Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 170: 'The Art of Tatooage' and What I Look for When I'm Looking for Ed Wood

I don't think Ed Wood wrote this 1962 article and here's why.

Ed Wood wrote a lot, you guys. No, you don't understand. I mean, he wrote a lot. Way more than you'd think a raging alcoholic with only a tenuous grasp on reality would be able to manage. In addition to his scripts, both produced and unproduced, Eddie penned novels and short stories, plus nonfiction books and magazine articles, all in massive quantities. For some projects, he used his real name, while at other times he wrote pseudonymously or even anonymously.  Besides releasing many of Ed's books and articles, adult publisher Bernie Bloom used Ed as a sort of literary "man-of-all-work" at Pendulum in the 1970s. Who knows how many pieces of unsigned filler text, including editorials and photo captions, Ed wrote while in Bernie's employ?

A canonical Wood work.

This hyperabundance of work is both a blessing and a curse to the Woodologist. It's wonderful to have so much writing to study and enjoy. But Ed Wood's bibliography is an absolute mess, often frustrating to navigate. It can be very difficult to tell what he wrote and what he didn't. To help us out, we can divide his literary output into a few extremely broad categories. First, there is what I'll call "canonical Wood." These are the works that bear Ed's own name and are generally not in dispute. (I say "generally" because some Wood scholars are extremely skeptical and question his authorship of anything.)

Beyond these uncontroversial works, we have what I call the "stealth canon." These are works that are widely known to be Ed Wood's but don't bear the man's own name. They're listed on his carefully self-curated resumes, and Eddie even signed some copies of them. Eddie's best known aliases are probably Dick Trent and Ann Gora, and these turn up frequently in the "stealth canon," but he wrote under many pen names. His aliases may number in the dozens.

After that, though, you have a whole universe of speculative Wood works—not in the canon (or even the stealth canon) but bearing enough of Wood's trademarks to arouse curiosity. Maybe it's about one of his "pet" subjects, like angora or cross-dressing. Maybe it uses some of his favorite words or expressions. Maybe it's from Pendulum or one of Eddie's other known publishers and comes from the era when we know Ed was active. Or maybe someone just has a hunch about a particular book or article. Does it past the duck test? That's where the debates begin.

I can't say I've read everything Ed Wood wrote. (I don't know if anyone has, other than Eddie himself.) But I've read many works, both long-form and short-form, that he is known or widely believed to have written. And there are certain things I'm looking for when I'm given a text and asked whether I think Ed Wood penned it. This can be especially tricky, since Ed had a number of different modes or styles as an author. He could be surreal and dreamy when he wanted, especially in his short fiction, or he could be dry and encyclopedic if necessary. You never know which Eddie you're going to get. I'm not joking when I say it may depend on how drunk or sober he was when he wrote it.

Recently, podcaster and pop culture scholar Rob Huffman shared with me and some other Wood fans a few pages from an article called "The Art of Tattooage," credited to an author named J. Lee Anderson. It appeared in a men's magazine called Chére in 1962. This now-forgotten magazine was the product of an adult publisher called France, which released both magazines and paperback novels in the 1960s. Ed Wood is thought—or at least rumored—to have written for France in the early 1960s, possibly using "J. Lee Anderson" as a pen name. Rob has explored these possibilities in depth with my colleague Greg Dziawer in the past.

Naturally, I took a good, long look at "The Art of Tattooage" to see if I could detect any traces of Ed Wood within it. Dating from 1962, this would be one of the earlier examples of Wood's writing, if it were his, but the fully-canon novel Killer in Drag (1963) shows that Eddie's signature style was already formed during this time period. So his authorial voice would be detectable if "Tattooage" were indeed his work.

Alas, this article did not give me any particularly strong Woodian vibes. For one thing, in describing the seedy tattoo parlors of early '60s Los Angeles, J. Lee Anderson uses a lot of words that I just can't imagine Ed Wood using very often: dowdy, truculent, vagaries, bemoan, echelon, conjecture, etc. On the other hand, the author never uses any of the words Eddie loved to employ in his own writing: thrill, soft, lovely, conventional, accept, etc. It would also have been nice to see some of Eddie's telltale ellipses.

In a broader sense, Eddie had a way of taking any topic and steering it toward his lifelong obsessions: death, alcohol, and women's clothing. He'd shoehorn these subjects (and anything else that came into his head) into his writing whether they fit the subject matter or not. "The Art of Tattooage" does none of that. Albeit a bit pretentious in his vocabulary, the author of this article sticks to the topic of tattoos and does not veer off on any quasi-philosophical rants. at least not in the passage I read. Eddie rarely had that kind of discipline.

If there's anything Woodian in "The Art of Tattooage," it's the way J. Lee Anderson uses old-timey slang and eye dialect. The article gives us a colorful quote from a tattoo artist who declines to be photographed: "The boss don't want no pitchers. The heat's on. We don't want publicity around here. And no pitchers." Ed Wood often wrote about the underworld of crime, and his characters in this milieu usually talk like gangsters in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, so that dialogue could have come from one of Eddie's works. Otherwise, this article lacks the tone and cadence I expect from Ed.

But don't take my word for it. Follow that link up there and read it for yourself. See if it passes your version of the duck test.