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Harlan Ellison turned 74 years of age the other week. And so I dug out my copies of THE GLASS TEAT and THE OTHER GLASS TEAT, the collections of his columns on television written circa 1969-1971, and began to re-read them, as I do every couple of years. The thing you need to know about the GLASS TEAT books is that, for all the wrong reasons, they’re timeless. The states of American network tv, dissent and education have not notably changed since he wrote those columns in his mid-thirties. (I’ve been re-reading those books since I was 20 or so, and it’s a shock to realise I’m finally older than he was when he wrote them. And I don’t want to think about how long it’s been since I first picked up a volume of his short stories in Rayleigh Library. With my dad making approving noises behind me: "Harlan Ellison. Good writer.’’)
I met him once. I’d made a crack somewhere online about Harlan’s heart being held together with garden twine and Lego, I think as part of a larger piece about dealing with anger as a writer. One of his fans — not representative of his constituency as a whole, I think — suffered a major reading comprehension failure, fired a foul note off to me and put it in front of Harlan as a ’’let’s you and him fight’’ kind of deal. From which I received a very nice email from Harlan, assuring me that no gardening supplies were required to hold him together and actually addressing the substance of the piece rather than the misreading placed before him. It was nice, he said, that it turned out we each liked the other’s work.
There’s a peculiar artist’s fear, that rides very low in the gut and mostly goes unspoken. Though few of us would cop to having ’’heroes,’’ debased term that it is, the fear does run along the lines of ’’don’t meet your heroes.’’ The man or woman who wrote the things that helped form you as a creator is not necessarily as loveable as the work. This is something I’ve been lucky in, but I will admit to passing on meeting Hunter Thompson a couple of times, and friends of mine have not had my luck. I know writers who now cannot read their heroes’ work. The books are tainted by the experience.
I met Harlan some months later, at a convention. Our signing tables were side by side. Harlan arrived later than I did (I think the signings were staggered), spotted me and yelled "Warren Ellis! Let me give you a manly hug!’’ So I stood up. Harlan’s about five and a half feet tall. I’m six foot tall barefoot, and I was wearing heavy boots. He looked up at me and exclaimed, "Jesus, you’re HUGE!"
I don’t have "heroes," but there are writers I admire greatly, who were influential in my becoming a writer, and I am grateful to have met Harlan Ellison and remain able to take pleasure in his work. Better: now I can hear his voice, and recall the great personal warmth with which he welcomed me on every occasion we met during that convention.
All of which, wishing him a belated happy birthday and talking about how generations of writers deal with each other and so forth, is really just preface to my discovery last night that the fine ebook purveyor Webscription is now offering eight Harlan Ellison books.
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
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