling mightily with a means of humanizing science fiction, often via the incorporation of stylistic features new to genre writing. Examples of Sturgeon’s innovative approach to form here include his use of multiple points of view and the story-within-a-story device, stream of consciousness, poetic discontinuities and other methods of conveying the movement of the mind, and a whole host of metafictional devices.
Related to these metafictional impulses is a general foregrounding of authorial self-consciousness that wouldn’t be common in sf until the late-Sixties “New Wave” work of Delany, LeGuin and others. While many of these stories are about “love” in the most obvious, romantic sense, it is equally apparent that nearly all of them are about Sturgeon’s own love affair with language. Sturgeon was probably the first American sf author to bring language to the foreground of his work, not merely in the sense of unfolding his narratives within prose mannerisms that are lyrical and rely on assonance, alliteration and other poetic devices, but also in the sense of providing an ongoing (frequently hilarious) commentary on the limits of language even as they offer themselves as new possibilities of how words can function. This sort of reflexiveness and inquiry into the role of language and of the artist appears in a surprisingly large number of these selections.5 Many of them describe individuals who are seeking a form of union and connection that will also preserve their individuality and sense of freedom. These questions, meanwhile, are frequently analogous to those of Sturgeon himself. Can he, the stories seem to be asking, find a stylistic and semiotic freedom that is not simply a meaningless cliché or incoherence? Can he find a form that will not trap him inside existing genre norms?6 Can he construct a verbal, textual space where he will be free to examine those philosophical and psychological issues that prior sf (or crime, or fantasy, or western) spaces simply could not express?
One of the most obvious indications of Sturgeon’s impulse to construct a verbal space that mediates between social space and the private, inner space of the story proper is the manner in which he chooses to constantly draw attention to his own linguistic performance. Consider the following passage, which appears near the outset of “The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast”:
“Lirht is either in a different universal plane or in another island galaxy. Perhaps these terms mean the same thing.… Now, on Lirht, in its greatest city, there was trouble, the nature of which does not matter to us, and a gwik named Hvov, whom you may immediately forget, blew up a building which was important for reasons we cannot understand … So on Lirht, while the decisions on the fate of the miserable Hvov were being formulated, gwik still fardled, funted, and fupped. The great central hewton still beat out its mighty pulse, and in the anams the corsons grew …”
This sort of playful, reflexive commentary is one of the many ways that Sturgeon demonstrates his resistance to, and liberation from, the conventions concerning how one should use words to present reality. This sort of foregrounding is reinforced by a more general self-consciousness about the strange and problematic relationship between words and things—and the problematical position of human beings, who participate in both7. The end result is that throughout nearly all the selections in The Perfect Host readers are compelled to submit to the turbulence, or share in the delight, of Sturgeon’s mind working itself out in visibly verbal performances.
The obvious analogy would be jazz.
VII. CODA:
Literary Critic Announces Refutation to Sturgeon’s Law
Borrego Springs, California. At a press conference today, postmodernist expert and cyberpunk promoter, Dr. Larry McCaffery announced results of recent tests he has been conducting to determine the accuracy of “Sturgeon’s Law.” First proposed by the late science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon in the mid-1950s, Sturgeon’s Law essentially states, “Of course 90 percent of science fiction is crap, 90 percent of everything is crap.” According to McCaffery, however, his own literary research indicates that while Sturgeon’s Law is valid in the great majority of cases, there are important exceptions—specifically, Sturgeon’s own stories. “After careful analysis of some 17 stories written by Sturgeon himself and collected into The Perfect Host: Volume Five of the Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, I’m forced to conclude that Sturgeon’s Law simply doesn’t apply to Sturgeon’s own stories.” When pressed, McCaffery added that readers and critics could continue to apply Sturgeon’s Law in the great majority of cases: “Careful measurements taken on a control group of non-Sturgeon stories consistently produced “crap-percentages” that were consistently in the 93 to 97 percent range; however, this percentage dropped drastically when applied to Sturgeon’s own stories.
Asked if he could explain the remarkable disparity in crap-percentages, McCaffery cited a number of possible factors that might have contributed to his findings: “Empathy is undoubtedly one of the main factors. If you look at the main characters in the 17 stories I conducted my readings on, you’ll find that, first of all, they’re a marvelously motley crowd: you’ve got your usual sf types—scientists, military figures, and so on—but you’ve also got cowpokes, outcasts, musicians, murderers, misfits, kids, old people, idiots, geniuses, heroes, villains, and several different kinds of aliens. And yet somehow Sturgeon seemed to be able to empathize with them all, even with truly repellent figures like Fluke, the hipster jazz musician and murderer in ‘Die, Maestro, Die!’ ”
Asked if the empathy factor might not be related to the well-known theme of ‘Love’ which Sturgeon himself had posited as being one of the commonalities present in all his stories, McCaffery agreed, but hastened to add, “There’s no question that ‘love’ is one of the building blocks in all Sturgeon stories, but there’s so many different kinds of love—so many “isotopes,” as it were—that just noting its presence in his work doesn’t really tell you much. It’s like saying that carbon is one of the common features of human beings—that’s true, but unless you know something about what that carbon is combined with, you aren’t going to really know much about any given person. For instance, in the case of these particular 17 stories, my research was able to identify several different kinds of love—parental love (“Quietly,” “Prodigy”), romantic love (for example, “The Martian and the Moron,” “One Foot and the Grave” and “The Dark Goddess”), and of course sexual love (in “Scars,” “The Music,” “Till Death Do Us Join” and “Die, Maestro, Die!”). You could also say that Sturgeon ‘loves’ all his characters in the sense that he cares enough about them to produce some understanding of them—whereas in most crappy genre writing, the authors don’t really (if you’ll pardon the expression) give a shit about their characters, especially the bad guys. This doesn’t mean he forgives them or sympathizes with them—just that he empathizes with them.”
McCaffery also noted that Sturgeon’s well-known stylistic virtuosity undoubtedly contriburted to the low level of crap detected in the stories he analyzed. “One of the things that my readings of these stories confirmed is that Sturgeon’s stories nearly always exhibited a far greater attention to language—assonance, alliteration and other features of sound, patterns of symbol and metaphor, and so forth—than do the works in the control group.”
By way of conclusion, McCaffery noted, “There’s a lot of other tests that need to be done, and there will no doubt be other experiments that will contradict these findings. That’s okay. Ted Sturgeon himself would have welcomed these sorts of contradictions and controversy. He always liked to keep things stirred up.”
Larry McCaffery
April 1998
Foreword Notes
1. Sturgeon reminds us of how truly mind-altering radios seemed earlier in this century in several stories in The Perfect Host—most notably “The Martian and the Moron.”
2. “ ‘And Faulkner—have you read any of Faulkner?’ ”—“The Martian and the Moron.” Surely other readers and critics have noted the likely influence of Faulkner on Sturgeon’s writing?
3. For what it’s worth: in the humble opinion of the author of this Foreword, “Scars” and “Die, Maestro, Die!” are the two finest stories included in The Perfect Host.
4. To the contrary, Sturgeon’s choice of characters in this volume’s stories tends to run towards madmen, misfits, freaks, murderers, and other similar “abnormal” figures.
5. “The Martian and the Moron,” “Unite and Conquer,” “The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast,” “Die, Maestro Die!”, “The Perfect Host,” “The Love of Heaven” and “Prodigy” are all stories that, at least on one level, can be read as allegories of the artist generally, and of the sf writer in particular.
6. “This sort of thing is strictly against the rules.”—“The Perfect Host”
7. Cf.: “It isn’t easy to to tell what happened next.” from “One Foot and the Grave”; “It’s sort of hard to describe.” from Hulon, in “What Dead Men Tell”; “Damnit, it’s hard to find words that make sense!” from “One Foot and the Grave”; “Please don’t translate. It couldn’t be phrased as well in English.” from “The Martian and the Moron”; “There is no word for it.” from “The Perfect Host.”
Quietly
SHE WAS BORN in a house near a very old town, quietly. Her father was turning the pages of very old books, and thinking strange thoughts in the gloom of his study. Her mother lay silent and suffering, two flights above him. Her father was lost in his studies, but waiting for some sign, some faint sound of the borning. Her mother lay still by the light of a candle. The peak of her suffering came to her swiftly. Her eyes puckered deep, and they looked like the mouths of the burrows of animals scarring the face of a white limestone cliff. She stiffened, and, crushing the pillow beneath the taut arch of her nape, she bit her thin lips and she buried her nails in her palms. The breath whistled out of her delicate, quivering nostrils; and then she decided to draw no more, and in silence she trembled and died.
“You’re a fool,” said the doctor.
“Do your work,” snapped the child’s father.
The doctor went on with his work amongst the clutter and clabber of childbirth. The windows at dawn were at last showing lighter than their frames, but the light did not challenge the doctor’s lamp. Rolled up and tumbled away, the bedclothes strayed off on the floor, full of hollows and shadows. Rolled away, useless and spent and inert, the body of the mother lay out of the lamplight, graying with the growing dawn.
The doctor, his supple hands saving the child, said, “My work is to heal and to cure, and to right what I can of the bungling of fools. But it is also to fight fools’ work by speaking my mind. Why didn’t you call me days ago? Why didn’t you send her to the hospital?”
“She wouldn’t have gone,” said the father starkly.
The doctor glanced up at him. The father was flat, wide, tall, with a nose like an eave and sea-going eyes. “You couldn’t have taken her? You could carry off six like her under your arm.”
“She wouldn’t have gone,” repeated the father. “She’d have died.”
“She did,” said the doctor bluntly.
“Then she was bound to. I had her for a day or so more. In that time, with all she fought, she did not have to fight me as well.”
The doctor wrapped up the child and put it in the waiting basket. “You loved her, didn’t you?”
“That is not a doctor’s question. Have you written out the things to be done and what the child will eat?”
“Yes.”
“And the certificate for her?” He motioned toward the corpse. “And whatever papers are necessary for the child?”
“All those.”
“You are paid.”
“Too well, in money.”
“Good. Now go. Do not come back here for anything, ever.”
The doctor moved to a basin and washed his hands. “You’ll send for me if I’m needed? Children sicken, you know.”
“This one won’t. I am not accustomed to failure and there will be none of it in my house. The child will not sicken.”
The doctor packed his instruments, glanced around the room, and walked out. The father followed him to the door with that in his bearing which ensured the departure and was not polite. At the door the doctor turned suddenly, to stare up into the long controlled face, to look blatantly at the signs in it of the naked grief that was about to break there. “Have you no friends, man?”
“Friends!” spat the father. “There are friends about me as there is disease about you. No sickness will get the better of you if it is within your power. No friend will eat, and suck, and weaken me. Go back to your ingrown nails and your physics and your death-watches, and leave me to myself.”
The doctor shrugged and left, blowing what seemed to be a taint out of his nostrils.
She was born quietly, and quietly she passed her childhood. Her father, when he thought about her silence in other terms than appreciation, thought her a mute. When she showed she was not, he felt no surprise.
The house was large and as alone as its master. The rooms and the stairs and the wide hallways were carpeted, wall to wall, with heavy gray rugs. The house was old and solid, its timbers pegged, its paneling and joinery screwed and glued and immovable. Inside the brassbound oaken slab of a door, a cushioned vestibule held a rack for shoes. Barefoot he glided about the house, and barefoot his daughter toddled until, early indeed, she learned his soundless stride.
He named her—Quietly. Quietly she grew.
She was not beautiful—not if mannequins and calendar girls are beautiful. Her face was her father’s, but softened with womanliness and with something else. Her nose was his, but rounded. She had his far-horizoned gray eyes, but wide and wide-set. Her jaw was strong and planar, yet only a part of the clean complex curve of shoulder, neck and cheek. Her hair fell to her waist and was the color of black-iron heated until it just begins to glow its deepest red.
He taught her strangely. He brought her, in his teaching, not only the contents of his library, but the quintessence of his own astonishing experience. All that he said was simple—simple and quiet. He explained that often, saying,
“What is basic is simple. Complicated things are not basic, and are not important.”
So everything she learned was simple. She learned about earning—that things could be had without being earned, but that without being earned, they could not be kept. She learned about fear—that it’s not a shameful thing, nor a foolish one, since it is the essence of self-preservation; but that he who truly hides his fear is accepted as superior. She learned about giving—that to give is to get, but that to give too much is to take and to lose. She learned to define evil: that which is extreme. She learned to define good: that which is moderate. She learned, above all, to be alone. She learned to accept aloneness at any time—halfway through a meal, or on waking, or even in the midst of a lesson, for her father would sometimes leave a sentence unfinished and step out of the room, to be gone, sometimes, for days. There were occasions when there was no food in the house, or when there was food hidden. In these cases, she did without, or she went into the woods and made snares and caught small animals or collected berries and wild birds’ eggs. The one inexcusable offense was to sit frightened and bleat her father’s name. That happened once, and all her life she bore the scar of it, for he shouted at her. Her conditioning made her immune to the one thing that had taken her father by surprise—the dreadful fact that aloneness can come to any human being, without warning or justice.
