Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison!

by Harry Harrison

  For me, like thousands of other readers, Astounding, or ASF, was the bible and the keystone to science fiction. However, unlike the Bible, it was reborn every month, fresh and new and filled with stories and ideas that titillated and inspired us. Since I grew up as a reader, it was the most important event in my professional life to meet John—then to become a member of his stable. This was not a matter of bending the knee and spine and submitting to his will and fancies. Rather it was a matter of hurling myself into the maelstrom of creativity that surrounded him, to listen to him, war with him, learn from John and the other ASF writers. I shaped myself as a writer, since we all must walk the final mile alone. But by god I was shaped in the annealing oven of John’s genius—something that I will be ever grateful for. Late in his career he suggested that I should take over editing the magazine when he died. I recoiled, rejected the idea as honestly as I could without giving my reasons in too great detail. Because I knew that he was the magazine: the magazine was him. When he died that spirit that had created ASF for all those years would die with him. Yes, ASF is still a fine magazine. But it is not John’s magazine.

  A final note. When I was guest of honor at Devilcon 3 in New Jersey, I was interviewed on stage by Barry Malzberg. Barry is an old and good friend—and very much a historian of SF. He pointed out an interesting fact that I had not realized before. After the war, when I was writing stories and serials for ASF, I was most prolific. So much so that I had more words accepted and published by John than any other writer published by him at the time. Thank you, Barry. This is a warming and happy-making observation.

  My first novels were all published first as magazine serials. Then they were sold as books. I was lucky enough to have the late Larry Ashmead as my first editor. I was also one of the first authors he published at Doubleday. He had been friends at college with another student who was one of the Doubleday family who later moved into the family publishing house. Since Larry had a degree in geology he was hired as a science editor—just when science fiction began to appear in books. Larry became science fiction editor because the word “science” was there. Sounds bonkers, couldn’t happen. But if you know anything about publishing you will know it must be true.

  Other editors came and went down the years until I settled with the happiest of sighs into the publishing embrace of Tom Doherty and his firm, Tor Books. Tom is an old and true friend who is absolutely the best in publishing.

  I’ve been screwed blind by various agents around the world who wanted to sell my books. There was one I remember who was from India, and I remember his name to this day—Kunarumple P. Pernoose. How do you forget a name like that? And on his business card it said “Calcutta University, BA (failed)”! I sent him some books, and I told Brian about it and he sent some too, and he said: “It’s probably a con job to get some of our books to sell.” And it was, we never got a cent. But what I did do—I thought, what the hell, I’m corresponding with this guy—I said do you have any cookbooks in English about Indian cooking? I think I sent him five pounds or something, and he was honest about it, he sent about ten books that cost two-and-six each, paperbacks, in really crazy English. And with ads for the front cover. There was one thing I had to ask Brian about. This was about one of the measures of rice—it was a cigarette tin. He said that in India they had an oval tin. We finally figured out it was about a cup or two or whatever. There were a lot of nice recipes, some of which Joan made, but that was all we made out of old Kunarumple P. Pernoose.

  Once when I was in Europe a fan gave me a Spanish book to sign. I signed it but I’d never seen it before. It had my name on it. I opened it up, and it was published in Mexico City. I copied the details down and a couple of years later Mack Reynolds was living in Mexico, and I saw him somewhere at a convention and I asked him if he ever went to Mexico City. He said yes, at least once a month, it was only about thirty miles. I said, “Do me a favor, go by and see this joker who stole my book, and tell him I’d like some money—tell him you’re my agent,” and I gave him the address.

  A couple of months later I got a letter from Mack, saying: “Listen, Harrison, next time you want to collect some money for yourself, don’t ask me!” He went to Mexico City, found the address, went up the stairs, talked to the girl and went into the office: a nice guy with a necktie and jacket in a nice office, who spoke good English. Mack explained about Harry Harrison and his book, and he said, “Oh, yes, we published it. You want some money?” Mack said, “Yes.” The guy opened a drawer, reached in, and took out a gun! He said: “I don’t think I want to give you some money.…” Mack said: “I don’t want to bother you anymore; I’ve got to go.…” That was Mexico.

  It is these bad experiences that make you appreciate the good ones.

  There are still many stories to tell, experiences that were lived. However, I will stop here. Science fiction has brought me a full life, along with my family—we have traveled and lived around the world. As well as my biological family I have had my science fiction family, where we have found a home away from home in nearly every part of the world. From these memoirs you will have glimpsed the things I feel most passionately about in life: my work, my beliefs, my enthusiasm for Esperanto and my family, especially my beloved wife, Joan. She lost her fight with cancer in 2002, an unimaginably horrific event. She left a hole in our lives that cannot be filled.

  My daughter Moira has read and helped to edit my memoirs. She said to me the other day, “Dad, I thought I might be able to figure out the reasons we went various places and did various things by reading the memoirs but now I realize the truth. You did what you did because …

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time!”

  THE END

  PART TWO

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  These essays were originally to be integrated into the main text of Harry Harrison’s memoir, but Harrison died before he was able to do the work of weaving them into the body of the book. Because they were written separately, and in some cases repeat bits of material already in the book, they are being presented separately here, in approximately chronological order in relation to Harrison’s career. Their importance to a reader of Harrison’s fiction, and to his autobiographical efforts, is unquestionable, and they are entertaining and informative in and of themselves.

  David G. Hartwell

  JOHN W. CAMPBELL

  When I was fifteen years old I thought John W. Campbell was God. I wrote that in the introduction to a collection of Campbell’s editorials that I edited. I was of the generation that grew up reading Campbell’s magazine. I read ASF—Astounding Science Fiction—and loved it. That was life everlasting! I read it before the war, I read it in the army, and I read it after the war. Astounding used to come out on a Thursday late in the month, and I found a subway station downtown that had them one night early, about a half hour’s ride—an hour’s round trip—and I read it on the way back. To read Astounding was a pleasure, while to be published in his magazine was a pleasure beyond measure.

  I first met John in New York after I had submitted the idea for Deathworld. He had sent me back a long letter, seventeen pages in response to a one-page outline or something. So with that, I girded my loins and went up to his office and met him. As an editor he didn’t need to be in the office, but he’d come in one day a week. He would read galleys in the morning. Then, after putting the magazine to bed, he would take invited authors to lunch, along with any other writers who were in the office.

  He was a big man in every way. Six foot tall, and none of it fat. His head was shaved and he always had a cigarette holder in one hand, an inhalator in the other. Poul Anderson said that having a conversation with John was like throwing manhole covers at each other, but they were intellectual manhole covers. John Campbell conversation consisted of a series of pointed questions. I remember one day he looked at me and said:

  “You’re a medieval peasant and you’re allergic to white bread, what happens? Speak up!”

  I said: “Er … er … I
eat white bread and I get sick.”

  “Right, and you fall down foaming at the mouth. Now where do you get white bread, eh? When would you ever see white bread? Only the landowner eats white bread, you would never see it.”

  “Maybe I get some that falls from his table.… Or he throws it out in the garbage.”

  “You’re not thinking!” He’d crack the whip and make you think. I had about half an hour of this. My palms were clammy. I was wishing for salvation or for lightning to strike or something. Finally, reluctantly, he sits back heavily and says: “The answer is obvious. I said you were a peasant, remember? When would you ever see white bread? You’d actually be served white bread when you got the Host in church. When you got the Host you’d fall down and foam at the mouth—and that’s the explanation for medieval possession! Go away and write the story.”

  I never did. If you want to write it and send it in to Analog, tell them John gave you the idea! In a conversation with John there’d be ten to fifteen ideas. He would infuse writers’ little minds with Campbellian ideas. You could write them as stories for him, but he didn’t demand that you wrote them, and if you wrote them, there was no guarantee he’d buy them. Randy Garrett made his living from John Campbell ideas; he used to write them all! Life was fun with John Campbell, I’ll tell you! He made you work, and he’d make you sweat.

  When someone asked John why he didn’t write anymore, he said: “I have a hundred writers writing my stories now! If I have a hundred writers, I write a hundred stories a year!” He fed you ideas. With Deathworld he didn’t tell me what to write, but he showed me new ways of approaching the material I had already developed. He brought new ideas out of my basic idea, expanding on it. It was an education to be with John Campbell.

  John’s office was just a few adjoining rooms at the back of a paper warehouse. When Condé Nast bought out Street & Smith, they kept Analog only because it was making money. But they had no office for it except in the back of this warehouse. He had one room where he did his correspondence, and there was a typing table where Kay Tarrant sat. She was the only other employee. She read the copy with the vigilant eye of a virginal old maid. She wouldn’t allow curse words of any type.

  This brought problems. I remember that in Deathworld it was very important that the word “damn” was in it. I asked John, “Is it okay to use the word ‘damn’?” I could not tell him that Kay censored the stories after John had approved them. He said, “Yes, of course it’s okay.” But Kay took it out! There’s the old story of George O. Smith being the only guy who ever got some dirty copy by her. He referred to a “ball-bearing mousetrap”—none other than a tomcat! She was so pure she couldn’t catch the double meaning.

  Lunch was the time when John talked to his authors. “Talk” is not the correct word—perhaps “destroy,” “crush,” “grind” might be better! He had appointments with some of the authors; the others just tagged along. John didn’t care who came to lunch. You’d walk down the street with him and a bunch of three or four other writers. I remember once walking between John and Poul. Each was deaf in one ear. I had the good luck to be next to the wrong ear for both of them.

  Lunch with John Campbell was a challenge, and there was really not much chance to eat. One day Randy Garrett was there and John was giving a lecture and all eyes were on him. Randy stopped the waiter and ordered a double martini, and I quickly said make that two. That’s when I discovered that John didn’t care what you ate or drank. Many times sustaining drink was the difference between life and death. It helped a good deal! He would ignore what you were doing, you could be getting drunk as ever, and he’d sit there with his cigarette holder in a world of his own.

  The film Lunch with John Campbell is an attempt to capture one of those editorial lunches on camera. I was in New York having lunch and a drink with Jim Gunn—he was based at the University of Kansas and mentioned that he had some grant money for his students to do interviews with science fiction authors. He wanted to come to New York and do an interview with John Campbell. I said, “If you want to do a film about John Campbell, you should do lunch with John Campbell, because that way you’ll see how John Campbell works and inspires his writers.” Jim said, “That’s a great idea, Harry, and you’ll do it!” That’s what you get if you open your mouth with a big idea. But I would get a free lunch out of it, and the chance to do the old verbal agro, which you always do with John, so it seemed like a good idea.

  Gordy Dickson was in New York and I was talking to him about ideas that I could ask John about, and Gordy said, “You know, Harry, I always had a thought that the film Lifeboat would make a good science fiction story.” I said, “Stop, Gordy, say no more. Let’s present that to John Campbell, just that amount of material, and see where it goes from there.”

  We ended up doing lunch with John in his favorite German restaurant. Lighting was set up, there were two cameramen and a soundman. John couldn’t care less what was going on around him, he was smoking his cigarette and nattering away. We started talking and like always with John, you mentioned the idea and he’d start with, “You couldn’t possibly do it, it’s a physical impossibility, it wouldn’t work.” Right away he would get your back up. And the film is full of us saying these wonderful things to move it along: “You know, John, you could do this and this.…” and John saying, “It wouldn’t work!” And us saying, “Of course you’re right, John, it wouldn’t work.…” We’d instantly change gear. There was a lot of that. It’s funny watching us bend our spines.

  Within about five minutes, one of the cameras broke down. This made the whole film for me. When you see it, the one remaining camera is always on the wrong person. When John is talking, giving a lecture, there is Gordy knocking a drink back, or me pouring more booze.

  We actually built the book on screen, plotted beginning, middle, and end, and then a few months later John died. Gordy and I felt driven to write the book and sell it as a serial to Analog. He flew out to California and we collaborated on it. Very early on we got a modus operandi. I write pretty much final copy, but Gordy was a wanderer and expander and he’d go back over it. We sat down and plotted the whole book very carefully, and then I wrote five-hundred- or eight-hundred- or thousand-word chapters, and Gordy would expand them to three thousand words. We had the structure absolutely dead right from beginning to end, and it worked well.

  * * *

  I was in the middle of writing Deathworld or some book, and John Campbell wrote me a letter saying, “Harry, have you ever thought of war pigs?” I’ve thought of a lot of things in my life, John, but I’ve never thought of war pigs. He was very serious. Pigs have sharp feet, they use them to forage food. I know the whole glory of pigs now. But when you say “pigs,” people think they’re funny. They think bacon. And this was a very serious book I was writing. Who knows how long he went on about it. I was in the middle of a novel, and all I could think about was pigs, pigs, pigs.…

  I had to cleanse my mind of pigs. I did that by writing the war pigs story, The Man from P.I.G. But it didn’t exorcise them, because they ended up coming back over and over again, including in the last Stainless Steel Rat book, in which the porcuswine return. I got a lot of mileage out of the pigs! My daughter Moira must have been affected by this passion for pigs because much later in life she owned a farm and bred Vietnamese potbellied pigs. She was one of my biggest fans when it came to pig stories, and to this day is extremely fond of pigs, which was disturbing to her Jewish grandmother!

  With a short story, John would either buy it or not buy it, absolutely black and white. But with a novel, he would work with you, often over a period of years. I think Deathworld was three or four years. I started Deathworld in New York, worked on it in Mexico, took it to Europe, to Italy, then came back to New York and I had some more copy, and I gave it to John, but it wasn’t the whole book. He was very annoyed. “I thought you were handing me the whole book here; I don’t want to read more copy!” So I settled down and in a few weeks wrote enough copy to fina
lize the book. The hero of Deathworld has got psychic powers, which John was into then and it fitted the plot, and became very important to the plot. I very quickly got rid of the normal psi stuff and had just this overall psychic “feeling” that this guy has. The money for Deathworld got me out of New York, because I had no money then. John was paying three cents a word; a book is sixty thousand words, that’s eighteen hundred dollars. I bought tickets to Denmark on SAS.

  * * *

  When I was eight or nine years old in school in the States, we had an alcoholic science teacher. She’d usually come in and give us a chapter to read and answer questions, and she’d have her “cough medicine” in her bag. One day she decided to show us that when metallic sodium is put into water, it bursts into flames. Sodium comes in a jar under oil, and you take a dry knife and take a bit like a fingernail paring and put it in a basin of water and it goes SHOOF! Very dramatic. She took this thing out and cut a piece about the size of a lozenge! And she dropped it in the water and it went WHHEEEENG!!! and burned her hair and turned her face coal black! The piece of sodium shot up and stuck in the plaster ceiling and smoked and burned like crazy! And we were impressed, I’ll tell you! “What are you going to do next week, Miss?” That was “science” for me! For years, until I left the school, you could see a bit of black stuck in a hole in the ceiling.… And the nonfiction articles in Astounding were also an essential part of my education and that of other young readers. I think the first time I heard the word “ecology” was in an article in Astounding. I was very interested and started buying a few books about it. John educated his readers, dragged them kicking and screaming toward intelligence—I know a lot of physicists and engineers who got into their jobs because of Astounding.