As Carr himself admitted, his fiction could be lifeless, descriptive, with interesting turns of phrase, but lacking plot. Nonetheless, in the 1940s he broke into the slicks:
The stories concerned either war, science fiction—or some combination of those. “Border Incident” told of a groups of American soldiers who accidentally landed in Russia during World War II and killed some invading Japanese—which was a diplomatic problem considering Russia and Japan were not then at war. “The Dictator’s Double,” written after Russia had become America’s antagonist, concerned a Stalin look-alike who badly wanted out of his job as a double for the tyrant, and finally got relief from a botched assassination attempt that left him disfigured. “The Lie Detector” was about a woman who sussed out her boyfriend’s job as a German spy by listening to his heartbeat. None of the stories have much—or any—action—and they all tend toward the propagandistic, but the first two, at least, draw upon Carr’s knowledge of Russia and so have a certain authenticity. The first to also reveal in the ironies of war and tyranny. It is interesting that we have come to forget the fatalism associated with World War II fiction—think of the dark humor of Catch-22—as we have ben inundated with all the talk of “The Greatest Generation.”
(Note, I have not seen “Murder in Moscow.”)
“Morning Star” is juvenile science fiction that nonetheless made its way into The Saturday Evening Post. It concerns a conference of the big four scientific brains—presumably a play on the Big Four in international politics—and their visit by a strange woman. She turns out to be from Venus and convinces the scientists that rather than direct the first interplanetary rocket at Mars, it should be shot to Venus. Because Venus has evolved in such a way that the males of the species are little more than tiny parasites, while the females are beautiful humans. And they want to have sex with earthmen. The story ends with the first astronauts returning from Venus and recruiting more men for the next trip.
“Nightmare at Dawn” is Carr’s second best story, for it sustains a certain amount of drama through the end. The tale concerns two Martian crafts that have landed on earth, one in front of the White House, one near the Kremlin. The Martians are a dying race, troubled by a lack of resources; but they are also very advanced, having given up war and also made astounding technical discoveries. The humans, understandably, want to gain this technology—and figure that whichever country first does so will be able to conquer the world. In the course of talking with the humans, the Martians are confronted with very different political ideals, which they soon adopt, the Martian craft in America persuaded by American ideals, the one in Russia by Soviet ideals. The two craft then battle; one is destroyed, the other takes off for Mars to recruit the rest of its race to earth. The humans, though, do not know which is which, and so are left in suspense, awaiting the return of the Martians—aliens that will either side with the Americans or the Russians.
The story is a potent metaphor for the tension of the Cold War. Unfortunately, it is marred by Carr’s ridiculous notions of domesticity and gender. Even as the world hangs in a balance, the two protagonists of the story—a reporter and a secretary—only worry about how they might get married and find a small weekly paper to run. And they do, in Carr’s hometown of Ashley, Ohio. The secretary, who had been the only American able to communicate with the Martians, gladly gives up her life in DC to become a homemaker. Against the battle for the fate of the planet, this all seems small potatoes.
“The Laughter of the Stars” suffers from the same problem—domesticity and conventional notions of gender undermining the science fiction premise, which, in this case, is not as developed and remains static. Carr starts with interesting premises, and the language is precise. "Beyond Infinity" is about a detective who only searches for missing people--murder was too commonplace, disappearances had something uncanny about them. The tone is knowing, subtly or not telling the story from some future, which the writer assumes the reader shares. This early precision of language and intensity of story, though, soon peters out. There is a setting, excitement--then mostly talk, talk, talk. The detective finds the missing couple all too easily, and then awaits as they are sent into space--against the law!--only to return seventeen minutes later but, thanks to relativity--younger when they left though they had seen much of the solar system. (There is a limp gesture at the end that they had not seen enough, that it might still be some kind of hoax). And even as the perfect couple launches into space--they seem to be a kind of Martin and Osa Johnson--the detective falls in love with the daughter of the man who hired him, and that becomes the main concern of the story. The love affair, though, is completely unbelievable, built upon ridiculous flirting and nothing else.
The problems are at their greatest in his novel “The Room Beyond.” Ostensibly, this is a bildungsroman, the story of Dan Bryce’s education. Born into a well-to-do but declining family, Bryce is the object of affection for the neighborhood girl—we meet him when she is promising to lose her virginity to him the next night, though the discussion is oblique—but he falls in love with Christine, a Spanish nurse who works in the worst part of town. Christine is of an indeterminate age, and Dan only in his teens, but he instantly falls in love with her. To the chagrin of the girl next door, his guardian, and his spiritual adviser, he spends all summer with her, ministering to the less fortunate. To the chagrin of all the men who know Christine—and love her—this results in her being driven from town.
Bryce then goes to New Mexico for education—for Christine is from Mexico—before returning to Wendra, the girl next door. She loves him still, and he hates her for loving him, so is cruel to her, and rough when they (inevitably) have sex, which, ahem, just makes her love him more. (By this point, we’ve heard quite a bit about how Dan could have sex with most any woman he wanted, but he’s mostly reserving himself for Christine.) She agrees to keep him as a lover in New Orleans, but it is there that Bryce again happens on Christine’s trail. He finds her serving as a lay nurse in a convent. Again, he proposes to her, and again, she slips away—in a purposefully confused chronicle of events.
Abandoned once more, Dan decides to become a doctor—something Christine has always wanted to do, though she’s been prevented by her gender. He then goes off to France in WWI, where he has more sexual adventures, before finding his way back to Wendra—whom he yet again treats to cruel sex that makes her beg for more—and then slips away to Christine’s home town in New Mexico.
The New Mexico set piece is odd. Carr was living there when he wrote this book, and so could speak authoritatively of the landscape. But it’s the culture that’s bizarre: Dan arrives on Good Friday when a local cult is recreating the crucifixion. Dan is almost crucified, but instead put into a cave—blocked by a boulder—for three days. Of course, Christine somehow comes to him there and they engage in an interminable dialogue, with him professing his love, her refusing his advances.
This is only one of many interminable dialogues—the book could have been shortened by a third if people merely said what they needed to say once, rather than three or four or five times. Just before is a long, portentous discussion between Dan and a priest about the meaning of saints and miracles. (In a sign that Carr was forcing the symbolism, he had to switch perspectives just for this section, after 283 pages of living in Dan’s mind; it was a jolt, but also a relief: a break from the narcissism.)
Christine leaves—again!—but promises to return if Dan does not look for her. By this point, we realize that she is nearly immortal, her birth hundreds of years before, her body never aging. Dan agrees, and settles himself in New Mexico to minister to the small town where Christine was born. His work eventually wins him a prestigious award which, conveniently, is presented to him in his own hometown, where he first met Christine, and where all the original characters—with the exception of his guardian and minister—still live, awaiting him—thankful to him for making them all friends. As readers, we get to catch up on their lives, but since they were never really characters—just signposts on Dan’s own path—it doesn’t really add up to much.
There is some melodrama, of course. Dan meets Christine, who has been living here for some time, unrecognized because she has not aged (except by the atheistic doctor, who refuses to credit his own senses). Wendra finds them together, tries to kill Christine—impossible—and kills herself. By this point she is the curdled symbol of materialism.
Christine finally explains everything to Dan. She is able to enter and exit the afterlife—the so-called room beyond—and appear whenever she wants in time: for time is an illusion. Christine is tired, and winks out to wait for there for Dan, which will be no wait at all, since there is no time. Dan is a doctor in town, with a beatific understanding of life, unafraid of death because he knows all time is an illusion, and that the vast part of the universe is unseen to humans until after they die. He is unconcerned by world events because he knows not everyone can be beatific and, indeed, some are controlled by forces to bring about the apocalypse.
The book seems to owe a lot to Carr’s earlier friendship with E. Hoffman Price: the descriptions of food, of New Orleans, of soldiering in Europe, and whoring there, too. Oddly, there’s very little of Carr’s communism or time in Russia (That was another book, I guess). The only seeming reference is to one communist in the story who does not see—as Dan sees-that beyond class warfare is the warfare that occurs in the individual to reach the mystical state that he eventually achieves.
Never, though, has Nirvana seem so self-absorbed.
“Mutation” is weak science fiction—more of a Theosophical fairy tale, about the coming of the next great race. Presumably there is action—even a double killing—but these barely register against all the talk.
Carr’s best story is his last, “The Coming of the Little People,” his inability to plot helping the story rather than dragging it down. The story is told from several perspectives and the descriptions do the work of carrying the story along. The novella concerns the sudden arrival of weird beings at inaccessible mountain tops throughout the U.S. At first, there is confusion about whether the beings are aliens or some form of biological weapon launched by the Russians or Chinese. At the end, we find out they are actually fairies—all the little people of legend—who have come out of hiding to stop mankind from destroying the world through atomic war. The story is at turns funny and charming and insightful.
To be continued.
- “Border Incident,” The Saturday Evening Post, 20 Nov. 1943
- “Lie Detector,” Liberty 4 March 1944.
- The Bells of St. Ivan’s, 1944
- “Morning Star,” The Saturday Evening Post, 6 Dec. 1947 (later collected in Beyond Infinity).
- The Room Beyond, 1948
- “Nightmare at Dawn.” The Saturday Evening Post, 24 Sept 1949 (later renamed “Those Men from Mars” and collected in Beyond Infinity).
- “The Laughter of the Stars,” The Blue Book, August 1950 (later renamed “Beyond Infinity, and collected in Beyond Infinity).
- “Murder in Moscow,” The Blue Book Jan 1951
- Beyond Infinity, 1951, which included the new story “Mutation.”
- “The Dictator’s Double,” The Saturday Evening Post 1 November 1952
- “The Coming of the Little People,” The Blue Book, Nov. 1952
The stories concerned either war, science fiction—or some combination of those. “Border Incident” told of a groups of American soldiers who accidentally landed in Russia during World War II and killed some invading Japanese—which was a diplomatic problem considering Russia and Japan were not then at war. “The Dictator’s Double,” written after Russia had become America’s antagonist, concerned a Stalin look-alike who badly wanted out of his job as a double for the tyrant, and finally got relief from a botched assassination attempt that left him disfigured. “The Lie Detector” was about a woman who sussed out her boyfriend’s job as a German spy by listening to his heartbeat. None of the stories have much—or any—action—and they all tend toward the propagandistic, but the first two, at least, draw upon Carr’s knowledge of Russia and so have a certain authenticity. The first to also reveal in the ironies of war and tyranny. It is interesting that we have come to forget the fatalism associated with World War II fiction—think of the dark humor of Catch-22—as we have ben inundated with all the talk of “The Greatest Generation.”
(Note, I have not seen “Murder in Moscow.”)
“Morning Star” is juvenile science fiction that nonetheless made its way into The Saturday Evening Post. It concerns a conference of the big four scientific brains—presumably a play on the Big Four in international politics—and their visit by a strange woman. She turns out to be from Venus and convinces the scientists that rather than direct the first interplanetary rocket at Mars, it should be shot to Venus. Because Venus has evolved in such a way that the males of the species are little more than tiny parasites, while the females are beautiful humans. And they want to have sex with earthmen. The story ends with the first astronauts returning from Venus and recruiting more men for the next trip.
“Nightmare at Dawn” is Carr’s second best story, for it sustains a certain amount of drama through the end. The tale concerns two Martian crafts that have landed on earth, one in front of the White House, one near the Kremlin. The Martians are a dying race, troubled by a lack of resources; but they are also very advanced, having given up war and also made astounding technical discoveries. The humans, understandably, want to gain this technology—and figure that whichever country first does so will be able to conquer the world. In the course of talking with the humans, the Martians are confronted with very different political ideals, which they soon adopt, the Martian craft in America persuaded by American ideals, the one in Russia by Soviet ideals. The two craft then battle; one is destroyed, the other takes off for Mars to recruit the rest of its race to earth. The humans, though, do not know which is which, and so are left in suspense, awaiting the return of the Martians—aliens that will either side with the Americans or the Russians.
The story is a potent metaphor for the tension of the Cold War. Unfortunately, it is marred by Carr’s ridiculous notions of domesticity and gender. Even as the world hangs in a balance, the two protagonists of the story—a reporter and a secretary—only worry about how they might get married and find a small weekly paper to run. And they do, in Carr’s hometown of Ashley, Ohio. The secretary, who had been the only American able to communicate with the Martians, gladly gives up her life in DC to become a homemaker. Against the battle for the fate of the planet, this all seems small potatoes.
“The Laughter of the Stars” suffers from the same problem—domesticity and conventional notions of gender undermining the science fiction premise, which, in this case, is not as developed and remains static. Carr starts with interesting premises, and the language is precise. "Beyond Infinity" is about a detective who only searches for missing people--murder was too commonplace, disappearances had something uncanny about them. The tone is knowing, subtly or not telling the story from some future, which the writer assumes the reader shares. This early precision of language and intensity of story, though, soon peters out. There is a setting, excitement--then mostly talk, talk, talk. The detective finds the missing couple all too easily, and then awaits as they are sent into space--against the law!--only to return seventeen minutes later but, thanks to relativity--younger when they left though they had seen much of the solar system. (There is a limp gesture at the end that they had not seen enough, that it might still be some kind of hoax). And even as the perfect couple launches into space--they seem to be a kind of Martin and Osa Johnson--the detective falls in love with the daughter of the man who hired him, and that becomes the main concern of the story. The love affair, though, is completely unbelievable, built upon ridiculous flirting and nothing else.
The problems are at their greatest in his novel “The Room Beyond.” Ostensibly, this is a bildungsroman, the story of Dan Bryce’s education. Born into a well-to-do but declining family, Bryce is the object of affection for the neighborhood girl—we meet him when she is promising to lose her virginity to him the next night, though the discussion is oblique—but he falls in love with Christine, a Spanish nurse who works in the worst part of town. Christine is of an indeterminate age, and Dan only in his teens, but he instantly falls in love with her. To the chagrin of the girl next door, his guardian, and his spiritual adviser, he spends all summer with her, ministering to the less fortunate. To the chagrin of all the men who know Christine—and love her—this results in her being driven from town.
Bryce then goes to New Mexico for education—for Christine is from Mexico—before returning to Wendra, the girl next door. She loves him still, and he hates her for loving him, so is cruel to her, and rough when they (inevitably) have sex, which, ahem, just makes her love him more. (By this point, we’ve heard quite a bit about how Dan could have sex with most any woman he wanted, but he’s mostly reserving himself for Christine.) She agrees to keep him as a lover in New Orleans, but it is there that Bryce again happens on Christine’s trail. He finds her serving as a lay nurse in a convent. Again, he proposes to her, and again, she slips away—in a purposefully confused chronicle of events.
Abandoned once more, Dan decides to become a doctor—something Christine has always wanted to do, though she’s been prevented by her gender. He then goes off to France in WWI, where he has more sexual adventures, before finding his way back to Wendra—whom he yet again treats to cruel sex that makes her beg for more—and then slips away to Christine’s home town in New Mexico.
The New Mexico set piece is odd. Carr was living there when he wrote this book, and so could speak authoritatively of the landscape. But it’s the culture that’s bizarre: Dan arrives on Good Friday when a local cult is recreating the crucifixion. Dan is almost crucified, but instead put into a cave—blocked by a boulder—for three days. Of course, Christine somehow comes to him there and they engage in an interminable dialogue, with him professing his love, her refusing his advances.
This is only one of many interminable dialogues—the book could have been shortened by a third if people merely said what they needed to say once, rather than three or four or five times. Just before is a long, portentous discussion between Dan and a priest about the meaning of saints and miracles. (In a sign that Carr was forcing the symbolism, he had to switch perspectives just for this section, after 283 pages of living in Dan’s mind; it was a jolt, but also a relief: a break from the narcissism.)
Christine leaves—again!—but promises to return if Dan does not look for her. By this point, we realize that she is nearly immortal, her birth hundreds of years before, her body never aging. Dan agrees, and settles himself in New Mexico to minister to the small town where Christine was born. His work eventually wins him a prestigious award which, conveniently, is presented to him in his own hometown, where he first met Christine, and where all the original characters—with the exception of his guardian and minister—still live, awaiting him—thankful to him for making them all friends. As readers, we get to catch up on their lives, but since they were never really characters—just signposts on Dan’s own path—it doesn’t really add up to much.
There is some melodrama, of course. Dan meets Christine, who has been living here for some time, unrecognized because she has not aged (except by the atheistic doctor, who refuses to credit his own senses). Wendra finds them together, tries to kill Christine—impossible—and kills herself. By this point she is the curdled symbol of materialism.
Christine finally explains everything to Dan. She is able to enter and exit the afterlife—the so-called room beyond—and appear whenever she wants in time: for time is an illusion. Christine is tired, and winks out to wait for there for Dan, which will be no wait at all, since there is no time. Dan is a doctor in town, with a beatific understanding of life, unafraid of death because he knows all time is an illusion, and that the vast part of the universe is unseen to humans until after they die. He is unconcerned by world events because he knows not everyone can be beatific and, indeed, some are controlled by forces to bring about the apocalypse.
The book seems to owe a lot to Carr’s earlier friendship with E. Hoffman Price: the descriptions of food, of New Orleans, of soldiering in Europe, and whoring there, too. Oddly, there’s very little of Carr’s communism or time in Russia (That was another book, I guess). The only seeming reference is to one communist in the story who does not see—as Dan sees-that beyond class warfare is the warfare that occurs in the individual to reach the mystical state that he eventually achieves.
Never, though, has Nirvana seem so self-absorbed.
“Mutation” is weak science fiction—more of a Theosophical fairy tale, about the coming of the next great race. Presumably there is action—even a double killing—but these barely register against all the talk.
Carr’s best story is his last, “The Coming of the Little People,” his inability to plot helping the story rather than dragging it down. The story is told from several perspectives and the descriptions do the work of carrying the story along. The novella concerns the sudden arrival of weird beings at inaccessible mountain tops throughout the U.S. At first, there is confusion about whether the beings are aliens or some form of biological weapon launched by the Russians or Chinese. At the end, we find out they are actually fairies—all the little people of legend—who have come out of hiding to stop mankind from destroying the world through atomic war. The story is at turns funny and charming and insightful.
To be continued.
