The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence

He was obsessed.  If he did not discover and make known to himself these delights, they might be lost for ever.  He wished he had a hundred men's energies, with which to enjoy her.  He wished he were a cat, to lick her with a rough, grating, lascivious tongue.  He wanted to wallow in her, bury himself in her flesh, cover himself over with her flesh.  

Front cover of copy I read

In an effort to justify my mother's complaints that I am a snob and my father's fears that I am a dangerous reactionary who is putting his good name at risk, I have been reading T. S. Eliot's earlier poetry and about the St. Louis native and London habitue's early life (basically up to 1922 and the publication of The Waste Land.)  In Robert Crawford's Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land and in The World Broke In Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year That Changed Literature by Bill Goldstein, mention is made of Lawrence's 1915 novel The Rainbow as a controversial book that was "suppressed for indecency."  I've never read anything by D. H. Lawrence, and seeing that the novel was (apparently) full of sex and that the more famous Women in Love was a sequel to it, I decided The Rainbow would be a good place to start my D. H. Lawrence experience and tracked down a copy (Penguin 2007, edited by Mark Kinkead-Weekes) at the Baltigore County Public Library.  For what it's worth, this edition claims to be the closest ever published to what Lawrence intended.

The Rainbow is the story of three generations of the Brangwen family, relatively prosperous owners of the farm known as the Marsh in or near the village of Cossethay on the border of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, a tale that runs from the mid 19th century to the first years of the 20th.  After a brief look at his immediate ancestors, we spend 100 or so pages with Tom Brangwen as our main character.  Though not the eldest, Tom succeeds to ownership of the Marsh, his older brother Alfred moving to Nottingham to take a job as "a draughtsman in a lace-factory."  After an encounter with a foreign gentleman, Tom becomes fascinated with foreigners and aristocrats—one of the themes of The Rainbow is of people who yearn to be more, to grow into something different, something bigger, or to have children who do so  These hopes are generally frustrated; for example, Tom's mother wanted her children to be educated, but Tom was a horrible student, "a hopeless duffer at learning," "a fool" who "had not the power to controvert even the stupidest argument...."

...and the back

Tom becomes enchanted with Lydia Lensky, a Polish widow with a little girl, Anna.  Lydia, the daughter of a landowner, and her husband, a physician, were forced to leave Poland because they were patriots and got mixed up in a rebellion against the Russians--her husband died of illness in London, leaving her and little Anna penniless.  Tom and Lydia marry, and we learn all about the joys and miseries of their marriage. Their marriage is contrasted with Alfred’s; Alfred cheats on his wife with an intelligent woman who lives in a house full of books with her father--Alfred and the woman read Herbert Spencer and Robert Browning together.

When Anna is eighteen, Alfred’s son Will moves near the Marsh to take up work himself as a draughtsman at a lace factory. Anna and Will, a sensitive sort who likes to visit churches and look at books of reproductions of church architecture and Christian paintings and sculptures (Ruskin has had a big influence on him), fall in love, and we get 100-something pages in which their marriage, the joys and miseries of which are even more extreme than that of Tom and Lydia's, is described in detail.

Lawrence’s book is focused primarily on psychology, on the characters’ inner lives and on their feelings, feelings mostly related to their sexual and family relationships. There is quite little description of people’s work or their relationships with other people in the community--we don’t get scenes of Tom haggling with customers over prices for his butter or beef or Will trying to get a raise from his boss, and we learn very little of the economics of managing a farm or the intricacies of designing lace patterns, we don't hear people's complaints about government trade or tax or foreign policy.  Again and again the characters eschew the outside world, shutting themselves up in the family:

Anna continued in her violent trance of motherhood, always busy, often harassed, but always contained in her trance of motherhood....No responsibility, no sense of duty troubled her.  The outside, public life was less than nothing to her, really.  

.... 

And to him, as the days went by, it was as if the heavens had fallen, and he were sitting with her among the ruins, in a new world, everybody else buried, themselves two blissful survivors....

or themselves:

...she was always tormented by the unreality of outside things....she became hard, cut herself off from all connection, lived in the little separate world of her own violent will.

The descriptions of people’s family relationships, particularly relationships between spouses, ring very true and are very effective. Just like in real life, everybody’s feelings are ambiguous, equivocal,  subject to endless revision, and Lawrence's character's emotions shift from one extreme to the other from one moment to the next.   Lawrence addresses, in detail, many of the challenges faced by married people: you can't live without your wife, can't imagine a life without her, she is the center of your being, but at the same time that you adore her and desire her, you resent her because of her power over you.  She makes fun of your hobbies, and it hurts so much you throw the woodcarving you've been working on for months into the fire!  (When this happened to Will I was reminded of scenes in Kipling's The Light that Failed and in Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage in which women destroyed men's art work.)  Your wife criticizes your religion, your deepest beliefs, and you begin to doubt.  You love your husband and desire him sexually, but there is nothing more delicious than being alone at home while he's at work, and you can't get any sleep in the same bed with him, so you send him to another room every night.  Lawrence goes into all these things at great length, as well as into Tom's relationship with Anna and Will's with his and Anna's first daughter, Ursula.

Lawrence's style is not subtle--when people are not overwhelmed by love or desire they are going into "black rages" and consumed by hate, usually for the person they were in paroxysms of desire for just two paragraphs ago, and will be equally in love with within a page or two.  Lawrence's style is characterized by repetition.  Lawrence will use the same short straightforward words and phrases multiple times in a single sentence, in a single paragraph, again and again throughout the book ("rage" and "black" are favorites):

All the blood in his body went black and powerful and corrosive as he heard her.  Black and blind with hatred he was.  He was in a very black hell, and could not escape.

....

Oh, Oh, the bliss of the little life sucking the milk of her body!  Oh, Oh, Oh the bliss, as the infant grew stronger, of the two tiny hands clutching, catching blindly yet passionately at her breast, of the tiny mouth seeking her in blind, sure, vital knowledge, of the sudden consummate peace as the little body sank, the mouth and throat sucking, sucking, sucking, drinking life from her to make a new life, almost sobbing with passionate joy of receiving its own existence, the tiny hands clutching frantically as the nipple was drawn back, not to be gainsaid.  This was enough for Anna.  She seemed to pass off into a kind of rapture of motherhood, her rapture of motherhood was everything.

Lawrence will make the same points about a character and use the same metaphors again and again, in a brief space.  One minor character is a Polish baron, Skrebensky, exiled to England where he has taken up the job of a vicar and marries an Englishwoman.  On page 184 Lawrence tells us the Baroness has "the soft, creamy, elusive beauty of a ferret."  On the same page we are told "She had real charm, a kind of joyous coldness, laughing, delighted, like some weasel."  And at the top of the next page we find that Will "watched her with deferential interest as he would watch a stoat playing."  (I was hoping Lawrence would whip out "ermine," favorite of all us Leonardo and Wyndham Lewis fans, but he limited himself to three of these weaselly ferrety metaphors.)

(Is repetition a hallmark of "literary modernism?"  Linked to the interest of its practitioners in primitive chants and ancient ritual?  Eliot certainly uses lots of repetition in his poetry.)

Almost halfway through our 450-page trek, and eight years into Will and Anna's marriage, Will goes to town and picks up a girl at a theatre; he gropes her in the dark corner of a park, but she won't let him go all the way.  Back home Anna immediately notices something is different about him, but she is not necessarily offended:

She liked him.  She liked this strange new man come home to her.  He was very welcome, indeed.  She was very glad to welcome a stranger.  She had been bored by the old husband.  

Will's infidelity triggers a revival, a revolution, of his and Anna's relationship, and they devote themselves to ferocious animalistic sex, sex bereft of love or tenderness, sex based on lust: "They abandoned the moral position, each was seeking gratification pure and simple...Their children became mere offspring to them, they lived in the darkness and death of their own sensual activities."  It is hard to tell to what extent Lawrence is endorsing this kind of attitude towards sex, and to what extent he is condemning it.

Some publishers try to sell The Rainbow as a sex
novel--this is my favorite of the sexy
covers I have seen

I enjoy this kind of extravagant writing, when some guy is so hot for a chick he swoops down on her like a predatory bird and wants to devour her like a cat, and when he is so angry at her that he wants to take her in his hands and break her. The problem I began having with The Rainbow, however, was that Lawrence was doing this stuff again and again—there was no relief, no variety, it got repetitive, monotonous.  It is hard to burn at a fever pitch for page after page without it getting stale, especially when the topic does not vary for over 100 pages.  I thought of Proust, who also writes at length about love and sex and how they make people feel and act goofy, but he also writes about art, literature, social class, and politics, and includes many memorable images and even pretty funny jokes. (And Proust writes about more varieties of love and sex than Lawrence does here.)  Fortunately, in the second half of The Rainbow, Lawrence expands his scope and his range of topics a bit, and tries to include arresting images, particularly featuring the moon and flowers.  (I love to look at the moon, but, unfortunately, and despite the best efforts of my father, who cultivates a huge garden, my wife, who loves to decorate our home with cut flowers, and Bryan Ferry, flowers leave me cold and I have no idea what a rhododendron looks like without googling it.)  More interesting, to me at least, are the characters' responses to political, economic and social issues.

Anna and Will's plunge into ecstatic and indulgent sex feels like the climax of the first half of The Rainbow.  It is followed by a sequence in which Tom Brangwen, Anna's (non-biological) father and Will's uncle, is killed in a flash flood at the Marsh farm, drowned while drunk.  Fred, Anna's half-brother, son of Tom and Lydia, succeeds to the farm.

Will and Anna's daughter Ursula is the main protagonist of the remaining 225 or so pages of the novel.  Following the book's themes, Ursula is selfish and self-absorbed:

She was a free, unabateable animal, she declared in her revolts: there was no law for her, nor any rule.  She existed for herself alone. 

and wants to improve her status and go out and explore the world:

So even as a girl of twelve she was glad to burst the narrow boundary of Cossethay, where only limited people lived.  Outside, was all vastness, and a throng of real, proud people whom she would love. 

She often indulges in fantasies of being a rich aristocratic lady, helping others and otherwise flaunting her superiority over them.  Lawrence includes lengthy descriptions of teenaged Ursula's grappling with religious questions.  She, of course, wants to do the right thing, but she is unwilling in her squabbles with siblings and schoolmates to turn the other cheek and forswear self-defense and revenge, and though she is troubled by the parable of the camel and the eye of the needle, she is very reluctant to give up her superior status as the member of a relatively prosperous family or sell her fine things (among them a pearl-backed brush and mirror, silver candle stick, and a "lovely little necklace") and hand the proceeds over to the poor--in fact, the poor disgust her.

"Very well," she thought, "we'll forgo that heaven, that's all--at any rate the needle's eye sort."  And she dismissed the problem.

(Lawrence fills The Rainbow with quotes from the Bible and Biblical references--Anne Fernihough furnishes this edition with fourteen pages of very good notes that help uneducated people like myself spot the less obvious ones.)

Ursula is a rebel who questions all she hears.  Her first romance is with Anton Skrebensky, son of that Polish Baron turned vicar; Anton is an engineer in the British Army.

"But what would you be doing if you went to war?"

"I would be making railways or bridges, working like a nigger."

When he talks of why he is willing to fight for the nation and its people, the importance of maintaining order, and so on, Ursula insists that it is all nonsense, that she doesn't care about the Mahdi or Khartoum ("I don't want to live in the desert of Sahara--do you?") and attacks the very idea of a nation:

"But we aren't the nation.  There are heaps of other people who are the nation."

"They might say they weren't, either."

"Well, if everybody said it, there wouldn't be a nation.  But I should still be myself," she asserted, brilliantly.

Anton is sent off to fight the Boers.  Ursula's second lover is a woman, Winifred Inger, one of her school teachers the last year she attends classes and a sort of feminist activist.  As with so many relationships in The Rainbow, this one veers from ecstatic adoration to absolute detestation.  Sick of her, Ursula sets up Winifred with her uncle Tom (Will's brother, son of drowned Tom) who, after travelling around the world a bit, has taken up the job of managing a coal mine.  Ursula is disgusted by the colliery and the ugly town that has sprung up around the pit and the way the miners ("colliers") are forced to adapt to the industry--she thinks they would be better off living in poverty than toiling to produce the energy that powers the modern economy.  Tom's role in the coal mining industry, and Winifred's interest in Tom (the two do end up married) makes them abhorrent to Ursula.

This cover, from a website offering
e-books, is the funniest I've seen

As I have suggested, Lawrence lays everything on pretty thick in this book, and he doesn't skimp when expressing how horrible--in Ursula's opinion, at least--the whole business of mining is, though he doesn't portray the colliers as slaves or innocent victims: they are volunteers who like the high wages they receive at the colliery.  Lawrence paints everything in The Rainbow in bold (garish?) colors but at the same time he presents everything as ambiguous and equivocal.

Ursula is sickened by the idea of staying at home with her mother and all her many siblings--she wants to enter the world of work, the world of men (Chapter XIII is actually titled "The Man's World"), she wants freedom and independence, and so she takes a job as a teacher (her "matric" qualifies her for such work.)  She has dreams of moving far away to teach among the beautiful people, but she ends up taking a teaching job nearby in a poor district, a job her father gets for her (so much for independence!)  The kids are rebellious, and to keep her job Ursula must abandon her fantasies of being the kind sensitive teacher every student loves and become a ruthless taskmaster who beats down recalcitrant boys with a cane--like the colliers she must adapt, alter her personality, become a servant of the machine, to the school which feels like a prison and a system she finds "inhuman."

She did not want to do it.  Yet she had to.  Oh why, why had she leagued herself to this evil system where she must brutalize herself to live?  Why had she become a school-teacher, why, why?

Ursula works as a schoolteacher for two years before attending college.  This is probably the most interesting part of the book, as Lawrence gets into what it is like to be a schoolteacher at the turn of the 20th century and actually shows us a character developing in a logical way and not just changing his or her attitude on a dime, as Ursula has to learn to adapt to the challenge of teaching a bunch of kids who do not want to be taught and of appeasing her superiors, who are not exactly eager to help her learn the ropes.  The minor characters in this portion of the novel are also interesting, the monstrous kids and the monstrous teachers who have to tame them if they want to be able to do their work.  This chapter of The Rainbow offers the pleasures of a conventional plot--I found the scene in which Ursula defeated the most villainous of the students and asserted her control of the class and won the support of her colleagues to be cathartic and satisfying, and some of the students' antics amusing.  I only wish we had gotten similar chapters on Will at the lace factory and Tom Senior managing the Marsh farm.

One of the recurring motifs of The Rainbow is people beginning new lives and entering new worlds, when they get a new job or meet a new lover or something like that.  In the last one hundred pages of the book Will, Anna, and their legion of children, the summer before Ursula begins college classes, enter into a new life, moving to from the village of Cossethay to Beldover, a newly risen town of newly constructed houses, one of those coal towns Ursula detests, where Will takes up the job of art teacher.  Ursula lives in this new house while attending college.  At first she is thrilled by the college, seeing it as a temple of learning and the professors as priests of knowledge, but she is soon disillusioned--the teachers don't teach out of love of learning, but merely in order to receive a paycheck, and the students aren't there to drink in the ambrosia of knowledge, but to increase their value on the labor market!

This was no religious retreat, no seclusion of pure learning.  It was a little apprentice-shop where one was further equipped for making money.   

Ursula, who in high school loved the Romans (on page 310 she "with her blood...heard a passage of Latin, and she knew how the blood beat in a Roman's body, so that ever after she felt she knew the Romans...") finds she doesn't even like Horace!  She compares Greek and Roman literature to the Chinese and Japanese "curiosities" for sale in antique shops, worthless gewgaws (page 403: "She was bored by the Latin curiosities....")

Anton Skrebensky, now a lieutenant, returns from South Africa late in Ursula's college career after serving down there for years; he has six months leave before heading to India.  Sick of school, Ursula "wanted to run to Skrebensky--the new life, the reality."  His time in Africa has turned Anton into a man, and Lawrence gives us some more animal metaphors: Anton is a leopard, then a lion, then a tiger.  As they sit in the night by the river, Anton tells Ursula all about life in Africa:

"I am not afraid of the darkness in England....It is soft, and natural to me, it is my medium, especially when you are here.  But in Africa it seems massive and fluid with terror--not fear of anything--just fear.  One breathes it, like a smell of blood.  The blacks know it.  They worship it, really, the darkness.  One almost likes it--the fear--something sensual." 

Distracted by Anton, whose body thrills her, Ursula skips class, fails her exams, is denied her B.A.  She and Anton get engaged, but after a tirade against England ("meagre and paltry...unspiritual") and democracy ("I hate democracy....Only the greedy and ugly people come to the top in a democracy....who are those chosen as best to rule?  Those who have money and the brains for money") Ursula tells Anton she doesn't want to get married.  (We later learn that she wants to experience other men--she loves and desires Anton, but he is the only man she's ever had sex with, and she is sure she could love and enjoy the bodies of other, different, men.)  Anton bursts into tears, and she relents, but over the next weeks he also realizes they are not made for each other and he marries a more stable woman and brings her with him to the East.

The brief final chapter includes symbolic visions, one in which Ursula sees herself as a seedling growing from an acorn, a new living thing with no connection to the Brangwen family or Anton or anything from her past life, and another in which she sees a rainbow appear over the world and sweep away the new coal towns and usher in new lives for everybody.  There is also a tedious dream-like scene in which Ursula is trapped in a wood by horses and has to climb a tree to escape the equines.  She is carrying Anton's child, but falling from the tree induces a miscarriage.  I think.  This is the lamest chapter of the book, and compares badly with the visionary scenes in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain.

Of course, many publishers have
taken the safe and literal route

So, did I enjoy The Rainbow?  Can I recommend it to people?  Individual chapters and individual passages are definitely good, and as a failed PhD candidate in history the occasional insights into the lives and attitudes of the people of Victorian and Edwardian England held my rapt attention.  It is noteworthy how much time and energy Lawrence devotes to women, to getting into their heads (for example, describing Anna's fulfillment as a mother as well as her evolving sexual feelings for her husband) and to exploring the problems and burdens faced by women in their relationships with men (Winifred moans that men are really mostly concerned with their work, be it in the shop, the pits or the office, and that their wives only get from their husbands what little is left over, "the bit the shop can't digest.")

However, after the first hundred pages or so, the novel's repetitiveness, the way Lawrence banged away at the same words over the course of a paragraph, the same ideas over the course of a chapter, and the same themes over the course of 450 pages, made reading much of The Rainbow more like a job than a joy, and I had trouble achieving my goal of reading fifty pages a day.  The characters are not very sympathetic, and because they are all prone to radical attitude adjustments they lack definition and individuality--the book left me feeling adrift, with nothing solid to hold on to.  I don't regret acquiring some familiarity with a famous and important author, but I'm glad this exploration is behind me and doubt I will read another novel by Lawrence any time soon.

In our next episode, another British novel from the same period. 

Doomstar by Edmond Hamilton

"Johnny," she whispered.  "Johnny, you shouldn't have come back!" 

My copy

We all had a good time back in November when, with Edmond Hamilton, we joined space naval officers, scientists and politicians (?) in the fight against aliens who sought to throw Earth into the Sun or blow up a super nebula and kill every person in the galaxy or commit sundry other genocidal astronomical atrocities. Those stories from the 1920s were reprinted by Ace in 1965 in the volume Crashing Suns, under the direction of the great Donald Wolheim.  But Ace wasn't the only publisher to join forces with World Wrecker Hamilton during the Swinging Sixties.  In 1966 Belmont Tower, whom we have to thank for my beloved Novelets of Science Fiction, Frank Belknap Long's It Was the Day of the Robot, and Harlan Ellison's From the Land of Fear, put out a brand new space adventure by Hamilton, Doomstar.  I own the 1979 reprint--let's check it out!

Our story begins in a nightclub in the Manhattan of the distant future where our hero, Johnny Kettrick, is watching alien dancing girls and ignoring his Earthling date!  (His heart isn't on boring old Earth, but out among the stars of the Hyades Cluster!) Unexpectedly, government agents pick Kettrick up and drive him out to Long Island (I hope Hamilton means the Hamptons!) for a meeting with some of the biggest wigs in the galaxy!  Scientists have reason to believe somebody in the Hyades has developed a weapon that can cause a star to emit catastrophically dangerous gamma radiation, radiation powerful enough to sterilize entire solar systems.  Kettrick, though an Earthman, grew up and spent his career in the Cluster until he was exiled from the Hyades two years ago for breaking some silly protectionist trade laws (the government calls that "smuggling.") Seeing as he knows all the ins and outs, all the languages and cultures, of the Cluster, he is the perfect candidate for the job of playing gumshoe out there and getting to the bottom of the eggheads' suspicions about a star poisoning device that, rumor has it, is known as "the Doomstar."

Fake news!  Johnny is not really a pirate!  He
just resists unjust trade restrictions!

Once Kettrick is back in the Cluster we get the hard-boiled detective stuff we should perhaps expect from Leigh Brackett's husband!  Some of Kettrick's old buddies, including his alien former girlfriend (for whom Kettrick is still carrying a space torch), aren't too happy to see him, and when somebody tries to murder Kettrick by sabotaging a boat he is a passenger on, it looks like they really aren't happy to see him.  Can it be that some of his old friends, the aliens he "went native" with as a youth, are actually part of the Doomstar conspiracy?  Trust no one, Johnny!

Hooking up with some other of his many friends in the Cluster and their old decrepit space ship, Kettrick travels from system to system, trading goods and seeking revenge on the boat saboteur while investigating this whole Doomstar business.  After lots of close calls and tense conversations on several different worlds (featuring eight different alien races), in the end, Kettrick leads a bunch of stone age alien tribesmen in an infantry assault on the ground-based missile battery whose cobalt-tipped munitions will, in mere minutes, turn the local star into a gamma ray death machine.

Doomstar reminded me of the kind of adventures Han Solo or Lando Calrissian might have had before getting involved with that troublesome Skywalker clan: travelling from planet to planet via hyperspace, dodging the authorities and buying and selling goods among disparate intelligent species.  Kettrick even has a big hairy alien sidekick and flies in a temperamental old ship that needs a lot of maintenance, and, like Solo and Calrissian, lays aside his hopes for personal gain to instead fight for the greater good.

The characters in Doomstar all have believable and interesting motivations and relationships, a welcome improvement over the flat characters in the 1920s stories of space war by Hamilton we were talking about earlier.  Unfortunately, this novel lacks the driving energy of those stories from Crashing Suns, the gusto and horror of the combat and torture that made up so much of those tales.   Johnny is not the kind of hero who is master of his fate and drives the book's plot; rather he often seems to be at the mercy of events and of forces beyond his control, and we repeatedly see him manipulated, protected or rescued by other characters (I associate such motifs with those hard-boiled mysteries in which the reader and the main character don't know what is going on until the end of the story.)  Doomstar's narrative feels more episodic than tight, though the individual episodes are all entertaining, if not thrilling.

First edition

I often wonder how these old stories would play in our 21st-century world in which everything is political and everybody is liable to be offended.  Laissez faire types might appreciate that our hero is an unabashed businessman out to make a profit (kind of like a Poul Anderson character) and the text's implicit idea that trade brings different cultures together amicably.  The whole book could be seen as a celebration of diversity, with Kettrick friendly with and working closely with numerous alien individuals and polities, and Kettrick even gives a lecture on tolerance to his Earthling date when she says that aliens give her "the creeps."  But on the other side of the social justice ledger we have the fact that most of the female characters in the book are ditzes or selfish, treacherous, femmes fatales.  Doomstar vaguely reminded me of Rudyard Kipling's The Light That Failed, which--as I read it at least--argues that women are nothing but trouble and the best life for a man is to be among other men, having risky adventures far away from "civilization." Some might see Doomstar as guilty of romanticizing "cultural appropriation" and the "exoticization of the other," and the Edward Said definition of "Orientalism."  

A decent space adventure, suitable as an entertainment.

**********

The last page of my copy of Doomstar has an ad for three novels, none of them SF. There's an important mystery novel, a minor gothic romance thing, and a minor adventure caper apparently designed to appeal to fans of Burt Reynolds movies.  Even though they only advertise three titles, the good people at Belmont Tower include an order form with space for five titles, plus space for four alternates.  Just try to put yourself in the shoes of a guy who ordered a novel about a "Southern stock car racer cum hillbilly hoodlum" and opens up his mail (after waiting four weeks!) only to find the sole available alternate was the tale of Lady Barbara and her trials in gloomy old Cameron castle!

The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

She said to her own children, "Please look after Amy.  Never leave her alone with Ben."

"Would he hurt Amy the way he hurt Mr. McGregor?" asked Jane.

"He killed Mr. McGregor," Luke said fiercely.  "He killed him." 

"And the poor dog," said Helen.  Both children were accusing Harriet.

"Yes," said Harriet, "he might.  That's why we have to watch her all the time."  

Front cover of copy I read

At Rutgers University back in the late '80s I took a class on science fiction, and was assigned to read Doris Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell.  I did not read it.  (As I think I have mentioned before, if we judge a student by his grades, I was a good student--I graduated with High Honors--but if we judge a student by how much important knowledge, how many valuable skills, and what sort of work habits he acquired, I was a terrible student.)  Since then, of course, I have seen Lessing's books on the shelves (the hardcover editions of those Canopus in Argos books are very handsome) and heard about her occasionally in the news (she was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2007, died in 2013) and have wondered when and if the time would come when I would give some of her work an honest try. Well, the time is now!  At the West Des Moines Public Library I saw the slender paperback The Fifth Child, a 1989 Viking edition of the 1988 novel, and found the back cover text enticing. It was time to take the plunge.

It is the Swinging Sixties!  David, a thirty-year-old architect, and Harriet, a twenty-something graphic designer working in sales, meet in London and marry.  David and Harriet are "eccentric," considered "oddballs" by their peers because they are not sexually promiscuous (Harriet suffers the contempt of women her age because she is a virgin) and have old-fashioned ideas about family life being the foundation of happiness.  They marry and buy a big Victorian house in the country and set out building a large family.

David and Harriet's house becomes a gathering place for their extended families, where legions of relatives will come for weeks-long visits around Easter and Christmas and during the summer.  Of one picnic outing we are told "The house party filled five cars, children wedged in or on the adults' laps."  David and Harriet are happy, their belief in the primacy of family life vindicated, their massive home a fortress of safety in a world, that of the early '70s, which is sinking into a period of rampant crime and instability.  Of course, sacrifices must be made for family; David spends four hours a day on the train commuting between their haven and London, and brings extra work home; Harriet and David must endure everybody's criticisms of the couple for having too many kids (four in six years); and they become financially and psychologically indebted to those family members who give them money and stay with them for months at a time helping look after the four darling children, little Paul, Jane, Luke and Helen.

Back cover of copy I read

Then comes Harriet's fifth pregnancy. The fetus is unusually large and energetic, causing Harriet such pain she comes to considers it "a monster," and "an enemy." In the face of the skepticism of her doctor and family she insists this pregnancy is "absolutely different" from her earlier babies. Exhausted and irritable, her relationship with David, once so close and warm, is strained ("At night, David heard her moan, or whimper, but now he did not offer comfort, for it seemed that these days she did not find his arms around her any help") while the criticisms leveled by the extended family and from those outside the family are redoubled.      

Harriet's fifth child, named Ben, is born in a hospital, unlike the four previous children.  Harriet declares that he looks like "a goblin," or "a troll," or "an alien."  Ben is very strong and seems to develop at an unusually rapid rate, rarely crying and learning to stand and walk without going through any intermediate crawling stage.  On the other hand he seems to be of low intelligence.  From day one Ben gives everybody the creeps, and his sinister escapades as he grows vindicate their instinctive fears--he harms one of his siblings, then stalks and kills a small dog, and then a cat! The people who used to throng the big house for weeks during holidays stop coming. The four "normal" kids live in terror of their weird and violent little brother.  Harriet is bombarded by insistent suggestions of what to do about Ben that leave her feeling that people blame her for the problems the little freak presents.  Ben has ruined David and Harriet's happy life together!  

David and his wealthy relatives take charge and Ben is briefly sent to a mysterious institution in the moors of northern England, liberating the family from the monster's oppression.  But Harriet is guilt-ridden, and when she visits the institution and sees the hideous conditions Ben is living in (constrained in a straight jacket and by powerful drugs, spending all day mindlessly lying in his own excrement) she brings him home. David and the four normal kids feel betrayed by Harriet; she has chosen the monstrous Ben over them.  As the years pass the four normal kids contrive to move away to boarding school and/or with relatives, while David buries himself in work, leaving Harriet alone in the huge house with her fearsome offspring.  

First edition cover

As a teenager Ben becomes involved with a violent gang of thugs, not returning home for days at a time, and as the novel ends Harriet wonders if he will end up in prison, or somehow survive by his wits a member of the criminal underground.

The Fifth Child is a good mainstream novel about the family and maternity and the choices and sacrifices people (women in particular) make, the dilemmas individuals and families face in their efforts to achieve happiness while trying to stay true to their values and do the right thing. Harriet, by leaving Ben in the institution where he soon would have died, could have preserved for herself, David, and their four ordinary kids the happy and healthy life they had before Ben burst onto the scene.  But, as a mother, and as a decent person, she felt compelled to rescue Ben, sacrificing her own happiness, psychologically damaging her other children and even putting the rest of the community at risk (Harriet has every reason to believe teen-aged Ben has been organizing robberies, participating in riots, and even raping women.)  

Lessing was not shy about associating herself with the science fiction community, and The Fifth Child has at least one major SF theme.  Harriet strongly suspects Ben is some kind of genetic throwback, representative of a forgotten race that flourished thousands of years before Homo sapiens, a people who perhaps lived underground and raided and raped human settlements, tainting the human genetic pool.  I'm not sure this element was well-integrated into the book as a whole, which is very realistic; it kind of comes off as hinting Harriet is some kind of crackpot.  

The Fifth Child seems pretty strait forward, and Lessing doesn't use difficult words or employ any unusual or challenging narrative techniques. But is there some kind of point, some kind of symbolism or statement I am missing?  Lessing was a member of the Stalinist British Communist Party in the 1940s and '50s--does this suggest we should see Ben as representing the proletariat, acting out because he is smothered by the middle classes?  Is Ben the product of the bourgeois decadence of the '60s or the neoliberalism of the '80s?  (Clues: adolescent Ben hangs out with uneducated young men who can't or won't find steady work, and members of teen-aged Ben's gang of criminals mouth revolutionary slogans.)

Could Ben represent the Third World, the inexplicable and oppressed "other?"  The many descriptions of Ben as some kind of alien or goblin brought to mind Kipling's phrase "half-devil and half-child" and the idea that misbehavior by non-whites is evidence of white responsibility, either that whites (as Kipling suggested) have a responsibility to civilize non-whites or that such phenomena as revolution, terrorism, and corruption in the Third World are the result of Western meddling and exploitation (what people sometimes call "imperial blowback.")  There is a scene in which we see that teen-aged Ben's gang eats, almost exclusively, foreign food (pizza, tacos, Chinese, Indian), perhaps a signal that Ben is analogous to non-British peoples in some way.

(The problem with these theories is that I didn't notice David and Harriet doing anything that led to Ben being a dangerous monster or suggested they deserved to have their family life wrecked.  The novel could perhaps be seen as a refutation of "society made me do it" explanations for crime--Ben was just "born bad" and his parents and siblings, and all those animals, are just his innocent victims.)   

Another possibility is that The Fifth Child is "about" the decay of English life, the rise in crime and social unrest suffered from the late '60s to the '80s.  Rather than being a throwback, perhaps Ben represents the bleak future of England.  The centrality of motherhood to the novel, and Harriet's essential blamelessness might be a response to commonplace arguments that poor parenting is to blame for the social ills (crime, drugs, teenage pregnancy, single motherhood, etc.) that dominated discussion in late-20th century society.  I thought Lessing was using television as a sort of indicator of societal decay.  Before Ben is born the family almost never watches television, but Ben and the fourth child, Paul, who is arguably the character most psychologically damaged by Ben (among other things, Ben tries to strangle him at one point), watch TV religiously, as do Ben's gang of violent thieves.  

An entertaining novel that has me digging for clues.  The direct, understated, even detached, style is quite effective.  A worthwhile read.  After finishing it, it came to my attention that in 2000 a sequel to The Fifth Child appeared, entitled Ben, in the World. I'll try to get my hands on a copy soon; I'm curious to see how Lessing portrays Ben in a different milieu.

Outside the Universe by Edmond Hamilton

I think that never in all space and time could there have been a moment as strange as that one, when the mighty fleet of our galaxy lay prow to prow with this other mighty fleet from the dark, unguessed mysteries of outer space.  

I'm no expert on Weird Tales, and when I think of that "unique magazine" I think of Conan and Cthulhu, of sword and sorcery tales and of horror stories.  But Weird Tales also published space operas by Edmond Hamilton, including today's topic, Outside the Universe, which first appeared as a serial over the course of four issues in 1929.  Last week I bought the 1964 book printing of Outside the Universe by Ace (Ace F-271) at the Jay's CD and Hobby in South Des Moines.  This edition includes an illustration by Jack Gaughan and an introduction by editor Donald Wollheim.  Wollheim points out that A. Merritt adored Outside the Universe and wrote Hamilton fan mail about it. Wollheim, in his promotion (or defense) of the novel also seems to cast aspersions on SF writers who seek to use SF as a way of discussing science, saying that Outside the Universe was a "novel which told a tale of interstellar adventure on the kind of scale that would terrify the slide-rule space engineering storytellers of today....The purpose of the novel was not an exposition of advanced mechanics; it was an entertainment in starry voyaging....And, really, is there anything more anyone could ask from a science-fiction novel?"  

Our narrator is Dur Nal, human captain of one of the Interstellar Patrol's cruisers, a slender warship with a crew of approximately one hundred.  The Milky Way is a united political entity, with a central government in the Canopus system, and Dur Nal's crew is drawn from "a score or more" different intelligent species, including "Octopus-beings from Vega, great planet-men from Capella, [and] spider-shapes from Mizar...."  Dur Nal's lieutenants are an Antarean, Korus Kan, who has three eyes, three arms and three legs and is made of metal, and Jhul Din, a crustacean from Spica.

Dur Nal and company are patrolling the edges of the Milky Way when they detect an alien armada of 5,000 vessels bent on conquering our galaxy.  A running fight with the alien invaders leads to a terrific naval battle between the Milky Way fleet and the enemy, a battle lost by the good guys because the aliens have special "attraction-ships" which can magnetically grab the Milky Way ships and draw them to their destruction.

Dur Nal's ship is one of the few survivors of this debacle, but the craft is crippled, so Dur Nal and his crew (somehow) sneak up on an alien ship and board it.  They find that the extragalactic invaders are like worms or snakes, and Hamilton refers to them as "serpent people."  We are told it is unsafe to fire off ray guns inside a ship, so the fighting during the boarding action is all hand to hand, our people bludgeoning the invaders with metal bars while the snake people seek to constrict the boarders to death.  Sixty percent of the boarders are killed (as are all the serpent beings), but Dur Nal and comrades seize the ship and bring it back to Canopus.

Documents on the captured enemy ship are (somehow) translated, and it is learned that the invaders come from a dying galaxy, where nearly all the suns have gone dark.  The snake people tried to conquer the Andromeda galaxy, but were rebuffed, so attacked the Milky Way, their second choice.  The president of the Milky Way galaxy, "a great black-winged bat-figure from Deneb" gives Dur Nal, Korus Kan and Jhul Din command of the refurbished alien craft (it is faster than our own ships) and the mission of travelling to Andromeda to request aid.

In these adventure stories the protagonists tend to get taken captive, and, sure enough, on their way to Andromeda our heroes are captured by the serpent-people and taken to their dying galaxy of expired and decrepit suns.  The snakemen are masters at using force fields, and have surrounded their entire dark galaxy with one.  The opening to the galaxy is guarded by two colossal cubical space fortresses.  Nur Dal and the survivors of his crew are taken to the capitol planet of the enemy, where they find that the snakemen do not make their buildings of metal or stone, but the same flickering blue force fields that guard their galaxy.  Construction and demolition in the vast city that covers the entire surface of the planet is as easy as flipping a switch.  In the towering central government building our heroes are interred in a glass case in a museum of biology, pumped full of a drug that paralyzes and preserves them, suspending all bodily functions but thought:

Rigid, unmoving, unbreathing, yet with consciousness, mind and senses as clear as ever, living brains cased in bodies that were helpless and motionless, I think that no position of any in all time could have been more terrible than ours.

Of course our heroes make it out of the dark galaxy and to Andromeda.  The Andromedans are people made of gas, and have technology and power that surpasses that of the people of the Milky Way and of the serpent people; in fact, they have rearranged the very stars and planets of their galaxy for maximum efficiency.  In their government chamber they vote to launch a vast fleet to the dark galaxy and exterminate the snake race, and to put our man Dur Nal in charge of the whole shebang!

The last quarter of the novel follows the Andromedan fleet as it attacks the dark galaxy and then races to the Milky Way in hopes of catching up with the serpent fleet before it has made operational its super weapon, a conical ship 20 miles across armed with a death ray that can exterminate all life on a planet with a single shot!  In the very last pages of the book the Andromedans use their star shifting technology to move two suns together, crushing the giant cone between them.

If you are a stickler for scientific accuracy and an airtight plot then this book is not for you.  Hamilton uses the words "universe" and "galaxy" interchangeably, as evidenced by the title.  Space craft routinely travel a thousand times the speed of light, with a minimum of odd or unusual effects.  (However, during the climactic naval battle numerous ships travelling at such alarming speeds within the boundaries of solar systems blunder into planets and stars and are destroyed.) There is lots of talk of ether, the invisible substance that lies between the stars, and it plays a role in the story like that ocean currents and the weather would play in a story about ships at sea.  Ether currents can influence a ship's speed or course, and early in the story our heroes use an ether storm (it is marked by a space buoy) to foil pursuit.

As for plot holes, after numerous scenes in which ships spot each other via equivalents of radar (a "star chart" which shows moving "dots" for ships and "circles" for heavenly bodies) and powerful telescopes ("distance windows" and "telemagnifiers") it was a little difficult to suspend disbelief when Dur Nal's ship sneaked up on an alien ship and his crew of over one hundred spacers broke into it without being detected.  And how (in a matter of hours!) could the Milky Way cryptographers have deciphered the extragalactic documents?  And then there is Dur Nal figuring out, in minutes, how to fly the serpent ship.

As with much fiction involving wars or adventures, we also have to accept that thousands of people all around the hero are always getting killed in battle after battle while he somehow always manages to escape injury. We can (with some effort!) confidently ascribe the survival of Achilles, Aeneas, John Carter, Conan, and Elric on the battlefield to their superior ability to dodge and parry, and/or to divine intervention, but we have to accept that Dur Nal is just lucky that his ship is the one out of thousands that isn't hit by an irresistible death ray.  Even Dur Nal seems a little perplexed by his longevity:

How our own ship escaped, in the van of our fleet, I can not guess, for space about us at that moment was but a single awful mass of shattered and shattering vessels.

Outside the Universe is also remarkable in that there is really no character development, no relationships between the characters, and very little "normal" emotional content--all the emotional content is on the order of over the top terror of getting tortured or awe at the beauty of celestial phenomena and the sight of thousands of space vessels engaging in battles which lead to a fatality rate of 90% or higher.  The descriptions of stars and galaxies and space battles can be a little repetitive; perhaps readers in 1929 were less likely to notice this, taking a month out between reading each of the four installments.

Despite all these issues, the novel still has considerable appeal.  Hamilton tells the tale with gusto--the pace is fast and Hamilton writes in long breathless sentences full of superlatives.  Hamilton also has a wide range of invention, coming up with all sorts of alien races and menacing phenomena and curious settings.  There are plenty of striking images--the book is like a script for a movie you create in your mind, a technicolor epic replete with bizarre and awe-inspiring visions.

As for ideological content, the only thing notable (beyond the implied superiority of representative democracy) is that, while our hero is a human male, all the other characters, including our hero's political superiors, are aliens; Hamilton's novel doesn't suggest that Earth or the human race are in any way special, but just one of dozens of civilizations united E Pluribus Unum style.  We see so many SF stories in which humans in general or Europeans in particular are superior and have some kind of manifest destiny or Kiplingesque burden (I'm thinking of John Carter and Tarzan here, as well the end of Van Vogt's The Weapon Makers) and so many in which humans are assholes and elves or alien collectivists are shown to be our betters, that I think this vision of brotherhood and equality is noteworthy.  (I get the impression that Star Wars and Star Trek are going for this attitude, but perhaps are limited by the fact that they need to cast humans as the main characters.  Wasn't Han Solo supposed to be a frog man or something?)

I thought Outside the Universe was fun.  I think we can also see it as an interesting document in SF history, an early example of the seminal space opera genre which has conquered Hollywood with all those Star Wars and Star Trek movies and an example of what Harry Harrison was satirizing in things like Bill the Galactic Hero and what the New Wave writers were trying to get away from.  After a suitable interval (to catch my breath!) I will definitely be reading more Hamilton space operas.  

Kipling's "The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case" & Gissing's "The Prize Lodger"

I'm back on the icons of modern Brit lit beat!

In 1961's The Ice in the Bedroom P. G. Wodehouse mentions George Gissing as a kind of exemplar of the writer of "gray novels of squalor" which "don't sell."  Being a philistine with a spotty education, I had no idea if Gissing was a real guy or just a euphonious name Wodehouse had made up.  Wikipedia informed me that not only was Gissing a real person, but that he was considered one of England's top writers by people like H. G. Wells and George Orwell.  Certainly worthy of investigation.

Several of Gissing's greatest hits are available at gutenberg.org, and tucked among them is an odd title, Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages, an anthology apparently compiled in 2005 that includes stories by such figures as Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan-Doyle as well as Gissing.  This sounded like it was right up my alley--I have a weakness for tales of difficult sexual relationships, and here was my chance to dip my toe in the Gissing pool of "gray squalor," and read another Kipling story while I was at it.

A charming 1960 edition of
Plain Tales from the Hills
owned by blogger Douglas Dalrymple

"The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case" by Rudyard Kipling (188?)

The Gutenberg people assert that this story first appeared in 1884 in the Civil and Military Gazette out of Lahore, where Kipling worked from 1882 to 1887.  The people at the Kipling Society say it first appeared in the 1888 collection Plain Tales from the Hills.  A little mystery for us.

Bronckhorst is an absolute anti-social jerk who is always humiliating his innocent wife and child; he takes pleasure in insulting and embarrassing them in front of visitors.  Another man, Biel, is friendly to Mrs. Bronckhorst in public, and Bronckhorst takes him to court, accusing him of having had an affair with his wife.  Kipling tells us that it is common for the native Muslims and Hindus to lie in court in return for bribes, and Bronckhorst's case against Biel relies on just such false evidence.

Biel hires a detective, Strickland, who is a master of disguise and skilled at dealing with the natives.  Strickland disguises himself as a fakir and gathers evidence that Bronckhorst's case is wholly fraudulent, and uses his ability to influence the natives to get Bronckhorst's paid perjurers to recant their testimony.  Bronkhorst is defeated in court, and then Biel thrashes him with a whip; everybody in town approves of this method of frontier justice, and Kipling hints that Bronckhorst became a better husband as a result.

This is an entertaining and interesting story; along with the detective stuff and "life in British India" stuff is the perhaps even more mysterious, and certainly more universal, theme of the inexplicability of sexual relations and marriage.  Why do women like Mrs. Bronckhorst marry men like Bronckhorst?  Why does Bronckhorst treat his wife so terribly?  Does it even make sense for people to pair off and spend decade after decade together--is seeing the same face every morning for twenty, thirty, forty years really how we want to spend our lives, really the path to happiness?  Such conundrums, Kipling suggests, are "unanswerable," and perhaps "too unpleasant to be discussed."    

First ed. of Human Odds and Ends
for sale at Victorian-novels.co.uk 

"The Prize Lodger" by George Gissing (1896)

I liked the Kipling story, but it has the trappings of adventure or genre literature; an exotic locale, a criminal trial, a detective, disguises, violence.  A collection called Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages, I had expected, would include stories of a more "literary" character, with more psychology and less of what you might call "sensationalism." I'm pleased to say that "The Prize Lodger" fulfills my expectations and is quite good--it may have turned me into a George Gissing fan!

According to victorianresearch.org "The Prize Lodger" appeared in The English Illustrated Magazine in 1896.  It was included in the collection of stories entitled Human Odds and Ends in 1898.

It is 1889 in the London neighborhood of Islington.  Archibald Jordan, age 45, has a comfortable income and leisurely lifestyle as the owner of a grocery store; he handles the books a few hours a day, and leaves most of the business operations to his partner and subordinates.  He spends his free time relaxing with friends and walking the streets of the neighborhood where he has lived his entire life.

Jordan does not own a home, but lives in lodgings, and, in fact, is famous among the local landladies for being a very desirable tenant.  He is very particular about his desires, and demands attention, but landladies are always willing to put up with his peculiarities because he is so respectable and because he not only never questions the bill, but overpays it.  To the dismay and bewilderment of the landladies, he has never, over the course of two and a half decades, stayed in one place for more than a year.

In 1889 Jordan moves into the house of a thirty-three year old widow, Mrs. Elderfield. Mrs. Elderfield turns out to be the best cook and most efficient landlady Jordan has ever encountered, and he resolves to marry her.  But the realities of married life come as a dreadful shock to Jordan.  All his adult life he has been his own master, and been able to dominate landladies, who have been eager to please him.  But as a husband it is he who is dominated.  His wife moves him out of his beloved neighborhood and into a big house in the suburban countryside, insists that he come home at the same time every evening, scolds him for tracking mud in, and demands that he break the habits of a lifetime:

'You mustn't read at meals, Archibald. It's bad manners, and bad for your digestion.'

'I've read the news at breakfast all my life, and I shall do so still,' exclaimed the husband, starting up and recovering his paper. 

'Then you will have breakfast by yourself.'

Jordan's freedom and happiness are in jeopardy, and as the story ends we are not sure what he will do.  It seems possible that Mrs. Jordan cares only about her fine house in the suburbs and her husband's comfortable income, and will not object if he moves back to Islington without her.

A great story; I loved the plot, characters, and style.  Wells and Orwell seem to have known what they were talking about!

***********

Two good stories about marriage that express skepticism (dare we say "realism"?) about that revered institution.  There's more Kipling and Gissing in my future.

Two stories by Rudyard Kipling: "Baa Baa, Black Sheep" & "The Gardener"

Click to zoom in and see if any of your
faves are available for the low low price
of 48 cents!

I'm back on the titans of British literature beat!

I recently spent a day walking around Manhattan--according to the little "Health" feature on my iPhone I walked over 13 miles. One of the places I visited was The Strand, the famous bookstore. Outside on the sidewalk I picked up two books from the "Special 48 cents" box, a biography of Oliver Goldsmith and a tiny paperback of two Kipling stories, a "Penguin 60" published in 1995.

The Penguin 60s, I glean from the back cover, were issued in celebration of the publisher's 60th anniversary, and cost 60 pence. There is a list of titles in this celebratory series in the back of the book (see below); for the most part they are by writers you would expect, like Melville and Camus and Updike, but I was surprised to see one dedicated to Poppy Z. Brite. (I've never actually read anything by Brite, though I know her name from horror anthologies.  Maybe I would like her--Will Errickson and Harlan Ellison do.)

The two Kipling stories included in my Penguin 60 (reduced to a mere Penguin 48, you might say) are linked by the fact that they "reflect Kipling's own experiences in life."  "Baa Baa, Black Sheep," the people at Penguin tell me, is a recounting of Kipling's youth, spent with a foster family in England, while "The Gardener" is an allegory of his suffering after his son was killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915.

"Baa Baa Black Sheep" (1888)

Five-year-old Punch and three-year-old Judy (curious pseudonyms for a brother and sister, perhaps reflecting the boy's somewhat anarchic and potentially violent life and character) are English children living in India, beloved by their parents and servants, given carte blanche to do whatever they want.  So being sent to live with a foster family back in England that consists of a tyrannical and petty religious bigot, "Aunty Rosa," and her cruel teen-aged son, Harry, is hard on poor Punch.  Every move he makes results in psychological and physical punishments from these two creeps, who take to calling him "Black Sheep" and fill his mind with visions of Hell and the idea that he is a sinful liar.

When he attends school, Punch's class snobbery ("'If I was with my father,' said Black Sheep, stung to the quick, 'I shouldn't speak to those boys.  He wouldn't let me.  They live in shops.  I saw them go into shops--where their fathers live and sell things"), and Harry's poisoning the minds of the other students against him, lead to fights and beatings.  Punch is under so much stress that he contemplates murder, arson, even suicide, and engages in brazen deceptions and makes terroristic threats in an effort to achieve some peace.  Aunty Rosa and Harry's harsh tutelage, which ostensibly has the object of making Punch behave virtuously, has in fact driven him to dreadful misbehavior.

One of Punch's few refuges is reading, and his father sends him gifts of books like the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson, though Aunty Rosa discourages him from spending time with his books and asking adults for help defining odd words--she thinks he is just "showing off."  "Uncle Harry," a veteran who talks incessantly of the Battle of Navarino and treats Punch decently, is another comfort, but he dies shortly after Punch and Judy's arrival.

After five years of this nightmare, Punch and Judy's parents come to England to collect them, and happy days are here again.  Mom's generous parenting is more conducive to making Punch behave than Aunty Rosa's tyranny ("...when one can do anything without question, where is the use of deception?")  However, Kipling reminds us that "when young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion and Despair, all the Love in the world will not take away that knowledge...." Perhaps we are expected to see these horrible years as formative ones, that it was in such miserable circumstances that Kipling's passion for literature and interest in some of his characteristic subject matter was aroused.

This is a solid story.  Like much of Kipling's work, besides being entertaining, at times moving, it provides the 21st century reader with insight into Victorian attitudes about religion, race and ethnicity (among the students are Jews and a black boy), and social class.

"The Gardener" (1925)

I have to admit this one brought a tear to even my cynical eye!

Helen Turrell raises her "nephew" Michael, whom she tells everyone is the product of a scandalous relationship of her dead brother's.  Michael wants to call Helen "Mummy," but she refuses to let him, because, she says, "it's always best to tell the truth."  (The propriety of telling untruths is a theme of both stories in this little collection.)

Michael is commissioned as an officer during the First World War, and like Kipling's own son, is killed and listed as "missing." Like Kipling, Helen becomes involved in the administration of war memorials.

Over a year after the end of the war Michael's body is found and interred in Belgium. Helen travels to the Continent to visit his grave; on her journey she meets other women on similar pilgrimages, witnesses their grief.  One such woman has to deceive others as to whose grave she is visiting, because the fallen soldier was her illicit lover.

At the cemetery Helen has trouble finding Michael's final resting place among the thousands of graves, and is directed by a gardener, who says, "Come with me...and I will show you where your son lies."  This gardener is, in fact, Jesus Christ; this is an allusion to John 20:15, a footnote tells me.

On a first reading I misinterpreted the story; I thought that Christ was telling Helen that, because she raised Michael and she and Michael loved each other, that in every way that matters, she was his mother.  What I was missing (and what I learned while googling around to see if the cemetery in the story was a real one) was that Michael was Helen's biological son, and all that business about him being her brother's son was an elaborate lie to cover up her own illicit affair.  There are plenty of clues that this is the case in the first few pages of the story, but I missed them, naively taking what Helen had to say at face value.

A moving, and (for dunderheads like me, at least) tricky, story.

***************

List of Penguin 60s

I've been impressed with the Kipling I've read in the past (I think The Light that Failed, which I read shortly before starting this blog, is great) and I think these two stories also have quite a lot to offer.  Presumably they are available for free online, but I don't regret purchasing this little Penguin 60, which is a curious artifact and a souvenir of my pleasant day in Manhattan--only the gods know when (or if) I will spend another such day.        

Best of Kuttner 1: Part 3: "Juke-Box," "The Ego Machine," "Call Him Demon," & "The Piper's Son"

Let's return to my 1965 British copy of The Best of Kuttner 1 and read four more tales by Henry Kuttner.  Bring the packing tape; this book is falling to pieces.

"Juke-Box" (1947)

This story was first published under the pseudonym Woodrow Wilson Smith in Thrilling Wonder Stories.  The isfdb lists C. L. Moore, Kuttner's wife, as a coauthor.

Jerry Foster is one of those irresponsible guys who dates a different woman every day, spends his money at the race track and spends his time hanging around bars getting drunk and moaning about his problems to the bartender.  One particularly difficult day he leans against the jukebox, half drunk, and tells the machine that it is his new girlfriend, his true love.  The juke-box reciprocates by spitting out the money Foster needs to pay his bookie and then playing a song that includes the phrase "helping hand."  Foster bets on a horse called "Helping Hand" and makes a bundle.

The juke-box continues to give Foster career advice, and he achieves success.  But when he starts dating his secretary the juke-box gets jealous and stops helping him.  Financial ruin is staring him in the face, and things only get worse when Foster discovers that the juke-box is an alien surveillance device.  The aliens can't have Foster alerting the other Earthlings, and resolve to eliminate him.

"Juke-Box" is a sort of "Twilight Zone"-ish story, with its bizarre premise and macabre and jocular twist ending.  This one gets a passing grade; it is entertaining and just the right length (12 pages.)

"The Ego Machine" (1952)

This story first appeared in the May issue of Space Science Fiction under Kuttner's own name.  ISFDB credits C. L. Moore with co-authorship of the story.

This is a story about a robot who time travels from the future to the Twentieth Century to solve some problems.  (Don't tell Harlan Ellison's lawyer.)  Nicholas Martin is a successful Broadway playwright who has been trapped in a long term contract by a Hollywood director.  Martin's other problem is that he is too shy to declare his love for Erika Ashby, his agent.  Except for the robot, this sounds like P. G. Wodehouse stuff.

The robot from the future puts a helmet on Martin that temporarily rearranges Martin's brain cells so that they more closely follow the pattern of the ultimate man of Martin's type.  The model man of Martin's type is Benjamin Disraeli, the famous 19th century intellectual, politician and clotheshorse. With Disraeli's invincible self-confidence and heroic eloquence, Martin makes progress in solving his problems, but then has to deal with a violent foreigner who is immune to Disraeli's charm and logic.  Martin has the robot configure his brain to follow the matrix of a cave man known as Mammoth-Slayer. As Mammoth-Slayer, Martin is able to outfight the foreigner, and, in a commentary on women all you feminists will appreciate, not only Ashby but a second woman fall deeply in love with Martin after he grabs them up King Kong style, bites them on the ear (!), and declares them "Mine!"

This story isn't very good.  It is too long, 37 pages, for a story about such trifles, and the jokes are weak (guys, including the robot, get drunk; a guy spills his drink on another guy; the sex goddess of the silver screen is a narcissistic imbecile, etc.)  I've got to give this one a thumbs down.

"Call Him Demon" (1946)

"Call Him Demon" appeared under the pen name Keith Hammond in Thrilling Wonder Stories.  On the cover it is hailed as a "Fantastic Novelet."  As with the other stories we're looking at today, isfdb lists it as a collaboration between Kuttner and Moore.

"Call Him Demon" is in part an homage to L. Frank Baum's Oz books and Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book. I haven't read the Oz books, which are revered by important SF authors--Robert A. Heinlein and Philip Jose Farmer come to mind immediately, and I guess we can add Kuttner and Moore to the list.  I've read and enjoyed some Kipling (Kim, The Light That Failed, and some stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King") but not the Jungle Book.  Heinlein and Poul Anderson, among other SF greats, were big Kipling fans.

(Sometimes when these SF stories reference great writers like Kipling a nagging part of my mind wonders why I'm spending my time reading about time-travelling robots who get drunk by putting their fingers into light sockets and lovelorn juke-boxes when I haven't read most of the work of great writers like Kipling.)

It is 1920, and nine-year-old Jane Larkin has arrived at her grandmother's big house in Los Angeles.  Living among her relatives there is a stranger, an alien monster who has taken the form of a human being, and hypnotized the adults of the house into thinking he is a relative they have known all their lives.  But the resident children are immune to its mental powers, and know it has just moved in, three weeks before Jane's arrival.

While an extension of the monster's physical form sits in a chair along with Jane's other adult relatives, the remainder of the alien, including its soul, resides in a nether world, a sort of space-time warp. Telepathically, the monster commands the children to feed it; the only food it accepts is raw meat, and to reach the "little, horrible nest he made by warping space" the kids have to climb up into the attic and fix a particular image in their minds as they cross the portal between the dimensions.  

This story reminded me of Ray Bradbury stories about children who encounter alien or supernatural dangers, like "Zero Hour" and "The Man Upstairs," but it is not nearly as good as those Bradbury classics.  I feel like I should like this story, as the premise is good.  But the style doesn't work for me; the story is too long-winded and fails to convey any kind of fear.  "Call Me Demon" also lacks mystery; Kuttner and Moore employ an omniscient narrator and tell you exactly what is going on in the first five pages of the 20 page story.  Also, there are too many characters, like seven adults and five or six kids, and few of them stand out from the mass.  Because the characters are so dimly realized the horrific climax of the story lacks the power it could have had.

"Call Him Demon" is also one of those stories that romanticizes childhood, again and again talking about how children have different perceptions and psychologies than adults.  ("But Charles, who made the first discoveries, was only six, still young enough so that the process of going insane in that particular way wasn't possible for him.  A six-year-old is in a congenitally psychotic state; it is normal to him.")  Often in books and on TV they pull this on you--children can see fairies or whatever that adults can't--and I have never found it convincing or even interesting, and having encountered this conceit so many times I now find it annoying.

You've probably already guessed that I'm casting a negative vote on this one.  

"The Piper's Son" (1945)

This one was the cover story of Astounding, with Kuttner and Moore's pseudonym Lewis Padgett getting top billing.

I had high hopes for "The Piper's Son." Astounding has a higher reputation than Thrilling Wonder Stories, and it was in Astounding that the most critically acclaimed Kuttner/Moore stories, "Mimsy Were the Borogroves" and "Vintage Season," appeared.  The cover illustration is also promising; fully clothed men fighting with knives or short swords in a futuristic city. (The bikini girls in outer space covers you so often see are fun, but rarely correlate closely with the contents of a story.)

It is some decades after a nuclear war.  The United States now consists of small independent towns; if any town gets too big for its britches, it gets nuked.  Similarly, men all wear daggers and duels are commonplace.  (These means of keeping the peace are somewhat reminiscent of ideas in Robert Heinlein's 1940s work, like Beyond This Horizon and Space Cadet.)  Thanks to radiation from the war, a proportion of the population are "Baldies," telepaths recognizable by the fact that they have no hair whatsoever.  Baldies who want to assimilate wear wigs, fake eyebrows and fake eyelashes.  Ordinary people often view Baldies with suspicion, and the fact that some Baldies, generally those who don't wear fake hair, use their powers to take advantage of ordinary people doesn't help matters.

The plot of the story concerns Burkhalter, a Baldy with a wife and a young son. Burkhalter, in his private life and professional life, has to navigate difficult relationships with non-Baldies who are scared or resentful of the telepathic mutants.  In the climax of the story, it is discovered that one Baldy in town is trying to stir up hatred of non-Baldies among the young Baldies, including Burkhalter's own son.  In an explicit reference to the Japanese and German ideologies that led to World War Two, this racist Baldy thinks that since Baldies are superior to ordinary people they should band together to rule or exterminate the normal people.  The assimilationist Baldies, led by Burkhalter, gather together to nip this problem in the bud.

In "The Piper's Son" Kuttner and Moore come up with an interesting milieu in which to discuss topics like prejudice, racism, relationships between parents and children, and means to maintain social and international peace.  As I had hoped, Astounding comes through with a serious, thoughtful piece that is engaging and entertaining without resorting to lame jokes.  Thumbs up!

(Under the Padgett name Kuttner and Moore wrote a whole series of Baldy stories for Astounding; later collected in a volume entitled Mutant.  Probably worth looking into.)

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So, four stories, two weak, one acceptable, one good.  A decent record.  There is a lot more Henry Kuttner in my future.

Three tales from The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories: Wells, Kipling, and Williamson

Cover of the edition I borrowed

I wanted to read “Problems of Creativeness,” an earlier version of “The Death of Socrates,” the first chapter of Thomas M. Disch’s fixup 334, and so checked out a copy of 1992’s The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories. The collection, edited by Tom Shippey, seemed to have a number of interesting stories in it, so I put off Disch for a space and read several of them, today stories by H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and Jack Williamson.

“The Land Ironclads” by H. G. Wells

Published in 1903, in this story an unnamed hardy frontier nation of hunters, cowpunchers and “negro-whackers” (Shippey in his intro compares them to the Boers or the Australians) has been invaded by the army of a similarly anonymous urban, sophisticated nation of clerks and factory hands, presumably Europeans.  The skinny city boys easily defeat the rugged country boys by using what we would today call tanks, as well as bicycles.  Wells thinks bicycles are more suited to warfare than horses.

There isn't much by way of character or plot in this one, though the descriptions of the fighting are good.  Wells spends quite a bit of time describing the complex mechanisms of the land ironclads, and those that make their rifles so accurate; there are compensators that take into account the movement of the vehicle, for example, and a device that measures range to target and raises or lowers the gun barrel accordingly.  While Wells condemns war, he celebrates the triumph of science and the brain over spunk and brawn--the city boys in the tanks are described as doing their fighting in a rational, methodical, business-like way, which Wells heartily approves, and they share Wells's contempt for emotionalism, including patriotism.

"Land Ironclads" is more effective as an essay than as a piece of fiction; while competently written, there is no feeling beyond a facile "Gee Whiz!" response to the technological stuff and a smug confidence in the superiority of the educated elite.

“As Easy as ABC” by Rudyard Kipling

In the future (2065) there is what amounts to a world government, the Aerial Board of Control.  With a fleet of highly maneuverable aircraft armed with nonlethal weapons (blinding lights and deafening sound projectors), the ABC's multinational staff is an irresistible force able to maintain order anywhere in the world. 

(The ABC reminded me of the Space Patrol in Robert Heinlein's Space Cadet, which prevents international war by being ready at any moment to nuke aggressors.)

Kipling describes a post-democratic world in which the average person finds a crowd a disgusting source of physical and mental disease and voting to be an absurdity.  People lack any curiosity and are obsessed with privacy; there are no newspapers and everybody plants around their homes dense stands of quick grow trees to block line of sight.

A bunch of democracy activists has amassed in Chicago, however, and are demonstrating.  The local authorities are shocked at the sight of people standing so close that they brush against each other.  These demonstrations have inspired angry counter-demonstrations, and the ABC has to rush air ships to Illinois before the democracy activists are murdered by the anti-democracy crowd.  The members of the democrat crowd (and their families and friends who aren't even there!) are whisked away without any sort of trial to London, where their bizarre antics of taking votes and gathering in crowds will amuse the theater-going public.  Meanwhile the people of Chicago beg the ABC to take direct control of the town.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this story.  Is Kipling so worried about mob violence and so hostile to meddlesome elected politicians that he is advocating rule by an invincible and unaccountable elite that can carry you off without any kind of due process?  Or is he satirizing such fears?  Maybe he is just speculating that, if those of us in democratic countries don't show restraint and exercise responsibility when enjoying such freedoms as freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, and when voting for our representatives, that some kind of tyranny or other will arise.

All the clues point to Kipling believing that ABC rule is benevolent, however, that this story is a utopian attack on democracy and popular government.  The crew of the lead airship (an Englishman, an Italian, a Japanese, and a Russian) are depicted in a positive way, and it is suggested that all people in the world are rich because the population is low.  Maybe the ABC airship using force to keep the two Chicago crowds from fighting is analogous to a 19th century British imperial force taking up the white man's burden and maintaining order in some unruly Indian or African village.
            
On the "Gee Whiz!" front Kipling is as good as Wells.  Besides the aircraft and the fast growing trees, Kipling has automatic maps that act like a GPS computer, electric paralysis rays, and advanced medicine (people normally live to be 100.)  

An interesting, challenging story.

“The Metal Man” by Jack Williamson

It is perhaps not fair to compare Jack Williamson to major literary and cultural figures like H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling, but where "The Land Ironclads" and "Easy as ABC" try to make some point about society and human nature, "The Metal Man," published in 1928, is just a conventional piece of entertainment.

A scientist is searching the South American wilderness for radium.  For some reason he doesn't have any local guides or grad students with him.  He finds a ten mile wide crater full of a weird green heavier-than-air gas.  He blunders into the crater, and discovers that the gas in the crater turns organic matter into metal.  He finds lots of dead metal birds and even a metal prehistoric reptile.  He encounters a bizarre life form, intelligent crystals that have the power to defy gravity.  The crystals help him get out of the crater, but he is doomed to turn to metal.  He writes a letter to his best friend, and pays a guy to deliver his dead metal body to his friend with the letter.  When the friend accepts delivery he puts the metallic corpse in the museum of the college where the scientist taught.  The End.

A barely acceptable trifle.

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These three stories were more interesting than fun.  I have read more entertaining work by each of these writers in the past: Wells - Kipling - Williamson.  Still, the Wells and Kipling perhaps provide some kind of insight into the thinking of two important British writers. 

This weekend I will read some more tales from The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories.