A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison by Nat Segaloff, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer

Framingham, Massachusetts: NESFA Press, 2017: $35.00 hc; 416 pages

Oh, look, a book about Harlan. A very entertaining, even moving book about Harlan.

If I have to explain who “Harlan” is, this book is probably not for you. If you have never read his work, you will not have the associations in your head for this book to really resonate. But if you are of a certain age and you have been reading science fiction all your life, then he has been a presence in your life even if you’ve never met him or heard him speak. If you have attended conventions and interacted with him, if only as a member of his audience, this very lively book is going to mean a great deal. It is not a regular biography, but it’s what we’ve got, and it’s full of Harlan Ellison Stories.

Those of that certain age remember when a “Harlan Ellison Story” referred not to a work of fiction written by Harlan Ellison but a story about him, told either by Harlan himself in one of his celebrated public lectures or by fans among themselves. There was a time when the Harlan Ellison Story was the basic currency of conversation in fandom. If two science fiction fans got together, complete strangers, they didn’t have to make small talk about the weather or even the latest Hugo-winning novel (which one of them might not have read). They could talk about Harlan, what he did, or what people said he did.

No, he never threw a fan down an elevator shaft. He was apparently bothered that people went on believing that he did for years, but surely the less reality-challenged among us always doubted it. Otherwise, how did Harlan avoid a charge for murder? We certainly never heard anything about that.

You can go through Nat Segaloff’s book and find lots of Harlan Ellison stories, some of them your favorites (including the dead-gopher story, with confirmation of its veracity). Some of the others are not there, including one of my favorites, which was about how Harlan worked for Disney for half a day. It goes something like this:

Harlan was hired by Disney to work on some science fiction project. He drove to their studio, or writers’ building, or whatever it was. There was a space reserved in the parking lot with his name on it. There was a huge office with his name on the door, and a huge desk with a row of pencils neatly lined up on it—not entirely useful because Harlan always used a typewriter. He was supposed to sit there and let his genius gene. (Ellisonian phrase.) Break for lunch. Harlan in the cafeteria, entertaining a whole table full of people with shtick about doing a porno film with the Disney cartoon characters. “Okay, get that camera in real close on Minnie! Let me see that flaming labia!” “Heh ... heh....” “Aw, fuck off Goofy....” He had his audience in hysterics, until he gradually realized that the people seated facing him, who could see behind him, were not laughing. That was because Walt Disney’s brother Roy was standing directly behind Harlan, and he wasn’t laughing. Not only was Harlan instantly fired, but he was made into an unperson. By the time he got back from lunch, the movable walls had been shifted around so that his office had ceased to exist. Presumably his car was still in the parking lot, but you can be sure that personalized parking spot disappeared as soon as he drove away. The one rule at Disney, as Harlan put it, “You do not make fun of the Mouse.”
I got that story from Harlan himself, which is to say I heard him tell it. It might have been at Clarion in 1973, or it might have been at some convention.

There was a brief moment about 1975 when Roger Elwood became the currency of conversation, almost overshadowing Harlan. But Elwood stories were different. I know one Elwood/Harlan story which demonstrates this:

Roger Elwood, who was notorious for putting together anthologies the way McDonald’s turns out toadburgers (another Ellisonian phrase), called up Harlan one day and asked for a story. Elwood, a fundamentalist Christian who used to work for professional wrestling magazines—but quit in righteous indignation when he finally figured out after three years that pro wrestling was fixed—rather oddly asked Harlan for “an anti-homosexual story.” Harlan expressed displeasure with this concept so vociferously that “the phone lines burned up from coast to coast.” (Elwood was in New Jersey, Harlan in California.) At the end of this tirade Elwood sheepishly replied, “Gee, Harlan, I didn’t know you were that way.”

I actually don’t know where I heard that one or even if it is true. (I doubt Elwood was the source.) I do know that “that way” became a fannish joke on its own for several years, used in mock-disapproval. (“You’re a secret admirer of Space: 1999? Gee, I didn’t know you were that way.”) But it doesn’t matter. There was a folk process going on here that revealed something important about Harlan Ellison’s standing in the science fiction world. However outrageous or curmudgeonly he was, he was generally admired. The typical Harlan Ellison Story, even when Harlan took a pratfall in it (as in the Disney story), showed him to be smart, quick-witted, and on the side of right. The typical Elwood story showed him to be a clueless klutz.

A Lit Fuse is not primarily about Harlan’s standing in the science fiction world. I have already seen complaints about this on social media. It is clear that Segaloff is a Hollywood person, not a science fiction person. He first interviewed Harlan for an A&E piece on Stan Lee. His other credits include biographies of Arthur Penn and William Friedkin. Sure enough, his descriptions of Harlan’s role in science fiction are rather vague, very much the view of an outsider who doesn’t quite understand the context, but his book really comes alive in the parts about Ellison’s battles with the world of television and movies. There Segaloff tells another famous Harlan Ellison Story. Harlan is in a conference with a “universally despised” ABC censor, Adrian Samish, discussing a Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea episode. Samish’s notes are uniformly moronic. Harlan counters them, losing patience. Samish loses patience, exclaiming, “You’ll do it! Writers are toadies!” Apocalypse followed:

Ellison—seething at the end of a long conference table and flanked by [Irwin] Allen’s flunkies—leapt onto the table, ran toward Samish full bore with his fist extended, slipped on some papers, fell to his stomach, and skidded into Samish’s throat. Samish tumbled backward in his chair, dislodging a heavy model of the show’s Seaview submarine from the wall and dropping it onto him, breaking his pelvis. (104)

I heard Harlan tell that story once. What none of us in his awed audience thought to ask him, and what Segaloff does not ask is the obvious follow-up: How did Harlan avoid an arrest for assault or at least a whopping big lawsuit, or did ABC just hush it all up and pay Samish’s medical costs? How did Harlan ever find work in the TV industry after that? As a Harlan Ellison Story, the currency of fannish conversation, this doesn’t need such follow-up detail. In a biography, I think it does.

It may be that Segaloff was approved to do this book precisely because he is an outsider. One of Harlan’s lifelong complaints has always been that he has been typed as a science fiction writer, that even books like Rockabilly (aka Spider Kiss, a rock-and-roll novel) and The Glass Teat (TV and social criticism) are placed in the science fiction section of the bookstore and would probably have the words “science fiction” on the spine if he did not go to extraordinary lengths to make sure they didn’t. So he is doubtless pleased that Segaloff is able to bring in many other outsider voices.

The book itself is more of a testimonial than anything else with extensive quotes from interviews with Harlan and with people who knew Harlan. It is a compilation of what Harlan says about himself and what people say about him. It is, of course, selective. Inevitably it can cover only those things Harlan wanted to talk about. But what’s important is that Harlan’s life and career are placed in a much larger context, so we see it has never been just about science fiction, fans, and conventions. He is also someone who hung out with Steve McQueen and Robin Williams. His altercation with Frank Sinatra is legendary. (For the fannishly gossip-minded, his antipathy to Forrest J Ackerman is touched on but not explained; his feud with Charles Platt is not mentioned.)

What you expect from a literary biography and don’t find here is any analysis of the subject’s writing. If you don’t know what Harlan Ellison has written, if you don’t know why “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” is so often anthologized, or why “The Deathbird” is famous, you’re not going to find out in A Lit Fuse. That is elementary Ellison Studies 101. This is an advanced text, as I have suggested, for readers of a certain age (’bout 50 and up) who have been following Harlan’s career for a long time. It may well be true, as some booksellers have been telling me, that Ellison’s work is not “transgenerational” and the kids today can’t make any sense of it, but that does not matter for the success of A Lit Fuse. It has a very definite readership, even if that readership consists almost entirely of Baby Boomers.

(I will butt in with my opinion here. I think there will be, over the next few decades, a winnowing out. A lot of Harlan Ellison’s work will be forgotten or require extensive footnoting, but a handful of stories, like a handful of Edgar Allan Poe’s, will live, if not unto the heat death of the universe, then at least a very long time in the human scale of things.)

In fact, you don’t get much analysis by Segaloff about anything. You get reportage. It is very good reportage. The book is not quite chronological in its plan. Yes, the opening chapter covers the subject’s childhood and early years, and the last (rather grimly) shows him as an old man, recovering from a stroke, his mind as sharp as ever but his strength and energy failing, unlikely to ever be able to work in his old office on the second floor of his home again. The other chapters are more or less thematic: about TV and Hollywood, one about Harlan’s obsessive collecting (books, art, etc.), one about the fate of Last Dangerous Visions, which, it is pretty clear, given Harlan’s present physical condition, is not going to be coming out. (Says Ellison: “Forget about it. People only want it because they can’t have it. Tell ’em they can’t have it. There’s nothing to talk about.” [327]) The chapter entitled “The Snit on the Edge of Forever” gives us much about the celebrated Star Trek episode, “The City on the Edge of Forever” and the controversies surrounding it. There is perhaps too much (289–94) about the Connie Willis breast-fondling incident at LA Con in 2006.

“I do not live in fear of going to my grave a beloved figure,” Harlan once told a reporter for People magazine. But he just might, more than he expects. Certainly he will be a respected figure. He’s already written his own epitaph, which is quoted on the back of the dustjacket: “For a brief time I was here, and for a brief time I mattered.” Yes, he did. Does. Not past tense yet. Robert Silverberg is also quoted dryly telling Segaloff, “You have picked a difficult subject for a biography.”

Under the circumstances, I think he’s done quite well. There probably will be other biographies of Harlan Ellison someday, but all of them will have to draw on A Lit Fuse as a primary source.

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Darrell Schweitzer has been a member of Harlan Ellison’s audience since about 1967. He was one of Harlan’s students for a week at the Clarion Workshop in 1973. Since then he has been a member of the audience.

Comments

[Nat Segaloff]

Thank you for this perceptive review, Darrell. (I'm writing this comment two days after Harlan died so I'm still pretty shaken.) In "A Lit Fuse" I didn't try to analyze Harlan's writing; that was already done extremely well by Weil & Wolfe in "Edge of Forever" and less accessibly by Francaville. If I ever do another book on him, perhaps I should make it more of a deconstruction, so thanks for the nudge, and I will add more about his fights, including Platt and more of Groth. I know details of the Ackerman split but now that both icons are dead perhaps it's best to let it sleep with them. As for Harlan's work, you're right that some will endure longer than others, but the man did have multitudes.

[Paul Chadwick]

Darrell, if you should turn your retrospective critical focus to Ellison, I'd devour it with delight. Your Dunsany, Ligotti and Lovecraft books are wonderful.

[James Van Hise]

I found the book a mixed blessing in that there is a lot there, including a brutally honest evaluation of the situation with The Last Dangerous Visions. That section even includes claims Harlan made back in 1980 about how the book had already been finished and turned in when clearly that was just hyperbole. That may be why the Disney anecdote is not there because it was probably hyperbole. A friend of mine knew someone who worked at Disney and he told him the Harlan anecdote. That person looked Harlan up in the Disney files and it indicated that Harlan had actually worked at Disney for a few months, not just half a day. The book also seems to have been carefully guided by Harlan in that it fails to mention that in 1968 Harlan had started writing a novelization of Demon With A Glass Hand and the first chapter was even published in a small press publication (now quite rare). The story "Bring On The Dancing Frogs" is mentioned in the text (but not the index) but what isn't mentioned is that the story was unfinished but read on the air on the radio show Hour 25 in 1984 and then never heard of again. While Harlan's involvement with Babylon 5 is explored, what isn't mentioned is that in 1992 Harlan announced that he was going to write an episode of Babylon 5 which would feature Robert Culp and be a sequel to Demon With A Glass Hand. Babylon 5 ended in 1998 and Harlan's untold story was never mentioned again, even in the published history of that TV series. The book also leaves out the fact that Harlan had been friends with Philip K. Dick for 20 years until they had a falling out in 1977. Nothing about that appears in the book. I could go on.

[John Orloff]

Just a correction. Adrian Samish was my grandfather. He was not "the censor"for ABC (though he had worked at ABC in the 50's), but by that time, he was Quinn Martin's #2, basically running the creative side of the company.

As has been noted, he was not the most pleasant of people, and I hardly new him before he died in the 80's, so I don't know how accurate the story actually is. All writers tend to "enhance" a story with the re-telling (ie, Samish was a "censor"), but being a screenwriter myself, I can believe the moronic notes... but the rest? Certainly not impossible. But I never heard about my grandfather having a broken hip...

Cheers

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