The Man Who Lost the Sea

Theodore Sturgeon playing guitar to entertain fellow conventioneers at the 1962 World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago, at which he was Guest of Honor. Photograph by Dean Grennell.

T
HEODORE
H
AMILTON
S
TURGEON
was born February 26, 1918, and died May 8, 1985. This is the tenth of a series of volumes that will collect all of his short fiction of all types and all lengths shorter than a novel. The volumes and the stories within the volumes are organized chronologically by order of composition (insofar as it can be determined). This tenth volume contains stories written between spring 1957 and autumn 1960.

Preparation of each of these volumes would not be possible without the hard work and invaluable participation of Noël Sturgeon, Debbie Notkin, and our publishers, Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger. I would also like to thank, for their significant assistance with this volume, Jonathan Lethem, the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust, Marion Sturgeon, Jayne Williams, Ralph Vicinanza, Tina Krauss, Dixon Chandler, Cindy Lee Berryhill, T. V. Reed, and all of you who have expressed your interest and support. For those who would like more information about Theodore Sturgeon and the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust, the website address for the Trust is:
http://www.theodoresturgeontrust.com/

By Jonathan Lethem

I never met Theodore Sturgeon, but I did have a chance to introduce him to my father, in a Sturgeonish fashion. Paul Williams and I were visiting Woodstock, New York, on our way from a science fiction convention in Massachusetts. In Woodstock we were to meet my father, who had driven to pick me up from and return me to his cabin in the Catskills. In Woodstock Paul and I met Noël Sturgeon, Theodore Sturgeon’s daughter. We were an hour or so early for the rendezvous with my dad, and, of course, more than a decade late to hope for an encounter in the flesh with Theodore Sturgeon.

This was in 1993, at the start of North Atlantic Books’ noble publishing marathon
The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon
, of which this is the tenth volume. At that time the project was a whisper or a promise. Or perhaps I should say it was a drive in the woods, for that is what it was that day. We went for a drive in the woods and Paul and I contemplated the territory of Sturgeon’s life in his Woodstock years, with Noël’s eloquent guidance, her narration and her silences. She led us down backroads to contemplate the place where Sturgeon’s writing shack had been hidden. We absorbed the presence of his absence, and I absorbed the delicate weight of his daughter’s spoken and unspoken memories, and those of her father’s friend Paul. I remembered what I knew of Sturgeon, the stories when I’d first read them as a kid. Noël spoke of her childhood with an artist father, and I thought of my own.

Then we went back into Woodstock and met my father in a café. By the time I was able to introduce Noël to my father I felt I was returning a favor, or at least trying to. I felt that I was completing a circle. Leaving Paul and Noël behind, driving off into the Catskills,
I spoke to my father of Sturgeon, and I spoke to him differently. That night I slept beside my father in two sleeping bags in a cabin lit only by candles and by the stars, and told him more of my life as an adult than I ever had. I was still with Sturgeon, though I was alone with my father and had never been with Sturgeon at all.

These stories are like that: they speak of human beings connecting with other human beings or attempting to do so at great odds, and at odd angles; of human beings failing at or sabotaging their own best efforts for fear that what they want most doesn’t make any sense, or that the odds are too great; of human beings learning again and again that their thin howling selves are part of a chorus which stands shoulder to shoulder in a traffic jam, a mob scene of lonely selves, of members of a great estranged family of beings. Sturgeon wrote miraculous short stories. Some fly, some stumble, but all are miraculous. By that I mean he always wrote of miracles, of deliverance and miracles and of a lust for completion in an incomplete world. He wrote of needs and their denial, with such undisguised longing and anger that his stories are caustic with emotion. His stories are carved in need. Many of the fine examples gathered here in Volume 10 are by happy coincidence the first ones Sturgeon wrote in those woods; he moved his family to Woodstock in 1959.

Paul Williams once said, in conversation, that Sturgeon’s “only method was the tour de force.” That has long seemed to me the only critical remark on Sturgeon’s art that needs making. It is impossible to imagine the work arising from anything but the peculiar circumstances of its making. Sturgeon found his urgency directed in becoming, in bursts of stylistic juice, the John Dos Passos, the William Faulkner, the Ring Lardner, the James Thurber, the Virginia Woolf of science fiction. The pulp form gave him the motifs of transcendence and metamorphosis, and the imperative of optimism, he needed to cut against what seems to me an instinctive morbidity. See how his imagination collapses into the gothic in the non-SF tales; alternately, consider how
The Man Who Lost The Sea
, the finest literary fugue this side of James Salter’s
Dusk
, relies on its rocket. Yet Sturgeon’s work is the opposite of Pop Art; he never predicted much; his cheerleading’s embarrassing. He can seem misplaced in science fiction; I’d
argue he’d have been misplaced anywhere. And would he have written his masterpieces without that form to write against? I doubt it.