The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  I didn’t much want to live frugally, and the apartment was far from frugal. It cost $175 a month. That doesn’t seem like a lot after thirty years of inflation, but it was rather more than my monthly income had ever been in my life up until then. And it was really a nice apartment, modly furnished top floor in an old building on Grove Street, just down the block from where Tom Paine had written one of his Crisis feuilletons and around the corner from several of the favorite hangouts of the Mafia. A roof garden went with it. Tina and I carried brown-paper bags of topsoil all the way in from my father’s farm to fatten the garden up, and on summer nights it was a marvelous place to sit and observe the world below. Our building was owned by a prosperous and art-loving dentist. He encouraged talent, especially musical, and one of his protégés was a young pianist named Constantine Stronghilos. Tina and I were invited to his first recital, and there was no doubt that he had the touch for Chopin and Liszt. For years afterward I kept watching the pages of the Sunday Times to see when he would make his breakthrough into fame, but he never did.35 Tina was as gregarious as a pretty puppy and we quickly made friends—notably Kathleen and Joe Skelly, in the building across the back yards from us, and through them we met people like Ayn Rand and others who floated through their cocktail parties. Tina began taking courses at the New School, in subjects like theater and paranormal psychology. We built mazes and tried to telepathically command mice to follow one path rather than another—it never worked; and she wrote endless scripts for plays and musical reviews, which didn’t work very well, either. (She subsequently published half a dozen good books, but the theater never opened its doors to her.) It was a fine way to live, but I could see that our resources were not going to survive it indefinitely without replenishment. Besides, I was about ready to go back to work. I hauled out the novel I had written in the tufa-block EM club in Stornara. It was evident at once that it had a great flaw. It was about the advertising business. I didn’t know anything about the advertising business, and it showed.

  That was a problem, but for that problem there was an easy solution. I bought a Sunday Times, looked under the help-wanted ads for advertising copywriters, and answered three of them. And on April Fool’s Day of 1946 David Altman put me to work in his little Madison Avenue agency as chief (and only) copywriter.

  Advertising writing should be under constant surveillance by the narcs; it is addictive, and it rots the mind. When you spend your days persuading Consumers to Consume articles they would never in their lives dream of wanting if you didn’t tickle them into it, you develop fantasies of power. No, not fantasies. Power. Each sale is a conquest, and it is your silver tongue that has made them roll over and obey. If you do not end your day with a certain contempt for your fellow human beings, then you are just not paying attention to what it is that you do.

  Most of the advertising I did in my three years in the business was mail-order, and most of the commodities I sold were books and magazines. Book clubs were the specialty of the Thwing & Altman agency, and after six months there I moved over to Popular Science Publishing Company, pushing magazine subscriptions and our line of how-to-do-it books.

  One of the characteristics of the advertising business that rots the brain and destroys the disposition is that most people in it hardly ever know whether what they are doing is any good. You can see whether your product sells well or poorly, yes. But what did it? Is it the TV spots, the jingles, the billboards, the space ads, the point-of-sale displays…or maybe just the fact that the weather suddenly turned warm, so people are drinking more of your soda pop or acquiring more of your air conditioners? And even if you know that your ads are working, is it because of your copy, or the art department’s layout, or none of the above?

  My kind of advertising was not like that. If you were good at what you were doing, it showed. No argument. You printed the space ads or sent out the mailings, and either the orders came in or they didn’t.

  The first things I wrote were big full-page display ads for the best sellers of the Dollar Book Club. David Altman had hired me in the first place because there was not a lot of difference between the kinds of words I had strung together as pulp-magazine blurbs and the kinds that made good headlines for best-seller ads. I think the first one I did on my own was for Frank Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow:

  In the wickedest city in the world

  this copper-haired giant built an empire out

  of gunplay, gambling and the eager hearts of women.

  That one sold a zillion copies of the book—I really don’t know how many, but it filled full-page space in at least fifty of the top circulation media in the country. Another—I have forgotten the name of the book—was:

  He knew the whole town’s secrets

  but he had one secret of his own:

  the huge white bride’s bed

  that he kept for the wife of another man.

  We also did copy for the Junior Literary Guild, and for the G. & C. Merriam line of dictionaries, among other accounts. On all of the ads David Altman stood over me, guiding, revising, editing. Some of the ads, like the two above, survived almost intact; most were heavily changed. I liked and respected him, but I didn’t much like being rewritten; and besides, he was paying me only fifty dollars a week. In a month with four Fridays I took home, after deductions, only a dollar more than my monthly rent for the apartment on Grove Street, and it seemed to me that another job would give me both more money and more independence.

  Popular Science gave me both, under a grand, tall, gentlemanly man named George Spoerer. Of all the people I have ever worked for, George was about the kindest and most decent. He was a science-fiction fan, which was a big bond. He should have been a science-fiction writer. His apartment in Greenwich Village was just a few blocks from mine, and on halfway decent days we would walk home together, an hour’s stroll, enjoying each other’s company.36 George was very good at mail-order advertising, and at letting his junior assistant, namely me, be good at it in my own way rather than in his. He sometimes made suggestions. Usually he just presented problems: Here’s what we need to do; how do you want to go about doing it?

  Almost the first problem George laid on me was a big coffee-table picture book called Outdoor Life’s Gallery of North American Game. Mostly it was full-color reproductions of the cover paintings from Outdoor Life itself, and it was really quite handsome, if you like that sort of thing. But in the market it was no wily white-tailed deer or battling steelhead salmon. What it was in the marketplace was a dog. The company had printed fifty thousand copies of it, and forty-nine thousand-plus were still in the warehouse. They had tried everything: buckeye four-color circulars the size of a bedsheet and personalized we’re-all-art-connoisseurs-together letters on embossed stationery. And nothing worked.

  I decided to test some new copy appeals. At the time, penny postcards still cost only a penny, so I wrote up a dozen or so sample appeals for postcard testing and we sent out thousand-piece mailings to test them out. I tried all the angles I could think of—

  The book is beautiful and will impress your friends…

  With this book you will be better able to kill, crush, mutilate and destroy these beloved game beasts…

  This book will teach your children the secrets of wildcraft and keep them from turning into perverts and drug addicts…

  And then I tried one more card, which said:

  HAVE YOU GOT A BIG BOOKCASE?

  Because if you have, we have a BIG BOOK for you…

  and that was the winner. We didn’t bother transmuting the copy appeal to a circular, we just mailed out those cards. Nearly a million of them, and the only reason we didn’t mail more was that we ran out of books.

  That was the fun part, and the addictive part, and the part that makes advertising people cynical about the wisdom of their customers—which is to say, you, and me, and all of us. Advertising reaches out to touch the fantasy part of people’s lives. And, you know, most people’s fantasies are pretty sad.

&n
bsp; But still it was fun. We used our ingenuity particularly in the subscription efforts for the magazines, most doggedly of all in the renewal series. Because the money in the magazines came from advertising, and advertising rates were tied to circulation, we were glad to spend three or four times the subscription price to get you to subscribe. And if you once subscribed, boy, we hung on to you. You would stay on our list, one way or another, until you died. If you let your subscription lapse, we would send seventeen separate renewal efforts to get you back. First we would bill you. Then we would remind you. Then we would coax you. Then we would start to bribe you: two free issues, three free issues, a year at half price. If you still held out, we began to get desperate. Kidding letters. Belligerent letters. Pathetic letters. I wrote one that purported to be from Diane, the girl who had cut your Addressograph stencil: “Dear Friend, my boss just told me I had to take your subscription stencil out of our file. To me, every name on those plates is a friend, and I hate to see yours go—” They all worked, exactly like the osmotic diffusion barriers in a uranium-isotope separation plant. Ten percent responded to the first appeal. Ten percent of what was left to the second. Ten percent of the remainder to the third. We got a perfectly satisfactory return on every mailing at every stage in the cascade, and if you managed to get away unrenewed after receiving all seventeen, my hat, sir, is off to your determination. (Wow, why didn’t I think of that then? “My hat, sir, is off to your determination, and as determined readers like you are our favorite subscribers, I am going to extend this one more chance—”)

  Popular Science was a great success story as a publishing company, and a good place to work. Gene Watson was the VP in charge of our department, wise, sharp, highly competent. Harry Walton, old sf-writing friend, was one of the editors on the magazine side, and now and again we would get together for lunch or coffee. I kept getting promoted, with added duties and added assistants: book editor, manager of subscription agents, executive in charge of book fulfillment; and I was always allowed to try whatever crazy ideas I thought might work. They didn’t, always, but the “big bookcase” had bought me a license to experiment, and I used it. Most of what I did was fairly orthodox, four-color circulars, letters, order forms, return envelopes. But each of those presented its own opportunities for varying style, size, and format. I have never been able to draw well, but I could lay out a circular, showing where the art would go and where the type, picking out type faces and indicating the color masses, and have an artist make from it a handsome-looking piece of advertising. I found that I could dictate selling copy as well as I could write it, often better. When I see words on paper I pause and try to mold them into a certain balanced sonority,37 but advertising copy doesn’t want to be artistic. It wants to be crude and ragged enough to catch hold of the customer’s calloused reflexes as it goes down. And sometimes I tried nonverbal communications. Tricks with color, tricks with typography—even tricks with scent. We published a book, experimentally outside our regular hairy-chested-men’s area, called How to Make Paper Flowers and Party Decorations. I designed some nice feminine mailing pieces, and then it occurred to me that all the women I knew wore perfume. Why not try perfuming? So I went down to the five-and-ten for a gallon jug of their best rose cologne and a flit gun, and a warehouseman and I spent one whole afternoon riffling through sheaves of letters and spraying them with the cologne. First he riffled and I sprayed, then out of compassion I riffled and he sprayed. On my way home that night people turned to stare at me from half a block away.

  On the test, the perfumed letters outperformed the others almost two to one, so we went for broke.

  We almost made it. Testing is the key to mail-order selling, but you have to understand what it is you’re testing. We established that Woolworth’s rose cologne would bring in extra sales right enough. But no one was about to riffle through half a million mailing pieces. We had to automate. So for the big mailing we arranged with the printer to add rose perfume to the ink, and the chemical combination produced something that did not in the least smell like Woolworth’s best. It smelled a little bit like rotting hibiscus, and a lot like nothing you ever smelled before in your life. It wasn’t total disaster; even that unearthly aroma did help the sales a little, as we verified from the test mailings we had included with the big one. But not anywhere near what we had expected.

  All this was fun. But I had managed to lose track of why it was that I had got into advertising in the first place—i.e., to research my novel. After a year or two it began to penetrate that I was letting a lot of time go past.

  Time was passing in the other parts of my life, too. Tina and I had a pretty good year’s marriage, but in the second year it stopped being quite as good. We got along well enough. But she had her interests, largely in the theater, and I had mine; and we also had some basic differences about what marriage should be. Tina was quite sure she didn’t ever want to have children. I had no burning urgency in that area, but I wasn’t ready to foreclose my options permanently. And so in the summer of 1947 Tina went off to visit her mother in California, and dropped me a note to say that her mother was fine, the weather was nice, and, oh, yes, she had filed for a divorce.

  I hadn’t expected that. I hated it. I had a good night’s drunk on it, and when I woke up the next morning I perceived through the hangover that, all in all, it might well be for the best.

  Perhaps as a consequence of the divorce, I dropped out of orbit to reenter the world of organized science fiction.

  I had not been neglecting science fiction. I had been writing the occasional story all along, and most of them were getting published. Not all were science fiction. I made my first sale outside the pulps in 1946, a sort of domestic mystery that the Toronto Star Weekly retitled “Stolen Tires,” and I invented a series-character detective named Josh Healey and sold a few stories about him to Street & Smith’s Detective Story. But most were in the good old sf groove. Thrilling Wonder published “Donovan Had a Dream” and “A Hitch in Time” in 1947. Planet printed “Let the Ants Try,” the story George Spoerer had given me. Five Novels used a sort of science-fiction article called “Trip to the Moon.”38 I still kept in touch with my old friends now and then, but there was no systematic relationship. If the Futurians still continued some sort of shadow life—and I understood they did—I was not involved in it.

  But on Labor Day weekend of 1947 there was a World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia.

  I had never actually managed to attend a worldcon. As you remember, I almost made it to the first one of all, in New York in 1939. In 1940 it was in Chicago; in 1941, Denver. I couldn’t afford to attend either. The war had imposed a hiatus until 1946, when there was a convention in California; I couldn’t afford that either, but Philadelphia I could afford. Everything considered, I doubt that I have ever made a better investment.

  From time to time people come to me, skeptical or wistful, to ask, “What’s a worldcon like?” It’s like—well, it’s like the Zen fable of the blind men and the elephant. Gordie Dickson says it’s his childhood fantasy of a gentlemen’s club; you come back from ten months on the Amazon, measuring the spots of jungle butterflies, and you compare notes with colleagues who have been studying wind velocities in the Antarctic or mating patterns in Haight-Ashbury, and then you go off to further adventures. I think of it more as a family reunion. I have heard it described as a chaos, a madhouse, and a crashing bore; and I think it is all those things.

  The thing about science-fiction conventions in general, and worldcons in particular, is that they are made up of science-fiction writers and fans,39 as well as agents, editors, artists, teachers, and general hangers-on. This quality separates them from most of humanity in that, by and large, they are in the habit of using their brains for abstract thought.

  I hate to say that about science fiction out loud. It puts people off. And, of course, it isn’t absolutely essential to possess an informed or analytical mind to read science fiction. There’s plenty of junk for the junk add
icts, and it’s even possible to read, say, “Who Goes There?” for the adventure or “Against the Fall of Night” for the lovely color without troubling one’s head much about complexities and implications. But you miss the best parts. Sf encourages thought and curiosity, and requires both to appreciate it fully. Your average Newsweek reader or game-show viewer can’t handle this sort of thing, and responds to sf with hostility or scorn. Sf readers can handle anything.

  This does not guarantee that in each individual case they will be intelligent, or admirable, or even house-broken. Some of the worst people I have ever met have turned up at worldcons, as well as some of the best. Nevertheless, I cannot imagine any topic on which I could not find someone to carry on a rewarding conversation at a science-fiction convention. I can’t think of many subjects that haven’t been programmed. I am not all that fond of formal programs, having long since participated in enough of them for one lifetime, but even the formal programs contain jewels: scientists coming to tell the science-fiction world what they have been doing in space communications, or sociometrics, or the structures of the brain; advocates preaching alternate life-styles; writers rapping about their work; editors in give-and-take with the readers. And in and around the program items are the informal get-togethers, in room parties or bars, with side trips to points of local interest and reunions with long-lost friends.