Stories: All-New Tales

By 1965 we’d at least laid the foundations of the two-way street. Pop art came one way, pulp the other. The Beatles and Dylan were doing the sound track. They broke new ground and got paid for it, but most people had no real idea what we meant when we talked about combining “high” and “low” arts, in spite of the two cultures being as popular a subject in features pages as the big bang and planet-size computers. We wanted to rid pop fiction of its literalism, taking exaggeration for granted in ambitious work, but were only slowly developing a critical vocabulary, trying to bring a deeper seriousness to the novel, but were still frustrated, reckoning we were still missing a piece in the equation. Whittling the title slowly down to one word hadn’t been enough. We needed writers desiring to emulate modern classicism to help build a genuine bridge able to take the weight of our two-way traffic.

It took Rex turning up in 1965 to show us what we needed to convince readers and writers of our authority. Like Allard or Hayley, he wrote better than any other contemporary I knew. His sardonic style was deceptively simple. He, too, was a Balzac fan with a special love of Jacques Collin/Vautrin. We were almost exactly the same age. Like me, he’d supported himself since the age of sixteen. He’d climbed out of a family of father-dominated German Catholic drunks, dropping out of the University of Texas after selling a few stories to the digests which got him a couple of book contracts to fund the trip to Europe he felt was the next rung on his career ladder, which he planned with his friend Jake Slade, a fellow Texan Catholic and a master ironist.

I was only familiar with Rex’s world through what little fiction I’d read of Jim Thompson or what he’d described himself in Paine in Congress or The Clinic. I’d certainly never been to Texas and only knew Manhattan. Jake’s stories had never seen print; they were dry, sly and ticking with the energy of unexploded bombs. Rex’s were like Henry James on speed. Quick-mouthed contemporary clarity; good fast fiction fresh off the calendar and with plenty of class. Rooted in our familiar world.

Jake and Rex had planned to write a mystery together in Spain, travel around Europe for a while, then return either to Austin or to New York. But they hadn’t anticipated catching jaundice from bad acid in Spain and having to stay with friends in London until they could finish the book. Rex, having read about us in Juliette Masters’s NYT column, came to see me in the hope of raising some living money. He also brought some of Jake’s manuscripts and I immediately knew we were in luck. Neither had come from populist traditions but they thirsted for pulp. They brought the best academic ambitions to the subject matter we featured. They were exactly what I’d been looking for, roaring down from the other end of the two-way street and bringing a bunch of new writers and readers after them. Two for the price of one. Murder and the human soul. The face of society and the fabric of the future. Their intensity and intelligence lacked the hesitancy or vulgarity I’d rejected when posh literary agents thought they’d found somewhere to dump their clients’ awful bits of generic slumming, neither did they stink of the creative-writing class.

Sociable, a little formal, a knowing catalyst, Rex introduced me to friends he had known at UT, including the talented fine artists Peggy Zorin, Jilly Cornish and her husband, Jimmy, as well as others who were yet to leave Texas en route for Mysterious and London. At last we had a full set of talented contributors who could give us a substantial inventory, interacting with increased gravity, attracting other writers who added superb stories to our contents list, the best anyone had read in ages, combining a sophistication and vitality taken for granted today but representing a quantum jump at the time and making us the most celebrated fiction magazine of our day. The debate was suddenly over. We could demonstrate everything we’d discussed. That was what Rex Fisch did for Mysterious and the rough-and-ready movement we’d always denied was a movement. We entered a golden age. Almost every story we published was anthologized. A good many won prizes.