Barry N. Malzberg's "Writers' Heaven" series

Let's read from the 1980 Barry N. Malzberg collection The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady.  We read the first four stories in the book back in November; the fifth through eighth pieces of fiction in the  collection are all listed at isfdb as being part of a series titled "Writers' Heaven."  Three of them debuted in the late Seventies in Ed Ferman's F&SF; as Malzberg relates in the afterword to the four stories, Ferman rejected the third in the sequence and it was first printed here in The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady, where I am reading all the stories courtesy of the sorcery of the internet archive. 

(In 1989 Malzberg would return to the Writer's Heaven concept with a story I read years ago and in which he opines about H. P. Lovecraft, "O Thou Last and Greatest," but isfdb doesn't include that story in the Writers' Heaven series.) 

"Big Ernie, the Royal Russian and the Big Trap Door" (1978)

This one debuted in F&SF, where in his intro editor Ed Ferman warns us it is the first of three such "sketches."  There isn't much of a plot here, though I guess the dramatic tension is provided by the puzzle aspect, and the reader's assessment of Malzberg's ability to imitate other writers' styles and portray their personalities.  We might also see this story as an introduction to the whole Writers' Heaven concept.  If you aren't already familiar with the mainstream writers Malzberg is trying to simulate, the value the story--and the entire four story sequence--provides is perhaps limited.

Heaven is split into areas, musicians here, writers there, etc.  (Literary critics are in hell.)  The writers have a bar, a barracks, and a brothel.  Our unnamed narrator is hanging in the bar with "Big Ernie," whom I assume is Ernest Hemingway.  Malzberg generally doesn't give real full names in these stories, just first names or nicknames--this is the puzzle aspect.  For example, casual reference is made to "Oxford Billie," which I guess may be Shakespeare or the guy some people say was Shakespeare's ghostwriter.  In the aforementioned afterword to the Writers' Heaven series in The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady, Malzberg implies that the narrator of these four tales is Damon Runyon.

The narrator is bitching that people still alive are imitating his style (a recursive joke, as the whole point of these little sketches is Malzberg imitating other writers' styles and depicting their personalities.)  He and Big Ernie almost have a fist fight.  Then the newly dead "Royal Russian" appears--I assume this is Vladimir Nabokov.  Nabokov contemptuously issues a gnomic utterance, making Big Ernie cry and the narrator consider moving to musician's heaven. 

"Big Ernie, the Royal Russian and the Big Trap Door" in 1981 appeared in a Swedish anthology.

"Ring, the Brass Ring, the Royal Russian and I" (1978)

Malzberg not only has this story in this issue of F&SF, but writes the book column; in his reviews of books and articles by such people as Alexei Panshin, Thomas Disch, Philip K. Dick and Christopher Priest, Malzberg talks at some length about the history of SF and SF's possible role in our lives and society.

Vladimir Nabokov is back for the second of the Writers' Heaven stories, but we have two new characters as well, Ring of the Thousand Faces and Little Red.  Malzberg offers us clues as to the identities of these drinkers at the bar and bangers at the brothel up in Heaven, and I followed them up at wikipedia with mixed success.  Ring says of Little Red, "I recognize this sinister midwestern type" and the narrator says he got a Nobel Prize, so I'm guessing Little Red is red-haired foe of religion and capitalism Sinclair Lewis of Minnesota.  Ring loves sports, wrote plays and short stories and novels, and was a friend of H. L. Mencken, which are great clues for people who know anything about sports or H. L. Mencken, which I do not.  [UPDATE 5/23/2024: One of my genius commentors has convinced me that "Ring" is Ring Lardner, a guy I never heard of.]

As for a plot, Ring is loud and obnoxious and Sinclair Lewis crumbles under his insults but Nabokov stands up to him, disarms him.  Then some guy Tom (Thomas Wolfe?) with manure on his boots comes in and antagonizes Nabokov.   

"Of Ladies' Night Out and Otherwise" (1980)

So, here's the one Ferman declined to print.  In "Of Ladies' Night Out and Otherwise," Malzberg introduces two new characters, women whose identities are easy to guess because Malzberg uses their pretty uncommon first names, Flannery and Carson.  These women argue with each other and lead the bartender to suggest that the women writers are "even worse" than the men writers.  The narrator ends the story by expressing in tragic tones the idea that writers are doomed to write, constitutionally unable to perform any other job, except for Nabokov, who could have been a zookeeper or a headwaiter.

If Ferman was going to refuse one of these stories this was the one to pick, as it is the least interesting--whereas Malzberg offers wild caricatures of Nabokov, Hemingway, and Lewis and pictures them in a way that is humiliating, he doesn't do this to O'Connor or McCullers, rendering the story bland.     

"The Annual Once-A-Year Bash and Circumstance Party" (1979)

"The Annual Once-A-Year Bash and Circumstance Party" first appeared in an issue of F&SF that included the second installment of the serialized version of Thomas M. Disch's On Wings of Song, a novel I read way back in 2014.  Amazingly, Malzberg's name is above Disch's on the cover.  "The Annual Once-A-Year Bash and Circumstance Party" would be reprinted in an Italian anthology in 1992 with a hot-chick-riding-a-space-dinosaur cover.

Of these four stories this is the best of them because it has an actual intelligible theme and some human feeling.  An annual meeting is held in which a report is read describing whether each of the assembled writer's readership has gone up or down; for most of them it has gone down.  The narrator argues that the practice of giving reports should be ended because it keeps the writers from accepting the inevitable, that they will be forgotten.

Dashiell Hammett figures in this story, and has a conversation with the narrator.  Building on the theme of the previous story--that writers suffer a perhaps painful compulsion to write--the story climaxes with Hammett saying that this place is a heaven for writers because the writers have been liberated from the desire to write, Malzberg telling us in no uncertain terms that the life of a writer is misery.

Writers, like creative people in general, are a self-pitying, self-important, woe-is-me bunch who are desperate for attention, and it is easy to roll one's eyes at the sentiments that this story expresses, but at least there is some kind of digestible sentiment in this story for the reader to latch onto.  The other attraction of this story is akin to that of its predecessors, the puzzles--who are the three Johns, John O., John S. and John M.?  Is "Virginia" Virginia Woolf, even though all the writers mentioned so far except for Shakespeare (who wasn't "on screen") have been American, and Malzberg has implied the sections of heaven are culturally distinct (the French and Russian writers' heavens have already stopped issuing reports)--maybe this isn't American writers heaven but Anglophone writers heaven.      

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So there we have Barry N. Malzberg's Writer's Heaven series, four short stories that can be hard to grok if you don't already have informed opinions about critically-acclaimed 20th-Century American novelists--not the American novelists that ordinary people read in the 1970s like Sidney Sheldon and Stephen King and James Michener, but the American novelists college professors read and talk about.  Most of Malzberg's work, no matter how opaque and oblique, has some theoretical appeal to people who read science fiction, horror, or detective stories, as they depict the world of genre fiction writers and readers, criticize the role of science and technology in our society, present scenarios in which people commit crimes and/or suffer mental illness, or present outrageous jokes about sex, government or religion.  But today's stories are about writers very few people actually read and in them Malzberg doesn't really deal with the concerns ordinary people have, like problems with the spouse or wondering what the government is up to, but with writers' neurotic sense of competition with each other and agonizing need to be famous.  So who did Malzberg write these stories for?

If you pay attention to the world of comedy (another bunch of characters who think of themselves in tragic terms and will do anything for attention), you'll have heard people say that Gilbert Gottfried or Norm MacDonald or somebody like that sometimes didn't write and perform for the common audience, but for each other, for other professional comedians.  I think we have to consider that Malzberg wrote these four stories with his fellow well-educated writers in mind, perhaps writers like himself who, while working in the genre fiction realm, are very conversant with literary fiction and perhaps wish that that rarified world was the world in which they could make a living.

There is more Malzberg in our future, comrades, so stay tuned.