Working for Harlan Ellison in 1996-97, part 2

So far here, I’ve rerun the “non-interview” I conducted with Harlan Ellison over the phone in 1984 for a very short-lived Boston magazine called What’s New . . . went back in time to recall the first time I saw him do his thing live, in 1981 — finishing a story in progress and then reading it “hot off the Olympia” in a benefit for a Boston used bookstore . . . then shifted forward to the winter of 1996-97, when I proofread volume 3 of the Edgeworks collection published by White Wolf.

Harlan had said he would try me out on the White Wolf job, since I volunteered to do it for free after the debacle of the first two typo-ridden volumes. His new story collection, Slippage, was just about to come out from Mark V. Ziesing Books as well, so he had them send me the galleys for that, with the understanding that he would pay me for my efforts out of his own pocket. [This photograph courtesy and © Steven Barber; all rights reserved]

I have two vivid memories from the Slippage job. Before online self-publication came along, a book went through many hands, not unlike a feature film. Many more are involved making a movie (actors and grips and lighting techs and set designers and wardrobe and makeup people and a DP and the director and others strive to do their part of the whole) . . . so it’s understandable that something occasionally slips through the cracks.

In a movie, for example, continuity may be broken; a prop that was on one side of a table shifts a foot to the left in another shot, or a character with a gun in his hand is seen a few seconds later holding it in the other. More spectacularly, the cast and crew might fail to notice something in shot that JUST SHOULDN’T BE THERE — a striking example being the paper coffee cup that turned up for a few seconds in an episode of Game of Thrones.

Similarly, before the 21st century, the many hands involved (author to editor to fact-checkers — and sometimes authoritative reviewers in the case of nonfiction works such as history and science — to typesetters to proofreader, back through the author and possibly other checkers, etc.) were intended to lead to a flawless final product . . . but sometimes, not all the i’s got dotted and t’s crossed.

Slippage contains a dedication to Harlan’s wife Susan, which includes a quote from Cyril Connolly. Somewhat uncharacteristically, Harlan felt a need to inform the reader who Mr. Connolly was; you’ll find a parenthetical identifier in the dedication: “England’s most influential and controversial literary critic.” I don’t know why Harlan didn’t simply say to himself, “people can look it up.” Maybe the publisher insisted.

If you were never an English lit grad student, the only place you might have heard of Connolly (if you were paying sufficiently close attention) is in the outro to the Monty Python song “Eric, the Half-a-Bee,” in which canny Michael Palin inserts the name of the eminent yet all-but-forgotten critic as a pun on John Cleese’s closing phrase “semi-carnally” (it’s at 1:48 in the above video clip).

I looked up the quote and discovered — as with Michigan J. Frog, Pogo, and Dr. King in the Hornbook, and nearly reproduced in Edgeworks 3 until I caught them (or two of them, anyway) — Harlan had gotten it not quite right. If you look in your Ziesing edition, or your Houghton Mifflin clothbound or paperback copy, you’ll find the correct quotation from Connolly — “We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self” — in the actual introduction roughly eight pages later, where it had also been wrong and I corrected it . . . but not in the dedication, which still renders it “We are all serving a terminal sentence in the dungeon of life.”

The sense is roughly the same (although I think a decent philosophical argument could be had over the distinctions in nuance between “self” and “life”), but in the end, what’s between the quotation marks is not what Connolly wrote. I wonder if anyone else has noticed the discrepancy in the opening pages of Slippage up to now? Twain’s line, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug,” seems apropros here. Not to get it right in an attribution is — I don’t know any other way to say it — disrespectful. I did my best to keep it from happening.  [ * SIGH * ]

In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll share a contrasting story which shows me having pushed my luck. It’s kinda cool to be able to brag that I got Harlan Ellison to change a detail in one of his science-fiction stories (one of his rare compositions that honestly merits that genre classification), but looking back, I oughtn’t to have bothered.

“Go Toward the Light” was a tale Harlan wrote to order in 1994 for National Public Radio, which had requested Hanukkah-themed stories from a number of authors. Chaim Potok and Rebecca Goldstein also delivered, but their pieces were read by Joel Grey and Lainie Kazan, respectively. Harlan read his, of course, and the result aired on November 15, 1994. Dove Audio released the three tales on a single cassette in 1995, and Harlan’s reading was re-released by Audio Literature/Fantastic Audio in 2001, and again by Blackstone Audio in 2011, as part of the contents of volume two of “Voices From the Edge: Midnight in the Sunken Cathedral.”

In the first paragraph of “Go Toward the Light,” there is a passing reference to Stephen Hawking . . . in the present tense. Given the technology described in the story, it has to take place well into the 21st century, and even by the time the galleys for Slippage got to me, we were still back in the 20th century. Hawking had been wasting away from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease) . . . so I suggested — gently but firmly — that maybe there ought to be some explanation for how the genius in the wheelchair known to the world via a speech-generating device could have survived so long. (Below is how it looked in the galley proof that I received; five lines from the bottom of the page is the passing remark “...Stephen Hawking says....”)

Harlan grumbled about this, but he went ahead and inserted a parenthetical remark that’s not in the original recording: “(yeah, courtesy of the over-the-counter anti-agathic drugs, still alive, and breaking a hundred on the links)….”

As it turned out, Harlan himself lived longer than I had expected such a hellion (not to mention an un-fastidious eater) to survive — certainly beyond any of the dates he projected in his own essay-fantasy, “The Day I Died” (installment 10 of the Harlan Ellison Hornbook, March 4, 1973, in which Harlan imagined himself dying in 10 different scenarios, starting less than two months later that same year and extending out as far as 2010, when he dies “from weary old age….”)

As I say, for a time I felt privately smug about having gotten Harlan Ellison to change something in one of his stories, but as it turned out, Hawking rolled comfortably into the 21st century, and even into the second decade of the 21st century, even WITHOUT the anti-agathic drugs (whateverthehell those are)! How could I have known? Amazingly, Hawking shouldered on with ALS for more than half a century (he had been diagnosed in 1963) and predeceased Harlan by just 105 days!

That’s all the minutiae with which I’ll torture you about Slippage. As with my marked-up galleys of Edgeworks 3, once my changes had been absorbed into the final ms. (most of them, anyway), Harlan made sure the proof copy with my red-inked comments was returned to me, with the gratifying acknowledgement and autograph you see below.

He instructed me to bill him directly. I figured $30 an hour was a decent rate for this kind of labor, and I’d spent about 20 hours on the task, so as I recall, I sent him an invoice for $600. He phoned me, rather taken aback, and protested that he wasn’t as wealthy as many people seem to think. On the one hand, I don’t believe my bill would have been unreasonable out in the real world of 1996-97 . . . on the other, I would gladly have done the work gratis, given a further chance to work for — and with — one of my heroes.

So I didn’t object in the slightest to the adjusted amount he proposed. I remember he referred to me as “ya greedy fuck!” during that phone conversation . . . but we were both laughing when he said it.

[ Still to come: dining with Harlan in Oregon in 2001, indexing the Teats while recovering from knee surgery, and pushing a dead 1947 Packard down La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles in 2007. . . . ]