The Man Who Lost the Sea (48 page)

Character is the key. Plot springs from character. I have a “talented” but rather frantic and insecure Gorwing, a big good-natured physically ugly ape, Noat, and Smith, who could be anybody … would I be in too much of a pocket if I just started out with the taxi incident and went on from there? … Noat narrating: I was in front of the pool hall when Gorwing pulled up in his Dodge. Do you want to make a big buck? I said sure. So I got in and he tore off. All he told me was to keep my eyes open, especially the ears, and my mouth shut. We pulled up by the traffic light on 9W and there was this anxious-looking guy pacing it on the road. Gorwing says, “Taxi, mister?” and laughs a dirty laugh. The guy jumps in and Gorwing pulls right over to the side and shuts the motor off. The guy gets frantic. Gorwing puts it to him: how much? The guy says, whatever you say, but get going. Gorwing says, I say a hundred. The guy screams. Gorwing opens the door. The guy closes it and says drive then. We go to Congers, the guy fires out into a house. Gorwing starts to lean on the horn. The guy comes out with a twenty and says push off. Gorwing turns the flashlight on my face and says G-Note here will collect in the morning. Then I begin to haunt the house. Pretty soon the guy stops being tough at me and begins to be nice. I fall for it and finally settle for Gorwing’s cut: Gorwing never knows the difference. But after that I see a lot of this Smith
.

G-Note could be a charming character who believes everything anyone tells him and has an alarming ability to rationalize the irreductible. He believes Gorwing and then he believes Smith, and in his own mind sees nothing difficult about believing both. Keep it in mind but don’t make it signal
.

Wonder if I’m overlooking my Woodford after all these years. Seven elements: Problem, character, obstacle, complication, crisis, climax, denouement. BOY that was a meaty thought! Do you mean after all these years
I got plot trouble? That’s it, tho’—at least as far as this beast is concerned. Because tho’ I have characters, my Noat is only an observer, Smith a motivator, and really, only Gorwing has a problem—and that’s not much of a problem; it’s only that of making a living like the rest of us … which may be the crucial thing here after all. How about a domestic picture of Gorwing in trouble—his story after all—in why he pulls Noat into it. At first seeming hard, taciturn, unsympathetic, he is revealed as a guy crying inside with the clamor of demand on him: for his own survival he
can’t
sympathize with anyone … the undertone of the story, then, can be a study of values. He has to get liquor, say, for an alcoholic wife whom he really loves
 … 
or food for the baby, for that matter
 … 
and in the course of the story, he does. The big switch is in the reader’s re-estimate of him, which he shares with Smith
.…
Maybe Smith is looking for a hard guy and in a way appreciates this ploy
 … 
or Noat could wander through the story in his dim way trying to show each what a nice guy the other is
 …

This is quite a portrait of an author getting ready to let a story come through him. Interesting that he says, early on:
my Machine won’t produce this until it has a clear Build to the yarn
, as though his experience is that there is a mechanism inside him that seems to write the stories itself once he gives it sufficient fodder and momentum. The comment
All I’ll have to do then is to write what moves me
 … 
and the hell with sf & f
 … suggests that the editor at Avon has let him know that this new story for the book didn’t have to be science fiction or fantasy (perhaps the editor was aware of what a valuable addition “Bright Segment” was to
Caviar
, without being sf or fantasy).

The line in the above “maundering”
Wonder if I’m overlooking my Woodford after all these years
is of much interest to students of Sturgeon’s work. Jack Woodford’s first book on writing,
Trial and Error: A Key to the Secret of Writing and Selling
was published in 1933, five years before Sturgeon began writing professionally. It seems possible that the “Woodford” Sturgeon is referring to here (indicating clearly that he’s studied and practiced Woodford’s guidelines in past years) is Woodford’s 1939 book
PLOTTING: How to Have a Brain Child
.

“How to Kill Aunty”:
first published in
Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine
, March 1961. Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance (where the story was titled “How to Kill Your Aunty”; Sturgeon changed the title when the story was included in his 1966 collection
Starshine):
A CAT MAY PLAY WITH A MOUSE A LONG TIME BEFORE KILLING IT. AND MURDER IS CAT PLAY TO SOME. Below this blurb and under the author’s name atop the story was this line: A MYSTERY NOVELET OF DARK VIOLENCE

As mentioned above in the note to “A Crime for Llewellyn,” Lucy Menger in her book
Theodore Sturgeon
describes “How to Kill Aunty” as one of Sturgeon’s “portrait stories,” “journeys of discovery into man himself.”

In 1962, this story was included in Brett Halliday’s annual collection
Best Detective Stories of the Year
.

“Tandy’s Story”:
first published in
Galaxy Science Fiction
, April 1961. Editor’s blurb above the title from the first page of the original magazine appearance: BORAX FOR BROWNIES AND THE MOONWATCHER WHO MISSED—THE CRINKLED GETTER AND THE CANAVERAL SNEEZE—THESE ARE THE THINGS THAT MAKE UP—

In his introduction to “Tandy’s Story” in the 1979 collection
The Stars Are the Styx
, Sturgeon wrote:

One is conditioned to be austere and objective—I don’t know why, or who started it; somehow it’s not supposed to be “appropriate” (a word I hate a lot) to bring oneself and one’s bloodstream into public view
.

Well, I say the hell with it. Most of what I write is written by the simple process of opening a vein and dripping it (all too slowly) into the typewriter. My research has always been people, and more often than not, it’s the people closest to me that I can research most conveniently. And the process of compiling such a collection as this must of necessity bring a sharp focus on the environment in which they are written
.

Tandy’s Story was designed to be the first in a series, ultimately to be collected as a book of short stories and novelettes, to be called
The Family.
There would be this, and Noël’s, and Timothy’s (he’s the baby mentioned in these pages) and Robin’s, and then
The Mother’s Story
and finally
The Father’s Story.

But then one of those great winds that sweep across our biographies arose, and I was separated from these people by some thousands of miles and days, and here I am a week away from having watched Noël graduate from college and “the baby” Timothy whack his head against a six-foot door lintel. Robin has been celebrated elsewhere in my work, and Noël’s turn is coming some day soon, I’m sure, as is something special
for Tim, but these can’t happen in the same matrix as this one. Nostalgia is often tinged with regret; mine is not. But at the same time I am poignantly aware that in a contiguous universe there is a volume called
The Family
which will not and cannot be written. I’d like to read it
.

In the December 1962 issue of a science fiction writers’ journal called
PITFCS (Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Sudies)
, Frederik Pohl, Horace Gold’s successor as editor of
Galaxy
, wrote, “One of the best stories Horace ever bought—the last he worked on before he had to give up and go to the hospital—was Theodore Sturgeon’s “Tandy’s Story.” I know for a fact that he converted it from a passable bit into an excellent job by demanding and getting considerable revision.”

“Tandy’s Story” is included in
The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960–1990
, edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery.

Further bibliographic and biographical notes

During the time when Sturgeon wrote the stories included in this volume, mid-1957 to the end of 1960, he published five books, and lived in four different towns in several different parts of the world.
A Touch of Strange
(August 1958) was a hardcover collection of nine stories, three of which are included in this volume of
The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon
.

The Cosmic Rape
was a novel, published as an original paperback in August 1958, four years after Sturgeon had contracted to write it and had indicated that he could produce it quickly; the delay led his editor to remark to a mutual acquaintance, Judith Merril: “I know Sturgeon can write a novel in three days, but
which three days?”
The August 1958 issue of
Galaxy
included a short novel by Sturgeon called “To Marry Medusa,” which is actually a condensed or edited-down version of
The Cosmic Rape
, probably prepared by the magazine’s editor. I have not chosen to include “To Marry Medusa” in
The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon
because I believe it is not a story but a shortened version of an already completed novel, possibly put together by someone other than Sturgeon.

In 1959, Sturgeon published a new paperback collection called
Aliens 4
, made up of four short novels: “The Comedian’s Children,” “Killdozer!” (slightly revised), “Cactus Dance,” and “The [Widget], The [Wadget], and Boff.”

In September 1960, Sturgeon published an original paperback novel
called
Venus Plus X
. In July 1960, he published a new paperback collection called
Beyond
, which included “Need” and “Like Young.”

For the first part of 1957, Theodore and Marion Sturgeon and their children Robin, Tandy and Noël continued to live in Congers in Rockland County, New York, just northwest of New York City. Sometime in the second half of 1957, the Sturgeons moved to a house in Truro, Massachusetts, near the tip of Cape Cod. “The Comedian’s Children” and much of
The Cosmic Rape
were probably written in Truro.

“But the Cape was cold and lonely,” I wrote in my biographical profile (published in 1981 in
The Berkley Showcase, vol. 3
and currently available online at the Sturgeon Literary Trust page whose address is in the Editor’s Note at the front of this volume), “and the Sturgeon family decided they could live cheaper and happier in the West Indies. Ted’s mother was teaching on St. Vincent, and she found them a place on the island of Bequi. They arrived and the house was too small, noisy, no privacy … so they began months of island-hopping, searching for a home. They ended up on Grenada. Ted had no place to write during all this, but he kept trying. He was working on a story called ‘The Man Who Lost the Sea.’ ”

In mid-1959 the Sturgeons left the West Indies and returned to New York state, eventually settling in the “artists’ colony” town of Woodstock, where they would live happily for the next six or seven years.

Corrections and addenda

Series reader Jim Wilson has found and kindly supplied us with a further comment by Sturgeon on “A Saucer of Loneliness” (volume VII). This is from a 1968 paperback anthology edited by Robert P. Mills, called
The Worlds of Science Fiction
, in which authors were asked to choose their personal favorite among their stories and to write a brief rubric explaining why they chose that particular story. TS wrote:

“Not one writer in twenty thousand,” a knowledgeable agent once told me, “is competent to judge his own product.” This may well be true; could I judge him and his sweeping statements? Be that as it may, I have good and sufficient reasons for my special fondness for “Saucer.” It was written in about four hours, one of those profoundly satisfying creations, which simply lays itself out, word after word, “feeling” right all the way. In addition, it is one of the stories which bears out something that I have been formulating for some time; that good science fiction is good to the extent that it is fable; that is, stories about foxes and grapes are not dubious
accounts of improbably herbivorous foxes impossibly making spoken conclusions; they mean other things in other contexts. As such, “Saucer” is a fable, an explication of that endemic disease called loneliness. Finally, the story pleases me with its opening; few things I have ever done have so exploded onto the page
.