The Perfect Host (2 page)

What struck me then was how different that story seemed from all the others I was reading and listening to. Here was a story that was undeniably sf, but without any of the gadgets or alien invasions or technological extrapolations or other plot devices from that era. In today’s terms, the story might be categorized as “psychological sf,” but what seems most obvious is that the story is pure Sturgeon, a
love story
warmly and lyrically presented, subtly nuanced in its depiction of two people struggling to connect with other beings. Undeniably science fiction, it was also obviously a story that used its sf motifs as a means of metaphorizing a universal human condition.

III. The Professor’s Teddy Bear

Twenty three years later, I finally met the man responsible for “A Saucer of Loneliness.” Like other literary critics who wind up teaching and writing about science fiction, I had drifted away from the field in my late teens, and only rediscovered it when I decided in middle age to prepare a course (at San Diego State University) in contemporary science fiction. I encountered a number of pleasant surprises while doing background reading for this course, but nothing really prepared me for the shock and amazement I felt when I opened
More than Human
and read the first page. Not only did that opening passage remind me of a different passage—the opening to Benjy’s section in Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury
²
—which had once jolted me out of my plans to pursue a career as a lawyer, but it immediately placed me back in contact with the Sturgeon stories that had so enthralled me as a young boy.

A few months later, when I discovered Sturgeon was living in San Diego, I gave him a call to see if I could entice him into visiting my class, even though I could only offer him a Mexican lunch by way of payment. Ted agreed, and in just a few weeks I was guiding Theodore Sturgeon—who in 1980 looked very much like an impish hippie, with a ponytail and bell-bottoms—to the front of a large lecture hall to answer questions from an overflow crowd of students. The q&a session that followed was one of the most memorable I’ve ever seen or heard. Ted quickly took control of the discussion and directed it to boldly go to realms where none of these kids had ever gone before. Mixing stories about his background and influences together with more specific anecdotes about the writing of
More than Human
that clarified some of the book’s treatment of para-psychological union, Sturgeon was soon bringing to life a whole slew of issues concerning mankind’s long-term potential, communication, music, sexual identity and so on. The real highlight of the class was an exchange between Ted and a gorgeous 20-year-old red-headed co-ed who somewhat timidly asked Sturgeon if he felt that
More than Human
’s notion of
homo gestalt
anticipated the experiments from the 1960s with communes, sexual experimentation, and so on. I’m not sure about the rest of the class, but I was certainly blown away when Ted proceeded to use this occasion to launch into an extended discussion, vividly illustrated by his own experiences, about marriage, jealousy, group sex, homosexuality, and his personal efforts at determining the ideal number of participants in a committed sexual relationship. My only regret about that afternoon is that I can’t remember what that number was.

IV.
The Perfect Host:
Ted Sturgeon’s
Sun Sessions

The Perfect Host
—the fifth installment in this grandly ambitious
Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon
series—is a revelation, a gift to be treasured, a mind-blower, a time machine, a stick of literary dynamite, an eye-opener. Or, to borrow an analogy from Sturgeon’s own favorite resource of simile (music), it can probably best be compared to one of the more impressive of the recent “boxed set” compilations on compact disc. Like, say,
The Capitol Years: The Best of Frank Sinatra
, or
Charlie Parker: The Complete Savoy Sessions, The Perfect Host
provides enough of a representative sampling of Sturgeon’s “greatest hits” (e.g., such classic Golden [Age] Oldies as “Unite and Conquer,” “Prodigy,” and the volume’s title story) to give the uninitiated a good sense of what all the fuss was about way back when. And at the same time it offers a generous selection of alternate takes, rarities (notably several of Sturgeon’s best forays into other forms of genre writing, such as his wonderfully-rendered cowpoke yarn “Scars” and his jazz-drenched tour de force crime story, “Die, Maestro, Die!”
³
), and previously unreleased cuts (including one of the volume’s major finds, “Quietly,” which appears to be an early warm-up for
More than Human
)—which altogether offer even the most knowledgeable Sturgeon fan the chance to gain a more complete picture of the author’s influences and range, and an awareness of patterns of connection and influence that were not so evident in the stories’ original formats (magazines, anthologies, radio dramatizations). Add to this Paul Williams’s informative “liner notes,” and some nifty new packaging, and it becomes obvious (to me) that
The Perfect Host
deserves to be considered one of the major literary events of the year. Actually, given the transformative impact that the stories from this period of Sturgeon’s career had on the science fiction and fantasy genres, a more accurate comparison would be to boxed sets focused on Elvis Presley’s
Sun Sessions
or Bob Dylan’s
Highway 61 Revisited
.

V. Stranger in a Strange Land

As was the case with Presley’s and Dylan’s arrivals on the pop music scenes in their respective eras, it is difficult today to appreciate just how truly out of place—how truly “Irregular”—this totally coolcat Sturgeon dude must have seemed while he was bebopping his way onto the center stage of the commercial sf and fantasy scenes during the late 1940s. It must have been a little as if this long-haired Italian painter named Michaelangelo had showed up as one of the illustrators for Disney back in the ’30s. Indeed, Sturgeon’s anti-intellectualism and mysticism, his fascination with sexual desire and other ecstatic states of human consciousness, his abhorrence for conformity (and frequent suggestion that science was not only potentially dangerous but one of the principal agents of conformity), his experiments with language and metaphor as a means of depicting the inner, irrational lives of characters, and his love of jazz—all these features indicate that the authors from this era with whom Sturgeon shared the deepest affinities were not genre writers of any sort but the Beats.

Of course, by the time Sturgeon was writing the stories included in this volume he was already recognized as one of the leading luminaries of science fiction’s “Golden Age,” a community of writers and a body of work that John Campbell had helped nurture as an influential magazine editor since 1937. But “Golden Age” or not, it’s important to recall that this was still a fairly conservative commercial genre that Sturgeon was trying to earn his livelihood in in the late ’40s. Yes, there were plenty of other talented writers around who found themselves forced to earn a living with the clichés and formula-methods of genre sf. And talented artists nearly always find ways to loosen the corset of genre expectations to give themselves enough room to move around in, personally and artistically, so that they can produce genre works that seem to them fresh and original.

On the other hand, as
The Perfect Host
demonstrates, truly
great
writers like Theodore Sturgeon are rarely content with merely loosening these restrictive norms; what they are often after are much more thoroughgoing reconfigurations that will permit them to break on through to an entirely new textual space—an alternate genre world where they can set themselves and their readers down and begin exploring what they
really
want to write about. In this regard, one thinks of the way Dashiell Hammett recast the elements of the classical detective novel back in the late ’20s to accommodate new themes and character types which contrasted starkly with those that had previously been central to the genre. The end result was the “Hard-boiled” novel, which portrayed a world in which chaos, mystery and depravity were no longer isolatable elements that could be identified, contained and eliminated via the careful application of ratiocination and logic but far more active agents permeating not merely all aspects of society, but the nature of truth and perception.

Interestingly enough, classic detective fiction shares a number of key assumptions with the science fiction field during the period when Sturgeon was writing the stories that appear in
The Perfect Host
. The most important commonality between these two genres was a faith in the power of men’s minds, disciplined by logic and scientific method, to solve nature’s riddles—and a consequent emphasis on characters and plot lines which embodied this faith. These norms—which had been originally championed by Campbell and had replaced the genre paradigms that had governed science fiction during the rise of the pulps in the 1930s—had helped channel the limitations of sf authors, enabling them to sacrifice a certain amount of wild imagining in order to attain a much greater degree of credibility and conviction in their work. The end result was sf which was more thoughtful and credible, which had better speculative development, and which was more effective as literature as well.

VI. More than Non-Human: Sturgeon Breaks on Through

However, even such undeniable advances within genre sf had a downside, especially for an author like Sturgeon, who was obviously unsuited by temperament to approach the craft of writing from any position requiring him to sacrifice
anything
, least of all wild imagination. Certainly the stories in
The Perfect Host
make it clear that Sturgeon had little interest in depicting the usual sort of science fiction characters (courageous, bold, self-restrained, dedicated to applying technology for the betterment of mankind).
⁴
or plot lines. These stories make it equally clear that by now Sturgeon had found a way to present some very radical topics indeed. These include a greater attention to semiology, philosophy, psychology and sexual desire, and a related set of concerns that would later be explored in his greatest work,
More than Human
, the postulated existence of being without ego, of a movement across the borders of a unified self, and of displacement of physical fusion onto a mental plane.

A different way to put this is that what one finds throughout these stories is a writer grappling mightily with a means of
humanizing
science fiction, often via the incorporation of stylistic features new to genre writing. Examples of Sturgeon’s innovative approach to form here include his use of multiple points of view and the story-within-a-story device, stream of consciousness, poetic discontinuities and other methods of conveying the movement of the mind, and a whole host of metafictional devices.

Related to these metafictional impulses is a general foregrounding of authorial self-consciousness that wouldn’t be common in sf until the late-Sixties “New Wave” work of Delany, LeGuin and others. While many of these stories are about “love” in the most obvious, romantic sense, it is equally apparent that nearly all of them are about Sturgeon’s own love affair with language. Sturgeon was probably the first American sf author to bring language to the foreground of his work, not merely in the sense of unfolding his narratives within prose mannerisms that are lyrical and rely on assonance, alliteration and other poetic devices, but also in the sense of providing an ongoing (frequently hilarious) commentary on the limits of language even as they offer themselves as new possibilities of how words can function. This sort of reflexiveness and inquiry into the role of language and of the artist appears in a surprisingly large number of these selections.
⁵
Many of them describe individuals who are seeking a form of union and connection that will also preserve their individuality and sense of freedom. These questions, meanwhile, are frequently analogous to those of Sturgeon himself. Can he, the stories seem to be asking, find a stylistic and semiotic freedom that is not simply a meaningless cliché or incoherence? Can he find a form that will not trap him inside existing genre norms?
⁶
Can he construct a verbal, textual space where he will be free to examine those philosophical and psychological issues that prior sf (or crime, or fantasy, or western) spaces simply could not express?

One of the most obvious indications of Sturgeon’s impulse to construct a verbal space that mediates between social space and the private, inner space of the story proper is the manner in which he chooses to constantly draw attention to his own linguistic performance. Consider the following passage, which appears near the outset of “The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast”:

This sort of playful, reflexive commentary is one of the many ways that Sturgeon demonstrates his resistance to, and liberation from, the conventions concerning how one should use words to present reality. This sort of foregrounding is reinforced by a more general self-consciousness about the strange and problematic relationship between words and things—and the problematical position of human beings, who participate in both
⁷
. The end result is that throughout nearly all the selections in
The Perfect Host
readers are compelled to submit to the turbulence, or share in the delight, of Sturgeon’s mind working itself out in visibly verbal performances.