1
As It Was in the Beginning
When I first encountered science fiction, Herbert Hoover was the President of the United States, a plump, perplexed man who never quite figured out what had gone wrong. I was ten years old. I didn't know what had gone wrong, either.
A boy of ten is not without intelligence. It seems to me that then I was about as educable and perceptive as I was ever going to be in my life. What I did lack was knowledge. Was something bad happening in the world? I had no way of knowing. It was the only world I had ever experienced. I knew we moved a lot. I suspected that it was because we couldn't pay the rent, but that wasn't any new thing in my ten-year-old life. My father had always been a plunger. There were times when we lived in suites in luxury hotels, and times when we didn't live anywhere at all, at least as a family. My father would be in one place, my mother in another, and me with some relative until they could get it together again. The name of the game that year was the Great Depression, but I didn't know I was playing it. And at some point in that year of 1930 I came across a magazine named Science Wonder Stories Quarterly, with a picture of a scaly green monster on the cover. I opened it up. The irremediable virus entered my veins.
Of course it isn't really true that there is no cure for the science-fiction addiction, because every year there are thousands of spontaneous remissions. I have wondered from time to time why it is that any number of kids can discover science fiction and some will abandon it in a year, others will keep a casual interest indefinitely but never progress beyond that, while a few, like me, will make it a way of life. I suppose both seed and soil are needed. Damon Knight says that, as children, all we science-fiction writers were toads. We didn't get along with our peers. We had no close friends and were thus thrown on our own internal resources. Reading, particularly science fiction, filled the gaps. A more charitable explanation might be that most science-fiction readers were precocious kids who got little reward from the chatter of their subteen schoolmates and looked for more stimulating companionship in print. Either way, Damon was hooked, and so was I, and so were some ten or twenty thousand people all over the world who comprise the great collective family called "science fiction."
I do, however, deny that I was a toad.
Actually, I was quite a good-looking ten- or twelve-year-old. I have the pictures to prove it. My reflexes were okay, and I could handle myself at sports. Never much of a ballplayer, but a good swimmer and a good marksman from the age of ten on. I did not, it is true, spend a great deal of time with my peers. I missed four years out of the beginning of my school career, partly from moving, partly from maternal stubbornness. Every time I went to school I got sick. Not just sniffles or Monday-morning fevers, but thumping good cases of all the UCD. The law said I had to go to school at a certain age, and so obediently my parents sent me off; I got whooping cough and was in bed for a month. They sent me back; I got sick again, with something else; sent me again, and I came home with scarlet fever. In the 1920s, that was no fun. It meant a Board of Health quarantine sign on the door, all my possessions baked in an oven for two hours, and nothing for me, for weeks on end, but to lie in bed and wish I had something to do. Well, I did have something to do. I read. I don't remember a time when I couldn't read, and the Bobbsey Twins and Peewee Harris kept me content when I couldn't go out and skate.
After my mother came to the conclusion that the New York City public-school system was proposing to kill her only child with its diseases, she kept me out of school entirely. It helped that we moved so often. Even so, from time to time the truant officer would come around to complain. She would inform him that she herself was a fully accredited teacher, a graduate of Lehigh State Teachers College and well able to tutor her son at home. Perhaps she was. I don't remember any lessons, only books in endless supply. But that is not a bad way of getting an education.
When I was around eight the world finally caught up with us, and I started school. They had a little trouble placing me. By age, I should have been a grade or two lower down. In terms of some of the specifics children learn, I was hardly performing at kindergarten level; when the principal asked me to write my name, I smiled sweetly and said, "I'll print it for you." (There are no penmanship lessons in Huckleberry Finn.) But in reading and general knowledge of the world I was well up there with the big kids, and so they compromised on 4-A. It wasn't so bad. The only thing I can find to object to in my grammar-school career was that I don't remember learning anything in it.
My father, he was a traveling man. When he was around twenty-two he was a machinery salesman, and one of his accounts was Flegenheimer's iron and steel works, near Allentown, Pennsylvania. There my mother, a redheaded Irish girl two or three years older than he, worked as a secretary. They got married in 1917. The next year my father was drafted. He spent a few weeks in basic training, prepping to go to France to kill off the Kaiser and finish World War I, but the Armistice came before they got around to him. He got out without ever having gone overseas. On the twenty-sixth of November in 1919 I was born. The next week my father left for the Panama Canal, where he had a job waiting. My mother and I followed, and I spent my first Christmas at sea.
They tell me that the Canal Zone was not a bad place to be—assuming, of course, that you were American, employed, and white. We had servants, including one immense black lady whose only job was taking care of me. But we didn't stay there. My father spent his life convinced there was something better than what he had, if he could only find it. We chased it to places like Texas, New Mexico, and California over the next couple of years. By the time I was old enough to be aware of where I was, we were back in Brooklyn. And there, in one neighborhood or another, we stayed all through my childhood.
Depression or none, Brooklyn was a warm and kindly place to me. There was much to do, and little to fear. I can remember a few rough times—schoolboy fistfights, once or twice a tentative advance from some sad, predatory gay, a time or two when older kids carried a practical joke a touch too far. But nothing that made me afraid. What I remember best are pleasures. Penny candy and Saturday movie-matinees. Sunday drives to my grandparents' home in Broad Channel, gimcrack little house that old Ernst Pohl had built with his own hands on tidal water, with killies to be seen from the plank walks that reached out to the stilted summer houses behind it. Cattail marshes you could lose yourself in, four or five blocks from my house. Summer camp at Fire Place Lodge, where I learned to ride a horse, paddle a canoe, and hit what I aimed at with a .22. Once or twice a year we would take the Lehigh Railroad to visit my mother s family in Allentown. All I remember of them are character tags: the leap-year aunt who had had fewer birthdays than I because she was born on the twenty-ninth of February, the uncle who drank (I remember my tiny mother taking a bottle away from her six-foot-four brother and pouring it down the sink), the cousin who played the violin.
A ten-year-old is a piece of unexposed film. I soaked up all the inputs that fell on me without sharing them. I perceived quite early that I was a reader, and most of the people I came in contact with were not. It made a barrier. What they wanted to talk about were things they had eaten, touched, or done. What I wanted to talk about was what I had read.
When it developed that what I was thinking and reading was more and more science fiction, the barrier grew. I don't want to give the impression that I read only science fiction. Perhaps I would have if I could, but there wasn't enough of it to meet my needs. Since I had the good luck to learn to read long before I saw the inside of a school and so did not associate it with drudgery, I read quickly and easily; and if I didn't understand all the words, I could usually get the drift, confident that sooner or later the words would fit themselves into a context. One reason for this catholicity of taste was that I had very little control over what reading matter was available to me. At ten, I had not achieved the sophistication of buying books for myself or belonging to a library; I took what turned up in the house or what I could borrow from friends. That first issue of Science Wonder was heaven, but I didn't realize that the fact that it was a magazine implied that there would be other issues for me to find. When another science-fiction magazine came my way, a few months later, it was like Christmas. That was an old copy of the Amazing Stones Annual, provenance unknown. Given two examples, I was at last able to deduce the probability of more, and the general concept of "science-fiction magazines" became part of my life.
That Amazing Stones Annual contained the complete text of Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Master Mind of Mars, all red-skinned princesses and mad scientists and huge, four-armed, talking white apes. I doted on it. The cover enslaved me before I turned a page: bright buckeye painting of Ras Thavas, the crazy old organ transplanter of Barsoom, leaning over the sweet, dead form of a beautiful Martian maiden into which he proposed to transplant some rich old hag's brain. I couldn't wait to read it; having read it, at once read it again; having all but memorized it, attained the wisdom to go looking for more. I found more. I found back-number magazine stores where I could pick up 1927 Amazings and 1930 Astoundings for the nickel or dime apiece that even my ten-year-old budget could afford. I found second-hand bookstores, scads of them, which turned out to have science-fiction books: all the rest of the Burroughs oeuvre, originally published in the Grosset & Dunlap editions for a dollar and now available to me, hardly damaged, for as little as a dime. It was something of a blow to find that Burroughs had written books about other things than the planet Barsoom. I tried Tarzan as an experiment and didn't much like it—talking great apes were not wonderful enough for me—but there were half a dozen other Mars books, plus books about Venus, Pellucidar, and the Moon.
All of these interesting places appeared to have sensibly organized native civilizations, with beautiful princesses to win and important deeds of valor to do; more they had useful and exciting inventions, like radium rifles and airships propelled by the secret rays of the sun. I got my first public-library card around then. Although I was ghettoized into the children's section without appeal, I found tons of Jules Verne and a smattering of H. G. Wells. Verne was bread and butter, enough to survive on, at least; Wells was pure delight. And now that my antennae were sensitized, I discovered children's books that showed the same stigmata: Carl H. Claudy, Roy Rockwood, even, although contemptibly old-fashioned and watered-down, Tom Swift.
My uncle Bill Mason turned out to be King Midas for me. He was my war-wounded uncle, gassed in the Argonne in World War I and eking out some sort of a livelihood on his disability pension, an occasional job of watch repairing, and what he could grow on a rented acre of ground in Harlem, Pennsylvania. He took me off my parents' hands now and then in the summer, not so much to give me a vacation as to get me away from the polio scare that enlivened most pre-Salk city summers. I enjoyed going to the farm. We could swim behind the dam in the little brook, hunt ginseng in the woods, engage in butting contests with the neighbor's bull calves. I was even allowed to fire the family shotgun now and then.
I wasn't much use as a farmhand, but neither were my two cousins. The three of us put much more effort into the avoiding of work than into the doing of it. When trapped, we could feed the chickens and gather the eggs. We could cut a little brush and pick potato bugs off the vines. What we did as much as we could was hide.
After some research, I found the perfect hiding place in the farmhouse attic. My grandfather lived on the same farm, and he grew his own tobacco. The attic was where he cured it, so that it smelled of ripening tobacco and a sour-salty tang of heat. But that wasn't the marvelous thing about it. The truly marvelous thing was that in a corner of the attic was a treasure-trove of old pulp magazines, hundreds of them.
Only a few were science-fiction magazines. Quite a lot were Westerns or queer things like submarine stories and sports magazines, but many were golden. Someone had been a big fan of Frank Munsey's old Argosy, then a weekly pulp magazine selling for a dime, each issue packed with half a dozen shorts and installments of four different serials. And what serials! Borden Chase novels about sandhogs digging the Holland tunnel. Eight-parters about adventure in ancient Greece or Rome. I knew nothing of history, but I knew a good story when I read one, and these stories awakened my interest in the classic ages in a way that nothing in school ever did. (I have no doubt that in the long run I owe the fact that I am the Encyclopedia Britannica's source for the Roman emperor Tiberius to those old pulp novels.) Derring-do among Soviet collective farms and in American steel mills. Medical adventures with Dr. Kildare. Exploration of every corner of the Earth. The literary style was peremptory, and someone was getting hit over the head on every page, but they were grand. And among them was the occasional pure vein of science fiction. I read A. Merritt's The Moon Pool up in that attic, with the temperature a hundred and four under the eaves, and Ray Cummings and Otis Adelbert Kline, and I only stopped when someone dragged me away. Or when the sun went down. The house had neither electricity nor running water, and after dark there were only limited options. You could sit in the kitchen by the kerosene lantern and listen to Whisperin' Jack Smith on the battery radio. Or you could go to bed.
So in the two years from age ten to twelve I managed to read every scrap of science fiction I knew to exist: every back issue of Amazing and Wonder and Astounding, most of Weird Tales, all the books I could find in second-hand stores, friends' homes, and the children's section of the library; everything. My head was popping with spaceships and winged girls and cloaks of invisibility, and I had no one to share it with.
The house we lived in when I was ten was at 2758 East 26th Street in Brooklyn.
A few months ago I did a nostalgic thing. I was driving to Kennedy Airport in my rented Avis car, about to catch a plane to Budapest and, astonishingly, with an hour or two to spare. On impulse I got off the Belt Parkway at Sheepshead Bay, hunted around, and found that very house, the first time I had seen it since I left it forty-five years earlier.
When we lived there, the house had been of the style called "semidetached," which meant that it shared a common building wall with the next-door house on one side. It wasn't semidetached any more. The house next door had been neatly amputated, sacrificed to the building of the Belt, but 2758 was still there, a corner house now, and not really looking very old.
The whole neighborhood was much changed. When New Yorkers say that, what they generally mean is that the blacks and Hispanics have moved in. That isn't so, but it is all built up now. In 1930 it wasn't like that. Most of one side of the big block was an actual farm devoted to growing Italian tomatoes. One of the best things I found to do on late summer nights was to steal and eat them by the pound, fresh off the vine, warm, powdery with some no doubt damaging chemical residue on their skins, but delicious beyond any tomato I have tasted since.
I thought of knocking on that door and asking to look around. But I have no recollection of what the house was like inside. I know which room had to be my room—the back one on the second floor—because I can remember spying out that window into the bedroom of the house across the driveway. But I don't know what the room looked like.
Beyond the house I remember spying into was a vacant lot where we once dug an underground clubhouse. Beyond that was another semidetached house inhabited by a family named Abbot. They had been family friends for years, before either of us lived on that block, and remained so through countless moves of both families until we lost touch in World War II. Griffith and Daisy Abbot were British-born and kept ties to the homeland. Every week or two they received packets of Papers from Home in the mail, mostly children's weeklies like Puck, primitive color-comics about Robin Hood and about somebody named Val who adventured around the English countryside in a "caravan." When the five Abbot kids were through with them, I inherited them, and puzzled in my ten-year-old way over this strange language that seemed to be English but sometimes wasn't. We all played street games like Green Light and King of the Hill. We played other games, too. In one of them we decided to hang somebody—I suppose the game was Rustler and Posse, carried out to its logical Saturday-matinee conclusion—and I was given the starring role. My mother caught sight of what was going on out of the kitchen window and came storming out just as the noose was stretching my neck. On the far side of Sheepshead Bay, reached by a wooden pedestrian bridge, was Oriental Point and a small, primitive, very probably polluted bathing beach. It was about half an hour's walk, and we all walked it over and over again all through the summers. I saw my first dead man there. He was a very ripe one, two weeks drowned and hauled up on the beach pending someone's coming to take him away; I almost stepped on his chest, being busy woolgathering at the time. He smelled. Out along our own side of the bay, in the general direction of Queens and Long Island, there was not much between our house and the new Floyd Bennett Field except tidelands and bulrushes. They were marvelous to roam around in. You could get lost in a minute, and see nothing made by man for an hour. Now they are all high-rise apartments, built on God-knows-what foundations.
It was a nice place to be. But the money ran out, and we could no longer pay the rent on the house. In the winter of 1931 we moved into a tiny apartment downtown.
The words "the money ran out" cannot be understood in the context of the 1970s as they were in that quite different ambience of 1931.
Nearly half a century later, money never quite runs out. I don't mean there are no poor people any more. Of course there are, and enough squalor and misery to stock a planet. But when trouble strikes in the 1970s, there is one additional option. You can surrender to it. You collect unemployment insurance, or you go on welfare; if you're evicted, some bureau picks you up and finds you a place to live; if you're sick, there are agencies to pay your doctor bills. In 1931 you could not surrender because there was no one to give up to. You could find a soup kitchen to get something to eat. But no one would keep your family together, and no one would pay your rent.
The other side of the coin in the Great Depression was that the landlords were in as much trouble as you were. There were plenty of apartments to rent, and it was a buyer's market. To persuade you to take his apartment in the first place, the landlord would give you the first two months free; you paid the third month and moved after the fourth.
Or so my family seemed to do, in one year in which we lived in four different apartments. Our first apartment after 26th Street was in a high-rise just off Grand Army Plaza, with its livery stables and luxury flats. We made our way down Flatbush Avenue a few blocks at a time, winding up in a cold-water flat* on Dean Street, at the bottom of Park Slope. (Then things began to improve, and a year or so later we were back up at the top of the Slope again.)
* "Cold-water" flats had hot water; what they didn't have was central heating. |
Even in those years, the pit of the Great Depression, that part of Flatbush Avenue was a bustling, lively street, seamed with trolley tracks, lined with shops of all kinds. The merchants might have had trouble paying their rent, but they put on a busy front. There were three motion-picture theaters in that eight-block stretch, and they told the story of the Depression more clearly than the stores did. At the top of the hill, the Bunny Theater was open, but not as a theater; it had been turned into an indoor miniature golf course. At the foot of the hill, the Atlantic was shuttered, hoping for better times. The only one that was functioning was the Carlton, in between, and it wasn't prospering greatly. On Tuesdays they would let you in for nothing if you would drop a can of food into a bin to feed the hungry of the neighborhood.
None of the people I knew personally had anything to do with bread lines or baskets for the poor. They weren't "poor." They didn't think of themselves as poor, only broke. In the war for survival they were outnumbered and surrounded, but they had not surrendered (if only because there was no agency to surrender to) and they had not, yet, been wiped out. Of the totally defeated, I only encountered one, and him only at long range.
The shuttered Atlantic Theater was a nice place for a twelve-year-old to spend an hour or two on an idle Saturday, climbing the fire escape, four stories of strap-iron stairs and landings. From the top landing you could look down like a god on the people strolling Flatbush Avenue. I went there often. But on one Saturday, as I started up the stairs, I perceived that something was different. The top landing seemed to be full of cardboard cartons. I ghosted up the steps, silent as any kid stalking the strange, and saw that the top landing had been walled with flattened cardboard. Inside the room he had built, sitting on the floor, doing nothing because having nothing to do, was a white-haired old man.
When I say "the money ran out," what I mean is him. Even at twelve I could figure out his story. He was alone, and broke, and had nowhere to go. He managed to get one sparse meal on the bread lines every day, and he had the clothes he stood up in, and that was all. He had no other place to live. There were such things as municipal lodging houses, true. But there were an awful lot of penniless, hopeless, homeless men, and so the "munies" were full.
I tiptoed unseen back down the stairs to ponder this. For the first time in my life I was moved to charity. I took some eggs out of the icebox, hard-boiled them, put them in a paper bag, sneaked back up the steps, and left them for him. A day later I stole back and found a note he had left for me, penciled almost illegibly on a scrap of the paper bag: God-bless-you-unknown-stranger, and Thanks.
And a day or two after that his cardboard nest had been taken apart and carried away, and he was gone.
The thing about my friend of the fire escape was that there were so many of him. You saw him all over, thousands and thousands of him, in every city of the land. Younger versions of him shoveled snow, in their black dress shoes and double-breasted business suits—the only clothes they had to wear, and the only thing they could find to do. They prayed for snow. An inch of snow was a dollar's worth of shoveling. You saw him in his improvised huts, cardboard or sheet tin, in the parks and the vacant lots, whole communities of him. And he could be you. My own grandfather would have been one of him if there had not been my mother or my uncle to take him in.
The communities of homeless men were called "Hoovervilles," an honor our President did not like and had not sought. How much of the blame for the Great Depression belonged to Hoover, really? I tried to answer that question once, in a book that I worked on for several years, decades after the fact.* Hoover did not plant the seeds, they were sown over the boom years of the 20s, in easy credit buying and mad stock swindles. But he did nothing to respond to the crisis. Herbert Hoover was a decent, capable man, who boasted of his kindly, fatherly record of providing food for the needy in the battle-damaged Europe of World War I. He could not see the point of giving help to people who were merely out of work, and so history, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, assigned him the blame for the whole thing.
* After fifty thousand words of copy and three-quarters of a million words of notes, I decided I didn't like the book and bought back the contract, so it is, and may well remain, unpublished. |
A few years ago I was on Long John Nebel's all-night radio talk show, and the conversation turned to the Depression. With great joy I plunged into an analysis of who had been at fault. I described Hoover's flat refusal to provide food or jobs for the needy, and his callous cruelty (or cowardice?) when he permitted MacArthur and Eisenhower to drive the bonus marchers away from their encampment on Anacostia Flats. I drew a picture of him as a frightened and closed-minded man who had neither the wisdom to see that fundamental change was needed nor the courage to admit mistakes, and as I was soaring through my peroration Long John passed a note to me across the studio table: "Did you know he's listening to you?" It was so. The dying ex-President didn't sleep well in his Waldorf suite, and it was his custom to tune in Long John on the radio by his bed through the long nights. That was a shock. I had been thinking of him as a symbol for so long that it had never occurred to me that he was still a living, hurting old man.
I had another shock, but a pleasant one, when I was writing my book on the Depression: I found a newspaper story about my friend of the fire escape, and a third of a century after the fact learned the end of his story. The beginning was just about what I had deduced. He had had a job, but the job closed; had money in the bank, but the bank went broke; had a room but couldn't pay the rent; and so the landlord turned him out and kept his clothes and workmen's tools (he was a carpenter) against the unpaid bill. The police found him on the theater fire escape and chased him away, but a newspaper reporter happened to cover the story. The publicity resulted in his getting admitted to a municipal shelter; so, in a sense, his story had at least a happy ending.
But I've always wondered who was turned out of the municipal lodging house to make room for my friend.
And all this had its effect on science fiction, not only on my own work but on that of many writers; not only in affecting moods and themes but in practical, tangible ways. Magazines were a Depression business. If you couldn't afford fifty cents to take the family to the movies, you could probably scrape up a dime or twenty cents to buy a magazine, and then pass the magazine back and forth to multiply the investment. And talk was cheap. One reason for the growth of science-fiction fan clubs in the 30s was that you could get an evening's worth of entertainment out of two nickels spent on the subway.
There is a populist, anti-establishment tone to a lot of the science fiction of the 30s, and in fact to all science fiction everywhere. One of the reasons has to do with its flowering in an age in which anyone could plainly see that the Establishment had screwed up the world. Rich people got a very bad press in almost all newspapers, magazines, books, plays, and films, and nowhere worse than in science fiction. Rich people were "Steel"—power behind villainous Blackie DuQuesne and evil adversaries of good, pure Richard Ballinger Seaton—in The Skylark of Space. They were the pitifully empty Eloi of The Time Machine, the smug and corrupt legless master race of The Revolt of the Pedestrians, the maniac gulgul-collectors of The Blue Barbarians.
Of course, that tradition is older than the Depression,* but the climate of the times encouraged it, and even encouraged that kind of thinking about the unthinkable which is one of the hallmarks of some kinds of science fiction: talk of social change. The 30s seethed with proponents of social change: Anarchists and Technocrats, Single-Taxers and four or five brands of Marxists, Father Coughlin and Upton Sinclair, Ham and Eggs and Thirty Dollars Every Thursday. Science fiction both reflected and sparked events in the outside world. When you invent a new civilized planet, you have to invent a new society to inhabit it; when you invent a new society, you make a political statement about the one you live in. Every writer is in some sense a preacher. (Why else would anyone write a book?) With or without intent, with or without awareness of what they were doing, the science-fiction writers were preaching.
* In fact, most of the stories I have just named were written before 1929. |
James Blish once had a theory that science-fiction writing was the specific consequence of some historical event, as Parkinson's Syndrome was considered to be the late aftereffect of the world influenza epidemic of 1920. He could not identify the event, but he based his theory on the observation that, of all major science-fiction writers alive a decade or two ago, more than half had been born within a year or two of 1920.
Jim's theory doesn't now seem as plausible as it did when he proposed it, because there are too many new writers showing their faces: Samuel R. Delany, Larry Niven, even a few who were actually being born just about when Jim was developing his theory, such as George R. R. Martin. But there's some truth to it, at least in the sense that science fiction does clearly show the impact of the social confusion and experimentation of the 30s. For all of us who were born between, say 1915 and 1920—Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and a lot of others—the world of the 30s, which was the world of the Great Depression, was where we grew up, and where we formed our conceptions of the universe.