Pulp Fiction V: Show Me The Money!

Misled. No male characters actually appear in the story Night Club. And just what conclusions, exactly, are we expected to draw regarding the wad of bills being tucked down the front of the girl-in-pink's dress? (Do I even need to ask?) Readers will search in vain for anything even remotely akin to what the cover illustration suggests.

And while "Intimate Confessions" might be accurate, the alleged behind-the-scenes "goings-on" happen outside of the club: the story's impact lies in its sheer vagueness, the incompleteness of its narrative. 

Oddly enough, Night Club does actually contain one genuinely controversial  story: The Mother Has the Custody was rejected by numerous magazine publishers because it dealt with the subject of abortion, which of course was absolutely taboo in 1928. The story appeared in print for the first time anywhere when the hardcover edition of Night Club was published in 1929. 

The Little Sins cover is certainly the tackiest and tawdriest of all the pulp covers. Look closely: I am quite certain that the décolletage was drawn in. And that icky guy squishing his greasy face against the girl? 'Nuff said.

Pulp Fiction IV: Banned in Pittsfield

From the "That's Incredible" File:

The 1949 Avon reprint of You Go Your Way was actually banned in Pittsfield, Massachusetts for having an obscene cover! Not for the content of the book, mind you, it was banned for its cover! Booksellers and newsstands were ordered to remove the book, along with a handful of other titles deemed equally offensive.

Kay, of course, defended her work (and rightly so), saying "there's not a salacious word in it!" Kay publicly took full responsibility for the debacle, admitting that she should have been more vigilant and not allowed the book to be released in its immodest new attire in the first place. But in the same breath she went on to assert that the cover photograph certainly wasn't that different or any worse than much to be found in current advertising, giving a pretty clear indication of just what she thought of the Pittsfield officials' decision...  

Even by 1949 standards, Pittsfield must have been one hell of a straight-laced town!

Pulp Fiction III: The British Connection

Kay was forever suffering the indignity of having her name misspelt (and no, I haven't misspelt "misspelt"; look it up) a fact pointed out by one New York gossip columnist who mentioned that Katharine Cornell also spelled (or should I say "spelt"?) her given name with two a's. (As did Katharine Hepburn, of course.) It must have been particularly galling, though, in the case of Avon's tawdry looking pulp edition of Red-Headed Woman. (The editors and art directors also managed to lose the hyphen in the title.)






What's really funny to me, though, is on the back of the book: a picture of the Bard being used to tout "GOOD BOOKS" by "Great Authors". That may well be the case, but it's completely incongruous with what's on the front cover. (Oh, remind me to show you my copy of The African Queen sometime!)










ANYway. One of the books in my collection is this 1948 British edition of Woman (depicting an elfin, modestly attired Lil--LOVE the Cinnabon hairdo!), inscribed by Kay in 1949 to some friends, with thanks for a lovely weekend. 







Now, one of the really nifty things about collecting is that sometimes you find little  unexpected surprises. Inside this copy of the book was this hand-written note from Kay ("Bob" was Kay's companion):

Isn't that cool? The "nasty-looking paperbound reprint, of the railroad station type" is undoubtedly the Avon edition. It's no surprise that Kay found it distasteful. The note also contains a bit of poignancy: Kay never would get around to writing that new book. She would be dead just three years later.

Pulp Fiction II: Bad Girls Club

Apparently, sometimes the titles of the books themselves were deemed insufficiently titillating, and had to be changed:

But it's interesting, isn't it, that it's the female character that gets recast as the bad one. So what if that's thoroughly inaccurate and completely unfair? The point is to sell books, right?

Oh, well. At least they spelled Kay's name correctly...

The Last Word

Kay’s last two books amount, rather sadly, to little more than an addendum, a footnote to a career that was ofttimes marked by huge popular—if not critical—success.

Out of My Mind from 1943 is a collection of—what, exactly? Observations, musings, and vignettes—about life and love and aging and language and Christmas and travel—that had previously been published in magazines such as The New Yorker, Good Housekeeping, and Reader’s Digest. And War. More than a few of the pieces are about War. Not surprising, given the time. 

Most of the pieces seem dated and irrelevant today, but the best of them have a certain timelessness about them:




It's New York. It's the town that out-of-towners wouldn't live in if you gave it to them—and neither would New Yorkers, as far as that goes. Not if you gave it to them. What they like is paying and paying and paying. That's obvious. ("Bronx Cheer For Manhattan")

There is no proper day or date for mailing out your Christmas cards, and no matter when you do it, you'll be wrong. Here we have a problem which—though annual and universal—has never been solved by anybody in the history of man. For if you mail your greetings late, with a view to getting them there on Christmas Day, you are (a) burdening the post office, and (b) giving the recipients the impression that you only remembered to address a card to them after their card came. Whereas, if you mail early, it's just the reverse, as everybody knows. In that case you will never be sure whether the influx of greetings that you yourself receive at the last minute is truly affectionate, or merely dutifully reciprocal. You will never (I repeat) be at all sure. But you'll suspect. ("Merry You-Know-What")

This Man and This Woman appeared in 1944 and gathered together four magazine stories, the earliest of which dated all the way back to 1936 (Free Woman, mentioned previously) and which were now re-categorized as “short novels.”

Free Woman is probably the best of the lot, what with Harriet Lansing—who seems so to have everything—losing the one thing that matters most in the world to her in an ironic twist of fate. Kay’s best stories always end with an ironic twist.





And Two to New York has the glamorous and soigné atmosphere of vintage Brush, even if it is marred by an overly sentimentalized ending played out against a backdrop of the Pearl Harbor attack. But, hey, I wasn’t around for Pearl Harbor, and I imagine it was as good an excuse for sentimentalized endings as ever there was.

This Man and This Woman does not, certainly, represent “The Best of Katharine Brush.” Writing in The Saturday Review, Sara Henderson Hay felt that, having already appeared in the pages of Good Housekeeping and Redbook, the stories “would seem to have served their purpose. To put them into a book is a bit like trying to immortalize yesterday’s omelette.” I am sorry to say that I am inclined to agree.

This Man and This Woman was issued in two different dust jackets

Time of Her Life

After work on her sixth (which would eventually be published as her seventh) novel stalled, Kay found herself unable to write. Anything. 

So she started doing finger exercises on the typewriter. Then, at the prompting of her publishers (at 2am in the Persian Room of the Plaza Hotel, if we take Kay at her word), she agreed to tell the story of her stories. What resulted was This Is On Me, a “hodge-podge autobiography, bubbly and easy to take throughout and really memorable in spots,” according to The American Mercury. 

The book owes its “hodge-podge” character to the fact that it is both autobiography and anthology, “interlarded” (to borrow Mercury's term) “with samples of pertinent literary work, including complete short stories.”

And though Time magazine felt the stories and sketches would not have been missed, their reviewer found This Is On Me “lively reading,” and “a welcome change from the usual preening of popular authors on How-I-Learned-To Write.” The critics, in fact, appear to have been quite unanimous in their praise; I have not found a single review that was less than glowing.

Parts of This Is On Me appeared first in Ladies’ Home Journal (beginning with the December 1939 issue) under the title Time of My Life. The Journal excerpts featured photographs that were not included when the book was published in the summer of 1940. This Is On Me was instead illustrated with simple line drawings by Susanne Suba. Suba was a successful and well-regarded artist and illustrator, but I think This Is On Me would be just that much more valuable as autobiography had the photos been retained.  

Left: This photographic timeline appeared in Ladies' Home Journal;

Above Right: Photo of a rather prim looking Kay from the book's dust jacket