Continued from…

The possibility that Karl Wagner of Knoxville, Tennessee would one day be a world-famous writer of science fiction, horror, and heroic fantasy, translated into six languages, winner of numerous awards for fiction, and frequent guest of honor at fan conventions all over the U.S., Canada, and London, seemed remote when I first met him in Mrs. Pace More Johnson's Latin class. (We later styled her Post-Mortem Johnson and speculated that Latin was her native language.) I first realized we had interests in common one Hallowe'en.

Mrs. Johnson had softened her usually austere approach to pedantry to allow the talented among us to observe the day with musical performances and story telling. The program had been at complete variance with my concept of how a black mass should be celebrated, and I was diverting myself with a book of ghost stories. Suddenly, I realized that the story being delivered to the class by that great red-haired lout was drawn from the very library book I was reading. I had dismissed the fellow as a football player or some such ruffian on the basis of his hulking build and rather brutal features. Imagine my surprise to discover that behind those beetling brows was a brain as tasteful and perceptive as my own. Wagner was an intellectual… and big enough to get away with it.

We began to compare notes on our favorite brand of literature and our acquaintance grew into a fast friendship. This required a certain amount of courage on Karl's part, for I had already acquired an unsavory reputation that would have made Huckleberry Finn–or Jack the Ripper–reluctant to be seen chatting with me. Having come from the cloistered environment of a parochial school, free to members of First Lutheran Church where my deadpan sense of humor was well known, I was not prepared for the literal interpretation the Central lads placed on my witticisms. It wasn't long before I was labeled insane by students and faculty alike, a judgment I eventually began to accept myself, innocent though I was of the more eccentric behavior attributed to me. I did not, for example, sleep in a coffin no matter how many of my classmates claimed to have peeked in at my window and seen it. The situation had at first seemed quite funny, but it got old fast. I developed a chip on my shoulder that led to fights with my classmates and detentions and suspensions from Principal Boring. (He once remarked, referring to his extreme tolerance toward me, "John, if the school board ever saw your record they'd kick us both out on our ears!")

I was awed when I saw Karl's library–a tiny fraction of the one he eventually acquired, but impressive even then. Karl ate, slept, and breathed pulps, almost literally, for his monolithic bookshelves stood by his bedside and the odor of moldering pulp paper filled the air like incense. And his lunch money went to purchase more.

We traded paperbacks and went on treasure hunts downtown. Knoxville actually had a downtown in the ‘50s, with 10-cent stores Woolworth's and Kress's and Grant's, not one but two Miller's department stores, and four movie houses, including the Roxy where Bridgette Bardot movies were sometimes shown. We scrounged through (and under, and behind) the dusty shelves of Doc Black's New and Used Books and Costume Shop, or in the curio and junk shops in the area now called The Old City but then called Urban Blight, seeking the imaginative pulps and pre-code horror comics that had vanished in the drab and colorless ‘50s. (Wagner would later sneer at ‘50s nostalgia: "It was like 10 years in detention hall.")

Hard as it is to imagine now, science fiction was rare in the ‘50s and early ‘60s; pulps had ceased to exist and editors of paperbacks were convinced there was no market for sci-fi and less for fantasy. There was an upside to this situation: The few science-fiction volumes that did see print were those the editors found so compelling they were willing to set aside their commercial prejudices. (It was a far cry from the ‘90s where any sort of dreck labeled science fiction or fantasy seemed to get published, and most of it in the form of trilogies).

In the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, comics had experienced the birth of a true creative artistry, particularly in the horror, action, and Mad comics of E.C. Comics. But this creativity had been smothered in its crib by the Comics Code Authority administered by John Goldwater of Archie infamy. The Code was the result of a national panic created when psychologist Frederick Wertham revealed that comic books were the cause of "juvenile delinquency." As revealed in his book Seduction of the Innocent, he discovered in the shadows and details of the art subliminal obscenities not apparent to the layman (or layboy, either). It was the old joke: "So… all the inkblots look to you like genitalia. You certainly have a sexual obsession." "Me?! You're the one showing me all the dirty pictures!"

Unfortunately, Tennessee's own Senator Estes Kefauver took the joke seriously and launched a congressional investigation resulting in the Comics Code Authority. The Authority boasted that it had "at its inception adopted as the cornerstone of its program the most stringent [censorship] code in existence for any communications media." In this sterile, conformist environment, Karl and I hungered for the lurid prose and illustrations, the flights of fantasy, the rebellion we discovered in those forgotten and tattered publications. We had soon sniffed out every pulp and pre-code comic in Knoxville's shops, but Wagner had discovered mail-order purveyors of these arcane opuscules. Regrettably, unlike the local shopkeepers, these merchants recognized something of the worth of their wares. I feared Wagner had gone off the deep end when he began paying as much as $6 for copies of Weird Tales. At a time when you could live comfortably on a sawbuck a week, paying those sums for old magazines that had only cost two bits when they were in mint condition seemed extravagant folly. But Wagner had the collector's fever and was determined to own every issue.

If science fiction was unpopular with publishers, it was abhorred by educators. More than once both Wagner and I had books confiscated in study hall for no reason other than that they were science fiction and, ipso facto, trash. Of course, our teachers really didn't even know what science fiction was. I once attempted to present a book report on a work by Poul Anderson based on Nordic myths. Mrs. Pierce, an especially malignant grimalkin, read the dust jacket, noted the references to Odin, trolls, elves and frost giants and said, gleefully, "I'm sorry, John, but I don't approve of science fiction. I'll have to give you an F."

Mrs. Pierce seemed to take a special delight in tormenting both Wagner and me. It was she who caught us violating the Walk-Home, a special day when all public school students who customarily rode the school bus were to walk home and time their walk so that authorities could project how many of us would be incinerated in case of nuclear attack. Karl and I attempted to hitchhike and, naturally, the first car we thumbed was driven by Mrs. Pierce. We were two of only three people in Knox County required to seek absolution from the local head of Civil Defense. When I ventured that I welcomed nuclear war as a way of ending a repressive society and bringing about anarchy, the Civil Defense guy scoffed at my political naiveté. "There could be no anarchy," he explained to me, "unless the key figures were already organized and prepared to set it up."

Next: A Troubling Case of Lycanthropy

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