Barry N. Malzberg: "Heavy Metal," "Turpentine," "Quartermain" and "The Prince of the Steppes"

In a Malzbergian mood, this week I reread my copy of 1970's Dwellers of the Deep, which I first read and blogged about back in 2017.  A fun read.  Now let's fast forward from the Nixon era to experience some Malzberg stories from the Reagan and Bush years!  

In 1939, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei founded Arkham House to preserve in hardcover the work of their hero, H. P. Lovecraft.  In the year 2000, in one of those ironies with which life abounds, Arkham House published In the Stone House, a book of 24 stories by a guy who has it in for Lovecraft (see 1989's "O Thou Last and Greatest"), our hero Barry N. Malzberg!  I bought a copy of In the Stone House at Second Story Books in Rockville, MD, just recently for 15 bucks, which I consider a good price.  Let's read the first four stories in this 240-page volume (these four stories take up like 47 pages.)

"Heavy Metal" (1992)

Barry Malzberg is obsessed with world-class womanizer and murder victim John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, and this is yet another Malzberg story about the man.  I've been hearing people swoon and mourn over JFK my entire life and they just say the same goop again and again* and I am pretty sick of it, but I'm still going to slog through "Heavy Metal," which I know you were hoping would be about Ozzy Osbourne and Tony Iommi or iron, copper and tin.

The narrator of "Heavy Metal" is JFK's closest confidant; I think Barry means JFK's conscience or a ghost or something, not a real individual flesh-and-blood person.  Whatever he is, the narrator describes a bunch of behind-the-scenes incidents from the 1960 campaign, including JFK banging some chick, but mostly JFK talking to his brother about LBJ or journalist Theodore H. White (watch out you don't think he's the same guy as Englishman T. H. White, as I did for years!) or them arguing about strategy (Bobby wants Jack to try to stay faithful to his wife for a little while) or watching the returns on election night.  

The pivotal scene of the story is a meeting with Chicago mayor Richard Daley.  In Barry's alternate world JFK doesn't suck up to Daley, so JFK loses the election because Daley refuses to commit the fraud that would deliver Illinois's electoral votes to Kennedy.

This story is a drag unless you are some kind of Kennedy fanatic who will relish yet another opportunity to read about the Kennedy clan, Daley, White, Henry Luce, Johnson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Adlai Stevenson, David Powers, Richard M. Nixon, that whole cast of characters.  And if you are a Kennedy fanatic maybe the story will irritate you because it portrays the Kennedys and their allies and their quest for power as pretty sordid--Malzberg reminds us that JFK won a Pulitzer prize for a book some other guy wrote, for example.  I think, however, that Malzberg's aim in writing the story is to present a more human and sympathetic JFK than the one who existed in real life and the one we so often see portrayed, to present a more vulnerable JFK we can relate to--a victim--and a more moral JFK we wish we could identify with--a mensch who refuses to kiss the ass of the anti-Semitic Daley and thus breaks out of his victimhood but throws away his chance to be leader of the free world.

(I might also note that Malzberg writes in his usual slightly oblique style, using no quotation marks in the many scenes of dialogue, and never using JFK or LBJ's last names or Richard Nixon's name at all, so readers who aren't familiar with the 1960 election might have trouble telling what the hell is going on, though it seems impossible such people would ever encounter this story.)

To me, this story is a waste of time, but I will grudgingly admit that Malzberg achieves his goals here, so those who are the audience for a story like this will probably enjoy it.

"Heavy Metal," the significance of whose title is escaping me, was first printed in Mike Resnick's anthology Alternate Presidents.  Malzberg has two stories in Alternate Presidents; but the other one, which is apparently about Huey Long, is not in In the Stone House.  I'm curious what Malzberg has to say about Long, so maybe I'll look that one up in the near future.   

*Other presidents people argue about, other presidents are revaluated periodically, but people feel compelled to say the same stuff about JFK again and again and again...  

"Turpentine" (1991)

Looks like more alternate history.  Alternate history is a subgenre I avoid, but my commitment to Malzbergian studies is so great that I am going to hack my way through this one as well.  

"Turpentine" is about student revolutionaries in the New York City of the late 1960s--I guess it is based on Black Panther and Weather Underground violence in New York City in 1969 and 1970.  Malzberg also contrives a way to mention Chicago and Hilary Clinton's hero Saul Alinsky.

Our narrator is the number two man of a gang of revolutionaries who have taken over a Manhattan college campus, Ronald X.  The number one man is called Richard.  Richard and Ronald X are black, but the #3 revolutionary, Johnathan, is white, and there are other white people among the unnamed "soldiers" of the revolutionary gang.  

The black leaders of the group force a white college professor (this guy got his degree in Chicago, which is how Barry drags Chi-town into the story) to show them the secret way to the school's nuclear reactor.  (In real life, Columbia University built a nuclear reactor but never operated it, in part because of fears of student violence.)  Richard starts negotiating with the government, threatening to blow up New York City unless he is given control of the town.  Johnathan vigorously argues against this risky course, arguing that since LBJ has decided to not seek reelection he will be bitter and have nothing to lose and will respond to Richard's threats with air strikes--even a nuclear bomb!  Johnathan warns Richard that he is going to bring the Vietnam War home, Malzberg cleverly echoing, I guess somewhat ironically, the slogans and sentiments of the Weather Underground.  Sure enough, the story ends with the devastating aerial bombing of the nuclear facility.

A leftist who wanted to defend Malzberg might say this story demonstrates the plight of black people in America, the lengths they have been driven to and whatever, and Richard certainly complains about how hard life is for black people and how white allies of blacks always let them down, are just play acting at revolution before returning to safe bourgeois life.  And I suppose it depicts LBJ as a trigger happy warmonger.

I have to say, however, that to me the primary "takeaway" of the story is its depiction of blacks as a reckless, menacing, dangerous "other."  Malzberg writes grammatical errors and black accents for Richard and Ronald X, emphasizes black men's aggressive and threatening sexuality, and has Richard and Ronald X physically manhandle the Chicago-degree holding prof and poor Johnathan in a humiliating way.  Richard, for example, sees Johnathan cleaning his spectacles and snatches them from the white student's hands and deliberately smears his fingerprints all over the lenses.  Richard's course is not only suicidally risky, he also mistreats, with deliberate cruelty, the very people who are trying to help him!  (We might also add that eyeglasses are often used as a symbol of the intellectual, so Richard's deliberate defacing of a man's eyeglasses is a sort of symbol of his contempt for intelligence and learning--Richard is a savage or a barbarian.)  "Turpentine" suggests that white people who try to help blacks are fools whose efforts will not be appreciated, at best--at worst the blacks will abuse them and then they will get killed in the violence the blacks cause.         

This story is well-written--it pushes your emotional buttons and has lots of human drama, and is certainly thought-provoking.  Thumbs up!   

As for the title, I am guessing it is a reference to a metaphor Richard uses about how in the dark you can't tell a person's skin color but when the sun comes up or the lights are switched on it is obvious who is white and who is black and white people like Johnathan can get out of tough situations that blacks like Richard and Ronald X are stuck in.  I know that is not a good guess.  Maybe "Turpentine" is a reference to how LBJ is going to wipe NYC off the M-A-P?   

"Turpentine" debuted in the third volume of Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenburg's What Might Have Been series, Alternate Wars.

"Quartermain" (1985)

Life in the 22nd century is unsatisfying; machines do everything and the government manages your life for you, including selecting your friends and lovers for you, so people are alienated and prone to insanity.  A small number of people find satisfying work being cult leaders.  Our narrator, Quartermain, is a man who seeks to become a cult leader, but to qualify he has to overcome obstacles in a simulation, a simulation of the trials faced by our lord and savior Jesus Christ!  His government-assigned girlfriend and the computer that runs the simulation are pretty discouraging, but Quartermain is determined.  Within the simulation, he wrestles Satan in the middle of a desert for forty days, deals with Lazarus and Mary Magdalene, hangs on the cross.   At every step people advise him to abandon the simulation, even going so far as to say it is a scam, that nobody ever beats the simulation and the cult leaders are just government stooges playacting.  Nobody in the 22nd century believes in God!, they say.  But Quatermain stays the course.  The end of the story is ambiguous; it doesn't seem like Quartermain becomes a cult leader, and I can't tell if we are supposed to think he got killed in real life or just in the simulation.  If he got killed in real life, how is he still talking to us?  Is the afterlife real?  Maybe this story qualifies as a shaggy dog story.   

OK, I guess.  The story is short and there is enough sex and violence to keep your mind from wandering.  

Here's some SF trivia for you.  If isfdb is to be believed, "Quartermain" was going to appear in New Dimensions 13, but the book was never published, even though copies were sent to reviewers.  (Missed it by that much!)  The story ended up in Asimov's, and was even translated for a German anthology of stories from Asimov's.  

"The Prince of the Steppes" (1988)

In "Turpentine" Malzberg tried to speak in the dialect of leftist African-American college students--in "The Prince of the Steppes" he apes the English of Russian immigrants to the United States who are pretending to be defectors but are in fact agents of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!

Our narrator is Yuri Semeyonvich Tomavechki--he goes by Simon.  Simon has psychic powers--he can read the minds of people within 30 feet, and exert influence on them so he can do what he wants (he can park illegally and nobody will notice, people let him move to the front of a queue, that sort of thing.)  As far as Simon knows, he is the only psychic in the world.  The Communist Party has sent him to Brooklyn to live as a taxi driver and to investigate a young female defector, referred to as Elena.  Elena's older cousin, Nicholas, is also a defector, currently living in Los Angeles.  Nicholas is a scientist who invented a new type of super-bomb, the D-Bomb, and then fled to America.  Simon has been tasked with picking up Elena in his cab and reading her mind to discover if Nicholas has handed over the secret of the D-Bomb to the U.S. government.     

Simon is not portrayed as a die hard socialist eager to spread worldwide revolution; rather he is sort of hapless, a man who regrets how his psychic powers attracted the attention of the Soviet government and looks forward to getting this mission over with so he can return to Russia and live a simple life as a worker.  

What Simon learns from Elena's brain impels him to force her to rush to Los Angeles with him to confront Nicholas.  But the trick is on Simon--in the end of the story we learn the extent to which the psyker is not an agent of the monstrous Soviet government but instead one of its many victims.  Elena and Nicholas are not sincere defectors, but Soviet agents deep undercover, and Simon is not really a spy sent to investigate them--Simon is the D-Bomb, an artificial person created by Nicholas!  (I think.)  It is implied that the Soviet government has decided to destroy LA, and so Elena and Nicholas have manipulated Simon into going there, where he will soon be detonated!

I don't know if the plot to this one quite makes sense, but the slightly jocular style is pleasant to read.  Acceptable.

"The Prince of the Steppes" first appeared in F&SF--Barry's name is not only on the cover, it is at the top of the list, even above that of every hipster fanboy's fave, Harlan Ellison!--and has been translated into French and Italian, mio paisanos!

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"Turpentine" is the most memorable and provocative of these four stories, in part because it feels fresh--"Heavy Metal" and "Quartermain" are Malzberg remixing stories we already know (the 1960 election and the life of Christ) and addressing topics we have already seen him address.  "Turpentine" also seems serious, evoking real human emotions, while the other stories are too jokey or too incredible and mysterious to inspire sincere feelings.    

We'll get back to In the Stone House, Malzberg fans, but first we'll look at some things from 1940s issues of Astounding.