We had other strict rules. No cop could be crooked. They could be dumb, but they had to be honest. We disapproved of Raymond Chandler's corrupt police. No mechanical or scientific device could be used unless it had a firm foundation in fact. We used to laugh at the outlandish gadgets Bob Kane invented (he wrote his own squinkas as a rule) for "Batman and Robin" which, among ourselves, we called Batman and Rabinowitz. Sadism was absolutely taboo; no torture scenes, no pain scenes. And, of course, sex was completely out.
Holiday tells a great story about George Horace Lorrimer, the awesome editor-in-chief of The Saturday Evening Post, our sister magazine. He did a very daring thing for his time. He ran a novel in two parts and the first installment end with the girl bringing the boy back to her apartment midnight for coffee and eggs. The second installment opened with them having breakfast together in her apartment following morning. Thousands of indignant letters came and Lorrimer had a form reply printed: "The Saturday Evening Post is not responsible for the behavior of its character between installments." Presumably our comic book heroes lived normal lives between issues; Batman getting bombed and chasing ladies into bed, Rabinowitz burning down his school library in protest against something.
I was married by then, and my wife was an actress. One day she told me that the radio show, "Nick Carter," was looking for scripts. I took one of my best comic book stories, translated it into a radio script, and it was accepted. Then my wife told me that a new show, "Charlie Chan," was having script problems. I did the same thing with the same result. By the end of the year I was the regular writer on those two shows and branching out to "The Shadow" and others. The comic book days were over, but the splendid training I received in visualization, attack, dialogue, and economy stayed with me forever. The imagination must come from within; no one can teach you that. The ideas must come from without, and I'd better explain that.
Usually, ideas don't just come to you out of nowhere; they require a compost heap of germination, and the compost is diligent preparation. I spent many hours a week in the reading rooms of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. I read everything and anything with magpie attention for a possible story idea; art frauds, police methods, smuggling, psychiatry, scientific research, color dictionaries, music, demography, biography, plays . . . the list is endless. I'd been forced to develop a speed-reading technique in law school and averaged a dozen books per session. I thought that one potential idea per book was a reasonable return. All that material went into my Commonplace Book for future use. I'm still using it and still adding to it.
And so for the next five or six years I forgot comics, forgot science fiction and immersed myself in the entertainment business. It was new, colorful, challenging and—I must be honest—far more profitable. I wrote mystery, adventure, fantasy, variety, anything that was a challenge, a new experience, something I'd never done before. I even became the director on one of the shows, and that was another fascinating challenge.
But very slowly an insidious poison began to diminish my pleasure; it was the constraints of network censorship and client control. There were too many ideas which I was not permitted to explore. Management said they were too different; the public would never understand them. Accounting said they were too expensive to do; the budget couldn't stand it. One Chicago client wrote an angry letter to the producer of one of my shows, "Tell Bester to stop trying to be original. All I want is ordinary scripts." That really hurt. Originality is the essence of what the artist has to offer. One way or another, we must produce a new sound.
But I must admit that the originality-compulsion can often be a nuisance to myself as well as others. When a concept for a story develops, a half-dozen ideas for the working-out come to mind. These are examined and dismissed. If they came that easily, they can't be worthwhile. "Do it the hard way," I say to myself, and so I search for the hard way, driving myself and everybody around me quite mad in the process. I pace interminably, mumbling to myself, I go for long walks. I sit in bars and drink, hoping that an overheard fragment of conversation may give me a clue. It never happens but all the same, for reasons which I don't understand, I do get ideas in saloons.
Here's an example. Recently I was struggling with the pheromone phenomenon. A pheromone is an external hormone secreted by an insect—an ant, say—when it finds a good food source. The other members of the colony are impelled to follow the pheromone trail, and they find the food, too. I wanted to extrapolate that to a man and I had to do it the hard way. So I paced and I walked and at last I went to a bar where I was nailed by a dumb announcer I knew who drilled my ear with his boring monologue. As I was gazing moodily into my drink and wondering how to escape, the hard way came to me. "He doesn't leave a trail," I burst out. "He's impelled to follow a trail." While the announcer looked at me in astonishment, I whipped out my notebook and wrote, "Death left a pheromone trail for him; death in fact, death in the making, death in the planning."
So, out of frustration, I went back to science fiction in order to keep my cool. It was a safety valve, an escape hatch, therapy for me. The ideas which no show would touch could be written as science fiction stories, and I could have the satisfaction of seeing them come to life. (You must have an audience for that.) I wrote perhaps a dozen and a half stories, most of them for Fantasy & Science Fiction whose editors, Tony Boucher and Mick McComas, were unfailingly kind and appreciative.
I wrote a few stories for Astounding, and out of that came my one demented meeting with the great John W. Campbell, Jr. I needn't preface this account with the reminder that I worshiped Campbell from afar. I had never met him; all my stories had been submitted by mail. I hadn't the faintest idea of what he was like, but I imagined that he was a combination of Bertrand Russell and Ernest Rutherford. So I sent off another story to Campbell, one which no show would let me tackle. The title was "Oddy and Id" and the concept was Freudian, that a man is not governed by his conscious mind but rather by his unconscious compulsions. Campbell telephoned me a few weeks later to say that he liked the story but wanted to discuss a few changes with me. Would I come to his office? I was delighted to accept the invitation despite the fact that the editorial offices of Astounding were then the hell and gone out in the boondocks of New Jersey.
The editorial offices were in a grim factory that looked like and probably was a printing plant. The "offices" turned out to be one small office, cramped, dingy, occupied not only by Campbell but by his assistant, Miss Tarrant. My only yardstick for comparison was the glamorous network and advertising agency offices. I was dismayed.
Campbell arose from his desk and shook hands. I'm a fairly big guy, but he looked enormous to me—about the size of a defensive tackle. He was dour and seemed preoccupied by matters of great moment. He sat down behind his desk. I sat down on the visitor's chair.
"You don't know it," Campbell said. "You can't have any way of knowing it, but Freud is finished."
I stared. "If you mean the rival schools of psychiatry, Mr. Campbell, I think—"
"No I don't. Psychiatry, as we know it, is dead."
"Oh, come now, Mr. Campbell. Surely you're joking."
"I have never been more serious in my life. Freud has been destroyed by one of the greatest discoveries of our time."
"What's that?"
"Dianetics."
"I never heard of it."
"It was discovered by L. Ron Hubbard, and he will win the Nobel Peace Prize for it," Campbell said solemnly.
"The Peace Prize? What for?"
"Wouldn't the man who wiped out war win the Nobel Peace Prize?"
"I suppose so, but how?"
"Through Dianetics."
"I honestly don't know what you're talking about, Mr. Campbell."
"Read this," he said and handed me a sheaf of long galley proofs. They were, I discovered later, the galleys of the very first Dianetics piece to appear in Astounding.
"Read them here and now? This is an awful lot of copy."
He nodded, shu
ffled some papers, spoke to Miss Tarrant, and went about his business, ignoring me. I read the first galley carefully, the second not so carefully, as I became bored by the Dianetics mishmash. Finally I was just letting my eyes wander along, but was very careful to allow enough time for each galley so Campbell wouldn't know I was faking. He looked very shrewd and observant to me. After a sufficient time, I stacked the galleys neatly and returned them to Campbell's desk.
"Well?" he demanded. "Will Hubbard win the Peace Prize?"
"It's difficult to say. Dianetics is a most original and imaginative idea, but I've only been able to read through the piece once. If I could take a set of galleys home and—"
"No," Campbell said. "There's only this one set. I'm rescheduling and pushing the article into the very next issue. It's that important." He handed the galleys to Miss Tarrant. "You're blocking it," he told me. "That's all right. Most people do that when a new idea threatens to overturn their thinking."
"That may well be," I said, "but I don't think it's true of myself. I'm a hyperthyroid, an intellectual monkey, curious about everything."
"No," Campbell said, with the assurance of a diagnostician, "you're a hyp-O-thyroid. But it's not a question of intellect, it's one of emotion. We conceal our emotional history from ourselves although Dianetics can trace our history all the way back to the womb."
"To the womb!"
"Yes. The fetus remembers. Come and have lunch."
Remember, I was fresh from Madison Avenue and expense-account luncheons. We didn't go to the Jersey equivalent of Sardi's, "21," even P. J. Clarke's. He led me downstairs and we entered a tacky little lunchroom crowded with printers and file clerks; an interior room with blank walls that made every sound reverberate. I got myself a liverwurst on white, no mustard, and a Coke. I can't remember what Campbell ate.
We sat down at a small table while he continued to discourse on Dianetics, the great salvation of the future when the world would at last be cleared of its emotional wounds. Suddenly he stood up and towered over me. "You can drive your memory back to the womb," he said. "You can do it if you release every block, clear yourself and remember. Try it."
"Now?"
"Now. Think. Think back. Clear yourself. Remember! You can remember when your mother tried to abort you with a buttonhook. You've never stopped hating her for it."
Around me there were cries of, "BLT down, hold the mayo. Eighty-six on the English. Combo rye, relish. Coffee shake, pick up." And here was this grim tackle standing over me, practicing Dianetics without a license. The scene was so lunatic that I began to tremble with suppressed laughter. I prayed. "Help me out of this, please. Don't let me laugh in his face. Show me a way out." God showed me. I looked up at Campbell and said, "You're absolutely right, Mr. Campbell, but the emotional wounds are too much to bear. I can't go on with this."
He was completely satisfied. "Yes, I could see you were shaking." He sat down again, and we finished our lunch and returned to his office. It developed that the only changes he wanted in my story was the removal of all Freudian terms which Dianetics had now made obsolete. I agreed, of course; they were minor, and it was a great honor to appear in Astounding no matter what the price. I escaped at last and returned to civilization where I had three double gibsons and don't be stingy with the onions.
That was my one and only meeting with John Campbell, and certainly my only story conference with him. I've had some wild ones in the entertainment business, but nothing to equal that. It reinforced my private opinion that a majority of the science fiction crowd, despite their brilliance, were missing their marbles. Perhaps that's the price that must be paid for brilliance.
One day, out of the clear sky, Horace Gold telephoned to ask me to write for Galaxy, which he had launched with tremendous success. It filled an open space in the field; Astounding was hard science; Fantasy & Science Fiction was wit and sophistication; Galaxy was psychiatry-oriented. I was flattered but begged off, explaining that I didn't think I was much of a science fiction author compared to the genuine greats. "Why me?" I asked. "You can have Sturgeon, Leiber, Asimov, Heinlein."
"I've got them," he said, "and I want you."
"Horace, you're an old scriptwriter, so you'll understand. I'm tied up with a bitch of a show starring a no-talent. I've got to write continuity for him, quiz sections for him to M. C. and dramatic sketches for him to mutilate. He's driving me up the wall. His agent is driving me up the wall. I really haven't got the time."
Horace didn't give up. He would call every so often to chat about the latest science fiction, new concepts, what authors had failed and how they'd failed. In the course of these gossips, he contrived to argue that I was a better writer than I thought, and to ask if I didn't have any ideas that I might be interested in working out.
All this was on the phone because Horace was trapped in his apartment. He'd had shattering experiences in both the European and Pacific theaters during World War II and had been released from the service with complete agoraphobia. Everybody had to come to his apartment to see him, including his psychiatrist. Horace was most entertaining on the phone; witty, ironic, perceptive, making shrewd criticisms of science fiction.
I enjoyed these professional gossips with Horace so much that I began to feel beholden to him; after all, I was more or less trapped in my workshop, too. At last I submitted perhaps a dozen ideas for his judgment. Horace discussed them all, very sensibly and realistically, and at last suggested combining two different ideas into what ultimately became The Demolished Man. I remember one of the ideas only vaguely; it had something to do with extrasensory perception, but I've forgotten the gimmick. The other I remember quite well. I wanted to write a mystery about a future in which the police are armed with time machines so that if a crime is committed
They could trace it back to its origin. This would make crime impossible. How then, in an open story, could a clever criminal outwit the police?
I'd better explain "open story." The classic mystery is the closed story, or whodunit. It's a puzzle in which everything is concealed except the clues carefully scattered through the story. It's up to the audience to piece them together and solve the puzzle. I had become quite expert at that. However, I was carrying too many mystery shows and often fell behind in my deadlines, a heinous crime, so occasionally I would commit the lesser crime of stealing one of my scripts from Show A and adapting it for Show B.
I was reading a three-year-old Show A script for possible theft when it dawned on me that I had written all the wrong scenes. It was a solid story, but in the attempt to keep it a closed puzzle, I had been forced to omit the real drama in order to present the perplexing results of the behind-the-scenes action. So I developed for myself a style of action mystery writing in which everything is open and known to the audience, every move and countermove, with only the final resolution coming as a surprise. This is an extremely difficult form of writing; it requires you to make your antagonists outwit each other continually with ingenuity and resourcefulness. It was a novel style back then.
Horace suggested that instead of using time machines as the obstacle for the criminal, I use ESP. Time travel, he said, was a pretty worn-out theme, and I had to agree. ESP, Horace said, would be an even tougher obstacle to cope with, and I had to agree.
"But I don't like the idea of a mind-reading detective," I said. "It makes him too special."
"No, no," Horace said. "You've got to create an entire ESP society."
And so the creation began. We discussed it on the phone almost daily, each making suggestions, dismissing suggestions, adapting and revising suggestions. Horace was, at least for me, the ideal editor, always helpful, always encouraging, never losing his enthusiasm. He was opinionated, God, knows, but so was I, perhaps even more than he. What saved the relationship was the fact that we both knew we respected each other; that, and our professional concentration on the job. For professionals the job is the boss.
The writing began in New York. When my show went off for the sum
mer, I took the ms. out to our summer cottage on Fire Island and continued there. I remember a few amusing incidents. For a while I typed on the front porch. Wolcott Gibbs, the New Yorker drama critic, lived up the street and every time he passed our cottage and saw me working he would denounce me. Wolcott had promised to write a biography of Harold Ross that summer and hadn't done a lick of work yet. L F. (Izzy) Stone dropped in once and found himself in the midst of an animated discussion of political thought as reflected by science fiction. Izzy became so fascinated that he asked us to take five while he ran home to put a fresh battery in his hearing aid.
I used to go surf-fishing every dawn and dusk. One evening I was minding my own business, busy casting and thinking of nothing in particular when the idea of using typeface symbols in names dropped into my mind. I reeled in so quickly that I fouled my line, rushed to the cottage and experimented on the typewriter. Then I went back through the ms. and changed all the names. I remember quitting work one morning to watch an eclipse and it turned cloudy. Obviously somebody up there didn't approve of eclipse-breaks. And so, by the end of the summer, the novel was finished. My working title had been Demolition. Horace changed it to The Demolished Man. Much better, I think.
The book was received with considerable enthusiasm by the Galaxy readers, which was gratifying but surprising. I hadn't had any conscious intention of breaking new trails; I was just trying to do a craftsmanlike job. Some of the fans' remarks bemused me. "Oh, Mr. Bester! How well you understand women." I never thought I understood women. "Who were the models for your characters?" They're surprised when I tell them that the model for one of the protagonists was a bronze statue of a Roman emperor in the Metropolitan Museum. It's haunted me ever since I was a child. I read the emperor's character into the face and when it came time to write this particular fictional character, I used my emperor for the mold.
The reclame of the novel turned me into a science fiction somebody, and people were curious about me. I was invited to gatherings of the science fiction Hydra Club where I met the people I was curious about: Ted Sturgeon, Jim Blish, Tony Boucher, Ike Asimov, Avram Davidson, then a professional Jew wearing a yarmulka, and many others. They were all lunatic (So am I. It takes one to spot one.) and convinced me again that most science fiction authors have marbles missing. I can remember listening to an argument about the correct design for a robot, which became so heated that for a moment I thought Judy Merrill was going to punch Lester del Rey in the nose. Or maybe it was vice versa.
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