“Teddy” (1953)

When J.D. Salinger was working on this story he knew it would be the last in the Nine Stories collection, and he wrote it deliberately as a kind of symmetrical balance to the first story in the collection, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” It works that way—notably the endings are echoes and reflections of one another. However, this might be a point where I’m thinking of getting off the boat with Salinger. This kid, Teddy, is just too special. He’s 10 and he’s psychically gifted. He wants to make people understand reincarnation, Zen enlightenment, and stuff like that. What are his powers? We see that he can predict the future and/or has extraordinary insight into others. He’s vastly more evolved than his parents. His dad says things like, “I’ll exquisite day you, buddy.” The family of four—dad, mom, Teddy, and sister Booper—are on an ocean cruise of some kind, maybe a transatlantic crossing. Mysterious sidelong intimations suggest scientific and religious groups have interest in studying him. For further elucidation—but not really enough—Salinger inserts some kind of journalist or young man interested party on the boat who buttonholes Teddy and asks a lot of questions for the sake of readers. We see Salinger really going headlong into the mystical stuff of Eastern flavor here. It’s the kind of thing that would specifically get developed with the Glass stories to come. “Bananafish” very much presages the Glass drama. “Teddy” fits them in terms of themes and elements but no one here, as far as I know, has anything to do with the Glasses. I’m not sure what to think of this story. I’ll be looking into that next with Salinger’s late novellas and only other published material, outside of the novel The Catcher in the Rye and some scattered stories. I’ve been checking the internet semiregularly since Salinger’s death in 2010. I understand he left a lot of manuscripts and that they are on the way. I look forward to that if they ever get here. I don’t even need to know more—are they Glass family stories? novels? or both? or something else? “Teddy” suggests I may see more limitations than I did when I read Salinger so avidly as a high school teen.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

More Than Human (1953)

Theodore Sturgeon’s much celebrated novel is a kind of fix-up of three novellas. The first and third—“The Fabulous Idiot” and “Morality,” respectively—were written expressly for the novel. The centerpiece second part, “Baby Is Three,” was previously published and won awards of its own. The novel has followed a crooked path to its present status as one of the 100 best sci-fis. I didn’t know any of this when I went to read it, but I did notice that “Baby Is Three” was notably the best part. The other two were way too unnecessarily coy about letting us in on what’s going on. It’s a fantastic idea, this Homo Gestalt, the next evolutionary step from H. Sapiens. As readers, we need all the help we can get without some peekaboo routine of the determinedly slow reveal. But it’s a big and intriguing idea, this vision of human mutants. I got such a hit of X-Men at points that I wonder how well Stan Lee or whoever worked on the comic might have known this novel. The big ideas are there to be discovered (not without labor, alas, at least in my experience). Sturgeon is a name I knew way back when I was reading science fiction stories as a kid, along with Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein. I don’t remember much about the Sturgeon stories, whereas stuff by Bradbury and Heinlein has stuck with me. I think most of Sturgeon’s greatest achievements are wrapped up in this novel. I wouldn’t know where to go next with him. The first part, “The Fabulous Idiot,” has some affinities structurally with William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and its baffling first part, which is also explicitly about “an idiot” (term of art in more benighted times). They are very different works, but I do wonder if Sturgeon was prone to literary pretension. Two-thirds of this book anyway suggest he might be, but I don’t know. He wrote a lot of stories that might be worth a look for a next stop. Kudos to the Library of America anthology, American Science Fiction, 1953-1956, for reminding me science fiction doesn’t have to be just space opera, which we see a lot of, of course. More Than Human is decidedly not space opera and has lots of interesting ideas about psychology and evolution, though it may not be necessarily done well overall—ambition, reach, grasp, all that. Read the first part to get to the second part. Third part optional. Another reminder of the problems with fix-ups.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

The Space Merchants (1953)

This short novel by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth arrives today with much apparent promise: accolades from Kingsley Amis, Anthony Boucher, Groff Conklin, and others, comparisons to Brave New World, and routinely on short lists of best science fiction ever, not to mention the first novel in the sizable Library of America American Science Fiction series of novels from the ‘50s and ‘60s. The Space Merchants is still talked about on booktube and Goodreads too—I saw it mentioned just the other day on a video, described as “Mad Men with spaceships.” If that sounds like something you might like, I can tell you I think that description is accurate, because it’s pretty much not what I like. It has some good ideas, notably Chicken Little, a food product, but the main problem is I don’t go to science fiction looking for lampoons of the advertising industry. The plot is frenetic and mostly pointless. The depictions of women are typically painful. It may be too much for me to expect a sense of wonder, but at least some more science fiction would be nice. I guess the visionary points are won by the dystopic setting—overpopulation, corporations literally holding political office, deep divides between rich and poor and little between, and marketing and advertising driving most thought. Fair enough. I think some people find The Space Merchants funny too. But little worked for me on this one. The video that mentioned it was focused on second-tier writers in the classic era, specifically Pohl rather than Kornbluth, along with James Blish, Doc Smith, and others (see “The Forgotten Sci-Fi Masters of the Golden Age”). One of the interesting points about Pohl—this is the first I’ve read him—is that he frequently collaborated with others, and not just Kornbluth. For that matter, Kornbluth was the name I was more interested in, though this is also the first I’ve read by him (and I might have him mixed up with one or two others). The whole Madison Avenue sizzle to this thing felt mostly dated to me now. The main character is a reasonable facsimile of Don Draper, who in turn is a reasonable facsimile of David Ogilvy. Their era was later, however, more the ‘60s, which leaves The Space Merchants with its best models MIA, and hence somewhat aimless and perhaps having an identity crisis. I wouldn’t call it visionary.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Childhood’s End (1953)

I first read this Arthur C. Clarke novel, a certified science fiction classic, when I was in my 20s, but I didn’t remember much about it except I had a meh reaction. I liked it more this time but still think it’s within range of meh. The streaks of mysticism seem out of place to me. The larger view is of human evolution going to places we can only imagine, much like the movie and novel he collaborated on with Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey. In a general way that novel and movie is equally hard to fathom. There’s no denying the ambition of Childhood’s End even as short as it is. It starts with a first contact story (the 1996 movie Independence Day lifted a lot of ideas about how it would go) and ends with the last generation of human beings as we know them. The universe here is mostly rational, ordered, and hierarchical. The “Overlords” who take over running planet Earth have their own masters up the chain. This “Overlords” thing is funny—the Overlords don’t like the term. It reminds me of one of the best gags in The Simpsons, from broadcast news anchor Kent Brockman: “And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.” Humanity gonna humanity! For the most part I appreciate what the Overlords do, wiping out war and poverty and such. It’s not their primary purpose here, but that’s where the mysticism cup begins to froth over. In many ways it’s a pastiche of nuclear anxiety, riffing on relativity and time dilation in space travel, and seeking for the greater purposes of life. Clarke has a lot of ideas that keep it interesting, such as exploring the mysteries of the ocean depths. There is a notable passivity to the human beings here, but that’s plausibly understood as the ultimate response to the Overlords’ superior powers. There’s something cringy for me about the physical appearance of the Overlords, which they don’t reveal until 50 years after the occupation. It's kind of like the way we’ve been denied information about the JFK assassination. When the reveal finally came it struck me as very silly. But that doesn’t mean Childhood’s End is not still entertaining as a classic of SF.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Call Me Madam (1953)

USA, 114 minutes

Director: Walter Lang

Writers: Arthur Sheekman, Howard Lindsay, Russel Crouse

Photography: Leon Shamroy

Music: Irving Berlin, Alfred Newman

Editor: Robert L. Simpson

Cast: Ethel Merman, Donald O’Connor, George Sanders, Vera-Ellen, Billy De Wolfe, Helmut Dantine, Walter Slezak, Steven Geray, Ludwig Stossel, Julie Newmar

I keep wanting to designate Call Me Madam as a guilty pleasure, perhaps because I have a personal reason for being predisposed toward it—I happen to know it was the movie my parents saw on their first date. We even had the 1950 Decca 10-inch soundtrack album from the Broadway show in our house. It’s possible my mother purchased it before the movie came out. She liked to sing “It’s a Lovely Day Today” and “You’re Just in Love” around the house. As a kid I could often be found cringing at this activity, which obviously I would love to be around again now. So I have a sentimental attachment to those songs specifically and thus, what’s more, something of a defensive attitude toward Ethel Merman, who largely seems to be taken as a joke these days, and not the right kind of joke.

As far as I can tell, this take on her rests chiefly on her unschooled singing style and her generally brassy demeanor. Her persona could run to the coarse—she had a reputation for telling dirty jokes—and always had the cynical midcentury American Bugs Bunny sheen of someone who actually does know better than you. A lot of her humor is influenced by Groucho Marx’s pattering tangents. She makes a baseball joke to sum up a situation, for example, and, at another point, when two characters attempt to flatter her as beautiful, she mutters, half to the camera, “A good optometrist could really clean up around here.” Another time someone refers to a palace estate and she assumes they are talking about Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. “The Palace? Who’s playing there?” she asks.

“The Preserving Machine” (1953)

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, editors of The Weird and other highly recommended anthologies, really talked up this story by Philip K. Dick somewhere. It’s not widely included in collections—the VanderMeers’ point, if I recall correctly, was that they had not been able to license it, for whatever reason. Maybe the estate thinks the story is too weird. It does have an interesting premise that is very weird even for Dick. The hero is an academic, Doc Labyrinth, who is worried about nuclear extinction and saddened most by the idea that music would be lost. So he draws up plans for a machine that will save music by converting printed sheet music into animal life forms. The idea is staggering in its way yet also a great example of Dick’s willful soft science fiction. This is creating life that we’re talking about, which is only an incidental function in Doc Labyrinth’s mind. He can’t even build the machine himself. He only draws up the plans and ships them off to a manufacturer. There is not a single theoretical basis for any of this. Take at face value—take it or leave it. I like the cheek, the confidence, but wish for a little more science. The manufacturer at any rate is excited about the project and promptly assembles the machine and ships it to Labyrinth. A sort of charming Holmes-and-Watson scene follows, with Labyrinth and the story’s first-person narrator sitting around trying it out. First they convert the Mozart G Minor Quintet, dropping the score into the machine. Out comes a bird, apparently of heretofore unknown species: “pretty, small and slender, with the flowing plumage of a peacock.” They call it a “mozart bird.” Later they produce a “beethoven beetle” (note that this story was written before the Beatles and even before Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven”) and then a “schubert animal.” The ones that are described merely as “animal” are far and away the creepiest but lowercasing the proper noun has its effect too. Doc Labyrinth is kind of disappointed and lets them loose in the woods behind his house. He doesn’t think about them for some time. When he finally checks on them, they have evolved and changed. Some have died. He tries running a bach bug through the machine—evidently reverse-processing these animals is how the preserved music is obtained again—but the music he gets back is mere cacophony when he plays it. More disappointment. So weird!

Philip K. Dick, The Preserving Machine
Read story online.

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1953)

[Previous notes here.]

[spoilers] A discussion of the “anguish, mercy, charity, divine grace, and imitation of God” themes in this famous and much anthologized story by Flannery O’Connor can be found at the Wikipedia article, which also includes points about the author’s formal intent. That’s all well and good, but—though I could well be missing the point—my interest in this story has more to do with how it works as a cunning horror story. As such, it is more along the lines of the conte cruel because there is nothing supernatural or really the least bit spooky about it. Some may even want to classify it as a type of crime story. Certainly it has its improbabilities and indulgences. In the very first paragraph the unnamed grandmother, who is the main character and an exceedingly annoying person, notices a newspaper item about the “The Misfit,” a lunatic madman who has escaped from prison. Then the turning point of this story occurs when she and her family encounter him by random on the road. The family—grandmother, father, mother, two kids, and a baby—is on a road trip from Georgia to Florida but they are in a strange kind of hurry that is never explained. They might be on the run themselves. The mother has almost nothing to say. O’Connor skillfully uses misdirection to keep us from worrying these points too much in a story that moves quickly, but they register unconsciously as points of anxiety. It all feels innocent but worrisome, worrisome but innocent, something is wrong here, which sets us up for the encounter with The Misfit and his gang. But nothing can really set us up for how the encounter goes. The Misfit is already faintly ludicrous with his self-bestowed moniker—cocky and pretentious too, when he starts talking. And he is first seen, like Vladimir Putin, swaggering around bare-chested. It feels like safe literary symbolism and narrative all the way up to the point where the murders start, as the father and older son are taken off into the woods by henchmen with guns. Two shots are heard and the henchmen return with the father’s garish vacation shirt, which The Misfit casually dons. These points are made with no flourishes. These things just happen. But they are so monstrous they almost put us into shock, certainly on a first reading. It’s clear at that point what is happening and what will happen to all of them, including the grandmother. The story carries an unmistakable load of despair and meaninglessness, and it also feels just a little amused by our sickened response. It also has a lot of heavy religious themes, but they’re for digging out with more care on subsequent readings. I understand some people don’t even want to read it a second time.

Read story online. (Library of America)

"Long Distance Call" (1953)

[spoilers] This Richard Matheson story is another nice example of a specific type of technology-related horror popular at midcentury. Let’s call it the “haunted telephone” story, reaching into the privacy of your home to make your phone ring and such. Who could be calling? Robert Aickman has a nice version in “Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen” (also from 1953) and there’s a host of others. In fact, the original title for this story, “Sorry, Right Number,” is a direct reference to the 1948 movie Sorry, Wrong Number, which features Barbara Stanwyck playing a disabled woman confined to bed but with an unfortunate line to the outside world in the telephone by her bedside. That movie has exactly the mood Matheson wants to set here: a little bit paranoid and a little bit helpless, and it’s all coming through the phone. Our gal in this story is much older but likewise confined to bed. The calls come in the middle of the night. At first the caller never speaks and he never hangs up. When he finally does speak, the things he says make no sense. The story is still a little scary—it made me nervous anyway, even if it’s also fairly obvious. Matheson could probably make recipe directions and technical manuals scary. The story plays explicitly with this technology that has access to our most private, intimate, and vulnerable lives. Today communications technology is ubiquitous and overwhelming, but still there are movies like Unfriended, which work similar angles with internet technology. With no caller ID in 1953, all incoming phone calls were anonymous, just the ringing of the phone. You knew some of the voices. The ones you didn’t know could be creepy until you knew who it was. Matheson leans into that and builds on it. The voice is ominous, but it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense, but it is ominous. So we are well softened for the ridiculous revelation that the calls are coming from a graveyard. I stayed under the story’s spell even with that, though there isn’t much more to it than that. Matheson’s habit of reaching for the darkest grim notes is compressed into the certainty of the imminent death of the woman receiving the calls. The rest is mysterious, eerie, unknowable ... on the other end of a telephone line.

The Best of Richard Matheson, ed. Victor LaValle
Listen to story online.

"It's a GOOD Life" (1953)

Technically, the title of Jerome Bixby's remarkable story is "It's a Good Life," but I can't italicize blog headers so caps will have to do for this otherwise flawless tale of excruciating despair. It was published first as science fiction and is still claimed as such (and now as the "weird" as well) but really it's more accurate to call it horror. For one thing, it's often quite scary, even now, and it's also at pains to be creepy and ooky. I like the way Bixby keeps associating purple with Anthony, the monster 3-year-old with "a bright, wet, purple gaze." I like how there's no hope for anything rational with him for years, until Anthony is older and understands more. In the time of this story, he is merely an infant's id, with strange deadly powers. He is telepathic and able to change reality at will. In fact, the small Ohio town where it takes place (don't the best ones always take place in small Ohio towns?) no longer appears to be connected to planet Earth. Or perhaps Anthony destroyed planet Earth and the town is all that's left. It exists now next to "nothingness." Anthony the tot is not so much evil—though he might be evil—but more an infant struggling with his development and prone to infantile rages. But he also has these powers. He's shown doing things like playing with a rat in the basement and then growing bored and making the rat eat itself alive. He can just do things like that. He likes music but he doesn't like singing, instantly destroying anyone he hears doing so. The townsfolk have to learn by trial and error what Anthony likes and doesn't like. There's a graveyard in the corner of the cornfield where the results are buried. Anthony sends lots of things and people directly there. He's a lot like any 3-year-old, which is the profound hook to this story. When does a human start to become civilized? Age 3 is still pretty early. Anthony is already a loner, operating a kind of nature preserve, where he communes with the swamp creatures and makes life better for them. Basically Anthony has all the powers of the Old Testament God, which is also what is so terrifying about the story—its insidious familiarity. How do you make this God happy anyway? He is a jealous God, doesn't He say so Himself? But I digress. I read this story when I was a kid and it was one of a handful that got under my skin and kept me up late at night a lot and made me sweat from helplessness remembering them in the daylight. I see now why—it's just really well done, bleak, unrelenting, disturbing, shocking, ever-deepening. It was even my favorite episode when it became part of the Twilight Zone movie in the '80s—and the 1961 TV original with Billy Mumy and Cloris Leachman is not bad either. The Simpsons did a treatment of it too. But anyway, that's the situation—the dwindling population of humans is intent on placating Anthony until he comes to reason, which could be 20 years or never. He can read their minds so they have to keep their thoughts pure, which isn't easy as you can imagine. They mumble a lot. It seems to help. They keep everything upbeat. The story is desolate, strange and disorienting. Anyone acquainted with a 3-year-old is sure to get the horror of this little masterpiece right away.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories for Late at Night, ed. Robert Arthur (out of print)
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
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"Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen" (1953)

In a way this story by Robert Aickman is dated now because it relies so much on telephone technology without features we take for granted today, such as caller ID, which alone may have destroyed hundreds of horror story premises not to mention criminal stalking activities. On the other hand Aickman's story is a nice reminder of how mysterious this connection to the outside world could feel, exploited so well in the 1948 picture Sorry, Wrong Number. And exploited so well here too. It's probably a ghost story but also reminds me in key ways of Hanns Heinz Evers's story "The Spider." Edmund St. Jude is housesitting for his girlfriend while she recuperates from TB. Already this is "strange," the term Aickman preferred for his stories. What is he doing with his place in the meanwhile? Her apartment has a telephone, which is common by 1953, but not so common that it wouldn't be unusual not to have one. Edmund here would prefer not to have one, but it's a lot of trouble to remove so he lives with it. Is it haunted or is it glitchy? First it rings a lot and won't stop until he answers it. Then the caller waits for him to say "Hello?" three times and hangs up. There's not much to be done about it. He has more strange adventures with the phone when he tries to call out. Eventually he wanders into strange conversations at the other end of the line with a woman he doesn't know. He is strangely drawn to her and soon they are declaring their love for one another. But she won't give him a number to call. He can only wait for her to call. She says he can't see her but she won't say why. It briefly enters into the early internet / late landline period when people spent hours on the phone with strangers in phone-based relationships. If this story is dated in one way, it's prescient in another. Meanwhile Edmund is so preoccupied he's letting his life go to hell. He makes a living as a translator but loses interest in his work and starts to get fired from jobs. Then he starts to get wrong-number calls for an extension 281 at a "Chromium Supergloss Corporation." He's also ignoring letters from his girlfriend now, letting them pile up. "Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen" (which words never occur in the story by the way) is a meditation on all the spaces a ghost might occupy in telephone technology. The woman on the phone is more or less a ghost in this story, but not exactly, much as the woman across the way in "The Spider" is a vampire, but not exactly. "Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen" is sadder but it has a cold core—maybe that's the point of the title. Looking it up, it appears to have something to do with the opera La boheme. Strange stuff indeed from early in the career of one of the best story writers of his time.

Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea
Story not available online.

"Paycheck" (1953)

This long story by Philip K. Dick has a kind of fairy tale D&D aspect of quests, where the main character Jennings has multiple tasks to do, puzzles to solve, and dilemmas to resolve. Jennings is an engineer who works on projects so top secret that he must undergo memory wiping after each one. At the end of the latest, following the memory wipe, he finds that he has formally and legally declined payment in favor of an envelope full of trinkets, as he calls them—a code key, a ticket stub, a parcel receipt, etc. Before long he is in trouble with the police for his work on the project. But he can't remember anything about it and they've never heard of memory wiping. Then the trinkets start to come in handy, one at a time. By story's end we're learning of a machine that can see the future, which is how Jennings is ultimately able to save himself. In 2003, John Woo made a movie of it with the same name. It starred Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman, and typically Woo makes the stakes higher. In the movie Jennings is saving the world, has a beautiful faithful girlfriend, and the envelope contains 20 trinkets—or knickknacks, as he calls them in the movie. Don't ask me why that change was made. The movie got terrible reviews but I like John Woo in a general way and the picture is reasonably faithful to the story. The story is just less Phildickian enough that it can work as John Woo. The best effect in the story, the reveal of the device called a time scoop, is missing in the movie, where the concept is based on optics, explained early, with a lens that can see around the curve of the universe into the future (kind of like the way it's always tomorrow in Australia). It might even make sense, but I miss the nice way the story ends. Otherwise it's all about constructing set pieces around random everyday objects, such as a single paperclip in the movie. Woo and Dick are both good at set pieces but Woo might have the edge here. It certainly has some of that thing you find in puzzle movies (and stories all the way back to Sherlock Holmes at least) where convenience is remarkably persistent. Whereas one abstract clue—that paperclip, say—could suggest multiple potential uses our hero somehow always lands unerringly on the right one at the right time. Remarkable! It's arguable that it's not that bad in this case because the person providing Jennings with the clues after all is Jennings himself, who should know how he thinks. It was enough explanation for me to enjoy the action, but my complaint is that it is merely action. In the end neither story nor movie may be that good as Dick or Woo, respectively, but there's worse. Scanners and Impostor are much worse adaptations of Dick. You can pick your own poison with Woo. How about Broken Arrow?

The Philip K. Dick Reader

"Impostor" (1953)

I think there's a name for the type of story Philip K. Dick has written here—not exactly doppelganger, and mistaken identity isn't it either. On an Earth at war and under constant attack by aliens from Alpha Centauri, Spence Olham works in some kind of war industry engineering capacity. On his way to work this morning he finds himself arrested as a spy and saboteur, charged with being a robot impersonating the real Olham and armed with an embedded implanted U-bomb (which sounds pretty scary). They take him to the far side of the moon to confess and detonate. But Olham escapes. He wants badly to straighten it all out. The military intelligence that led authorities to Olham indicates the U-bomb is triggered by a spoken phrase. For fly-through readers it's hard to tell how Dick the narrator is playing it. He appears to have no suspicions about the Olham we're traipsing along with. Yet I leaped immediately—perhaps knowing it's a Dick story—to wondering if Olham weren't the robot. Anyway, spoilers, he is, the triggering phrase is "but if that's Olham," and the last line of the story is, "The blast was visible all the way to Alpha Centauri." Nyuk, nyuk, get it? I love the way Dick blows the whole planet to smithereens for the sake of a punchline. In 2001 a movie was made out of it directed by Gary Fleder (Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead) and starring Gary Sinise, Madeleine Stone, and Vincent D'Onofrio, with a cameo by Rosalind Chao, aka Keiko on Star Trek. As a live action story it's a bit too much to blow up the planet so they don't. D'Onofrio is basically fine-tuning his Law & Order: Criminal Intent shtick, so at least he seems to be having a good time. You get the impression they thought based on a story by Philip K. Dick plus lots of action scenes and doomsday mood would get them over, but sadly no. The movie is not as good as the story, as usual, but this time the story is not even above average. The point of it seems to be as a jokey anecdote but maybe you can't make a movie like that. I do like the story of a robot that doesn't even know it's a robot, that's the type of story I was trying to think of—see also Blade Runner, of course, which I imagine could have been part of the pitch here. Impostor does have some interesting ideas about personalized advertising that were developed much further and better the following year in Minority Report. This story is just minimally a head trip—that's the problem. The Dick brand (so to speak) is so restrained as to be almost invisible. Almost—because there is that nice thing about the sentient robot that doesn't know it's a robot.

In case it's not at the library.

Henry James: A Life (1953-1985)

Does it say something about the tendency of Henry James toward prolixity that even the condensed version of his biography comes in over 700 pages? It might have more to do with making his three score and ten in a productive career, but that's still a big book, cut down from Leon Edel's original five volumes published between 1953 and 1972. It's enjoyable for anyone with more than passing interest in James and who can stomach people routinely calling him "The Master." Yes and yes for me, though just barely on the latter point. I learned a lot of interesting things. He knew Flaubert and Zola as a young man. He became close friends with Ivan Turgenev. His flirtation with theater was a humiliating disaster. Beginning midway through composing What Maisie Knew in the mid-1890s, he dictated to typists and revised from there. In fact, his personal life in the 1890s—acquiring a typewriter and having electricity installed in his flat—vividly place him in the far past. I should know, because typewriters did not become available until 1874, but it still blows my mind that James and all the others submitted manuscripts in longhand. No wonder he developed some kind of repetitive strain injury, which prompted the move to dictation. Maybe that's all beside the point. Edel is an assiduous biographer, meticulously chasing down points of detail via letters, diary entries, and any way he can find evidence. By his view, James was celibate all his life, and there's a strong sense he was probably gay in an era that would not countenance that. James saw what happened to a much younger man, Oscar Wilde (whose work he didn't think much of anyway, though I still suspect Dorian Gray had something to do with James's The Sacred Fount, doubtless unconsciously). Edel's insights can be striking and illuminating, notably in that 1890s period, when James's greatest personal failure was followed by some of his greatest work, through which Edel traces an ingenious restorative process. Edel lauds the last three novels above all others, as do most students of James, but his personal favorites appear to be the short novel The Aspern Papers and the long story "The Beast in the Jungle"—excellent choices. Along the way, James has interesting friendships with Edith Wharton, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and the public at large, which has always been a little dubious about James, the wise course. For the rest of us, this is a great one-stop account of his life.

"interlocutor" count = 1 / 714 pages

In case it's not at the library.

Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

James Baldwin's first novel is thinly disguised autobiography that ultimately reads more like a personal excoriation of fundamentalist Christianity, laying bare its hypocrisies and general foolishness in acid terms. It's a short novel but full of backstories and the complexities of blended and extended families. Set in Harlem, the preacher Gabriel Grimes and his family undergo convulsions of grief when the second son is killed stabbed in the throat. It's Gabriel's second marriage. His first was in the South and produced no children. In fact, the family history is so complex, and so central to all the themes, that exposition often feels like it's running breathlessly to keep pace with the narrative of Roy's death. The novel is full of Bible stories and biblical language, starting with the reason-for-the-season Christmas carol in the title. For teenage John Grimes, the novel is more about climbing the mountain than it is about saying something, and the climb is not easy, which makes the joyfulness of the carol referenced a little weirdly distracting. Much of the narrative comes directly from Baldwin's life—same kind of father, same kind of relationship, same turn to Jesus at 14, etc. For all the artfulness of Go Tell It on the Mountain—and there is plenty—it feels more like something Baldwin needed to get out of his system. Its freewheeling structure and experimental passages produce isolated remarkable fragments, such as a night-long conversion experience, but it's uneven. My favorite character is Gabriel's sister Florence with her lifelong seething resentment of Gabriel. I think a better novel might be the same story written from Florence's point of view by a woman. Obviously that is not the novel we have. Gabriel, for his part, is just too easy to judge and dispense with. As Florence points out, he is too often the cause of problems in the lives of others. I didn't think anyone in that family should want to have anything to do with him. That's my judgment, but the result was I got quickly tired of him and his catalog of sins. Florence is the only one who sees him clearly in this novel, and she does exactly what I would—puts him behind her, moving to the North. When he shows up there 20 years later, after he has caused a lot more grief down home, there's little she can do. Of course he causes more in the North, all of it predictable. There's a lot that's good and even great in this novel, but it's hard for me to agree it's the best thing Baldwin ever did, let alone one of the great novels of the 20th century.

In case it's not at the library.

"The Hanging Stranger" (1953)

Philip K. Dick can be made to fit too easily into the caricature of muzzy-headed acid casualty and/or mental illness case, which is why it's helpful to read a story like this one. He was young when he wrote it, not quite 25, but the images are powerful, mature, and hard to shake. It's written by someone who obviously knows what he is doing. After spending the day working on redoing the foundation of his house, Ed Loyce, an unpretentious model of the postwar working man, emerges to find a strange man lynched, his body swinging from a lamppost. It's a gruesome sight, but what's even more unusual is that none of his neighbors or friends finds anything strange about it. Loyce is wild to do something like call the police but no one seems to understand his reaction. Eventually someone does call the police—on Loyce—and the story deepens into stark paranoia. The power of this story is achieved in various ways. For example, the police do come and take Loyce away. We see Loyce chatting with them in the car. Suddenly he leaps from it in motion and runs away as fast as he can. Only then do we learn that Loyce knew immediately that the policemen were not who or what they said. It's a small enough town that Loyce can figure this out quickly. But we learn nothing of his suspicions until he has run away. It's much more chilling, confusing, and scary to be kept two steps behind the main character and primary point of view this way, a skillful choice by Dick. The story's plot goes much like a Twilight Zone episode—only a single isolated man can see the shift to insanity that no one else can—though it was never produced for film or TV until an episode of Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams in 2017 (haven't seen it). Not everything works. The insect nature of the invaders is a mixed bag as is their portal way to us, and generally it can't quite shake the stink of the Cold War '50s. But calling up the simmering racism of mainstream America—the hanged man is not black, but it's a lynching—does much to overcome these problems and make the story feel fresh and relevant and if anything even more powerful all these 66 years later. The story has the same kind of conformity issues that show up in the original 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and may have been the most terrifying element of it when it was first published. For me, it's the image of the hanged man swinging from the lamppost in the wind, made infinitely worse by the indifference of everyone. Whatever route you take to get there, this story is unsettling.

The Philip K. Dick Reader

"Second Variety" (1953)

This early long story by Philip K. Dick works equally well whether you take it as a '50s-style killer robot rampage or as a prescient treatment of artificial intelligence (which term would not come into use as we understand it now until two years later, in 1955, with The Logic Theorist computer program). Dick invented a fiendish device here called a claw, a silver sphere with retractable whirling razor blades reminiscent of the weapon / monster / dream object in the movie Phantasm. "Second Variety" is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and these claws were developed as a defense weapon, largely against encroaching small mammals. Claws are not only highly intelligent in their hunting protocols, but they are also programed to manufacture and improve themselves. How that is accomplished is another question but one Dick distracts us from with a swiftly moving action story. Like the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica first seen as menacing "toaster" killing machines and then later returned with hyper advancements, so these lowly rat-chomping claws became something far beyond what anyone had ever imagined. Dick manages the story with a lot of skill and a sharp series of reveals that often surprise. If nothing else, "Second Variety" confirms Dick's abilities as a storyteller, sustained long enough that some refer to it as a novella, whatever. Forty years later it was turned into a movie, 1995's Screamers, that made a few changes to the story but was reasonably faithful. I read the story first—it's a better experience, as is often the case—and I'm not sure how much sense the movie would make without knowing the story. I think it might be very little. Screamers has its bona fides. Screenwriter Dan O'Bannon also worked on Dark Star, Alien, The Return of the Living Dead, and Total Recall. Total Recall is as close as I've seen to anyone getting Dick right, so there's that too. And they're doing the best they can with obvious limitations on casting and special effects. It's more an exercise in atmospheric mood and brawny swaggering. It also includes some scenes distinctly reminiscent of Blade Runner, and I happen to know for a fact they don't come from the story, so that's weird. But the story is really great and also genuinely Dickian in the way he simply imagines artificial intelligence and exactly what can possibly go wrong just the way we imagine it now. Say, which reminds me, what is the present status and/or policy on military technology and artificial intelligence? You say it's classified? Well, damn.

The Philip K. Dick Reader

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" (1953)

Read story by Flannery O'Connor online.

Flannery O'Connor's story is a hard gut punch, certainly the first time. After that you go back to dissect and figure out how it was done. The central problem and conflict are right there in the first paragraph, a fact perhaps as improbable as it is amazing. Even more amazing is the smooth way O'Connor pulls it off. A family's grandmother is an out-of-touch barnacle on the hull. Their ship is sinking, though we don't know why. We only know the mother and father are in a big hurry to travel from Georgia to Florida, although they are pretending it's a family vacation. There are two kids and an infant, the stressed-out parents, and the grandmother, who all things considered would rather be traveling to East Tennessee. She is an exasperating character, a kind of Lucille Ball figure oblivious to the worries of others or the reality around her, and attempting to manipulate all things her way. At the same time she's not wholly an unsympathetic person. If I were in her position I'd want to know more about why they're doing the things they're doing too. She doesn't deserve the fate she inadvertently forces—though even in the worst moments of their ultimate predicament she still doesn't seem to grasp the gravity of the situation, which leaves one less sympathetic. As big-time bad guys go, "The Misfit" is a lulu, starting with the moniker (no relation to the Arthur Miller story, which came later). Once he's squatting down in front of the family holding court, it's his show in every way, and all you want to do is quote him: "I found out the crime don't matter," he says. "You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it." Or: "I call myself the Misfit because I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment." Or (my favorite): "Lady, there never was a body that give the undertaker a tip." He's the kind of character people make whole books about, when O'Connor is probably the one who has it right: stick him in a short story and overflow it with bitter bilge until it leaves a taste in the mouth. Among other things, a scene of a man putting on a shirt could well be one of the saddest, most pitiful, and horrifying things you have ever seen.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

Madame de... (1953)

The Earrings of Madame de..., France / Italy, 105 minutes
Director: Max Ophüls
Writers: Louise de Vilmorin, Marcel Achard, Max Ophüls, Annette Wadamant
Photography: Christian Matras
Music: Oscar Straus, Georges Van Parys
Editor: Boris Lewyn
Cast: Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux, Vittorio De Sica, Lea di Lea, Jean Debucourt

A hasty internet search this morning failed to reveal the circumstances of the title change for the American release of this movie (to The Earrings of Madame de...). So I don't know who did it or why. What's interesting is how it subtly yet effectively alters the prevailing frame, from a wry focus on the upper-class foibles of the elaborately unnamed protagonist, which is appropriate, to a focus rather on a classic cinematic "MacGuffin," a plot device of an object in which all characters have an interest, but which otherwise has little point. The statue in The Maltese Falcon is a classic MacGuffin.

Just so, the earrings in question, which appear in the first and last shots of this movie, are a notably busy kind of MacGuffin all through, moving from the possession of one character to another over a dozen times, which is taken to a particular point in the second half where credulity itself begins to be strained. It's easy to be distracted by them, so easy that you might be tempted to feature them in a retitle for midcentury American audiences. But this MacGuffin actually has meaning—many meanings. The earrings are always a reflection of any character in possession of them at the moment they have them, and always further receding reflections in an opposing mirror of Madame de (we never quite catch her name though it comes up now and again, concealed presumably as a matter of valor or at least discretion). At first the Madame finds the earrings ugly, when she is deciding to sell them to pay off illicit debts. Later, when she can no longer possess them, she will love them with all her heart.

Space Guitar (1953-1963)

I don't have anything against Johnny "Guitar" Watson's disco period, it's just that I love his rhythm and blues stuff from earlier points in his career more. He adopted his nickname after seeing the 1954 Nicholas Ray movie with Joan Crawford, Johnny Guitar, so maybe there's some kind of natural progression there. He brings a certain level of manic flamboyance and showmanship that's hard to resist. At any rate, he was still going as Young John Watson for the original release of most of the songs on this nice 2004 collection on Varese. Watson loved him some T-Bone Walker, and sure enough, the electric guitar is often the most salient point song to song, as on "What's Goin' On," where he makes it sound like a buggy. On the title song, "Space Guitar," he takes a rock star turn, growing his guitar licks big, ripping away the reverb, making it squeal, moan, playing the Dragnet theme, etc., and with unruly feedback too. And there's an alternate version here that's even wilder. Pretty cool. That electric guitar is always a strong supporting element, but I think it's actually his songwriting here that wins me over so big. He goes back to jump blues for the nimble structures of many of these little delights, and he operates within the world that Louis Jordan outlined so well: drinking, gambling, house parties, and woman troubles are frequent themes. He's often exasperated by life's setbacks, but he's jubilant too when the victories come. There are horn charts and some real nice honkytonk piano too. "No I Can't," which comes early in the sequencing, is a good one to sing with—it's possible you get a feel for what it's like to be Johnny "Guitar" Watson there, which sets the mood and tone well. "Half Pint of Whiskey" and "Gettin' Drunk" are pretty much as described—he's counting on the alcohol, but it's not always delivering. The latest song here and the one that feels most like a hit is "Gangster of Love," from 1963. The title is more prescient than the sound, which is the chattering rhythm and blues style he establishes so well. But he's not that far off from what we associate with "gangster" now, with scenarios that would work for the Notorious B.I.G. himself: "I robbed the local beauty contest / For their first place winner / They found her with me out in Hollywood / Eating a big steak dinner / They tried to get her to go back / To pick up her prize / She stood up and told them / You just don't realize that he's a gangster of love." It might be a bit Rat Pack, but I like that picture of her saying "You just don't realize that he's a gangster of love" standing over a steak dinner, in 1963.

The Cosmic Puppets (1953)

In case I needed any reminders of Philip K. Dick's productivity, this little feller comes along: written in 1953, his fifth novel, and published in 1957, his fourth published. It's raw and fanciful, basically going to the H.P. Lovecraft well for its charge, yet insanely compelling. It reminds me of the kind of exercises produced by another '50s science fiction writer, Fredric Brown, small-town American innocence in confrontation with dark forces. It also foreshadows Rod Serling by several years, and Dick could well have been under the spell of Ray Bradbury too. Guy is on vacation with his harpy wife. Decides he wants to pay a visit to the town where he was born and lived until he was 9, nearly 20 years earlier. But when he gets there everything is different in weird ways. The streets and stores have different names and nobody remembers him. Also kids are molding with clay and the objects come to life. Plus something about the anthropomorphic shape of the horizon. It's all quite mysterious. And as the plot wends its way across its stepping stones of convenience and coincidence it never loses momentum. The potency of the ideas is still strangely strong. There is a fairly steady stream of weird shit going on at any given time, and one of the secrets to this whole thing is the trim size, under 150 pages. It keeps you guessing, whops you upside the head, ropes you and jerks you along, and before you know it it's done. Good and evil weigh in with all the usual markers—rats, spiders, and snakes on the one side, sunshine and golden goodness on the other. There's not a lot to it but it is profoundly Dick all the same, at a practically primitive brainstem level, with cascading masks of reality itself continually tearing away and filling in again with fresh detail. That's how he does it. Who does that? And somehow he burrows inside our heads as well, to the kind of dislocations of novels such as Martian Time-Slip, when it feels like he's actually in there, doing something. Changing reality. There are roots of that here.

In case it's not at the library.