Losing One's Head

Back in 1977 JDM bibliographer Walter Shine asked the question “What is JDM’s favorite joke?” He answered the query himself with a listing of five different books wherein one particular truism had been repeated. Here are the specific quotes:

He pulled himself slowly out of the chair. “I don't condemn you on moral grounds, Morrow. Better men than you and me have done like that little old dog on the railroad tracks. I just think it was damn poor judgement for a man in your position to fediddle the Mayor’s wife.”

Herb Leighton in Judge Me Not (1951)

She set the bottle down, and fluffed her back hair, and arched her back a little, just enough to push those things out farther than God intended. There wouldn’t be any of that in prison. Not a morsel of it. They’d let you dream about it, and that was all. Probably stop that too, if they could figure out how. Sure turned out to be the little dog on the railroad tracks this time.

Del Bennicke (interior monologue) in The Damned (1952)

“Wipe your mouth, I’ll be damned if I’m going to get all mixed up in a … This is the craziest thing anybody could possibly… I’m not going to let you be the little dog on the railroad tracks, Lloyd. Because it can’t mean that much. I can’t mean that much in that kind of way to anybody.”

Sylvia Danton in The Empty Trap (1957)

“Look, you’ve got to get yourself sorted out. I mean it. It can happen to anybody, getting all hung up on some twenty-year-old quiff. Like the little dog in the freight yard, and the train nips off the end of his tail and he yelps and spins around and it cuts off his head. Never lose your head over a piece of tail.”

Leo, in “The Random Noise of Love” from S*E*V*E*N (1971)

I had seen somebody I had invented, not Mary Alice. I explained away her inconsistencies, overlooked her vulgarities, and believed her dramatics. And so it goes. It is humiliating, when you should know better, to become victim of the timeless story of the little brown dog running across the freight yard, crossing all the railroad tracks until a switch engine nipped off the end of his tail between wheel and rail. The little dog yelped, and he spun so quickly to check himself out that the next wheel chopped through his little brown neck. The moral is, of course, never lose your head over a piece of tail.

Travis McGee in The Scarlet Ruse (1973)

"The Taste of Gravy"

John D MacDonald’s first short story to be published in Playboy magazine appeared in the relatively late year of 1967, long after his work had made appearances in nearly every other major (and minor) periodical in the United States. What took him so long is anybody’s guess, but one is tempted to go back to Travis McGee’s infamous 1966 rant in One Fearful Yellow Eye, where he refers to Hugh Hefner’s philosophy as “laborious,” “interminable” and the writer himself as “pseudo-educated.” This would certainly not put the author in Hefner’s good graces, assuming that Hef ever read a McGee novel. But MacDonald’s work was sold through his agent, and the agent worked not with the magazine’s owner, but with its fiction editor, who happened to admire and respect MacDonald’s writing. “Quarrel,” which appeared in the May 1967 issue, began a series of short story appearances that were marked by a more adult sensibility than that which had been on display in, say, his work for This Week or Collier’s, not surprising given the kind of magazine Playboy was. These included the titles “The Annex,” “Dear Old Friend,” and “Double Hannenframmis,” which was published in August 1970. MacDonald then took these stories and, along with three new originals, included them in his anthology S*E*V*E*N, which came out in April 1971.

But MacDonald would write one more story for Playboy, and it appeared in the magazine’s June 1974 issue. Titled “The Taste of Gravy,” it was one of the last short stories MacDonald would ever write. Both its tone and subject matter make it a good companion for his other Playboy works, and it would have fit nicely into S*E*V*E*N (had S*E*V*E*N been E*I*G*H*T), and would have, I believe, made for a better final “chapter” in that thematically organic anthology than the existing title, “The Annex.”

Paul Catlett, the story’s protagonist, is a close cousin to “Woodchuck’s” Aldo Bellinger and to Wyatt Ross in “Double Hennenframmis”: a corporate leader of questionable morals, a man who has built a business empire using any means available, legal or otherwise. In Ross’s case it was outright larceny but here Catlett skated just inside the boundaries, building “something so big there is a lot less there than meets the eye,” and he has done this by “stealing from the wolves.” As the story opens he has just completed months of preparation to unload the company onto another group of unsuspecting “wolves,” and to emerge “with enough golden booty to last [him] forever.” He is sitting in the first class section of an airliner flying from Los Angeles to New York when he is notified by a stewardess that the plane will be forced to land short of Kennedy Airport and is being diverted to Syracuse. It is then that he notices a passenger across the aisle, a “big girl, young, with a strong pale face... her hair... dark blonde, heavy and healthy.” (A MacDonald ideal from as far back as his beginnings as a writer.) As he is heading for the security check point before boarding the replacement flight he again notices the same girl, this time engaged in some sort of dispute with a security guard at the metal detector. She is triggering the device even though she is carrying no metal, and the same thing happens to Catlett. He makes a suggestion that gets them through this delay, but it is not in time and Catlett and the girl watch as their flight takes off without them.

It lifted into the clear windy night, toward a diamond sky. He turned away and suddenly she took hold of his forearm with such shocking strength it made him gasp. He turned back toward her and saw her staring, her eyes wide and mouth slack, sagging open. He thought for an instant she was having some sort of seizure, but then he looked toward [the plane] and saw a long trail of orange flame, a dirty orange that made an arc, a gentle long curve toward the ground. There was a sudden bloom of orange-and-white flame that made him think of those television pictures from the Cape, when the booster separated and it would look for a few moments as if the whole rocket had blown up. The bigger blossom of fire continued along the same arc, while smaller burning pieces fell out of it. It coasted down out of the sky and disappeared behind a distant hill, and then a bigger flare lit up all of the night. Moments later, there was an audible "Whumpf" sound that shook the big window.

Understandably upset by the tragedy, the two would-be passengers comfort each other and head for the airport bar to calm their nerves. Through their conversation they gradually learn about each other. She is Sheila Christopher, a young woman currently having an affair with a married man in New York. She was flying there to embark on a 15-day cruise with him, hoping that when they return the man will have the courage to ask his wife for a divorce. She learns that Catlett is THE Paul Catlett, CEO of CatCo, made recently famous by a day's worth of congressional hearings investigating his shady business practices. He reveals that he is married, to an unfaithful second wife, and that his trip to New York was to put an end to CatCo by putting "gravy on the blade."

"Steal from the wolves and they come after you. There is a primitive way to get rid of wolves. You freeze a very sharp knife, blade up against the ice, with a little frozen gravy on the side of the blade. The wolves lick the blade. It is so cold they can't feel it slicing their tongues. They taste fresh blood, their own, and keep at it until they swoon and freeze. While I am far away, over the icecap and the mountains, and down the other side.”

Sheila becomes philosophical about the near miss and tries to understand its meaning.

“I have the feeling that something... valuable has happened to me. I want to sort of sit back and put it together and see what it says to me. If I go rushing about, inserting myself back into place, right where I was before, then I won't know what this meant…. we’ve got this chance to change things.”

She suggests that they pool their money, hop a flight to Biloxi, "where nobody will know us or give a damn." As Catlett considers the sudden suggestion, "he felt his heart lift for the first time in a year. He felt a hollow excitement in his belly. He reached to grasp her extended, challenging hand…”

Following that ellipsis MacDonald inserts a three-asterisk section break and resumes in a disorienting place. Catlett, with Shelia not far behind him, is walking through a canvas tunnel, boarding an airplane. They are the last two passengers to get on the replacement flight from Syracuse to New York City…

Without revealing anything further for the would-be reader, let me say that this is not fantasy or science fiction. The device is used as a means to an end, which takes up the second half of “The Taste of Gravy.” and is more about Catlett’s state of mind than any airline tragedy. Shelia is not really Shelia, but Sarah, a much more interesting character. It is an extreme example of the unreliable narrator, a literary device used in all of the stories collected in S*E*V*E*N. The big difference between “The Taste of Gravy” and the other stories in that anthology is in its ending, and it is primarily for this reason that I think it would have made a better final story than “The Annex.” Perhaps MacDonald felt that way as well, and wrote “The Taste of Gravy” as a kind of “what-if” ending to his unifying theme. And while “The Annex” was one of the author’s proudest short story achievements, maybe he thought, as I do, that it was out of place in S*E*V*E*N and belonged in a more appropriate collection such as his sf anthology Other Times, Other Worlds, where is was also the final entry.

“The Taste of Gravy” has never been anthologized or reprinted, as far as I have been able to tell. Used copies of Playboy are very easy to find online and prices can be reasonable. And of course, Playboy has made its entire run available digitally in its online archive, for something like eight bucks a month. There you can read “The Taste of Gravy” and MacDonald's other four Playboy short stories, as well as an excerpt from The Lonely Silver Rain, which appeared in the March 1985 issue.

"The Annex"

In 1966, after having written and published 53 books, all but one of them works of fiction, John D MacDonald decided to take up a different kind of challenge. Intrigued by a suggestion from newspaper reporter John Pete Schmidt, MacDonald decided to try his hand at non-fiction, something he had dabbled in a year earlier with his cat biography The House Guests. A Sarasota physician by the name of Carl Coppolino had been accused by an ex-lover of murdering both her husband and Coppolino’s wife by lethal injection, using an untraceable drug. Coppolino was indicted in both New Jersey (where he supposedly murdered the husband) and in Florida, and the New Jersey trial was to take place first. With a juicy story like this and an A-list celebrity lawyer defending (none other than F Lee Bailey), the Coppolino case was the OJ Trial of its day, breathlessly covered in all the nation’s newspapers and in the newsweeklies.

MacDonald was attracted to the idea of writing a serious non-fiction crime book, and with one of the murders happening right in his own back yard, it seemed natural that it should be him, not some other author or reporter who should write the definitive story of Carl Coppolino. Thus began an intense 17-month period in the life of the author, one that had him travelling back and forth from New Jersey to cover bail hearings, jury selections and the trial itself, and then back to Florida (Venice, where the trial was moved to) to cover the second trial. During this time he wrote little fiction and he was later quoted as saying that this period cost him three McGee books that could have been written but were not. The book that was written was called No Deadly Drug and it was 600-pages long, published in hardcover, and covered the Coppolino story up to the end of the first trial, where the defendant was found not guilty. The book sold poorly and is little remembered today, if it is remembered at all.

But MacDonald did take a day off here and there during his research and coverage of the case to write fiction. One of the short stories he finished was something he called “The Annex,” and he went out of his way at the time to state that writing it was a kind of therapy to relieve him of the stress of writing No Deadly Drug. It appeared in the May 1968 issue of Playboy (No Deadly Drug was published in June of that year) and was MacDonald’s second appearance in this premier men’s magazine. Highly regarded by the author and many of his readers and editors, it is the story of what goes on inside the mind of a dying man. It is typically listed among the author’s science fiction works and has been included in at least three such anthologies. The author himself told an interviewer that it was one of his favorite short stories, and he used it to make the assertion that there were two or three of his short stories that he liked better than any of his novels.

The 5,500-word story is framed by two short sections that take place in a hospital. A young nurse is caught chatting up a handsome intern when she should have been watching a comatose coronary patient whose IV has become dislodged from his arm. “After chewing her out with a cold expertise that welled tears into the blue eyes” of the young nurse, her superior tells her young charge, “An hour before dawn they get restless… as if they had someplace to go, some appointment to keep.”

A paragraph break with three asterisks lets us know we are changing scenes, and the reader enters into a strange, dreamlike world of a deserted city and a man with an appointment to keep. Referred to only as Mr. Davis, the protagonist wakes from a strange bed in “the first gray light of the morning,” and heads to his unrevealed rendezvous.

There were shadows still remaining in the empty streets, so that even though he knew his way and walked swiftly, the city seemed strange to him. They were changing it so quickly these past few years. The eye becomes accustomed to the shape and bulk of structures giving them only a marginal attention: yet when, so abruptly, they were gone, one had the feeling of having made a wrong turn somewhere. Then even the unchanged things began to look half strange.

He arrives at a downtown hotel, a place of onetime grandeur but now reduced to shabbiness. He ponders the fact that his “shabby assignment in an unknown room” could not have taken place in any other kind of locale. Yet he has been here before. The only other person in the hotel lobby is a desk clerk, who walks “toward him out of the lobby shadows,” and who Davis recognizes as someone who used to be a bellhop at this very locale. But the man does not seem to remember Davis. The manager asks for “that thing,” the curious identification that Davis has been given by some unknown others, a “gold miniature of his own dog tag”.

Davis is told the party he is supposed to meet with is in Room 4242, and when he asks for the key he is told that the room is not in the hotel proper, but in “the annex,” which is in the process of being torn down.

“Listen, [said Leo,] they got old foops in there living there since the year one, and lease agreements and all that stuff, so about the only thing they can do is work around them until they get sick of all the noise and mess and get out. There aren’t many left now. I think maybe your party is the only one left on that floor, but I don’t keep close track.”

When Davis asks for the key, he is told there is only one master key, and it is in the possession of one “Mrs. Dorn.” He is to head down some stairs and follow a red pipe until he reaches another set of stairs, which lead up to the annex. While walking there he notices that the red pipe is made of plastic material and he sees it expanding and contracting. Then the pipe disappears into a wall and he has arrived.

These were unexpectedly wide and elegant stairs, marble streaked with gray and green, ascending into a gentle curve. At the top of the stairs he pushed a dark door open and found himself in an enormous lobby. It had the silence of a museum. Dropcloths covered the shapes of furniture. Plaster dust was gritty on the floor. Some huge beams had fallen and were propped at an angle, as in pictures of bombings.

He meets Mrs Dorn, a woman with a “soft and pretty face,” and one who he feels he has known before. She’s walking around marking things with a piece of yellow chalk, writing something like a “D” with a slash through it. As she takes him up to his floor she explains how there are two types of residents in city hotels, the transients and the residents, and the residents all live on the upper floors. They walk for what seems like miles, through oddly lit corridors, past rooms where all the room numbers have been removed from the doors, and past an elderly couple coming out of a room. The man’s voice reminds Davis of his fourteen year old son’s. Eventually they arrive at Room 4242 and Mrs. Dorn unlocks the door. Davis begins to do what he was sent to do…

“The Annex” is a story filled to the brim with dream imagery and symbolism; nearly every paragraph has some sort of universal image of the unconscious. This should come as no surprise to longtime readers of John D MacDonald. Many of his novels contain passages where the protagonist tries to unravel the mystery of some dream, which is described in great, long detail in the text. In The Deceivers, for example, the two main characters discuss a dream one of them had, and the symbolism is obvious to the reader, even if it isn’t to the characters. MacDonald himself was a vivid dreamer and at various times in his life he kept a dream journal at his bedside. (These journals are included among his papers at the University of Florida, but were personal enough to have been kept with his financial and medical records and were sealed until twenty-five years after his death.)

The trouble with MacDonald’s dream references, at least for this reader, is that they are boring, uninteresting and typically stop his narrative dead in its tracks. I usually find myself skimming over these passages so I can quickly jump back into the story. “The Annex” is, basically, one long dream sequence, and the ending framing section is filled with lots of “ah ha!” moments where we learn what it all meant. And while repeated readings of the story provide greater insight into all of the various symbols and related settings, dramatically the piece comes off as obvious. Still, MacDonald’s prose is at the top of its game here, and it really sings in places.

As noted, “The Annex” was anthologized several times after it first appeared in Playboy. It first reappeared in Best SF: 1968: The Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss (1969). That same year is was included in Playboy’s Stories of the Sinister and Strange. It was the final story in MacDonald’s own science fiction anthology, Other Times, Other Worlds, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and was the lead tale in what was perhaps the most obscure MacDonald anthology ever, The Annex and Other Stories. This collection was something MacDonald helped to prepare in the months preceding his death, a signed, limited edition with a run of only 350 copies containing his four favorite short stories: “The Annex,” “The Bear Trap,” “End of the Tiger,” and “Hangover”. It was published in Helsinki and was printed on special Michelangelo paper made at the Magnani Paper Mills in Pescia, Italy. I believe it was put together to help raise funds for some environmental cause, but I can’t swear to that and can't locate any information about it in my files. The book was printed and signed, but apparently never “released,” and a copy or two usually show up for auction on the internet for very high prices.

The most notable inclusion of “The Annex” in an anthology was, of course, as the seventh and final story in MacDonald’s 1971 collection S*E*V*E*N. A combination of new and previously published stories (all in Playboy), S*E*V*E*N is one of my favorite JDM guilty pleasures, one that I’ve gone back to more times than I can remember, and -- I have to say it -- I usually don’t bother with “The Annex”.

The anthology appeared without warning as a paperback original, without an introduction of any kind, and went through a relatively small number of printings before being permanently consigned to the used book stores of the world. MacDonald’s original title for the collection was The Random Noise of Love, after the first story in book, and he wrote that had wanted to combine “a bunch of related stories into a novelistic structure without it being one of those things where the seams and joints show, and without it sounding as if I had hauled folk in from far left field to join the party.” He claimed that it took “all available concentration to keep everything constantly sorted out in [his] mind,” and that he had gone “underground” while putting it together. I’ve often tried to discern the connecting theme of the anthology, with little success, other than the obvious fact that they all reflect various aspects of love and friendship, and all seem to be seen from the viewpoint of an unreliable narrator. “The Annex” just doesn’t seem to fit in with any of these themes and, for me, it’s just not very compelling reading. I certainly wouldn’t go as far as the author did and include it among his finest works.

I’ve now written about all of the stories in S*E*V*E*N. They are:

“The Random Noise of Love”

“Dear Old Friend”

“The Willow Pool”

“Quarrel”

“Woodchuck”

“Double Hannenframmis”

Despite what I wrote in my posting titled “Three Years Later” a few pieces back, S*E*V*E*N is now available as an eBook from Amazon and Barnes & Noble (as is The Executioners, leaving only Other Times, Other Worlds as the one JDM original not digitized). Used copies of the paperback are, of course, available, and there’s even a hardcover version of S*E*V*E*N available on Amazon, published in 1986 by one Amereon Ltd, a British concern, I’m guessing. If “The Annex” is all you are interested in, used copies of the original issue of Playboy are usually easy to find for a relatively low price.

"Double Hannenframmis"

"Double Hannenframmis" is the oddly-titled John D MacDonald short story that was originally published in the August 1970 issue of Playboy. It was MacDonald's fourth appearance in the famous men's magazine -- his fourth of five stories that were published there -- and it was the last of his Playboy stories that would soon become part of the 1971 anthology he titled S*E*V*E*N. In fact, four of the seven stories that made up that collection were all originally published in Playboy, and the other three were written especially for the book. Like those other stories, "Double Hannenframmis" is adult JDM, a tale featuring an unlikeable protagonist caught in an inescapable spiral of greed and lust. In fact Wyatt Ross could be nearly interchangeable with the main characters of two other S*E*V*E*N stories: D. Franklin Raymond in "Dear Old Friend" and Aldo Bellinger of "Woodchuck".  Almost, but not quite. Wyatt Ross's evil is of a different degree.

In 1985 MacDonald was asked in an interview if, as a writer, he was trying to "change" his readers. His answer was revealing and goes a long way to explain his central moralistic point of view:

"I have, let's say, certain moral values and standards that cannot help but appear in my books. I am, in a sense, Calvinistic. I think that the worst that any of us can do is hurt someone unnecessarily, maybe just to prove that we've got the muscle to hurt them, to hurt them emotionally, to hurt their image of themselves. That, to me, is Sin Number One, and if that shows through in the books, if I seem to be trying to promote that as a way of life, and if a few people could be moved by it, OK."

By this definition, Ross is certainly guilty of "Sin Number One," although the reason for his being so lies not in a desire to prove he's "got the muscle," but out of cold fear and a desperation to save his own hide, even at the expense of the person most dear to him. In the "Playbill" section at the beginning of this issue of Playboy, MacDonald summarizes his character in a brief two sentences:

"['Double Hannenframmis'] is about a young man who rode the explosive bull market in 1967 and 1968, wheeling and dealing like all the Young Turks of the go-go funds and the hatchet men of funny-money conglomeration. When the times and tides change, he maintains position by turning corrupt, and sacrifices his wife along with his integrity."

As Ross's wife is depicted as a complete innocent, it is hard to imagine a more repulsive protagonist in the JDM universe.

 The story opens as Ross is flying into an unnamed city (Las Vegas?), the sole passenger on his company's private jet. This corporate executive, the president and majority owner of Dallas-based Wyro International Services, usually travels with the company of his "strike force," but today he is alone.  Distracted and unable to concentrate on the transcripts of his own Senate sub-committee testimony, he bears little resemblance to the "Young Turk" he has been portrayed by the press in the last six years, profiled in big-circulation periodicals such as Business Week, Forbes and Newsweek. Things were great in the "go-go" years, as Wyro International grew and prospered through a series of expertly timed corporate takeovers, but when the economy soured while Ross was in the process of acquiring Kallen Equipment, he got out the only way a man with no moral compass could: he cheated.

He didn't cheat smart, he cheated "greedy stupid." Making market moves based on information known only to himself, he "got in at the bottom and out at the top." And he pulled cash out in a way that could never be traced back to him. His actions got the attention of a Senate sub-committee and the SEC, and when he knew he was in too deep to ever extricate himself alone, he sought the aid of a fixer.

He's paying a man named Willy Russo to come up with a way to get him in the clear. Russo's plan involves laying the blame on Wyatt's innocent wife and mother of his two young children. The idea is to make it seem as if Wyatt's wife Mary Lou is having an affair, and that her lover is exhorting her to pump insider information from her husband. Just exactly how Russo hopes to lay that blame takes the reader down a very familiar road in the JDM universe.

The purpose of Wyatt's trip to this "resort city" is to meet with one Ruth McGann, an expert in vocal mimicry. Wyatt arrives with a reel of tape containing a secretly-recorded conversation between him and Mary Lou at the breakfast table, and he finds Miss McGann a formidable, independent professional, albeit one straight out of the JDM playbook:

"A tall woman, younger than he had expected. Strong-bodied, big-bosomed blonde, with a pretty and impassive face, cool blue eyes, careless hair, brief green skirt with a big brass buckle, yellow sleeveless blouse, yellow sandals."

Ruth has quite a setup in her hotel room, consisting of two tape recorders, an amplifier with two small speakers, and "a piece of laboratory equipment that looked like an unfinished television receiver." She takes the tape from Wyatt and plays it, listening intently to Mary Lou's intonation. When she tells Wyatt that it sounds like he has "a nifty little wife," Wyatt reacts with controlled outrage, a CEO unused to being talked to that way. He gets a response he wasn't expecting:

"Correction, deary. I'm not on your conglomerate payroll. I am a specialist, and I am damned good, and I get paid very, very well. You got too confident and you got too cute and you got caught. You can lose your ass, fellow. Russo knows it, you know it and I know it. I think your Mary Lou is better than you deserve and I think you will be doing her a favor by dropping her off the back of your sleigh, fellow. I say what I want when I want to and take crap from no man alive. Now tell me you're not used to being talked to like this. And I will tell you to relax and enjoy it. Now let me get to work."

Once Ruth has Mary Lou's voice down the two of them perform a script for the recorder, where "Mary Lou" asks a lot of leading questions about the name of a company she saw among Wyatt's papers on his desk. Then another one about quarterly earnings, and another where Wyatt tells her he has changed his mind about the merger. After a few wooden performances Wyatt finally gets it down and they are through. At this point he isn't exactly clear what the grand plan is, and when he asks "what's next?" Ruth can only surmise.

"There's a lot of options... Somebody will show up with the tapes. In the interest of fair play and all that... Some woman hired an investigator to get the goods on your Mary Lou and her husband. So the investigator bugged the house; and, because it wasn't exactly legal, he sends the tapes in with an anonymous letter of explanation, sends them to your attorneys."

This is too much, even for a corporate cheat, and Wyatt claims he won't stand for it. When he tries to rationalize his actions, Ruth smiles a crooked smile and replies:

"[You were doing it] for the wife and kiddies? Come on! Any way you deal the hand, you've lost your Mary Lou. Best to set it up to look as if somebody was using her. Otherwise, she could get clipped for tax evasion. After they play the tapes and question her, and after you testify that those are conversations you had with your wife, you think she'll forgive and forget? ... [If you are cleared] you can afford to give her big alimony. If they nail you, she might have to work waitress to support those kids."

It's all too much for Wyatt and he breaks down sobbing, bringing out the "Earth mother" in Ruth, but not so much that she isn't able to get off a wonderful crack: "Poor sorry bastard... later on, you can tell yourself that when it happened, you cried."

In addition to a hard sort of pity, Wyatt's breakdown elicits another feeling in Ruth and she kisses him. Soon they are in bed and, right before the moment of truth, Ruth stops the action briefly so she can make her own rationalizations for being the way she is. In MacDonald's somewhat quaint universe, Ruth and Wyatt are two of a kind.

The second half of the story takes place four months later, in a setting nearly identical to the one in another S*E*V*E*N short story, "Woodchuck." Wyatt is awakening from a dream, one where he was on trial and found guilty of "hannenframmis."

The idea of using an actor to impersonate someone else on a tape recorder is, of course, familiar to any reader of MacDonald's novella "Linda." He used a variation on this device in his 1950 short story "Breathe No More, My Lovely" and it probably appears in other early works I've not read yet. In a similar vein, he often used the device of visual trickery, where one person was made up to appear to be another in an effort to elicit a certain response. It was done rather melodramatically in the 1953 novella "Death's Eye View" and, to a much better effect, in the Travis McGee novel Darker Than Amber.

But "Double Hannenframmis" is less about the mechanics of trickery than it is about the effects of amorality on the soul. Ruth is a person who has come to accept her own lack of ethics, lost in the act of pretending to be someone else, but for Wyatt it is different. In the cutthroat world of business and high finance he could write off his actions as necessary to the growth and prosperity of the company, but when those same ethics turn personal it becomes a different thing. Wyatt survives financially, he manages to stay out of jail, and he can rationalize the greater good of how he saved his own hide, but the act weighs heavy on him and alters his perception of everything. As the author described it in the "Playbill," "... the joy is gone and it is [now] a time of despair." And if there is any trickery in the beautifully-written second half of this story, it's in the author's ability to write that despair between the lines of a relatively ordinary scene.

The stories in S*E*V*E*N are remarkable works of short fiction, even from a writer as talented as John D MacDonald. From the mad lust of "The Random Noise of Love," the coldhearted indifference of "Dear Old Friend," the achingly sad life and times of Norrie Ames in "The Willow Pool," to the predatory machinations of Aldo Bellinger in "Woodchuck," the arching theme of this collection is that of loss: how it happens, its brutal effects, and the hopeless realization that, once gone, whatever was lost can never be retrieved. And invariably in this world of S*E*V*E*N, loss doesn't just happen, it is caused -- by the omissions, the weaknesses and the conscious decisions of the author's protagonists. These tales were among the last short stories MacDonald would ever produce, and they not only prove that he never lost his literary touch, they prove that he never stopped growing as an artist.

"Quarrel"

"Quarrel" was the first John D MacDonald short story ever published in Playboy. It appeared in the May 1967 issue and must have provoked a few smiles and a lot of head scratching among MacDonald's dedicated fans, following as it did only a year after Travis McGee's anti-Hefner rant in One Fearful Yellow Eye. "Quarrel" was the first of five JDM stories that would appear in Playboy between 1967 and 1974, and all but the last of these tales would eventually appear in MacDonald's 1971 short story collection S*E*V*E*N. It was the fourth story in that anthology, and even though there is supposed to be thematic arc to S*E*V*E*N, I've never been able to figure out what it is.

The story is told in the first person by a character simply named Noonan, an aging hippie who walks around with a pet mouse in his coat pocket and who talks in the hep jargon of the day. Depending on your age and point of view, Noonan's dialogue is either wonderfully authentic or embarrassingly arch, a woeful attempt by a middle-aged author to capture the speech patterns of the counter-culture. MacDonald is usually deadly accurate with his dialogue, but many of the phrases found in "Quarrel" sound as if they came from a bad episode of the "The Mod Squad." Still, the story itself is sound and the use of flashback to tell a tale is a MacDonald trademark. Finishing up at a mere 1,900 words, there's hardly a wasted sentence, even if some of them are stilted.

We first encounter Noonan in New York's Central Park as he runs into "crazy Kaberrian," an old friend and fellow hippie who he hasn't seen in years. It's actually Kaberrian who recognized Noonan first, as the crazy one has now become "a square." He's sitting on a park bench next to a primly-dressed girl, looking far different from the way Noonan remembered him.

"The laugh was the same. Everything else had been changed. With that 12 or so pounds of shiny curly black hair chipped away and shaved away, underneath was a very ordinary-looking-type person, like the uptown subways are full of five evenings a week, like come and take away things people don't make payment on."
 

When Noonan recalls just how unkempt and far out Kaberrian had been back in the day, he comes to the only conclusion that makes sense and he tells it to him face-to-face: "A sell job. A fink-off. You squared it, huh, baby?" Kaberrian and the girl just laugh, and then Noonan is introduced to Ellie (the girl), who, in turn, is introduced to Noonan's mouse, named Buckley. Ellie then looks at her watch, kisses Kaberrian on the cheek and walks away, "very girl in every way." She's heading back to her job at a local museum, and just as Noonan's head is about to explode at the very squareness of it all, he asks Kaberrian to tell him what happened.

Kaberrian reveals that he and Ellie are married and that they "have an apartment, even." He's employed in a hi-fi store, which at least makes some sense to Noonan, as the Kaberrian he knew was an aural playwright who used tape recordings to make "accidental plays the way painters get accidental paintings." Even back in the day, Kaberrian's knowledge of recording techniques was vast. And, as he relates, it's how he met Ellie. But before he begins to tell the tale, Noonan has to bitch at him.

"It hurt me. So I explained how everybody has this terrible tendency to give up the fight, man. Square it out, and fink off, and start dying of conformity and plastic coffee. But when he started yawning, I had the idea I wasn't getting to him."
 

Kaberrian then relates how it all started. He was living in a tiny flat on 12th Street with the apartments on either side of him vacant. Then, on the very same day, both become occupied, one by a man, the other by a woman. It turns out that they were a couple, but the woman (Ellie, of course) "had such a deep belief in all the old-timy values," she would not permit co-habitation until marriage. The male is a playwright, the kind who has never finished anything, who is always working on the second act, and who sits around the apartment all day awaiting a call from his muse. Ellie, on the other hand, "is the only one earning bread, and she pays both rents, cooks, cleans, everything." They also don't seem to get along very well. Their loud arguments, easily heard through the paper-thin walls, inspire Kaberrian to break out the Ampex, and he begins recording the tiffs with the goal of turning them into one of his "accidental plays." He quickly builds up a large library of reels (this was 1967, after all) and begins splicing things together into what can only be termed as modern art. He even hires a couple of musicians to play along, with a clarinet mimicking Ellie and a French horn filling in for her boyfriend. Once everything is finished and put together for playback, Kaberrian tries it out on the most logical audience of all: Ellie and the playwright. Their reactions prove to be very different.

MacDonald does a wonderful job in contrasting the two main male characters in "Quarrel," pitting the willing-to-change Kaberrian against the supposedly more enlightened Noonan, who has become that most pathetic of creatures: the aging radical. In a couple of wonderfully economic sentences, the author manages to sum up the wasted life of Noonan, a grown man still walking around with a mouse in his pocket. My favorite:

"[Kaberrian] asked me how things were at Columbia, and I said I was auditing the Oriental-religions thing again, the same course [he] and I had audited maybe seven years ago together, which is how we met. I said they had changed it a little, but it was still stimulating."
 

How many of us have known someone like Noonan? There are few authors I read who can say as much with so few words as John D MacDonald.

Noonan's final rueful summation of what Kaberrian has become says more about himself than it does his friend:

"Off he went. That's the last we'll ever see of him. Who's going to keep up the good old traditions if we keep on losing the Kaberrians one at a time? Who can laugh in a world like this one?"
 

(That line will make more sense once you've read the entire story, as I've left out any spoilers.)

Used copies of S*E*V*E*N are easily obtainable for very little money, and one can even find the original May 1967 Playboy for relatively little cash through any number of online used book stores.

"The Willow Pool"

"The Willow Pool" is the third entry in John D MacDonald's 1971 short story collection S*E*V*E*N, and like the other tales in that anthology the author uses the device of imperfect perspective to tell his story. In this particular entry -- written especially for the anthology and the longest in the book -- it's a case of multiple perspectives that depict a protagonist without a voice of her own. Constructed as a mystery, "The Willow Pool" works on a number of levels: it's a character study, a detective story, a commentary on the times, an experiment in story construction and, ultimately, the sad tale of a damaged and disturbed young woman. It's a superior example of writing by an author who began experimenting with this kind of storytelling as far back as 1954 with All These Condemned. "The Willow Pool" is full of compassion, insight and a palpable feeling of regret about the plight of a victim unable to annunciate her own cry for help.

The story is told by seven secondary characters, all people connected in some way to Norrie Ames. Each character has their own section of the story, told in first person and all beginning with "My name is .... " First up is Mable Turner, an elderly farmer's wife who begins by relating how, two years ago, a young college girl arrived at her remote New York apple farm and asked about renting a small cabin, located in a far corner of the property, private and remote and next to a small pond surrounded by willow trees. Mable is a bit uneasy about renting to a single girl, but agrees when told by Norrie that she's there to catch up on some missed school work and is preparing for exams in a month. Things are fine for a while until one day Mable, an upright, God-fearing woman, accidentally discovers Norrie with a boy in her cabin, caught in flagrante, and orders her off the property. It doesn't help matters that "the young boy wore his hair as long as a girl."

Next we hear from Dr, Wyndam Hargier, a physician who works at the college attended by Norrie. He recalls how he was called in two years ago when, after disappearing for ten days following a party, Norrie was dropped off in front of her dormitory by a car that sped away. She was "semiconscious and uncommunicative," and badly bruised as "the result of strenuous copulation with a male either very muscular or of sadistic tendencies." Dr. Hargier recommends sending her home to Philadelphia to recuperate.

Norrie's mother recalls when she was called by the college and how she found it "most irritating that [she] could not speak to [Norrie] on the telephone." Amelia Ames is one of MacDonald's classic and most perfectly realized self-absorbed parent, a typically affluent and distracted person who has little time or inclination to raise a child. When told of her daughter's condition, she is upset, because both she and her husband "had engagements [they] could not easily break." She's also not happy with the college, who she feels could have "kept better track of my daughter." Norrie comes home to a house where her father has just been caught in the middle of an affair and there is little effort to deal with her recovery. Her parents hire a doctor to look after her, "the very top talent available," but Norrie disappears in the middle of her treatment and later notifies them that she is up at the cabin, preparing to return to school.

Norrie's boyfriend Michael relates how he stumbled upon the cabin while hiking one day, became acquainted with Norrie and then fell in love with her. They lived together in the cabin for several weeks in a kind of idyllic fog, but after they were caught by Mrs. Turner they drove across the country living a nomadic life, until they eventually ended up at a hippy commune in Arizona. After three weeks of that lifestyle they tired of it, and tired of each other and split. Michael went on to college and Norrie returned home, where she eventually married, then took her new husband on a honeymoon to a special place... a small cabin by a willow pool.

The final character in the story is William Mass, a criminologist who was asked by police to look into the sudden and mysterious murder of one Paul Warcroft, who was killed on a remote apple farm upstate, and who was Norrie's husband.

"The Willow Pool" is a beautifully written and inexpressibly sad story that covers a lot of ground in it's 42 pages. MacDonald deals with issues of self-worth, psychosis, repression, the sixties youth movement, and even environmental issues, parroting a rant on DDT taken directly from a letter he wrote to friend Dan Rowan. Norrie's problems began long before her ten-day disappearance, evidenced by her preoccupied mother, and is described by her boyfriend Michael as a person who "hated the way she looked, hated her body, hated her build [and] felt as if she was a scrawny, ugly, sickening mess." The unifying theme with all of the narrators -- excepting her mother -- is a profound sense of regret and guilt that they were unable to help her when they had the opportunity. And while it's never made clear until the very end exactly what happened to cause these people to reminisce about this poor girl, it's obvious that it was something terrible and avoidable.

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, the only short story MacDonald published the year S*E*V*E*N was issued was a piece in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine titled "He Was Always a Nice Boy." That tale is a kind of mirror image of "The Willow Pool," both in style and substance, as we are told about another troubled child -- a boy -- who was raised by preoccupied, affluent parents and who eventually went off the deep end. There's only a single narrator in "He Was Always a Nice Boy," but his voice could have come directly out of "The Willow Pool;" he is as bemused and as clueless as to how something like "that" could happen as some of the characters in that story are.

As I mentioned in the beginning, the antecedent to this particular style of storytelling is MacDonald's 1954 novel All These Condemned. There we have a story told by several different-yet-connected characters, all talking in first-person about an off-screen character who never speaks for herself. At that point in his career MacDonald felt the need to separate the current with the past by giving each character two chapters, a before and after, where by the time he wrote "The Willow Pool" he was accomplished and talented enough to condense past and present into a single character narrative. Both stories are whodunits featuring a female lead character, but in the novel that character is dead, and in the short story, well...

MacDonald's use of the willow tree as both imagery and symbol is interesting as well, with its echoes of Shakespeare and two of his doomed women. The soon-to-die Desdemona sings a "Willow Song" before being murdered in Othello, and in Hamlet the driven-mad Ophelia drowns herself in a stream overhung by a willow tree, but not before making a crown for herself from its branches. MacDonald never makes any direct references to these plays, thank goodness, but the imagery of the icy pond -- overhung by three willow trees and always in the shade -- paints a sufficiently ominous picture early in the story.