Barry N. Malzberg: "On the Air," "Here, for Just a While," "In the Stocks" and "The Man Who Married a Beagle"

In our last episode we read a sex novel by Barry N. Malzberg that is a satire of both mid-century middle-class people's lives and academics' bogus efforts to interpret such lives, 1971's In My Parents' Bedroom.  After that I reread Horizontal Woman (1972), a sex novel that is a satire of the public welfare system and liberals' attitudes about the poor and ethnic minorities* that includes unflattering portraits of an Hassidic Jew, a teenaged African-American thief, an unemployed Latino, a Holocaust survivor who is a slumlord, an African-American civil servant who sexually harasses his subordinate, and a novice social worker with a head full of psychological theories whose campaign to buoy the self-esteem of men on the dole revolves around letting them have sex with her.  Horizontal Woman is a lot better than In My Parents' Bedroom, a brisk fun read with an actual climax and a main character who evolves that confronts the reader on almost every page with a line that will take him aback.

*"Elizabeth reminds herself of what she should always have been aware; that Willie really has the mind of a twelve-year-old.  That is all he is, all that most of them are: not only sick but retarded."

I'm going to continue this Malzberg mini-marathon with some short stories drawn from the 1980 collection The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady.  As an inveterate cheapo, I am reading the scan of the first hardcover edition available at the internet archive, but all you moneybags out there should know that the good people at Stark House in 2021 published in paperback an omnibus edition of The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady and 2000's In the Stone House.  (MPorcius superfans are well aware that I own a hardcover copy of In The Stone House and have slowly been working my way through its stories--check out my blog posts about its first half or so at these links: one  two  three  four.)

Today we attack the first four stories in The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady, all of which debuted in the late 1970s, when your humble blogger was just a mere wee lad.

"On the Air" (1976)

"On the Air," which doesn't mention Mozo, first appeared in Robert Silverberg's New Dimensions 6, and Silverberg liked it enough to include it in The Best of New Dimensions in 1979.

"On the Air" is told in the present tense, has some stream of consciousness elements and starts in the second person but shifts to first person.  The story has odd punctuation and no capital letters, and on this score Malzberg pulls some ambiguous "meta" recursive comedy on us--the narrator of the story explains that his typewriter is broken so he can't use capital letters and that we readers shouldn't assume the lack of them is an ambitious artistic choice, an effort "to reproduce typographically the feeling of anonymity of the caller in live-show radio and how oppressed and small they feel...."

The narrator relates how he telephoned a late night radio talk show and claimed to be able to fly to Venus and other planets, and offers theories about what his story might symbolize, theories he dismisses.  In his little afterword, Malzberg explains the genesis of the story, brags he wrote it in one hour, and offers an additional theory on what the story is "about," which he treats almost as dismissively as his narrator treats the theories proposed within the text; Malzberg also offers some clues about his relationship with Silverberg.

Acceptable.

"Here, for Just a While" (1978)

This one was first printed in Fantastic, where on page 116 its title appears as "Here for Just a While," no comma, though the comma is included on the table of contents page.  (Copyediting is hard.)  (Incidentally, page 51 is a full page ad for a Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set that includes geomorphs, something classic TSR fans may want to check out.)  In his afterword to the story, Malzberg tells us that he has revised the story for book publication here in The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady, and admits to being proud of it, suggesting it is the best of all his many assassination stories.

"Here, for Just a While," consists of six little chapters.  Half concern the second-person protagonist, who is apparently Jewish and has left behind a failed marriage and a failed career.  He is having a casual affair with a married woman who it is hinted looks like Jackie Onassis; the narrator wishes this relationship was put on to a firmer and more regular basis, but Jackie won't have it.  Chapters One, Three and Six take place in a little bedroom in which hangs prominently a painting of the crucified Christ and where "you" has sex with the woman.  When "you" realizes his lover has other men in her life, he draws a revolver.  Does he shoot her?  It is not really clear.

Chapters Two, Four and Five take place in a medium-sized town in Indiana where there is a parade being held for three astronauts who have returned from a mission to Mars.  Jackie's psychopathic husband, a serial killer, is perched on a rooftop, waiting for the astronauts' car to roll into view so he can murder them with his "hand rifle."  "Hand rifle" is an odd locution, but I guess Malzberg didn't want us to think the maniac was going to try to assassinate the spacemen with a 16-inch gun like those on an Iowa-class battleship.  (In Fantastic, the weapon is a "hand-rifle," with an extra little dash or hyphen.)  Will the killer succeed in murdering the astronauts and getting publicity for his unspecified political ideas?

This story is OK, a sort of jumble of many recurring Malzberg themes: the murder of JFK; unfulfilling erotic relationships; the impossibility of successful space exploration (it is made clear the astronauts were pressed to the limit psychologically by their trip to Mars); whether life is futile or people can accomplish things; an invisible and perhaps illusory being who talks to a character who is insane; the Jewish and Christian religions.  Malzberg doesn't actually have much to say about these themes here, and there is not much that is conclusive, surprising or funny about the story.  Malzberg seems to think this is one of his best stories because "it is all feeling," but I'm finding it merely acceptable.      

"In the Stocks" (1977)

Here we have a better story than its two predecessors, one with a real plot, a character who evolves, and even an interesting image, a story that takes standard Malzberg themes of sexual dysfunction, an invisible and likely illusory interlocutor and oppressive society/government and actually does something with them instead of just pro forma presenting them the way Malzbergian hobby horses are just paraded in front of you in "Here, for Just a While."

The narrator lives in an industrial city that is a colony of homosexuals with a sort of authoritarian or totalitarian government.  The narrator is repeatedly visited by an attractive woman named Georgina who tries to seduce him and spur him to perform sexually with her: "I am going to convert you to the pleasures of heterosexuality."  Georgina, the narrator supposes, is an agent from "the Capitol" sent to disrupt the gay colony.  The narrator becomes depressed and confused--is he horrified and disgusted by Georgina, or fascinated and aroused?--and unable to function sexually with the man who is his "selected partner," Kenny.  Brought before "the Group," he is told Georgina and "the Capitol" are not real, and exiled to a subterranean region.  To what extent is the narrator insane, and to what extent the victim of the political machinations and lies of the gay colony's rulers and the (perhaps nonexistent) Capitol?       

In his afterword, Malzberg talks about the publication history of "In the Stocks," its place in his body of work, and also about the controversial Roger Elwood, who commissioned the story, but didn't end up publishing it.  The story itself is better than average, and this afterword has more valuable information than most of Malzberg's afterwords.  

Thumbs up for "In the Stocks."

"In the Stocks" ended up being published in Silverberg's New Dimensions 7 and, in my opinion, should have been in the Best of instead of "On the Air."  

"The Man Who Married a Beagle" (1977)

This one is written in a pretty straightforward conventional style, and has many of the plot elements of conventional mainstream fiction about divorce (we even get the phrase "the death of feeling in the suburban middle class"), something Malzberg more or less admits (the narrator relates that while explaining his divorce to his sons he suspected that "I was becoming every male character in every story and film about divorce with children that I had ever been exposed to.")  The wacky unconventional element of the story is right there in the title--the 41-year-old narrator abandons his wife and children and moves to Manhattan in order to spend more time with the dog he is secretly having sex with, and eventually finds a woman cleric who was ordained through the mail by some cult in California to pronounce him and the canine "man and wife."

The punchline is that after a while the narrator gets sick of the dog and plots to abandon it as callously as he abandoned his human wife.

In his afterword Malzberg tells us he thinks this is one of his ten best short stories, and relates how he tried to sell it to The New Yorker (they told him the joke was old); in the event it appeared in Fantastic. 

"The Man Who Married a Beagle" is not bad, and is easier to understand than most of Malzberg's productions, but it isn't terribly funny or surprising.  Acceptable.    

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"In the Stocks" is the big winner here, but there are no actual failures.  More short stories by the sage of Teaneck in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.