F&SF, Nov 1980: H Ellison, K Reed and G Kilworth

In our last episode we read an uncollected Harlan Ellison story from 1957 and I said it was no good.  Today we'll read a celebrated Ellison story which appeared in the November 1980 issue of F&SF and was promoted on the cover, complete with a portrait painting of Ellison himself as a sensitive young man wearing boots near megaliths.  "All the Lives That Are My Life" was printed the same year as a chapbook by Underwood Miller (again with the portrait with the boots and megaliths--this kind of art buttresses my suspicion that Ellison's popularity is a function of his persona as much as of his actual work--the guy is a celebrity) and would go on to be reprinted in multiple Ellison collections, including 2024's Greatest Hits (hmm, the title likens Ellison to a rock star, a person admired as much for his life style and public persona as his artistic work.)

I'm reading "All the Lies That Are My Life" in a scan of the November '80 ish of F&SF, and after we've weighed in on this major composition of rock star Ellison we'll look at some other stuff in the magazine that may strike my fancy.      

"All the Lies that Are My Life" by Harlan Ellison

"All the Lies that Are My Life" is a representative specimen of Ellison's work, showcasing the things paid up members of Team Harlan like about Ellison and his writing and the things about them that irk me so that I think of Ellison as good and interesting rather than tremendous and life-changing.  The story is not really SF, but a contemporary mainstream story stuffed full of real life proper names that happens to be about people working in the SF field.  It is solipsistic, basically being about Ellison himself, Ellison serving as the basis for both main characters, and portrays Ellison as a total jerk, an adventurer, a celebrity, and a bold truth teller who suffers for his courageous truth telling.  It is extravagant and over-the-top, full of long sentences, reams of superfluous and irrelevant material, long, bitter, sarcastic, angry jokes, many of which are insults, and characters whose extreme personalities and behavior strain credulity.

The story begins at a funeral on a rainy day.  A world famous celebrity, a "living legend," is being buried--a bestselling novelist whose name is a household word, like those of Jonas Salk or Richard Nixon (over-the-top Ellison lists six famous names; I'll stick to those two) and who was respected by the critics as well as adored by common readers.  (Ellison uses lots of cliches in his work, like "household name" and "living legend.")  This guy was also a hit with the ladies, marrying a woman with "Audrey Hepburn shoulders" while sleeping around with four women: a top scientist whose utterings are comprehensible only to the "five or six" people with "the finest minds on the planet;" a crusading reporter with an "Ann-Margaret coiffure" whose journalism led Xerox to lose $250,000; an Olympic gymnast; and a political refugee from Communist Cuba who here in America is an actress whose vocal range is comparable to that of a celebrity I never heard of, Yma Sumac.  The dead guy's name is Kercher Oliver James Crowstairs, and our narrator, who is attending the funeral alongside a very long list of celebrities including Carl Sagan and an unnamed former President of the United States, is Larry Bedloe.  Larry calls Crowstairs "Jimmy," when almost everybody else calls him "Kerch."

The plot of the story concerns the funeral and the reading of the will.   Jimmy had himself videotaped a few months ago directly addressing his ex-wife Leslie, Larry, a fellow writer he worked with, his female assistant, and his hated sister, and Jimmy's lawyer projects the recording for these five individuals.  Over-the-top Ellison describes all the legal mumbo jumbo on the videotape and all of Jimmy's obvious jokes at the lawyer's expense, and describes in detail Larry's fit of vomiting when something on the tape suggests that Jimmy's collaborator friend perhaps ghost wrote some of Jimmy's best material.  It is not enough for Larry to feel sick to his stomach or feel his face drain of blood or whatever, Ellison always turns everything up to 11, so Larry has to run to the lavatory, puke into the toilet, push Leslie away and insult her when she tries to soothe him there in the bathroom, etc.  Too much is never enough for Ellison.

Jimmy hated his sister, who abused him as a child, and Ellison, who gets as much milage and word count out of each joke as possible, reminds us again and again that Jimmy called his sister a "cunt."  As his revenge on her, Jimmy tells her she gets nothing (the estate goes to the collaborator and the assistant and Leslie) and then spends twenty minutes insulting her and saying the obvious pop psychology stuff about how if he has bad relationships with women as an adult his sister is at fault for what she did to him as a kid.

(I keep saying that Ellison uses cliches and makes obvious jokes, and one of the reasons I find the devotion of Ellison's fans surprising is that Ellison doesn't do a lot that is original; this story feels like a bunch of stuff you've heard already cobbled together and pumped full of steroids.)

The climax of the story is what Jimmy gives Larry.  The living legend of literature makes Larry his literary executor, and begs him to promise to keep his work alive, to make sure he isn't forgotten like Clark Ashton Smith or become the victim of hacks who will refashion his material for their own purposes like Robert E. Howard.  The twist of the story is that this is not a blessing but a curse, as this responsibility will cut into the time Larry has to do his own work, and if he devotes a lot of energy to editing and celebrating Jimmy, Jimmy's style will begin to infect Larry's brain and Larry's writing won't be his own any more, but a sort of amalgam.

Then there is the deeper, more soap opera, more psychological angle that is the best element of "All the Lies that are My Life."  Jimmy has lived a wild life, and he doesn't want something dreadful he did exposed to the world.  Larry, apparently, is familiar with the thing Jimmy is ashamed of, though he isn't quite sure what exact thing it is.  Jimmy was a huge fan of Edgar Allen Poe, and is very conscious that Poe's literary executor, a Griswold, tried to blacken Poe's reputation after Poe died, but instead ended up making himself notorious.  Larry knows that if he says anything crummy about Jimmy, no matter how true it is, the literary world won't believe it, but will turn on Larry, calling him a Griswold.  Thus, Jimmy has made sure Larry won't reveal his deepest darkest secret.  The worst thing about this is that it proves that Jimmy didn't trust Larry, proves that their friendship was a lie, which is painful because Larry has never had any intention of blackening Jimmy's reputation.  The real theme of "All the Lies that are My Life" is that people are jerks and you are totally alone.

This current day plot only makes up like half of the text of "All the Lies That Are My Life"'s 35 or so pages.  The account of the funeral and of the reading of the will is broken up by five flashback anecdotes about Larry's relationship with Jimmy, plus one gratuitous action scene:

1) Our main characters meet for the first time at a SF convention when some thugs who put out a fanzine which Larry, in his own fanzine, has lambasted for saying Lovecraft was better than Poe physically beat up Larry and Jimmy comes to Larry's rescue.  This foreshadows Jimmy's attachment to Poe which is important to the final scene.  

2) This anecdote demonstrates how Jimmy callously stole Leslie from Larry, and would callously remind Larry that he (Jimmy) was the better writer, but this shabby treatment didn't keep Larry from always being there to help Jimmy. 

3) Jimmy was a confessional writer and would write only about stuff he knew, so he had to go on adventures like climbing mountains and driving race cars and so on (Ellison offers a list of like ten such adventures) in order to gather material.  One day he had to go help out a gang of Hungarian gypsy bank robbers whom he had developed a relationship with (one of the jokes in this section is that a gypsy woman who threw herself at Jimmy gave Jimmy pubic lice) and he brings Larry along with him.  The gypsies (yeah, I know I am supposed to call them "Roma" and that I am supposed to say it is wrong to depict this marginalized community as violent murderous criminals who have crabs) recognize that they are probably going to be captured by the FBI soon and want the famous Jimmy to act as an intermediary between them and the authorities to lower the chance of the Feds just gunning them all down.  While Jimmy is working out plans with the woman who gave him crabs in one room, Larry is in another room where the gypsies almost murder him due to a comedic misunderstanding.

4) Larry thinks Jimmy's maid, a fat black woman, is deaf because she always has what we might in 2024 call an earbud in one ear.  For years, whenever he sees her, Larry will shout at this made in deference to her poor hearing.  The punchline of the joke is that her hearing is normal--she is listening to a transistor radio through that earpiece.  Also, at the time of the reading of the will, she is thin, having lost 80 pounds, and Larry doesn't recognize her.

Gratuitous action sequence) Jimmy died in a car crash on Halloween because while driving around Los Angeles he was harassed by three young Hispanic thugs("culeros"--multiple times in the story Larry demonstrates knowledge of foreign languages, saying stuff like "In Iran there's a word--ziranji--it means cleverness, or wiliness," and this is Larry's demonstration of his knowledge of Spanish) in a "decked Chevy" and a fight and a car chase broke out that climaxed in Jimmy crashing his Rolls Royce Corniche so it "went off like a can of beer in a centrifuge."  This is a bad metaphor if the gasoline in the Corniche exploded because that is a fiery explosion and when such a can explodes it is not fiery but the opposite--wet, and also a bad metaphor if the Corniche was torn apart by the physical force of the crash because it was torn apart by external pressure and the can in question exploded because of internal pressure.  Tsk, tsk.  Larry writes this scene as an action sequence from a detective novel or thriller, an effort to emulate Jimmy's own writing, so maybe the bad metaphor is intentional?  Anyway, this section sort of foreshadows the idea of Larry writing like Jimmy, an idea that is important to the final scene.  

5) Jimmy and Larry are together in a car in winter and Jimmy tells Larry that he (Larry) knows the one thing about him (Jimmy) which he hopes nobody else ever learns, and then they skid on the ice and get buried on a snowbank.

The foundational idea of this story, that a writer who exploits other writers has come up with a career-of-Poe-inspired strategy to keep a fellow writer from wrecking his posthumous reputation, is good.  But instead of writing a tight economical 8 or 12 page story based on this idea Ellison gives us a story three or four times as long; Ellison's writing is indulgent and uneconomical at every level, with unnecessary words and phrases in the sentences, unnecessary sentences in the paragraphs, unnecessary paragraphs in the sections, and entire sections that are just dead weight.

Why describe in detail the women Jimmy had affairs with and the celebrities who attend the funeral if they will never be seen after their descriptions?  Why in flashback anecdote 2 describe the complex process of Larry opening a liquor cabinet and selecting a bottle and pouring out just the right booze in just the right amount with just the right proportion of ice and tap water--who cares?  Why the lists of artists whose work is represented in Jimmy's mansion?  Ellison doesn't have anything interesting to say about the artists, he literally just typed their names out with a comma between each one.  Was Ellison trying to reach a specific word count?  I'm afraid the list of artists, like the totally superfluous use of "ziranji," is just Ellison showing off his learning.

As for the flashback anecdotes, these are little separate stories that are long and not very entertaining and some of them have limited attachment to the plot.

"All the Lies That Are My Life," printed with much fanfare and reprinted time and again, is not very good.  Maybe people out there enjoy the jokes and relish being inundated with cultural references like the name checking celebrities like Jimmy Stewart (Ellison alludes to 1959's The FBI Story) and consumer brands like Perrier (Jimmy hits one of the "chicanos" with a Perrier bottle, knocking out all the teeth of this member of a marginalized community) but to me "All the Lies That Are My Life" is a bloated and tedious mess wrapped around a clever little core idea.  Thumbs down!

Writing about Ellison has got me thinking of Barry N. Malzberg.  Malzberg is like the good version of Harlan Ellison.  Both are Jewish Americans with a deep knowledge of genre literature who apparently aspire to mainstream literary success and have produced large bodies of controversial work that pushes the envelope with all kinds of social commentary and stuff about sex and women and minorities that is likely to piss people off.  The difference is that Malzberg is likable and Ellison is a jerk who gets into fights with everybody; Malzberg's work is economical and original while Ellison's work is overblown and cliche-ridden; and Malzberg's work is actually funny and intellectually challenging while Ellison's is not funny and it is challenging in the way a sweaty guy with bulging eyes yelling at you is challenging.

**********

Before we get back to the fiction, let's take a look at some of the ancillary departments in this issue of F&SF; let's be honest, in many magazines the gossipy book reviews and letters columns are more fun than the actual stories.    

Well, there's no letters column here in F&SF, but our hero Barry Malzberg handles the book review column, and it includes some juicy SF gossip and, like Ellison's story, is in part about the writer's relationship with the world of SF.  Malzberg frames the column with the story of how an older boy got him into SF, mostly Astounding, and Malzberg takes the opportunity to obliquely praise Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore by describing  "Vintage Season" and "Private Eye" as high points in Astounding's history without actually naming Kuttner and Moore--Malzberg does the same thing with T. L. Sherred, citing "E for Effort" without appending Sherred's name to it.  Robert Heinlein and Alfred Bester Malzberg extols by name, which seems perverse because many people who would know who wrote "Year of the Jackpot" and The Demolished Man won't know who penned "Vintage Season" or "E for Effort."  Oh, well, he works in mysterious ways.    

The first book Malzberg is reviewing in the column is a collection of stories from Galaxy published on the occasion of that magazine's 30th anniversary, and he transitions to the topic by suggesting that young Barry often found Galaxy stories easier to read than Astounding stories because they had more conventional literary merit.  Malzberg praises the early Galaxy, while at the same time suggesting Galaxy editor H. L. Gold was a madman and a tyrant who hated and feared science and ruined people's careers and messed up their stories.  Malzberg carps that the 30th anniversary anthology doesn't include enough from the first five years of Galaxy, arguing the magazine was already in decline in the 1960s under editor Frederik Pohl, whom Malzberg damns with faint praise, calling him "competent."  Malzberg also complains that some writers--Edgar Pangborn, Cyril Kornbluth and Floyd Wallace--have been left out of the book, and that the stories included by Damon Knight, Robert Sheckley and William Tenn are not those gentlemen's best work.  He also grouses about the index, though he assures us his friend Martin H. Greenberg will see to it that the index will be fixed for future editions.

On the occasion of the publication of Crompton Divided, Malzberg talks about Robert Sheckley's career.  I'm not interested in Sheckley and just skipped this.

The third and final item on Malzberg's list is an anthology edited by George R. R. Martin, New Voices III: The Campbell Award Nominees.  Malzberg agrees with Martin's claim that starting in the 1970s, SF has not been governed by dominant editors and magazines like John W. Campbell, Jr. of Astounding and H. L. Gold of Galaxy, but by the actual authors.  But Malzberg thinks the anthology is weak, and points out that many of the Campbell award nominees celebrated in the book have more or less stopped writing SF.  However, Malzberg does say that Felix Gotschalk's "The Wishes of Maidens" is "the most graphic and relentless science fiction sex story ever published," so maybe I should check that out.  (As well as "E for Effort;" I've already read "Vintage Season," and "Private Eye.") 

In the film column, Baird Searles attacks Stanley Kubrick's The Shining because it doesn't make sense and because Kubrick makes the error of trying to do both a supernatural and a psychological horror story; Searles thinks you have to choose one or the other.  Searles' criticisms of the film are justified, but I still love The Shining because I don't watch movies looking for a story or even characters, but for visuals, and, as Searles admits, The Shining "is produced and filmed splendidly."

**********

"The Visible Partner" by Kit Reed

Reed is famous but I have avoided her work because I have suspected her stories are feminist or socialist polemics, something I can get my fill of anywhere, and something I received several lifetimes' supply of during my career as a spear carrier in public sector academia.  But, beyond Ellison and Malzberg, the contents page of this issue of F&SF is a sea of names I've never heard of, with the exception of Reed's, so I am grasping after it like a bit of flotsam in a storm.  And of course I recently read a story by a member of the CPUSA and actually liked it, so maybe it makes sense to give Reed a chance.  (And this story is only nine pages.)

"The Visible Partner" is surprisingly mundane, an acceptable story, no big deal.  I guess it is sort of a humor piece as well as a thriller.

We have two unscrupulous college professors who come up with an invisibility drink, the narrator, obviously the subordinate of the pair, and his colleague, who was recently drummed out of the university and has drunk the potion, so he is invisible.  To achieve his revenge and accomplish other crimes, the invisible man needs the narrator to act as his accomplice.  In return, he promises to help the narrator get tenure by using his invisibility to tamper with his personnel file, remove critical letters and add enthusiastic recommendation letters.  If that wasn't a big enough inducement, the invisible man threatens to murder the narrator if he won't cooperate, and how can he outfight a man who is invisible?

(On a side note, I often find invisibility overvalued in fiction.  In real life I am always hearing people breathe, smelling their tobacco or garlic or sweat, etc.; could you really just walk through a room without being detected, even if you are invisible?  Similarly in fiction, guys are always peeking through doorways without being spotted.) 

Various crimes are pulled off, and the narrator starts making time with the invisible professor's girlfriend, whom he has, ostensibly, abandoned.  But it turns out that the invisible man is lying to the narrator, and the woman is in cahoots with the invisible man--the narrator is one of the people the invisible man is trying to get revenge on.  As the story ends the narrator is plotting a counter attack on the invisible man, and we are not quite sure how successful he will be.

Competent but forgettable filler, the pacing and construction are fine.  "The Visible Partner" was reprinted in some European magazines and in the Reed collection The Revenge of the Senior Citizens**Plus.

"Lord of the Dance" by Garry Kilworth

A few minutes of research suggest that British writer Kilworth has produced mass quantities of popular fiction for adults and children ranging from faerie stuff and a Redwall-style series about warring weasels and stoats, to murder mysteries set in the middle of the Zulu War.  Well, let's round out this already too long blog post with a quick look at this 13-page story.

Our narrator (three first-person narratives today, and even Malzberg's book review has the character of a memoir) is an antiques dealer who has come to a little English town where there is some kind of festival going on in which people do Morris dances and dance around with swords and so forth.  We learn a bit about this guy's psychology.  He thinks hobbies are a waste of time, like work for which you will not be paid--in particular he considered learning to fly but realized managing and maintaining and operating an aircraft is an endless series of onerous rules.  He finds annoying the traditional English dances and considers them effeminate and sissified.  The SF element of the story is that by touching items he can sense their age, and touching old things sort of rejuvenates him.  He has come to this little town in part because he has felt drawn to it, had the intuition that other people with powers similar to his are gathered there.  Also, to buy an astrolabe, an artifact from ancient times, to sell on to a client.

In the local museum he sees an old painting and when he touches it feels not only its age but a powerful evil!  The painting, he then sees, is labelled The Dance of Death.  

There is also some business about the woman who accompanied him to the town, an assistant or partner at his store or something.  They had an affair in the past, then dropped it, but he sometimes thinks they should start it up again.

Anyway, the significant thing about the story is that the narrator realizes that living in England is a tiny population of people who are more or less immortal, people centuries old.  Their longevity is contingent on them gathering every year at this time to do a weird dance.  Though they are immortal, they grow physically feeble and ugly and of course can have no deep relationships with mortals, as the mortals will find them out.  These immortals contact the narrator, and he has to decide if he will join them.  But having to follow a bunch of onerous rules like dancing on a specific day every year and moving from town to town to avoid people noticing you don't die will be a terrible life (like owning and operating a plane.)  And he won't be able to renew his sexual relationship with the female lead.  So he leaves the town without joining the immortals.

This story is competent filler that feels kind of long, but is structured well, with all the little details about dancing and all the little minor characters fitting together smoothly in the end.  (There's not a lot of superfluous gunk gumming up the gears, like in another story we read today.)  It works mechanically, but doesn't do anything to the reader on an emotional or intellectual level, I'm afraid.

"Lord of the Dance" was reprinted in the language of Goethe in a 1982 anthology of stories from F&SF and in the 1984 Kilworth collection Songbirds of Pain, which was translated in 1988 into the language of Voltaire.

**********

I'm not exactly in love with any of these stories, but it is always good to explore new territory, to learn,  and that is what we did today.  Maybe we'll be doing some more of that in upcoming episodes of MPorcius Fiction Log; stick around to find out.