The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (99 page)

The young Kuttner was a facile wordsmith, turning out a great deal of copy that had the look and sound of storytelling, but all of it was totally lacking in both original imagination and conviction. He imitated Lovecraft. He imitated Robert E. Howard. He turned out yard goods to order, including mildly sexual or sadistic material for marginal science fiction and horror magazines—which did his reputation as a writer no good. His best-known science fiction stories, a series of imitations of Stanley Weinbaum’s Ham and Pat Hammond stories, which began with “Hollywood on the Moon” (
Thrilling Wonder,
Apr. 1938), were an assignment that was handed to him to write.

During the late Thirties, Kuttner kept traveling back and forth between Los Angeles and New York. When he was in Los Angeles he worked as a reader in a literary agency. Then he’d head off to New York to make contacts and arrange assignments, and even to try to live as a full-time writer. But he would soon get to hate it there and retreat to Los Angeles.

On his way back and forth, he would stop to see Catherine Moore in Indianapolis. She was older than he by three years, and a much more highly regarded writer. Their relationship was largely carried forward by letter, but when Kuttner was living in California, Moore came out to visit him there. The two were married at last at City Hall in New York City on June 7, 1940, four years after they first began corresponding.

Kuttner had met John Campbell during his early visits to New York, and had sat in on his writing circle. After Campbell became editor of
Astounding,
he asked Kuttner for a contribution, but the story he received from him was a Techno Age cliché, and the editor didn’t ask for another.

The problem was that Kuttner had no education whatsoever in science, and wasn’t very interested in it. Nor did he have sufficient faith in the regularity and manageability of the material world to write stories of universal operating principles. In the initial phase of the Golden Age, he had nothing to offer
Astounding.

He did somewhat better in the context of
Unknown.
Over a three-year period, he sold Campbell half-a-dozen fantasy stories. But he was by no means a mainstay of the magazine. He was a filler of pages and very little more.

C.L. Moore was far more sincere and original, but she had never been able to produce much work. From 1934 to the beginning of 1942, she had a total of five novelets in
Astounding,
plus a sixth novelet in
Unknown.

This, then, was the couple that Campbell decided to approach in the spring of 1942 to supply him with as much material as they could write: Moore, the author of highly regarded, but widely spaced stories; and Kuttner, the complete hack, who punished himself by turning out derivative junk that was an insult to his own intelligence, but who lacked the confidence and self-esteem necessary to attempt work of greater ambition.

No account exists of the conditions and suggestions that Campbell made in offering them this deal, but it is possible to make some likely guesses, partly based on what we know of his indications to other writers and partly based on the work that Kuttner and Moore actually produced for
Astounding.

The first condition that Campbell laid down was that they should write together. Individually, they each had weaknesses. Moore was a slow writer and much stronger on emotion than on plot. Kuttner was a technician, a student of story mechanics, but his own stories were thin and derivative. Campbell knew him to be a sophisticated and well-read man, but he didn’t write like one. The two should combine their strengths and produce more work of better quality.

Second, it was an entirely new writer that Campbell wanted to see—not Kuttner, not Moore, but a flashy new talent he could present as a find, an
Astounding
exclusive. The editor would still use work under their own names, but what he really wanted was a whole new personality—a Don A. Stuart, as it were—who would say new things in a new way.

Third, what he primarily needed from them was short fiction—short stories and novelets. He needed to be able to count on a contribution from them for every issue.

Fourth, they should avoid space opera. In fact, they should forget entirely about the old-fashioned sort of science fiction. Instead, they should invent a future, throw in some strange new possibility, and then play the game through to its logical conclusion. Heinlein, van Vogt and Asimov were models of this new kind of science fiction.

There is something else that Campbell may have said. It is possible that he reminded Kuttner of the game “Hezekiah Plantagenet” that they used to play in the old writers’ circle, and how Kuttner had gotten howled down when he would say something like, “ ‘Just then a hole in space happened along, and Hezekiah stepped through it. . . .’ ”

Campbell may have said: “Well, Kuttner, you’re allowed to write stories like that now. Take a look at Heinlein’s ‘ ”And He Built a Crooked House” ’ and ‘By His Bootstraps’ and van Vogt’s ‘The Seesaw.’ And then think about that when this new fellow gets ready to sit down at the typewriter.”

The name of the new writer that Kuttner and Moore chose to become was a token of their determination to write together. They combined the maiden names of Kuttner’s mother and Moore’s grandmother and came up with Lewis Padgett.

Their initial collaborative method had Kuttner writing first drafts and Moore doing final copy, smoothing out the rough places and adding touches of emotion, color and imagination. However, as they grew more adept at working together, their talents blended, even on stories that were published under the individual byline of one or the other. As Moore says, “We collaborated on almost everything we wrote, but in varying degrees.”
⁷⁹⁷

George O. Smith would be a weekend house guest while the couple was at work on a story that is generally credited to Moore alone. He remembers one of them sitting with him for morning coffee while the typewriter rattled away upstairs, and then husband and wife swapping places. Smith says, “They worked at it in shifts, in relays, continuously, until about two o’clock that Saturday afternoon, when the one downstairs did not go upstairs when the one upstairs came down. This time the typing stopped.”
⁷⁹⁸
Story completed.

Moore’s own view of their working habits was:

After we’d established through long discussion the basic ideas, the background and the characters, whichever of us felt like it sat down and started. When that one ran down, the other, being fresh to the story, could usually see what ought to come next, and took over. The action developed as we went along. We kept changing off like this until we finished. A story goes very fast that way.
⁷⁹⁹

Lewis Padgett would become the primary voice of their fiction in
Astounding.
From the spring of 1942 through the end of 1945, Moore would have a two-part serial and a novelet in the magazine, and Kuttner would contribute two short stories and two short-shorts. Three stories would be published under the name Lawrence O’Donnell. But no less than twenty stories would be presented as the work of Lewis Padgett.

Who was this new writer?

Well, to every appearance, he was a man of education, refinement and wit. His stories were full of allusions to Lewis Carroll, James Branch Cabell, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Wolfe, Gilbert and Sullivan, the Venerable Bede, Omar Khayyam, Longfellow, Shakespeare and Shelley. It seemed that he might be a college professor, or perhaps a
New Yorker
writer on a holiday.

It was clear that this urbane fellow had studied van Vogt’s audacious intrusions of strangeness into the familiar world, Heinlein’s future societies, and Asimov’s robots. But the stories he wrote weren’t exactly like theirs, or any other pulp SF. His storytelling seemed more akin to that of John Collier, Dashiell Hammett and Thorne Smith.

Some of Padgett’s early tales were ironies or horror stories, while others were whacky little comedies, exercises in alternative logic. His settings were the Village—America in the near future, or the present day. His favorite subjects were uncooperative robots, corrupt business practices, crooked lawyers, intuitive inventors, bright young couples, intolerably gifted children, time travel, drinking, and glitches in reality.

The initial stories by Kuttner and Moore written in the guise of Lewis Padgett were published during the last half of 1942 and 1943. They can be seen as an attempt to achieve the effects of A. Merritt and H.P. Lovecraft—the sense of imminent incomprehensible strangeness trying to break through into conventional reality—within the new terms of modern science fiction.

Clearly, these stories had many derivative aspects. They were also marked by great fear and reservation. Nonetheless, they had two areas of fresh insight.

More than any previous SF, the stories of Lewis Padgett brought the World Beyond the Hill into the heart of the Village and then denied that there was any essential difference between these two places. Transcendent mystery was capable of appearing anywhere at all, and it might involve the most ordinary of contemporary people.

Padgett’s second great insight was into the nature of transcendence and how human beings might most effectively relate to it. If the World Beyond the Hill was the Village, and the Village was also the World Beyond the Hill, how then was transcendence to be recognized? Padgett’s answer was that anything transcendent to us, wherever it is encountered, must have an appearance of bizarre strangeness, of irrationality, and that the way for humanity to bring itself into alignment with this higher aspect of existence must lie in the cultivation of non-rational thought processes.

The first Lewis Padgett story—which sported an allusion to Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” in the third paragraph—was “Deadlock,” published directly after Heinlein/MacDonald’s “Waldo” in the August 1942 issue of
Astounding.

In a near future dominated by ruthless corporate struggle, the supposedly “ ‘indestructible’ ”
⁸⁰⁰
robots that are the monopoly of one such company are going crazy. At last, one robot, Thor, cobbles together a strange new machine which looks like “the sort of toy an erratic child might construct with a mechano set.”
⁸⁰¹
This is a two-foot-long cylinder, with a lens for an eye, which buzzes and floats unsupported in mid-air.

The first thing the machine does is to blast its maker to pieces. It then goes zipping around the factory grounds performing a variety of weird stunts. It eats its way through steel doors, stops watches, gives heart twinges to company owners, turns people invisible, and nullifies the force of gravity.

The most amusing and imaginative passage in the story is the description of the machine’s pranks during one fifteen-minute period:

The gadget, as though demoniacally inspired, tried to visit each separate branch of the gigantic plant. It changed a valuable shipment of gold ingots into dull, comparatively worthless lead. It neatly stripped the clothes from an important customer in the upper tower. It caused all the clocks to begin working again—backward. It revisited the wretched Twill, giving him another heart attack, and causing him to shine with a vague, purplish glow which did not wear off for more than a month thereafter.
⁸⁰²

For what purpose was the machine constructed? A second Thor robot thinks he knows, and proposes to test his solution. He steps in front of the machine—and it blasts him to pieces, too.

The human understanding of this situation is that it is all a consequence of inquisitive robots at the mercy of an irresistible impulse to discover whether they are actually indestructible or not. Either the problem drives them crazy, or they resort to this odd transcendent solution.

However, there is an underlying half-implication in the story structure that this whole queer episode may actually be the result of these robots being ordered to perform tasks by their human makers that the robots find morally repugnant. Since they are incapable of saying no directly to their masters, this is their way out of an intolerable situation. The strange machine that Thor has made says their no for them.

The second Lewis Padgett story, “The Twonky” (
Astounding,
Sept. 1942), would begin comically enough with another instance of radical strangeness intruding into the familiar world. As it progressed, however, it would alter into a tale of horror. The story opens with a bewildered little man with a big head wandering vaguely out onto the floor of a contemporary radio factory, fingering a bump on his forehead. The plant foreman calls him “Joe,” in the same spirit that he might call anyone “Joe,” and shoos him back to work.

The only thing Joe can remember is that “his job was to make Twonkies.”
⁸⁰³
And so he proceeds to construct a Twonky that to outward appearance looks just like one of Mideastern Radio’s latest radio-phonograph consoles. Only after he is done and has taken a nap under a workbench do the mists begin to clear from his mind:

“Great Snell” he gasped. “So that was it! I ran into a temporal snag.”

With a startled glance around, he fled to the storeroom from which he had first emerged. The overalls he took off and returned to their hook. After that, Joe went over to a corner, felt around in the air, nodded with satisfaction and seated himself on nothing, three feet above the floor. Then he vanished.
⁸⁰⁴

So far, so funny. And the story continues to be amusing as we observe young professor Kerry Westerfield watching his wife Martha pack for a trip, and contemplating his brand-new radio-phonograph—and then being shocked when it uses a tendril to light his cigarette for him. Soon after that, it is out in the kitchen washing dishes. All without needing to be plugged in.

But then the story begins turning nasty. First the Twonky starts deciding what music it will or won’t play. When Kerry comes home after having downed fourteen brandies, it won’t allow him to be drunk, but counteracts the effects of alcohol with a beam of yellow light. There are certain books it won’t permit him to read, including a detective novel,
Alice in Wonderland,
and a book on literary history that he needs to consult in order to teach a class. And when he persists in trying to read the forbidden, it uses another ray on him which leaves him unable to read and comprehend certain ideas.