Who Goes There?

I like Margaret St. Clair. I think out of the many authors who were filling up the genre SF market in the ’50s she was in the top tier, or at least the next best. But you know how it goes, with women who were prolific short story writers in the ’50s: she got out of it. After 1960 she turned mostly to novel-writing, and not prolifically at that. Not that St. Clair owed readers anything, but it’s a shame that there was sort of a vacuum of good female writers in the field for much of the ’60s. St. Clair was so good that she was two of the best women writing at the time, as she published work under her own name as well as the pseudonym Idris Seabright. The conventional narrative is that St. Clair would submit her pulpier stories under her own name whilst reserving the slicker stuff for Seabright. “The Listening Child” is one such example of a genre story that can be hard to categorize, and was in fact the first published under the Seabright name.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 1950 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted three times: in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction (ed. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas), in Young Mutants (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh), and in the collection The Best of Margaret St. Clair. There’s also A Compendium of Margaret St. Clair, but that’s only an e-book so I hesitate to count it. (I don’t like e-books, sorry.)

Enhancing Image

Edwin Hoppler is 63 and wracked with a heart condition that leaves him bedridden for much of the day. He lives in a boardinghouse, with the only people he talks to regularly being the older but much more spritely Mrs. Dean and her grandson Timmy. A case of scarlet fever as an infant left Timmy a deaf mute; he presumably knows ASL but is still learning to read people’s lips. There is something else about Timmy: he seems to be able to sense things that haven’t happened yet That’s So Raven-style. One day a dog gets run over right outide the boardinghouse, but as Hoppler is observing Timmy he notices that the boy seemed to react to the dog getting hit before it happened. “Timmy hadn’t heard the dog’s yelps, the cries, when they occurred. Had he, somehow, heard them ahead of time? It was beyond belief. But it had looked like that.” In a sense the boy was “listening” to things that were about to happen—more specifically bad things, which Hoppler, being understandably worried about his own mortality, considers taking advantage of, hanging out with the boy and whatnot.

Newbery Medal material.

This was, I suppose, back when an old man who is not a relative could be left in the same room with a child for long periods of time and nobody would think it suspicious. Jokes aside, the budding friendship between Hoppler and Timmy is cute, not least because at first Hoppler is disturbed by what he thinks is the boy’s secret power. In a different story, even a St. Clair story in a darker hue, Timmy would be a weird little creep; but here, he is more or less innocent, free of even implied character flaws. Maybe it could be that we’ve seen this archetype way too many times since then, but I felt jaded with the whole “baby Jesus figure” routine. Timmy is not really a character so much as he’s an object of fascination for Hoppler (but not in a creepy way!) and an outlet for him to ponder his own lot in life. The only other “character” is Mrs. Dean, who exists as a foil to Hoppler, being older (or so he believes) but being much more grateful for the life she’s been given. There’s something wrong with Hoppler’s heart, both medically and metaphorically, and this short (I do mean like ten pages) story sees Hoppler’s heart thaw the more he interacts with Timmy. It’s a robust character arc.

Let’s talk disabilities.

There’s a very long history of able-bodied writers having characters with physical disabilities be constantly angsty over said disabilities. (I myself am angsty, but it’s not because of my partial blindness or scoliosis.) Robert Heinlein of all people was actually better about this than most, although he too occasionally indulged in it (I’m looking at you, Waldo). Thing is, both of the main characters in “The Listening Child” have disabilities: one is basically a walking symbol while the other wallows in worry and self-pity. It’s a story about people wounded by circumstance connecting with each other, but it’s also evidently written by someone who—while meaning well—has probably not interacted with disabled persons a great deal. Now, I’m not a sourpuss who can’t enjoy something if it doesn’t align with my own personal understanding of the world. (I mean come on, one of my favorite authors is Yukio Mishima, who has almost nothing in common with me in terms of worldview.) This is more me saying that, even without racism, sexism, or outdated tech, a story can still show its age.

There Be Spoilers Here

Hoppler recover enough from his condition, thanks to medication, that he decides to take Timmy to the beach. (Again this was apparently something you could do in the ’50s and nobody thought it was weird.) Unfortunately, Hoppler suffers an attack and, fumbling for his meds, realizes he had misplaced them. “With desperate incredulity Hoppler remembered that he had meant to move the bottle and hadn’t. It was in his other coat, at home, in the closet.” By all rights this should be the end for Hoppler, but then something pretty strange happens: having sensed before that Hoppler was about to die, Timmy decided to give up his own life, choosing to drown in the ocean if it meant saving the old man. Hoppler sees Timmy gets engulfed by the waves, and as this happens the horrible weight on his chest lightens; he seems to have been cured of his condition, but at the cost of the boy’s life. The ending is a bittersweet one, as the friendship ends tragically but Hoppler is given a new lease on life.

If there was an award for killing fictional children then St. Clair would certainly be in the running.

Now, there is a question that was tumbling through my head as I was reading this story: What genre is it? Because its inclusion in Young Mutants would make you think it’s SF, but while Timmy’s deafness is said to have been from scarlet fever, his precognitive ability lacks an explanation. You could argue losing his sense of hearing as a baby gave Timmy some ESP somehow, but this is grasping at straws; if there’s a connection made, St. Clair does not make it explicit. Timmy’s power to predict the future is treated as magical, and if anything the ending confirms for me that this is a work of fantasy, since Timmy’s ability to heal Hoppler at the cost of his own life implies a supernatural force at work. I would even say the ending makes no sense if taken as SF, but works fine enough as supernatural fantasy. The fact that I had to think what label to even put on this story, though, tells me St. Clair was not thinking actively of labels when she was writing it—that the story itself took much higher priority than what kind of story it would be. This fast-and-loose approach to genre suited F&SF well, especially as the magazine was still forging its own identity.

A Step Farther Out

It’s slick and certainly heartfelt, although I think St. Clair would become more ambitious under the Seabright name quite soon. It does, however, work very convincingly as an early example of what kind of magazine F&SF was trying to be and how it was differentiating itself from its peers. You could show “The Listening Child” to someone without any real genre experience or even interest and they wouldn’t think it unusual. This also shows St. Clair’s willingness to blur genre boundaries and focus on the human angle of a story. I think it’s good, but not great.

See you next time.