Our guided tour through the science fiction and fantasy of 1958 continues.  Our guide is the New York Journal-American's favorite anthologist, Judith Merril, our map is the alphabetical list headed "Honorable Mentions" in the back of her 1959 edition of SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy.  Today we'll read the four 1958 stories by "L" authors recommended by Merril, three of which debuted in issues of F&SF edited by Anthony Boucher.

"A Deskful of Girls" by Fritz Leiber

Here we have a story that is a satire of Hollywood--how Hollywood exploits women and reflects our sex-obsessed society that sees women as sex objects--as well as a feminist revenge fantasy.  "Deskful of Girls" is also one of those SF stories that offers an explanation of a supernatural belief; SF writers love to come up with rational explanations for ancient religions and supernatural phenomena like the Greek gods or the Norse gods or vampires or werewolves or Medusa the Gorgon or whatever, and Leiber here speculates on the origin of the common belief in ghosts.  For some reason Merril cites as its source the eighth volume of The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction and not the magazine in which "A Deskful of Girls" debuted, so we are dutifully reading it in a scan of that book instead of a scan of the magazine. 

Our narrator, Carr Mackay, is on a mission: he has been hired to negotiate with Emil Slyker, the overweight psychoanalyst to the stars, a man who integrates into his practice his deep knowledge of sex and of the occult and has been blackmailing Evelyn Cordew, the current top Hollywood sex symbol.  Mackay befriends Slyker and ends up in Slyker's office, seated before the man's desk, which, Slyker has told him, is full of girls, a metaphor which has got Mackay's imagination humming.  Slyker is a gifted raconteur, and as he relates to our narrator the stories of Hollywood starlets and other prominent women he has known intimately as their analyst, Mackay gets a sense that Slyker is presenting to him the true essence of these women, and eventually comes to realize that Slyker has these women's ectoplasmic emanations in those folders he keeps pulling out of his desk drawers.  Slyker explains that when a person sleeps or is under hypnosis, he or she sends forth an ectoplasmic form almost invisible, something like a transparent or translucent layer of skin that carries with it all of his or her genetic information as well as emotional and psychological content that can be sensed by those the ghost touches.  Normally these ghosts return to the sleeper when he or she awakes, but the umbilicus that connects ghost to living person can be severed and the ghost captured.  Skyler has a bunch of these ghosts of beautiful women in his desk, and he admits to Mckay that he has five ghosts of the woman in whose interest our narrator has come, reigning queen of the cinema Evelyn Cordew!

Slyker restrains and silences Mckay in a high tech chair and promises to let him see a ghost of Evelyn Cordew; a ghost can only be seen in the dark, so he turns out the lights.  But then Evelyn Cordew herself, using her own high tech equipment, busts into the room and restrains Slyker.  She wants her ghosts back, believing their lack has damaged her looks and thus her acting career.  (Earlier, Slyker told Mckay that stealing some of Cordew's ghosts had served to relieve her of some dangerous anti-social personality traits.)  The narrator watches as Cordew reunites one at a time with each of her five ghosts; this takes several pages, as Leiber dwells on the surreal movements of the ghosts as they reintegrate themselves with Cordew's gorgeous body and as Cordew herself describes the experience of slipping back into these ectoplasmic skins and narrates the course of her career, tying each ghost to the events of her life in Hollywood at the point when it was stolen from her by Slyker.  This is where we get a big fat dollop of the feminism that perhaps endears this story to people like Merril--Evelyn Cordew asserts that female movie stars are not to be envied or admired but to be pitied, as they are the victims of men, exploited by Hollywood's elite and the viewing public alike; Cordew sums up her case by claiming that all men are pimps or johns.  (One of the clever things Leiber does in "A Deskful of Girls" is to refuse to exempt our narrator from this charge, making it clear from the start of the story that Mckay himself is as horny and preoccupied with women's bodies as any of us.  I also feel compelled to point out that plenty of Leiber stories seem to treat women as sex objects and appeal to readers' interest in somewhat off-the-reservation sex, so those inclined to read "A Deskful of Girls" and then accuse Leiber of hypocrisy have grounds to do so.) 

The story ends with Slyker's death and the liberation of all the other ghosts, the destruction of all the blackmail material and the escape of the narrator with Cordew's aid.

This is a pretty dense and wordy story with lots of long sentences, lots of metaphors, lots of references and allusions.  Leiber describes the layout and decor of Skyler's room, and the advanced technology both the contending blackmailer and sex symbol employ, in great detail, and there are oblique indications that Cordew and maybe Slyker are in touch with other time streams--"A Deskful of Girls" is one of Leiber's Change War stories about feuding time travelers.  Leiber name drops numerous visual artists (Heinrich Kley, Mahlon Blaine and Henry Fuseli) and talks about high brow music (the Nutcracker Suite of "Chaikovsky.")  Plus, Leiber offers theories of what the popularity of Hollywood actresses like Greta Garbo ("her romantic mask heralded the Great Depression") and Ingrid Bergman ("her dewiness and Swedish-Modern smile helped us accept World War Two") say about their epoch and what these screen goddesses provide to their societies.

"A Deskful of Girls" is a strong and ambitious story that is well-written and has lots going on, but it may also be one of those stories that is easier to admire than to enjoy.  Leiber kind of goes overboard with the descriptions, and my eyes glazed a little bit during the passages mapping out Slyker's office and giving us a repetitive and simile-laden play by play of Cordew's reintegration with each and every one of five different ghosts ("Then, as if the whole room were filled with its kind of water, it seemed to surface at the ceiling and jackknife there and plunge down again with a little swoop and then reverse direction again and hover for a moment over the real Evelyn’s head and then sink slowly down around her like a diver drowning.")  I can also imagine that people unfamiliar with Leiber's Change War stories might find the references to the Change War concept to be totally opaque.

Despite reservations, thumbs up for "A Deskful of Girls," which has appeared in many languages in many Leiber collections.

"Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee" by Fritz Leiber       

Here we have a long and elaborate and somewhat tedious joke story, as the title, with its puns referring to secondary sexual characteristics, perhaps warns us.  I guess we can call this is a satire of 1950s culture, but while the satire of "A Deskful of Girls" has a feminist bite and still feels relevant, the satire in "Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee" feels silly and is very much of its time, the kind of thing people might dismiss as "dated."

Six intellectuals meet weekly in a large space where one of them makes splatter paintings by standing on a 20-foot high scaffold and flinging paint down on a huge canvas that takes up most of the floor.  This week's conclave, Leiber tells us, coincides with a special moment when "all the molecules in the world and in the collective unconscious mind got very slippery."  Another of the intellectuals is a jazz musician, the descendent of a witch doctor, who beats out tunes on an African log.  At the very moment the molecules go slippery he beats out the tune rendered in onomatopoeia as the story title.  The painter flings black paint on the white canvas, the resulting blobs and streaks visually representing the notes of the tune with two little titties and a big glob as the rump and so forth.  All the assembled intellectuals think the musical passage and the abstract painting special, and one of them photographs the canvas and each of them leaves the meeting with a print.

Over the next week the musician becomes famous with the tune and starts a whole new movement, Drum-and-Drag, that rivals Rock-and-Roll.  The psychiatrist uses the photo of the painting as a Rorschach test and his patients start having breakthroughs.  Three other of the intellectuals have similar success due to the influence of the tune and/or painting on their careers.  (Rest assured that Leiber offers lots of details and little jokes about all six of these hipster eggheads, going overboard just as he did with the five ghosts in our previous story.)  The painter, however, has a problem.  Every time he flings paint the exact same pattern appears, though he can control the size.

In succeeding weeks the other five intellectuals start suffering problems I won't describe, while social problems of wider ramification born from the tune and painting also begin to trouble the wider world.  Basically, the world is addicted, obsessed, hypnotized, by the little tune and the abstract painting.  One of the six, a cultural anthropologist, realizes that the ancestor of the musician, the witch doctor, has sent the musical phrase, a sort of spell, across time to them, and to save the world they have to cast a spell contacting this guy (who must be alive somehow outside the timestream) and receive from him the counterspell.  To cast the spell they enlist a medium, snoke marijuana, paint pentagrams and hang garlic and on and on.  Success is achieved, and everyone in the world forgets the dangerous tune and image.  The final little paragraph has the medium report that the witch doctor from centuries ago is in Hell and the Devil forced him to cough up the counterspell because even the damned and demons of the underworld were getting addicted.

A lot of work obviously went into this story but it is not thought-provoking or entertaining.  Gotta give it a thumbs down, though I suppose if this is your thing, you will like it, because it is not lazy or clumsy--Leiber is a smart, educated professional who set himself a goal and accomplished it--my gripe is that I do not see value in the goal he set himself.

"Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee" debuted in F&SF and people seem to have liked it; Groff Conklin included it in Science Fiction Oddities (1966) and Damon Knight in A Science Fiction Argosy (1972), a book I bought for a dollar over nine years ago.  (I read the story today in a scan of the appropriate issue of F&SF.)

"Glossary of Terms" by Jack Lewis 

I don't think I've read anything by Lewis before.  isfdb lists nine pieces of short fiction by Lewis and one ridiculous looking novel about mercenaries who pursue money and Hitler in Latin America and on their travels encounter a nymphomaniac.  "Glossary of Terms" is listed by isfdb as an "essay," but I think at a stretch it counts as fiction in the way that Brian Aldiss' "Confluence" counts as fiction--it is presented as an artifact of some other, fictional, culture and provides clues to this alien culture's nature.

"Glossary of Terms" is a guide for SF writers living far in the future after mankind has developed interstellar travel and time travel.  Over its two and a half pages the story or article covers ten items, offering definitions and advice on usage for such things as "TELEPATHY" and "DISINTEGRATOR RAY."  The entries offer opportunities for Lewis to make weak jokes and engage in banal criticism of SF.  For example, in the future the "ATOMIC BOMB" will be considered a weak weapon used only in minor skirmishes.  Lewis spoofs how aliens in SF often have hard to pronounce names, points out that time travel is used by authors to give them an excuse to write a fantasy adventure story, and makes a tepid joke about how taxpayers oppose foreign aid.  And so on.

This story is a waste of time and I do not think it has ever been reprinted.  Maybe Merril liked it because of its anemic but still dimly apparent criticism of our society for being violent, of adventure SF for being violent and nonsensical, and of taxpayers for objecting when the government ships their money off to foreigners...and probably for being violent.

"No Evidence" by Victoria Lincoln

Here's another author new to MPorcius Fiction Log.  Victoria Lincoln has one credit at isfdb, but a New York Times obit suggests she wrote multiple successful mainstream novels as well as biographies of notable women like Lizzie Borden and St. Theresa of Avila.  Merril, as I've told you a million times, loved to reprint and recommend SF by mainstream writers and SF that was published in mainstream venues because she thought genre boundaries were essentially bogus, and here we have another example.  I guess Lincoln was well-known enough that Anthony Boucher thought it worthwhile to put her name on the cover of the issue of F&SF in which "No Evidence" appeared, below Chad Oliver's but above Avram Davidson's.  A quick look online did not unearth any evidence the story has appeared elsewhere.

Charley is an orphan, an immigrant from Ireland whose mother drank herself to death when he was a child.  As a youth Charley always had trouble making up his mind, and was often torn between conflicting impulses; one horrible day he drowned a cat, his sadistic impulses overcoming his affection for the little creature and his sense of right and wrong.  At other times he demonstrated drawing ability.

As a young adult, after a stressful episode in which he vandalized property with elaborate graffiti and stole some booze, Charley got drunk and then split into two people!  The second version of himself returned to Ireland tout suite and every few years sends a letter to the Charley in America to beg for money.  In the absence of the selfish, rebellious, artistic half of his personality, Charley becomes a success at work and socially, while his Irish counterpart is a drunken layabout who is forever living off others and getting in trouble.

Eventually the Irish half of Charley makes a go of it as an artist.  In one of his letters begging for money he talks about how he is doing an elaborate woodcut depicting death and destruction and mentions the cat he and Charley drowned.  Bitter at being reminded of this crime, American Charley refuses to send any more money, and begins having nightmares of the troubles faced by Irish Charley, who has some kind of illness that is killing him as he struggles to complete his masterwork depicting all the ways people destroy themselves and each other.  Irish Charley considers this work of carving to be essential evidence of the hopeless reality of life, that hope is an illusion.  American Charley begins getting sick himself, and the way he coughs while wracked by his nightmares dreams upsets his wife.

Eventually American Charley sends more money, but Irish Charley dies, and Irish Charley's much put upon wife destroys the horrifying carving.  American Charley stops having the bad dreams and his health recovers, and he burns all the letters from his Irish half--no evidence remains of his bizarre double life, but his personality, it seems, never quite recovers.   

The lens through which we look at "No Evidence" today is that of identity.  Lincoln exercises the much discussed "duality of man" theme, the idea that everybody is capable of both good and evil; Lincoln makes this a little more interesting by illustrating the disturbing fact that talented creative people tend to be selfish jerks who live like parasites--the talented version of Charley who might change the world is also the evil one.  Perhaps less hackneyed, or at least more in tune with 2024 concerns, is the theme of how immigrants have two identities--that connected to the country in which they were born and that connected to their adopted country.  As a kid in Ireland, Charley was poor and the love of drink of his mother made his life a nightmare, and the half of Charley who returns to the Emerald Isle is also impoverished and afflicted with alcoholism.  We might also consider the idea that drunks have two identities, a sober one and an inebriated one.

Lincoln generates tension by keeping us unsure which half of Charley we should sympathize with and admire, the boring guy who works his way up through the company or the rebel who strives to live on his own terms, exploiting others, and create a masterwork that will blow the lid off our illusions and reveal to us one and all the horrible truth of life and history.  

We can call this one marginally recommendable.

**********  

All four of these stories are remarkable, each at least a little off the beaten path: Leiber's two stories are ambitious and chock-full of content, in fact maybe too stuffed; Lewis's is a sort of in-joke that attacks the common run of SF; and Lincoln's story is by somebody who has not written any other SF.  Even though I gave two of these stories low marks, this has still been an interesting stage of our journey through 1958.  Next stop: "M!"

I decided to take a little break from SF this week and focus on one of my other interests, the circle of writers associated with American ex-patriates Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.  I read T. E. Hulme's poems from Pound's 1912 Ripostes, H. D.'s 1916 collection of poems Sea Garden and the contributions of Richard Aldington to the 1917 anthology Some Imagist Poets.  Then I advanced the clock over thirty years forward to read a 1951 collection of stories by painter, novelist and all around interesting character Wyndham Lewis, Rotting Hill, who consciously built up a reputation, what today we might call a "brand," as "The Enemy." 

"Where's the sense," asked a neighbour with militantly folded arms, "in bringin' children up above their station, I should like to know?  That young lady...young Maddie, I should say--she doesn't never seem happy, do she, for all her dollin' up and puttin' on the talk?"

In his introduction to an excerpt of Wyndham Lewis's criticism of George Orwell in the collection Enemy Salvoes, C. J. Fox mentions Lewis's 1941 novel The Vulgar Streak, calling it "a book about a proletarian con-man's attempted rise to middle-class prosperity."  In his Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis, Paul O'Keefe reports that American publishers during World War II rejected The Vulgar Streak for being "too critical of England."  This sounded interesting to me, so I decided to read the novel.  I acquired a 1973 US printing via interlibrary loan; a scan of the same edition is available for free at the internet archive, though this edition is full of irritating typographical issues, so those interested should perhaps seek the 1985 edition from Black Sparrow (which I have never seen.)

From the start we see that The Vulgar Streak is about men who, to put it charitably, create or recreate themselves, or, to put it not so charitably, are fake phony frauds.  On the very first page of text we meet a man, Martin Penny-Smythe, a short and fat Englishman, who "cultivated a mild stammer."  Later we learn that he is a convert to Catholicism, and that he carries around a pipe (Lewis on that first page, before revealing his name, actually calls Martin "the pipe-sucker") in part to drive away women.  Martin is a man who has consciously created an identity for himself, crafted an image of himself to present to the world that is not entirely natural--he hasn't accepted the religion of his birth, nor even the speaking ability he has been born with.

On that first page Martin is walking ("strolling" is how the characters and Lewis describe it) in Venice in the late 1930s with another Englishman, an artist, the tall and elegant Vincent Penhale.  It is Vincent who turns out to be the novel's protagonist.  Vincent is even more affected (or self-created) than Martin.  While they ride a gondola, Vincent, jocularly referring to Martin's Catholicism, makes a "confession" to his friend, admitting that he is not the product of a middle-class family and a good school as he has led people to believe, but the child of a slum-dwelling working-class couple.  "...I am a sham person from head to foot," he tells Martin.  As Vincent flirts with a young Englishwoman, the niece of a baronet, April Mallow, he makes poses that she recognizes as theatrical, "reminiscent of the footlights."  We later learn that most of Vincent's artistic work has been for the theatre, designing costumes and the like, and that he is an actor who has appeared on stage.

In the first of the book's three parts, Vincent seduces April, who falls in love with him, despite her revulsion over another friend of Vincent's who makes an unexpected appearance, a thuggish working-class man named Bill Halvorsen, and her suspicions about a mysterious interaction Vincent has with the local police.  April is vulnerable to Vincent's advances for a number of reasons, including the tense atmosphere in which these British tourists in Venice are living: they all spend lots of time listening to the radio, scrutinizing the newspapers and assessing rumors regarding the possibility of war as a result of the ongoing Sudetenland crisis. 

The second part of the 247-page novel begins two months later, in London.  We learn that Vincent and April were married because April was pregnant; though April is as much in love as ever.  We become acquainted with Vincent's home and lifestyle, and meet Vincent's family, most of whom he hides from April and her wealthy family.  The one Penhale whom Vincent introduces to April is his beautiful sister Madeline ("Maddie.")  Like Vincent, Madeline has risen above her working-class origins, having married a professional cartoonist (whom Lewis tells us is "a hack.")  Also like Vincent, Maddie is perpetually putting on an act, and she too has a professional background redolent with artifice and performance, having done work as an artist's model.  Lewis emphasizes the tremendous amount of exhausting work it takes for Vincent and Maddie to keep up their facades ("One reason why she held herself so stately and unsmiling--perhaps a little queenly--was because she had had to be always on her best behavior"), in particular focusing on the study and concentration it takes for them to maintain their bogus Oxford accents.  Vincent, in one scene, gives Maddie lessons on how to pronounce "Buckingham Palace," complete with lecture notes and mnemonic devices.  Other characters remark that Maddie hardly ever talks--they don't realize that she keeps mum for fear of revealing her working class origins via some blunder in pronunciation.  Maddie even goes on "dates" with an educated man, Dougal Tandish, thus risking her relationship with her husband, because Tandish has, she believes, a good accent and she can learn by listening to him.

The reason Vincent and Maddie go to all this trouble, according to Vincent at least, is the stifling English class system.  "The relentless pressure of the English class incubus had poisoned the existence of one as much as of the other," Lewis tells us.  In this second part of The Vulgar Streak Lewis has various characters air their views on class.  Not only does Vincent discuss the English class system with a German therapist--a refugee from Nazi Germany--but we see Vincent interact with his working class siblings and in-laws--charwomen and automobile mechanics and the like whom Lewis gives broad accents--at his father's funeral.   

We hear lots of complaints from the Penhale clan about their treatment at the hands of the middle class and the government: e.g., doctors won't prescribe poor people the (expensive) medicine they need, and the tax-payer-funded hospital tries to speed up the death of poor patients rather than to cure them.  And then there is Vincent's pretentious lament to the curate who presides at Dad's funeral: "when are they going to learn, I wonder, to design a standard house for the Worker that is both sanitary and beautiful?"

More provocatively, especially for us 21st-century readers, Vincent compares the English poor to African-American slaves and to women in China.  In England, he opines, the working classes are considered an inferior breed, "creatures of another clay," and calls his siblings' accent and slang "a slave-jargon" that they can't help themselves from speaking.  He claims that:

"Since there are no niggers here, they had to create niggers.  The poor are the niggers in this country."

(Compare to this John Lennon / Yoko Ono production...at home with headphones on)

and:

"...the religion of class...in England restricts the personal development of any man or woman born outside the genteel pale.  It denies expansion to him or her as much as the shoes formerly worn by Chinese ladies denied normal development to the feet."

While Vincent (and the mysterious Bill Halvorsen, it turns out) are willing to go to any length, to take terrible risks, to escape their class or oppose the class system, most of the other working-class people in the novel accept their station and even resent Vincent and Maddie's "putting on airs."  There is the unnamed minor character quoted in the passage I use as an epigraph to this blog post, for example, and one of Vincent's sisters, Minnie, who vocally resents her siblings' attitude and declares "I belong to the working-class an' I'm not ashamed to say so."  It was not clear to me if Lewis expected the reader to see the wisdom of these working class people's resignation to their fate, or condemn them, as Vincent does, as complicit in their own oppression.

After the funeral, the plot of The Vulgar Streak becomes increasingly melodramatic.  We learn how Vincent is able to afford trips to Venice--he is passing counterfeit money for Bill Halvorsen, who is a socialist activist and engraver who forges banknotes as a way of undermining the capitalist system (Vincent even voices a precis of Halvorsen's views on monetary theory.)  When Maddie's boyfriend (or whatever he is) Dougal Tandish, who is too clever for his own good, starts to suspect something is fishy with Vincent and Bill, he investigates Bill's engraving shop, where Bill shoots him dead.  (The best joke in The Vulgar Streak is that Vincent starts calling Halvorsen "Buffalo Bill.")  Vincent helps Bill toss the corpse in the Thames, but the bobbies are on to them almost immediately.  Vincent's true origins and involvement in the murder are splashed all over the papers, leading April to collapse and have a miscarriage, from which she dies.  Maddie's husband the hack cartoonist abandons Maddie.  Seeing how he has ruined April's and Maddie's lives, Vincent hangs himself.  Maddie has to move into the slum quarters of her alcoholic widowed mother and her resentful sister, and take up modelling again to put food on the table.

The Vulgar Streak is a little lackluster; Lewis is an idiosyncratic and controversial thinker, and I was hoping for something surprising and strange here, but I didn't get it. Tarr was challenging and unusual, and Self Condemned was full of unconventional opinions as well as memorable incidents, characters and images and even some quite funny jokes, but The Vulgar Streak feels like a pretty ordinary novel. I can't really object to the book's ideas about class and the dangers of maintaining a facade (and associating with commies!), but these ideas are not particularly novel or surprising--I feel like people are deploring the English class system and exhorting you to "be yourself" all the time.  Maybe the ambiguity of the novel (on the one hand the English class system is restrictive, but on the other people who resist it cause unhappiness for themselves and everybody they come into contact with) is "literary."  As for the style, it is just acceptable; there were no particularly scintillating passages or images, and I didn't really feel for or care about the various characters.

There are a few interesting things here and there in The Vulgar Streak for us culture vultures.  Lewis, one of the most prominent of the early 20th-century British painters and a prolific art critic, fills the Venice part of the novel with references to Guardi, Canaletto and Ruskin, figures with whom I was familiar.  I was more excited to be introduced to The Magnet and Billy Bunter, an element of British pop culture to which I had never been exposed.  Near the end of the novel there is a little talk of Stendhal's The Red and The Black, which Martin has read but Vincent has not.  I haven't read it either, but the juxtaposition of red and black reminded me of Lewis's own metaphorical description of 1930s Europe as being a plain in which 90% of the people live docilely, trapped between mountains inhabited by menacing hill tribes, one tribe following the red principle of communism and the other the black principle of fascism.  (This parable of Lewis's is quoted at length in Paul O'Keefe's Some Sort of Genius, where I read it; originally it appeared in the book Left Wings Over Europe.)

The Amazon page advertising the 1985 edition of The Vulgar Streak gives one the impression that the book is about fascism, that Vincent is a fascist sympathizer, but there is not really much in the novel about fascism, and Vincent is vocally hostile to fascists.  (He calls Dougal Tandish, whom he abominates, a fascist, though it is not clear if this is an accurate assessment or just Vincent, who is constantly lying, maligning the man unfairly.)  Vincent does have something in common with Hitler and Mussolini, however: when he visits the German shrink the idea that Vincent is a man characterized by "an excess of Will" is raised, and the therapist notes that Mussolini and Hitler are "extreme, and curiously disagreeable, expressions of this morbid Will."  Maybe another thing about The Vulgar Streak that is "literary" is that it seems to argue that being a "go-getter," what Samuel Johnson might have called a "projector," is a terrible mistake, that you, your spouse, your colleagues, and your relatives will be made miserable if not outright killed if you embark on some grand scheme to change your station in life or, even worse, change the world.  Entertainment fiction, of course, regularly celebrates the hero who masters his environment and accomplishes some project or solves some problem, or tries to do so and nobly fails--in The Vulgar Streak if you are a charwoman or a motor car mechanic you probably should just embrace it.   

Not bad, but not really remarkable, I'm awarding The Vulgar Streak the "acceptable" rating that gets so much use here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Hopefully my next foray into Wyndham Lewis's fiction will be more exciting.

"I am really awfully sorry; I sympathize with you most genuinely."  He sighed.  "What Canada is like I do not know.  They say it is a tough place."  Then he said facetiously, with a broad smile, "You may end up as a lumberjack!  That would be rather fun!"

Here's another novel by Wyndham Lewis, one of T. S. Eliot's favorite people.  Check out these blurbs if you think I might be exaggerating:



Damn, now that is a friend.

Self Condemned was first published in 1954, more than thirty years after Tarr, Lewis's first published novel, which I read in June.  As with Tarr, I got my hands on a copy of Self Condemned via interlibrary loan through a suburban Maryland public library.  When I picked up the 1955 printing of the novel, along with a 1951 printing of Lewis's Rude Assignment, the librarian who presented them to me said, "Wow, these books look old!"

The copy of Self Condemned which I read

Self Condemned is the story of René Harding, a 47-year old British college professor and successful author of two books; as our story begins he is living in London.  Harding has decided, without consulting his wife Hester (AKA "Essie") or his family (his French-born mother and his two married sisters), to quit ("throw up" is the phrase used) his position as Chair of History at some unnamed university and move to Canada.  Why is he leaving his "first-rate job, as good as a man of my mental habits can have," an act which one uncharitable character calls "committing suicide."?  Why is René abandoning a center of international culture, power and finance to live in what all the book's English characters think is some kind of godforsaken wilderness, a grim frontier where where he has no job prospects ("I may have to teach Algebra or--oh yes, or History in an elementary school...of course I may prefer to earn my living as a waiter....")?

The novel, like 400 pages in this edition, is split into three parts.  Part One, "The Resignation," consisting of ten chapters, is set mostly in London and its environs.  We accompany René as he visits in turn individual friends and family members to explain to them his shocking change of life and to bid them a final farewell.  Satirist Lewis entertains us with the amusing antics and odd personalities of Rene's acquaintances, most of whom are oddballs or creeps of one kind or another, while exposing us to René the intellectual's ideas and René the man's public and inner character. 

René's best friend is Robert Parkinson, AKA "Rotter," a writer of  articles and reviews for highbrow publications, and we get an extensive introduction to our hero's thinking when Rotter reads aloud--to its very subject himself--a draft of an article he has been commissioned to write about René.  René, we learn, is a master at interpreting and predicting historical events--his more recent book was entitled A Secret History of World War II, written and published before the actual war has begun!  René is bitterly hostile to Marxism and laments and condemns its pernicious effect on academia and on modern life--René believes that if it were not for the malign influence of Marxist thought and of the Soviet Union, that the 20th century, instead of a century of mass war and totalitarianism, could have fulfilled the dreams of peace and prosperity of the Victorian liberals.

Perhaps most importantly, René believes that historians, instead of focusing their researches on and dominating their narratives with rulers, most of whom are tyrants and mass murderers who live out tedious melodramas, should prioritize the small minority of inventive and creative people. In a later part of the book we get another look at René's theory of what historical writing should be when René is explaining his belief that the natural world is insane, is a madhouse:


If the chapter devoted to Rotter gives us a full description of Rene's ideas and his professional work, the chapters in which he has his final meetings with his French-born mother, his sister Mary and her husband Percy Lamport, his sister Helen and her husband Robert Kerridge, and his sister-in-law Janet and her husband Victor Painter, give us explanations and demonstrations of why Harding has chosen to go into voluntary exile from his field and his country.  Not only is Rene's brand of thinking not welcome in the academy, but he in turn looks at the world of academia as "fundamentally a racket" whose inhabitants are, to a man, "dishonest."  He can spend no more time in such an environment lest he lose his self respect!  His last encounters with Percy Lamport, Robert Kerridge (why are there two characters named "Robert?"), and Victor Painter give us an idea of the kind of dolts, jerks and phonies René has to deal with in England.  Percy is an anti-Semite and successful businessman who strikes a pose as a member of the progressive avant garde, collecting Marie Laurencin paintings and reading George Orwell, G. D. H. Cole, George Bernard Shaw and leftist periodicals: "the richer he [Percy] became, the more to the left these newspapers and weeklies moved."  Victor is a snobbish nouveau riche striver with whom René gets into a shouting match at their last meal together in a restaurant.  Robert Kerridge, husband of Rene's favorite sister Helen, is a leftist clergyman; at their last meeting, at the Kerridge home in Robert's country parish, Robert and his friend, a local leftist schoolmaster, insult René, calling him a fascist--Rene's hostility to Marxism and his calling out of the hypocrisy of those who abominate Hitler but admire the equally murderous and despotic Bolsheviks has attracted such attacks from many quarters.  (Self Condemned is to some extent I am not yet cognizant of autobiographical, and Lewis himself is often dismissed as a fascist.)

Lewis is adept at making some of these scenes funny, but also conveying René's sense of isolation from his peers in the educated middle classes and his and his sister Helen's sadness at parting, presumably to never meet again.  (Rene's last sight of Helen actually cleverly foreshadows his last sight of Hester, one of the devices by which Lewis encourages us to compare René's relationship with his wife and his favorite sister.)

The tenth chapter of Part One describes René and Hester's voyage across the Atlantic to Canada; during the journey Great Britain declares war on Germany (we are told that the ships' passengers were "very little affected" by the news or by the King's speech.)  We had Lewis, a successful painter himself, doing a little art criticism when he attacked Laurencin's paintings in Percy's mansion, and on the ship we get some Lewis literary criticism.  René, who has "read few of the English classics," tries to read George Eliot's Middlemarch, and after Lewis presents us a deadpan page-long summary of the novel's beginning, Rene wonders "Why am I reading this dull nonsense?" and throws the book over the side into the ocean.

As Part Two, entitled "The Room," begins, we learn that René and Hester have lived for over three years in the same hotel room in the fictional Canadian city of Momaco.  Lewis, born in 1882, spent the first five years of his life in the US and Canada, and spent World War II there as well; I haven't read any biographies of Lewis yet, but his description of the place in Self Condemned suggests he hated North America like poison!

Momaco has no cafes!  Momaco has no theater, and the cinemas only show Hollywood garbage, no French, Italian, or German movies!  And the weather!  If it is not thirty or forty below, the streets a treacherous sheet of ice, it is the brief summer, when the hard sunlight (sunlight in England, we are told, is soft) makes your eyes water and monstrous flies devour you!  Our heroes come up with divers hilarious euphemisms and nicknames for Canada/Momaco, like "the living death" and "the hideous ice-box."

The hotel in which René and Hester spend their first three Canadian years is ill-run and inhabited by dangerous criminals, maniacs, and whores, and René repeatedly describes it as a microcosm of North America and of the entire world.  North America, Lewis declares, is a matriarchy, and sure enough, the hotel's owner and its (mis)manager are women, a Mrs. Plant and a Mrs. McAffie, called "Affie."  The ethnic diversity of America, that we are all so used to hearing panegyrized, is by Lewis called "a jumble" and held up as one example of the characteristic mixed identity or multiple personality of the New World: "an incoherence customary on this new continent where nothing can ever be one thing."  The different ethnic groups that make up the population of North America all hate each other and contact with each other brings out the worst in each:

...the protestant English, backward and bigoted, rage against the papist hierarchy ruling the French.... the Anglo-Saxon suffers from a Hitlerian superiority feeling, and the 'Peasoups' (as the French are called) have to put up with a lot of contempt from the master-race.

When a Canadian thug and his American friend, a draft dodger, overhear René and Hester's English accents, our heroes are physically assaulted, and René is beaten up, even viciously kicked as he lays on the floor.  The hotel is full of violence, with fights in the bar a common occurrence and René and Hester often hearing the bloodcurdling screams of a German woman tenant as her live-in (American) Indian boyfriend beats her:

...the Indian--drunk as all Indians had been ever since the Whites had landed--dwelling amid the sentimental screams of his blonde Teutonic squaw...

Part Two of the novel concludes with a murder and then a tremendous fire, set by the murderer, that razes the hotel.

Part Two of Self Condemned is very (blackly) humorous, with Lewis presenting us with many strange and amusing figures.  These bizarre characters, among them a generous and wealthy homosexual book-collector, Mr. Furber (one wonders if this is somehow a reference to Faber and Faber, the famous literary publishing house), who hires René to aid him in organizing his library, and the aforementioned manageress of the hotel, Affie, who reads all the hotel employees' and tenants' futures in tea leaves and makes uncannily accurate predictions (her powers derive from her practices of steaming open everyone's mail before it is delivered and plastering her ear to keyholes), are each of them endearing, amusing, and sinister, all at the same time.

The ordeal of the fire and the need to move to another (less poorly managed) hotel works changes in the social and psychological lives of the Hardings.  Furber, macabrely fascinated by René's acquaintance with the hotel arsonist and murderer, intensifies their relationship and shows him off to friends, so that, after over three years in Canada, René and Hester receive their first dinner invitation, to the home of a British college professor, McKenzie, and his wife; the McKenzies moved to Canada a year or so after the Hardings, and experienced the Blitz back in England.  Talking to a fellow scholar reignites René's mind, which begins percolating with new ideas and theories, and he begins writing a new book; his new social contacts lead to a regular job writing a well-received newspaper column in which he applies his expertise to predicting the twists and turns of the raging war, and then a teaching position at a university in Momaco is offered to him!   René hopes that their improved financial circumstances, new intellectual stimulation, and new friends, will make Hester more amenable to their life in the New World, but their fiery expulsion from the vile hotel and intimate familiarity with murder has left Hester more than ever obsessed with returning to England.

"Whether Momaco ignores you or fetes you, it is always Momaco.  Do you really want to spend the rest of your life in this awful city?"  

René, however, has no interest in returning to London.  At the end of her rope, unable to dislodge René from his steadfast determination to stay in the "God-forsaken ice box," on page 369 Hester commits suicide by jumping in front of a moving truck.  René is physically and psychologically broken by the sight of her mangled body and the enormity of this catastrophe, and spends long months recuperating in a hospital and then a Catholic retreat, where he is surrounded by priests and considers converting to Catholicism.  The last 37 pages of the book consist of René trying to come to terms with his new life and sort out his radically shifting feelings about his wife and her final desperate act, feelings which range from love and pity to hate and contempt.  He achieves career success--wealth and a position at an important American university--but he is a hollowed out man, a man who went against the tide, who saw through all of the bogus stratagems and deceptions of the universe and of human society, but who has suffered from this enlightenment, been punished like a character in a Greek myth who defied the gods.

Self Condemned excels as an entertaining and moving story about unusual people and their unhappy fates, but Lewis doesn't see himself merely as a comedian and tragedian, but as a satirist, and he takes a dim view of our world and its people, and he works a number of satiric themes.

Prominent among these themes is the absurdity of life.  Lewis and René use the word "absurd" again and again, and several times Rene is taken aback by how absurdly other characters act.  Lewis also presents us with many incidents which are at once absurd, but also wholly believable.  The attitude of Affie and her staff about janitors, for example:

She actually preferred a man to be a thief and drunkard....the only kind of janitor she heartily disliked was a competent one, like a man called Jan--whom everybody hated because he was so clean, sober, and good at his job.

Another instance is Rene's job with the book collector, Furber; this guy is paying Rene to offer advice on the value of rare books and whether he should add such and such a book to his collection, but Rene is a scholar, not a bookdealer:

He knew as little about the market value of a book, as he did of the value of diamonds or fur coats...since most of Furber's books did not interest him, it was a waste of time consulting him as to the desirability of adding a little-known Marquis de Sade to the collection.  But he had to affect enthusiasm, in order to retain his position....  

The hotel, Canada, and the world: all one big madhouse!

A more recent edition

A related theme of the novel is the prolonged fit of insanity commonly called the Second World War.  We are accustomed, when WWII is discussed, of hearing such terms as "the finest hour" and "the greatest generation" when the Allies are the topic at hand, and denunciations of German aggression and Nazi racism in reference to the Axis powers.  Lewis does not take this tack.  As evidenced by the reaction of the liner's passengers to the King's speech (which I am told has recently been romanticized in a fanciful Hollywood picture), Lewis's characters feel disconnected from the war and are far from patriotic heroes.  When the war is directly addressed Lewis does not mention the stirring victories of military men or the noble sacrifices and selfless dedication of blitzed Londoners and "Rosie the Riveter;" rather, he has René and Hester hear reports on the radio about what we might consider Allied misbehavior, like the shackling of German prisoners in Britain and Canada and FDR's receipt of the gift of a letter opener made from the bone of a Japanese fighting man.  (Lewis does not provide any context for these regrettable British and American actions, such as the fact that they were responses to more systematic and severe German and Japanese atrocities, or that there was a public outcry in America against abuse of Japanese war dead and that FDR later repudiated the gruesome trophy Lewis cites.)  Mrs. McKenzie was far from willing to "do her bit" during the Blitz--she complains bitterly about how the local air warden harassed her over her failure to meet black out regulations and how the government tried to force her to house a crippled twelve-year-old Jewish refugee--she took it as a personal affront that they tried to pollute her home with a Jew!  Mrs. McKenzie also complains about the war profiteering of shopkeepers.  Both times Winston Churchill is mentioned by name it is not done to extol the man; one time it is only so Lewis can goof on him for using outdated American slang.  There is no talk about the German invasion of Poland or Japanese sneak attacks on Pearl Harbor or British Pacific colonies; when the characters blame the war on anything it is on government in general (Rene asserts that "Government is often in the hands of criminals or morons, never in the hands of first-rate men.")  Affie wins Rene's approval when she expresses her horror of the war in a way that condemns all authority and stresses continuity between the World Wars:

'They are taking our boys,' she said in an undertone, as if speaking to herself and the fact that her eyes were dry was only because anger dried them up.  'They are taking our boys again.'

Lewis eschews the particular and the familiar when talking about WWII in an effort to argue that WWII is not as "special" as we are commonly lead to believe, not an episode of unique heroism among the Allied peoples and unprecedented evil on the part of Hitler and his henchmen and the German war machine.  In his telling, war seems like the inevitable result of immutable human evil, not the particular crime of individual malefactors or evil political parties.  In fact, the book René is inspired to write by his intellectually invigorating relationship with McKenzie has as one of its arguments the claim that the cataclysmic period of World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Depression, the rise of fascism and World War II is not some kind of horrible outlier, but a normal period of history: "His slogan was as follows: 'The past thirty years is typical, not exceptional.'"

And another

While relatively few passages address the war directly, many more seem to address it obliquely or symbolically.  One hilarious and somewhat disgusting scene covers Affie's enthusiastic warmaking on the cockroaches which infest the hotel--she is not reluctant to get up close and personal, down and dirty, in her pitiless campaign of extermination against the six-legged fiends, engaging with brio in chemical warfare and hand to hand combat with the vermin.  The hotel's barkeep, after a particularly desperate scrap, declares he is "neutral" and will no longer intervene in the regular bar fights.  And the fire that destroys the hotel occurs just after Rene predicts that the war will trigger the very quick ("overnight") dissolution of the British Empire.

Self Condemned's themes, topics and techniques are perfectly suited to my interests and temperament: loneliness, exile, and suicide; difficult sexual relationships; hostility to Marxism and disillusionment with academia; detailed descriptions of claustrophobic rooms and their psychological effect on those who live in them, who feel imprisoned in them.  Lewis even provides a page-long debunking of the romantic mythology that has grown up around motherhood!  Compared to Tarr, this is a more conventional and straightforward novel; it is definitely "easier" and its settings and characters are more clearly and more sharply drawn, so that you can see in your mind bold and disturbing images of the book's people and the places they inhabit.  I ate it up!

A good balance of laugh out loud humor, pathos, and Lewis's idiosyncratic and against-the-grain opinions make Self Condemned a fun, at times affecting, at times surprising, read.  I particularly recommend it to those who enjoy narratives about down-and-out self-important outsider smart guys, like those of Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski.

"A group of us are aiming to set up a colony outside--in the open.  We need two or three more people.  Would you come?"

"How is that possible?  The books say that life outside had to be given up.  North is too cold.  South is too hot and has hostile cities.  You will not be allowed to go."

"Never mind about that." 

Publisher's Weekly, your source for fake news--every word of that blurb is false

In our last episode I told you that I purchased my 1970 paperback copy of Douglas R. Mason's 1966 novel From Carthage Then I Came, retitled Eight Against Utopia in this edition, partly because it appeared to be inspired or influenced by one of the 20th century's foremost poets, T. S. Eliot, one of the most important of all Christian theologians, Augustine of Hippo, and the ancient tales of the sons of Oedipus.  I even described my experience of reading Seven Against Thebes by Greek playwright Aeschylus and The Thebaid by Roman poet Statius.  Now let's read the lovely blue paperback which set me on that mission of reading books from 2,000 years ago.  Joachim Boaz, star SF blogger and tweeter, warned us that Eight Against Utopia is dull, but let's cross our fingers and dive in anyway!

Seven thousand years ago mankind retreated into domed cities in order to survive a new ice age!  (This must be the ice age J.G. Bennett warned us about on Robert Fripp's experimental rock music album Exposure!)  Over the millennia, ostensibly to conserve scarce resources and maintain order in the shelter's tight confines, the northernmost domed city, Carthage, sited on the African coast of the Mediterranean, has developed into a repressive authoritarian state; each citizen's bodily functions and brainwaves are monitored, so the government can even tell (more or less) what you are thinking!  This system doesn't have the capacity to read everybody's mind at once, reminding the reader of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, and with effort clever people can evade its probing by filling the surface of their minds with a jumble of tedious calculations and trick it by thinking of forbidden matters via misdirecting symbols. 

Gaul T. Kalmar is an engineer in Carthage, and because his duties include doing maintenance on the outer dome, he knows full well that the ice age is over--he has opened hatches and spent time in an almost forgotten observatory atop the dome, and there he has breathed the outside air and seen that the dome is surrounded by forests instead of glaciers.  He wants to leave Carthage and start a new, more free, society in Europe he will call "New Troy."  He gathers together seven additional like-minded people, including a beautiful psychologist, Tania Clermont, and they plot their escape.  The headshrinker (or "mind-bender," as they call psychologists in this book) is a critical member of the team--in her office is a room shielded from the mind-reading rays, so the pioneers can discuss their plans openly in there.  (People can actually sense the oppressive intrusion into their minds of the government monitors, and so to treat her patients Clermont needs a place where they can temporarily escape this source of anxiety.)

One of the remarkable things about Eight Against Utopia is that it is chockablock with learned cultural references.  There are the aforementioned quotes from Eliot's The Waste Land and Four Quartets, a description of a woman as having a "Marie Antoinette bust," a passage in which the "posture of the wife of Indra" (link NSFW!) is mentioned, another in which a character refers to La Venus du Gaz, and many more.  Of course I enjoy these nods to works of art with which I am familiar, and enjoy looking up online mentioned works with which I am unfamiliar.  (Just a few days ago I was reading Wyndham Lewis's Rude Assignment, and was moved to look up Gerald Leslie Brockhurst because Lewis mentioned him.  Even though Lewis brought Brockhurst's paintings up as an example of lowbrow gunk that appeals to the masses, I kind of liked them!)  Unfortunately, Mason's esoteric references add almost nothing to his book!

Firstly, the fact that the characters are intimately familiar with the work of T. S. Eliot and Pablo Picasso makes them seem more like 1950s grad students in the humanities than the engineers and psychologists of a eugenically bred, constantly surveilled and intensely propagandized population of the year 9000 A. D.  Mason is apparently more interested in showing off his own erudition than in conjuring up the atmosphere of an alien milieu and depicting the mindset of its inhabitants.

Secondly, all these erudite allusions and quotations are not integral building blocks of a deeply philosophical work, but merely window dressing tossed practically at random into a routine adventure story.  Despite the cover text that invokes George Orwell's 1984 and the cradle-to-grave welfare state, Eight Against Utopia doesn't have much to say about how a state socialist system operates or what it does to human psychology and sociology, and it isn't a defense of individualism or a celebration of man's unquenchable desire for freedom.  Rather, it is a series of tedious engineering scenes and mediocre action scenes starring a superfluity of bland and forgettable characters.

The bulk of the first half or so of the novel consists of detailed descriptions of Kalmar and company secretly digging through the dome foundation (they have a sort of hand held disintegrator device called a "matter pulverizer") in search of a point of egress and sabotaging the city's power source, which they hope will hamper the security forces' efforts to track them down after their breakout.  What Mason describes are not emotions or psychological states, but architecture and the laborious cutting of walls and opening of seized doors, and thus these scenes generate no suspense or fear and do not move or even interest the reader.  I have to admit that I found these engineering scenes difficult to visualize, maybe because I have only the dimmest sense of what "tie bars," "flanges" and "culverts" really look like and in what context one encounters them, but also, I think, because of another problem, Mason's writing style, which is not good.

Instead of explaining things clearly, Mason employs a style full of euphemisms, cliches, and not-at-all-funny ironic deadpan humor, which not only makes it hard to tell what is going on in the many scenes that include architectural and geographical description, but undercuts any excitement or tension the action scenes might generate.

Another distracting tic of Mason's is his reusing again and again the same words and phrases, even though plenty of perfectly suitable synonyms are available.  We see "tack" (for direction or approach) three times in the book's first chapter alone, and Mason uses the phrase "when the balloon goes up" (meaning when some dangerous operation has irrevocably begun) on pages 43, 46 and 57.  This brings us back to my earlier complaint: why are people who have lived in a dome for 7,000 years using sailing and ballooning metaphors, anyway?  These people have never seen the ocean or the sky!  If Mason is going to make no effort to depict the mindset of people living in an environment radically different than our own, why does he set his story in such an environment?

A passage that I think demonstrates many of the essential characteristics of Eight Against Utopia comes on the day our heroes make their break for freedom (the day the balloon goes up!)  While everybody is hustling to the airlock and the hovercraft the men of the group have excavated, Tania Clermont is revealed to be a traitor working for the government!  When Clermont pulls her government-issued gun, one of the men, Shultz, knocks her cold with a karate chop, and then he carries her out of the dome on his shoulder because he still thinks he can make her his girlfriend!

She was very light.  He slung her over his shoulder and through the thin leotard could feel the pneumatic tension of her jagana against the side of his face.  Her scent was a matter of some subtlety and care, with a faint overtone of sandalwood.  Without overt intention, she was doing a fair job of mind-bending.  

I'm guessing "pneumatic," which Mason uses four times over the course of the book to describe women's bodies, is another Eliot reference, especially since at one point it is used in the same sentence with "Phoenician sailor," a famous phrase from The Waste Land, but I've never seen "jagana" before.  (I mean I've never seen the word--I can assure you I have seen a woman's jagana...whatever it is.)

Besides Mason's useless literary references, lame jokes, and vague descriptions, this passage also serves as an example of the novel's attitude towards sex and gender--were Eight Against Utopia to take flight in today's grrrlpower/MeToo era I suspect it would run into some heavy flak!  Not only are there many "male gaze" scenes and groping scenes, but during all the action sequences the women are essentially burdens--men need to tell them what to do, carry them over obstacles, rescue them, etc.  We are told that women are less adept than men at concealing their thoughts from the government monitor rays, so Kalmar keeps the women in the dark during the planning stages of their breakout.

Six of the party (this count includes unconscious Tania Clermont) fly off in the dusty old hovercraft, but the fuzz are hot on their tails and Kalmar and sexy redhead female engineer Jane Welland are left behind.  In the third quarter of the novel we get long descriptions of the six baling out the hovercraft and rigging a makeshift sail after the machine loses power and lands in the ocean, and long descriptions of Kalmar and Welland fleeing Carthage on foot.  The team's sabotage having cut the city's power, the pair traverse darkened walkways, creep through empty maintenance tunnels and then ascend the shaft of an inert elevator.  Under cover of darkness, a cop Kalmar already has a grudge against tries to rape a woman we never heard about before whom he just picks out of a crowd, Goda Hurst, and our hero Kalmar stumbles on this crime and takes it upon himself to rescue her.  Hurst joins the fugitive party and promptly falls in love with Kalmar, incurring Welland's jealousy.  From the secret little observatory atop the dome the three rappel down to the surface.

Carthaginian security forces pursue the two groups of fugitives, and we get chase scenes and fight scenes.  Kalmar's trio captures an aircraft from their pursuers, and the two groups of refugees are reunited.  They are chased into an old military installation at Gibraltar in the final quarter of the book, and there Mason gives us another punishing dose of descriptions of architecture and climbing and tunnel running and cutting holes in walls.  Tania the treacherous shrink is vaporized by the security troops' energy weapons, but don't feel bad--she had repented of her treachery and faced death with equanimity, and within minutes Shultz develops a crush on Goda Hurst.  (Any port in a storm, I guess.)  They find a MTB or some such military boat, preserved as a museum exhibit.  After 7,000 years its engine and rapid fire deck gun still operate like clockwork, so our heroes crew the thing and, in the shadow of "The Rock," win a naval battle against five Carthaginian hovercraft.  Then they sail to England to restart civilization.
   
What a disappointment!  Eight Against Utopia's references to classical and modernist literature are only skin deep and the political and philosophical issues revolving around the individual's relationship to the state get more of an airing on the back cover than in the actual text, leaving us with a 150-page book about engineering, sex and violence, but all the engineering, sex and violence scenes are inept!  Thumbs down!  (Gotta agree with Joachim this time!)