The Nail and the Oracle Read Online Free

we
can
be, but we cannot get out of our own way. Ted was the king of that disclosure. He could not cease being Sturgeon for a moment, and he was chained to the genre that was too small for him.
    (Ted once told me, and everyone I have dealt with since has toldme I’m full of shit and lying, that he
hated
the title, “A Saucer of Loneliness” that Horace Gold attached to the story before he’d even finished writing it—because UFOs were “hot” and “sexy” at that time—and that he’d originally wanted to call it just “Loneliness” and sell it to a mainstream, non-sf market. Apparently he wrote it as a straight character study, couldn’t move it—same with “Hurricane Trio” he said—and did it as Gold had suggested.)
    (Had a helluva fight with the brilliant Alan Brennert over titling “Saucer” when Alan wrote his teleplay for
The Twilight Zone
on CBS in 1985 when we worked the series together.)
    No matter how congenial, how outgoing, how familial, Ted knew way down in the gristle what Hunter Thompson identified as “… the dead end loneliness of a man who makes his own rules.” And it made for anguish because he was imprisoned in a literary gulag where there was—and continues to be—such an acceptance of mediocrity that it is as odious as a cultural cringe. And Ted wanted more. Always
more
.
    More life, more craft, more acceptance, more love, more of a shot at Posterity. Not to be categorized, seldom to be challenged, just famous enough that even when he wasn’t at top-point efficiency everyone was so in awe of him that they were incapable of slapping him around and making him work better. That kind of adulation is death to a writer as incredibly
Only
as was Theodore Sturgeon. He hungered for better, and he deserved better, but he could not get out of his own way, and so … for years and years …
    He burned, and he coveted, and he continued decanting those fiery ingots, all the while leading a life as disparate and looney as Munchausen’s. He knew love, no argument, but it was the saving transmogrification from fevers and railings against the nature of his received world. And this anecdote I want to relate—as funny as it tells now—was idiomatic of Ted’s plight.
    Here’s what happened.
    What we were doing in a Greyhound bus station, damned if I can remember. But there we were, about five of us—I think Bill Dignin was one of the group, and I seem to recall Gordy Dickson, as well. But Ted and I and the rest of these guys were going somewherechimerical, the sort of venue my Susan likes to refer to as Little Wiggly-On-Mire. And there we sat at a table waiting for our bus, chowing down on grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches, or whatever, and one of the guys nudged Ted and did a “Psst,” and indicated a guy at the counter, who was (so help me) reading the Pyramid paperback reissue of Ted’s terrific novel,
The Dreaming Jewels
(under the re-title
The Synthetic Man
). And it just tickled Ted, and he came all a-twinkle, and whispered to us, “Watch this, you’ll love it.”
    And Ted got up, sidled over to the dude, slid onto the stool next to him and, loud enough for us to hear, cozened the guy with the remark, “Watchu readin’?” and the dude absently flashed the cover, said it was something like a fantasy novel, and Ted said archly, “How can you waste your time reading such crap?”
    And we waited for the guy to defend his taste in reading matter to this impertinent buttinski. We held our breaths waiting for the guy to correct this stranger with lofty praise for what a great writer this Theodore Sturgeon was.
    The guy looked down at the book for a scant …
    Shrugged, and said, “Y’know, you’re right,” and he flipped it casually across the intervening abyss into the cavernous maw of a huge mound-shaped gray trash container. Then he paid his coffee tab, slid off the stool, and moto-vated out of the Greyhound station.
    We knew better than to laugh.
    Ted came back; and he