The Artificial Man and Other Stories. Clare Winger Harris

       introduction

      I’m standing in front of a house outside Cleveland, half-waiting for a spaceship to arrive. When it finally appears, blotting out the sky, I will crane my neck and stare at its sleek, impossible angles. People will shout, point, and run.

      But I don’t see it.

      Instead, the house at 1652 Lincoln Avenue sits quiet. It was built in 1917 of stone brick with a front porch. The house is a duplex, split in two by an interior wall I can only imagine. There is a single dormer window sticking out from the attic, perched towards the sky. There is a big tree on the left, whose tips are already turning to fire, here in the September sun. The front door is closed.

      When I asked to organize a new edition of Clare Winger Harris’s stories, I knew I wanted to see the place she once lived in Lakewood, Ohio. But as I stare at her old house, I see little in the way of connection. There is some old grating and windowsills that may have survived the century, but that’s about it. The old bones are there, but the paint is new.

      People still live here, but there is no one home, so I don’t push it. What’s to push, anyway? This wasn’t William Faulkner’s house. Or Emily Dickinson’s. It didn't belong to Langston Hughes, who went to high school in Cleveland. No, this was the house of Clare Winger Harris, who wrote weird science fiction in the early decades of the twentieth century. If I rang the bell and announced that, like I was some door-to-door literary merit salesman, I can easily guess the reply:

       Who?

      It’s a fair response, especially for a woman author who wrote in a marginal genre in cheap magazines. That is why I wanted to write something here that wasn’t the usual elevation of her work. I don’t want to tell you what to think of her stories; I just want you to read them. Instead, I want to tell you about her.

      I circle around again, looking at the cracks and corners. I again hope for some unexplainable trans-temporal event, a sudden fold in space-time from which Ms. Harris would appear, stepping through a shimmering tunnel with Mary Poppins-like authority to answer my questions in full.

      I then realize that the people who live here now, whoever they are, might have one of those security cameras to guard against people stealing their Amazon packages. As I duck behind the dashboard, I think about what Clare might think of such an invention. I think of similar things possibly inside this house: phones, computers, microwaves, and televisions; pads and tablets and smart things you can shout at. In a way then, she was here in full.

      I look again. Maybe instead of an alien ship I can I hear the three baby boys she raised here, something we have in common. I can see her husband Frank, hat in hand, out the front door and on to his job as an engineer at American Monorail. I can almost see the postman come to the door. All writers, regardless of decade, wait for the mail.

      But I still can’t see her. I can’t see Clare. But she’s inside. I know it. I can hear the typing.

      If I had

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