Barry N. Malzberg: "Ship Full of Jews," "Amos" and "Improvident Excess"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are working our way through Barry N. Malzberg's collection In the Stone House, published by Arkham House in 2000 and purchased by yours truly in 2021 at Second Story Books in Rockville, MD.  We are like half way through our journey, which has been chronicled in blog posts you can find at these links: 

"Heavy Metal," "Turpentine," "Quartermain" and "The Prince of the Steppes"

"Andante Lugubre," "Standards & Practices," "Darwinian Facts" and "Allegro Marcato"

"Something From the Seventies," "The High Purpose," "All Assassins," and "Understanding Entropy"

Today's ports of call: the three stories from the early '90s that inhabit pages 118 to 141 of the book.

"Ship Full of Jews" (1992)

This is a sort of grim flight of fancy; we might perhaps think of it as a bad dream.  "Ship Full of Jews" first appeared in Omni, in an issue apparently full of quizzes, and later that year in Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg's Alternate Americas, the fourth volume of a series of alternate history anthologies, and it offers us a surreal rethinking of Columbus's first voyage to the New World.  In this universe, Chris isn't a particularly ambitious adventurer, but has been manipulated by a flirtatious Queen Isabella, about whom he has obsessive sexual fantasies as he stalks the deck of the Pinta, to carry to the New World into exile a cargo of hundreds of undesirables and troublemakers.  The Pinta's lower decks are stuffed full of Hasidic Jews, while the Santa Maria carries across the Atlantic the worst criminals in Spain.

A representative of the Jews petitions Columbus to allow the exiles to leave the stinking crowded lower decks to get some fresh air on the upper deck; Columbus refuses.

When the scene switches to the Santa Maria we learn that Columbus has been tricked, that there is an even more sinister motive behind this voyage and a gruesome climax to the trip ahead.  Aboard the Santa Maria, among the criminals in disguise, is Torquemada, the Inquisitor!  Torquemada has made himself the desperadoes' leader, and plans to lead them in a massacre of the Jews once they make landfall in the New World--the blood of the Hasidim will serve as a sacrifice that will consecrate the New World!

There isn't much plot here, and the story doesn't make much literal sense (for example, the people we today call the Hasidim are a sect that formed in the 18th century, and it seems like everybody in the story knows the New World is there, even though no European has been there yet.)  I guess we have to see it as a literary exercise, a dark caprice or nightmarish mélange of disparate elements meant to disturb the reader by evoking thoughts of the suffering of the Jews, the cruelty of the Spanish Inquisition, the morally ambiguous nature of the discovery and colonization of the New World, etc.  Maybe some people today would be angered by what they might see as Malzberg's cultural appropriation, done with the aim of dramatizing the sufferings of his own people, of the experience of Africans brought to the New World against their will.

A strange and surprising thing, ambitious and audacious, though I can't say I can grade the final result as anything above "Acceptable"--it is not thrilling or fascinating or fun or anything like that, merely odd and curious.  Greenberg would include "Ship Full of Jews" in another book of alternate history stories, The Way It Wasn't, just four years later.  I guess he was crazy about it. 

"Amos" (1992)

"Amos" debuted in F&SF.  In her little intro to the story, F&SF editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch gushes that Malzberg "has written some of the finest fiction I have ever read," and says Barry told her "Amos" is his most "stylistically ambitious work" in years; Rusch assures us that "the ambition succeeds."

Don Winograd was a minor Jewish-born scientist or technician or engineer or something when he was plucked "from the back room" and made the chief spokesman of The Institute of the American Academic Sciences--they even gave him a stage name, adding an "n" to make from Winograd the more euphonious "Winogrand."  Winogrand now travels the country, giving talks and speeches and making countless radio and TV appearances, promoting science and the advances in knowledge and technology that will improve our lives.

But Winogrand has an inner life that is always threatening to burst out, an inner life he must suppress with all his might because if it was exposed it would end his lucrative career.  Winograd converted to Christianity years ago, and has become a religious fanatic, an expert on the Bible who even thinks of himself as a prophet and who is confident in the imminent return of Jesus!  On TV, on the radio, he often feels himself about to start shouting Bible verses!  He controls himself by looking at, by thinking about, women's breasts--the thought of breasts calms him down, allows him to keep his job.  

The story has a climax of sorts, when Winogrand finds himself in a Hasidic synagogue and starts speaking in tongues and shouting about Jesus and is thrown out violently by the Jews, and then, on the last page of the story, we learn about Winograd growing older and mellower and losing his job as spokesman and losing his "n" along with it.  Malzberg hints that the climax of Winograd's life is when he returns to the synagogue from which he was forcibly ejected, but offers no details.

A good character study of a man who has to hide his true self, as perhaps many of us feel we must, wedded to the theme that, in the modern world, science and technology play something of the same role in our lives and societies as religion and sexual desire (at one point Winogrand tells us the satellite dishes he lectures on are like breasts) though perhaps not quite so successfully.  One wonders how much of Malzberg himself is in Winograd--not that I think Malzberg is a Christian, but that he hoped to be a literary writer like Updike or Nabokov or Bellow, and ended up writing vast amounts of SF (which has a reputation as being a sort of spokesorgan for science and technology), pornography, violent action stories, and movie and TV tie-ins to make ends meet.

"Amos" is better than "Ship Full of Jews," but I guess lacked a champion like Greenberg, because it has not made multiple reappearances the way "Ship" has, only ever getting reprinted here in In the Stone House.   

"Improvident Excess" (1994)

Our last blog post was about three Mickey Spillane stories from the 1960s, and, amazingly enough, this story has a Spillane connection!  "Improvident Excess" first appeared in Murder is My Business, an anthology edited by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins and published in 1994 by Dutton.  (It took me a few minutes to figure this out, as the publication page of my copy of In the Stone House has the wrong date and lead editor, and isfdb also has the wrong date, and there are several books and films with the title Murder is My Business.)     

For his story "in the hard-boiled tradition of Mickey Spillane" as it says on the back cover, Malzberg mixes his fascination with political assassinations with his interest in classical music.  "Improvident Excess" also has an air of despair, one of its themes being that we don't run our lives, that we all are following orders or otherwise at the mercy of "larger forces."

Our main character is a "political consultant" who changes the course of elections by murdering candidates; his ironic name is "Gerald Harmless."  Harmless has committed numerous such killings.  He has two contacts, one man, Curly, who meets him before each job, and a second man, Brown, who debriefs him after each job.

After one of these jobs, meeting Brown in a hotel room, Harmless realizes that Brown looks like Tchaikovsky, and he tells Brown a whole story about how the Russian aristocracy forced Tchaikovsky to commit suicide because the czar was embarrassed by Tchaikovsky's homosexuality.  Then Brown tells Harmless that Harmless must murder Curly.  Harmless resists at first, but of course he is at the mercy of those larger forces.

Meeting and killing Curly, Harmless begins to identify with Tchaikovsky--he realizes that his superiors are going to kill him--and resolves to go down fighting instead of killing himself the way Tchaikovsky did.

I guess in deference to the assignment to write in "the Spillane tradition," "Improvident Excess" is much more straightforward and easy to understand than the dreamy surreal "Ship Full of Jews" or the disjointed stream of consciousness "Amos."  The only real Malzbergian stylistic touch is that there is a lot of dialogue but none of it is set off in quotation marks.  I think we have to ask how much this story really is in the "Spillane tradition," however.  I am no expert on Spillane, but the three 1960s Spillane stories we read in our last blog post have happy endings in which the villains are defeated, making the world a better place, and we are assured the hero and his new girlfriend, their time of trial behind them, are going to get married and live a happy and fulfilling monogamous life together.  The world and the lives of individuals may be crummy in those Spillane stories,  but if you are brave and lucky, you can make things better.  Obviously, Malzberg's story here is about how America is going down the tubes and there is nothing that can be done about it, and its main character is a villain who is about to be killed.    

Acceptable.

**********

Not a bad crop; sometimes Malzberg's work can feel lazy or rushed, but these three stories all show effort and ambition.  "Amos" is actually good, and "Ship Full of Jews" and "Improvident Excess" are certainly worthwhile for Malzberg fans and people interested in portrayals of what America is all about in genre literature, and the former is interesting to those studying depictions of Jews in SF and the latter for those interested in the tradition and legacy of hard-boiled crime fiction.