Bacchus’s writeup on shudder pulps continues

It can be hard, sometimes, to determine whether a particular bit of social pressure is censorship proper (an exercise of government suppression) or “merely” public censure of a particularly robust but more informal kind. It’s the difference between Carrie Nation’s hatchet-wielding saloon-smashers and the formal Act of Prohibition of 1918, if you will; the distinction is strong in theory and rather less important in practice. There was definitely some of both sorts deployed against the most scandalous of the pulps of the late 1930s, and given the extra-legal impulses of machine politicians of the era, clear lines will not always possible to draw.

The most notable — and most often cited — bit of anti-shudder-pulp fulmination and agitation must surely be the nine pages of derisive criticism vomited forth by Bruce Henry in the conservative magazine The American Mercury in April of 1938 under the title “Horror On The Newsstands”. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but the first paragraph alone will set you on the road to understanding the tone:

This month, as every month, some 1,580,000 copies of terror magazines, known to the trade as “the shudder group”, will be sold throughout the nation. Between their frankly lascivious front covers and their advertisements for masculine pep tablets in the rear, these titillating contributions to American belles lettres will contain enough illustrated sex perversion to give Krafft-Ebing the unholy jitters. Never, in fact, since the popularity of the Marquis de Sade, has civilzation seen such a plethora of Frankensteinian literature as is now circulating in this land of peace and good-will. France may have her Grand Guignol, Spain her wartime atrocities, but only in America is it possible for the masses to go in for vicarious Torquemadian exercises through the simple expedient of patronizing the nearest newsstand.

Interestingly, though Henry disapproves of the shudder pulps at great and vituperative length, he nowhere calls for their censorship. It is not inconceivable that The American Mercury’s own 1927 brush with obscenity prosecution explains this restraint; editor H.L. Mencken was tried and acquitted, and an issue of his magazine declared unmailable by the U.S. Postal Service. No, Henry’s article is literary criticism at its most dismissive, but it’s no call for censorship.

Other hints of public disapproval also find their way into the pulp-aficionado accounts of shudder-pulp history. For instance, in Pulp Horrors Of The Dirty Thirties (an essay found in The Pulpster, excerpted here) Don Hutchison writes that in “the early 1940s” “there developed a public rejection of the permissiveness and thrill-seeking of the thirties… As shudder pulp stalwart Bruno Fischer described it “Clean-up organizations started throwing their weight around and gave editors jitters, and artists and writers were instructed to put panties and brassieres on the girls.” Sadly no context for the Bruno Fischer quote is offered.

To be continued.

[Editor’s note: When I first started posting pulp covers here at Erotic Mad Science, I noticed something unusual, which is is that beginning in the 1930s publishers were willing to put forth some remarkably — and to my dirty mind, enjoyably — lurid material on their covers. But this phenomenon of the “shudder pulps” got throttled back dramatically sometime around 1940. Many pulps just went plain out of business, and those that continued to publish did so with considerably tamer art. Puzzled at this phenomenon, I commissioned my friend Bacchus of ErosBlog, a man with a working Internet connection and a bulldog’s instincts wherever anything licentious might be found, to produce a research series on the question of why the shudder pulps faded so quickly. Bacchus’s extensive write-up of his discoveries will be running at mid-day here at Erotic Mad Science for the next few weeks, and I hope you all find it as enjoyable and informative as I did.

The blazing cometary arc of the shudder pulps is variously explained by different authors. Wikipedia, which along with some other authors prefers to call them “wierd menace” pulps, cites a definitive start date for the genre of 1933, but puts their demise in the “early 1940s”, attributing it to a vaguely-explained “censorship backlash.”

Other accounts have similar dates but offer more varied reasons. Blogger Todd Tjersland’s account of shudder pulp genesis is the standard one:

[T]he “Weird Menace” genre, a bizarre type of erotic horror story that was extremely popular in the 1930s, [was] hitting its peak between 1934-1937 and dying out by 1942. Weird Menace got its start in the pages of Popular Publications’ DIME DETECTIVE MAGAZINE (1933); brisk sales caused the genre to branch out into three “all weird menace, all the time” sister magazines: TERROR TALES (1934), HORROR STORIES (1935) and SINISTER STORIES (1940).

His account of their demise is also fairly standard:

Culture Publications legendary “Spicy” series…were considered so “hot” they had to be sold under the counter, often stripped of their lurid covers. … By the early 1940s, the “Spicy” line had become so notorious that it had trouble finding distribution thanks to censorship; Culture quickly changed the word “Spicy” in the title to “Speed” but it was a short-lived ruse that failed to save the line. Censorship (and the real life horrors of World War II) contributed to the decline and demise of Popular Publications’ weird menace titles around the same time.

If you would criticize Tjersland’s brief account for vagueness, do not; I selected it from among dozens precisely for its brevity. Any deficiencies in detail and citation it may have, it shares with other accounts that are more opinionated and much more lengthy; but for our purposes, it serves admirably. In a nutshell, it introduces the three main factors most often cited for the decline of risque pulps in general and the shudder pulps in particular:

• Censorship
• Distribution difficulties
• Changing popular tastes, due to the war or to the rise of alternative entertainments

However “censorship” and many distribution “distribution” difficulties collapse into a single factor upon consideration; official disapproval and legal sanction, after all, can be a big part of what makes it difficult to put magazines on newsstands where customers can buy them.

In addition, some authors have suggested additional factors, including:

• Wartime resource constraints on paper, labor, or printing supplies
• Easing of depression-era economic pressures that may have brought distribution partners such as newsstand owners into a more risque business than they were comfortable remaining in once business got better

The research has focused primarily on censorship, and the related distribution problems that are, as noted, too closely intertwined with it to be separated. The goal has been to get specific. What where the censorship pressures that the industry faced? Who went to jail? Whose doors had to close in the night? Where information supporting or debunking one of the other factors has come to light, it is noted; but the focus of effort has been on the censorship questions.

To be continued…