Black History Month Books: a forgotten satire of 1960s America left no idols untoppled

Henry Bemis Books celebrates Black History Month with a 30-day selection of fascinating titles. Here’s today’s:

Demijohn, Thom (Thomas Disch & John Sladek), Black Alice (Doubleday/Book Club ed., 1968). LOC 68-22503. The authors take the concept of Alice falling down the rabbit hole into a totally unfamiliar world and apply it to race relations in the United States in the fraught Sixties. Blonde-haired heiress Alice is kidnapped and held for a million-dollar ransom; to make sure no one will find her, the kidnappers brown her skin, treat her hair, and turn her into Black Alice, parked in Bessie McKay’s Norfolk whorehouse. A period piece of “moustache-turning satire and melodrama,” one reviewer called it. Hardcover, unclipped dust jacket, good condition, though with some chips in the dust jacket. A rare and unusual find, even as a book club reprint. 8.75” x 5.75”, 224 pp. HBB price: $40.

Sladek (1937-2000) and Disch collaborated on two books; the other, The House That Fear Built (published as Cassandra Nye), was a 1966 Gothic horror pastiche.

The two made a fascinating pair, each a true original in his field. Disch (1940-2008) was a gay American writer when that was still a dangerous thing to be. 

Disch’s New York Times death notice took the full measure of his range:

Disch’s work was voluminous and included many forms and genres. In addition to writing speculative fiction (his preferred term for science fiction), he wrote poetry from light to lyric to dramatic; realist fiction, children’s fiction and historical fiction; opera librettos and plays; criticism of theater, films and art; and even a video game.

One of Mr. Disch’s best-known works is “The Brave Little Toaster: A Bedtime Story for Small Appliances” (1986), in which a toaster, a clock radio and an electric blanket come to life. In The New York Times Book Review, Anna Quindlen said the book was more sophisticated than it seemed: “Buy it for your children; read it yourself,” she advised. 

But it was as an exemplar of a generation of more sophisticated, better-educated science-fiction writers who emerged in the 1960s that Mr. Disch first stood out. His dark themes, disturbing plots, corrosive social commentary and sheer unpredictability made him a leader of what was called “the new wave” of science fiction writers, those who consciously wrote literature rather than disposable pulp entertainment.

“You could finally write for grownups!” Mr. Disch said in 2001 in an interview with Strange Horizons, an online speculative fiction magazine.

Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and a poet and critic, said Monday, “The reason his science fiction is important is that he combined a kind of really dark Swiftian satire with a modernist, really postmodernist sensibility.”

David Pringle, an editor and critic, most recently listed three novels by Mr. Disch on his list of the 100 best science fiction novels: “Camp Concentration” (1968), which tells of political prisoners who are being treated with a new drug that increases their intelligence, but also causes their early deaths; “334” (1972), which describes a New York City housing project that has sunk to depressing depths in 2023; and “On Wings of Song” (1979), which chronicles an Iowan who comes to New York and encounters a similar hell…

In the 1980s and 1990s Mr. Disch used classic thriller techniques in his “Supernatural Minnesota” series, in which he combined the macabre with science fiction to expose the corruption of various occupations, including businessman, doctor, priest and teacher. Priests in “The Priest” (1994) take the biggest hit: pregnant teenagers are imprisoned and killed by mad clergymen.

“‘The Priest’ deserves consideration as the purest Gothic novel of the 20th century,” The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers said.

Mr. Disch’s poems were known for their technical craft, rejection of obvious sentimentality and unusual subjects. “How to Behave When Dead” prescribed etiquette for the interred.

His criticism appeared in The Nation, The New York Daily News, The New York Sun and elsewhere. He wrote a series of poems on grammar, for which he was a stickler, including one on auxiliary verbs. He antagonized some science fiction fans by writing a book in 1998 criticizing the genre for encouraging people to believe in things like UFOs.

Before his death, Disch published “The Word of God: Or, Holy Writ Rewritten,” a novel in which he used his idea of God’s voice. In an interview with Publishers Weekly, he said this device meant he could speak nonsense and it would be true. He had a morbid sense of humor, proposing a calendar with a famous self-annihilation (like Sylvia Plath’s on Feb. 11) commemorated each day of the year.

In the end, he entered his own date on that notional record.

The Times noted,

His friend Alice K. Turner said Mr. Disch shot himself. She and other friends told how his apartment had been devastated by a fire; then his partner of more than 30 years died; then his home in Barryville, N.Y., was flooded; and finally, he faced eviction after he returned to the apartment. He also suffered from diabetes and sciatica.

“He was simply ground down by the sequence of catastrophes,” his friend Norman Rush, the novelist, said Monday.

Though born in Iowa, Thomas Sladek spent decades in the UK, becoming a leader in the New Wave in sci-fi, which often mocked the fusty conventions and gee-whiz gadgetry of the old school. He had a parodist’s bent, publishing successful mockeries of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. His was not a road leading to riches and fame. His Guardian obituary concluded, “Sladek was a brilliant maverick author who claimed to read very little SF - Disch and Philip K Dick excepted - but nevertheless parodied it with wicked skill, and found his melancholy comedies best appreciated by the broad-church SF audience. He deserved a far wider readership.”

Another of his pseudonymous novels, Arachne Rising, treated the notion that people will believe anything dressed as a conspiracy, this time when the scientific community is charged with suppressing the discovery of a thirteenth zodiac sign.

His articles in skepticist magazines filleted dowsing, homeopathy, parapsychology, perpetual motion, and Ufology. Home was rarely far from his thoughts; at his death, one newspaper reported, “In 1982 he mentioned plans to set a book in Albania but ruefully admitted: ‘It'll probably come out looking exactly like the American midwest.’”

Though many feel a visceral reaction to Disch and Sladek’s 1968 novel, Black Alice, it is a remarkable- and remarkably overlooked- addition to the protest literature of the 1960s. Set in Richmond, Virginia, the story revolves around Little Alice Raleigh, eleven years and blonde like corn, and heiress of an immense fortune. Kidnapped from her Baltimore home, Alice is held for a ransom of a million dollars.

Kirkus Reviews enthused,

Black Alice is black suspense with elements of black comedy -- actually a modern satire twirling a mustache of villainous melodrama . . . . Black Alice will inherit a fortune if she can survive the attempts of her father Roderick Raleigh (Rodipoo to her ailing mother Delphinia) to take it away from her if he drives her insane. For a time Alice does become disordered with her imaginary playmate ""Dinah"" and when cured, Roderick arranges her kidnapping. He deposits her in a former colored cathouse (now yclept Green Pastures Funeral Home) where a pill does turn her black under the care of dusky Bessy. Well between her kinfolk and Klansmen of all kinds and some rampageous events (including murder) this stomps through Southern areas of prejudice where Negroes are still Nigras but sometimes ""not Niggers. . . . . It's just appearances that are against us."" A lively, campy caper.

The central conceit of the book is that no one can see what is right in front of them because all they can see is social constructs though confirmation biases. The grieving father couldn’t possibly be using his own child to steal money; the cops can’t see Alice when she screams at them from a bus because they're after a blonde white kid, not a crazy black one.

The Nameless Zine’s review, decades later, praise the work for turning logic upside down in the manner of American racial politics (and Lewis Carroll’s books):

Fortunately, the satirical nature of the piece means that we can't ever be too safe in our expectations of where Disch and Sladek are going to take both us and their characters. Both writers were known for their unconventional works in the science fiction New Wave, so we really can't expect them to suddenly turn conventional when setting up a thriller.

What really matters is that the very white Roderick Raleigh and his wife, Delphinia Duquesne [Alice’s parents, kept on a tight allowance by Alice’s grandfather, who manages her fortune], are, in actuality, written almost exactly how white folk saw black folk at the time. Roderick is lazy and has no intention of working for a living, but expects money to be showered on him anyway. When he doesn't get what he wants, he resorts to crime. Delphinia is even lazier, confined to bed by mysterious and non-existent illnesses…

With no parenting coming from her parents, Alice cares instead most for her governess, Miss Godwin, who fits all the normal aspects of the traditional, almost always white, governess, while just happening to be black. She also connects with Bessy, the old, fat, black madam who runs the Green Pastures brothel outside of Norfolk and who becomes her parental substitute during her time as a hostage.

In other words, Disch and Sladek created characters that are almost stereotypical but with their races reversed to shake up the whole story and get us thinking. I liked this approach a lot, which is a good thing because it's what drives the piece in the absence of a suspenseful story. In fact, even though it's very much rooted in its time, a product of the counterculture and a reflection on the civil rights movement, I'd suggest it's very much worth reading today.


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