A Small Group Of Literary Personal Favorites And Pulp Covers

 

There is real hope for a culture that makes it as easy to buy a book as it does a pack of cigarettes.

                                                            —a civic leader quoted in a New American Library ad (1951)

What follows is taken from the website of Princeton University Press as a lead-in teaser for Paula Rabinowitz's book, American Pulp. I never thought I'd need a scholar from Princeton to explain to me the meaning and history of all the cheap little tomes I picked up over the years at yard and rummage and library sales for ten cents each or five for a dollar. Ms. Rabinowitz has written, apparently, quite a through little history of this mid-20th-century popular culture phenomenon.  

"American Pulp tells the story of the midcentury golden age of pulp paperbacks and how they brought modernism to Main Street, democratized literature and ideas, spurred social mobility, and helped readers fashion new identities. Drawing on extensive original research, Paula Rabinowitz unearths the far-reaching political, social, and aesthetic impact of the pulps between the late 1930s and early 1960s.

Published in vast numbers of titles, available everywhere, and sometimes selling in the millions, pulps were throwaway objects accessible to anyone with a quarter. Conventionally associated with romance, crime, and science fiction, the pulps in fact came in every genre and subject. American Pulp tells how these books ingeniously repackaged highbrow fiction and nonfiction for a mass audience, drawing in readers of every kind with promises of entertainment, enlightenment, and titillation. Focusing on important episodes in pulp history, Rabinowitz looks at the wide-ranging effects of free paperbacks distributed to World War II servicemen and women; how pulps prompted important censorship and First Amendment cases; how some gay women read pulp lesbian novels as how-to-dress manuals; the unlikely appearance in pulp science fiction of early representations of the Holocaust; how writers and artists appropriated pulp as a literary and visual style; and much more. Examining their often-lurid packaging as well as their content, American Pulp is richly illustrated with reproductions of dozens of pulp paperback covers, many in color."

Strange, but a woman in a pink sweater without any noticeable breasts and looking like she's either a journalist or a fashion designer is not exactly what comes to my mind when someone says the words "American pulp fiction." But that's Princeton for you in this age of ridiculous wokery.

I think these two are more like it.

So, below, I'll start with my own collection and Oxford, Mississippi's own William Faulkner, who resided for years in Rowan Oaks, a place which I've visited and seen the storyboard drawings, (a strategy he learned while doing a lot of well-paid work that he hated in Hollywood). He rendered the scenes by hand, one drawing at a time on the walls of one room for his 1954 novel A Fable.  

Pulps took a strange path mid-century, going high-brow, you could say, once they started featuring winners of the Nobel Prize. According to a 2015 article in New Yorker magazine by Louis Menand, six of William Faulkner's titles got the pulp treatment form 1947 to 1951 with sales nearing 3.3 million. 

William Faulkner was a genius, no question about it, despite some of his novels being impossible for me to penetrate. Though not all, of course, and if I were to introduce Faulkner to anyone, I'd start with one of his short stories such as Dry September.  

It was his brother, John Faulkner, who was the pulp maestro, and who sold more books and never won any prizes. Nor did he have, I think, any aspirations toward eminence as a practitioner of high literary merit. It appears to me he was trying to sell books, while his brother Bill was laboring slowly and successfully to reforge American fiction and give it a new depth of language, structure and imagination.

I've tried, but I haven't been able to get through any of John Faulkner's novels. Safe to say, based on the photograph below, John resembles his older brother, and anyone interested in learning more about William Faulkner should read John's memoir, My Brother Bill: An Affectionate Reminisence. Here is a link to it on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2624836-my-brother-bill

Here below are some cover images of John Faulkner's novels. 

Note the words "Complete and Unabridged" in the lower left-hand corner of the above title. Again, form Louis Menand: "Hardcover dust jackets rarely said 'complete and unabridged.' The practice of putting that phrase on paperback covers began because Robert de Graff, who launched Pocket Books in 1939, the first American mass-market paperback line, worried that readers associated paperbacks with abridgments, but it became virtually universal among publishers of paperback reprints, since it suggested that you were finally getting the original, uncensored text."

Here below is another Southern author who from 1945 to 1951 sold 25 million copies of his books. My favorite, still, to this day, his novel, Tobacco Road, which in 1941 was adapted into a film directed by John Ford. However, I often return to his short stories for a satisfyiung dose of sometimes gory and disturbing Southern gothic fiction. I'm talking about Erskine Caldwell, native son of Moreland, Georgia.

God's Little Acre, from 1933, sold ten million copies. Allegedly this was due to the novel's sexual themes which were so racy for those times that the New York Society For The Suppression Of Vice requested that the book be censored. 

Note here in the cover above in the lower left-hand corner the signature of James Avati. He signed only his last name, but he signed all his covers, and any of them in mint condition (which are quite rare) tend to fetch a little more money on the collectors' market. Avati was an Italian-American immigrant who became known in some circles as The Rembrandt Of Pulp.

Here is an exhaustive list with links to many of the book cover aritsts of the pulps during midcentury and beyond: https://americanpulps.com/american-pulp-artists/

God's Little Acre became a film in 1958 starring Robert Ryan and directed by Anthony Mann. The script was penned by Ben Maddow, who at the time like many Hollywood screenwriters was being hounded as an alleged Communist by HUAC (The House Committee on Unamerican Activities). Due to this witch hunt, this Second Red Scare, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, the screenwriting credit was given to Philip Yordan. Later on, long after the era of McCarthyism had passed, Maddow's name was returned to the film.

Above here's Robert Ryan playing Ty Walden. Fans of 60's era television, yes, that's the lovely actress Tina Louise in an early movie role. She's best known for playing Ginger on the sitcom Gilligan Island.

Here's a funny Robert Ryan story. I taught ESL for a year in a school called Theatre Of Arts of Wilshire Boulevard just a block from the center of Hollywood and the Walk of Fame. Many 70s-era television actors had studied acting there, and the school's owner liked to keep their 8x10 photographs on the wall for visitors to see when they entered the building. One of the administrators there, a man named Bill who'd worked there forever, told me that the most famous graduate of the school was Robert Ryan, but it was a secret because Mr. Ryan had asked the school to keep it that way and they'd agreed to do so. And also that Ryan wasn't as well known as some of the TV stars whose photos were on the wall.

Naturally, I had my doubts. However, to prove this, Bill told me that if I went to the men's room and looked up the wall to my right just above the toilet I'd see proof that Ryan had been a student there. Sure enough, Robert Ryan, as grafitti, was etched into the wall. The name was clear, easy to read, but it had been there a while in such an old building. Old for Hollywood, anyway. 

So, I returned to Bill and told him what I'd seen, asking, "But is it legit? Really?" 

Bill wasn't one to lie or play practical jokes; he was a gentleman of the old school. "Yes, it is. I knew him," he said. "I was a bit younger then, and much younger than him, but he was a fine man. A fine actor, too." 

I think Bill was pleased as punch that I'd even heard of the man and knew some of his films, such as Crossfire, and The Wild Bunch. 

"It'll be our little secret," said Bill with a smile. "In keeping with the tradition."

Here is a You Tube link to a brief interview with Erskine Caldwell, who died in Arizona in 1987 after writing 60 books and becoming one of the best selling American authors of all time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ata2bgruzY

Here is a link to an audio recording from the archives of UCLA of Caldwell giving a lecture there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lFaAJvRvUs

Lastly, here is a link to an interview, #62 in the Art Of Fiction series published in the Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3098/the-art-of-fiction-no-62-erskine-caldwell?mc_cid=facdcc36a2&mc_eid=32624827f9

Next we have a female Southern Gothic novelist and story writer, and another of my favorites, and a native of Georgia, specifically Savannah where she was born in 1925. She died in 1964 in Milledgeville, Georgia, on her mother's farm where due to her suffering from systemic lupus erythematosus she spent a lot of her adult life.  

From 1951 to 1964, she lived on her Georgia estate, Andalusia, where she raised geese, turkeys, mallard ducks, Japanese bantams, hens, pheasants and peacocks. She published two novels and 32 short stories, none of which disappoint. I think she's one of the best of the late 20th Century American writers.

This is an short audio link to the Georgia-born author Harry Crews speaking with Smith Kirkpatrick about Flannery O'Connor and narrative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUDgoZAi3i8

Here's a link to the website Mental Floss which provides some unusual and disturbing tidbits about Ms. O'Connor's life: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/635719/flannery-oconnor-writer-facts 

Next, seen above, we have John Hawkes, not a Southern gothic author, and will you look at all the critics and publications and appraisals on one cover. All these magazines and newspapers are stumping for this one John Hawkes novel. These preclude sound bites, I suppose, and all the critics have a little something to say. It's almost as if they're important!

Critics and their standards, the very idea of literary criticism that isn't bought and generated by paid-for marketing campaigns in our popular culture, is all but dead compared to what it was even back in the 70s. That era seems ages ago. I miss it sometimes. Better I should say I miss the illusion that a large swatch of the population read books and cared about mid-list authors and quality fiction that wasn't based in a genre such as horror or fantasy.

I'm all for freedom of speech, but I'd welcome the return of erudite, informed and reasonable cultural commentary from gatekeepers older than 25 who are concerned with quality in the arts -- from movies to painting to literature to dance -- over their own careers, their politically correct allegedly woke agendas, their proper pronoun usage and gender identification and labelling everything they disagree with homophobic or racist. I don't think I'm alone in this. 'Nuff said.

John Hawkes was a Harvard graduate, an ambulance driver during World War II, and a unique post-modern author who once famously said that he considered a story's structure his main concern, and that plot, character and theme are the "true enemies of the novel."

Which first-rate author today is approaching literature in such a daring fashion and, like Hawkes, is still able to develop a loyal readership? I don't see many, not in North America, at least. 

My favorite Hawkes novel is Death, Sleep And The Traveller, with Blood Oranges taking second, and Second Skin coming in third. When I'm in the mood for his work, it seldom disappoints. The man taught at Brown University for 30 years and, sadly, in my opinion, he's all but forgotten today. 

Here is passage of description from Second Skin: 

"Briefly then our new home. White clapboard house, peeling paint, abandoned wasp's nest under the eaves, loose shingles, fungus-like green sludge scattered across the roof. Widow's house, needy but respectable. In front a verandah - the old green settee filled with mice, heap of rotted canvas and rusted springs - and a naked chestnut tree with incurable disease and also two fat black Labrador retrievers chained to a little peeling kennel. Protection for the poor widow, culprits who heaped the bare front yard with the black fingers of their manure. And in the rear the widow's little untended victory garden - a few dead vines, a few small humps in the frost - and, barely upright and half-leaning against a weed-grown shed, the long-abandoned wreck of a hot rod - orange, blue, white, no tires, no glass in the windows, big number five on the crumpled hood - the kind of hopeless incongruity to be found behind the houses of young island widows."

Robert Graves is another fine unfairly neglected author who developed a loyal following in his lifetime. This Englishman was a poet, a scholar of Greek and Roman mythology who wrote comprehensive and popular books about the subject, and novels about England, and the Roman empire. He was a foot soldier for England whose memoir, Goodye To All That, is required reading for anyone who thinks they  have an inkling of the gruesomeness of the front line fighting during the first world war. 

Ambrose Bierce, one of the most original of the early American short story writers. I remember well reading An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge in high school, and then again in a college literature class, liking it even more the second time. There were other memorable stories too, such as Chickamauga, A Horseman In The Sky, and A Man With Two Lives.

I wonder if any students read Bierce's wicked and powerful stories today. They can be found here online: https://americanliterature.com/author/ambrose-bierce/ It would be a shame if they weren't still being read. Mr. Bierce was a master. In his work, there's the discovery and evolution of the emerging American character and landscape, along with the despair following the American Civil War, but there's also an unnerving sense of horror. 

John O'Hara is another forgotten author who when I talk to younger people just look at me and shrug, admitting they've never heard of him. If they read, they've likely heard of the New Yorker magazine. O'Hara gets credited, deservedly so, for having developed the New Yorker style for short stories. 

Of his many novels, O'Hara's best known are likely Appointment In Samarra, and Butterfield 8, which Daniel Mann directed as a film with Elizabeth Taylor in 1960 garnering her an Oscar. My personal favorite is from 1938, Hope Of Heaven, along with his collection of essays, An Artist Is His Own Fault.

Many of his novels and stories are set in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania. From 1935 to 1974, he published thirteen short story collections, from Pipe Night in 1945, and The Hat On The Bed in 1962. 

His 1940 novel Pal Joey was made into a stage musical and in 1957 a film that starred Kim Novak, Rita Hayworth and Frank Sinatra. Here's a link to the film's trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts4-CxMj4Rs

Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, the first American to do so. I highly recommend Babbit, and his other novel of Zenith, Ohio, titled Main Street. I'm also a fan of his opus about a doctor's life and career, Arrowsmith. 

This edition is the first Bantam printing, and it's small enough to fit inside the palm of my hand. If my copy were in better condition, it would have some slightly higher value to collectors. 

This is a tie-in to the film of Albee's play starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Some would regard this as Ms. Taylor's best dramatic performance as an actress. It's a harrowing story and sometimes so wretchedly honest that it's difficult to watch.

I had the fortune of seeing Mr. Edward Albee in person when he visited the campus of USC to give a free lecture. He engaged the students and talked about the amount of revision he'd do just to get a scene or a line of dialogue right. He also quoted a TS Eliot interview he'd witnessed, offering up the line that Eliot said that in order to write a good play one should read a thousand of them, write a hundred of them, and then hope to get lucky.

My grandfather used to perform in many of the theatres that Mr. Albee's adoptive father, Reed A. Albee, and his grandfather Edward Franklin Albee II owned. E.F. Albee II was an extremely wealthy and powerful magnate on the vaudeville scene. My grandfather and my grandmother played as a team for ten years on the road performing in theatres that were on what was called the Keith Circut and owned and controlled by E.F. Albee, who I'm not so sure paid his performers all that well. Not that thespians have ever been known to make a lot of money. 

Here is a link to Vaudeville, a website, and Anna Jennings detailed article about E.F. Albee : II. https://vaudeville.sites.arizona.edu/2023/03/28/edward-albee-controversial-father-of-vaudeville-by-anna-jennings/ 

The title story of this collection, The Daring Young Man On The Flying Trapeze, is one I return to again and again, especially when I'm running out of energy or feel as if I'm losing my edge and need inspiration due to suffering what some term "writer's block." I can still remember just how uplifted I felt when I first read it. Unbelievable. I've been a huge fan ever since.

Mr. Saroyan's novel The Human Comedy, which was one of my father's favorites, does not disappoint. It was made into a film in 1943 with Mickey Rooney and Frank Morgan (the Wizard in Wizard of Oz), capturing the mood and the tragic nature of life in the wartime America of the 40s. 

The character Homer Macauley could have been my Dad as a boy puffing along on his heavy one-speed bicycle with its balloon tires and delivering newspapers on street corners and getting word from the front about how the war was going. 

In 2015, this story was made for a second time into a film that was directed by Meg Ryan and titled Ithaca, starring Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, and Sam Shepard. 

Both films are worth one's time, but I think this is because the novel is so good. It's deceptively simple and almost naive and yet optimistic in light of its tragic nature. 

Conversely, it's also safe to say that Saroyan's work is uneven, but mostly because he was so prolific, especially later on his life. At his best he's uniquely American in a comical and sometimes raffish way, a child of Armenia but also of Fresno, growing up there as a boy and later working in theatre in Manhattan at a time when America was a much more open and unspoiled country.

Saroyan's most famous play, The Time Of Your Life, is also a work I can return to repeatedly without losing interest. I can't put my finger on it, but there's a liveliness and a humor in Saroyan's work that shines through when he's at his best. This play was made into a film starring James Cagney, whose perfect for the part of Jopseph T., who observes people. William Bendix, Ward Bond, and Broderick Crawford also star. 

Here's a slightly fuzzy free link to the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCrakx20Oxo

I'll end with this early novel by an author I met and spoke with in 1983 when he came to what was then Roger Williams College and gave a reading from his controversial and later banned nonfiction book, In The Spirit Of Crazy Horse. 

Regardless of the lawsuits, and what the likes of Alan Dershowitz had to say about it, In The Spirit Of Crazy Horse is required reading for anyone interested in what was going on, especially in the 1970s, with the Lakota Nation, Leonard Pelletier, the violent Pine Ridge Reservation incidents, and the war the FBI was waging against the American Indian Movement. The book is thoroughly researched. 

Peter Matthiessen started as a naturalist, learning in his backyard. He published his fiction early. He would later publish a collection of short stories, Midnight Turning Gray, with Geoffrey Clark as his editor at Ampersand Press. He and Geoff had an ongoing and amicable professional relationship that I think Geoff took great comfort and pride in.

I found him to be friendly and approachable, and as a young man in my twenties I was slightly in awe of his Ivy League diploma, his range of interests, his writing style, his studies in naturalism, biology, ecology, history, Zen Buddhism, and commercial fishing. It also stunned me to think he published his first novel at the age of 26. 

 

Here is a bookseller's encapsulation of some of his available titles: https://lopezbooks.com/elist/110/

While chatting, I asked Mr. Matthiessen if there were any writers he'd recommend an aspiring novelist or story writer to read. His answer was Dostoevsky, and Joseph Conrad. 

Hard to imagine such a taut multi-layered novel as Heart Of Darkness, with its dense descriptions and its racist overtones that reflect the colonialism of its time, being sold in drugstores and on the spinning racks at soda fountains and bus terminals, where the focus was on selling not only to women but GI's just back from the war seeking escapism. 

Here is an excerpt from Conrad's novel:

"When the sun rose there was a white fog, very warm and clammy, and more blinding than the night. It did not shift or drive; it was just there, standing all round you like something solid. At eight or nine, perhaps, it lifted as a shutter lifts. We had a glimpse of the towering multitude of trees, of the immense matted jungle, with the blazing little ball of the sun hanging over it - all perfectly still - and then the white shutter came down again, smoothly, as if sliding in greased grooves."