Playboy early 1957: R Bradbury, R Bloch, C Beaumont and F Brown

It is fun flipping through 1950s issues of Playboy, seeing the old ads and mid-century illustrations and marveling at how every single page of the magazine offers more information about jazz than I will amass in a lifetime.  So let's read stories by members of the SF community that appeared in our most pretentious skin rag in the first half of 1957, when Ike was sworn in for a second term, the European Economic Community was founded, and electric watches first came on the market.  

NB: I am reading all these stories in scans of the original magazines; other printings may feature alternate texts. 

"In A Season of Calm Weather" by Ray Bradbury (1957)

Let's be honest; I prefer the Ray Bradbury stories in which somebody gets killed and people are engaged in disastrous sexual relationships, and I try to avoid the sappy Bradbury stories that look like they might be putting forward some banal social message or something.  I considered skipping this one based on the title and then again when I realized it was about a guy who is what the kids today might call a "Picasso stan."  I think Picasso is lame, and the drawings by Picasso included in this issue of Playboy did nothing to alter my opinion.  But I forged on regardless.

And I am glad I did, because whatever I might think about Picasso, this is a good story, short and pungent.  A guy from Ohio who worships Picasso in on vacation in France.  He is alone on the beach as sunset approaches.  He notices another man has arrived nearby, an old geez who is scrawling in the sand with a dirty popsicle stick he found.  It is Picasso himself!  Drawing his lame doodles--I mean "incredible figures"--in the sand.  Creations that will soon be washed away by the tide!  Ohio guy sees drawings by his god, the artist everybody professes to adore, that nobody else will ever see!  It appears that Ohio man won't even ever tell anyone else of this transcendent moment--later, he doesn't tell his wife about it, a woman who can't even pronounce "Picasso" correctly.

I may find Picasso worship inexplicable, but I find Bradbury worship easily comprehensible--Ray does a good job of describing a transcendent magical experience, the greatest moment of a man's life, one which he cannot share with anyone else.  So, thumbs up for "In A Season of Calm Weather," a story which overcame my prejudices and makes me wonder if I myself am getting sappy as the reaper approaches.

After debuting in the January '57 issue of Playboy, "In a Season of Calm Weather" would be included in the Bradbury collections A Medicine for Melancholy and The Day it Rained Forever.  It seems that in the 1980s the story began appearing under the title "The Picasso Summer." 

 

"The Traveling Salesman" by Robert Bloch (1957)

The February '57 ish of Playboy includes a photo of the bespectacled Bloch with an unidentified woman whom I believe to be Maila Nurmi in her Vampira costume.  And this story, which, if isfdb is to be believed, was reprinted in the same year in F&SF and later in a Playboy anthology, but no place else.  Is "The Traveling Salesman" some kind of rare Bloch story which for some reason has never been collected?   

Maybe this story hasn't been reprinted much because it is a short short and a waste waste of your time time.  Arthur Schlongenheimer is a centuries-old wizard who has lived into the 20th century.  When not raising the dead or avoiding Satan's minions, Black Art, as his friends call him, throws wild parties.  Our narrator is one of the friends; he and Black Art's circle use beatnik or hipster slang.  At one of the parties arrives a mysterious stranger.  He declares that he is the Traveling Salesman, the character from all those ribald jokes about farmer's daughters.  He was created by the mass psychic energy of all those jokes being thought of and told, and he laments that he has to live out all the jokes' scenarios.  The punchline of the story is that none of the jokes ever describes what he is selling, so the Traveling Salesman carries bricks around in his briefcase.

"Night Ride" by Charles Beaumont (1957)

I spent the last two blog posts attacking Charles Beaumont's stories from 1956 issues of Playboy, but maybe in 1957 he was pushing out product more to my taste.  Let's hope so as we read this story from the March issue that would go on to be the title story of a 1960 Beaumont collection.

Our narrator is in a jazz band.  (Of course he is.)  The band needs a new pianist, and finds David Green, a kid who "has troubles...great big troubles," and who is a great jazz musician--he isn't "what you'd call a virtuoso exactly...he didn't hit all the notes.  Only the right ones."  "Night Ride" is one of those stories that uses wacky metaphors and supposedly clever wordsmithery to express how great music affects people (at least the small elite of people sophisticated enough to appreciate great music) and to get across that jazz is too special, too capacious, to awesome for mere words to describe.

"We're a jazz band, Green.  Do you know what jazz is?"

Davey threw me a glance and ran his hand over his hair.  "You tell me."

"I can't.  No one can.  It was a stupid question."  Max was pleased: if the kid had tried an answer, that would have been bad.

Max is the head of the jazz band in the story, the Band of Angels, and after we get through the pages that try to convey to you how awesome and ineffable jazz is, we learn about Max.  Max is like a preacher who talks passionately and poetically about jazz, and also tends to the spiritual/psychological problems of jazz musicians.  The narrator, who plays the trumpet, was broken hearted because he ran over a child with his automobile while driving drunk, and Max has helped him deal with his grief.  David Green's issue is that he is mourning his wife, who died a year or so ago.  Max's therapy is, it seems, just to get the sufferer to talk, and thereby to put his tragedy behind him so he can contribute to the universe by giving birth to jazz that "throws a whole lot of sparks" and "makes the cats all swallow their ties."     

  

With Green the genius in the band, the Band of Angels becomes one of the top groups in the nation, making records, making money.  Then Green meets a gorgeous girl and they fall in love.  And Green's music turns pedestrian!  He was a great musician because he was sad!  So Max solves the problem--by telling Green that "Chicks are all the same" and that he had sex with Green's new love!  Miserable again, Green can go back to fathering music that throws sparks and makes cats eat neckwear!  At least that is the plan--in the event, Green kills himself!        

It becomes clear to everybody in the band that all these years Max wasn't helping them deal with their spiritual/psychological problems--he was subtly keeping their psychological trauma alive so that everybody was miserable and could play their best, because the true jazz greats are all broken men!   

The plot of "Night Ride" is good, even if the lists of famous jazz songs and famous jazz musicians flew over my head and all the gushing about the fictional performances of the characters and the mystical passages on how jazz is indescribable are tiresome.  Acceptable.

"Sentence," "Daisies" and "Politeness" by Fredric Brown (1954) 

Remember when, in 1955, in the pages of The Best From F&SF: Fifth Series, Anthony Boucher told us that Fredric Brown was the master of the "vinnie," Brown's cute little name for short shorts?  Well, here in the March 1957 issue of Playboy, we get three Brown vinnies that first appeared in his hardcover collection Angels and Spaceships and then in the paperback edition, retitled Starshine, which has a stellar Richard Powers cover which shows that Powers can draw and paint the human form as well as the bizarre shapes jutting out of wastelands or just floating in the middle of a void he is known for.  These three short shorts take up two pages in Hugh Hefner's magazine, and appear under the collective title "Triplicate Twisteroos."

In "Sentence," a Terran lands on a planet, kills a native, and is arrested and sentenced to death, sentence to be carried out the next day.  The custom of the natives is to provide the doomed man delicious food and drink and his choice of gorgeous whores the night before he is to be executed.  This planet's rate of rotation is so slow that one night is many Earth decades, so the murderer will live out the rest of his life in a libertine paradise.  

"Daisies" is a joke based on a cliché that I had never heard before.  The cliché is "daisies never tell."  A scientist invents a way to receive telepathic communications from flowers.  When he lets his wife use it some daisies tell her that the scientist is having sex with his assistant.  So the wife shoots them both.

"Politeness" takes place on Venus, in this story a desert planet.  For years Earthmen have tried to make friends with the natives, who just ignore or dismiss all such overtures.  One Terran diplomat gets so angry at being rebuffed by a Venusian that he yells at the desert dweller to go fuck himself (in the story this is styled "go -- yourself.")  Venusians are hermaphrodites (in the story this is styled "bisexual") and can fuck themselves, and, in fact, as if this story had been written by an 11-year-old, "go fuck yourself" is the traditional greeting among Venusians, and so the native and the Earther sit down and become pals.

Three stupid stories.

          

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The Beaumont story is a successful work of fiction with a conventional construction--characters in conflict with each other and themselves who change over the course of the plot, which has a beginning, middle and end.  The Bradbury story is more like an anecdote than a story, but Bradbury manages to make the anecdote affecting.  The Bloch and Brown stories are just weak jokes expanded to a length that wastes your time--come on, I'm not going to live forever, guys!  

This episode of MPorcius Fiction Log was brought to you by the letter "B."