“My Wife” by George Briggs
She is as fragrant
As the aroma of a good cigar to the nostrils of a man Who has just sworn off smoking.
She satisfies my desire for the useless and expensive And is as necessary as a cocktail before dinner.
I wish I had discovered her desirability
Before we were divorced!
George also used more than one name for The Smart Set, usually “George Briggs Jenkins, Jr.,” and “George Briggs.” Sometimes he and Will collaborated, as on a play called “The Beautiful Thing” in the August 1919 issue bylined
“Murray Leinster and George B. Jenkins, Jr.” George also began appearing in Snappy Stories, Saucy Stories and Breezy Stories.
Carl R. Dolmetsch, in his book The Smart Set, A History and Antholog y (New York: Dial Press, 1966) quotes George J. Nathan as saying in 1955,
“There never was anything quite like it ... but there ought to be. Where can beginning writers of today get that kind of exposure?” Will cherished that early relationship with The Smart Set. Years later he wrote this to his daughter Jo-an, “Query: would you like a Xerox of Mencken’s letter to me acknowledging that he’d put some of my stuff in a book of his and offering to settle for a large beer?”
When Will’s boss at Prudential got word of his budding writing career, however, he called him in to inform him that the company frowned on outside work, but would overlook it if Will would report on any misbehavior of other
Three • The Early Days: 1910 –1919
29
employees. Will, indignant, promptly quit and, except for a spell in the army in World War I and his stint with the Office of War Information during World War II, he never took a job again.
With over a year of writing and selling stories behind him, Will registered for the draft on June 5, 1918. George had registered in Newark, the year before listing his mother as next of kin. Will registered in Washington, D.C., using the St. James Hotel as his address and also listing his mother as next of kin.
Why he was in Washington is unknown. The record showed George of medium height and build with light brown hair and gray eyes. Will was described as tall (although he was actually 5' 7") and slender with brown hair and dark brown eyes. George entered his occupation as “Clerk, Prudential Insurance Company,” while 21-year-old Will confidently wrote “Author.” George was called up quickly and, according to Will, served overseas. Will said he had the devil of a time getting in because he was underweight and used the well known “stuffing himself with bananas” trick to add more pounds.
He was disappointed that he did not go overseas but was sent instead to the Office of Public Information in the 19th Division, a
training unit. (Still in action
during the Iraq war, the 19th
or Iroquois Division was the
subject of a flurry of internet
exchanges complaining that a
National Guard unit was
being sent to Iraq without any
weapons. It was explained by
the army that regulations
authorized all equipment “from
typewriters to weapons” and
that training units such as the
Iroquois did not need weapons
but would have them issued to
them by another unit if they
were needed. To those who
knew him, the picture of Will
Jenkins going to war with his
trusted Remington upright
typewriter is somehow appro-
Mamie in Newark.
priate.)
30
M U R R A Y L E I N S T E R
In spite of the demands of their military service until the war’s end in November 1918, stories by both young men kept appearing in print.
In February 1918, Will first appeared in Breezy Stories with “Sacrifice,” but he soon branched out beyond the light, trendy, humorous pieces he had been selling to The Smart Set and Snappy, Saucy and Breezy Stories. He added ones with an adventure, western or mystery flavor using his pen name, Murray Leinster. He found a new market adding the Munsey magazines All-Story Weekly and The Argosy to his publishers and was averaging two stories a month among these publications.
Coincidently, in 1896 the year Will was born, Frank Munsey decided to take advantage of the development of pulp paper, a cheap alternative to what was previously available. Munsey had entered the publishing business in 1882
with a boy’s adventure magazine, The Golden Argosy. He converted The Golden Argosy to a monthly, dropping the Golden, targeting adults and printing all fiction. Using the new paper and untrimmed pages, he was able to price the magazine at ten cents a copy and sales took off. Because of pulp paper’s giant advantage — it was cheap, so magazines printed on it could be cheap — there was tremendous growth of the genre. Street & Smith entered the field in 1903
with The Popular Magazine and Munsey added All-Story Weekly to his group in 1905. The Argosy started to publish weekly in 1917 still selling for 10 cents a copy. It printed all fiction, soon including science fiction; therefore The Argosy and All-Story Weekly became important new markets for Murray Leinster.
His first Munsey story was “Atmosphere” in The Argosy, January 26, 1918.
This was followed by adventure stories in All-Story Weekly: “You Can’t Get Away with It,” February 2, 1918; “A Cabin in the Wilderness,” April 6, 1918;
“Grooves,” October 12, 1918; “Footprints in the Snow,” June 7, 1919; “W.S.S.,” August 2, 1919; and “Oh Aladdin” on November 1, 1919. “Evidence,” published July 12, 1919, was a western murder mystery.
Five more Murray Leinster stories appeared in The Argosy in 1918: “In Cold Blood,” May 4; “The Hour After Supper,” July 13; “Jiggy Jazz,” September 21; “Honesty,” September 28; and “Izzy,” November 16.
Will’s relationship with Argosy continued through its various name and editorial changes. The skills he learned in these early years prepared him well, and, when Argosy switched to slick format and a varied editorial content in 1942, Will switched also and continued to sell to them, changing to the Will F. Jenkins byline. In April 1963, it printed “Night to Survive,” which had originally been published in The Saturday Evening Post.
While Will was experimenting with new genres and finding new markets, George, other than one appearance in Detective Tales in February 1923, never Three • The Early Days: 1910 –1919
31
emerged from his early style. The bulk of his work appeared in The Smart Set and The Parisienne.
In 1968, in a letter to his daughter Jo-an, Will reflected on this time: oh, yes. I found a Pleiades Club annual volume for 1918–1919. It contains the first item of my writing to be included in a hardcover book. And it’s terrible!
But it was amazing to see the names of so many people I used to know who for a time were more or less famous. Richard le Gallienne (Eva le Gallienne’s father) to you may be the name of a famous actress. But he was highly literary and much admired.
If you were to find somebody of my generation they would prick up their ears (providing they were intellectuals fifty years ago) if somebody said Berton Braley, Lillian Bennet-Thompson, Dorothy Dix, Thomas Edgelow, Archie Gunn, Bernard Hamblin, Joseph Hergesheimer, Fanny Hurst, George B. Jenkins, Jr., Reginald Kauffman, Harry Kemp, Murray Leinster, Elias Lieberman, Wyndham Martyn, Cleveland Moffett, Channing Pollack, H. Thompson Rich, Walter Adolph Roberts, Francis Rolt-Wheeler, Herb Roth, Margaret Sangster, Clinton Scollard, Elizabeth Sharp, Thomas Grant Springer, Robert W. Sneddon, Archie Sullivan, Margaret Widdemer, Clement Wood... It is most singular to come upon the names of all these people I knew more or less well, of whom I have all sorts of irrelevant memories, who at one time were recognizable entities with known achievements and with status ... the fact that reputation even in one’s field is just what Bill Shakespeare said. It’s a bubble. It bursts.
The Pleiades Club was a literary
society that was founded in Greenwich Village in 1896 and published yearbooks through 1936. It started when a group from the artistic community, who were regulars at an Italian restaurant (Maria de Prato’s on MacDougal Street), decided to formalize their gatherings.
Mark Twain is perhaps the best known now of the first members. They met weekly for dinner and entertainment, music, poetry readings and the like, and, as the membership grew, moved to larger quarters. They saw their mission as promoting the arts of “Music, Drama, Art and Literature,” providing an appreciative audience and helping needy artists with free scholarships. It is possible that he met the poet Strickland Gillian there. He certainly brought up his children reciting Gillian’s so-called world’s shortest poem, “On the Antiquity of Microbes.” In its entirety it reads, “Adam had ’em.” The Pleiades Yearbook 1918 –1919 included “The Ass,” a short story by Murray Leinster, and “In the Subway,” a humorous poem by George B. Jenkins, Jr.
Will always said that if he had been able to continue in school, he would have become a chemist. However, his scientific interests extended beyond chemistry into physics and the biological sciences. The thought of combining his interests in science and writing by producing science fiction was not yet in his mind, even though science fiction had begun to attract major attention as long ago as 1864 with Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and 32
M U R R A Y L E I N S T E R
From Earth to Mars in 1865. H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine in 1895, The Invisible Man in 1897, and War of the Worlds in 1898. Mark Twain wrote his story of time travel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, in 1889.
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Under the Moons of Mars (later published in book form as The Princess of Mars) was printed as a series in six issues of All-Story Magazine beginning in February 1912. Notable in the story was that the hero, John Carter, rescued and married Princess Dejah Thoris and the fruit of their union was an egg. Burroughs’ more enduring Tarzan was printed in its entirety in one issue of All-Story in October 1912. Even Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a number of science fiction stories beginning with The Lost World in 1912. This series about the exploits of rich, eccentric Professor Challenger was concluded in 1929.
For now, Will was spurred by the reality of actually making a living by writing, so he continued to seek out all possible markets and tried to write a minimum of a thousand words a night. Of those early years, one of his favorite lines was, “I only starved to death twice.”
In 1919, in the mix of adventures, westerns, mysteries and other stories published as by Will F. Jenkins or Murray Leinster, there appeared also the first of his attempts at science fiction.
• FOUR •
Entering Science Fiction:
1919–1921
The whole thing started when the clock on the Metropolitan Tower began to run backward. It was not a graceful proceeding. The hands had been moving onward in their customary deliberate fashion, slowly and thoughtfully, but suddenly the people in the office near the clock’s face heard an ominous creaking and groaning. There was a slight, hardly discernible shiver through the tower, and then something gave with a crash. The big hands on the clock began moving backward.
“The Runaway Skyscraper,” published in
The Argosy magazine, February 22, 1919
“The Runaway Skyscraper” was Will’s first science fiction story. Sam Moskowitz, science fiction writer and editor, well known as a historian of science fiction, tells the story of how it all happened in his profile of Will, “The Strange Case of Murray Leinster,” in the December 1961 issue of Amazing Stories.
Although Will had achieved his goal of supporting himself by writing, he told Moskowitz he had gotten fed up with the kinds of stories he had been writing and selling to Argosy since 1917. So he told Argosy’s editor, Matthew White, Jr., he was finished with that stuff for a while. He casually mentioned he was working on a story beginning with the line, “The whole thing started when the clock on the Metropolitan Tower began to run backward.” White immediately sent back a letter saying he wanted to see it.
“I had to write it or admit I was lying,” Will said.
Matthew White was an interesting man. He was personable, a prolific writer, and also a drama critic. Will’s memory of him included his snow-white whiskers and a slight lisp. His editorship, some said his genius, in the early 1900s greatly contributed to the growth and success of the magazine.
33
34
M U R R A Y L E I N S T E R
Cut from “The Runaway Skyscraper.”
An article in the January 1908 issue of The Writer laid out White’s editorial rule that was the secret of The Argosy’s success: “Pique the reader’s curiosity, then gratify it.” The article quoting White continued as follows.
“The Argosy,” he says, “never has a story written backward — that is to say, the editor never hits on some frenzied position for the hero, and calls on an author to write a story around it. The editor considers what phase of life is likely to be most interesting to the big majority of readers. This being settled upon, the author is told to carry his hero along in a series of experiences that would be liable to happen to anyone under such conditions. The Argosy,” says Mr. White,
“...does not print stories which wander off at the end into hazy nothingness, which some writers are pleased to call ‘artistic finish,’ but which, as a matter of cold, hard fact, is neither finish nor art. Neither do readers of The Argosy have to waste time in wading through a tame introduction to get at the kernel of the narrative. Stories must capture interest at the outset.” Will’s first line certainly piqued curiosity, including his own. The idea for “The Runaway Skyscraper” came when he looked out the window and noticed the clock on the Metropolitan Life Tower, one of the tallest buildings in New York at the time, was running backwards. It was being reset. What if time was really running backwards? How could he gratify his curiosity? He began the process of developing literary plots he followed all his life.
“The Runaway Skyscraper” captured the interest of Harold Hershey, one Four • Entering Science Fiction: 1919 –1921
35
of the editors of Thrill Book, a new publication planned by Street and Smith in 1919. He and fellow editor Eugene Clancy had been having difficulty finding stories for the new magazine. They had planned for it to be an all-fantasy magazine but could not find enough material and decided to add science fiction, straight adventure and mystery stories. He knew of Will’s work from The Smart Set in addition to Argosy and approached Will, asking him for something for Thrill Book. Will came up with three stories. “A Thousand Degrees Below Zero” was published July 15, 1919. Its plot involved an evil inventor whose machine could draw heat from all objects it was directed onto, killing all living creatures and destroying the rest. This plot with changes in the inventions was a basis for many further Leinster stories.
The story was a success and was quickly followed by “The Silver Menace” in two installments on September 1 and September 15. Here, the seas are turned into gelatin by a swiftly multiplying life form.
“JuJu,” an adventure story set in Africa, appeared in the October 15 issue, and Murray Leinster had achieved enough interest that his name was on the cover. Unfortunately, this, the sixteenth, was the final issue of Thrill Book.
Will continued to read everything he could get his hands on and on every subject. This took him to French entomologist Jean Henri Fabré who wrote The Life of the Spider, The Life of the Fly, Social Life in the Insect World, and many others.
Will, in the Author’s Note of The Forbidden Planet (Gnome Press, 1954) said about them, “These books, while absolutely factual, are much more interesting than most fiction and can be read as if they were make-believe instead of the sound and honest work they are.”
He also commended the work of Ralph Beebe on the army ant in Edge of the Jungle and Maurice Maeterlinck for Life of the Bee. Will introduced all of these books to his children at an early age, an
d they devoured them as well.
“The Mad Planet,” which came out in Argosy on June 12, 1920, was a result of this interest. In what could be a prescient warning of global warming, changing climate conditions had resulted in a world where plants and insects had grown to enormous size and were dominant, and man was reduced to a primitive, hunted state. The hero, Burl, an early genius, begins to lead mankind out of this predicament. The popularity of the story resulted in
“The Red Dust,” printed in the April 2, 1921, Argosy, bringing Burl back with even more exciting adventures. A spaceship crash strands its crew on a planet where a dangerous experiment had been tried, then abandoned and forgotten.
A cloud of dust containing primitive bacterial plant and insect life had con-taminated the planet, and the crew must fight to survive.
It is interesting that these stories were basically narrative and included 36
M U R R A Y L E I N S T E R
little dialogue. Will loved to break rules and, in this case, was defying the critics who said a reader’s interest could not be maintained with pure narrative.
Third in the series, “Nightmare Planet,” didn’t come out until June 12, 1952, also in Argosy, and Moskowitz said, “It was an older, more philosophical, more thoughtful Jenkins writing this story, but the magic of the first two carried through.” When the three stories were put together in a book, The Forgotten Planet (Gnome Press, 1954), he moved the locale to another planet for scientific reasons. Moskowitz called it “a book of such magnetic appeal it is unlikely to become a forgotten classic.”
Now confident that he could make it with his writing, Will turned to settling his personal life. Although his brother George was living comfortably with his mother, in Newark, New Jersey, Will, now in his twenties, was eager to be on his own. He complained that Mamie looked through his mail, and that she boasted to the neighbors about the number and size of the checks he was receiving. It is doubtful that he stayed very long with his mother and brother after leaving the army when the war ended in 1918. He often referred to time spent in Greenwich Village, but the easy, freewheeling Bohemian atmosphere, though stimulating in some ways, probably did not appeal to Will for long (he spoke disparagingly about it in later life). What he was seeking was a secure family life.
Murray Leinster Page 4