Case Studies Regarding
the Psychology Beneath
Fantasy & Science Fiction
by
Wally Lee Parker
(Copyright © 2013 Wallace Lee Parker)
As the practicum of daily life
teaches, the difference between sanity and psychosis is not so much a matter of
diagnosis as of degree. If so, it might
explain why a little insanity is good for the creative juices. And a lot will make you either a mass
murderer or Stephen King.
The most common form of insanity is
“magical thinking.” It’s a residual
artifact from the dawn of each human’s self-awareness — an expected part of
everyone’s childhood. Lingering traces of
magical thinking likely form the foundations upon which artists, musicians, and
writers construct our most beautiful dreams and troubling nightmares. In fact, the intertwining of magical thinking
with these arts is likely what allows the absurdity of poetry to become
literature and the psychosis of love to become the root of our most engaging
comedies and enduring dramas. How else
could one explain, “But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
who is already sick and pale with grief.”
The hypothesis of magical thinking
is drawn from observing a very young child attempting to hide. In a child’s purely egocentric world the way
you hide is by placing your hands over your eyes while tightly squeezing your
eyes shut. From a young human’s point of
view, it’s a logical hypothesis — a hypothesis that assumes, “Since I’m the
center of the world, dissolving everything outside my perception leaves me
alone in the world.”
Now
an artist —
either a fine artist or a scam artist since they’re often pretty much the same
— might take that little chink in
developmental human psychology and make something of it.
Assuming that both artists and
politicians — politician being among the above noted scam artists — often
stealthily reference the more primitive bits of human nature in order to rouse
their target audience, it’s well within reason that an abstractionist such as
Pablo Picasso and a tyrant such as Adolf Hitler can figuratively be seated in
the same demonstrative pew — at least when they’re engaging in some artful
though not so subtle audience manipulation.
Of course each clearly “uplifts” their audience to different purpose —
this clarification hopefully assuaging the sensitivity of anyone finding the
juxtaposition of an artist and a mass-murderer troubling even as a matter of
example.
It should be noted that both Hitler
and Picasso were known to throw what were described as “childish tantrums” when
they didn’t get their way — which suggests something similar in the egocentrism
of their psychological makeups. And both
demonstrated at least some skill at creative draftsmanship — though critics
tend to fall all over themselves anti-fawning at Hitler’s artistic expressions,
as if to assure everyone of their non-approval regarding his larger agenda.
As for the principal difference
between the two; one’s masterwork was a depiction of the destruction of the
Basque village of Guernica by Nazi warplanes, while the other’s masterwork was
the construction of the killing factory at Auschwitz. And this suggests how much difference a
little empathic reinforcement can make to one’s future course. After all, Hitler might have stayed in Vienna
long enough to have starved to death had the critics at the Akademie der
bildenden Künste Wien been a little nicer when adjudicating the Führer’s
potential as a budding Rembrandt.
But how about those that practice
the art of the wordmonger?
One writer possessing a peculiar
skill for lifting the scales covering our primeval psyche was Jerome Bixby (18
years old at the beginning of America’s involvement in the above alluded World
War II). In 1953 Jerome published a
disturbing short story titled “It’s a Good Life.” On the 3rd day of November, 1961,
Rod Sterling’s teleplay of Jerome’s story unnerved CBS’s audience so
effectively that the half-hour drama continues even today to be rated as one of
the Twilight Zone’s best episodes ever.
And a case study for writers and directors in the psychology of manufacturing
a deep and lingering dread.
The story’s premise is quite
elemental. Other than driving adults
crazy, the egocentrism of children seldom does permanent damage to the larger
culture simply because very young children don’t have the physical or intellectual
power to widely broadcast such damage.
And if they appear to be trying, their behavior can often be modified
through discipline — various reasonable forms of discipline having been proven
to be very effective at getting across the idea that actions have consequences,
and that some of those consequences are likely to be very unpleasant.
But — author Jerome Bixby asks —
what if a relatively young child did have the power to successfully retaliate
against any and all attempts at discipline?
What if a child manifested the power to reach out and alter the physical
environment through his or her force of will alone — by magical thinking? What if a child screaming “I wish you were
dead” resulted in your being forever banished into the ground beneath some
semi-mythical place called the cornfield?
The protagonist of “It’s a Good
Life” is six years old — and by all appearance a very young six at
that. He’s also a mutant with godlike
powers. And by that I mean the Old
Testament’s style of hardcore godlike powers.
Our protagonist, Anthony Fremont, is
wrathful, vengeful, jealous, expectant of worship, and intolerant of
defiance. He isolates his hometown from
the rest of the world by either removing it to some other dimension or by destroying
everything in the universe other than his tiny community. Exactly which has occurred is not made clear,
and it’s totally irrelevant to the plot anyway since, as with most journeys
into the Twilight Zone, there’s not likely to be a happy ending despite
such clarity.
If you’d like to read Jerome’s
original story, downloadable public domain PDFs are scattered across the web.
I have a suspicion — purely a guess
— that at least a few published psychoanalytic papers and postgraduate thesis
have referenced “It’s a Good Life” as a case study in consequences of
early onset narcissistic personality.
And because of that, it’s probable that most any competent child
psychologist — read not nuts themselves — could at least paraphrase the story’s
most salient points. After all, the
author walked into the shadow-lands of something we adults should be able to
recall, if only dimly. His writing picks
at a stressful scab every parent at least subliminally feels when confronting
their younger selves via their own children’s manifestations of self-centered
behavior.
As a matter of fact, confronting
these dusty images of prior selves is quite often embarrassing enough to make a
good number of parents want to pull the covers up over their heads and wish the
world away — which, if you’re traversing “the middle ground between light
and shadow, between science and superstition,” just might work.
The history of televised science
fiction had another major collusion with Jerome Bixby’s craftsmanship in the
late 1960’s when Bixby penned the teleplay for an episode of Star Trek’s
original series titled “Mirror, Mirror.”
Once again Jerome is launching the
viewers into an alternate dimension — this one reached when a transporter
malfunction swaps Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, and Uhura for their doubles from a
parallel universe. It’s soon discovered
that in this other universe the crew’s alternate selves are members of an
Imperial force of rather bloodthirsty killers.
The alternate Commander Spock is a coolly bearded assassin, Uhura —
overtly sexual in thigh boots and bare midriff — a knife wielding hellcat, and
Kirk even more prone to overacting than he is in our universe.
And likewise paralleling Bixby’s
work on the Twilight Zone, the “Mirror, Mirror” episode
consistently rates among the top five fan favorites from Star Trek’s original
series.
Within literary circles, science
fiction is often entwined with fantasy — which would explain why Bixby’s “It’s
a Good Life” could be classified as either sci-fi or fantasy. The essential difference between the two
genres is that fantasy is usually framed by plausible variations or
extenuations of humanity’s collective mythology, while science fiction follows
plot lines suggested by the imaginative potentials of scientific development or
practice. Both hold elements of magical
thinking. — the suspension of disbelief required of the fantasy reader being
based on an acceptance of the magical or spiritual elements of the story, while
science fiction asks the readers to accept that everything within flows from
some rational premise that can be formalized within a scientific principle —
though oddly enough, hypothetical or purely imaginary principles are quite
acceptable.
For example — what exactly is the
difference between the mental telekinesis “It’s a Good Life’s” Antony
Fremont used to permanently banish his aggravations of the moment and the
Tantalus device hidden in the wall of Captain Kirk’s cabin? Star Trek’s “Mirror, Mirror”
never made clear where the Tantalus device sent people after they appeared to
wink out of existence. Were they
dematerialized, shifted to another dimension, or perhaps they rematerialized in
the cornfield of author Jerome Bixby’s imagination?
The point of all this being that a
sprinkling of invented terms — telekinesis, teleportation, or Tantalus device —
allows a writer to change what appears to be magic into something else. As to what that something else is; Arthur C.
Clarke’s third law of prediction stated, “Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And the alchemy of swapping magic for
advanced technologies, if done skillfully, allows even the most critical to
suspend their disbelief for at least the length of the story.
An example of this magical
technology was the seemingly endless technobabble on television’s Star Trek
— especially those versions coming after the original series where most every
problem seemed to be solvable by the creation of a sub-space tachyon
bubble. And as for Star Wars, we
need not even mention the “Force” emitted by large collections of
midi-chlorians — this fictionalization apparently patterned after the energy
producing function of cellular mitochondria; they themselves theorized within
scientific circles as being pre-animate life forms residing symbiotically
within all living tissue.
This brings us around to a classic
example of splitting the difference between magic and science — in this case by
creating a world of technically explicable magic.
Bear with me.
It seems evident that there’s
something contrarian in the makeup of most really good writers. The argument as to what generates this
habitual opposition to the accepted opinion, style, fad — whatever — will
inevitable come down to that classic psychological conundrum of “nature
versus nurture.” As to which it is
within those compelled to write either as a hobby or for a living,
psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud would doubtless opine that it must have something
to do with a deep rooted conflict between the writer and his or her
mother. And in the case of Poul
Anderson, considered one of the true Grand Masters of science fiction, Sigmund
might just have touched on something — though the word “conflict”
doesn’t justify the actual dynamics.
Born in Pennsylvanian and spending
his early childhood in Texas, Poul Anderson was of Scandinavian descent — the
name Poul being a Scandinavian variation of the common Paul. Choosing her son’s first name, Poul’s mother,
Astrid, reportedly insisted on the Scandinavian spelling/pronunciation in
response to the fact that her husband, Anton, had changed the family’s last
name, Andersen, to the more Anglo spelling of Anderson.
Astrid’s apparent rebellion against
Anton’s desire to blend with the Anglophiles seems to suggest contrarianism as
a family trait — at least on the maternal side.
According to Poul Anderson’s 2001
obituary in the New York Times, whenever he considered changing his
first name to the less distracting “Paul,” he’d just need to recall that
his more insistent grade school teachers had made a habit of telling him he
wasn’t spelling his first name right.
The Times article quoted Anderson’s reaction as, “I got my
back up about it.” So — it appears
that his insistence on keeping things as his mother wanted was indicative of an
inherited quotient of pure Scandinavian contrarianism.
Well — maybe not “pure” in
the sense of such being based only on the emotionally satisfying as opposed to
the rationalizing side of contrarianism.
Meaning something else may have also influenced his decision to retain
his Scandinavian name.
Early on Anderson had developed what
turned out to be a lifelong love for the languages, culture, and history of his
Nordic ancestors. Though generally
classified as a science fiction writer, in the very early 1950s he began
drawing on that heritage to fabricate a series of fantasy stories. 1953 saw the publication of a four part
serial in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction titled Three
Hearts and Three Lions. An expanded
version of this story was printed in book format in 1961.
In this novel a mid-20th
century man, at a moment of military crisis, is transported to a parallel world
still steeped in the mythos of northern Europe's middle ages. On this alternate Earth the story’s
protagonist finds that magic, witchcraft, and numerous other forms of
metaphysical phenomenon are the essence of reality — and himself a long-lost
feudal knight of said realm. The
thematic substrate within the novel is that in this parallel world the hero
must defeat the moral equivalent of the enemy he left back home — Nazi
Germany. Though much, much better than
this short synopsis would suggest, the novel uses a unique twist when it comes
to how a rationalist from our world might cope when attempting to rationalize
what appears to be actual magic.
With a degree in physics, Poul
Anderson — like Isaac Asimov (biochemistry), James Blish (biology), and Arthur
C. Clarke (mathematics and physics) —
was well grounded in the physical sciences.
In Three Hearts and Three Lions the author — speaking through his
protagonist — used his scientific knowledge to suggest some degree of physical
explicability for the magic confronting his hero. As a result, the story has the kind of firm
narrative edge most science fiction readers prefer. And as such, it allows the sci-fi reader to
enter a realm of trolls, elves, and the like without the self-consciousness
adults often find in elfin play.
This implies that fantasy and
science fiction are just forms of guided make-believe. And in turn implies that writers are in a
manner just tour guides for the imagination.
As for the quality of said guidance; sci-fi and fantasy writers
traditionally trend toward being among the most creative of wordsmiths, though
not always the most poetic or emotionally evocative.
To act as a guide, a writer must
scribe words across a page in a manner that reduces the generality of that
jumble of words to the point of explicability.
Everything that can be expressed through words is floundering just
beneath the bland uniformity of any unwritten page. Startling stories, erotic fantasies,
disturbing exposés — all these things are hiding in the dense fog of a blank
page, just waiting to be dragged to the surface. The writer’s task is to snare the exact words
needed to tell a story without leaving things too general to lead the reader to
the correct conclusion, or becoming so specific that the reader’s imagination
drowns within an inky swamp of unnecessary letters. This is to say that a large part of the art
of writing is the ability to know when the above noted generality has been
reduced enough that any residual implications slithering around the margins
aren’t solid enough to derail the story’s thread — and then to quit
embellishing.
This is part of self-editing.
Being able to edit through the
critical eye of the eventual reader implies that a writer’s success at creating
literary magic depends on the ability to review his or her own work as if a
dispassionate observer. This may
explain why most writers talk to themselves.
Authors may excuse such symptomatic behavior as a bit of necessary
weirdness — a bit of transient psychosis handily summoned just long enough to
edit a phrase or to work through several different perspectives on a specific
bit of plot. But verbalizing to edit
only works if the author is able to split his or her mind — is able to hear
their own voice as if it’s coming from another room.
Of course an alternative possibility
is that such verbalizations are just a writer cursing his schizophrenic muse
for the hours spent trudging down this or that red-penciled path and ending up
with a sooty mass of words demanding the sweet mercy of total redaction. Haven’t we all been there?
All this said; no matter how
fanciful the framework or how precise the editing, the grist within any story is
that specific part the reader can relate to — or more precisely, that part the
reader is in the mood to relate to.
Writers spend an inordinate amount
of time trying to set the mood — trying to seduce the reader into a more
receptive state of mind. But sometimes
the reader brings his or her own mood along when they plop down in the lakeside
lounger and crack the cover of #4 on the New York Times’ list of
bestsellers. But if the writer’s intent
and the reader’s endemic mood coincide, the results can be a passage or scene
that will remain imprinted in the reader’s memory forever.
For example …
Being primed for future fandom by
televised afterschool screenings of old Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers
serials, in the later years of the 1950s I became acquainted with what would
become a lifelong addiction — the science fiction novel. Our 7th grade library had a small
assortment of sci-fi hardbounds — including, oddly enough, the second volume in
a set of classics from the early 1930s.
Well patched with cloth binding tape, the worn and somewhat begrimed
condition of the second novel suggested the probable fate of its missing
precursor. And yet, a short synopsis in
the front of the sequel outlining the events from the missing first tome
allowed the book in hand to stand alone.
It was the sequel’s title that jumped off the shelf. “After Worlds Collide.”
One thing I learned early on, titles
can be deceptive. Too many times my eyes
have run across a title suggestive of science fiction that turned out to be a religious
tract or some such. So the act of
pulling a volume from the unsorted books in a secondhand store, or the musty
rows of a bookshop where only the generic term “fiction” marks the shelves,
always seems to have a bit of anxiety added to the anticipation. After all, After Worlds Collide might
be an economic treatise on the effect of first world capitalism on third world
economies. But in this case it most
certainly wasn’t.
As to what it was and continues to
be; After Worlds Collide, and its precursor, When Worlds Collide,
are volumes most properly ranked within the one hundred most important works of
speculative fiction ever written. Though
the science is dated, as most classic sci-fi is — and with some slight
forgiveness for the literary idioms and geopolitical realities common to the
earlier 1930s — both novels remain extremely readable.
The premise behind the Worlds
Collide novels was drawn out of one of the two general hypothesis of
planetary formation vying for acceptance in the first part of the 20th
century. Today a variation of the
condensing solar nebula theory is generally accepted, but in the early 1930s
several “encounter” theories — near collision theories — were still in the
running. These assumed that the
gravitational tides induced by the close passage of two stars would pull
sufficient matter from the surfaces of both stars to form planets around each,
and that the planets condensing from said matter would retain the angular
momentum caused by the speed of passing — thusly explaining the orbital
velocities of the planets.
Since the chances of such “just
right” near-hits were considered abysmally low, the potential for finding
planets elsewhere in the universe was assumed to be nearly non-existent within
the “encounter” hypothesis. On the other
hand, the condensing nebula theories seemed to suggest a planet rich universe —
though, outside of the heavily populated star-fields of speculative fiction,
the acceptance of this “abundance” of planets viewpoint seemed remarkably slow
even after the condensing nebula model was widely adopted as the most likely.
Thanks to the pioneering work of
Edwin Hubble, during the 1920s the scientific visualization of the size of the
universe and probable number of stars in it expanded exponentially. Prior to Hubble’s revision, the known
universe consisted solely of our own galaxy — the Milky Way. Hubble discovered that the majority of a
substantial smattering of small, barely detectable luminous smudges then classified
as stellar nebula (possibly the condensing kind) were actually distant galaxies
— distant conglomerations of hundreds of millions to billions of stars that
were themselves formed into island universes similar to our own Milky Way. Since Hubble's time the estimated number of
such distant galaxies has grown to half a billion.
Within Hubble’s massively larger
universe, the authors of the Worlds Collide novels, Philip Wylie and
Edwin Balmer, set up a statistically improbable scenario in which a near
collision similar to the one hypothesized as the mechanism of creation for our
solar system had also occurred long ago to some distant star. Sufficient materials were dragged from the
stellar body to create a solar system.
And then, eons later, a second stellar encounter ripped those evolved planets
from their orbits and flung them into the immensity of interstellar space.
As a gravitationally bonded pair,
two of these rogue planets — the larger named Bronson Alpha and the smaller
Bronson Beta by the astronomer that first detected them — eventually entered
our sun’s system. Bronson Alpha collided
with Earth, essentially evaporating both itself and the Earth, while Bronson
Beta was captured by the Sun’s gravitational field and assumed Earth’s prior
orbit, though only in the sense of an elliptical exaggerated of the Earth’s
original.
Appearing as a magazine serial in
1932, the first story — When Worlds Collide — dealt with the discovery
and naming of the incoming planets, and of the efforts of the human race to
build “space arks” capable of jumping from the doomed Earth to the smaller of
the approaching planets — the one calculated most likely to escape
destruction. It ends with a few of the
arks landing on this new world, and the discovery that the planet had once been
inhabited by an intelligent species.
The serialized version proved so
popular it was quickly reprinted as a novel.
The prior inhabitants of Bronson
Beta had constructed a series of domed cities.
And then, before the deep chill of interstellar space first liquefied
and then froze the atmosphere, said builders seem to have mysteriously
disappeared. Through untold millennia of
interstellar flight, the cold and dark of deep space had perfectly preserved
these massive structures — only now slowly rousing as the frozen atmosphere thawed
and automated machinery, drawing power from deep in the planet’s interior,
turned on the lights and heat. The
cities were apparently constructed by the original inhabitants in the belief
that it might be possible to survive what was about to befall their world. Whether these first and as yet undiscovered
inhabitants had somehow contrived to remained viable after what was likely to
have been a multi-million year deep freeze is one of the consuming questions
this second novel deals with.
After Worlds Collide was
first published in 1933 — again, like its precursor, as a magazine serial. A short time later it was likewise reprinted
as a hardbound novel.
Regarding these two authors: Edwin Balmer, though trained as an engineer,
worked primarily as a magazine editor and writer; while Philip Wylie — a
Princeton dropout — became a controversial essayist, novelist, and short story
writer. Judging by the amount of
biographical materials available for the two, Wylie’s greater output, acidic
wit, and willingness to gore sacred cows has made him the more enduring within
literary circles. And among the fans of
his more vitriolic essays, there appears to be an ongoing desire to place him
within the most legendary of said literary circles, the “vicious” inner
“circle” of the Algonquin Roundtable — though the actual evidence for such
membership seems scant.
Just to refresh your memory (as I
did mine) — beginning around 1919 and lasting through the ‘20s, a group of
notables within New York’s literary ghetto would gather for lunch at the city’s
Algonquin Hotel for repast and repartee — with a certain portion of the
resultant verbal zingers finding their way into columns within the various
newspapers and magazines the participants wrote for. This gathering became ritualized as the Algonquin
Roundtable, or, as the participants reportedly labeled it, the vicious
circle. To be included was to be
honored as a certified member of New York’s avant-garde.
It’s probable that Philip Wylie was
well acquainted with the vicious circle.
Reportedly Wylie was “on staff” with the initial issue of a new weekly, The
New Yorker, when that magazine launched in February of 1925. Also on staff from the beginning was the Roundtable’s
sharpest tongue — theater critic, short story author, and poet, Dorothy Parker.
While Parker’s often scathing
theatrical reviews became something her readers expected, after The New
Yorker received a particularly well-connected complaint regarding one of
Wylie’s theatrical reviews, he was fired.
With the end of his magazine career in 1927, Wylie became a
well-respected and often published freelance writer, and continued as such
until his death in 1971.
Though his membership in the
Algonquin’s vicious circle is questionable, Wylie did the group’s
venomous reputation an honor in 1942 with the publication of his collection of
slams at everything American. Generation
of Vipers brewed a slew of reactionary responses that continue even to this
day; and may explain why the majority of Wylie’s works, covering a wide swath
of subjects, have been largely forgotten — possibly buried by the ability of
his toxic words to offend large numbers of people in a single phrase; thusly
suggesting that his banishment into literary obscurity is just a retroactive
punishment for such inflicted barbs.
Through the rest of their respective
lives, at least some type of continuing social intercourse between Parker and
Wylie is suggested by a notation appearing in the summer 1956 issue of The
Paris Review. In the introduction to
this piece — the piece being an interview with Dorothy Parker — the author,
Marion Capron, noted that on the wall of Parker’s New York apartment there hung
a “portrait” of “a sheepdog owned by the author Philip Wylie, and
painted by his wife.” Which suggests
Parker wasn’t among the overly offended at Wylie’s above noted sarcastic — and
bestselling — dissertation on the hypocrisy of American’s “viperous”
values.
What may be coincidental is that
both Parker and Wylie — each considered a highly creative and skilled short
story writer with a reputation for a sniping wit — reportedly suffered an
eerily similarity of damage during childhood.
Philip was born in 1902. HIs mother, popular novelist Edna Edwards
Wylie, died when he was 5. Philip’s
father, a Presbyterian minister, soon remarried. Philip didn’t get along with either his
father or stepmother. Part of that
dislike may have come from his stepmother’s misdiagnosis of his childhood appendicitis
as something else (possibly malingering), resulting in a rupture and prolonged
recovery at the ripe old age of 8.
Already something of a reclusive, this event is suggested to have
alienated him even further from his family.
As for any genetic predisposition
from having a novelist mother, all three of Edna Edwards Wylie’s sons published
at least one novel under their own names — with Philip publishing about fifty
novels, collections, and book length dissertations all told.
Dorothy (Rothschild) Parker lost her
mother just a month before her fifth birthday.
Her Jewish father was a well to do garment manufacturer; emotionally
distant at the very least, and quite possibly physically abusive — her
punishment for being late to the dinner table being to have her wrists
“hammered” with a silver spoon. (Solid
silver spoons — the kind burglars prefer — are quite heavy.) Soon after her mother’s death, her father
remarried. Dorothy’s stepmother was a
devout Roman Catholic that Dorothy grew to detest — likely because she insisted
Dorothy attend a boarding school run by nuns.
John Keats, one of her biographers,
encapsulated the emotional trauma of her upbringing by suggesting it was the
equivalent of being raised in an “orphanage administered by psychopaths.” It was not made clear if that phrase came
from Dorothy herself, though, as with any number of quotes rightly or wrongly
attributed to her, it sounds like something she might have uttered.
In
the research material I’ve previewed, it’s not specifically stated if either
Parker or Wylie verbalized to themselves while editing their copy — though with
psyches clearly scarred at a tender age, at least some mumbling would seem
excusable.
Digesting the above, it does suggest
that the ability of at least some of our better writers to probe into the
darker corners of human fears and foibles has something to do with the way
they’ve been psychologically bruised, especially early on — such bruising
possibly causing an inward drawing, an emotional internalizing that becomes the
root of a given individual’s literary compulsion.
As for readers, could it be some
similar literary compulsion that draws them into a novel’s pages?
In After Worlds Collide, Edwin
Balmer and Philip Wylie are describing the first exploration of an alien city
by survivors of the American expedition to Bronson Beta. I’m surprised at how few pages are actually
used for the description. I first read
the passages nearly sixty years ago. My
recollection is of twenty or so pages of high tension. Now it’s miraculously shrunk down to just a
few pages of print.
Is this a demonstration of
Einstein’s suppositions regarding time dilation? Or is it an example of the effect the
reader’s mood has on how they interpret what they are reading? Or is it evidence of the power of surprise
when it comes to twisting otherwise ordinary things into art?
It was our farmhouse in William’s
Valley, early spring, about 1959. It was
late afternoon — nearing twilight of what had been a blustery, cloud strewn
day. I was sitting at the dining room
table, engrossed in Balmer and Wylie’s sequel — walking along a strange,
metallic roadway (at least I recall it being metallic) — approaching the
towering transparent dome of the alien city.
Just then thunder rolled over the farm.
Through the dining room window I see the fields darken as light is rapidly
squeezed out of the sky. Rain begins to
shotgun against the windows. Something
snaps and the lights sputter out.
Doubtless a power line down somewhere.
I retrieve our coal-oil table
lamp. Light the wick. And in the dim light, with wind howling, rain
smattering, thunder peeling, and an occasional twig from the tamaracks
skittering across the roof’s tarpaper shingles, I go back to reading.
Somehow the alien city’s lights have
come on. Who has turned them on? The city is remarkable clean — as if the
residents had tidied up before leaving for the night — though in this case it
was a night of a million years at least.
So where are they, these long-ago inhabitants? Where are the bodies? If no bodies, are they somehow still
alive? Have they risen from a frozen
sleep to peer out of seemingly eyeless windows, scurrying back into the shadows
just as the Earthmen turned to look?
It seemed to last forever — the
search. Each corner approached with the
expectation that aliens are waiting to pounce.
Each corner passed revealing nothing but some new expanse of sleek
towers, deserted streets, and empty doorways.
I was well through the next several
chapters before power was restored and the farmhouse lights blinked on. What that storm left behind was a memory that
still haunts — the actual sensation of dread upon entering what may have only
appeared to be a deserted city.
Acting as guides, Balmer and Wylie
were only suggesting the images I encountered.
Reconstructing those images with my own embellishments required my
willing and active participation. And
the thing that drives any reader to the next page is the same thing often
driving the writer to the next page — that thing being either a shared
psychosis or a shared curiosity.
Such leads me to suspect that Balmer and Wylie
were just as anxious (or potentially just as dreadful of) as I when it came
time to peer around the city’s next corner.
Such apprehension plays well when bounced against the myriad of times
this or that author has attempted to describe the urgency they feel when about
to discover what their character is going to do next.
Oh sure, the writer knows where the
story’s going (well, some do anyway) — but the details are often just as
surprising to the writer as to the reader.
Most any writer will tell you this.
But doesn’t this suggest that an author’s characters are actually
disembodied entities possessing at least a partial free will — disembodied
entities that must be hiding deep in the crevasses of the author’s
cerebrum? Might such an admission be
sufficient evidence to suggest a diagnosis of clinical schizophrenia?
I don’t have a problem with that
analysis of my favorite authors. As long
as I get my money’s worth, why should I give a damn if the story’s word-smiter
— one who smites words into some semblance of explicability — is nuts?
As for why humans write things or
read things or both, perhaps it’s just as Dorothy Parker quipped, “The cure
for boredom is curiosity. (But) there is no cure for curiosity.” Making curiosity dichotomous — being both the
curse and the cure.
Before moving on, one last set of
thoughts regarding Parker and Wylie.
Dorothy Parker’s association with
Hollywood’s Screen Writers Guild, with the anti-Nazi league, and with various
organizations supporting union rights, civil rights, and equal rights, made her
a person of interest to J. Edgar Hoover — earning her a 1000 page dossier with
the FBI and, eventually, a place on Hollywood’s infamous blacklist.
Wylie on the other hand was placed
under house arrest in the spring of 1945 as a security risk. This for submitting a story to his publisher
detailing the detonation of an atomic bomb several months before that had
actually been done. Though Wylie’s
publisher rejected the story, The Paradise Crater, as “too fantastic,”
the publisher also submitted it for government inspection — resulting in an
investigation as to how Wylie had derived the essence of the most secret of a
plethora of top secret government projects.
After it was explained and the explanation triple checked — and after
some serious lobbying by his friends — Wylie was released. And then, after the atomic bombs were dropped
on Japan, Wylie submitted the story once more — this time to his new publisher
since he was really pissed at his old one — and it was accepted; accepted not
only into Wylie’s literary dossier, but also into the pantheon of sci-fi’s most
retold anecdotes.
Philip Wylie wasn’t the only science
fiction writer to write about atomic energy or atomic bombs in the decades
before Hiroshima, but as far as we know he was the only one to be arrested —
even if it was only house arrest.
Not that political or social
controversy is anything new to science fiction and fantasy. Think Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit
451, and Animal Farm. But
eons ago it was discovered that controversial subjects sell — especially if at
least one of the topics making it controversial is sex.
In this age of permissiveness, it’s
hard to fathom just how pervasive literary censorship was for much of the 20th
century. This of course created a
pent-up market for all things forbidden.
By the 1950s it was requisite for paperback novels to suggest a “racy”
content by splashing cautionary blubs across the front and back covers. For example, “A high voltage story of
violence and vice among over-privileged teen-agers,” or “A torrid new
novel,” or “exposing the hypocrisy hidden behind the guise of the
respectable.” As should be expected,
despite the suggestion of some sort of graphic exposé intended solely to inform
the reader of some imminent threat to civilization’s very structure, often the
most “torrid” part of these novels were the blurbs on the covers — which
is just as well considering that censorship was still very much a part of life
in mid-century America.
But after World War II a new
collection of bohemian counter-culturist — later labeled Beatniks — were coming
to the fore. Among them writers William
S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, poet Allen Ginsberg, and the founder of San
Francisco’s City Lights Books, publisher and poet Lawrence
Ferlinghetti. The various cultural and
legal battles that swarmed around these men resulted in a loosening — and in
some cases total suppression — of censorship laws. And considering how tainted by political,
religious, racial, and social-class considerations the application of these
laws were, in balance that was a good thing.
What is generally agreed within
literary circles — though often very begrudgingly — is that when this often quite
toxic bloom of postwar counterculture began seeping into American arts and
letters, it regenerated —possibly by acting as a much needed irritant — the
creativity energies of most everything and everyone else.
Speaking of creative energies, one
of the young writers starting his career in 1950 was WWII veteran and recent
college graduate Salvatore Albert Lombino.
And as regards that diploma; it was earned at New York’s Hunter College
while majoring in English and psychology, with minors in dramatics and
education. The term Phi Beta Kappa, the
academic honors society, is also noted on his educational résumé.
Among other things, S. A. Lombino
was noted for the number of pseudonyms he used during his literary career. Best known when writing as Evan Hunter and Ed
McBain, he also wrote as Hunt Collins, Curt Cannon, Richard Marsten, Ezra
Hannon, John Abbott, D. A. Addams, Ted Taine and, possibly, a few more. As for why so many names; a literary agent
advised Salvatore Lombino that he’d have problems selling his works if he kept
his Italian name. So in 1952 he legally
changed his name to an appropriately white, Anglo-Saxon sounding Evan
Hunter. He was then advised that publishing
too much low-brow crime, sci-fi, and the like under his new legal name would
curb his ability to sell quality fiction.
Therefore he began publishing different types of fictions under
different nom de plumes.
Of course Lombino/Hunter did have a
few best sellers. In 1954 he did a
little book titled The Blackboard Jungle. He also wrote the very popular the 87th
Precinct crime series as Ed McBain.
He’s responsible for three novels in the 1950s juvenile Winston Science
Fiction series — Find the Feathered Serpent as Evan Hunter, then Rocket
to Luna and Danger: Dinosaur! as Richard Marsten.
Though incredibly prolific as a
novelist and short story writer, it’s likely most everyone is more familiar
with his television and movie screenplays — despite the fact that a
screenwriter’s name is seldom recalled, even if noticed at all. And one of his screenplays in particular
tends to suggest that Lombino/Hunter’s degree in psychology from New York’s
Hunter College (the name of his alma mater not coincidental to the spelling of
his adopted legal name) was put to good use.
In the fall of 1955 a new half-hour
anthology series premiered on television.
And for the next 267 episodes, with each showing hosted by the namesake
himself, Alfred Hitchcock Presents made television history — a history
that continued for another 93 episodes as the expanded Alfred Hitchcock Hour. As a spinoff of the television series, a
series of literary anthologies were printed, also under the collective title Alfred
Hitchcock Presents.
In the summer of 1961, while still
basking in the success of his blockbuster Psycho, Hitchcock occupied
himself looking for his next movie project.
Eventually he recalled a short story that had been included in his print
anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents: My Favorites in Suspense. This particular bit of fiction, The Birds,
was first published in 1952 by English writer Daphne du Maurier in a collection
of her own stories titled The Apple Tree. The story detailed the fate of a community
along the Cornish coast as it was being slaughtered by an unrelenting flocks of
murderous birds.
On the 18th of August,
1961 — as Hitchcock was mulling how to turn Daphne’s story into a movie — an
article appeared in California’s Santa Cruz Sentinel under the headline
“Seabird Invasion Hits Costal Homes; Thousands of Birds Floundering in
Streets. The article recounted how
coastal residents in the upper Monterey Bay area — specifically along an
approximate 4 mile stretch of beach between Pleasure Point to the southeast of
Santa Cruz and further on east to Reo del Mar — were woken in the early morning
by the sound of “a rain of birds” colliding with the sides of their
houses. Many of the residents reportedly
grabbed flashlights and rushed outside, only to quickly retreat as the invading
horde of birds flew toward the handheld lights.
As dawn arrived, thousands of dead and dying birds were found littering
the streets.
As for an explanation; the birds,
identified as Sooty Shearwaters, were assumed to have become disoriented in the
early morning fog and to have flown toward the lights of the seaside homes. Considering that Sooty Shearwaters are fairly
substantial — 40 inch wingspans, 17 or so inches in length, and weighing an
average 1.7 pounds — a flock of cruising birds splashing head-on against walls
or slicing through windows would be shocking, to say the very least.
In its August 21st
edition, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported that they’d received a
telephone call from Alfred Hitchcock himself, asking for a copy of the paper’s
report on the incident.
Out of hand I’d likely have been
hesitant to accept the “lost in the fog” explanation. It seemed so eerie; surely there must have
been something more to this event. But
then, just this last September, something occurred within my own family to suggest
it might be accurate.
I, my wife, daughter, and
granddaughter were spending the weekend at Ocean Shores on the Washington
coast. Early that Sunday morning my
daughter called me to the window of our room on the hotel’s third story.
“Can you see what I’m seeing,”
Gwendolyn asked? (It was an aging
eyesight question.)
Low over the surf line, paralleling
the beach, glided a narrow line of dark colored birds. Five or six birds seemed to pass over any
given point each second, all flying south.
And they kept coming, and coming, and coming.
“I’ve been watching for five
minutes at least,” she said, “and I’ve not noticed a single significant break
in that stream.”
“That’s really odd.” I
observed.
“It’s not odd, Dad. It’s scary.
It’s creepy like in one of those tsunami movies where the birds know
something’s coming and all clear out.”
We watch for another 10 minutes —
enough total time for six or seven thousand birds to stream by. When we left the window they were still
speeding south. We checked again 15 or
20 minutes later and they were gone. But
the tsunami sirens hadn’t gone off. Nor
had the tide withdrawn a mile or two further out than normal. Nor was there a huge wave visible along the
horizon. So we didn’t abandon the hotel
in a panic and head inland — though that might have been a reasonable
precaution.
Later that afternoon we visited the
community’s natural history interpretive center. I explained what we’d seen to the center’s
naturalist, and he said it was not at all unusual.
“The birds you saw, were they
fairly big with chocolate brown plumage?”
“They must have been good size
for us to see them from that far away.
As for color, all we could say was dark.”
“From the way they were acting I
don’t think there’s any doubt they were Sooty Shearwaters,” the naturalist
said. “They’re diving birds, knifing
down into the water after small fish and the like. They’re excellent underwater swimmers
too. Sometimes you’ll see them floating
in mass out beyond the surf, and sometimes you’ll see them gliding along the
beach in seemingly endless strings just as you described. They’re long-distance migrators, coming up
from as far south as New Zeeland, up to Alaska, and then back down to New
Zeeland during our winter. But they
weren’t migrating this morning. Likely
they were just moving to a better hunting spot.”
So — let’s suppose on that long-ago
August morning a mass of Shearwaters floating in the dark waters just west of
Santa Cruz are roused by the lights of the town up-illuminating the 3 a.m.
covering of fog. (At that time of year,
actual sunrise at Santa Cruz would have been about 5 a.m. in standard time, or
about 6 a.m. in daylight saving time.)
Maybe confused by this reflected light — confused into thinking it’s
close to dawn — they rise in mass and begin their occasional pattern of
streaming in a line along the surf.
Gliding south, they round the city, flying along the beach as it curves
east into Monterey Bay. As the flock,
flying low and fast as is their habit, leaves the densely populated oceanfront,
the luminosity of the fog lessens and the leading Shearwaters respond by moving
inland, drifting over the beach and toward the scattered street and porch
lights to the north. What happens next
is just a confluence of circumstances that lead to a consequence — the really
spooky consequence of a long thread of following-the-leader Sooty Shearwaters
dashing themselves into the upright obstructions — walls, windows, cars, trees,
whatever — rising from the beachfront properties.
Roused by the muted thuds, a
multitude of robed homeowners ease out into the shadow filled pre-dawn mist
with flashlights in hand. Inhaling the
wet air in short, shallow breaths, they sweep beams of light through the fog,
watching the barely visible droplets drifting down as if a granular flow of
slowly falling dust. And in this damp
shroud they hear the rustle and squeak of broken birds — hundreds upon hundreds
of broken birds flopping on the sodden lawns.
Suddenly the chill air, dimly
luminous under the streetlamps, ricochets with ghostly shadows. And among the shadows swoops a hail of hard
black edges — fast moving edges driving toward the flashlights. Near hit!
Near hit! The searchers run for
the safety of their doors.
Slammed and locked, one homeowner
asks, “What the hell’s wrong with the birds?” Others demand a more elemental answer, as
they wondered, “Why are those damn things after us?”
That was the first impression the
residents had. The birds weren’t after
the lights; they were after the people behind the lights. And if that were true, maybe it represented
the awakening of a long suppressed racial memory. Maybe it’s a recollection of the eons old
battle between feathered egg layers and furry nest robbers. Maybe it’s the bird’s ancient dinosaurian
heritage speaking to them. Maybe it’s a
wisp of recollection — a wisp recalling that long ago this planet belonged to
the velociraptor kind — their kind.
Or maybe it’s as simple as Revelation
19: “And I saw an angel standing
in the sun: and he cried with a loud voice saying to all the fowls that fly in
the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves unto the supper of the great
God; That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the
flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and
the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great.”
But I digress.
At about the same time as the
incident in Monterey Bay, Hitchcock contacted Lombino/Hunter (a.k.a. Hunt
Collins, Ed McBain, etc., etc., etc.) about doing a screenplay for The Birds. Hitchcock was well acquainted with Hunter’s
work in Hollywood, especially the dozen or so screenplay adaptations he’d done
for Hitchcock’s television show — including some scripts the writer had adapted
from his own materials.
Hitchcock told Hunter he wanted to
move the location from Daphne du Maurier’s Cornish coast on the very
southwestern tip of England to a small town some 60 miles north of San
Francisco called Bodega Bay. In fact, Hitch
wanted most everything except the downbeat mood of the piece changed —
everything except that and the basic bones of a few exceptionally well-drawn
scenes.
Which is to say that though Daphne’s
disturbing story is well structured and well told — a solitary farmer battling
for the survival of his family in a community that is, before story’s end,
composed of corpses — Hitchcock wanted a less provincial — meaning a somewhat
less rural — feel to the story.
But the one thing Hitchcock was
intent on was that the rationale for the bird’s attack would be left
unresolved; leaving only, as the original story had suggested, a hint that it
might be some ancient instinct inherent in “those little brains”
compelling them to use their “stabbing beaks” to gnaw away everything
human, and do so with “the deft precision of machines.”
Daphne’s original story also
displays the deft precision of a machine — using the mechanics of suggestion to
forever alter one’s perception of the world’s feathered population.
Thought Evan Hunter developed the
movie’s script in close collaboration with Hitchcock, the ending the
screenwriter wrote was even darker than the rather ambiguous close Hitchcock
actually shot. In a slow last drive
through the town, the script made clear that most of the citizens of Bodega Bay
have been slaughtered by the birds. As
to whether the rest of the world remains, Hitchcock once reminisced that he had
toyed with the idea of ending the movie with a shot showing the Golden Gate
Bridge covered in birds. In the taped
interview exposing such, Hitchcock was heard chuckling at the recollection.
Posters for the movie bear a quote
from Hitchcock. “It could be the most
terrifying motion picture I have ever made,” they say. While close to right, this quote also
suggests that advertising for this movie, as for movies in general, is kindred
in kind to the advertising for paperback novels in that they both display a
degree of suspect hyperbole thinly stretched over at least a modicum of
truth. Still, advertising aside,
cinematic history agrees that The Birds is a classic movie drawn out of
a near-perfect script — meaning Evan Hunter should get a fair portion of the
praise as regards any quotient of “terrifying” the movie might actually
possess.
Under the nom de plume Hunt Collins,
the multi-named writer penned a novel eventually called Tomorrow and
Tomorrow. I say eventually because
its genesis was a short story appearing in the January 1954 issue of the long
running magazine If: Worlds of Science Fiction — there printed under the
title Malice in Wonderland. In
1956 an expanded version of this story was published as a hardbound novel
branded Tomorrow’s World. It
reappeared in pocketbook format in 1961, this time rebranded Tomorrow and
Tomorrow. And then once again in
1979 as Tomorrow and Tomorrow, but this time under what was at that time
a much more recognizable penname, Ed McBain.
My copy is the 1961 Pyramid
pocketbook. On the first page, my
hand-scribbled note relates that I’d purchased the book in 1963. As for why; the cover art displays a
partially nude woman, her breast painted pale blue. In keeping with the times, the quite explicit
illustration is very small. However,
having been blessed with near terminal nearsightedness, I’m able to lift my
glasses and by peering beneath the lenses crisply focus on objects only three
inches away. So yes, I can certify that
the young lady is not wearing anything above the waist. And yes, I can also certify that her bare
boobs are indeed painted pale blue. (And
yes, I can thread needles very handily.)
Thusly having had my literary
interest piqued, I moved on to the printing on the cover.
Small print above the title bears
the all-cap banner, “Battle of Strange Cults for Control of the World.” And the back cover is sprinkled with phrases
such as “savage satire,” “perverse thrill-seekers,” “cruelly
logical exposé,” and of course the near requisite “a world gone mad!”
The very first page — normally the
unprinted fly page in hardbound novels — notes, “A searing satire on today’s
amorality.” And then, “This is a
future that could happen to us!”
Being that I was nearing the end of
my teens — and considering that all the truly salient points regarding the
book’s alleged contents seems to have been illustrated or otherwise revealed on
the cover — the sale was more than made.
As for the author’s writing style;
it’s a clear, crisp, third person narrative — purely expository. He uses a fair amount of dialog. All said, whatever direction his plot is taking,
he writes in a manner intended to make it understood. In other words, his style is professional
grade expository.
The “strange cults” noted
above are neither that strange nor cults; at least in the proper sense of the
words. In this particular future — the
last half of the 22nd century — society has simply divided into two
supposed extremes.
One group is the Realist —
dressing conservatively, acting conservatively, railing against smut, drugs,
and everyone else’s lack of family values.
At the same time said Realist are imbibing alcohol at a ferocious
pace, engaging in sexual affairs at the drop of the hat, and doing just about
everything their supposed polar opposites are doing, just doing it in what they
believe to be secret. In other words,
it’s pretty much a portrait of today’s conservative ideology.
Now the other side, the Vicarions,
have their own set of values. With the
advent of Sensos — movies in which the viewers are able to feel
everything occurring on screen — things such as actually having physical sex have
become unnecessary — and in fact repulsive.
As for the group’s name, since they prefer to experience things such as
the above noted sex vicariously, they’re called Vicarions. Drugs are legal; being produced and marketed
much like alcohol or cigarettes (remember, this was written in the mid-1950s,
so the fact that most of these futuristic characters smoke in not a big
deal). And near nudity for the Vicarions’
medically enhanced and sculpted bodies is all but mandatory — which of course
necessitates that women apply makeup to more body parts than just their faces
(thusly explaining the various tints of
breast rouge). Extrapolating from
their preference for vicarious sensations, it seems normal things that remind
people that they are in fact animals — eating food in front of other people for
example — are considered rude in the extreme, and therefore eating, like
toiletry, is only to be carried out in private.
The culmination of the struggle
between the two social forces comes when the Realist manage to convince
Congress to once again outlaw drugs. How
could they manage such a thing you might ask?
Well, since government works about the same way in this highly
permissive future as it does now, the Realist simply pool their
resources and pay Congress off.
By today’s standards there’s nothing
particularly explicit about this book.
However, it’s interesting both as a bit of social commentary written
during a particularly repressive period, and as a bit of classic science
fiction. As for myself, I was actually
hoping the Vicarions would win the “battle of strange cults for
control of the world” — especially since I’ve always had a fondness for
feminine boobs.
And even though those portions of
the author’s future society that we might consider analogous to today’s
political rightwing won the culture war, what little we know of
Lombino/Hunter/Collins’ personal life suggests that had the quirks of his Tomorrow
and Tomorrow plot allowed otherwise, he also may have preferred the Vicarions
win. After all, the Vicarions
were obviously the more fun set of characters.
When developing a fondness for the
works of a particular writer — the subjects that writer has chosen, the plots
they’ve created, the characters they’ve embellished — it’s quite natural to
also become at least mildly interested in the author’s personal story — if for
no other reason than to find out how much of the author has seeped into the
characters. Though the mechanics of
writing on the professional level tends to washes most of the author’s private
subtext out of any given script, the nature of dipping into an internal
creative well for inspiration assures that bits of the scribe’s self will still
somehow creep in. For anyone who knows
the writer personally, small hints of the author’s private persona may appear
as artifacts within the conscious or unconscious tone, style, and so forth of
the work. But it’s still the nature of
professional level writing that most such hints are worked and reworked so often
that only the writer’s innermost circle can puzzle out such private references.
The truth is that due to the various
forms of psychosis that compel a good portion of our writers to write, we
sometimes find the personal lives of writers more interesting, or at least more
accessible, than anything they’ve written — just as we often find the personal
lives of painters more interesting, or at least more accessible, than anything
they’ve painted — especially in the modern era.
This is to say that knowing the backstory of a particular painting —
especially if we find that backstory intriguing — usually compels a deeper
interest in the painting itself since we thereafter tend to believe we can see
the scandalous story beneath the pigment.
Substitute a novel, short story, whatever for the painting, the same
tendency to believe we can read between the lines still applies.
Sometimes this desire to know a
creator by means other than his or her creations can become baroquely
incestuous. And by this I am of course
referencing the most incestuous of all kinds of writers, those insidious
biographers.
I’m told one place to find the souls
of writers, painters, and a telltale biographer all mashed together is within
the works of Gertrude Stein. I keep
promising myself that one of these days I’m going to try to read some Stein —
emphasis on the “try.” Likely I’ll look
at her reminiscences of Pablo Picasso and some of her lesbian stuff. After all, like most men I’m always interested
in Picasso and lesbians — though not necessarily in that order. The thing is; I’m told reading Stein in the
original tends to leave one fuzzy in the brain.
I’m also told it’s best to let a good biographer interpret both Stein
and Picasso. I’m told this is especially
important when it comes to interpreting Stein when she’s interpreting Picasso —
and since she was Picasso’s personal friend and an early promoter of his work,
her voice is a good source for biographical interpreters to draw from.
All this is just to suggest that
people are interested in Stein and Picasso primarily because they were
characters with depths far beyond what they created. What they have created is merely the locus
around which we hinge the satisfaction we feel when meddling into their
well-documented private lives. The fact
that both were artists — a writer and a painter — seems to give us that
right. And I suspect there’s more than a
small measure of moral rectitude in this viewpoint. After all, if they didn’t want to be examined
in such intimate and well footnoted detail, they shouldn’t have exposed
themselves artistically.
Which draws us back around to the
writer with many names, and an examination of another of his nom de
plumes. It is alleged — take careful
note of the word alleged — that Lombino/Hunter authored a series of “sleaze”
novels under the name Dean Hudson. To be
fair, of the sixty or so titles attributed to Dean Hudson, only a few of the
first twenty are actually believed to have been by Lombino/Hunter — all of
those published after 1964 were assumed to have been penned by others. Within those first twenty titles, Sinville,
Las Vegas Lust, Wall Street Wanton, and The Casting Couch
are among those attributed to Lombino/Hunter.
As for why such a prolific writer would crank these smutters out at a
supposed thousand dollars a pop, that’s a bit involved.
Supposedly these novels were
published “off the books;” meaning no records of Hunter’s involvement were
kept. All payments were in cash and
under the table. As for why; the story
goes that Lombino/Hunter was something of a Lothario. And since he was married, he needed a secret
income to finance his romantic endeavors.
The quality required of these sexploitation scripts was so low he could
continue writing his mainstream materials without rousing suspicion due to a
drop in his overall literary production.
And in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, a thousand dollars was a fairly
hefty sum. For example; in the 1950s
room rates at New York’s Waldorf Astoria began as low as $20.00 per night. The same room would cost $320.00 nowadays.
The above allegations of moonlight
pornography were vehemently denied by Hunter of course. And since records were not kept — that being
the whole point — it comes down to examining writing styles to guess who wrote
what.
As for how this might affect our
perception of his novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow, the writer with many
names seems to have had such a clean, non-nuanced style that trying to read
between the lines is likely to produce few insights. In other words, he’s like a bottle of wine
with a screw-on cap — functional at the dinner table, but not particularly
useful to anyone wanting to impress others with their esoteric insights into
the winemaker’s soul. Unlike with a
specific year of California pinot, adjudicating that the essence of one of his
novels is a bit tannic with just a hint of roasted chestnut won’t work when it
comes to describing a vintage Evan Hunter.
His prose is too workmanlike for that.
As for understanding the psychology
of writers in general — and sci-fi and fantasy writers in specific — since
writers cover a spectrum of personal idiosyncrasies likely as wide as the
subjects they write about, that would seem an improbable task. However, as far as the overall art of writing
is concerned, we could speculate that there are two types of writers — those
that write to be read (and maybe even get paid for allowing such) and those
that write to be noticed.
At first glance it might seem that
being read and being noticed are essentially the same thing. Well, yes they are — but not quite. And within that subtle little fissure of
meaning dwells the difference between being a serious student of the
compositional arts, and being a dabbler — meaning a pudknocker.
Which is to say; writing is the art
of being understood. If that requires
the total sublimation of self into the needs of the story, then that’s what the
artist does. A dabbler writing merely to
be noticed has little interest in the needs of the story — which tends to
negate the chances of his or her work being taken seriously by anyone expecting
a story of at least passable quality.
The objective of most serious
writers is to get published. As noted
above, some may have the expectation of getting paid for their work, but people
good enough to make a living or even a few extra dollars at writing are few and
far between. Most of us are satisfied
just to have appeared in print — as long as the publisher is a legitimate
outlet such as a magazine, newspaper, anthology, or the like.
Having appeared at least once in
print, and therefore ever after classified as published writers, we’re
occasionally approached for an opinion regarding a novice manuscript. At that point we have a choice. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s best to
ask one question. “Do you have a writing
style?” If the one that approaches
professes to having a “style,” it’s best to pass the proffered script by.
My suspicion is that a writer’s
style is simply a residue rising organically out of the way the writer handles
the art of being understood — said residue being the remaining traces of the
unique mannerisms and methodologies the individual applies when handling plot,
structure, composition, word usage, and so forth — a residue that sometimes
remains on the script’s surface even after the script’s been highly polished.
If the above is true, having a
discussion regarding a particular writer’s “style” before that writer has
managed to create at least one publishable script seems somewhat premature —
and again, by published I mean having a story printed by a legitimate outlet.
Which draws me to that often
ruminated about piece of psychodrama called stream-of-consciousness
writing. As a psychoanalytic tool, this
is in the same school as free-verse poetry.
It doesn’t need to be good. It
doesn’t even needs to be revealing. It
just needs to be perplexing enough that the author can spend endless hours
talking about it.
As to its relationship to
literature, most stream-of-consciousness is tantamount to dredging the muck
from the bottom of a writer’s collection of unorganized notes — tantamount to
slurping those free-floating bits of serendipitous thought that writers of all
genera tend to jot down on restaurant napkins and/or handy strips of toilet
paper. But the essence is, even accomplished
writers need to transfer their toilet paper musings — highlighted with
clarifying embellishments — into their journals and such within several days of
generating said beer-infused quips, since even the original author tends to
lose track of the meaning of such stream-of-whatever blurbs over time.
One of the problems with
stream-of-consciousness writing is that the interior monologue the writer is
supposedly tapping can only be fully understood when the reader has a clear
understanding of the writer’s intent.
Clarity of intent is the reason the English language uses sets of
traditional idioms organized into an agreed upon grammatical structure. Without the careful editing needed to
translate the unique forms of word usages, the nonverbal grammatical structures,
and the mental fragmentation of stream-of-consciousness to a more traditional
grammatical structure, gross misunderstandings will likely occur. In other words, reading someone else’s
unfiltered internal dialog is the equivalent of reading a foreign language
translated by using a duel-language dictionary while having no understanding of
the underlying grammar of the original language. While you may get within a ballpark or two of
the general gist, without understanding the grammatical conventions you’ll lose
the nuance inherent in the original language — nuance clearly apparent to most
any native speaker of that original language.
All this would imply that the depth
one occasionally sees in stream-of-consciousness writing is illusionary — like
those angular bits of inside-out cows one often finds littering a Picasso.
A tendency toward
stream-of-consciousness is the kind of thing that makes Gertrude Stein a “hard”
read — or so I’m told. And that’s one of
the reasons it’s her notes on members of the “lost generation,” rather than the
merits of her own writing, that makes her a feast for biographers.
If the intent of most
stream-of-consciousness writing is to draw attention to the writer rather than
the material being written, then being offered such a missive for opinionating
is almost invariably an invitation to a dull and fruitless slog. The advantage to the writer is that it takes
neither talent nor creativity nor any great amount of labor to crank out a few
dozen pages of this drivel. Nor — since
editing stream-of-consciousness is contraindicated by its very nature — none of
the self-editing skills most writers hone during countless hours of trial and
error are necessary. In other words,
stream-of-consciousness seems an easy way to invite oneself into many hours of
literary discussions without paying any of the prerequisite artistic dues. Whereas creating a piece of work with the
intent of the work being understood without at least an evening of subsidiary
conversation usually requires countless hours of solitary and largely unnoticed
work — such being the prerequisite artistic dues.
As a clearly structured literary
device, internal monologues displaying some superficial resemblance to
stream-of-consciousness have proven their artistic worth. However, such devices bear little
relationship to what most amateur writers appear to believe
stream-of-consciousness writing to be.
Due to this common ignorance, examples of “interior dialogs” are often
clipped from this or that bit of classic literature and proffered with a smug
“Here! This is what
steam-of-consciousness looks like.”
Well, yes. That’s what
stream-of-consciousness — or at least specific bits of highly polished and
exceptional literate examples selectively stripped from hundreds of thousands
of pages of otherwise indecipherable crap — looks like.
What I’m seeing when confronted with
these select bits of classic literature is something quite different than the
example-clippers intend. What I’m seeing
are bits of prose so lyrical they can be defined as excellent examples of
poetry without obvious rhyme. And
there’s the rub. These bits aren’t
stream-of-consciousness. These are
highly polished bits of expository prose worked thoroughly through by gifted
writers and then presented as representations of their character’s interior
monologue. And if an aspiring writer
fails to recognize these superb examples as something far, far beyond the
literary equivalent of verbatim musings from the psychoanalytic couch, it tends
to suggest that said writer needs to put a little more time into understanding
the basics of the craft he or she is aspiring to.
In the meantime, foisting any
unpolished stream-of-consciousness scripts on an unwary reader is the
equivalent of having a lascivious relationship with your laser-jet and then
bragging how accomplished you are as a lover.
In other words, your magical thinking has gotten the better of you. If so, now would be a good time to
self-administer a round or two of electroshock therapy, or a prophylactic dose
of English 101.
But I digress.
Within their prose, one thing
science fiction and fantasy writers should be especially adept at is
clarity. The acuity needed by the
expository writing within these two genera is among the highest in all of
literature. After all, the author is
required to make totally invented worlds seem real. This requires both a precision of vision, and
a high degree of invented detail within the literary descriptions of those
visions. There’s no room for pudknockers
here.
Perhaps it’s the simple clarity of
prose within the best of sci-fi and fantasy that suggests it’s easier to write
than other forms of fiction. As for the
disdain certain aspiring writers have for any form of writing other than
fiction; perhaps it’s the illusion that none of the drudgery associated with
nonfiction writing — drudgery such as researching subjects or checking facts —
are necessary when writing fiction. Such
illusions would suggest that fiction is a low-labor path to fame and
fortune. And it would seem that the
fraction of people professing a preference for writing in an experimental
stream-of-consciousness style are seeking a path even lower in labor and
commitment than that. If that’s their
collective assumption, then there’s more than a little magical thinking
involved.
Removing those that consider fiction
in general and science fiction and fantasy in specific some kind of literary
dodge, it leaves the question as to what motivates those that remain and
eventually do well at the craft. And
that reminds me of another Alfred Hitchcock story.
Reportedly an actor, perplexed at
the rationale beneath a particular scripted scene he was being asked to
interpret via the usual cinematic legerdemain, approached Hitchcock and asked,
“But what’s my motivation?” To
which Hitchcock replied, “Your paycheck.”
Even those that have made a
profession of magical thinking have to admit that within this particular
manifestation of the universe — within reality as we understand it — life is
corporeal. One needs to eat. And other than a genetic predisposition to
dreaming out loud, or a deep rooted need to be noticed, the need to make a
living is probably the primary psychological motivation underlying the
creations of some of the world’s best fantasy and science fiction.
Yes.
It might be as simple as that.
——— end
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