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Regarding Ted Sturgeon (1918-1985)
Jessica Amanda Salmonson
Has he really been gone so many years? I see him still, sitting across from me on the floor in a hallway, our legs touching from opposite walls, his devil-whiskered face beaming with life. Surely this image of Ted Sturgeon would not be this clear in my memory if he were gone so long.
Just before & immediately after Ted Sturgeon moved to the Pacific Northwest (Eugene, Oregon to be exact) & until he became very ill from having been a heavy smoker all his life, I began to run into him at conventions. He would sometimes seek me out, sit with me in halls, & we had lovely conversations. He was in that squish-mush life-phase of "Move to the Next Question" & was trying (it seemed to me) to found a new cult of sorts -- mainly for the sake of his youngish wife I would like to think, not because he'd gone all soft in the head toward the end. Love'll make any of us think & do nutty things, as might knowing 80% of your lungs are shot & you'll be dead soon.
Everyone (fans & his fellow authors) seemed to think well of Ted's little golden equivalent of the Cross of Jesus. It was a Q with an arrow through it, meaning "move to the next question," but looked like an altered male-symbol for "Queer" & the arrow was giving the Q a Q-lube. Everyone was willing to be preached at, but I swear, if he hadn't been a Big Name, no one would've listened to it. I don't know if it was polite or patronizing everyone not mentioning the philosophy was just plain dumb; but I seemed to be all alone in my crass willingness to make fun of it while speaking with Ted. So all the more surprising he never took offence but seemed to find me amusing. I was a little surprised, I admit, that he wasn't a more sensible guy, but he was goodhearted, & I liked him. He'd been an influence on my own writing by right of having been one of the first authors I focused on as a young reader, & I certainly did always have a sense of being in the presence of a literary equivalent of an Elder Statesman who deserved enormous respect even if our way of thinking was completely opposite.
I was so honored he'd bother to be interested in my existence & I made an effort to be a little less "obnoxious" than I would usually be about the New Age Noodle Shit, though I wasn't always successful, & he would let me argue against the cultishly sweety-pie blitherings without getting noticeably peeved. Yet we were mutually immovable; my cynicism & his sentimentality remained unaltered after our mild verbal sparring. And when that topic was run into the ground we would finally talk about short story art, & that's when I felt a real kinship for him.
Really at heart he was a genuinely cool old guy & my only qualm at the time was that I did fear, occasionally, I was supposed to join his wife's church -- she'd ordained herself -- but I may have just been being paranoid that I was being targeted as a convert. I tried to stay in touch with Jane after Ted died but our few communications inevitably incuded this faux-religion stuff -- so I moved to the next question.
Ted wrote in an era when not more than a half-dozen f/sf pulp writers could seriously be regarded as concerned with character & psychology. Because he went to that second level, he was highly rated by his peers, & it has remained traditional to assess his achievement as of the highest literary concern. A fresh assessment without sentimental blinders would probably find his stories as a whole a lot less inspired than tradition credits. In a famous story like "A Touch of Strange" it would have nothing remaining without the two central character studies that sustain it; it hardly qualifies as a story at all & even for character it's not terribly good. If you compare it to other 1950s pulp stories it is certainly a stand-out, almost pioneering in its notion that pulp fiction could be all characterization without plot. But outside of the pulp-era context of terrible stories badly told, "A Touch of Strange" relies on irony too obvious to impress. It is perhaps best read as a prefiguration of the syrupy philosophy Ted advocated toward the end of his life, a naive sentimentality that mars many of his works, in some cases descending into mere religious metaphysics -- most agregiously in his posthumously published novel Godbody that should've been issued twenty years sooner for the Hippies & Love Generation, or the less obviously hamstrung More than Human. that works as a children's book but any adult who failed to find its "misfit children are advanced entities" theme just a little cloying is probably still laboring under their own pain of childhood, & seeking fantasy excuses for continuing adult failure. More than Human reminds me most of a truly nutty New Age manual called Starchildren that practically assumed advanced forms of humanity could be recognized by their near-sightedness, the tape on their glasses, & their runny noses.
I won't mention the completely abominable stories dredged back into print in the complete short stories series from North Atlantic Books, but even some relatively famous stories turn out more flawed than I'd remembered. Because some of us, myself anyway, were rather little when we first found Ted's stories, we could not judge their artistic merits but only their ideas & protagonists. He looks way impressive from a precocious ten or twelve year old's point of view. The famous novella Killdozer is a man vs. machine fable that reads like a good children's book in execution spinning out every possible variation of the situation, but of only the most idle interest to any sophisticated reader. The unconventional tale of an angst-ridden vampire in Some of Your Blood is one of the few horror stories to really sustain itself at novel length, the genre being more often at its best in the short forms; but I'm afraid it is not the equal of Shirley Jackson's best at similar lengths. "Fluffy" -- about a kitty's revenge on the houseguest from hell -- is like a lightweight moment from John Collier or Saki, if not Robert Bloch on a mellow day. But if you look at it too long & as an adult, it's all jest with no substance. There is more substance to "Cargo" about a drunken sailor who assists the fairy folk in escaping the savagery of war in Europe, in exchange for a lifetime supply of whiskey & a mermaid for his sweety -- a goofy story well told. I think people forget Ted wrote tongue in cheek too much -- "Accidentally on Porpoise" (too awful to sell in his lifetime) indicates by title alone the low quality of some of this humor. But Ted marred his stories far less often than did Robert Bloch by turning it all into a stupid joke by the end.
Had Sturgeon been competing critically with Garcia Marquez or Flannery O'Connor instead of Asimov & Simak, he'd've been assessed as much less important. This dawned on me a little sadly I must admit, since I was fond of the silly notion that my tastes as a child were critically acute. Some stories like "Take Care of Joey" & "Slow Sculpture" are told with such stylish economy & craftsmanship that one understands immediately why those of his contemporaries who hoped to excell as craftsmen knew they had much to learn from him, & young storytellers today would likewise do well to study the nearly invisible technique embodied in these stories. But perfecting one's craft often means breaking storytelling in duplicable components; being that sort of slick professional is not the same as being an artist, which would require breaking conventionality altogether.
One thing that made him look more humanly advanced in the 1940s & 1950s was his liberalism. In the context of militaristic Man Conquers Space rocketship fantasies such as dominated the science fiction pulps, he was able to write tales like "The World Well Lost" which is a plea for tolerance toward homosexuals, & the gender-bending novel Venus Plus X which is actually a very bad novel but prefigures such good ones as Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness. And several of science fiction's most wholehearted fans must have been asking what kind of commy peacenik could've written "Thunder & Roses" & shouldn't Senator McCarthy have him arrested immediately; one of Ted's youthful sweeties, Judith Merrill, in fact moved permanently to Canada because of McCarthyism.
Though many of Ted's characters are selfish & sexist without the author necessarily realizing it, he must nevertheless be regarded ahead of his time in humanistic terms -- but only within the context of science fiction which remained stunted in this department until well into the 1960s when the then-called "New Wave" opened up the field for experimentation. If the level of humanistic compassion were measured against Theodore Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson or Mary Heaton Vorse, instead of Robert Heinlein or Murry Leinster, Ted's step forward for "sci-fi" would still appear well behind the time. And the good heart of some of his stories does not alone raise them to the level of works of art; some of the heartless militaristic tales of Robert Heinlein are better.
Yes, I was disappointed to start rereading Ted's Complete Stories only to realize less than one in five tales were more than competent; that as a whole, no, I wasn't such a great judge of prose at the ages of ten to sixteen. And the old-guard genre critics who would make of him a Literary God, rather than a leading pulp practitioner, are for the most part over-reaching to make a sound achievement into an achievement of vast distinction. Still, & despite this rarely admitted frank criticism, if you do pull the best from out of that larger body, you will have something that does live up to the higher expectation. These best tend to be the supernatural horrors, as his science fiction & his whimsical tales & his tales of metaphysical love tend either to be too fluffy or just planely not to have withstood the test of time. The much-praised "Microcosmic God" about a man who plays god to miniature people is in reality as dated as 1960s episodes of Outer Limits & Twilight Zone which used the same premise because it's simpleminded enough for television. "A Saucer of Loneliness" because it is more about character than plot retains some emotional effectiveness, but must be read as a relic of the 1950s to sustain appreciation, a spot of originality for the hoary old flying saucer theme but still rather hoary. These imperfect examples I cite are stand-outs among tales of aliens & spaceships that for the most part are no better than any other creeky sci-fi yarn of the time. By contrast, among the horror stories, there are some timeless tales that while few in number nevertheless add up to more than most writers of recent generations accumulate inside a lifetime of scribblings.
I hope I have not sounded harsh, as I do retain a sentimental love for Ted's stories, & this new reading of him has not entirely knocked him off the idol rack in the Temple of Ur. When the huge set of his complete tales began to appear, we were all in a position to easily discover Ted was as a general rule a pretty regular writer like most of his contemporary pulpsters, though most assuredly there are stand-out stories with lasting power not so easily found among his contemporaries. Indeed, if removed from the "complete" works, there are a handful of stories that do uphold the more glowing picture of achievement, & if we pretend the majority of his stories don't exist, there is perhaps one slim book to convey absolute genius in storytelling art.
I so love "Hag Saleen" I sometimes feel that I am the Hag Saleen, which is a good thing to be; how relieved I was that it stands up perfectly well, no excuses required. Same for "The Professor's Teddy Bear" with its demonic teddy that scared the bejabbers out of me as a child, & still seems a work of art on adult re-read. "Bianca's Hands" I did not understand as a child, but it left lingering images all these years of a horribly ugly woman with almost magically beautiful hands. On reread, I regard it a great work of literature with the balance of psychological probing & horrific incident a roadmap for ideal storytelling. Standing equally far to the opposite extreme of Ted's occasional campiness is a story called simply "It" about a manifestation of purest, most revolting evil shambling toward purity. What a strange unsettlingly deranged view of hope this story provides!
In total, the exceptional tales are these: The above-mentioned "Bianca's Hands," "The Professor's Teddy Bear," "It" & "The Hag Saleen," plus these: "The Silken Swift," "Shadow, Shadow on the Wall," & "Shottle Bop." On an only slightly lesser level are these: the overly vague but poetic "Graveyard Reader"; "The Other Celia" with some haunting imagery but too-ordinary plotline & resolution; & "Cellmate" about a prisoner with an unseen companion. This is not a lot of stories all told; I'm having trouble thinking of anything I've left off that would withstand comparison in such select company. If pressed to pad out the selection for publication, I would add "Thunder & Roses" just on the strength of its humanity, & I would not be reluctant to add a couple lighter tales from Unknown which are artful & imaginative if less powerful in their impact, vis, "God in the Garden" & "The Ultimate Egoist," this last celebrating his love affair with fellow author Judith Merrill & surprisingly aware of his own character flaws. With these few tales I believe we would have one excellent collection that would look so good that (just so long as the greater bulk of his output remained hidden) Ted would after all stand tall beside some of the great writers of the twentieth century.
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