Maijstral (Comedy is Hard)

I thought I’d write down some thoughts on the Maijstral books, in anticipation of their imminent release in e-formats.

(And first of all, the matter of pronunciation.  I pronounce it My-STRAHL.  You are, however, welcome to pronounce the protagonist’s name any way you like.  I’ll know who you’re talking about.)

I wrote these books pretty much accidentally.  It wasn’t part of any plan.  I had just finished Hardwired and Voice of the Whirlwind, both of which would become Tor hardbacks.  Neither of them had appeared yet in print, and I had the proposal and the first 100 pages of Angel Station ready, but my editor informed me that Tor was unwilling to acquire a new hardback before they found out how the first two did in the marketplace.

I was taken aback by this sudden drop in Tor’s confidence level.  (Now that I’m more experienced, I know that publishers do bonehead stuff like this all the time.   It’s normal for a publisher to fork over money for some books that they think are promising, and then freeze in sudden terror as they realize they have actually made a bet that an author might succeed.  They then spend a couple years hiding under their desks at the thought that the author might actually walk into the office with a manuscript under his arm.  Then, if the author’s books are successful, they publishers get angry because the author doesn’t have a followup ready.  And because there’s a two or three-year gap till the next book, all the author’s momentum is lost, and the career often crashes . . . and it’s all the publishers’ fault, because they are stupid stupid stupid. It’s the sort of thing that makes me want to clean out editorial offices with a flamethrower.)

A more experienced Walter would have told Tor to go fuck itself and written a book for someone else, probably for more money.  But instead, a little taken aback, I proposed a quickie paperback trilogy.

What I wanted was a way to distinguish my quickie paperbacks from serious (and far more lucrative) novels like Hardwired and Voice of the Whirlwind. So I thought I’d write comedies that couldn’t be mistaken from my weightier works.  I furthermore set them off by referring to them, in the “other books by this author” list (opposite the title page) as “divertimenti.”

That said, they were books that I kinda wanted to write, if not exactly right at that moment.  I’d always wanted to try my hand at comedy, and in fact “write a comedy” was on my to-do list.

I had a lot of funny stuff to inspire me.  When in my teens I read a lot of P.G. Wodehouse, till I realized all his books had the same plot and I lost interest.  (Now, as a writer, I can only admire Wodehouse his ability to write ninety-odd books with the same plot.)  In college I’d read a vast amount of Shakespeare— practically majored in the Elizabethans— but the comedies that really struck my fancy were those of Ben Jonson, Moliere, and (most of all) the English Restoration, writers like Congreve, Wycherly, Vanbrugh, and Aphra Behn.  These were a good deal more ruthless than those by Shakespeare.  They were sharper.  More satirical.  Less sentimental.

Maijstral is a Restoration buck— self-centered, aristocratic, stylish, without funds, yet privileged— and, though not quite as heartless as Wycherly’s heroes, he does at least as well with the ladies.   And his servant, Roman, is Jeeves with a black belt, who truly deplores the terms of his employment as a leg-breaker as well as a valet.

There was also a tradition of droll science fiction that I’d absorbed:  Panshin’s Villiers books, Poul Anderson’s Flandry and Nicholas van Rijn, Jack Williamson’s Giles Habibula, Laumer’s Retief stories (before they got all angry and didactic).

This was pretty much an extinct subgenre even in 1985, when I started writing The Crown Jewels.  You could no more sell a Flandry-type story now than you could The Country Wife.  The whole field has moved away from that sort of thing.  (As, incidentally, it has moved away from the type of satire so prominent in the 1950s, as practiced by Fred Pohl, William Tenn, and Cyril Kornbluth.  Possibly because it’s impossible to produce satire in the modern world— you simply can’t think of anything more outrageous than what’s in the daily news.  I remember when Paddy Chayefsky’s Network was cutting-edge satire— now it’s just a documentary.)

As for why Maijstral’s genre is extinct, I refer you to its name: it’s the Comedy of Manners.  You can’t have a comedy of manners in a society that isn’t mannered, and ours isn’t.  As a culture, we don’t even have a memory of a mannered society.  Which is why the remake of The Women bombed.   A story that made sense when it was about 1930s New York sophisticates doesn’t work in a world with Casual Fridays.

(There’s plenty of comic SF and fantasy out there now, but it’s mostly parody.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, a good parody is a joy forever, as Terry Pratchett has frequently proved.  There’s also a small subgenre of screwball comedies, by folks like Lawrence Schoen and Connie Willis.  And, occasionally, by me— I refer you to “The Tang Dynasy Underwater Pyramid.”)

Another big influence were the works of Donald Westlake, particularly the Dortmunder books, which feature a buncha guys who steal for a living.  My hero likewise steals, he just steals on television.

The contract paid me $8000 for each book, and I got half on signing.  The $12,000 got me through the first two books, after which I needed a hit of higher income— and by that time Tor was ready for Angel Station.  The third book kept getting delayed and delayed, because I couldn’t afford to write a book for that final payment of $4000.  The contract succeeded in impoverishing me, but slowly.   Eventually Rock of Ages appeared in 1995, seven years after House of Shards. (So far as I could see, no one noticed— even diehard Maijstral fans didn’t know that Rock of Ages was available.)

Anyway,  I set to work.  The books feature what I was writing about anyway— crime, obsession, violence,  sex, rebellion, conspiracy, and digital media.  Except funny.

This brought to the fore a point of craft: How make funny?

The answer to the question How make funny? is short and to the point: A whole fuck of a lot of work.  Which brings to mind the last words of the actor Edmund Kean: “Dying is easy, but comedy is hard.”

This was supposed to be a quickie series, tossed off lightly and effortlessly.  It was neither quick nor effortless.  It was a whole load of work, and for very little return.

One of the ways I made funny was Deadpan, inspired perhaps by Buster Keaton.   People who are inside a joke, I realized, are not laughing.  Everyone in the books is dead serious about what they’re doing, and in complete earnest.  If the end result is hilarity, it’s not because the characters were trying to be funny, it’s because they were trying to be themselves.

Another way to make funny is Distance.   Charlie Chaplin said, “Life is a tragedy from close-up, and a divine comedy from a distance.”  If you’ve got a knockabout scene in which people are being banged on the head by shovels, you don’t actually want the audience to be close to those people, because then they’ll feel their pain and won’t be inclined to laugh.

Not if they’re normal, anyway.

A corollary of Distance is Not Too Caring.  You want the audience to care enough about the characters to want to follow their story, but they can’t care about them so much that they won’t be amused when they’re socked in the jaw, stuffed into a garbage chute, escape only to find themselves naked and covered with muck in the white-upholstered bedroom inhabited by a screaming stranger and the stranger’s spouse, who is a knife-throwing champion with a bad hangover.

See?  You’re smiling already.

Another way to make funny is Opposites Go Boom.  Cops and robbers become incendiary when in close proximity.  Cranks get huffy in the presence of other cranks.  Egotists collide with egotists, and go crazy when people aren’t paying attention to them.  Snobs go in a tizzy when someone eats with the wrong fork.  Just think Groucho Marx and Margaret Dumont.  Arlecchino and Pantalone.  Ferris Bueller and Ed Rooney.  Dame Edna Everage and the Royal Family.  The Three Stooges and Eleanor Roosevelt.

And then there’s Piling On.  If one cop and one robber is funny, three cops and three robbers is funnier, particularly if the robbers are disguised as cops and the cops are undercover disguised as robbers.  And then they get confused with a couple dozen people dressed as cops and/or robbers for a costume party, except for the one person who’s dressed as Kaiser Wilhelm because he got the wrong memo.

Another rule is Everyone is There For a Reason.  (Except maybe for the guy at the lemonade stand, who’s just standing there minding his own business until Harpo and Chico show up.)  What this means is that Everyone Has an Agenda.  And everyone is very serious about their Agenda,  especially when their Agendas start colliding in a series of explosions.

So in House of Shards, for example, we’ve got two master thieves, one obsessed cop, one footsore cop, an undercover actor, a couple of celebrities, a man in disguise, an apprentice celebrity, a reporter, an enigmatic alien, a number of purposeful females to complicate the hero’s life, and THE GREATEST TREASURE IN THE GALAXY, which is up for grabs.  All the characters have their agendas, not all of which are visible on the surface, but which are bound to come into conflict.

These books have the most complex plots of any I’ve written.  And I’ve written a lot of complex plots.

So . . . how did these books do?

Horribly.  They came out in paperback in a period when any important book was published in hardback.  They were comedy— and, as Woody Allen sadly observes, “When you do comedy, you are not sitting at the grownups’ table.”  I was supposed to be this hard-as-nails cyberpunk— which I was, in my own peculiar way— and the Maijstral books just confused everybody.

These books sold worse than any of my books.  They didn’t even earn my pathetic advances back.

I think they probably set back my career, possibly permanently.  If I had followed Voice of the Whirlwind with Angel Station or any other work suitable for the grownups’ table, I would have gone from strength to strength.  Instead my career took this weird loopy track off into the wilderness for a couple years, and much of the momentum drained away.

Still, the books have a loyal, if numerically insignificant, audience.  They might find an audience yet.

We’ll just have to hope the Long Tail Effect takes over.