K Koja and B N Malzberg: "The High Ground," "Literary Lives" and "The Witches of Delight"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are scouring the interwebs in search of collaborations between Barry N. Malzberg and Kathe Koja, and today we have three specimens of such collabs published in the good old days of the 1990s, one each from the years 1993 (Muslim radicals bomb the World Trade Center!), 1994 (Rwandan genocide!), and 1995 (cultists poison people on the Tokyo subway!)  These stories have, as far as I can tell, only been printed once, so maybe we have reason to fear these are below average productions from these widely-admired (by critics and genre lit professionals, at least) writers, but we won't know for sure until we've read them.  

"The High Ground" (1993)

This story appears in Temporary Walls, the souvenir book of the 1993 World Fantasy Convention, ; a book bearing the subtitle "An Anthology of Moral Fantasy inspired by John Gardner's On Moral Fiction."  Am I going to read On Moral Fiction (200 pages) in order to better understand this 13-page story?  No, but wikipedia offers a three-sentence summary that draws on Daniel Burt's The Chronology of American Literature that may allow us to cheat our way to a dim comprehension of Gardner's argument.

In this work, Gardner attacks what he sees as contemporary literature's lack of morality, which he calls the highest purpose of art and which he defines in the book. According to Gardner, morality is not an arbitrary social construct, but an eternal truth, taking on different forms but not essentially changing through the ages. He says that moral fiction "attempts to test human values, not for the purpose of preaching or peddling a particular ideology, but in a truly honest and open-minded effort to find out which best promotes human fulfillment."

Editors Robert Garcia and Greg Ketter suggest Gardner would have "loathed" "The High Ground;" well, let's see what we think.

"The High Ground" is a Socratic dialogue about morality, with allusions to Dante and the Holocaust and maybe other stuff that went over my head, a fairy tale didactic but frustratingly inconclusive.  There are horror images, but little by way of plot or character.  It seems possible that the point of the story is that life is meaningless and morality is mere opinion, but it is not impossible that the point of the story is that people who feel that morality is a mere opinion are the immoral ones and they will be consigned to hell.  

A bunch of fantasy-type characters are hanging out in the "woods of inconsequence;" among them are a wizard, a dwarf, a giant with an oozing sore, a deformed rodent, and an "enchanted virgin" with a stump where she has lost a hand.  The wizard tells the story of how he was given responsibility over a city of some thousands of people, and then was confronted by an evil sorcerer of invincible power--the evil magician demanded a hundred young people as his slaves, and should his demand not be met, promised to exterminate everyone in the city; the wizard had to make this horrible choice, and it scarred him and led him to believe morality is not real.  The dwarf offers the story of Paolo and Francesca; he had some kind of role in the story.  A young woman tells the story of how she was employed in a castle or manor house or something and she and the master fell in love but refrained from consummating their relationship because they didn't want to commit adultery, and were thus miserable.  The giant and an elf don't have their own stories but sometimes offer little comments that contribute to the debate.

The story restarts with the wizard again telling his story; presumably these characters are retelling their tales of woe and having their debates on the nature of morality again and again throughout eternity.

I'm going to have to give a thumbs down to "The High Ground," it feeling long, being kind of boring, and offering debates that just run in circles that stem from contrived and improbable stories.  Is this story attacking Gardner's insistence that morality is "an eternal truth" by offering theoretical situations in which people have no opportunity to behave morally?  It is not surprising that this ultimately sterile story has not been reprinted.  I read "The High Ground" it in a scan of Temporary Walls at the internet archive by following a link at isfdb; at time of writing there is something fishy with the file's name and it can be hard to find on your own, but if you click the isfdb link you will go right to it.

"Literary Lives" (1994)

"Literary Lives" has only appeared in Mike Resnick's Alternate Outlaws, a paperback with a cover illo chillingly depicting Elvis Presley as a bolshevist terrorist.  Recent events suggest that people don't really take seriously the political advice of celebrities like Cardy Bee and Meghan the Stallion or even Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, but if The King of Rock and Roll himself was on on the side of Moscow or Peking maybe today I'd be wielding a hoe on a collective farm or sitting in an office listening in on conversations via bugs and wire taps--scary.  

Resnick in his intro to "Literary Lives" tells us it is about Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway, two people I know very little about, so I may not get a lot out of this story.  (I know "You might as well live" from Bryan Ferry and of course people talk about Hemingway all the time, so I have a vague sense of the conventional wisdom about him.)  Let's give it a try, anyway.

"Literary Lives" lives up to its title and is a pretty literary story with lots of stream of consciousness jazz and plots that are told largely through flashbacks.  I say "plots" because the story comes in two parts, each depicting a distinct alternate universe in which Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemmingway share a disastrous sexual relationship and one murders the other.  (Spoiler alert!)  There is plenty of block quoted poetry, but whether it is Parker's real poetry or something Koja and Malzberg cooked up, I don't know.  I think we can call "Literary Lives" a feminist story--the two Dorothys' relationships with her father, husbands, and other men are prominently featured, the thoughts and careers of prostitutes are explored, and the text contains lines like "in this America nothing, but nothing, was as invisible as a sixty-year-old woman."  

Part 1 is set in the 1980s (Trump Tower is mentioned) and in this alternate universe an aging, overweight Dorothy Parker (wikipedia says she was born in 1893, but in this universe it seems she is 60) is a novelist and today is appearing on a New York-based TV talk show promoting her sixth novel set in Edwardian England.  (She abandoned poetry long ago.)  During the commercial breaks, she thinks back on her life, on her marriage to a failed womanizing poet (I guess alternate universe Ernest Hemmingway) who sired her two (now estranged) children and cheated on her so outrageously that Dorothy considered suicide and then contrived to murder hubby and one of his girlfriends.  After hubby's death, Dorothy began her career as a novelist.  The story ends with the novelist walking through New York, observing a multi-ethnic squad of street hookers.  

The Dorothy Parker of the second part of "Literary Lives" is herself a prostitute in the late Forties.  Her career as a writer in New York and Hollywood made her feel like a whore so she became an actual whore.  (As I type that it sounds pretty funny but as I was reading the story it felt perfectly natural.)  We saw this artist-as-whore theme in our last episode when reading Koja and Malzberg's "The Careful Geometry of Love."  This iteration of Parker is also an alcoholic, and we get a scene of her vomiting.  One thing this part of the story mentions again and again that was not brought up at all in the first part is the fact that Parker is Jewish.    

One of Parker's johns turns out to be Ernest Hemingway.  Papa bangs Dotty and then accuses her of making him impotent for three years back in the Twenties by laughing at the size of his penis--he says her laugh, her jokes about his member (she called it "she," a clever bit of emasculation that is probably illegal in Canada today and may well be here tomorrow) have haunted his dreams all through the Depression and the War.  He whips out a knife and stabs her repeatedly, his dialogue making explicit the way the knife is a phallic symbol and surrogate.

"Literary Lives" is well-written and the themes are sort of interesting, but it feels very long, and it bangs away at the same themes and ideas again and again.  And of course I expect there are all kinds of nuances that Parker and Hemmingway fans will appreciate that totally escaped my detection.  We'll call it acceptable.

"The Witches of Delight" (1995)

Here's the third of our unreprinted stories--we are digging deep today, friends!  The sole appearance of "The Witches of Delight" was in Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg's anthology Witch Fantastic.

"The Witches of Delight" is another longish story that comes to us in two distinct parts.  In the first part we meet Joe Thompson, a writer who lives in the suburbs with his wife and two kids and commutes to the big city to work, attend art gallery openings and the like, and of course to cheat on his wife.  Thompson has been having dreams in which he has sex on an alien planet with a sort of witch queen, a beautiful woman clad in black who has long white legs, long white fingers, and small pointy breasts.  Also, Thompson's Dad is dying or recently died in the hospital.  The tale of Thompson, his father, and this Queen is kind of confusing, with us readers not quite sure which of the narrative's fragments are real and which are dreams or delusions.  There are images of the Queen coming to Thompson's Dad in the hospital and having sex with him while Joe watches, and of Dad's broken body littered throughout Thompson's suburban home.  Thompson meets the Queen in real life, at an art gallery where there is a new exhibition of photographs of a female model, and she takes him to her apartment to have sex with him.  She suggests she is an immortal sorceress who has ruled other planets and knows the future as well as the past, at some points declaring "I am history" and likening herself to figures like Medea, Sylvia Plath, Anne Boylen and Catherine the Great, at others saying "I am your future," but later claiming those assertions were lies and what she really is is "duty" and "honor."  It is all pretty inconclusive and contradictory.  I got the impression that Koja and Malzberg might be making some feminist point about how men use and fear women and haphazardly, for their own purposes, assign to women attributes and responsibilities, and how history is an endless repetitive tragedy because of men's ambitions and neuroses but men try to blame their actions and the resultant unhappiness on women.

The second half of the story concerns a love triangle.  We've got Horst, an immigrant, I suppose a Jew from the former communist East (the text refers to "the hard edges of the shtetl, the barley soup, the hard consonants of the grey regime slid[ing] from him") who came to America and began an affair with Anne, an art photographer.  They had tons of sex, but then Anne began photographing a new model, Margo, an extraordinarily good subject who becomes a muse for Anne, and a lover; Anne became cold to Horst in bed and otherwise.  (Anne is the photographer, and Margo the subject, of the exhibition where Thompson meets the witch Queen.)  Horst is so needful of Anne that he wants to surrender his masculinity so he can fit into the "sorority" that Anne and Margo comprise; he shaves his genitals and even offers to castrate himself.

The story ends mysteriously, with Anne presenting Horst some kind of revelation and asking him if he understands, but we readers can't know if he does understand and we certainly aren't given the means to understand ourselves.  The endings of the Thompson narrative and the Horst narrative exhibit many parallels, sharing words and phrases (for example, Koja and Malzberg use the word "history" a lot in both.)  What happens to the two men at the hands of their sex partners? 

Thompson lies there: beneath the witch of the worlds, queen of covenant, bitch of last and final consequence, in passage and at torment: subsumed by history, overtaken by time and content at last not to rise.

[Anne] leading him [Horst] to the space he must now occupy, the square of light which would from now on be his home. 

It isn't particularly clear--have they been murdered?  Trapped in some kind of limbo forever?  Victims of evil women?  Or criminals against the fair sex suffering a just punishment?

"The Witches of Delight" is well-written and entertaining with plenty of erotic and horrific images, and the personalities and motivations of the men in the story are clear and easy to understand, though the philosophical or ideological content of the story is a little hard to pin down.  I can give this one a thumbs up.

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"The High Ground" is a waste of time, but "Literary Lives" works and "The Witches of Delight" is a real success.  Maybe we'll continue our search for Koja/Malzberg collaborations in the near future here at MPorcius Fiction Log.