"Harlan Ellison - Paingod & Other Delusions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

eighteen years and I keep getting these letters, and I keep listening to people, and at times it’s too much to handle. If
you don’t know what I’m talking about, go read Nathanael West’s MISS LONELYHEARTS.
And so I write these introductions, what my friend and the brilliant writer Avram Davidson calls “going naked
in the world.” Avram wrote me recently and, in the course of taking me to task for something he believed I had done
wrong, he more-than-mildly castigated me for dumping it all on paper. Well, he’s not the first, and from time to time I’ve
considered never writing another of these self-examinations. But Irwin Shaw said, “A man does not write one novel at
a time or one play at a time or even one quatrain at a time. He is engaged in the long process of putting his whole life
on paper. He is on a journey and he is reporting in: ‘This is where I think I am and this is what this place looks like
today.’ “
This report, then, is about pain. The subject is very much with me. My mother had another heart attack, and
the general topic of mortality obsesses me these days. We will all die, no reprieve. A beautiful young lady of my
acquaintance, who happens to be an accomplished astrologer, told me (though she knows I don’t believe in astrology)
that my chart says I’m going to die by being beheaded. Terrific remark. She told it to me one night when we were out
on a date, and she was surprised that I turned out to be no goddam good in bed that night.
Well, she needn’t have been so surprised; I know I’m going to buy the farm one day, sooner or later
depending on how much I run my mouth in dangerous situations. But it isn’t death that bothers me, it’s dying alone.
So I think about pain, and I present you with this group of stories that say a little something about what I’ve
learned on the subject. They may not be terribly deep or illuminating, just some random thoughts I’ve had through the
years. A few of them seem funny, and they were intended so because I think the only things that get us through the
pain are laughter and the promise of love to come. At least he possibility of it. But each one of them has some special
pain in it, and I urge you to seek it out, through the chuckles and the bug-eyed aliens and the what-if furniture that
makes these stories not sermons.
Because there’s only one thing that links us as human beings: the universality of our pain and the
commonality of our need to go out bravely.

Harlan Ellison
9 November 74
Introduction to First Edition: SPERO MELIORA: From the Vicinity of
Alienation
THIS IS MY ELEVENTH BOOK. (It should have been thirteen, counting the one I did under a pseudonym for a
schlock publisher because I needed the money some years ago, but number twelve was a false start Avram Davidson
and myself wish had never happened and fortunately never got into print, and thirteen is a book of short stories no
one seems constitutionally capable of publishing, and which seems well on its way to becoming an “underground
classic” for those who have read it in manuscript form.) That doesn’t seem too bad, for thirty years; twenty of which
were spent in learning on which end of this particular body the head was attached.
Very nearly all of the past ten books have had some sort of introduction or prologue by myself. I have the
feeling it is necessary to know what a writer stands for, in what he believes, what it takes to make him bleed, before a
reader should be asked to care about what the writer has written. This is patently foolish. B. Traven writes eloquently,
feelingly, brilliantly, yet he is an unknown quantity. Wilde’s life contradicts most of what he wrote. Shaw and Dickens
and Stendahl were virtually anonymous in their seminal, important years, yet what they wrote remains keen and true
and valid. Granted, the philosophy of “love me, love my writing” is my problem. Still, it is the one to which I pander,
and so each of my books has had some viscera-revealing treatise at the opening, from which the usual reader reaction
has been total revulsion and a mind-boggling reeling-back in disbelief. I have the unseemly habit of going naked into
the world. It comes from a seamy desire on my part not only to be a Great Writer, but to Be Adored as well.
There is no introduction this time. I’m tired.
This is my first hook in over two years. (In early 1962 I came out to Hollywood, as part of a package deal that
involved dismembering a marriage and fracturing a small but intense group of lives. I’ve been here over three years, as
this is written, and I’ve been busy making a decent living in television and feature films to do much book work. And I
cry a lot.)
I hit thirty-one last May; I turned around, and I’d grown up. I knew Santa Claus was a winehead who spent