Summary: This tribute was produced by Karen Anderson shortly after Henry Kuttner’s death in 1958 and contains a number of short memoirs from Poul Anderson, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, and Robert Bloch. It also contains a few other items, including a short article by Anthony Boucher about Kuttner’s mystery fiction, and a comprehensive bibliography by Donald H. Tuck. It is an interesting item.
[ISFDB.org page] [Fanac.org copy]
Other Reviews:
Anthony Boucher, F&SF (December 1958)
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Editor, Karen Anderson
Non-fiction:
Cover & Back Cover • by Karen Anderson
Interior Artwork • by Ed Cartier (x3)
In Memoriam: Henry Kuttner • poem by Karen Anderson
Introduction
Memoirs of a Kuttner Reader • essay by Poul Anderson
The Many Faces of Henry Kuttner • essay by Fritz Leiber
Hank Helped Me • essays by Richard Matheson and Ray Bradbury
The Mystery Novels of Henry Kuttner • essay by Anthony Boucher
The Closest Approach • essay by Robert Bloch
Extrapolation • essay by Henry Kuttner
A Bibliography of the Science-Fantasy Works of Henry Kuttner • by Donald H. Tuck
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There are several useful websites I use to pursue this hobby (ISFDB.org, Archive.org, etc.), and one that is creeping up the list is fanac.org, a growing repository of fanzine scans. I’ve occasionally used it before, but it was slow to use (a lot of the scans are on individual webpages, which makes it almost impossible to flick through a publication as quickly as one might a PDF); there also weren’t many fanzines that were of interest to me (I’m mostly interested in reviews of magazines and anthologies, although I downloaded a pile of Science Fiction Times issues a couple of Retro-Hugos ago).
Recently, however, there has been a lot of material of interest made available in PDF format, including long runs of the BSFA’s Vector magazine (which has mid-60’s reviews of New Worlds and Science Fantasy magazines) as well as issues of Dick Geis’s Science Fiction Review, which gives an interesting view of the field in the early and mid-70s (although its publication dates stretch to either side of that). Another item that recently turned up is the item discussed here today.
Henry Kuttner: A Memorial Symposium is a memorial fanzine that was edited by Karen Anderson in 1958 after the untimely death of Henry Kuttner from a heart attack (February 3rd, age 42). It opens with a poem, In Memoriam: Henry Kuttner (F&SF, May 1958) in which Anderson uses many of Kuttner’s (and Moore’s) story titles to produce an elegiac piece.
After a very short Introduction, the essays lead off with Memoirs of a Kuttner Reader by Poul Anderson, which tells of a trip by Poul and Karen Anderson to visit Kuttner and Moore towards the end of the his life:
Only once did I meet Henry Kuttner. We drove down to Los Angeles after Christmas, chiefly to renew old friendships, but added this to the agenda and placed it high. I didn’t really plan on more than How do you do/very glad to meet you/always enjoyed your stories/so long; professional courtesy does not give carte blanche to take up a man’s time. Even when a diffident phone call was met by a more than cordial invitation, I didn’t expect much over an hour of talk.
He and his wife had found an apartment which was like some magician’s castle, nested among green leaves on the heights, so that from a glassed wall you looked directly down to land’s end and the ocean. It was pale blue that day, a single curve around the planet, Henry guided us himself, through the drive and into his living room. Meeting Catherine was no less a pleasure, intellectually as well as visually; and I have never been in a more serene home. She held the burden of conversation, for Henry was off at once to bring drinks, and thereafter gave nearly his whole attention to the comfort of his guests. Typical: I noticed him sit down quietly on the floor, because my small daughter had put her doll on the last occupied chair. p. 4-5
More writers turn up (Ed Hamilton and Leigh Brackett among them) and the Andersons have a great time. Later they receive an unexpected invitation to stay for dinner—but they have another engagement, and have to leave. Six weeks later Kuttner is dead.
In the rest of the piece Anderson examines Kuttner’s (and Moore’s) work.
The Many Faces of Henry Kuttner by Fritz Leiber talks about his and Kuttner’s first meeting in 1937, and later mentions an occasion where Kuttner and Robert Bloch discussed the different personalities of the former’s pseudonyms:
Lewis Padgett was a retired accountant who liked to water the lawn of an evening and then mosey down to the corner drugstore to pick up a quart of ice cream and whose wife collected recipes to surprise her bridge club. Lawrence O’Donnell was a wild Irishman who lived in Greenwich Village with a malicious black cat who had an infallible instinct for check letters and generally managed to chew up their contents before his master had shaken loose from his latest hangover. Keith Hammond was a Lewis Padgett fan, newly broken into pro ranks, whom Padgett loathed . . . p. 9
Hank Helped Me by Richard Matheson shows Kuttner as mentor:
At that time I was just beginning work on my first science-fantasy novel “I Am Legend” and was hopelessly mired in technical troubles, not to mention story troubles. Hank, single-handedly, helped me out of them, guiding me (Hank never pushed, never dogmatized) step by step with suggestion and discussion until all problems were met. I dedicated that book to Hank but it was a small thing when one considers that Hank dedicated his life to writing and writers. p. 10
Matheson’s short piece is followed by a similar one from Ray Bradbury. This opens with an account of how Bradbury met Kuttner—a lot of these meetings (Leiber, Matheson, Bradbury, etc.) seem to have occurred at the Los Angeles SF Society in 1937, so Vintage Season time-travellers take note. Then Bradbury talks about Hank the thinker, and Kuttner and Moore as a couple:
The thinking Hank did went into his stories and into his life with his wife, too. I have never known a more dedicated pair. I’m not speaking from false sentiment but with real admiration for two people who set up standards for themselves, planned ahead, and went out to educate themselves to get the answers. Separate or together, they set an example every writer should look to. They cared about writing. They were literary people. Too many people in the field are not literary people, but are in it for the money or a few fast licks of notoriety. Hank was not one of their kind. p. 11
Bradbury has this about Kuttner’s mentorship:
I remember him as an honest critic and a kind but firm teacher who kicked hell out of me when I needed it. He tolerated Ray intruding on his life, he forced me to read every issue of Amazing Stories for an entire year, so I would learn the bones of plotting (a terrible job, but I did it!) and he beat the “purple writing” out of me with a few words one afternoon in 1942.
Over the years he wrote me 8 and 9 page letters concerning certain stories I had shown him. The last two hundred words of my story The Candle, which appeared in Weird Tales many years ago, are Hank’s. He rewrote the ending and I left it that way. p. 11/13
Anthony Boucher’s The Mystery Novels of Henry Kuttner is a useful piece that provides clues about an aspect of Kuttner’s writing that I know nothing about, and also points out its influence on his SF writing:
Much of Kuttner’s science fiction shows the influence of the mystery; and many of his (for his, understand in most cases their) stories The Fairy Chessmen, Rite of Passage, etc.—are the detective stories and murder-suspense novels of the future. p. 12
The following comment may be useful to the web reviewer who dismissed Private Eye as “ultimately a story about a guy killing a girl”:
These novels were profoundly influenced by “the new genre of the psychoanalytical tale,” as Max Lemer calls The Jet-Propelled Couch and the other cases in Robert Lindner’s The Fifty-Minute Hour—tales in which the dramatic structure of psychoanalysis, with its attendant surprise-revelations, is the story. p. 13
The Closest Approach by Robert Bloch starts by quoting a Kuttner line off the dust-cover of A Gnome There Was, “Fantasy interests me because it is the closest approach to realism I know.” Bloch goes on to explain why he thought Kuttner was being sincere when he said this, and not trying to be funny.
Bloch then goes on to examine Kuttner’s early fantasy work (including their three collaborations) before noting that, when the fantasy market dwindled during the early 1940s, Kuttner “turned almost inevitability to science fiction” (this pivot hadn’t been apparent to me as I’ve read little if any of his early work).
Throughout the rest of the piece Bloch charts Kuttner’s development as a writer:
For Kuttner had gone full gamut—from the Gothic past to the galactic future—and then realized that there was still the greatest field of imaginative speculation left to explore: the human imagination itself. p. 16
Bloch then expands on this in a long and illuminating passage:
I do not know if he ever expressed himself upon the subject of psychological fantasy. But through our many years of personal contact and correspondence, I became increasingly aware of his interest in psychotherapy and its potentialities. On the face of it, after By These Presents and De Profundis in the early Fifties, he seemed to abandon the “fantasy approach” to fiction. But in actuality he was still exploring enchantment, delving into the deepest and darkest dreams of all, that murkiest of mysteries which is the mortal mind. He had discovered that the true “world of imagination” is the little grey globe each of us carries inside our skulls.
[. . .]
Henry Kuttner was a modest and a humble man. He was his own severest critic, and his harshest task-master, too. All during his professional career, he studied writing, studied other people, studied himself. He was constantly striving to do better work, and conscientiously preparing for it. There were books he’d planned for the future—when he felt that he was “ready” to write them properly. And these books were not science fiction novels, they were not the psychological-detective mysteries, they were not suspense thrillers; they were simply stories about people. “Realistic” or “mainstream” novels? Perhaps, in outward form. But actually, what Henry Kuttner was contemplating, eventually, was the creation of a whole new field of fantasy; the realistic novel of the imagination, He had no intention of emulating the “stream-of-consciousness” school or travelling the rocky road of Kerouac, nor did he expect to employ the eideticism of a Proust, He was merely experimenting endlessly in a search for the proper form in which to reveal the substance.
Do not let these words mislead you; Kuttner was not self-consciously pretentious about his goals, nor egotistic, nor ambitious. Anyone who had the good fortune to know him can give the lie to that. He was far too self-critical, far too self-deprecating, far too self-ridiculing to ever regard himself as a “dedicated” writer. And what I have written here about his plans is the embodiment of my own concept of his purpose, gleaned bit by bit through the years of conversation and correspondence, and never self-dramatized in the form of a direct statement on his part. For himself, Henry Kuttner was merely honestly and earnestly attempting to evolve a style and a method of writing the stories he wanted to tell—the stories which would reveal the fantasy behind our reality, and the realities behind our fantasies. p.17
These memoirs are followed by a couple of other pieces of material. The first is Extrapolation by Henry Kuttner (Fanscient, Fall 1948), a long-winded and not particularly funny piece which satirises letters in SF magazines criticising unwelcome fantasy elements—and then does the same with letters in fantasy magazines criticising SF elements. I suppose the subject matter marries up with Bloch’s earlier comments.
The remaining article is a comprehensive bibliography by Donald H. Tuck, A Bibliography of the Science-Fantasy Works of Henry Kuttner. This has, at the end of it, two pages from a letter from Kuttner which gives a wealth of information about his various pseudonyms (although Tuck notes some corrections in later correspondence). One thing I noted from Kuttner’s letter is this:
C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner married June 7, 1940. Stories written after this date are often collaborations, but: C. L. Moore stories are always by C. L. Moore. Lawrence O’Donnell stories are usually by C. L. Moore. Exceptions: “This is the House” Ast., Feb., 46, by Kuttner. “Fury,” May, June, July 1947, Ast., collab. by Moore-Kuttner. p. 33
This makes Clash By Night, The Children’s Hour and Vintage Season solo Moore pieces (ISFDB lists them as collaborations).
There are also three pieces of poorly reproduced Interior Artwork from Ed Cartier (a function of producing an amateur magazine at the time).
Kuttner is long overdue a major book examining his work but, in the meantime, this short and interesting booklet is well worth a look. Especially recommended for Kuttner & Moore fans. ●
Click for larger image.
