Spine Intact, Some Creases. Victor J. Banis
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When gay pulps lost their momentum, he donned another series of pen masks (Jan Alexander, Lynn Benedict, Jessica Stuart, Elizabeth Monterey), and became “the Queen of Gothic Romance.” Then he moved to historical novels, published under the pen name “V. J. Banis’—but right when his literary mask moved closer to his own real name, in the mid-eighties, and he eventually seemed ready to give up the safeguard of his caped crusader identity, well, he vanished. He was no longer heard of, on the literary scene, and the fog of time closed around him. What better star, for the pulp scene, than an undercover star author, who avoids the Time magazine front page and downtown bookstores in favor of masked, sudden and short-lived appearances in grocery stores and soda shops, and then evaporates, leaving behind himself only his textual ghosts?
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In the last few years cultural critics, librarians and book-collectors have found themselves playing the part of characters in a hardboiled, sexy detective story; they turned into sleuths, sniffing for paper clues and traces as they went after lost paperbacks and those who authored them. It wasn’t an easy task, in fact; they first had to try and unveil the real identity that lay behind the cover of their collective or personal pseudonyms, and then they had to try and dislodge them from their forced retirement. Real-life versions, as these pulp heroes are, of the superheroes of the 2004 Pixar movie, The Incredibles, such hunt, if successful, is bringing them back onstage. They are not usually required to save the world, but rather to do what they were great at doing forty years ago; they are asked to tell their stories, as witnesses and protagonists of an era of most radical social and cultural transformation. Their personal memories turn out to be among the most extraordinary documents we may produce in charting the obscene social history of pulp.
In a recent article he wrote for the New England’s gay and lesbian newspaper Bay Windows, Michael Bronski tells us a witty story about his detective work in 2002 as he was looking for the authors of the pulp classics he excerpted in his Pulp Friction collection. He was struggling to trace Victor Jay, the author of a gay ghost story, The Gay Haunt (The Other Traveller, 1970). Textual traits led him to suspect that Victor Jay, Don Holliday, and a number of other writers might in fact be the same person, and the only likely real name among the throng of pen masks this textual subject sported was “Victor Banis.” But even in case the guess was right, how could the Sleuth Critic trace him on earth? Well, the specter of Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter must have materialized in Bronski’s mind—in order to decrypt the most obscure secret, he might well try and look at the most visible place of all, at the very index of visibility; there a “Victor J. Banis” was in the white pages of the phone book, living in San Francisco. And answering the phone.
I was even luckier than that. I had been frustratingly looking for that Man from C.A.M.P. series for years, in fact, to little end (that was before the Internet made things much easier). As in late 1998 I was completing a book on camp, I went to the University of California at Berkeley (thanks, Chris, for inviting me there), and I decided to stay in San Francisco (thanks, Gian Piero, for suggesting that). With no connection whatsoever to my actual research, I met Victor. A friend (thank you, Fulvio) had told me that he had been a writer, once upon a time, and gosh, that’s part of my job, getting to know writers better. So I asked him what sort of stuff he had written, back in the sixties. And there he was, that Man from C.A.M.P. in person, the author of the books I had been searching for years, the creator of the Jackie Holmes star character and—as I was to discover—of numberless other starlets of the queer freak show. Now, that’s what I call serendipity.
Later, I was even luckier. I found a good publishing house, the Haworth Press in New York, that was interested in bringing back to print Jackie Holmes; I thus edited the 2004 reissue of three C.A.M.P. adventures, and interviewed Victor for that book. So, I learnt that he had decided to write his memoirs. Of course, that’s what big stars are expected to do, aren’t they? And I was so lucky as to read them—not just that, I could edit them. In doing so, I had a chance to fully appreciate the fact that Victor J. Banis is no mere starlet, as dozens of pulp authors and characters have been. Just like his darling creature Jackie, he is certainly the one big star of that scene. Even better, he is its superstar. Not so much, or just, because he possibly wrote more books and sold more copies than any other gay pulp author, in that half-decade. Rather, because his work and memoirs are a cipher of pulp authorship, and best illustrate the dynamic of superstardom, one that hypes, parodies and demystifies the ideological apparatus of stardom.
Let me articulate on this point, which I take to be a central issue both in pulp fiction, and in the remarkable life and work of Victor J. Banis. As we learn from Chapter II, in an ironic deployment of the “artist as a young man” trope, Banis remembers how he did not set out, in his early days, to become a writer. He basically set out to become a stage actor of any kind, and he tried his chances along different routes to the spotlight; dancing, acting, singing, modeling. Banis confesses that, in all these professions, he inexorably made his way to the stage, but only marginally so, as he managed to become “only a super—or a supernumerary, to be exact.” In such self-ironic, nonchalant remark, Banis inadvertently provides us with a key to his career and field. For it was when he struck on writing, that he turned this recurrent failure of being “only a super” into the epitome of his later success and underground star identity, as being “really a super.” It was when he found an appropriate stage, the pulp stage, a stage pivoted in fact on the very idea of “the super”—the super prefix (“over,” “above,” “on the top,” “higher in rank, quality, amount, or degree,” “beyond,” “besides,” “in addition”) standing at once for contradictory conditions, for what is “very great, or too great,” dictionaries tell us. A cognate term of extra, super stands in fact both for what is superior, “exceptional,” “remarkable” (a meaning best represented in recent use which, lexical repertoires such as the Oxford English Dictionary tell us, designates “a person, animal, or thing which markedly surpasses all others, or the generality, of its class”), and for what is added, “over the top,” “inessential,” “in excess of what is usual, or of what ought to be.” That’s what pulp fiction—a “paraliterary” and generic writing, bringing excess, sensationalism, freak subjectivity to the spotlight—represented, in fact; a whole stage whose essence is the parergon (i.e., what lays beside and beyond the artwork proper), celebrating the marginal, unnatural, unusual, superfluous and discarded, what in other words exceeds the “hard facts” of history; the feather boas, zoot suits and second-hand dresses that we may run into by ransacking the trash bins of cultural and social history. As to its protagonists, its chief characters, authors, cover artists and editors, it is only appropriate that they reach not so much a banal kind of notoriety or celebrity—the one gracing mainstream figures—but rather the paradoxically underground condition of superstardom, as emblems of the realm of “the super.”
Super-stardom may best be addressed by summoning Andy Warhol, who allegedly coined, in fact, the very term superstar, and ultimately articulated the grammar of superstardom aesthetics. Stars like Candy Darling, International Velvet, Ingrid Superstar, Ultra Violet, Mario Montez, Holly Woodlawn, Edie Sedgwick, Joe Dallesandro, Viva, Ondine et alii were no mere stars; they were Factory products, a counter, serialized version of the Hollywood industry of exceptional individuality. As such, they were superstars in the compound way inherent to the super prefix; they were so, in fact, both as “hyped stars” and as stars of “the super,” of trash and the leftover. In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol; From A to B and Back Again (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975, p. 93), in fact, Warhol states that he liked “to work on leftovers, doing the leftover things,” for “[t]hings that were discarded and that everybody knew were no good […] had a great potential to be funny.” The Factory, in other words, was a recycling industry of individualities; “You’re recycling work and you’re recycling people, and you’re running your business as a byproduct of other businesses.” In describing the queer, derivative economy of his “funny” cultural (re)production, Andy Warhol was envisaging the campy aesthetics of pulp stardom, the role played by superstars such as Victor Banis, and the very logic of his memoirs. The pulp superstar, secondary as s/he is, enacts a parody of “proper” stardom and iconicity, a travesty of celebrity culture and the consumerist economy of exceptionality, originality, iconicity, and emblematic value, that one finds in Oprah and Hollywood culture. A “transgressive reinscription,” it might be called in academic jargon.