The Avram Davidson Treasury : a tribute collection

Afterword TURN OUT THE LIGHTS[3] by Harlan Ellison

(Harlan Ellison has written or edited seventy-three books; in his bibliography, more than seventeen-hundred stories, essays, articles, newspaper columns, motion pictures, and teleplays. Among his many awards and honors, he has won the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award, the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award twice (he came in second on his third nomination), the Horror Writers of America Bram Stoker Award five times (including a Lifetime Achievement honor), the Nebula three times, the Hugo 8½ times, the Writers Guild of America Most Outstanding Teleplay Award for solo work an unprecedented four times, the Silver Pen for Journalism from PEN, and the universal opinion that he is the most contentious person now walking the Earth. He is still delighted to recall the day in 1962 when he finally managed to sell a short story to Avram Davidson at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction: “Polly Charms the Sleeping Woman,” which appeared in August of that year. Slippage, Ellison’s latest story collection and seventieth book altogether, was published in Fall 1997.)

On the day I sit down to write this note, ruminations meant to add a grace note to an event, a publication, a fervent wish, a vain hope I’ve harbored for thirty-eight years (since I sold my first story at the end of 1955) — I have just hung up the phone, having been informed that my pal, the most excellent and virtually unremembered master talent, the great Avram Davidson, has died.

And I am suddenly more concerned with stealing a moment here to honor him, than I am with blowing my own horn about how clever I was to have written “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore.” Because, you see, for all the hot air and Monday-morning-quarterback deconstructionist horse puckey that writers and academics like to slather on the subject, there are only a couple of genuine Secrets about writing.

The first has to do with the why. And most of what is said and written is sententious claptrap, intended to buy us a shot at posterity by providing untenured educationists drivel for their treatises. Quentin Crisp once observed that “Artists in any medium are nothing more than a bunch of hooligans who cannot live within their income of admiration.” Oh, how we want that assurance that once we’re gone, no matter that we were as specialized a savory as Nathanael West or as common a confection as Clarence Budington Kelland, that we will be read fifty years hence. Because the why is as simply put as this: “I write only because I cannot stop.” Don’t credit that one to me, I’m not that smart. It was Heinrich Von Kleist. And he nailed it; what he suggests, in literary terms, is the equivalent of the answer to most of the stuff that we do: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

But West is barely read today, not to mention Shirley Jackson (who was the inspiration for “The Man Who Rowed—”), or James Agee, or William March, or Jim Tully, or even John O’Hara or Zoë Oldenbourg. Or Avram Davidson, who was one of the most stylish, witty, erudite, and wildly imaginative writers of our time. Author of more than twenty-five books. Only one of them in print.

He died in a VA hospital’s liaison “recuperation facility” called Resthaven; in Bremerton, Washington; all alone save for a compassionate nurse who knew his name as a superior fantasist; penniless, unknown to a nation of readers though he was working right up to the end; seventy years old and cranky as a screw being turned against its threads; a man who wrote like a wonky, puckish, amusing Henry James, sans the stick up his butt.

Avram dies, and like Kelland, who was as commercially successful in his time as Stephen King is in his, or Jackson, who was never higher than “mid-list,” gone is gone, and Posterity is busy figuring out who among today’s Flavors-of-the-Month will bring in the most money by going “interactive.”

On this day that I sit down to write my note to accompany (finally, after thirty-eight years of dreaming about it, lusting after it) my inclusion in The Best American Short Stories, all I can think about is Avram, and how he deserved many times to have been included here over the years, how he never got that notice, how posterity may have escaped him entirely, and I keep returning to this damned question of why we miss going to the movies, or attending a concert, or spending a quiet evening with a loved one, or taking that trip to the Great Barrier Reef…because we’ve got yet another deadline, yet another story to write, yet another idea burning to be slammed onto paper. It’s far far less, I think, of Mario Vargas Llosa’s “The writer is an exorcist of his own demons,” than it is what Von Kleist and Quentin Crisp said.

I have a T-shirt that bears the message NOT TONIGHT, DEAR, I HAVE A DEADLINE.

Funny, till the last deadline comes, as it did for Avram. And then, like West or Tully or F. Van Wyck Mason, you’re no-price. So what was it all about?

The secret is this: anyone can become a writer. If you look at the actual work of many of the creatures appearing on the bestseller lists, you know that things that flourish in petri dishes can become writers. The trick, the secret, is to stay a writer. To produce a body of work that you hope improves and changes with time and the accumulation of skill. To stay a writer day after year after story, till at last you get smart enough, or work long enough pulling the plow, to write something that gets included in The Best American Short Stories, a dream you know (in those cold moments when you can’t lie to yourself) will always elude you, because there is no great bearded sentience in the universe, and “it ain’t fair… I deserve it” doesn’t mean shit, as David Webb Peoples said in his screenplay for Unforgiven (which should’ve won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay). There is no god, or even upper-case God, wasting his, her, or its time mucking about in our daily affairs. There is only random chance and the cupidity of the uncaring cosmos.

Which is exactly what “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore” is about. There is no pattern; no pantheon of busybody entities up there in the clouds ordaining our lives; no Grand Scheme. You can be walking down the street, slip and tear your Achilles tendon, and walk with a limp for the rest of your life, thereby killing your career as a ballet dancer, but forcing you to make a living at brain surgery, during which career you discover the cure for brain cancer. That’s what the story is about. Don’t listen to the bonehead deconstructionists when they start all that “basic Apollonian-Dionysian Conflict” hooey. The story is about nothing more difficult or loftier than the admonition that you are responsible, that posterity is a snare, that memory is short, and that life is an absolutely unriggable crap shoot, with the stickman a civil servant who works for some department as inept as you are. Some days he does something swell, some days he does something creepy, some days he does something crummy, and some days, well, he don’t do nothin’ at all.

Even if you’re standing all alone in the middle of the Gobi Desert at high noon, and a Mosler safe falls out of the baggage compartment of a Concorde zipping by overhead at thirty-three thousand feet, and the great heavy thing falls right on top of you and squashes you to guava jelly…it was your fault. You’re responsible. It was, after all, you who chose to stand in that spot, at that moment.

And it only took me fourteen years, from conception and the writing down of the first few lines of the story, to get smart enough to write the complete story, and do it properly. And I cannot tell you how goofily pleased I am to be here. It only took thirty-eight years, and I’m nuts with pleasure. I’m one of the lucky ones. Avram never made it.

Rest in peace, old pal.