Charles Beaumont: Selected Stories Read online

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  Introduction to

  FREE DIRT by Dennis Etchison

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  In the fifties and sixties Charles Beaumont's name was magic. With a style so smooth and polished that it could be published in Playboy and the slicks as easily as in the genre magazines, he was a singular inspiration. Ray Bradbury had achieved some degree of detente with the literary mainstream years earlier; now there was a new champion and role model, one with a unique aura of glamour, confidence and apparently unlimited potential who would surely succeed in elevating imaginative writing from its adolescent ghetto to a position of respectability in the real world. His method was facile and yet sophisticated, accessible and esoteric, readable and technically impeccable, and somehow never superficial or calculated but deeply personal, sincere and committed in the manner of any serious art. The field has not known his like before or since. In 1963 the UCLA Extension catalogue listed an Advanced Science Fiction Workshop, one of the first of its kind anywhere, to be taught by Beaumont himself. I was still living at home and had no job or money other than the small checks I had begun to receive for my fiction. But UCLA was within driving distance of Lynwood, and I did own a 1950 Ford, bought with my first short story sale, that might get me there if I carried an extra quart of oil in the trunk and stayed off the freeway. So I signed up as quickly as I could borrow the enrollment fee from my parents, and set out on the long haul down Imperial Highway for ten weeks of evening sessions. I had seen him before, at the World Science Fiction Convention in 1958, where he and Richard Matheson shared the spotlight, and at the Pacific Coast Writers Conference, where he appeared along with the likes of Christopher Isherwood, Anais Nin, Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling. He was as I remembered him, though his sandy hair was no longer bright and his eyes showed signs of sleeplessness. There he sat behind his desk, dignified beyond reproach, chain-smoking Pall Malls so deeply that nothing re-emerged after he inhaled. He spoke quietly and charmingly on a level perfectly adjusted to the needs of the class. He suggested that we submit stories, read them or allow him to read them aloud if he wanted an oral critique, and entertained us with anecdotes. From time to time friends of his would drop by, lecture or answer questions if they felt like it- William Shatner, who had starred in the film of The Intruder, stayed to give a cold dramatic reading of one of the student stories; William F. Nolan taught us the value of notebooks; Ron Goulart remained in the background shy and self-effacing. Our teacher honored us by sharing a new manuscript of his own, and went so far as to offer us an idea that he had never gotten around to writing but which, he said, was ours to use as we liked. It was about a man who is killed in an accident but revived after being dead for several minutes-long enough to develop a ghost. Several in the class wrote about this premise. I did not, but the idea remained with me, and in the late sixties I used it as the basis for a pseudonymous novel. Later, in the eighties, a variation became the core of my novel Darkside. A definitive version has yet to be written, but someday one of us may get it right enough to do Beaumont justice. He even took us to the movies one session for a sneak preview of The Haunted Palace, which he had scripted from work of Lovercra ft's but which was presented by AlP as another Edgar Allen Poe adaptation. We were encouraged to invite friends, and when two or three times as many people as were in the class gathered around Beaumont in front of the World Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, he reached for his wallet without hesitation and purchased a kitetail of tickets several feet long. Needless to say we applauded when his name came on the screen. One night Ray Bradbury spoke to our group. It came out in passing reference that Bradbury was ten years older than Beaumont, who was then only thirty-four. I remember my shock, since Ray looked healthy enough to pass for ten years younger than our teacher. Had they misspoken, reversing the order? Later I learned of the illness that had already begun to take its debilitating toll, and wondered if on some molecular level Beaumont had understood how short his time was and that he must compress a lifetime's achievement into only a few years . All that remains now is the memory of that summer as it exists unchanged in the minds of those who were there, and the typed comments he handed back with our assignments. I have carefully saved mine, a brief page on "Wet Season." Not long after the class ended I sent the story to Nolan, who was then editing the magazine Gamma. He rejected it with the longest and kindest such letter I would ever receive. He said that he did not quite understand the story but that it reminded him of "Free Dirt," another tale he could not grasp logically but which he found haunting and compelling. I was overwhelmed, particularly since the Beaumont story was a favorite of mine. My piece had nothing to do with it in either style or substance, and the comparison was certainly unwarranted as an assessment of quality, but Nolan had detected Beaumont's influence. Six months later Nolan wrote asking to see the story again, claiming that he could not get it out of his mind. This time he did publish it, something that would not have happened had it not been for the class. There is more to tell, but this book is supposed to be by and about Beaumont, not his fans and camp followers. So let me just say that there were other lessons I am only now beginning to understand. Over the years I have come to see that summer as immeasurably richer than it seemed at the time, one of the cornerstone events of my life and career. Twenty years later I decided to try in my own small way to pay back the debt by teaching my version of the same class for UCLA Extension. I do not have Charles Beaumont's talent, but I have done my best to inspire students as young as I was then, and to retell as much of the advice from 1963 as I can remember. Nolan has dropped by several times, as have Bradbury and Matheson and many others who have become my friends, including Beaumont's son Chris, now a successful writer, producer. And on those nights when my class lets out after three all-too-short hours, I wish that I had taken Chuck up on his repeated offers to join him for a drink at the Cock & Bull on Sunset. I never did, because I was embarrassed to be only twenty and poorly dressed with barely enough gas money in my jacket pocket, and because I did not know that that time would never come again. The only thing I can do now is to buy my own students a drink while they are still mine to know, and to ask them to raise their glasses with me in tribute to the living memory of the man they should have known.