After the War, Johnson returned to his basement apartment at 1443 Montgomery--at least that's what Don Herron's timeline would have--and resumed his literary life. Not that he took care of his books. Again according to Herron, the first thing he did with a new book was break its spine so that it was easier to read. And George Haas once discovered that he had been using a slice of bacon (!) as a bookmark.
In the late 1940s, he signed a contract with Blue Book magazine for six circus stories and novellas each year. He wrote in The Weird Tales Story that he made "ten times" as much as he did for any of his weird writing. At the time, Weird Tales paid about 1.5 cents per word for stories. According to Paul Reynolds's The Middle Man, Blue Book was paying about 7.5 cents per word--not quite ten times as much, but still a substantial increase.
Blue Book, at the time, was filling a niche between the pulps and the slicks such as Redbook and Saturday Evening Post, offering quality fiction at a lower cost and open to lesser known authors than those magazines. Its competitor was Argosy. Argosy was one of the first pulps; it had declined seriously by the end of the 1930s and was purchased by Popular Publications--the upstart company where Rogers Terrill worked. Eventually, he was given command of that magzine and raised its quality--surprising given his earlier interest in the sexploitation pulps. One wonders whether Johnson did not avoid Argosy because of his poast associations with Terrill.
At any rate, this seems to have been Johnson's main--if not only--source of income through the late 1940s and early 1950s. He published five stories there in 1948, five in 1949, and then three each in 1950 and 1951. (Kennicott left in 1952). Johnson continued to publish then, contributing articles to the Fortean-inflected Mystic, Short Story, Short Story for Men, andThe Magazine of Horror. (There are probably others, too, still yet uncatalogued.) He even sent a story to Weird Tales--a cursed story, as he was to later remember. An earlier version had been destroyed--along with the agent--during the London blitz; another had been accepted at some magazine that then folded. As fate would have it, Weird Tales accepted Johnson's story, but also went out of business before publishing the story. That was in 1954, a time that generally witnessed the passing or transformation fo all the pulps.
Four years later, Johnson was of the opinion--put down in the fanzine New Frontiers--that the heyday of weird fiction was gone. Certainly, examples of it would still be published, but only his generation was blessed with magazines that provided only weird fiction.
It is tempting to see the end of Weird Tales as signalling an end of Johnson's creative outputs. The record bears that out--but then the record could be wrong, and the absence of available evidence make this seem a more definitive period.
Be that as it may, by the mid-1960s, he had moved to 2040 Franklin Street, Apartment 803, and only saw Haas occassionally, the last recorded connection between them in 1970, when they discussed the possibility of escaped circus gorillas being mistaken for Bigfoot. When R. Alain Evarts tracked him down, he did not want to talk about the past or himself. Johnson's friends reported to Evarts that he had become reclusive and obese. Rumors abounded; that he was paranoid, told stories of having no social security card, avoided paying taxes, and had moved to Salinas, California.
Not all of this is true. He did have a social security card, which he applied for in 1971, caliming he was born in 1906 so that he could start receiving benefits in August of that year. Whether he was paranoid or claimed to have been an intelligence officer in World War II cannot be verified. But, he seems to have moved to Salinas. At least, there's a death certificate from there for a Robert B. Johnson, whose birth was listed as 19 August 1907 in Kentucky, and whose death was given as 26 December 1987 (the SSDI has a different date), caused by a heart attack secondary to pneumonia.
In the late 1940s, he signed a contract with Blue Book magazine for six circus stories and novellas each year. He wrote in The Weird Tales Story that he made "ten times" as much as he did for any of his weird writing. At the time, Weird Tales paid about 1.5 cents per word for stories. According to Paul Reynolds's The Middle Man, Blue Book was paying about 7.5 cents per word--not quite ten times as much, but still a substantial increase.
Blue Book, at the time, was filling a niche between the pulps and the slicks such as Redbook and Saturday Evening Post, offering quality fiction at a lower cost and open to lesser known authors than those magazines. Its competitor was Argosy. Argosy was one of the first pulps; it had declined seriously by the end of the 1930s and was purchased by Popular Publications--the upstart company where Rogers Terrill worked. Eventually, he was given command of that magzine and raised its quality--surprising given his earlier interest in the sexploitation pulps. One wonders whether Johnson did not avoid Argosy because of his poast associations with Terrill.
At any rate, this seems to have been Johnson's main--if not only--source of income through the late 1940s and early 1950s. He published five stories there in 1948, five in 1949, and then three each in 1950 and 1951. (Kennicott left in 1952). Johnson continued to publish then, contributing articles to the Fortean-inflected Mystic, Short Story, Short Story for Men, andThe Magazine of Horror. (There are probably others, too, still yet uncatalogued.) He even sent a story to Weird Tales--a cursed story, as he was to later remember. An earlier version had been destroyed--along with the agent--during the London blitz; another had been accepted at some magazine that then folded. As fate would have it, Weird Tales accepted Johnson's story, but also went out of business before publishing the story. That was in 1954, a time that generally witnessed the passing or transformation fo all the pulps.
Four years later, Johnson was of the opinion--put down in the fanzine New Frontiers--that the heyday of weird fiction was gone. Certainly, examples of it would still be published, but only his generation was blessed with magazines that provided only weird fiction.
It is tempting to see the end of Weird Tales as signalling an end of Johnson's creative outputs. The record bears that out--but then the record could be wrong, and the absence of available evidence make this seem a more definitive period.
Be that as it may, by the mid-1960s, he had moved to 2040 Franklin Street, Apartment 803, and only saw Haas occassionally, the last recorded connection between them in 1970, when they discussed the possibility of escaped circus gorillas being mistaken for Bigfoot. When R. Alain Evarts tracked him down, he did not want to talk about the past or himself. Johnson's friends reported to Evarts that he had become reclusive and obese. Rumors abounded; that he was paranoid, told stories of having no social security card, avoided paying taxes, and had moved to Salinas, California.
Not all of this is true. He did have a social security card, which he applied for in 1971, caliming he was born in 1906 so that he could start receiving benefits in August of that year. Whether he was paranoid or claimed to have been an intelligence officer in World War II cannot be verified. But, he seems to have moved to Salinas. At least, there's a death certificate from there for a Robert B. Johnson, whose birth was listed as 19 August 1907 in Kentucky, and whose death was given as 26 December 1987 (the SSDI has a different date), caused by a heart attack secondary to pneumonia.
