The Nail and the Oracle Read Online Free PDF Page B

finds out something else that makes this eleven-page short a stunning example of Sturgeon’s off-kilter insight and humanity.
    “The Girl Who Knew What They Meant” is the other winner and it is so carefully-constructed, so meticulously-spun that not until the last twenty-seven words, the final three sentences, does the reader know he has had his soul wrung like the neck of a chicken. It is Sturgeon transcendent. And if Martha Foley’s
Best American Short Stories
overlooks it this year, surely there is no justice.
    On sum, though the book is weak and for the most part a terrible disappointment, merely having Sturgeon writing again—and being able to prove it with slugs of type—is a blessing. And even with typographical errors rampant (a felony heretofore difficult to charge to Putnam’s) it is a book well worth having done. Not just for those two incredible little short stories but by the same rationale that insists we preserve every letter and laundry list written by a Lincoln, a Hemingway or a Melville.
    What I’m trying to say, is that Sturgeon is one of our best. He will be read and enjoyed a hundred years from now. So we
must
see it all, even the least successful of it.
    This has been a difficult review to write.

    Ted never told me what he thought of that piece. We had no bitterness over it, but we never sat down to bagels and lox about it, either. We were friends, and both of us knew that meant unshakeable trust in the truth that we loved each other, that we respected and admired the best of each other’s work in such a way that to blow smoke and/or sunshine up each other’s kilt would have been to poison that trust. Unlike many writers who expect their friends to write blurbs and dispense encomia on the basis of camaraderie rather than the absolute quality of the work, Ted and I understood that we could lie to others that way, but never to each other.
    So. Enough.
    I have more, endless more that I could set down about Ted, about abiding with Ted, about the chill wind blowing through the burlesque houses of both of our lives, but enough is enough.
    Noël has suggested that I take the eulogy I wrote for Ted in 1985, that appears near the beginning of this essay, and move it back here, because every time she reads it, she cries.
    And she thinks it is a proper end for this love letter to my friend now dead more than two decades.
    No, dear Noël, it has to stay where it is; and I’ll tell you my thinking here.
    Ted wanted me to write his eulogy. He made me promise. And I did it. But I was so wracked by loss at the time, it was brief, far briefer than
this
eulogy. And thus I left out most of what’s set down here in print for the first—and last—time. It is the for-real eulogy Ted probably wanted, and which I have perceived is being read over my shoulder as I’ve written it, by Ted’s ghost. Not for you, Noël, not for any of Ted’s other kids, not for Marion, not for the publisher who is herewith getting a major piece unexpectedly, and sure as hell not for admirers, fans, readers of Ted’s work.
    I have written this because Ted needs to read it, and because it is a picture of The Great Artist that cannot exist via
hoi polloi
. It had to be done by me, kiddo; and if you think this is all of it …
    Most
of what I know about Theodore Sturgeon I cannot tell you.I haven’t told you about the two times we fought, the first being the imbroglio over that meanspirited piss-ant, the toweringly talented British novelist Anthony Burgess, who was a nasty little shit; and the second time subsequent to Ted doing one of the most awful things I’ve ever known of a human being doing to others, resulting in my telling him to get the fuck outta my house, now, tonight, this minute!
    I haven’t told you about Ted and the Meatgrinder; Ted and the Tongue-Tied Germans; Ted and the Apollo Trip; Ted and Chuck Barris in Movieland; Ted and the Wing-Walker; Ted and the Naked Monkey. Oh, trust me, I could go on for days.