The Spread by Barry N. Malzberg

I founded the newspaper because I wanted to do my part to tear open the windows and let the cold breath of sanity into the room of America.  I realized that often the publication was perverse and offensive, but this was the way it had to be if it were to have any vitality at all because the price of freedom was pain, the price of liberty was the blasting of cultural cant, and I was willing to do this because through centuries it had been men like me who had restored human culture, periodically, to sanity through upheaval.  I listen to myself with astonished interest; I appear to have a social conscience.

I guess I have pointed out a number of times here at the old blog that there is a close relationship between the SF world and the world of men's magazines, with many major SF writers like Ray Bradbury, Frederik Pohl and Robert Silverberg selling stories to Playboy and its imitators and many SF writers like Harlan Ellison, Mack Reynolds and Frank M. Robinson actually working as editors or columnists at magazines the main draw of which was pictures of topless young ladies.  Another member of the SF community who found himself on the editorial staff of a men's magazine was MPorcius fave Barry N. Malzberg, who edited Escapade for a period in 1968.

In 1971 Malzberg published a novel whose narrator is the founder and editor of a weekly pornographic newspaper, The Spread, and this week I read it in its recent Stark House printing in an omnibus volume in which it appears with The Horizontal Woman, a novel the electronic version of which I read back in 2016 and thought was terrific.

The narrator of The Spread is Walter; Walter, after abandoning his ambitions to become a novelist, worked as an editor at men's magazines for a while and then took the risky step of starting his own pornographic periodical, a weekly newspaper based in New York City with a four-member full-time office staff--besides Walter there are sexy secretary Virginia and two homosexuals ("faggarts"), Jim and Donald, the circulation director and the accountant.  When interviewed by the media Walter claims he started The Spread to fight for liberation from the values foisted on the world since the industrial revolution and for a new and better American culture; sometimes he tells us readers that he thinks that he is performing the worthwhile service of helping lonely men to masturbate.  But mostly it seems he is in it for the money, and sometimes he expresses contempt for his paper's readers.  Walter's paper has some of the characteristics of a scam--it has an advice column that responds to questions, but Walter himself and the magazine staff write the questions for a laugh, ignoring submitted queries, and we see Walter writing an angry letter to the editor.  One of the newspaper's biggest advertising clients is a maker of sex toys and accessories whose products include a poisonous cream meant to be applied to the male genitals to diminish sensation and thus treat premature ejaculation, and Walter only makes half-hearted, self-interested efforts to stop running the ads when the cream's toxicity becomes apparent.

Malzberg's main characters are often pathetic and ineffectual losers driven by forces beyond their control, and there is plenty of this in The Spread.  The local District Attorney, for example, going against Supreme Court rulings regarding the First Amendment, has severely restricted what The Spread can publish and seriously damaged circulation through various strategies.  Walter's efforts to contact the makers of the toxic penis desensitizer application to coordinate proactive (and then when the lawsuits start, reactive) legal measures come to nothing because it is impossible to find an address or phone number for the California manufacturer of the dangerous cream.  And there is Tony, the head of the firm that distributes The Spread in the Bronx, who blackmails Walter into placing bets for him at Belmont and the Aqueduct--these bets have to be placed in person, necessitating long drives for Walter.  (Malzberg loves to write about the racetrack, he seeing betting on the horses as a metaphor for our lives, in which we make decisions based on our calculations of odds and the advice of experts, only to find that in fact the universe operates at random and our own efforts to plan are futile and the alleged experts' ability to predict illusory.)

(Another parenthetical note.  We sometimes hear supporters of the market stress how relationships between buyers and sellers are voluntary human relationships based on trust and mutual benefit, a contrast to relationships between individuals and the inhuman institution of the government, which are based on coercion, violence, and fear and have the characteristics of the relationship between parasites and hosts.  In a way that commies will relish, Malzberg portrays Walter's relationships with his customers and with his suppliers as anonymous and monstrous--Walter never meets Tony, only talks to him on the phone, and can only communicate with the cream manufacturers via letters and through a brusque go-between who refuses to answer any questions.  When Walter interacts with readers of his paper face-to-face he tries to conceal his identity and usually succeeds--when he fails disaster results.)

One of the noteworthy elements of The Spread, remarkable because it feels a little uncharacteristic of our pal Barry's pessimistic body of work, is that in the first half or two-thirds of the book, along with the scenes of Walter being stymied and bewildered by the universe and other people, are scenes suggesting he is a man who often can achieve his goals.  Despite the DA's campaign to destroy the paper, it is still quite profitable.  And Walter is a real success with the ladies: he has no trouble performing in bed with his wife, and easily overcomes her objections to having sex; after she has delivered a feminist speech ("You went into business to degrade women") he just starts touching her and she gets so excited she succumbs to his will and even has an orgasm.  Walter has sex regularly in the office and at a hotel with Virginia, sometimes looking at pictures from the newspaper as he is thrusting into her, thinking about the men who masturbate looking at these same photographs (one of the novel's themes is Walter's homosexual tendencies.)  Virginia takes her affair with her boss seriously, at times comforting him, performing sex acts his wife is incompetent to perform, and expressing hopes Walter will marry her.  Walter also with ease seduces a young woman journalist who comes to the office to interview him for a mainstream publication--as with his wife, she says "no" repeatedly but he overcomes her resistance and brings her to satisfaction.  

Walter is sometimes portrayed as a bold master at manipulating people, and not just when he is trying to get between some woman's legs.  Several times in the novel, the narrator assumes the role of a villain, for no rational reason playing quite cruel practical jokes on readers of his publication.  These jokes consist of him humiliating men he sees on the street who have bought The Spread, ("Pervert....Fool.  Idiot.  What are you buying that stuff for?"), as well as people who advertise in The Spread's classifieds, like a woman who is offering her services as a prostitute and a gay man looking for a partner with which to engage in "water sports."  After humiliating these people he then terrifies them by claiming he is a government spy who is keeping track of individuals' immoral and/or illegal activities--"We see everything, you know.  We've got our eye on you people, every single one of you, and we have for a long time.  There's a special branch which does nothing but keep up files on you people."

I guess these cruel jokes are an expression of self-loathing, Walter venting his own skepticism about the morality of his own publication and his anxiety over his own inclinations to participate in homosexual sex.  As for his success in bedding young ladies, Malzberg often writes in the voice of people suffering hallucinations, so maybe these scenes of sexual prowess are delusions, or just lies Walter is telling us readers (and perhaps himself.) 

The Spread doesn't have a strong central narrative in which we see Walter make specific decisions related to specific goals and obstacles and then see the consequences of Walter's efforts; rather the novel is a series of quite independent episodes that illustrate facets of Walter's life and career.  In the final third or quarter of the book these episodes demonstrate how everything has gone south for Walter after two years of running The Spread.  He visits one of the people who has placed an ad in the paper's classified section--a homosexual foot fetishist--and instead of humiliating this character, Walter is himself manipulated.  Both Virginia and Walter's wife leave him, and he develops a relationship with a blow up doll.  The DA abandons his campaign against The Spread, but instead of welcoming this development, Walter sees it as a sign his importance and the importance of the paper is diminishing.  Jim and Donald quit, and Walter's last conversation with them is a desperate interrogation in which his demands that they describe to him how it feels to perform fellatio fall on deaf ears.  The paper's relationships with Tony and with the makers of the toxic cream collapses, and the paper's circulation shrinks.  In the novel's surreal last two pages, Walter is locked out of the office because he has not paid the rent, so he can't put together a new issue, but a new issue appears on the newsstands anyway--The Spread is apparently a machine that can run under its own steam, maybe suggesting Walter is a sort of Dr. Frankenstein, or maybe just that people's sexual lust and/or Americans' collapsing morals, desire for freedom, or commitment to commerce, constitute an unstoppable force wholly independent from human agency.

The Spread is interesting, in particular the high degree of ambiguity with which it treats the sexual revolution and the contemporaneous and somewhat related feminist and gay liberation movements.  I'm afraid I didn't find it as amusing and entertaining as many other Malzberg outings, however.  The jokes aren't as funny, and Walter's personality is sort of all over the place, not as driven or extreme as other more compelling characters in Malzberg's oeuvre.  As for the sex, depending on your proclivities, maybe you'll find it titillating, maybe you'll find it disturbing or disgusting.  I have to admit that the way Walter terrorizes the sad lonely people who resort to looking for sexual satisfaction and human contact through his periodical disturbed me; I guess the last few pages of the novel, in which Walter himself has to resort to plastic dolls and to the classifieds in The Spread, constitute poetic justice.  We'll say we're giving this one a mild recommendation.