This profile of Robert O. Erisman appeared in 1939, a year after he became a pulp editor at Martin Goodman’s Magazine Management. Erisman, thought to be a Goodman relative, also contributed scripts to Goodman’s early comics: Daring Mystery and Mystic.
Editor of 29 pulps prefers melodrama to the correct prose he used to write
Robert O. Erisman has ideas to sell to Hollywood
by Douglas Gilbert
Robert O. Erisman is a slight, shy chap of 30 with a sloping dome, mild eyes and a trance-like hesitancy and he looks like just what he was. What he is is editor of newsstand publications, whose 29 pulps on love, confession, horror, mystery, western, detective, etc. Is the largest chain of penny-a-liners in America.
What he used to be is an artist writing garret prose for the arty little literary mags. Maybe you remember their Steiny style. You didn’t read it, you played it:-
A rose is a rose is a pigeon on the abbadaba protistan ixnaxy ofay.
This is not a quote from Mr. Erisman’s unpublished novel: Pink and Blue Evening Sky. But the guy was a genius until somebody besides his girl said they understood his stuff. After that he was just a vulgarian writing for the masses. But Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder liked Mr. Erisman’s stuff and wrote nice things about it the Manuscript, which used to publish some of Mr. Erisman’s little things.
Wrote much, Ate little
Well, this went along for about four years during which Mr. Erisman was considered by the long haired boys as the great new leap in American literature. He wrote much but ate little. Gradually a lamb chop became the most beautiful thing in the world.
“So I forgot about the escape I was trying to make and went over to the pulps as an editor,” Mr. Erisman explained in the Newsstand Publications offices in the RKO building today.
It was a jump to:
Rollo spun on his heel, his steely blue eyes narrowed to fiery slits. He was unarmed, yet unafraid. “Drop that rod, you cur!” he hissed. The girl beside him quivered, her fear overcome by love. Her arm stole about his manly shoulders as she nestled her tawny curls on his breast. Rollo, her stalwart, would protect her. A shot (Turn to page 122)
“But I never had such a good time in my life,” said Mr. Erisman, “and it is nice to make money. I think that whole school of escapist literature is dying out. Even Gertrude Stein is writing more clearly, and when she writes clearly she writes well.”
The pulp style, Mr. Erisman says, is also undergoing changes for the better. He says writers may give their heroes personal problems: they overcome fear or cowardice. Of course, in the rejuvenation boy gets girl as always. But it tends more towards characterization than action, he says.
A funny thing happened to him. Although Manuscript used to print his stuff, White Burnett of Story always rejected his beautiful brain children. Then soon after he came over to the pulps he wrote what he considered a slick piece (“slicks” being the argot for magazines like Collier’s, SEP, etc.), and darned if Burnett didn’t accept it for publication. The name of his story is Hot Date.
Dreams of Hollywood
Mr. Erisman hasn’t been able to crash Collier’s yet, but he has even wilder dreams—Hollywood. He says Hollywood could use a good pulp editor. He says the pattern of the pulps is sounder and has to be paced for a special mass audience of the type the movies reach.
Mr. Erisman lived in Youngstown, Ohio, Buffalo and Baltimore before he came to New York four years ago. A student at Illinois, he transferred his studies to NYU where he met Thomas Uzzell, an instructor in story writing and whose literary agency managed for a while.
Used to be an advertising copywriter, too. Like the big words, no go, and he passed them up for the pulps. He says some of their stuff ” really moves you”.