Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction

by R. A. Lafferty

  Name one thing missing from it.

  Oh, enjoyment. That's one of the things left out. The end always comes too soon. Just when the enjoyments could begin, the end comes. The end comes when the sky breaks open, and the enjoyment of rain is outside of it. The story ends with the climax and there is no room for that collection of enjoyments called After Such Climaxes. It would misshape the story to have a longer ending, or to allow anything to happen after the ending. No, there is just the one classic shape for the old heroic wave, and it works thunderously well in most cases.

  Whenever I have the opportunity, I sit on ocean rocks or the ocean sand and watch the waves come in. (We don't have an ocean in Tulsa, but sometimes I travel.) Most of the waves are of the classic shape, the quick and alert rising just beyond the shelf, the flowing continuity or pursuit, and the crashing climax. This is the old wave form, the heroic form, the form of the Science Fiction Story especially. The resolution and culmination of those classic old waves is well worth watching. And yet there are a few exceptions to the classic old wave.

  There is one exception that would have to be accounted heroic, if that name hadn't already been preempted by the things in the big box. This is the standing wave that doesn't break at all (“Who swims in sight of the great third wave / That never a swimmer shall cross or climb” as Swinburne has it). Not everybody believes in the existence of this standing wave though. And there are also a multitude of waves that break badly (though that may be a slanted judgment), that break non-classically or incompletely (refusing the completion-extinction), or that have no real climax. For it is a fact of observation that not every wave does have a climax or culmination or dramatic resolution. Some of them lack the culm-form or apex-form entirely. And there is a thin, hissing, cream after-irony to many of those waves that refuse to crest properly.

  Well, what is the quality of these misshapen waves? It is usually very poor.

  Can these be described as new waves? Inexactly. Divergence isn't new. But since no two of the misshapen waves are alike, then those that you see today are new today.

  What was that business a while back of the dreary middle-modern things that do not conform to the shape? Oh, that's only things of the last ten thousand years or so, things of the present. The classic s.f. story shape is valid for the steep past, and it is valid for tomorrow. But it has always been a bad fit for the day before tomorrow. Farming and business, for two instances, are not heroic things and they cannot be included in the shape. Cain Adamson and George Babbit both found that out. The rejection of Cain's land-fruits presentation (that down-curling smoke may have been the first rejection slip) was taken badly by Cain. The presentation may have been rejected for its poor quality, but we presentation types always believe that there are darker reasons behind the rejections of our masterpieces. And George Babbit just didn't accept the fact that he didn't fit in anywhere in the heroic shape. These two were anti-heroes. Cain had limited revenge when Christ also turned out to be an anti-hero.

  Well, what was that business a while back about ‘for all stories except one’? Oh, there was one story that didn't accept the killing as the final end, that maintained (with compassionate irony) that death may be only an interlude or anticlimax; this was the story of which we were permitted to hear the part that comes after the end. But this story hasn't been of strong literary influence.

  The Science Fiction Story does adhere more completely than others to the classic shape, and it punishes dissent more sharply. It insists that the sides of the box that it is in are the sides of infinity itself. And there has always been much that is strong and noble about this almost perfect shape.

  And there has usually been something a little bit scruffy about things of lesser shapes. And they have not, so far, shown much quality.

  Is it important that the ignoble wavelets be allowed to break on the noble beach? Is it important that the questing tongue should reach for that furthest shriveled pig-weed? Is it important that the poor-quality new shapes be tolerated?

  Is it important that there remain the possibility of Things outside the Box?

  Review: Some Things Dark And Dangerous

  Edited by Joan Kahn

  Harper & Row

  This is the third and probably the best (previous two: The Edge of the Chair and Hanging By A Thread) of a series of ‘good but forgotten stories’ edited by Joan Kahn, the editor of the Harper Novels of Suspense. There are sixteen pieces (four fact, twelve fiction), opening with an Evelyn Waugh and closing with a Robert Louis Stevenson, with the great Blackwood and Collier and Kuttner (Lewis Padgett) and the almost great Dorothy Sayers and F. Marion Crawford and Howard Pyle and others coming between. All of the writers are dated and most of them are dead.

  All are suspense stories, wonder stories; all are mystery stories, in a sense, though none is a conventional detective story and certainly none is a formula story. Three of them might be called Science Fiction (at the name of which all honest hearts must leap with pleasure!); all are pretty much Blood and Thunder (“as simple as the thunger of Heaven and the blood of men” as Chesterton once defended the type).

  At this point, from the covert enemies of the Lively Arts, there come two automatic protests, and we must answer them.

  Is there any real importance in producing another collection of old stories even if it is ‘good material sunk out of sight’?

  Is there any importance at all (while the eschatological things are standing up tall and crying for attention) to be found in the inferior and trivial art form of the suspense story, a surrogate or life-escapist device?

  (Really, it is no more life-escapist than are any other cultural accretions since the breechclout and the fist-axe; and it retains more of the clout and the axe than do most other forms.)

  The first answer is that there may be importance in collections of old and valid fact and fiction. No great book has ever come about in any other way than this. It was the mechanism of Scripture, of all the Epics, of the Arabian Nights, of the works of the Bard and of the Comedist who produced no more than superior collections of old material. Not that this is a great book, but it would be a great book if it stood alone of its kind. And the Iliad would not be a great book if it stood with a dozen others of like sort.

  The second answer is that there may be intrinsic importance in the suspense story. The whole life affair is a suspense story, and this cannot be said about any other sort of literature. And it can itself be eschatological. The short extract from Prescott's History presented here under the title Fatal Visit of the Inca is chillingly eschatological, filled with all the final things. So is Robert Coates' “These Terrible Men, the Harpes!” an enigma of evil so irrational and bemused as to be almost innocent.

  And the suspense story has had noble practitioners. A writing acquaintance (an unbeliever) once gave me the opinion that God the Father, on the basis of some hundred striking narrations in both Testaments, would have to be classed as one of the three greatest masters of the suspense story. And I have it on peculiar authority that He enjoys these things Himself, and that there is much in literature that He does not enjoy.

  God the Father, however, is not represented directly in this collection. Evelyn Waugh, with the story Ms. Loveday's Little Outing, serves as viceroy with a fair amount of assurance.

  It has also been protested that Suspense is a thing to be minimized and not encouraged, that it is the enemy of Serenity which should be the ideal and the goal.

  Be very careful here! We run into all sorts of double-meaning words for double-meaning things. The evening-jade Serenity and the nightmare Suspense were she-colts together, and the former may have been the wilder. A serene, in its first and weatherwise meaning, meant a clear fair calm, a subtropical evening calm. But it also had a weirder tropical meaning, ‘a fine rain falling down from a cloudless sky after sunset’ and ‘a noxious dew or mist’. Several of the included stories have this latter aspect of serenity. Serene is related to sere, a claw or talon. It is also related to serus
which means ‘evening’ or ‘late’;sometimes it means ‘too late’. The serene is a tricky calm and it is complement to suspense. They are not opposites.

  If man is the only creature who laughs (this may be argued; poltergeist and several animals snigger and chortle; likely all the higher creatures laugh; certainly the Creator does), man is not the only creature who experiences suspense. All the animals, all the creatures experience it. It is the necessary tension, and without it the limbs would be unstrung.

  But it may be that man is the only creature who has experienced changes (two changes) in the nature of Suspense. One was at the time of the Fall (those of other orientation may call it the Hiatus or the Amnesia or they may call it nothing at all, but they must recognize that something happened then). At the time of the Fall, man went into a state of Suspended Animation. Or perhaps it was a state of Animated Suspense. It must have been a frighteningly powerful state from the disguised memories we still carry of it. Certain animals and persons and intermediate spirits are in that case yet. Collier's tale of Wet Saturday is of such case, and perhaps the strange John Collier himself was.

  Did Lewis Padgett intend a parallel to the Fall of Man or the Failure of Man in the flesh-crawling ending of his story When the Bough Breaks? Likely he did. Nobody can understand all the levels of a Padgett story, but he himself certainly understood the first two or three levels of his own.

  The second change in the nature of Suspense was at the time of the Redemption (those of other orientation may call it the End of an Era or the Anamnesis, but they must recognize that something happened then). The suspense was not abolished; perhaps it was sanctified. Some of the dread was removed, but the bow itself was not unstrung. The tension was likely increased, but tension in grace became more possible. Suspense is now a requirement of the pleasure principle, of the victory principle, of the high comedy of being. And it will be a requirement of the Vision, which will not be static. It is a necessity to the feeling of immediacy, to the constant newness of outlook and experience. It is at the heart (the courage) of things.

  Suspense is not the same thing as uncertainty, not the same as apprehension, not the same as doubt, not quite the same thing as danger, certainly not the same as fear.

  Might bold claims, those! Can one stand and produce on the subject? No, I cannot, and probably you cannot produce for any powerful interest of your own. But in this collection, and others like it, there are fleeting pieces of something important, and they must be caught on the fly. We lack the right words for all these things (Suspense is not the right word), and we lack the means of tying them together. The Lively Arts, the Lively Sciences, the Lively Eschatologies, the Lively Congresses of every sort are all of one thing which the Greeks called simply ‘the musics’ and for which we lack any correct word.

  Sheridan Le Fanu's The White Cat of Drumgunniol is an Irish legend which you may have heard in some form from your grandmother, whether you are Irish or not. Edmund Pearson's The Murder of Doctor Burdell takes us back to 1857 and the old newspaper accounts of popular murders; things were much more violent then than now. Q. Patrick's Portrait of a Murderer is a portrait of yourself when you were fourteen years old, and a murderer. Calling All Stars by Leo Szilard the brain (an associate of Einstein and Fermi who first wrote his fictions privately for his friends) is solid Science Fiction, but it is topped by Padgett's When the Bough Breaks, the best story in the book. I have always suspected that Padgett (Henry Kuttner) was a superior brain himself.

  The only thing wrong with Dorothy L. Sayers' The Fantastic Horror of the Cat in the Bag is that you have probably already read it. It would be difficult to find a little-known piece by Dorothy Sayers.

  This is a very good book. Let the flesh crawl a little! That's the sign that you are alive with more lives than one. If you believe that you are above such things as good suspense fiction, then you may be looking at other things upside down also.

  Review: Tales Of The Natural And Supernatural

  by Mario A. Pei

  Devin-Adair

  Dr. Mario A. Pei, twelve-sided (at least) genius, world's greatest philologist and damned near world's greatest linguist, political and social and economic analyst, battler for the right and for the Right, gnome and knower, a good candidate for the title ‘The Noblest Roman of them all’, is here revealed to have a thirteenth string to his bow. He has been writing (apparently for many years) fictional tales; and the best and the worst of them are collected here.

  The only pertinent question we may ask here is how well this multiplex genius (is there any other kind? Belloc wrote that genius is simply the ability to think in several different categories, and Pei certainly fills this multiplexity) succeeds in this odd thirteenth field?

  He succeeds pretty well. The last of the great philologists to write tales were the Brothers Grimm who were responsible both for Grimm's Law of the relationship of Indo-European languages and for the fairy tales. These tales of Pei are very uneven (so are the fairy tales; have you dipped into them lately?) and innocent of any change in tale-telling technique since the time of Poe, or at least that of Blackwood. But Pei's successful nineteenth-century flavor makes it seem that all change has not been improvement.

  The worst (and thankfully the shortest) of the stories is With His Arm in a Sling. The best are The Bones of Charlemagne and The Sparrows of Paris, the longest of them which is really a superb short novel. Pei's humor which keeps creeping in prevents event the most outré of the supernatural tales from being really frightening. A flesh-crawler he is not. But he is an entertainer. The book comes to much more than the totality of its parts; there is a sunniness that suffuses it all.

  And does he slip any propaganda into the tales to support his often strong views in some fields? Not a bit, except indirectly by the pleasant sanity that runs through it all. This is pretty good.

  Review: Mysteries Of Time And Space

  by Brad Steiger

  Prentice-Hall

  From 1919 into the 1930s, Charles Fort presented mountains of incredible happenings. The only word for them was ‘wonderful’. The only word for the reaction of the scientific community was ‘furious’. A cut above his followers, Fort didn't try very hard to explain his monstrosities.

  In the 1950's, Immanuel Velikovsky presented such an array of high anomalies that there were attempts to suppress him. Velikovsky did try to explain his data, and his explanations were almost as wonderful (though not quite as likely) as the facts themselves.

  Since then, there have been several hundred books overflowing with amazing facts, and this review could apply to almost any of them, except that (“the print of a shoe 500 million years old”) except that, after the late Ivan T. Sanderson, Brad Steiger does this sort of thing much better than anyone else. He is a few cuts above the ‘Chariots of the Gods’ cult.

  (Innumerable carvings and pictures of elephants from an early America that knew no elephants.)

  Brad Steiger also attempts explanations, and his explanations are less than wonderful; but nobody can do everything.

  (Roman coins in Amerindian burial mounds.)

  A surprising thing is that the people who are infuriated by the facts that do not fit are the same people who will not admit the possibility of design in the universe. They are in fear of anything that will not fit into their particular non-design consensus. But awkward facts do not bother the catastrophists very much, and they don't bother the creationists.

  (The more than 30,000 impossible artifacts of Acambaro, Mexico, discovered in 1945 and dated at about 6,500 years old. Every one of these is different and every one is incredible. There are accurate representations of dinosaurs and other creatures more than 100 million years old that Mexicans of 6,500 years ago just couldn't have reconstructed. These artifacts are of peoples and animals that have been, and are, and will be, and of those that cannot possibly be.)

  There is only one explanation; the ‘Great-Gusto-of-God’ explanation.

  (“blood, flesh, live fish, frogs and
the pages of a mysterious manuscript falling out of clear skies.”)

  We hold to the idea that there is supposed to be fun, outrageous fun, in the universe.

  “and always those fish-faced warriors, mummies, horsemen and gladiators grappling with gigantic reptiles.”)

  Now he's talking about our kind of people.

  Tolkien as Christian

  Oh, oh, here comes a great folly. To commit it is to be assaulted by the surrogate people and to be lacerated by the fangs of rubber serpents. This is more serious than it sounds. They use real venom in rubber serpents these days. And to fail to commit the folly is to fail the scriptural caution about leaving undone the things that we ought to have done. So I will do the folly, namely to write the piece named Tolkien As Christian.

  I am not a member of the Tolkien cult, and there is some resentment against non-cult members speaking out at all. Oh well, J.R.R. Tolkien was not a member of the Tolkien cult either. And to consider Tolkien as a Christian is to work in too narrow a field. Christian refers to the handling of small pieces that have fallen off an essential thing, to the disregard of the thing itself. And Tolkien wasn't a Christian. Should I adopt a more spacious and essential word then and write of Tolkien as Catholic? There's a difficulty there too.

  Whenever the question of names came up, and Tolkien apparently avoided the question whenever he could, he referred to himself as a Papist. The Papists are a mannered and droll club on the fringes of the English Universities. There is little to them except the name and the conveyed impression of eccentricity. The Papists do not take themselves so seriously, for instance, as do the members of the Society for Creative Anachronism in the United States. But Tolkien does not seem ever to have used words so gauche as Christian or Catholic.