Case and the Dreamer (47 page)

“I could not bring myself to quit while this was going on. But the very minute I completed my first term, and was no longer on the bottom …” He dropped out of nautical school, just like he’d dropped out of high school, and used his cadet credentials to get an Ordinary Seaman’s Ticket, and shipped out with a steamer outfit called the Merchant and Miners Transportation Company.

The short stories Sturgeon wrote for the newspaper syndicate, in his room on West 63rd Street, were not science fiction—they were human-interest vignettes, boy-meets-girl or sailing stories or whatever, but always with some kind of little clever twist that gave them their charm. Like the girl gets the guy by putting vanilla extract on her ear lobes, so every time he gets near her he thinks about cookies and yellow curtains in the kitchen.

Sturgeon wrote these stories, and other odd assignments when he could get them, and then one day when he’d walked over to Brooklyn to see his brother, or maybe late one night nursing a five-cent cup of coffee in Martin’s 57th Street Cafeteria, somebody showed him a copy of a new fantasy magazine called
Unknown
, and said, “Hey! This is what you ought to be writing for.…” Sturgeon went to see John Campbell, the editor, who also edited a magazine called
Astounding Science Fiction
and ended up selling him twenty-six stories in the next year and a half. It was 1939.

Science fiction was not a new discovery for Sturgeon. Like most of us, he started reading the stuff when he was twelve or thirteen. His stepfather—always the autocrat—took one look at Ted’s copies of
Amazing
and
Astounding
and forbade him to bring those pulp magazines into the house. The Sturgeon family lived in a fourth-floor apartment, top of the building, and the closet in Ted’s room had a hatch that led to a crawlspace under the roof. Ted took his magazines up there and dropped them behind the fourth rafter back, where they couldn’t be seen even by somebody standing on a chair looking in with a flashlight. “So it’s a mystery to me how that man was ever able to discover them.…”

But he did. “One time I came home, and he says, ‘There’s a mess in your room. I want you to clean it up.’ I walked in there, and that room was nearly ankle deep in tiny little pieces of paper no bigger than postage stamps. He had torn up my entire collection of science-fiction magazines. It must have taken him hours—I guess his hands must have ached for days. I can remember I was sobbing, just crying, sweeping up those little pieces of paper, and looking at one every once in a while, wondering what story that was. And I had to clean it all up. Which may well be why I’m a science fiction writer today.”

Ted’s brother went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and Ted stayed in New York, writing his stories. He married his high school sweetheart—her name was Dorothy, and she changed it to Dorothe so it would be the same as Theodore—and they had a baby girl, Patricia, and then Ted—who’d written his best-received story to
date, a tale of eldritch horror called “It,” in ten hours on his honeymoon, and then followed it with a little epic called “Microcosmic God,” which made such an impact that decades later it was voted one of the top five sf stories of all time by the Science Fiction Writers of America—Ted turned his back on his growing reputation as a writer and got a job managing a hotel in Jamaica.

Sturgeon was twenty-two years old. He’d thought he could turn out stories fast enough—at a penny a word—to support his new family, but it wasn’t working out; in fact lately the stories had stopped coming altogether. This hotel gig would take care of immediate needs, and then maybe the change of scene would get his creative juices flowing again.…

It didn’t work out that way. In the next five years, Sturgeon wrote exactly one story, right in the middle of this period; the rest of the time, though he tried and tried, nothing happened. The war came, the hotel closed down—Sturgeon became a bulldozer driver, a heavy equipment operator (he was not a big man, but he was good with machines, and it was wartime)—they moved to Puerto Rico, and then St. Croix. A second daughter, Cynthia, was born. Eventually Ted quit his other jobs and just worked full time at trying to write—but apart from his classic short novel “Killdozer,” written in nine days in 1943, no stories came. He just didn’t understand it. It was like something had broken inside him, and he couldn’t put it together again.

In pursuit of a hero.

It was his daughter Tandy—the fourth of Ted’s seven children—who gave me the word for what kind of a hero Theodore Sturgeon is. She said she’s had this vision, since she was a small child, of “a society that works”—maybe a small village—not a conscious model, but something she’s picked up from dreams, or by osmosis. “A place I know as the society that should be. And the storyteller is central to that society. He—Homer—is the cement that holds society together. They need to go and listen to him. Now people don’t ask. They’ve forgotten, they don’t have time to listen. But they still need it. And they like him because he makes them want to listen.”

Storyteller. That’s the word.

Tandy’s vision reminds me of a Sturgeon story called “The Touch of Your Hand.” It takes place in a small village, and there’s a wise old man who the people go and listen to—but he’s a musician—but the story’s about an angry young man, who wants to take these sleepy villagers and teach them to struggle and hate, so that they can build cities and glorious machines and become real men … and about a beautiful young woman, who doesn’t understand, but who loves him and tries to help. Like most Sturgeon stories, it has powerful characters and some very surprising twists in the plot line. And the story, which manages to show at the same time much of what is ugliest
and most beautiful about human beings, is also memorable for introducing one of Sturgeon’s most original and challenging ideas on the subject of how to improve human nature.

The same idea in a somewhat different form crops up in a later story, “The Skills of Xanadu.” (“Touch” is from 1953; “Xanadu” from 1956.) In both instances Sturgeon suggests that human beings, or creatures like them, will develop a form of telepathy within a social group (a village, a nation) which allows each person to automatically draw on the group’s collective reservoir of knowledge and acquired skills whenever he or she needs to know something. In other words, if you need to sew a buttonhole and you don’t know how, you just concentrate and the way to do it will come to you from someone who does know will come to your fingers, and you can just start to do it and feel how it should be and which motions are right.

“We are telepathic, not in the way of conveying details, but in the much more useful way of conveying a manner of thinking.” (“The Touch of Your Hand.”) “He knew without question that he had the skills of this people, and that he could call on any of those skills just by concentrating an a task until it came to him how the right way (for him) would feel. He knew without surprise that these resources transcended even death; for a man could have a skill and then it was everyman’s, and if the man should die, his skill still lived in everyman.” (“The Skills of Xanadu.”)

Above and to the left of the sink in Sturgeon’s kitchen is one of those crowded bulletin boards where odd items accumulate and stay in place for years. My eye was caught one night by a postcard bearing a line from Karl F. Gauss (German mathematician, 1777–1855), and I mentioned it, and Ted said it was one of his favorites, and from that time forward the quote has become a kind of touchstone in our conversations, we’ll just naturally arrive at it in the course of what we’re saying, look at each other, mumble some obeisance to “that line from Gauss,” and move on from there. We can almost hear the theme music in the background.…

The quote reads: “I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.”

If you look at this long enough, it will tell you: how Sturgeon
writes a story. How he lives. And the way in which a Sturgeon story affects the person who reads it.

Sturgeon’s vision of a limited telepathic linkage that allows each person’s skills to become everyman’s is at least as important an idea as the notion of going to the moon, which originated in science fiction (thousands of years ago) and has been repeated over the years until somebody finally went ahead and acted it out. It is the idea, not the technology, that is the force behind human progress. As Frederik Pohl explained it in his brilliant story “The Gold at the Starbow’s End”: “Most problems have grammatical solutions. The problem of transporting people from the Earth to any other planet does not get solved by putting pieces of steel together one at a time at random, and happening to find out you’ve built a spaceship by accident. It gets solved by constructing a model which describes the necessary circumstances under which the transportation occurs. Once you have the grammatical model, you just put the metal around it and it goes like gangbusters.”

All of Sturgeon’s stories are models: problems and solutions. He is a (very sympathetic) student of the human situation—what makes people tick? But to say that he has his solutions before he starts is not to say he knows the end of the story before he starts writing. The solution is the beginning of the story, it is the implicit harmony of the situation, the way things ought to be. As soon as we meet the people, the characters, we feel it. This harmony is violated by the problem(s) facing the characters—which is the dramatic element, the tension: if there were no problem, there would be no story, just a portrait. But there is a problem; and the end of the story, the climax of the plot, is not the solution (that’s implicit, a restoration of order) but the how-to-arrive-at-it. At the end we discover how the solution is arrived at. And that’s the part that Sturgeon (like Gauss) doesn’t know until he gets there.

The secret I am trying to tell here is the art of storytelling, at its highest—how it’s done. It’s like Houdini getting himself locked in a trunk and thrown in the ocean. I don’t think he knows beforehand how he’s going to get out of that trunk. Rather, he’s putting himself
in a situation where he will be forced to focus every bit of his own strength and concentration on the problem at hand—and he knows that under those circumstances, and only those circumstances, he has the capability to find a way out. It’s an act of faith.

The solution is: open the trunk. That’s obvious. And the way to arrive at the solution is to lock yourself in the trunk. That’s not obvious at all. But it’s beautiful.

Sturgeon came back from the islands and turned into a zombie. Originally he’d flown to New York for a ten-day visit, to get a new agent. “I went into some kind of a funk at the time, it must have been a severe depression.” He found an agent, but he still hadn’t done any writing, and he couldn’t get together the money or the energy to fly back to St. Croix. So he stayed in Manhattan, sleeping eighteen to twenty hours a day.

Ten days became eight months, and finally Dorothe, who was still down in the islands with two kids and no money, decided she’d had enough, and asked for a divorce. Ted flew down to try to patch things up, but it was too late. His marriage was kaput. Another failure.

The atom bomb exploded in Hiroshima.

Sturgeon had moved in with a friend of John Campbell’s named L. Jerome Stanton. “Stanton had an apartment on Eighth Avenue with no furniture in it, and I had a whole warehouse full of furniture, so I moved my furniture into his place and just did anything he suggested … you know, take the stuff out to the laundry or do the shopping or cook the dinner or something, until it was done, and then I just stopped, like a switch had been thrown, until he said to do something else. I was really in a zombie-ish condition.…”

He got a job as copy chief in the advertising section of a wartime firm that made quartz crystals; that ended when he flew back to try to talk things through with Dorothe, and when he came back to New York he was more depressed than ever. He wrote to another high school girlfriend, Ree Dragonette, and eventually she came to live with him; meanwhile he was having lunch every day with John
Campbell, editor of
Astounding
(
Unknown
had folded due to the wartime paper shortage), and spending time in the basement of John’s house in New Jersey. It was in that basement, at the end of 1945, after a dry spell of more than five years, that Sturgeon finally started writing again.

At first the new stories were almost 100% dialogue, as if Sturgeon were not yet ready to hear the sound of his own voice on paper. The third story—“Mewhu’s Jet,” about a visitor from outer space who turns out to be a little kid on a joy ride—was mostly dialogue, but the characters were stronger, the humor brighter, the human qualities of the situation more fully developed. Sturgeon’s storytelling skill was starting to reemerge.

And then came the breakthrough: a story called “Maturity,” a tense, warm, brilliant, utterly moving account of an irresistible, irresponsible young genius (songwriter/sculptor/poet/ne’er-do-well) who undergoes a series of glandular treatments intended to make him grow up, biochemically speaking. It’s a love story—the old eternal triangle—something of a detective story—a fabulous portrait of a fabulous human being who is not entirely unlike the author’s idealized view of himself—and more, much more than that, a tale that transcends category to confront one of the central human riddles of any era: who am I? What is maturity?