Art
Pulp’s gumshoes, Martian invaders get their due
01:00 AM EST on Sunday, March 11, 2007
Brown University’s Public Humanities Program hosts Pulp Uncovered, a community festival celebrating the impact and legacy of pulp fiction magazines Thursday through next Sunday. The festival includes a film series, guest speakers and an exhibition at the John Nicholas Brown Center.
A beautiful dame walks into a room. A murderous man follows.
Or maybe it’s a Martian. It’s hard to tell. The lights are low.
Meanwhile, across town, a detective slams back whiskey and waits by the phone.
Pulp fiction makes its move.
This week the literary genre that helped shape the nation gets its due: Pulp Uncovered. It’s a four-day festival at Brown, Thursday through Sunday, featuring films, talks, exhibits and tours.
While the heyday of pulps has passed, their influence has not.
“Pulp fiction helped create the visual cultural icons we have today,” says Scott Tiffany, the festival’s director. “We think Batman is Batman and Zorro is Zorro and the gumshoe is the gumshoe, but they all come from somewhere.”
That somewhere is the 1920s and ’30s. That’s when pulps peaked. Now their history, legacy and artistry are celebrated.
“It still exists in a general way through things such as Star Wars, Star Trek and Stephen King,” Tiffany says. “It exists through the modern creators of our culture today. As a thing itself, you see it in the comics and graphic novels.”
Pulp fiction, according to Tiffany, a graduate student in Brown’s public humanities program, means many things.
It’s a catch-all term for lots of literary topics once deemed fringe: fantasy, horror, science fiction, adventure, westerns and detective stories.
And, just as important, it refers to the type of treatment given these topics: unpretentious, somewhat salacious, and accessible to the masses.
“Once the magazines resorted to cheap pulp paper and printed in black and white, the cost was cut in half,” Tiffany says. “So the working class could afford to buy them.”
Before pulp magazines, periodicals produced for the middle and lower classes were limited, according to Tiffany. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, magazines — such The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s Weekly — were called “the slicks,” suggestive of their thick, glossy paper, which not everyone could afford.
“They were geared to a higher-end audience,” Tiffany says.
When the relatively inexpensive pulp paper began to be used, prices fell and audiences grew.
At first, the magazines offered a variety of story styles — horror, western, detective, etc. — in a given edition. Then, to meet demand, publishers produced more magazines — Dime Detective, Horror Stories and Marvel Tales — specializing in particular genres.
“Writers let their imaginations loose to come up with all kinds of stories,” Tiffany says. “You get Batman, which was featured in a pulp series. It’s not the Batman you and I know. It’s not Adam West. But he has a costume and the mission to save us from bad guys.”
You get Buck Rogers, Conan the Barbarian, Tarzan and The Shadow, among others. Some of the 20th century’s best writers produced pulp: Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Chandler, Stephen Crane, Dashiell Hammett, O. Henry, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams and Providence’s own H.P. Lovecraft.
Of course, Tiffany says, there were lots of other writers, too, collectively offering a great range of writing, from “quality to just trash.”
At pulp’s peak, about 150 magazines were produced for men, according to Tiffany, and about 50 for women, although the audiences for both genders were about equal; men just had more choices.
A pulp magazine’s appearance was important.
“The cover is the main thing,” Tiffany says. “Inside, the magazines have scanty black-and-white illustrations. They had a lot of loosely clad women. The cover was everything. You had to have a great cover to get you to pick the magazine off the rack.”
One of the most enduring cultural icons from the pulps is the gritty gumshoe detective.
“It is a direct contrast to the Victorian detective,” Tiffany says. “Sherlock Holmes was wealthy and lived in a nice place and worked for wealthy clients. That was fiction for the upper classes.
“The hardboiled detective is a working-class guy. He’s street smart and the wealthy hire him to solve their problems. The detective has almost a disdain for the upper class, but they’re paying his bill.”
Think of Peter Falk as the TV character Columbo, or Garrison Keillor as Guy Noir on radio’s Prairie Home Companion.
The same goes for science fiction, according to Tiffany.
“If it wasn’t for the pulps, Star Trek wouldn’t exist today, or it would have come a generation later.”
Another major genre with roots in pulps and in Providence is horror, brought to the masses by H.P. Lovecraft.
“Lovecraft takes things from outer space and has them invade your house,” Tiffany says. “All these aliens and monsters we think of come from the mindset of H.P. Lovecraft, who gives horror to the masses.”
Lovecraft was born, raised and buried in Providence, where he lived almost all 46 years of his life, which ended March 15, 1937. It’s not a coincidence the Pulp Uncovered festival coincides with the date.
“Lovecraft wasn’t recognized in his own time as a master of horror,” Tiffany says. “He was stuck between writing for the low-brow working class and being a better writer, though he was never recognized for that. He kind of languished, writing for these pulps that he hated. It was all he could ever do, was write for the pulps.”
In honor of Lovecraft’s contributions to the history of pulp fiction, and the 70th anniversary of his death, the festival includes a couple of tours devoted to his College Hill haunts.
Here’s the schedule:
THURSDAY
6 p.m., keynote address by pulp writer and historian Will Murray in Room 106 of Smith-Buonanno Hall, off Brown Street between Meeting and Cushing streets.
7 p.m. opening of exhibition “Pulp Uncovered: How Pulp Magazines Changed America,” at the John Nicholas Brown Center, 357 Benefit St.
9:30 p.m., Pulp Uncovered film series, by the Cable Car Cinema and RISD in honor of the conference, begins at the Cable Car204 South Main St, with a showing of Alphaville (1965). Tickets to all showings are $8, $6 for students. Visit www.PulpUncovered.com for more filminformation and any changes in scheduling
FRIDAY
Noon, talk by S.T. Joshi, a H.P. Lovecraft scholar and Brown alumnus, at the John Nicholas Brown Center.
6:15 p.m., Pulp Uncovered film series: Pulp Western Night at the Cable Car.
7 p.m., panel discussion at the Ladd Observatory, 210 Doyle Ave., on H.P. Lovecraft’s interest in outer space.
SATURDAY
11 a.m., “H.P. Lovecraft Life and Works Walking Tour” begins at the Van Wickle Gates at the corner of College and Prospects streets; tickets are $10 and reservations are recommended: (401) 273-7507 ext. 62, bbarnes@rihs.org.
Pulp Uncovered film series continues at Cable Car and RISD Auditorium, in Market Square at College and South Main streets.
•11 a.m. Metropolis (1927), RISD
•1:30 p.m. Badlands (1973), Cable Car
•3:30 p.m. 2046 (2004), Cable Car
•6:15 p.m. Nosferatu (1922), RISD
•8:15 p.m. The Big Heat (1953), RISD
4 p.m., a discussion on the portrayal of minorities, sexuality and gender in pulp magazines, “The Femme Fatale and the Gumshoe: Gender in the Pulps.”
7 p.m., Pulp Plays, playwrights present readings of pulp-magazine-inspired plays commissioned for the festival at the John Nicholas Brown Center.
NEXT SUNDAY
Pulp Uncovered film series continues at Cable Car and RISD.
•11 a.m. H.P. Lovecraft Film Shorts, RISD.
•1:30 p.m. The Thing from Another World (1951), Cable Car.
•3:30 p.m. Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Cable Car.
•6:15 p.m. The Maltese Falcon (1941), RISD.
•8:15 p.m. Double Indemnity (1944), RISD.
1 p.m., “H.P. Lovecraft as Preservationist: A Walking Tour of Providence’s East Side” begins at Shakespeare’s Head, 21 Meeting St.; tickets are $10; reservations (401) 831-7440.
3 p.m., “The Art of Pulp Fiction,” local artists talk about the influence of pulp fiction magazines on their work at RISD Museum, 224 Benefit St.
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