by JUDITH MERRIL
The man has style.
The same quality of "voice" or "presence" that makes the most unevenly composed Sturgeon story compellingly readable, marks his personality with equally unmistakeable (if no more definable) fascination.
He is a man of varied interests and strong opinions, many skills and endless paradox. Snob-and-vulgarian, athlete-and-aesthete, mystic-and-mechanic, he is detached and merry, humble and arrogant, over-mannered and deeply courteous—a manicured nudist, a man of elegant naturalness, thoughtful simplicity, schooled ease, and studied spontaneity.
Strangers always notice him; children respond with immediate and lasting confidence; those who know him, like or dislike him. No one is indifferent—and no two see quite the same man.
No two are presented with quite the same man. Yet there is rarely intent to deceive (I would have said never, but one must allow for the natural effects of, for instance, bill collectors, Internal Revenue officers, and certain publishers); nor is deception ordinarily the result. The change of face or stance or style, from one audience to another may be anywhere from subtle to sensational; but each attitude is as genuine as the last—simply a new permutation of the internal contradictions.
Beauty is a state of mind compounded of harmony and/or contrast with the environment of the beautiful thing, he wrote me once. The environment does not have to be concrete, but it does have a hell of a lot to do with the reflexes of the beholder . . .
This is one of the basic ingredients of Sturgeon's style. In his work, the choice of language, the prose (or poetic) meter, sometimes even the syntax, is generated by the situation or character: a constant variation of prose pattern is one of the elements that marks his writing style. In his person, a similar variable surface stems in the same way from the instinct for "harmony and/or contrast."
"Sturgeon is living his own biography," one close mutual friend used to say in moments of maximum frustration with the eternally sincere poseur. And though I doubt Ted has given much thought—or would care, if he did—to the figure he may someday cut in a scholar's summary, it is certainly true that he insists on revising the script constantly. He simply cannot stand idly by and see the dramatic unities destroyed by the gross, absurd hand of real happenstance: there is never a doubt which road to follow, when logic or self-interest depart from the moment's artistic necessities.
There are certain things about Ted that are (comparatively) unvarying: attributes that change, as in all of us, only with time and growth. His appearance is one.
A bit above average height (perhaps five-ten?), he is slender in build, but determinedly fit. (His first ambition was to be a circus acrobat.) He is just short of being conventionally handsome, but the trim beard he adopted years back (before they were fashionable) is the touch that turns what was almost a faun-like countenance into a faintly satanic mask.
He is a warm person, and the only formalities he practices are his own—such rituals of behavior he has devised to suit his own purposes (or, rather, pleasures. At work —any kind of work—he is impatiently, starkly, functional). He is (almost) obsessively clean, with a passion for neatness and pleasing design. (Note the "almost," nothing is ever all-one-way with Ted. He is fond of saying: "The definition of perversion is anything done to the exclusion of everything else—including the normal position.")
He loves good food, good drink, good talk, good music, good decor, good looks, good manners. He hates dirt, sweat, too-loud voices, ill-fitting clothes, clumsy behavior. (I feel that the nearest to a basic you can get is in living graciously. I can only know my own definition of graciousness, and it is one that precludes hating a man for his black skin, pissing on other people's rugs, going naked when it will distress others, sleeping with other men's wives, violating privacy, and any number of other delightful or uncomfortable or fun-making things .. .)
He acquires skills with the dedication of a collector: offhand, I know him to be anywhere from competent to expert as a chauffeur, guitarist, radio (and general electronics) repairman, cook, bulldozer operator, automobile mechanic, and maker-of-what-have-yous-from-wire-hangers-toothbrushes and-old-bottles. He also sings well, and speaks with an unusually, noticeably, clear diction—and with a wit that is, mostly, warm and friendly.
In my first list of paradoxes, I stressed the "manicured nudist." (Yes, if you've been wondering; those rumors are at least partly true. Ted was, for some years, an enthusiastic (nay, evangelical) nudist.)
I mentioned later that his near-obsession with cleanliness and tidiness had an exception. The exception is work. The most obvious thing about the Sturgeon style, is the easiness of it, but that ease is earned the hard way.
An editor, fretting about an overdue novel of Ted's, once told me: "He says he has three days' work left to do. I believe him. I know he can write a novel in three days. But which three days is it going to be?"
The editor was almost right, but also wrong. I have known Sturgeon to sit at the typewriter (in an attic or cellar or closed-off bedroom, before the garage, uncombed, paper-strewn, coffee-nerved, and sweating) for hours on end, sleepless and almost foodless, producing a steady stream of (one-draft, final-copy) words, hour after hour. (I think the record for three days, though—with catnaps and. sandwiches—was not quite two-thirds of a novel.) But typing is only one part of the job.
"Nobody can do two things at the same time," Ted says lightly. "I never think while I'm writing." He doesn't. The thinking comes first, between the false starts and in the glare of the virgin white sheet on the typer roller.
(He said it a little differently in "The Perfect Host") You want to write a story, see, and you sit down in front of the mill, wait until that certain feeling comes to you, hold off a second longer just to be quite sure that you know exactly what you want to do, take a deep breath, and get up and make a pot of coffee.
This sort of thing is likely to go on for days, until you are out of coffee and can't get more until you pay for same, which you can do by writing a story and selling it; or until you get tired of messing around and sit down and write a yarn purely by means of knowing how to do it and applying the knowledge.
Neither way of saying it explains why he loses weight in the process. He sweats—just like people; he does it in private. When he's done enough of it, out of the mill comes the fluent graceful prose anyone would know as Sturgeon's.
The operative phrase in that quote is "knowing how to do it and applying the knowledge." In an enormously gratifying introduction to a short story collection of mine, Ted publicly disclaimed any responsibility for me as a writer. When he learned I was writing this article, he reminded me, sternly, of his version of the matter. Having been forbidden to extend public gratitude, and with full intention of doing so, perhaps, I can take the curse off it, by taking some credit to myself first:
It was I who taught Sturgeon how much he knew about writing; I did it by listening, and asking an occasional question, while he was teaching me everything he knew about writing. (The differences that are still evident are, I am afraid, a matter of art rather than craft.)
I am not just joking. At the time that Ted decided I should, and by-damn would, write science fiction, he was still recovering from the double shock of his first prolonged experience with "writer's block," and the breakup of his first marriage. He could not think ill enough of himself. (His best stories then were tragedies—or self-mockeries: "Maturity," "Thunder and Roses," "It Wasn't Syzgy," "The Sky Was Full of Ships." There was even one, less memorable, called "That Low.") And his sad theme, reiterated, was: "I want to be liked or admired for something I do —not just for what I am." Or, alternatively:
"I'm not a writer. You are, Phil (Phil Klass–William Tenn: at that time he was also a new writer—two stories ahead of me (he had two published). For most of a semi-starved year, just before the Big S-F Boom started, the three of us lived—or so it now seems—on one ten dollar bill loaned around in continuous rotation.) is. I'm not. A writer is someone who has to write. The only reason I want to write is because it's the only way I can justify all the other things I didn't do."
At the same time, he was scouring his mind for what helpful odds and ends it might contain for a novice writer. (I did not mean to imply that Sturgeon formed his intent against my will; I could hardly talk or think of anything else in those days—but to me it was a hopeless hope. I knew I was, literate; I could do research; I could write a tolerable article, or even a "hack" pulp story, to formula rules. But to be A Writer, which was something else again, one needed Talent and Imagination . . .)
The first thing he did was to give me a book.
He had seen some (sincere, young, and of course free verse) poetry of mine in a fan magazine. He liked one poem, said so, and showed up a few days later with Clement Wood's "Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet's Craft Book," inscribed:
I give it so that Judy can
Become a goddam artisan.
He suggested, gently, that I try my hand first at some of the French light verse forms. I did try one, and decided to go on to greater things. I wrote a sonnet; or so I thought. It had the right number of lines and rhymes in the right places, and it was in iambics. I sent it to Ted, and got back a five page critique, line by line. Some lines he even praised; but he began with a sort of first-grade explanation that a sonnet is never, not ever, in tetrameter; each line, always, has ten syllables, not eight. He wrote, in part:
Keep pure and faithful your respect for the form. Violate it nowhere, ever, not in the slightest shift of syllabic value. Our language, with all its faults, is one of the most completely expressive in history. (Joseph Conrad thought so well of it that he adopted it completely. When using it, never forget that godlike compliment.) We have a highly flexible grammar. Verbs can be placed anywhere in a sentence. Parenthetical thoughts are in the idiom. The rich sources of English have brought to it shades of meaning and choices between sounds which are unparalleled in other tongues . . .
. . . I find little fault with your punctuation, but it might help you to assume my view of it; namely, that punctuation is inflection in print. To me, "She loves me–" is heard differently from "She loves me . . ." and from "She loves me." There is a speaking difference between a colon and a semicolon and a coma ...
. . . If you master this form, you will have such a feel for the music of words that in your odes and your vers libre your work will be completely compelling, and in your prose your songful characters will speak, when their thoughts sing, with singing ...
He said, apologetically, that there were only two things he could really tell me about story writing, and that one of those was not his own thought, but had been told to him by Will Jenkins. It was the basic device for generating a plot —
Start with a character, some one with certain strong, even compulsive personality traits. Put him in a situation which in some way negates a vital trait. Watch the character solve the problem.
I don't think I have ever written a successful story that emerged any other way.
The second piece of advice was his own, and this was: see everything you write about. Don't put a word down until you can see the whole scene for yourself—the room, or outdoors area, all the people, including the ones who do nothing; the colors and shapes; the weather; clothes, furnishings, everything. Then describe only those parts concerned in the action; or describe nothing, except what your characters do; they will be behaving in context, and the reader will be able to rebuild a complete scene from the pieces of the pattern you've given. It doesn't matter if this scene is different from yours; it will have the same meaning in his frame of reference that yours did for you.
This is one of the most astonishing pieces of instruction on record—simply because I have never heard it anywhere else. It seems so obvious—once you know it.
He wrote me the letter with the first quote I used here, about the nature of beauty; it was, in context, concerned with the ability to create beauty. And another letter picks up a theme he spent hours on:
. . . imagination is a thing like language skill or how to drink brandy something which can be done well or badly, too much or not enough . . .
It would be impossible to detail, one by one, the things he taught me, or the boosts he gave. I doubt that I remember all of them now. Most of it was so well absorbed that I no longer distinguish it as something learned from Ted. I have relayed what I recall most vividly, and will yet add an incident or two, primarily for two reasons.
The first is that, in all seriousness, he learned something vital to him in the process, and I think it constituted a sort of turning point, starting up from the extreme of his depression. It was, I believe, the day I read "Bianca's Hands," in carbon (the ms. was then in England, submitted for the British Argosy short story contest). I did not —do not—like the story. Even more, I disliked his effort to compare it with Ray Bradbury's work. I had at that time read exactly one Bradbury story I liked. (I have since read several that were published before then, and many written afterwards, that I greatly admire. But this was 1947; most of Bradbury up till then was in the Weird Tales vein, and this is rarely to my taste.) In any case, I was somewhat brusque in my criticism. Ted, perhaps defensively, explained it had been written many years earlier, and that he had showed it to me for one section, just redone: several paragraphs of deliberately constructed poetry, highlighting an emotional crisis, but spelled out like prose, so that it did not appear to break into the narrative.
And it was in pointing this out (I had missed it, as he expected) that he stopped, astonished, and said he had just realized how much he did know about how to write —that it was a skill, with him, not just a talent.
Whatever reinforcement the recognition needed came very soon afterwards, when the story won the first prize of $1000.
I never again heard the line about "something I do, not just something I am."
My other reason for leading you through my primer class as a writer is that I feel it reveals some vital aspects of Sturgeon's personality that I have not seen expounded in any of the several eulogies, prefaces, blurbs, and biographies I have read myself. Nor could I (I tried!) describe these facets myself, except by playback.
I might mention, here, that this article has been the most difficult piece of nonfiction I have ever done. How many false starts I made, or how many pages of unused copy will wind up in the circular file, I don't want to count. I started out to do a straightforward biographical article, with some, like, personal touches. (You know: "I was there, when . . .") And the more I tried, the more I realized I was, probably, uniquely unqualified to write anything balanced, objective, or factually informative about Ted Sturgeon. ("Probably," because there are others who know him, as person and writer, at least as well as I do; some of these have also been the beneficiaries of his astonishing capacity for advice, support, instruction, and encouragement of younger writers. But—) I believe my position is unique, because I am not only a friend, fan, colleague, and sometime protege; I am also, in one sense, Ted's own invention.
The first Judith Merril story published was called, "That Only A Mother . . ." (I had done these pulp jobs under various by-lines.) It was on the strength of that one story, before it was published, that I got the editorial job at Bantam Books which led directly to my first anthology. Less directly, the same story had much to do with Doubleday's acceptance of my first novel, on the basis of a short and unfinished sample. It was Sturgeon who supplied the confidence, and ultimately, the challenge, to try to write the story; in between, he also supplied—by accident—the ideas for the central problem and the central character. All I did was write it; after that, it was Ted, again, who took it to his own agent; and it was in the agent's office that it was read by those people who later influenced jobs and contracts. All this was, to some extent, happenstance. But the author of the story was created by design—Sturgeon's design.
Sometime before I gathered up my courage to try the "serious story," I had already determined to be a freelance writer (of articles and "hack pulp stories"). For several reasons, irrelevant here, I wanted a pen-name. Among others, I asked Ted for ideas. He suggested my daughter, Merril's, first name. I balked; none of my reasons included the wish to change my Jewish name to anything so flamboyantly anglo-saxon-sounding .
Ted reacted with unwonted anger, and we parted in mutual irritation. Three days later, I had a letter, explaining things, with an enclosure—a sonnet called, "On The Birth of Judith Merril!"
Two lines of the poem had come to his mind, you see, while we were talking (in an ice-cream parlor!). From that point on, all my arguments were unreasonable and obstreperous. He went home to finish the story he was working on: an assigned job with a sure check at the end, which he needed badly. But the poem kept growing. Finally —
. . . remembering something you had said about your Hebrew name, I went to the encyclopedia . . . It was right in there, reproduced also in Greek script and in Hebrew, and it means Jewess. It doesn't mean anything else but Jewess. . . .
With this reassurance that I was bound to change my mind, he spent the next day on the sonnet. The letter goes on-
. . . it is a Petrarchan sonnet, which means that its form is extremely rigid and complex. The rhyme scheme is 12 2 1 , 1 2 2 1 , 3 4 5 , 3 4 5 . Notice that there is no rhymed couplet at the end, as is found in Shakespearean and Wordsworthian sonnets. The idea is presented in the octet (the first eight lines) and resolved in the sestet. I'd rather build something like this than eat, which is demonstrable . . .
(Well, what would you have done? Let a reasonable prejudice stand in the way of a compulsive christening?) I had a name.
The man is full of self-contradictions: he is blind and perceptive; rational and illogical; pedantic and lyrical; self-centered and warmly outgiving. But he does each side of all the coins with style.
One more anecdote, about the final challenge that sent me home to write my story:—
I was leaving the apartment he then shared with L. Jerome Stanton. It was just after the big news about "Bianca's Hands," and Ted was effusing in all directions, including mine. He went to the door with me, told me to go home and write a better one. I took it as mocking. He stopped himself in mid-explanation (of his sincerity) and said, suddenly, pointing to the hall wall:
"Look!"
I did, and looked back questioningly.
"Look! Don't you see it?"
"See what?"
"The little green man, running up the wall ...?"
I shook my head, smiled faintly. "Nope."
"Keep looking. Look. See! Right there? He has a long green cap sticking straight out, and he's taking tiny little steps . . ."
I didn't see any green man, and I said as much. "What's more, if there was one, he'd be taking long draggy steps and his cap would hang down, going up that wall . . ."
"There," he said triumphantly. "See? I write fantasy. You write science fiction."
So I did—and came, eventually, to be asked to write about Sturgeon. Well, as I said, I am prejudiced; and the things that seemed important to say left no room for statistics. These have, in any case, been more than adequately compiled elsewhere. I have tried to portray what I could of an unusual and admirable human being. But it's tough, when you're writing about a man whose style you can't possibly match.