Everything Old Is New Again

It shouldn’t surprise me but it always does. You write what you think is a new idea into a story only to find out someone you’ve never read has done it before you. I’ve talked about this before with Edmond Hamilton’s “Day of Judgment”. In that case I wrote a flash piece called “Goddog” only to discover he had written a much better and longer version for Weird Tales back in 1947. That one didn’t bother me because Hamilton’s story is so damn good and mine was less than a thousand words long.

This time around the roles are reversed. Back in 1988 I wrote a story called “The Other Woman” (published in 2002 in The Book of the Black Sun). It’s 5000 words long and the plot in short is: a writer’s wife becomes jealous of her husband’s typewriter. When she tries to destroy it, it attacks her because it is actually a Mythos creature sucking her husband dry of his essence. After a desperate battle, the wife wins and the machine is destroyed. The story ends with a bit of irony, when the writer-husband replaces the typewriter with a word processor, and it’s much smarter than his old machine….

Reaction to the piece was mixed. Written in 1988, home computers had arrived and typewriters would soon be museum pieces. By 2002 even more so. I think for the older generation the story worked. Younger readers not as much. I shrugged it off and moved on. You can’t stand against time and tides.

Last week I wrote a piece on Fanciful Tales of Time and Space #1, Fall 1936. It’s a fanzine that Donald A. Wolheim began his amazing career with. It features Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth and one story in particular, “The Typewriter” by David H. Keller M. D. I think you’ve already guessed it, right?  A 1500 worder about a writer who dreams of a typewriter, finds and writes a bestseller about a fantastic woman. The wife gets jealous and destroys the machine with an ax. The typewriter screams and the writer can never write again. In all the important points, the story is the same. I’d never read it before. I can be sure of this because the story has never been reprinted outside the fanzine. I read it for the first time last week, not before 1988.

I don’t say this out of fear of legal action. David H. Keller is long gone. I’m not talking about this because some reader will accuse me of stealing the idea. I’m mentioning this because it fascinates me. Two guys coming up with the same idea, separated by thousands of miles and five decades. Now to be fair, neither story is a masterpiece. Keller basically threw it away in a fanzine and forgot about it. I would not list “The Other Woman” among my best work (not by a long shot).  In Keller’s story the typewriter is haunted by a woman’s spirit. It reaches out to him in dreams, sending him to a pawn shop to buy it. Her soul is released when the ax chops into the machine. In my story, the typewriter has arcane Mythos script scratched into the undercarriage, infecting it with Lovecraftian nastiness.

Here is the core of what both Keller and I wanted to get across: a machine imbued with an evil essence, paired with a tale of jealousy between a writer and his wife. His characters are pale sketches, mine (hopefully) better drawn out at the longer length, two obvious versions of myself (Gerry for Gary) and my wife’s name unaltered. Keller was happy to leave it after the climax, while I suggest hope then pull it back. Who knows, in 2038 we are due for another version, about a writer and his computer…..

I don’t worry about this too much. I recall a story about Jack London. He wrote “Moon-Face” in 1902, about a man who kills a rival by training his retriever to bring back a stick, knowing the man will use dynamite for illegal fishing. Frank Norris accused him of stealing the idea from his story “The Passing of Cock-Eye Blacklock” (also 1902). Both had been based on a newspaper story by Charles Forrest Maclean. They tracked down Maclean and asked him, where did you get the idea? He admitted he’d stolen it from somebody else….

Ideas are nice and fine but it what the author does with them that really matters. Jack London defended his work in a letter to a friend with “expression, you see–with me–is far easier than invention.” I would rather read London’s treatment of an adventure idea over most other writers any day of the week. Frank Norris I know because he wrote a few horror stories but would never seek out intentionally. Charles Forrest Maclean is unknown to me and probably will stay that way. Stephen King has said within his fiction: It is the tale, not he who tells it. King is the living proof that this is NOT true. His constant readers come to him time and again because he is telling the tale. If this were true, then the hundreds of Stephen King knock-offs that polluted the shelves in the 1980s would still be read today. It’s not the ideas…