As I
started to read Hardboiled in
America: The Weird Years of Paperbacks by Geoffrey O’Brien, I realized that I
was becoming addicted to old books about old books. Consider it a
specialty fetish. But it’s true.
This 1981
book is a mere 35 years old but it harkens back to another era. Plus its
subject matter dates to another era, primarily the 1940s and ‘50s.
O’Brien’s
book details the popularity of a certain genre in paperback form, one that made
an indelible impression on the author.
He saw
these books to be revealing something about Americans. He wrote:
“The
paperbacks were a microcosm of American fantasies about the real world.
They took the ordinary streets, the dives, the tenements, the cheap hotels, and
invested them with mystery – with poetry even – turning them into the stuff of
mythology. Shamelessly exploitative, they made their points with a
maximum of directness. No trace of subtlety was permitted to cloud the
violent and erotic visions that were their essence, and that very lack of
subtlety lifted them out of this world. The people they depicted seemed
to exist in some impossibly energetic super-America parallel to the one we know.
“The
covers were voyeuristic rather than decorative. They permitted, by means
of a hyperrealism weightier than any photograph could be (after all, a photo
would show the people to be mere humans), a peep through a window, and thereby
proposed an answer to a society’s secret question: What is really going on
out there? The answer could not, of course, be pleasing to all. A
Congressional committee feared that “the casual reader of such ‘literature’
might easily conclude that all married persons are habitually adulterous and
all teenagers devoid of any sex inhibitions.” Readers today, inured to
adultery and uninhibited sex, may still feel considerable qualms about an art
that never hesitated to equate sex and violence. The persistent
necrophilia is indeed troubling, since the paperbacks were presumably a
faithful mirror of the inclinations of the American males for whom they were
created. As a man in his forties remarked when looking over some vintage
covers, “I got all my sex education from books like this.”
Times
were changing during the middle of the last century, and these books clearly
fed pent up desires of their readers. And they were being sold on the
cheap. The author wrote:
“Paperbacks
such as these, which made their first appearance in 1939 and had their heyday
of licentiousness in the decade following the Second World War, were from one
point of view merely a physical format, a new way of packaging discounts books.
But in the unconscious fashion of forms set adrift in a society, they became
both a source of new imagery and a synthesis of certain old images that found
in them their perfect incarnation. They were a new kind of book, most
definitely an American kind of book. The earliest Pocket Books gave rise to
paeans of praise to the democratic spirit, praise that would ultimately evolve
(sometime in the early Fifties) into cries of horror at the degradation of mass
taste.”
Crime
fiction grew in popularity with the advent of these books. O’Brien wrote:
“Although
the first paperback publishers strove with reasonable earnestness to provide
their public with the finest in world literature, it was inevitably popular
taste that triumphed. Popular taste, circa 1939, meant to a large degree
whodunits, and the early paperbacks, relied heavily on the works of Agatha
Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Rex Stout, and other classicists of the mystery
genre. But in time it was another brand of crime story – the hardboiled
kind, initiated primarily by Dashiell Hammett and carried on industriously by a
long line of descendants – that was to become peculiarly identified with the
format, so much so that Hammett, even though his last novel was written years
before the paperbacks come into existence, can easily be thought of as a
“paperback writer.”
O’Brien
writes of these paperbacks perhaps as one would write about today’s e-book
erotica popularity:
“From one
point of view, the paperbacks can be seen as just another aspect of the media
bombardment to which Americans have (with no apparent unwillingness) been
increasingly subjected. What other culture has had its fantasies depicted for
it in such profusion and in such a variety of forms? The most determined
cultural archaeologist cannot cope with the flood of material that the
marketing directors of America have come up with: pulps, comic books,
paperbacks, movies, television shows, record albums, trading cards, radio
programs, stamp books, colorings books, posters, illustrated lunch-boxes,
illustrated T-shirts, decals, badges, laser beam concerts. The list goes on and
becomes ever more inventive as technology discovers new ways of delighting the
sense of the citizenry.”
Though
O’Brien notes that publishers didn’t intend for these kinds of books to be
classics, as evidence of his book, these materials still left a lasting
impression:
“These
books were not intended by their publishers to endure, but merely to fill a few
hours for someone looking for entertainment a bit grittier than the more
official culture of the time, those elaborate glories of the Forties and
Fifties that have since been recapitulated almost to exhaustion: the
ceremonial music of big bands and crooners, the grand rituals of television
history, the formal splendor of never-to-be forgotten MGM musicals –in brief,
the world as reconstitute by Life magazine, a world ultimately
reassuring and meaningful.”
So did
these books reflect a new America that already existed or were they predicting,
almost advocating, for what would come? He writes of how these books
touch upon powerful forces:
“The
paperbacks, on the other hand, tell a dark world below the placid surface, a
world whose inhabitants tend to be grasping, dissatisfied, emotionally twisted
creatures. Here, all is not well; from the looks of it, all could not be
much worse. This other America, when it is not a bleak rural wasteland
inhabited by murderous primitives, is a glittering hell ruled by money and
violence, flaunting images of beauty that are either deceptive or
unobtainable. The temple of this world is the barroom, and its holy of
holies the booth where the blonde sits, always just out of reach. The
precincts are guarded not by priests but by cool psychopathic bodyguards who
wisecrack as they bludgeon. It is a world whose governing forces are, as
in the title of a film of the era, Fear
and Desire.”
Will we
see another trend or revolution in books the way these pocket books took over a
generation? Most likely. I leave you with the author’s description
of when the paperbacks launched:
“Cheap
reprints and books bound in paper arose and flourished sporadically in America
from the nineteenth century onwards. Although most of these were purely
commercial efforts, a significant percentage were associated with a zeal for
bringing culture to the masses. Nevertheless, and despite the obvious
practicality of cheap mass printings, no one had been able to give that kind of
publishing any permanence until June 19, 1939, when the first ten releases of
Pocket Books saw the light of day. Robert DeGraff, the company’s founder, may
have been influenced by the success of Penguin Books, which had begun
publishing several years earlier in England.
“The
kickoff of the paperback industry was heralded by a full-page ad in The New York Times: “OUT
TODAY – THE NEW POCKET BOOKS THAT MAY REVOLUTIONIZE AMERICA’S READING HABITS.”
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Brian Feinblum’s views,
opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his
employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him
at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the
third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2016
