Masques

by J N Williamson

  Baba’s appearance never got any worse, but this was the only thing that remained static in her new life. In addition to her trips around the world, back and ahead through time, she developed one day no different from any other day the notion that she was pregnant.

  Nothing could dissuade her, either. Because of her heart there was nothing but to humor her, so for almost an entire year we would ask her if she felt it was “time” yet; she’d listen, poke her stomach with her good hand, and answer no, but soon, and we’d all better stick around.

  Then one day I stopped in her room for a visit and, as had become customary, inquired whether she thought it would be a boy or a girl. This used to delight her.

  She just looked at me.

  “Gonna name it after me, are you?” I joshed.

  She rolled her eyes. “Letty!” she called. “Come and get your young’n. He’s gone completely crazy!”

  After that the subject of grandmother’s pregnancy never came up.

  By this time we had stopped taking in boarders and Death and Dr. Cleveland became infrequent callers. At least, in their official capacities. And with the absence of these two, a pall slowly descended which none of us seemed able to lift. It wasn’t exactly a gloomy or joyless house, but the lively spark that pulls each moment from the level of the ordinary to something a little finer, this was certainly gone. And it would never come back.

  On a nicely chill September morning, with many of the roses still left in the garden, Baba called us all into her room and announced calmly that she was going to stop living. Now since she was the only one of us who had never previously issued such a statement—Aunt Dora always said “Goodbye, goodbye” and squeezed my arms even when she was only going to the movies—we were impressed. Unconvinced, but impressed.

  Baba asked Pearl and Nellie to take her to the window so that she might have a last look at her flowers: she was there fully forty-five minutes and got to see them all, plus a lot no one else could see for she remarked how lovely the japonicas were and there had never been japonicas in the garden.

  I remember it all very well. I was standing by Baba’s side at the window and, since it was true—it was early in the morning—I commented that the hoarfrost looked like diamond-dust on the grass.

  Baba jerked her head around. “Young mister,” she said, “I’ll thank you to remember there’s ladies present!”

  For some reason that made me cry. I wanted suddenly to pray, but we all changed religions so often, I could only apologize. They sent me out for an ice cream bar, then: my grandmother always had a great fondness for ice cream bars.

  When I got back she was dead.

  I spent that night in the room with the horrible heads. But they didn’t scare me a bit.

  I imagine they’re still there, if the ink hasn’t faded.

  Charles Beaumont:

  The Magic Man

  William F. Nolan

  He was an adventurer.

  A thousand passions shaped his life. He was always discovering new ones, remembering old ones. My phone would ring at midnight in California: Chuck calling from Chicago to tell me he planned to spend the day with Ian Fleming and why not grab a plane and join them? By morning I was in Illinois. We flew to Europe that way, spurred to action by a wild Beaumontian plan to see the 1960 Grand Prix at Monte Carlo. (“I’ll write it up for Playboy!” And he did.)

  He loved King Kong, trains, pulp magazines, Vic and Sade, Oz, Steinbeck, old horror movies, late-night coffee shops . . . All his pores were open; he absorbed life with his body, mind and spirit. He moved through the world like a comet. This is not hyperbole; it is fact. Sleep was an enemy—to be endured for a few hours each night. Chuck was almost never at rest; there was so much to see, to learn, to experience, to share with others.

  Racing driver, radio announcer, musician, actor, cartoonist, multilith operator, statistical typist, film critic, story analyst, book and magazine editor, literary agent, teacher at UCLA, freight expediter, the father of four children . . . he was all of these. But writing was the blood in his body, the stuff of dreams put to paper, the driving force which gave ultimate meaning to his life.

  Chuck could never write fast enough to catch up with his ideas, and he always had many projects planned: a play with Richard Matheson, a novel of his youth, a World War I flying spectacular, a comedy record album with Paul DeWitt, a film on auto racing, a novelet about a cowboy he’d met in Missouri . . .

  A technical virtuoso in prose, he utilized many styles, but the distinctive “Beaumont touch” was always evident, whether he was telling us about power-hungry Adam Cramer in The

  Intruder, jazzman Spoof Collins in Black Country, the perverted lovers of The Crooked Man, the tough stock car veteran in A Death in the Country, or the gentle little man who rode stone lions in The Vanishing American. And although he wrote in many fields, it was fantasy and science fiction which shaped him as a creative writer. “I lived in illiterate contentment until spinal meningitis laid me low in my twelfth year,” he once declared. “Then I discovered Oz, Burroughs, Poe—and the jig was up.”

  He spent his childhood on Chicago’s north side, and in Everett, Washington, with his aunts—publishing his own fan magazine, Utopia, in his early teens and writing countless letters to sf/fantasy publications. Radio work led to his leaving high school a year short of graduation for an acting career in California. It didn’t jell, and soon he was inking cartoons for MGM in their animation studio and working as a part-time illustrator for FPCI (Fantasy Publ. Co.) in Los Angeles.

  And starving.

  His father obtained a job for him as a railroad clerk in Mobile, Alabama—where, at 19, he met Helen Broun, and scribbled in a notebook: “She’s incredible. Intelligent and beautiful. This is the girl I’m going to marry!”

  When Chuck moved back to Los Angeles, Helen went with him as his wife.

  I met him (briefly) for the first time late in 1952, at Universal. Ray Bradbury, then working there on It Came From Outer Space, introduced us. I recall Chuck’s sad face and ink-stained hands; he wanted to write for Universal, not run a multilith machine in the music department. Ray was certain of the Beaumont talent, and had been helping Chuck with his early work—as he later helped me. The first Beaumont story had already appeared (in Amazing) and within a few more months, when I saw Chuck again, half a dozen others had been sold. Forry Ackerman, then Chuck’s agent, got us together early in 1953, and our friendship was immediate and lasting.

  I found, in Chuck Beaumont, a warmth, a vitality, an honesty and depth of character which few possess. And (most necessary) a wild, wacky, irreverent sense of humor; Chuck could always laugh at himself.

  The Beaumonts were in disastrous shape in ’53; Chuck’s typewriter was in hock and the gas had been shut off in his apartment. I remember his breaking the seal and turning it back on; his son, Chris, required heat, and damn the Gas Co.! Chris got what he needed. Later, as his other children, Cathy, Elizabeth and Gregory came along, he loved them with equal intensity. Chuck’s love was a well that never ran dry; it nourished those around him. No one was happier at a friend’s success; Chuck had a personal concern for what you were, what you were doing, where you were headed in life. He would encourage, bully, insult, charm—extracting the best from those he loved. You were continually extending yourself to keep up with him; happily, he kept all of his friends at full gallop.

  Chuck’s last hardcover book was Remember, Remember . . . and there is so much to remember about Charles Beaumont: the frenzied, nutty nights when we plotted Mickey Mouse adventures for the Disney magazines . . . the bright, hot, exciting racing weekends at Palm Springs, Torrey Pines, Pebble Beach . . . the whirlwind trips to Paris and Nassau and New York . . . the sessions on the set at Twilight Zone when he’d exclaim, “I write it and they create it in three dimensions. God, but it’s magic” . . . the walking tour we made of his old neighborhood in Chicago . . . the day my first story was published (“See, Bill, you can do it! You’re on the way!”) .
. . the enthusiastic phone calls, demanding news (“Goodies for ole Bewmarg!”) . . . the fast, machine-gun rattle of his typewriter as I talked to Helen in the kitchen while he worked in the den . . . the rush to the newsstand for the latest Beaumont story . . .

  He was 25 when he wrote Black Country and began his big success with Playboy and his close friendship with editor Ray Russell. He was 38 when he died, after a three-year illness. It is trite to say, but true, that a good writer lives in his work. Charles Beaumont was a very good writer indeed. His full potential was never realized; he might well have become a great one.

  The Magic Man is no longer with us, but his magic still dazzles, erupts and sparkles from a printed page, shocks us, surprises us, makes us laugh and cry—and, finally, tells us a little more about the world we live—and die—in.

  That’s all any writer can hope to do. Chuck did that.

  For us, the Beaumont magic will always be there.

  Master of Imagination

  (Interview)

  Richard Matheson

  That original writer and perspicacious editor Ray Russell, in an uncredited introduction to his friend’s frightening yarn “First Anniversary”[1] I said, “Richard Matheson is almost too good to be true.”

  As he generally is, Russell was right. There’s been no one since the development of television—in or out of movies or so-called “category fiction”—like the author and scripter of such dissimilar unforgettables as Duel, What Dreams May Come, The Shrinking Man, and Bid Time Return.[2]

  Possibly Matheson, a modest man, senses it. Perhaps he has never considered himself a science fiction or a horror writer but a “realistic fantasist” because he knows nature challenges Olympian versatility, and Richard prefers to remain a moving target. No one medium appears to maintain a lasting grip on him; he is or has been at home writing short stories, novels, theatrical and TV scripts, and stage plays. While no less knowledgeable a personage than Stephen King regards him as one of the two writers to affect the modern horror story[3] and it was this dignified son of Norwegian immigrants with whom Rod Serling first shared writing chores on TV’s Twilight Zone, Richard Matheson now means to produce work that uplifts (as this interview reveals)—writing that stimulates a less-horrified and -fictive interest in fundamental questions of life and death.

  “An enormous man, luxuriantly bearded and pale-eyed, like a seer of old,” Ray Russell said of the man who adapted the “unadaptable”Bradbury masterpiece, The Martian Chronicles, and the Jack Palance-starring Dracula, to television, and spoke of Richard’s “deep and abiding belief . . . in everything super-, preter-, extra-, or un-natural.” Here, Matheson clarifies those beliefs and politely explains why he adheres to them but is no sermonizer. The also-bearded Russell and William F. Nolan, who has called Matheson “Mr. Dependable, Mr. Resolute, Mr. Solid,” agree with him that he was born to write (that first event happening in New Jersey, February 20, 1926). He wrote Novel One, The Beardless Warriors, following combat duty in World War II, and the fact that it may loosely be termed a “war novel” does not seem surprising to Matheson—nor should it be, since such men become interested in a great many things and are always hard to pigeonhole. His first published short story, “Born of Man and Woman ” opened the world of fantasy to him—and it was as if lovers of fantasy had been waiting for Richard. After that publication, in 1950, science fiction mags welcomed him and, in common with most 20th century writers, he went where the fiction sold.

  But what Matheson offered was something different, or special: Oft-terrifying tales in which all appears normal, possibly small-townish of milieu, but for an ever-spreading stain of the fanciful, the unexpected, or the alarming. No more did readers have to mumble the names of foreign characters or locations, then settle for another rehashing of the time-honored but ancient myths. Now, as H. P. Lovecraft once hoped, horrors could be really “original” and the “illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law”[4] might be happening down the block or around the corner—or deep inside a character not surfacely unlike the spellbound reader.

  The writers of horror and the supernatural who came next, know it or not—among them, his good friend and sometimes-collaborator Charles Beaumont—were in a way liberated by the influence which Richard Matheson subtly exercised through his prose—and perhaps, most of all, on television. It is a fate he takes with seeming ease that his most permanent renown may reside in those stories he devised or adapted for that impermanent, often-unfaithful creature sometimes called “the tube”. Consider his Night Stalker adaptation[5] or Night Strangler original; The Morning After; or such Twilight Zone Matheson originals as “Little Girl Lost,” “Steel,” “Death Ship,” “The Invaders,” “Nick of Time” or “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.”

  Maybe it’s simpler to accept a videotape, electronic future when you know that, so long as television itself exists, uncountable people will be delighted by your impressively varied, creative output and knowing you are the Master of Imagination.

  [1] The Playboy Book of Horror and The Supernatural, 1967.

  [2] Called Somewhere in Time, starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, in the motion picture version.

  [3] The second was inventive Jack Finney, author of The Third Level and The Body Snatchers.

  [4] Some Notes on a Nonentity, by H. P. Lovecraft.

  [5] This surprising and exciting blend of horror, detection, humor, and clever special effects with reporter Carl Kolchak at the center—an inspired characterization by actor Darren McGavin—was, to that point, the highest-rated television film of all time.

  On Being Richard Matheson: His work and Defining It.

  JNW: Do you feel there is greater freedom in writing fantasy than other kinds of writing? Are you comfortable when you’re termed a “fantasist”?

  MATHESON: There is, to be sure, a certain freedom a fantasy writer has. He is not bound by reality. If he wants to write a story about someone traveling through time, he does so without regard for the scientific realities which make such travel impossible in the literal sense. If he wants to have vampires prowling suburbia at night, he does so. If he chooses to have his main character shrink until he disappears from sight, he does not hesitate to do so. I have, of course, done all these things—and enjoyed it very much. I doubt if I enjoyed, as much, following the progress of a teenage infantryman through Germany in World War Two or writing suspense or murder mysteries or westerns, for that matter . . . It does the creative spirit good to shift gears and go from zero to sixty in seconds flat, fantasy-bound.

  At the same time, I regard myself as a realistic fantasist . . . I like my fantasy firmly entrenched in contemporary reality. It occurred to me just today that, in the realistic soil of our times, I enjoy inserting one minor seed of fantasy. How that seed grows and what it grows into is the usual substance of my work. It is my nature—half dreamer, half conservative. It is the most pleasurable way for me to function creatively. In the past, I certainly came to the conclusion that writing terror worked best (for me, anyway) when it took place “in the noon-day sun.” This phrase either came from Anthony Boucher’s mind or he quoted it in a review of my novel, A Stir of Echoes.

  I don’t care to write terror any longer. Not perse, at any rate. If what I have to say includes areas which are necessarily frightening, I do not short-change them. But to scare readers for that reason alone is no longer of interest to me. Doing so is a venerable literary tradition and I do not condemn it. I just have lost my interest in doing it personally. . . . I feel I have other things to do now. God knows that, where the world and its conditions are concerned, I am virtually a cynic. When I see who runs society and what they do to it, I usually shake my head, cast my eyes heavenward and mutter a curse under my breath. I see, in our world, a reenactment (in many cases literal) of the Roman Empire. Mankind—at least, this stage of it—is coming to a point where major decisions have to be made, the primary one being: Do we go on or do we blo
w it again? By this, I mean that I think prior civilizations on earth reached similar points and made the wrong decision. I hope we do not.

  JNW: Joyce Carol Oates once said that all writing is experimental. Agree? And what seems to you to be the primary distinction, if any, between the avant-garde so many critics extol, and the fantasy writing so many readers read?

  MATHESON: I am not exactly sure what Joyce Carol Oates meant . . . In the sense that an experiment is a trial or a test conducted to find out something, of course almost any human endeavor is experimental. This includes writing. When we write, we are trying out something. . . . The elements being tested are psychological. Memory. Emotion. Aspiration. Our brains come up with ways in which to take these ingredients and, hopefully, cook them into a new, tasty stew . . .

  The difference between avant-garde and fantasy? I feel that avant-garde has more to do with form and/or technique than thought content. Not to mention the fact (a fact, to me) that fantasy is more difficult in that there are certain guidelines to follow; at least, in the kind of fantasy I prefer. I don’t think there is, in avant-garde, any point the practitioner reaches beyond which he or she cannot go. Fantasy, I believe, does have that point. Call it logic. Whatever it may be, that willing suspension of disbelief always spoken of hardly comes into play in avant-garde literature. The author—or artist; whatever—has a point to make and will use any means to make it. And without regard for the question, “Am I going too far?” In fantasy, I think, it is a question which the creator must constantly be aware of, if not constantly asking himself or herself. If you go too far in avant-garde, you will probably get a pat on the back from the coterie which loves avant-garde. If you go too far in fantasy and break the string of logic, and become nonsensical, someone will surely remind you of your dereliction. I am not against avant-garde. I just think, pound for pound, fantasy makes a tougher opponent for the creative person.