alzberg's alive: to begin with. That's the good news. It is good
news that the nagging ghost at the feast of 1970s SF is still lurking
behind the podium, still telling us things we should know about the
vertiginous instability of history and the lunacy of SF, which tries to
tell us stories about the future and to make neat sense while doing so. It
is good to hear Malzberg again, the unstoppable, unstinting, stentorian
whisper of the Malzberg voice as it insists, again and again, that riding
the engine of history is not the same as steering it.
The bad news, if it is bad news, is that the news has not changed.
The stories assembled in In the Stone House may eschew any further
assaults on the big-prong fallacies of the space program; there is nothing
here like The Falling Astronauts (1971) or Revelations (1972)
or Beyond Apollo (1972), three acid baths whose message, a message
transmitted far too soon for our taste, was that the race to Mars was dead
meat. But the message--which each story here collected manifests--remains
the same: that we are a species obsessed with a need to sort out the
terrible haze of the labyrinth of the real. As one of Malzberg's
continuing characters, Tom Winogrand, realizes in "Something About the
Seventies" (1993)--where he is an account executive abducted by aliens--the
aliens will never understand us, because they will never understand our
obsession with linearity. "We hold to chronology as if it had consequence.
... Linear, he thought, that was the fallacy."
Winogrand is entirely a figure of fiction; but most of the stories
of In the Stone House put into alternate-history versions of the last
century the same real men and women--or their siblings--whose lives
Malzberg has been spinning into fantasticated fugues for decades now: the
Kennedy family and the guys who butcher it, Emily Dickinson, Leonard
Bernstein, Tchaikovsky, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Adolf
Hitler and his suppurating henchmen, J. Edgar Hoover, Jesus Christ or some
obsessive nerd out of some future century who just has to experience the
Passion for himself, Satan, Mayor Daley Number One of Chicago, Christopher
Columbus, Torquemada, Senator Joe McCarthy, Gregor Mendel.
They are all of them figures of the 20th century, except for
those, like Emily Dickinson or Columbus, who are brought--whose way of
seeing the world is brought--into our time in order to illuminate it. In
"Standards & Practices" (1993) Dickinson, a 38-year-old single woman in
1990s Manhattan, sees our world through the antique slant of light of her
great verse, and our world is consequently shamed. In "Ship Full of Jews"
(1992) Columbus captains a Ship-of-Fools fleet toward the New World;
hundreds of suffering Jews are imprisoned in steerage below decks, and
Torquemada, in his wake, does a frenzied Dance of Death on the decks of
the Pinta Maria:
as Torquemada leapt, as the Jews chanted, as a grim and compliant
Cristoforo set sextant and compass and shrugged toward this newest part of
his destiny, in that moment it was as if all the centuries had slipped by
and this strange and mismatched concatenation of spirits and flesh,
voyagers and prisoners, repelled and necessitous, were gathered by that
bolt that had struck Torquemada and ... [which now] expelled them to
all of the crevices of the twentieth century itself, myths of purgation
and collision hastening their way toward the apostasies to come.
Malzberg's
passages of light
It is an unrelenting voice. The 24 stories in this first new
collection in many years must be read carefully, one or two at a sitting,
never more. They burn; they harangue; they speak desperately of making
sense, within the clutch of storylines which mock the attempt. They were
written over a period of two decades, and they need to be taken slowly,
savored, digested. Even so, the Malzberg voice can seem cruelly
unvarying, especially in the more enraged and abstract monologues about
the hellishness of the search for linear meaning in the world, like
"Hieratic Realignment" (1989); but there are two categories of tale which
are very sharply focused into their own voices.
First there are the four stories which make sense through music.
In "Allegro Marcato" (1993), Arturo Toscanini renames himself Art Tosca
and becomes the manager of the New York Yankees, and in 1927 has to deal
with a drunken Babe Ruth just as some conductor might have to grapple with
Beethoven on an off day. Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, in "Andante Lugubre"
(1993), survives way into the 20th century, where as an ancient
figurehead he sits in on a gathering of artists concerned about the fate
of the Jews, just before World War II begins--a war which also dominates
"Fugato" (1994), a sharp eloquent homage to Leonard Bernstein, who is seen
as a footsoldier enduring the worst, fuguing through death under fire.
And "Concerto Accademico" (1991) homages Ralph Vaughan Williams. A dragon
shows up at a rehearsal of his Ninth Symphony, but it transpires that the
dragon's breath of fire, and the great music, are one.
Alternate
JFKs; alternate Americas
And there are the Kennedy family stories, each of them shaped
around a different alternate history of America. "Heavy Metal" (1992) is
utterly fascinating: a campaign-weary JFK finally shakes off the
astonishing oppressiveness of his elders (men like his own father, or J.
Edgar Hoover) and tells Mayor Daley where he can go. This costs him the
1960 election (Illinois goes Republican) but saves his soul. "In the Stone
House" (1992) features Joe Jr., who does not die in World War II, who lives
on to obey his dreadful father in all things (for Malzberg, historical
characters so insanely clear-headed that they think they know the truth
usually win). He becomes president in 1952, but fires his secretary of
state, Joe McCarthy; and Joe Sr. fires him. Later, he assassinates his
brother in 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald, who may be the narrator of "Heavy
Metal," is a member of JFK's staff in "All Assassins" (1992). Having lost
the 1960 election, JFK prepares to contest in 1972; but Oswald, convinced
that if elected he will "let through all the gnomes and fires of the
apocalypse," prepares to kill him.
Other Kennedy-family stories--like "Darwinian Facts" (1989) or
"The Intransigents" (1993)--are only marginally less compulsive. They burn
like fire through the usual fecklessness of the alternate history as an SF
device. Indeed, for Malzberg, the Kennedys are almost intoxicatingly
relevant. They are magnets of apparent meaning; they calibrate the eye;
they are a slant of light to see with: they seem to make linear sense of
the American century.
But, of course, in the end--as Malzberg attests by using them in
so many different scenarios--the Kennedys don't make that much sense after
all. What they are, he suggests, is as good as we are going to get, stuck
here in the shambles of history, stuck here in the rag and bone shop
without a paddle. A tough message: but taken as directed, in small doses,
In the Stone House makes it go down easy.
