Merril-approved 1958 SF stories: F Leiber, J Lewis, V Lincoln

Our guided tour through the science fiction and fantasy of 1958 continues.  Our guide is the New York Journal-American's favorite anthologist, Judith Merril, our map is the alphabetical list headed "Honorable Mentions" in the back of her 1959 edition of SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy.  Today we'll read the four 1958 stories by "L" authors recommended by Merril, three of which debuted in issues of F&SF edited by Anthony Boucher.

"A Deskful of Girls" by Fritz Leiber

Here we have a story that is a satire of Hollywood--how Hollywood exploits women and reflects our sex-obsessed society that sees women as sex objects--as well as a feminist revenge fantasy.  "Deskful of Girls" is also one of those SF stories that offers an explanation of a supernatural belief; SF writers love to come up with rational explanations for ancient religions and supernatural phenomena like the Greek gods or the Norse gods or vampires or werewolves or Medusa the Gorgon or whatever, and Leiber here speculates on the origin of the common belief in ghosts.  For some reason Merril cites as its source the eighth volume of The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction and not the magazine in which "A Deskful of Girls" debuted, so we are dutifully reading it in a scan of that book instead of a scan of the magazine. 

Our narrator, Carr Mackay, is on a mission: he has been hired to negotiate with Emil Slyker, the overweight psychoanalyst to the stars, a man who integrates into his practice his deep knowledge of sex and of the occult and has been blackmailing Evelyn Cordew, the current top Hollywood sex symbol.  Mackay befriends Slyker and ends up in Slyker's office, seated before the man's desk, which, Slyker has told him, is full of girls, a metaphor which has got Mackay's imagination humming.  Slyker is a gifted raconteur, and as he relates to our narrator the stories of Hollywood starlets and other prominent women he has known intimately as their analyst, Mackay gets a sense that Slyker is presenting to him the true essence of these women, and eventually comes to realize that Slyker has these women's ectoplasmic emanations in those folders he keeps pulling out of his desk drawers.  Slyker explains that when a person sleeps or is under hypnosis, he or she sends forth an ectoplasmic form almost invisible, something like a transparent or translucent layer of skin that carries with it all of his or her genetic information as well as emotional and psychological content that can be sensed by those the ghost touches.  Normally these ghosts return to the sleeper when he or she awakes, but the umbilicus that connects ghost to living person can be severed and the ghost captured.  Skyler has a bunch of these ghosts of beautiful women in his desk, and he admits to Mckay that he has five ghosts of the woman in whose interest our narrator has come, reigning queen of the cinema Evelyn Cordew!

Slyker restrains and silences Mckay in a high tech chair and promises to let him see a ghost of Evelyn Cordew; a ghost can only be seen in the dark, so he turns out the lights.  But then Evelyn Cordew herself, using her own high tech equipment, busts into the room and restrains Slyker.  She wants her ghosts back, believing their lack has damaged her looks and thus her acting career.  (Earlier, Slyker told Mckay that stealing some of Cordew's ghosts had served to relieve her of some dangerous anti-social personality traits.)  The narrator watches as Cordew reunites one at a time with each of her five ghosts; this takes several pages, as Leiber dwells on the surreal movements of the ghosts as they reintegrate themselves with Cordew's gorgeous body and as Cordew herself describes the experience of slipping back into these ectoplasmic skins and narrates the course of her career, tying each ghost to the events of her life in Hollywood at the point when it was stolen from her by Slyker.  This is where we get a big fat dollop of the feminism that perhaps endears this story to people like Merril--Evelyn Cordew asserts that female movie stars are not to be envied or admired but to be pitied, as they are the victims of men, exploited by Hollywood's elite and the viewing public alike; Cordew sums up her case by claiming that all men are pimps or johns.  (One of the clever things Leiber does in "A Deskful of Girls" is to refuse to exempt our narrator from this charge, making it clear from the start of the story that Mckay himself is as horny and preoccupied with women's bodies as any of us.  I also feel compelled to point out that plenty of Leiber stories seem to treat women as sex objects and appeal to readers' interest in somewhat off-the-reservation sex, so those inclined to read "A Deskful of Girls" and then accuse Leiber of hypocrisy have grounds to do so.) 

The story ends with Slyker's death and the liberation of all the other ghosts, the destruction of all the blackmail material and the escape of the narrator with Cordew's aid.

This is a pretty dense and wordy story with lots of long sentences, lots of metaphors, lots of references and allusions.  Leiber describes the layout and decor of Skyler's room, and the advanced technology both the contending blackmailer and sex symbol employ, in great detail, and there are oblique indications that Cordew and maybe Slyker are in touch with other time streams--"A Deskful of Girls" is one of Leiber's Change War stories about feuding time travelers.  Leiber name drops numerous visual artists (Heinrich Kley, Mahlon Blaine and Henry Fuseli) and talks about high brow music (the Nutcracker Suite of "Chaikovsky.")  Plus, Leiber offers theories of what the popularity of Hollywood actresses like Greta Garbo ("her romantic mask heralded the Great Depression") and Ingrid Bergman ("her dewiness and Swedish-Modern smile helped us accept World War Two") say about their epoch and what these screen goddesses provide to their societies.

"A Deskful of Girls" is a strong and ambitious story that is well-written and has lots going on, but it may also be one of those stories that is easier to admire than to enjoy.  Leiber kind of goes overboard with the descriptions, and my eyes glazed a little bit during the passages mapping out Slyker's office and giving us a repetitive and simile-laden play by play of Cordew's reintegration with each and every one of five different ghosts ("Then, as if the whole room were filled with its kind of water, it seemed to surface at the ceiling and jackknife there and plunge down again with a little swoop and then reverse direction again and hover for a moment over the real Evelyn’s head and then sink slowly down around her like a diver drowning.")  I can also imagine that people unfamiliar with Leiber's Change War stories might find the references to the Change War concept to be totally opaque.

Despite reservations, thumbs up for "A Deskful of Girls," which has appeared in many languages in many Leiber collections.

"Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee" by Fritz Leiber       

Here we have a long and elaborate and somewhat tedious joke story, as the title, with its puns referring to secondary sexual characteristics, perhaps warns us.  I guess we can call this is a satire of 1950s culture, but while the satire of "A Deskful of Girls" has a feminist bite and still feels relevant, the satire in "Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee" feels silly and is very much of its time, the kind of thing people might dismiss as "dated."

Six intellectuals meet weekly in a large space where one of them makes splatter paintings by standing on a 20-foot high scaffold and flinging paint down on a huge canvas that takes up most of the floor.  This week's conclave, Leiber tells us, coincides with a special moment when "all the molecules in the world and in the collective unconscious mind got very slippery."  Another of the intellectuals is a jazz musician, the descendent of a witch doctor, who beats out tunes on an African log.  At the very moment the molecules go slippery he beats out the tune rendered in onomatopoeia as the story title.  The painter flings black paint on the white canvas, the resulting blobs and streaks visually representing the notes of the tune with two little titties and a big glob as the rump and so forth.  All the assembled intellectuals think the musical passage and the abstract painting special, and one of them photographs the canvas and each of them leaves the meeting with a print.

Over the next week the musician becomes famous with the tune and starts a whole new movement, Drum-and-Drag, that rivals Rock-and-Roll.  The psychiatrist uses the photo of the painting as a Rorschach test and his patients start having breakthroughs.  Three other of the intellectuals have similar success due to the influence of the tune and/or painting on their careers.  (Rest assured that Leiber offers lots of details and little jokes about all six of these hipster eggheads, going overboard just as he did with the five ghosts in our previous story.)  The painter, however, has a problem.  Every time he flings paint the exact same pattern appears, though he can control the size.

In succeeding weeks the other five intellectuals start suffering problems I won't describe, while social problems of wider ramification born from the tune and painting also begin to trouble the wider world.  Basically, the world is addicted, obsessed, hypnotized, by the little tune and the abstract painting.  One of the six, a cultural anthropologist, realizes that the ancestor of the musician, the witch doctor, has sent the musical phrase, a sort of spell, across time to them, and to save the world they have to cast a spell contacting this guy (who must be alive somehow outside the timestream) and receive from him the counterspell.  To cast the spell they enlist a medium, snoke marijuana, paint pentagrams and hang garlic and on and on.  Success is achieved, and everyone in the world forgets the dangerous tune and image.  The final little paragraph has the medium report that the witch doctor from centuries ago is in Hell and the Devil forced him to cough up the counterspell because even the damned and demons of the underworld were getting addicted.

A lot of work obviously went into this story but it is not thought-provoking or entertaining.  Gotta give it a thumbs down, though I suppose if this is your thing, you will like it, because it is not lazy or clumsy--Leiber is a smart, educated professional who set himself a goal and accomplished it--my gripe is that I do not see value in the goal he set himself.

"Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee" debuted in F&SF and people seem to have liked it; Groff Conklin included it in Science Fiction Oddities (1966) and Damon Knight in A Science Fiction Argosy (1972), a book I bought for a dollar over nine years ago.  (I read the story today in a scan of the appropriate issue of F&SF.)

"Glossary of Terms" by Jack Lewis 

I don't think I've read anything by Lewis before.  isfdb lists nine pieces of short fiction by Lewis and one ridiculous looking novel about mercenaries who pursue money and Hitler in Latin America and on their travels encounter a nymphomaniac.  "Glossary of Terms" is listed by isfdb as an "essay," but I think at a stretch it counts as fiction in the way that Brian Aldiss' "Confluence" counts as fiction--it is presented as an artifact of some other, fictional, culture and provides clues to this alien culture's nature.

"Glossary of Terms" is a guide for SF writers living far in the future after mankind has developed interstellar travel and time travel.  Over its two and a half pages the story or article covers ten items, offering definitions and advice on usage for such things as "TELEPATHY" and "DISINTEGRATOR RAY."  The entries offer opportunities for Lewis to make weak jokes and engage in banal criticism of SF.  For example, in the future the "ATOMIC BOMB" will be considered a weak weapon used only in minor skirmishes.  Lewis spoofs how aliens in SF often have hard to pronounce names, points out that time travel is used by authors to give them an excuse to write a fantasy adventure story, and makes a tepid joke about how taxpayers oppose foreign aid.  And so on.

This story is a waste of time and I do not think it has ever been reprinted.  Maybe Merril liked it because of its anemic but still dimly apparent criticism of our society for being violent, of adventure SF for being violent and nonsensical, and of taxpayers for objecting when the government ships their money off to foreigners...and probably for being violent.

"No Evidence" by Victoria Lincoln

Here's another author new to MPorcius Fiction Log.  Victoria Lincoln has one credit at isfdb, but a New York Times obit suggests she wrote multiple successful mainstream novels as well as biographies of notable women like Lizzie Borden and St. Theresa of Avila.  Merril, as I've told you a million times, loved to reprint and recommend SF by mainstream writers and SF that was published in mainstream venues because she thought genre boundaries were essentially bogus, and here we have another example.  I guess Lincoln was well-known enough that Anthony Boucher thought it worthwhile to put her name on the cover of the issue of F&SF in which "No Evidence" appeared, below Chad Oliver's but above Avram Davidson's.  A quick look online did not unearth any evidence the story has appeared elsewhere.

Charley is an orphan, an immigrant from Ireland whose mother drank herself to death when he was a child.  As a youth Charley always had trouble making up his mind, and was often torn between conflicting impulses; one horrible day he drowned a cat, his sadistic impulses overcoming his affection for the little creature and his sense of right and wrong.  At other times he demonstrated drawing ability.

As a young adult, after a stressful episode in which he vandalized property with elaborate graffiti and stole some booze, Charley got drunk and then split into two people!  The second version of himself returned to Ireland tout suite and every few years sends a letter to the Charley in America to beg for money.  In the absence of the selfish, rebellious, artistic half of his personality, Charley becomes a success at work and socially, while his Irish counterpart is a drunken layabout who is forever living off others and getting in trouble.

Eventually the Irish half of Charley makes a go of it as an artist.  In one of his letters begging for money he talks about how he is doing an elaborate woodcut depicting death and destruction and mentions the cat he and Charley drowned.  Bitter at being reminded of this crime, American Charley refuses to send any more money, and begins having nightmares of the troubles faced by Irish Charley, who has some kind of illness that is killing him as he struggles to complete his masterwork depicting all the ways people destroy themselves and each other.  Irish Charley considers this work of carving to be essential evidence of the hopeless reality of life, that hope is an illusion.  American Charley begins getting sick himself, and the way he coughs while wracked by his nightmares dreams upsets his wife.

Eventually American Charley sends more money, but Irish Charley dies, and Irish Charley's much put upon wife destroys the horrifying carving.  American Charley stops having the bad dreams and his health recovers, and he burns all the letters from his Irish half--no evidence remains of his bizarre double life, but his personality, it seems, never quite recovers.   

The lens through which we look at "No Evidence" today is that of identity.  Lincoln exercises the much discussed "duality of man" theme, the idea that everybody is capable of both good and evil; Lincoln makes this a little more interesting by illustrating the disturbing fact that talented creative people tend to be selfish jerks who live like parasites--the talented version of Charley who might change the world is also the evil one.  Perhaps less hackneyed, or at least more in tune with 2024 concerns, is the theme of how immigrants have two identities--that connected to the country in which they were born and that connected to their adopted country.  As a kid in Ireland, Charley was poor and the love of drink of his mother made his life a nightmare, and the half of Charley who returns to the Emerald Isle is also impoverished and afflicted with alcoholism.  We might also consider the idea that drunks have two identities, a sober one and an inebriated one.

Lincoln generates tension by keeping us unsure which half of Charley we should sympathize with and admire, the boring guy who works his way up through the company or the rebel who strives to live on his own terms, exploiting others, and create a masterwork that will blow the lid off our illusions and reveal to us one and all the horrible truth of life and history.  

We can call this one marginally recommendable.

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All four of these stories are remarkable, each at least a little off the beaten path: Leiber's two stories are ambitious and chock-full of content, in fact maybe too stuffed; Lewis's is a sort of in-joke that attacks the common run of SF; and Lincoln's story is by somebody who has not written any other SF.  Even though I gave two of these stories low marks, this has still been an interesting stage of our journey through 1958.  Next stop: "M!"