Before Netflix, our popular culture was piped through the pulps. These forgotten archives of American art brought us our superheroes and monsters, our lovers and heartbreakers, and our unforgotten immortal storytellers, from Agatha Christie to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Mark Twain to Tennessee Williams.
We've written previously about the fantasy/horror pulp called Weird Tales, which in 1924 hired Harry Houdini as its star writer and headliner. Historians now consider it the most important and influential of all the early pulps.
The May-July Anniversary Number was a Hail Mary edition designed to stave off bankruptcy. The publisher was betting all by putting Houdini on the cover with his story "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs." As we've reported, it really was Houdini's story idea, but it was really written by H.P. Lovecraft, who in those days had a day job being Harry's ghost writer, if we may use that expression. "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" had not only ghosts, but also Houdini, in Cairo, being captured by nefarious Arab terrorists and imprisoned beneath a pyramid, to be sacrificed to horrid monsters of untold age.
The May-July Anniversary Number was a Hail Mary edition designed to stave off bankruptcy. The publisher was betting all by putting Houdini on the cover with his story "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs." As we've reported, it really was Houdini's story idea, but it was really written by H.P. Lovecraft, who in those days had a day job being Harry's ghost writer, if we may use that expression. "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" had not only ghosts, but also Houdini, in Cairo, being captured by nefarious Arab terrorists and imprisoned beneath a pyramid, to be sacrificed to horrid monsters of untold age.
The first step was to get free of my bonds, gag, and blindfold; and this I knew would be no great task, since subtler experts than these Arabs had tried every known species of fetter upon me during my long and varied career as an exponent of escape, yet had never succeeded in defeating my methods.
But Lovecraft cranked up the challenge so much that the Blackburn handcuffs seemed like a Sunday school picnic. The story was actually a well-researched piece of Egyptology that was then simmered in hedgepig slime, lycanthrope venom, adder's fork and blindworm's sting. Men with the heads of crocodiles, horrifying creatures with toes as big as hippopotami - even Houdini, one of the strongest men on earth, faints three times before the genuinely surprising ending. As described in the Journal of the History of Ideas by S. J. Weinreich:
"The story bears all the hallmarks of Lovecraftian 'cosmic horror': ghastly and ancient things lurking beneath ordinary life, grotesque monsters compounded from all manner of anatomies and mythologies, the inability of the human mind to comprehend the awful truth, and his unique—to put it kindly—prose style."
It was the ecstasy of nightmare and the summation of the fiendish. The suddenness of it was apocalyptic and daemoniac—one moment I was plunging agonisingly down that narrow well of million-toothed torture, yet the next moment I was soaring on bat-wings in the gulfs of hell; swinging free and swoopingly through illimitable miles of boundless, musty space; rising dizzily to measureless pinnacles of chilling ether, then diving gaspingly to sucking nadirs of ravenous, nauseous lower vacua. . . . Thank God for the mercy that shut out in oblivion those clawing Furies of consciousness which half unhinged my faculties, and tore Harpy-like at my spirit! That one respite, short as it was, gave me the strength and sanity to endure those still greater sublimations of cosmic panic that lurked and gibbered on the road ahead.When this edition of Weird Tales finally hit the news-stands, the publisher himself underwent a Harpy-like tear at his spirit: it was banned in Indiana and, according to historians, removed from the newsstands in several cities.
It was not Houdini's piece that offended the Mike Pences of 1924. It was the one written by his friend C.M. Eddy, also a collaborator with Lovecraft and a charter member of Houdini's "secret service," his private detective force who infiltrated the dens of fraudulent spirit mediums and gathered evidence for Houdini's public exposures.
Eddy had written a lurid story called "The Loved Dead," a first-person account of necrophilia. It may have been too much to read, even for Houdini, but it sold, and saved both the magazine and the career of H.P. Lovecraft. The citizens of Indiana traveled to both Ohio and Illinois to get their copies.
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Great post David!
ReplyDeleteThank you! There seems to be a lot in the connection between Lovecraft and Houdini....
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