Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

Bruce, acknowledged ace of battle-in-the-air yarns; Norvell Page, who was said to earn $500 a
month for his stories in the Spider; and Theodore Tinsley, a regular contributor to Black Mask.
President of the Guild was Arthur J. Burks, who had been dubbed 'King of the Pulps' in a New
Yorker profile and quoted as saying that any pulp writer who did not make at least $400 a month
was not worth his salt. It was a remark that was to cause him considerable embarrassment, for it
was common knowledge in the Guild that Burks never earned that much, despite turning out
around two hundred thousand words every month.
Ron was not the kind of young man to be overawed by such illustrious company and he walked into
the Guild lunch at Rosoff's as if he was quite as famous and successful as any man present. He
was also a good deal younger than most of the members, but acted as if he had seen and done
more than any of them. By the end of the lunch, he was confidently presiding over one end of the
table, holding the attention of everyone within earshot with an enthralling blow-by-blow account of
his expedition to explore pirate strongholds of the Spanish Main.
It was accepted, at the American Fiction Guild lunches, that members might be inclined to blur the
distinction between fact and fiction. What mattered more than strict adherence to literal truth was
that the stories should be entertaining, and on that score young Hubbard could not be faulted. He
was a natural story-teller, able to set the scene quickly and evocatively, describe the action in rich
detail, recount credible dialogue and interject humour with an acute sense of timing. Arthur Burks
was happy to welcome him as a new member of the Guild, after he had paid his $10 membership
fee, of course.
Ron did well in New York. He made the rounds of the pulp publishers, talked his way into the
offices of the important editors, sold a few stories and generally made himself known. In the
evenings he used to sit in Frank Gruber's room at the Forty-fourth Street Hotel, kicking ideas around
with other young writers and holding forth, although his host eventually tired of Ron's apparently
endless adventures. One evening Gruber sat through a long account of Ron's experiences in the
Marine Corps, his exploration of the upper Amazon and his years as a white hunter in Africa. At the
end of it he asked with obvious sarcasm: 'Ron, you're eighty-four years old aren't you?'
'What the hell are you talking about?' Ron snapped.
Gruber waved a notebook in which he had been jotting figures 'Well,' he said, 'you were in the
Marines seven years, you were a civil engineer for six years, you spent four years in Brazil, three in
Africa, you barnstormed with your own flying circus for six years . . . I've just added up all the years
you did this and that and it comes to eighty-four.'
Ron was furious that his escapades should be openly doubted. 'He blew his tack,' said Gruber.[5]
He would react in the same way at the Guild lunches if someone raised an eyebrow when he was
in full flow. Most of the other members expected their yarns to be taken with a pinch of salt, but not
Ron. It was almost as if he believed his own stories.
Back home with Polly and the baby, Ron continued writing for 'the pulps' at a ferocious rate, turning
out endless variations on a hairy-chested theme. His protagonists thrashed through jungle thickets
pursued by slavering head-hunters, soared across smoke-smudged skies in aerial dog-fights,
wrestled giant octopi twenty fathoms beneath storm-tossed seas, duelled with cutlasses on bloodsoaked
decks strewn with splintered timbers and held dervish hordes at bay by dispensing steeljacketed
death from the barrel of a machine-gun. Women rarely made an appearance except to be
rescued from the occasional man-eating lion or grizzly bear. The titles he gave to his stories vividly
attested to their genus - 'The Phantom Patrol', 'Destiny's Drum', 'Man-Killers of the Air', 'Hostage to
Death' and 'Hell's Legionnaire'.