More Fun With Theodore Cogswell

The Third Eye
A collection of short stories
by Theodore Cogswell
p. 1968







[There is absolutely no story in this book that includes a giant, green, glob with one eye... God I love sixties sci-fi covers.]

Last summer I read a collection of short stories under the title The Wall Around the World, the first collection by science fiction author, Theodore Cogswell, and was so unexpectedly charmed by his sense of humor and style that I couldn’t possibly pass up an opportunity to get my hands on more of his work. When his second short story anthology, The Third Eye, presented itself to me, I was eager to read it.

In The Third Eye, Cogswell employed that same sly, playful attitude he used to delightful effect in The Wall Around the World. I was expecting it this time, but it did not disappoint. Cogswell strikes me as the kind of guy who would have been really a real hoot to hang out with, as he never seems to take things too seriously. Even the most serious stories of Cogswell’s aren’t without their hint of the absurd. It's refreshing to read something like this from a sixties science fiction writer, because so many of those I read tend to take themselves very seriously, and it's nice to see someone poke fun at the genre every now and then.

My favorite stories are probably “Machine Record,” in which a mad scientist carries on a comedic dialogue with his assistant as he struggles with his chosen line of work, and “A Spudget for Thwilbert,” a lighthearted tale of unexpected fortune when two swindlers try to screw over a hapless galactic traveler by foisting their unusable diet product on him.

My only complaint about this copy of The Third Eye is that it was horribly edited. I personally noticed several typos, and on at least two occasions, the wrong name was used, possibly because Cogswell initially had another name lined up for a character then changed it later, only to miss one. It didn’t ruin my enjoyment of the stories, but it did take me out of them for a bit.

Post perusal of this second piece of work by what I had hoped would be my new favorite sci-fi author, I was disappointed to discover that Cogswell only ever released two collections. Aside from a random “Star Trek” novel which I have no interest in delving into, the only work I will be able to find by Cogswell now will be individual, unreleased short stories among the forty or so he has supposedly written. At this point I must have read half of his legacy and as Cogswell passed away in 1987, there won’t be any more. It’s a shame he has never written a full length novel, as I would very much like to see that. I suppose I’ll just have to find comparable authors to enjoy instead.

Eleven Reasons to Take a Valium

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
by Richard Yates
p. 1962 (Stories written between 1951 and 1961)

It was the title that snagged me; I had never heard of Richard Yates, though I realized later, I’d heard of at least one of his novels, if only because it had been made into a movie a few years back—Revolutionary Road (which famously reunited Titanic costars DiCaprio and Winslet in a much different setting). This collection of short stories, released one year after the aforementioned novel, is a simple yet introspective reflection on the mundane life of 1950s Americans, and in my subsequent research on Yates’ legacy, I’ve come to understand that it not only embodies the spirit of what is known as the “Age of Anxiety,” but that Yates is generally regarded as the type of author that authors love... and one who is criminally under-read.

I’ll talk about this Age of Anxiety thing first, as that is a concept that was unfamiliar to me, and it guides a lot of my views on Yates’ collection. The term comes from a W.H. Auden poem (and later the Leonard Bernstein symphony upon which it was based). From what I understand, it refers to an era from the 1940s on when American society was unsettled, tense, trying to find their footing but feeling displaced in an increasingly industrialized world.

Well, I suppose there were a lot of things to feel tense about in the 1950s. Fresh off of one war and finding ourselves in another, the implementation of nuclear technology and the subsequent Cold War atmosphere, McCarthyism and Red Scare, and the wave of technology designed to bring us closer but irrevocably driving us further apart.

Unlike my beloved pulp sci-fi novels, which capitalize on Cold War fear and technological advances to create tension and intrigue, Yates’ work focuses more on the domestic—the subtle ways in which these changes affect our every day lives. The recurring theme in these eleven stark tales is, of course, loneliness, but not so much of the literal kind as the alone-in-a-crowd kind. I found that often times the central figure to each story (and almost all of the stories were told from a perspective outside of the subject) was someone with ‘vision,’ someone who possesses unique if unpopular traits that Yates believed should be more widely appreciated. It is a retrospective on the American Dream—not on the bright, shining possibilities and Land of Opportunity dogma you always hear about—but on what comes after, when you realize that perhaps that American Dream was not all it was cracked up to be and you must now struggle to find your place in a changing world that doesn’t care about your dreams.

If that sounds depressing then I’m doing it right, because these were eleven ridiculously depressing tales with very little relief. Seriously, I couldn’t read more than one in a single sitting because I needed to take a break for something lighter.

What makes it so much worse is that reading about the Age of Anxiety—fear of constant war, of religious fundamentalism, of out of touch politicians running things, of degradation of society, of a crumbling environment, of technology isolating us even while it ‘unites’ us—you realize that all of these things are as alarmingly applicable to today’s society as they were then. Sure, some of the details have changed, but the loneliness prevails. I need only look at my friends and family struggling with unemployment and displacement after decades of hard work—or at myself even, 26 and working a job unsuited to my own ‘dreams’ and aspirations—and I realize that we’re still deeply embedded in our own version of the Age of Anxiety. Perhaps reading Yates’ eleven tales of lonely people in a lonely world is so very depressing because it hits all too close to home.

I can’t say that Richard Yates’ writing style resonated with me—the prose is spartan and not very poetic, and he relies a bit too heavily on the cliched Italian-American ‘New Yawkah’ dialect but in spite of this the characters are deeply drawn and for the first time since this project of mine began, I can say I’ve encountered the first example of a story written in the 1950s that presented women as complex characters, perhaps not quite equal to men, but nonetheless relatively positive in their representation. The pulp sci-fi authors who think they’re doing women a favor by including them in the action could have learned a lesson or two from Yates about giving them a soul and a voice, but sadly, as I’ve come to find out, Yates wasn’t appreciated in his own time. He never sold more than 12,000 copies of any of his first editions and wasn’t recognized until after his death. He’s still not widely recognized today, which is a shame, because while his writing is simplistic, his ideas are far from such.