All those magazines are gone now. The paper shortages of World War II mowed them down like standing wheat. There was a flickering resurgence after the war, but television, paperbound books, and the increased costs of publishing finished what the war had started. Even science fiction, runt of the litter that survived its bigger brothers, is now limited to a handful of magazines, though it is an immense factor in the paperbound book market; and as to Westerns, air-wars, sports pulps, even detectives, they just don’t exist.
Said Harry Steeger to me: “What kind of a budget do you need?”
Said I to Harry Steeger, stalling for time: “Well, let’s see, I need to buy stories, departments, art—”
“Right,” he said. “Two hundred seventy-five dollars for stories. A hundred dollars for black and white art. Thirty dollars for a cover. That’s four hundred and five dollars an issue for Astonishing Stories. On the other one—what do you want to call it?”
“Super Science Stories.”
“Whatever. That’s going to be sixteen pages longer, so we’ll make it fifty dollars more on the budget. See Aleck about cover logos. Anything else, see Peggy Graves.”
The smaller of the two magazines, Astonishing Stories, held 112 pages an issue and sold for a dime. I counted a lot of pages and discovered that a full page of type amounted to 620 words. Subtracting the pages that would be filled by advertising, illustrations, and front matter, I found I would need about sixty thousand words an issue. I didn’t quite have half a cent a word, but close enough, close enough.
Art was something else. When I brought my budget to Aleck Portegal, the art director, he looked at me with compassion and disgust. Where the hell was I going to get artists to work for that kind of money? Writers, sure. Everybody knew what writers were like. But artists did a job of work for a dollar, and they wouldn’t take less. That didn’t worry me, because I had a secret weapon. In fact, two of them. There were the fan artists, as eager as the fan writers for publication in a science-fiction magazine. And besides, my girlfriend, Doë, was an art student at Cooper Union. She had at her fingertips a whole school of striving newcomers to whom five dollars would look like a hell of a price for something they would gladly have bribed us to print.
In the event, the art students were a disappointment, and most of the fans were worse. But there were a couple who were competent, and one—Hannes Bok, whom Ray Bradbury had been touting at the World Convention not long before—who was superb. We got the art, anyway. Aleck found, to his mild surprise, that a fair number of his regular professionals would be willing to take a little less for the extra work, and as I learned how to juggle my budget I found a few extra dollars. I didn’t really need to buy sixty thousand words an issue. I could write long editorials, use big house ads, run a letter column; I could save six or eight pages of paid stories that way. And some writers couldn’t count very well; the story that they said was six thousand words would actually turn out, when Peggy Graves checked it, to run seven thousand, maybe even more. The house rule was that if the official count was lower than the author’s count, we paid off on the official count. But if the author’s was lower, we paid on his. Altogether I could scrounge as much as forty or fifty dollars an issue on text, and Aleck taught me how to save a little on the art, too. If there was a nice-looking spaceship or an all-purpose alien-planet scene in a piece of art, we marked the line cut to hold, trimmed off the specific detail, and used it over and over again as a spot illustration. After a while Harry Steeger asked me if I thought an extra fifty dollars an issue would help. I assured him it would…But, you know, I think I lied to the man. In my experience, the money a market pays for stories has only the roughest congruence with how good the stories are. Some writers will stretch themselves when the money is good. Some won’t. Some react the other way: the more they get paid, the worse they write; probably a kind of stage fright is involved. It seems to me to be an editor’s bounden duty to get as much money for his writers as he can, but once he gets it, what is he to do with it? Divide it equally between them all? But the harsh fact is that not all stories are of equal merit. Some you print with joy and thanksgiving. Some because the alternative is to put out a magazine with some of the pages blank. There is neither justice nor morality in paying the same price for both. So when I told Harry Steeger that a few more dollars in the budget would make a difference in the quality of the stories, I was hallucinating. What it did do, though, was make me feel good.
I did not understand all this at the time, but I quickly found out that the best stories were not necessarily the ones that cost the most. My principal instructor in this area was a Grand Old Man named Ray Cummings. He was tall, skinny, wore a stock instead of the conventional collar and tie, and was unimaginably old to me—he had actually been too old for World War I, which had ended before I was born. I suppose he must have been around sixty when we met. I respected Ray as a writer very much. He had never been a great writer, but he had been a prolific one, and sf was his specialty. He had a fascinating background—had even worked for Thomas Edison in his youth—and was a personally engaging, roguish human being. What he was not was a source of good stories. I don’t think his talent had left him, I think he just didn’t care any more. In the beginning I am sure that he cared about science fiction, but his typewriter was his living and he used it to produce whatever would sell; by and by it must all have seemed the same to him. Before I came to work at Popular, he had been selling them quantities of mystery and horror stories, under a variety of pen names. Horror stories were the dregs of the pulp market, cheap thrill-and-sadism stuff to a precise formula: the buildup involved a fear of the supernatural, but in the end it always had to turn out to be a hoax perpetrated by some criminal, spy, or madman.27 When I started there and Ray discovered I was a fan, it was a great day for Ray. Not only could he get back to science fiction, but he quickly perceived that I was his pigeon. I had no way of saying no to so great a man. Worse than that. He would not write for less than a penny a word, and I missed my chance to tell him that that was beyond the limits ordained for me by God and Harry Steeger, because the day he first walked into my office was the day I discovered I had a few extra dollars to play with. So for months he would turn up regularly as clockwork and sell me a new story; I hated them all, and bought them all.
I had at least the wit to keep them short, and so although Ray depleted my disposable surplus, he didn’t quite wipe it out. I had always kept one eye on John Campbell’s magazine. What I saw there I coveted, and with a little extra money I had hopes of acquiring some of his writers. The new Titans in my eyes were A. E. Van Vogt, L. Sprague de Camp, and Robert A. Heinlein. They are still Titans, to be sure, but in 1939 and 1940 they were not only great, they defined what was great in science fiction. I wanted them a lot. I never did get a Van Vogt, but one of John’s weaknesses as an editor (he didn’t have many) was his conviction that readers got tired of any byline after a while. He urged his writers to use pen names from time to time; and now and then he rejected a story by even the best of them.
In this, as far as de Camp and Heinlein were concerned, he was wrong. Both of them were at the peak of their form, trotting ahead of the rest of the field without a misstep. The Heinleins and de Camps I got—“Lost Legacy” and “Let There Be Light” in particular from Heinlein, and from de Camp especially his fine collaboration with P. Schuyler Miller, “Genus Homo”—would have looked good anywhere.
John’s other weakness as an editor was that he just didn’t want to talk about sexuality. All the characters in Astounding were as featureless around the groin as a Barbie doll, and one reason he didn’t want the Heinleins was that they contained what he thought pretty raunchy language. (Sample: “I suggest you follow the ancient Chinese advice to young women about to undergo criminal assault.” “What’s that?” “‘Relax.’”) This blatant filth did not go unreproached in Super Science Stories, either. One reader wrote in:
“…the vulgarity of the language is such as to make me look thrice
before buying the magazine again.”
And another:
“Frankly, I’m disgusted. If you are going to continue to print such pseudosophisticated, pre-prep-school tripe as ‘Let There Be Light,’ you should change the name of the mag to Naughty Future Funnies.”
I met other writers at the Thursday Afternoon Luncheon Club, the back room of a kosher restaurant just off Times Square where Manly Wade Wellman, Malcolm Jameson, Henry Kuttner, and others got together to talk shop once a week. Other editors were grazing in that same pasture. Mort Weisinger would show up from the Thrilling Group now and then, and Dave Vern was a regular. Amazing Stories was still in New York, no longer owned by Teck and no longer edited by T. O’Conor Sloane. The new people had made it bigger and richer, but not better. Under Sloane it had developed fine pale mold around the edges; under the new people it had turned cheap pulp. But Dave Vern, the new editor, was a decent guy, and generous to a kid competitor.
I enjoyed the Thursday Afternoons, and from them I got some good stories. One I particularly liked, and rued, was Malcolm Jameson’s “Quicksands of Youthwardness.” I liked it because it was a great idea for a science-fiction story. It wasn’t original with Jamie, or at least it had been suggested a decade before by no less than Sir James Jeans. He had written, in one of his popularizing books, that Time was probably the Fourth Dimension. H. G. Wells, he said, had written a science-fiction story in which a man went through some sort of transdimensional reversal and came back with his left and right sides interchanged, but how much more exciting, Jeans said, if he had come back with his past and future interchanged. Jamie had picked up the hint and made a nice twenty-seven-thousand-worder out of it. What I rued was that I had read the same book and had written the same story, not nearly as well, and I could see I had been outclassed. Sadly I bought Jamie’s story and shelved my own.
But what to do with twenty-seven thousand words in my two rather small magazines? I decided to run it as a three-part serial. The readers quickly pointed out to me that they hated that; both magazines were bimonthly, which made it worse, but in any event nine-thousand-word installments were pretty skimpy. That was a mistake…and, I’m afraid, only one of a great many.
I wasn’t really a very good editor. I was learning as fast as I could—I had Harry Steeger and Peggy Graves standing over me with circulation figures, a powerful spur. But being an editor requires kinds of maturity and resourcefulness you do not find in your average nineteen-year-old. An editor doesn’t have to be always wise and authoritative. But he has to make most of his writers think he is, most of the time, and that is not easy when you don’t yet need to shave more than once a week.
Editors as a class are not highly respected. Very few of them become famous. From an editor’s point of view, it is the writer who gets all the breaks. Writers make more money. Writers get their names known. They do, even when the editor has at least as much to do with the success of the story as the writer himself. Does that seem unlikely? But there are some very famous stories that began as slop, until some editor worked painfully with the writer, over a long time, coaxing him through revisions, cajoling him into changes, hewing out of the shapeless fat of the first draft a work of art. Then, years later, when the story is a classic, no one but the writer knows that it was the editor who made it so.28
On the other hand, from where the writer sits, the editor looks like the boss. The editor makes the decision to buy or to bounce. At the end of the year the writer may have twice as much money to pay taxes on as the editor. But on that day in February when he needs that thousand-dollar check to get his kid’s teeth fixed, it is the editor who says whether he gets it or not. This conflict is not helped by the known fact that most editors are failed writers, and most writers are sure they could edit anything better than the incumbent—and are often right.
The editor is always in the middle. His job is to harvest the basic exudations of writers, as ants lick the sweat off their dairy aphids, to pick them over to find the ones that will stimulate the readers’ pleasure glands, process them in the most attractive way, and place them on the market.
How does he know which ones will please the readers?
Ah, that’s the problem, isn’t it? He doesn’t. He can only guess. If he is any good at his job, it is an informed guess, with experience and insights to help it, but it is a guess all the same.
If an editor is a systematic professional (translation: hack), he probably makes a study of all the successful magazines in his area, observes what they have done that has seemed to work, and does the same. If he is a genius, he looks for what isn’t being done by anybody else. Then sometimes he does it, and sometimes he doesn’t. Most of the things that aren’t being done aren’t worth doing, so you can’t count on novelty alone for success. You make a series of those informed guesses, rejecting the ideas that won’t work, as God gives you the gift to perceive them, and trying out the ones that might. Editorial skill lies in knowing what has worked. Editorial genius lies in taking a chance on what hasn’t worked yet, but will when someone summons up the nerve to try.
All this I understood pretty well at the time, but between the understanding and the execution was a wide, wide gap.
I look at those old magazines now and my fingers itch; I want to pick up the telephone and dial 1-9-4-0 and tell that kid what to do. It was an easy time to be an editor. With what I know now I could have made those magazines sing, but as it was they just lay there.
But my, I had fun! First kid on the block to be a professional editor! The rest of the Futurians were jealous as hell.
When I say the “rest” I mean mostly the leaders myself and others, a feisty lot, given to competing for the sake of game-playing even when no stakes were involved. Among the Futurians there was clear-cut distinction between the leaders and the led. Whatever our politics (and by then most of the top considered themselves at least cosmetically Marxist), none of this nonsense about a classless society was allowed to interfere with how we ran our own group. The People Who Decided were Don Wollheim, John Michel, Bob Lowndes, and I. We called ourselves “the Quadrumvirate,” and we lived in and among each other’s lives almost inextricably. In fan and science-fiction affairs we operated under a unit rule. The decisions we wrangled out in private we presented to the world as monoliths. But even among ourselves there was a fine structure of interlocking relationships and power positions—and yes, by gosh, of friendship. Johnny and I joined the YCL together and went camping in pup tents at Lake Tiorati. Donald and I went to amateur-press conventions together. Bob Lowndes and I shared an obsessive interest in popular songs, and in the more flamboyantly decadent writers: Huysmans, Mallarmé, James Branch Cabell.
We also competed with each other, never more strenuously than between Donald and myself. I don’t know what Donald thought was going on—someday I would like to ask him—but I know where I stood. Donald represented something to me. At a parlor game, in the early Futurian days, among non-Futurian people, I had been asked to name my hero, and the name that popped out was “Donald A. Wollheim.” I was maybe sixteen then, and Donald had a towering advantage over me in years and experience. But I was catching up. I was working at catching up; not only to catch up but to surpass; and, of course, no one knew that better than Donald.
It is a marvel that that four-way directorate survived as well as it did, but when I got to be an editor it began to shred. The other three Quads began to write for me for pay. Friendship could have survived that (that sort of strain has been placed on most of my friendships, one time or another, over the years). But the temporary armistice among young bulls each confident of his destiny as herd leader was more fragile, and a space developed between the rest of the Quadrumvirate and me.
But I needed the Futurians, needed them in my job. If writers think of editors as empowered to pollinate whatever blossoms they choose, over acres of flowers, editors quickly perceive that those acres are not very broad, and most of the blossoms are duds. An editor has to scratch to find g
ood stuff—particularly with the pitiful money I had to offer—and one of the best places for me to scratch was among the Futurians. There was a wonder of talent there. Most of it was still new and growing, and some never really lived up to early promise; but first and last I bought stories not only from the other three Who Counted but also from Cyril Kornbluth, Dirk Wylie, Isaac Asimov, Richard Wilson, David A. Kyle, Jack Gillespie, Walter Kubilius, and others. They would work for very little, and sometimes they worked very well. Cyril Kornbluth was born with a trenchant phrase in his mouth. He was terribly young and inexperienced—around fifteen when I published his first story. But he was learning very fast the technical skills of story construction, and he had never needed to learn to shape a sentence. Isaac Asimov was growing visibly with every story. He carefully numbered them in series; I can still see the shape of his manuscripts, the title double-spaced, the first page almost entirely blank, but with the serial number of the story up in the corner to keep his records systematic. (He was always a horribly well organized person, Isaac was, and a standing reproach to the rest of us.) Unfortunately (for me, not for Isaac), he had already made the Campbell Connection. I had to content myself mostly with John’s leavings. Hannes Bok, Doë, Dave Kyle, and others did illustrations for me, and I farmed out departments and columns to those who wanted to do them—for nothing, of course; the lure of possible free books or movie tickets was enough reward. The “perks” that went with being a professional editor were scarce (no such thing as an expense account, of course) but enjoyable, and some of them I was able to share. Both Dick the Drama Critic and I had passes to the New York World’s Fair, and so one or two nights a week he and I would wander past Trylon and Perisphere, dine economically at the Mayflower Doughnut Pavilion (our passes did not include anything to eat), visit Salvador Dali’s Dream of Venus (big goldfish tank of mildly nude girls swimming in underwater ballet) or whatever else looked exciting.
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