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Kersh biography, non-spoiler discussion
Nate:
Good evening and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Nate and I'm joined by my co-hosts, J.M. and Gretchen, and tonight we are taking a look at six miscellaneous short stories. If you'd like to listen to our first two segments, check out our previous installments in this episode for Kylas Chunder Dutt's, "A Journal of 48 hours in the Year 1945", and Sakyo Komatsu's "The Savage Mouth". But for now, J.M. will be taking us through the short story, "The Brighton Monster", by Gerald Kersh.
JM:
Yeah, this is my bit, and I've been looking forward to this for quite a bit. I picked this one. We all struggled kind of a little bit to pick stories because not that there's a lack of stories, quite the opposite. There's so many awesome short stories in this field, and this is the first time we got a chance to do this. Where do we go? And, you know, I have tons of science fiction anthologies and collections and stuff like that. But for this, I decided that I wanted to highlight a story that comes from somebody who's not exactly a genre writer anyway, although he does dabble in it, and we'll get to that.
Gerald Kersh is somebody I discovered, I think around 2016, maybe early 2017. I came across him, I can't remember, I think it was a list of something that I found online about unusual fiction works or something like that. And then I also came across Harlan Ellison writing about him. So Harlan Ellison is somebody we'll be talking about very shortly, actually.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
He always said that Gerald Kersh was his favorite writer, so that's kind of a cool connection. There's actually quite a lot of connections between all this stuff, which I think is really neat, actually.
But Gerald Kersh was born in Teddington on Thames in England on August 26, either 1912 or 1911. There seems to be some conflicting info about that. But he was born to a large and somewhat impoverished Jewish family. He wrote a lot of genres, arguably crossing over with total ease, but it seems interestingly like the weird and science fiction communities had a large part in keeping his work alive and talked about. It seems after his death, pretty much besides that, Gerald Kersh, despite being a rising star in the 1940s, was all but completely forgotten by the general literary public. Ellison had a good deal to do with preserving his name. He wrote about him frequently.
You can also find some of his stories anthologized by people like Judith Merrill in the 1960s and in the Alfred Hitchcock anthologies, like "Stories Not For the Nervous" and "Fear and Trembling" and basically all these these creepy suspense thriller crime anthologies that I'm not sure how much Hitchcock really had to do with putting them all together. A lot of them do seem like stories that he might have made into either movies or episodes of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series or something like that. To be fair, he does seem to really have had his ear to the ground when it comes to this kind of stuff. Obviously, a lot of his work is based on horror stories of various kinds of suspense stories, Daphne du Maurier and Patricia Highsmith and stuff like that. And I believe even our soon-to-be-discussed Frederik Pohl featured one of his stories and one of his anthologies.
A lot of the biographical and analysis work on him seems to have been done by the writer Paul Duncan in the late 1990s. So we have his website to thank for a lot of the details about him and his life right now. Supposedly he was working on a biography of Kersh for print, but I'm not sure if that come to fruition yet. He did say, "Gerald Kersh was one of those word hustlers who haunted all night coffee bars in London's Soho, writing on stolen toilet paper, making a mug last until daybreak. And when he made it, when he became one of England's highest-paid wordsmiths, fate and circumstance cruelly ganged up to throw him back in the gutter."
Nowadays, you can find additions of some but not all of his works from cool, smaller presses like the awesome Valancourt books. They've done a lot of great stuff for fantastic, weird and decadent fiction reprinting lots of obscure and interesting titles and also producing new anthologies like "The Valancourt World Book of Horror", which features writers from all over the world. So it's pretty cool. Some of them are reprints, some of them are new stuff. They reprinted "Night Shades and Damnations" in 2013 with an introduction by Harlan Ellison, and the same year is comic novel "Fowlers End" with an introduction by Michael Moorcock.
Yeah, again, it's interesting that much of this stuff is not strictly speaking in the fantastic, let alone science fiction, but it's really this community that seems to have taken such an interest in his work, and I don't know if that's because of his writing, which does tend to get a little strange at times, even when he's writing seedy crime fiction. But Valancourt did release his arguably science fiction novel "The Great Wash" called "The Secret Masters" in the US, and this book was originally published in 1953, and it is certainly a work of science fiction. I haven't read it myself yet. I've read a number of his other things by now, and this one has something to do with a group of scientists that want to basically take over the world by melting the polar ice caps, and Duncan compares it to like an Edgar Wallace kind of story. Certainly seems different from some of his other stuff, but some of his short stories definitely fit into science fiction as well. You can find electronic editions of a lot of this stuff online. Well, it doesn't seem like his entire ouvre has been reprinted. It looks like a good amount of it has been, though some of the novels and story collections, they do seem pretty rare, and they may have been only printed a few times during his lifetime and not afterwards.
He seems to have been what was called a raconteur and loved tall tales, and there's an odd sense in his biographical information I found that it's kind of characters you see in his stories, larger-than-life grandiose con men and schemers and boxers and wrestlers with big dreams. They're all wrapped up in Gerald Kersh, the person. He was a big physical presence and worked a large number of jobs from a young age, everything from cinema manager to bodyguard, debt collector, ship's cook, traveling salesman. It seems like he did it all in his lifetime, and reading about him gives a sense of a man who lived hard and fast and maybe burned out rather quickly.
From a young age, Gerald Kersh was really into writing. At some point, he did write the very successful novelist Edgar Wallace, he wrote him a five-page letter, reproaching him for his success and challenging him to read an enclosed short story, claiming it was better than anything Edgar Wallace could have written. But on the same token, he was also asking him for advice about how he could go about publishing his stuff. So supposedly he did get a perfunctory letter back from Wallace's secretary, but what that letter said, we don't know, but the kind of person that you as very, you know, in your face a little bit challenging.
He was also really into wrestling and boxing, and you can see that and a good number of his stories, including the one we're about to cover tonight. He was an all-in wrestler himself for a few years. Outside of that, he was always getting into fights, and in 1931 was apparently hit on the head with a hatchet. And he supposedly won the fight, but had nerve trouble and recurrent headaches for the rest of his life as a result of this injury. It was quite something to look at, apparently, a lot of scars all over his hands and stuff like that. There's some pictures of him online.
His first novel was published by Wishart and Company in 1934, and this was a semi-autobiographical work called "Jews Without Jehovah", which would kind of set a pattern for many of the titles to come in his work, like "Room Without Walls", "Clocks Without Hands", "Profit Without Honor", "Men Without Bones", etc. It really seems to like this format.
This book was the tale of the trials and tribulations of a lower-class Jewish family living in London. But unfortunately, the book was read by some of his relatives who banded together and sued him for libel, and the book was quickly withdrawn. And as far as I can see, it's now impossible to find anywhere.
For the next year, he was working with the larger publishing house, William Heinemann, and his big breakthrough came in 1938 with his third novel, the book "Night and the City". This is a sordid tale of dirty, so-ho nightlife clubs and cons and vicious people, but also very funny at times, and was filmed twice, once in 1950, and once in the 90s with the action of movie in New York. The 1950 movie is directed by Jules Dassin and stars Richard Widmark, and includes actors like Herbert Lom and Gene Tierney. I really like that movie, but it's quite different from Kersh's story. And Kersh himself was paid $40,000 for it and joked that he was the highest-paid writer in history, as he got paid $10,000 of work for four words, the title. This is a really good book, though, and introduces one of, if not his most famous character, the incredibly slippery and devious con artist Harry Fabian.
Short stories were also an important part of his ouvre, and he cranked them out pretty steadily for 30 years, and were all sorts of magazines, large and small. His first book of shorts was in 1939 called "I Got References", and even during the war years, Kersh was extremely prolific, putting out a very large number of novels and short stories in multiple genres, with all sorts of intriguing titles like "Prelude to a Certain Midnight", "The Ugly Face of Love," "The Terribly Wild Flowers", "A Long, Cool Day in Hell," "The Nine Lives of Bill Nelson", "The 1,000 Deaths of Mr. Small," and so many more.
During the war itself, Kersh joined the Coldstream Guards in 1940, and he wrote at night, and ironically, it was while on leave in London, during the blitz that he was injured during a bombing raid, causing him crippling knee trouble, and also destroying a half-finished manuscript he was working on.
To illustrate the kind of guy Kersh was, once again, an anecdote, but he apparently had cartilage removed from his legs, from his knees, and kept it as a souvenir, and years later, while living in America, traded it to a random stranger, one would hope at a bar or something like that, for a zippo.
His injury got him transferred to non-combat duty stuff, associated with the war office, and he was asked to write propaganda pieces. So he wrote what was supposed to be a pamphlet on infantry training, but the war office disliked it and rejected it, so he fleshed it out and sold it as a book called "They Died with Their Boots Clean", a story about young, fresh recruits being heartened into guards, and this 1941 book became a huge seller, and was highly regarded in the war years. Despite this, the radio play adaptation he wrote for the BBC was apparently bad.
He was no stranger to radio, though, having done comedy scripts for the BBC as early as 1936. He had an anonymous column in The Daily Herald called "The Private Life of a Private," and did films for the Army unit. He wrote under a number of pseudonyms around this time for newspapers, one of which was for the people, where he wrote under the name Piers England for pretty much the duration of World War II.
Generally, though, the Army was dissatisfied with his war performance, and he failed to make officer grade, and so was no longer allowed to work with the film unit, but he really wanted to participate in the war, and he managed to talk to some people and got himself flown to France as an American war correspondent. Here, he was on the ground in Nazi-occupied territory, and he had family in France, and he discovered that some of them had been sent to Nazi death camps. For others, he stole food from the Army mess hall to bring to them.
Technically, he'd actually deserted the Army to fly to France, but it seemed he mostly got away with it. Of course, he continued to write, and back in England, he co-wrote the screenplay to the film "The True Glory", which is an Oscar-winning documentary production about the victory in Europe. Perhaps as a result of his position as American war correspondent after World War II, he started spending more time in the United States, where he began to crack the magazine market and also get his stuff published by companies like Ballantine.
"Prelude to a Certain Midnight" was published by Doubleday in the US in 1947, and that's the first Kersh book I personally read. Really great book, kind of a dissection of the detective mystery genre set in, once again, grimy SoHo of the 1930s with a host of really interesting and eccentric characters and a really dark point of view shift in the last quarter when the narrative suddenly changes to the point of view of the murderer.
The Saturday Evening Post seems to have been a favorite magazine of his, but he also had stuff published in Esquire, Playboy, and Colliers. Unfortunately, bad luck or bad business seems to haunt Gerald Kersh, like it hangs around a lot of his characters, and he soon fell into heavy debt. He had lots of money on taxes and started searching for a place he could live and basically not have to pay. He bought a house in Barbados, but it burned down, and he lived in Canada for five years, I think somewhere in rural Quebec, and then moved to Upstate New York, where he lived the rest of his life. It seems like his hard living was really starting to catch up with him, and along with his financial woes, he started to suffer serious health problems in the 1950s and 60s. His second marriage ended in bitter divorce in 1955, and that may have taken another toll on him.
He would have been the first person to tell you, you should take care of the body you have, but it seems like that was a lesson he himself learned too late in life. He was still writing, though, and very prolifically. genre didn't seem to mean anything at all to him, as he just casually crossed boundaries all the time. I mentioned the novel "The Great Wash", though, earlier, and this was published in '53, and this book Paul Duncan links to the sort of downfall of Kersh with a literary establishment. And seemingly, that was not at all what the critics especially were looking for at the time, and sales of his work would decline after this.
Indeed, it seems like Kersh's later period stuff is actually harder to locate than his earlier material nowadays. Still, people did notice his novel "Fowlers End", 1957, was considered by Anthony Burgess an utter comic masterpiece, and that year he also won the Edgar Award, the prestigious American Mystery Writers Prize, for his story "The Mystery of the Bottle", which was an account and speculation on the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce. A writer we haven't covered on the podcast, but we might do someday.
In 1961, he produced a historical novel, "The Implacable Hunter", about Saul, the persecutor of Christians who became Saint Paul, the late apostle. And this novel was again favorably reviewed by Anthony Burgess and compared with Robert Graves' "Claudius" novels.
Kersh died on November 5, 1968, in Middletown, New York, only at age 56, throat cancer, or complications due to throat cancer. So Kersh's short stories in particular often do take the form of a tall tale, often told as though it was a story delivered to the narrator, Gerald Kersh, himself.
And this story here is very nearly an example of that, not as much as some of his others, which literally, oh, Gerald Kersh was sitting at a bar one day and this crazy guy came up to me and started telling me this weird story.
Yeah, this is kind of similar to that in some ways. I read this first in the collection "Night Shades and Damnations", which has a lot of really cool stories from him. It's been reprinted a bunch of times. It first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, February 21, 1948. And it was actually anthologized a year later in an anthology called "The Other Side of the Moon", edited by August Derleth. It ended up being printed first in his collection "The Brighton Monster and Other Stories" in 1953.
So very, very busy times for Gerald Kersh in the 40s and 50s especially. This one was originally just called "The Monster". Somehow the addition of the word "Brighton" does make it stand out a lot more.
But yeah, what do you guys make of this piece?
Nate:
Yeah, I thought that was pretty good. And it's one of these ones that are difficult to talk about in non-spoiler sense because so much of it does hinge on the ending. But overall, I think it was definitely a good one. And this is an author I'd never heard of before you picked the stories.
Gretchen:
Yeah, of course, I only really knew about Kersh after we had talked about him, J.M. I did not know about him before that. This is still the first thing I've read. I would like to read more by him, but I thought this was a great story. I know that we've kind of mentioned before that we have quite a few stories that we've read this for the host choice here that are disturbing in kind of the more traditional horror ways, and then there are stories that are disturbing in more subtle in ways that cut closer to our real world issues. And that's definitely what we get here. It is really just a very sad story. And of course, it's hard to say why without getting into spoilers, but it is quite... This one is definitely a heavy story in the same way that some of the other ones we've read for this section have been.
JM:
Yeah, and I just spent a few minutes talking about Kersh's life and from all that stuff, you would kind of expect this really grandiose, big, larger-than-life kind of crazy story. But this is actually very understated, very calm. It doesn't really feel like some of his other stuff, although it seems like also what's come of learning about his entire output is that he was capable of a lot of different things and moving around a lot in different areas of genre and everything. And I don't know, I'm really... Since I started reading his stuff, I really got into his work a lot. The short stories are really diverse and really good. The novels, although I mostly read the kind of London crime, con-type novels and stuff like that, they're really, really awesome. Really, really cool writing, really sharp, really funny. Very interesting characters that he really makes you understand and relate to, and sometimes it's really painful, and especially you're reading about somebody who seems like a really, really shitty person at first and then you get to the core of what kind of person it is and why they're that way, and suddenly you end up empathizing with them more than you thought you would. It's pretty cool.
Yeah, I like this one a lot. Most of the stories in "Nightshades and Damnations" are maybe not quite as fantastical, but they can be a little bit that way. "The Man who Collected Clocks" was a good one in there, and "Busto Is a Ghost". "Too Mean to Give Us a Fright!", a story about a despicable landlord who ends up having, again, a tragic underside to him.
This one, yeah, we'll just get into it, because like you said, Nate, it's not really, you can't really talk about it too much without describing...
Nate:
I mean, I guess you could say it is good in the atmosphere. The atmosphere reminded me a little bit of the beginning of that Visiak novel, "Medusa" we covered a while back, where it's just kind of weird stuff happening around this coastal sea town. Yeah, you get a lot of weird goings on here for sure, but yeah.
JM:
Yeah, I didn't make that connection, but you're totally right.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I didn't think about that either, but I like that comparison.
JM:
Yeah, definitely. It was actually from that book that I learned that Portishead is an actual place, not just a band.
Nate:
But I guess, generally speaking, if you're into that weird sea kind of stuff that we covered a whole while back, this could definitely fit in there, and I think it has some similar atmosphere to some of those stories.
Gretchen:
Yeah, kind of even like with Hodgson, it kind of has that same sort of vibe to it.
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spoiler summary and discussion
JM:
So yeah, the way this is told is really interesting, because again, it's kind of like a story within a story, and until you get to, you kind of think that maybe the narrator is just going to talk about his manuscript and nothing else, but then in the end you kind of get the addendum to it, which adds the cap onto the whole story and gives it a lot of its weight.
But the Brighton Monster purports to be a thing discovered by Gerald Kersh, and he's going to summarize a dusty old 18th century manuscript he found and add something to it. So it's an extraordinary tale full of sad coincidence.
The newspaper office was clearing out some garbage, and of course it's London in 1943, and there is a paper shortage, and well, everything has to be salvaged. So the corridor is full of moldy old paper by the sound of it, and most of the paper was pulped, hundreds of pounds of it. But Kersh saved this weird little pamphlet entitled, "Account of a Strange Monster Captured Near Brighthelmstone in the County of Sussex on August 6th in the Year of Our Lord 1745".
That was probably at the bottom of a drawer somewhere, and this, of course, is in 1943, and the significance of this find took a bit to become clear, but, of course, our friend Gerald is publishing this in 1948.
He says the only reason he grabbed it was that he was born on August 6th, so I guess he thought it'd be amusing. And he read the thing, and it languished unattended in his uniform pocket until two years after the end of World War II. And he offers 250 pounds to any lady or gentleman who comes forward who might have sent this to the paper.
Anyway, he calls the document rubbish from a literary standpoint, a pretentious piece of, "natural philosophy written by an idol reverend in the church." Kersh exhibits some contempt for the writer, so that's somewhat amusingly named Arthur Titty.
Nate:
Yeah, I was kind of just curious why he went with that name. I mean, we've covered a lot of silly names on the podcast, but that has to be one of the silliest.
JM:
Add Art Titty to the collection. But he does say the manuscript makes him afraid in a succinct paragraph while it's on. So the monster was found in the summer of 1745 by a couple of fishermen off Brighton, then generally called Brighthelmstone. Not the tourist attraction it would later become.
These two fishermen, though, brothers-in-law Hodge and Rogers, are out in a boat, and they had a bad night, and Hodge, a notorious drunkard, is in desperate need of money. So he was just about to turn for home in discouragement when it's like there's a huge bubble bursting nearby in the sea, and suddenly something's there, a monster of the title, a thing the likes of which the parochial Englishmen have never seen, but which George Rogers instantly identifies as a man, nonetheless.
Hodge says, it can be no such thing! He thinks it's a merman. The body is naked and covered in tattoos of snakes, dragons, and birds with yellow skin. And Hodge is excited, instantly smelling profit. He wants to sell his find and thinks it's worth a lot more than his usual catches.
The man, or creature, is definitely alive and bleeds profusely when they hook him and pull him into the boat. The tattoos the men find frightful, but they are described rather beautifully and are done in many colors.
"It was shaped like a man and covered from throat to ankle with brilliantly coloured images of strange monsters. A green, red, yellow and blue thing like a lizard sprawled between breast-bone and navel. Great serpents were coiled about its legs. A smaller snake, red and blue, was pricked out on the Monster’s right arm: the snake’s tail covered the fore-finger and its head was hidden in the armpit. On the left-hand side of its chest there was a big heart-shaped design in flaming scarlet. A great bird like an eagle in red and green spread its wings from shoulderblade to shoulderblade, and a red fox chased six blue rabbits from the middle of his spine into some unknown hiding place between his legs. ‘There were lobsters, fishes, and insects on his left arm and on his right buttock a devil-fish sprawled, encircling the lower part of his body with its tentacles. The back of his right hand was decorated with a butterfly in yellow, red, indigo and green. Low down, in the centre of the throat, where the bone begins, there was a strange, incomprehensible, evil-looking symbol."
So you can see why a couple of poor English fishermen would be pretty surprised and not know what to make of this. Rogers covers him up and gives him bread to eat while Hodge gives him some gin and a live fish and goes on about how much money he'll fetch, despite Rogers' protest that they should throw him back. The, "monster" looks very distressed and cries out in a strange voice.
When they get to Brighton, this is where Arthur Titty comes into the picture. Everyone's excited about the find, and the Reverend leaves his book and breakfast, throws on his hat, and marches down to the pier. Titty also recognizes, instantly, that it's a man, but he doesn't respond to any of the languages that the Reverend knows. And the Reverend thinks it's a shipwrecked sailor, but Hodge says, that's impossible, no wind, no wrecks of any kind nearby, no foreign ships, and he points out that the stranger's skin is free of the signs of immersion.
So they have an argument while the monster looks on in distress, and the Reverend agrees to give Hodge a crown for the loan of the stranger, whom he takes to his house to examine. All this not before the stranger's doused with buckets full of seawater, though, and there's a bit of a pattern going forward. Lots of people think that the fact that this revives him from a faint proves that he is a deep sea merman, and they don't know how to feed him, so lots of things are tried. Go figure, he doesn't like seawater or rob meat, prefer it fresh and cooked, respectively.
In their ignorant way, I guess they try to look after him, and he's got a bed of straw and a blanket, only the blanket is damp with seawater, as if he'd prefer this somehow. The Reverend also does all sorts of experiments for his natural philosophy document, weighing, measuring, and bleeding. When the stranger revives, the Reverend's account says he likes to walk and seems extremely strong and agile. He can pick up and throw a man twice his weight, as demonstrated when a surly blacksmith tries to pinch him, but it soon becomes clear that the stranger is not a well man. Not only is he dejected and won't eat much, but sores start to appear on his skin, and they keep assuming he's some kind of air-breathing aquatic mammal, and seawater is really good for him.
Meanwhile, Hodge and the Rev have a small, legal battle, and the former gets seven guineas for the fine, but then hears that a showman offered the Reverend twenty-five for it and basically goes nuts. He ends up in the stocks for being a nuisance, and he immediately starts a fight with his brother-in-law and brains him with a heavy ale can, and gets hanged for his trouble. So none of this stuff makes the Reverend a popular man, and the find is now considered unlucky. Things get pretty intense with an attack on his home, and he ends up moving to London eventually. But meanwhile, the stranger is getting worse, and his sores now turn to open, suppurating blisters, and his teeth begin to fall out. He's locked in a room regularly soaked with water, while a learned doctor pours boiling pitch on the man's sores, and the man does occasionally seem to want to escape captivity, and at last three months after his capture, he does, and he pushes past a manservant at lightning speed on a windy, stormy day.
The stranger runs at full tilt out into the bitter November, plunging into the sea, swimming like hell, and eventually being lost forever. In a room where he'd been held, using one of his dislodged teeth, the man has scratched some markings on a wood paneling, which the Reverend faithfully duplicated in his account. The bright, cobblestone fisherman said, "the sea devil" is what they called it, and this is when the Reverend Arthur Titty packs up for London, and is totally forgotten about his pamphlet of natural history making not even a splash.
But in 1947, our narrator, Kersh, meets up with a Colonel friend of his who works in intelligence, and the guy's retired, but he's spoken about with some reverence, like a romantic wandering character who has seen and done many things which most normal people would never imagine. And this man's really into sports, and like Kersh, he loves boxing and wrestling, and over coffee and cigarettes, the Colonel's waxing enthusiastic about wrestlers from Asia in the West Indies. And here's where Stanislaus Zbyszko is name-dropped, having been beaten by Gama, a West Indian wrestler of considerable age, and mentioned Zbyszko because he actually ended up in the film version of "Night in the City", which hopefully maybe was one thing that may have pleased Gerald Kersh a little bit. The only film he ever acted in, and he played a pretty cool character in that movie.
Anyway, they start arguing about Japanese wrestlers, Sumo vs. Jujitsu, I guess, and the Colonel expresses his favor for the light Jujitsu masters, and it's here that he mentions an incredible wrestler named Sato, whom he had seen in Japan, and who he thought of taking around the world, and I guess this is a hobby of his, but Sato disappeared without trace, and described his looking frightful. He has a picture of him in his wallet, hanging on, and he's like, he has a picture of him there, and he's like, hang on a sec, let me get this picture, and lo and behold, standing among a group of big, strapping, strong men of various types is a compact man, covered in colorful, mythological, and animal tattoos, and Kersh, getting a strange feeling, runs for his old uniform, where that pamphlet has been hanging out, smelly, and neglected, and the Colonel reads the document and is quite astounded.
It's quite a coincidence we have here, but a kind of a cool one, and he can describe easily how Sato's behind was tattooed. It's the same with the octopus and the fox chasing rabbits. Kersh points out the pencil representation of the weak, sick man's teeth scratchings, although it's distorted by time and degredation the Colonel can tell it's Japanese and eventually translates.
"I was asleep. I thought it was all a bad dream, from which I should wake and find myself by the side of my wife. Now I know that it is not a dream. I am sick in the head, pity me poor Sato, who went to sleep in one place and awoke in another. I cannot live anymore. I must die. Hiroshima, 1945."
And Sato had indeed lived in Hiroshima and was on leave from the Navy in August 1945. Did he catch the middle of the bomb blast? Did they somehow shunt him backwards through time and through space, of course. What's more, the symptoms Sato had definitely sound like radiation poisoning, and he speculates on various monsters exhibited in the 18th century at fairs and such. Makes you think, both men agree.
The Colonel expresses a shuddering pity for Sato, and he says, "It scares me, Kersh my boy. It puts a patch to trains the thought of the most disturbing nature. It makes me remember that past and future are all one. I shall really worry in future when I have a nightmare. One of those nightmares in which you find yourself lost, struck down, completely bewildered in a place you've never seen before, a place out of this world. God have mercy on us. I wish I'd never thought of that disgusting secret weapon."
So, yeah, it's really something, and Kersh is writing about this, and obviously had a lot of reason to participate in the war and to hate Nazis specifically. And yet, he says through his characters in this work that the worst invention that mankind ever came up with was basically the atomic bomb, and that was used against Japan, obviously. And certainly, during this time, we definitely see a lot of impending fear of what would happen with the development of first the A-bomb and then the hydrogen bomb, future nuclear weapons that would come to pass that could indeed make the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like minor incendiary devices.
Nate:
Yeah, and definitely the nuclear apocalypse paranoia is a major theme in science fiction for the decades to come. And we've seen a couple of stories of the effects of the bomb in culture before, the Judith Merrill story we covered it a couple episodes ago as a really good example of that. And I don't know, it's really effective at what it does. I mean, it's basically, it's simple and it's messaging, but it combines two concepts of the damage that the bomb does to people with out of this weird time travel story in a way that kind of reminded me of the Poul Anderson, "The Man who Came Early", where we have this one figure just kind of thrust into a time period where this character has even less of an idea of what's going on or how to function or engage with the society as at least the character in the Poul Anderson story could at least speak the language of the Icelanders whereas this, our Sato here is completely illiterate and unable to speak English, French, German and whatever languages the Reverend speaks to him.
JM:
Yeah, and the Reverend apparently knows a good number of European languages and he tries them all and none of them really make any difference, right? He can't understand a word. He's also sick and lost and there's no success at communication and it doesn't seem to occur to the Reverend to really put a lot of effort into that aspect of things. So he's basically like just stuck there getting buckets of water dumped on him the entire time and like this must be so such a miserable existence, right? It's just like, and yeah, like just thinking like, you know, we think of, I guess, yeah, I mean 1745 Britain during that time, like there were novels and other works and stuff like that and the Enlightenment was in full swing and stuff, I guess, but it really makes a point of how 200 years in the past pretty much there's no hope of bridging the gap between Sato and the people in this stupid village, right? It's like, it's really, it might as well be the medieval times or something like that.
Nate:
It almost adds another horror to the bomb in addition to the physical torture. It's the mental torture and estrangement that he experiences.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, definitely a very emotional piece. And it kind of strikes me too that this was published in a quite a mainstream magazine too. I mean, I guess by this time the larger magazines were starting to try their hand at publishing the odd science fiction story in America. And of course, looking at some of the older ones like Argosy and stuff, I guess, yeah, they did regularly feature these kind of, well, sci-fi adventure stories and stuff like that at least. But this was like even more mainstream than that, right? It's like the Saturday evening post. So this is interesting, you know, he was cracking these markets and really seemed to want to tell this strange story. Yeah, it's powerful. I mean, it's the kind of thing that you can reread a few times and just like it really, he sets it up so well with this like intriguing situation of finding this old manuscript and not thinking much of it. And he's like, well, now the time has come for me to tell you what it contains and then to find out about "The Brighton Monster". And yeah, it definitely partakes in the tradition of, I mean, I don't even know if "paranoia" is the right word because yeah, I mean the...
Nate:
Well, maybe fear and dread and, you know, "paranoia" probably isn't the right word because it is a very rational fear.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. And it's not like, you know, fear of a specific enemy, even in this case, it's just like the weapon itself, right?
Gretchen:
And like even that implication, of course, at the end that this is something that didn't just happen to this one individual, but like it's a situation that many people could have gone through with the use of this bomb and maybe even future uses of this bomb, people being sent back if this weapon were to be used again.
JM:
Yeah. And I guess I didn't look this up and it kind of got me thinking like, so how many people during that time, especially people who were in Hiroshima, for example, how many bodies were never recovered, right? Not saying like they definitely went back in time, but it's just kind of weird, creepy feeling, right? It's like, we don't know, especially in 1948, like he was kind of thinking like, I don't know what the consequences of this could be. Not only terrible radiation sickness and stuff like that for the survivors, but something else that's still unknown, right? We see that decades in the future too with all kinds of ideas that like radiation can cause really strange things to happen and stuff like that. I guess in this case, you know, it's the blast itself. You know, he's kind of even talking about how, well, of course, it's not just movement in time, it's movement in space as well, right? So it's very short story, but it packs a lot into its few pages.
Gretchen:
We've talked with some of the other stories about the idea of eugenics and certain kinds of sciences that have exploited certain people and like have made us look at people differently, different groups of people in dehumanizing ways, and even that is kind of covered in this and like that idea of this person who everyone thinks is just this monster, this beast that is a spectacle that should be put on display or be made as like something to have profit made off of him.
JM:
But it's interesting too because like you got the two brothers, right? The one of them was like, oh, it's obviously a person, right? And the other was like, no, no, it's a profit making machine, right? I need my beer money, right? The contrast, I mean, it's too bad that the more somewhat perhaps somewhat more sensitive brother who actually tried to feed him real food and stuff didn't make it to the end of the story. But yeah, you know, even he was like fearful, you know, it's like, oh, we should like it's bad luck. We should throw him back in the water, right? Where he would obviously die pretty quickly. Just this is an interesting contrast there. And the Reverend, I guess, learned it for his time, you know, he still can only do so much. And he's like thinking of this more as a "natural philosophy" study than an actual. Well, I have a mysterious person on my hands. I should try to help him somehow, right? This doesn't seem to really cross his mind.
Kersh's own war experiences and stuff like that might sort of play into this a little as well. Thinking about people being turned into, you know, something less than human by their circumstances and by the war machine and by Nazi deprivations and stuff like that. But yeah, and when you read that message from Sato at the end and you know what it says, it's just so like, it's not like a long death note or anything like that. But it's just so, just a poignant few sentences, right? It just makes you feel like really bad. Just, oh man.
Gretchen:
The image of him writing it with his own tooth is really also just really, really sad and really quite effective.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, and to think like he did that knowing probably that nobody would ever see what he wrote, but he had to have something. He leaves something behind, right? Yeah, as it turned out, somebody did see what he wrote. Gerald Kersh gave it to the public in the way that Gerald Kersh does.
But yeah, I mean, I would definitely, I'm not sure if this story ended up in any of the general, I mean, it's obviously in a few Kersh collections that you can get now, but some of his stories, like especially the one "Men Without Bones" seems to have been anthologized a lot. But I think this one did show up in a couple of places. I think I came across it and I can't remember what it's called now, but it's actually a collection of, I can't remember the title. I have to see and maybe I can add this in, but it's a collection of stories from non-science fiction authors, basically writing science fiction. And I think it was put together in the 60s or 70s or something like that.
Nate:
Yeah, I see one that's called "Tales of the Supernatural". That was from the 60s, 1962. And there's a later one, "The Young Oxford Book of Time Warp Stories" from 2001.
JM:
Oh, interesting. That seems like it'd be, that would be a cool one to get.
Nate:
Yeah, it looks like there's another Poul Anderson story in there. There's a Ray Bradbury story, Arthur C. Clarke. A couple of authors I recognize, a couple, a lot more than I don't.
JM:
Yeah, these anthologies that have been published over the decades are really gold mines of interesting stuff, and what I really like about them too is that you can go down big rabbit holes where you find an author and you really like it, and you're like, oh, I'm going to, I want to find out more about that person, right?
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
And this is just such a cool thing to discover. Just looking at the table of contents, you're like, oh, I know that name. Let's see what this one's like. And yeah, I mean, when I started becoming aware of Gerald Kersh, I found a few of his stories and collections and stuff like that. Oh, you know, that's really cool. And he has a style that's really awesome. And although this one definitely feels a little different, like it's a bit more reserved, I guess, like it's got that wartime sobreness to it. But it's still got that thing that he does so well, or it's like, well, let me tell you a strange tale. This one, he seems like genuinely, like he said, he's afraid, right? So he's thinking about the consequences of this great scientific discovery and secret weapon.
And also, yeah, dehumanization, you know, major theme in this work. So, but yeah, I definitely recommend this one a lot. This is a really great little story. And again, if you can read this, probably only take you maybe 45 minutes or something like that less. And it's powerful little piece.
Gretchen:
Yeah, even though it is effective, especially if you don't know the twist, even knowing it, it's still a very good read.
Nate:
Yeah, it's one of those stories that do benefit with a reread knowing that, going into it.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Looking at it from a different angle. Because when I first read this, I had like no idea that that was what the twist at the end was going to be, this nuclear time travel thing. I don't know what I was expecting, but not that.
JM:
Well, yeah, were you expecting something different?
Nate:
Yeah, I just didn't know it was going to go in this sci-fi direction. I thought it was, I didn't know what it was going to do really.
JM:
You thought it was going to be an actual monster or something?
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know.
JM:
Yeah, my rampaging monster in 18th century and whatnot, right? That would have been fun, but yeah, it's not like that at all. And yeah, I mean, it's got that thing where I think sometimes people have trouble with that, like the beginnings of stories because they have no idea where it's going and they don't know how to like align themselves. And it's a little harder in a novel sometimes, but with a short story like this, it doesn't take him long to get to the main narrative. I don't find it a waste to set it up this way. I think it's a really good way of setting it up and using like this. Yeah, like Kersh does come back into the story in the end, puts the pieces together with his friend there. And yeah, it's a huge coincidence. But like I said earlier, I think it's actually a pretty cool way of using a coincidence. To like make the story work. There's sometimes you see a big coincidence in a story and you're just like, Oh, that would never happen, right? But I don't know for some reason that didn't really cross my mind here. Like didn't cross my mind. Oh, like it's a nice coincidence that he just happened to meet this colonel who just happened to know who this guy was. And he just happened to find this manuscript in this like happened, you know, it's just like, yeah, well, sometimes weird shit like that is what makes a story good. I think it really worked here, even though it seems improbable. But I mean, it also seems probably not likely that a man would be shot backwards in time by an atom bomb, but it's still a cool way of showing how weapons like this can be dehumanizing and terrible.
All right, well, I'm not sure we'll be coming back to Gerald Kersh on Chrononauts because there's really not a ton of science fiction content. Maybe one day we could do that book, "The Great Wash". There's a couple of other stories that might fit in, but even if we never talk about Gerald Kersh again, I'm glad that we had the chance this once because, yeah, in the last few years, he's definitely become an author I really, really appreciate. And I'm glad that we were able to bring him in this episode. Glad we all enjoyed it. And I think it's time to talk about another story, another very, very dark story written by Frederik Pohl.
Bibliography:
The Nights And Cities Of Gerald Kersh https://web.archive.org/web/20160212044247/https://harlanellison.com/kersh/
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