Barry N. Malzberg: "Andante Lugubre," "Standards & Practices," "Darwinian Facts" and "Allegro Marcato"

Let's take a break from the 1930s and read four stories from my copy of the Barry Malzberg collection In the Stone House, printed by Arkham House in the year 2000, stories that appeared first in the 1990s.  These stories collectively take up like 35 pages, so we won't be away from the Thirties for long.

(This will be our second blog post about In the Stone House.  In our first we read stories on the themes of JFK, Jesus Christ, black terrorists, and communist spies.) 

"Andante Lugubre" (1993)

Barry Malzberg loves music, and when we say he loves music we don't mean he loves the music I love, the music of Ray Davies and Peter Gabriel and Pete Townshend and David Roback, or that he loves music the way I love music, which consists of listening to youtube videos as I wash the dishes and dust my wife's collection of antique typewriters--we mean he plays the violin and knows all about Tchaikovsky, whose name I can't even spell.  Barry Malzberg is an educated man.

"Andante Lugubre" is an alternate history story in which Tchaikovsky, who was born in 1840 died in 1893 according to wikipedia, lived on to see World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of Hitler.  In his late 90s, having lived in Hollywood for two decades, he attends meetings of prominent cultural and political figures like Rachmaninoff, Walt Disney, Samuel Goldwyn and Jacob Javits, meetings called to discuss how the American cultural elite should respond to the oppression inflicted upon Jews in Nazi Germany.  Malzberg focuses on how age has deteriorated the great composer physically and mentally; he smells, for example, and, unable to follow the conversation or even understand its purpose, he warns the assembled luminaries that one must keep his eyes on those Jews, who are always keeping their eyes on you.  Tchaikovsky insists that the Jews will live on and on, in the same way he has lived on and on.  Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a guy I never heard of before (wikipedia is telling me he was a Jewish Austrian composer who fled Europe to become an important composer of film scores in Hollywood), pushes Tchaikovsky out of his wheelchair, almost killing the frail old man, but Tchaikovsky somehow survives.  Survives that fall, survives the 1930s and 1940s, lives on and on to the present day, after all the other famous people in the story have died, Malzberg tells us in the last paragraph of the story, in which Malzberg seems to be telling us that life and history are a meaningless chaos:

What does this mean?  It means almost nothing: it is an anomaly which defies the ability of even an ironist to assess.

This story is a little like the JFK story we read in our last Malzbergian blog post--you may need particular knowledge, in this case about Romantic composers, Hollywood in the Thirties, and New York politics, to really get a lot out of it.  Beyond that, it seems Malzberg has hit upon Tchaikovsky as a symbol of gentiles' (alleged) eternal antipathy to Jews and indifference to Jewish suffering.  But Malzberg's point may be more general than that--there are Jewish people at the meeting (like Jacob Javits and Darryl Zanuck) who are more concerned about their own careers than the Jews of Europe and are reluctant to stick their necks out to help Europe's Jewish population, and Rachmaninoff points out that when the Bolsheviks were threatening people like him and Tchaikovsky nobody from America came running to help them.  He suggests, perhaps callously, that the victims of Hitler's rule will have to fend for themselves, the way the victims of Lenin and Stalin have had to.  Maybe Malzberg's point is everybody is selfish and slow to help others in trouble.  

A downer and a puzzle complete with disgusting references to sex and physicals ailments, in which the author shows off his erudition--Barry delivers what we expect from him in this story, so thumbs up!

"Andnate Lugubre," which apparently is a technical term referring to a piece of music that is moderately slow and mournful, first lowered readers' spirits in the magazine Science Fiction Age, alongside articles urging exploration of Mars and promoting TV shows I never saw.

"Standards & Practices" (1993)

Here's another of these alternate history things.  Malzberg explores what Emily Dickinson's life might have been like if she had been born in the middle of the 20th century and moved to New York City to be an adjunct professor at CUNY.  At 38 years old, she has man trouble, partly because she is scared of catching AIDS, as well as career trouble, as there is little interest in publishing her poetry after her supporter at The New Yorker has died and CUNY doesn't need all that many adjuncts any more.  The story consists of her going to readings and parties and a sports bar and meeting men who for various reasons are unsuitable or unreachable.

I'm no Emily Dickinson expert, so maybe I am missing a lot of clever stuff in this story, but it is leaving me cold--all I'm really getting out of it is obvious it-is-sad-to-be-a-thirty-something-woman-with-no-man-and-no-kid and it-is-sad-to-be-an-academic-with-no-tenure-track-position stuff that you could write without invoking Emily Dickinson.  Maybe a Dickinson lover would really get a charge out of this story, pick up on many clever allusions.

"Standards & Practices" first appeared in F&SF as "Standards and Practices."  Our friends in Germany and Italy had the opportunity to read this story in their native languages; hopefully the frauleins and paisanos got more out of it than I did.

"Darwinian Facts" (1990)

In 1989, Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg put out a hardcover anthology called Stalkers with a red-skinned, knife-wielding, skull-faced freak on its cover.  There was no Barry Malzberg story in 1989's Stalkers.  But when a paperback edition of Stalkers came out in 1990, lo and behold, Barry's "Darwinian Facts" had been added! 

This is a hard to understand and hard to enjoy story inspired by one of Malzberg's favorite topics, the murder of John F. Kennedy.  The narrator is a fat guy who, like Jack Ruby in real life, murdered the assassin (called in this story Gregor Mendel, the same name as a major scientist who was basically the founder of modern genetics) of a president.  Some of the story relates the steps of the plot to kill the unnamed president--Mendel's recruitment by shadowy figures who supply him with an M-1 rifle, Mendel's relationship with his wife Grace, the actual murder and then Mendel's capture by the cops--but we are to understand that these passages are more or less the narrator's speculations and not to be trusted.

The narrator's own story consists of being recruited to kill Mendel while the murderer is in custody in order to hide the identity of Mendel's (and now the narrator's) employers.  One of the story's bizarre twists is that the narrator is in love with Grace Mendel, though it is not clear if the narrator has ever spoken to her, and the shadowy figures suggest that, after Gregor Mendel is dead, maybe they can facilitate a relationship between Grace and the narrator.  Anyway, after he has killed Gregor Mendel the narrator is in jail, and comes to believe that his employers are transmitting invisible rays at him that will cause him to die of cancer.  (Jack Ruby himself died of cancer while in jail.)

This story is tedious and boring, with some individual passages being long and confusing and seeming to go nowhere.  The story as a whole is cryptic, but while I was curious about the puzzle of "Andante Lugubre," the puzzle that is "Darwinian Facts" holds no appeal.  My whole life I have been hearing Kennedy and Oswald conspiracy theories and I cannot be bothered to think about them further--I could not care less which theory (if any) Malzberg believes or which he is dramatizing for the purposes of this story.

The interesting question about this story is why Malzberg named it after Charles Darwin and named his Oswald stand-in after Gregor Mendel.  Could it be that Malzberg is equating the widespread and banal assertion that "the death of Kennedy saw the end of American innocence" with the commonplace observation that the scientists, like Darwin and Mendel, who propagated the idea that human beings are essentially animals and the human race the product of predictable mechanical systems, wrought a change in how people saw human life and human civilization, damaging belief in religion and the soul and destabilizing old forms of community?  Did Darwin and Mendel assassinate the Early Modern World and give rise to our anxious Modern World the way Oswald might be said by some to have destroyed a more youthful and confident America?   

I have to give this story a thumbs down; it is not fun, it is not funny, it is not moving and it is not thought-provoking.

"Allegro Marcato" (1994)

I think "allegro marcato" refers to notes played quickly and loudly, but don't cite me, I'm no authority.  This story first appeared in By Any Other Fame, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Mike Resnick.  Are there really a lot of SF fans out there champing at the bit to read stories in which Elvis Presley is president?  Did this anthology make money for DAW?   

I don't know much about Romantic music, I don't know much about Emily Dickinson, and I don't know much about baseball, either, so I groaned when I saw Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth were characters in this story.  In this story Gehrig and Ruth are on a baseball team together and their manager is Italian-American immigrant Arturo Toscanini, who in real life was an important conductor. 

The plot of "Allegro Marcato" is that Babe Ruth has gotten arrogant and is getting drunk and fucking whores so much it is affecting his game, and the Yankees are not winning anymore, and when Toscanini tries to discipline him, the Babe goes berserk and tries to kill him.  So the team owner steps in and gets Ruth to straighten up and fly right and the Yankees start winning again.  After winning for a few years Toscanini retires from managing.  The years go by and the story ends with Toscanini dying in a nursing home, disappointed in his life, but realizing that whatever might have happened he would probably have died disappointed.

Maybe Barry here is suggesting that ball players, like conductors and composers, are passionate artists who do great things but are also prone to acting selfishly and crazily.  And that no matter what you do life is a disappointment.  Happy Thanksgiving!  

Compared to the Gregor Mendel story, this Babe Ruth story has the merit of being easy to understand, and compared to the Emily Dickinson story, it has an actual plot in which the protagonist has a conflict and the conflict is resolved (though not by the protagonist.)  But nothing really interesting happens; gotta give it a thumbs down.  Maybe people who eat, drink and sleep America's past time would like it?

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This has been an unfruitful crop of Malzbergs for me.  "Andante Lugubre," with its disgusting descriptions of an old man's failing body and its compelling themes--the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the question of what responsibility people outside such tyrannies might have to the people suffering within them--won my interest.  But the others are about topics (baseball, JFK) I don't care about or tell stories (baseball dudes argue, chick has trouble getting a date) that aren't very compelling, though they do exemplify the standard Malzbergian idea that life is a nightmare over which we have no control.  Hopefully the next batch of Malzberg stories from In the Stone House will be more appealing.