ONCE AROUND THE BLOCH: AN UNAUTHORIZED AUTOBIOGRAPHY - ROBERT BLOCH (1995)
Nearly everyone knows Robert Bloch as the author of Psycho, the book which became a movie that redefined the horror film in Hollywood. What few do know however, was just how rich and varied Bloch's Ше and career was. His work spanned generations and in addition to novels he wrote for pulp magazines, radio, film, and television. An eternal optimist at 55 and a tireless writer, Bloch managed to maintain his integrity even after being pulled behind the gleaming facade of Hollywood.
Bloch was bom in Chicago in 1917, a period of transition in postwar America. and one which Robert recreates with loving detail. An early reader. Bloch's precocious intelligence had him skipping straight to the fourth grade upon entering school. "The gameplaving routines I'd invented for neighborhood kids kept me from being a loner.” Bloch recalls. "but the lure of the public library was strong: at eight 1 was granted a special dispensation to borrow books from the adult section. What I found there - together with my parents collections . . . - augmented my classroom curriculum. In a remarkably short time I became a full-fledged smartass."
Bloch was fortunate to have parents who valued education and could afford small luxuries like frequent trips to galleries, museums, and the theater. Radio plays, stage musicals, and vaudeville were common fare. Then came the movies. Silent films - particularly comedies - were a wonderful treat, but the world changed the night that nine-year-old Bobby Bloch saw Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera.
Bloch recalls this vividly, drawing the reader into the amazed mind of that boy in the process. The phantom scared him badly. It also made him a lifelong fan of Chaney, and other horror films of that era. "My inability to identify with heroes had an obvious source," Bloch notes wryly, " - the mirror, which revealed quite clearly that I was not destined to enjoy the physical requirements of a leader of men or a follower of women. With this in mind, you don't have to be a psychology major to figure out why I came increasingly to empathize with comics or villains on the screen, or why comedy and villainy eventually became dominant motifs in my work. But that development was yet to come."
It was the summer of 1927 when Bloch discovered the infamous pulp magazine Weird Tales and the unforgettable work of H. P. Lovecraft. . to me personally Weird Tales became a sort of nentheelegical Book of Revelation. What it revealed was that fantastic fiction was not necessarily the work cf long-deceased authors like Poe, Hawthorne or de Maupassant: its prose and poetry were not entombed in pages from the past. Death was alive and well and living in Chicago." At 849 North Michigan Avenue, to be exact, the location of WT's editorial offices.
Before long young Bloch made himself known b» writing letters to the editor of the magazine. Through Weird Tales Bloch was able to correspond with Lovecraft, who kindly critiqued the boy's early stories, lent him copies of his own fiction, and encouraged him even as editors such as August Derleth were rejecting Bloch's work as fast as he could submit it. Finally, in July of 1934. the magazine accepted a short story called "The Secret in the Tomb." Ata rate of a penny per word, it earned Bloch the princely sum of twenty dollars.
It wasn't much, but it was a start. Soon enough, however, it became clear that writing short stories was a good way to starve to death slowly. Bloch worked his way through a series of equally brief and poorly paying careers writing radio dramas that somehow never aired, comic bits for a ventriloquist who skipped town before paying for Bloch's work, and a six month stint in the wonderful world of Chicago politics as a speech writer and spin doctor for a mayoral candidate who, frighteningly enough, actually beat the incumbent (although he too failed to pay as promised).
In the end Bloch found a "real" job writing advertising copy. He had married by then, and had a wife and daughter to support; but that didn't stop him from writing and selling short fiction, even though "on social occasions, admitting that one wrote for the pulps was like telling people you were into necrophilia; both led to a dead end." By 1953 Bloch was a common guest at fantasy and science fiction conventions, recognized and well-respected within those circles, but still barely managing to pay the bills. "I had been sitting in the pay toilet of advertising for eleven years," Bloch writes, " - and I was beginning to see the writing on the wall." A fellow writer who'd managed to find work writing television screenplays in Hollywood offered to help Bloch get a start there. Robert took him up on the offer.
Writing about his days in Hollywood, Bloch recalls the lasting friendships he made with stars like Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee and Joan Crawford, as well as how his inexperience earned him more than his fair share of financial trouble. You can hear the rueful tone in his voice when he recounts how his naivete resulted in the sale of the movie rights to Psycho for a mere 59.500.
An aside concerning that infamous and groundbreaking film: Bloch notes that "From time to time people come to me and volunteer the information that after seeing Psycho they were unable to take a shower. I can only tell them that they're lucky I didn't kill off my victim on a toilet seat."
Bloch wrote for Thriller, Night Gallery, and Star Trek. among other shows, and helped to create such amusing horror offerings like Asylum and The House That Dripped Blood. Despite his eventual Hollywood successes Bloch never disguises the fact that writing fiction was and continued to be his first love. When he died in the fall of 1994, he had more than fifty books to his credit.
Although Bloch is at his best when recounting the life lived before Tinsel Town success, fans of classic television and film will find more than enough in the way of comment and observation concerning the latter to keep them happy. The general reader will be left with the impression that Robert was a born storyteller with an ironic wit and a finely-honed sense of humor.
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