HARRISON FORD TAKES^N THE FUTURE IN ^BLADE RUNNER’
NEW JOURNEYS OF THE IMAGINATDN
Rod Scrlings
JUNE 1982/$2
A TZ First!
Richard Matheson’s ‘THE DOLL
THE ‘TWILIGHT ZONE’ EPISODE YOU NEVER SAW
Photo section:
A Gallery of Grotesques
NINE NEW TALES of Indian Magic Monstrous Binhs and Zombies
TZ Interviews
Hugo -Winner Philip K. Dick
An author’s eye-view ot ‘Blade Runner’
MOTHER’S DAY SPECIAL A trio of Moms you’ll never forget! '
Thomas Disch on books Gahan Wilson on movies
AND ALWAYS ... THE UNEXPECTED
A laga/iix:
nr^ROD SERLING’S
TODGHT
2PNE““
FEATURES
PNE
In the Twilight Zone Other Dimensions: Books Other Dimensions: Screen Other Dimensions: Music Other Dimensions: Etc.
Fantasy in Clay TZ Interview: Philip K. Dick Screen Previe^ ‘Blade Runner’
Show-by-Show ^ide to TV’s ‘Twilight Zone’: Part Fifteen The Story Behind ‘The Doll’
TZ Discovery: ‘The Doll’
FICTION ~
Browning’s Lamps Anniversary Dinner The Dark Ones Alan’s Mother Zombies Home Visit
Mrs. Halfbooger’s Basement The Broken Hoop Some Days Are Like That Cover art by Malcolm McNeill
June 1982
4
Thomas M. Disch 6
Gahan Wilson 10
Jack Sullivan 14
^
Scott Hyde 35
John Boonstra 47
James Vemiere 53
Marc Scott Zicree 85
Marc Scott Zicree 91
Richard Matheson 92
David Nemec 22
D. J. Pass 42 Richard Christian Matheson 46
Steve RasnicTem 58
* Dolly Ogawa 61
Roger Koch 64
Lawrence C. Connolly 70
Pamela Sargent 76
Bruce J. Balfour 84
[l N ' T H E ■ T Wj_J L I G M T ZONE:
j The mind’s eye . .
I
I
The late John Collier was well knoAvn for dozens of wonderfully macabre short stories (such as “The Chaser,” adapted in 1960 for The Twilight Zone), as well as for the bizarre novel His Monkey Wife, but his strangest book may well have been his last. It was called Milton’s "Paradise Lost”: Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind, and though there was briefly some talk that Fellini might try to film it, the book was really the cinematic equivalent of closet drama, written not for stage or screen but for the reader’s imagination. One of the screenplay’s most memorable images, I re(M, was of the Fall of the Rebel Angels; Collier described them as filling the skies like a fall of snow.
(Incidental note: Next month’s TZ will feature an interview with the celebrated Canadian writer Robertson Davies, whose novel The Rebel Angels is currently winning much acclaim here; and the following month will see an interview with The Tvnlight Zone’s Douglas Heyes, director of— among other episodes— ‘"The Chaser.”)
Readers of this month’s TZ will have the chance to exercise their own minds’ eyes with The Doll, an unproduced Tnnlight Zone script by RICHARD MATHESON. Matheson himself pictured Martin Balsam and Maiy La Roche in the two main roles, according to MARC SCO’TT ZICREE’s Story Behind ‘The Doll, ’ but you are free to cast anyone you like, from Tvrilight Zone regulars Burgess Meredith and Anne Francis to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Nastassia Kinski. Dream-casting imaginary movies is good clean fun, and rest assured that no matter how wild your choices are, they can’t be any worse than some of Ae casts that have actually made it to the screen— such as dark and hulking Oliver Reed playing the brother of pale, skinny-as-a-r^ Michael Crawford in The Jokers, or swart blue-collar-type Charles Bronson playing an upper-middle-class Manhattan architect opposite Hope Lange in Death Wish. (And a free Twilight Zone cat poster to the first
Tern
Koch
tale, the gently cheerful “Holiday,” and it packs a lot of power into a few hundred words.
Two other writers make return visits in this issue. PAMELA SARGENT, who offered a satiric look at human-animal relations in October’s “Out of Place,” here sounds a darker, more haunting note in The Broken Hoop, a tale of two cultures and two heavens. With The Golden Space recently out from Timescape and the young-adult Earthse^ soon to be published by Harper & Row, she’s now hard at I work on a longer novel, Venvs of Dreams. The prolific S’lEVE ! RASNIC TEM, author of “Sleep” in
R. Matheson
R. C. Matheson Sargent
reader who points out what those films have in common.)
Richard Matheson, subject last September and October of our only two-part interview, is currently looking forward to this fall’s Broadway opening of his new suspense thriller. Now You See It; and Marc Scott Zicree is lookup forward to the publication of his Twilight Zone Companion (that’s the new title), due this fall from Bantam. Also featured in this issue is RICHARD CHRIS’HAN MATHESON, of that same creative tribe, who contributes a devastating short-short called The Dark Ones. It’s I a far cry from the author’s first TZ
Nemec
Balfour
ftoto credits: Richard Mothosori/Marc Scott Zicree Sargent/George Zebrowskt Tem/Greg Doyle.
our March issue, returns with Alan’s Mother, a poignant tale about death and maturity in the tradition of Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s “The Watchful Gods.” Since his previous appearance here Tem has sold several new stories— and look for his novelette in Alan Ryan’s religious fantasy anthology Perpetvxd Light, due in October from Warner Books.
If Tern’s is the mildest of the three Mother’s Day tales we’ve gathered for you to month, the nastiest by far comes from ROGER KOCH of Bloomington, Indiana. A self-described free-lance portrait artist-tumed-househusband, Koch has taug^it English as a Peace Corpsman in Thailand, traveled throughout Southeast Asia, Indonesia, India, and Iran, and worked as, among other things, a social services caseworker —an occupation which forms the background of Home Visit.
DOLLY OGAWA’s tale also has a touch of autobiography in it. “I know something about musicians and a lot about moSiers,” she says, having “just barely survived the raising of four oddy assorted creative offspring,” some of them, like her main character, musically inclined. Zombies is her first published stoiy.
This issue also marks the fiction debut of BRUCE BALFOUR, though he’s published interviews with sf/fantasy writers in various other magazines. He is currently studying ! computer science at the University of ! California, Santa Cruz, and reports:
! “I’m interested in artificial I intelligence. If things go well, I may ! try for a Ph.D. from Stanford. Then 1 rU declare myself Emperor.”
I The theme of motherhood resurfaces, in a rather macabre form, in Mrs. Halfbooger’s Basement by LAWRENCE C. CONNOLLY, whose fiction has appeared in those two venerable and much-loved magazines. Amazing and Fantastic. Now living and writing in Pittsburgh (which, to horror buffs, is becoming I as identified with George Romero as Providence is with Lovecraft), Connolly has worked as a newspaper reporter, print shop manager, folk singer, and studio musician.
Anniversary Dinner also features a certain rather furtive hint of motherhood. The story’s by D. J. PASS, a native Georgian and ex-
ROOSBHJNG'S
DGHT
PNE
MAGAZJNt
newspaperman now living in Nova Scotia, where he’s been occupied, of late, in renovating both a house and a novel. Anniversary Dinner was written as a going-away present for a fiiend about to drive alone fi'om Georgia to Arizona, and, says Pass,
“I hope it makes your readers as paranoid as it did him.”
Our lead story this issue is by DAVID NEMEC, a New York writer whose most recent novel was Bright Lights, Dark Rooms, published in 1980 by Doubleday, with two more due to appear to October: Bad Blood from Dial and The Systems of M. R. Shumas from Riverrun Press. Two of his stories have also been included in Martha Foley’s yearly honor roll of Best American ShoH Stories. As Browning’s Lamps demonstrates so delightfully, Nemec has a special feel for the lore and color of old-time baseball, having written extensively on the sport, including the historical text for The Ultimate Baseball Book (Houghton Mifflin, 1979) and a series of baseball quiz books for Macmillan.
By way of postscript, we owe a special mention to Boston writer RICHARD BOWKER, whose ingenioirs story “The Other Train Phenomenon” appeared in our February issue but whose name failed to appear on this page. Del Rey Books has just brought out his novel Forbidden Sanctuary, and the least you can do is buy it.
We also owe another mention, with thanks, to reader Robert Anderson, whose sharp eyes have spotted two more omissions from our Show-by-Show Guide: teleplay credit for “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” in our November issue should have gone to Rod Serling, and, in the following issue, Robert Drasin deserved music credit for “The Hunt.”
As we go to press, we’ve learned of the death at fifty-three of PHILIP K. DICK, who’s interviewed in this issue by JOHN BOONSTRA, film critic for the Hartford Advocate. His death seems all the more tragic because it comes on the eve of the release of Blade Runner, which promised to be one of the most talked-about films of the year. Phil Dick would have shared, deservedly, in its success.
-TK
TZ Publications Inc.
S. Edward Orenstein President & Chairman Sidney Z. Gellman Secretary /Treasurer Leon Garry Eric Protter
Executive Vice-Presidents
Executive Publisher:
S. Edward Orenstein Publisher: Leon Garry Associate Publisher and Consulting Editor: Cafol Serling Editorial Director: Eric Protter
Editor: T.E.D. Klein Managing Editor: Jane Bayer Assistant Editors: Steven Schwartz, Robert Sabat
Contributing Editors: Gahan Wilson, Thomas M. Disch
Design Director: Michael Monte Art and Studio Production:
Georg the Design Group
Production Director: Stephen J.
Fallon
Controller: Thomas Schiff Assistant to the Publisher:
Judy Borrman
Public Relations Manager:
Jeffrey Nickora
Accounting Mgr.: Chris Grossman
Circulation Director: William D. Smith Circulation Manager: Janice Graham Eastern Circulation Manager:
Hank Rosen
Western Newsstand Consultant: Harry Sommer, N. Hollywood. CA
j Advertising Manager: Rachel Britapaja Adv, Production Manager:
Marina Despotakis Advertising Representatives:
Barney O’Hara & Associates, Inc.
410 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611 (312) 467-9494
326 W. Rosa Dr., Green Valley, AZ 85614 (602) 625-5995
Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, 1982, Volume 2, Number 3, is published monthly in the United States and simultaneously in Canada by TZ Publications, Inc., 800 Second Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017. Telephone ^12) 986-9600. Copyright ©1982 by TZ Publications. Inc. Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone M^azine is published pursuant to a license from Carolyn ^rling and Viacom Enterprises, a division of Viacom International, Inc. All r^hts reserved. Second-class postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Responsibility is not assumed for unsolicited materials. Return postage must accompany all unsolicited material if return is requested. All ri^ts reserved on material accepted for pumication unless otherwise specified. All letters sent to Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine or to its editors are assumed intended for publication. Nothing may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publishers. Any similarity between persons appearing m fiction and real persons living or dead is comcidental. Sii^le copies $2 m U.S., $2.25 in Canada. Subscriptions: LJ.S., IJ.S. possessions, Canada, and APO— one year, 12 issues: $22 ($27 in Canadian currency): two years, 24 issues: $35 ($43 in Canadian currency). Postmaster: Send address changes to P.O. Box 252, Mt. Morris, II 61054. Printed in U.S.A.
I repeat my rave here, because I think there is a significant correlation between the appeal of one aspect of sf and that of a certain kind of historical novel, the kind typified by Aztec or by Mary Renault’s incomparable recension of the Theseus myth. The King Must Die. Both Jennings’s and Renault’s novels are based much more on the findings and hypotheses of anthropology than on narrative history, written records being in short supply for both pre- Homeric Greeks and pre-Columbian Aztecs. These works are speculative in the same way that, in sf, an internally consistent alien ecology or culture must be speculative— with the difference that the historical novelist does have sturdier evidential foundations for his inventions and may build to proportionally greater heights without the risk of Ws whole edifice collapsing into a picaresque jumble of unrelated fancies. Readers who get off on this world-building side of sf would do well, the next
Books
by Thomas M. Disch
T. H. White is the author of one book so hugely good and epochally successful &at ^ his other works seem to be merely the harbingers or the echoes of that central masterpiece— which is, of course.
The Once and Future King. Reading ’The Maharajah and Other Stories (Putnam, $12.95) is therefore a bit like watching Liza Minelli in a remake of The Wizard of Oz: comparisons and some degree of disappointment are inevitable. No matter how good some of these tales may be (and their range shades evenly from memorable to so-so), none of them has the authority of his once-and-forever retelling of the Arthurian legends. No other Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin, or « Mordred can hold a candle to White’s, nor is there another mythic Merrie England that can measure up to his Camelot. His colors are rich, his focus sharp, and his compassional range Shakespearean.
What, then, did he lack? Why is there only the one great book and not a shelf of them? The Maharajah suggests one answer: he lacked a facility for dramatic invention (which was not a liability in the Arthurian book, for obvious reasons). Again and again in these stories White will posit a potentially dramatic situation and then provide no drama or one that is perfunctory and hackneyed.
In tales of ritual or predestinate inevitability, as in “Kin to Love,” an account of an “ordinary” rape/mimder and the subsequent “ordinary” execution of the criminal, this lack of original invention isn’t bothersome, but when it has the effect of laming what might otherwise have been a masterpiece of macabre horror, like “The Troll,” one could weep. Even though enfeebled by an ending as traditional as a banker’s tie, “The Troll” is an object lesson to anyone who aspires to write fantasy of hallucinatoiy believability. Add to the titles ^eady mentioned “The Spaniel Earl,” a story about a seventeenth-century English nobleman traumatized in early childhood to believe himself a lapdog and indulged through his life in this conviction, and you have the cream of the collection. No more
than an hour’s reading, even if you’re as slow a reader as I am, and worth making out a request slip for at the library. But for your own library shelves the book to invest in is still The Once and Future King.
Or, if you’ve already read that and agree with me as to its merits, then try Aztec by Gary Jennings (Avon, $3.95). When I reviewed the hardcover of Aztec in 'The Washington Post, I called it “an historical diorama of the broadest dimensions, a meditation on the human condition that bears pondering, and a story of unfailing (if variable) power to bind a spell.” Also: “The social panorama of pre- Columbian Mexico that we view through the narrator’s eyes registers as alien and credible in an ever- accruing multitude of humanly significant details. Aztec deserves to supplant Prescott’s The Conqioest of Mexico as the Authorized Popular Version of one of history’s most awesome confrontations.”
i BOOKS
time they’re threatened with famine, to consider Aztec as an alternate source of epic protein.
I
There is another way in which the sf and the historical imagination may cross-fertilize, and that is in stories of time travel into the past. Since Mark Twain invented the idea in 1889, it has become almost a sub- 1 genre in its ovm right. The drama of ’ time travel lies in the collision I between an historical civilization and : a consciousness formed in our own time; between, as well, the sense of history as an inalterable fact and the effort of some Connecticut Yankee to ; make his mark on it— or not to, if j the time traveler observes the ; decorums of field anthropology. The I second possibility gets around the 1 paradoxes involved in introducing ^microwave mousetraps into the court of Charlemagne, but drama is harder to come by, since the protagonist- ' time traveler must keep such a low : profile.
All of this preamble to explain r the particular excellence and originality of Michael Bishop’s No Enemy But Time (Timescape,
$15.95), a time-travel novel that does it the hard way and succeeds. Bishop’s hero is bom in Seville in 1962, the bastard son of Encamacion Ocampo, a mute Morisco “whore and i black marketeer,” and a black ; enlisted man in the Strategic Air I Command. Adopted into the family ; of another SAC staff sergeant, he i becomes John Monegal and grows up ' in a variety of stateside Air Force , bases. The milieu of career servicemen is one that Bishop, an Air Force brat himself, knows like the back of his hand, and his novel shares the virtue of so many of his best stories in portraying that milieu realistically and sympathetically, but without the Alamo psychology of the School of Heinlein.
Through his childhood John Monegal has dream visions of Pleistocene Africa, and as a young I man he is recruited as a time I traveler to that era and area, when i Homo sapiens was only a twinkle in the eye of the apelike Homo habilis. The core of the story’s sdence- ; fictional excitement lies in John’s life ; as an assimilated member of a tribe ; of habilene himtsmen, and in these I Pleistocene chapters, which alternate
in a strict A-B-A-B pattern with chapters recounting John’s growing up. Bishop has created a vicarious treat of three-scoops-and-a-cherry dimensions, a kind of Tarzan for the eighties, based on sound paleontological evidence and shrewd anthropological extrapolation, but no less fun for being well informed.
The remarkable thing about Bishop’s book is that the story of John’s growing up through the sixties and into the eighties always holds its own dramatically against his adventures among the habilenes. As in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, the alternating time schemes are tightly interlocked so that present and past illuminate and elucidate each other.
As in Benford’s Timescape, the chapters set in the recent historical past serve as a kind of litmus test of the author’s ability to tell home truths about real people. The clarity, sanity, and truthfulness of these essentially “mainstream” chapters give the author’s more imaginative flights an authority and verisimilitude all too rare in genre sf. Like both Le Guin and Benford, Bishop is determined to write about human goodness without resorting to the mock heroics of formula adventure stories. There are no villains in the book, even among the habilenes. The central and absorbing drama of the book is the hero’s growing love for the pre-Rhematic habilene, Helen.
(The Rhematic period is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first period of specifically hiunan history, when language came into being.) Looming behind this love story is a larger theme, the formation across the entire span of history of the Family of Man, a phrase that becomes, as the novel ripens to its conclusion, no mere liberal piety but a fully realized dramatic affirmation.
'This is not to say the book is flawless. As with most time -travel stories, the rationale for “how it’s done” is embarrassingly unconvincing. Better to offer no explanation than one that leaks this ba^y. But that’s a small exception to take to a large achievement. After No Enemy But Time it would be an insult to continue to speak of Michael Bishop as one of science fiction’s most promising writers. 'The promise has been fulfilled.
A FREE DRUGS! EASY SEX! NO JOB HASSLES! t' SOME PEOPLE JUST DON'T KNOW
:: WHEN THEY'RE BEING OPPRESSED!
RUDY RUCKER
oufhor of fhe acclaimed WHITE LIGHT
Less than a year ago, in reviewing Rudy Rucker’s White Light, I wrote, “White Light is a good, intelligent, jjowerful novel, and the most auspicious debut in the sf field since . . . Well, considering it’s his first novel, since I don’t know when.” I was wrong. White Light deserves at least that much praise, but it was not Rucker’s first novel. Spacetime Donuts (Ace, $2.50) is his first novel, and it saddens me to report it’s pretty much a dud. Rucker and/or Ace Books did well to withhold it from publication till White Light had garnered due garlands —and would have done still better to have consigned it to the limbo of a file drawer, at least until Rucker had taken the trouble to rewrite from scratch the last one-half to two-thirds of the book. It starts off
well enough but really goes off the rails around page seventy-five, when, like a dybbuk, the spirit of Chapter | Twenty-Six-or-Bust takes control of | Rucker’s speeding fingers and flagging imagination.
Chapters one through nine are a | semi-fun remake of Brave New World !
as filtered through the consciousness of a reader of Zap Comix. (Rucker lays claim not only to a Ph.D. in math but to experience as an underground cartoonist.) There are too many stock figures— a forever-spaced-out pothead who is never without his identifying
s
reefer, a standard-issue all-too- absent-minded professor— but as compensation iJiere’s also a good deal of zany invention and viable collegiate humor. The plot curdles as Rucker brings on his Big Idea, a joimney round the universe by “scaleship,” shrinking to subatomic scale and then returning to a size-thirty waist via the Extra Large sizes of the macrocosm. It might have worked at novelette length, but here Rucker is tripped up by his own honesty. He refoses to humanize the quarks and black holes at either end of his universe, and so the wonder-journey proceeds through its crystal landscapes in the spirit of an educational pamphlet. (“And this, children, is a Molecule!”) I enjoyed the same ride at Disneyland a whole lot more. Worse yet, the scaleship’s journey has only a tenuous effect on the development of the Rebels- Against-Utopia plotline, which, when we get back to it, collapses upon the author like an act of God. Passages of hysterical violence alternate with paragraphs of maundering psychologese:
The next few days passed in a flickering of wakefulness and unconsciousness. It was hard to say which was worse . . . When awake, Vernor had the pain and the awful guilt to contend with, but when he was asleep these elements were incorporated into terrible, merciless visions, unlimited in space and time.
In such cases, sleep is the right choice. Even the most terrible, merciless vision is, after all, limited in space and time, and the weariest novel comes to an end.
The Engines of the Night
(Doubleday, $10.95) so candidly asks to be censured that any reviewer is put into the position of the sadist in the classic joke, who, from a more refined cruelty, refuses to grant the masochist the beating he begs for. Rarely does a book appear that is at once so self-loathing (one of the author’s favorite characterizations of Itself) and so self-serving (a subject on which he is more reticent). The publisher abets its author’s desire to make his name anatliema by publishing blurbs from two colleagues
who evidently disliked the book as much as I did, and the following equivocal praise from Algis Budrys: “Destined to be misunderstood and misused, this cry from the heart will prove once more that honesty is suicidal.”
I think, on the contrary, that it’s destined to be understood by anyone who bothers to read it and used as a cautionary example of how the practice of hack writing, too long indulged, can sap the character, warp the judgment, and turn to jelly the prose of writers who can’t resist a fast buck. The author (who, as a special, Dantean torment, shall remain nameless in this review) would seem in his own darker moments to endorse even the harshest of these judgments, but he also suffers fits of megalomania when he insists that his career has been peculiarly congruent with the history of all science fiction, and that he embodies a kind of tragic fate that dooms him (and all science fiction) to mediocrity, oblivion, and a pauper’s grave. He loves to cover himself with ashes and tell sad tales of the deaths of writers, such times as his word processor isn’t on automatic pilot and churning out such portentous piffle as this passage, which is the book’s only gloss on its title:
Ah but still. Still, oh still.
Still Kazin, Broyard, Epstein, Podhoretz and Howe; grinding away slowly in the center of all purpose, tiddng us to the millennium: the engines of the night.
(Those names are the critics the author feels particularly neglected by, but as to what the rest of that trans-syntactical paragraph may mean, only the author knows— and he’s not saying.)
Does this seem a mite draconian? Well, judge for yourself. Here’s a less inchoate example of the author in his kvetching vein, with pique in control and self-pity momentarily in abeyance:
. . . The writer— the experienced ■ writer in any event— knows that most editors acquire and publish not in an effort to be successful so much as to avoid failure. Defensive driving. They seek, then, that which they consider
}
safe, and the writers who are at the mercy of those editors function from the same motivation. (It can be presumed that those who feel or function differently find it almost impossible to get their work into the mass market.) . . . Science fiction, like all commercial fiction (and quality lit too although in a slightly different way), can perhaps be best understood in terms of what is not written rather than what is. Self- censorship controls. Any writer who understands this at all will know what not to try. As good a definition of professionalism as any other.
If that’s professional, how would you define craven? Such pre-emptive surrender to the “demands of the market” is all the more reprehensible when one realizes that the author is a man who presently makes his living by selling his own professional expertise, pseudonymously, to fledgling writers.
If the book were only a “personal bitch” (as Alexei Panshin describes it_ on tile back cover), it would not be worth even this much notice, but it lap claim in its subtitle, “Science Fiction in the Eighties,” to have a larger subject. The claim is specious. As a critic, the author is careless, ungenerous, and fainthearted. He praises the work of his friends out of proportion to their merits, especially that of Robert Silverberg, which so often echoes the author’s lamentations on the futility of writing sf. There is scarcely one generalization about sf in the book to which some significant exception cannot be made, either because the author practices defensive reading or because he writes faster than he thinks. And for all his constant insistence on the essential, inescapable second-rateness of all sf, he never has the guts to come out and say that any particular book by any particular writer is bad. Indeed, there is scarcely a senior member of the sf establishment that isn’t kowtowed to at some pojnt and scarcely a junior member that gets mentioned.
All in all, a shameful performance. And you can quote that on the cover of the paperback, fg
9
o
H
R
D I M E N
I O N
Screen
by Gahan Wilson
"Giving conviction to such lines as ‘Kwahl En kwahl’ " In the prehistoric epic Quest tor Fire, actors Ron Perlman, Everett McGill, and Nameer El-Kodl— all appropriately mode up— appear as “honest-to-God beetle-browed cavemen."
Quest for Fire
(Twentieth Century-Fox)
Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud Screenplay by (Jerard Brach
Defying, among others, the antievolutionist Institute for Creation Research, director Jean-Jacques Aimaud has had the gall to show us his version of what we looked like and acted like some eighty thousand (count ’em, eighty thousand) years ago.
Now of course none of us, or at least none of us with any spunk, agrees with any other one of us as to how it was back then. 'The aljpve- * mentioned creationists would have us neatly and cleanly descended from Adam and Eve (though there are, even in this tidy thesis, a few irritating loose ends such as Lilith), a depressingly large number, I suspect, hover around the theories advanced by Alley Oop and/or One Million Years B.C.; folks like you and me hold vague, widely-varying theories lazily based on our faulty and superficial educations; and the experts— God help us!— bicker in the stratosphere.
All that accepted and for the nonce nudged to one side, Qwest for Fire is, without doubt or quibble, the most carefully planned, most sincerely approached, and, yes, best movie we have yet had on those long-gone ancients who tottered about in furs, clumsily setting the stage for ourselves, their surprising descendants. Its makers clearly took the whole project very seriously, and they went to really remarkable lengths and hired all sorts of expensive, cleverly selected people to insure that the film would feasibly represent our now-fossilized ancestors.
They hired Desmond Morris, for instance, author of The Naked Ape, etc., and without doubt the most famous ex-Curator of Mammals of the London Zoo, to work out the nonverbal communications that the beings of eighty thousand years ago might have hit on. Anthony Burgess, who built a most convincing future
English for his Clockwork Orange and who’s an expert on James Joyce and many other strange languages, was hired to figure out how they might have communicated whilst in a verbal mood.
The result of this collaboration is subtle, touching, and convincing. Mr. Morris’s signals can be read by us (as he pointed out in an interview, it really wouldn’t have been very bright to make them incomprehensible to the twentieth-century ticket buyer), but they are not of us. They are strange. The folk in Qwest do not nod “Yes,” but give a small, agreeing bob; they do not shake their heads “No,” but avert their faces slightly with a kind of duck, and so on. It all works very well. Mr. Burgess came up with something like one hrmdred words of a language that, according to theory, ccndd sound more or less like Indo- European, which supposedly was the lingua franca back in those good old days. It soimded perfectly okay to me, and I think its being worked over so carefully must have helped the actors considerably in giving
conviction to such lines as “Kwah!
En kwah!” etc, etc.
The movie’s plot is decidedly science-fictiony, and I found it now and then somewhat cumbersome to my going along with its fantasy. It is asking a lot of someone who has just quit Sixth Avenue to believe he is looking at honest-to-God beetle- browned cavemen; it’s asking an awful lot more of him to have him believe that these cavemen came in contact not only with positively contemporary-looking (albeit primitive) types which anybody from Akron, Ohio, with his American Express card in order, can jet to and take instant photos of, to his heart’s content. This jarred me, at first, but I got used to it, and in the end, it gave the movie some of its best effects.
On the whole, by and large, the film is quite remarkably credible. You are brought into it gently, into the world of the Cro-Magnon, and the mood is almost riost^gic at first because we encoimter all sorts of symbols we’re familiar with. It’s almost like something we’ve been
10
Photos courtesy Twentieth Century-Fox
[SCREEN j
, j
' ' i
I through and personally remember.
I There’s the foe, for one. We are ; instantly aware of its preciousness,
■ its life-givingness. It’s being lovingly ; tended by a caveman in shaggy fors
• who pokes helpfully at its warm glow and carefully feeds it fresh logs. Wolves prowl outside its light, hating it. One darts in close, snarling, but the caveman tosses a burning stick at the creature and it howls off with : a patch of flame on its back. We’re ' safe with this foe. Nothing can get j us. We’re okay. It’s a great feeling.
Then we move on into the cave, and there they are: all our monkey grandfathers and grandmothers, our
■ simian uncles and aunts, sprawled and snuggled together on the rocks, the soles of their feet showing, their eyes shut in sleep under their gorilla brows, grunting and meeping in their almost animal dreams. One uncla
i over there is wincing at the vision of a saber-toothed tiger coming too close; another, nearer, is smacking his lips over the taste of fat meat; and an aunt, without waking, is disposing of a louse with a pinch of her fingers.
We know them all. It’s easy to recognize them. It’s us, without the trimmings. Before we got smart. Before we wised up. It’s the super- rubes, the innocents we sprang from.
This affection, once achieved,
' does not depart. Throughout, we are i fond pf our innocent forebears. We \ chuckle affectionately at their i fumbles, feel a kind of fatherly pride when they manage'to pull off something, and sigh tenderly at their wistful vulnerability. They are so dumb, these sillies, that your heart ; can’t help but go out to them.
The plot of the movie is, as the I title impUes, a quest for foe. Our ^ grandfather and grandmother’s tribe j loses their foe and, there not being I a working Zippo in the crowd, three I heroes are chosen in the hope they I can get hold of some and lug it back : in a great little Stone Age foe- I carrier some clever prop man came i up with. The heroes are an j intelligently mixed bag: a handsome i type (in his Cro-Magnon way) played I with a touching mix of bravery,
' stoicism, and confusion by Everett ' McGill; a big, lumpy type, i trustworthy but not the swiftest,
- played by Ron Perlman; and a kind ; of dreamy type you suspect of
"I wouldn't be surprised to see the style catch on." In a tender moment, McGill and leading lady Roe Down Chong contemplate the full mcon— arxl, symbolically, the future of man.
". . . ever egging his subjects on to fresh naughtiness." The goat-bearded chief of the advanced Ivaka tribe confronts modem Homo sapiens In the person of Oscar-wInnIng director JearvJacques Annaud.
12
"Maybe wt V/ng that fur brought It all back to them." Elephants In costume mode servlet, ible ma.'>todons for a touching, rather mystical scene between man arxJ beast.
probably being the smartest of the lot, but not the leader material, played quietly and very well by Nameer El-Kadi.
These three charsicters encounter one menace after another in their fire pursuit, and eventually, during a rescue, run into one of the best Cute Leading Ladies I’ve seen for I don’t know how long. She’s Rae Dawn Chong (daughter of comic Tommy Chong) . . . she’s covered all over with charcoal marking and blue clay— and that’s all. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the style catch on if this movie gets a good enough distribution, Rae Dawn wearing her blue clay and ash as flatteringly as she does.
The relationship h>etween this woman and the three heroes is possibly the nicest thing in the film, despite my earlier comments regarding the unlikelihood of such historically diverse types ever having intercourse, literally or otherwise, with one another. The byplay
between the ape-men and the Homo sapiens female is excellently handled. I think my very favorite moment is Rae Dawn bursting into giggles at a funny event, looking around to share the laugh with one of the heroes, and realizing that none of the poor ninnies has yet developed a sense of humor. They just don’t know there is any such a thing as a joke, and so her little giggle trails off. Excellent.
Humor is very present throughout Qvsst for Fire, and it’s first rate. Some of the best comic louts to lurch across the screen are here present, including a dandy clutch of fearsome cannibals, a swell group of bandits who, lurking in the forest, are undone— to their astonishment— by the heroes’ technical superiority, and a fine Neanderthal with remarkably insensitive fingers.
Rae Dawn Chong’s tribe, the Ivaka— which, as I say, is a little hard to believe existed in the same era as our intrepid heroes, in
particular when one sees this tribe’s relatively swanky huts and decorated pottery— is nonetheless delightfully presented. They seem to be a collection of jesters, their bodies cheerfully painted, their leaders wearing masks, all of them playing endless humiliating jokes, chortling away, having a swell time enjoying the foolishness of everything including sex, death, and pain. They are ribald gagsters all, m^e and female alike, and they seem to have no respect for anything whatsoever, unless it’s for their goat-bearded chief, ever egging his subjects on to fresh naughtiness.
'The animals are nicely handled, if not all that convincing from the standpoint of special effects. No one seems to be able to figure out how to turn a contemporary lion into a saber-tooth, and the producers of Quest are no exception. They give us very, nice lions, to be sure, and the scene involving them is rather droll, but saber- teeth alone do not a saber- tooth make.
The mastodons, however— ah, the mastodons! Here is an odd achievement indeed. They are elephsmts wrapped in shaggy fur, and at first glance your instinct as a blase viewer of special effects— you who have seen dragons, wise green gnomes, and God knows what else presented in such superb detail that even the very pores seem authentically alien— you, very understandably, can be excused if you snort from your theater seat at these transparent shams. A mastodon? Hah!
But it works. I don’t know just how, but it works. It may be due to whoever designed the wise, patient, imdeniably mastodon eye which is tossed at you in closeup at crucial points. Perhaps it is the elephants themselves, stirring under all that fur. Maybe wearing that fur brought it all back to them, the recollection of their old grandfathers and grandmothers and aunts and uncles so long ago vanished from upstate New York and elsewhere, now only to be glimpsed in effigy in some museum. Maybe this inspired them, somehow made actors of them. Who knows? Whatever, you will like the mastodons. Or at least I hope you will. I certainly liked the mastodons.
In fact, I loved them. iS
13
OTHER DIMENSIONS
Music
by Jack Sullivan
This column is devoted entirely to the music of Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), the greatest symphonic composer of oiu" time and easily the most prolific composer of spectral music. Shostakovich wrote an extraordinary number of genuinely dark and nightmarish works. Indeed, his finest work is in the spectral mode: when he tried to be patriotic or cheery— especially in his ambivalent and erratic attempts to appease the Soviet censors— he was often banal and self-consciously “uplifting.” But when he let the lid off his anxiety and anguish, he poured out great musical ideas of unsettling power.
Nowhere is this phenomenon more striking than in the Fourth Symphony (1936). This gigantic work begins with a brutal march and ends with an ethereal minor chord that is sustained by the lower strings for six minutes of pure gooseflesh. The repeating bass figures throb like an artery, while other instruments, including an ascending celesta and a muted trumpet, play doleful fragments as the chord dies away. Actually, the entire piece is fragmented, a kaleidoscope of disparate ideas— some gently lyrical but most piercingly dissonant— which appear out of nowhere and vanish, without development or recapitulation. Structurally and harmonically, this is the most original of Shostakovich’s symphonies; emotionally, it is one of the darkest.
It is (fifficult for us to imagine how “pure” music— music without a text— could conceivably be politically subversive. Nevertheless, Stalin apparently felt that the despair and terror exploding through this work would hardly be inspiring to the masses or would hardly represent the official image of life in the Soviet Union he wished to project. So stem was Soviet censorship that the symphony was yanked out of circulation on the eve of its first performance and was not heard imtil 1961. The American premiere was
given by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1963, and the Philadelphians recorded the work the same year (Symphony No. 4, Ormandy, Philadelphia Orchestra, Columbia MS-6459). Still in print, this is one of the most thrilling recordings of Ormandy’ s career, a mirror image of his desultory efforts of late. Tempos are brisk, attacks are sharp, textures are clear, and the orchestra plays with great passion and intensity.
The Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich’s most popular, is more conservative than the Fourth— very deliberately so, for Shostakovich was desperate to get off Stalin’s blacklist. Subtitled “the creative reply of a Soviet artist to just criticism” (a truly nauseating label), the Fifth is conventionally regarded as a “safe,” unchallenging, classically structured work designed to make Stalin smile and to commemorate the October Revolution.
It has always struck me as being, in a sneaky way, considerably more than that. Yes, the piece does have a rousing finale with the required “patriotic” and “optimistic” sound; yes, the scherzo is folksy and
jocular, if a bit caustic. Survival was indeed Shostakovich’s first priority. Nevertheless, he got away with more than is generally acknowledged: the greater portion of the symphony is given over to darkness; including the long, gloomy first movement (which ends with another sustained minor chord embellished with a spooky celesta) and the tragic slow movement. Even the finale is interrupted by an extended wailing of pain from discordant strings
before the requisite “heroic” ending. The final timpani thwacks in that ending still sound awesome in the famous 1959 Leonard Bernstein recording, especially in the newly pressed budget-piiced reissue (Symphony No. 5, Bernstein, New York Philharmonic Orchestra, CBS MY-37218). In fact, the entire performance has a tautness and conviction that no recent version surpasses. Worth looking for is an exciting out-of-print Previn version (London Symphony Orchestra, RCA LSC-2866 OP).
Fortunately, Previn’s later recording of the Eighth Symphony (Symphony No. 8, Previn, London Symphony Orchestra, Angel S-36980) is still available, an overwhelming performance of an expressionistic work that once again got Shostakovich in trouble. One would think that the tense wartime atmosphere of 1943 would make a musicd depiction of brutality and horror acceptable even to Stalin, but such was not the case. The Eighth was denounced by the Party as decadent and “formalistic,” and this gripping symphony, like the Fourth, was hurled into oblivion until the 1960s.
The work opens with a shuddery motif deep down in the low strings— an idea reminiscent of the Fifth Symphony but far more ghoulish— which sets the mood of the work. The first movement builds to a series of wrenching explosions for full orchestra, then slowly winds down into gloom and silence. Two macabre scheizos follow in rapid succession, the second exploding into an ugly climax for brass and gongs which introduces the long slow
Stmcturally and harmonically, the Fourth is the most original of Shostakovich's symphonies; emotionally, it is one of the darkest.
14
movement. In this ghostly passacaglia, the heart of the work, the low strings (Shostakovich’s favorite tonal color) repeat a sinuous, haunting melody some dozen times, while delicate woodwinds whisper high above them. For spectral atmosphere, this astonishing
movement is surpassed in music only by Shostakovich’s own deathbed works.
Another disquie ting piece withheld for years I'rom the public was the First Violin Concerto.
This unusual work features another introspective passacaglia, as well as an incredibly athletic cadenza for the soloist. The most chilling movement is the first, which opens once again with dreary cellos and double basses, over which the soloist traces solenm figurations. At the
movement’s end, the muted violin, determined to break free fi’om the dark murk of the orchestra, soars as high above it as is humanly possible. Shostakovich is always good with endings, but this one is truly
breathtaking. The late David Oistrakh, to whom the concerto is dedicated, manages this and every other difficult passage with tremendous virtuosity and nobility (Violin Concerto No. 1, Oistrakh, New Philharmonia Orchestra,
Angel S-36964).
'The Tenth Symphony, Shostakovich’s major work from the 1950s, is an anomaly: for much of its epic length, it is sullen and gloomy, yet despite some criticism it survived the censors. Was -its survival due simply to Stalin’s death the year of its premiere (1953)? Or did it survive because the jaunty finale embodies, to quote Yeats, a case of “gaiety transfigurag all that dread”? One would think so listening to Herbert von Karajan’s compelling reading (Symphony No. 10, Karajan, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Deutsche Grammophon DG-139020), where the twirling woodvraid theme in the finale soimds positively magical. For
The Eighth was denounced by the Party as decadent and ‘Jormalistic, and this gripping symphony, like the Fourth, was hurled into oblivion until the 1960s.
you are seriously interested in science fiction, this
is a ‘must have’ book.” — Gene Roddenberry
Scifi fans: if you were to buy only one book on your hobby, this is the one. It's definitive — the one reference a buff must have. From A to Z — from Mbott <S Costello Go to Mars to Zontar: The Thing from Venus — here are over 1,000 detailed entries on the best (and worst) in SF movies, TV, authors, publications, organizations and awards.
The superman who gives you this FUN reference book is Starlog and Future Life ex-editor Ed Naha. Ed assembles:
□ 999 films — major players, credits, plots (summarized with exquisite drollery), production company, running time, and whether in b/w or color o 292 TV shows: series, specials, made-for-TV movies, kidvid, even pilots that never got on the air — from nearly four decades. Data include principal players, credits, plots, year(s), b/w or color □ 204 SF authors: profiles, birth/death dates, major works, knowing comments on their styles □ Nearly 200 great photos □ SF awards — Hugo and Nebula □ Oscars in
Space: scifi Academy Award winners □ Data on scifi magazines and organizations — are you missing out on anyVn Theme and Theme Again: or, the plots and subjects that get used over and over 0 400 big 6'/! x 9'/.
SAVE $15 Yours for only $1.95
When you join the Movie/Entertainment Book Club and agree to buy 4 or more bocks over the next 2 years
pages □ FUN Extral The Best in Scifi Quotes: snippets of unforgettable (and very forgettable) dialogue from genre heavies — sometimes insightful, sometimes hilarious.
Hurry, before our copies are devoured by the Empire of the Ants.
TZ5
MOVIE/ENTERTAINMENT BOOK CLUB TZ Publications, Inc.
800 Second Ave.
New York, NY 10017
I enclose $1.95. Please send me the $16.95 Science Fictionary by Ed Naha, postpaid and at no additional charge. At the same time, please accept my membership in the Movie/Entertainment Book Club. I agree to buy 4 books over the next 2 years at regular Club prices, plus shipping and handling. I will be ottered at least 200 books on movies and entertainment, usually at 20-33% discounts plus shipping and handling. Forevery book I buy at the regular price, I receive one or more FREE Bonus Book Certificates which entitle me to buy many books at tar below regular Club price, usually at e0-80%discounts. I'll be offered a new Club Selection plus Alternates every 4 weeks (13 times a year) in the Club bulletin, PREVIEWS. If I want the Selection, I will do nothing and it will come automatically. If I want an Alternate or no book at all. I'll notify you by the deadline date specified. If I should ever receive a Selection without having had 10 days to decide if I want it, I may return it at Club expense and receive full credit. PREVIEWS also includes news about my fejlow members and their hobbies. I am welcome to send in similar items about myself and my interests. PREVIEWS will publish every such item it deems suitable. FREE.
Name (please print)
Address
MUSIC
With the Fourteenth Symphony, we move into the final, grimmest phase of Shostakovich's career, a phase given over almost entirely to contemplations of death.
the budget conscious, the young Andrew Davis offers a clean, conscientious performance (Davis, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Seraphim S-60255), if conscientiousness alone is enough in such searing, tragic music. One hopes that Previn, the most eloquent Shostakovich conductor, soon get to the Tenth.
A decade after the Tenth, Shostakovich again incurred the displeasure of die Soviet regime, this time with his Thirteenth Symphony, a choral work subtitled “Babi Yar” because of its hellish depiction of the massacre of 200,000 Russian Jews. The authorities objected to Shostakovich’s choice of text, a set of Yevtushenko poems condemning totalitarianism, anti-Semitism (clearly imputed by the poet to Soviet as ,well as Nazi regimes), and *
censorship.
In this work, Shostakovich showed that he could write great program music. “Fears like shadows slithered everywhere,” intones the bass soloist in a description of life imder Stalin, and the music itself— fearful, shadowy, and slithery— is a perfect embodiment of the text. Ormandy premiered the work in America, but his fine reading doesn’t quite match the shattering account by Previn (Symphony No. 13, Previn, London Symphony Orchestra, Angel SZ-3766).
With the Fourteenth Symphony (1969), we move into the final, grimmest phase of Shostakovich’s career, a phase given over almost entirely to contemplations of death. “What Shostakovich has siunmoned musically,” wrote Rory Guy when the Fourteenth first appeared, “is a direct confrontation wi& death as specter, almost medieval in its dark and fearful intensity” (Symphony No. 14, Rostropovich, Moscow Philharmonic ()rchestra, Columbia/Melodia M-34507).
Like its predecessor, the Fourteenth has a text, this time an anthology of poems about death. The symphony opens with a desolate violin solo which introduces Federico Garcia Lorca’s “De Profundis,” an hallucinatory vision of a huge graveyard of dead lovers. A violent, flamenco-flavored motif then slashes its way through Garcia Lorca’s
“Malaguena,” a poem which depicts death stalking through a Spanish tavern. The remaining poems similarly treat death as a terrifying rather than consoling reality. 'This is Shostakovich’s most imcompromising symphony, not only in its cosmic pessimism but in its direct, angiy swipe at Soviet tyranny (“Rotten cancer . . . horrid nightmare . . . mad butcher,” shouts the soloist).
The orchestration— for strings, percussion and two singers— is spare, austere and full of unforgettably unearthly effects. The most telling of these comes at the veiy end, when a madly galloping dissonant chord suddenly shuts off, leaving a terrible silence and emptiness which is surely the most precise evocation of death in music. “All powerful is death,” chant the singers just before this awful moment:
It is on watch
Even in the hour of happiness In the world of higher life it suffers within us.
Lives and longs And cries within us.
Composer and critic Eric Salzman recently wrote that despite its high quality, Shostakovich’s late music is sometimes too “depressing.” Indeed, the listener should be warned that this music is unremittingly bleak. Especially gray and ghostly are the unresolved tnlls in the Sonata for Violin and Piano (Sonata for Violin and Piano, Kremer, Gavrilov, Columbia/Melodia M-35109), and the bonelike tapping and rattlings in the Thirteenth String Quartet (String Quartet No. 13, Fitzwilliam Quartet, Oiseau-Lyre DSLO-9).
The climax of this movement toward the grave is the Fifteenth String Quartet (1974), Shostakovich’s farewell to the world, an audacious, experimental work which fittingly
and movingly rounds out his controversial career. This last quartet consists of six slow movements in a row (including an elegy, a nocturne, a funeral march aad an epilogue), each about death, each utterly black, and each filled with tremendous poetry and harmonic originality. It is astonishing that such a severe work, one so obsessively focused on a single terrible thing and with only a single tempo, can also contain such richness of invention. The ideas range from infinitely sad, hymnlike melodies, to defiantly jabbing single- note crescendos, to deathly silences. The ending, with its hollow open chords and stark atonal trills, simply vanishes into grayness, suggesting the fading of a heartbeat. 'The Taneyev Quartet, to whom this valechctory work is dedicated, plays with a tenderness and affection that only slightly soften the gloom (String Quartet No. 15, T'aneyev Quartet, Columbia/Melo^a M-34527).
Yet gloom is by no means the only emotion in Shostakovich’s late music. As Andrew Porter of The New Yorker recently pointed out: “In one way, the Frick re<dtal was a profoundly depressing occasion, for it compelled one to think about the stricken, unhappy artist, confiding his sorrow to these intimate pages. And in another way, it was a profoundly inspiring occasion— a manifestation . that the human spirit is indestructible, a de profundis from a voice that could not be silenced.
These works contein utterances as moving, as poetic, as those in despairing Psalms, and are beautifully wrought, strangely imaginative music.”
Many controversial, experimental composers, such as Bartok and Schoenberg, mellowed in their later years, but not Shostakovich. He did not go gentle into , that good night.
Next month: Contemporary composers. 18
OTHER
DIMENSIO NS
Etc.
wrote it, thanks also for the interesting accom- panying piece on the making and coming of “Swamp Thing.” The only
Inspired by the Gar- goyles of Gotham photo feature in our February issue, reader Kevin D. Shields snapped some gargoyle photos of his own on a recent trip abroad. The top left photo (which he’s entitled “That’s Right, Buddy, Number One!”) and the one to its right were taken in Helsinki; the bot- tom photo (entitled “I Am the Walrus”) was taken fn Leningrad.
UP FROM HORROR
TZ’s Tom Seligson recently received the following letter from director Wes Craven (The Last House on the Left,
The Hills Have Eyes,
Deadly Blessing, and Swamp Thing), whom he interviewed in our February issue. Craven makes such an interesting and articulate case for himself that we thought his letter worth reprinting here:
Dear Tom:
I’d like to thank you for one of the most even- handed, thorough and ac- curate interviews ever printed about this film- maker. And, to whoever
thing that confused me in that second article was the question “How much I Craven -will a family- I oriented film based on a I comic book be able to I take?”
\ 'That’s a little like I asking “How many brushstrokes by Joe Blow iwill a painting by Joe Blow be able to take?” The answer is, just as many as it takes, and not one more. The fact is that with the exception of the basic Swamp Thing character and setup, the story and film are my creation — pure Craven from beginning to end. And yet when this film was recently tested at Preview House in Hollywood with an au- dience of 8- to 18-year- olds, the response was 93% good to excellent! That’s how much they could take. And love it!
I’m really not blow- ing my own horn so much as protesting the unspoken assumption leveled towards all writer/directors who earned their film wings by working inthe violence/horror end of genre films: the assump- tion that that is all we can do. Far from it, guys. We’re all just getting rolling, all still growing, and we all have a hell of a lot more capability, laughter, tenderness, and intelligence than the ways we clawed our way into the system allowed us to show. At least not show on the surface.
6ARG0YLSKIS
“Etc.” is a
for you, the readers. We’re looking for pithy views, provocative quotes, imusual photos, weird and amusing newspaper items (please send actual clippings for vertification), surprising uses in the media of that magic phrase “the Twilight Zone,” and any other tidbits suggesting that the
'Twilight Zone exists right now here on earth. Enterprising readers whose material we use will receive, along with our lasting gratitude and an acknowledgement in these pages, a snazzy 12” x 18” poster of Maximilian, the Tmlight Zone cat— just the sort of thing to brighten even the most miserable day.
i
17
!
[etc.
It astonishes me it’s taken so long for it to be seen that the best “hor- ror” films, though sand- bagged by ridiculously small budgets, have Imen raised right back up by their strong visions, and have been among the most free, uncensored, ribaldly funny, and telling films made in America during the last gasp of the 20th century.
Horror films have allowed us survival in a sink-or-swim marketplace, and at the same time allowed us — by both their nature and the nature of their young audience — in- credible freedom to ex- plore far beyond the fron- :
tiers of Establishment |
reality and morality. Only in horror films were we free to howl the pain and outraged laughter of a generation that dared to |
join hands and dance j
with its parents’ worst j
nightmares, all on the i
bloody brink where we j
happen to have been |
bom. I
That’s not a bad i
start, do you think? And ■
when you see “Swamp |
Thing,” I hope you’ll agree that’s exactly what it is: just the beginning. I
Sincerely, Wes Craven
1«
^ We are always coining across references to “the Twilight Zone” in newspapers and magazines, and invite readers to send us interesting examples.
This month’s item comes from the San Francisco Chronicle of January 31, courtesy reader Jim Aschbacher.
REQUIRED
READING
“So far as I can see, Blackwood’s The Willows is the ip'eatest weird story ever written, with Machen’s The White People as a close second, and wilh things like Shiel’s Home of Sounds, Machen’s Black Seal and White Powder, Chambers’ Yellow Sign, Poe’s House of Usher, and James’s Count Magnus as good runneKi-up.”
— H.P. Lovecraft to Wilfred Blach Talman, November 10, 1936
STRAUD
ON sr
“As a kid I was interested in science fiction, but now I can’t read anything where the people have funny names, or ‘Erlhor got up in the morning and put on his Illiath and walked out to the plains of Gimm.’ I look at the stuff and think, ‘Jesus, that’s easy, anybody can do that.’ ”
—Peter Straub, interviewed by Tom 'Gleddie in the March Fantasy Newsletter
CALIING AU CARfOONISTS
Get a gag that’s also ghostly, weird, super- natural, futuristic, or just plain other-dimensionsd? Tunlight Zone is now featuring cartoons (as you can see by this page), and we’ll pay $50 for ea^ one we use. Send submissions, enclosing an SASE, to Cartoon Editor, TZ Publicjjtions, 800 Second Avenue, New York, NY 10017.
“We have just returned from a month-long space flight and we can report that there is a dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between man’s grasp and his reach. It is an area which we call The Twilight Zone. ”
Collage by Marty Blake
SEARC^HING FOR THE GREATEST BAHER IN BASEBALL HISTORY, HE DISCOVERED THE DREADFUL SECRET OF . . .
In January of 1974, a writer named Howard Gammill was interviewing Goober Talbot, the old outfielder, in a hotel room in New York. This is not really the beginning of the story, but it was Gammill’s first inkling there might be a story. More of one, anywEiy, than Talbot could tell him.
Talbot had once led the National League, in batting, but that had been during the Second World War when most of the better hitters were in uniform; in later years Talbot had trouble hanging on as a mere pinch hitter. Unlike most of the old- timers Gammill had interviewed over the winter, Talbot bore no grudge toward baseball. “01’ country boy like the Goob,” Talbot kept saying between nips at the pint of rye in his lap, “jes glad he got to play up top as long as he did.” He reposed on the bed, his shirt imbuttoned to the waist, his feet up, eyeing the tape recorder as if he had never seen one before. He was a fat, nearly toothless hulk who bore no resemblance to the cherub face that had once adorned bubblegum cards. No more than sixty, Gam- mill thought, and already he’s fallen apart; sad the way these guys let themselves go when they’re done playing.
Gammill’s book would be called Day of Gold. Each of the former players Gammill was interview- ing had performed a single, solitary super feat dur- ing an otherwise mediocre career. Gammill didn’t much care for the tiook’s title or the idea behind it, but his editor was convinced there was another book or two to be mined from the lode Kahn’s The Boys of
Summer had uncovered a few years back. Gammill’s last literary endeavor had been a string of folksy in- terviews with a dozen 5)itchers who had faced both Cobb and the Babe. It had sold fifty thousand copies and brought him some recognition— but not the kind the men in his book had enjoyed in their day; that would forever be beyond Gammill’s reach. Talbot could look back on his former glory— the batting ti- tle, fluke that it was, still put him in the limelight for a few moments now and then. Gammill’s book would provide yet another such moment for Talbot, and he seemed grateful for it. Some of the others— Hunne- field, the pitcher who’d lost a Series no-hitter on a broken-bat single, for one— wouldn’t agree to come to New York, though all their expenses would be paid and they’d get a grand or two besides. To talk to Hunnefield, Gammill had to make a hideous bus trip from the Miami airport to a sugar mill town in the Florida interior. Even then Hunnefield, now a foreman at the mill, wanted Gammill to find him a job in baseball as his price for talking, and when Gammill couldn’t promise this, the interview dis- solved into a blast at the game: a ruthless business. Can’t find room for an old star, but willy-nilly pays millions to kids fresh out of Little League who don’t even know how to hold a runner on first base . . .
Gammill was thirty-five in 1974 and still in reasonably good condition. In college he’d once gone three-for-four against a pitcher who later won twen- ty games for the Red Sox. It was his own personal day of gold. And he wanted to believe that he could
Browning’s Lamps
have hit in the major leagues if he’d had the chance. Oh, maybe not .300, but at least a solid .270 or .280. Earlier in the winter he’d let this fantasy slip out while interviewing Gusty Gayles, whose twenty-nine saves in 1953 still held a Cardinal record, and Gayles had laconically said, “Try .080,” and then led him into a field back of the Gayleses’ homestead. It had been a raw day in November and Gammill had wor- ried about the bat stinging his hands when it made contact, but Gayles, at fifty-four, still had a slider that was so wicked, Gammill had all he could do to scratch out a couple of weak ground balls.
That, rationally, should have been the end of it. The sensible man would have resigned himself to writing about baseball, realizing that was about as close as he could ever hope to come to the game, but Gammill knew that for him there could be no easy end to the dream. The five-year-old who had stood up in front of his kindergarten class and announced he was going to be a ballplayer had become a thirty- five-year-old who would gladly trade all the glowing reviews that Day of Gold would bring to see his name, just once, in a major league box score. So he made up his mind to get into something else as soon as he finished the book. Talking to men like Talbot only rubbed salt where the skin was still too thin. He was worried that Talbot could sense this. That was perhaps why Talbot kept gloating, “A man that’s played in the big leagues, he’s done something proud.”
“No regrets?” Gammill said.
“Exceptin’ maybe that the Goob ain’t around for this designated hitter gimmick. 01’ Goob coulda had another bat title, he didn’t have to go out to the field and make a clown of hisself.”
“You did all right all those years as a pinch hitter.”
“Once a game. That was all the Goob could swing. Shoot, hardly enough to get the blood warm.”
“Who do you think the best pinch hitter you ever saw was? Besides yourself, of course.”
In bringing the pint bottle up to his mouth, Talbot paused to wag his head self-effacingly. “The best? Naw, that wadn’t ol’ Goob. Goob was good all right, but there was better.”
“For instance?”
“Waahl, guy down in one of those cotton- pickin’ leagues ol’ Goob played in when he was no more’n a taddy. Guy you prob’ly never heard of. Pless. Pinch Pless, they c^led him. Worst glove ever, couldn’t catch a pea in a bushel basket. Made ol’ Goob look like DiMaggio out there in the pasture —but stick a bat in his hand, man, that sucker coulda hit a apple seed blowed off a bam roof.”
In such ways do writers learn there are stories better than the one they are telling. Listening to the
24
tape of the interview later, Gammill heard the catch in his voice when he asked, “Wliat league was this, do you remember?”
“Somewheres down there in ’Bama or Ken- tuck. Maybe Tennysee. Played in those dogpatch leagues a lotta years before the PhUs took attention that ol’ Goob was always good for his .350. You oughta look up the Goob’s complete record sometime. It w^n’t jes those eight years in the majors.”
But Gammill wasn’t interested in the Goob any longer. Somewhere, in one of his talks with the old pitchers, he seemed to recall the mention of Pless, a few seconds on the order of “ . . . toughest hitter I ever faced, tougher even than Cobb, was back in the bushes. Little tubby guy named Pless. Never even made it up to A ball, from what I remember, because there was no place he could play in the field where he wouldn’t kill himself. But Christ! Best pure hitter you ever saw!” Gammill hadn’t even included this bit of memorabilia in his book, or rather he had, simply recording ever3dhing verbatim and then letting his editor weed out what didn’t seem of interest. He’d been very lazy in his approach to that book, and he’d been going along about half asleep on this one, too. But he was waking up; the second reference to Pless triggered a nerve at the back of his mind.
He wondered if Talbot remembered the exact year he’d played against this Pless. Talbot thought it was the early thirties, after taking a moment to gaze at the ceiling as if calculating something. His true age, probably, as opposed to his baseball age.
“Say ’31 or so?” Gammill heard his own voice on the tape straining to sound mild.
“A whDe before the war, anyway,” Talbot said. He sounded tired. Small wonder— the pint bot- tle had been empty by then, ard he’d dragged his suitcase from under the bed, looking for another. Getting off the bed to shake hands when Gammill was leaving proved embarrassing to both of them.
The next morning Gammill r.an through his taped talks with the old pitchers until he found the one he wanted. The description of Pless was about as he’d remembered it, and there was an odd lilt in the pitcher’s voice, as if the memory brought him pleasure. Every player wanted to believe he’d been up againsi; the best at some point, so perhaps this Pless really was something. Still, Gammill was prepared for a disappointment when he started digging through old Baseball Guides. It was too hard to believe Pless could have been much good and still been buried all those years in the lower minors. Gammill wels browsing through the final averages for the Smokey Mountain States League in the 1932 edition when he came across Pless for the first time. Pless was listed by his full
“Guy you prob’ly never heard of. Pinch Pless, they called him.
Worst glove ever, couldn’t catch a pea in a bushel basket. Made ol’ Good look like DiMaggio out there in the pasture— but stick a bat in his hand, man, that sucker coulda hit a apple seed blowed off a barn roof.’’
name, as was the Guide’s custom: “Pless, Walker B.” Scanning the page, he took in Pless’s statistics unbelievingly; in 108 at bats Pless had accumulated forty-nine base hits and fourteen homers. In the en- tire league only one other player, someone named Rice who’d batted over 400 times, had more homers and no one was within a hundred points of Pless’s .454 average. Delving farther back, he discovered in 1928 Pless had hit an astounding .483 with twenty- six homers in less than 200 at bats. Over the course of that season Pkiss had managed to play enough games in the outfield to have his fielding average listed too; it was actually lower than his batting average and looked so absurd— thirty-five errors and only twenty-eight put outs— that Gammill would have been sure it was a misprint if he hadn’t recalled Talbot’s “ . . . coddn’t catch a pea in a bushel basket.”
He picked up a paper and pencil and began making columns of Pless’s batting achievements, go- ing all the way back to 1921. When he had finished be caught his breath. Pless had an average in organized baseball of .447 and once had led the Bluegrass League in homers and triples despite hav- ing fewer than 100 at bats. His incompetence in the field had kept him from ever moving out of the lower minors, apparently. It was a different game then. No club wanted only lialf a player. Smead Jolley, who hit a ton everywhere he went, was ultimately squeezed out of the majors because of his fielding mishaps, and the Cubs had once dropped a player named Babe 'Twombley after he hit .377. You still had to wonder, though, if there weren’t more to the story: a drinking problem, or perhaps some bizarre physical defect like that Pete Gray who’d played with only one arm.
Gammill placed an ad in The Sporting News, requesting anyone with knowledge of the where- abouts of Walker B. Pless, nicknamed “Pinch,” former minor league slugger, to write to him. For a month after the ad ran, he checked his mail each day but without any real hope anything would come of it: Pless had played too long ago; he’d probably been dead for years. One morning, however, an envelope came, bearing a postmark that, near as Gammill could make out, was of a town in Kentucky that began with “G.” In the envelope was a single sheet of cheap tablet paper with a few pencil-scrawled lines on it. The gist seemed to be that the writer had once been a teammate of Pless’s. “You ever get down to Gloam,” Gammill was told, “just come around the general store in the day.” The signature was unreadable, and there was no return address. Gammill found Gloam in the atlas; it was about a hundred miles south of Louisville, which meant another miserable bus ride, and on top of it the ex- penses for the trip would have to come out of his own pocket. What could he tell his editor? “Nobody wants to read about a guy who never even made it out of Class C,” the editor would say.
He got to Gloam late on a Wednesday after- noon. The writer in him tried to feel on the verge of a story, but the dryness and shaking in his hands felt more like the day he’d gone into the field with Gusty Gayles. Gloam had thr^e stores and he started with the one that looked the least prosperous, following the principle that had carried him through most of his literary enterprises: when in doubt as to which way to point your nose, seek the smell of failure.
An old man in a flannel shirt was behind the counter. Gammill watched him a while from the doorway. There were several customers in the store, but the man paid little attention to them. His eyes seemed to be focused on something in his mind. He had a frail, wizened, stooped profile— nothing about it to suggest an erstwhile ballplayer. Still, Gammill sensed that this was his man. Nearly all the ex- ballplayers he had interviewed had those turned- inward eyes, as if the only events that mattered were memories. He approached the counter with the letter in his hand. The man’s eyes remained out in space. Gammill saw that the flesh on his face and neck himg in loose folds, as if it had once encased the head of a much heavier man, and he knew then (“ ... little tubby guy”) that he was, in all proba- bility, looking at Pless himself.
He stood at the counter, waiting for the man to focus his eyes on the present. After the better part of a minute the man turned and started to move off. So there was nothing for Gammill to do but speak. “Mr. Pless? Walker Pless?”
For an instant the man appeared to be star- tled. Then GammDl saw his shoulders steady and ■\l 2S
Browning’s Lamps
straighten, a movement that Gammill took to mean he would not be caught out so easily. “Who’re you?” the man said flatly.
“Howard Gammill.” Gammill held out the let- ter. “It said I’d find you in the general store.”
“Lemme look.” The man took the letter, pressed it flat on the coimter, then stood well back as if he needed the extra distance to see. “Uh huh ... I remember this. Thing in The Sporting News said if anybody knew Pless. I knew Pless.”
“Matter of fact,” Gammill said matter of fact- ly, “you are Pless, aren’t you?”
The man laughed in a short, humorless way, as if he were being polite. “People hereabouts call me Carter. Joe Carter.”
“But you played as Walker Pless.” If Gammill had learned anything as a writer, it was how to persist.
The man laughed again and shrugged slightly. “When I played as anybody.”
“Look, I just want”— Gammill shot a sharp glance over his shoizlder— “I mean, can we go someplace where we can be alone?” he said more quietiy.
“Here’s good enough.”
“All right, then, what I want to do is talk to you about your tremendous hitting ability. I mean you had some of the highest averages in the entire history of baseball.” He was conscious that Pless’s eyes were fixing on him now. “There’ll be some money in it, of course. Several hundred dollars.”
“Don’t care about money. Store brings all I need.”
That was either a lie or else Pless had the skimpiest needs humanly possible. “Well, will you agree to just talk to me, then?”
“It’s what we’re doing.” Dry as Pless’s words were, his tone held no hint of irony. Everything was being said in the same flat voice.
“The question in my mind is why you never made it out of Class C. It must have made you a lit- tle bitter to post those fantastic averages year after year and never move up.”
“No place I could move. There wasn’t such a thing in those days as a man could just pinch-hit. Johnny Fredrick, Red Lucas, Sheriff Harris— they all had a position to play.”
“How was it that you were such a terrible fielder? It would seem you could have learned, like you learned to hit.”
“Nothing to learn there. Hitting came natural. Playing in the field, running them bases, just couldn’t ever pick it up. Tried, hell— Christ, did I try, but it wovddn’t come.”
“Tot Pressler said you were the toughest bat- ter he ever pitched to. Even tougher than Cobb.”
“They’d say the same thing now, I was play-
ing. Nobody around could get me out steady. Getting down to first base, though, that’d be something else. I’d have to hit it out to the v/all even to get a single.”
“You’re telling me you could still hit?”
“For damn sure. Maybe nothing what I did when I was younger and had more shoulder, but near .300 anyway.”
Gammill had heard things like this before from other old-timers, outrageous protestations that even at seventy they could play the game as well as the kids. Usually he had to restrain himself from grin- ning, but now he felt his whole body undergo a peculiar tightening. Pless’s eyes held a dark and steady light in their centers. The rest of the man looked ordinary, even a little below ordinary; his shoulders drooped so much they almost touched the counter, and his pipe-stem arms didn’t look strong enough to hold a bat, much less s^ving one. But those eyes looked as if they might contain something special. “Hornsby always used to make claims like that,” Gammill said invitingly.
“Hornsby was good, but I was better. Still d>m*
“Come on. You must be over seventy. You mean to tell me you could hit Ryan, Seaver, all those hard-throwing kids they have now?”
“Satch Paige threw as hetrd as any of ’em. Two years ago he came through here and I had a lit- tle get-together with him out on the high school field.” Pless’s mouth made an effort to smile natural- ly, but it escaped into an old man’s nervous quiver- ing of the lips. “About five pitches, Satch gave up. ‘Never could get one by you,’ he said; ‘never will.’ ”
“Paige must be nearly seventy himself.”
“Still throws mean, though. Legs ain’t there to give him much follow-through, but the ball still comes.”
They had arrived at a juncture where GammUl could no longer deny his motives for coming there. Still, he had to pretend, if only to himself, that he wasn’t taking any of this seriously. I’m not from Missouri, Mr. Pl^s, but you’re still going to have to show me was the sort of thing he wanted to say, light but to the point. Instead he found himself com- ing out with it like a kid would, as a challenge. Pless irritated him, under all; it was tliat damn could-not- care-less attitude, as if he knew how helplessly Gammill was his captive.
“I’m not Paige,” Gammill said, “but I still remember how to throw what used to be a pretty fair nickel curve. Go you any amount from a beer to the price of a month’s supplies for your store, that you can’t hit anything off me but air.”
Pless could easily have laughed this off, but Gammill had begun to sense that the man, for his own reasons, was a captive here no less ’ than he.
26
“Not much good light left,” Pless said. “Don’t get dark till around six, but the old windows never did like them shadows. So you get back here in under a hour with your gear, and maybe we’ll have us time for a few swings.”
“I’m ready now. My glove’s in the car, along with a bat and a couple of balls.”
“Need more’n.a couple. Field here’s got a crick running back of right field. Good lefty batter’s gonna hit a few out in it. Can’t be helped.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“Waste of time, two balls. Nobody out there shagging, they’ll roll in the crick first two swings. You get yourself down to the sporting goods, get a good dozen or so. Maybe dig up a kid to chase. Meet me out to the field in a hour.”
Two boys were on the high school field knock- ing flies when Gammill got there. For a coin or two they probably would have agreed to shag for him, but instead he gave them each five I dollars to go home. Whatever was going to happen ‘ here, he wanted no witnesses to it. Besides, the ' creek, at a glance, looked about four hundred feet . from the plate. He sat on the grass beside the backstop, waiting for Pless to come along. In his lap ^ was a Louisville Slugger, Hank Aaron model, and a I gloveful of new balls, American League, Joe Cronin’s signature on them. Pless didn’t get there until after five o’clcek; he took a squint at the sun down low behind third base and said, “Got about ten pretty fair minutes. Couldn’t find no shaggers, eh? Well, get yourself ready to do some chasing out yonder.”
' Pless was weEiring the same flannel shirt and trousers he had on in the store. Other than rolling up his sleeves, he made no preparations. He merely ■ picked up the Aaron bat, hefted it two or three times, then shambled toward the plate.
“Stick okay?” Gammill said. He had rather ex- pected Pless to bring his own bat and himself to have to go through some shenanigans to check that it wasn’t loaded or coated with nails or some such thing.
“It’s wood, ain’t it?” Pless was setting himself in the open stance of a slugger. On him, though, with the stick arms and baggy clothes, it looked like a scarecrow turned sideways.
Gammill would have liked a few warm up pitches, mainly to make certain of his control so he wouldn’t bean Pless, but he felt ridiculous not being ready when Pless, more than twice his age, obviously was. Looked impatient, in fact. He kept hefting the bat, then stepping out of the box to rub his eyes and take a fresh squint toward third base with them while Gammill toyed with the mound.
Satisfied at last with the footing, Gammill went into a perfunctory windup and delivered a medium-range fastball belt high. Pless’s eyes seemed to bug out of his head and his arms to quiver like jel- ly before he managed to launch the bat in a kind of schoolgirl swing, but the result so stunned Gammill that he felt his own eyes widen to their full size. The noise— bat against ball— made his eardrums tingle, and peeling his head over his shoulder, he was just in time to see a hectic blur ripple the underbrush that separated the creek from the outfield.
“ ‘Lean on the cfipples,’ mama always said,” Pless called humorlessly.
Gammill stood still as ice, frozen in the thought that he was in the dream of his life. To make sure it could not be punctured he started a more elaborate windup, resolved to let his arm all out on the next pitch, but Pless was out of the box again. Doing some more eye rubbing. Then Pless hopped back in, and he was cocking his wrist to break off a vicious curve.
The ball snapped sharply down and toward I Pless’s knees. It wasn’t a major league pitch, but it ! didn’t miss being one by much. Most batters would have let it go by as slim pickings, taken the strike. ; Pless took a stuttery step toward first base, though, and golfed it down the line, a man-sized double in any league.
The next pitch, on the outside corner, was sent on a line to dead center, and the fourth, fifth, and sixth were scattered to the deepest parts of the out- field, missing the creek only because they were not pulled quite hard enough.
“Ain’t getting around on you a’tall. Old shoul- ders don’t have that good snap no more.” Pless sounded almost apologetic.
Gammill had two balls left; he would soon have to do some retrieving. The first hit, in the creek, was definitely gone, and some of the others might not be found either. He had only brought half a dozen more
t
27
Browning’s Lamps
balls, despite Pless’s injunction. His breath was com- ing nearly as hard as Pless’s now, though not because of any physical effort. He was in a state of tremendous excitement and imbelief. He watched Pless hold the bat between his knees while he dug at the comers of his eyes. Pless had done this same routine now before each pitch. It could have been only an old ritual Pless had picked up, a habit like Harry Walker’s taking his cap off and putting it on again or Rocky Colavito’s stretching the bat behind his back to flex his shoulders, but it could have had other meanings. Maybe Pless didn’t believe what he was seeing, either.
Gammill tossed the ball idly in his hand, but his mind was not idle. “Lights going on you, Pless?’’ he said finally. The man had taken an especially long time since the last pitch.
“Dust in the old windows,” Pless muttered. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and shook it out in a vastly exaggerated gesture. Gammill had the distinct impression that this was all part of a show to get him to ask the question that had been crabbing away in his brain for the past several minutes.
“What would happen if you didn’t rub your eyes? If you just got in there and hit?”
Pless put the handkerchief away and squared himself at the plate again, as if he hadn’t heard. Perhaps he really hadn’t, or hadn’t wanted to.
“What about it, Pless? You putting some kind of trick drops in them or something?”
For an instant, only the barest instant, Pless’s shoulders jerked, and Gammill remembered in the store when the man had been caught off guard. Only out here it seemed he was acting as if he wanted to be caught. Gammill felt a tremor of recognition across the back of his own shoulders as it occurred to him that the events in the store might have been staged, too. He had been meant to see quickly through the play-role of Joe Carter, slothful store- keeper. Now he was intended to see that Pless had a secret to hitting. Those eyes were it. In them, somewhere. There’d been Ted WUliams with his 20-10 vision, so acute he never swung at a pitch that was so much as a hair out of the strike zone. Pless’s eyes looked to be even keener, for distances anyway. In the store Gammill recalled how Pless had held the letter well away from him to see it. An old man’s eyes, when it came to reading. Or perhaps that too had been an affectation. Gammill was beginning to arrive at the notion that Pless could actually read Cronin’s signature on each ball before he swung at it. If he could read at all. If he had ever learned how. Goober Talbot recognized his favorite brand of rye by the picture on the label, and Pless didn’t look much swifter in the head department. By God, though, with Pless’s ability to hit, even a cretin could make the majors these days. Gammill himself would
2«
become a Hall of Famer. He understood now the foolishness of the hope that had brought him here. He had wanted to divine the secret of Pless’s wizard- ry with a bat and acquire it for himself. But the secret wasn’t anything that could be told. It was a gift, Gammill was convinced, a gift of vision, and there was no way he could acqitire that.
And then, as it happened, there suddenly was a way. Pless, in swinging at the next pitch, went down in a heap beside the plate and lay very still. The ball squibbed off his bat along the ground toward Gammill, who followed its course a moment or two before he observed that Pless had fallen. Racing to the plate, he found Pless’s eyes open and blinking but the rest of his face gone awry, as if he had been struck in the head— clubbed from behind. Gammill had seen this once before on the ballfield; in 1948, as a nine-year-old, he had watched Don Black, of the Indians, tofple after swinging hard at a pitch, the victim of a cerebral hemorrhage. Bending over Pless, he asked if he could be heard. When Pless only blinked some more, he shouted he was going for a doctor and ran for his car.
In the hospital the improbable fragments that had been shaken loose and stirred amok all those weeks ago in that New York hotel room tumbled at last into the mosaic of a firm and final plan. Pless was diagnosed as having sustained a massive stroke and put under around-the-clock observation. Accord- ing to the doctors, he might pull through but more likely he wouldn’t; in any case, he would never again be more than basket material. All this Gammill was told after identifying himself as Pless’s nephew. He was taking a risk that Pless liad no other living relatives, or at least none who cared enough to im- pede step one of the Gammill Coup. Around mid- night, left alone briefly with Pless, he got a pen into the man’s putty-jointed fingers and sat beside the bed, pretending to doze while he waited for the nurse to return. On the bed sh(jet, within reach of Pless’s hand, was a single spideiy line of scrawl: “I leave my body to my nephew, Howard Gammill, to do with as he wishes.” Pless’s signature was even more wispy than the will itself, and Gammill trusted no one would examine it too closely, for he had started to write Pinch before catching himself and scratching Walker over it.
No one wondered unduly long how Pless had managed to eke out a will although pretty much paralyzed, but a few days later, when Pless fell into a coma that spelled the end, Gammill’s request that Pless’s eyes hie transplanted into his own head got some odd looks and an argument. What did a young man with quite serviceable vision want with the eyes of a bummy cabbage-head? Gammill produced a tale of hereditary blindness at age forty, noting that
A few days later, when Pkiss fell into a coma that spelled the end, Gammill’s request that Pless’s eyes be transplanted into his own head got some odd lool« and an argument.
What did a young man with quite serviceable vision want with the eyes of a bummy cabbage-head?
Pless alone of the males in his family had been spared the dread affliction. All the doctors Gammill spoke to had the SEime reaction. To a man, they did not want the responsibility for any operation such as Gammill was suggesting. One eye— well, perhaps, but never both. There was Holzapple, though, up in Louisville, an opthomological renegade who’d put his mother’s eyes in a mole for the sake of experiment.
Gammill found Holzapple to be much older than he’d anticipated. Close to Pless’s age, in fact, with hair growing out of his ears and indeed out of the edges of every orifice except his eyeballs. These listened intently to Gammill and then appeared to blur with doubt.
“Why not just swap the corneas? Be much safer. Corneas I C£in do just like putting in a new windowpane.’’
“The whole eyeball,” Gammill said. “It has to be. The disease affects the retinas.”
“Oddest thing I ever heard. Only attacks the males, you say?”
Gammill was afraid Holzapple would continue to probe until the story was shown up for the sham that it was, but Holzapple stopped short of that. He seemed willing to allow Gammill his lie if Gammill in return would sign a waiver releasing him of all culpability in the event the operation failed. Gam- mill’s plan had included a clause that he would get his own eyes back if Pless’s didn’t work out. They could be stored somewhere, couldn’t they, while the results of the operation were awaited? No such luck, Holzapple said. There was no going back; the tissues wouldn’t absorb further surgery for weeks after- ward, and in the meantime Gammill’s eyes would be worthless. As yet, human organs weren’t like spare auto parts that could be kept on the shelf until needed.
Hearing all this, Gammill suffered a violent qualm, but it passfid in the glaze of remembering Pless’s artistry with a bat. The chance that those seventy-odd-year-old eyes in his thirtyish body could make him overnight into a Rod Carew . . . the mere
chance! That they could also reduce him to a walker of guide dogs, a toter of tin cups was swept quickly out of mind by a picture of himself in a major league uniform. And the voices of sportscasters all across the country saying, “Howard Gammill, oldest Rookie-of-the-Year ever, at thirty-five, four times a batting title winner, today was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in a landslide vote. Gammill, who compiled a .386 lifetime average in his brief but incredible career ...” Later for the stuff of dreams. For now, it was enough that he had a shot at mak- ing them come true. He signed the waiver, entered the one hospital in Louisville that ' still granted the controversial Holzapple surgical privileges under the name of Harold Traynor (getting a kick out of the fact that no one on the staff recognized the real monicker of the immortal Pie) and as a show of faith gave his own eyes to a teenage girl who had blown her face apart with a can of hair spray.
Coming to consciousness after the operation, Gammill found his entire head swathed in bandages and wished only to sleep until the day they could be removed. Thus he swallowed voraciously all the Valiums and Darvons he was given and sought ex- tras from his fellow patients, bargaining away dishes of rice pudding, slabs of steak, occasionally slipping a bill or two into a hand that could not see what it was getting any more than his own could see what it was giving. »
Days passed so. On one of them Gammill turned his face toward what he was told was the vidndow and tried to see through the ban- dages. It was his only moment of impatience. The afternoon Holzapple announced they’d try a test or two was a murky one. Anyway, that was how it looked when Gammill unsealed his new eyes and took a glance into space. There wasn’t much of it— that was his first impression, and his second was that his room must be underwater. A lot of fishy items were out there swimming around, some of them so close he could have reached out and grabbed them, if he’d been able to locate his hand when he looked down where it used to be. In its place was a wad of fuzz, and another was off to his left talking to him in Holzapple’s voice.
“See anything, Gammill?”
“The bottom of a rain barrel.”
“Excellent. Most transplants come up blank.” “Now you tell me.”
Gammill waited for Holzapple to tell him that his sight would get better. Holzapple didn’t. The ban- dages went on again, and the day follovidng Gammill saw the same spectrum of murk. A moment oc- curred, however, when it lifted and the world he remembered emerged as if from behind a curtain. He felt reborn, in a way. Certainly not the same man.
- -‘t
29
Browning’s Lamps
Holzapple predicted there’d be other such moments of clarity, and that one day they’d begin outnumber- ing the periods of murk. As soon as the riot in his vitreouses ran its course.
In late May there came a morning when the bandages came off and stayed off. The eyes were still bloodshot and more blurry than not, but Gam- mill did not feel he could wait any longer before con- ducting a few vital tests of his own on them. One in particular. He chose an interval when he was imobserved, closed his right eye and lifted a finger to the comer of his left. He could not rub hard, the flesh there was still too tender for that, but he did get in a few light swipes before a throbbing started.
The throbbing was severe enough to make him blink, but he would have blinked anyway. He couldn’t have helped himself. For what he saw over the next few moments nearly stopped his heart. His left eye was fixed on the nurse where she stood at the window arranging the blind to let in the morning light. At first everything thalf occurred seemed in the realm of the ordinary— her back arched and her hand closed on the cord, tugging to secure it. But as she turned from the window, matters started to get weird. She looked as if she was having trouble bring- ing her head around; and yet— no, it wasn’t just her head, it was all of her body. None of her movements looked right; they were the right movements, and in their natural order, but something about them was way off. Gammill’s hand went to his eye reflexively -to rub some more, then dropped with astonishment to his side as what was happening dawned on him. The nurse was moving as if she had been put into slow motion! It was taking her forever just to get away from the window and cross the room to his bed.
In another moment, however, she seemed to be running at him, and then she was there. “What’s wrong, Mr. Traynor? Are you all right?”
“Fine. Never better.” He ought to repeat the process immediately so he would know he hadn’t imagined it, but the nurse wouldn’t stop hovering over him.
“You look so pale, and your eye— why is it closed like that? Does it hurt?”
It was his left eye that was closed now, against what it had seen. The right one was moving around the room a little wildly, for it was his now: the secret, the trick to hitting .400. To hitting 1.000 if he wanted to be gluttonous about it! Jim Palmer’s curves would have no more menace than clots of cot- ton candy. Wilhelm’s knucklers might never reach the plate in this millennium.
“Nothing hurts. I feel great. It’s just being here. I’m getting edgy.”
Holzapple released him from the hospital at the end of the week. By then he’d learned that the rub-
bing stunt worked equally well on both eyes, and that no matter how hard he rubbed, the slo-mo phenomenon lasted at most only a few seconds. All of this was knowledge gained under indoor condi- tions, lying flat on his back in bed. Out of doors re- mained an unknown until he hit the street. There, with the hospital looming behind him, he stood on the comer waiting for the traffic light to change. When it seemed to be taking too long, he realized what he had done. In stepping out of the hospital in- to the dazzling sunshine, he had performed by in- stinct some brushing of the eyes to protect them. It could be brought about quite by accident, then. He wondered what other quirks he had yet to discover. Refining his act was undoubtedly going to take a wMe. Not terribly long, though, he hoped, because the baseball season was already well underway and he’d have to debut soon to have any chance at Rookie-of-the-Y ear.
In his musing he had missed the light change. No problem. A pass at his eyes and approaching cars were reduced to the pace of giant snails. He stepped off the curb and started across. In a moment he was reeling backwards, lunging for the curb again. His legs, walking, weren’t carrying him anywhere near as fast as the cars. In bed he’d had no occasion to notice how his own movements slowed to correspond to the world around him. A whole world of snails and himself one of them. A v'orld of time inter- rupted, if only for a few moments here and there. It was all illusory, but then, what wasn’t?
Tinkering with something cosmic was what he was doing. Pless had done it for years, and nothing untoward had happened to him, except your stand- ard old man’s graceless death. One thing he had done some stopping to think on while in the hospital was how Pless had come into possession of these eyes. Perhaps witchcraft was beliind them. How else to explain the similarity in method between summon- ing their magic and the genie in Aladdin’s lamp? With that strangely thrilling conviction, Gammill hailed a cab and went directly to the airport, re- hearsing the sick-relative story he would spring on his editor to account for the long silence from his typewriter. -
The Indians, going nowhere as usual, let him travel with their club while he supposedly worked on a baseball version of Plimpton’s Paper Lion. The players ribbed him mercilessly and kept suggesting such titles as Wooden Indian. His editor had made a deal with the Cleveland manage- ment whereby he would be put on the active roster after the twenty-five-man limit was lifted on September 1, and thrown into a game or two as a pinch runner. The prospect of putting him up to bat, though, was nigh onto nonexistent. The game was
30
; still smarting from Veeck’s use of a midget years ! ago and wanted no more sideshow ventures, even ; under the catch-all guise of literature.
! That, on short notice, was the best Gammill’s j editor had been able to do for him and then only j under enormous prodding. In his professional view : he gave a very low value to the theory about Gam- mill’s needing an insider’s look at the game before he could make Day of Gold credible, especially since . rival publishing outfits were coming out with : baseball books all the time by poets and feminist : journalists who had no more idea that “hit-and-run”
. in baseball parlance was not a criminal offense, than they did that a steel cup was not for drinking but an item of protective apparel. “The trouble with
■ Bouton, Brosnan, and the rest of them,” Gammill said, “was they were really company men at bottom.
. If you thought they made feathers fly, put me in the ; clubhouse for a fev/ weeks and you’ll see the real I lowdown on what makes a bunch of men run around , in pajamas.”
Gammill actuEilly took no notes at all, though he did make a display of hanging around a lot and nodding wisely to himself each time one of the subs I uttered in his earshot some bon mot about the game.
■ The Indians’ manager meanwhile ignored him, as did I most of the regulars. From time to time, however,
' one of the rookie pitchers, a lefty named Tybender,
. came out to the parlt early in the morning and threw
a few minutes of batting practice to him in return for some tutoring in the art of writing. 'Tybender was keeping a diary of his first season and hoped to become a novelist v'hen his playing days were over.
. That could be soon, for pitching to Gammill began I invidiously to undermine his confidence. At the j outset Gammill limited his eye gimmick to one or two pitches a session, but gradually he stepped up the tempo until he was smoting the rookie’s best of- ferings effortlessly out of the park. Word of Gam-
mill’s unlikely prowess in due order reached the In- dians’ third-base coach, who lurked in a corner of the dugout one morning, pretending interest in the bat racks. Both Gammill and the rookie knew he was there, and both were nervous. The rookie, thinking he was on trial, blazed his first pitch high and tight, and Gammill, having decided to take a straight look at a toss or two before going into his eye-throttling routine, narrowly missed decapitation.
'I^bender next served a curve that started in on Gammill’s hands and broke like a comet at the last instant over the inside corner. That, at least, was how the pitch might have appeared to the coach. To Gammill’s genie-invoked eyes it was a moon on a platter, and he hit it into the upper deck.
A groan escaped Tybender, and in the dugout there was a clatter. Glancing over his shoulder, Gam- mill saw a bench had fallen and the coach was now up on the steps.
Mixing frequent cap adjustments with the ' cleansing of perspiration from his brow, he kept time | on the field in a state of near perpetual suspension | while he rattled balls off the fences like buckshot. 1 He was careful not to overstimulate the coach, | sometimes deliberately missing pitches he could easi- ' ly have clobbered. Once he even switched for a few moments to batting righthanded and looked foolish. The coach was meant to believe he was treating the outing as pure fun andrthat he took nothing he did too seriously. Like an aspiring film actor, he must ^ not toot his own horn but let the director discover : him on his own. He finished the workout with a shot over the center field fence that struck at the base of j the bleachers, territory no Indian had reached in j years. Locked into downshifted motion still, and a little dizzy, he turned from the plate to amble toward the dugout. The coach was creeping out on the field to greet him, arms waving like windmills on a ' breezeless day. The coach’s words tumbled out at normal speed, though. Sounds, oddly, were not af- fected in the slightest. |
“Pretty fair stroke there, Gammill, for a guy i sits behind a typewriter all day. Stick around. Maybe Klosterman will chuck a few to you when he comes ■ out to do some photos for Sport.”
Klosterman was the team’s ace, a righty j fireballer who already had nine wins despite it being | only June. The closest thing to Feller since Feller I himself. “Well, I don’t know if I’m up to anything like that,” Gammill said. “My God, I’m just out for a little exercise.”
Self-efface 'at every opportunity. Overdo, if necessary. What a clod the coach was. Cotdd barely keep from choking on the wad of chewing tobacco in j his cheek over what he’d seen, but still trying to play it coy. As Gammill watched, the man’s coma ended and the arm gyrations quickened. That was the way
I
31
Browning’s Lamps
it went, one instant the world spinning in turtle time and then everything back to its usual pell-mell self.
“Yoiu" life insurance is paid up,” the coach said, directing a stream of tobacco juice at a point midway between his feet and Gammill’s. “Besides, Klostie needs some work on his breaking stuff against lefties.”
The coach was getting intrigued by him. When he’d pounded Klosterman around, the manager would be next. The Indians desperately lacked a reliable designated hitter. They lacked at a number of other positions, too, but Gammill’s fantasies did not extend to filling any of them. In the field he’d discovered, as Pless must have, that slowing down the flight of a ball hit his way did not help much; he was missing the instinct and the footspeed necessary to get him to where it was going. On the other hand, standing stationary in the batter’s box, lining him- self up to tee off on an object rendered almost ponderous, was a matter he could have mastered in his sleep. Well, actually not. The eye gimmick would not work in the dark or under artificial light; Gam- mill did not know why that was. It seemed to have something to do with the sun; on a cloudy day, for example, he couldn’t get his eyes focused clearly. He remembered Pless’s obsession that there be good light for batting and his continual squinting into the setting sun, which he had regarded at the time as part of the act. Of late he had begun feeling unac- countable impulses to gaze into the sun himself. The brighter it was, the more he was drawn to it. Thus far he had refrained from indulging those urges. The sun was dangerous to the naked eye; moreover, things that did not . . . belong sometimes material- ized if he were out in it too long. There had been those queer ads for toothpowder and chewing tobac- co on the outfield wall a few days ago; and just this morning Tybender had been wearing a baggy uniform of a style that had been the norm in Goober Talbot’s day.
Klosterman finished his photography session with Sport shortly after eleven. He held no great interest in Gammill but agreed to toss a few pitches to him in lieu of his normal workout the day before a scheduled starting assignment. Gammill pretended to shake in his shoes as he stepped up to the plate, to be playing the clown. -He settled in, the bat resting on his left shoulder. Direct- ly overhead the sun glared, nearing noonday intensi- ty. Behind him the coach hunkered in the dugout; a few other players, subs out early for a little extra practice, took up positions on the field. Falling in with GammOl’s mock festive spirit, one of them sta- tioned himself at shortstop with a catcher’s mitt, and another trotted out to first base wearing his cap backwards. This man went flying heels over head 32
when Gammill’s first swing caromed a liner at him so hot it tore the glove off his hand.
“Better bear down, Klostie; get a man killed out here,” someone shouted. Unobtrusively Kloster- man dug a deeper foothold for himself at the edge of the rubber. Gammill peered at his obdurate, arrogant profile, trapped in the throes of time half-fi-ozen. Suddenly the profile seemed to grow in size, to move closer, and over its shoulder Gammill saw the short- stop was now playing barehanded. Craning his head judiciously to the right, he watched the man on first smooth his hair and replace his cap. The maneuver was standard, one he’d seen a thousand times on the playing field, but the cap was a different matter. He had never seen one like it anyvirhere. Definitely it was not the red felt job the man had on his head up till a moment ago. Matter of fact, it was brown. So was the rest of the man’s uniform, including the socks, which also bore wide yellow stripes. And in place of the first baseman’s glove he had been wear- ing was a skin-tight contraption that resembled the hand protectors used by golfers and horsemen.
Klosterman, under average height, rather stocky, now seemed positively elongated. He too had on a brown uniform. His pitch came plateward from below his shoulder, jerkily sidearm, with hardly any windup. Thoroughly unnerved, Gammill could not get his bat off his shoulder even though he had what must have been a good five seconds from the time it left Klosterman’ s hand.
But it was no longer Klosterman out there. The face that stared back at his was gaunt and sallow. Then of course it disappeared and Kloster- man’s sneering mouth and ruddy cheeks floated in front of him again.
He backed hastily out of the box and scraped some dirt over his hands. Klosterman’s call to him was low-pitched but giggly with amusement. “What happened, Howie? Too much smcike on that one?”
Gammill wanted desperately to assume this was all some effect of the light on his still not-quite- healed eyes, and that at the same time was precisely his dread. The sun even this moment was attempting to pull his eyes up from the ground. Now it was much more - than curiosity that; impelled him to wonder what he evoked each time he performed his Aladdin ritual. However, his dogged determination asserted itself at this point. He would forge ahead. A hand on his forehead, thumb and middle finger stroking gently at the comer of either eye, and the earth’s rotation slowed, an action so deftly managed that it would have seemed only a moment’s brow- mopping to the casual onlooker. Anyway, all the at- tention was on Klosterman, who was cranking his arm for another high, hard one.
Except that Klosterman’s pitch once more came in sidearm, and with so li1;tle steam on it he
In a surge of self-pity, he wondered whether anyone in all the world was as unlucky as he. He had the secret to becoming the greatest hitter in the history of baseball, and nothing to stop him from exploiting it. Nothing except the complete knowledge of his doom if he did.
could literally have counted the seams on the ball. A queerish ball it was, too, having no league stamp on it and a trifle lopsided, more a melon shape than ex- actly round.
He swatted grimly at it and watched it scoot out over second base where it was speared on the run by the shortstop with his bare left hand. Pausing to right himself, the man heaved the ball across to the first baseman, who awaited it with both feet straddling the bag.
Throughout this performance Gammill stood stock-still. Whatev€!r was going on out there re- minded him more of a vaudeville act of baseball than baseball itself. No one in his right mind played first base with his feet anchored like that, but then no one played barehanded either. Not in this day and age.
Nor, for that matter, in Pless’s day. Hence the possibility, which Vv^as just now occurring to him, that these eyes might retain pictures of the past, along with their other supernatural qualities, could not be rejected out of hand.
Or now, wait a minute.
Gammill again felt a curious desire to look skyward and relucfcintly succumbed to it.
He saw nothing unusual up there, but the mere fact that he wanted to stare into the sun and keep on staring was in itself unusual.
“Whattaya, crazy? Burn your lamps out, you keep doing that.” Klosterman’s voice was derisive, but the words sounded as a familiar melody to Gammill.
Someone else had referred to eyes as lamps, once. Someone long ago, in the infant days of baseball.
The Gladiator. He who, legend had it, used to stand on the street each morning upon emerging from his hotel and stare for moments on end directly into the sun. Gave the old lamps energy, he said when queried about his habit, and though his logic was thought to be the height of madness, who could argue with its results?
The Gladiator. For years the scourge of the old American Association.
And there it was. Gammill’s jaw sagged. And as he tore his eyes away from the sun, he experi- enced at first a fantastic suspicion, then a sudden pulsating conviction. Unhurriedly he backed away from the plate and bent down as if to tie his shoe while he thought more. But his nonchalance now disguised panic: it was horribly clear to him that these eyes had not originated in any Walker B. Pless.
The American Association. The Beer-and- Baseball-on-Sunday League. Those drab brown uniforms out there a few moments ago, those absurd block caps, the awakening, confused images of another century versus the gaudy red and white In- dian outfits he saw all around him now: two kinds of appearance and no reality at all.
He wished with all his heart that he had the capacity to tell himself otherwise, but he knew beyond any doubt that he had been in the company of the fabled old St. Louis Browns. The elongated pitcher, that had been Scissors Foutz who still held the all-time record for the highest lifetime winning percentage. None other than the Old Roman, Charlie Comiskey himself, at first base. The rest of them scattered out over the diamond he didn’t know by name, but they were all there. The boys of Chris Von Der Ahe. For a moment his terror was overcome by a blade of fancy. Oh, the book he might write if he could somehow get them to stay long enough to talk to them!
But then his own psychic plight numbed him to any sensations of nostalgia, and he began trembling. All that looking into the sun the Gladiator had done hadn’t been to store up energy but for quite another purpose.
He yearned to find some other explanation of events, but he knew he could not. In a surge of self- pity, he wondered whether anyone in all the world was as unlucky as he. He had the secret to becoming the greatest hitter in the history of baseball, and unlike Pless, who had lived in a day when hitting alone couldn’t vault a man into the majors, he had nothing to stop him from exploiting it. Nothing ex- cept the complete knowledge of his doom if he did. It seemed all too clear to him that the Gladiator hadn’t acquired his lamps by accident but had bargained for them hideously and then had somehow maneuvered to pass them on before he was called to account. Pless too had managed to escape the fate sealed in their centers. '
Of course, at least some of this could be the product of a panicked imagination, but could he af- ford the risk? Could he gamble that whoever was luckless enough to have the eyes when the lights finally went out in them would not be made to pay
- %
33
Browning’s Lamps
the full electric bill?
Backing out of the batter’s box, Gammill understood at last the difference between obsession and mere desire. For someone truly obsessed there would have been no decision to make now: the risks were never greater than the possibility of reward. But for him there was nothing in his mind but decision.
He pulled his face away from the sun and ran for the dugout.
In Louisville the following morning, he was un- surprised to learn when he looked up Pless’s death certificate that the B. stood not for Babe or Bingo but for his mother’s maiden name. Holzap- ple could tell him little of the early history of eye transplants but agreed to check the reference books. One of the first on record, it turned out, was per- formed in the same hospital where Holzapple now had surgical privileges. In 1905 a six-year-old boy who was blinded in a factory accident had received the eyes of his dying uncle. Neither the boy’s name nor tiiat of the donor was recorded in medical an- nals, but Gammill had only to check The Baseball En-
cyclopedia to fill in both with deadly accuracy.
The boy had been Walker Browning Pless, and his uncle had been Louis Rogers Browning.
Old Pete. The Gladiator.
Gammill would never know imder what circum- stances the original pact for the incredible eyes had been made. Nor would he ever discover whether Pless had known the awful secret of the eyes and schemed mightily to get them out of his head. But then no one had to know anything of his own brush with sorcery.
Holzapple charged him a thousand dollars for the eyes of a toothbrush salesman v'ho had fallen off a motorcycle, and what with the effects of the two operations, his vision was only eighty percent of what it had once been. But Gammill would settle for seeing the world at normal speed, no matter how dimly.
By the middle of fall he was back at work on Day of Gold. Holzapple never told him what he had done with the bewitched eyes, and Gammill never asked. It is said, though, there is a mole in Louisville now that comes out of the ground at dawn and lies about the rest of the day, staring at the sun. (8
Channel Thirteen invites the public to bid on an outstanding collection of art and antiques to be auctioned live on THIRTEEN April 29-May 2
»1lntaiGoLLECTion
will offer more than 1500 items including folk art, paintings, sculpture, photographs, furniture and decorative arts, prints, silver, jewelry, stamps, coins, rare books and maps, autographs and much, much more — as auctioneers and celebrity guests from the art and antiques world take you through the fascinating world of collecting.
A free listing of lots and their time of soie is ovaiiobie. Write or coil.
CHAIRMAN;
Sylvan Cole, Jr, Associated American Artists EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE:
David Bathurst, Christie. Manson & Woods International Inc. Allan S, Chait, Ralph M. Chait Galleries, Inc.
Andre Emmerich, Andre Emmerich Gallery Inc.
Lovirrence A Fleischman, Kennedy Galleries, Inc.
Thomas Moving Connoisseur Magazine John L. Marion. Sotheby Parke Bernet Inc.
Harold Sack. Israel Sack, Inc.
Paul M. Schaffei: A La Vieille Russie, Inc.
ALL PROCEEDS FOR THE BENEFiT OF 1
THURSDAY AND FRIDAY 5 p.m.-l am.
SATURDAY AND SUNDAY 1 p.m.-l am.
Catalogue available (send $2 50 to cover postoge and handling)
n«1liittinCoLLECTion
356 \Atest 58th Street, NYC 10019 or call' (212) 560-2700
34
Fantasy in Clay
Of all the cre£,tures who crawled out of the darkness in the nineteenth century, perhaps the strangest are the ones captui'ed in the British studio of the Martin brothers.
From 1880 to 1.914, the four Martins— Robert Wallace, Walter, Edwin, and Charles— created in clay an unholy world of bizarre birds, half-human faces, and other grotesque creatures. A hundred years latei', in a landmark exhibition, these monsters have invaded America.
The eldest Martin brother, Robert Wallace, wa,s originally trained as a stonecutter in the medieval manner. This was the age of the Gothic revival, of Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, of grotesques leering out of dim church windows. He wrote, “My daydreams and my nightly visions teem with Gothic, a very forest of glistening spires . . . Through loopholes which barely disturbed the gloom within I have seen strings of sleeping
Photographs by
Scott Hyde
THE MARTIN BROTHERS, FOUR VICTORIAN ENGLISH POTTERS, CREATED A GROTESQUE MENAGERIE OF 'BOOBIES, BOOJUMS,
AND SNARKS/
bats and in darksome chambers found quaint carvings never intended to see the light.”
He began producing his strange ceramics in Fulham, London, in 1873, and within several years the Martin Brothers Pottery, relocated in Southall, Middlesex, was fashioning pitchers that resembled faces, tobacco jars
that Ipoked like birds, and odd- shaped figurines that nobody could quite compare to anything. Historians consider them the first real artworks to come from an English pottery of their time.
But despite the enthusiasm of Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, their wonder monstrosities went unloved for many years. The Martins could rarely afford the best clay, and could only fire up their kiln twice a year. Often they couldn’t bear to part with favorite pieces and refused to sell them. In 1903, a fire destroyed their show in London’s Brownlow Street, along with two years’ worth of work.
In 1910 Charles died in an insane asylum. In 1915 Edwin died of a horrible facial cancer.
■A sister died of a monkey’s bite, and Walter died of a blood clot, caused when he innocently banged his elbow while filling the kiln.
The work of these tortured lives is now on display in a show
35
Fantasy in Clay
entitled “Boobies, Boojums, and Snarks: The Ceramic Curiosities of the Martin Brothers,” assembled by New York gallery owner Todd Volpe. From his own gallery the show moved to the Delaware Art Museum, and from May 8 to Jime 30 it can be seen at Ae Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York.
What was once unloved is now highly valued indeed. Rita Reif, in the New York Times, hailed the exhibit as “a memorable, highly imaginative show,” and the various pieces of Martin-ware, as it has come to be known, fetch enormous prices from collectors. One of the Martins’ birds recently sold for nearly fourteen thousand dojjars.
‘ Like the Martin brothers themselves, modem art lovers clearly have a taste for the extraordinary and the bizarre.
Below: His master’s voice? This quizzical canine, lop ears and all, is one of the Martin brothers’ gentlest creations.
According to mystical tradition, it’s I said, humans who commit the sin of ; impatience are reborn as snails ... |
or perhaps even as snail-like ceramic I watering pots. i
Above: Like anyone else, monsters like to stay out late once in a while. And like anyone else, they have their irate wives to deal with when they finally return home.
Right: “Guilty . . . (cough cough)
. . . Guilty! . . . (ahen) . . .
GUILTY! ... All right, bailiff, I’m ready. Send in the first case.” This irascible-looking English judge, complete with wig, might almost have stepped out of a Dickens novel.
Below: You can fool some of the creatures some of the time . . . but if you try to fool this one, you’ll find out that those talons aren’t just for traction. Bird-shaped tobacco jars with expressions ranging from the comic to the sinister were the Martin brothers’- most popular item.
Left: In Greek mythology, Cerberus was the three-headed dog who guarded the entrance to Hades. In the Martins’ version, the three heads clearly do not get along.
Above: Hollywood sources tell us that this amiable-looking fellow is up for the starring role in Son of The Blob. Most of the Martins’ pieces represent birds, dogs, or other real- life species, but this figure, amorphous yet expressive, belongs solely to the world of fantasy.
Above: “I’ve just had the most delicious lunch. I wish I could remember his name.” Smiling with evil satisfaction, this well-fed-looking
creature an amalgam of simian,
canine, human, and batrachian— seems unperturbed by the world’s low opinion of English cooking.
Left: 'The eyes are so lifelike you’d almost swear . . . Wait a minute
... In the dim light of a Victorian parlor, this alanningly realistic face might have startled many an unsuspecting matron.
“My dear, you look ravishing. In fact, good enough to eat!” The
comic quality of the Martin brothers’ creations belies the poverty, misery, and madness that bedeviled the four brothers’ lives.
Above: It’s hard to imagine a Victorian family actually using this as a cookie jar. Like the other Martin brothers pieces, in fact, its purpose was more aesthetic than utilitarian.
Right: Striking a pose reminiscent of a curbside derelict, this pagan figure, two thousand years from home, seems to have fallen on hard times.
39
Fantasy in Clay
Left: Known as “Wally birds” after Robert Wallace Martin, their designer, the Martins’ tobacco jars wear unnervingly human expressions. They are, in fact, caricatures in clay, poking fun at human foibles— and sometimes at actual contemporaries such as Gladstone and Disraeli.
Below: Nanook of Northumbria?
This foot-high piteher in the form of a fur-clad Eskimo seems to relish the warmth of an English fireside.
Above: Birds do it. Bees do it.
Even creatures just like these do
it. These grotesque dogs, reminiscent of ancient Chinese porcelains, make an inseparable pair.
Left: He claims to be a frog prince. Any volunteers for kiss-and-tell?
“Oh, yes, he’s very fond of children. Lamb chops, too.’’
Anniversary
Dinner
by DJ. Pass
A MODERN AMERICAN CAUTIONARY TALE ABOUT ONIONS, MARIJUANA, AND THE GENERATION GAP.
The late afternoon sun came through the cafe curtains on the kitchen windows and fell warmly on Henry’s 1)ack. This was the time of day he felt most comfortable. And most thankful: as . he sat at the table and watched Elinor put the finishing touches on their dinner, he never failed to think how fortunate they had been. Fortunate to have each other, to have lived so comfortably and so happily together.
“Here you are, dear.” Elinor set the plate of stew down in front of him and wiped her hands on her apron. “I hope you like it.”
“Like it?” Henry smiled. “Fve liked it for forty years now. I don’t see why I wouldn’t like it tonight.” Elinor smiled back. Her soft gray curls, rosy face, and gold-rimmed glasses made her look like a grandmother— a very pretty grandmother.
“Forty-two,” she corrected him. “Forty-three on the third of next month.”
“Another anniversary? They seem to come so close together.” Henry reached across the table and put his hand on Elinor’s. “I guess that’s because I’ve been so happy.”
“You’re awfully sentimental tonight.”
“And you’re blushing.”
Elinor slapped his hand. “Eat your stew.” Henry took a bite of the stew. Elinor was a consummate cook, and the stew was just as good as it had been forty-odd years ago. It was perfect, in fact, with the minor exception of the onions.
“How is it, dear?”
“Couldn’t be better.” Henry grinned. “Perfect as always.”
“Good. What would you like to do to celebrate our anniversary this year?”
“I haven’t thought about it. Have any ideas?” “Well, I thought we could have a special din- ner at home, just the two of us.”
“The two of us?” Henry laughed.
“In a sense.” Elinor smiled. “You liked the goulash I made last year so well.”
“Yes, indeed I did. I recall you made so much that we spent the whole next day packaging the left- overs up for the freezer.”
“A year of goulash . . . not that it wasn’t delightful goulash ...”
“Oh, I didn’t mean I’d make it again! No, I was thinking about something with a burgundy sauce and bay leaves.” Elinor’s eyes became thoughtful. It was an expression Henry loved to see on her. It made him think of an artist ha'dng a vision.
“Sounds terrific!”
“Everything but the meat is in the garden. The mushrooms are doing \rell. Some carrots, onions—”
“About the onions ...” Henry began.
“Yes?” Elinor smiled sweetly. “What about them, Henry?”
“Ah ...” Henry’s courage failed him. “I think we ought to harvest them earlier this year. They were a bit sharp last season.”
“Of course.”
“And now, why don’t we take our port out to the hot tub? There’s a nip in the air, perfect night for watching the stars come out.”
“You’re much too romantic for a man your age.” Elinor laughed. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep up with you.”
On Saturday Henry got out the old Plymouth and they drove down into town. Since their retirement, Henry and Elinor had stayed on their farm in the hills as much as possible. There was little to entice them away from home. The closeness of their relationship had made close friends un- necessary, and they had no living relatives. Life on the farm was so nearly self-sufiacient that they only made one trip a month into to^vn. These excursions
42
Illustration by Robert Morello
were occasions for neither pleasure nor pain, simply something that had to be done. Ten minutes at the hardware store, half an hour at the supermarket, and they were back on the main road out of town.
There were hitchhikers all along the highway, just as there always were on the weekend. Henry eyed them as they jjassed, ultimately giving each a disapproving frown.
When they were within a few miles of the turn-off that led up into the hills, Henry spotted a girl sitting by the road with her thumb half-heartedly up.
“Look at that, Elinor. Can’t be more than twenty years old.”
Elinor pushed her glasses up her nose and peered at the girl. “Not even that old. What’s a young girl like that doing out on the road? It certain- ly isn’t safe.”
“What do you think?”
“Oh, yes, Heni'y. You must definitely stop and pick her up.”
Henry eased the Plymouth delicately off the road just past the gii*!. She jumped up and ran to the car. As she came up alongside the car she stopped, peered in at Henry and Elinor, and broke into a big grin.
“Wow! Thanks, a lot!” She threw her pack into the back seat and sktmmed the door shut behind her.
“Glad to help,” Henry said.
“Especially a young girl,” Elinor added. “Isn’t it dangerous for you to be out hitchhiking?”
“No, I’m really careful who I ride with. I’ve been sitting there for over an hour because I didn’t like the looks of the people who stopped for me.
That’s why I was so glad when you stopped. I feel a lot safer with a couple like you.”
“You mean we’re too old to be dangerous?” Henry teased her. “No, don’t be embarrassed. It works both ways. I never pick up hitchhikers, but, well, you remind me of ©ur granddaughter so much. I just hated to see you sitting on the side of the road. You don’t know what kind of fiend might pick you up.”
“Yeah, I guess there are a lot of fiends on the road.”
“Where are you going, dear?” Elinor asked.
“I wanted to get to Springfield tonight, but I don’t think I’m going to make it. It’ll be dark in a couple of hours.”
“But what if you don’t get a ride? Where will you stay the night?”
The girl shrugged.
“Drat it!”
“What’s wrong, Henry?”
“We forgot to get any tea at the market.”
“That’s all right, dear. You can run in at that little store where we turn off the highway.”
“Good idea, Elinor.” In a few minutes they had reached the turnoff and Henry pulled up to the store.
“Wow, I just can’t believe you two,” the girl said, after Henry left the car.
“Why, whaf do you mean?”
“You and your husband. You’re just the ar- chetypal grandparent types. You ought to be making tv commercials for apple pie and lemonade.”
“Are we really like that?” Elinor marveled. “I certainly never thought of myself as a grandmother
43
Anniversary Dinner
type, though I suppose I am. We have a grand- j daughter about your age. How old are you?” j
“Nineteen.” Elinor didn’t believe it, and the ! girl’s blush betrayed her lie. i
“Nineteen! Well, you’re a lovely young woman, | if you don’t mind my saying so ... I was just now ■ thinking, wouldn’t it be better if you went with us up ; to our place for the night? It isn’t far, and you can | start out for Springfield in the morning.” '
“Really? I’d love that! The truth is, I was get- i ting pretty scared about what I’d do after dark.”
“We’ll enjoy having you. We don’t get much ' i company.”
] “What about your husband? Will it be all right '
! with him?” I
I “Don’t worry about Henry; he’s the kindest ;
man in the world.” j
Of course, Henry would be delighted to have i her stay the night with them. He would have offered himself, but he had felt awkward about it. It would ♦ be good to have a young person around the house again.
And she loved the farm. “I’ve never eaten any grapes like these,” she told Elinor between seeds.
“They’re wine grapes. Henry’s done wonders getting them to grow here. We make all our own wine. And over here is the garden.”
“This is really too much. Do you grow all your own food, too?”
“Almost. We have to buy a few things, but we’re very proud of our near self-sufficiency.”
“Do you have animals?”
“We have some chickens and goats for eggs and milk, but we found it was cheaper not to raise our own meat.”
“You must have everything here.”
“We even' grow our own marijuana.”
The girl was out of expletives; she could only stare at Elinor with bulging eyes.
“I’m certainly not being a good hostess, am I?” Elinor clucked. “Would you like some? It’s dry- ing in the barn; you can have some before dinner.”
“You folks are too much! Nobody’s going to believe this.”
“We try to live comfortably, and I suppose we indulge ourselves. But what else is there in life, especially at our age?”
“At any age.”
“Hmmm. Now you come over here and relax a bit before dinner.”
“A hot tub!”
“Henry built it himself.” Elinor couldn’t keep a note of pride out of her voice. “It’s rather small, but we like the coziness. You can sit here and watch the sun go down in the hills. We do it almost every night.”
The girl undressed and slid into the warm
water. Inside the tub was a little shelf with a built-in ; hookah. Imagine, she thought, those two old people sitting out here in their tub every night, stoned out of their heads and watching the sunset.
“Here you are, my dear.” Elinor stuffed the hookah and lit it. “I brought ycu some wine, too. I hope you like sherry.”
“This is really too much. But I don’t want to j hog your tub ...” I
“Nonsense. We’re thrilled to have someone to j cater to. You relax, and I’ll gather some vegetables j for dinner.” :
The hills turned red, then purple. As she ! watched the colors, the girl thought about how she had been worried about spending the night on the side of the road. She giggled asi she thought of her friends. They really wouldn’t believe it when she told them about this weird old couple and their Shangri-la in the hills.
“Would you like some vegetables to nibble on?” She looked up to see Elinor standing beside the tub with an apron full of vegetables. “Maybe some celery, or some carrots? I’ll just drop them in the tub and you can pick what you like,”
“Sure, drop ’em in.”
“Shall I turn the water uj) a bit? It’s starting to get chilly.”
“Sure, jack it up some. Arid maybe you’d hand me a shingle off your house. It is made of ginger- bread, isn’t it?”
Elinor walked away trailing silvery laughter.
“So warm,” the girl murmured. “Womb ...”
Henry grunted as he rolled a cask of wine up to the tub. “I’ve got to get some smaller casks,” he muttered. “I’m getting too old to be manhandling these.” He thought momentarily how it was a shame that they really didn’t have anj- children, or grand- children for that matter. He could have used the help.
“You’re not too old for anything, Henry.” Elinor dropped another apron-load of vegetables into the tub. “Here you are. Some nice mushrooms, some onions ...”
The girl didn’t bother to answer; her eyes were getting glassy.
“Shall I turn the water up?” Hearing nothing from the girl, Elinor turned the thermostat all the way up.
“Elinor?”
“Yes, Henry?”
“In all the years we’ve been married, you’ve fixed a lot of meals for me—”
“Thousands.”
“Elinor.” He looked into her bright eyes and hoped her feelings wouldn’t be hurt. Both a whine and a tremble crept into his voice. “Elinor, you always put the onions in too early.” iS
Illustration bv Annie Allennan
HUNDREDS PUf^SUED HIM— AND THE ONLY ESCAPE WAS DEATH.
he pain hadn’t stopped for hours.
It seared his shoulder, and moving was making it worse. He shuddered, barely able to go on.
Only an hour ago.
The family had been together, the children playing in their favorite hiding place. Beautiful children, children of their own. The two of them had watched so proudly. They were lucky. Children were rare these days. And after her first terror with the Dark Ones, having a family had seemed impossible,
It was getting bad again.
What did they use that made their spears hurt so much? He’d felt it splay the skin out when it buried itself in his back. It was like no pain he’d ever felt.
She and the children had escaped. He wasn’t sure where. North, perhaps. Away from where the Dark Ones could try and murder them.
He knew the children must be tired, wherever they were. To be chased by the Dark Ones would be a nightmare for them.
He, too, was tired. But he knew he had to keep moving.
Night.
His eyes ached. He couldn’t see far ahead.
The Dark Ones might turn back. He knew they were fidghtened of the blackness. It could be his chance.
He stopped to breathe for a moment, and the cooling air soothed inside.
But seconds later, he screamed.
The Dark Ones had shot again. The thing was twisting in his neck, and he shrieked for it to stop,
4*
He felt as if he were going to lose consciousness as it tore and burned inside.
She and the children.
He had to keep moving and see them once more. He loved them so. He had to get to them before the Dark Ones found him. Keep moving, he told himself.
Keep moving.
But the pain was spreading. j
He looked back and saw the Dark Ones coming j closer, shouting with glee. He couldn’t breathe. I’m ; growing weaker, he realized. Slowing down. \
He began to cry. He didn’t want to die without seeing her and the children one last time. But the pain was getting worse.
He pleaded for someone to help.
Then, suddenly, he felt it: a rupturing explo- sion in his shoulder, and everything went black.
A thin rain fell as the laughing voices neared and circled slowly, looking at v'hat they had done.
The body had been ripped and shredded and oily blood splashed everywhere, dyeing everything it touched.
As they worked, joking among themselves, they didn’t notice her watching.
With the children there beside her, she saw them haul her mate upward, and began to weep, i Then, moaning a cry of eternal loss which rang to ■ the depths, she and the children plunged their great bodies back into the bloody sea.
As they fled, seeking the safety of the deeper waters, the echoes of their cries were answered by the haunted, faraway responses of the few who remained. iS
Photos © 1981 by Kim Gottlieb
A FINAL INTERVIEW WITH SCIENCE FICTION'S BOLDEST VISIONARY, WHO TALKS CANDIDLY ABOUT BLADE RUNNER, INNER VOICES, AND THE TEMPTATIONS OF HOLLYWOOD
i [Editor’s note: When John Boonstra story “We Can. Reynember It for Ymi from the possibility of authentic being;
' conducted the following interview with Wholesale, ” fresh attention is certain to recognize the human among the an-
- Philip K. Dick, he never thought that to come to Dick’s thirty years of droids. His genius weds a core of
■- it might be Dick’s last. Dick himself outstanding work. memorable characters to paradoxical
■ was in excellent spirifei and was look- Among his peers he has never been plots rich with philosophical inquiry,
; ing forward to the pr<;miere of Blade underrated. “Dick has been . . . but a brief description can’t explain
I Runner, based on ont; of his novels, casting illumination by the kleig lights how entertaining this eclectic mix in-
; with considerable excitement. Boon- of his imagination on a terra in- variably proves to be. stra’s introduction— wliich we’ve left cognita of staggering dimensions,” In the late 1960s, Dick showed in- unaltered— reflects its subject’s wrote Harlan Ellison in Dangerous creasing interest in drug-induced
optimism. In late Febiniary, however. Visions. Brian Aldiss has favorably altered states of consciousness, but The
Dick suffered a massive stroke; and compared Dick’s “ghastly humor” to Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,
now, as we go to press, we’ve learned Dickens and Kafka. And Norman often cited as LSD-based, was com-
that he has died ui a California Spinrad states the case as plainly as pleted before Dick’s minimal exposure
hospital on the morning of March 2. possible in his introduction to the to hallucinogens. Similarly, some of
His death makes the following inter- Gregg Press edition of Dr. Blood- Dick’s earlier novels (The Cosmic Pup-
view all the more poignant, particular- money: “Fifty or erne hundred years pets. Eye in the Sky) presage his con-
ly the hopeful note on which it ends.] from now, Dick may well be recognized troversial visionary episodes of recent
in retrospect as the greatest American years— episodes which he’s described in
s Philip K. Dick may be a household novelist of the second half of the twen- print and which have formed the basis
word— in Hollywood, at least— by tieth century.” jof his recent fiction. He holds that a
year’s end. With his sf novel Do From his first book (Solar Lottery) ' higher consciousness— possibly the Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? through his most recent (The Divine unleashed right hemisph^e of his own
filmed by Ridley Scott as Blade Rim- Invasion), Philip Kendred Dick has brain, possibly an alien or angelic en-
ner, and with the Disney studio focused on the struggle— in all walks of tity— seized temporary control of his
budgeting an equally large sum for the life, in every occupation— to see beyond body and effected lasting changes in his
forthcoming Total Recall, based on his the illusions that separate mankind life. It provided him with verifiable in-
Philip K. Dick
formation that, in one case, diagnosed an unsuspected birth defect in his young son.
Dick’s thirty four published novels and six short story collections are so uniformly good that it seems a shame to single out any. But if I had to be marooned with a halfdhzen. I’d take Dr. Bloodmoney, about nuclear war and the psionic abilities of a homun- culus called Happy; Martian Time-Slip, where daily life on the miserable Mars colony is upended by an autistic child; Time out of Joint, featuring the mar- velously named Ragle Gumm, un- knowing linchpin of Western civiliza- tion; Confessions of a Crap Artist, a mainstream novel of devastating love glimpsed through the funhouse-mirror mind of one glorious fool; and VALIS and The Divine Invasion, which describe God’s return to this globe after His— and/or Hers— puzzling absemce.
VALIS is set in a present-day reality identical to our own, except for its protgonist’s contention that “the Roman Empire never ended.” Such revelations send Horselover Fat, who is either mad or enlightened, after the new Messiah— a two-year-old girl. The closest this tour de force comes to con- ventional sf is its account of a film that contains encoded information on the Messiah’s whereabouts; the entire book grew from a draft which was that movie’s plot. The Divine Invasion brings the themes of VALIS into a recognizable sf future of spacecraft and social changes. The astual God of the Old Testament appears as a young boy who must lose his amnesia (a concept coded anamnesis, crucial to Dick’s re- cent work) to defeat the powers that hold the earth in illusion. Along for the ride are the boy’s all-too-human “father,” Herb; the prophet Elijah; and a pop singer suspiciously similar to the author’s favorite, Linda Ronstadt.
But it seems a shame to single out just half a dozen of Dick’s navels. I can’t exclude Ubik’s world of devolving forms, or the Hugo-winning novel of the Axis victory. The Man in the High Castle, in which the eastern half of the United States is controlled by Nazi Germany and the western half by Japan. Or Clans of the Alphane Moon. Or Dick’s bitter eulogy to the drug culture, A Scanner Darkly. And as Phil Dick is only fifty-three, there is the promise of more to come. He may just be hitting his prime.
4t
TZ: Your forthcoming novel. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, is essentially a non-sf literary work based on the mysterious death in the desert of your friend Bishop James Pike, and I’ve been told that you wrote it in lieu of doing a novelization of the Blade Runner screenplay. Why did you choose to write a book with openly religious themes instead of a lucrative, all-but-certain bestseller? Dick: The amount of money involved would have been very great, and the film people offered to cut us in on the merchandising rights. But they re- quired a suppression of the original novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, in favor of the qommercialized novelization based on the screenplay. My agency computed that I would ac- crue, conservatively, $400,000 if I did the novelization. In contrast, if we went the route of rereleasing the original novel, I would make about $12,500.
Blade Runner’s people were put- ting tremendous pressure on us to do the novelization— or to allow someone else to come in and do it, like Alan Dean Foster. But we felt that the original was a good novel. And also, I did not want to write what I call the “El Cheapo” novelization. I did want to do the Timothy Archer novel.
So we stuck to our guns, and at
one point Blade Runner became so cold-blooded they threatened to withdraw the logo rights. We wouldn’t be able to say, “The novel on which Blade Runner is based.” We’d be unable to use any stills from the film.
Finally we came to an agreement with them. We are adamant about rereleasing the original novel. And I have done The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.
Now, the payment on that novel is very small. It’s only $7,500, which is just about minimum these days. It’s because in the mainstream field I am essentially a novice writer. I’m not known. And I’m being paid on the scale that a new writer coming into the field would be paid on. The con- tract is a two-book contract, and there’s a science fiction novel in it.
And it pays exactly three times for the science fiction v/hat is being paid for Timothy Archer.
TZ: Have you begun the sf novel? Dick: I’ve done two different outlines. I’ll probably wind up laminating them together and m;iking one book out of it, which is what I like to do, develop independent outlines and then lam- inate them int;o one book. That’s where I get my multiple plot ideas. I really enjoy doing that, a paste-up job. A synthesis, in other words.
This second novel is not due until January 1, 1983, so I’ve got time. Right now I’m just physically too tired to do the typing. It looks like it’s go- ing to be a good book, too. It’s called The Owl in Daylight
Simon and Schuster wanted Ar- cher first, and I wanted to do it first. Of course, I may find that I made a very great error, because it may not turn out to be a successful book. It may be that I’ve lost the ability to write a literary novel, if indeed I ever had the ability to do so. It’s been over twenty years since I’ve written a non- science-fiction novel, and it’s very problematical vrhether I can write mainstream, literary-quality-type fic- tion. This is definitely an unproven thing, an X factor. I may find that I’ve turned dow;.i $400,000 and wound up with nothing.
TZ: I don’t consider VALIS science fiction. It could have been published as a mainstream novel and gotten who knows what kind of attention that way. I’m sure it got more response wift its sf wrapping than it would have otherwise. But it is quite literary itself; marginal sf, at best.
Dick: I would ca.ll VALIS a picaresque novel, experimental science fiction. The Divine Invasion has a very con- ventional structiu’e for science fiction, almost science fantasy; no experimen- tal devices of any kind. Timothy Ar- cher is in no way science fiction; it starts out the ds.y John Lennon is shot and then goes into flashbacks. And yet the three do form a trilogy con- stellating around a basic theme. This is something that is extremely impor- tant to me in terms of the organic
'7 may find that Vve turned down $400,000 and wound up with nothing.
development of my ideas and preoc- cupations in my writing. So for me to derail myself and do that cheapo novelization of Blade Runner— a com- pletely commercialized thing aimed at twelve-year-olds— would have probably been disastrous to me artistically. Although financially, as my agent ex- plained it, I would literally be set up for life. I don’t think my agent figures I’m going to live much longer.
It’s like Dante’s Inferno. A writer sent to the Inferno is sentenced to rewrite all his novels— his best ones, at least— as cheapo, twelve-year-old hack stuff for all eternity. A terrible punish- ment! The fact that it would earn me a lot of money illuminates the gro- tesqueness of the situation. When it’s finally offered to me, I’m more or less apathetic to the megabucks. I live a rather ascetic life. I don’t have any material wants and I have no debts. My condominium is paid off, my car is paid off, my stereo is paid off.
At least, this waj', I attempt the finest book I can write— and if I fail, at least I will have taken my best shot. I think a person must always take his best shot at everything, whether he repairs shoes, drives a bus, writes novels, or sells fruit. You do the best you can. And if you fail, well, you blame it on your motlier, I guess.
TZ: How do you comjDare the VALIS trilogy to the rest of your work?
Dick: I jettisoned the first version of VALIS, which was a very conventional book. 'That version appears in the finished book as the movie. I cast around for a model that would bring something new into science fiction, and it occurred to me to go all the way back to the picanjsque novel and have my characters be picaroons— rogues— and write it in the first per- son vernacular, using a rather loose plot. I feel there’s tremendous relevance in the picai’esque novel at this time. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man is one; so is TTie Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. I see this as a protest form of the novel, a repudia- tion of the more structured bourgeois novel that has been so popular.
I’m reprocessing my own life. I’ve had a very interesting ten years start- ing in lOTO when my wife Nancy left me and went off witli a Black Pan- ther, much to my surpinse. As a result of which I hit bottom. I mean, I just fell into the gutter, I crashed into the streets in shock when this happened.
"The two reinforce each other." With the "bad blood” between him and the studio a thing of the past, Dick poses with Blade Runner director Ridley Scott.
I was very bourgeois. I had a wife and child, I was buying a house, I drove a Buick and wore a suit and tie. All of a sudden my wife left me and I wound up in the street with street people. And after I climbed out of that— which was ultimately a death trip on my part— I thought, “Well, I’ve got some interesting first-hand material that I’d like to write about. I will recycle my own life in the terms of a novel.” Having done that in A Scanner Darkly, I was faced with what to do next. It took me a long time before I felt that I had what I wanted.
Now, prior to that I tended to view people in terms of the artisan. I worked for eight years in retail. I managed one of die largest record stores on the West Coast in the fifties, and I had worked at a radio repair shop when I was in high school. I tended to view people in terms of “the tv repairman,” “the salesman,” and so forth. Then later, as a result of my street experience, I tended to view
people as essentially rogues. I don’t mean lovable rogues, I mean un- scrupulous rogues out to hustle you at any moment for any reason. I found them endlessly fascinating. And I didn’t see people of this type ade- quately represented in fiction.
TZ: Sometimes the world at large strikes me as being an sf novel, and not necessarily a pleasant one. I often have the feeling that I am living in the future I was reading about fifteen years ago. I wonder what that’s like fi’om your perspective, having written the stuff I was reading when I was an adolescent.
Dick: Oh, Jesus, I agree with you completely. My agent said, after he finished The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, “You know, in your science fiction they drive things called flobbles and quibbles, and in this one they drive Hondas— but it’s still essen- tially a science fiction novel. Although I can’t explain exactly how."
It’s really as if fte world caught up with science fiction. The years
49
I
Phmp K. Dick
went by and the disparity, the tem- poral gap, began to close until finally there was no temporal gap. We were no longer writing about the future. In a sense, the very concept of projecting it ahead is meaningless, because we are there, literally, in our actual world. In 1955, when I’d write a science fiction novel. I’d set it in the year 2000. I realized around 1977 that, “My God, it’s getting exactly like those novels we used to write in the nineteen-fifties!”
Everything’s just turning out to be real. That creates within science fiction a completely fantastic type of novel which is set on the planet “Mor- daria” or “Malefoozia” in another galaxy. And all the Malefoozians have eighteen heads, and sixteen of them have a sexual act together. In other words, no connection with Earth, none of the social satire and commertt you get in works like Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano. Which is a perfect ex- ample; you might just as well go downtown to the big business offices and just walk in and sit down, as read Player Piano.
TZ: In earlier interviews you have described . your encounter, in 1974, with “a transcendentally rational mind.” Does this “tutelary spirit” con- tinue to guide you?
Dick: It hasn’t spoken a word to me since I wrote Tlie Divine Invasion. The voice is identified as Rvah, which is the Old Testament word for the Spirit of God. It speaks in a feminine
voice and tends to express statements regarding the messianic expectation.
It guided me for a while. It has spoken to me sporadically since I was in high school. I expect that if a crisis arises it will say something again. It’s very economical in what it says. It limits itself to a few very terse, suc- cinct sentences. I only hear the voice of the spirit when I’m falling asleep or waking up. I have to be very receptive to hear it. It sounds as though it’s coming from millions of miles away. TZ: What made you into a writer? You were saying it wasn’t for the so
money. When did you make your first sales, and how long were you writing before that?
Dick: I started my first novel when I was thirteen years old. That’s the honest-to-God truth. I taught myself to type and started my first novel when I was in the eighth grade. It was called Return to Lilliput.
I made my first sale in November of 1951, and my first stories were published in 1952. At the time I graduated from high school I was writing regularly, one novel after another. None of which, of course, sold. I was living in Berkeley, and all the milieu-reinforcement there was for the literary stuff. I knew all kinds of people who were doing literary-type novels. And I knew some of the very fine avant-garde poets in the Bay area— Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Philip Lamantia, that whole crowd. They all encouraged me to write, but there was no encouragement to write science fiction and no encouragement to sell anything. But I wanted to sell, and I also wanted to do science fiction. My ultimate dream was to be able to do both literary stuff and science fiction.
Well, it didn’t work out that way. I was reading a lot of philosophy at that time. My wife came home one day from school and said, “What is it you’re reading again?”
I said, “Moses Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. ”
She said, “Yeah, I mentioned that
to my instructor. He says you’re prob- ably the only human being on the face of the earth who at this moment is reading Moses Maimonides.” I was just sitting there eating a ham sand- wich and reading it. It didn’t strike me as odd.
TZ: You mention one of your wives. I know you’ve been through a couple of marriages . . .
Dick: At least. There’s more. I hate to say how many— an endless succession of divorces, all stemming from recklessly engaged-in and seized-upon marriages. I still have a good relation-
ship with my ex-wives. In» fact, my most recent ex-wife— there are so many that I have to list them numerically— and I are very, very good friends. I have three children. My youngest is seven, and she brings him over all the time.
But the reajson all my marriages break up is I’m so autocratic when I’m writing. I become like Beethoven: completely bellicose and defensive in terms of guarding my privacy. It’s very hard to live with me when I’m writing.
TZ: You’ve said that many of the characters in your fiction are thinly disguised variations of people you’ve known personally.
Dick: That is correct.
TZ: What effect has this had on them? Dick: They hate my bloody guts! They’d like to rend me to shreds! I ex- pect that someday they’ll all fall on me and beat the cra.p out of me.
I find that you can only develop characters basecl upon actual people; there’s really no such thing as a character that springs ex nihilo from the brow of Zeus. Tendencies are ex- tracted from actual people, but of course the people aren’t transferred intact. This is not journalism, this is fiction.
The most important thing is pick- ing up the speecdi pattern, picking up the cadence of aictual spoken English. That’s the main thing I look for— the little mannerisms, the word choice. TZ: We’ve talked about your mainstream writing and your science fiction. What alx)ut fantasy writing? Did you ever write for The Twilight Zone?
Dick: No. But I would have welcomed the opportunity. I did some radio scripts for the Mutual Broadcasting system, and I wrote fantasy-type things for them.
I always lie to myself and tell myself that I never really want to do fantasy, but the record does not bear me out. The record shows that my original interesD was that kind of Twilight Zone fantasy, fantasy set in the present. But you couldn’t make a living writing this kind of stuff, while you could make a living writing science fiction. In 1953 there were something like thirteen science fiction magazines, and in June of that year I had stories in seven of them simulta- neously—all science fiction. I published thirty stories in 1953.
''As a result of my street experience, I tended to view people as essentially rogues/'
Dick sees the need for new forms of science fiction. ‘We were no longer writing about the future. In a sense, the very concept of projecfing It ahead Is meaningless, because we are there, literally. In aur actual world."
; TZ: Why did you temporarily give up • writing at the end of that decade? Dick: By the year 1959 the science fic- ■ tion field had totally collapsed. The ' readership had shrunk down to 1 100,000 readers total. Now, to show I you how few readers that is. Solar ^Lottery alone had sold 300,000 copies j in 1955.
Many writers had left the field. We could not make a living. I had gone to work making jewelry with my wife. I wasn’t happy. I didn’t enjoy making jewelry. I had no talent what- soever. She had the talent. She is still a jeweler and a very fine one, making gorgeous stuff which she sells to places like Neiman-Marcus. It’s great art. But I couldn’t do anything except polish what she made.
I decided that I’d better tell her I was working on a book so I wouldn’t have to polish her jewelry all day long. We had a little cabin, and I went over there with a sixty-five;-dollar portable typewriter made in Eiong Kong— the “e” key was stuck on it. I started with nothing but the name “Mister Tagomi’’ written on a scrap of paper.
no other notes. I had been reading a lot of Oriental philosophy, reading a lot of Zen Buddhism, reading the I Ching. That was the Marin County Zeitgeist at that point, Zen Buddhism and the / Ching. I just started right out and kept on trucking. It was either that or go back to polishing jewelry.
When I had the manuscript fin- ished, I showed it to her. She said, “It’s all right, but you’ll never make more than $750 off of it. I don’t even see where it’s worth your while to submit it to your agent.’’
I said, “What the hell!’’ And The Man in the High Castle was bought by Putnam’s for $1500, which isn’t a great deal more than she had proph- esied. It did get tremendous reviews. Part of that was due to the good for- tune that it was picked up by the Science Fiction Book Club. Had it not been picked up by them, it would not have won the Hugo Award, because the edition would have been too small.
I must admit that I had thought for years about writing an alternate- world novel in which the Axis won
World War II. I did start without written notes, but I had done seven years of research at the closed stacks in U.C. -Berkeley. And I looked at Gestapo documents, because I could read some German, marked “For the eyes of the higher police only.”
I had to structure out the deci- sions that the Nazis would have had to make, the changes in history that ; would have permitted them to win that war. It would be a very long list of things that would have had to hap- pen, and they’re not all in Man in the High Castle. Just for example, Spain : would’ve had to grant them the right to go through, you know, from France to take Gibraltar and close off the Mediterranean. That war was not real- ly as close a call as we thought it was.
I mean, it is just not that easy to defeat Russia— as certain people in i history have found out. I hope we’re j not about to find that out ourselves. TZ: Let’s get back to Blade Runner. What turned you 180 degrees in your attitude toward the production?
Dick: You know, I was so turned off by Hollywood. And they were really turned off by me. That insistence on ’ my part of bringing out the original ’ novel » and not doing the noveliza- tion— they were just furious. They finally recognized that there was a legitimate reason for reissuing the novel, even though it cost them money. It was a victory not just of contractual obligations but of theo- retical principles.
And although this is spectllation on my part, I think that one of the spin-offs was that they went back to the original novel. Because they knew it would be reissued, you see. So it is possible that it got M back into the screenplay by a process of positive feedback. I was such a harsh critic of Hampton Fancher’s original screen- play, and I was so outspoken, that the studio knows that my present attitude is sincere, that I’m not just hyping them. Because I was really angry and disgusted.
There were good things in Fan- cher’s screenplay. It’s like the story of the old lady who takes a ring into a r jeweler to have the stone reset. And the jeweler scrapes all of the patina of years and years and shines it up, and she says, “My God, that was what I loved the ring for— the patina!” Okay, they had cleaned my book up of all of the subtleties and of the meaning. 'The
51
Philip K. Dick
"I started with nothing but the name 'Mister Tagoml' written on a scrap of paper." Dick’s Hugo-winning novel The Man In the High Castle Is set In on alternative universe In which the Axis powers have won World War II.
meaning was gone. It had become a fight between androids and a bounty hunter.
I had this vision in my mind then that I would go up there and be in- troduced to Ridley Scott, and be in- troduced to Harrison Ford, who’s the lead character, and I’d just be so dazzled I’d be like Mr. Toad seeing the motorcar for the first time. My eyes would be wide as saucers and I’d just be standing there completely mesmer- ized. Then I would watch a scene be- ing shot. And Harrison Ford would say, “Lower that blast-pistol or you’re a dead android!” And I would just leap across that special effects set like a veritable gazelle and seize him by the throat and start battering him against the wall. They’d have to run in and throw a blanket over me and call the security guards to bring in the Thorazine. And I’d be screaming, “You’ve destroyed my book!”
’That would be a little item in the newspaper: “Obscure Author Becomes Psychotic on H’wood Set; Minor Damage, Mostly to the Author.” They’d have to ship me back to i Orange County in a crate full of air ■ holes. And I’d still be screaming.
I started drinking a whole lot of scotch. I went from a thimbleful to a jigger glass and finally to two wine glasses of scotch every night. Last Memorial Day I staitod bleeding, gastrointestinal bleeding. And it was because of drinking scotch and taking j aspirin constantly and worrying about I this whole goddamned thing. I said, | “Hollywood is gonna kill me by 1 remote control!” j
One is always haunted by the j specter of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who | goes there and they just grind him up, I like in a garbage disposal. i
TZ: All of that changed when you | saw David W. Peoples’s revised j screenplay? . ;
Dick: I saw a segment of Douglas j Trumbull’s special effects for Blade i Runner on the KNBC-'TV news. I i recognized it immediately. It was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly.
I wrote the station, and they sent the letter to the Ladd Company. They gave me the updated screenplay. I read it without knowing they had brought somebody else in. I couldn’t believe what I was reading! It was simply sensational— still Hampton
Fancher’s screenplay, but miraculously transfigured, as it were. The whole thing had simply been rejuvenated in a very fundamental way.
After I finished reading the screenplay, I got the novel out and looked through it. The two reinforce each other, so that someone who started with the novel would enjoy the movie and someone who started with the movie would enjoy the novel. I was amazed that Peoples could get some of those scenes to work. It taught me things about writing that I didn’t know.
The thing I had in mind all of the time, from the beginning of it, was The Man Who Fell to Earth. 'This was the paradigm. That’s why I was so
disappointed when I read the first ! Blade Runner screenplay, because it i was the absolute antithesis of what was done in TIve Man Who Fell to Earth. In other words, it was a destruction of the novel. But now, it’s magic time. You read the screenplay and then you go to the novel, and it’s like they’re two halves to one meta- artwork, one meta-artifact. It’s just exciting.
As my agent, Russell Galen, put it, “Whenever a Hollywood film adap- tation of a book works, it is always a miracle.” Because it just cannot really happen. It did happen with The Man Who Fell to Earth and it has hap- ! pened with Bkuie Runner, I’m sure j now. j
TZ: It’s great to hear that.
Dick: Oh, yeah. It’s been the greatest thing for me. I was just destroyed at one point at the prospect of this awful thing that had happened to my work.
I wouldn’t go up there, I wouldn’t talk to them, I wouldn’t meet Ridley Scott.
I was supposed to be wined and dined and ever^hing, and I wouldn’t go, I just wouldn’t go. There was bad blood between us.
That David W. Peoples screenplay
changed my attitude. He had been working on the third Star Wars film. Revenge of the Jedi. The Blade Runner people hired him away temporarily to do the script by showing him my novel.
I’m now working very closely with the Ladd Compa,ny and. I’m on very good terms with them. In fact, that’s one of the things; that’s worn me out. I’ve been so anped-up over Blade Runner I couldn’t work on The Owl in Daylight.
I hear the film’s going to have an old-fashioned gala premiere. It means I’ve got to buy— or rent— a black tux- edo, which I don’t look forward to. That’s not my style. I’m happier in a T-shirt. IS
‘‘It guided me for a while. It has spoken to me sporadically since I was in high school. I expect that if a crisis arises it will say something again.
S2
Photos © 1962 by Ladd Ci
Blade Runner
HARRISON FORD CONFRONTS A WORLD OF RENEGADE ANDROIDS IN RIDLEY SCOTT'S FILM OF THE PHILIP K. DICK NOVEL TZ'S JAMES VERNIERE REPORTS.
If alienation is the modem condition, then Philip K. Dick was its prophet. In his novels, which include VALIS, Ubik, Through a Scanner Darkly, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and the classic Man in the High Tower, Dick created universes that are literally falling apart, where Americans are a powerless, colonized people, where radioactivity contaminates everything, where the fabric of space and time is rent, where a universal cancer infects all and reduces all to “kipple,” and where humans cannot be distinguished from androids.
In keeping with the entropy motif of Dick’s work. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a portrait of the slow death of the planet. It is, like the novels of British “new wave” writers Brian Aldiss and J.G.
Ballard, a paranoid vision of the future. In Dick’s case it is a future where, if paranoia and schizophrenia don’t get you, the androids will.
To anyone familiar with Dick’s work, the adaptability of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to the screen is obvious: It is on one level an action-packed
detective thriller, in which the protagonist is a bounty hunter named Rick Deckard who tracks down and kills androids who have infiltrated human society. On another level, it is a love story set against the backdrop of a grimly realistic future world.
Evidently screenwriter Hampton Fancher recognized the novel’s potential as a feature film and arranged to do the first draft of a script. The result came to the attention of director Ridley Scott {The Duellists, Alien) and producer Michael Deeley {The Deer Hunter), and the twenty-million-dollar Blade Runner (the title actually comes from an sf novel by Alan E. Nourse) was on its way to the screen. The finaJ product is slated to be released this. May by the Ladd Company.
Like Dick’s dystopian novel, Blade Runner is a hybrid, a product of the cross-fertilization of genres. It is at once a stunningly bleak vision of the near future set in the year 2020 and a hard-boiled detective thriller. In the opening of Scott’s film, Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford of Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost
f
53
Blade Runner
In a downtown noodle bar, tormor "blado runner" Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) Is dratted out of retirement by (Edward Jarrres Olmos) aixt his old police unit.
Ark, is summoned from an early retirement by his old police unit, Rep-Detect (for “replicant detection”) to hunt and kill five renegade replicants — the term “android” is not used in the film— who have escaped from their off- world colony. The cynical Deckard is solicited because he is the best “blade runner” (i.e., replicant exterminator) in the business. Deckard, who travels in a flying police car called a spinner, can expose someone as a replicant by testing him with a device called a Voight-Kampf machine, a futuristic polygraph that measures empathic levels. (Replicants, who are naturally solipsistic, must feign empathy.)
“Our main character,” says director Ridley Scott,
“is a detective like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, a man who follows a hunch to the end. He gets in trouble when he begins to identify with his quarry, the replicants. He possesses some of ^e doumess of Bogey, but he’s more ambivalent, more human, almost an antihero.”
Deckard’s nemesis is a cunning and dangerous replicant named Roy Batty, played by Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, who. scored in the U.S. as the heroic protagonist of Soldier of Orange and the bloodthirsty terrorist in Nighthawks. The replicants in Blade Runner are genetically engineered beings grown from human tissue cultures, and they are virtually indistinguishable from human beings. They are, however, much stronger and faster, and they come in combat models.
The most obvious digression from Dick’s novel in the film is the filmmakers’ decision to jettison the term “android” in favor of the tonier neologism “replicant.”
“When we set out to do this film,” says Scott, “we decided to make ‘android’ a taboo word. I said, ‘Anybody who uses the word “android” gets his head broken with a baseball bat, okay?’ Because it sets up all sorts of preconceptions of the kind of film this could be.”
Co-scenarist David W. Peoples actually came up with the term. “I called up my oldest daughter, who majors in biochemisty,” said Peoples. “We talked about androids, and she gave me some jargon which included the term ‘replicate.’ I wasn’t really looking to replace the term ‘android,’ but it has been us^ an awful lot.”
The setting of the story, too, has been altered. Dick’s novel is set in a post-“World War Terminus” San
Deckard's adversary 1$ Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), leader of geneticalty engineered beings Imown as replicants.
Bock In action, Deckard mans a Voight-Kampf machine, a futuristic polygraph which exposes replicants masquerading as humans.
Several renegade replicants pay a clarxjestine visit to Chew (James Hong) In his sub-zero lab, site of mlcrosurgical genetic deskjn work.
M
Tyrell (Joe Turkel), head of a corpofotkjn that manufactures replicants, maintains a penthouse office atop a 7(X)-story pyramid with his mysterious assistant Rachael (Sean Young).
Through the teeming streets, Deckard (page 51) pursues Zhora (Joanna Cossldy-above). an exotic entertainer and suspected replicant.
Francisco. In contrast to the film, the novel depicts a dwindling population. The surrounding area is a sterile wasteland of radioactive debris, and many of the survivors of the war have emigrated to off-world colonies. Almost all plant and animal life has been eradicated, and those who remain on Earth are continuously bathed in residual radioactivity. As a result, many are genetically damaged mutants derisively referr^ to as “chicken-heads.” An idea that has been retained by the filmmakers is that most people are unhappy because life on Earth is for losers who can’t afford ^e luxury of an off-world colony. «
In the film, the setting is an unnamed future metropolis reminiscent of New York or Chicago. The switch was as much the daughter of necessity as it was a product of invention, since the filmmakers wanted to build their future city on top of an existing one, and such a set existed at Burbank Studios, where a complex known as “New York Street” was built years ago. (In fact, Humphrey Bogart worked on this set for Warner Brothers.)
As designed by Lawrence G. Pauli, Blade Runner is a vision of the future as an urban nightmare. In the film, old-fashioned buildings have been “retro-fitted”— adapted for future use by adding new technology to existing structures. They form the foundation for a multilevel megastructure consisting of hundreds of floors of futuristic structures inlaid above ground level. The city in Blade Runner is a dense tangle of Byzantine canyons full of multilingual neon signs, milling crowds of predominantly Asian citizens, and crawling ground traffic. “Our concept,” says Pauli, “is that cities will start to deteriorate and the electrical, mechanical, and ventilating systems will break down. Rather than rebuild from scratch, we have decided to ‘retro-fit.’”
Pauli’s crews not only “retro-fitted” the existing street set. They also, added about three stories of futuristic structures on top of it. “I’d call it a production designer’s dream and nightmare all at once,” says Pauli. The hundreds of levels ix)ve the third story were matted in by the Entertainment Effects Group, a facility formed by Douglas Trumbell {2001, Star Trek, Close Encounters), who supervised the film’s special effects. Its final look
I
Deckard follows a lead down Animold Row, where replicant animals are sold. Most real species are by now almost extinct.
ss
Danger lurks ovortiead os well as In the streets. In a cNmoctlc confrontation, Deckard chases Roy Batty arrrong the ledges, eaves, and rooftops of Ridley Scott's Infernal future city, where the height of one's apartment reflects one's social status.
has been playfully dubbed “retro deco” and “trash chic” by the filmakers.
Blade Runner has silready been described by some as a live-action Heavy Metal magazine, prompting a few to wonder if Ridley Scott might have been inspired by the future cities depicted by graphic illustrator Moebius, who designed the Samurai spacesuits for Scott’s Alien. “Yes, there’s a lot of Heavy Metal influence in the show,” Pauli admits. “As soon as I got involved in the project, Ridley laid out around fifteen Heavy Metal issues, and we took certain elements of scale and density from some of the cities in the magazine.”
In fact, in 1977, Moebius and Alien scenarist Dan O’Bannon did a futuristic, Raymond Chandler-inspired detective story for Heavy Metal entitled “The Long Tomorrow,” which featured a tough detective with a shaved head beset by shape-shifting aliens. “We went through that one extensively,” says Pauli. “There was a drawing of the city in that story that had a texture we liked.” Coincident^y, in the early stages of Blade Runner there were rumors that Harrison Ford had shaved his head to play Deckard.
Like Alien, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Escape from New York and Cannenry Row, Blade Runner is an art- directed film, meticulously designed to reflect a particular look. In the case of Blade Runner, the costumes, for example, designed by Charles Knode and Michael Kaplan, are both realistically futuristic yet reminiscent of the 1940s, which is in keeping with the film noir look that Scott and his colleagues have tried to create.
If Swiss artist H. R. Giger is the spiritual father of
Alien’s bioengineered hell, then the infernal city in Blade Runner is the soul child of artist-engineer Syd Mead, whose science fiction paintings can be seen in the 1980 art book Sentinel. Mead, who helped create the “V-ger” entity in the Star Trek movie, is a futurist designer who has worked for Chrysler, U.S. Steel, NASA, and Ford. He was initially hir^ to create vehicles for Blade Runner, but his role was expanded.
“I started by designing something we called ‘the peoples’ car,’ as well as the taxis, the trucks, Deckard’s sedan, and the spinners. But I soon started putting in background details that reflected the look of the setting,” says Mead, who created the “retro-fit” look for the film and came up with windows that are actually video screens through which a viewer may gaze at whatever scene he likes without revealing the real urban blight outside. “It’s like a cable tv service clamped on your window. It gives the buildings a strange, warehouse look.”
Mead also conceived of layering new buildings on top of old. “Once you get past one hundred floors,” he explains, “you need a whole new highway system. That’s why the street scenes are so impacted— because the streets are practically underground, which accentuates the brutality.”
What the makers of Blade Runner have attempted to create is a kind of archaeology of the future, in aJl of its vast multiplicity and wealth of detail, within the confines of an action-packed detective plot. If they succeed, serious students of science fiction will have reason to rejoice in the spring of ’82. iS
56
9
by Steve Rasnic Tern
SHE WAS WISE IN THE WAYS OF MAGIC, BUT SHE HAD SOMETHING MORE IMPORTANT TO TEACH: A LESSON IN REALITY.
turned ten before the summer i—/ began that year, and for the fourth summer in a row he had left his father’s home in the city to stay with his mother in a cottage by the dark green pond.
Years later he would doubt his memories of ' that time, and would wonder, after all, what had really occurred. This was the last summer Alan would believe his mother to be magical.
He did not understand his parents’ divorce; when he was six his mother had come to him one day and explained it all, but he hadn’t really understood what she was saying. He did remember that she had said his father did not like the things she wanted to do, and that this made her very unhappy. She said people owed it to themselves to do the things that made them happiest. That had made a lot of sense to him at the time, and when his father or others had criticized his mother for it, he had ob- jected strongly. But then he couldn’t understand why she didn’t take him along with her, and he was always a little angry with her for that.
His mother’s cottage was a beautiful place, with many flowers and animals and, of course, the dark green pond, which always seemed to hold your reflection a moment— an image clearer than any mir- ror’s—before drawing it into the deep dark green of itself. As he stared into the water, Alan always felt that he was drowning, but for some reason it was a nice feeling, as if the pond were delivering him to some other, more beautiful world beneath the surface.
Sometimes the image of himself seemed older than he was by a week, by a year, by decades. The clothes would be different, or the willow tree hang- ing over him in the reflection would be showing signs of a different season from the one on his side of the reflecting surface. And one time the willow tree wasn’t there at all, and the image in the water was that of an old, old man.
It had seemed, then, without a doubt, that his mother was magical. Each summer when she greeted him at the crossroads beyond her cottage.
she had presented him with a gift, and it was always the .gift he had secretly wished for: a teddy bear, or a spin top, or the comic book he’d begged his father to buy him the previous week, only to see the last copy sold when he ran to the drugstore out of breath, the dime clutched in his anxious fist.
When he asked his mother how she knew, she always replied the same: “Mothers know everything.’’ She’d laugh and he’d laugh too, but always a little more puzzled than before.
Another time she showed her magical powers was when he was sick or injured. There seemed to be nothing she couldn’t cure. Her neighbors in this part of the country seemed to think this, too, and were always bringing rashes and bellyaches and broken bones for her to mend. She’d send them away with mixtures of herbs, homemade ointments, or sometimes even water from the dark green pond. And he never heard any of th(!m say she hadn’t cured them; all praised her abilities.
He remembered the day he had cut his hand badly on a piece of broken glass out by the crossroads. He knew he wasn’t supposed to be play- ing out there— she’d always warned him against it— so he didn’t want to come to her £it first, afraid she’d punish him. Or perhaps she wouldn’t cure it at all because he’d disobeyed her. Perhaps she’d even make it hurt worse. But it bled a great deal, all over his new blue shirt, and he was afraid he would die if he did not go to his mother.
He’d raced into the cottage crying hysterically, bare-chested, his bleeding hand vn-apped in his new shirt. His mother had cried out in alarm and em- braced him, stroked him, cooed to him— all this, even though he was bleeding over her. Her reaction pleased him and made him uneasy at the same time; she’d always seemed so calm arid controlled about everything else.
After she had comforted him she’d taken him into her sitting room, and showed him a small, shiny wood table covered with a piece of red velvet. He was to lay the back of his hand on the velvet.
She took a jar of ground herbs off orte of her
Etch'lng by Harry Pincus
shelves and sprinkled the powder over his hand, those other kids again. But they had been especially Then she added a f(3w drops of a blue liquid. Then nice to him.
she wrapped the velvet up around his hand and led And then his eleventh summer came, and
him out by the pond, where she dipped his hand for everything was different after that, several minutes. The first thing he noticed was in the taxi on
Later he would try to understand exactly what the way to the crossroads. He suddenly realized he had happened next. He remembered her taking the wasn’t all that excited about seeing his mother that velvet and his bloodied bandage off immediately year. It was his first year of eligibility for the base- after pulling it out cf the water. But it had to have ball league at the city park, and he had to admit he’d been a period of weeks, he was sure, for the skin really rather be playing baseball that summer. All was completely heakid. 'There wasn’t even a scab. the other boys had even made fun of him when he’d
His mother always seemed to know what he told them how he was spending the summer, had been thinking back then. Later he would wonder “Well, I don’t really want to go. But my dad
if perhaps all littkj boys thought that of their says I have to . . . ’’ he’d told them, and his face had mothers. He would always remember the day he had suddenly gone hot with shame. What if his mother been so disappointed that he wouldn’t be in the city knew then, what he had been thinking and saying? A for a friend’s party, and how his mother had sur- chUl played with his fingers, and he imagined her in- prised him with a big party in her cottage, with all visible form standing beside him, looking sadly down the neighboring kids and some kids he couldn’t at him as a cold wind lifted her hair, recognize. It was funny, because he had thought he There was a lot to do in the city that summer,
knew all the kids aimund there, and he never saw he had suddenly realized, and for the life of him he
59
Plan 's ^Mother
couldn’t remember doing anything those summers at his mother’s that had been fun at all.
But he was proud of his new jeans, his baseball cap, the tennis shoes the big boys wore. He wasn’t a little kid anymore; he wanted his mother to see that.
His mother was there at the crossroads to greet him, her tall dark gray form standing by the high embankment covered with dead weeds. He was almost startled to see her; she looked old, and he could not remember her looking old before. Her hair was gray, her face starkly shadowed, and as the cab pulled up beside her he could see lines in the shadows. Her once-smooth face was lined. And her characteristically stoic expression seemed one of sadness this time, as if a thin line of mood had been crossed in her advancing age.
He got out of the cab, and it sped off. He watched it leave, purposefully delaying the moment he must look her in the face. When he did turn and look up at his mother, she was holding something out to him. He had almost 'forgotten. It was his yearly gift.
“A slingshot?” he asked in surprise. She did not answer him, just slipped it into his hands. He stroked the hardwood handle. “How did you—” But something about her expression stopped his question.
It wasn’t a toy, nothing like the ones he’d had before. He’d seen one just like it in one of his father’s sporting goods catalogs. He’d wanted it badly ever since then: something he could show the other kids down at the park.
But his father had said it wasn’t a toy; it was a hunting weapon. It wasn’t for him. How did she know that was what he wanted? And moreover, why was she giving him this? He would have expected her not to approve.
His mother was looking at him sadly. And unlike any summer before, she did not take his hand when they left the crossroads for her cottage. But he was a big boy now; she must have seen that.
The cottage seemed much as he had remem- bered it: the lace tablecloth on the small table in her alcove she used for dining, the kitchen with its natural woods and cast iron, the fireplace of gray stone. But it was all smaller and older than it had been before, and there seemed nothing there that might interest him.
For the first time she fixed a dinner he did not enjoy. Why didn’t she know he didn’t like fish anymore?
And the story she read him that evening was one he’d become bored with a long time ago.
He could tell she was feeling the difference, too. All her smiles were sad ones this summer.
All summer he waited for his mother to do something special, magical. Neighbors still came to her for aid, and she gave them herbs and ointments
as before, but never did he see the miracles he remembered. How could he know' if the people had been cimed? They seemed satisfied with her help; people came back to her and no one ever appeared to complain. But he was losing co]ifidence in her this year. Alan wanted proof.
Then one cool summer’s morning Alan re- ceived his opportunity. He had been sitting down by the pond, picking up small pebbles and seeing how far he could shoot them. After weeks of practice he had gotten good enough to get them across the pond, where they landed on a large moss-covered rock with a satisfying thump. Wlien that no longer was a challenge, he started aiming at the large and small trees which bordered the other side of the pond.
Suddenly he stopped; he thought he’d seen something in the weeds covering one small section of the far bank.
There it was again! Alan sat up on his heels. By squinting carefully he was able to focus in on one particular spot. It was a rabbit, brown with patches of gray.
Alan held his breath. He could not remember ever having seen a creature so beautiful. It was just like the rabbits in stores. In fact, he had a stuffed toy at home that looked much like it— though he didn’t play with it very much anymore, because he was a big boy now, too big for that kind of toy.
He wanted it to come to him. He wanted it very badly.
The next thing he would remember was run- ning around the edge of the pond, staring straight ahead at the clump of weeds where the rabbit had been. Then staring down at the still form, the mouth open over the teeth, the eyes glassy.
He’d scooped it up even though it smelled, and had raced all the way to his mother’s cottage.
But she’d only looked at him in sadness, and at his precious slingshot he’d not forgotten even in his haste, stuffed into his front poclcet. She shook her head slowly. “I cannot,” she’d said. “I’m sorry, Alan.”
“But you have to, you have to!” he’d cried, his face wet with tears. He wanted to stop his crying; how could he be a big boy and cry? But he couldn’t stop. “You’ve always been able to fix things. Always.”
“Do you still believe in my magic, Alan? Do you still believe those things?”
Dumbly he stared at her. And finally shook his head. “No ...”
Alan never paid attention to the people visiting his mother for cures after that. Sometimes when a storekeeper in the nearby town would say, “Oh, you’re the conjure woman’s boy,” he’d merely laugh, wondering how those grown-ups could be so gullible.
60
Illustration by Peter de Seve
IT WAS A REAL ROCKY HORROR SHOW- DIRECTED BY HIS OWN MOTHERI
/really dug being a Zombie, they’re a group that’s going places, they’ve got a bad sound. I dug the chicks too, the Zombies were getting it on with the chicks. It was bad.
Ma was so hyper about my amplifiers; the only kind of music she liked was quiet. I tried to be cool with her, after all, she is my mother, but we’re not tuned in to the same scene. I ask you, how could she expect me to keep up my chops, when she wouldn’t even let me turn up the amps? The old biddy got a headache every time I took out my axe.
She’d been a bitch about everything, she never smoked or drank anything stronger than tea; I watched her go completely bonkers over finding a little shit in my room. One time it was only a few seeds.
The last time she found my little stash of grass, coke and a couple of Ludes, she tried to call