L.Q. Jones – Blood and Porridge

May 28, 2024June 7, 2024

The writer on the edge of forever

I’ve just discovered that yesterday, May 27^th, would have been the 90^th birthday of writer Harlan Ellison. I don’t know if nowadays I’d describe Ellison as one of my all-time favourite writers, but he was certainly a massive influence on me when I was growing up and trying to write stuff myself. Here’s an updated version of something I wrote about him in 2018, just after he’d passed away at the age of 84.

Harlan Ellison was often categorised as a science-fiction writer, although he once memorably warned anyone who called him a science-fiction writer that he would come to their house and ‘nail’ their ‘pet’s head to a coffee table’. In his lifetime the Cleveland-born Ellison authored some 1800 stories, scripts, reviews, articles and opinion pieces, but it’s as a short story writer that he was best known. In fact, when he was in his prime, from the 1960s to 1980s, he was responsible for some of the boldest and most exhilarating short stories I’d yet come across. He seemed to push both his imagination and his writing energies to the very limit.

Describing his stories is difficult, but the nearest comparison I can think of is the fiction of Ray Bradbury. However, Ellison’s work also had counter-cultural and radical political tones that encompassed both the idealism of the 1960s’ civil rights movement and Summer of Love and the cynicism and despair that came with the Vietnam War and, in the 1970s, Watergate. His short stories frequently contained a palpable anger too. Yes, Ellison had a lot of anger in him. More on that in a minute.

By focusing on his short stories, I don’t wish to denigrate his occasional novels. Indeed, I’d rank 1961’s Spider Kiss alongside Iain Banks’ Espedair Street (1987) and John Niven’s Kill Your Friends (2008) as one of the best rock ‘n’ roll novels ever.

Ellison wasn’t a big name in the UK but in the 1970s – perfectly timed for my development as a teenager – Britain’s Pan Books brought out editions of several of his short story collections, like The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World (1969), Approaching Oblivion (1974) and Deathbird Stories (1975). All had gorgeously psychedelic covers by (I think) the artist Bob Layzell. It’s fair to say that my 14 or 15-year-old mind was blown by them.

© Pan Books

I also loved how Ellison prefaced each story with a short essay describing how it had come into being. These pieces gave insight not only into his combative personality but also into the rich life-experiences he’d had, or claimed to have had. Before establishing himself as a writer he’d been, among other things, a truck driver transporting nitro-glycerine, a hired gun and a tuna fisherman. This inspired me when I was a budding writer to try my hand at different jobs and build up my experiences, though the stuff I ended up doing – stacking shelves in Sainsbury’s, working in a shoe warehouse, serving as a warden at Aberdeen Youth Hostel – was rather less glamorous than the items on Ellison’s CV.

Some of his work also appeared on television, although TV was a medium he generally had a low opinion of. In a 2013 interview he accused it and other modern forms of entertainment and communication of having “reduced society to such a trivial, crippled form that it is beyond my notice.”

For instance, he scripted the 1967 Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever, which has Captain Kirk, Mr Spock and Dr McCoy catapulted back in time to 1930s America and confronted with an agonising time-travel-related moral dilemma. Do they intervene in an accident and prevent the death of a woman called Edith Keeler who (despite being played by Joan Collins) is a noble political activist dedicated to peace, pacifism and public service and with whom, predictably, William Shatner’s horn-dog Captain Kirk has fallen in love; or do they let her die, which means her political movement won’t gain power in the USA, delay her country’s entry into World War II and allow the Nazis to become masters of humanity, which will happen otherwise?

Thanks to its inventive and thought-provoking spin on time travel, The City… is the best episode of the original series of Star Trek. In fact, as I don’t like any of the later TV incarnations of Star Trek, I’d say it’s the best Star Trek episode, full stop. Ellison, however, was unimpressed with how the show’s producer Gene Rodenberry and his writing staff rewrote his script and watered down some of its themes and was never slow to sound off about it afterwards. It may be significant that his later short story How’s the Night Life on Cissalda? (1977) features William Shatner attempting to make love to a revolting-looking alien creature. Shatner’s toupee falls off in the process.

© Desilu Productions

More time-travelling figures in the Ellison-penned episodes Demon with a Glass Hand and Soldier that he wrote for the TV anthology show The Outer Limits (1963-65). Years later, he was incensed at what he saw as plagiarism of elements of his Soldier script by James Cameron while he was making the first Terminator movie in 1984. Ellison threatened to sue and got a payment of 65-70,000 dollars from Cameron’s financiers and an acknowledgement on The Terminator’s credits. By 2014 Ellison had mellowed to the point where he could see the funny side of it. He played himself in an episode of The Simpsons in which he gets into an argument with Milhouse Van Houten. When Millhouse comments, “I wish someone would have come from the future and warned me not to talk to you,” Ellison grabs him by the throat and screams, “That’s my idea!”

In fact, Ellison was highly litigious. After discovering his writing, I found an interview with him in an American magazine called Future Life where he talked about suing Paramount Television for stealing an idea of his, about a robot policeman and a human one who are partnered together, and turning it into a TV show called Future Cop (1976-78). “We’re going to nail their asses to the barn door!” he declared in the interview. Later, when I was playing rugby for my school and while we were trying to psych ourselves up against our opponents, I inadvertently let slip with Ellison’s phrase: “We’re going to nail their asses to the barn door!” I exclaimed. That earned me some strange looks from my teammates. Nailing asses to barn doors was not part of the common vernacular on south-of-Scotland rugby pitches.

I can honestly say that for a period when I was a teenager, Harlan Ellison, with his mind-bending fiction, his braggadocio, his adventurous backstory and his take-no-shit-from-anyone attitude was the person I wanted to be. Of course, as I grew older and became less impressionable and more mature, and learned more about Ellison, that changed. I began to appreciate that Ellison’s persona involved a fair bit of self-mythologizing, egotism and unwarranted bloody-mindedness. When Stephen King observed that he knew one writer who was convinced that Ellison was the reincarnation of Jonathan Swift and another writer who referred to him as a ‘son-of-a-bitch’, I found myself in sympathy with both viewpoints.

And by the time I read a profile of him in a non-fiction book called Dream Makers (1980), written by Charles Platt, I was disappointed but somehow unsurprised to encounter a character rather too driven by vanity and rather too desperate to impress. Ellison and Platt later fell out badly, violently it’s said, though not as far as I know about the Dream Makers profile.

Also falling out with Ellison was the late English writer Christopher Priest, who took issue with Ellison’s editorship of the Dangerous Visions series of science fiction anthologies in the early 1970s. There was supposed to be a third volume in the series but for reasons known only to Ellison himself it never appeared, leaving a lot of commissioned stories in limbo and depriving a lot of authors of potential earnings. This seems hypocritical of Ellison, considering how famously touchy he was about payment for his own work – he’s said to have once mailed a wayward publisher ‘213 bricks’ and a ‘dead gopher’ as a protest. Priest even wrote a short, investigative book about Dangerous Visions 3’s non-appearance, inevitably entitled The Book on the Edge of Forever (1994). Priest’s website notes how an anonymous review of his book on Amazon, headlined Mean-Spirited Jealousy and giving it one star, “bears all the hallmarks of Mr Ellison’s own unmistakable style: florid overstatement and a fog of half-truths intended to cloud the issue. Well worth a visit to witness the great man in action, a rare sight!”

© Fantagraphics Books

And although Ellison was a vocal supporter of the USA’s Equal Rights Amendment, much of that good work was undone in 2006 when he groped the writer Connie Willis onstage at an awards ceremony. I’ve seen a clip of the incident and am inclined to think Ellison believed he was indulging in some harmless japery, but that’s not to say he wasn’t massively disrespectful towards Willis and didn’t make a colossal arse of himself. He also did himself no favours when, after he’d issued an apology – one commentator described it as something that “could only loosely be construed by a chimpanzee whacked on smack as an apology” – and after Willis hadn’t acknowledged it, he ranted abusively about her on his official message board.

Still, as I came to know the artist’s failings, and revised my opinion of him, I focused more on the quality of the art itself. And with Ellison, some of that art was amazing. Here’s a list of ten of his short stories that bowled me over when I read them.

Delusion for a Dragon Slayer (1966). An unremarkable little man suddenly finds his soul transplanted into the body of a Conan-the-Barbarian-type swordsman in a blood-and-thunder fantasy land. What follows is a merciless dissection of the inadequacies of the nerdy males who read sword-and-sorcery stories. I actually write sword-and-sorcery stories, so I’m allowed to make sweeping generalisations like that.

Pretty Maggie Money Eyes (1967). This sad, haunting story is about a woman’s spirit inhabiting a Las Vegas slot machine and the down-on-his-luck gambler whom she – possibly – takes pity on.

© LQ / Jaf Productions

A Boy and His Dog (1969). A post-apocalyptic satire that’s a spot-on blend of anarchy and irreverence, featuring as its main character a young hoodlum and an intelligent, telepathic and sarcastic canine. It was filmed in 1975 by L.Q. Jones, with a youthful Don Johnson in the lead (human) role. Though the movie version isn’t perfect, it still holds up better than a lot of other, more portentous sci-fi films made in the same decade.

Along the Scenic Route (1969). A biting analysis of the relationship between Americans and their cars, Scenic Route details how a couple out for a leisurely drive end up competing in a lethal demolition derby. It prefigures a lot of ‘dystopian-vehicle’ movies like Death Race 2000 (1975) and the Mad Max ones.

One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty (1970). Another of Ellison’s time-travel tales, this grippingly melancholic one is about a man going back in time and befriending his younger self while he’s a bullied, insecure child.

Bleeding Stones (1973). This is quite simply a story that made my jaw drop with its combination of brutality, blasphemy and surrealism.

© Pan Books

Hindsight: 480 Seconds (1973). End-of-the-world stories are a dime-a-dozen in science fiction, but the brilliantly simple yet elegiac concept behind this one has always stayed with me. It’s about a poet who volunteers to stay on an about-to-be-destroyed earth after the rest of humanity have been evacuated, so that he can provide a commentary on his planet’s dying minutes.

I’m Looking for Kadak (1974). This Kurt-Vonnegut-meets-Woody-Allen-type comedy is about the tribulations facing a group of blue, eleven-armed aliens on a far-flung planet who’ve converted to Judaism. The minyan – quorum – for communal Jewish worship is ten, and they want to sit shiva, i.e., conduct the rituals of mourning for a departed friend. The problem is that there’s now only nine of them on the planet. So the hero sets off on an epic quest to find a long-lost Jew, Kadak, in the hope he’ll serve as the tenth.

Shatterday (1975). In this unsettling tale, a man accidentally phones his own apartment one evening and finds himself talking to himself. In fact, this other self is a sinister doppelganger who’s appeared from nowhere and is planning to usurp him from his existence.

Count the Clock That Tells the Time (1979). Taking its title from a sonnet by William Shakespeare, this describes how a lethargic never-do-well gets trapped in a weird, ghostly netherworld. It’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of wasting time and frittering your life away – something you couldn’t accuse the famously prolific Ellison of doing.

So, thank you for the entertainment and the inspiration, Mr E. May you rest in un-cantankerous and non-litigious peace.

© Pan Books

July 28, 2022July 28, 2022

First men in the moon

© Carolco Pictures / Tri-Star

One of the depressing things about being in your (later) middle years is that the people who were your heroes in your youth start to die with an alarming frequency. Yes, they’ve become old and this is to be expected, but it’s still depressing. This month has seen the departures of Alan Grant, the Scottish comic-book writer whose career took him from DC Thomson in Dundee to DC Comics in America, and who played a big role in shaping Judge Dredd, the signature character and strip of 2000AD, my favourite comic, as well as writing stories for Strontium Dog, Robo–Hunter and Batman; of the actor L.Q. Jones, who was best known for appearing in American western movies and TV shows of the 1950s and 1960s and was one of the very last, recognisable ‘cowboy actors’ still alive; and of the wonderful English character-actor David Warner, about whom I wrote this blog-entry on his 80^th birthday last year. By a sad coincidence, Jones and Warner were also the final survivors of the repertoire who worked with director Sam Peckinpah in a string of classic movies.

And July 2022 saw the death of director Bob Rafelson, whose credits include Head (1968), Five Easy Pieces (1971) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981). By way of a tribute, here’s a slightly updated piece I wrote eight years ago about a Rafelson movie that, I felt, had unfairly disappeared under the radar – 1990’s Mountains of the Moon.

Some of you may be old enough to remember the heyday of Ladybird Books, a company that published children’s books emphasising the educational, the wholesome and the patriotic. The library at my primary school was stuffed full of them. Their historical tomes were given special prominence on the shelves. These dealt with famous figures in British history like Admiral Nelson, Captain Cook, Florence Nightingale and David Livingstone and painted glowing and sanitised portraits of them.

These historical characters, according to Ladybird, were fine, upstanding and virtuous, qualities that British people had traditionally prided themselves on having. Also, the establishment they represented, back in the days of British imperialism and the British Empire, was by extension a fine, upstanding and virtuous thing too. Needless to say, Ladybird Books didn’t trouble the minds of its young readers with such topics as Admiral Nelson’s dalliance with Mrs Emma Hamilton, or Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer’s orchestration of the Amritsar Massacre in 1919, or indeed Winston Churchill’s opinions of Afghans, the ‘feeble-minded’, women, Jews, Trade Unionists, the Irish, Indians and using chemical weapons.

And yet… I can understand anyone, at a young age, being enthusiastic about the damned things. In my childhood, I loved the Ladybird history books because they served up two things that were vital for a kid: heroes and adventures. Never mind the fact that they overlooked the moral complexities of character and the moral ambiguities of history. It was simply, viscerally exciting to read about people who were, supposedly, both incredibly decent and incredibly brave, setting off to perform feats of derring-do in a world that, a couple of centuries ago, seemed full of danger and mystery.

This brings me in a roundabout way to Mountains of the Moon, the Bob Rafelson-directed movie from 1990, which tells the story of Victorian explorers Richard Burton and John Speke and their 1857 expedition to find the source of the River Nile. I suspect the reason I like this film so much is because it lets me have my cake and eat it. On one hand, it offers a tale of British historical adventure that’s as thrilling as anything in the old Ladybird Books. On the other hand, it’s critical of the British Empire and the people who ran it. You can enjoy the exploits of the two protagonists as they battle their way past peril after peril but, simultaneously, you don’t have to feel guilty for doing so.

Mind you, I don’t ever remember seeing a Ladybird volume dedicated to Sir Richard Francis Burton, despite the fact that Burton, as his Wikipedia entry puts it, was a ‘geographer, explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer, Egyptologist and diplomat’ and spoke 29 languages, including Icelandic, Swahili, Amharic, Sanskrit and Hebrew. The lack of a Ladybird biography on Burton may be down to Burton’s fascination with the sexual practices of the many cultures he visited, which ‘led him to take measurements of the lengths of the sexual organs of male inhabitants of various regions which he included in his travel books’; or to the rumour that during his military career he once went ‘undercover to investigate a male brothel reputed to be frequented by British soldiers’. Less salaciously, Burton was simply a loose cannon. His unruly reputation prevented him from being promoted to the very heights of the British establishment, either as a soldier or as a diplomat.

In the Mountains of the Moon, Burton is played by Irish actor Patrick Bergin. From the movie’s opening scenes – when we see Burton have a spear thrust his mouth by some natives in Somalia, a mishap that’d deter most other people from ever wanting to set foot beyond their front gate again, but with Burton seems only to enflame his passion further for travel and exploration – Bergin does a good job of capturing the man’s versatility, unpredictability and boundless energy. Indeed, if there’s one thing the film conveys beautifully, it’s the glorious insanity that propels Burton and Speke into the unknown, determined to make sense of it; whilst enduring hardships, indignities and degradations a million miles removed from the cosy, cloistered lives they led in upper-class Victorian Britain. During the 1857 expedition, Speke – who in Mountains of the Moon is played by Iain Glen – is almost driven mad by beetles crawling into his ears while Burton becomes crippled, his legs swelling up to the point where they need to be lanced. Come to think of it, the Ladybird books kept clear of stuff like this too.

While the film celebrates the two men’s heroism – and heroic powers of endurance – it disdains a British imperial establishment that’s supportive of them because it hopes to enjoy the prestige of their achievements; but that’s also manipulative and untrustworthy. It’s a historical fact that by the early 1860s Burton and Speke had fallen out, due to a claim by Speke that the source of the Nile lay in Lake Victoria. This was something that the British press of the time was only too happy to believe and it led to Speke being feted and celebrated. Meanwhile, Burton’s role in the 1857 expedition was played down.

Mountains of the Moon would have you believe that one reason for this was Burton’s Irishness. His father was of Anglo-Irish stock, though Burton himself was born in Devon. Here, with Bergin in the role and displaying a recognisable Celtic brogue, Burton seems more Irish than he probably was in real-life. Speke on the other hand was an English gentleman of the stiff-upper-lip variety, whom the establishment found more palatable to sell as a hero of the Empire. Actually, it’s a bit ironic that actor Iain Glen is a Scotsman, from Edinburgh.

The feud between the two explorers came to a sudden and unexpected end in September 1864, one day before Burton and Speke were scheduled to debate the Nile’s source at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Hunting on a relative’s estate, Speke was killed when his gun discharged itself into him while he was climbing over a wall. This caused speculation that the controversy that’d soured things so badly between him and his old comrade had led Speke to kill himself, although a jury later ruled that it’d been an accident. Mountains of the Moon remains ambiguous about Speke’s death, but the door is left open for the possibility that, upset about how the establishment had set him and Burton at each other’s throats, Speke committed suicide.

Also indicative of British attitudes at the time is the neglect shown to the African guide Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who in Mountains of the Moon is engagingly played by the Kenyan actor Paul Onsongo. He proved invaluable to Burton and Speke, and later served with Henry Morton Stanley, and crossed Africa from east to west in 1873, and became the British Empire’s most travelled citizen in Africa. Eventually, he clocked up some 9600 kilometres, most of it covered on foot. Despite this, we learn in a postscript that nobody ever thought of inviting Bombay to Britain, presumably because of his lowly ‘native’ status.

The rest of the cast is good too. The distinguished theatrical actress Fiona Shaw turns in a lovely performance as Isabel Burton, the woman who manages to capture the rumbustious Burton’s heart. She doesn’t, though, capture it to the point where he stops voyaging off to the back of beyond for years on end. As Speke’s publisher, Richard E. Grant gives a performance of superciliousness that only Grant himself seems capable of. And Bernard Hill sneaks in an endearing late-minute cameo as Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone, who gets involved in a somewhat homoerotic duel with Burton. Desperate to impress each other, both men strip off to compare their Africa-acquired scars.

In retrospect, the only things that are regrettable about Mountains of the Moon are: (1) how overlooked the film is; and (2) how low-key Patrick Bergin’s film career has been since. Regarding the second point, although he made a stir as Julia Roberts’ psychotic husband in 1991’s popular but not-very-good Sleeping with the Enemy, Bergin’s fortunes took a tumble with a couple of unfortunate film choices afterwards. His performance as Robin Hood in the 1991 movie of the same name was buried by the success of the same year’s bigger, brasher, sillier, Kevin Costner-starring, Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. Meanwhile he was unlucky enough to play a villain in 1992’s ignorant Tom Clancy / IRA thriller Patriot Games, or as it was known in Ireland, Patronising Games.

I suspect these days Bergin derives more pleasure from his music. He has a band called Patrick Bergin and the Spirit Merchants and they’ve made the Irish top ten. That said, a few years ago, I was delighted to see him turn up in Ben Wheatley’s tongue-in-cheek gangster / terrorist bloodbath Free Fire (2016).

As for the commercial failure of Mountains of the Moon, it certainly didn’t help that its production company (Carolco Pictures) was in the process of going bankrupt at the time and its distributor (Tri-Star) was more interested in promoting another historical drama, Edward Zwick’s Glory (1989), which it’d produced itself. Neither did the film’s lack of bankable ‘big-name’ stars help its fortunes. But the way the film has been critically neglected is harder to fathom. Maybe it had the bad luck to appear at a time when imperial-era British costume epics of the David Lean / James Ivory school were starting to out of fashion, although Mountains of the Moon certainly doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with such staid fare as Chariots of Fire (1982) or A Room with a View (1985).

Director Bob Rafelson, alas, has just passed away and the titles that’ll likely be inscribed on his tombstone are of his earlier films, like 1972’s Five Easy Pieces or 1981’s The Postman Always Rings Twice or even Head, that trippy 1968 epic featuring the Monkees. But at least Rafelson himself recognised the quality of his lost 1990 classic. “(W)hen people ask me, ‘If you were to come to our country and we will give you some kind of an homage, what movie would you want to show?’” he once told an interviewer, “…I always say, ‘Top of the list is Mountains of the Moon.’”