Case and the Dreamer (46 page)

Theodore Sturgeon was Guest of Honor at that particular science-fiction
convention (Labor Day Weekend, 1962), and I shook his hand but didn’t actually talk with him. He had his wife and his children with him, and was very much the center of attention wherever he went in the convention hall, and anyway I had nothing to say; I loved the man and I loved his stories and there was no way I could tell him that.

Fourteen years later I visit his home, we talk about anything and everything, I enjoy his hospitality and see his feet of clay—we’ve been friends of a sort for two or three years now—and each time I read a story of his he is again my favorite writer, a worker of miracles; but in between times he’s just a friend, attractive and annoying and as blind as the rest of us.… To write this story I need a hero, because this is a story of great achievements. But even after months of careful research, the man slips away from me, he’s too human—I know him and his life so well but I still can’t understand where his miracles come from.

Sturgeon wrote, just to give you an example, the all-time great story about Senator Joseph McCarthy, who he was and how he did what he did. The story is called “Mr. Costello, Hero,” and it starts out on a spaceship. This man Costello is a passenger on the ship—wonderful guy, everybody likes him. Except maybe the skipper, an uptight old coot who doesn’t approve of the progressive influence Mr. Costello has had on his crew. Like they’ve started playing draw poker without the draw, because that way there’s less opportunity for anyone to cheat. And volunteers stand watch in the galley, to make sure the cook isn’t poisoning the food. True, it makes for a crowded kitchen, but Cooky doesn’t mind—this way he knows everybody can trust him.

Costello gets off at a city on a frontier planet and manages to drive a wedge between the city-dwellers and the trappers who provide the fur that is the planet’s chief export, by making people deathly afraid of anyone who likes to be alone. Pretty soon he’s running the place. It’s utterly terrifying and utterly believable, particularly because Sturgeon tells the story from the viewpoint of a guy (the ship’s purser) who really likes Mr. Costello and doesn’t see anything wrong in the way he does things.

It’s a triumph of skilled storytelling—great characters, absorbing narrative, hair-raising conclusion. But there’s more to it than that. The story was written and published in 1953, at the height of the McCarthy era, and it is a devastating, thinly disguised attack on the man and his methods … but more than that, it’s a beautifully lucid presentation of exactly how a man like McCarthy can use fear and vanity and gullibility to divide people and set them against each other and put himself in power.

“Mr. Costello, Hero” is one of the finer pieces of writing to come out of the whole McCarthy experience, and it was written for a science-fiction magazine by a genre writer who had listened to the Army-McCarthy hearings on the radio and had once in his youth written speeches for a local politician in a Texas seaport, and that was the extent of his involvement in the world of politics.

How does Sturgeon do it? No two stories of his are alike, but of the 160 he’s written in the last four decades, I count at least fifty major works, stories as beautiful and important as anything you might care to compare them with. And none of these stories is known to anyone but science fiction readers and Sturgeon fanatics; and forty-five of the fifty are not even in print in this country.

And Sturgeon sits in his house in Los Angeles, full of ideas, and stares at his typewriter, and doesn’t write.

Theodore Sturgeon was born February 26th, 1918, on Staten Island in New York City. His name at birth was Edward Hamilton Waldo. “I was born a Waldo,” Sturgeon told science fiction scholar David Hartwell in an unpublished 1972 interview, “and had kind of an interesting family. Peter Waldo was a dissident priest in the 12th century who got ahold of the dumb idea that perhaps the Pope at Rome ought to go back to the vows of poverty and obedience, get rid of the Swiss Guards and the jewel-encrusted cross, and put on a monk’s habit and go out amongst the people. The Pope took a very dim view of that indeed, and they persecuted the Waldenses all across Europe for 200 years.”

“That was the Waldensian Heresy, that you should go back to
Apostolic Christianity. Nobody wanted to go and do a thing like that. And they settled in Flanders, and in England, and in 1640 two ships of them decided to go to the New World. They got separated by a storm, and one of them went to Connecticut; there are still Waldos in Connecticut to this day. The other ship went far south, and it wound up in, of all places, Haiti. Well, Haiti in 1640 was already a refuge for runaway slaves; and when they found they had a shipload of dissident priests, they welcomed them with open arms. Waldo became corrupted to Vaudois, which became Voodoo, which is the etymology of the word ‘voodoo’…. There’s been a whole line of gurus in my family: Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of them.”

Edward Waldo’s father, who was in the paint, oil and varnish business, left his mother when Edward was five. Five years later she remarried, and Edward (along with his older brother Peter) was adopted by his stepfather and his name was legally changed to Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon because that was the stepfather’s name—he was a professor of modern languages at Drexel Institute in Philadelphia—and Theodore because Edward was the boy’s father’s name and the mother was still bitter and anyway young Edward had always been known as Teddy. (To this day, libraries all over the world list “Theodore Sturgeon” as a pseudonym for “E. H. Waldo,” which is incorrect; Sturgeon is his real name.)

At the age of thirteen, Theodore became a star athlete. He’d had to do something. His stepfather had arranged for him to enter high school at the age of 11—he went from the fifth grade to the ninth grade with nothing in between but eight weeks of summer school—and naturally he was the smallest kid in the class. “I was pretty well brutalized by the whole thing. I had to figure out different ways to walk to school every day, because kids would lay for me on the way. I had curly golden hair and was very thin and kind of wheyfaced and—pretty. And I was just an absolute target.”

“While I was in high school I discovered apparatus gymnastics, and that became my total preoccupation. In a year and a half I gained four inches and sixty pounds, and I became captain and manager of my gym team, which is literally a transfiguration. I was totally born again. The very kids that used to bully me would follow me around
and carry my books. And then when I was fifteen, I came down with acute rheumatic fever.”

“By this time I had a two-year scholarship already at Temple University, an athletic scholarship; and my whole life was blueprinted. I was going to get my degree in physical education and spend a year teaching, and then I was going down to Florida and join the Barnum & Bailey Circus and become a flyer. However, acute rheumatic fever and six months flat on my back took care of that. My heart was so enlarged, it squirted up between my ribs where you could see it beating from outside. Inside of a year I had a fantastic recovery—but no more gymnastics, ever. It was a shattering experience.”

Sturgeon left high school a few weeks before graduating. He went to sea for three years. And then he became a writer.

Sturgeon’s best-known work is a novel (actually three interconnected stories) called
More than Human
. It’s about five children with unusual psychic powers who are able to “blesh” their talents together so that they become a single functioning organism,
homo gestalt
, the next step in human evolution. This novel contains some of the most memorable characters and extraordinary passages of writing (“The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear. His clothes were old and many-windowed. Here peeped a shinbone, sharp as a cold chisel, and there in the torn coat were ribs like the fingers of a fist. He was tall and flat. His eyes were calm and his face was dead.”) in modern fiction. It won the International Fantasy Award in 1954, has sold over a half-million copies in paperback, and both directly and indirectly has had a huge impact on the ideas and values of several generations of young Americans.

When a friend of mine, in 1964, asked David Crosby about the new rock group he was performing in, he said, “We blesh.” Crosby, like most mid-Sixties’ rock musicians (and underground press editors, political activists, dope impresarios, etc.), was an avid reader of science fiction in general and Sturgeon in particular; and he realized early that the Byrds and other rock groups were living examples of
Sturgeon’s idea that a group of humans could function as more than the sum of the individuals involved … not just more, but mystically more, so that the group took on its own personality and created things that none of its individual members could even have imagined. Chester Anderson wrote in the San Francisco
Oracle
in 1966, in a widely reprinted analysis of the new rock or “head” music, “Rock is evolving Sturgeonesque homo gestalt configurations.…” The Merry Pranksters were another example of the same phenomenon, as were all the nameless groups that came together to organize political or cultural events and then disbanded and vanished when the work was done.

The “counterculture,” in retrospect, was heavily modeled on a handful of science-fiction and fantasy novels:
Childhood’s End, Dune, The Lord of the Rings, Stranger in a Strange Land
and
More than Human
. The ideas expressed in these books hit home for a lot of impressionable adolescents, who later tried hard to transform their yearnings into changed lifestyles and new realities.

And a new set of values. Sturgeon, in
More than Human
and throughout his work, is a moralist as well as a visionary. Not the kind of moralist who knows what’s right and what’s wrong and tells you in so many words, but the kind who is searching for the answers and shares his search with his readers. In
More than Human
, the problem faced by
homo gestalt
is, “Now that you’re superman, what do you do with your powers?” Sturgeon’s answer is awkward and incomplete, but, for our generation, much more appropriate than Nietzsche’s.

We have to live our lives, he says, constantly refining and acting out a definition of morality that goes beyond individual survival and even goes beyond survival of the social unit. He is reaching constantly for a higher sense of the human role on this planet, and in that he is very much in touch with his postwar readers.

Sturgeon has an ambivalent attitude towards his own work, his career, all that sort of thing. He wants success desperately, and avoids it like the plague. Late one night, puttering around the kitchen (it was probably 3
AM
, and he was probably getting ready to feed the rabbits or wash the dishes), Ted told me he’s been hearing this voice
inside him all his life which says, in response to whatever is or seems to be expected of him by the outside world, “I won’t do it.” Only recently, he said, he’s realized that there’s another half to the sentence, and what he’s really saying, deep in there somewhere, is, “I won’t do what they want me to do.”

And, God knows, he doesn’t.

Sturgeon does not do what the world expects him to do. He resists mightily. He always has. When he was in high school there was a regulation that, when the weather got warm, if you came to school wearing a sweater you had to take it off. So Ted would show up at school wearing a sweater but no shirt.

“He has this need to do it backwards.…” Betty Ballantine, Sturgeon’s editor on a number of his best books, was talking about Sturgeon’s approach to a novel or short story (like when he wrote a western in which the hero loses the girl, or portraying Mr. Costello via an admiring observer); but as soon as the words were out of her mouth we both realized it was a perfect description of Sturgeon’s approach to everything in his life.

In his own funny way, Theodore Sturgeon is one of the contrariest people I’ve ever met. This makes him hard to work with and helps keep him away from success. But it’s also a significant part of what makes his stories so special. Sturgeon consistently sees things as though he were looking from the other side.

He turns things around and inside out at the same time, without letting go of your hand. It’s a neat trick if you can do it.

Q: How did you get started as a writer?

A: “I was in the merchant marine, working on a coastwise tanker, and I worked out a way to rob the American Express Company of several hundred thousand dollars. I did my homework: I wrote to the company and found out precisely how they shipped this and that and the other thing, got it all worked out and then wrote it as a short story because I didn’t have quite the guts to do it myself.

“And one magical day, when I was picking up my mail at the Seaman’s Institute in New York, I got a letter that said I’d sold the story.
I’d sold it to a newspaper syndicate, the McClure Syndicate, and I was so excited I quit my job, I went ashore and I was going to be a writer.

“Well, I sold the story for five dollars, payable on publication. It had taken me three months to research it. And they were willing to buy one story, sometimes two, a week. No more. So for almost six months, I lived on five or ten dollars week. I lived on West 63rd Street, where Lincoln Center is now, and it cost me seven and a half dollars a week for the room; and I ate on whatever was left.”

So in 1938, at the age of 20, Theodore Sturgeon quit the merchant marine and became a full-time writer. He’d been at sea for three years, starting with six months on a school ship, the Penn State Nautical School, which was just like going back to the ninth grade and getting brutalized (new cadets were hazed mercilessly by upper-classmen) all over again. “I remember the first shit session I was in. One of the officers came up from aft, and started to walk forward, and walked right past this line. And I greeted him with—silently, of course, but I thought, ‘Oh thank God! Here comes an officer. This is going to stop.’ And I could not believe it when he walked right through without looking. We were getting brutalized and beat on and kids were passing out, it was just ghastly. And the guy did nothing to stop it; he smiled slightly and walked on. That was so bloody unfair—” Ted says this like it was yesterday; after forty years, you can still hear the anger in his voice.