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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.
* * * *
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