This is about that night I took Theodore Sturgeon to bed.
I’m lying there with The Ultimate Egoist: Volume I of The Complete Stories [The Ultimate Egoist: Volume I: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon: Sturgeon, Theodore, Williams, Paul, Bradbury, Ray, Clarke, Arthur C., Wolfe, Gene: 9781556436581: Amazon.com: Books] in my hands, and starting to feel real let down. Maybe he was just another guy who hadn’t aged well.
About thirty-five years ago I first encountered his story “A Way of Thinking,” [anthologized in Black Magic: 13 Chilling Tales Black Magic, 13 Chilling Tales, a Mayflower Book: Amazon.com: Books] and you never forget reading something like that—the mastery of the form and the mood and the voice and the brilliance of the plot itself.
And I always enjoy rereading “The Other Celia” [collected in A Touch of Strange A Touch of Strange: Theodore Sturgeon, Joseph Mugnaini: Amazon.com: Books]. It hasn’t the power of “A Way of Thinking” but it’s still a remarkable story.
So there I was, that night, with all my high expectations, and after three dozen or so pieces—written for popular magazines’ demands for Mother’s Day and Fourth of July and all sorts of fit-the-slot stories that seemed a relentless fulfillment of his own Sturgeon’s Law—I started to feel scornful that he’d sold himself so cheap.
And then I reached “Bianca's Hands.”
Like Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery,” “Bianca's Hands” seems to rise like a black light from the darkest part of the human soul. And, like “The Lottery,” “Bianca's Hands” is notorious for the violent response it engendered. Sturgeon's friends, agents and editors were appalled by it and no American publisher would touch it.
Eventually he sent it off to a contest in British Argosy and beat out Graham Greene for the top prize.
It seems to me almost sacrilegious that a story of such transcendently horrifying power inhabits the same volume as the hack work Sturgeon pumped out.
And I wonder if it’s wise for any writer to aim for earning a living from his art. What if your worst work becomes your most commercially successful? What if that audience isn’t the one to recognize your best?
What if the day job you hate, though it may be a sort of temporal indentureship, just enables you to pay the bills and saves you from savaging your artistic integrity?
I found an online audio recording of the story and will listen to it today. I remember as a teenager being impacted by "More Than Human", even though now, 50 years later, I have absolutely no memory of what it was about! Time for a reread.
I want to read the horrible thing, because now I'm curious. But if it keeps me up at night, maybe not.
What if you want to know more than you're afraid to know? Isn't evil better when it's in good writing than when it's in real life? And what IS "real life"? Maybe real life is when you feel most intensely what you feel...