THE DEEP ONES: "Usher II" by Ray Bradbury

"Usher II" by Ray Bradbury

Discussion begins March 9.

First published as "Carnival of Madness" in the April 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories.



ONLINE VERSIONS

https://drinkwateronline.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/usher-ii-bradbury.pdf
https://youtu.be/NHqS_yAimss (audio version read by Leonard Nimoy)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?64844

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Martian Chronicles
The Illustrated Man

MISCELLANY

http://www.britannica.com/art/horror-story/images-videos/Science-fiction-writer-...
http://www.raybradbury.com/
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6012/the-art-of-fiction-no-203-ray-brad...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XESDRP82png
http://tinyurl.com/hoaw97a

Way back, in my early teens or so, I made an attempt at reading The Martian Chronicles but gave up because I found it weird and aimless. It shall be interesting to see what I think of this now.

Re-read the Martian Chronicles relatively recently, after first reading it as a teen during a Golden Age of SF focus. It held up, but the biggest impression it left was the vignette style of telling an overarching story. I recall only a few of the stories specifically, and "Usher II" isn't one of them (at least, not by title). I'm curious to discover what is familiar about it this time, if anything.

>3 elenchus:

"Usher II" wasn't even in the edition of The Martian Chronicles that I read in the late '70s (under its original UK title The Silver Locusts).

I'll be rereading this in my (can it be?) 30+-year-old paperback copy of The Martian Chronicles:

That's the same edition I have. Not the same as what I first read it in, though it was around then.

>6 elenchus:

Cool. Mine actually has the "Scholastic" logo in the upper right-hand corner and doesn't have the pricing and publisher info in the upper left-hand one, but otherwise it's identical to the one in >5 artturnerjr:.

http://www.librarything.com/pic/5225055

Here are the late-70s UK paperback editions of "The Silver Locusts" and The Illustrated Man. I'll read Usher II in The Illustrated Man.

(illustrations by Peter Goodfellow).

>8 housefulofpaper:

Nice! Those old Panther paperback covers are pretty great.

I am very fond of this old Bantam paperback cover from the early 1950s (artist unknown, unfortunately). Characteristically manly and phallic. Donald Trump would approve, I have no doubt:

>9 artturnerjr:

Yeah! Those Martians better watch out!!

A good piece to read after you've read the story (contains spoilers):

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/opinion/uncle-rays-dystopia.html

In my edition of The Martian Chronicles, the preceding "story" is really an introduction, and apt for "Usher II" but also a bit spoiler-ish, or at the very least heavy-handed in its foreshadowing. The piece is called "The Naming of Names".

Sometimes Bradbury's propensity for nostalgia can be a bit overdone, but here it works quite well with the razor's edge that awaits just underneath.

Here's a fascinating article on Poe:

http://historybuff.com/edgar-allan-poe-had-a-time-machine-and-i-can-prove-it-K0G...

Bradbury was nothing like a prescient futurist. The US moral clampdown and biblioclasty of the 1970s was certainly off the mark!

I'm divided on this one. I love the idea and the set piece of the House as a trap, not quite Dante-esque in meting out its punishments but darkly comic enough. And the head-to-head scheming of Stendhal and the Moral Climate officer was intriguing, despite it ending up pretty one-sided in the end.

But I'm left with a strong vibe of pettiness and heavy-handed morality from Stendhal himself. Talk about a Moral Climate officer, he would have been a fabulous crusader, just happened to be on the other side. The ultra-conservative strain of Bradbury's politics spoiled the experience for me on this one.

Setting that aside, though, I'm impressed with the nomination, it would not have occurred to me to find this one, but it works really well as a DEEP ONES read. And the references to various Poe tales, not to mention Stendhal as an influence, were pretty fun.

I didn't find Stendahl a sympathetic character at all. He's a psychopath, albeit a product of bizarre cultural repression.

There's something so gloriously pulpy about this story in its religious fervor for gothic horror transmogrified into mad-scientist robotic vengeance.

"Is the color right? Is it desolate and terrible?"
"Very desolate! Very terrible!"
"The walls are - bleak?"
"Amazingly so!"
"The tarn, is it "black and lurid" enough?"
"Most incredibly black and lurid."
"And the sedge - we've dyed it, you know - is it the proper gray and ebon?"
"Hideous!"
Mr. Bigelow consulted his architectural plans. From these he quoted in part: "Does the whole structure cause 'an iciness, a sickening of the heart, a dreariness of the heart, a dreariness of thought'? The house, the lake, the land, Mr. Stendahl?"
"Mr. Bigelow, it's worth every penny! My God, it's beautiful!"

That works well - equal parts Charles Addams and modern fanboy mentality! :-)

"Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can."

– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction(1979: 204).

An homage from one master of fantasy (Bradbury) to another (Poe). Good stuff. (The references to Lewis Carroll and Lovecraft don't hurt, either.)

>14 paradoxosalpha:

Apologies if I'm misreading your tone, but it seems to me that that's hardly the point. Science fiction (or in this case, science fantasy) is almost never really about what the author thinks is going to happen in the future - it's about what the author thinks about what's happening now. "Usher II" is, I think, very much about what Bradbury thought was happening when the story was published (i.e., in the early 1950s). As Peter Nicholls wrote in the online version of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (in an article on anti-intellectualism in SF) , "The 1950s were the era of McCarthyism: it was a common fear of US writers and artists that to be viewed as a smart aleck might be a preliminary to being attacked as a homosexual and thence, by a curious progression, as a communist – that is, to be an intellectual implied that one was suspicious and unreliable. It is therefore not surprising that satires of the type noted above should be so densely clustered during this period." (http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/anti-intellectualism_in_sf#sthash.DWnrY50u.dpuf)

>15 elenchus:

The ultra-conservative strain of Bradbury's politics

The notion of Bradbury as a conservative is a very interesting one to me, as, in spite of having read quite a bit of his stuff, I've never really thought of him that way. There is, in fact, a conservatism apparent in his worldview, that, it can be argued, is almost reactionary in nature. Some quick research reveals that he was, in fact, quite conservative politically:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/06/06/was_ray_bradbury_s_writing_conserva...

Interesting stuff. Must research further and process.

>16 paradoxosalpha:

I didn't find Stendahl a sympathetic character at all. He's a psychopath

Of course. No wonder he relishes the role of Montresor so much! :D

>17 gwendetenebre:

equal parts Charles Addams and modern fanboy mentality! :-)

Don't let Guillermo del Toro get wind of this story - he'll be building his own House of Usher, too! =:^O

>18 artturnerjr: The notion of Bradbury as a conservative is a very interesting one to me, as, in spite of having read quite a bit of his stuff, I've never really thought of him that way.

It had to be pointed out to me, actually, years after having read most of what I'd read of his work, despite it being fairly evident in hindsight. I'll say, though, that for me conservatism is not synonymous with immoral or evil, and also that I meant here by "ultra-conservatism" something more like "melodramatic conservatism". It's a straw man argument, really: who would support this sort of censorship, really, regardless of one's politics? Well, yes, egomaniacal authoritarians. I tend to think of that variant as giving a distorted view of conservatism, though.

I'll stop here, my intent with the DEEP ONES is to enjoy the stories we read separate from politics, or to argue a story wasn't particularly enjoyable, but without resorting to moralising. We seem to be a pretty resilient bunch, in terms of sharing opinions and ideas, but there's no need for me to tempt fate.

Well, I'm pretty sure the early teenage me wouldn't have appreciated this (I think I must've quit the book before reaching this because it didn't seem at all familiar, beyond the backdrop of the rapidly transforming Mars).

The present me thought it was rather nice though. It helps I now know who Lovecraft or Bierce were! I'm not sure I'd even encountered Poe then, which has to be pretty much a prerequisite for appreciating this.

I doubt Stendahl was intended as sympathetic. Characters who gleefully admit their homicidal insanity generally aren't.

Both Garrett and Stendhal are, arguably, evil by circumstance. In another context, the former one suspects might be a competent bureaucrat in the service of some decent objective, while the latter might put his wealth and imagination into something more pro-social than Bond villainy.

>18 artturnerjr: Science fiction (or in this case, science fantasy) is almost never really about what the author thinks is going to happen in the future - it's about what the author thinks about what's happening now.

Well, some science fiction certainly involves vigorous futurist speculation. (I might instance Accelerando or River of Gods.) My point was that this is obviously not that kind of science fiction. Nor was Bradbury really that kind of science fiction writer. As I wrote in my review of The Martian Chronicles, "Ultimately, the book didn't read as if it were about Mars or the 21st century at all. It's a set of fables that use Mars to reflect on very terrestrial, very American, very mid-20th-century concerns."

On this read, I found my attention piqued by the contrast between actual 1970s cultural trends and what Bradbury had imagined twenty years earlier.

I've never considered Bradbury to be a SF writer. I think he got lodged in that category because it was considered to be slightly more tasteful than just about any other alternative. Not that "science fiction" itself was very reputable for a good chunk of the 20th century! Of course, most now would probably refer to him as either a "fantasist" or just plain "writer".

>18 artturnerjr:

Don't let Guillermo del Toro get wind of this story - he'll be building his own House of Usher, too! =:^O

A prime candidate for ultimate fanboy!

I'm surprised that nobody's mentioned Fahrenheit 451 yet, but surely both the novel and this story come from the same set of real-world concerns (McCarthyism, primarily).

After all, the background to "Usher II" is a near-identical scenario of book-burning and censorship. The difference for me is where the novel is a "serious" novel - serious enough for François Truffaut to film it, at any rate - the short story is a less considered artistic response. It's more of an EC Comic-style ghoulish burlesque of just revenge.

Looking at it that way, and with the Moral Climates people hardly three-dimensional characters, I have no qualms about siding with Mr Stendahl (if only for the duration of the story).

I wonder why this story is in the UK edition of The Illustrated Man? Or rather, why was it dropped from The Martian Chronicles the year before (1951 according to "The Silver Locusts" copyright page)? I can't see robust 1950s sensibilities being offended by Mr Stendahl's killing spree; for one thing we're in the era of Ealing comedies like Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers. And Tod Slaughter was still performing.

My guess would be that it was rejected for being too much of a comic story and not in keeping with the elegiac, poetic tone that pervades the book.

I don't really recognise Bradbury as a conservative. Without knowing anything about his politics or economical views (not that the two can be separated, really) it's clear to me from the stories that he's quite socially progressive in his ideas (some stories, I seem to remember, even ruminate on things that most people would row away form very quickly these days - a near-romance between a (female) teacher and (male) pupil in their early teens, for example).

However, there's always been an immature strain in Bradbury's stories that sits right alongside some really incisive stuff, sometimes even in the same sentence. He really seems to have never quite grown up, at least in his imaginative life and writing career. And this can sometimes be expressed in broad-strokes and over-simplifications, and even the contradictory positions of teenage years.

However, what is also true, and is certainly a kind of conservatism, is Bradbury's intense nostalgia for (cliché alert!) the small-town America of his childhood.

I've decided to reread the whole of The Illustrated Man, for the first time since 1980, I think. I'm really enjoying it.

>19 elenchus:

I'll stop here, my intent with the DEEP ONES is to enjoy the stories we read separate from politics, or to argue a story wasn't particularly enjoyable, but without resorting to moralising. We seem to be a pretty resilient bunch, in terms of sharing opinions and ideas, but there's no need for me to tempt fate.

Probably a wise stance for me as well, given my generally unfortunate tendency to proselytize. :)

A final note (and then I'll shut the hell up about politics, I swear): this does clarify Bradbury's reported displeasure regarding the reference to his Fahrenheit 451 in the title of leftist filmmaker Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11.

>20 AndreasJ:

Both Garrett and Stendhal are, arguably, evil by circumstance. In another context, the former one suspects might be a competent bureaucrat in the service of some decent objective, while the latter might put his wealth and imagination into something more pro-social than Bond villainy.

Stendahl seems to me, in many ways, almost an archetype of an LTer: a peaceful-enough person when left alone, but mess with their books, and man! You've got a problem! :D

>21 paradoxosalpha:

Agreed. Thanks for clarifying.

>22 gwendetenebre:

I've never considered Bradbury to be a SF writer. I think he got lodged in that category because it was considered to be slightly more tasteful than just about any other alternative.

I think it had a lot to do with where the markets were when he started writing professionally in the early 1940s. More fantasy- and horror-oriented pulps like Weird Tales were starting to fade, whereas the SF pulp market was really starting to explode. Bradbury started to tailor his tales for the SF market a bit, got a lot of work published in them, and thereafter became known as a "science fiction writer".

>23 housefulofpaper:

This story is included under its original "Carnival of Madness" title in the recent Bradbury collection A Pleasure to Burn: Fahrenheit 451 Stories. Ray seems to be mixing his trademark nostalgia with a great deal of anti-censorship rage here. Your EC Comics observation is interesting. At the time this story was written, EC's Bradbury adaptations were still a couple of years in the future.