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8
Ten Percent of a Writer

 

 

When I get up before an audience to speak, there is usually someone to introduce me, and that person almost always mentions, among other tidbits of biography, that at one time I was a literary agent.

That part of my life is a quarter-century past, and besides, it ended badly for me. Everything considered, I would just as soon forget it, but it still fascinates the introducers and the blurb copywriters, and I think I know why. Everyone at all involved with writing has heard of agents. Hardly anyone knows what they do or who they are. They are shadowy figures who seem to wield great power, but who do they wield it on? and how?

I'll tell you all that, never fear. But I didn't actually get into the agency business until 1947, so there is a little chronology I'd like to catch up on first.

 

The Army gave me my freedom on my birthday, 26 November 1945. I spent most of the next couple of months waiting for my new wife to get out to join me, and I spent them with my father.

He was at the height of his prosperity just then. There was big money in war. He had made a lot of it.

He would have made even more if the war had been kind enough to keep going another year or two. The Japanese surrender was a body blow. If they had only had the consideration to keep fighting as advertised until every island of the homeland was overrun, he could have soaked away a million or two, easy.

He had already begun the soaking-away process, and one of the soaking places was a thousand-acre farm abutting Camp Upton, Long Island. I spent a couple of solitary weeks there that winter, listening to the farmhouse turn itself on and off—the refrigerator, the oil burner, the water pump in the basement, all sorts of friendly little machines keeping themselves busy just for me. I did a little writing, and a lot of loafing, and experimented with the idea of being the son of a gentleman farmer. It was going to be quite a farm, one day. Pop had had two hundred acres cleared and planted in apple seedlings, put a few hundred more into cauliflower, a few hundred into potatoes, and a small but very expensive patch of a few acres into strawberry vines. He had bought a riding horse for his friend Lillian's daughter. I tried to ride the beast to keep him sweet, but it was too late; he was already so hog-fat and lazy that my best summer-camp horsemanship could not get him to move in any direction except toward the barn. I regret the absence of that farm. If it were still in the family we would be multimillionaires for the land alone, but it's the farm itself that I miss. In the event, it went down the tube because my father had soaked too much money into too many different ventures, and the Army's niggardly way with contract cancellations caught him short.

I watched some of that money seep into the ground, leaving nothing but a stain, one night at his apartment. He was entertaining some financial friends at a dinner party, and they sang him the siren song of Cosmopolitan Records. Cosmo was a tiny war-born competitor to such biggies as RCA and Columbia, but it had lucked out in a big way with an oddball disk called "Tubby the Tuba." All America was mad for "Tubby the Tuba." The orders poured in. Cosmo could not press the records fast enough. What Cosmo needed, the sirens sang, was a manufacturing genius like my father, someone who could rev up the antique machinery and get production up to demand . . . and, oh, yes, of course he would be expected to bring in some couple of dollars to help pay for the expansion.

My father's eyes were aglow. I recognized the signs. I kicked him under the table as hard as I could, but he was firmly on the hook and with no interest at all in wriggling free.

So he signed aboard Cosmopolitan Records, and it was a disaster. We went out to the plant to study the production process, lumps of black biscuit tossed into a steam-heated press that squeezed them and molded them and cured them and baked the labels onto them. My father mastered that easily enough and got the rate of production up to competitive levels. But then what would we do with all that production once the madness for "Tubby" died? Obviously there was a need to diversify. So they recorded some hot new prospects and put some of the presses to making the new ones, and "Tubby"'s production figures slipped back. The capricious American public despised the new records. "Tubby," contrarily, kept blossoming, but as we were shipping so few we lost the exclusive rights, and my father lost his shirt.

He still had plenty left. Remained the machine shops: But the War Department was being unexpectedly hard-nosed about paying off for contract cancellations, and what had looked like millions of dollars in income materialized at barely enough to pay the notes.

Remained the farm.

That was blue-chip, gilt-edged; my father had thought it out carefully, and he had done everything exactly right, with one little mistake. He had planned for the long haul. The haul turned out short, and so did he. The apple trees would not produce a crop for four years. The strawberries not for two. It was a bad cauliflower year; a cold snap froze it in the ground, a total loss. Potatoes—ah, they were superb! Tens of thousands of bushels, plump and perfect. But so were everybody else's potatoes that year, and they were hardly worth the trouble of carting to the market to sell. The government stepped in for Long Island potato growers, bought them in the field, chopped them up, dyed them purple, and sold them for hog feed. He made a few bucks on that, but the rest was all ashes. Within a year he was broke again.

I really think my father was some sort of financial genius. He took risks, cut corners, laid it all on the fall of dice; in his life he earned more than a dozen ordinary men, but he lost more, too. He made a couple more modest coups in the remaining decade of his life, but when he died his estate did not cover the price of the funeral.

I think this fiscal idiocy runs in the family. The one talent I am certain I do not have in any measure at all is the orderly cultivation of assets. I know a lot about the theory of money management; what I don't know is how to apply it to real money.

This must be so. How else can one account for the fact that over the next six or seven years I managed to repeat my father's feat by going broke as a literary agent?

Consider the facts. Running a literary agency is about as low-capital, low-overhead as a business enterprise can get. I was really very good at it. I managed to establish a near-monopoly position in science fiction, then the fastest-growing area of the publishing business. Of all the writers who were any good at sf, I represented probably two out of three: John Wyndham and Isaac Asimov and Cliff Simak and Bob Sheckley and Frank Robinson and Jack Williamson and Cyril Kornbluth and Jim Blish and Fritz Leiber and William Tenn and H. Beam Piper and—oh, hell; of the top fifty sf writers of the early 50s, I represented at least thirty-five. The biggest markets in the field, Galaxy and Analog and Doubleday and Ballantine, all bought more from me than from all other agents and individual writers combined. Not just sf; I had successful clients in half a dozen other fields as well, Westerns and mysteries, regional novels and how-to-do-it books; I sold to film and to the fledgling TV markets, and I had a network of foreign representatives abroad. And after seven industrious years I had managed to lose thirty thousand dollars I didn't have.

 

I didn't set out to be a literary agent after World War II. I set out to be a novelist. In order to do that, I decided to become an advertising copywriter.

Tina got out of the service in February of 1946. We stayed for a short time in a hotel near Times Square, and then Dave Kyle came along with an idea. He had also just got his civilian clothes back, and his brother had a brand-new postwar car he was willing to lend Dave for a while. So the three of us drove down to Florida, Dave to look up an old girlfriend in Lakeland, Tina and I to visit her parents in Orlando, then a comfortably lazy community of lovely warm orange groves and avocado farms surrounding about a million tiny lakes. We lived on lotus for a restorative month and then came back to New York to find an apartment in (where else?) Greenwich Village. There didn't seem to be any great pressure. We were young, and pleased with ourselves as honorable veterans of the last of the just wars, and we had plenty of money. Neither of us had spent much during the war. We had pay accumulated, and my mother had left me a little when she died. We could have lived frugally without working at all for at least a year or two.

I didn't much want to live frugally, and the apartment was far from frugal. It cost $175 a month. That doesn't seem like a lot after thirty years of inflation, but it was rather more than my monthly income had ever been in my life up until then. And it was really a nice apartment, modly furnished top floor in an old building on Grove Street, just down the block from where Tom Paine had written one of his Crisis feuilletons and around the corner from several of the favorite hangouts of the Mafia. A roof garden went with it. Tina and I carried brown-paper bags of topsoil all the way in from my father's farm to fatten the garden up, and on summer nights it was a marvelous place to sit and observe the world below. Our building was owned by a prosperous and art-loving dentist. He encouraged talent, especially musical, and one of his protégés was a young pianist named Constantine Stronghilos. Tina and I were invited to his first recital, and there was no doubt that he had the touch for Chopin and Liszt. For years afterward I kept watching the pages of the Sunday Times to see when he would make his breakthrough into fame, but he never did.* Tina was as gregarious as a pretty puppy and we quickly made friends—notably Kathleen and Joe Skelly, in the building across the back yards from us, and through them we met people like Ayn Rand and others who floated through their cocktail parties. Tina began taking courses at the New School, in subjects like theater and paranormal psychology. We built mazes and tried to telepathically command mice to follow one path rather than another—it never worked; and she wrote endless scripts for plays and musical reviews, which didn't work very well, either. (She subsequently published half a dozen good books, but the theater never opened its doors to her.) It was a fine way to live, but I could see that our resources were not going to survive it indefinitely without replenishment. Besides, I was about ready to go back to work. I hauled out the novel I had written in the tufa-block EM club in Stornara. It was evident at once that it had a great flaw. It was about the advertising business. I didn't know anything about the advertising business, and it showed.

 

* Connie Stronghilos turned up in my life again twenty-five years later, when he joined the New Jersey Unitarian Church of which I was then a trustee. I found out what had gone wrong with his career: arthritis. The mind understood the music, but the fingers would not obey his will. (It really is quite a small world.)

 

That was a problem, but for that problem there was an easy solution. I bought a Sunday Times, looked under the help-wanted ads for advertising copywriters, and answered three of them. And on April Fool's Day of 1946 David Altman put me to work in his little Madison Avenue agency as chief (and only) copywriter.

 

Advertising writing should be under constant surveillance by the narcs; it is addictive, and it rots the mind. When you spend your days persuading Consumers to Consume articles they would never in their lives dream of wanting if you didn't tickle them into it, you develop fantasies of power. No, not fantasies. Power. Each sale is a conquest, and it is your silver tongue that has made them roll over and obey. If you do not end your day with a certain contempt for your fellow human beings, then you are just not paying attention to what it is that you do.

Most of the advertising I did in my three years in the business was mail-order, and most of the commodities I sold were books and magazines. Book clubs were the specialty of the Thwing & Altman agency, and after six months there I moved over to Popular Science Publishing Company, pushing magazine subscriptions and our line of how-to-do-it books.

One of the characteristics of the advertising business that rots the brain and destroys the disposition is that most people in it hardly ever know whether what they are doing is any good. You can see whether your product sells well or poorly, yes. But what did it? Is it the TV spots, the jingles, the billboards, the space ads, the point-of-sale displays . . . or maybe just the fact that the weather suddenly turned warm, so people are drinking more of your soda pop or acquiring more of your air conditioners? And even if you know that your ads are working, is it because of your copy, or the art department's layout, or none of the above?

My kind of advertising was not like that. If you were good at what you were doing, it showed. No argument. You printed the space ads or sent out the mailings, and either the orders came in or they didn't.

The first things I wrote were big full-page display ads for the best sellers of the Dollar Book Club. David Altman had hired me in the first place because there was not a lot of difference between the kinds of words I had strung together as pulp-magazine blurbs and the kinds that made good headlines for best-seller ads. I think the first one I did on my own was for Frank Yerby's The Foxes of Harrow,

 

In the wickedest city in the world

this copper-haired giant built an empire out

of gunplay, gambling and the eager hearts of women.


That one sold a zillion copies of the book—I really don't know how many, but it filled full-page space in at least fifty of the top circulation media in the country. Another—I have forgotten the name of the book—was:


He knew the whole town's secrets

but he had one secret of his own:

the huge white bride's bed

that he kept for the wife of another man.

 

We also did copy for the Junior Literary Guild, and for the G. & C. Merriam line of dictionaries, among other accounts. On all of the ads David Altman stood over me, guiding, revising, editing. Some of the ads, like the two above, survived almost intact; most were heavily changed. I liked and respected him, but I didn't much like being rewritten; and besides, he was paying me only fifty dollars a week. In a month with four Fridays I took home, after deductions, only a dollar more than my monthly rent for the apartment on Grove Street, and it seemed to me that another job would give me both more money and more independence.

Popular Science gave me both, under a grand, tall, gentlemanly man named George Spoerer. Of all the people I have ever worked for, George was about the kindest and most decent. He was a science-fiction fan, which was a big bond. He should have been a science-fiction writer. His apartment in Greenwich Village was just a few blocks from mine, and on halfway decent days we would walk home together, an hour's stroll, enjoying each other's company.* George was very good at mail-order advertising, and at letting his junior assistant, namely me, be good at it in my own way rather than in his. He sometimes made suggestions. Usually he just presented problems: Here's what we need to do; how do you want to go about doing it?

 

* On one of those strolls George told me the plot of a science-fiction story he had made up the night before. I told him he ought to write it, but he didn't want to do that; what he wanted was for me to write it. It's called "Let the Ants Try," and I wrote it just as he said it, and all he would ever accept for the free gift of a story I like a lot was a bottle of Scotch. There are only about two stories in my whole catalog which were suggested by someone else (the other is "The Midas Plague," which I owe to Horace Gold), and it is a source of some chagrin to me that I like them better than most.

 

Almost the first problem George laid on me was a big coffee-table picture book called Outdoor Life's Gallery of North American Game. Mostly it was full-color reproductions of the cover paintings from Outdoor Life itself, and it was really quite handsome, if you like that sort of thing. But in the market it was no wily white-tailed deer or battling steelhead salmon. What it was in the marketplace was a dog. The company had printed fifty thousand copies of it, and forty-nine thousand-plus were still in the warehouse. They had tried everything: buckeye four-color circulars the size of a bedsheet and personalized we're-all-art-connoisseurs-together letters on embossed stationery. And nothing worked.

I decided to test some new copy appeals. At the time, penny postcards still cost only a penny, so I wrote up a dozen or so sample appeals for postcard testing and we sent out thousand-piece mailings to test them out. I tried all the angles I could think of—

 

The book is beautiful and will impress your friends. . . .

With this book you will be better able to kill, crush, mutilate and destroy these beloved game beasts. . . .

This book will teach your children the secrets of wildcraft and keep them from turning into perverts and drug addicts. . . .


And then I tried one more card, which said:


HAVE YOU GOT A BIG BOOKCASE?

Because if you have, we have a BIG BOOK for you. . . .


and that was the winner. We didn't bother transmuting the copy appeal to a circular, we just mailed out those cards. Nearly a million of them, and the only reason we didn't mail more was that we ran out of books.

That was the fun part, and the addictive part, and the part that makes advertising people cynical about the wisdom of their customers—which is to say, you, and me, and all of us. Advertising reaches out to touch the fantasy part of people's lives. And, you know, most people's fantasies are pretty sad.

But still it was fun. We used our ingenuity particularly in the subscription efforts for the magazines, most doggedly of all in the renewal series. Because the money in the magazines came from advertising, and advertising rates were tied to circulation, we were glad to spend three or four times the subscription price to get you to subscribe. And if you once subscribed, boy, we hung on to you. You would stay on our list, one way or another, until you died. If you let your subscription lapse, we would send seventeen separate renewal efforts to get you back. First we would bill you. Then we would remind you. Then we would coax you. Then we would start to bribe you: two free issues, three free issues, a year at half price. If you still held out, we began to get desperate. Kidding letters. Belligerent letters. Pathetic letters. I wrote one that purported to be from Diane, the girl who had cut your Addressograph stencil: "Dear Friend, my boss just told me I had to take your subscription stencil out of our file. To me, every name on those plates is a friend, and I hate to see yours go—" They all worked, exactly like the osmotic diffusion barriers in a uranium-isotope separation plant. Ten percent responded to the first appeal. Ten percent of what was left to the second. Ten percent of the remainder to the third. We got a perfectly satisfactory return on every mailing at every stage in the cascade, and if you managed to get away unrenewed after receiving all seventeen, my hat, sir, is off to your determination. (Wow, why didn't I think of that then? "My hat, sir, is off to your determination, and as determined readers like you are our favorite subscribers, I am going to extend this one more chance—")

Popular Science was a great success story as a publishing company, and a good place to work. Gene Watson was the VP in charge of our department, wise, sharp, highly competent. Harry Walton, old sf-writing friend, was one of the editors on the magazine side, and now and again we would get together for lunch or coffee. I kept getting promoted, with added duties and added assistants: book editor, manager of subscription agents, executive in charge of book fulfillment; and I was always allowed to try whatever crazy ideas I thought might work. They didn't, always, but the "big bookcase" had bought me a license to experiment, and I used it. Most of what I did was fairly orthodox, four-color circulars, letters, order forms, return envelopes. But each of those presented its own opportunities for varying style, size, and format. I have never been able to draw well, but I could lay out a circular, showing where the art would go and where the type, picking out type faces and indicating the color masses, and have an artist make from it a handsome-looking piece of advertising. I found that I could dictate selling copy as well as I could write it, often better. When I see words on paper I pause and try to mold them into a certain balanced sonority,* but advertising copy doesn't want to be artistic. It wants to be crude and ragged enough to catch hold of the customer's calloused reflexes as it goes down. And sometimes I tried nonverbal communications. Tricks with color, tricks with typography—even tricks with scent. We published a book, experimentally outside our regular hairy-chested-men's area, called How to Make Paper Flowers and Party Decorations. I designed some nice feminine mailing pieces, and then it occurred to me that all the women I knew wore perfume. Why not try perfuming? So I went down to the five-and-ten for a gallon jug of their best rose cologne and a flit gun, and a warehouseman and I spent one whole afternoon riffling through sheaves of letters and spraying them with the cologne. First he riffled and I sprayed, then out of compassion I riffled and he sprayed. On my way home that night people turned to stare at me from half a block away.

 

* You mean you couldn't tell?

 

On the test, the perfumed letters outperformed the others almost two to one, so we went for broke.

We almost made it. Testing is the key to mail-order selling, but you have to understand what it is you're testing. We established that Woolworth's rose cologne would bring in extra sales right enough. But no one was about to riffle through half a million mailing pieces. We had to automate. So for the big mailing we arranged with the printer to add rose perfume to the ink, and the chemical combination produced something that did not in the least smell like Woolworth's best. It smelled a little bit like rotting hibiscus, and a lot like nothing you ever smelled before in your life. It wasn't total disaster; even that unearthly aroma did help the sales a little, as we verified from the test mailings we had included with the big one. But not anywhere near what we had expected.

All this was fun. But I had managed to lose track of why it was that I had got into advertising in the first place—i.e., to research my novel. After a year or two it began to penetrate that I was letting a lot of time go past.

Time was passing in the other parts of my life, too. Tina and I had a pretty good year's marriage, but in the second year it stopped being quite as good. We got along well enough. But she had her interests, largely in the theater, and I had mine; and we also had some basic differences about what marriage should be. Tina was quite sure she didn't ever want to have children. I had no burning urgency in that area, but I wasn't ready to foreclose my options permanently. And so in the summer of 1947 Tina went off to visit her mother in California, and dropped me a note to say that her mother was fine, the weather was nice, and, oh, yes, she had filed for a divorce.

I hadn't expected that. I hated it. I had a good night's drunk on it, and when I woke up the next morning I perceived through the hangover that, all in all, it might well be for the best.

Perhaps as a consequence of the divorce, I dropped out of orbit to reenter the world of organized science fiction.

I had not been neglecting science fiction. I had been writing the occasional story all along, and most of them were getting published. Not all were science fiction. I made my first sale outside the pulps in 1946, a sort of domestic mystery that the Toronto Star Weekly retitled "Stolen Tires," and I invented a series-character detective named Josh Healey and sold a few stories about him to Street & Smith's Detective Story. But most were in the good old sf groove. Thrilling Wonder published "Donovan Had a Dream" and "A Hitch in Time" in 1947. Planet printed "Let the Ants Try," the story George Spoerer had given me. Five Novels used a sort of science-fiction article called 'Trip to the Moon." * I still kept in touch with my old friends now and then, but there was no systematic relationship. If the Futurians still continued some sort of shadow life—and I understood they did—I was not involved in it.

 

* I wonder what I said in it! Haven't seen it in thirty years.

 

 

But on Labor Day weekend of 1947 there was a World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia.

I had never actually managed to attend a worldcon. As you remember, I almost made it to the first one of all, in New York in 1939. In 1940 it was in Chicago; in 1941, Denver. I couldn't afford to attend either. The war had imposed a hiatus until 1946, when there was a convention in California; I couldn't afford that either, but Philadelphia I could afford. Everything considered, I doubt that I have ever made a better investment.

From time to time people come to me, skeptical or wistful, to ask, "What's a worldcon like?" It's like—well, it's like the Zen fable of the blind men and the elephant. Gordie Dickson says it's his childhood fantasy of a gentlemen's club; you come back from ten months on the Amazon, measuring the spots of jungle butterflies, and you compare notes with colleagues who have been studying wind velocities in the Antarctic or mating patterns in Haight-Ashbury, and then you go off to further adventures. I think of it more as a family reunion. I have heard it described as a chaos, a madhouse, and a crashing bore; and I think it is all those things.

The thing about science-fiction conventions in general, and worldcons in particular, is that they are made up of science-fiction writers and fans,* as well as agents, editors, artists, teachers, and general hangers-on. This quality separates them from most of humanity in that, by and large, they are in the habit of using their brains for abstract thought.

 

* Who are essentially the same people. Nearly every writer is an ex- or present fan, and I've seldom met a fan who didn't think of trying his luck as a writer sooner or later.

 

I hate to say that about science fiction out loud. It puts people off. And, of course, it isn't absolutely essential to possess an informed or analytical mind to read science fiction. There's plenty of junk for the junk addicts, and it's even possible to read, say, "Who Goes There?" for the adventure or "Against the Fall of Night" for the lovely color without troubling one's head much about complexities and implications. But you miss the best parts. Sf encourages thought and curiosity, and requires both to appreciate it fully. Your average Newsweek reader or game-show viewer can't handle this sort of thing, and responds to sf with hostility or scorn. Sf readers can handle anything.

This does not guarantee that in each individual case they will be intelligent, or admirable, or even house-broken. Some of the worst people I have ever met have turned up at worldcons, as well as some of the best. Nevertheless, I cannot imagine any topic on which I could not find someone to carry on a rewarding conversation at a science-fiction convention. I can't think of many subjects that haven't been programmed. I am not all that fond of formal programs, having long since participated in enough of them for one lifetime, but even the formal programs contain jewels: scientists coming to tell the science-fiction world what they have been doing in space communications, or sociometrics, or the structures of the brain; advocates preaching alternate life-styles; writers rapping about their work; editors in give-and-take with the readers.

And in and around the program items are the informal get-togethers, in room parties or bars, with side trips to points of local interest and reunions with long-lost friends.

As part of the world's hypertrophy syndrome, sf conventions have grown uncomfortably huge. Three or four thousand persons is not rare; sometimes they are even worse. That's a pity. Too much of a good thing reduces the possibilities for personal interaction; it is a confusion rather than a coming together. But thirty years ago there were only a few hundred of us band of brothers at Philadelphia. Most of us had not seen each other since the far side of a war and were glad to meet again, even gladder to meet people we had known only through letters or the printed page. Willy Ley, John Campbell, Lester del Rey were all there. Ted Sturgeon accompanied a lovely girl named Mary Mair on his guitar as she sang his song "Thunder and Roses." William Tenn—brand-newest of the Big Name Writers—his "Child's Play" just out—gave an uproariously funny comic lecture on writers' correspondence. And Judith Merril was there. I had met her briefly a year or two earlier. We had both been married at the time; now neither of us were. Judy had just published "That Only a Mother," a brilliant twisty-dismaying short story about a woman who gives birth to a radiation-damaged child, the sort of story that gets right in among the glands and squeezes pretty basic parts of the psyche, so she was a writer to be respected. She was also a person to be known better, in her mid-twenties, with a small, incredibly beautiful blonde daughter. Judy herself was not pretty. She was something quite different. My friend Jacques LeCroix, arguably the best portrait photographer in Paris at the time, described her as having "the capacity for great beauty."

Philcon '47 left such a delicious aftertaste in all our mouths that Lester del Rey and I decided to revive it on a semipermanent basis in New York. So one night a few weeks later Lester brought a few of his friends down to my apartment on Grove Street, where a few of mine were already gathered, and the nine of us r'ared back and passed a miracle. We called it the Hydra Club.

Over the next few years the Hydra Club came to include nearly every science-fiction writer in the New York area, plus a lot of others: Fletcher Pratt, Willy Ley, L. Jerome Stanton (associate editor of Astounding), William Tenn, Judith Merril, George O. Smith, Jack Gillespie, Basil Davenport, Dave Kyle, Sam Merwin, Harry Harrison, as well as Lester and myself. It was the place where sf writers met. When Arthur Clarke turned up from London, Hydra was where he came. When visiting firemen from California or the Midwest passed by New York, we laid on special meetings. Hans Stefan Santesson was the general coordinator, in charge of letting us know when to meet; Debbie Crawford, with a comfortable little apartment in the North Village, was our usual hostess. At Christmas we rented a hotel ballroom to revel in. Betweentimes we met and drank a few and enjoyed each other's company.

Hydra was a fine place for establishing and cementing relationships, not all of them literary. Lester found his wife, Evelyn, there. Jack Gillespie met and married Lois Miles. And I married Judy Merril. By that time she had become an editor at Bantam Books, and I was turning into a literary agent.

 

Q. What is an agent?

A. An agent is a person who acts for another person.

Q. What kind of an agent is a "literary" agent?

A. A literary agent is a person who acts for a writer in literary matters.

Q. What do you have to be in order to become a literary agent?

A. Willing.

 

Literary agents come in all shapes and sizes. Some are Big Business. Some are cottage industry. Some are only a kind of hobby, scratching out a piece of a living from the odd reading fee or commission while holding a job, or free-lancing editorial work, or even collecting welfare. There are no professional standards. It is a little trickier to get started now than it was thirty years ago, but only because everything is a little trickier now, since a larger proportion of everything is taxed and/or registered with the government. It still isn't hard to set up shop. And in 1947 there was nothing to it.

Dirk Wylie came back from the wars with a bad back, acquired jumping out of that truck in the Ardennes. Army hospitals did what they could for him, and he emerged a civilian in 1946. But he wasn't well enough to get a job, and he was looking for something he could do at his own pace, preferably in his own home, preferably in the publishing business somewhere. He decided to set up as a literary agent.

In this I encouraged him a lot. The writing market was changing every day in the postwar confusion. I kept hearing about new magazines, new kinds of markets. What I really would have wished in my heart was to write for them all myself, but there was no hope. I'm not a very fast writer. It graveled me to see these opportunities going begging, and so I offered to help Dirk out as a silent partner. So Dirk printed up some letterheads and went looking for clients.

I remembered that when I had worked for Popular Publications, standing orders had been to save the outside envelopes from all slush-pile manuscripts and turn them over to somebody in the business department. They copied off the return addresses, typed up copies, and sold them to purchasers of mailorder lists. I asked a few publishers, found that such lists were still available, and we bought a few. We wrote a letter on Dirk's new stationery:

 

Dear Writer:

We have a vacancy in our lists for a few additional clients. . . .

 

And manuscripts began to flow in. Not just manuscripts but checks; we were charging a reading fee.

A lot of agents still do charge reading fees. It's not really an intrinsically evil process, just a schlocky one. Like heroin and beer, reading-fee criticism is a commodity that is wanted very much by some people, and if it were against the law to supply it, there would be bootleggers. I understand the need. If you are a writer, you understand it, too. There are times when you are putting all those words onto those sheets of white paper and you would gladly pay anything to have some competent professional tell you whether they are any good or not.

The person who writes the reading-fee letters usually does know more than the client does, but not necessarily very much more. The big agencies tend to hire anybody who can type neatly, grammatically, and fast. They would hire skilled professionals if they could, provided skilled professionals would work for the kind of money a reading-fee person can command, but that doesn't happen. At least with Dirk all the letters were written by people who had actually written and published stories of their own, mostly by Dirk himself. But still it was not exactly what Dirk wanted to do with his life, and after the first year or so, when there began to be a few commissions from actual sales, Dirk decided to drop the reading fees.

Dirk was a fine, bright man. I think he would have made quite a good agent, but what the war had done to him could not be undone. His spinal injury began to relapse. He was hospitalized and released; hospitalized again, and the stay grew longer and release began to look remote. His wife, Rosalind, carried on with the work of the agency, with help from me.

And then Dirk died.

Dirk's death was not the first that had invaded my own life. But he was still in his twenties! And he was my oldest friend. I could not accept it—because so much of my growing up had been shared with him, because it was such a shocking waste. I couldn't make myself go to his funeral.

 

When we were able to make reasonable plans, Ros and I decided to continue the agency as a partnership, retaining Dirk's name.* I was still working for PopSci, so most of my work for the agency was limited to evenings and weekends. But now and then something productive happened during the working day. My boss, George Spoerer, came back from lunching with an old friend at Doubleday to report that they were about to set up a science-fiction line. In fact, they had already begun buying, when someone in the corporate structure happened to think that they really didn't know much about science fiction. Not to worry, George told his friend; I have this kid assistant who knows something about it, and if you like we'll get you together and you can pick his brains. Did I want to do that? he asked.

 

* That lasted about three years; then we broke it up and I continued on my own.

 

I wanted little more; it was the nicest news I had heard in some time.

Science fiction had been growing slowly out of its pulp origins. Big slicks like Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post were trying their luck with the occasional Bradbury or Heinlein story. The trade book publishers had not yet perceived the existence of a market, but a few amateurs had. In Pennsylvania, Lloyd Eshbach had started Fantasy Press. In Chicago, Erie Korshak had Shasta. In Philadelphia there was Prime Press, and in New York City there was Gnome. None of these were very big or very profitable. But they demonstrated that a market was there, though they didn't have the capital or the knowledge to exploit it.

The one I followed most closely was Gnome Press, because it was closest to hand and because my old buddy Dave Kyle was one of its founders. Dave's elder brother, Arthur C. Kyle, was a newspaper publisher in upstate New York. That meant he had a printing press. It wasn't very well adapted to book work. It could print only eight-page signatures, and not very rapidly at that. But it was an asset of importance to a shoestring operation. Dave's partner was a glass blower and science-fiction fan named Marty Greenberg.* The two of them secured the rights from the author, Fletcher Pratt, and published a fantasy novel called The Cornelian Cube.

 

* Not to be confused with the anthologist and political-science professor Martin Harry Greenberg, who became active in science fiction a couple of decades later.

 

The partnership did not survive very well, and, for that matter, neither did Gnome Press. It kept going for five or six years and foundered in a mass of lawsuits and unpaid bills. But if you look at one of Gnome Press's old catalogs, you find you are staring at a million dollars. The authors they had! Isaac Asimov. Robert A. Heinlein. Arthur C. Clarke. They had them all. They had the rights to books that have collectively sold tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of copies since, and they had acquired them at prices that would make a cat weep. Jack Williamson and I wrote three original sf novels for Gnome, and the biggest advance we got was $750. Edd Cartier designed Gnome's colophon and did their covers. The finest talents that science fiction owned were lined up and knocking on Gnome's door, hungry for the book publication that all of them wanted and every one of them had been denied.

What went wrong with the semipro publishers was that they could not bridge the distribution gap. The commodity was there, the marvelous stories that had been silting up for decades in the sf magazines. The market was there, hundreds of thousands of readers thrilled by the idea of owning their favorite stories in permanent form. Or, for that matter, in any form, because for some of the newer readers novels like The Skylark of Space and Slan! were only legends. Unless they could find tattered second-hand copies of the magazines they had been published in, there was no way for them to read the books themselves.

But between publisher and reader lies a wide space, and the best way to bridge it is with salesmen, distributors, jobbers, and a whole network of promotion, billing, and service departments. The semipro publishers had none of these things. They could print the books, and they could sell them a single copy at a time, mostly direct-by-mail, to individual customers; that way they could get rid of an edition of two or three thousand copies, enough to show a theoretical profit. But there was no way for Marty Greenberg in his little office on West 10th Street to reach ten thousand bookstore proprietors and persuade them to stock his books. Worse. The profits were only theoretical. To make them real required the investment of real capital, which none of the semipros had.

Nevertheless, the big trade houses began to notice what was going on. Random House, Crown, and one or two others tested the waters with sf anthologies, and they moved nicely. Simon and Schuster began to sign up an occasional novel—I had already sold them Jack Williamson's The Humanoids, for instance.

Doubleday's act of faith went beyond that. They were not talking about an isolated title here and there, they were planning for a category—six books a year, maybe twelve, maybe more than that! It was the Promised Land.

 

So we met for lunch, George Spoerer and I trekking up to Mad Ave's restaurant of the week, a place called Cherio's. The Doubleday people we lunched with were Jerry Hardy, an advertising-promotion type, very quick to comprehend and full of ideas, and the managing editor of the corporation, Walter Bradbury. Brad was and is one of the great gentlemen of the publishing business, never forgetting a favor, never remembering a slight. He impressed me at once as a good person to work with.

Between the very, very dry martinis and the second cup of coffee I told them all I could fit in about science fiction. Brad's big immediate problem was the first book they had bought for the new series, Max Ehrlich's The Big Eye. Ehrlich was a highly competent and successful writer (and still is, as witness The Reincarnation of Peter Proud), but he had not previously written any science fiction. No one at Doubleday was sure that The Big Eye met the canons of the field. They had sent a copy of the manuscript to a Harvard astronomer who had said it was scientific poppycock. Was it? Did it matter?

I took the manuscript home and read it apprehensively. But there really seemed to be little to worry about. The Big Eye is not one of the all-time masterpieces of the field. But it kept my interest all the way through, and I was satisfied that it would do the same for most readers. There was one short passage that I thought needed a fix, so I wrote in a couple of insert pages and sent it back. Brad expressed his gratitude with a bottle of Scotch, and later on, when the book proved out even more successful than he had hoped, with a fair-sized check. (He was under no obligation to do that, but I told you he was a gentleman.) And I began to sell him books.

My client Isaac Asimov, I happened to know, had a nearly book-length manuscript lying around, gathering dust because no magazine wanted to publish it. He had written it, on request, for Thrilling Wonder Stories, who hated it and sent it back. John Campbell had politely declined interest, and none of the other magazines of that particular time had much use for long stories. Let's try it on Doubleday, I proposed. They won't buy it, Isaac remonstrated; they want book writers, like this fellow Ehrlich, whoever he is, and I'm a magazine person. Don't argue with your agent, I explained. After some arm wrestling I got the manuscript away from him and shipped it off to Doubleday.

What did Brad know? He wasn't aware he only wanted book writers, or that Grow Old with Me (as it was called at the time) wasn't exactly what the readers expected of Isaac Asimov. All he knew was that he enjoyed reading it and, after some revisions, was perfectly willing to publish it. Which he did, after giving it a new title. As Pebble in the Sky, it has sold, and keeps on selling, a lot of copies.

That was Isaac's first book—not counting a part of a biochemistry text. He caught the fever at once. We followed that one up with another original, The Stars Like Dust, and then another, and another. Doubleday was not quite ready to pick up some of his famous older stories, heaven knows why, so they declined I, Robot and the Foundation series (and I sold them elsewhere), but they were willing to publish his new work almost as rapidly as he could write it.

My other clients were also getting into the act, and some of them with even fatter rewards. John Wyndham turned up with a new novel called The Day of the Triffids. Doubleday snapped it up, but I had to ask them to hold off publication because Collier's also loved it, and Collier's love expressed itself in the biggest check I had ever seen, five figures worth of fondness. My most cherished client (by then also my wife), Judith Merril, wrote a borderline science-fiction novel about New York City under nuclear attack, Shadow on the Hearth (later it became a TV special). Cyril Kornbluth was out in Chicago, playing hardboiled-newspaperman games with Trans-Radio Press and doing little of the science-fiction writing he was so good at. I sent him a note, explaining that it was raining soup and he looked silly standing there without a spoon, so he retooled and came on line. First he did a collaboration with Judy, flimsily based on a short story I had begun and abandoned years before; it appeared variously as Marschild, Outpost Mars, and a couple of other titles, in one edition or another, under their joint pen name of "Cyril Judd." Then he struck out on his own, with three or four chapters of something called The Martians in the Attic. It had to do with the first manned trip into space, and some kind of cockamamie Martians that complicated it. They also complicated the story line more than it would stand, and he bogged down.

Cyril and I worked together pretty closely, not just on the stories that bore our joint byline. When I was having trouble making a story work, over the years, it often helped to show it to Cyril for comments and suggestions, and he did the same with me. We re-plotted the novel all one late night in my kitchen, amputating the Martians. Cyril revised a few pages to accommodate the changes, and I showed the remaining fragment to Brad. Fine, said Brad, I'd love to publish it. But there's this one technicality. For the sake of the weekly editorial conference I need an outline of the rest of the book before I can put through a contract.

When I reported this to Cyril, he pursed his lips, borrowed one of my typewriters, and holed up in the small, old, once-theatrical Hotel Latham, a block or two from my office. They had a room just right for writers, on the top floor, next to the elevator motors; it was noisy enough on its own that a little typing disturbed no one, and I used the same room myself for the same purposes now and then. He emerged forty-eight hours later with the completed manuscript. I turned it in to Brad, explaining that most writers disliked writing outlines but Cyril really hated it, and Doubleday published it as Takeoff.

Other book publishers were falling in line, and the specialist science-fiction magazine market was beginning to swell toward its biggest boom. Ellery Queen decided to diversify with a one-shot called The Magazine of Fantasy. It seemed to work out, and under a slightly expanded title it is still being published today. An Italian publishing company had done so well with soap-opera comics that they proposed to try them out in America. For makeweight they added a couple of other titles; one was Galaxy, with Horace Gold as editor, and it too survives today. The agency was prospering, and not just in science fiction.

It seemed to be decision time, get all the way in or get out.

I was under no illusions about the money. It would be a long time at best before the agency would net me as much taking-home money as Popular Science was reliably handing over to me every week. But then I didn't really need that much money. With a little luck, at least I might not starve.

Moreover, it felt like time to move on. George Spoerer remained a marvelous man to work for, but the person I really enjoy having as a boss has not yet been born. I had talked about quitting once or twice before. Each time the company had come through with more money and assorted other kindnesses. This time I was serious. In November of 1948 I resigned from Popular Science and set out as a full-time literary agent.

 

It all came to nothing in the end. But my, it was fun for a while!

I had, all worked out in my mind, a clear description of what an ideal literary agent would be. The ideal agent would not concentrate on selling books or magazine pieces. He would represent writers. The ideal agent would not make deals and then find writers to carry them out. He would learn what each writer's strengths were, and find ways to help him develop them. The way to measure the success of an agent was not to tote up the dollars in his bank account, but to see whether his writers were producing regularly and well.

You see, each literary agent is free to do business in the way that suits him best, and some of the ways that are best for him are worst for his writers.

But no, you say, that's not possible! After all, he gets nothing but a ten percent commission on whatever his writers make. Obviously, whatever is good for his writers is exactly one-tenth as good for him, right?

Wrong. Let's do a mind experiment. You be an agent. You open your mail in the morning, and here is a story from a writer. Because you are a smart agent, you know that you can sell it to X, and he will pay you a thousand dollars for it. Or, alternatively, you can try to sell it to someone who will earn, maybe, two thousand dollars for you with it—Y, or Z, or Q, or W. The trouble is, none of those are a sure sale.

You'll have to try all four of them, maybe, before one will buy it.

So which is a better return on your time, as a literary agent? The fast, sure thousand-dollar sale, or the slower, more problematical sale for twice the money? If you are running a factory, you go for the fast grand.

But now be the writer, and see how different the view is from the other side of the desk. You have spent exactly the same amount of time in writing the story, no matter how long it takes to sell it; one way will bring you exactly twice as much return as the other, so which do you-the-writer prefer? Of course you do; but your agent's cost/effectiveness studies may lead him to the other course.

Things are rarely that simple, but the choices are real. Book contracts are pretty complicated. When the complications have to do with how much money the publisher is going to pay you, then the agent's interests are pretty close to those of the writer. But there are many other clauses in a contract. For example, when you sign a publishing contract, you usually sign your name to a clause that says that if anyone brings suit for libel or plagiarism or one or two other actionable possibilities, then it will be you, not the publisher, who will take the rap. That's reasonable. But sometimes the language of the clause is not; it requires you to pay costs that you may think out of line, or to accept responsibilities that are not properly yours. That doesn't affect your agent, particularly. His neck is not on the line. But yours is. He may be willing to horse-trade a bad indemnity clause for a better share of subsidiary rights with the publisher . . . but are you?

Some agents made a specialty of making package deals—supplying the entire contents of a magazine, or a line of specialized books. I don't know of any case when these captive markets were what any writer would want to aim at, but in the aggregate they could amount to tens of thousands of dollars of sales for the agent. Of course, the agent would have to throw in something by his big-name clients now and then to sweeten the pot. It seemed to me that that was a bad deal for all the writers concerned: for the big names, obviously, but also for the trained seals who turned out the mass copy, because what they were being paid to write seldom had anything to do with what they were good at.

Now, none of this is meant to say that all agents, or even any agents, are crooked or malevolent. Most of them do a better job than their writers ever know. But they are human beings, and they have diverse styles, and after some observation of a lot of them, as editor buying stories for them, as client and as competitor, I had worked out just what I thought was right.

I didn't, for instance, want to get into supplying captive markets. I didn't want to divert writers from what they did well to what would surely sell.

But many writers actually liked writing for those markets because they meant sure sales. Writers, too, like to eat.

I invented a solution for that. One of my most promising, but least solvent, writers was a young Californian who was averaging about one sale for every ten stories, not enough to live on. He was not the only writer in the world with that problem, but he was making a serious effort to support himself and his family by writing; he had no resources, and unless he could count on scratching together at least enough to pay for groceries, he would have to give it up.

In similar circumstances, any number of writers have either turned into hacks or gone out and got a job and deferred, maybe permanently, their writing careers. But it seemed to me there was an experiment worth trying, and so I made an arrangement with him. I undertook to pay him an advance on every story he turned in, so much a word, immediately on receipt of manuscript. He could write whatever he liked. I would worry about where and how to sell it. But every time a page came out of the typewriter he could count on a few bucks—not maybe, not later, but then.

Actually, it worked pretty well. Without the constraint of desperately needing to please some editor, he was able to write what he was good at. His sales began to pick up. I mentioned this to Cyril, and he allowed as how he would like the same arrangement; I agreed, and it worked for him, too. Jim Blish and Damon Knight wanted to try the same arrangement, and it also worked for them. By and by I had twelve or fifteen writers doing their own things, liberated from the need to slant, and, by gosh, doing very well. If you look at the major sf magazines of the early 50s, you will find that around half of the stories in them came from my agency; and of those I think at least half, including many of the best ones, were written under that arrangement, and mostly would not have been written without it.

I am really rather pleased with myself about this. Most of the writers involved were producing at the top of their form. The stories themselves comprise a solid part of the literature of sf. They are still being reprinted, and even taught. While it isn't as good as having written them myself, it still isn't bad; they are my stepchildren, with whom I am well pleased. It wasn't all roses. What was most wrong with it was that it required substantial amounts of capital—which I didn't have. But what was right about it was that it made it possible for good writers to do their best work without worrying about pleasing some nut of an editor. And shielding writers against editorial insanity, it seems to me, is an agent's principal task.

I tried to do that in as many ways as I could, and sometimes it worked pretty well. For instance, Hal Clement wrote a marvelous sf novel called Mission of Gravity. He had had a temporary aberration of his own and submitted it in some kind of fruitcake "best novel" contest run by one of the semipro publishers, which I was desperately afraid the book would win; untangling it from them was my first and hardest job. But then I sent it off to John Campbell, who sent it back with the sad news that although he, of course, loved it, it would be impossible for him to run it as a serial since it did not break naturally into three installments.

Now, this was clear lunacy. I have no idea what made John say a dumb thing like that. John was about the best editor sf ever had, but even the best can go out of his mind at certain phases of the moon. I was never any good at winning arguments with John Campbell, but in this case I was certain he was wrong, and it was my clear duty, to him as well as to my client, to save him from his folly. So I took the manuscript out of its box and thumbed through it. It ran about 270 pages. I turned to page 90 and found a paragraph that could be construed as a cliffhanger, and penciled under it "End of Part One." On page 180 I wrote in "End of Part Two." I turned the manuscript over to my secretary with instructions to retype three or four pages before and after each break. I put it in the file for three weeks and then sent it back to John with a note saying that I hoped he would find that the revisions made it suitable for serialization. Of course he did, and it wound up as one of the best-loved serials Astounding ever ran.

I tell this story, not to make fun of John Campbell, but to illustrate the point that all editors, even he, sometimes say crazy things. If they are taken seriously, they can mean lost sales and wasted work for writers. One of the hardest things an agent has to do is to know when to reject a rejection. "How" is even harder.

With Horace Gold at Galaxy I was on easy terms.

Half a dozen times I refused to accept his turndown of a story and kept sending it back until he weakened and bought it. (Half a dozen other times I didn't persuade him.) With most editors I was less forthright. The simplest ploy was to hold a manuscript for a month or two and then send it back as if it had been revised. I tried not to lie outright, but I was willing to send off a letter that said:

 

"You know, Charlie, I think you've put your finger on a good point in Sam's story. I'll see what he thinks."


And then, a few weeks later:


"Here's Sam's story back, as we discussed. I really think it's a winner now."

 

What made it easy for me to play tricks was that I had a lot of leverage in science fiction, and the science-fiction field was booming. I used the muscle when I could, not just for my own writers. The reason the prevailing rate went from two cents a word to three in the early 1950s was a complicated three-way squeeze play that I planned and flawlessly executed.

When I went into the Army in 1943, I had helped Damon Knight get my old job at Popular Publications; now he was getting tired of it and looking for something with more authority to do. He stopped by my office and asked for advice. I had heard some trade gossip about Alex Hillman, then proprietor of a magazine chain, and suggested Damon hit on him for a science-fiction magazine; Damon did, and Hillman was willing to give it a try. Then Damon came to my office and asked how he could get a look at some of the stories that were going to Horace Gold and John Campbell. "Pay more than they do," I said, and Damon thought it over, and took it back to Hillman, and got a budget that allowed him to squeeze out an extra penny a word. That was step one. Step two was for me to trot down to Horace Gold and tell him that he now had powerful competition for a first look, and what was he going to do about it? "Let me talk it over with the publisher," he said, and did, and then Galaxy went to three cents a word. Whereupon I called up John Campbell and told him that the two-cent line had been broken; and a few weeks later Astounding followed suit. Well, no doubt all of that would have happened sooner or later, anyway; but it happened when it did because I squeezed.

All these things pleased me a lot; forgive me if I dwell on them, because some of the other things weren't very pleasing at all. I was having a lot of fun, but one thing I was not doing was making a profit.

Although the gross kept growing, the cost of doing business kept growing just a little faster. Advances. Rent. Salaries. Taxes. Telephone. Entertainment—I didn't do nearly as much of this as many agents, but still it was an item. Stationery! We used a lot of it, and most of it was custom-made. I designed a really handsome die-cut manuscript folder. They did exactly what they were intended to do, protected the scripts and made ours stand out from everyone else's, but they also cost the earth. Every time we ordered a new batch it blew the commissions on half a dozen sales. I designed locater cards and rights cards, ten times as good as the stock varieties, and at ten times the price.

And then there were those special and inevitable costs, like Christmas.

Christmas! It's a quarter of a century since I had my agent's office in New York City, but I can still barely force myself to send out a Christmas card. The jolly Yule spirit does not survive being an entrepreneur. Early in November the vultures start to gather. Building-service personnel you hardly see all year round make sure to wish you a happy holiday. The elevator people give you a group card, with each name carefully spelled out. The cleaning women identify themselves. The gnomes that toil in the caverns underground, fixing the pipes and feeding the boilers, every one makes himself known to you, and every one expects a little token of affection. And the Post Office! God must love mailmen, he made so many of them. The First-Class Delivery men present you with their collective card. Then the Bulk Mail deliverers give you theirs. Then the Special Delivery and Registereds come along. Then the Pickup Men, who empty out the box in your building. Then the for God's sake Sorting Clerks send a deputy out to visit your office, Christmas card in hand, cheery smile on face, and larceny in heart.

Taken all in all, a lot of money was funneling through the agency checking account, but it all seemed to belong to someone else. Somehow or other we managed to go on eating, but not out of those ten-percent commissions. Popular Science had been reluctant enough to see me go to ask me to continue with odd jobs on a free-lance basis, and so from time to time I packaged a new book for them, photography manual or fishing guide. There was not much satisfaction in them, but they were easy work for the money and kept body and soul together.

But I kept thinking I would like to do some real writing.

The thing was, there was a moral question involved. Selling my own writing meant competing with my clients. Ninety-five percent of the time, that would make no real difference to anyone, the work sold on its merits, the editors were glad to have it, there was never enough really good stuff to suit them, anyway. But now and then there would be conflicts, inevitably. A slick magazine would want to try one science-fiction story as an experiment. Whose? Bob Lowndes would have a cover and need a story written around it. Whom should the assignment go to?

For a time I compromised by editing a few anthologies. Brad had asked Bob Heinlein to do one for Doubleday, and Heinlein had objected that he didn't know enough about what had been published or how to secure permissions. Brad asked me if I were willing to ghost it, and I was, provided I could share it with Judy; and so the two of us put together Tomorrow, the Stars. It turned out very well, in fact I still get royalties on it, twenty-odd years later, and so Brad asked me to do some more in propria persona.

But it wasn't quite the same as writing.

I should say that the desire to write is really independent of the need to make a living. Not just for me. Harlan Ellison and I were talking to some fledgling writers a year or so ago, and he said, "No one should consider writing if he can possibly imagine doing anything else." I was struck by the wisdom of the remark because it defined exactly my own unexamined attitudes. Writing is the way I make my daily bread; but it is also my hobby, my vice, and my ongoing and most valued psychotherapy. Most writers would be straight up the wall if they didn't have the typewriter to fantasize through. James Branch Cabell once wrote a tenderly critical little jape about a writer: gauche, self-obsessed, petulant, he cried out, "I am pregnant with words! And I must have lexicological parturition, or I die!"

And I was beginning to bulge.

 

In the beginning of the 50s Judy and I took a summer place up on a hill overlooking the Ashokan Reservoir, a strange, comfortable old house with the upstairs where the downstairs ought to be: the ground floor was all bedrooms, while the upper part was mostly an immense open drawing room with a big fireplace. One weekend I felt the need to do some kind of writing badly enough to exhume my wartime novel, For Some We Loved. I sat in front of that fireplace all night long, reading it page by page. And as I finished each page I threw it in the fire. It was, boy, bad. Scratch For Some We Loved. I had achieved my purpose in learning enough about the advertising business to write a novel about it, no doubt. But not that novel. It was too immature and incompetent to salvage. I thought of starting over again from the beginning, same premise but better resources and maybe even better skill at writing, since I had learned something in the years between. But by then Fredric Wakeman had made an immense success with The Hucksters. The idea's virginity was gone.

A year later Judy and I were weekending at Fletcher and Inga Pratt's immense old place in Highlands, New Jersey, tenderly called The Ipsy-Wipsy Institute. It was a literary sort of place to be. Fletcher himself used to set up his typewriter in the billiard room; he would type a few lines, pause to chat, toss cards into a hat, have a drink, feed the marmosets, then go back and type a few more. I have never understood how the man could string sentences together to make sense under conditions like that, but his example was a prod. The other guests were people like Willy Ley, John Ciardi, Sprague de Camp, Bernard de Voto, all of them with writing of their own to do, and I felt left out.

So I took my lavender typewriter out on the lawn and began typing something called Fall Campaign. It seemed to be the beginning of a science-fiction novel about advertising. I didn't know where I was going with it. I especially didn't know what I would do with it after I wrote it, but it seemed like an interesting thing to do; and in any event, the problem of what to do with it would not arise until I had it written, which seemed comfortably far in the future.

As time permitted, for the next few months, I added a page now and then. Time didn't permit a lot. Putting in seventy hours a week as a literary agent did not leave many hours for writing, but, even so, by the summer of 1951 I had some twenty thousand words of very rough draft on paper, and the novel seemed to have solidified itself.

Then along came Horace Gold.

I had been selling him at least half of what he printed, as an agent, and besides, we had become good friends. I fought temptation for a while and then bashfully admitted I had a novel of my own in the works. Show me, said Horace. I did. Finish it and I'll print it, said Horace.

Fine! But how? I was still putting in seventy-hour weeks. At the current rate of progress it was two or three years in the future, at best, and here Horace was talking about having a cover painted and scheduling it as soon as Alfie Bester's The Demolished Man was through.

By then Judy and I had bought the big old New Jersey house I still live in, just across the river from Red Bank, and we had house guests. Cyril Kornbluth and his pregnant wife, Mary, had come to stay with us while they sorted things out. Cyril had quit his job as a wire-service news editor in Chicago to come east to free-lance. Naturally he was one of my clients. He was also my tried and trusted old collaborator. And he was right there in the house.

I showed him my twenty-thousand-word fragment. We chatted for a while about where I thought I was going. Phil Klass, alias William Tenn, had made a suggestion about having the hero do the Haroun al Raschid bit, wandering around the planet as a plebeian instead of an upper-crust advertising executive, and I thought that was a profitable area to explore. Cyril agreed and took the manuscript away, and when I saw him again he had rewritten the first twenty thousand words and added a whole new middle section. The last third we wrote turn and turn about, and then I put the whole thing through the typewriter one more time, and what came out Galaxy serialized as Gravy Planet.

As The Space Merchants, the book has had quite a career. I have a shelf made up of nothing but editions of it, in some twenty-five languages: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, Latvian, Japanese, Serbo-Croatian, Dutch, Swedish, Hungarian, Romanian, and a dozen others. There are seven different English-language editions, from seven different publishers. We sold the film rights for a pretty penny: * it was broadcast on CBS's Columbia Workshop, and you can still buy pirated tape cassettes of the dramatization. For that matter, you can still buy the book. I don't know how many copies of it have been printed worldwide. There's no good way to tell, since there are several pirated editions I know of only from hearsay, not to mention the Eastern European editions on which no royalty statements have ever been furnished (or, of course, royalties paid). But it may be somewhere around ten million.

 

* Actually five million pretty pennies. But they've never made the film. Movie people are crazy.

 

Not bad, right? And obviously, any book with that kind of potential had to be snapped up by the first book publisher to see it, right?

Well, it didn't happen that way. The book market for science fiction was booming when Gravy Planet came out, and I had little doubt that we would find a home for it. Unfortunately, the book editors didn't see it that way. I submitted it to every trade publisher, one by one, in the United States with a science-fiction line—toward the end, with even a hope that they might consider having a science-fiction line. And, one by one, they turned it down.

You must remember that I was not some rank outsider trying to get my first lucky break. As an agent, I was selling big chunks of material to all of them. Most of the editors were personal friends. But they didn't allow that to influence them, and in fact one or two were not even very kind about it. One very good friend handed the manuscript back to me and said, in tones of great sorrow, "Fred, look. I don't know how to tell you this, but it's no good. There are a couple of good ideas, sure. But you don't know how to handle them. What you need is some good professional writer to pull the whole thing together."

I never did find that good professional writer. What I found was an unprofessional publisher. His name was Ian Ballantine.

 

Judy had worked for him for a year or two, when he was president of Bantam Books and she was their science-fiction and mystery editor. Bantam mostly limited itself to reprinting hard-cover books, and so I had little to do with them as an agent. But I came to know some of the Bantam people pretty well—Arnold Hano, the managing editor (who greeted me with the tepid enthusiasm reserved for the husbands of colleagues until he found out I had written the copy for the "huge white bride's bed" ad he had tacked over his desk), and Ian Ballantine himself.

Ian had started Bantam and made it thrive. But in 1951 he and they had come to a tight place. He wanted to try some new ideas; Bantam's owners were happy with the good old procedures that were working very well, thank you. And so Ian took his courage in his hands and set up his own publishing house of Ballantine Books.

Ian Ballantine is not a physically dominating figure. He is short, and shaped mostly like a penguin. He has flaring John L. Lewis eyebrows and a habit of replying at right angles to any question. His wife, partner, and chief executive officer, Betty, makes up the difference. She is not only beautiful and sexy but a good fifty percent smarter than most publishing people; but I don't believe even Betty always follows Ian's logic.

No matter. A genius doesn't need logic. Ian Ballantine is a publishing genius. Half the major categories of paperback books on the stands today are there because Ian Ballantine had the wit and courage to try them out when no one else dared. He was the first paperback publisher to do serious amounts of science fiction, the first with books on the ecology, with mass-market art books, with war books; with books in unusual formats, sold through unusual channels. Without Ian Ballantine the paperback book business would be far tinier and more dull than it is.

All of this is true, and is one of the reasons why Ian Ballantine was my favorite publisher for a quarter of a century, but not all of it was evident in 1951 and 1952. The firm of Ballantine Books, Inc., was operating out of Ian and Betty's Chelsea penthouse. It was a big, handsome apartment. It probably would have been gracious and luxurious if it had not been crammed full of card-table desks and cardboard-carton filing cabinets. Their editorial staff was there, notably Bernard W. Shir-Cliff and Stanley Kauffmann.* So were most of the business department, and the art department, and the publicity department, and Ian and Betty's ten-year-old son, Richard, whose bedroom was the only corner of the house not ceiling-high with manuscripts and galley proofs. Fortunately for the sanity of all of us, after a couple of months Ballantine Books found office space on Fifth Avenue. From then on, having dinner with Ian and Betty was just as stimulating, but a lot less athletic.

 

* Bernie Shir-Cliff has stayed in the paperback business and is now boss editor for Warner Paperback Library. Stanley Kauffmann had a marvelously interesting career after deciding against continuing as a book editor. For a while he was the first-string drama critic for The New York Times. That lasted, if I remember correctly, about three weeks; almost the first thing he published was a reasoned analysis of the influence of homosexual playwrights on the New York theater scene, and they had his heart for breakfast. He is now a specialist in the art and history of film.

 

Ian's principal innovation was a decision to publish both hard- and soft-cover editions of all of his books simultaneously. The skeptics said it would never work. Who would pay hard-cover prices when they could pick up a paperback of the same book for a tenth of the money?

In the long run, it turned out that the skeptics were right, or almost so. But they were right for the wrong reasons. The customers seemed perfectly happy to accept both editions; I saw with my own eyes a good many people carrying around three-dollar hard-cover editions of Ian's first big bestseller, Cameron Hawley's Executive Suite, right past newsstands where the paperback was on sale for thirty-five cents. But the wise old hands of the publishing business knew it wouldn't work. The terrible thing about these wise old hands is that even when they are wrong, their convictions make them right. When dealers, jobbers, wholesalers, and salesmen think something won't work, they pull back, and the prophecy becomes self-fulfilling.

Simultaneous hard- and soft-cover sounded pretty jazzy to me, so I showed the tear sheets of Gravy Planet to Ian. Poor fellow, he was just too inexperienced a publisher to know it was no good. So he published it. And kept on publishing it, for twenty-some years.

Not only that, now that he had caught the sf fever he wanted more. I trotted out half a dozen candidates from the limitless resources of my agency, and he bought them all. We will do one science-fiction title a month, Ian decided, but in order to assure a supply, we will have to figure out some way of keeping our image bright in the memories of all science-fiction writers. How do we go about that?

Well, I said, you could publish an anthology. There is nothing like getting checks, even smallish anthology-sized checks, to make a writer aware of your existence. Come to that, I'd be glad to edit one for you.

Ian pondered that for a moment, and then his face lit up. No, he said, I don't want to do what all the other publishers have done. I want to do something original—in fact, what I want to do is an anthology of all original stories. You edit it. We'll outpay the magazines, to get the very best. We'll call it—we'll call it—well, never mind, we'll think of something to call it. You get the stories.

That's how Star Science Fiction was born. There have been a good many imitations of it since, but Star was the first regular series of anthologies of originals.

And, you know, not bad, either. It should have been pretty good; I had everything going for me. So many of the best writers in the field were my clients that I could easily get first look at the cream of the crop. I couldn't shortstop it all. I had, after all, some obligations to the editors I had been dealing with. But I also had some obligations to my writers, and Ian had opened the treasure chest wide enough so that we were paying twice as much as the magazines.

So I began assembling stories, first by checking out what my own clients had to offer. About that time I realized that it wasn't entirely fair for me to take a commission on sales I made to myself, so I waived the ten percent (which meant that a sizable fraction of my earnings as editor was lost back in forgiven commissions ). Even so, I was pleased to be able to print Cliff Simak's "Contraption," John Wyndham's "The Chronoclasm," Isaac Asimov's "Nobody Here But—," Judy Merril's "So Proudly We Hail," H. L. Gold's "The Man with English"; Fritz Leiber did a wildly funny burlesque of Mickey Spillane, "The Night He Cried"; William Tenn and Robert Sheckley had bright, satirical stories called "The Deserter" and "The Last Weapon" . . . and then there was the case of Joe Samachson. Under his pen name, William Morrison, Joe was one of the great unrecognized all-time pros of science fiction. He was always competent, and once in a while great—as in "The Sack." This time he had a peak again, with my favorite story in the whole book, "Country Doctor."

That was more than half the lineup. I didn't want to publish only the work of my clients, and fortunately by then the word had got around that this new volume would be worth appearing in. I was able to get first-rate stories from Lester del Key, Ray Bradbury, Murray Leinster, Arthur C. Clarke and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. It all worked well, and over the years we did half a dozen more just like it.

It also gave me perhaps the sweetest moment of revenge I have ever tasted, on the hapless body of Horace Gold.

The thing about Horace was that he was a dynamite editor, energetic, talented, skilled, but he had this one little fault. He could not keep his fingers off his writers' prose. He got his training under Leo Margulies, in the old pulp-chain days when an editor's productivity was measured by the proportion of pencil markings on the pages he sent to the printer. Horace never forgot the lessons learned at Leo's knee.

He drove some writers wild. Even Cyril Kornbluth, compleat pro, casehardened against all editorial madness. Even me. We all muttered in our beer about the way Horace tinkered with our words. Most of us tried to tolerate it—he was, after all, putting out just about the best magazine in science fiction. But we hated it. It was the kind of curse that seems put upon the world to strengthen our spirit, like hemorrhoids or the torment of psoriasis.

And then Ian gave me Star to edit, and Horace gave me the manuscript of his story, "The Man with English."

Cyril dropped into the office just as I was finishing reading it, and I told him what it was. Are you going to buy it? he asked. I told him I was, and he looked pensive. You know, he said, I'd like to buy a story from Horace. I'd like to buy it, and then edit it. I'd like to go over it from beginning to end, with twelve sharp pencils, and then—

He stopped, and we looked at each other. Inspiration was born.

So I sent Cyril out for a bottle while I had my secretary type up another copy of the script. (There were not yet Xeroxes in every office!) I prepared the new copy for the printer and sent it off, and then Cyril and I settled down to enjoy ourselves.

Ah, the creativity of that evening! No manuscript has ever been as edited as that one. We changed the names of the characters. We changed their descriptions. If they were tall, we made them short. We gave them Irish brogues and made them stutter. We switched all the punctuation at random and killed the point of all the jokes. We mangled his sentence structure and despoiled the rolling cadence of his prose, and then we came to the point of the story. The hero of "The Man with English" has somehow had his senses switched around, so that he hears light and sees sound. At the end of the story he thinks he has had them straightened out, but then he wrinkles his nose and asks, "What smells purple?" We argued over that for half an hour, and then crossed it out and wrote in, "He said, 'Gee, there's a kind of a funny, you know sort of smell around here, don't you think?'"

And then, with great cunning, I let the manuscript be mixed in with some others intended for Horace, as if by accident, and dropped them all off at his apartment on my way home from work. And by the time I walked into my house the phone was ringing.

If you ask Horace about it now, he will tell you, sure, he knew it was a gag all the time. Don't you believe him. "Fred," he said, "uh, listen. I mean—well, look, Fred. You know I'm a pro. I don't object to editing. But . . ." Long pause. Then, "Jesus, Fred!" he finished.

Well, in the long run it made no difference; Horace kept on doing what he always did, making authors weep and putting out a fine magazine. But one thing it did do. For a while one evening it made Cyril and me feel a lot better.

First to last, I was an agent for seven years.

Being an agent is almost like being an editor. It satisfies the god complex. John Campbell once told me that if he hadn't been an editor he would have been either teacher or preacher, and I guess so would I. Problem-solving is always a great high. Other people's problems are always the easiest to solve, and I enjoyed doing it. I liked taking brand-new writers like Robert Sheckley and A. J. Budrys and breaking them into top markets. I liked opening new areas for established writers—a nonfiction book condensation and then a movie sale for H. Beam Piper, their first TV assignments for James Blish and Joe Samachson. Because I got him into book writing in the first place, I am almost as pleased about Isaac Asimov's scores of books as he is,* and all that was fun.

But among the great pluses I could count from my career as a literary agent, making myself rich was not one. In fact, I was running out of money. I was certain that I was on the right track. In the long run it would all pay off. But the trouble with the long run, as John Maynard Keynes is supposed to have said to Franklin D. Roosevelt, is that in the long run we are all dead. Even after I had managed to get the enterprise feebly into the black, even when I had begun doing outside editorial work and even some writing, I still was netting a lot less than I had taken home every week, headache-free, from Popular Science, and the strain was beginning to be hard to take. Among other things, it was messing up my personal life.

 

* Well, no, not that pleased.

 

After Judy and I married, we had a couple of pretty interesting years. It probably was not highly intelligent of us both to quit our well-paid jobs at the same time, but I wanted to spend more time at agenting and Judy wanted to write Shadow on the Hearth, and we took the plunge. We didn't have much money. On the other hand, we didn't need a lot. Our first apartment (which had been Judy's apartment, until I moved self and typewriter in) was a basement in the East Village, about as cheap as an apartment got. It was large and rather nice—assuming you didn't mind squeezing past the steam pipes and the laundry room to get to the door—and we had a lot of good parties there. It didn't matter much if we were noisy, and that was good. Sometimes Jay Stanton would bring his guitar, or Ted Sturgeon would bring his. There was a piano, and usually someone to play it. Most often it was a young girl named Gerry Schuster, who was rehearsal pianist for the Ballet Theatre and once or twice brought actual dancers and choreographers around.*

 

* Once she borrowed the apartment to give a party for the whole troupe—Nora Kaye, Danilova, everybody! In my own home! But I was out of town and missed it. I could have killed her.

 

Considering how little money we had, Judy and I got around quite a lot. We made it to Toronto for the 1948 World Science Fiction Convention (the first one to take the word "world" seriously, or a little bit seriously, by having the site actually outside the United States). George O. Smith and Chan Davis drove up to Toronto and back with us. That's where I first met people like Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson, young fans just beginning to break into print, and on the way back George O. achieved his life's ambition by bellying up to the rail at Niagara and urinating into the Falls. We had a summer place at Ashokan one year. We were on Cape Cod, visiting Chan Davis's family, when the Korean War broke out. We got to the Cincinnati convention in 1949, sharing our twin beds with Chan and his new bride when they arrived too late to get a room. The 1950 convention was off in some unexplored area like California, and we didn't see how we could make that, but we beat the system by holding our own convention in New York City.

 

One couple to each bed, of course, what did you think?

 

New York-1950 was the first convention I had actually participated in organizing, and if God spares my reasoning powers, it will be the last. It was a harrowing experience.

By now there have been hundreds of conventions. There is a great body of accumulated wisdom, passed on from committee to committee. Hotels have become aware of sf conventions and usually welcome them, sometimes compete furiously to attract them. But in 1950 there was much ground still unbroken. Hotel managers were not at all sure of what they were getting into; they wanted guarantees. Registration fees were modest. No one had yet thought of converting sf conventions into Farmer's Markets for hucksters of books, magazines, and trinkets, so there was no income from renting out sales space. There wasn't very much money at all to work with, and certainly none to pay speakers. Nevertheless, we got several hundred people out, and all in all, it was one of the best conventions of the decade.

It even attracted media coverage. Life sent a crew around, and published a group photograph of the banquet. The saddening thing about the photo, looking at it now, is that so many of the people are dead: Willy Ley, Will Jenkins (a.k.a. Murray Leinster), my old boss George Spoerer, Rita Pringle (Dirk Wylie's sister-in-law; Dirk himself had died a year or two earlier), Jim Williams of Prime Press. The other saddening thing, or at least the sort of rueful thing, is to observe how many of the couples there are couples no longer, or are coupled with different partners. My wife, Carol, is in the picture, but not only were we not yet married, we had barely met.

The convention committee, besides Judy and myself, were Jay Stanton, Lester del Rey, and Harry and Evelyn Harrison, a small and incestuous world. A few months later Jay married Carol; that lasted not quite a year. Harry and Evelyn Harrison split up, and Evelyn marred Lester del Rey. A sociology student named Jean Haynes came into the Hydra Club around that time and decided to do her master's thesis on kinship ties in our social microcosm. She spent three months trying to sort out who was married to whom and which had been married to what, not to mention less formal alliances, and gave up in despair. The game was Musical Beds. At its peak it was hard to get a quorum of the Hydra Club to transact business, since so many of its officers were divorcing and remarrying so many others.

At the time of the New York convention, however Judy and I were pretty solidly married. We had even decided to risk parenthood, and two or three months later, on the twenty-fifth of September, 1950, our daughter Ann was born.

Judy already had a daughter from a previous marriage, Merril Zissman, so I was not unused to being in loco parentis. What I was not used to was newborns. She was so tiny. On one side of her face she was one of the prettiest babies ever seen, but the other side was somewhat squeezed from the business of being born, and so I worried intensely (and privately) that she would grow up hideously deformed in the right profile. No matter! I would protect her! If the other kids tried to make fun of her, well, I would know how to deal with those lousy other kids. . . . As a matter of fact, within a week or two the right side of her face filled out to match the left, and she turned into a beautiful child.* And that winter, with Annie beginning to crawl and Merril well into her school career, Judy and I began to discuss where we wanted to make a permanent home for the kids.

 

* She is now a beautiful adult, with two spectacular tiny children of her own, in Canada.

 

C. Northcote Parkinson says that when institutions finally get themselves into permanent headquarters, that is the sign that the peak has passed and they are on their way to oblivion. So it was with us. In the spring of 1951 Judy and I bought the house in Red Bank, and three months later we had decided to get a divorce.

To my surprise, shock, and anger, the divorce was not in the least amicable. I wasn't ready for that. After all, it was my third. I was beginning to think of myself as an acknowledged expert in the field. The procedure was all pretty routine: one party decides to call it off, the other party agrees, you sign some papers, and pretty soon both of you are married to somebody else and no harm done.

But it wasn't that way at all.

What made this divorce unlike any other was Annie. We both loved her. We both felt we could do more for her than that rotten other person. The first steps toward divorce were painless enough, but when we got to the question of custody, we wrangled bitterly and interminably, through the courts and outside them, for years. I wish we could have avoided all that.

But I am not sure it could have happened in any other way. I think I can explain it all in terms of nuclear physics. It is a question of pair formation, and the conservation of net charge. When a positively charged + male and a negatively charged – female annihilate each other in divorce, they instantly become free-flying photons with a 0 neutral charge, and the law of conservation is maintained. Time passes. Each photon ultimately interacts with another, and so another electron-positron pair is formed. But. When the pair has formed some smaller particle, they no longer have the capacity to act as leptons. They cannot separate to lead the carefree lives of photons. There is a piece left over. Charge-conservation is violated, and the result is acrimony and pain. So Doë and I, and Tina and I, could end our marriages and still be friends. Judy and I could not, for years.

Of course, that was years ago, and I think we have now settled into a position as old and good friends. Which leads me to something I want to say. I don't quite know how to say it. I am hesitant to speak of "my ex-wives" as if the term defined them as a class. The principal thing that the ladies I have been married to (and some ladies I have not been married to) have in common is that each is very much an individual, with talents and graces far beyond the usual allotment. I keep running into people who speak of lives damaged by mates so malevolent and self-centered that the marriage is a constant pain. It has never happened to me. It is hard for me to believe that these closet beasts and termagants exist. Barring the odd dissonance in the relationship—well, maybe barring a lot of dissonances—the women who have shared any part of my life have each been a treasure, and a joy.

 

But the dissonances with Judy were immediate and painful in 1951 and after, and they were made a lot worse by the dissonances in my work. I ran out of money.

Part of the reason was my wonderful invention of advancing money to my clients so that they could write what they chose. It mostly all did pay off in time,* but I was undercapitalized. I began operating on float, drawing against funds between the time I wrote the checks and the time they would be presented for collection. Now and then, and then more and more often, my checks began to bounce.

 

* Ultimately all the advances were repaid except for one or two writers amounting to a few thousand dollars, but I have spent more for things I valued less.

 

I decided to trim expenses to the bone, got out of the Fifth Avenue offices, and moved to a tiny single room on West 10th Street, in the same building as Marty Greenberg's Gnome Press. Marty was also suffering undercapitalization woes, and when things got too grim in my office I would wander down the hall to his to compare notes on disaster. I cut down to one secretary, no messenger, no assistant. It turned out that the extra people were not necessary to the work of the agency. The monthly sales figures continued the trend upward. But their absence was very expensive in terms of my own time. I was working eighty hours a week and more, and it was beginning to be more pain than it was worth. My writers were generally sympathetic, but they were also getting worried.

Gossip carried the word around the publishing business that I was having money troubles, and other agents began to send out feelers. Would I care to sell my contracts for a capital-gains payment? Sell the agency entire to another agent? A new agent, Rogers Terrill, once my boss at Popular Publications, urged me to come into partnership with him, and that was tempting; Rog was a prince of good fellows, as well as a capable and industrious person.

But the Fool-Killer was loud behind me, and it no longer seemed worth struggling to survive as an agent.

In 1953 the agency at last threw off enough net profit to equal the salary I had had from Popular Publications. That in some way satisfied a need, and so I packed it in. I made cash settlements where I could, turned the authors loose, and toted up my losses.

Counting everything, I was in hock for around thirty thousand dollars.

Years later, my lawyer asked me why I hadn't considered bankruptcy. I didn't know what to tell him. I don't know now; I just never gave it a thought. I intended to pay off the whole thirty thousand, and I did; but it took me nearly ten years.

 

 

 

 

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