Afterword: Volume 1, Pulp Classics Reading Club
So what can we learn from the pulps?
I’m going to come right out and say it: we don’t have to learn anything.
We can read these stories, just as those first readers probably did, and simply enjoy them.
What else are fictional adventures for? They are for our enjoyment.
When did we forget this?
In the days of the pulps, times were hard. The first World War decimated an entire generation.
Then there followed a severe economic depression. Another generation scarred for life. (When my wife’s grandfather died, his family found his stash of Sara Lee aluminum pie plates. He’d saved them, just in case they might come in handy some day. Never mind that he’d become a wealthy man!)
Then, on top of all that, another war broke out.
Through all this upheaval and hardship, through business failures and paper shortages, the pulps remained a fixture of early 20th-century American society. Why?
As the English writer G. K. Chesterton wrote in 1901, in his essay “In Defense of Penny Dreadfuls”:
This class of composition has presumably always existed, and must exist. It has no more claim to be good literature than the daily conversation of its readers to be fine oratory, or the lodging-houses and tenements they inhabit to be sublime architecture. But people must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must have stories. The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important. Every one of us in childhood has constructed such an invisible dramatis personae, but it never occurred to our nurses to correct the composition by careful comparison with Balzac. In the East the professional story-teller goes from village to village with a small carpet; and I wish sincerely that any one had the moral courage to spread that carpet and sit on it in Ludgate Circus. But it is not probable that all the tales of the carpet-bearer are little gems of original artistic workmanship. Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
In the erudite and cultured Wisdom of the Current Year, it is an accepted posture to scoff at “escapist literature”: it’s alright to read it if you’re twelve.
But the Wisdom of the Ages tells us something different: a certain form of story nourishes and nurtures our psyches. Especially in hard times, we fall back on the stories closest to our hearts for encouragement and, yes, escape.
Regarding that dirty word, “escape”, J.R.R. Tolkien writes in his celebrated essay, “On Fairy Stories“:
Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using Escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.
—from Tree and Leaf (affiliate link)
And as author and fellow traveler Alexander Hellene points out, escape is not the same as retreat:
We seek to escape to somewhere better, even if only for a little bit, to recreate ourselves.
Recreation = re + create
Retreat is running away.
Escape is rearmament.
—from Escapism Is Rearmament
Did you know that as the American troops boarded the landing ships headed for Normandy, each man was handed a book? In fact, along with classic literature, many of those books were “escapist” fiction: adventures, Westerns, even superheroes (The Adventures of Superman was especially popular!). It wasn’t just at Normandy, either. Read up on the “Armed Services Editions” some day.
Were those men retreating from reality by reading about courage and adventure?
No, they were arming themselves for the challenges to come.
So if we must take a lesson from anything, take this: whether you are twelve or 120, enjoy these stories and others like them that glory in the masculine virtues and warn of the follies that would bring a man low.
Read them as often as you like, openly, in public, without shame.
Arm yourself for the challenges to come.
Then, recommend them to your friends.
Leave them unattended on the coffee table when your nephews (and nieces!) are visiting.
Don’t apologize.
Fiction is a necessity.