FFS(&E&RP): some uncollected Wilma Shore short stories (and essays and one radio play) online (and one Joseph Payne Brennan poem)

Two blogposts over the last half-decade isn't Too much to devote to the late, brilliant Wilma Shore, whose career is briefly limned here and here, so here's a third...along with, in the latter, links to the un-"protected" online archives of the magazines that ran these items (and a couple of posts offering both the script and the recording of the playlet she wrote with her husband for Orson Welles's CBS radio series).  An amusing set of magazines, too...there are a few other writers, but no too many, who might tie together the folded but extremely influential sf magazine Galaxy (which published among so much else Damon Knight's "To Serve Man", the first form of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Frank Herbert's Dune Messiah and Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Day Before the Revolution"--Galaxy in its first decade particularly was the home of the kind of satire Kingsley Amis dubbed the "comic inferno"--eventual editor Frederik Pohl was Amis's choice as the best of 1950s sf writers), Good Housekeeping (now ever more a "service" magazine at well over a century of publishing), and the Communist-sponsored quasi-revival of the more broadly radical and also hugely influential magazine The Masses, retitled for the new decade The New Masses.  All of these stories are worth reading, the essays as well, and the playlet just a bit slight and humorously sentimental, but not extraordinarily so (and probably pitched just so to Welles or at least at his request). 

"Goodbye Amanda Jean" is a savage bit of satire, set in a version of 1970 U.S. that allows hunting humans for meat, but where killing just for sport is frowned upon, to say the least (and shooting a teenage girl pedestrian from a moving car, rather than from a stopped one or on one's own feet, is utterly illegal if possibly not prosecuted); Shore barely allows the reader time to gather much at all before Amanda Jean's father has failed to shield his daughter from a crosstown neighbor of sorts, and has, still stunned, accepted a side of the kill for dressing and refrigeration. The loss and injustice of it all still rankles him, and it might just be time to take retribution into his own hands...while staying more inarguably within the law. Bloodsport was in the air at the turn of the '70s, and Shore's story is unrelenting and as plausible as sending National Guard units onto various state university campuses and pointlessly dragging out a war in Vietnam while expanding it to neighboring countries. More startling to me is how much this story, which after appearance in Galaxy has only been reprinted in Robert Silverberg's anthology Alpha 2, and which I've read for the first time this week, prefigures the nature and the method of the satire I applied in one of my better stories, "Bonobos," published a decade back in Claude Lalumiere's webzine Lost Pages...my story, as human/bonobo behavioral crosses might suggest, is as drenched in sex as this one is in violence, and is by intention funnier than Shore's story, but Shore's is the better story, and the laughter here is meant to have what Avram Davidson once referred to as a big bubble of blood in it, in describing a similarly incisive satire. A number of people to whom I've recently mentioned the Shore story remember it well, from reading it decades back. 

The newer of the two stories from The New Masses, "The Story of Dorothy Anstable", is a much more muted affair, but has an early example of the kind of overbearing stage mother, living through her family, who will recur in some of Shore's other stories; Dorothy also is fortunate enough to have her story retold by her rather slow-witted elder brother, so by the end, we're (or at least I'm) not exactly sure of all the details of how thoroughly her mother's obsession with the daughter's reliable promptness and attendance record, and the minor but Official recognition of it and the petty fame that has accrued with that, has derailed her daughter's life, but we have some sense of it. The least of these stories, but it still has a bit of a chill to it. Speaking of a bit of a chill, the story is immediately followed by an example of historical blank verse, about George Custer and Crazy Horse and their encounter, by none other than the relatively young Joseph Payne Brennan...never much of a poet, and sometimes a rather clumsy constructor of prose but not by any means always, and clearly like his Arkham House editor and publisher August Derleth at least an occasional contributor to the politically radical press. Wilma Shore and Joseph Payne Brennan, both praised by Avram Davidson, though AD liked Shore's work better.

"Some Day I Have to Buy a Hat" is a much more probable item to have sold to Good Housekeeping, the account of an obstetric nurse doing a favor for a young patient of her boss's private practice, during World War II, in the face of the disruption the war was causing. A far more humane tale than the first two, albeit by necessity just as cognizant of the ugly realities of its times, if also noting that some tragedy can be ameliorated, to some extent, by the kindness of relative strangers. (Shore's essay "What Happened to the Slicks?" notes that this kind of story, not at all shying away from what was happening in a world at war, was now something found in women's magazines that might previously have preferred more purely escapist, if also feminism-tinged, fare. ) It's notable that her story is the first piece of fiction one finds in the GH issue, blurbed by them "A story on the hard-boiled side, but there's a fair chance you'll like it." Shore later stories would get cover credits at the magazine.

"Decision" is the oldest of these stories, and much more deftly and complexly deals with racism, classism, sexism and the exigencies of Getting By under unfeeling bureaucracy and general inequity than something like the fairly recent film The Help, not too tough for a good short story written by an observer as sharp as Wilma Shore was when this was published in 1941, when the clumsy US bureaucracies were still coping as they did with the leftovers of the Great Depression, not quite yet also coping with US involvement with the war.  The last lines are almost inexorable, and still sting today. 
You can do much worse than visit with these stories and more, and the occasionally reprinted stories and memoirs, in one anthology or occasionally several, including the O. Henry Award Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories and the Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction's volumes over the decades, that await you from Ms. Shore's not so small set of contributions, along with those behind paywalls and the like from The New Yorker, Cosmopolitan, The Nation, The Antioch Review, Women's Studies Quarterly, The Ladies Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines, or seeking out her two books, the short story collection Women Should Be Allowed and the apparently charming, Edward Lear-ish children's picture story Who in the Zoo? Perhaps I'll need to do more than I have so far to advocate and excavate here. 

Much more traditional books and more reviewed at links collected at Patti Abbott's blog.