The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  Words take on the coloration of their times. The word “Communist” has one sound today, had quite another in the 50s, when Joe McCarthy shambled across the land, and probably will sound different still in the year 2000. In 1936 it sounded adventurous, active, and, above all, “progressive.”

  I’m not sure what the word “progressive” meant to me, except that it seemed generally forward-looking. The Communists had made sure that it sounded so. They had finally figured out that if they didn’t get a revolution in 1932, when the bonus marchers looked like an uprising even to Herbert Hoover and millions wondered where their next month’s rent was coming from, they weren’t going to get one at all in the foreseeable future. So the word had come down to broaden the base. It worked pretty well. The Communist Party and the YCL combined had well over a hundred thousand members in the late 30s, vastly more than ever before or after. They controlled countless other groups—workers’ fraternal organizations, trade unions, anti-Fascist leagues—with memberships ten or a hundred times as large.

  I carried my YCL card for almost four years. For most of that time I believed in what I was doing and worked hard at it, a regular Jimmy Higgins: president of my own branch, street-corner rabble-rouser, ace recruiter, even a kind of low-level policy maker. Of course, the really important policies were set by levels of leadership so high they disappeared out of sight. But in the implementation of the commandments there was room for interpretation, and I held membership in a dozen county and state committees and in the national conventions. It was all pretty open and aboveboard, except for this curious little custom of “Party names.”

  From 1940 on the Communist apparatus became a lot less benign and a hell of a lot more conspiratorial, but I was long gone by then. I suppose that even in the 1930s some sort of infrastructure was being laid. But I saw no signs of it, no trace of anything that I could not reconcile with the Pledge of Allegiance and the Boy Scouts’ oath. Maybe half a dozen times I was asked to do mildly covert things: attend a Nazi Bund meeting as a potential convert to report back on what they were up to (I chickened out of that one), pretend to be a member of some union to take part in a picket line. That was about it. The YCL was so square it was a disappointment.

  What we did was right out in the open. We cruised the five-and-tens looking for Japanese goods, and when we found them we picketed the stores, urging boycott. When the International Catholic Truth Society picketed theaters showing the movie Blockade, an ever-so-mildly pro-Loyalist film about the Spanish Civil War, we counterpicketed the International Catholic Truth Society. Several times a year we filled up Madison Square Garden with conventions, rallies, debates, anti-Fascist mass meetings, whatever. Those were glorious fun, twenty thousand clenched fists raised in the last lines of the “Internationale,” and afterward streaming out to Times Square to picket Walgreen’s drugstore (in the process of a strike at the time) or just to show the flag.

  More than anything else, we met. There were meetings all the time. Each branch met once a week. Committees met when they could. Between times there were parties, socials, musicales. Those were fund-raisers, a dozen people paying a quarter apiece to listen to records in someone’s apartment. Mostly what we heard was strictly long-hair, Beethoven-Bach-Brahms, rarely even Stravinsky or Prokofiev. Since I didn’t own a record player until I was twenty, the most exposure I had to classical music was at YCL musicales.

  The actual meetings of the branches were something else, heavily political, with a table of pamphlets always by the door, and wondering hurt in the eyes of the comrade behind the counter if you didn’t buy a couple. Yet, politically, what they said made sense. In the social dialogue, the opposition always has all the best lines. Boycott Japanese goods? Why, only a couple years later every human being in America shared those feelings. Practice collective security against the Rome-Berlin Axis? In far less than a decade, that became American national policy; it is what we now call the United Nations. Trade unionism, civil rights, an end to racial and sexual discrimination—no one now thinks of them as revolutionary. What the Communist Party and the YCL stood for in the 1930s, absent Moscow, looks pretty good right now.

  But Moscow was never absent. It was the Homeland of the Working Class, the socialist paradise. It could not be criticized. Whatever it did was right. Among the pamphlets for sale at the YCL meetings was a little copy of the new Constitution of the U.S.S.R., a marvelous document whose concern for the rights of individuals and national minorities should be an inspiration for freedom fighters everywhere. Especially in the U.S.S.R. We could see in the Soviet Constitution that the death penalty was abolished. We could see in the daily paper that, nevertheless, an astonishing number of Old Bolsheviks were being systematically stood up against a wall for left-wing, right-wing zigzag deviationism, and what was in those rifles, bottle corks? And yet this astonishing dichotomy not only was not resolved in the endless YCL discussions, it was not even raised. I do not remember a single person in any YCL meeting ever questioning the treason trials, the concentration camps, or the denial of civil rights. Not even me.

  We simply closed our eyes to what we did not want to see, and, of course, there are those who still can. Even now. Even after Solzhenitsyn’s memoirs and Khrushchev’s “secret” speech. Two or three years ago I was standing on the steps of Moscow’s Hotel Ukraine, waiting for the embassy driver to pick me up, and I struck up a conversation with an Australian trade unionist. He was on a socialist holiday, he told me. He had been saving up for ten years to do it. Stars were in his eyes. He had been to a light-industry factory that morning, and wasn’t it wonderful, he asked me, to see workers happily engaged in industries that they themselves owned?

  My driver came by before I could think of an answer, which is fortunate enough because I didn’t have one, or at least one that he would have been willing to hear. Clemenceau said, “A man who is not a socialist at twenty has no heart. A man who still is a socialist at forty has no head.” And my Aussie friend was well past forty.

  I think I learned something from my four years in the YCL, and most of what I learned was—what shall I call it?—skeptical compassion. I am a lot less sure of my own moral incorruptibility than I might otherwise have been and, maybe, a little less righteous about other people’s sins.

  Like most teen-agers, I had a general distrust of authority figures; also like most teen-agers, I had a strong need to be part of something larger than myself. The YCL solved those problems for me. I could march while I decried militarism, oppose regimentation in disciplined ranks.

  I wonder sometimes what might have happened in some alternative paratime world—say one in which my father’s parents had not left Germany and my mother’s had somehow wandered there, so that I grew up under Hitler’s Third Reich instead of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Would I have joined the Hitler Youth as easily as I plunged into the YCL? I hope not. On good days I even think not. I don’t see how I could possibly have swallowed that hogwash and joined with the murderers of the innocent…But I comprehend how it is that others did.

  Over the next couple of years Johnny Michel and I succeeded in persuading a few other science-fiction fans to follow us into the YCL.

  Everything considered, we were not particularly successful. All YCLers were expected to reproduce themselves by the recruitment of others, and we did what we could; but most of my own tally of souls won for Stalin came from casual contacts at open-air meetings, prospect lists furnished by higher authority, and other sources not connected with science fiction.

  I don’t think our failure was because Communism was so outrageous an idea for science-fiction fans. It may even have been that it was not outrageous enough. Science-fiction fans, like science-fiction writers, are about the most obstinately individual people alive, and they do get into strange things. Preaching Marxism, we were competing with Technocrats, Esperantists, Single-Taxers, New Dealers, Ham-and-Eggers, and even one or two self-labeled Fascists. None of them were making much headway, either.

  Of course, we
were quite sure that there was a significant difference between them and us. They were whoring after false gods, and we had the real stuff. So six or eight of us constituted ourselves The Committee for the Political Advancement of Science Fiction, and drew up a manifesto for what we called “Michelism.”

  The Michelist Manifesto, signed by John B. Michel himself, but written with the help of all us master theoreticians, was syncretic, idiosyncratic, and stylistically derived from an F. Odin Tremaine thought-variant story. It had a lot of V. I. Lenin in it, and a lot of H. G. Wells. We circulated it like any other fanzine, and it drew about the same kind of response, which is to say, it was treated as an entertainment instead of a revelation.

  If we couldn’t make Bolsheviks, perhaps we could at least create a few fellow travelers. Some of us copied the names of new fans out of the letter columns in Astounding and Thrilling Wonder and attempted conversion by mail:

  Dear Jim:

  I enjoyed your letter in Brass Tacks, and I think you are right about Doc Smith. Have you read “Wollheim Speaking for Boskone”? It really shows what a Fascist mentality Smith and John Campbell are trying to foist off on us. A lot of us progressive fans are getting pretty irritated, and if you’d like to join us—

  That didn’t accomplish very much, giving our political-action efforts a nearly perfect score. I don’t really think we expected it to. We knew whom we were dealing with: science-fiction fans. In order to read science fiction with any enjoyment, you have to be willing to make some pretty preposterous assumptions: men from Mars, time machines, invisibility, trips through the fourth dimension, all manner of mind-blowers. You don’t have to believe these things are real. But you have to accept them as postulates at least while you are reading the story, or the story won’t work. Trained in that school, science-fiction fans will play any game you propose. Just tell them the rules, and they’re off…and then, ten minutes later, they’re playing a quite different game with other rules entirely, and nothing is changed. Right discouraging, it was. Or would have been…if we hadn’t been playing the same game.

  5

  The Futurians

  By 1937 there were half a dozen science-fiction clubs in New York City, but none was quite satisfactory. Either we weren’t particularly welcome in them, or we didn’t like them to begin with. So we decided to start our own. We were getting pretty bored with Robert’s Rules of Order, and so we limited the number of formal meetings, and even more bored with BSFLs and NYB-ICSCs, so we chose a name that did not lend itself to compression to initials. We called it The Futurians.

  The Futurians was not exactly a club, it was a description: The Futurians were us. The Futurians was the air we breathed and the world we moved around in. It was home base. We were all growing and adventuring into new areas of experience. The Futurians was what we came back to.

  The Futurians wasn’t political, though some of its members surely were: Johnny Michel was, and so was I, and so over the next couple of years were six or eight others. Most of the Futurians were simply not interested. What held us together was science fiction, and a common desire to write it. As near as I can remember, the original Futurians were:

  Isaac Asimov

  Daniel Burford

  Chester Cohen

  Jack Gillespie

  Cyril Kornbluth

  Walter Kubilius

  David A. Kyle

  Herman Leventman

  Robert W. Lowndes

  John B. Michel

  Frederik Pohl

  Jack Rubinson

  Richard Wilson

  Donald A. Wollheim

  Dirk Wylie

  Later additions included Hannes Bok, Damon Knight, and Judith Merril, and, as you can see, a fair proportion of Futurians achieved their desire. There are three or four names on that list who, as far as I know, never succeeded in publishing a science-fiction story and getting paid for it, but there are also three or four who are collectively responsible for several hundred books and a number of short stories beyond my counting. To some extent, the winners owe a little of their success to the Futurians, if only for the reciprocal goading-on that we all supplied each other. We were almost all, from time to time, each other’s crutch. The only way to learn to write is to write; but there are ways of making the process easier, and one is collaboration, and we collaborated madly: Johnny with Donald, Dick Wilson with Dirk Wylie, Cyril with me, and as time went by, in other permutations and combinations that defy recollection. (I know there was one story on which seven of us collaborated. What I can’t remember is the story, probably because whatever memorability it had hoped to possess had been beaten flat by the hooves of the herd of collaborators.)

  I doubt that we Futurians, taken collectively, were a very likable group. We were too brash for that. More than brash; we were egregious, egotistic, adolescent, highly competitive, and a touch insecure. We were given to put-down jokes, and the one among us who showed a human weakness was savaged about it endlessly. We were pretty damn smart—I’d guess the average IQ somewhere over 125, with peaks past 160—and we knew it. We made sure everyone around us knew it, too.

  A little bit, there was justification for our arrogance. Collectively talented we were. Collectively lazy we were not. Nearly all the Futurians supported themselves from late teens on—not so much out of preference as that the Depression was not yet over and there wasn’t much choice. Dirk pumped gas at a filling station in Jamaica; Dick Wilson clerked at a bank until he moved on to a genuine publishing job with Women’s Wear Daily. Johnny Michel worked for his father, silk-screening “Special Today Only” signs for the Woolworth five-and-tens. Danny Burford delivered telegrams for Western Union. (Remember Western Union? Remember telegrams?)

  Evenings and weekends were for hobbies and talents. Cyril and Bob Lowndes wrote poetry—I still remember some of it, and still like it. When Isaac Asimov wasn’t tending counter at his parents’ candy store, he was reading the Encyclopedia Britannica through, volume by volume. Jack Gillespie and Jack Rubinson wrote plays—none ever produced, most long lost. Johnny painted funny little proto-PopArt scenes—one was a magenta sperm approaching a lavender ovum on a background of cobalt blue; it was called “Love.” Curiously, none of us did much about music except to sing. Probably the voice was the only instrument any of us could afford.

  As time passed and we grew a little older, we began experimenting with the standard adolescent vices. There was no such thing as a drug scene, but there was liquor. Isaac, Donald, and one or two other oddballs were next door to teetotal, but the rest of us experimented in varying degrees. Some of us experimented a lot. I think I was more often taken drunk with Dirk Wylie, and later with Cyril, than with all the rest of humanity combined. As far as I know, only one Futurian turned out to be anything you could call an alcoholic (he died of it, decades later), and he was one of the sparser drinkers of Futurian times. Most of us gave it a conscientiously thorough try and tapered off. Since our young male glands were boisterously flowing, there was a lot of interest in sex. But not much action. In the beginning the Futurians were one hundred percent male, and although one or two made regular trips to 125th Street to get their ashes hauled, and a couple of others had outside female interests, most, no doubt, relieved their stresses in the time-honored adolescent way. There was certainly no detectable homosexuality. On the one occasion when a Futurian made some sort of ambiguous approach to another, he was greeted with such revulsion and horror that he cravenly crept back into line; I am not even sure how serious the approach was—I was not present. In the breeze from the opened closets of the 70s that seems odd, if only on statistical grounds. But the climate of the 30s was something else. We were tolerant of diversity, but not that much diversity.

  Most of our pleasures were innocent. We made up our own games, word games like Djugashvili and La Spectre, variations of the old spelling-out Ghosts; trickster sports like The Piece of String. (Two Futurians stationed themselves at a dimly lit park path. As a stroller approached, they pretended to be unr
eeling a piece of string across the way at tripping-up level. The fun lay in the reactions of the strollers.) There was a vogue for the hotfoots, and most of our shoes were scorched for a year or so, and a brief fad of dialing strange numbers on the telephone to strike up conversations.

  Although we began to be published for pay more and more frequently, we were still fans, and addicted to fan feuds. Will Sykora, our former ally of the NYB-ISA, had declined to disappear once we walked away. With Sam Moskowitz of Newark and Jimmy Taurasi of the Queens Science Fiction League, he had flanged together another national organization they called New Fandom. No CIA nor KGB ever wrestled so valiantly for the soul of an emerging nation as New Fandom and the Futurians did for science fiction. Pronunciamentos were hurled back and forth. Alliances were formed with empires as far off as Philadelphia and Los Angeles. At a time of uneasy truce, all of us in the New York area had conceived the notion of a World Science Fiction Convention to take place at the time of the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Now we were enemies, and the prize we fought for was sponsorship of the convention.

  Heavy drinking, foolish games, blood feuds, and escapades—were we all really as bad as that? The head says yes, this is the record of the facts. But the heart says it was not that way at all.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan says that all established societies are destroyed, fertilized, and reborn through the invasions of the barbarians. Sometimes the barbarians come from outside. More often, in fact always, says Moynihan, they are born out of the society itself: the young men from fourteen to twenty-four, who look at the Establishment from outside, and resolve to take Rome or burn it.