(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: some bright bells)
Henderson biography, non-spoiler discussion
Gretchen:
Hello everyone, this is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. This episode is about the magazine Galaxy, where we are covering six stories from its pages. For more background on the magazine and discussion on Katherine MacLean’s “Contagion” and C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons,” please take a look at our previous sections.
The second of the five children of Emily Vernell Chlarson and Louis Rudolph Chlarson, Zenna Henderson was born Zena Chlarson in Tucson, Arizona, on November 1, 1917. Her mother, a housekeeper, had emigrated from Mexico a few years prior. She had been part of the Mormon settlement Colonia Díaz, which was destroyed during the Mexican Revolution. Though Henderson was also baptized as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she seemed to be non-practicing, especially after her marriage to a non-Mormon, Richard Harry Henderson, in 1943. Though she never officially renounced her membership, she was recorded as having started attending Tucson’s Catalina United Methodist Church.
Either way, religious themes are frequently found throughout Henderson’s work, her spirituality influencing her writing. Henderson graduated from Phoenix Union High School, then attended Arizona State Teachers’ College, earning a bachelor’s degree in education in 1940. She worked as a schoolteacher throughout the rest of her life. She mostly taught as an elementary school teacher in the Tucson area, but she went through several periods where she taught elsewhere and under different circumstances. The most notable of these was during the Second World War, when she would teach children at the Gila River Relocation Center, an internment camp for Japanese Americans near Sacaton, Arizona. She also taught in France on a U.S. military base from 1956 to 1958, and in Connecticut at the Seaside Children’s Hospital from 1958 to 1959. Before these latter two experiences, Henderson also earned a master’s from Arizona State. On May 11, 1983, after a lifetime of teaching, Zenna Henderson passed away from cancer.
In 1951, the same year Henderson and her husband would divorce, she would also publish her first story. “Come On, Wagon!” was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in the December issue of that year, soon followed in 1952 by the story “Ararat,” the first in a series about a group of beings known as the People, which Henderson would become most known for. In 1959, one of her other works, “Captivity,” would earn Henderson a Hugo nomination. The following year, the story we are covering tonight was published. “Something Bright” first appeared in the February 1960 issue of Galaxy and later was reprinted in “Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction,” which is where I found both of my picks.
Yeah, I enjoyed the story. I thought it was just a really sweet one.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely big contrast from the last story we did, very charming and pleasant. And I know there’s something about just the wonder that she is able to capture here, both in terms of the mystery and childhood in general. A lot of people, I forget where I read this, but somebody made the remark that a lot of people, when they write about children, they write them as small adults and not as children with a, I guess, kind of wide-eyed and almost fantastic view of the world, which she really captures very, very well here, that I liked a lot.
JM:
I think I only read one Zenna Henderson story before this, and it was quite recently, and I can’t remember the name of it, unfortunately, but it also had to do with children. And the main character was an educator. She was a teacher. And one of her big things, maybe her main thing, seems to be this idea that there are aliens among us and that sometimes they live like, “normal people,” but there’s always something that shows through and somebody who has to kind of discover the truth, right? And the other story I read was exactly like that too. And this one was very similar.
This one almost felt more like a fantasy story. It’s not a bad thing, but it had this fairy-tale-esque quality to it. The other one was a little more science fiction, but it had a very similar theme, where the teacher discovered what was really up with this boy and that he was, in fact, a representative of him and his alien family, who were here on the Earth, and there were, in fact, other people like them. And she had to see them off eventually on their spaceship and everything like that because they had to leave for some reason. And it was kind of sad, but poignant at the same time. And yeah, there was this sense of wonder that seems very powerful with her.
And yeah, I mean, I feel this story was a little bit more like, I don’t know if it’s because the main character was a child, but yeah, it did feel juvenile, but not in a bad way. It felt like this is a different kind of story than the others we’ve seen and that we’re going to be looking at. It did feel a lot more, again, even though it’s about somebody in the Depression. It feels pretty modern too, though. It feels like this story could have been written at any time almost and feels like, in a way, the most similar story in this collection of six, to me, strangely enough, is the Lafferty story, because I feel like both of them have this tale-recounted-by-an-old-raconteur kind of feeling to them. And here you’re listening to this woman who’s now maybe a lot older, and she’s recounting this experience she had and how powerful and important it was to, I guess, shaping her life. She’s definitely no longer a kid when she’s relating this story, but she takes you right back there. It was really good and very short, but it packs a lot into it. It’s powerful.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I think that it is really Henderson’s writing, her style. Like you were saying, Nate, she’s able to capture that childhood feeling, the feeling of being a child and relating to a child. It feels very bittersweet at times, though. There’s like a kind of nostalgia, and I think that nostalgia comes through both as the narrator telling the story and the nostalgia for, as we get into it, where this protagonist can never really go.
Nate:
Yeah, and she, well, I guess we’ll get into it too when we get to the story, but yeah, she can’t go there and her friends can, and that is presumably a point of pain when she’s looking back on this. But yeah, I really like this overall. This was a really good story and yeah, relatively unique as far as stuff that we’re covering this time around, for sure.
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah, I do agree, J.M., that it does have a fantastic feel to it. It does feel a bit more like fantasy, and I think it does come from that childhood perspective and the wonder that you feel from it.
JM:
Yeah, I think in the other story, it was kind of like this too. A lot of us, I think maybe just the media we’re used to and stuff, now we’re pretty used to the idea of aliens among us and stuff like that. And I don’t know, even when we look back to “The Fate of the Poseidonia,” which we did a long time ago, and it was a story written in the 1920s, and this Martian guy is like a Martian spy and he’s concocting all these things and stealing the main character’s women and all this stuff. And he seems kind of like an irresistible character or kind of suave and all that.
Again, going with the fairy-tale kind of motif, I guess the tendency would be to think of the alien outsider who has a lot of knowledge and is sending somebody or representatives to live among us. They would be sort of beautiful and they would be irresistible and good-looking and stuff like that. But Henderson makes our visitors kind of a little bit awkward and ungainly. They don’t really know how to handle things. They’re a little embarrassing perhaps from our perspective when they’re acting among us and stuff like that. And in a lot of ways, that makes more sense. I mean, even if somebody studied humanity perfectly for a long time, that doesn’t mean they’re going to be able to ape us and just be the ideal human being that they’ve sent among us, and they’re going to be this beautiful fairy creature, wonderful pixie or something like that. No, no, it’s a different way of looking at it.
And I don’t know, I appreciate that. She’s always described as being kind of big and ugly and even, I think she uses the word gross a couple of times. She’s just like a very ungainly person and she knows it. And that’s part of the reason why maybe she’s not the happiest person in her current incarnation, right, as a human being. So yeah, it’s really interesting seeing this from the perspective of a child too.
Yeah.
(music: cosmic tunnelling)
spoiler summary and discussion
Gretchen:
“Something Bright” starts with the narrator, a woman named Anna, recalling the difficulty of growing up during the Depression and the struggle it was for her mother to feed her and her siblings. However, she also remembers a woman named Mrs. Klevity, who remarkably had eggs for breakfast every day. She came to Anna’s mother to see if one of her children could stay in her house while her husband was away, as she didn’t like being alone at night. She was willing to feed Anna breakfast and pay her lunch money for each night she stayed over at her house. So Anna, despite her discomfort around Mrs. Klevity, was willing to take on the duty to help her mother and their finances.
On her first night at Mrs. Klevity’s, the woman told Anna they couldn’t go to bed until they had checked the house. Anna was confused about this. The door had been locked since she arrived, so who could have gotten in? But Mrs. Klevity was adamant. Doors make no difference. It might be when you least expect, so you have to expect all the time.
After looking through the house, including under the bed, the two prepared for sleep, and Anna, reciting her prayers, heard Mrs. Klevity wondering, “How long, O God, how long?” The next morning, as Mrs. Klevity made Anna an egg for breakfast, Anna asked her if she was afraid of getting burned, being so close and careless around the stove’s heat. Mrs. Klevity showed her a scar hidden by her hair and told her that she had once been burned before. Anna also told her mother that Mrs. Klevity was strange and that she looked under her bed. Her mother responded that she may be hoping to find something there.
That night, as Anna looked under the bed for Mrs. Klevity, she remarked that there was something shiny, and Mrs. Klevity immediately pushed her away to see for herself, disappointed that it was just the gleam from a suitcase lock. The next night, when Mrs. Klevity pleaded with Anna to “look good,” she replied that she hoped to find the way out, the way back again. Anna found nothing and the two went to sleep. However, Anna soon woke up in the night and Mrs. Klevity, speaking in a different voice that Anna describes as like silver, asked if she had ever been away from home and had ever been in prison. Anna reacted indignantly, but Mrs. Klevity clarified that she didn’t mean jail, but “the weight of the flesh,” a feeling Anna does relate to. “You feel that way and you belong Here,” Mrs. Klevity responded.
JM:
Yeah, the whole idea of the thing being something under the bed, it was just so fairy-esque.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
The way it even is described, what you see in this little, almost like a little window, is these little tiny people and stuff like that. It just feels really mystical and strange, and it almost reminds me of Arthur Machen or something like that, or one of these early twentieth-century weird writers who’s obsessed with the stone circles and the fairy folk and stuff like that. It feels more like that in a way to me. It’s not a bad thing. I’m totally cool with that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it’s interesting. You said before, J.M., about the reverse of what we usually see, where we would see these more ethereal creatures that feel inhuman in a more graceful way, but here they are less graceful because they’ve had to put on this new form. And to see that here, with Mrs. Klevity saying this is a feeling that humans do have even though they don’t have any reason for it the way that she does.
JM:
Yeah, and the child is such a practical person to have in this situation because nobody else would really know what to do. But the window is finally revealed, and the alien woman is like, “Oh, but my husband might show up. How do I get the knowledge to him?” And Anna’s just like, “Well, why don’t you just write him a note?” It’s like, oh yeah, okay, cool. That’s a good idea. Easy, right?
Yeah.
Gretchen:
But after Mrs. Klevity responds to Anna this way, they both go back to sleep and Anna believes it was just a dream. The next evening, Mr. Klevity might be returning home, but Mrs. Klevity still insisted on paying Anna if he did. Anna started to prompt Mrs. Klevity into a story about her childhood in olden times, but Mrs. Klevity exclaimed that she is young and that three years aren’t an eternity. She apologized for not making sense, but continued by saying that this was supposed to be just a holiday from There while helping with research. But three years There, she figured, are eight threes Here.
Anna interrupted by saying she’d helped Mrs. Klevity look through the house one more time. Upon her last check under the bed, a dazzling brightness appeared in the space, and Anna called to Mrs. Klevity that there was something bright. The latter shouted for her husband, though he had not yet returned, and Anna suggested she leave a note for him. Once she finished writing one, the woman hurried under the bed, crawling toward and into the light, funneling herself into it until all that was left was her clothes and old skin.
Her husband arrived at that moment, and reading the note, lost no time following his wife. With both gone from this world back into their own, Anna took another look at the light, finding a beautiful world where two silver young creatures were greeted by a group like them, rejoicing. Anna watched it shrink, then went to gather her pajamas. She found a note by Mrs. Klevity leaving her house and possessions to her. Anna ran home, woke up her mother, and, realizing she could never tell her about what she experienced in the Klevitys’ home, told her this news instead. And that is the end of “Something Bright.”
Nate:
Yeah, really good little story. I just like the point of view of the narrator. I like the weird horror aspect that we get here of just kind of being sucked into a different dimension and leaving this human shell casing behind.
JM:
Yeah, yeah.
Nate:
And I guess also the mental conflict the narrator faces at the end of not being able to tell anybody she knows about this weird, tender experience she had and what happened to her friend, who she’s just never going to see again.
JM:
Well, I also really feel like Henderson had a lot of experience with children, and it’s not just like writing the narrator, but also it’s interesting because it’s very domestic. But again, she’s seeing this from a wondrous perspective. And okay, this isn’t necessarily just pertaining to this story, but children can have such a unique perspective. I guess they can be wondrous and wonderful, right, in a way, because they haven’t been formed by the kind of experiences that adults have, and they can think about things differently. And sometimes when we think about children, we have a hard time bridging the gap, and we see them almost as something other and something a little bit strange and alien. Here it’s not an alien child, but that’s the case in some of the other stories. And her main characters often have this sort of sympathy with the other, the alienness, and they want to understand it, and they also want to help, right? So it’s very wholesome and sweet, I think, in a lot of ways.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I do like that balance that you get. She is practical too, Anna, where she has this ability. She lives in this world, and even though this does feel like a story about a childhood that feels a bit timeless, the fact that it’s set during the Depression and we see this reality that Anna has had to already process. I mean, the reason that she’s willing to go to Mrs. Klevity’s in the first place is because she knows her mother needs the money. She does have this practical knowledge in her because of the circumstances that surround her. And yet I think she’s still open to that wonder of something that probably another adult at this time wouldn’t have that same openness to.
Nate:
Yeah, it’s kind of the tenderness shown by the Klevitys. She gets to eat eggs, and that’s just like a rarity during this time. And I think the decision to set this during the Depression was within more recent memory during the time that this was written. But it was a really nice touch. I think that added a lot to the story just because, yeah, you did get that moment of human tenderness there in a really, really tough time that probably goes a long way in the mind of a child who probably doesn’t get to have that kind of tenderness and warmth in her day-to-day life.
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s telling that obviously, before she’s able to admit to this experience that she has, the thing that she says that she remembers is, oh yeah, Mrs. Klevity used to have eggs every day for breakfast. And the fact that she shared that with Anna is just, yeah, really a sweet moment.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
Yeah, and we’ve been talking about the wonder aspect, but on the other side of things, great depiction of the Depression-era atmosphere. Everybody living in really close quarters. Nobody having any money to really buy anything in terms of good food for their families and stuff like that. And it’s just very, I don’t know. I mean, you can tell that she lived through that and she knew what it was like.
So it’s written after the fact, but that’s just different because yeah, I read this right in proximity to “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” which was written during that time period. And it’s obviously a very different kind of story, but seeing the poverty of pretty much everyone except the very well-to-do in North America around that time period, the luxury of something like having your own bedroom if you were a child would have been impossible to imagine, right? It’s just funny when you see today people, I guess, talking about certain things and how, oh, I can’t believe the children were sharing a bedroom and all this stuff. It’s like, that was normal at one time. It still is for a lot of people, right? So living in close quarters, having to walk to some public place just to have a shower and stuff like that. And you’re very, very lucky if you get some lunch money, ten cents for lunch money or something like that.
So it’s well done. I mean, you never really learn about what the research is that the fairy aliens are doing, why they’re there, and they seem harmless enough. They don’t seem to be up to anything nefarious. But yeah, they’re here, and maybe they stand out in a little bit of a way because she always has fresh eggs, right? That’s different. That stands out.
Gretchen:
I know, Nate, you had mentioned there’s like a bit of a horror aspect, especially the leaving the old skin behind, just like that husk. But I also really appreciate there are these really fun little moments of humor. One that I really like is when Anna is telling her mother like, well, she looks under the bed. It’s kind of odd that she does that. Her mom’s like, she might want to find something there. And Anna’s response is, well, she has a husband already, kind of like this sort of implication of like, well, she might be looking for some lover under there. But I think that’s another moment of seeing Anna still sure and has this more worldly knowledge. I just thought that was a really fun moment as well.
Nate:
Yeah, and I also really like the depiction of the Klevitys as just being trapped and stuck there, and what that would feel like for them, being unable to return home, aside from this intermittent, sporadic access to a portal under the bed that comes and goes whenever.
JM:
She likens it to being in prison, right?
Nate:
Yeah, exactly.
JM:
I mean, I guess she’s kind of talking about the body too, but there’s this being in prison in more ways than one.
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah, and being able to not go home, that same nostalgia that Anna seems to have both as she’s recalling her youth and also as she is thinking about this other place, the There rather than Here.
JM:
Yeah, it’s really interesting to see the contrast of the kind of stories that were coming out in Galaxy. They reminded me of Arthur Machen, who is generally known for writing more horror kinds of stories, but it’s not really like that. Just in the whole, the portal to fairyland.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
I don’t know. I want to read more of her stories and see what other angles she comes at this from. And from what I read about her in other sources of the various SF encyclopedias and stuff we have, and based on that one other story, this is kind of a common theme for her. And that was her thing.
And I do like the fact that as we do this podcast, I’ve been kind of noticing certain things like that certain authors have their thing. And their thing is what they focus on a lot. And that’s okay. It’s good to have variety, but it’s also cool when you have a specific, not just style, but a kind of story that you like to write. And it seems like, yeah, I mean, this was hers. And I like that she has a distinctive thing that nobody else kind of has, right? That I know of anyway, from back then. So that’s really cool. I want to read more.
Nate:
Yeah, it’s also an interesting turning point for the magazine, because this is when, not quite when Pohl took over as editor, but Gold was definitely becoming more and more out of the picture with his health issues.
JM:
Yeah, definitely.
Nate:
Pohl was more or less unofficially the editor of the magazine, even if he wasn’t credited as being such in the actual position. So if this was written in 1950 or 1952 or something like that, maybe it would not have been in the magazine. But I think the fact that Galaxy could expand and change and start to encompass more stories like this is a real positive for the magazine, as just being stagnant, publishing the same thing over and over again, is not a winning formula. It can become routine after a while. And yeah, it’s cool that Pohl took it in a slightly different direction in the 1960s.
JM:
Kind of a weird thing that I just thought of, but did either of you ever see the late ’80s, early ’90s TV show “Alien Nation”?
Nate:
No, I know they made a movie out of that. And then the TV show afterwards, I think was how it went?
JM:
From what I remember, and I’m sure I’m not remembering perfectly, but I saw a few episodes. And yeah, it was kind of like these aliens living among us, and these people are like going to high school and everything like that. And there’s something with the aliens, they’re on the run from something or somebody or other, and they’re posing as humans, and it’s working out all right in some ways, but not in others. And I didn’t see much of it. But I know when I was younger and I watched it, I thought it was pretty interesting and like I kind of wanted to see more of it.
And Henderson’s thing kind of does remind me of that. It does seem like these kind of stories were influential. And yeah, I mean, I can’t think of any other examples, but there’s certainly these more modern cases of like, here’s the alien boy or girl at the high school, and there’s somebody who becomes their best friend and learns the secret and all this stuff, or yeah, maybe it’s a teacher or something like that. And things kind of expand from there. I mean, it feels like we’re touching on, and again, this is our job, this is Chrononauts, but it feels like we’re touching on the origins of a lot of different things when we do some of these older stories. And we come up against things that, yeah, we can’t think of anything from before then. And maybe some of these stories didn’t directly influence the things that are contemporary that we know now, but we can see how things begin. It adds another level of interest, I think.
Cool. Well, yeah, it’s really short. It took me what, I don’t know, twenty minutes to read this, like it’s a very, very short story. And so I think we all really recommend it.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I would definitely like to read some more Henderson, especially some of those People stories.
JM:
Yeah, I have a big compilation of her stuff, “Ingathering: The Complete People Stories”. It seems to be that she wrote several stories that were consciously set in, I don’t know if it’s the same milieu as this story necessarily, but the same kind of universe sounds silly to use, but the same kind of context. And yeah, I don’t know, I’ll look through that. But when we come back, we’re going to talk about an author who I’ve considered a favorite for a really long time. We’re going to talk about a man we mentioned a few times, Raphael Aloysius Lafferty, or R. A. Lafferty, as he called himself in print. And we’re going to talk about a story called “Rainbird.” So we’ll be back with that.
Bibliography:
Mormon Literature and Creative Arts - "Zenna Chlarson Henderson" https://web.archive.org/web/20120204042207/http://mormonlit.lib.byu.edu/lit_author.php?a_id=2767
Webster, Bud - "Zenna Henderson" http://www.philsp.com/articles/pastmasters_04.html
Yaszek, Lisa - "Zenna Henderson" https://womensf.loa.org/zenna-henderson/
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