PULP FICTION
Jim Burns
Pulp fiction. It’s a term usually designed to dismiss what is being referred
to as not worthy of serious consideration. It’s said to be literature
designed for quick and easy reading and hardly taxing the intelligence of
the reader. That’s certainly how it is often seen, and there is, perhaps,
some truth in how its limitations are defined, at least on a general level.
But, being of the opinion that good writing is where you find it, I’ve more
than once been pleasantly surprised to come across it in a pulp novel I’ve
read. I’d agree that it’s necessary to pick and choose carefully when
delving into the world of pulp. My own liking is for older novels, those
dating mostly from the 1930s through to the early-1960s. After that, it
seems to me, the breakdown in censorship meant that writers were more at
liberty to focus openly on sex and violence, with the result that it was no
longer necessary to suggest it. The imagination declines in such
circumstances.
This is a contentious issue, and I’m not advocating censorship, simply
pointing to what might have happened when it was relaxed. Writers of pulp
fiction will no doubt disagree with me and claim that they now have greater
freedom to develop characters and situations. But they could surely do that
by suggestion when working within a restricted framework. The fact is that
sex and violence sell books, and pressure is exerted on writers by agents
and publishers to add doses of each to their novels. A crime novelist of my
acquaintance once told me that this was the case.
I don’t want to spend time generalising about pulp fiction. The above
reflections were triggered by the recent discovery of an example of a pulp
book. It’s an interesting item to look at for more reasons than one.
Published in 1962 by Lancer Books, New York, it has two novels –
Season of Love by Colin Ross and
The Wrong Turn by Daniel Harper –
both of them short (123 and 127 pages, respectively) which might suggest
they were written to a specified format. With very few exceptions pulp
novels rarely exceeded more than 250 paperback pages, and many hovered
around the 180 to 220 pages mark. Putting the Ross and Harper books together
(250 pages in total) made sense in that context.
There are one or two curious aspects surrounding when the two novels (do
they fit easier into the novella category?) were written. As mentioned
earlier, Lancer published the book in 1962 and the Ross novel was
copyrighted by them in the same year. But the Harper was copyrighted in that
name in 1954, and a check shows that it was originally published that same
year by Avon Books, New York. The earlier edition isn’t mentioned by Lancer.
I’m making no claims for these books as more than what they are, lightweight
“entertainments” that have inevitably been long-forgotten other than by a
scattering of dedicated pulp readers. There are enthusiasts who specialise
in collecting old paperbacks, often as much for their covers as for their
contents. And there are magazines and books devoted to pulp writers and
their publishers. Some contemporary publishers – Stark House and Hard Case
Crime, for example – find what they think can be usefully salvaged from
bygone years and re-publish it. It all seems to me a worthwhile enterprise,
but I’m prejudiced and freely admit to a long-standing interest in pulp
novels and the stories surrounding them.
To return to the novels in question.
Colin Ross’s Season of Love has
little to recommend it in terms of its capacity to keep the reader attentive
to the storytelling. A young woman with aspirations to be a writer is
involved in a relationship with an older man. She ends it and heads for
Paris where, she thinks, she’ll have the time and stimulus to produce
something creative. In fact, she encounters a series of men on board the
ship, when she’s in Paris, and in the South of France, who all find her
desirable and want to sleep with her. Bearing in mind what I said earlier
about what could appear in print prior to the 1960s the sex scenes are brief
and with little detail. A somewhat contrived ending appears to suggest that
the woman will marry and settle down, although she has made it a condition
of marriage that she be allowed time to write a novel. The book had
previously been published under the title,
The Mistress, by Beacon Books in
1958, but no mention was made of this in the 1962 Lancer publication.
References to young Americans in Paris living on G.I. Grants earned because
of their military service in the Second World War, sets the period as around
the late-1940s and early-1950s. There are also the obligatory inclusions of
Hemingway, the Select, Kiki of
Montparnasse, the Existentialists
and other elements of “local colour” to provide some authenticity. It tends
to come across as designed to appeal to American “stay-at-homes” who can
fantasise about a Paris they may never get to. The writing is functional at
best, pedestrian at worst.
Daniel Harper’s The Wrong Turn is
better written and much livelier. A judge’s wife, Adele, with an older
husband, craves excitement and decides to look for it with a young criminal,
Eddie, she encounters when visiting the judge at his courtroom. She’s bored
with the kind of life she’s leading among the well-to-do social set she‘s
required to associate with in Washington, and the young man has the
potential of offering something different. Her meetings with him are
clandestine at first, but she soon becomes indifferent to the possibility of
discovery. She smokes marijuana, buys clothes more in keeping with the kind
of women he normally associates with, and visits bars and other
establishments where criminals congregate. She doesn’t go unnoticed and a
local gossip columnist makes an oblique reference to her one day.
She’s soon persuaded to participate in actual criminal activities, including
a raid on a Western Union Office during which someone is shot. Eddie drops
the gun while escaping with the money, and
persuades Adele to blackmail her husband into removing Eddie’s
fingerprints from police records. He does so, but realising that what he’s
done will soon come to light he commits suicide, but not before writing a
confession of his guilt. Adele and Eddie panic and drive out of the city but
the car crashes and both are killed. It all sounds very much in the spirit
of the kind of Hollywood productions of the 1940s that were labelled film
noir. There’s the same dark feeling that the relationship between Adele and
Eddie is sure to end as it does. The writing is much more compelling than in
the Ross novel, and pushes the narrative from page to page,
What intrigues me about both books, despite whatever drawbacks they have
when it comes to their literary qualities, is that they were published under
pseudonyms. Colin Ross was Harry Roskolenko, and Daniel Harper was Chandler
Brossard. They were writers with novels and other publications in print
under their real names, and it can only be assumed that the pulp material
they produced was done for the purpose of making a little money,
They were far from alone in doing this, though some writers were happy to
have their real names on the covers of their pulp paperbacks. The
experimental novelist David Markson wrote three pulps between 1959 and 1961.
One of them, Epitaph for a Dead Beat,
used the Greenwich Village bohemian scene that he knew well as a
location for its story. The critic Seymour Krim called Markson’s
Springer’s Progress (not a pulp),
“The most honest and stunning Greenwich Village novel of my time”.
And there was R.V. Cassill, an academic, editor, noted short-story writer,
and novelist who wrote at least nine pulp novels, with titles like
A Taste of Sin and
Left Bank of Desire, as well as
several more published in hardback by major companies. I’m tempted to say
that, on the whole, I always preferred his pulp novels to most of the
others. But what may be his major achievement,
Clem Anderson, is well worth
looking at. A fellow novelist and fine short-story writer, Richard Yates,
said that it was “the best novel I know of on the subject of writing, or on
the condition of being a writer”.
Harry Roskolenko appears to have used a bewildering number of pseudonyms
during his writing career, and I assume that most of them applied to
material that he wrote purely for financial reasons. To take one example
when he again called himself Colin Ross,
New York After Dark was published
by McFadden Books in 1966. It claimed to give the lowdown on the city’s
sleazy side, with chapters on sex orgies, drugs, prostitution (male and
female), lesbians, homosexuals and anything else guaranteed to convince
provincials that New York really was as decadent as they thought.
One chapter inevitably focused on Greenwich Village and at least
demonstrated that the writer had a familiarity with its history as a
bohemian outpost, and with some of its legendary characters like Maxwell
Bodenheim, Eli Siegel, Harry Kemp, and John Rose Gildea. He says that he
“first saw the Village, before World War One”, and seems to have kept up an
acquaintance with it over the years. He waxes nostalgic for older periods of
bohemianism, but yesterday’s bohemia was always more interesting and
productive in the eyes of those who experienced it.
It’s easy to understand why Roskolenko may have looked askance at some of
the posturings of the Beats of the 1960s. He’d led quite a colourful life.
Born in 1907 to Jewish immigrant parents on the Lower East Side of New York,
he ran away from home when he was 13 and in the early 1920s became a
merchant seaman. He wrote about this period of his life in a wonderful
memoir, When I Was Last on Cherry
Street, published in 1965. In the 1930s he aligned himself with the American
Trotskyists, and began to establish a reputation as a poet alongside Kenneth
Rexroth, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky in avant-garde
magazines like Blues and
Pagany. He also hiked across
America, attempting to spread the revolutionary word. In the 1940s he joined
the Navy and served in the Pacific. After the war he travelled, wrote
novels, three memoirs, including the one referred to, and various other
books. I’m dealing with his activities in a very limited way. There isn’t
the space here to go into details about all the things he did and the people
he met. Roskolenko died in 1980.
Chandler Brossard also had a varied career, although of a different kind to
Harry Roskolenko. He was born in 1922 in Salt Lake City to “educated Mormon
elite and upper middle-class” parents. He moved to Washington with his
mother when his parents divorced, and seems to have dropped out of formal
education at the age of 11. When he was 18 he got a job with the
Washington Post and later worked
for the New Yorker, which is when
he started to think seriously about writing fiction. In the 1950s he had
editorial positions at leading magazines such as
Time, Life, and
Coronet. In 1955 he edited the
anthology, The Scene Before You : A
New Approach to American Culture, which included essays by writers like
Seymour Krim, Manny Farber, Harold Rosenberg, Lionel Trilling, Elizabeth
Hardwick, Clement Greenberg, Anatole Broyard, Milton Klonsky, Norman
Podhoretz, and others.
The inclusion of Broyard, Krim and Klonsky points to Brossard’s familiarity
with the Greenwich Village of the late-1940s and his novel,
Who Walk in Darkness, was
published in 1952 in the United States, but not before there had been
threats of legal action unless certain alterations were made. The main
problem centred around a character called Henry Porter who was allegedly
based on Anatole Broyard. The opening sentence stated, “People said Henry
Porter was a ‘passed’ Negro”, and Broyard’s parents were indeed black. But
he could easily pass for white, and it was useful to do that in the
racially-conscious atmosphere of America in the 1940s and 1950s. He was
publishing stories and essays in magazines like
Partisan Review,
New World Writing and
Discovery, and in due course
would become a regular reviewer for the
New York Times. His
posthumously-published Kafka Was The
Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir, came out in 1993.
Brossard solved the dispute over the opening of
Who Walk in Darkness by changing
it to “People said that Henry Porter was an illegitimate”, and the book duly
appeared in 1952. It has been described as the first Beat novel, though it
isn’t about them. What it does deal with is the Greenwich Village scene of
the late-1940s and the young writers and intellectuals who gathered there. A
good description of that milieu can be found in Seymour Krim’s brilliant
essay, “What’s This Cat’s Story”. It was a competitive environment and
marked by its move away from the political tensions of the 1930s and the war
years. There may have been a few writers still involved with supporting
strikes, communism, and such matters, but there is no evidence of it in
Brossard’s novel or in Krim’s essay.
Brossard went on to publish several more novels, some of them –
The Bold Saboteurs and
The Double View – as hardbacks
with established New York publishers, while others –
Episode with Erika, The Girls in
Rome, A Man for all Women –were pulp paperbacks. The latter title was
actually a re-working of the 1954
Paris Escort by Daniel Harper, and
Episode with Erika had been
published in 1954 under the title All
Passion Spent. What this points to is a writer struggling to make a
living and turning to various strategies to bring in some earnings. In the
1960s he edited a number of paperback anthologies of short stories. The
titles, among them In Other Beds,
Marriage Games, Desire in the Suburbs, were obviously aimed at the pulp
market, but the writers included Chekhov, D.H. Lawrence, Turgenev, George
Eliot, as well as some of Brossard’s contemporaries like John Cheever,
Philip Roth, Richard Yates, and Herbert Gold. Brossard usually put in one of
his own stories, often under a pseudonym, which may have been a useful way
of pulling in a few extra dollars.
I have to say that I found Brossard’s later work of less interest.
Wake Up, We’re Almost There, a
sprawling, uneven novel, gained a degree of attention, but didn’t sell. He
produced a number of curious collections of short pieces that were published
by small, independent presses. One of them, Redbeck Press, was run by the
English poet and novelist, David Tipton, and as it happened he also
published three or four books of mine. I don’t suppose Brossard made much
money from these publications – Redbeck Press was hardly a money-spinner -
and he spent time as a writer-in-residence and similar positions at various
academic establishments, including Birmingham University in Britain. He died
in 1993.
I realise that, in some ways, I’ve moved away from pure pulp fiction as
practised by those writers who produced nothing but pulp and made no claims
to creating anything beyond it. There were plenty of them, and not all they
wrote can be easily dismissed. At their best they did what writers ought to
do and kept readers interested and keen to know what comes next. They could
establish strong characters, describe striking scenes, and invent effective
dialogue and intriguing plots. And they were entertaining. Just from that
1940s and 1950s period that interests me most I’ve enjoyed books by Gil
Brewer, Jim Thompson, Day Keene, Wade Miller, Steve Fisher, and Ed Lacy, to
name only a handful of the writers.
NOTES
For information about Harry Roskolenko it’s useful to look at his three
memoirs, and especially When I was
Last on Cherry Street (Stein and Day, New York, 1965). The others were
The Terrorized (Prentice-Hall,
New York, 1967), The Time That Was
Then : The Lower East Side 1900-1913 – An Intimate Chronicle (The Dial
Press, New York, 1971). For information about his poetry, and its
background, it’s best to refer to Andrew Crozier’s excellent essay, “The
Case of Harry Roskolenko” in his
Thrills and Frills: Selected Prose, edited by Ian Brinton (Shearsman
Books, Bristol, 2013). An obscure item of interest worth tracking down is
the obituary Roskolenko wrote about the New York bookseller and poet Harold
Briggs, whose bookshop, Books ‘n
Things, stocked little magazines and radical and
avant-garde literature. As Roskolenko, a friend from the 1930s, said,
“Harold and I hated every aspect of fascism, in and out of books”. It was
published in The Wormwood Review 40
(Stockton, 1970), edited by Marvin Malone.
The best source for information about Chandler Brossard and his various
publications is the Spring 1987 issue of
The Review of Contemporary Fiction,
devoted to him and edited by John O’Brien (Elmwood Park, 1987). It has a
bibliography of his novels, short stories, and selected essays, along with
an interview and a number of essays and commentary by other writers.