Dream World, Feb '57: M Lesser, P G Wodehouse, & H Ellison

Advertising works!  We just took a look at the May 1957 issue of Amazing, and saw within it an ad for Dream World, another magazine edited by Paul W. Fairman.  Dream World endured for three issues, all appearing in 1957, and the value proposition of the magazine, though promoted as "A New Kind of Fiction...Stories of Incredible Powers," seems to have been that it carries stories about sex.  I guess this was in the wheelhouse of Fairman, author of several volumes of The Man from S.T.U.D. series, including 1968's The Orgy at Madame Dracula's and 1969's Rape is a No-No. These S.T.U.D. books appeared under a pen name, and it seems lots of Fairman's work appeared under false names or other people's names; we read his novel Whom the Gods Would Slay, credited to Ivar Jorgensen, way back in 2018, and according to isfdb, Fairman ghostwrote juveniles for Lester del Rey (del Rey provided extensive plot outlines), among them The Runaway Robot, a book I see all the time in antique stores and used book stores.

Let's look at the first issue of Dream World, and read some of the included stories, one by Milton Lesser (under his pen name Adam Chase), one by P. G. Wodehouse (wow!), and one by Harlan Ellison.  Thorne Smith, a famous guy I have never read, Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett also make contributions (Smith's an excerpt from a 1930s novel) to this new venture, but we'll be skipping those today.  I'm also skipping the Milton Lesser story that appears under the Darius John Granger pseudonym because it is twelve pages long and is apparently about football and ain't nobody got time for dat. 

"Legs on Olympus" by Milton Lesser (as by Adam Chase)

Like 66% of today's stories, "Legs on Olympus" has apparently never appeared in any form in any other venue.  This is a jocular retelling of the famous Judgement of Paris which you no doubt know all about from your readings in classical literature and study of art history.  Hollywood columnist Abner Paris is in Atlantic City in the greatest state in the union to judge a beauty contest.  A naked girl appears in his room at the Troy Hotel and asks him to judge a "celestial" beauty contest.  Lesser engages in lame puns and jokes of that nature; this woman doesn't know about air conditioning, for example, and doesn't know that "gag" is a synonym for "joke" or "gimmick," even though she uses other corny colloquial English like "The heck you say!" and "drat the luck."  Anyway, Abner thinks it's all a gag and agrees to judge the contest as a way of calling the girl's bluff and getting rid of her, but after he agrees she jumps on his lap and they (it is strongly implied) have sex.

When Abner wakes up he and the girl, who reveals herself to be Eris, the Goddess of Discord, are on a sheep-infested hillside and he is wearing a wool cloak.  Eris takes him to where he is to judge which is the fairest, Hera, Athena or Aphrodite.  The three goddesses, all haughty and self-important, show off their looks to Abner and offer him extravagant bribes, but in the end he gives the golden apple marked "FOR THE FAIREST" to Eris, with whom he has fallen in love.  This story has a pretty wholesome ending, a guy bangs one chick and then immediately gets engaged to her.

"Legs on Olympus" is a bland and mediocre filler piece, but never actually boring or irritating, so we're judging it barely acceptable.  I was actually curious what Lesser was going to do with the material as I read it, so reading it was no chore.

"Ways to Get a Gal" by P. G. Wodehouse

The cover of Dream World Vol. 1 No. 1 advertises "Ways to Get a Gal" as a "Brand New Story" by the world famous and universally beloved Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, but an elaborate and extensive website about Wodehouse's early work suggests "Ways to Get a Gal" is a version of "Ahead of Schedule," a story that appeared in 1910 in the British magazine Grand and was revised for publication in this republic of ours in 1911 in Colliers.  I decided to read the Dream World story and then read a version of the story found in a 1980 printing of the oft-reprinted 1914 Wodehouse collection The Man Upstairs and Other Stories and see what differences there might be.

As the world knows, Wodehouse writes in a charming and fun style, filling his texts with amusing phrases and little jokes based on the shortcomings of his characters, jokes which are lighthearted and affectionate rather than cruel or superior, and he goes in for fun silly little plots with happy endings; somehow, Woodhouse writes stories in which everything works out for everybody but at the same time acknowledges the reality that life is characterized by failure and the world is awash in evil, so that his stories don't bring you down but also don't come across as squeaky clean or saccharine lies.  The man is some kind of hero and genius.  He does all this characteristic stuff here in "Ways to Get a Gal," so of course I enjoyed it and am giving it a thumbs up.

The plot:  An Englishman with a title but little sense is in love with a blue-eyed blonde woman who works in a department store and has set out to marry her, following a scientific plan of campaign devised by himself.  Being totally incompetent, this guy's income consists of an allowance from a fat uncle who owns a very lucrative chain of restaurants over in the land of plenty, the U S of A.  Said allowance is sufficient to keep his Jaguar running and his valet on staff.  Trouble appears when fat uncle comes to visit Blighty and fat uncle falls in love with the very same blue-eyed blonde woman at the glove counter at the department store and embarks on his own campaign to make her his wife.  If our hero marries this chick, uncle may well stop sending the allowance.  If old fat uncle marries the chick, our hero will probably no longer be in line to get his full inheritance when old fat uncle dies, this woman being young and healthy.

The resolution of the plot comes when the blonde falls in love with our hero's valet--she seems to think the flowers the valet has been personally delivering for some days are from the valet himself, not some goofy lord.  Also, she is apparently more susceptible to the naive wooing methods the valet learned in his rural village than to the latest scientific methods current in London.  Our hero's finances are safe, and Wodehouse makes it clear that both he and his obese uncle (215 pounds!) are shallow twits who are falling in and out of love all the time and will forget the blonde woman in days if not hours, so no hard feelings.

OK, now the version of the story from The Man Upstairs and Other Stories, entitled "Ahead of Schedule."  (The hero's scientific method of pursuing women operates on a careful schedule.)  This version feels longer, and has longer sentences, with more details and more jokes, but the jokes are good so we don't mind.  The protagonist has a different name, and the obese uncle (sixteen stone five!) does not own restaurants, but a company that makes braces (I call them "suspenders") and is an American himself, a native of "Pittsburg," as the town was apparently commonly styled in 1910.  (Pittsburgh comes in for some ribbing in "Ahead of Schedule.")  The characters in this version of the tale all have more personality, more complex back stories.  The woman in question is a chorus girl, not a department store employee, for example, and she actually has some dialogue.  This version of the story also has more learned references, like a military history joke ("He hated to abandon the schedule. To do so meant changing a well-ordered advance into a forlorn hope") and more big or rare words ("The advent of an unbidden guest rarely fails to produce a certain gêne.") 

The plot is also a little more complex, with the hero accelerating the schedule of his scientific method in hopes of beating out his uncle in winning the hand of the fair maiden, and the chorus girl and the valet hooking up because they knew each other back in their village, were engaged but broke up and upon meeting again realized they had made a mistake.  

The '57 version of the story is more streamlined, but the additional, perhaps superfluous, material, in the 1910 version is actually entertaining, so I prefer the earlier version.

A fun little experiment, reading both versions of this story, both of which again and again brought a smile to my face.  The Dream World story "Ways to Get a Gal" would be reprinted in the 1990s in First Impressions, Mature Reflections, the fifth volume of Plum Stones, a small press series that reprinted rare Wodehouse stories that had previously been uncollected.

Left: 1958     Right: 1980

"A Bucketful of Diamonds" by Harlan Ellison 

Here we have a Harlan Ellison story that has never been reprinted.  Harlan completists, perk up!  

Davey the second-story man is in jail.  A djinni (Ellison insists on calling it an "Estrian" after telling us it looks just like a djinni) appears and offers Davey a deal.  The djinni can't touch anything in our universe, being from a "another time-line" and thus "immaterial," so he wants Davey to steal something for him at some unspecified future time.  In exchange, he will give Davey the ability to walk up vertical walls and use his djinni powers to make any possible witness look the other way while Davey is committing crimes.  Davey agrees--my twitter feed is full of stories of people getting arrested dozens of times and still being set free to massacre people, but this is the 1950s and fiction besides, and Davey has been arrested more than four times and it looks like this time they will really throw the book at him, so he has no reason not to agree to the deal with the djinni.

Davey's trial is in two days, so he hustles to use his new powers to escape confinement.  Then he commits one brazen robbery after another--the powers the djinni promised him are real!  Davey buys a nice house and enjoys a comfortable lifestyle, slows down his pace of robberies, only committing really lucrative ones once or twice a month.  For example, he climbs a skyscraper and infiltrates a party attended by movie and TV stars and a famous lady novelist and, Ellison going for some kind of obvious tried-and-true comedy, a "British-colonel type, complete to flowing white mustache" who says stuff like "By Jove!" and "I say!"  Nobody can see Davey, so he gropes women's asses or kisses them if they are trim and kicks them in the ass if they are fat, and his victims blame innocent men and a brawl erupts.  The sexiest and most famous woman at the party, I guess a Marilyn Monroe caricature, Davey robs of her necklace and strips of her clothes so everybody can see her naked.  This scene has no effect on the plot and I guess is just here to appeal to the desire of readers to sexually abuse women and to humiliate those they envy for their wealth and status.

The djinni finally calls upon Davey to steal that item for him.  Davey launches the operation, but comes to a bad end.  The item the djinni wants is the magical key that will set him (the djinni) free from the prison that is used by his race to confine criminals--this Earth.  The guardian of the magical key is another djinni, an agent of the djinni establishment that imprisoned Davey's benefactor, and thus can see Davey just fine--this djinni is also on this time-line and thus material and can kill Davey with ease, and does so.  This story is less wholesome than Lesser's, but in the end the people who misbehave are punished.

The start of the story, Davey and the djinn's relationship and Davey's escape from prison and his amassing great wealth, are entertaining.  But the Marilyn-Monroe scene is just OK, and the ending is sort of perfunctory and disappointing.  It feels like Ellison was making an effort in the first half of the story, then included the exploitation material he felt was called for by the venue in which the story would appear, and then just quickly wrapped things up with little thought.  I'm calling "A Bucketful of Diamonds" acceptable--the first half or so is better than Lesser's "Legs on Olympus."  

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The Wodehouse of course is quite good, and the Lesser and Ellison get passing grades--they are exploitation filler, but I didn't find them repulsive or snooze-inducing.  I can't truly recommend the first issue of Dream World unless you are a student or collector of Wodehouse or Ellison, but I'm not denouncing it, either.  I find these odd little corners of the SF world intriguing and so we will probably be reading from the second and the third and final issues of Dream World.