FORGOTTEN (?) BOOK: BEER! BEER! BEER!

 Beer!  Beer!  Beer! by Avram Davisdon  (2021)

Not really a forgotten book, more of a misplaced one, an unpublished novel found among Davidson's papers, now sent forth into the world with a minimum of editing.

Several things should be understood from the beginning, all of which are related in the back cover copy of the novel.  First, in large letters:  "AVRAM DAVISDSON IS ONE OF THE GREAT WRITERS OF THE 20TH CENTURY."  That, my friends, is no lie.  If there is any justice in the world, Davidson -- along with a few of his contemporaries such as Fritz Leiber and R. A,. Lafferty -- will be lauded, inspected, and disected by literary scholars of the future.  He's that good.   Second, "Beer!  Beer!  Beer! exists at the intersection of magical realism (just a hint) and historical fiction."  Don't read too much into this.  There is not a hint (or even a whiff) of magical realism here.  Aside from coming from Avram Davidson's pen, this is not a fantasy.  Nor is it historical fiction really, despite being set ten years into Prohibition and two years into the Depression.  What it is is a love song to an idiosyncratic time, place, and people of the city of Yokums, New Jersey, a fictional counterpart to Davidson's childhood Yonkers.  Third, "[T]he streets of Yokums representing the Yonkers of his youth in the 1920s and 1930s much in the way that the British Hidalgo of Lomekiller! parallels Belize,"  That said, buckle up.  You're in for a wild and joyous ride.

The Depression and Prohibition have done all it could to beat down the people of Yokums.  Poverty and unemployment are rampant.  City politicians -- besieged by unanswered pleas to lower taxes and to hire people -- are hanging on the best they can with a minimum of graft and bribery coming their way.  Many of the rivers and streams of old Yokums have been covered, making way for sewers.  the roads are in ill repair.  And there is a section (twenty square feet of it) of open sewer in the city on land that appears to have no known owner, property records being vague and sometimes missing.  People have been throwing unwanted trash into this open sewer, things that were never meant for a sewer -- mattresses, dead horses, old machines, anything and everything.  These items have blocked the sewer and have raised a literal stink, right behind one of the largest stores in the city.  Something had to be done and the politicians in power -- those who should have known better but didn't, those who should have been bribed but weren't -- order a crew to go into the sewer and clear the blockage.

Among the many things the crew found was a large pipe that did not belong there.  Pulling and straining, they managed to get is loose and from the pipe flowed an abundant and continuiong steam of beer.  They manage to get the still flowing pipe to the surface, where the citizenry soon crowd around with every type of container available from old vases to cups to empty hats, each person filling up their container to partake of the marvelous liquid.  Traffic is stopped, people appear from everywhere, the city's politicians stand in amazement, and the local chapter (North New Jersey Region) of the National Family Temperance Union (Mrs. Mary Mabel Moomaw, Regional Director, assited by Miss Birdie Shallot) stand ready to fight the good figh, maintain the Struggle against the Poison Trust and save humanity from the evils of the systematic degration brought about by vile alcohol.  Eventually the wellspring that came from the pipe stopped, but not before a well-meaning and clueless lower functionary informed the federal Prohibition task force of the pipe and its contents.

Enter the Feds, interested in whence the pipe came from and where it eventually went.  They followed the six thousand feet of pipe in one direction, which led them to several abandoned garages, the occupants having enough warning to clear out with all of their equipment.  Efforts to trace the pipe back to its source were not fruitful.  Further inspection of the sewer system revealed a second pipe (quickly disconnected), then a third (left in situ for the time being.  Meanwhile, Mrs. Moomaw had been marshalling her forces and, with the help of some religious leaders, managed to get the state to organize a grand jury and subpoenas were sent to all local officials.  The officials knew nothing but were aware that, somewhere along the line, someone was receiving $2500 weekly in graft for the beer pipes, but who that person was they did not know.  (Alas, the person(s) believed to be the beneficiary of this graft was not, and (double alas) so too were the many politicans who wished they were the recipients od said bribery.)

Behind the manufacture of the beer are Madoc Owen, a regional crime kingpin, Albert Stolz, the local crime kingpin, and Robert "sonny Boy"  Boykin, a younf lawyer who managed to wrest control of the National Cereals Company -- the only licensed (by the federal government) manufacturer of near beer in northern New Jersey; near beer was still being allowed for sale under the Volsted Act.  The managing director of National Cerals Company was the unassuming grain chemist Orpheus T. Brower, PhD, who had no idea that the company was used to make honest to goodness real beer.   Brower was an occasional writer of scientifiction who spent most of his time trying to perfect a mix for donuts.  (Think food chemist and science fiction writer E. E. Smith, whose career professional career involved the production of donuts.)

This is the main thread running through the novel, but the thrust of the book is the people of Yokums, the high and the low, the past and the present, all exquisitely detailed by Davidson in his leisurely, rambling style, sprinkled with a heavy amount of sly wit, local idioms, and regional dialogue.  Davidson's treatment of the people of Yokums is a pure delight as he deceptively carves out jewels of sentences.

Any description of Beer!  Beer!  Beer! would be inadquate other than to say it is pure Davidson.  And you cannot get any better than that.

Beer!  Beer!  Beer! is published by Or All the Sea with Oysters Publishing, set up by Davidson's godson Seth Davis to preserve the works of Avram Davidson and his onetime life partner Grania Davis (Seth's mother).  Among OATSWOP's other books is AD 100, a massive two-volume collection of 100 unpublished and uncollected stories by Davidson.  Check them out.