Ray Bradbury in Weird Tales: "There Was an Old Woman," "The Wind," and "The Lake"

While working on my Frank Frazetta Vampirella jigsaw puzzle last weekend, finishing up the bottom brown section, I watched the Olivia de Havilland TV movie The Screaming Woman, which is based loosely on a Ray Bradbury story.  Bradbury having been pushed to the forefront of my mind, I decided to read a few stories by the creator of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles chosen more or less at random, and hit upon three that first appeared in Weird Tales and would later be reprinted in the 1947 collection Dark Carnival and the 1955 collection The October Country.  I am reading the Weird Tales versions of the stories, straight from scans of the World War II-era issues in which they appeared that are available at the world's finest website, the internet archive.  

"There Was an Old Woman" (1944)

When she was a child, Tildy's mother died, and Tildy's response was to boycott death, to pretend death doesn't exist, to refuse to believe in death.  She neglected to attend her father's funeral.  She doesn't listen to the radio or read the paper because of all the talk of death in the news.  She didn't get married because she could never find a man who refused to believe in death, a man who could promise her he'd never die.  

We learn all that background in flashbacks--the story begins with Aunt Tildy, now old, being visited by the Grim Reaper!  He tries to convince her to accept her own death, saying stuff like "Aren't you tired?" and "It would be so nice for you to rest," but Aunt Tildy is adamant.  The Reaper leaves, but when Emily, Tildy's niece, returns home and is shocked to see her Aunt there, Tildy realizes she is a ghost, that her body has been taken to the funeral home!  She rushes to the funeral home and refuses to leave until the mortician and staff sew her body back up and put her blood back in it and carry the corpse back to her home, where she exerts all the considerable force of her will and reenters her body and gets it walking and talking again.  Aunt Tilly has foiled death and will live for the foreseeable future, always on guard against another visit from the Reaper.

This is kind of silly joke story with macabre elements; I guess maybe people who like this sort of thing would use the word "whimsical" to describe it.  To me, "There Was an Old Woman" seems merely tolerable.  One of my issues with it is that Aunt Tildy speaks in a sort of rural dialect, for example, making extensive use of variations on the phrase "Lands of Ghosen!" and I tend to find that kind of thing annoying. 

"There Was an Old Woman" has not been anthologized much, though it has of course been reprinted a billion times in various Bradbury collections.  It was presented in a 1949 issue of the British magazine Argosy, however.

The 1961 British printing of The October Country on the right, isfdb is 
telling me, omits seven stories from the Ballantine edition; "There Was an Old 
Woman" and "The Wind" were among the survivors

"The Wind" (1943)

This is a traditional Weird Tales-type story about an educated Westerner who goes to the mysterious East and when he gets back home to England or America or wherever is haunted by something that he encountered in "the Orient," as we used to say.

Colt, aged 30, is one of these adventurer guys who has been all over Africa and Asia; he is an expert on storms who has written books on tornadoes and hurricanes and that sort of thing, written them based on direct experience of extreme weather phenomena from every corner of the globe!  In Tibet he climbed some mountain the locals warned him it was blasphemy to touch, climbed this "vast evil mountain, gray and jutting" and looked into a valley that was full of winds, "not one wind but millions, small and large, light and smoke-hued."  The evil winds of the world who kill thousands of people via typhoon and twister, offended that their secret lair had been discovered, followed Colt back home to the USA.  Colt has had his house reinforced, and the wind batters it for several nights.  At first Colt thinks the wind wants to destroy him, but he realizes it is trying to take him alive--it wants to integrate his mind or soul or whatever into its own, as he is the world expert on wind and countermeasures mankind can use to defend itself from the wind, knowledge of value to this weird being!  As his house begins to fall apart, Colt rushes to the cellar to hang himself, but he is too slow--the last scene of the story makes clear his consciousness is now one with that of the evil winds.

I found this story a little more entertaining than "There Was an Old Woman," but "The Wind" is obviously less original than that tale and lacks the distinctive Bradbury voice which is so evident in  "There Was an Old Woman."  Quite a few editors have reprinted "The Wind" in their anthologies, and the story was even included in a 1977 issue of the fanzine The Diversifier.   

"The Lake" (1944) 

I suggested earlier that "There Was an Old Woman" was characteristic of Bradbury's work, and the same is true of "The Lake," but whereas I wasn't crazy about the silliness and whimsicality of "There Was an Old Woman," the evocation of childhood and both the beauty and sadness of life, and the poetic touches, that make "The Lake" a very Bradburian story are striking a chord with me, and I am giving this one an enthusiastic thumbs up!

Our narrator relates how, as a twelve-year-old, he visited the beach one last time with his mother--it was the end of summer, and they were moving West; Bradbury successfully evokes all the feelings of being at some kind of sad endpoint, and turns it up to maximum when he reveals that at this very beach the narrator's friend, a girl his age with whom he had fallen in love even though he hadn't really reached puberty, drowned and her body was not recovered.  

In the brief section on the narrator's journey to his new home out West, Bradbury, in a way I found very clever and satisfying (this is one of the poetic parts), constructs a parallel between the way sandcastles are crumbled by water and our memories crumble when we move, reinforcing one of the story's main themes, that everything crumbles.

The narrator grows up, attends university, gets married.  On their honeymoon he and his new wife go to that beach; it is his first trip back East and he was last here almost precisely ten years ago--again it is the end of summer.  Bewildering events, perhaps supernatural, both grisly and touching, occur that bring back all of the narrator's feelings for the girl he loved as a twelve-year-old, and we know his marriage is going to be an unhappy one because he can never love his wife the way he loved--still loves--that little girl.

I of course like stories that tell you life is a tragedy as well as stories about disastrous sexual relationships, so "The Lake"'s themes and plot are right up my alley, and Bradbury's style and pacing are very fine.  Five out of five waterlogged corpses! 

"The Lake" has been reprinted in several venues beyond the innumerable times it has reappeared in Bradbury collections, including anthologies by serial anthologizers August Derleth, Leo Margulies and Martin H. Greenberg, and even The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Magazine (which was published by the Leo Margulies Corporation and edited by Margulies' wife Cylvia Kleinman.)  Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh's 1982 volume The Arbor House Celebrity Book of Horror Stories has as its gimmick the fact that famous people with some connection to the world of horror fiction from Vincent Price and Joyce Carol Oates to Stephen King and Robert Bloch selected the stories, the editors having asked them to identify and write intros to "the most frightening story they had ever read."  John Jakes' selection is "The Lake," and in his intro he talks about his early writing career and his relationships with Bradbury and with editor of Amazing and Fantastic Howard Browne.  (Lawrence Block, Robert Silverberg and Ira Levin all chose stories I can recommend myself, Fredric Brown's "Don't Look Behind You," H. P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time," and Richard Matheson's "Prey.")  

     

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Next time, three more short stories from magazines published before my parents were born.