Penguins on Parade: Perchance to Dream!

Some Penguin Classics, as we seem to be mentioning quite a bit lately, are a bit odd. They call to mind fifty years of mottos the line has used to promote itself to the reading world, things like “The Best Books Ever Written.” They call these mottos to mind in aggressively evaluating terms, because when these certain Penguin Classics appear, they challenge any idea of inclusiveness. Even if we stretch “The Best Books Ever Written” to include also important books, path-breaking books, perhaps socially relevant books, there are some Penguin Classics that just don’t seem, well, good enough to belong in the same ranks as Tolstoy, Austen, Chaucer, and the Brontes. No matter how far we stretch any parameter of inclusion, in other words, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to include, say, Ray Russell – or any worth do doing so.

Which brings us in short order, since the two men knew each other and one paid money to the other for the task of writing on deadline, to Charles Beaumont: one of the newest Penguin Classics is a collection of his short stories called Perchance to Dream. It boggles the mind.

Beaumont was born in 1929 and broke into big-time print when a 1954 story appeared in Playboy. He sat himself in front of a manual typewriter every single day of his short life (he died at the age of 38) and pounded out short stories, novels, and a string of TV scripts, including for some of the best-known episodes of The Twilight Zone. He wrote a lightning speed for anybody with a check to write, and he was smart, and he was clever, and he had an incredibly fertile imagination, and if you’re noticing that I’m leaving something out of that list, you’re right: he had no literary talent. He never for an instant thought he did. Nobody who knew him for an instant thought he did. He wouldn’t have known what to do with literary talent – in fact, its appearance in his heart or mind would have alarmed him, since it would have gummed up the works.

Bizarrely, this is a point very nearly explicitly made in the Introduction of Perchance to Dream, an enthusiastic essay of appreciation by the late Ray Bradbury – one damning paragraph in particular:

I realize what a risk I take by daring to use the truly operative word Fun here. It could well label Charles Beaumont and damn him to hell amongst the agonizers and intellectual duck-pressers of the world. For, as you have noticed, you simply must agonize for them. If you do not sweat blood by the pint or the jeroboam, if you do not think loud and long or silent and heavy, and show traces of the sunken pit and the glorious masochism, are not a writer. Your novel took twenty years of nailing yourself to the cross over your typewriter? Splendid! You say that you revised your short story eighty-nine times, and are still not happy with it? Superb! Your three-act drama was in and out of your eyeballs and down on paper through ten thousand revisions? The Croix de Guerre is yours. But don’t be surprised if you trip over copies of your boring books as you leave the house. Literature? No. Doorstops is more like it.

This kind of nonsense says a great deal about the obvious limitations of Beaumont’s writing – limitations, keep in mind, obvious even to his friends, and hoo-boy, it says even more – all of it very accurate – about Bradbury’s own prose, . The one thing it says nothing about is the inscrutable Penguin editorial mindset.

And that mystery certainly isn’t cleared up when we turn to the twenty-three stories in Perchance to Dream, which aren’t really so much stories as they are pitch-ideas that natter on a bit. They have one single idea apiece, no characterization, perfunctory dialogue, and a wind-up length clatter-typed to perfectly commercial-friendly closure every time. Without exception, they reek of commercialism, expedience, and the tin-pan rattle mere shock. Without exception, they reek of convenience rather than any kind of craft other than shadow-puppetry. Without exception, in short, they reek.

“Sorcerer’s Moon” starts with “When he heard the screams, Carnady stopped walking. A fist closed about his heart.” “Blood Brother” starts with, “’Now, then,’ said the psychiatrist, looking up from his note pad, ‘when did you first discover that you were dead?’” About Mr. Pollet, the main character in “Father, Dear Father,” we learn:

Friends he had none. Acquaintances, few. His wife was afraid of him. And in the scientific clubs he was personal non grata: for when he was not mumbling jiggery-pokery about the “space-time continuum” and “the pretzel of the Past,” he was nudging people and asking them his famous, and perpetually wearisome question:

“Well, now, what about you, what is your opinion? If I were to go back in Time and kill my own father – what would happen?”

And those kinds of things aren’t just the carny-barker enticements to draw the reader into deeper matters, no: those lines are their stories – it doesn’t get any deeper. It makes a Penguin Classic of Perchance to Dream genuinely mysterious. The volume comes with a brief afterword by William Shatner. So: the Penguin Classics TekWar novels next?