They Called Back!

This time my imaginary $125,000.00 had moved from Mexico to Canada and was now a mysterious package. Again, the caller identified himself as a U.S. Customs Agent. Again, I begged the question by asking "You're a U.S. Customs Agent?"

He answered "I am a Canadian Customs agent."

Again, I think he knew the jig was up when I turned out not to be 90. This time I told the guy I just wasn't interested and hung up the phone. If they call a third time I will make them Internet Famous. I consider three unsolicited calls permission to publish their phone number. Not that I am entirely sure where this phone number goes to.

Speaking of mysterious, I have just finished Harold Hersey's book Pulpwood Editor. First published in 1937, this book is one of the few on the record accounts of a pulp magazine creative. It has been republished by a pulp fandom house, however the edition I have is original. (Snobby sniff.) (Actually, I would have bought the reprint edition, but it's out of stock.) I can now say to all my fellow pulpsters that I HAVE AN ORIGINAL. That should make me a big cheese amongst the some eight of us who care about such things.

It's not a bad book. Hersey is one of those FDR Types who matriculated during the 1920s. You can very much imagine him dictating this book to his secretary between puffs from a cigarette held in a long holder. He's the type who has elaborate practical jokes played on him and owns a cottage on the outskirts of New York. You can almost hear him say "Read that back to me again, deary and I will give you the exact punctuation."

Hersey's claim to fame, such as it is, is that he invented the western romance magazine. As far as hits, that's pretty much the start and end for him. From his account, he sort of dashed the western romance idea off and then handed it to another editor. Actually doing anything is a bit beneath Mr. Hersey's pay grade. He's more of a firer of people and a giver of sweeping opinions. For a time he worked as the chief editor for Bernarr MacFadden, an entire chapter to whom a knob job is given. After his stint at MacFadden, he started his own shop which attempted to beat the Gangster trend to absolute death. At the time he is writing Pulpwood Editor his line has sunk, a victim of the Depression. He doesn't know it yet, but his career has pretty much peaked.

It's sort of like reading a baseball memoir from a .200 hitter. If there was any intention at all behind the writing of this book, it seems to be an attempt to catch on with another team. The book is actually good at providing a historical bridge between the Dime Novels and the Pulps.

Hersey views the pulps as being 'lineal' descendants of the Dime Novels, which he calls Yellow Backs. It was his use of terminology that I found most interesting. For the most part, pulp industry jargon has gone the way of the pulps themselves. Pulps were referred to as Seven by Tens or Sheets. The covers were called Shop Windows. As for the genres themselves, they don't have names. Launching a new pulp was a graft and draft sort of affair: you are either mixing two things together or you are attempting to follow the leader. In all cases, true originality was to be shunned.

Make no mistake about it: pulps are about making money, not literary achievement. Hersey hammers that point. He views the pulp audience as being uneducated, unimaginative boobs. The purpose of a pulp story is to provide escape for these people via a set formula of story telling, the pre-established archetypes of which are not to be messed with. Start mid res, slam bang it out and avoid complicated sentence construction. Give it a tight close and call it a wrap. Or he's not interested in it. As Hersey says, James Joyce can do what he wants--the rest of you must follow the program.

Sadly, this advice is pretty good, even today. My experience with the small press has been that they are just as formula driven and the prescription Hersey gives is one that the aspiring writer should take to heart.

It's hard to read through how condescending Hersey is. To a modern reader, it seems like he is putting you on. I don't think he is. Instead, he's speaking in a vanished idiom. It's the obnoxious way of being frank.

After a promising start, wherein Hersey seems to be attempting to give instructions on how to start a pulp magazine, the book bloviats on random subjects. His rant on pulp magazine advertising seems almost entirely without direction or need for inclusion. Mr. Hersey is just one of those people who has an opinion on everything and cannot stop himself from rambling.

His immediate predictions are particularly laughable. He believes the detective magazine, a bully-filled genre, has run its course and will have no place in the future--not in radio, not in films and not in television. He thinks that the just around the corner medium of television (he's off by a decade or so) will instead be dominated by the likes of True Story--yet another knob job to Macfadden. And the sex magazine is about to go poof and never return. In truth, few prognosticators on any subject are ever right, but very few of them are ever this comprehensively wrong. To be generous, it may have been more of a wish on his part.

Hersey does dote on the idea that pulp fiction is about wish fulfillment. The purpose of pulp fiction is to fulfill the dream aspirations of a frustrated audience. On this, I think he's dead on right. This blunt idea is phrased in terms of fashioning a commodity for consumption. His tone is a bit off-putting, but he's not wrong.

Beyond this, the book makes tangential reference to such pulp luminaries as Frank Munsey, various first wave Street & Smith editors and Courtland Young. It seems that the only story Hersey ever had published was purchased by Young. (I may want to find that.) The epitaph on Frank Munsey was fairly stark: despite his vast fortune, his personal conduct and overall lack of warmth will consign his memory to nothingness. Wow. Cold, but all too true.

Hersey himself went onto some success as a pulp editor, but he is primarily remembered as a historian of Cowboy culture, preserving the lyrics of cowboy songs and poetry in two other books. Perhaps not the fate that he intended, but literary success nonetheless. Hersey was the type who was going to be successful, no matter what he tried.