The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  As part of the world’s hypertrophy syndrome, sf conventions have grown uncomfortably huge. Three or four thousand persons is not rare; sometimes they are even worse. That’s a pity. Too much of a good thing reduces the possibilities for personal interaction; it is a confusion rather than a coming together. But thirty years ago there were only a few hundred of us band of brothers at Philadelphia. Most of us had not seen each other since the far side of a war and were glad to meet again, even gladder to meet people we had known only through letters or the printed page. Willy Ley, John Campbell, Lester del Rey were all there. Ted Sturgeon accompanied a lovely girl named Mary Mair on his guitar as she sang his song “Thunder and Roses.” William Tenn—brand-newest of the Big Name Writers—his “Child’s Play” just out—gave an uproariously funny comic lecture on writers’ correspondence. And Judith Merril was there. I had met her briefly a year or two earlier. We had both been married at the time; now neither of us were. Judy had just published “That Only a Mother,” a brilliant twisty-dismaying short story about a woman who gives birth to a radiation-damaged child, the sort of story that gets right in among the glands and squeezes pretty basic parts of the psyche, so she was a writer to be respected. She was also a person to be known better, in her mid-twenties, with a small, incredibly beautiful blonde daughter. Judy herself was not pretty. She was something quite different. My friend Jacques LeCroix, arguably the best portrait photographer in Paris at the time, described her as having “the capacity for great beauty.”

  Philcon ’47 left such a delicious aftertaste in all our mouths that Lester del Rey and I decided to revive it on a semipermanent basis in New York. So one night a few weeks later Lester brought a few of his friends down to my apartment on Grove Street, where a few of mine were already gathered, and the nine of us r’ared back and passed a miracle. We called it the Hydra Club.

  Over the next few years the Hydra Club came to include nearly every science-fiction writer in the New York area, plus a lot of others: Fletcher Pratt, Willy Ley, L. Jerome Stanton (associate editor of Astounding), William Tenn, Judith Merril, George O. Smith, Jack Gillespie, Basil Davenport, Dave Kyle, Sam Merwin, Harry Harrison, as well as Lester and myself. It was the place where sf writers met. When Arthur Clarke turned up from London, Hydra was where he came. When visiting firemen from California or the Midwest passed by New York, we laid on special meetings. Hans Stefan Santesson was the general coordinator, in charge of letting us know when to meet; Debbie Crawford, with a comfortable little apartment in the North Village, was our usual hostess. At Christmas we rented a hotel ballroom to revel in. Betweentimes we met and drank a few and enjoyed each other’s company.

  Hydra was a fine place for establishing and cementing relationships, not all of them literary. Lester found his wife, Evelyn, there. Jack Gillespie met and married Lois Miles. And I married Judy Merril. By that time she had become an editor at Bantam Books, and I was turning into a literary agent.

  Q. What is an agent?

  A. An agent is a person who acts for another person.

  Q. What kind of an agent is a “literary” agent?

  A. A literary agent is a person who acts for a writer in literary matters.

  Q. What do you have to be in order to become a literary agent?

  A. Willing.

  Literary agents come in all shapes and sizes. Some are Big Business. Some are cottage industry. Some are only a kind of hobby, scratching out a piece of a living from the odd reading fee or commission while holding a job, or free-lancing editorial work, or even collecting welfare. There are no professional standards. It is a little trickier to get started now than it was thirty years ago, but only because everything is a little trickier now, since a larger proportion of everything is taxed and/or registered with the government. It still isn’t hard to set up shop. And in 1947 there was nothing to it.

  Dirk Wylie came back from the wars with a bad back, acquired jumping out of that truck in the Ardennes. Army hospitals did what they could for him, and he emerged a civilian in 1946. But he wasn’t well enough to get a job, and he was looking for something he could do at his own pace, preferably in his own home, preferably in the publishing business somewhere. He decided to set up as a literary agent.

  In this I encouraged him a lot. The writing market was changing every day in the postwar confusion. I kept hearing about new magazines, new kinds of markets. What I really would have wished in my heart was to write for them all myself, but there was no hope. I’m not a very fast writer. It graveled me to see these opportunities going begging, and so I offered to help Dirk out as a silent partner. So Dirk printed up some letterheads and went looking for clients.

  I remembered that when I had worked for Popular Publications, standing orders had been to save the outside envelopes from all slush-pile manuscripts and turn them over to somebody in the business department. They copied off the return addresses, typed up copies, and sold them to purchasers of mail-order lists. I asked a few publishers, found that such lists were still available, and we bought a few. We wrote a letter on Dirk’s new stationery:

  Dear Writer:

  We have a vacancy in our lists for a few additional clients…

  And manuscripts began to flow in. Not just manuscripts but checks; we were charging a reading fee.

  A lot of agents still do charge reading fees. It’s not really an intrinsically evil process, just a schlocky one. Like heroin and beer, reading-fee criticism is a commodity that is wanted very much by some people, and if it were against the law to supply it, there would be bootleggers. I understand the need. If you are a writer, you understand it, too. There are times when you are putting all those words onto those sheets of white paper and you would gladly pay anything to have some competent professional tell you whether they are any good or not.

  The person who writes the reading-fee letters usually does know more than the client does, but not necessarily very much more. The big agencies tend to hire anybody who can type neatly, grammatically, and fast. They would hire skilled professionals if they could, provided skilled professionals would work for the kind of money a reading-fee person can command, but that doesn’t happen. At least with Dirk all the letters were written by people who had actually written and published stories of their own, mostly by Dirk himself. But still it was not exactly what Dirk wanted to do with his life, and after the first year or so, when there began to be a few commissions from actual sales, Dirk decided to drop the reading fees.

  Dirk was a fine, bright man. I think he would have made quite a good agent, but what the war had done to him could not be undone. His spinal injury began to relapse. He was hospitalized and released; hospitalized again, and the stay grew longer and release began to look remote. His wife, Rosalind, carried on with the work of the agency, with help from me.

  And then Dirk died.

  Dirk’s death was not the first that had invaded my own life. But he was still in his twenties! And he was my oldest friend. I could not accept it—because so much of my growing up had been shared with him, because it was such a shocking waste. I couldn’t make myself go to his funeral.

  When we were able to make reasonable plans, Ros and I decided to continue the agency as a partnership, retaining Dirk’s name.40 I was still working for PopSci, so most of my work for the agency was limited to evenings and weekends. But now and then something productive happened during the working day. My boss, George Spoerer, came back from lunching with an old friend at Doubleday to report that they were about to set up a science-fiction line. In fact, they had already begun buying, when someone in the corporate structure happened to think that they really didn’t know much about science fiction. Not to worry, George told his friend; I have this kid assistant who knows something about it, and if you like we’ll get you together and you can pick his brains. Did I want to do that? he asked.

  I wanted little more; it was the nicest news I had heard in some time.

  Science fiction had been growing slowly out of its pulp origins. Big slicks lik
e Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post were trying their luck with the occasional Bradbury or Heinlein story. The trade book publishers had not yet perceived the existence of a market, but a few amateurs had. In Pennsylvania, Lloyd Eshbach had started Fantasy Press. In Chicago, Erie Korshak had Shasta. In Philadelphia there was Prime Press, and in New York City there was Gnome. None of these were very big or very profitable. But they demonstrated that a market was there, though they didn’t have the capital or the knowledge to exploit it.

  The one I followed most closely was Gnome Press, because it was closest to hand and because my old buddy Dave Kyle was one of its founders. Dave’s elder brother, Arthur C. Kyle, was a newspaper publisher in upstate New York. That meant he had a printing press. It wasn’t very well adapted to book work. It could print only eight-page signatures, and not very rapidly at that. But it was an asset of importance to a shoestring operation. Dave’s partner was a glass blower and science-fiction fan named Marty Greenberg.41 The two of them secured the rights from the author, Fletcher Pratt, and published a fantasy novel called The Cornelian Cube.

  The partnership did not survive very well, and, for that matter, neither did Gnome Press. It kept going for five or six years and foundered in a mass of lawsuits and unpaid bills. But if you look at one of Gnome Press’s old catalogs, you find you are staring at a million dollars. The authors they had! Isaac Asimov. Robert A. Heinlein. Arthur C. Clarke. They had them all. They had the rights to books that have collectively sold tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of copies since, and they had acquired them at prices that would make a cat weep. Jack Williamson and I wrote three original sf novels for Gnome, and the biggest advance we got was $750. Edd Cartier designed Gnome’s colophon and did their covers. The finest talents that science fiction owned were lined up and knocking on Gnome’s door, hungry for the book publication that all of them wanted and every one of them had been denied.

  What went wrong with the semipro publishers was that they could not bridge the distribution gap. The commodity was there, the marvelous stories that had been silting up for decades in the sf magazines. The market was there, hundreds of thousands of readers thrilled by the idea of owning their favorite stories in permanent form. Or, for that matter, in any form, because for some of the newer readers novels like The Skylark of Space and Slan! were only legends. Unless they could find tattered second-hand copies of the magazines they had been published in, there was no way for them to read the books themselves.

  But between publisher and reader lies a wide space, and the best way to bridge it is with salesmen, distributors, jobbers, and a whole network of promotion, billing, and service departments. The semipro publishers had none of these things. They could print the books, and they could sell them a single copy at a time, mostly direct-by-mail, to individual customers; that way they could get rid of an edition of two or three thousand copies, enough to show a theoretical profit. But there was no way for Marty Greenberg in his little office on West 10th Street to reach ten thousand bookstore proprietors and persuade them to stock his books. Worse. The profits were only theoretical. To make them real required the investment of real capital, which none of the semipros had.

  Nevertheless, the big trade houses began to notice what was going on. Random House, Crown, and one or two others tested the waters with sf anthologies, and they moved nicely. Simon and Schuster began to sign up an occasional novel—I had already sold them Jack Williamson’s The Humanoids, for instance.

  Doubleday’s act of faith went beyond that. They were not talking about an isolated title here and there, they were planning for a category—six books a year, maybe twelve, maybe more than that! It was the Promised Land.

  So we met for lunch, George Spoerer and I trekking up to Mad Ave’s restaurant of the week, a place called Cherio’s. The Doubleday people we lunched with were Jerry Hardy, an advertising-promotion type, very quick to comprehend and full of ideas, and the managing editor of the corporation, Walter Bradbury. Brad was and is one of the great gentlemen of the publishing business, never forgetting a favor, never remembering a slight. He impressed me at once as a good person to work with.

  Between the very, very dry martinis and the second cup of coffee I told them all I could fit in about science fiction. Brad’s big immediate problem was the first book they had bought for the new series, Max Ehrlich’s The Big Eye. Ehrlich was a highly competent and successful writer (and still is, as witness The Reincarnation of Peter Proud), but he had not previously written any science fiction. No one at Doubleday was sure that The Big Eye met the canons of the field. They had sent a copy of the manuscript to a Harvard astronomer who had said it was scientific poppycock. Was it? Did it matter?

  I took the manuscript home and read it apprehensively. But there really seemed to be little to worry about. The Big Eye is not one of the all-time masterpieces of the field. But it kept my interest all the way through, and I was satisfied that it would do the same for most readers. There was one short passage that I thought needed a fix, so I wrote in a couple of insert pages and sent it back. Brad expressed his gratitude with a bottle of Scotch, and later on, when the book proved out even more successful than he had hoped, with a fair-sized check. (He was under no obligation to do that, but I told you he was a gentleman.) And I began to sell him books.

  My client Isaac Asimov, I happened to know, had a nearly book-length manuscript lying around, gathering dust because no magazine wanted to publish it. He had written it, on request, for Thrilling Wonder Stories, who hated it and sent it back. John Campbell had politely declined interest, and none of the other magazines of that particular time had much use for long stories. Let’s try it on Doubleday, I proposed. They won’t buy it, Isaac remonstrated; they want book writers, like this fellow Ehrlich, whoever he is, and I’m a magazine person. Don’t argue with your agent, I explained. After some arm wrestling I got the manuscript away from him and shipped it off to Doubleday.

  What did Brad know? He wasn’t aware he only wanted book writers, or that Grow Old with Me (as it was called at the time) wasn’t exactly what the readers expected of Isaac Asimov. All he knew was that he enjoyed reading it and, after some revisions, was perfectly willing to publish it. Which he did, after giving it a new title. As Pebble in the Sky, it has sold, and keeps on selling, a lot of copies.

  That was Isaac’s first book—not counting a part of a biochemistry text. He caught the fever at once. We followed that one up with another original, The Stars Like Dust, and then another, and another. Doubleday was not quite ready to pick up some of his famous older stories, heaven knows why, so they declined I, Robot and the Foundation series (and I sold them elsewhere), but they were willing to publish his new work almost as rapidly as he could write it.

  My other clients were also getting into the act, and some of them with even fatter rewards. John Wyndham turned up with a new novel called The Day of the Triffids. Doubleday snapped it up, but I had to ask them to hold off publication because Collier’s also loved it, and Collier’s love expressed itself in the biggest check I had ever seen, five figures worth of fondness. My most cherished client (by then also my wife), Judith Merril, wrote a borderline science-fiction novel about New York City under nuclear attack, Shadow on the Hearth (later it became a TV special). Cyril Kornbluth was out in Chicago, playing hardboiled-newspaperman games with Trans-Radio Press and doing little of the science-fiction writing he was so good at. I sent him a note, explaining that it was raining soup and he looked silly standing there without a spoon, so he retooled and came on line. First he did a collaboration with Judy, flimsily based on a short story I had begun and abandoned years before; it appeared variously as Marschild, Outpost Mars, and a couple of other titles, in one edition or another, under their joint pen name of “Cyril Judd.” Then he struck out on his own, with three or four chapters of something called The Martians in the Attic. It had to do with the first manned trip into space, and some kind of cockamamie Martians that complicated it. They also complicated the story l
ine more than it would stand, and he bogged down.

  Cyril and I worked together pretty closely, not just on the stories that bore our joint byline. When I was having trouble making a story work, over the years, it often helped to show it to Cyril for comments and suggestions, and he did the same with me. We re-plotted the novel all one late night in my kitchen, amputating the Martians. Cyril revised a few pages to accommodate the changes, and I showed the remaining fragment to Brad. Fine, said Brad, I’d love to publish it. But there’s this one technicality. For the sake of the weekly editorial conference I need an outline of the rest of the book before I can put through a contract.

  When I reported this to Cyril, he pursed his lips, borrowed one of my typewriters, and holed up in the small, old, once-theatrical Hotel Latham, a block or two from my office. They had a room just right for writers, on the top floor, next to the elevator motors; it was noisy enough on its own that a little typing disturbed no one, and I used the same room myself for the same purposes now and then. He emerged forty-eight hours later with the completed manuscript. I turned it in to Brad, explaining that most writers disliked writing outlines but Cyril really hated it, and Doubleday published it as Takeoff.

  Other book publishers were falling in line, and the specialist science-fiction magazine market was beginning to swell toward its biggest boom. Ellery Queen decided to diversify with a one-shot called The Magazine of Fantasy. It seemed to work out, and under a slightly expanded title it is still being published today. An Italian publishing company had done so well with soap-opera comics that they proposed to try them out in America. For makeweight they added a couple of other titles; one was Galaxy, with Horace Gold as editor, and it too survives today. The agency was prospering, and not just in science fiction.

  It seemed to be decision time, get all the way in or get out.