"Harlan Ellison - Pa" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

INTRODUCTION

What better to lure you into these unholy partnerships than a righteous tumble down a rabbit hole? Sheckley for
openers. Alone, by himself, unaided, he is certainly deranged. In company with your humble ellisonian guide. he runs
thoroughly amuck.
He came out to visit me in H*O*L *L*Y*W*O*O*D on some nefarious fiddlefoot journey--one of the many
wanderings that constitute Sheck’s only discernible vice--and one late afternoon we wound up in my Camaro,
whipping and skinning across Mulholland’s snake, the rear seat filled With a gaggle of teen-aged gigglers I was ferrying
somewhere for some now-forgotten reason.
It was impossible to talk to them; even Mary, my close friend in Women’s Lib, would not object to my
calling these girls, girls: not women. They were just-God forgive me-pretty meat. And I had to take them somewhere,
so I was doing it, and Sheck was in the front bucket next to me, and to pass the time, we started rapping a story plot.
Not seriously, you understand, just one of those lunatic conversations into which one falls with Bob as a matter of
course: if we could sweep the beach clean with brooms, how many years would it take; if trolley cars had wings,
would elephants have overhead runners; is Amelia Earhart living in sin in Guatemala with Ambrose Bierce and Judge
Crater; why do women put the toilet paper in the wall roller backward; if you could shrink people down to the size
of walnuts, could you’ solve the population explosion by building and stocking a city the size of New York in
Disneyland, right?
None of the conversations ever mean a damn thing. They are just crazy raps between Sheck and whomever
he happens to have snagged.
But this time, for some inexplicable reason, by the time we had driven all the way across Mulholland, down
Laurel Canyon, and were emerging on Sunset Boulevard, we had worked out a fairly complex, thoroughly mad story
line.
“Tell me, Bob,” I said, from behind the wheel, in my best W. C. Fields voice, “what do you see as a title for
this masterpiece?”
“I see a man sitting on a chair, and the chair is biting his leg,” he replied, thinking himself too cute for words.
“Then that’ll be the title,” I said, calling his bluff. And it was. And it is.
No one was more shocked than Sheck. For no matter how crazy a writer gets, there is always another writer
just a little crazier.
After performing various hideous obscenities on the nubile persons of the backseat gigglers, I dropped the
young ladies off, joined Bob in a hearty lunch at the Old World, and we dashed back to my house in the hills to start
the story.
Sheck began the writing. His first assault runs from the opening sentence to the description of the
TexasTower, ending with the paragraph whose last phrase is, “it was a marvel.” I took over then, and wrote to the
time-break after Pareti and Peggy Flinn have had sex and Pareti goes to sleep. We alternated sections from that point
on.
But! Aha! You think it was that easy, that we just whipped on through, alternating sections? No. After we
had finished the first draft, at a total wordage that now escapes me, I went back and did a full rewrite. And then
Sheck went over my rewrite and did a final polish, so that the version you now have before you is inextricably
interwoven with both of us in each other’s sections. For instance, in the fourth paragraph, the Eskimo-slit glasses are
mine, but the Indians of Patzcuaro are his.
We wrote for forty-eight hours straight, napping fitfully while the other wrote. Ladies of my acquaintance
appeared from time to time and cooked us food and sulked at the growing rudeness of our manner as our nerves
frayed and the story grew. Finally, it was done. I did a retype of the manuscript, adding a fillip here and an Ausable
Chasm there.
When it was done, we both collapsed and let someone else mail it out to Ed Ferman at the Magazine of
Fantasy &; Science Fiction, and we slept round-the-clock.
In collaborating, unless there is a specific reason for the styles to be identifiably different, I try to adapt my
writing to the manner of my co-author. In the case of Sheckley, it meant I had to start thinking like a brain damage
case. Consequently, I make no brief for the logic or sanity of this story. Further, deponent saith not.