Weather -- I too dislike it!
Heavy Weather: Tempestuous Tales of Stranger Climes (2021) edited by Kevan Manwaring
Readers unfamiliar with Heavy Weather: Tempestuous Tales of Stranger Climes may prefer to read these notes only after reading the anthology.
The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus. —Joseph Glanvill
"History of a Six Weeks' Tour" (Extract) by Mary Shelley consists of diary extracts covering the famous 1816 "year without a summer."
Shelley has an eye for Alpine sublimity in all its changing moods.
"The Great Snow" (1876) by Richard Jefferies will remind readers of his peerless nonfiction. Nothing is missed in this tale of a snow that brings industrial Britain quickly to its knees. Rural isolation and urban dependence on logistics spell doom when the delicate balance of supply and demand is inundated.
"Through the Vortex of a Cyclone" (1907) by William Hope Hodgson is his finest maritime story. He employs a direct, stripped-down prose style normally associated with Bierce, Crane, and Conrad.
In "The Birds" (1952) by Daphne du Maurier, a sudden weather change from mellow autumn to wintry early December coincides with an uncanny unity of purpose among different species of birds.
Black and white, jackdaw and gull, mingled in strange partnership, seeking some sort of liberation, never satisfied, never still. Flocks of starlings, rustling like silk, flew to fresh pasture, driven by the same necessity of movement, and the smaller birds, the finches and the larks, scattered from tree to hedge as if compelled.
Nat watched them, and he watched the sea-birds too. Down in the bay they waited for the tide. They had more patience. Oyster-catchers, redshank, sanderling and curlew watched by the water’s edge; as the slow sea sucked at the shore and then withdrew, leaving the strip of seaweed bare and the shingle churned, the sea-birds raced and ran upon the beaches. Then that same impulse to flight seized upon them too. Crying, whistling, calling, they skimmed the placid sea and left the shore. Make haste, make speed, hurry and begone; yet where, and to what purpose?
As in Arthur Machen's 1917 masterpiece The Terror, an apparent judgment against humanity has been reached. Du Maurier conveys this in glimpses, scattered sensations, and anecdotes culled from her high-and-low rural characters.
By the second day, when strange events have developed into a national crisis, Du Maurier focuses on the minutiae of survival carried on by disabled farm worker Nat Hocken and his family. Nat has a reputation for being solitary and observant. Du Maurier suggests that may not ultimately be enough.
"The Birds" is a masterful example of thickening dread. The tale asks more questions than honest storytelling could ever wish to answer, a style that cannot but evoke a familiar-unfamiliar sense of the supernatural.
Together with "The Birds," Doris Lessing's spare and remorseless "A Mild Attack of Locusts" (1955) is the unalloyed classic in Heavy Weather.
Unlike "The Birds," no animals behave strangely in the story. Both the locusts and the farm workers deployed to thwart them perform roles little changed for millennia.
Lessing's viewpoint character, Margaret, was born in a city and only comes to the farm when she marries its owner, Richard. Lessing conveys the strangeness of her new life beautifully. Anyone who knows a farmer anywhere in the world or has sat at their table will smile at lines like: "She still did not understand how they did not go bankrupt altogether, when the men never had a good word for the weather, or the soil, or the Government."
During her third year, the locusts return.
War for economic survival commences: Margaret, Richard, and their workers have one goal: stop the insects from settling and feasting on their three thousand acres of maize above the Zambezi.
Lessing portrays the humans-versus-Nature war with prose of elegant simplicity. At times, "A Mild Attack of Locusts" reads like extracts from The Bible or Tolstoy. A chief message of the story is that victory is only won through cross-class unity, perhaps a bow to Lessing's (at the time) Stalinist politics.
"A Descent Into the Maelström?" (1841) by Edgar A. Poe takes place on a mountain in the high north on the Norwegian coast. A local man escorts our narrator to an overlook where they can see a series of near-shore islands.
From this height:
The ordinary accounts of this vortex had by no means prepared me for what I saw. That of Jonas Ramus, which is perhaps the most circumstantial of any, cannot impart the faintest conception either of the magnificence, or of the horror of the scene—or of the wild bewildering sense of the novel which confounds the beholder. I am not sure from what point of view the writer in question surveyed it, nor at what time; but it could neither have been from the summit of Helseggen, nor during a storm....
The guide recounts a deadly episode when he and his brother were caught at sea by the vortex. It is a harrowing tale-within-a-tale, which raises "Maelström" to a chief place as a work of the Romantic sublime.
"The Lightning-Rod Man" (1856) by Herman Melville is an arch and tempestuous rhetorical farrago. Excellent for use as a dramatic monologue.
"The Purple Cloud" (Extract) by M. P. Shiel presents early sections of the novel: the strange voyage to the Arctic and the discovery of the pole's secret. Extracting a portion of The Purple Cloud is a fool's errand. Shiel's moody and beguiling prose becomes more off-putting the more it is carved up. And weather/climate observations are episodic before Jeffson's turn south as the expedition's sole survivor. "The thing can’t be so simple."
"May Day Eve" (1907) by Algernon Blackwood is a story about a man who becomes lost in bad weather while walking from the isolated train station to the even more isolated house of a friend.
I rather chuckled to myself, because in my bag I was taking down a book that utterly refuted all his tiresome pet theories of magic and the powers of the soul.
It was a calm, windless evening, just after sunset, the air warm and scented, and delightfully still. The train, already sinking into distance, carried away with it the noise of crowds and cities and the last suggestions of the stressful life behind me, and from the little station on the moorland I stepped at once into the world of silent, growing things, tinkling sheep-bells, shepherds, and wild, desolate spaces.
As with many Blackwood protagonists, he #learnsbetter.
"August Heat" (1910) by William Fryer Harvey perfectly conveys both the quality of unfolding nightmare in waking life, and the way hot weather can manifest as murderous emotion in individuals. Harvey's meticulous first-person calculus exploring these factors is unmatched.
Re-reading "The Horror-Horn" (1922) by E. F. Benson is always a pleasure. A longtime devotee of Alpine sport, Benson opens his tale with a wonderful evocation of the season. "The Horror-Horn" is a particularly enjoyable story to read in Heavy Weather because in the editorial end-note we get to enjoy editor Manwaring contorting himself to deny the ghastly and droll horror spectacle that ends the tale.
[....] Benson pursues this idea to its literal and terrifying conclusion, but [sic?] positing the existence of an evolutionary throwback. If read in a psychological way—the result of the auto-suggestion of Ingram’s hoary anecdote—then the story at the very least dramatises the weird effect of the weather on the human mind.
[Emphasis mine - JR]
(Manwaring here certainly out-Lucia's Lucia).
"The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes" (1950) by Margaret St. Clair is a slickly acute midcentury-modern science fiction story. In it, Madison Avenue Mad Men have made a TV star of reticent Herbert, a youth boosted by an appallingly parasitic father.
All this is as-read. St. Clair begins the story at Herbert's penultimate tv appearance. He meets Mr. Read, a scientist who has come to study him. In addition to Mr. Read reading Herbert, Herbert has been doing some reading of his own. Thanks to his compassion, he provides a comforting story for loyal viewers of his last broadcast.
St. Clair's flash-bang ending underscores her skilled use of wit and intelligence. "The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes" certainly outclasses a story like "Inconstant Moon" by Larry Niven.
"The Wind-Gnome" (1893) by Jonas Lie is a faux northern folktale about daughters turning tables on fathers who got them princes for husbands.
"Monsoons of Death" (1942) by William P. McGivern is a commonplace story that tries for bathos about duty and loyalty when its absurdly absurd plot fails to rise. Rod Serling won fame for his ability to twist the wings off bugs like this twenty years later. And saying weather plays a central role in the plot is like saying weather is the primary mover in a film like "Aliens" (1986).
"Summer Snow Storm" (1956) by Milton Lesser is a too-cute story not about weird weather, but about a meteorologist who finds out he can control weather with his mind. It's too bad for the Soviets when they kidnap his girlfriend.
* * *
Manwaring's only discussion of “what is to be done” about our current weird weather “anthropocene” comes when he discusses Greta Thunberg, a media folly of several years ago.
Manwaring does this nod in notes to two different short stories.
[....] Imagine if a bellwether activist like the remarkable Greta Thunberg not only drew the world’s attention to the immediacy and scale of the threat that the Climate Emergency presents, but could somehow manipulate climate?
This is part of Manwaring's afterward to Adam Chase’s story, “Summer Snow Storm,” the one about the meteorologist who finds he can control weather.
Commenting on Margaret St. Clair's permanent classic, "The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes" (1950), Manwaring writes:
[....] The media-exploitation of a gifted fifteen-year-old—one whose message severely hacks the “business-as-usual” model—has a prescient quality. Herbert has a “Greta Thunberg” quality to him, or at least performs a similar role, warning us of extreme weather events and other challenges to come. Of course, Herbert is purely fictional, and lacks the eloquence, courage, and scientific awareness of the remarkable Thunberg.
It would be hard not to dispute this. St. Clair's young and self-educated seer, surrounded by hucksters, understands exactly what he sees because he has educated himself. Unlike Thunberg, he gives his views no how-dare-you rhetoric. Knowing tomorrow will never come, he dazzles with a humble opiate no one will live to indict.
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A political aside
Since I find so much fault with Manwaring's editorial statements and choices, I will briefly sketch my own communist proposal to deal with environmental emergencies and crises.
My thoughts are best summarized in this editorial from The Militant, a socialist newsweekly published in the interests of working people:
[....] The working class is the only force with the power to enforce safety on the job and in all aspects of production. All work can be performed safely.
The fight for workers to wrest control of production and transport from the bosses is the road to preventing more injuries, deaths and catastrophes. To advance that struggle, unions need to demand bosses open their books for inspection by workers on the job and in the surrounding community. The fight to ensure that no worker dies or is maimed on the job is intertwined with extending working-class solidarity and strengthening class consciousness.
Only by organizing in our millions can the working class take political power into our own hands and establish a government we can call our own. The working class in power would mobilize to nationalize the bosses’ factories, banks and land and begin to run them ourselves to meet human needs worldwide.
Rail disasters in towns like East Palestine, Ohio and earlier in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec were the result of leaving safety up to the bosses and their government. Joseph Biden, in fact, outlawed a national rail strike over train crew size and safety only months before the East Palestine disaster.
* * *
The day of the animals / where have all the people gone? genre had a formative impact on my imagination. Perhaps every child in bourgeois society enjoys pretending they are Robinson Crusoe or -- in my case -- “Robinson Crusoe On Mars.”
Heavy Weather has several such stories. Even its cozy catastrophes are grim: "The Birds" has more in common with Beyond the Pleasure Principle than Hitchcock's film version. As does Shiel's The Purple Cloud when compared to “The World, The Flesh, and the Devil.”
Weather, that daily pervasive ground and constant topic of a slave's small talk, deserves to be celebrated. Every reader knows their own home ground is ground-zero for the tempestuous zephyr that maddens nerves and sweeps away reason: like the face of Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), gone with the wind in the 1996 film “Twister.”
Jay
March 6 2024