Harlan Ellison Was One Of Our Greatest Writers — And One Of Our Worst Examples of Humanity
A Personal Reminscence and History of a PROUDLY Difficult Man
There’s a short story in Harlan Ellison’s collection Shatterday — time has led me to forget the title but the plot is very clear. (If you are a fan and you know the story please remind me.)
A famous celebrity and writer is about to have his will read. Five people have been invited to it including the narrator, who was his closest friend. The friend was a writer of some note himself but who never had the same level of fame his friend did and was jealous of it.
The executor of the estate says that the will is a video will, which strikes the friend as appropriate: this was a guy who always got the last word, and why should death stop this? As he relates how his estate is to be divided, the friend remember times they were together which now seem to show the worst part of his life then the better ones. It’s clear as the celebrity relates how his estate will be divided that he’s enjoying lording it over everyone there, and it becomes increasingly uncomfortable for everyone. Of particular note is the man’s ex-wife who he has spent years bemoaning and calling a bitch. Everyone wonders why she’s there and it turns out that he has used his video will to humiliate her one last time: he calls her a monster, a ghoul and every name he can think of, and he makes it clear he left her nothing. In other words the only reason he mentioned her as part of the will was so that he could humiliate her one last time.
The last person he mentions is the narrator. In it he tells him that he has left him to be the sole caretaker of all his material, everything he has written in his long career. This blow strikes the narrator as a worse one than the humiliation the celebrity left on his wife because it means whatever career he ever hoped to have now that he was out of his famous friend’s shadow in life will never be a reality. For the rest of his life he will only be associated with his famous friend.
I could not help but be reminded of this story in a recent article involving J. Michael Straczynski as he discussed that he was now the man responsible for Harlan Ellison’s legacy.
Harlan Ellison to be blunt was one of the most prolific writers of all time. In his nearly seventy year career, he published more than 1700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, teleplays, essays and criticism. He wrote under more than ten different pen names, the most famous of which was Cordwainer Bird. He was an editor and anthologist for the groundbreaking Dangerous Visions series, which took up two volumes. (A third was planned but has yet to be published, see below.) He was by far one of the most influential writers in science fiction and every field.
Straczynski, as anyone who is a fan of genre fiction knows, has been more productive than Elison was in Hollywood. He is held in awe for his creation of Babylon 5 which Ellison helped him create. He has also written such undervalued series as Jeremiah and Sense8. He has written for countless Marvel and DC comics has worked in animation and met Ellison during the 1988 writers’ strike.
Their most direct connection was the 1980s remake of The Twilight Zone. Ellison was one of the executive producers and writers for the show on CBS in its first season, writing many of its best shows, among them ‘Shatterday’ and ‘Paladin of the Lost Hour’. He resigned before the second season began because of controversy over a story he planned. When the producers needed new shows to create more episodes so that the now cancelled series could air in syndication, they hired Straczynski as executive story editor. Straczynski not only wrote ten scripts he persuaded Ellison to write the episode “Crazy as a Soup Sandwich’
I can understand why Straczynski took it upon himself to be the executor of Ellison’s estate. Someone had to put order into the chaos of the thousands of works Ellison published, never mind the countless others he must have written over the decades. But part of me wonders how long it will take for Straczynski to feel like a character in Ellison’s stories. And if you’ve read any of Ellison’s stories, you know that misery is so common that the happiest endings for any of them is oblivion.
I’m not going to deny that Ellison isn’t a great writer, maybe one of the greatest of all time. I’ve read dozens, if not hundreds of his short stories and quite a substantial bit of his non-fiction since the age of sixteen. He is incredibly funny even (or sometimes especially) when he is being grim and dark, he has a wonderful gift for language and plot and his personality is evident in every bit of his work. He also marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War and was a prominent supporter of the ERA.
All of that no doubt makes you want to forgive the fact that all evidence seems to be that he was a horrible human being, something he seemed to relish in throughout his career. His reputation was that of being aggressive and abrasive, and one of his own dust jackets described him as ‘possibly the most contentious person on Earth.” In a piece written a year before his death, he was referred to as ‘Sci-Fi’s Most Controversial Figure’ and he would now doubt have sued because he hated being considered a sci-fi writer. (I’ll get to that.)
When he attended a convention at Texas A & M, he referred to the university’s corps as ‘the next generation of Nazis, despite the fact that the university was no longer a military program”. He allegedly publicly assaulted Charles Platt at the 1985 Nebula Awards banquet. Platt chose not pursue legal action, mainly because of a non-aggression pact promising never to discuss the incident again, and Ellison (according to Platt) spent much of his time boasting about the incident. When he was attending the 2006 Hugo awards and the female presenter who gave him a special award asked, probably with all seriousness: “Are you going to be good?” he first placed the microphone in his mouth, and then during an embrace of the presenter groped her. He then subsequently claimed he never accepted his apology. He filed constant lawsuits and copyright suits throughout his career and once send a dead gopher to a publisher.
The third volume of the Dangerous Visions series was announced for publication in 1973. As of 2022 it has yet to be published. Christopher Priest wrote a long editorial in which he documented half a dozen unfulfilled promises to publish the book. When Ellison learned this he threatened him publicly. The book is scheduled to be published this September but at this point many of the writers have now died. Priest himself claimed that Ellison’s attitude was to act like a dick, and that does sound like Ellison.
And that pales with the people who loved him. When Ellison’s older sister died, she had not spoken to him since their mother’s funeral. He was expelled from Ohio State because he hit a professor who he claimed denigrated his writing ability. For the next twenty years he sent that professor a copy of every story that he published: which given Ellison prolificness showed just how much he was determined to show he’d won. He was married five times in his life, and except for the last, they all lasted only a few years and in some cases only a few weeks. Once he had a relationship with an actress, but according to her he ending when he caught her smoking dope in his house. Ellison almost never took responsibility for his part in the end of his marriage, and in fact called his first marriage so horrible that he frequently referred to it in his non-fiction writing and sometimes even in his fiction writing.
Ellison spent several years in Hollywood and was apparently a beast to everyone who worked there. He is the author of ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’, considered the greatest episode of Star Trek ever written but after producer Gene Roddenbery rewrote it he repeatedly criticized it, later called it a fatally inept treatment. He eventually resigned from Star Trek and spent a lot of time an energy basically shitting on the show. He never let go of this and in March of 2009, sued CBS seeking payments of receipts from merchandising and publishing, naming the WGA for acting on his behalf. He used the pseudonym Cordwainer Bird to alert the public to situations in which he felt his creative contribution to a project had been mangled by others.
That may be in part while so many of Ellison contemporaries, including Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury and Robert Bloch, enjoyed vast success in Hollywood equivalent to literary success, Ellison has had to date only a single one of his story was ever adapted into a film. In large part this is due to his own constant and unfiltered contempt for Hollywood which he showed in almost every element of his non-fiction writing. He famously wrote a column called ‘The Glass Teat’ in which he regularly wrote negatively on television and published a film criticism article for awhile which was similarly dismissive of most films. He also showed a very great hatred for fiction itself. In a story called ‘The New York Review of Bird’, his nom de plume Cordwainer Bird looks at the New York Review of Books — all of which have books that are significantly more profitable and read then his own — and uncovers the darker secret of the New York literary establishment before slaughtering all of those same writers.
This is, at best, an example of petty jealousy for a man unable to accept the fact that his books were not as popular as others. At worst, it shows a man who every chance he got, hated every time his books were classified in science fiction. I have several copies of his books when they were reissued in the Edgeworks collections at the turn of the century. Many of them have on their dust jackets blatant calls that I have little doubt Ellison authored arguing that if you found these books in the Sci-Fi section, you should berate the bookstore owner who did so or commit violence against whoever did. This is a strange attitude for a man who was friends with so many writers in science fiction and was more than willing to publish their works. But so much of Ellison’s attitude in all his writing is “what is good for thee is not good for me.” Considering that Ellison won so many awards for writing science fiction, you’d think it would be a point of hypocrisy to take awards for his work but not want them to share space with other winners of the prizes. But not surprisingly, Ellison never admitted the contradiction.
Reading all of Ellison’s work — the fiction and non-fiction — you see a loathsome man. I’ve read dozens of his short stories; I can’t remember one with anything resembling a happy ending. For Ellison, dystopian was too good a word for his writing: there’s an argument he was the very first doom-porn writer. Every single word he ever wrote was telling his reader just how shitty the world was. It didn’t matter if he was writing in the present, in the future or on an alien world, whether he was talking about individual people, a group of people or society. In his mind, nuclear annihilation or destruction from an alien race — something that happened quite a bit — was too good for us.
And it’s not like he held any higher regard for other civilizations: I remember his story ‘The Region Between’ in which he makes it clear all alien civilizations are, in the heart as horrible as man, that the gods are insane and monstrous and he ends the story destroying the entire universe — something he did at least twice more in his fiction. It’s kind of impressive that so many people loved his work, considering how much of it was just the same version of story over and over.
It would be simple — too simple — to call Ellison a leftist and be done with it. He was binary in his thinking when it came to politics. In one of his stories, one of his characters has to target seven political figures, including Richard Daley, LBJ and George Wallace, who have targeted by an alien civilization to destroy Earth. Taking place during the 1968 election, he essentially has his hero say it makes no difference if Humphrey or Nixon wins — something that, like all leftists, he never took back.
But for all his problems with how society was now, there was also an overwhelming nostalgia factor in his work. In one of his most famous stories Jeffy is Five, the protagonist has a friend who has been stuck as five years old while everyone else has grown older. One day he goes to see him and finds out that his friend has the ability to hear new episodes of radio shows that ended decades ago, gets prizes from cereal boxes that stopped giving them, and can take him to films that stopped existing long ago. When Jeffy ends up dying at the end of the story, the protagonist is heartbroken not so much by the death of his friend, but that he can’t get access to his past anymore.
Ellison spent a lot of his non-fiction raging against corporate America but he was also blindly against the rise of the New Hollywood. He famously loathed not only the work of Brian DePalma, causing a scene and walking out on such films as Dressed to Kill but also famously hating The Omen. He showed a similar contempt for such movies as Back to the Future and was also looking more to the past culture such as certain comic strips rather than finding inspiration in the present.
I think that is, in large part, why so many critics and peers revered Ellison and he doesn’t have the same popularity as so many of his contemporaries. Ellison knew very well how the game was played by everyone else, he saw how everyone else was doing it and knew that if he bent just a little, he could have that too. Instead he spent his entire career being utterly inflexible and blaming literally everyone in the world for his problems other than himself. There are many creative forces who have this attitude — Alan Moore and David Chase are vastly similar in temperament towards Hollywood — and they are revered in a certain circle because of their refusal to compromise in the face of society. That this is seen by these people not as a weakness but something for all people to aspire is not surprising, but it shows the contradiction. They may think that they are producing art and that means they should have final say over those who make money off it. That they are ignoring the fact that they are ostensibly making money off themselves — in Ellison’s case, suing over it — is a contradiction that never occurs to so many critics, who see it only as art and not content.
Ellison has been dead and gone for more than five years. Like so many writers, his reputation will fade and only his work remain. At least that would have happened at an earlier time, I don’t know for sure now. But to ensure his legacy, I have a suggestion to Straczynski:
I believe there needs to be a Harlan Ellison oral history project. For Ellison’s entire career we heard only his version of events and we were told that he was the final arbiter. While those who are still alive and who remember him, you need to interview them. You need to go to every convention he attended and said something horrible to the masses. You need to get people to pore over every single lawsuit he filed over his long and litigious life. You need to go to Ohio and track down whatever childhood friends of Ellison and his family were and get their side of the story. You need to track down the families and friends of all the women he married and find out if the failures of his marriages were entirely on him. You need to track down his former publishers and find out all of the horrible things that were involved in it. You need to track down the families of his editors, his collaborators, anyone who worked with him in Hollywood.
Once you have completed that,, you need to offer it to anyone who read Ellison’s work. Offer it at a discount price. Then once they’ve all read it, see if there are any people who still want to be buy Ellison’s fiction.
And as to his non-fiction, put in an archive at his estate. I’ve read a lot of it over the years; it is, kindly, some of the most grievance filled screeds I’ve read in my entire life. I don’t think anyone should be forced to read it, and the estate shouldn’t make a dime off it.
Oh and one more thing. Every single collection of Ellison’s work, from now until eternity, will only be listed under sci-fit, regardless of whether it is or not. And all of the proceeds will go to two charities: The Daughters of St. Crispin and The Audubon Society. The former is a society for shoemakers (which is what a cordwainer is) and we all know what the Audubon society is for. Ellison might hate that, but it’s the kind of punishment he’d admire if it was done to others.