“The Question My Son Asked” (1962)

[spoilers] Stanley Ellin (not to be confused with Stanley Elkin) was a successful and prolific writer in a mystery verging on horror (or “suspense”) subgenre favored at midcentury. He wrote several novels and some Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes but was known more as a short story writer, which won him a bunch of Edgars and eventually a Grand Master Award in 1981 from the Mystery Writers of America organization, of which he was a longtime member and past president. This is a horror story insofar as it is a look inside the mind of a homicidal maniac—or that’s the twist anyway, revealed in the last sentence. The first-person narrator is an electrician by day, an executioner on the side. He somewhat primly tells us he calls himself an “electrocutioner” because the electric chair is his medium. He is equally pedantic about defending the death penalty, saying that juries and judges are as culpable as he is. He keeps his work a secret because of the stigma, but he is seething with resentment about society’s judgment. Also, this is an “all in the family” enterprise—his father was an electrician and executioner, and he hopes his son will be too. Indeed, the son is already an electrician. But he recoils when his father tells him of his electrocution work. I’ve seen accounts around the internet saying this story is ambivalent or ambiguous about where it stands on the death penalty. It doesn’t seem so to me. In 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court was not far from outlawing capital punishment altogether, which stood for 10 years or whatever, until Gary Gilmore came along and got us all mixed up again. This story has also been published under the title “The Question,” so portentous does it want us to take the plot point that goes on at the end:

    You enjoy it, don’t you? [my son asked]....
    Enjoy it?
    That was the question my son asked me. That was what he said to me, as if I didn’t have the same feelings deep down in me that we all have.
    Enjoy it?
    But, my God, how could anyone not enjoy it?

Rimshot. And therein lies the rub, or something. The story is pretty clearly opposed to the death penalty, making its principal out to be a psychopath, and thus less horror and more social commentary. The narrator and electrocutioner is not likable at all. He’s thin-skinned and petulant. When we find out he’s a sadist who enjoys killing people with the electric chair, deaths he describes in some graphic detail, it doesn’t help us like him any better. But, come on, it’s not fair to imply that anyone who favors the death penalty is a homicidal sadist—as social commentary it’s a little like holding soldiers responsible for foreign policy. It might be even less fair to claim this is a competent horror story, as much as I may agree with the moral of it. It is intended primarily to shock but only in the service of a larger social point. Horror is better off without social points and morals.

These Will Chill You, ed. Lee Wright & Richard G. Sheehan (out of print)
Listen to story online.

Experimenter (2015)

The Stanley Milgram Story, USA, 98 minutes
Director / writer: Michael Almereyda
Photography: Ryan Samul
Music: Bryan Senti
Editor: Kathryn J. Schubert
Cast: Peter Sarsgaard, Winona Ryder, John Palladino, Jim Gaffigan, Anthony Edwards, Anton Yelchin, Taryn Manning, John Leguizamo, Kellan Lutz, Dennis Haysbert

Social psychologist Stanley Milgram is best-known today for practically the first serious experiment he ever conducted, examining obedience to authority, and especially for the ethical controversy that followed and still dogs the results. Director and writer Michael Almereyda defines his movie almost self-consciously as a biopic, however eccentric, however experimental, but like Milgram himself he is forced to return again and again to the obedience experiment and controversy. Milgram, who died in 1984 at the age of 51, researched far more widely than just that one experiment. One of the pleasures of Experimenter is its depiction and discussion of those experiments, ingenious attempts to uncover the warp and woof of human personality and social interaction: the small-world experiment (which gave us the term and concept "six degrees of separation"), the lost letter experiment, the looking up experiment, the familiar stranger experiment, and others.

But the obedience trials are what Milgram remains known for, and indeed that is likely the most profound and important experiment he ever conceived, if only because the results were so depressingly surprising to everyone. The experiment is a bit complicated, because it involves deception of the test subject (the source of the ethical controversy). Experimenter makes its first order of business a detailed enactment of that test procedure. A subject is told he or she will take the "teacher" role in a learning experiment that involves inducing increasingly more intense electrical shocks to the "learner" when the learner gives a wrong answer to a question. The learner is actually a confederate of the experimenters, sitting in another room out of sight of the teacher, playing a tape recording of himself groaning in pain as the shocks become stronger. When the subject shows reluctance to continue, the authority figure, another confederate of Milgram's pretending to be the learning experiment test administrator, tells the subject that the test must go on and he the administrator will take all responsibility. The subjects, presumably thus relieved of the responsibility, continued administering shocks all the way to the highest levels in 60% to 70% of the trials. Later tests in the 2000s replicated these results.

"A Poetics for Bullies" (1964)

Story by Stanley Elkin not available online.

Stanley Elkin might appear to be 50 years or more ahead of our current preoccupations with bullying. But I'm not so sure. The first-person narrator is named Push, and he is a self-declared bully. He contrasts himself with bullies who beat up their victims, claiming they are more "athletes" than bullies. His style is mocking and tormenting through trickery, and he throws out a handful of his favorites at one point, most of which I happen to remember well from growing up, usually on the receiving end: making a match burn twice, the Gestapo joke, Adam and Eve and Pinch Me Hard. That's all good, and Push often reminded me uncomfortably of people I have known—even been. Then into this fiefdom one day comes a tall and patrician boy named John Williams, who is unafraid of Push. In turn, that makes Push a little afraid of him, or something. This is our central conflict, and I thought it was weak after how vividly Push had introduced himself. Williams is a world traveler, and probably rich. He has many fascinating stories to tell. All the kids love him, and his behavior helps to make them less afraid of Push. In turn, Push becomes even more intimidated by Williams. I didn't like this turn in the story—it turns it into a type of practical moral illustration. Push is a coward even though he denies it specifically early on, attacking the idea that all bullies are cowards. Yet in the end he is plainly a coward. I do agree with the cliché all bullies are cowards, but that's beside the point. I don't need to have it diagrammed for me. Besides, Push is more of a winning character than repulsive. He's charming, funny, well spoken. He's a bully but somehow that's forgivable. Maybe he doesn't seem so bad, or maybe it's the radiance of his self-awareness. Williams somehow has supernatural powers to intimidate Push, but we have to accept it as a given. We don't feel his powers much, though he does tell interesting stories and is somehow ingratiating. But that's not enough. From perfect self-awareness to almost no self-awareness is an unexplained sea change for Push in this short story. I don't believe it, and I don't think I understand the point. I like Push but I don't mind seeing a bully lose, so I think my stubborn loyalty to him suggests Elkin might be hedging his bets on making Push so bad. He's more like rapscallion, and that keeps him sympathetic enough, and that's what I don't get. Please don't tell me this is about bullies being redeemable. Next you'll be talking about racism against whites.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (1984)

Stanley Booth is an American music journalist from the South. He happened to fall into the orbit of the Rolling Stones shortly after the death of Brian Jones, and was on hand for a good deal of the band's first extensive tour in several years in 1969, including the ill-starred show at Altamont in December that year. Even the Stones formally recognize and acknowledge the legitimacy of Booth's reporting in a brief, vaguely mocking letter to him, dated October 21, 1969, which is reproduced in my 1985 paperback edition (I'm not familiar with the 2000 edition, which reportedly contains minor revisions and an afterword that discusses the writing of the first edition): "This letter assures you of the Rolling Stones' full and exclusive cooperation in putting together a book about the Stones for publication," and it's signed by Mick Jagger, Keith Richard, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, and Mick Taylor. It's fair enough to call this book a labor of love, but the emphasis there must fall on the "labor," as it took Booth some 15 years to complete and the language feels well worked over, honed and buffed to a point where it's occasionally a labor to read as well. But I don't know of anything better anywhere on the Stones, or particularly on Altamont, and it makes an excellent companion piece and counterpoint to the Maysles brothers well-known documentary Gimme Shelter; each is a nice tonic to the excesses and deficiencies of the other, and both offer converging yet significantly differing points of view that harmonize well. Both have also earned colossal burdens of reputation, hailed as landmark works about the times—figures of no less stature than Harold Brodkey and Robert Stone, for example, call Booth's book the best single volume on the '60s. OK, fair enough. I'm inclined myself to put that on a few other volumes first (Dispatches, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Manchild in the Promised Land, or Catch-22 come to mind immediately). But I see how it works. And if I'm going to indulge hyperbole of my own here, it's for the 50-some pages that Booth devotes to the Altamont show proper, which open with a section of transcript from the discussion between Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips on the epistemology and ontology of evil, and hell, in the context of the song they are attempting to record, "Great Balls of Fire." It's an earnest and serious discussion, at least on the part of Lewis, steeped in old-time Christianity. Just so, I have never encountered anything anywhere that penetrates so deeply into the simple facts of what was happening that day at Altamont as Booth's book (and that includes Gimme Shelter, which I have always counted as impressive and important)—nor, more importantly, any more powerful, simple, and nuanced suggestions of "what it all meant." There are no easy answers here, and not much comfort. I should get that 2000 edition, if only to find out for sure what held up the writing of this for 15 years. But I have a feeling I might already know.

In case it's not at the library.