Memories of the Pulps

Category: Nostalgia

This story was written by my long time friend Terry Barker who lives with his wife Connie in Sechelt British Columbia.

Terry is a multi-talented individual who amongst many things has been a teacher, a stage director, an ambulance driver, a published author , a sketch artist and now a photographer.

Enjoy!

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Her real name was Mrs. Hannah, I think, but I used to call her Mrs. Henna in my mind be­cause she had such sensational fake jap-orange hair. I wonder what ever happened to her.

She hung out in a shabby little shop not much bigger than a hallway on Helmken Street, just off Granville. She must have weighed in the neighbourhood of three hundred pounds, making it troublesome for her to move about between the piles of old magazines. Her wrinkled dress advertised what she'd had for lunch. I thought she was the ugliest old hag I'd ever seen, but she possessed the keys to heaven.

I used to drop in there on my way to the YMCA in downtown Vancouver. Initially I was attracted by her minute window display, which always, in all the years I went there, had the same decaying pulp magazine on view. Even after I'd read it, even when the window be­came so grimy that you could barely see through it, that magazine had the power to stop me in my tracks.

It was the November 1940 issue of Fantastic Novels. The feature story was A. Merritt's The Snake Mother. On the blinding cover was a Virgil Finlay painting of a woman naked to the waist, at which point her body turned into -- coils! Yep, neighbours, that's the way the pulp authors used to write: they'd start the sentence with a hook ("She was naked to the waist"): then tease you with a mysterious connector ("where her body turned into"): and fi­nally hit you with an em dash and a topper, usually in italics (" --- "coils!"). The penulti­mate word or phrase was always followed by an exclamation point. My parents called it "trashy pulp fiction", so I learned to smuggle the stuff home and read it under the covers with a flashlight. God, how I loved it.

I discovered the pulps in 1940, on a paper drive. I was in Grade Seven at Point Grey Junior High School. I'd been made a Junior Air Raid Warden, which gave me the power to stay up late and have my own special flashlight with black sticky electricians tape across the lens, leaving a small slit to peer down back lanes and check my neighbours' curtains. It also gave me the authority to manage my class's paper drive. My first memory of the pulps was one afternoon after school, sitting atop an enormous pile of newspapers and magazines, root­ing through the bundles and pulling out copies of Astonishing Tales of Super Science. That was the night my mother called the police to report a missing child, and they found me there, reading Ray Bradbury's yarns about Mars by the light of my ARP flashlight.

The pulps usually cost a dime (later, during the war, they went up to 12 cents). They were about seven by nine inches, usually a quarter to half-inch thick. They had untrimmed edges. The paper was fat and porous and when you got too excited about Captain Future your sweaty fingers smeared the ink. They smelled old, even when you'd just plunked down the dime that you'd been saving up for a package of Players Plain but bought Galaxy with instead. They smelled old -- even before you bought them!

They covered a range of interests: romances. confessions, westerns, crime, adventure, and the new kid on the block, science-fiction. You could get away with reading a Zane Grey Western or Black Mask or Doc Savage -- and even educated folks read The Shadow some­times -- but you had to be tough to read science-fiction. If you were caught with a copy of Astounding Stories, you were in for an hour of ragging about Buck Rogers and space travel and all that crap. It didn't do you any good to protest that Buck Rogers was a comic strip whereas what you were reading was serious stuff, the literature of ideas, specula­tive fiction -- all those literary terms that precocious teen-aged fans like Isaac Asimov used to write about in the Letters to the Editor column, and boy, didn't you write lots of letters yourself and then haunt future issues to see if you got printed? But it didn't do you any good at all because they didn't want to hear your viewpoint, what they wanted to do was make you run home in tears.

At thirteen, though, the rewards were sweet enough to allow one to endure the social pun­ishment. Where else, for example, could you read about a potion that would shrink one to the world of the infinitely small? Ray Cummings "Golden Atom" series followed the ad­ventures of an intrepid explorer into the microscopic, then sub-atomic, universe where our electrons and protons were actually their planets and suns -- and then on and beyond, into the infinite! Atoms made up of yet smaller atoms, and those of even smaller ones. Could we be -- part of a giant's eyelash on an infinitely larger world! Which may in turn perhaps be only a part of -- who can say! I remember writing an essay about this idea for Mr. Lewis, my Grade Eight Science teacher, complete with much-erased pencil drawings of solar systems (which are really atoms, eh?) and galaxies (nothing but molecules, dig?) -- and his look of pitying amusement as he asked me, "Have you been reading those crazy pulps?" (Who, me? No, no sir, not me!) The memory hangs on after fifty years, and even today I'd like the chance to take Mr. Lewis by his meager neck and throw him through -- the Time Gate!

The Frank A. Munsey Company had a hammerlock on most of the really terrific science-fiction yarns that had appeared since the beginning of the century. Science-fiction maga­zines, per se, came into existence only in 1927, when Hugo Gernsbach published his semi­nal Amazing Stories. Twelve years later, when I started reading the field, there was a handful of s-f pulps struggling along: Planet Stories, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Astounding Stories. But the Munsey Company started a new magazine in 1939 to cull their enormous backlog of pre-1927 stories from their old Argosy All-Story Magazine. They named it Famous Fantastic Mysteries (FFM to those of us who loved it). And the first issue featured A. Merritt's classic The Moon Pool, a tale of a mysterious land be­neath the Pacific Ocean, a place where super-science and ancient occult power wedded in a unholy mix that produced the vampirous being called The Dweller. Then their compan­ion magazine, Fantastic Novels, published the sequel, The Conquest of the Moon Pool. Later they published Merritt's great yarns about a lost civilization buried behind the ramparts of Yu-Atlanchi, deep in the Andes. The Face in the Abyss and The Snake Mother. That last one is the one that sat for years in Mrs. Henna's grungy window, the one with the half-naked snake woman on the cover. Teen-aged boys noticed stuff like that. The Munsey company published all of his work eventually. Who could resist such alluring bait?

Mrs. Henna -- Hannah! -- displayed all these wonderful magazine, with their garish sun­bursts and Bug-Eyed Monsters threatening Half-Naked Languishing Women, and Heroes threatening the Bug Eyed Monsters. But in her back room she kept the really good stuff: Unknown and Astounding Science-Fiction , rare pulps that had to be smuggled across the border. By this, time, in 1941, we were deep into the war, and the Canadian government decided to ban the import of all pulp magazines. Why? Who will ever know? But we ad­dicts had had our supply stopped, and we were perfectly willing to pay whatever it took. She charged fifty cents reading fee for an illegal copy, and another fifty cents deposit. A lot of money in those days. You got the deposit back when you returned her treasure. She once leaned over the rutted counter and confided in me: "I'm an old woman, and I don't have much in this world, but as long as I got me mags -- and young men like you who want to read them -- I'll get by." Her jap orange hair blazed in the dim light. I felt deliciously part of some kind of adult conspir­acy.

Well, I drifted away from the Grey Lensman and Giles Habibula of the Space Patrol and Northwest Smith and Conan and Asimov's unbearably brilliant transfer of the fall of Rome to the galactic scene. I grew up, graduated from high school, started UBC. I discov­ered Ariel and Caliban, the ghost of Hamlet's father, MacBeth's witches -- much the same stuff, actually, but at a much different level. The pulps, in the meantime, disappeared. In the brave new post-war world, who would be caught dead reading anything so outdated as -- a pulp mag!

Some years later, when I was 26, I found myself teaching high school English. And in­cluded in the anthologies of literature that I was supposed to be introducing my young charges to were -- Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, which I had read in Planet Sto­ries! And Zenna Henderson's "People" yarns in A Mess of Pottage, that I had devoured in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction ten years before! No need now to smuggle garish covers home under my coat and read fusty-smelling pulps under the covers! No, sir! Now all was approved by the British Columbia Department of Education! (When I showed this to my mother she sniffed and said, "Well, as far as I'm concerned it was trash then and it's still trash today.")

And Mrs. Hannah? That summer I sought her out. But she, like the pulps, had disap­peared. Her old hole-in-the-wall on Helmken Street was gone. The whole building was transformed. Where once I had pressed my two hard-saved quarters into those fat hands for the read of a lifetime, now was the back of a restaurant.

Did she fall victim to changing times? Like the old shoemakers of Galsworthy's Quality, did she fail to adapt? When the young men stopped coming for Unknown and Astounding, did she starve rather than bring in Colliers and The SatEvePost and Liberty and Pageant?

Did she end her days living with her bitchy daughter in a rambling old apartment building on Thurlow Street? Did she harangue her about the faithless young men who used to come in for "good reading" and then abandoned her for CanLit?

My memory ends in 1953. All that remains is a picture of a sad, fat old drab with her hand out for my quarters -- and in return, renting out excursions to space and time. I got the better bargain.