Ria
A Novel by Paul Linebarger as Felix C. Forrest
Ria, by Felix C. Forrest, was published in
1947, about a year before Carola. 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 probably more often found
online than the first edition. See further down this page
for a selection from the book.
I re-read the book when I created this website. Felix C.
Forrest is not yet Cordwainer Smith, though the themes of cats,
suffering, cruelty, and male-female relationships are already
dominant. It has no real science fiction aspect. 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."
Here is the cover of the first edition, and here is the
blurb from it: 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 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.
 And here is the cover and blurb 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 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?
|
Ria is often available online. You may
find it at Alibris.
Or at Amazon.com:
|
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