Murray Leinster
Page 6
From the first, Clay Bank was a popular gathering place for family and their extended circle of friends. Mamie and brother George came, Lula with her family, and Will’s
father, George, after he
moved in with Lula.
Mary’s brothers and
sisters and their fami-
lies often arrived for
vacations and holi-
days. The several acres
of lawn, a sandy beach
for oyster roasts, crab-
bing off the wharf, and
the wide York River
for swimming were big
Adeline and unknown friend (in overalls) hitch a ride with Barneymule on his load of watermelons.
attractions.
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Mary in her brother John’s car during a visit on his way to Florida.
Visitors to Ardudwy, coming within sight and the salty smell of the river, would watch for a narrow dirt lane on the right just before the Clay Bank store. They would make a sharp right turn onto it and drive uphill past a field on the left where in the spring there were daffodils, and, later in the season, a crop of corn. By 1930, the old, white-painted, story-and-a-half colonial house was half-hidden by a high privet hedge. For a time, there was a sign at the entrance saying “Ardudwy.”
It was likely that Will would be at the open door, for it was rare for anyone to be coming up the lane unless they were coming to see the Jenkins family. Engine noise, headlights at night, or a cloud of fine dust during the hot, dry summers announced your impending arrival. His first words in his soft Tidewater accent would be, “Come on in. Let’s have a memorial for my seventh great grandfather.” He was referring to a saying, popular at the time.
The governor of North Carolina was supposed to have said to the governor of South Carolina, “It’s been a damn long time between drinks.” Will would be quick to explain that when his first ancestor in America, John Jenkins, was a governor in the 1600s there was no North and South Carolina, it was all Olde Albemarle County. “So,” he would say, “we consider that he was talking to himself.”
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Friends were always welcome, and they were encouraged to bring guests, so there was an interesting mix. Like other young couples, Will and Mary had many parties continuing the socializing and camaraderie they had enjoyed in New York. The Lawson sisters, Gussie and Hylda Lawson and Edith Hatch would bring down guests from the Botetourt Hotel. They were often the traveling men, salesmen who made regular stops in Gloucester. The Jenkins girls particularly looked forward to a visit from one of the tobacco salesmen recalled as a Mr. Berkabile. He was a very talented amateur magician and entertained them by pulling quarters out of their ears and other tricks.
Gussie was a charmer, always beautifully dressed with finger-waved hair, a fresh manicure and smelling sweetly of cologne. Hylda was more reserved.
She wore trousers when no one but Katherine Hepburn did and had a thriving business growing and selling jonquil bulbs and making wreaths. Edith was married but also lived at the hotel where Mr. Hatch, who worked in Richmond, visited from time to time. She was also beautifully dressed and “went to business” as was the term at the time.
Meanwhile Will had to worry about supporting his growing family. He was polishing his craft and had learned that, even at the going rate of half a cent to a cent a word, he could make a living if he was versatile enough and wrote enough stories that sold.
Fortunately he had been doing well since his marriage. William Clayton’s Telling Tales and Clues printed several stories in the twenties. A long relationship with Street and Smith began with appearances in Top Notch Magazine, Detective Story Magazine, and Cowboy Stories. In September 1923, he began a long run in Short Stories under Doubleday-Page and later Doubleday-Duran with “In Account with Destiny.” It continued with 29 more stories through 1948 and ended in 1958 in Leo Margulies’ revival of the magazine under the new American Short Stories Corporation. His first story in Doubleday’s West,
“Howdy,” appeared in January 1926.
The Munsey Company, publishers of Argosy, started a new magazine, Love Story, in 1921. They had been publishing Will’s adventure stories in Argosy and were familiar with his versatility, so they wrote to him about a series they planned to initiate based on some British six-penny novels they had purchased.
Would he be interested in taking on writing romances for Love Story Magazine?
Resourceful as usual, Will was able to respond positively. They were paying half a cent a word, so he was happy to give it a try. He created Louisa Carter Lee out of his half-sister’s first name, Louisa, and two venerable Virginia sur-names, Carter and Lee. Writers often took women’s names for romance stories and triple names were considered elite and were very popular.
“A Chivalrous Silence” was published in two parts in August 1921. Louisa
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“The Unkissed Wife” appeared in Love Story Magazine, March 25, 1922.
was very popular and, in 1926 alone, 12 of Louisa’s stories were printed in Love Story Magazine. Chelsea House published two Louisa Carter Lee novels, Her Desert Lover in 1925, and Love and Better: A Love Story in 1931. Later he estimated Louisa was earning about $200 a week at this time, good money in those days when two thousand dollars a year was a living wage for many of the middle class. Louisa was popular, and there were plans to expand. Will invented a male love novelist, Dana Furnam, and proposed a serial with Louisa and Dana writing alternating chapters. But all of a sudden he couldn’t do it.
He said in his Disclave 70 speech, “I was living a real romance and couldn’t write the phoney stuff any more.” The Munsey Company tried to encourage him: “They offered a cent a word, then two cents and finally three cents a word if I would just go back to being my old Louisa. It would have meant five, six hundred dollars a week — in the early Twenties! And I just couldn’t do it.”
But a check was a check, and he managed to write “the phoney stuff ” occasionally as late as 1937 when Thrilling Love published a story by him. The Louisa Carter Lee name surfaced again in May 1949, when “Red Canyon” was reprinted in Movie Magazine. But he wasn’t happy about it. In the end, he fell so out of love with what had been a solid income earner that, later, when his daughter Billee was in her early teens and was caught reading Love
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Story Magazine, he stood the copies up on the mantelpiece, thinking to embarrass her by allowing people to see what trash she was reading.
Much later, Will wrote to his daughter Jo-an about this period: Man I’ve been reading stories sold as far back as 1921, and I writhe at how bad, and how immature and how simply sickly those yarns are. I must have sold more utterly lousy stories than anybody else in the world.— I suspect that if I ever got famous enough for somebody to propose a “Complete Works” that I’d rise up from my grave to strangle him. But the necessity isn’t likely to arise.
Meanwhile his family was growing. A second daughter, Betty (Elizabeth Madden Jenkins), was born on April 2, 1925. Louisa’s retirement, and the notoriously slow pay of the pulp magazines made things difficult for a time, but Will continually checked on new and unusual markets for opportunities to sell the same story more than once. A western story, “Ample Water,” bylined Murray Leinster, was published in Sunset in January 1925, and in the Brooklyn Standard Union newspaper on Sunday, May 3, 1925. It contained the Leinster trademarks, an engaging animal, in this case a rabbit, and an evil antagonist, defined by his actions and not by words.
Will once commented disparagingly of his brother, “When George doesn’t sell a story for a couple of months, he gives up and gets a job editing.” Will never gave up.
Hugo Gernsback launched Amazing Stories in April 1926. He is credited with being th
e father of science fiction and developing some of the most successful writers in that genre. Gernsback wanted Will, and writing for Gernsback with his idea of a magazine devoted to scientifiction as he called it should have been a natural for Will. It was an idea whose time had come. However, there was a crucial issue, payment, and by now Will was already firmly established as a name writer because of his regular appearances in Argosy, Short Stories, Clues, Telling Tales and others. Gernsback was notorious for being slow pay or no pay.
Gernsback had been publishing a number of science-oriented magazines like Radio News, The Electrical Experimenter, and Science and Invention, and had identified a market for this genre. Munsey’s The Argosy and All-Story had started to print some science adventure and he might have brought out a new magazine, but he died in 1926 without trying the new format. Blue Book Company was printing some science fiction. Street and Smith’s The Thrill Book had failed, so they were not ready for another attempt. It was only Gernsback who dared take the plunge and try an all science fiction magazine.
Will did appear in the June 1926 issue of Amazing Stories with a reprint
Opposite: “My wife merely feels faint,” he says in “The Unkissed Wife.” 50
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of “The Runaway Skyscraper” from Argosy. This issue of Amazing Stories, like the first two, was made up primarily of reprints, including “The Star” by H. G. Wells and Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne. Because he paid his authors very little if at all, Gernsback was having trouble attracting new stories, including from Will, and he soon had the reputation of using only reprints. He undoubtedly would have been more successful in getting new material if he had not been so parsimonious.
Gernsback had tried out set rates on H. G. Wells: $100 for a novel and $50 for short stories. This was not so bad in those days for the short stories, but, for a 60,000-word novel like War of the Worlds, it came out to 1⁄6 of a cent a word. This was further complicated by a possible confusion that the rate agreed upon was in pounds rather than dollars. The pound being worth $5 at the time, this was serious confusion, and Gernsback soon stopped printing Wells’ stories, probably because he didn’t want to meet Wells’ price.
Amazing Stories went on to reprint Will’s “The Mad Planet” in November 1926 and “The Red Dust” in January 1927, both originally in Argosy.
Gernsback paid $45 for the reprint of “The Red Dust” but, more importantly, Robert T. Hardy, Will’s agent at the time, negotiated a payment upon contract rather than publication. “The Red Dust” was 23,000 words, so the $45 represented about 1⁄5 of a cent a word. Gernsback liked to plead poverty and asked writers for special consideration while he was launching his new magazine. As the magazine went into its second year, authors got tired of that excuse, especially in light of his lavish personal life-style.
Hardy had been with Will since The Smart Set days when he had represented several of their authors. Striking at well over six feet tall, Hardy had a reputation for a good rapport with his authors, and his advice to Will seems to have been good as well. He surely must have helped this youthful beginner negotiate a then uncommon relationship with Munsey. At that time, the potential for reprint sales for science fiction was not anticipated, and publishers regularly retained all publishing rights. Will’s contracts retained the rights for him, a practice he continued. This was a particular bonus for his wife, Mary, in later years, as foreign rights became a reliable source of income. From the first sale, Will told Mary that all money from foreign rights would be hers personally, to spend as she chose. Even if he had to borrow from her occasionally, he respected that gift and always paid her back.
Because of Will’s reputation from Argosy, Gernsback was eager to obtain new stories from him. He heard Will had written a new novel called The Strange People and asked to see it. He also requested a sequel to “The Red Dust” and up to six new stories a year, but Hardy’s advice was that he wouldn’t pay enough to make it worthwhile.
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Hardy wrote to Will saying:
I don’t know whether it would pay you to undertake to write this for two cents a word, if payment was on acceptance. I am not sure it would, as he probably wouldn’t order them in advance, and if you didn’t sell them to him you might have some difficulty in disposing of the stories elsewhere. Don’t you think you could put your time better elsewhere?
Hardy was not convinced of the viability of this new genre and thought of science fiction as freak stories and not particularly marketable. The Strange People sold later to Weird Tales and was published in March, April and May 1928. Their usual rate was at least a cent a word.
Gernsback lost Amazing Stories in 1929, when he was sued into bankruptcy. He further developed the reputation of “paying upon lawsuit,” when science fiction writer Donald A. Wollheim sued him in 1935 for not paying for two of his stories in Wonder Stories.
However, Gernsback’s encouragement of fandom was a major contribution to the future of science fiction and of benefit to Will. Gernsback started a “Discussions” letter column in the January 1927 issue of Amazing Stories, providing an opportunity for communication among the widespread science fiction fans who were beginning to form into clubs. These fans were a nucleus for a generation of writers and editors and a market for the additional science fiction magazines to come that would give Will an outlet where he could combine his passion for science with writing moneymaking fiction. He called his science fiction writing “a hobby,” as he tells in his editor’s introduction to Great Stories of Science Fiction, published by Random House in 1953.
The sort of mental exercise these writers have done for their own satisfaction may not appeal to everybody, but to me it’s fun. Anybody’s hobby has some attraction and science fiction has been a hobbyist’s hobby up to now. I think it is an intelligent hobby without being in the least “intellectual” in the repulsive meaning of the word.
The sort of people who practice it may have something to do with that. A good many of the writers are simply addicts, like myself, who have been writing it for fun because there is no money in it. I view with some alarm that presently there may be profit in it.
Will was moving toward his interest in science fiction, and the field was beginning to open up. Although writing was still a precarious way of making a living, he was able to do so because of the steady markets he had developed in adventures, mysteries and westerns. If one magazine closed, he found other outlets. The film Good as Gold, which starred popular cowboy star Buck Jones, came out in 1927. It was based on “The Owner of the Aztec,” printed in Western Magazine, May 5, 1926. A few beginning stories in 1924 in Triple X Weekly, a Fawcett publication, led to a series of four serials in 1928 through 1931.
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Alfred H. King published one, The Kid Deputy, in hardcover in 1935. Four of Murray Leinster’s most enduring stories were published in Argosy in late 1929 and 1930, “Darkness on Fifth Avenue,” “The City of the Blind,” “The Man Who Put Out the Sun” and “The Storm That Had to be Stopped.” Sam Moskowitz in Seekers of Tomorrow (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1961) specifically refers to these stories in identifying what he considers the basic theme of most Leinster stories, man battling against nature.
Moskowitz says, “A majority of Leinster’s stories emphasize that it is the battle, not the ultimate victory, that is important. Man courageously, sometimes magnificently, fights a mindless, implacable creature, phenomenon, or condition. Even if some man has caused the situation, he is rarely the antagonist.”
He says Will, writing as Leinster, “recognizes man against nature and he will permit the appearance of man battling against man but disallows the Freudian concept of man against himself.”
He mentions “Ribbon in the Sky” ( Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1957) as an example where Will tells of people who believe they will become ill if they come in contact with people in othe
r communities, and do, because they believe they will. Will indicates that he believes the cure “is physical action, not psychiatric treatment.”
Moskowitz attributes this attitude to Will’s Catholic faith. However, he says Will, a convert, did not push his faith on others, did no proselytizing, and embraced his new faith because “it represented his attitudes even as a youth.” Moskowitz felt that Will’s stories represent how he himself felt about things rather than pushing religious beliefs saying: “Things happen and man responds to events. In science fiction, where what happens is frequently more important than why it happens or to whom it happens, this tendency has easily been overlooked.”
Joe Rico, a Fellow of the New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA) and editor of First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster (The NESFA Press, 1998), was particularly interested in how Will’s Catholic faith affected his stories. He wondered if it was a convenience or had a spiritual basis. Rica says,
“Villains redeeming themselves, or at least being implored to repent, are a common theme in his SF stories ... as well as people realizing they may be in the wrong. It struck me as a Catholic attitude.” Will loved storytelling in every form, and he particularly enjoyed those that came out of everyday life. His Catholic faith contributed to one of his favorites that emerged during the 1928 election when Al Smith, a Catholic, was running against Herbert Hoover (who won). Although Will had been brought up as an Episcopalian, and Mary had been raised as a Catholic, it Five • Marriage: The 1920s
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had not been an impediment to their marriage. Later, as Will read and studied, he embraced the Catholic faith as his own. There were few other Catholic families in Gloucester at that time, and those were viewed with suspicion.