Harlan Ellison: "Night Vigil," "Lonelyache," & "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes"

Let's finish up my signed copy of the fifth (1979) Collier paperback printing of Harlan Ellison's 1971 collection Alone Against Tomorrow, about which I have already written at some length here, here and here.  After today I will have read every story in the book, in one form or another, and blogged about most of them.  (A few--the most famous ones, probably--I read before this blog quivered to glistening and sinister life, and I haven't felt like rereading them yet, and anyway, I feel like this blog offers the most value when I write about stories which haven't already been written about a million times.)  You shouldn't take anything I say, or anybody says, at face value, life and the world being what they are, so I encourage you to read Alone Against Tomorrow yourself--try these links--before seeing what I have to say about "Night Vigil," "Lonelyache," and "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes," or after.

"Night Vigil" (1955)

"Night Vigil" appears to have debuted in an issue of the fanzine Peon with a cover by Ed Emshwiller, which is pretty cool.  This side-stapled periodical also includes essays by Robert Bloch and Terry Carr.  Fun.  "Night Vigil" enjoyed a wider audience in 1957 when it was printed in an issue of Amazing with a cover suggesting our fine-feathered friends and the mechanical minds that owe their existence to our ingenuity are teaming up to exploit one of our most valuable resources--swimsuit models!  Don't count out the trim brunette who is representing our civilization, though--she's packing heat!  After seeing print in Amazing under the title "Yellow Streak Hero," "Night Vigil" has reappeared in many Ellison collections.

"Night Vigil" is a normal science fiction story about being in space and dealing with aliens and one man sacrificing to help his civilization, and a decent one.  Mild recommendation.

The human race, in its travels around the universe, has come upon evidence that other advanced civilizations have been wiped out by some mysterious enemy.  The government needs to deploy some kind of sentinel or tripwire on an asteroid at a specific strategic point way way out there, far from Earth, to watch for this enemy.  Using computers, they determine from among all the young men on Earth the man most likely to remain sane while living in a tiny one-room Quonset hut, bereft of human contact, year after year, decade after decade.  This nineteen-year-old is seized by the government as he is sitting on his front porch canoodling with his girlfriend, hypno-trained how to operate the communications system that he will need to use on the asteroid should the alien monsters appear, and then shipped to the watching post.

Our guy has been in the Quonset hut for 24 years.  Ellison does a good job of describing all the psychological phenomena he has endured over those years.  Then the scanners finally detect the approaching enemy and he sends the critical message to Earth.  He has sacrificed his life for his people.

A decent story.  Star Trek fans may find Ellison's use of the phrase "on the edge of Forever" amusing.  Maybe we should see this story as one that subverts our expectations, as the critics like to say.  Some stories might have this single guy outwit the aliens all by himself.  Other stories might have a twist ending in which there are no aliens and the government is using the alien scare to manipulate the populace.  Ellison here does neither, instead producing a story that depicts the sad truth that polities have enemies and those polities require people who will take risk and make sacrifices to oppose those enemies if they are to endure.

"Lonelyache" (1964)

"Lonelyache" debuted in Knight, "The Magazine for the Adult Male," in an issue that promises to introduce us to "the Aqua-Nudes," reveal to us "the truth about the Irish Sweepstakes," and share with us "pix" of Christine Keeler, the woman embroiled in the Profumo affair.  isfdb lists one anthology, a Belgian one, that reprints "Lonelyache;" otherwise, it has only reappeared in Ellison collections, many of them.    

This is essentially a mainstream story about people whose marriages have failed and how they have empty sexual relationships, adultery and one-night stands and so on, in a vain effort to fill their time or feel love, etc.  Also, perhaps, about how people with difficult childhoods have trouble making adult relationships work.  There are lots of uncomfortable angry conversations, and some literary-type metaphors.  The genre fiction elements consist of the protagonist's dreams, in which he has to fight for his life against a series of assassins, all of them former friends, and defeats them one by one, Ellison describing the gore of their horrible wounds, and a monster forming in the protagonist's small apartment, I guess a metaphor for the man's unhappiness, dissatisfaction, psychological collapse over his loneliness and his shame at using women for sex.  Finally, he pays a prostitute, and this degrading act brings the monster to completion, and the protagonist digs his old service pistol out of the closet and commits suicide.

"Lonelyache" is competent--no major blunders--and at times it is sort of clever or arresting, but it is also long and meandering, episodic, the scenes don't flow logically from one to the other, you almost feel that the scenes could be in different order and the story would work the same.  The gory dreams--which seem to be about comradely relationships with other men and a child's relationship with his parents--and the monster, which receives short shrift, seem tacked on, divorced from the main drama, which is all about sexual relationships with women.  We'll call "Lonelyache" acceptable and move on with our lives.

"Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes"  (1969)

Here we have a story about African-American life that uses the "n-word," so there is your trigger warning.  "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes" is actually a good story, better paced and structured than so many of Ellison's stories, so, thumbs up.

A white man who is some kind of hobo or tramp rides the rails illegally to the n-word section of a town to attend a funeral, using his special powers to avoid the railway police.  This guy, our narrator, is some kind of space alien, we eventually realize--he steals Hydrox cookies but mostly eats grass and weeds, and can "go dark," which I guess means "become invisible."

He spies on the funeral of a well-liked 82-year old black guy, Jed, planning to pay his final respects when all the other funeral attendees have left the room in which lies the body.  But then another (apparent) white person, an astoundingly beautiful woman, comes into the room she thinks is empty to (apparently) pay her respects.  She steals the silver dollars off Jed's eyes--according to the narrator, this means Jed won't have passage for the trip to Heaven and will end up in Hell.   

The narrator chases the woman all the way to a different city, using up a considerable portion of his small store of money to do so.  This striking beauty is a whore, and he confronts her at the brothel, and has to use his special powers to kill whatever you call the bouncer at a whorehouse.  Eventually, he gets her full story out of the beauty and we get his full story out of the narrator.  The narrator is a space alien and the kind, generous, giving, etc., Jed, who was always helping people down on their luck, helped the alien and taught him how to pass as a Earth human.  The prostitute is Jed's daughter, and they had an antagonistic relationship because she insisted on passing as a white woman and Jed, the narrator tells Jed's daughter,

"...took in all kinds, and didn’t care where they came from, or what they were. Just as long as they didn’t lie about it.  He had a lot of love."

There is quite a bit of stuff to think about in this story, if we choose to do so.  All three main figures in the story, alien, prostitute, and Jed, are unable to "go home"--the alien can't get back to his home planet, the prostitute isn't able to comfortably spend time with her own father or any black people (or even respectable white people, for that matter), and Jed also seems to have had trouble getting along with his own flesh and blood and is kept from Heaven.  The narrator and the prostitute are both passing, and are both in a sense Jed's children, and both lower class thieves--how great a parent was Jed if his real child and his de facto child both ended up on the wrong side of the law, making their way by doing things that conventional morality holds to be degrading and humiliating?  Ellison writes in the voice of the space alien,

Jed, Jed, you poor old nigger bastard. You knew I couldn’t get home again, back to whatever world it was I'd come from, and you taught me how to pass so they wouldn’t kill me, but you couldn’t handle it when it happened to you.

What does "when it happened to you" mean?  When Jed's own daughter tried to pass, and succeeded?  Or in some way was Jed also trying to pass, trying to hide white blood of his own or a sexual relationship with a white woman or both?

A successful story--even the action scenes work.  Worth your time, especially if you are interested in depictions of African-Americans by white authors, in particular efforts by white people to depict rounded and realistic black people who aren't just dangerous monsters or innocent victims or beleaguered saints.  

 

"Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes" debuted in Galaxy.  The text there is obviously different than that in my paperback copy of Alone Against Tomorrow, but I just glanced at the magazine version, didn't actually closely compare, and the differences may just be in mechanical stuff like punctuation.  Norman Spinrad, whom I have heard Ellison helped get work at places like Knight, included "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes" in his 1971 anthology The New Tomorrows, and it also turned up in the first Best From Galaxy volume. 

The moon and the woman's profile on The New Tomorrows seem to be copied
from the Dillons' cover for Over the Edge.  Weird.

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I'm glad I could finish up my look at Alone Against Tomorrow with stories I can say something nice about, including one I can recommend without reservation (I don't count the trigger warning as a reservation.)  It might seem like it, but I don't open up Ellison's books and hunt down his magazine appearances hoping to point out problems and otherwise cut the man down to size--I am genuinely curious about Ellison's work and career and am glad when I can legitimately enjoy anything he has written.

Harlan Ellison produced a lot of work and no doubt we will be seeing more of him in the future here at MPorcius Fiction Log.