Harlan Ellison: "The Silence of Infidelity," "Sally in Our Alley," "Daniel White for the Greater Good" and "Lady Bug, Lady Bug"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading Harlan Ellison's 1961 collection of non-SF stories, Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation, one little chunk at a time.  (Chunk 1, Chunk 2.)  Four more stories today that first appeared in men's magazines in the period 1957-1961. 

"The Silence of Infidelity" (1957)

This one made its debut in Caper, and would be reprinted in Sex Gang, a 1959 collection published under a pseudonym, as well as here in Gentleman Junkie.  

A husband and father living in a New York apartment runs out to get ketchup at a bodega, expecting to be back home in five minutes.  But he sees a beautiful woman in fashionable clothes at the bus stop.  Their eyes meet, and she leads him to her apartment where they have sex.  Ellison describes her disrobing in detail, but says nothing about the actual sex.  These two never speak a word to each other.  Then the guy just returns home with the ketchup, telling his wife he ran into an old friend.

Ellison in the jazz stories we've already read from Gentleman Junkie describes great jazz and its effect on listeners in abstract terms, and he does the same kind of thing here in describing how it is awesome and not at all wrong to cheat on your wife with a total stranger.

He knew this was the way it was, because it was.

He did not consider the idea of sin, and he did not consider the idea of adultery.  This was real, it was true, it was the way he must live.

This is just empty profundity that means nothing, a fig leaf effort to elevate a male wish fulfillment fantasy that blithely dismisses the risks, and the moral dimensions, associated with a man's betrayal of his wife and children; hell, this guy has sex without even the hassle of talking to a woman--"The Silence of Infidelity" is practically a SF story! 

"Sally in Our Alley" (1959)

"Sally in Our Alley" first saw print alongside stories by SF writers Algis Budrys and Henry Slesar in Knave ("Adult Fun for Men.")  The cover of this issue of Knave is more clever and interesting than the covers of most skin rags--thumbs up to the art director!  

"Sally in Our Alley" is a light-hearted and humorous detective story and a sort of a goof on beatniks.  The narrator is a poet working as a janitor at an apartment building run by a hard-hearted "Polack."  This neighborhood is inhabited by aspiring artists and writers who love to party and get drunk and have promiscuous sex.  One day a woman who lives in the area, Sally, turns up dead--the cops find surgical equipment in her apartment and it is theorized she was a prostitute who was murdered by an abortionist she had hired when the operation went wrong.  The cops have trouble finding any clues, and enlist the narrator to help them in their investigations; they secure his reluctant aid by threatening to charge him with statutory rape--the narrator has been banging a "nympho" who is underage.

The mystery is solved when at a party later that week a poet who calls himself "The Hooded One" gives a performance, and the nympho, in a paroxysm of desire, unmasks this guy.  The complicated truth behind the death of Sally is that Sally was a plastic surgeon operating without a license, and The Hooded One was one of her patients.  This poet hated the fact that he was handsome and women threw themselves at him because of his looks--he wanted to be appreciated for his verse.  So he asked Sally to make him ugly, and when she failed in this counterintuitive task, in a rage, he slew her.

Like "Memory of a Muted Trumpet," this story features wacky artistic characters with wacky nicknames attending wacky parties, but I feel Ellison's treatment of this sort of material is more successful here in "Sally in Our Alley" than it was there.  For one thing, the characters, and Ellison's depiction of them, are more interesting and more "edgy"--e.g., the narrator is something of a creep himself, there is a scene that makes a joke out of the violence characteristic of lesbian relationships, and a scene in which some union thugs beat up the narrator because he hasn't been paying his dues to the janitorial union.   

One thing I found interesting: in "May We Also Speak?" and "The Silence of Infidelity," Ellison, in describing something as excellent and proper--I guess transcendent--applies to it the word "true" or "truth," and in this story he had beatniks using "truth" in the same way, but apparently in an effort to make the beatniks look silly.  

I enjoyed this one; there is some moral ambiguity that creates tension that maintains the reader's interest, and Ellison's little jokes land.

 

"Daniel White for the Greater Good" (1961)

Many websites report that this story was praised by Dorothy Parker, one of those famous important writers whose work I have never read, though I have often heard people say "What fresh hell is this?" and "You might as well live," so I guess I can say I am familiar with Parker's greatest hits.   "Daniel White for the Greater Good" first appeared in Rogue, and Parker, like me, read it in Gentleman Junkie, apparently the only paperback she ever reviewed for Esquire.

Daniel White is an African-American thief, a ne'er-do-well who is always making trouble for the people in his Georgia town.  When he rapes a teenaged white girl, the white townspeople are enraged and the social fabric is torn asunder; white people fire their black employees, and there is a wave of anti-black racist violence, including the bombing of a black church.   A mob forms that threatens to lynch White.  White, safe in prison, is confident that the politicians and the NAACP will protect him.  But when the NAACP representative, a college-educated black man from New Jersey, arrives, in his meeting with the local black community he makes a startling suggestion: that they permit the white mob to lynch Daniel White!  His reasoning: if Daniel White isn't punished for his crime, it will set back the civil rights movement fifty years; allowing the mob to murder White will defuse their anger and prevent further attacks on innocent black people; and create in White a martyr for the black community that will galvanize further support for the civil rights movement around the nation.  

The local black leaders are pretty skeptical of this crazy plan, but then the white mob attacks them and the NAACP man, severely beating them.  The local black leaders become incensed at Daniel White for bringing this upon them, and decide to put the NAACP rep's plan into action, though he laments that "they are doing it for the wrong reasons," out of hate instead of calculation that sacrificing the odious White will benefit their cause and spare many innocent people.    

This story works because it is so surprising and because it presents a moral dilemma instead of just telling you what to think about some controversial issue.  I'm more skeptical of Ellison's artistic touches; a few passages of the story detail how, if "Daniel White for the Greater Good" was a motion picture and not "a story of some truth" (there's that word "truth" again), the film would be shot, the camera angles and all that.  

"Lady Bug, Lady Bug" (1961)

Another piece from Rogue.  And another story about hipsters and their blasted parties.  Maybe I should have spread my reading of Gentleman Junkie out over a longer period, because I am losing interest in these beatniks and their parties.

Ivor Balmi is a bad painter who lives in a loft and who manages to pay his rent by letting people throw parties in his place.  Ivor maintains a distance between himself and other people--we learn at the end of the story that he does this because his father was a communist who was called before Joseph McCarthy and lost his job as a teacher; impoverished and ostracized by the community, little Ivor's mind was warped.  Because he is militantly aloof, women find him attractive, and so Ivor bangs lots of girls, and they fall in love with him, and he breaks their hearts because he couldn't care less about other people.

The plot of "Lady Bug, Lady Bug" concerns how the rich mother of a sixteen-year-old who has fallen in love with Ivor comes to one of the parties to talk to him.  She threatens to get him in trouble with the law for having sex with a minor but when he acts like he doesn't care and just stalks off to work on one of his crappy paintings, she falls in love with him.  Their love affair is tempestuous and he is always trying to get rid of her, but she persists and somehow their relationship starts making his paintings better.  But he doesn't want to paint good paintings, because if he has the ability to make good art then he has a responsibility, just like if he builds a relationship with a woman it becomes a responsibility.  Ivor wants the easy life of being a lonely failure of whom nothing is expected.  So he finally gets rid of the woman and cuts his paintings to ribbons with a knife as he cries.

Excepting the mind-numbing italicized descriptions of Ivor's paintings, this story isn't bad.  

**********

None of these stories is bad.  "The Silence of Infidelity" and "Lady Bug, Lady Bug" are competent filler, the former a male sex fantasy and the latter a literary psychological study (now that I think of it, "Lady Bug, Lady Bug" is kind of like "Final Shtick": both end with some guy crying because his life has been warped by the bullying he suffered as a kid, either because he was a Jew or because his Dad was a commie.)  "Sally in Our Alley" and "Daniel White for the Greater Good" succeed because they have some kind of moral ambiguity that is thought-provoking and characters with personality. 

Having absorbed a dozen stories from Gentleman Junkie we are past the half way mark; only ten stories to go!  I guess our next sallies into its pages will each cover five stories.