The Moamrath Papers:
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Table of Contents Part 1 appeared in issue 167. |
| part 2 of “The Moamrath Papers” |
Throughout his career, such as it was, M. M. Moamrath supplemented his income with money by revising, for pay, the work of aspiring writers. On occasion he also hired himself out as a ghost writer, or as a bipod when the writing business was slow. His hand and a bit of his spleen are evident throughout The Bland Spot, by Hector Freon Quartz, which ran serially in Never-ending Sagas Weekly from the January 15, 1925 issue till sometime in the late spring of 1928 or 1929. Moamrath certainly wrote most if not all of “The Gaiter People,” attributed to F. Lloyd Boyd and published in True Men’s Accessories Weekly one month before Moamrath’s own, virtually identical “Suspenders of Doom” saw print in Tales of Haberdashers.1
Moamrath’s most famous and yet least understood collaborations were with Marsha Moormist. For years, scholars made much of references in Moamrath’s and Moormist’s letters to his having rewritten several of her tales about Thickthew the Barbarian.2 The stories have been painstakingly examined for Moamrath’s tell-tale writerly tics, but, except for a few lines in “Rogues in the Bathhouse” and some of the punctuation in “The Snout with the Pout,” no such tics reveal themselves. One school of thought is that Moamrath revised Moormist’s stories after their publication and smugly sent her his “improved” versions.
It is now known that Moamrath was employed during the early months of 1935 as an editor for the perennially faltering Penny Pynchon Publications, one of the lesser pulp-magazine companies of the day. Moamrath’s close association with “Tri-P,” as it was called, began in the 1920s when he sold “Ship From Shinola” to Landlubber Stories, and necessarily ended with his death in the late 1930s. Most Tri-P titles never saw their second issues; nevertheless, the company managed to survive into the 1950s and even made attempts to diversify with such titles as All-Dwarf Comics, Red Scare Book, and Women’s Underwear Weekly.
Moamrath preferred to work out of his home in Hatcheck, Connecticut, which was just as well, since Tri-P President Putnam DeRitz kept his office, as the saying went, “in his hat”; between New Year’s Day and the end of April 1935, Tri-P changed business addresses nineteen times, generally late at night, when DeRitz’s entourage of creditors and process-servers were least alert. Part of Moamrath’s job was to rewrite other authors’ work to make it conform to DeRitz’s notions of what constituted good story-telling — among other things, all stories above a certain length had to average one partial undressing of the heroine per 5,000 words. DeRitz believed absolutely that “no story was ever hurt by a girl’s blouse catching on something and tearing open.” It was Moamrath’s inability to write such scenes convincingly that led to his being fired.3
While he lasted at Tri-P, however, he made his presence felt. He took over the writing of the fifth Doc Sacrilege novel, “The Juju-Bees,” when the regular writer, Lester Bent, fell gravely ill. Bent leaves off and Moamrath begins at that point in Chapter 17 when Doc and his aides, Spam and Mumps, abruptly abandon their search for the secret lair of the Zeppelin raiders and start to gibber insanely of unspeakable occult practices in Harlem nightclubs.
Some of Moamrath’s “fixes” amounted to complete rewrites, and while most of the writers affected were rank amateurs whose efforts can hardly have been hurt by Moamrath’s attentions, a few were more or less professional writers who resented his tampering. One of these was Elvis Rasputin Bumstead, who had achieved fame, or at least notoriety, in Agony All-Story Weekly and other Frank A. Mundane pulps as the author of a long series of jungle tales such as Mantan of the Mandrills, Mantan and the Jews of Opie, and Butane, Son of Mantan. Bumstead submitted a novel-length interplanetary romance which Moamrath rewrote extensively, albeit haphazardly, and published in the Summer 1935 issue of Pseudo-Pscientific Pstories as Effluvia, Maid of Bazoom. Bumstead went on to write several sequels, including The Gobs of Bazoom and Lola of Gazonga, but pointedly never again submitted his work to any Tri-P editor. He was vehement in his denunciations of Moamrath, especially after the introduction of Moamrath’s own jungle hero, Tarzoon (in “The Thing in the Trees”), and the publication of Moamrath’s only interplanetary romance, “The Pawns of Marzoom.” The ensuing feud shook scientifiction fandom for days.4
In another Tri-P title, Fatuous Fantastic Mysteries, Moamrath ran a version of Sir Arthur Thongor Drool’s “When the World Squeaked,”5 in which the irrepressible Professor Collider plunges a gigantic needle through the crust of the Earth, which he correctly believes to be hollow and filled with helium; a slow leak results, and general collapse is threatened before nature sets matters aright. The FFM text contains more adjectives than the original6 as well as two scenes in which female by-standers’ blouses catch on things and tear open.
Not all of Moamrath’s relations with fellow writers ended so acrimoniously. On another occasion, finding himself with a 7000-word Otto Changeover Daly story on the one hand and 5000 words’ worth of space in Unbridled Western Thrills on the other, Moamrath resorted to a standard practice of the day and simply excised 2000 words in a lump from the middle of the story. Daly protested that, since he got paid by the word, this left him $2.50 down on the deal. Moamrath was sympathetic — he knew only too well what it was to try to make ends meet on the pittances paid by the pulps — and as soon as he found himself a 5000-word Daly story and a 7000-word hole in Pueblo Action, he stuck in the 2000 words, thereby confusing readers but mollifying Daly.
In the main, however, Moamrath the editor did not endear himself to writers. Even his seemingly minor editorial tinkering tended to alienate them. Particularly unforgiving were the mystery writers. Raymond Shambleau complained that his “Foul Ball, My Lovely” appeared in the Moamrath-edited Two-Fisted Heartthrobs for May 1935 exactly as written save for a single crucial sentence. As Shambleau wrote it, after Moo-Cow Malloy has shot his one-time girl friend Velcro Patootie, narrator Philip Mylar remarks, “I guess he really loved her.” Shambleau complained that Moamrath had complete missed the point, whereas Moamrath maintained that he thought he was just correcting a typographical error, when the line was changed to read, “I guess he really loathed her.”
End notes
1 Boyd recalled in a 1974 interview that he had been “perplexed and really pretty angry about Moamrath’s rewriting. Basically, what he gave me was the penultimate draft of his ‘Suspenders’ yarn. But I have only myself and my lousy handwriting to blame. The original story I gave him was ‘The Goiter People’, about this whole town full of folks with thyroid problems.”
2 Typically, Moamrath neglected to affix dates to his letters, and sometimes stamps, too. Moormist’s half of the correspondence comprises letters dated March 28, 1932, through April 17, 1932, and a letter of comment printed in Lonely Sailors, June 1942.
3 The parting was amicable, however. Late in 1935, DeRitz bought several Moamrath stories — “two or three pounds of my prose,” the author noted in his journal — and wrote the same blouse-tearing scene into each of them for use in his forthcoming line of “spicy” pulps.
4 Bumstead claimed legitimacy as “the original Edgar Rice Burroughs imitator,” declaring, “I have the right initials and everything.” Asked what he made of the dispute, Burroughs himself replied, “Bumstead? Moamrath?”
5 Originally published in Great Britain in 1922 and collected in The Poisson Belt and Other Stories (London: Methane and Co., 1929).
6 Moamrath had purchased his first thesaurus the preceding year but was only beginning to figure out how to use it when he went to work for Tri-P. He wrote in his journal, “It is not, as I had hoped, a herpetology text, a fact that leaves me chagrined, crushed, disconcerted, discomposed, out of countenance, perturbed, and upset.”
Copyright © 2005 by S. Dale and the Moamrath Project
