DO: "I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket . .. But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!" by Joanna Russ

"I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket . . . But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!" by Joanna Russ

Discussion begins September 3.

First published the August 1964 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.



ONLINE VERSIONS

None found to date.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?82615

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Hidden Side of the Moon
Cthulhu 2000

MISCELLANY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joanna_Russ
http://tinyurl.com/mhdv4tm
http://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/07/101-weird-writers-27-joanna-russ/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/arts/joanna-russ-74-dies-wrote-science-fiction...
http://tinyurl.com/mpjrpum

Whew! Just barely got all that up in the subject line! I'll be reading from Cthulhu 2000.

With nothing online, I'll be lurking to see whether folks think it lives up to the masterful title.

>3 elenchus:

What you said.

Cthulhu 2000 for me.

I thought there was a lot to chew on in this rather brief story. The title is a little bit of a head-fake: the quoted expression shows that Lovecraft is "just literature" in the story. It shares with "Pickman's Model" an obtrusive narrative frame, doubled in this case: the conversation between Irvin and June pushes the implied recounting from June to Joanna (?) out one frame, allowing Joanna to take the Eliot-burden from the reader, and leaving June as Thurber to Irvin's Pickman.

There was a discontinuity of knowledge experienced by Thurber in the titular allusion, and conveyed to the reader. He didn't realize until he later took the paper from his pocket that "it was a photograph from life." In Russ' story, the discontinuity is expressed by the ironic epilogue of Irwin's demise that Joanna is able to add to June's story.

I found an interesting contrast in the use of the photographic prop itself. In "Pickman's Model," the photo (at the end) betrays the reality of Pickman's inhuman monstrosities. In "I had vacantly crumpled...," the photo (in the middle) exposes the humanity of "the nut" who is so alienating to even the one co-worker in whom he confides.

There were plenty of Lovecraftian tropes: sepulchral chill, urban squalor, and so forth. Even so, I was reminded a little more of Fritz Leiber, with the emphasis on textuality and the femme fatale. Didn't it seem as if Irvin might have conjured "his girl" out of his reading?

She almost fancied she saw a kind of cold mist rise from the page.

Of course, the metaphysical femme fatale is contrasted to the quotidian and humane June Kramer. Russ may be deliberately skewering the male fantasy of the feminine here.

>6 paradoxosalpha:

Even so, I was reminded a little more of Fritz Leiber, with the emphasis on textuality and the femme fatale.

I was absolutely reminded of Leiber. Irv's "girl" could easily have been from the same paramental entity family line as Mater Tenebrarum or the "Smoke Ghost". I found myself wondering what was meant by her "automatic arms" as she embraces Irv. The following description evokes not only Leiber, but the terrifying cosmic reaches decribed by HPL, CAS, etc:

I can see her fade away against the darkening air, that black coat that holds nothing, her iridescent hat become an indistinguishable part of the evening sky, her legs confused with tree trunks, and her eyes – those wild, lovely, violet eyes! – kindling brighter and brighter, radiant as twin planets, brilliant as pole-stars, out of a face now grown to the hue of paper. I can see them melting, flattening, and diffusing into a luminous freezing mist, a mist pouring out from sockets that are now sockets in nothing, doing God only knows what to poor Irv Rubin…

I agree that the tale isn't the play on the original "Pickman's Model" that one would expect. I admire Russ for that. The photograph itself would seem to be merely a photograph of a boy and his dog, and while I appreciate the contrast you point out, let's not forget that in "Pickman", HPL describes "nameless dog-like things in a churchyard teaching a small child how to feed like themselves." Perhaps June hasn't looked closely enough at the photo. There does seem to be something off about Irv that goes beyond a mere obsessive interest in weird fiction. Maybe there was more to his intended nuptials than meets the eye.

>7 semdetenebre: The photograph itself would seem to be merely a photograph of a boy and his dog, and while I appreciate the contrast you point out, let's not forget that in "Pickman", HPL describes "nameless dog-like things in a churchyard teaching a small child how to feed like themselves."

Point taken. And Irv's "girl" has her dachshunds, continuing with the canine signifiers. Given the doggishness of HPL's ghouls in "Pickman's Model," I don't think we can dismiss these lightly.

KentonSem, paradoxosalpha,

Speaking of Fritz Leiber, & as you probably already noted, the cover story in that issue of F&SF is Leiber's "When the Change-Winds Blow."

One other Leiber connection that I kept making was caused by the references to the white, paper-like skin of Irv's "girl". I kept thinking of the "scholar's mistress" from Our Lady of Darkness, a fearsome entity with a body made of books

I really like Russ's writing style. There is a sinister undertone to even the most melancholy passages:

I think she was afraid to move. It was not only the human desolation of that room, but the somehow terrifying vision it gave her of a soul that could live in such a room and not know it was desolate, the suggestion that this bleak prose might pass – by a kind of reaction – into an even more dreadful poetry.

and especially

It occurred to her with agonizing vividness the number of evenings Irvin had come home to that awful room, had come home and pulled out a book and peopled that room with heaven knows what, and then gone to bed, and got up, and gone to work, and eaten and come home and pulled out a book again until it was time to lie in bed for eight long hours (Irvin was a punctual sleeper), dreaming dreams that however weird – and this was less disturbing – were at least more like the lives led by others in their dreams.

Very nicely written. Did anyone else get the idea that June might be a lesbian ca. 1964?

>11 semdetenebre: Did anyone else get the idea that June might be a lesbian ca. 1964?

I didn't, but it would make good sense. It would actually help to justify her sympathy for the repulsive loner Irv.

>12 paradoxosalpha:

I was thinking that single girl June, dressed in a suit for her all-female bridge party, might be a signifier that Russ (who would eventually come out as lesbian) might have dropped in.

>13 semdetenebre:

Yeah, I saw those cues after you pointed it out.

Yes, there is a lot to chew on. I think everybody's comments are intriguing and noticed things I didn't except that nice sentence contrasting "bleak prose" with "dreadful poetry".

However, I had different thoughts from these.

Here's my lightly edited first responses.

Even after reading it a second time, I still don’t know what Russ’ intent was. A literary game? a pun on our protagonist Irvin Rubin, obsessed with Lovecraft and consumed by a mysterious woman who is last seen reading Ovid’s The Art of Love? Are we to make a punning substitution of that title: Craft=Art so the new title being The Craft of Love?

Perhaps we should not think of that Ovid title but his Metamorphoses dealing with transformed human bodies, sometimes in to trees, rocks,a nd animals. The never named woman's appearance is so often metaphorically described in natural terms: eyes the color of winter twilight skies, clothes as black as the night sky, legs “confused with tree trunks”. Given that the narrator last sees Rubin with the woman in a park, the park where Rubin is found stolen to death, are we to think she’s a sort of dryad?

There is a further bit of irony in that Rubin works for Fantasy Press and is killed by a sort of fantasy that acts as, Kramer knows, like no real woman?

But are we to make something particular about his love of Lovecraft? Are we to just make the association that she is an unearthly creature who could only dupe one so socially awkward, insular, and indoorsy as Rubin? Is she proposing a faulty similarity between Rubin and Lovecraft who was, after all, sociable and liked taking walks and married. If Russ was doing some sort of metaphorical speculation on the relationship between Lovecraft and Sonia Greene, she would have been unconstrained by any substantial biography of him in 1964.

>9 dukedom_enough: and >10 semdetenebre: I believe I heard on one of the Coode Street Podcasts that Russ had a great affinity and respect for Leiber calling him the best man she ever knew. My faulty memory tells me she may have been his guest for a few months too.

>15 RandyStafford:

I agree with you as to not knowing the author's true intent with this story. Just when I thought I was detecting a wry humor on her part, the pathos would become almost overwhelming. Then there is Irv's dire fate followed by the Ovid line. Is it a pun? A clue? And of course there is obscure meaning of the title. You might be right in describing it as a "game"! It's a nice puzzle to chew on, at least.

>16 RandyStafford:

Thanks for that info on Russ/Leiber. I'd like to find out more about their connection. It definitely explains some of this story's traits!

>15 RandyStafford: The never named woman's appearance is so often metaphorically described in natural terms: ... are we to think she’s a sort of dryad?

In the set of parallels I adduced in #6, Irv's "girl" would necessarily be the ghoul from the depths whose photograph Thurber pocketed, presumably the same one that Pickman had to fend off during his visit. The canine association Kenton pointed out seems to cinch that.

But she's definitely a being of a different order: sky and trees, rather than underearth, and her origins seem less objective than the ghouls who obviously pre-existed Pickman. Irv is an anti-social fantast, and he seems to have somehow evoked or even created the succubus who dooms him. Note how he emphasizes his own esoteric exercise of imagination.

>18 paradoxosalpha: I agree. I think there is a hint that Irv somehow creates the woman though she outlasts him.

Yes. Good point. The nature imagery is of sky and trees not the earth. Irv may spend his life hanging around in rooms reading, but he doesn't have to go underground to meet his doom. In some sense, the woman represents an escalation of the ghoulish intrusions of Lovecraft's story. They violate our sense of normality by lurking in the dark and underground. Irv's doom is in the open air. The woman even playfully confronts Jane. This is a predator that lurks in our normal world, an aboveground example of the weird.

Fascinating comments, which I delayed reading until I'd been able to read the story. I can see a strong Leiber influence here.

The author is using irony all the way through this story, from the title onwards (the "girl", the climactic scene reveals, is more photograph than reality). This use of irony means of course that Russ can suggest multiple meanings so there may not be one 'correct' reading of the story. For what it's worth, I assumed the character motivations were fairly conventional here: Irv was susceptible to the ghoul or vampire or smoke ghost or whatever she was because he lived in a fantasy world (which included erotic fantasy - and can I point out a link between fantasy (Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont and so on) and "high class" mens magazines like Playboy at the time this story was written? Not to mention the unbroken tradition of cheesecake covers on pulps and paperbacks?) - all the while ignoring a real woman (June) who could have been attracted to him. The card game could have been an example of dull spinsterhood.