"Harlan Ellison - Stalking the Nightmare" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

My wife begins to scream and roll around on the floor, foaming, pulling her hair out in great clots, drumming
her heels, crying out: “I WANT A DIVORCE! THIS MAN HAS CORRUPTED MY CHILDREN AND I W ANT A
FUCKING DIVORCE!”
My heart glows with the warmth of fulfillment (or maybe it’s just acid indigestion). My mother’s homilies
have slipped into the minds of yet another generation, just as chemical waste has a way of seeping into the
water-table. I think: Ah-hah-hah-hah! Another triumph for us bog-cutters! Long live the Irish!
Another of this wonderful woman’s wonderful sayings (I told you--I got a million of ‘em; don’t make me
prove it) was. “Milk always takes the flavor of what’s next to it in the icebox.” Not a very useful saying, you might
think, but I suspect it’s not only the reason I’m writing this introduction, but the reason I’m writing it the way I’m
writing it.
Does it sound like Harlan wrote it? It does?
That’s because I just finished the admirable book which follows. For the last four days I have been, so to
speak, sitting next to Harlan in the icebox. I am not copying his style; nothing as low as that. I have, rather, taken a
brief impression of his style, the way that, when we were kids, we used to be able to take a brief impression of Beetle
Bailey or Blondie from the Sunday funnies with a piece of Silly Putty (headline in the New York Times Book Review:
KING OFFERS EERILY APT METAPHOR FOR HIS OWN MIND!!).
How do I know this is what has happened? I know because I have been writing hard for about twenty-five
years now--which means (as Harlan, or Ray Bradbury, or John Crowley, or any other writer worth his or her salt will tell
you) that I have also been reading hard. The two go together. I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be
writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they “don’t have time to read.” This is like a guy starting
up Mount Everest saying that he “didn’t have time to buy any rope or pitons.”
And part of the dues you pay while you’re doing this hard reading, particularly if you start your period of
hard writing as a teenager (as most of us did--God knows there are exceptions, but not many), is that you find yourself
writing like whoever you’re reading that week. If you’re reading RED NAILS, your current short story sounds like that
old Hyborian Cowboy, Robert E. Howard. If you’ve been reading FAREWELL, MY LOVELY, your stuff sounds like
Raymond Chandler. You’re milk, and you taste like whatever was next to you in the refrigerator that week.
But this is where the metaphor breaks down... or where it ought to. If it doesn’t, you’re in serious trouble.
Because a writer isn’t a carton of milk--or at least he or she shouldn’t be. Because a writer shouldn’t continue to take
the flavors of the people he or she is currently reading. Because a writer who doesn’t start sounding like himself
sooner or later really isn’t much of a writer at all; he’s a ventriloquist’s dummy. But take heart--little by little, that voice
usually comes out. It’s not easy, and it’s not quick (that’s one of the reasons that so many people who talk about
writing books never do), but there comes a day when you look back on the stuff you wrote when you were
seventeen... or twenty-two... or twenty-eight... and say to yourself, Good God! If I was this bad. how did I ever get any
better?
They don’t call that stuff “juvenilia” for nothing, friends’n neighbors.
The imitativeness shakes out, and we become ourselves again. But. One never seems to develop an immunity
to some writers... or at least I never have. Their ranks are small, but their influence--at least on this here New England
white boy--has been profound. When I go back to them, I can’t not imitate them. My letters start sounding like them;
my short stories; a chunk of whatever novel I’m working on, maybe; even grocery lists.
 Lovecraft. Raymond Chandler (and, at second hand, Ross Macdonald and Robert Parker). Dorothy Sayers,
who wrote the clearest, most lucid prose of our century. Peter Straub.
And Ellison. That’s really where it hews to the bone, I guess. When you take it right back down home, you
come to this: the man is a ferociously talented writer, ferociously in love with the job of writing stories and essays,
ferociously dedicated to the craft of it as well as its art--the latter being the part of the job with which writers who have
been to college most frequently excuse laziness, sloppiness, cant, and promiscuous self-indulgence.
There are folks in the biz who don’t like Harlan much. I don’t think I’m telling you anything you don’t know;
if you know Phantasia Press, whose imprint this book bears, then you probably know enough about speculative
fiction to know that. These anti-Harlan folks offer any number of reasons for their dislike, but I believe that a lot of it
has to do with that ferocity. Harlan is the sort of guy who makes an ordinary writer feel like a dilettante, and an
ordinary liver (i.e., one who lives, not a bodily organ which will develop cirrhosis if you pour too much booze over it)