Danse Macabre (55 page)

"I started working on the book in 1955. It was the only book I ever wrote back east—if you exclude a novel I wrote when I was sixteen and living in Brooklyn. Things had been going badly out here [in California] and I though it might be a good idea to be back east and close to editors for the sake of my career; I had given up on the idea of getting into movies. Actually, there was nothing rational in the move. I was just fed up out here on the coast and talked myself into going back east. My family was there. My brother had a business there and I knew I could get some work for us to live on if I couldn't sell any writing. * So we went. We were renting a house at Sound Beach on Long Island when I wrote the book. I had gotten the idea several years earlier while attending a movie in a Redondo Beach theater. It was a silly comedy with Ray Milland and Jane Wyman and Aldo Ray and, in this particular scene, Ray Milland, leaving Jane's apartment in a huff, accidentally put on Aldo Ray's hat, which sank down around his ears. Something in me asked, `What would happen if a man put on a hat which he knew was his and the same thing happened?' Thus the notion came.

"The entire novel was written in the cellar of the rented house on Long Island. I did a shrewd thing in that. I didn't alter the cellar at all.

*
In The Shrinking Man
, Scott Carey's life becomes an ever-louder, ever more discordant medley of anxieties; one of the greatest is the shrinking money supply and his inability to support his family as he always has. I won't say that Matheson has done anything so simple as transferring his own feelings at the time to his character, but I will suggest that perhaps Matheson's own frustrations at the time enabled him to write Carey's character that much more convincingly.

There was a rocking chair down there and, every morning, I would go down into the cellar with my pad and pencil and I -would imagine what my hero was up to that day. * I didn't have to keep the environment in my mind or keep notes. I had it ail there, frozen. It was intriguing, when I watched them shoot the film, to see the cellar set because it reminded me a good deal of the cellar in Sound Beach and I had a momentary, enjoyable sense of
déjà vu
.

"It took me about two and a half months to write the novel. I originally used the structure the movie did, starting with the beginning of the shrinking process. This didn't work as it took too long to get to 'the good stuff.' So I recast the storyline to get the reader into the cellar immediately. Recently, when I thought they were going to do a remake of the film and I thought they wanted me to do it, I decided I would revert to the original structure because, in [the film], as in my original manuscript, 'the good stuff' took awhile to get to. But it turned out they were going to make it into a comedy with Lily Tomlin and I wasn't going to write it anyway. John Landis was going to direct it at the time and he wanted all the science-fantasy people out here to play minor parts in the film. He wanted me to play a pharmacist who . . . won't give a prescription to Lily Tomlin who is so small at the time that she is sitting on the shoulder of an intelligent gorilla (shows you how they changed the original idea). I demurred. As a matter of fact, the opening of the script is almost like my original one to the point of actual dialogue. Later, it deviates wildly . . . .

"I don't think the book means anything to me at this time. None of my work does from this distant past. I think I prefer
I Am Legend
if I had to choose but they are both too far from me to have any significance in particular . . . . Accordingly, I wouldn't change anything about
The
Shrinking Man
. It is a part of my history. I have no reason to change it, only to look at it without much interest and be pleased at whatever stir it made. I just read the first story I ever sold the other day—'Born of Man and Woman'—[and] I cannot relate to the story at all. I remember writing certain phrases but it was someone else who wrote them. I'm sure you feel that way about the early stuff you wrote. **

*Matheson's hero, Scott Carey, also goes down into the cellar every day with his pad and pencil; he too is writing a book (these days, isn't everybody?). Scott's book is about his experiences as the world's only shrinking man, and it provides for his family quite adequately . . . as Matheson's own book and the subsequent film made from it did for Matheson's own family, one supposes.

**As a matter of fact, I do. My first novel,
Carrie
, was written under difficult personal circumstances, and the book dealt with characters so unpleasant and so alien to my own outlook as to seem almost like Martians. When I pick up the book now—which is seldom—it does not seem as if someone else had written it, but I do get a peculiar sort of feeling from it . . . as if I had written it while suffering from a bad case of mental and emotional flu.

"
The Shrinking Man
only recently had a hardcover edition. Now it is being printed by the Science Fiction Book Club too. Up to then it was strictly softcover . . . . Actually,
I Am Legend
is much more science fiction than
The Shrinking Man
. It has a lot of research in it. The science in
The Shrinking Man
is strictly gobbledegook. Well, I did .come asking around and reading but I hardly had a great rationale for Scott Carey's shrinking. And I wince daily . . . that I made him shrink 1/7" a day instead of geometrically and that I had him worry about falling from heights when it wouldn't have hurt him. Well, to hell with it. I wouldn't have written `Born of Man and Woman' a few years later either because it is so illogical. What difference does it make really?

"As I said, I enjoyed writing the book . . . because I was like Scott Carey's Boswell, watching him each day as he made his way around the cellar. I had a piece of cake with my coffee the first few days of writing and I laid it on the shelf and soon it became a part of the story. I think that some of the incidents during his shrinking period are pretty good—the man who picks him up when he hitchhikes, the midget, the boys chasing him, his deteriorating marriage relationship."

A summary of
The Shrinking Man
is easy to render if we view it in the linear fashion Matheson suggests. After going through the sparkling cloud of radioactivity, Carey begins to lose a seventh of an inch a day, or roughly one foot per season. As Matheson suggests, this smacks of expediency, but as he also suggests, what does it matter as long as we realize that this is not hard science fiction and that it bears no resemblance to novels and stories by writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, or Larry Niven? It is not exactly sensible that the children in the C. S. Lewis tale should be able to reach another world by going through a bedroom closet, either, but that is exactly what happens in the Narnia stories. It is not the technicalities of shrinking that we are interested in, and the inch-per-week pattern at least enables us to keep our own mental yardstick on Scott Carey.

We are given Scott's adventures in flashbacks as his shrinks; the main action takes place in what Scott assumes is his last week of life, as he shrinks from one inch down to nothing. He has gotten trapped in the cellar while trying to escape his own housecat and a garden sparrow. There's something particularly chilling in Scott's desperate duel with Puss; does anyone have the slightest doubt about what would happen if we were suddenly changed to a height of seven inches tall by malign magic and yon kitty curled up by the fire woke up and happened to see us skittering across the floor? Cats, those amoral gunslingers of the animal world, are maybe the scariest mammals going. I wouldn't want to be up against one in a situation like that. Perhaps above all else, Matheson excels at the depiction of one man alone, locked in a desperate struggle against a force or forces bigger than himself. Here is the conclusion of Scott's battle with the bird that knocks him into his cellar prison:

He stood up, flinging more snow at the bird, seeing the snow splatter off its dark, flaring beak. The bird flapped back. Scott turned and struggled a few more strides, then the bird was on him again, wet wings pounding at his head. He slapped wildly at it and felt his hands strike the bony sides of its beak. It flew off again . . . .

Until, finally, cold and dripping, he stood with his back to the cellar window, hurling snow at the bird in the desperate hope that it would give up and he wouldn't have to jump into the imprisoning cellar.

But the bird kept coming, diving at him, hovering before him, the sound of its wings like wet sheets flapping in a heavy wind. Suddenly the jabbing beak was hammering at his skull, slashing skin, knocking him back against the house . . . . He picked up snow and threw it, missing. The wings were still beating at his face; the beak gashed his face again. With a stricken cry, Scott whirled and leaped for the open square. He crawled across it dizzily. The leaping bird knocked him through.

When the bird knocks Scott into the cellar, the man is seven inches tall. Matheson has made it clear that the novel is, to a large extent, a simple comparison of the macrocosm and the microcosm, and his hero's seven weeks in this lower world are a tiny capsule of experience which exactly mimes what he has already been through in a larger world. When he falls into the cellar, he is its king; he is able to exert his own human power over the environment with no real trouble. But as he continues to shrink, his power begins to wane once again . . . and the Nemesis appears.

The spider rushed at him across the shadowed sands, scrabbling wildly on its stalklike legs. Its body was a giant, glossy egg that trembled blackly as it charged across the windless mounds, its wake a score of sand-trickling scratches . . . the spider was gaining on him, its pulsing egg of a body perched on running legs—an egg whose yolk swam with killing poisons. He raced on, breathless, terror in his veins.

In Matheson's view,
macrocosm
and
microcosm
are terms which are ultimately interchangeable, and all of Scott's problems throughout the shrinking process become symbolized in the black widow spider which also shares Scott's cellar world. When Scott discovers the one thing in his life which has not shrunk, his ability to think and plan, he also discovers a source of power which is immutable no matter which
-cosm
it happens to exist in. His escape from a cellar, which Matheson succeeds in making as strange and frightening as any alien world, follows . . . and his final heartening discovery "that to nature there was no zero," and that there is a place where the macrocosm and the microcosm eventually meet.
The Shrinking Man
can be read simply enough as a great adventure story—it is certainly one of that select handful that I have given to people, envying them the experience of the first reading ( others would include Bloch's
The Scarf
, Tolkien's
The Hobbit
, Berton Rouché's
Feral
). But there's more going on in Matheson's novel than just adventure, a kind of surreal Outward Bound program for little people. On a more thoughtful level, it is a short novel which deals in a thoughtprovoking way with concepts of power—power lost and power found. Let me pull back from the Matheson book briefly—like Douglas MacArthur, I shall return—and make the following wild statement: all fantasy fiction is essentially about the concept of power; great fantasy fiction is about people who find it at great cost or lose it tragically; mediocre fantasy fiction is about people who have it and never lose it but simply wield it. Mediocre fantasy fiction generally appeals to people who feel a decided shortage of power in their own lives and obtain a vicarious shot of it by reading stories of strong-thewed barbarians whose extraordinary prowess at fighting is only excelled by their extraordinary prowess at fucking; in these stories we are apt to encounter a seven-foot-tall hero fighting his way up the alabaster stairs of some ruined temple, a flashing sword in one hand and a scantily clad beauty lolling over his free arm.

This sort of fiction, commonly called "sword and sorcery" by its fans, is not fantasy at its lowest, but it still has a pretty tacky feel; mostly it's the Hardy Boys dressed up in animal skins and rated R ( and with cover art by Jeff Jones, as likely as not). Sword and sorcery novels and stories are tales of power for the powerless. The fellow who is afraid of being rousted by those young punks who hang around his bus stop can go home at night and imagine himself wielding a sword, his potbelly miraculously gone, his slack muscles magically transmuted into those "iron thews" which have been sung and storied in the pulps for the last fifty years. The only writer who really got away with this sort of stuff was Robert E. Howard, a peculiar genius who lived and died in rural Texas ( Howard committed suicide as his mother lay comatose and terminally ill, apparently unable to face life without her). Howard overcame the limitations of his puerile material by the force and fury of his writing and by his imagination, which was powerful beyond his hero Conan's wildest dreams of power. In his best work, Howard's writing seems so highly charged with energy that it nearly gives off sparks. Stories such as "The People of the Black Circle" glow with the fierce and eldritch light of his frenzied intensity. At his best, Howard was the Thomas Wolfe of fantasy, and most of his Conan tales seem to almost fall over themselves in their need to get out. Yet his other work was either unremarkable or just abysmal . . . . The word will hurt and anger his legion of fans, but I don't believe any other word fits. Robert Bloch, one of Howard's contemporaries, suggested in his first letter to
Weird Tales
that even Conan wasn't that much shakes. Bloch's idea was that Conan should be banished to the outer darkness where he could use his sword to cut out paper dolls. Needless to say, this suggestion did not go over well with the marching hordes of Conan fans; they probably would have lynched poor Bob Bloch on the spot, had they caught up with him back there in Milwaukee.

Even below the sword and sorcery stories are the superheroes who populate the comic magazines of the only two remaining giants in the field—although "giants" is almost too strong a word; according to a survey published in a 1978 issue of Warren's
Creepy
magazine, comic readership has gone into what may be an irrecoverable skid. These characters ( traditionally called "long-underwear heroes" by the bullpen artists who draw them) are invincible. Blood never flows from their magical bodies; they are somehow able to bring such colorful villains as Lex Luthor and the Sandman to justice without ever having to remove their masks and testify against them in open court; they are sometimes down but never out.*