Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading 1956 stories recommended by Judith Merril in the back of her 1957 anthology
SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume, where you will find a long alphabetical list of "honorable mentions" that didn't quite make the cut for inclusion in Merril's book. Today we finish up the "C"s with stories by three authors with whom I have very little familiarity: Mildred Clingerman, Theodore R. Cogswell, and Chester Cohen.
This will be leg six on our Merril-guided journey through 1956. Below find links to the earlier installments.
"First Lesson" by Mildred Clingerman
I regularly see Clingerman's name on issues of
F&SF (I don't know if she was ever published in any other SF magazine, though her work did appear in mainstream periodicals like
Good Housekeeping) but,
when I read her joke story "Letters From Laura" in
F&SF editor Anthony Boucher's
A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, I wasn't impressed enough to seek out other work by her. (I also had a vague intuition that Boucher was publishing her because he had a crush on her.) But today, based on Merril's recommendation, let's today give Clingerman another chance.
"First Lesson" is full of regional stuff and identity politics stuff: a hostile description of the American South presented in the voice of a woman who misses the deserts and the mountains of her native Arizona (Clingerman herself seems to have spent most of her life in Arizona;) a bitter description of relations between the wives of enlisted men and the wives of officers; sketched portraits of the volatile friendships that women have with each other; and a plot that relies on the idea we see in fiction all the time, that black people have special occult or spiritual knowledge that can be used to help or harm white people. Various Southern accents are represented, but the "crisp consonants" of the residents of New Jersey--the land of my birth--also get a shout out. (I guess I can provide 21st-century readers trigger warnings that the story features a "magic Negro" and represents African-American speech phonetically in a way that is maybe not flattering and African-American writing as being rife spelling errors.)
America is at war. Our narrator is the wife of an enlisted man in the paratroopers and they have moved into the tower room of a Queen Anne house in the Southern town near the base where he is being trained. (In keeping with the story's horror plot and general tone of unease, the narrator considers the house very ugly, but I have to register my dissent here and say that I find Queen Anne houses delightful; I am
quite satisfied with the
current HQ of MPorcius Fiction Log, but for years and years I had little daydreams about setting up my HQ in one of those Victorian towers.) Every day hubby goes to the base to train, and every night the narrator has horribly vivid dreams of him dying in an accident. She unburdens herself to the black maid, who offers to employ black magic to protect her husband for a fee of twenty bucks. Sure enough, after the money is handed over an odd little rituals are performed, husband narrowly escapes death in an accident exactly like the one in the dream. Clingerman's ending introduces a lot of ambiguity--she gives us multiple clues that the supernatural is real and supernatural phenomena are what saved the narrator's husband, but also has the black maid admit the rituals were all a goof. I believe that the way Clingerman squares this circle is by rendering her story
not a weird tale about how the universe is horrible and inexplicable, but a tale of Christian awakening: the narrator's husband was saved because the black maid prayed to God to spare him, and the narrator is telling us this story because it represents the first step of her journey from young cynical unbeliever to one who today embraces the Christian religion, thanks to the intercession of that African-American servant, a woman who, like all of us, may be a sinner but can do God's work.
This story is well-written and all the characters' behaviors and personalities ring true, and all the social class and regional stuff, though perhaps superfluous, is interesting and feels authentic. A decent mainstream story with SF elements; probably a good story to read if you are studying the portrayal of black people, Christianity, and (nonsexual) relationships between women in SF.
Merril loves to reprint and promote stories as SF that first appeared in mainstream venues, and before Anthony Boucher reprinted "First Lesson" in F&SF it made its debut in Collier's. In 1960, Robert P. Mills included "First Lesson" in A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and you can also find it in the Clingerman collections A Cupful of Space (1961) and The Clingerman Files (2017.)
"Impact With the Devil" by Theodore R. Cogswell
Here's another name I see when I'm looking at old magazines but haven't gone out of my way to read; this will be the first Cogswell story I have ever read. Its title is making my spider-sense tingle like crazy--it seems likely it is one of those allegedly humorous deal-with-the-devil stories, but in pursuit of this Merril 1956 project I am reading it anyway.
"Impact with the Devil" debuted in F&SF, where, as a note from editor Anthony Boucher explains, it is one of three stories presented in this issue that each integrate three genre fiction cliches--the deal-with-the-devil story, the locked room mystery, and the time paradox story. Isaac Asimov and Miriam Allen deFord also contribute stories to this quixotic project, which is the brainchild of Cogswell.
"Impact with the Devil" is a complicated sort of Rube Goldberg thing with various twists and surprises that are neither fun nor interesting. In the future, a criminal whose henchman is in trouble tries to enlist the help of a scientist who has a time travel machine in getting his underling out of a jam. We are lead to believe that the scientist is the Devil, but then the truth is revealed--the scientist is not the Devil, but the criminal and his offscreen henchman are rank and file devils. The onscreen devil travels back in time but his scheme to help his subordinate is foiled by the laws governing time travel. (You can't change history in a way another person might notice.) When the devil tries to kill the scientist in a locked room and thus present the police with an insoluble locked room mystery, the scientist turns the tables on the devil--the scientist knows how to bend the rules governing time travel (you can change history if nobody notices) and uses this against the devil; besides, the scientist is an angel in disguise who is on Earth hunting down devils.
A waste of time with no human feeling or intellectual interest, just a cold and complicated mechanism full of trickery, like a non-heliocentric orrery full of epicycles. I guess Merril admired the way Cogswell conceived of and tackled the (to my mind profitless and academic) challenge of working three tired and boring cliches into one whopper of a gimmick story.
"Impact with the Devil" would be reprinted in the Basil Davenport anthology Deals with the Devil and the Theodore Cogswell collection The Third Eye.
"Round-Up Time" by Chester Cohen
Here we have a name I don't know if I ever saw before it came under my steely gaze in Merril's "Honorable Mention" list. Cohen only has five fiction entries at isfdb, and this story has never been reprinted.
"Round-Up Time" is a lame filler story and I have no idea why Merril recommended it. Like the Eric Frank Russell story we read recently,
"Rhythm of the Rats," it is based on the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
Our narrator is a beggar who goes to Central Park in Manhattan to beg people for money. He encounters a colorfully dressed guy, watches him attract a crowd of people by, apparently magically, summoning irresistible music. The music sounds different to each person, but each listener finds it to be his favorite type of music, flawlessly performed. The gaily attired music-maker hurries off and his rabid fans follow him into a space ship that hovers over the river; the ship leaves, carrying these New Yorkers to an unknowable fate. The somewhat predictable surprise ending of the story is that the narrator is deaf--this is how he escaped capture.
Cohen includes in his story an analog of the lame child who appears in many of the Pied Piper stories and is not able to follow the Piper with the others. An element of "Round-Up Time" that maybe is derived from some component of the tale of the Pied Piper that I don't remember, is that people who hear the Piper's music are eager to give money to the beggar.
I have to give this story a mild negative vote.
**********
Clingerman's is obviously the best of this scurvy crew of "C"s, her story being the best written and the only one that has any real human feeling or hint of a point or an ideology; the Cogswell is a self-conscious stunt, the Cohen gimmicky derivative filler. I am interested in authentic feeling and speculation, which Clingerman delivers (a woman worried about her husband, trapped away from home in a place she doesn't like, encountering other demographics and dealing with the supernatural) while the Cogswell and Cohen are just recursive or meta in-jokes--Clingerman's story is in dialogue with and a reflection of real life, while Cogswell's and Cohen's are just commentary on the practice of writing and other earlier writings (if I was being mean-spirited, I would call Cogswell's and Cohen's stories masturbatory and incestuous.)
Stay tuned for more not-at-all mean-spirited commentary on fiction here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
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