by Steve Aylett
During his erstwhile Beat phase Lint was an enthusiast of close-up magic despite his never really mastering the crucial ‘magical’ phase of a single trick, a shortcoming he tackled by punching the observer’s lights out just before the moment of wonder. Thus any onlooker who chose the fist containing the palmed coin would instantly feel that fist slamming into his nose. When later challenged by the victim, Lint would feign bafflement and claim that the trick had been completed successfully, without violence and to the victim’s awe and delight. In San Francisco in 1955 Lint was cornered by Ginsberg and Kenneth Rexroth into doing a trick before an audience at the Six Gallery and felt it necessary to go berserk, spraying the cards at the volunteer’s face and firing a starting pistol into the panicking crowd.
More apposite to his real vocation was Lint’s regular appearances in public in a fright wig and sharpened wooden teeth. Taking up a place on some busy thoroughfare, he would throw his arms wide and volley his verse at nobody in particular. MONSTROUS POET ALARMS SHOPPERS, announced a headline in the Washington Post of March 18, 1954: ‘Customers of Woolworths department store on Monday were frightened by a freakish man with unkempt hair and sharp teeth, who delivered a stream of rhyming gibberish. His theatrics attracted the attention of store police, who claim that he “disappeared” before they could detain him.’ Lint’s favorite recitations included ‘I Can See You Eddie’, ‘Gripe Into This Horn’, and a poem about his cogitations on whether to join the army, ‘The Day Maggots Sing’:
The day maggots sing
I will join the army
I will join the army
The day maggots sing
When they do, call me
Maybe they swing
I will join the army
The day maggots sing
Later appearances of the ‘monstrous poet’ were reported to involve the violent death of several onlookers, but these are thought to have been the work of an opportunist copycat.
The golden age of Lint’s pranks happened to coincide with the rise of the McCarthyist commie scares and as early as 1949 he had infiltrated a crowd picketing the Waldorf in protest against Shostakovich—among those with banners yelling GO BACK TO RUSSIA WITH YOUR COMMIE PROPAGANDA, Lint paced about with a sign that stated I’M GROWING FINS. Lint was twitted the same year when three friends dressed as cops raided his apartment and found him forcing a bust of Lenin down the toilet.
One of Lint’s many false-starts to a mainstream media career occurred as a result of the blacklisting of suspected communist sympathisers in showbiz. Up-and-coming CBS exec Douglas Norton came to Lint in 1951 and told him he could make good money filling in for the commie scriptwriter Ordal Lissitsky. Lint took him at his word and banged out scripts in which shiny-faced families talked about how things were ‘better in the Soviet Union’ and Irish cops chided ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need’, all delivered in the blandly mirthful style of the cookie-cutter sitcom. Norton burst into the script room and shook Lint by the shoulders, shouting that he’d ‘smashed the world’ with his craziness, then mistook Lint’s blank incomprehension for poker-faced cool. Norton grabbed Lint and tripped over the carpet, pulling him to the floor and laughing despite himself. Lint stood up with dignity, brushed himself down and left the room in silence. He would have nothing more to do with television until the disastrous Catty and the Major more than a decade later.
In April 1952 Lint appeared before the House Committee un-American Activities pretending to be Elia Kazan, following it up with a parodic advertisement in the New York Times. ‘Kazan himself didn’t mind,’ Lint later claimed, ‘as it got him out of having to appear or be blamed for anything that was said.’ Among the things Lint said in his stead were ‘What’s wrong with looking at the cupboard?’ and ‘Clifford Odets has tomatoes for eyes’, then repeating: ‘Eyes’. Lint felt it important to emulate Kazan quite closely, up to and including his being a spineless mass when cornered. The Times advert called communism an ‘alien conspiracy’ and claimed that ‘liberals must speak out’. It was, at the time, Lint’s best and most sustained absurdist work. This was still seven years before the revelation that Senator McCarthy lay every morning in a bathtub brimming with liquidized doves.
To his credit, Lint allowed none of these antics to slow his progress in the expanding pulp market. As the pulps entered the fifties and recovered from the wartime paper shortage, dozens of new magazines appeared, with titles like Thrilling Wonder Stories, Beyond Absurdity, Swell Punch-Ups, Damaging Claims and Pull the Other One. The covers invariably depicted bug-eyed humans examining receipts or fifties housewives closing the curtains on bewildered aliens. Between 1950 and 1955, Lint sold 123 stories to Astounding, Bewildering, Confusing, Baffling, Frazzling, Scalding, Mental, Marginal, Fatal, Useless, Appalling, Made-Up and Meandering, as well as the short-lived Completely Unbelievable Explanation, Maggoty Stories, Way Beyond Your Puny Mind, Over-Elaborate Alibis and Maximum Tentacles. The latter overlapped into what today would be called the ‘specialty’ market, promising ‘a tentacle in every sentence’, and Lint had trouble modifying his story ‘The True Origin of the Magi’ to fill this prescription. There were several such dubious titles, Denim Bear, Train Epiphany and Commercial Rose Cultivation foremost among them. Strapped for cash, Lint tried to write a story appealing to all three of these titles—this resulted in the ground-breaking ‘Rosebud Investment’, a tale of exuberance and paranoia. The tale begins with Ben Marax sitting on a train—he suddenly realises that he’s been living in a fool’s paradise. These things he calls ‘bantamweight roses’ are in fact grenades, but their explosion sequence is so subtle and obscure that human beings fail to notice the event. Aliens voided the objects into our dimension without understanding our value system—humanity never even noticed or valued the portion of themselves destroyed by these colourful antenna landmines. ‘And that part is,’ says the appalled alien leader, a denim bear, ‘the SOUL!’
Lint eventually sold the tale to Maggoty Stories.
Ironically it was this tailor-made yarn which led Lint to shout defensively at Cameo Herzog: ‘Your body picks up a pen and it aligns to others. Mine flies all over the place.’
Lint’s prolific output provoked Gernsback to accuse him of writing with a rake dipped in ink.
But how did Lint write so many stories and what was the nature of the pulp world in which he worked?
6
“I CAN TAKE ANYTHING”: THE PULP LIFE
High pulp · Perry Street · Baffling Belly Stories · a crystalline associate · Alvarez · toasting the Bread of Shame · release the tigers
Despite his hell-for-leather delineation of an existence withered by compromise, Lint never wanted for female company. Women were curious about this fellow who, according to Kerouac, ‘walked around like some angelic oaf’ and talked about the tilted cities of Mars in a tone of bored resignation. Lint responded to flirtation by yelling ‘Attract me will you?’ with all the panoramic heroism of resistance. The woman who could tackle or overlook this was a catch indeed and Lint took up with such a catch in 1953, renting a sort of imploded loft on Perry Street with Emily Abodon, a dressmaker. Lint began churning out stories while Abodon ran off creations in which he could deliver the typescripts. They were scallywags on the up.
The pulps devoured galactic stories without strict regard for payment and the typical editor was a broken man yet to realise he was in need of repair. A case in point was Hugh ‘Banzer’ Dewhurst of Terrible Stories, who frantically admitted his aim was to ‘just fill the damn thing’ with ‘jelly, charge-beams, idiots—who am I?’ and smacked at his own head until his hair was wild and conditionless. Despite this the pulps were a welcome gash of fluorescence in a culture that Lint described in ‘The New Testament of Cigarettes’ as ‘a dowager dealing manners out of a purse’. But Lint tried to inject an element of health-giving betrayal into the sort of gassy hokum that was proving popular with pulp audiences at the time. Hooked initially by Lint’s ludicrou
sly bad dialogue such as ‘It’s a sort of sensory potbelly, bouncing toward us’ and his tendency to describe characters as entering rooms with ‘gills blazing’, readers would stay to find out whether the pig mentioned in the opening paragraph would re-appear as a significant part of the story.
Following the success of ‘Rosebud Investment’ and its declamatory punch ending, Lint repeated the formula in a string of stories which pulp historian Mike McCurry describes as ‘garbage’: ‘He kept doing these stupid endings where the main character or villain turns around and announces some revelation, but it got pretty predictable pretty fast.’ Such as the story ‘I Married a Trash Compactor’ in which, after marrying a trash compactor and suffering the many adversities pursuant to that mistake, the hero turns to us, the readers, and states, ‘It was bound to happen, because… I married a trash compactor!’ The element of surprise was a distant memory when Lint submitted a tale in which a postman wakes up early, goes on his rounds, drinks some coffee, finishes his work, leaves the office, then stops to announce, startled by doom, that he did it all because he is a postman. Lint was by this time eating nothing but kelp and some kind of papery gauze, according to Abodon. The loft was a dented hell of beaten hay and the margins which Lint cut off because they ‘twisted his melon’.
Lint’s own interpretation of those days is more hallucinatory—in a 1971 interview he said of his Village years: ‘The apartment gradually became a hangout for the living dead.’ And later he claimed again: ‘The befuddled undead kept splintering the doors and shambling around like simplicity itself till someone had the smarts to behead them. That’s the style of interruption I had to contend with.’
Abodon encouraged him to spend more time with his buddies at Fugazzi’s but Lint would enter the bar wearing a papier-mache alsatian head—and this almost thirty years before Reagan’s inauguration. Marshall Hurk recalls: ‘He’d stand there tensing his stomach and say, “Punch me—I can take anything.” Of course because of the false head we didn’t know which of us he was talking to, so we all hit him at the same time. It was brutal.’
‘He’s a dangerous bastard,’ said Herzog at the time. ‘The next thing will be the police.’
But the next thing was ‘Chestdeep in My Own Belly’, the first of Lint’s alarming ‘belly stories’, which he claimed—to any editor who would listen—were popular on the streets. Paul Steinhauser of Baffling Stories, a shell of a man at best, was out-of-touch enough to believe him and published them as fast as Lint could churn them out, including ‘The Belly Cannot Lie’, ‘Woe Unto My Belly’, ‘Belly Invasion’, ‘My Belly is an Eye’, ‘My Eye is a Belly’, and ‘Look Out—Bellies’. Steinhauser found himself with such a backlog of belly stories that he attempted to get rid of them in a special belly issue, Baffling Belly Stories—only to find more belly stories coming in every day and mere incomprehension on the streets. Many of the new belly stories were from other authors, who had taken note of the editor’s apparent thirst for them. Rouch wrote three in one day—‘Escape From the Belly’, ‘My Belly Will Be Sainted Today’, and ‘Liberation Belly—an Odyssey into the Belly of the Belly’. Steinhauser was bewildered by the onslaught and the fact that he had become known as the Belly Guy. Writers stopped sending him normal SF, drawling in bars that ‘No—he only takes belly stories these days’, and beginners were ‘forcing bellies’ into their tales long after Lint had moved on. Baffling Stories sank under the weight of this manufactured craze, and Lint would not encounter Steinhauser again until the editor’s surprise attack on him in 1973.
Lint’s new pastures after the belly series were gated by his meeting with the literary agent Robert Baines. Lint was unusual among pulp story writers in that he had already had a novel published and Baines claimed he could help Lint to smash upward in the literary world. He was instrumental in getting Jelly Result sold to Doubleday, and then slipped into the dormant insectile state common to agents while siphoning 15 percent from all Lint’s subsequent earnings. The contract he left in testament was labyrinthine. Lint was later to parody agent catatonia in his story ‘The Crystalline Associate’ but this was as nothing compared to the real story: one of souping flesh and unbreathable air.
However, in 1954 this was all to come and the sale of Jelly Result had Lint in a froth of optimism as to his prospects. ‘I’ll probably bake a pie for my famous friends every Wednesday,’ he speculated in his notes, ‘and push my luck a little further each time.’ Next to this note is a sketch of Lint with an axe.
Among Lint’s present friends was Jose Alvarez, a highly-strung Cuban who had penned a poem called ‘Magnificent Stallion Humiliation’ and felt that this justified his every emotional and financial demand upon society. He never wrote another work but insisted that he was ‘the greatest of poets and worthy of praise’. Alvarez was irrationally terrified of rainfall and Lint delighted in tormenting him by entering the room shaking an umbrella. He also tormented Alvarez by addressing him as ‘Lenny’ and telling everyone he was a ‘gifted barber’. People continually approached the erstwhile poet requesting a haircut and, rebuffed, would cajole him with cries of ‘Just a trim, Lenny’ until he exploded with rage. Lint started the rumour that Alvarez would give a haircut in exchange for an umbrella of any quality. The Cuban was by now phobic about umbrellas and tried to strangle Herbert Huncke, who had staggered up to him with rheumy eyes and a dead cocktail parasol. Lint continued to favour story series and produced four tales about Jose’s antics: ‘False Hope for Lenny’, ‘Lenny Turns Violent’, ‘Lenny Burns his Bridges and is Not Bailed Out’, and ‘Lenny Will Never Be More Than a Somewhat Gifted Barber’. This stream of rubbish was to gain a terrible significance less than a decade later.
Lint’s pulp story career was at its most productive in 1954 and this was down to a writing routine that eliminated anyone who came near him—or attempted to. ‘I went to see him at the Perry Street loft,’ says Marshall Hurk, ‘and as soon as I entered he pushed a hen towards me—a live hen—with the tip of his boot. Anyone else would be honking with laughter as they did that but he was completely silent. Even the hen was silent. Freaked me out.’ Terry Southern also commented on Lint’s habits at this time: ‘He had a sort of mantra he repeated, it was “Great crowd tonight—release the tigers”. But he’d walk towards you saying it louder and louder until your whole body was filled with a kind of core panic and you ran like hell.’
It was during these hen-shoving, mantra-bellowing days that Lint laboured over the story that would grow to become Jelly Result.
7
JELLY RESULT
Rain upon travellers · Eterani · Valac infects his punishment and backs it up into the community · the coining of Fanny Barberra · shallow and deep vanishing · like a cat · Slogan Love · relief disguised as penance · circus of glossolalia · Maurice Girodias
Lint was ambushed by his second novel—what started as a fairly standard tale of sagging clock ducts grew out of size, provoking Emily Abodon to issue an ultimatum, ‘The story, or me.’ Baffled, Lint was still waiting for a verb when Abodon slammed from the apartment and left him to his work. Lint was experimenting (perhaps in an attempt to profit from the painful experience of One Less Bastard) with the replacing of a single word throughout his already published works—the most successful of these was his substituting the word ‘jelly’ for ‘belly’ in his ‘Belly Series’4—he made a thick binder marked Jelly Results, alongside Death Results, Snot Results and Exhaustion Results, then began weeping at what his life had become. He fell to the floor like a faulty assistant and saw a vision of bodies located below their impatient souls. ‘They behave like rain upon travellers,’ he thought, seeing those spirits. ‘We are a circus of ourselves. We make the sleeve. We the alteration.’ The strong moment disappeared. ‘The zeal here is a captivity,’ he wrote in his notebook. ‘Some scallywag has mis-connected the reward to cancer.’
In the novel Jelly Result, half of Eterani city is exactly the same as the other half, because the authorities don’t have
enough ideas to cover the whole area. Among its citizens only Valac is aware of this. ‘This furniture happens every day,’ he complains, and sets out to find how many recurrences exist of each object. Should a slight variation be counted as a different idea? ‘The happy clock is in several places, magic as yes and no.’ Both versions of each object can be altered a little, but when Valac tries to introduce something new he is physically attacked by the environment, which tries to digest and redistribute him into the architecture. Jelly Result features the first appearance of equalizer pests, fatal gizmos that Lint never really described except to repeatedly deny that they were ‘made of wax’.
Finally, Valac distracts the city by shuffling the two halves together so that the paucity of ideas is not so strikingly apparent (thus Eterani becomes like any human city). The city itself, now forgetfully convinced that it is interesting, loses its defensiveness. When Valac introduces a genuinely new notion (in this case the innards of a mirror packed into a transparent dome covered in converging lampreys hewn from black stone and incorporating a few simplicity junctions for breathing) the authorities are so sure that it should lead to disaster, they order such a disaster by the backdoor. Emboldened, Valac infects his punishment and backs it up into the community—a titanic elemental wall hits the city, percentages stretch in the boiling air and molten angels blot out of the walls. The book ends with the city mayor expressing ominous dissatisfaction with the polychrome result: ‘The instant the sky was launched that morning it became obvious that so vivid a reality was unacceptable.’ The world is not yet won.
Jelly Result had an impact among those clipped to the main nerve. It briefly popularised the use of the term ‘hand expiry’ for death, as well as the phrase ‘I alone am indecent enough to say it aloud’. It also included the trope ‘Barricades stop the knowing of both sameness and difference, Fanny Barberra’, a slogan that was to appear on some of the larger and more expensive protest banners in the sixties. Eterani itself has the feeling of Hinton’s flatlands, but is surrounded by Lint’s casual dimensional contortions, such as the digression on the difference between ‘shallow vanishing’, by which you walk around a fold in the air and disappear apparently into nowhere, and the art of ‘deep vanishing’, by which you simply walk directly away.