Rod Serling's Nightmare at Ground Zero (1953).

Every major talent starts out small.  That's just the way things work around here.  Stories like The Iliad and Odyssey or an epic like Beowulf aren't the best demonstration of what the normal trajectory of artistic talent is like because while Homer managed at least two great works to his name, the story of Grendel and the Dragon all seem to have been complete one-offs.  We don't even have the original author's byline, or biographical details that might help tell us who the Beowulf Poet was, what his artistic temperament was like, what was his imaginative life of the mind as a creative talent, and what sort of early influences went into the shaping of how that creative gift would later be expressed for all time?  These are the questions that any half-way competent critic has to ask if they want a fuller portrait of the artist as a developing talent.  A careful and competent approach to digging up the facts of the artist and their art always tends to tell the same story: big things have small starts.  Even the mighty Charles Dickens began his career with just a handful of slice-of-life newspaper essays that showcased a series of snapshots of life on the streets of Victorian England as they happened to catch his fancy.  He'd hock these wares to whichever newspaper would take them just to find lodgings and food for the night, and his first book was a collection of these articles titled Sketches by Boz that he mostly had to help create out of his own pocket.  It was the success of this sketchbook that made other journals publish his first efforts at tackling the short story format, and these were later gathered into The Pickwick Papers, and things really took off from there.

The point is the kind of trajectory just described for Dickens is sort of the template for the way all genuine talent develops, or else fails to.  Part of the package deal that comes with this growth of the artist's mind is the occasional discovery that sometimes our favorite fantasists began not just in places, but also in the sort of modes or genres of storytelling that we might not have expected from.  It can be a surprise, for instance, to realize that someone like Gene Roddenberry really didn't emerge full grown as someone whose mind was already reaching for that fabled, Final Frontier.  Instead, when we first meet the future Great Bird of the Galaxy, he's just this retired airline pilot who's swapped his wings and flyer's license in for a badge with the LAPD, and whose speech writing for his chief get the attention of department liaisons for Jack Webb's Dragnet series, and so Gene gets his first start in TV Land with Police Procedurals, then Westerns, and even some Comedy Variety Shows, until at last he begins to construct an idea for his own Science Fiction oriented program, and at last NBC buys his pitch (web).

It's the same pattern of start out small, build up big.  The same thing happened to Rod Serling.  Just like Roddenberry, the inventor of the Fifth Dimension doesn't begin his creative life in the realm of the Fantastic, but rather the world of gritty social drama.  It's very much as Gordon Sander writes in the preface to his biography of the mind behind the Zone.  What Sander has to say here is very pertinent to the background context of Serling's early career, which is part of the focus of this review.  For that specific reason, it's worth quoting the biographer at some length here.  "A child of the 1930s, when social concerns and realist aesthetics dominated the arts, Ser- ling was an early devotee of Norman Corwin and the other angry young men who populated the airwaves during the Roosevelt era. Like Corwin, Arch Oboler, and Orson Welles, as well as Clifford Odets and the agitators of the legitimate stage of that era, Serling fervently believed that the theater of the air, like the other literary arts, in addition to being entertaining, should be both relevant and provocative. Serling saw the dramatist’s role in American society as that of an agent of change and a spark to controversy. Or, as he put it in a speech to the Library of Congress in 1968: “The writer’s role is to menace the public’s conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time." With television, Serling was able to fulfill the writer’s role as he defined it.

"And menace the public’s conscience he did, during television’s golden age, with such powerful plays as ‘“‘The Strike” and ““The Rack,” his antiwar diptych; ‘‘Patterns,”’ his no-holds-barred look at the corporate jungle; ‘“‘Requiem for a Heavyweight,” his stomach- turning take on the fight game; in both ““A Town Has Turned to Dust” and ‘Noon on Doomsday,” his plays on prejudice; and ““The Velvet Alley,” his semi-autobiographical critique of the television industry itself. And just as Corwin’s ethereal masterworks helped to legitimize radio drama as an art form, so did Serling’s taut, powerful, and wonderfully visual works, along with those of such fellow video agent provocateurs as Paddy Chayefsky, Gore Vidal, and Robert Alan Aurthur, help make TV one of the lively arts of the 1950s.

"While Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee took Broadway on an absurdist, nonrealist track, Serling and his fellow video litterateurs made the television theater of the late 1950s the real spiritual successor of both radio and the legitimate stage of twenty years before. Unfortunately, Serling’s Ibsenesque bent did not sit well with the network tastemakers. At the start of the fifties, when TV had only just begun its explosive growth, and was still an accoutrement of the educated classes, there had been room for high populist art like “Marty” and “Patterns” on the airwaves. However, the medium proliferated, and sponsors and network officials began to worry about alienating and losing their audience. As a result, this small window of creative opportunity began to close, and TV playwrights were faced with increasing censorship from timorous ad agencies and broadcasting executives.

"Serling...complained loudest. In 1961, Television Age called him the industry’s leading critic. As Andrew Sarris has written: ‘‘Television was the biggest sociological game in town, and Serling wasn’t giving it up without a fight.’’ Unfortunately, it didn’t do TV or Serling much good. By the end of the decade, with the exception of Playhouse 90, Serling’s proscenium and bully pulpit, the dramatic anthology show, had entered extinction, giving way to filmed western and detective shows. Most of Serling’s comrades had long since left television for other less censorious and more “artistic” media, but Serling refused to abandon video: he believed in television. And—unquestionably— Serling liked the limelight. Television (contrary to what another biographer has written) was not only the medium best suited to Serling’s talents, it was also the one best suited to his intense, quirky personality.

"And so Serling continued to badger and probe and moralize— and entertain—as the guiding Aesop of The Twilight Zone. As media historian Peter Kaplan recently has written, "On The Twilight Zone...the nightmare side of American life was opened up. The national soul was the subject, and its real villains were the selfish, the shallow, the rapacious. If there was a real golden age of tele- vision, its single commercial offshoot, never to die, was The Twilight Zone. It loved wit and had wonderful actors and a patina of writing that is television’s answer to the short story (xvii-xix)".  What this helpful bit of background context means is that Serling's creativity can be divided into two differing yet allied aspects.  The first is the one we're all familiar with.  It's the artist as the Twilight Man, Televisions own precursor to what we now think of as the Urban Fantasy and/or contemporary Horror narrative, with an occasional bit of Science Fiction thrown in for good measure.  The other side of this same coin is the one Sander talks about.  This is the part where Serling gets to showcase his skills as a straightforward dramatist without the usual genre centric trappings.  Instead of a beleaguered protagonist haunted by ghosts or aliens, we're instead treated to the sight of a boxer struggling with his personal life and career.

Instead of ghosts on Mars, we see a fresh made and naive young corporate executive as he gets a brutal schooling in the fact that being promoted to the upper class means spending the rest of your swimming around in a shark cage, and hoping to God you're not next on the menu.  The point of such dramas is simple and declarative.  They all count as rages against a very old machine.  The same one that tries to manage a person's life by cementing their worth as a person to second class status, and that will then crawl across hot coals just to make sure things stay that way.  In these moments, Serling resembles nothing less than an early small screen version of Martin Scorsese.  Just like with the auteur of the Mean Streets, the other side of Serling's artistry is concerned with the various mindsets that cause chaos and suffering in modern American life.  What makes Rod's explorations of these same themes stand out from Marty's is that he'll choose to lighten things up with what's best described as a form of proto-Spielbergian humanism on occasion.  Like with Taxi Driver Serling doesn't flinch away when taking a good look at the dark side of the mind of man.  Unlike Scorsese, however, Serling always left room for enchantment into the mix.  He seems to have believed that even the darkest corners can have just a little worth and light to them.

The story under discussion here today is somewhat unique in that it almost acts as a snapshot of the artist at a crucial moment of transition in his career.  It's almost like seeing Rod's mind at work as it begins switching gears from the mode of Scorsese to that of Spielberg.  When Television's Angry Young Man starts to think in terms that will one day inspire one of his fans to become the director of films like Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.  Both of which films carry several degrees of resonance with the kind of narratives Serling once helped to tell.  Before all that came about, however, Rod had a simple writing assignment to fulfill.  He was commissioned to write a half hour script for a TV show known as Suspense.  It was a crime drama centric show, yet it's focus also allowed a certain amount of room for the Gothic macabre.  Such is the case with an obscure Serling tale called Nightmare at Ground Zero.

Charles Dickens' To Be Read at Dusk (1852).

He would have found his way here sooner or later.  That's because he's one of the Big Names.  He belongs to that select group of writers whose fame and renown grants him the kind of status which allows us to know of him, even if we've never read so much as a single word he ever wrote.  This is the weird game that history likes to play with those lucky handful of authors whose writings were good enough to leave such an impact on their times, that they became this strange kind of pop culture juggernaut.  Time hasn't been able to erase our awareness of Charles Dickens, though it has managed to flatten our understanding of who he is, and what he did.  If he's known for anything these days, then it all comes down to just one, or maybe a handful of his efforts.  The most well known of course remains the Christmas Carol.  It's become so much a staple of the Holidays, that we've paid the author the worst sort of compliment he could have imagined.  We've taken what was meant as a social plea for the plight of the poor and the English working class, and turned it into a Hallmark Card about "keeping good cheer" at least once near the end of every year.  I have said that pop culture has a way of playing tricks on those artists who manage to stay alive in it.  I should also point out that sometimes these trick can turn a good reputation into the worst sort of cruelty.

Still, for better or worse, this bit of historical irony is what has allowed Dickens to survive in the memories of countless fans who have never heard of him from his numerous volume of books.  Beyond the Carol itself, he's perhaps remembered also as the author of books like Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and for being the creator of both David Copperfield and Oliver Twist.  That's a handsome sampling so far as pop culture memory goes.  The saving grace there is that all of the books and characters just listed do go a long way toward giving a fair overview of the writer, and a good idea of his best strengths as an artist.  Dickens has been lucky in that regard.  He may not have escaped all the vagaries and tricks that time and history likes to play on those it can bother to remember, he never gets it as bad as others.  Instead, the former street urchin who once had to earn his keep by the sheer will power of his words as a grubbing journalist now gets to take up the same shelf space as his most famous forebearer, Shakespeare, and alongside his near contemporary, Jane Austen.  They seem to have become a trio of gold standards that all the rest are compared to.  Or at least that's seems to be the effort on someone's part out there.  It might all be a construction of the Ivory Tower, yet at least these Names are being recognized in some way for the genuine strength of their talents as writers and storytellers.

At the same time, the fact remains there was always more to Dickens' reputation that just these handful of later Sketches by Boz.  He's also written plenty of other stories that no one, not even tenured academic scholars, have bothered to give much time or attention to.  Since The Scriblerus Club has a policy of shining the spotlight on the stories that fall through the cracks, it does make enough sense to try and see if the formula can be applied where you wouldn't expect it.  What happens if we take a well known writer, and then bring the audience's attention to some of his lesser known efforts?  I think it can be done, and what's interesting in this case is that it follows up on, and continues a bit of criticism from a previous post.  The last review published on this blog was about an item in Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.  The big revelation of that article was how the chilling story of "The Dream" had its origins in a very specific literary source.  It's possible to claim that the true author of that story is a Victorian Gothic writer by the name of Elizabeth Gaskell.  She's an important, yet overlooked architect in the construction of the modern Horror genre as we now know it today.  This importance extends all the way to a greater understanding of such genre tropes as the Final Girl.

It all got its start thanks to the efforts of writers like Liz Gaskell and Anne Radcliffe.  The review of "The Dream" goes into greater detail on these topics, and there has to be more worth exploring on the topic of how women constructed the Horror genre as an expression of protest and satire.  For now though, the relevant thing about that previous article is that it was mentioned in passing that one of Gaskell's friend was none other than the author of A Christmas Carol.  She remained a contributor to not just one, but two magazines owned by Dickens, Household Words, and All the Year Round.  It was a position and a friendship she would maintain to the end of her life.  In fact, as pointed out in "The Dream" review, it seems that Dickens himself might have tried his hand at bringing Liz Gaskell's untold tale of modern day Folk Horror to life in a short story of his own.  It's the content of that short story that I'd like to unpack, examine, and compare/contrast now.  It's a story that's meant "To Be Read at Dusk".