Searching hi, low, and every-virtual-where for the movie yields only one result: A Spanish-subtitled, low resolution version, which can be found at Archive.org.
Ashe was typical of that strata of mankind which conducts its human relationships according to a principle of challenge and response. Where there was softness, he would advance; where he found resistance, retreat. Having himself no particular opinions or tastes, he relied upon whatever conformed with those of his companion. He was as ready to drink tea at Fortnum’s as beer at the Prospect of Whitby; he would listen to military music in St. James’s Park or jazz in a Compton Street cellar; his voice would tremble with sympathy when he spoke of Sharpeville, or with indignation at the growth of Britain’s colonial population. To Leamas this observably passive role was repellent; it brought out the bully in him, so that he would lead the other gently into a position where he was committed, and then himself withdraw, so that Alex was constantly scampering back from some cul-de-sac into which Leamas had enticed him. There were moments that afternoon when Leamas was so brazenly perverse that Ashe would have been justified in terminating their conversation – especially since he was paying; but he did not. The little sad man with spectacles who sat alone at the neighboring table, deep in a book on the manufacture of ball bearings, might have deduced, had he been listening, that Leamas was indulging a sadistic nature – or perhaps (if he had been a man of particular subtlety) that Leamas was proving to his own satisfaction that only a man with a strong ulterior motive would put up with that kind of treatment.
“Oh, I don’t know – I’ll just work on it till I get it right, I guess.”
As cool water poured over me, he empty, uncertain feeling in the center of me gradually became bearable. George was somewhere in the vicinity, doing whatever he was doing, and when I saw him next I would be clean, calm, self-possessed; I would stop acting like an eighth-grader. I thought for a while about what to wear and decided that there was no point in pretending I went around dressed for a party whenever we weren’t working; I pulled on a clean pair of cutoffs and looked through my shirts. But the only ones that were clean were so totally functional I couldn’t stand them. A bold thought entered my mind: Wear one of Augusta’s. She might give me a hard time later on, but … I opened the door of my room and peered out, making sure that George wouldn’t catch me in my bra, and hurried into her room. The thought of wearing one of Augusta’s mannish cowboy shirts with the mother-of-pearl snaps filled me with a dizzy sense of power; I didn’t take her favorite, but they were all fascinating, all too big for me in a way I found irresistibly casual. I put one on, knotted it around my waist, looked myself over in the mirror above her dresser. Almost, for once, satisfactory. Back in my room I laced up my sneakers, did the best I could with my impossible hair, and sneaked out into the living room and listened. Where was he? There were no sounds from downstairs, no voices drifting in the windows; I could hear the quiet scrape of sandpaper that had been going on all day. With the thought that I might as well go all the way if I was going to get in trouble, I went back into the bathroom and found in a corner of the medicine cabinet Augusta’s tiny bottle of Interdit. Then I felt silly. She would smell it and give me an unbearable look – and did I want George to, after all? Here it was four o’clock on a hot day and he had come over to do a job. I put it back.
That left nothing to do but go downstairs and look for him. I found him in the dining room, supplied with a stack of blank paper, a handful of pencils, and a ruler; Augusta’s sketch was in front of him, and he was reworking it. He looked as if he had already found his place in the house and settled in.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.” He smiled, preoccupied, and kept drawing.
“What are you doing?” I looked over his shoulder, one hand on the table, one on the back of his chair.
“Trying to make some sense out of this. I’ve got a feeling she doesn’t really want it to look like that, anyway.”
As he talked, his hand continued to draw with a control that impressed me; he put in a vertical line with the ruler, using just enough pressure on the pencil so that its point gently stroked the surface of the paper. Then he began to draw some gingerbread decorations freehand. As I watched, a piece of wooden scrollwork took recognizable shape before me; I had seen its like repeated a dozen times around Augusta’s house but had never actually examined it. When had he had time to commit its form perfectly to memory?
“Mind if I watch?”
“No.”
I sat on the table, my knee almost at his elbow, and wondered how long it would take him to look up for more than a glance. That’s really good,” I said.
“Thanks.”
He continued to draw methodically without the slightest hurry or impatience. I was beginning to consider how long this part might take, when he put down his pencil and ruler picked up a ball-point pen, and without a pause put his left hand around my kneecap to steady it and wrote on it in tiny capitals, HI KAREN HOW ARE YOU? The hand made me self-conscious, but the writing tickled. I took the pen and his left arm and wrote FINE, becoming tensely aware that because of the way I was holding his arm, his left hand was against my thigh. I had meant to write more than FINE, but I stopped there and let go of his arm so he wouldn’t get the wrong idea.
“How long do you think this’ll take?”
“Oh, I don’t know – I’ll just work on it till I get it right, I guess.”
“Did you get her to agree with you about the roof?”
“Well … I don’t know if ‘agree’ would be the right word,” he said, giving me a mischievous smile. “But I’m building it, right?”
“You’ve got the idea, George.”
They were made for each other, I thought, but not as jealously this time. I got up and searched through the house for my Lord Peter book, finally finding it sitting with a wrinkled cover on top of my damp bathing suit from the day before; I tucked it under my arm, wandered into the kitchen and got two glasses of iced tea and a bag of potato chips, put everything on the dining-room table, and sat down across from George to read.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Does this come out of my paycheck?”
“Not if you’re nice.”
He tickled my ankle with his foot.
“I’m very nice,” he said.
______________________________
It’s an appealing image – especially with the various shades of blue, particularly the sky edge with a pink horizon – but on second glance, Rick Lovell’s cover painting for Family Resemblances is also a bit of a visual pun, reminiscent of the work of Guy Billout. Look, and look again: A house is reflected mirror-like from the driver’s window, but in the distance, in the upper left corner, stands a gazebo, distorted, as if rushing by.
Jay McInerney authored three novels published as Vintage Contemporaries: Bright Lights Big City, Story of My Life, and – below – Ransom, for which Rick Lovell’s stunning cover art is equal parts simplicity and symbolism…
The principles of Japanese advertising, he said, were really quite simple. Gaijin were glamorous. If you were selling a luxury product – liquor, perfume – you used a gaijin, preferably a blond model, a New York, London, or Paris backdrop, and an English slogan. If you were selling a household product, you used a domestic-looking Japanese model. The interesting cases were those in between. Miti had decided that the sauna, being a service, ought to have some racial identification as well as gaijin glamour.
Miti asked Ransom what he thought of Sadaharu Oh, the home-run heir apparent.
Ransom said he was a fine ballplayer.
Miti said, Hank Aaron is a Negro, isn’t he?
Ransom said he was, unsure of the significance Miti ascribed to this fact. He went back out to his deck and struggled with the sauna copy, the construction of which was brought back to him that evening as he worked through Lesson Nine of Level Two with his Mitsubishi class, Ransom reading and the class repeating, books closed.
I make a deal.
“I make a deal.”
You make a deal.
“You make a deal.”
He makes a deal.
“He makes a deal.”
She makes a deal.
“She makes a deal.”
Mr. Smith makes a deal…
______________________________
With a pair of Samurai swords suspended above a gently flowing stream, a bird – a rainbow-colored Japanese red-crowned crane – stands in the middle of a gently flowing stream, the swords reflected in the water in the undulating form of a Japanese wooden foot bridge. More symbolism: Just as the swords are reflected as a symbol of Japanese culture, so is the crane: It appears as a red-hued bonsai tree, seeming to float upon the water’s surface. The orange-yellow moon (yes, it can appear that way) suspended to the side, above, balances the the scene. And completing the image, soft and undulating green hills recede into the distance, separating the blue of sky from blue of water.
“Tell her you are suffering from amnesia and looking for clues.”
I haven’t read the book, but I remember the movie.
I saw the movie.
I really liked the movie.
I really like Marc Tauss’ cover art, too…
Open the drawers of your desk and you realize it could take all night.
There is a vast quantity of flotsam:
files,
notebooks,
personal and business correspondence,
galleys and proofs,
review books,
matchbooks,
loose sheets with names and phone numbers,
notes to yourself,
first drafts of stories,
sketches and poems.
Here, for instance, is the first draft of “Birds of Manhattan.”
Also the “U.S. Government Abstract of Statistics on Agriculture, 1981”,
indispensable in researching the three-part article on the death of the family farm,
on the back of which you have written the name Laura Bowman and a telephone number.
Who is Laura Bowman?
You could dial the number and ask for her, ask her where she fits into your past.
Tell her you are suffering from amnesia and looking for clues.
____________________
The term “odeon” (via the Century Dictionary), refers to, “…A kind of theater in ancient Greece, smaller than the dramatic theater and roofed over, in which poets and musicians submitted their works to the approval of the public, and contended for prizes; — hence, in modern usage, the name of a hall for musical or dramatic performances.” I especially like the way a neon-lit Odeon, and, the World Trade Center, contrast with one another in shape, size, and color, their orange and blue nicely complimenting the violet color of the empty sky above. The fact that protagonist Jamie Conway (I suppose he’s Jamie Conway?!) has his back turned towards the viewer – amidst the city’s exciting glow – imparts upon the scene feelings of solitude and anonymity.
A work of art can be distinctive in, of, and by itself. Yet, its impact and power can be enhanced by setting it within just the right kind of “frame”, and not just a physical frame.
In science-fiction and fantasy pulp art of the 1950s and early 60s, prominent examples of how art could be framed – visually framed, that is – were the Galaxy Science Fiction and Beyond Fantasy Fiction, pulp magazines which utilized the same general cover design. Cover illustrations were set within the lower right corner of the cover “landscape”, with all textual information – magazine title, names of authors and stories, and mundane but necessary information like selling price and date of issue – located within the top and left margins. This design could capture a passing reader’s attention with great effect, and, give the publications a somewhat “arty” (pardon the pun!) look. Hey, if the only thing you know about a story is its title and the name of its author, the cover art has to be its biggest selling point!
A memorable example of this style of cover design took prominence from the mid-1980s through early 1990s, in Random House’s Vintage Contemporaries series, which eventually comprised 89 novels as both reprints and works by contemporary authors.
In a general sense, two cover designs were used for the series: A more traditional style, with a work of art occupying the entirety of the cover and text superimposed upon it, and, the style alluded to above, in which a cover painting comprised only a portion of the front “real estate”. This latter style involved placing the illustration within the cover’s right center and “framing” it by white space alone its top, bottom, and left margins. The author’s name was situated in the upper right corner, as white text on a colored rectangular field – said color being repeated on the upper spine, with the author’s surname again superimposed in white. On the front cover, the book’s title was set just below the author’s name, just above the main illustration. Another cover element was a rectangular grid of subtle gray dots to the upper left of the cover painting, which kind of broke up the monotony of white space, and at the same time, balanced the cover art.
All this might read kind of technical, but when you actually look at the Vintage Contemporaries covers, they stand out for the catchy and pleasing effectiveness of the overall design. Well, that’s why I bought a few of them – !.
You can read much more about the design history of the Vintage Contemporaries covers at TalkingCovers, a blog created by Sean Manning (Vice President and Executive Editor at Simon & Schuster), which was active from May of 2012 through November of 2013. (Though quite fortunately, it’s still “up and running” and entirely accessible!) As described in its descriptive blurb: “Talking Covers is a blog where authors, designers, and artists join to discuss a particular book cover. It is edited by Sean Manning. He is the author of the memoir The Things That Need Doing and editor of the nonfiction anthologies The Show I’ll Never Forget, Rock and Roll Cage Match, Top of the Order, and Bound to Last. He has written for The Village Voice, Esquire.com, The Daily Beast, Deadspin, USA Today, The Awl, and elsewhere, and he is a frequent guest commentator on WNYC’s music talk show Soundcheck.”
Mr. Manning’s post about Vintage Contemporaries, created on September 12, 2012, can be accessed right h e r e.
To quote just a little bit:
“Editor Gary Fisketjon launched Vintage Contemporaries, a paperback imprint of Random House, in September 1984. There were seven initial titles. By decade’s end, there would be close to 100. The line was a mix of reprints and originals, and nearly thirty years later the checklist found in the back of the books reads like a ballot for some Cooperstown of late-20th Century fiction.”
“The person who came up with the uniform, De Stijl layout, and the one whose name can be found on the back of those hundred or so books – that was Lorraine Louie.”
“The series was a critical and commercial success; Bright Lights, Big City sold 300,000 copies in two years, and publishers raced to start their own knock-off imprints. But by the early nineties, personnel and tastes within Vintage Contemporaries had changed and the design was phased out.”
It’s a long, pithy, and fascinating post, highlighted with numerous examples of Vintage Contemporaries covers, as well as comments by authors, editors, and artists involved in the production of the series. They comprise, in order of appearance in the post (scrolling from top to bottom):
Comments by Mark Tauss, artist Far Tortuga, by Peter Matthiessen The Chosen Places, The Timeless People Dancing Bear, by James Crumley Dancing in The Dark, by Janet Hobhouse
Comments by Jay McInerney, author Bright Lights, Big City Ransom Story of My Life
Comments by Thomas McGuane, author The Bushwacked Piano To Skin A Cat Nobody’s Angel Something to Be Desired
Excerpt from Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life by Carol Skelnicka Where I’m Calling From What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Fires Cathedral
Comments by Maxine Chernoff, author Bop
Comments by Rick Lovell, artist Airships, by Barry Hannah Fiskadoro, by Denis Johnson Norwood, by Charles Portis The Car Thief, by Theodore Weesner The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford
Comments by Richard Ford, author A Piece of My Heart The Ultimate Good Luck Rock Springs
Comments by Joy Williams, author Taking Care Breaking & Entering State of Grace
Comments by Paul Hoover, author Saigon, Illinois
Comments by Jill Eisenstadt, author From Rockaway
Comments by Steve Erickson, author Days Between Stations Rubicon Beach
Comments by Chris Moore, artist Platitudes, by Trey Ellis (with comments by Trey Ellis, author) Angels, by Dennis Johnson Myra Breckenridge and Myron, by Gore Vidal Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski Lulu Incognito, by Raymond Kennedy Ellen Foster, by Kaye Gibbons
Comments by Patricia Mulcahy, editor
Comments by Michael Downing, author A Narrow Time
Comments by Peter Davies, author The Last Election
Comments by Lowry Pei, author Family Resemblances
Comments by Gary Krist, author The Garden State
Excerpt from A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates by Blake Bailey Revolutionary Road The Easter Parade
Comments by Mary LaChapelle, author House of Heroes
Comments by Susan Daitch, author The Colorist
Comments by Valerie Martin, author A Recent Martyr The Consolation of Nature
Mr. Manning’s post opens with an image of the checklist of Vintage Contemporaries titles. Rather than copy and paste directly from his blog, I’ve OCR’d these scans to come up with this list of all titles in the series. They’re listed alphabetically by book title, each title followed by author’s name, price, and ISBN.
Airships, by Barry Hannah – $5.95 – 394-72913-7 All Girl Football Team, The, by Lewis Nordan – $5.95 – 394-75701-7 Angels, by Denis Johnson – $7.95 – 394-75987-7 Anywhere But Here, by Mona Simpson – $6.95 – 394-75559-6 Asa, as I Knew Him, by Susanna Kaysen – $4.95 – 394-74985-5 Bad Behavior, by Mary Gaitskill – $7.95 – 679-72327-7 Beginning of Sorrows, The, by David Martin – $7.95 – 679-72459-1 Bop, by Maxine Chernoff – $5.95 – 394-75522-7 Breaking and Entering, by Joy Williams – $6.95 – 394 75773-4
______________________________
Movietime!
Bright Lights. Big City, by Jay Mclnerney – $5.95 – 394-72641-3
Bushwhacked Piano, The, by Thomas McGuane – $5.95 – 394-72642-1 California Bloodstock, by Terry McDonell – $8.95 – 679 72168-1 Car Thief, The, by Theodore Weesner – $6.95 – 394 74097 1 Carnival for the Gods, by Gladys Swan – $6.95 – 394-74330- Cathedral, by Raymond Carver – $6.95 – 679-72369-2 Chosen Place, the Timeless People, The, by Paule Marshall – $6.95 – 394 72633-2 Clea & Zeus Divorce, by Emily Prager – $6.95 – 394 75591- Colorist, The, by Susan Daitch – $7.95 – 679-72492-3 Commitments, The, by Roddy Doyle – $6.95 – 679-72174-6 Consolation of Nature and Other Stories, The, by Valerie Martin – $6.95 – 679 72159-2 Dancing Bear, by James Crumley – $6.95 – 394-72576- Dancing in the Dark, by Janet Hobhouse – $5.95 – 394-72588-3 Days Between Stations, by Steve Erickson – $6.95 – 394-74685-6 Debut, The, by Anita Brookner – $6.95 – 679-72712-4 Easter Parade, The, by Richard Vales – $8.95 – 679-72230-0 Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, by Richard Yates – $8.95 – 679 72221-1 Ellen Foster, by Kaye Gibbons – $5.95 – 394-75757-2 Family Resemblances, by Lowry Pei – $6.95 – 394-75528-6 Fan’s Notes, A, by Frederick Exley – $7.95 – 679 72076-6 Fat City, by Leonard Gardner – $6.95 – 394-74316-4 Fires, by Raymond Carver – $7.95 – 679-72239-4 First Love and Other Sorrows, by Harold Brodkey – $7.95 – 679-72075-8 Fiskadoro, by Denis Johnson – $6.95 – 394-74367-9 From Rockaway, by Jill Eisenstadt – $6.95 – 394 75761-0
______________________________
Movietime!
Garden State, The, by Gary Krist – $7.95 – 679 72515-6
Great Jones Street, by Don DeLillo – $7.95 – 679-72303- Handbook for Visitors From Outer Space, A, by Kathryn Kramer – $5.95 – 394-72989-7 House of Heroes and Other Stories, by Mary LaChapelle – $7.95 – 679-72457-5 I Look Divine, by Christopher Coe – $5.95 – 394-75995-8 Last Election, The, by Pete Davies – $6.95 – 394-74702- Last Good Kiss, The, by James Crumley – $6.95 – 394-75989-3 Last Notes from Home, by Frederick Exley – $8.95 – 679-72456-7 Latecomers, by Anita Brookner – $7.95 – 679-72668-3 Love Always, by Ann Beattie – $5.95 – 394-74418-7 Lulu Incognito, by Raymond Kennedy – $7.95 – 394-75641- Mama Day, by Gloria Naylor – $8.95 – 679-72181-9 Mezzanine, The, by Nicholson Baker – $7.95 – 679-72576-8 Mohawk, by Richard Russo – $8.95 – 679 72577-6 Myra Breckinridge and Myron, by Gore Vidal – $8.95 – 394-75444-1 Names, The, by Don DeLillo – $7.95 – 679-72295-5 Narrow Time, A, by Michael Downing – $6.95 – 394-75568-5 Nobody’s Angel, by Thomas McGuane – $6.95 – 394-74738-0 Norwood, by Charles Portis – $5.95 – 394- 72931-5 November, by Janet Hobhouse – $6.95 – 394-74665-1 One to Count Cadence, by James Crumley – $5.95 – 394-73559-5 Pages from a Cold Island, by Frederick Exley – $6.95 – 394-75977- Piece of My Heart, A, by Richard Ford – $6.95 – 394-72914-5 Platitudes, by Trey Ellis – $6.95 – 394-75439-5 Player, The, by Michael Tolkin – $7.95 – 679-72254-8 Players, by Don DeLillo – $7.95 – 679-72293-9 Rabbit Boss, by Thomas Sanchez – $8.95 – 679 72621-7 Ransom, by Jay Mclnerney – $5.95 – 394-74118-8 Ratner’s Star, by Don DeLillo – $8.95 – 679-72292-0 Recent Martyr, A, by Valerie Martin – $7.95 – 679-72158-4 Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates – $8.95 – 679-72191-6 Risk Pool, The, by Richard Russo – $8.95 – 679 72334- River Dogs, by Robert Olmstead – $6.95 – 394-74684 8 Rock Springs, by Richard Ford – $6.95 – 394-75700-9 Rubicon Beach, by Steve Erickson – $6.95 – 394-75513-8 Running Dog, by Don DeLillo – $7.95 – 679-72294-7 Saigon, Illinois, by Paul Hoover – $6.95 – 394-75849-8 Selected Stories, by Andre Dubus – $9.95 – 679-72533-4 Soft Water, by Robert Olmstead – $6.95 – 394 75752-1 Something to Be Desired, by Thomas McGuane – $4.95 – 394 73156-5 Sportswriter, The, by Richard Ford – $6.95 – 394-74325-3 Stars at Noon, The, by Denis Johnson – $5.95 – 394 75427-1 Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski – $5.95 – 394-75716-5 Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, by Harold Brodkey – $12.95 – 679-72431-1 Story of My Life, by Jay Mclnerney – $6.95 – 679 72257-2 Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy – $6.95 – 394-74145-5 Taking Care, by Joy Williams – $5.95 – 394 72912-9 To Skin a Cat, by Thomas McGuane – $5.95 – 394-75521-9 Ultimate Good Luck, The, by Richard Ford – $5.95 – 394-75089-6 Visit From the Footbinder, A, by Emily Prager – $6.95 – 394 75592-8 Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair, by Lewis Nordan – $6.95 – 679-72164-9 What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver – $6.95 – 679-72305-6 Where l’m Calling From, by Raymond Carver – $8.95 – 679-72231-9 Within Normal Limits, by Todd Grimson – $5.95 – 394-74617-1 Wrong Case, The, by James Crumley – $5.95 – 394-73558-7
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…”
____________________
“Kissing your hand may make you feel very good but a diamond bracelet lasts forever.”
____________________
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.
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)
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“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)
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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)
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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)
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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.
“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)
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“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
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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)
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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)
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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?
“So, that is love,” thought I dumbly, despairingly, as we picked up our things; “so that is the love my books at home were so full of – of which I had expected so much in the vague dreams of my youth!”
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The Road Back is a book I’ve read a b o u t, but not yet actually read, having learned about it at ChicagoBoyz. There, the book is discussed in the context of literature of First World War in general, and, the war’s impact and legacy, in intellectual and cultural terms, in particular, on the generation of soldiers who fought in it. Much more importantly – with relevance for the world of 2022; our world – is the way in which the war altered ways of understanding, living in, and acting upon (and catastrophically against?) the world, for veterans of the conflict and especially those who came after.
Akin to Remarque’s to Arch of Triumph, The Road Back was transformed to film in 1937. The full movie, at Sir Jänskä’s YouTube channel, can be viewed here…
The Old Man decides to humor us at all costs. We are too many, and Willy stands there too formidably trumpeting before him. And who can say what these undisciplined fellows may not be doing next; they may even produce bombs from their pockets. He beats the air with his arms as an archangel his wings. But no on listens to him.
Then suddenly comes a lull in the tumult. Ludwig Breyer has stepped out to the front. There is silence. “Mr. Principal,” says Ludwig in a clear voice, “you have seen the war after your fashion – with flying banners, martial music, and with glamour. But you saw it only to the railway station from which we set off. We do not mean to blame you. We, too, thought as you did. But we have seen the other side since then, and against that the heroics of 1914 soon wilted to nothing. Yet we went through with it – we went through with it because here was something deeper that held us together, something that only showed up out there, a responsibility perhaps, but at any rate something of which you know nothing, and about which there can be no speeches.”
Ludwig pauses a moment, gazing vacantly ahead. He passes his hand over his forehead and continues. “We have not come to ask a reckoning – that would be foolish; nobody knew then what was coming. – But we do require that you shall not again try to prescribe what we shall think of these things. We went out full of enthusiasm, the name of the “Fatherland” on our lips – and we have returned in silence, but with the thing, the Fatherland, in our hearts. And now we ask you to be silent too. Have done with fine phrases. They are not fitting. Nor are they fitting to our dead comrades. We saw them die. And the memory of it is still too near that we can abide to hear them talked of as you are talking. They died for more than that.”
Now everywhere it is quiet. The Principal has his hands clasped together. “But, Breyer,” he says gently, “I – I did not mean to – “
Ludwig has done.
After a while the Principal continues. “But tell me then, what is it that you do want?”
We look at one another. What do we want? Yes, if it were so easy a thing to say in a sentence. A vague, urgent sense of it we have – but for words? We have no words for it, yet. But perhaps later we shall have. (97-98)
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At last came my turn. The man who had been before me stumbled out and I stepped into the room. It was low and dark, and reeked so of carbolic acid and sweat that I thought it strange to see the branches of a lime tree just outside the window, and the sun and wind playing in the fresh, green leaves – so withered and used up did everything in the room appear. There was a dish with pink water on a chair and in the corner a sort of camp-bed on which was spread a torn sheet. The woman was fat and had on a short, transparent chemise. She did not look at me at all, but straightway lay down. Only when I still did not come, did she look up impatiently; then a flicker of comprehension showed in her spongy face. She perceived that I was still quite young.
I simply could not; horror seized me and a chocking nausea. The woman made a few gestures to rouse me, gross, repulsive gestures; she tried to pull me to her and even smiled as she did so, sweetly and coyly, that I should have compassion on her – what was she, after all, but a poor, army mattress, that must bed twenty and more fellows every day? – but I laid down only the money beside her and went out hastily and down the stairs.
Jupp gave me a wink. “Well, how was it?”
“So, so”, I answered like an old hand, and we turned to go. But no, we must go first to the A.M.C corporal again and make water under his eyes. Then we received a further injection of protargol.
“So, that is love,” thought I dumbly, despairingly, as we picked up our things; “so that is the love my books at home were so full of – of which I had expected so much in the vague dreams of my youth!” I rolled up my great-coat and packed my ground-sheet, I received my ammunition and we marched out. I was silent and sorrowful, and I thought upon it: how now nothing was left me of those high-flying dreams of life and of love, but a rifle, a fat whore and the dull rumble out there on the sky-line whither we were now slowly marching. Then came darkness, and the trenches and death. – Franz Wagner fell that night, and we lost besides twenty-three men. (157-158)
For Further Thought
World War One, and the Transformation of Civilization, With Relevance for Our Times, atChicago Boyz…
Though I’ve been unable to find much about artist Tom Dunn, his work appears to be stylistically similar to that of Bayre Phillips, possibly – at least in this instance – because of Pocket Books’ desire to maintain consistency in style and cover design for Cardinal Edition paperbacks.
