NERD YOUR ENTHUSIASM (3)

By: Lucy Sante
October 8, 2021

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of (one of) their nerdy obsessions.

PSEUDO-AMERICAN PSEUDONYMS OF FRENCH PULP WRITERS DURING WWII

I spent a lot of time in my native Belgium in the 1990s—I was researching a book—and I devoted a great deal of that time to its flea markets. My favorite was the one that ran on Thursday mornings along Boulevard de la Constitution in Liège, where you might find just about anything, cheap, offered up by a mix of small-time professionals and people cleaning out their attics. It was there that I became fascinated by French-language pulps of the 1940s, in particular their covers. The ones from the ’30s and earlier were often beautiful, and the ones from the ’50s and ’60s were direct and sometimes comically vulgar. The ones from the war and its immediate aftermath, though, had a special crude energy. Ugly or beautiful, they conveyed mystery and intrigue in stark visual language, as if they were tattoo flash or tarot cards. What they all had in common was that they were pretending to be American.

From 1940 until more than halfway through 1944, Western Europe was of course dominated and brutalized by the Nazis, who effectively banned every culture but their own. After 1941, American popular culture was especially proscribed, although the appetite for it—movies, jazz, crime fiction—was fierce, so many Europeans simply made their own American popular culture, sometimes at considerable risk. Movies were too expensive to be a viable medium for cultural resisters, but pulp literature was cheap, beneath notice, and could be marketed by foot and bicycle. You could conceive and execute every Hollywood movie that lived in your imagination, with little overhead. If you gave your book an American-sounding title it would sell, and it would do even better if it appeared to have been written by an American. Few French or Belgians of the pulp-writer class had ever been to the United States, though, and they had maybe a year or two of school English at most; their knowledge of American culture was entirely based on movies and novels. So they built an imaginary America, something like Kafka’s Amerika or Brecht’s Mahagonny or the Arizona imagined by the hero of Jean Renoir’s Le crime de Monsieur Lange.

The names these writers gave themselves give a pretty good indication of both the limits of their knowledge and the exuberance of their imagination. Some are near-misses: Bill Blondy, Lew Dolegan, N. T. Bobmarkson, R. Teldy Naim. Some are possible but unlikely: Herbert Smally, Harry Liver, Joan Sun, Jacky Fray. Some sound purely like character names: Alphonso Steel, Diego Michigan, Duchess Holiday. And some throw caution to the winds and enter the realm of poetry: Bernard Cheyenne, Martin Slang, Lionel Rex, Cornel Milk, Jack Screen, Rupert Staircase. Someone calling him- or herself John Dull was outmatched by another calling themself Goldwyn Duller. The future historian of Surrealism Maurice Nadeau published his first book under the alias Joë Christmas; Faulkner was already big in France by then. The great crime novelist Léo Malet published his first novel as Frank Harding (Johnny Metal, 1941). Louis Chavance, who edited Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante and wrote scripts for Marcel Carné and Henri-Georges Clouzot, wrote potboilers under the names Irving Ford and Jack River. Not one of these books by pseudo-Americans has ever been translated into English.

***

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

NERD YOUR ENTHUSIASM (3)

Categories

Tags