Galaxies

Perhaps the most contentious artistic slogan was adopted by Parisian intellectuals in the 19th century: l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake.

The axiom is simple: art merely exists as a metaphysical circle in communication with itself, the creator, and the witness. It requires no utilitarian reference in order to be “functional” — the poem is merely the poem, and the poet is honored to bear witness to its manifestation.

Barry Malzberg, among the most vulnerable writers I have read in literature, would have called this: broke for art’s sake.

If we were to catapult across time, like one of those science fiction novels, and soar in and out of a thousand bedrooms — where a writer with a pack of cigarettes, a cup of coffee, and a take-out meal cold and soggy from the night before sat in utter desolation at their inability to sell their work, yet all of a sudden realized the profundity of their artistic gift, completely in private — well, we may not find such a person.

This means all that is left is a dedication: if you love the artistic act, do it; if you don’t, do something else. Hemingway told us that “You must be prepared to work always without applause.” He is correct, old Ernest.

Galaxies, among the most fascinating literary objects the genre produced, is an ode to the absence of what David Lynch called “The Art Life” — a representation of a genre that was misclassified, overlooked, and had a great capacity to sacrifice its best writers under a commandment of artistic conservatism.

Galaxies is a personal novel about the genre, the writer, and the reader. Do not let Barry fool you into thinking otherwise, as he will try in the first sentence by claiming that Galaxies will not be a novel but merely notes toward one. This is a novel — the protagonist Malzberg himself, the settings an allegory for his condition, his frustrations expressed as the kind of novel he should write but never would. And why would Barry not write a novel about a spaceship collapsing into a black hole? Because he was ambitious, and felt that if the work needed to be done in this genre rather than the mainstream, then by god he would do it. In Galaxies, Barry welcomes us to view the mold corroding at the heart of his passion. But crucially, this is not a pessimistic novel — it is merely a way to deal with oneself, and perhaps the most successful way to do that is through humorous debasement.

Galaxies was published by Pyramid in 1975, accompanied by Guernica Night and The Gamesman, which I also consider two of his masterpieces. It is worth noting how Pyramid chose to market the novel with a blurb exclaiming: “The spaceship was trapped in the timeless black vortex of an imploded neutron star!”

If you have not read Malzberg, do not start here. If you have, you already know I was correct to claim he would never write a book with such a ridiculous pulp-era premise. I have read a dozen of Barry’s novels and not once has he considered the nature of a neutron star, and not once have I observed a spaceship hurtling through a black hole. The brilliance of Galaxies, therefore, is that it is a novel Malzberg does not want to write — but feels he should. To abide by the conservative guardrails of the genre, he must please the reader and honor the publisher’s advance, but as will be shown, he will fail. Galaxies is a meta-commentary on a failed novel by a self-proclaimed failed author:

“The author has been writing, with some success, for several years now, but he was writing without success for a long time before that, and, therefore, his failure ratio, even taking into account his recent modest rise in reputation, is still convincing. Not only has the author always felt himself to be a young person, he has thought himself to be a young failure; but there is more strength in that because our youth and possibility may be stripped from us, but our failure can remain shining and constant forever.”

But Malzberg will not only malign himself — albeit in an often hilarious fashion — he will also inform the reader that a novel of such stunning magnitude as Galaxies, one which aims to enter the arena of acclaimed hard science fiction with utter intellectual rigor and regard for the mechanics of astronomy and physics, will demand a certain courage from the author. Now the reader is excited; they will get what they came for, what they were promised in the unspoken contract between author and reader — only for Malzberg to admit that courage has:

“Nothing to do with the writing of fiction, particularly science fiction. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise. Most science fiction writers are drunks and almost all of them have unhappy lives.”

If you read Malzberg’s deeply personal overview of the genre, Breakfast in the Ruins, you will quickly see that he loved this field and belonged to it. But he was a man of high ambitions from the outset. In Breakfast, Malzberg fantasizes about his ultimate dream in vivid, almost cinematic detail — he imagines himself in his living room putting out ash from his cigarette for his interview “At Home with Malzberg.” The journalist is praising his ability to make quality literature out of such a childish genre — how do you do it, he asks? Malzberg smiles: well, I don’t know, I’m not sure if I’m any good, he says, replacing another cigarette into his elegant black holder. I’m just one of many, many writers.

Malzberg believed he could change the genre, but instead described himself as a fool:

“An idiot stick has been described as pointing toward nowhere on one end, attached to an idiot on the other end, and the stick was science fiction.”

Galaxies is a fascinating statement of an artist caught between care and disillusion. Not all of Malzberg’s novels were effective, but Galaxies tells us why — and further, when they were effective, they stand among the most important works in the genre. He got the work done.