The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  Gee, no, Mr. Campbell, I never thought of that.

  Right, Pohl, and no one else did, either. But what is the audience for radio?

  Uh—

  (Rueful shake of the head.) The primary audience is bored housewives. They turn the radio on to keep them company while they do the dishes.

  Yeah, I guess that’s right, all r—

  And the point (warming up, jabbing the cigarette toward me) is, you can’t ignore television! You have to look at it!

  After a few such conversations, and after reading the editorials in Astounding a month or two after each of them, I figured out what was happening. That was how John Campbell wrote the editorials. On the first of every month he would choose a polemical notion. For three weeks he would spring it on everyone who walked in. Arguments were dealt with, objections overcome, weak points shored up—and by the end of each month he had a mighty blast proof-tested against a dozen critics.

  I didn’t mind that. Actually, I admired it a lot. I filed it away in my mind as one of the smart things editors did, and very quickly it appeared that there were a lot of smart things John did.

  Every word he said I memorized:

  On atmosphere: “I hate a story that begins with atmosphere. Get right into the story, never mind the atmosphere.”

  On motivating writers: “The trouble with Bob Heinlein is that he doesn’t need to write. When I want a story from him, the first thing I have to do is think up something he would like to have, like a swimming pool. The second thing is to sell him on the idea of having it. The third thing is to convince him he should write a story to get the money to pay for it, instead of building it himself.”

  On rejection letters: “When there’s something wrong with a story, I can tell you how to fix it. When it just doesn’t come across, there’s nothing I can say.”

  On plot ideas: “When I think of a story idea, I give it to six different writers. It doesn’t matter if all six of them write it. They’ll all be different stories, anyway, and I’ll publish all six of them.”

  On the archetypal sf story: “I want the kind of story that could be printed in a magazine of the year two thousand A.D. as a contemporary adventure story. No gee-whiz, just take the technology for granted.”

  He was also a fount of information on the technological infrastructure of publishing: line engraving, halftones, four-color separations, binding machines. I had never known anyone else who knew about these things, and I learned from him as from Jesus on the Mount. He was a great teacher. Later I figured out why. He was learning the same things, too, maybe forty-eight hours ahead of me on the track, rehearsing his own learning by teaching it to me. When John took over Astounding he was around twenty-seven, very junior to every other editor at Street & Smith. He must have got, and must have needed, the reassurance he found in people like me, like Isaac Asimov, like the dozens of other writers and would-be writers who took the subway to 79 Seventh Avenue and were even more junior than he.

  Even at seventeen I perceived that he was not wholly without seam or flaw. I had a nice little racket going with Street & Smith, because my friend Pudna Abbot worked in the circulation department there. She could bring home the newest copy of Astounding as soon as it came off the press, a full three weeks before the official release date. Not only did I get my copies before any other kid on the block, but I got them free.18 Unfortunately I made the mistake of bragging about it to John. He put a stop to it. That was the first time I was ever disappointed in him. I wouldn’t have done that. It showed a lack of class.

  John’s tackier side has had a lot of exposure in the last few years. I sat with him all through a banquet in California, two or three years ago, while the principal speaker denounced John for anti-semitism. John took it imperturbably enough, but I didn’t think that showed much class on the part of the speaker, either.

  Was John a bigot?

  I have no doubt that he was always a little embarrassed by people who didn’t have the sense to be born white, male, and Protestant. Like most WASPs of his generation, he was brought up to believe that blacks were shiftless and Jews kind of comical. But I do not believe that he ever in his life withheld any obligation or courtesy on the grounds of race or religion. But he wasn’t sure that his readership (who he assumed were also largely WASPs) were as tolerant as he. So he invited his Jewish writers to conceal that blemish. When I sold him Milt Rothman’s first story, he laid it on the line. “The best names,” John declared, “are Scottish or English. That’s true for characters and for bylines. It has nothing to do with prejudice. They sound better.” It was not just for Milt that he insisted on that. It is only because Isaac Asimov and Stanley G. Weinbaum were first published elsewhere that we don’t know them now as, maybe, Tam MacIsaacs and S. G. Macbeth.

  John was not, of course, the only editor who thought that. There are few Jews or blacks in the science-fiction stories of that period; the entire Doc Smith Skylark-Lensman canon contains only a handful of Jewish names, and almost every one is either petty racketeer or pitiful victim. I now think that John and the others underrated their audience. As time passed and blacks, Jews, Orientals, and females began to appear both as sympathetic characters and as authors, the readers showed no serious concern. But that’s hindsight. In 1937 the evidence was on John’s side, as far as it went.

  John was a bull dinosaur, roaring his challenge across swamps, and maybe a really good editor has to be like that. I was a pretty cocky kid, and he was a supremely self-confident young adult, and there were times when we fought like wombats. I would come charging into his office full of the latest exposés of the wickedness of the capitalist system from yesterday’s Daily Worker, and John would fit a cigarette into its holder, squirt a little decongestant into his sinuses, and tell me where I was wrong. He was a hundred percent behind the capitalist system, was John Campbell. He was getting a fast thirty-five dollars a week, and punching a time clock to get it, but he was a boss. If I told him that in a decent socialist society we Creative Literary Artists would be state-subsidized and wouldn’t have to work on trivial jobs to eat, he would tell me that his own odd jobs had been a more important part of his education than MIT. If I informed him that Big Corporations were buying up and suppressing inventions that would make everything cheap, beautiful, and streamlined, he told me I was crazy and took me to meet his father, a senior executive with Ma Bell, to prove it.19

  My feelings about John Campbell have to be colored by the fact that throughout my later career as a science-fiction magazine editor I was competing with him. Sometimes it was no contest. In the 1940s I didn’t have the maturity, the experience, or the money. I caused him no concern at all. In the 1960s it was different. I won as many rounds as I lost, and maybe a few more, but I was at the peak of my form and John just wasn’t very interested any more. I could pay almost as much as he did. And I had learned from him.

  But he was, and remains, over all, the best science-fiction magazine editor there ever was.

  A quarter of a century after we first met, it happened that we were on the same bill at a scientific seminar, the American Astronautical Society’s annual Goddard Memorial Lectures. I gave the keynote address. That year’s theme was announced as “Technology and Social progress: Synergy or Conflict?” I took it seriously, and spread myself with a quantitative approach of my own devising to the question of what “progress” really was. On the way home John turned up in the same Eastern Airlines shuttle to Newark. He patted my shoulder and said, “Fred, you did real good for science fiction.” And all of a sudden I was seventeen again, and I blushed like a fool.

  At the age of eighteen or nineteen I was sampling for the first time the mixed diet of a free-lance writer. Your time is your own. But it is the only thing that you own that you can sell, and how you portion it out is reflected in how well you do.

  I devised a system for making my time more useful to me. I slept sixteen hours at a stretch, every other day.

  That worked out well. The time when I was slee
ping, on even-numbered days, was disposable time, when there were no social demands on me: the eight hours when the rest of the world was sleeping, and the eight hours when most of the rest of the world was at work. When I was awake for thirty-two hours at a stretch, it was really fine.20 There is a special kindness about the middle of the night for a writer. The phone doesn’t ring, no one comes to the door, the kids (when you get to the point of having kids) are asleep; long consecutive thoughts are possible. I did a lot of writing in those prolonged stretches. Not much of it was any good, and hardly any of it survives, but I was learning my trade.21

  So in every forty-eight hours I had a sleep day and a workday, and all my evenings free for business. The YCL took up a couple of evenings a week. The Futurians took up a couple more. Doë occupied most of what was left. It was a cheap time to be dating a girl. Even on my budget of nothing much we could see Broadway shows, go to the ballet, wander in the park. Those were the days of the WPA Theater Project, when half the theaters on Broadway were lighted only by make-work projects paid for by the federal government. For thirty-five cents you could see Orson Welles do Doctor Faustus, operatic Elizabethan voices rolling out Marlowe’s thundering lines, shocking-fantastic makeup and costumes, puppets acting out the Seven Deadly Sins from a box. There were dance drama and Living Theater. The parks were full of free band concerts in warm weather; lounging on the lawn to Edwin Franko Goldman playing “Poet and Peasant.” The New School ran a film series, free or near enough to free not to matter: quaint old science-fiction pictures like The Crazy Ray, flaky Cocteau like The Blood of a Poet. Even Real Broadway itself was not inaccessible. Most shows stayed open by papering the house with twofers: buy one ticket, get one free. Or Leblang-Gray’s ticket agency always had cut-rate specials. An evening’s relaxation started out with eating something at home (restaurant meals were still pricey; no way you could get out under a dollar for two people), picking Doë up at her home on Glenwood Road, taking the subway to Times Square for a show. Sometimes we went by ourselves, sometimes with other Futurians or friends; and afterward a leisurely snack in the 42nd Street Cafeteria, where coffee was a nickel, sandwiches started at a dime, and no one ever asked you to move on. The 42nd Street was “our” place, but there were a dozen like it in the Times Square area and a thousand around the city. They never closed. They tolerated indefinite loitering for minimal purchases, even none at all. Now the world is all different, and even the 42nd Street Cafeteria closed a couple of years ago, battered out of existence by pimps, prostitutes, muggers, holdup men, and general crazies who made a lot more trouble than we ever did. We never bothered anybody. The worst we ever did was eat the flowers out of the vases on the table, and they put in new ones every morning, anyway.

  And then, along about two or three or later, we would break it up. If I didn’t have to take Doë home, and if one of my walking friends was present we might stroll home. It didn’t take more than three or four hours, and by then the quiet streets would become all different and rosy in the dawn. I almost got it on one of those same streets a couple of years ago, when four young things approached me with mugging in mind, but in the late 30s there was nothing to fear.

  In spite of our competing arrogances and differing interests, the Futurians hung together for years, and one of the reasons was the appearance of a common enemy. We were engaged in a titanic intrafan struggle over the possession of that glamorous dream, the First World Science Fiction Convention.

  It was Don Wollheim’s idea to begin with. It struck us all as fantastic, but we were used to thinking galactically big. The more we thought about it the more feasible it seemed. The coming New York World’s Fair would draw people to the city, that’s what World’s Fairs are for, and surely among them would be fans and writers. We were not confident we could get anyone from Outside just to talk about science fiction. But if they were coming to New York, anyway—

  It all came to pass just as we had planned, with one tiny difference. We lost control of the committee. When the event happened, half a dozen of us Futurians weren’t allowed in. There had been a falling-out with Willy Sykora, genius of the NYB-ISA, who had then allied himself with Jimmy Taurasi from Flushing and Sam Moskowitz of Newark; and the three of them combined took the convention away from us. They had persuaded the professional editors to cooperate. They had secured professional writers to speak. They had hired a hall. They had pledges of attendance from fans as far off as Chicago and California. And there we were, out in the cold.

  To be truthful, we pretty nearly had it coming. Not quite. The punishment exceeded the crime. But we Futurians were, as you must have observed by now, a fairly snotty lot. Politics had something to do with the struggle, but not actually very much. Although we Communist Futurians maintained a high profile, we were never a majority in the Futurians (and actually, there were one or two lefties on the other side). What we Futurians made very clear to the rest of New York fandom was that we thought we were better than they were. For some reason that annoyed them.

  We were, to be sure, a good deal more literary than the New Fandom group. Apart from that, not that much difference. Jimmy Taurasi was a good-natured guy who worked for Consolidated Edison or something of the sort. Sam had made a few abortive attempts at writing science-fiction stories, but quickly realized that his future lay in some other area of the publishing field and has, in fact, scored major successes in more than one way. Will Sykora was something else. He was a hard person to like. I was used to cynics, even wanted to be one myself when I grew up, but there was something about Sykora that outdid even Wollheim and Michel. They cut up writers and editors as individuals; Willy derogated the whole profession of writing. Sf writers were no better than anyone else, he said. If he wanted to, he could write a story in three weeks and have it published in any magazine in the field. His confidence impressed me; why didn’t he do it, then? Because it would just be more trouble than it was worth, he said. That struck me as more than cynical, it was close to a sin against the Holy Ghost. Especially as I came to recognize a grain of truth in what he said. To get a story published wasn’t then (and isn’t now) a particularly impressive feat; all it takes is luck, determination, and a few monkey tricks of style and plot. (To write a good story is something else, but there are a hundred bags of monkey tricks in print for every really good piece of work.)

  Regardless of the merits, in any case they had the muscle. When we came to Bahai Hall, Don Wollheim, Johnny Michel, Bob Lowndes, Jack Gillespie, and I were turned away. Other Futurians were let in, and ran courier between us excludees and the action inside, but we were Out.

  I didn’t personally mind that a whole lot. It was kind of exciting. I’ve never really enjoyed what goes on in the formal sessions of any convention as much as the socializing that surrounds it, and we had plenty of that. To the cafeteria down the block or the bar next door the writ of New Fandom did not extend. When the conventionees found the going tedious and stepped out for refreshment, we were there. We met Californians like Forrest J. Ackerman and his feminine sidekick Morojo,22 both of them stylishly dressed in fashions of the Twenty-fifth Century and turning heads in every cafeteria they entered. Kid fan Ray Bradbury was there, two years away from his first professional sale and anxious to display the art of his young friend Hannes Bok. We met Jack Williamson, a slow-spoken New Mexican who looked as if he should be wearing a .45 and a star, and L. Sprague de Camp, hottest and newest star in John Campbell’s powerhouse stable. We even ran our own counterconvention, at the headquarters of the Flatbush III Branch of the YCL in Brooklyn. (We had no trouble getting the use of the hall; I was the president of the chapter.) A dozen of the out-of-towners made the long subway trip to Brooklyn, curiously observing the posters and slogans on the wall. Our convention was smaller than Theirs, but more fun, I think, and so the Futurian Exclusion Act failed of its purpose.

  There was an interesting postscript, long later. In 1950 the Hydra Club decided to put on a convention of its own in New York, and Sykora came roaring ou
t of the Long Island City swamps to challenge us, I have forgotten over what. The Futurians had decayed away by then, in propria persona, but enough of the Hydras accepted the heritage of the blood feud to debate excluding Sykora from our con. I voted against it. It was more fun to turn the other cheek. In the event, Will showed up, and leafleted some of the chairs in the ballroom with handbills against “the nine phony heads of Hydra,” and then was gone, to be seen no more.

  One thing the Futurians lacked was a headquarters, and so we decided to go for broke. We found a house and signed a lease—or at least Doë and I did. Unfortunately we couldn’t handle the rent, and after some stressful times with the lawyer for the landlord we got out of it unscathed. But Wollheim, Michel, Lowndes, and Dirk Wylie had had enough of a taste for sf-commune living to want more, and so they found an apartment at 2754 Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. They called it The Ivory Tower, and it was solar plexus for the Futurian nerve network for the next couple of years. They four remained the main tenants, but there was a floating population of whatever other Futurians chose to crash for a while, and all of us used it as an operating base. We had parties there, we published fanzines there, we sat around and talked endlessly there.

  Quietest and gentlest of the Futurians was Jack Rubinson, so quiet that mostly we didn’t know he was around. One day he surprised us by turning up with a full-length play he had written, all by himself, without announcing what he was going to do—quite contrary to Futurian custom—and, even more surprising, I thought it astonishingly good.23 He gave all of us speaking parts, but the starring part—the character in the play had no name but “Hero”—was obviously himself. He gave me a line which I thought summed up quite neatly what we were all about:

  Hero: Then what is “The Ivory Tower”?

  Pohl: It is nothing more nor less than a shell or an attitude built up by several people to separate their group from the general mass of people. It is a method for keeping the group intact at the expense of everything else. The group tries to deny the existence of anybody except its members.24