Merril-approved 1958 stories by C Einstein, G P Elliott, & H Ellison

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading selected stories from the Honorable Mentions list Judith Merrill included in her SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume.  In our last episode we finished up the "D"s with Gordon R. Dickson, so today is brought to you by the letter "E."  I had hoped to read all of the "E" stories recommended by Merril here in the 1958-centric volume of her much-heralded anthology series, but I can't find a text of Koller Ernst's "The Red Singing Sands," which appeared in the February issue of Super-Science Fiction.  Too bad.

"The Short Snorter" by Charles Einstein

Einstein has one novel (apparently about New York suffering a drought) and five short stories listed at isfdb, and wikipedia is telling me he is the half brother of Super-Dave Osborne, whom I saw many times on TV in my youth.  (Before I moved to New York I watched TV like ten hours a day, and while as an adult TV annoys me, I have to admit I loved TV back then.)  "Short Snorter" debuted in If and has not been reprinted as far as I can tell.

This is a dumb joke story and I am giving it a thumbs down but at least it is educational--I had never heard of "short snorters" before, but apparently this is a well-known phenomenon involving armed service members and air crews signing dollar bills as souvenirs for each other.

A couple is staying at a hotel.  They spot a flying saucer partly hidden in the woods on the hotel grounds.  The hotel manager is well aware of the space craft, and introduces the couple to the machine's pilot, a Venusian who looks just like an Earthman.  One of the story's two main jokes is that the government and academia have been alerted to the presence of the alien but think it is just a hoax.  The other big joke is that the Venusian trades short snorters with everybody--he gives natives a bank note of Venus currency and gets US currency in exchange; in this way the alien is making money, and perhaps we readers are supposed to think that the guy is just an Earthman perpetrating a profitable fraud--after all, the Venus notes have English words and Arabic numerals on them.

The "point" of "The Short Snorter," which is voiced explicitly, seems to be that everybody is obsessed with money, and maybe this jocular attack on American greed is why Merril, a commie of some sort (the wikipedia page on The Futurians identifies Merril as a Trotskyist), likes the story.  This point is banal, the jokes are not funny, and there is nothing more to this little filler piece, so thumbs down for "The Short Snorter."  

"Among the Dangs" by George P. Elliott

Way back in 2015 I read Elliott's "Sandra" and thought it very good.  "Among the Dangs" made its debut in an issue of Esquire featuring hubba hubba photos of Iowa-born actress and Black Panthers devotee Jean Seberg and was reprinted in F&SF in 1960; it serves as the title story to a 1961 Elliott collection. 

As F&SF editor Robert P. Mills admits, "Among the Dangs" isn't really a science fiction or fantasy story.  Rather, it is a sort of adventure slash psychological mainstream story, though it certainly has some of the elements of wish fulfillment and world-building that we often find in SF, and it has a point of view about science (a skeptical one.)  Merril of course felt that genre categories were essentially bogus and boundaries between genres should be knocked over and so liked to promote as SF stories that appeared in mainstream publications.

Our narrator is an African-American academic, and this story is his memoir of how, after earning a bachelor's in history in the late 1930s he switched to anthropology and built a career in that field (in which he is not all that comfortable), earning advanced degrees and prestigious positions by embarking on dangerous research trips to the Amazon.

The most famous faculty member of the narrator's university, while living among an Amazonian tribe of headhunters who regard him as a god for teaching them some basic agricultural techniques, has learned about a neighboring stone-age tribe, the Dangs, whose religion revolves around trances, prophecies, and human sacrifice.  This prof recruits and trains the narrator for the mission of infiltrating the Dangs so he can study them from the inside.  The mission is a success; the Dangs accept the narrator, he has sex with various fifteen-year old girls of the tribe and marries one, and works his way into the Dang priesthood, in part by impressing them with his prophecies, which he delivers while in a drug induced trance.  He can't remember the substance of the prophecies he has propounded once he has woken up from the trance, but later realizes he has been relating to the Indians the life of Jesus; among the themes of Elliott's story is the power of the Gospels, which the narrator calls "the best story," even if you don't believe them, even if they are not true, and the propriety of preaching the Gospels if you don't yourself believe them.

The plot follows the narrator as he rises in Dang society, surviving, through skill and luck, various episodes that have the potential to see him killed in a fight or sacrificed to the Dang gods.  Eventually he leaves the Dangs, and back in the United States our hero reflects that he only narrowly escaped actually becoming permanently embedded among the Dangs, dead or alive.  "Thinking about it afterward, I did not understand or want to understand what I was drifting toward, but I knew that it was something that I feared.  And I got out of there as soon as I was physically able."  One of the themes of "Among the Dangs" is identity and belonging, the extent to which we choose the community in which we make our lives, and to what extent circumstances drive us into communities.  

Advertised on F&SF's cover as a novelet, "Among the Dangs" is pretty long and it does feel long, the style being flat and long-winded, the pace slow, and the plot a little repetitive.  The story also felt unpleasantly claustrophobic; the narrator is always trapped in some place, physically or psychologically

One reason "Among the Dangs" feels repetitive is that the narrator makes three separate trips to the Dang village, returning to America for years at a time to continue his academic career.  The course of the narrator's lives in the United States and in the Amazon parallel each other; in both places he marries, and in both places he moves up the ranks of his profession, one might see the ceremonies at which he prophesies among the Dang and wins renown as being like oral exams or depositing major papers.  Elliott's story offers a pretty dim view of academia (a professor publishes the narrator's work under his own name, for example) and science in general, and anthropology in particular.  The narrator faces mortal danger in the Amazon but outside it as well, serving in World War II and losing a hand; the mechanical claw he wears in place of his lost hand makes a big impression on the Dangs.  

There are plenty of subtle deadpan jokes in "Among the Dangs," and while they don't make you laugh out loud, they are not bad.  Some of these jokes people might find offensive; on the first page the narrator explains why he took a class in anthropology: "In idle curiosity I had taken a course in anthro, to see what I would have been like had history not catapulted my people a couple of centuries ago up into civilization...."  

I think we might ask why Elliott decided to make his protagonist black.  The (comedic) in-story reason is that the professor who recruits him for the task of joining the Dang tribe figures the Dangs will be more welcoming of a dark-skinned person, even though the narrator can hardly pass as a Dang, his hair, skin color and facial features being quite distinct from that of the Amazonians.  One literary reason, I suspect, is to emphasize the narrator's position as an alien--he's an historian who becomes an anthropologist who doesn't really believe in the science of anthropology; he's an academic who becomes a high priest of the Dang by preaching the Christian gospel, even though he doesn't believe in either religion; when in the Amazon he's a modern American among stone-age Indians, and, to cap it all off, in the U.S. he's a black person in the white institution of the university.

"Among the Dangs" is a serious piece of work worthy of respect with a good plot, but I'm not loving it, for the various stylistic reasons I have mentioned; here we have a borderline case between acceptable and mildly recommendable.  Definitely worth your time, however, if you are interested in late Fifties fictional portrayals of academia--anthropology in particular--or depictions of non-whites by white authors; the wikipedia page on Elliott suggests that the inadequacies of academia and the condition of black Americans were topics he wrote about repeatedly.           

"The Last Day" AKA "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" by Harlan Ellison

It's our old pal Harlan!  Merril actually includes two stories by Ellison on her 1958 Honorable Mentions list; "My Brother Paulie" we read way back in 2018, but "The Last Day," later published as "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" is new to us.  The story first appeared in Rogue, and under its new name it was included in six or seven different Ellison collections.  I can't find the Rogue text that impressed Merril, and I could read the story in my paperback copy (signed by the author!) of Alone Against Tomorrow, but I am going to read the version in the 1984 version of Ellison Wonderland because a note in the beginning of that book (the cover of which includes a blurb saying Ellison is "like an angry Woody Allen") suggests it contains a revised text.

"The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" is an acceptable melodramatic filler story suitable for the men's magazine in which it debuted.  A man lived with his mother until he was like 38, and after her death lived alone in the same house for six more years; during that period he inexplicably developed a clairvoyant ability--he can see glimpses of the future.  Mostly he sees quotidian things, but when he is 44 he gets unmistakable visions that indicate that the world is going to end soon in a blaze of fire!  

The psyker has never had sex, and becomes consumed with the need to have sex with a woman before he dies along with all of life on Earth.  Having spent all his time with his mother, and then living alone, he has no idea how to meet and charm women, so his efforts to date end in humiliation.  He finds himself unable to commit rape.  Finally, on the last day of the human race, he meets a prostitute in a bar, overcomes his fears, manages to get her back to the house.  When the flash comes and they are both reduced to ash, the psyker is happy, having had sex, and the hooker is happy, holding in her hands his life savings, $4,000.  

As with Einstein's story, I am going to assume Merril was attracted to "The Last Day" for its "love of money" aspect.  She might also have been impressed by the way sex is the central theme of Ellison's story; Merril was a leading architect and cheerleader of the New Wave, and one of the standard claims of the New Wavers was that SF didn't discuss sex, or didn't do so in the direct or mature manner of mainstream literature.

"...like an angry Woody Allen."

**********

So there we have the 1958 "E"s.  On to the "F"s!