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CHAPTER 1
A Total Assault on the Culture?
Pulp and Popular Fiction during the Long Sixties
As has been widely celebrated, derided, and mythologized, the 1960s was a time of significant social and political change across the world. Decolonization, second-wave feminism, mass opposition to conscription and the Vietnam War, Black Power, wildcat strikes, campus ferment, lesbian and gay liberation, a flood of "hip and groovy" consumer items, and the radical countercultural group the White Panthers' infamous call (channeling poet and social activist Ed Sanders) for "a Total Assault on the Culture by any means necessary, including rock 'n' roll, dope and fucking in the streets" — all of these swirled together in a surge of radical and rebellious ideas and practices challenging everyday life and existing structures. In some cases it transformed them, while in others it merely retooled them for continued exploitation and new forms of ennui. Given that many of the key social and political trends associated with the era extended back into the previous decade and didn't fully unfold until the mid1970s, some have come to label this extended period the "long sixties."
Inspired by, and part of, these revolutionary times were a host of wild and challenging novels. While many of these became intrinsic to the ferment and zeitgeist of the period, potboilers by the likes of Jacqueline Susann, Harold Robbins, and Arthur Hailey continued to dominate sales, with only the occasional breakthrough of left-field works from Rita Mae Brown, Kurt Vonnegut, Alex Haley, and Gore Vidal. For every novel and novelist who became iconic, hundreds have been forgotten and whole genres written off.
This collection brings a number of overlooked, entertaining, and revealing texts and writers from 1950 to 1980 back into the light. It also explores how popular culture in the form of fiction dealt with and portrayed the radicalism and social shifts of the era. Unable to cover the entire world, we concentrate on the United States, Australia, and the UK, three countries which all had homegrown publishing industries dealing in mass-market paperbacks and original paperback titles. Although this collection considers books dealing with dystopian and utopian near-future scenarios, the sheer volume of New Wave and other experimentation among science fiction will be covered in our next book, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1960 to 1985.
Sticking It to the Man's contributors mainly focus on novels that were aimed at a mass audience, written in an accessible style, or in genres that were then highly popular. Much of this output could be labeled "pulp" and was written quickly by dozens of little-known authors eager for their next advance and for whom mainstream publishing success remained elusive. Some of the books were penned by scribes who were successful in making it from the margins into the bestseller lists. Some of have become accepted and analyzed in academic and "highbrow" literary circles long after their original publication. Some aimed for and received such recognition upon release. Many remain undeservedly obscure.
The long sixties was not just a time of social and political upheaval but also took in the heyday of the paperback novel. During the mid to late 1940s this format displaced pulp magazines as the primary fictional and printed form of mass entertainment. By the 1950s, novels increasingly made their debut as paperbacks, and because paperback publishers put out more titles and often paid better rates than their more highbrow competitors, this allowed a growing number of authors to make it into print, if not sustain a comfortable living. Even with television making increasing inroads, novels remained hugely popular. By the 1970s medium-to-large publishers could still expect the majority of their successful releases to sell in the tens of thousands or more. Alongside these major firms, smaller outfits eked out reasonable profits through the production of pornography and genre fiction. Much of their output represented pale imitations of the books their bigger rivals were producing, but some of it was superior due to their propensity to take a chance on something different or unusual. This fiction, particularly in the fields of crime, erotica, thrillers, and romance, retained the approach of the 1930s magazine-based pulp: quickly written and produced for cheap thrills with a focus on action, titillation, and the sensational, and little expectation or view to posterity.
The thousands of novels produced from the 1950s to 1980 that deal with social change remain fascinating for a number of reasons. On a historical, cultural, and sociological level they give the modern reader an insight into how political and social transformations and challenges were portrayed and understood by authors, publishers, and readers. Many, probably the majority, of the authors responsible for these novels had little if any connection to the movements or communities depicted in their fiction. In many cases, their portrayals were negative and inaccurate, filled with salacious, hyperbolic, and sometimes reactionary observations and material befitting the sensational nature of the publishers they worked for. Nonetheless, these writers dealt with issues and communities few others in popular culture would touch, at the very least giving readers a sense that alternatives existed. This was particularly so up until the early 1960s when the culturally conformist and, in the case of the United States, McCarthyist atmosphere of the 1950s was beginning to be challenged. And even the books that are made up of the most reprehensible rubbish still provide an insight into the social mores, fears, and mind-sets of earlier times.
These novels not only reflected their times but also shaped them, providing new opportunities to air and explore progressive ideas or, alternatively, to ridicule and oppose them. The challenges posed in much of the fiction covered in this book increased as the years rolled on and the ranks of working novelists were swelled by active participants of the long sixties' political and cultural ferment. Pulp, erotica, and mass market fiction publishers' incessant appetite and need for new work to meet consumer demand had long provided outsiders a chance to break into writing and, within the editorial confines of the time and particular firms, spaces within which to expound alternative views. New opportunities arose for women, people of color, LGBTQI writers, former convicts, leftists, and others to get their work into print. Often this was via firms owned and operated by conservative, older white men trying to increase sales by sourcing work that would connect them with rapidly changing audience tastes. Sometimes it was via new entrepreneurs or movement-based and -influenced presses, such as Australia's left-nationalist Gold Star and the U.S. lesbian feminist Daughters Inc., who sought to defy the mainstream and print works that could find no other home. The examinations of popular fiction contained here provide insights into the lives and work of a range of writers, the industries within which they labored, and the changes all were experiencing.
This book makes no pretense at being a definitive history of the period it covers. Rather it presents a variety of mass-market fiction snapshots of the assault on culture mounted in U.S., UK, and Australian society in the 1960s, and the reaction from other parts to this, with all the omissions such an overview by definition presents. Present are the civil rights movement and the growth of Black Power across all three countries, as well as the white backlash against it. There is the rise of the New Left and its offshoots, the anarchists and Maoists, Weatherman and the Angry Brigade, antiwar protesters and draft resisters, and Yippies blending "smash the state" rhetoric with the mirthful and cultural approach of the hippies to court media attention and "turn on the kids." Although female writers, especially women of color, had far less opportunity than their male counterparts to get their experiences published, this era saw the beginning of second-wave feminism and its concept that "the personal is political," which feminists wielded to fight dismissals of their issues as something to be sorted out "after the revolution." There are the growing demands of gays and lesbians for equality, tolerance, and liberation, both pre- and post-Stonewall.
These books offer portrayals of the maelstrom of militants, activists, protesters, and everyday people who consciously threw themselves into movements and causes or got caught up in them; those who, inspired by urban revolts and disillusioned with their inability to stop the Vietnam War and gain equality, called for revolution; and those who stayed in the struggle or dropped back into apolitical workaday lives and interrupted careers, got involved with cults and New Age spirituality, wiped themselves out with drugs and booze, or entered what was called the "long march through institutions" via unions, universities, and government. Many novels offer wild, cartoonish takes on the lives and times of such people, while others successfully portrayed and catered to communities previously ignored by the publishing industry. Some did both.
Also present is the fictional counter or backlash to these radical movements, characters who hail from the intelligence services and law enforcement, those Vietnam veterans and disillusioned, often unhinged cops and members of the public who turned to vigilantism in the numerous lurid and over the top paperback men's adventure titles of the 1970s. All of them not only reflect the times but also popular fiction's insatiable demand for new material and plot lines.
Most importantly, the majority of the books covered within are entertaining. Some thrillingly so due to their fast-paced, action-packed, and unpredictable plots, chilling insights and heart wrenching pathos. Others are arresting and hilarious for all the wrong reasons. While some are only worthy of an amusing paragraph (our writers have read these all the way through to spare you the pain and effort), many are fascinating curios. This is despite, or more often because of, their blunderingly bad dialogue, woefully inaccurate "hep" patter, erratic plotting, and lack of continuity.
And then of course, there are the covers, of which we've included more than 350. Due to their lowbrow nature, few of these books were ever reviewed in major newspapers or magazines, instead relying on their lurid, eye-catching titles, images, and bylines to draw consumers passing through newsstands, chemists, barbers, supermarkets, and second-tier bookstores. And as with the stories they housed, the style and genius, or alternatively the pure awfulness, of these jackets unsurprisingly cuts through to the present.
Iain McIntyre and Andrew Nette
Survival Mode
The Crime Fiction of Chester Himes
Chester Himes became a crime fiction writer almost by accident. The creator of the Harlem Detective series, the man who gave us Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, as tough and furious a pair of cops as you'll find, wrote his thrillers grudgingly at first and until middle age showed no inclination to write genre fiction.
He'd published his first book, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), when he was thirty-six years old. By then, he'd experienced ejection from Ohio State University — for a prank he'd pulled — and imprisonment for armed robbery. Arrested in Ohio in 1928, given a sentence of twenty to twenty-five years, he wound up doing seven and a half years behind bars, and it was in jail that he started writing fiction. He was still incarcerated when his short stories began appearing in prestigious magazines such as Esquire. After his parole, Himes embarked on novels, and his first five were social realist works focused on race relations. One, Cast the First Stone (1952), later published in unabridged form as Yesterday Will Make You Cry (1998), told a stark tale about prison. Writing these novels, Himes achieved modest success, but in the meantime he needed to support himself. Transplanted to Los Angeles, he was able to find work in Hollywood. But what started out well quickly turned sour, as Himes described in Dear Chester, Dear John: Letters between Chester Himes and John A. Williams (2008):
I met the head of the reading department, I suppose they call it, you know, where they have people read the novels and write a one-page synopsis, which is all the producers read; they don't have time to read a book. So I was tried out by the young man who was head of this department at Warner Brothers. … Anyway, he offered me the job, and I was going to take it. I wrote a synopsis for The Magic Bow, a well-known book about Paganini, and submitted it. He said it was a good job and that they would employ me. And then — this is what he said: he was walking across the lot one day and he ran into Jack Warner and told him, "I have a new man, Mr. Warner, and I think he's going to work out very well indeed." Warner said, "That's fine, boy," and so forth. "Who is he?" And he said, "He's a young black man." And Warner said, "I don't want no niggers on this lot."
Himes persisted, moving to New York City, taking different jobs, but by the early 1950s he had become convinced that sustaining oneself as a black writer in the United States was impossible, due to both a lack of money and respect from the literary establishment for writers of color. In 1953, like Richard Wright and James Baldwin before him, he left the United States and settled in Paris. Here he continued to have middling sales, but unlike in his native country, he was well respected among the literati. He would have regular café get-togethers with Wright, cartoonist Ollie Harrington, and others. But it was a meeting in 1956 that changed his writing life and ultimately led to the glowing reputation he has today.
In reaction to Himes's comments about his financial difficulties, French publisher Marcel Duhamel suggested that he write a crime novel. Duhamel had founded Editions Gallimard's Série noire line of crime fiction paperbacks, and in so doing had brought Raymond Chandler, Horace McCoy, and a good deal of American hard-boiled fiction to France. He knew Himes's work and had translated If He Hollers Let Him Go into French. But Himes saw himself as a literary writer, not one to demean himself by writing a thriller, and reacted with skepticism to the proposal. He said he had no idea how to write that type of book. He couldn't do it. Unfazed, Duhamel offered him a decent advance and wrote to him with advice that has since become famous:
Get an idea. Start with action, somebody does something — a man reaches out a hand and opens a door, light shines in his eyes, a body lies on the floor, he turns, looks up and down the hall. … Always action in detail. Make pictures. Like motion pictures. Always the scenes are visible. No stream of consciousness at all. We don't give a damn who's thinking what — only what they're doing. Always doing something. From one scene to another.
After a false start or two, Himes produced For the Love of Imabelle (1957), later retitled A Rage in Harlem, the book that introduces Coffi n Ed and Grave Digger Jones. In 1958 the book won the Grand Prix de la literature policière, the first time a non-French author won the award, and Himes's career as a crime novelist was launched.
In terms of style, Duhamel had recommended he use Hammett and Chandler as models. Himes seems not to have loved Chandler as a writer — in his talks with John A. Williams, he refers to "some of Raymond Chandler's crap out there" — but he did admire Hammett and also William Faulkner. The sense of absurdity in Faulkner, and how Faulkner mixed that absurdity with violence, struck a chord with Himes. For his second crime novel, Il pleut des coups durs (1959), published in English as The Real Cool Killers, he reread Faulkner's Sanctuary (1931) to immerse his mind in precisely that sort of overheated violence. And this time Coffi n Ed and Grave Digger Jones were central characters in the story; he only added them to A Rage in Harlem when well into the book, at Duhamel's behest. The approach for Himes was now set, and though he'd never intended to, he found himself churning out what he'd once considered potboilers. He preferred to call his Harlem thrillers "domestic" novels rather than detective or crime or mystery novels, but whatever their label, over a fifteen-year span, he wrote ten of them, nine featuring Coffin Ed and Grave Digger. The one book they don't appear in is Run Man Run (1960), which centers on the actions of a white policeman. Harlem is a world unto itself in these works, and if Himes began writing them with the feeling that the thriller form was beneath him, he ended up reshaping the crime novel to meet his artistic and socially engaged needs.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Sticking It to the Man"
by .
Copyright © 2020 Iain McIntyre and Andrew Nette.
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