What’s Glenn Willmott Reading?
“I went cold all over when I saw who it was—Joel! He stood in the doorway, his big gentle eyes never wavering from my face, looking so thin and tired. He was so different from Jack, I saw in that first glance; Joel was part woman, but Jack was all man.”
Trashy romance. Not “trashy romance” with a wink, which covers a lot of ground these days, but literal pulp fiction: Love Story Magazine, the issue sold from crowded, colourful racks of its competitors in the newsstands on March 30, 1935. I first read it a few years ago, when I was browsing around in science fiction and weird horror pulps—that is, magazines once marketed to “fellows” like me. But I’m a bit OCD: I don’t like anything incomplete. So I had to read every kind of pulp, even ones addressed to the “gals.”
But who really is a “fellow” or a “gal”? In the dimming distances of time, here measurable in the very disintegration of pages these stories are printed on, such identifications can seem alternately relatable and opaque. Yes, they are about love. The thrill, the passion, the heart pounding, shiver inducing, mind altering ecstacy of awakened desires. Even bad writing can do that. Maybe especially bad writing. “She felt herself swirling around in a new world. Surely, this new world was not the one she had inhabited before. Surely she had stepped out of her ordinary, humdrum existence into a new world of beauty and adventure!” But what hooked me—I’m reading now True Romances, I’m reading Cupid’s Diary—is that these stories are less about love than about safety and fear. In 1935, women want to work with dignity or to pursue a career, to be independent, to be creative, to be free—and also to desire, without desire rendering them vulnerable—or rather, without vulnerability leading to violence or exploitation. Whom do you trust? “With a solicitous gesture he drew the shawl across my shoulders. For a moment his hands fumbled around my throat. I did not like it. The man was my host and I hesitated to say anything for fear of hurting his feelings.” Who is he trying to be, and who is he really? Who is she trying to be, and who is she really? Trashy romance holds up a ceaselessly turning kaleidoscope of questions and answers, shards of conventional ideas falling into position after position, often formulaic, often glimmering with something new.
Digital copies of hundreds of original pulp magazines are free to read online at sites like The Pulp Magazines Project and Internet Archive.
Glenn Willmott is a writer and a scholar at Queen’s University where he teaches modern experimental and popular genres. “Almost Sexual” belongs to a story sequence in development, Love Songs for Friends and Foes.