The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford and Other Classic Stories tcsopkd-1
Page 54
The fact that Roog sold was due to Tony Boucher outlining to me how the original version should be changed. Without his help I’d still be in the record business. I mean that very seriously. At that time Tony ran a little writing class, working out of the living room of his home in Berkeley. He’d read our stories aloud and we’d see—not just that they were awful—but how they could be cured. Tony saw no point in simply making it clear that what you had written was no good; he assisted you in transmuting the thing into art. Tony knew what made up good writing. He charged you (get this) one dollar a week for this. One dollar! If ever there was a good man in this world it was Anthony Boucher. We really loved him. We used to get together once a week and play poker. Poker, opera and writing were all equally important to Tony. I miss him very much. Back in 19741 dreamed one night that I had passed across into the next world, and it was Tony who was waiting for me to show up there. Tears fill my eyes when I think of that dream. There he was, but transformed into Tony the Tiger, like in that breakfast cereal ad. In the dream he was filled with delight and so was I. But it was a dream; Tony Boucher is gone. But I am still a writer, because of him. Whenever I sit down to start a novel or a story a bit of the memory of that man returns to me. I guess he taught me to write out of love, not out of ambition. It’s a good lesson for all activities in this world.
This little story, Roog, is about an actual dog—like Tony, gone now. The dog’s actual name was Snooper and he believed as much in his work as I did in mine. His work (apparently) was to see that no one stole the food from the owner’s garbage can. Snooper was laboring under the delusion that his owners considered the garbage valuable. Every day they’d carry out paper sacks of delicious food and carefully deposit them in a strong metalcontainer, placing the lid down firmly. At the end of the week the garbage can was full—whereupon the worst assortment of evil entities in the Sol System drove up in a huge truck and stole the food. Snooper knew which day of the week this happened on; it was always on Friday. So about five A.M. on Friday, Snooper would emit his first bark. My wife and I figured that was about the time the garbagemen’s alarm clocks were going off. Snooper knew when they left their houses. He could hear them. He was the only one who knew; everybody else ignored what was afoot. Snooper must have thought he inhabited a planet of lunatics. His owners, and everyone else in Berkeley, could hear the garbagemen coming, but no one did anything. His barking drove me out of my mind every week, but I was more fascinated by Snooper’s logic than I was annoyed by his frantic efforts to rouse us. I asked myself, What must the world look like to that dog? Obviously he doesn ‘t see as we see. He has developed a complete system of beliefs, a worldview totally different from ours, but logical given the evidence he is basing it on.
So here, in a primitive form, is the basis of much of my twenty-seven years of profes sional writing: the attempt to get into another person’s head, or another creature’s head, and see out from his eyes or its eyes, and the more different that person is from the rest of us the better. You start with the sentient entity and work outward, inferring its world. Obviously, you can’t ever really know what its world is like, but, I think, you can make some pretty good guesses. I began to develop the idea that each creature lives in a world somewhat different from all the other creatures and their worlds. I still think this is true. To Snooper, garbagemen were sinister and horrible. I think he literally saw them differently than we humans did.
This notion about each creature viewing the world differently from all other creatures—not everyone would agree with me. Tony Boucher was very anxious to have a particular major anthologizer (whom we will call J.M.) read Roog to see if she might use it. Her reaction astounded me. “Garbagemen do not look like that,”she wrote me. “They do not have pencil-thin necks and heads that wobble. They do not eat people.” I think she listed something like twelve errors in the story all having to do with how I represented the garbage-men. I wrote back, explaining that, yes, she was right, but to a dog—well, all right, the dog was wrong. Admittedly. The dog was a little crazy on the subject. We’re not just dealing with a dog and a dog’s view of garbagemen, but a crazy dog—who has been driven crazy by these weekly raids on the garbage can. The dog has reached a point of desperation. I wanted to convey that. In fact that was the whole point of the story; the dog had run out of options and was demented by this weekly event. And the Roogs knew it. They enjoyed it. They taunted the dog. They pandered to his lunacy.
Ms. J.M. rejected the story from her anthology, but Tony printed it, and it’s still in print; in fact it’s in a high school text book, now. I spoke to a high school class who had been assigned the story, and all of the kids understood it. Interestingly, it was a blind student who seemed to grasp the story best. He knew from the beginning what the word Roog meant. He felt the dog’s despair, the dog’s frustrated fury and the bitter sense of defeat over and over again. Maybe somewhere between 1951 and 1971 we all grew up to dangers and transformations of the ordinary which we had never recognized before. I don’t know. But anyhow, Roog, my first sale, is biographical; I watched the dog suffer, and I understood a little (not much, maybe, but a little) of what was destroying him, and I wanted to speak for him. That’s the whole of it right there. Snooper couldn’t talk. I could. In fact I could write it down, and someone could publish it and many people could read it. Writing fiction has to dowith this: becoming the voice for those without voices, if you see what I mean. It’s not your own voice, you the author; it is all those other voices which normally go unheard.
The dog Snooper is dead, but the dog in the story, Boris, is alive. Tony Boucher is dead, as some day I will be, and, alas, so will you. But when I was with that high school class and we were discussing Roog, in 1971, exactly twenty years after I sold the story originally—Snooper’s barking and his anguish, his noble efforts, were still alive, which he deserved. My story is my gift to an animal, to a creature who neither sees nor hears, now, who no longer barks. But goddam it, he was doing the right thing. Even if Ms. J.M. didn’t understand. (written 1978)
I love this story, and I doubt if I write any better today than I did in 1951, when I wrote it; I just write longer. (1976)
THE LITTLE MOVEMENT Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nov 1952.
BEYOND LIES THE WUB Planet Stories, July 1952.
My first published story, in the most lurid of all pulp magazines on the stands at the time, Planet Stories. As I carried four copies into the record store where I worked, a customer gazed at me and them, with dismay, and said, “Phil, you read that kind of stuff?” I had to admit I not only read it, I wrote it.
THE GUN Planet Stories, Sept 1952.
THE SKULL If, Sept 1952.
THE DEFENDERS Galaxy, Jan 1953. [Parts of this story were adapted for the novel THE PENULTIMATE TRUTH.]
MR. SPACESHIP Imagination, Jan 1953.
PIPER IN THE WOODS Imagination, Feb 1953.
THE INFINITES Planet Stones, May 1953.
THE PRESERVING MACHINE Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1953.
EXPENDABLE (“He Who Waits”) Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1953.
I loved to write short fantasy stories in my early days—for Anthony Boucher—of which this is my favorite. I got the idea when a fly buzzed by my head one day and I imagined (paranoia indeed!) that it was laughing at me. (1976)
THE VARIABLE MAN Space Science Fiction (British), July 1953.
THE INDEFATIGABLE FROG Fantastic Story Magazine, July 1953.
THE CRYSTAL CRYPT Planet Stories, Jan 1954.
THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF THE BROWN OXFORD Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jan 1954.
THE BUILDER 7/23/52. Amazing, Dec 1953-Jan 1954.
MEDDLER 7/24/52. Future, Oct 1954.
Within the beautiful lurks the ugly; you can see in this rather crude story the germ of my whole theme that nothing is what it seems. This story should be read as a trial run on my part; I was just beginning to grasp that obvious form and latent form are not the same thing. As Heraclitus said in frag
ment 54: “Latent structure is master of obvious structure,” and out of this comes the later more sophisticated Platonic dualism between the phenomenal world and the real but invisible realm of forms lying behind it. I may be reading too much into this simple-minded early story, but at least I was beginning to see in a dim way what I later saw so clearly; in fragment 123, Heraclitus said, “The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself,” and therein lies it all. (1978)
PAYCHECK 7/31/52. Imagination, June 1953.
How much is a key to a bus locker worth? One day it’s worth 25 cents, the next day thousands of dollars. In this story, I got to thinking that there are times in our lives when having a dime to make a phone call spells the difference between life and death. Keys, small change, maybe a theater ticket—how about a parking receipt for a Jaguar? All I had to do was link this idea up with time travel to see how the small and useless, under the wise eyes of a time traveler, might signify a great deal more. He would know when that dime might save your life. And, back in the past again, he might prefer that dime to any amount of money, no matter how large. (1976)
THE GREAT C 7/31/52. Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy, Sept 1953. [Parts of this story were adapted for the novel DEUS IRAE.]
OUT IN THE GARDEN 7/31/52. Fantasy Fiction, Aug 1953.
THE KING OF THE ELVES (“Shadrach Jones and the Elves”) 8/4/52. Beyond Fantasy Fiction, Sept 1953.
This story, of course, is fantasy, not sf. Originally it had a downbeat ending on it, but Horace Gold, the editor who bought it, carefully explained to me that prophecy always came true; if it didn’t ipso facto it wasn’t prophecy. I guess, then, there can be no such thing as a false prophet; “false prophet” is an oxymoron. (1978)
COLONY 8/11/52. Galaxy, June 1953.
The ultimate in paranoia is not when everyone is against you but when everything is against you. Instead of “My boss is plotting against me,” it would be “My boss’s phone is plotting against me.” Objects sometimes seem to possess a will of their own anyhow, to the normal mind; they don’t do what they’re supposed to do, they get in the way, they show an unnatural resistance to change. In this story I tried to figure out a situation which would rationally explain the dire plotting of objects against humans, without reference to any deranged state on the part of the humans. I guess you’d have to go to another planet. The ending on this story is the ultimate victory of a plotting object over innocent people. (1976)
PRIZE SHIP (“Globe From Ganymede”) 8/14/52. Thrilling Wonder Stories, Winter 1954.
NANNY 8/26/52. Startling Stories, Spring 1955.
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