Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading genre stories from 1957 issues of genre-defining men's magazine Playboy.  Our last episode covered the first half of 1957, and today we look at the second half of that year.  Now, we've already blogged about Gerald Kersh's story from the July issue, "Mistress of Porcosito," having read it in the Kersh collection On an Odd Note, where it was titled "The Queen of Pig Island."  But we do have another Kersh story today, as well as offerings from Psycho scribe Robert Bloch and prolific Twilight Zone contributor Charles Beaumont.

"The Cure" by Robert Bloch (1957)

You'll definitely want to check out the October 1957 issue of Hugh Hefner's magazine, because it includes photos of Benny Goodman and Frank Sinatra receiving their medals for earning top spots in the 1957 Playboy Jazz Poll.  Wow!  But let's tear ourselves away from that color photo of Ol' Blue Eyes long enough to read the issue's story by Robert Bloch, a guy who has a big stack of awards of his own, multiple Hugos and Stokers among them, and who appears in a photo in the magazine himself, conning a boat. 

"The Cure" is a competent crime story, only noteworthy because of its eye-rollingly lame pun ending.  It is illustrated with a powerful color woodcut by Richard Tyler that all you fans of BDSM should check out, however.

Jeff, Mike and Marie are dangerous American criminals hiding out in a Brazilian jungle village.  Their lackey Luiz, an Indian, is very loyal to Jeff.  Luiz rescues Jeff when Marie goes insane one night and tries to murder Jeff with a machete.  Then Luiz and Mike tie the naked Marie down while Jeff tends to his injury.  

The crooks are waiting for some money to arrive--I guess some associate in Cuba is changing marked American bills they stole from an armored car into pesos.  It is decided that Jeff will stay in the village to recuperate and wait for the dinero while Mike and Luiz take insane Marie to a town to get treatment from a psychiatrist.  One of the weaknesses of the story is that the characters act like going to the psychiatrist to get your homicidal mania fixed is like going to the emergency room to get stiches because you cut yourself slicing a lemon for your iced tea.  When you build an entire story around a stupid pun sometimes you have to sacrifice plausibility.

The punchline of the story comes when Luiz returns alone to the village.  He tells Jeff that doublecrosser Mike got his hands on the money before Jeff could learn about its arrival and was even going to murder Luiz before absconding with the filthy lucre; in the ensuing fight Mike was slain and the money fell irretrievably into a river.  Luiz then followed Jeff's instructions to take Marie to a "headshrinker" literally; he hands the severed and shrunken head of Marie to Jeff.

Barely acceptable.  Among the Bloch collections in which "The Cure" would reappear is a German volume called Nacht der Schrecken.  The bulk of this book is actually the novelization by a Michael Avallone of Bloch's screenplay for the Barbara Stanwyck film The Night Walker.  I like Barbara Stanwyck and tried to watch The Night Walker after reading "The Cure" but it is pretty ridiculous, and worse, boring, and I gave up at the 47 minute mark.

"The Deadly Will to Win" by Charles Beaumont (1957)

November's Playboy has a photo of Beaumont at the wheel of a car, clad in goggles.  Appropriately enough, as "The Deadly Will to Win" is about Buck Larsen, bitter 47-year-old race car driver!  Buck's friends are all dead or retired, he hasn't had a woman in a while, his reflexes and nerves aren't what they used to be, and he doesn't have any money.  If he doesn't finish in the top three (of almost twenty drivers!) in the next race he won't have enough money for a hotel room or even for the gasoline he'll need to get to the next race!  Even though he hates racing and hates race fans, whom he thinks watch in hopes of seeing people like Buck get killed, he keeps on doing it, for some reason unwilling to settle down to the job of car mechanic.

In the minutes before the race, Buck meets one of his competitors, a young guy with a pretty girlfriend.  "You want to impress your girlfriend," Buck thinks, "I just want to go on eating."  Will Buck survive the race?  Will the young stud survive the race?  Will Buck finish among the top three so he can afford to continue his perilous career?

A very straightforward (no twist ending) but effective adventure story; we watch Buck prepare his car and his performance in the race, and it is entertaining.  "The Deadly Will to Win" has been reprinted in quite a few Beaumont collections.  

"Something on His Mind" by Gerald Kersh (1941)

The December issue of Playboy reprints a story by Gerald Kersh that was first published by British magazine Lilliput in October 1941; the original title, "Strong Greek Wine," was dropped by the editors of Playboy in favor of "Something on His Mind." 

A guy goes into an inn.  He looks like he's been through something terrible, and is in a terrible mood, complaining and cursing.  He pays for drinks for everybody in the place, angrily throwing one silver coin and then another at the innkeeper.  The surprise ending is that he had on him thirty silver coins when he came in and he is eager to be rid of the rest of them, throwing them to the floor, where patrons scurry to collect them.  Kersh doesn't come out and say it, but this must be Judas; clues suggest today was the day Jesus was crucified.  An appropriate story for the Yuletide issue of the magazine, I suppose.

Acceptable.

**********

For the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log we'll be turning back the clock twenty years and reading more short stories from a magazine.  Stay tuned!   

...several thousand plain Englishmen of indefinable colour and temperament; short rather than tall, thin rather than fat, passionately devoted to football and accustomed to living on an average thirty-two shillings a week; men who are here because everyone else is here; men who hate nobody much, love nobody much, believe in nothing much--ordinary English wartime soldiers who get their martial spirit as they get their furniture, in greater quantities than they feel they need, for the sake of self-respect.  The Desert is a vast suburban street full of watching neighbors...fearlessness is an oaken dining-room suite--you can't very well be without it; everybody has it; people would talk.

We recently read a book of stories by Gerald Kersh, and today we continue our exploration of the work of the man reputed to be Harlan Ellison's favorite author.  You know I like to read World War II fiction written by men who actually served in the war; well, Kersh spent the early war years in the Coldstream Guards and the later part of the war as a war correspondent and had several war novels published while hostilities were underway.  Through the modern magic of e-commerce I have acquired one of these novels, a small and slender hardcover copy of Kersh's short 1944 novel Faces in a Dusty Picture.  My copy was printed in England, apparently while the war was still ongoing; on the publication page it is asserted that it was "produced in complete conformity with the authorised economy standards."  The novel is dedicated to Carl Olsson, a writer whom I am afraid is mostly forgotten, and bears a Biblical epigraph.  The other interesting thing about my copy of this book is that it was evidently used to kill a silverfish, and the back endpapers remain the final resting place of the noxious, now mummified, beast.

In the first line of Faces in a Dusty Picture, Kersh reminds us of a truth we'd like to forget: that if you are reading books you aren't really living, that reading books is like masturbating.

Mr. Mann stands outside the Hotel Bristol, gently ruminant, a man of books, mature yet virginal, heavy with the fruits of other mens' experience; mildly astonished like an artificially-inseminated cow.

(You can see how a sentence like this--semi-vulgar, daring the reader to be insulted--would appeal to Harlan Ellison.)

Lieutenant Mann is in a town in Egypt, serving with the fictional regiment "The Royal Archers," whom we are told are "a common regiment of foot-sloggers, a rough-house mob...recruited from the hard, dour men of the Midlands...."  Mann himself is a man of independent means who has a science degree and a vast mental storehouse of knowledge, making some of his comrades wonder why he is in North Africa and not doing some kind of scientific war work.  

The town is in an uproar, choked with crowds of refugees because the Germans are approaching, and we meet a bunch of other British soldiers and witness how each is dealing with the knowledge that they are about to be involved in a perilous fight with Rommel's Afrika Korps; a third of the way through the short novel (my copy is less than 130 pages of text) the British troops march out into the desert to take a position held by the enemy, and we see how they react to aerial bombardment, a sandstorm, and the danger of getting lost in the featureless waste where there is no water to be had.  In the final few pages the Tommies assault the Italians (and yes, just as those of you with delicate ears have feared, the British call their foes "dagos" and "wops") and take the position and all the little subplots--e.g., will this guy overcome his fear? will those sergeants who are feuding over a woman make up?--are resolved.  Of course, everybody knows that this is only the smallest of steps in the long march to win the war, and tomorrow's test, when the Germans, a far more formidable force than their Italian allies, arrive, will be a far more challenging one.  

Faces in a Dusty Picture is a series of bold and brief character studies; we get to know like a dozen different guys, a handful of them as intimately as we do Mann.  There is the general with the cold and selfish wife, the officer who just inherited a pile of money, the guy who is thinking of getting out of the fighting by shooting himself in the foot or hand, the private who is worried about his wife's pregnancy, those sergeants who are at daggers drawn over a woman the privates call "a gingerish tart," and several more.  Faces in a Dusty Picture is also a meditation on what an army--and I guess in particular, a British army--is like; for one illustrative example see the epigraph I have chosen for this blog post, and here is another sample:

Looking about him and seeing a mass of moving men, he [Mann] begins to think of their individual differences and their common similarities, and he wonders at the miraculous regimentation of an assembled Army....it seems to him that comrades in battle are comparable to people in love--they lose a little as separate personalities but, in the end, regain as parts of a united force, much more than they have lost.

Kersh's narrative includes a number of striking incidents, including sappers clearing mines, another sapper sacrificing his own life to make sure a supply column can get around an obstacle, a pair of men lost in the desert who are miraculously preserved when a plane crashes nearby and they can scavenge the water and food carried by the now dead pilot, and more.

As we might expect of a book published while the war was still raging, Faces in a Dusty Picture (while showing the terrible cost of war, with many characters killed) is a very sympathetic portrait of the British soldier and the British Army as an institution, and presumably the kinds of people who find military life abhorrent or took to twitter to broadcast their passionate hopes that Queen Elizabeth II had died a painful death would scoff, but Kersh's tribute is temperate and convincing, and presented with real literary skill, and I found it compelling and entertaining.  Faces in a Dusty Picture is more about human psychology than equipment and tactics, but I think people interested in the British experience of the Second World War will find it rewarding; thumbs up.   

Let's finish up my copy of the 1958 collection of Gerald Kersh stories On an Odd Note by reading the last five of its 13 offerings.

"The Brighton Monster" (1948)

Looks like this one was first printed in The Saturday Evening Post under the title "The Monster" and has since been reprinted in various Kersh collections and some SF anthologies. 

Our narrator, during the war, stumbled upon an 18th-century pamphlet in a basket of paper to be recycled and stuck it in his pocket, forgetting about it until two years after the war was over, when he was inspired to rush to the closet to retrieve it from his old uniform.

Kersh doesn't try to imitate 18th-century prose; the narrator mostly paraphrases the pamphlet.  It relates how a Brighton fisherman in financial and marital difficulties (he is alleged to have cheated on his wife and impregnated a girl) discovered in the sea an unusual man, a man covered in tattoos of various animals--snakes, lizards, birds, insects, etc.  Unable to speak any European languages, and extremely strong, the people of Brighton are divided over whether he is a human being or some kind of monster.  After all, how could a human man have survived underwater for as long as this creature apparently had?  The presence of the strange man causes some strife, as the fisherman who found him doesn't get the price he thinks he deserves from the pamphlet-writer, a vicar and natural philosopher, to whom he sells this unfortunate individual, and then the fisherman's companion demands a cut of the payout, etc.  The strange man escapes back into the sea after being held in captivity and studied for some months by the vicar.  

In 1947 the narrator is talking to a friend, an Army Intelligence officer who has been all over the world and knows all about unarmed combat--jujitsu, wrestling, etc.  He tells the story of a Japanese wrestler of his acquaintance who was apparently killed during the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the description of whom sends the narrator racing to get the half-forgotten pamphlet.  It turns out that that wrestler was transported through time and space by the atomic blast, to Georgian England, where the natives drove him to suicide!

Acceptable...maybe mildly good.  Kersh includes lots of asides describing life in England during the Second World War, the appearance, personality and opinions of that Intelligence officer, and so on, but this ancillary stuff is entertaining, so I won't bitch about it the way I groused about Frank Belknap Long's digressions in Journey into Darkness.  One of the interesting things about the story is how the narrator and the Intelligence officer deplore the atomic bomb and science in general; the story ends by highlighting the idea that the Japanese wrestler was the victim of scientists both in the 20th century and the Eighteenth.

"The Extraordinarily Horrible Dummy" (1939)

Resist the temptation to make the obvious joke about that politician you don't like or your ex!

"The Extraordinarily Horrible Dummy" first appeared in Penguin Parade 6, and would reappear in several magazines, anthologies, and Kersh collections.  It is a brief and effective tale.  The narrator is living in a crappy London hotel for impecunious losers.  He meets his next door neighbor, Ecco the ventriloquist, a nervous and high strung guy who has a particularly ugly dummy.  The narrator thinks this guy is a genius ventriloquist, but Ecco explains that he is actually a mediocre ventriloquist--his father was the genius ventriloquist.  Dad ruthlessly browbeat his son, trying to teach him the family trade, but was never satisfied with Ecco's performance.  When Ecco was 20, Dad died (it is hinted Ecco murdered him) and Dad's ghost took up residence in the dummy and has continued to berate his son mercilessly ever since.

It is sort of basic, but I like it.  

"Fantasy of a Hunted Man" (1942)

An issue of John Bull with an ad for cocoa on its cover appears to be the venue in which "Fantasy of a Hunted Man" first appeared under the pseudonym "Waldo Kellar."  Not the hit "The Extraordinarily Horrible Dummy" was, the tale has only been reprinted here in On an Odd Note, in Neither Man Nor Dog, and in a Swiss collection.

In "Fantasy of a Hunted Man" Englishman Kersh writes about racism in the American South.  "Fantasy of a Hunted Man" is also one of those switcheroo stories, like that Twilight Zone in which a U-boat captain magically finds himself aboard a defenseless ship about to be torpedoed, or all those stories in which a guy who hunts is then hunted, or a guy who kills bugs is then killed by a giant bug, or whatever.

The Major is a tough old character, brave, resourceful, determined to do his duty.  He is also a racist who hates blacks and foreigners.  One day a black guy, Prosper, innocently approaches a white woman who lives nearby, and the hysterical female flees, screaming bloody murder.  A lynch mob forms, and the Major is its leader!  Prosper runs for his life, leaving the mob far behind--except for the Major, who refuses to give up!  Finally, exhausted, the sixty-year old Major stops to rest and falls asleep.  While he is asleep his soul and that of Prosper are switched!  The Major, for a few hours, knows the fear felt by Prosper!  Prosper, in the Major's body, begs the mob for mercy; the mob thinks the Major has gone insane and this distracts them and they abandon the search for Prosper.  When their souls are switched back, the Major has become a kindly guy who no longer hates black people.      

Acceptable--the story is short and sharp and direct, not too long, not overwritten.  I generally find these switcheroo (Joanna Russ calls them "role reversal") stories tiresome, but "Fantasy of a Hunted Man" is better than many switcheroo stories; often such stories feel like self-indulgent revenge fantasies, and/or have boring flat one-dimensional characters.  Fortunately, the Major is a sort of interesting character with admirable as well as deplorable personality traits, and the story, as it depicts a man growing and changing, has a beginning, middle and end and is not just a horror anecdote about some bastard the reader has been primed to hate getting punished ha ha ha.  

"The Gentleman All in Black" (1942)

Another kind of story I generally find lame is the make-a-deal-with-the-Devil story.  And here is Kersh's make-a-deal-with-the-Devil story, "The Gentleman All in Black," which I am giving a thumbs down--it is lame filler.

The narrator knows a beggar in Paris, a beggar who has an apartment and who is reputed to have a secret stash of money.  The beggar tells the narrator the story of his last day working as the sole clerk to Mahler, the great financier.  

Mahler made a bad investment, and was so deep in debt he would have to go out of business.  But then a man in fine black clothes and fine black jewelry arrived unexpectedly at the office.  Mahler doesn't realize it, but of course this is the Devil.  Mahler doesn't believe in the soul, so Satan doesn't offer to buy his soul; instead he offers to buy Mahler's time.  "I will give you twenty million francs for one year of your life--one year in which you must devote yourself utterly to me."  Mahler is a hard bargainer, and gets what looks like a good deal--fifty million francs for just one second of his time.  The Devil puts the money on the table and moments later uses that one second of mastery over Mahler to order the financer to jump out the window to his death.  The beggar, it is implied, seizes the money after Lucifer leaves but is reluctant to spend it.

Another Waldo Kellar story from John Bull that would reappear in Neither Man Nor Dog and that Swiss collection.       

"The Eye" (1957)

"The Eye"'s debut appearance was in the Saturday Evening Post under the title "The Murderer's Eye."  It would go on to be included in The Ugly Face of Love and in a 1965 anthology titled Great Detective Stories About Doctors. 

Let's read four more stories by British-born Jewish writer, Edgar Award winner, British Army veteran, and naturalized American citizen Gerald Kersh from the 1958 collection On an Odd Note.  I have the old paperback edition of the collection, published by Ballantine with a Richard Powers cover; the book has been reprinted in trade paperback size in our own 21st century by Valancourt as part of their 20th Century Classics series.

(We read the first four stories in the book, in which feature plenty of scoundrels, mysterious deaths and strange artifacts, earlier this month.)

"The Sympathetic Souse" (1954)

After first appearing in Lilliput, "The Sympathetic Souse" has been in multiple collections, including Men Without Bones and The Best of Gerald Kersh.

Dr. Almuna thinks the human mind is too complicated to really understand, rendering psychoanalysis bunk, and in conversation to the narrator likens Freud and the psychoanalysts to witch doctors, joking that Dracula, werewolves, and psychoanalysts all come form the same region of the world, the Carpathians.  

At a party, a medical guy tells a story of sympathetic pains--a young woman in 1944 suddenly got a pain under her collar bone and cried out--it was later learned that at that very moment her brother had been shot on the battlefield under the collar bone.  Then Dr. Almuna tells his story of "physical sympathy."

The brothers John and William came to see Almuna, John complaining that while William constantly drank booze and smoked, it was he, John, who never drank or smoked, who suffered the ill effects: a red nose, coughing fits, sickness in the stomach, etc.  Kersh goes on in this vein for some pages, how William's vulgar and indulgent behavior inconveniences and discomforts the sober and abstemious John.  Then at the end of the story comes the lame punchline which doesn't really make any sense--John and William were Siamese twins.

Besides the fact that the ending is an annoying trick, Almuna having conveniently forgotten to mention that John and William were conjoined twins, the three segments of the story barely go together--the first part is about how psychoanalysis is a scam, the second part has nothing to do with psychology but describes a psychic or supernatural phenomena, and the third describes a (quite dubious) purely physical phenomena.

Thumbs down.  

"The Queen of Pig Island" (1949)

Here's another piece that was given the nod by Simon Raven for inclusion in The Best of Gerald Kersh.  It first appeared in The Strand and later in Playboy under a different title ("Mistress of Porcosito") and in Nightshade and Damnations, the 1968 edition of which not only had an intro by Kersh superfan Harlan Ellison, but a cover by Ellison's favorite illustrators, the Dillons.

"The Queen of Pig Island" is the history of a circus freak, based in part on the memoir she wrote that was found in a bag near her skeleton on a small island; Lalouette, born with no arms or legs, died on that island after the ship her circus was sailing to Mexico upon sank.

Lalouette was a cultured genius, born to an aristocratic family, well-read, fluent in five languages, able to paint and write and clothe herself just with her mouth.  When she was shipwrecked along with the circus strongman--a gentle giant--and two midgets--recalcitrant jerks--Lalouette became their leader, more or less, directing them to build a shelter and hunt for eggs and make a spear and hunt pigs and so on.  At night she tells them the story of the Odyssey, unwittingly giving the jealous midgets inspiration of a method of murdering the generous and decent strong man, and their little colony of freaks is wiped out in a spasm of violent death.

A successful little tragedy, understated and sad rather than shocking, as we know from the start that a disaster will befall Lalouette. 

"Prophet Without Honor" (1958)

It looks like this one was first published here in On an Odd Note and would be reprinted in 1960 in The Ugly Face of Love.

Bohemund Raymond was a hard-drinking London newspaper editor in the first decades of the 20th century.  He claimed descent from a leader of the First Crusade who married a Saracen prophetess.  (Kersh in this story repurposes the famous story of the Holy Lance at the siege of Antioch, Raymond attributing the dream that revealed the Lance to the Crusaders to his Arab ancestor instead of French priest Peter Bartholomew.)  After his death in 1939, our narrator (named Gerald) and his fellow journalists relate anecdotes about their old boss Raymond, in particular his propensity to make predictions.  Their talk leads them to reexamine a sheet typewritten by Raymond in the Thirties, a document long thought to be gibberish, but which today they realize is in fact Arabic typed phonetically in the Roman alphabet; it seems that Raymond's ancestor, the Arab prophetess, contacted him from the beyond, because the translated text, by way of cryptic metaphors, predicted the course of World War II and of the Cold War, which, the prophecy contends, will end in 1995.  It is unclear, but I guess the prediction is that the world will be destroyed.

Acceptable; the jokes about newspaper people being yelled at by their bosses, hired and fired on a whim, and playing practical jokes on each other are tired and obvious, but not bad--people going to bat for Kersh could convincingly claim the jokes are not tired, but "time-honored classics."  

"The Beggar's Stone" (1941)

This one was first published in John O' London's Weekly as "The Stone," and would reappear in three Kersh collections before the Second World War was over; in 1945 it was published in Esquire under its new name, "The Beggar's Stone," accompanied by a dashing photo of Kersh in his uniform in front of a Union Jack. 

Squint or click to get a closer look at Powers' painting and to  more comfortably read this encomium to Gerald Kersh

Back in 2021, I read the short story "River of Riches" by Gerald Kersh, a man whom Harlan Ellison has said was his favorite writer.  Recently, at the Second Story Books location in Rockville, MD, attracted by the Richard Powers cover, I picked up Ballantine Books 268, a 1958 paperback collection of Kersh stories entitled On an Odd Note. The yellow back cover is an essay about how awesome Kersh is; let's read the first four stories in the book and see if there is something to this essay and to Ellison's adulation or if that is all a lot of hogwash.

"Seed of Destruction" (1947)

"Seed of Destruction" appeared in Esquire the same year it was published in the British hardcover collection Sad Road to the Sea.  In 1959 British readers who had two shillings to rub together had another crack at it when it was reprinted in Suspense magazine.

This story is OK, no big deal.  A jeweler with a small shop full of odds and ends, knickknacks and geegaws, has a vivid imagination and makes up extravagant lies on the spot in order to make sales.  This broken inkpot was used by Shakespeare, this rusty spearpoint was used by Richard the Lion Heart, this pipe was smoked by Emile Zola, etc.  Showing to the narrator a signet ring with Arabic script on it, the shop keeper spins a yarn about the ring bearing a  powerful magic, the power of bringing to anyone who should steal it or receive it as a gift catastrophically bad luck--if you buy it you are safe.  The ring is purchased by some other individual, and the narrator later learns that its powers, made up on the spot by the fabulist shopkeeper, seem to have been coming true as the ring changed hands in Britain and then America over the years, until it finally returned to England, to the shopkeeper himself, who died when he was gifted the ring by his son.

Merely competent; it feels like a dry list of incidents lacking tension and interesting characters.

"Frozen Beauty" (1941)

This one first appeared in John Bull, a weekly magazine that it seems during this period sold its cover to advertisers rather than use that space to attract readers with a striking image.  In '53 the story was thawed out and reappeared in the collection The Brighton Monster and Other Stories, and it would go on to be reprinted in multiple Kersh collections and in Mike Ashley's The Best of British SF 1. 

"Frozen Beauty" is more like an idea than a complete story, as it doesn't have much of a plot and the characters don't go through any kind of growth or make any decisions or anything.  "Frozen Beauty" is also one of those stories that has multiple framing devices, so that the actual story is several layers away from the reader.  This is one of the traditional story-yelling devices of which I am skeptical.   

Our narrator meets a Russian doctor who fled from the Revolution., and this medico tells his story to the narrator.  In the course of his flight, Doc found himself in a hermit's hut in deepest Siberia.  In the hut is a beautiful dead woman; Doc can't place the ethnicity of the woman.  The hermit tells Doc the story of how he met this woman, whom he has treated as a daughter for sixteen years.  One day, far from his hut, after a fierce storm, the hermit found a hole in the ground that lead to a large frozen hut full of people and their animals, all of them flash frozen alive long ago.  The fire the hermit burnt for light down there, astonishingly, thawed a little girl and she returned to life!  The hermit brought her home and raised her, and recently she died of unknown causes.  And that's it.           

Remember Howard Wandrei's 1934 story about a frozen woman, "The Other"?  That story had its problems, but it also had a world-shattering climax and characters with personality who have motivation and make all kinds of decisions.  And then there was "Skyrock," Frank Belknap Long's 1935 story of finding a woman from ancient times encased in crystal.  The discovery of a person frozen in ancient times and physically intact today, pretty common genre literature theme, I guess.

For his treatment of this theme, "Frozen Beauty," Mr. Kersh is receiving a grade of merely acceptable from Professor MPorcius.

"Reflections in a Tablespoon" (1946)

It is time to break out into some new territory here at MPorcius Fiction Log and read four stories by people I have never blogged about before.  Our guide on this expedition will be Judith Merril, a woman whose fan base may not be all that big (Barry Malzberg in a 2016 column for Galaxy's Edge reports that Donald Wollheim told him that Merril's famous anthology, England Swings! SF, "was the worst-selling Ace paperback in history") but its members are dedicated and powerful.  Merril, by including them in the fourth installment of "The Most Acclaimed S-F Anthology," is telling us that these four stories are among 1958's "greatest," so let's give them a shot.

"Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" by Richard Gehman 

Richard Gehman appears to be a guy who wrote some novels and did lots of Hollywood and Broadway journalism, writing articles about celebrities for TV Guide and penning biographies of Bogie, Jerry Lewis, Gary Cooper, and the restaurant Sardi's.  He apparently also hung around with the "Rat Pack."  Gehman only has two fiction entries at isfdb.  Merril's little intro to the two-page "Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" here in SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Fourth Annual Volume tells us it is a satire and points out that Playboy editor Ray Russell warned her he didn't think it fit into her SF anthology. 

I'm a little reluctant to say this story is a total waste of time because I haven't read any Kerouac so maybe nuances are going over my head, and maybe people familiar with Kerouac love "Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" when first they encounter it.  But to me it is just a bunch of puns and goofs on hipster slang.  For example, the protagonist, a mouse, tries pot, but it doesn't give him any kicks, so he tries pan.  Later, still in pursuit of a transcendent experience, the mouse runs up and down a clock like in the nursery rhyme.  Then he gives up on trying to get high from external sources ("in the final analysis, he had to look inward") and writes a novel and gets rich.

I guess Merril considers this SF because animals talk, but there is no speculation in it, no escapist adventure, no science--it's a gentle parody of a cultural phenomenon.  I have to suspect she included it in her book of 1958's "greatest science-fiction and fantasy" stories in an effort to make it look like SF readers are sophisticates conversant with important literary movements and not just pimple-faced freaks who know how to use a slide rule. 

"Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" appeared first in Playboy under the pen name Martin Scott, alongside photos by Shel Silverstein of his trip to Moscow and a story by Richard Matheson.  Merril loved it so much she included it in 1967's SF: The Best of the Best; Gehman didn't get his name on the cover among those of Brian Aldiss, Clifford Simak and Damon Knight (who famously panned Merril's novel The Tomorrow People at some risk to his career), but is instead lumped in with Steve Allen under the description "eleven other contemporary masters."  "Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" would be reprinted again in 1974 in a McGraw-Hill textbook, Fantasy: The Literature of the Marvelous.  I guess if he is in a text book he really is a master!

"The Yellow Pill" by Rog Phillips

The pill in "Mother's Little Helper" is yellow, isn't it?  Now there's a great song.  And it's about a contemporary social issue--I wonder if Merril considered it one of the greatest SF songs of 1966.     

"The Yellow Pill" first appeared in John W. Campbell Jr.'s Astounding, so I think we can expect it to be a better fit for conventional notions of what constitutes SF than is Gehman's piece.  Rog Phillips actually has many stories listed at isfdb and a pretty long Wikipedia entry but somehow I have never read anything by him before.

Cedric Elton is the world's most famous psychiatrist.  The cops bring to him Gerald Bocek, a man who murdered five people in a supermarket.  Bocek claims those he shot down were in fact a boarding party of reptilian space pirates who had attacked the space ship upon which both he and Elton are serving as professional spacemen.  Bocek insists that if Elton really thinks himself a head shrinker on Earth it is because he is suffering from space madness, an occupational hazard of space travel, and should take one of the yellow pills carried aboard to dispel such madness.

Over the course of several days, each man tries to convince the other that he is delusional and each employs strategies to cure the other.  The twist ending of the story is that both succeed in changing the other's mind--as the story ends Elton has come to believe they really are spacemen whose vessel is full of charred lizardman corpses while Bocek has come to think himself a murderer (not guilty by reason of insanity) who has just been cured of his delusions by Elton the brilliant psychiatrist.  After expressing his gratitude, Bocek walks out of the doctor's office...or did he just step into the airlock where he will die of asphyxiation?           

This story is OK; competent, but no big deal.  Editors have been keen on "The Yellow Pill" and it has appeared in numerous anthologies and reprint magazines.  

"River of Riches" by Gerald Kersh