It's a time of memorials for me, so, a slightly augmented redux post, featuring two gracious artists I've read for half a century, and had the pleasure of meeting in person on one occasion each...though had a correspondence with Barry that went on for a couple of decades.
Kit Reed, 7 June 1932-24 September 2017
Barry Malzberg, 24 July 1939-20 December 2024
Thief of LivesbyKit Reed(University of Missouri Press, November 1992, 0-8262-0850-9, $19.95, 179pp, hc, co) Can be read here.
Below, a previously posted review of the story "Winter", collected among Reed's other work in this volume and one a decade earlier, in this case after it was also included in the R. V. Cassill's first edition of The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction (1988).
Winter, (ss) Winter’s Tales 15 ed. A. D. Maclean, Macmillan UK, 1969
Kit Reed saw "Winter" first published in the 1969 15th volume of Winter's Tales, the annual then edited by A. D. MacLean (as it would be for all its long original run, 28 annual volumes), and she included it in four of her collections over the decades, with good reason; even though it eventually becomes a suspense story, it was also reprinted in the first volume of Richard Davis's annual, with two more volumes to follow from Davis and published for some decades further in the US by DAW Books with US editors Gerald W. Page and then Karl Edward Wagner, The Year's Best Horror Stories...despite not being a horror story, per se. Grim, literate, richly-detailed character-driven stories were among Reed's favorite modes, and this story of two older sisters, living in the northern woods of the US somewhere unnamed, but the kind of country where people hunt to put up meat for the winter, and were and sometimes are dependent on what canned goods and preserves they've put aside, is a prime example of her work. Told from the point of view, and in the slightly eccentric cadences, of the older sister, one whose mild epilepsy has helped her remain something of a pariah in her community, and how she and her slightly younger and resentful sister, who has felt obligated to keep company with her sister for that reason, are like as not to argue as a matter to death and then start joking about it. One day, they find a young male stranger sleeping in their childhood playhouse, used mostly for storage, and they take him in, finding him helpful and grateful for a few day's refuge from the military basic training he's deserted...and he becomes a longer-term guest, and the source of some romantic rivalry between the two women.
The utterly realistic setting of the story, in its starkness and accommodation of lethal weather, can have an almost sfnal feel about it, abetted by the woods-folk attitudes of the sisters...but by the rather severe end to their rivalry, one has the sense of mimetic fiction doing one of the things it can do as well as historical or fantastic fiction, bring the readers into lives unlikely to be too similar to their own. And the turn toward the weirder sort of crime fiction isn't at all an abrupt change in tone.
Barry Malzberg has graciously contributed several times to this blog, and his literary jape for the 2020 annual 14th issue of The Mailer Review, a handsomely-produced little magazine published by the Norman Mailer Society out of the University of Southern Florida; my copy came as a kind gift from Deputy Editor Michael Shuman. Between them, Barry and Michael provide more nonfictional lines of set-up and afterword for "Barbarians? Sure" than the vignette proper contains, but that's more than all right, since the conceit is to give a flavor of the kind of science fiction Mailer might've written in the 1950s instead of such poorly-received work as Barbary Shore and The Deer Park. (There apparently is some surviving Mailer juvenilia of an sfnal nature, notably "The Martian Invasion".) Despite Malzberg previously suggesting that Mailer has been one of his primary influences, until seeing this vignette it hadn't quite registered how much his prose can resemble Mailer's, as the vignette proper could as easily be the work of a retooled (but not Too recalibrated) Mailer as it is of Malzberg in his more humorously baroque mode. Malzberg also slips in a sly reference to the emptiness that can be the fate of an astronaut who realizes he's more tool than heroic explorer, a theme running through some of his most famous early work (and certainly widened to encompass members of other occupations, very much including writers, as he continued to write). Shuman generously supplies an Appreciation of the vignette as postscript, explaining some of the subtler details of the pastiche and parody to the null-SF readership; I'll air the slightest of quibbles with his citation of Arthur C. Clarke and Damon Knight along with Catherine Moore as mainstays of the sf magazines Astounding Science-Fiction and Planet Stories, Clarke presumably cited as one of the best-known sf writers still, Knight as one reasonably well-known for his workshop teaching career among academics...Moore, usually in collaboration with her husband Henry Kuttner, was a key contributor to ASF, but Clarke had only a handful of stories in it (including one of his most famous, "Rescue Party"), even as Knight had a handful of stories in Planet, but none of them his major work...though ASF and PS were among the most distinct of the 1950s sf magazines, while such other good ones as Startling Stories and If would be more obviously eclectic, have a less polarized identity...Galaxy, probably the single most influential of the decade's sf magazines, also had at least as strong a slant, as did The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by "Anthony Boucher" and J. Francis McComas (and magazines, particularly F&SF, more likely to have Clarke and/or Knight stories in a given issue in the '50s).
Meanwhile, from the story:
"He [the protagonist] was the first Terran in recorded history to conjoin with the Martians. It was shocking and yet somehow utterly meaningless, like the stoned and shadowy eyes of his wife who in a distant eruption of time spent, had been lying against him in the limitless field of the bed they had made and were to lie upon forever was herself an alien."
For more of this round of Short Story Wednesday reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
Two accounts of aging men, more sinning than sinned against, albeit one is more obliviously culpable than the other.
The recent Joyce Carol Oates story is the account of a late middle-aged man taking his still, if just barely, teen-aged mistress (he is careful to refer to her in his running interior monologue as very nearly 20yo) on a weekend getaway in Cape May, NJ. The somewhat older Malzberg/Pronzini story is an account of a man perhaps a few years older, trying to make sense of his predicament as he awaits his orders to commit mayhem in NYC from an amorphous but deadly conspiracy that has him under their collective thumb. Malzberg's ultraviolet sense of humor, as frequently in their collaborations, is only augmented by Pronzini's contribution.
Both men mistake themselves for essentially benevolent, even if potential agent of chaos Elias is less certain of this than is philanderer Cassidy.
Both have wives and children that they have grown somewhat estranged from, albeit their wives are still present in their lives and can be seen as trying to help both protagonists, however insufficiently from the point of view of both men. Oates's Cassidy first met his young mistress Brianna when she performed in the same high school Palestrina choral concert as Cassidy's daughter, who remains three years younger than his paramour. Brianna for her part is somewhat flighty and lost, floating through life haphazardly (as her affair might suggest), but still full of vigor that Cassidy draws on and enjoys controlling as best (or worst) he might.
Both stories are good examples of what their authors have been capable of. The collaboration cites the Rene Magritte painting that presumably served as partial inspiration; the Oates doesn't overplay the kind of smug self-justification its Cassidy wallows in, even as he feels a distant sense of shame for some, but by no means all, of his behavior.
I'd been meaning to read the Oates for a week or so, since it was released on-line...I'd misplaced the book I was going to review along with the New Yorker story, but the long-buried AHMM issue had just been disinterred, so it makes an interesting counterpoint in paranoia of a different flavor...as I'd put the issue away almost a decade ago before I had a chance to read it.
For more of today's short stories (and another take on the Oates!), please see Patti Abbott's blog.
Syracuse University classmates Barry Malzberg and Joyce Carol Oates at lunch in a New Jersey diner, the Coach House, in 2022; among the items discussed was an issue of a mid-'60s SU literary magazine issue with contributions from both, and Michael Herr.
Joyce and Barry Malzberg, Robert Friedman (who edits and lays out JCO's Substack blog, A Writer's Journal) and Joyce Carol Oates, from that same luncheon.
Barry N. Malzberg, from an interview posted 13 October 2010 at Locus Online:
I did a body of work which represented my best possibility, and some of that could not have been done by anyone else. [Critic, fiction-writer, editor and writing teacher Algis] Budrys could have done [critical volume] Breakfast in the Ruins better, but he didn’t do it at all. Phil Klass [who wrote most of his usually sharply satirical sf as "William Tenn"] could have done Herovit’s World better, but he didn’t. And I think it had to be done.
This article is more than 1 month oldProlific science fiction writer, among other work, who conceived alternative lives for others, including Emily Dickinson and Sigmund Freud
In 1965, Barry N. Malzberg, who has died aged 85, decided that the career he sought as a "literary" fiction writer was closed to him – most of the "little" magazines were impenetrable, paid poorly and were little-read, the control of editors at publishing houses absolute – and that science fiction (along with fantasy, horror, crime fiction and some other work which also appealed to him), which he had read in his youth, was the path he would pursue into writing.
He made his first sale in sf in 1967 under the name K. M. O’Donnell, and, in the seven years that followed, sold a further 2 million words – 23 novels and six short-story collections, along with further published work not immediately collected. At the end he felt he had succeeded too well and chose to retire, saying: “There is almost no room left for the kind of work which I try to do.”
Those few years had seen Malzberg write some of the most ambitious, challenging and profound, yet pessimistic and not traditionally "crowd-pleasing" novels. His breakthrough came with the John W. Campbell Memorial Award-winner Beyond Apollo (1972) – an ironic win as it was a novel that Campbell would have loathed. Malzberg described it as “dystopian, anti-NASA, anti-space [or at least against the hype with which space exploration was sold to the public-TM], enormously cynical about technology”. While it divided fans and critics, the award opened doors to publishers. Malzberg’s literary ambitions intersected with those of the sf "new wave", and his fascination with paranoid astronauts, the John F. Kennedy assassination and “what if?” alternate lives of historical figures (Emily Dickinson is a successful poet in her lifetime, Sigmund Freud ventures into outer space) led to him being spoken of in the same breath asJ.G. Ballard, Robert Silverberg andHarlan Ellison.
Malzberg was born in New York, the son of Michael, a salesman with a lumber company, and his wife, Celia (nee Feinberg). He was educated locally in Brooklyn public schools and then at Syracuse University. Leaving with a degree in sociology in 1960, Malzberg joined the New York City Department of Welfare as an investigator, and also worked as a reimbursement agent at the New York State Department of Mental Health.
He had long wanted to be a writer and made his first attempts aged seven. In 1951 he discovered science fiction magazines, and received his first rejection slip from Amazing Stories aged 11. He favored the unique, frequently satirical voices in Horace Gold’s Galaxy magazine over Campbell’s tech-driven (if often also mystical) Astounding, especially such writers as Alfred Bester, Walter M Miller, Frederik Pohl, C. M. Kornbluth, Robert Sheckley and Theodore Sturgeon.
In high school, though, Malzberg decided he wanted to be a contemporary/mimetic writer, inspired most directly by Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, John Updike and James Agee. With the offer of two writing fellowships, he returned to Syracuse University in 1964-65 but despite the chance of a further year, “drowning in rejection”, and in debt to the New York State Loan Fund, he joined the Scott Meredith Literary Agency (SMLA).
His job there involved reading and reporting on up to fifty manuscripts a week from fee-paying newcomers for a cut of the enclosed cheque. So adept was he that he was taking home over $200 a week by the time he was fired in 1967 (“for reasons never made clear”). He became, briefly, managing editor of the men’s magazine Escapade (there accepting Ms. Jody Scott's first novel Down Will Come Baby and editing it to novella length to fit in the magazine) and, later, the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories and the fantasy/sf magazine Fantastic – but was again fired after arguing with the publisher (most directly, over the cover illustration he'd accepted for a Fritz Leiber story). By then he was selling his own fiction.
Malzberg had aimed high, hoping to write like Mailer but emulate the success of Philip Roth and win the National Book award by the age of 26. Indifferent editors turned down more than 100 of his stories, and Malzberg was already 26 when he sold "The Bed" (as Nathan Herbert, 1966) to Wildcat magazine, a tenth-rate Playboy knockoff.
He struggled on until, finally, "We’re Coming Through the Window" (1967), a comic time-travel tale, sold to Galaxy, under the byline "K. M. O’Donnell" (in tribute to Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore, a married couple, who wrote impressive and innovative fiction of varying sorts, in collaboration and separately, under their own names and using varying pseudonyms such as "Lawrence O'Donnell"; another loose inspiration might've been the old comic song "They're Coming through the Window"). A breakthrough came with the novella "Final War" (1968), the story of a soldier trapped in an endless, meaningless war.
While working at SMLA he had written a novel, which was published as Love Doll under the name Mel Johnson in 1967, and was followed by two dozen more softcore porn books until that market collapsed. He returned to science fiction novels, beginning with The Falling Astronauts (1971), and including Revelations (1972), Herovit’s World (1973), In the Enclosure (1973), Tactics of Conquest (1974), The Destruction of the Temple (1974), On a Planet Alien (1974), Guernica Night (1975) and Galaxies (1975).
He also wrote a series of increasingly subversive "men's adventure" novels (the Lone Wolf series as by Mike Barry), novelizations (Phase IV, Kung Fu) and further "adult" novels (as Lee W. Mason).
Although he announced his retirement in 1976, he continued to write fiction, including thrillers and crime stories with Bill Pronzini and, solo, one final science fiction novel, The Remaking of Sigmund Freud (1985). In addition there were many short stories, the best to be found in In the Stone House (2000), Shiva and Other Stories (2001), The Very Best of Barry N. Malzberg (2013) and Collecting Myself (2024).
He also compiled anthologies and collections, often championing neglected authors such as Mark Clifton and F. L. Wallace, writing reviews, columns (including Dialogues with Mike Resnick, collected as The Business of Science Fiction, 2010) and essays, many collected in The Engines of the Night (1982; expanded as Breakfast in the Ruins, 2007) and The Bend at the End of the Road (2018).
Malzberg is survived by his wife, Joyce Zelnick, whom he married in 1964, and their daughters, Stephanie and Erika.
Two sorts of retrospective, the kind of fine work Stark House continues to do...from two writers whose work I've been reading for nearly my whole literate life, Malzberg because my father had anthologies including his work when I was very young (and I would eventually inherit them), Pronzini whose work I would discover only a bit later via Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and the essentially unrelated (except by paying license fees) Alfred Hitchcock Presents: volumes edited by Harold Q. Masur for Random House (reprinted in Dell paperbacks) in the '70s. As we face our Final Wars and try to avoid joining the Hanging Man in his fate, this is a propitious time to take in these books, for me those stories I have read are usually decades ago, and those I haven't deserve to have my neglect remedied.
Barry has also contributed to this blog, and very graciously indeed. Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller have helped with a few projects of mine (and in her case, a very badly-handled project of one of my bookstore colleagues decades ago). I am glad to have been able to make the acquaintance of both.
Barry Malzberg's first two collections of his short fantastica stories were published as halves of Ace Doubles (and under his fantastic-fiction pseudonym "K. M. O'Donnell"--a tribute to writers, and married couple, Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore, who among their collaborations signed some of their best as Lawrence O'Donnell), in 1969 paired with a John Rackham novel, and in 1971 with his own novella Gather in the Hall of the Planets. "Final War" has reminded at least two Richards, the late Richard Geis (of Science Fiction Review fame) and Rich Horton (of Locus, his anthologies and his blog) strongly of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and was probably the most widely-admired of Malzberg's early fantastica stories, coming a close second in the balloting for the Nebula Award in its contest. When asked what he'd like to be remembered for, he told his interlocutor that the latter might note just how funny he could be (since his work is shot through with wit, even at its most anguished). Particularly in the vignettes in these collections, he demonstrates this frequently.
Novella cover illustration by Jack Gaughan; second cover by Karel Thole
The Stark House edition has only one (new) cover, and Barry has decided to write a single new brief introduction, as he looks back less than fondly at either collection's original introduction; a decent bibliography of his books rounds out the book.
“I’ll See to Your Horse”, (ss) Zane Grey Western Magazine February 1972; rewritten as the opening of The Gallows Land (Walker and Co., 1983; Berkley pb 1983); this is a composite of both.
147 * "Crucifixion River" by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini; apparently first published in the collection Crucifixion River: Western Stories (Five Star, 2007; ISBN-13: 978-1594145568) by Muller and Pronzini (this story won the WWA Spur Award)
202 * Pronzini Bibliography * bi
As the acute scanner might note, there is an overlap with, though not complete duplication of, The Best Western Stories of Bill Pronzini, Swallow Press, 1990...I picked that one up when it was new--at first thought, hard to realize it's been almost 35 years:
The FictionMags Index (FMI) listing:
The Best Western Stories of Bill Pronzini by Bill Pronzini (Swallow Press, March 1990, 0-8040-0932-5, xix+177pp, hc, co-edited by Martin H. Greenberg)
162 · The Western Pulps · Bill Pronzini · ar portions of this article first appeared as part of the introduction to Wild Westerns ed. Bill Pronzini (Walker & Co., 1989).
171 · The Bibliography of Books by Bill Pronzini · [uncredited] · bi
