One time in the seventies, I was at his house with, as I recall, the writer Mike Friedrich. Mike (if indeed it was Mike) and I were talking. Harlan was in his office pounding away on some essay — for what, I do not recall. He was wearing only a towel, which was his usual writing uniform in those days. And this doesn't matter much in the era of Microsoft Word but he was working on a manual typewriter — as he did all his life — and producing the cleanest, typo-free copy I ever saw. It was a skill somehow linked to his ability as a writer to choose words with great precision.
So like I said, Mike and I were sitting there talking and we suddenly heard Harlan whoop and shout to no one in particular, "I have just written the greatest fuckin' sentence I have ever written!" He bolted from his chair and began running madly around his house and even out into the street, losing the towel in the process. Like a nine-year-old on a Frosted Flakes high, he was sprinting and dancing and working off a rush of joyous, supercharged energy.
Mike and I looked at each other and one of us said, "That must be some sentence."
So while Harlan danced nude on his front porch, we rushed into his office for a peek at the greatest fuckin' sentence Harlan Ellison had ever written.
You may be crushed to hear that I cannot recall what it was; only that Mike and I agreed it wasn't notably superior to the fuckin' sentence before it or the fuckin' sentence before that or the fuckin' sentence before that or any of the many fuckin' sentences already on that page. It was a fine fuckin' sentence, a good fuckin' sentence, a fuckin' sentence worthy of the name Ellison…
…but not a particularly outstanding fuckin' sentence. An hour or so later when Harlan had completed the piece and he made us both read it, I don't think either Mike or I could even pick out which one it was and I'll lay you even money that Harlan couldn't either. By then, he might even have preferred several other fuckin' sentences in the article.
Next July, I will have been a professional writer for fifty years — or as Harlan would say, fifty fuckin' years. I have written a great many sentences. I wrote two just now for this paragraph. Make that three. I may even have written more sentences than my late friend, Harlan Ellison. Not better ones, certainly, but more.
I have definitely never written one that caused me to run out into the street for a naked victory dance…and since I am presently in a hotel room near the San Diego Convention Center, that is probably a very good thing. Not one sentence has made me do that, although that last one wasn't bad. That day at Harlan's, I think I got a bit of insight as to one thing that made his writing so exceptional.
As a longtime reader of everything he wrote that I could get my paws on, I guess I already knew he wrote with such passion, throwing himself into every noun, verb, adjective and adverb. I just hadn't seen and heard it before. I marveled at that passion, envied it at times and felt reassured that when I felt it on a page of his, it was really and truly there.
When used for good, that passion could be an awesome force and it was one thing…probably the main thing that made his books stand out for me from the work of so many others on the same shelves.
I have one more story I want to post here about Harlan. I'll try and get to it in the next week or so. You may already have guessed what it'll be about.