Harlan Ellison: "No Game for Children," "Have Coolth," "This is Jackie Spinning," and "There's One on Every Campus"

At Second Story Books on Dupont Circle I recently purchased an old copy of Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation, a collection of non-SF stories by Harlan Ellison printed in 1961 with a cover by Leo Dillon that utilizes some very nice blues and purples and greens.  The stories are billed as controversial tales about social issues (the publisher, Regency, actually characterizes its whole line as controversial) and the back cover not only offers you a glamour shot of your pal Harlan smoking a cigarette--tsk tsk--but stresses how he wrote a novel about street gangs and is currently working on a novel about "Negro-White relations in the North."  I'm not really interested in subjecting myself to hectoring lectures, but I am curious enough about Ellison's early work to give some of these stories a try, and, who knows, maybe they are actually good, and there is only one sure way to find out, after all.

Eleven of the 22 stories in Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation first appeared in the men's magazine Rogue, a periodical that began publication in 1956 and soldiered on for like 25 years under a series of editors and owners.  Rogue has many connections with the SF world (among those editors are Frank M. Robinson and Ellison himself, and if you take a gander at the table of contents page of the July 1963 issue, which is available at the internet archive, you will see listed the names of Fredric Brown, Robert Bloch, Alfred Bester, and Mack Reynolds.)  Today we'll read four of Ellison's stories that debuted in Rogue in 1959.  

"No Game for Children" 

Tall and skinny, Herbert Mestman is a world authority on Elizabethan drama--he even has his own theories on how to spell William Shexpeer's and Ben Johnson's names!  He lives next door to Arthur Murrow, a broad-shouldered guy the pinnacle of whose life was his college football career; this guy has a 9-5 job and is sick of being "bothered" by "lousy intellectuals" who "keep crazy hours."  Murrow has a seventeen-year-old son, "Frenchie," who is a juvenile delinquent with a hotrod.  One night Mestman catches Frenchie in his yard, peeping at his sexy wife Margaret ("slim, with small breasts") as she undresses.

Mestman tells Murrow about his son's shenanigans, and in response Frenchie launches a campaign of terror against the professor!  First he tries to enlist the help of the local street gang, the Laughing Princes, but their low-IQ leader, Monkey, who has a "mongoloid face" and struggles to read a comic book, refuses to deal with him, so Frenchie has to terrorize Mestman all on his lonesome.  He menaces Mestman on the highway, almost causing an accident; he kills the Mestman's cat "Sir Epicure" with his switchblade; he drinks nine beers and a "chocolate Coke" and sneaks into the Mestman household to rape Mrs. Mestman, but flees when the prof comes home, the deed unconsummated.  

Mestman considers himself a pacificist, but as with so many self-proclaimed pacifists, we find that was all just a pose that is easily discarded as soon as he himself is threatened or insulted.  Monkey and the Laughing Princes murder Frenchie by luring him into what amounts to a rigged game of chicken with the offer of membership in their prestigious gang and the promise of the sexual favors of a hot chick should he emerge triumphant; in the event Frenchie never emerges from the burning wreck of his beloved hot rod, as one of the Laughing Princes has sabotaged Frenchie's brakes.  In the final scene we learn that Mestman hired the Laughing Princes to exterminate the "louse" that was Frenchie.

"No Game for Children" is a competent but pedestrian thriller.  Maybe it will interest people with all its period slang and references.  I expected Ellison to do something more with the idea that Mestman was the world expert on Elizabethan drama, like kill Frenchie in such a way that it echoes a death in one of the Swan of Avon's immortal works, but as far as I could tell he doesn't do anything like that.  Also, it is a little incongruous that the leader of the Laughing Princes is presented as an imbecile--if he is so stupid, how did he get to be leader and how is it he conceived and managed the plan to trick Frenchie?    

Acceptable.  "No Game for Children" appears to be the most popular, or at least the most widely printed, of the four stories we are reading today.  In the same year Gentleman Junkie was first published, the saga of Frenchie also appeared in an Ace collection of Ellison stories titled Juvies; Juvies was reprinted in the 21st century as Children of the Streets.  Just a few years ago a new paperback Ellison collection from the people at Hard Case Crime landed on bookstore shelves, Web of the City, and it, too, includes "No Game for Children."  Props to Frenchie and Monkey; the other three stories we are talking about today would only ever be reprinted in new editions of Gentleman Junkie. 

"Have Coolth"

Like "No Game for Children," "Have Coolth" has plenty of period slang, but while the slang in our first story sort of served to distinguish the mature and well-educated Mestman from the young punk Frenchie, everybody in this story is in the same milieu so the slang is ubiquitous and serves less of a purpose.  The tale also serves up large helpings of musical metaphors and poetic efforts to describe the effect of good music on listeners, which I found to be mostly indigestible.

Pianist Derry Maylor had his heart broken by a woman, and now he has lost his cool, or "coolth" as it is styled here; "the drums were quiet, and the horns didn't blow, and the faint cha-tah of the sticks could not be heard."  Too shattered by failure at love to tickle the ivories anymore, Maylor took up a new profession--mugging people.

One of the people Maylor tries to mug is our narrator, who is physically fit and overpowers the musician, who has not eaten in three days.  The narrator befriends Maylor because the would-be mugger seems "hip" and "with it."  The manager of a number of down and out performers and PR guy for small jazz venues, the narrator quickly identifies Maylor as a genius musician and gets the pianist's career back on track.  (We have to endure paragraphs about how Maylor's piano playing is like "progressive Waller" and "catches you in the stomach" and makes you hot and so forth; I guess "progressive Waller" means something to the kind of people who read Playboy and its imitators like Rogue, all of whom are expected to have educated opinions about jazz.)

Maylor's career is going well when the woman who broke his heart reappears.  The narrator is amazed by how sexy she is (her voice is "butter on a stack of hot-cakes" and there is a lot of talk about her breasts) and soon she again has Maylor wrapped around her finger.  Once she is firmly integrated into the lives of Maylor and the narrator, she tries to manipulate the narrator into jump starting her singing career, threatening to break the pianist's heart again so he can't play and even seducing the narrator with those amazing breasts of hers.  When Maylor catches his best girl and best friend in a clinch a fight ensues, somebody gets killed, somebody gets the electric chair, and somebody goes on to have a triumphant career.  

I know I have been goofing on this story's style, but I like femme fatales and tales of disastrous sexual relationships, so, despite its somewhat annoying slang and the eye-rolling metaphors, I think "Have Coolth" is marginally better than "No Game for Children."  

"This is Jackie Spinning"

This story has a dumb gimmick.  Jackie Whelan is a disk jockey, and the regular unadorned text of the story represents what he says into the microphone.  That in itself is fine, but most of the story is conventional third-person omniscient narration, as  Jackie talks to people in the studio and goes about his business, smoking cigarettes and taking pills and moving records around and looking at documents, and all those passages are in parentheses.  So, most of the story is in parens, which is silly.

Anyway, the plot of "This is Jackie Spinning" has two big elements.  1) Jackie is cheating on his wife with a sexy blonde singer who currently has the number one hit, and she is in the studio with him today.  2) The mob is pushing a singer and all the other DJs are following their direction and spinning that guy's discs heavily, because the mob kills DJs who buck them, but Jackie has decided to resist and promote a rival of the gangster-approved singer (not because he is some kind of free speech crusader or something, but because Jackie has made an investment in the rival singer and will get a tidy return if he is a success.)

During his show today Jackie is separately confronted by the gangsters and by his jealous wife--will Jackie survive to the end of his show, or will he be shot down by his wronged spouse or by the mob?

I found this one tedious--Ellison on the first page inflicts on us a long paragraph detailing how Jackie loosens his collar and unbuttons the cuffs of his shirt and all that, and it is a pretty mind-numbing start.  The story actually comes to life when Jackie has to negotiate with the thugs between commercial breaks and we don't know if he is going to be blasted or not, but that compelling portion is only like one page out of the story's seven.  (I'll note here that though seven pages might sound short, that measure is misleading, as the typeface of my copy of Gentleman Junkie is tiny.  In a 2013 hardcover edition of Gentleman Junkie the story is like 11 pages.)

The noteworthy component of "This is Jackie Spinning" is how the public-facing and widely-beloved stars of the pop music world like Jackie and the blonde #1 singer are greedy and corrupt and have contempt for the fans who have made them rich, whom they call "teen-aged morons."  I guess if you are interested in depictions of the music industry and the payola scandals of the 1950s this story might be worth your time, but I am giving it a thumbs down.             

"There's One on Every Campus"

Of the four stories we are talking about today this is the most ambitious, the most literary.  The other three stories are essentially genre stories, stories about criminals murdering each other, but "There's One on Every Campus" is a sort of feminist story that explores the way men see women as sex objects!  It is also the shortest story, and we admire economy here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Living near the college is a plain woman (not enrolled herself) who will have sex with just about any male student; she spends almost every night with a different guy.  The college boys who have sex with her know almost nothing about her, they don't take her on dates, they don't treat her as an equal.  The plot of the story is about how one student suddenly realizes the oddness, the unfairness, the inhumanity, of how he and the others treat her, and how she unexpectedly tries to get him to treat her as a human being, and how he responds.  The ending is sort of ambiguous; it seems possible that the lives and personalities of the two principal characters are about to change, but maybe not. 

This is the best of today's stories.

********** 

I liked these stories more than I expected to; I feared they might be in-your-face anti-racism preaching, but instead three of them are more or less ordinary crime stories that include some interesting period elements (chocolate Coke!) and the fourth is unexpected and thought-provoking.  I was also a little surprised by the story's apparent hostility to rock and roll and youth culture; I reflexively think of Ellison as a counterculture guy who has it in for the establishment, but these stories don't take that tack--Ellison is a more complicated and idiosyncratic guy than perhaps I was giving him credit for, which I guess I should have already known because I am familiar with his 1968 anti-drug story "Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" and his 1976 story about promiscuous men, "Lonely Women are the Vessels of Time." We'll read more stories from Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation in the future, but first, a British paperback about the struggle against black magic!

On the left a 1973 edition of the collection, and on a right a 2013 edition.  
It is interesting to see how the original 1961 cover has been revised for the 21st century,
with a different list of controversial topics ("snitchrats?") and a reminder that Ellison's
name is a registered trademark,