What’s the Point of Pulp?

The Pulp Jungle is a memoir of a golden-age pulp fiction writer, narrating his beginnings, lean years, and his eventual rise to…well, I’ll get to that later.

The book’s last few sentences admirably embody the hollowness at its core:

Twenty-five of my books have sold to motion pictures. I have also sold a substantial number of “original” screenplays.

And that’s it. The book just ends there. No afterword. No rousing reflection from Mr. Gruber on a long career in the publishing world, nor any attempt at an understanding of what his career(which by his accounts includes many hundreds of completed stories and novels) actually meant. You can take that word ‘meant’ any way you want, and my last sentence still stands. There’s a strange, tinny silence in all the places you’d expect to find meaning, reflection, regret — there’s nothing: not what it meant to him, the industry, or what it meant in terms of…well, just about anything other than his finances and standing within a now utterly forgotten cabal of pulp writers.

I know that I seem to have gotten things flipped around here by starting with the last sentences, even to the point of being unfair. Professional memoirs should be judged not just by their ends but by the trajectories they narrate, and the lucidity with which the memoirist is able to trace those trajectories. But The Pulp Jungle only occasionally reads like a memoir — that’s mainly at the beginning, and then during Gruber’s sojourn into Hollywood — for the bulk of the book, it would seem that Gruber did little else besides sit at a typewriter every day, and then by some entirely independent process, stand up having written thousands and thousands of saleable words, which he then sold often enough and for enough money to allow him to live an upper-middle-class life(at one point in the story he explicitly compares his income to that of a successful doctor or lawyer, gloatingly but without much further comment.)

And this is the crowning achievement, outside of fleecing Hollywood for a few hundred dollars a month as he sat around smoking and drinking and writing a thing or two that all parties involved seemed to know would never actually get made into a movie.

If I sound bitter, it’s because I paid 75 dollars(!) for this book thinking it would actually inspire me. I hoped for psychological insight into a mind capable of writing a novel’s worth of words month after month for years on end. Suffice it to say I didn’t get that. What I did get was a mildly interesting series of vignettes, and a portrait of ambition that did at times verge on profundity, up to the point when that ambition’s end was finally met, and the book became a sort of accounts book of sales and successes that led to no discernible destination either professionally or artistically, unless you count Hollywood. When the Hollywood life fizzles out for Gruber, what I took to be the books actual, probably unintended message sank in for me:

It all meant nothing. You can write and write and write, and if you’re decent and smart about it you can make as much as a doctor or a lawyer. Then maybe you can make it to Hollywood and write scripts that don’t get made, and maybe get paid a bit more. If you’re even luckier, you can get access to a sort of writerly men’s club, wherein poets and big L literary writers are looked at as foolish, like failed pulp writers who just can’t seem to get it together and inject the sort of juice that stories need to actually sell.

That’s whats sort of fascinating about The Pulp Jungle. At first, it seems like a somewhat typical artist’s memoir: the boy with early failures and big ambitions, then the move to the city where he’s sure it’ll all happen for him, then more failure, then eventually a bit of success, and then a bit more…but then when Gruber does finally hit his stride, it reads more like the memoir of a tradesman with little understanding of what others actually value about his trade. In Gruber’s world, there are the clients, the checks, the few essential tricks you need to get around in the business…and that’s sort of it. Which might be interesting, if you’re a tradesman looking to pick up a few unintuitive bits of info about the business and the tradecraft itself…but Gruber says hardly anything about actually writing! It’s remarkable, in a frustrating sort of way. Outside a brief section at the end, which I’ll touch on next, I don’t think there are a thousand words in this book about what it’s actually like to write stories day after day, with your whole livelihood dependant upon their quality and novelty. That’s why I picked this book up, and it’s just not here, which makes me wonder if Gruber has a (Bob) Dylanesque reluctance to talk about the art, in fear of rubbing the dust off the butterfly wings…which would be odd because Gruber’s whole thing is that stories and novels can be banged out just like articles, pamphlets or even, like, shoes from a sweatshop or something. Concern about a fragile and magical muse required for writing seems the furthest thing from his mind, in fact, the very thing the book itself stands as evidence against.

Okay, so that section that’s actually about writing goes like this:

To this day I claim that this plot formula is foolproof. You can write a perfectly salable mystery story with perhaps only seven or eight of these elements, but get them all into a story and you cannot miss.

1. Colorful Hero

2. Theme

3. Villain

4. Background

5. Murder Method

6. Motive

7. Clue

8. Trick

9. Action

10. Climax

11. Emotion

Each of the eleven points needs amplification. In general the line to follow is summed up in the word “unusual.” Every one of the eleven points had to be “unusual.”

He then goes on to elucidate on each point, sort of. Here’s an example:

2. THEME. This, to me, is the most important element of any mystery story plot. By theme I mean subject matter, what the story is about In addition to, over and above, the ACTUAL MURDER plot. To illustrate:

Death at the Main is about fighting cocks…The Lock and the Key was about locksmiths. A liberal education in making locks and keys was thrown into the murder plot. I knew absolutely nothing about locks and keys until I did research on the subject. I know no more than is in the book.

Have I lost it, or is that a really idiosyncratic definition of ‘theme’? But perhaps it’s a useful one in the business of writing pulp stories. I will say that Gruber does include a paragraph that I suppose could be taken as an explanation for the startling lack of actual writing in the memoir of a man who by the numbers probably spent eight hours a day doing nothing else:

Only the writer alone can work out this myriad of idea and detail. No one can help him to do it. He must do it alone, and he must write down his five thousand words, his seventeen pages.

Which is true and I think anyone who has ever written anything would agree with. But then why don’t we get any insight into what that was actually like for Gruber? This is about as close we come:

A writer is truly alone. He sits and thinks, works and reworks his ideas, his thoughts. And then he writes and rewrites. And while he is doing all this, he is utterly alone.

Am I off base in hoping for a more high-resolution look into his process? At times the book gives me that creepy sort of non-entity impression I get from bad mass-market memoirs written by athletes and politicians, wherein they come off as robots that sort of moved through a life, rather than actually lived it. I think David Foster Wallace has an essay where he talks about this, in regards to a tennis player’s memoir. He goes onto wonder if that utter lack of introspection was actually a fundamental contributor to her athletic success. The Pulp Jungle is definitely not that that bad, nor is it a totally sterilized bit of airport-rack nothingness — but there is a lot I was hoping would be here that is absolutely nowhere to be found.

(In Gruber’s defense I get this feeling from almost all ‘how to write better’ type books. I come away feeling like I’ve read nothing, mainly because writing is such an individual process. There’s just not that much another person can tell you in general. Therein lies the problem — writing teachers try to give generalized advice. I think I would learn a lot more from an in-depth memoir that narrated the development of a single work. I don’t know of any books like this, but I’d love to read one. (I guess the closest thing I know of is Nietzche’s Ecce Homo, but it doesn’t quite fit the bill. I think the writer being a once in a generation genius actually makes the book less useful to other writers. Another reason I picked up The Pulp Jungle.)

Another example of this absence, from the paragraphs that crystallized my growing disappointment with the book:

During the seven years between 1934 and 1941 I wrote an average of six hundred thousand words a year. During the last three years of this period I was already writing books and the wordage of the twelve or so books produced during this period, added to the shorter stories, brought my average per year to above eight hundred thousand words.

This is an enormous amount of writing, any way you slice it. The manual labor involved in typing eight hundred thousand words a year is considerable. I flogged the typewriter day and night. I flogged it in the early hours of the morning, I beat at it, late at night. I worked Saturdays and Sundays.

This latter paragraph should’ve been the climax of the book, the energetic focal point. Instead, I read it and just think, “Oh wow, that sounds like a lot of work…” just as I do when say a friend at a large company tells me they worked eighty hours the previous week. Ultimately it’s impressive but uninteresting. It reminds me of the interactions I had quite a lot while I was growing up. They usually went something like this:

I would be talking to an adult, and somehow it would come up that their job title sounded like something I might want to do when I grew up. Say, ‘writer’ for instance. They or my parents would tell me they were a ‘writer’ and I would get excited and say I wanted to be a writer and oh please tell me what it’s like. Then they would sort of laugh and say:

“Oh no, not that kind of writer. I’m a technical writer for IBM.”

But I would still be excited. Writing for a big computer company? That must be cool.

“Okay, so what’s that like?” I would ask again.

Then they would look sort of bored. Bored with me, or bored with themselves, or just not that jazzed to talk about their job at the neighborhood block party or wherever we happened to be.

“It’s like anything else…it’s hard work,” they would say. And then my interest and excitement would drain, and I would think that maybe being a writer wasn’t such a good thing after all. This is the impression I get from Gruber, and I don’t think it comes down to his talent level, the literary or Literary content of his pulpy stories, or the fact that he made a good income from what he did. None of those things are whatsoever damning, in and of themselves.

The disappointment comes from the fact that he himself is not excited by what he wrote over the span of his career. He talks about his last story the way a dentist talks about the last cleaning he did, and perhaps not even with that level of pride or excitement. Each story was just another thing that had to be done to keep turning the endless wheel of “career” that powered his life. Again, this is not a problem in itself, but it is a serious problem for The Pulp Jungle as a reading experience. A very interesting book could’ve been written about the process of accepting personal limitations, of consciously choosing money over potential fame and literary legacy, of choosing a scrappy sort of craftsmanship(which I did and still do see as admirable) over the more cerebral joys that might come from a less grueling writing schedule. The Pulp Jungle is not that book, and it doesn’t really try to be. It doesn’t try to be much of anything, other than a tool to help Gruber himself remember the good old days, and in a few minor ways that I expect less than a hundred people on earth care about, ‘set the record straight’ about who did what in the pulp world.

You do get to see Gruber making the sorts of trade-offs I described above, but only in the sense that he just sort of makes them and moves on. We don’t get any insight into his decision-making process, the pain of giving up the old dreams, or anything like that.

But we do get details about the pulp writers milieu (all of which should’ve been more detailed, rather than just mentioned in passing), and a few of them I found kind of delightful. These include Gruber’s physical confrontation with Raymond Chandler, a heart-wrenching description of immortalized, anthologized, household name poets scrounging for dimes at a pathetic basement reading(after they were already immortalized, I mean, which is what makes it so sad and surprising) and an all too brief run-in with L. Ron Hubbard (introduced as the ‘creator of the Dianetics fad’) who is exactly the sort of bizarre character the book could’ve done with more of. For a book about DIY artists in NYC with big incomes, there are remarkably few eccentrics on the record here. The best that we do get it is a man named George Bruce, and I’ll end with him because his little moment actually delivers on what I hoped(and others told me!) this book had to offer:

About ten o’clock in the evening George announced that he had a deadline for a twelve thousand-word story the following morning and he had to get at it. I assumed that it was a hint for the guests to leave, but such was not the case at all. George merely went to his desk in one corner of the room and began to bang his typewriter. George sat at that typewriter for four solid hours, completely oblivious to the brawl going on around him. At two o’clock in the morning he finished his twelve thousand words and had a drink of gin.

They don’t make them like that anymore!

Addendum:

I’ve never paid $75 dollars for a book before. It’s totally possible that caused me to judge the book much more critically than I would’ve otherwise.