The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  I was under no illusions about the money. It would be a long time at best before the agency would net me as much taking-home money as Popular Science was reliably handing over to me every week. But then I didn’t really need that much money. With a little luck, at least I might not starve.

  Moreover, it felt like time to move on. George Spoerer remained a marvelous man to work for, but the person I really enjoy having as a boss has not yet been born. I had talked about quitting once or twice before. Each time the company had come through with more money and assorted other kindnesses. This time I was serious. In November of 1948 I resigned from Popular Science and set out as a full-time literary agent.

  It all came to nothing in the end. But my, it was fun for a while!

  I had, all worked out in my mind, a clear description of what an ideal literary agent would be. The ideal agent would not concentrate on selling books or magazine pieces. He would represent writers. The ideal agent would not make deals and then find writers to carry them out. He would learn what each writer’s strengths were, and find ways to help him develop them. The way to measure the success of an agent was not to tote up the dollars in his bank account, but to see whether his writers were producing regularly and well.

  You see, each literary agent is free to do business in the way that suits him best, and some of the ways that are best for him are worst for his writers.

  But no, you say, that’s not possible! After all, he gets nothing but a ten percent commission on whatever his writers make. Obviously, whatever is good for his writers is exactly one-tenth as good for him, right?

  Wrong. Let’s do a mind experiment. You be an agent. You open your mail in the morning, and here is a story from a writer. Because you are a smart agent, you know that you can sell it to X, and he will pay you a thousand dollars for it. Or, alternatively, you can try to sell it to someone who will earn, maybe, two thousand dollars for you with it—Y, or Z, or Q, or W. The trouble is, none of those are a sure sale. You’ll have to try all four of them, maybe, before one will buy it.

  So which is a better return on your time, as a literary agent? The fast, sure thousand-dollar sale, or the slower, more problematical sale for twice the money? If you are running a factory, you go for the fast grand.

  But now be the writer, and see how different the view is from the other side of the desk. You have spent exactly the same amount of time in writing the story, no matter how long it takes to sell it; one way will bring you exactly twice as much return as the other, so which do you-the-writer prefer? Of course you do; but your agent’s cost/effectiveness studies may lead him to the other course.

  Things are rarely that simple, but the choices are real. Book contracts are pretty complicated. When the complications have to do with how much money the publisher is going to pay you, then the agent’s interests are pretty close to those of the writer. But there are many other clauses in a contract. For example, when you sign a publishing contract, you usually sign your name to a clause that says that if anyone brings suit for libel or plagiarism or one or two other actionable possibilities, then it will be you, not the publisher, who will take the rap. That’s reasonable. But sometimes the language of the clause is not; it requires you to pay costs that you may think out of line, or to accept responsibilities that are not properly yours. That doesn’t affect your agent, particularly. His neck is not on the line. But yours is. He may be willing to horse-trade a bad indemnity clause for a better share of subsidiary rights with the publisher…but are you?

  Some agents made a specialty of making package deals—supplying the entire contents of a magazine, or a line of specialized books. I don’t know of any case when these captive markets were what any writer would want to aim at, but in the aggregate they could amount to tens of thousands of dollars of sales for the agent. Of course, the agent would have to throw in something by his big-name clients now and then to sweeten the pot. It seemed to me that that was a bad deal for all the writers concerned: for the big names, obviously, but also for the trained seals who turned out the mass copy, because what they were being paid to write seldom had anything to do with what they were good at.

  Now, none of this is meant to say that all agents, or even any agents, are crooked or malevolent. Most of them do a better job than their writers ever know. But they are human beings, and they have diverse styles, and after some observation of a lot of them, as editor buying stories for them, as client and as competitor, I had worked out just what I thought was right.

  I didn’t, for instance, want to get into supplying captive markets. I didn’t want to divert writers from what they did well to what would surely sell.

  But many writers actually liked writing for those markets because they meant sure sales. Writers, too, like to eat.

  I invented a solution for that. One of my most promising, but least solvent, writers was a young Californian who was averaging about one sale for every ten stories, not enough to live on. He was not the only writer in the world with that problem, but he was making a serious effort to support himself and his family by writing; he had no resources, and unless he could count on scratching together at least enough to pay for groceries, he would have to give it up.

  In similar circumstances, any number of writers have either turned into hacks or gone out and got a job and deferred, maybe permanently, their writing careers. But it seemed to me there was an experiment worth trying, and so I made an arrangement with him. I undertook to pay him an advance on every story he turned in, so much a word, immediately on receipt of manuscript. He could write whatever he liked. I would worry about where and how to sell it. But every time a page came out of the typewriter he could count on a few bucks—not maybe, not later, but then.

  Actually, it worked pretty well. Without the constraint of desperately needing to please some editor, he was able to write what he was good at. His sales began to pick up. I mentioned this to Cyril, and he allowed as how he would like the same arrangement; I agreed, and it worked for him, too. Jim Blish and Damon Knight wanted to try the same arrangement, and it also worked for them. By and by I had twelve or fifteen writers doing their own things, liberated from the need to slant, and, by gosh, doing very well. If you look at the major sf magazines of the early 50s, you will find that around half of the stories in them came from my agency; and of those I think at least half, including many of the best ones, were written under that arrangement, and mostly would not have been written without it.

  I am really rather pleased with myself about this. Most of the writers involved were producing at the top of their form. The stories themselves comprise a solid part of the literature of sf. They are still being reprinted, and even taught. While it isn’t as good as having written them myself, it still isn’t bad; they are my stepchildren, with whom I am well pleased. It wasn’t all roses. What was most wrong with it was that it required substantial amounts of capital—which I didn’t have. But what was right about it was that it made it possible for good writers to do their best work without worrying about pleasing some nut of an editor. And shielding writers against editorial insanity, it seems to me, is an agent’s principal task.

  I tried to do that in as many ways as I could, and sometimes it worked pretty well. For instance, Hal Clement wrote a marvelous sf novel called Mission of Gravity. He had had a temporary aberration of his own and submitted it in some kind of fruitcake “best novel” contest run by one of the semipro publishers, which I was desperately afraid the book would win; untangling it from them was my first and hardest job. But then I sent it off to John Campbell, who sent it back with the sad news that although he, of course, loved it, it would be impossible for him to run it as a serial since it did not break naturally into three installments.

  Now, this was clear lunacy. I have no idea what made John say a dumb thing like that. John was about the best editor sf ever had, but even the best can go out of his mind at certain phases of the moon. I was never any good at winning arguments with John Campbell, but in this case I was certa
in he was wrong, and it was my clear duty, to him as well as to my client, to save him from his folly. So I took the manuscript out of its box and thumbed through it. It ran about 270 pages. I turned to page 90 and found a paragraph that could be construed as a cliffhanger, and penciled under it “End of Part One.” On page 180 I wrote in “End of Part Two.” I turned the manuscript over to my secretary with instructions to retype three or four pages before and after each break. I put it in the file for three weeks and then sent it back to John with a note saying that I hoped he would find that the revisions made it suitable for serialization. Of course he did, and it wound up as one of the best-loved serials Astounding ever ran.

  I tell this story, not to make fun of John Campbell, but to illustrate the point that all editors, even he, sometimes say crazy things. If they are taken seriously, they can mean lost sales and wasted work for writers. One of the hardest things an agent has to do is to know when to reject a rejection. “How” is even harder.

  With Horace Gold at Galaxy I was on easy terms. Half a dozen times I refused to accept his turndown of a story and kept sending it back until he weakened and bought it. (Half a dozen other times I didn’t persuade him.) With most editors I was less forthright. The simplest ploy was to hold a manuscript for a month or two and then send it back as if it had been revised. I tried not to lie outright, but I was willing to send off a letter that said:

  “You know, Charlie, I think you’ve put your finger on a good point in Sam’s story. I’ll see what he thinks.”

  And then, a few weeks later:

  “Here’s Sam’s story back, as we discussed. I really think it’s a winner now.”

  What made it easy for me to play tricks was that I had a lot of leverage in science fiction, and the science-fiction field was booming. I used the muscle when I could, not just for my own writers. The reason the prevailing rate went from two cents a word to three in the early 1950s was a complicated three-way squeeze play that I planned and flawlessly executed.

  When I went into the Army in 1943, I had helped Damon Knight get my old job at Popular Publications; now he was getting tired of it and looking for something with more authority to do. He stopped by my office and asked for advice. I had heard some trade gossip about Alex Hillman, then proprietor of a magazine chain, and suggested Damon hit on him for a science-fiction magazine; Damon did, and Hillman was willing to give it a try. Then Damon came to my office and asked how he could get a look at some of the stories that were going to Horace Gold and John Campbell. “Pay more than they do,” I said, and Damon thought it over, and took it back to Hillman, and got a budget that allowed him to squeeze out an extra penny a word. That was step one. Step two was for me to trot down to Horace Gold and tell him that he now had powerful competition for a first look, and what was he going to do about it? “Let me talk it over with the publisher,” he said, and did, and then Galaxy went to three cents a word. Whereupon I called up John Campbell and told him that the two-cent line had been broken; and a few weeks later Astounding followed suit. Well, no doubt all of that would have happened sooner or later, anyway; but it happened when it did because I squeezed.

  All these things pleased me a lot; forgive me if I dwell on them, because some of the other things weren’t very pleasing at all. I was having a lot of fun, but one thing I was not doing was making a profit.

  Although the gross kept growing, the cost of doing business kept growing just a little faster. Advances. Rent. Salaries. Taxes. Telephone. Entertainment—I didn’t do nearly as much of this as many agents, but still it was an item. Stationery! We used a lot of it, and most of it was custom-made. I designed a really handsome die-cut manuscript folder. They did exactly what they were intended to do, protected the scripts and made ours stand out from everyone else’s, but they also cost the earth. Every time we ordered a new batch it blew the commissions on half a dozen sales. I designed locater cards and rights cards, ten times as good as the stock varieties, and at ten times the price.

  And then there were those special and inevitable costs, like Christmas.

  Christmas! It’s a quarter of a century since I had my agent’s office in New York City, but I can still barely force myself to send out a Christmas card. The jolly Yule spirit does not survive being an entrepreneur. Early in November the vultures start to gather. Building-service personnel you hardly see all year round make sure to wish you a happy holiday. The elevator people give you a group card, with each name carefully spelled out. The cleaning women identify themselves. The gnomes that toil in the caverns underground, fixing the pipes and feeding the boilers, every one makes himself known to you, and every one expects a little token of affection. And the Post Office! God must love mailmen, he made so many of them. The First-Class Delivery men present you with their collective card. Then the Bulk Mail deliverers give you theirs. Then the Special Delivery and Registereds come along. Then the Pickup Men, who empty out the box in your building. Then the for God’s sake Sorting Clerks send a deputy out to visit your office, Christmas card in hand, cheery smile on face, and larceny in heart.

  Taken all in all, a lot of money was funneling through the agency checking account, but it all seemed to belong to someone else. Somehow or other we managed to go on eating, but not out of those ten-percent commissions. Popular Science had been reluctant enough to see me go to ask me to continue with odd jobs on a free-lance basis, and so from time to time I packaged a new book for them, photography manual or fishing guide. There was not much satisfaction in them, but they were easy work for the money and kept body and soul together.

  But I kept thinking I would like to do some real writing.

  The thing was, there was a moral question involved. Selling my own writing meant competing with my clients. Ninety-five percent of the time, that would make no real difference to anyone, the work sold on its merits, the editors were glad to have it, there was never enough really good stuff to suit them, anyway. But now and then there would be conflicts, inevitably. A slick magazine would want to try one science-fiction story as an experiment. Whose? Bob Lowndes would have a cover and need a story written around it. Whom should the assignment go to?

  For a time I compromised by editing a few anthologies. Brad had asked Bob Heinlein to do one for Doubleday, and Heinlein had objected that he didn’t know enough about what had been published or how to secure permissions. Brad asked me if I were willing to ghost it, and I was, provided I could share it with Judy; and so the two of us put together Tomorrow, the Stars. It turned out very well, in fact I still get royalties on it, twenty-odd years later, and so Brad asked me to do some more in propria persona.

  But it wasn’t quite the same as writing.

  I should say that the desire to write is really independent of the need to make a living. Not just for me. Harlan Ellison and I were talking to some fledgling writers a year or so ago, and he said, “No one should consider writing if he can possibly imagine doing anything else.” I was struck by the wisdom of the remark because it defined exactly my own unexamined attitudes. Writing is the way I make my daily bread; but it is also my hobby, my vice, and my ongoing and most valued psychotherapy. Most writers would be straight up the wall if they didn’t have the typewriter to fantasize through. James Branch Cabell once wrote a tenderly critical little jape about a writer: gauche, self-obsessed, petulant, he cried out, “I am pregnant with words! And I must have lexicological parturition, or I die!”

  And I was beginning to bulge.

  In the beginning of the 50s Judy and I took a summer place up on a hill overlooking the Ashokan Reservoir, a strange, comfortable old house with the upstairs where the downstairs ought to be: the ground floor was all bedrooms, while the upper part was mostly an immense open drawing room with a big fireplace. One weekend I felt the need to do some kind of writing badly enough to exhume my wartime novel, For Some We Loved. I sat in front of that fireplace all night long, reading it page by page. And as I finished each page I threw it in the fire. It was, boy, bad. Scratch For Some We Loved.
I had achieved my purpose in learning enough about the advertising business to write a novel about it, no doubt. But not that novel. It was too immature and incompetent to salvage. I thought of starting over again from the beginning, same premise but better resources and maybe even better skill at writing, since I had learned something in the years between. But by then Fredric Wakeman had made an immense success with The Hucksters. The idea’s virginity was gone.

  A year later Judy and I were weekending at Fletcher and Inga Pratt’s immense old place in Highlands, New Jersey, tenderly called The Ipsy-Wipsy Institute. It was a literary sort of place to be. Fletcher himself used to set up his typewriter in the billiard room; he would type a few lines, pause to chat, toss cards into a hat, have a drink, feed the marmosets, then go back and type a few more. I have never understood how the man could string sentences together to make sense under conditions like that, but his example was a prod. The other guests were people like Willy Ley, John Ciardi, Sprague de Camp, Bernard de Voto, all of them with writing of their own to do, and I felt left out.

  So I took my lavender typewriter out on the lawn and began typing something called Fall Campaign. It seemed to be the beginning of a science-fiction novel about advertising. I didn’t know where I was going with it. I especially didn’t know what I would do with it after I wrote it, but it seemed like an interesting thing to do; and in any event, the problem of what to do with it would not arise until I had it written, which seemed comfortably far in the future.

  As time permitted, for the next few months, I added a page now and then. Time didn’t permit a lot. Putting in seventy hours a week as a literary agent did not leave many hours for writing, but, even so, by the summer of 1951 I had some twenty thousand words of very rough draft on paper, and the novel seemed to have solidified itself.

  Then along came Horace Gold.

  I had been selling him at least half of what he printed, as an agent, and besides, we had become good friends. I fought temptation for a while and then bashfully admitted I had a novel of my own in the works. Show me, said Horace. I did. Finish it and I’ll print it, said Horace.