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6
Nineteen Years Old, and God

 

 

The office of Popular Publications was on the twentieth floor of the Bartholomew Building, at 205 East 42nd Street in New York City. The building cornered on Third Avenue, tatty street of bars and one-man barbershops, shadowed and dirtied by the El. At the other end of the block was Second Avenue, even tattier and dirtier because the Second Avenue elevated trains were older and rattlier and the whole thing was just that much farther from the real part of the city. A block farther still, just at the river, was a sudden eruption of elegance: Tudor City, luxury apartments inhabited, so my mother told me, by KWs—which is to say, Kept Women. Just north of Tudor City on the East River was a slaughterhouse.* Sometimes on a lunch hour I would walk down to watch the river, and would see the flats come in with their cargo of sheep, and the Judas ram leading them up the ramp to the killing place. Across 42nd Street from us was the Daily News Building, with the biggest globe of the earth I have ever seen turning ponderously in its lobby. We were a block or so from the Chrysler Building and the Grand Central complex. We were, boy, in the heart of things.

 

* The site is now occupied by the United Nations buildings. No jokes, please.

 

Not only was I at the very core of the Big Red Apple, but I commanded a network that stretched across the continent. Even the world. Linotype operators in Chicago were waiting to turn my words into metal. Newsdealers in Winnipeg and Albuquerque were going to display my magazines to their customers. Writers in California would tailor their prose to my wishes, artists would paint what I ordered, fans from India and South Africa would send me letters. It was a heady dose for a nineteen-year-old. I had aimed my whole life to this moment, and here I was.

Of course, the reality was not quite so glamorous. Even then I was aware that my two little science-fiction magazines were hardly a pimple on the mammoth corpus of the pulp magazine industry. With one part of my head I knew it. With the rest of me I was just floating in joy.

I met my colleagues with awe. To me at nineteen they seemed pretty impressive. The other editors were mostly young, if not quite as young as I; I doubt the average age was as much as thirty, even if you leave out the giggling girls from Accounting, where I never trod. But some were very old, and very wise. Just down the short hall from my own little office was Ken White, editor of Black Mask. Ken had inherited directly from Cap Shaw, who with Dashiell Hammett had shaped the modern detective story only a few years before. On the longer hallway, toward the 42nd Street side, was Janie Littell with her love pulps; heavyset ex-circus performer (so she said), she wrote a lot of the contents herself under a dozen pen names, all intensely moral tales in which there was never any touching below the neck, gobbled by an avid audience of young girls. In the other direction along the long hall were most of the other editors: Alden H. Norton (later my boss) with his sports pulps; Rogers Tamil genially overseeing all at a salary reported to be as much as Fif Teen Thous And a Year; the myriad Westerns, the dozens of detectives, the horrors, the air-wars, with their editors Loren Dowst, Willard Crosby, Mike Tilden; Aleck Portegal and his Art Department; and The Two Houses of Heaven. They were the two largest offices on the floor, and they belonged to the two men who owned the company, Harry Steeger and Harold S. Goldsmith. Rog Terrill was the fellow I had applied to, but Steeger was the one who actually hired me: courtly, youngish Princeton millionaire, who liked to yacht and to ski. He carried my typewriter into my new office, and when I said I'd rather do my own typing than have a secretary, did not burst out laughing. Secretaries got easily eighteen or twenty dollars a week. I was getting ten.

1939 was mid-autumn in the long, glorious season of the pulps. Popular wasn't the biggest pulp chain, or the best, but it was up there. We had more than fifty titles going at one time. The Thrilling Group had about as many. Street & Smith had fewer titles, but generally much bigger sales: they had original titles, like Love Story, Detective Story, and Western Story, not to mention the series books like Doc Savage and The Shadow. We were about Number Two to Thrilling in number of titles, and Number Three behind them and Street & Smith in aggregate sales; but there were at least a dozen other sizable pulp houses, and any number of small ones and transients. Put them all together and there were close to five hundred pulp magazines, with aggregate annual sales of around a hundred million copies.

I learned a great deal about the pulps, but one thing I never quite figured out was who read them. There were hundreds of titles on the stands. Somebody bought them, because that's where the money came from that paid our salaries. But you never saw a person reading one on the subway or carrying one on the street, so where did they all go? A lot of the readership, I knew, was in the small towns and on the farms, where the local movie house wasn't as handy as in New York. But New York dealers sold a lot of copies, too.

What was clear about the general pulp audience was that it was not finicky about literary quality, because, my God, most of the stories were awful. Even the science-fiction magazines of the time showed an awful lot of leaden prose and tone-deaf style, and they were the class of the field. The worst of modern television is not quite as brainless as the average pulp story of the 20s and 30s. And yet most of the people who edited them, and even most of the people who wrote them, were cultured and refined, as much so, at least, as their opposite numbers in the major book publishers of today. The guys who were editing Sinister Stories and G-8 and His Battle sometimes talked about Dos Passes and Alban Berg in the coffee breaks and then went back to shrieking, swooning females and the rattle of twin Vickers sluicing destruction into the Baron's Fokker triplane. Popular was not the classiest of the pulp houses. It was a me-too operation; when Westerns were selling, we did lots of Westerns; when they stopped, we stopped. But it wasn't the worst, by a long way. Ken White did fine things with Black Mask almost always, and there were individual writers—Joel Townsley Rogers was one—who always wrote with an understanding of the sound of the language and a care for its structure, whichever pulp they were aiming at. It was not all trash. But trash was the way to bet it.

One reason the stories were so bad was the pathetically low rates. A penny a word is not lavish. I am a reasonably productive writer, but my lifetime average is not much more than a hundred thousand words a year (and that includes a lot of early years when I was more interested in volume than in quality, and it showed). That's higher than most writers. It's even higher than most pulpsters of the 1930s; but, as you can see, a pulp writer in 1939 who wrote a hundred thousand words, and sold every word of it at a penny a word, would have been blessed each week with just a touch less than twenty dollars.

The result was that good writers got out of the pulps if they could, or, if they stayed, drove themselves to such heavy production schedules that quality disappeared.

If you want to think of a successful pulp writer in the late 30s, imagine a man with a forty-dollar typewriter on a kitchen table. By his right hand is an ashtray with a cigarette burning in it and a cup of coffee or a bottle of beer within easy reach. Stacked just past his typewriter are white sheets, carbons, and second sheets. Stacked to his left are finished pages, complete with carbon copies. He has taught himself to type reasonably neatly because he can't afford a stenographer, and above all he has taught himself to type fast. A prolific pulpster could keep up a steady forty or fifty words a minute for long periods; there were a few writers who wrote ten thousand words a day and kept it up for years on end. Some writers contracted to write the entire contents of some magazines on a flat per-issue fee, under a dozen pseudonyms; two of our air-war magazines were done that way, by a young fellow named David Goodis. Series-character magazines like The Spider or The Shadow were written by single authors; Robert J. Hogan did G-8 for us that way. At Popular most of those writers didn't get a penny a word. Some didn't get half that; some times the fee for a whole magazine was as little as $150, for as much as sixty thousand words.

The key to survival in the pulps, the old-timers kept telling us, was volume. I schooled myself to write and sell first drafts. I would put clean white paper, carbon, and second sheet in the typewriter one time through, and when I came to "The End," that was the last I saw of the story. It went directly to the editor. If I was lucky, a month or two later it was in print. If not, it bounced around until I had used up all the possible markets, and maybe then, and only then, I considered revising it.

You see, it didn't matter. The customers were not critical, and there were no rewards for virtue. Not with the readers—they were not consulted—and not even with the editors. Dependability, personal contact, and adherence to policy, those were the important considerations; literary quality came a poor fourth. And what the readers wanted—as far as I know, which is not very far—was vicarious adventure. If they could buy half an hour's anodyne, they would not raise questions of style. Oh, I am sure that there were stories they liked better than other stories. I am even sure—it is an article of faith with me—that they could distinguish between good style and bad. But the distinction was not reflected in the cash register.

All those magazines are gone now. The paper shortages of World War II mowed them down like standing wheat. There was a flickering resurgence after the war, but television, paperbound books, and the increased costs of publishing finished what the war had started. Even science fiction, runt of the litter that survived its bigger brothers, is now limited to a handful of magazines, though it is an immense factor in the paperbound book market; and as to Westerns, air-wars, sports pulps, even detectives, they just don't exist.

Said Harry Steeger to me: "What kind of a budget do you need?"

Said I to Harry Steeger, stalling for time: "Well, let's see, I need to buy stories, departments, art—"

"Right," he said. "Two hundred seventy-five dollars for stories. A hundred dollars for black and white art. Thirty dollars for a cover. That's four hundred and five dollars an issue for Astonishing Stories. On the other one—what do you want to call it?"

"Super Science Stories."

"Whatever. That's going to be sixteen pages longer, so we'll make it fifty dollars more on the budget. See Aleck about cover logos. Anything else, see Peggy Graves."

The smaller of the two magazines, Astonishing Stories, held 112 pages an issue and sold for a dime. I counted a lot of pages and discovered that a full page of type amounted to 620 words. Subtracting the pages that would be filled by advertising, illustrations, and front matter, I found I would need about sixty thousand words an issue. I didn't quite have half a cent a word, but close enough, close enough.

Art was something else. When I brought my budget to Aleck Portegal, the art director, he looked at me with compassion and disgust. Where the hell was I going to get artists to work for that kind of money? Writers, sure. Everybody knew what writers were like. But artists did a job of work for a dollar, and they wouldn't take less. That didn't worry me, because I had a secret weapon. In fact, two of them. There were the fan artists, as eager as the fan writers for publication in a science-fiction magazine. And besides, my girlfriend, Doë , was an art student at Cooper Union. She had at her fingertips a whole school of striving newcomers to whom five dollars would look like a hell of a price for something they would gladly have bribed us to print.

In the event, the art students were a disappointment, and most of the fans were worse. But there were a couple who were competent, and one—Hannes Bok, whom Ray Bradbury had been touting at the World Convention not long before—who was superb. We got the art, anyway. Aleck found, to his mild surprise, that a fair number of his regular professionals would be willing to take a little less for the extra work, and as I learned how to juggle my budget I found a few extra dollars. I didn't really need to buy sixty thousand words an issue. I could write long editorials, use big house ads, run a letter column; I could save six or eight pages of paid stories that way. And some writers couldn't count very well; the story that they said was six thousand words would actually turn out, when Peggy Graves checked it, to run seven thousand, maybe even more. The house rule was that if the official count was lower than the author's count, we paid off on the official count. But if the author's was lower, we paid on his. Altogether I could scrounge as much as forty or fifty dollars an issue on text, and Aleck taught me how to save a little on the art, too. If there was a nice-looking spaceship or an all-purpose alien-planet scene in a piece of art, we marked the line cut to hold, trimmed off the specific detail, and used it over and over again as a spot illustration. After a while Harry Steeger asked me if I thought an extra fifty dollars an issue would help. I assured him it would. . . . But, you know, I think I lied to the man. In my experience, the money a market pays for stories has only the roughest congruence with how good the stories are. Some writers will stretch themselves when the money is good. Some won't. Some react the other way: the more they get paid, the worse they write; probably a kind of stage fright is involved. It seems to me to be an editor's bounden duty to get as much money for his writers as he can, but once he gets it, what is he to do with it? Divide it equally between them all? But the harsh fact is that not all stories are of equal merit. Some you print with joy and thanksgiving. Some because the alternative is to put out a magazine with some of the pages blank. There is neither justice nor morality in paying the same price for both. So when I told Harry Steeger that a few more dollars in the budget would make a difference in the quality of the stories, I was hallucinating. What it did do, though, was make me feel good.

I did not understand all this at the time, but I quickly found out that the best stories were not necessarily the ones that cost the most. My principal instructor in this area was a Grand Old Man named Ray Cummings. He was tall, skinny, wore a stock instead of the conventional collar and tie, and was unimaginably old to me—he had actually been too old for World War I, which had ended before I was born. I suppose he must have been around sixty when we met. I respected Ray as a writer very much. He had never been a great writer, but he had been a prolific one, and sf was his specialty. He had a fascinating background—had even worked for Thomas Edison in his youth—and was a personally engaging, roguish human being. What he was not was a source of good stories. I don't think his talent had left him, I think he just didn't care any more. In the beginning I am sure that he cared about science fiction, but his typewriter was his living and he used it to produce whatever would sell; by and by it must all have seemed the same to him. Before I came to work at Popular, he had been selling them quantities of mystery and horror stories, under a variety of pen names. Horror stories were the dregs of the pulp market, cheap thrill-and-sadism stuff to a precise formula: the buildup involved a fear of the supernatural, but in the end it always had to turn out to be a hoax perpetrated by some criminal, spy, or madman.*

 

* Although they were even more awful than I have said, I wrote a few myself. So did even so fine a writer as Henry Kuttner. One likes to flex one's muscles on a new form, and also one likes to eat.

 

When I started there and Ray discovered I was a fan, it was a great day for Ray. Not only could he get back to science fiction, but he quickly perceived that I was his pigeon. I had no way of saying no to so great a man. Worse than that. He would not write for less than a penny a word, and I missed my chance to tell him that that was beyond the limits ordained for me by God and Harry Steeger, because the day he first walked into my office was the day I discovered I had a few extra dollars to play with. So for months he would turn up regularly as clockwork and sell me a new story; I hated them all, and bought them all.

I had at least the wit to keep them short, and so although Ray depleted my disposable surplus, he didn't quite wipe it out. I had always kept one eye on John Campbell's magazine. What I saw there I coveted, and with a little extra money I had hopes of acquiring some of his writers. The new Titans in my eyes were A. E. Van Vogt, L. Sprague de Camp, and Robert A. Heinlein. They are still Titans, to be sure, but in 1939 and 1940 they were not only great, they defined what was great in science fiction. I wanted them a lot. I never did get a Van Vogt, but one of John's weaknesses as an editor (he didn't have many) was his conviction that readers got tired of any byline after a while. He urged his writers to use pen names from time to time; and now and then he rejected a story by even the best of them.

In this, as far as de Camp and Heinlein were concerned, he was wrong. Both of them were at the peak of their form, trotting ahead of the rest of the field without a misstep. The Heinleins and de Camps I got—"Lost Legacy" and "Let There Be Light" in particular from Heinlein, and from de Camp especially his fine collaboration with P. Schuyler Miller, "Genus Homo"—would have looked good anywhere.

John's other weakness as an editor was that he just didn't want to talk about sexuality. All the characters in Astounding were as featureless around the groin as a Barbie doll, and one reason he didn't want the Heinleins was that they contained what he thought pretty raunchy language. (Sample: "I suggest you follow the ancient Chinese advice to young women about to undergo criminal assault." "What's that?" "'Relax.'") This blatant filth did not go unreproached in Super Science Stories, either. One reader wrote in:


". . . the vulgarity of the language is such as to make me look thrice before buying the magazine again."


And another:


"Frankly, I'm disgusted. If you are going to continue to print such pseudosophisticated, pre-prep-school tripe as 'Let There Be Light,' you should change the name of the mag to Naughty Future Funnies."


I met other writers at the Thursday Afternoon Luncheon Club, the back room of a kosher restaurant just off Times Square where Manly Wade Wellman, Malcolm Jameson, Henry Kuttner, and others got together to talk shop once a week. Other editors were grazing in that same pasture. Mort Weisinger would show up from the Thrilling Group now and then, and Dave Vern was a regular. Amazing Stories was still in New York, no longer owned by Teck and no longer edited by T. O'Conor Sloane. The new people had made it bigger and richer, but not better. Under Sloane it had developed fine pale mold around the edges; under the new people it had turned cheap pulp. But Dave Vern, the new editor, was a decent guy, and generous to a kid competitor.

I enjoyed the Thursday Afternoons, and from them I got some good stories. One I particularly liked, and rued, was Malcolm Jameson's "Quicksands of Youthwardness." I liked it because it was a great idea for a science-fiction story. It wasn't original with Jamie, or at least it had been suggested a decade before by no less than Sir James Jeans. He had written, in one of his popularizing books, that Time was probably the Fourth Dimension. H. G. Wells, he said, had written a science-fiction story in which a man went through some sort of transdimensional reversal and came back with his left and right sides interchanged, but how much more exciting, Jeans said, if he had come back with his past and future interchanged. Jamie had picked up the hint and made a nice twenty-seven-thousand-worder out of it. What I rued was that I had read the same book and had written the same story, not nearly as well, and I could see I had been outclassed. Sadly I bought Jamie's story and shelved my own.

But what to do with twenty-seven thousand words in my two rather small magazines? I decided to run it as a three-part serial. The readers quickly pointed out to me that they hated that; both magazines were bimonthly, which made it worse, but in any event nine-thousand-word installments were pretty skimpy. That was a mistake . . . and, I'm afraid, only one of a great many.

I wasn't really a very good editor. I was learning as fast as I could—I had Harry Steeger and Peggy Graves standing over me with circulation figures, a powerful spur. But being an editor requires kinds of maturity and resourcefulness you do not find in your average nineteen-year-old. An editor doesn't have to be always wise and authoritative. But he has to make most of his writers think he is, most of the time, and that is not easy when you don't yet need to shave more than once a week.

Editors as a class are not highly respected. Very few of them become famous. From an editor's point of view, it is the writer who gets all the breaks. Writers make more money. Writers get their names known. They do, even when the editor has at least as much to do with the success of the story as the writer himself. Does that seem unlikely? But there are some very famous stories that began as slop, until some editor worked painfully with the writer, over a long time, coaxing him through revisions, cajoling him into changes, hewing out of the shapeless fat of the first draft a work of art. Then, years later, when the story is a classic, no one but the writer knows that it was the editor who made it so.*

 

* I am not speaking out of private pain (or, anyway, not just out of private pain). The particular science-fiction editors who come instantly to my mind in this connection are John Campbell of Astounding, Horace Gold of Galaxy, and Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek.

 

 

On the other hand, from where the writer sits, the editor looks like the boss. The editor makes the decision to buy or to bounce. At the end of the year the writer may have twice as much money to pay taxes on as the editor. But on that day in February when he needs that thousand-dollar check to get his kid's teeth fixed, it is the editor who says whether he gets it or not. This conflict is not helped by the known fact that most editors are failed writers, and most writers are sure they could edit anything better than the incumbent—and are often right.

The editor is always in the middle. His job is to harvest the basic exudations of writers, as ants lick the sweat off their dairy aphids, to pick them over to find the ones that will stimulate the readers' pleasure glands, process them in the most attractive way, and place them on the market.

How does he know which ones will please the readers?

Ah, that's the problem, isn't it? He doesn't. He can only guess. If he is any good at his job, it is an informed guess, with experience and insights to help it, but it is a guess all the same.

If an editor is a systematic professional (translation: hack), he probably makes a study of all the successful magazines in his area, observes what they have done that has seemed to work, and does the same. If he is a genius, he looks for what isn't being done by anybody else. Then sometimes he does it, and sometimes he doesn't. Most of the things that aren't being done aren't worth doing, so you can't count on novelty alone for success. You make a series of those informed guesses, rejecting the ideas that won't work, as God gives you the gift to perceive them, and trying out the ones that might. Editorial skill lies in knowing what has worked. Editorial genius lies in taking a chance on what hasn't worked yet, but will when someone summons up the nerve to try.

All this I understood pretty well at the time, but between the understanding and the execution was a wide, wide gap.

I look at those old magazines now and my fingers itch; I want to pick up the telephone and dial 1-9-4-0 and tell that kid what to do. It was an easy time to be an editor. With what I know now I could have made those magazines sing, but as it was they just lay there.

But my, I had fun! First kid on the block to be a professional editor! The rest of the Futurians were jealous as hell.

When I say the "rest" I mean mostly the leaders myself and others, a feisty lot, given to competing for the sake of game-playing even when no stakes were involved. Among the Futurians there was clear-cut distinction between the leaders and the led. Whatever our politics (and by then most of the top considered themselves at least cosmetically Marxist), none of this nonsense about a classless society was allowed to interfere with how we ran our own group. The People Who Decided were Don Wollheim, John Michel, Bob Lowndes, and I. We called ourselves "the Quadrumvirate," and we lived in and among each other's lives almost inextricably. In fan and science-fiction affairs we operated under a unit rule. The decisions we wrangled out in private we presented to the world as monoliths. But even among ourselves there was a fine structure of interlocking relationships and power positions—and yes, by gosh, of friendship. Johnny and I joined the YCL together and went camping in pup tents at Lake Tiorati. Donald and I went to amateur-press conventions together. Bob Lowndes and I shared an obsessive interest in popular songs, and in the more flamboyantly decadent writers: Huysmans, Mallarmé, James Branch Cabell.

We also competed with each other, never more strenuously than between Donald and myself. I don't know what Donald thought was going on—someday I would like to ask him—but I know where I stood. Donald represented something to me. At a parlor game, in the early Futurian days, among non-Futurian people, I had been asked to name my hero, and the name that popped out was "Donald A. Wollheim." I was maybe sixteen then, and Donald had a towering advantage over me in years and experience. But I was catching up. I was working at catching up; not only to catch up but to surpass; and, of course, no one knew that better than Donald.

It is a marvel that that four-way directorate survived as well as it did, but when I got to be an editor it began to shred. The other three Quads began to write for me for pay. Friendship could have survived that (that sort of strain has been placed on most of my friendships, one time or another, over the years). But the temporary armistice among young bulls each confident of his destiny as herd leader was more fragile, and a space developed between the rest of the Quadrumvirate and me.

But I needed the Futurians, needed them in my job. If writers think of editors as empowered to pollinate whatever blossoms they choose, over acres of flowers, editors quickly perceive that those acres are not very broad, and most of the blossoms are duds. An editor has to scratch to find good stuff—particularly with the pitiful money I had to offer—and one of the best places for me to scratch was among the Futurians. There was a wonder of talent there. Most of it was still new and growing, and some never really lived up to early promise; but first and last I bought stories not only from the other three Who Counted but also from Cyril Kornbluth, Dirk Wylie, Isaac Asimov, Richard Wilson, David A. Kyle, Jack Gillespie, Walter Kubilius, and others. They would work for very little, and sometimes they worked very well. Cyril Kornbluth was born with a trenchant phrase in his mouth. He was terribly young and inexperienced—around fifteen when I published his first story. But he was learning very fast the technical skills of story construction, and he had never needed to learn to shape a sentence. Isaac Asimov was growing visibly with every story. He carefully numbered them in series; I can still see the shape of his manuscripts, the title double-spaced, the first page almost entirely blank, but with the serial number of the story up in the corner to keep his records systematic. (He was always a horribly well organized person, Isaac was, and a standing reproach to the rest of us.) Unfortunately (for me, not for Isaac), he had already made the Campbell Connection. I had to content myself mostly with John's leavings. Hannes Bok, Doë , Dave Kyle, and others did illustrations for me, and I farmed out departments and columns to those who wanted to do them—for nothing, of course; the lure of possible free books or movie tickets was enough reward. The "perks" that went with being a professional editor were scarce (no such thing as an expense account, of course) but enjoyable, and some of them I was able to share. Both Dick the Drama Critic and I had passes to the New York World's Fair, and so one or two nights a week he and I would wander past Trylon and Perisphere, dine economically at the Mayflower Doughnut Pavilion (our passes did not include anything to eat), visit Salvador Dali's Dream of Venus (big goldfish tank of mildly nude girls swimming in underwater ballet) or whatever else looked exciting.

The space that was growing between me and the other Futurian leaders left room for new associations. Some came along with the job. I began to meet the Old Pros of the field, or at least nearly all who came through New York in those early years of the 1940s. Manly Wade Wellman was a regular at the Thursday Afternoon Luncheon Club, a courtly, heavyset Virginia gentleman who wrote several useful, workmanlike stories for me. So was Malcolm Jameson, an ex-naval officer who had had part of his larynx removed, smoked like a chimney, and spoke only in a harsh whisper. Henry Kuttner turned up, a slim, dark young man, humorous and surprisingly gentle, considering the terrifying words he was pouring into Weird Tales and the horror pulps. At a dinner party at the Jamesons' I met a flamboyant character who had just returned from being shipwrecked off the coast of Alaska and was on his way to some equally jock exploit in some equally improbable part of the world. His name was L. Ron Hubbard. He was the kind of person who expects, and without fail gets, the instant, total attention of everyone in any room he enters. If his later destiny as guru of world Scientology was anywhere in his thoughts at that time, he gave no sign of it. Lester del Rey came up to my office one day with a couple of manuscripts John Campbell had been unwilling to buy. I was unwilling to buy them, too (and it is possible John and I were right, because those stories, long lost, have never been published anywhere), but Lester himself I was willing to buy. Scrappy little kid with the face of an unseamed angel, he was then and has been for all of the forty years since one of the most rewarding human beings I have ever known.

All of us live at the centers of our own individual universes, most visibly so when we reminisce. But that is palpably unfair. Collectively all of these people were creating a literature. Individually they were loving, hating, marrying, learning, failing, and now and again most brilliantly succeeding, and to kiss any one of them off with a casual line is not only a disservice but a disrespect. So I leave this catalog dissatisfied, but I do not know how to make it complete.

It was not only males that I met. I encountered, and marked with one eye, Malcolm Jameson's pretty young daughter, Vida. Jamie was not the only writer with a pretty young daughter; Ray Cummings had one whom I also met and admired. But along about that time things became serious between Doë and me, and so I took myself out of competition in at least one area by marrying Doris Baumgardt in August of 1940. I was still under the legal age of consent. I had to get my parents' permission, and so my mother and father were required to show up at the Municipal Hall of Records to sign my marriage license. It was the first time they had seen each other in years, and it turned out to be the last.

We were married by a minister I had never met before (I have been married a lot, but never by anyone I knew) and took off for a sort of honeymoon in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Why Allentown? Both Doë and I were pretty parochial people. Allentown was the only nearby place we had ever heard of.

 

The other thing that happened in 1940 was that I finally and for good severed my connection with the Young Communist League.

Paris fell that spring. The next day one of my YCL friends turned up at my office for lunch. He bought us wine, held up his glass, and proposed a toast: "To the liberation of the bourgeois capital by the people's forces of socialism."

I drank his lousy wine. But it lay sour in my stomach while I brooded in my office all that afternoon. The YCL was very close to the core of my existence as a social person; what structure of belief I had managed to erect followed its blueprints, as I had perceived them. I don't think my belief-structure has changed much. The evils that the YCL had called my attention to (Fascism, militarism, the persecution of helpless people) are still evils. The Marxist interpretation of history no longer seems quite right, but it is not much more wrong than most others. But the YCL changed with the Stalin-Hitler pact, and my friend's toast to the panzers grinding up the Champs Élysées made me confront that change in a way I could not escape. It was not easy to separate myself cold turkey from the YCL. I had dear friends, and commitments made. But I couldn't hack it, and over the next few months I phased out, not without reproaches and by no means without pain.

Most of the friends I left behind ultimately drifted away, too. The Party line flip-flopped again in June of 1941, when the Germans attacked the Soviets. But by then I no longer cared.

 

After our marriage Doë and I moved into an apartment in Knickerbocker Village. The rent was $42.75 a month, which was reasonable enough, even in 1940. The problem was that the salary Popular Publications was paying me was ten dollars a week, which comes to $43.33 a month. I have always been good at arithmetic. It took me no time at all to do in my head the simple calculation

 

$

43.33

-

42.75

$

 0.58

 

and deduce that my salary might pay the rent but would do little about meeting our expenses for food, clothes, entertainment, or even an occasional pack of cigarettes.

Well, I didn't expect to keep house on fifty-eight cents a month. Popular Publications didn't expect me to, either, but it took me a while to figure out that what they expected me to do was what all the pulp editors did: to supplement my salary by writing for myself and for the other magazines in the chain.

Because I was slow in catching on to this, my 1940 total of sales amounted to only $281.42 (and that represented eleven stories and a poem!). But by the end of the year I had learned the ropes, and besides, Popular Publications had doubled my salary. It looked as if 1941 would—with a little luck—give me a cash income of nearly two thousand dollars. Not luxury, no. But enough for even a little comfort.

There were about six good months in there, the first half of 1941, when everything went pretty much as I had expected and the world seemed almost worrisomely easy to cope with. Doë and I were nest-building, and Knickerbocker Village was a fun place to live in. It was the first of the giant New York apartment developments. It took up a whole city block, hard up against the Manhattan Bridge on one side, a few blocks from Chinatown and the Five Points on the other. Architecturally it seemed something from the future, two separate structures, each a hollow square surrounding a grassy little park, a children's playground dividing the two. Under the building was a warren of passages and chambers, so that you could go from any building in the complex indoors to any other, and even to any of the built-in ground-floor commercial establishments—drugstore, candy store, co-op supermarket, restaurants, bars. Most of what one needed for life was right there in Knickerbocker Village, including friends.

A few months after us, my friend Dick Wilson married Doë's friend Jessica Gould and at once moved into a KV apartment the mirror image of ours, across the central court and a few stories lower down. We could see each other's windows, and arranged signals for when we wanted company to save on phone bills. On the penthouse floor of our own building were Willard and Eleanor Crosby. Bill was one of my colleagues at Popular, a marvelously witty and urbane man who ultimately wound up on The New York Times until his death in the 1960s. Another Popular editor, Loren Dowst, had an apartment in the complex, and two Brooklyn friends, Ben and Felice Leshner, turned up a few tunnels away. Our own neighbors across the hall were named Hoke and Cara Smith—Hoke a librarian, Cara a student. We got along well, especially in the hot weather, when we learned that if we and they kept our hall doors open, we could get a straight-through ventilation almost as good as (wild fantasy of luxury!) air conditioning.

Knickerbocker Village had been built in part as a sort of primeval urban redevelopment plan. The neighborhood was tatty, and a lot of it was pure slum. It was the old Five Points neighborhood, in the middle of the nineteenth century the armpits of hell, ridden with crime and violence far worse than anything in East Harlem or Bed-Stuy today. The ghetto people then were Irish, rather than black or Puerto Rican, and that whole area was where the Civil War draft riots started, where police dared go only in pairs, and then only walking down the middle of the street. That was 1850 and thereabouts. Now, in the 1970s and thereabouts, it is—New York. It is like any other part of New York. If you walk the streets late at night you are reasonably likely to be mugged.

But in 1941 and 1942 it was gentler and more colorful. The neighborhood was a mosaic. Here was an Italian street fair, there a Greek kaffeineon; Jewish pushcart peddlers were all over, and Chinatown was just a few blocks away. North of Chinatown was the Bowery, solid ranks of missions, quarter-a-night flophouses, and dime-a-shot bars. Derelicts were sprawled sodden in every doorway at night and lurched down the sidewalks all of every day. Each morning I took the Second Avenue El from Chatham Square to 42nd Street on my way to work, and you could look right into the windows of the flophouses to see the ranks of cots in the dormitories, and the shoulder-high partitions that defined the "private" rooms for the more affluent. New Yorkers had not yet learned to be afraid. It did not occur to us that any of them would harm any of us, and none of them ever did.

In among all these warehouses and old-law tenements Knickerbocker Village stood tall and self-contained, gates open, playground unlocked, like the keep of a particularly prosperous baron in a particularly tranquil decade of medieval Europe.

We weren't even isolated. We went out into the bigger world to theaters, to friends, to work. Friends came to see us. We seemed to have a lot of parties (bless those thick, quiet Knickerbocker Village walls), and people were in and out of the apartment every day and night. On Sundays Isaac Asimov came clear across the river from Brooklyn to visit. Doë wasn't terribly fond of him, and so we would go out and walk around Chinatown while he told me the plot of the newest Foundation story he was writing for John Campbell, and I would try to interest him in writing something else for me. Willy Ley had come to America a few years earlier out of pure loathing for Hitler and the Nazis. He was writing articles and the odd story for science-fiction magazines, and he brought his pretty wife, Olga, down for dinner once or twice, a lovely, slim, dark girl with a ballerina's figure. (She acquired it dancing with the St. Petersburg Corps, and as of a few weeks ago has it still.)

But Europe was at war. The United States was still a year and more from Pearl Harbor, but the handwriting was on the wall. The Army had begun to draft men. Dirk Wylie had signed up in the reserve, and they took him away to become an MP. Dave Kyle went off, and reappeared a few months later in the uniform of a staff sergeant of the Armored Corps. Jack Gillespie didn't much care for wearing a uniform. That was what the cards spelled out if he didn't do something to prevent it, so he got himself into the Merchant Marine as a deckhand, and came back from time to time to report on what life was like in the Caribbean and the Med. My own draft situation was reasonably comfortable (Doë qualified as a dependent because we had married before the cutoff date), but all young males understood well that the rules could change any time if the war went badly; and badly it was going. After creaming France, the Nazis had sat tight for a time, flexing their muscles and organizing their conquests. Then, in a series of lightning strokes, they occupied Denmark and Norway, moved into the Balkans, and in the summer of 1941 attacked the Soviet Union. If I had had any faith at all left in Joe Stalin as wise all-father to the proletarian republic, it would have been destroyed by his handling of that invasion—if, of course, I had known what was really going on. He blew it badly, disastrously badly. What saved him was the toughness of the Russian people and the almost equal foolishness of Adolf Hitler. Even so, within a few weeks the Germans were deep inside the Soviet Union, and Stalin was in nervous collapse.

There was, to be sure, a certain amount of sardonic fun in the situation. As soon as Hitler struck at Stalin, the Communist Party line flopped back, from "The Yanks Are Not Coming" to "Victory for the Freedom-loving Peoples of the World." And not just the Communist Party. All at once Stalin was our friend, the Russians our allies and protégés. Hollywood began churning out a series of films showing how the heroic Russian masses were outsmarting and outfighting the invader. Chicago meatpackers began manufacturing kielbasa for lend-lease. And one ludicrous evening in the Radio City Music Hall I heard their symphony orchestra playing, for God's sake, the "Internationale."

It was not only a bad time in the war, it was suddenly a very bad time for me. About that time I became unemployed.

I have never been sure whether I quit or got fired. I hung at Harry Steeger's doorway one morning until I got to see him. My intention was to ask for a raise, meaning to quit and free-lance if he turned me down.

But Steeger had complaints of his own. When I walked out of his office I didn't have the raise, and didn't have the job, either.

From the early summer of 1941 to the beginning of 1942, seven months in all, I was a free-lance writer.

That wasn't the first time I had been a free-lance writer. What else was I to call myself in 1938? But it was the first time that it mattered much whether I made a living or not. Knickerbocker Village wanted its rent every month. We ate. We burned electricity. The landlord called, and twelve o'clock arrived too often.

In that seven-month period I wrote quite a lot. I actually finished five stories which sold, for a collective price of not much less than a thousand dollars—for the first-serial sale, that is; over the years, they've earned quite a lot more than that. If you divide seven months into a thousand dollars, you find that my weekly earnings came to around thirty dollars, or almost, not even counting what long-subsequent reprints brought in. That was just about what I had been earning in salaries and free-lance checks while I was at Popular.

But it was not the same thing at all, at all.

There is a vast difference between earning a thousand dollars at the boiler factory and earning that same thousand as a free-lance writer. At the boiler works you get a check every Friday. If you write for a living, you get your check when you get it, and not a moment before. Maybe you get it when you finish your story. Maybe you get it a few months later, after a few editors have had the unwisdom to reject it. Maybe you get it never.

This is a terrible trauma for many writers, not just the effect on their credit of the slapdash arrival of checks, but the effect on their writing itself. Jim Blish was one of the more successful, and also one of the more deservedly successful, writers I have known. For more than twenty years he alternated between periods of holding a job and writing on the side, and periods of full-time writing as a free-lancer. And for all those years the best and most successful writing he did was when it was in his spare time; when he took his courage in his hands and set out to be Pure Writer, he froze. Not just Jim. Many of us. To some degree, at some time, all of us. Including me. (But always excepting Isaac Asimov, who is not like mortal man.)

The good thing about writing as a career is if you are any good at it, the paychecks keep coming long after the work is done. Nearly half my income usually comes from residual rights on work done anywhere up to forty years ago, including a share from those stories written in the fall of 1941. (If those subsequent earnings are added in, my actual income from those seven months must come to well over a hundred a week, at least twice as much as I then deemed affluence.)

The bad thing is that the money doesn't come when you need it. The normal curve of a writer's income is steadily up. But the point from which the curve starts is zero.

Doë and I weren't desperately poor. We certainly weren't being hounded by creditors; we had never bought anything on credit. Although we had no appreciable savings, and the cash inflow for that seven-month period was meager, I don't recall needing any tangible thing that we didn't have. What I personally needed very much was quite intangible: a touch more self-respect.

The funny thing is that I am sure I could have found another editorial job if I had looked. Young male editors were disappearing into uniform every week, and a draft-deferred specimen like me could easily have found a home. I am astonished to say that, as far as I can recall, the thought never crossed my mind. If I couldn't edit Astonishing and Super Science I would write, and if I couldn't write I would do nothing.

And nothing is what I did a lot of the time, or at least nothing very productive in terms of bringing cash into the domestic economy. What I did a great deal of the time was play chess. I had never been any good at it, but I wanted to be, and now, with time to spare, I lived on the chessboard for seven months. I learned all the end games, and puzzled for weeks over the fact that a knight and a bishop could checkmate a king but two knights could not. I bought a book of famous games and played them out. And I challenged any player I could catch.

The player I could catch most frequently was Dick Wilson, handily right across the court in Building E. By the time he got home from work I would already have the light impatiently in the window, and as soon as he was through dinner he would come up to BH8, or I would come down to EE2, and we would play until he had to go to sleep. I don't remember what Jessica and Doë did while we played chess. I don't know if I cared.

When I wasn't playing chess, I read. When I wasn't reading, I listened to music. Doë and I had discovered ballet a little earlier, and as often as we could afford we were off to the old Metropolitan Opera House to see the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Fredric Franklin taking a hundred and twenty-eight bars to die as the slave in Scheherazade, the astringent excellence of Les Sylphides, Swan Lake's heart-meltingly sweet cygnets. Once I had seen the ballets, the music meant a great deal more to me than it had before, and I began listening in earnest. Somehow I had reached the age of twenty with only the sketchiest acquaintance with classical music. I hadn't owned a record player and had not fully realized that WQXR and WNYC were broadcasting all the concerts one would want to hear every day on the radio. The ballet Petrouchka opened up Stravinsky to me; Gala Performance, Prokofiev. I bought the fragile, ponderous 78-rpm albums—The Song of the Nightingale, Firebird, Sacre—and played the grooves right off them. From Les Sylphides I discovered Chopin, and just about that time Alexander Brailowsky began a concert series that included the entire Chopin oeuvre, even the seldom-played ones that seem to need twelve fingers on each hand; I went to Town Hall for some of them and marveled. When I wasn't playing chess or reading or listening to music, I was visiting with friends; and when I wasn't doing any of those things, and only when I wasn't doing any of those things, I wrote.

There are well-organized writers in the world, but I haven't known many of them. (Just one, I think—and you know who you are, Isaac.) I do know what a well-organized writer is like. He gets up in the morning, washes the sleep out of his eyes, sits down at his typewriter, and picks up where he left off at five the evening before. For three hours he types, and then he breaks for lunch. After a pleasant meal and a stroll in the garden, it's back to the typewriter for three more hours. Then, virtuous and complacent, he covers the typewriter and revels all the evening long.

It is not like that for me, and isn't for most of the writers I have known—all the hundreds, maybe thousands, of them. What we mostly do is sweat, stall, worry, and convulse.

I have subsequently learned how to be somewhat systematic. It doesn't come naturally, but I couldn't function without it. Now I have formal quotas and projections, and I often know fairly well in February what work I will have finished by the end of the year. Even so . . . even so, not long ago I found myself totally unable to write for nearly six months; a few years before that, I was convinced I would never write again; and it was only this week, even this day, that I sat and stared at the typewriter for an hour or more without putting a word on paper. As far as I can tell from my own experience and that of many others that is how the game is played.

At twenty-one I was far less well organized than (even!) I am now. Writing was scary. The stakes were high, my confidence was shaky, I put it off when I could. When I wrote it was in bursts: an eighteen-thousand-word novelette all one night long, taking the last page out of the typewriter at noon and falling exhausted to sleep. It was not a bad novelette,* but the way I wrote it was very bad. To produce so much so quickly and so exhaustingly makes it that much harder to sit down to produce again. The experience gives you the confidence that a great deal can be done in a short time, which encourages delay. The memory of the exhaustion gives you the knowledge that it won't be any fun, which discourages getting started.

 

* At least, I don't think it was bad. It was "Wings of the Lightning Land." It has been reprinted since, and is in The Early Pohl (Doubleday, 1976), but I've never had the courage to reread it.

 

I now think that everything I did at that time—in fact, everything I was doing in all those years, and almost everything I've done through my life—carried its own justification of a sort. What a writer has to sell is his own perspective on the universe. The way to make that perspective significant is to learn all one can learn about—everything. What I was doing was informal, disorganized, spasmodic, but it was all learning. All of it helped to unravel that central mystery which is what writing is all about, and so all of it contributed to my career. I don't regret a minute of it . . . now. But at the time it didn't feel good at all. It felt as if I were washed up at twenty-one.

 

That "central mystery" can be defined in many ways, but most of them revolve around a single central question: "Who am I?"

 

I have sat staring at this page, trying to remember and to understand, so that I can say just what was happening in those seven months. I think I do understand. I don't like my understanding of that time in my life very much, and I have buried so much of it so deeply inside the layers of my head that it is difficult to exhume fact out of the strata of rationalization.

But whether I like it or not, I think I know what happened. I was not feeling happy about myself, and for that reason I was not happy with those around me. The principal person around me was Doë. We were two raw children, Doë and I. We married very young; even the marriage ceremony only ratified a commitment that had been implicit almost since we first started dating at seventeen. The growing-up process that most adolescents experience through transient dates and relationships, we worked out only on each other, and we carried a lot of adolescent role-playing into our marriage. I more than she. I had made a model of myself in my head, and I acted it out. The model was mature, authoritative, a genu-wine leader type, capable of command decision and never at a loss. And the tide went out and the sand washed away and the foundations crumbled, and I had to learn a new model for myself. The father-bear role would not play any more.

Where did I learn the father-bear role? Why, I think we all learned it. It came out of the sexist society that taught us role-playing, out of a dozen Astaire-Rogers movies, out of the stereotypes of the stories we wrote and read, out of all the conventional wisdom of the age. We were all a little crippled. Some of us still limp when the rain wind blows from the east. Prickly Women's-Lib ladies, you can have anything you want of me. Your fight is my fight, but you come a little late; I wish you had been around forty years ago, when I needed liberating. Because we were taught that women were dependent, it followed that there was no one for them to depend on but men. Among others, my own father had taught me to play that role, but I think he had also taught me to fail at it.

I don't want to give the impression that Doë and I suffered through months of misery, because it wasn't like that at all. We had a lot of fun. We did productive things. We were so young that we knew, fundamentally and surely, that there would always be other chances and new experiences without end, and in fact there were. But we blew that one. Not "we." I. Having married Doë as part of a scenario I had written for myself, and then having found out that the scenario didn't work, I was restive. I had signed a run-of-the-play contract, but I wanted to quit the part.

It was a gritty personal time, and made grittier and more confusing by the world scene. In December the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and my country was at war.

 

Early in 1942 Alden H. Norton sent me a telegram, asking me to come back to Popular Publications as his assistant. To make it sweeter, he offered me more as an assistant than I had been paid as a full-fledged editor. I felt around my pride to see if it was injured, and when it did not seem to hurt anywhere, I accepted at once.

Al Norton was a boss editor, a department head. He had fifteen or sixteen pulp magazines to look after and four people to help him do it: a secretary and three assistant editors, including myself. The staff had been depleted by the draft and other turmoils, and when I came aboard there was only one surviving assistant, Olga Mae Quadland, tall, dark, good-looking, and good-humored. Ollie had the curious attribute of being a female deacon in the Episcopal Church, but I was big enough not to hold that against her, and she was very good at her job. A little later another assistant signed on to complete the roster, Dorothy LesTina. She was a pretty, brown-haired recent divorcee from San Diego. Tina was a year or two older than I, wore her hair in coronet braids, and was new enough in New York that she didn't know a soul.

The war had begun to change publishing, even in seven months. There were new things, real or on the horizon, called "price controls" and "rationing." Paper was going to run short. The Canadian forests were still there, and the mills were ready to grind the trees into magazine pages, but to get the trees to the mills and the paper rolls to the printing presses involved trains and trucks, and they were suddenly heavily committed to troop movements and shipments of airplane parts. There was even, without warning, censorship. None of us knew how that was meant to work. But one day I wrote an editorial for one of the air-war magazines, full of pulpy fantasy about the terrible vengeance our Air Force was about to work on the Axis, and laid it on Alden's desk. He came in an hour later, looking worried, and said Harry Steeger had told him he would have to clear it with Air Force Intelligence. We phoned around, and got a name, and sent it off, and a few days later it came back, heavily red-lined and amended. "Night fighters parachuting agents into the heart of Occupied Europe" had been changed to "support of ground operations, covert and otherwise." Bragging about the invulnerability of the B-17 "Flying Fortress" had been revised to a recitation of the published official performance figures on rate of fire and armor. It was apparent at once that the censors hadn't yet figured out how they were supposed to work, either.

But we got along fine, all of us corralled into the long, narrow room at the end of the hall. We slashed the Western and sports stories into English, took fair turns at editing the worst of them, lunched together more often than not, went bowling at the alleys down the block once or twice a week. After the fretful tension of trying to free-lance, coming into the Bartholomew Building every morning was like a vacation with pay. Alden made it easy for me to be his assistant, decent man, careful to consider the feelings of the people who worked for him. Apart from the growing alienation in my marriage, it was an easy time. I liked the work, relished the abdication from decision-making, had enough money to meet our needs; it was clear that it could not last forever—the Red Death was stalking the world, and the cracks were spreading at the foundation of my personal universe—but that was something that could be worried about at a later time. I was not Prince Hamlet. But it was pleasant to be an attendant lord while my glands caught up with my ambitions.

I had almost lost touch with the Futurians. Most I still saw on a one-to-one basis, but I was no longer part of the group. Partly it was my own vanity—having thrown my weight around as a boy editor, it was quite a comedown to be one more faceless aspiring writer in the mob—but it was also that I had had all the in-jokes and scurrility I wanted for a while. Individually the Futurians contained some of the brightest and best people I have ever known, but collectively they—no, we—were often kind of awful.

They were also changing. Old Futurians were vanishing, new blood was flowing in. The center of gravity had moved from the Ivory Tower in Brooklyn to a West 103rd Street walk-up called Prime Base. There was a pentacle painted on the tatty linoleum of the living room, and murals on the wall (the figures were the Unholy Trinity: Stinky, Shorty, and the Holy Ghost). The artwork was due to a new boy in town named Damon Knight, skinny, callow, with a pear-shaped head and a lot on the ball in his idiosyncratic way. Damon had been a fan since he was old enough to read, and his intention in coming to New York was to become a professional science-fiction artist. He might well have succeeded, in spite of having no discernible talent at art, if the example of the other Futurians had not suggested to him that writing was easier. A few editors bought his illustrations, but then they began to buy his stories as well, and he put away his sketch pad for good. Jim Blish had been a fringe Futurian for some time and now became more active in the group; a little later Judy Merril came in, first female Futurian accepted in her own right rather than as a ladies'-day guest of some male.

But by then I was long gone.

The pleasure had begun to diminish, and the cracks to widen. By the end of 1942 Doë and I came to the parting of the ways. When the lease ran out on our Knickerbocker Village apartment, she went back to her parents' home, and I took a room in a hotel on West 45th Street. I had begun to get very interested in that hazel-eyed girl with the coronet braids, Dorothy LesTina. But the dynamics of the situation were more than I could handle, and I decided to go for to be a soldier.

 

Unfortunately, Uncle Sam did not seem in any particular hurry to acquire my young flesh. The draft machine was in high gear, and voluntary enlistments had been suspended while they figured things out. And they didn't draft me.

This displeased me, and so I went down to Local Board 1 to complain. Take me, I said. Go away, they said; we'll come to you when we come to you. How come you didn't come to me already? I asked. And they said: Because, first, you are deferred because of dependency; second, because we have been assigned a quota, and our quota is overfulfilled. All the young fellows in Chinatown signed up long ago to fight the Japanese. When we finish with them, maybe we'll get to you, so go away.

Well, that bugged me. I had been talking anti-Fascist so long that I was beginning to feel guilty about doing nothing more tangible in the war than writing editorials in Fighting Aces. And when you come right down to it, I have this special unalterable love for the United States of America. Bumbling, sometimes blundering, it is still my country, right or wrong, and I take much pride in the fact that over its two hundred years it has been right a lot more than it has been wrong. (God preserve us all from the exceptions!) So I wanted in. A lot.

There was some fun to be had in the situation because I appointed myself spokesman for all the unwilling draftees in the country, I wrote my local board, I telephoned them, I went down and pounded on the table. The dependency depended on the marriage, I said, and the marriage was over. We'll make a note of that, they said, and don't call us, we'll call you. I'm not really in Local Board 1's territory any more, because I moved to West 45th Street, I said. We'll make a note of that, too, they said, but go away.

In the long run they did grant me my wish, but it took some four months of doing. They inducted me on April Fool's Day, 1943.

 

 

 

 

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