Charles Beaumont: Selected Stories
Page 17
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Introduction to
BLACK COUNTRY by Ray Russell
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The irony seared my mind like acid, and inwardly I winced as I helped carry Charles Beaumont's coffin that morning early in 1967. Suddenly I had realized, as I and my fellow pallbearers approached the open grave, that my introduction to Beaumont, years before, had involved another cemetery, another funeral: the burial of Spoof Collins in Beaumont's novella, "Black Country." The fictive funeral and the all-too-real one merged in my thoughts, temporarily becoming the same. Even now, I have a little trouble keeping them apart. That's why I find it difficult to be objective about the story. But I'll try… Words are not music, but I know of no other way to define "Black Country" than to say it is musical. I don't mean merely that the subject matter is musicians and their music. I mean that the writing itself has cadence, rhythm, a beat, a sound. It seems to have been "composed" rather than written, and composed at white heat, without interruption, from first word to last, in a fever of creativity. The vibrancy, this musicality was the first thing that impressed me when I began to read the story in typescript in 1954, Playboy's first year. As I read on, I found other things to admire-such as the author's command of character, idiom, structure and suspense. I was also swept along by the passion and energy of the prose-but these two qualities are not rare in a young, talented writer. What is rare in a wordsmith only a couple of dozen years old is a firm grasp of technique, and this sizable piece displayed a control of craft and form usually found only in older, more experienced professionals. I read it all the way through at one sitting, put it down stunned and breathless, and immediately recommended it for purchase. The story required no editing. It went to the printer unscathed by my pencil. At press time, a column space emergency necessitated the cutting of two short words, but even this was dictated by purely mechanical, not literary, needs. Everything about the story was right-even the title, with its strong, symbolic simplicity, echoing a song title (of Beaumont's own invention) and representing not only the dark "country" of Death but also the black race of Spoof Collins and most of the other characters. Today, it might be easy to forget that the love between white Sonny Holmes and black Rose-Ann was still a "daring" theme in the early Fifties when this story was written"miscegenation," no less!-requiring courage on the part of Beaumont as writer and Playboy as the story's first medium of publication. Many popular magazines of that time, wary of offending the bigots among their readers, probably would have suppressed that aspect of the story, diminishing its total impact. "Black Country," the first of many Beaumont writings Playboy was to accept, appeared in our September 1954 issue. In the decades since that first appearance, my opinion of the story has not changed. It remains a fresh, vital work; powerful; a masterpiece among American short stories. "Though not a horror story in any of the usual senses," I later wrote, in the year of Beaumont's death, "it tells of a special kind of demonic possession, thoroughly contemporary and compellingly believable; and its infectious, finger-popping tempo propels the tale irresistibly toward a most unsuspected and macabre finale." I wouldn't change a word of that description. To me, "Black Country" is the brightest and best of Beaumont's achievements.