Barry Malzberg: "Hitler at Nuremberg," "Concerto Academico," "The Intransigents," "Hieratic Realignment" and "The Only Thing You Learn"

In our last episode, we read some 1970s stories by Barry N. Malzberg, tireless critic, editor and writer of genre literature and a particular favorite of ours here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Now let's wrestle with some 1990s Malzberg, four stories from the 2000 collection In the Stone House, a copy of which I bought some time ago and from which I have already read fifteen stories, as proven by the blog posts you can access at these four 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"

"Ship Full of Jews," "Amos," and "Improvident Excess"

Today we address five stories, the contents of pages 142 to 187 of my hardcover First Edition copy of In the Stone House.

"Hitler at Nuremberg" (1994)

In these five pages of text Malzberg tries to get into the mind of Adolf Hitler, speculating on what sort of defense the leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party might have mounted if, instead of committing suicide in his bunker, he had been captured by the Soviets and subsequently put on trial at Nuremberg alongside such figures as Herman Goering, Heinrich Himmler and Julius Streicher.  Malzberg also offers allusive descriptions of Hitler's relationships with those figures--in particular Streicher--as well as Eva Braun, Rudolf Hess and Josef Stalin.  

I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that in this story Malzberg is offering a possibly controversial argument--that our conventional depiction of Hitler as uniquely evil, the very personification of evil, is something of a defense mechanism, an effort to distract ourselves from the horrible truth that we are all capable of evil.  Hitler's defense at trial is that he didn't order and didn't desire the extermination of the Jews, that in fact the genocidal program was an initiative of underlings that the Fuhrer didn't quite know about, he being so busy looking at the big picture of international relations and world war; Hitler goes so far as to claim that he had lost control of the German government and had even attempted (through Hess) to make peace with the Western Allies.  The repetitive last lines of "Hitler at Nuremberg" are "It could have been any of you, any of you.  Any of you."

The story covers an interesting topic and has a provocative thesis, and all the little relationships and personalities it economically sketches out ring true; this is a pretty good one.

It looks like "Hitler at Nuremberg" appeared in the anthology By Any Other Fame and in the magazine Pulphouse the same year. 

"Concerto Academico" (1992)

"Concerto Academico" made its debut in the dragon anthology Dragon Fantastic and in 2010 reemerged in the dragon anthology Wings of Fire.  This story has the endorsement of the dracophile community!  

"Concerto Academico" starts as a cutesy absurdist story about how a dragon walks into a Westchester County orchestra's daytime rehearsal and sparks allegedly funny reactions from the players, who see the dragon, and the conductor, whose back is to the orchestra and so does not see the monster.  Malzberg suggests that the members of the orchestra have all suffered disappointments in life (among them are refugees from the Warsaw Pact states, for example, as well as people who retired from stressful business careers or are enduring unhappy marriages) and so the appearance of a mythical monster does not really faze them--they are grizzled veterans of failure and have bigger problems to worry about than a tremendous reptile.  When the conductor finally sees the monster he flees, but most of the orchestra members remain, and the story evolves into a heartfelt celebration of the power of art and imagination to offer comfort to the afflicted (who of course include most of us--even if the god-damned commies didn't drive you out of your beloved homeland, some girl probably broke your heart, right?)  The dragon turns out to be friendly, even a sort of manifestation of the beauty and wonder of classical music (in particular, the ability of classical music to paint a vivid picture in the mind of the educated listener), and the story's main character, a sexagenarian hopelessly in love with a thirty-something married member of the strings section, takes over the role of conductor and, it seems, has the finest and most beautiful experience of his life.      

Malzberg has a deep knowledge of classical music, and shows it off here; people who know about Sir Adrian Boult and Ralph Vaughan Williams will probably get more out of this story than I did.  "Concerto Academico" is the kind of story that I can respect as a successful endeavor--Malzberg has set out to accomplish a goal and seems to have achieved his aim--but I am not in a position to really appreciate, in this case because I am not crazy about absurdist stuff and I don't know anything about classical music.

Good, but not really for me.

"The Intransigents" (1993)

This is a somewhat oblique retelling of conspiracy theories about Marilyn Monroe and those two saints of America's decadent and degenerate royal family, JFK and RFK.  (I've been hearing rumors that the royal family is trying to stage a comeback--heavens forfend!)  Monroe, the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover are never explicitly named; instead Monroe is "the actress," Hoover is "the Director," and John and Robert Kennedy (or Jack and Bobby as their swooning worshipers call them) are given the first names "Jeptha" and "Rifka" and no last name.  (The Kennedy stand-ins' first names made me think maybe this story depicts an alternate universe in which the Kennedy analogs are Jewish, but later in the story the Director derides them as "Catholic boys," putting a big hole in that theory.)

Our lead character is Rifka, head of the Justice department; his brother, Jeptha, is a politician.  The opening scenes of the story depict a conversation between Rifka and the Director; it seems the famous actress Rifka and Jeptha have been boning ("He had had the actress in a hundred ways after Jeptha had gotten rid of her and there had been moments so pure, so vaulting, so pornographic and yet spiritual in their content that he had gasped") is going to expose her affairs with the brothers to Hedda Hopper and Walter Winchell!  (Unlike the four main characters, Hopper, Winchell, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Daley, and Adlai Stevenson bear their real life names.)  The "Director," who has some level of control over the brothers because of his vast collection of "files" of compromising info, is apparently going to have the actress murdered before she can spill the beans; Rifka is uncomfortable being a party to this atrocity, but Jeptha seems to cold-bloodedly support the idea.

The second part of the story takes place over a year later, while the third and final is later still; these scenes concern the murders of Jeptha and then Rifka, which occur in essentially the same fashion as the real life murders of JFK and RFK, with the additional suggestion that the Director is behind the assassinations.

One has to wonder what the point is of just regurgitating in garbled form shopworn rumors and theories about historical events as Malzberg does here.  Well, "The Intransigents" first appeared in the anthology Solved, which bears the description "Wherein great mystery writers crack classic unsolved crimes;" I guess Malzberg just wrote this story to fit the book's theme.  Can't blame a guy for trying to make a buck, but you don't have to pretend that work produced under such conditions is of high merit if it isn't.

The Hitler story we talked about today seemed to have a provocative point to make, and to explore some relationships I don't hear about constantly, but as far as I can see, Malzberg here in "The Intransigents" has nothing interesting or new to say about the Kennedys, Monroe or Hoover, people we hear about all the time--Barry just says stuff we've heard already; the dubious value he adds is making it all a little harder to understand via such strategies as leaving out famous names and refusing to put quotation marks around the dialogue.  I admit that I still find Hitler sort of interesting and am sick to death of hearing about the Kennedys, so maybe I am biased, but I feel justified in giving "The Intransigents" a thumbs down, regardless.

"Hieratic Realignment" (1999)

The cover of the issue of Amazing Stories in which "Hieratic Realignment" made its debut inspired laughter here at MPorcius HQ, what with its efforts to attract the attention of those browsing the magazine rack with the logos for Star Wars and the computer game StarCraft, and the promise of some sort of celebration of, of all people, Hillary Rodham Clinton!  I certainly don't want to read "fiction set in the StarCraft universe" or speculations about the universe in which "our First Lady followed her earliest dreams" (Awwwwww.....) or a review of The Phantom Menace penned by a guy who "has been professionally involved with the Star Wars universe since 1986" (gee, I wonder if he'll tell us we should go see it?)  But maybe Barry's story is good and means this issue of Amazing wasn't just a steaming pile.

(I'll note here that in Amazing "hieratic" is spelled correctly while in In the Stone House it is misspelled in two different ways.  And I found two additional typos in the book version that are not in the magazine version.  Advantage, Amazing!  Come on, Arkham House!)

Today's Malzberg stories are written with the expectation that the reader brings to them some knowledge about, say, the Nazi party and World War II or the Kennedy brothers and their relationships with Marilyn Monroe and J. Edgar Hoover, and in this story it probably helps the reader to know a little about Lubavitch AKA Chabad.  Luckily, nowadays, wikipedia and google are right there if you don't. 

The leader of a New York City-based sect of ultra-orthodox Jews with subsidiary branches all around the world, an elderly rabbi considered by some of his followers to be the messiah, dies.  Before he expires he issues a prophecy that some members of the faction-ridden sect consider mere senile ramblings, that his successor will be an outsider, the man whom they will least expect to become their new leader.  A few years later, Blake, "a plucky guy," appears and talks his way into the vacant position.          

Installed as Rabbi and Messiah, Blake gets religion!  Has he been inhabited by the spirit of the dead rabbi, his predecessor?  And Blake is to be no mere timeserver as top Rabbi, but a reformer, a revolutionary!  He calls a meeting of all the faithful, and, on the spur of the moment, driven by his own life-long preoccupations, institutes his big reform--breaking down the barriers between the sexes that characterizes life in the sect and encouraging greater sexual activity!

"Hieratic Realignment" (AKA "Hieractic Realignment" AKA "Hierartic Realignment") is entertaining enough, but its ending is something of a letdown.  Throughout the story a miracle is foreshadowed--what will this miracle be?  The miracle that occurs is pretty small bore.  We today live in a sex-positive and feminist society, in which pornography is ubiquitous, readily available antibiotics, contraceptives, abortion, divorce and food stamps mean people who exercise no sexual restraint face little risk, the government has a special flag and a special month set aside to celebrate sexual minorities and puts its hand on the scale in favor of women when doing hiring, and encomia of women and vindication of all their choices is de rigueur.  So, making the ultra-orthodox sect in the story abandon its adherence to strict gender roles and sexual modesty is not much of a miracle--they are just conforming with the mainstream.  A real miracle, and a much more provocative climax and a real paradigm shift ending, would be if Blake's miracle was to force the rest of the world to abide by the ultra-orthodox Jews' version of sexual morality!

"The Only Thing You Learn" (1994)

"The Only Thing You Learn" is dedicated to Cyril M. Kornbluth.  Kornbluth has a high reputation, but I have very limited tolerance for left-wing satires, and so generally avoid Kornbluth's work, though in 2014 I did reread and blog about Kornbluth's most famous solo production, "The Marching Morons," attacking it on ideological and artistic grounds.

"The Only Thing You Learn" is a brief little vignette that draws on detective and espionage fiction for its style and atmosphere and is apparently set in a universe wracked by conflict between space empires, a struggle characterized by the interactions of secret agents who teleport between planets and time periods.  Written in the second person and the present tense, full of dialogue but bereft of quotation marks, the plot follows "you" as, following the detailed instructions of your masters, you enter a bar and meet a guy, I guess some kind of double agent or traitor or something, as well as some enemy aliens in disguise.  You leave an esoteric device with these jokers, and sprint away, thinking to teleport safely off this world, but as the device begins to work, triggering a holocaust ("the hundred years of fire"), you realize your masters have double crossed you and will not teleport you off the planet.

I guess "The Only Thing You Learn" is that you are at the mercy of the powerful who consider you nothing more than an expendable tool.

A mere trifle; OK, I guess.  "The Only Thing You Learn" made its debut in Universe 3, and was selected for inclusion in 2013's The Very Best of Barry N. Malzberg.   

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A hostile critic might look at these five stories and point out that they are all derivative, each of them a reworking or just rehashing of real life events, or an effort to recreate the feeling generated by other art forms or genres of popular literature through absurdity or pastiche.  In Malzberg's defense, we champions of the man can argue that all art is derivative in this way at some level, and of these five 1990s stories only "The Intransigents" is actually bad, because Malzberg does so little to add to or transform the material, while "Hitler at Nuremberg" is challenging and offers engaging speculations and characters, "Concerto Academico" charmingly evinces Malzberg's sincere love of a dying art form, and "Hieratic Realignment" and "The Only Thing You Learn" are sort of entertaining.              

         

More Malzberg in our future, but we'll be doing something different next time.  See you then!