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9
Four Pages a Day

 

 

For the next seven or eight years I was a pretty nearly simon-pure free-lance writer.

In the minds of most civilians, the life of a writer has got to be glamorous and exciting. Well, it is, some of the time. A writer often gets to meet special people, visit fascinating places, do exciting things. But none of these occur when he is actively engaged at his employment. When he is writing, he is the nearest thing to a vegetable that you will find registered to vote. He sits.

He doesn't even have the apparent function of pushing typewriter keys most of the time, because during most of that sitting time the activity is all internal and thus invisible.

Let me show you the numbers: Any jackleg typist can manage seventy-five words a minute. If you type at that rate from nine to five every day, with time out for lunch and a ten-minute break at the end of each hour for flexing the fingers, you will produce the equivalent of two 75,000-word novels in every five-day week.

It is an observed fact that writers do not ordinarily produce two novels a week. Most don't even manage two a year. Therefore it is demonstrated that writing is not merely a matter of putting words down on the page. Some other activity is taking place.

The name of that process is "thinking."

The trouble with a career in which ninety-five percent of your working time is spent thinking is that, therefore, ninety-five percent of the time you don't look as if you're working. Or even thinking. What a writer looks like he is doing, generally speaking, is watching TV, playing solitaire, cleaning his typewriter keys, or taking a nap. Writing is not much of a spectator sport. I have had one or two nonwriting friends whose curiosity was so piqued that they coaxed to be allowed to watch me write. After ten or fifteen minutes they always fled to some other room. The boredom reaches criticality very soon. It does for the writer, too, unfortunately, so that actually getting words on paper becomes a test of strength, will power against terminal tedium. Which is why it is said that writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Writing is the only job I know that your wife will nag you out of. Why wouldn't she? There you are, sprawled out on the living-room sofa, rereading the real-estate section from last Sunday's Times—although it is known that you have no extensive real-estate holdings, and little prospect of acquiring any. Meanwhile, the dishwasher needs fixing. Poor soul! How can she know that if she interrupts you now, you will lose a precarious train of thought that has taken you four hours to construct?

The other side of the coin is that sometimes your wife is right, and you're just loafing. There simply is no external way to tell when a writer is working, and maybe even the writer himself doesn't know.

Nevertheless, the end product is easily recognizable. If the writer is a writer, at some point words will come out, and finished works, and if he is any good they will sooner or later be published. This is conclusive diagnostic evidence. Pity it doesn't come along in time to be useful when you need to know whether the dishwasher should be fixed.

I don't write all the time—I don't know many writers who do. There are periods when, for reasons not easy to identify, I write regularly and well for months on end. There are other times when I don't.

The times when a writer isn't writing are called "writer's slump." Everybody has it, at least now and then. Nobody, or nobody I know, is wholly successful in dealing with it. I don't know how to deal with it any more than anyone else, but what I do know is a way to postpone its happening, pretty well, most of the time, in a fashion that works, more or less, for me. What I do is to set myself a daily quota of four pages. No more, no less; and I write those pages every day, no matter where I am, no matter how long it takes, if I die for it.* Sometimes it takes forty-five minutes. Sometimes it takes eighteen hours. Sometimes I am reasonably satisfied with the words that go onto the paper, and quite a lot of the time I loathe them.

 

* These particular pages, for instance, were written early on a Saturday morning in a hotel room in Cleveland, Ohio. Chip Delany was right across the hall. Joe and Gay Haldeman, Annie McCaffrey, Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey, and other boon companions were only a few doors away, and I was certain, absolutely, despondently certain, that they were all getting ready to have a fun brunch, laughing and chortling and having a hell of a great old time, while I was slaving away on my decrepit French portable. But I stuck it out and postponed collapse for one more day.

 

But I do them. If I miss, if I skip one day, the rhythm of the stride is broken and the shattered edifice of my life tumbles down on my head. So I do it every day, which means every day there is, including Saturdays, Sundays, Christmas, my birthday, the day I'm going to the dentist to find out if I'm going to need a root-canal job, the day I fly to London, the day I am so badly hung over that my eyelashes bleed. I do my quota in airports, on boardwalk benches, and in commuter trains. I have been known to take my typewriter along on a weekend date. "Every day" means "every day," and this is the first rule of writing for me.

Of course, with all this terrible strength of character, the times do come when I fall. I've missed a day, never mind why. Then everything is at risk. If I can climb right back on the wagon, maybe it will all be all right again, but maybe it won't—and sometimes that single day has extended itself to months.

But that is what it is like to be a writer (for me, anyway), and that is why there is not a great deal to say about what occupied the greatest part of my attention for the remaining years of the 1950s, I wrote. And was a damn dull spectacle doing it.

So will you imagine, please, that all through this chapter I am—whatever else I am doing—writing about forty short sf stories (and a couple of dozen other short pieces) and about a dozen science-fiction novels (and eight or ten other books).

 

I did manage to get away from the typewriter long enough to do a few other things, and one of them was to get married again.

The girl was (and is!) a tall, leggy, strikingly beautiful blonde, nee Carol Metcalf Ulf. A brief marriage to Jay Stanton left her with a brand-new daughter, Karen, who in the twenty-odd years since has changed from a tiny scarlet bundle of flesh, with an eye that wandered northeast and a foot that pointed southwest, to the kind of beauty who stops conversation when she comes into a room . . . and with intelligence, creativity, and personality to match.* So Carol and Carol's Karen, and me and my Annie, at least when the varying vicissitudes of my struggles with Judy gave me custody of Annie, set up housekeeping. First it was a tiny apartment on the far East Side of New York. The 10th Street bus paused to gather its strength for the westward run right under our window, so that the noise of idling Diesels kept things lively all night long, and there were mice. But it was a pretty nice little apartment. It was only a few blocks from Horace Gold's place in Stuyvesant Town, and our Friday nights were given to Horace's poker games. It was very good that this was so. We didn't have money for baby sitters and shows, since I was trying to make a dent in paying off thirty thousand dollars.

 

* You probably have noticed by now that I am fond of my kids, but all this is objectively true, I swear.

 

 

Those Friday-night games were fun. Horace edited Galaxy from his apartment, and a lot of the regulars were Galaxy writers: Bob Sheckley, William Term, A. J. Budrys, sometimes Lester and Evelyn del Rey, Tony Boucher when he was in town. Not everyone was a writer. John Cage showed up occasionally, a gentle, humorous man who clutched his cards diffidently, bet insecurely, and seemed to win a lot. Years later, when Karen-grown-up was taking a course in Cage's music, she was startled to learn that she had met him as an infant, between Spit in the Ocean and High-Low Seven, when we took her out of the carriage for her ten o'clock feeding.

Before long we were back in the house in Red Bank, trying to fill up fourteen rooms with what furniture we could acquire on a budget of hardly anything at all. Carol was superb. Former art student and fashion model, she made most of her own clothes—as well as drapes, spreads, and slipcovers for the tatty furniture—naturally clothing the babies on the same sewing machine. Moreover, she was handy with pliers and paintbrush. Before long she had made the house eminently livable. Even partyable. We began inviting friends out, at first a few at a time, then overnight parties of dozens of people which climaxed, when the weather was warm enough, with a little daybreak swimming in the lake down the street.

We had a great natural resource to draw on, because the fabulous Ipsy-Wipsy Institute was not very far away. The Ipsy was the immense house in Highlands owned by Fletcher and Inga Pratt, twenty-three rooms, on acres of land rolling down to the Shrewsbury River. (I suppose that the reason I wasn't afraid to acquire a fourteen-room house of my own was that, seeing it for the first time after a weekend at the Ipsy, it seemed charmingly compact.)

The Ipsy-Wipsy was some two hundred years old, with sculptured plaster ceilings in the billiard room and immense fireplaces in the drawing room and the dining hall, and a strange, huge painting that went with the house (because there was no way to remove it) on the landing of the stairs. The Pratts had bought it cheaply enough, but I cannot imagine how many tens of thousands must have gone into jacking up the fireplaces, stopping the leaks in the roof, replacing wood that had rotted and plaster that had peeled away. Owning a big old house is a career. They are like beaver dams, a dynamic interplay between creation and decay. If you take your eyes off them for a moment, they are down around your ears: the heating system goes, the roof tiles separate and blow away, water stains the walls you have just repainted, the floors begin to pop. But it's worth it. Maybe it's worth it. It's worth it if you enjoy the house, and if you keep it filled with life.

The Pratts surely filled theirs, with people, books, and marmosets. Fletcher raised the little wooly monkeys; they lived in bird cages in the billiard room huddling under scraps of blanket and peering out with their old-man faces cocked to one side, wistful for a mealworm or a grape. Fletcher, who was the dearest man alive, looked like a marmoset himself with his own head held in exactly the same position, and with his marmoset beard and bright marmoset eyes. Sometimes we borrowed the Ipsy's company. Sometimes they borrowed ours. Basil Davenport was an Ipsy-Wipsy regular, a Book-of-the-Month-Club editor who came out one weekend in great exultation because he had persuaded the Club to take an Arthur Clarke book as an alternate selection, and thus struck a great blow for science fiction. St. Leger Lawrence was another. So was John Ciardi, paying his bills by teaching in a New England college and doubling as a science-fiction editor for Twayne while waiting for poetry to pay off. So were any number of literary skin divers, former dictators of obscure countries, rocket millionaires, space chemists, and, naturally, science-fiction writers: Ted Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, Katherine MacLean and her husband, Charley Dye, the Kornbluths, the de Camps, the del Reys. William Lindsay Gresham was there a lot just at the end of his life, an irascible, mean-mouthed man who was having troubles he could not handle, and one night a little later, checked into a Times Square hotel and killed himself. Willy Ley and his wife, Olga, came out frequently with their two small girls (enough bigger than ours so that we had inherited Xenia's crib for, successively, Annie and Karen). When Dona and John Campbell were divorced, Dona married George O. Smith, and by and by they came to the Ipsy not as house guests but to live. (The old original house, four or five rooms of it, was still part of the structure, with its own independent facilities and entrances, and it became theirs.) Laurence and Edie Manning came for a few weekends. Larry had written The Man Who Awoke and many other science-fiction stories in the old days and now was the proprietor of his own mail-order nursery; they made up their minds quickly, bought a piece of Fletcher's property, and built a house of their own next door. Meanwhile, the del Reys had come out to spend a weekend with Carol and me, stayed several months, and then moved into their own place down the street. The science-fiction population of Monmouth County was growing by leaps and bounds.

Saturday was the special day at the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute. At five the cocktail flag was hoisted while Fletcher tootled the trumpet, and the guests began to assemble. We drank for hours around the huge oak cocktail table in the billiard room, before dining on the quail or eel or roast hump of bison. Fletcher, God save him, was a lousy cook. He did not believe in overexposing food to fire, and so it was always all bloody. (He actually served the only rare bouillabaisse I have ever encountered.) What saved us all from terminal trichinosis was Grace, the all-purpose maid, who lied to him about cooking times.

Ceremonial was a joy to Fletcher. He had been born a Buffalo farm boy, achieved prosperity and fame,* and set out to re-create himself in the image of a landed gentleman. The Ipsy-Wipsy made it all come true. The port was always passed to the left. The after-dinner liqueurs were drunk to courteous toasts and responses. It was easy to tease Fletcher for his pretensions, but he knew what game he was playing. He saw as much humor in it as anyone else, and there was nothing mean or pretentious in it, or in Fletcher. He made the world a nicer place.

 

* Not just in science fiction. His Ordeal by Fire is the best one-volume history of the Civil War ever written, and taught me most of what I know about the writing of nonfiction.

 

In 1957 he began to feel ill. Staunch Christian Scientist, he would have nothing to do with the doctors of the flesh. By the time Inga bullied him into seeing one, it was too late. He died of cancer of the stomach.

A year or two later Inga remarried and moved away and the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute was sold to a dentist from Jersey City. One night it burned to the ground. The dentist cleared away the rubble and built himself a split-level ranch house on the spot. It may be a nice enough place, but it has nothing of the majesty of the Ipsy, or of the memories.

 

Early in the 1950s something else happened that changed my life in ways I had never anticipated, and it began when I subscribed to Scientific American.

I had a fair grounding in science and mathematics from Brooklyn Tech and Chanute Field, but I was not terribly interested in the subjects. SciAm began to turn me on.

The precipitating incident was a brief, popularized article on the theory of numbers. At that time it was a terribly arcane subject. Now it is less so, particularly for ten-year-olds, because the "new math" of the public schools leans heavily on number theory: which is to say, the properties of numbers.

Now, I don't really expect you to sit still while I explain number theory to you. I am not sure if I could even answer the question if you were to ask me if it mattered at all. One answer would be, "My God, yes!" Another would be, "Of course not." The best answer would be that it has the same importance as God has. Either it is of transcendental concern or it doesn't matter at all, and which it is to you depends on you.

The article was only a teaser, but it included a bibliography. I had my secretary order all the books in the bibliography and I read them—not, dear God, without pain! They stretched my head to its limits. I found that they were teasers, too. I found that number theory was one of the very few domains of science and mathematics in which an amateur might well achieve something all the professionals had always missed, and, in fact, in which quite a few amateurs had done so.

Well, that seemed like pretty jazzy fun, and so I plunged into a couple of the classic problems. The seductive thing about them is that they are almost all quite easy to understand. Solving them, not so easy.

For instance, there is the case of Fermat's last theorem.

This fellow, Pierre de Fermat, who died some three hundred and more years ago, had some flaky habits. There is no question that he was a genius of a mathematician, everyone knew that. The trouble was that he knew it, too, and knew it so well that he never felt any obligation to prove it to anyone. Most of what he said he mentioned offhandedly in casual letters to friends, or even in little scribbles to posterity in the margins of his books, and one of those scribbles has caused immense pain to all the world's greatest mathematicians—and also to me!—ever since.

It goes like this:

When you were in high school, you learned that the sum of the squares of the sides of a right triangle equals the square of the hypotenuse. You learned to write it as a2 + b2 = c2. That was a powerful discovery in itself, but it wasn't made by Fermat; a fellow named Pythagoras laid that one on us two thousand years ago.

A different ancient fellow named Diophantos looked at the equation in a different way and proposed a general solution for the formula; and there matters languished till flaky old Fermat came along. And in his copy of Diophantos's book he wrote:

 

It is impossible to write a cube as the sum of two cubes, a fourth power as the sum of two fourth powers, and in general any power beyond the second as the sum of two similar powers.

 

That's not news in itself. It means that equations like a3 + b3 = c3 or even a115 + b115 = c115 might as well never be written, because they don't mean anything—there aren't any numbers you can put into them that will make them come out with exact answers. But everyone rather suspected that, anyway.

But Fermat didn't stop there. He added one more sentence, which was the kicker:

 

For this I have discovered a truly wonderful proof, but the margin is too small to contain it.

 

Now, what a spot to leave generations of mathematicians in! It cannot be ignored. You or I could write that in the margins of anything we liked, and no one would lose a moment's sleep. But Fermat did not make claims he could not support, ever.

Well, I never found that "truly wonderful proof." No one else has, either. But in looking for it I came across half a dozen other brain teasers: verifying Goldbach's conjecture,* looking for a formula for primes. Finding a general rule to explain the recurring rhythms in sums of powers—well, never mind about that one; I may get back to it someday.

 

* "Any prime number can be written as the sum of two primes." It's true, as far as anyone knows. But prove it?


That is, some mathematical formula into which you can substitute arbitrary numbers on the left-hand side of the equation, and for which the solution on the right-hand side will always be a prime number. I still think that one can be solved, but I no longer think it will be by me.

 

From first to last, I must have spent a year on number theory, reading papers in things like Scripta Mathematica, doodling endless series of numbers. About half of what I did that year could have been done in minutes on a computer, or in a few days, anyway, on a pocket calculator of the kind my son carries in his shirt pocket to classes, but I didn't have them. Then finally the fever spent itself.

But there were sequelae. I'm not fully recovered yet.

I discovered that I could learn quite a lot about a particular subject; having demonstrated this on one subject, I tried it on some others. I became interested in recent American history and began to look into the causes and consequences of the Great Depression. After a time I realized I knew enough to write a book and began systematically to prepare it. That one never made it to print—not yet, anyway *—but first-century Rome also interested me, and that one did turn into a book, Tiberius. One on the Ku Klux Klan made it all the way to final draft and a publishing contract, but then I found I was dissatisfied with it and withdrew it, meaning to go over it one more time when I found an opportunity. (It hasn't come yet.) I learned the uses of reference collections and the microfilmed periodicals in the big Fifth Avenue library. I developed an appetite. School had never sated it, or even let me know I had it.

 

* I wound up with three quarters of a million words of notes and about fifty thousand words of the text of what was called Say, Don't You Remember? But while I was doing that, several other people noticed the need for such a book and beat me into print.

 

I don't think of myself as a scholar. I think I have the same relation to knowledge that your brother-in-law has to the Los Angeles Rams. Learning—all kinds of learning, but especially history, politics, and above all, science—to me is the greatest of spectator sports. It gives me pleasure.

Real-fun, kicky pleasure? Well—yes, maybe. Pleasure in the sense that sex is pleasure, but also painful in the sense that unfulfilled sex can be a yearning and obsessive pain. It hurts me to be ignorant. It is unpleasant, in an interior, unfulfilled way, for me to discover that there is a whole space of knowledge I don't share.

God knows, I am no scientist. There is no prospect at all that I will ever make any fundamental discoveries in physics, chemistry, or biology. I don't have the equipment. I don't just mean the skills, although they are daunting. I mean the hardware that is pretty fancily outside my amateur reach: mile-long particle accelerators, radio-telescope dishes with hearts of liquid helium and skins that spread across a valley, whole populations of nude mice and genetically pure tree frogs. I can accept that. Scientific discovery is not the sort of challenge that I feel compelled to take up personally. I really want to know very much what the world of Venus is like under its opaque, searing clouds. But it's all right to leave the problem to the Soviet and American space establishments. Little by little, they are fitting the pieces together, and when they learn something new, the JPL or Carl Sagan or Walter Sullivan will be sure to tell me, one way or another. I am content with that. I think that somewhere I have a basic religion, and its dogma is that the purpose of life is to understand the world and all it contains. I don't need to make the discoveries. But I do need to know about them.

And so I read Scientific American and New Scientist and Science and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Spacefiight and the Journal of the B.I.S. and, oh, hell, I don't know, maybe a dozen other publications. And when in one of them somebody says something new and elegant, it is almost like it used to be when Roy Campanella drove Jackie Robinson across the plate in the old days.

Sometimes people ask me what my scientific background is, and I have worked out an answer. I point to my friend Isaac Asimov, who is about the same age as I am. We met when we were both still in high school. I dropped out without graduating, and most of what I have learned I have picked up catch-as-catch-can. While Isaac did graduate from high school, and went on to college, and got a bachelor's degree, and then a master's degree, and then a doctorate, and finally became a professor. And that proves that, when the will to learn is present, obstacles can be overcome; because when you come right down to it, Isaac knows as much science as I do.

The 1950s were boom years for science-action magazines. At the peak there were some thirty-eight of them, and anybody who could write science fiction at all could get published in one or another of them. (So did a lot of people who couldn't.)

Making a living was something else. A lot of the word rates were low—well, they were all low, compared with the kind of money sf writers expect now. Three cents a word was a good price. Horace paid me four, and that was super. In that decade I was Galaxy's most prolific contributor, with some seven serials and about thirty shorter pieces; I counted on some three or four thousand dollars a year from Galaxy, and somewhat more than that amount from all the other markets combined. In the 1950s eight or ten thousand dollars a year was well above the poverty level, and if I hadn't had that thirty-thousand-dollar millstone hanging around my neck, I would have felt pretty prosperous.

Unfortunately the debts did exist. I paid them off as best as I could. In the process new debts developed. I discovered that my local grocer would let me charge. So, a while later, did my friend and down-the-street neighbor, Lester del Rey. Within a year or two we each had four-figure tabs with the poor grocer.* He was incredibly good about it. As prosperity seeped back Lester paid him off and he built a new entrance to his store. A little later I did, too, and he built a new store.

 

* I would like to pay him honor by mentioning his name. But I did that once, on the air, and he was far from pleased. He said that within forty-eight hours a dozen regular customers began asking for credit, and would I please not ever do that again?

 

After The Space Merchants Cyril and I began a new novel, and when it got far enough along to show I turned it over to Horace Gold. Fine, he said, I'll publish it. I'll do more than that. I'll consider it as an entry in the Galaxy $7,000 Prize Novel Contest, and I can tell you right now, from looking at the other entries, it's practically a sure thing to win. Only thing is, you have to use a pen name. Why is that? I asked. Because I say so, he explained. But the rules don't say anything about it having to be by a new name, I protested. No, but the purpose of the contest is to discover new talent, and I by-gosh will discover new talent even if I have to find it in you, he clarified.

 

Gladiator-at-Law, Bantam Books.

 

So I went home and talked it over with Cyril, and Cyril shared my view: seven thousand dollars was mighty attractive numbers, but not, when you come right down to it, any more than we would get anyway from serial and book sales, and we liked the book, which meant we wanted to have it under our own names. I told this to Horace, and he accepted defeat gracefully enough; he did serialize it, just as planned, without involving the contest at all.

I do not think I was a good enough person to refrain from telling Horace I had told him so. I had. Prize contests are a terrible way to find talent. I do not believe they have ever worked well, and mostly they don't work at all. So it happened with Horace's. As the deadline approached and he read through the hundreds of entries that blocked every doorway in his apartment, it became clear that there was nothing there that was really outstanding, and an awful lot that was preposterously bad.

By then Lester and I had gotten together on a novel about the future of the insurance business, Preferred Risk. Gladiator-at-Law was already in type, and I offered the new one to Horace. He read it and called me up: Uh, Fred? How about if we make this one the winner?

The stipulation was the same: we had to use a brand-new pen name, and everyone concerned was to pretend it was a real person. I talked it over with Lester, who is philosophical about the vagaries of editors. Why not? he said, and we proceeded to cook up a pen name. We divided the labor equally. I chose the first name—"Edson"—and he provided the other—"McCann." And then a few days later he came to me with the look of wild pleasure that serendipitous flakiness always gives Lester and pointed out that the initials E. McC. could equally well be written e = m c2.

All of this was a terribly deep secret. We made up a whole life for this Edson McCann person, celebrated nuclear physicist, so heavily into classified research that he did not dare show his face in public. But the secret was really no secret. Five or six years later, when I went to work for Bob Guinn, Galaxy's publisher, he let me know as gently as he could that he had found out about it long since.

Collaborating is a familiar life-style to me, I've done it with at least a score of writers, some of whom I've never met. But this time was especially tricky. Lester and I do not collaborate well. He has his own very idiosyncratic way of working. While I have, of course, a well-thought-out and admirable set of work habits of my own. The two do not meet at any point, and the whole exercise took twice as long as it should have with ten times the trouble. Lester and I have been close friends for a very long time. One reason we have stayed so is that, after Preferred Risk, we never collaborated again.

Especially not for Horace Gold, who added a whole other dimension of complication to the effort. With Preferred Risk the complication was almost entirely in the Byzantine conspiracy of silence. In the work with Cyril Kornbluth it was at every step. Working with two individuals as quirkily brilliant as Horace and Cyril kept me on my toes twenty-four hours a day. Horace would edit. He would also come up with suggestions as the work was going along, great gobs of them, some bright and some lunatic. To the maximum extent possible I believe in humoring editors, and so, at Horace's special request, we, for instance, added a couple of chapters to the serial version of Gravy Planet, carrying the action of the story onto the surface of the planet Venus. (It was easy enough to drop them out again when we came to publish the story in its book form as The Space Merchants.) But when Horace asked for something of the same sort on Gladiator-at-Law, I flatly refused. As far as I was concerned, that closed the matter. Cyril and I had a working treaty. After the rough draft of the book was done, he was out of it. I always did the final revisions (except on the last novel we did together, Wolfbane), and I always did all the dealing with editors and publishers. But with Gladiator-at-Law Horace outwitted me; he got on the phone with Cyril when I wasn't looking, and persuaded him to borrow the setting copy of the manuscript and write in some additional scenes.*

 

* Also dropped from the book version. Working with Cyril, by the way, was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. If I say comparatively little about it here, it is because I have already said a great deal about it in three other books, The Best of C. M. Kornbluth (Ballantine), Critical Mass (Bantam), and Before the Universe (Bantam).

 

Working with Horace was always a challenge, sometimes delightful and stimulating, sometimes with a lot of screaming at each other. He personalized the editorial function more than any other person I have ever known, even John Campbell, who sometimes seemed ordained by God to sit at a desk and tell people how to write their stories. With Horace, editing involved every aspect of his personality. Editing was not only what he did, it was what he was.

Horace was a medium-tallish, mostly baldish, and slightly plumpish sort of person. He never left his apartment. He made the world come to him. When it was unwilling to do so, he pursued it on the phone. Most of his dealings with writers were telephonic, so that wherever you were, at whatever time, the phone might ring. There would be Horace on the other end, lying on his back on his bed with cigarettes and ashtray at one hand and your manuscript in the other, ready for as long and complicated a talk as was needful to get you to do what he wanted.

Horace's phone bills must have been immense, and so was his determination. He knew what he wanted.

Horace's battle to substitute his own conception of a story for the writer's caused fury and frustration. But, my God, the stories he got! Sheckley, Knight, Kornbluth, Leiber, Bester, Sturgeon, Tenn, and fifty others never wrote better than when they were writing for Horace Gold's Galaxy. He took mediocre writers and made them at least momentarily pretty good. He took good writers and stretched them as far as they would go. He wasn't always right in what he asked for. Sometimes he was terribly wrong. That didn't really matter. The creative synthesis of the dialectic was at work; in the struggle between Horace-yin and writer-yang something came out that was better than either could have achieved alone.

If Horace had a failing as an editor, it was that when a perfectly good story came along his responses faltered. He had no way to improve it, and sometimes he rejected it. He turned down a couple of my best I think. He also turned down Jim Blish's A Case of Conscience and Danny Keyes's Flowers for Algernon and—well, quite a few good ones. That didn't really matter, either. While Horace was in swing, Galaxy was where the action was.

Apart from editorial dealings, of course, we were friends, Horace and Evelyn and Carol and I. When we lived nearby we saw each other frequently. When Carol and I moved to New Jersey, not as often, but we still kept in touch.

As our lives began to settle down, Carol and I decided that having a child of hers and one of mine wasn't quite enough, and so we opted for one of ours. Horace was delighted, called anxiously all through the pregnancy, and was the first person I phoned when our son, Frederik Pohl III, was born in the cold November of 1954.

He was a big, strong, beautiful baby. He came home from the hospital with a slight cold, or something of the sort. The pediatrician thought it would clear up quickly. It didn't. He became seriously ill, and then, very quickly, he died.

If I could go back and rewrite my life with the privilege of editing out one experience, that is the one I would pick to obliterate. Even now I cannot think of it without rage and pain. Friends tried to console us with the promise that as time went by we would forget. They lied. The only thing that happened was that the pain receded and became bearable. Even that took a long, long time.

What made the world begin to look promising again, fifteen months later, was the birth of another son, to whom we gave the name Frederik Pohl IV. Since he is now a man grown, I dare not say what I would like to say about his infancy, because he would have my heart out. But when he came into the house the world brightened. Rick was born in January, 1956. Cyril and I were just finishing a novel called Presidential Year. We were into the last chapter when Carol announced that it was time; I took her to the hospital, came back, wrote the final pages of the novel just as the phone rang to announce the birth. I am not so enslaved to writing discipline that I would do that sort of thing as a matter of course. With Presidential Year we didn't really have a choice. It was about—well, it was about a Presidential Year, which 1956 was; if we wanted it out in time to do anything, we had to get it to the printer.

In the event, the novel was only a marginal success. It sold a reasonable number of copies, got some friendly reviews, and earned a little movie money. That was it. It is more or less irrelevant to these radically different post-Watergate political days, and so I have to call it at best a passable accomplishment; but the son was a triumph.

 

Presidential Year was written for Ian's Ballantine Books, as were more than half the books I have written for anyone in my life so far.*

 

* I don't really know how many books there are. I used to. I used to write the title and date of every new book on the wall of my office as they came out. Then Carol painted the wall. The total is somewhere around a hundred, give or take half a dozen or so.

 

By 1956 Ian had gone through a burst of opening splendor, a fairly catastrophic fallback, and a return to reasonable prosperity. The thing about Ian as a publisher was that he couldn't help seeing the authors' side of it. When he started, every paperback company in the United States was paying 4 percent royalty to its authors. Ian decided to pay eight. Every other paperback publisher was sticking pretty close to Westerns mysteries, and best-seller fiction. Ian chose to let his writers try new things. He was not only a publisher but a friend, and he was something else, too. Ian was my bank. When the well ran dry I would go to Ian and say, "More money, please, sir." And he would give me an advance on some future book, not only not written but not even thought out yet in my head.

For all those reasons Ian Ballantine became my principal publisher and stayed so as long as he was head of the company that bears his name. I am not sure whether this was wise or not. There is a limit to how many books by one writer any publisher can keep in print. If the writer is Joseph Heller, publishing a book every eighteen years or so, that is one thing. If the writer is Isaac Asimov, or Robert Silverberg at his most fertile, emitting books every twenty-eight days as the moon grows full—a little blood and a few days' discomfort, and there's the book—obviously no publisher in the world is going to keep up with him. If the writer is somewhere in between, like me, then the problem is hard to solve. My trouble is that I have monogamous instincts. Flitting from publisher to publisher has always seemed sort of vaguely promiscuous. So I had an adolescent fling with Gnome Press, and an occasional dalliance with Doubleday, and a few one-night stands here and there, but then it was back to hearth, home, and Ballantine Books.

As Ballantine with books, so Galaxy with serial rights was my main outlet, but there I was even more often led astray. There were so many magazines!

Some were edited by old and good friends, for whom I really wanted to write. When Bob Lowndes's science-fiction magazines at Columbia Publications were shot down by the war, he stayed on as general editor of the pulp group. As science fiction began looking good again, he revived them. Bob is a skilled editor, particularly in dealing with some kinds of writers, and although his rates were seldom competitive with the top of the field, he put together attractive magazines. Larry Shaw, who had briefly been one of my employees during my agency days, became editor of Jim Quinn's magazine If, in Kingston, New York. Leo Margulies, once head honcho for Thrilling Wonder et al., started a new magazine called Fantastic Universe. Out in Chicago, Ray Palmer left Amazing Stories to start his own science-fiction magazine. The magazines swelled tall in fairy circles after every rain, thirty-odd separate titles on the stands at one time. Although I was writing a hundred thousand words a year, I couldn't appear in all of them. But I gave it a royal try.

Then, suddenly, it was harvest time. The magazines fell like threshed wheat.

A lot of them, of course, were well ripe for obliteration, put together in a hurry by people who knew nothing of science fiction, printing derivative yard goods and living off the reputations of their better brethren. But some of the good ones fell, too. Bad science fiction hurts good. The in-and-out readers who have not yet developed a major habit don't always distinguish between magazines—or between authors, either—and if the last two or three sf books or magazines they've read have displeased them, it may be a while before they buy any more science fiction at all.

But that was not the major reason for the collapse. What did them all in so massively and fast was the sale of the American News Company.

I think I have to explain what the American News Company was. It was a nationwide distributor. When a publisher brings out a magazine or a line of paper-hacks, he does not walk down to your corner newsstand to put them in the racks. He employs intermediaries for that purpose: a national distributor who in turn supplies a large number of local wholesalers, six or eight hundred sizable ones in the United States.

American News had its own local wholesalers in every community. They were not a monopoly. There were a dozen or more other national distributors, collectively called "the Independents." They jointly supplied another complete network of local wholesalers, so that in every community there were two sources from which newsdealers got their publications: the ANC wholesaler, and the wholesaler for the Independents. ANC was big, mighty, and old. It had been around so long that over the years it had acquired all sorts of valuable real property. Land. Buildings. Restaurants. Franchises. Items of considerable cash value, acquired when time was young and everything was cheap, and still carried on their books at the pitiful acquisition costs of 1890 or 1910. A stock operator took note of all this and observed that if you bought up all the outstanding stock in ANC (a publicly held corporation) at prevailing prices, you would have acquired an awful lot of valuable real estate at, really, only a few cents on the dollar. It was as profitable as buying dollar bills for fifty cents each. And it was legal.

So he did. He bought a controlling interest and liquidated the company.

Now, all this is perfectly legal. It is even common. It may seem strange that you can buy dollar bills for fifty cents each in this way, but that's because most of us still believe in the legends we were taught at our mothers' knees: Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the validity of the pricing mechanisms of the Free Market. Let's have a short multiple-choice quiz:

 

Q. What does the price of a share of stock reflect?

       I. Its proportionate value of the assets of the corporation?

      II. The expectation of future earnings?

     III. The growth expectations of the corporation?

     IV. The security of the investment?

A. None of the above.

 

What the price of a share reflects is nothing more or less than the state of mind of the people who buy it.

The New York Stock Exchange is basically a big parimutuel machine which balances off optimism and gloom.* When optimism is high, the price goes up. When optimism goes down, the price does, too. Investors do not really know what they are doing, you know. During the excitement of the early days of commercial air transport, thousands of them spent millions of dollars to get in on the ground floor by buying a stock called Seaboard Airways. (It turned out to be a railroad.) And more recently, remember the misery of all the wise old institutional investors who bought gold.

 

* See Gladiator-at-Law, by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Bantam Books.

 

So there was old American News, ripe for the scavenging, and it was scavenged. The operator bought up a controlling interest, sold off everything that could be sold, and liquidated the concern. He made quite a nice couple of capital-gains bucks out of it all, and in the process American News Company ceased to exist.

Oh, the panic, the terror! All the magazines that had been distributed by ANC now had no way to get their next issues on the newsstands!

The publishers came running to the offices of the various Independents, hats in hands, tears in their eyes. Most of them were turned down flat. There was just so much volume that each Independent was capable of handling, and they picked and chose. Life and Time they were glad to take. But who wanted to bother with some bimonthly pulp about spaceships and monsters? Especially if the publisher was rather inadequately financed and in the habit of hitting up his distributors for advances to pay the printers?

This period in history is referred to by scholars as "the final solution to the sf magazine boom," and, one by one, they went to the gas ovens. Some were spared, of course. The luckiest of the lot was Galaxy. Horace Gold had heard rumblings and warned Bob Guinn only a matter of months before that it was time to move. So he had taken his business from ANC to one of the Independents just before the stock shuffle began, and in the panic that followed, Bob could look on with compassion and complacency because he already had his contracts for distribution signed.

But for the others—a score of them, at least—R.I.P. Their like shall not come this way again.

 

All was not smooth sailing for Galaxy, however. It did have a problem. The problem was the health of its editor, H. L. Gold.

Like Cyril Kornbluth and Dirk Wylie, Horace had come out of World War II as a disabled veteran.

For a man officially described as "disabled," Horace was fantastically able. In his dealings with writers, agents, artists, printers, and all the other fauna of the publishing environment, his problems did not slow him down for a second. What he could not accomplish by phone he managed by mail. When letters failed, he persuaded the people he needed to see to come to his apartment in Stuyvesant Town.

It did cost him. There were times when he would have five or six people visiting him at once, and abruptly they would be too many. Horace would retreat to the hall, looking into the room where everyone else was gathered; a part of the conversation, saying everything that needed to be said, but shielded by the doorframe. There were times when anxiety made decision-making unpleasant, then difficult, now and then impossible.

Editing a magazine is no easy spot for a person who second-guesses his decisions. There is a go or no-go decision to be made on every manuscript, a hundred times a week, not to mention all the serial decisions that go into the big ones.

When he could, he would ask writers and other friends for help. Groff Conklin did a great deal to assist; so did Evelyn Gold, Horace's wife. More and more he came to me. He would save up the slush-pile manuscripts until they filled every drawer of a bureau in his bedroom. Then he would ask me to deal with them, and I would take them away, a suitcase-full at a time. What I liked I would return to him with appropriate comments—"Buy this one," "Tell him it needs cutting," "The scene beginning on page nineteen kills the point of the story"—whatever. What I didn't like I stuck a rejection slip on and dropped in the mail.

It is not uncommon for an editor to have someone to do his preliminary reading for him. I've never done it myself, but then I was lucky enough to be able to read fast. In the late 1950s Horace began to go beyond that. At times he asked me to "ghost" the magazine for him: do all the reading, all the buying and bouncing, all the preparation of the magazine for the printer, all the writing of blurbs and house ads and editorials.

None of this was any sweat for me, really. If anything, I looked on the chance to edit a magazine again as a pleasant vacation from the reality of pounding the typewriter for a living.

Between times Horace functioned as always, acerbic, quick, opinionated. He had lost faith with all the orthodox procedures for dealing with his problems and began about then to devise his own therapy. At least twenty times he offered to share it with me, but I wanted no part of it. I did not see that I had any problems that needed psychotherapy at all. (Vanity, vanity!)

It is my personal opinion that any therapy sometimes produces benefits, probably on the analogy of kicking the Model T to see if it will start itself running. Horace's did—at least temporarily, at least now and then, at least for some people. One of them was Horace himself. He made it out of his apartment now, at first experimentally, late at night; often I would come by in my car and pick him up, and we would drive around New York, stopping now and then to let him get out and walk and stretch his limits. Then he began to go out on his own, or with others, sometimes for a weekend.

Then, on one of his excursions, he was injured in a taxi smash.

Together with the other threats to his health, his injuries were more than he could stand. He began to lose weight. Horace is medium height, normally rather solidly built. A hundred and seventy pounds would be a good weight for him. He dropped down close to a hundred. He could not eat. He was in constant pain. And toward the end of 1960 it became clear that his life was in danger, and that he was simply too ill to continue with the magazine, or indeed with any activity not directly aimed at getting him better.

With Horace's approval I went downtown to see Bob Guinn, the publisher of Galaxy, offering to fill in for Horace on a temporary basis until things clarified themselves.

Bob hemmed and hawed a little bit. He had had ten years of an editor who never came into the office, and if there was going to be any change, he would have liked it to be in the direction of someone who would be where he could be watched forty hours a week. Well, this is against my religion. I said, as a concession, that I would be willing to come in maybe once a week, at least for part of a day, but that was as far as I could go; Bob mulled it over for a day or two and then called me up to say he agreed.

I stayed with Galaxy for just about a decade. The pay was miserable. The work was never-ending. It was the best job I ever had in my life.

 

 

 

 

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