The Perfect Host (57 page)

“Scars”:
first published in
Zane Grey’s Western Magazine
, May 1949. Written in mid-1948. Sturgeon’s working title for this story was “Chivalry.”

Lucy Menger in her study
Theodore Sturgeon
(1981) says: “ ‘Scars’ beautifully illustrates Sturgeon’s growing sympathy for people, his developing psychological insight, and his increasing technical skill … His approach to sex in this story is typical of his approach to sex in later stories: frank but without sensationalism … Many of Sturgeon’s technical skills as a writer come together in his portrait stories. In these, the protagonist’s subjective experience provides the framework and tone for the narrative. ‘Scars’ is probably the prototype of this genre.”

Theodore Sturgeon from a recorded conversation with Paul Williams, April 5, 1978:
Yeah. Sometimes not knowing is a great advantage. I sometimes think of one of the best stories I’ve ever written—it’s called “Scars,” a western story, remember? And years later I got ahold of a copy of the journal of the Western Writers of America, and in there someone had witten an article about the clichés that one does not do in writing a western story. And virtually at the head of the list was, “A cowboy is riding along, comes around a rock and some girl is bathing naked in a stream. If that story occurs to you, don’t write it!” And I didn’t know that, when I wrote one of the best stories I’ve ever written in my life. If I had known that, as soon as the thing occurred to me I’d have said, “No, I can’t do that.” I wouldn’t have had a story. So sometimes it pays to be ignorant
.

“Messenger”:
first published in
Thrilling Wonder Stories
, February 1949.

Magazine blurb: THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WAY TO SKIN A RAT—AS THE OLD SCIENTIST DISCOVERS

“Minority Report”:
first published in
Astounding Science-Fiction
, June 1949.

In a rubric written in 1980 for an unpublished collection called
Slow Sculpture
, TS said of “Minority Report”:
A very early story. It has nice hardcore s-f content, but the one thing that interests me most is the hulking wordless character on the space-ship, who looks like an ape and thinks like a poet/philosopher. He appears again in another story (not here) called “The World Well Lost”
[1953]
and in another costume in a story called “Need”
[1960].
This guy is very real to me—more so than many I have met in the flesh; yet to my most intense recollection, I have never met or seen anyone like him. I can report a blinding shock of recognition when I read (years after “Minority”) Richard McKenna’s unforgettable “Casey Agonistes”
[1958].

There is a strong parallel between the themes of “The Love of Heaven” and “Minority Report.” In the former early humanoids are separated from their beloved homeland (our Earth) because their biochemistry is somehow poisonous to current Earth life forms. “Minority Report” recounts humanity’s experience of discovering in 2700 AD that it is similarly alienated from most of the inhabited universe because we turn out to be misfits in the cosmos, made out of antimatter. And thus forced to accept and live with a vast aloneness.

Magazine blurb: A FASCINATING BASIC IDEA; MANKIND FACED WITH THE HOPELESS PROBLEM OF BEING ALL DRESSED UP WITH INTERSTELLAR SPACESHIPS, AND NO PLACE TO GO!

“Prodigy”
first published in
Astounding Science-Fiction
, April 1949. Written in fall 1948.

Magazine blurb: HE WAS A VERY STRANGE CHILD—AND A STRANGE CHILD WAS SOMETHING THAT WORLD COULDN’T STAND. PARTICULARLY, THAT KIND OF STRANGENESS—

“Farewell to Eden”
first published in
Invasion from Mars: Interplanetary Stories
, edited by Orson Welles, a paperback book published in 1949 (Sturgeon’s appearance in this collection may have been arranged by his friend Don Ward, who edited
Zane Grey’s Western Magazine
and did some work for Dell paperbacks; the “1948 Income” page indicates that TS was paid $116. for this story at the end of ’48 by “Dell—Ward”).

“One Foot and the Grave”:
first published in
Weird Tales
, September 1949. Written in early 1949.

William F. Nolan, in his introduction to this story in his 1968 anthology
3 to the Highest Power
, says, “One Foot and the Grave” is full of Sturgeon’s particular magic, his humor, his poetic images, his elfin girls, his ability to shock and delight; it is a story of fantasy and fear, beauty and suspense. And it takes place in deep woods … the woods of “It,” the woods of New York, the dark, surprising mystery-brimming woods of Ted Sturgeon’s childhood.”
More than Human
and
Some of Your Blood
and “Quietly” are also partly set in those woods. (See note to “It” in Vol. I of
The Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon
for more on the location of the woods TS experienced as a child.) Nolan quotes Sturgeon as telling him, in a telephone interview, that he remembers Staten Island, where he spent the first eleven years of his life, as
a place of dark woods and mystery
.

“What Dead Men Tell”:
first published in
Astounding Science-Fiction
, November 1949. Written in early 1949. The title of this story was suggested by Richard Hoen, a reader of
Astounding
who wrote a letter to the editor published in the 11/48 issue, praising the stories in the 11/49 issue and naming those stories and their authors. The editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., decided to make the letter come true, and asked those writers (Heinlein, Asimov, van Vogt, del Rey, de Camp, Sturgeon) to write those stories.
Time
Magazine made mention of this stunt when the 11/49 issue hit the newstands; it was thereafter known to fans as “the predicted issue of
ASF
.”

Mary Mair’s “codification” showing that “what is complicated is
not important” (see notes to “Quietly”) shows up again in “What Dead Men Tell,” where it is cited as being at the heart of the young philosopher/protagonist’s philosophy. Lucy Menger, in her critical study
Theodore Sturgeon
, is greatly provoked by this statement (“so what is complicated isn’t important”). She calls it “an arrow aimed at the heart of intellectualism” and says, “With that one sentence, Sturgeon sweeps aside as of no importance all the intricacies and complexities the human intellect can uncover.” She believes “ ‘What Dead Men Tell’ was probably the peak of Sturgeon’s anti-intellectualism.”

“What Dead Men Tell” is one of the stories TS could be referring to in his 1983 Science Fiction Radio Show interview when he says,
I have been accused of inventing Velcro, which was in one of my stories about 15 years before it appeared on the market
.

One wonders if poet Michael McClure might have been influenced by this story when he wrote his play
The Beard
, a dialogue in eternity between Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid.

Magazine blurb: IT’S A CURIOUS THING THAT A CORPSE—A REMARKABLY NOTICEABLE OBJECT—CAN BE OVERLOOKED SO EASILY. ONE TENDS TO SHY AWAY, EVEN WHEN IT HAS A MESSAGE TO DELIVER—

“The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast”:
first published in the first issue of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, fall 1949. Written at the end of April, 1949.

This was the last piece of fiction Sturgeon wrote until the beginning of 1950; in the second half of 1949 he was preoccupied with his new job in the promotion department of Time, Inc. and writing scripts for a television program that apparently never found a sponsor.

Anthony Boucher, coeditor of the new magazine, wrote to TS care of Prime Press on April 14, 1949 asking if he could write (on a short deadline) a short science fiction story “with human values, literacy and humor” for what would be called at first
The Magazine of Fantasy
. TS received the letter on April 23, and immediately wrote back,
It sounds like what I’ve been looking for for years. I started to write at the time
Unknown
was born, and became a stf writer by default. I’d rather write fantasy than anything else, and I can’t because
I can’t market it and I have to eat … I’d
much
rather be known as a fantasist than a stf writer
. But since Boucher’s letter explained the publisher felt they should have “one pure stf [scientifiction] item” amongst the fantasy, TS did write this science fiction story and mailed it to Boucher on April 25, with this note:

Here’s the HURKLE and I hope you like it
.

I have another story in mind about Lirht and its gwiks and hurkles. This one concerns the gwik Hvov, who was an anti-religionist fanatic, dedicated to the destruction of the symbol of a certain sect. This symbol was two hollow cylinders joined at the top, and the destruction was always confined to the symbol, never to anything it might contain. When Hvov was exiled from Lirht through space-time, he arrived on earth and found himself surrounded by people wearing the detested symbol on their nether limbs. He built a radiating incunabulator coupled to a defriction lens and proceeded to dissolve the hated things wherever he found them
.

In the mid-1950s, TS began one of his maundering sheets (efforts to talk himself into a story idea) with the following lines:

Oh, ye Shottle Bop!

Where is the light-hearted, character-filled, surprising and make-you-feel-good attitude of the Hurkle and the Brat?… much of that stuff, like The Green-Eyed Monster
[“Ghost of a Chance”],
I wrote when I was in deep trouble and worried to death. There has to be more like it somewhere …

“The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast” has been included in at least ten different anthologies of science fiction stories published in the United States between 1950 and 1989. Theodore Sturgeon was in fact, during his lifetime, one of the most-anthologized living short story writers in the English language.

An additional note on the circumstances of the writing of
The Dreaming Jewels:

Theodore Sturgeon’s first novel,
The Dreaming Jewels
(also published as
The Synthetic Man
), was first published in the February 1950 issue of
Fantastic Adventures
magazine and as a hardcover book in August of 1950. When I interviewed TS for my introduction
to the 1978 Gregg Press edition of the novel, he thought he had written it on assignment to go with an already painted cover—but when I showed him the
Fantastic Adventures
cover, which is inconsistent with the novel in various details, he agreed it couldn’t have been that cover. New information has since become available to me which clarifies the actual circumstances of the writing of the novel (evidently not remembered by TS when we spoke in ’78). In a letter to his mother dated July 5, 1949, Sturgeon says:

Last October Mary Mair and I broke up
[later they got together again and eventually got married],
and I went into a tailspin. I tried to ship out and couldn’t, and spent five or six weeks doing nothing because I was sure the phone would ring at any moment calling me to a ship. Things began to get desperate so I got to work on a magazine novel, working in close cahoots with the editor. I worked on it for nearly three no-income months and it was fine with him all the way; I felt I was justified in working on spec. It took a whole month for it to be read at his office and it got seven “pro” votes. Then the editorial director mysteriously and without precedent changed the policy of the magazine and rejected it out of hand, leaving me with dispossess notices, the gas and electricity shut off, my hospitalization and insurance policies lapsed, a demand note and threat of suit, doctor’s and dentist’s bills, and holes in my shoes in exchange for three months’ work. A short while later … I was hired as Assistant Circulation Manager of the fabulous FORTUNE Magazine, a thing that had been in the works for 15 months … About three days after I went to work the accursed novel sold to another magazine, and then I got a television show to do which is going on the air towards the fall, DV
[Deo volente—God willing].

So
The Dreaming Jewels
was evidently written 11/48–2/49, probably between “Farewell to Eden” and “One Foot and the Grave.”

Corrections and addenda:

Because the character Robin English in Sturgeon’s story “Maturity” (revised in 1948) is so central to Sturgeon’s body of work and such a primary influence on Robert Heinlein’s magnum opus
Stranger in a Strange Land
, and because these notes might be the only
biography this fine twentieth century storyteller receives, I think it is worthwhile to append here (one volume late) two paragraphs from a letter TS wrote to his parents at age 20, April 27, 1938, which speak eloquently of the extent to which Robin English and Michael Valentine Smith are modeled after the real Theodore Sturgeon:

While I am here I spend hours on Times Square. I can’t understand the fools who blindly plow through it looking for somewhere to spend money most of them can’t afford, when there is so much free entertainment going on all around them. There is a new Wilson Whiskey ad that—in a square of lights closely set like the band around the Times Building which gives news flashes, that presents a whole animated cartoon. I would dearly like to see the mechanism of that thing. That tremendous Wrigley sign is still there, with its brilliant bubbling fishes. The Salvation Army has procured a portable mike and amplifier and are there every night distributing paperback copies of Matthew. I have taken about fourteen of them because I get such a huge kick out of the little brunette who gives them out; she most obsequiously and humbly thanks me for her generosity. The last five or six times she has shown growing suspicion; I’m going to keep it up until she says something. Don’t disapprove; the gospels aren’t going to waste, as I leave them on the subway. Everyone leaves tracts in the subway; I am only doing my duty
.

Then there is the popular grand opera at the Hip. I make it a point to meet someone interesting every time I go. I have stopped my very bad habit of following up such acquaintances; I find it either a nuisance or a disappointment or genuine trouble afterwards; hence I never mention my name or my place in the world, but just try to contribute by listening. It is of real value; since I have been doing all Pearl Zeid’s English themes (she’s in U. of P.) I often have some knotty problem in dramatics or dialectics or philosophy to clear up. I spot my victim: “Pardon me, sir, but what is the difference between urbanity and sophistication?” or “I beg your pardon, but I was wondering if censorship is good for movies and the moviegoer.” You would be surprised at how few blank stares and cold shoulders I get, and how many people will bunch their brows and screw up their shoulders and attack the problem
.