The Perfect Host (55 page)

What is important is basic
.

What is basic is by definition simple
.

What is complicated is therefore not important
.

See the note to “What Dead Men Tell” for more on this “codification,” which can be found almost verbatim on the third page of “Quietly.” Possibly Sturgeon’s difficulties in his relationship with Mair throughout 1948 (they eventually married, briefly, in 1949) had an impact on his ability to go on writing this novel that year.

Regarding Quietly’s efforts, when she first encounters other
humans (the girls in the lake), to recall what she had learned from her father about “the clothing convention”: Sturgeon when he wrote this was already a practicing nudist. TS to A. Bertram Chandler, 5/16/48:
When TAN (The American Nudist—Phil Klass dreamed up that cute acrostic) comes out this year I’ll do a colyum for it, the purpose of which will be to inject the light touch as far as possible … will call it THE NAKED EYE … If organized nudism could speak with the high-hearted idiom of its full membership, the outsider’s view of ‘crackpot’ and ‘fetishist’ would be quickly and forcibly revised. These are real people—a higher percentage of true values than in any other resort group I ever ran into. What else can you expect when people are forced to stand or fall on their merits as people, and not because of wealth or position or origin?

“The
Music”:
written in 1947 or early 1948; first published in Sturgeon’s story collection
E Pluribus Unicorn
in 1953.

In a letter to his Lower East Side neighbor Armand Winfield, April 12, 1948, Sturgeon wrote:
Have you made the NEUROTICA connection yet? I have a couple more suitable yarns for them, but won’t show them any more unless they evince some real interest. I have a pretty good potential spot for THE MUSIC, by the way; would appreciate NEUROTICA’s prompt report. It really is good of you to try this contact for me
.

Neurotica
was a New-York-based literary magazine, described by Ann Charters as “an early counterculture magazine.” In 1950 it printed one of Allen Ginsberg’s first published poems. This is the only instance I know of of Sturgeon attempting to be published in a literary magazine.

The original manuscript of this story is among Sturgeon’s papers and its text is identical to the 1953 book version, suggesting that when Sturgeon decided to include this unpublished piece in his second short story collection, he made no changes in what he’d written years earlier.

This story has also been published under the title “In the Hospital,” in a mystery magazine in 1962.

“Unite and Conquer”:
first published in
Astounding Science-Fiction
, October 1948. Purchased (and presumably written) in early 1948.

In the previous volume I quoted TS in 1949 saying his story “Thunder and Roses”
was written in 1947 out of a black depression caused by the uncaring reception of books like
One World or None
by a public happy to goad the United Nations into a state of yapping uselessness
. The plot/theme of “Unite and Conquer” presumably has similar origins. But to understand the historical context in which readers of
Astounding
read this novelette in 1948, it is useful to know that
One World or None
, a 1946 book by atomic scientists trying to awaken humanity to its post-Hiroshima circumstances, derived its title from a 1943 bestseller by former presidential candidate Wendell Willkie called
One World
. In Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book
No Ordinary Time
, she speaks of President Roosevelt’s “change of heart” regarding the political acceptability of discussing, while war still raged in 1943, the sort of cooperation between nations that a meaningful peace would require. “His change of heart,” writes Goodwin, “could be traced to the phenomenal success of Wendell Willkie’s book,
One World
. No book in American publishing history had ever sold so fast. Within two months of its publication, sales had reached a million copies. Based on Willkie’s travels through Russia, China, and the Middle East, the book was an eloquent plea for international cooperation to preserve the peace.” So Sturgeon in 1947 and 1948 was disappointed that an American public that had briefly shown great interest in the idea of world cooperation seemed to have lost interest only a few years after the founding of the United Nations and the dropping of the first atomic bomb. We can imagine him asking himself, What would it take for us to overcome our emotional attachment to nationalism?

“Unite and Conquer” is one of a number of Theodore Sturgeon stories (“Memorial,” 1946; “Brownshoes,” 1969; “Occam’s Scalpel,” 1971) that explore the circumstances in which one person, acting alone, might have the power to save or awaken the world. It is reasonable to assume the author identified with these protagonists. On April 22nd, 1939 he wrote to his fiancee:
Here’s another feeling I have had for years, my darling, that I may now tell you; from the
bottom of my soul I have a deep conviction that some day the consequences of something I will do or say or write are going to have a profound effect on the entire world. In what way I do not know; with what effect to me and mu
[me and you]
I do not know; but I do know that it will happen. Odd, too, since I am not generically a revolutionist …

He goes on to speak of the power of love:
What have you done to me, princess consort? Look at me now! Look at what you have given me! Look at that in which I exult! Because of you I am a Messiah. Is that too unbelievable? But what is a Messiah? He who changes a world … no? He who brings a great and gentle influence to bear on things about him. And why can I say this? Because I know that I love you as you love me, and that you have brought such a change into my world, and that therefore I have done the same for you …

When Sturgeon was asked in 1969 what authors had influenced him the most, H. G. Wells was the first name he mentioned.
Wells had something to do with it
, as Dr. Simmons tells his brother in “Unite and Conquer.”

Editor’s “blurb” atop the first page of the story in
Astounding:
OLD AS HUMAN GOVERNMENT IS THE FACT THAT A DISUNITED POPULATION WILL UNITE TO REPEL THE ALIEN INVADER. BUT THAT WAS SOMETHING THE ALIEN INVADER HADN’T COUNTED ON, PERHAPS! This story was voted best-in-the-issue in the readers’ poll, even though its competition was the first installment of one of A.E. van Vogt’s popular “Null-A” novels.

“The Love of Heaven”:
first published in
Astounding Science-Fiction
, November 1948.

In an undated letter to Judith Merril, probably mid-1949, Sturgeon talks of stories already written. One is called “Blight,” presumably his original title for this story. He refers to it as
the new mystical Sturgeon
.

A 1949 letter to TS from his young friend (and fellow sf writer) Chan Davis says, “It’s easy for me to understand why you didn’t get charged by ‘The Love of Heaven.’ Some of the things that are best
about it are things you do automatically, tho not usually so well: The correctness of the characters’ attitudes & reactions; the justeness of the mots (particularly the alien’s groping for words, which is something most writers can’t do convincingly); the careful plot completely in accord with the logic of the situation. On this last point, the most impressively correct angle was the fact that the alien clearly didn’t realize himself when he left that his people wd come back to Earth, yet the reader can see that they’ll have to, & why, & how. Some of the things that aren’t so good you did automatically too: The episode of the dog, which
sounded
automatic; & the excessive superness of the alien. I wonder how the story wd have turned out if you’d been in love with it the way you’ve been with some of your good stories (& some of your bad ones).”

The word “Dalinese” in the description of the stranger departing in his matter transmitter is a reference to the surrealist painter Salvador Dali. Dali was a hero of Sturgeon’s, a kind of role-model. In July 1944, TS wrote to his mother, about Dali’s illustrated autobiography,
The Secret Life of Salvador Dali: It is totally unlike anything I have ever read, and the illustrations are really out of this world. It is full of the strangest kind of bragging, the most incredible sexual motivations, and glimpses of sane, cool beauty that make you gasp for breath. Some of it is riotous. He tells on himself—I might say he kisses and tells on himself, with more accuracy—and throughout he dares you to call him crazy, or a braggart, or anything else. In every instance he’s beaten you to it, particularly when you finally find out just how much salt to use and admit to yourself that he is a genius
.

Magazine blurb: FOR THEM, THE LOVE OF THE WORLDLY THINGS AND THE LOVE OF HEAVEN WERE MUCH ALIKE—AND IN THAT THEY WERE FOREVER UNTOUCHABLE!

“Till Death Do Us Join”:
first published in
Shock
, July 1948. Written early 1948. Sturgeon’s original title was “The Rivals.”

TS to his mother, 7/6/48:
Sold a story to new magazine recently which was a honey; the magazine was just what I’ve been looking for for years, ever since UNKNOWN folded. This one did too …
A
letter to TS from Erik Fennel, who apparently had also been writing for the magazine, says, “That’s tough about SHOCK. Damn it, that was a good pulp with a novel slant, and was actually beginning to pull away from a few of the usual taboos and make something of itself. It must have been rough on you, having it blow in your face that way.” July 1948 was the final issue of the magazine.

In his 1953 essay “Why So Much Syzygy?” Sturgeon lists some of the different “investigations” into “this matter of love, sexual and asexual” that he has attempted in stories over the years, and says:
In “Until Death Do Us Join
[sic]
it was the murderous jealousy between two personalities in a schizophrenic, both in love with the same girl
. He notes that:
“Bianca’s Hands” and “The World Well Lost” cause the violently extreme reactions they do because of the simple fact that the protagonist was happy with the situation. No one was churned up (in these areas) by “Until Death Do Us Join” because the crazy mixed-up little guy was killed in the end
.

Magazine blurb: SANDRA WAS HAUNTED BY THE CHAMELEON MAN WHO STOLE A MARCH ON PAUL—AND TOOK THEM TO A MIDNIGHT FUNERAL.

“The Perfect Host”:
first published in
Weird Tales
, November 1948.

In a letter to his mother in the fall of 1948, TS wrote,
Something very nice happened to me yesterday. I have an outlet for the literary forms of my catharses, the doughty WEIRD TALES, which doesn’t pay much but leaves its gates open to such mouthings as I put out from time to time when I feel that way. I had the lead in the November issue this year, a yarn called THE PERFECT HOST. In one sequence a man grieved for his wife, and I got a letter yesterday from South Africa containing a poem, an epitaph for the girl. It was a bit crude, but nicely put together; at the third reading I realized that the poet, one Desmond Bagley, had put the whole thing together, almost without alteration, with lines from the story. It is good to feel that something of one’s own can have not only reflective, but creative and recreative effects
.

So we may thank the open gates of
Weird Tales
for giving Theodore Sturgeon the freedom to experiment with form and style—
to start with, “The Perfect Host” is a narrative told powerfully and effectively from eight different points of view, in eight very different voices—in ways that would have enormous impact on almost every writer of science fiction and fantasy during the next five decades.

“Because of Sturgeon other writers have been freer to write what they wished to write and able to find a market for it.”—James Gunn, in
Alternate Worlds, The Illustrated History of Science Fiction
(1975).

“The most important science fiction writer of the forties was probably Theodore Sturgeon.… What Sturgeon did was to keep open the possibility for a kind of science fiction that eventually many others came to do.… In his use of style, internalization and quirky characterization he was keeping the door open for everything that happened after 1950. If Sturgeon had not established that the literature could be style-oriented … no basis would have existed upon which writers within the field could build.”—Barry Malzberg, in
The Engines of the Night
(1982).

Commenting on Sturgeon’s 1952 story “The Sex Opposite,” James Blish complained that Sturgeon was writing too many stories about “syzygy” (defined in that story as
a non-sexual interflow between the nuclei of two animals
) and said Sturgeon had already handled the subject “definitively” in “The Perfect Host.” In a 1953 letter to the editor of the magazine Blish’s comments appeared in, Sturgeon quoted the editor as having said, “without sexual pleasure there would be no passionate attachments between humans,” and then wrote:
I think that in “Bianca’s Hands” and “The Perfect Host” and in “The World Well Lost,” and in the remarks just quoted, we have sufficient material for the tentative establishment of a lowest common denominator
[in Sturgeon’s fiction].

“Sturgeon’s failures, some of them, are as triumphant as his successes; they made the successes. Sturgeon is the most accomplished technician this field has produced, bar nobody, not even Bradbury; and part of the reason is that he never stops working at it. He tried writing about each character in a story in a different meter once—iambs for one, trochees for another—a trick, not viable, but it taught him something about rhythm in prose.”—Damon Knight, in
In Search of Wonder, Essays on Modern Science Fiction
.

Like such related stories as “Blabbermouth” and “Ghost of a Chance” (see Volume III of
The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon
), “The Perfect Host” blurs the line between fantasy and science fiction by firmly portraying the parasitic entity referred to in the title as a real (i.e., “scientific”) energy creature which cohabits our physical as well as psychological universe. This is the basic Sturgeon theme: what is love? what is guilt? what is jealousy? what is curiosity? what is the gestalt “we” that empowers and oppresses humans? His answers always conjecture a science fictional universe in which these forces are living entities subject to physical laws, and even capable of interacting with the story’s characters or even, in this case, with the story’s readers. Not only does Sturgeon break the “fifth wall” between playwright and audience in section 7 of this story (becoming a sort of character in the story himself), he goes further in section 8, breaking a sixth wall by warning the reader that he or she may already have become infected by the parasite just by reading this far. Of course he had already made a similar radical leap and warning in the opening lines of “It Wasn’t Syzygy” (1947). Sturgeon like Philip K. Dick doesn’t just entertain the reader with fantastic tales, but actually corrupts/invades his or her reality. Metafiction indeed.