This Writer Spares Audience No Punches--and They Love It

The eager, sober-faced audience knew they were in for it when Harlan Ellison asked how many of his listeners fancied themselves writers.

More than half the crowd of about 160 people shifting uncomfortably on hard chairs in a room at the Warner Center Marriott raised their hands.

Ellison, who has written stories about people caught flat-footed and slack-jawed in the face of unexpected danger, paused a moment, perhaps to allow the weaker-willed people time to flee before he pounced. Then he recalled a line from an obscure writer.

“There are already too many people who mistake a love of reading for a talent for writing,” he said. Then he looked up. “You think I’m going to savage you. I am.”

Thus began an evening with Harlan Ellison, a small man of pugnacious good humor who has been described as a “prolific author, fiery critic and general all-around nuisance.” Ellison, whose credits include 60 books, numerous television scripts and short stories, some of which are among the most reprinted stories in the English language, stalked the room, microphone in hand, fulminating against the idiots that bark at his heels and mischievously telling unflattering stories on himself.

At times, he almost seemed to be daring his worshipful listeners to disapprove of him.

Addressing the vaguely worded topic, “On Being a Writer,” gave Ellison the opportunity to rage against the things that irritate him as a writer. When asked the repugnant question “where do you get your ideas?” he invariably says he subscribes to an idea service in Schenectady. “Inevitably, at the end of the lecture, some ----- will ask for the address,” he said, then warned everyone in the room not to make that mistake.

Ellison’s scoldings reflect his belief in the need for an artist to separate himself from the people who appreciate his work. He feels a writer “must not only ignore his audience, he must despise his audience . . . For better or worse, I have an adversarial relationship with my audience.”

He told two particularly unflattering stories about himself. In the first, he described in detail how he beat a traffic ticket he deserved by lying to the judge so convincingly that the policeman who gave him the ticket threatened him outside court.

Afterward, he avoided the policeman’s patrol area.

The second story was even nastier. Awakened during a cold snap by a misdirected call from a man asking for a cab to be sent to pick him up, he told the man to stand on the frozen street until the car arrived.

“The last I heard he was a statue,” Ellison said.

He also recounted his bon mot when a fan asked him an insulting question. “When I hear a question like that, I think ‘you weren’t born yesterday, because nobody could get that stupid in 24 hours.’ ”

“I know it’s mean,” he said of his behavior. “I’m not perfect.”

But nothing he did could break the spell over people who paid up to $45 each to the Learning Tree University to hear him fulminate against everything from the fools who screwed up the printing job on his most recent book to critics to his own fans.

His listeners seemed to enjoy it in the same way people seek out restaurants whose waiters insult the guests, as though being ill-treated was part of the fun of the experience, even when the person handing out the abuse insists he is in deadly earnest.

“He’s a crack-up,” said Julie Ustin, a clinical art therapist of 43 who likes to write and illustrate children’s stories. She hasn’t published any yet. Worse, a bad case of writer’s block has stymied her writing for the past three months.

She hoped Ellison might help break the shell that had hardened around her. “He’s getting me off,” she said during a break.

Also hoping for inspiration was Susan Tombrelli, a 31-year-old hospital public relations woman who has written since she was 4 and has produced several novels “I wouldn’t show anyone if they bribed me.”

Asked whether Ellison’s barbs had scared her off, she demurred. “He’s very entertaining,” she said.

Of her need to write, it’s beyond choice anyway. “Unfortunately, I can’t help it.”

Ellison wears his rage and his opinions as heavily and proudly as a Russian general wears his decorations. But, for this crowd at least, it was no more possible to disapprove of him than to hate Hulk Hogan or Charles Barkley or any of those other figures of uniquely American dimensions, people so outsized that a new measuring system is required to chart the breadth and depth of their personae.

And unlike the star athletes, whose form of self-inflation can be distilled as soliloquies to the “wonder of me,” Ellison was by turns literate and prideful, then--possibly tiring of the professorial--vulgar and spiteful. And always, and this is surely why they came, entertaining.

At one point, he proposed calling the seminar “Conversations With God And Other Useless Activities.”

No one was spared his barbs, even himself. He admitted he is not his favorite author, though he made it clear he is pretty damn good in his own eyes. Self-reviewing his latest book, “Mefisto In Onyx,” he said it would “blow your underwear off.”

As for the thousands of people throughout history who have made a living writing, he said only three or four have really made a difference. “For the most part,” he said, “we are toilers in fields of lies.”

Despite all this, there seemed something more purposeful to his rants than simply to play the mischief-maker. Perhaps this was his way of finding the freedom to write, by rejecting all other demands people laid on him so he could find his way back to that place where he first discovered inspiration. Then again, perhaps he just likes to set off little incendiary devices in his audiences.

“I wind up with a lot of enemies because I will not perform,” he said, then dismissed the pretense in the remark: “Not that I think I’m so ---- special.”