The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence

He was obsessed.  If he did not discover and make known to himself these delights, they might be lost for ever.  He wished he had a hundred men's energies, with which to enjoy her.  He wished he were a cat, to lick her with a rough, grating, lascivious tongue.  He wanted to wallow in her, bury himself in her flesh, cover himself over with her flesh.  

Front cover of copy I read

In an effort to justify my mother's complaints that I am a snob and my father's fears that I am a dangerous reactionary who is putting his good name at risk, I have been reading T. S. Eliot's earlier poetry and about the St. Louis native and London habitue's early life (basically up to 1922 and the publication of The Waste Land.)  In Robert Crawford's Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land and in The World Broke In Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year That Changed Literature by Bill Goldstein, mention is made of Lawrence's 1915 novel The Rainbow as a controversial book that was "suppressed for indecency."  I've never read anything by D. H. Lawrence, and seeing that the novel was (apparently) full of sex and that the more famous Women in Love was a sequel to it, I decided The Rainbow would be a good place to start my D. H. Lawrence experience and tracked down a copy (Penguin 2007, edited by Mark Kinkead-Weekes) at the Baltigore County Public Library.  For what it's worth, this edition claims to be the closest ever published to what Lawrence intended.

The Rainbow is the story of three generations of the Brangwen family, relatively prosperous owners of the farm known as the Marsh in or near the village of Cossethay on the border of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, a tale that runs from the mid 19th century to the first years of the 20th.  After a brief look at his immediate ancestors, we spend 100 or so pages with Tom Brangwen as our main character.  Though not the eldest, Tom succeeds to ownership of the Marsh, his older brother Alfred moving to Nottingham to take a job as "a draughtsman in a lace-factory."  After an encounter with a foreign gentleman, Tom becomes fascinated with foreigners and aristocrats—one of the themes of The Rainbow is of people who yearn to be more, to grow into something different, something bigger, or to have children who do so  These hopes are generally frustrated; for example, Tom's mother wanted her children to be educated, but Tom was a horrible student, "a hopeless duffer at learning," "a fool" who "had not the power to controvert even the stupidest argument...."

...and the back

Tom becomes enchanted with Lydia Lensky, a Polish widow with a little girl, Anna.  Lydia, the daughter of a landowner, and her husband, a physician, were forced to leave Poland because they were patriots and got mixed up in a rebellion against the Russians--her husband died of illness in London, leaving her and little Anna penniless.  Tom and Lydia marry, and we learn all about the joys and miseries of their marriage. Their marriage is contrasted with Alfred’s; Alfred cheats on his wife with an intelligent woman who lives in a house full of books with her father--Alfred and the woman read Herbert Spencer and Robert Browning together.

When Anna is eighteen, Alfred’s son Will moves near the Marsh to take up work himself as a draughtsman at a lace factory. Anna and Will, a sensitive sort who likes to visit churches and look at books of reproductions of church architecture and Christian paintings and sculptures (Ruskin has had a big influence on him), fall in love, and we get 100-something pages in which their marriage, the joys and miseries of which are even more extreme than that of Tom and Lydia's, is described in detail.

Lawrence’s book is focused primarily on psychology, on the characters’ inner lives and on their feelings, feelings mostly related to their sexual and family relationships. There is quite little description of people’s work or their relationships with other people in the community--we don’t get scenes of Tom haggling with customers over prices for his butter or beef or Will trying to get a raise from his boss, and we learn very little of the economics of managing a farm or the intricacies of designing lace patterns, we don't hear people's complaints about government trade or tax or foreign policy.  Again and again the characters eschew the outside world, shutting themselves up in the family:

Anna continued in her violent trance of motherhood, always busy, often harassed, but always contained in her trance of motherhood....No responsibility, no sense of duty troubled her.  The outside, public life was less than nothing to her, really.  

.... 

And to him, as the days went by, it was as if the heavens had fallen, and he were sitting with her among the ruins, in a new world, everybody else buried, themselves two blissful survivors....

or themselves:

...she was always tormented by the unreality of outside things....she became hard, cut herself off from all connection, lived in the little separate world of her own violent will.

The descriptions of people’s family relationships, particularly relationships between spouses, ring very true and are very effective. Just like in real life, everybody’s feelings are ambiguous, equivocal,  subject to endless revision, and Lawrence's character's emotions shift from one extreme to the other from one moment to the next.   Lawrence addresses, in detail, many of the challenges faced by married people: you can't live without your wife, can't imagine a life without her, she is the center of your being, but at the same time that you adore her and desire her, you resent her because of her power over you.  She makes fun of your hobbies, and it hurts so much you throw the woodcarving you've been working on for months into the fire!  (When this happened to Will I was reminded of scenes in Kipling's The Light that Failed and in Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage in which women destroyed men's art work.)  Your wife criticizes your religion, your deepest beliefs, and you begin to doubt.  You love your husband and desire him sexually, but there is nothing more delicious than being alone at home while he's at work, and you can't get any sleep in the same bed with him, so you send him to another room every night.  Lawrence goes into all these things at great length, as well as into Tom's relationship with Anna and Will's with his and Anna's first daughter, Ursula.

Lawrence's style is not subtle--when people are not overwhelmed by love or desire they are going into "black rages" and consumed by hate, usually for the person they were in paroxysms of desire for just two paragraphs ago, and will be equally in love with within a page or two.  Lawrence's style is characterized by repetition.  Lawrence will use the same short straightforward words and phrases multiple times in a single sentence, in a single paragraph, again and again throughout the book ("rage" and "black" are favorites):

All the blood in his body went black and powerful and corrosive as he heard her.  Black and blind with hatred he was.  He was in a very black hell, and could not escape.

....

Oh, Oh, the bliss of the little life sucking the milk of her body!  Oh, Oh, Oh the bliss, as the infant grew stronger, of the two tiny hands clutching, catching blindly yet passionately at her breast, of the tiny mouth seeking her in blind, sure, vital knowledge, of the sudden consummate peace as the little body sank, the mouth and throat sucking, sucking, sucking, drinking life from her to make a new life, almost sobbing with passionate joy of receiving its own existence, the tiny hands clutching frantically as the nipple was drawn back, not to be gainsaid.  This was enough for Anna.  She seemed to pass off into a kind of rapture of motherhood, her rapture of motherhood was everything.

Lawrence will make the same points about a character and use the same metaphors again and again, in a brief space.  One minor character is a Polish baron, Skrebensky, exiled to England where he has taken up the job of a vicar and marries an Englishwoman.  On page 184 Lawrence tells us the Baroness has "the soft, creamy, elusive beauty of a ferret."  On the same page we are told "She had real charm, a kind of joyous coldness, laughing, delighted, like some weasel."  And at the top of the next page we find that Will "watched her with deferential interest as he would watch a stoat playing."  (I was hoping Lawrence would whip out "ermine," favorite of all us Leonardo and Wyndham Lewis fans, but he limited himself to three of these weaselly ferrety metaphors.)

(Is repetition a hallmark of "literary modernism?"  Linked to the interest of its practitioners in primitive chants and ancient ritual?  Eliot certainly uses lots of repetition in his poetry.)

Almost halfway through our 450-page trek, and eight years into Will and Anna's marriage, Will goes to town and picks up a girl at a theatre; he gropes her in the dark corner of a park, but she won't let him go all the way.  Back home Anna immediately notices something is different about him, but she is not necessarily offended:

She liked him.  She liked this strange new man come home to her.  He was very welcome, indeed.  She was very glad to welcome a stranger.  She had been bored by the old husband.  

Will's infidelity triggers a revival, a revolution, of his and Anna's relationship, and they devote themselves to ferocious animalistic sex, sex bereft of love or tenderness, sex based on lust: "They abandoned the moral position, each was seeking gratification pure and simple...Their children became mere offspring to them, they lived in the darkness and death of their own sensual activities."  It is hard to tell to what extent Lawrence is endorsing this kind of attitude towards sex, and to what extent he is condemning it.

Some publishers try to sell The Rainbow as a sex
novel--this is my favorite of the sexy
covers I have seen

I enjoy this kind of extravagant writing, when some guy is so hot for a chick he swoops down on her like a predatory bird and wants to devour her like a cat, and when he is so angry at her that he wants to take her in his hands and break her. The problem I began having with The Rainbow, however, was that Lawrence was doing this stuff again and again—there was no relief, no variety, it got repetitive, monotonous.  It is hard to burn at a fever pitch for page after page without it getting stale, especially when the topic does not vary for over 100 pages.  I thought of Proust, who also writes at length about love and sex and how they make people feel and act goofy, but he also writes about art, literature, social class, and politics, and includes many memorable images and even pretty funny jokes. (And Proust writes about more varieties of love and sex than Lawrence does here.)  Fortunately, in the second half of The Rainbow, Lawrence expands his scope and his range of topics a bit, and tries to include arresting images, particularly featuring the moon and flowers.  (I love to look at the moon, but, unfortunately, and despite the best efforts of my father, who cultivates a huge garden, my wife, who loves to decorate our home with cut flowers, and Bryan Ferry, flowers leave me cold and I have no idea what a rhododendron looks like without googling it.)  More interesting, to me at least, are the characters' responses to political, economic and social issues.

Anna and Will's plunge into ecstatic and indulgent sex feels like the climax of the first half of The Rainbow.  It is followed by a sequence in which Tom Brangwen, Anna's (non-biological) father and Will's uncle, is killed in a flash flood at the Marsh farm, drowned while drunk.  Fred, Anna's half-brother, son of Tom and Lydia, succeeds to the farm.

Will and Anna's daughter Ursula is the main protagonist of the remaining 225 or so pages of the novel.  Following the book's themes, Ursula is selfish and self-absorbed:

She was a free, unabateable animal, she declared in her revolts: there was no law for her, nor any rule.  She existed for herself alone. 

and wants to improve her status and go out and explore the world:

So even as a girl of twelve she was glad to burst the narrow boundary of Cossethay, where only limited people lived.  Outside, was all vastness, and a throng of real, proud people whom she would love. 

She often indulges in fantasies of being a rich aristocratic lady, helping others and otherwise flaunting her superiority over them.  Lawrence includes lengthy descriptions of teenaged Ursula's grappling with religious questions.  She, of course, wants to do the right thing, but she is unwilling in her squabbles with siblings and schoolmates to turn the other cheek and forswear self-defense and revenge, and though she is troubled by the parable of the camel and the eye of the needle, she is very reluctant to give up her superior status as the member of a relatively prosperous family or sell her fine things (among them a pearl-backed brush and mirror, silver candle stick, and a "lovely little necklace") and hand the proceeds over to the poor--in fact, the poor disgust her.

"Very well," she thought, "we'll forgo that heaven, that's all--at any rate the needle's eye sort."  And she dismissed the problem.

(Lawrence fills The Rainbow with quotes from the Bible and Biblical references--Anne Fernihough furnishes this edition with fourteen pages of very good notes that help uneducated people like myself spot the less obvious ones.)

Ursula is a rebel who questions all she hears.  Her first romance is with Anton Skrebensky, son of that Polish Baron turned vicar; Anton is an engineer in the British Army.

"But what would you be doing if you went to war?"

"I would be making railways or bridges, working like a nigger."

When he talks of why he is willing to fight for the nation and its people, the importance of maintaining order, and so on, Ursula insists that it is all nonsense, that she doesn't care about the Mahdi or Khartoum ("I don't want to live in the desert of Sahara--do you?") and attacks the very idea of a nation:

"But we aren't the nation.  There are heaps of other people who are the nation."

"They might say they weren't, either."

"Well, if everybody said it, there wouldn't be a nation.  But I should still be myself," she asserted, brilliantly.

Anton is sent off to fight the Boers.  Ursula's second lover is a woman, Winifred Inger, one of her school teachers the last year she attends classes and a sort of feminist activist.  As with so many relationships in The Rainbow, this one veers from ecstatic adoration to absolute detestation.  Sick of her, Ursula sets up Winifred with her uncle Tom (Will's brother, son of drowned Tom) who, after travelling around the world a bit, has taken up the job of managing a coal mine.  Ursula is disgusted by the colliery and the ugly town that has sprung up around the pit and the way the miners ("colliers") are forced to adapt to the industry--she thinks they would be better off living in poverty than toiling to produce the energy that powers the modern economy.  Tom's role in the coal mining industry, and Winifred's interest in Tom (the two do end up married) makes them abhorrent to Ursula.

This cover, from a website offering
e-books, is the funniest I've seen

As I have suggested, Lawrence lays everything on pretty thick in this book, and he doesn't skimp when expressing how horrible--in Ursula's opinion, at least--the whole business of mining is, though he doesn't portray the colliers as slaves or innocent victims: they are volunteers who like the high wages they receive at the colliery.  Lawrence paints everything in The Rainbow in bold (garish?) colors but at the same time he presents everything as ambiguous and equivocal.

Ursula is sickened by the idea of staying at home with her mother and all her many siblings--she wants to enter the world of work, the world of men (Chapter XIII is actually titled "The Man's World"), she wants freedom and independence, and so she takes a job as a teacher (her "matric" qualifies her for such work.)  She has dreams of moving far away to teach among the beautiful people, but she ends up taking a teaching job nearby in a poor district, a job her father gets for her (so much for independence!)  The kids are rebellious, and to keep her job Ursula must abandon her fantasies of being the kind sensitive teacher every student loves and become a ruthless taskmaster who beats down recalcitrant boys with a cane--like the colliers she must adapt, alter her personality, become a servant of the machine, to the school which feels like a prison and a system she finds "inhuman."

She did not want to do it.  Yet she had to.  Oh why, why had she leagued herself to this evil system where she must brutalize herself to live?  Why had she become a school-teacher, why, why?

Ursula works as a schoolteacher for two years before attending college.  This is probably the most interesting part of the book, as Lawrence gets into what it is like to be a schoolteacher at the turn of the 20th century and actually shows us a character developing in a logical way and not just changing his or her attitude on a dime, as Ursula has to learn to adapt to the challenge of teaching a bunch of kids who do not want to be taught and of appeasing her superiors, who are not exactly eager to help her learn the ropes.  The minor characters in this portion of the novel are also interesting, the monstrous kids and the monstrous teachers who have to tame them if they want to be able to do their work.  This chapter of The Rainbow offers the pleasures of a conventional plot--I found the scene in which Ursula defeated the most villainous of the students and asserted her control of the class and won the support of her colleagues to be cathartic and satisfying, and some of the students' antics amusing.  I only wish we had gotten similar chapters on Will at the lace factory and Tom Senior managing the Marsh farm.

One of the recurring motifs of The Rainbow is people beginning new lives and entering new worlds, when they get a new job or meet a new lover or something like that.  In the last one hundred pages of the book Will, Anna, and their legion of children, the summer before Ursula begins college classes, enter into a new life, moving to from the village of Cossethay to Beldover, a newly risen town of newly constructed houses, one of those coal towns Ursula detests, where Will takes up the job of art teacher.  Ursula lives in this new house while attending college.  At first she is thrilled by the college, seeing it as a temple of learning and the professors as priests of knowledge, but she is soon disillusioned--the teachers don't teach out of love of learning, but merely in order to receive a paycheck, and the students aren't there to drink in the ambrosia of knowledge, but to increase their value on the labor market!

This was no religious retreat, no seclusion of pure learning.  It was a little apprentice-shop where one was further equipped for making money.   

Ursula, who in high school loved the Romans (on page 310 she "with her blood...heard a passage of Latin, and she knew how the blood beat in a Roman's body, so that ever after she felt she knew the Romans...") finds she doesn't even like Horace!  She compares Greek and Roman literature to the Chinese and Japanese "curiosities" for sale in antique shops, worthless gewgaws (page 403: "She was bored by the Latin curiosities....")

Anton Skrebensky, now a lieutenant, returns from South Africa late in Ursula's college career after serving down there for years; he has six months leave before heading to India.  Sick of school, Ursula "wanted to run to Skrebensky--the new life, the reality."  His time in Africa has turned Anton into a man, and Lawrence gives us some more animal metaphors: Anton is a leopard, then a lion, then a tiger.  As they sit in the night by the river, Anton tells Ursula all about life in Africa:

"I am not afraid of the darkness in England....It is soft, and natural to me, it is my medium, especially when you are here.  But in Africa it seems massive and fluid with terror--not fear of anything--just fear.  One breathes it, like a smell of blood.  The blacks know it.  They worship it, really, the darkness.  One almost likes it--the fear--something sensual." 

Distracted by Anton, whose body thrills her, Ursula skips class, fails her exams, is denied her B.A.  She and Anton get engaged, but after a tirade against England ("meagre and paltry...unspiritual") and democracy ("I hate democracy....Only the greedy and ugly people come to the top in a democracy....who are those chosen as best to rule?  Those who have money and the brains for money") Ursula tells Anton she doesn't want to get married.  (We later learn that she wants to experience other men--she loves and desires Anton, but he is the only man she's ever had sex with, and she is sure she could love and enjoy the bodies of other, different, men.)  Anton bursts into tears, and she relents, but over the next weeks he also realizes they are not made for each other and he marries a more stable woman and brings her with him to the East.

The brief final chapter includes symbolic visions, one in which Ursula sees herself as a seedling growing from an acorn, a new living thing with no connection to the Brangwen family or Anton or anything from her past life, and another in which she sees a rainbow appear over the world and sweep away the new coal towns and usher in new lives for everybody.  There is also a tedious dream-like scene in which Ursula is trapped in a wood by horses and has to climb a tree to escape the equines.  She is carrying Anton's child, but falling from the tree induces a miscarriage.  I think.  This is the lamest chapter of the book, and compares badly with the visionary scenes in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain.

Of course, many publishers have
taken the safe and literal route

So, did I enjoy The Rainbow?  Can I recommend it to people?  Individual chapters and individual passages are definitely good, and as a failed PhD candidate in history the occasional insights into the lives and attitudes of the people of Victorian and Edwardian England held my rapt attention.  It is noteworthy how much time and energy Lawrence devotes to women, to getting into their heads (for example, describing Anna's fulfillment as a mother as well as her evolving sexual feelings for her husband) and to exploring the problems and burdens faced by women in their relationships with men (Winifred moans that men are really mostly concerned with their work, be it in the shop, the pits or the office, and that their wives only get from their husbands what little is left over, "the bit the shop can't digest.")

However, after the first hundred pages or so, the novel's repetitiveness, the way Lawrence banged away at the same words over the course of a paragraph, the same ideas over the course of a chapter, and the same themes over the course of 450 pages, made reading much of The Rainbow more like a job than a joy, and I had trouble achieving my goal of reading fifty pages a day.  The characters are not very sympathetic, and because they are all prone to radical attitude adjustments they lack definition and individuality--the book left me feeling adrift, with nothing solid to hold on to.  I don't regret acquiring some familiarity with a famous and important author, but I'm glad this exploration is behind me and doubt I will read another novel by Lawrence any time soon.

In our next episode, another British novel from the same period. 

Triton by Samuel R. Delany

"There was this man, you see, from some sect she called the Dumb Beasts--I mean, if there is such a sect.  But considering all that happened, how do you tell if any of it was real?  I don't know big their endowment was...and maybe the 'endowment' was part of the 'theater' too." 

Recently Joachim Boaz, Fred Kiesche, Winchell Chung and I had a conversation via twitter about the Mitchell Hooks cover of Samuel R. Delany's 1976 novel Triton.  Martin Wisse spoke up, urging me to read the novel tout suite.  I didn't have anything in particular planned after The Future Is Now, so I figured, why not? 

Triton appears to have been more successful than a lot of the books I talk about on this blog, going through many different printings and editions and being included in a Book-Of-The-Month Club omnibus edition called Radical Utopias along with Joanna Russ's The Female Man and Suzy McKee Charnas's Walk to the End of the World.  Joachim Boaz harbors doubts that I will like the novel, and it is true that I thought Delany's Nova and Empire Star were just OK, but the copy on the back cover of my edition, an eighth printing that does not include Frederick Pohl's name on the cover (Triton was a "Frederick Pohl Selection" and the first printing was labelled as such) but does include a reference to the 1979 Tales of Nevèrÿon, makes it sound awesome:

On the other hand I have an aversion to utopias and the novel's table of contents and other front matter, like a half-page epigraph from British anthropologist Mary Douglas's Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, make we wonder if Triton isn't the kind of extravagant New Wave artifact that Terry Dixon so recently warned me about.  Well, let's just read Triton and see if it passes the MPorcius test (some, no doubt, will prefer to see this excursion as an inquiry into the possibility of MPorcius passing the Delany test.)

The first (brief at 24 pages) chapter of Triton introduces us to the city of Tethys, which lies on Neptune's largest moon, and the book's themes, which revolve around the fact that real knowledge is very difficult to come by--we can almost never really know anything for sure--and that communicating real knowledge is very difficult--defining and describing things accurately is practically impossible.  In this chapter Delany foregrounds various weird religious sects--some mendicants and others dangerously violent--and a troupe of bohemian performers who live off government endowments and present one-of-a-kind spectacles to more or less randomly chosen individuals they run into in Tethys's "unlicensed sector," a neighborhood where the law is not enforced.  The one-person audiences of these "micro-theater dramas" are drugged (surreptitiously, without their prior consent) to foster "better access to the aesthetic parameters" of the troupe.

Tethys is a place where things are not as they seem and communications cannot be trusted, and these two dozen pages are rife with examples of hidden knowledge revealed, deceptions, and garbled or meaningless communications.  The city is covered with a "sensory shield" that alters (prettifies) the appearance of space and Neptune from Triton's surface; artwork is torn down from a wall to reveal further, fragmented, layers of artwork and texts (Delany uses the word "palimpsests") that our protagonist interprets from his perhaps vague memories of seeing such texts before; one religious sect assigns its members new names that consist of long strings of random numbers, another trains its members to precisely mumble absolutely meaningless sequences of dozens of syllables, and yet another forbids its members to speak.  Our protagonist is tricked into attending a performance of the aforementioned troupe, and he is not sure if a fight he witnesses is part of the performance or an actual violent encounter.  One of the odd cults we hear about may not be real at all, but an invention of the troupe's leader, a woman named "The Spike."  Sexual ambiguity is one major component of this theme of malleable and unknowable truth; besides the woman with the phallic name, the troupe's ranks include a "hirsute woman" with a horrible scar indicating "an incredibly clumsy mastectomy" whom the protagonist mistakes for a man, and who may have actually been portraying a man earlier in the performance.

Our protagonist is Bron Helstrom, a traveler from off-colony come to study and practice "metalogics," a type of "computer mathematics."  Bron was born and grew up on Mars, where he worked as a prostitute who served women before coming out to the colonies on the satellites of the gas giants.  Delany scrambles up all our 20th-century expectations about gender in this book; examples include the characters in the novel who have names traditionally associated with the opposite sex, and the fact that most of the cops in Tethys are women (in the last quarter of the novel we learn that women in the time of the novel, the year 2112, are as tall and as strong as men, maybe due to rapid evolution, maybe because 21st- and 22nd-century adults are equally affectionate towards female and male infants, whereas parents for thousands of years prior lavished attention on boys and neglected girls.)  Bron is an intellectual traveler as well as a geographic (astronomic?) one--in the past he studied to join one of those bizarre religious sects before abandoning it (he couldn't memorize those pointless chants) and currently he is friends with an elderly homosexual, Lawrence.  Bron always rejects Lawrence's regular sexual advances, and the septuagenarian acts as a sort of mentor or guru, dispensing wisdom to Bron; in particular, Lawrence talks about how all people are "types."  (Identity--what makes you who you are, whether who you are is natural or artificial, and how malleable who you are might be--is another of the novel's themes, and there is much discussion of people's names and ID numbers and a taboo in Tethys on talking about your parents, a taboo ignored, like most customs, in the unlicensed sector.)

We meet Lawrence in the flesh and learn about Bron's home life in Chapter 2.  Bron lives in a "single-sex unspecified-preference co-op" with both straight and gay men.  (There are several types of co-ops and communes on Triton and Delany gives us a whole rundown of what proportions of the population live in each type.)  Lawrence is teaching Bron vlet, a complex war game, and the chapter revolves around a match between them. (You'll notice that Mitchell Hook's at-first-glance fine but generic painting on the cover of the novel is in fact very specific, incorporating chess pieces, as well as the kinds of mirrors and goops an actor might use in preparation for a performance, direct references to some of Triton's plot elements and themes.)  Watching the game are other residents, including the handsome and well-educated diplomat Sam, and a retarded man who goes by the nickname Flossie, whose mental shortcomings are partially alleviated by computer finger rings, and his ten-year-old son Freddie.  (Freddie presents one of the several opportunities Delany takes advantage of to hint to us readers that in Tethys it is normal for children to have sex with each other and with adults.)  As befits a SF utopia (we all know how SF titans Robert Heinlein and his pal Theodore Sturgeon felt about the subject!), most of these people hang around naked, and even go to work naked on occassion.

 
In keeping with the novel's themes of incomprehensibility, the rules of vlet are astoundingly complicated; below is the "modulus by which the even more difficult scoring system...proceeded."

The vlet match is interrupted by a power outage that temporarily disables the sensory screen and allows the inhabitants of Triton to see the real sky for once.  The second chapter of Triton ends as Bron does research in a computer directory on The Spike, learning her real name and reading critical analyses of her work; again Delany pushes home his theme of inscrutability as we learn that The Spike's writing is deliberately opaque, and, while widely commented upon, actually seen by very few people (Bron is one of the lucky ones!)

In the third chapter we see Bron at the office, where he uses metalogic to program a computer to make predictions (or something--Delany here, as elsewhere, is deliberately obscure.)  He meets a new employee, Miriamne, a woman who is "his type," and gives her (and us) a nine-page lecture on metalogic, much of which is difficult going; I think this fairly represents the salient part:

Areas of significance space intermesh and fade into one another like color-clouds in a three-dimensional spectrum.  They don't fit together like hard-edged bricks in a box.  What makes "logical" bonding so risky is that the assertion of the formal logician that a boundary can be placed around an area of significance space gives you, in such a cloudy situation, no way to say where to set the boundary, how to set it, or if, once set, it will turn out in the least useful.  Nor does it allow any way for two people to be sure they have set their boundaries around the same area.  

Bron hopes to seduce Miriamne, but soon learns she is a lesbian (for now, at least.)  Luckily, she lives in the same co-op as The Spike, with whom Bron (as he reluctantly admits to himself) is infatuated, and facilitates the beginning of Bron's brief sexual relationship with The Spike.  Then we get some sitcom/soap opera business from Delany--Bron is jealous, thinking The Spike and Miriamne may have a relationship, and so he acts in such a way that Miriamne loses her job.

(I wondered if this business with Miriamne was a nod to Proust; Marcel famously acts crazy because he is jealous of Albertine's lesbian affairs.  A number of times I thought I detected hints of Proust in the novel; late in the book The Spike is directing a performance of Phedra, presumably the same play by Racine that plays a prominent role in the second volume of In Search of Lost Time.  Marcel's confusion when seeing Phedra and his changing opinion of the performances mirror some of Delany's own themes about knowledge here in Triton.  The very template of Triton--a long story about varying types of love and sex among intellectual/artistic types set against a background of international diplomacy, intrigue and war--is similar to In Search of Lost Time.) 

Bron is then chagrined to learn that The Spike's troupe is leaving the colony in a matter of hours.   

All through the first three chapters, looming in the background and bubbling under the surface, has been vague talk about a war between an Earth-Mars alliance ("the worlds") and the colonies on Luna and the moons of the gas giants ("the satellites.")  Neither Bron nor us readers know much about the war, save that Triton has been trying to stay out of it and everybody assumes Triton will soon be dragged into it anyway.  The war moves closer to center stage in Chapters 4 and 5 as Sam goes to Earth on a diplomatic mission and brings Bron along with him, but we learn absolutely nothing about the negotiations (or whatever) that take place on Earth, and, as far as the war is concerned, apparently it is just a matter of espionage and tariffs and the like, a cold war with no space fleets or marines or anything of that nature.  Delany keeps hammering home his same themes, and early in the trip Sam reveals to Bron a secret--now a black man, Sam used to be a white woman.  Chapter 4, another short one, consists of the trip from Tethys to Earth--I always like reading this sort of thing, the author describing how people experience and cope with lift off and the view of space through the ports and low gravity and all that.

In Chapter 5 Delany does more traditional SF stuff I always enjoy, as Bron, who has always lived under domes and breathed artificial atmospheres, for the first time breathes natural air and walks under an unobstructed sky on the surface of mother Earth!  (This stuff brought to mind Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth, another novel from 1976 about a guy who travels from a gas giant satellite to Earth.)  Bron also gets tossed into jail briefly, and I always find descriptions of being imprisoned oddly compelling.

Later editions appeared under
the title Trouble on Triton

Bron only spends a few pages in jail, but Delany gives us many pages on Bron's date with The Spike, who, by coincidence, is also visiting Earth for the first time.  Whereas in Chapter 1 The Spike stage managed an elaborate performance for Bron, here in Chapter 5, on their date to a fancy restaurant, to which they are transported by a flying limo staffed by four naked female footmen, Bron draws on his experience as a prostitute on Mars (when accompanied women on similarly fancy dates many times) to stage manage an event for The Spike.  I won't be providing any more examples, but rest assured that on every page Delany bombards the reader with his themes of the impossibility of pinning down true facts and transmitting reliable knowledge to others.  Bron declares his love for The Spike and asks her to spend her life with him (marriage is illegal on Triton) but she rejects him.

Just as Bron returns home in Chapter 6 the war gets hot and Triton is right there in the middle of it.  Tethys is battered, with buildings collapsing and some minor characters killed.  Minutes before the devastation (apparently wrought by saboteurs) Bron receives a somewhat garbled letter from The Spike in which she says she doesn't like him and never wants to see him again.  It is here in Chapter 6 that Delany's purposes become, perhaps, a bit more clear and direct.  It is revealed that there are Christians and Jews in Tethys, and they are denounced as troublemakers, Delany suggesting Judaism and Christianity are religions that drive people insane or perhaps appeal only to insane people.  Lawrence, our mentor and guru, is one of the survivors, and Bron makes to him a speech that I guess is Delany's paraphrase of his view of typical 20th-century male thinking: women don't understand men, and men are individuals who have to stand apart from society, which is the domain of women and children, in order to protect that society.  Lawrence calls Bron a fool and tells him such thinking is a perversion that was once almost universal but that now only afflicts one in fifty men and one in five thousand women, and gives a feminist speech about how women for thousands of years were not treated as human beings and men are to blame for all the wars.  (Did this thing go through so many printings because it was being assigned to college students?)  And, by the way, the war is over and the satellites have defeated the worlds, in the process massacring 75% (or more) of Earth's population.

Italian edition

Bron jumps up and runs through the rubble-strewn streets to request a sex-change operation.  After a ten-page lecture and a brief operation (in Tethys a sex change is same-day surgery, no appointment required) he returns to his half-ruined co-op (his room is in the not-ruined half.)  Did Bron become a woman because he got "woke" and didn't want to be a beneficiary and perpetrator of patriarchy?  That is what I expected, but Delany is not so easy to predict.  Back home, Bron tells Lawrence that he still believes all that stuff he told him about men being lonely heroes who have to protect society, that it is those one in fifty men and one in five thousand women who keep our race going.  Bron became a woman to bolster the tiny number of women who have those traditional values, and hopes to be the perfect woman for the sort of heroic old-fashioned man he (thinks he) used to be!

Chapter 7 takes place six months after Bron's sex change.  Bron runs into The Spike again (it's a small solar system) and she again rejects his proposal that they spend their lives together.  Bron makes friends with a fifteen-year-old girl whose regular recreation is sex with 55-year-old men, and this kid tries to help Bron find a man, but Bron has no luck.  I think maybe Delany is using Bron-as-woman-with-traditional-values to show how our 20th-century values make (in Delany's opinion, at least) healthy and happy relationships almost impossible.  The chapter, and the novel proper, ends without Bron's sexual life being at all resolved, though we do see a number of ways that Bron's becoming a woman has changed his/her own psychology and altered how people around him/her feel about and interact with Bron.

German edition; check out
the typeface

After the novel proper we have the two appendices.  Appendix A consists of SF criticism, some in the mouths of characters from the novel, that mentions Heinlein, Gernsback and Bester and celebrates the possibilities of SF, its superiority to "mundane" fiction because of its "extended repertoire of sentences" and "consequent greater range of possible incident" and "more varied field of rhetorical and syntagmic organization."  (Delany really slings the academese here.)  Delany likens the relationship of SF to mundane fiction to the relationship of abstract art and atonal music to "conventional" art, something I had never considered.  (I just recently was talking to commentor and blogger Lawrence Burton about A. E. van Vogt's belief that what distinguishes SF from regular old fiction is the fact that the "good" reader of "good" SF has to bring something to the material, because the author has deliberately left something out, providing the reader and opportunity to use his imagination to build upon the material or presenting the reader an obligation to figure out the material--isn't this something like what people commonly say about abstract art?) 

It is nice to hear Delany championing SF after so often reading Malzberg bemoan the field's decline, imply it is a slum he had to resort to after literary markets were closed to him, and lament the way SF killed Henry Kuttner, Cyril Kornbluth and Mark Clifton (in his 1980 essay "Mark Clifton: 1906-1963.")

Appendix B is a brief biography of Ashima Slade, one of the most important intellectual founders of metalogics and an associate of The Spike's, and a person who had multiple sex changes.  Slade was born in 2051 and killed in the war on the day Bron had his own sex change operation.  In keeping with Delany's themes throughout the book, many facts about Slade's life are unknowable and in a footnote it is made clear that evidence presented in this biography is not trustworthy.  Also, Delany reveals to us something potentially very important that he has kept from us for 350 pages--the lingua franca of the year 2212, the language spoken by all people on the satellites and 80% of people on Earth, is "a Magyar-Cantonese dialect," suggesting a radical political and cultural change between our own time and Bron's that we didn't know about as we followed Bron's story.  This is comparable to the revelation late in Starship Troopers that Rico is non-white, one of the Heinlein passages Delany talks about in Appendix A.

A later British edition

In a recent blog post I compared Ted White's By Furies Possessed to Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, wondering to what extent White's novel was a response to or inspired by Heinlein's.  (In a 2016 talk that I highly recommend to SF, pulp, and comics fans, pointed out to us in a comment by Paul Chadwick, White talks about how important Heinlein was to him as a youth.)  I think it might also be useful to ponder how much Triton may have been influenced by Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress--both are about a colony on a moon where people have new innovative familial and sexual relationships, and both involve a war between the colonials and the Earth--and I Will Fear No Evil, in which a man's brain is implanted in a woman's body?  Delany has no doubt thought seriously about Heinlein's body of work--he wrote the intro to the edition of Glory Road I read some years ago and in his Appendix A here in Triton talks about important sentences in Starship Troopers and Beyond This Horizon, sentences which obliquely tell the reader about the imagined future world of the novel.

Four years and two states ago I read Delany's Empire Star and admired its structure and the evident hard work Delany put into it, but I didn't find it very fun.  My feelings about Triton are somewhat similar.  Delany is working ably in a literary tradition (I've already compared Triton to Proust) with a story that strongly pushes its themes and includes clever devices, like speaking in different voices and effective foreshadowing (the attack on Christianity on page 245, for example, is foreshadowed on page 2 in a way that is quite effective).  He also works masterfully in the SF tradition (I've already mentioned similarities to Heinlein), filling his book with hard science and social science, presenting speculations on what space travel and interplanetary war might be like, and giving us an inhabitant's eye view of a society radically different from our own, one with no marriage in which only 20% of women have children, people live communally, sex involving children is normal, there is a government that provides services to the unemployed and supports a diplomatic and defense apparatus but (somehow) collects no taxes, there is income inequality and social distinctions but (so they say) no money.  (Instead of money everyone has an amount of "credit" based on his or her job; Delany hints that in practice this "credit" is just like money but with the added "benefit" that it makes it easier for the government to keep tabs on you.  How the beggars and artsy fartsy recipients of government endowments we meet in Chapter 1 fit into Tethys's economy I do not understand.)

An early British edition--I'm afraid there are no dog fights in the novel

There are all these good things to say about Triton, but somehow the novel lacks excitement and fun despite all the war and espionage business, lacks feeling despite all the love and sex and death elements; Triton feels a little too cool and a little too intellectual.  Delany, to me, comes across as a skilled technician whose work is built on a strong foundation of thought and knowledge, who lacks some kind of (difficult for me to define) emotional fire or breath of human life.  Or maybe Delany and I are just on such different wavelengths that I can't receive the spark or passion he is transmitting?

Triton is well put together and thought-provoking, but it is easier to admire than to love, one of those books that I'm enjoying more now as I think back on it that than I did while actually in the process of reading it.  Mild to moderate recommendation from me, though it is easy to see that Triton is exactly the kind of SF book that will hold a powerful appeal for some but be prohibitively tedious and opaque to others.

Pretty Leslie by R. V. Cassill

She had to be capable of anything now.  When the surface of her life flowed on like rote--as it usually did--still the lower currents wandered among the stony surprises of an unknown stream bed.  

I spent some time in Des Moines on my recent Thanksgiving travels, and found that the public library was selling books for five cents each! Among those I purchased for this cheap as free price was R. V. Cassill’s Pretty Leslie, a Bantam paperback from 1964 with an interesting red cover that proclaims it to be “the brilliant, moving novel of modern sexual life!”, complete with exclamation point! (The book first appeared as a Simon and Schuster hardcover with a repulsive cover in 1963.) The back cover text of my paperback suggests this 295-page book is about a horny chick whose horniness gets her in some kind of trouble; I guess we’ve all been there, haven’t we?

Ronald Verlin Cassill was born in Iowa, and my copy of Pretty Leslie was once part of the Des Moines Public Library’s collection of books by Iowa authors. It is in quite good shape; evidently nobody found the sexalicious cover enticing  enough to actually sit in the library ("FOR USE IN LIBRARY ONLY") and read it. I guess it does look more like one of those "curl up all alone with" type of books.  But don’t think that I purchased Pretty Leslie in hopes it was a piece of pornography!  Not only did Cassill win various literary awards as well as the praises of the snobs at the New York Times and James Dickey (whose Deliverance I read about six years ago and am happy to recommend)--for two decades Cassill edited The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, a perch of great power and prestige in the world of wordsmithery!  All the evidence suggests that Pretty Leslie, even if it is about a horny chick, is a respectable piece of modern literature!

Leslie Skinner (Skinner?  hmmmm...) grew up in the tony Long Island suburb of Manhasset, and then moved to Manhattan and worked at a famous magazine. As our story begins, Leslie is 27 and has lived with her husband, Ben Daniels, a pediatrician, for three years in Sardis, Illinois.  Leslie loves attention, and is a skilled liar and clever manipulator: “She could, and did, still make anyone she wanted to fall in love with her.  The tactics were exactly those that had worked in Manhasset High...."  She flirts with Ben's friends and the men at the ad agency where she works part time, and tells white lies to her female coworkers to get them to tell her their own secrets--these secrets she relays to her husband.  Leslie, Ben reflects, has a "contagious lust for drama."

The back cover of Pretty Leslie, with its handwritten quote from the title character's diary, had given me hopes that this novel would be a first person narrative from a nymphomaniac or someone with some other psychological problem, but it is in fact written in the third person omniscient form, and we follow several characters, learn their backstories, look into their minds, and witness events from their points of view. In the first of the novel's four parts we learn Ben Daniels' deep dark secret: As a child growing up in Kansas he cunningly murdered another boy, meting out rough justice for that boy's having tortured a dog. The murder was ruled an accident, and Ben and his stepmother moved to New York City to start a new life. Throughout his life Ben has wrestled with a dilemma: can he unburden himself of this weighty secret, tell anyone, even his wife, how he coaxed Billy Kirkland behind a car parked on an incline and then, oops, released the brake so Billy was crushed?

In Part Two we learn about Leslie's past: she was fat, which scarred her mind, making her obsessed with keeping off weight.  She developed a slender figure as a young adult, but she is haunted by a "Fat Girl" and at times of stress will quickly gain weight and resort to girdles.  Cassill's novel is full of Freudian mumbo jumbo: we not only learn about the childhood incidents which have caused the various characters' adult fetishes and hangups, but read all about their stupid dreams, and all the characters fling around goofy psychological analyses of each other. Ben, for example, thinks that when Leslie gains weight it may be because she subconsciously wants to be pregnant.

Did I say "fetishes and hangups?"  Leslie wants to be treated roughly by a man, dominated, or at a least part of her she isn't quite ready to admit to, even to herself, does. One of Cassill's recurring themes is personalities split in two, entities composed of two opposing or complementary elements.  Leslie is both the sexy sophisticated professional and the Fat Girl, while Ben is both the cunning assassin of a child and the devoted preserver of children's lives.

Leslie's desire to be roughly handled is all mixed up in her attitudes about race.  While she calls herself a liberal and was "madly for Adlai" during her high school days, she was sexually aroused when she heard a horror story from the South about a black woman who was gang raped by whites while held up against the fender of a car, and was also excited when she saw a cop on the streets of Greenwich Village beating Puerto Rican boys with his billy club.  That very same cop later tried to make the moves on her, and when she resisted he hit her with the very same club, a beating she found cathartic.

Ben has his own complicated views of blacks and Hispanics, which are all mixed up in his beliefs in superstition and "the uncanny."  Ben's father died in Africa where his parents were missionaries devoted to helping whom Ben calls "black idiots;" a "witch doctor" tended Ben's father on his deathbed and Ben's mother soon after went insane. Ben himself volunteers two days a week at a clinic in an Illinois ghetto, looking after "Negro" children.  In an early part of the novel Ben fails to save a black baby (the little boy ate lead paint chips and dies of lead poisoning) and the same day revives an apparently doomed white little girl; Ben conceives the ridiculous notion that the events are inextricably linked, that somehow the little Negro boy was sacrificed to rescue the Caucasian child.

I should probably note that animals also play a role in the novel (there is the aforementioned dog, for example, as well as a pet bird, some pet fish, and a recurring reference to a chimpanzee) and that these animals play a role in the novel similar to that of the numerous minor nonwhite figures--they are alien inferiors, and the way the three white principals treat them reveals something about their character.  

First edition; are those gummy worms
or mitochondria?  Hideous!

The climax of Part Two comes when Ben is down in Caracas, at a medical conference where he learns about the plight of Latin American children.  After a party at her boss's fancy house Leslie has a brief affair with a social inferior, Donald Patch.  We learn all about Patch in Part Three.  A short man Leslie doesn't even like, Patch is a loutish commercial artist and science fiction fan (!) whom nobody respects; he uses an airbrush to paint highly detailed and "garishly" realistic depictions of people, aircraft and military equipment (sophisticated people like Leslie prefer abstract modern art, even if they work at an ad agency which makes its money by offering clients Patch's realistic work.)  Patch is a serial womanizer, but he has only ever had lower class women, including many "Negro" women--white, educated middle-class Leslie is a major catch for him.  Patch seduces women by being dismissive and cruel to them (I guess nowadays people call this "negging") and he is a violent lover who hurts Leslie.  This selfish creep brings Leslie to orgasm, something her kind and gentle husband has never done!

Also in Part Three Ben returns from Venezuela, his contact with poor Latin American kids having fired him with the idea that he and Leslie (who have been unable to have their own child) should adopt.  But when he suggests this idea to Leslie over dinner at a fancy restaurant she isn't even listening to him--she's thinking of Patch!  Over the succeeding weeks various clues convince Ben that Leslie had another man in his absence.  He tries to be modern and liberal about it ("If someone had her on her back, what's the harm in it?  Who am I to rock the boat?") but the knowledge of her infidelity has terrible effects on his mind; he becomes impotent, for example.  Patch badgers Leslie into resuming the affair; she spends her days in Patch's crummy apartment and her nights in the house Ben bought her.  Cassill suggests that Leslie needs both gentle Ben and brutal Patch to achieve satisfaction, and even that Ben and Patch are different versions of the same person, shaped by different circumstances. The climax of Part Three is when Leslie discovers she is finally pregnant!

In Part Four Leslie flees west and Ben finally realizes what is going on and confronts Patch; he and Patch (it appears) die, while Leslie, sower of discord, moves on to another phase of her life.

There are some good things in Pretty Leslie; the sex stuff is more or less entertaining, and the uncomfortable race stuff, Leslie and Ben's powerful but condescending, ambivalent, and at times hypocritical feelings about blacks and Hispanics, is interesting.  I liked the character of Donald Patch, the brutish artist consigned to the edges of polite society.  I give Pretty Leslie a passing grade.  But there are also lots of problems--it is certainly not as "brilliant" or "moving" as advertised.  Cassill doesn't have a very engaging prose style, and he uses lots and lots of elaborate metaphors and similes.  Some of these work, but some just weigh down the narrative, expressing an idea with more words but no more clarity than a simple declaration would have.  Some of the longer metaphorical passages I found distracting and, as my mind wandered, incomprehensible.

The profusion of metaphors suggests Cassill is trying to produce a serious literary novel; he also assumes a level of cultural literacy on the part of the reader, including plenty of references to artists like George Bellows and Willem De Kooning and fictional characters like Circe, Madame Bovary, and Mrs. Miniver.  Cassill never uses Maugham's name, but makes it clear Patch thinks of himself as Strickland, the protagonist of Somerset Maugham's Moon and Sixpence, an artist above the stifling strictures of bourgeois morality.

In the same way the overabundance of metaphors makes the book feel a little too long and too slow, there is a superfluity of minor, uninteresting characters who appear briefly and then never show up again; maybe Cassill could have combined some of them--how many friends and colleagues do the Daniels really need for the narrative to function?

A recent edition

The novel's biggest problem is probably that it is about a marriage, but neither the husband nor the wife is very interesting, and their relationship isn't compelling either.  Leslie and Ben Daniels are wishy washy--why should the reader be "moved" if Ben and Leslie themselves are so bland and hesitant, so ambivalent, about each other?  I can't remember why they even got married, what attracted them to each other in the first place, they never exhibit the kind of deep love or ferocious hate I want to see in drama. Don Patch, a man driven by big emotions who stands at odds with society, is the book's most interesting character--he acts and reacts, he feels things and he does things.  Leslie and Ben just go with the flow, they think and talk but can't make up their minds about what they feel and what they should to do, and end up feeling and doing very little.  Leslie and Ben are passive victims to whom things happen, and victims are boring--Patch is a villain or antihero who makes things happen.

A part of the problem is all that modern psychology jazz; it quashes the characters' agency as well as any romance or tragedy the story might have had, turning them into malfunctioning machines instead of flesh and blood people you can feel for.  The idea of people as deterministic machines may make sense as a description of real life, but it can ruin fiction, especially when the characters, instead of rebelling against determinism, blandy accept it.

Pretty Leslie wasn't a waste of my time, but Cassill lacks the sort of special something--depth of feeling, a beautiful style, a unique point of view, humor or a sense of fun, surprising ideas--that excites me about the "mainstream" or "literary" writers I really like, such as Proust or Nabokov or Maugham or Orwell or Henry Miller or Bukowski, so I don't think I will be reading any other of his numerous works.

1977 stories by George Alec Effinger, Gene Wolfe, R. A. Lafferty and Carter Scholz

Fellow SF fan R. R. Nurmi,
we salute you!

It's Part Two of our look at Terry Carr's Universe 7, an all original anthology from 1977.  I own a hardcover copy of the book club edition which was formerly in the library of Des Moines resident R. R. Nurmi.  I own several volumes from the Nurmi library, including Anthony Boucher's A Treasury of Great Science Fiction. 

"Ibid." by George Alec Effinger

I know there are Effinger fans out there.  Well, here is where I tell you people that you have to buy a copy of Universe 7 because it is the one and only place where "Ibid." has appeared.

This is a decent Twilight Zone-style story that touches on Cartesian philosophical issues (can we trust any of our sense impressions?) and the question of whether life has any meaning if we cannot be confident of our knowledge of the outside world (if we can't tell if friends and family really like us or if our work is truly valuable, why not just become a slacker, a drunk or a suicide?)

Cathy Schumacher is an academic who suddenly finds messages directly addressed to her in academic journals, students' papers, supermarket celebrity magazines, even the local TV news!  Is she going insane?  Are mysterious eldritch forces aiding her? Tormenting her?  These bizarre problems are piled on top of more ordinary problems Schumacher is facing, the kinds of problems faced by many (most?) ordinary people: her work (teaching uninterested students about English literature) seems pointless and her daughter and husband are distant--he in fact may be having an affair.  Her response to these problems, revealed on the final page of the story?  Taking up alcoholism!

I like "Ibid."'s structure and themes, and the style is fine.  For a while I thought it should be more scary--the story doesn't transmit to the reader a sense of horror, it is a bit cold and clinical.  (If I opened up a supermarket tabloid and saw a headline that read "Hey, MPorcius, look out!") I'd probably just die right there on top of my cart full of Count Chocula and Ovaltine.)  But thinking further on the story, I have decided that it is less about the heavy kind of cosmic horror represented by the impossible messages, the kind of horror that drives people in H. P. Lovecraft stories insane, and more about one of the quotidian sadnesses of life, that we cannot have any confidence that those whom we love love us in return, the kind of sadness represented by Schumacher's relationships with her daughter and husband, the kind of sadness we see in Proust.  Because this sadness is so common, is experienced by so many of us, a low key tone makes sense, and keeps the story from descending into soap opera melodrama.  

Good.

"The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton" by Gene Wolfe

I don't have to tell you that Wolfe is widely regarded as the best SF writer of all time and all that.  I read "The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton" in my copy of Storeys from the Old Hotel years ago, and here I go again.  This story must be highly regarded, it having been included in the Tor 2009 collection Best of Gene Wolfe.

It is centuries in the future!  The human race is reduced to a kind of Early Modern technological and political level, though educated people have knowledge of the computers of the past and can identify weather satellites in the night sky.  Perhaps to evoke thoughts of the Thirty Years War as well as Cold War fears of a NATO vs Warsaw Pact ground war, the story is set in Germany and people fling around references to Burgermeisters and have names like Hans and Gretchen and Karl.  A war with the Russians is underway, and has been for a long time; soldiers and deserters are everywhere, and in the distance can be heard the thunder of siege guns.  

A man comes to the village of Oder Spree who claims to own the sole surviving operable computer, a computer devoted to playing chess!  After the machine is demonstrated, an academic purchases it for the University, only to find the machine is a scam (much like the late 18th-century "Turk" automaton which captured the imagination of Europe and played such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte); a skinny mutant, a genius chess player with an oversized brain, hides inside the machine to make the moves.  The mutant falls in love with a local blue-eyed blonde and decides he wants to stay in Oder Spree; to this end he conspires with the academic to get his money back from the con artist, but a terrible tragedy results from their desperate plan.

Very good.  You've heard me praise Wolfe before, so you won't be surprised to hear me say the story is economical, full of memorable images, pulls at the heart strings, has clever foreshadowing, interesting premises, and a puzzling mystery.  Shall I voice my theory regarding the mystery?  Of course I will!  The mystery is that the chess-playing machine, to the surprise of the double-crossing scam artists, seems to start working on its own.  Now, Wolfe is a Christian who believes in the supernatural, so it is not impossible that we are to suspect that the machine is animated by ghost or deity as a means of punishing the sinful cheaters who callously put the blonde woman's life at risk.  A related possibility (one the unnamed narrator puts forward, but remember that Wolfe is famed for his use of unreliable narrators) is that the mutant has telekinetic abilities even he doesn't understand--it is his own guilty conscience that brings the antiquated machine to life.  But my favored theory (reflecting my cold-hearted materialism, perhaps) is that the machine is being used in strong sunlight for the first time in a long time (Wolfe mentions the sun and bright sky more than once) and the sunlight has recharged the computer's batteries via unremarked upon solar cells, allowing it to operate as it did a hundred or more years ago.

Like I often do with Wolfe stories, I read it twice in one day, enjoying it both times. Highly recommended.          
 
"Brain Fever Season" by R. A. Lafferty

This story is, according to isfdb, the final installment of a series of stories called "Men Who Knew Everything."  The story is a little opaque; maybe I would have had an easier time "getting" it if I had read some of the previous stories in the series.

The story's characters are immortal and eccentric geniuses who manipulate the world from behind the scenes.  Significantly, they "set up" the equator and the four seasons. The idea behind this story is that there are additional "seasons" which affect not the weather and length of the day, but the human mind.  There are, for example, seasons during which there is a flurry of large scale construction (the Great Pyramid of Giza was built during such a period, we are told) or a sudden flowering of artistic production.  In this story there is a sudden explosion in interest and publication of high brow scientific and philosophical writing, "an information-and-invention sort of fever," across the Northern Hemisphere.

Of course, all this stuff I'm just telling you in a few sentences is revealed gradually through clues over  story's 17 pages, accompanied by lots of jokes and farcical explorations of the ramifications of the abrupt elevation of intellectual prowess of the average man.  This isn't a "realistic" look at what might happen if everybody all of a sudden got smarter (like Poul Anderson's Brain Wave), but a funny, silly story in which geniuses feverishly write books in 18 hours and publishers get them printed and into the stores in five hours, a response to the public's fervid demand for material like "Emanuel Visconti's Costive Cosmologies Freed," the widespread demand for which actually predates the completion of the book's first draft.

A recurring motif of the story is likening the desire for knowledge to sexual desire; people "howl" that they are "hot" for a book and "have to have it right now," and the brain fever season is compared to the rutting season or oestrous period of animals. The explosion in human brainpower first becomes evident when publishers and sellers of pornography (famed for being able to produce and distribute material quickly) start selling mass quantities of books like a Tibetan grammar and a volume on plate tectonics.

"Brain Fever Season" is alright, not great.  I didn't laugh at the jokes (many are just lists, like of funny names) and I didn't feel like my work figuring it out had a commensurate payoff.  Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I had been already familiar with Barnaby Sheen and his troupe of weird geniuses.  Besides in Universe 7, you can read it in the 1984 collection Ringing Changes, in English or Italian!

"The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs" by Carter Scholz

I've never read anything by Scholz before, but on isfdb I see he has worked with Barry Malzberg and Kathe Koja, writers whose short stories I like, and has some kind of collaborative relationship with critical darling Jonathan Lethem.  A good omen.

The intro to "The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs" contains what I like to think of as "mysteries," even if you skeptical types out there would probably call them "typos."  Carr tells us that Scholz has a story in Alternities--I just read Alternities and there is no Scholz story in there!  He also tells us Scholz has a story in Clarion IV--there is no Clarion IV listed on isfdb, though probably Carr is referring to Clarion SF, the fourth Clarion anthology.  Finally, we are told Scholz has contributed a story to Output, but what exactly Output is, my five-minute Google search does not reveal.

Enough with the mysteries, on with the story.  "The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs" takes place in 2016.  A means of sending a person's consciousness back in time to inhabit the brain of another person has been developed; you can't influence your host, but you can see through his eyes and share his thoughts.  The main character of the tale, Charles Largens, is a musicologist, and he has his mind sent back in time to ride as a passenger in Beethoven's head.

A large proportion of the story concerns academic angst and office politics: the grantmaker will pull the grant if they find out how the money is being spent, guys compete over a promotion to head of a department, Largens has sex with another academic's wife, composers suffer writer's block, Largens worries that he shouldn't have abandoned his creative career as a composer to become a mere critic and historian of music, he realizes that his academic career has been manipulated by his mentor, etc.

The science fiction elements of the story revolve around the fact that, while your host won't be influenced by a single or a handful of visiting psyches from the future, so many scholars enter the head of a fascinating cultural giant like Beethoven that ol' Ludwig Van begins to pick up the "crosstalk" and it has a terrible negative effect on him.  Beethoven's output is diminished as he loses sanity (the famous Ninth symphony ceases to exist!) and Largens begins to notice differences between the 2016 he leaves for the 1800s and the one he returns to after each transfer.  In the end of the story Largens acts to shut down the dangerous time travel program and abandons scholarly life to return to his true calling, creating new music.

This story is well-written and constructed.  The idea that scholarly research work is sterile and stifling, and can render a creative person impotent (one character literally gets too caught up in his Beethoven research to be able to achieve an erection and have sex with his wife) is provocative, reminiscent of the way (one suspects) that actual soldiers and politicians look down on military and political historians, athletes look down on sports journalists, novelists look down on critics, etc.  (Scholz's story also reminded me of Proust's idea that things like friendship are a waste of time for the true artist, distractions from his real work, his art.) Sterility, like impotence, is a theme of the story--2016 is called a " barren year" and we learn in an aside that New York City has been reduced to a population of only two million, so that instead of new buildings going up, buildings are actually being torn down!  Sounds even worse than the real 2016!

Worth checking out.  "The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs" would later appear in British and German anthologies.

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A good anthology, with seven stories that I can definitely recommend and only one clunker.  Universe 7 earns the MPorcius Seal of Approval.

Stories from 1960s New Worlds: Ballard, Platt & Disch

Joachim Boaz was recently singing the praises of Michael Moorcock's New Worlds, in particular singling out the art design work of Charles Platt (whom I have been praising on this blog for his fun and provacative interviews of SF writers.)  So let's check out three stories from The Best SF Stories from New Worlds #2, edited by Moorcock and published in 1968, including one by Platt and selections from New Wave icon J. G. Ballard and one of my personal faves, Thomas Disch.

I have the 1969 Berkley printing with a terrific (Paul Lehr?) cover in a beautiful blue that succeeds in simultaneously conjuring up the majesty of both the moon in outer space and a whale in the ocean depths.

"You : Coma : Marilyn Monroe" by J. G. Ballard (1966)

This five-page story consists of 18 paragraphs, each with its own title.  (In his interview with Ballard in Dream Makers, Platt imitates this distinctive formatting.) I have to admit I had to read the story twice to make much of it; befitting (what I take to be) its themes, it is a bit vague and abstract.

The plot, as far as I can tell, is about a guy, Tallis, who goes to a seaside resort, where he meets a woman, Karen Novotny, and has a sexual relationship with her.  He spends a lot of time pacing in her spartan white-walled apartment.  He then meets another woman, Coma, and murders Novotny.

The themes I am getting from this story are decay, alienation and abstraction.  The setting is some kind of post-cataclysmic scenario; the resort is "deserted," a planetarium at the resort is "dead," on the beach there is a car "buried in the sand."  Tallis has some kind of mental illness, and when a doctor helicopters in to see him, we find the doctor has lost his ability to speak, his "jaw moving in exaggerated spasms" but producing no audible sounds.  Novotny feels "a mood of abstraction," a "growing entropy" and an "increasing sense of disembodiment."

The women Tallis encounters, the beach landscape, and the white apartment are described monotonously in geometrical, mathematical terms, and all are linked, one to another, as if they are some bland unified whole, depriving them of any life or personality.  "The white flanks of the dunes reminded him of the endless promenades of Karen Novotny's body....the white recti-linear walls, Tallis realized, were aspects of that virgin of the sand-dunes whose assumption he had witnessed."  (This is a sharp contrast to the seaside resort described by Proust in In Search of Lost Time, where every person, room and element of the landscape glows with life and has a shimmering, distinct personality.)

Marilyn Monroe is mentioned repeatedly, but every mention refers to her in death: her thighs are "volcanic ash," the broken dome of the planetarium is like one of her "eroded breasts," the white walls of the apartment are like her cheekbones.  Like a deserted pleasure resort on the sea, the lush and vivacious Monroe, whose death was so pathetic, is a vivid metaphor for scintillating life fallen into sterile desiccation.  Showing off his erudition and taste, Ballard also brings up the Hindu yantra, vorticism, and Max Ernst's Robing of the Bride.

Edward Wadsworth, Max Ernst, Dearest Marilyn

This story is intriguing, presenting a challenge and even providing an education (I had never heard of yantra before), and there are many mysteries about it I haven't brought up here (e. g., who is the "You" of the title?) and no doubt many I didn't even notice. But I can't say it is truly enjoyable or entertaining.  The suicide of Marilyn Monroe, a madman murdering his lover, a seaside resort and a planetarium falling into ruin, should all make me sad or angry, but the story is too cold, clinical, even a little gimmicky, to affect my emotions.  In the aforementioned profile of Ballard in his book Dream Makers, Charles Platt suggests that Ballard's "obsessions are more with landscape than with ordinary human relationships" and tells us "You : Coma : Marilyn Monroe" is the first of Ballard's "condensed novels," which dispense with the "usual elements of fiction" like dialogue and conflict and consist primarily of "images, metaphor, landscape, message, and myth-figures."*  Perhaps because I have botched my own, I find human relationships fascinating, and when done well I enjoy the "usual elements of fiction," so maybe Ballard really isn't for me.

I'll give "You : Coma : Marilyn Monroe" a recommendation, as it is a worthwhile experience, but, judged by conventional measures of what we look for in fiction, I think it falls short.

*If I was in a bitchy mood, I'd say this sounds like a way of writing a novel that includes the parts that are fun for the writer but hard for the reader, and leaves out the parts that are hard for the author but fun for the reader.

"The Total Experience Kick" by Charles Platt (1966)

Ballard's story, with its innovative, convention-defying technique, is very "New Wavey," but Platt's story is a traditional SF tale about technological innovation, in which the main character succeeds in achieving his goal through technical expertise and trickery.  Where it is, sort of, reminiscent of the New Wave is in its subject matter: pop music.

Our hero works in the record industry in the London of the near future of 1982, and the story is, in part, a satire of that industry.  It makes the sort of comments about pop music I remember seeing in episodes of The Flintstones: pop audiences are fickle and respond to gimmicks and fads, so the record industry is in constant upheaval, with new acts appearing all the time, rocketing to popularity and then collapsing into obscurity just as quickly.  Platt also includes a joke about how record companies strive to identify and appeal to the lowest common denominator in an effort to achieve a wide audience.

The plot: The protagonist uncovers evidence that a rival record company is about to market some new gimmick, and engages in industrial espionage, getting a job at the rival firm in order to learn its secrets and headhunt its best employees.  The new gimmick is an elaborate electronic device that can amplify listeners' emotions (with rays or something); if a song makes a concertgoer sad or happy or whatever, this device will make him far far more sad or happy.  Our hero tries to get the genius who has invented this device to abandon his current employer for the hero's, but the genius is not interested in leaving, because he is in love with the boss's daughter.  So the protagonist meddles with the device, altering it so that it makes the genius fall out of love with the girl.  This results in the headhunting mission achieving success.

"The Total Experience Kick" is an acceptable story.  People fascinated by the music industry might appreciate it more than I did.  Maybe historians of pop music could use it to get a sense of what people thought about the record industry in the mid-60s?  

"The Contest" by Thomas M. Disch (1967)

Three quite brief stories (none is over five pages) by Disch, "The Contest," "The Empty Room," and "The Descent of the West End," all appeared in a single issue of New Worlds, and they appear together in The Best SF Stories from New Worlds #2 as well, though they have appeared separately elsewhere.

I think Disch is a very fine writer and an exciting and perceptive critic with a vast store of knowledge and all that, and I wish I could find a way to recommend all of three of these little pieces, but I cannot. Two, including "The Contest," are silly absurdist stories that are supposed to be funny but did not make me laugh.

These three stories have at their centers depressing asymmetrical love relationships and the common Disch theme that our lives are out of our control, subject to callous, irresistible, unknowable forces.  "The Contest" has two men walking the streets of Midtown Manhattan--the Pan Am Building (it was the Met-Life Building by the time I got to Manhattan) and the Seagram Building are namechecked--in a totalitarian near future America.  One tells the other about a sexual relationship he had with a paranoid woman, suggesting that the woman's love for him was fostered rather than stifled by society's totalitarian nature.  The paranoid, he relates, committed suicide.  The second man, revealed as a secret agent, then shoots down the first man, and we readers are left to wonder exactly why.

"The Empty Room" by Thomas M. Disch (1967)

This story takes place in a future in which people lacking in skills can rent out their brains part time for use as components of semi-organic computers (Disch compares such people to vacuum tubes.)  A middle-aged man with just such a job is apartment hunting in New York with his twenty-something wife or girlfriend.  They look at a crummy apartment, the only kind they can afford; while investigating it the woman repeatedly asks for assurances that he loves her, and admits that she is not sure she loves him.  They remark that life is not as fun or meaningful as they had thought it would be as children, and when they consider if they are responsible for their own unhappiness, they tentatively conclude they are not.  The couple decides to take the apartment, telling each other, though they know they lie, that they will only live there short term and the landlord will fix the place up before they move in.

This is the best of these three stories; it has a plausibility and an emotional power the other two lack, and includes a few interesting SF touches (e.g., women wear disposable paper bras and panties and carry multiple changes of underwear in their purses.)

"The Descent of the West End" by Thomas M. Disch (1967)  

This is the most outwardly comedic of the three, with lots of jokes.  A cruise liner gets in a collision with another vessel, and begins to sink.  The captain refuses to believe the ship is sinking, and won't order the lifeboats lowered.  (All three of Disch's stories here have authority figures who are derelict in their responsibilities.)  An elderly fortuneteller tries to seduce a young member of the ship's crew; when her husband knocks on the door to warn her that the ship is sinking, she hides the young man in a trunk; he gets locked in the trunk and dies of suffocation as the trunk floats in his septuagenarian pursuer's stateroom.  There's also a bit about an Irish poet giving an incomprehensible reading which the radio officer tries to transmit via telegraph to the world, while the ship is sinking and he should be calling for help.  (Does Disch, an expert on poetry and a voluminous writer of poetry, have some particular poet in mind here?)

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The Ballard story is experimental enough and challenging enough that it seems to fit into a "Best" anthology, but the Platt and Disch stories feel like trifles.  Maybe they felt fresh when they were new?
 
More stories from The Best SF Stories from New Worlds #2 in our next episode.  Stay tuned!