Henry S. Whitehead: "Sea Change," "The Thin Match," and "The Wonderful Thing"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log, we are reading stories from 1925 issues of Farnsworth Wright's unique magazine, Weird Tales.  Today, three stories from Henry S. Whitehead, an Episcopal minister from the greatest state in the union, New Jersey, who, like myself, left the Garden State seeking education and adventure.  Whereas my travels took me to New York City and the Middle West, where I explored varied forms of goldbricking, loafing and slacking, Whitehead, before settling in Florida, spent many years in New England and in the Virgin Islands, where he learned about voodoo, learning which he integrated into his fiction.  I don't know if today's stories will be about voodoo, but soon we'll find out.

Some of today's tales have been reprinted in book form, but we will be reading "Sea Change," "The Thin Match," and "The Wonderful Thing" in the pages of scans of the appropriate issues of Weird Tales.  Click the links in the previous sentence to read along.  

"Sea Change" 

"Sea Change" debuted in the first issue of WT to reprint H. P. Lovecraft's 1920 "The Statement of Randolph Carter," a story that would reappear in WT in 1937 and which I would blog about (after reading a book printing) in 2022.  "Sea Change" was included in the 1946 Arkham House Whitehead collection West India Lights as well as the 21st-century Whitehead collections Passing of a God and Other Stories and Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead.  Does this story take place in the West Indies?  Does it include voodoo or a ghost?  I don't think so.  

Chapter 1 introduces us to newlyweds Edward and Marian Redwick, who are on their honeymoon aboard a "windjammer."  Sailing the seas is dangerous, at least in the stories we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and this opening chapter is consumed with a typhoon which the vessel finds itself in, Whitehead describing the curious nature of the sky before the storm hits and then the way the ship is violently tossed about and the damage it suffers and the casualties suffered among the crew.  In the end, through a freak happenstance, Edward and Marian are the only survivors!  

Chapter 2 flashes back and we get a biography of young Edward's life heretofore.  As a little kid he suddenly became extremely ill, skin paling, hair falling out, teeth turning black, muscles paralyzed, mind becoming so vegetative he didn't recognize his family, etc.  The medicos eventually figured out that he needed to take thyroid pills, and he recovered.  He has taken these pills every day of his life since.  In his twenties he met Marian and they found they shared a fascination with the sea, maybe from reading Conrad and Kipling.  Maybe they should have read Frank Belknap Long--then they might have stayed ashore where thyroid pills are available at every pharmacy!  As it is, they book passage on that windjammer and get stranded on a little island with a few dozen Polynesian inhabitants and no drug stores!

Chapters 3 and 4 concern the first week or so the island.  The natives are very friendly, and tell Ed a ship comes by maybe every one or two years.  Ed is in trouble--he only has eight thyroid pills in his pocket!  After they are consumed he'll probably start turning into a "Caliban!"  Ed realizes the wreck of the windjammer is just barely visible from the beach--a single spar emerges from the waves, the actual hull is totally submerged.  Within that hull is his waterproof container packed with a generous supply of thyroid pills!  So in Chapter 5, when he is out of pills and fears he will soon grow weak and feeble-minded, he braves the waves and the sharks to swim out to the wreck!  But the wreck is further than he realized--the spar, due to some optical illusion, is not nearly as close as it appears from the shore.  He decides to turn back before confronting the sharks that haunt the wreck, presumably eating the dead crewmen.  

When Edward fully realizes how far he has swum, and how he is suffering only minimal fatigue, he comes to another realization--he has grown out of his childhood illness!  He doesn't need the pills anymore!  He can enjoy a year or two on this island paradise with his charming wife and then a life together with her wherever they elect to be.

With its lack of supernatural or science fiction elements, its focus on a man's relationship with his parents and with his wife, its allusions to Shakespeare, and its happy ending (for the good-looking middle-class couple at least--maybe not the prole crewmen who are now shark food), "Sea Change" is more like a mainstream story than anything weird or speculative.  But it is alright.  We'll mildly recommend it; it is pretty well-written, and I am interested in storyies about family dynamics, though usually I read about people who hate their parents and about sexual relationships that are catastrophic, relationships unlike those in this story, in which everybody is lovey dovey and going the extra mile to look out for each other--I don't know, maybe this is a fantasy.

"The Thin Match" 

This is another mainstream-like story, ably told, but far from weird.  The odd sort of gimmick Whitehead employs here is anthropomorphizing matches; they don't move or talk or anything, but they have feelings.  

Anyway, we follow a match which is particularly thin from the factory and through the hands of all the people who by chance acquire the box of sixty matches into which it has been packed.  It feels like two dozen people in this story acquire the box of matches and then somehow lose it.  Being so thin, the match who is our inanimate main character slips into a corner of the box and goes unnoticed and is thus the final to be used.  Along the way we are privy to the hopes and dreams of matches.  Whitehead contrives a situation in which a man in the frozen north's life depends on his last match successfully lighting.  (This guy also has only one cartridge left for his rifle when a lynx is attacking--learn to plan ahead, guy, or just stay in the city and goldbrick or the suburbs and slack like the rest of us.)  Will the match save this guy, or will he freeze to death?

Acceptable filler.  "The Thin Match" has not been reprinted.

"The Wonderful Thing"

"The Wonderful Thing" was reprinted in the 2007 Whitehead collection Passing of a God and Other Stories.

It is the early 1840s.  O'Hara, a man with "Celtic common-sense," moves from New Jersey to Connecticut to work as a land-surveyor and engineer for New England railroads, building bridges and the like.  He hires an elderly black couple, former slaves, to be his servants.  He works too hard to have time for a social life.

One night he has a very vivid dream in which he has a close relationship with a rich family in a nearby town, visiting them regularly, and he falls in love with a young woman in the family and she returns his love and they get engaged.  Whitehead describes this happy dream, in which O'Hara rides his horse to visit his friends, in exacting detail--the beautiful clothes, the beautiful scenery, the beautiful architecture, et al--trying the patience of those of us who open up a copy of Weird Tales hoping to read about Americans and Europeans fighting for their lives against monsters, aliens and members of marginalized demographic groups, not going to tea parties at each other's mansions.  When O'Hara wakes up from the most memorable dream of his life he is in love with the fiancé from his dream and is in a funk for three weeks.

At the end of those three weeks O'Hara takes a day off from work (his railway bridges are several days ahead of schedule--maybe "The Wonderful Thing" really does count as a utopian science fiction story) and rides his horse on the same route he rode in the dream.  We heave to hear about the same scenery and architecture and all the rest again--good grief!  He comes to the mansion of his friends from the dream, and meets the woman from the dream with whom he got engaged.  The woman tells him she had a dream of falling in love with and getting engaged to him three weeks ago, and we get a happy ending.

This story, like the other two Whitehead stories we read today, feels like it belongs in a mainstream magazine full of opinion pieces on tax and trade policy, a report on the latest trends in wallpaper, an interview with a Hollywood star, and advice for the housewife on how to get better deals from the grocer, not the magazine of Conan, Cthulhu, and more vampires and space monsters than you can shake a cross and a ray pistol at.  "The Wonderful Thing" is not bad, but it is certainly not for me.  Barely acceptable.

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I really expected there to be voodoo in at least one of these stories.  Or a murder or a ghost or something.  I guess a storm kills lots of people in "Sea Change" and a guy shoots a lynx in the face in "The Thin Match," but those incidents of mayhem are hardly the focus of the stories in which they appear, and the main characters are neither perpetrators nor victims of the violence.  Today's stories feel like they could be in a grade school reading text book designed to teach you concepts like "flashback," "metaphor," "simile," and "personification," and I don't relish reliving that experience.  At the same time, I can't fault the stories on any kind of technical grounds--they are professionally written--the content and themes just aren't what I want to read, and not what I expect from the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual.

Well, we'll be seeing Whitehead in 1926; maybe those stories will be a little more on the thrilling side?  Till then, stay tuned for more 1925 weirdness.