Playboy 1955: Ray Bradbury and Charles Beaumont

As I have mentioned on the blog a few times, many members of the SF community have had close relationships with Playboy and/or with the many imitators of Hugh Hefner's magazine.  Barry N. Malzberg edited Escapade, Frank M. Robinson edited Rogue and Cavalier, and Harlan Ellison also worked as an editor at Rogue, to name a few examples in the editorial role, and of course many writers of SF got stories into print in magazines whose main attraction consisted of photos of topless young ladies.

Flipping through 1955 issues of Playboy, I noticed quite a few stories by SF peeps; of them, we have already blogged about Mack Reynolds' "Burnt Toast" (I gave it a passing grade), Charles Beaumont's "The Hunger" (I called it "a well-written story about human evil"), and Beaumont's "The Crooked Man" (I wrote of it: "It is the 27th Century.  There are no families and no private homes...and everybody is born in a test tube and lives in a dorm...and everybody is a homosexual!")  But there is still a healthy crop of stories I have either never read, or not read since I started blogging, and today we'll read three.  We have another 1955 story by Beaumont, and two stories by the man who is perhaps America's premier SF writer, Ray Bradbury, stories first published in the late 1940s that were reprinted in 1955 in America's premier showcase for women's boobs.  Nota bene: I am reading these three stories in scans of copies of Playboy, so the texts may differ from those found in other publications.

"The Concrete Mixer" by Ray Bradbury (1947)

Reprinted in the January 1955 issue of Playboy that features a picture of Bradbury in a bow tie and presents the universally-beloved Bettie Page as its centerfold, "The Concrete Mixer" actually debuted in Thrilling Wonder Stories, in the same issue as Edmond Hamilton's "Alien Earth" and Leigh Brackett's "Quest of the Starhope."  When I wrote about "Quest of the Starhope" in 2020 I made a public mental note to read "The Concrete Mixer" soon, and today I fulfill this promise I made to myself, the internet community, and the broader universe.

"The Concrete Mixer" is a satire of mid-century American life, with meta elements and some of Bradbury's flights of poetry.  

Space, thought Ettil.  Here we are banging across black ink and pink lights of space in a brass kettle.

Ettil is a Martian who loves to read, but Mars is a jingoistic authoritarian state where Earth literature is forbidden!  Having studied the first and only Earth rocket to land on Mars, the Martians have built a fleet of rockets of their own and are now launching an invasion of Earth.  Ettil wants no part of the war effort, but is forced to join the invasion force on pain of death.  Ettil, having read many Earth SF magazines, is sure the invasion will fail, because these magazines, full of stories of unsuccessful Martian attacks on Earth, will have given Earthers an invincible confidence.

When the armada from the red planet arrives at its target, the human race doesn't resist with an arsenal of nuclear weapons--this is the peaceful future of the 1960s and Earth has abandoned war!  Instead, conscript Ettil and his comrades, landing in some small American town, are greeted warmly by brass bands and small town politicians' speeches, offered free hot dogs and free tickets to the movie theater!  Ettil realizes that the Martians are going to be psychologically and culturally crushed by America's seductive and banal, homogenous and consumerist culture of films, automobiles, cheap fattening foods, materialistic women who chew gum and simple-minded Christians who sell salvation!  America is a like a concrete mixer which renders everybody tossed into it the same--inoffensive and boring!  Instead of dying on the battlefield, the Martian invaders will die in car crashes, from obesity, from alcoholism, from banality-induced suicide!  And then the Martians back home will be seduced by America's irresistible consumer culture and Mars will be covered in casinos and tourist traps and Mars's ancient culture will be buried under suburban banality!  Ettil, the peacenik, is forced to consider the possibility that the peace of consumer capitalism may be worse than war!

Presumably the people who read Playboy and thought of themselves as sophisticates relished this attack on the tastes and lifestyles of ordinary people, even though the archetypal Playboy man who drinks expensive booze and collects jazz records and wears expensive clothes is just as beholden to consumer capitalism as the small town yokel.  Lefties may like "The Concrete Mixer"'s denunciation of consumer capitalism, but they will be repelled by the fact that Bradbury describes all the women in the story as disgusting and subtly (or maybe not so subtly) blames women for the whole mess, both the warmongering and the consumerism--women are conformists who when young enforce conformity to toxic social mores on men by offering or withholding love and sex and when old by just hectoring them--on Mars a chorus of old witches tries to shame Ettil into joining the military and his own wife cries in embarrassment when he refuses to fight and then cries with pride when he marches off to the rocket that will carry him to what everybody expects will be a ferocious war on Earth.  (That's right, women manipulate men with their tears...in this story by award-winning writer Ray Bradbury!)   

Thought-provoking and perhaps enraging, "The Concrete Mixer" has to be counted a success even if it might be hard for one to say he or she likes it, it being so over-the-top and its ideology perhaps offensive or ridiculous.  Scholars of SF will be interested in Bradbury's caricature of the very magazines he himself was published in, and in its exploration of themes (like Bradbury's hostility to motor cars) that recur in his body of work.

"The Concrete Mixer" was collected in The Illustrated Man which of course has been reprinted more times than one can count.

"The Next in Line" by Ray Bradbury (1947)

"The Next in Line" first appeared in the Arkham House Bradbury collection Dark Carnival.  In 1955 it was included in the collection The October Country and in the December issue of Playboy; Ray skips the bow tie this time.

A middle-aged American couple who never have sex anymore (sad!) are driving around Mexico on vacation.  The wife becomes progressively more unnerved at one little town where they stay after watching the funeral procession for a little girl and then visiting the local cemetery to see the bones and mummies in the catacombs.  Bradbury does a great job with both descriptions of the dead and reflections on our attitudes towards dead bodies.  The wife is eager to escape the town, but they are stuck there due to car failure, and everything reminds her of the corpses, the sight of her own naked body in the mirror, for example, or the enchiladas on a plate.  Impatiently waiting in the hotel for the car to be repaired she thinks of all the things she hasn't done in her life but has wanted to do, and begins to fear she will die down here in Mexico and never again see their residence in New York or her hometown in Illinois.  

As it turns out, she doesn't make it back to America.  Her husband doesn't seem too broken up about it.  Did he save money by having her deposited in the catacombs to be mummified instead of shipping her body home or having her buried in the Mexican graveyard?

Quite good.  I guess you'd have to say this one is vulnerable to charges of misogyny--a guy is tired of his wife, and she is kind of ruining his vacation with her nagging and complaining and lack of interest in the sights and local culture, so it is something of a liberation for him when she dies.  "Next in Line" would be reprinted in a number of horror anthologies as well as innumerable printings of Bradbury collections.

"A Classic Affair" by Charles Beaumont (1955)

"A Classic Affair" made its debut in the December 1955 issue of Playboy, where Beaumont appears in a sports car in his photo.  The story would go on to reappear in several Beaumont collections.

This is a well-written and straightforward story, with no actual SF content, though it is sort of transgressive and a little twisty, so appeals to SF sensibilities.

Our narrator is a writer or something, and was in love with a woman, Ruth, but she fell in love with the narrator's pal Hank and married him.  The narrator went to Europe for a year to forget, and has recently returned.  Ruth tells the narrator that she fears Hank is cheating on her, that Hank is nervous and distracted and doesn't have sex with her and many nights he goes for long walks, presumably to meet some woman.  Ruth asks the narrator to investigate.

It turns out that Hank is not thinking about another woman, but has fallen in love with an automobile, a 1929 Duesenberg.  This machine sits in a used car lot and Hank is spending his evenings admiring it and "protecting" it, as he is so in love with this car that he is paranoid that, at night, delinquent kids will vandalize it.  He spends much of his other time at libraries and bookstores reading up on the car, and Beaumont spends much of the text of the story describing how awesome this car is in the voices of the characters.  Either because Beaumont is a good writer, or the car is truly this amazing in real life, or both, the car actually does sound pretty awesome!  Poor Hank can't afford to buy the car and so is in agony.

The narrator comes up with a scheme: he will buy the car and then trade it to Hank in exchange for Ruth.  He purchases the Duesenberg and then, intending to drive it over to Hank's office to open negotiations, realizes how fun the car is to drive and so decides to spend the day driving around and maybe approach Hank that evening, or maybe some other day.  As the story ends it sounds like the narrator may have, like Hank, come to love the car more than Ruth.

This is our third misogynist story today, one that suggests that high technology, superb design and fine craftsmanship are more worthy of admiration and devotion than a human woman and raises the idea of horse-trading for a woman without explicitly condemning it.  What can I say?--the patriarchy's wordsmiths were doing their damnedest in 1955 and it is hard to not admire their work.                

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These stories are actually pretty good; maybe people really did subscribe to Playboy for the articles.  No doubt there will be more Playboy, and more Ray Bradbury and Charles Beaumont, in the future here at MPorcius Fiction Log.