Summary:
An interesting and worthwhile anthology about the arts. It contains one of Barry Malzberg’s better (and longer) stories, Choral, which mixes time travel, Beethoven, metaphysics and black comedy; Richard Frede’s strangely titled Oh, Lovelee Appearance of the Lass from the North Countree, a very readable story about a painter preparing for a flight in a military jet (although the fantasy ending is much stranger and doesn’t really work); finally, there is the Nebula Award winning A Glow of Candles, a Unicorn’s Eye, which is a story about the death of theatre in the future. It has a neat title and is competently done I guess, but is the least interesting piece in the collection.
[ISFDB link] [Archive.org copy] [Barry Malzberg’s Chorale (novel version)]
Other reviews: 1
Anonymous, Kirkus Review
Various, Goodreads (none as of Jan 2020)
Brian Stableford, Foundation #88, September 1978 (partial)
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Editors, Edward L. Ferman & Barry N. Malzberg
Fiction:
Oh, Lovelee Appearance of the Lass from the North Countree • novelette by Richard Frede ∗∗+
A Glow of Candles, a Unicorn’s Eye • novelette by Charles L. Grant ∗∗∗
Choral • novella by Barry N. Malzberg ∗∗∗+
Non-fiction:
Science Fiction and the Arts • introduction by Barry N. Malzberg
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When I first started reading SF magazines in the mid-seventies I also tried to keep up with the new original anthologies, seeing them as essentially the same thing (albeit an ersatz version of the former). While this was relatively easy for British anthologies (they were few and far between, and usually had paperback editions—New Writings in SF, New Worlds, Andromeda, etc.), it was harder to do for American ones: they were more expensive and, apart from the currency hit, I had to get them mail order (more cost) from Ken Slater at Fantast Medway. A further problem was that some of these American anthologies only appeared in hardback, which meant that, even if Ken could get hold of them, the cost was prohibitive for a cash-strapped student.2 So, even though I was aware of the likes of, say, the Orbit series of anthologies from Damon Knight, I never saw a copy of the later hardbacks until a couple of years ago, when I stumbled upon some scanned editions.
As for the volume under review, not only do I not recall seeing any mention of Graven Images, but I also never came across it subsequently; I only found out about it when there was a mention of the Richard Frede story on one of my listservs a couple of weeks ago (if I recall correctly he was thought to be an unusual choice of contributor for a volume that also contains Grant’s Nebula Award winning story and Malzberg’s piece).3 Frede was a name I recognised from F&SF (I remembered his May 1977 story Mr Murdoch’s Ghost, or at least the title), and who I thought was a frequent contributor. When I checked ISFDB, however, I found that he only contributed three stories over a fifteen-month period. I then picked up Graven Images, thinking I’d have a quick look at the beginning of Frede’s story . . . and ended up finishing it at half past one in the morning (a rare event for me as at that time of night drooping eyelids always trump reading).
The reason that Oh, Lovelee Appearance of the Lass from the North Countree kept my attention is twofold: first, Frede is a very good storyteller (an early bestselling novel, Interns, sold over 1,000,000 copies according to the cover blurb) and, second, the story’s narrative arc—a painter attending a number of aeromedical courses in preparation for a flight in a USAF fighter—is similar to something I’ve experienced myself.
The story itself opens with a Colonel Jack “Jock” McTeague flying upside down in an F-106 looking at the colours in the sky at the edge of a distant storm. When he gets home he tells his wife what he has seen, and she tells him she will commission a painting for his Christmas present:
His wife then wrote to the American Artists’ Association, “He says it was generally flaming color, but he could see, as well, sepia, burnt sienna with raw sienna at the edges, and both umbers (burnt and raw), the earth colors, he believes you call them, and oranges . . .”
.
“. . . and some pinks along in there with the oranges, too,” Mr. Tribble of the American Artists’ Association read. “He believes he saw, too, ranges of rose and vermilion, especially against leadlike gray and blacks. He says especially, too, note the yellow-oranges and burnt oranges, streaks of yellow, ochers, the yellow-orange family.”
“Turner,” Mr. Tribble said aloud. Over his desk intercom he said, “Nancy, who is that fellow who does Turner for us?”
“I don’t remember,” Nancy said. “It’s been so long since anyone wanted a Turner. Shall I look him up?” p. 14
They contact a painter called Clarence Beattie, who discusses the commission with them before he—driven in part by domestic restlessness—phones Colonel McTeague. McTeague thinks it would be a good idea if Beattie came for a flight and saw what a storm front looks like from the cockpit. He tells Beattie to get a medical certificate, and then attend a military aeromedical course where he’ll be taught about the dangers of hypoxia, how to safely eject from the aircraft, and so on. And that’s what the first thirty pages or so are mostly about: his medicals, the training, and the endless travelling to and from, and waiting at, various Air Force bases (McTeague is continually postponing their meeting as he is a busy man). There is also one night in a bar where his sexual fidelity to his wife is tested.
This is recounted in a breezy and very readable style (you can see why Frede was a bestselling writer), and the story is also leavened with military quirkiness and black humour, such as the advice given by his ejection seat instructor:
“You’ll need [the fur hat] on the flight line before the colonel lowers the canopy. Afterward slip it into your flight suit. In case you have to eject, you’ll need it on the ground. Remember, before you eject, get your head back, chin back, arms in tight across your chest; tuck your hands into your armpits and get your knees and feet tight back against the seat. When you go out, you’re going to get exploded out and you don’t want to lose anything going, like your legs or head. That could ruin your whole day.
[. . .]
“You don’t know how many people, even the pilots, don’t remember to pull in their legs when they’re ejecting, and they’re a mess afterward, believe me, those who survive. But probably you won’t have to.” p. 33
Beattie, at long last, meets McTeague, and they have several drinks in the bar the night before they go flying. The next day Beattie is in the back seat of the jet:
The colonel climbed in and settled himself. He was about eight feet forward, but there was a radar screen directly in front of Clarence and a lot of other equipment in between, so all Clarence could see of the colonel was a bit of white of the back of the colonel’s helmet. Clarence was tightly fitted in. It was difficult for him to move. The colonel seemed a great distance away. Clarence, usually most at ease in confinement, such as his studio, now found himself subject to an attack of claustrophobia.
I’m going to be flying at thirty thousand and be claustrophobic there? Clarence asked himself. I am?
Something buzzed and garbled in his helmet. Then again. Then. “zzzzz . . . zzzzz . . . ’s that?” said the colonel.
“What?” said Clarence.
“—ll turn it up. . . . There. How do you read me?”
“Fine.”
“Fine,” said the colonel. “Just give me a few minutes to get everything checked. There’re so many dials and gadgets and things, they confuse me.”
Clarence did not laugh. p. 40
Before much longer they are off the ground and in an afterburner climb to thirty thousand feet. When they get through the cloud, McTeague tells Beattie to look to his left, where he finally sees the coloured sky ahead of the storm front.
It’s at this point (spoiler) where the story takes a major left turn. Having been repeatedly briefed and drilled, Beattie ejects when a red light unexpectedly comes on in front of him. As he falls away from the aircraft he realises that the caption didn’t say EJECT but AC GEN. He then remembers his ejection drills and activates his emergency oxygen, and then waits for his parachute to open.
The next part of the story is even weirder: he lands in snow and makes his way to a solitary farmhouse, where he is greeted by a strange woman who thinks he is someone else:
A woman opened the door. She wore a long dress of rough material in an old style, as in eighteenth-century paintings of provincial life. Her hair was piled up. She was pretty, but her skin was coarse, from work or weather.
Her features had beauty and dignity, but there was a sternness to the set of her expression as if she had just eaten something not to her liking. She said, tonelessly, and as if withholding her belief, “Jack-Jock, my John-John.”
“No,” said Clarence, “my name is Clarence.”
“Jack-Jock,” she said quietly. “You’ve come to me, come back to me.”
“May I come in?” said Clarence.
“I thought you’d sunk beneath the wind. You went off in that terrible wind and never came back. No message. But I knew why, did I not, Lord John?”
“I don’t know. My name really is Clarence.”
“Clarence, Jack, John, Jock. You may come in. Ah, you’ve come again.”
“Thank you. But actually I haven’t been here before. Actually I just sort of fell down from the sky.”
She said, “It does not surprise me. You were a harper then, did sing of air.” pp. 45-46
The next part reads like a fantasy sequence.4 She accuses Beattie of trying to deflower her, something he apparently achieved with her now dead sister, and she takes him down to the cellar to see her frozen body. He is locked in, and eventually goes to sleep.
The next day she lets him out and takes him outside at the end of a shotgun but, before she can shoot him, a rescue helicopter arrives overhead and he runs to them and is winched on board.
When Beattie gets back to base he learns that McTeague is now a general in Hawaii, and that his ejection occurred several years previously. He then finds that he has been declared dead, his wife has moved to California with his daughter, and that she has remarried.
This last section made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever, and seems completely at odds with the rest of the story (it’s almost like the pages of two different stories got muddled up in the editor’s office). That said, I really enjoyed the first two-thirds/three quarters of the story, so I’d classify this one as a fascinating failure.
A Glow of Candles, a Unicorn’s Eye by Charles L. Grant gets off to a maundering, near-incoherent start:
There are no gods but those that are muses. You may quote me on that if you are in need of an argument.
It’s original. One of the few truly original things I have done with my life, in my life, throughout my life, which has been spent in mostly running. Bad grammar that, I suppose. But nevertheless true for the adverb poorly placed.
And how poorly placed have I been.
Not that I am complaining, you understand. I could have, and with cause, some thirty years ago, and for the first thirty-seven I did—though the causes were much more nebulous. But the complaints I have now are of the softer kind, the kind that grows out of loving, and are meant—in loving—not to be heard, not to be taken seriously.
For example, consider my beard. Helena loved it, once she became accustomed to its prickly assaults. But I do not need it anymore. There is no need for the hiding because I have been forgiven my sins—or so it says here on this elegant paper I must carry with me in case the message has been lost—forgiven my trespasses. But I like the stupid beard now. Its lacing of gray lends a certain dignity to a face that is never the same twice in one week. And it helps me to forget what I am beneath the costumes and the makeup and the words that are not mine. Yet it’s not a forgetting that is demanded by remorse, nor is it a forgetting necessitated by a deep and agonizing secret. pp. 55-56
There is a page and a half of this sort of thing, and it is an awful beginning.
The story then cuts to the narrator, Gordon Anderson, a film actor (or what passes for films in this near future) doing a take with a simulacrum of a tiger. He is accidentally injured, and then gets a lecture from the director.
We then find out what kind of films Anderson is involved in making:
Begun by the British and expanded by the Americans, the tapes were the foundation of a dream-induced system through which young people would hopefully be matured without actually suffering through the birth pangs of adolescence. Hospital wards with soft colors, nurses with kind faces, and for two hours and twenty minutes every other day the young were wired and hooked and taped to a machine, which I and others like me, those actors with no place to go, inhabited. We wrestled with tigers, endured floods, endured women and men and disasters personal. It was, as the narration stressed again and again and again—who knows how often?—all very symbolic, and all very real.
Watch! the voice ordered.
Take care, the voice cautioned.
Watch, and take care, and listen, and apply . . . apply . . . apply . . . listen . . . apply . . .
A debriefing, then, which lasted for something like an hour. More, if you were new to growing without aging. Less, if you’d been in the system for a year or more. p. 64
We also learn about Anderson’s past, that he appeared in five failed stage plays (there is no appetite for these in this future), and subsequently, in a fit of anger, beat up the playwrights involved. The authorities have not yet discovered his involvement in this crime.
Anderson later gets involved with Helena, the partner of friend. After he sleeps with her, he tells her about the assaults. Eventually (spoiler), the authorities discover he is responsible. The couple go on the run, leaving the city for the sparsely populated countryside and hiding out in abandoned house (it is in this section where Helena finds and gives Anderson the unicorn necklace mentioned in the title).
Woven into this chase story is the couple’s interest in old plays (Shakespeare, Williams, Miller, Chekhov, etc.). Later in the story, after the heat has dies down, they set up a travelling theatre. They visit small towns, and have some success educating the audience about the art form before performing their plays.
One night, Helena’s ex and an official appear at one of their shows, and the couple find out they have been pardoned.
The story ends with a reference to Helena’s death at age eighty, and the unicorn necklace.
In my notes I ended up categorising this as “good”, although, judging from what I’ve written above, I’m a bit puzzled as to why (if I recall correctly the beginning and end are better than the middle). That said, there is no escaping the fact that it is an entirely minor piece, and one hamstrung by its waffle, pretentiousness, and unconvincing future.
The theme of artists losing, and then regaining, their audience obviously played better with SFWA voters than me—they voted it a Nebula Award for best novelette in 1979.5
Choral by Barry N. Malzberg is the longest story in the book, and the best. This was a pleasant surprise for me as I wasn’t a fan of his short fiction in the late 1970’s and the early 1980’s: it seemed as if his stories always featured protagonists having a breakdown, or who were suffering from terminal sexual or existential angst. In small doses these would have been tolerable, but it felt like the stories were everywhere. It didn’t help that they were in advance of my reading age (and maybe still are).
This story opens with a time-traveller called Reuter who is forging documents thought to be written by Beethoven:
Hunched over the papers on the third floor of his stinking, reeking rooms in the Vienna of 1802, Reuter applied himself to the paper. I renounce, he wrote, I renounce. How did that go in German? It didn’t matter, the papers would be picked up and the translation done by his section man, but he would feel a little more secure if he knew German. A hint of authenticity. For that matter, he would feel a little more secure if he knew more music, but then again you had to keep some sense of perspective. What he knew about was history and the psychology of the mind that would have been Beethoven’s. The rest could be faked, right down to the transcripts of the compositions, which he had stowed in various cubicles in the room. Nothing had to be original; all he had to do was to reconstitute. He supposed. p. 105
Reuter is unhappy in his role, and frequently discusses this with his superiors—but he agrees to continue. According to the theories of Karl Kemperer, the “mad physicist”, the past is in flux and must be eternally reconstructed by surrogates:
Kemper’s core speculation was that his theory could be proved true if the reconstruction of historical figures were evolved. He believed that upon the return of surrogates from the present to the past, it would be found that the surrogates were the actual personages, that there had been, in short, no JFK, Chamberwit, Thomas Alva Guinzaburg other than those who were the surrogates.
This would make clear, Kemper had postulated, that the past was an absolute creation of the present and that indeed it was only the concept of a timeless present, working toward both future and past, that sustained all of human existence. p. 113
There is quite a lot of this kind of metaphysical comment throughout, and I found some of it confusing (it may be that the later passages are just intended to show Reuter’s unsettled mental state).
What I thought the story does do well are the details about Beethoven’s life (there is a lot of this in the back end of the tale), and the mordant black humour threaded throughout the piece. Sometimes these combine, such as when Reuter/Beethoven faces a near mutiny from his orchestra about the opening of his Fifth Symphony—at this point Reuter begins to suspect that the conductor and orchestra are also time-travellers. The comedy is also evident when he is interviewed by supervisors, who seem to have a decidedly shaky grasp of past events:
“In some ways your work is quite satisfactory. The outburst to the orchestra was quite neatly conceived.”
“I knew it was in character.”
“It is important, however, that there be a sense of total conviction. You cannot lapse. We are dealing, after all, with a central historical figure, the cornerstone, so to speak, of modern music. The five piano concerti, the ten symphonies—”
“Nine symphonies.”
“Come?”
“He wrote nine symphonies, not ten.”
“Oh,” the Supervisor said. “Well, no difference.” He consulted some papers in his hand. “Perfectly true; there were only nine symphonies.”
“He died with some notes for a tenth, but they were lost, or at least appropriated by someone.”
“Quite so,” the Supervisor said. “On balance, your performance is adequate, however. There are elements of real range and passion. If you could open up some more levels of pain—”
“I don’t understand how you could think there were ten symphonies,” Reuter said. “There were nine, that’s a very common fact.”
“No difference. That’s your specialty. Now, when I talk about pain, I mean—”
“It’s not a matter of specialty. It’s just something that you ought to know. I mean, if you’re reconstructing the past, then it should be assumed that you know the details you’re seeking to reconstruct. Wouldn’t that be reasonable?” pp. 123-124
A worthwhile read, and possibly one for my hypothetical ‘Best of the Year’ collection.
Like most anthologies there isn’t much nonfiction, but there is an introduction to the volume as a whole, as well as individual ones for the stories. In the former, Science Fiction and the Arts, Barry N. Malzberg begins with this:
Science fiction, as Brian Stableford has pointed out in various essays, has always been a technological fiction, a means of helping us understand the confusing machines and of mapping little way stations, such as showing us where the lavatories might be in the rocket ships—and since its emphasis was on the explication of the machinery, it had very little room for somewhat less urgent matters. Busy, busy: the science fiction writer felt himself to be a tour guide around the apocalypse. p. 9
The emphasis may lie there, but there are so many counter-examples I wonder if this is even a worthwhile generalisation.
Malzberg then gives a brief sketch of the arts in SF before telling us what we can expect from this volume:
Painting, music, performance—this anthology is the first, I think, to be exclusively devoted to the subject of art, and so it may constitute a precedent of sorts.
Precedent is what art is about: the breaking of new ground, the granting of the perception to see as we have never seen before, the spiritual insight that will enable us to understand or be moved in different ways. Precedent is not perhaps the business of science fiction, which for the most part seems more than ever dedicated to the smoothing away of strange and terrible landscapes to outposts of Corporate Headquarters . . . and this may be one explanation for the dearth of stories utilizing both art and science fiction. p. 10
Malzberg also contributes introductions to the stories. In the one for the Frede story he mentions that the “story grew from an Experience [Frede] had while researching an upcoming novel called The Pilots”, and quotes a letter that shows the story’s genesis:
“I wrote a letter to a friend in the Air Force and one day I found myself at the second and tandem set of controls of an F-106 Delta Dart. At one point in a rather violent maneuver the EJECT light seemed to flash on—it may have been an instant of electrical malfunction or it may have been in my imagination. I elected not to eject and, fortunately, my instructor, through my headset, confirmed my decision. But the warning light kept going off in my mind, and I had a lot of recall of the lonely upstate New York countryside over which we did our training. . . .” p. 11
The introduction for the Grant is perfunctory, but Malzberg provides an informative one for his own contribution (click on the image above).
This anthology has an interesting mix of stories, and is well worth seeking out. ●
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1. According to ISFDB, this anthology doesn’t seem to have been reviewed in any of the publications they index. I only found one complete review on the internet. (Goodreads is usually a reliable source for at least a brief comment, but it is a blank sheet.)
2. When I hear people moan about Amazon I think of the old days, and then gladly buy the easily available (and relatively cheap) Kindle editions.
3. Richard Frede’s ISFDB page is here. And here is the cover for The Interns (which was later made into a film):
Apparently the genesis of Graven Images was that Frede and Ferman were neighbours, and Frede couldn’t sell the story to a mainstream market.
4. Kirkus Review states that the “fantasy” part of the story is actually taking place in a daydream of Colonel McTeague’s—missed that, if this is the case, although she does call him “Jack-Jock”. I’m not sure that knowledge improves matters.
5. Grant’s story was up against Mikal’s Songbird by Orson Scott Card, and Devil You Don’t Know by Dean Ing for the 1979 novelette award (I can’t remember reading Card’s piece). ●
