Collected Essays. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ You could hardly believe your luck when one of Ted’s stories went singing through your head.

      ‘It’, with Cartier illustrations, in Unknown. Terrifying. ‘Derm Fool’. Madness. The magnificent ‘Microcosmic God’, read and re-read. ‘Killdozer’, appearing after a long silence. There were to be other silences. ‘Baby is Three’: again in the sense of utter incredibility with complete conviction, zinging across a reader’s synapses. By a miracle, the blown up version, More Than Human, was no disappointment either. This was Sturgeon’s caviar dish. Better even than Venus Plus X with its outré sexuality in a hermaphrodite utopia.

      As for those silences. Something sank Sturgeon. His amazing early success, his popularity with fans and stardom at conventions—they told against the writer. Success is a vampire. In the midst of life we are in definite trouble. They say Sturgeon was the first author in the field ever to sign a six-book contract. A six-book contract was a rare mark of distinction, like being crucified. A mark of extinction. Ted was no stakhanovite and the deal did for him; he was reduced to writing a novelization of a schlock TV series, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, to fulfil his norms.

      At one time he was reduced further to writing TV plot scripts for Hollywood. He lived in motels or trailers, between marriages, between lives. Those who read The Dreaming Jewels or Venus Plus X or the story collections forget that writing is secretly a heavy load, an endless battle against the disappointments which come from within as well as without—and reputation is a heavier load. Ted was fighting his way back to the light when night came on.

      About Ted’s dark side.

      Well, he wrote that memorable novel, Some of Your Blood, about this crazy psychotic who goes for drinking menstrual discharge. Actually, it does not taste as bad as Ted made out. That was his bid to escape the inescapable adulation.

      Here’s one small human thing he did. He and I, with James Gunn, were conducting the writer’s workshop at the Third Conference of the Fantastic at Boca Raton, Florida.

      Our would-be writers circulated their effusions around the table for everyone’s comment. One would-be was a plump, pallid, unhappy lady. Her story was a fantasy about a guy who tried three times to commit suicide, only to be blocked each time by a green monster from Hell who wanted him to keep on suffering. Sounds promising, but the treatment was hopeless.

      Dumb comments around the table. I grew impatient with their unreality. When the story reached me, I asked the lady right out, ‘Have you ever tried to commit suicide?’

      Unexpected response. She stared at me in shock. Then she burst into a hailstorm of tears, collapsing onto the table. ‘Three times’, she cried. Everyone looked fit to faint.

      ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of’, I said. ‘I’ve tried it too.’

      ‘So have I’, said Sturgeon calmly.

      He needn’t have come in like that. He just did it bravely, unostentatiously, to support me, to support her, to support everyone. And there certainly was a lot of misery and disappointment in Ted’s life, for all the affection he generated. Yet he remained kind, loving, giving. (The lady is improving by the way. We kept in touch. That’s another story.)

      If that does not strike you as a positive story, I’m sorry. I’m not knocking suicide, either. Everyone should try it at least once.

      Ted was a real guy, not an idol, an effigy, as some try to paint him. He was brilliant, so he suffered. I know beyond doubt that he would be pleased to see me set down some of the bad times he had. He was not one to edit things out. Otherwise he would have been a less powerful writer.

      There are troves of lovely Sturgeon tales (as in the collection labelled E Pluribus Unum), like ‘Bianca’s Hands’, which a new generation would delight in. He wrote well, if sometimes overlushly. In many ways, Ted was the direct opposite of the big technophile names of his generation, like Doc Smith, Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein et al. His gaze was more closely fixed on people. For that we honoured him, and still honour him. Good for him, that he never ended up in that prick’s junkyard where they pay you a million dollars’ advance for some crud that no sane man wants to read.

      Ted died early in May 1985 in Oregon, of pneumonia and other complications. Now he consorts with Sophocles, Phil Dick, and the author of the Kama Sutra. He had returned from a holiday in Hawaii, taken in the hopes he might recover his health there. That holiday, incidentally, was paid for by another SF writer—one who often gets publicity for the wrong things. Thank God, there are still some good guys left. We are also duly grateful for the one just departed.

      Of course, Sturgeon had his faults, but at his best his turn of phrase, his twist of mind, should have made him a widely admired name in American letters. A story like ‘When You’re Smiling’, which appeared in Galaxy in the 1950s, is beautiful and brutal, spiked with psychological understanding. It’s the old conundrum, posed every day to those of us who love SF: why doesn’t everyone recognize its sterling virtues?

      So Ted slowly went into eclipse—not that that is not often the fate also of better-known writers. He showed up at one of Harry Harrison’s Dublin conferences in the late 1970s with a charming lady in tow. He addressed me in these words, ‘Hey, Brian, you and I are the best ever SF writers, why don’t we get together and write the best ever novel? Why don’t I come back to your place for a coupla months, settle in and work with you?’

      A hundred reasons for saying no leapt immediately to mind.

      Now there’s a Sturgeon Project,^[1] aiming at returning all of Sturgeon’s stories to print. In 1993, the project published Argyll, an eighty-page booklet. It is Ted’s tragic story of his relationship with his step-father. Samuel R. Delany, in a well meaning afterword, compared Argyll with Kafka’s Letter to His Father. That’s a mistake. Kafka’s profound document adds to our understanding of human nature. Whereas Ted Sturgeon’s piece, though of great interest, is just a self-pitying account of a man’s cruelty to a small boy, a persecution of the almost helpless.

      At least it tells us where ‘Microcosmic God’ came from.

      1. For more information, write to The Sturgeon Project, c/o Paul Williams, Box 611, Glen Ellen, CA 95442, USA.

       THE DOWNWARD JOURNEY Orwell’s 1984

      ‘There is a word in Newspeak’, said Syme, ‘I don’t know whether you know it: duckspeak, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse; applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.’

      Neologisms such as duckspeak and slogans like WAR IS PEACE provide dramatic signposts in the landscape of George Orwell’s 1984, and direct our attention towards the oppositions and paradoxes of which it is constructed. The whole novel charts an example of enantiodromia, that is, the inevitable turning of one thing into its opposite; its strategy is to anatomize Winston Smith’s progression from hatred to the time—dramatically achieved in that resounding last sentence of the text—when he comes to love Big Brother.

      In this mirror effect, left has become right, right left. I shall deal here with some of the ways in which Orwell mirrors life.

      One major mirror effect is proclaimed in the very title, for Nineteen Eighty-Four is itself a piece of wordplay, the year 1984 being a mirror image, at least as far as the last two digits are concerned, of the year in СКАЧАТЬ