Francis Stevens was still a major object of his affections in another letter written as Augustus T. Swift in ARGOSY WEEKLY for May 22, 1920: "I note with joy that your one thousandth issue of March 6 is to celebrate by printing the first installment of Claimed, by Francis Stevens. ... Mr. Stevens, to my mind, is the highest grade of your writers. ... In other words, he realizes that psychology plays the most important part in life's comedy, tragedy, and romance, and that revolvers, daggers, and rifles are no longer exclusively popular as tokens of affection or otherwise between gentlemen and gentlewomen of honor."
There is no reason to believe that Lovecraft stopped reading ARGOSY WEEKLY in 1920, and we know beyond a doubt that he read it continuously from 1905 to 1920, when he was thirty years old, and that his enthusiasm for its authors and their works was unabated. Since H. P. Lovecraft, after the writing of Supernatural Horror in Literature, which first appeared in THE RECLUSE in 1927, gained considerable respect as a critic of fantastic and supernatural fiction, his views on the Munsey pulps must be regarded seriously. Practically nothing of the material, styles, or attitudes of the writers of the Munsey pulps, even those he praised most highly, is observable in his work—underscoring, perhaps, that the writers who are most pleasing to a budding author are not necessarily the most important influences on their writings.
12. THE PULPS WOO WOMEN READERS
IT WOULD BE easy to pass over the H. P. Lovecraft-Fred Jackson episode as a meaningless tempest in a teapot, stirred up by blind chance. From the vantage of historical perspective it proved considerably more significant than that. It uncovered a sharp difference in the readership, with cleavage much deeper than had been suspected.
THE ARGOSY deliberately appealed to a masculine audience with most of its material, but also slanted a substantial portion toward women to secure a broader base of readership. In the process they had watered down the adventure and conventionalized the love stories.
The excitement in "The Log-Book" which often prompted headings like "Our Readers Cheer and Groan" or "How Do You Like THE ARGOSY?" was a symptom of a troubled readership and not the calculation of editorial objectivity or cleverness. The major complaints were repeated over and over again, so there was no wishing them away. There was almost universal agreement that virtually all of the short stories were terrible. The idea of a complete novel was good, but when the reader didn't like it, the issue was spoiled for him. A novel by Fred Jackson seemed to arouse protests from a quarter of the readers. Letter after letter said they liked THE ARGOSY of the early years of the century much better. The lack of fantastic stories was a frequent complaint.
THE ARGOSY had been running 240 pages for fifteen cents. They quietly dropped the number of pages to 224 at no decrease in price in the issue of January, 1915, an indication of circulation decline. Then, abruptly, with the October, 1915, issue, the price dropped to ten cents, the pages to 192, but with smaller type to maintain the wordage, and serials were resumed. A four-page blue insert in that issue from Frank A. Munsey rationalized the return, but his flip-flops of logic were now greeted cynically.
Suddenly serial novels were good things again, not anachronisms for monthlies, as had been authoritatively proclaimed, and the times had not passed them by. Ironically, the first serial was by the controversial Fred Jackson, titled The Diamond Necklace (October-December, 1915), but it was a murder mystery and not a love story. There was a return to fantasy, though only temporarily, eight stories published that year and two of them important.
The Abyss of Wonders by Perley Poore Sheehan, a complete novel in the January, 1915, issue, was perhaps his best work of science fiction. An "island" is found in the Gobi Desert (that once was a sea) inhabited by two thousand people, remnants of a once great civilization, lost in antiquity. They have an idyllic community, with weather control. Small hair-covered slaves that come and go like wraiths, subject to the superior wills of the people of the "island," wait on them hand and foot. Ennui has reduced the population, until extinction will shortly face them (though the average life span is one hundred years) and their ancient knowledge will be lost to the world. A priest uses a heat ray to prevent an exodus; the island is destroyed and the slaves scattered to the desert. The American, Russian, and Chinese who have penetrated the sanctuary leave with three women, but the women all die from the ordeal of making their way back to modern civilization.
The tribulations of travel on the way to the "island" have never been told better or with greater drama, and that is a great deal to say, considering the vast library of fine desert stories. The personality of a camel, oddly enough, becomes the finest characterization of a thrilling novel, which was reprinted in a limited boxed edition of fifteen hundred copies by Polaris Press, Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1953.
Of highly unusual interest was The Moon Maiden, by Garrett P. Serviss, in the May, 1915, issue. It would be the last science fiction by him that would ever appear, and one that raised a number of questions. Paid for on July 14, 1913, it was held for almost two years before publication, despite the fact that the one thousand dollars Serviss received for the seventy-thousand-word story was the most he had ever been paid.
In no previous novel had romance played anything but a very minor role, but The Moon Maiden is first, last, and entirely a love story, and one in which the dialogue can best be described as American Victorian, and a triangle that was new only when Lilith momentarily seemed to offer competition to Eve in the Garden of Eden. Antinous Altair Smith, an astronomer, is reporting on the findings of special color lenses he has perfected, which permit him to see life on the moon, before a congress of astronomers at the Harvard Observatory. Carelessness of a colleague destroys his lenses before he can give an exhibition. An apparition of a superbly beautiful woman appears before the assembly, says she is from the moon, and then disappears.
She reappears briefly several times at later dates for Antinous Smith, and then after three days alone in a room, through alien science, rearranges her structure into that of a beautiful woman. She is in love with Antinous and has observed him from the moon, where she is queen. At great personal sacrifice, she has permanently cast herself into human guise and wishes to use her superior knowledge to guide Smith to greatness.
Ethel Goodenough, the daughter of a great astronomer, Professor Good-enough, is in love with Smith, and she is a brilliant scientist in her own right, having duplicated his color lenses. A great struggle for Smith's affections ensues between the two women, and Miss Goodenough is threatened by a demonlike entity which has accompanied the Moon Maid to Earth.
Losing control of the entity, the Moon Maid is killed by it in trying to protect Ethel Goodenough. The "demon" is destroyed by a fusillade of .45 slugs. Despite the inferior writing, the blatant sentimentality, and the too obvious allegorical symbols represented by the characters, the novel surmounts all to build in suspense and end on a note of considerable power.
This is the strangest, most atypical and mystical of all Serviss' work. It is difficult to believe that it could have been written after The Second Deluge. Antinous Smith is obviously a transposition of a youthful Garrett Serviss. One is led to suggest that it was an early unsold work, and what lends additional credence to this supposition is that the story carried under Serviss' name, "Author of The Conquest of Mars, The Moon Metal, A Columbus of Space, The Second Deluge, etc." All but the first had been published by Munsey magazines. That listing was to drive science-fiction fans to despair for thirty years, searching for a Serviss story titled The Conquest of Mars, to eventually find that it had appeared in early 1898, syndicated in newspapers as a sequel to H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, under the title Edison's Conquest of Mars.
Probably in early submissions of The Moon Maiden, Serviss had added "by author of The Conquest of Mars" (conceivably its original title), and it was from that source that THE ARGOSY editor preparing the opening page secured it.
Other leading action pulp magazines were suffering from the same schizophrenic problem as THE
ARGOSY. They were desperately seeking a formula that would appeal to both men and women and provide the broadest possible audience, and the result was frequently ludicrous.
ADVENTURE, by 1915, was a potent competitor to THE ARGOSY. It offered 224 pages of adventure fiction for fifteen cents on a monthly basis, and most of it was real he-man stuff. There were the vigorous and mystical novels and novelettes of Talbot Mundy, usually in exotic, far-off settings; the effectively done mysteries of Richard Marsh; Edgar Wallace was a contributor; and Octavus Roy Cohen was writing sports stories. Outstanding interpreters of the Old West—William MacLeod Raine, W. C. Tuttle, and Raymond S. Spears—were building their reputations; and Stephen Chalmers, J. Allan Dunn, Gordon McCreagh, Arthur D. Howden Smith, J. U. Giesy, and Samuel Alexander White were regular contributors.
"The Camp Fire," a department subtitled "A Meeting Place for Readers, Writers, and Adventurers," was probably superior to that offered by the Munsey magazines, and it was in that department in November, 1914, that endorsements from Theodore Roosevelt and Major General Leonard Wood for the formation of the American Legion appeared.
ADVENTURE ran few fantasies, but The Crimson Chamber, a complete novel by J. I. Cochrane, M.D., about a character named Dan Wheeler who has the entire underworld at his command and used it to save New York City from destruction, in the June, 1915, ADVENTURE, might have qualified. That novel could also have served as a prototype for the character magazines such as THE SPIDER, THE SECRET SIX, THE AVENGER, and others that came later.
One of the better lost-race stories published by ADVENTURE was The Story of William Hyde, by Patrick and Terence Casey, in the issues, December, 1915-March, 1916. William Hyde, the narrator, tells of his discovery of a "lost race" in Borneo who arc the descendants of an army of Tartars sent there by Genghis Khan to conquer the land. Hyde resembles the ancient Khan, so he is accepted, and marries, but is finally driven out, partially through the vindictiveness of a jealous queen who also loves him. Extravagantly promoted as "One of the Greatest Romantic Stories Ever Written," The Story of William Hyde rates fourth among all stories published in 1916 by a vote of the readers, but the editor confessed that its publication received some of the most vigorous protests in the history of the magazine. This acted to tighten still further ADVENTURE'S restriction on fantasy.
Despite all of the masculinity described previously, starting with its May, 1915, issue ADVENTURE features on every cover the slogan: "Stories of life, love, and adventure." No action scenes at all appeared; instead, each cover featured pastels of beautiful women's hair-dos, a girl with a parrot, a girl with a mink stole, a girl with a snowball, or, if it were a summer issue, a girl with a fan, a girl with an umbrella, a girl walking a dog, or a girl with a fur hood.
The entire arrangement was a fraud. The woman seduced by the covers was hard-pressed to find any love stories at all in the pages of ADVENTURE. With only a few exceptions, Arthur Sullivant Hoffman bought and published fiction as though he had never noticed what was promised so explicitly on the covers.
In early 1917, the word "love" and the pictures of women were dropped, the pages fell to 192, and the publication pretended to be nothing but what it actually was—a rousing magazine for red-blooded men. The circulation increased at such tremendous rate that ADVENTURE began twice a month in mid-September, 1917, issue and for the next ten years was one of the ranking successes in magazine publishing.
Among the factors that helped circulation was the serialization of Finished, by H. Rider Haggard, a five-part novel of the fight of the African Zulu nation against the British, which began in the April, 1917, issue. During 1918 the price was raised to twenty cents, with no increase in content, and it did not appear to affect readership at all.
THE BLUE BOOK, ever since its inception, had followed the same ambiguous policy discarded by ADVENTURE. It featured on its cover every issue the face of a woman, usually resembling some celebrity of the stage or screen. Under the pressure of competition, it increased its pages from 224 to 240 for fifteen cents with the October, 1914, number. In order to do this, it eliminated a section of photos of stage and moving-picture stars (predominantly women), plus scenes from the productions, which had been printed on coated stock. These were transferred to a companion magazine, THE GREEN BOOK
THE BLUE BOOK carried no interior illustrations at first, but then very small designs began to appear within the title of each story beginning in 1915. Its roster of authors was most impressive, including James Oliver Curword, James Francis Dwyer, Albert Payson Terhune, Harris Merton Lyon, Victor Rousseau, Octavus Roy Cohen, Clarence Herbert New, William Wallace Cook, Edgar Jepson, Albert Dorrington, Ellis Parker Butler, George Allan England, Edwin Balmer, and William B. Marcharg and Gaston Leroux.
Its answer to ALL-STORY CAVALIER WEEKLY'S Edgar Rice Burroughs was H. Rider Haggard, whose novel The Ivory Child was stretched out through eight monthly installments, beginning in February, 1915. It features Allan Quartermain, older and broke, but still game to set out on a hunt through the upper Nile for the kidnapped wife of Lord Ragnell, in a fast-moving adventure incorporating elements of superstition and mysticism.
THE POPULAR MAGAZINE was still doing well at twice a month in 1915, offering 224 pages for fifteen cents, plus a readers' section and superb covers. It was more a middle-of-the-road family adventure magazine and did not as blatantly appeal to women as did its competition. A very large percentage of its contents was written by second-raters and was literary pabulum, though blended with it were contributions from Sax Rohmer, Albert Payson Terhune, Henry Herbert Knibbs, H. Devere Stacpoole, Peter B. Kyne, and William Hope Hodgson.
The quality of science fiction published by THE POPULAR MAGAZINE was not great. The Inert Atom, by Francis Lynde, a complete novel in the issue for April 23, 1915, was of interest for its predictions of the utilization of atomic energy and a schism between the United States and Japan.
The Forgotten Land, by Henry Herbert Knibbs, a short story of only eight pages in the February 7, 1917, issue, is a minor masterpiece. After invasion and conquest by the Japanese, the United States is slowly re-populated by the Indians. The story deals with the meeting and life of the last white man and woman with memorable effectiveness. Edgar Rice Burroughs, an admirer of Knibbs, had borrowed some of his poetry for use in The Mucker. There is a belief in some quarters that Knibbs, who was primarily a western-story writer, had been assisted in this story by Burroughs as a return favor. It is so off-trail for Knibbs and so characteristic of Burroughs in plot that, true or not, it is easy to believe.
With the issue in which that story appeared, THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, which had dropped to 208 pages in the fall of 1916, raised its price to twenty cents and restored the missing pages. It also all but eliminated the pictorial cover, indicating sales problems.
Street & Smith's PEOPLE'S, "Stories That Stir," gave every indication of strengthening while THE POPULAR MAGAZINE waned. Through 1914, 1915, and 1916 it offered 224 pages for fifteen cents, with it's biggest attraction the popular Jimmy Dale stories of Frank L. Packard, of a criminal blackmailed and intimidated by a girl and forced to use his safecracking and other talents for constructive purposes.
A banner science-fiction exposition of the era was its novel of the invasion of the United States by Japan titled The Peril of the Pacific, written by J. Allan Dunn, with an impressive cover by John A. Coughlin showing San Francisco skyscrapers toppling before Nipponese bombs. The magazine dropped to 208 pages in 1917, probably as a result of a paper shortage created by World War I.
PEOPLE'S gained by absorbing ALL AROUND MAGAZINE into its April, 1917, number. ALL AROUND MAGAZINE, a changed title from the old NEW STORY MAGAZINE, had carried more fantasy in its last years than most of the other Street & Smith pulps. PEOPLE'S inherited the Semi-Dual stories from ALL AROUND MAGAZINE'S backlog and published The Compass in the Sky by J. U. Giesy and Junius B. Smith as the cover story for their May, 1917, issue. It was the first of many in that series.
PEOPLE'S was, in ma
ny ways, a more attractive magazine for adventure lovers than its companion THE POPULAR MAGAZINE. Its covers by P. J. Monahan, Modest Stein, and John A. Coughlin, conveyed an atmosphere of exotic mystery that had undeniable appeal. The magazine carried interior illustrations and had a very personalized editorial department. Its authors were excellent professionals, including H. Bedford Jones, J. Allan Dunn, Frank L. Packer, J. E. Grinstead, Harold Lamb, Achmed Abdullah, Perley Poore Sheehan, George Allan England, and William Merriam Rouse.
The foregoing positive factors, coupled with the rise in price to twenty cents of THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, which probably caused a shift of readership, found the circulation climbing. In its September, 1917, issue PEOPLE'S announced it would increase its publication schedule to semi-monthly, beginning with the August 10, 1917, issue. The dates given are precisely accurate, and people's favorite magazine (its new title with that issue) must certainly be one of only a very few professional magazines in the history of publishing to have announced an August number immediately following September!
Science fiction and fantasy did appear in PEOPLE'S FAVORITE MAGAZINE, but the editor, Eugene Clancy, was so adroit at outwardly disguising it that a complete reading of every story was required to identify it. Undoubtedly, the most important single work of science fiction to run in the entire history of the magazine was a seven-part novel by George Allan England, The Nebula of Death (February 10-May 10, 1918). It was England's intent to show the importance to life on this planet of the chlorophyll manufactured by plants from the sun's rays, and the effect of the earth's passing through a nebula that prevents the creation of this vital chemical is the basis of the story. Immediately following its publication, the editor claimed it was the most popular single story in the magazine since it began publication. PEOPLE'S FAVORITE MAGAZINE appeared to be doing well until it raised its price to twenty cents with the August 25, 1918, issue. To add insult to injury, it cut the number of pages back to 192 with the October 10, 1918, number. With its issued dated September, 1919, it went to letter-size on coated stock and began running illustrated "significant" articles along with the fiction, and temporarily left pulp competition.
Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of the Scientific Romance in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 Page 53