De Prorok: “B. Mysterious Sahara.”

  De Prorok: “Byron in Quest of Lost Worlds.”

  H. Malamud, I. Berkman, and H. Rogovin, “A Protest”

  Amazing Stories, April 1943

  Sirs:

  This is a protest against that moronic, harebrained series of articles known as “Scientific Mysteries” which you have been so misguided as to publish. Such stupidity is remarkable—no, it is unbelievable. Without stopping to think, you take a few shreds of evidence, plus a goodly hunk of imagination, and draw fantastic conclusions, which, if true, would turn our everyday world into a science fictioneer’s conception of Mars.

  Take, for instance, your latest in this infamous series, “Totem of the Eagle.” You take the fact that the eagle was used as an emblem in Imperial Russia, Greece, and Rome; that eagle feathers were used by two or three races; that feathers were used by the Polish knights and the Sioux and Aztecs; that winged beings other than birds were depicted by ancient peoples.

  To these facts you add that the American Indians of the East trained their hair in what you call a “birdlike” crest. (Do you really think it is birdlike?)

  With those facts, and nothing more, you retire to your fabrication room and produce a masterpiece about an “eagle-totem.” Perhaps you have not heard of the swastika-totem. It was used by the Aztecs and other American Indians. At the present time it still survives among the primitive races, particularly near Milwaukee, although formerly it was most used on the coast. It may also be seen in Egyptian designs, ranging from textile designs to temple ornaments. The Eskimos of Greenland also used the swastika. Oddly enough, this totem still survives at the present time in a limited district surrounding Berchtesgaden.

  From these facts I deduce that one of the following conclusions must be true: (1) That the ancient Egyptians, Aztecs, and Eskimos must have been Fascists. (2) That Germany is populated by Aztecs, Indians, Eskimos, and Egyptians. (3) It may have been a coincidence that all used the same design.

  H. Malamud, I. Berkman, H. Rogovin

  122 Eames Place

  Bronx, N.Y.

  Isn’t it true that, when dealing with the past of which there are so few relics, theory enters into reconstruction to a great degree? And isn’t it true that these articles serve to arouse discussion and thereby help attain the real truth of the past of mankind? We know that L. Taylor Hansen plans to publish these articles in book form, and such a contribution, however erroneous it may turn out to be, is of great value and interest to science, because of the collection and compilation of many related facts which can then be studied by other scientists and eventually may form a definite added link to the past.

  As to the swastika, your editor could quote authorities who have dealt with this symbol at great length, and they do not arrive at your conclusions—although since your editor is a former Milwaukeean himself, we might agree that those primitive peoples are no proof of anything even if they do use the swastika—and besides they don’t use it, but a reversed form, which is something quite different, we assure you.

  Perhaps we will run an article in the future on the swastika.

  —Ed. [Raymond A. Palmer]

  L. Taylor Hansen, “L. Taylor Hansen Defends Himself”

  Amazing Stories, June 1943

  Sirs (Messrs. Malamud, Berkman, and Rogovin):

  Although the editor of Amazing Stories defended my series of articles very ably, yet I must answer in person because I enjoyed your letter so thoroughly. You have a very real touch for satire, which is not a common ability. Therefore I am taking the keenest delight in crossing swords with you.

  It is true that the symbol of the Swastika was once as worldwide as that of the Eagle. Furthermore, it was not only scattered over ancient Europe, the Americas, and Egypt, but also the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and Northern Africa. Nuttall, the well-known Central American archaeologist, who thought it a calendrical sign indicating a certain long epoch or passage of time, wrote the best treatise upon the subject and published it long before the word Nazi had been conceived.

  Your conclusions therefore (1) “that the ancient Egyptians, Aztecs, and Eskimos must have been fascists; (2) that Germany is populated by Aztecs, Indians, Eskimos, and Egyptians; (3) it may have been a coincidence” were delightfully refreshing.

  However, may I point out: (1) that the only possible conclusion you have offered, namely the last, is only true if the number of culture traits which accompany a symbol do not exceed the law of averages; (2) that you forgot another possibility—namely that the symbol under discussion with its accompanying culture traits might have migrated from a center, and therefore could have been ancestral to them all even though the physical type carrying it in that remote date has since been drowned in the subsequent migrations of other ancestors which we must all claim a few millenniums ago?

  As for Berchtesgaden and its emblem, it is not the Indian male, but rather the female symbol. As one old Indian chuckled: “Him have a she-sign on sleeve!”

  In conclusion, may I add that I am only pursuing truth and could not, even should I wish most fervently to do so, reach any hard and fast conclusions. However, I must say that your delightful fallacies were so amusing that the readers of the mag must be indebted to you if they were only partially as tickled as the author to whom you were tossing the brickbats.

  L. Taylor Hansen

  (address withheld)

  Atta-boy, Hansen! They asked for it. And thanks for saying our own defense was “able.”

  We wish we could speak with your authority!—Ed. [Raymond A. Palmer]

  * Wissler, Clark—Curator of Anthropology, Amer. Museum of Nat. Hist., New York City.—Ed.

  * Itzaes, “First Conquerors of Colkuas.” They founded the Mayan Golden Age. In turn were conquered by Tutul-Xius.

  * For Apache legend see E. L. Squier, “Children of the Twilight.“

  * Wasm, Arabic for trademark or signature. See De Prorok, “Mysterious Sahara.”

  4

  EDITORS

  The Anglophone periodical boom coincided with an influx of educated women into the labor force at the turn of the twentieth century; therefore, it is no surprise that such women sought careers in magazine editing of all sorts, including SF. Many of the women working in SF, such as Miriam Bourne at Amazing Stories and Catherine “Kay” Tarrant at Astounding Science Fiction, were employed in essential but largely behind-the-scenes support roles. A few, however, made their names as lead editors. Following the pattern established by their nineteenth-century predecessors in commercial women’s magazine production, Dorothy McIlwraith of Weird Tales and Mary Gnaedinger of Famous Fantastic Mysteries guaranteed the success of their publications by adopting the role of the editor as facilitator. As such, they used written commentaries to suggest that the creation of SF as a popular genre was a joint endeavor between editors and readers, while quietly furthering their unique visions of SF through content selection. Meanwhile, Lilith Lorraine of Different chose a path similar to that of women editors from the early-twentieth-century modernist little-magazine movement, using her publication to speak directly about the relations of aesthetics and politics in both her editorials and her content choice.

  Magazines dominated Anglophone literary culture from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. This was particularly true in the United States, where, as the feminist literary historian Ellen Gruber Garvey explains, “about 60% of Americans were regular magazine readers” by the opening decades of the twentieth century (xi). In an era when an increasing number of women sought paid work outside the home, editing seemed to be an ideal career because “many people believed editing was simply an extension of reading, and … women had long been associated with fiction reading” (xiv). In practice, however, editing required women to grow beyond conventional gender roles because it demanded a certain facility with “unwomanly” activities such as public speaking and business management (xix). Women accepted this challenge eagerly and found particular success as editors in two distinct areas: the commercial women’s magazines that helped define the cult of domesticity and the rhetoric of separate spheres in the middle to late 1800s and the noncommercial literary magazines that shaped modernist politics and aesthetics in the early 1900s.

  More than seven hundred women worked as editors at the wildly popular and profitable women’s magazines that debuted in the Victorian Era. Such women often took on the editing persona of the facilitator to negotiate the gap between their publications’ stated commitment to conservative gender ideals and their own, often more progressive social and political beliefs. Fionnuala Dillane explains that while men employed the “model of editor as impresario … authoritative, visionary, and entrepreneur-like,” women gravitated to the model of editor as facilitator because while they were “aware that there would always be compromises on content” that exceeded their control, they could exert authority in terms of “how that content was delivered” (284). This is certainly true of Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited Godey’s Lady Book from 1837 until 1877. On the one hand, Hale’s editorial comments seemed to uphold “the notion that women, being innocent and fragile, are more suited to life in the home” (Darling 22). At the same time, she “subtly advocated a public role for women in the arts and letters” with story selections that encouraged a critical dialogue about traditional gender roles and editorials that linked education to the success of women’s domestic labor—which, Hale suggested, might even be expanded to include teaching and writing (Darling 22). In a similar vein, Mary Louise Booth, who edited Harper’s Bazaar from 1867 to 1889, “recognized the potential in the high-fashion magazine’s position as trend-setter—its futuristic orientation—and exploited it from the start, using it as a cover for her advocacy of social … and gender reform” (Bennett 226).1 By showing how the work of women as homemakers and consumers might coexist with and even facilitate their work in the realms of culture and politics, Hale and Booth ensured the ongoing success of their publications while disseminating progressive new ideas to large audiences.2

  By way of contrast, the noncommercial modernist literary magazines that sprung up in the early twentieth century provided new opportunities for women editors to experiment more directly with creative expression. As the literary historian Jayne E. Marek explains, women working at these little magazines—many of which were owned and operated by the women who edited them—“refused to use editing as a passive facilitation of others’ works and were instead visibly confrontational, juxtaposing editorials, reviews, and articles to highlight critical controversies” over everything from cubism and imagism to the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Emma Goldman (61). As they combined art and politics in their magazines, women often encountered resistance from male colleagues who advocated a strict separation between the two realms. This was particularly true of Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver at the New Freewoman (later renamed the Egoist) and Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap at the Little Review, who, “to the perpetual frustration of men like [Ezra] Pound, John Quinn, William Carlos Williams and others … refused to separate art out into a special sphere of its own, somehow devoid of history, personality, and the micropolitics of everyday life” (Latham 408). In direct contrast to their counterparts in commercial magazine production, who often downplayed their innovative editing activities to ensure the continued success of their magazines, little-magazine editors proudly claimed such activities as their own.

  Genre publications made their debut at the height of the commercial magazine boom in the 1920s, and their production was made possible by scores of women working in support roles. Many of these women were crucial to the success of their magazines. Miriam Bourne began her career at Amazing Stories in 1926 as a secretary, but quickly took on editorial work reading manuscripts and running interference between Hugo Gernsback and the many authors to whom he owed money. In 1928 Gernsback promoted Bourne to the position of associate editor, and in 1929 his successor, T. O’Conor Sloane, made her managing editor, in which position she handled the daily operations of the Amazing franchise.3 In a similar vein, Catherine “Kay” Tarrant was hired at Astounding Science Fiction to perform secretarial work, but because her boss, John W. Campbell, preferred to do his own typing, she quickly assumed the role of manuscript editor. In this capacity, Tarrant ensured Astounding’s reputation as a clean magazine suitable for readers of all ages by ruthlessly excising racy content from her authors’ submissions.4 What began as clerical jobs for both Bourne and Tarrant became editorial careers in which the two facilitated the success of their respective publications through a wide range of behind-the-scenes activities.

  Women also adopted the persona of the facilitator in their work as lead editors. Like many of their nineteenth-century counterparts, both Mary Gnaedinger and Dorothy McIlwraith were seasoned professionals brought in from outside their respective magazines’ generic communities to promote already established publishing agendas. For Gnaedinger, who was hired by the Munsey Company in 1939 to edit Famous Fantastic Mysteries, this meant ensuring the success of a magazine dedicated to reprinting SF and fantasy stories from the Munsey catalog. For McIlwraith, who became the editor of Weird Tales in 1940, this meant fulfilling her predecessor Farnsworth Wright’s promise to print only “the cream of the weird scientific-fiction that is written today” (qtd. in Weinberg, “Weird” 120). Both women were also careful to follow the convention introduced by Hugo Gernsback in the first issue of Amazing Stories (and imitated by all other editors from this period) of building community with the promise that all editorial decisions would be guided by reader preferences. As Gnaedinger vowed in a brief March 1940 headnote, “Each succeeding issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries [will] conform further with the readers’ requests” (41). Meanwhile, McIlwraith used Weird Tales’ discussion forum, “The Eyrie,” to solicit audience engagement by asking, “What do you readers think?” and encouraging fans to write in because “such letters are a great help to us in giving you the kinds of stories that you really want to see.” Gnaedinger and McIlwraith may not have been familiar with speculative fiction prior to their work within the genre, but as experienced editors they quickly identified the conventions of their new communities and employed them to ensure a strong subscription base.

  Neither Gnaedinger nor McIlwraith was prone to making extensive editorial pronouncements, but any such pronouncements were also designed to facilitate a sense of partnership between editor and readers. When All-Fiction Field bought Famous Fantastic Mysteries in 1943, Gnaedinger suddenly had the freedom to print both new and old stories of her own choosing. As she explained in her March 1943 editorial, “In our opinion, this change, far from diminishing the quality of the book, should improve it…. Now we have the fantastic lore of the world from which to choose” (113). While Gnaedinger goes on to preview a story that will appear in the next issue that is, “in our opinion, one of the most outstanding imaginative fantasies ever written,” she concludes by assuring readers that she is also negotiating for the rights “to an English fantasy novel for which a lot of you have been clamoring for a long time” (113). Meanwhile, in her preface to the July 1941 readers’ forum, Mc-Ilwraith uses a reader’s comparison of Weird Tales to a kind of literary time machine as the occasion to explain why her magazine’s multi-genre approach to fiction trumps the more narrow focus of the specialist genre magazines: employing genres such as “horror,” “science fiction,” and “fantasy of every kind” allows readers to explore the past, present, and future through stories “so varied that, no matter what your taste, you will be entertained” (122). The practice employed by Gnaedinger and McIlwraith of always emphasizing the positive and creative connections between editor and fan was a far cry from that of Hugo Gernsback, Farnsworth Wright, and Harry Bates of Astounding, all of whom courted readers when they needed money but testily corrected them when their ideas about SF departed from those of the editors themselves.5

  Even as they worked to build a community among readers, Gnaedinger and McIlwraith expanded that community’s understanding of speculative fiction through invisible editing activities, including art and story selection. Gnaedinger secured the early success of Famous Fantastic Mysteries by commissioning the much-loved Weird Tales artist Virgil Finlay to produce both interior and cover art. Moreover, in an era when editors such as John W. Campbell and Groff Conklin were loudly declaring that women could not write SF, Gnaedinger preserved women’s contributions to the genre by reprinting their stories and poems.6 The fourth issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries included Francis Stevens’s 1918 tale “Behind the Curtain” as well as Lillian M. Ainsworth’s 1917 horror story “An Astral Gentleman” (coauthored with Robert Wilbur Lull; see figure 4.1). Other issues of Famous Fantastic Mysteries featured offerings by Laura Withrow, Minna Irving, and, once Gnaedinger was free to commission new works, C. L. Moore.

  Similarly, when the death or departure of key Weird Tales contributors demanded that McIlwraith rethink her predecessor’s publishing agenda, she seized the opportunity to shift the magazine’s focus away from the cosmic horror and sword and sorcery stories that appeared outdated to an American audience increasingly interested in “atom bombs, space flight, and flying saucers” (Hanley). Accordingly, she introduced readers to new authors, including Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon, and Margaret St. Clair, all of whom would become central to the socially oriented SF that flourished at midcentury and paved the way for New Wave SF. For instance, in the November 1942 issue of Weird Tales, McIlwraith provides readers with offerings from longtime contributors H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Stanton A. Coblentz, and David H. Keller alongside tales from Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, and Hannes Bok, newcomers who were just a few years into their highly prolific, decades-spanning careers (see figure 4.2). She also introduced readers to new artists such as Frank Kelly Freas, whose fifty-year career in SF would earn him the title “the Dean of Science Fiction Artists” (“Presenting”).7 As such, Gnaedinger and McIlwraith can be seen as having facilitated the economic success of their magazines, the social cohesiveness of their audiences, and the literary development of SF itself.