Lint Read online

  Lint wasn’t in love with his chances when he sent it to Amazing, and the editor Hugo Gernsback wrote back commenting that the story seemed to have been written in the Berserker tradition. Lint waited a further year before realising that the letter had been one of rejection. The next story he sent to Amazing was ‘And Your Point Is?’, the tale of an oblivious pariah, which Lint submitted under the pen-name Isaac Asimov. It was published in early 1943 and was a rare occasion of the magazine having a cover created to fit the story rather than the other way around. But after the fact, Gernsback decided the cover looked like a heap of stinking garbage and resumed the practice of ordering up an octopus, a spaceman and a screaming woman for the front of every issue.

  By the time the story appeared Lint had had several more stories accepted by Daring Adventure Stories, Troubling Developments and Tales to Appall, which appeared throughout 1943. Among these were ‘Digestion and the World’, in which the few remaining humans live in sun-blasted Greenland for half the year while vampires overrun the rest of the globe, switching places for the remainder; ‘The Trunk Show of Everything’ in which an alien plant growing from a large purple bole begins to manifest every possible form on its branches; and ‘Watch the Endless Shipwreck’, in which salt-stained sea zombies converge on a town in search of an affordable tailor. As a result that year Lint received fan mail from a New York pulp fan called Alan Rouch, who turned out to be only a year older than Lint. Also that year Lint first caught the attention of his nemesis Cameo Herzog, a man whose impoverished imagination spawned the statement ‘Moderation in moderation’ and who said of the sky ‘I’ve found countless defects in its grain.’ Herzog regularly described his own heroines as ‘tasty and pathetic, enticingly vanquished’ and his conservative views (‘A government is due for removal when dust is deep on its mask’) meant that whenever he tried to portray an alien it inevitably showed up in the form of an ostrich in a fez. According to Herzog’s review column in the back pages of Stunning Liberties, Lint ‘vexed’ him ‘in a hundred-and-twenty-seven ways’ with his characters’ constant mumbling.

  Lint was experimenting with what happens when you bend a word the wrong way or when the integuments of the sentence are left visible, a ghost sentence behind the inked one. In time this would allow him to describe political setups many would have thought too lopsided for language. But he was still young enough to envision a life verdant with fees. So he stumbled into the literary world like a bliss-blasted saint, haplessly imaginative and for a good long while unaware of the resentments he was setting to bud.

  Lint knew better than to escape while nobody was watching. He asked Rouch to send him a fake letter offering a job in New York. Lint’s mother gave him some mittens, and a glare.

  4

  ANGEL OR SARDINE

  Hiding in Columbia · Campbell · Kerouac · Benzedrine · trying too hard · appearances · Gramajo · spinal pheasants · first shot out of the box · typography cracked the voices of silence · Roswell

  Upon arriving in New York, Lint threw his mittens immediately into the trash and went to the halls of Columbia University. It seems that Lint passed a required exam for Rouch and in return stayed anonymously in Rouch’s Warren Hall dorm room for several months while Rouch continued to live with his parents. Lint was a happy phantom—he never went to lectures but sucked the library dry and hung out with fellow pulp writer Marshall Hurk, author of ‘Frontier Bugs and Coffin Lumber’ for Weird. Lint had set his sights on New York because it was the home of such magazines as Startling, Astounding, Baffling, Useless and Terrible. He swanned into the office of Astounding editor John W. Campbell with a story about a conjuror in a hurry and Campbell laughed in his face, walking ever forward so that Lint had to back away until he was stepping backward onto the sidewalk again. Campbell then stopped laughing and told him to come back when he had something better. Lint returned to the gutter and searched desperately for his mittens, sobbing like an infant. He considered sending the story in again under his Asimov name—Campbell was taking the most appalling trash from the real Asimov at the time—but finally sold it to Terrible and was on his way.1

  Lint was being influenced by his mixing with the nascent Beat scene. Toward the end of 1944 he met Jack Kerouac, who had rented a room at Warren and was devouring books at a similar rate to Lint. On several later occasions he would visit Kerouac’s 115th Street apartment, where fellow paleo-cyberpunk William Burroughs was also staying. Seeing the number of Benzedrine inhalers the group were getting through, Lint asked an eminent flu specialist to call at the apartment. When the doctor showed up, the door opened onto a scene combining shock-haired mania with virtuoso lethargy. Lint wrote about the incident in his poem ‘Middle-distance Hate Decision’:

  smoke hotel

  coin eyes

  pocket name

  and hung answer long gone

  ‘Perfect grammar eschews screaming,’ he wrote in a letter to Ernest Hemingway, who was in France observing the 22nd Infantry Regiment’s push toward Germany. Hemingway didn’t know Lint and knew immediately he didn’t want to. Lint continued: ‘In fact its existence depends on denying that people can make legitimately communicative noise without words.’

  In February 1945 Lint visited Allen Ginsberg’s Hamilton Hall dorm room in the middle of the night and showed him a papier-mache replica of a New York ambulance with the words MILK ME stencilled upon it. Saying nothing, Lint quickly ran away with the object, leaving Ginsberg—at the time wrestling with the issue of his homosexuality—disturbed by the possible meaning of the incident.

  Lint wrote to his mother about ‘Times Square, a sort of crossroad processing upward of a million idiots a day.’ But he soon caught Kerouac and Ginsberg’s notion of the Square as a big room hanging in space, nothing but smog between it and the universe. Lint told them his vision of the Flatiron Building as ‘one giant inconvenience’. On one occasion Lint fired forty pounds of chilli from a turn-of-the-century baseball gun mounted on the roof of a 23rd Street apartment block, and eagerly told a baffled Kerouac about it. The young pulpeteer was clearly fumbling his way in the city, but to his credit this seems to be the last recorded instance of Lint trying to impress anyone. From here on he became more real, and a self-amusing trickster. When a shrunken head was hurled into the Angler Bar, it was not confirmed that Lint was responsible.

  At 17, Lint was shaping up to be a striking figure. ‘Though he was a big guy,’ says Hurk, ‘Lint’s face was aquiline and sensitive-looking, with a duckish mouth. I think he looked like a conga eel with a couple of legs.’

  ‘He looked like a duck,’ said Rouch. ‘And seemed to wear whatever he landed in when he stepped out of bed.’

  When challenged about his appearance, Lint said ‘Appearance runs like clockwork. I always have one.’ Lint had apparently honed the ability to stand framed in the doorway ‘like a medieval paintsaint with a halo like a watermelon’. Lint had a temperament which was at best parallel to the rest of humanity.

  Lint consulted Osman Spare and struggled with the realities of what could be achieved with the manipulation of symbols. Watching workers in passing night trains, he wondered: Were their flashing silverine flanks those of angels or sardines? Which were crammed upon a pinhead? He tried to accept that we are here to escort the blue photograph of the sky. ‘All the time eternity plays its angle.’ He liked Hurk’s quip that ‘Every time I look up from my disastrous life I see rubbernecking deities.’

  These and other issues were thrashed out in the West End Bar, where one of the regulars was Hector Gramajo, a terrible painter more famous for his statement that ‘Writing is a hostile political act, a way of keeping ideas in a book and out of the way.’ Cameo Herzog had described him as ‘a brush with stupidity’ but Lint was startled into defending Gramajo when the artist remarked that ‘Not all colors are in the dictionary.’ Observing a Gramajo painting which portrayed bats, a man under a glass, and a few dried dates, Lint said the painting was ‘better than it looks’.

  ‘Y
ou’re not lulling anyone, Lint,’ said Marshall Hurk. Lint admired Hurk, who once tried to wriggle out of a deadline by claiming to have submitted the manuscript ‘in the non-visible spectrum’.

  Gramajo would later create a pizza carved from redwood.

  Lint first met Cameo Herzog in the West End. He complimented Herzog on his story about a giant grasshopper wearing a hat, and Herzog threw a punch. Lint, not yet acquainted with the deceits of the world, watched the onrushing fist with interest. As he later put it, ‘The sky cohered, birds interlocking.’ Lint enjoyed the experience, and had nothing to envy in Herzog’s work, which read like something pecked out by a dying hen. As Tennessee Williams once said, ‘Why should I read Herzog? It’s easier to leave him helpless.’ Lint’s only written account of the incident seems to have been in a letter to his mother: ‘Last week I was jeered by a lemon. I consider that an achievement.’ To Kerouac he said: ‘I have a private infinity in my pants to take care of.’ This ‘trouserverse’ was to feature again in ‘The Saint of Ozone Park’, a Lint story appearing in a 1961 issue of Floating Bear.

  After the fight Lint had a nightmare about ‘spinal pheasants’, strange bone-helix birds that seemed abjectly real amid a thousand cold complications. In daylight death meshed with life in corners and on the ceiling an insect body’s crouch was like a sigilized frown. Lint called Campbell and said he had a story that was ‘plump as a gorilla’s finger’ for which he’d accept any offer. Lint was then left with the task of writing the thing, pulling a dress on and going around there. The tale that finally got Lint into Astounding was ‘Ben Carnosaur’s Harmless’, in which a sauroid businessman’s bloody appetites are strenuously ignored by his workmates—a yarn which the cover-lines trumpeted with the words ‘Beautiful woman by day—spindly, boring ant by night!’ Herzog’s only response to the story was to glare accusingly and wrathfully at Lint when they crossed paths on Third Street, though Lint circled back and met him again, praising his philosophy of being ‘suspended from a speck’ in the hope of receiving another inspiring wound from the desiccated moron.

  Lint had been giving Alan Rouch the skinny on pulp writing and Rouch tried his hand, sending Startling a story called ‘The Tripe Chandelier’. Retitled ‘Dragon of the Starry Deeps’ and rewritten to include a dragon and exclude any mention of ‘tripe chandeliers’, it appeared two months later, to Rouch and Lint’s happy surprise. Rouch was thus set upon the slippery slope to pointblank sobbing and raw yells of bearded despair. ‘Doubts on either side propel me forward,’ said Rouch, and Burroughs observed that he ‘merely looks decisive, an aimless word dropped in ice’.

  Never Never Publications, which published Awkward and Inconvenient Stories (later simplified to Awkward), had recently begun putting out entire novels. Lint had sold a story (‘Galactic Exasperator’) to the magazine and thought the book venture might be ideal for a longer work he was getting together. The book One Less Person Lying begins with a Professor Forneus building an energy device to gauge how long it would take for the world to fall apart if everyone was honest. Hours, minutes, seconds? Forneus starts with a two-second burst and millions of people die of massive heart failure. The experience of being honest merely with themselves is like the ground abyssing suddenly beneath them. Only one man, Billy Stem, manages to cling to both honesty and life beyond the burst. He faces his own abyss—that if he ceases to be honest he will join the false morass of the masses. He winds up going to the moon to escape humanity, but another astronaut shows up. This was all to the good for Lint, as the pulps thrived on stories of limited spacemen slugging it out on a barren planet.

  ‘Words are hatless, a geyser,’ he told editor Dean Rodence, who pretended not to hear him. Rodence agreed to putting out One Less as a Never Never book, due for fall 1946, as part of a three book deal.2 Lint thought his luck had changed—first shot out of the box, his book had been taken on.

  As publication approached, Rodence requested changes. He deleted the Huskanoy, a weird brand of photograph with a whiskery root behind it. He struck out ‘runaway decipherment’ and the description of modern culture as ‘the triumph of complicity’. Some readers have compared Lint’s books to one of those hazardous gourmet fish with only one non-fatal component. Rodence seemed intent on removing all but the most bland ingredients from One Less. He didn’t like the sentence ‘When he spoke, energy would fry his chin’ in regard to Professor Forneus. All mention of the Cabaret of Apology were removed, as was Billy Stem’s exposing of his ‘Whitman compass’ in the town square. ‘Is an abdomen’s arousal still controversial?’ Lint asked wearily. But he made the mistake of conceding to Rodence in changing the title to One Less Bastard Lying. ‘Bastards are always in fashion,’ Rodence claimed.

  When the book finally appeared, Rodence had left off the word Lying from the title and the ending had been mysteriously rewritten to feature a maniacal killing frenzy, with Billy Stem hurling a boulder onto his fellow man. Lint burst into Rodence’s office with his arms already raised in a strangling pattern, connecting with Rodence’s throat and twisting it like an industrial sinkpipe. Marshall Hurk was no more impressed than Lint. ‘The first question I asked Lint about that book was how fast he was driving when he hit it.’ Campbell did not even dimly suspect that it was any good. Herzog wrote: ‘Instinct should look where it’s going.’ And veteran pulpist E.E. Smith said of Lint: ‘Yes, I read one of his books: One Less Bastard, if the title on the cover were to be believed. When I finished the volume, I wept with relief.’

  When Lint read about the Roswell incident in 1947 he was taken back to the cancelled Mars Invasion of 1938—the present incursion, too, was quickly written off. Maybe the Martians really have only half an arse, he reflected.

  5

  “MONSTROUS POET ALARMS SHOPPERS”

  The joker · covers and headlines · escape artist · ‘The Day Maggots Sing’ · smashing the world · this bad reputation · ‘Rosebud Investment’

  ‘Distract one ear, scare the other, steal everything,’ said Edward Bernays of the strategies of government. Lint was adept at the first two stages of this game plan but neglected the third, and it is left to us to conclude what his goal was in screwing a snail into a light socket. Though Lint claimed that ‘nothing unites vampires like a sleeping vicar’, it won him few friends and had him pencilled in as an enemy for at least eight of his acquaintances.

  Lint would allude to this time in his story ‘Ghostly Hens Forever, Forever’, published as ‘The Man With the Stupid Arm’ in issue 87 of Terrible Stories. In those days the tales in such magazines were often commissioned to conform to cover artwork already created, and in this case editor Hugh ‘Banzer’ Dewhurst wanted Lint to write around a splash depicting a gardener being savaged by a sort of space-lobster. In ‘Ghostly Hens’, which was already written, Lint had talked about his days in late-forties New York through a metaphor. A hale fellow sits contentedly on a rural porch; he reaches for his pipe and finds that a sort of ectoplasmic hen is bulging from his arm. He laughs, then screams, then becomes complacent, and then loves the creature—and then cycles through all these emotions repeatedly as time passes around him. ‘He looked at a kind of dark finality through windblown stirring nausea and proportion surrounding his sidewalk. He was as unconcerned and killable as a flower, from whose death as little can be gained as that of a flower. A lifetime passed in a minute.’ When suddenly his wife pops out of the house with a sandwich, the break from eternity ejects him from the porch and sends him wheeling through the neighbourhood, flinching as though dodging shrapnel. ‘And it wasn’t even fun,’ the tale concludes. For Terrible Stories, Lint changed the hen to a space-lobster and wrote in a covering note to Dewhurst: ‘Got yourself into quite a pickle haven’t you?’ Lint’s relationship with Dewhurst finally reached an end with Lint’s 1960 story ‘Feelgood’, in which the hero awakes Day of the Triffids-style to find the world empty of people and wanders blissfully free of harassment for the rest of his life. The character’s transition from cautious optimism
to boundless joy is superbly handled, though Dewhurst removed several scenes where the protagonist spontaneously climaxes while walking down the deserted streets.

  In 1949 Lint managed to convince the hapless Alan Rouch that he could win the Nobel Prize by disguising his head as a giant eyeball. The smartly-dressed Rouch looked striking with the huge orbit atop his shoulders and attracted a crowd of gawkers in the New York Public Library, explaining the grand aim of his act when a journalist arrived. This encounter resulted in the headline STARING IDIOT PUNCHES REPORTER and, feeling bad over the stunt, Lint announced to the same reporter that he himself intended to marry a hen. Presented with the paper by a beaming Lint, Rouch pointed out to him that the headline ECCENTRIC AUTHOR MARRIES HEN topped a story about how ‘author Alan Rouch openly admits to his lust for poultry’. Lint was dogged by lazy journalism throughout his life and among his bannered outings are PULP WRITER’S PUMP-ACTION HEAD CLAIM (San Francisco Chronicle), SF AUTHOR IN ‘CHARMED WONDERBOY’ OUTBURST (Los Angeles Times) and WRITER IS MADE OF CHIMP MEAT (Maine Catholic Record), though each of these seems to have some obscure origin in truth.3