A book can draw your attention by its cover, but its power and impact by nature ultimately derive from the words upon its pages.
If so in print, and even moreso in pixels. To that end, many posts at WordsEnvisioned – particularly those for novels – include an excerpt which gives a representative sample of the author’s literary style, and more importantly, to lesser or greater degree, embody the ethos, spirit, or animating idea behind the work.
As such, in February of 2018 I posted images of the 1958 Bantam Books’ edition of Carson McCullers’The Member of the Wedding, sans other content. That literary lacuna is now remedied with an excerpt from the novel, which you can read below.
You can view the cover of the 1962 paperback edition of McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Caféhere.
And now F. Jasmine walked with a soldier
who in his mind included her in such unknown pleasures.
But she was not altogether proud.
There was an uneasy doubt that one could not quite place or name.
The noon air was thick and sticky as hot syrup,
and there was the stifling smell of the dye-rooms from the cotton mill.
She heard the organ-grinder sounding faintly from the main street.
The soldier stopped. “This is the hotel,” he said.
They were before the Blue Moon
and F. Jasmine was surprised to hear it spoken of as a hotel,
as she had thought it was only a café.
When the soldier held the screen door open for her,
she noticed that he swayed a little.
Her eyes saw blinding red, then black, after the glare,
and it took them a minute to get used to the blue light.
She followed the soldier to one of the booths on the right.
“Care for a beer,” he said, not in an asking voice,
but as though he took her reply for granted.
F. Jasmine did not enjoy the taste of beer;
once or twice she had sneaked swallows from her father’s glass and it was sour.
But the soldier had not left her any choice.
“I would be delighted,” she said. “Thank you.”
Never had she been in a hotel,
although she had often thought about them and written about them in her shows.
Her father had stayed in hotels several times,
and once, from Montgomery,
he had brought her two tiny little cakes of hotel soap which she had saved.
She looked around the Blue Moon with new curiosity.
All of a sudden she felt very proper.
On seating herself at the booth table, she carefully smoothed down her dress,
as she did when at a party or in church, so as not to sit the pleats out of the skirt.
She sat up straight and on her face there was a proper expression.
But the Blue Moon still seemed to her more like a kind of café than a real hotel.
She did not see the sad, pale Portuguese,
and a laughing fat lady with a golden tooth poured beer for the soldier at the corner.
The stairway at the back led probably to the hotel rooms upstairs,
and the steps were lighted by a blue neon bulb and covered with a runner of linoleum.
A sassy chorus on the radio was singing an advertisement:
Denteen Chewing Gum! Denteen Chewing Gum! Denteen!
The beery air reminded her of a room where a rat had died behind a wall.
The soldier walked back to the booth, carrying two glasses of the beer;
he licked some foam that had spilled over his hand
and wiped the hand on his trousers seat.
When he was settled in the booth, F. Jasmine said,
in a voice that was absolutely new to her –
a high voice spoken through the nose, dainty and dignified:
“Don’t you think it is mighty exciting?
Here we are sitting here at this table
and in a month from now there’s no telling on earth where we’ll be.
Maybe tomorrow the army will send you to Alaska like they sent my brother.
Or to France or Africa or Burma.
And I don’t have any idea where I will be.
I’d like for us to go to Alaska for a while, and then go somewhere else.
They say that Paris has been liberated. In my opinion the war will be over next month.”
The soldier raised his glass, and threw back his head to gulp the beer.
F. Jasmine took a few swallows also, although it tasted nasty to her.
Today she did not see the world as loose
and cracked and turning a thousand miles an hour,
so that the spinning views of war and distant lands made her mind dizzy.
The world had never been so close to her.
Sitting across from the soldier at that booth in the Blue Moon,
she suddenly saw the three of them – herself, her brother, and the bride –
walking beneath a cold Alaskan sky,
along the sea where green ice waves lay frozen and folded on the shore;
they climbed a sunny glacier shot through with pale cold colors
and a rope tied the three of them together,
and friends from another glacier called in Alaskan their J A names.
She saw them next in Africa, where, with a crowd of sheeted Arabs,
they galloped on camels in the sandy wind. Burma was jungle-dark,
and she had seen pictures in Life magazine.
Because of the wedding, these distant lands, the world,
seemed altogether possible and near:
as close to Winter Hill as Winter Hill was to the town.
It was the actual present, in fact, that seemed to F. Jasmine a little bit unreal.
“…writing is different because you do not have to learn or practise…”
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“Kissing your hand may make you feel very good but a diamond bracelet lasts forever.”
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Bergey, Bergey, Bergey!…
Earle K. Bergey, cover illustrator of mainstream publications, pulp magazines, and paperbacks – all in a variety of genres – produced a body of work that while more conventional in terms of subject matter than that of artists like Frank Kelly Freas or Edmund Emshwiller, is eye-catchingly distinctive, and is truly emblematic of mid-twentieth-century illustration.
His science-fiction art commenced in the late 1930s and continued until his untimely death in 1952 … see examples here, here, and here. As described at Wikipedia, his, “…science fiction covers, sometimes described as “Bim, BEM, Bum,” usually featured a woman being menaced by a Bug-Eyed Monster, alien, or robot, with an heroic male astronaut coming to her assistance. The bikini-tops he painted often resembled coppery metal, giving rise to the phrase “the girl in the brass bra,” used in reference to this sort of art. Visionaries in TV and film have been influenced by Bergey’s work. Gene Roddenberry, for example, provided his production designer for Star Trek with examples of Bergey’s futuristic pulp covers. The artist’s illustrations of scantily-clad women surviving in outer space served as an inspiration for Princess Leia‘s slave-girl outfit in Return of the Jedi, and Madonna’s conical brass brassiere.”
Commencing in 1948, Bergey became heavily involved in creating cover art for paperbacks. This began with Popular Library’s 1948 edition of Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which was first published in 1925. Though the book is a light-hearted work of conventional fiction (perhaps lightly semi-autobiographical; perhaps loosely inspired by fact), Bergey’s cover is a sort-of…, kind-of…, maybe…, perhaps…, well…, variation on a theme of “Good Girl Art” characteristic of American fiction of the mid-twentieth-century, and likewise is a stylistic segue from Bergey’s science fiction pulp cover art. Sans shining copper brassiere, however.
Here is it…
From Bergey’s biographical profile at Wikipedia, here’s an image of the book’s original cover art. The only information about the painting (does it still exist?) is that it’s “oil on board”.
A notable aspect of this painting, aside from the extraordinarily and deliberately idealized depiction … exaggeration?! … of Miss Lorelei Lee (looks like she’s being illuminated by a klieg light, doesn’t it?) is the appearance of the men around her, each of whom is each vastly more caricature than character. Well, exaggeration can work in two directions.
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She was a
GIVE AND TAKE GIRL
Lorelei Lee was a cute number with lots of sex appeal and the ability to make it pay off. With her curious girl friend, Dorothy, she embarked on a tour of England and the Continent. And none of the men who crossed their path was ever the same again. When one of Lorelei’s admirers sent her a diary she decided to write about her adventures. They began with Gus Eisman, the Button King, who wanted to improve her “mind” and reached a climax in her society debut party – a three-day circus that rocked Broadway to its foundations. A hilarious field study of the American chorus girl in action set down in her own inimitable style!
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Lorelei Lee’s appearance in Ralph Barton’s cartoons in the 1925 edition of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is – wellll, granting that they’re just cartoons; thirty-three appear in the book – vastly less exaggerated than her depiction on Bergey’s cover. Three of his cartoons are shown below…
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It would be strange if I turn out to be an authoress. I mean at my home near Little Rock, Arkansas, my family all wanted me to do something about my music. Because all of my friends said I had talent and they all kept after me and kept after me about practising. But some way I never seemed to care so much about practising. I mean I simply could not sit for hours at a time practising just for the sake of a career. So one day I got quite tempermental and threw the old mandolin clear across the room and I have never really touched it since. But writing is different because you do not have to learn or practise and it is more tempermental because practising seems to take all the temperment out of me. So now I really almost have to smile because I have just noticed that I have written clear across two pages onto March 18th, so this will do for today and tomorrow. And it just shows how tempermental I am when I get started. (Illustration p. 13)
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“Kissing your hand may make you feel very good but a diamond bracelet lasts forever.”(Illustration p. 101)
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“Dr. Froyd seemed to think that I was quite a famous case.”(Illustration p. 157)
A qualifier: Despite being a movie aficionado and voracious reader, I’ve not actually viewed this movie, for … despite being able to appreciate and enjoy most any genre of film … I’ve absolutely never been a fan of musicals. (Ick.)
What would Gentlemen Prefer Blondes be without “Diamond’s Are a Girl’s Best Friend”? (Starts at 59:00 in the film.) The idea of a rotating chandelier formed of women strikes me as really bizarre, if not disturbing… Oh, well.
Before NCR was “NCR”, the company was appropriately known as the National Cash Register Corporation. After having been acquired by ATT in 1991, a 1996 restructuring of that firm led to the spin-off Lucent Technologies and NCR, with the firm being the only “spun-off” company that has retained its name.
This advertisement, from August 9, 1943, illustrates the company’s National Class 3000 Bookkeeping Machine.
The advertisement is quite simple in style and design. A sketch of a model using an NC 3000 is repeated four times in the same illustration, giving an impression of “depth” and activity as in – well, quite appropriately! – an office setting. An example of a neatly completed bill appears in the background.
The full text of the advertisement appears at bottom. Note the use of alpha-numeric telephone number prefixes (“CIrcle”, “MOtt”, and “CAnal”).
Bookkeepers for a Nation
Unheralded! Unsung! … It’s time to praise the bookkeepers of our nation … for, without them, the wheels of industry would not turn to produce vital war materials and keep supplies rolling up to the home front and on to you.
Without machines to help them do this job, hundreds upon thousands of new bookkeepers would be needed to keep our records, and millions of man-hours would be stolen from our war effort.
National Typewriting-Bookkeeping Machines in industry, in business and in government are speeding record making and record keeping for the nation because they are simple and easy to operate…for they alone combine the standard adding machine and typewriter keyboards with full visibility of forms in the machines… Any typist with a knowledge of an adding machine becomes a proficient operator with a few hours’ practice.
Nationals are flexible…for they can be changed to do all sorts of bookkeeping…like the statement you receive from the department store or the wholesaler…or for purchase records…payroll writing…posting general ledgers…and numerous other applications.
National Typewriting-Bookkeeping Machines, as well as all other National products and systems, save man-hours and provide protection over money and records for the bookkeeping of the nation.
National Accounting-Bookkeeping Machines may be secured by essential industries through priorities… A stock of modern used National Cash Registers is also available for business needs.
40 ROCKEFELLER PLAZA, CIrcle 5-6300 321 EAST 149TH STREET, MOtt Haven 9-3323 138 BOWERY, CAnal 6-4906
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Here’s an illustration of an NC 3000 from Office Museum:
These two images – showing the front and rear of an NC 3000, on its stand – are from the Smithsonian Museum of American History. This example was manufactured in 1938 or 1939.
Akin to the frequent appearance of advertisements in The New York Times for devices and systems for faster and streamlined communication (such as the Private Automatic Exchange telephone system), so was the promotion of machines that would enable a firm or organization to rapidly manipulate numerical data.
That is, calculating machines.
The two advertisements below – for the Dalton Calculating and Adding Machine – appeared in the closing months of the First World War, and in terms of text and graphics are fitting examples of the way such devices were brought to the attention of the public.
Though known and marketed as “Adding” machines, the advertisements specifically emphasize the machine’s parallel capabilities in the performance of the subtraction, multiplication, and division. Given the (simplified) description of how these operations are actually performed, in terms of keystrokes and data entry, it’s evident that the copy-writer assumed that his audience would have a basic familiarity with calculating machines, probably from the use of earlier generations of such devices. Given the timing of the advertisements, it’s notable that the “first” example, from September 17, 1918, specifically alludes to mobilization for America’s effort in “The Great War”, a central issue underlying this effort being speed. (A brief segue, as it were.) An analogy is drawn to the capabilities of the Dalton Calculating Machine. But, with appearance of the example from over a month later – in late October – the war, which would end thirteen days later, is neither mentioned nor alluded to.
Obviously, the future was at stake, not the present.
The full text of both advertisements is presented below.
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September 17, 1918
Put greater Speed into your Office Accounting
“Speed up” is our national “middle name”. We gather our men, materials, machinery together and then the wheels commence to turn with mighty force. The same is applicable to the new office girl who is given a DALTON Adding-Calculating Machine to figure with.
Here is her instrument for the production of figure facts. No machine equals it in simplicity of keyboard. Only 10 keys, one for each numeral. She writes 1276.91 and then 1.53, then .77. She notes each figure is put into its proper column automatically. Consider the ease of figuring, the accuracy, the relief afforded by this service.
Shortly she begins to operate the keys without looking at them at all. This is “touch operation”. It is the fastest, moist accurate method of handling figures, and is practicable only on the DALTON. Multiplication – all figure work requiring multiplication is easily handled. The DALTON adds, subtracts, multiplies, divides, makes out statements, tabulates. It is the “all-around” adding, listing, calculating machine for figure work in any business.
Phone Barclay 9729 for Demonstration
Compare your present methods with the 10-KEY DALTON. It may mean a saving in labor or time you did not consider possible. Phone today or write for data descriptive of the DALTON.
GRUBBS & SHERIDAN
642-646 Woolworth Bldg.
Dalton
Main Office and Factory, Cleveland, Ohio
ADDING AND CALCULATING MACHINE
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October 29, 1918
The All-around Calculating Machine for Every Business
No other office figuring machine has the practical application of the DALTON. Aside from the simplicity of the keyboard arrangement which eliminates the necessity of experienced help – aside from its utility as the fastest adding and listing machine made – it is also a versatile all-around calculating machine.
Adding machines, as a rule, are designed for adding and listing only. The DALTON is far more than an adding machine. It is as easy to multiply on the DALTON as it is to add. The cipher (0) key makes this possible. Multiplication of the most complicated problems is but a question of seconds.
See it yourself. Here is a machine for any arrangement in any business. Railroads, great mercantile houses, business firms everywhere, are standardizing on DALTONS. It adds, subtracts, multiplies, divides, lists, every operations, adds two totals at once, makes statements, tabulates, etc.
Phone Barclay 5350 for Demonstration
Is your office strictly efficient? Office costs, like plant or store costs, can only be cut by more efficient machinery. Let us bring a DALTON to your office for inspections. Or write for booklet descriptive of this new time and labor saver.
New York Sales Agents: GRUBBS & SHERIDAN 642-646 Woolworth Bldg.
But, for those activities to take place, something else is necessary: Information has to be stored.
For which purpose, the three mid-1918 advertisements below – promoting The Dictaphone sound recording machine – are examples.
The Dictaphone Company was founded by Alexander Graham Bell, the name – Dictaphone – being trademarked by the Columbia Graphophone Company in 1907. The technology of the device was based on the use of wax-coated cardboard cylinders for sound recording. The Dictaphone company existed through 1979 (!), when it was purchased, though retained as an independent subsidiary, by Pitney Bowes.
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Though the advertisement uses different images – the Dictaphone itself; a “boss” or manager surveying inefficiency in an office setting; a generic office setting – and the “copy” likewise differs, the fundamental thrust of the ads is identical: More efficient use of the employee labor, greater output of correspondence, and supplanting activity of absent employees. As per August 20, 1918: “No wonder that every stenographer away on her vacation adds greatly to the burden or short help, mail congestion and overtime work.” (Uh-oh!) Each advertisement closes with the suggestion that the prospective client should obtain a copy of Dictaphone Company’s booklet, “The Man at The Desk”.
The full text of the three advertisements follows each image.
Enjoy, and, wonder!
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July 8, 1918
Why The Dictaphone for you?
The Dictaphone keeps the mail going out on time in spite of summer vacations.
The Dictaphone is the easiest, the most comfortable, the nerve-saving method of hot-weather dictation.
Two Dictaphone operators can write more letters per day than four able stenographers. Dictaphone operators can wrote from 50% to 100% more letters per day, better letters, too.
Convince yourself with a demonstration in your office, on your work. No obligations.
Secretaries and Stenographers: Send for free book, “One Way to Bigger Pay.”
Phone, Worth 7250 280 Broadway “The Shortest Route to the “Mail Chute”
Write for “The Man at the Desk”
It is not a Dictaphone unless trade-marked “The Dictaphone,” made and merchandised by the Columbia Gramophone Company.
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August 13, 1918
“If I Only Had the Dictaphone!”
Four of his stenographers are spending two hours apiece per day taking dictation, and the fifth is on her vacation. No wonder that much important dictation must wait until tomorrow.
Install the Dictaphone in his office, and he would not miss the girl on her vacation. The other three girls would easily turn out more letters per day than all four when they have to write each other in shorthand as well as on the typewriter.
And with the Dictaphone right at his elbow all the time, he could dictate his important mail at the hour most convenient to him.
You need the Dictaphone as much as he. Phone or write today for a demonstration in your office, on your work.
THE DICTAPHONE
Registered in the U.S. and Foreign Countries Phone 7250 Worth Call at 280 Broadway Write for the booklet, “The Man at the Desk,” Room 224, 280 Broadway, New York
It is not a Dictaphone unless it is trade-marked “The Dictaphone,” made and merchandised by the Columbia Graphophone Company.
“The Shortest Route to the Mail Chute”
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August 20, 1918
The Dictaphone solves vacation troubles
Look at the waste! The typewriter is absolutely idle. One stenographer has been taking dictation continuously for nearly two hours. The second stenographer is puzzling over her shorthand notes. And all this time, not one letter is actually being written.
No wonder that every stenographer away on her vacation adds greatly to the burden or short help, mail congestion and overtime work.
What is the remedy? Stop writing each letter twice. The Dictaphone makes it necessary to write each letter only once – on the typewriter. Result – from 50% to 100% more letters per day – better letters, too, and at one-third less cost. Phone or write for demonstration in your office, on your work.
To Secretaries and Stenographers
You have to pay for the time you lose going back and forth to take dictation – and waiting to take dictation – with overtime work and constant strain and anxiety. Send for free book “One Way to Bigger Pay.”
THE DICTAPHONE Registered in the U.S. and Foreign Countries Phone 7250 Worth Call at 280 Broadway Write for the booklet, “The Man at the Desk,” Room 224, 280 Broadway, New York
It is not a Dictaphone unless it is trade-marked “The Dictaphone,” made and merchandised by the Columbia Graphophone Company.
A green-skinned woman (note her otherwise red pumps and equally red lipstick, as well as her strawberry-blond hair?) holding a pistol, is restrained by a guy in a skin-tight purple body-suit, while a red-headed (also) green warrior approaches upon a duck-billed-sort-of-pterodactyl, followed by reptile reinforcements? And behind all, three massive, almost-featureless, gray towers? And, what’s with that green-skinned guy laying in the foreground?
Gadzooks, what is going on here?
Well, there’s an explanation: Walter Popp’s cover art for the June, 1952 issue of Fantastic Adventures is a representation of “The Woman in Skin 13”, a tale by Paul W. Fairman. Strangely though, the cover lists the author’s name as “Gerald Vance”. This is an odd, for the magazine’s table of contents and the leading page of the story itself (it starts on page 8) clearly list the author as Fairman. Likewise, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database indicates that “Vance” was the pen-name for Randall Garrett, William P. McGivern, Rog Phillips, Richard S. Shaver, Robert Silverberg, and Henry Slesar – not a single “Paul W. Fairman” among them.
I first noticed this cover art some years back, I think (?) in Brian Aldiss’ compilation Science Fiction Art: The Fantasies of SF, published by Bounty Books (New York), back in 1975.
The scene depicted stands out as much for its strangeness as its GGA – “Good Girl Art” – qualities, the latter being manifested in much of artist Popp’s oeuvre.
In light of Fantastic Adventures, akin to many other science-fiction pulps now having been digitized and thus being immediately available at the Luminist Archive, and, the Pulp Magazine Archive, I thought it’d be interesting to read Fairman’s original text which was the basis of Popp’s painting. I wanted to see how the genre was presented in periodicals whose cover art has typically been – in retrospect! – far more memorable than their literary content. (Of course, with exceptions.) At least, as opposed to stories published in higher-tier pulps in the genres of 40s and 50s era science-fiction and fantasy, such as Astounding Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, and, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
So, Fairman’s story, while hardly great, is not bad, either; I think apt words would be “adequate” and “serviceable”. It is an entertaining and mild diversion. But, while competently written, it doesn’t at all possess the degree of originality in terms of plot and theme, let alone character development, that would makes one “pause” and ponder the tale, whether in the midst of reading it, or afterwards. It’s not at all great, by any stretch of the imagination. It’s not altogether bad, by any stretch of the imagination.
The plot is based on an alien invasion of Earth which begins in and expands from Chicago, by human-appearing – and, for all practical purposes, biologically human – invaders known as the Argans, who arrive aboard a generation-ship made of steel (yes, steel) known as the Narkus, with the goal of colonizing the earth. The males and females of this species, “…according to the refugees and the counter-attackers, were of two colors. The males were of a violet hue; the females, all the same shade, of green. Physically, both sexes were, according to Earth standards, magnificent specimens. They wore little clothing, but seemed entirely comfortable even in the comparative chill of night and early morning.”
The story centers around an effort (solely on the part of the United States, despite Chicago only being the starting point of a global invasion) to conduct an offensive against the Argans in order to regain captured territory, and, drive the aliens away. This action hinges on the infiltration of the Argans by one Mary Winston (the green-skinned woman on the cover), upon whose mind the memories and particularly the personality of a captured Argan female have been superimposed and imprinted. This process is the basis of the story’s title: “Skin 13” refers to the 13th effort (the prior 12 having been unsuccessful) to create a formula capable of dying human skin green in order to simulate the skin color of Argan females.
Paralleling Mary’s clandestine infiltration of Argan forces, her significant other – one Mark Clayton (the purple-suited guy on the cover) – leads a team of commandos into the heart of Argan-controlled territory, with the eventual goal of reuniting with Mary and returning her to Earth forces. En route, there are interactions with “zants” and “zors”. The former are a caste of Argan slaves, their control maintained by forces addiction to “dream pellets”; the latter (featured on the cover) are flying reptiles of a sort.
The ending – a bittersweet twist – I will not give away!
In sum, we have two oft-used plot elements of science-fiction: Extraterrestrial invasion, and, mind transference. It is the latter that’s really the crux of the story, and which Fairman develops to a great and solid extent.
So, given that I read the story, I thought it’d be interesting to turn it into a stand-alone document, should anyone “out there” be curious about Fairman’s now sixty-eight-year-old tale. So, in a roundabout way, I turned the file (from the Luminist Archive) into a stand-alone document (which, incidentally, incorporates the two illustrations appearing in the original text) which you can access here.
Neither great nor bad, the story is a passing and entertaining diversion.
Which, I suppose, is just what Paul Fairman and the publisher of Fantastic Adventures wanted.
[Though I created this post back on August 15, 2021, I’ve felt through the intervening year (it’s now July of 2022) that a central aspect of the story of “Red Sky at Morning” – the movie “Red Sky”, rather than Richard Bradford’s original novel upon which the film is based – has been missing. That missing piece is, given the centrality of Catherine Burns’ performance to the movie “Red Sky”, the story of Burns’ own life. While some of the links listed below, such as Wikipedia and IMDB, shed light on Burns’ life and brief acting career, by nature the information therein is limited in scope and depth.
However, the puzzle is a puzzle no longer. Scott Feinberg and Scott Johnson’s poignant and moving article “Catherine Burns: The Vanishing of an Oscar-Nominated Actress”, from February 3, 2020, atHollywoodReporter.com, provides a much fuller biography of Burns, encompassing her upbringing, brief acting career, and subsequent, intentionally anonymous life as a writer.]
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“I am one of a kind,” she said. “Ah, but what kind?” – Catherine Burns, 1989
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There wasn’t anything I could do. I just stood there with my hands behind me, wondering what was happening, and what was going to happen.
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“How old is this friend of yours that has the figure?” “My age. Seventeen.” “My God, are you insane? I already have a civic reputation as a lewd old man.” “This is a really nice girl. Her father’s a minister.” “Worse and worse.”
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“Red sky at night, sailors’ delight. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.”
Red Sky at Morning. I remember this movie.
I remember catching it on NBC television in the 1970s. (The specific date and time were, just now I’ve found, Wednesday, January 30, 1974, at ten PM. )
I remember being as uninterested as I was unimpressed with the film – “Boring!”– which – looking back – was probably more reflective of my age than the film itself. Yet even then, to the small extent that I viewed it (“Isn’t anything going to happen?! It’s World War Two after all…!”) I noticed what I’d deem, in retrospect, to have been the air of skepticism? – distance? – deliberate anti-nostalgia? – surrounding the characters and story, especially in light of it having been set well into America’s engagement in the Second World War. The events of which, I noticed, were far, far more backdrop than central to the story.
And, I remember the presence of Richard Thomas in the film. That guy from The Waltons… What was he doing in New Mexico? I thought he was in Virginia…
(I was always interested in movies, television programs, and books dealing with history, but somehow, The Waltons left me cold. The show seemed to have been permeated by a Potekmin-Village-like air of near mathematically-generated-sentimentality, especially the grating, contrived, ingenuous “Niiight, ‘sooo-and-sooo’…. routine that accompanied each episode’s closing credits (I’d turn the volume down whenever that came on) particularly ironic given the post-WW II ideological ethos of the CBS Television network (and not just CBS) – which today, looking back from 2021, seems quaint.)
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So, moving forward.
Here’s the 1986 Harper Perennial edition of Richard Bradford’s Red Sky At Morning. What really caught my attention far more than the story itself (!) – well, thus far! – is William Low’s lovely, subtle, and entirely well-conceived cover art, which expresses a transition from youth to adulthood; the uncertainty between moods of “beginning”, “possibility”, and the arrival of a new horizon – or impending danger, the “unknown”, and “oncoming challenge” – all depending on the viewer’s mindset – “Do you see morning or evening?”; the manner in which most of the composition is actually occupied by horizon and sky, rather than characters and action; the characters themselves, representing a triad of youth, young adulthood, and (wizened? detached? patient? skeptical?) middle age:
There’s a conversation going on…
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So. I have not read the novel just yet (too much of a backlog!), but these excerpts give an appreciation for Bradford’s prose…
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“Amadeo,” she said, “seems to be forgetting that he’s a servant and not a member of the family. Your father’s always been too lenient with both of them. He seems to lose all perspective when he come to Sagrado, and forgets his class distinctions. Class distinctions are extremely important, because without them nobody knows where his place in life is. A stable society is a society in which everyone knows his situation.”
“And anything else is Red Communism, right?”
“Don’t you dare be sarcastic with me. Don’t you dare be snotty. You’re already picking up a lot of filthy manners from those tacky trash you go to school with, that Greek boy and that Davidson girl. Do you know that she’s Jewish?”
“I thought her father was the Episcopal minister,” I said.
“He is,” she said. “That’s just the point. That’s the first thing they do, become Episcopals.”
“Well, if they’re Episcopals, how can they be Jewish? I mean, if you switch from being a Baptist to being a Methodist, you’re not a Baptist any more.”
“I don’t care how Episcopalian they pretend to be. I don’t care if one of them becomes the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
“Okay,” I said. “First thing tomorrow I’ll go out and paint a swastika on St. Thomas’s.”
“You just shut your mouth, Joshua M. Arnold, or I’ll come over there and slap it shut for you. I’m going to write your father about your behavior.”
“You might mention in the same letter that Kimbob’s got pneumonia. Dad might need some cheering up.”
She got up from he chair and walked three or four steps and slapped me on the check with her right hand. I didn’t even have time to finch; she’d never slapped me before. It didn’t really hurt, but it stung, and it made me sick to my stomach. I felt as though I’d been hit by a crazy stranger. I wanted to hit her back, to slug her a good one, so I locked my hands behind my back to be sure I wouldn’t. She cracked me another one, backhand, on the nose, and it made tears come to my eyes. I could feel my nose starting to bleed. There wasn’t anything I could do. I just stood there with my hands behind me, wondering what was happening, and what was going to happen. I was much bigger than she was, and heavier and stronger. I’d never noticed before what a little woman my mother was. I looked at her face closely while she was hitting me, and it was a stranger’s face. Her cheeks were fuller than they’d ever been, and her skin was gray. There were tiny grape-colored lines in her cheeks near her nose, and the whites of her eyes were pink, as it she’d been swimming in a chlorinated pool. Each time she slapped me I caught a whiff of sherry.
She said, “Apologize! Apologize! Apologize!” and each time she said it she slapped me. But when I opened my mouth she hit me in it. I don’t know how many time she slapped me. My face was getting numb, and the slaps sent little dark red drops of blood from my nose flying around the room. After five or six blows, I realized, in a detached and clear-headed way, that I wasn’t angry any more, just bored. So I finally brought my hands around in front of me and grabbed her wrists and held them. They were thin and without strength. I said, as slowly and clearly as I could, “I’m sorry, Mother,” and dropped her wrists and walked into my bedroom. It was only after I’d sat down on the side of the bed that my legs began to tremble.
I sat in the dark for several minutes, waiting for her to come in and start again, but she didn’t. I turned on the light and went into the bathroom and wiped the blood off my face with a wet washcloth, and then I threw up the coffee that Chango’s parents had served me. (115-117)
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I walked home alone, and saw that the frying pan from breakfast was still in the sink where I’d left it. My mother was still in her room; I could hear her humming tunelessly to herself. I washed the frying pan and put it away, and then went down the hill, turning left on Camino Chiquito to go to Romeo’s studio.
He had a dirty white bandage wrapped around his head, and a purple bruise extending down his jaw. He pointed to it. “Anna moved out, and left me with this. She hit me with an iron saucepan during a perfectly civil discussion about art, and when I awoke she was gone, along with eighteen dollars and several cases of Vienna sausage, which I’d been saving for when I was really broke. Come in. I want you to meet Shirley.”
Shirley was sitting at the table, smoking a cigarette, and wearing the same dirty bathrobe that Anna had worn. She was very large and sleepy-looking, and acknowledged my presence by slowly nodding her head. Her bathrobe was untied, and she was naked underneath it. She arranged it arranged her very deliberately, without changing her expression. “Romeo”, she said, yawning, “I’m tired. Can I rest now?”
“Shirley, my dear, you’ve been resting for half an hour. Don’t you remember? Look at all the cigarette butts in the ashtray.”
“Oh,” she said, “half an hour. I’m so-o-o tired.” She cradled her head on her arms and conked off.
Romeo took the burning cigarette from between her fingers and put it out. “You want some coffee?”
I nodded, and we walked over to the kitchen area. “Have you been giving her sleeping pills?” I asked him.
“No, it’s her thyroid. When she first came three days ago I took her down to my doctor, and he gave her a basal metabolism test. He told me that clinically she’s been dead for some time. Has no thyroid gland at all. He wrote a prescription for thyroid stimulants, but I like her this way. If I gave her the pills she might get jumpy and start throwing things, like Anna. This way she’s easy to handle.”
“Can she model?”
“She’s a terrific model. She’s like a catatonic. I can arrange her in any position, standing, sitting, kneeling, leaning over, balanced on one toe, and she falls asleep and never moves. Of course, she’s not very good as a housekeeper, but she eats very little. It doesn’t take much fuel to keep an engine that sluggish moving. All in all, I’d say she was about perfect. She may even be intelligent, but she can’t stay alert long enough to let me know.”
“I know a girl who’d be a good model,” I said. “She has a good figure, anyway.”
“Good figures have nothing to do with it. Or very little. A model has to have some imagination and lots of muscular control, and she has to know how to take orders. If she looks like Miss America she’ll probably be a lousy model. Girls that are always preening themselves and showing you their profiles and wondering if they have a pimple on their behinds. How old is this friend of yours that has the figure?”
“My age. Seventeen.”
“My God, are you insane? I already have a civic reputation as a lewd old man.”
“This is a really nice girl. Her father’s a minister.”
“Worse and worse. I can see that you have no appreciation for the niceties. Here, drink your coffee. It may help to clear your mind.” (120-122)
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“At the heart of this coming-of-age story of young man sitting out World War II with his mother is a father-son relationship of intense mutual respect and loyalty. The year is 1944. When Mr. Arnold volunteers his services to the navy, Josh Arnold and his mother are transplanted from Mobile, Alabama, to the hills of New Mexico. The leading player is seventeen-year-old Josh, who narrates the story with deadpan irreverent humor. Miss Anne, Josh’s genteel Southern Belle mother, gradually withers in Sagrado, tippling sherry and playing bridge with Jimbob Buel, their permanent houseguest, while Josh becomes an integral member of the Corazon, Sagrado community – Chango, a criminal kid turned softie and Chango’s sister Viola, a would-be-nun-turned criminal; Steenie Stenopolus, who collects sex facts from his father, the OB-GYN; Marcia, the rector’s daughter; and others. The group is as delightful as they disreputable. In the correspondence between father and son, we watch Josh come into his own as he reconciles news of the war with the events and people that are shaping his life in Sagrado. In this New Mexican hill town, Bradford takes a piece of America and catches the enduring spirit of youth and the values of life that count.”
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The 1971 film Red Sky at Morning is the subject of Larry Karaszewski’s review, at Trailers from Hell.
On another note, it was only while completing this post that I learned about the extraordinarily talented Catherine Burns who played Marcia Davidson, her acting career having spanned 1967 through 1984. Burns also published a children’s novel, The Winter Bird (link given below), possibly (?) one of a number of works. According to Wikipedia, “Little is known about Burns’ life following her acting career; Shire said that she had resented the publicity and scrutiny from it, saying “She hated the movie [Last Summer]… and most everything that came with it. She wanted to be remembered as a published writer of novels.”
You can listen to the movie’s theme, “Red Sky at Morning Suite” (quite an appropriate name!), by Billy Goldenberg (William Leon Goldenberg), at Valdez444’s YouTube Channel.
And – yes! – you can view the full movie at Christian Arthur’s YouTube Channel (Gadzooks – download it now while you still can….!) ((Just kidding.)) (((Or am I…?))) ((((!))))
The second novel of Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet” (which otherwise in order comprised Justine, Mountolive, and Clea), Balthazar – as well as the latter two novels – was never adapted for film, unlike the first volume of the series.
Though the cover artist of this 1961 edition of Balthazar is unknown, that anonymous person would s e e m to have been the same individual who created the cover of the other three 1961 Cardinal Edition Quartet novels: For each of the four books, a woman’s face – sometimes veiled; sometimes not – occupies most of the cover, while at the lower left appears a mosque and minaret. Each of the four novels also has its own distinguishing background color: Justine in pale yellow, Balthazar in blue, Mountolive in violet, and Clea in Brown.
He was at that time deeply immersed in the novel he was writing, and as always he found that his ordinary life, in a distorted sort of way, was beginning to follow the curvature of his book.
He explained this by saying that any concentration of the will displaces life (Archimedes’ bath-water) and gives it bias in motion.
Reality, be believed, was always trying to copy the imagination of man, from which it derived.
You will see from this that he was a serious fellow underneath much of his clowning and had quite comprehensive beliefs and ideas.
But also, he had been drinking rather heavily that day as he always did when he was working.
Between books he never touched a drop.
Riding beside her in the great car, someone beautiful, dark and painted with great eyes like the prow of some Aegean ship, he had the sensation that his book was being rapidly passed underneath his life, as if under a sheet of paper containing the iron filings of temporal events, as a magnet is in that commonplace experiment one does at school: and somehow setting up a copying magnetic field. (pp. 106-107)
P.S.!… Here’s the cover – with a prominent and rather distracting bend in the lower right corner (ugh!) – that originally featured as the main image of this post. As you can see above, the cover image is now from a different, undamaged copy of Durrell’s book.
“Synchronicity (German: Synchronizität) is a concept first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl G. Jung ‘to describe circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection.’ Jung held that to ascribe meaning to certain acausal coincidences can be a healthy, even necessary, function of the human mind – principally, by way of bringing important material of the unconscious mind to attention. This further developed into the view that there is a philosophical objectivity or suprasubjectivity to the meaningfulness of such coincidences, as related to the collective unconscious.”
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So I was perusing; leafing through; skimming; wandering within, the pages of my copies of Galaxy Science Fiction, and chanced upon the issue of November, 1950, which features Don Sibley’s cover art for Fredric Brown’s short tale “Honeymoon in Hell”. The issue also contains part two of Clifford Simak’s three-part serial “Time Quarry” (retitled in novel form as Time and Again) and notably, Damon Knight’s “To Serve Man”, which was the basis for Twilight Zone Episode # 89, adapted for television by Serling himself and broadcast under the same title on March 2, 1962.
Remarkably for its cultural significance, Knight’s story is only six pages long. It also features David Stone’s illustration of a Kanamit, the tale’s extraterrestrial protagonist (or, one of the protagonists, for those Kanamits seem to be pretty indistinguishable from one another) which portrayal is utterly unlike the aliens as depicted in the Twilight Zone adaptation.
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Close-up of Don Sibley’s cover art.
Red uniform? Soviet Cosmonaut, Anna Borisovna.
Blue uniform? American Astronaut, Captain Raymond F. Carmody.
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Interesting. But, for all its prominence in pop culture, “To Serve Man” has never been one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, for the plot, though ending with a twist that’s as disturbing as it is clever – o k a y, I’ll grant it t h a t – is really quite simple in concept. Unlike many ‘Zone episodes, “To Serve Man”, though obviously and easily adaptable to television because of the simplicity and brevity of the original story, is one of the series’ more middling episodes because it simply does not have anywhere near the psychological and even moral depth of the numerous other, more complex episodes. The best of these involve individuals confronting and often (but not always!) overcoming their moral, psychological, and even spiritual “ghosts” in settings where themes of science fiction, the paranormal, and occasionally the supernatural – alone, or in combination – while inherent to plot and setting, are actually incidental to themes of personal transformation. And if not transformation, at least an epiphany.
So, suppose that every aficionado of the series has their own (!) favorite episodes, here are mine:
A story of great complexity, based upon an extraordinarily simple premise, with an excellent near-solo performance by Joe Mantell.
Outstanding, by all measures.
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But, getting to the subject at hand. Or more accurately, the image at hand.
Within the November, 1950 issue of Galaxy is another short story; one by Fritz Leiber, Jr., entitled “Coming Attraction”, (You can listen to Atomic Julie’s audio version here.) As summarized (in greater depth) at Wikipedia, the tale is set within a mostly uninhabitable Manhattan – rendered so by a Soviet “Hell Bomb” – amidst an ongoing war between the United States and (former) Soviet Union. The protagonist, British citizen Wysten Turner, has ventured to New York City to obtain grain in exchange for electronic equipment which may be intended for an American military installation on the moon.
The story, however, features none of the standard science fiction tropes, such things as transformative technology, extraterrestrials, space voyages, time travel, and genetic engineering being quite absent. Instead, the plot focuses on social interactions between men and woman, through the experience of Turner himself, in a society that has the air of a social dystopia – albeit a bland, soft, depressing sort of sociological dystopia rather than one characterized by material want or technological regression – where women have taken to wearing masks as a taken-for-granted accoutrement of everyday attire.
Unsurprisingly, given Leiber’s extraordinary literary skill, the story is well constructed; it’s “tight”, moving forward at a steady pace with no extraneous detail, tedious digressions, or slack. Yet with that, I still don’t think it’s one of Leiber’s best efforts, and I find it very odd that it was deemed worthy of inclusion in volume one of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, published two decades later. While certainly interesting in concept and well executed on a technical level, it’s just not one of Leiber’s strongest tales, or really, that strong of a tale at all. Though it was included in Ballantine Books’ The Best of Fritz Leiber, it’s easily outshown by most of the other tales in that anthology, particularly “Gonna Roll The Bones” (1967), and “A Deskful of Girls” (1958), the latter showing Leiber’s originality at its best.
So much for words.
And pictures?
The story is illustrated by single thematic image, created by Paul Callé, which – soon after you begin reading the tale – leaves no room for ambiguity.
Well, if these were “average” times (but there are no more average times, and I doubt if any era has ever been “average”, anyway) the reader would take a look, think “hmmm, interesting,” and much for any story, flip the page and move on.
Alas, times are no long average, and they may not be so again in our lifetimes. I wish that were not so, but so it is; so may be. (But, for how long?)
Did Paul Callé’s art, of a mask as a fashion statement (in the story, it serves no other function), in some unanticipated way portend the year 2021? And beyond?
She just sat there. I couldn’t even tell if she was trembling. I tried to read a message in her eyes through the mask.
“I’ll take you away,” I said to her. “I can do it. I really will.”
He smiled at me. “She’d like to go with you,” he said. “Wouldn’t you, baby?”
“Will you or won’t you?” I said to her. She still just sat there.
He slowly knotted his fingers in her hair.
“Listen, you little vermin,” I snapped at him. “Take your hands off her.”
He came up from the seat like a snake. I’m no fighter. I just know that the more scared I am, the harder and straighter I hit. This time I was lucky.
But as he crumpled back, I felt a slap and four stabs of pain in my cheek. I clapped my hand to it. I could feel the four gashed made by the dagger finger caps, and the warm blood oozing out from them.
She didn’t look at me. She was bending over little Zirk and cuddling her mask to his cheek and crooning: “There, there, don’t feel bad, you’ll be able to hurt me afterward.”
There were sounds around us, but they didn’t come close. I leaned forward and ripped the mask from her face.
I really didn’t know why I should have expected her face to be anything else. It was very pale, of course, and there weren’t any cosmetics. I suppose there’s no point in wearing any under a mask. The eyebrows were untidy and the lips were chapped. But as for the general expression, as for the feelings crawling and wriggling across it…
Have you ever lifted a rock from damp soil? Have you ever watched the slimy white grubs?
I looked down at her, she up at me. “Yes, you’re so frightened, aren’t you?” I said sarcastically. “You dread this little nightly drama, don’t you? You’re scared to death.”
And I walked right out into the purple night, still holding my hand to my bleeding cheek.
No one stopped me, not even the girl wrestlers. I wished I could tear a tab from under my shirt, and test it then and there, and find I’d taken too much radiation, and so be able to ask to cross the Hudson and go down New Jersey, past the lingering radiance of the Narrows Bomb, and so on to Sandy Hook to wait for the rusty ship that would take me back over to seas to England.
The first novel in Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet” (which also comprised Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea), Justine was produced for the screen in 1969 as a film directed by George Cukor and Joseph Strick. The movie’s cast included Anouk Aimée in the title role, Dirk Bogarde as “Pursewarden”, and Michael York as “Darley”. According to Wikipedia, the film … uh, er, ah … didn’t go over too well, either critically or financially.
(C’est la vie!)
Though the full film is apparently unavailable in digital format, you can view the trailer – rather a brief trailer at only a minute in length – (uploaded to YouTube in 2010) here.
As for Clea herself: is it only my imagination which makes it seem so difficult to sketch her portrait? I think of her so much – and yet I see how in all this writing I have been shrinking from dealing directly with her. Perhaps the difficulty lies here: that there does not seem to be an easy correspondence between her habits and her true disposition. If I should describe the outward structure of her life – so disarmingly simple, graceful, self-contained – there is a real danger that she might seem either a nun for whom the whole range of human passions had given place to an absorbing search for her subliminal self, or a disappointed and ingrown virgin who had deprived herself of the world because of some psychic instability, or some insurmountable early wound.
Everything about her person is honey-gold and warm in tone; the fair, crisply trimmed hair which she wears rather long at the back, knotting it simply at the downy nape of her neck. This focuses the candid face of a minor muse with its smiling grey-green eyes. The calmly disposed have a deftness and shapeliness which one only notices when one sees them at work, holding a paint-brush perhaps or setting the broken leg of a sparrow in splints made from match-ends.
I should say something like this: that she had been poured, while still warm, into the body of a young grace: that is to say, into a body born without instincts or desires.
To have great beauty; to have enough money to construct an independent life; to have a skill – those are the factors which persuade the envious, the dispirited to regard her as undeservedly lucky. But why, ask her critics and observers, has she denied herself marriage?
She lives in modest though not miserly style, inhabiting a comfortable attic-studio furnished with little beyond an iron bed and a few ragged beach chairs which in the summer are transferred bodily to her little bathing cabin at Sidi Bishr. Her only luxury is a glittering tiled bathroom in the corner of which she has installed a minute stove to cope with whatever cooking she feels inclined to do for herself; and a bookcase whose crowded shelves indicate that she denies it nothing.
She lives without lovers or family ties, without malices or pets, concentrating with single-mindedness upon her painting which she takes seriously. In her work, too, she is lucky; for these bold yet elegant canvases radiate clemency and humor. They are full of a sense of play – like children much-beloved.
From rear cover:
The wine press of love
Alexandria – a thousand dust-tormented streets. Flies and beggars own it today, and those who enjoy an intermediate existence in between.
Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds – but there are more than five sexes. The sexual provender which lies to hand is staggering in its variety and profusion. The Orient cannot rejoice in the sweet anarchy of the body – for it has far outstripped the body.
Someone once said that Alexandria was the great wine press of love; those who emerged from it were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets – I mean all who have been deeply wounded in their sex.
And now F. Jasmine walked with a soldier
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