Barry N. Malzberg: "Something From the Seventies," "The High Purpose," "All Assassins," and "Understanding Entropy"

So far I have read eight stories from my copy of the Arkham House collection of Barry Malzberg stories published in 2000, In the Stone House, blogging about them here and here.  Today we read four more.

"Something From the Seventies" (1993)

Not a good start to today's operations!  "Something From the Seventies," which debuted in F&SF and has been reprinted in a 1994 Italian anthology and in 2013's The Very Best of Barry N. Malzberg, is not good! 

Aliens have conquered the Earth, and alien historians or journalists or intelligence agents are interrogating people, trying to learn about the 20th-century history of the United States.  The story consists of a guy giving capsule assessments of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and impressionistic "takes" on the 1960s and the 1970s; for example, he characterizes the 1970s as a time in which the world was run via blackmail ("Everybody had something on everybody else.")  

There is no plot or character to this story, bad enough, but there are also no jokes or interesting insights--Malzberg's opinions seem pretty conventional, and it is not like this is a scholarly paper with citations of primary sources or a literature review that synthesizes and critiques secondary sources, it is just a guy rambling like we could all ramble about the decades in which we lived as adults.   

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

"The High Purpose" (1985)

This story is a collaboration with Carter Scholz, and appeared in an issue of F&SF in which Harlan Ellison complains about how (in his view) the Hollywood studios sabotaged the releases of Dune and Return to Oz and Algis Budrys examines Gene Wolfe's Free Live Free, which I will have to reread one of these days.  Back in 2016 I read Scholz's story "The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs" and I liked it, so a good omen.

In our last blog post we read Malzberg stories that expected you to know about Shakespeare, Bizet and Leroux, and "The High Purpose" expects you to be very familiar with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett--it is full of references to their lives and work, references I really was unequipped to get.

The plot consists of the two mystery writers driving cross country, from California to New York, because one has suggested "getting away" from their work for a while.  Somewhere along the way two professional hitmen started following the authors; the story proper covers the stretch of driving from Ohio to Gotham.  Who are the killers and why do they want to kill Chandler and Hammett?  I don't know; one of my theories is that they resent the writers for giving the world a false image of underworld life, another is that they are characters from mystery novels, figures who were created by Chandler and/or Hammett or their imitators, and want revenge for the crappy lives their creators gave them.  Anyway, at the last moment, right before crossing the George Washington Bridge, the killers pull up behind C & H as they wait at the toll booth--the killers are in position to blow away the writers, but they can't bring themselves to do it, and let their quarry escape.  Why?  I don't know.

A lot of the text of "The High Purpose," as I have already suggested, is about Chandler and Hammett's relationship with each other--what each thinks of the other's writing and career and character--and about each man's relationship with the women in his life.  Maybe experts on Chandler and Hammett's lives will enjoy being reminded of all this stuff, but I never heard about any of it before, so I don't know what to make of it.

The spirit or tone of the story is bleak; "The High Purpose" suggests that life is inexplicable and that the most important thing about life is the inevitability of death, and reminds us how very little we really know about lifer and death even though we think about them all the time.  At least that is what I am getting out of it; of course, maybe I am just projecting a lot of that.  There is also a lot about how difficult the writer's life is, you know, the envy of other writers, the influence of other writers, frustration that you were trying to write something important ("literature") and it is treated like disposable entertainment ("genre"), how writers drink hard and act like jerks, etc.

It seems unfair for me to give this story a thumbs down, seeing I am not its audience--fans of Chandler and Hammett are its audience--but I can't say I enjoyed it, so my hands are tied.  Now, I know I gave "Time-Trackers" a thumbs up in my last blog post, even though I know little about Carmen and The Phantom of the Opera, but that story had interesting SF ideas and scenes of violence and danger that sparked some kind of feeling in me; the corresponding scenes of driving and of people bickering here in "The High Purpose" did nothing for me.

"All Assassins" (1989)

"All Assassins" made its debut in Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg's anthology of alternate history stories, Alternate Empires, which has appeared in a number of different editions.  Alternate history is one of my least favorite SF subgenres, but you never know, maybe I'll like this one.

Ah, Malzberg never seems to tire of writing about the Kennedys.  “All Assassins” is written in the voice of Lee Harvey Oswald in an alternate universe in which Nixon won the presidential election in 1960 but in 1964 was succeeded by Johnson, who won a second term in 1968.  All this time John F. Kennedy has been a senator, and Oswald has been his appointment secretary; among Oswald’s jobs are placating the senator’s irascible father Joe, driving the senator around, and procuring sluts for the senator to bang.  Oswald doesn’t fit in with the randy boozy chummy Kennedy and his friends, guys who are always cracking jokes about “pussy” and Oswald’s apparent celibacy, and from the inside, Oswald, an idealist and a commie (or maybe just a pinko), sees how vulgar and corrupt the Kennedys and their henchman are--Oswald really wants to end American involvement in the war in Vietnam, but Kennedy and the other Democratic big wigs care more about ass and booze than government policy. 

The 1972 election is coming up, and Kennedy is probably going to be the Democrats' nominee.  When Oswald learns the senator is going to give a speech in Dallas which he implies he is not going to work to abandon the war, even though Oswald has been lead to believe he is the “antiwar candidate,” Oswald snaps and plots to murder Kennedy while the senator is giving a speech, using the “old point-thirty-eight Smith & Wesson” he got from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.     

Acceptable...maybe a marginal positive score.  While I don’t know enough about Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler’s relationships with women and with other mystery novelists to get any emotional or intellectual juice out of “The High Purpose,” I know at least something about American politics and foreign policy in the postwar era and have my own opinions about it and so the events depicted in “All Assassins” engage me and I am willing to grapple with the task of figuring out whatever Malzberg is trying to say in this story.  I can also identify with the experience of being stuck among a bunch of people with whom one really doesn’t fit, of being the odd man out of a group, the group’s court jester or foil, and I think Malzberg does a good job with his alternate Oswald’s psychology here.

“Understanding Entropy” (1994)

This little story has an odd and interesting publication history, and seems to have been embraced by the SF community, or at least to have been strongly supported by some members of that community.  “Understanding Entropy,” four pages in In the Stone House, first appeared in an issue of the magazine Science Fiction Age which features an essay by David Brin titled “Only Science Fiction can solve the perplexing problem of gun control.”  A year later the story was reprinted in Locus as a paid advertisement by the publishers of Science Fiction Age.  A year after that, “Understanding Entropy” appeared in Nebula Awards 30, edited by our new friend Pamela Sargent.  Two years later, in 1998, it was included in the Readercon 10 Souvenir Book.  In 2007, seven years after resurfacing in In the Stone House, “Understanding Entropy” was included by Michael Bishop in A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-Five Imaginative Tales about the Christ.  In that Bishop anthology, Malzberg provides a very brief afterword, saying the story was written in memory of a close friend who was also Malzberg's lawyer.

In his cagey allusive way, Malzberg doesn’t use the words “AIDS” or “gay” or “Jesus” in the story, but it is clear that “Understanding Entropy” is about a man, Martin Donner, who leaves his wife for a man and contracts AIDS and then dies in the hospital, his body wrecked by numerous illnesses.  The narrator is Jesus, who contacts Donner at various points in his life (Donner thinks these contacts are dreams or hallucinations) to ask him if satisfying his need to live his authentic life--that of a gay man--is worth the price of self-destruction and the betrayal of his family.  Donner offers different answers at different points in his life; the idea that living a life that does not express your true nature is like dying young and in agony is a central metaphor of the story, and the question is, is it worth experiencing one of these deaths to avoid the other?  Another metaphor is the idea that Donner is like Jesus, his death the result of being his true self, like that of Christ's on the cross. 

The story works, and it is easy to see why people would like it; it is short and economical, addresses not only timely topical concerns, but timeless concerns about how we balance duties we might have to ourselves and to others as well as how we assess the risks attendant with the pursuit of our desires.  Like "All Assassins," at the center of "Understanding Entropy" is a tragic figure one is expected to sympathize with, but Malzberg doesn't just let this sympathetic figure off the hook--JFK and Martin Donner have agency and responsibility, and we don't necessarily have to approve of all the risky and antisocial actions they took just because in the end something unfortunate happened to them.

Today's climate, in which "cultural appropriation" can be a topic of heated discussion, perhaps provides another lens through which to view this story and another way in which it might be viewed as controversial; I don't believe Malzberg is a Christian or a homosexual, but he doesn't let that stop him from putting words in the mouth of Jesus Christ in a story about the choices and sufferings of a gay man and his family.

I'm glad I can finish up this blog post with a story that is provocative and compelling after starting off with some clunkers that I couldn't really get into. 

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We'll be spending more time with our cheerful friend Barry in our next episode.  See you then!