Authors: Sam Moskowitz (ed.)
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Sci-Fi, #SF, #Magazines, #Pulps
Reporting on reader reaction in the February 1 THE CAVALIER, Bob Davis asserted that seventy five percent were favorable and twenty five percent against the story. He ran two pages of letters, but significantly the most ardent praise came from fellow horror-story writers George Allan England, John D. Swain, and William Holloway.
Time has vindicated Bob Davis completely. In fact, most of Cobb's humor is out of print and unavailable, but
Fishhead
is repeatedly being reprinted or anthologized and may turn out to be Cobb's supreme achievement. That this would be the case was determined early, when George T. Delacorte, Jr., founded THE FAMOUS STORY MAGAZINE, devoted to "The World's Best Stories from Modern and Classic Literature," and the very first issue, October, 1925, had
Fishhead
featured as one of the major attractions of the issue.
As THE CAVALIER approached the end of its first year as a weekly, it had become a highly unusual magazine, with offbeat concepts in storytelling and an excellent balance, made possible by 192 pages. To attempt to solidify the readers and give them something in common, the December 28, 1912, issue announced the Cavalier Legion, a brotherhood made up of readers, who would be identifiable by a red button with a green star in the center, supplied free to anyone who wrote in and asked for it. The slogan was "Good Fiction, Good Fellowship." It is not known just how much enthusiasm readers showed for the idea, but it is quite probable that Arthur Sullivant Hoffman, editor of ADVENTURE, got his idea for the formation of the American Legion (which eventually became the great veterans' group) from this source. ADVENTURE announced the concept in their November, 1914, issue, and hammered away at it until it eventually evolved into a national veterans' organization.
Despite Bob Davis' resourcefulness and good taste in selecting stories and keeping the magazine exciting, the major hope for its success rested in the new type of "scientific romance" which had been inaugurated by George Allan England's
Darkness and Dawn
and not in the reworked themes of discovering a method of manufacturing gold or cultivating an ape, or, as in the case of Gaston Leroux's
Balaoo; or, The Footprints on the Ceiling
(November 23-December 12, 1912), discovering
the
Missing Link, who can converse fluently with animals. Entertaining as these stories might have been, they lacked the element of novelty.
The sequel to
Darkness and Dawn
, titled
Beyond the Great Oblivion
, was featured on the cover of January 4, 1913, by Clinton Pettee, who had illustrated
Tarzan of the Apes
. The scene showed Allan Stern and Beatrice Kendrick, clothed in furs, turning to confront a pack of wolves trailing them through a forest in Manhattan, from which still rise the bent structures of gutted skyscrapers. The sequel begins virtually without a break from the last paragraph in
Darkness and Dawn
, and is enthrallingly imaginative. Allan and Beatrice set sail for Boston and are almost drowned in a cataract in the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island Sound. They rebuild an airplane found in the ruins of Providence, Rhode Island, and fly west. A "bottomless" chasm the other side of Pittsburgh appears to have no other side. Their plane gives out and drops them into the chasm, where they are captured by a race of humans, descended from survivors of a great cataclysm when a huge portion of the earth, possibly five hundred miles across, ripped out of the North American continent and was flung into space, to become a second moon (in a sense this is an early story of the concept of an "artificial" earth satellite). They win the confidence of this race by helping them fight off enemies and, in a ritual battle with its leader, Allan becomes ruler of the People of the Abyss and helps them once more "emerge into the sun."
Beyond the Great Oblivion
was literally weaseled out of George Allan England, who produced the ninety-thousand-word novel in segments and got paid piecemeal as he delivered it. The first portion brought one hundred dollars on August 21, 1912; the second, two hundred dollars on August 25; the third, one hundred dollars on September 12; and the balance of the novel, six hundred dollars on September 25. The rate of one thousand dollars represented 1% cents a word, a slight rate increase over
Darkness and Dawn
. In running the story, the editor footnoted that "
Darkness and Dawn
... was one of the most talked-of serials which ever appeared in THE CAVALIER—its imaginative power and realism recalling Jules Verne at his best." The four issues containing it were offered for sale, for those who had not read it.
Little time was wasted in securing the final novel in the trilogy,
The Afterglow
, when Davis found letters of approbation pouring in for
Beyond the Great Oblivion
. George Allan England delivered 16,200 words of the final story of February 25, 1913, and was paid $850 for the completed 76,500-word novel on April 9, 1913. To encourage England, Davis gave him a shot at the higher-paying MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE, buying a four-thousand-word nonfantasy,
The Sprucer
, for two hundred dollars on January 29, 1913, at a rate of about five cents a word.
In
The Afterglow
, Allan and Beatrice fly up to the earth's surface to prepare the way for recolonization from below. The ruins of the Metropolitan Opera House yield a cache of phonograph records and a phonograph. One of them is a recorded marriage ceremony, so the two pledge their troth as a minister dead fifteen hundred years intones the vows.
Three at a time they fly the people out of the great chasm, forming a new surface colony. Attacked by the subhumans first encountered on awakening in New York, they utterly exterminate them with a monumental forest fire which traps the horde against a river.
Beatrice bears Allan a son, who will eventually take over his leadership. The colony grows to one hundred thousand. Science is rediscovered, and soon there are many airplanes, printing presses, a shipyard, and even a monorail. The story ends with ringing hope for the future, now that the old systems no longer exist and mankind can build anew. "I see a world," concludes England in socialistic fervor, "where thrones have crumbled and kings are dust. The aristocracy of idleness has perished from the earth.
"I see a world without a slave. Man at last is free. Nature's forces have by science been enslaved ... a world in which no exile sighs, no prisoner mourns; a world on which the gibbet's shadow does not fall; a world where labor reaps its full reward—where work and worth go hand in hand!
"I see a world without the beggar's outstretched palm, the miser's heartless, stone stare, the piteous wail of want, the livid lips of lies, the cruel eyes of scorn."
The truth, however, was that England had not written a great socialistic tract, but he had written a marvelous scientific romance, which was destined to provide a few hours' escape from the devils he decried. In that respect it possessed more practicality than a good part of his political philosophy.
At the conclusion of the final installment, Bob Davis asked the readers whether they would like to see the three novels—all 216,000 words of them—brought out in hardcovers. At that time, Davis handled subsidiary rights for authors, including book, newspaper syndication, and moving picture. The response must have been heartening, for the trilogy appeared under the title of
Darkness and Dawn
from Small, Maynard and Company in 1914. The book carried the inscription: "To Robert H. Davis, unique inspirer of plots, do I edicate this trilogy. G.A.E." It included as a frontispiece the P. Monahan full-color cover from
The Afterglow
, depicting Beatrice and Allan opening the lead box in which they found the phonograph. The endpapers were the line drawing from the cover of
Darkness and Dawn
, showing the two surveying the ruins of the skyscrapers in Manhattan. There were three interiors, one a black-and-white rendition of the cover of
Beyond the Great Oblivion
and two black-and-whites apparently drawn especially for the book by E. W. Gage. The volume sold for $1.35 and saw at least three printings.
George Allan England, with some acknowledged help from Bob Davis, had struck, in the
Darkness and Dawn
trilogy, a success formula very similar to that which would make Edgar Rice Burroughs in the years immediately ahead one of the world's most widely read authors. Why he did not follow up on it is a literary puzzle. He would write a substantial number of science-fiction novels and short stories in the future, some of exceptional quality, but they would not be scientific romances.
Possibly part of the answer rested in his versatility. He could satisfactorily write virtually any type of story requested. He sold to almost all the other major pulps and some of the important slick magazines. They would buy almost any type of thing he wrote. With Edgar Rice Burroughs, it was different. When he wrote
The Outlaw of Torn
in answer to an editorial request for a historical novel, it would be summarily rejected. Whenever he deviated from the scientific romance or Tarzan, he either had trouble selling it or had to settle for lower rates. He was writing to support a family. He could not afford to experiment. This forced him to write primarily those things which he would have the least trouble placing, and these proved to be just the things that would bring him fame and fortune and would create an entire new school of science fiction.
THE CAVALIER in mid-1913 was a thick magazine, printed in large, clear type, selling for ten cents, with attractive covers but no interior illustrations at all. Though its readers' department contained long and fulsome blurbs of virtually every important forthcoming story, the stories, with rare exceptions, were presented as so many slices of cheese, without any intimation of what they were about other than their title.
Despite the masculine title of THE CAVALIER, there were many love stories published. These love stories were of a nature that had a general appeal, but the notion that THE CAVALIER was a men's magazine was not accurate. The readers'-department letters ran a high proportion of letters from women, most well satisfied with what they were getting. The covers, with some exceptions, highlighted a woman, even if she was but one of many participants in an action scene. Increasingly, an attractive woman's head in the identical manner and sometimes by the same artists that appeared on women-oriented publications like THE LADIES' HOME JOURNAL, THE WOMAN'S HOME COMPANION, THE RED BOOK, and COSMOPOLITAN graced the cover of THE CAVALIER.
It should be further stressed that THE ARGOSY and THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE followed a similar policy of appealing to women. The letters seemed to indicate that housewives were the leading female supporters of these magazines. They found in them escape from the drudgery or humdrum aspect of their lives, and the clean, wholesome fiction could be read by their children without the slightest qualm. The Munsey pulps were family magazines, and unlike the dime novels of a previous era, were approved by the broad middle class of the United States.
THE FULL WEIGHT of Frank A. Munsey's three-pronged experiment rested upon the shoulders of Bob Davis. With THE CAVALIER he had to prove whether an all-fiction pulp
weekly
was feasible. With THE ARGOSY, it was his job to see that its circulation did not decline much further, despite the fifty-percent increase in price to fifteen cents. THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, which never had a base of readership as great as THE ARGOSY even at ten cents, had to hold and gain with the fifteen cent price.
The fate of THE CAVALIER was still very much in doubt, though it carried as firm a circulation as a weekly as it had as a monthly, probably at seventy-five thousand. THE ARGOSY had such a large base of readership, and such a reservoir of goodwill, that nothing tragic was likely to happen. THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE was another matter. It was plainly evident that its success or failure rested on the appeal of a single writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs, who had elicited a whirlwind of appreciation with
Under the Moons of Mars
and
Tarzan of the Apes
. Burdened with the responsibility of three magazines, Davis left Burroughs entirely in the hands of Thomas Norman Metcalf, who was in every sense Burroughs' real discoverer.
Discussing the sequel to
Tarzan of the Apes
, which Metcalf was pressing him for, Burroughs, in a letter dated December 5, 1912, mentioned the possibility of putting Tarzan in the Foreign Legion. In the meantime, he sent the revised historical novel,
The Outlaw of Torn
, in for another reading. On December 18 Metcalf rejected it for the third time.
Finally the eagerly awaited sequel to Tarzan of the Apes, tentatively titled Ape Man, was completed and mailed in by Burroughs on January 1, 1913. Pressed so constantly for a sequel to Tarzan of the Apes, Burroughs was understandably confident that the story would be accepted. His third child, John Coleman, was on the way, and the money from the story was urgently needed.
Then, to his utter consternation, Metcalf wrote on January 22 that
Ape Man
lacked "balance" and would be rejected.
The combination of the rejection of
The Outlaw of Torn
and
Ape Man
almost closed Burroughs' writing career. He responded on January 24 that he was thoroughly disgusted, that at this rate authorship was not the proper vehicle for supporting his family.
On January 27 Metcalf frantically telegraphed him not to get discouraged. The same day he dispatched the final rejection of the ninety-five-thousand-word
Ape Man
with a detailed chronicle of its faults and failings.
Now it was Metcalf's turn to worry. The success of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE depended upon Burroughs, and the maintenance of his own job depended on the continuance of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE. It was evident that he was already out of his depth. He was handling a once-in-a-lifetime circulation booster like Burroughs with far less finesse than he exercised upon the scores of run-of-the-mill hacks that were grinding out an endless series of eminently forgettable stories for the new breed of pulps that were digesting millions upon millions of words per year.