ALL THE SOUNDS OF FEAR
Each
of the sixteen short stories collected in Ellison Wonderland starts off with a preface,
that is, a paragraph where Harlan shares some of the background for
writing the story we're about to read - for example: an idea he was
kicking around in his head or situation he observed or something that
actually happened to him, either out in the world or in his own dreams
or nightmares. Here's a snip from Harlan's intro for this 1962 tale:
"What
kind of a culture are we breeding around us? A society in which
everyone tries to be average, right on the norm, the common denominator,
the median, the great leveler. College kids demonstrating a callow
conservatism that urges them not to stick their heads above the crowd,
not to be noticed....I fear for the safety of my country and its people
from this creeping paralysis of ego."
As any reader knows who is
familiar with Harlan's writing, he isn't one to mess around with a
lukewarm beginning to his story. No, no, a thousand times no!! Harlan
wants to thrust a reader into the middle of the world he's creating
right from the first lines, as per this tale's opening:
""Give me some light!"
Cry:
tormented, half-moan, half-chant, cast out against a whispering
darkness; a man wound in white, arms upflung to roistering shadows,
sooty sockets where eyes had been, pleading, demanding, anger and
hopelessness, anguish from the soul into the world. He stumbled, a step,
two, faltering, weak, the man returned to the child, trying to find some
exit from the washing sea of darkness in which he trembled."
All the Sounds of Fear,
a tale of intensity, of anguish, a tale that will give you, the reader,
the distinct feeling storyteller Harlan Ellison grabs your heart, holds
it in his grip and then starts to squeeze.
We follow the
theatrical career of Richard Becker beginning at age twenty-two when
Richard takes on the part of paranoid beggar. Prior to the play hitting
Broadway, Richard Becker lived for six straight weeks as a bum on the
skids down on the streets of the Bowery. In other words, the young man,
via the actor's method developed by Stanislavski, surrendered his own
identity to become, heart and soul, the part he was to play. The theater
critics raved - Richard Becker wasn't just a method actor; Richard
Becker was the method. Astonishing achievement.
As so it went for
Richard Becker, from Broadway play to Broadway play, forever the
supremely accomplished man up on stage, becoming the lead character for
an appreciative audience.
You'll have to read this humdinger for yourself to see, step by step, the ways in which Harlan links
Richard Becker's acting with his introductory remarks about an entire
American society filled with men and women conforming to a socially
designated role. Allow me to conclude with one telling direct quote in
the form of a doctor's report from a well-known New York mental
hospital:
"To a man like Richard Becker, the world was very important. He was very
much a man of his times; he had no real personality of his own, with
the exception of that one overwhelming faculty and need to reflect the
world around him. He was an actor in the purest sense of the word. The
world gave him his personality, his attitudes, his façade and his reason
for existence. Take those away from him, clap him up in a padded cell -
as we were forced to do - and he begins to lose touch with reality."
Harlan Ellison, 1934-2018
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