Ria,
by Felix C. Forrest, was published in 1947. It was a novel Paul
Linebarger wrote before he began his Cordwainer Smith era. The
book was out of print for years, and then was reprinted in 1987.
That edition is out of print as well, but some copies have turned
up and you can buy one here.
I re-read
the book not long ago. Felix C. Forrest is not yet Cordwainer
Smith, though the themes of cats, suffering, cruelty, and male-female
relationships are already dominant. At times he pontificates at
length, and some of the writing (and the ideas) are dated. I didn't
enjoy this as much as I enjoy most CS. But as I said on the home
page, being his daughter, I'm hardly objective. Re-reading the
book was rather like an extended conversation with my father,
in which I couldn't answer back.
Ria
herself came alive for me (though most of the other characters
didn't so much), and one of the most interesting things about
the book for me was how my father wrote mostly from the female
point of view, through the eyes of Ria herself. When he was about
Ria's age, he lived for some time in Baden Baden, and the novel's
odd variety of characters, and its descriptions of the power of
American dollars in 1922 Germany sound very much like what he
told me about his experiences there.
Ria
may help with the discussion about when he became involved in
Christianity. Bits like this can be read in more than one way:
"But if you stopped and thought about life as it truly was,
all problems came down to yourself, and your own tragic temporariness,
and the fact that you were no more solid than a daydream in the
mind of an unimaginable God."
Cover
and blurb from the original edition
 The
author of this extraordinary first novel is a government scientist,
now back at his regular occupation after three and a half years
in the Army. Ria was written while the author was overseas and
it was mailed back to his wife in installments.
The
central figure of this novel is an American girl who has been
educated in Japan and Germany, the attractive, bright, and intense
fifteen-year-old Ria. Most of the action takes places in Bad Christi,
Germany, when the girl finds herself caught up in a curious pattern
of behavior that is often beyond her understanding as well as
out of her control. Surrounded by a group of vivid and unusual
characters, and compelled to action by circumstances as real as
they are peculiar, Ria plays her odd part in enacting a drama
of 'sex plus time plus space.'
Quite
as strange as the central figure are the other characters in the
story: the young and fantastic German intellectual, the exiled
ancient Russian prince, the broken-down English madam, the lovely
blond Swedish girl, Ria's helpful and irrepressible mother, and
half a dozen others, including the magnificent golden cat, Sardanapal.
It
is safe to say that Felix C. Forrest has scored an outstanding
success with his first book of fiction. Before the war Mr. Forrest
had written extensively in his professional field, but this is
is his first book of general interest. Born in 1913, the author
has lived much of his life abroad. As a very young child, he was
taken to Japan, and he still regards the Inland Sea as the most
beautiful spot on earth. Later, as readers of this novel will
understand, he lived on the Riviera and in the Black Forest. He
has also lived in China and in southern England. As a result,
he says now that at any given place he is apt to find himself
homesick for all the rest of the world.
Cover
blurb and cover from the 1987 edition
Those
familiar with the quirky stylistic nuances of Cordwainer Smith
will recognize in RIA a similarity that is more than mere coincidence.
Long before the first published appearance of "Cordwainer
Smith," the man who would be Smith was already producing
works of fiction using the same unique style and invariably humane
inner vision that was later to characterize his tales of mankind's
far future.
RIA, like the tales of the Instrumentality,
is a story of human growth and introspection. A story of humanity
that cuts across cultural boundaries by finding and exploring
the threads of human experience that are common to all. And, like
Smith's later tales of a far future universe, RIA is a story that
cannot be told in the here and now. It is a story that can only
be told as it is remembered; through the obscuring mists of time
and memory.
Chapters
One and Two
I.
The Memories of Ria
I. Ria Regardie
Browne stood alone on the hotel terrace and looked over the dunes
at the edge of the ocean. East of her the sky was gray. Into that
sky Gene had flown, and had not come back.
And now it
was September—17 September 1943, 1930 hours—that's the
way Gene would have put it, with vehement mock-military enthusiasm.
But war was hard, practical work, and Gene had not been the right
kind of man to venture into a sky full of howling machinery. Gene
had resented war; but when it came he accepted it as duty and
adventure. Now she looked over the waters, all alone, while her
hand hurt.
She was not
looking for anything. That spring the coast had been invested
with danger. Heavy columns of smoke and unnatural dark-orange
flame had stained the coastal sky whenever the undersea boats
attacked. Now the sky was quiet.
The sky was
coolly gray. It held neither threat nor promise. Ria was alone
with herself and the pain in her hand. The hand looked all right
from the outside: the numbness did not stand out in red welts;
the twist did not betray itself as a deformity. The hand looked
like an ordinary hand, but filled with fire known to herself alone.
The doctor
had said, just an hour earlier, on this same terrace:
"Well,
Mrs. Browne, if you don't want to go to a psychiatrist, there's
nothing much that I can do for you. The neurologist has said that
there is no organic difficulty in your nerves. We could, of course,
block off the nerve leading to your arm, and shut off the pain
that way if it becomes intolerable; but's that's tricky business.
You assure me that you have adjusted yourself to the death of
your husband. You said that, didn't you?"
While he
had been talking, Ria visualized his life as a corridor running
parallel to her own. His corridor was bright, warm, pink, alive
with domesticity, health, laughter. Her corridor was gray, dry,
cool, quiet, apart. Words made windows between the corridors.
You could guess at what people really thought if you could mind-read
the intended words behind their voiced words, the real meanings
behind the sounds they mouthed. Preoccupied with the image, Ria
merely answered:
"Yes."
"Well,
then, if it isn't your husband, it's something else. You're too
young for this kind of syndrome—young for a person of your
personality type. You're thirty-six, and haven't any reason for
this, not for years yet. Rule out organic troubles, for the time
at least... What have you been hiding from me? Or from yourself?"
"I don't
know."
"But
you have to know! It's your brain, not mine. If you can't dig
out the trouble, a psychiatrist can. Somewhere, sometime, you've
picked up a worry, a conflict, a blocked desire—one like
thousands of others in anyone's life. But this one has happened
to be permanent and hidden. Now it's tangible enough to reach
across the years and twist your hand. Do you need any more proof
that something is really wrong?"
"I suppose
I'm just tired. After all, Gene's death..."
"No.
We've gone into that. You've persuaded me it isn't that. Tell
me. Anywhere, somewhere in your past—isn't there a shock
you haven't mentioned, a disappointment, humiliation, a crime?"
"Crime?...No."
But as she answered, Ria felt the past uncoiling in the depths
of the corridor behind her. She felt her German yesterdays stir
faintly in the silence of her brain.
"Well,
Mrs. Browne?"
"There
may be something. You'll have to let me think it over. I don't
need a psychoanalyst or a Christian Scientist or anything like
that. I may find something. If there is anything there, I can
find it for myself."
The doctor
rose. Ocean wind moved across his thick gray hair. His face seemed
tinted a more than usual bronze as it reflected the red glow of
the late-afternoon sky. Ria thought with casual envy of the woman,
unknown, to whom this man would go home. She said good-bye to
the doctor almost listlessly, appreciating the way he took her
warped hand casually, but not too casually, in the conventional
handshake. He passed the edge of the building and was gone.
Ria turned
her eyes to the sea, and the past. Somewhere in herself there
was a force; she visualized it as an animal, indolent, brainless,
cruel only in that it lived. This animal attacked her. It was
up to her, and to her alone, to go back into the darkness to herself,
to find the enemy, and to kill it with light. But who? What? When?
What crime?
She remembered.
Of course, she remembered:
Bräutigam
murmuring, "Wealth—wealth—wealth! More wealth than
the world has ever seen, ever. More food. Riches for everybody."
And she could see Bräutigam sucking his innocently lascivious
lips, and brushing his stringy, soft brown hair away from his
high, narrow forehead.
Or the cat
Sardánapal walking past, broad muzzle grinning, fiery eyes
scornful; funny, thought Ria, that even after twenty-one years
she could not get over half-believing that the cat really was
the incarnation of a scientist from Mars.
Or Murata,
eating cream puffs and politely bowing every third bite, becoming
sharp and tense as he described pain. Ria thought to herself:
How could I have known it then? The poor little man was getting
lustful. It was just his way of getting passionate. But she could
not forget Murata's black eyes blazing, his voice catching, as
he said to her:
"The
Chinese—the Chinese—they are terrible people. The tortures!
Rinchiku, one of them is called. Do you know what they say about
that one, Ria? Do you know what they say about that one? They
say that a dead man—truly, a man who has been dead all one
day—will wake up and make weeping for shame if they do the
rinchiku to him! Ria. Isn't that terrible, Ria? What do
you think, Ria?"
His greedy
eyes had searched her face as he watched for an answer; but Ria
had looked out of the window at the Black Forest and the familiar
promenaders of Bad Christi, and—without knowing why—she
refused him the satisfaction of seeing that he had keyed her up.
He let his eyes fall to the table, and his Japanese golden teeth
flashed as he smacked up another bite of cream puff. Ria let that
memory slip sideways, and away.
Or the Prinz
Todschonotschidsche, whose old lungs whistled as he wheezed his
sharp philosophy. And the Russian smell of the big room, where
dusty sunlight fell unnoticed into a tray of cheap jewels.
Or the nice
people. Nicest of all, her mother, gray eyes glittering, fearless
before God and man, skeptical of everything but the truth, and
dead sure of what truth was. Nice, too, Desirée—pale
face and pale lips and pale golden hair, making her look like
a statue coming halfway to life, still enchanted with beauty.
Or Wolf von
Julo, long fang-like teeth gleaming, fierce-looking, sharp-talking,
until he took a pear from his pocket and polished it on his sleeve,
clicking his heels and saying: "Fräulein Regardie, the
Germany of one thousand nine hundred and twenty-two can give you
little that you cannot buy for a butter-bread with your good American
dollar and our thousands of marks. But take note, Fräulein:
a pear like this cannot be bought at any price. All your dollars
could not buy it. We German people still have our land, and our
pride. You cannot buy this pear. So! You are a good girl. I give
it to you. What do you say, Ria?" And his chuckle followed.
But these
things were just the glimpses of memory.
She had to
get back to the house itself, if she were to recapture the smell
of crime, to see again the pale, hunted face of Desirée,
the imperial fury of Bräutigam despairing, the blood all
over the room—and her own sinking, sinking feeling that she
had stumbled into something from which no God could extricate
her, ever.
II.
But how could
you ever find anything, if you looked back? Memory was not a clear
paneling to the corridor behind you, neatly niching the days and
hours of life. Memory was just a chart, a map as unreal as a picture-map
of familiar cities. Memory was what you had taught yourself to
remember about yourself—the practical things, the dates,
the events which you had to put on passport applications and driver's
licenses, the anniversaries you told other people about. Memory
was personal history—tidied up, improved, falsified, like
any kind of history.
Memory was
not the raw uncontrollable pictures which sprang forth from the
depths of your mind—the chaos of queer things which most
people kept under control. Memory was not the bite of poetry evoked
by a familiar texture, the sting of wan unhappiness brought forth
by a once-familiar tint. Ria remembered how a particular cerise
color on the walls of a department-store restaurant in Richmond
had made her feel puzzled and at home, until she knew that the
color was the color of a dress of Desirée's—the one
which Mother had called the Dress of the Scarlet Woman, and which
Mrs. Cordon had said she wouldn't go to a dogfight in. Ria remembered
that going to a dogfight had seemed an improbable necessity for
Mrs. Cordon, and that the two women had explained the idiom to
her painstakingly; Mrs. Cordon had told Mother that she, Ria,
should be taken home to America so she would grow up a real American
girl, instead of living in Japan and Germany and God knows where;
and Ria had thought of the picture books of America, and the never-ending
stream of good things which had come from America, and had felt
oddly wistful at the familiarity of little Mr. Murata who alone
of all people in Bad Christi was the only one who could connect
her childhood in Japan and her adolescence in Germany by talking
good, Tokyo-twanging Nihongo to her as they peered over the wooded
hills toward the Rhine, where the French were, grim, menacing,
and implacable—There! That was what happened when you just
let yourself remember, instead of sorting out the tidy dates and
the formal dissociated names. That wasn't real memory.
But what
was real memory? It wasn't dreams, either, not the monstrous shapes
which rose and struggled and fell in a familiar but unknowable
world. Ria remembered her own dreams—especially the few signal
ones for which she had names: the Dream of Innocence, the Dream
of Crime, the Dream of Pure Power—as a sort of life convulsively
apart from the elegant superficiality of waking hours. When awake,
her brain was genteel; it forgot Bräutigam and the blood
on the table; it forgot the Martian-scientist glare of the accusing
cat Sardánapal; it forgot the rainfall around Mademoiselle
Lavallance and the jabbering heartbreak of old Frau Bräutigam.
But dreams stripped the past of everything extraneous—names,
persons, places, times. Nothing remained but the pure gesture,
dressed up again in the garments of more recent experiences. And
dreams were at that broad borderland of sheer experience which
was so obvious that people did not dare to talk about it.
What about
the traps which everybody had inside his head?
What about
the sudden glimpses backward into the forever-unknowable first
person singular, the blank abyss from which each of us comes forth,
and over which each of us is precariously suspended?
Ria found
herself changing mental images, and dropping the fiction of the
corridor. With her mind she saw a lunar landscape, full of potholes
like bullet-marks in the cold stone. Over each hole a person stood,
suspended in thin, empty air. Now and then some individuals would
vanish; all the time, empty holes were popping up new people.
The new people immediately set to bowing and simpering and chatting
with the others, until they too flashed downward and forever out
of sight, back into the subterranean nothingness from which they
had first leapt. The remarkable thing was not the way that people
sprang forth out of the horror of being born—not the way
they impotently flashed downward into irrevocable death. No, the
odd and important thing was the way they pretended this tremendous
spiritual drama was not going on all around them—the way
that they chatted with each other while mysteries and miracles
occurred pell-mell all over the place—the way that they looked
at each other's hats and dresses, or applauded one another's wit,
or flirted and fell in love with one another, while the blinding
machinery of the universe operated in plain sight before their
unseeing eyes.
Perhaps they
dared not look. Perhaps dreams were the fugitive sidewise glimpses
which people dared take at the terrific truth of being alive.
Perhaps words were built to guard men from vision. After all,
words were not designed to express what we experience; they were
set up for a very different purpose, to express what people want
to communicate. What could people really say about death? Say,
that is, that mattered? Or say about the elusive oddity of sex,
the charmingness of being one kind of human being?
People talked
about the safe things, the nice things, the good things, the true
things which did not matter much. When ordinary facts stared them
in the face—facts like the certainty of dying, the goodness
of passion, or the strangeness of being—people looked away.
Yet among those facts was one that Ria had to find. She saw herself
walking wide-eyed into the landscape of mysteries, lunar in its
bleak brightness of light. Somewhere she would find the combination
of facts which now lay hidden in her brain, and which by its mere
presence twisted her arm out of shape.
But she would
have to stop being genteel; she would have to stop thinking about
unimportant things like last year's hat or next year's politics.
Dresses and wars and newspapers and politics and talk and books—these
were things which people did together, things with which they
amused themselves before flashing, one by one, irrevocably away
out of sight. Communism or Culbertson bridge or Boulder Dam might
look important for a minute if you tried hard not to use your
own imagination, and tried to think that the blank spaces in betweeen
living people were more important than were the people themselves;
but if you stopped and thought about life as it truly was, all
problems came down to yourself, and your own tragic temporariness,
and the fact that you were no more solid than a daydream in the
mind of an unimaginable God. How could people really look at things?
Or really talk about themselves? Of course, they pretended they
weren't people. They kept fundamentals off the stage of the everyday.
When she
was a girl, her mother had always shushed her up when she got
down to anything important or true. Yet Ria, smiling at the thought
of her mother's incomparable bravery, knew that her mother was
one of the rare people who can keep both worlds, the eternal and
the momentary, plainly in sight all the time. Ria remembered her
mother's thin-lipped bright smile, and the way that her mother
could utter—unconsciously but authoritatively—some tremendous
theological truth at the moment she scrubbed out the ears of a
dirty baby.
Ria thought:
Sometimes I realized that the world was full of people who went
around keeping secrets from each other, secrets which they all
knew. I've looked across aisles in streetcars and watched blank
lumpy people sitting in docile rows. You could see their eyeballs
move as they read the ads or as they looked across at the traffic
to be seen through the windows opposite.
But sometimes
you would see more than that—something else would go across
their faces, something odd which they didn't like. And then they
would look around to see if anyone caught them feeling that way,
because people sense that when they see the truth, it is so obvious
that other people ought to be able to catch them seeing it. But
they notice that everybody else looks dull and usual, and they
heave little sighs, and look cheered up, and try to focus their
minds back on the things which don't matter—the streetcar,
the world around them, the prices of things: anything but the
absolutes which they've looked at face-to-face. Why should they
talk about being alive? There isn't anything to say—nothing
that words can say.
Yet, Ria
somehow felt that the combination of memory, dream, and formal
recollection could be put together; she could find the question
which, unanswered, had converted itself into physical torment.
But the question was not to be found among the real, the basic
questions. These had no answers; and if mankind did indeed require
answers to the questions, why birth? why love? why death? why
anything?, mankind would have gone mad long ago.
It was the
final miracle that mankind could ignore miracles—could ignore
the overwhelming inexplicables of everyday life, and find enough
games to keep happy. What Chinese was it who said, "We are
born in a stupor and die in a dream"—without mentioning
what would happen if we dared to wake up in the middle of it all?
Category:
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