The Harlan Ellison Non-Interview, circa 1985

It’s been a week since the passing of a giant -- certainly in my life. Harlan Ellison, the author of fabulous short stories, provoking essays and commentaries, memorable television scripts, a great early rock ’n’ roll novel, and occasional comic book plots -- and one helluva raconteur -- passed away in his sleep on the night of June 27-28.

For those who knew him, it was a wonder he lasted so long, and a surprise and a blessing that he didn’t flame out in more dramatic fashion.

In the days since, I’ve spent many hours -- far more than I would have anticipated -- reading and sharing stories of the man by other fans, as well as defending his legacy and memory against the carpers who mostly knew of him only for his fearsome reputation and a few myths about his life.

I first read some Ellison stories in about 1974 or 1975. I first saw him speak and I started to collect autographs in 1981. Knowing he was fairly approachable and still had a listed phone number in the Los Angeles directory, one day in 1985 I called him from the East Coast in hopes of an interview. The result was a piece I published in a short-lived Boston magazine called What’s New.

I titled it “The Harlan Ellison Non-Interview”:

Opinionated, controversial, and highly quotable, Harlan Ellison is an interviewer’s joy . . . when he wants to cooperate.

-- Hello, is Mr. Harlan Ellison there?
-- This is he.
-- My name is Dave Loftus, Mr. Ellison. I wanted to interview you at a time that’s convenient for you.
-- Uh, I don’t mean to be cranky about it, but really no time is convenient for me. I hate interviews. I’m about as interviewed-out as I care to be. Everybody in the world wants to talk to me. You get to a point where you just don’t want to hear your own voice anymore.

This is understandable. In the past, Publisher’s Weekly, Contemporary Authors, Crawdaddy, the Dallas Sun, and TV Guide have interviewed Ellison. Specialty magazines like the Comics Journal, RBCC, and Twilight Zone have printed extensive Ellison badinage. Everyone hopes to get him to let loose in their pages.

Although he is now fifty years old, Harlan Ellison will always be viewed as an angry young man. It’s partly due to his perennial boyish good looks and his diminutive stature, for which larger, lesser beings torment him.

Despite the publication of Memos From Purgatory (a memoir of his ten weeks with a kids’ street gang in New York), two collections of television criticism, and Spider Kiss (which Greil Marcus called the best rock novel of the last twenty-five years), his work continues to be labeled “science fiction.”

He made his name in the Sixties with fantastic tales bearing eye-catching titles like “ ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” and “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," and his legend spread largely as a result of antics at various science fiction conventions.

Perhaps that will begin to change now that a handful of essays written over the last twenty years for a variety of magazines are beginning to appear in hardcover and win praise.

“I’ve probably done more nonfiction than fiction in my time,” says Ellison, “and they’ve never wanted to collect it or reprint it. But because I insisted on the four pieces that were included in Stalking the Nightmare and they got such a huge response -- more than the stories did -- there’s been a great surge of interest in my nonfiction.”

The four essays in 1982’s Stalking the Nightmare included an account of the gruesome small-time carnival which 13-year-old Harlan joined after running away from home, how Canadian television screwed up an original Ellison idea for a series, the Voyager I flyby of Saturn, and “The 3 Most Important Things In Life” (which are sex, violence, and labor relations, natch).

His new book, Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed, is all nonfiction. It features profiles of fellow fantasists, several anti-television tirades, a paean to the city of Los Angeles, a beautiful eulogy to his mother, an account of Ellison’s participation in the 1965 March on Montgomery, a piece on Steve McQueen, an enraged call for gun control following Lennon’s murder, and a gentle investigation into a video dating service.

“This book has had nothing but good reviews,” Ellison remarks. “It’s the first book I’ve had in years that somebody has not found fault with on any grounds, and I’m really pleased about that.”

As a result, publishers are scrambling to issue other Ellison nonfiction. The Donning Company is struggling this winter to get out a complete collection of “An Edge In My Voice,” a series of columns Ellison wrote for Future Life magazine and LA Weekly in the early Eighties. The column won the P.E.N. International Silver Pen Award for Outstanding Journalism in 1982.

“The Harlan Ellison Hornbook,” a series of columns from the early Seventies, may be published by Jack Chalker later this year.

Aside from jaw fatigue, the normally garrulous Mr. Ellison has an additional reason for resisting recent pleas for interviews: “I’m working real hard: I was up this morning at five, trying to get books out of here. I’ve had a long period where physical disabilities got in the way, so now I’m really in a survival mode, as they say in the computer business. And anything that doesn’t contribute to it kind of drains the energy off me and keeps me from doing the kind of work that I have to do.”

The “physical disability” is a mysterious illness that has plagued Ellison for the past six years. One symptom was a “terrible lassitude” that struck about mid-day, causing Ellison simply to fall down and vegetate, retaining perhaps only enough energy to read. A long series of doctors diagnosed this and prescribed that, concluding brilliantly that this was an “idiopathic” disorder; that is, an illness of unknown origin.

Ellison kept his condition secret because his sufferings and drastically reduced creative output could mean death in the marketplace. By mid-1984 he decided he just didn’t give a damn anymore about identifying and curing the problem. So he went public, and with the help of some friends he went to work on moving projects out of the pipeline.

The word from the author is that the long-awaited Last Dangerous Visions, thirteen years in the making, will appear this year. As for other Ellison projects that fans have heard about over the past decade, who knows? Blood’s a Rover, the expanded version of his famous novella, A Boy and His Dog, was scheduled for 1980 publication, but has yet to show.

In the same state of limbo are: Dial 9 to Get Out, his novel about the crazy world of television production; Shrikes, for which Houghton Mifflin paid $154,000 on the basis of a plot summary; Nights in the Garden of Trepidation, a light fantasy about a troll who inherits the Brooklyn Bridge; and The Prince of Sleep, a surrealist character study of a man in the future.

As Ellison is wont to tell anxious publishers: It’ll be done when it’s done.

Readers familiar with Ellison’s hatred of the bitch goddess TV will be surprised to hear he is working for her again in a small way. “I’ve taken on the job of creative consultant for the new CBS Twilight Zone series.”

How did he get suckered into that? “I wasn’t really suckered into it. I went in with my eyes open. I look at all the material they want to use and say, ‘Look folks, this is real close to something that has already been done and you’re going to be sued; or, this is a dumb idea and you don’t want to do that.’ I may write a script for them as a lark, because I’d like to be able to say I wrote for The Twilight Zone, but I’m not actually immersed in production.”

What happened to his crusade against the glass tit, well represented by three essays in the Sleepless Nights collection?

“I’m sort of weary of standing out there all alone and saying, ‘TV is shit, folks, and you ought to burn your sets,’ and having everybody look at me, say, ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ and go back to watch Gilligan’s Island. I just figured, fuck it, the human race doesn’t want to do anything about it so who am I to piss on their parade?

“It’s hard to tell the Common Man that he should want something better than McDonald’s.”

Ellison’s new job as TV consultant hardly signals the demise of the man who once said of television: “I’m firmly convinced it’s evil.” Who said Star Wars was “awful, dumb, stupid, pointless crapola,” and Tolkien “imbecile shit.”

Although Harlan Ellison seems to hear time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near and is trying manfully to get down all he needs to record in the meantime, his Jiminy-Cricket-as-Zorro persona can’t have gone far and is sure to be heard from again.

If I’m lucky, maybe he’ll even let me interview him.

*          *          *          *          *

As it turned out, more than a decade later I would end up doing a little long-distance freelance work for Ellison, and meet him a few times after that on a kinda sorta friend-and-colleague basis. The autographs in my growing collection began to include more personal and playful notes.

But those are stories for another day.