The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  The space that was growing between me and the other Futurian leaders left room for new associations. Some came along with the job. I began to meet the Old Pros of the field, or at least nearly all who came through New York in those early years of the 1940s. Manly Wade Wellman was a regular at the Thursday Afternoon Luncheon Club, a courtly, heavyset Virginia gentleman who wrote several useful, workmanlike stories for me. So was Malcolm Jameson, an ex-naval officer who had had part of his larynx removed, smoked like a chimney, and spoke only in a harsh whisper. Henry Kuttner turned up, a slim, dark young man, humorous and surprisingly gentle, considering the terrifying words he was pouring into Weird Tales and the horror pulps. At a dinner party at the Jamesons’ I met a flamboyant character who had just returned from being shipwrecked off the coast of Alaska and was on his way to some equally jock exploit in some equally improbable part of the world. His name was L. Ron Hubbard. He was the kind of person who expects, and without fail gets, the instant, total attention of everyone in any room he enters. If his later destiny as guru of world Scientology was anywhere in his thoughts at that time, he gave no sign of it. Lester del Rey came up to my office one day with a couple of manuscripts John Campbell had been unwilling to buy. I was unwilling to buy them, too (and it is possible John and I were right, because those stories, long lost, have never been published anywhere), but Lester himself I was willing to buy. Scrappy little kid with the face of an unseamed angel, he was then and has been for all of the forty years since one of the most rewarding human beings I have ever known.

  All of us live at the centers of our own individual universes, most visibly so when we reminisce. But that is palpably unfair. Collectively all of these people were creating a literature. Individually they were loving, hating, marrying, learning, failing, and now and again most brilliantly succeeding, and to kiss any one of them off with a casual line is not only a disservice but a disrespect. So I leave this catalog dissatisfied, but I do not know how to make it complete.

  It was not only males that I met. I encountered, and marked with one eye, Malcolm Jameson’s pretty young daughter, Vida. Jamie was not the only writer with a pretty young daughter; Ray Cummings had one whom I also met and admired. But along about that time things became serious between Doë and me, and so I took myself out of competition in at least one area by marrying Doris Baumgardt in August of 1940. I was still under the legal age of consent. I had to get my parents’ permission, and so my mother and father were required to show up at the Municipal Hall of Records to sign my marriage license. It was the first time they had seen each other in years, and it turned out to be the last.

  We were married by a minister I had never met before (I have been married a lot, but never by anyone I knew) and took off for a sort of honeymoon in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Why Allentown? Both Doë and I were pretty parochial people. Allentown was the only nearby place we had ever heard of.

  The other thing that happened in 1940 was that I finally and for good severed my connection with the Young Communist League.

  Paris fell that spring. The next day one of my YCL friends turned up at my office for lunch. He bought us wine, held up his glass, and proposed a toast: “To the liberation of the bourgeois capital by the people’s forces of socialism.”

  I drank his lousy wine. But it lay sour in my stomach while I brooded in my office all that afternoon. The YCL was very close to the core of my existence as a social person; what structure of belief I had managed to erect followed its blueprints, as I had perceived them. I don’t think my belief-structure has changed much. The evils that the YCL had called my attention to (Fascism, militarism, the persecution of helpless people) are still evils. The Marxist interpretation of history no longer seems quite right, but it is not much more wrong than most others. But the YCL changed with the Stalin-Hitler pact, and my friend’s toast to the panzers grinding up the Champs Élysées made me confront that change in a way I could not escape. It was not easy to separate myself cold turkey from the YCL. I had dear friends, and commitments made. But I couldn’t hack it, and over the next few months I phased out, not without reproaches and by no means without pain.

  Most of the friends I left behind ultimately drifted away, too. The Party line flip-flopped again in June of 1941, when the Germans attacked the Soviets. But by then I no longer cared.

  After our marriage Doë and I moved into an apartment in Knickerbocker Village. The rent was $42.75 a month, which was reasonable enough, even in 1940. The problem was that the salary Popular Publications was paying me was ten dollars a week, which comes to $43.33 a month. I have always been good at arithmetic. It took me no time at all to do in my head the simple calculation

  $

  43.33

  –

  42.75

  $

  0.58

  and deduce that my salary might pay the rent but would do little about meeting our expenses for food, clothes, entertainment, or even an occasional pack of cigarettes.

  Well, I didn’t expect to keep house on fifty-eight cents a month. Popular Publications didn’t expect me to, either, but it took me a while to figure out that what they expected me to do was what all the pulp editors did: to supplement my salary by writing for myself and for the other magazines in the chain.

  Because I was slow in catching on to this, my 1940 total of sales amounted to only $281.42 (and that represented eleven stories and a poem!). But by the end of the year I had learned the ropes, and besides, Popular Publications had doubled my salary. It looked as if 1941 would—with a little luck—give me a cash income of nearly two thousand dollars. Not luxury, no. But enough for even a little comfort.

  There were about six good months in there, the first half of 1941, when everything went pretty much as I had expected and the world seemed almost worrisomely easy to cope with. Doë and I were nest-building, and Knickerbocker Village was a fun place to live in. It was the first of the giant New York apartment developments. It took up a whole city block, hard up against the Manhattan Bridge on one side, a few blocks from Chinatown and the Five Points on the other. Architecturally it seemed something from the future, two separate structures, each a hollow square surrounding a grassy little park, a children’s playground dividing the two. Under the building was a warren of passages and chambers, so that you could go from any building in the complex indoors to any other, and even to any of the built-in ground-floor commercial establishments—drugstore, candy store, co-op supermarket, restaurants, bars. Most of what one needed for life was right there in Knickerbocker Village, including friends.

  A few months after us, my friend Dick Wilson married Doë’s friend Jessica Gould and at once moved into a KV apartment the mirror image of ours, across the central court and a few stories lower down. We could see each other’s windows, and arranged signals for when we wanted company to save on phone bills. On the penthouse floor of our own building were Willard and Eleanor Crosby. Bill was one of my colleagues at Popular, a marvelously witty and urbane man who ultimately wound up on The New York Times until his death in the 1960s. Another Popular editor, Loren Dowst, had an apartment in the complex, and two Brooklyn friends, Ben and Felice Leshner, turned up a few tunnels away. Our own neighbors across the hall were named Hoke and Cara Smith—Hoke a librarian, Cara a student. We got along well, especially in the hot weather, when we learned that if we and they kept our hall doors open, we could get a straight-through ventilation almost as good as (wild fantasy of luxury!) air conditioning.

  Knickerbocker Village had been built in part as a sort of primeval urban redevelopment plan. The neighborhood was tatty, and a lot of it was pure slum. It was the old Five Points neighborhood, in the middle of the nineteenth century the armpits of hell, ridden with crime and violence far worse than anything in East Harlem or Bed-Stuy today. The ghetto people then were Irish, rather than black or Puerto Rican, and that whole area was where the Civil War draft riots started, where police dared go only in pairs, and then only walking down the middle of the street. That was 1850 and th
ereabouts. Now, in the 1970s and thereabouts, it is—New York. It is like any other part of New York. If you walk the streets late at night you are reasonably likely to be mugged.

  But in 1941 and 1942 it was gentler and more colorful. The neighborhood was a mosaic. Here was an Italian street fair, there a Greek kaffeineon; Jewish pushcart peddlers were all over, and Chinatown was just a few blocks away. North of Chinatown was the Bowery, solid ranks of missions, quarter-a-night flophouses, and dime-a-shot bars. Derelicts were sprawled sodden in every doorway at night and lurched down the sidewalks all of every day. Each morning I took the Second Avenue El from Chatham Square to 42nd Street on my way to work, and you could look right into the windows of the flophouses to see the ranks of cots in the dormitories, and the shoulder-high partitions that defined the “private” rooms for the more affluent. New Yorkers had not yet learned to be afraid. It did not occur to us that any of them would harm any of us, and none of them ever did.

  In among all these warehouses and old-law tenements Knickerbocker Village stood tall and self-contained, gates open, playground unlocked, like the keep of a particularly prosperous baron in a particularly tranquil decade of medieval Europe.

  We weren’t even isolated. We went out into the bigger world to theaters, to friends, to work. Friends came to see us. We seemed to have a lot of parties (bless those thick, quiet Knickerbocker Village walls), and people were in and out of the apartment every day and night. On Sundays Isaac Asimov came clear across the river from Brooklyn to visit. Doë wasn’t terribly fond of him, and so we would go out and walk around Chinatown while he told me the plot of the newest Foundation story he was writing for John Campbell, and I would try to interest him in writing something else for me. Willy Ley had come to America a few years earlier out of pure loathing for Hitler and the Nazis. He was writing articles and the odd story for science-fiction magazines, and he brought his pretty wife, Olga, down for dinner once or twice, a lovely, slim, dark girl with a ballerina’s figure. (She acquired it dancing with the St. Petersburg Corps, and as of a few weeks ago has it still.)

  But Europe was at war. The United States was still a year and more from Pearl Harbor, but the handwriting was on the wall. The Army had begun to draft men. Dirk Wylie had signed up in the reserve, and they took him away to become an MP. Dave Kyle went off, and reappeared a few months later in the uniform of a staff sergeant of the Armored Corps. Jack Gillespie didn’t much care for wearing a uniform. That was what the cards spelled out if he didn’t do something to prevent it, so he got himself into the Merchant Marine as a deckhand, and came back from time to time to report on what life was like in the Caribbean and the Med. My own draft situation was reasonably comfortable (Doë qualified as a dependent because we had married before the cutoff date), but all young males understood well that the rules could change any time if the war went badly; and badly it was going. After creaming France, the Nazis had sat tight for a time, flexing their muscles and organizing their conquests. Then, in a series of lightning strokes, they occupied Denmark and Norway, moved into the Balkans, and in the summer of 1941 attacked the Soviet Union. If I had had any faith at all left in Joe Stalin as wise all-father to the proletarian republic, it would have been destroyed by his handling of that invasion—if, of course, I had known what was really going on. He blew it badly, disastrously badly. What saved him was the toughness of the Russian people and the almost equal foolishness of Adolf Hitler. Even so, within a few weeks the Germans were deep inside the Soviet Union, and Stalin was in nervous collapse.

  There was, to be sure, a certain amount of sardonic fun in the situation. As soon as Hitler struck at Stalin, the Communist Party line flopped back, from “The Yanks Are Not Coming” to “Victory for the Freedom-loving Peoples of the World.” And not just the Communist Party. All at once Stalin was our friend, the Russians our allies and protégés. Hollywood began churning out a series of films showing how the heroic Russian masses were outsmarting and outfighting the invader. Chicago meatpackers began manufacturing kielbasa for lend-lease. And one ludicrous evening in the Radio City Music Hall I heard their symphony orchestra playing, for God’s sake, the “Internationale.”

  It was not only a bad time in the war, it was suddenly a very bad time for me. About that time I became unemployed.

  I have never been sure whether I quit or got fired. I hung at Harry Steeger’s doorway one morning until I got to see him. My intention was to ask for a raise, meaning to quit and free-lance if he turned me down. But Steeger had complaints of his own. When I walked out of his office I didn’t have the raise, and didn’t have the job, either.

  From the early summer of 1941 to the beginning of 1942, seven months in all, I was a free-lance writer.

  That wasn’t the first time I had been a free-lance writer. What else was I to call myself in 1938? But it was the first time that it mattered much whether I made a living or not. Knickerbocker Village wanted its rent every month. We ate. We burned electricity. The landlord called, and twelve o’clock arrived too often.

  In that seven-month period I wrote quite a lot. I actually finished five stories which sold, for a collective price of not much less than a thousand dollars—for the first-serial sale, that is; over the years, they’ve earned quite a lot more than that. If you divide seven months into a thousand dollars, you find that my weekly earnings came to around thirty dollars, or almost, not even counting what long-subsequent reprints brought in. That was just about what I had been earning in salaries and free-lance checks while I was at Popular.

  But it was not the same thing at all, at all.

  There is a vast difference between earning a thousand dollars at the boiler factory and earning that same thousand as a free-lance writer. At the boiler works you get a check every Friday. If you write for a living, you get your check when you get it, and not a moment before. Maybe you get it when you finish your story. Maybe you get it a few months later, after a few editors have had the unwisdom to reject it. Maybe you get it never.

  This is a terrible trauma for many writers, not just the effect on their credit of the slapdash arrival of checks, but the effect on their writing itself. Jim Blish was one of the more successful, and also one of the more deservedly successful, writers I have known. For more than twenty years he alternated between periods of holding a job and writing on the side, and periods of full-time writing as a free-lancer. And for all those years the best and most successful writing he did was when it was in his spare time; when he took his courage in his hands and set out to be Pure Writer, he froze. Not just Jim. Many of us. To some degree, at some time, all of us. Including me. (But always excepting Isaac Asimov, who is not like mortal man.)

  The good thing about writing as a career is if you are any good at it, the paychecks keep coming long after the work is done. Nearly half my income usually comes from residual rights on work done anywhere up to forty years ago, including a share from those stories written in the fall of 1941. (If those subsequent earnings are added in, my actual income from those seven months must come to well over a hundred a week, at least twice as much as I then deemed affluence.)

  The bad thing is that the money doesn’t come when you need it. The normal curve of a writer’s income is steadily up. But the point from which the curve starts is zero.

  Doë and I weren’t desperately poor. We certainly weren’t being hounded by creditors; we had never bought anything on credit. Although we had no appreciable savings, and the cash inflow for that seven-month period was meager, I don’t recall needing any tangible thing that we didn’t have. What I personally needed very much was quite intangible: a touch more self-respect.

  The funny thing is that I am sure I could have found another editorial job if I had looked. Young male editors were disappearing into uniform every week, and a draft-deferred specimen like me could easily have found a home. I am astonished to say that, as far as I can recall, the thought never crossed my mind. If I couldn’t edit Astonishing and Super Science I would write, and if I couldn’t
write I would do nothing.

  And nothing is what I did a lot of the time, or at least nothing very productive in terms of bringing cash into the domestic economy. What I did a great deal of the time was play chess. I had never been any good at it, but I wanted to be, and now, with time to spare, I lived on the chessboard for seven months. I learned all the end games, and puzzled for weeks over the fact that a knight and a bishop could checkmate a king but two knights could not. I bought a book of famous games and played them out. And I challenged any player I could catch.

  The player I could catch most frequently was Dick Wilson, handily right across the court in Building E. By the time he got home from work I would already have the light impatiently in the window, and as soon as he was through dinner he would come up to BH8, or I would come down to EE2, and we would play until he had to go to sleep. I don’t remember what Jessica and Doë did while we played chess. I don’t know if I cared.

  When I wasn’t playing chess, I read. When I wasn’t reading, I listened to music. Doë and I had discovered ballet a little earlier, and as often as we could afford we were off to the old Metropolitan Opera House to see the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Fredric Franklin taking a hundred and twenty-eight bars to die as the slave in Scheherazade, the astringent excellence of Les Sylphides, Swan Lake’s heart-meltingly sweet cygnets. Once I had seen the ballets, the music meant a great deal more to me than it had before, and I began listening in earnest. Somehow I had reached the age of twenty with only the sketchiest acquaintance with classical music. I hadn’t owned a record player and had not fully realized that WQXR and WNYC were broadcasting all the concerts one would want to hear every day on the radio. The ballet Petrouchka opened up Stravinsky to me; Gala Performance, Prokofiev. I bought the fragile, ponderous 78-rpm albums—The Song of the Nightingale, Firebird, Sacre—and played the grooves right off them. From Les Sylphides I discovered Chopin, and just about that time Alexander Brailowsky began a concert series that included the entire Chopin oeuvre, even the seldom-played ones that seem to need twelve fingers on each hand; I went to Town Hall for some of them and marveled. When I wasn’t playing chess or reading or listening to music, I was visiting with friends; and when I wasn’t doing any of those things, and only when I wasn’t doing any of those things, I wrote.