is Horton Beam) retires from the huge, noisy textile mill in North Carolina where he has spent most of his adult life. It is his last day, and they give him a gold watch as he collects his last paycheck. At last, after a lifetime of subservience to the machine, he crosses a patch of grass outside the plant in defiance of a Keep Off the Grass sign and mutters (under his breath), “They can all go to hell.” It is important for the tone of the story and for Beam’s ultimate position in life that he does not have the courage to yell it out loud or to commit any major infraction of the rules. He tells his coworkers on that last day that he is going to do nothing. At the house where he has lived alone since his wife died years ago, his watch off, he begins looking at the books left in the house and comes across his dead son’s copy of Walt Whitman’sLeaves of Grass (1855) and sees the line “ heard the learned astronomer.” Beam decides on impulse to become a Learned Astronomer. This is a novel (or novella) of ideas, a short allegory set in prose form, a multileveled symbolic novel in the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and, as it turns out, a consummate exercise in mythopoetic fiction—for Betts’s artistry is such that it can be all these things, and in such a short space.

The next day, a young man, Fred Ridge, appears on Horton Beam’s doorstep, wanting to rent a room. The Astronomer ignores him and studies his star charts all day, but the young man is still there at nightfall, so Beam rents him a room. The next morning Ridge presents The Astronomer with his paramour—and the representative of the labyrinth—Eva, who has abandoned her husband and children and run off with Ridge, one of her husband’s used-car salesmen. These characters are not merely people but are the allegorical embodiment of ideas or forces or human options and choices. Eva reminds one of Eve by her name, but she is more like Lilith, the first (and evil) wife of Adam. Lilith, according to legend, objected to the recumbent position in sexual intercourse, preferring the superior one; when Adam tried to compel her obedience, she uttered the name of God and left. Lilith became the destroyer of the newborn (just as, later in the short story, Eva aborts the love child she conceived during her affair with Ridge). God is supposed to have sent three angels, Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof, to fetch Lilith back; she would not go but agreed to spare newborn children if the names of the three or their likenesses on an amulet appeared above the infants. This led to the apotropaic rite formerly practiced by devout Jews in which a message in charcoal was written inside a charcoal circle on the wall of the newborn’s room: “ADAM AND EVE. OUT, LILITH!” Jewish children who laughed in their sleep were supposed to have been caressed by Lilith.

The other Hebrew legend about Lilith is that she ruled as queen in Zmargad and in Sheba; in another, because she left Adam before the Fall, she was immortal, and she not only strangled sleeping infants but also seduced men in their sleep. In this novella, The Astronomer, at the height of his infatuation for Eva, feels that he has for a moment seen through sheet and mattress and boards and earth right down to hell, which is certainly congruent to Eva’s representing Lilith. If Lilith is a demon, then The Astronomer represents Judeo-Christian spiritual history against the forces of darkness, another reading of the allegorical content of this novella. The Astronomer at another point claims identification with Adam in that he gives names to stars. It might also be noted, however, that this allegory is not merely religious, but also aesthetic; its conflict is between the artists and those involved in the quotidian burdens of life. To give the story a “middle reading,” these are real people, too, in a real workaday North Carolina. The car lot where Fred Ridge used to work for Eva’s husband was depressing, Eva says. The progress of life annoys her; for her, the momentary pleasures of life, the feeling of slight removal from things rushing to their conclusions, are part and parcel of living. She fears final things, and so, from the beginning, her adventure with Ridge and her abandonment of the children can only be a momentary loop in the straight road to death through alienation and despair. She is not, perhaps, a good example of those who live recklessly by improvisation, dedicated to survival by their wits, but here, as in so many Betts stories, there are no final winners.

Eva is a sensualist. She has, like her little girl, chewed tar from the telephone poles, and she asks The Astronomer if he has ever chewed peach-tree gum or eaten wild locusts (this reference is almost biblical). Eva is pregnant with Fred’s child, however, and she goes to an abortionist on the street running between the black and white communities. He makes her prostitute herself as the price of the abortion. Eva’s troubles, her new sordid life, and his going down into Nighttown to find her force a conversion upon The Astronomer (and it might be remembered that in Hebrew legend, Lilith goes East, beyond Eden, to live by the Red Sea, home of the lascivious demons). It is not quite a religious experience; Betts’s control does not leave her for an instant. The Astronomer begins to think of Ridge, and he begins to feel sexual desire for Eva as she recovers from her abortion; desire is something he has not felt for a long, long time. He comes alive; he thinks he can hear the grass growing. His telescope becomes covered with dust. After Eva recovers, both of them disappear, an ending that shocks the reader but provides a perfect conclusion to the story.

“The Spies in the Herb House”

“The Spies in the Herb House,” in The Astronomer, and Other Stories, is a beautiful evocation through unobtrusive prose of a happy childhood; it is based on a wickedly funny conceit: that two innocent young girls growing up in Piedmont, North Carolina, during World War II could believe that a popular graffito could stand for Fight Until Children Killed. There is not much motion in the story, in the great tradition of stories of childhood remembered, and it is rather closely autobiographical (one little girl’s name is Doris), but the diction, the timing of the joke (and it is timed as expertly as any stand-up comedian’s), and the characterization of the girls all make the story more than worthwhile. The Herb House of the story is a large, ugly wooden building in the Herb Capital of the World (Statesville, North Carolina), where elder flowers, true love, wild cherry bark, blackberry and pokeweed roots, sumac berries, ginseng, sassafras bark, catnip, balm of Gilead buds, and other herbs were stored until a few years before the story opened; the warehouse is no longer in use. It is the sort of place two tomboys like Doris and Betty Sue would break into, and they do.

Once inside, they discover an “X” on a box, which they mistake for a swastika (this story takes place during World War II, and Doris’s playmate has boyfriends in the service who write her letters). Later, the girls, who believe that they have discovered a German spy hideout, have “other dreadful discoveries to make.” They see “two long glass counters against one wall. They were about as high as the glass counters which held candy at the dime store. By taking turns, by twisting our necks, we could see they were lined with velvet.” Doris immediately deduces the German spies are engaged in diamond smuggling. “Why would the Germans do that?” Betty Sue asks. “Submarines cost money!” Doris says. Then they see the graffito written on the wall and deduce its meaning too and feel utterly powerless and alone. “There was so much I understood that day—valor, and patriotism, and the nature of the enemy. Even my fear was specific. The war had come to me and I did not have to go to it. I was one with all the innocent victims of history.” This is not a bad discovery, however frightening, to make at any age.

“Benson Watts Is Dead and in Virginia”

Betts said about the story “Benson Watts Is Dead and in Virginia” that it “is a logical extension of the things that interest me most in fiction, which, as I say, are mortality and time. ” The premise is intriguing. It is in fact the one question that has tormented every human culture since time began: Where do we go when we die? In this first-person narrative, Benson Watts, a sometime schoolteacher, dies and wakes up in Virginia. He is sixty-five and survived by grandchildren, “none of whom I liked very much.” He looks like John L. Lewis and teaches United States and world history in high schools all over Texas.

When he wakes up one day, he is bald, younger, forty again, dressed in Dacron trousers and a pair of shoes he has never owned. Around his neck hangs a medallion which says:

1. Dwell, then travel2. Join forces3. Disremember

He finds a house he immediately recognizes as the one Henry David Thoreau built by Walden Pond. Shortly thereafter Olena, a pregnant red-headed woman in a hairdresser’s white uniform, appears; she is in her late twenties and has stayed alive eating persimmons. Next, as throughout the story, animals from medieval bestiaries once read by Benson Watts begin to follow them everywhere, coming almost close enough to be seen in detail. Then the two are joined by Melvin Drum, a connoisseur of religions and a streetcorner preacher, who is beaten to death in an alley by men who mistake his identity. This is, at this point, a welter of religious ideas, allusions, references, symbols, and speculations entering the story. Betts is writing here of Everyman Dead, not just a meditation on the Christian heaven or purgatory, limbo or paradise.

The three have been following, at first separately and then together, the first injunction written on Watts’s disc: “Travel.” All three begin to travel through endless virgin forests, over pure limpid streams, deeper and deeper into a world that none of them recognizes. Now, with the exception perhaps of Benson Watts, they begin to obey the third injunction: “Disremember.” Benson Watts begins to make love to Olena. Drum disappears. They continue to drift across an empty planet thick with forests. The baby in Olena’s body disappears, the first disconcerting sign: Perhaps their time in this limbo is keyed to the number of years each has lived. Finally Olena dies, leaving Watts alone. The tale ends with Watts closing his journal (the story has been a sort of epistle intended for dispatch to the Void, or perhaps for the next one to come along) and waiting for an end he cannot imagine. The novella is built around a powerful idea, which accounts for most of its thrust, but its execution and the expert blending of philosophy with realistic rendering of the human beings involved make it almost unique in American letters. Betts breaks new ground in her first fantasy short story and dramatizes many beliefs and attitudes toward death. The most important thing about the story, however, is that it reads almost like a biblical tale: It is authentic, human, and cathartic.