Category Archives: Straining Pulp

Strained Pulp #3: “The Man from the Atom” Parts 1 & 2 by G. Peyton Wertenbaker (Amazing Stories #1 and #2, April 1926 and May 1926)

Lookit us, breaking out of “Weird Tales” and into some honest-to-gosh science fiction (or, as Hugo Gernsback preferred, “scientifiction”)!

This is the first issue of the very first magazine devoted to science fiction ever, making 1926 basically the date at which you can pin the creation of the genre. I know people like to wax moronic about Lucian of Samosata and Mary Shelley and all that older stuff, and certainly it’s important, but the fact of the matter is that, until Hugo Gernsback started publishing magazines, no one would have said that what they were reading (or writing) was “science fiction.” It was in this magazine right here that the genre was defined and delimited and created, by readers, writers, editors, and publishers, who had a dedicated space to wrangle and argue and pontificate about what was (and wasn’t) science fiction!

That being said, there’s also an interesting aspect to the creation of the genre that’s immediately noticeable right there on the cover of the magazine. Take a look at those authors: Wells, Verne, and Poe. If you look inside at the ToC, you see that there’re other names there too, though interestingly NONE of the fiction in this first issue was written for the magazine; they’re all reprints, either of “classics” or of stories that were previously published in Gernsback’s older radio and electronics news magazines.

It would actually take a while for the stories to start being “originals” for the magazine – the whole first year of Amazing Stories is absolutely dominated by Verne and Wells, often with their longer works stretching over multiple issues. This is, interestingly, different from Weird Tales, which actively made a call for submissions in writers’ magazines and professional journals before it’s first issue was published. I haven’t run across any advertisements like that for Amazing Stories, and it certainly seems like Gernsback had a very definite plan in mind to use these older and “classic” works in his magazine.

ALSO interesting, to me, is that Poe is such a major figure in here. This is 1926, Weird Tales has been chugging along for 3 years already at this point, but the tangle of “science fiction” and “weird fiction” is still very evident in both of the magazines. Interestingly the George Allen England story there (“The Thing From – Outside”) is also 100% a weird fiction “monster from beyond” horror story. These broadly speculative and imaginative literatures are so intimately intertwined at this time, and only with the nichification of the pulps did they develop the kind of rigid boundaries that we tend to think about today.

Anyway, the story that we’re going to talk about today is Wertenbaker’s “The Man From the Atom,” which is a two-parter that stretches over these first two issues. The first part, written as a standalone, was originally published in an earlier issue of Gernsback’s Popular Science-like magazine “Science and Invention.” The sequel to the story is actually the first original fiction published in Amazing Stories. Wertenbaker is an interesting guy; he’d write a bit more sci-fi early in his career, then turn to historical and regional novels, then became an editor at some major magazines. After WWII he’d end up at NASA as a speech writer, and would eventually become a big part of their space medicine program as a documentarian and historian. Interesting dude!

A thing to note about “The Man From the Atom” part the first is that Wertenbaker wrote it when he was fifteen, and it shows! It’s really overwritten, even for the time, with extremely purple prose and some brutally tortured sentences. The science in it is goofy as hell, of course, but it illustrates just how big of a deal Einstein was at the time, and how influential relativity was on popular culture.

First thing first, though, are these little intro boxes that Gernsback (or one of his flunkies, although I’m inclined to think they’re from ol’ Hugo) wrote at the beginning of each of these stories. Here’s the one for “The Man From the Atom:”

A big part of Amazing Stories, especially early on, was the lengths to which Gernsback went to argue that scientifiction was an “improving” literature – it was both artistically sophisticated as well as educational. In fact, later editorials by Hugo would go on to claim that many scientists were writing him to let him know that they chose their careers BECAUSE of his magazine. This text is interesting, because he’s really playing up the literary merits of the story rather than it’s science-y aspects, probably because even for Amazing Stories the science in “The Man From the Atom” is pretty fantastical.

But before we get into it, check out this incredible title page art for the story! Amazing Stories had such great interior art, right from the beginning, it’s really a treat.

Between that art and the little blurb box, you know what’s coming: this is a story about a Boy what gets Big.

It starts with the narrator lamenting his fate, real sad-sack style. But then he buckles down and shares with us His Strange Tale. Seems our boy, called Kirby later in the story, is basically a Guinea Pig for a wild-eyed weirdo inventor names Professor Martyn. Their relationship is summed up on the first page fairly succinctly, if oddly:

This maniac Professor Martyn basically invents weird stuff and Kirby eagerly tries ’em out, which is hilarious. Imagine being so “romantic” that you’re like, “yeah man, blast me with that ray!” or “sure, I’ll drink this bubbling vial of strange fluid, no problem.” But Kirby doesn’t give a shit; he’s down for anything. And that includes the Prof’s most recent invention, a machine that he accidently invented and doesn’t fully understand, but that basically can shrink or grow a person infinitely. And Kirby is pumped as hell to try it out:

It’s really funny to imagine embiggening as the secret to unlocking all astronomical mysteries. Glad to know a giant foot isn’t going to smash the Earth though, good that the Prof has already determined that. They soon get down to brass tacks:

Suited up, Kirby prepares to expand himself to cosmic scale. It’s kind of fun to consider the writing of this story from the perspective of a nerdy teen sometime before 1923. Rocketry as a viable discipline was still well down the pike, and the question of exactly how people are going to explore the universe and learn about space was still, really, a wild and fully speculative exercise. So the idea that this character is going to learn about planets and stars and stuff by just getting fuckin’ huge is, while extremely silly, also extremely imaginative and unprecedented.

Kirby and the Prof drive out to a secluded spot and begin their test. There’s some fun writing in this part, a real attempt by the author to describe the sensation and observations of someone growing exponentially to cosmic proportions.

It’s all fun and games though until Kirby grows to such a large size that he begins to experience the rotation of the earth under his feet, like he’s balancing on a ball. It’s very disorienting, and eventually he simply slips off the tiny earth, and floats powerless in space, watching the planets and the sun whizz by in every faster arcs. And as he keeps right on growing, the planets vanish and other stars come to dominate his vision; he grows beyond our solar system.

Fun cameo from “the ether” here, the old and, even in the 1920s, discredited idea of the interstellar medium that allowed for the transition of energy. It’s an idea that persists a long time in the pulps, even though it was largely debunked in the late 19th C. and was killed by Einstein’s own work. There’s a whole dissertation to be written on the incomplete and sometimes inchoate way that physics and science in general were incorporated into the pulps!

Anyway, Kirby expands beyond the galaxy eventually, watching the nebula recede until it itself is proven to be but a speck of light in an even larger nebula, and on and on, an ever expanding recursion of eternity, infinitely scalable. Kirby even experiences a moment of transcendent illumination, linking this the largest of scales with the tiniest expression of reality at the atomic level:

Like, woah, man, you know?

But this is too much for Kirby! He gets spooked, and starts to shrink back down. But he’s faced with a conundrum…how is he supposed to find the Earth again? He’s literally as big as the universe, and everything has been in motion around him, and now he’s supposed to find a specific speck in the vastness of space? The first planet he lands on, a warm weird water world, is clearly not the Earth. So, after a recuperative freakout, he decides to try again, expanding and then shrinking, aware of the difficulty but willing to give it a try. And at first it seems like it’s working, he finds the nebula, the right stars, and expects to find the sun soon…but…it’s gone! Then the final horrible revelation:

That’s right! By gettin’ big, Kirby experienced time at a fundamentally bigger scale – his brief sojourn among the stars, mere moments to him, was millions of years back home. He ends up shrinking down and finding a planet full of big-brained aliens, all of them hugely intellectually superior and scientifically way more advanced than he is; he’s a “savage” among them, a dumb curiosity who can’t learn their language (though they easily learn his). “The Man From the Atom” ends with Kirby trapped forever, unable to ever return to a long dead Earth…

…or IS HE!?!?

The sequel to “The Man From the Atom” is, like I said, the first piece of original fiction published in Amazing Stories. Here’s the cover from that issue, with a rad alien on it:

Our story picks up with Kirby saying that, yeah, he might’ve come off a little dramatic and despondent in his previous story, but it wasn’t ALL bad. For one thing, he met this big-brained cutie named Vinda!

Vidna digs him, and makes his time on the alien world almost pleasant. Of course, he still yearns for the Green Hills of Earth and all that, so one day, Vinda comes to see him with a plan.

That’s right: the curvature of space-time = yuga cycles, basically, and if Kriby just gets himself big again and lets the universe spin for a few zillion years, he’ll come back around to, basically, the same Earth that he left, reborn in one of the infinite cycles of existence. It’s a fully bonkers idea, but it resonates kind of nicely with the spatial scaling stuff in the previous story, where the universe is like an atom in a bigger universe etc etc. Fully stoner sci-fi, but it’s absolutely non-derivative and novel in 1926.

Of course, nothing is ever easy, is it? It turns out that there’s some sort of weirdly “progressive” direction to history, so that even with its cyclic nature Kirby will return to a slightly changed, slightly more advanced world than when he left. It’s never really explained why this is, in the story; rather, it’s just an obvious, natural function of time cycles. Kind of a weirdly comforting idea, and one that you can absolutely see as coming out of the particular moment of the post-World War I american boomtime, what with the wonders of the modern age – it’s a particularly golden age sort of science fiction concept, that of course everything will always be somewhat better, at least iteratively.

Anyway, Vinda helps Kirby write up a star chart from when he left Earth, which will help him ID the time and location of Earth. He does his cosmic expansion thing and, with his careful preparations, actually does cycle back and finds the Earth at roughly the time when he left it. He shrinks down and finds himself in the Sahara, back home in good old’ late 1840s, although its actually as advanced as the 1940s of Kirby’s original timeline/cycle/whatever! He finds himself back in New York and discovers that Professor Martyn is in jail for his murder! It seems that in this cycle they did the experiment also, and everybody blamed Martyn for Kirby’s dissaparence. In fact:

Kirby’s reappearance causes quite a stir, and Martyn is released from jail and presumably scientist are taken off the terrorism watch list. There’s then a chunk of the story that explores some of the alternative history of this cycle of the Earth:

That bit about Teddy Roosevelt and the Great War of 1812 is weird – in our “cycle” of course Roosevelt wasn’t born until 1858, and the “Great War” of 1812 seems to imply that WWI happened nearly a hundred years earlier. I guess that this is some of that “accelerating advancement” stuff that is inherent to these cycles, but I wonder why the author chose those particulars. Guess we’ll just have to wait for the book by Kirby and Martyn. Anyway, who cares, because tomorrow Kirby is going to travel the cycles again in search of Vinda, whom he now realizes he’s passionately in love with. Of course, the inescapable logic of this cyclic universe crap leads to some odd musings:

So that’s it, the very first piece of original sci fi written for Amazing Stories. It’s an odd one, and I don’t know why the author wanted to write a follow up – honestly, to me, the ending of the first part feels perfectly satisfactory. I think the interesting thing is how, in these early days of pulp sci-fi, the fantastical elements of modern physics and invention has an absolute stranglehold on the imagination. These kind of way-out ideas, like a device that makes you grow so huge that you experience time in a fundamentally different way, are a lot of fun and also speak to a very different mode of science fiction. In a couple years, E.E. “Doc” Smith will start publishing his Skylark stories in Amazing, and that’ll be a huge change – those stories, and Smith in general, kind of invent the Space Opera subgenre, and two-fisted thrilling action sci-fi comes to quickly dominate the early pulps. Similarly, socialist science fiction writers in the 30s, as well as the general collapse of the economy in the Great Depression, will lead to a newer, grimmer, more psychologically and socially oriented flavor of sci-fi. But in these early years of the genre, and particularly as envisioned by Gernsback, there’s a real, honest-to-goodness “gee whiz” style to these stories, not necessarily in a kiddie way; rather, there’s real excitement about invention and imagination in them, and an emphasis on humans interacting with weirdness on the bleeding edge of science. They’re fun, is the thing, and they’re also so very original, that they’re honestly just a pleasure to read.

Strained Pulp #2: “A Square of Canvas” by Anthony Rud (Weird Tales #2, April 1923)

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I promise these won’t all be about stories from Weird Tales! I’ve got some stuff from Amazing Stories, Black Mask, and Astounding that I want to hit eventually, but Weird Tales is such a huge, important magazine, and its story is so interesting, that we’re definitely going to be seeing a lot of it. And this week is no exception, with Anthony Rud’s (kind of unpleasant) story of grisly murder, art, and madness, “A Square of Canvas.”

This is the second issue of Weird Tales, from May, 1923, with a cover by (I think) R.M. Mally. You can definitely tell that Baird is still trying to find his footing with the stories and general thrust of the magazine. Take a look at this little descriptor above the ToC:

It’s interesting for a couple of reasons, one being that there’s a lot of “two-part” stories, meaning that they’re being spread across multiple issues. This is something that you see a fair amount in Weird Tales, especially early on, and man, did the readers hate it. Lots of miffed letters complaining about how annoying it is to wait for a month to find out the next part of the story, with all the attendant dangers of forgetting what happened or missing an issue. It’s obviously an attempt at hooking an audience, since it’s used a LOT in the Baird era (1923-1924), even though the magazine is incredibly long at that point and could easily have accommodated these longer pieces; this issue, #2, is nearly 200 pages! You’ll see some things split up later on, but after Baird leaves and Wright takes over, there’s an effort to avoid it, much to the appreciation of the readers.

The second interesting thing in that little description is the “interesting, odd, and weird happenings” bit, which refers to things like this:

These goofy little articles appear as page filler below the endings of stories throughout these early issues, unattributed and unsubstantiated and generally of a broadly defined “weird” flavor. The one above seems tenuously related at best (a brief allusion to “spook” plays seeming to be the only weird thing to recommend it), but it DOES have a common thread with a lot of the other “strange interludes” scattered throughout the magazine: a scientific bent. Here’s another:

(As a side note, this one is 100% false – the earliest human remains in South America date to, at the oldest, 40,000 years, though most workers accept 26,000 years before present as much more likely).

A lot of these, as mentioned above, are science-y at least, although there’re also a fair number of “horrible murders” included. But you can really see by their inclusion that the idea of “weird fiction” is still being hashed out; there’s a lot of strange, abortive attempts at including things like this in the magazine, seeing what sticks and what doesn’t, conceptually, as weird. Baird, a fan of crime fiction and a veteran of the detective pulps, clearly thought stuff like this was important, since he actively solicits “weird shit that happened to you!” in the back of this issue:

These sorts of things eventually go away, replaced by art or better page layouts that eliminate white space, but ALSO because the second editor, Farnsworth Wright, hated this shit. Time and time again, he studiously ignores the calls from readers in The Eerie to include “real life” ghost stories, Fortean-type reports of weird stuff, and even “strange dreams” that readers wanted to submit. Wright (thankfully) had a clearer, exclusively literary idea of what the weird genre could be, and took a lot of strong editorial decisions to put it into practice.

But that’s all in the future! Here, in May of 1923, with Baird at the helm, we’ve got the second issue of Weird Tales, and it’s really not good! The only recognizable names on the ToC are Farnsworth Wright, Otis Kline (who will be hired alongside Wright by Baird after this issue as a reader and editorial assistant) and Anthony Rud. Reading through the issue, what really stands out is how much crime/murder stories still dominate Weird Tales – there’s some occultism and some supernaturalism, a monster here or there, and some weird science, but a solid half of these stories are just “watch this psycho brutalize someone.” Which brings us to our story today, Rud’s “A Square of Canvas.”

Now, first thing first – this is not a good story per se. There’s some neat bits, and it’s interesting (though ultimately inconsequential) that the narrator is a woman. But there’s also some real unpleasantness here in the form of cruelty to animals, so be warned! What makes it worthy of contemplation, at least in my mind, is that it’s a very early version of the “Freaky Artist” trope, which has a long history in both horror and weird fiction. Perhaps its most famous expression will come in 1927, when H.P. Lovecraft publishes “Pickman’s Model” in Weird Tales, but Rud’s take on it here is a striking early example.

It starts, as these things often do, in a sanitarium:

This is a fun bit of dialog, very vital and effective; you can feel the urging and the eagerness of the speaker who, clearly, is coming off a little intense. It also employs one of weird fiction’s most versatile and fun little tricks, the mixing of fact with fiction. This weirdo is trying to convince a woman that, while he recognizes that he’s in an insane asylum full of people who think they’re famous figures from history, HE at least is who he says he is, and he does this by referencing a portrait of himself done by Gauguin and hanging in the Met! A fun little example of something very much specific to the weird genre, this blending of reality with strangeness.

The woman Hal Pemberton is speaking to is, it turns out, also an artist, and so she is certainly familiar with the Gauguin portrait he’s speaking of. With a gasp she realizes that she DOES recognize this guy – he’s older, with greyer hair and more wrinkles, but he DOES in fact resemble the picture! Gratified by this, Pemberton confides in her that he has been imprisoned in this institution by mistake, and hopes that, by unfolding his tale, this unnamed woman will help to get him released, for he is an Artist, and has much Great Work to do!

This begins the the meat of the story; Pemberton, the scion of an affluent family, has a hard time in school as a child. He finds his lessons boring, and in fact the only thing he takes pleasure in is tormenting his classmates. He likes to pinch them, kick them, pull their hair, eventually graduating to full on brawls. He loses as many of them as he wins, but for Pemberton, that’s beside the point. What he likes is pain:

This is pretty good writing – you get a reeeeeeeal uncomfortable feeling reading this, a pretty effective sense of a deeply and fundamentally fucked-up kid. You also probably see where this is going by this point; unfortunately, the story is going to take its time to get there, with some unpleasant detours along the way.

Pemberton ends up getting kicked out of school and goes through a succession of tutors, all of whom are implied to have quiet as a result of Pemberton’s weirdness or stubborn refusal to learn. His last tutor makes the mistake of leaving him alone with some live beetles that they’re studying, and Pemberton does the thing that you knew was coming. He tortures the beetles, and while he’s doing it he sketches something, specifically using their agony and suffering to fuel whatever it is he’s drawing. His tutor returns and sees what he’s done, but also sees the drawing he’s made. Hilariously, his horror at his pupil’s cruelty leads him to quit, but not before telling Pemberton’s dad that he’s a good artist and should be sent to art school. Can you imagine that scene? “Hal’s a fuckin’ sadistic little creep, but damn can he draw!”

Pemberton is exiled to Paris to study art, where he’s perfectly competent but not as “inspired” as he was with the beetles. Again, you know what’s going to happen, but it doesn’t make it any less unpleasant of a read. There’s some very unpleasant stuff with some rabbits and a horse, and a through-line of the need for escalating violence to spur the artistic inspiration sought after by Pemberton. It’s all quite ugly. I do think it’s interesting how Rud clearly makes his freaky artist a sadist for ARTIST REASONS ONLY; there’s not a hint of sadistic sexuality in this story, not even an upcoming section where you’d expect it. I wonder if there was any in the original and it got cut or edited out? From the editorial statements of Baird, there’s a clear worry, even this early on, that people might think Weird Tales was a little too degenerate for public consumption, so it could’ve been removed. But it also might reflect Rud’s actual intention – he wants to focus on weirdness, and, honestly, a freak who does the sort of shit that’s in this story not for fetishistic but, rather, purely aesthetic reasons is way weirder than some run-of-the-mill sadosexual guy.

Pemberton’s new art is a big hit, initially, but when his teacher in Paris learns about how he went about getting inspired for its creation, he’s horrified. The story gets out and Pemberton is ruined in Europe; so he flees to America where, the facts unknown, his animal-torture inspired work is a huge hit! Oddly, this leads to Pemberton becoming a famous and rich portraitist of the moneyed elite – is that a bit of subtle satire from Rud? Pemberton, whose work is inspired by brutal violence inflicted on the innocent, somehow just resonates with these high society types and becomes their go-to guy for getting a portrait done. Is he, with his horrible insight, capturing something of the truth about these people?

Whether satirical or just silly, Pemberton meets his wife, Beatrice, through this work, and they fall in love, get married, and have a daughter. Now, at this point, interestingly, Pemberton has basically renounced his older work and has chosen to stick to mundane portraits. The trouble is, he’s bored to death by it all, but he’s scared to try and recreate his “experiments” because he knows they might not be enough for him anymore. Trying to stave off despair at his artistic blockage, he abandons portraiture for landscapes, choosing as his subject “dirty, sordid, or powerful” scenes. These include fish markets, ghetto streets, and industrial seascapes; the implication here is that he’s seeking out grim and gritty realism, trying to find the spark of abjectness that always gave his art the fire he was after, but he can’t quite get it.

Finally, driven to a frenzy by his need to produce “real” work, he escapes to the countryside, buys a horse, and does his awful thing, producing a canvas that he calls “Cannibalism.” Now, this is the only real description in the story of the product of his particular method, and it suggests that the cruelty and torture are a sort of spiritual or emotional inspiration for him, since the painting he produces doesn’t have anything to do with horses (rather, it’s a casually racist depiction of “savages gorging themselves on human flesh”). It’s not fully satisfying to Pemberton though, and it almost gets him in trouble when it’s exhibited; his wife ends up making him burn it. But the artistic failure just makes his need all that much greater.

You know where this is all going.

In an inversion of Dante, Pemberton tortures his Beatrice to death, finally creating a painting he’s happy with. The servants, horrified, call the police and Pemberton, afraid that they’ll destroy his masterpiece, hides it. He’s taken in, tried, convicted, but found insane and sent to the asylum. Interestingly, there’s a little interlude in his imprisonment:

That’s a weird part, right? It’s very enigmatical – it COULD be that Pemberton’s society pals like him and want to help him out and send him to Tahiti (where he meets and gets painted by Gauguin), but there’s the odd bit about them basically keeping him under lock and key and forcing him to paint. Are they providing him with “inspiration” too? This part, very creepily, sort of implies that there’s this snuff-painting ring being run with Pemberton at its heart, not that he’s interested; all he can think about is his masterpiece hidden away in his old house. Anyway, let’s wrap this up:

That’s it, The End of “A Square of Canvas” by Anthony Rud.

First thing first: gotta love an italicized ending, right? Just a real classic move, and they’re always delightful when you encounter them. This one is a little strange, and leaves you (or me, at least) with a few questions. Obviously Pemberton is off his onion, but in what way, specifically? Did the torture and murder of his wife break his last tenuous grasp on reality, or is his whole story a fabrication, start to finish? Maybe you’re just supposed to be shocked that, after all this build-up, there’s not even a painting to “justify” it all? Or has Pemberton realized his true art is in the monstrous acts, and no representation of them can ever come close? Maybe Rud just got tired of writing, figured he’d locked in his quarter-of-a-cent per word, and moved on to something else? Dunno! S’weird though, which I reckon is what counts.

The whole story is interesting, although like I said, the animal torture stuff is extremely distasteful – it’s not overly graphic, but for me it’s plenty, and I can’t fault anyone for not wanting to read it. Like I said way up above somewhere, though, I do think it’s really interesting as an early (and possibly influential) example of the Mad Artist trope, something that’s nearly as well represented in weird fiction as the Mad Scientist. Both of them posit an answer to C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” dilemma, which is that both disciplines, striving towards some kind of transcendent truth, can lead to madness, ultimately. It’s a deep part of horror and weird fiction; I’d lay good money that it started with E.T.A. Hoffmann’s murderous jeweler in “Mademoiselle de Scudéry,” but it’s all over the pulps.

Lovecraft has a number of mad artists in his stories, the most notable being the painter Richard Upton Pickman from “Pickman’s Model.” In that story, the SHOCKING TWIST is that Pickman, a painter of horrendous and terrible phantasmagoric scenes, is actually a strict REALIST, and he’s been painting not nightmare visions but, rather, accurate representations of real life scenes!!!!!! That’s a story worth reading, by the way, and one I kind of suspect has some kind of relationship to this story – we know Lovecraft was a Weird Tales reader from the get-go, so he certainly read this story, although I don’t know if he ever mentioned it in his voluminous letters. But there’re some things that seem to connect the two – the chatty narration from a character, the emphasis on horror revealed in art, even the description of Pemberton’s “Cannibalism” seems to resonate with Pickman’s “Ghouls Feeding” painting mentioned in Lovecraft’s story.

We tend (rightly) to talk about how the modern scientific age influenced weird fiction (and sci fi, of course) – Deep Time and evolution displaced Paley’s Watchmaker and humanity’s centrality in Nature, an absolute necessity in weird fiction’s decentering of humans in favor of stranger and older forces and agencies. Similarly, early atomic science discovered the reality of invisible and heretofore unmeasurable rays and energies; in a world of X-rays and radiation, who knows what alien processes may be impinging on our placid, narrow little lives? But of equal importance to these revolutions in the sciences are the contemporaneous upheavals occurring in the arts and humanities in the early 20th century. Modernism and Futurism are as big a part of the weird fiction story as Darwinism and astronomy, and the idea of art as a dangerous door to the unknown and madness is one of the major themes of outré literature. Actually, it’s interesting that Rud writes a science horror story for the first issue of Weird Tales, and then produces this mad artist tale for the second issue! Just goes to show how intricately interwoven these ideas are in the history of weird fiction!

Straining Pulp #1: “The Closing Hand” by Farnsworth Wright

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Alright! I wanna talk about classic weird fiction and pulp sci-fi and shit like that, so I’m gonna do it here! Very cleverly I’ve titled the series “Straining Pulp,” because it’s me sifting and winnowing old pulp magazines (thanks archive dot org!) and talking about stories I find interesting or noteworthy or fun. I’ll probably bop around a bunch of ’em as my mood takes me, but I figured I’d start with a magazine that is very important to me personally, pulps generally, and pop culture broadly. That’s right, it’s WEIRD TALES #1, from March 1923!!!!!

(Just a heads-up, I’m 100% going to spoiling these stories, so chase ’em down and read ’em aforehand if you want!)

First thing to note is the price on the cover there! 25 cents! There’s a misconception generally that pulp magazines were dirt cheap, but 25 cents in 1923 is something like 5 or 6 dollars today. Not gonna break the bank buying this copy of The Unique Magazine, but still… $6 for a magazine is respectable, you know? These weren’t penny-an-issue cheapos for the kiddie crowd to spend their milk money on, is what I’m saying.

Anyway, this is the very first issue of Weird Tales. Its editor at the time was Edwin Baird, a figure of some importance in the history of the detective/crime pulps, but at this point he’s got himself a job working for Rural Publications, editing both “Weird Tales” and “Real Detective Tales” at the same time. There’s a lot of animus towards Baird today; people tend to think that he hated horror and ghost stories, but I don’t think there’s any real evidence for that. He certainly had a PREFERENCE for crime fiction, but who among us doesn’t have their likes and dislikes, right? It’s important to recognize that, Joshi be damned, there’s no such thing as “weird fiction” until the invention of WEIRD TALES magazine – up to this point there was just a disparate morass of “goose-flesh” stories. It’s a topic for another time, but it’s clear that Baird is fighting his entire tenure against the fact that there’re some serious growing pains going on among the readership (and writers) as they try and decide on WHAT a “weird tale” is, exactly. Most of Baird’s comments in the Eerie (the reader letters section of the mag) start off with him telling people what NOT to send to the magazine. He’s seeing some seriously shitty writing in his time, and it’s definitely effecting his mood!

Case in point: this first issue is, honestly, a mess. The cover story, “Ooze,” gets a good painting by R. R. Epperly who, I think, never did another cover for them ever. The weird thing is that in the story the monster is very much a blobby pile of gunk (an “ooze” if you will) but the painting shows what is clearly an tentacular octopus of some sort. Still, I like its haunted eyes. Also, what’s that dude going to do with a shotgun in one hand and a cutlass in the other? Pick one, man!

As an aside, “Ooze” is a fairly middling story – got a fair bit of the ugly racism (and classism!) of the time in it, so be aware if you decide to chase it down. What is interesting is that it’s much more of a sci-fi story than what you’d think of as a “weird tale.” Of course, science fiction didn’t exist yet either (no matter what anyone will tell you!) since Hugo Gernsback’s magazine AMAZING STORIES wasn’t published until 1926. In these early days, and especially before there were dedicated sci-fi magazines, there’s a fair amount of it in Weird Tales, so much so that there’d be huge running gun battles in The Eerie about whether “planet stories” were weird enough for Weird Tales. It’s an interesting point in the evolution of both genres, and it’s right there from the get-go in Weird Tales #1.

But, anyway, Baird has a hard job – Weird Tales was really the first NEW genre in the pulps, and there wasn’t a depth of writing or writers to draw from, and it shows! Check out this ad, right there on the 4th page of the magazine, just after the ToC:

It’s an advertisement for ITSELF, right there in the magazine, trying to give the reader a way to approach this collection of stories. It’s super interesting to see the creation of a genre in real time in the magazine itself!

Interestingly, the story we’re going to look at today is written by Farnsworth Wright. Wright would step into the editorship of Weird Tales after Baird leaves in 1924, and is probably one of the most important figures in the early history of horror (something for another time, too). At this point, Wright is just a writer; he’ll get another story in the next issue of Weird Tales, at which point he’ll be hired by Baird as an editorial assistant. But, on to his story:

“The Closing Hand” is super short; a scant two-page haunted house story. The writing is overwrought to the point of parody, which I think was Wright’s intention. This isn’t juvenilia; Wright had written and been published in college and afterwards too, and his literary sophistication is evident from those pieces. I think Wright is using this short story to distill the haunted house tale down to it’s barest, most elemental parts, and to do that he’s got to speed-run the language used. Here’s the beginning; note the ripe-to-the-point-of-fermenting purple prose used to set the scene:

Rich, sloppy, bubbling language; it’d be self-indulgent if it was meant to be taken seriously. To be clear, it’s not tongue-in-cheek either; it’s Wright going overboard, reveling in the cliched conventions of the haunted house. There’s decay and abandonment and the aura of wrongness about this place, all very standardized to the point of banality.

We’re then introduced to the victims of the story: two sisters, an elder sceptic and a younger ‘fraidy cat convinced that the terrible old house is haunted. Of course they’ve been left alone, sleeping up in an attic while their mother is out at, I dunno, one of Gatsby’s parties or something. The younger sister wishes they’d gone with her, but the older sister scolds her, pointing out that SOMEONE had to stay in the house because of all the silverware. Get a dog guys, damn!

The younger sister than helpfully provides some exposition:

Not gonna find that in the zillow listing, lemme tell you what!

Anyway, the inevitable happens: there are furtive sounds in the night from downstairs, and the older sister heads off to investigate, leaving the scared younger sister alone in the upstairs room. And then she doesn’t come back.

Wind rattles the house, and then there’re strange creeping sounds, as if someone (or…someTHING!!!!) is ascending the stairs towards the attic bedroom. The younger sister begins to imagine what it could be, what horror is climbing towards her, and this is where the story gets the most fun; the sister rattles through a list of the basic horror tropes, scared in turn by the idea it might be a ghost, an undead body fresh from the grave (and “gibbering in terror it could not tear the cerements from its face” which is a great image…the horror itself is frightened by its condition!), a wild animal, or a murderer who, having killed her sister, has come up to finish the job. Then, something enters the dark room, crawling towards the bed…the younger sister reaches out, searching for the thing that comes ever closer, closer, closer, until her hand is suddenly gripped in an iron, cold claw and…she faints!

Here’s the end:

Not necessarily the most surprising of endings, sure, but I think it’s interesting for two reasons: 1) it’s pretty gruesome! That’s something Weird Tales, as the magazine where the genre was being created, would have to constantly deal with (maybe we’ll end up talking about C.M. Eddy’s story “The Loved Dead” one of these days…) but also 2) it’s interesting to me that Wright, the future editor of Weird Tales, was writing a barebones genre study in the very first issue of the magazine. I mean, there’s not really any other way to look at this story: it’s like the most economical haunted house tale you could write: 1) Here’s the spooky old house; 2) some victims discussing its spooky old history; 3) something spooky happens to separate them; 4) one of them produces a list of the various spooky things that could happen to the one left behind on their own; 5) oh shit something spooky is happening to the one left behind!!!!

Here’s the thing: Weird Tales is a new magazine. There’s literally been nothing like it on the market before. There’ve been ghost stories and such published in things like Argosy, sure, but here’s a magazine DEVOTED to this inchoate thing they’ve decided to call “the weird tale.” A big part of the magazine is everybody figuring out what that means…what the hell is a “weird tale?” So you end up with a cover story that’s science fiction, and a story by the future editor of the magazine that is dissecting one of the classic expressions of outré literature, the haunted house story. And that’s important, given the way Baird, as the editor, really goes out of his way on many different occasions to tell people not to submit derivative crap.

I think that makes “The Closed Hand” an interesting story – it’ll never be anthologized, because AS A STORY it’s not particularly interesting. But as an exercise, as a genre study, I think it’s really a worthwhile document that shows how, in 1923 at the birth of the formalized “weird tale,” you have people wrasslin’ with these ideas and conventions and clichés, trying to determine what works and what doesn’t, what needs to be discarded and what needs to be explored. That’s fascinating, and it’s fun to get the chance to see how both writers and readers at the time were navigating the dark waters of weird fiction.