19 ROBERT BLOCH
Robert Bloch catapulted to public attention and accelerated success when Alfred Hitchcock's production of his novel Psycho not only shocked the nation and the critics, but boasted the second largest gross in the history of black-and-white motion pictures. This tale of the murder of a young girl in the shower of her motel room and the suspicion that focuses on a querulous old woman, who is heard but never seen, and her son, who appears to be covering for her, ends with an explosive impact that Hitchcock regarded as
"tech-nically the most satisfying" of any of his productions.
As those who have seen the picture know, the mother has been dead for years and the son has a split personality and talks to himself in a striking simulation of his mother's voice; he is in fact the actual murderer of the girl.
What, it might be asked, has all this to do with science fiction? The answer is: very little, except that Bloch has spent a good part of his lifetime as a fan and writer building a public image as a pillar of science fiction while scoring most of his successes outside of the field. He was guest of honor of the Sixth Annual World Science Fiction Convention in To-ronto, Canada, July 3-5, 1948, and was anticipating the psychiatric punch line of Psycho when he prefaced his talk on "Fantasy and Psychology" by mimicking Peter Lorre in an animated stream-of-consciousness manner. Yet, for five years preceding the honor, science-fiction writing had made up a relatively minor portion of his work.
He received a Hugo for the best science-fiction short story of the year, That Hell-Bound Train (the magazine of fan-tasy and science fiction, September, 1958), a story built around a pact with the devil, a theme which does not belong in the science-fiction canon except allegorically. It is obvious that Robert Bloch is a paradox, a special case, and a privileged character. How did he get that way?
He was born April 5, 1917, in Chicago, the first child of Paphael A. Bloch, a bank cashier, and Stella Loeb Bloch, a school teacher and social worker. Twenty-two months later a sister, Winifred, was born. Though his parents were of German-Jewish extraction, most of the religious instruction he received was at the Methodist Church in Maywood, a suburb of Chicago. This was not due to any change in the family's religious persua-sion, but resulted from the closeness with which his family's social activities were interwoven with those of the commu-nity.
Both parents had an abiding interest in the performing arts. His mother once turned down an offer to go into light opera, where she might have capitalized on an excellent singing voice. She was also a fine pianist and accompanist. The theater and vaudeville were his father's notion of grand entertainment. As a result, young Robert was introduced to the fabulous world of living players when it was still at its peak. At the same time he was privileged to watch the parade of stars of the silent screen: Lon Chaney, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Rudolph Valentino, and nostalgic scores of others. Most children live a good part of the time in a make-believe world, but Robert Bloch rarely left it, recruiting the neighborhood youngsters for an endless series of "dramatic" plays, circuses, mock wars (with hundreds of lead soldiers), and "situation" games. The escapism was overdone, but it was largely accomplished in concert with other children, with Bloch showing signs of leadership. His exceptional ability as a student quickly changed all that. Repeatedly skipping grades, he soon found himself lone-ly in the company of much older children who could not be commandeered to participate in his fun. Nor was he capable of physically matching them in sports. This forced a partial introversion and a dependence on the vicarious thrills and intellectual pleasures of books.
An economic turn for the worse in his parents' financial status in 1927 had the effect of socially cutting him off from the world. The bank where his father worked failed. So did a second at which he had procured another job. There were straws in the wind leading up to the 1929 Wall Street crash, but no one was properly interpreting them. His mother re-sumed social work to help support the family and they moved to another town. Now the ten-year-old boy knew no one. The necessity of taking care of his younger sister while his mother was at work hampered still further his making new friends. Lon Chaney's motion picture The Phantom of the Opera scared the hell out of him, but it also converted him to the world of psychiatric terror and the supernatural. His intro-duction to the fantasy magazines came in August, 1927, when he was in a railroad station with his parents and his aunt. The aunt offered to buy him any magazine on the stands. To her consternation he gleefully selected the current issue of weird tales, featuring Otis Adelbert Kline's The Bride of Osiris, with a partially nude girl on the cover. Two issues later he really "flipped" when he read H. P. Lovecraft's Pickman's Model, a frightening tale of a painter who drew monsters from "real life."
His conversion to science-fiction magazines came with the February, 1928, amazing stories, featuring The Revolt of the Pedestrians by David H. Keller, M.D., a tale of city folk who gradually lose their ability to walk as a result of over-mechanization.
Gradually the effects of the Depression on his family caused the fantasy magazine purchases to cease. His father became afflicted with a strange malady that caused gradual paralysis of his lower limbs, was unable to obtain work as a bank teller, and was grateful to find employment as a night cashier in a restaurant. The family moved from place to place as the whims of economics dictated. At Milwaukee's Lincoln High School, Bloch coasted in his studies but went full tilt into "dramatics." The stage appealed strongly to him, particularly comedy, and he not only acted but wrote skits as well. Bloch's scintillating wit and superb sense of pace, subsequently demonstrated in his numerous appearances as master of ceremonies at science-fiction affairs, had their origin here. He wanted to be a comic so bad he could taste it, vaudeville was disappearing and, with it, burlesque. The Depression was scarcely the time to begin a nightclub career. His activities on the school stage won him popularity, however, and he was five times elected head of the Student Council. As he grew older, the difference in age between him and the other students didn't matter as much. His circle of friends began to widen. In 1932 he resumed buying weird tales, encountering Lovecraft's stories again. Strongly impressed, he wrote the author a fan letter. He was amazed to receive a friendly response and soon a correspondence ensued, during which time he sent Lovecraft trial literary efforts for criticism, some of which had been rejected by weird tales' editor Farns-worth Wright. Lovecraft suggested the science-fiction fan magazines and sent him copies of the fantasy fan, contain-ing his series of poems, Fungii From Yuggoth, as well as recommending William Crawford's semiprofessional fantasy magazine, marvel tales. It was there that Bloch first saw print with Lilies, a moving short-short story of an old lady who every Saturday night brings flowers from the country to her upstairs neighbors, reaching a climax when she brings the funeral lilies her son has left at her bier after her death. That issue was Winter, 1934, but a previously announced story by Bloch, The Madness of Lucian Gray, never appeared, pos-sibly because it was patterned too closely after Lovecraft's Pickman's Model, the advance blurb reading: "a weird-fantasy story of an artist who was forced to paint a picture ... and the frightful thing that came from it." A second story accepted by Crawford appeared in unusu-al stories, a companion magazine, after Bloch had already made a number of sales nearly a year later. Titled Black Lotus, it dealt with a man who cut his own throat in a dream. The story was a minute stylistic recreation of a certain period in Lovecraft's writing when he was heavily influenced by the technique of Lord Dunsany. Readers were thus confronted, as they would be again when Henry Kuttner began to sell, with the ludicrous spectacle of a Lovecraft-struck acolyte imitating Lovecraft's imitation of Dunsany.
Another very early Bloch tale, The Laughter of a Ghoul, was a vignette concerning a man waiting for his wife to give birth to a child, only to find the mother dead and the new-born infant a chortling ghoul. This story, which ap-peared in the December, 1934, fantasy fan, was a literary failure, but nevertheless these test efforts of Robert Bloch's showed s
uch definite ability that it was small surprise when in July, 1934, a month after his graduation from high school and two months after he turned 17, he sold a story to weird tales, The Secret of the Tomb. A second sale, a real shocker called The Feast in the Abbey, was published first. The story appeared in weird tales for January, 1935, and concerned a man who sits down to a feast with some "monks" in an old abbey, to discover in time the main meat course is his brother. Despite the overpowering influence of Lovecraft, The Feast in the Abbey was a remarkably effective effort and tied for first place with three other stories in the same issue by Seabury Quinn, Clark Ashton Smith, and Laurence J. Cahill. The reader's department, "The Eyrie," was filled with be-grudgingly favorable comment on Bloch's story, surprising since he had made the political error of venting his spleen on Robert E. Howard's Conan in a letter in the November, 1934, weird tales, and the readers were openly out to "get" him. The poorly timed letter had read: "I am awfully tired of poor old Conan the Cluck, who for the past 15 issues has every month slain a new wizard, tackled a new monster, come to a violent and sudden end that was averted (incredi-bly enough!) in just the nick of time and won a new girl friend, each of whose penchants for nudism won for her a place of honor, either on the cover or on the inner illustration. Such has been Conan's history, and from the realms of the Kushites to the lands of Quilenia, from the shores of the Shemites to the palaces of Dyme-Novell-Bolonia, I cry: 'Enough of this brute and his iron-thewed sword-thrusts— may he be sent to Valhalla to cut out paper dolls.' "
It was a close thing, for Howard was writing at his bloody best and his fans were legion, including even Bloch's newly acquired mentor H. P. Lovecraft, who must have taken small pleasure in the incident. Had Farnsworth Wright, editor of weird tales, printed first the story Bloch had sold him, The Secret in the Tomb (which eventually appeared in the May, 1935, issue), there would have been a literary massacre. The Secret in the Tomb was a pathetically weak mood piece of a man who discovers his ancestor is a ghoul. Equally inadequate was Suicide in the Study (weird tales, June, 1935), in which a scientist splits his good and evil personalities into two physical bodies and is destroyed in the act. If the tale has any significance, it is that it was the first in which Bloch made the slightest gesture in the direction of scientific explanation for the strange events he relates.
The Howard incident was an important lesson learned early. Rarely again did Bloch ever pervert his brilliant wit to vitriolic ends. Instead, he became a master of the art of making people feel important as he ribbed them, of investing his literary or verbal lampoon with an implied compliment. As a result, his friends were to become legion and his detractors negligible.
During this early period of his writing, Bloch was held completely in thrall by Lovecraft. Virtually nothing of his own showed through. Such popularity as he enjoyed was obtained by basking in the reflection of the master. The Shambler from the Stars (weird tales, September, 1935) was not only dedicated to H. P. Lovecraft but made him the central character, who unwisely utters an incantation that draws a monster from the unknown, to break him up like kindling wood and suck the blood from his body. Lovecraft employed a "famous" book as a literary device in his stories, The Necronomicon; Clark Ashton Smith was fond of The Book of Eibon; and August Derleth coveted the Cultes des Goules, so why couldn't Bloch invent his own book? He did: De Vermis Mysteriis (Mysteries of the Worm), by Ludvig Prinn, a man allegedly burned at the stake in Brussels as the result of his activities as an alchemist and necromancer.
"Robert Bloch deserves plenty of praise for Shambler of the Stars. Now why doesn't Mr. Lovecraft return the compli-ment, and dedicate a story to the author?" suggested reader B. M. Reynolds of North Adams, Mass., in weird tales' Eyrie for November, 1935. His suggestion became reality when H. P. Lovecraft wrote The Haunter of the Dark (weird tales, December, 1936) as a sequel to Shambler of the Stars and dedicated it to Robert Bloch. In this story he returns the compliment, and Robert "Blake" is killed by a loathsome monstrosity which breaks out of an abandoned church tower in Providence, Rhode Island, under the cover of darkness caused by an electrical breakdown.
A resident of Milwaukee during 1935, Bloch received a write-up in the local papers underscoring his success as a weird-fiction writer. Soon there came an invitation to join a unique literary group called The Milwaukee Fictioneers, some of its members writers working in the fantasy field. The group met once every two weeks, barred all women, and confined its membership to professionals only. It had a rule against reading manuscripts at meetings but worked extreme-ly hard, together, on story plotting. Meetings were held alternately at members' homes and the size of the group rarely exceeded twelve. The result was writing discipline that paid off for all and gave Bloch a feeling of professional acceptance. Among its members was Stanley G. Weinbaum, whose influence on writers who followed was more far-reaching than even that of Lovecraft; Ralph Milne Farley (Senator Roger Sherman Hoar), who had built up a considerable reputation for his "Radio Man" novels in argosy, and Ray-mond A. Palmer, who was to become the editor of amazing stories. Earl Pierce, Jr., a contributor to weird tales, was also a resident of Milwaukee whom Bloch met at the time.
Bloch became a frequent visitor to Weinbaum's home; they had in common a strong interest in James Branch Cabell.
Bloch remembers Weinbaum as a soft-spoken Southerner (originally from Louisville), a good-looking, unassuming man, living quietly and modestly with his wife. Among the "secrets" that Bloch confessed to Weinbaum and other Mil-waukee Fictioneers was the fact that he still yearned to be a comic. His adulation of Lovecraft was light years removed from this ambition, but he recalls, "I did submit gags to F. Chase Taylor, of the then-popular comedy team, Stoopnagle and Budd, whom I admired, and got a couple of small checks. When Roy Atwell, then appearing with Fred Allen, came to town in vaudeville, I appeared on an amateur show at the theater. Atwell was not only interested in my imper-sonation, he also bought the monologue material I used for myself. For a short time I did nitery stints as M. C. or monologist, but the money was poor even by Depression standards, the hours were terrible, and the whole milieu seemed seedy and seamy. I wasn't hip enough to thrive at the trade."
The death of Lovecraft on March 15, 1937, affected Robert Bloch much harder than he admitted in his eulogy, which appeared in the June, 1937, weird tales. "Of course there ought to be a memorial volume, with stories chosen by the readers," he wrote. "That's the smallest tribute we can pay." (A few years later August W. Derleth and Donald Wandrei accomplished that objective and the beginning of a new fame for Lovecraft.)
"But there's an end of the world," Bloch continued, "the world of Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, and Abdul Alhazred; the finest world of fantasy I know."
During the past year Bloch's stories in the Lovecraft vein had been growing in effectiveness, predominantly a result of greater care in building the backgrounds of his stories. Their popularity became undeniable, but equally undeniable was the fact that the endings were forced and unbelievable. Sto-ries like The Druidic Doom, The Faceless God, The Grinning Ghoul, The Opener of the Way, The Dark Demon, and Brood of Bubastis were cast in the same mold. The author seemed unaware that in the majority of his later writings Lovecraft had abandoned the supernatural in explaining his horrors and had leaned with increasing weight on science. Bloch was actually writing pastiches of early Lovecraft. In this respect he had company. Henry Kuttner, as fervid a Lovecraft enthusiast and imitator as Bloch, had broken into the professional ranks by the same road. They had been correspondents for years, and when Lovecraft died, sensing Bloch's bereavement, Kuttner's mother suggested to Henry that Bloch be invited as a guest to their Beverly Hills home. C. L. Moore was in town visiting at the time, and Bloch was also introduced to another aspiring author who would even-tually make his reputation in fantasy ranks, Fritz Leiber, Jr. They were as curious about Bloch as he was about them, and what they saw was a tall, angular young man, not yet turned 21, with features as sharp as his wit (largely expressed in the scie
nce-fiction fan magazines) and rimless glasses that im-parted an intellectual appearance. In person they found Bloch was soft spoken, quiet, almost gentle.
Kuttner was barely getting under way as a writer. Besides weird tales he was selling to thrilling mystery and was evaluating other markets. It would be years before Bloch would seriously try for any magazine other than weird tales, and then only by accident.
On the recommendation of Ralph Milne Farley, Ray Pal-mer had been given the job as editor of amazing stories by Ziff-Davis Publications, a Chicago firm that had purchased the magazine from Teck Publications in the spring of 1938. Palmer was desperately casting about for Chicago-area writ-ers he could shape into a dependable team and he urged Bloch to try his hand at writing science fiction. Bloch's first attempt, The Secret of the Observatory in the August, 1938, amazing stories, was a potboiler about a camera that could photograph through walls, but it did force Bloch to write dialogue. Lovecraft couldn't write dialogue, so precious little appeared in any story by writers influenced by him. In his nearly four years of fantasy writing, Bloch proba-bly hadn't written 1,000 words of dialogue in his fantasy, though of course he did some for comedy routines.
In his second attempt at science fiction, Bloch hit the bull's-eye. No one knew it at the time, but Bloch had found the thing he was best at and that would eventually lead to the writing of Psycho. Authors had detailed every conceivable aspect of the physical side of space flight, but in The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton in amazing stories for March, 1939, Bloch explored its psychological aspects. A man is sent to Mars in a windowless spaceship on a journey that will take ten years. His instrument board is smashed on take-off so he has no way of estimating distance or duration. Time passes and his hair whitens, his skin shrivels, and he begins to grow old. Finally the ship stops vibrating and he emerges to learn that the ship never left Earth, that he was sealed inside for only one week. New space developments may possibly date the story, but at the time of its appearance it was a masterpiece based on excellent scientific knowledge (atomic energy engines) with a finale that figuratively tore the reader's head off.
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