The Moamrath Papers:
an American Subliterary Family

by Patrick Dale Lawson

part 1

“In the great garden of popular literature often called the Pulp Era, there are many examples of rare flora that grew high among the shrubberies and unclipped roses of the common growth. Experts agree, for example, that Raymond Chandler was a redwood, and that horror master H.P. Lovecraft was undoubtedly a night blooming lily, but one specimen among the mundane species that flourished in the pulps has defied classification, precipitating furious arguments over whether he should rightly be regarded as a lichen, a fungus, or — the prevailing theory — a slime mold.” from Horticultural Semiotics, by Ronald Blather, 1972.

That author is, of course, the cult favorite Mortimer Morbius Moamrath, whose work has often been favorably compared to such critically acclaimed works as the Providence Rhode Island City Directory and certain cautionary publications about venereal diseases. Moamrath’s earliest published writing dates from 1920 — a single indecipherable word in the amateur journal Prawn Songs — and his last imputed short story, “The Fellow Traveler by Night,” appeared at the very end of the pulp era in Subversion Stories for Fall 1954, though there is uncertainty over whether that story was in fact by Moamrath or one of several imitators who, for reasons known only to themselves, took his name as well as copying his turgid and often unreadable style. Indeed, the very date and circumstances of Moamrath’s death are unknown, though there were many hopeful accounts in the first half of the 20th Century, some of them as outlandish as Moamrath’s fiction. His utter incompetence has influenced countless authors, including many whose works appear regularly on bestseller lists.

What is known for certain is that Moamrath was wildly eccentric — he never ventured outside without a slouch hat and heavy muffler, even when he forgot his pants — sporadically prolific — in 1935, he wrote every story published by the immense Slushpile Press pulp empire — and inept. He has been called both the best chum of the adjective and its worst enemy.

Moamrath was semi-rescued from obscurity in the 1970s by a cadre of tasteless young men and women who found his work inexplicably compelling and who arranged to have several of MMM’s better-known efforts reprinted and even collected — usually in waste receptacles, but occasionally between printed covers. Despite the ravages of time and the condemnation of the League of Decency, their zealous crusade continues today.

Moamrath’s cousin, Fescennine Morte Rataplan (1889-1958), critic, poet, and writer of incredibly pedestrian, if not downright incompetent, modernist fiction, had given the appearance of precocity as a youth, editing and publishing an amateur magazine, Fin de Siècle (subtitled “The Journal of Literature, Sophistication, World-Weariness, and Fashionable Despair”), when he was twelve years old. This was his creative peak and also the only time he made a profit from writing. He shared with his American cousin, besides a near-total lack of talent, a badly impaired business sense. His agent and publisher in the United States was the notorious Colonel Cesare Fineprint, who had Rataplan locked into a shady, to say nothing of peculiar, contract with the Trinity (Tennessee) Storm-Door Company, Industrial Maintenance Facility, and Primitive Baptist Vanity Press. The American edition of The Doleful and the Banned (1923) met with almost complete indifference except in the South, where it met with overwrought backwoods hostility. Rataplan responded by penning The Gripes of Rat (1924), a book rumored to have submerged the entire United States into a decade-long depression . The effect was delayed by about six years, however, owing to the impenetrability of Rataplan’s prose.

Morte and Mortimer are of course variations on an old family name, and the Rataplan surname is of course of medieval French origin and had been long in use by the military coxswains from whom Moamrath was descended on his mother’s side. Rataplan wrote several dreadful childrens’ books under the nom de plume Moniker Coxswain and put his wife’s collegiate portrait on the back of the jacket covers. Rataplan’s Humongous Fungus Among Us, Great Green Gobs of Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts, and The Velveeta Rabbit are thought by some scholars to have inspired Moamrath’s Child’s Garden of Aversions. The three Rataplan works are collected in Cheerless Tales (Runnynose, Connecticut: Larvy, Ruggrat and Anchelbeiter, 1988).

Throughout the decades since Moamrath’s demise, scholars seeking to shed light upon his life and works have found themselves at loggerheads with the Moamrath family, which, with typical Moamrathian logic, has sought to obscure its relationship with the writer by means of a well-publicized campaign to locate and destroy all copies of his work.

In recent years, the Reverend Dr. Buster K. Bejeezus (né Buster Kaon Hodag), grandson of Moamrath’s cousin Eustachea, has moved the forefront as the family’s spokesman. His emergence has coincided with his rise to prominence as a television evangelist on a syndicated program called Sweet Hour of Fulmination.

It is as a writer that Dr. Bejeezus bears the closest family resemblance to M. M. Moamrath, with whom he shared not only an impressive prolificacy but also a tin ear for the English or any other language. His numerous publications articulate the particulars of his social, political, and religious leanings; a survey of book titles and newsletter headlines is instructive as to the range and intensity of his concerns.

What Secular Humanists Are Doing to Deliver YOUR Children Into Hell, a 388-page hardcover book, comprises three long essays. Dr. Bejeezus makes clear in the first of these, “Fossils = Communism: Satanic Soviet Science’s Tools for World Conquest,” that he supports the essential fundamentalist view that anyone who believes Adam and Eve to have been australopithecines is bound for Hell. Moreover, the same destination is predicted for “Carl Sagan — the Devil’s stalking horse! — and anyone else who believes the Moon is a thing made out of stuff,” as Dr. Bejeezus puts it in his major cosmologic al work, “Kepler Refuted!” The third essay, “Music That Will Damn Your Children to Eternal Torment,” is a round condemnation of Mozart, Madonna, and virtually everything between, excluding only gospel music recordings issues on the Hodag label.

A thick pamphlet, Sin, Where to Find It and How to Punish It, bears the subtitle, “A Handbook for Community Activists,” and includes essays with such headings as “Public Libraries and Other Stops on the Road to Perdition” and “The Godless Homeless: The Connection Between Unrepentance and Poverty.” Spare the Road and Spoil the Wife is the 1988 revision of a 1973 work entitled Women’s Lib is the Devil’s Fib. The doctor’s response to the AIDS crisis is What the Bible Says About Having Sex With Queers, which contains such essays as “What You Can Do to Keep YOUR Son from Dating a Lesbian.”

Many of the essays mentioned above first saw print in the pages of the doctor’s newsletter, The Fulminator, which is given over in approximately equal portions to the expression of opinions on every subject and the solicitation of contributions from readers. An implacable and outspoken foe of ecumenicalism, which he views as “the pollution of the purity and essence of our precious spiritual fluids,” Dr. Bejeezus has in recent months published such pieces as “No Statue of Limitations for Christ-Killing Jews,” “Why Priests Wear Dresses,” and “Tie the Pope to an Anthill.” Judging from such headlines as “What the Bible Has to Say About the Panama Canal Treaty,” “Prophecy and Preemptive Nuclear Strikes,” and “Let’s Give Those Muslins [sic] a Holy War They’ll NEVER Forget,” American foreign policy is insufficiently direct to suit him. In another essay, he advocates death by decapitation for convicted drug-offenders but admits that he doesn’t expect to see it happen, “because our namby-pamby Supreme Court would say it’s ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ and we should coddle these drug-dealing vermin by giving them lethal injections instead.”

Of particular interest to Moamrath scholars is the Fuliminator’s May 1987 edition, in which the doctor inveighs at length about not just Moamrath but all writers of supernatural literature, claiming they are “the spiritual progenitors of this so-called heavy metal be-bop music, which is only the most visible, or more accurately the most audible, manifestation yet of godless libertine secular humanism’s insidious campaign against our American way of life.” A self-styled expert on demons, he is especially critical of what he calls “the literature’s trappings of sorcery and devil worship and its emphasis on the power of evil.” His diatribes reveal a better-than-passing acquaintance with supernatural literature — an unsought effect of his efforts to suppress his relative’s writing. Indeed, elsewhere in the same issue, an essay on the quality of after-life in Hell abounds with demonic characters virtually indistinguishable from members of Moamrath’s eldritch pantheon, save that Dr. Bejeezus ascribes to them an eagerness to make the specific acquaintance of numerous and varied categories of people he does not like, such as “foreign-looking, foreign-speaking individuals who think they can come to this country from someplace else and turn into Americans!”

Dr. Bejeezus initially agreed to be interviewed by this publication and then declined, as his involvement with a lending institution called The Gospel of Lucre Savings and Loan came under investigation.

* * *

Sir:

Thank you for allowing me to examine a pre-publication copy of the essay, “An American Subliterary Family.” I am dismayed to note that it does not so much as mention my great-grandmother, Claudia Laudanum, née Moamrath, who was Mortimer’s aunt or great-aunt. (The family records are somewhat unclear on this point.) She wrote at least four novels, all privately printed during the 1890s and all extremely derivative of their author’s girlhood reading, which had tended toward (though it was not restricted to) Gothic romances; they were Jane Eerie, Blithering Heights, Little Vermin, and a sequel to the last, Jo’s Buboes. She married Cummings Laudanum, the patent-medicine heir, and it is believed that her nephew’s lifelong addiction to cod-liver oil was a direct consequence of her husband’s having bestowed a year’s supply on Mortimer’s parents in the way of a wedding gift. She knew Henry James, who couldn’t stand her but was too much the gentleman ever to say so.

Cordially yours,
Epson Saltz
Snarkham, Mass.

Copyright © 2005 by Patrick Dale Lawson for the Moamrath Project