There’s a well-known adage that pertains to many aspects of life: “Less is more.” This is so in the field of advertising, where relegating the name or image of a corporation, product, or service to the “background” – sometimes humorously; sometimes ironically; sometimes idealistically – can ignite a flame of curiosity and interest that would otherwise lay fallow.
A superbly done example of this approach (who’s the person who dreamed this one up?!) appeared in The New York Times on December 27, 1942, in the form of an advertisement for the Nash-Kelvinator corporation, a manufacturer of automobiles and household appliances. The ad consists of a painting – though in a newspaper obviously printed by the half-tone process – of the bombardier of a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber in the nose of his aircraft during a mission over Europe, followed by his thoughts as expressed in stream-of-consciousness internal monologue. Only at the very “bottom” of the advertisement – placed after the bombardier’s message – appear symbols for Nash-Kelvinator (a car and kitchen refrigerator). This is followed by a statement about the company’s mission: To manufacture weapons and material in support of the war effort, with the ultimate goal of ensuring that life in the United States will continue once victory is achieved and servicemen return. There is absolutely no mention – in this age before the primacy of shareholder value, and, America’s deindustrialization only three short decades later – of any of Nash-Kelvinator’s products. The ad, published only a year and nearly a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, is simply a message of patriotic solidarity, cautious optimism, and, hope.
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Here’s the ad in its entirety:
The text of the ad is striking in – through very few words – encompassing several aspects of the war in general, and America’s air war, in particular.
First – this stands out! – the B-17 is shown and described as being on a night-time mission, rather than a daylight sortie. This probably reflects currents of news about the 8th Air Force prevailing in 1942 (assuming such information was available to the public?!) in terms of discussions concerning whether the 8th would switch to night operations and participate with Royal Air Force Bomber Command in wide-area bombing. Of course, this never came about. As described by John T. Correll at Air & Space Forces Magazine in “The Allied Rift on Strategic Bombing“, “Churchill had President Franklin D. Roosevelt almost convinced that the B-17s should join Bomber Command in operating at night. Before that happened, Churchill met with Eaker during the Allied conference at Casablanca, Morocco, in January 1943, and Eaker talked him out of the idea. His key point was the value of keeping the Germans under attack both day and night.”
Caliban Rising addresses the issue of the RAF’s advocacy of night bombing for the 8th Air Force, versus the American intention of bombing by day, in his video “Shocking Comments About RAF Bomber Command vs 8th Air Force,” commencing at 4:55.
Then, we learn that the bombardier signed up because of the adventure involved in combat flying, but only upon reaching England and encountering the reality of war, and, the nature of the Third Reich, did he begin to appreciate the true gravity (accidental pun, there) of his decision.
This takes the form of symbolic encounters with symbolic representatives of two of the nations which have have been conquered by Germany: A Czech civilian refugee in London, and, a fallen Polish fighter pilot who sacrificed his life to destroy an Me-109. A third encounter is of a very different sort, and expressed in a very different way. A fellow American aviator’s offer a a cigarette to a captured German flyer is refused with sheer fury, the aviator being “Izzy Jacobs”, obviously and clearly by the “sound” of his name a Jew. A sign of the times (and the Times?) the word “Jew” is absent from the ad, unlike “Czech” and “Polish”. Well, that this point was even made in a mainstream advertisement by a major American corporation in 1942 is itself remarkable.
Then follow the bombardier’s thoughts about past, present, and future. His central hope is that the country he returns to – for he expects to return – will be much the same as the country he left, with the hope that the reader – the American public, will, “Keep it for the way I remember it, just the way I see it now – until I come back.”
Whoever he was, I hope he made it back.
“UNTIL I COME BACK”…
We’re over 20,000 feet now (the coffee’s frozen in the thermos) and that’s the Zuyder Zee below. We must be halfway across Holland.
Funny thing what happens to a fellow…
Those are the same old stars and the same old moon that the girl and I were looking at last Christmas.
And here I am – flying 300 miles an hour in a bubble of glass, with ten tons of T.N.T.
Somehow – this isn’t the way I imagined it at all, the day I enlisted. Don’t get me wrong – sure I was sore at the Japs and the Nazis – but mostly, it was the thrill of the Great Adventure.
Well, I know now – the real reasons – why I’m up here paying my first call on Hitler.
It’s only when you get away from the U.S.A. that you find out what the shootin’s really about and what you’re fighting for.
I learned from the Czech chap in London. The refugee, the nice old fellow who reminded me of Dad except for the maimed hands. I was dumb enough to ask about it. “I got that,” he said, “for writing a book the Nazis didn’t like…”
Then there was the captured German pilot who screamed and spit when Izzy Jacobs offered him a cigarette…how do fellows get that way?
And that crazy Polish pilot – the fellow who rammed the Messerschmitt. After the funeral I learned what was eating him. Seems as how he had a sister in Warsaw who had been sent to a German Officers Club…
I hope to hell Hitler’s home tonight…light and wind are perfect.
Yes, sir, I’ve met ‘em by the dozens over here – guys warped by hate – guys who have had ambition beaten out of them – guys who look at you as if you were crazy when you tell ‘em what America is like.
They say America will be a lot different after this war.
Well, maybe so.
But, as for me, I know the score…you learn fast over here. I know how there’s only one decent way to live in the world – the way my folks lived and the way I want to live.
When you find a thing that works as good as that – brother, be careful with that monkey-wrench.
And there’s one little spot – well, if they do as much as change the smell of the corner drug store – I will murder the guy.
I want my girl back, just as she is, and that bungalow on Maple Avenue…
I want that old roll-top desk of mine at the electric company, with a chance to move upstairs, or quit if I want to.
I want to see that old school of mine, and our church, just as they are – because I want my kids to go there.
That’s my home town…
Keep it for the way I remember it, just the way I see it now – until I come back.
NASH KELVINATOR
NASH-KELVINATOR CORPORATION, DETROIT, MICHIGAN
Published in the belief that here at Nash-Kelvinator we carry a double responsibility – not only to build the weapons for victory but also to build toward the kind of a future, an American future, our boys will want when they come back.
Reprints of this Nash-Kelvinator advertisement will gladly be sent you on request.
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Here’s a close-up of the ad’s single illustration, showing our pensive bombardier in the nose of his aircraft.
(By way of explanation, the image above was scanned from a paper photocopy made by a 35mm microfilm viewer (I think manufactured by Minolta … it’s been a few decades since I made this!) which I used to review this issue of the Times … as 35mm microfilm … rather than from a digitized image “copied & pasted” from the Internet such as from the “Times Machine”. The ubiquity and ease of access of digitized images from newspapers, though fantastic for accessing text, is typically a step far down in terms of the quality of the images that accompany such news items. In other words, technological convenience is often an unrecognized and unanticipated step far, far backwards in terms of preserving the past.)
Intentionally or not, the unknown artist who created this illustration changed the mood of the art by making the figure of the bombardier – relative to the size of the B-17 – perhaps twice as small as in actuality, making the aircraft look practically cavernous. You can see this in the image below, which illustrates a B-17 bombardier as seen looking forward from the crew station of the aircraft’s navigator. If he’s seated, there’s just enough room for him and not much more. This WW II Army Air Force Photo 3200 / A45511) is captioned, “Lt. Maurice A. Bonomo, Bombardier, 333 W. 86th St., New York City, 18 daylight missions; holds Air Medal with two Oak Leaf Clusters”. The picture gives an excellent representative view of the the bombardier’s position in a B-17 Flying Fortress (specifically, a B-17G Flying Fortress).
Given that Lt. Bonomo isn’t (!) wearing his oxygen mask, and is directly touching the control panel without (!) gloves (neither of which would be advisable at altitude…) this is certainly a “posed” photograph, taken while the B-17 was on the ground.
Though the date of this photograph is unknown, what is known is that Lt. Bonomo, a member of the 401st Bomb Squadron, 91st Bomb Group, became a prisoner of war on July 20, 1944, during a mission to Leipzig, Germany. On that date, he was a member of 1 Lt. Arthur F. Hultin’s crew in B-17G 42-102509, which was lost due to anti-aircraft fire. Fortunately, all 10 crewmen survived as POWs. The plane’s loss is covered in MACR 7274 and Luftgaukommando Report KU 2560, the latter document being unusually detailed in its description of the plane.
The husband of Janet A. Bonomo, of 333 West 86th Street, in New York, Maurice Bonomo was imprisoned in North Compound 2 of Stalag Luft I, in Barth, Germany.
Here’s a similar picture. Taken on or before December 28, 1942, Army Air Force photo 3A40521 / 23535AC is captioned, “Bombardier on a Boeing B-17 flying on a search mission in the Hawaiian Islands.” The nose framing reveals that this is an “E’ model of the B-17, unlike the “G” version in the photo of Lt. Bonomo. (I scanned this picture at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.)
And, here’s a view limited to the photo itself, with contrast and lighting slightly adjusted to render details (clouds in the distance) in greater clarity.
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The contemplative and serious nature of the advertisement, both in print and art, cannot help but remind one of the scene – in William Wyler’s wonderful 1946 movie (see at Archive.org) “The Best Years of Our Lives” – in which former 8th Air Force bombardier Capt. Fred Derry, played by Dana Andrews, highly uncertain of his place in the America to which he has returned; completely uncertain about his future, and certainly seeing no future for himself in his hometown of “Boone City” (any-midwestern-state-USA), decides to leave for parts unknown.
While awaiting the departure of his flight at a nearby Army Air Force Base (the sequence having been shot at Ontario Army Airfield, California), he happens to wander through a boneyard of surplus warplanes (past rows of Wright Cyclone Engines with Hamilton Standard propellers stacked alongside, like lines of soldiers-all-in-a-row, engineless P-39 Airacobras, and then engineless B-17s; this would’ve been under the auspices of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation).
Randomly coming across an aircraft nicknamed “ROUND ? TRIP” (the plane is B-17F 42-3463, which never actually left the United States, its nose art having been created for the movie), he enters the nose compartment and climbs into the bombardier’s position. (Once and again.) Then, in one of the most evocative and moving scenes to emerge from a film of this era – truly, any era – he relives the past. Viewed from the front, the camera zooms in on the aircraft and then pans across each of the B-17’s four nacelles from the plane’s left to right, momentarily focusing on each as the background music rises in pitch and intensity, symbolizing the plane coming to life for a combat mission. The fact that the aircraft’s engines are actually missing from this plane – the camera focusing on each nacelle’s empty bulkhead – reveals to us that for Captain Derry, past and present are indistinguishable.
The camera then zooms in on Derry as (breaking out in a sweat), he leans forward as if to peer through imagined bombsight, and relives the experience of witnessing a friend’s B-17 being shot down in combat – with no survivors. Only when the foreman of a salvage crew looks up to notice Derry in the aircraft and yells from below, does Derry abruptly awaken from his dark reverie. This transition is symbolized in the way that Derry (as viewed from outside the bombardier’s nosepiece) is filmed out of focus amidst his flashback, and only comes into clear focus when he leaves the past. Having returned to the present, Derry leaves the plane, and after a brusque but straightforward conversation with the foreman that entails the possibility of a job – a menial job for a former Captain but a job nonetheless – returns to the present, and the possibility of a real future.
Below you’ll find a clip of this sequence. In the full version at Archive.org, it begins near the film’s end, at @ 2 hours 32 minutes.
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It was an arduous journey, but our bombardier came back.
Appearing after Nash-Kelvinator’s 1942 advertisement in The New York Times, which features an inspiring illustration of a B-17 Flying Fortress bombardier in the nose of his aircraft, here’s an ad that’s stylistically similar, but to a different purpose: Though it uses the visual symbol of an aviator – a bomber pilot – on a combat mission, the ad is for the military, rather than a corporation. Rather than validating the patriotism of a corporation, it seeks to persuade men to defend their country. And at that, it does a masterful job.
The advertisement – seeking candidates for pilot, navigator, and bombardier positions in the United States Army Air Force – which appeared in national newspapers in early September of 1943, the example below having been published in The New York Times on September 7.
The ad evokes purpose and achievement, within a context of teamwork. Patriotism is certainly implied, but that’s secondary to both challenge and adventure.
Following the verbal “hook” (a well-written and meaningful hook, at that!) forming the core of the advertisement, information is presented about the practical steps of entering the Army Air Corps for qualification as a Pilot, Bombardier, or Navigator.
The artwork, depicting a B-17 pilot, is by Robert L. Benney, who, during his very lengthy career as a professional artist, served as a civilian correspondent, focusing on military activity at Saipan and the Marianas Islands. Several powerful examples of Benney’s work – which has a very distinctive, clearly recognizable style, in terms of visual texture and the use of light and shadow – can be found at the website of the Naval History and Heritage Command.
The ad is below, followed by a verbatim transcript of its text.
(The image was scanned from a paper photocopy made by a 35mm microfilm viewer, rather than from a digitized image “copied & pasted” from the Internet. The abundance of digitized newspaper images, though a boon for accessing text, is often a step far downward in terms of the quality of the images within such news items. Technological convenience can be a step far, far backwards in terms of preserving the past…)
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THIS IS WHERE I BELONG…
We’re almost there…
Only four minutes to go – and the plane up ahead will drop the first flare.
Only four minutes to go – and Joe will give us our speed, the doors will open and we’ll start our run … and the ship will quiver like a thoroughbred who’s been given her head…
And Bob will center the target and we’ll come in – and the ten seconds or fifteen will seem like a year before we hear him call “Bombs away”…
And then – they’ll go out of the bay, nose over and fall, and begin their march over the land with the stamp of a giant’s tread.
This is where I belong…
Not down there but up here…with my ship and my crew…in a world of our own.
Up here, where the clean, sharp air bites to the bone, I can see things clear. I can see the kids we were, and the team we’ve become and the men we’ll be.
Up here in the night, I remember nights with the books – when numbers and formulas fumbled and blurred and I couldn’t get them into my head.
But I swore that if other men had done it before – I could, and I would. And all at once they came clear and I understood.
And I remember the time when I took over the stick and the ship lost speed and she stalled and spun…and my mouth went dry and my hand shook. And then, my instructor’s voice was quiet in my ear and the fear left me – for good.
And now up here, alone, and all of us closer together than we’ve ever been, I hear once again the words of a pilot I knew: “I can’t tell what it means to fly with a bomber crew,” he said, “that’s like telling a blind man what you mean by the color red.”
As the target comes nearer, and the fighters slide up, and the guns start their chatter, I know this is where I belong…this is what matters…
This is my air.
This is my future.
This is what I was born for…to fly with the Army Air Corps!
If you can qualify – you, too, belong in the Army Air Forces as a Bombardier, Navigator or Pilot! And here’s what you can do about it right now. Go to your nearest Aviation Cadet Examining Board – or see the commanding officer of the Army Air Force College Training Detachment nearest you.
If you are under 18…see your local Civil Air Patrol officers about taking C.A.P. Cadet Training – also see your High School adviser about taking H.S. Victory Corps prescribed courses. Both will afford you valuable pre-aviation training.
If you are 17 but not yet 18…go to your nearest Aviation Cadet Examining Board…take your preliminary examinations to see if you can qualify as a Junior Cadet in the Air Corps Enlisted Reserve. If you qualify, you will receive your Enlisted Reserve insignia but will not be called for training until you are over 18.
If you are 18 but under 27…go to your nearest Aviation Cadet Examining Board…see if you can qualify as an Aviation Cadet. If you are in the Army, you may apply through your commanding officer. When called, you’ll be given 5 months’ training (after a brief conditioning period) in one of America’s finest colleges…you’ll get dual-control flying instruction…then go on to eight months of full flight training during which you will receive a $10,000 life insurance policy paid for by the Government. When you graduate as a Bombardier, Navigator or Pilot – you will receive an extra $250 uniform allowance and your pay will be $246 to $327 per month.
And after the war you will be qualified for leadership in the world’s greatest industry – Aviation!
(Essential workers in War Industry or Agriculture – do not apply.)
U.S. ARMY AIR FORCES
THIS ADVERTISEMENT HAS THE APPROVAL OF THE JOINT ARMY NAVY PERSONNEL BOARD
“NOTHING CAN STOP THE ARMY AIR CORPS”
For information regarding Naval Aviation Cadet training, apply at any Naval Aviation Cadet Selection Board or any Naval Recruiting Station; or, if you are in the Navy, Marine Corps or Coast Guard, apply through your Commanding Officer.
Here, in this house, you shall meet the first sketch of the real God. It is a man — or a being made by man — who will finally ascend the throne of the universe. And rule forever.
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No, no; we want geldings and oxen. There will never be peace and order and discipline so long as there is sex. When man has thrown it away, then he will become finally governable.
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But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.
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What’s on a book is interesting (hey, that’s why this blog’s here!) but it’s what’s inside that really counts. Some novels; some stories are so compelling that the message they present – whether explicitly or implicitly – demands acknowledgement; demands recognition; demands contemplation. This is so regardless of a tale’s format, physical quality, or (sometimes being generous!) literary venue. In some pulp fiction, there has been profundity. In a few cheap paperbacks, there has been prescience. And even in some works of mainstream fiction, there can be (on infrequent occasion!) meaning. Such as, in the four examples below: Two pulps; a mainstream novel; a cheap paperback. While they certainly merit notice of their cover art, it’s the commonality – expressed in different degrees of sophistication and style – of their understanding of the intersection between human nature, technology, and civilization, and the endurance of civilization, for which they should be recognized.
So, each post features images of the book or pulp’s cover art, followed by a whole, long, big bunch of excerpts.
… some worthy quotes from That Hideous Strength, the trilogy’s final novel, follow below.
But first…!
here’s George Orwell’s review of the novel from the Manchester Evening News of August 16, 1945, published one day after Emperor Hirohito’s radio broadcast concerning the termination of WW II. A strange and subtle synchronicity, eh? Orwell’s opinion of Lewis’ novel is generally positive, but his criticisms of the magical and supernatural elements in the story are, I think, unwarranted and strangely naive, especially coming from a man of such shining literary skill and moral sensitivity. (I recently finished The Road to Wigan Pier, and, Homage to Catalonia, both of which clearly reveal Orwell’s intellectual honesty, compassion, and political wisdom.) After all, it was Lewis’ specific and deliberate intention – having successively “segued” from Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra – to combine elements of science-fiction, fantasy, and the supernatural as a warning about the dangers of deification of the human intellect, the seductiveness of power – and especially the desire to feel that one is among a society’s elect, and, an entirely mechanistic view of reality.
Here’s the review…
The Scientist Takes Over
(Reprinted as No. 2720 (first half) in The Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison, Vol. XVII (1998), pp. 250–251)
On the whole, novels are better when there are no miracles in them. Still, it is possible to think of a fairly large number of worth-while books in which ghosts, magic, second-sight, angels, mermaids, and what-not play a part.
Mr. C.S. Lewis’s “That Hideous Strength” can be included in their number – though, curiously enough, it would probably have been a better book if the magical element had been left out. For in essence it is a crime story, and the miraculous happenings, though they grow more frequent towards the end, are not integral to it.
In general outline, and to some extent in atmosphere, it rather resembles G.K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday.”
Mr. Lewis probably owes something to Chesterton as a writer, and certainly shares his horror of modern machine civilisation (the title of the book, by the way, is taken from a poem about the Tower of Babel) and his reliance on the “eternal verities” of the Christian Church, as against scientific materialism or nihilism.
His book describes the struggle of a little group of sane people against a nightmare that nearly conquers the world. A company of mad scientists – or, perhaps, they are not mad, but have merely destroyed in themselves all human feeling, all notion of good and evil – are plotting to conquer Britain, then the whole planet, and then other planets, until they have brought the universe under their control.
All superfluous life is to be wiped out, all natural forces tamed, the common people are to be used as slaves and vivisection subjects by the ruling caste of scientists, who even see their way to conferring immortal life upon themselves. Man, in short, is to storm the heavens and overthrow the gods, or even to become a god himself.
There is nothing outrageously improbable in such a conspiracy. Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced “obsolete” – has just blown probably three hundred thousand people to fragments, it sounds all too topical. Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable.
His description of the N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments), with its world-wide ramifications, its private army, its secret torture chambers, and its inner ring of adepts ruled over by a mysterious personage known as The Head, is as exciting as any detective story.
It would be a very hardened reader who would not experience a thrill on learning that The Head is actually – however, that would be giving the game away.
One could recommend this book unreservedly if Mr. Lewis had succeeded in keeping it all on a single level. Unfortunately, the supernatural keeps breaking in, and it does so in rather confusing, undisciplined ways. The scientists are endeavouring, among other things, to get hold of the body of the ancient Celtic magician Merlin, who has been buried – not dead, but in a trance – for the last 1,500 years, in hopes of learning from him the secrets of pre-Christian magic.
They are frustrated by a character who is only doubtfully a human being, having spent part of his time on another planet where he has been gifted with eternal youth. Then there is a woman with second sight, one or two ghosts, and various superhuman visitors from outer space, some of them with rather tiresome names which derive from earlier books of Mr. Lewis’s. The book ends in a way that is so preposterous that it does not even succeed in being horrible in spite of much bloodshed.
Much is made of the fact that the scientists are actually in touch with evil spirits, although this fact is known only to the inmost circle. Mr. Lewis appears to believe in the existence of such spirits, and of benevolent ones as well. He is entitled to his beliefs, but they weaken his story, not only because they offend the average reader’s sense of probability but because in effect they decide the issue in advance. When one is told that God and the Devil are in conflict one always knows which side is going to win. The whole drama of the struggle against evil lies in the fact that one does not have supernatural aid. However, by the standard of the novels appearing nowadays this is a book worth reading.
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This post concludes with a bunch of references to commentary about and discussion of the novel, the most recent of which are N.S. Lyons’ profound “A Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism” – also available in podcast form via Audyo – and Rusty Reno’s “That Haunting Nihilism“. (Admittedly, the very title of Lyons’ post inspired the leading word in this post’s title: Technonihilism. One must give credit where credit’s due!)
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But First, Some Thing to Watch
So, to (try!) to begin on a note of levity, what better way than to poke fun at sciencescientism than by Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science” (Official Video – HD Remaster – April 15, 2009), at Thomas Dolby Official?
After all, humor may be the refuge of the powerless, but it is a refuge nonetheless.
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And so, some quotes:
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The most controversial business before the College Meeting was the question of selling Bragdon Wood. The purchaser was the N.I.C.E., the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. They wanted a site for the building which would house this remarkable organisation. The N.I.C.E. was the first fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world. (23)
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Jewel had been already an old man in the days before the first war when old men were treated with kindness, and he had never succeeded in getting used to the modern world. (28)
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“And what do you think about it, Studdock?” said Feverstone.
“I think,” said Mark, “that James touched on the most important point when he said that it would have its own legal staff and its own police. I don’t give a fig for Pragmatometers and sanitation de luxe. The real thing is that this time we’re going to get science applied to social problems and backed by the whole force of the state, just as war has been backed by the whole force of the state in the past. One hopes, of course, that it’ll find out more than the old free-lance science did; but what’s certain is that it can do more.” (38)
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“But it is the main question at the moment: which side one’s on – obscurantism or Order. It does really look as if we now had the power to dig ourselves in as a species for a pretty staggering period, to take control of our own destiny. If Science is really given a free hand it can now take over the human race and re-condition it: make man a really efficient animal. If it doesn’t – well, we’re done.” (40-41)
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“It’s the real thing at last. A new type of man; and it’s people like you who’ve got to begin to make him.”
“The practical point is that you and I don’t like being pawns, and we do rather like fighting – especially on the winning side.”
“And what is the first practical step?”
“Yes, that’s the real question. As I said, the interplanetary problem must be left on the side for the moment. The second problem is our rivals on this planet. I don’t mean only insects and bacteria. There’s far too much life of every kind about, animal and vegetable. We haven’t really cleared the place yet. First we couldn’t; and then we had aesthetic and humanitarian scruples; and we still haven’t short-circuited the question of the balance of nature. All that is to be gone into. The third problem is Man himself.”
“Go on. This interests me very much.”
“Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest – which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as you can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of. Quite.”
“What sort of things have you in mind?”
“Quite simple and obvious things, at first – sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of backward races (we don’t want any dead weights), selective breeding. Then real education, including pre-natal education. By real education I mean one that has no ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it’ll be mainly psychological at first. But we’ll get on to biochemical conditioning in the end and direct manipulation of the brain…”
“But this is stupendous, Feverstone.”
“It’s the real thing at last. A new type of man; and it’s people like you who’ve got to begin to make him.” (42)
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“Is there, do you think, anything very seriously wrong with me?”
“There is nothing wrong with you,” said Miss Ironwood.
“You mean it will go away?”
“I have no means of telling. I should say probably not.”
Disappointment shadowed Jane’s face. “Then – can’t anything be done about it? They were horrible dreams – horribly vivid, not like dreams at all.”
“I can quite understand that.”
“Is it something that can’t be cured?”
“The reason you cannot be cured is that you are not ill.” (64)
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“But what is this all about?” said Jane “I want to lead an ordinary life. I want to do my own work. It’s unbearable! Why should I be selected for this horrible thing?”
“The answer to that is known only to authorities much higher than myself.” (66)
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“I happen to believe that you can’t study men; you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing. Because you study them, you want to make the lower orders govern the country and listen to classical music, which is balderdash. You also want to take away from them everything which makes life worth living at not only from them but from everyone except a parcel of prigs and professors.” (71)
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They walked about that village for two hours and saw with their own eyes all the abuses and anachronisms they came to destroy. They saw the recalcitrant and backward labourer and heard his views on the weather. They met the wastefully supported pauper in the person of an old man shuffling across the courtyard of the almshouses to fill a kettle, and the elderly rentier (to make matters worse, she had a fat old dog with her) in earnest conversation with the postman. It made Mark feel as he were on a holiday, for it was only on holidays that he had ever wandered about an English village. For that reason he felt pleasure in it. It did not quite escape him that the face of the backward labourer was rather more interesting than Cosser’s and his voice a great deal more pleasing to the ear. The resemblance between the elderly rentier and Aunt Gilly (When had he last thought of her? Good Lord, that took one back.) did make him understand how it was possible to like that kind of person. All this did not in the least influence his sociological convictions. Even if he had been free from Belbury and wholly unambitious, it could not have done so, for his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow. Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as “man” or “woman,” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes” and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen. (87)
______________________________
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in May-fair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
“Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us — to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.”
“I don’t believe you can do that,” said Mark. “Not with the papers that are read by educated people.”
“That shows you’re still in the nursery, lovey,” said Miss Hardcastle. “Haven’t you yet realised that it’s the other way round?”
“How do you mean?”
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in May-fair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
“As one of the class you mention,” said Mark with a smile, “I just don’t believe it.”
“Good Lord!” said the Fairy, “where are your eyes? Look at what the weeklies have got away with! Look at the Weekly Question. There’s a paper for you. When Basic English came in simply as the invention of a free-thinking Cambridge don, nothing was too good for it; as soon as it was taken up by a Tory Prime Minister it became a menace to the purity of our language. And wasn’t the Monarchy an expensive absurdity for ten years? And then, when the Duke of Windsor abdicated, didn’t the Question go all monarchist and legitimist for about a fortnight? Did they drop a single reader? Don’t you see that the educated reader can’t stop reading the high-brow weeklies whatever they do? He can’t. He’s been conditioned.” (99-100)
______________________________
Stone had the look which Mark had often seen before in unpopular boys or new boys at school, in “outsiders” at Bracton — the look which was for Mark the symbol of all his worst fears, for to be one who must wear that look was, in his scale of values, the greatest evil. His instinct was not to speak to this man Stone. He knew by experience how dangerous it is to be friends with a sinking man or even to be seen with him: you cannot keep him afloat and he may pull you under. But his own craving for companionship was now acute, so that against his better judgment he smiled a sickly — smile and said “Hullo!” (109)
______________________________
The least satisfactory member of the circle in Mark’s eyes was Straik. Straik made no effort to adapt himself to the ribald and realistic tone in which his colleagues spoke. He never drank nor smoked. He would sit silent, nursing a threadbare knee with a lean hand and turning his large unhappy eyes from one speaker to another, without attempting to combat them or to join in the joke when they laughed. Then — perhaps once in the whole evening — something said would start him off: usually something about the opposition of reactionaries in the outer world and the measures which the N.I.C.E. would take to deal with it. At such moments he would burst into loud and prolonged speech, threatening, denouncing, prophesying. The strange thing was that the others neither interrupted him nor laughed. There was some deeper unity between this uncouth man and them which apparently held in check the obvious lack of sympathy, but what it was Mark did not discover. Sometimes Straik addressed him in particular, talking, to Mark’s great discomfort and bewilderment, about resurrection. “Neither a historical fact nor a fable, young man,” he said, “but a prophecy. All the miracles — shadows of things to come. Get rid of false spirituality. It is all going to happen, here in this world, in the only world there is. What did the Master tell us? Heal the sick, cast out devils, raise the dead. We shall. The Son of Man — that is, Man himself, full grown — has power to judge the world — to distribute life without end, and punishment without end. You shall see. Here and now.” It was all very unpleasant. (128)
“It was not his fault,” she said at last. “I suppose our marriage was just a mistake.”
The Director said nothing.
“What would you — what would the people you are talking of — say about a case like that?”
“I will tell you if you really want to know,” said the Director.
“Please,” said Jane reluctantly.
“They would say,” he answered, “that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”
Something in Jane that would normally have reacted to such a remark with anger or laughter was banished to a remote distance (where she could still, but only just, hear its voice) by the fact that the word Obedience — but certainly not obedience to Mark — came over her, in that room and in that presence, like a strange oriental perfume, perilous, seductive, and ambiguous…
“Stop it!” said the Director, sharply.
Jane stared at him, open mouthed. There were a few moments of silence during which the exotic fragrance faded away.
“You were saying, my dear?” resumed the Director.
“I thought love meant equality,” she said, “and free companionship.”
“Ah, equality!” said the Director. “We must talk of that some other time. Yes, we must all be guarded by equal rights from one another’s greed, because we are fallen. Just as we must all wear clothes for the same reason. But the naked body should be there underneath the clothes, ripening for the day when we shall need them no longer. Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.”
“I always thought that was just what it was. I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.”
“You were mistaken,” said he gravely. “That is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes — that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food. You might as well try to warm yourself with a blue-book.”
“But surely in marriage… ?”
“Worse and worse,” said the Director. “Courtship knows nothing of it; nor does fruition. What has free companionship to do with that? Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not. Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends — comrades — do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed…”
“I thought,” said Jane and stopped.
“I see,” said the Director. “It is not your fault. They never warned you. No one has ever told you that obedience — humility — is an erotic necessity. You are putting equality just where it ought not to be. As to your coming here, that may admit of some doubt. For the present, I must send you back. You can come out and see us. In the meantime, talk to your husband and I will talk to my authorities.” (147-148)
______________________________
No, no; we want geldings and oxen. There will never be peace and order and discipline so long as there is sex. When man has thrown it away, then he will become finally governable.
“At present, I allow, we must have forests, for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth. In fact, we clean the planet.”
“Do you mean,” put in a man called Gould, “that we are to have no vegetation at all?”
“Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English fashion, you shave him every day. One day we shave the planet.”
“I wonder what the birds will make of it?”
“I would not have any birds either. On the art tree I would have the art birds all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the singing you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt.”
“It sounds,” said Mark, “like abolishing pretty well all organic life.”
“And why not? It is simple hygiene. Listen, my friends. If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not say, ‘Oh, the horrid thing. It is alive,’ and then drop it?”
“Go on,” said Winter.
“And you, especially you English, are you not hostile to any organic life except your own on your own body? Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath.”
“That’s true.”
“And what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms — sweat, spittles, excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions.”
“What are you driving at, Professor?” said Gould. “After all we are organisms ourselves.”
“I grant it. That is the point. In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould — all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course. Slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation.”
“I don’t think that would be much fun,” said Winter.
“My friend, you have already separated the Fun, as you call it, from fertility. The Fun itself begins to pass away. Bah! I know that is not what you think. But look at your English women. Six out of ten are frigid, are they not? You see? Nature herself begins to throw away the anachronism. When she has thrown it away, then real civilisation becomes possible. You would understand if you were peasants. Who would try to work with stallions and bulls? No, no; we want geldings and oxen. There will never be peace and order and discipline so long as there is sex. When man has thrown it away, then he will become finally governable.” (172-173)
______________________________
“The world I look forward to is the world of perfect purity. The clean mind and the clean minerals. What are the things that most offend the dignity of man? Birth and breeding and death. How if we are about to discover that man can live without any of the three?” (174) Filostrato
______________________________
Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away.
“For the moment, I speak only to inspire you. I speak that you may know what can be done: what shall be done here. This Institute — Dio mio, it is for something better than housing and vaccinations and faster trains and curing the people of cancer. It is for the conquest of death: or for the conquest of organic life, if you prefer. They are the same thing. It is to bring out of that cocoon of organic life which sheltered the babyhood of mind the New Man, the man who will not die, the artificial man, free from Nature. Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away.” (177)
______________________________
Here, in this house, you shall meet the first sketch of the real God. It is a man — or a being made by man — who will finally ascend the throne of the universe. And rule forever.
“You are frightened?” said Filostrato. “You will get over that. We are offering to make you one of us. Ahi — if you were outside, if you were mere canaglia you would have reason to be frightened. It is the beginning of all power. He lives forever. The giant time is conquered. And the giant space — he was already conquered too. One of our company has already travelled in space. True; he was betrayed and murdered and his manuscripts are imperfect: we have not yet been able to reconstruct his space ship. But that will come.”
“It is the beginning of Man Immortal and Man Ubiquitous,” said Straik. “Man on the throne of the universe. It is what all the prophecies really meant.”
“At first, of course,” said Filostrato, “the power will be confined to a number — a small number — of individual men. Those who are selected for eternal life.”
“And you mean,” said Mark, “it will then be extended to all men?”
“No,” said Filostrato. “I mean it will then be reduced to one man. You are not a fool, are you, my young friend? All that talk about the power of Man over Nature — Man in the abstract — is only for the canaglia. You know as well as I do that Man’s power over Nature means the power of some men over other men with Nature as the instrument. There is no such thing as Man — it is a word. There are only men. No! It is not Man who will be omnipotent, it is some one man, some immortal man. Alcasan, our Head, is the first sketch of it. The completed product may be someone else. It may be you. It may be me.”
“A king cometh,” said Straik, “who shall rule the universe with righteousness and the heavens with judgment. You thought all that was mythology, no doubt. You thought because fables had clustered about the phrase, ‘Son of Man,’ that Man would never really have a son who will wield all power. But he will.”
“I don’t understand, I don’t understand,” said Mark.
“But it is very easy,” said Filostrato. “We have found how to make a dead man live. He was a wise man even in his natural life. He lives now forever; he gets wiser. Later, we make them live better — for at present, one must concede, this second life is probably not very agreeable to him who has it. You see? Later we make it pleasant for some — perhaps not so pleasant for others. For we can make the dead live whether they wish it or not. He who shall be finally king of the universe can give this life to whom he pleases. They cannot refuse the little present.”
“And so,” said Straik, “the lessons you learned at your mother’s knee return. God will have power to give eternal reward and eternal punishment.”
“God?” said Mark. “How does He come into it? I don’t believe in God.”
“But, my friend,” said Filostrato, “does it follow that because there was no God in the past that there will be no God also in the future?”
“Don’t you see,” said Straik, “that we are offering you the unspeakable glory of being present at the creation of God Almighty? Here, in this house, you shall meet the first sketch of the real God. It is a man — or a being made by man — who will finally ascend the throne of the universe. And rule forever.” (178-179)
______________________________
One of Ransom’s greatest difficulties in disputing with MacPhee (who consistently professed to disbelieve the very existence of the eldils) was that MacPhee made the common, but curious assumption that — if there are creatures wiser and stronger than man they must be forthwith omniscient and omnipotent. In vain did Ransom endeavour to explain the truth. Doubtless, the great beings who now so often came to him had power sufficient to sweep Belbury from the face of England and England from the face of the globe; perhaps, to blot the globe itself out of existence. But no power of that kind would be used. Nor had they any direct vision into the minds of men. It was in a different place, and approaching their knowledge from the other side, that they had discovered the state of Merlin: not from inspection of the thing that slept under Bragdon Wood, but from observing a certain unique configuration in that place where those things remain that are taken off thine’s mainroad, behind the invisible hedges, into the unimaginable fields. Not all the times that are outside the present are therefore past or future.
It was this that kept the Director wakeful, with knitted brow, in the small cold hours of that morning when the others had left him. There was no doubt in his mind now that the enemy had bought Bragdon to find Merlin: and if they found him they would re-awake him. The old Druid would inevitably cast his lot with the new planners — what could prevent his doing so? A junction would be effected between two kinds of power which between them would determine the fate of our planet. Doubtless that had been the will of the dark eldils for centuries. The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped, had been subtly manoeuvred in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result. Babble about the élan vital and flirtations with panpsychism were bidding fair to restore the Anima Mundi of the magicians. Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stilling of all deepset repugnances was the first essential for progress. And now, all this had reached the stage at which its dark contrivers thought they could safely begin to bend it back so that it would meet that other and earlier kind of power. Indeed they were choosing the first moment at which this could have been done. You could not have done it with Nineteenth-Century scientists. Their firm objective materialism would have excluded it from their minds; and even if they could have been made to believe, their inherited morality would have kept them from touching dirt. MacPhee was a survivor from that tradition. It was different now. Perhaps few or none of the people at Belbury knew what was happening; but once it happened, they would be like straw in fire. What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men?
While the cover art of the Washington Square Press edition of Famous Chinese Short Stories is, well, nice, it’s nothing so dramatic in visual impact as to “make me write home about”. (Or * ahem * specifically blog about.) Rather, I’m presenting this book by virtue of its content, which is excellent, if not fascinating, if not enchanting.
Notably, Lin Yutang is listed as neither the compiler nor the editor of the twenty tales comprising this collection. Rather, he is dubbed is a reteller: The stories herein have not simply been collected-and-there-you-have-them-and-no-more, a la science fiction anthologies by Asimov & Greenberg, Knight, Conklin, Bleiler & Dikty, or, Wollheim. Likewise, they are probably not direct translations from original manuscripts or sources, regardless of wherever and whenever those documents may have originated. Rather, Lin Yutang has modified the stories – to an indeterminate degree – to make them more accessible and appealing to a non-Chinese readership, in terms of plot, characters, and literary style.
In this, he has succeeded. While I have no idea if these stories actually are genuinely significant in terms of Chinese literature and culture, I immensely enjoyed this volume. The tales flow rapidly, and from them one immediately gains a sense of the sheer universality of human experience, in terms of emotion, eroticism, relationships, love, fate and justice, and – yes – the supernatural, regardless of differences in history and language.
Contents
Adventure and Mystery
Curly-Beard, by Tu Kwang-t’ing The White Monkey, by anonymous The Stranger’s Note, by “Ch’ingp’ingshan T’ang”
Love
The Jade Goddess, by “Chingpen T’ungshu” Chastity, a popular anecdote Passion, by Yuan Chen Chienniang, by Chen Hsuanyu Madame D., by Lien Pu
Ghosts
Jealousy, by “Chingpen T’ungshu” Jojo, by P’u Sung-ling
Juvenile
Cinderella, by Tuan Ch’eng-shih The Cricket Boy, by P’u Sung-ling
Satire
The Poet’s Club, by Wang Chu The Bookworm, by P’u Sung-ling The Wolf of Chungshan (otherwise “The Wolf of Zhongshan“), by Hsieh Liang
Tales of Fancy and Humor
A Lodging for the Night, by Li Fu-yen The Man Who Became a Fish, by Li Fu-yen The Tiger, by Li Fu-yen Matrimony Inn, by Li Fu-yen The Drunkard’s Dream, by Li Kung-tso
A Reference or Two. Or three. (Perhaps four?) ((Even five?))
Famous Chinese Short Stories (this book itself!), at…
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled.
All our difficulty comes with the others.
When did you meet a workman who believes the papers?
He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles.
He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs
about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats.
He is our problem.
We have to recondition him.
But the educated public,
the people who read the highbrow weeklies,
don’t need reconditioning.
They’re all right already.
They’ll believe anything.”
________________________________________
Since completing this post, I’ve made innumerable attempts to learn more about the NICE’s current incarnation, but information about the organization – at least, beyond what C.S. Lewis presents in his novel – is remarkably elusive. (Understandable: Much has changed since 1946, not least the fact that the NICE is no longer headquartered in England.) Despite extensive searches using DuckDuckGo, and, that o t h e r search engine (y’know, the one headquartered in Mountain View, California, at which the arc of human history is tacitly understood to “progress” (Babel-like?) ever forward; always upward; ever higher…), I’ve been unable to identify either the Institute’s home page, or, links to the organization through any other website, whether governmental or private; whether in the Americas, Western or Eastern Europe, Africa, or Asia.
Likewise, though the Institute assuredly has a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, these too remain elusive.
Well, not entirely true: I did come across one possible link. But, I’m not going to click on it. (Y’never know what might happen…!)
(Okay, just kidding! I thought it would be fun to indulge in brief speculation about parallel universes and alternate histories….)
But, I did find the image below: It’s conceptual art of a promotional / propaganda poster for the NICE, fittingly done in 1940s “atomic” style: The kind of image you’d see – 1984-like – in abundance, weather-marked with tattered corners yet always freshly replaced – upon the walls of any urban center.
The poster is one of many works created by J.P. Cokes as conceptual illustrations for That Hideous Strength, and can be viewed at Behance. J.P. Cokes has also created a great series of stylistically similar illustrations for Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, which – like That Hideous Strength; like so many other works of science fiction and fantasy (A.E. van Vogt, anyone?) – merits transfer from the printed page to animation, or, the “live” screen.
________________________________________
You can view the cover of Avon Books’ 1958 abridged version of That Hideous Strength, published under the title The Tortured Planet (Avon # T-211), here.
Here’s the cover of Avon Books’ 1958 edition of the third and final novel of the Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, published under the awkward title The Tortured Planet. (Ugh.) I don’t know the reason for the title change, though it may relate to this Avon edition being – as stated on the cover – C.S. Lewis’ abridged version of the original work.
This edition’s cover art, which looks like two factory-reject Christmas tree ornaments floating confusedly in space, is by Richard Powers, and is the “weakest” of the cover illustrations of Avon’s three 1950s-era volumes of Lewis’ trilogy. This is more than ironic, given the typically exceptional quality – in terms of complexity, symbolism, and originality – of Powers’ oeuvre.
You can view the cover art of Macmillan’s 1965 edition of That Hideous Strengthhere.
A (the?) central plot element of the novel concerns an organization dubbed NICE., the National Institute for Coordinated Experimentation. As stated by Foster, Lewis describes NICE as “the first fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world.” Though thankfully there’s no congruent analogue of N.I.C.E. in our world, perhaps the Institute can be taken to represent the long-reigning academic / corporate / media “complex”, which has wielded, and continues to wield, vastly more power than than the stereotyped (albeit a somewhat hackneyed stereotype) “military industrial complex”.
Just sayin’.
Oh, here’s a quote by, “…the Head of the Institutional Police, a woman named Miss Hardcastle … nicknamed the Fairy, who explains to sociologist Mark Studdock [a professor “on the make” at Bracton College], the ease with which the news media can manipulate the public. (Specifically alluding to that portion of the public that is “educated”, credentialed, and perhaps meritocratic?)
Whether in the world of the Space Trilogy or our world, her point is valid.
Thus:
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled.
All our difficulty comes with the others.
When did you meet a workman who believes the papers?
He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles.
He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs
about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats.
He is our problem.
We have to recondition him.
But the educated public,
the people who read the highbrow weeklies,
don’t need reconditioning.
They’re all right already.
They’ll believe anything.”
________________________________________
Since completing this post, I’ve made innumerable attempts to learn more about the NICE’s current incarnation, but information about the organization – at least, beyond what C.S. Lewis presents in his novel – is remarkably elusive. (Understandable: Much has changed since 1946, not least the fact that the NICE is no longer headquartered in England.) Despite extensive searches using DuckDuckGo, and, that o t h e r search engine (y’know, the one headquartered in Mountain View, California, at which the arc of human history is tacitly understood to “progress” (Babel-like?) ever forward; always upward; ever higher…), I’ve been unable to identify either the Institute’s home page, or, links to the organization through any other website, whether governmental or private; whether in the Americas, Western or Eastern Europe, Africa, or Asia.
Likewise, though the Institute assuredly has a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, these too remain elusive.
Well, not entirely true: I did come across one possible link. But, I’m not going to click on it. (Y’never know what might happen…!)
(Okay, just kidding! I thought it would be fun to indulge in brief speculation about parallel universes and alternate histories….)
But, I did find the image below: It’s conceptual art of a promotional / propaganda poster for the NICE, fittingly done in 1940s “atomic” style: The kind of image you’d see – 1984-like – in abundance, weather-marked with tattered corners yet always freshly replaced – upon the walls of any urban center.
The poster is one of many works created by J.P. Cokes as conceptual illustrations for That Hideous Strength, and can be viewed at Behance. J.P. Cokes has also created a great series of stylistically similar illustrations for Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, which – like That Hideous Strength; like so many other works of science fiction and fantasy (A.E. van Vogt, anyone?) – merits transfer from the printed page to animation, or, the “live” screen.
Following the theme of C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy, here’s Art Sussman’s cover for Perelandra, the second book of the series, as published by Avon in 1957. Sussman also created the cover of Avon’s 1960 edition of Out of the Silent Planet.
You can view the cover of Macmillan’s 1965 edition of Perelandrahere. The large human figures in yellow-orange are probably symbolic representations of Tindril, the Queen of Perelandra (a.k.a. to we inhabitants of Earth as “Venus”), and her un-named King. There’s also a science-fiction element on the cover in the form of a rocket-plane, but no such craft figures in the story!
And as always, to give you a literary “taste” of the novel’s contents, here’s an excerpt: A conversation between the hero, Dr. Elwin Ransom, and his antagonist, Dr. Weston.
“My dear Ransom,
I wish you would not keep relapsing on to the popular level.
The two things are only moments in the single, unique reality.
The world leaps forward through great men
and greatness always transcends mere moralism.
When the leap has been made our ‘diabolism’
as you would call it becomes the morality of the next stage;
but while we are making it, we are called criminals, heretics, blasphemers…”
“How far does it go?
Would you still obey the Life-Force
if you found it prompting you to murder me?”
“Yes.”
“Or to sell England to the Germans?”
“Yes.”
“Or to print lies as serious research in a scientific periodical?”
“Yes.”
“God help you!” said Ransom.
* * * * * * * * * * *
As the novel progresses, Dr. Weston is transformed into some thing no longer quite human, although physically human in superficial appearance. Here are Dr. Ransom’s observations of what remains of Weston – physically, intellectually, and spiritually – after the latter has succumbed (voluntarily?) to demonic possession.
It [Weston] looked at Ransom in silence and at last began to smile. We have all often spoken – Ransom himself had often spoken – of a devilish smile. Now he realized that he had never taken the words seriously. The smile was not bitter, nor raging, nor, in an ordinary sense, sinister; it was not even mocking. It seemed to summon Ransom, with horrible naivete of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it.
It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation.
Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence. It was beyond vice as the Lady was beyond virtue.
Among the series’ many imprints over the past eight-odd decades, perhaps the most immediately “recognizable” – in terms of duration of publication and (therefore!) especially cover art – has been the Macmillan edition. Published from 1967 through 1979, all Space Trilogy books with that imprint bore cover illustrations by Bernard Symancyk, about whose career little information is available – albeit Terence E. Hanley at TellersofWeirdTales presents a brief biography at “From Things To Come into The Space Trilogy-Part One“.
Well, Macmillan wasn’t alone. In 1949, 1956, and 1960, Avon Books released its own edition of the Space Trilogy, with unique cover art for each “set”, and within each set, the cover illustrations having been created by different artists.
Certainly the art of the Space Trilogy is varied, but even moreso is the vast commentary the books have engendered across the decades. While the Trilogy can ostensibly be categorized as science fiction, the tropes associated with that literary genre are far secondary to the ideas actually animating the books. These are theological, though not purely couched in the verbiage of theology (the books’ ethos is clearly expressed in a allegorical manner), and concern the nature of good and evil; collectivism versus the worth of the individual as an individual; the nature, exercise, and temptation of power – whether that power be technological, biological, or governmental; the destiny of men as individuals and humanity as a civilization.
Well… The above sentences merely superficially (and ever so tangentially!) scratch the surface of depths vastly deeper.
Well… I can recommended these two discussions concerning the final novel of the series – That Hideous Strength (Avon’s awkward title The Tortured Planet) – at ChicagoBoyz, both by David Foster. They are “Summer Rerun – Book Review: That Hideous Strength” (September 15, 2017), and, “Summer Rerun – Lewis vs. Haldane” (August 31, 2019). These discussions can also serve as a sort-of-segue to the Trilogy’s other two novels.
As a matter of fact, these two ChicagoBoyz posts are what let me to read the first two novels. That Hideous Strength is in my “queue”, for the “world” depicted in Lewis’ final Space Trilogy novel has striking resonance with the world of 2020.
And perhaps – depending on the winds of history and the choices of men – alas, beyond.
Oh, yes, as for cover art?
Here are the covers, front and back, of the 1956 edition of Avon’s first novel in the trilogy – Out of the Silent Planet – by artist Everett Raymond Kinstler.
You can view the cover of Macmillan’s 1965 edition of Out of the Silent Planethere.
Here’s a brief excerpt from Out of The Silent Planet: A conversation between the hero of both “this” first novel of the trilogy and the second, Perelandra: Between Dr. Elwin Ransom, and his (our?) nemesis, “Dr. Weston”, whose religion (if any) seems to be a variation on the theme of what is known to us as “scientism” – not science, which is altogether a thing quite different.
Or, put it another way, deification of rationality.
Thus:
Weston: “…We are only obeying orders.”
Ransom: “Whose?”
There was another pause. “Come,” said Weston at last, “there is really no use in continuing this cross-examination. You keep on asking me questions I can’t answer; in some cases because I don’t know the answers, in other because you wouldn’t understand them. It will make things very much pleasanter during the voyage if you can only resign your mind to your fate and stop bothering yourself and us. It would be easier if your philosophy of life were not so insufferably narrow or individualistic. I had thought no one could fail to be inspired by the role you are being asked to play: that even a worm, if it could understand, would rise to the sacrifice. I mean, of course, the sacrifice of time and liberty, and some little risk. Don’t misunderstand me.”
“Well,” said Ransom, “You hold all the cards, and I must make the best of it. I consider your philosophy of life raving lunacy. I suppose all that stuff about infinity and eternity means that you think you are justified in doing anything – absolutely anything – here and now, on the off chance that some creatures or other descended from man as we know him may crawl about a few centuries longer in some part of the universe.”
“Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.” – Norbert Wiener
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In the summer of 2020, I read a book.
Actually, in 2020 I read several books, and I’m reading a book right now, in 2021: Judgement Night, by Catherine L. Moore. But of last year’s reading, two works – read back to back – have particularly stood out for me: S. Ansky’s (pen name of Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport) The Enemy At His Pleasure, and, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
A central theme of both – viewed from a very distant literary vantage point! – is the sudden and unanticipated transformation of a culture, society, and nation through the development and impact of forces within and without. While in practically ever significant respect the books are vastly dissimilar (not even considering the central fact that Ansky’s is non-fiction and Bradbury’s not) a commonality of their writings is the reaction of people – people as individuals; people collectively – to overwhelming, unexpected, and traumatic social change.
In retrospect, coincidentally or not, how very strange that having read in The Enemy At His Pleasure in April, I finished Bradbury’s novel on a Friday in the latter part of May: While seated in a quiet, shaded garden adjacent to a public library in a (for the time being…) peaceful suburb (was it only a few brief months ago that public libraries maintained full operating hours?) – considering the events would soon follow in the United States, and even beyond in the still-atrophying “West”, shortly thereafter.
Regardless of how the events of 2020 are viewed “now”, I think that future historians – that is, assuming history even survives as an intellectual discipline in the future – will come to understand the events of the past year (primarily in the United States, and secondarily in parts of Western Europe) as having been a kind of antinomian religious frenzy. This strikingly parallels the millenarian social unrest that persisted in central and western Europe from the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries. But, rather than ostensible (and really, superficial) concerns about “social justice”, the events of 2020 were at heart a reflection of obsessions about the potential loss of social status by a secular (and comfortably insular in that secularity), credentialed, technocratic, entitled, and ultimately quite venal elite.
Or more accurately, “elite”.
Oh, back to the novel at hand…
And while the power and depth of Bradbury’s novel were well forceful enough on their own in literary, emotional, and intellectual terms, the intersection of these qualities with the impact of events in “outside world” – the “real” world – only intensified the validity and force of the book’s message. Or, messages, of which there were several.
And so… This also gave me an appreciation for the quality of Ray Bradbury’s writing, for despite having long been a devotee of science fiction (specifically that of Cordwainer Smith and A.E. van Vogt and Philip K. Dick and Catherine L. Moore and Cyril Kornbluth and Dan Simmons and Poul Anderson; Isaac Asimov not so much and really not at all), this was actually the first time I’d read any of Bradbury’s novels. (Well, I guess people change.) The very antithesis of a “hard SF” writer – though technological conjecture and extrapolation are nonetheless central to his stories – I found that Bradbury excelled in the description of emotion and thought; actions and event; communication and conflict, with a richness of language born of an uncanny (well, sometimes overdone, but it works) use of metaphor and similie.
And, so… In much that same way that my posts combine scans a book or magazine’s cover (and frequently interior) art with excerpts from those publications, this post revisits my earlier post about Fahrenheit 451, which displays the cover art of the book’s first American paperback edition, by displaying the cover of the book’s Del Rey / Ballantine Book edition of April, 1991. As you can see, the central component of Joseph Mugnaini’s art – a “Fireman”, whose fireproof suit is actually made from the torn newspaper pages is wreathed in flames – has been retained from the 1953 edition, but otherwise, the cover is simplified: The Fireman appears in black & white, and there is no background. That’s all there is. For reasons of literary and cultural familiarity, I suppose this was enough.
And… In much the same way that some of my posts – at least, those for the genre of science fiction! – include images of both a book’s cover, and, the cover art of the magazine in which said book was first serialized, this post features images of Fahrenheit 451’s first appearance: The February, 1951, issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Bradbury’s novel, illustrated by Karl Rogers, occupies half the magazine’s length (pages 4 through 61), the other stories being “…And It Comes Out Here” by Lester Del Rey, “The Protector” by Betsy Curtis, “Second Childhood” by Clifford D. Simak, “Two Weeks in August” by Frank M. Robinson, and the second installment of Isaac Asimov’s “Tyrann”.
And… This is an instance most interesting and not uncommon, where the magazine’s cover art has absolutely no relation to the stories within. Entitled “The Tying Down of a Spaceship on Mars in a Desert Sandstorm,” the time-frame (early 50s) subject matter and vivid softness of the colors make the painting easily recognizable as a work of Chesley Bonestell,
And yet… Even as I read Fahrenheit 451, I couldn’t help but notice the way that the world constructed by Ray Bradbury – either through prescience, chance, or an uncanny combination of both – has captured our world: The world of the recent past; the world that exists now, in 2020; the world that seems to await us, even as this second decade of the twenty-first century is shortly drawing to a close. So, I’m presenting excerpts of some (hard to chose!) of the novel’s most crisply and vividly crafted passages, juxtaposed with contemporary symbols that most uncannily match and embody the events, scenes, and characters depicted in these very passages.
Among these excerpts are some videos and book over art that reflect the mood and message of Fahrenheit 451.
The post closes with by Yann Tiersen’s melody “Comptine d’un autre été – “Rhyme for Another Summer”, from the sound-track for trailer of 2001’s Amélie, at Rousseau’s YouTube channel. I chose this because it’s the background theme for the short video, “This Is Our World – I Am Speechless“, in the “middle” of this post.
I wish that Ray Bradbury were with us now, to “illustrate” (pardon the pun!) by words the world we now inhabit. But, he is not. He died in 2012, only eight years by the measure of time, but another world by the measure of technology.
“We have a good deal of experience as to how the industrialists regard a new industrial potential. Their whole propaganda is to the effect that it must not be considered as the business of the government but must be left open to whatever entrepreneurs wish to invest money in it.”
In the myths and fairy tales that we read as children we learned a few of the simpler and more obvious truths of life, such as that when a djinnee is found in a bottle, it had better be left there; that the fisherman who craves a boon from heaven too many times on behalf of his wife will end up exactly where he started; that if you are given three wishes, you must be very careful what you wish for. These simple and obvious truths represent the childish equivalent of the tragic view of life which the Greeks and many modern Europeans possess, and which is somehow missing in this land of plenty.
“Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.”
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We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?
It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time…
For another of those impossible instants the city stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped or strived to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in gouts of shattered concrete and sparkles of torn metal into a mural hung like a reversed avalanche, a million colors, a million oddities, a door where a window should be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell down dead.
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His wife said, “What are you doing?”
He balanced in space with the book in his sweating cold fingers.
A minute later she said, “Well, just don’t stand there in the middle of the floor.”
He made a small sound.
“What?” she asked.
He made more soft sounds. He stumbled towards the bed and shoved the book clumsily under the cold pillow. He fell into bed and his wife cried out, startled. He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend’s house, a two-year-old child building word patterns, talking jargon, making pretty sounds in the air. But Montag said nothing and after a long while when he only made the small sounds, he felt her move in the room and come to his bed and stand over him and put her hand down to feel his cheek. He knew that when she pulled her hand away from his face it was wet. (41)
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And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn’t cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman, while the hungry snake made her still more empty. (44)
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A great thunderstorm of sound gushed from the walls. Music bombarded him at such an immense volume that his bones were almost shaken from their tendons; he felt his jaw vibrate, his eyes wobble in his head. He was a victim of concussion. When it was all over he felt like a man who had been thrown from a cliff, whirled in a centrifuge and spat out over a waterfall that fell and fell into emptiness and emptiness and never-quite-touched-bottom-never-never-quite-no not quite-touched-bottom … and you fell so fast you didn’t touch the sides either … never … quite … touched … anything.
The thunder faded. The music died.
“There,” said Mildred,
And it was indeed remarkable. Something had happened. Even though the people in the walls of the room had barely moved, and nothing had really been settled, you had the impression that someone had turned on a washing-machine or sucked you up in a gigantic vacuum. You drowned in music and pure cacophony. He came out of the room sweating and on the point of collapse. Behind him, Mildred sat in her chair and the voices went on again: (45)
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He had chills and fever in the morning.
“You can’t be sick,” said Mildred.
He closed his eyes over the hotness. “Yes.”
“But you were all right last night.”
“No, I wasn’t all right.” He heard the “relatives” shouting in the parlor.
Mildred stood over his bed, curiously. He felt her there, he saw her without opening his eyes, her hair burnt by chemicals to a brittle straw, her eyes with a kind of cataract unseen but suspect far behind the pupils, the reddened pouting lips, the body as thin as a praying mantis from dieting, and her flesh like white bacon. He could remember her no other way. (48)
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“No, not water; fire. You ever seen a burned house? It smoulders for days. Well, this fire’ll last me the rest of my life. God! I’ve been trying to put it out, in my mind, all night. I’m crazy with trying.”
“You should have thought of that before becoming a fireman.”
“Thought!” he said. “Was I given a choice? My grandfather and father were firemen. In my sleep, I ran after them.”
The parlor was playing a dance tune.
“This is the day you go on the early shift,” said Mildred. “You should have gone two hours ago. I just noticed.”
“It’s not just the woman that died,” said Montag. “Last night I thought about all the kerosene I’ve used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I’d never even thought that thought before.” He got out of bed. (51)
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And then he shut up, for he remembered last week and the two white stones staring up at the ceiling and the pump-snake with the probing eye and the two soap-faced men with the cigarettes moving in their mouths when they talked. But that was another Mildred, that was a Mildred so deep inside this one, and so bothered, really bothered, that the two women had never met. He turned away. (52)
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“Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click,
Pic,
Look,
Eye,
Now,
Flick,
Here,
There,
Swift,
Pace,
Up,
Down,
In,
Out,
Why,
How,
Who,
What,
Where, Eh?
Uh!
Bang!
Smack!
Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!” (55)
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“There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down.
There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!
Technology, mass exploitation,
and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.
Today, thanks to them,
you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.”
“Yes, but what about the firemen, then?” asked Montag.
“Ah.” Beatty leaned forward in the faint mist of smoke from his pipe. “What more easily explained and natural? With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word `intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright,’ did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn’t it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike.
Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says,
but everyone made equal.
Each man the image of every other;
then all are happy,
for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.
So!
A book is a loaded gun in the house next door.
Burn it.
Take the shot from the weapon.
Breach man’s mind.
Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won’t stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. That’s you, Montag, and that’s me.” (58)
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(Art by Ed Lindlof, for cover of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death – Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1986 Penguin Edition)
Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely `brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won’t be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I’ve tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your dare-devils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I’ll think I’m responding to the play, when it’s only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don’t care. I just like solid entertainment.” (61)
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“This Is Our World – I Am Speechless” (creator unknown)
“THESE SYSTEMS ARE FAILING”
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Across the street and down the way the other houses stood with their flat fronts. What was it Clarisse had said one afternoon? “No front porches. My uncle says there used to be front porches. And people sat there sometimes at night, talking when they wanted to talk, rocking, and not talking when they didn’t want to talk. Sometimes they just sat there and thought about things, turned things over. My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn’t look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think. So they ran off with the porches. And the gardens, too. Not many gardens any more to sit around in. And look at the furniture. No rocking chairs any more. They’re too comfortable. Get people up and running around. My uncle says … and … my uncle … and … my uncle …” Her voice faded. (63)
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The bombers crossed the sky and crossed the sky over the house, gasping, murmuring, whistling like an immense, invisible fan, circling in emptiness.
“Jesus God,” said Montag. “Every hour so many damn things in the sky! How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn’t someone want to talk about it? We’ve started and won two atomic wars since 1960. Is it because we’re having so much fun at home we’ve forgotten the world? Is it because we’re so rich and the rest of the world’s so poor and we just don’t care if they are? I’ve heard rumors; the world is starving, but we’re well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we’re hated so much? I’ve heard the rumors about hate, too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don’t, that’s sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes! I don’t hear those idiot bastards in your parlor talking about it. God, Millie, don’t you see? An hour a day, two hours, with these books, and maybe…” (73)
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He could hear Beatty’s voice. “Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page from the second and so on, chain smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the second-hand notions and time-worn philosophies.” There sat Beatty, perspiring gently, the floor littered with swarms of black moths that had died in a single storm. (75-76)
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The people who had been sitting a moment before, tapping their feet to the rhythm of Denham’s Dentifrice, Denham’s Dandy Dental Detergent, Denham’s Dentifrice Dentifrice Dentifrice, one two, one two three, one two, one two three. The people whose mouths had been faintly twitching the words Dentifrice Dentifrice Dentifrice. The train radio vomited upon Montag, in retaliation, a great ton-load of music made of tin, copper, silver, chromium, and brass. The people were pounded into submission; they did not run, there was no place to run; the great air-train fell down its shaft in the earth. (79)
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“It looks like a Seashell radio.”
“And something more! It listens! If you put it in your ear, Montag, I can sit comfortably home, warming my frightened bones, and hear and analyze the firemen’s world, find its weaknesses, without danger. I’m the Queen Bee, safe in the hive. You will be the drone, the travelling ear. Eventually, I could put out ears into all parts of the city, with various men, listening and evaluating. If the drones die, I’m still safe at home, tending my fright with a maximum of comfort and a minimum of chance. See how safe I play it, how contemptible I am?” (90)
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They were like a monstrous crystal chandelier tinkling in a thousand chimes, he saw their Cheshire Cat smiles burning through the walls of the house, and now they were screaming at each other above the din. Montag found himself at the parlor door with his food still in his mouth. (93)
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Montag said nothing but stood looking at the women’s faces as he had once looked at the faces of saints in a strange church he had entered when he was a child. The faces of those enameled creatures meant nothing to him, though he talked to them and stood in that church for a long time, trying to be of that religion, trying to know what that religion was, trying to get enough of the raw incense and special dust of the place into his lungs and thus into his blood to feel touched and concerned by the meaning of the colorful men and women with the porcelain eyes and the blood-ruby lips. But there was nothing, nothing; it was a stroll through another store, and his currency strange and unusable there, and his passion cold, even when he touched the wood and plaster and clay. So it was now, in his own parlor, with these women twisting in their chairs under his gaze, lighting cigarettes, blowing smoke, touching their sun-fired hair and examining their blazing fingernails as if they had caught fire from his look. Their faces grew haunted with silence. They leaned forward at the sound of Montag’s swallowing his final bite of food. They listened to his feverish breathing. The three empty walls of the room were like the pale brows of sleeping giants now, empty of dreams. Montag felt that if you touched these three staring brows you would feel a fine salt sweat on your finger-tips. The perspiration gathered with the silence and the sub-audible trembling around and about and in the women who were burning with tension. Any moment they might hiss a long sputtering hiss and explode. (95)
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The room was blazing hot, he was all fire, he was all coldness; they sat in the middle of an empty desert with three chairs and him standing, swaying, and him waiting for Mrs. Phelps to stop straightening her dress hem and Mrs. Bowles to take her fingers away from her hair. Then he began to read in a low, stumbling voice that grew firmer as he progressed from line to line, and his voice went out across the desert, into the whiteness, and around the three sitting women there in the great hot emptiness: (99)
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His fingers were like ferrets that had done some evil and now never rested, always stirred and picked and hid in pockets, moving from under Beatty’s alcohol-flame stare. If Beatty so much as breathed on them, Montag felt that his hands might wither, turn over on their sides, and never be shocked to life again; they would be buried the rest of his life in his coat-sleeves, forgotten. For these were the hands that had acted on their own, no part of him, here was where the conscience first manifested itself to snatch books, dart off with job and Ruth and Willie Shakespeare, and now, in the firehouse, these hands seemed gloved with blood. (105)
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There was a crash like the falling parts of a dream fashioned out of warped glass, mirrors, and crystal prisms. Montag drifted about as if still another incomprehensible storm had turned him, to see Stoneman and Black wielding axes, shattering window-panes to provide cross-ventilation. (114)
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Nowhere. There was nowhere to go, no friend to turn to, really. Except Faber. And then he realized that he was indeed, running toward Faber’s house, instinctively. But Faber couldn’t hide him; it would be suicide even to try. But he knew that he would go to see Faber anyway, for a few short minutes. Faber’s would be the place where he might refuel his fast draining belief in his own ability to survive. He just wanted to know that there was a man like Faber in the world. He wanted to see the man alive and not burned back there like a body shelled in another body. And some of the money must be left with Faber, of course, to be spent after Montag ran on his way. Perhaps he could make the open country and live on or near the rivers and near the highways, in the fields and hills.
A great whirling whisper made him look to the sky.
The police helicopters were rising so far away that it seemed someone had blown the grey head off a dry dandelion flower. Two dozen of them flurried, wavering, indecisive, three miles off, like butterflies puzzled by autumn, and then they were plummeting down to land, one by one, here, there, softly kneading the streets where, turned back to beetles, they shrieked along the boulevards or, as suddenly, leapt back into the sir, continuing their search. (125)
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There it lay, a game for him to win, a vast bowling alley in the cool morning. The boulevard was as clean as the surface of an arena two minutes before the appearance of certain unnamed victims and certain unknown killers. The air over and above the vast concrete river trembled with the warmth of Montag’s body alone; it was incredible how he felt his temperature could cause the whole immediate world to vibrate. He was a phosphorescent target; he knew it, he felt it. And now he must begin his little walk. (126)
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He was three hundred yards downstream when the Hound reached the river. Overhead the great racketing fans of the helicopters hovered. A storm of light fell upon the river and Montag dived under the great illumination as if the sun had broken the clouds. He felt the river pull him further on its way, into darkness. Then the lights switched back to the land, the helicopters swerved over the city again, as if they had picked up another trail. They were gone. The Hound was gone. Now there was only the cold river and Montag floating in a sudden peacefulness, away from the city and the lights and the chase, away from everything.
He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts. He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.
The black land slid by and he was going into the country among the hills: For the first time in a dozen years the stars were coming out above him, in great processions of wheeling fire. He saw a great juggernaut of stars form in the sky and threaten to roll over and crush him.
He floated on his back when the valise filled and sank; the river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper. The river was very real; it held him comfortably and gave him the time at last, the leisure, to consider this month, this year, and a lifetime of years. He listened to his heart slow. His thoughts stopped rushing with his blood. (140)
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(Art by Guy Billout, for cover of Thedore Roszak’s The Cult of Information – The Folklore of Computers And the True Art of Thinking, 1986 Pantheon Books Edition)
“Listen,” said Granger, taking his arm, and walking with him, holding aside the bushes to let him pass. “When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”
***
Granger stood looking back with Montag. “Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.” (156-157)
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The concussion knocked the air across and down the river, turned the men over like dominoes in a line, blew the water in lifting sprays, and blew the dust and made the trees above them mourn with a great wind passing away south. Montag crushed himself down, squeezing himself small, eyes tight. He blinked once. And in that instant saw the city, instead of the bombs, in the air. They had displaced each other.
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Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen) and Lt. “Doc” Ostrow (Warren Stevens), commander and medical officer of Starship C-57D, in Forbidden Planet (1956)
Adams: So you took the brain boost, huh?
Ostrow: You ought’a see my new mind. It’s up there in lights. Bigger than his now.
C’mon, easy, doc!
Morbius, was too close to the problem. The Krell had completed their project. Big machine. No instrumentalities. True creation!
C’mon doc, let’s have it.
But the Krell forgot one thing!
Yes, what?!
Monsters, John. Monsters from the id!
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For another of those impossible instants the city stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped or strived to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in gouts of shattered concrete and sparkles of torn metal into a mural hung like a reversed avalanche, a million colors, a million oddities, a door where a window should be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell down dead. (160)
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And so, we return to where we began: summer’s end.
The war was over – I had survived. I was home, safe in the land of my birth. Only my innocence had died, and with it my youth. Fair or not fair, right or wrong, whether I wanted it or not, whether anyone liked it or not – I had a life to live. I was twenty-one.
In a number of previous posts, I presented cover art for books authored by veterans of the Second World War who’d served as combat fliers in the United States Army Air Force, and, Royal Air Force. Regardless of the different personalities of these authors; regardless of the differences in military duties of these men and the theaters of war in which they served; regardless of their styles of literary expression, the central and consistent tone emerging from these books is one of contemplation – deep and profound contemplation – and seriousness.
For all of these men, the constant threat of injury or death, comradeship and the inevitable loss of comrades (which these men directly witnessed), the numbing routine – psychologically and physically – of combat flying, and, the inherent unpredictability of the future, were transformative at a level which the written word can sometimes express quite clearly, and at other times, only indirectly.
(But, you can even learn something from “indirection”!)
In this context, John Sigler Boeman’s memoir Morotai: A Memoir of War, is superb, in terms of military aviation history, and in a larger sense, as a work of literature. Boeman served as a B-24 Liberator pilot in the 371st Bomb Squadron of the 13th Air Force’s 307th (“Long Rangers“) and later as a career Air Force officer, flying C-54s and B-52s, serving in both the Korean and Vietnam Wars. He passed away at the relative young (these days) age of 74 in 1998, seventeen years after the first publication of Morotai.
Morotai is vividly descriptive, whether in “capturing” the personalities of Boeman’s crew members (the men are presented honestly and not as caricatures, as occurred – in a different vein – in the ridiculously overrated television series M*A*S*H, the animating ideology of which was always apparent…), living conditions at Morotai (an island in eastern Indonesia’s Halmahera Group), or the psychological and physical challenges and complexities of combat flying. An unusual aspect of the book is that an underlying theme of uncertainty – about the technical skill and ability of the author and his crew; about the nature of the military effort their Squadron and Group were tasked with; about the “future” immediate and the “future” distant – hovers throughout its pages.
The literary tone of the book probably emerged from what seems to have been Mr. Boeman’s inherently contemplative, introspective disposition. But, it also arises from the book’s final two chapters, in which the author recounts – with utter and remarkable candor – the take-off crash of his bomber on May 29, 1945, an accident which claimed the lives of four of his crew members, and eventuated in the disbandment of his crew as a unified group of aviators. By retelling his story chronologically and placing the jarring account of the take-off crash in the book’s final pages, one gets the impression that structuring the memoir in this manner may have been a kind of literary catharsis for Mr. Boeman: A catharsis entirely understandable, and deserving of respect.
The book ends with Boeman’s departure from the 371st Bomb Squadron and return to his home in Illinois. There he would be, during Japan’s surrender several weeks later.
So… the dust jacket of Morotai (Doubleday first edition) appears below. Strangely, the illustration depicts a B-24D Liberator in desert-pink camouflage, rather than the later-model natural metal finish Liberators actually piloted by Boeman: Ooops… Somebody in Doubleday’s art department should have paid more attention!
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Here’s a review of Morotai by Captain Carl H. Fritsche that appeared in Aerospace Historian in Fall of 1981.
“John Boeman, a farm youth from Illinois, enlisted in the Army Air Corps and he was inducted into the military service in March 1943. Morotai is a book of his experiences in the WW II cadet program and of his 20 combat missions as a B-24 pilot in the Southwest Pacific Area. The book is an in-depth analysis of the author’s thoughts, hopes, frustrations, successes, and failures during the global conflict.
John Boeman is an excellent writer. There were no 1,000-plane raids staged from the small island of Morotai, so the author takes you with him on each of his small squadron’s flights to bomb a single bridge, ship, or gun emplacement. As Boeman gains confidence in his ability as a combat B-24 commander, his career is shattered by his own “pilot error” takeoff crash in which several of his crew members are killed. The psychological impact of the plane crash was devastating and Boeman was sent home. WW II ends as Boeman returns to his home town and Boeman completes the book with an excellent analysis of his success and failure in the conflict.
Morotai is a good book about one man’s life and his one failure as a plane commander. The publisher’s note in the back of the book is important as John Boeman did not allow his own failure as a pilot to defeat him. He returned to the military service and served many years as a B-52 plane commander as well as many other very important assignments before retiring from the Air Force in 1972.
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Morotai, first published by Doubleday in 1981, was republished in an illustrated edition by Sunflower University Press in 1989. This second edition included several photographs from John Boeman’s personal collection, some of which are shown below:
Lieutenant John Sigler Boeman
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Lieutenant Boeman’s crew, posed on the wing of B-24J 44-40946, an aircraft of the 372nd Bomb Squadron.
The men are…
Standing (back row), left to right
1 Lt. John S. Boeman, Il. – Pilot 2 Lt. Joseph C. Miller, N.J. – Co-Pilot F/O Alton Charles Dressler, Hershey, Pa. – Navigator, T-132887 (Killed in crash) WW II Honoree Page by Mrs. Jean Dressler Heatwole (sister) F/O Joseph Pasternak, St. Louis, Mo. – Bombardier
Seated (front row), left to right
S/Sgt. Arnold Jerome Shore, Philadelphia, Pa. – Waist Gunner, 33777766 (Killed in crash) S/Sgt. William J. Harrington, Minneapolis, Mn. – Radio Operator S/Sgt. William P. Brown, Poulsbo, Wa. – Ball Turret Gunner S/Sgt. Leonard I. Sikorski, Milwaukee, Wi. – Flight Engineer S/Sgt. David G. Swecker, Clarksburg, W.V. – Tail Gunner S/Sgt. Ernest James Smieja, Minneapolis, Mn. – Nose Gunner, 37569058 (Killed in crash)
This is F/O Alton Dressler’s tombstone, via FindAGrave contributor Glen Koons
And, the tombstone of S/Sgt. Arnold J. Shore.
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Another view of B-24J 44-40946
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John Boeman and his fellow Officers
Left to right
F/O Joseph Pasternak (Bombardier)
2 Lt. Joseph C. Miller (Co-Pilot)
1 Lt. John S. Boeman
F/O Alton C. Dressler(Navigator) ______________________________
Some years ago, I contacted the Air Force Historical Records Center at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, to learn more about the tragic accident that figures so prominently in John Boeman’s book. It turns out that no Accident Report exists for this incident, that document having been lost since the Second World War, or (more likely!) never having been filed in the first place. However, the events of May 29, 1945, are well covered in the Squadron History for that month, the pages of which are shown below.
On May 29th, tragedy struck at the 371st when six planes were lined up for an early dawn take-off. Three planes were already airborne when Lt. Boeman in A/C #548 crashed at the end of the runway. Within a matter of minutes, his plane burned and two of the 6 1000# GP bombs exploded and four were blown clear and did not explode. By some unexplainable miracle of fate eight crew members out of eleven escaped this raging inferno with their lives. Three died in the accident and were burned beyond recognition. The following men were killed: F/O Dressler, S/Sgt. Shore and S/Sgt. Smeija. The funeral was held for these men on the afternoon of the same day at a Cemetery on Morotai Island. Other members of the crew are recovering from serious burns, broken limbs and severe shock.
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B-24L Liberator 44-41548, “Polly”, which would eventually be so central to John Boeman’s journeys, both life and literary. (Images from B-24 Best Web)
After dinner, Dad drove, with Mom in the seat beside him as always. I sat in the back seat and watched city lights fade away to country darkness. Near midnight, turning into our farm lane, the car’s headlights flashed across the big white house where I was brought into the world. Dad stopped under the big maple tree near the front porch. I got out into the still, dark, warm night air among the summer cornfields. The urge was strong to block the past three years from my mind, to forget it all, as I went into the house with my parents.
“I gave Lowell your bedroom when he came to stay with us,” my mother said. “You can sleep in the big bedroom, where your brother used to sleep. Is that all right?”
“Oh. Okay, sure, that’s fine,” I said, and carried my B-4 bag up the stairs.
Bogey had missed by one day. On my first full day at home, President Truman announced Japanese acceptance of the Potsdam surrender terms. My mother asked me to attend special prayers with them at church. I agreed.
I remembered that big white church on the north side of town. Long ago, the lady who taught Sunday school, when she was not pumping and playing the organ, had told me how God knew everything. “He knows all about each of us,” she had said as we little boys and girls listened from straight-backed chairs. “He knows how many hairs we have on our head. He knows every time we are good and every time we are bad. He takes care of good little boys and girls …” Now I listened to the pastor in that same church. His words, it seemed to me, thanked God for taking care of those who were good – by ending the war. I sensed, perhaps unfairly, smug satisfaction that victory had confirmed goodness. The pastors’ pious recitation of God’s hand, in vindication, seemed to ignore those who, I knew, deserved more than I to be home with loved ones.
Did God end the war? I asked myself. If He did, did He start it? Can we blame our enemies for the beginning and thank God for the ending? No. War, from the beginning to the end, must be an affair of men, in which God plays no favorites. How dare we be so arrogant as to believe that God would help us, just because we prayed for it, to kill and defeat those whom we select as enemies? Had there not been those among our enemies who asked God’s help, too, in their way? Would an omnipotent God sell his favors for a few prayers? Were my crewmates, who fell victim to my shortcomings, less deserving of God’s help than I?
As we left the church, I had not the words to describe my feelings, to articulate my thoughts. To avoid burdening my parents with my reaction to the service, I said nothing. On our way home, passing the village main street, I saw people gathered. Home, I borrowed the car and returned to town.
On the one-block main street of the village I had known as my hometown all my life,
they had built a bonfire.
While some in our town thanked God for ending the war,
others chose to vent emotions in a ritual that closing the village taverns could not inhibit.
Parked around the corner,
I got out and approached a scene that struck me as one from an old movie,
in which barbaric tribesmen were whipping themselves to frenzy.
They had sacrificed their young men to appease the demon and ward off dark evils.
Now, celebrating their success, they were giving their thanks to the Great God War for sparing them.
Flames shot up from the fire.
Amid shouts and yells, a pair of teenaged boys,
obviously drunk,
approached in an automobile.
One waved a whiskey bottle out the window while the other drove through the edge of the fire.
The crowd cheered, what, their bravery?
What are they cheering? I asked myself.
What are they celebrating?
“Hello, Johnny.” A voice I remembered.
One of the few girls who had called me Johnny, instead of John, in school.
Once I had thought her the most beautiful creature on earth,
but had never told her so.
I had never kissed her, never asked.
There had always been another boy, regarded by our peers as her “steady.”
Conforming to the code of our time and place,
maybe from shyness,
I had tried to keep from exposing my true feelings about her.
“I heard you were coming home,” she said.
“Come on and join the snake dance.”
She held out her hand. The cool pressure of her fingers in mine excited old emotions. We joined the crowd forming in a line, holding hands, to dance and run through the street and around the fire. I knew she had married a “steady” since I left. He was overseas. Was the invitation a friendly overture for old time’s sake, or was it the approach of a lonely married woman yielding to temptation in the excitement? By the end of the dance, I was afraid to know the answer. Whichever, it could lead to complications I did not want to face. I disentangled myself and moved to the sidewalk beyond the crowd.
What are they celebrating? I asked myself the question again. Among them I recognized some I had known well when the decisive battles were still to be fought. They had not seen those as their battles. They had not sworn to obey any orders. They had taken no oath. They had pledged not their lives, their fortunes, nor their Sacred Honor. Yet they accepted the victory as theirs, as if by Divine Right, attained, by them, simply by waiting for it. Now they celebrated peace, their peace.
The street scene filled me with consternation equal to that I had felt in the church. I had known these people. I could put names to all their faces. But now they were strangers to me, living in a world apart from mine. I wanted their silly celebrations no more than their pious prayers. I wanted to run away.
I wanted to run away, but to where? Turn my back because they prayed, or celebrated? Should I condemn them for not seeing a world I saw? I had been raised among them, with them, as one of them. By what right could I now say I was not one of them? If not one of them, who could I be? My commitment to win the war had been total, but if not on their behalf, then on whose? I could not answer.
The war was over – I had survived. I was home, safe in the land of my birth. Only my innocence had died, and with it my youth. Fair or not fair, right or wrong, whether I wanted it or not, whether anyone liked it or not – I had a life to live. I was twenty-one.
I would find new dreams, new commitments. I locked the consternating questions within myself, without answers, and stepped off the sidewalk into the crowd.
I joined the survivors.
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References
Boeman, John S., Morotai – A Memoir of War, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, N.Y., 1981 (1st Edition)
Boeman, John S., Morotai – A Memoir of War, Sunflower University Press, Manhattan, Ks., 1989 (2nd Edition; Illustrated)
Fritsche, Carl H. (Book Review), Morotai – A Memoir of War by John Boeman, Aerospace Historian, V 28, N 3, Fall, 1981, p. 212
307th Bomb Group Aircraft Inventory and Air Crew Losses, at 307th BG
