9,10 of The Fanlight Window (ah, Providence !) & we send to a list of dealers and
11 Colleges (you shall have one, too). Cook has made a cut of a title page to adorn
12 back cover (this typed on proof). I have put in the Family Mather at a steep
13 price ; together with a small list of the supernatural, all firsts, with my notes :
14-16 Walpole’s Otranto, The Monk (a beauty, had for nothing), all of Brockden Brown,
17,18 & the original Melmoth, a signed first of Chambers’ King. With a dusting of
19,20 Hawthorne, Melville (now properly esteem’d in the Academy) and that
21,22 Barbarian Whitman (the big and little Leaves). Overcoming my natural
23 repugnance for the tripewriter,
I remain,
H.P. Lovecraft, Bibliopole
Notes
1) Illustration: see note 11
2) Clarkash-Ton: Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961), California artist, poet, and frequent HPL correspondent. In 1933, HPL wrote approximately 250 words about Smith’s chapbook, The Double Shadow, in the message area of a postcard to Smith (now in the Bancroft Library).
3) all Cook’s fault: W. Paul Cook (1880-1948), Lovecraft’s friend and correspondent, and the printer of Supernatural Horror in Literature (SHL) in the first number of The Recluse, 1927. Cook also printed The Shunned House, 1928, in 300 copies. Cook also wrote and printed the fine essay In Memoriam Howard Phillips Lovecraft, 1942.
4) mountains: Vermont
5) throne of Mammon: New York City
6) Kennerly: Mitchell Kennerley, publisher and president of Anderson Galleries, New York auctioneers, see Bruccoli, The Fortunes of Mitchell Kennerley, Bookman (1986).
7) Phila. fossil: I have before me the sales catalogue of the library of the late Beverly Chew (of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia), Anderson Galleries, 8–9 December 1924 & 5–6–7 January 1925. I am playing a little with the dates and contents of the library: the Chew library was chiefly English literature, but a suitable collection of Americana could have come on the block in this period.
8) Cook will print: see note 3. In 1926, Cook prepared offprints of Lovecraft’s essay “The Materialist of Today,” from an issue of Driftwind.
9) Fanlight Window: see bookplate of HPL, designed in 1927 by Wilfred B. Talman.
10) (ah, Providence!): While living in New York, Lovecraft longed for his native city.
11) cut of a title page: block for printing the illustration of the American cannibals on the title page of Johann von Staden’s Warrhafftige Historia, 1557?, Church 105. See also HPL story, “The Picture in the House.”
12) Family Mather: Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, London, 1702. LL 598 identifies the Phillips-Lovecraft family copy of the original London edition (“an inheritance”), the only one of considerable value in the antiquarian book market.
13) a small list of the supernatural: one can infer the contents of the notes from Supernatural Horror in Literature. For the longest time, I kept thinking I would write excerpts from The Fanlight Window: Catalogue One as the critical fiction; then I grasped that to write the note sent to CAS on the occasion might have the same effect.
14) Walpole’s Otranto: Horace Walpole. The Castle of Otranto, a Gothic Story. Translated by William Marshal, Gent., from the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto. 1769.
15) The Monk: Matthew Gregory Lewis. The Monk: A Romance . . . In Three Volumes. London, 1796.
16) all of Brockden Brown: Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810), American novelist and man of letters, whose work is, from the first, fantastical. Wieland; or, The Transformation. An American Tale. New York, 1798; Ormond; or, The Secret Witness. New York, 1799; Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793. 2 vols., Philadelphia, 1799–1800; Edgar Huntly; or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, 3 vols., Philadelphia, 1799.
17) the original Melmoth: Charles Maturin. Melmoth the Wanderer. 4 vols., Edinburgh, 1820–21.
18) Chambers’ King: Robert W. Chambers (1865–1933). The King in Yellow. Chicago, 1895. I have advanced HPL’s discovery of Chambers to 1925.
19) Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables. Boston, 1851: “New England’s greatest contribution to weird literature,” SHL.
20) Melville (now properly esteem’d in the Academy): the 1920s saw the establishment of Melville’s literary reputation, formerly in near total eclipse.
20) Barbarian Whitman: HPL mocked Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” but knew his work; the diary records a visit to a Whitman exhibit at the New York Public Library, CE 5:171.
21) big and little Leaves: the 1855 and 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass.
22) tripewriter: an expression I borrow from “Selectra Six-Ten” (1970) by Avram Davidson, whose Letter of Explanation to his editor about the story “The Last Wizard” was, like these notes, longer than the story itself.
American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, edited by Gary K. Wolfe
New York: Library of America, 2012; $70.00 hc;
1750 pages in two volumes
reviewed by Arthur D. Hlavaty
The word venerable has two meanings: in the original sense it denotes the ability to inspire a feeling somewhere between admiration and worship, but it is also used to mean old, as if mere age brought worthiness. This process of automatic veneration is now overtaking the allegedly trashy amusements of my youth. In music, it had already happened; in fact, the sounds I grew up with and still love are several decades before the oxymoronic Classic Rock. Television and comics have likewise gained venerability, and the Buck Rogers stuff is joining them.
The Library of America was created to be that very canon from whose barrel the power comes. It began with the traditional Greats (Mark Twain, Henry James), the minority writers who were belatedly and deservedly added (Frederick Douglass, Edith Wharton), and of course some of the work that brings Required Reading into disrepute (James Fenimore Cooper). The series grew, approached the present (Saul Bellow, Philip Roth), and then, in defiance of the wishes of its late founding father Edmund Wilson, expanded to the less reputable neighborhoods. When the literary Brahmins do outreach to the labeled categories, they start out with mysteries, and Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were soon welcomed aboard. After a collection of H. P. Lovecraft’s work achieved popularity, the series turned to science fiction, with Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut, failed and successful crossover artists respectively.
Now the Library has published a two-volume anthology of nine of the best science fiction novels of the 1950s, and they have done an excellent job of it. It has been remarked that “historical importance” can be a euphemism for works that have no other kind, works that we read only for the foretaste of books built upon them that are worth reading for their own sake. I would maintain, however, that this selection brings us works that are enjoyable on their own as well as pointing the way to much of what we enjoy in contemporary sf.
Since the proverbial age of wonder is twelve, I can be expected to consider the ’50s the golden age, but I will now propose an argument intended to convince others.
Science fiction as that which is called “science fiction” (Norman Spinrad’s recursive definition) was created by Hugo Gernsback in 1926. Within a few years, audiences were growing blasé about sf as education (characters lecturing each other about how nifty it is to live in the future) and sf as spectacle (chases and crashes on a galactic scale). When John W. Campbell Jr. took over the editorship of Astounding, he suggested the next step, a view of sf as the mainstream writing of the future: sf should be as well written as the Saturday Evening Post. He found a cohort of writers to meet his specifications, and the field prospered.
For all Campbell accomplished, his influence was limited by his technological orientation and by a contrarianism that would harden into crankery. More qualities were needed, and while most of the magazines made no advances on Gernsback and Campbell, two new publications brought new approaches: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction em
phasized the mainstream values of prose and character, and Galaxy saw the field as an opportunity for social, as well as scientific and technical, speculation.
Many critics have noted that science fiction purports to be about the future but is really about the present. One can point to any number of works where vaulting speculation in some areas combines with unquestioning acceptance of supposed eternal verities (sexual and domestic arrangements are two obvious examples) that will have been obsolete long before the date in which the work is set. The ’50s could be seen as the time when science fiction began doing it on purpose, with conscious satires of matters such as McCarthyism and segregation that more mimetic writers dared not utter in uncoded form.
The field was in many respects slightly braver than the mainstream and in some ways less. Science fiction tended to include at least one person of color per book, not too wincingly described even by today’s standards, and I fear that it was thus ahead of the curve. Sex, on the other hand, was even more in its infancy in sf, with copulation occurring in between paragraphs or chapters, indicated by the proverbial row of asterisks or a swift change of scene after a suggestive remark. (That would soon change.)
There is a sense in which science fiction works have grown like giant chicken hearts. The magazines were made for shorter works (with occasional serializations). Then came book publishing, and the serials were joined by fix-ups of shorter works set in a common background and eventually short novels actually written as books. (Ace would bind two of them of together.) The books then grew longer (John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar in 1968 was a milestone) and led to trilogies, series, braided meganovels, and franchises. In the ’50s, 160 pages seemed like a good length for a book, and the writers learned to write within that boundary.
At the end of the decade, there was a first step to respectability. Invited in 1959 to discourse at Princeton on a literary topic of his choice, Kingsley Amis delivered a series of lectures introducing his august audience to science fiction. (It would be published the following year as New Maps of Hell.) It was a balanced and judicious look; the lurid covers were scorned, the all-too-obvious Freudian subtexts of the worst work were brought out, and such follies as the translation machine were mocked, but there was also the recognition that the best of it offered “a peculiar interest, related to but different from ordinary literary interest,” and Amis praised and elucidated some of the best examples with particular note of sf’s unique capacity for social relevance and satire. It could be argued that Amis was an ambiguous figure in transition out of academe to professional writing and considered a troublemaker and iconoclast, perhaps beyond the facts. (One of his characters said, “Filthy Mozart,” and the author was reported to have uttered the phrase in propria persona.) Still, the wall was breached.
The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth is very much what Amis is talking about. Indeed, he begins the first lecture with a quote from it, along with a better-known one from The War of the Worlds, as examples of the “peculiar interest.” The example is a futuristic office briefing that is not too heavy-handedly briefing the reader.
One can see why Amis selected this, as it is excellent of its kind. In 150 pages, it includes imaginative speculation and satire, a dramatic plot, a love story, and a Hero Who Learns Better. It deals with one of the pressing issues of the time, what Vance Packard called The Hidden Persuaders, a diabolical plot by the Mad Men of Mad Ave to brainwash the American people into buying whatever was advertised by means of the irresistible techniques of Freudian science. (It now appears that the whole thing gave Freudian science an empirical test and it failed, but we didn’t know that then.) The book often gets cited as an example of the predictive powers of sf. Ubiquitous advertising: check. Overpopulation: check. World run by multinational corporations: check. Interplanetary exploration: well, you can’t have everything.
It also appeared in and helped define two of the main sf institutions of the decade. Serialized in three issues of Galaxy, it then became the twenty-first Ballantine Book, published simultaneously as a 35¢ paperback and a more prestigious $1.50 hardcover with a front-matter and back-cover note assuring the reader that it was “an original novel—not a reprint.”
Kornbluth, alas, did not have long to live. In World War II, he had contracted an ailment with the remarkably evocative name of essential malignant hypertension. He was never really healthy thereafter, and in 1958 he died of a heart attack after shoveling the snow out of his driveway. He had written three further sf novels with Pohl and three by himself. He is probably best known for “The Marching Morons,” a cynical tale that tender-minded readers consider essentially malignant; but a more thorough look at his work, such as “Gomez,” shows the basic love of humanity that helps produce the best cynics.
Pohl, on the other hand, has flourished. Having contributed much fiction to Galaxy, he became its editor late in the ’50s, and in the ’70s he moved on to Bantam Books, where Dhalgren and The Female Man, among others, were published as Frederik Pohl Selections. He has kept writing fiction; Gateway (1977) won the Hugo and led off the highly successful Heechee series. He is now in his nineties; he had a new novel, All the Lives He Led, published in 2011, and at the time of this writing, he was blogging about a science fiction convention he had just attended.
Teachers have told me that when they include Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human in a science fiction course, the reaction tends to be distributed bimodally: “Why can’t it all be like that?” and “This is what I read sf to get away from.”
One can tell from the first sentence of the book that Sturgeon was doing something different. Most ’50s sf writers prided themselves on the transparency of their writing; i.e., it did not obstruct our view of the Good Stuff. As Molière might put it, they wrote prose because the only alternative was poetry. Sturgeon, however, begins his story with “The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear.” He kept doing things like that, and it worked significantly more often than not.
The form, however, was less controversial than the content. Unprecedentedly in the field, More Than Human was a book about feelings and relationships. It introduced the concept of Homo gestalt, a small group of seemingly deficient people who come together to be much more than the sum of their parts. It takes a harrowing journey to get them there. Sturgeon looked unflinchingly at the cruelty and madness at the heart of many American families and towns, and he described it unsparingly; his characters suffer and sometimes are driven to inflict pain and even death. At the end, though, they turn out to be a literal example of the often euphemistic phrase “differently abled,” having psi powers that they can coordinate when they team up. They dream up antigravity, but that’s not what the story is about; the Gestalt is the point. In the next decade, More Than Human would become a popular text among those seeking alternative family arrangements.
Even the book’s construction was unusual: Sturgeon wrote the middle story (“Baby Is Three”) and placed it in Galaxy. Then, when Ballantine asked him for a novel, he added a beginning and an end. Sturgeon kept asking questions others were unwilling to. In 1953, he wrote a story called “The World Well Lost.” Today its treatment of the then-taboo issue of homosexuality seems condescending, but then it may have been actually scary. Sturgeon reported that one editor not only rejected it but warned all his colleagues to do likewise.
Sturgeon’s stories, many of them brilliant, have been collected in thirteen substantial volumes, but he is widely thought of as not having written enough, perhaps because he never wrote the Big Novel he was thought capable of. His remarkable stylistic tour de force Godbody was published posthumously, perhaps because he never figured out how to end it well.
The ’50s were a time when we all lived under the shadow of the Bomb, and sf and other fiction reflected the fear. Alexei and Cory Panshin say that science fiction, having predicted the Bomb, went into a tailspin and did not recover for years. There is something to b
e said for that, as there was at that point a plausible possibility that there would be no future, or at least not the kind science fiction had been dreaming of.
There had of course been speculations about that sort of thing even before the Bomb, notably Stephen Vincent Benét’s “By the Waters of Babylon,” and the possibilities included tales of resignation, never-say-die rebirth, and of course satire. Leigh Brackett wrote The Long Tomorrow, in which America has been devastated and the survivors have turned in revulsion from science and cities and other parts of civilization, bringing back a version of the technophobic faith of the Amish. Of course the old ways have not been entirely suppressed, and our protagonist sets out on a quest. . . .
It is a good tale, well told, but I have to admit that for some readers, including me, this sort of thing is just technically science fiction. It feels like the past, albeit a past we have moved forward to, and if I want to read about the past, I will read about the real past. The Collapse is, however, a continually important trope in the field. It has flourished in England, where it mirrors the fall of Empire and, as Jo Walton has suggested, can appeal to racist and other unpleasant forms of nostalgia. In any event, it is where John Wyndham and J. G. Ballard meet. Here in the States, it has been utilized by writers as diverse as Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, and Jerry Pournelle, and the addition of zombies can make it even more fun for those so inclined.
The Long Tomorrow was an exemplar of that new (to sf) novelistic life-form that emerged full-formed between hard covers (Doubleday) without prior magazine publication. Leigh Brackett was an established figure in the field by the time of the book, known for the space-operatic tales of Eric John Stark. She was also (or primarily) successful as a screenwriter; in perhaps an unprecedented meeting of subcultures, she had collaborated with William Faulkner on the screenplay of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. She went on to contribute to The Empire Strikes Back. Many believe that she is responsible for most of the good parts of that film and perhaps even of the whole Star Wars series.
NYRSF January 2013 Issue 293 Page 3