Following the theme of C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy, here’s Art Sussman’s cover for Perelandra, the second book of the series, as published by Avon in 1957. Sussman also created the cover of Avon’s 1960 edition of Out of the Silent Planet.
You can view the cover of Macmillan’s 1965 edition of Perelandrahere. The large human figures in yellow-orange are probably symbolic representations of Tindril, the Queen of Perelandra (a.k.a. to we inhabitants of Earth as “Venus”), and her un-named King. There’s also a science-fiction element on the cover in the form of a rocket-plane, but no such craft figures in the story!
And as always, to give you a literary “taste” of the novel’s contents, here’s an excerpt: A conversation between the hero, Dr. Elwin Ransom, and his antagonist, Dr. Weston.
“My dear Ransom,
I wish you would not keep relapsing on to the popular level.
The two things are only moments in the single, unique reality.
The world leaps forward through great men
and greatness always transcends mere moralism.
When the leap has been made our ‘diabolism’
as you would call it becomes the morality of the next stage;
but while we are making it, we are called criminals, heretics, blasphemers…”
“How far does it go?
Would you still obey the Life-Force
if you found it prompting you to murder me?”
“Yes.”
“Or to sell England to the Germans?”
“Yes.”
“Or to print lies as serious research in a scientific periodical?”
“Yes.”
“God help you!” said Ransom.
* * * * * * * * * * *
As the novel progresses, Dr. Weston is transformed into some thing no longer quite human, although physically human in superficial appearance. Here are Dr. Ransom’s observations of what remains of Weston – physically, intellectually, and spiritually – after the latter has succumbed (voluntarily?) to demonic possession.
It [Weston] looked at Ransom in silence and at last began to smile. We have all often spoken – Ransom himself had often spoken – of a devilish smile. Now he realized that he had never taken the words seriously. The smile was not bitter, nor raging, nor, in an ordinary sense, sinister; it was not even mocking. It seemed to summon Ransom, with horrible naivete of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it.
It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation.
Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence. It was beyond vice as the Lady was beyond virtue.
Among the series’ many imprints over the past eight-odd decades, perhaps the most immediately “recognizable” – in terms of duration of publication and (therefore!) especially cover art – has been the Macmillan edition. Published from 1967 through 1979, all Space Trilogy books with that imprint bore cover illustrations by Bernard Symancyk, about whose career little information is available – albeit Terence E. Hanley at TellersofWeirdTales presents a brief biography at “From Things To Come into The Space Trilogy-Part One“.
Well, Macmillan wasn’t alone. In 1949, 1956, and 1960, Avon Books released its own edition of the Space Trilogy, with unique cover art for each “set”, and within each set, the cover illustrations having been created by different artists.
Certainly the art of the Space Trilogy is varied, but even moreso is the vast commentary the books have engendered across the decades. While the Trilogy can ostensibly be categorized as science fiction, the tropes associated with that literary genre are far secondary to the ideas actually animating the books. These are theological, though not purely couched in the verbiage of theology (the books’ ethos is clearly expressed in a allegorical manner), and concern the nature of good and evil; collectivism versus the worth of the individual as an individual; the nature, exercise, and temptation of power – whether that power be technological, biological, or governmental; the destiny of men as individuals and humanity as a civilization.
Well… The above sentences merely superficially (and ever so tangentially!) scratch the surface of depths vastly deeper.
Well… I can recommended these two discussions concerning the final novel of the series – That Hideous Strength (Avon’s awkward title The Tortured Planet) – at ChicagoBoyz, both by David Foster. They are “Summer Rerun – Book Review: That Hideous Strength” (September 15, 2017), and, “Summer Rerun – Lewis vs. Haldane” (August 31, 2019). These discussions can also serve as a sort-of-segue to the Trilogy’s other two novels.
As a matter of fact, these two ChicagoBoyz posts are what let me to read the first two novels. That Hideous Strength is in my “queue”, for the “world” depicted in Lewis’ final Space Trilogy novel has striking resonance with the world of 2020.
And perhaps – depending on the winds of history and the choices of men – alas, beyond.
Oh, yes, as for cover art?
Here are the covers, front and back, of the 1956 edition of Avon’s first novel in the trilogy – Out of the Silent Planet – by artist Everett Raymond Kinstler.
You can view the cover of Macmillan’s 1965 edition of Out of the Silent Planethere.
Here’s a brief excerpt from Out of The Silent Planet: A conversation between the hero of both “this” first novel of the trilogy and the second, Perelandra: Between Dr. Elwin Ransom, and his (our?) nemesis, “Dr. Weston”, whose religion (if any) seems to be a variation on the theme of what is known to us as “scientism” – not science, which is altogether a thing quite different.
Or, put it another way, deification of rationality.
Thus:
Weston: “…We are only obeying orders.”
Ransom: “Whose?”
There was another pause. “Come,” said Weston at last, “there is really no use in continuing this cross-examination. You keep on asking me questions I can’t answer; in some cases because I don’t know the answers, in other because you wouldn’t understand them. It will make things very much pleasanter during the voyage if you can only resign your mind to your fate and stop bothering yourself and us. It would be easier if your philosophy of life were not so insufferably narrow or individualistic. I had thought no one could fail to be inspired by the role you are being asked to play: that even a worm, if it could understand, would rise to the sacrifice. I mean, of course, the sacrifice of time and liberty, and some little risk. Don’t misunderstand me.”
“Well,” said Ransom, “You hold all the cards, and I must make the best of it. I consider your philosophy of life raving lunacy. I suppose all that stuff about infinity and eternity means that you think you are justified in doing anything – absolutely anything – here and now, on the off chance that some creatures or other descended from man as we know him may crawl about a few centuries longer in some part of the universe.”
My prior post, regarding Ray Bradbury’s The Fireman (later Fahrenheit 451), presented musings about his novel viewed in the context of the events of the year 2020, and, in terms of the effect of “information technology” in the contemporary world, which seem to have been anticipated in his novel. This serves as an introduction to images of the magazine and book cover art associated with Fahrenheit 451’s first appearance:in Galaxy Magazine (under the title The Fireman), and next, as Ballantine Books’ publication of the novel under that much-more-familiarly-known title. In turn, the post includes excerpts from some of the novel’s passages that are the most powerful, descriptive, and relevant to the world we now live in.
This post is quite different in nature: It’s the text of an interview with Ray Bradbury that appeared in Charles Platt’s Dream Makers – The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction, published in November of 1980 by Berkley Books. The author’s conversation with his Ray Bradbury occurred in Los Angeles in May of 1979.
Platt’s book is excellent, for the reader gains an appreciation through exchanges with 29 authors of not only their relationship with the world of writing, but simply about their personal histories (sometimes their families, too) and lives, as “people”. Albeit, the profile of Cyril Kornbluth is by definition and nature not an interview as such, Kornbluth having died in 1958! Thus, Kornbluth’s brief biographical profile is based on Charles Platt’s taped interview with Kornbluth’s widow Mary, which occurred in November of 1973.
(Alas, I so wish that something had been included about Cordwainer Smith or Catherine L. Moore!)
Profiled in the book are:
Brian W. Aldiss Isaac Asimov J.G. Ballard Gregory Benford Alfred Bester Ray D. Bradbury John Brunner Edward Bryant Algis Budrys Samuel R. Delaney Philip K. Dick Thomas M. Disch Harlan Ellison Philip Jose Farmer Frank Herbert C.M. (Cyril M.) Kornbluth Damon Knight Barry N. Malzberg Michael Moorcock Frederik Pohl Robert Scheckley Robert Silverberg Norman Spinrad Hank Stine E.C. Tubb A.E. (Alfred Elton) van Vogt (…see more at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, at the University of Kansas…) Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Ian Watson Kate Wilhelm
So, here’s Charles Platt’s interview with Ray Bradbury. If I emerged from reading Fahrenheit 451 with an appreciation of Bradbury’s literary skill, I emerged from reading Platt’s interview with a solid appreciation of Bradbury as “a person”. A person, most impressive, at that.
________________________________________
Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury’s stories speak with a unique voice. They can never be confused with the work of any other writer. And Bradbury himself is just as unmistakable: a charismatic individualist with a forceful, effusive manner and a kind of wide-screen, epic dedication to the powers of Creativity, Life, and Art.
He has no patience with commercial writing which is produced soullessly for the mass market:
“It’s all crap, it’s all crap, and I’m not being virtuous about it; I react in terms of my emotional, needful self, in that if you turn away from what you are, you’ll get sick some day. If you go for the market, some day you’ll wake up and regret it. I know a lot of screenwriters; they’re always doing things for other people, for money, because it’s a job. Instead of saying, ‘Hey, I really shouldn’t be doing this,’ they take it, because it’s immediate, and because it’s a credit. But no one remembers that credit. If you went anywhere in Los Angeles among established writers and said, ‘Who wrote the screenplay for Gone With the Wind?” they couldn’t tell you. Or the screenplay for North by Northwest. Or the screenplay for Psycho – even I couldn’t tell you that, and I’ve seen the film eight times. These people are at the beck and call of the market; they grow old, and lonely, and envious, and they are not loved, because no one remembers. But in novels and short stories, essays and poetry, you’ve got a chance of not having, necessarily, such a huge audience, but having a constant group of lovers, people who show up in your life on occasion and look at you with such a pure light in their faces and their eyes that there’s no denying that love, it’s there, you can’t fake it. When you’re in the street and you see someone you haven’t seen in years – that look! They see you and, that light, it comes out, saying, My God, there you are, Jesus God it’s been five years, let me buy you a drink… And you go into a bar, and – and that beautiful thing, which friendship gives you, that’s what we want, hah? That’s what we want. And all the rest is crap. It is. That’s what we want from life – “ He pounds his fist on the glass top of his large, circular coffee table. “ – We want friends. In a lifetime most people only have one or two decent friends, constant friends. I have five, maybe even six. And a decent marriage, and children, plus the work that you want to do, plus the fans that accumulate around that work – Lord, it’s a complete life, isn’t it – but the screenwriters never have it, and it’s terribly sad. Or the Harold Robbinses of the world – I mean, probably a nice gent. But no one cares, no one cares that he wrote those books, because they’re commercial books, and there’s no moment of truth that speaks to the heart. The grandeur and exhilaration of certain days is missing – those gorgeous days when you walk out and it’s enough just to be alive, the sunlight goes right in your nostrils and out your ears, hah? That’s the stuff. All the rest – the figuring out of the designs, for how to do a bestseller – what a bore that is. Lord, I’d kill myself, I really would, I couldn’t live that way. And I’m not being moralistic. I’m speaking from the secret wellsprings of the nervous system. I can’t do those things, not because it’s morally wrong and unvirtuous, but because the gut system can’t take it, finally, being untrue to the gift of life. If you turn away from natural gifts that God has given you, or the universe has given you, however you want to describe it in your own terms, you’re going to grow old too soon. You’re going to get sour, get cynical, because you yourself are a sublime cynic for having done what you’ve done. You’re going to die before you die. That’s no way to live.”
He speaks in a rich, powerful voice-indeed, a hot-gospel voice – as he delivers this inspirational sermon. He may be adopting a slightly more incisive style than usual, for the purposes of this interview, and he may be using a little overstatement to emphasize his outlook; but there can be no doubt of his sincerity. Those passages of ecstatic prose in his fiction, paying homage to the vibrant images of childhood, the glorious fury of flaming rockets, the exquisite mystery of Mars, the all-around wonder-fullness of the universe in general – he truly seems to experience life in these terms, uninhibitedly, unreservedly.
Intellectual control and cold, hard reason have a place, too; but they must give way to emotion, during the creative process:
“It takes a day to write a short story. At the end of the day, you say, that seems to work, what parts don’t? Well, there’s a scene here that’s not real, now, what’s missing? Okay, the intellect can help you here. Then, the next day, you go back to it, and you explode again, based on what you learned the night before from your intellect. But it’s got to be a total explosion, over in a few hours, in order to be honest.
“Intellectualizing is a great danger. It can get in the way of doing anything. Our intellect is there to protect us from destroying ourselves – from falling off cliffs, or from bad relationships – love affairs where we need the brains not to be involved. That’s what the intellect is for. But it should not be the center of things. If you try to make your intellect the center of your life you’re going to spoil all the fun, hah? You’re going to get out of bed with people before you ever get into bed with them. So if that happens – the whole world would die, we’d never have any children!” He laughs. “You’d never start any relationships, you’d be afraid of all friendships, and become paranoid. The intellect can make you paranoid about everything, including creativity, if you’re not careful. So why not delay thinking till the act is over? It doesn’t hurt anything.”
I feel that Bradbury’s outlook, and his stories, are unashamedly romantic. But when I use this label, he doesn’t seem at all comfortable with it.
“I’m not quite sure I know what it means. If certain things make you laugh or cry, how can you help that? You’re only describing a process. I went down to Cape Canaveral for the first time three years ago. I walked into it, and yes, I thought, this is my home town! Here is where I came from, and it’s all been built in the last twenty years behind my back. I walk into the Vehicle Assembly Building, which is 400 feet high, and I go up in the elevator and look down – and the tears burst from my eyes. They absolutely burst from my eyes! I’m just full of the same awe that I have when I visit Chartres or go into the Notre Dame or St. Peter’s. The size of this cathedral where the rockets take off to go to the moon is so amazing, I don’t know how to describe it. On the way out, in tears, I turn to my driver and I say, ‘How the hell do I write that down? It was like walking around in Shakespeare’s head.’ And as soon as I said it I knew that was the metaphor. That night on the train I got out my typewriter and I wrote a seven-page poem, which is in my last book of poetry, about my experience at Canaveral walking around inside Shakespeare’s head.
“Now, if that’s romantic, I was born with romantic genes. I cry more, I suppose – I’m easy to tears, I’m easy to laughter, I try to go with that and not suppress it. So if that’s romantic, well, then, I guess I’m a romantic, but I really don’t know what that term means. I’ve heard it applied to people like Byron, and in many ways he was terribly foolish, especially to give his life away, the way he did, at the end. I hate that, when I see someone needlessly lost to the world. We should have had him for another five years – or how about twenty? I felt he was foolishly romantic, but I don’t know his life that completely. I’m a mixture; I don’t think George Bernard Shaw was all that much of a romanticist, and yet I’m a huge fan of Shaw’s. He’s influenced me deeply, along with people like Shakespeare, or Melville. I’m mad for Shaw; I carry him with me everywhere. I reread his prefaces all the time.”
Quite apart from what I still feel is a romantic outlook, Bradbury is distinctive as a writer who shows a recurring sense of nostalgia in his work. Many stories look back to bygone times when everything was simpler, and technology had not yet disrupted the basics of small-town life. I ask him if he knows the source of this affection for simplicity.
“I grew up in Waukegan, Illinois, which had a population of around 32,000, and in a town like that you walk everywhere when you’re a child. We didn’t have a car till I was twelve years old. So I didn’t drive in automobiles much until I came west when I was fourteen, to live in Los Angeles. We didn’t have a telephone in our family until I was about fifteen, in high school. A lot of things, we didn’t have; we were a very poor family. So you start with basics, and you respect them. You respect walking, you respect a small town, you respect the library, where you went for your education – which I started doing when I was nine or ten. I’ve always been a great swimmer and a great walker, and a bicyclist. I’ve discovered every time I’m depressed or worried by anything, swimming or walking or bicycling will generally cure it. You get the blood clean and the mind clean, and then you’re ready to go back to work again.”
He goes on to talk about his early ambitions: “My interests were diverse. I always wanted to be a cartoonist, and I wanted to have my own comic strip. And I wanted to make films, and be on the stage, and be an architect – I was madly in love with the architecture of the future that I saw in photographs of various world’s fairs which preceded my birth. And then, reading Edgar Rice Burroughs when I was ten or eleven, I wanted to write Martian stories. So when I began to write, when I was twelve, that was the first thing I did. I wrote a sequel to an Edgar Rice Burroughs book.
“When I was seventeen years old, in Los Angeles, I used to go to science-fantasy meetings, downtown. We’d go to Clifton’s Cafeteria; Forrest Ackerman and his friends would organize the group there every Thursday night, and you could go there and meet Henry Kuttner, and C.L. Moore, and Jack Williamson, and Edmond Hamilton, and Leigh Brackett – my God, how beautiful, I was seventeen years old, I wanted heroes, and they treated me beautifully. They accepted me. I still know practically everyone in the field, at least from the old days. I love them all. Robert Heinlein was my teacher, when I was nineteen… but you can’t stay with that sort of thing, a family has to grow. Just as you let your children out into the world – I have four daughters – you don’t say, ‘Here is the boundary, you can’t go out there.’ So at the age of nineteen I began to grow. By the time I was twenty I was moving into little theater groups and I was beginning to experiment with other fictional forms. I still kept up my contacts with the science-fiction groups, but I mustn’t stay in just that.
“When I was around twenty-four, I was trying to sell stories to Colliers and Harper’s and The Atlantic, and I wanted to be in The Best American Short Stories. But it wasn’t happening. I had a friend who knew a psychiatrist. I said, ‘Can I borrow your psychiatrist for an afternoon?’ One hour cost twenty dollars! That was my salary for the whole week, to go to this guy for an hour. So I went to him and he said, ‘Mr. Bradbury, what’s your problem?’ And I said, ‘Well, hell, nothing’s happening.’ So he said, ‘What do you want to happen?’ And I said, ‘Well, gee, I want to be the greatest writer that ever lived.’ And he said, “That’s going to take a little time, then, isn’t it?’ He said, ‘Do you ever read the encyclopedia? Go down to the library and read the lives of Balzac and Du Maupassant and Dickens and Tolstoy, and see how long it took them to become what they became.’ So I went and read and discovered that they had to wait, too. And a year later I began to sell to the American Mercury, and Collier’s, and I appeared in The Best American Short Stories when I was twenty-six. I still wasn’t making any money, but I was getting the recognition that I wanted, the love that I wanted from people I looked up to. The intellectual elite in America was beginning to say, “Hey, you’re okay, you’re all right, and you’re going to make it.’ And then my girlfriend Maggie told me the same thing. And then it didn’t matter whether the people around me sneered at me. I was willing to wait.”
In fact, Bradbury must have received wider critical recognition, during the late 1950s and into the 1960s, than any other science-fiction author. His work used very little technical jargon, which made it easy for “outsiders” to digest, and he acquired a reputation as a stylist, if only because so few science-fiction authors at that time showed any awareness of style at all.
Within the science-fiction field, however, Bradbury has never received as much acclaim, measured (for example) by Hugo or Nebula awards. Doe this irk him?
“That’s a very dangerous thing to talk about.” He pauses. Up till this moment, he has talked readily, with absolute confidence. Now, he seems ill-at-ease. “I left the family, you see. And that’s a danger… to them. Because, they haven’t got out of the house. It’s like when your older brother leaves home suddenly – how dare he leave me, hah? My hero, that I depended on to protect me. There’s some of that feeling. I don’t know how to describe it. But once you’re out and you look back and they’ve got their noses pressed against the glass, you want to say, ‘Hey, come on, it’s not that hard, come on out.’ But each of us has a different capacity for foolhardiness at a certain time. It takes a certain amount of – it’s not bravery – it’s experimentation. Because I’m really, basically, a coward. I’m afraid of heights, I don’t fly, I don’t drive. So you see I can’t really claim to be a brave person. But the part of me that’s a writer wanted to experiment out in the bigger world, and I couldn’t help myself, I just had to go out there.
“I knew that I had to write a certain way, and take my chances. I sold newspapers on a street comer, for three or four years, from the time I was nineteen till I was twenty-two or twenty-three years old. I made ten dollars a week at it, which was nothing, and meant that I couldn’t take girls out and give them a halfway decent evening. I could give them a ten-cent malted milk and a cheap movie, and then walk them home. We couldn’t take the bus, there was no money left. But, again, this was no virtuous selection on my part. It was pure instinct. I knew exactly how to keep myself well.
“I began to write for Weird Tales in my early twenties, sold my short stories there, got twenty or thirty dollars apiece for them. You know everything that’s in The Martian Chronicles, except two stories, sold for forty, fifty dollars apiece, originally.
“I met Maggie when I was twenty-five. She worked in a bookstore in downtown Los Angeles, and her views were so much like mine – she was interested in books, in language, in literature – and she wasn’t interested in having a rich boyfriend; which was great, because I wasn’t! We got married two years later and in thirty-two years of marriage we have had only one problem with money. One incident, with a play. The rest of the time we have never discussed it. We knew we didn’t have any money in the bank, so why discuss something you don’t have, hah? We lived in Venice, California, our little apartment, thirty dollars a month, for a couple of years, and our first children came along, which terrified us because we had no money, and then God began to provide. As soon as the first child arrived my income went up from fifty dollars a week to ninety dollars a week. By the time I was thirty-three I was making $110 a week. And then John Huston came along, and gave me Moby Dick [the film for which Bradbury wrote the screenplay] and my income went up precipitously in one year – and then went back down the next year, because I chose not to do any more screenplays for three years after that, it was a conscious choice and an intuitive one, to write more books and establish a reputation. Because, as I said earlier, no one remembers who wrote Moby Dick for the screen.
“Los Angeles has been great for me, because it was a collision of Hollywood – motion pictures – and the birthing of certain technologies. I’ve been madly in love with film since I was three years old. I’m not a pure science-fiction writer, I’m a film maniac at heart, and it infests all of my work. Many of my short stories can be shot right off the page. When I first met Sam Peckinpah, eight or nine years ago, and we started a friendship, and he wanted to do Something Wicked This Way Comes, I said, ‘How are you going to do it?’ And he said, ‘I’m going to rip the pages out of your book and stuff them in the camera.’ He was absolutely correct. Since I’m a bastard son of Erich von Stroheim out of Lon Chaney – a child of the cinema – hah! – it’s only natural that almost all of my work is photogenic.”
Is he happy with the way his stories have been made into movies?
“I was happy with Fahrenheit 451: I think it’s a beautiful film, with a gorgeous ending. A great ending by Truffaut. The Illustrated Man I detested; a horrible film. I now have the rights back, and we’ll do it over again, some time, in the next few years. Moby Dick – I’m immensely moved by it. I’m very happy with it. I see things I could do now, twenty-five years later, that I understand better, about Shakespeare and the Bible – who, after all, instructed Melville at his activities. Without the Bible and Shakespeare, Moby Dick would never have been born. Nevertheless, with all the flaws, and with the problem of Gregory Peck not being quite right as Ahab – I wanted someone like Olivier; it would have been fantastic to see Olivier – all that to one side, I’m still very pleased.”
In the past few years Bradbury has turned increasingly toward writing poetry as opposed to short stories. Not all of this poetry has been well-received. I ask him if he suffers from that most irritating criticism – people telling him that his early work was better.
“Oh, yes, and they’re – they’re wrong, of course. Steinbeck had to put up with that. I remember hearing him say this. And it’s nonsense. I’m doing work in my poems, now, that I could never have done thirty years ago. And I’m very proud. Some of the poems that have popped out of my head in the last two years are incredible. I don’t know where in hell they come from, but – good God, they’re good! I have written at least three poems that are going to be around seventy years, a hundred years from now. Just three poems, you say? But the reputation of most of the great poets are based on only one or two poems. I mean, when you think of Yeats, you think of Sailing to Byzantium, and then I defy you, unless you’re a Yeats fiend, to name six other poems.
“To be able to write one poem in a lifetime, that you feel is so good it’s going to be around for a while… and I’ve done that, damn it, I’ve done it – at least three poems – and a lot of short stories. I did a short story a year ago called Gotcha, that is, damn it, boy, that’s good. It’s terrifying! I read it and I say, oh, yes, that’s good. Another thing, called The Burning Man, which I did two years ago … and then some of my new plays, the new Fahrenheit 451, a totally original new play based on what my characters are giving me, at the typewriter. I’m not in control of them. They’re living their lives all over again, twenty-nine years later, and they’re saying good stuff. So long as I can keep the channels open between my subconscious and my outer self, it’s going to stay good.
“I don’t know how I do anything that I do, in poetry. Again, it’s instinctive, from years and years and years of reading Shakespeare, and Pope – I’m a great admirer of Pope – and Dylan Thomas, I don’t know what in hell he’s saying, a lot of times, but God it sounds good, Jesus, it rings, doesn’t it, hah? It’s as clear as crystal. And then you look closely and you say, it’s crystal – but I don’t know how it’s cut. But you don’t care. Again, it’s unconscious, for me. People come up and say. Oh, you did an Alexandrian couplet here. And I say, Oh, did I? I was so dumb, I thought an Alexandrian couplet had to do with Alexander Pope!
“But from reading poetry every day of your life, you pick up rhythms, you pick up beats, you pick up inner rhymes. And then, some day in your forty-fifth year, your subconscious brings you a surprise. You finally do something decent. But it took me thirty, thirty-five years of writing, before I wrote one poem that I liked.”
There is no denying this man’s energy and his enthusiasm. It’s so directly expressed, and so guileless, it makes him a likeable and charming man regardless of whether you identify with his outlook or share his opinions. He projects a mixture of innocence and sincerity; he looks at you directly as he speaks, as if trying to win you over and catalyze you into sharing his enthusiasm. He is a tanned, handsome figure, with white hair and. often, white or light-colored clothing; the first time I ever saw him, at a science-fiction convention, he seemed almost regal, standing in his white suit, surrounded by a mass of scruffy adolescent fans in dowdy T-shirts and jeans. Yet he seemed to empathize with them; despite his healthy ego he is not condescending toward his younger admirers, perhaps because he still feels (and looks) so young at heart himself. In a way he is forever living the fantasies he writes, about the nostalgic moments of childhood. He has a child’s sense of wonder and naive, idealistic spirit, as he goes around marveling at the world. He has not become jaded or disillusioned either about science fiction or about its most central subject matter, travel into space.
“We have had this remarkable thing occurring during the last ten years, when the children of the world began to educate the teachers, and said, ‘Here is science fiction, read it’; and they read it and they said, ‘Hey, it’s not bad,’ and began to teach it. Only in the last seven or eight years has science fiction gotten respectable.
“Orwell’s 1984 came out thirty years ago this summer. Not a mention of space travel in it, as an alternative to Big Brother, a way to get away from him. That proves how myopic the intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s were about the future. They didn’t want to see something as exciting and as soul-opening and as revelatory as space travel. Because we can escape, we can escape, and escape is very important, very tonic, for the human spirit. We escaped Europe 400 years ago and it was all to the good, and then from what we learned, by escaping, we could come back and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to refresh you, we got our revolution, now maybe we can all revolt together against certain things.’ My point is that intellectual snobbishness permeated everything, including all the novels, except in science fiction. It’s only in the last ten years we can look back and say, ‘Oh, my God, we really were beat up all the time by these people, and it’s a miracle we survived.’“
But, I suggest, a lot of the mythic quality of space travel has been lost, now that NASA has made it an everyday reality.
“I believe that any great activity finally bores a lot of people,” he replies, “and it’s up to us ‘romantics’ – hmm?” (he makes it clear, he still dislikes the term) “to continue the endeavor. Because my enthusiasm remains constant. From the time I saw my first space covers on Science and Invention, or Wonder Stories, when I was eight or nine years old – that stuff is still in me. Carl Sagan, a friend of mine, he’s a ‘romantic,’ he loves Edgar Rice Burroughs – I know, he’s told me. And Bruce Murray, who’s another friend of mine, who’s become president of Jet Propulsion Laboratories – first time I’ve ever known someone who became president of anything! – and he’s a human being, that’s the first thing, and he happens, second, to be the president of a large company that’s sending our rockets out to Jupiter and Mars. I don’t think it’s been demystified. I think a lot of people were not mystified to begin with, and that’s a shame.”
Is Bradbury happy with the growth of science fiction? Does he like modem commercial exploitation of the genre – as in movies like Star Wars?
“Star Wars – idiotic but beautiful, a gorgeously dumb movie. Like being in love with a really stupid woman.” He gives a shout of laughter, delighted by the metaphor. “But you can’t keep your hands off her, that’s what Star Wars is. And then Close Encounters comes along, and it’s got a brain, so you get to go to bed with a beautiful film. And then something like Alien comes along, and it’s a horror film in outer space, and it has a gorgeous look to it, a gorgeous look. So wherever we can get help we take it, but the dream remains the same: survival in space and moving on out, and caring about the whole history of the human race, with all our stupidities, all the dumb things that we are, the idiotic creatures, fragile, broken creatures. I try to accept that; I say, okay, we are also the ghosts of Shakespeare, Plato, Euripedes and Aristotle, Machiavelli and Da Vinci, and a lot of amazing people who cared enough to try and help us. Those are the things that give me hope in the midst of stupidity. So what we are going to try and do is move on out to the moon, get on out to Mars, move on out to Alpha Centauri, and we’ll do it in the next 500 years, which is a very short period of time; maybe even sooner, in 200 years. And then, survive forever, that is the great thing. Oh, God, I would love to come back every 100 years and watch us.
“So there it is, there’s the essence of optimism – that I believe we’ll make it, and we’ll be proud, and we’ll still be stupid and make all the dumb mistakes, and part of the time we’ll hate ourselves; but then the rest of the time we’ll celebrate.”
(Los Angeles, May 1979)
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Ray Bradbury is probably best known for The Martian Chronicles (1950), his enduring collection of stories which use off-the-shelf science-fiction hardware (rocket ships, the planet Mars colonized by man), but explore these ideas in a spirit of fantasy as opposed to predictive reality. Bradbury’s vision of the ‘lost race’ of Martians was powerful enough to eclipse all others and become a tradition, followed in many subsequent science-fiction novels by other writers.
The Illustrated Man (1951) presents fantasy and horror stories linked by the slightly artificial device of embodying key scenes in tattoos on the body of a man who has supposedly journeyed through the various events. Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is a novel depicting a repressive future where all books must be burned, and firemen start the fires rather than put them out. The October Country (1955) is a collection of fantasy and macabre stories. Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) is a novel depicting a peaceful, innocent small town, visited by a sinister carnival which brings pure evil.
Bradbury’s recent poetry, much of it dealing with science-fiction themes, appears in a couple of recent collections.
“Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.” – Norbert Wiener
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In the summer of 2020, I read a book.
Actually, in 2020 I read several books, and I’m reading a book right now, in 2021: Judgement Night, by Catherine L. Moore. But of last year’s reading, two works – read back to back – have particularly stood out for me: S. Ansky’s (pen name of Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport) The Enemy At His Pleasure, and, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
A central theme of both – viewed from a very distant literary vantage point! – is the sudden and unanticipated transformation of a culture, society, and nation through the development and impact of forces within and without. While in practically ever significant respect the books are vastly dissimilar (not even considering the central fact that Ansky’s is non-fiction and Bradbury’s not) a commonality of their writings is the reaction of people – people as individuals; people collectively – to overwhelming, unexpected, and traumatic social change.
In retrospect, coincidentally or not, how very strange that having read in The Enemy At His Pleasure in April, I finished Bradbury’s novel on a Friday in the latter part of May: While seated in a quiet, shaded garden adjacent to a public library in a (for the time being…) peaceful suburb (was it only a few brief months ago that public libraries maintained full operating hours?) – considering the events would soon follow in the United States, and even beyond in the still-atrophying “West”, shortly thereafter.
Regardless of how the events of 2020 are viewed “now”, I think that future historians – that is, assuming history even survives as an intellectual discipline in the future – will come to understand the events of the past year (primarily in the United States, and secondarily in parts of Western Europe) as having been a kind of antinomian religious frenzy. This strikingly parallels the millenarian social unrest that persisted in central and western Europe from the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries. But, rather than ostensible (and really, superficial) concerns about “social justice”, the events of 2020 were at heart a reflection of obsessions about the potential loss of social status by a secular (and comfortably insular in that secularity), credentialed, technocratic, entitled, and ultimately quite venal elite.
Or more accurately, “elite”.
Oh, back to the novel at hand…
And while the power and depth of Bradbury’s novel were well forceful enough on their own in literary, emotional, and intellectual terms, the intersection of these qualities with the impact of events in “outside world” – the “real” world – only intensified the validity and force of the book’s message. Or, messages, of which there were several.
And so… This also gave me an appreciation for the quality of Ray Bradbury’s writing, for despite having long been a devotee of science fiction (specifically that of Cordwainer Smith and A.E. van Vogt and Philip K. Dick and Catherine L. Moore and Cyril Kornbluth and Dan Simmons and Poul Anderson; Isaac Asimov not so much and really not at all), this was actually the first time I’d read any of Bradbury’s novels. (Well, I guess people change.) The very antithesis of a “hard SF” writer – though technological conjecture and extrapolation are nonetheless central to his stories – I found that Bradbury excelled in the description of emotion and thought; actions and event; communication and conflict, with a richness of language born of an uncanny (well, sometimes overdone, but it works) use of metaphor and similie.
And, so… In much that same way that my posts combine scans a book or magazine’s cover (and frequently interior) art with excerpts from those publications, this post revisits my earlier post about Fahrenheit 451, which displays the cover art of the book’s first American paperback edition, by displaying the cover of the book’s Del Rey / Ballantine Book edition of April, 1991. As you can see, the central component of Joseph Mugnaini’s art – a “Fireman”, whose fireproof suit is actually made from the torn newspaper pages is wreathed in flames – has been retained from the 1953 edition, but otherwise, the cover is simplified: The Fireman appears in black & white, and there is no background. That’s all there is. For reasons of literary and cultural familiarity, I suppose this was enough.
And… In much the same way that some of my posts – at least, those for the genre of science fiction! – include images of both a book’s cover, and, the cover art of the magazine in which said book was first serialized, this post features images of Fahrenheit 451’s first appearance: The February, 1951, issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Bradbury’s novel, illustrated by Karl Rogers, occupies half the magazine’s length (pages 4 through 61), the other stories being “…And It Comes Out Here” by Lester Del Rey, “The Protector” by Betsy Curtis, “Second Childhood” by Clifford D. Simak, “Two Weeks in August” by Frank M. Robinson, and the second installment of Isaac Asimov’s “Tyrann”.
And… This is an instance most interesting and not uncommon, where the magazine’s cover art has absolutely no relation to the stories within. Entitled “The Tying Down of a Spaceship on Mars in a Desert Sandstorm,” the time-frame (early 50s) subject matter and vivid softness of the colors make the painting easily recognizable as a work of Chesley Bonestell,
And yet… Even as I read Fahrenheit 451, I couldn’t help but notice the way that the world constructed by Ray Bradbury – either through prescience, chance, or an uncanny combination of both – has captured our world: The world of the recent past; the world that exists now, in 2020; the world that seems to await us, even as this second decade of the twenty-first century is shortly drawing to a close. So, I’m presenting excerpts of some (hard to chose!) of the novel’s most crisply and vividly crafted passages, juxtaposed with contemporary symbols that most uncannily match and embody the events, scenes, and characters depicted in these very passages.
Among these excerpts are some videos and book over art that reflect the mood and message of Fahrenheit 451.
The post closes with by Yann Tiersen’s melody “Comptine d’un autre été – “Rhyme for Another Summer”, from the sound-track for trailer of 2001’s Amélie, at Rousseau’s YouTube channel. I chose this because it’s the background theme for the short video, “This Is Our World – I Am Speechless“, in the “middle” of this post.
I wish that Ray Bradbury were with us now, to “illustrate” (pardon the pun!) by words the world we now inhabit. But, he is not. He died in 2012, only eight years by the measure of time, but another world by the measure of technology.
“We have a good deal of experience as to how the industrialists regard a new industrial potential. Their whole propaganda is to the effect that it must not be considered as the business of the government but must be left open to whatever entrepreneurs wish to invest money in it.”
In the myths and fairy tales that we read as children we learned a few of the simpler and more obvious truths of life, such as that when a djinnee is found in a bottle, it had better be left there; that the fisherman who craves a boon from heaven too many times on behalf of his wife will end up exactly where he started; that if you are given three wishes, you must be very careful what you wish for. These simple and obvious truths represent the childish equivalent of the tragic view of life which the Greeks and many modern Europeans possess, and which is somehow missing in this land of plenty.
“Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.”
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We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?
It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time…
For another of those impossible instants the city stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped or strived to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in gouts of shattered concrete and sparkles of torn metal into a mural hung like a reversed avalanche, a million colors, a million oddities, a door where a window should be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell down dead.
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His wife said, “What are you doing?”
He balanced in space with the book in his sweating cold fingers.
A minute later she said, “Well, just don’t stand there in the middle of the floor.”
He made a small sound.
“What?” she asked.
He made more soft sounds. He stumbled towards the bed and shoved the book clumsily under the cold pillow. He fell into bed and his wife cried out, startled. He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend’s house, a two-year-old child building word patterns, talking jargon, making pretty sounds in the air. But Montag said nothing and after a long while when he only made the small sounds, he felt her move in the room and come to his bed and stand over him and put her hand down to feel his cheek. He knew that when she pulled her hand away from his face it was wet. (41)
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And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn’t cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman, while the hungry snake made her still more empty. (44)
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A great thunderstorm of sound gushed from the walls. Music bombarded him at such an immense volume that his bones were almost shaken from their tendons; he felt his jaw vibrate, his eyes wobble in his head. He was a victim of concussion. When it was all over he felt like a man who had been thrown from a cliff, whirled in a centrifuge and spat out over a waterfall that fell and fell into emptiness and emptiness and never-quite-touched-bottom-never-never-quite-no not quite-touched-bottom … and you fell so fast you didn’t touch the sides either … never … quite … touched … anything.
The thunder faded. The music died.
“There,” said Mildred,
And it was indeed remarkable. Something had happened. Even though the people in the walls of the room had barely moved, and nothing had really been settled, you had the impression that someone had turned on a washing-machine or sucked you up in a gigantic vacuum. You drowned in music and pure cacophony. He came out of the room sweating and on the point of collapse. Behind him, Mildred sat in her chair and the voices went on again: (45)
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He had chills and fever in the morning.
“You can’t be sick,” said Mildred.
He closed his eyes over the hotness. “Yes.”
“But you were all right last night.”
“No, I wasn’t all right.” He heard the “relatives” shouting in the parlor.
Mildred stood over his bed, curiously. He felt her there, he saw her without opening his eyes, her hair burnt by chemicals to a brittle straw, her eyes with a kind of cataract unseen but suspect far behind the pupils, the reddened pouting lips, the body as thin as a praying mantis from dieting, and her flesh like white bacon. He could remember her no other way. (48)
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“No, not water; fire. You ever seen a burned house? It smoulders for days. Well, this fire’ll last me the rest of my life. God! I’ve been trying to put it out, in my mind, all night. I’m crazy with trying.”
“You should have thought of that before becoming a fireman.”
“Thought!” he said. “Was I given a choice? My grandfather and father were firemen. In my sleep, I ran after them.”
The parlor was playing a dance tune.
“This is the day you go on the early shift,” said Mildred. “You should have gone two hours ago. I just noticed.”
“It’s not just the woman that died,” said Montag. “Last night I thought about all the kerosene I’ve used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I’d never even thought that thought before.” He got out of bed. (51)
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And then he shut up, for he remembered last week and the two white stones staring up at the ceiling and the pump-snake with the probing eye and the two soap-faced men with the cigarettes moving in their mouths when they talked. But that was another Mildred, that was a Mildred so deep inside this one, and so bothered, really bothered, that the two women had never met. He turned away. (52)
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“Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click,
Pic,
Look,
Eye,
Now,
Flick,
Here,
There,
Swift,
Pace,
Up,
Down,
In,
Out,
Why,
How,
Who,
What,
Where, Eh?
Uh!
Bang!
Smack!
Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!” (55)
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“There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down.
There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!
Technology, mass exploitation,
and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.
Today, thanks to them,
you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.”
“Yes, but what about the firemen, then?” asked Montag.
“Ah.” Beatty leaned forward in the faint mist of smoke from his pipe. “What more easily explained and natural? With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word `intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright,’ did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn’t it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike.
Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says,
but everyone made equal.
Each man the image of every other;
then all are happy,
for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.
So!
A book is a loaded gun in the house next door.
Burn it.
Take the shot from the weapon.
Breach man’s mind.
Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won’t stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. That’s you, Montag, and that’s me.” (58)
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(Art by Ed Lindlof, for cover of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death – Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1986 Penguin Edition)
Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely `brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won’t be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I’ve tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your dare-devils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I’ll think I’m responding to the play, when it’s only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don’t care. I just like solid entertainment.” (61)
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“This Is Our World – I Am Speechless” (creator unknown)
“THESE SYSTEMS ARE FAILING”
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Across the street and down the way the other houses stood with their flat fronts. What was it Clarisse had said one afternoon? “No front porches. My uncle says there used to be front porches. And people sat there sometimes at night, talking when they wanted to talk, rocking, and not talking when they didn’t want to talk. Sometimes they just sat there and thought about things, turned things over. My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn’t look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think. So they ran off with the porches. And the gardens, too. Not many gardens any more to sit around in. And look at the furniture. No rocking chairs any more. They’re too comfortable. Get people up and running around. My uncle says … and … my uncle … and … my uncle …” Her voice faded. (63)
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The bombers crossed the sky and crossed the sky over the house, gasping, murmuring, whistling like an immense, invisible fan, circling in emptiness.
“Jesus God,” said Montag. “Every hour so many damn things in the sky! How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn’t someone want to talk about it? We’ve started and won two atomic wars since 1960. Is it because we’re having so much fun at home we’ve forgotten the world? Is it because we’re so rich and the rest of the world’s so poor and we just don’t care if they are? I’ve heard rumors; the world is starving, but we’re well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we’re hated so much? I’ve heard the rumors about hate, too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don’t, that’s sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes! I don’t hear those idiot bastards in your parlor talking about it. God, Millie, don’t you see? An hour a day, two hours, with these books, and maybe…” (73)
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He could hear Beatty’s voice. “Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page from the second and so on, chain smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the second-hand notions and time-worn philosophies.” There sat Beatty, perspiring gently, the floor littered with swarms of black moths that had died in a single storm. (75-76)
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The people who had been sitting a moment before, tapping their feet to the rhythm of Denham’s Dentifrice, Denham’s Dandy Dental Detergent, Denham’s Dentifrice Dentifrice Dentifrice, one two, one two three, one two, one two three. The people whose mouths had been faintly twitching the words Dentifrice Dentifrice Dentifrice. The train radio vomited upon Montag, in retaliation, a great ton-load of music made of tin, copper, silver, chromium, and brass. The people were pounded into submission; they did not run, there was no place to run; the great air-train fell down its shaft in the earth. (79)
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“It looks like a Seashell radio.”
“And something more! It listens! If you put it in your ear, Montag, I can sit comfortably home, warming my frightened bones, and hear and analyze the firemen’s world, find its weaknesses, without danger. I’m the Queen Bee, safe in the hive. You will be the drone, the travelling ear. Eventually, I could put out ears into all parts of the city, with various men, listening and evaluating. If the drones die, I’m still safe at home, tending my fright with a maximum of comfort and a minimum of chance. See how safe I play it, how contemptible I am?” (90)
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They were like a monstrous crystal chandelier tinkling in a thousand chimes, he saw their Cheshire Cat smiles burning through the walls of the house, and now they were screaming at each other above the din. Montag found himself at the parlor door with his food still in his mouth. (93)
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Montag said nothing but stood looking at the women’s faces as he had once looked at the faces of saints in a strange church he had entered when he was a child. The faces of those enameled creatures meant nothing to him, though he talked to them and stood in that church for a long time, trying to be of that religion, trying to know what that religion was, trying to get enough of the raw incense and special dust of the place into his lungs and thus into his blood to feel touched and concerned by the meaning of the colorful men and women with the porcelain eyes and the blood-ruby lips. But there was nothing, nothing; it was a stroll through another store, and his currency strange and unusable there, and his passion cold, even when he touched the wood and plaster and clay. So it was now, in his own parlor, with these women twisting in their chairs under his gaze, lighting cigarettes, blowing smoke, touching their sun-fired hair and examining their blazing fingernails as if they had caught fire from his look. Their faces grew haunted with silence. They leaned forward at the sound of Montag’s swallowing his final bite of food. They listened to his feverish breathing. The three empty walls of the room were like the pale brows of sleeping giants now, empty of dreams. Montag felt that if you touched these three staring brows you would feel a fine salt sweat on your finger-tips. The perspiration gathered with the silence and the sub-audible trembling around and about and in the women who were burning with tension. Any moment they might hiss a long sputtering hiss and explode. (95)
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The room was blazing hot, he was all fire, he was all coldness; they sat in the middle of an empty desert with three chairs and him standing, swaying, and him waiting for Mrs. Phelps to stop straightening her dress hem and Mrs. Bowles to take her fingers away from her hair. Then he began to read in a low, stumbling voice that grew firmer as he progressed from line to line, and his voice went out across the desert, into the whiteness, and around the three sitting women there in the great hot emptiness: (99)
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His fingers were like ferrets that had done some evil and now never rested, always stirred and picked and hid in pockets, moving from under Beatty’s alcohol-flame stare. If Beatty so much as breathed on them, Montag felt that his hands might wither, turn over on their sides, and never be shocked to life again; they would be buried the rest of his life in his coat-sleeves, forgotten. For these were the hands that had acted on their own, no part of him, here was where the conscience first manifested itself to snatch books, dart off with job and Ruth and Willie Shakespeare, and now, in the firehouse, these hands seemed gloved with blood. (105)
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There was a crash like the falling parts of a dream fashioned out of warped glass, mirrors, and crystal prisms. Montag drifted about as if still another incomprehensible storm had turned him, to see Stoneman and Black wielding axes, shattering window-panes to provide cross-ventilation. (114)
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Nowhere. There was nowhere to go, no friend to turn to, really. Except Faber. And then he realized that he was indeed, running toward Faber’s house, instinctively. But Faber couldn’t hide him; it would be suicide even to try. But he knew that he would go to see Faber anyway, for a few short minutes. Faber’s would be the place where he might refuel his fast draining belief in his own ability to survive. He just wanted to know that there was a man like Faber in the world. He wanted to see the man alive and not burned back there like a body shelled in another body. And some of the money must be left with Faber, of course, to be spent after Montag ran on his way. Perhaps he could make the open country and live on or near the rivers and near the highways, in the fields and hills.
A great whirling whisper made him look to the sky.
The police helicopters were rising so far away that it seemed someone had blown the grey head off a dry dandelion flower. Two dozen of them flurried, wavering, indecisive, three miles off, like butterflies puzzled by autumn, and then they were plummeting down to land, one by one, here, there, softly kneading the streets where, turned back to beetles, they shrieked along the boulevards or, as suddenly, leapt back into the sir, continuing their search. (125)
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There it lay, a game for him to win, a vast bowling alley in the cool morning. The boulevard was as clean as the surface of an arena two minutes before the appearance of certain unnamed victims and certain unknown killers. The air over and above the vast concrete river trembled with the warmth of Montag’s body alone; it was incredible how he felt his temperature could cause the whole immediate world to vibrate. He was a phosphorescent target; he knew it, he felt it. And now he must begin his little walk. (126)
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He was three hundred yards downstream when the Hound reached the river. Overhead the great racketing fans of the helicopters hovered. A storm of light fell upon the river and Montag dived under the great illumination as if the sun had broken the clouds. He felt the river pull him further on its way, into darkness. Then the lights switched back to the land, the helicopters swerved over the city again, as if they had picked up another trail. They were gone. The Hound was gone. Now there was only the cold river and Montag floating in a sudden peacefulness, away from the city and the lights and the chase, away from everything.
He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts. He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.
The black land slid by and he was going into the country among the hills: For the first time in a dozen years the stars were coming out above him, in great processions of wheeling fire. He saw a great juggernaut of stars form in the sky and threaten to roll over and crush him.
He floated on his back when the valise filled and sank; the river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper. The river was very real; it held him comfortably and gave him the time at last, the leisure, to consider this month, this year, and a lifetime of years. He listened to his heart slow. His thoughts stopped rushing with his blood. (140)
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(Art by Guy Billout, for cover of Thedore Roszak’s The Cult of Information – The Folklore of Computers And the True Art of Thinking, 1986 Pantheon Books Edition)
“Listen,” said Granger, taking his arm, and walking with him, holding aside the bushes to let him pass. “When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”
***
Granger stood looking back with Montag. “Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.” (156-157)
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The concussion knocked the air across and down the river, turned the men over like dominoes in a line, blew the water in lifting sprays, and blew the dust and made the trees above them mourn with a great wind passing away south. Montag crushed himself down, squeezing himself small, eyes tight. He blinked once. And in that instant saw the city, instead of the bombs, in the air. They had displaced each other.
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Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen) and Lt. “Doc” Ostrow (Warren Stevens), commander and medical officer of Starship C-57D, in Forbidden Planet (1956)
Adams: So you took the brain boost, huh?
Ostrow: You ought’a see my new mind. It’s up there in lights. Bigger than his now.
C’mon, easy, doc!
Morbius, was too close to the problem. The Krell had completed their project. Big machine. No instrumentalities. True creation!
C’mon doc, let’s have it.
But the Krell forgot one thing!
Yes, what?!
Monsters, John. Monsters from the id!
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For another of those impossible instants the city stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped or strived to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in gouts of shattered concrete and sparkles of torn metal into a mural hung like a reversed avalanche, a million colors, a million oddities, a door where a window should be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell down dead. (160)
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And so, we return to where we began: summer’s end.
Whatever the truth of the hackneyed expression “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, imitation most definitely characterizes other aspects of life: Ways of thought; similarities in the “mood” of an age, whether that mood be artistic and intellectual; technological or theatrical; parallels in language and speech. And especially, similarities in literature.
In the literature of science fiction, a striking similarity occurred from the 1970s through the 1990s, in the form of anthologies issued by two different publishing houses: Donald A. Wollheim Books, and, Ballantine Books.
Wollheim Books (for short!) took the approach, under the dual aegis of Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg, of publishing a series entitled “Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories,” from 1939 through 1963. Each book in the series – the sequential number of each volume appearing as part of its very tile – was devoted to short stories and novellas published during each successive calendar year over that twenty-five year time-frame. In effect (I don’t know about intent!) the Wollheim approach resulted in a not-so-indirect eye upon the literary and cultural development of science fiction, as it moved from the semi-eyebrows-raised / not-necessarily-in-polite-company / harrumph! periphery of culturally acceptable literature to (well, by 1963) its increasing and open acceptance by the general public. And even; and eventually, beyond.
From 1974 through 1995, that company published its own set of anthologies, under the series title “Ballantine’s Classic Library of Science Fiction”, albeit the “header” on the cover page of each book simply used the verbiage (in rather small font, at that) “Classic Science Fiction”. Rather than approach the genre on a year-by-year, stylistic, or topical basis, Ballantine chose to allocate each of its books to the stories of one author only, eventually resulting in anthologies of the works of 22 writers. Most volumes included about sixteen stories, with a “low” of 11 for the works of Catherine L. Moore and Hal Clement, all the way up to 31 (!) for Fredric Brown. Given that the books were generally of the same length – from 350 to 400 pages – these “story counts” were an indirect reflection of the authors’ writing styles. Some writers preferred to pack a “punch” into relatively few(er) pages, while for others – like the extraordinarily talented Catherine Moore or the uncannily imaginative Cordwainer Smith, both of whose creativity equaled their originality (or was it the other way around?) – the power of a tale remained undiminished throughout the entirety of its text.
Unlike the approach of Wollheim, with Asimov and Greenberg being dual editors / commentators for every volume of the “Isaac Asimov Presents…” series, Ballantine presented their books’ contents in a way that was ultimately far more expressive, creative, and therefore less rote. Regardless of whether each book’s stories were selected by the actual author of the stories within it (some authors, like John W. Campbell, Jr., and Cyril Kornbluth having passed away years before), each volume included an introduction and overview by an already-established author of science fiction, who approached the subject author’s collected work from vantages literary, cultural, and especially biographical. In some books, every story is prefaced by a brief but substantive blurb about the literary origins or cultural context of the tale, while other books (like that devoted to stories by Henry Kuttner – check it out below…) are bereft of any “intros” at all. In at least one book, that devoted to the wonderful tales of the aforementioned Cordwainer Smith (Paul M. Linebarger), the introduction is preceded by a diagram of the timeline of the “universe” created by the author, a touch utterly unlike the Wollheim series.
Having read every book in the Wollheim series, and some of the Ballantine series, I think that Ballantine’s approach was better. Though the commentary by Asimov and Greenberg was – welllll, I’ll be charitable – en-ter-tain-ing as it were – the presence of introduction and commentary by different, recognized writers, each with their own perspective, writing style, and “world-view”, lent to the Ballantine volumes a deeper, more solid, and substantive literary and historical “heft” – by far – than the Wollheim series. Within the latter, Asimov’s and Greenberg’s lightly humorous introductions and comments became – as you moved through the series – as predictable as they were empty. (Entirely consistent with the shallowness of most of Asimov’s fiction. But, that’s another topic…)
As for the cover art of the Ballantine series? That, too, took a different approach from the Wollheim series. For every book in the Ballantine series, the cover art occupied the entirety of the cover. For the Wollheim series, the books started with “full” cover art, switched to small illustrations set within a solid color background, and for the last eleven books in the series, returned to full cover art.
So…
Like the post about the Wollheim series, “this” post summarizes the publishing history of the Ballantine series, all titles of which, arranged alphabetically by author’s surname, are listed below. After the title, you’ll see the name of the introductory author, date of publication, name of cover artist, cover price, Ballantine or Del Rey-Ballantine book serial number, and ISBN. Whew. (Those books for which I’ve already created posts are linked, as well.)
Here they are:
The Best of James Blish, Robert A.W. Lowndes, August, 1979 (H.R. Van Dongen), $1.95, 25600 / 0-345-25600-X
The Best of Robert Bloch, Lester Del Rey, November, 1977 (Paul Alexander), $1.95, 25757 / 0-345-25757-X
The Best of Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton, September, 1977 (Boris Vallejo), $1.95, 25954 / 0-345-25954-8 (Republished June, 1986 (Boris Vallejo), $3.95, 33247 / 0-345-33247-4)
The Best of Fredric Brown, Robert Bloch, May, 1977 (H.R. Van Dongen), $1.95, 25700 / 0-345-25700-6
The Best of John Brunner, Joe Haldeman, November, 1988 (Barclay Shaw), $3.95, 35307 / 0-345-35307-2
The Best of John W. Campbell, Jr., Lester Del Rey, June, 1976 (H.R. Van Dongen), $1.95, 24960 / 0-345-24960-7 (Republished February, 1995 (H.R. Van Dongen) $5.99, 24960 / 0-345-24960-7)
The Best of Hal Clement, Lester Del Rey, June, 1979 (H.R. Van Dongen), $1.95, 27689 / 0-345-27689-2
The Best of L. Sprague de Camp, May, 1978 (Darrell Sweet), $1.95, 24574 / 0-345-25474-0
The Best of Philip K. Dick, John Brunner, March, 1977 (Vincent Di Fate), $1.95, 25359 / 0-345-25359-0 (Republished March, 1978 (Vincent Di Fate), $1.95, 25359 / 0-345-25359-0)
The Best of Raymond Z. Gallun, J.J. Pierce, August, 1978 (H.R. Van Dongen), $1.95, 25273 / 0-345-25273-X
The Best of Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, August, 1977 (H.R. Van Dongen), $1.95, 25900 / 0-345-25900-9
The Best of Henry Kuttner (this post!), Ray Bradbury, April, 1975 (Dean Ellis), $1.95, 24415 / 0-345-24415-X
The Best of Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, September, 1979 (Michael Herring), $2.25, 28351 / 0-345-28351-1
The Best of Murray Leinster, J.J. Pierce, April, 1978 (H.R. Van Dongen), $1.95, 25800 / 0-345-25800-2
The Best of C.L. Moore, Lester Del Rey, March, 1976 (Tim and Greg Hildebrandt), $1.95, 24752 / 0-345-24752-3 (Republished, December, 1980, $2.25, 28952 / 0-345-28952-8, and… January, 1981, $2.25, 28952 / 0-345-28952-8, …both covers by Tim and Greg Hildebrandt)
The Best of Frederik Pohl, Lester Del Rey, April, 1976 (Dean Ellis), $1.95, 24607 / 0-345-24507-5
The Best of Eric Frank Russell, Alan Dean Foster, October, 1978 (H.R. Van Dongen), $1.95, 27700 / 0-345-27700-7 (Republished July, 1986 (Barclay Shaw), $3.95, 33223 / 0-345-33223-7)
The Best of Cordwainer Smith, J.J. Pierce, September, 1975 (Darrell Sweet), $1.95, 24581 / 0-345-24581-4 (Republished October, 1977 (Darrell Sweet), $2.25, 27202 / 0-345-27202-1)
The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum, Isaac Asimov, June, 1974 (Dean Ellis), $1.65, 23890 / 0-345-23890-7 (Republished January, 1979 (Dean Ellis), $1.95, 27965 / 0-345-27965-4)
The Best of Jack Williamson, Frederik Pohl, June, 1978 (Ralph McQuarrie), $1.95, 27335 / 0-345-27335-4
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Here’s the cover of the first published volume in the series and the inspiration for this post: The Best of Henry Kuttner, with Dean Ellis’ cover illustration inspired by the story “The Proud Robot”. All stories in this volume were co-authored with Kuttner’s wife Catherine L. Moore, except for “The Proud Robot”, “Misguided Halo”, “The Voice of the Lobster”, and, “The Big Night”.
Contents
Mimsy Were the Borogoves, from Astounding Science Fiction, February, 1943
Two-Handed Engine, from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August, 1955
The Proud Robot, from Astounding Science Fiction, October, 1943
The Misguided Halo, from Unknown, August, 1939
The Voice of The Lobster, from Thrilling Wonder Stories, February, 1950
Exit the Professor, from Thrilling Wonder Stories, October, 1947
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The Twonky, from Astounding Science Fiction, September, 1942
Here’s the cover of the September, 1942, issue of Astounding…
…and, a close-up of William Timmins’ cover art. Giant light-bulbs a-bursting? Well, it gets the point across!
Continuing with the theme of articles about Aharon Appelfeld, here’s Aloma Halter’s substantive and insightful interview and discussion with the author, during a meeting at Beit Ticho in Jerusalem, at the time: nearly thirty years ago a cafe, and now, a gallery. Appelfeld’s understanding of Jewish existence, identity, and survival are interpreted by focusing on the intersection between his life experiences before and during the Shoah, as reflected through characters, plot, and setting – both geographic and psychological – of the novels The Immortal Bartfuss, The Age of Wonders, To The Land of the Reeds, and especially, Tzili: The Story of a Life.
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Does he mind being labeled a Holocaust writer? “It saddens me, because I would like simply to be called a writer of fiction. It seems that people who don’t like me so much attach that label. But I don’t argue with anyone who says that I just write about the Holocaust. There’s nothing to argue about: either you understand the tone and color, or you don’t.”
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Appelfeld: The Man Who Helps The Words Escape
Through words, writer Aharon Appelfeld has transcended the trauma of the Holocaust to produce some of the most memorable works of postwar Israeli literature. By Aloma Halter
Jerusalem Post April 28, 1991
EVEN BEFORE we had arranged to meet at a Jerusalem cafe, I felt I knew Aharon Appelfeld, major and prolific Israeli writer. Like my father, like all my father’s friends, Appelfeld is a survivor. The characters of his books also seemed familiar. In Israel the past is always thrusting itself into the present.
“Sometimes you reach a certain place, a closed place you can’t get out of, and then you start to look for yourself. Your past, your life. That’s what happened to me in the forests, and later in Israel, and because of this, this is also what happens in my books. Here the searing sunlight doesn’t let me forget that I have come from another place. Sometimes I turn it into the snow and winter of Eastern Europe, and sometimes I turn the snow into sun.
“When I reached Israel I was 14, entirely without roots, without my own world, without culture, possessions, luggage or language. This period of disorientation lasted many years, because not only me, but all my generation, preferred not to dwell on the past. We wanted to be like other Israeli children; only stronger, taller, blonder. Because if you have a defect, you want to be more, in order to compensate for it, and Israeli society subtly treated us as if we did have a defect.
“While I was searching for myself, the important question for me (not that I consciously asked myself it; a person doesn’t ask himself questions – they’re embedded in the flesh), was, what was I doing? To whom did I belong? I knew that I was alien here, and this bright sunshine, which wasn’t the sun I was used to, kept bringing me back to these basic questions.”
Aharon Appelfeld’s translated works include Badenheim 1939; The Age of Wonders, Tzili: The Story of a Life; The Retreat; To the Land of the Reeds; The Immortal Bartfuss; For Every Sin and The Healer. His early books were translated by Dalya Bilu; for the past few years, all his books have been consistently, and superbly, translated by Jeffrey Green. Appelfeld’s writing has gained international recognition for its subtlety and sensitivity.
Of all living Israeli writers, he is probably our most realistic candidate for the Nobel Prize; while we have other fine and powerful talents, Appelfeld’s work bears a quality of transcendent universality. He was awarded the Israel Prize in 1983. He holds honorary doctorates from the Orthodox movement’s Yeshiva University, the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, and was back in Jerusalem in August to receive his third honorary doctorate from the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College. It is with wryness that he notes these achievements together with the fact that, due to the war, he finished only the first grade of school.
WE’RE TALKING under the shade of lofty trees that overlook the terrace of Appelfeld’s favorite Jerusalem cafe: Beit Ticho. Around are the genteel noises of subdued conversation and the clink of teaspoons and forks, as coffee is stirred and pastries eaten. With no great effort of the imagination, this could be one of the spas or quiet holiday pensions which recur so often in his novels.
Appelfeld, who is observant, wears a little peaked marine cap, which reminds me of the one worn by the Polish train driver in the film Shoah. He talks slowly, his voice low as if to persuade and disarm his listener. He uses impeccable and distancing politeness to steer himself, unscathed, through the encounter. There is no way of taking the measure of this extraordinary man.
Appelfeld was back in Jerusalem from a sabbatical at Harvard, where he teaches creative writing, researches and continues his writing, to collect his honorary doctorate from Hebrew Union College. In another year he will resume his teaching post at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba.
His reputation has grown steadily over the years. In Israel, in the mid 1950s, no one understood why Appelfeld wrote about the Holocaust; it took years (from 1956 to 1962) for his first book, Ashan (“Smoke”), a collection of short stories, to be published.
He feels that the literary establishment treated him like an outsider.
“At first I was taken to task over my Hebrew. At that time it was fashionable to sprinkle one’s writing with biblical references, and use as elevated a language as possible – even if your character was a simple peasant or porter who would never have spoken in such a way. Critics took me to task over the ‘simplicity’ of my language, making me feel like a child who’d been kept three classes down. Just as well I had the sechel not to listen. But when the first book came out, an awful thing happened. People said: (his voice drops to a self-mocking and melodramatic whisper): ‘Appelfeld is good, but he writes about the Shoah.’ And then they said: ‘Appelfeld is good, but he writes about Jews…’ and then the most nasty thing: ‘Appelfeld is good, but he’s not one of us.’’
“The tragic element is that my natural readers – those who had gone through the Holocaust – didn’t want to read about it, and I understood them. But not the attitude of my colleagues and contemporaries. For example, A.B. Yehoshua and I had studied together, Amos Oz was a pupil of mine. Amalia Kahana Carmon I’d known for years … they didn’t react as if I’d brought something new to Israeli literature, something it didn’t have before.
“If someone has a different biography, the question is: how do you relate to it? Do you welcome him, accept the differences? Or, on account of the subject matter, do you say: ‘he’s different, he’s not one of us.’ “
APPELFELD’S “different” biography began in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now part of the Soviet Union), then a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire. An only child of extremely wealthy parents, his father had made the family rich by introducing motorization to the country’s flour, water and windmills.
It was a diverse and cosmopolitan life. “My parents spoke German. My grandparents, Yiddish. The town of Czernowitz was Ukrainian-Rumanian. The regime, Romanian and later, toward the end of the war, I was with the Russians. Every year there were excursions to spas and holiday resorts. My parents were assimilated people, and saw Zionism as a death wish. Who would want to go back in time to Palestine, that hole in the old Ottoman empire, and leave behind the culture of 20th-century Europe!”
When asked to speak about his childhood, Appelfeld talks simply, as if trying to defuse the effect he knows his words will have. “At the start of the war in 1940, they killed my mother, and I was left with my father. Later they separated us, when they took the men off to work. I was eight. I saw that, if I stayed alone, I would die. So I ran away.”
His blandness is terrifying, and only his repetitions hint at emotion, as if he repeats to reassure himself too. What is it like to be an 8-year-old child and totally alone in the world?
“So I ran away, slipping under the fence. No, not with other children. Alone, alone. In the war, you learned very quickly to do things alone. It’s a harsh rule, but you learn it quickly. I became very, very conscious of my surroundings. You couldn’t have survived if you weren’t aware of every noise, every movement – and it all had somehow to be interpreted. And the interpretation was a matter of life and death. So I spent most of the war in the forests, or near the outlying huts where ‘normal’ peasants wouldn’t have lived. There you had the chronically ill, the slightly mad, the witches, the prostitutes.
“I’d escaped in summer and thought I could survive in the woods. But autumn came with heavy rains, and I couldn’t stay there. First of all, I lived in a prostitute’s hut. I told her that I’d run away from a nearby town which had been bombed. I couldn’t reveal that I was Jewish, even though she was often quite genial and kind to me, because in one of her drunken rages, she would have killed me or told one of her clients. I was eight, and that was my first real school. I had to buy the food from the village and clean the hut. Yes, in my parents’ home there’d been servants to clean, but you learn.
“But one day, after about a year, one of her clients seized me and accused me of being Jewish. My face was round, my eyes blue, but all the same, he must have sensed there was something not of his element. Had he caught me out in the open, I might have run away. But it was in her hut, all hemmed in. ‘You’re Jewish! You damned Jews!’ Till this day I can feel it. I was dumbstruck as I stood there. No sound would come from my mouth. Only later, I was able to rally and fling back enough curses to make him doubt it. But after a few days, I ran away: if one of her clients had noticed something, perhaps it had also crossed the minds of others.
“I fled to another place. Then I was taken in by a horse thief; it’s a unique profession.”
APPELFELD’S CHARACTER Bartfuss, from Bartfuss the Immortal, is the archetypal survivor. In Israel after the war, Bartfuss undergoes a crisis when he realizes that the strategies which had helped him to survive are exactly what prevent him from living and communicating in non-threatening situations.
“A lot of Bartfuss … is me, and a lot comes from observations of people I know. Bartfuss is seeped in the Holocaust; he doesn’t have to talk about it. He’s not a big speaker, he can’t get close to people, not even himself. He’s closest to his coffee, cigarettes, and walks by the sea.”
Appelfeld says he is close to people, and likes a few of them a lot. He speaks of his family, his children – now mainly grown up – his Argentinian wife. There were friends like the poet Dan Pagis, another survivor who came from Czernowitz. “He was a very closed kind of person. Much more than myself; much more Bartfuss! (he laughs), a man with many secrets, yes, many secrets.”
Out of all Appelfeld’s books, I asked, which comes nearest to telling what happened to him, alone in the forest, at the age of eight?
“Sometimes, you have a strong emotion but can’t express it directly. That happened all the years I wanted to write about my life as a child in the forests. I couldn’t. Only when I put it into the story of a little girl, in Tzili, was I able to express it. When I wrote about myself, or even another boy, it wasn’t near the truth at all; the tone wasn’t right, nothing was right.”
She wandered in the outskirts of the forest. Her food was meagre: a few wild cherries, apples, and various kinds of sour little fruits which quenched her thirst. The hunger for bread left her. From time to time she went down to the river and dipped her feet into the water. The cold water brought back memories of the winter, her sick father moaning and asking for another blanket. But these were only fleeting sensations. Day by day her body was detaching itself from home … She had severe pain in her stomach and diarrhea. Her slender legs could not stand up to the pain and they gave way beneath her. “God, God.” The words escaped her lips. Her voice disappeared into the lofty greenness. If she had had the strength, she would have crawled into the village and given herself up.
IF APPELFELD had the choice, and could write about aspects of life totally separate from the Holocaust, would he focus on the problems and complexities of modem Israeli society?
“I can’t write about the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, for instance; I haven’t lived with Arabs for years. Neither is my experience of, say, Ashkenazi-Sephardi conflicts so great. But the Ukrainians, whose beds I slept in, and whose horses I ate with – I do have something small to say about them.”
Unlike other Israeli novelists, Appelfeld’s art begins and ends with personal experience. He would not “go out,” seeking new experiences, doing research in the field as, for example a writer like David Grossman did for his book The Yellow Wind about Palestinians in Israel. But neither is Appelfeld’s work simply narrative in the style of Polish-American survivor Jerzy Kosinski, who recently committed suicide. “If I just told what happened to me in life, it would look like a madhouse,” Appelfeld says. “A writer has to communicate something of his innermost truth. If we want simply history, we can look to the historians. For psychology, we can turn to the psychologists and sociology, to the sociologists, but that elusive inner truth a writer gives us can be found nowhere else.
“Chronology, which is the truth, isn’t entirely the truth. It sometimes over-emphasizes. People who write chronology are usually still drawn to the more dramatic events. But at the time one lives through them, these events aren’t necessarily significant. It’s also a matter of perspective. Very often people write their memoirs and send them to me to read. They’re 100 percent true, and I’m always stirred. But at the same time, it’s rather sad, because in a way, these memoirs are not entirely true.”
I ASK HIM ABOUT the occasional times that Israelis, particularly since the start of the intifada, have been compared to Nazis. How does he, with one son who has completed his IDF duty, and another about to be drafted, react to the comparison?
“Jews have been misunderstood for generations. It’s a comparison engendered by malice and evil, but it’s hard to do away with either of them. I deal a lot with that in my work. I’m very upset by what the Arabs are suffering, but there is no comparison to that, even by this much (he holds up his little finger).
“Only about 10 to 15 percent of what I’ve written has been published. There are two reasons for this: first of all, as you get older, you’re more critical about your work, and then there are many books which after I finish them, I just put away in a drawer, to see how they’ll age after five years or more. From time to time I take one out and read it. So there are usually two books on my desk at once – an old one in revision and a new one in writing. When I get dulled by one, I turn to the other, and when things look black, and I feel as if I’ll never finish the one I’m writing, I know there’s one already written, full, and that’s encouraging.”
Does he treasure those which are unpublished more than those already published, like a parent’s pained love for a less successful child? “No, my feeling is that I have to complete them.
“One of the writers I most admire is Kafka, whom I came to as an assimilated Jew, and not from the existential aspect. The same with Bruno Schultz. In The Healer, I wanted to explore the pain of the assimilated Jew who has no skin, an uneasy conscience. I see the modern Jew as being torn between two tendencies, or two worlds: the first is to escape from himself and his culture; the second is to return to his heritage. The first – the escaper – is much the stronger. For torn as he is, the modem Jew has been a major partner in the making of the modem world: modem literature, music, psychology, even modem painting, philosophy. That’s why the assimilated Jew is so interesting.”
A TRIVIAL, but tangible, side effect of reading Appelfeld is to find oneself drinking more coffee than usual. To the Land of the Reeds, for example, is full of such lines: “Her longing for coffee secretly tortured her, but the torture was not unbearable. She smoked two cigarettes, and they dulled her desire.” Or: “Rudi prepared a cup of coffee for her. She took the cup without a word and brought it to her lips.
“ ‘Hot,’ she said. ‘Good.’ “
“In my early books,” Appelfeld explains, “it all went together: coffee, cigarettes, cognac. Usually people drink because they want to drug or silence something in themselves. My characters have a lot to silence, so they drink a lot.”
The conversation has been leisurely but lengthy, and I wonder if Appelfeld is flagging. “No, no let’s go on. When I returned to Jerusalem from Boston I couldn’t get to sleep easily, but last night I slept. I’ve slept, we’ve eaten, we’re having a nice conversation. What else will you have? Coffee?”
I’m strongly reminded of his character, Bartfuss, who for months, years, can’t sleep properly until the end of the book, and then: “Only when he drew near the bed did he feel that that mighty sleep, that full sleep, which he had been struggling against for years, had gathered strength, and now it was about to spread its iron web over him. He managed to take off his shoes and socks, to put his shirt on the chair, look about the naked room, and to say a sentence to himself that he had heard by chance: ‘From now on I shall remove all worry from my heart and sleep.’ “
THOUGH APPELFELD’S books often depict the lost world of European Jewry before the Holocaust, his characters are remarkably multifaceted, human in their weakness and strengths. Above all, he is a universalist, a subtle and keen observer of human beings. Incredibly, absurdly, some Jewish critics have accused him of helping to exonerate the Nazi’s treatment of the Jews because he portrays Jews unfavorably – in some books he dwells on their weaknesses and hesitations, as in The Age of Wonders, or even in his recently published For Every Sin. It seems hard to conceive of such a gross, and perhaps willful, misinterpretation of a writer’s work and intentions:
“After I’d written The Age of Wonders, which was mainly about my parents and their generation, I could suddenly appreciate all the lovely things about them. Before I’d never been able to express my love for them, for all the lost Jews of Europe. It had always seemed sentimental. In the book Katerina, I found the character who could be the mouthpiece for this love. When Katerina says: ‘I love Jews,’ it doesn’t sound sentimental.”
Does he mind being labeled a Holocaust writer? “It saddens me, because I would like simply to be called a writer of fiction. It seems that people who don’t like me so much attach that label. But I don’t argue with anyone who says that I just write about the Holocaust. There’s nothing to argue about: either you understand the tone and color, or you don’t.”
In a general way, Appelfeld is not an arguer. He is an accepter and under-stander of how things are.
At the academic convocation held at the Hebrew Union College in August for the ceremonies of rabbinic ordination and presentation of two honorary doctorates – to Ayala Zacks Abramov and Aharon Appelfeld – Appelfeld spoke just as twilight was draping the courtyard with magenta and rose. Although the audience was restive after more than two hours of speeches, and Appelfeld was the last speaker, people visibly calmed under the influence of his words.
His acceptance speech was a moving summary of the spiritual path the Jewish people had traveled, first away from religion, and more recently toward it, over the past 150 years. He spoke of the phenomenon of the return to traditionalism in Israel, and the impatience or downright resentment of secular people toward this phenomenon.
“When I came to Israel in 1946, religion had been banished from this new country. People sought to replace it with social positivism, with Zionism, with communism. People had shrugged off religion; they wanted to shrug off old bonds. The old world had been destroyed in the Holocaust, and now there would be a new one. What we are now witness to is an outbreak of yearning which can’t be stemmed. Those of us who find ourselves naturally more on the side of traditionalism and humanism than on the side of religious fervor should not try to fight them, but rather strengthen the moral kernel of those who are aligned with the more extreme elements of our religion. Not to deride but to help: to refine, to bring out the good.”
Appelfeld’s works deal unflinchingly with a spectrum of life which is full of shadows, yet he manages to use these, like the strong shading effects of chiaroscuro, to illuminate and show the innate refinement of everyday human actions, human emotions and beliefs.
Continuing with the theme of works by Aharon Appelfeld, here’s an article by Jonathan Rosen from the Forward of thirty years ago, published when that periodical was (all-too-briefly, alas…!) under the wise helm of Seth Lipsky. The article is an interesting hybrid: Part book review (focusing on Badenheim 1939, and, The Healer), part interview, and, part sociological and philsophical exegesis.
On (re)reviewing the article for this post, I couldn’t help but take note of Aharon Appelfeld’s statement…
Eastern European Jews knew they should suffer, will suffer, that suffering belongs to them. For the German Jews who saw themselves as Germans this was too terrible.
Aharon Appelfeld was born in Czernovitz, Bukovina, to an assimilated, prosperous Jewish family, but he grew up in the forests of Eastern Europe where he wandered alone after his escape from a Nazi labor camp at the age of eight. It was in the forest that he first brooded on the nature of his Jewishness. “During those two and a half years I discovered the Jewish mystery. Why was it,” I asked myself, “that all the world wanted the Jews dead? It seemed that even the animals hated me. In a childish way I thought maybe it was my smell. It was a kind of mystery.”
After the war Mr. Appelfeld made his way to Palestine. He has remained in Israel since then, writing the novels that have, over the last ten years, earned him a growing reputation in America. The night before we meet, Mr. Appelfeld delivered a speech at the Jewish book fair on the importance of writing in Hebrew. He speaks with the composure of someone who has refashioned his life, but for all the gentle refinement of this small, bald, bespectacled man there is still something of the forest about him. He listens with the nervous alertness of a bird who might fly.
We are in his hotel restaurant, except for a waiter who constantly refills our coffee cups and who addresses Mr. Appelfeld deferentially as “Monsieur.” He and Mr. Appelfeld regard each other intently, as if they knew each other once in a past life. When the waiter walks away, Mr. Appelfeld whispers, “A Viennese accent. He is a refugee, I’m sure.” He belongs to Mr. Appelfeld’s world of victims and displaced persons, of lives touched by the Holocaust.
Mr. Appelfeld, though identified as a Holocaust writer, does not write directly about the destruction of the Jews. His books take place on the eve of war or in its bleak aftermath. His characters are perched on the brink of a catastrophe that is never named. The action unfolds against the backdrop of our own historical knowledge, a method that draws us uncannily into his books. In “Badenheim 1939,” the novel which made him famous in this country, a group of Jews at an Austrian resort are slowly encircled by the forces of Nazism. Drunk on coffee and pastries, lulled by music and the poetry of Rilke into a kind of trance, these Jews are powerless to resist. They step onto the trains “as easily as grains of wheat poured into a funnel.”
“Badenheim 1939’’ is characteristic of much of Mr. Appelfeld’s fiction, but the author resists the label of Holocaust writer. “I’m trying to understand the entire phenomenon of Jewishness. What is this illness, what is this healthness, what is this greatness called Jewishness?”
Some would say that he is more curious about illness than health. Raised, as he tells me, in a home that forbade Yiddish and enforced German, a home where East European Jews were looked on with disdain (though the town he grew up in, now part of Romania, was itself in Eastern Europe), it is easy to understand his assumption in the forest that Judaism was a kind of sickness and that he had caught the disease. It was only later, he says, meeting East European Jews in his wanderings during the war, meeting refugees afterwards, that he came to appreciate the richness and resiliency of the religion.
The Jews he grew up among seem to him now peculiarly unsuited for survival. “When these Jews were brought from Vienna and Germany to the camps, the worst thing for them was that they were counted as Jews. I will tell you now a piece of news. Most Jews transported from Vienna and Germany to Eastern Europe, to the camps, committed suicide. I have seen this with my own eyes. Eastern European Jews knew they should suffer, will suffer, that suffering belongs to them. For the German Jews who saw themselves as Germans this was too terrible. They committed suicide.”
It is not surprising that ill health often marks the Jews in his fiction and that ill health functions as a kind of trope for an ailing soul. Does Mr. Appelfeld think of Judaism itself as a kind of disease? He doesn’t deny it. “Sometimes a sick tree has wonderful colors,” he says.
Mr. Appelfeld’s most recently translated novel, “The Healer,” published this year by Grove Weidenfeld, the question of well-being is obsessively treated. This hypnotic novel tells the story of Felix Katz, an assimilated businessman from Vienna whose daughter Helga has fallen ill. To cure her, Felix and his wife and son move east, to the Carpathian mountains where a healer is said to live. The healer, an old rabbi reputed to have magical powers, turns out to be sick himself.
Snowbound for the winter, Felix must sit, full of rage and contempt, cut off from his beloved Vienna while his wife and daughter visit an ailing mystic whose only prescription is the study of Hebrew. Felix at last “escapes” with his son and travels to Vienna, where he imagines salvation awaits him. The year seems to be 1939. The city he loves will no longer have him. Felix is overwhelmed by his Jewishness the way a character in a Greek tragedy is overwhelmed by fate.
Despite the bitterness of the book, Mr. Appelfeld professes a great devotion to the assimilated, Germanified Jews he writes about so unsparingly. “I adore this phenomenon of assimilation,” he tells me. “What does it mean? It means someone who does not wish to be a Jew but who is somehow affiliated. More important, he has guilt feelings. It’s a kind of drive.” For Mr. Appelfeld, “these people created the modern world,” even if it is a world he found false in the forest. He is deeply influenced by writers like Franz Kafka and Joseph Roth, whose ambivalence was paramount to their conception of the world. “Ambivalence is a good thing,” says Mr. Appelfeld. “One shouldn’t be too sure – that’s a good rule. And there should be a bit of irony too. That’s also a good rule.”
“This” post also pertains to Aharon Appelfeld, but it’s of a different nature: It’s a review of The Immortal Bartfuss by Aloma Halter which appeared in The Jerusalem Post some thirty-two years ago. The review also includes a nice portrait of Appelfeld, but the photographer’s name is not given.
Surviving in silence BARTFUSS THE IMMORTAL by Aharon Appelfeld Translated by Jeffrey M. Green. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 135 pp. £10.95.
The Jerusalem Post May 28, 1988 Aloma Halter
WITH Aharon Appelfeld, Israel has a novelist whose growing body of powerful work ranks him among the best of the world’s contemporary novelists. Unlike Bashevis Singer or Amos Oz, he can be categorized as neither “Jewish” nor “Israeli”: his writing is a unique blend of the two modes. Furthermore, there is a quality about his work – perhaps its simplicity, perhaps its abstraction, perhaps the sheer human credibility of the characters – that carries it beyond national and religious definitions and makes it universal. Above all, his work manages to uncover – to discover – something about the human condition. Reading Appelfeld, we understand more about ourselves.
Bartfuss The Immortal is one of Appelfed’s most compelling novels yet. This is the story of a survivor of the Holocaust who has acquired his enigmatic nick-name because of experiences in the Nazi death camps; other survivors respect, fear him and keep out of his way. Now in his 50s, Bartfuss lives in Tel Aviv. Locked into an unhappy marriage, the father of two daughters (one of whom is retarded) whom their mother has estranged from him, he earns his living easily and soullessly from trading on the stock exhange.
There is the very early rising, the invigorating first cup of bitter coffee, the cigarettes, the walk to the cafe, the strolls by the sea, the brief hour at the stock exchange and the meals in anonymous restaurants. Sometimes he takes the bus to Netanya. Mainly he concentrates, trying to stop his thoughts before they formulate themselves, and words, unnecessary words – forewarners of unwanted thoughts – fill him with revulsion. “He had invested a lot of energy into blocking up the openings through which thoughts could push out. In recent years he had managed to seal them off almost completely. Now he felt he didn’t have the power to stop them any more.” Bartfuss’s wife Rosa, who spends her time lying around the house eating sandwiches and gaining weight, likes words; she “piles them up,” she uses them against him. But Bartfuss has learned how not to retaliate; he leaves the house while his wife and unmarried daughter are still fast asleep and returns when they have already gone to bed. He will go to any length to avoid speaking to Rosa.
Extremely voluble or forbiddingly uncommunicative, Appelfeld’s most memorable characters share a dominant feature – speech, or its absence – that characteristic that has been called man’s most human attribute.
The strategies of survival which once saved his life – detachment, the ability to grit his teeth and endure, to freeze his emotions and restrain himself – have now hardened around Bartfuss, impeding his possibility for communicating, for fully living.
On a daily basis, he had evolved a way of being among people without any contact, without words … a way of surviving intact in his isolation. He had slept little, and never deeply; his room was sparse, almost ascetic, but his days had been full of reassuring rituals. Bartfuss’s routine had given him a kind of rigid, blinkered security which might have carried him, intact and detached, if not into old age, then at least on for many more years.
But Appelfeld’s character is at a turning point in his life. One spring, a series of minor events occur that jolt the routine, that begin to have a profound and perceptible effect on his life. He runs into faces from his distant past: Theresa, Dorf, Schmugler, Sylvia. The encounters with them revive emotions in himself which he had long believed, and hoped, were extinct.
The translation, by Jeffrey Green, reads superbly.
The war was over – I had survived. I was home, safe in the land of my birth. Only my innocence had died, and with it my youth. Fair or not fair, right or wrong, whether I wanted it or not, whether anyone liked it or not – I had a life to live. I was twenty-one.
In a number of previous posts, I presented cover art for books authored by veterans of the Second World War who’d served as combat fliers in the United States Army Air Force, and, Royal Air Force. Regardless of the different personalities of these authors; regardless of the differences in military duties of these men and the theaters of war in which they served; regardless of their styles of literary expression, the central and consistent tone emerging from these books is one of contemplation – deep and profound contemplation – and seriousness.
For all of these men, the constant threat of injury or death, comradeship and the inevitable loss of comrades (which these men directly witnessed), the numbing routine – psychologically and physically – of combat flying, and, the inherent unpredictability of the future, were transformative at a level which the written word can sometimes express quite clearly, and at other times, only indirectly.
(But, you can even learn something from “indirection”!)
In this context, John Sigler Boeman’s memoir Morotai: A Memoir of War, is superb, in terms of military aviation history, and in a larger sense, as a work of literature. Boeman served as a B-24 Liberator pilot in the 371st Bomb Squadron of the 13th Air Force’s 307th (“Long Rangers“) and later as a career Air Force officer, flying C-54s and B-52s, serving in both the Korean and Vietnam Wars. He passed away at the relative young (these days) age of 74 in 1998, seventeen years after the first publication of Morotai.
Morotai is vividly descriptive, whether in “capturing” the personalities of Boeman’s crew members (the men are presented honestly and not as caricatures, as occurred – in a different vein – in the ridiculously overrated television series M*A*S*H, the animating ideology of which was always apparent…), living conditions at Morotai (an island in eastern Indonesia’s Halmahera Group), or the psychological and physical challenges and complexities of combat flying. An unusual aspect of the book is that an underlying theme of uncertainty – about the technical skill and ability of the author and his crew; about the nature of the military effort their Squadron and Group were tasked with; about the “future” immediate and the “future” distant – hovers throughout its pages.
The literary tone of the book probably emerged from what seems to have been Mr. Boeman’s inherently contemplative, introspective disposition. But, it also arises from the book’s final two chapters, in which the author recounts – with utter and remarkable candor – the take-off crash of his bomber on May 29, 1945, an accident which claimed the lives of four of his crew members, and eventuated in the disbandment of his crew as a unified group of aviators. By retelling his story chronologically and placing the jarring account of the take-off crash in the book’s final pages, one gets the impression that structuring the memoir in this manner may have been a kind of literary catharsis for Mr. Boeman: A catharsis entirely understandable, and deserving of respect.
The book ends with Boeman’s departure from the 371st Bomb Squadron and return to his home in Illinois. There he would be, during Japan’s surrender several weeks later.
So… the dust jacket of Morotai (Doubleday first edition) appears below. Strangely, the illustration depicts a B-24D Liberator in desert-pink camouflage, rather than the later-model natural metal finish Liberators actually piloted by Boeman: Ooops… Somebody in Doubleday’s art department should have paid more attention!
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Here’s a review of Morotai by Captain Carl H. Fritsche that appeared in Aerospace Historian in Fall of 1981.
“John Boeman, a farm youth from Illinois, enlisted in the Army Air Corps and he was inducted into the military service in March 1943. Morotai is a book of his experiences in the WW II cadet program and of his 20 combat missions as a B-24 pilot in the Southwest Pacific Area. The book is an in-depth analysis of the author’s thoughts, hopes, frustrations, successes, and failures during the global conflict.
John Boeman is an excellent writer. There were no 1,000-plane raids staged from the small island of Morotai, so the author takes you with him on each of his small squadron’s flights to bomb a single bridge, ship, or gun emplacement. As Boeman gains confidence in his ability as a combat B-24 commander, his career is shattered by his own “pilot error” takeoff crash in which several of his crew members are killed. The psychological impact of the plane crash was devastating and Boeman was sent home. WW II ends as Boeman returns to his home town and Boeman completes the book with an excellent analysis of his success and failure in the conflict.
Morotai is a good book about one man’s life and his one failure as a plane commander. The publisher’s note in the back of the book is important as John Boeman did not allow his own failure as a pilot to defeat him. He returned to the military service and served many years as a B-52 plane commander as well as many other very important assignments before retiring from the Air Force in 1972.
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Morotai, first published by Doubleday in 1981, was republished in an illustrated edition by Sunflower University Press in 1989. This second edition included several photographs from John Boeman’s personal collection, some of which are shown below:
Lieutenant John Sigler Boeman
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Lieutenant Boeman’s crew, posed on the wing of B-24J 44-40946, an aircraft of the 372nd Bomb Squadron.
The men are…
Standing (back row), left to right
1 Lt. John S. Boeman, Il. – Pilot 2 Lt. Joseph C. Miller, N.J. – Co-Pilot F/O Alton Charles Dressler, Hershey, Pa. – Navigator, T-132887 (Killed in crash) WW II Honoree Page by Mrs. Jean Dressler Heatwole (sister) F/O Joseph Pasternak, St. Louis, Mo. – Bombardier
Seated (front row), left to right
S/Sgt. Arnold Jerome Shore, Philadelphia, Pa. – Waist Gunner, 33777766 (Killed in crash) S/Sgt. William J. Harrington, Minneapolis, Mn. – Radio Operator S/Sgt. William P. Brown, Poulsbo, Wa. – Ball Turret Gunner S/Sgt. Leonard I. Sikorski, Milwaukee, Wi. – Flight Engineer S/Sgt. David G. Swecker, Clarksburg, W.V. – Tail Gunner S/Sgt. Ernest James Smieja, Minneapolis, Mn. – Nose Gunner, 37569058 (Killed in crash)
This is F/O Alton Dressler’s tombstone, via FindAGrave contributor Glen Koons
And, the tombstone of S/Sgt. Arnold J. Shore.
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Another view of B-24J 44-40946
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John Boeman and his fellow Officers
Left to right
F/O Joseph Pasternak (Bombardier)
2 Lt. Joseph C. Miller (Co-Pilot)
1 Lt. John S. Boeman
F/O Alton C. Dressler(Navigator) ______________________________
Some years ago, I contacted the Air Force Historical Records Center at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, to learn more about the tragic accident that figures so prominently in John Boeman’s book. It turns out that no Accident Report exists for this incident, that document having been lost since the Second World War, or (more likely!) never having been filed in the first place. However, the events of May 29, 1945, are well covered in the Squadron History for that month, the pages of which are shown below.
On May 29th, tragedy struck at the 371st when six planes were lined up for an early dawn take-off. Three planes were already airborne when Lt. Boeman in A/C #548 crashed at the end of the runway. Within a matter of minutes, his plane burned and two of the 6 1000# GP bombs exploded and four were blown clear and did not explode. By some unexplainable miracle of fate eight crew members out of eleven escaped this raging inferno with their lives. Three died in the accident and were burned beyond recognition. The following men were killed: F/O Dressler, S/Sgt. Shore and S/Sgt. Smeija. The funeral was held for these men on the afternoon of the same day at a Cemetery on Morotai Island. Other members of the crew are recovering from serious burns, broken limbs and severe shock.
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B-24L Liberator 44-41548, “Polly”, which would eventually be so central to John Boeman’s journeys, both life and literary. (Images from B-24 Best Web)
After dinner, Dad drove, with Mom in the seat beside him as always. I sat in the back seat and watched city lights fade away to country darkness. Near midnight, turning into our farm lane, the car’s headlights flashed across the big white house where I was brought into the world. Dad stopped under the big maple tree near the front porch. I got out into the still, dark, warm night air among the summer cornfields. The urge was strong to block the past three years from my mind, to forget it all, as I went into the house with my parents.
“I gave Lowell your bedroom when he came to stay with us,” my mother said. “You can sleep in the big bedroom, where your brother used to sleep. Is that all right?”
“Oh. Okay, sure, that’s fine,” I said, and carried my B-4 bag up the stairs.
Bogey had missed by one day. On my first full day at home, President Truman announced Japanese acceptance of the Potsdam surrender terms. My mother asked me to attend special prayers with them at church. I agreed.
I remembered that big white church on the north side of town. Long ago, the lady who taught Sunday school, when she was not pumping and playing the organ, had told me how God knew everything. “He knows all about each of us,” she had said as we little boys and girls listened from straight-backed chairs. “He knows how many hairs we have on our head. He knows every time we are good and every time we are bad. He takes care of good little boys and girls …” Now I listened to the pastor in that same church. His words, it seemed to me, thanked God for taking care of those who were good – by ending the war. I sensed, perhaps unfairly, smug satisfaction that victory had confirmed goodness. The pastors’ pious recitation of God’s hand, in vindication, seemed to ignore those who, I knew, deserved more than I to be home with loved ones.
Did God end the war? I asked myself. If He did, did He start it? Can we blame our enemies for the beginning and thank God for the ending? No. War, from the beginning to the end, must be an affair of men, in which God plays no favorites. How dare we be so arrogant as to believe that God would help us, just because we prayed for it, to kill and defeat those whom we select as enemies? Had there not been those among our enemies who asked God’s help, too, in their way? Would an omnipotent God sell his favors for a few prayers? Were my crewmates, who fell victim to my shortcomings, less deserving of God’s help than I?
As we left the church, I had not the words to describe my feelings, to articulate my thoughts. To avoid burdening my parents with my reaction to the service, I said nothing. On our way home, passing the village main street, I saw people gathered. Home, I borrowed the car and returned to town.
On the one-block main street of the village I had known as my hometown all my life,
they had built a bonfire.
While some in our town thanked God for ending the war,
others chose to vent emotions in a ritual that closing the village taverns could not inhibit.
Parked around the corner,
I got out and approached a scene that struck me as one from an old movie,
in which barbaric tribesmen were whipping themselves to frenzy.
They had sacrificed their young men to appease the demon and ward off dark evils.
Now, celebrating their success, they were giving their thanks to the Great God War for sparing them.
Flames shot up from the fire.
Amid shouts and yells, a pair of teenaged boys,
obviously drunk,
approached in an automobile.
One waved a whiskey bottle out the window while the other drove through the edge of the fire.
The crowd cheered, what, their bravery?
What are they cheering? I asked myself.
What are they celebrating?
“Hello, Johnny.” A voice I remembered.
One of the few girls who had called me Johnny, instead of John, in school.
Once I had thought her the most beautiful creature on earth,
but had never told her so.
I had never kissed her, never asked.
There had always been another boy, regarded by our peers as her “steady.”
Conforming to the code of our time and place,
maybe from shyness,
I had tried to keep from exposing my true feelings about her.
“I heard you were coming home,” she said.
“Come on and join the snake dance.”
She held out her hand. The cool pressure of her fingers in mine excited old emotions. We joined the crowd forming in a line, holding hands, to dance and run through the street and around the fire. I knew she had married a “steady” since I left. He was overseas. Was the invitation a friendly overture for old time’s sake, or was it the approach of a lonely married woman yielding to temptation in the excitement? By the end of the dance, I was afraid to know the answer. Whichever, it could lead to complications I did not want to face. I disentangled myself and moved to the sidewalk beyond the crowd.
What are they celebrating? I asked myself the question again. Among them I recognized some I had known well when the decisive battles were still to be fought. They had not seen those as their battles. They had not sworn to obey any orders. They had taken no oath. They had pledged not their lives, their fortunes, nor their Sacred Honor. Yet they accepted the victory as theirs, as if by Divine Right, attained, by them, simply by waiting for it. Now they celebrated peace, their peace.
The street scene filled me with consternation equal to that I had felt in the church. I had known these people. I could put names to all their faces. But now they were strangers to me, living in a world apart from mine. I wanted their silly celebrations no more than their pious prayers. I wanted to run away.
I wanted to run away, but to where? Turn my back because they prayed, or celebrated? Should I condemn them for not seeing a world I saw? I had been raised among them, with them, as one of them. By what right could I now say I was not one of them? If not one of them, who could I be? My commitment to win the war had been total, but if not on their behalf, then on whose? I could not answer.
The war was over – I had survived. I was home, safe in the land of my birth. Only my innocence had died, and with it my youth. Fair or not fair, right or wrong, whether I wanted it or not, whether anyone liked it or not – I had a life to live. I was twenty-one.
I would find new dreams, new commitments. I locked the consternating questions within myself, without answers, and stepped off the sidewalk into the crowd.
I joined the survivors.
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References
Boeman, John S., Morotai – A Memoir of War, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, N.Y., 1981 (1st Edition)
Boeman, John S., Morotai – A Memoir of War, Sunflower University Press, Manhattan, Ks., 1989 (2nd Edition; Illustrated)
Fritsche, Carl H. (Book Review), Morotai – A Memoir of War by John Boeman, Aerospace Historian, V 28, N 3, Fall, 1981, p. 212
307th Bomb Group Aircraft Inventory and Air Crew Losses, at 307th BG
Some science fiction illustrations stand out in their depiction of action; some through portrayal of the landscapes of alien worlds; some by imagining technology of the future (or the past, as the case may be); some by presenting aliens in a myriad of variations; some, in capturing the appearance of a tale’s protagonists – male and female; young and old – in the context of adventure, danger, discovery, fear, failure, and (one would hope) triumph
But, science fiction art (and not just the art of science fiction) need not be “literal” in terms of adhering to a story’s original text to have an impact. Likewise, an illustration that’s largely symbolic and heavily stylized can be more visually arresting than an image literal. In this regard, the work of Richard Powers immediately comes to mind. (Well, there are lots of examples of his work at this blog!)
Though his body of work was, stylistically, vastly different from that of Powers, Hubert Rogers, who created many covers, and many, many (very many, come to think of it…) interior illustrations for Astounding Science Fiction from February of 1939 through May of 1952, created art that – while not purely imaginative and fanciful – was often striking in its use of story elements and plot elements as symbols. (His interior art, far more so.)
His superb cover for the November, 1949 issue of Astounding being a case in point.
Created for the second of the four installments by Isaac Asimov that, collectively, would eventually comprise and be published as Second Foundation, the cover “illustrates” part one (of three) for “And Now You Don’t”.
The cover doesn’t really depict any specific scene or event from the tale. Instead, it shows and symbolizes the story’s characters.
There’s the startled looking face of Arkady Darell in the lower right corner. To her left, ill-defined in murky shades of green: the Mule. While I’m not certain about the identity of the figure in red behind Arkady, I’m inclined to think that he’s Homer Munn: A librarian who is among a group of conspirators attempting to locate the Second Foundation, upon whose spaceship Arkady stows away during Munn’s efforts to find such information at the Mule’s palace.
Well, those are the elements. But the way that Rogers arranged them is really creative. First, rather than a simple scene in space, there’s a plain, bold, bright, yellow background. Against that, a bluish-gray, fog-like shadow extends across the scene, lending an air of concealment and murkiness. And finally (well, Homer Munn is a librarian, after all) an array of alpha-numeric symbols extends across the scene through a pair of red arrows, which perhaps symbolize a 1949 version of an automated text reader. Coincidentally, there’s something very “Turing machine reader”-ish in the appearance of this string of characters.
Seemingly juxtaposed at random, together, everything really works. The yellow, blue, red, and green “fit” together perfectly, and, and the figures and faces balance each other as well.
A superb job on Rogers’ part. Well, some of his work is truly stunning, and, I think, as good as if not actually better than that some of his better known near-contemporaries, one of whom received vastly greater accolades. Overall, the central, consistent, and most distinguishing quality of Roger’s work – especially his black and white interior illustrations – is its deeply mythic, rather than literal, air.
Oh, yes…. The issue’s cover (a nearly-hot-off-the-press-looking copy; the colors have held up beautifully across seven decades) appears below, followed by Michael Whelan’s 1986 beautifully done depiction of Arkady Darell on Trantor, which appeared as the cover of the 1986 edition of Second Foundation.
You can view another Astounding Science Fiction cover – for the magazine’s December, 1945 issue, wherein appeared Part I of “The Mule” – here.
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The novellas that comprise the FoundationTrilogy are listed below:
Foundation
These four novellas form the first novel of the Foundation Trilogy (appropriately entitled Foundation), which was published by Gnome Press in 1951. However, the first section of Foundation, entitled “The Psychohistorians”, is unique to the book itself, and as such did not appear in Astounding.
May, 1942 – “Foundation” (in book form as “The Encyclopedists”)
June, 1942 – “Bridle and Saddle” (in book form as “The Mayors”)
August, 1944 – “The Big and The Little” (in book form as “The Merchant Princes”)
October, 1944 – “The Wedge” (in book form as “The Traders”)
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Foundation and Empire
Foundationand Empire – the second novel of the Foundation Series, first published in 1952 by Gnome Press, is comprised of “Dead Hand” (retitled “The General”) and “The Mule” (which retained its original title).
April, 1945 – “Dead Hand” (in book form as “The General”)
November, 1945, and, December, 1945 – “The Mule”
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Second Foundation
Second Foundation – the third novel of the Foundation series, first published by Gnome Press in 1953 – is comprised of the novellas “Search By the Mule”, and, “Search By the Foundation”. The former was published in the January, 1948 issue of Astounding Science Fiction under the title “Now You See It…”, while the latter appeared as three parts in Astounding: in the magazine’s 1949 issues for November and December, and, the January, 1950 issue.
January, 1948 – “Now You See It…” (in book form as “Search By the Mule”)
November, 1949, December 1949, and, January 1950 – “…And Now You Don’t” (in book form as “Search By the Foundation”)
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Of the eleven issues of Astounding listed above, six were published with cover art symbolizing or representing the actual Foundation story within that particular issue. But, the cover art for issues of May, 1942; October, 1944; December, 1945; December, 1949, and January, 1950 was entirely unrelated to Asimov’s trilogy.
And as always, to give you a literary “taste” of the novel’s contents, here’s an excerpt: A conversation between the hero, Dr. Elwin Ransom, and his antagonist, Dr. Weston. 
