Who Goes There?

We don’t know a lot about Evelyn E. Smith (not to be confused with Edward E. Smith), which unfortunately is not unusual for women in pre-New Wave SF, and incidentally she had mostly stepped away from the field by the time the New Wave and second-wave feminism kicked in. Her story is very much like what you’ve come to expect with female SFF authors in the ’50s: she would mostly give up short fiction to focus on novels. Hey, that’s where the money is! It’s a shame, because this is my first story of hers and I’m already looking forward to more stuff of hers. “The Agony of the Leaves” is very much emblematic of the kind of fantasy H. L. Gold wanted printed in the short-lived Beyond Fantasy Fiction, and I mean that in a good way. This is a fun yarn that doesn’t take itself very seriously.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1954 issue of Beyond Fantasy Fiction. It’s been reprinted a total of one time, in Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1953-1957). The editor isn’t credited, but seeing as I am friends with a few of the people involved, I can make an educated guess on who the culprit is. Also strange to see “The Agony of the Leaves” included here since it’s urban fantasy and not SF.

Enhancing Image

Ernest is a freelance tea master (I guess they had fictional jobs that don’t exist in the ’50s) who has to live with two women fighting over him—both of whom are witches. Mrs. Greenhut (whatever happened to Mr. Greenhut is never disclosed, although Ernest has his theories) and Ms. Levesque are not the most charming or kind-hearted women, but what they lack of decency they make up for in assertiveness. Ms. Levesque has been giving Ernest love potions while Mrs. Greenhut has been giving him love cookies. “[Ms. Levesque]—both of them—were so careless with other people’s property, as well as with other people themselves.” The two women were once friends but now fight as rivals over Ernest. That Ernest is being fought over by two powerful women and is also able to afford rent with his non-job immediately tells us this is a fantasy, never mind the witch part. Then there’s Nadia, an Eastern European woman whom Ernest has the hots for, and this conflict makes him worry and wonder as to what’s to be done about the witches. So we have what you might call a love square at the heart of it, with Ernest trying to get it with Nadia while also trying to make her understand that two witches are tormenting him.

Getting the obvious out of the way, I’m not sure if Smith would’ve read Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife when she wrote this story. Sure, the magazine version of Conjure Wife would’ve been a decade old at this point, but I have no clue if Smith would’ve read the issue of Unknown it appeared it, and then there’s the fact that Leiber’s novel didn’t see book publication until right before Smith would’ve presumably written her story. A recurring criticism of Leiber’s novel is that it operates on the (admittedly absurd) notion that women are witches; not that witches are women (as they tend to be depicted), but that every other woman in the world is secretly a witch. Achievements that men take for their own are actually the workings of their witch wives, which means (of course Leiber didn’t intend this implication) that women are reponsible for holding up patriarchy. It’s a hurdle to get over, if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like to have fun at all. Smith’s story seems to be in conversation with Leiber’s; after all, all the women with speaking roles in the story are either witches or suspected to be witches. Unlike the protagonist of Conjure Wife, who makes the uncomfortable discovery that his wife is a witch, Ernest starts out as knowledgable about witchcraft and wants desperately to return to normalcy—whatever that is.

(By the way, the title is a reference to tea-making, “the unfolding of the leaves when boiling water’s poured on them.” Ernest is apparently eager to tell everyone about his tea-making knowledge, and there are even hints that he’s the 1950s equivalent of a weeaboo. Of course it’s also a pun, given how much Ernest suffers here.)

So there are two driving questions: How do we get rid of these witches? And is Nadia a witch herself? When Ernesst and takes Nadia out to dinner, the witches try to ruin the date, and they try pretty hard; but for some reason their magic tricks have no effect on Nadia, who either doessn’t notice or mistakes Ernest’s blubberings for some psychological thing. Nadia herself is a funny character: she talks in butchered English and is weirdly preoccupied with psychoanalysis. Everything that happens to Ernest (according to Nadia) can be explained by either mania or hallucinations. Nadia isn’t even sure these women exist, despite them living in the same apartment building as Ernest. Is Nadia gaslighting Ernest or is she genuinely clueless? It gets to the point where even Mrs. Greenhut and Ms. Levesque are unsure if Nadia is a witch even more powerful than either of them, which leads them ultimately to joining forces—if for no other reason than to get Ernest out of the clutches of this foreign lady. “The Agony of the Leaves” is a novelette that moves at a breakneck pace, such that you probably don’t realize we’re already approaching the climax when Ernest takes Nadia out on that date. Smith has a way with snappy dialogue that makes everything at the very least entertaining.

There Be Spoilers Here

The ending is pretty good. It’s not confirmed if Nadia is a witch or not but it’s implied she’s a normal-ish person, who just so happens to be way more charming than the witches. Ernest ultimately decides that it doesn’t really matter if Nadia is a witch or not, because he’s under a different kind of spell, if we’re to take Nadia as emblematic of the then-modern woman. It’s subversive because we were led to believe that, given her heritage and her unusual behavior, Nadia is a witch of an even older breed than Greenhut and Levesque. There’s an unspoken rule that Eastern European characters are written as prone to a certain pre-Christian mysticism. The two witches admit, however, that they’ve lost this battle. Smith might be saying something about the superficial nature of a lot of relationships, or she could be having fun with it. This is a pretty cynical ending that could take a legitimately dark turn if it wasn’t the ending to a comedy.

A Step farther Out

On the one hand there’s not too much to say about the story itself, but does there need to be? It’s a frivolous satire, of the kind Gold liked, but it does that job with a fun-loving nature that doesn’t read as phoned-in; rather it seems like Smith genuinely liked to play into Gold’s brand of comedy. I never laughed out loud, but I did chuckle a few times and I was smirking for much of it. You could very easily turn this premise into something unfunny and offensive, and in the hands of a male writer from that period (including, sad to say, Leiber) it could’ve been that. A shame this one had to languish in limbo for over half a century; it’s a fun read.

See you next time.