Harlan Ellison: "May We Also Speak?", "Someone is Hungrier," "Memory of a Muted Trumpet" and "Final Shtick"

Squint or click to read effusive praise of Harlan Ellison

It is time to read four more stories from my copy of the 1961 printing of Harlan Ellison's collection Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation.  My copy's first page offers testimonials to the "determination," "talent," "sensitivity" and "guts" of Ellison from comedian and reputed rock and roll hater Steve Allen, writer Charles Beaumont and Leslie Charteris of The Saint fame.  My favorite bit from the page is when Beaumont says Ellison "doesn't write, he screams."  So true, so true.  

Today's four stories, like the last batch, all debuted in Rogue, one of Playboy's competitors in the pretentious skin rag game.  But, as we'll see, in these stories Ellison isn't exactly endorsing the roguish sexual license and devotion to partying we might associate with the playboy lifestyle!     

"May We Also Speak?" (1959)

The subtitle of this "story" is "Four Statements From The Hung-Up Generation" (every generation seems to have in its ranks a vocal cohort of self-appointed representatives who are  quick to proclaim that their generation has it particularly hard, even uniquely hard.)  For some reason, isfdb categorizes "May We Also Speak?" as an essay, but this is a mistake; in fact, "May We Also Speak?" is a collection of four tiny stories of like two pages each; the title of each is preceded by a number, so I guess they really are supposed to be connected in some way, a connection I personally thought somewhat vague.

I guess these little pieces are the basis of the claim on the cover of the 1975 printing of Gentleman Junkie that the book contains 25 stories (AKA "mind-blasts"); my 1961 edition modestly credits itself with only 22.

1. "Now You're in the Box!"

Hank is a writer in an urban multicultural milieu--the smell of sauerkraut cooking in the next apartment annoys him.  He has had writer's block for a month--he has a title for a story ("Now You're in the Box!") but no idea what the title means or how to build a story around it.  He has smoked 40 cigarettes today and is now out--he goes downstairs to a "one-armed grocery" to buy more; the grocer is cutting meat at the meat counter.  A young black man ("Negro") tries to stick up the place, but the grocer realizes the would-be robber is wielding a toy pistol and snatches it from him.  The black criminal flees, and the grocer chases him with his own very real revolver.  Hank joins the chase, and witnesses the stick-up man being shot dead.  It is implied that this adventure is going to cure Hank's writer's block, that now he knows what "Now You're in the Box!" means.  I guess "the box" is a coffin, but maybe we are to understand that the grocer's statement "I worked twelve years in that store" suggests that he is also "in a box," and maybe Hank's writer's block is also like a box.  Maybe Ellison is suggesting that we are all in a box, because life or our society or whatever is a box!

2.  "The Rocks of Gogroth"

I guess Ellison here is using "throwing rocks" as a euphemism or metaphor for "ferociously expressing and acting upon displeasure" or something like that.

Spence is an ad exec with a wife who loves money and is always threatening to leave him.  F. J. Gogroth is the head of a brewery.  Gogroth hired the firm where Spence works to come up with an ad campaign, the slogans and parameters of which Gogroth concocted himself.  Spence knows the campaign is bad and will lose Gogroth many customers.  But if he tells that to Gogroth today at the scheduled presentation, Gogroth will no doubt get Spence fired.  But in a few months when it is clear the campaign has tanked sales, Gogroth will no doubt get Spence fired over that.  Spence has to decide whether to just accept that his job is doomed, or, to take the chance he has today to tell Gogroth that one of Spence's colleagues, a guy who has a kid with cancer, deserves full credit for the campaign--in that way, in a few months cancer Dad will get fired and not Spence.

3. "Payment Returned, Unopened"

Claude Hammel is an anti-Semite.  Hammel's attitude towards Jews doesn't really figure in the story, but it is a way for Ellison in the first ten lines of the story (total number of lines: 87) to signal to us that he is a bad guy.  In my opinion, this is a mistake--instead of telling us at the start that Hammel is a villain, it would be more exciting to demonstrate that Hammel is no good over the course of the story, or to spring it on us at the end as a surprise that overturns our expectations.

Hammel recently seduced a young woman with a hare-lip; she naively found their coupling meaningful, while to him it was just a one-night stand.  Today he learned she is pregnant.  Hammel doesn't want to marry her, because of the hare-lip, and because he doesn't have much money and doesn't want to jeopardize his education (he is a first-year dental student.)  He goes to get advice from a fortune teller.  Her cryptic aphoristic reading gives Hammel the idea to get the young woman blind drunk and then have ten other guys have sex with her one after the other.  It is not spelled out in the text, but I suppose the point of this is to make it difficult for the young woman to convince people that Hammel must be the father of the child she is carrying.

Of the four little pieces that make up "May We Also Speak?", this one is the least well put together. 

4. "The Truth"

The first three components of "May We Also Speak" are not statements at all, but vignettes written in the third person about how people misbehave when under pressure, overreacting to problems in ways that hurt others and/or taking advantage of others in order to get themselves out of a jam.  This final short short is in the first person and thus qualifies as a statement, but like its predecessors presents a dim view of humanity.

The narrator is the leader of a jazz band, and his trumpet player has been arrested for possessing drugs and so he is looking for a replacement.  He finds a kid whose eyes remind the narrator of those of Jesus in a painting.  The kid auditions, and he is phenomenal, as good a musician as Thelonius Monk or Louis Armstrong!  As in "Have Coolth," Ellison strives to convey in words the feeling very good jazz gives the educated listener, and comes up with the idea that "The kid was blowing the truth."  

The narrator passes on hiring the kid, because "Nobody likes to hear the truth."  Having such a genius around would humiliate the rest of the band!

The first three vignettes are acceptable filler, but "The Truth" is actually good; its ending actually is sort of surprising and it is less "over the top" than the others, rings truer than the others, to my ears at least.  

"Someone is Hungrier" (1960)

I guess because he had a second story in the issue, "Someone is Hungrier" appeared in Rogue under the pseudonym Pat Roeder.  Like most of the stories we read in our first foray into Gentleman Junkie, this is a crime story, but I think it is better than those 1959 tales.

Rachel Dowsznski was a kept woman!  But then she decided to steal documents from the businessman whose mistress she was, Marshall Ringler, docs proving he is a tax cheat, and sell them.  She fled the comfortable Chicago apartment Ringler had been providing her to hide out in an English basement in the north of the Windy City.  (My wife and I lived in this sort of apartment in Queens for a little while, but I don't recall anybody calling it "an English basement;" everybody in New York called it a "garden apartment.")

In the dingy basement apartment Rachel (who has been calling herself Ricky Darwin) reflects on how her ambition--her hunger--had lead her to leave the small town of her birth and make risky and morally questionable decisions and had finally deposited her in this uncomfortable situation, where she waits to hear Ringler has been arrested and so she is safe, or for Ringler's thugs, who she figures will torture her with acid, have caught up with her.

In a clever bit, Ellison tells us that one of the ways Rachel expresses her success, one of the ways the money she has acquired from Ringler allows her to live out her dream of being rich, is to never carry change, to pay with bills and always say "keep the change."  In the end of the story, when Ringler's thugs are after her and she jumps into a phone booth to call the police, she realizes she can't because she doesn't have any change!

A good crime story; all the images and character motivation stuff is good.  Thumbs up for "Someone is Hungrier." 

"Memory of a Muted Trumpet" (1960)

"Memory of a Muted Trumpet" appeared in the same issue of Rogue as "Someone is Hungrier."  Like "No Game for Children," which we talked about in our last Ellison excursion, "Memory of a Muted Trumpet" was reprinted in the collection The Juvies (AKA Children of the Streets) as well as here in Gentleman Junkie.

This story of six pages is pretty tedious, consisting mostly of long descriptions of parties in an apartment in a condemned building in lower Manhattan; we learn all about the many weirdos attending the party--their silly nicknames, their strategies for getting laid, and so on.  The actual plot is confined mostly to pages four and five.  Spoof, a writer of genius too lazy to accomplish anything, spots a girl he dubs "Irish" and seduces her.  (As in "Someone is Hungrier," the taking of a new name in this story seems to symbolize the destruction of the authentic self and to mark the start of a descent into catastrophic risk-taking.)  Spoof has sex with Irish several times over the course of the next few months, but otherwise Spoof has no interest in the woman and when she tells him she is pregnant he just laughs.  Irish leaves the baby to die in the park.  Then come tedious scenes from another party, and the reappearance of Irish, whose life and character have been ruined by Spoof and the "scene" of all these promiscuous people who are wasting their lives.

A condemnation of the sex and drugs lifestyle, in particular of the way men say anything to women to get those gullible and delicate creatures to surrender their bodies and then abandon them, breaking their hearts.  The story also suggests that a lifestyle based on selfish sensual pleasure can prevent intelligent people from meeting their potential.  These are interesting arguments, but this story doesn't present them in very entertaining ways, with too much of the word count devoted to the flabby and mind-numbing descriptions of the party-goers.  Gotta give a thumbs down to "Memory of a Muted Trumpet."

"Final Shtick" (1960)

I found a photo of the contents page of the August 1960 issue of Rogue, in which "Final Shtick" made its debut appearance, and the magazine was full of content by famous SF writers: a well-received story by Damon Knight, "The Handler;" humor by Robert Bloch; two non-fiction articles by Mack Reynolds; an article about Dean Martin by William F. Nolan; a column by Alfred Bester; and an article by Robert Silverberg.

"Final Shtick" has as an epigraph a definition of the word "shtick."  I already knew what the word meant, and wish instead somewhere in this book Ellison had offered a definition of what he means by "hung-up generation."  "Hung-Up Generation" isn't a widely-used cliché like "Lost Generation" or "Greatest Generation" or "Generation X" or "Silent Generation," so I am not quite sure exactly what Ellison is getting at--I'm going to assume he doesn't mean that the problem of the generation in question is sexual inhibition, as the people in these stories seem to get into trouble because they are too eager to have sex.  Well, maybe I am speaking too soon, as I haven't read Ellison's preface or Frank M. Robinson's intro yet, for fear they are full of spoilers, and maybe somewhere in there lies the answer to my question.

Marty Field is a world famous comedian, "king of the sick comics!"  He is flying back to Ohio, where he grew up in a small town, to be feted as the favorite son of that little rural burg.  

Immediately we learn that Marty is also a fake, a phony!  He puts on fake smiles for the stewardess, he sneers at his reflection in the window because he had plastic surgery on his once-oversized nose.  And he was born Morrie Feldman!  (Remember what we just said about name changes in these stories!)

Marty reminisces about his youth as a skinny little Jew in small town Ohio, how the big dumb Gentiles beat him up and put a burning cross on his lawn, how he caught his girlfriend performing sex acts on other boys, acts she had refused to perform on him!  Marty became a sick comic because he couldn't defeat those goyim with his fists, but he could tear them to ribbons with his sharp tongue! 

Marty attends the big event honoring him in the tiny town of his birth, where he is given a plaque and then is expected to give a thank-you speech.  He wants to give a speech denouncing the town, reminding everybody how they abused him because he was Jewish, but Marty just thanks the crowds and leaves; he cries in the car on the way back to the airport, back to his life hobnobbing with Ed Sullivan and Frank Sinatra.

Ellison himself was born in Ohio and according to wikipedia claimed on the Tom Snyder show that he suffered discrimination from other high school students, so maybe there is an element of autobiography in "Final Shtick."  Otherwise, it is a pretty pedestrian story; competent, but no big deal.  It would, however, be included in the 1968 collection Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled and the various editions of The Essential Ellison.

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Eight down, fourteen to go!  It won't be long before we are opening up Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation again, but first we'll read some short stories by an author Ellison considered one of his favorites.