Christmas Scenes: cards, and Isaac Asimov

Christmas Book Scenes are back!  During December I like to post entries which are more Christmas in Books than Clothes in Books, and kind readers say it puts them in a seasonal mood.

If you have a favourite Christmas book or scene not featured yet – please let me know

Season’s Greetings by Isaac Asimov

short story from the collection More Tales of the Black Widowers, published 1976 - this story, unlike most in the collection, had not been published in a magazine previously

[A manufacturer of greetings cards talks about his wife’s collection of them]

“… She grew interested in [cards], she began to collect interesting ones, and then her friends began to collect them and send them to her. Over the last ten or twelve years the thing has been getting more and more elaborate. Christmastime especially, of course, since that is greeting-card time par excellence…. It’s Christmastime that counts, She practically papers the walls with cards and the apartment becomes a kind of fairyland…

In fact gentlemen, if you’re really interested in seeing samples of unusual greeting cards, you’re invited to my apartment. We have open house the week before Christmas. All the people who send cards come round to see where and how theirs contribute…. I keep telling her we’ll have to get the apartment declared a national landmark.”

comments: The Black Widowers Club is a group of NY chaps (none of them, so far as we know, actual widowers) who meet regularly to have dinner in a restaurant private room together. One of them is designated host, and usually someone brings a guest. It has become a tradition that the guest brings a puzzle or a mystery for the Widowers to consider, and so whatever it is, is discussed in detail before finally a solution is reached. There is a smooth and efficient waiter, Henry, and the other tradition is that at the end of the discussion, when the diners are at a loss, he says “May I ask a question…?” and then proceeds to cast light on the situation and work out a solution.

In this story, there is a particular card that is not interesting at all, and everyone is truly mystified – “A practical joke. It wasn’t you Roger, was it?” – “Me? Think I’m crazy? I sent her one with little jingle bells in it. Real ones… You really have to knock yourself out for her.”

If you can accept that this isn’t just a misstep by someone, that there must be a reason, then off goes the investigation to its strange conclusion.

The stories are charming and artless, funny and nicely-told. I like them for that reason (there are six collections) and Asimov gives the impression of being a very nice man. However there is a less worthy reason why I like them: they make me feel clever. When I first started reading them, I guessed the answer to the first one. Then the second, then the third. This doesn’t lessen my enjoyment, I’m #justsaying. Not every single one – about two-thirds - but I’m impressed when they fool me.

[Though on occasion have remembered Raymond Chandler on Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express - mentioned in my recent blogpost:

‘This is the type [of solution] that is guaranteed to knock the keenest mind for a loop. Only a halfwit could guess it.’ Though that always seems a good getout for lack of imagination…]

Asimov is primarily known as a writer of Science Fiction, not a genre I follow at all, but he was plainly a polymath, a kind, self-deprecating man with an interest in everything and always able to turn a fresh gaze on the world.

After each story he writes a paragraph explaining when and where it was first published (if at all - as with this one he likes to have a few new stories in each collection) and often how, where and why he came to write the story.

I have quoted before Edmund Crispin on the crime short story:

‘A short story can aim either at atmosphere or at an anecdote’ – that’s Edmund Crispin, introducing his own book of short stories, Beware of the Trains. He goes on to explain that he likes his stories to embody the ‘increasingly neglected principle of fair play to the reader – which is to say that the reader is given all the clues needed to enable him to anticipate the solution by the exercise of his logic and his common sense.’ I said then it was an interesting and useful distinction, and second, a good description of fair play. The Asimov stories are absolute exemplars of the anecdote style – and he often says that he came up with an idea, a quirk, a twist, and then wrote the story to fit.

The stories are, of course, of their time, and it is interesting to see, for example, the attitudes to smoking – Asimov hates it but feels in the minority. And there are occasional infelicities: - I missed a few words out from the quotation above:.

'the apartment becomes a kind of fairyland, if I may use the term without being misunderstood’

and that is typical of something that you would suggest was an attempt to be jokey, not an element of homophobia.

There are dozens of these stories, and they make a lovely easy read. Each story is very short so it is tempting to read one more... and I am working my way through them all. 

Pictures from bloggers who I hope won’t mind.