1958 SF (?) stories by Richard Gehman, Rog Phillips, Gerald Kersh & John Steinbeck

It is time to break out into some new territory here at MPorcius Fiction Log and read four stories by people I have never blogged about before.  Our guide on this expedition will be Judith Merril, a woman whose fan base may not be all that big (Barry Malzberg in a 2016 column for Galaxy's Edge reports that Donald Wollheim told him that Merril's famous anthology, England Swings! SF, "was the worst-selling Ace paperback in history") but its members are dedicated and powerful.  Merril, by including them in the fourth installment of "The Most Acclaimed S-F Anthology," is telling us that these four stories are among 1958's "greatest," so let's give them a shot.

"Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" by Richard Gehman 

Richard Gehman appears to be a guy who wrote some novels and did lots of Hollywood and Broadway journalism, writing articles about celebrities for TV Guide and penning biographies of Bogie, Jerry Lewis, Gary Cooper, and the restaurant Sardi's.  He apparently also hung around with the "Rat Pack."  Gehman only has two fiction entries at isfdb.  Merril's little intro to the two-page "Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" here in SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Fourth Annual Volume tells us it is a satire and points out that Playboy editor Ray Russell warned her he didn't think it fit into her SF anthology. 

I'm a little reluctant to say this story is a total waste of time because I haven't read any Kerouac so maybe nuances are going over my head, and maybe people familiar with Kerouac love "Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" when first they encounter it.  But to me it is just a bunch of puns and goofs on hipster slang.  For example, the protagonist, a mouse, tries pot, but it doesn't give him any kicks, so he tries pan.  Later, still in pursuit of a transcendent experience, the mouse runs up and down a clock like in the nursery rhyme.  Then he gives up on trying to get high from external sources ("in the final analysis, he had to look inward") and writes a novel and gets rich.

I guess Merril considers this SF because animals talk, but there is no speculation in it, no escapist adventure, no science--it's a gentle parody of a cultural phenomenon.  I have to suspect she included it in her book of 1958's "greatest science-fiction and fantasy" stories in an effort to make it look like SF readers are sophisticates conversant with important literary movements and not just pimple-faced freaks who know how to use a slide rule. 

"Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" appeared first in Playboy under the pen name Martin Scott, alongside photos by Shel Silverstein of his trip to Moscow and a story by Richard Matheson.  Merril loved it so much she included it in 1967's SF: The Best of the Best; Gehman didn't get his name on the cover among those of Brian Aldiss, Clifford Simak and Damon Knight (who famously panned Merril's novel The Tomorrow People at some risk to his career), but is instead lumped in with Steve Allen under the description "eleven other contemporary masters."  "Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" would be reprinted again in 1974 in a McGraw-Hill textbook, Fantasy: The Literature of the Marvelous.  I guess if he is in a text book he really is a master!

"The Yellow Pill" by Rog Phillips

The pill in "Mother's Little Helper" is yellow, isn't it?  Now there's a great song.  And it's about a contemporary social issue--I wonder if Merril considered it one of the greatest SF songs of 1966.     

"The Yellow Pill" first appeared in John W. Campbell Jr.'s Astounding, so I think we can expect it to be a better fit for conventional notions of what constitutes SF than is Gehman's piece.  Rog Phillips actually has many stories listed at isfdb and a pretty long Wikipedia entry but somehow I have never read anything by him before.

Cedric Elton is the world's most famous psychiatrist.  The cops bring to him Gerald Bocek, a man who murdered five people in a supermarket.  Bocek claims those he shot down were in fact a boarding party of reptilian space pirates who had attacked the space ship upon which both he and Elton are serving as professional spacemen.  Bocek insists that if Elton really thinks himself a head shrinker on Earth it is because he is suffering from space madness, an occupational hazard of space travel, and should take one of the yellow pills carried aboard to dispel such madness.

Over the course of several days, each man tries to convince the other that he is delusional and each employs strategies to cure the other.  The twist ending of the story is that both succeed in changing the other's mind--as the story ends Elton has come to believe they really are spacemen whose vessel is full of charred lizardman corpses while Bocek has come to think himself a murderer (not guilty by reason of insanity) who has just been cured of his delusions by Elton the brilliant psychiatrist.  After expressing his gratitude, Bocek walks out of the doctor's office...or did he just step into the airlock where he will die of asphyxiation?           

This story is OK; competent, but no big deal.  Editors have been keen on "The Yellow Pill" and it has appeared in numerous anthologies and reprint magazines.  

"River of Riches" by Gerald Kersh

In her intro to "River of Riches," Merril says that "s-f has enjoyed a rather more reputable name in Great Britain than it has here--or at least a good many more 'literary' British authors have written it" and goes on to name Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, and others.  Kersh himself is British, though he moved to New York and in 1958 became a U.S. citizen.  Kersh's novels, wikipedia is telling me, were about London low-life, but his post-war short stories were largely of the detective or speculative type.  Wikipedia also informs us Harlan Ellison told people that Kersh was his favorite author.  So maybe this story is going to be good.

The narrator, an Englishman in New York, meets an impecunious countryman in a bar.  This guy, Jack Pilgrim, tells the story of how he comes from a wealthy family but doesn't stand to currently inherit much and was sent to Canada to work and has since worked many jobs and gained and lost multiple fortunes.  

The central episode of this account is how Pilgrim found himself alone among cannibal Indians in a Latin American jungle and there made and quickly lost a fortune.  In brief, these primitives played a game like marbles using a certain species of nut.  As explained in their mythology, one in ten-million of these nuts is intelligent!  A tribal chief traded Pilgrim one of the rare intelligent nuts for the Englishman's rifle.  With the thinking nut Pilgrim won the game again and again, amassing a vast fortune in gold and jewels, which the natives do not consider valuable.  But, ignoring the advice of both natives and a European trader, Pilgrim went up against the chief of a tribe of Indians famed for their trickery, and those guys stripped Pilgrim of his wealth, including the super nut!

This is a well-put-together and entertaining story, so thumbs up.  "River of Riches" first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post and would be included in a British collection of Kersh's and in one of those anthologies with Alfred Hitchcock's name and handsome mug on them.           

"The Short-Short Story of Mankind" by John Steinbeck

Richard Gehman and Gerald Kersh may be forgotten, but I think people still read John Steinbeck--I feel like it was just a few years ago that there was a whole controversy over how much of Travels with Charley was just made up.  Whether they make kids in school read Of Mice and Men nowadays I don't know, but they made me read it back in the 1980s.

In her intro Merril admits "The Short-Short Story of Mankind" is not really SF, but as it is a "delightful" satire, and her famous anthology has begun including a non-fiction section, she included it.

This five-page joke story is about a bunch of cavemen who engage in incestuous sex and cannibalism.  The joke is that they say the same sorts of things and hold the same sorts of attitudes as 20th-century people whom people like Steinbeck and Merril look down upon.  They complain about the younger generation.  They are suspicious of foreigners and people of a different religion.  They fear new technology.  Besides the repetitive jokes, Steinbeck offers fable-like stories of how agriculture, trade and government arose, and finally suggests that people today are no different than the cave people he has depicted.  He ends on the positive note that in the past people chose to abandon their prejudices rather than go extinct, and so it is likely we 20th-century people will do the same, getting over our differences rather than nuking the world into oblivion.

Tedious self-satisfied conventional wisdom packaged with lame jokes.  Thumbs down!

"The Short-Short Story of Mankind" first appeared in Playboy and would be included by Brian Aldiss in the oft-reprinted Penguin Science Fiction.

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I might read something by Rog Phillips or Gerald Kersh in the future, but don't bet on seeing blog posts about Richard Gehman or John Steinbeck ever again here at MPorcius Fiction Log, oh my brothers.

Half Price Books thinks I should read these "classics"

I got a free calendar at Half Price Books, but this wasn’t a sign of unconditional love. Half Price Books includes on the page for August (I still got time!) a reading list. A reading list! Is this what I have to do to show I am worthy of Half Price Books and their free calendar? Let’s see, maybe I’ve got a head start on my assignment.

1) To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
I read this in school, and thought it was pretty good. And of course I saw the movie. All you science fiction fans out there already know that Scout was the model for the young woman in Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage, a decent SF novel in the style of a Heinlein juvenile.

While I think To Kill A Mockingbird is good, I always suspect it is on these kinds of lists (and on the top of this list) because it advocates for the values the people who make these lists want us all to have and fear we don’t have. Is To Kill A Mockingbird really the best book of all time, or the book you most should have already read or whatever? I am skeptical.

2) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Everyone is constantly talking about how great this book is, but somehow they have yet to overcome my sales resistance. Part of the problem is that I feel like I know all the ins and outs of the plot from seeing it on TV three hundred times, mostly the long version starring the pretty girl from “Absolutely Fabulous” and the pretty girl from “House of Cards.” The lead actress is also pretty, but I’ve never seen her in any other show, so I call her “the pretty girl from ‘Pride and Prejudice.’”

Maybe someday I’ll read Pride and Prejudice and be amazed at how great it is. But not before August.

3) Lord of the Flies by William Golding
We read this in school, and I read it once as an adult as well, and it is pretty good. We were all saying “Sucks to your assmar” for months afterwards. I mean as a kid, not when I read it as an adult. Well, not as much.

4) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Like Lord of the Flies we read this in school, and then I read it as an adult. Somehow it didn’t make the impression on me that it makes on a lot of people; I thought it was just OK. The thing I always remember about it is that it was the first time I saw the word “holocaust” outside the context of the German program to exterminate the Jews, without a capital letter.

Anyway, I think the “Great American Novel” is Moby Dick.

5) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
I read this once as an adult, and it is pretty good, due to the plot and ideas. I don’t remember thinking the style was very good.

6) Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
I haven’t read this one. I read Cat’s Cradle at Rutgers, and I read at least one other Vonnegut book as an adult, but I wasn’t blown away by them, and have not read any more Vonnegut. (Well, we read “Harrison Bergeron” in high school, which was not bad.) Someday I may read Slaughterhouse-Five, but probably not before August.

7) The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
I have not read this, and am quite unlikely to. I read The Three Musketeers as an adult, and was amazed at how lame it was. A boring adventure story full of lame jokes? I couldn’t believe it. Not only was the alleged adventure boring and the alleged jokes not funny, but after spending my whole life being sympathetic to the Huguenots, in The Three Musketeers I am supposed to think of them as the enemy? I kept hoping a Huguenot sharpshooter would kill Balthazar, Melchior and/or whatever the other guy’s name was.

I think maybe Half Price Books is going to break up with me.

8) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Like Pride and Prejudice, this one has lots of good PR, but I have yet to be sold on it. Like Pride and Prejudice I have seen more than one version on TV, and the plot seems OK. Maybe I’ll read this one day.

Or maybe not. In college (on the banks of the old Raritan, as we say) I read Hard Times, and didn’t think it was very fun. (I had a hard time reading it, ha ha.) My other exposure to Charles Dickens, like everybody else with a pulse, is from seeing three million versions of "A Christmas Carol," three million times each. As a kid I always thought Grand Moff Tarkin, Darth Vader, and Boba Fett were cooler than Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, and I had the same thing going with Scrooge and all those nags trying to get him to stop saving his money. When the Death Star explodes, or Boba Fett gets eaten by that, uh, well, we all know what it looks like, I feel a little deflated, and I always feel a little deflated when Scrooge gives in to the nags and starts throwing his money around, trying to buy their love or maybe their silence. I don’t know if Great Expectations is a celebration of nags and a denunciation of frugality, but I fear it could be.

9) Animal Farm by George Orwell
Orwell is a good writer with a very good style, and this is a good book. Of course, I may be vulnerable to the charge that I like this book because I am hostile to the Soviet Union. Maybe there are Bolshevists out there who think Animal Farm sucks, and suspect it is on these kinds of lists because the people who write these lists are members of the bourgeoisie and are trying to brainwash the proletariat. Maybe it is on this list at number 9 as a sop to those of us who are going to roll our eyes when we get to number 10 and it is The Grapes of Wrath.

10) The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
I haven’t read this, and I doubt I will. I saw the movie and it seemed about as subtle as a sledge hammer and sickle. If I want to hear somebody’s extravagant moaning about being poor, I’ll call up my mother.

And as I’ve already said, I think Moby Dick is the “Great American Novel.” Captain Ahab uber alles!

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Alright, let’s look at the totals. I’ve read half the books Half Price Books thinks I’m supposed to read. But I’ve read some of those twice, so maybe Half Price Books will cut me some slack. And maybe I’ll get some bonus points if I’ve read some of the 30 additional books on the list at the website. (A reading list of 40 books! Half Price Books is high maintenance!) I haven’t looked at this full list of 40 books yet, and I sure hope Homer, Virgil, Dante, Nabokov, Boswell, Proust, and Melville are Half Price Book’s idea of “classics”; if J. K. Rowling and that The Life of Pi guy are on the list, I may be in trouble.