'You Might Have Done Worse'

Apropos of nothing, I remembered a short story I fell for when I was twelve. I couldn’t recall the title but did remember the author’s name – Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Some will remember his novel The Ox-Bow Incident (1940), or William Wellman’s 1943 film version with Henry Fonda. A brief search turned up the story’s title: “The Portable Phonograph.”

Reading it again after all these years, I can see why it appealed to this adolescent. Being among the last men on earth is a common childhood fantasy, like being invisible, flying or shrinking to microscopic size. The heroic is built into the idea – a survivor in a cruel world. The film of On the Beach, episodes of The Twilight Zone, and Walter M. Miller Jr.’s novel A Canticle for Leibowitz had already familiarized me with the post-apocalyptic trope. In his first paragraph, Clark drops his only overt reference to the disaster: “These pits were such as might have been made by falling meteors, but they were not. They were the scars of gigantic bombs, their rawness already made a little natural by rain, seed and time.” I was also attracted to the idea of a man having four books in his possession in a world that is otherwise, apparently, bookless:  

“‘Shakespeare, the Bible, Moby Dick, The Divine Comedy,’ one of them said softly. ‘You might have done worse.’

“‘You will have a little soul left until you die,’ said another harshly. ‘That is more than is true of us. My brain becomes thick, like my hands.’ He held the big, battered hands, with their black nails, in the glow to be seen. ‘I want paper to write on,’ he said. ‘And there is none.’”

  

We learn the owner of the books, Dr. Jenkins, has just finished reading The Tempest aloud to his three guests. The scene – Jenkins and the others seated around a peat fire in a cave – has a ceremonial feel, as though the reader and his acolytes were performing a sacred rite. On the phonograph he plays a Debussy nocturne:

“In all the men except the musician, there occurred rapid sequences of tragically heightened recollections. He heard nothing but what was there. At the final, whispering disappearance, but moving quietly, so that the others would not hear him and look at him, he let his head fall back in agony as if it were drawn there by the hair, and clenched the fingers of one hand over his teeth.”

The men promptly leave the cave when the recording is finished. Jenkins promises to play Gershwin when they return in a week. He must preserve the needles and records, and play them infrequently. The final sentence, with its perceptible O. Henry click, I remembered clearly: “On the inside of the bed, next the wall, he could feel with his hand, the comfortable piece of lead pipe.” In other words, even humans who survived world cataclysm have failed to learn their lesson. Jenkins knows his guests might try to steal his music and books, and he is prepared to kill to stop them.

This is a pulpy, heavy-handed story, with frightful patches of overwriting, but sufficiently potent to stay with me for more than half a century. It reminds me why I stopped reading science fiction not long after I read Clark’s story. A little digging revealed a surprise. “The Portable Phonograph” was first published in the September 1941 issue of The Yale Review – three months before Pearl Harbor, four years before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.