Harlan Ellison is not in good health. Hard Case Crime, the neo-pulp Chicago publisher, has just reissued his first novel, 1958's Web of the City. When I contacted them for an interview I was told that it would not be possible due to Ellison's ongoing health problems. In 2012, Ellison, the author of over 50 book and a legendary science fiction and fantasy master, announced he was dying. No details were given, but shortly after that he did attend a science fiction conference.
I can only hope Ellison gets better. He is one of the last remaining male novelists with a rampaging ego, pugnacious attitude and inflated sense of self-worth. (He is indeed a great writer, and the fact that his self-assessment isn't far off the mark makes it doubly annoying.) After the deaths of Hunter S. Thompson, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, Ellison is one of the few authentic madmen still standing. Here is a man who got fired on his first day working for Disney for joking about making a porno film with Disney characters.
Ellison, like Mailer and the other tough guys, is a member of a generation of male writers who mined tough experience for their art. Born in 1934, Ellison was raised in Ohio and moved to New York in 1955. He wanted to write about street gangs, and joined one in Brooklyn under a fake name (echos here of Thompson joining the Hells Angels).
His experience became the novel Web of the City. It tells the story of Rusty Santoro, a member of the gang the Cougars. Santoro wants out. The story has girls, violence, near-misses and, even the author admits in the intro, some purple prose. Still, even in his early twenties Ellison was showing signs of real talent. If Web of the City is not a great book it is certainly not a bad one either. It never flags and is a terrific edition to the beach bag for reading this summer.
Ellison would, of course, go on to true greatness. Shatterday, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, A Boy and His Dog, the great Star Trek script City on the Edge of Forever -- the list is long and, indeed, awesome. Science fiction and fantasy, the genres Ellison chooses to work in, may reveal what separates him from the Mailers and the Roths, as well as why his work may even last longer.
In 1997 David Foster Wallace wrote a scathing essay about John Updike and the other male writers that Wallace referred to as the postwar Great Male Narcissists (GMN). The essay was a review of Toward the End of Time, a dystopian science fiction novel by John Updike. The book, according to Wallace, is an absolute disaster; even in a work set in the year 2020, Updike could not stop talking about sex, women, neurosis, sex, himself, his penis, sex, and sex. Wallace actually broke down the page count of how often what subjects appear where. The final tally: Toward the End of Time contained about three percent science fiction. The rest was Great Male Narcissist anguish.
Ellison would never make that mistake because he is not a narcissist but an egomaniac. The narcissist is someone looking to fill his hollow self because he has such a fragile psyche. The egomaniac is the opposite. Whereas the GMN like Mailer and Updike and Roth were too weak and damaged to stop talking about themselves for too long, Ellison is almost psychotically cocksure. They wrote about alcohol, suburban malaise, prostitutes and shimmering mortality. Ellison set out for the stars.
And in the end this may make his work more immortal than theirs. In a recent blog post the science fiction writer John C. Wright explored how science fiction and fantasy moved into mainstream popularity as literature began to withdraw from monsters (Grendel), adventure (The Iliad), and the nature of evil (The Divine Comedy). People by nature like stories about about these things, because they take us outside of ourselves even while allowing us to reflect on love, death, fate and good vs. evil.
Ellison is a blowhard. He's full of himself. Web of the City is no masterpiece. But I daresay the man who wrote the screenplay for what would eventually become the movie The Terminator and dozens of other amazing stories will be read after Philip Roth is forgotten. That is not necessarily a bad thing for literature.
