Barry N. Malzberg: "September 1958," "Into the Breach," "Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty," "The Trials of Sigmund" and "The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady"

For like a year we've been sporadically reading the 1980 Barry Malzberg collection The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady.  Today let's finish it up with the final five pieces of fiction in the book, all of them from the period 1977-1980.  But first, links to my blog posts on the previous 23 stories in the volume.  

“On the Air”
“Here, for Just a While”
“In the Stocks”

“The Man Who Married a Beagle”
“Big Ernie, the Royal Russian and the Big Trapdoor”
“Ring, the Brass Ring, the Royal Russian, and I”
“Of Ladies' Night Out and Otherwise”
“The Annual Once-a-Year Bash and Circumstance Party”
“The Appeal”
“Yahrzeit”
“Another Burnt-Out Case”
“I'm Going Through the Door”
“Cornell”
“On Account of Darkness”
“Impasse”
“Varieties of Technological Experience”
“Varieties of Religious Experience”
“Inside Out”
“Line of Succession”
“Reaction-Formation”
“Indigestion”
“A Clone at Last”
“Backing Up”

Damn, I hate typing.  I am really looking forward to when we finally conquer Mars and enslave the natives and I can have a whole steno pool of those little green bastards.

"September 1958" (1980)

It looks like "September 1958" is a The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady exclusive, debuting in this hardcover book and never being reprinted.

"September 1958" is about failure, about letting yourself down, and about the impossibility of people understanding each other.  It may be autobiographical.  There are two plots, both about men who find themselves unable to understand "the other" and screw up and feel terrible shame, and we switch back and forth between these two plots several times over the course of the story's four pages.

One plot follows a male college student who spends a lot of time looking at magazines; he musters the courage to ask an attractive woman with small well-formed breasts out on a date, and they go out for coffee and then kiss and hold hands afterwards.  This date is a major event in the male student's life, but that evening he brokenheartedly fears he has done something wrong because he can't understand the way women think, and when he encounters her in class later his fears are proven justified--she has absolutely no interest in a second date.

The other plot is about a spaceman on Mars who discovers the records of a long extinct native race of great sophistication and wisdom and how he realizes that he has no ability to comprehend even a fraction of what the Martians could teach him.  Simulacra of the Martians, like ghosts, ask him to protect the ruins and records of the great Martian civilization from the deprivations of avaricious Earthmen, and he promises to do so, but does nothing of the kind, and Mars is conquered and despoiled by Terra.

Presumably the magazines are SF magazines and the college student is based on Malzberg and/or meant to be similar to the kinds of people who read SF hardcover collections, and the story about Mars is a sort of allegory of his shameful failure with thew woman cooked up by the college student.  Is it an appropriate allegory, though?  The college student is courageous enough to ask the woman out, and then she refuses him a second date, he knows not why--it is not a lack of courage that undoes him, but his failure to know how to deal with women.  In contrast, while the spaceman is unable to understand the Martians, his shameful failure is a result of his lacking enough courage to rebel against Earth, not ignorance--he knows what the right thing to do is, but he doesn't do it.  Another contrast: the college student's failure only harms himself, while the failure of the spaceman in the Mars story hurts the Martians (if only in some abstract way, they being dead.)   

In his afterward to "September 1958" Barry suggests this story is unsalable, either in SF markets or to the "quarterlies/New Yorker circuit" and seems a little bitter about it.  "They can go, in the words of the sainted John Brunner about another facet of the market, to hell."  I can't remember, if I ever knew, who John Brunner told to go to hell.  Malzberg's writing is full of these kinds of references that go over the heads of the uninitiated.

"Into the Breach" (1980)   

Another story that, it seems, has only seen light of day here in The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady.  In his afterward, Malzberg tells us that Ted White bought it for Fantastic but then there was a change in Fantastic's ownership, White's tenure came to a close and "Into the Breach" was sent back to Malzberg unpublished.  Malzberg praises Ted White as an editor willing to publish new things, and the owner of Fantastic during White's editorship, Sol Cohen, for being the kind of owner who gave White editorial freedom.

"Into the Breach" depicts life in 2147, a time by which the government has achieved the ability to turn back your physical age if you feel like you have screwed up your life, so you can get a fresh start.  Much of the story seems to draw upon Malzberg's own period of employment in a government welfare department--there is a lot about going to a government office and having to prostrate yourself before the government functionaries, waiting long hours and filling out forms with dubious honesty and telling pathetic stories about your failures and your pathetic need, as well as how the citizens who come for help and the public employees paid to help them inevitably hate each other.  It is a little hard to understand how "Timeback" works, but we are assured it is very very painful and humiliating.  

The narrator, as far as I can tell, blames his failure at age 47 on a woman, and has his age reset to 46, when he still had hope and confidence.  It is implied that people Timebacked are moved to a different part of the country and are expected to get new jobs and build up new social networks, but after getting out of the Timeback machine our narrator dashes out of the government office and before the authorities catch up to him he murders the woman he holds responsible for his woes.  Then the government Timebacks him a second time, all the way to infancy.

(If he is just going to kill that woman and not try to elude capture by the cops, why does he bother getting Timebacked one year?  Maybe he was so depressed over her that he needed to regain his self-confidence to go through with the crime.)

An acceptable Malzbergian short story.  One Malzbergian touch is the suggestion that in 2147 there is a regular commemoration of political murders, an actual "Assassination Festival," which is held regularly, maybe even daily.   

"Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty" (1976)

So often when writing this blog I am lukewarm about stories and feel compelled to point out flaws even in stories that I enjoy that it is gratifying to be able to enthusiastically praise a piece of fiction unreservedly, as I can today.  "Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty" is a fun, challenging, and complex story full of literate but legible references to modern and ancient, Western and Eastern culture, a space adventure processed through the Malzberg sensibility that emphasizes despair, difficult sexual relationships and psychological disorder and conveys plot and theme via the characteristically Malzbergian narrative techniques of characters whose perceptions are totally unreliable and an anti-chronological story structure.

In "Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty" we have Gene Wolfe-level work!  Five out of five mummified Martians!

I don't have to tell my sophisticated and sensitive audience that this story's title and structure (36 teeny little chapters that take up 18 pages of The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady) are an homage to the 19th-century prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige, Japanese works of art that rival in popularity and influence even Godzilla and Hen na Joshi Kousei Amaguri Senko.  The story these somewhat disjointed and fragmentary chapters relate unchronologically is that of a sexually dysfunctional spaceman who suffers delusions, which won't surprise my sensitive and sophisticated audience, its members being familiar with Malzberg's body of work as they are.  Interestingly, this story seems to be set in the same universe as that of the Mars portions of "September 1958," a universe in which the human race discovered on Mars the ruins of an advanced civilization millions of years old and found that Deimos and Phobos, the moons of Mars, are artificial satellites thrown up by that lost race; some of the same plot elements, like ghost Martians imploring a guy to deter human exploration and expansion, and themes, like shame, are also present.

"Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty" is more plot-driven than we are used to with Malzberg, and the plot is a surprisingly traditional one, reminiscent of the plots of the kinds of stories Leigh Brackett or C. L. Moore would sell to Thrilling Wonder Stories or Weird Tales decades before, though of course Malzberg tells his story radically out of chronological order (something he makes a joke about, having a wise alien say that time is not linear and "strict chronology" is "only a symptom of psychosis") and much of what is described may merely be dreams or hallucinations.  I read this one twice to make sure I knew what was going on, and on the second read it really feels like a moody adventure story.

The protagonist of "Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty" was born on Earth in a decadent period of human history.  Centuries ago Earth first colonized many of the planets and moons in our solar system, but has not ventured far beyond the system's limits.  Perhaps the most technologically advanced human settlement was the thriving human colony on Neptune, but like 200 years ago it became aggressive, warring on the other human colonies, and had to be destroyed. 

Our guy moved to Mars as a youth, where he became fascinated by the ruins of the long-expired, highly sophisticated Martian civilization.  He broke the rules and touched a mummified Martian on display in a museum, and as he walked the red planet's sands in his pressure suit, imagined that he was speaking to the last of the Martians, imbibing the alien sage's cryptic wisdom.  Asked why the Martians, when they ran out of resources, embraced death, the Martian wise man tells the child that death came to the people of Mars "like a bride."  Could this be the source of our protagonist's sexual dysfunction?  Since then, he has had visions of the last Martian, who offers advice and psychological support--our guy even thinks about the last Martian when he is having sex with his wife (ewww.)

A skilled technician, whom his Martian mentor has told has a high destiny ahead of him, our hero is chosen to fly a mission to Neptune, to search the ruins of the human colony there for technology that will enable interstellar travel, technology the human race, in its decadence, is incompetent to deveop from scratch.  (I wonder if we are to see here a parallel between the way the Earth needs the technology of the defeated aggressor state of Neptune to conquer the stars and the way the United States used German technology after World War II to jump start the American space program.)  In the course of his training on Ganymede for this mission the narrator's marriage collapses.  On Neptune he meets a beautiful woman, The Maiden of the Sea, perhaps a computer simulation left by the exterminated Neptunian warmongers to serve as a guide to those who might come after them, perhaps an hallucination.  The Maiden has conversations with the last Martian--does this make us more likely to believe that our guy really is in regular contact with a Martian ghost, or more likely to believe the Maiden is an hallucination?  The spaceman has sex with the Maiden, achieving his first ever orgasm without the aid of the dead Martian, and falls in love with her.  He finds the blueprints and artifacts that will enable the human race to travel to other star systems, and the last Martian advises him to not share this info with his superiors back on Ganymede--he seems to think the humans of Earth should emulate the people of Mars and expire rather than preserve their race by engaging in space exploration and imperialism.  Our guy does not take this advice, and Malzberg leaves the reader room to judge for himself whether either or both are acting selfishly or judiciously.  The leaders of the human race are thrilled with the success of the mission, and offer our guy any reward he can think of, but all he wants is to be with the Maiden of the Sea again, which of course his superiors consider impossible, they thinking she was merely an illusion of one kind or another.

When the human colony on Neptune is rebuilt it features a cyclopean statue of our protagonist, and he is practically worshipped as a god, and the Maiden of the Sea is one component of the stories told of him.  Considering the title of the story, we can suspect that this statue holds a place in the hearts and minds of the citizens of the revitalized Neptune colony that Mount Fuji held in the hearts of 19th-century Japanese.  Malzberg also cleverly points out the way our protagonist and his statue are like the Martian mummy and the Maiden of the Sea--a sort of message from the past in the shape of a person.  Malzberg makes reference to the sons of Levi in the story, and I likely don't know enough about the Bible or Jewish history and literature to get what Malzberg is trying to say, but maybe the idea is that our hero is like a priest and leader who has done a great deed for his people but who is denied a certain type of property or wealth that is afforded others--in the case of the story's hero, I guess this means love and/or sex, or maybe just the chance to travel to another star.

It is always a pleasant surprise when a Malzberg story has an actual traditional plot, and in "Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty" Malzberg does a great job of integrating his typical techniques and concerns with the kind of traditional "we're gonna explore the lost cities of ancient races and then conquer the stars" SF plot that I love.  Here we have an excellent Malzberg production that is true to Malzberg's essential nature, that shows him stretching himself while remaining true to himself, a story that celebrates and also reworks traditional SF ideas and elements.  "Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty" would be a good story with which to introduce Malzberg to SF fans who haven't yet tackled the work of the Sage of Teaneck.

      

"Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty" first saw print in Chrysalis 6, an anthology edited by Roy Torgeson, and in his afterword to the story here Malzberg thanks Torgeson for publishing the story, which it seems was rejected by other editors and only just barely accepted by Torgeson.  Barry also takes another swipe at the mainstream publishing world and "Quality Lit." in particular.  Chrysalis 6 was translated into German and our Teutonic friends' efforts to market the anthology are interesting--the cover includes an illustration originally affixed to Robert Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold that I guess is meant to convey a sense of dangerous dimension-hopping adventure, and the name of only one of the thirteen authors whose work is included in the book, R. A. Lafferty, is mentioned on the cover, and his in huge type.  Maybe Lafferty was a big draw in Germany (the David Hasselhoff of SF?)

"The Trials of Sigmund" (1980)  

Another story original to this volume, which according to isfdb would be recycled as part of the 1985 fix-up novel The Remaking of Sigmund Freud, a book I bought some years ago for two bucks at Half Price Books but which have yet to read.

One of my least favorite gimmicks is the attempted recreation of a real person in fiction.  In this three-page trifle Malzberg tries to bring to life alternate universe versions of Sigmund Freud, Adolf Hitler, and a newspaper publisher I never heard of, Robert McCormick.  (Wikipedia makes McCormick sound like the kind of exciting character who was in the news every day for his wacky hijinks, idiosyncratic opinions and innovative business practices and then was memory holed as soon as he died because nobody in the establishment had either sufficient sympathy or animus to keep knowledge of him alive for use as a sainted exemplar or a defenseless whipping boy or strawman.)  Freud smokes cigars and thinks about how he will die in ten years or so from cancer.  A young Hitler comes to Freud for a consultation and Freud dismisses him.  McCormick comes by, offering Freud a newspaper advice column and when Freud turns down the lucrative offer the Chicagoan shoots Freud dead.  Besides these three major characters, Malzberg through Freud offers capsule diagnoses of many other famous people, among them Carl Jung, William Randolph Hearst, Alice B. Toklas, and quite a few more.  

In his afterword, Malzberg speculates on what Marianne Moore might have thought of science fiction, tells us he was not able to sell "The Trials of Sigmund," and airs his fear that The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady is going to sit unread in the basements of libraries.  Barry, if you wrote more stories like "Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty" and fewer like "The Trials of Sigmund," maybe you could worry less? 

Feels like a waste of time; maybe if you've read biographies of Freud and McCormick and are familiar with the poetry of Marianne Moore this will do more for you than it did me.  

"The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady" (1977)

This is a series of little episodes, somewhat absurd little adventures on passenger trains, episodes that seem to represent cliched plot elements of fiction in which passenger trains figure.  A New York City subway car stops and there is a burning smell--our narrator reassures an old woman that this is a minor incident, not a deadly accident.  Our narrator is on the Orient Express, threatened by a turban-wearing,  knife wielding smuggler--the Kiev police board the train and rescue our guy.  The narrator meets a beautiful blonde on the train and they fall in love--alas, she is a ghost who haunts this train because she committed suicide by jumping off it and she falls in love with many men who board the train and then vanishes on them.  Our narrator is a famous detective, and when a murder occurs on the train on which he is a passenger he is enlisted by the train crew to solve the crime.

These four incidents are training simulations a grad student of the future is undergoing as part of his final exams.  He is unenthusiastic about taking up an academic career as an expert on passenger trains, but this is a future of scarcity and (it appears) of government control of the economy, and when he passes the test and is shown the quarters he has been assigned he is very excited--this six foot by eleven foot cell is apparently luxurious by the standards of this future high tech/low freedom society.  The sting in the tail of the story, however, is that the narrator is going to be haunted for the rest of his life by his memory of the kiss of the midnight lady, even though she is a fictional character and a ghost even within her fictional world.  (Compare to "Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty.")

Let's consider that "The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady" is a commentary on male sexuality, how real life women never measure up to a man's dreams or something like that, and the possibility that this sad reality is merely one representative facet of a broader phenomenon Malzberg wants to talk about: how nothing in real life lives up to our fantasy version of it--after all, real life train rides almost never involve murder mysteries, tragic love stories or confrontations with exotic criminals, and so it is strange that modern people associate mundane businesslike activities like riding a train with such thrilling and unlikely adventures.  Do we moderns suffer this disconnect because of our easy access to a wealth of cinema, television and written fiction?  Are we all living in dream worlds and failing to embrace all that the real world has to offer because we are addicted to fiction?  Could I be projecting a 2020s problem linked to the internet and video games back on to the 1970s? 

This is an OK sort of Malzbergian filler story with his typical despair and depiction of a narrator having interactions with people who are not real, this time through the medium of a hypno helmet (we've read a lot of Malzberg hypno helmet stories over the years.*)  "The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady" was first printed in Midnight Specials: An Anthology for Train Buffs and Suspense Aficianados (or Addicts, you know, whatevs) edited by Malzberg crony Bill Pronzini.  To my surprise John Pelan included "The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady" in his book The Century's Best Horror Fiction: 1951-2000.  This is barely a horror story, and it is hard to believe it is the best horror story of 1977. 

*"Battered-Earth Syndrome," "At the Institute," "Tapping Out," "Going Down," "On Ice," "The Wonderful All-Purpose Transmorgifier" and maybe others I am forgetting. 

**********

Alright, another collection behind us.  And "Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty" alone makes this one well worth it.  Thumbs up for The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady, which even has a good cover by Michael Flanagan.  If you are cheap, read it on internet archive!  If you are a collector, pick it up on ebay for less than twenty dollars!  And if you want to support Malzberg and small press publishers who make available physical books of classic SF and crime fiction, buy a copy from Stark House, who offer an omnibus edition of The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady and another Malzberg collection we've read here at MPorcius Fiction Log, In the Stone House!