Soup Cans and Love Slaves: National Politics and Cultural Authority in the Editing and Authorship of Canadian Pulp Magazines

Middle class: the one too proud to read pulp magazines for pleasure and not important enough to read them for mental relaxation. —Toronto Daily Star, 19351 Kelley had been walking along Wellington Street, past the offices of some pulp magazines, when an editor saw him going by and rushed into the street and said he needed a story immediately for one of his confession magazines. "Two hundred bucks if you can do it before noon," the editor said. "So I walked in," Kelley said, "and he sat me down at a typewriter and I said "What's the title?" and the editor said "Type this at the top: I WAS A LOVE SLAVE." Ten pages later, and in time to meet me for lunch, he had done the story and collected his money. —Scott Young on pulp writer Thomas P. Kelley2 Up until 1996, it was commonly believed that the pulp magazines that circulated in mass quantities in Canada during the first half of the twentieth century were entirely American publications. The discovery of a publisher's archive, and the collection of four-hundred-and-fifty pulp magazines that went with it, proved that Canada had its own pulp publishing industry. This industry came into being at the start of the Second World War, as a ban on the import of American pulp magazines and comic books prompted Toronto's Alec Valentine to form a publishing house that could meet the demand for pulp reading materials.3 These pulps were printed and distributed in Canada until 1949, when Valentine's firm collapsed as a result of both governmental and commercial pressures. During their decade of popularity, the Canadian pulps, like their American counterparts, were hardly a lauded [End Page 261] aspect of literary culture. As the comment from the Toronto Daily Star's Humour Column suggests, pulp magazines were a widely derided form of entertainment, the possession of which signaled social differences among readers. The cavalier attitude that the prolific Canadian pulp writer, Thomas P. Kelley, showed towards his writing further demonstrated the gap between literature that one could be proud of writing or reading and literature that was considered smut. These literary distinctions are central to understanding the nature of the Pulp Magazine Collection, which is currently housed at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, Ontario, and the editing and authorship that defined the magazines within the collection. The class politics that surrounded the emergence of pulp production in Canada were remarkably similar to those surrounding the development of American pulp publishing. I therefore begin this essay with a brief overview of the origins of American pulps, and then go on to compare Alec Valentine's editorial strategies to those of two Canadian middle-class slicks (Chatelaine and Maclean's). My intent is to articulate the ways in which the practices of pulp production generated the pulps' status as one of the lowliest form of literature in Canada. Next, I take up the influence that the federal ban on the import of American pulp magazines, as well as cultural politics, had on the writing of pulp fiction. Importantly, Canadian pulp magazines existed within a cultural hierarchy that proved itself to be trans-national, and the lack of difference between the production of pulp fiction in Canada and its production in the United States suggested that the two nations shared many social and cultural characteristics that prompted political anxiety in Canada on a national scale. That a Canadian publisher adopted a form of American mass culture during the Second World War, and then adapted it to a national circulation within Canada, drew out fears of the Americanization of Canadian culture. Canadian pulps were thus stigmatized as both a form of lower-class literature and a form of American mass culture. The purpose of this essay, then, is to examine the ways...

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