Ellison Still Angry, Still Writing

Harlan Ellison still angry, still writing at 81
   By Nat Segaloff   Advocate correspondent   

 Harlan Ellison is still an angry young man, except he’ll be 81 on May 27. He has used this anger, fueled by childhood anti-Semitism, throughout his extraordinary career as a writer of speculative fiction. This year saw the publication of his 116th and 117th (so far) books: The Top of the Volcano, a collection of his awardwinning short stories, and a graphic novelization of his original script for “The City on the Edge of Forever,” widely considered the best Star Trek episode ever written.Although Ellison’s hundreds of published stories contain a wealth of Jewish characters, his most complex creation is Ellison himself. Born in Cleveland Heights, Ohio in 1934 and raised in nearby Painesville, “We were not very Jewish,” he said of his family. “I was a Shabbos Jew. We were Jewish when it came to the High Holy Days. The rest of the time, the only time Jewishness was brought up was when somebody called somebody a kike and there had been a fight. And that was usually me.”Although his surname derives Biblically from “Eli’s son” and his family (father, Louis; mother, Serita; and sister, Beverly) considered themselves assimilated, that assessment was not shared by tenyear old Harlan’s Midwestern peers. “I was the only Jewish kid in town for a long while until the Millers and the Rogats moved in,” he said with a tinge of bitterness. He recalled the time his grammar school teacher “picked me up and brought me back inside to the nurse’s station after [bullies] had beaten me up for being a Jew.” He was in so many school fights, “that the seat outside the principal’s office conformed to my rear end.” Ellison has drawn on his combative childhood for his fiction. In “One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty” (1970), in which a blocked writer returns to his past, he names his grade school (Lathrop Elementary), visits his home (89 Harmon Drive), and cites his major antagonist ( Jack Wheeldon) for the world to read. In “Final Schtick” (1960), he brings his narrator back to Lainesville (sic) to accept an award from a town he intends to lambaste. And in “In the Fourth Year of the War” (1979), he finally gets back at the nasty neighbor who had his dog euthanized 35 years earlier. For Ellison, the cold dish of revenge isn’t complete unless it’s served up with razor blades. As he likes to put it, “I’m still working off grudges from 1951.”It’s things like these that have earned Ellison the reputation as a fractious, aggressive person. A more generous appraisal is that he is acutely sensitive to the world’s wrongs and is impatient, if not intolerant, if other people don’t share his ire. He might not agree, but the ethic of collective guilt and individual responsibility is an exquisitely Jewish notion.Like any good Jewish son, Ellison had a Jewish mother. Serita Ellison survived her husband by 27 years, all of which were spent trying to figure out her increasingly famous author-screenwriterlecturer son.“If something happened that was adventurous,” he says, “I would tell my mother. My mother would be very pleased, but I’m not quite sure she realized what it meant. She was more concerned with ‘Was I healthy? Was I working? Was I happily married? Was I unhappily married?’ She would come and visit me and tidy up the house. She was a regular Jewish mama.” An autodidact, Ellison took pleasure in lecturing at hundreds of colleges that he never attended. The only person happier at his countless college appearances was Serita. “The moment I made my mother proud of me was when she came up from Florida in the middle of winter and was sitting in when I spoke at Yale. People would come up and present one of my books to her and would say, ‘Would you sign my book?’ My mother was in heaven. Afterward, we walked in the snow to a luncheon with a group of eminent scientists and she said, ‘I’m very proud of you.’ I swelled twelve times my size. I had made my mother proud.”Ellison has been married five times, with only the first and fourth to Jewish women. His fifth and lasting (nearly 30 years) marriage was in 1986 to Susan Toth. The couple lives in an ornate structure modestly called the Lost Aztec Temple of Mars, atop a mountain overlooking a land preserve in Sherman Oaks, California. He still gets angry occasionally, but, with most of his enemies dead, he has the satisfaction that they are now somebody else’s problem. Former Boston film critic and TV producer Nat Segaloff ’s biography of Harlan Ellison is forthcoming. Ellison’s titles can be purchased at www.HarlanEllisonBooks.com