Sharyn McCrumb - Zombies of the Gene Pool

Providence, Rhode Island June 1958

I write to bury Pat Malone, not to praise him. Speaking no ill of the dead smacks of hypocrisy and I'll have none of it, so I will at least do Pat the courtesy of being as forthright as he was, and not pretend that death has improved him. (Though I thought it might.)

I never met Pat Malone face to face, but I have certainly

felt his typewritten wrath in various altercations that ran between ALLUVIAL and JACKAL'S MEAT. One such return salvo was sent back to me unopened in mid-June by Ethel Malone from Cupertino, California, enclosed in a letter saying that her husband Pat was dead, and so, ironically enough, it was his chief enemy who was given the task of announcing his death to his friends. (If he had any.) I only regret that, unlike MacDuff, I cannot also bring them his head.

Others will have to eulogize Pat Malone, the man. I knew him as a typeface with one half the "S" missing. It summed him up very well. The half-essed Pat Malone. He came from a dull, but respectable background, and perhaps being something of the alienated intellectual, the perpetual rebel, made him decide to leave the little college town of his birth, and begin his odyssey-to make a fandom of hell, and a hell of fandom.

He found others of his kind through the S-F magazines of the 'Forties, and later drifted onto the Fan Farm in Wall Hollow, Tennessee, where a mimeograph machine salvaged from a redneck's junkyard launched his career as a fan publisher. ALLUVIAL was born, and its regularity and reasonably good quality (he had a lot of other people's talent to draw from, and he used it well) quickly made him a celebrity in the genre. Not that Pat cared much about that. He contended that it didn't pay anything, and that the people singing his praises were "nobodies," so Pat tried to make the leap to pro-dom.

He managed to write one novel, River of Neptune, which sounded to me like a rewrite of some of Jules Vernes' ideas (most notably "The First Men in the Moon"), but I am not a literary critic. I just know what I like, and in my opinion Harlan Ellison has a better chance to be famous than Pat Malone does.

That one "real" book did not make a happy man of Pat Malone. He didn't become famous with his little paperback yarn. He didn't become the darling of the literati. And he still didn't have any friends. The fact that there is only ONE

book by Pat Malone further suggests that it was a fluke, rather than an indication of any real literary talent.

He gained much more notoriety from THE LAST FANDANGO, because people are invariably drawn to sleaze, however mendacious it is.

Pat Malone was a failure. He failed at life. He failed at fandom, his retreat from life. And he failed at being a writer, his retreat from fandom. His well-publicized and unprovoked attacks on well-meaning associates in the hobby testifies to his basic instability and to his own misery, which he attempted to alleviate by inflicting it on others.

I do not mourn his passing, and upon contemplating his life and his death, I do not think they let him in to heaven. If they did, I don't suppose he likes it much.

JACKAL BEXLER

GOOD NIGHT, SWEET PRINCE

In Remembrance of Pat Malone by Angela Arbroath

(* REPRINTED FROM ARCHANGEL, JULY 1958, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

(Jack L. Bexler writes that Pat Malone has died in Mississippi. And I write this partly in sorrow for the loss of an old friend, and partly to let you know that I have no further details to give you on his actual passing. I did not know that Pat Malone was in Mississippi, and I believe that he was down near the Gulf, whereas I live up near Memphis, TN. Please don't send me any more letters asking for details. I don't know anything about Pat's death! What follows is a tribute to his life.-A.A.)

It has been several years since I saw Pat Malone, so perhaps the person who has died is not, in the emotional sense, the man that I knew, but, for the annals of fandom, wherein lies his best hope to be remembered, it falls to my lot to eulogize Pat Malone.

On a personal level, I can only say that I liked him as a friend and respected his talent, and then I must try to explain him to his many adversaries, because Pat Malone was truly a stormy petrel, whom few people appreciated and virtually no one understood.

Pat Malone was an idealist who valued intellectual qualities above material possessions, and he very much wanted to be a part of a special group of dedicated and intelligent people. If he could have come to terms with God, he would have become a Jesuit, I think. As it was, he opted for a group of people who wrote with spirit and enthusiasm, made strong friendships (bickering aside), and who built an environment in which intelligence and verbal skill rather than race, social aptitude, sex, or family background determined one's position. Aldous Huxley aside, let us hope that this is the Brave New World. It is certainly the world in which Pat Malone wanted to live.

When his newfound paragons fell short of these Utopian expectations, he took them to task for it. He hated the pettiness of some fans, and he was contemptuous of "Big Name Fans," who sought to become celebrities in what Pat considered a solemn intellectual order. He was forthright in his criticisms, and he made people angry. So long as what he said was true, Pat didn't care how people felt about its being said.

But he wanted to love us. I think that the civilization described in his novel River of Neptune is an idealization of fandom: the Marilaks are us as he would have liked us to be.

There is not much to say about my personal relationship with the young Pat Malone of the Wall Hollow fan farm. We wrote for a long while and drew mind-close, and later we came together as physical beings, and it was a very special time. I would have liked for us to have grown old together. I'd like to think of us 42 years from now, parking our air-car on a hilltop in Kenya and watching the Millennium come up like thunder, while we reminisced about sixth fandom, and all the wondrous things our old friends had done and been, but such a future was not to be.

Three years ago Pat Malone went out of our lives, and now he has even left our planet. I wish that I could have said good-bye to him before he went, so that I could have tried to tell him that even a stormy petrel is a wondrous creature to his friends.

ANGELA ARBROATH

In the Lanthanides' private party, no one was singing "Auld Lang Syne," and their expressions of shock and dismay left no doubt as to which way they would vote on the question of should auld acquaintance be forgot?

Only Angela Arbroath had summoned a tentative smile for the man in black. His expression suggested that he was receiving just the reception that he had expected, and was quietly enjoying it. While the others conferred in a buzzing undertone, he helped himself to straight Scotch and examined the hors d'oeuvres tray without favor.

"Is it really you, Pat?" ventured Angela, coming close to peer at him.

The stranger looked up from his perusal of the label on the bottle of Scotch. After a moment's study of the blushing middle-aged woman, he countered, "Am I to assume that somewhere in there is the former Angela Arbroath?"

She refused to be offended. "I do believe it is you, Pat Malone!" she cried. "I don't know of another soul who could be so offensive and ill tempered on such short notice and little provocation. You just want to see what I'll say! Well, here goes. You don't look so hot yourself, Patrick. I don't think I'd have known you." She gave him a hug. "Now where the hell have you been since 1958?"

He smiled, nodding to the others who had clustered around to hear his answer. He addressed them all. "Fandom may be a microcosm, children, but the rest of the world out there is reasonably large. I got lost in it. I found better things to do."