5
The Futurians
By 1937 there were half a dozen science-fiction clubs in New York City, but none was quite satisfactory. Either we weren't particularly welcome in them, or we didn't like them to begin with. So we decided to start our own. We were getting pretty bored with Robert's Rules of Order, and so we limited the number of formal meetings, and even more bored with BSFLs and NYB-ICSCs, so we chose a name that did not lend itself to compression to initials. We called it The Futurians.
The Futurians was not exactly a club, it was a description: The Futurians were us. The Futurians was the air we breathed and the world we moved around in. It was home base. We were all growing and adventuring into new areas of experience. The Futurians was what we came back to.
The Futurians wasn't political, though some of its members surely were: Johnny Michel was, and so was I, and so over the next couple of years were six or eight others. Most of the Futurians were simply not interested. What held us together was science fiction, and a common desire to write it. As near as I can remember, the original Futurians were:
Isaac Asimov
Daniel Burford
Chester Cohen
Jack Gillespie
Cyril Kornbluth
Walter Kubilius
David A. Kyle
Herman Leventman
Robert W. Lowndes
John B. Michel
Frederik Pohl
Jack Rubinson
Richard Wilson
Donald A. Wollheim
Dirk Wylie
Later additions included Hannes Bok, Damon Knight, and Judith Merril, and, as you can see, a fair proportion of Futurians achieved their desire. There are three or four names on that list who, as far as I know, never succeeded in publishing a science-fiction story and getting paid for it, but there are also three or four who are collectively responsible for several hundred books and a number of short stories beyond my counting. To some extent, the winners owe a little of their success to the Futurians, if only for the reciprocal goading-on that we all supplied each other. We were almost all, from time to time, each other's crutch. The only way to learn to write is to write; but there are ways of making the process easier, and one is collaboration, and we collaborated madly: Johnny with Donald, Dick Wilson with Dirk Wylie, Cyril with me, and as time went by, in other permutations and combinations that defy recollection. (I know there was one story on which seven of us collaborated. What I can't remember is the story, probably because whatever memorability it had hoped to possess had been beaten flat by the hooves of the herd of collaborators.)
I doubt that we Futurians, taken collectively, were a very likable group. We were too brash for that. More than brash; we were egregious, egotistic, adolescent, highly competitive, and a touch insecure. We were given to put-down jokes, and the one among us who showed a human weakness was savaged about it endlessly. We were pretty damn smart—I'd guess the average IQ somewhere over 125, with peaks past 160—and we knew it. We made sure everyone around us knew it, too.
A little bit, there was justification for our arrogance. Collectively talented we were. Collectively lazy we were not. Nearly all the Futurians supported themselves from late teens on—not so much out of preference as that the Depression was not yet over and there wasn't much choice. Dirk pumped gas at a filling station in Jamaica; Dick Wilson clerked at a bank until he moved on to a genuine publishing job with Women's Wear Daily. Johnny Michel worked for his father, silk-screening "Special Today Only" signs for the Woolworth five-and-tens. Danny Burford delivered telegrams for Western Union. (Remember Western Union? Remember telegrams?)
Evenings and weekends were for hobbies and talents. Cyril and Bob Lowndes wrote poetry—I still remember some of it, and still like it. When Isaac Asimov wasn't tending counter at his parents' candy store, he was reading the Encyclopedia Britannica through, volume by volume. Jack Gillespie and Jack Rubinson wrote plays—none ever produced, most long lost. Johnny painted funny little proto-PopArt scenes—one was a magenta sperm approaching a lavender ovum on a background of cobalt blue; it was called "Love." Curiously, none of us did much about music except to sing. Probably the voice was the only instrument any of us could afford.
As time passed and we grew a little older, we began experimenting with the standard adolescent vices. There was no such thing as a drug scene, but there was liquor. Isaac, Donald, and one or two other oddballs were next door to teetotal, but the rest of us experimented in varying degrees. Some of us experimented a lot. I think I was more often taken drunk with Dirk Wylie, and later with Cyril, than with all the rest of humanity combined. As far as I know, only one Futurian turned out to be anything you could call an alcoholic (he died of it, decades later), and he was one of the sparser drinkers of Futurian times. Most of us gave it a conscientiously thorough try and tapered off. Since our young male glands were boisterously flowing, there was a lot of interest in sex. But not much action. In the beginning the Futurians were one hundred percent male, and although one or two made regular trips to 125th Street to get their ashes hauled, and a couple of others had outside female interests, most, no doubt, relieved their stresses in the time-honored adolescent way. There was certainly no detectable homosexuality. On the one occasion when a Futurian made some sort of ambiguous approach to another, he was greeted with such revulsion and horror that he cravenly crept back into line; I am not even sure how serious the approach was—I was not present. In the breeze from the opened closets of the 70s that seems odd, if only on statistical grounds. But the climate of the 30s was something else. We were tolerant of diversity, but not that much diversity.
Most of our pleasures were innocent. We made up our own games, word games like Djugashvili and La Spectre, variations of the old spelling-out Ghosts; trickster sports like The Piece of String. (Two Futurians stationed themselves at a dimly lit park path. As a stroller approached, they pretended to be unreeling a piece of string across the way at tripping-up level. The fun lay in the reactions of the strollers.) There was a vogue for the hotfoots, and most of our shoes were scorched for a year or so, and a brief fad of dialing strange numbers on the telephone to strike up conversations.
Although we began to be published for pay more and more frequently, we were still fans, and addicted to fan feuds. Will Sykora, our former ally of the NYB-ISA, had declined to disappear once we walked away. With Sam Moskowitz of Newark and Jimmy Taurasi of the Queens Science Fiction League, he had flanged together another national organization they called New Fandom. No CIA nor KGB ever wrestled so valiantly for the soul of an emerging nation as New Fandom and the Futurians did for science fiction. Pronunciamentos were hurled back and forth. Alliances were formed with empires as far off as Philadelphia and Los Angeles. At a time of uneasy truce, all of us in the New York area had conceived the notion of a World Science Fiction Convention to take place at the time of the New York World's Fair in 1939. Now we were enemies, and the prize we fought for was sponsorship of the convention.
Heavy drinking, foolish games, blood feuds, and escapades—were we all really as bad as that? The head says yes, this is the record of the facts. But the heart says it was not that way at all.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan says that all established societies are destroyed, fertilized, and reborn through the invasions of the barbarians. Sometimes the barbarians come from outside. More often, in fact always, says Moynihan, they are born out of the society itself: the young men from fourteen to twenty-four, who look at the Establishment from outside, and resolve to take Rome or burn it.
So it was with us. We saw Imperial Earth from outside and we wanted in. Because we were nicely brought up we zapped the enemy with words instead of with bicycle chains, but we were out to draw blood. When I first took Cyril Kornbluth up to meet John Campbell—feisty, fresh Cyril and staid, almighty John—Cyril behaved like a boor. Outside I asked him what the hell had been going on, and he said simply, "I wanted him to notice me." We all wanted to be noticed. We would have enjoyed being loved, but next best was to be resented.
With all this activity, fandom, writing, YCL, and general exploration, there were not enough hours in the day. What I gave up was school. I had been getting spotty marks at Brooklyn Tech. Then they all turned bad. After some unhappy hours with my faculty advisor I transferred from Tech to a less demanding, and even less interesting, school called Thomas Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson was a bad school, the building crumbling, the students unruly. The teachers were an oddly assorted lot, a few saints who were there because their conscience drove them, a larger number of incompetents who simply did not deserve a better job. It didn't matter much to me, because I didn't spend much time there. I played hooky most of the time for three or four months, and as soon as I had reached the legal dropout age of seventeen I was gone. I didn't graduate, and I never attended any college, though I've taught in a few; as John Brunner says, I had to quit school because it was interfering with my education. Still, I did learn one thing from Thomas Jefferson High. One of my courses was in touch-typing. I didn't learn it there, because I didn't show up that often for classes, but I took the textbook home, spread the keyboard chart out before me, and plugged away on my lavender portable. It took about ten days to master. It is probably the most valuable single skill I have ever acquired.
Do you hear me, would-be writers?
There are some questions that I get a hundred times each a year. They come by mail, in rap sessions after college lecture dates, in chance encounters of all sorts with people who would like to be writers but don't know quite how to go about it. The third most frequent question is: What courses should I take to become a writer? *
* You may want to know what the first and second most frequent questions are. The first is, "How do I become a writer?" The answer is, you write. There is no other way. Intending to write, talking about writing, studying how to write, do not do the job; you actually have to keep on putting words down on paper. The second is, "How do I get published?" The answer is, you take what you have written and you send it to someone who might conceivably publish it—the editor of a magazine, a book publisher, whatever. There are other ways, but that's the best one. |
Most questions imply some sort of expectation about the answer, and usually what is implied in that one is whether to choose courses in journalism, short-story writing, English lit. But none of those are particularly important. They may not do any active harm—I know a few good writers who have exposed themselves to them. But they surely are not necessary, because most writers have never gone near them.
A few years ago I was allowed to sit in on a meeting of the faculty of a Western university, rethinking its mission in life, and one of the deans said, "We have to get away from the concept of the university as a place where you learn to make a living, and approach the task of making it a place where you learn to live." That makes sense to me, for anyone. For a writer, the two objectives come out in the same place. A writer is in the business of interpreting life to an audience, and the more he knows about living the better he will write. In my own brief school career I am grateful for early music-appreciation classes, for the exposure to physical science and technology in Brooklyn Tech, for a reasonable competence in mathematics, and for very little else. What I regret is that I did not learn foreign languages in school, when I was young enough to assimilate them fairly easily, but had to pick up smatterings out of books, tape cassettes, and travels. (I also regret that I didn't learn to play an instrument or dance, but not too many schools offered those courses then.)
But if you confine yourself to the view of education as a kind of vocational training, then the courses you want are in spelling, punctuation, grammar, and touch-typing. They are fundamental.
They are not quite indispensable. There are a number of fine writers who can't spell K-A-T cat, or punctuate the sentence, "Help!" But their lives are harder for that reason. A lot of writing is in bold strokes, and you can dictate that sort of thing into a machine if you like. But a lot is in nuance, too, and if you don't know what is conventional, you are clumsy and less effective at doing what is unconventional.
Sure, when you are rich and famous you can hire little people to correct your mistakes and type your scripts. You can go further than that. You can buy plot ideas out of the ads in The Writer's Digest. You can hire a ghostwriter to finish them off. You can send the scripts off to a reading-fee critic for evaluation and revision, and then if you want to, and you probably won't have much choice, you can pay a vanity press to print them for you. But, my God, why bother?
A year or two ago I met a lovely young Italian countess, or something of the sort, beautiful, sweet, smart, well brought up, loaded. Her sister was a science-fiction fan. The contesa invited me and a couple of Italian science-fiction writers up to her hotel room for a drink. The "room" turned out to be an immense suite in a Milan hotel so posh and exclusive that I had never heard its name. Servants brought hors d'oeuvres and cocktails—not those yard-tall fruit-punch things that the Milanese call "coctel," but authentic Beefeater martinis, double dry. A few jet-set friends had dropped in, and the conversation was polylingual, like in a Maugham or early Huxley drawing room. The contesa invited my advice. Her sister wanted to become a science-fiction writer. Who, Mr. Pohl, should she hire to do the actual writing for her? I said, well, I personally would not be in a position to do that. She nodded, gracefully respecting my wishes, and asked if I had any other recommendations: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, who?
She was too nice a person to play jokes on. So I didn't suggest she make her offer to one of them. But it would have been interesting to see the reaction, from a safe distance.
Out of school, into fandom, writing, and the YCL, the next step in my growing-up was to get myself a girl. On May 11, 1937, an ex-classmate with whom I had kept in touch, Teddy Hill, invited me to meet the girl he had eyes for. Her name was Doris Marie Claire Baumgardt, and I approved highly of Teddy's good taste. Doë was strikingly beautiful, and strikingly intelligent, too, in a sulky, humorous, deprecatory way that matched well with most of the other people I admired. She could paint some, and write some, and she liked me. Having found my way to the girl-fields of the YCL only a few months earlier, I now decided to settle down. Doë and I dated steadily for three years, and then we got married. The marriage didn't last quite as long as the courtship, and that was a great pity, because she was a nice person. Doë tolerated my YCL activities without showing much desire to share them. My science-fiction life seemed a little more promising to her. She had never read the stuff, but as time went on she began writing and drawing it and wound up with a catalog of published works of her own. And she liked my friends. More important, her friends, all girls, liked my friends in the Futurians, one hundred percent boys. It was marrying time, I suppose. Over the next few years her friend Rosalind married my friend Dirk, her friend Jessica married my friend Dick Wilson, her friend Elsie married my friend Don Wollheim, not to mention any number of less formal involvements. We did everything collectively, as you see.
The Depression was lightening a little, though a long way from over. Money was a little more plentiful than it had been. Even in our house. I had pretended to a job that did not exist in order to get permission to leave school, but after a while of that my mother made it clear that it was time I brought in a little money, and I went to work for a firm of insurance underwriters called W. L. Perrin and Son, on Maiden Lane in downtown New York.
Apart from requiring me to get up early in the morning, which I have never liked, the job was not without charm. Without dignity, yes. It was totally without dignity. What Perrin hired me to do was to deliver letters for them. I was competing with the Post Office. It was cheaper for Perrin to pay me ten dollars a week to schlep the letters around than to put two-cent stamps on them and leave it to the mailman. The best part of it was the chance to explore the old New Amsterdam part of the city—my route stopped north of City Hall. I learned what an intricate marvel New York City is, from the old Customs House and Bowling Green to Brooklyn Bridge and the Woolworth Building. In nice weather it was a pleasant ramble. In bad I learned to dodge through buildings and secret underground warrens, avoiding the inclement open air. I made friends with other insurance runners—we debated dividing our routes, but never dared risk the anger of our bosses—and with elevator girls, starters, receptionists, even policemen. The central five-and-ten where Johnny Michel worked was only a few blocks from the Perrin office. Two or three times a week we would have a quick lunch together and then prowl the immense Goldsmith stationery store on Nassau Street, coveting the typewriters and the automatic mimeograph machines. A block in the other direction was the Federal Reserve Building, and every once in a while you could see an army of guards sweating pallets of genuine gold bricks across the sidewalk.
For a writer, there is a lot to be said for a job that makes no demands on the intellect and does not carry over past quitting time. Washau the chimp could have been trained to do what Perrin paid me for. The forebrain was not involved. I carried a notebook and a pencil with me, and while I was waiting for an elevator, or sneaking a cup of coffee in some underground cafeteria where no one from Perrin was likely to come, I scribbled story ideas or wrote poetry.*
* I wrote a lot of poetry in those years. Cyril had a book on the various forms of poetry, and between us we tried most of the formal varieties: haiku, villanelle, chant royal, and all. I found out that a sonnet had some interior laws of its own, and after experimenting with the forms of Shakespeare and Petrarch, I tried evolving my own. Here is a sample. SHAFT Through a die one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter drawn, Cold when drawn, emerging smoke-hot, a metal strand. This and a thousand others, woven tight together, Attached to an electric winch and to a car. A hole is bored through sheets of blueprint cap. Created then, a steel and stonework frame to fit. Straight up and down three hundred feet, the pit, The womb of emptiness, becomes a fact. Then blindly humans enter, wary men, yet blind. Ascending viciously, they viciously go down, To rise, to fall, on vicious errands. Iron cord in iron-bound vacuum. Iron consciousness, inflexible and dull, Iron all (vicious), iron (vicious) all. |
Perrin's wasn't the first job I had ever held. I had been a busboy in a restaurant on Times Square one summer, twelve hours a day, six days a week, for twelve dollars a week. I had worked part-time after school now and then—mostly running errands for Mrs. Bradley's boarding house on Dean Street. (Strange old anachronism! The cooking was on a coal stove and the illumination from gas, Welsbach mantles and all, this in 1931! The best part of that job was a buying trip down the street to the Bond's Bakery day-old shop, where you could get nickel package cakes to feed the boarders for two cents each. True, they were a little stale, but that did not much impair their quality. That would not have been easy to do.) But Perrin's was full-time, and I held it nearly a year. I was almost sorry when it came to an end. I told my boss, in a rare conversational exchange, that sooner or later I was planning to leave, and he took umbrage. If I was that disloyal to the firm, I should be fired right then, he said, and so I was.
By that time I was beginning to earn a few dollars here and there from writing.
You must understand that when I say a "few" dollars, I mean so few that each separate one was an event. There were many people who were earning pitifully small incomes in the late 30s, but not very many who earned less than I. The next step below my annual income was zero.
But the difference between "nothing" and "almost nothing" is very large. And it got bigger as I went along, jumping almost an order of magnitude a year. A few dollars in 1937, a few tens of dollars in 1938, a few hundred in 1939—well, boy! If that rate of economic growth had only continued, I would now be earning, let me see, something like $1040 this year, or roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times the gross global product.
It has not worked out that way. But I had established the principle that money could somehow be earned out of the writing business; it was only necessary to increase the flow. Writing was unreliable, and I had not yet aspired to editing, but I had heard of the existence of such a thing as a literary agent.
I had never seen one, and had no very clear idea of what anybody needed one of these creatures for, but the theory seemed simple. You persuaded writers to give you their stories, and you sent them out to editors. When an editor bought one, you then sent the check to the writer, deducting ten percent for your trouble.
That seemed as if it should be easier work for the dollar than writing. I calculated that if I had nine clients and sold an aggregate of a thousand dollars' worth of their work, they would each have averaged one hundred dollars net. And so would I! That was a fascinating revelation. It meant that if I had nine writers as clients, I would be earning as much as if I were a writer myself. (I have always been good at figures.*)
* Less good, maybe, at making them come out in the black. |
I knew that a literary agency was a business, and a business needed printed letterheads and cards. That was no problem. Johnny Michel's father had remarried and the new wife sort of preferred Johnny out of the house, so he had come to live in the spare room of our apartment and brought his Kelsey 3x5 flatbed printing press along. He taught me how to set type, and so I set up and printed my own letterheads and even business cards. I was all set, except for the lack of any clients.
My first client was myself. I could see that it didn't look good for an agent to be peddling the work of only one writer, especially if he was the writer, but I devised a way around that. I had always thought it a romantic notion to write under pseudonyms, and I could have ten instant clients simply by signing ten of my stories with different names. It didn't matter particularly that I did that. None of them sold, anyway, in those years.
Then there were the Futurians. They didn't like wasting money on postage stamps any more than W. L. Perrin and Son, and most of them were willing to let me risk my efforts on the problematical results. Out of their collective resources I made one or two tiny sales. At the time of the first "convention" in Philadelphia, I had met a young fan named Milton A. Rothman, just out of high school and torn between colleges. He had won a science scholarship to Penn and a music scholarship to Juilliard: did he want to be a physicist or a pianist? He finally settled for physics, but what he really wanted to be was a science-fiction writer. He gave me a couple of his stories. I didn't just market them, I actually rewrote them (we had agreed on a twenty-percent share for me in the event of sale, somewhere between agent's fee and collaborator's half), and, my God, I sold them both. And to Astounding, at that.* By then I had begun to meet a few pros, and I wheedled rejects out of them.
* "Heavy Planet" and "Shawn's Sword," both appearing under the pseudonym of Lee Gregor. |
It made a certain amount of sense for the pros, because the science-fiction market was in one of its recurrent flare-star periods, and you really needed to be on the scene to find out who was hungry for manuscripts. Wonder Stories had been taken over by the Thrilling Group. It had developed some distressing comic-book aspects (the letter column was conducted by a "Sergeant Saturn"), but it was solvent, and they had even added a couple of companion magazines, Startling Stories and Captain Future. F. Orlin Tremaine, having left Astounding and all of Street & Smith, was starting a new magazine called Comet. Malcolm Reiss had entered the field with Planet Stories; a new fellow named Robert O. Erisman had a couple of titles, Marvel and Dynamic; even Hugo Gernsback was coming back into the field for the third time. (After the war, he went for number four.) With all these customers I found homes for an occasional script. Put them all together, and they added up to—
Well, not very much. In actual dollars and cents I had earned more running errands for W. L. Perrin and Son. But it was more interesting work, and it gave me entry into the offices of real flesh-and-blood editors.
When you speak of science-fiction editors in the later 1930s, you are really talking about one man, and his name was John W. Campbell, Jr.
Science fiction has had a great many idiosyncratic editors. Some have wound up on the funny farm. One or two have landed in jail. A few have been very good, many have been competent, and a lot have brought to their craft the creativity of a toad and the intelligence of a flatworm. John stands above them all. By any measure you can name, he was the greatest editor science fiction has ever had.
He was also quirky, gullible, susceptible to attacks of bigotry, and given to long stretches of apathy. First and last, John edited Astounding/Analog for thirty-four straight years. That's too long. No one can hold a job like that without at least an occasional sabbatical year to renew one's perceptions of the world and repair one's soul. John showed the strain. Sometimes for years on end he would edit the magazine with a maximum of twenty-five percent of his attention, maybe less than that. John swallowed whole such magnolious nonsense as dianetics, the Hieronymous machine, and the John Birch Society. There were a lot of things about him that were funny: his private under-the-counter bottle of ketchup at the branch of Chock full o' Nuts where he was accustomed to take his lunch. None of that matters. You can't be better than the best, and John was the best there was.
When John became editor of Astounding in 1937, he had already been well established as a writer, with at first a keen sense of gadgetry and no clue as to what went on inside a human being. He began while still an undergraduate at MIT and rapidly took over the Number Two position, behind Doc Smith, as the leading spot-weld-me-another-busbar space-opera author. There was no living in that, of course—remember what writers were getting in the 1930s. So John sold second-hand cars, or did whatever he had to do, to supplement his half cent a word, promptly on lawsuit, from Hugo Gernsback.
To me, in 1936, Campbell was a hero, in the sense that every science-fiction writer was a hero, but not a big hero like Doc Smith, say, or Stanton A. Coblentz. His space operas were fine fun, but Smith had been there first. His shorter works were not particularly distinguished.*
* Later on, yes; he wrote some of the finest sf novelettes ever: Who Goes There? The Cloak of Aesir, and many others. But they were published under his pseudonym, Don A. Stuart (= Dona Stuart, his wife's maiden name). |
Then, all of a sudden, upheaval. There was a high-level tremor at Street & Smith. Tremaine was kicked upstairs, and John Campbell was hired to succeed him.
I didn't like that much, because I had been getting along very well with Tremaine and doubted I would do any better with the new boy.† But it was worth a try, so I trotted up to the familiar decrepit office building, a few blocks from the women's prison, and was admitted to The Presence. As I came into the office John rolled down his desk top, swiveled around in his chair, pointed to a seat, fitted a cigarette into his holder, and said, "Television will never replace radio in the home. I'll bet you don't know why."
† And, in fact, I didn't. In all of John's thirty-four years I never sold him a story that was all my own. Fair mortified my feelings, he did. |
That set the pattern. Over the next few years, and intermittently for much longer, I made the pilgrimage to John's office and was greeted each time with some such opening remark. The conversation always went the same way:
Gee, no, Mr. Campbell, I never thought of that.
Right, Pohl, and no one else did, either. But what is the audience for radio?
Uh—
(Rueful shake of the head.) The primary audience is bored housewives. They turn the radio on to keep them company while they do the dishes.
Yeah, I guess that's right, all r—
And the point (warming up, jabbing the cigarette toward me) is, you can't ignore television! You have to look at it!
After a few such conversations, and after reading the editorials in Astounding a month or two after each of them, I figured out what was happening. That was how John Campbell wrote the editorials. On the first of every month he would choose a polemical notion. For three weeks he would spring it on everyone who walked in. Arguments were dealt with, objections overcome, weak points shored up—and ,by the end of each month he had a mighty blast proof-tested against a dozen critics.
I didn't mind that. Actually, I admired it a lot. I filed it away in my mind as one of the smart things editors did, and very quickly it appeared that there were a lot of smart things John did.
Every word he said I memorized:
On atmosphere: "I hate a story that begins with atmosphere. Get right into the story, never mind the atmosphere."
On motivating writers: "The trouble with Bob Heinlein is that he doesn't need to write. When I want a story from him, the first thing I have to do is think up something he would like to have, like a swimming pool. The second thing is to sell him on the idea of having it. The third thing is to convince him he should write a story to get the money to pay for it, instead of building it himself."
On rejection letters: "When there's something wrong with a story, I can tell you how to fix it. When it just doesn't come across, there's nothing I can say."
On plot ideas: "When I think of a story idea, I give it to six different writers. It doesn't matter if all six of them write it. They'll all be different stories, anyway, and I'll publish all six of them."
On the archetypal sf story: "I want the kind of story that could be printed in a magazine of the year two thousand a.d. as a contemporary adventure story. No gee-whiz, just take the technology for granted."
He was also a fount of information on the technological infrastructure of publishing: line engraving, halftones, four-color separations, binding machines. I had never known anyone else who knew about these things, and I learned from him as from Jesus on the Mount. He was a great teacher. Later I figured out why. He was learning the same things, too, maybe forty-eight hours ahead of me on the track, rehearsing his own learning by teaching it to me. When John took over Astounding he was around twenty-seven, very junior to every other editor at Street & Smith. He must have got, and must have needed, the reassurance he found in people like me, like Isaac Asimov, like the dozens of other writers and would-be writers who took the subway to 79 Seventh Avenue and were even more junior than he.
Even at seventeen I perceived that he was not wholly without seam or flaw. I had a nice little racket going with Street & Smith, because my friend Pudna Abbot worked in the circulation department there. She could bring home the newest copy of Astounding as soon as it came off the press, a full three weeks before the official release date. Not only did I get my copies before any other kid on the block, but I got them free.* Unfortunately I made the mistake of bragging about it to John. He put a stop to it. That was the first time I was ever disappointed in him. I wouldn't have done that. It showed a lack of class.
* Or almost free. There was the little matter of an hour's subway and bus ride each way from my home in Brooklyn to the Abbots' house in Flushing, but who counted things like that? |
John's tackier side has had a lot of exposure in the last few years. I sat with him all through a banquet in California, two or three years ago, while the principal speaker denounced John for anti-semitism. John took it imperturbably enough, but I didn't think that showed much class on the part of the speaker, either.
Was John a bigot?
I have no doubt that he was always a little embarrassed by people who didn't have the sense to be born white, male, and Protestant. Like most WASPs of his generation, he was brought up to believe that blacks were shiftless and Jews kind of comical. But I do not believe that he ever in his life withheld any obligation or courtesy on the grounds of race or religion. But he wasn't sure that his readership (who he assumed were also largely WASPs) were as tolerant as he. So he invited his Jewish writers to conceal that blemish. When I sold him Milt Rothman's first story, he laid it on the line. "The best names," John declared, "are Scottish or English. That's true for characters and for bylines. It has nothing to do with prejudice. They sound better." It was not just for Milt that he insisted on that. It is only because Isaac Asimov and Stanley G. Weinbaum were first published elsewhere that we don't know them now as, maybe, Tam MacIsaacs and S. G. Macbeth.
John was not, of course, the only editor who thought that. There are few Jews or blacks in the science-fiction stories of that period; the entire Doc Smith Skylark-Lensman canon contains only a handful of Jewish names, and almost every one is either petty racketeer or pitiful victim. I now think that John and the others underrated their audience. As time passed and blacks, Jews, Orientals, and females began to appear both as sympathetic characters and as authors, the readers showed no serious concern. But that's hindsight. In 1937 the evidence was on John's side, as far as it went.
John was a bull dinosaur, roaring his challenge across swamps, and maybe a really good editor has to be like that. I was a pretty cocky kid, and he was a supremely self-confident young adult, and there were times when we fought like wombats. I would come charging into his office full of the latest exposes of the wickedness of the capitalist system from yesterday's Daily Worker, and John would fit a cigarette into its holder, squirt a little decongestant into his sinuses, and tell me where I was wrong. He was a hundred percent behind the capitalist system, was John Campbell. He was getting a fast thirty-five dollars a week, and punching a time clock to get it, but he was a boss. If I told him that in a decent socialist society we Creative Literary Artists would be state-subsidized and wouldn't have to work on trivial jobs to eat, he would tell me that his own odd jobs had been a more important part of his education than MIT. If I informed him that Big Corporations were buying up and suppressing inventions that would make everything cheap, beautiful, and streamlined, he told me I was crazy and took me to meet his father, a senior executive with Ma Bell, to prove it.*
* There's a funny thing. Years later I found myself debating some of these questions with him again, only we had switched sides. I was in favor of writers working in other areas while they learned, and John had come to believe the corporations were withholding technology. This shows how inconsistent John was. |
My feelings about John Campbell have to be colored by the fact that throughout my later career as a science-fiction magazine editor I was competing with him. Sometimes it was no contest. In the 1940s I didn't have the maturity, the experience, or the money. I caused him no concern at all. In the 1960s it was different. I won as many rounds as I lost, and maybe a few more, but I was at the peak of my form and John just wasn't very interested any more. I could pay almost as much as he did. And I had learned from him.
But he was, and remains, over all, the best science-fiction magazine editor there ever was.
A quarter of a century after we first met, it happened that we were on the same bill at a scientific seminar, the American Astronautical Society's annual Goddard Memorial Lectures. I gave the keynote address. That year's theme was announced as "Technology and Social progress: Synergy or Conflict?" I took it seriously, and spread myself with a quantitative approach of my own devising to the question of what "progress" really was. On the way home John turned up in the same Eastern Airlines shuttle to Newark. He patted my shoulder and said, "Fred, you did real good for science fiction." And all of a sudden I was seventeen again, and I blushed like a fool.
At the age of eighteen or nineteen I was sampling for the first time the mixed diet of a free-lance writer. Your time is your own. But it is the only thing that you own that you can sell, and how you portion it out is reflected in how well you do.
I devised a system for making my time more useful to me. I slept sixteen hours at a stretch, every other day.
That worked out well. The time when I was sleeping, on even-numbered days, was disposable time, when there were no social demands on me: the eight hours when the rest of the world was sleeping, and the eight hours when most of the rest of the world was at work. When I was awake for thirty-two hours at a stretch, it was really fine.*
* But I think you have to be nineteen years old to survive it. |
There is a special kindness about the middle of the night for a writer. The phone doesn't ring, no one comes to the door, the kids (when you get to the point of having kids) are asleep; long consecutive thoughts are possible. I did a lot of writing in those prolonged stretches. Not much of it was any good, and hardly any of it survives, but I was learning my trade.*
* One story which does survive I like pretty well: "A Gentle Dying," a collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth. We misplaced the rough draft for years, and it only turned up after his death. |
So in every forty-eight hours I had a sleep day and a workday, and all my evenings free for business. The YCL took up a couple of evenings a week. The Futurians took up a couple more. Doë occupied most of what was left. It was a cheap time to be dating a girl. Even on my budget of nothing much we could see Broadway shows, go to the ballet, wander in the park. Those were the days of the WPA Theater Project, when half the theaters on Broadway were lighted only by make-work projects paid for by the federal government. For thirty-five cents you could see Orson Welles do Doctor Faustus, operatic Elizabethan voices rolling out Marlowe's thundering lines, shocking-fantastic makeup and costumes, puppets acting out the Seven Deadly Sins from a box. There were dance drama and Living Theater. The parks were full of free band concerts in warm weather; lounging on the lawn to Edwin Franko Goldman playing "Poet and Peasant." The New School ran a film series, free or near enough to free not to matter: quaint old science-fiction pictures like The Crazy Ray, flaky Cocteau like The Blood of a Poet. Even Real Broadway itself was not inaccessible. Most shows stayed open by papering the house with twofers: buy one ticket, get one free. Or Leblang-Gray's ticket agency always had cut-rate specials. An evening's relaxation started out with eating something at home (restaurant meals were still pricey; no way you could get out under a dollar for two people), picking Doë up at her home on Glenwood Road, taking the subway to Times Square for a show. Sometimes we went by ourselves, sometimes with other Futurians or friends; and afterward a leisurely snack in the 42nd Street Cafeteria, where coffee was a nickel, sandwiches started at a dime, and no one ever asked you to move on. The 42nd Street was "our" place, but there were a dozen like it in the Times Square area and a thousand around the city. They never closed. They tolerated indefinite loitering for minimal purchases, even none at all. Now the world is all different, and even the 42nd Street Cafeteria closed a couple of years ago, battered out of existence by pimps, prostitutes, muggers, holdup men, and general crazies who made a lot more trouble than we ever did. We never bothered anybody. The worst we ever did was eat the flowers out of the vases on the table, and they put in new ones every morning, anyway.
And then, along about two or three or later, we would break it up. If I didn't have to take Doë home, and if one of my walking friends was present we might stroll home. It didn't take more than three or four hours, and by then the quiet streets would become all different and rosy in the dawn. I almost got it on one of those same streets a couple of years ago, when four young things approached me with mugging in mind, but in the late 30s there was nothing to fear.
In spite of our competing arrogances and differing interests, the Futurians hung together for years, and one of the reasons was the appearance of a common enemy. We were engaged in a titanic intrafan struggle over the possession of that glamorous dream, the First World Science Fiction Convention.
It was Don Wollheim's idea to begin with. It struck us all as fantastic, but we were used to thinking galactically big. The more we thought about it the more feasible it seemed. The coming New York World's Fair would draw people to the city, that's what World's Fairs are for, and surely among them would be fans and writers. We were not confident we could get anyone from Outside just to talk about science fiction. But if they were coming to New York, anyway—
It all came to pass just as we had planned, with one tiny difference. We lost control of the committee. When the event happened, half a dozen of us Futurians weren't allowed in. There had been a falling-out with Willy Sykora, genius of the NYB-ISA, who had then allied himself with Jimmy Taurasi from Flushing and Sam Moskowitz of Newark; and the three of them combined took the convention away from us. They had persuaded the professional editors to cooperate. They had secured professional writers to speak. They had hired a hall. They had pledges of attendance from fans as far off as Chicago and California. And there we were, out in the cold.
To be truthful, we pretty nearly had it coming. Not quite. The punishment exceeded the crime. But we Futurians were, as you must have observed by now, a fairly snotty lot. Politics had something to do with the struggle, but not actually very much. Although we Communist Futurians maintained a high profile, we were never a majority in the Futurians (and actually, there were one or two lefties on the other side). What we Futurians made very clear to the rest of New York fandom was that we thought we were better than they were. For some reason that annoyed them.
We were, to be sure, a good deal more literary than the New Fandom group. Apart from that, not that much difference. Jimmy Taurasi was a good-natured guy who worked for Consolidated Edison or something of the sort. Sam had made a few abortive attempts at writing science-fiction stories, but quickly realized that his future lay in some other area of the publishing field and has, in fact, scored major successes in more than one way. Will Sykora was something else. He was a hard person to like. I was used to cynics, even wanted to be one myself when I grew up, but there was something about Sykora that outdid even Wollheim and Michel. They cut up writers and editors as individuals; Willy derogated the whole profession of writing. Sf writers were no better than anyone else, he said. If he wanted to, he could write a story in three weeks and have it published in any magazine in the field. His confidence impressed me; why didn't he do it, then? Because it would just be more trouble than it was worth, he said. That struck me as more than cynical, it was close to a sin against the Holy Ghost. Especially as I came to recognize a grain of truth in what he said. To get a story published wasn't then (and isn't now) a particularly impressive feat; all it takes is luck, determination, and a few monkey tricks of style and plot. (To write a good story is something else, but there are a hundred bags of monkey tricks in print for every really good piece of work.)
Regardless of the merits, in any case they had the muscle. When we came to Bahai Hall, Don Wollheim, Johnny Michel, Bob Lowndes, Jack Gillespie, and I were turned away. Other Futurians were let in, and ran courier between us excludees and the action inside, but we were Out.
I didn't personally mind that a whole lot. It was kind of exciting. I've never really enjoyed what goes on in the formal sessions of any convention as much as the socializing that surrounds it, and we had plenty of that. To the cafeteria down the block or the bar next door the writ of New Fandom did not extend. When the conventionees found the going tedious and stepped out for refreshment, we were there. We met Californians like Forrest J. Ackerman and his feminine sidekick Morojo,* both of them stylishly dressed in fashions of the Twenty-fifth Century and turning heads in every cafeteria they entered. Kid fan Ray Bradbury was there, two years away from his first professional sale and anxious to display the art of his young friend Hannes Bok. We met Jack Williamson, a slow-spoken New Mexican who looked as if he should be wearing a .45 and a star, and L. Sprague de Camp, hottest and newest star in John Campbell's powerhouse stable. We even ran our own counterconvention, at the headquarters of the Flatbush III Branch of the YCL in Brooklyn. (We had no trouble getting the use of the hall; I was the president of the chapter.) A dozen of the out-of-towners made the long subway trip to Brooklyn, curiously observing the posters and slogans on the wall. Our convention was smaller than Theirs, but more fun, I think, and so the Futurian Exclusion Act failed of its purpose.
* Acronym, in the Esperanto alphabet, for Myrtle R. Jones. |
There was an interesting postscript, long later. In 1950 the Hydra Club decided to put on a convention of its own in New York, and Sykora came roaring out of the Long Island City swamps to challenge us, I have forgotten over what. The Futurians had decayed away by then, in propria persona, but enough of the Hydras accepted the heritage of the blood feud to debate excluding Sykora from our con. I voted against it. It was more fun to turn the other cheek. In the event, Will showed up, and leafleted some of the chairs in the ballroom with handbills against "the nine phony heads of Hydra," and then was gone, to be seen no more.
One thing the Futurians lacked was a headquarters, and so we decided to go for broke. We found a house and signed a lease—or at least Doë and I did. Unfortunately we couldn't handle the rent, and after some stressful times with the lawyer for the landlord we got out of it unscathed. But Wollheim, Michel, Lowndes, and Dirk Wylie had had enough of a taste for sf-commune living to want more, and so they found an apartment at 2754 Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. They called it The Ivory Tower, and it was solar plexus for the Futurian nerve network for the next couple of years. They four remained the main tenants, but there was a floating population of whatever other Futurians chose to crash for a while, and all of us used it as an operating base. We had parties there, we published fanzines there, we sat around and talked endlessly there.
Quietest and gentlest of the Futurians was Jack Rubinson, so quiet that mostly we didn't know he was around. One day he surprised us by turning up with a full-length play he had written, all by himself, without announcing what he was going to do—quite contrary to Futurian custom—and, even more surprising, I thought it astonishingly good.*
* He surprised us again, somewhat later, by going on to get a doctoral degree. The only other Futurian who stayed in school that long was Isaac Asimov, and we all knew about him. |
He gave all of us speaking parts, but the starring part—the character in the play had no name but "Hero"—was obviously himself. He gave me a line which I thought summed up quite neatly what we were all about:
Hero: Then what is "The Ivory Tower"?
Pohl: It is nothing more nor less than a shell or an attitude built up by several people to separate their group from the general mass of people. It is a method for keeping the group intact at the expense of everything else. The group tries to deny the existence of anybody except its members.†
† From The Ivory Tower, a play by Jack Rubinson. March, (Unpublished.) |
Trouble was, we couldn't deny the existence of the rest of the world. The rest of the world was closing in on us. That summer Joe Stalin and Adolf Hitler signed their nonaggression pact. Consternation in the left wing. Argument and confusion among the political Futurians. And a few weeks later the panzer divisions were loping through Poland.
If Chamberlain and Daladier had stood up to Hitler in Munich in 1938, would the Nazis have collapsed? If the Czechs and the Poles had accepted Stalin's treaty offer of aid, would they have survived as independent states? Or would it have meant going directly to Soviet tanks on the street corners of Prague and Warsaw half a decade earlier? What is Truth? I am tempted to write science-fiction scenarios, but they go in a dozen different directions, some toward a later but worse World War II and some to permanent peace and brotherhood. I doubt they are any of them realistic.
I can only say what I perceived in 1939, colored by science fiction, politics, and my own raunchy young-male glands. Like most young males, I thought the idea of fighting in a war was scary but exciting, by no means without appeal. A year or two before, I had volunteered to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain.* Being a soldier was only an adventure. Being a citizen of a country at war was something else. America in the 20s and 30s seemed to be exempt from that sort of European folly. Oh, now and then our Marines went down and beat the hell out of somebody in Nicaragua, but I had no idea of what it would be like to have an organized enemy bombing our cities and sinking our ships. When I observed that my science-fiction friends and pen pals in London and Paris, Ted Carnell and Georges Gallet, were now in that precise position, reason recoiled. World War? We knew what it meant. H. G. Wells had explained it to us in Things to Come. And here was the Luftwaffe pounding Warsaw as flat as Wells had smashed London in the film. It looked like the end of Western civilization, and science fiction's nightmares were coming true.
* They would have none of me. They needed fund-raisers in America a lot more than eighteen-year-old bodies in Teruel. |
It was a stressful and perplexing time. The Communist Party expressed no doubts. They made a 180-degree flip-flop overnight. On one day the slogans were "Quarantine the Aggressor" and "Death to the Nazis." On the next it was "Keep America Out of the Imperialist War."
It hurt. It was like being awakened from a pleasing dream by a kick in the gut. I could not change my head to keep pace with the slogans. I had grown up to hate Fascists. They had not changed. Neither had my feelings toward them. I found it more and more difficult to function as a YCL leader, or even to sit through a meeting. I knew what words I was supposed to say, but I couldn't stand the taste of them on my tongue.
So the YCL was in trouble with me, but I was also in trouble with the YCL. In the angrier, harsher climate that fell over the YCL after the Stalin-Hitler pact, there was a new and inquisitorial attitude toward deviationism. Who were all these science-fiction people I had invited to come into the Flatbush III YCL headquarters? At a meeting of the executive committee, an Irish youth named Marty O'Shaughnessy (my own recruit!) furiously hissed the damning question: Were any of them Trotskyites? I couldn't help it. I laughed. And then there was the problem of Cyril Kornbluth's morals. Cyril was only about sixteen or seventeen at the time, looked like thirty, drank like a retired railroad switchman; and he and I stayed behind at some YCL party with what was left of a bottle of wine and sang and giggled for hours. Did I not realize, the comrades asked judgmentally, that I had involved the YCL in impairing the morals of a minor?
That was even funnier, but there was no one in the branch to share the joke. The comedy had gone out of the YCL personality. I began to miss meetings now and then. When the next branch elections came along, I was not reelected president; I wasn't even nominated, nor expected to be.
A year earlier that would have hurt a lot. I had started that branch. But under the circumstances at least a trial separation was indicated, if not actually a divorce; and besides, I had found something a good deal more exciting that used up all the time and attention I had.
The great advantage of constituting myself a literary agent specializing in science fiction was not in the sparse commissions. It was in the entry it gave me to the offices of real professional editors. I could see at once that they came in all shapes and sizes. Some were wise and grizzled, some almost as young as I. Some had backgrounds stretching back before I was born; others were learning before my eyes.
I did not hope to compete with someone like John Campbell in diligence or inventiveness, but few of the other editors I saw impressed me. To the extent that their jobs involved knowing a good science-fiction story from a bad one, I was pretty sure that I knew more than they. So I took my courage in my hands and began to shop around for a job. One of the friendliest of the editors was a man named Robert O. Erisman, veteran of many pulp titles, now experimenting for the first time with this newfangled thing of science fiction. Did he, I asked him very tentatively, think he could use an assistant with a solid background in the field, namely me?
No, he said, gently and pointedly, he couldn't; the budget didn't allow that sort of thing. But maybe there was a chance somewhere else. He had heard that Popular Publications, down at the other end of 42nd Street, was adding a cheap line of pulps, half a cent a word tops. If I put it to them right, maybe they'd find a place for a science-fiction magazine on the list. Why not go talk to the boss there, Rogers Terrill?
So I did; and Rogers hired me; and there I was, nineteen years old, and the full-fledged editor of not one but two professional science-fiction magazines.