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Editor, H. J. Campbell

Fiction:
The Rose • novella by Charles L. Harness ∗∗∗∗+
Never Been Kissed • reprint short story by E. Everett Evans
Frontier Legion (Part 6 of 6) • novella serial by Sydney J. Bounds

Non-fiction:
Cover • by John Richards
Interior artwork • by John Richards (x2) [as by Davis], Fischer (x2)
H. J Campbell’s Page • editorial by Herbert J. Campbell
Scientist and Censor: Should They Meddle? • essay by William F. Temple
American Commentary • essay by Forrest J. Ackerman
SF Handbook: Terms of Interest to the Science-Fictioneer • essay by Herbert J. Campbell [as by uncredited]
Book Reviews • by Herbert J. Campbell
Projectiles • letters

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This issue of Authentic has the story that the magazine will probably forever be remembered for, Charles Harness’s classic novella, The Rose, a piece that can probably be described as “transcendent super-science meets art-house cinema”. The story, rejected by all the American markets, was finally sold by Forrest J. Ackerman, not to the Campbell that Harness probably wanted to sell it to (John W. Campbell Jr. at Astounding), but this one (Herbert J. Campbell).¹ The story would be out of print for another 13 years, until Michael Moorcock issued it (along with two other short stories) as a Compact Books paperback.²

The character at the heart of The Rose is Anna van Tuyl, a psychiatrist who is physically deformed, as we find out when she looks in a tall mirror:

Sombre eyes looked out at her, a little darker than yesterday: pools ploughed around by furrows that today gouged a little deeper—the result of months of squinting up from the position into which her spinal deformity had thrust her neck and shoulders. The pale lips were pressed together just a little tighter in their defence against unpredictable pain. The cheeks seemed bloodless, having been bleached finally and completely by the Unfinished Dream that haunted her sleep, wherein a nightingale fluttered about a white rose.
As if in brooding confirmation, she brought up simultaneously the pearl-translucent fingers of both hands to the upper borders of her forehead, and there pushed back the incongruous masses of newly-grey hair from two tumorous bulges—like incipient horns. As she did this she made a quarter turn, exposing to the mirror the humped grotesquerie of her back.
Then, by degrees, like some netherworld Narcissus, she began to sink under the bizarre enchantment of that misshapen image. She could retain no real awareness that this creature was she. That profile, as if seen through witch-opened eyes, might have been that of some enormous toad, and this flickering metaphor paralysed her first and only forlorn attempt at identification.
In a vague way, she realised that she had discovered what she had set out to discover. She was ugly. She was even very ugly. p. 6

After this she breaks the mirror, which gets the attention one of her colleagues, Matt Bell. He distracts her by returning the score for her unfinished ballet, which is based on the Oscar Wilde story, The Nightingale and The Rose.³ (The story tells of a student who needs a red rose to gain admittance to a ball, and a nightingale which helps him by fatally piercing its chest on a thorn to let its blood turn a white rose red.) Bell tells her how good the ballet is, and mentions that “the man who read your Rose score” wants to stage it at the annual Via Rosa festival. There is a taxi waiting to take her to meet him, and Anna goes.
After wandering around the bohemian quarter of Via Rosa for a while, she hears her music playing from speakers, and is approached by a man in a white suit with green and purple polka dots. He too is deformed. He asks her to dance with him, and she reluctantly agrees.
Later, they end up in White Rose Park, where she tells him of her dream:

She began haltingly. “Perhaps I do know about this place. Perhaps someone told me about it, and the information got buried in my subconscious mind until I wanted a white rose. There’s really something behind my ballet that Dr. Bell didn’t tell you. He couldn’t, because I’m the only one who knows. The Rose music comes from my dreams. Only, a better word is nightmares. Every night the score starts from the beginning. In the dream, I dance. Every night, for months and months, there was a little more music, a little more dancing. I tried to get it out of my head, but I couldn’t. I started writing it down, the music and the choreography.”
The man’s unsmiling eyes were fixed on her face in deep absorption.
Thus encouraged, she continued. “For the past several nights I have dreamed almost the complete ballet, right up to the death of the nightingale. I suppose I identify myself so completely with the nightingale that I subconsciously censor her song as she presses her breast against the thorn on the white rose. That’s where I always awakened, or at least, always did before tonight. But I think I heard the music tonight. It’s a series of chords . . . thirty-eight chords, I believe. The first nineteen were frightful, but the second nineteen were marvellous. Everything was too real to wake up. The Student, The Nightingale, The White Roses.” p. 17

This (spoiler) metaphorically telegraphs the ending of the novella.
She learns that the man is Ruy Jacques and that, as well as having his deformities, he has “forgotten” how to read and write, and that his wife has organised a psychiatrist to see him. Anna already knows this as, coincidentally, his wife has previously contacted for Anna for a consultation. She tells Ruy this, and they part for the night.
The next day Anna goes to see his wife, Martha Jacques, and finds her in the company of Colonel Grade, Chief of the National Security Bureau. Grade is acting as minder to Martha as she is attempting to solve the Sciomnia formula (later described a “final summation of all physical and biological knowledge” that will let “the first person to understand [it] rule not only this planet, but the whole galaxy”). The formula is also known as the “Jacques Rosette”, and Anna realises why when she looks at the paper in front of Martha Jacques:

And then the psychiatrist found her eyes fastened to a sheet of paper on Mrs. Jacques’ desk. And as she stared, she felt a sharp dagger of ice sinking into her spine, and she grew slowly aware of a background of brooding whispers in her mind, heart-constricting in their suggestions of mental disintegration.
For the thing drawn on the paper, in red ink, was—although warped, incomplete, and misshapen—unmistakably a rose.
“Mrs. Jacques!” cried Grade.
Martha Jacques must have divined simultaneously Anna’s great interest in the paper. With an apologetic murmur she turned it face down. “Security regulations, you know. I’m really supposed to keep it locked up in the presence of visitors.” Even a murmur could not hide the harsh metallic quality of her voice.
So that was why the famous Sciomnia formula was sometimes called the “Jacques Rosette”: when traced in an ever-expanding wavering red spiral in polar co-ordinates, it was . . . a Red Rose. p. 21-22

The first part of the interview, where they discuss her prospective patient, initially proceeds straightforwardly, but then they are interrupted by one of Grade’s underlings, and the pair learn that Anna met Ruy Jacques the night before. Apart from Martha’s possible jealousy, Grade thinks there may be national security implications. However, before matters can deteriorate further, Ruy arrives, entering though a previously locked door that only Colonel Grade had the combination for. Ruy also appears to know what the group have been talking about.
Anna observes Ruy and Martha arguing (this is mostly about art versus science—the couple are essentially personifications of these subjects throughout the story), and she sees how dysfunctional their relationship is. This is all brought to a halt when Ruy collapses, and Anna summons an ambulance to take him to her clinic.

To say that the rest of the story spirals around these three characters barely scratches the surface of what is packed into this multi-layered 31,000 word novella. Apart from the repeated imagery (particularly of roses), and the ongoing science vs. art arguments (which contain cultural references to the likes of Wilde, Rimbaud, Goya, Milton, and many, many others), we find out more about Ruy’s anatomical peculiarities. These appear to be similar to Anna’s, and later it seems that they provide knowledge of future events. These matters are laid out in two of the several mini-science essays that, like the cultural references and the imagery, permeate the work.
Later, matters come to a head when Anna goes to a party at the Jacques’ house and there is an incident involving her and Ruy. Grade demands to question Anna about her relationship with Ruy and the security implications. In the interview she is confronted with incriminating written evidence about Art versus Science, and the destruction of the Sciomnia weapon (the papers are written in her hand but were produced by Ruy’s automatic writing). Anna looks at them but realises that, like Ruy, she has now lost the ability to read. Moreover, she can sense metal objects in the room, and the interrogator’s gun is screaming “Kill! Kill! Kill!”. Ruy helps her to escape and, after a short pursuit she is left alone in the White Rose Park:

At that instant a blue-hot ball of pain began crawling slowly up within her body, along her spine, and then outward between her shoulder blades, into her spinal hump. The intensity of that pain forced her slowly to her knees and pulled her head back in an invitation to scream.
But no sound came from her convulsing throat.
It was unendurable, and she was fainting.
The sound of footsteps died away down the Via. At least Ruy’s ruse had worked.
And as the mounting anguish spread over her back, she understood that all sound had vanished with those retreating footsteps, forever, because she could no longer hear, nor use her vocal chords. She had forgotten how, but she didn’t care.
For her hump had split open, and something had flopped clumsily out of it, and she was drifting gently outward into blackness. p. 115-116

Before this point I hadn’t found the piece as stellar as I had remembered. It isn’t bad, far from it, but only good to very good, and not the excellent that I remembered. This is probably because it is rather uneven in places, and in others it could have done with a little rewriting to smooth the joins. There is also the relentless ideation, which is sometimes detrimental to the flow of the piece: it feels as if Harness knew he was going to stop writing for the next decade or so and was trying to use up every idea he had left.⁴
However, the mini-climax in White Rose Park sets up (spoiler) the excellent final section. This takes place later at what should be the premiere of Anna’s ballet, but the lead ballerina has been bribed to stay away and it appears as if the show will be cancelled. However, as Martha turns up to gloat at Ruy’s failure, Anna makes a surprise arrival: she has been missing since the night of the party but, nevertheless, prepares to perform the role herself. When she finally dances on stage it is as if she is aided by what everyone thinks are costume wings on her back.
This last section involves not only Anna’s performance but a scene where Ruy is held captive by his wife. The final battle between science and art takes place between Martha’s Sciomnia weapon and the transfigured Anna. After this is over we get a brief, transcendent glimpse of a possible future populated by people like Anna and Ruy, thousands of years in the future, and spread across the Galaxy.
The story has a stunning final passage where Anna dies, having absorbed the blast of the Sciomnia weapon:

As [Ruy] stared stuporously, her dun-coloured wings began to shudder like leaves in an October wind.
From the depths of his shock he watched the fluttering of the wings give way to a sudden convulsive straining of her legs and thighs. It surged upward through her blanching body, through her abdomen and chest, pushing her blood before it and out into her wings, which now appeared more purple than grey.
To the old woman standing at his side, Bell observed quietly: “Even homo superior has his death struggle, his rigor mortis.”
The vendress of love philters nodded with anile sadness. “And she knew the answer . . . lost . . . lost . . .”
And still the blood came, making the wing membranes thick and taut.
“Anna!” shrieked Ruy Jacques. “You can’t die. I won’t let you! I love you! I love you!”
He had no expectation that she could still sense the images in his mind, nor even that she was still alive.
But suddenly, like stars shining their brief brilliance through a rift in storm clouds, her lips parted in a gay smile. Her eyes opened and seemed to bathe him in an intimate flow of light. It was during this momentary illumination, just before the lips solidified into their final enigmatic mask, that he thought he heard, as from a great distance, the opening measures of Weber’s Invitation to the Dance.
At this moment the conviction formed in his numbed understanding that her loveliness was now supernal, that greater beauty could not be conceived or endured.
But even as he gazed in stricken wonder, the bloodgorged wings curled slowly up and out, enfolding the ivory breast and shoulders in blinding scarlet, like the petals of some magnificent rose. p. 135-136

A seminal, if slightly uneven, piece.

The rest of the fiction in this issue is as poor as I had been expecting from Authentic. There is a short story from the well-known fan E. Everett Evans,⁵ Never Been Kissed (first published as Little Miss Ignorance in Other Worlds, September 1950). It is the first of three ‘Barbara Greenwood’ stories, and the only one ever reprinted. It starts with Greenwood arriving at the spaceport on Mars, where a man called James Foxe starts talking to her. After a short conversation between these strangers, Foxe offers her a job as his secretary. As you would when you talk to a stranger at a port or airport.
It later materialises that Greenwood can type both quickly and accurately, and has a photographic memory but is ignorant of many everyday matters. She starts a relationship with Jimmy, and later repairs a complicated computer. She is quite emotional about the thought of failing the latter task but she perseveres, and eventually succeeds.
The story comes to its (obvious) conclusion when Jimmy proposes, whereupon she reacts badly and refuses, telling Jimmy to go and see his boss for the reason. At that meeting (spoiler) we find out she is a robot! After a brief discussion about this between Jimmy and his boss, they rush to her house just as she is away to fry her brains with a coil of copper wire. They manage to stop her before there is any damage. When she comes around they tell her that everything will be fine, because they are robots too! Everyone is on Mars! This is not only dated but is also the most ridiculous story I’ve read in some time.

Frontier Legion, the serial by Sydney J. Bounds, ends with this sixth instalment. As I predicted in my review of part one in #26, Bounds manages to keep the plates spinning as long as the hero’s amnesia persists and the underlying plot is hidden: this takes us through parts two and three. In part four the story becomes increasingly silly with Arrowsmith undergoing a supposedly perilous hypnotic procedure, not to mention that it becomes obvious that the entire Pluto episode, i.e. more than half the story, is a red herring: the threat is on Earth’s moon, where various planetary leaders are meeting to form a Federation (which will mean the end of the Frontier Legion).
Arrowsmith, his wife, and the miner who saved them from the security services, steal a spaceship and go to Earth. They take a prisoner with them, Lieutenant Bauer.
In part five Bauer, apropos of nothing, mentions “Copernicus”, which is the trigger word that gives Arrowsmith his memory back: Raymond is planning to kill all the leaders at their meeting on the moon (which Lydia already mentioned in the last part, if I recall correctly).
They slip through the least convincing space blockade I’ve ever read about, and then Raymond calls them saying he has Lydia’s (and Arrowsmith’s) daughter hostage.
This last part wouldn’t be that bad if it wasn’t for Arrowsmith having a raging attack of egomania. He (spoiler) puts his daughter’s life in danger without a second thought, finds out that there is a device to shatter the glassite dome covering the moon station, kills Commandant Raymond, and thwarts the plot. The story finishes with him immodestly taking full credit (undeservedly, as his wife had a major role). Lydia and her daughter watch him on TV, knowing that they will never see him again.
Apart from the dumb plot, Bounds cannot write anything other than functional, plot-driven prose. Take the dramatic opening of part three (#28) where Arrowsmith is about to be shot by the Frontier Legion guards:

Death cast its long shadow at Jan Arrowsmith, reaching for him with black fingers. He was a puppet dangling from the thread of life, suspended above the gaping jaws of eternity . . . and, in seconds, the thread would snap. Seconds of time. Bright seconds, fixed and unalterable, with his awareness at white-heat and concentrated on the timeless moment stretched before him. p. 109

Apart from this kind of thing, Bounds also repeats the same descriptions of his characters ad nauseam. Commandant Raymond is repeatedly described as having a “moonface”, Lydia, his wife, is nearly always “lithe”. You wonder how any writer could miss this on rereading or redrafting, all of which makes me wonder if this went straight from the typewriter to the editor.

The Cover, by John Richards, is obviously for the Harness novella. I don’t particularly like it, partly because it portrays Anna as a witchy hag. There are also interior illustrations by this artist (under the “Davis” pseudonym for some reason). I like those but have the same reservation about Anna’s portrayal. The other stories are competently illustrated by Fischer (I like the one for the Bounds’ serial). There is also an astronomical photograph on the back cover.

This issue has a new title page design:

There had just been a redesign in issue #29, but that only lasted two issues:

The listings are tidier on first of these, but I like the design at the top of this one.
H. J Campbell’s Page, the editorial, covers a variety of topics in the first half: a reaffirmation about the future inclusion of a short novel in the magazine, extra short stories because of the magazine’s increased size; a rave for Harness’s novella with the news it will appear in America in hardback (this never happened); a promise to run no more serials because of reader dislike; a note that the “starred letter” in Projectiles will now win a selection of books; and news of Forrest Ackerman’s visit to an upcoming SF convention.
The second half is a messianic rant about how the UK should develop interplanetary space travel, and the perils of other countries establishing a moon base, or even launching a satellite, before us. It ends with this:

In this magazine and in others of its kind, we treat the subject fictionally. But it is incumbent upon us to be sure that it will remain in the realms of fiction only a little longer. By spreading the gospel of science fiction we also bring home to those less imaginative than ourselves the dark possibilities—some would say probabilities—that come from being an earthbound nation while others hold the key to space.
In time, I hope, our politicians will realise that science fiction is not the stuff that childish dreams are made of but the stuff that makes for nightmares of a kind never before experienced in human history. Let us hope they are not too late.
But hope is not enough. Something has to be done. It is being done. Science-fiction fans are on the increase. This magazine alone can show a list of many thousands of people who never read science fiction before and are now staunch supporters.
They would think it strange, you know, those men in high office, those men in the City with their stocks and shares, those reformers and philosophers and prim and proper highbrow socialists—they would think it strange if you told them that science fiction is playing a vital part in the defence of democracy as we know it in Britain. But it’s true.
They would laugh. They might sneer. But the time will come when in one of these editorials I will tell you about that first Moon rocket. I hope it will be one of ours. p. 3

Scientist and Censor: Should They Meddle? by William F. Temple is an interesting article about the fate of his movie, Four Sided Triangle, and how Temple managed to defend it from scriptwriter interference only to fall foul of the censor:

I couldn’t have guessed then that one day a science-fiction film bearing my name (although I didn’t write the script) would end up with the rare creature being duly destroyed in routine fashion, and its creator done for too, in a general chorus of “He didn’t oughter . . .”
For this was the first scenario ending of the film version of my novel Four-sided Triangle. The creature was a girl, artificially made. The book ending allows her at least the possibility of survival. The first film scenario swatted her like a fly. I protested, and others agreed and managed to get my climax substituted, and filming began on the new script.
I might have known I wouldn’t get away with it. But the real executioner is not a film character nor even the script-writer. He stands behind the scenes, still roughly where he was before the war. Down came the censor’s axe and my creature’s head rolled. It had to. There must be no question about a creature unnaturally born ever surviving. We are not the masters of life and death, pronounces the censor, and we must not assume that power (except in war, it seems).
Is he right?
Strange that I, who once knew the answer, now do not. (My protest about my film was based, not on moral principles, but on those of good story-telling.) I survey the results of scientists’ “meddling” since those days and I see penicillin and the atomic bomb, streptomycin and the V-2.
And somehow I feel that the good and bad of it, like the light and shade of life, can never be separated. And that neither the scientist nor the censor really knows any more about it than I. p. 30-31

American Commentary by Forrest J. Ackerman begins with this piece of (admittedly enjoyable) froth:

So this German-born French gazelle named Gisele, late of Indo-China, was dancing around my living-room till early in the morning.
What has this got to do with science fiction?
Well, I might use the weak excuse that sf author Chas. Beaumont was accompanying her dances, that sf artist Mel Hunter was modelling her in his mind’s eye, that sf film director Curt Siodmak was auditioning her for a part in one of his future pictures. Actually, Gisele was entertaining these guests at my post-preview party of a new scientifilm, at the present time nameless, for which I have suggested such titles as: “The World at Bay,” “Element of Fear,” “How Long Left?”
It concerns a hungry metal (artificial element 161) which threatens to grow and throw the earth off balance. Appropriate to the air of authenticity with which the production has been imbued, I passed out copies of the current Authentic to Ray Bradbury, Ross Rocklynne, S. J. Byrne and the other celebrities present. p. 51

This is followed by some movie news, and then the obligatory self-promotion:

Proof of the growing popularity of our favourite literature is the fact that my Agency, which handles the literary material of some ninety or so sf authors, placed over twice as many manuscripts on the world market in 1952 as in 1951! p. 51

SF Handbook: Terms of Interest to the Science-Fictioneer explains the meaning of the terms “Q-value” through to “Rocket”. At the bottom of the page is a paragraph titled “Cry Chaos”, which talks about next month’s issue (a short novel by Dwight V. Swain and, among others, short stories from A. E van Vogt and Rick Conroy). There are a number of science fillers throughout the magazine.
The Book Reviews column is only a page and a half long, and all the books examined are science ones, apart from Isaac Asimov’s Currents of Space:

Being an Asimov, there is a good deal of politics in the story, but this time it does not intrude too much.
Indeed, it is there as a necessary and interesting background to the swift action, poised suspense, and first-class characterisation that will make this book something of a favourite. The hero is psychoprobed because he knows too much. It takes him most of the book to get his memory back and when he does all hell is let loose on the smug moneygrabbers who turn their backs on a planet’s impending doom.
You’ll like this story. p. 137

I hope Asimov does better with the amnesiac plot than Bounds did.
Projectiles is three pages of letters that read like a mix of Astounding magazine’s Brass Tacks and Science Discussions, except that some of H. J. Campbell’s replies are grumpier:

Get it quite clear, Brian [Bell], that we are continuing to publish a long novel. The shorts are there for free. If you don’t want to read them, you’ve still got the novel just as you had it before. But do read them. We’ll steer clear of sensationalism and monsters, never fear. And there’ll be very few damsels. Anyway, you’ll be pleased to know we are dropping serials. p. 140

Most of the letters comment positively on the changes, and the writer of the starred letter, James Ratigan, of London, asks Campbell to drop the “Joan the Wad” adverts on the inside cover (these were low-rent good-luck charm advertisements, missing in this issue but which had regularly appeared hitherto):

In conclusion: this a must get issue for the Harness novella. ●

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1. Harness refers to Campbell’s rejection in his intensely personal introduction to The Rose in the retrospective collection An Ornament to his Profession (NESFA Press, 1997, Amazon UK):

The Rose is about my brother Billy—Blandford Bryan Harness. Billy was nine years older than I, and the age gap precluded the comradely rapport of brothers born closer together. No matter. Maybe he knew me only as a noisy kid, often in his way. But I knew him, as the acolyte knows the demi-god. He was a fine artist; he studied art at TCU, then at the Chicago Art Institute. He wrote short stories but never submitted any for publication. Much much later, I used the plots of several of those stories in my own work. He was a fair mechanic; he kept our ancient Hudson tuned and running. He was many things. No palette of adjectives really illustrates him. He was mocking, wry, sardonic, frequently scornful.
He was killed by two brain tumors. Inoperable, the surgeons said, though God knows they tried. He died at home, in his bed. Mother sat there and held his hand. We all heard his last gasp. He was 26.
I began work on The Rose almost twenty years later. It had been a rough season for me. In the lab where I worked then, a dear friend, a world-class chemist, had been passed over for promotion, and we knew he would now resign. He had been like an older brother to me, a tremendous help when I was just getting started in the patent department. In fact, looking back, he very nearly filled the vacancy left by Billy. His departure was prolonged and painful. Writing The Rose helped me deal with it, like some sort of catharsis. So I finished it and it went out to market.
Every SF market in the U.S. turned it down. John Campbell: “I know only one tune, ‘Pop Goes the Weasel.’” Forrest Ackerman finally sold it in England to Authentic Science Fiction magazine. After that everybody wanted it, and it’s been printed in the U.S. and in six or seven foreign languages.
The tale (as indeed the story itself says) is plotted around a short story, “The Nightingale and the Rose,” by Oscar Wilde. This was in a little fabrikoid-bound volume I found among Billy’s books after he died. I was so impressed, I actually memorized the story—2,500 words.
The picture of Billy I love best: He and I are trying to play checkers on the breakfast-room table. Little Brother Pat keeps interfering. Billy in calm silence unlatches the window screen. picks a puzzled Pat up carefully, lowers him out the window, relatches the screen, returns to the game. It was all so smooth, so ceremonial, so right, that I think little Pat took it as a rare honor.
Wherever a mind could go, Billy had been. He could answer Goethe’s question in Mignon: Yes, he knew the land where the lemon trees grow. And the other things. He had sailed to Byzantium. He had heard the mermaids sing. And the very best of all, he had loved, and been loved.
The perfect Ruy Jacques.

2. The 1966 Compact Books collection The Rose included the novella and an introduction by Michael Moorcock along with two other stories, The Chessplayers (F&SF, October 1953) and The New Reality (Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1950). Moorcock was obviously a fan as he also reprinted two stories in New Worlds magazine, Time Trap (Astounding Science Fiction, August 1948) in #150, and Stalemate in Space (Planet Stories, Summer 1949) in #165. (This latter publication must be the only intersectional part of the Planet Stories/Moorcock New Worlds Venn diagram!)
It was probably no coincidence that Harness started publishing new material again in 1966 after a 13 year layoff.

3. Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and The Rose is here. The Rose follows its plot but has a completely different takeaway on the subject of love.

4. I initially thought the relentless ideation was due to Harness putting too much in. Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder (Advent, 1956, Amazon UK) reports Harness’s comment about another work:

Flight Into Yesterday (reprinted as The Paradox Men) represents the brilliant peak of Charles L. Harness’ published work; Harness told me in 1950 that he had spent two years writing the story, and had put into it every fictional idea that occurred to him during that time. p. 134

However, I later found out that The Rose was initially a much longer work while reading an interview conducted with the author by Darrell Schweitzer (Chronicle #236, June 2003, reprinted in Speaking of the Fantastic II, 2004, Amazon UK, Google Play):

Harness: [. . .] In fact, I wrote a considerably longer version of [“The Rose”]. I didn’t like that, and I started changing it around, abbreviating it, cutting out. So it finally wound up to be what it is now. It was totally unplanned. The final product was not recognizable from anything in the beginning. It just turned out that way. In fact, right up to the end, I was making changes in it. I threw away the original, which is probably a good thing. But what [has] survived is a very neatly packaged little novella, which has some entertainment value.
Q: But you had some difficulty selling it, so that it originally appeared in Authentic SF, a very marginal magazine. But again we have thousands of other stories from the same period that are forgotten. . . . Did you get a lot of bewildered rejections from American editors? Why were you unable to publish “The Rose” in a major American magazine?
Harness: My agent at the time was Forrest Ackerman. He submitted it to every science-fiction magazine in the United States. Every one turned it down. For a long time I kept John W. Campbell’s letter rejecting it. It troubled him, I think, because I brought music into it as a theme. He said that he understood “Pop Goes the Weasel” and he knew one other tune, but he couldn’t remember what. He had to turn it down. So maybe the times have changed and it is acceptable now, but back then nobody wanted it.

So (a) not too much put in but, perhaps, too much taken out, and (b) I don’t understand Campbell’s response: the music references are hardly a key element in the story.
I wish Darrell Schweitzer had asked what the other editors said in their rejection letters, particularly Boucher & McComas at F&SF.

5. SFE has this page for Evans. ●