"After a Judgment Day," "The Pro," and "Castaway" by Edmond Hamilton

It's the final installment of our look at The Best of Edmond Hamilton, a collection of stories published in 1977 and edited by the author's wife, Leigh Brackett.

"After a Judgment Day" (1963)

Throughout his career, Hamilton wrote stories about evolution and the related topics of radiation and mutation, and stories about the plight of somebody who finds himself the last man on Earth. We've read a bunch of such stories here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and Hamilton also dealt with such themes in his comic book work; for example, in "Superman Under the Red Sun," a story appearing in Action Comics # 300 (May 1963), Superman is tricked by the "Superman Revenge Squad" into travelling a million years into the future, where he encounters land-whales (the descendants of whales who have adapted to an Earth without oceans) and eagles which, due to radioactive fallout, have acquired the ability to shoot lighting bolts from their eyes.  Kal-El also finds that the human race has vacated the planet, making him The Last Man On Earth!  (Luckily, there is a robot version of Perry White available to keep the Man of Steel company.)

"Superman Under the Red Sun" was the cover story of Action Comics #300 (the other story in that issue was about Supergirl's horse...zzzzzzzzzz...) and one of Hamilton's other cover stories that very same year was "After a Judgment Day" for Fantastic, a story which is like a more adult, more apocalyptic remix of the same elements from that Superman story.

Martinsen is a scientist on a lunar research base; from this base robots designed to mimic humans travel to distant planets to collect data and then return.  Because their bodies resemble human tissue and organs, any effects suffered by the robots while walking around on the alien worlds serve as a good predictor of how real humans would react to those alien environments.

During Martinsen's tenure at the moon base a plague strikes the Earth--a previously-harmless bacteria, mutated by radioactive fallout, wipes out the human race in short order.  Most of Martinsen's comrades return to Earth, leaving Martinsen alone on the moon with a single colleague who has turned to popping sleeping pills for comfort (there is no booze on the base.)  And the robots, of course, though they have not been programmed to make conversation (unlike the Perry White robot in Action Comics #300.)  Martinsen, in a last romantic gesture, prepares a recording describing highlights of Earth history and culture, gives a copy to each of the robots, and then programs them to search the universe for intelligent life to present the recording to.  With luck, Earth's memory will thus be preserved.  After the robots have departed, fanning out across the galaxy, Martinsen and the pill-popper return to Earth to die.

This story is alright; it tries to pull the old heart-strings but didn't really do it for me; in that respect I think Hamilton's "Requiem," for example, is more successful.  The title "After a Judgment Day" comes from a poem by G. K. Chesterton, an epic of over 2,500 lines about 9th-century hero King Alfred called The Ballad of the White Horse. Chesterton is one of those important writers (he is one of Gene Wolfe's favorites, I hear) I haven't gotten around to reading yet.  Maybe someday.

"After a Judgment Day" has not been one of Hamilton's more popular pieces; besides The Best of Edmond Hamilton the only place it has reappeared has been in a 1972 magazine, Thrilling Science Fiction, that consisted of reprints of 1960s SF stories.

"The Pro" (1964)

If you are reading MPorcius Fiction Log, you probably already know that Barry N. Malzberg is one of the great historians and critics of SF, and that Malzberg considers his own career and the entire SF field to be a disappointment, a sort of failure or missed opportunity.  In his 1980 essay "The Science Fiction of Science Fiction," included in The Engines of the Night, Malzberg talks about two Robert Silverberg stories from the early '70s ("Science Fiction Hall of Fame" and "Schwartz Between the Galaxies") that, according to sad sack Barry, are a message from Silverberg telling us that "science fiction is doomed by its own nature and devices to be a second-rate form of literature." Malzberg goes on to discuss the hopes of the Futurians (that SF could "save the world") and those of "the field's best writers--Kornbluth, Clifton, Budrys, Heinlein" (that SF could "change society" and "alter institutions and personal lives") hopes that were, he suggests, unrealized.

Malzberg points out other SF stories and novels that, he believes, posit that "science fiction is junk" or "contemptible" or mere "comfort," including his own Herovit's World (1973) and Galaxies (1975), Samuel R. Delany's 1967 "Aye, and Gomorrah" and Edmond Hamilton's "The Pro."

(NB:  I think you should buy and read The Engines of the Night, but I have to warn you that my 1984 Bluejay edition, at least, was not properly fact-checked or copy-edited.  In the essay at hand Malzberg tells us Silverberg's "Science Fiction Hall of Fame" appeared in Infinity Three, when in fact it appeared in Infinity Five, and he refers to Silverberg's story "Our Lady of the Sauropods" by the name "Our Lady of the Stegosaurs."  Maybe such errors are rectified in the later enlarged edition from Baen which bears the title Breakfast in the Ruins?)

"The Pro" is a psychological study, its subject Jim Burnett, who, like Hamilton himself, is a science fiction writer with decades of work and a multitude of stories in pulps, paperbacks, and hardcovers behind him.  His son Dan is a member of the two-man crew of the first manned mission to the Moon.  Our story covers the day of the launch and the day preceding, as Burnett wrestles with his emotional responses to his son's participating in this historic, but dangerous, mission: the fear that his son may be killed and guilt that, through his writing, he may be responsible in some way for inspiring the whole space program and encouraging his own son's risky role in it, as well as envy that it is his son, and not he himself, who will be among the first to step on the Moon.  An interesting subtheme is the idea that the writer is a spectator of life, rather than a participant--Henry Miller said something to this effect in that thrilling, shocking, first chapter of Sexus, and it has always stuck with me.

Dan's the pro, not me.  All we writers who daydreamed and babbled and wrote about space, we were just amateurs, but now the real pros have come, the tanned, placid young men who don't babble about space but who go up and take hold of it...

Burnett's powerful but ambivalent feelings--he jocularly brags that he "invented" space travel one minute, then is vigorously denying that his writing and science fiction in general deserve any credit for inspiring the space program the next--feel very authentic.  This is what a real person is like: unsure if he has done the right thing, unsure even what the right thing is, almost always rationalizing, sometimes breaking down from regret or guilt or fear.  An effective story.  "The Pro" first appeared in F&SF (in the 15th Anniversary "All Star Issue") and then in various venues, including T. E. Dikty's Great Science Fiction Stories About the Moon (1967) and Mike Resnick's Inside the Funhouse: 17 SF Stories About SF (1992).

(I feel like I have to put in my two cents here and assert that I certainly do not consider science fiction a failure.  Most importantly, I don't think providing comfort or escape or entertainment is bad, or pointless; why shouldn't people have a little comfort or pleasure in this brief life full of trouble?  Beyond that, I think it obvious now (and almost as obvious in 1980) that SF has been influential, has made a mark on society. Dr. Frankenstein and his monster and Tarzan of the Apes are as central to our culture as Robinson Crusoe and Romeo and Juliet.  King Kong and 2001: A Space Odyssey are considered among the greatest works of cinema.  Popular TV and movie franchises like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Alien are essentially the themes and visions of Edgar Rice Burroughs, E. E. Smith, Edmond Hamilton, A. E. van Vogt and Leigh Brackett projected on a screen, and I think half the TV shows my wife watches are about people with special powers or people living in a post-apocalyptic world. Lovecraft, Burroughs, Blish, Brackett and Bester are enshrined in the Library of America, and Jack Vance gets a glowing write up in the New York Times.  We are told that the people who were responsible for putting a man on the moon were inspired by SF, while libertarian intellectuals like David Friedman report being inspired by Robert Heinlein and statist intellectuals like Paul Krugman announce they were inspired by Isaac Asimov.  This all sounds like success to me.  What would sound like success to the Futurians, to "the field's best writers," to Malzberg himself?  Science fiction triggering the development of a communist utopia?  An anarcho-capitalist utopia?  A culture in which people like Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore and Barry Malzberg get the critical attention Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow get, or an economy in which they get the kind of money Mick Jagger and Johnny Depp get?  Such absurd and extravagant hopes are bound to be dashed.  I think Thomas Disch is much closer to the truth when he claims science fiction has conquered the world than is Malzberg with his lamentations.)

"The Castaway" (1969)

"The Castaway" appeared in SF historian and editor Sam Moskowitz's anthology The Man Who Called Himself Poe, apparently a collection of stories about Edgar Allan Poe or written in his style. Most of the included pieces seem to be reprints, but a few, including Hamilton's contribution, were specifically written for the collection.  "The Castaway" would reappear in the collection What's It Like Out There? as well as The Best of Edmond Hamilton.

"The Castaway" stars Edgar Allan Poe himself.  A woman comes to his office, tries to convince him that she is a traveler from an idyllic far future, inhabiting the body of a 19th-century woman.  She informs Poe that another such far future traveler's mind inhabits his body, but, because he has greater than average intelligence and will, his native mind has dominated the interloping mind instead of vice versa.  The submerged future personality's memories have, however, expressed themselves in his fantastical stories--"The Domain of Arnheim," "The Tale of the Ragged Mountains," and "William Wilson" are specifically mentioned.  The mind supposedly submerged within Poe's brain is that of the future woman's lover, and she tries, through conversation, to get it to emerge so it can return to the future with her, but she is frustrated by Poe's powerful personality, and returns to the future alone, leaving the 19th-century woman she was dominating to wake up in horror in Poe's office, from which she precipitously flees.

Not bad.  I could not muster the energy to read The Ballad of the White Horse, but maybe this week I will read the three Poe stories Hamilton invokes in "The Castaway."

**********

And so we bid a fond farewell to The Best of Edmond Hamilton and The Best of Leigh Brackett.  I feel like this has been a very enjoyable and profitable project, and I'm happy I have more Brackett and Hamilton stories available to me both on my own bookshelves and at the internet archive.  For a personal look at these two giants of the SF community, their careers and their relationships with people like Ray Bradbury and John W. Campbell, Jr., check out an interview of Hamilton and Brackett conducted in 1976 by Dave Truesdale and Paul McGuire III pointed out to us a few days ago by commenter marzaat, available at the link.

Pretty Leslie by R. V. Cassill

She had to be capable of anything now.  When the surface of her life flowed on like rote--as it usually did--still the lower currents wandered among the stony surprises of an unknown stream bed.  

I spent some time in Des Moines on my recent Thanksgiving travels, and found that the public library was selling books for five cents each! Among those I purchased for this cheap as free price was R. V. Cassill’s Pretty Leslie, a Bantam paperback from 1964 with an interesting red cover that proclaims it to be “the brilliant, moving novel of modern sexual life!”, complete with exclamation point! (The book first appeared as a Simon and Schuster hardcover with a repulsive cover in 1963.) The back cover text of my paperback suggests this 295-page book is about a horny chick whose horniness gets her in some kind of trouble; I guess we’ve all been there, haven’t we?

Ronald Verlin Cassill was born in Iowa, and my copy of Pretty Leslie was once part of the Des Moines Public Library’s collection of books by Iowa authors. It is in quite good shape; evidently nobody found the sexalicious cover enticing  enough to actually sit in the library ("FOR USE IN LIBRARY ONLY") and read it. I guess it does look more like one of those "curl up all alone with" type of books.  But don’t think that I purchased Pretty Leslie in hopes it was a piece of pornography!  Not only did Cassill win various literary awards as well as the praises of the snobs at the New York Times and James Dickey (whose Deliverance I read about six years ago and am happy to recommend)--for two decades Cassill edited The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, a perch of great power and prestige in the world of wordsmithery!  All the evidence suggests that Pretty Leslie, even if it is about a horny chick, is a respectable piece of modern literature!

Leslie Skinner (Skinner?  hmmmm...) grew up in the tony Long Island suburb of Manhasset, and then moved to Manhattan and worked at a famous magazine. As our story begins, Leslie is 27 and has lived with her husband, Ben Daniels, a pediatrician, for three years in Sardis, Illinois.  Leslie loves attention, and is a skilled liar and clever manipulator: “She could, and did, still make anyone she wanted to fall in love with her.  The tactics were exactly those that had worked in Manhasset High...."  She flirts with Ben's friends and the men at the ad agency where she works part time, and tells white lies to her female coworkers to get them to tell her their own secrets--these secrets she relays to her husband.  Leslie, Ben reflects, has a "contagious lust for drama."

The back cover of Pretty Leslie, with its handwritten quote from the title character's diary, had given me hopes that this novel would be a first person narrative from a nymphomaniac or someone with some other psychological problem, but it is in fact written in the third person omniscient form, and we follow several characters, learn their backstories, look into their minds, and witness events from their points of view. In the first of the novel's four parts we learn Ben Daniels' deep dark secret: As a child growing up in Kansas he cunningly murdered another boy, meting out rough justice for that boy's having tortured a dog. The murder was ruled an accident, and Ben and his stepmother moved to New York City to start a new life. Throughout his life Ben has wrestled with a dilemma: can he unburden himself of this weighty secret, tell anyone, even his wife, how he coaxed Billy Kirkland behind a car parked on an incline and then, oops, released the brake so Billy was crushed?

In Part Two we learn about Leslie's past: she was fat, which scarred her mind, making her obsessed with keeping off weight.  She developed a slender figure as a young adult, but she is haunted by a "Fat Girl" and at times of stress will quickly gain weight and resort to girdles.  Cassill's novel is full of Freudian mumbo jumbo: we not only learn about the childhood incidents which have caused the various characters' adult fetishes and hangups, but read all about their stupid dreams, and all the characters fling around goofy psychological analyses of each other. Ben, for example, thinks that when Leslie gains weight it may be because she subconsciously wants to be pregnant.

Did I say "fetishes and hangups?"  Leslie wants to be treated roughly by a man, dominated, or at a least part of her she isn't quite ready to admit to, even to herself, does. One of Cassill's recurring themes is personalities split in two, entities composed of two opposing or complementary elements.  Leslie is both the sexy sophisticated professional and the Fat Girl, while Ben is both the cunning assassin of a child and the devoted preserver of children's lives.

Leslie's desire to be roughly handled is all mixed up in her attitudes about race.  While she calls herself a liberal and was "madly for Adlai" during her high school days, she was sexually aroused when she heard a horror story from the South about a black woman who was gang raped by whites while held up against the fender of a car, and was also excited when she saw a cop on the streets of Greenwich Village beating Puerto Rican boys with his billy club.  That very same cop later tried to make the moves on her, and when she resisted he hit her with the very same club, a beating she found cathartic.

Ben has his own complicated views of blacks and Hispanics, which are all mixed up in his beliefs in superstition and "the uncanny."  Ben's father died in Africa where his parents were missionaries devoted to helping whom Ben calls "black idiots;" a "witch doctor" tended Ben's father on his deathbed and Ben's mother soon after went insane. Ben himself volunteers two days a week at a clinic in an Illinois ghetto, looking after "Negro" children.  In an early part of the novel Ben fails to save a black baby (the little boy ate lead paint chips and dies of lead poisoning) and the same day revives an apparently doomed white little girl; Ben conceives the ridiculous notion that the events are inextricably linked, that somehow the little Negro boy was sacrificed to rescue the Caucasian child.

I should probably note that animals also play a role in the novel (there is the aforementioned dog, for example, as well as a pet bird, some pet fish, and a recurring reference to a chimpanzee) and that these animals play a role in the novel similar to that of the numerous minor nonwhite figures--they are alien inferiors, and the way the three white principals treat them reveals something about their character.  

First edition; are those gummy worms
or mitochondria?  Hideous!

The climax of Part Two comes when Ben is down in Caracas, at a medical conference where he learns about the plight of Latin American children.  After a party at her boss's fancy house Leslie has a brief affair with a social inferior, Donald Patch.  We learn all about Patch in Part Three.  A short man Leslie doesn't even like, Patch is a loutish commercial artist and science fiction fan (!) whom nobody respects; he uses an airbrush to paint highly detailed and "garishly" realistic depictions of people, aircraft and military equipment (sophisticated people like Leslie prefer abstract modern art, even if they work at an ad agency which makes its money by offering clients Patch's realistic work.)  Patch is a serial womanizer, but he has only ever had lower class women, including many "Negro" women--white, educated middle-class Leslie is a major catch for him.  Patch seduces women by being dismissive and cruel to them (I guess nowadays people call this "negging") and he is a violent lover who hurts Leslie.  This selfish creep brings Leslie to orgasm, something her kind and gentle husband has never done!

Also in Part Three Ben returns from Venezuela, his contact with poor Latin American kids having fired him with the idea that he and Leslie (who have been unable to have their own child) should adopt.  But when he suggests this idea to Leslie over dinner at a fancy restaurant she isn't even listening to him--she's thinking of Patch!  Over the succeeding weeks various clues convince Ben that Leslie had another man in his absence.  He tries to be modern and liberal about it ("If someone had her on her back, what's the harm in it?  Who am I to rock the boat?") but the knowledge of her infidelity has terrible effects on his mind; he becomes impotent, for example.  Patch badgers Leslie into resuming the affair; she spends her days in Patch's crummy apartment and her nights in the house Ben bought her.  Cassill suggests that Leslie needs both gentle Ben and brutal Patch to achieve satisfaction, and even that Ben and Patch are different versions of the same person, shaped by different circumstances. The climax of Part Three is when Leslie discovers she is finally pregnant!

In Part Four Leslie flees west and Ben finally realizes what is going on and confronts Patch; he and Patch (it appears) die, while Leslie, sower of discord, moves on to another phase of her life.

There are some good things in Pretty Leslie; the sex stuff is more or less entertaining, and the uncomfortable race stuff, Leslie and Ben's powerful but condescending, ambivalent, and at times hypocritical feelings about blacks and Hispanics, is interesting.  I liked the character of Donald Patch, the brutish artist consigned to the edges of polite society.  I give Pretty Leslie a passing grade.  But there are also lots of problems--it is certainly not as "brilliant" or "moving" as advertised.  Cassill doesn't have a very engaging prose style, and he uses lots and lots of elaborate metaphors and similes.  Some of these work, but some just weigh down the narrative, expressing an idea with more words but no more clarity than a simple declaration would have.  Some of the longer metaphorical passages I found distracting and, as my mind wandered, incomprehensible.

The profusion of metaphors suggests Cassill is trying to produce a serious literary novel; he also assumes a level of cultural literacy on the part of the reader, including plenty of references to artists like George Bellows and Willem De Kooning and fictional characters like Circe, Madame Bovary, and Mrs. Miniver.  Cassill never uses Maugham's name, but makes it clear Patch thinks of himself as Strickland, the protagonist of Somerset Maugham's Moon and Sixpence, an artist above the stifling strictures of bourgeois morality.

In the same way the overabundance of metaphors makes the book feel a little too long and too slow, there is a superfluity of minor, uninteresting characters who appear briefly and then never show up again; maybe Cassill could have combined some of them--how many friends and colleagues do the Daniels really need for the narrative to function?

A recent edition

The novel's biggest problem is probably that it is about a marriage, but neither the husband nor the wife is very interesting, and their relationship isn't compelling either.  Leslie and Ben Daniels are wishy washy--why should the reader be "moved" if Ben and Leslie themselves are so bland and hesitant, so ambivalent, about each other?  I can't remember why they even got married, what attracted them to each other in the first place, they never exhibit the kind of deep love or ferocious hate I want to see in drama. Don Patch, a man driven by big emotions who stands at odds with society, is the book's most interesting character--he acts and reacts, he feels things and he does things.  Leslie and Ben just go with the flow, they think and talk but can't make up their minds about what they feel and what they should to do, and end up feeling and doing very little.  Leslie and Ben are passive victims to whom things happen, and victims are boring--Patch is a villain or antihero who makes things happen.

A part of the problem is all that modern psychology jazz; it quashes the characters' agency as well as any romance or tragedy the story might have had, turning them into malfunctioning machines instead of flesh and blood people you can feel for.  The idea of people as deterministic machines may make sense as a description of real life, but it can ruin fiction, especially when the characters, instead of rebelling against determinism, blandy accept it.

Pretty Leslie wasn't a waste of my time, but Cassill lacks the sort of special something--depth of feeling, a beautiful style, a unique point of view, humor or a sense of fun, surprising ideas--that excites me about the "mainstream" or "literary" writers I really like, such as Proust or Nabokov or Maugham or Orwell or Henry Miller or Bukowski, so I don't think I will be reading any other of his numerous works.

Commemorating Banned Books Week with Henry Miller

I spent much of the recent holiday weekend at two Half Price Books locations, and I saw that they were already putting up the banners trumpeting Banned Books Week.  If it is good enough for HPB, it is good enough for MPFL—let’s beat the Banned Books Week rush and celebrate Banned Books Week three weeks early!

Unsubstantiated rumors have reached me that suggest kids are giving readings of Harry Potter books and Twilight books at Banned Books Week events—are these books really banned? I see piles of them at every bookstore and people can’t stop running their yaps about them. I’ve even heard that there are films associated with these volumes!

To commemorate Banned Books Week, which I fear is, like so many other holidays and commemorative weeks and months, just a stunt engineered to sell merchandise or garner attention for the self-appointed professional representatives of some special interest group, here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are presenting an excerpt from a book that was literally banned (copies imported into the United States and Canada were seized by the government as contraband), Henry Miller’s 1934 novel Tropic of Cancer.

I selected these four pages from my 1961 paperback edition because I think they are interesting and amusing, and give the reader an idea of Miller’s virtues as a writer and breadth of knowledge about and attitude towards literature, and also because they will perhaps give readers an idea of why the American and Canadian governments might consider the novel obscene—it is possible even today, in our enlightened age of trigger warnings and sensitivity training, that some readers may find something in these four pages that will give offense.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell

London!  Mile after mile of mean lonely houses, let off in flats and single rooms; not homes, not communities, just clusters of meaningless lives drifting in a sort of drowsy chaos to the grave!  He saw men as corpses walking.  The thought that he was merely objectifying his own inner misery hardly troubled him.  His mind went back to Wednesday afternoon, when he had desired to hear the enemy aeroplanes zooming over London.   

During my ill-fated pursuit of a doctorate in History I had a class on Modern Britain.  The professor was an expert on the press and publishing industry, and one class session was devoted to George Orwell.  I read Down and Out in London and Paris and Road to Wigan Pier for this session, both of which I heartily recommend for being well-written, interesting, and fun.  (I'd read 1984 and Animal Farm in junior high, and remembered them well enough that I thought I could wing it in class if the prof asked me about them.)  A woman in the class mentioned Keep the Aspidistra Flying, warning us all it was very bad and nobody should read it. Inquiries as to why it was so bad yielded no details--"It is just bad," she assured us.

This exchange stuck in my mind due to its mysteriousness; why did this student object so heartily to Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and with so little specificity?  Years later, I guess in the early 2000s, I read the novel myself, and developed theories as to what about the novel had inspired her distaste.  I found the novel quite good, and recently decided to reread it.  Last week, during rare moments of solitude on a cross-country road trip, I read an old hardcover university library copy of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, published by Harcourt, Brace and Company and printed in the USA.  The novel first appeared in 1936.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying is one of those novels in which an artist or writer has no money and is struggling to survive and achieve recognition for his art.  There are lots of these out there; Henry Miller's oeuvre comes to mind, as does Charles Bukowski's. There's also Knut Hamsun's Hunger.  Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage also includes some of this kind of material.  Even though these books are pretty thick on the ground, I tend to fall for them; there is something about the idea of the down and out writer, railing against society and counting his pennies, unsure of what tomorrow might bring, that appeals to me.

Prefacing the text proper of Keep the Aspidistra Flying is half a page of Bible verses, I Corinthians xiii, with the word "love" replaced with "money" (e.g., "abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money"), a childish sort of joke that gives us a foretaste of the book's theme.

Gordon Comstock, our hero, is an unsuccessful poet, "aged twenty-nine and rather moth-eaten already," consumed with envy of those with money, and convinced that everything worth having--charm, love, sex, a successful career--is the product of access to money:  "It was the lack of money, simply the lack of money, that robbed him of the power to 'write.'  He clung to that as an article of faith."  "All human relationships must be purchased with money.  If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you...."  The first two dozen pages are full of lines like that, as well as descriptions of Gordon toying with the coins in his pocket and fretting because he can't afford as many cigarettes as he would like to smoke, and so has to ration them out, resist smoking some today so he won't have to face a day without tobacco on the morrow.

One of the things I enjoy about Miller's and Bukowski's stories about down and out artists and writers is how the protagonists are total and absolute jerks.  They may rail against the evils of the world or capitalism or society or whatever, but they are no better-- they steal, they abuse women, they take advantage of friends, and so on.  This sets up dramatic tension, as the reader has to wonder to what extent the impoverished artist is the victim of our allegedly horrible society, and to what extent he has made his own bad luck.  (It also matches the reality of writers and artists I have met, a disreputable and snobbish lot who are always taking advantage of people, taking temporary jobs at art supply stores or bookstores so they can steal supplies, and moaning that the taxpayers should subsidize their decadent lifestyles because the art-buying public is too obtuse to voluntarily part with their lucre--which the artist himself of course has contempt for--to buy their paintings and sculptures.)

Gordon Comstock fits comfortably into this mold; he hates everybody and everything, from the advertisements pasted on the walls, to the books in the bookstore and lending library where he works, to the customers of the store, who come in two types; the educated snobs he hates for their money and polish, and the middle-class and lower-class readers of thrillers and romances whom he despises for their lack of taste and refinement. Comstock even hates Greta Garbo and Arthur Rackham!  He is so angry at the modern world that he looks forward to the inevitable mass war that will see bombers blasting civilization to rubble!  Gordon's seething hatred, his inexhaustible store of criticisms, complaints and calumnies, is amusing; some specimens of his spleen are funny in their own right, and the sheer volume of off-the-wall complaints creates, in Gordon, a laughably absurd, but still quite real, character.

Through flashbacks about his family and exemplary episodes chronicling Gordon's relationships in the mid-1930s with such people as his friend Ravelston (a wealthy and ineffectual socialist who edits a leftist periodical nobody reads called Antichrist), his long time girlfriend and office worker Rosemary (they have been dating two years and have not had sex yet), and his sister Julia (she barely makes a living for herself, but has been lending Gordon money for years which he has never paid back), we learn the hows and whys of Gordon's poverty.  As we expected, he has made his own bed, but blames society for his troubles.  When he does get fifty American dollars from selling a poem he doesn't use it to buy new clothes or pay back his sister Julia; he blows it all on booze and a whore within hours of cashing the check!  He blames this selfish and idiotic behavior on the fact that he can't be expected to know how to wisely spend money because he's never had money before.  When Gordon had a decent job he was good at (as copywriter at the ad agency where he met Rosemary) he quit, a decision he rationalizes as "declaring war on the money god."  He never finishes his second book of poetry because he's "too crushed by poverty to write." And so on.

Things get worse for Gordon as the novel progresses; he loses his crummy flat and lame job at the bookstore and lending library after, while inebriated, punching a police officer, so he has to take an even crummier apartment and an even lamer job at an even worse lending library, one which only caters to the lowest dregs of society, providing them books which are"published by special low-class firms and turned out by wretched hacks at a rate of four a year, as mechanically as sausages...."

Eventually, Rosemary has sex with Gordon out of pity.  ("It was magnanimity, pure magnanimity, that moved her.  His wretchedness had drawn her back to him.")  When Rosemary turns up some weeks later with news that she is pregnant with his child, Gordon suddenly comes to his senses. He abandons his war on the money-god, gets his job at the ad agency back, throws the unfinished manuscript of his second book of verse down a storm drain, and marries Rosemary. After resisting bourgeois life and its rules for years, the appearance of his child has inspired him to embrace middle-class life. To Rosemary's amazement, he even buys an aspidistra, the hardy plant which to him has long symbolized boring middle-class pretensions.

There is a lot to like about Keep the Aspidistra Flying.  I've already told you I enjoy Gordon acting like a total jerk to everybody.  Numerous minor characters are also entertaining.  At the same time that Gordon's misadventures are funny, Orwell manages to convey to the reader a sense of his desperation and frustration as he faces cold and uncomfortable residences, doubts about his poetry career, boring jobs, and guilt at how poorly he treats Ravelston, Rosemary and Julia, who are always trying to help him despite his trespases against them and his self-destructive behavior.  The book is also full of interesting tidbits about literature and literary life, like a quick rundown of authors popular in the 1930s, many of whom are largely forgotten today, and a description of lending libraries, which, unlike the free public libraries I have been familiar with all my life, are private businesses that charge a few pennies to their customers for each book "borrowed." 

Orwell makes a number of surprising and interesting choices with the novel.  It is definitely strange for Gordon to throw his manuscript, the product of years of work, down the drain!  We expect writers to glorify writers, and we expect lefties like Orwell to denounce advertising, but in the end of the book Gordon turns his back on literature decisively and embraces a job producing deceptive ad copy.  Orwell's attacks on advertising seem sincere, so the reader wonders what he is trying to say by having Gordon's salvation come from producing catchphrases and slogans that will fool people into purchasing items they don't need, like foot deodorant.  (Deodorant, like advertising, is apparently a hot button issue with socialists; at Rutgers a history prof in a 19th century class told us that the selling of deodorant was a scam, and just recently we had Bernie Sanders disparagingly bringing up deodorant.  At the CUNY Grad Center there was a perennially disheveled Marxist prof who famously smelled bad.)

There is a real ambiguity about the book's attitude about capitalism and the bourgeoisie; to what extent does Orwell share the at times contradictory criticisms he puts in Gordon and Ravelston's mouths?  Should we see Keep the Aspidistra Flying as the story of a man who is stupidly rebelling against capitalism and then makes his peace with it and lives a better life thereby, or as the story of a brave man who follows his principles as long as he can, and is eventually crushed?  This ambiguity is stark when one considers that Gordon's character arc is similar to that of Winston Smith in 1984; Smith wages a (pathetic) war on the Big Brother government, and in the end of the novel embraces ("loves") Big Brother, while our man Gordon Comstock pursues his own quixotic struggle against "the money god" only to rejoin the ranks of the strap hanging army of salarymen at the end of the book because he loves his wife and baby.

Besides 1984, Keep the Aspidistra Flying reminded me of Don Quixote, the tale of a mad man sometimes seen as the portrayal of a man who suffers (and makes others suffer) because he has noble values in our corrupt world, and A Clockwork Orange, in which the evil protagonist is reformed by the prospect of becoming a father.
     

So, if I am giving a big thumbs up to it, why did that student in my late 1990s class object to the novel?  I'm guessing it is because the book is a resounding endorsement of traditional family values and, by 1990s (and 21st century) standards, totally "politically incorrect."  In that first chapter in the bookstore Gordon heaps scorn on feminists, homosexuals, and women who like to read popular fiction about love and sex.  The book is full of what I guess you would call "essentialist thinking."  Gordon, like "all small frail people hated to be touched," while we are told fat men typically have a good humor and never admit to being fat: "No fat person ever uses the word 'fat' if there is any way of avoiding it....A fat man is never so happy as when he is describing himself as 'robust.'"  Scots get a similar treatment.  Gordon's competition for title of "Most Villainous Character" in the novel is a physically deformed businessman of low scruples; his physical ugliness represents his moral ugliness in a way that is common in literature, but which nowadays is likely to be seen as declasse or even a "microaggression" against people with disabilities.  

At the end of the book we get an unambiguous, unalloyed indictment of abortion. First the emotional case against abortion.  Gordon, even though his modus operandi though the whole novel has been to act selfishly and to hope English society will be obliterated by enemy bombs, finds abortion unthinkably revolting: "'Whatever happens we're not going to do that.  It's disgusting....I'd sooner cut my right hand off than do a thing like that.'"  Then a few pages later the scientific case against abortion. Gordon goes to a public library and looks at medical textbooks with illustrations of fetuses; Orwell describes in detail a six-month-old and a nine-month-old fetus--Gordon is "surprised" that "they should begin looking human so soon."  He'd thought it would look like a blob with a nucleus!  Finally the moral case against abortion.  "Its future, its continued existence perhaps, depended on him.  Besides, it was a bit of himself--it was himself.  Dare one dodge such a responsibility as that?"

Women in the novel are less interesting and well-rounded than the male characters; there are briefly sketched women we are supposed to find repellant (the feminist bookstore customer, a suspicious public library employee, the whores, or "tarts" as Orwell styles them), while the important female characters (Julia and Rosemary) are there to be Gordon's victims; they are there to demonstrate what a creep Gordon is and lack inherent interest.  Gordon is not punished for treating Julia and Rosemary so poorly, and a minor character (the good-natured fat man alluded to above) cheats on his wife repeatedly, but after hitting him in the head with a glass decanter she takes him back.  

I believe I have diagnosed my former classmate's allergy to Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and I "get" why she wouldn't like it or recommend it to a class of grad students in the humanities and social sciences, but I will have to disagree with her overall assessment of the book.  I love Orwell's clear writing style, and Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a fun novel, full of laughs and period interest, and its somewhat ambiguous and idiosyncratic take on social and political issues may offer surprises to today's readers.  Definitely worth a read.

Six 1940s erotic stories by Anaïs Nin

Scan of my copy

With that Twilight sequel in the theatres it seems like everybody is talking about erotica written by women.  MPorcius Fiction Blog is not afraid to jump on this trend!  On Valentine's Day, appropriately enough, I purchased at Half Price Books a quality-sized paperback edition of Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus.  My copy is in quite good shape for a used book, which pleased me because I love the cover: I love the colors, the typeface, and the photo.  I even like the somewhat rough, matte paper they printed the cover on.

The story goes that in 1940 a wealthy weirdo approached writer Henry Miller and offered to pay Miller a dollar a page for pornographic stories for his private personal collection.  Miller suggested to Anaïs Nin that she also write some erotica for the mysterious "Collector," and over the course of a few years she did so as a means to supplement her income, particularly in times of financial hardship.  Several other struggling writers joined in.  In the 1970s Nin decided to publish some of these stories, and in 1977 Delta of Venus, which contains fifteen of them, was presented to the public by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and achieved some measure of acclaim.  I'm a fan of Miller's, and have enjoyed the Nin I have read, and so I have been curious about Delta of Venus for years.  This week I read about 50 pages from the collection, the first six of its stories.

The six stories, I was disappointed to find, are quite poor, lacking style, feeling, plot and character.  Most are so full of rape, incest, pedophilia and violence that I found them more disturbing than arousing.  (That collector must have been a real piece of work!)  It was a mistake to read so many in a row, because they get really monotonous.

I am lead to wonder about all that critical praise you can see on the back cover of the book and hear about on wikipedia.  Maybe "erotica written by women" is just not for me.  Maybe the stories in the rest of the book are better, but I am loathe to go on.  In fact, my original plan was to read half the book (Delta of Venus totals 250 pages) but I couldn't do it.

In Nin's defense, she was writing this stuff to order for a freakazoid, and said freako specifically enjoined Miller, Nin, and all the other down-and-out writers who took up his commission to "Concentrate on sex" and "Leave out the poetry."  The "Collector" complained that George Barker's submissions, which Nin herself loved, were "too surrealistic."  Nin herself fully recognized how weak these stories were; according to wikipedia she worried that they could negatively impact her reputation.  In 1941 she wrote the collector a letter, saying she and the other writers hated him and explaining to him that his mechanical monotonous view of sex was boring, that it was emotion and human relationships that made sex exciting.    

(The passages from Nin's diaries that describe the collector and include the "we hate you" letter are all reproduced in the front matter of Delta of Venus, which is far better reading than the first six tales in the body of the book.)

Three of the many Penguin editions of the collection: gotta catch 'em all!

So, if these stories are bad, and Nin recognized they were bad, why did they get published? (In two volumes--Delta of Venus was followed by Little Birds, another selection of Nin's dollar-a-page erotica.)  Nin tells us in the Preface to this volume that, "I finally decided to release the erotica for publication because it shows the beginning efforts of a woman in a world that had been the domain of men."  According to Nin, for centuries erotica had only been written by men, and this makes Nin, who tried to write about sex from a woman's perspective, "using a woman's language," a pioneer.

People interested in Nin and her milieu and/or the history of women in (erotic) literature should check out Delta of Venus but I can't recommend the six stories I read as entertainment, though the  ability of some of them to shock cannot be denied.

[UPDATE, April 18, 2019:  I read four more stories from Delta of Venus and blogged about them.]

For a description of each of these six stories, read on.  Adults only, please!

A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin

Five or six years ago I read some of the diaries of Anaïs Nin, the 1931-34 volume of the expurgated diaries published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and one of the unexpurgated volumes, I can't recall if it was Incest or Fire.  I remember enjoying them, but I can recall only very little of what went on in them. The only clear image left is of Nin at the psychoanalyst's office; having lived for years in New York apartments where you could always hear the televisions, arguments, and sexual escapades of other tenants, I admired the thick curtains in the head shrinker's office, which were said to be able to block out any outside sounds.

Anyway, while dusting my wife's bookshelves last week I came upon the 1994 paperback edition of Nin's 1959 novel, A Spy in the House of Love.  If the advertisements in the back are any indication, the book was marketed exclusively to women, but, I am, you know, open-minded like, and early this week I read the 166 page novel.

Sabina lives in New York City with her loving husband, Alan.  Sabina leads Alan to believe she is an actress, that she is with a theatre company that performs in New England.  In fact, during these absences, as well as at other times, Sabina is with one or another of her lovers, in Manhattan, up in Provincetown, or over in Long Island.  These lovers include Phillip, an opera singer, Mambo, an Afro-Caribbean mathematician and drummer, and John, an RAF war veteran who suffers from survivors' guilt.

Sabina is unable to find satisfaction with one man; she is driven by a desire to experience all the world has to offer, she aches to live more than one life, be more than one Sabina.  With each of her lovers, Sabina plays a different role, leads a different life, is a different Sabina.

Sabina is fundamentally restless; she can't settle for one life, but the lies and betrayals required to pursue many lives create terrible anxieties, make her feel like a spy in an enemy country. When she is with Alan in their apartment and hears the fog horn of a ship on the Hudson she wishes she could be on the ship; when they play records the music conjures in her mind visions of Paris, Germany, Haiti, all the many places she would rather be.  But when she is away from Alan, she often wishes she was back with him, and after enjoying a tryst with one of her lovers she often feels guilt over betraying Alan, and shame over arousing in her lovers a devotion she cannot reciprocate.  Sabina believes men (her philandering father, for example) have a freedom women lack, that they can enjoy sex without love, without guilt, and she aspires to achieve this freedom herself.

A Spy in the House of Love is more of a character study than a story; there isn't much plot. I sort of expected the ending to show Sabina either achieving her freedom, abandoning guilt and learning to enjoy her promiscuity, or, giving up the life of a "spy" and learning to love the man who loved her the most sincerely and generously, Alan. Instead, the ending of the book is surreal and I didn't quite get it; Sabina gets long-winded advice from two mysterious mentor characters, then she listens to Beethoven and then, apparently, keels over.  Maybe this is just a symbolic death?

I expected the novel to include explicit sex scenes, like, say, Henry Miller's Sexus.  There are in fact no such scenes.      

The book is full of metaphors; presumably some readers will embrace them while others find them ridiculous. Here is a sample, from pages 50-51, describing the aphrodisiac qualities of what Nin calls "Debussy's Ile Joyeuse" (apparently this is an unconventional spelling):

The model notes arrived charged like a caravan of spices, gold mitres, ciboriums and chalices bearing messages of delight setting the honey flowing between the thighs, erecting sensual minarets on men's bodies as they lay flat on the sand. 

There are lots of odd, clever bits that I liked.  Sabina's guilt drives her to talk, to confess, so she sits in bars and tells exotic stories to people for hours, leaving vague whether they are tales from her own life, or from the lives of friends, or just things she read.  She so needs to unburden herself that she will telephone random numbers late at night and talk to absolute strangers.  One of Phillip's hobbies is making his own telescope, even grinding his own lenses.  He hangs an open umbrella from the ceiling of his apartment over his half-finished telescope, because the running of the children who live upstairs rains plaster dust on his delicate lenses.  Sabina suspects the source of her behavior lies in her youth, when she eschewed sunbathing and instead "moon-bathed," laying naked in bed before open windows at night, letting the rays of the moon wash over her.  It seems that some people back then thought exposure to moon beams could have strange effects on the body and mind.  Sixteen-year old Sabina believed her moon-baths gave her skin a "different glow," and her friends asked what it was that had changed about her; was she using drugs?  Mom complained she looked like a consumptive.

Nin's peers according to Pocket Books' marketing people: Jackie Collins, Judy Blume, & Joan Collins

A Spy in the House of Live is an entertaining, interesting novel if you are willing to dispense with a traditional plot.  You academic types can get some additional mileage out of it by using it as a lens to examine womens' attitudes towards and perceptions of men, and whites' view of non-whites.  On page 54 we find Sabina, having taken off her wedding ring on the way to Phillip's, is walking "with her whole foot on the ground as the latins and the negroes do."  Mambo, on pages 67 and 74, bitterly complains that white women pursue him not for himself, but because of the "sensual power" of the black race.  "He felt that she embraced in him, kissed on his lips the music, the legends, the trees, the drums of the island he came from...."

A worthwhile read.

Lesser known 1950s stories: W. Guin, G. C. Edmondson, & Lion Miller

Like some kind of genre fiction Schliemann, yesterday I dug into Groff Conklin's 13 Great Stories of Science-Fiction in hopes of uncovering lost treasures, reading stories by three authors I had never even heard of.  I will allow the reader to judge whether the fact that I was unfamiliar with Wyman Guin, G. C. Edmondson, and Lion Miller reflects these writers' obscurity or my own lamentable ignorance.

"Volpla" by Wyman Guin (1952)

This is a first-person narrative with an unsympathetic narrator.  Our protagonist is what we would now call a genetic engineer, living in sight of the Pacific Ocean with his family.  His wife and kids have little idea what he is doing in his lab, which he keeps locked at all times.  At the start of the story he has just created a new life form, two foot tall people with pterosaur-like wings.

How unsympathetic is this guy?  Well, he's not a murderer or anything, but he's a callous self-absorbed prankster who is always making jokes at others' expense.  His generous wife calls him "eccentric," and at one point his son requests "Can it, will you?  You're always gagging around." The things that will likely leap out at your 21st century eyes are how the scientist calls his little girl "wench" the way guys on old TV shows call their daughters "pumpkin" or "princess," and how he pinches the maid's ass in front of his wife and the wife treats it like a joke. Maybe these things would seem innocuous in 1952?  Maybe "wench" was not as eroticized as it is nowadays?

The scientist pulls some other stunts that show his anti-social nature.  Most importantly, his big idea of what to do with the little flying people (he calls them "volplas") he has created is to fool them into thinking their race came to Earth from outer space centuries ago and then secretly set them loose in the wild.  Then he will follow their discovery by humankind in the newspapers.  The narrator thinks it will be hilarious watching journalists, scientists and the government trying to figure out the origin of the volplas and what to do about them.  He figures that, once linguists have learned the artificial language he will make up and teach the volplas, that some of the goofier of his fellow Californians will build a cult around volpla wisdom.

The joke goes awry, and at the end of the story the volplas, over one hundred strong, hijack the first unmanned rocket probe to Venus and leave Earth behind.  Our narrator has, perhaps, learned a little humility and sympathy for others.

This story is pretty good; a little different, never boring or irritating.  I was genuinely curious about what would happen next, and about the odd main character.  "Volpla" first appeared in Galaxy and has been anthologized several times.

While I had never heard of him, the SFE praises Guin's work as "brilliant" and "powerful," and in 2013 the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, which aims to bring attention to SF writers whom the judges feel are unjustly forgotten, went to Guin.

"Technological Retreat" by G. C. Edmondson

This story first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; this is its only book publication.

Two aliens that look like fish land in the woods in the United States, where they encounter a businessman who is fishing.  They set up a trade deal with the businessman; they provide him a supply of pen-like devices that can project two rays.  One ray softens metal so it can be safely shaped like clay, while the second ray hardens the metal up again.  With this device an ordinary person can quickly repair an automobile fender or engine or any other metal item.  In return the aliens accept sea food from a deli, which they consider a delicacy and believe they can sell back home.

The businessman expects to get rich selling the "plasticizers" for a thousand bucks each, but within two days the feds seize all his stock, and then it becomes clear that the aliens are trading plasticizers to people all over the world, flooding the market and reducing prices to less than a dollar.  Like the silencing device in the Arthur C. Clarke story we talked about in our last episode, the plasticizer is soon used for mischief; kids dissolve train tracks and limousines, for example.  Over in Russia the Communist Party, we learn, is losing its ability to maintain its power because people can just melt down their firearms.

The fish aliens have lifespans of thousands of years, and assume humans do as well, and return to Earth a century later, expecting to drop off another shipment of platicizers and pick up a shipment of caviar and anchovy paste.  They are surprised to find that not only are their business contacts dead, but that human civilization has collapsed to the level of the stone age, due to the destabilizing nature of the plasticizer.

I guess this is a satire of businesspeople, government, and the way technology can change society, but it is neither funny nor insightful.  For my taste it is too broad, too exaggerated; obviously a device like the plasticizer would change society, like the wheel, steel, the telephone, the computer, etc., but throw us back to the stone age?  I am disappointed that Edmondson spent so much time on long-winded jokes about the Elks Lodge and government bureaucracy, and on one liners ("'I'll have to call Washington,' Simpson said....'Don't tell me he slept here too...'"), and so little exploring the idea of how the plasticizer would change society; he doesn't describe the societal collapse, just presents us with it as a punchline.        

It wouldn't be fair of me to fail a story because the author intended it to be a light series of jokes, while I wish it was a serious story that speculated about technology and society (like, say, Gene Wolfe's "The Doctor of Death Island.")  So I guess this one gets a borderline passing grade.

"The Available Data on the Worp Reaction" by Lion Miller (1953)

This dude's first name is "Lion;" that's pretty cool, right?  King of the jungle and all that!

Lion Miller only has one credit on isfdb, for this story, which first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and was anthologized numerous times, including in an anthology of "Science Fiction Humor," Laughing Space.

Is there any chance this is a pen name for a more famous author? "Lion" does sound like "lyin'," after all.

This story is only 4 pages long, and it is not funny.  Perhaps it would be considered a "shaggy dog" story.  A retarded young man, Aldous Worp, from age six to age 26, collects rusty old junk from the city dump.  At age 27 (with no training or tools) he builds it into a vehicle that can levitate.  The world is amazed, and scientists and military men hope to discover the secret of the device.  But Worp never learned to talk, and when people start snooping around his machine he dismantles it.  The End.

What can I say about such a story?  It did remind me of the "Tower Power" episode of Sanford & Son, which, as a kid, fascinated me.

This is one of those stories for whom I am not the target audience.   I only rarely find science fiction humor stories to be amusing, and would never crack open a volume like Laughing Space.  (In my opinion even the great Gene Wolfe stumbled, painfully, with his humor piece, "How I Lost the Second World War and Helped Turn Back the German Invasion.") I certainly didn't foresee 13 Great Stories of Science-Fiction including a high proportion of humor pieces; the epithet "great" led me to expect "serious" stories with some kind of emotional power or technological or sociological speculation.

************

The Guin was a worthwhile read, the Edmondson wasn't painful, and the Miller was brief. And it is always good to explore new authors and titles, I suppose.

There are still stories in Conklin's 13 Great Stories of Science-Fiction by big name authors like Poul Anderson and John Wyndham, as well as by authors with whom I am not familiar, so I will be back.

Post Office by Charles Bukowski

Yesterday I reread Charles Bukowski’s first novel, Post Office, copyright 1971.  This slim volume (the 1974 Black Sparrow edition I read is just 115 pages) is the semi-autobiographical story of Bukowski’s alter ego “Henry Chinaski,” who works on and off for the postal service in Los Angeles as a carrier and then a clerk, taking time off to go to Texas where he marries an heiress (she divorces him) and then to try to live off his winnings at the racetrack.  The book describes Chinaski’s generally sad, and sometimes brutish, relationships with women, as well as his encounters with various strange characters.  There is little overarching plot; for the most part Post Office is a series of humorous anecdotes, written in a simple, smooth style that employs short and direct sentences.  As these anecdotes pile up, however, they do succeed in generating a sense of the sadness and futility of life.

I think Post Office is laugh out loud funny, but it is crudely sexist, and I do not doubt that some might find it offensive on that score. The unflattering picture Bukowski paints of the black men he meets over the course of his postal career may also raise the ire of readers. Part of the appeal of Post Office is Bukowski’s effort to shock us. Through a little intellectual jujitsu one could perhaps claim that Chinaski’s objectifying women and treating them shabbily is Bukowski’s way of indicting our sexist society. I doubt you could convincingly claim that, when Bukowski describes how blacks at the post office do no work because they will assault any supervisor who gives them an assignment, he is criticizing the racism of our society.

I have no idea how accurate his depiction is, but I found Bukowski’s description of what it was like working in the post office in the 1960s interesting. But I’m also the guy who enjoys the scenes in Moby Dick about whaling. On the other hand the paragraphs about horseracing: the odds, how to choose the winner, etc., bored me.

Bukowski is similar in some ways to Henry Miller. In both men’s most successful fiction we find the first person narrative of a writer, living down and out, casually describing to us his misbehavior and unconventional and/or uncouth opinions, implicitly justifying his misbehavior by pointing out how corrupt and absurd the world and people in general are. Where Bukowski differs from Miller is in how unpretentious he is; Miller repeatedly tells us how his friends proclaim him a genius, Miller talks about his love of such great cultural figures as Proust and Dostoevsky and cult authors like Hamsun, Miller thinks we are interested in his opinions about India and the theories of Spengler, Miller regales us with page after page of his surreal dreams. For the most part Bukowski sticks to funny anecdotes which reveal (revel in?) how much of an outsider and how much of a jerk he is, and sticks to his straightforward pithy style.

I read all of Bukowski’s novels in the 1990s, thinking Ham on Rye the best and Pulp the worst. Post Office made me laugh quite a bit, so I am considering rereading more of Bukowski soon.

Crazy Cock by Henry Miller

I looked over and organized my notes on Henry Miller yesterday because I had decided to finally, over a year after buying it, read Crazy Cock. I have been reluctant to read it because Moloch was so weak, and like Moloch, Crazy Cock was an early work of Miller’s, written before his breakthrough Tropic of Cancer and never published in Miller’s lifetime.

Written in the 1920s, Crazy Cock is based on Miller’s relationship with his second wife. As depicted in Crazy Cock, the marriage of Tony Bring (the Miller stand in) and his wife Hildred, a waitress at an establishment in bohemian Greenwich Village, has been a strange and difficult one from the start. Hildred, for example, endeavors to keep their marriage a secret from her friends, coworkers and family. Then a strange woman, Vanya, a depressed artist who makes eerie dolls, comes on the scene, and in a flash becomes Hildred’s inseparable best friend, and Tony’s formidable rival for his wife’s affections.

Written in the third person, unlike Miller’s later works, the novel lacks their immediacy and power. Crazy Cock is also burdened with too many “literary” descriptions of the sky and trees and so forth. (“White jockeys with spurs of malachite were scudding through the low-hanging clouds that hung like collars of fat about the slender ribs of the skyscrapers.”)

The triangular relationship of the three principles is interesting, of course, but Crazy Cock provides only a glimpse of the many themes and episodes that make The Rosy Crucifixion books, which cover the same period as Crazy Cock, touching, amusing and exciting: Miller’s many odd friends who tell him he is a genius and lend him money he likely won’t pay back, his love of good music, good food and good books, his love of the burlesque and of riding his bicycle, his frustrating efforts to become a writer, his agonizing desire to see Europe.

That glimpse of Miller’s mature work comes mostly in Part 5 (this 200 page book is split into six parts of several chapters each), the best section of Crazy Cock. There are loving references to Proust, the funny and sad story of a Christmas visit by the trio to Tony’s long-suffering parents’ home, and a stark snapshot of the complexity of the Tony-Hildred-Vanya relationship: Tony comes home drunk, and goes into a violent rage when he finds Vanya in his bed with his wife. He physically ejects Vanya from the bed, and in the melee punches Hildred to the floor, and minutes later, when the booze and anger have made him sick, it is Vanya who nurses him and mops up the mess he makes in the bathroom.

If Part 5 is a sort of prototype of the Miller I enjoy, Part 6 resembles the parts of Miller’s work I often find tedious: long surrealistic and symbolist passages and bizarre dreams that leave me yawning.

I wouldn’t recommend Crazy Cock to anyone who hasn’t read Miller’s later, more famous work, but devoted Miller fans will find it interesting, and Part 5 (about 55 pages) could stand on its own as a good short story or novella. Some will find Erica Jong’s 1991 foreword denouncing the United States amusing. Mary Dearborn’s introduction provides useful information on Miller’s life, and warns the reader about the anti-Semitism to be found in Crazy Cock. In fact, Crazy Cock has about one tenth as much anti-Semitism as Moloch.                   

Notes on Henry Miller

I first encountered the work of Henry Miller while at Rutgers.  Not in a class, of course.  I was killing time between classes in the Alexander Library and took a paperback copy of Sexus off the shelf and flipped through it, looking for the pornographic scenes, of which there were quite a few.  Years later, while living in New York, I bought new editions of the three volumes of the Rosy Cruxificion trilogy, Sexus, Plexus and Nexus, and read them for real, from start to finish.  I can still remember sitting on Fifth Avenue, not far from the Guggenheim, my back to Central Park, laughing as I read the scene in Sexus in which Miller, sitting in the passenger seat of a car speeding through Long Island, tries to convince his friends to drive him to Walt Whitman’s birth site.

                “What about visiting Walt Whitman’s birthplace?” I said aloud.

                “What?” yelled McGregror.

                “Walt Whitman!” I yelled.  “He was born somewhere on Long Island.  Let’s go there.”

                “Do you know where?”

                “No, but we could ask someone.”

                “Oh the hell with that!  I thought you knew where.  These people out here wouldn’t know who Walt Whitman was.  I wouldn’t have known myself only you talk about him so goddamned much.  He was a bit queer, wasn’t he?  Didn’t you tell me he was in love with a bus driver?  Or was he a nigger lover?  I can’t remember any more.”

Just typing that passage (from page 123 of my edition) made me laugh.  In that passage you find the appeal of Miller (to me at least) in a nutshell: funny, literary, and shockingly coarse, crude and offensive, or as we say today, “politically incorrect.”

Last year I reread the Rosy Crucifixion and read for the first time several other Miller books, and then filled my e-mails to friends (among them poet and playwright Jason Irwin, immortalized as the first commenter on this blog) with discussion of Miller.  In the interest of keeping all my literary notes in one place, I paste below excerpts relating to Miller from my correspondence. 

JULY 18, 2012

I read Tropic of Capricorn, which has some good parts, and one part I found very surprising, in which Miller complains that after they built the Williamsburg Bridge the Jews invaded his beloved Brooklyn neighborhood and ruined it. Then I reread Sexus, which I think is probably Miller's best book. It has the most sex, the fewest bizarre surrealist sequences, and has a more structured plot than Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. The Tropic books are mostly disconnected anecdotes divided by the weird surrealist transports and irrational hateful rants about how he wishes the world would explode or drown in blood, how he respects a man who murders his neighbor more than a man who has a 9 to 5 job, etc. I love the anecdotes, and the insane misanthropic diatribes can be fun, but those surrealistic sequences put me to sleep. I suspect, however, that Miller thinks that those nonsensical scenes are his best work.

Unable to find it in any of the libraries out here in the wilderness, I bought Crazy Cock at the Half Price Books just west of Des Moines. I love the cover; I wish my copies of Sexus, Plexus and Nexus had such nice covers. I have not read Crazy Cock yet.

I got Moloch from the Simpson College Library. It also has a nice cover. Unfortunately, it is the worst book by Miller I have yet read. A lot of the usual Miller stuff is in there; he works for the messenger company, he cheats on his wife (in one scene he has to borrow money for his wife's abortion from his mulatto girlfriend), there are several characters from his other work, like the mulatto girlfriend and the fat Jewish medical student (I think he's called Kronski in Sexus), there is an Indian, other people keep telling Miller he is a great guy and a genius, etc. But the style is not there, partly because it is written in the third person, so it is not nearly as fun.

The most interesting things about Moloch are the fact that the whole book is an anti-Semitic diatribe, and Miller's more sympathetic treatment of his first wife and his child. The book being in the third person, Miller not only says again and again that Jews are ugly and dirty, but has Jewish characters themselves admit this. As for the first wife, the Miller character loves her and tries to reform, tries to stop cheating and make things work out right with her. He also goes on about how he loves his little daughter. In his other work I don't recall Miller showing any sympathy or affection for his first wife and their daughter. In fact, in Sexus Miller takes credit for improving his wife by making her more sexually liberated; in Moloch it is just the opposite, the wife gets the husband to behave.

Perhaps the best scene in Sexus is when Miller gets a letter from his hero, Knut Hamsun, a stupid and embarrassing letter which breaks Miller's heart but of course had me laughing out loud. I read Hamsun's Hunger in the '90s and have decided to reread it. It turns out that Robert Bly translated it in the late 90s... I doubt it was his translation I read, I think I read an old mouldering hardcover. Anyway, today, when I take the laundry I will seek a copy of this Bly trans at the Franklin Street branch of the Des Moines library.

I'm reading Thomas Mann's “The Black Swan.” I liked The Magic Mountain and “Death In Venice” but this thing is damn lame. It is mostly two women talking about humanity's relationship with “Nature,” largely as reflected in the menstrual cycle and menopause! Thank heavens it is short.

AUGUST 23, 2012

I just finished Plexus, book two of The Rosy Crucifixion.  It was good, because there were lots of scenes of Miller being down and out and being a dick to everybody.  He and his second wife Mona try to sell candy door to door, try to run a speakeasy, hurry down to Florida during a real estate boom, and other crazy schemes, all of which end up with them stealing money from their creditors.  Most of the time they live on money Mona extracts from her "admirers" (she assures Miller that she never has sex with them, but also insists he never meet them.)  Fortunately the many long scenes in which Miller's friends tell Miller he is a genius don't bother me.   

Unfortunately, way too many of Plexus's 640 pages are given over to surrealist and Dadaist scenes, including dream sequences and a scene in which Miller retells the story of Goldilocks; in Miller's version Goldilocks is stripped, cooked, and eaten by the Three Bears.  There is also lots of mystical doubletalk, especially after Miller discovers Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West.

Next week I will start Nexus, the third volume of The Rosy Crucifixion.  I think I will read some Thomas Mann stories this weekend.

SEPTEMBER 2, 2012
I read Thomas Mann's "Tonio Kroger," a story Miller specifically praises in Plexus.  I liked it, but, as usual, I found Mann too long-winded, thought he was belaboring his points, and included too many long "philosophical" dialogues.  I am almost finished with Nexus, the third volume of The Rosy Crucifixion.  After reading the anti-Semitic Moloch it is kind of funny how every good character in The Rosy Crucifixion is Jewish, and how Miller will say things like "I have never met a Gentile of genius" and "every Jewish doctor I met was a man passionately interested in music, art, and literature."  Miller is a wacky character, it is hard to take much of the stuff he says seriously.