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Memos from Purgatory
Hemingway said, A man should never write what he doesn t know. In the mid-fifties, Harlan Ellison kicked out of college and hungry to write went to New York to start his career. It was a time of street gangs, rumbles, kids with switchblades, and zip guns made from car radio antennas. Ellison was barely out of his teens himself, but he took a phony name, moved into Brooklyn s dangerous Red Hook section, and managed to con his way into a bopping club. What he experienced (and the time he spent in jail as a result) was the basis for the violent story that Alfred Hitchcock filmed as the first of his hour-long TV dramas. This autobiography is a book whose message you will not be able to ignore or forget."
186 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1961
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348 people want to read
About the author
Harlan Ellison
1,081 books2,806 followersHarlan Jay Ellison (1934-2018) was a prolific American writer of short stories, novellas, teleplays, essays, and criticism.
His literary and television work has received many awards. He wrote for the original series of both The Outer Limits and Star Trek as well as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour; edited the multiple-award-winning short story anthology series Dangerous Visions; and served as creative consultant/writer to the science fiction TV series The New Twilight Zone and Babylon 5.
Several of his short fiction pieces have been made into movies, such as the classic "The Boy and His Dog".
His literary and television work has received many awards. He wrote for the original series of both The Outer Limits and Star Trek as well as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour; edited the multiple-award-winning short story anthology series Dangerous Visions; and served as creative consultant/writer to the science fiction TV series The New Twilight Zone and Babylon 5.
Several of his short fiction pieces have been made into movies, such as the classic "The Boy and His Dog".
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March 25, 2024
“That's right Billy Graham, it's a terrific world. Where do I go for a refund on my ticket?” -Harlan Ellison, 1974
Ellison is one of the main reasons I am a reader today. I discovered his book Approaching Oblivion when I was around eleven years old and from that point on I was hooked—hooked on the genre of science fiction and hooked on Ellison as a storyteller. At present eighteen of his books grace my shelves, many of which I have read with rabid enthusiasm. I’m telling you this because I don’t want what I am about to say to deter anyone from reading his stuff (if you haven’t already). He was a fantastic writer but he was also something of an egotist.
Memos from Purgatory is actually two novellas tied together with a lie. The first is an allegedly true account of the weeks Ellison spent “undercover” in a teenage street gang called the Barons. The second story is a recounting of Ellison’s brief stay in jail after his arrest for failure to register a firearm. Both stories are more than a little dubious for entirely different reasons.
10 WEEKS IN PURGATORY
When Ellison was in his early twenties he decided he would pose as a teenager (he passed for seventeen) and join a neighborhood street gang of hoodlums, delinquents, and petty criminals who called themselves the Barons. He claims he did so both to make the public aware of the plight of impoverished inner city children and to gather material for a new book. I was unable to dig up any evidence of the former but he did indeed go on to publish Web of the City (1958), The Deadly Streets (1958), Sex Gang (1959), and The Juvies (1961).
If Memos from Purgatory is to be 100% believed then Harlan Ellison deserved both an Oscar for his method acting and prison time for the crimes he committed while immersing himself in gang culture. By his own admission Ellison committed larceny, felonious assault and maybe even statutory rape. His description of 1950s street life falls somewhere between West Side Story and Rebel Without a Cause—including an episode where he fights a fellow gang member “Comanche Style” with switchblade knives, each man with one hand tied behind their backs, and each clinching one corner of a handkerchief in their teeth.
24 HOURS IN HELL
The second story occurs some seven years later when Harlan is arrested for possession of an unregistered firearm. He ties the two stories together by saying that he encountered one of the Barons, a guy known as “Pooch,” in the holding cell while awaiting his arraignment. Ellison later admitted that the Pooch encounter was a lie, a fabrication to connect the two stories together before they were published in a single volume.
Although Ellison was bailed out of jail by his mother just hours after his arrest, his recounting of it, including the fictional encounter with Pooch, reads like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption. Is this a mountain or is this a molehill?
CONCLUSION
If you’re familiar with Ellison’s fiction then I think you’ll find these supposedly true stories indistinguishable with the rest of his catalogue. I have no doubt that elements of Memos from Purgatory are completely true, but I also believe that the author’s enormous ego and his gift of embellishment and good storytelling took center stage here. This book should come with the disclaimer “Inspired by a True Story” rather than “A True Story.”
Ellison is one of the main reasons I am a reader today. I discovered his book Approaching Oblivion when I was around eleven years old and from that point on I was hooked—hooked on the genre of science fiction and hooked on Ellison as a storyteller. At present eighteen of his books grace my shelves, many of which I have read with rabid enthusiasm. I’m telling you this because I don’t want what I am about to say to deter anyone from reading his stuff (if you haven’t already). He was a fantastic writer but he was also something of an egotist.
Memos from Purgatory is actually two novellas tied together with a lie. The first is an allegedly true account of the weeks Ellison spent “undercover” in a teenage street gang called the Barons. The second story is a recounting of Ellison’s brief stay in jail after his arrest for failure to register a firearm. Both stories are more than a little dubious for entirely different reasons.
10 WEEKS IN PURGATORY
When Ellison was in his early twenties he decided he would pose as a teenager (he passed for seventeen) and join a neighborhood street gang of hoodlums, delinquents, and petty criminals who called themselves the Barons. He claims he did so both to make the public aware of the plight of impoverished inner city children and to gather material for a new book. I was unable to dig up any evidence of the former but he did indeed go on to publish Web of the City (1958), The Deadly Streets (1958), Sex Gang (1959), and The Juvies (1961).
If Memos from Purgatory is to be 100% believed then Harlan Ellison deserved both an Oscar for his method acting and prison time for the crimes he committed while immersing himself in gang culture. By his own admission Ellison committed larceny, felonious assault and maybe even statutory rape. His description of 1950s street life falls somewhere between West Side Story and Rebel Without a Cause—including an episode where he fights a fellow gang member “Comanche Style” with switchblade knives, each man with one hand tied behind their backs, and each clinching one corner of a handkerchief in their teeth.
24 HOURS IN HELL
The second story occurs some seven years later when Harlan is arrested for possession of an unregistered firearm. He ties the two stories together by saying that he encountered one of the Barons, a guy known as “Pooch,” in the holding cell while awaiting his arraignment. Ellison later admitted that the Pooch encounter was a lie, a fabrication to connect the two stories together before they were published in a single volume.
Although Ellison was bailed out of jail by his mother just hours after his arrest, his recounting of it, including the fictional encounter with Pooch, reads like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption. Is this a mountain or is this a molehill?
CONCLUSION
If you’re familiar with Ellison’s fiction then I think you’ll find these supposedly true stories indistinguishable with the rest of his catalogue. I have no doubt that elements of Memos from Purgatory are completely true, but I also believe that the author’s enormous ego and his gift of embellishment and good storytelling took center stage here. This book should come with the disclaimer “Inspired by a True Story” rather than “A True Story.”
February 18, 2024
Harlan Ellison goes undercover and joins a street gang - and finds out more about himself than he thought he would. This is one of the most 'immersive' books I have ever read; if you are already a fan of Ellison this will show you a side of him you may have never encountered before. This book could be adapted into a very interesting movie.
August 15, 2010
I feel somewhat goofy giving this book five stars, because it's far from a perfect book. But I read it at EXACTLY the right moment in my life. Something about Ellison's tone and style just completely cut me to the bone, and it forever altered the way I thought about writing. What impressed me first was the incredible lyricism I found in his writing, at once hard-boiled and erudite in a way that more traditional "detective" writing had never been. But far more important was the sense of compassion he showed toward people who were less fortunate than him, and whom he believed the fortunate sons and daughters of America were ignoring in their relentless drive for acquisition.
Many of the ways I think about urban poverty -- and, for that matter, my attitude toward any class of people at an economic disadvantage -- are dictated by the tragic tone of this book. I'd been brought up to believe that polite society was, well, polite, not that it stood on the backs of its less fortunate members. Ellison's lefty politics were new to me, and he drove them home with a gut-punch that the fruity hippies of my era simply couldn't conceive of; that's why it mattered to me, because it crossed righteous anger with desperation on another person's behalf. In that sense, I guess, I could say that Harlan Ellison of all people helped build me into the compassionate fuck I am today. Can you fucking believe that? What a twisted world we live in. Or maybe it's me that's twisted.
When I look back on Memos in the context of what I know know -- and particularly when looking at exploitation books from the same era like Lawrence Block's A Diet of Treacle and the like -- Memos from Purgatory seems much less impressive. But it doesn't so much matter; cultural and historical realities are dictated by the information available at the time. This book changed me, and I will forever love Harlan Ellison for that.
Many of the ways I think about urban poverty -- and, for that matter, my attitude toward any class of people at an economic disadvantage -- are dictated by the tragic tone of this book. I'd been brought up to believe that polite society was, well, polite, not that it stood on the backs of its less fortunate members. Ellison's lefty politics were new to me, and he drove them home with a gut-punch that the fruity hippies of my era simply couldn't conceive of; that's why it mattered to me, because it crossed righteous anger with desperation on another person's behalf. In that sense, I guess, I could say that Harlan Ellison of all people helped build me into the compassionate fuck I am today. Can you fucking believe that? What a twisted world we live in. Or maybe it's me that's twisted.
When I look back on Memos in the context of what I know know -- and particularly when looking at exploitation books from the same era like Lawrence Block's A Diet of Treacle and the like -- Memos from Purgatory seems much less impressive. But it doesn't so much matter; cultural and historical realities are dictated by the information available at the time. This book changed me, and I will forever love Harlan Ellison for that.
December 28, 2014
One of the great literary heroes of my youth. I read this book originally when I was maybe 16 years old or so, and it holds up, in my opinion.
May 7, 2021
I learned of Mr. Ellison’s story because I am a fan of Alfred Hitchcock—both on the silver screen and the idiot box. Some tales compel me to explore the work behind the 30-, 60- or 120-minute plays the Master brings to life from the printed page. In the cases where these stories turn out to be based on real-life events, I am compelled that much more.
***Spoiler Alert***
I’ll tag this review has having spoilers within. Not something I like to do, but this read was a special case. As of the second-hand, yellowed and dogeared copy I obtained, the book had been in its third printing. Ellison wrote an introduction at the book’s second printing, but it was the new introduction he wrote at the third that kept me from feeling I had wasted my time reading the second half of his story.
When you read his second intro, which comes before the first, one gets the sense that he’s a realist, albeit a somewhat disillusioned one. When you read his first introduction, you learn why. I don’t know what unicorn-rainbow-happy-happy got into him, but had it not been for knowing a bit about life, I might have expected he was suffering from undiagnosed schizophrenia or some bad LSD. The techtonic shift in attitude probably caused a tsunami in his brainwaves.
The crux of the story is his ballsy infiltration of a street gang, a group of lost youth with which he ran for 10 weeks. He weaseled through a rather terrifying sounding initiation and managed in ingratiate himself to most of his hoodlum brethren and their corral of whores. His observations of the lost souls which surrounded him drip of compassion and he tortures himself throughout the story with what-ifs
… he agonizes over things he’d do but cannot for the fear of blowing his cover and turning his covert operation into a wasted effort. In my opinion, he came across as being fearful he may learn that some people are beyond redemption—not worth the time or effort, because they are evil by nature. Some kids are thugs and a waste of space, but toxic sentiment of that sort, he saves for the cops later on down the line.
His time with the Barons was interesting and on occasion, and much like life, exciting, even frightening with extended periods of boredom mixed in. He attempts to lure the reader into believing he had become as much a badass as any of the punks he hung with, only to light out like a little bitch during a rumble and escape back to his side of the metaphorical tracks.
After several years of earning of off writing fictional tales about his experiences, and if you believe his self-proclaimed lament over not having helped any of the gang kids, not truly telling their story (which is what he intended to do), he gets busted for illegal possession of weapons. These were the weapons he used in an illustrative sense for his lectures, etc. Visual aids and nothing more. And like all intellectual sorts, he’s shocked and dismayed when he learns that the law does, indeed, apply to him, despite his superior wit. What follows—and which makes up half of the book—is a journey through hell. A veritable soul crushing and dehumanizing sojourn through the bowels of New York and his dealings with the dregs of civilization. But worse than the scum, the murderers, rapists, pushers, etc., are the cops. The fuzz. The “hacks.”
The trials and tribulations Ellison faced are described as one might try to characterize being flogged from the viewpoint of Jesus Christ just prior to being crucified and hanging, nailed and bound to a couple planks of wood for three days. His time in New York’s prison system is a long, drawn out recanting of an innocent man, a better man, one who writes about gritty stuff all while secretly yearning to help those less fortunate (though he never does … but he wants to … really).
Ellison describes his time in the slammer as having felt like months, yet his excursion through Hades was a mere overnight stay. His whining and bitching about how he was treated, how the scum around him was treated, grinds on the nerves to say the least. The second half of the book is an exercise in self-righteousness with some liberal drivel thrown in for good measure.
When I started reading it, I was sure I’d be giving this book five stars, but after so much whining (sorry if that sounds redundant, but it’s the only fitting word), I really only wanted to give the book three stars. I decided on four just for the portion of his time with the gang. Not many people would have the balls to do that, even back in the 50s when Ellison did. Were he a youth today, something tells me he’d never venture such a feat with the likes of MS-13, and as for getting arrested and put “through the machine system” as he likes to call it, I sincerely doubt he’d survive the ride to the station, let alone a night in jail.
Lastly, I circle back to the second introduction. Had he not written it, or had I obtained an older copy of the book that did not include it, it likely would have ended up as a contribution to a paper drive or some such worthy cause.
***Spoiler Alert***
I’ll tag this review has having spoilers within. Not something I like to do, but this read was a special case. As of the second-hand, yellowed and dogeared copy I obtained, the book had been in its third printing. Ellison wrote an introduction at the book’s second printing, but it was the new introduction he wrote at the third that kept me from feeling I had wasted my time reading the second half of his story.
When you read his second intro, which comes before the first, one gets the sense that he’s a realist, albeit a somewhat disillusioned one. When you read his first introduction, you learn why. I don’t know what unicorn-rainbow-happy-happy got into him, but had it not been for knowing a bit about life, I might have expected he was suffering from undiagnosed schizophrenia or some bad LSD. The techtonic shift in attitude probably caused a tsunami in his brainwaves.
The crux of the story is his ballsy infiltration of a street gang, a group of lost youth with which he ran for 10 weeks. He weaseled through a rather terrifying sounding initiation and managed in ingratiate himself to most of his hoodlum brethren and their corral of whores. His observations of the lost souls which surrounded him drip of compassion and he tortures himself throughout the story with what-ifs
… he agonizes over things he’d do but cannot for the fear of blowing his cover and turning his covert operation into a wasted effort. In my opinion, he came across as being fearful he may learn that some people are beyond redemption—not worth the time or effort, because they are evil by nature. Some kids are thugs and a waste of space, but toxic sentiment of that sort, he saves for the cops later on down the line.
His time with the Barons was interesting and on occasion, and much like life, exciting, even frightening with extended periods of boredom mixed in. He attempts to lure the reader into believing he had become as much a badass as any of the punks he hung with, only to light out like a little bitch during a rumble and escape back to his side of the metaphorical tracks.
After several years of earning of off writing fictional tales about his experiences, and if you believe his self-proclaimed lament over not having helped any of the gang kids, not truly telling their story (which is what he intended to do), he gets busted for illegal possession of weapons. These were the weapons he used in an illustrative sense for his lectures, etc. Visual aids and nothing more. And like all intellectual sorts, he’s shocked and dismayed when he learns that the law does, indeed, apply to him, despite his superior wit. What follows—and which makes up half of the book—is a journey through hell. A veritable soul crushing and dehumanizing sojourn through the bowels of New York and his dealings with the dregs of civilization. But worse than the scum, the murderers, rapists, pushers, etc., are the cops. The fuzz. The “hacks.”
The trials and tribulations Ellison faced are described as one might try to characterize being flogged from the viewpoint of Jesus Christ just prior to being crucified and hanging, nailed and bound to a couple planks of wood for three days. His time in New York’s prison system is a long, drawn out recanting of an innocent man, a better man, one who writes about gritty stuff all while secretly yearning to help those less fortunate (though he never does … but he wants to … really).
Ellison describes his time in the slammer as having felt like months, yet his excursion through Hades was a mere overnight stay. His whining and bitching about how he was treated, how the scum around him was treated, grinds on the nerves to say the least. The second half of the book is an exercise in self-righteousness with some liberal drivel thrown in for good measure.
When I started reading it, I was sure I’d be giving this book five stars, but after so much whining (sorry if that sounds redundant, but it’s the only fitting word), I really only wanted to give the book three stars. I decided on four just for the portion of his time with the gang. Not many people would have the balls to do that, even back in the 50s when Ellison did. Were he a youth today, something tells me he’d never venture such a feat with the likes of MS-13, and as for getting arrested and put “through the machine system” as he likes to call it, I sincerely doubt he’d survive the ride to the station, let alone a night in jail.
Lastly, I circle back to the second introduction. Had he not written it, or had I obtained an older copy of the book that did not include it, it likely would have ended up as a contribution to a paper drive or some such worthy cause.
February 23, 2009
good stuff from another time
October 4, 2020
A deeply flawed book but nonetheless incredibly engrossing
December 8, 2020
This is a fairly good book. The time he spent with the delinquent youth gang is entertaining and vivid. It gives a small but important and, nowadays, entirely forgotten aspect of a romanticised and now lost nation, the American 50s. The small details: slang, fashion, the ridiculous ritualized social behaviour that one had engage in so as to appear cool, all of it is cleverly included and is important to giving the novel (or memoir, if you believe it to be true, I honestly don't care) a colour and tone that sets it a league above almost all other memoirs, insufferable trash that populates airports the world over.
The second story in this book is impressive because Ellison does a lot with an encounter that lasted less than a day. He gives an interesting, dramatic, tense and fun description of the shithole to which he is sent, and the creatures that inhabit it's cavernous insides; the bruised and aggressive looking negro sitting hunched and insane looking in the corner of a cell, the two fags, one of whom is reeling in pain from heroin withdrawal. I also find the free use of (now) antiquated terms to be satisfying. It gives the book the feel of coming from a different and alien time, which indeed it does. This book depicts a dead world, and does a great job of it.
The second story in this book is impressive because Ellison does a lot with an encounter that lasted less than a day. He gives an interesting, dramatic, tense and fun description of the shithole to which he is sent, and the creatures that inhabit it's cavernous insides; the bruised and aggressive looking negro sitting hunched and insane looking in the corner of a cell, the two fags, one of whom is reeling in pain from heroin withdrawal. I also find the free use of (now) antiquated terms to be satisfying. It gives the book the feel of coming from a different and alien time, which indeed it does. This book depicts a dead world, and does a great job of it.
November 23, 2021
Coming from the early days of his writing career, this is a seminal book for Ellison, telling of his few weeks posing as a gang member in New York and of a later brush with legal system arising out of that episode. The first part is enthralling as he gets deeper into the life. What is frightening is that this dates back to fifties but relates very much to the present day (albeit that drugs were not at the core of the problem then. The introductions to the various editions are typically Ellison, thoughtful and entertaining. Whilst I was reading the first thirty pages of the first story my mind kept wandering back to West Side Story and specifically “Gee Officer Krupke” - of which I have very fond memories.
August 17, 2025
Alternative title: 'West Side Statutory'
When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way, I guess. Yeesh.
When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way, I guess. Yeesh.
May 3, 2015
Harlan Ellison rather famously infiltrated a real-life Brooklyn street gang in 1954 at the age of 19 to do background research for his first novel. His experiences became the basis for the novel Web of the City (1958) and two subsequent short story collections, The Deadly Streets (1958) and Gentleman Junkie (1961).
These books were perhaps the most authentic juvenile delinquent pulp fiction ever written, although they lacked what you might call literary merit. They were decent for a beginning writer, but Ellison's famous bombastic voice would prove to be a much better fit for science fiction and fantasy than crime.
On the other hand, Memos from Purgatory (1961) is the nonfiction autobiographical account of this experience, and it is more engaging and interesting. The street gangs Ellison writes about--the Poles, Hungarians, and Italians--are no longer around. In fact, they were already being replaced by black and Hispanic inner-city gangs when the book was published in 1961. They certainly bore little resemblance to gangs of today, not because the kids back then were any less desperate or better behaved, but because access to modern automatic firearms was so much less.
Even so, fifty years later Ellison's writing is still so effective it has a way of grabbing readers and making the danger still seem real and immediate. From the gang initiation ceremony, to the taking of a virgin "gang wife", to a switchblade duel in a parking lot, you emerge at the end feeling like you have been granted an illicit and rare glimpse into an obscure and dangerous American subculture.
The second half of the book (titled "The Tombs") relates Ellison's 24 hours in a New York City jail on a weapons charge, a technicality that probably should not have even been prosecuted. This story was more self-indulgent as he milked every minor inconvenience with all the self-righteous indignation he could muster. Parts of this narrative were highly fictionalized (something the author admits in his introduction to the 1975 reprint) in order to tie it back in to the earlier gang story.
Ellison is famous for his short stories, but the truth is he has always been a better essayist, and this book (especially the first half) is not to be missed.
These books were perhaps the most authentic juvenile delinquent pulp fiction ever written, although they lacked what you might call literary merit. They were decent for a beginning writer, but Ellison's famous bombastic voice would prove to be a much better fit for science fiction and fantasy than crime.
On the other hand, Memos from Purgatory (1961) is the nonfiction autobiographical account of this experience, and it is more engaging and interesting. The street gangs Ellison writes about--the Poles, Hungarians, and Italians--are no longer around. In fact, they were already being replaced by black and Hispanic inner-city gangs when the book was published in 1961. They certainly bore little resemblance to gangs of today, not because the kids back then were any less desperate or better behaved, but because access to modern automatic firearms was so much less.
Even so, fifty years later Ellison's writing is still so effective it has a way of grabbing readers and making the danger still seem real and immediate. From the gang initiation ceremony, to the taking of a virgin "gang wife", to a switchblade duel in a parking lot, you emerge at the end feeling like you have been granted an illicit and rare glimpse into an obscure and dangerous American subculture.
The second half of the book (titled "The Tombs") relates Ellison's 24 hours in a New York City jail on a weapons charge, a technicality that probably should not have even been prosecuted. This story was more self-indulgent as he milked every minor inconvenience with all the self-righteous indignation he could muster. Parts of this narrative were highly fictionalized (something the author admits in his introduction to the 1975 reprint) in order to tie it back in to the earlier gang story.
Ellison is famous for his short stories, but the truth is he has always been a better essayist, and this book (especially the first half) is not to be missed.
June 19, 2017
For ten weeks in 1954, then twenty-year-old writer Harlan Ellison adopted the alias of teenager Phil “Cheech” Beldone and joined a NYC street gang called the Barons all in the name of research—an endeavor that nearly cost Ellison his life on more than one occasion, from the gang initiation ritual to the final savage, bloody rumble against a rival gang in Prospect Park.
Fast-forward seven years to 1961 when Ellison attended a gathering in NYC and encountered an old “friend” named Ken Bales to whom Ellison had loaned a typewriter—which Bales promptly hocked. While at the party, Ellison took the opportunity to demand compensation from Bales. A few days later, two detectives arrived at Ellison’s apartment based on an anonymous report of drug parties and illegal weapons. Was Bales the caller? Ellison seemed to suspect as much.
Known for this vociferous anti-drug lifestyle, Ellison explained to the detectives that there were no illegal narcotics in his apartment and the weapons, taken from a street gang, were now used as part of his popular lectures on juvenile delinquency. After allowing the detectives to search his apartment, Ellison is relieved to learn that no charges will be filed for narcotics—but they will have to arrest him on possession of an unregistered firearm, as a .22 caliber pistol was among the gang weapons.
Thus begins the second part of this memoir—Ellison’s vivid and dramatic description of his 24 hours in jail. Here is where the narrative runs longer than necessary and I can understand why many readers consider it whiny.
Memos from Purgatory is an unflinching, up-close-and-personal examination of street gangs and the callous NYC legal system of the times. It was one of Harlan Ellison’s bestselling books for nearly 25 years. While the material is obviously dated, the color of Ellison’s honest and raw narrative has not faded. I think the same can be said for most of his work.
Of course, what Harlan Ellison book would be complete with an expository introduction? In this case, my 1983 ACE paperback edition contains three intros, one written for this book and two from each previous printing. Ellison’s commentaries are nearly as enjoyable his stories!
Fast-forward seven years to 1961 when Ellison attended a gathering in NYC and encountered an old “friend” named Ken Bales to whom Ellison had loaned a typewriter—which Bales promptly hocked. While at the party, Ellison took the opportunity to demand compensation from Bales. A few days later, two detectives arrived at Ellison’s apartment based on an anonymous report of drug parties and illegal weapons. Was Bales the caller? Ellison seemed to suspect as much.
Known for this vociferous anti-drug lifestyle, Ellison explained to the detectives that there were no illegal narcotics in his apartment and the weapons, taken from a street gang, were now used as part of his popular lectures on juvenile delinquency. After allowing the detectives to search his apartment, Ellison is relieved to learn that no charges will be filed for narcotics—but they will have to arrest him on possession of an unregistered firearm, as a .22 caliber pistol was among the gang weapons.
Thus begins the second part of this memoir—Ellison’s vivid and dramatic description of his 24 hours in jail. Here is where the narrative runs longer than necessary and I can understand why many readers consider it whiny.
Memos from Purgatory is an unflinching, up-close-and-personal examination of street gangs and the callous NYC legal system of the times. It was one of Harlan Ellison’s bestselling books for nearly 25 years. While the material is obviously dated, the color of Ellison’s honest and raw narrative has not faded. I think the same can be said for most of his work.
Of course, what Harlan Ellison book would be complete with an expository introduction? In this case, my 1983 ACE paperback edition contains three intros, one written for this book and two from each previous printing. Ellison’s commentaries are nearly as enjoyable his stories!
July 13, 2012
The best that I can say of Memos is intermittently entertaining. One thing that the other reviews here don't make clear enough is that the book does not read like a memoir. In fact, it's barely distinguishable from juvenile delinquent novels popular at the time except for the pretense of being true. I am very skeptical of that pretense.
In the first half Ellison runs with a Brooklyn kid gang. He infiltrates the gang, is initiated (his initiation includes the statutory rape of a 16 year old virgin), gets in a knife fight, and participates in a rumble. In the second half, he is arrested for possessing an illegal firearm and is unbearably indignant because his gun and ammo, while very real, are merely props for presentations on delinquency that he gives at PTAs and YMCAs. He spends the night in jail and is outraged to discover that the justice system operates pretty much mechanically. All of this is really overwritten, or rather heavily padded. If I had to guess, I'd wager that the second half is probably mostly true, the first half entirely or almost entirely false.
Ellison leaves out the fact that the book was initially published by Regency, the upmarket imprint he edited at softcore publisher Greenleaf. If I had to guess, I would say that Ellison likely just did not give a shit about writing a quality book for such a publisher. Regency was not a bad imprint. They published a number of books by good writers, including Jim Thompson and Cordwainer Smith. Ellison was not fond of his time there, however, and perhaps had a vantage that other writers didn't on the fact that Regency was the arm of a smut firm. Or maybe he just needed the money. Whatever it was, the book is flawed and overdramatic.
In the first half Ellison runs with a Brooklyn kid gang. He infiltrates the gang, is initiated (his initiation includes the statutory rape of a 16 year old virgin), gets in a knife fight, and participates in a rumble. In the second half, he is arrested for possessing an illegal firearm and is unbearably indignant because his gun and ammo, while very real, are merely props for presentations on delinquency that he gives at PTAs and YMCAs. He spends the night in jail and is outraged to discover that the justice system operates pretty much mechanically. All of this is really overwritten, or rather heavily padded. If I had to guess, I'd wager that the second half is probably mostly true, the first half entirely or almost entirely false.
Ellison leaves out the fact that the book was initially published by Regency, the upmarket imprint he edited at softcore publisher Greenleaf. If I had to guess, I would say that Ellison likely just did not give a shit about writing a quality book for such a publisher. Regency was not a bad imprint. They published a number of books by good writers, including Jim Thompson and Cordwainer Smith. Ellison was not fond of his time there, however, and perhaps had a vantage that other writers didn't on the fact that Regency was the arm of a smut firm. Or maybe he just needed the money. Whatever it was, the book is flawed and overdramatic.
December 8, 2012
Memos From Purgatory is two books in one - both of them memoirs rather than fiction. The Gang is the first book and goes back to 1954 when the 20 year old Ellison went "undercover" in a Brooklyn street gang for ten weeks. His depiction of gang life is very well done, but the writing is a bit dated by the constraints of the censorship of the time. It is all here, from his initiation, through his relationships with the gang members, up to the rumble with a rival gang that drove him off the project for good.
The second half of the book called The Tombs is from a time seven years later. Ellison was an established writer living in New York when he gets arrested and spends a day in the New York prison system before he makes bail. This seems to have been a harder experience for him than the ten weeks in the gang. He fears that he is going to lose his mind because of the panic reaction to being incarcerated. Since one night in jail doesn't seem to be so tragic, his whining can make this section of the book difficult to read. My personal guess is that Ellison was a control freak and being in jail was more than he could take. Yet his descriptions of the people he meets there is richly rewarding. His criminals, winos, derelicts, and guards are well portrayed and typical of the style of writing that has made him famous.
What makes this book a classic is the visceral and emotional writing style that Ellison employs. Even when I disagree with him most, in his diatribe against two gay black men in The Tombs, I am still taken with the power of his writing.
The second half of the book called The Tombs is from a time seven years later. Ellison was an established writer living in New York when he gets arrested and spends a day in the New York prison system before he makes bail. This seems to have been a harder experience for him than the ten weeks in the gang. He fears that he is going to lose his mind because of the panic reaction to being incarcerated. Since one night in jail doesn't seem to be so tragic, his whining can make this section of the book difficult to read. My personal guess is that Ellison was a control freak and being in jail was more than he could take. Yet his descriptions of the people he meets there is richly rewarding. His criminals, winos, derelicts, and guards are well portrayed and typical of the style of writing that has made him famous.
What makes this book a classic is the visceral and emotional writing style that Ellison employs. Even when I disagree with him most, in his diatribe against two gay black men in The Tombs, I am still taken with the power of his writing.
July 17, 2018
ok i read 2 of Harlan's short stories and watched the movie a boy and his dog which is based on another short story or book not sure before completing this book and so far i like Harlan's style attitude and writing very much. not sure where i plan to go from this book but i need something mellow cause Memos was just so heavy i am not sure how to describe it. but it has me thinking hard
October 13, 2019
Another gem from Mr Ellison. While a period piece when read today, it retains its power while showing us another side of the pugnacious Ellison, one we might not know from reading his later fiction. I was a bit disappointed to read that he connected the two halves of the story at the publisher's request, adding an element of fiction to what were otherwise real-life occurrences.
November 22, 2009
Harlan Ellison's contribution to the New Journalism of the late 1960's. Memos tells the story of his going undercover in a street gang, and later about a night he spent in an overcrowded jail. Powerfully visceral stuff, if a tad overwrought at times.
December 1, 2010
This memoir about going undercover with a teen gang and the dehumanizing criminal justice system in which he's trapped for 24 hours is vivid and harrowing, as Ellison almost goes out of his mind with fright (being cuffed to a man who killed a girl with a hammer didn't help). An amazing book.
May 30, 2016
This book was really fantastic and incredibly interesting. I got lucky and picked up a copy for a buck at a local gift shop and it was perhaps the best dollar I ever spent on a book. Definitely worth the read could not put down.
February 25, 2019
A good early read from 2 episodes in Harlan's 1950's life. His youthful enthusiasm is quite evident and his subsequent disillusionment with that enthusiasm is clear in his updated prefaces to this volume.
Read
August 5, 2014read
June 13, 2011
This one was very hard to find when I came across it. About his days of joining a gang so he would be better able to write about the people in them, and the mentality.
August 17, 2011
This is a really cool autobiographical book.
October 10, 2012
Harlan's main problem is that his stories are too short.
January 17, 2021
I generally like the early Harlan Ellison but I had several problems with this book. Maybe if he had written it as fiction I would have liked it better. I have serious doubts that many of the more violent incidents that personally involved Ellison actually occurred or that he was that deeply involved in a local gang and for 10 weeks. When Ellison died his friend Ted White wrote a column called "Remembering Harlan Ellison and His Place in My Life". In it White referred to the statement Ellison made when he was arrested for having an unregistered gun. White wrote:
"The box the police had found was, Harlan said, a box of props he used for lectures he gave on juvie gangs. He had, he said, run with a gang in Brooklyn’s Red Hook area in the mid-’50s, to get material to write. Hence the 'Cheech Beldone' piece in Lowdown. Frankly, I have my doubts about that. During the period in question Harlan shared an apartment with Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett (both science fiction writers). He worked in a Times Square bookstore. During his spare time, as Silverberg recalls, Harlan was mostly at his typewriter, writing stories. All three men had a contract with two science fiction magazine publishers to write a specific number of words of science fiction each month, for a monthly check. Harlan was churning out stories, many under pseudonyms, at a great rate. Silverberg discounts Harlan’s stories about running with a juvie gang, but Harlan did subsequently publish a novel about those gangs."
I was born in 1947 and grew up in a very rough housing project in South Philly. I saw a lot of fights and got in a few myself although I tried to avoid them whenever possible as I wasn't that good at it. Unlike Ellison I didn't have to deliberately go to a different section of town and join a gang to be surrounded by juvenile delinquents. A significant few of us managed to wend our way through that environment and move on to better lives but a great many of my peers spent at least some time in jail and many got hooked on drugs.
In South Philly the gangs were identified by the corner they mainly hung out at like "30th & Tasker". Some corners had big reps for being tough and you stayed away from them. There were also the young Italian Mafia wannabees who hung out around 9th Street. I was a teenager in the early 60's and rarely saw or heard about the type of rumbles and extreme violence Ellison portrays. Of course things may have been a lot different in NY 10 years earlier but I still think he exaggerates the amount and severity of JD violence using a lot of artistic license.
My milder group of teenagers hung out at at "29th & Morris", a block south and a block east of the very tough ""30th & Tasker" gang. We knew a lot of them and vice versa and knowing we were no threat they didn't bother us most of the time. A couple of my friends and I did get "jumped" and beaten up twice, once by "30th Street" and once by "the Hill" the gang that dominated the Tasker housing project I lived in. Both times I was told they didn't recognize us as being from the "projects" and one guy actually apologized for a case of mistaken identity.
While Ellison may have over-exaggerated his actual involvement in a gang and to some extent, exaggerated the levels of violence that took place, he was addressing a real problem from a different direction. He did manage to look at things from the view of teenagers living in slums who were molded into becoming JD's because they had no other easily available outlet. Today I think that drugs have escalated gang violence to levels beyond Ellison's exaggerated levels of the 50's but the backdrop of the slums and pressure to conform are still just as alive.
"The box the police had found was, Harlan said, a box of props he used for lectures he gave on juvie gangs. He had, he said, run with a gang in Brooklyn’s Red Hook area in the mid-’50s, to get material to write. Hence the 'Cheech Beldone' piece in Lowdown. Frankly, I have my doubts about that. During the period in question Harlan shared an apartment with Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett (both science fiction writers). He worked in a Times Square bookstore. During his spare time, as Silverberg recalls, Harlan was mostly at his typewriter, writing stories. All three men had a contract with two science fiction magazine publishers to write a specific number of words of science fiction each month, for a monthly check. Harlan was churning out stories, many under pseudonyms, at a great rate. Silverberg discounts Harlan’s stories about running with a juvie gang, but Harlan did subsequently publish a novel about those gangs."
I was born in 1947 and grew up in a very rough housing project in South Philly. I saw a lot of fights and got in a few myself although I tried to avoid them whenever possible as I wasn't that good at it. Unlike Ellison I didn't have to deliberately go to a different section of town and join a gang to be surrounded by juvenile delinquents. A significant few of us managed to wend our way through that environment and move on to better lives but a great many of my peers spent at least some time in jail and many got hooked on drugs.
In South Philly the gangs were identified by the corner they mainly hung out at like "30th & Tasker". Some corners had big reps for being tough and you stayed away from them. There were also the young Italian Mafia wannabees who hung out around 9th Street. I was a teenager in the early 60's and rarely saw or heard about the type of rumbles and extreme violence Ellison portrays. Of course things may have been a lot different in NY 10 years earlier but I still think he exaggerates the amount and severity of JD violence using a lot of artistic license.
My milder group of teenagers hung out at at "29th & Morris", a block south and a block east of the very tough ""30th & Tasker" gang. We knew a lot of them and vice versa and knowing we were no threat they didn't bother us most of the time. A couple of my friends and I did get "jumped" and beaten up twice, once by "30th Street" and once by "the Hill" the gang that dominated the Tasker housing project I lived in. Both times I was told they didn't recognize us as being from the "projects" and one guy actually apologized for a case of mistaken identity.
While Ellison may have over-exaggerated his actual involvement in a gang and to some extent, exaggerated the levels of violence that took place, he was addressing a real problem from a different direction. He did manage to look at things from the view of teenagers living in slums who were molded into becoming JD's because they had no other easily available outlet. Today I think that drugs have escalated gang violence to levels beyond Ellison's exaggerated levels of the 50's but the backdrop of the slums and pressure to conform are still just as alive.
November 20, 2022
Memos From Purgatory is an engaging read. In it, Harlan Ellison tells the tale of a broken society, broken cities, a society that in many ways has failed many of its citizens. Ellison is here writing about these things as he observed them in 1954. They read very much like the news of today: a contentious, flawed government. Death in the streets. Hopelessness and despair.
In Memos, Ellison purports to have run with a Brooklyn street gang under the pseudonym Cheech Beldone. He got beat-up in brawls. He took part in a massive rumble. But here's the thing with Ellison: things may not always be what they seem. I've read interviews with people who knew and lived with Ellison at the time and they cast doubt on whether he actually ran with a gang. Ellison seems to have spent most of his time back then in his apartment at his typewriter endlessly pounding out stories to make ends meet. When would he have found the time to infiltrate and run with a gang?
The book, as I mentioned, is engaging. And it is well-written, as is most of Ellison's work that I've encountered from various periods across his long career. And whether or not the events in Memos actually happened, he does seem to be genuinely concerned with the shabby way society treats its down-and-out citizens. But there's a passage near the end of the book that sours all of that. He's in a holding cell and he's observing the other prisoners. He focuses on a pair of homosexual Black men who are huddled together, coming down off of junk. Ellison doesn't veer into hate speech, but his portrait of these two men is the most unflattering one in the book and there is a homophobic vibe that radiates from this passage.
So I wonder. Are the events in Memos From Purgatory actually true? Or is the book the literary equivalent to one of those 1950s juvenile-delinquent B-movies that purport to be telling a real story, but are actually just a series of invented incidents, lurid and perverse, meant to titillate and shock the roadshow-exploitation crowd of midnight-movie attendees?
Either way, Memos From Purgatory is a curious cultural artifact, worth a look, worth a wonder.
In Memos, Ellison purports to have run with a Brooklyn street gang under the pseudonym Cheech Beldone. He got beat-up in brawls. He took part in a massive rumble. But here's the thing with Ellison: things may not always be what they seem. I've read interviews with people who knew and lived with Ellison at the time and they cast doubt on whether he actually ran with a gang. Ellison seems to have spent most of his time back then in his apartment at his typewriter endlessly pounding out stories to make ends meet. When would he have found the time to infiltrate and run with a gang?
The book, as I mentioned, is engaging. And it is well-written, as is most of Ellison's work that I've encountered from various periods across his long career. And whether or not the events in Memos actually happened, he does seem to be genuinely concerned with the shabby way society treats its down-and-out citizens. But there's a passage near the end of the book that sours all of that. He's in a holding cell and he's observing the other prisoners. He focuses on a pair of homosexual Black men who are huddled together, coming down off of junk. Ellison doesn't veer into hate speech, but his portrait of these two men is the most unflattering one in the book and there is a homophobic vibe that radiates from this passage.
So I wonder. Are the events in Memos From Purgatory actually true? Or is the book the literary equivalent to one of those 1950s juvenile-delinquent B-movies that purport to be telling a real story, but are actually just a series of invented incidents, lurid and perverse, meant to titillate and shock the roadshow-exploitation crowd of midnight-movie attendees?
Either way, Memos From Purgatory is a curious cultural artifact, worth a look, worth a wonder.
April 23, 2019
Ellison here purportedly writes autobiographically about two experiences in his life. First, in the early nineteen-fifties, he assumed a teen-ager identity (the improbably-named Cheech Marone) and ran with a juvenile street gang in New York for ten weeks, for research purposes. Abut seven years later, he was arrested, basically for still possessing some of the weapons he acquired then, and spent 24 hours or so in police custody and jail. The parts are linked by what Ellison later admitted was a fabrication: he did not, if fact, as claimed here, encounter the leader of the earlier gang during that jail sojourn. Ostensibly, Ellison fabricated this element only, to create a unity between the pieces (I think the link to the weapons he has in the gang was enough to manage that), but feeling bad about that later, revealed the deception in a preface to one of the subsequent editions (the one I have is at least the third). Trouble is, the revelation doesn't help make the book feel more true. Instead, it makes it feel more contrived and renders the entire encounter with "Pooch" in jail. Pointless. For that matter, the entire account of Ellison's time with the gang just doesn't ring true. None of the kids emerges as feeling like a sketch from life. Instead, they all read like cliches from fiction about juvenile delinquents. Ellison tries to write with passion and persuasiveness about the social and legal problems in America, but in my opinion, he just doesn't pull it off.
September 6, 2023
Sigh.
I was so disappointed. This guy is terrified of young people, who he treats with the distance of some kind of first contact experience. I get that times were different, but this author comes off as more juvenile than delinquent, and, so fucking straight. How were any of these people "cool?" And what's with an adult balling a 16 year-old as some kind of initiation proof. Shouldn't age have been a criteria, Storybook Harlan? And is it possible to describe a woman without all the sexual objectivity? And the portrayal of gay men in the cell? He can't see their humanity through his discrimination.
I was so disappointed. This guy is terrified of young people, who he treats with the distance of some kind of first contact experience. I get that times were different, but this author comes off as more juvenile than delinquent, and, so fucking straight. How were any of these people "cool?" And what's with an adult balling a 16 year-old as some kind of initiation proof. Shouldn't age have been a criteria, Storybook Harlan? And is it possible to describe a woman without all the sexual objectivity? And the portrayal of gay men in the cell? He can't see their humanity through his discrimination.
May 12, 2019
An early "memoir" of his time, a la Orwell, in a 1950s kid gang , which suffers from Ellison's rough hyperbole and dashes of youthful moralism. Strong voice as usual, but one can't help wonder how much of the running with a "kid gang" was exaggerated -- though there were indeed a spate of teen gangs at the time. For Ellison fans or researches first and foremost, otherwise you're better reading Deathbird Stories or Gentleman Junkie or Angry Candy.
August 17, 2024
This memoir of Ellison's time joining a street gang in Hell's Kitchen, New York in order to write about them, never left me. As he said in the book, "I've cried for these kids." I did too.
Later, it was turned into an episode of Alfred Hitchcock starring Walter Koenig of Star Trek. The two became life-long friends and Walter wrote about lying on Harlan's bed talking to him one afternoon a month before he passed away.
Later, it was turned into an episode of Alfred Hitchcock starring Walter Koenig of Star Trek. The two became life-long friends and Walter wrote about lying on Harlan's bed talking to him one afternoon a month before he passed away.
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