The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  So it was with us. We saw Imperial Earth from outside and we wanted in. Because we were nicely brought up we zapped the enemy with words instead of with bicycle chains, but we were out to draw blood. When I first took Cyril Kornbluth up to meet John Campbell—feisty, fresh Cyril and staid, almighty John—Cyril behaved like a boor. Outside I asked him what the hell had been going on, and he said simply, “I wanted him to notice me.” We all wanted to be noticed. We would have enjoyed being loved, but next best was to be resented.

  With all this activity, fandom, writing, YCL, and general exploration, there were not enough hours in the day. What I gave up was school. I had been getting spotty marks at Brooklyn Tech. Then they all turned bad. After some unhappy hours with my faculty advisor I transferred from Tech to a less demanding, and even less interesting, school called Thomas Jefferson.

  Thomas Jefferson was a bad school, the building crumbling, the students unruly. The teachers were an oddly assorted lot, a few saints who were there because their conscience drove them, a larger number of incompetents who simply did not deserve a better job. It didn’t matter much to me, because I didn’t spend much time there. I played hooky most of the time for three or four months, and as soon as I had reached the legal dropout age of seventeen I was gone. I didn’t graduate, and I never attended any college, though I’ve taught in a few; as John Brunner says, I had to quit school because it was interfering with my education.

  Still, I did learn one thing from Thomas Jefferson High. One of my courses was in touch-typing. I didn’t learn it there, because I didn’t show up that often for classes, but I took the textbook home, spread the keyboard chart out before me, and plugged away on my lavender portable. It took about ten days to master. It is probably the most valuable single skill I have ever acquired.

  Do you hear me, would-be writers?

  There are some questions that I get a hundred times each a year. They come by mail, in rap sessions after college lecture dates, in chance encounters of all sorts with people who would like to be writers but don’t know quite how to go about it. The third most frequent question is: What courses should I take to become a writer?12

  Most questions imply some sort of expectation about the answer, and usually what is implied in that one is whether to choose courses in journalism, short-story writing, English lit. But none of those are particularly important. They may not do any active harm—I know a few good writers who have exposed themselves to them. But they surely are not necessary, because most writers have never gone near them.

  A few years ago I was allowed to sit in on a meeting of the faculty of a Western university, rethinking its mission in life, and one of the deans said, “We have to get away from the concept of the university as a place where you learn to make a living, and approach the task of making it a place where you learn to live.” That makes sense to me, for anyone. For a writer, the two objectives come out in the same place. A writer is in the business of interpreting life to an audience, and the more he knows about living the better he will write. In my own brief school career I am grateful for early music-appreciation classes, for the exposure to physical science and technology in Brooklyn Tech, for a reasonable competence in mathematics, and for very little else. What I regret is that I did not learn foreign languages in school, when I was young enough to assimilate them fairly easily, but had to pick up smatterings out of books, tape cassettes, and travels. (I also regret that I didn’t learn to play an instrument or dance, but not too many schools offered those courses then.)

  But if you confine yourself to the view of education as a kind of vocational training, then the courses you want are in spelling, punctuation, grammar, and touch-typing. They are fundamental.

  They are not quite indispensable. There are a number of fine writers who can’t spell K-A-T cat, or punctuate the sentence, “Help!” But their lives are harder for that reason. A lot of writing is in bold strokes, and you can dictate that sort of thing into a machine if you like. But a lot is in nuance, too, and if you don’t know what is conventional, you are clumsy and less effective at doing what is unconventional.

  Sure, when you are rich and famous you can hire little people to correct your mistakes and type your scripts. You can go further than that. You can buy plot ideas out of the ads in The Writer’s Digest. You can hire a ghostwriter to finish them off. You can send the scripts off to a reading-fee critic for evaluation and revision, and then if you want to, and you probably won’t have much choice, you can pay a vanity press to print them for you. But, my God, why bother?

  A year or two ago I met a lovely young Italian countess, or something of the sort, beautiful, sweet, smart, well brought up, loaded. Her sister was a science-fiction fan. The contesa invited me and a couple of Italian science-fiction writers up to her hotel room for a drink. The “room” turned out to be an immense suite in a Milan hotel so posh and exclusive that I had never heard its name. Servants brought hors d’oeuvres and cocktails—not those yard-tall fruit-punch things that the Milanese call “coctel,” but authentic Beefeater martinis, double dry. A few jet-set friends had dropped in, and the conversation was polylingual, like in a Maugham or early Huxley drawing room. The contesa invited my advice. Her sister wanted to become a science-fiction writer. Who, Mr. Pohl, should she hire to do the actual writing for her? I said, well, I personally would not be in a position to do that. She nodded, gracefully respecting my wishes, and asked if I had any other recommendations: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, who?

  She was too nice a person to play jokes on. So I didn’t suggest she make her offer to one of them. But it would have been interesting to see the reaction, from a safe distance.

  Out of school, into fandom, writing, and the YCL, the next step in my growing-up was to get myself a girl. On May 11, 1937, an ex-classmate with whom I had kept in touch, Teddy Hill, invited me to meet the girl he had eyes for. Her name was Doris Marie Claire Baumgardt, and I approved highly of Teddy’s good taste. Doë was strikingly beautiful, and strikingly intelligent, too, in a sulky, humorous, deprecatory way that matched well with most of the other people I admired. She could paint some, and write some, and she liked me. Having found my way to the girl-fields of the YCL only a few months earlier, I now decided to settle down. Doë and I dated steadily for three years, and then we got married. The marriage didn’t last quite as long as the courtship, and that was a great pity, because she was a nice person.

  Doë tolerated my YCL activities without showing much desire to share them. My science-fiction life seemed a little more promising to her. She had never read the stuff, but as time went on she began writing and drawing it and wound up with a catalog of published works of her own. And she liked my friends. More important, her friends, all girls, liked my friends in the Futurians, one hundred percent boys. It was marrying time, I suppose. Over the next few years her friend Rosalind married my friend Dirk, her friend Jessica married my friend Dick Wilson, her friend Elsie married my friend Don Wollheim, not to mention any number of less formal involvements. We did everything collectively, as you see.

  The Depression was lightening a little, though a long way from over. Money was a little more plentiful than it had been. Even in our house. I had pretended to a job that did not exist in order to get permission to leave school, but after a while of that my mother made it clear that it was time I brought in a little money, and I went to work for a firm of insurance underwriters called W. L. Perrin and Son, on Maiden Lane in downtown New York.

  Apart from requiring me to get up early in the morning, which I have never liked, the job was not without charm. Without dignity, yes. It was totally without dignity. What Perrin hired me to do was to deliver letters for them. I was competing with the Post Office. It was cheaper for Perrin to pay me ten dollars a week to schlep the letters around than to put two-cent stamps on them and leave it to the mailman. The best part of it was the chance to explore the old New Amsterdam part of the city—my route stopped north of City Hall. I learned what an intricate marvel New York City
is, from the old Customs House and Bowling Green to Brooklyn Bridge and the Woolworth Building. In nice weather it was a pleasant ramble. In bad I learned to dodge through buildings and secret underground warrens, avoiding the inclement open air. I made friends with other insurance runners—we debated dividing our routes, but never dared risk the anger of our bosses—and with elevator girls, starters, receptionists, even policemen. The central five-and-ten where Johnny Michel worked was only a few blocks from the Perrin office. Two or three times a week we would have a quick lunch together and then prowl the immense Goldsmith stationery store on Nassau Street, coveting the typewriters and the automatic mimeograph machines. A block in the other direction was the Federal Reserve Building, and every once in a while you could see an army of guards sweating pallets of genuine gold bricks across the sidewalk.

  For a writer, there is a lot to be said for a job that makes no demands on the intellect and does not carry over past quitting time. Washau the chimp could have been trained to do what Perrin paid me for. The forebrain was not involved. I carried a notebook and a pencil with me, and while I was waiting for an elevator, or sneaking a cup of coffee in some underground cafeteria where no one from Perrin was likely to come, I scribbled story ideas or wrote poetry.13

  Perrin’s wasn’t the first job I had ever held. I had been a busboy in a restaurant on Times Square one summer, twelve hours a day, six days a week, for twelve dollars a week. I had worked part-time after school now and then—mostly running errands for Mrs. Bradley’s boarding house on Dean Street. (Strange old anachronism! The cooking was on a coal stove and the illumination from gas, Welsbach mantles and all, this in 1931! The best part of that job was a buying trip down the street to the Bond’s Bakery day-old shop, where you could get nickel package cakes to feed the boarders for two cents each. True, they were a little stale, but that did not much impair their quality. That would not have been easy to do.) But Perrin’s was full-time, and I held it nearly a year. I was almost sorry when it came to an end. I told my boss, in a rare conversational exchange, that sooner or later I was planning to leave, and he took umbrage. If I was that disloyal to the firm, I should be fired right then, he said, and so I was.

  By that time I was beginning to earn a few dollars here and there from writing.

  You must understand that when I say a “few” dollars, I mean so few that each separate one was an event. There were many people who were earning pitifully small incomes in the late 30s, but not very many who earned less than I. The next step below my annual income was zero.

  But the difference between “nothing” and “almost nothing” is very large. And it got bigger as I went along, jumping almost an order of magnitude a year. A few dollars in 1937, a few tens of dollars in 1938, a few hundred in 1939—well, boy! If that rate of economic growth had only continued, I would now be earning, let me see, something like $1040 this year, or roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times the gross global product.

  It has not worked out that way. But I had established the principle that money could somehow be earned out of the writing business; it was only necessary to increase the flow. Writing was unreliable, and I had not yet aspired to editing, but I had heard of the existence of such a thing as a literary agent.

  I had never seen one, and had no very clear idea of what anybody needed one of these creatures for, but the theory seemed simple. You persuaded writers to give you their stories, and you sent them out to editors. When an editor bought one, you then sent the check to the writer, deducting ten percent for your trouble.

  That seemed as if it should be easier work for the dollar than writing. I calculated that if I had nine clients and sold an aggregate of a thousand dollars’ worth of their work, they would each have averaged one hundred dollars net. And so would I! That was a fascinating revelation. It meant that if I had nine writers as clients, I would be earning as much as if I were a writer myself. (I have always been good at figures.14)

  I knew that a literary agency was a business, and a business needed printed letterheads and cards. That was no problem. Johnny Michel’s father had remarried and the new wife sort of preferred Johnny out of the house, so he had come to live in the spare room of our apartment and brought his Kelsey 3 × 5 flatbed printing press along. He taught me how to set type, and so I set up and printed my own letterheads and even business cards. I was all set, except for the lack of any clients.

  My first client was myself. I could see that it didn’t look good for an agent to be peddling the work of only one writer, especially if he was the writer, but I devised a way around that. I had always thought it a romantic notion to write under pseudonyms, and I could have ten instant clients simply by signing ten of my stories with different names. It didn’t matter particularly that I did that. None of them sold, anyway, in those years.

  Then there were the Futurians. They didn’t like wasting money on postage stamps any more than W. L. Perrin and Son, and most of them were willing to let me risk my efforts on the problematical results. Out of their collective resources I made one or two tiny sales. At the time of the first “convention” in Philadelphia, I had met a young fan named Milton A. Rothman, just out of high school and torn between colleges. He had won a science scholarship to Penn and a music scholarship to Juilliard: did he want to be a physicist or a pianist? He finally settled for physics, but what he really wanted to be was a science-fiction writer. He gave me a couple of his stories. I didn’t just market them, I actually rewrote them (we had agreed on a twenty-percent share for me in the event of sale, somewhere between agent’s fee and collaborator’s half), and, my God, I sold them both. And to Astounding, at that.15 By then I had begun to meet a few pros, and I wheedled rejects out of them.

  It made a certain amount of sense for the pros, because the science-fiction market was in one of its recurrent flare-star periods, and you really needed to be on the scene to find out who was hungry for manuscripts. Wonder Stories had been taken over by the Thrilling Group. It had developed some distressing comic-book aspects (the letter column was conducted by a “Sergeant Saturn”), but it was solvent, and they had even added a couple of companion magazines, Startling Stories and Captain Future. F. Orlin Tremaine, having left Astounding and all of Street & Smith, was starting a new magazine called Comet. Malcolm Reiss had entered the field with Planet Stories; a new fellow named Robert O. Erisman had a couple of titles, Marvel and Dynamic; even Hugo Gernsback was coming back into the field for the third time. (After the war, he went for number four.) With all these customers I found homes for an occasional script. Put them all together, and they added up to—

  Well, not very much. In actual dollars and cents I had earned more running errands for W. L. Perrin and Son. But it was more interesting work, and it gave me entry into the offices of real flesh-and-blood editors.

  When you speak of science-fiction editors in the later 1930s, you are really talking about one man, and his name was John W. Campbell, Jr.

  Science fiction has had a great many idiosyncratic editors. Some have wound up on the funny farm. One or two have landed in jail. A few have been very good, many have been competent, and a lot have brought to their craft the creativity of a toad and the intelligence of a flatworm. John stands above them all. By any measure you can name, he was the greatest editor science fiction has ever had.

  He was also quirky, gullible, susceptible to attacks of bigotry, and given to long stretches of apathy. First and last, John edited Astounding/Analog for thirty-four straight years. That’s too long. No one can hold a job like that without at least an occasional sabbatical year to renew one’s perceptions of the world and repair one’s soul. John showed the strain. Sometimes for years on end he would edit the magazine with a maximum of twenty-five percent of his attention, maybe less than that. John swallowed whole such magnolious nonsense as dianetics, the Hieronymous machine, and the John Birch Society. There were a lot of things about him that were funny: his private under-the-counter bottle of ketchup at the branch of Chock ful
l o’ Nuts where he was accustomed to take his lunch. None of that matters. You can’t be better than the best, and John was the best there was.

  When John became editor of Astounding in 1937, he had already been well established as a writer, with at first a keen sense of gadgetry and no clue as to what went on inside a human being. He began while still an undergraduate at MIT and rapidly took over the Number Two position, behind Doc Smith, as the leading spot-weld-me-another-busbar space-opera author. There was no living in that, of course—remember what writers were getting in the 1930s. So John sold second-hand cars, or did whatever he had to do, to supplement his half cent a word, promptly on lawsuit, from Hugo Gernsback.

  To me, in 1936, Campbell was a hero, in the sense that every science-fiction writer was a hero, but not a big hero like Doc Smith, say, or Stanton A. Coblentz. His space operas were fine fun, but Smith had been there first. His shorter works were not particularly distinguished.16

  Then, all of a sudden, upheaval. There was a high-level tremor at Street & Smith. Tremaine was kicked upstairs, and John Campbell was hired to succeed him.

  I didn’t like that much, because I had been getting along very well with Tremaine and doubted I would do any better with the new boy.17 But it was worth a try, so I trotted up to the familiar decrepit office building, a few blocks from the women’s prison, and was admitted to The Presence. As I came into the office John rolled down his desk top, swiveled around in his chair, pointed to a seat, fitted a cigarette into his holder, and said, “Television will never replace radio in the home. I’ll bet you don’t know why.”

  That set the pattern. Over the next few years, and intermittently for much longer, I made the pilgrimage to John’s office and was greeted each time with some such opening remark. The conversation always went the same way: