Your Dad's Favorite Short Stories
whether he knows it or not; and a note on Cynthia Ozick
Richard Matheson, best known for his short novel I Am Legend, is Ray Bradbury for horror fans. He’s serious about language, but not fussy; he’s playful and ornate in a Hollywood-haunted sort of way, or else he’s playing it straight. He’s committed to standard genre tropes, but usually as a way of luring readers into stranger, sometimes whimsical riffs on interpersonal and psychological drama. An example: space explorers find an abandoned ship with their own corpses in the wreckage. Time loop? Trick of telepathic aliens? The reader’s understanding of these possibilities, his desire to detect which track the plot will choose is explicitly aped by the characters until the character’s disagreements become the primary source of escalation. The story is about not wanting to die, and like Bradbury, such squishy, human, sometimes sentimental motifs remain the iron spine of his experiments.
Most importantly, though: Richard Matheson is one of your dad’s favorite writers. I don’t know your dad. Maybe you don’t know your dad. Maybe there’s no dad involved in your life. Dad is more of a sensibility here, a cliché even. Dad is a practical, smart person who gave you all of your favorite paperback novels at the age of twelve.1 Was that a librarian, a cool teen girl in your youth group, or maybe a stranger on a bus who smelled like gun oil? Congratulations, for the purposes of this newsletter, that’s now your dad. And along with whichever war they’ve chosen to read about forever—shoutout to my favorite Civil War Dad, Bill Coberly—your dad also loves Richard Matheson.
I can prove it with only two of Matheson’s short stories.
I. Why Can’t Anybody Drive?
Welcome to Dad-verse, where it’s possible you’re actually a mom or an uncle or seventeen and childless, but where you believe in changing your own oil. You are also the only reasonable driver on the road. I know I am, at least, and I’ll never understand why no one else can sense the rhythms of traffic, neither the hotheads in the BMWs nor the potheads in used BMWs. Like every Dad, my road rage is the only righteous example.
In the short story, “Duel,” Richard Matheson turns this sentiment into horror. A semi-truck driver begins to stalk and eventually attack our protagonist for no apparent reason. It’s JAWS for the highway.2 There’s nothing subtle to the story. Our protagonist is called “Man.” Matheson couldn’t even bother with “Guy,” a name people have actually used now and then. Man is driving along a one-lane highway to his next sales meeting when a trucker takes irrational offense and begins to run him down. It’s a great story about how no one else can drive but you, and how your skills at driving are the only line of defense between you and all those other imbeciles jerking their wheels with mysterious motion. Man, as in Humanity, is no longer wandering through the forest watchful of bears, he is wrestling his externalized self through a tangle of fenders, where new predators have evolved. He is still being hunted, and he is still surviving.
Tell me your dad isn’t nodding along right now.
II. Let Me Tell You A Joke
It gets better. There’s a story in The Best of Richard Matheson (a Penguin classic!) that your dad actually wrote. Remember all the caveats about your dad and how he might be a youth group friend named Sarah who lent you Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. Well, your dad also wrote a story about a man with the last name of Cook. Boy does Cook hate his middle-of-the-road life. But there’s a solution! He will duplicate himself and make that schlump, his second self, do all the boring stuff while he goes and dallies with a prostitute at his favorite house of ill repute. I know! Pretty blue material from your dad! But of course Cook #2 doesn’t love doing all the boring stuff like, I dunno, watching TV with his family (the dolt). So they make another duplicate and another and another, until there’s a whole neighborhood of Cooks running into each other. What, you must be thinking, is the point of this, Dad? I can’t believe, Dad, you even know the word “prostitute”!
Well, it turns out all the extra Cooks are now going to the same house of ill repute and driving the girls crazy. Crazy enough the Madame blows up Cook and all his clones one night at their house. Which is a pretty wild twist, to be honest. And you must be thinking, Why, why are you still telling this story, Dad!
Matheson, a good father, looks you in the eye: It’s like they say, “Too many Cooks spoil the brothel.”
A much less playful retrospective from my reading journal entry on Cynthia Ozick’s Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays (2016)
Cynthia Ozick was born in 1928, which feels vital to this collection in terms of its sense of history, the immediacy with which she presents the great questions of mid-century America. Largely, of course, this means talking about the Holocaust. The essays often take up the Jewish-American experience as her primary theme—she'd probably shudder at my Millennial phrasing—and the Jewish-American writer's experience in particular. What surprised, and possibly convicted, me most was her documentation of how the Holocaust as a central pillar of western intellectual thought has slowly eroded. Obviously that's partly history just moving forward, but the question of how to write about . . . whatever we call it, if we can call it anything, wends through the entire collection. The Holocaust. Not a parable, not a philosophical example, not a way to win an argument about right and wrong. The Holocaust. Not that Spielberg movie, not any movie, not a reason for art of any kind, perhaps. Not propaganda. A great and ominous mass that warps not just European history, not just 20th-century history, but History. She mentions [the German writer W.G.] Sebald's aside about, “No serious person should think about anything else,” and examines [Saul] Bellow's relationship to that impregnable, haunting center. Not the periphery, not a part of a greater and more horrible loss of life (though it was; somehow). But the Holocaust. The industrial pogrom. The first genocide made possible by assembly lines. The intent of it, the evil that looks inward as well as outward. Who, in my facile opinion, can doubt demons? Who, in my facile opinion, can wonder what they learn from us? We will judge angels one day, St. Paul tells us. Rulers of hell, Ozick counters, already abound.
A possible self-important note creeps into what I’ve written at the end; a sort of ponderous pondering. But Ozick did hit me in the center on a topic to which you’d think no one had anything else to add. Quite the opposite, of course. The more we talk and create and represent—especially as the years chew at its unspeakable specificity—the more the Holocaust is veiled.
Thanks for reading. I love you all.
Love to my actual Dad, who gave me me many.
Obligatory footnote to say that Spielberg directed a TV movie of “Duel,” which was more or less his major career breakthrough.
For the record, my Dad did love Richard Matheson, and reading this awoke an ancient memory of Dad explaining the Too Many Cooks story to me and looking pleased with himself after he had finished.