Barry N. Malzberg - A Delightful Comedie Premise.pdf - Barry N. Malzberg - widez2

A Delightful Comedie Premise

Barry N. Malzberg

Dear Mr Malzberg:

I wonder if you’d be interested in writing - on a semi-commissioned basis,

of course - a funny short-story or novelette? Although the majority of your work,

at least the work which I have read, is characterized by a certain gloom, a

blackness, a rather despairing view of the world, I am told by people who

represent themselves to be friends of yours that you have, in private, a delightful

sense of humour which overrides your melancholia and makes you quite popular

at small parties. I am sure you would agree that science fiction, at least at present,

has all the despair and blackness which its readers can stand, and if you could

come in with a light-hearted story, we would not only be happy to publish it, it

might start you on a brand-new career. From these same friends I am given to

understand that you are almost thirty-four years of age, and surely you must

agree that despair is harder and harder to sustain when you move into a period of

your life where it becomes personally imminent; in other words, you are moving

now into the Heart Attack Zone.

* * * *

Dear Editor:

Thank you very much for your letter and for your interest in obtaining from

me a light-hearted story. It so happens that you and my friends have discovered

what I like to think of as My Secret... that I am not a despairing man at all but

rather one with a delicious if somewhat perverse sense of humour, who sees the

comedy in the human condition and only turns out the black stuff because it is

now fashionable and the word rates, at all lengths, must be sustained.

I have had in mind for some time writing a story about a man, let me call

him Jack, who is able to re-evoke the sights and sounds of the 1950s in such a

concrete and viable fashion that he is actually able to take people back into the

past, both individually and in small tourist groups. (This idea is not completely

original; Jack Finney used it in Time And Again, and of course this chestnut has

been romping or, I should say, dropping around the field for forty years, but hear

me out.) The trouble with Jack is that he is not able to re-evoke the more

fashionable and memorable aspects of the 1950s, those which are so much in

demand in our increasingly perilous and confusing times, but instead can recover

only the failures the not-quite-successes, the aspects-that-never-made-it. Thus he

can take himself and companions not to Ebbets Field, say, where the great Dodger

teams of the 1950s were losing with magnificence and stolid grace but to Shibe

Park in Philadelphia, house of the Athletics and Phillies, where on a Tuesday

afternoon a desultory crowd of four thousand might be present to watch senile

managers fall asleep in the dugout or hapless rookies fail once again to hit the

rising curve. He cannot, in short, recapture the Winners, but only the Losers: the

campaign speeches of Estes Kefauver, recordings by the Bell Sisters and Guy

Mitchell, the rambling confessions of minor actors before the McCarthy screening

committee that they once were Communists and would appreciate the

opportunity to get before the full committee and press to make a more definite

statement.

Jack is infuriated by this and no wonder; he is the custodian of a unique and

possibly highly marketable talent - people increasingly love the past, and a guided

tour through it as opposed to records, tapes, rambling reminiscences would be

enormously exciting to them - but he cannot for the life of him get to what he calls

the Real Stuff, the more commercial and lovable aspects of that cuddly decade.

Every time that he thinks he has recaptured Yankee Stadium in his mind and

sweeps back in time to revisit it, he finds himself at Wrigley Field in Chicago where

Wayne Terwillger, now playing first base, misses a foul pop and runs straight into

the stands. What can he do? What can he do about this reckless and

uncontrollable talent of his, which in its sheerest perversity simply will not remit to

his commands. (It is a subconscious ability, you see; if he becomes self-conscious,

it leaves him entirely.) Jack is enraged. He has cold sweats, flashes of gloom and

hysteria. (I forgot to say that he is a failed advertising copy writer, now working in

Cleveland on display advertising mostly for the Shaker Heights district. He needs

money and approbation. His marriage, his second marriage, is falling apart. All of

this will give the plot substance and humanity, to say nothing of warm twitches of

insight.) He knows that he is onto something big, and yet his clownish talent, all

big feet and wide ears, mocks him.

He takes his problem to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist takes some

convincing, but after being taken into the offices of Cosmos science fiction to see

the editor rejecting submissions at a penny a word, he believes everything. He

says he will help Jack. This psychiatrist, who I will call Dr Mandleman, fires all of

his patients and enters into a campaign to help Jack recover the more popular and

marketable aspects of the fifties. He too sees the Big Money. He moves in with

Jack. Together they go over the top forty charts of that era, call up retired

members of the New York football Giants, pore through old Congressional

Records in which McCarthy is again and again thunderously denounced by two

liberal representatives...

Do you see the possibilities? I envision this as being somewhere around

1500 words but could expand or contract it to whatever you desire. I am very

busy as always but could make room in my schedule for this project, particularly if

you could see fit to give a small down payment. Would fifty dollars seem

excessive? I look forward to word from you.

* * * *

Dear Mr Malzberg:

I believe that you have utterly misunderstood my letter and the nature of

the assignment piece.

There is nothing funny in a fantasy about a man who can recapture only the

ugly or forgotten elements of the past. Rather, this is a bitter satire on the present

which you have projected, based upon your statement that ‘people love their

past’, with the implication that they find the future intolerable. What is funny

about that? What is funny about failure, too? What is funny about the

Philadelphia Athletics of the early 1950s with their ninety-four-year-old manager?

Rather, you seem to be on the way to constructing another of your horrid

metaphors for present and future, incompetence presided over by senescence.

This idea will absolutely not work, not at least within the context of a

delightful comedic premise, and as you know, we are well-inventoried with work

by you and others which will depress people. I cannot and will not pay fifty dollars

in front for depressing stuff like this.

Perhaps you will want to take another shot at this.

* * * *

Dear Editor:

Thanks for your letter. I am truly sorry that you fail to see the humour in

failure or in the forgettable aspects of the past - people, I think, must learn to

laugh at their foibles - but I bow to your judgment.

Might I suggest another idea which has been in mind for some time? I

would like to write a story of a telepath, let me call him John, who is able to

establish direct psionic links with the minds, if one can call them ‘minds’, of the

thoroughbreds running every afternoon (except for Sundays and three months a

year) at Aqueduct and Belmont race tracks in Queens, New York. John’s psionic

faculties work at a range of fifty yards; he is able to press his nose against the wire

gate separating paddock from customers and actually get inside the minds of the

horses. Dim thoughts like little shoots of grass press upon his own brain; he is able

to determine the mental state and mood of the horses as in turn they parade by

him. (Horses of course do not verbalize; John must deduce those moods

subverbally.)

Obviously John is up to something. He is a mind reader; he should, through

the use of this talent, be able to get some line on the outcome of a race by

knowing which horses feel well, which horses’ thoughts are clouded by the

possibility of soporifics, which other horses’ minds show vast energy because of

the probable induction of stimulants. Surely he should be able to narrow the field

down to two or three horses anyway which feel good and, by spreading his bets

around these in proportion to the odds, assure himself of a good living.

(I should have said somewhat earlier on, but, as you know, am very weak at

formal outlines, that John’s talents are restricted to the reading of the minds of

animals; he cannot for the life of him screen the thoughts of a fellow human. If he

could, of course, he would simply check out the trainers and jockeys, but it is a

perverse and limited talent, and John must make the best of what God has given

him, as must we all - for instance, I outline poorly.)

The trouble is that John finds there to be no true correlation between the

prerace mood or thoughts of horses and the eventual outcome. Horses that feel

well do not necessarily win, and those horses from whom John has picked up the

most depressing and suicidal emanations have been known to win. It is not a

simple reversal; if it were, John would be able to make his bets on the basis of

reverse correlation and do quite well this way; rather, what it seems to be is

entirely random. Like so much of life, the prerace meditations of horses appear to

have no relationship to the outcome; rather, motives and consequences are

fractured, split, entirely torn apart; and this insight, which finally comes upon John

after the seventh race at Aqueduct on June 12, 1974, when he has lost fifty-five

dollars drives him quite mad; his soul is split, his mind shattered; he runs

frantically through the sparse crowds (it is a Tuesday, and you know what OTB

has done to race track attendance anyway) shouting, screaming, bellowing his

rage to the heavens. ‘There’s no connection!’ he will scream. ‘Nothing makes

sense, nothing connects, there is no reason at all!’ and several burly Pinkertons,

made sullen by rules, which require them to wear jackets and ties at all times,

even on this first hot day of the year, seize him quite roughly and drag him into the

monstrous computer room housing the equipment of the American Totalisor

Company; there a sinister track executive, his eyes glowing with cunning and evil

will say, ‘Why don’t you guys ever learn?’ (he is a metaphor for the Devil, you see;

I assure you that this will be properly planted, and the story itself will be an

allegory) and, coming close to John, will raise a hand shaped like a talon, he will

bring it upon John, he will...

I propose this story to be 25,000 words in length, a cover story in fact. (You

and Ronald Walotsky will see the possibilities here, and Walotsky, I assure you,

draws horses very well.) Although I am quite busy, the successful author of fifteen

stories in this field, two of the novels published in hardcover, I could make time in

my increasingly heavy schedule to get the story to you within twelve hours of your

letter signifying outline approval. I think that an advance in this case of fifty dollars

would be quite reasonable and look forward to hearing from you by return mail,

holding off in the meantime from plunging into my next series of novels which, of

course, are already under lucrative contract.

* * * *

Dear Mr Malzberg:

We’re not getting anywhere.

What in God’s name is funny about a man who perceives ‘motives and

consequences to be entirely fractured ... torn apart?’ Our readers, let me assure

you, have enough troubles of their own; they are already quite aware of this or do

not want to be aware of it. Our readers, an intelligent and literate group of people

numbering into the multiple thousands, have long since understood that life is

unfair and inequitable, and they are looking for entertainment, release, a little bit

of joy.

Don’t you understand that this commission was for a funny story? There is

nothing funny about your proposal, nor do I see particular humour in an allegory

which will make use of the appearance of the Devil.

Perhaps we should forget this whole thing. There are other writers I would

rather have approached, and it was only at the insistence of your friends that I

decided to give you a chance at this one. We are heavily inventoried, as I have

already said, on the despairing stuff, but if in due course you would like to send

me one of your characteristic stories, on a purely speculative basis, I will consider

it as a routine submission.

* * * *

Barry N. Malzberg - A Delightful Comedie Premise.pdf

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