The Nail and the Oracle Read Online Free PDF Page A

sustains you at all, you have my respect and affection
.
    Yours, T. H. Sturgeon
    Accompanying the letter was number 20 of
Twenty Love Poems Based on the Spanish by Pablo Neruda
, by Christopher Logue, from
Songs
(1959). And then, quickly,
Dangerous Visions
was published, Ted’s marriage to Marion underwent heartbreak, Ted and I talked cross-country virtually every day, and in the wake of the notoriety of DV and his story, “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” which I had chivvied him into writing after a protracted writer’s block dry spell and financial reverses, Ted came to live with me.
    It was 1966, ’67, and at various times I think it was for a full year, at other times memory insists it was longer, but separate inputs staunchly declare it was only six, eight, ten months. I can’t recall precisely, now more than forty years later, but it seemed to go on forever.
    I have all of Ted’s books, of course, but the only two he ever signed were my copy of
Dangerous Visions
with
all
the authors logged on—a rare artifact existent in the universe, as I’ve said, in the number of one—and my personal library copy of his first collection,
Without Sorcery
, Prime Press 1948, for which I paid a buckfifty (marked down from $3.00) in 1952. Here is what he wrote on the front flyleaf in May of 1966 during my birthday gathering:
    To Harlan Ellison –
    Who has, at an equivalent stage in his career, done so much more—so much better
.
    Theodore Sturgeon
    That’s gracious crap, of course, but what I
did
do was get Theodore Sturgeon writing again.
    In the wake of my own day and night hammering on one of the half dozen or so Olympia office machines (never mind how many Olympia portables I had stashed), Ted grew chagrined at his facility to
talk
new story-ideas but not to
write
them, and I rode him mercilessly. The phrase “your fifteen minutes of fame has drained out of the hourglass” became taunt and tautology. I showed him no mercy; and with so many other younger writers passing through the way station of my home, all of them on the prod, worshipful but competitive, Ted ground his teeth and set up shop in the blue bedroom, and began writing.
    I’d long-since gotten him inside
Star Trek
, but now—for the fastest money in town—I opened the market at
Knight
magazine. Sirkay Publications. Holloway House. The low-end men’s magazines:
Adam, Cad, Knight, The Adam Bedside Reader
. Two hundred and fifty, three hundred, sometimes a little more, each pop … paid within 24 hours. Sometimes we’d kick the story around at the breakfast table; sometimes he’d come into my then tiny office at the front of the house, dead of night, as I was pounding away under the unrelenting pressure of studio or publication deadlines, and we’d noodle something out. Sometimes it was a snag in one of my stories, sometimes it was a glitch in his.
    And we wrote “Runesmith” together. And he wrote or plotted or set aside a snippet of the following, here at Ellison Wonderland: “The Patterns of Dorne,” “It Was Nothing—Really!” and “Brownshoes,” “Slow Sculpture,” and “Suicide,” “It’s You,” and “Jorry’s Gap,” “Crate,” and “The Girl Who Knew What They Meant.” Maybeothers, I can’t remember. But most of the stories that he finished when he was living with Wina about a mile away from me down the hill at 14210 Ventura Boulevard, La Fonda Motel, he plotted and started here before I threw him out.
    Here’s the flat of it, friends.
    And Ted would understand this.
    Most of what I know about Theodore Sturgeon I cannot tell you.

    We watched each other. He looked after me. I tried to help him. And then came out
Sturgeon Is Alive and Well
 …
    Many of the stories from that last, final collection of (almost) new fictions, got born here. Right downstairs in the blue bedroom. And I harassed my buddy Digby Diehl, the now-famous editor, who was at that time the editor of the
Los Angeles