Who Goes There?

Manly Wade Wellman debuted in 1927, in Weird Tales, and remained a resident there for quite some time, which partly explains how he, who wrote both SF and fantasy, managed to stay relevant after John W. Campbell started reshaping the former genre in his own image. Indeed his reputation as a fantasist only grew over time, and when he eventually settled in North Carolina he would become one of the foremost authors associated with that state. His career is a long-spanning one, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing him again before too long. He won the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1980. I may have picked “The Valley Was Still” as my first Wellman to review because it was adapted into a classic Twilight Zone episode, retitled “Still Valley.”

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1939 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. Was anthologized in Weird Tales (ed. Peter Haining), The Twilight Zone: The Original Stories (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Richard Matheson, and Charles G. Waugh), and The American Fantasy Tradition (ed. Brian M. Thomsen). It’s also in the Wellman collection Worse Things Waiting. That last one seems to be in print.

Enhancing Image

I wanna start this review by saying I’ll be discussing the ramifications of the American Civil War a fair bit—maybe even a bit more than the story itself. “The Valley Was Still” is a very fine story, but it’s also a work of neo-Confederate propaganda, albeit one that’s more morally nuanced than the usual. Wellman believed pretty heavily that the Confederacy fought for a just cause, more specifically that the Confederacy fought for “states’ rights.” What rights exactly states should have is something neo-Confederates are always silent about giving. The topic of slavery never comes up in this story, which for anything regarding the Civil War basically renders the given viewpoints incomplete at best. The problem with not mentioning slavery when talking about the Civil War is that the absence of slavery renders the Civil War a conflict seemingly without a root cause. The Civil War, Confederacy sympathizers argue implicitly, is a war that started basically from nothing. Mental gymnastics are obviously at work here.

You may be wondering how I, as a proud Union man, can like this story if I think the implied worldview it’s presenting is wrong on a basic level. The answer is simple: I have the media literacy of at least a 5th grader, as opposed to the 3rd grade where too many people are stuck at. You can like a work of art whilst disagreeing with its worldview. This is really easy to understand, but many people somehow miss the point. Like I said, “The Valley Was Still” is a very fine story, with maybe more texture in its ideas than Wellman had intended; but then art, even art written to fill pages in a pulp magazine, requires at least a fraction of the artist’s subconscious for its making. I have to say Wellman also does something that at least from a modern perspective is hard to pull off, in that he gives us a protagonist who is a Confederate soldier, a “chivalric idealist” as Wellman tells us, and despite his patriotism for a doomed and deeply immoral system he remains worthy of our sympathy. This is a sign of good writing, by the way. Wellman tells us very early on that Joseph Paradine is this idealistic patriot, because it’s important to establish such a thing before Paradine gets confronted with what would be for him (if not for us dirty Yankees) a tough choice.

Paradine and his scout buddy Dauger are looking out over the town of Channow, a Southern town deep in a valley that Union troops are supposed to be encamped in. There’s one problem: from where Paradine is sitting he can’t find any Yankees. Indeed the town is… a little too quiet. Paradine volunteers to go on ahead by himself, in what would under normal circumstances by almost a suicide mission. He would be guaranteed a POW if the Union boys caught him if not for the fact that he could, at least at a glance, pass for a Union soldier, having stolen several items of apparel as “trophies of war.” On the other hand, if the Union troops are not encamped here, then something more sinister may be going on. Paradine ventures into town and it doesn’t take him long to scout out the place: it’s basically deserted. All the townsfolk had gone. More importantly, he finds dozens of Union troops, all of whom have seem to have dropped dead. “But who could have killed them? Not his comrades, who had not known where the enemy was. Plague, then? But the most withering plague takes hours, at least, and these had plainly fallen all in the same instant.” Only it turns out, after some testing, that they’re not dead, but have somehow been made to take to a deathlike sleep. But what could’ve done this?

I wouldn’t call “The Valley Was Still” a horror story, but it does have a quiet eeriness at its center, and this is helped by Wellman’s style, which I would call a few steps above the standard weird pulp prose of the time. Rod Serling, when he adapted it into a teleplay for The Twilight Zone, must’ve been similarly taken by Wellman’s writing, It’s simple, but controlled and quite affecting. By the way, Serling must’ve read it in what had to be a battled old copy of the 1939 issue of Weird Tales, since “The Valley Was Still” had not yet been reprinted anywhere at that time. Indeed it’s very short (only maybe a dozen book pages) and it presents its message with a neat little bow, which is just the kind of thing Serling liked. However, the message, for how concisely it’s presented, may not be so simple. Things get weirder when Paradine finds there is one other waking person in the town—a very old man named Teague, who had apparently put a spell on the Union boys. Teague is a “witch-man,” from a family line of witches, so he says. The townsfolk of Channow treated him as an outcast, only coming to him for favors, and when the Union boys came in they high-tailed it, leaving Teague seemingly alone to fend for himself—only he’s a one-man army.

Like Paradine, Teague is a patriot. He almost confused Paradine for a Union man and nearly put the sleeping spell on him, but is delighted to find a bright-eyed Confederate willing to do anything for the cause. Well, we’ll see how far that “anything” goes. Before I get to spoilers, I wanna say again that we’re clearly supposed to believe Paradine is fighting on the “right” side of the conflict, even if it’s doomed by history. The plot almost could not exist if not for its pro-Confederacy angle—I say “almost” because Serling, a New Yorker and a flaming liberal, saw that there was something rather touching at the core of what could easily be woe-is-me Gone with the Wind-esque soap-boxing. (Gone with the Wind is a very bad, overlong, melodramatic, and deeply racist novel, none of whose qualities overlap with “The Valley Was Still,” other than a general wistfulness about a certain war neither of the authors were even old enough to have witnessed.) We’re told repeatedly that Paradine believes in honor, that he looks up to Robert E. Lee, that he believes in chivalry. Lee fought to preserve slavery, but he was courageous, and he did believe in such a thing as honor on the battlefield.

The question Wellman then poses is: How low are you willing to sink to fight for what you believe is a just cause? Do the ends justify the means? Should the Confederacy win, even through dishonorable means? Is “honorable” defeat something Paradine will have to accept? These are some juicy questions Wellman asks of us in the span of only a few pages, and it’s here that the story reveals itself as a parable. On the surface it’s a parable about an honorable man who’s fighting for a dishonorable cause, and must chose between cheating for the sake of victory and defeat on his own terms. Consciously Wellman thinks Paradine and Lee are perfectly honorable men, but subconsciously he might’ve been more conflicted; he might’ve been unsure, deep down, if the Confederacy really was a cause worth dying for. This uncertainty stops “The Valley Was Still” from becoming jingoistic garbage, but it also elevates this story about witchcraft from pulp to a perfectly respectable fantasy fable.

There Be Spoilers Here

Teague has a spell book. The whole thing, he claims, is filled with the word of God, but when Paradine sees the book for himself he finds God’s name has been crossed out and replaced with what is highly implied to be the devil’s. We’re told that with the power in this book the Confederacy can win the war, with Paradine as the second greatest man in the South—only behind Teague, of course. Paradine assumes when Teague refers to the greatest he means Robert E. Lee, but Teague clearly thinks highly enough of himself that he believes he can rule the South almost single-handedly. Almost. He needs the help of some fresh meat, some young patriot to help carry out his plan—someone like Paradine. All Paradine needs to do is sign his name in the book, with his own blood, to make an allegiance with the devil, and the South can win this war; if he doesn’t sign, then we’re told the devil doesn’t like being scorned. Now, Paradine is well-read enough to figure out quickly what kind of situation he’s in; he may be an idealist but he’s not an idiot. He knows the price one might have to pay for this deal.

Victory through evil—what would it become in the end? Faust’s story told, and so did the legend of Gilles de Retz, and the play about Macbeth. But there was also the tale of the sorcerer’s apprentice, and of what befell him when he tried to reject the force he had thoughtlessly evoked.

Thus “The Valley Was Still” is a Faustian parable, or a deal-with-the-devil type story. The difference between this and some others of its ilk is that rather than make a deal with the devil, Paradine ponders whether he should do such a thing in the first place. Ultimately he decides that whatever wrath the devil might inflict on him and the South, he figures it’s better to lose (if the South is to lose) honorably than to win dishonorably. Not only does he reject Teague’s deal but he cuts the old man’s head off with his saber before he can finish signing his name. He then takes the book and undoes the sleeping spell, replacing the devil’s name in his recitation with God’s, opting to do the right thing even if it means likely getting taken prisoner. Wellman seems to be telling us that even the most patriotic of Confederates would rather risk losing the war than to commit blasphemy in the name of winning it. I think Wellman is being a little charitable here, but you have to admit his take on the war is about as morally upright as one can be while still being pro-Confederate; indeed the story borders on anti-jingoistic. In the context of the story, the South loses because one man chose to do the right thing, even if it meant the devil conspiring against him.

A Step Farther Out

I shouldn’t have to say this, but you don’t need to be a neo-Confederate or even a Southerner to enjoy this one. Wellman, as expected in the pulp tradition, can phone it in at times, but this is definitely not one of those times. This is a story he clearly wanted to tell; it might’ve been rolling around in his head for years prior to the writing for all we know. It has the controlled style and tight structure, combined with a thematic density, that implies it was a passion project, and I’d be surprised if it was just another bit of hackwork. You could teach this in a course on the art of the short story and people would probably not make a big fuss over it. Certainly it’s a good place to start with if you’re getting into Wellman.

See you next time.