All posts tagged prose poem

Heard in the Dark, One evening and others by Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett short prose pieces from the 1970s.

  • Heard in the Dark 1
  • Heard in the Dark 2
  • One Evening
  • As the story was told (1973)
  • The Cliff (1975)
  • neither (1976)

Heard in the Dark 1

The two Heard in the Darks were extracts from the work in progress which was eventually published in 1980 as Company. These two extracts were published as stand-alone pieces in literary magazines.

Heard In the Dark 1 begins with unusual syntactical clarity i.e. readable sentences:

The last time you went out the snow lay on the ground.

It depicts a consciousness ‘lying in the dark’ remembering taking a spring walk in the snow. Because Beckett is determinedly anti-romantic he depicts the snow with lambs frolicking in it but also ‘strewn with red placentae’. the blood-soaked reality of farming reminded me of Ted Hughes’s many poems of farm life and lambing, from Moortown in particular.

He knows the walk inside out, could virtually do it with his eyes shut. With characteristically Beckettian obsessiveness about numbers he says, ‘you need normally from eighteen hundred to two thousand paces depending on your humour and the state of the ground.’

He used to do the walk with his father but not any more: ‘Your father’s shade is not with you any more. It fell out long ago.’ But now the walk is getting harder.

The same hundred yards you used to cover in a matter of three to four minutes may now take you anything from fifteen to twenty.

This is because the character has, as if in a nightmare, encountered what you could call The Beckett Problem which is simply: he can’t go on. Of his feet, he asks:

Can they go on? Or better, Shall they go on?

Now he lies in the dark remembering the scene and the sense of slow decline. At the very end he looks back expecting to see the usual straight line of footprints in the snow. He thinks he’s walking in a straight line, ‘a beeline’, ‘taking the course you always take’. But looking back at his footprints, he realises he’s been walking in a great swerve, anti-clockwise or ‘withershins’. And that’s the end of the fragment.

This prompts two thoughts:

1. ‘withershins’ is a Scottish dialect word and he was fond of these abstruse terms for direction, also using ‘deasil’ in several works from this time, which is a Gaelic word meaning ‘right-hand-wise, turned toward the right; clockwise.’

2. The Faber Companion To Samuel Beckett suggests the counter-clockwise circular movement is a nod to the same direction taken by Dante in the Inferno. Dante isn’t mentioned anywhere, but the piece is obviously yet another journey, though that makes it sound too glamorous, it’s yet another laborious trudge and in this fairly basic way lots of Beckett’s prose pieces can be related to Dante’s Divine Comedy, insofar as they are often about people trudging through bleak, inhospitable landscapes and/or bodies contorted into uncomfortable or painful positions, which is what the Inferno is packed with.

The obvious difference is that in the Divine Comedy, Virgil carefully explains why the people they see are in the plight they’re in, there’s always a good reason and the punishment generally matches the sinner’s sins. Not only that, but the individual is generally emblematic if wider categories of sin, which themselves sit within a carefully worked-out framework of Christian reward and punishment. In other words, The Divine Comedy overflows with meaning and purpose.

Beckett is like Dante with absolutely all the meaning, purpose and understandability stripped away, leaving inexplicable trudging, crawling, contortions and punishments, for no reason.

Heard in the Dark 2

Another fragment from Company. Again, the person being addressed as ‘you’ is lying on their back in the dark and remembering a ‘cloudless May day’ when a woman joins him in ‘the summer house’. Being Beckett, we are immediately given, not the romantic, emotional or psychological aspects of this encounter, but the precise physical dimensions of the house:

Entirely of logs. Both larch and fir. Six feet across. Eight from floor to vertex. Area twenty-four square feet to furthest decimal. Two small multicoloured lights vis-à-vis. Small stained diamond panes. Under each a ledge.

Here his father liked to retire after Sunday lunch with a glass of punch and read. When he chuckled, the person addressing themselves as ‘you’ liked to chuckle along. It appears to be a disarmingly simple memory from his boyhood.

Unexpectedly, the narrative gives a major insight into Beckett’s obsession with numbers and permutations and calculations: it’s therapeutic!

Simple sums you find a help in times of trouble… Even still in the timeless dark you find figures a comfort.

And details his boyhood calculations of the size and surface and cubic volume of the summer house. Escape from feeling into maths. Hah! As if Beckett has made what appears to be a psychological coping strategy into an entire literary aesthetic.

So no surprise that he then devotes a slightly demented amount of time thinking through the issues of measurement and scale and maths triggered by the fact that when ‘she’ arrives at the summerhouse where he’s waiting, her eyes are at his own eye-level even though he’s sitting down within. Pondering this problem requires far more text than anything at all to do with ‘her’ or with his feelings.

She must have entered the summerhouse because he looks at her breasts and then at her abdomen. They are both bigger than he remembered. Could she be pregnant, ‘without your having asked for as much as her hand?’ They both sit on in the dead still of his memory, remembering it, there, as he lies in the dark.

Well, it seems, on the face of it, to be a surprisingly straightforward and surprisingly poignant boyhood memory (father chuckling) mixed and blended by a young adult memory (a presumed girlfriend) on the family property back in Ireland (which was substantial and comfortable).

It is made into Beckett material via the obsessive calculation of shape and volume and then the characteristically oblique paragraph about her possible position in order for them to have the same eye level etc. But the basic content is amazingly old school and sentimental. Beckett was 74 by the time Company was published.

One Evening

One Evening is a prose poem related to the long piece Ill Seen Ill Said. It describes a body lying on the ground in a green greatcoat where it is found by an old lady dressed in black. Once again, the style represents a massive backwards step away from the radical prose style of How It Is, back to something vastly more conventional and conservative.

He was found lying on the ground. No one had missed him. No one was looking for him. An old woman found him.

She was looking for flowers. It is lambing time (lambs, hmm – like the lambs in Heard In the Dark and therefore in Company also). The text gets a bit more adventurous with the narrator commenting that this or that detail ought to be like this or that – as if we’re overhearing the author thinking aloud about his piece.

He wore a greatcoat in spite of the time of year. Hidden by the body a long row of buttons fastened it all the way down. Buttons of all shapes and sizes. Worn upright the skirts swept the ground. That seems to hang together.

When the phrase is repeated we realise it is one of those words or key phrases, whose repetition Beckett uses to build up the strange mechanical atmosphere of his prose.

Were a third party to chance that way theirs were the only bodies he would see. First that of the old woman standing. Then on drawing near it lying on the ground. That seems to hang together.

Attention switches to the old lady who has been cooped up all day by the rain. Now it has ceased she hurries out to take advantage of the light before sunset. She is wearing the black she adopted as a young widow. It is to lay flowers on her husband’s grave that she has come out to pick them.

This is another example of the paradox that, although much of Beckett’s technique was pioneeringly avant-garde in the 1960s and 1970s, so much of the actual content of those was immensely conservative and old fashioned. His plays and prose are highly experimental but often, when there is a discernable content, actually describe old ladies and old joxers from his youth in deeply rural Ireland. Beckett has been called ‘the last Modernist’, or one of the first post-Modernists – but a lot of the content has a late Victorian feel. An old lady dressed in black picking flowers to put on the grave of the husband who died when she was young sounds like something from Thomas Hardy.

Thus the figure of an old lady in black out picking flowers at sunset literally stumbling over the corpse of a young man dressed in a green longcoat face down in the grass of a field forms what the narrator calls a ‘tableau vivant if you will’. The whole thing has a late-Victorian feel, it might be a Symbolist painting from the 1890s, The Old Lady and The Suicide, or, as the Faber Companion suggests, a nocturne in green (the coat and the grass) and black (the old widow’s mourning) and yellow (the scattered flowers).

As the story was told (1973)

A short prose piece composed in August 1973. Like many Beckett prose pieces it simply begins and he sets down words and images and then you have the strong sense that the initial formulations then have to be explained and create an ongoing momentum of their own, one detail leading to another, which needs explanation, and so the text ramifies outwards like a glass of wine spilt on a tablecloth.

As the story was told me I never went near the place during sessions. I asked what place and a tent was described at length, a small tent the colour of its surroundings. Wearying of this description I asked what sessions and these in their turn were described, their object, duration, frequency and harrowing nature.

The narrator puts up his hand and asks where he is and is told in ‘a small hut in a grove some two hundred yards away’.

The narrator is, as so often, lying down. (Beckett protagonists rarely do much more than trudge around barren landscapes, or sit cramped in claustrophobic skullscapes, or lie in bed; you can’t help thinking that these are the common physical postures of The Writer – they never, for example, run, shower, bath, drive a car, catch a plane, sit on a train. No. Trudge, Sit or Lying down, preferably in the dark, these are the Beckett positions).

The dimensions of the hut remind him of the summer house he spent so much time in as a boy. Aha. As described in Heard In The Dark 2 and Company. The penny drops and I realise that it is not just the obsession with measuring and counting and calculating displayed by so many Beckett characters which reflects his own coping strategy –

Simple sums you find a help in times of trouble

… but that maybe the umpteen cramped spaces in which so many of his figures find themselves – especially in the experimental prose works like Imagination Dead Imagine or All Strange Away or The Lost Ones – are imaginative recreations of the warm and cosy, womb-like feel of the actual summerhouse in the grounds of the big Beckett family home in Cooldrinagh in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock where he spent so many happy boyhood hours.

Thus the cabin the narrator finds himself in now:

had the same five log walls, the same coloured glass, the same diminutiveness, being not more than ten feet across and so low of ceiling that the average man could not have held himself erect in it, though of course there was no such difficulty for the child.

The narrator describes himself as sitting in a cane chair with armrests, like the man in Fizzle 7 who sits at an open window facing south in a small upright wicker chair with armrests. There is a ripe slice of surrealism or Absurdity when a hand comes through the door and passes him a sheet of paper which he carefully tears into four pieces and gives back to the hand which withdraws.

And the arbitrary or contrived nature of the piece is made overt in the next passage:

A little later the whole scene disappeared. As the story was told me the man succumbed in the end to his ill-treatment, though quite old enough at the time to die naturally of old age.

What old man? Only in the last sentences can we maybe piece together that an old man was being subjected to ‘harrowing’ sessions – presumably, tortured – and would have been released if only he could find the right answers to the questions. The narrator asked what the old man was required to say, but no, they cannot tell him.

So there are two familiar Beckett tropes: the confined space or room within which the narrator is, initially lying down, but then finds himself sitting; and someone being tortured, as in Rough For Radio 2.

The Cliff (1975)

La Falaise was a short prose poem Beckett wrote in French in 1975. An English translation was commissioned from Edith Fournier so it could be included as The Cliff in the 1995 Complete Prose. It’s so short I can quote it in full:

Window between sky and earth nowhere known. Opening on a colourless cliff. The crest escapes the eye wherever set. The base as well. Framed by two sections of sky forever white. Any hint in the sky at a land’s end? The yonder ether? Of sea birds no trace. Or too pale to show. And then what proof of a face? None that the eye can find wherever set. It gives up and the bedlam head takes over. At long last first looms the shadow of a ledge. Patience it will be enlivened with mortal remains. A whole skull emerges in the end. One alone from amongst those such residua evince. Still attempting to sink back its coronal into the rock. The old stare half showing within the orbits. At times the cliff vanishes. Then off the eye flies to the whiteness verge upon verge. Or thence away from it all.

It demonstrates several things. First, that although the Faber Companion calls it a prose poem, there is nothing sensual or passionate about the prose. It is a very cold prose poem.

The word ‘skull’ crystallises the mood, and the whiteness of the cliff itself echoes the white skulls and white cells and white rotunda inside which the protagonists of All Strange Away and Imagination Dead Imagine found themselves, and which prompted critics to use the word ‘skullscapes’ to describe them. Although out of doors, this short piece feels like another skullscape.

The use of ‘residua’ (the plural of ‘residuum’ which is simply a more formal way of saying ‘residue’) is like a hangover from his earlier writings which he liked to stuff with arcane and obscure terminology, and has a double effect: insofar as it is a scientific term, it adds to the sense of clinical detachment and unemotion; but as an unnecessarily pedantic word it introduces a whiff of satire, self-deprecating satire against the author.

neither (1976)

Short enough to quote in its entirety:

to and fro in shadow from inner to outershadow

from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither

as between two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close, once turned away from gently part again

beckoned back and forth and turned away

heedless of the way, intent on the one gleam or the other

unheard footfalls only sound

till at last halt for good, absent for good from self and other

then no sound

then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither

unspeakable home

Another meditation, brief as a prayer, about the gap or space between self and unself, I and not I, the immediate consciousness which experiences and the posterior consciousness which reflects, remembers, re-assembles experience into a permanent flow of memories, thoughts, decisions, neither of which, in Beckett’s bleak phenomenology, can provide a resting place or home.

The word ‘footfalls’ anticipates or echoes the name and the subject of the stage play he wrote in the same year.

In fact, Beckett wrote neither to be set to music by the American modernist composer Morton Feldman and described its subject, living in the shadow between self and non-self as ‘the one theme in his life’.

Related link

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

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Posted by Simon on January 18, 2021

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The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (1950)

This is a sometimes hauntingly beautiful,sometimes thumpingly obvious, collection of visions, fables, dreams and nightmares. It consists of 26 linked short stories arranged in chronological order to describe mankind’s first expeditions to Mars, the colonisation of Mars, strange encounters with Martians, and then the abrupt abandonment of the planet as almost all the settlers fly back to earth in response to a catastrophic nuclear war.

In fact that figure of 26 breaks down into about 13 substantial stores, interspersed with 13 very short linking passages or free-standing vignettes. But whereas in, say, I, Robot by Isaac Asimov, the linking passages between the stories provide important factual information – Bradbury’s linkers are much softer, gentler, more evocative; if they introduce a theme it is often done only obliquely. Sometimes they are almost prose poems in their own right.

Although they come from the era of hard sci-fi, and were all first published in classic sci-fi magazines, most of the stories have an uncanny, sometimes hallucinatory effect. These two effects – dreaminess, and a concern for prose poetry over ‘facts’ – are well conveyed by the very first opening link section, itself barely a page long, and titled Rocket Summer.

One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets.

And then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town. A flooding sea of hot air; it seemed as if someone had left a bakery door open. The heat pulsed among the cottages and bushes and children. The icicles dropped, shattering, to melt. The doors flew open. The windows flew up. The children worked off their wool clothes. The housewives shed their bear disguises. The snow dissolved and showed last summer’s ancient green lawns.

Rocket summer. The words passed among the people in the open, airing houses. Rocket summer. The warm desert air changing the frost patterns on the windows, erasing the art work. The skis and sleds suddenly useless. The snow, falling from the cold sky upon the town, turned to a hot rain before it touched the ground.

Rocket summer. People leaned from their dripping porches and watched the reddening sky.

The rocket lay on the launching field, blowing out pink clouds of fire and oven heat. The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts. The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land…

That’s it. Blank faced prose, super simplified, to create an often fairy tale effect, or sound like a fable, or as if translated from a simpler language. Note the use of repetition to create the dreamy effect – ‘The rocket lay… the rocket stood… the rocket made…’

For this level of simplicity is deceptive. Simple sentences can contain strange, unexpected effects, odd juxtapositions of the homely and the eerie.

The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts.

What’s true of individual sentences is true of entire stories. Bradbury’s simple diction can be really simplified down to a kind of Biblical portentousness, or lifted to a fairy tale simplicity, it can have oddities added to turn it into something strange and unexpected. But just as easily, it can topple over into stereotypes and clichés. In the story The Earth Men, the men climbing out of the shiny rocket ship are 1950s Hollywood. The Martians taking them perfectly for granted is satire. The Martians then locking them up in a lunatic asylum is Swiftian satire. Then the Martians executing them all crosses a line into horror.

Bradbury’s deceptively simple prose is capacious and flexible enough to convey enormous shifts in tone and register in consecutive sentences, or within one story.

This is one of the things which makes the stories so disconcerting. Their changeableness.

Future history

The dates and even the events are not really the point of the stories, but despite their hallucinatory weirdness, there is a coherent timeline of sorts, which Bradbury emphasises by placing precise year dates next to each story – and which can be divided into three sections.

The first six stories (January 1999 to April 2000) describes a succession of expeditions to Mars in which the Martians kill each successive little party of earth intruders.

The pivotal story, ‘—And the Moon be Still as Bright’, describes the fourth mission to Mars, which discovers that almost all the Martians have been wiped out by a plague of chicken pox brought by one of the earlier earth missions.

In the middle bloc of stories (December 2001 to November 2005) humans proceed to colonise Mars with no interference – although there are a few eerie encounters with the remaining Martian survivors. Despite the presence of the spookily empty canals and the deserted Martian cities, Mars turns out to have pretty much the same gravity as earth, albeit the air is thinner and sometimes harder to breathe. but the human settlers quick turn it into a second earth, complete with earth agriculture, earth towns with earth names, and populations and prejudices.

The second pivot comes in the story, The Off Season, in which a dumb and violent working class earthman, who has set up a hot dog stall on the main highway from the rocket landing fields to the main colonial city (a hot dog stall? – yes the stories are that American, and the earth settlers make it into that much of a replica of home) hoping to make a killing from the next big influx of settlers — watches, with his pissed-off wife, as the earth is devastated by a nuclear holocaust. They both happen to be looking at distant earth, up in the Martian sky, when –

Earth changed in the black sky. It caught fire. Part of it seemed to come apart in a million pieces, as if a gigantic jigsaw had exploded. It burned with an unholy dripping glare for a minute, three times normal size, then dwindled.
‘What was that?’ Sam looked at the green fire in the sky.
‘Earth,’ said Elma, holding her hands together.
‘That can’t be Earth, that’s not Earth! No, that ain’t Earth! It can’t be.’

‘as if a gigantic jigsaw had exploded’. See how simple, but dramatically effective, Bradbury’s prose can be.

Driven by overwhelming nostalgia, all the Mars colonists pack into their spaceships and head off back to earth, leaving Mars almost abandoned. A handful of earthlings remain among the now-derelict earth settlements, which are themselves built next to the long-abandoned Martian settlements. A double layer of abandonment and melancholy.

The third section (December 2005 to October 2026) describes the experiences of these last few human survivors scattered across Mars. The very last story describes the arrival of the last-but-one spaceship from earth – bringing an all-American nuclear family, Mom, Dad and three boys. They expect one other family group to follow, a family with four girls. Between them, the adults plan that these children will leave behind all the destructive values of earth and found a new civilisation, becoming ‘the new Martians’.

The stories with nominal dates and lengths

The substantial stories in bold.

  • Rocket Summer (January 1999) 2 pages
  • Ylla (February 1999) 20 pages
  • The Summer Night (August 1999) 4 pages
  • The Earth Men (August 1999) 24 pages
  • The Taxpayer (March 2000) 2 pages
  • The Third Expedition (April 2000) 26 pages
  • —And the Moon Be Still as Bright (June 2001) 39 pages
  • The Settlers (August 2001) 2 pages
  • The Green Morning (December 2001) 8 pages
  • The Locusts (February 2002) 2 pages
  • Night Meeting (August 2002) 13 pages
  • The Shore (October 2002) 2 pages
  • The Fire Balloons (November 2002) 28 pages
  • Interim (February 2003) 2 pages
  • The Musicians (April 2003) 3 pages
  • Way in the Middle of the Air (June 2003) 21 pages
  • The Naming of Names (2004-05) 2 pages
  • The Old Ones (August 2005) 1 page
  • The Martian (September 2005) 21 pages
  • The Luggage Store (November 2005) 3 pages
  • The Off Season (November 2005) 18 pages
  • The Watchers (November 2005) 3 pages
  • The Silent Towns (December 2005) 16 pages
  • The Long Years (April 2026) 17 pages
  • There Will Come Soft Rains (August 4, 2026) 10 pages
  • The Million-Year Picnic (October 2026) 16 pages

Dying falls

As this brief synopsis indicates, it is not an optimistic narrative. We witness the extermination of not one, but two civilisations. Hence many of the stories have a plangent, dying tone. Hence there are a good number of atmospheric moments when people find themselves alone, marooned, isolated, standing amid the ruins of a Martian city, or at the edge of a dried-up Martian sea.

There Will Come Soft Rains,

The story, There Will Come Soft Rains, epitomises this sense of abandonment, although it’s one of the few set on earth. It describes the automatic functioning of a 21st century house – alarm clocks going off, breakfast automatically prepared, little robot cleaners tidying everything away – long after its human inhabitants have been vaporised by the atomic blast which destroyed the whole of the rest of the city the house stands in.

The nuclear war left only this one house standing, with one, city-facing wall charred black by the blast, except, that is, for the silhouettes of the Mom and Pop and the two kids who were playing on the lawn when the bomb detonated and whose vaporised outlines are preserved on the crumbling wall.

You could characterise a story like that as blunt, meaning it is a creative embroidering around a basically hard, crude subject. What’s more, a hyper-clichéd subject. I wonder how many teenage stories and poems and songs describe the horrors of a nuclear war in despairing detail.

The gag, or twist in Bradbury’s story, which lifts it above the utterly clichéd, is the humorous precision with which he describes the continued functioning of all the little futuristic gadgets in the house, creating a wan sense of pathos, once we realise all the humans they work for are long dead.

The Earth Men

A similarly blunt story is the satire The Earth Men, which describes how the second spaceship full of earth explores arrives, and they are disconcerted to find the Martians taking them in their stride. ‘Yes yes,’ the Martians communicate telepathically, ‘I’m busy right now, run along to see Mr Aaa,’ so they go along to another Martian dwelling, to find a harassed official too busy with his paperwork to give them full attention.

The increasingly exasperated explorers are eventually passed onto an official who can barely be bothered to look up from his paperwork before handing them a big silver key and telling them to go down the corridor and open the door.

When the men do as told, they enter a big dome to find loads of excitable Martians who lift them on their shoulders, and hurrah and toast them. ‘This is more like it,’ say the gee whizz space crew, until it slowly dawns on the captain that this is a Martian lunatic asylum. All the Martians who sent them along to Dr so and so who referred them to Mr Aaa who told them to come to this dome – they all thought they were run-of-the-mill Martians having telepathic hallucinations, that’s to say, faking a human (alien) appearance. The Martians who greet them in the dome quickly reveal themselves as suffering from all kinds of delusions, claiming to be explorers from earth or Nepture on the sun.

Finally the earth explorers are attended by Mr Xxx, a psychologist, who diagnoses them as normal Martians who happen to possess abnormal powers of telepathic projection with which they have changed their appearance. He finds their story of being ‘from earth’ very amusing and, when they insist, agrees to be escorted out to their ‘spaceship’.

Mr Xxx enters the ship, pokes and prods around, but remains fixed in his beliefs that it is a remarkable hallucination. Then he pronounces the only cure Martians know for this level of brain sickness i.e. execution.

He took out a little gun. ‘Incurable, of course. You poor, wonderful man. You will be happier dead. Have you any last words?’
‘Stop, for God’s sake! Don’t shoot!’
‘You sad creature. I shall put you out of this misery which has driven you to imagine this rocket and these three men. It will be most engrossing to watch your friends and your rocket vanish once I have killed you. I will write a neat paper on the dissolvement of neurotic images from what I perceive here today.’
‘I’m from Earth! My name is Jonathan Williams, and these — ‘
‘Yes, I know,’ soothed Mr. Xxx, and fired his gun.
The captain fell with a bullet in his heart. The other three men screamed.
Mr. Xxx stared at them. ‘You continue to exist? This is superb! Hallucinations with time and spatial persistence!’ He pointed the gun at them. ‘Well, I’ll scare you into dissolving.’
‘No!’ cried the three men.
‘An auditory appeal, even with the patient dead,’ observed Mr. Xxx as he shot the three men down.

The satire is swift and brutal. It has barely anything to do with science fiction, more a use of science fiction tropes to satirise the self-satisfied lack of imagination of the American psychiatric profession circa 1950. The story doesn’t tap deep emotional roots, although it is effective burlesque.

Night meeting

You could compare the blunt stories in the collection with the many others which are a bit more subtle or poetic in intention.

In Night Meeting an earthman on his way to a party suddenly encounters in the bleak bare Martian landscape, a bronze-skinned, golden-eyed Martian who is on his way to a Martian festival.

Both can hear the music in the distance of their respective parties, can anticipate the warmth, the wine, the beautiful women they will meet there. But when they go to touch each other, their hands go through each other’s bodies. They are both there, but not there. Two moments in time, which are equally as unreal to each other, have somehow overlapped.

Now, even though this story has a vague sense of déjà vu about it – as if I’ve seen it in an episode of The Twilight Zone or Star Trek or somewhere – you can straightaway see that it aims to capture something more eerie and uncanny than the blunt stories. All the details and dialogue of the story are focused on creating a mood of weirdness.

And it’s often true of these more poetic stories that, although they’re set on Mars, they could be set anywhere: this one is basically a ghost story and could just as well have been describing an encounter between, say a modern character and an 18th century highwayman on some remote midnight heath in Cornwall, as an event on planet Mars.

The Fire Balloons

Something of the same yearning, evocative quality dominates The Fire Balloons in which a Catholic priest and his colleagues come to Mars, determined to convert the rare and obscure Martians to Christianity. (For the purposes of this story, we are told that the previous species of Martians, the ones who have been wiped out, lived alongside a much smaller and rarer species, beings which look to us like luminous blue globes).

The priests have several eerie encounters with these strange, remote, hovering globes who, at a key moment, indicate their good intentions by saving the earthmen from a mountain avalanche.

Bu at the finale of the story, the blue globes communicate telepathically that they are perfectly happy, at peace, know no sin and so need no redemption.

This story contains some pretty blunt satire on religion, on Christianity, on Catholic superstition and dogma. But at its core is the wistful memories of the protagonist, Father Peregrine, of being a small boy and watching his grandfather light red, white and blue balloons to send off into the air on Independence Day. I suspected these warm happy memories would mislead the Father into trusting the blue globes who would then savagely let him down – but no, the mood of warm contentment continues right to the end as the happy, fulfilled globes float out of the story.

Civil rights

The Other Foot

Unexpectedly, there is a story strongly redolent of the Civil Rights movement in that it unmistakably set in the Deep South of America, and powerfully supports black characters against the narrow-minded hick racism of white bigots.

This us the second Bradbury story I’ve read which is fiercely critical of white prejudice against black people in America – The Illustrated Man contains the story The Other Foot, in which Mars has been entirely settled by black people, more or less exiled there from America, who have settled and made their own life and are happy. No spaceship has come from earth for twenty years and they think they have been ignored and forgotten.

When a spaceship is sighted, a black man named Willie Johnson recalls all the injustices black people suffered in 1920s and 1930s and 1950s America and whips the crowd up into a frenzy ready to lynch and string up the white folks who emerge from it.

There is real bite and anger in the story which lists in some detail the everyday social, cultural, political, economic and psychological oppression which black people have suffered in America.

Anyway, when the spaceship lands, the knackered old white man who appears in the door tells them there has been a nuclear apocalypse and earth has completely destroyed itself, nothing of civilisation remains. He and his team have patched together the last spaceship on earth and come to ask their forgiveness, come to ask if they will use their (the black peoples’) spaceships, and return to earth and help rebuild civilisation.

The plot sounds pretty silly, but the descriptions of black humiliation left me more shaken than anything else in the book.

Way in the Middle of the Air

Same goes for the ‘black’ story in this collection, Way in the Middle of the Air. It describes a bunch of hard-core, red-neck, southern bigots assembled on the porch of the hardware store owned by Samuel Teece. It describes in full their bigoted comments as a great tide of black humanity sweeps through the high street in front of them on their way to the rocket fields, where the entire black population of the South is going to take ship to Mars.

Teece, the big bully bigot, attempts to prevent two individuals going, a man named Belter riding a horse, who owes him $50. As the crowd gets wind of what’s going in they politely have a whip round and pay Teece his $50 and he is forced to let Belter go. And then Teece spots ‘Silly’, his shop boy, and pulls him over and refuses to let him go, even though the car with the rest of his family is impatient to get going and not to miss the spaceships. he begs, he pleads, he weeps, and eventually some of the other white men on the porch start feeling guilty and uneasy and one old dude says he’ll step in and replace ‘Silly’ and, eventually, Teece is shamed into letting him go, and off he roars in his family car.

Teece gets his gun and waves it around in rage and for a while there’s a real risk he’ll start shooting people in the great crowd at random. By God, he remembers the good old days, riding with the Klan and the lynchings, and Bradbury gives him some paragraphs of reminiscence.

He remembered nights when men drove to his house, their knees sticking up sharp and their shotguns sticking up sharper, like a carful of cranes under the night trees of summer, their eyes mean. Honking the horn and him slamming his door, a gun in his hand, laughing to himself, his heart racing like a ten-year-old’s, driving off down the summer-night road, a ring of hemp rope coiled on the car floor, fresh shell boxes making every man’s coat look bunchy. How many nights over the years, how many nights of the wind rushing in the car, flopping their hair over their mean eyes, roaring, as they picked a tree, a good strong tree, and rapped on a shanty door!

Enraged, Teece gets in his car with a few of the others, and drives off after the crowd. But they come to a great area where the entire black population of the South has abandoned all its unnecessary goods and belongings, a wasteland of trash and memorabilia. And then they hear the roar of the rockets and watch the little silver fins fly up into the sky.

In the cotton fields the wind blew idly among the snow dusters. In still farther meadows the watermelons lay, unfingerprinted, striped like tortoise cats lying in the sun.

The men on the porch sat down, looked at each other, looked at the yellow rope piled neat on the store shelves, glanced at the gun shells glinting shiny brass in their cartons, saw the silver pistols and long black metal shotguns hung high and quiet in the shadows. Somebody put a straw in his mouth, Someone else drew a figure in the dust.

Finally Samuel Teece held his empty shoe up in triumph, turned it over, stared at it, and said, ‘Did you notice? Right up to the very last, by God, he said “Mister”!’

Like The Other Foot, this is a really fierce, penetrating story and utterly unexpected in a book of otherwise quite hokey science fiction stories. It has a science fiction basis or trope, but is really all about earth and injustice in 1950. Even if you don’t like science fiction, you should give The Other Foot and this story a read, this one is the better, I think, because of the intensity with which it recreates the personality and psychology of its central character, the brute bigot Teece.

Related links

Ray Bradbury reviews

1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1953 Fahrenheit 451
1955 The October Country
1957 Dandelion Wine
1959 The Day It Rained Forever
1962 Something Wicked This Way Comes

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same London of the future described in the Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love, then descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces down attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – in an England of the future which has been invaded and conquered by the Russians, a hopeless attempt to overthrow the occupiers is easily crushed
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s

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Posted by Simon on December 19, 2018

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