PrettyFakes

As Victor Gischler reported late last week, pulp fiction icon Emerson LaSalle has recently passed away. Known for far-fetched but intensely compelling adventure yarns such as Vixen Shamus, Guns of Old Mars, and Zeppelins of the Sea, LaSalle was enormously famous (some might say notorious) among pulp afficianados and almost entirely unknown by everyone else. His obscurity was no doubt partly because of the lack of a successful film adaptation of any of his scores of novels and short stories—the sort of success that might mean little to an author artistically but means everything to him financially, not only in terms of whatever royalties he earns for the screenplay but also by earning him valuable shelf space in the ever dwindling paperback racks of stores like Walgreen’s and Wal-Mart.

I can’t profess to be much of a LaSalle expert. I’ve read a few, and was bowled over by them, though I’ve always resisted the siren call of obsessive LaSalle fandom, on the basis that—and here I hope my friend Victor will understand that he is an exception—LaSalle fans tend to be miserable people, as paranoid as Pynchonphiles but with cheaper drugs and duller razors. My most recent LaSalle experience came two summers ago, when I was raiding the soon-to-close Book Warehouse and happened upon a rare paperback collection of two early-1950s era LaSalle novellas, We Were Seamen and Men Called Him Trevor. Had this collection still had its covers, it could probably have fetched a couple hundred dollars on eBay; without it, it was just another book in my “fill up a sack for ninety-nine cents” bag.

Seamen and Trevor were packaged as a paperback “double,” so that you had two front covers, one printed (along with the story) upside down, so that when you worked you way to the middle of the book and finished the first novella, you could turn it over and begin the second one. In a neat bit of formal play, the last page of each novella—the middle page of the book—in this particular edition worked as the final page for both stories. When asked in an interview with a young John Barth if this interesting narrative gambit could be considered “postmodern,” LaSalle spat that he had no time for such japery, and that he simply found it efficient and convenient to get paid twice for the same words. (I paraphrase: LaSalle’s own language was as colorful as his reputation and punctuated, often and violently, by his frequently and violently stabbing his famous hook hand into the air and, at least once, into the table. Barth later donated the table bearing the gouge marks of LaSalle’s hook to the Smithsonian, though it has yet to go on public display, partly because the gouge pattern allegedly bears a striking resemblance to a particular sex act still criminal in the 1960s.)

As it turns out, that formal experimentation (or penny-ante chicanery) is among the least interesting things about this pair of stories. Both Seamen and Trevor are tales of adventure on the high seas—a genre that I usually avoid, given how easily authors are swept up into technical details about sextants and compasses and bits of rigging. They’ve done all that research, I suppose they think, and by damn if they’re not going to use it. That’s not a problem here—LaSalle seems utterly bored by nautical terminology and much more interested in the dread power of the open water as a place to test the hearts of men. (It’s always men in LaSalle, though you can probably guess what he said about academics who wanted to discuss the “homosocial” aspects of his fiction. Or, if you don’t want to guess, you can consult the recently unsealed transcript of his trial for assault and battery on the person of Phineas Garland, who was smacked with a chair by a disguised, never identified assailant halfway through his 1988 MLA presentation, “We Were ‘Semen’: The Phallic Hellscapes of Emerson LaSalle.” The case ended in a mistrial).

Still, LaSalle’s casual attitude toward research causes some confusion: though written in the early 1950s, the novels take place in the months just before the U.S. enters World War I. Nevertheless, LaSalle’s characters refer to Germans as “Nazis” (or, more commonly, “Ratzis”), and one character in Seamen is an operative for the CIA —despite the fact that the CIA had not yet been established. Chronology and geography are so jumbled in this novel—the waters off the coast of Cuba are referred to as the Mediterranean Channel at one point, though this might be a mistake intended to illuminate a character’s ignorance rather than the result of LaSalle’s own ignorance—that some have attempted to claim it as an early entrant in the “alternate history” genre recently imbued with literary prestige thanks to Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. This thesis is seductive but ultimately unpersuasive. It’s difficult to argue that LaSalle’s lapses are part of a subtle philosophical treatment of the themes of time and history when one notes that Men Called Him Trevor includes no character with that name—a Trent and two (!) Travises, but no Trevor.

(Hardcore adherents to the theory that most LaSalle fans mockingly refer to as the Doctrine of Infallible LaSalle will excuse this error by noting that LaSalle rarely had control over the titles of his works in this period, and that a junior editor at his publishing house probably slapped together that title after a cursory skim through the book. LaSalle’s contract was revised to relieve him of title privileges after the publication of 1948’s It Rhymes with Martian, a title which he was honor bound to use after losing a bar bet to Hugo Gernsback. The persistence of the rumor that LaSalle completed the book—a pornographic SF odyssey set, counter-intuitively, on Venus—while on a weeklong mescaline bender in an Alamo Motor Court with Gernsback’s wife and mistress, both of whom were famously unattractive, owes more to its luridity than its basis in fact.)

But all that aside: If you’re reading LaSalle for his evocation of “place” or his subtle character development or his treatment of historical trauma: You are doing it wrong. These things don’t matter to LaSalle. All that matters are the fundamental—nay, universal—existential questions, questions that are usually punctuated with a gunshot, a woman’s scream, or, in the case of an ellipsis, with the slowly fading sound of a trunk-bound captive kicking as hard as he can until he runs out of air. And the prose: the brutal, lacerating prose that makes masochists of us all, as we turn the page hoping (never in vain) to find another sentence that will flay the skin from our bones and the cozy feeling of safety and comfort from our minds. This scourge of words is LaSalle’s most lasting contribution to literature, and I hope that the inevitable flood of encomia that will follow his passing helps lead more readers to the truly unique experience of his prose.

Victor has further ruminations on LaSalle’s legacy, including some exciting news about unpublished LaSalle work, here and here.

UPDATE: Sean Doolittle remembers Emerson Lasalle.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 9:58 am and is filed under Books, In the Nation, Professor Fury. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.