Theodore Sturgeon: "The Music," "Scars," and "Die, Maestro, Die!"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading a 1965 edition of the 1953 collection E Pluribus Unicorn by Theodore Sturgeon, the man who brought you such bizarre utopian visions as "If All Men Were Brothers Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?", "The Skills of Xanadu," and "...And Now the News,"  as well as those wacky tales of alien invasion, "Make Room for Me" and "The Incubi of Parallel X."  Yesterday we read three stories from E Pluribus Unicorn, one about two virgins, one good, one evil; one about a superior race of sexless women; and one about two unattractive people finding love against the odds thanks to the intervention of a flying saucer.  Who can guess what Ted has in store for us today in "The Music," "Scars," and "Die, Maestro, Die!"?  You can read along at a scan of a copy of the very edition I am reading at this link.

"The Music" (1953)

This little thing, one and a half pages, seems to have made its debut in E Pluribus Unicorn.  It is a sort of literary exercise and a slightly oblique horror story.  A guy is stuck in a hospital, maybe a mad house.  He likes to escape the stifling atmosphere of the institution to a balcony or to a loading dock or something, a place where he can lean on a rail and smoke and look out into the night, see the mist and garbage cans and a cat chase and kill a rat.  A recurring motif of the story is this guy's music--I guess music he hears in his head.  As the story ends it is implied that he imitates the cat and chases down and kills a fat nurse leaving the hospital to head home, maybe even eats her.

Acceptable.  

"The Music" has only ever appeared in Sturgeon collections.

"Scars" (1949)

Well, here's a change of pace.  "Scars" debuted in Zane Grey's Western Magazine; Sturgeon wrote enough Western stories, some in collaboration with Don Ward, to fill a collection.  Well, let's sample Ted's body of work about the Wild West.

"Scars" is a well-written cynical twist-ending story; the style is evocative and economical and the surprise ending works.  Thumbs up, cowpokes!

Two cowboys are working together, day after day, night after night, far from any other people, putting up a barbed wire fence or something in what amounts to the wilderness.  They rarely talk, but sometimes, Sturgeon tells us, a man has to get something off his chest.  One time the elder cowboy tells the story of how he lost part of an ear when he was fighting with a slick Easterner over a woman and the woman in question hit him in the head with a frying pan.  Another time, he describes how he was shot in the belly but survived a long hospital stay.

The younger cowboy one night is complaining about women, saying they all want a gentleman but their definition of gentleman is unattainable.  The old man says that he is a gentleman, and explains how he merits this appellation.  One day he was riding in some remote area and saw a woman bathing in the nude, the region being so thinly populated she was sure nobody would be around.  Startled, she fell in the water and hit her head and fell unconscious.  The cowboy rescued her and spent several days nursing the young widow back to health as she suffered blood loss, a fever, delusions our hero was her dead husband, etc.  While she was laid up he did work on her farm, repairing a door and pulling weeds and so forth.  Sturgeon, who in his stories often depicts touching human relationships, leads you to believe this is some kind of wonderful selfless love the cowboy is expressing, forgoing one opportunity after another to take advantage of this woman.  When the woman is recovered and it is time for the cowboy to leave, the widow tells him he is a gentleman, and there is even the suggestion she has perhaps fallen in love with him--she watches him until he disappears beyond the horizon.

When the young cowpuncher asks why the oldster never took advantage of the widow, the old guy makes clear it was because his bullet wound, which left his "plumbin'" "all mixed up and cross-connected," rendered him impotent.

When the issue of Zane Grey's Western Magazine that included "Scars" was reprinted in the UK, our British friends gave it a different, perhaps more exciting, cover.

"Die, Maestro, Die!" (1949)

It seems our mates across the pond couldn't top the US cover of the issue of Dime Detective in which "Die, Maestro, Die!" debuted and so used the same cover for the British edition of the magazine.  Understandable--the cover is pretty awesome.

Like the narrator of (spoiler alert) "Saucer of Loneliness," whom we met in our last blog post, the narrator of "Die, Maestro, Die!" has a birth defect, a tiny little mouth with sharp pointy teeth that renders his mug among the ugliest anyone has ever seen.  This guy, Fluke, also has an unusual voice, and so has a job with Lutch's hip and happenin' band.  While Lutch the clarinetist and bandleader and beautiful girl piano player Fawn and drummer Crispin and the rest of the band are doing their thing, Fluke, hidden in the dark, speaks cool patter into the microphone.  "Lutch is here, Lutch is gone, man, gone....Top of the morn from the top of the heap, Kizd."  This story is full of hip slang:

She pulled Lutch's swallow-tail between numbers, dropped it like it was hot, and stood there blushing like a radish....The music business is full of roundheels and thrushes who feed on seed; this kid was from fresh air.

Anyway, "Die, Maestro, Die!" is the story of how Fluke keeps trying to murder Lutch, whom he envies  because of his talent and Fawn's love of Lutch and whom he resents because it is to Lutch that Fluke owes his success.  One of the grim realities we experience in life that that we are all too reluctant to acknowledge, one that molds our relationships and has painful ramifications for society, is the fact that often it is not gratitude but resentment and contempt that beneficiaries feel towards benefactors; if you loan or give money to a relative, he won't necessarily be thankful, but instead hate you for humiliating him, for making your superiority undeniable, for making him feel he owes you, even if you deny that he owes you anything.  And don't get me started on how people who "work" for the government or who are on the dole feel about the taxpayers who are keeping them housed and fed.  Anyway, Sturgeon in this story offers some sad but all-too-accurate psychological insight--the more Lutch and the other band members are nice to Fluke, the more they try to help him, the more he resents them and tries to destroy them.

One of Sturgeon's themes throughout his career, and one he cleverly illustrates in "Die, Maestro, Die!" is his skepticism of individualism and his romantic view of collectivism.  In his SF work this often manifests itself as telepathy and collective consciousness and similar fantastical elements , but in this mainstream crime story it manifests itself in the orchestra.  All the members of Lutch Crawford and his  Gone Geese work together, get on the same wavelength, and produce great art.  Even when Lutch disappears after Fluke drowns him in a sink and throws him in a river, the band, from long intimate familiarity with Lutch, are able to produce the kind of work Lutch would have produced--having successfully built relationships, having sacrificed himself for the collective, Lutch lives on after death, his band creating and performing just the kind of music he produced and would have gone on producing.  And our villain, Fluke, because he wants to succeed on his own, without help, because he is an individualist, is a monster who keeps trying to kill Lutch, even the immortal Lutch that is the band, by sabotaging the band's performances.

In the end, Fluke is found out, but even then the band members, inspired by the example of Lutch, treat Fluke far better than he deserves.  Fluke is punished, however, if only by his own inner demons. 

Personally, I find collectivism detestable and think of myself as  radical individualist, but I can't deny that Sturgeon here makes his case skillfully.  The characters and their relationships are also well rendered, even if Lutch and the band members sometimes seem impossibly goody goody.  And I have to say that Sturgeon here does a better job of describing what the experience of performing and hearing good music is like than do a lot of people that strain their brains and their typewriters piling on surreal  metaphors trying to do so, like Charles Beaumont in "Night Ride" or Robert Bloch in "Dig That Crazy Grave!"  So, thumbs up for "Die, Maestro, Die!"   

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More than once on this blog I have suggested that I might enjoy Barry Malzberg's mainstream work more than his SF work.  Today's three stories by Theodore Sturgeon make me wonder if I might say the same thing about old Ted.  These stories are more economical and have more believable characters than a lot of Sturgeon's SF work, and "Scars" and "Die, Maestro, Die!" effectively address Sturgeon's typical themes without resorting to psychic powers or space aliens and without expressing contempt for the mundanes.

I think the remaining stories in E Pluribus Unicorn first appeared in Weird Tales, and so we will get to them in the course of our exploration of the Unique Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual, assuming the Grim Reaper doesn't catch up with me first--I still have a lot of issues of Weird Tales to get through.