Bright Segment (57 page)

As it happens, Watson and Crick first published their double helix theory of DNA in 1953. It’s fair to assume that the notion came to TS independently and almost simultaneously … and that he wasn’t aware of their
work when he wrote this story.

In section IV, when Tod recalls
an old, old tale … from the ancient Amerenglish, by Hynlen (Henlyne, was it? no matter)
, the story he’s referring to is “Goldfish Bowl” by Robert A. Heinlein, which appeared in
Astounding Science-Fiction
in 1941.

Later in section IV,
They called the moons Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
is a reference to Eugene Field’s well-known late-19th-century children’s poem, “Dutch Lullaby”: “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night sailed off in a wooden shoe … All night long their nets they threw to the stars in the twinkling foam; then down from the skies came the wooden shoe, bringing the fishermen home.”

David Pringle wrote in his introduction to the 1987 collection
A Touch of Sturgeon
: “What are the ‘obsessive’ themes that make this author’s stories so interesting? The most frequently remarked is the theme of union—of meeting, melding, and becoming one. This takes various forms: love-and-togetherness, human-and-alien syzygy, the ‘bleshing’ of a
gestalt
consciousness (as in ‘Baby Is Three’) or a racial hive-mind (as in ‘To Marry Medusa’). Such unions are usually portrayed as highly desirable events, kinds of salvation, like the cosmic vision which concludes ‘The Golden Helix.’ ”

When this story with its many births and children and children-of-children was written, Theodore Sturgeon’s son Robin was a year old and his wife Marion was pregnant with their second child, Tandy.

“Extrapolation”:
first published in
Fantastic Stories
, April 1954, under the title “Beware the Fury.” Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: MEET WOLF REGER—TRAITOR. COMPARED TO HIM BENEDICT ARNOLD WAS A NATIONAL HERO AND JUDAS ISCARIOT A PARAGON OF VIRTUE. AT LEAST THAT’S THE WAY IT SHOWED IN THE MAJOR’S NOTES … BUT TRAITORS AREN’T BORN THAT WAY. SOMETHING HAS TO HAPPEN TO THEM LONG BEFORE THEY TURN AGAINST SOCIETY. THAT’S WHY, WHEN YOU DIG DEEP ENOUGH, YOU MAY FIND THAT THE WORD
TRAITOR
CAN BE ONE HELL OF A MISNOMER …

When Sturgeon included this story in his 1964 collection
Sturgeon in Orbit
, he called it “Extrapolation,” apparently his original (manuscript) title. The story-introductions TS wrote for that collection have as their theme the magazine editors who first published the stories and his relationship
with them. In his introduction to “Extrapolation,” he wrote:
This might be called a “forgotten” story in the sense that it has, through the years, been overlooked by anthologists and yet (I have it on good authority) is one of my major works. I know that when I unearthed it for this volume and read it, I put it down with (incredibly) real tears in my eyes. I let Groff Conklin (now
there’s
a good editor) see it, and he confessed it had him weeping aloud. It was Howard Browne who bought this story, and I suddenly recall the circumstances, because it was the only time such a thing ever happened to me. I came in with it and said, “Look, Howard, I’d appreciate it if you could let me know on this sort of soon because—” He interrupted me: “You in a bind? Wait a minute.” He reached for the phone and said “Accounting Department?” Then to me,” How long is it?” I told him. Howard looked up at the ceiling for a moment, calculating, and then said into the phone, “Send up a check for Theodore Sturgeon for a story called
Extrapolation
for (he named a figure).” “But Howard!” I cried, “you haven’t read it yet!” He shrugged his Kodiak-bear shoulders. “I don’t need to and you know it.” They don’t hardly make ’em like that no more
.

“Granny Won’t Knit”:
first published in
Galaxy Science Fiction
, May 1954. Written winter 1954.

In his introduction to “Granny Won’t Knit” in the 1979 collection
The Stars Are the Styx
, Sturgeon wrote:
This story had, for me, a most unusual nascence. Usually my stories emerge from hidden convolutions of my gut—my very own personal gut. In this case, a time arrived when Horace Gold, having saved space for me in an upcoming issue, called to ask, as politely as possible, “Where the hell is the novelette?” and I answered with perfect truth that although my gut was in perfect operation, it hadn’t taken that certain turn just yet. So he put me on hold, and called another writer with whom he had discussed an idea, but who had later said he had decided to do nothing with it, and asked him if he would mind his passing the idea over to Sturgeon. The writer said go right ahead; he’d never do anything with it himself. The basic idea was this matter transmission thing. So I wrote Granny, hardly getting up from the typewriter, at about the time the other writer changed his mind and wrote
The Stars My Destination.
I do indeed love Granny, but I wish I’d written the superb novel Alfred Bester did
.

Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: WHEN PRIMLY STARCHED BOY MET UNPRIM AND UNSTARCHED
GIRL, IT WAS REVOLT AT FIRST SIGHT, FOR GRANNY DIDN’T KNIT—SHE WOVE!

The speech and behavior of the authoritarian father in this story are clearly derived from Sturgeon’s childhood experiences with his stepfather, as described in his autobiographical essay “Argyll.”

“To Here and the Easel”:
first published in
Star Short Novels
, a book edited by Frederik Pohl and published by Ballantine Books in September 1954. In an appreciation published in the July 1985
Science Fiction Chronicle
, publisher Ian Ballantine recalled: “… Ted was now ready to take on commissions. Having been brought up in Woodstock, New York, I had an interest in the artistic creative process. I asked Ted for a short novel that gave the reader insight into the creative process. Ted wrote ‘To Here and the Easel,’ published in
Star Short Novels
, edited by Fred Pohl.”

In an essay in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, September 1962, science fiction author James Blish described this as his “favorite Sturgeon story.” In the version of this essay included in
More Issues at Hand
, a 1970 collection of Blish’s sf criticism, published under the pseudonym William Atheling, Jr., Blish wrote: “All of Sturgeon’s major work is about love, sexual love emphatically included.… Directly under this heading belongs Sturgeon’s love affair with the English language, which has been as complicated, stormy and rewarding as any affair he has ever written about. He is a born experimenter, capable of the most outrageous excesses in search of precision and poetry; people who do not like puns, for example, are likely to find much Sturgeon text almost as offensive as late Joyce (and I am sorry for them). Nobody else in our microcosm could possibly have produced such a stylistic explosion as ‘To Here and the Easel,’ a novella based in language as well as in theme on Ariosto’s 16th-Century epic
Orlando Furioso
, because in fact nobody else would have seen that the subject couldn’t have been handled any other way.”
Orlando Furioso
, an epic poem by Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto, was published in 1516;
Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature
says it is “considered the finest expression of the artistic tendencies and spiritual attributes of the Italian Renaissance.”

Damon Knight, science fiction author and critic, in his book
In Search of Wonder
, said: “ ‘To Here and the Easel’ was written at the very top of Sturgeon’s range, on the same level as
More Than Human
and ‘Saucer of Loneliness’ and a few others—a breathtaking display of sustained brilliance,
all glitter and pop, never holding still an instant, with the velvet-covered fist hanging, hanging … here a pun with a bawdier one on top of it, here a sudden unexpected gallop of blank verse … until that damned fist comes down and squeezes the whole thing so tight that there’s nothing more to say about it.”

No reader of “To Here and the Easel” will be surprised to learn that around the time he wrote this story Sturgeon was himself suffering from a bout of “writer’s block” comparable to the “painter’s block” suffered by its protagonist. On June 2, 1955, Sturgeon wrote to Anthony Boucher:
I’ve been terrified for a long time now. A year ago April I dried up, and though I’ve done four or five shorts since, they were hard and squeezed out with the sensation of working out a vein; every word closer to the last I could ever do. In June
[1954]
I accepted a very large advance from Dell and found I couldn’t write the book it was for, not a word of it
. Sturgeon in his 1962 Guest of Honor speech at a science fiction convention referred to this same time period by saying,
I went into a terrible dry spell one time. It was a desperate dry spell and an awful lot depended on me getting writing again
. In another letter to Boucher, Feb. 4, 1956, he said,
Fact is I’ve been battling my Beast, the paralysis of the typewriter which has beset me often on for the past fifteen years but ever so much worse in the last three. I still haven’t identified this monster, but I’ve made this much progress: I know when it’s working on me. That’s small progress, but it’s something
.

TS included “To Here and the Easel” in a 1971 collection called
Sturgeon Is Alive and Well
 … which was otherwise completely dedicated to eleven stories he wrote in the summer of 1969, suddenly ending another dry spell as the result of the arrival in his life of a female admirer of his work who traveled 6,500 miles with the intent of meeting him and encouraging him to write. In his foreword to that collection, he wrote,
I was living at the bottom of a mountain in Neverneverland, far under a rock … unaware of just how far I had crawled and how immobile my crouch. Suddenly one day there exploded a great mass of red hair attached to a laughing face. Her name was Wina … She crawled way in under that rock and hauled me out
. (She became the mother of his seventh child, Andros.)

“When You’re Smiling”:
first published in
Galaxy Science Fiction
, January 1955. Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance:
YOU’VE NEVER READ SCIENCE FICTION LIKE THIS BEFORE. IT’S A SHOCK WAVE OF TERROR—WITH A JOLTING, BLINDING CONCLUSION. IT’S STURGEON!

Introducing this story in his 1979 collection
The Stars Are the Styx
, Sturgeon wrote:
It must be apparent by this time that I tend to write about nice guys. But I also believe (as you will discover later on) that I believe in the yin and the yang, and that from time to time one must turn the coin over and investigate what lives under the sun-warmed rock. I also believe that although ultimate justice will be done (even if only statistically, even if later than sooner), it is, as often as not, done for selfish reasons and benefits the universe by accident
.

“When You’re Smiling” is the title of a song recorded by Louis Armstrong in 1929.

Among the “maundering” pages (efforts to develop story ideas) found among Sturgeon’s papers is one that suggests Sturgeon may have had the opening page or two of this story long before he wrote the rest of it or knew where it was going. The maundering page says:
Use that Henry copy—my God, it’s the start of
something.
Whoy! There’s the good seed of a regeneration story in it, implicit in the News feature writer
. Another page includes these lines:
So we meet Henry again. His key is empathy—loads of it, more of it than he needs or should have. Somehow I have to introduce this other character, the man with no empathy at all.… I feel that once I get him and Henry together I’ll charge right ahead
. Another page, that possibly precedes the writing of
that Henry copy
, contains some of the story’s elements but with the personalities of the characters seemingly reversed:
If Henry is happy with things as they are, who better to elucidate the virtues of our method? He would rush to the e-t as to a vacuum, this e-t suffering, as he does, a torture from excess empathy; Henry’s joy derives from real egocentricity, turned on its head and looking like altruism. So start off with reminiscences of school and what a happy underdog Henry was, and meet him again years later; go from joy to disgust and finally lash out at him.…

To me, one remarkable aspect of “When You’re Smiling” is its powerful portrayal, in the form of a first-person narrative, of the modern archetype described in Alan Harrington’s 1972 book
Psychopaths
and William and Joan McCord’s 1964 book
The Psychopath
. Harrington’s book begins: “ ‘There walk among us men and women who are in but not of our world,’ wrote the late Robert Lindner. ‘Often the sign by which
they betray themselves is crime, crime of an explosive, impulsive, reckless type. Sometimes the sign is ruthlessness in dealing with others socially, even commercially.’ ” Charles Manson is one of the examples Harrington cites. A significant passage in “When You’re Smiling” (referred to by Sturgeon as “the empathy story” in his maunderings before he wrote it) is this monologue:
“I’m different, Henry. I’ve always known I was different.” I poked my finger toward him and he curled from its imaginary touch. “You, for example—you have, like nobody else I ever met, that stuff called ‘empathy.’ … Now me, I have as much of that as my armadillo-cat has fur. It’s just not in me. I have other things instead. Do you know I was never angry in my life? That’s why I have so much fun. That’s why I can push people around. I can make anybody do anything, just because I always have myself under control … You’ve seen me operate. You going to call a man like me human?”

William Atheling, Jr., in
The Issue at Hand
(1964), wrote: “ ‘When You’re Smiling’ is a hate-piece, but it is never out of the author’s control for so long as three words. Ted’s portrait of the man who enjoys causing pain is that of a man who thoroughly deserves the author’s loathing. But by taking the pains to tell the story from that man’s point of view, and to convey some of the man’s enthusiasm for himself and his researches, Ted has made sure that his evil character does not emerge as an unbelievable caricature. The deeply subjective approach unfolds on the page with an air of pure objectivity, as though the author were simply presenting the character as he is, with an invitation to the reader to pass his own judgment; the author is loading the dice, to be sure, but entirely below the level of the reader’s attention.”