The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  There are well-organized writers in the world, but I haven’t known many of them. (Just one, I think—and you know who you are, Isaac.) I do know what a well-organized writer is like. He gets up in the morning, washes the sleep out of his eyes, sits down at his typewriter, and picks up where he left off at five the evening before. For three hours he types, and then he breaks for lunch. After a pleasant meal and a stroll in the garden, it’s back to the typewriter for three more hours. Then, virtuous and complacent, he covers the typewriter and revels all the evening long.

  It is not like that for me, and isn’t for most of the writers I have known—all the hundreds, maybe thousands, of them. What we mostly do is sweat, stall, worry, and convulse.

  I have subsequently learned how to be somewhat systematic. It doesn’t come naturally, but I couldn’t function without it. Now I have formal quotas and projections, and I often know fairly well in February what work I will have finished by the end of the year. Even so…even so, not long ago I found myself totally unable to write for nearly six months; a few years before that, I was convinced I would never write again; and it was only this week, even this day, that I sat and stared at the typewriter for an hour or more without putting a word on paper. As far as I can tell from my own experience and that of many others that is how the game is played.

  At twenty-one I was far less well organized than (even!) I am now. Writing was scary. The stakes were high, my confidence was shaky, I put it off when I could. When I wrote it was in bursts: an eighteen-thousand-word novelette all one night long, taking the last page out of the typewriter at noon and falling exhausted to sleep. It was not a bad novelette,29 but the way I wrote it was very bad. To produce so much so quickly and so exhaustingly makes it that much harder to sit down to produce again. The experience gives you the confidence that a great deal can be done in a short time, which encourages delay. The memory of the exhaustion gives you the knowledge that it won’t be any fun, which discourages getting started.

  I now think that everything I did at that time—in fact, everything I was doing in all those years, and almost everything I’ve done through my life—carried its own justification of a sort. What a writer has to sell is his own perspective on the universe. The way to make that perspective significant is to learn all one can learn about—everything. What I was doing was informal, disorganized, spasmodic, but it was all learning. All of it helped to unravel that central mystery which is what writing is all about,30 and so all of it contributed to my career. I don’t regret a minute of it…now. But at the time it didn’t feel good at all. It felt as if I were washed up at twenty-one.

  I have sat staring at this page, trying to remember and to understand, so that I can say just what was happening in those seven months. I think I do understand. I don’t like my understanding of that time in my life very much, and I have buried so much of it so deeply inside the layers of my head that it is difficult to exhume fact out of the strata of rationalization.

  But whether I like it or not, I think I know what happened. I was not feeling happy about myself, and for that reason I was not happy with those around me. The principal person around me was Doë. We were two raw children, Doë and I. We married very young; even the marriage ceremony only ratified a commitment that had been implicit almost since we first started dating at seventeen. The growing-up process that most adolescents experience through transient dates and relationships, we worked out only on each other, and we carried a lot of adolescent role-playing into our marriage. I more than she. I had made a model of myself in my head, and I acted it out. The model was mature, authoritative, a genu-wine leader type, capable of command decision and never at a loss. And the tide went out and the sand washed away and the foundations crumbled, and I had to learn a new model for myself. The father-bear role would not play any more.

  Where did I learn the father-bear role? Why, I think we all learned it. It came out of the sexist society that taught us role-playing, out of a dozen Astaire-Rogers movies, out of the stereotypes of the stories we wrote and read, out of all the conventional wisdom of the age. We were all a little crippled. Some of us still limp when the rain wind blows from the east. Prickly Women’s-Lib ladies, you can have anything you want of me. Your fight is my fight, but you come a little late; I wish you had been around forty years ago, when I needed liberating. Because we were taught that women were dependent, it followed that there was no one for them to depend on but men. Among others, my own father had taught me to play that role, but I think he had also taught me to fail at it.

  I don’t want to give the impression that Doë and I suffered through months of misery, because it wasn’t like that at all. We had a lot of fun. We did productive things. We were so young that we knew, fundamentally and surely, that there would always be other chances and new experiences without end, and in fact there were. But we blew that one. Not “we.” I. Having married Doë as part of a scenario I had written for myself, and then having found out that the scenario didn’t work, I was restive. I had signed a run-of-the-play contract, but I wanted to quit the part.

  It was a gritty personal time, and made grittier and more confusing by the world scene. In December the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and my country was at war.

  Early in 1942 Alden H. Norton sent me a telegram, asking me to come back to Popular Publications as his assistant. To make it sweeter, he offered me more as an assistant than I had been paid as a full-fledged editor. I felt around my pride to see if it was injured, and when it did not seem to hurt anywhere, I accepted at once.

  Al Norton was a boss editor, a department head. He had fifteen or sixteen pulp magazines to look after and four people to help him do it: a secretary and three assistant editors, including myself. The staff had been depleted by the draft and other turmoils, and when I came aboard there was only one surviving assistant, Olga Mae Quadland, tall, dark, good-looking, and good-humored. Ollie had the curious attribute of being a female deacon in the Episcopal Church, but I was big enough not to hold that against her, and she was very good at her job. A little later another assistant signed on to complete the roster, Dorothy LesTina. She was a pretty, brown-haired recent divorcée from San Diego. Tina was a year or two older than I, wore her hair in coronet braids, and was new enough in New York that she didn’t know a soul.

  The war had begun to change publishing, even in seven months. There were new things, real or on the horizon, called “price controls” and “rationing.” Paper was going to run short. The Canadian forests were still there, and the mills were ready to grind the trees into magazine pages, but to get the trees to the mills and the paper rolls to the printing presses involved trains and trucks, and they were suddenly heavily committed to troop movements and shipments of airplane parts. There was even, without warning, censorship. None of us knew how that was meant to work. But one day I wrote an editorial for one of the air-war magazines, full of pulpy fantasy about the terrible vengeance our Air Force was about to work on the Axis, and laid it on Alden’s desk. He came in an hour later, looking worried, and said Harry Steeger had told him he would have to clear it with Air Force Intelligence. We phoned around, and got a name, and sent it off, and a few days later it came back, heavily red-lined and amended. “Night fighters parachuting agents into the heart of Occupied Europe” had been changed to “support of ground operations, covert and otherwise.” Bragging about the invulnerability of the B-17 “Flying Fortress” had been revised to a recitation of the published official performance figures on rate of fire and armor. It was apparent at once that the censors hadn’t yet figured out how they were supposed to work, either.

  But we got along fine, all of us corralled into the long, narrow room at the end of the hall. We slashed the Western and sports stories into English, took fair turns at editing the worst of them, lunched together more often than not, went bowling at the alleys down the block once or twice a week. After the fretful tension of trying to free-lance, coming into the Bartholomew Building every morning was like a vacation with
pay. Alden made it easy for me to be his assistant, decent man, careful to consider the feelings of the people who worked for him. Apart from the growing alienation in my marriage, it was an easy time. I liked the work, relished the abdication from decision-making, had enough money to meet our needs; it was clear that it could not last forever—the Red Death was stalking the world, and the cracks were spreading at the foundation of my personal universe—but that was something that could be worried about at a later time. I was not Prince Hamlet. But it was pleasant to be an attendant lord while my glands caught up with my ambitions.

  I had almost lost touch with the Futurians. Most I still saw on a one-to-one basis, but I was no longer part of the group. Partly it was my own vanity—having thrown my weight around as a boy editor, it was quite a comedown to be one more faceless aspiring writer in the mob—but it was also that I had had all the in-jokes and scurrility I wanted for a while. Individually the Futurians contained some of the brightest and best people I have ever known, but collectively they—no, we—were often kind of awful.

  They were also changing. Old Futurians were vanishing, new blood was flowing in. The center of gravity had moved from the Ivory Tower in Brooklyn to a West 103rd Street walk-up called Prime Base. There was a pentacle painted on the tatty linoleum of the living room, and murals on the wall (the figures were the Unholy Trinity: Stinky, Shorty, and the Holy Ghost). The artwork was due to a new boy in town named Damon Knight, skinny, callow, with a pear-shaped head and a lot on the ball in his idiosyncratic way. Damon had been a fan since he was old enough to read, and his intention in coming to New York was to become a professional science-fiction artist. He might well have succeeded, in spite of having no discernible talent at art, if the example of the other Futurians had not suggested to him that writing was easier. A few editors bought his illustrations, but then they began to buy his stories as well, and he put away his sketch pad for good. Jim Blish had been a fringe Futurian for some time and now became more active in the group; a little later Judy Merril came in, first female Futurian accepted in her own right rather than as a ladies’-day guest of some male.

  But by then I was long gone.

  The pleasure had begun to diminish, and the cracks to widen. By the end of 1942 Doë and I came to the parting of the ways. When the lease ran out on our Knickerbocker Village apartment, she went back to her parents’ home, and I took a room in a hotel on West 45th Street. I had begun to get very interested in that hazel-eyed girl with the coronet braids, Dorothy LesTina. But the dynamics of the situation were more than I could handle, and I decided to go for to be a soldier.

  Unfortunately, Uncle Sam did not seem in any particular hurry to acquire my young flesh. The draft machine was in high gear, and voluntary enlistments had been suspended while they figured things out. And they didn’t draft me.

  This displeased me, and so I went down to Local Board 1 to complain. Take me, I said. Go away, they said; we’ll come to you when we come to you. How come you didn’t come to me already? I asked. And they said: Because, first, you are deferred because of dependency; second, because we have been assigned a quota, and our quota is overfulfilled. All the young fellows in Chinatown signed up long ago to fight the Japanese. When we finish with them, maybe we’ll get to you, so go away.

  Well, that bugged me. I had been talking anti-Fascist so long that I was beginning to feel guilty about doing nothing more tangible in the war than writing editorials in Fighting Aces. And when you come right down to it, I have this special unalterable love for the United States of America. Bumbling, sometimes blundering, it is still my country, right or wrong, and I take much pride in the fact that over its two hundred years it has been right a lot more than it has been wrong. (God preserve us all from the exceptions!) So I wanted in. A lot.

  There was some fun to be had in the situation because I appointed myself spokesman for all the unwilling draftees in the country, I wrote my local board, I telephoned them, I went down and pounded on the table. The dependency depended on the marriage, I said, and the marriage was over. We’ll make a note of that, they said, and don’t call us, we’ll call you. I’m not really in Local Board 1’s territory any more, because I moved to West 45th Street, I said. We’ll make a note of that, too, they said, but go away.

  In the long run they did grant me my wish, but it took some four months of doing. They inducted me on April Fool’s Day, 1943.

  26 The site is now occupied by the United Nations buildings. No jokes, please.

  27 Although they were even more awful than I have said, I wrote a few myself. So did even so fine a writer as Henry Kuttner. One likes to flex one’s muscles on a new form, and also one likes to eat.

  28 I am not speaking out of private pain (or, anyway, not just out of private pain). The particular science-fiction editors who come instantly to my mind in this connection are John Campbell of Astounding, Horace Gold of Galaxy, and Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek.

  29 At least, I don’t think it was bad. It was “Wings of the Lightning Land.” It has been reprinted since, and is in The Early Pohl (Doubleday, 1976), but I’ve never had the courage to reread it.

  30 That “central mystery” can be defined in many ways, but most of them revolve around a single central question: “Who am I?”

  7

  My Life as a Cardinal Man

  In writing about this period I don’t feel as if I am writing about myself; in fact, not about any real person at all. I think I know why. I was not a person. I was an enlisted man in the Army. An EM has no more individuality than the seventh egg in a box of a dozen. He is a unit quantity. He is not just a number, he is less than a number, because he does not even have that limited identity we sometimes give to certain numbers, like Third Base or the Year 1492. He has cardinality: if he is missing from a formation, the tally is one short. But he does not have ordinality: it does not matter (except perhaps to him, but who cares what a cardinal number thinks?) whether he is the fifth or the fifty-fifth in the muster roll, any more than it matters whether the sheet of paper I take out of a ream was the first or the last to go in.

  If a soldier were not a cardinal man, armies would not be possible. No person would allow himself to be restricted to his barracks because a quarter will not bounce off his bed, or would tolerate being refused admission to an “officers only” bar, or would stroll down to the Venetian Causeway, as I did on many evenings during basic training in Miami Beach, and gaze hungrily at the city lights across the bay, accepting the prohibition against walking across the bridge. A cardinal man in the uniform of the other side can be killed or maimed without penalty. A cardinal man on your own side can be ordered to storm a pillbox, or be shot for falling asleep, without consideration. A person would not put up with any of this crap for a minute.31

  Since I was born a white male Protestant, and thus competitively advantaged in the American society in ways that kikes, niggers, girls, gooks, and wogs were not, it would be hard for me to understand all the passions that lie behind the liberation movements…if I had not been an enlisted man in the Army. Aw, sure, I know it’s not the same, I knew it was only a game, and that when I got my discharge all the rules would change back again. But it was close enough while it lasted. An EM knows what it is like to be treated like a piece of meat. And he knows, too, the delicious advantages of accepting the status quo. You can let someone else do the worrying. Uncle Toms and cuddly girls learned this long before I did.

  Since the game rules called for me to be a cuddly Tom, I played that game and, my God, I actually enjoyed it. All of it. Even the utterly revolting parts, like cleaning grease traps on KP and getting up at a quarter to five in the morning, with the stars still out. Basic training (at least for the Air Force, at least in Miami Beach at that time) was a lot like going back to Camp Fire Place Lodge and the age of twelve.

  In 1943 the Miami Beach hotels were clustered south of Lincoln Road. They were relatively small and nearly vacant. The hotel owners had been torpedoed by the war as surely as the t
ankers whose oil washed up on the sand now and then, and so they struck a deal with the government. Almost all their hotels were used to house Air Force basic trainees. The owners were happy enough, and for us rookies it beat the hell out of sleeping in tents.

  I drove through that part of Miami Beach a few weeks ago, and it is all shabby and down at the heel. Collins Avenue, which used to resound with the cadence count and singing of our marching platoons, is now filled with elderly retirees trying to get along on Social Security, sunshine, and canned pet food. The signs on the little hotels I barracked in are in Cuban Spanish. The beach itself has almost disappeared. But in 1943 it was a whole new thing to me. I had never been in Florida before, had never tasted a subtropical climate except when I was too tiny to notice it. I found the smell of rotting palm trees fascinating, was astonished at the luminous clarity of Biscayne Bay, observed with interest the number of GIs who fell over with heat prostration at the daily retreat ceremony. I quickly made friends, first and most permanently with WINTERS Joseph S, ASN 32879797. Joe and I, as the two tallest men in Flight O, were almost always together leading the files as we marched. In the quick swap of autobiographies we discovered we also had the two tallest IQs, but of course the Army didn’t care much about that.

  Joe and I spent a lot of time together. When we could make our own decisions we swam, or drank a little beer in the blacked-out bars, or listened to Sunday-afternoon record concerts on the lawn of the public library. What we mostly did was what the Army told us to do, sitting around in the sun while someone explained one more time the nomenclature of the carbine, or watching films on venereal disease, or going through the obstacle course. We fired a lot of guns. My summers in camp and on my uncle’s farm paid off with a lot of marksmanship medals, and by and by they told us we were finished killers and sent us off in a thirty-car troop train to Chanute Field, Illinois, to become Air Force weathermen. Joe shipped out in the same batch. We snaked through every bypass in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, following the land-grant lines because that was the cheapest way for troops to go. At every siding there were Gray Ladies with coffee and cake, and on one short jump the engineer let me in the cab to drive the train for an omnipotent instant.