Covid Reading Diary 1: The Alley Man by Philip José Farmer

Image ganked from AbeBooks.

I tested positive for Covid on Saturday morning after having run all over Creation last week. If we crossed paths, you want to test.

Know that I am doing fine. As I write this, symptoms have mostly subsided.

Because I can’t get out to the post office and because I need to rest, I am not selling any books this week. Instead I will be reading and reviewing science fiction and fantasy and sending out more frequent newsletters than usual. Next week I will resume the standard one to two newsletter per week schedule.

The Alley Man by Philip José Farmer

This one was first published in the June 1959 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It’s a reread for me. This time I read it in the 1961 collection The Alley God.

This is an engaging story. Someone of my class, age and education would be apt to put a content warning before a review of this one. Domestic violence is central to the plot. The titular character does not consider the principle of consent in his sexual dealings with the protagonist and there are threats of sexual violence. The story is meant to be ugly and gnarly. It’s also sad and somehow whimsical.

The basic setup is that a sociology student named Dorothy has come down from the university to study Old Man, a polygamous, one-armed junk man, and his two women Gummy and Deena who live in a shanty outside the dump in a town in Illinois near the Kickapoo River.

Old Man is bestial, hairy and has a powerful odor. He is described as being like a walking tree trunk. He seems to have no neck. A detail I can’t place as normal or not circa 1959 is that he wears a bowler hat.

Initially Old Man wants nothing to do with the study, having recently been locked up in the “puzzle factory” (a mental institution) but the university offers him $50 for his time and he says something to the effect that beer money washes away his principles. We steadily learn that he is deeply idiosyncratic and neurotic, has an ugly relationship with Deena and a deeply fascinating view of world history and his place in it. From the jump, Dorothy and Old Man have an affinity.

While Old Man sings and carries on nonstop when he is in the alleys and junkheaps when he is on the main roads between them he clams up and becomes nervous. After the rapport between Dorothy and Old Man becomes strong enough, he reveals his belief as to why this is as part of his view of world history and his place in it.

According to Old Man, he is the last pureblooded member of the Paleys or Real Folkers—what we would call Neanderthals; though he considers that a slur—and the G’yaga or False Folkers—Homo sapiens—have oppressed and cursed his people in various ways for the past 50,000 years since the invasion of Europe by the G’yaga. One such curse is the banishment to the alleyways and trash heaps.

In Old Man’s story, the Father Sky God-worshipping Real Folkers and the Mother Earth Goddess-worshipping False Folkers were at war for some years but the Real Folkers had one advantage. The body odor of their men was irresistible to the women of the False Folkers. One day this led to the high priestess and princess of the G’yaga marrying the king of the Real Folkers.

This seemed to put the Real Folkers in an advantageous position because it cut off the G’yaga’s access to Earth goddess magic. Under the influence of his new wife, the king of the Real Folkers prepared for a final battle against the False Folkers. But just before the battle commenced, his wife double crossed him, stole his magic hat and returned to her people.

Real Folker men carry their souls in their hats and the particular magic hat that was stolen was the key link to the magic of the sky god. Though they put up a good fight, the Real Folkers were cut down by the superior magic of the False Folkers and the introduction to the battle of dogs of war.

Following this world historic defeat, the remaining Real Folkers settled in a remote town called Paley in the Pyrenees until Napoleon tried to conscript them in the 19th century and they ultimately wound up in America. Through interbreeding with other lumpen people who lived near trash heaps the population of pure Real Folkers eventually winnowed to the point where the last remaining pure specimen was Old Man. (Gummy is a half or quarter breed perhaps).

Old Man reveals that he believes the curse over him would be broken if he could find the magic hat of the king of the Real Folkers. He says he believes that someday a G’yaga will throw it out not knowing what it is and that the sky god will lead him to it.

Of course, Dorothy is at first incredulous. And her initial belief that Old Man has made up this story is supported by the kinds of literature he keeps around his shanty including the first volume of The Outline of History by H. G. Wells—where Wells characterizes the Neanderthal by “an extreme hairiness, an ugliness, or a repulsive strangeness in his appearance over and above his low forehead, his beetle brows, his ape neck, and his inferior stature”—and the prehistoric past life regression novel Allan and the Ice Gods by H. Rider Haggard. Deena tells Dorothy she can point to a place in each of the various volumes where part of Old Man’s story comes from.

And yet Dorothy finds herself stuck on the story. She reads as much as she can on the anatomical differences between ourselves and Neanderthals and ends up arguing with her sociology mentor over the possibility that Old Man might be what he says he is. The professor insists that while Old Man may be very ugly that he is most likely just a glandular misfit of some kind. But after examining the bone structure of Old Man’s foot, Dorothy becomes fairly convinced that he is a Neanderthal and tries to convince him to have his teeth x-rayed for further proof. He demurs of course.

The remainder of the plot hinges on three things:

(1) the ongoing domestic violence Old Man doles out against Deena;

(2) an unethical trick Dorothy plays on Old Man; and

(3) a sexual encounter between Dorothy and Old Man.

Know that (1) is going on in the background throughout the whole story and especially as (2) and (3) play out. One driver for this is that Deena, an educated and downwardly mobile former heroin addict who Old Man somehow cured of her addiction, keeps a picture of her high class mother up in the shanty. Old Man believes that Deena worships her mother as an idol and interprets this through the lens of the Father Sky God of the Neanderthals’ war with the Earth Mother Goddess of the Homo sapiens.*

There’s also an uncomfortable psychosexual aspect of the violence. Old Man and Gummy both insist that Deena intentionally provokes Old Man because she likes being beaten.

With this in the background, (2) takes the form of Dorothy having a taxidermist create a facsimile of the magical hat of the king of the Real Folkers and hiding it in a place where she knows Old Man will find it. Her motivations for doing this, like her character in general, read as thin but her choice to do so is probably the lynch pin of the novella. Old Man is credulous and pleased.

In a better mood than ever before and now able to carry on and enjoy himself on the main streets and thoroughfares as well as the alleyways, he takes Dorothy to his most secret place. It is a private spot where he has planted roses and other flowers and shows Dorothy an oval-shaped rose that hasn’t opened yet. Up to this point, it has been implied that Dorothy is a virgin and the rose is a metaphor telegraphing that (3) is about to happen.

This goes down by Old Man using will, sentimentality, middle class guilt and body odor to overpower Dorothy’s own will. He has been touching her for days and answering her rebuffs by coming for her over their class differences. Now in his secret place he holds her against him over her protests that he should stop. Afterwards she feels bad and does not return to the shanty for a few days. To steel herself when she finally does go back, she takes two shots of whisky for breakfast.

In the meantime things have gone poorly for Old Man. His luck is supposed to have been good because of the recovery of the magic hat. He resents Dorothy for rejecting him and thinks she may be a G’yaga witch responsible for his poor luck. He also thinks the Neanderthal sky god may be punishing him for abiding Deena’s mother’s portrait.

After an emotionally icy day out picking over junk with Dorothy, he receives a ticket for $25—his life savings, he complains—and his truck breaks down. He loses control and begins tearing pieces off the truck and beating its engine. They have to walk back to the shanty in the rain.

Once Dorothy has returned home, she decides she has enough data and needs to put the experience behind her by returning to the shanty and saying goodbye to Old Man and his women. Her return is accompanied by pitch blackness, a fierce thunderstorm and a rising river.

When she arrives Old Man has finally decided to destroy Deena’s mother’s portrait by throwing it in the Kickapoo. He goes to do so chased by Deena and then by Dorothy. Dorothy can only see when lightning flashes.

First Dorothy encounters Deena who is beside herself because Old Man has finally destroyed her mother’s portrait. Dorothy succors her. Before she goes on her way, Deena admits that she has done the same research as Dorothy and believes that Old Man really is a Neanderthal though she does not believe his grand narrative about it. More unnecessarily, she also admits that she does intentionally provoke Old Man to hit her because he is no longer interested in her sexually.

Next Dorothy encounters Old Man and he remains on a rampage. He has decided that in the encounter he coerced between himself and Dorothy in his secret place, Dorothy had used G’yaga witchcraft to take the magic from his hat. He believes he can take it back by raping her. A struggle ensues which Dorothy has little hope of winning until Deena shows up and stabs Old Man in the back.

He survives the wound and gets hold of the knife. Now he has decided that instead of raping Dorothy he will murder her for rejecting him and offer her in sacrifice to the Neanderthal sky god. Before he can do so, Deena pushes him and he falls on the knife which cracks his sternum and penetrates his heart. He is immediately too far gone for medical assistance.

Old Man spends his last moments requesting the hat be buried with him and colorfully suggesting that Deena will relapse in his absence. In the end, he seems to have some deep spiritual connection to the Neanderthal sky god via the thunderstorm and chokes on his own blood.

I was originally planning to review some other stories in this post as well but I think this one is probably long and heavy enough to carry it. And I don’t know how you go from this to anything else.

I probably don’t have to write the following paragraph because my subscribers seem like intelligent people. I disagree with the idea sometimes found on social media that an author approves of something because they portray it in fiction. I also don’t think that any particular evil should be off limits as a subject matter in a work of fiction. That doesn’t mean that there’s not fiction that’s too heavy or gnarly for me. It just happens that this is about my speed.

The only thing I would question Farmer about if I had the chance was why he needed Deena to like getting hit. That seemed artistically unnecessary and socially unproductive.

In any event, this story captures that a person can be colorful and interesting and also bad or even evil in a fundamental way and that still somehow the world can have lost something when they’re gone. Old Man was a violent would be rapist who cultivated a secret flower garden to spend time alone in. He was either the last Neanderthal or a lumpen glandular misfit and he ambiguously crafted or was heir to an elaborate legend explaining 50,000 years of secret history. There’s a lot going on there.

There’s also something to be said about whether there is an under-realized theme in Dorothy abusing her power over Old Man, the power a presumably middle strata social scientist has over a subaltern person they’re studying, by manufacturing the hat but this review is getting kind of long in the tooth for email.

It’s worth noting that the science fiction and/or fantasy elements in this story are all ambiguous. It is this ambiguity that makes the story work.

I’ll be back tomorrow.

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*Farmer had an interest in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. You definitely see it at work in Flesh and his Opar/Khokarsa novels and perhaps in this novella.