Richard Matheson: "Mantage," "One for the Books" and "The Holiday Man"

After spending some quality time in the year 1980 with Barry Malzberg, Felix Gotschalk and Harlan Ellison, let's go back...back...back...to the 1950s and hang out with the guy who wrote Steven Spielberg's best movie as well as Vincent Price's best movie, Richard Matheson.  On April 11 we started reading Matheson's 1961 oft-reprinted collection Shock!; let's read three more stories from that volume today (we're reading the original versions of these stories via the sorcery of the internet archive, world's greatest website.)

"Mantage" (1959)

"Mantage" debuted in Science Fiction Showcase, a hardcover anthology edited by Mary Kornbluth.  Fred Pohl got her the job editing the anthology after her husband Cyril died of a heart attack in 1958; as Pohl tells it, Kornbluth's heart was worn out during his World War II service and the man ignored doctor's orders to stop smoking, drinking, and eating salty food.  As an active SF fan, Mary Kornbluth was qualified to edit an anthology, and Science Fiction Showcase went through multiple editions, but for some reason she didn't go on to edit any more.  (I got all this info from three autobiographical posts at Pohl's blog which focus on his relationship with the Kornbluths, Cyril Kornbluth's death and cremation, and the genesis of Science Fiction Showcase.  (Links: One Two Three.)  Pohl sort of portrays himself as a hero in these memoirs, putting himself out to save the dysfunctional Kornbluths from themselves, and there is some evidence Mary Kornbluth found this kind of thing annoying.  (Link to some evidence.)) 

Enough with the SF gossip.  "Mantage" is what isfdb calls a novelette, and is like 24 pages in Science Fiction Showcase, a scan of which I am reading.  I sighed when I realized the story was about Hollywood; I'm kind of sick of Los Angeles stories.  (I am always glad when a story is about New York.)

"Mantage" is a total bore, even though it does take place partly in Manhattan.  A writer guy sees a movie about a writer guy, and laments that real life isn't like a motion picture, that you can't rush through the ten years of hard work it takes to become a successful writer in a 30-second montage of brief shots of clocks, cigarette butts, and a guy at a typewriter, but have to live every boring or arduous second.  That night, looking in the mirror, he wishes life was more like the movies.  

We kind of know what is going to happen, but, regardless, Matheson inflicts on us a long tedious mainstream narrative of the writer achieving literary success and getting married and taking a ten-week trip to La La Land to write a screenplay based on his novel where he gets involved in a love triangle with a sexy secretary and a sexy actress and thus jeopardizes his marriage but then his wife takes him back blah, blah, blah.  The gimmick that is supposed to make this cliched goop tolerable is that we read it in a series of brief scenes and--dun dun dun--the writer is also experiencing this stuff, his own life, as a series of brief scenes!  He can only remember the significant high points, not the quiet days of hard work, so it feels like his life is passing by in an hour and a half!  He can't recall swearing, he can't recall having sex--his memories of intimate moments with a woman fade to black before she disrobes, you know, just like in a Hollywood movie!  Suddenly his kids are grown without him having witnessed their formative years, suddenly his wife is old without his having appreciated their time together, suddenly he is dying--and he sees the words "THE END" floating before him!

The gimmick is dumb, the plot is sleep-inducing, there is no tension or surprise, and the story is three or four times as long as it need be.  Thumbs down! 

Besides in Matheson collections, after its debut "Mantage" would show up in a few anthologies, including Peter Haining's The Hollywood Nightmare.    

The Hollywood Nightmare has an introduction by fan favorite Christopher Lee

"One for the Books" (1955)

This is an OK story, maybe too long at 14 pages.  An uneducated 59-year-old man works at a university as a janitor.  One morning, he wakes up speaking French.  He can barely control his own speech, French phrases just come right out, almost of their own accord.

Yesterday he worked in the French department, and today his work brings him to other departments, and soon he has an encyclopedic knowledge of many subjects, and will reel off facts and figures and quotes from books autonomically, in response to questions.  He can't manipulate or even really understand this knowledge, he is like a machine, regurgitating words in a monotone when prompted by outside stimuli.

Matheson provides readers many scenes in which the janitor's wife and friends respond with alarm to stuff the janitor says, and we also get many examples of the kind of trivia the janitor now "knows."  The middle of the story thus feels repetitive.  In the final third of the story, assembled college professors rapid fire many questions at the janitor, testing his knowledge, but never think to figure out how this happened to the guy, 

But then we find out how.  An alien space craft appears and sucks the information right out of the janitor's brain, leaving him a blank slate without memory, a man unable to talk or recognize his own name.  We get a superfluous denouement that undermines the shock ending of the tale in which we learn that a year or so later he has learned to speak again.

I would have preferred a story in which a working-class man suddenly has access to vast knowledge and uses this unique resource to become president or a crime boss or a messianic figure or whatever, and faces moral dilemmas and/or undergoes a radical change in values and personality or something--you know, a story in which a character makes decisions and changes, a story which speculates about life and society.  I guess that would be a real science fiction story or a mainstream story--here we just have a horror story in which a guy doesn't act but is merely acted upon by inexplicable forces and suffers.  Oh, well.

We're judging "One for the Books" merely acceptable.  After its initial appearance in Galaxy, "One for the Books" would see print again in several Matheson collections and a few anthologies, including Untravelled Worlds, which looks like a text book inflicted upon British schoolkids.  

"The Holiday Man" (1957)

"The Holiday Man" debuted in the same issue of F&SF which contains one of the better of Chad Oliver's stories about how much better a primitive life is than a modern one, "The Wind Blows Free," as well as stories by Poul Anderson and Avram Davidson we should check out sometime.  It has been reprinted in anthologies like Robert Potter's Tales of Mystery and the Unknown and a book of stories from F&SF, and of course a pile of Matheson collections.

A man is very reluctant to go to work, but his callous wife tells him he must go, nobody else can do his job.  He walks to the station, rides the train to the city, wastes time in a bar not drinking his beer, then sneaks into his office late.  He lays down on a couch and writhes and screams for hours.  Then he gets up, writes notes on a sheet of paper, delivers the paper to his boss.  It seems that this dude goes into some kind of trance and can see everyone who will die the next day or something like that, that he watches them as they expire, be it peacefully in bed or horribly in a fire.  He works for a newspaper and they print his predictions.  It is sort of implied that this is prediction is done only for holidays, or maybe the prediction for holidays is particularly interesting to the public.

This story felt a little oblique when I read it, but I own a withdrawn library copy of Richard Matheson: Collected Stories Volume Two and took a gander at the little afterword to the story therein, to find Matheson confirming that newspapers, in the Fifties at least (I was born in 1971), would regularly predict how many people would die on each holiday, something I don't know that I have ever heard of before.

"The Holiday Man" is well-written, economical, engaging, and successful in setting a mood, and of course I like the theme of being in a difficult marriage and having to commute to an office job you find humiliating or debilitating (you know, like in the unacknowledged classic masterpiece The Kinks Present a Soap Opera), so thumbs up.

**********

Well, we've got a balanced mix here, one long and tedious story, one acceptable story, and one short and effective story.  So a score for today of zero.  The last installment had two pluses and two minuses, so also a zero.  So we are over halfway through Shock! and it's a wash; well, with six stories to go, Matheson has a chance to achieve liftoff or sink into the abyss.

We'll spend our next episode in the 1950s, so stay tuned if that is your thing.