Lonely Island Adventures

One of the weirder 20th-century pulps was called Lonely Island Adventures. It published Robinson Crusoe-style stories about people cast off on isolated islands, forced to survive with their wits. The magazine ran from 1925 to 1949—it gave rise to a small but dedicated community of fans, and the journal even minted a bona fide literary star, Mary Sterling.

One might wonder: how is it possible to tell so many stories about this one thing? It's a problem with the Western too—how is it possible to tell so many stories about a lone gunslinger saving a woman in peril. At the end of the day, what is there that's new to say?

With the Lonely Island Adventures, there was some variation in terms of the location of the island—sometimes they're in the Arctic, sometimes they're in the Mediterranean, sometimes they're in the Hebrides, and oftentimes the cast-offs are from various times and places. Alexander Greenspar wrote a dozen stories about a decadent Roman nobleman exiled to an isolated Black Sea island and forced to fend for himself—the success of these stories led other writers to write stories about ancient Persian, Chinese and Viking castaways.

But more often the drama came from interpersonal conflict and sexual intrigue. These writers learned how to place various groups of people on the island together in a way that would generate conflict. And these various scenarios themselves turned into tropes, and writers learned how to innovate within these tropes.

There is an anthology, The Best of Lonely Island Adventures, which does a great job of picking stories that demonstrated various tropes. For instance, Alfred Rossler’s "The Wizard of Al-Kaban" was an example of The Tempest trope: a vaguely Asiatic wizard rules an island, but he has a pretty daughter, Asdrama. In this case, there is a tribe of people who worship the wizard, and their chieftain, Xuchar, falls in love with the daughter. Asdrama reciprocates that love, but the two of them are terrified to confront this wizard. In the end, Xuchar faces down the wizard in his lair, and he kills the man, taking Asdrama home. But the story ends on a note of pathos:

On fair evenings, Asdrama would forever after turn her gaze to the crumbling towers of her youth. And, on days when the cares of hearth and home were not too pressing, she would navigate those treacherous passages, those labyrinths, taking them up into the remnants of her father’s library. She would peruse the spines of those rotted books, in languages she could not read--peruse the knowledge her father had not taught--and then she would return to the little village that lay forever imprisoned by the trackless waves.

As you can see, it's really the claustrophobic quality of these islands that tends to come out in these stories.

And of course, many of the stories were quite sexy, and often had a very uncomfortable subtext. For instance, there's one famous story, K.T. Zelig's "Another's Touch", where a brother and two sisters are trapped on an island together after a shipwreck, and they grow up, through their teen years. They have plenty of books from the ship's library, and they have some vague memories of life at home. One sister embraces the wildness of their current life, while another tries to create a regular home, with mealtimes and birthdays.

But the wild sister starts telling stories about a demon she's found in the woods—a demon who promises to give her a child. She brings her brother there into the woods, and neither will speak of what happens when they're together, but after nine months...a child is born.

The story is told from the point of view of the ‘good’ sister, Anna, who ends up looking after the child, Cressida. And the story ends:

After ten years, a ship was sighted, and we were brought home. Cressida's parentage aroused many questions, which we weathered in due course. Just another of life's many storms.

This pulp journal seems to have become obsessed with increasingly baroque forms of forbidden yearning between these castaways. On an island, with no other people around, various forms of unspeakable love became...well...if not speakable, then at least they could be heavily implied.

The star of this milieu, Mary Sterling, made her first appearance as a frequent writer to the magazine’s comment-section. She was born in Amarillo, Texas in 1915, and she had very strong opinions about what made for a good Lonely Island story. For instance, in reference to Alfred Rossler’s wizard story from earlier, she wrote a letter in 1932:

This might be a very good story for Weird Tales, but it has no place in Lonely Island Adventures, because the setting is far too civilized and the population numbers are too large. I believe that if a tale contains permanent stone structures and a settled civilization, then it really is not a Lonely Island Adventures story, don't you agree?

The editor of this pulp, Jim Tennant, was a bit charmed, and he asked her to expand her letter into an essay.

This essay was published in Lonely Island Adventures itself, and in the essay Mary claims that the essence of the Lonely Island Adventure story was right in the name—loneliness. She didn't see that Asdrama or Xuchar had much to be lonely about, as they had each other, and they had a whole world of people right in that village. They had a community right there.

No, a real lonely island adventure story ought to put its protagonist into a situation where there is no escape from loneliness. They have nothing at all, nobody interested in them, except perhaps one or two other people, who are often evil or otherwise bad. And in the best Lonely Island Adventure stories (she named "Another's Touch" as an example), you have woman protagonists forced to live with men who, in the outside world, they would otherwise hate or despise, but instead they're forced to marry them, live with them, see the good in them, because they're trapped on a lonely island together.

In this essay, Sperling also identified the classic left-hand / right-hand dynamic that would come to define the fiction in Lonely Island Adventures. Essentially, many of these stories were about a man who was forced to pick between two women, a 'left-hand woman' who was wilder and darker and embraced the freedom of island life, and a 'right-hand woman' who yearned for civilization and attempted to keep up the dimly-remembered patterns of their previous life. Sterling nicknamed these women the left-hand and right-hand women, because in the tale "Another's Touch" there was much discussion of how the wilder sister was left-handed.

There was a lot of letter discussion about this essay—K.T. Zelig herself felt that Sterling was being far too reductive in her characterization of the journal. Zelig wrote:

Although I am gratified by this young lady's fine analysis of my story, I really must speak up in favor of Alfred Rossler’s awe-inspiring tale, with its superb mythic resonances. I would not want this journal to constrain itself to publishing only tales where the sexual element predominates.

It might seem odd that Zelig would push back against sexual themes in these stories, because Zelig’s stories were often quite sexual and were almost always about incest. After her death, Zelig’s papers were donated to the University of Washington, and a scholar found that Zelig contributed anonymously to at least one zine dedicated to normalizing the idea of incest. In her letters, Zelig would sometimes explain, at length, to her writer acquaintances that incest was natural and was even celebrated in many cultures (Some speculate Zelig was an incest survivor herself).

Despite the controversy, Sterling wouldn't bend. You know, she was a classic type. At this point in 1935, she was only seventeen years old herself. She was a girl in a small town in Texas, somewhat homely, with a mother and father who doted upon her and thought she was brilliant, but who were a bit ineffectual and sickly themselves. And she had found something she liked, The Lonely Island Adventure story—something she thought was really good. She had read a lot of literature, and she thought, by God, these lonely island adventure stories were also real literature, what was happening in these pages was literature.

So she sat down to test her ideas. She started off selling various stories to this journal (and to its competitors, like Weird Tales). She was so prolific that she published under a variety of pen names, using every possible trope. She didn't just limit herself to lonely island tales, she also wrote science fiction, westerns, etc. All kinds of stuff.

And finally, in 1937, she wrote a novel that she entitled The Stalwart. It's had a long afterlife—it was reprinted several years later in The Saturday Evening Post, after she repurposed it with a South Pacific setting and a war theme. Doubleday put out the hardback—the book became a best-seller, and it's periodically been reissued in the years since (most recently by NYRB Classics in 2017).

But its first publication was by Lonely Island Adventures in 1938.

It was about a man who was marooned on an island with two women. One, Therese, was slender, intelligent and beautiful. The other, Ana, was dark-skinned, homely, with a broad nose. Much hay is made of Ana's peasant-like features and her stolid, dull demeanor.

This was a very typical premise for these stories. It's the same premise as "Another's Touch"—the brother-sister story. Two women, and one represents wildness, while the other represents order.

Any reader of these stories would expect the usual thing, which was that the man would live with Therese, have children with her, build a home with her. And then he would secretly visit Ana, have kids with her as well. That Ana's family would hang over his life with Therese, as a dark secret.

They would expect that this other family would often prosper on the other side of the island, and much of the tension of the story would be powered by this idea of the second-generation: what will happen once the dark-siders, the left-half of the family, finally come into the ascendance?

This had been played out so many times that it was difficult to find an ending that would genuinely surprise the readers of Lonely Island Adventures. Often it simply came down to the author's own personal ideas about rightness and order and civilization.

As I mentioned before, Mary Sterling was the one who first theorized this left-hand / right-hand divide in an essay for the journal. But in the intervening years, she had turned against it somewhat.

In a 1936 letter that was published in the journal, Sterling wrote:

Our field is collapsing under the weight of this story-pattern. Some readers identify with the right-hand, with traditional virtues of beauty, grace, moderation. Other readers identify with the left-hand, with what is savage, uncivilized, sublime. There is no story that can bring together the two halves in a manner that will satisfy every reader. Savagery versus civilization, it is a matter of individual preference. The weird fiction subgenre has chosen savagery; the science fiction subgenre has chosen civilization. We at Lonely Island Adventures have yet to decide. Instead we enact this moment of tension, this moment of choice, without resolving it, and that is why we shall perish.

In Mary Sterling's novel, there is a scene at the midway point where the right-hand woman, Therese, forces her man to choose. He picks her, and he sticks to that choice.

Richard was elderly now, and life with Therese was more restful. Ana was not the kind to make a scene. Her anger would break not upon him, but upon the next generation.

In the novel, there isn't much detail about how the castaways came to this island, but Richard's eldest son, Howard, has the notion that Richard owns the island. That it is Richard's by right, his patrimony, because he proved it and built it up, with his labor as a man. That Richard spent his life providing for these two women, and that's why the island was his.

And because Richard had married Therese, now his son, Howard, owned the island and ought to be in charge.

Eventually, the spring on the other side of the island fails, and there's not enough fresh water, so Ana's eldest son, Achilles, comes to ask if they can settle on this side.

And Howard says:

"If there's to be a single settlement, then we must accept one leader. Life can't go on as it's been going. We must accept that the lawful marriage is important and decent and proper. And that our side is the legitimate family, which gives us certain rights."

But here's the response:

Achilles paused for a moment, looking at this boy, who spoke so well, because he had been educated from books that had been denied to Achilles. And Achilles said, "But our father was not married to your mother. He was married to mine."

It comes out that on the ship, before it foundered, Richard and Ana were married. They were legally married, under the law that Therese and Howard claimed to value. And if that law held sway, then Achilles was the one with the rights.

They have a fight over it, and they go to Therese and Richard, who confirm that it's true.

And that's where the novel ends. The families are living together, trying to subsist on the water from this one spring. And now it's publicly known: Achilles is the legitimate child, and Howard is the bastard.

And it ought not to matter. It had no bearing on their new life. They ought not be tied down by this ancient, abstract thing, from a land now almost forgotten. This, myth, this memory, the law. It ought not to matter.

Sterling's novel was a taut, well-placed tale. It was really the execution that sold the story, the graceful way that it moved confidently through the beats of this newly-emerged story-pattern.

Most people who read the book fresh, without knowing this left-hand / tight-hand theorizing, tend to love the book—it has proven a huge hit amongst general readers.

But within the LIA community, the ending was quite controversial—some readers loved it, praised it as a work of genius, and said she'd finally created the perfect union of left and right. But other readers found the novel to be cliched and overwrought. It became clear that Mary's high-handed theorizing had earned her a healthy cadre of haters in this community.

K.T. Zeligs wrote to a friend:

This is the problem with stories written under the influence of theory. There's no life to Mary's story—the ending is utterly silly. To think of this family trapped on an island actually caring about a piece of paper—it's absurd.

The magazine ran an annual reader's poll for best story published in Lonely Island Adventures, and her serialized novel came in third in the 'longer story' category.

Mary Sterling was disappointed by the reception, and she never again wrote for Lonely Island Adventure, her first love.

In 1966, she was asked by Jim Tennant's widow to contribute a preface to the soon-to-be-published Best of Lonely Island Adventures. This story republished "The Wizard of Al-Kaban" and "Another's Touch" and a few of Sterling's lesser efforts, written prior to The Stalwart.

By then, Sterling was already seen as the one genuine literary star that'd been produced by this scene, and there's a noticeable undercurrent of envy when other writers from the LIA world talk about her. K.T. Zelig and Rossler were still in touch, and Zelig wrote:

The monstrous self-absorption of that woman, with her utterly tedious, self-important novel. Truly, it is Mary Sterling who's taught me that the world quite frequently takes people at their own estimation. If you walk around prattling for enough years about your own genius, then you can get surprisingly far. But, trust me, posterity comes for us all in the end. Mary Sterling will be forgotten long before the world forgets about you or me.

In her published remarks, Sterling was gracious, saying, "It was such a fine, wonderful journal in which to come of age. When looking back at the quality of the average LIA story, I still think it's better, by far, than the average story in Saturday Evening Post or Collier's."

High praise, since by then she was regularly appearing in both journals.

But in a private letter to Jim Tennant's widow, Cheryl, she wrote, "It was Jim. He and I, we did it together. The rest of them just wanted incest thrills. That's what they were in it for, nothing more. We're the ones who made it literature."

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Afterword

As you’ve probably surmised, Lonely Island Adventures doesn’t exist. All the authors and works in this tale are fictional.

But in reading about early pulp journals, I’ve been struck both by the ways they generated their own fan-communities and critical engagement, and by the varying ways that different authors conceptualized their own (and their peers’ work). Some authors proudly wrote just for the money. Others wrote for covert reasons that came straight the deepest recesses of their psyche. And others attempted, with varying degrees of success, to win some artistic legitimacy for their output. I could’ve just described these varying dynamics, but it seemed more fun to write a story about them instead.

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P.S. I have some travel and a few deadlines coming up, so this will likely be the last post until October 14th.