For some reason I’ve had stuck in my head for years that Fulton T. Grant was one of H. Bedford-Jones’ many pseudonyms. Thanks to anthologist and bibliographer Mike Ashley, University of Minnesota librarian Denny Lien, and other members of FictionMags, my notions got straightened out. Some odds and ends those fine gentlemen shared with me about Grant:
• Obituary for Fulton Thatcher Grant, New York Times Jan 16, 1949, p. 69.
Bennington, Vt., Jan. 15 -- Fulton T. Grant of North Bennington, son of Lewis F. Grant, New York artist, died last Thursday, at the Veterans Hospital in White River Junction. His age was 50.
Mr. Grant, an alumnus of Hamilton College, served as a private in the first World War. He was recalled into service in the second conflict with the rank of captain and was wounded in Italy. He had served as advertising manager of the old New York Herald in Paris.
• A Google Books search turns up v. 51 (1916/17) of the Hamilton College literary magazine. The April 1917 issue lists him (as Fulton Thatcher Grant, class of 1919) as one of the Board of Editors.
• A 1917 roster of Delta Upsilon fraternity at Hamilton lists him as a member (address 217 E. Spring Street, Ridgedale NJ).
• Also thanks to Google Books, the 1921 Hamilton alumni register lists him as living in Ridgewood, New Jersey.
• The same source turns up the 1923 CATALOG OF COPYRIGHT ENTRIES, with him credited with copyright on "Executive's Desk Index" for Thresher Service Advertising (page 616):
THRESHER SERVICE ADVERTISING. Executive’s desk index. Card, printed on both sides, 12 by 6 in. [14801 © Apr. 25, 1922; 2 c. and aff. Apr. 28, 1922; A 673742; Fulton T. Grant, New York.
The July 1946 issue of Blue Book provides the following profile:
Fulton Thatcher Grant was born July 4, 1897 at Randolph Center Vermont. Went to Holderness School and Hamilton College. Was for some years a member of the Faculte des Lettres, Universite de Clemont-Ferrand (France). World War I: US Marine Corps, May 1918, Commissioned 2nd Lt., July 1919.
In 1936 his first story, "The Pirate's Beard," appeared in Blue Book, and until war again interrupted his career, stories from his fertile imagination were frequent features on our pages. His famous novel, "A Million for John Destiny," ran for eleven months in 1938-'39.
In World War II he was called into ASC (Army Specialist Corps) as Captain, 15 October 1942, Commissioned Captain AUS (Intelligence) 5 December 1943. Casablanca, Salerno, Naples, Leghorn. Attached to Base Ordnance (ABS and PBS) in charge of liaison and civilian labor, returned to America February 1944 for hospitalization in Kennedy General Hospital, Memphis, until December 1945. Retired February 1946."
Mike Ashley knows that no detail is too small for pulp aficionados, and so he also found Grant’s passport application form “from July 1923, when he was 26. It reveals he was 5' 8" tall, had blue-grey eyes, a high forehead, brown hair, a short nose, a mole on the right of his lip and a scar on his left forearm! There's a photo of him which proves his high forehead and shows him with a moustache and wearing a bow-tie.”
Grant’s story in this issue of Blue Book -- that is, August 1936 -- is a well-drawn portrait of an outsider who learns to fit in on his own terms. Grant’s first-person narrator sets up the plot with the story’s opening two sentences:
His name was Hippolyte Ybarnegaray, but he got to be an American in spite of that. I first met him in 1920 when we were both youngsters in school.
Showing up in an American classroom with a funny accent, an exotic name, and wearing a French lycee uniform is perfect fodder for making oneself a target for bullies. And so it happens, which Grant describes. He also lays out the narrator’s growing friendship with young Ybarnegaray and how he meets the boy’s father -- a fencing master. The French youngster is, of course, masterful with a sword -- but not so good with the weapon of choice for the American schoolyard: the fist. This lack of pugilistic aptitude only makes young Ybarnegaray’s way more difficult with his schoolboy enemies. But the narrator is dazzled by his friend’s workouts with his father, and Grant touches his hat brim to the path trod by Alexandre Dumas:
“En garde!”
The spectacle I witnessed then was one of the most perfect things in my memory, possibly the most utterly complete moment of beauty in my life. Years later I was to witness another moment not unlike this, but still different; and although it was of greater importance to Hippolyte Ybarnegaray, I do not think of it with the same feeling of sheer beauty as that ten-minute show between father and son gave me.
They fenced. The awkward little boy, gangling and lean, became suddenly the embodiment of grace and rhythm. His foil had become a living part of him. It flowed from him, became a part of his bloodstream, of his nervous fibers. Behind it his body flowed, rippling and moving like an elastic thing, a thing of thinking rubber. A dark flush gathered in his face. His eyes danced with the thrill of each rhythmic movement. He was a tiger. Leaping to the attack, darting in and out, thrusting, parrying, dancing, avoiding the button on his father’s foil by the merest turn of his wrist of the slightest twist of his body, lunging, feinting, recovering, lunging again. I knew nothing of fencing, save what I had read about D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers and other heroic fiction, but that was beautiful to me.
Grant captures nicely the sense of movement and the narrator’s fascination. This narrative delight is enhanced by the flowing lines in Austin Briggs’ illustrations, which accompany the story.
The tale moves to its logical resolution: As required by the constraints of pulp fiction, the narration moves forward in time when the narrator, Ybarnegaray, and his chief tormentor are all attending the same college. Ybarnegaray -- now known as Barney, of course -- takes on his childhood tormentor in the boxing ring. I don’t think I’m giving away any surprises when I say that he wins the bout.
The story’s clichés aside, the childhood and schoolyard scenes Grant depicts are excellently handled. The scenes illustrating how the narrator is drawn into a vaster understanding of Ybarnegaray’s reality through the magic of fencing are the story’s high points, and Grant demonstrates his narrative mastery here. Perhaps the scenes are more affecting for any father who can look at his sons and recall the schoolyard conflicts that every kid encounters. But Grant’s deft manner with these settings and situations shows his own understanding and displays his skill as a writer. Grant makes plain that the tropes of swashbuckling don’t require a field of battle in a distant land or an exotic time far from our own -- heroics may take place in one’s own back yard.
Posted by ds at September 20, 2009 10:04 AM
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