At the beginning of the 1980′s Harlan Ellison agreed to do a regular column for the Los Angeles Weekly on the condition that they publish whatever he wrote, without revising it or suggesting rewrites. Little did they know what they were agreeing to. Had they read his introduction to the collected columns, An Edge in My Voice, beforehand rather than years later when he prepared it for publication, they might have demurred, and the world would be sixty-one literary gems poorer.

RC

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From Harlan Ellison’s Introduction to An Edge in My Voice

Ominous Remarks for Late in the Evening

Both Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald discovered a peculiar syndrome that affected critics of their work. They learned in the roughest way imaginable that if they were praised as great, fresh talents early on in their careers, that as they approached the middle years of writing they were “reevaluated.” The second guessers and the parvenus who could not, themselves, create the great and fresh stories, made their shaky reputations by means of pronunciamentos that advised those few literati who gave a damn, that les enfants terribles were now too long in the tooth to produce anything worth reading; that they were past it; and in the name of common decency should embarrass themselves no further by packing it in and retiring to the cultivation of Zen flower gardens. So they both croaked, and did the heavy deeds of assassination for their critics. But had they somehow managed to overcome cancer and alcoholism, had they managed to squeak through for another decade, they’d have found themselves lionized. Each would have made it through the shitrain to become le monstre sacré. Grand old men of letters. National treasures. Every last snippet they’d tapped out on yellow second-sheets sold at Sotheby’s for a pasha’s weight in rubies.

They never made it. Not rugged, spike-tough old Ernest, not lighter-than-air Scott. Time and gravity and the nibbling of minnows did them in. And so they don’t know that they are still famous–though seldom read–in the way that talk show guests are famous: you know their names and often their faces, but you can’t quite remember what the hell it is they did to make them “famous.”

The lesson we who work behind the words learn from this is that if your life is as interesting as your work, or even approaches that level of passion, there will be those who are not-quite-good-enough waiting in the tall grass, waiting to compound your fractures when your brittle bones splinter.

Never get too fat, never get too secure. The rat-things are waiting. Just hang in there long enough, like Borges or Howard Fast or Graham Greene or Jean Rhys, and the sheer volume of accumulated years will daunt all but the most vicious (who quickly self destruct when they try to savage the icons)

To read the complete introduction, click here.

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E-Reads is happy to offer An Edge in My Voice in e-book format for the first time. Watch this page for news of a paperback edition, and of course keep your eye peeled on Ellison’s author page at E-Reads for new additions to our collection of 32 masterpieces by a master author.