Murray Leinster

by Billiee J. Stallings; Jo-an J. Evans

  Also due to his bereavement, he felt, as he told Billee, “No one is going to visit anymore now that your Mother’s gone.”

  Of course, they did. Betty, Bill and Beth lived close by in Gloucester Court House. Billee’s daughter Pam and her husband, Cliff Hayes, moved from Tennessee to Clay Bank, while he finished his last year of college at William and Mary in Williamsburg before going on to Louisville Presbyterian Seminary. They rented a house just a short distance upriver from Will’s. Sub-sequently, Billee and her husband purchased that same house, kept it rented, and came down for vacations at Ardudwy just as they always had. Gail was at Westhampton College in Richmond and visited as often as she could. Mary Jr. came down from New Hampshire, where she now lived. And, although Jo-an moved to London in 1968, she came for visits and, after her marriage in 1973, was able to bring her husband, Adrian Evans, to Clay Bank before Will died. Other family members and friends continued to visit, so it went on being the family gathering place that Will had always wanted.

  Surprisingly, for a man fascinated by gadgets, Will was never comfortable making long distance phone calls. There was a family joke that he would buy Mary anything she wanted except time talking long distance. If she made a call, he would stand at her shoulder saying, “Mary, this is long distance. Don’t forget, this is long distance.” He would write to Jo-an, working in New York, asking her to make phone calls to editors for him, rather than call himself.

  In a letter dated September 10, 1964, he asked: “Did you call Miss Wood at Avon about that book synopsis? If not, please do.” Later, when Jo-an was living in London and telephoned, he could barely talk, saying repeatedly, “Gosh, this is costing you a lot of money.” Billee telephoned regularly, so he rarely wrote to her but passed on the news she told him in letters to Jo-an in London to whom he wrote frequently.

  This was unexpectedly fortunate, because a record of these last years remains in his letters.

  On February 12, 1968, a few days after Jo-an left New York to work in London, he wrote:

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  I was looking at a map of London last night and finding out where you lived.

  I was astounded to see how many places I feel like I know — with the damndest associations! Kensington Gardens isn’t so much Peter Pan as the place where one of the smallest bridges in the world exists, and is memorable because Chesterton was more frightened there than anywhere else in his lifetime. The British Museum says, “Karl Marx wrote here,” though I want to see the Egyptology section.

  A few weeks later on February 28, he told her, “I think I understand the way you feel about homesickness. It’s very bad. But as you accumulate even trivial things, it will help. And for time — this is my experience — you’ll get so that you forget now and then that there’s been a change. Things will seem quite normal so long as you don’t notice that they aren’t. Then it’s not so good when you’re reminded, but you can carry on.” He kept her up to date on his work, and on March 15, 1968, wrote, “The Land of the Giants thing went over. A sequel is already bespoken. I’m trying to get started again. That was the first piece of fiction I’ve been able to write since last April. [Mary died April 24.] I’ve covered reams of paper, but none of it would get started, or get ended, or something.” The Land of the Giants was published by Pyramid in 1968, and was followed by The Hot Spot (Pyramid, 1969) and Unknown Danger (Pyramid, 1969).

  All were novelizations of the TV series.

  His most creative years were behind him but he was not forgotten. Barry N. Malzberg called him

  a remarkable, irreplaceable figure. Take him out of the history and as with Campbell that history might collapse ... a remarkable career with many good stories and in my opinion a rare double: He wrote two stories which in essence founded subgenres. I don’t think any other science writer can claim that. “Sidewise in Time” in 1934 was the origination of the parallel world story and of course “First Contact” in 1945 about first contact with an alien civilization was the first major investigation of the theme and its implications. Both were endlessly imitated and imitated. To write two stories of such lasting importance is a staggering accomplishment. I think he is one of those few writers who, if he did not exist, would have left the field entirely different today.

  In April 1968, Syracuse University collected Will’s manuscripts and other papers to preserve in its library. They now fill 71 boxes in the university’s archival division and include manuscripts of published stories, story ideas and synopses, and correspondence with publishers, agents and other writers.

  At the last minute, he decided to keep many of his earliest writings, and the whole experience unnerved him. Above all, he was disappointed that his papers were not to remain in Virginia. As he told Jo-an in a letter dated April 26, 1968, “William and Mary called me on the phone. They’d heard about Syracuse University announcing the gift of my Mss. They wanted to know Ten • After Mary’s Death

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  wouldn’t I rather have them preserved in Virginia. Of course I would. I’d stalled Syracuse for nearly three years.”

  However, during those three years, Will never contacted any of the Virginia institutions that might have been interested in retaining his papers in their libraries. Not realizing that Syracuse contacted him because they were actively building a science fiction collection, he thought that, if others were interested, they would have gotten in touch with him as well. A friend, a William and Mary alumnus, alerted William and Mary of Syracuse’s plans, and, having had it brought to their attention, William and Mary was immediately interested, but by then it was too late.

  In the same letter to Jo-an, Will reported an exchange with his granddaughter Pam when she was still in college in Tennessee: Pam sent me a book by this Chardin guy — avant garde theology — with the observation that he made her MAD, and that I might like to get mad too. I couldn’t stomach the stuff, so I wrote her four pages single space denouncing all pseudo-intellectuals with page and paragraph included. She reported grate-fully that she had to turn in two papers at school and she filled them both out of my letter. I had only meant to exercise a grandfather’s privilege of being oratorical.

  Billee wrote to Jo-an on June 3, 1968, as follows: Another letter so soon. I wanted to fill you in on our plans. Pam will be married August 31.... Dad will be up Monday night to stay for Gail’s graduation the 13th and his birthday and Fathers Day. Talked to him and Betty Friday night and told them all the news. So they are set to come up and Dad was trying to decide whether to come to England for two weeks in August or September.

  He did go to England in September as planned but came to Haddonfield for the wedding first. He was delighted that George Cox, his half-sister Lula’s son, and George’s wife, Martha, were able to attend and Mary and Betty and Beth were there. Beth was a junior bridesmaid.

  During that summer, August of 1968, Will wrote on his favorite subject, gadgets, to his granddaughter Gail:

  What you’re talking about is a mobius strip, named after the German mathematician who described its remarkable properties. It might be respectful to call it a Mobius strip.

  You know how to make one. You take a strip of paper and make it into a loop, having turned one end a half turn before pasting it. But were you ever crazy enough to make the pencil line that proves it has only one surface, and then cut along that pencil line as if to cut it in two? You’ll be surprised. Making a complete turn before pasting produces something else. Splitting some of these secondary loops is crazy, too.

  In this connotation there is also a thing called a Klein Bottle, which instead of being a two-dimensional object with a single surface, is a three dimensional 156

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  object with only one surface. I probably have a picture of it somewhere, but heaven forbid that I try to draw it from memory!

  In the autumn of 1968, Will made his first and only trip out of the U.S.

  to visit Jo-an in London, arriving on a TWA flig
ht on the morning of September 6, 1968, to stay with her at 4a Markham Square in Chelsea.

  Although he wrote on July 29 that he planned to work while he was there and also spend time with his British agent, John Carnell, who wanted to arrange a number of meetings with science fiction fans and publishers, he focused on seeing landmarks for what he understood of his British ancestry, based on the family tree handed down in his family.

  I wish you wouldn’t make long and elaborate plans for me to do sightseeing. I am going to have to finish this book.... I have just one slightly insane place I would like to see. Your ninth great-grandfather spent most of Cromwell’s regime in the Tower. He was officially declared the most stubborn man in England. I’d like to see his cell — maybe even get a picture of it. Also there is his son, Sir Leoline Jenkins whose picture hangs in Jesus College Oxford, who is buried under the altar of that church, who founded scholarships for poor Welsh boys, and got his start as Charles II’s secretary, his special qualification being that he knew more dirty stories than any man in England but the King.

  I’m mildly curious about these things.... Old Judge David Jenkins must have been a character.

  Will loved this story and repeated it many times. Fortunately, he did not live to see it disproved. More accessible records now show that there is no direct male line coming down from the judge or that he and Sir Leoline were related.

  In London, Will wrote copious notes in a specially bought notebook, chuckling at road signs —“Heavy Plant Crossing” and “Do not enter box until exit is clear”— that struck him as worthy of a New Yorker cartoon. The Egyptology section at the British Museum absorbed him completely, and he happily compared the Museum of Natural History with the one he knew so well in New York. A performance of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest particularly pleased him when he discovered he could remember the dialogue almost word for word. He saw Oxford and Cambridge and the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, which, he said, was more or less the same as in the A. A. Milne poem he had so often recited to his children.

  On his return, he enjoyed telling stories about what he had seen. On October 21 he wrote to Jo-an, “I appear to have passed a new ten pence piece off to someone as a quarter. I know I tried a sixpence in a telephone, thought it was a dime, and it was indignantly returned.” On July 12, 1969, Will gave fatherly advice when Jo-an wrote of trying to plan an American meal for English guests: “You spoke of a party. I believe Ten • After Mary’s Death

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  one can get canned corn on the cob. Very, very American. Can you get cornmeal? Spoon-bread would be a novelty.”

  On September 9, 1969, he responded to a postcard from St. Tropez:

  “Stuck in my head somewhere is the statement that the Upper Corniche road to Menton is one of the three most beautiful drives in the world, the others being the road to Clovelly in Devon (where the clotted cream comes from) and El Camino Real in California.”

  In 1969, Will was awarded the First Fandom Hall of Fame award at the Hugo Awards Ceremony at the 27th World Science Fiction Convention held in St. Louis, Missouri, August 28 to September 1. He decided not to attend, and when the award was delivered to him in September, he described it in a letter to Jo-an, dated September 16, 1969, as follows, “It is two feet high with a very, very golden plate containing fulsome praise of me. Then more gold ...

  and up on top a sphere with two gold fins on it and a golden space ship on top.... The intention was admirable and I am properly appreciative, I hope.” For the first time there was livestock at Clay Bank. Mary had won a pony in a raffle a few years before, and it was given to their granddaughter Beth.

  She promptly named him Sandy Joe. As he grew older, a second pony joined him. After Mary died, it was decided that stabling them at Clay Bank might be a welcome diversion, and Will enjoyed them.

  He wrote Jo-an on November 16, 1969, “I feed the animals every morning and night. They can spot me from the cliff ... and look at me indignantly because I’m late. Their expressions say: ‘where the hell is our breakfast?’” He reported on Beth’s pets later in 1972, in a letter to his granddaughter Gail.

  There is little or no news from these parts. The ponies are well and I’ve been trying to get Brandy [his dog] to a more girlish figure. She’s been at least matronly, and I may be kidding myself that she’s lost a few ounces, but I cling to the belief.

  Beth has a kid — an eight-months-old lady goat who is actually learning to do tricks. This adds to tropical fish, a gerbal (Spelling?) [ sic] a cat, dog, the ponies aforementioned and a recently released robin who throve only on earthworms, so there was usually somebody gathering worms for him or her or it.

  In the same letter, he tells Gail that he and Billy DeHardit, Beth’s father, have found a discarded piano in a ditch, and he has salvaged some ivory from the keys. He’d cleaned it up with Brillo and Clorox and was sending it on, because she mentioned an interest in trying to carve scrimshaw. She still has the ivory.

  As Murray Leinster, Will was featured guest at Disclave 70, held by the Washington Science Fiction Association at the Skyline Inn in Washington, 158

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  D.C., in May 1970. He started his speech, “Recollections from My Past,” in character saying, “When the idea of my coming to D.C. to talk to the members of the Washington club was first mentioned, I asked what on earth I should talk about. I was at a loss to think of a good start. Then somebody said that he couldn’t speak for everyone, but it seemed to him that a good dirty story was always a way to get people’s attention.”

  And he swung into a very mildly dirty story (briefly, Mrs. O’Sullivan has triplets. Her neighbor Mrs. Casey visits her and is astounded when Mrs.

  O’Sullivan tells her that the doctor has said it only happens once in every two hundred thousand times. “Merciful heavens!” cries Mrs. Casey. “How did you ever find time to do your housework?”)

  When it finished, he went on, “So I asked if that was all right for a start and was assured it was. Then somebody else spoke up: ‘But this is a highly intellectual group, this Disclave thing. We’re culture. We’re highbrow. Maybe you’d better say something about your literary career.’

  “My literary career? You mean what General Lee got me into?” And he continued with his favorite story about his childhood (with which this biography begins.)

  He always appreciated recognition and was not always sure he deserved it. He wrote to Jo-an on October 5, 1971, “I just got a copy of Analog. There is a sort of Gallup Poll of the best science fiction stories before 1940. I’m listed with The Mad Planet series and The Runaway Skyscraper (!) In fact, I rate number four with H. G. Wells as number one. Not too bad, considering.” On March 25, 1971, Will became a great-grandfather for the first time.

  Pam gave birth to Eric Christopher “Chris” Hayes, the first of Cliff ’s and her four children, in Louisville, Kentucky, where Cliff was completing his studies at the seminary there. She and Cliff were able to bring him to Clay Bank to show him off when he was three. Will reported to Jo-an, “Pam with Cliff and Chris — aged three years of continuous conversation — were down last week and Cliff insists that I have improved his sermons (heaven knows how).” Cliff, who had studied philosophy in college and Louisville Seminary, said Will was the only person he knew who had read Emmanuel Kant in full, not once, but twice.

  Will enjoyed visits by young fans. Michael Swanwick shared a memory with Billee about a visit he made, one that undoubtedly pleased Will very much.

  In 1972, when I was an undergrad at the College of William and Mary, my friend Paul Fuchs and I had the privilege of accompanying my favorite English teacher, Dr. David Clay Jenkins [no relation], on a visit to Ardudwy to see your father. I was overawed by his intelligence, by his kindness, by the enormous piles Ten • After Mary’s Death

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  of books in his living room, by the experimental apparatus he had set up on the dining room table for an invention he was trying to find
a practical use for, indeed by everything about him. He was quite a raconteur. Clustered on a corner of his kitchen table were trophies for several science fiction awards, and he had a funny anecdote for each one, save the last. “And that’s my Hugo,” he said in a way that indicated he would have valued it more if only it had given him a story to tell about it.

  On that same visit, I asked Will Jenkins one of those questions that only a naïve young man can ask: Whether he was optimistic or pessimistic about the future. With a little smile, a distinct twinkle in his eye, and a whimsical touch of an Irish lilt to his voice, he quoted the Virginian ironic fantasist James Branch Cabell, saying, “I contemplate the spectacle with appropriate emotions.” Also in 1971, Will went again to a science fiction convention, an unusual occurrence for him. But it was in Norfolk, his birthplace and just down the road from his Clay Bank home. Bud Webster remembers it in an article in Jim Baen’s Universe, February 2010. The convention was a small event called Dixieland Fancom, and science fiction writer, editor and publisher Donald Wollheim, comic book writer Wally Wood and science fiction artist Kelly Freas were all there.

  Webster remembers Wood as “mostly absent,” and Wollheim as “imperious and frighteningly knowledgeable.” Since Webster had been primarily a comic fan, attending a science fiction convention was a first for him. But he knew Will’s works well, primarily because Will was so frequently reprinted.

  Groff Conklin, a prolific anthologist, had included Leinster stories in many of them. He had been keeping score in an unofficial competition between Leinster and Sturgeon appearances and noted in Science Fiction Adventures in Mutations (Vanguard, 1955) that the race was a draw. Both had appeared in all but one of his sixteen anthologies. Later, Sturgeon won with twenty-three, as opposed to Will’s nineteen.

  Webster wrote further, “I was barely even a fan back then.... The idea of meeting and speaking with one of my heroes, therefore, was more than a little alien to me. Will, on the other hand was an old pro at this. He knew how not to embarrass or discourage a fanboy, a skill I was later to discover was common in most pros, but appallingly lacking in others.” Later he added, “He was a dyed-in-the-wool Southern Gentleman, generous with his time and advice to younger authors.” Webster’s summary of Will’s work is insightful: “If there was a market he could figure out a yarn for, he wrote it and sold it. This strikes me as a handy thing for a professional writer to be able to do.” In response to what author, editor and critic Damon Knight has called