The Twilight Zone: One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty (1986)

I first learned about him through Star Trek.  I don't know if it's the most common way for people to become fans of his, yet that's how it happened for me.  When it comes to speaking of a writer like Harlan Ellison, there are always going to be a number of factors in play.  The first is how it's difficult to avoid anecdote and bombast.  We're dealing here with one of those writers who liked to cultivate an air of folklore about himself.  It's not too difficult to see why he might do this, either.  In many ways, Harlan was his own best publicity agent.  All he had to do was insert himself into any public situation, act out, and then exit.  No matter what he did, he knew how to make sure his actions were always talked about.  It's a strange way to guarantee immortality for yourself, though in his case, it worked well enough when he was alive.  In the years after his passing, however, Ellison's impact on pop culture seems to show signs of being in danger of slipping away into obscurity.  There will be some inclined to say good riddance, yet I am not one of them.  There's a lot to complain about with an artist like him, yet there is also, thankfully, enough genuine talent on display to be worth celebrating, even if it does drive you up the wall, sometimes.  I said that there were always two factors at play when talking about this particular writer.  If the first amounts to a legacy of notorious self-promotion, then the second has to do with a constant, sliding scale of aesthetic and personal response that Ellison was able to dredge up from his readers and viewers.

He's the kind of author whose fame and literary reputation will always exist somewhere between the poles of Derision and Enthusiasm.  This is an important, perhaps the key point to keep in mind.  This guy likes to force his audience into a spectrum between these two results of reaction.  He didn't care to do anything else.  If he ever got less than something between censure and approbation, then he'd come away feeling like a total failure, and probably then proceed to tear a new one into his own work as the most unglorified trash ever written, something not even fit for the tabloids and men's magazines.  For those that don't know who on Earth I'm talking about, you really are going to have to trust me on this.  I am not making up a single word I've said about this guy, so far.  You can take my word further when I say things are just getting started here.  The challenge will be finding a way to keep this article from becoming a book, and the book ranging anywhere from a tirade to an ode.  This is the kind of effect Ellison was always happiest with from his audience.  If he were to read this now, I'd have to prepare myself for anything from a raging bull scream fest to the warmest sort of congratulations, with maybe even a publicity boost for a moment or two.  At least it could go that way until I said or wrote something that pissed Harlan off, then it would all be a game of mortal enemies at daggers drawn.  Again, I can't say that I'm making much of anything up here about the guy.  It's all just a matter of who he was.

When it comes to the response scale between Acclaim and Derision, I always find myself moving back and forth between the two poles in my regard for this author.  If there's any comfort to be had in this kind of situation, it's knowing that it would make Ellison proud, even if it is at your own expense.  I can't believe I just wrote that.  At the same time, I'm forced to admit that this also is the truth.  If the guy I'm talking about sounds like he fits the general description of "Quite the character"...Go home....You have no bloody idea what you're about to get into.  I feel a warning of that nature is necessary, because while Ellison could be one of the wittiest, charitable, and urbane souls when he was in a good mood, when he was in a bad one...Let's just say, there are folks out there with a million stories they can tell you about him.  I think the best introduction I can give about this facet of his life is best told in the way he seemed to like the most, through folkloric anecdote.  With that in mind, this all happened once upon a time.  I'm going all the way back here not just to another time, but also something of another world.  I'm in a used bookstore chain, and I'm at the height of my Sci Fi movie and TV show geek out phase.  This was the point in my life when I was just getting to know the ins and outs of pop culture, and would eagerly grab off the shelf and gobble up the contents of any book that would sate this very desire.

On the particular day I recall now, I was lounging my way through the upstairs Entertainment section of this second-hand booksellers shop (an institution and pastime which will forever be precious to "we happy few" who have a surreal yet devoted following to the written word) and I happen to notice this neat looking book with the title Inside Star Trek, by Herbert F. Solo and Robert H. Justman.  I already owned a copy of William Shatner's Star Trek Memories, and so I was intrigued by this book promising a lot of further backstage anecdotes of The Original Series by two of the show's executive producers.  So I decided to give it a shot, paid my fee, and took the copy home with me.  Before we get into the main topic, let me just say here, that I now regard Justman and Solo's text to be perhaps one of the key Primary sources related to Gene Roddenberry's initial star fairing brainchild.  It is here that you will find a great deal of insight into the how the entire concept of the Starfleet universe was first pitched, and the struggles Gene, Bob, and Herb all went through in just getting the pilot greenlit, and letting the show's first season both find and then be able to keep it's voice.  It really is that good of a backstage history.

However, I'm not here to talk about any of that.  My concern is with one erstwhile member of the show's rotating roster of famous (or at least once famous) part-time contributors.  Solo and Justman emphasize that Gene really wanted his concept to be seen as legit in the eyes of the Sci-Fi community.  To that end, they had the very smart idea of reaching out to the best writing talent within that then burgeoning field, and asking them if they would be willing to leave their mark on the show by submitting scripts for potential broadcast.  "Scientific fact notwithstanding", the producers write, "it was Roddenberry's intent to employ the world's most famous science-fiction writers and convert their futuristic ideas into the visual medium of dramatic television.  The "future" belonged to them, to the science-fiction magazine writers and novelists, and to the sprinkling of science-fiction screenwriters, and Gene wanted to share their excitement.  Richard Matheson was the most experienced film writer and, as such, found less of a challenge than did the others.  Several, like A.E. Van Vogt, failed in their efforts to understand this plot-and-budget constrained medium.  Van Vogt submitted a number of story idea premises that contained unusual ideas and characters.  But his premises lacked story ideas and plot twists and contained elements that were unshootable.

"Some of them - Robert Bloch, Ted Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, Jerry Sohl, Jerome Bixby, Norman Spinard, George Clayton Johnson, and science fictions incredibly angry young man, Harlan Ellison - actually wrote episodes for the show.  But to his dismay, Roddenberry soon discovered that some of the science-fiction writers had great difficulty with the transition.  While their inventiveness ran amok with wild and exciting concepts, they were often incapable of developing them into believable dramas and do-able scripts.  Unfortunately, they were both marvelous storytellers and lousy dramatists.  And unfortunately, Roddenberry had given himself yet another problem.  Most of the science-fiction writer scripts had to be heavily rewritten - and he had to do it (127-28)".  Producer Herb Solo then recalls a brief anecdote about how this process worked with scribbling fellows like Theodore Sturgeon.  If he's remembered for anything at all, now, then it would have to be for just two things.  The first is the classic line that has since become known as Sturgeon's Law.  It's the one that goes, "99 percent of everything is crap".  The other thing he might be known for is in helping Gene to pioneer the concept of the Vulcans.  He did this by coming up with the ideas in a script that became the now classic episode, Amok Time.

It was there that the character of Spock, or more precisely his background, culture, and way of life were shown for the first time.  It might not seem like much, yet for Trekkers everywhere, this was the start of one the most famous of intergalactic beings in the history of Sci-Fi.  Bear in mind, this is what it was like to work with any of these guys on a good day, when the ideas could fit the limited budget of a mid-60s TV show.  Here is how Solo sums up what it was like to work with one of the most creative minds in the field on a regular basis.  After asking Sturgeon to whittle down his original novella Killdozer to fit the regular format of an ABC Movie of the Week, he gets back a rewrite that is still too complex and expensive, so he asks Sturgeon a question.  "Teddy, listen.  You were going to concentrate on character and conflicts.  What happened?"  The reply he got was simple, "Nothing".  Solo concludes, "I quickly realized Ted's world didn't permit him to accept that flying pterodactyls were out of the realm of character conflict.  Needless to say, much judicious rewriting was needed before the film was made (128)".  Let this stand as an introduction to the crux of the later conflict that Ellison had with the show.

For what it's worth, I'm reminded of something to do with Tolkien's work and the question of adapting the Rings novel to the big screen.  I've been told the author himself always held a very healthy skepticism about such a prospect, even as he was busy shopping the rights over to whichever Silver Age Hollywood studio was the next in line to show interest that week.  For what it's worth (and I know I'm going to get flack for this), I think Tolkien was essentially correct.  I've never seen any film version that was ever able to capture the full reality of that one single book that so many of its fans still mistake for a trilogy.  For me, it all comes down to a simple case of the Imagination forever outpacing our ability to set it down in anything like a definitive adapted image.  Even just the artwork of the great Alan Lee still never comes quite as close as it should.  For whatever it's further worth, I also believe this problem applies to any possible adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune, no matter what the current fans of the films say.  If you want, it might be possible to try for something like a radio adaptation, where the question of capturing the right imagery is neatly sidestepped.  For the rest, however, we've still got the pages, and that's enough for me.  Tolkien, however, kept a level head about the whole thing.  Harlan Ellison, on the other hand, turned out to be a whole different sort of beast altogether.  Here's where the legend begins.

From all accounts, the first season of The Original Series was pretty hectic to begin with in general, and that makes a goodish amount of sense.  Part of the problem facing the cast and crew was the need and ability to see if they would even be able to conjure up an entire secondary world from nowhere but the mind of this one inspired ex-cop and airline pilot.  Considering that an agreement was made to give Trek a chance only on the condition that an entire initial run of episodes was to be in the can and ready to ship to network stations by a certain given date, it's not too difficult to imagine those first initial efforts as one big scramble against the clock and the calendar.  That's the least ideal of conditions for any production to labor under.  The last thing a setup like that needs is an intemperate teammate to act as a kind firebrand willing to gum up the works all for the sake of making a point.  So the way Gene and company brought this blight upon themselves was when he made the most brilliant mistake of his life.  He decided to reach out to Harlan to see if there were any ideas he could throw their way as they were getting the show off the ground.  Ellison claimed his original idea came after he'd just read the biography of this old school Evangelist named Aimee Semple McPherson "and thought that it would be an interesting idea to have Kirk travel back in time and fall in love with a similar woman of good intent, but someone who must die in order to preserve the future. Ellison considered that it would have a heartrending effect on Kirk (web)".  With this in mind, Harlan began to work on a script for the show.

The rest of the process of was something of a self-created nightmare for all parties concerned.  To start with, the writing process itself was something of an endurance test.  Ellison would take his sweet time in bashing out the initial idea, and when it was handed in, the routine went something like this.  What Justman and the showrunners had on their hands was the draft outlines for the making of a great Sci-Fi romance.  It was also too damned uncontrollable to work as a Trek episode.  The worst part is that once this was explained to Harlan, he sort of went into warpath mode.  The man was notorious for insisting that his original idea not be tampered with, and it put Gene and his crew in a real bind of their own.  What makes this one of the most fascinating creative clashes I've ever read about is that it's just possible to see how both sides have legitimate points to make.  It is just possible to make a cautious and careful defense of Ellison's idea that a story should not be messed with up to a certain point.  This is when the Creative Idea can be said to have achieved it's fullest possible artistic expression.  The moment when the narrative can be said to have found its own natural voice, for lack of a better word.  It's the goal that every story at least tries to work toward.  All that's required is a writer with enough skill to work as much of the fossil out of the ground as possible.  Ellison seems to have had this sort of idea in mind.

If that's the only point he's trying to make, well, then, I'll have to admit I can't really disagree at all.  Stories can be fragile things, in the wrong hands.  The trick with any good narrative is that in order to be itself, it's voice must not be interfered with.  The moment someone does that, if a character or a scenario is bent out of the wrong sort of joint, if the story is "emasculated" (to use Harlan's word) in any way, shape, or form, it loses its own particular brand of "magic"; it dies.  I have no idea how that must sound.  All I can say is that it is a core concept of the Romantic Movement, and Ellison appears to have developed a liking for it, making him something of an inheritor of this outlook.  He's not the only one who thinks of storytelling like this, by the way.  It undergirds everything I'll ever write on this blog.  So if that's the perspective he's coming from, then I'll have no choice but to say it's the correct one.  The best possible irony comes in when you turn to chapter 18 of Inside Star Trek and read the following paragraph.  "Despite their hopes, it was evident to Roddenberry and Justman that the first draft of "City" was far from being shootable.  There were more than budgetary problems with this first Ellison script.  Both men were concerned that some of the "guest" Starship officers, as written by Ellison for this episode, didn't behave in the upright manner Roddenberry expected from proper Starfleet personnel.

"And Justman had other concerns: 'Although Harlan's writing is beautiful, it is not Star Trek that he has written.  It is a lovely story for an anthology television series or a feature (279-80)".  Now tell me something.  How familiar does this complaint sound in the aftermath of shows like Picard and Discovery?  Without ever meaning to at all, Justman has more or less summed up the key problem confronting the modern incarnation of a very lopsided Sci-Fi franchise that for some reason is calling itself by the name of Star Trek.  It's not opening a can of worms, so much as triggering a chain reaction in a very old, yet still dangerous minefield.  There's been a lot of spilled ink on the problems that Gene's brainchild has had to put up with in recent years.  I think Patrick Stewart was right about one thing, in a very ironic sense.  "It wasn't Starfleet".  That's the whole point Justman made years ago.  I'll say no more about the still recent enough kerfuffle that Trek finds itself embroiled in, except to point out that this is not a lone phenomenon, but rather one besetting multiple film and TV franchises, plus the Hollywood industry at large.  This is not the place to look for solutions, though most us know that would be a big help.  Instead, I'll just say this.  No matter what problems Ellison may have had while working on Gene's series, he never once took any of it as far as it's gone now.  For proof of this, go pick up a copy of Steve King's Danse Macabre, and you'll hear yet another touching Ellison anecdote.

It features Sci-Fi's Angry Young Man going to bat for none other than the Great Bird of the Galaxy himself in the face of a bunch of uncomprehending movie producers.  Say what you will about the man (and believe me, many have, and probably continue to always do so; he liked to give even his staunchest fans plenty of ammunition to work with) he knew how to stick up for the integrity of the Creative Idea, even when it came to secondary worlds that weren't his own.  It's also in King's pages where he'll tell you one of the most obvious traits about the author under discussion here today.  The guy never met a controversy he didn't like to court.  He's put all of these ingredients of himself into a blender and out pops one of the most talented and mercurial careers in the history of the Popular Genre fiction.  Not too long ago, I had the chance to catch another of this man's works adapted to the small screen.  What's funny about it is that once the final credits had rolled around, I came away with the impression that I'd gotten to know the writer a lot better than I ever had before.  It's this sense of learning a lot of vital information about the artist that finally made me decide to write up what I found out and share it here in this article.  This is the story of One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty.

The Thing in the Forest (2002).

Sometimes the biggest challenge for a critic is getting to know a new writer.  That's kind of a misstatement, in this case, however.  For one thing, not only is the English novelist A.S. Byatt an established name in her own right, she's also one of those authors who often gets touted as a very Important Name.  Entertain conjecture of a time when it was possible to speak of something known as an Ivory Tower.  It is, or was (once upon a time) something like a catch-all term to describe the hallowed halls of academe.  To tell you the truth, I don't know what that's like.  I never got the chance to experience whatever this type of setting was supposed to be.  However, everything I've either read or heard on the subject tells of a brief span of time (possibly from an inception dating to somewhere in or about the 1920s, all the way to a quiet and unremarked upon downfall at or near the mid-60s) when this academic establishment was meant to be a summation of all the best and brightest in terms of the Arts and Sciences.  In the fields of literary study, this amounted to the creation of a kind of hierarchy of what was considered the "Best Kind" of literature, if you can believe it.  I'm not sure that this was a mindset that ever took a real hold of the general audience, yet it was a criterion of a collection of critics and college professors such as Edmund Wilson, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis.  If you don't know who I'm talking about, let that be history's verdict on guys like them.

In retrospect, it becomes easy to see just how misguided the whole idea of an Upper Echelon of the Written Word is, when you stop and think it over.  There will always be too many stories for even a single lifetime (at least I hope that's true), and beyond a general ability to say that this narrative works while the other one doesn't. it's always going to be perhaps impossible to claim any one text as the Greatest Novel Ever Written!  I think the best any of us will ever be able to do is to point to which stories are our favorites, and then see if we have it in us to defend our enthusiasms.  As long as you're not hurting anyone while doing so, then go nuts, I say.  Still, the historical record does show that there was a time when a lot forgotten critics and English Lit 101 instructors seemed to have concocted a shared mission to both define and limit whatever it was that constituted a real book.  Looking back on all that now, the one defining feature that probably still stands out the most about the thought of guys like Wilson and Harold Bloom is that most of them saw fit to dismiss the Literature of the Fantastic as beneath consideration.  This is something they took as a fundamental, axial type of mindset.  It meant there was always going to be this disconnect between what Bloom thought Literature with a capital L was supposed to be, and the actual reading and movie going habits of the public at large.  They were all working with a picture which, due to their snobbery, was always going to remain incomplete.

It meant that there was always going to be a very short list roster of Important Names that would ever be considered worthy of the Ivory Tower.  Here is where you'd find the likes of John Cheever, John Updike, Eudora Welty, Williams Carlo Williams, and Henry James.  The upshot of all this academic hoarding was that it now looks like this close guarding and proselytizing means that there were a lot of good literary talents that had their chances at fame squandered by a bunch of opinion makers who were more concerned with being the In-Crowd, rather than alerting readers to the merits of the artist.  It's a categorical shirking of the critic's proper job, and perhaps that's the most telling verdict of the efforts of Bloom, Leavis, and the artistic outlook they once represented.  The funny part is that they claimed to set their sights forever against the Popular Genres, while also allowing in a handful of scribblers who just so happened to give Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction their modern identities.  Hence the Tower could admit the presence of Fantasists like Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, John Milton, Dante, Homer, and or course, Shakespeare and Charles Dickens.  The idea that any of these guys might have considered themselves popular authors writing to entertain the popular masses never seems to have occurred to Bloom, or a lot of the former chalk dusted gate keepers of the Tower who preceded him.

A.S. Byatt was one of the few women authors who were allowed to have a seat this once so vaunted table.  Looking at the works that bear her name, it's kind of easy to see why they would be willing to let her past the gate (even if she was just a girl).  Not that sexism ever had anything to do with it, heavens no.  After all, didn't Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters have their own spot in the Tower (they'd helpfully point out, all while ignoring the emergence of new talents like Shirley Jackson, Flannery O'Connor, Angela Carter, and Toni Morrison).  The Tower cares nothing for the gender of a writer, of course it doesn't.  All that matters is that you write what we deem our kind of story.  I guess the subgenre of Slice of Life social dramas of the kind pioneered by the likes of Updike and Arthur Miller in the 40s and 60s was considered the "right kind" of literature for them.  Let's just ignore the presence of a Gothic bodice ripper like The Witches of Eastwick, or the haunted presentation of the Salem Witch Trials in The Crucible.  A bit of dystopian Fantasy such as Toward the End of Time, meanwhile can always be written away as a one-off.  Let's just bury these facts under a tailor-made identity that we've constructed for all of these ink-stained wretches, one that is meant to occlude their otherwise obvious liking for, and considerable skill in both the Popular and Dramatic forms of art and storytelling.

Looking back on her career now, it makes the most sense to claim that a combination of luck and timing was one Byatt's side.  When she was allowed entrance to the Tower, her two biggest works at the time (Shadow of a Sun, and The Virgin in the Garden) could both be said to have fit the mold the gatekeepers were looking for.  Both works just mentioned almost deserve to be described as a pair of roman a clef as more than anything else, and so it's it's not too difficult to see why the Ivy Covered Citadel might have thought her to be a worth addition to their trophy collection Library.  As time went on, Byatt proved herself to be one of those literary types who also possessed a deft skill at handling the settings and characterizations from the worlds of Myth.  This appears to have always been something of a latent ability with Byatt, though I think it's telling that she never brought this aspect of her skills as far out to the fore until sometime starting in the early 90s, when it was clear that the heydays of the Tower had begun their long recede into the current level of cultural obscurity that it continues to enjoy today.  It was with novels like Possession, The Children's Book, and in particular short story collections like The Djinn and the Nightingale's Eye that the writer began to show the extent her true literary colors.

The curious thing about all this lies in the way she almost had to allow, or learn to grant herself permission to shrug off the demands of the Ivory Tower, and learn how the realm of Myth might be a safe haven for her own true voice.  It's curious because there's the sense of the author learning how to work her way toward an understanding of the proper expression of the Fantastic that she was able to call herself comfortable with.  It's this idea of struggling to know how to be at ease in the world of once upon a time that is the most striking and permanent feature of just about every word that Byatt wrote.  It starts out as a muted background note in early novels like The Game, until it becomes the over-arching theme in Ragnarök which was her last published work.  It's this notion of finding out if you can ever be at ease with the Fairy Tale that is the hallmark not just of Byatt's novels, but also of the semi short story that's placed under the microscope here today.  This is the modern myth of The Thing in the Forest.