SSW: Delmore Schwartz: "Screeno"; Donald Barthelme: "Great Days", PARTISAN REVIEW, Winter(?) 1977 (V. 44, #4), edited by William Phillips

Can be read here

The continuing reorganization of the house turns up items I haven't looked at for some years, including this issue of Partisan Review, which boasts of two short stories ahead of any other contents, and two stories which turned out to be relatively useful signposts of where their authors were Going at time of composition. 

The Donald Barthelme became the title story of the eventual collection (see cover below) and is one of a series of his later stories which eschewed anything but dialog, often in telling less a narrative than giving a sense of  what might be gleaned from seemingly random (at least at first) snippets of conversation, some single lines alone, others brief segments of conversations, in this case what sounds very much like what one might overhear while walking toward, into and through an art-show opening (one might recall that Barthelme worked in museums as well as a writer). The apparently untethered statements of slightly addled folks or otherwise atypical people one might've passed by to the eventual party, along with apparent statements by police into their radios, eventually give way to variously anodyne, clever and/or snarky statements and exchanges from the denizens of the gallery show and cocktail party within the destination. Barthelme seems to be reaching for a sort of fake-reportage in how he shapes these transcript-like records, and given he or his editor made this one the title story for the collection, someone was particularly happy with this one (or simply liked the title)...it is certainly readable and potentially less upsetting to the casual reader than some other examples of Barthelme in this mode, such as one (I can't currently recall the title) which seems to be told/transcripted from the POV of a man who is dying of a heart attack or something similar.  Good chance it's in the collection pictured below, and it might be "The Crisis". Barthelme adapted some of the stories from the collection, presumably including the title story, into a play for voices also entitled Great Days.

While the Delmore Schwartz story was composed about the the same time as "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities", 1937, but unlike that clangorous story (first published in the then-young Partisan Review in 1938), "Screeno" was not published until more than a decade after Schwartz's death, in this issue of PR, from a manuscript that had been collected in his papers, and was put forth by his son for reprinting in book form in the first edition of the 1978 collection named for "In Dreams..."; perhaps Schwartz thought of it as too similar in setting and incident, at least, to "IDBR", as it also involves a young man not unlike Schwartz himself going to catch a film in a theater...the film itself, in this case, being less fantastically a reflection of his chaotic life than the lottery run (instead of giving away plates or the like to customers, in a Depression movie house) and the protagonist the winner of a grand "Screeno" (like Bingo) prize, only (to the dismay of the theater's management) another claimant on the grand prize emerging from the audience with a reasonably legitimate claim to an identical grand prize of $425 (in 1937 dollars)...and the various bickering and small or not so small mercies which result. Perhaps also, Schwartz felt "Screeno" too sentimental in comparison to "In Dreams...", though as a "new" story in 1977, it was later used as the title story of an eventual New Directions paperback anthology gathering later-published/collected work, cover below. 

What struck me most about "Screeno" was how much it reminded me also of another story from not long before its composition, not so much in incident as in ambition and tone, William Saroyan's "Seventy Thousand Assyrians", like the Schwartz about a young writer in the Depression none too certain of how things are going to work out for him, encountering some other folks whose current state is that much worse, and with the author's analog within the story not too sure of how he might help in the long run, but grateful for what little he could do immediately, and enraged in a quiet way, for the predicament they all find themselves in. As Cynthia Ozick notes in the introduction to the Screeno collection, Schwartz's training in and passion for philosophy raises its head in the story, along with Schwartz's love of poetry...a T. S. Eliot poem is quoted along with a far older work. (It's notable that not only the hipster but au courant literary hipster cred of Schwartz's one-time student Lou Reed had risen sufficiently for the latter to be invited to write a new foreword to the second edition of the IDRB and Other Stories collection).

It's rather unsurprising that Partisan Review was happy to be the first publication source for both of these, however belatedly with the Schwartz.

For more of today's Short Story Wednesday reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: Doris Pitkin Buck: "Why They Mobbed the White House"; Kate Wilhelm: "The Planners" (ORBIT 3, edited by Damon Knight, G. P. Putnam 1968); Donald Barthelme: "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning"; Leonard Michaels: "Crossbones" (NEW AMERICAN REVIEW #3, edited by Theodore Solotaroff, Signet/New American Library 1968); Rod Serling: "The Escape Route" ('TIS THE SEASON TO BE WARY by Serling, Little, Brown 1967)

 

Doris Pitkin Buck is probably the most obscure writer, these years, in the third volume of Damon Knight's new-fiction anthology series Orbit...a former actor and eventually on the English faculty at Ohio State, she was among the earliest of the women writers recruited as contributors by Anthony Boucher and Mick McComas at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and made a name for herself as much for her light verse  as her fiction for that magazine and elsewhere. I knew her granddaughter Laurel Buck slightly, when we were students at the University of Hawaii, and LB recalled DPB gathering the kids and letting them know, I hope tongue in cheek, that the flying saucers/UFOs were actually alien visitors come to help us out..."Why They Mobbed the White House" is a jovial story (distinct from certain recent events), taking the tack of the newly complex tax forms of the mid-'60s, and the increasing use of computers at the IRS and elsewhere, as jumping-off point for something a bit gentler than the typical "comic inferno" sf stories associated with Galaxy magazine and other markets in the '50s and '60s; told as a DC tour-guide's patter, it details how a certain couple found their way into the White House on the platform of having computers actually fill in rather than simply check tax forms. 

Kate Wilhelm's "The Planners" (which w0n the 1969 Nebula Award for best short story) digs a bit deeper and reads a bit heavier, while demonstrating a darker sort of wit. The planners in question include both biochemists and psychologists who use monkeys and apes (the latter including humans) as their test subjects, in seeing how injections of strains of RNA into their bodies enable...and disable...intellectual abilities...and eventually some of the subjects become planners as well. The protagonist, one of the primary researchers and a psychologist, is also consistently suffering...if that's the right word...a series of hallucinations that interact with his actual life, some seemingly simply reveries of sexual dalliance with various women, others rather more extended fantasias...he seems most grounded when exploring the nature of his relatively unhappy marriage.  The narrative slides through the various sorts of experience he has without too many indicators as to where he is departing from reality, but Wilhelm nonetheless makes it fairly clear where she wants to indicate consensus reality in the story, and where not. This story, even more than the Buck story, is indicative of the kind of literary grace the Orbit series would become famous for in its early years, in its relative departure from "realistic" prose form part of what had a number of more conservative writers and readers grumbling over its incomprehensibility...and a Nebula Awards ballot driven by the mutual admiration of a "Milford Mafia" (after the Milford Writer's Conferences Wilhelm and Knight, a married couple, were hosting by the latter '60s). 

Leonard Michaels also deals with a certain retreat from the reality of his characters', a tempestuous romantic couple's, situation, in the vignette "Crossbones"...

which might well've been inspired at least in part by his troubled first marriage, to the eventually suicidal Sylvia Bloch (Michaels is quoted in one online source as referring to her seeming at times "like a madwoman imitating a college student")...the first sentence in this very short story is a long paragraph (a man after my own heart thus). There are about seven or possibly ten sentences in the entirety, about the surreal abuse they subject each other to, and about the probable progress of the woman's father (possibly) on his machismic way over for a visit.  It's funnier if one isn't as aware of Bloch's eventual fate.

Sad fate also plays a role in "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning", but mostly in the string of events that led, not too long after publication, to RFK's death and, a couple of years later, to Edward Kennedy's near drowning (and not so near for Ms. Kopechne). Donald Barthelme's story apparently would've been accepted by William Shawn at The New Yorker if Barthelme was willing to change the title-character's name to something fictional, but Barthelme simply took it back and sold it to New American Review instead...I'd suggest correctly, seeing that this is, essentially, a piece of parodic fiction about how "sophisticated" magazine profiles of (particularly) political figures of RFK's position are all too often inane examples of marketing, hoping to convince the incautious or uninformed reader that every action on the part of their subject is heroic, every utterance sagacious (the one non-fictional anecdote in this "profile" occurred at a gallery, where RFK made a condescending joke about a certain painting, in the presence of the artist; Barthelme, a visual arts museum curator and journalist previous to his fiction-writing, wasn't favorably impressed). 

So...what all four of these stories are about, to one degree or another, is delusion, of the self and others. to some extent voluntarily accepted but mostly not so much. Can't imagine how they might've seemed appropriate to the times, nor that they might've found their way to reasonably avant-garde magazines in book form in 1968.

The fifth story, Rod Serling's "The Escape Route", was one of the three newly-published novellas in his first (legitimate, not ghost-written) collection, The Season to be Wary, in 1967. Serling hoped to launch a career as a novelist, apparently (his brother, Robert Serling, had one, after all), and it, too, is about self-delusion...the fugitive concentration-camp second-in-command's delusions about his service to the Nazi regime, and his relative lack of self-delusion about his circumstances as the Nazi hunters of the 1960s are after him, in his unpleasant circumstances in Buenos Aires. Also about Serling's self-delusion that this novella (I've managed to get 20 pages in, about a third of the way through, as it was reprinted in Rod Serling's Night Gallery Reader, edited by widow Carol Serling, RS's old campus colleague Charles Waugh, and Waugh's typical editing partner Martin H. Greenberg; this trio presumably decided this novella was the least worst of the three. Sadly, while "The Escape Route" made for a decent if unsurprising segment of the Night Gallery pilot film (as I remember it from some 45 years ago), the prose of the novella can be described as passable treatment writing...clumsy, overstated, using poor word choices in the narrative passages...while the dialog, given Serling was not a novice as a playwright, isn't too shabby at all, and at times has a nice snap to it--when the preaching isn't getting a bit thick...another Serling flaw).

If not for the hour, or the nature of this day, I'd probably transcribe the first paragraph of the story...perhaps tomorrow...

For more Short Story Wednesday reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blog.  

SHORT STORY WEDNESDAYS: Avram Davidson, Patricia Highsmith, Margaret Millar, Donald Barthelme, T. V. Olsen, David R. Bunch, Barry Malzberg, Jay Kinney

 the October country: three magazine (October) issues and a book, relatively recent purchases, which I delve into in small part.

Avram Davidson's "Revolver" leads off this issue of EQMM, and while it's definitely missed in the crime-fiction retrospective collection The Investigations of Avram Davidson, among the welcome host of stories one does find there, that was in large part because it's one of the least-known stories sapiently gathered in the slightly earlier and rather larger The Avram Davidson Treasury (Bill Pronzini was tapped to write the introduction to the story in that volume). Utterly picaresque black humor as it traces the interlocking lives of several denizens of the slums of New York City on an eventful afternoon...a quickly-stolen pistol, a new purchase by a slumlord named Mason (a sure sign of perfidy) being not the only revolving aspect of the tale.

"The People Across the Canyon" by Margaret Millar is a horror story, or what Frederic Dannay tagged a "tale of the preternatural" in his blurb, which was otherwise mostly devoted to a quoted passage from the story. It's a deft one, as might be expected of Millar, featuring a rather fully realized dysfunctional but operational family of three, two middle-aged parents and their young daughter, and what happens when their exurban home gains some new neighbors...and their daughter gains some new playmates. 

And an old favorite story, if "favorite" is quite the right word, Patricia Highsmith's "The Terrapin" made its debut in this issue, which Dannay refers to as "an odd and thoroughly fascinating story"--true enough, haunting, a sure ringing of changes on the same sort of tale of sustained betrayal of a child as Saki's "Sredni Vashtar", only with even more agonizing detail provided (a certain pair of 1959 novels come to mind as well, though perhaps mostly because the films drawn from them are getting a workout on our movie channels--Psycho and The Haunting of Hill House...

though, of course, parental abuse is slightly less front and center in those). Two years later, the fantasy and sf magazine Gamma would publish "The Snail Watcher", despite it being neither fantasy nor sf--I think the later story has the slight edge, but these two are, I believe, the most widely read of her short stories, and there's little mystery as to why. Almost certainly, it's no accident that Millar, Davidson and Highsmith's names are the first three on the cover array.

The October 1970 issue of Fantastic features as half its text the apparently unreprinted novella "The Crimson Witch", from the period that Dean Koontz was primarily a fantasy and sf writer, rather than, as in more recent decades, more often a suspense and to a lessening degree a horror novelist. David Wright O'Brien, one of the brighter stars of the Ray Palmer era of Fantastic Adventures and Amazing Stories, and one of the relatively few U.S. writers for the sf and fantasy magazines to die in service in World War 2, has the second-longest story in the issue with his 1941 FA reprint, "Spook for Yourself". I've yet to read either of these, but suspect I'll like the O'Brien story better...and the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable Koontz fans I've known, Ed Gorman and Ian Covell, both are no longer in a position to know or speculate why Koontz hasn't done anything more with this long story. Jeff Jones's interior illustrations for the story rather better than Gray Morrow's generic sword and sorcery cover painting, with Caroline Negretti's lettering and design. 

"A Glance at the Past" is also a reprinted story, but this is unacknowledged in the issue, perhaps because editor Ted White and publisher Sol Cohen were unaware of the fact...this relatively early example of David R. Bunch's stories of Moderan (and in this case the neighboring nation of Olderan, where people eschewed replacing as much of their bodies as possible with chrome and plastic cybernetics) was first in Diversion magazine in 1959; Bunch's arch but usually cleverly so stories were a staple of Cele Goldsmith Lalli's and subsequent editors' Fantastic and Amazing, up through White's reign, and tended to vignette length, making their points (whether Moderan stories or otherwise) and bowing out. Dan Adkins's illustration gives away a bit of the punch of this one, but it's a punch that would be most surprising only to those who hadn't ever read a Moderan story before...still, a graceful and amusing exercise. (New York Review Books's classics series reprinted the collection Moderan in 2018.)

Barry Malzberg's "As Between Generations" is closer to metaphor and fable than fantasy as it's usually construed, another tale of the dysfunction between, in this case, son and father, the small resentments unforgotten over the course of years, the damages wrought in both directions by the careless or only incidentally spiteful act or words. Malzberg (whose middle initial, N., is typo'd on the cover), after his short term as editor of the magazines, remained another stalwart contributor to Fantastic and Amazing throughout White's years and beyond. His no bones about it horror story "Prowl" in this magazine eight years later deals with similar matter less head-on.

Fritz Leiber's first books column in several issues appears, as in the interregnum Leiber's wife, Jonquil, had died.

Jay Kinney's "2000 A. D. Man", I believe the first comic (or comix) strip to appear in Fantastic (early issues included some of Gahan Wilson's earliest single-panel cartoons to be professionally published, among less impressive panels) is amiable if slight...Spiro Agnew and Mark Rudd are among the nation's fearless leaders to come between 1970 and 2000...

This issue can be read here.

Donald Barthelme's "Great Days" is a set of interlocking bits of dialog, apparently, which can be interpreted a number of ways, but I suspect we are to understand this is the interior dialog of a man who has collapsed in the street and is being dealt with by first responders, imagining or recalling scattered bits of a conversation or conversations with his womanfriend or wife of long standing. Exactly the kind of story which will, in its resistance to being a coherent and clear narrative, annoy the hell out of some of my acquaintances who are impatient with his more pellucid work. This story lent its title to Barthelme's penultimate collection published during his lifetime, which featured some similar free-associational dialogs among more conventional prose. 

Theoretically, this issue can be read here. (Server apparently down "at the moment".)

T. V. Olsen's "The Strange Valley" was the first western short story I read, as anthologized in Nora Kramer's 1972 Scholastic Books anthology The Ghostly Hand and Other Haunting Stories, which I believe to have been the second satisfying horror assembly I was to find, as an 8yo, I believe in the classroom library in my Enfield, CT, elementary school, and the first then-recent one, as I tore through it in 1973. I've finally gotten around to investing in inexpensive copies of that book and the 1968 Scholastic hardcover mostly original-fiction anthology Great Ghost Stories of the Old West, edited by Betty Baker, the Olsen story's first publication site. It's a deftly told but relatively familiar story, for most adult readers who have read much in the way of horror fiction, and only slightly overindulges in having the three young men of the Sioux nation, visiting an odd, desolate spot in a nearby valley, speak without any contractions, or their equivalent in Sioux. As they discuss the odd apparition one saw a couple of nights before, in 1876, it or something like it appears again. And in 1968 or thereabouts, two 18-wheel truck drivers, one the grandson of one of the 1876 Sioux, have their own odd encounter. Western writers are often drawn, when writing crossover western/horror, to mysterious time-displacement stories, and not so very surprisingly. It was certainly the most impressive story in the book to me at the time...Baker was happy with it as well, leading off her volume with it.




Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine [v40 #4, #227, October 1962] ed. Ellery Queen (Davis Publications, Inc., 40¢, 132pp, digest)
Details supplied by Douglas Greene.
• 5 · Revolver · Avram Davidson · ss
• 16 · Murder to the Twist · Pat McGerr · vi
• 20 · The Talking Tree · George Sumner Albee · ss
• 32 · The People Across the Canyon · Margaret Millar · ss
• 45 · Mooney versus Cat · Michael Zuroy · ss
• 50 · Beyond a Reasonable Doubt · Edgar Pangborn · ss
• 61 · Best Mysteries of the Month · Anthony Boucher · br
• Briefly discussed:
• The Edge of Eden by Dick Pearce
• The Love Thieves by Peter Packer
• Lizzie Borden: The Untold Story by Edward D. Radin (nf)
• The Trial of Dr. Adams by Sybille Bedford (nf)
• The Will of the Tribe by Arthur W. Upfield
• Counterweight by Daniel Broun
• The Crabtree Affair by Michael Innes
• The Evil Wish by Jean Potts
• and the then-current Ace Double crime fiction releases en masse
• 62 · Green Goose Chase · Veronica Parker Johns · ss
• 72 · The Last Answer · Hal Ellson · ss
• 76 · The Walewska Cross · Dorothy Fletcher · ss
• 87 · A Matter of Judgment · K. T. Edwards · ss
• 90 · Mystery Hardcovers of the Month · [Various] · br
• 90 · Mystery Paperbacks of the Month · [Various] · br
• 91 · Any Man’s Death · Paul W. Fairman · ss
• 99 · The Terrapin · Patricia Highsmith · ss
• 111 · Murder at Merryoak · Margaret Austin · ss

Fantastic [v20 #1, October 1970] ed. Ted White (Ultimate Publications, Inc., 60¢, 148pp, digest, cover by Gray Morrow and Caroline Negretti) 4 • Editorial (Fantastic, October 1970) • [Editorial (Fantastic)] • essay by Ted White 6 ·  The Crimson Witch · Dean R. Koontz · na 7 •  The Crimson Witch • interior artwork by Jeff Jones 74 · The Movement · Greg Benford · ss 75 • The Movement • interior artwork by Gray Morrow 84 · A Glance at the Past · David R. Bunch · vi Diversion Apr 1959 85 · A Glance at the Past • interior artwork by Dan Adkins 87 · As Between Generations · Barry N. Malzberg · vi 89 · Science Fiction in Dimension: Unbinding Science Fiction · Alexei Panshin · ar 98 · Spook for Yourself · David Wright O’Brien · nv Fantastic Adventures Jan 1942 98 •  Spook for Yourself • (1942) • interior artwork by Jay Jackson 117 · Fantasy Fandom · Michael Juergens · ar 119 • Fantasy Books (Fantastic, October 1970) • [Fantasy Books (Fantastic)] • essays by Fritz Leiber and Jean Marie Stine 119 •  Review: The Guardians, #2/Dark Ways to Death by Peter Saxon • review by Fritz Leiber 122 •  Review: Kavin's World by David Mason • review by Fritz Leiber 123 •  Review: The Foe of Barnabas Collins by Marilyn Ross • review by Jean Marie Stine [as by Hank Stine] 129  • ... According to You (Fantastic, October 1970) • [According to You (Fantastic)] • letter column conducted by Ted White 141 · Fantastic Illustrated: 2000 A.D. Man · Jay Kinney · comic strip Partisan Review [v44 #4, 1977] ed. William Phillips (PR Inc., $2.50, 499-654 (155) pp, 6" x 9") 499 · Notes · [Various] · ms 501 · Great Days · Donald Barthelme · ss 512 · Screeno · Delmore Schwartz · ss 528 · Faces of Freud · Steven Marcus · ar 539 · Fact in Film and Literature · Roger Shattuck · ar 551 · [untitled poem] · Killarney Clary · pp 552 · Contextualization · Richard Elman · pm 553 · Second Apart · Michael Brownstein · ex 554 · Home Movies · James Venit · pp 555 · Little Chapter · James Venit · pm 556 · Of Self and Soul · David Lehman · pm 557 · Fortune · Paul Hoover · pm 558 · You Have Wasted Your Life · Harry Fainlight · pm 558 · The Bayswater Road · Harry Fainlight · pm 559 · An Attitude About Poetry · Eileen Myles · pm 560 · For Daily Use · Maxine Chernoff · pm 561 · A Homecoming · Harry Mathews · pm 563 · Our Mothers Were Sisters · Marilyn Johnson · pm 565 · Drink as Disease: John Berryman · John Haffenden · ar [John Berryman] 584 · The Sexual Triangle · Jan Kott; translated by Mark Rosenzweig · ar 591 · The “Thaw” and the Fate of Bulgarian Dissent · Atanas Slavov · ar 599 · Flotation · Konstantin Pavlov · pm 600 · Capriccio for Goya · Konstantin Pavlov · pm 601 · Second Capriccio for Goya · Konstantin Pavlov · pm 602 · Singing Contest · Konstantin Pavlov · pm 605 · On Being a Communist at Harvard · Richard Schlatter · ar 616 · Mailer and Miller · George Stade · ar 625 · Two Plays in Moscow · Wassily Leontief · ar 628 · Books · [Various] · br 652 · Index to Volume XLIV · Anon. · ix 654 · A Request · Diana Trilling · lt Publication: Great Ghost Stories of the Old West Editor: Betty Baker Date: 1968-00-00 Publisher: Four Winds Press (Scholastic) Price: $3.50 Pages: 126 Format:  hc Type: ANTHOLOGY Cover: Great Ghost Stories of the Old West by Mel Fowler 9 • Introduction (Great Ghost Stories of the Old West) • essay by Betty Baker 13 • The Strange Valley • short story by T. V. Olsen 27 • The Phantom Mustang • (1954) • poem by S. Omar Barker 29 • The Trap • short story by Henry Wilson Allen [as by Clay Fisher] 56 • The White Riders • short story by Glenn R. Vernam 72 • Back Before the Moon • (1932) • short story by S. Omar Barker 85 • The Hexer • short story by Thomas Thompson 99 • Johnny Who Rode the Ghost Train • short story by Phoebe Ballard and Todhunter Ballard 111 • Ghost Wolf of Thunder Mountain • short story by Henry Wilson Allen [as by Will Henry]

For more of today's Short Story Wednesday posts, please see 

Patti Abbott's blog.