(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: low tones, flange)
Judith Merril biography, non-spoiler discussion
JM:
Hello and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm J.M. and here with Gretchen and Nate and we're talking about the family and fertility and we've got four stories lined up of varying lengths. We just did an intro segment, followed by a discussion of David H. Keller, M.D.'s, Mr. Baby Man himself, and his story, "Unto Us a Child is Born". So if you want to hear the opening remarks, definitely listen to that episode.
But now that we're going to be talking about Judith Josephine Grossman. She was born in 1923 in Boston. She's known in the science fiction world and elsewhere as Judith Merril. And this is the pen name she adopted in the late 1960s as her official name. But yeah, she was born Judith Josephine Grossman in Boston, Massachusetts, USA in 1923.
So in the 50s and 60s, she was an important figure in SF, as she liked to call it, as a writer, but especially as an anthologist. She compiled the year's greatest SF stories from 1956 to 1967 and put together several other anthologies as well, including one showcasing Britain during the New Wave here, "England Swings SF", living briefly in that country in 1967.
Things got increasingly uncomfortable for her in the US with Vietnam and stuff, and she was always deeply involved in left-wing politics. So she moved to Canada during this time to my home city of Toronto, in fact, to participate in Rochdale College, a free university that unfortunately no longer exists and didn't last very long. Basically, as you can sadly imagine, it was shut down because it was unable to finance itself. And yeah, because it was a cooperative institution with everybody kind of living together, the people in the neighborhood started to notice there was a lot of drug-taking and other unruliness. I guess the whole thing was maybe something to be considered a failed experiment, but good intentions for sure.
But during that 1956-1967 period, she organized a Writers' Conference in Milford, Pennsylvania, with Damon Knight and James Blish. And she was married three times, and her second husband was Frederik Pohl, whose name certainly come up a lot. In the past, and we'll no doubt do so again. And together with Pohl, she started what they called the Hydra Club, which was basically another SF Writers' Meetup, including editors and publishers. Lots of people would attend, including Isaac Asimov and Willie Ley. Worth pointing out, just because we just spent a lot of time talking about him recently and his interesting attitudes, she had an affair with Fritz Leiber when they were both married, and she talks about him a lot in her memoirs, and obviously it was extremely fond of the guy.
So a lot of the info for this I drew from basically her unfinished posthumous memoirs, which are entitled "Better To Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril", and these were put together by her granddaughter, Emily Pohl-Weary. And it's kind of an interesting experience, reading the memoirs, they're unfinished, and Emily does talk a lot about what she did in order to prepare the work and the various internal conflicts she had about which things she should include and what she might have to leave out.
Nate:
Right, I bet.
JM:
Yeah, so Merril was, I'll get into this a little later, but certainly a figure that was very opinionated and I guess maybe caused a lot of friction with other people sometimes, and I think from what Emily Pohl-Weary says in the memoirs, she had written down a lot of stuff that was, I guess, stories and anecdotes that went differently than what other people told, and she had to decide what parts she should kind of tone down a bit. So it's kind of interesting to read because a lot of the memoirs do seem, you can really feel that unfinished aspect. It's a little bit rambly. It's mostly Judith's stuff herself because she did write a lot of the pieces, but according to Emily, Judith didn't want to finish it because she thought once she finished her memoirs, that would kind of be it, and she would have nothing else to write about. And she didn't really write much fiction after 1960, and this was a project that Emily agreed to work on and said she would finish herself. She did do, but yeah, there's a lot of letters from various people and from her correspondence. A lot of people in the SF community, so it's kind of interesting to read that stuff. There's some letters from Leiber in there. There's letters from Theodore Sturgeon. She has a whole chapter dedicated to him, really kind of inspired her as a writer and helped her out in a lot of ways, so she's very grateful to that. So yeah, she was friends with lots of people, but maybe made some enemies too, and she was certainly one to burn bridges according to her granddaughter.
Going back to her childhood, Judith's father killed himself in 1929 jumping out of a window. Seems like a lot of people were doing that in 1929. I always thought maybe it was a little bit exaggerated, but apparently he actually did. In 1936, Judith and her mother moved to New York, the Bronx, where her mother ran a home for delinquent children, and this wasn't apparently very good for young Judith, so they thought. So they found her another place to stay a few blocks away with another woman. Interestingly, this was Jack London's widow, and this didn't go well either. According to Judith, she was always too dirty, too messy for this severe, meticulous woman.
So her grandfather was a renowned rabbi in the Jewish community, and as a young person, she was very interested in Zionism. But she made what she described as a typical Jewish American intellectuals path from Zionism to socialism to Trotskyism. And in the late 1930s, she was really into communism, which is how she met husband number one eventually. She hated Stalinism from the beginning and considered herself a Trotskist, but she ended up leaving any semblance of that organization, too, because she said, she found their authoritarian organizational tactics unbearable. Of course, this was largely during the Depression, and communism was pretty common in the Bronx the way she tells it, and there weren't the sort of roundups you got after World War II.
She held down a few jobs and had her first daughter in 1942, and she was moving all over the country in 42-43 to be with her husband, pretty much places all over the United States. She said they must have moved seven times, but then Dan was sent overseas, and that's when she started meeting people in the SF community. So she became good friends with the editor and agent Virginia Kidd, and they lived together for a while with their two daughters. Dan does come back from the war, and they try to make things work, but the marriage is broken, and they separate.
So, like I said before, Judith Merril is her pen name, Merril being actually her daughter's first name. And apparently it was Ted Sturgeon who suggested this name in the first place. But her first published stories are actually sports tales in some pulps under various pseudonyms, all male. And she was a researcher by this time, and getting into this pulp ghostwriting business.
"That Only a Mother" was her first sale to an SF magazine, and that's tonight's story.
So in 1946, she and Pohl met, like I said before, and they quickly moved in together, and they would eventually get married, and this lasted until 1951. And her career as an editor, meanwhile, started in '47 when she applied for the position of mystery editor at the fledgling Bantam Publishing. They wanted to experience editor, and she had none. So she was pretty surprised when she got the job, and it turned out it was because she already had connections through the Scott Meredith literary agency, and all the people she'd met in her moving around in various circles. Bantam was mostly doing reprints then, and she kept up this till 1950 when she quit to work on her novel, which was published by Doubleday.
She left her mark on Bantam though, and she persuaded them to publish the science fiction anthology, here for 1950, and it was somewhat amusingly titled "A Shot in the Dark", which was probably exactly what they thought it was. The novel was not a qualified success as far as Judith was concerned, although it got a favorable review in the New York Times and ended up being televised as "Atomic Attack." Doubleday changed the title to something really innocuous and non-specific, "Shadow on the Hearth", which could have been anything, and barely promoted the book and changed the ending without her consent.
In her writing, she was into doing collaborations, as in the 1950s, her favorite writer to collaborate with was Cyril M. Kornbluth, and they published quite a lot together, under the name of Cyril Judd. Many of these were serialized in Astounding, and she speaks of two major influences on getting her going, Theodore Sturgeon and Anthony Boucher. Boucher was an editor and writer, and he was co-founder of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which was a magazine that we mentioned before and featured at least two stories from, and this one that Judith seems to have really liked.
By 1952, she and Fred were already separated, and she would marry again in another ten years. This time, another guy named Dan, this time not a writer, and that didn't last long either. They decided to live separately.
She seemed to mostly like Canada, which is where she moved in the late 60s, and yeah, she has her collection, formerly called the Spaced Out Collection, which she donated to the Toronto Public Library in 1970, and she's kind of involved in politics, too, being involved in committee organizing relief for refugees from militarism. She was really busy and, in fact, was responsible for a lot of stuff that I probably experienced somewhat as a kid and didn't really realize that the person was involved was Judith Merril or know her name at that time.
So she wrote a lot of scripts for the show "Ideas", which was CBC radio documentary about all kinds of interesting art and science topics that used to air on the weekdays, and I remember it well, although I guess she was probably gone by the time I mostly heard it in the early 90s. She taught science fiction seminars at various alternative schools in the Toronto area, and yeah, interestingly, she worked for TV Ontario as well for a while, which was the station on which I first saw Doctor Who, and she did these short documentaries no longer than about seven minutes that were aired after Doctor Who was on, and I completely forgotten about these, but reading about this now, yeah, I remember seeing some of these, there were a lot of them were about science stuff, and they kind of seemed like maybe a bit child-friendly, and I'm guessing they had probably little animations and stuff, but I'm not really sure that, yeah, I remember seeing some of these, so they were still showing some of these in '86, '87 probably, not long after I first started watching that show.
Nate:
Yeah, that's pretty cool.
JM:
Also, a Canadian publisher put out her collection "Survival Ship and Other Stories" in 1978, and that's probably why that story was actually part of my ninth grade English curriculum, and again, I didn't know Judith Merril's name at that time, and I wouldn't have been able to tell you who wrote the story unless I saw a reference to it, and I'm really like, yeah, I remember reading that story, and okay, so that was her too, but it's kind of an interesting story because it's, yeah, it's about a ship in the future, I think it's going to a colony or something like that, or they're trying to start a new life away from a decimated Earth, and it's a story written completely without gender pronouns, so I think part of the whole idea of it being a classwork was like, people probably made a lot of assumptions about it based on that, the fact that it didn't have any gender pronouns, how long does it take you to notice that, right? I guess, I don't know, I can't exactly remember because 9th grade was a long time ago, but it's kind of interesting, so...
She also made it into the Best American Short Stories book edited by Martha Foley of 1955, worth noting this was a story called Dead Center, which was about a moon landing, and the people involved in particular, so, yeah, a lot of moon landing stories before, but she was definitely focusing on the human angle, and both the guy on the rocket, but also his family and other scientists working on the ground, and stuff like that, many of whom were women, and she didn't comment on that, just assumed that they would just be working with the men that they wouldn't even be an issue, which I think that a lot of her male counterparts in the 50s were not quite, maybe, able to handle yet, so, yeah.
Starting in the mid-80s, like a number of Canadians, she decided to winter in warmer climates and would spend half a year in Jamaica. She was still really active teaching in Toronto, especially at Seed Alternative High School, and she got back into editing anthologies by 1985, publishing Tesseract, which is the first anthology of Canadian science fiction, and it lasted for a long time. I'm not sure if it's still going. I meant to check on that, but, yeah, I've kind of been thinking of looking at it because I've never really taken the time to get into it, and maybe there'll be some cool stories for us to do on the podcast at some point.
So I guess we should talk about Merril on sex and feminism, because it's sort of relevant to the topic. She writes this about this quite a bit in her memoirs, and it's a complicated thing, and sometimes one gets at the idea that she's being a little defensive. She had what might have been called, at one time, a reputation, and this maybe did tend to contribute to throwing her personal life through some people. And certainly, I don't mean to be critical when I say this, but this is certainly something that her granddaughter also comments on, and the science fiction community in New York was very close knit, and everybody knew each other, and I guess there was certainly Damon Knight's Futurians book, too, there's an awful lot of gossip of who was sleeping with who, and I don't know, it seems like everybody was sleeping with everybody, so I'm not necessarily going to, again, criticize one person, but there was only really two or three women mostly involved in the group, and Merril herself commented, it was like they didn't know any other women. So, in any case, she says this in her memoirs. I'm going to read a couple of sections.
She says, "I didn't do that much sleeping around, so I find myself reacting defensively, much the way I would have if I had known what people were saying at the time. But now my defensiveness is for a different reason. I feel defensive in the face of women, who are convinced that all heterosexual gender politics are exploitative. I suppose in my life, there have been times when my partner and I were exploiting each other consensually, but that's called a trait. Certainly, I feel I came out of every relationship richer intellectually and creatively than when I entered it. I am still struggling with how to present this fact, without either sounding like I naive, know nothing, to whom any man could say anything and make me feel like I've gained something, or seeming to apologize for being heterosexual, which I am perfectly willing to apologize for. I think everybody should be bisexual. Often physical acts of love make other kinds of communication between men and women easier. This is only true when lovemaking is distinguished from those relationships that involve perspective and future expectations or possession. Because those things make active love all much more difficult. I believe there is an inequality between the sexes, but that a lot of the inequality is in the minds of women, who have been raised and trained and conditioned to believe that men have more power and will always be sexually exploitative. I don't mean that it's only in the minds of women, but that part of the problem is that women are prepared to accept unacceptable behavior. If women expect that they must behave in certain ways, then they often put themselves in the position of having to behave in these ways, even if the man they are with is not trying to set up such a situation. Basically I think there are three main ways in which men are oppressed in our society. They are taught not to have emotions, to separate their bodies from their intellects, and to be competitive and aggressive. Part of what has made my view different from that of most feminists is that I was not given the same conditioning when I grew up. My mother was already a feminist from the first wave, that I didn't have a father, there was no male protecting me and telling me I was beautiful."
She goes on to relate her reading of a story by Fritz Leiber for his Mimeographed fanzine in 1952, "The Nice Girl with Five Husbands", a short utopian story, and she says she sometimes fondly thought of herself in that way. In the early 50s she lived in a small town, Milford, PA, while undergoing really bitter seeming custody battles over both her children, and she says this was a very difficult time, and they were always being watched and needed to present the front of the ideal American family. Only there was no husband in the house. She relates her social, intellectual, and sexual frustration. And yeah, it does seem like this was a really bad time from the way the girls at both ex-husbands with two different daughters got together and ganged up on her and hired a bunch of lawyers and she was totally broke.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
It sounds like it was really, really awful.
Nate:
I can imagine.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
But Virginia Kidd was actually the wife of James Blish, who she always calls Jim. And she and Virginia were good friends, but apparently Merril and James Blish didn't get along, according to how she says it anyway. But she does write a lot about control and possessiveness, and how she thinks possessiveness is at the root of many problems between the sexes, especially when related to things like marriage. Unsurprisingly, she takes these thought to some unusual places and while I won't do any more quotes of that stuff from here, it would be interesting to see what someone more versed in, I guess, feminism and gender politics might have to say about some of this stuff, especially from a 21st century perspective. But it's there in the East Village with her infant daughter Merril, that she was really getting into SF, and she met up with the Futurians and she described them as mostly left-wing. And she writes a lot about fans, fandoms, fanzines and the community aspect, especially in New York around this time. Mostly the 40s.
Of course, she had her own fanzine, The Temper, which changed the titles every month, depending on how she was feeling, but it was always something like that, like, Distemper. And, yeah, she describes a lot of political infighting. And I'm sure everybody has their own story.
But getting on to tonight's story, "That Only a Mother", Judith Merril has a brief piece that she calls "Give the Girls a Break" after a common slogan at the time. "Give the boys a break". And I'm going to read this kind of pretty relevant to tonight's whole topic, and I think it gives a very different perspective than somebody like Keller. And I think you can tell, you know, maybe it's from a person's personal fanzine. It's a little bit rambly, but I think it's really good.
"Of recent months, the digests and women's magazines have broken out in a rambling rash of rhetoric on the most unassailable of subjects, mother love. They are joyously enumerating the emotional and psychological pitfalls that lie and wait for the child, cruelly deprived of the understanding and constant affection that only a mother can give.
"The cause is clearer than the complaint. During the war, when women were needed in factories and offices, group care for children received a tremendous impetus. Young girls as yet unmarried answered the call for labor power. Mature women, with grown children, tossed off their aprons with no great reluctance, and young wives and mothers, by the thousands, women with young children and husbands overseas, leaped at the chance to make some money and to be doing something.
"Now the men have come home, and there aren't enough jobs to go around. For good wholesome frolicsome and fantasy value, Henry Wallace's 60 million jobs is equaled only by the two chickens in every pot of 20 years ago. At the last reading, the number of unemployed had reached 3.5 million. What jobs there are, says good old reliable public opinion, must go to the men.
"(The cover of the July 1945 issue volume 1) Give the boys a break, a good slogan, and with a veteran husband all my own. I'm in favor of it. Let's give the boys the jobs, the homes, the clothes and cars, and little luxuries they're entitled to. And maybe if the bright lads who dream up the slogans, put their slick paper brains to work on getting the wheels of industry turning for peace, the boys would get all those things.
"But it's really so much easier to create a smug illusion of peace and prosperity by getting the little woman back to her ruffled apron at the kitchen sink and giving her job to her husband. The understanding fictionists and heartthrob psychologists assure us daily that whatever woman may think she wants, she's really much happier in a submerged role as wife and mother and homemaker. Right after V-E. Day, we started getting these little gems about the working wife whose problems are all solved when she discovers she's pregnant, can't work, and is really in love with her husband.
"The only trouble with the idea was that so many of the little ladies didn't believe. They liked their jobs and in fact didn't want to leave them. So the sloganeers sacked the paper pulp industry on them. Now bland authority is issuing dire predictions about the terrible fate that lies in wait for the nursery change child.
"Give the kids a break!
"I have a daughter and I admit I learned about her present and future happiness even if I do work for a living. My girl was past three now. She's been in nursery schools full of part-time for two years already and if I stop working tomorrow I'd still whittle the family budget six ways at once to keep her there. I've had too good a chance to make comparisons watching the children in my apartment house and the ones who go to nursery school too.
"If it's giving the kids a break to coop them up in an apartment designed for adults where mama's every other word of necessity is no or don't touch, if it's giving them a break to let them play on the street under the guidance and training of older children better versed in street law, I'll let mine go underprivileged in a nursery where shelves and sinks and furniture are designed to size and built to withstand the child's powers of destruction where a trained and interested person was with her all the time. If a child's psyche is really supposed to be better off under either the brooding care of full power concentrated motherhood or the nervous yelling of a woman with more work on her hands than she can manage I'll let mine risk the deprivations of nursery school life.
"I've had some chance to compare mothers too. The carriage wheelers and the ones to go to work. Next time you run across one of these the 'worst home is better than the nursery' dictums stop a minute and think about the homes you know. How many of the women you know are able to give their children as much as one full hour of attention during the day are actually physically able to drop what they're doing at any moment to run and give Junior the admiration he wants and needs when he finishes building a particularly complicated blockhouse.
"And just in case the women you know all have mates and you think overworked housewives in street playing are slum conditions try this on for size and see how it fits your preconceptions. In 1935-36, a good year, the prosperity just around the corner, approximately one half of what the statisticians call the economic units which on the average is a family of four at incomes under $25 a week. I could go into rents, the cost of food and household help and the etc. But it's hardly necessary to get a fair estimate how much time mother had for her two kids between laundry, cooking, cleaning marketing and making both ends meet. In the country where kids at least have all the room they need to run wild, this might not be so bad. In urban communities I fail to see how the child benefits from home atmosphere.
"And what about the other half of the good homes full of plenty of free time for the lady of the house? How many women do you know who really care for their children? Who don't have a girl in the afternoons to take the baby off their hands for a while? Who wouldn't honestly rather go shopping, play bridge, work at the Red Cross than stay home with the kids?
"What the self styled authorities don't seem to know is that a real change has come over the world. The old cook stove is no more and farm sized family don't fit into city apartments. In the so called good old days when women had 5 to 10 children to care for and a big house to take care of, she didn't have to worry either about utilizing her excess energies or about the children's play. They had plenty of space and a natural family group. We couldn't go back to that now if we wanted to and nobody really wants to."
I think that's a really pretty good way to set up the situation around this story right here, "That Only a Mother", this story was in fact written in 1946, shortly after the Second World War and the piece that I just read was actually from the July 1945 Temper: The Family Magazine and I think it was the cover piece.
So yeah, this one was written in 1946 while Judith's daughter Merril had measles and was "cooped up" indoors and Judas' brief intimate relationship with Ted Sturgeon was coming to a close. They remained friends until Ted's death. The inspiration sort of was an article in the New York Herald Tribune denying the rumors that infanticides were happening in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and she recalls seeing pictures of brain tumors and other such things and missing limbs on experimental rats exposed to radiation in Scientific monthly.
At the same time she was working on a western story for one of Robert Lowndes' magazines and that was the ghost writing gig and she would keep this up to writing the sports stories of various magazines and even the Toronto Star at one point. She wrote this story in 8 hours straight with time out for calls from the other bedroom.
So I've read this story before doing this podcast. Have you seen this the first time for you guys?
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yes. This is my first ever Merril work that I've read.
Nate:
Yeah, likewise.
JM:
Cool. Yeah, this is a story that I actually read for my science fiction class that I mentioned before on the podcast. The professor chose this. This was actually in the "Science Fiction Hall of Fame" book, I believe the first one. A story that was well liked at the time and yeah, we read the story. People were quite disturbed by the story, I think. They all had one big question, which I'll reveal at the end when we get there. It's probably the same question that we all have, but it's left ambiguous, so you can imagine it either way, but yeah.
What do you guys like this one?
Nate:
Yeah, this is great.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I really enjoyed this story.
Nate:
Yeah, a lot of good social commentary, good style. I like how she plays with the formatting of including the letters and the telegrams and stuff like that. It's always nice when you got in a story and it feels natural, lends a nice touch to the world and the environment that you're reading. And also has, yeah, great monster appearance which is I don't know, it reminded me a lot of the film ЖCombat ShockЖ, if you've ever seen that one, which is basically, you know, like this, but with "Тaxi Driver" laid on top of it.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, it's cool. You don't really know what the monster, like you don't know what it looks like very much until the end, and you kind of slowly get a picture that always maybe not what it seems.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah.
Gretchen:
It's a really powerful reveal for sure.
JM:
It's pretty subtle throughout, and then at the end it's quite shocking.
Gretchen:
I think that that veneer of peace that was mentioned in that quote you read, that is what's happening, you know, at the end and you kind of see that taken to its extreme of, this is the domesticity that's wanted while there's still such horrible things that are going on, such atrocities that can cause something like this.
JM:
Yeah, she makes comments on this in her memoir too, but she had arguments with, for example, Cyril Kornbluth who served during World War II and was very pro like he really stood behind what the Second World War stood for in terms of the American military involvement and stuff then. The way she put it he said it was like a holy war against Hitler, and I think that a lot of people thought, oh you know, it's after it's over and it'll be peaceful and stuff, but of course I don't know, things started to heat up with the Soviet Union and there was always this specter looming atomic destruction in the air.
Nate:
And there's certainly plenty of direct references to that in the story talking about the bomb and the horrible effects of radiation that she no doubt saw from Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as references to the actual program itself, you know, the Oak Ridge labs and all that stuff, so definitely going to be a major theme in science fiction stuff going forward is the threat of nuclear apocalypse and all the horrible stuff that will fall out from that.
JM:
Yeah, there's a lot definitely nuclear fallout and I mean that literally and figuratively in terms of how the science fiction stories of the day really depicted this apocalyptic scenario and so many different guises. We especially see it in the 50s, but this is definitely a concurrent example. We're in 1947, so everything is still fresh in everybody's minds especially with the atom bombs being dropped on Japan. Japan is a country she didn't stay in briefly for a while in the 60s too, so Nate, you were asking earlier about Japanese translations that, yeah, I guess she could, she felt confident enough to do this, so.
Nate:
Yeah, she translated one or two stories in Japanese that appear in an anthology which I thought was pretty interesting.
JM:
Yeah, so let's reveal this.
So this is another short one, more so than the Keller I'm going to suggest to get the full effect of Judith and her prose and everything and the way the story goes. Come back after you've read the story. Listen to the brief summary, but if you haven't read the story read it first, because it's good.
(music: distorted pulse, falling tones)
spoiler plot summary and discussion
This was published in October 1947 in Astounding and here we go, so.
So, Margaret wakes up one morning in 1953, alone in her bed in her place in New York City. And she's pregnant, and the doctor says she needs breakfast, but coffee's always been good enough for her. And she lives in a home with all mod cons, a button starts the breakfast, the fax machine produces the newspapers, and there's some sort of war situation still. And her husband Hank has worked with radioactive materials, and Margaret's mother is worried about the baby. Margaret, though, has been reassured by her doctor. After five months, they can always tell genetic abnormalities.
Margaret works in an office building, within walking distance. It's a desk farm, and she has her own computer. Fancy! She's just thinking about how everyone needs to work if they can, and she was warned by a psychologist once that she might be neurotic, so it's good that she has a job to go to when she has a dizzy spell. Her doctor enforces rest, and she writes a letter to her husband, Hank.
She's bothered reading about infanticides in the paper. It's always the husbands who kill the babies, and the juries don't convict. So yeah, we got some notes and telegrams back and forth from Hank and Maggie. Maggie's baby was premature and put in an incubator. She doesn't like the head nurse who keeps going on obsessively about mutations. She writes Hank, that the baby's normal, though, and maybe just ugly, a face that only a mother would love.
Hank's been in contact with the hospital, too, and they told him the baby is male. But Maggie insists it's a girl, and that she's taken her home already. So the months go by, and the notes from Maggie keep on coming, talking about how well their daughter's doing. Enclosing film reels apparently sometimes. And after only a few months and no teeth, the baby has started to talk, Maggie says. And she's already got plans for a speech therapist.
At seven months, not only can she talk, but she can sing, too. So almost a whole year passes, and finally we get a message from Hank, and he can have leave at last. It's December, and very, obviously, baby is super intelligent, but still in a crib. She can't go in the bathtub yet, and descriptions of her physicality are big, but suggestive. Daddy is expected, and Margaret is preparing a rpast.
I guess what I like about some of the descriptions we've had so far is, okay, if you know what's coming, or you know what kind of story this might be, based on everything I've said so far, you kind of have an idea what the descriptions mean, but they also could just be a baby. You know, sometimes a baby does look like a potato in a sac. Right?
Nate:
It is a nice touch, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. But while bathing, she reads the paper again, and there's more talk of mutations due to atomic bomb explosions, with Hiroshima and Nagasaki being name checked. And yeah, this already happened in Japan, including the infanticides, so it was that stuff that made Hank quit his job and become a technical designer, instead of a technician working directly with missile materials.
Hank arrives, and it's a joyous reunion, made strange by the passing of 18 months time, and, I don't know, I just can't help but feel this might mirror the way Judith thought when her husband came home from overseas. I don't know. It doesn't seem like the relationship lasted long after that at all. I hardly know the guy now, right? That's almost, I don't know.
Yeah, Hank wanders around the place and ends up by the crib. The baby's sleeping, and the covers get pulled back, and the baby says, hello. And despite having heard the news earlier, Hank is astonished. The baby, finally given a name, Henrietta, starts to crawl, but needs to be turned over by Margaret.
She's all done uptight in a nightie for the second time, is likened to a potato sack, and then Hank thinks of a worm. And slowly, and mostly by feeling around, he realizes the baby has no limbs, and her musculature is exposed, and his hand begins to tighten around the sack of flesh as he goes in hysterics, and there it ends.
So, what do you think the burning question on everybody's mind was when they read this story?
Nate:
I don't know. What was it?
JM:
Did he kill the baby?
Nate:
Oh. I don't know.
JM:
Yeah, we don't know. It's fine. It's ambiguous, but it's just, you know, you're under like a much of 19, 20-year-olds reading this story for the first time. Everybody was like, but we don't know. Did he kill the baby?
Nate:
Yeah, that never even entered my mind, so I guess I'd be in the no camp myself. Yeah.
JM:
I mean, all the hints of the infanticides and stuff, but I guess seemed to be leading that way. But...
Gretchen:
Yeah, I wouldn't have thought of it beforehand, but going through it again and thinking about those references, it does feel like it could be a possibility.
JM:
Yeah, and I think kind of goes back to what I was saying once about terror stories and reading Brian Evenson in particular, and realizing that he cuts off almost all his stories before the big horror is revealed, like before the big moment, and some people would carry it one step further and describe that big moment, but he always cuts it off before you know for sure what or if it's going to happen, and that's more terrifying because you don't know, right? So you're left to think about it and imagine it, and she follows that principle in this for sure.
I mean, hey, if you want to be an optimist, you could say, yeah, he freaks out, but she calms him down, and she's like, look, we can still do this. Our baby's super smart. She might look weird, but she can still have a future. I don't know. It's possible, but it's ambiguous. So I guess however your disposition is, however you'd be thinking at the time, is how you would feel about this, about whether he kills the baby or not. Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, I thought it was a more interesting commentary on her state of mind, you know, hallucinating being in this state of denial, where she perceives reality as different than it actually is for what, like a year or two?
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Something like that.
JM:
It seems that way. But she also knows, right? Because she has to bathe baby and she has to take care of baby Henrietta. So she has this neurosis and she talks about it, but she also recognizes it in a way, and I don't know, maybe she mostly wants to hide it from her husband. So she's kind of hiding it from herself. I mean, I don't know. To me, it's like, I get that. I get that part about like, I mean, I'm certainly not going to judge her for it. This is that only a mother thing, right? You know, it's like, it makes sense. I don't know. Who's to say how long that would carry on for. But I mean, I know for sure, like a lot of parents of disabled children are in denial, and they stay in denial for a really long time. But if you ask them, they'll tell you, yeah, we know that we have them, like we know this and we understand this. But that doesn't mean they're willing to take on all the facets and the responsibilities and stuff like that, I guess.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
It's something we've covered before too. I mean, it does remind me of "Alas, All Thinking" by Harry Bates. And I kind of wonder if that was a story she would have, she probably would have read and thought about. And she doesn't mention Harry Bates in her memoirs, but I kind of wonder, like, I guess he was kind of more old school and not in a different crowd and all that.
Nate:
But yeah, I mean, this is well into the Campbell era of Astounding.
JM:
Yeah. But I remember commenting when we did that one, how I thought maybe the story would have been written a lot differently if it was post-World War II.
Nate:
Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah.
JM:
This definitely is less of an epic. It's more of like a weird, I guess, although you could almost say it's like a slice of life of this woman's, you know, pregnancy and her early experience with her atomic offspring daughter. So it's a very different kind of story, but I think it reflects some of the same concerns. And presumably Henrietta, if she grew up, she would have to have mobility assistance of various kinds. And then she would definitely be, she obviously has quite a brain, right? As it developed really quickly anyway.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
That was something that Maggie did perceive accurately is that she is very intelligent.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And so as far as I'm concerned, I mean, there's no reason why she can have a future. She didn't seem like she was in pain. That would have been the main thing, right? This is like, yeah, I mean, being distorted by radiation could cause a lot of painful things, right? Is it not just not being able to walk or not having, you know, well, I mean, she also says her musculature was kind of exposed, like externalized, right? So that could be really dangerous for her too. So I don't know. She's talking about the infanticides. And it's like, I think that as a parent, right, you would want to put yourself in a position of, okay, my child may be different. But I still want them to have a future. And I still want them to be, I mean, this is a consequence of our actions and the society we live in. And maybe it shouldn't be this way, but my child doesn't deserve to die for that. So and yeah, I mean, that's that's kind of why one must ask the question in the end, did he kill the baby? I guess to me, that was the my takeaway from it more so than her particular neurosis about the child's disability or the child's radioactivity induced birth conditions.
Nate:
Right. Yeah.
JM:
That was certainly a really interesting aspect. We didn't really see a lot of Hanks letters and they were all very clipped telegrams. So I don't know, again, it's kind of it feels like a very one sided relationship as well at this point. Although he seems happy enough to be home. But here she is writing all these gushing letters and everything. And he's just like firing off these telegrams, presumably because that's what they did in the military, I guess. I don't know.
Definitely an awesome piece, liked a lot. Really good to read a second time. And also to learn about Merril. And if you're interested, yeah, I would definitely suggest reading those memoirs. Like I said, they are fragmentary and a little bit disjointed due to the nature of the thing that she never really finished by herself. But there's a lot of interesting stuff there for science fiction fans of the American '40s, '50s scene, but also, I guess, residents of Toronto in particular, commenting on things that were happening later in the book and transmigration to Canada and adopting Canadian citizenship and stuff like that, moving in different circles entirely. But it never seemed like she really left a lot of those old figures behind and seemed like as she was getting older, she kind of started to feel really sad that a lot of them were dying before her. And she, I don't know, it seems like there was a lot of things she felt were unset and something when you, you, I guess, read the thoughts of an old person who's been through quite an interesting hectic life. And there's just, I guess, a lot of regrets and emotions and different things that she had to go through and with a lot of these people back in the 40s when she was younger.
She's got a lot to say about it and pretty much every person who was moving in the community at that time, she's got something to say about. And yeah, there were a lot of, from what people like her and Damon Knight tell, it was pretty steamy and sorted with lots and lots of sleeping around and people not being very happy with each other and stuff like that. Unfortunately, when you get into settings like this, you have people with varying degrees of open-mindedness and not everybody's really on the same page. And even if you spend a lot of time talking about it, at the end, feelings of possessiveness and jealousy and purgishness and all kinds of different things still come up. So even though most of these people were, as she said, very left-wing, there are certainly some reactionary attitudes. She calls out Don Wolheim in particular. But yeah, interesting stuff, great story. Definitely recommend. I'm glad you guys liked this one too.
Nate:
Yeah, no, this is great.
JM:
I kind of felt like I had to put this one in as we were kind of talking about what to do for this story of this episode. And then like, yeah, that one has to be there. So yeah.
Gretchen:
I'm glad this one was chosen. And I think it does fit in really well with the other stories.
Nate:
Yeah, for sure.
JM:
All right. Well, time to visit with an author we've already spent a little bit of time with on the podcast. E.M. Forster.
Bibliography:
Knight, Damon - "The Futurians" (1977)
Merril, Judith and Pohl-Weary, Emily - "Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril" (2002)
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