What I learned from reading Harlan Ellison

When I was in high school, I went through a Harlan Ellison phase. Ellison, who died in 2017, was a prolific science fiction and screenwriter and the author of such stories as “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” and “A Boy and His Dog,” as well as the celebrated Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever.”

I had no ambition to write science fiction, but I liked Ellison’s edginess and I soon stumbled onto his two books of television criticism: The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat. Published, respectively in 1970 and 1975, these were collected essays originally published in the Los Angeles Free Press. Ellison dissected network television’s presentation of politics, sex, race, culture, and more, and his writing had a snark and sarcasm that appealed to high school me.

Stylistically, what stood out most was his use of parentheses. In the essays, Ellison used them all the time. In a random four-page section I count six parentheticals, some as long as a paragraph. Elsewhere, I found a couple that went on for more than half a page.

Here are a handful of examples. Commenting on a young TV personality who spoke in “a syntactical jumble of ‘yeahs’ ‘uh-huhs’ and ending lamely with ‘I really don’t know’.” Ellison twists the knife with “(Everything she comments on ends with ‘I really don’t know.’).” Writing about First Tuesday, the NBC network’s answer to CBS’s 60 Minutes, he offers this aside: “(And wouldn’t you know the sonsofbitches would put it on directly opposite 60 Minutes …)” Occasionally, the parentheses explain a novel word usage such as “I sat Elmer’d (as in the glue) in front of various TV screens” or “things here in the ‘underground’ (if you’ll pardon the pretension) are not good.” Ellison used the parenthesis to amplify his outrage, to underscore his smart-alecky awareness, and even occasionally to poke fun at himself.

For a time, Elision’s style left a mark on me as a writer. I began including (what I thought were) pointed, witty asides in my essays and correspondence. I got away with it in high school, less so in college, and finally my wife convinced me to give it up. It was, she said, “too cutesy” and “distracting.”

Every now and then, I miss parentheses and trot a pair of parens out, but for the most part I’ve given them up. The style worked for Ellison, who managed to never be too cutesy and whose distractions were interesting, but I could not pull it off. I would later describe parentheses to my students as a whispered aside, as opposed to the breathless shout of dashes or the matter-of-factness of commas. It was a device, I would say, not to be overused.

There is a coda to this tale of parentheses. Fast forward about twenty years from high school, and I saw Ellison speak at the university where I was working. In his talk to a packed house, I listened as he began one story, then started another, then another and then two more. After concluding the final story, he went back to the penultimate one, then the ones before that, wrapping up each in its place until he was back at the first story. I laughed, realizing that he was using parentheses within parentheses within parentheses to narrate his stories. Whether in an essay or in a lecture, parenthesis was a rhetorical trick he had mastered.

But it is not a trick for everyone to attempt.

_{Featured image: Harlan Ellison at the LA Press Club. Photo by Pip R. Lagenta. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}