Novella Review: Vintage Season by C.L. Moore writing as Lawrence O'Donnell

 

Vintage Season by Catherine Lucille Moore Writing as Lawrence O'Donnell

First publication: Astounding Science Fiction, September 1946

50 pages (Collected many times)

 Anyone who follows my reviews and writing knows I love the pioneers of science fiction and horror. The trailblazers were writing at a time when there was no long tradition to draw on. When this novelette, novella, or short story depending on how to classify it was written, it was just twenty years after the genre got the name science fiction itself. We know the tradition of the SF vibe is longer than the time a name has defined it, but that doesn’t take away from the groundbreaking power of the 20s, 30s, and 40s Golden Age. Early in that century of Science Fiction young writers like Cathy Moore were the young voices that built the foundations.

 Her position as a pioneer in SF and horror is underrated because little of her work has been translated into film, although she worked in Hollywood. Academics who study the pioneer days and the impact of women will tell you she is one of the greats. Still, I admit I discovered her through Lisa Yaszek's amazing anthology The Future is Female only a few years back.  CL Moore started writing in the women’s dorm at Indiana University in 1931 and a few years later she was a regular in the magazine Weird Tales alongside HP Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, and her future husband Henry Kuttner. The tales were in a boundary zone of SF, Horror, and Fantasy, sometimes all three.  I hesitate to bring up her first husband Henry Kuttner, they were both on the path to genre success when they became a duo. Neither needed the other, but they became a powerful team.

 While this stone-cold classic is often credited to both of them, it appears that this was mostly the work of Catherine. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that it was written under a pen name they both used. You see in the Forties there were only so many spots in the pulps and if you had already appeared in a magazine in a year, you could use another name. There were other reasons but for whatever purpose this CL Moore was first in print under the name Lawrence O’Donnell. 

 Vintage Season is considered a classic. I decided I wanted to read it after hearing Robert Silverberg talk about it in a recent interview. He said it was not only a favorite of his, but he wrote a companion story that took place adjacent to the events. This made me interested and a collection of Moore/Kuttner I had on the shelf included the story. So why not? (oh yeah spoilers from here on out.)

 Published in September 1946 the same month President Harry Truman started Operation Paperclip to bring former Nazi scientists into government service and the first TVs were mass-produced. So yeah, this story was a long time ago. When we read these classics from this era the first thing, we must realize is that stories that sound familiar came later, part of the excitement of this era was seeing authors first play with these themes. There was a 19th-century tradition of time travel stories from Rip Van Winkle and Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, but atomic war stories were new as we were just over a year from the first use of them and even SF had only been Atomic weapons/energy a little bit, most notably Lester Del Rey’s Nerves.

Vintage Season is a time travel, but since I went in cold, I didn’t know that and was glad that I didn’t know that ahead of time, it added to my experience. I thought maybe it was a haunted house story, as the first few pages were built around a house and a group of weird strangers who had paid a weird amount of money to stay there. Even though the house is not particularly nice, various groups are bidding for it. 

 This creates a mystery for the owners who want the first group out so they can sell the house, but they are weird, and they won’t leave.

 “Why they live so contentedly in this ramshackle old house was a question that disturbed his dreams at night. Or why they refused to move. He caught some fascinating glimpses into their rooms, which appeared to have been changed almost completely by additions he could not have defined very clearly from the brief sights he had of them. The feeling of luxury which his first glance at them had a vote was confirmed by the richness of the hangings they had apparently brought with them, half-glimpsed ornaments, the pictures on the walls, even the whiffs of exotic perfume that floated from the half-open doors.”

 I love this part of the story. They are odd because they are time travelers, observers from the future. To the characters and first-time readers, it is an effective mystery why they are strange. My first impression was that they were witches or something silly, that the house was haunted. I was engrossed enough in the storytelling that I forgot it was a classic of SF.  There is a beautiful bit of prose when one of the time travelers is talking about music of another era

 “The calamity was single. The music did not attempt to correlate all human sorrows; it focused sharply upon one and followed the ramifications out and out Oliver recognized these basics to the sounds in a very brief moment they were essentials, they seemed to be in his brain with the first strains of the music which was so much more than music.”

 The answer of course is time travel, that these people are from the future and the reason they are so insistent on the house is because it is the one house that survived an atomic blast.  They have traveled back to see the war and do it from the one house that survived the blast.

 “The story is very simple, really,” Kleph said. “We travel period our time is not terribly far ahead of yours. No. I must not say how far. But we still remember your songs and poets and some of your great actors. We are a people of much leisure; we cultivate the art of enjoying ourselves.”

 It is subtle but Moore comments on tourism in a way. These travelers come from a better time and can only affect the past so much. They are observing, for the homeowners they can’t understand how the travelers can look the other way at the start of the war. They talk about the time travel as the rich talk of resorts.

 “This is a tour we are making -  a tour of a year's seasons, vintage seasons. That autumn in Canterbury was the most magnificent autumn our researchers could discover anywhere. We rode in a pilgrimage to see the shrine it was a wonderful experience, though the clothing was a little hard to manage.”

 So why witness destruction? It is history, a vintage season of another kind. A rare moment of history. It is a privilege to sit in a spot that promises their safety and watch the disaster unfold. When Moore portrays the destruction, it is some beautiful dark prose.

 “On the far skyline fire was already a solid mass, painting the low clouds Crimson. That sulfurous light reflecting back from the sky upon the City made the rows upon rows of flattened houses with flame beginning to lick up among them, and further out the formless rubble of what had been houses a few minutes ago was now nothing at all.

 The city had begun to be vocal. The noise of flames rose loudest, but you could hear a rubble of human voices like the beat of surf a long way off, and staccato noises of screaming made a sort of pattern that came and went continuously through the web of sound. Threading it in undulating waves of shrieks of sirens knit the web together into a terrible Symphony that had, in its way, a strange inhuman beauty.”

 Vintage Season is a classic deserving of the status. It is strange, powerful, and written with strong prose not always found in the stories of the era. A well-deserved spot in the canon.