The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  The convention committee, besides Judy and myself, were Jay Stanton, Lester del Rey, and Harry and Evelyn Harrison, a small and incestuous world. A few months later Jay married Carol; that lasted not quite a year. Harry and Evelyn Harrison split up, and Evelyn married Lester del Rey. A sociology student named Jean Haynes came into the Hydra Club around that time and decided to do her master’s thesis on kinship ties in our social microcosm. She spent three months trying to sort out who was married to whom and which had been married to what, not to mention less formal alliances, and gave up in despair. The game was Musical Beds. At its peak it was hard to get a quorum of the Hydra Club to transact business, since so many of its officers were divorcing and remarrying so many others.

  At the time of the New York convention, however Judy and I were pretty solidly married. We had even decided to risk parenthood, and two or three months later, on the twenty-fifth of September, 1950, our daughter Ann was born.

  Judy already had a daughter from a previous marriage, Merril Zissman, so I was not unused to being in loco parentis. What I was not used to was newborns. She was so tiny. On one side of her face she was one of the prettiest babies ever seen, but the other side was somewhat squeezed from the business of being born, and so I worried intensely (and privately) that she would grow up hideously deformed in the right profile. No matter! I would protect her! If the other kids tried to make fun of her, well, I would know how to deal with those lousy other kids…As a matter of fact, within a week or two the right side of her face filled out to match the left, and she turned into a beautiful child.47 And that winter, with Annie beginning to crawl and Merril well into her school career, Judy and I began to discuss where we wanted to make a permanent home for the kids.

  C. Northcote Parkinson says that when institutions finally get themselves into permanent headquarters, that is the sign that the peak has passed and they are on their way to oblivion. So it was with us. In the spring of 1951 Judy and I bought the house in Red Bank, and three months later we had decided to get a divorce.

  To my surprise, shock, and anger, the divorce was not in the least amicable. I wasn’t ready for that. After all, it was my third. I was beginning to think of myself as an acknowledged expert in the field. The procedure was all pretty routine: one party decides to call it off, the other party agrees, you sign some papers, and pretty soon both of you are married to somebody else and no harm done.

  But it wasn’t that way at all.

  What made this divorce unlike any other was Annie. We both loved her. We both felt we could do more for her than that rotten other person. The first steps toward divorce were painless enough, but when we got to the question of custody, we wrangled bitterly and interminably, through the courts and outside them, for years. I wish we could have avoided all that.

  But I am not sure it could have happened in any other way. I think I can explain it all in terms of nuclear physics. It is a question of pair formation, and the conservation of net charge. When a positively charged + male and a negatively charged – female annihilate each other in divorce, they instantly become free-flying photons with a 0 neutral charge, and the law of conservation is maintained. Time passes. Each photon ultimately interacts with another, and so another electron-positron pair is formed. But. When the pair has formed some smaller particle, they no longer have the capacity to act as leptons. They cannot separate to lead the carefree lives of photons. There is a piece left over. Charge-conservation is violated, and the result is acrimony and pain. So Doë and I, and Tina and I, could end our marriages and still be friends. Judy and I could not, for years.

  Of course, that was years ago, and I think we have now settled into a position as old and good friends. Which leads me to something I want to say. I don’t quite know how to say it. I am hesitant to speak of “my ex-wives” as if the term defined them as a class. The principal thing that the ladies I have been married to (and some ladies I have not been married to) have in common is that each is very much an individual, with talents and graces far beyond the usual allotment. I keep running into people who speak of lives damaged by mates so malevolent and self-centered that the marriage is a constant pain. It has never happened to me. It is hard for me to believe that these closet beasts and termagants exist. Barring the odd dissonance in the relationship—well, maybe barring a lot of dissonances—the women who have shared any part of my life have each been a treasure, and a joy.

  But the dissonances with Judy were immediate and painful in 1951 and after, and they were made a lot worse by the dissonances in my work. I ran out of money.

  Part of the reason was my wonderful invention of advancing money to my clients so that they could write what they chose. It mostly all did pay off in time,48 but I was undercapitalized. I began operating on float, drawing against funds between the time I wrote the checks and the time they would be presented for collection. Now and then, and then more and more often, my checks began to bounce.

  I decided to trim expenses to the bone, got out of the Fifth Avenue offices, and moved to a tiny single room on West 10th Street, in the same building as Marty Greenberg’s Gnome Press. Marty was also suffering undercapitalization woes, and when things got too grim in my office I would wander down the hall to his to compare notes on disaster. I cut down to one secretary, no messenger, no assistant. It turned out that the extra people were not necessary to the work of the agency. The monthly sales figures continued the trend upward. But their absence was very expensive in terms of my own time. I was working eighty hours a week and more, and it was beginning to be more pain than it was worth. My writers were generally sympathetic, but they were also getting worried.

  Gossip carried the word around the publishing business that I was having money troubles, and other agents began to send out feelers. Would I care to sell my contracts for a capital-gains payment? Sell the agency entire to another agent? A new agent, Rogers Terrill, once my boss at Popular Publications, urged me to come into partnership with him, and that was tempting; Rog was a prince of good fellows, as well as a capable and industrious person.

  But the Fool-Killer was loud behind me, and it no longer seemed worth struggling to survive as an agent.

  In 1953 the agency at last threw off enough net profit to equal the salary I had had from Popular Publications. That in some way satisfied a need, and so I packed it in. I made cash settlements where I could, turned the authors loose, and toted up my losses.

  Counting everything, I was in hock for around thirty thousand dollars.

  Years later, my lawyer asked me why I hadn’t considered bankruptcy. I didn’t know what to tell him. I don’t know now; I just never gave it a thought. I intended to pay off the whole thirty thousand, and I did; but it took me nearly ten years.

  35 Connie Stronghilos turned up in my life again twenty-five years later, when he joined the New Jersey Unitarian Church of which I was then a trustee. I found out what had gone wrong with his career: arthritis. The mind understood the music, but the fingers would not obey his will. (It really is quite a small world.)

  36 On one of those strolls George told me the plot of a science-fiction story he had made up the night before. I told him he ought to write it, but he didn’t want to do that; what he wanted was for me to write it. It’s called “Let the Ants Try,” and I wrote it just as he said it, and all he would ever accept for the free gift of a story I like a lot was a bottle of Scotch. There are only about two stories in my whole catalog which were suggested by someone else (the other is “The Midas Plague,” which I owe to Horace Gold), and it is a source of some chagrin to me that I like them better than most.

  37 You mean you couldn’t tell?

  38 I wonder what I said in it! Haven’t seen it in thirty years.

  39 Who are essentially the same people. Nearly every writer is an ex- or present fan, and I’ve seldom met a fan who didn’t think of trying his luck as a writer sooner or later.

  40 That lasted about three years; then we broke it up and I continued on my own.

&
nbsp; 41 Not to be confused with the anthologist and political-science professor Martin Harry Greenberg, who became active in science fiction a couple of decades later.

  42 Actually five million pretty pennies. But they’ve never made the film. Movie people are crazy.

  43 Bernie Shir-Cliff has stayed in the paperback business and is now boss editor for Warner Paperback Library. Stanley Kauffmann had a marvelously interesting career after deciding against continuing as a book editor. For a while he was the first-string drama critic for The New York Times. That lasted, if I remember correctly, about three weeks; almost the first thing he published was a reasoned analysis of the influence of homosexual playwrights on the New York theater scene, and they had his heart for breakfast. He is now a specialist in the art and history of film.

  44 Well, no, not that pleased.

  45 Once she borrowed the apartment to give a party for the whole troupe—Nora Kaye, Danilova, everybody! In my own home! But I was out of town and missed it. I could have killed her.

  46 One couple to each bed, of course, what did you think?

  47 She is now a beautiful adult, with two spectacular tiny children of her own, in Canada.

  48 Ultimately all the advances were repaid except for one or two writers amounting to a few thousand dollars, but I have spent more for things I valued less.

  9

  Four Pages a Day

  For the next seven or eight years I was a pretty nearly simon-pure free-lance writer.

  In the minds of most civilians, the life of a writer has got to be glamorous and exciting. Well, it is, some of the time. A writer often gets to meet special people, visit fascinating places, do exciting things. But none of these occur when he is actively engaged at his employment. When he is writing, he is the nearest thing to a vegetable that you will find registered to vote. He sits.

  He doesn’t even have the apparent function of pushing typewriter keys most of the time, because during most of that sitting time the activity is all internal and thus invisible.

  Let me show you the numbers: Any jackleg typist can manage seventy-five words a minute. If you type at that rate from nine to five every day, with time out for lunch and a ten-minute break at the end of each hour for flexing the fingers, you will produce the equivalent of two 75,000-word novels in every five-day week.

  It is an observed fact that writers do not ordinarily produce two novels a week. Most don’t even manage two a year. Therefore it is demonstrated that writing is not merely a matter of putting words down on the page. Some other activity is taking place.

  The name of that process is “thinking.”

  The trouble with a career in which ninety-five percent of your working time is spent thinking is that, therefore, ninety-five percent of the time you don’t look as if you’re working. Or even thinking. What a writer looks like he is doing, generally speaking, is watching TV, playing solitaire, cleaning his typewriter keys, or taking a nap. Writing is not much of a spectator sport. I have had one or two nonwriting friends whose curiosity was so piqued that they coaxed to be allowed to watch me write. After ten or fifteen minutes they always fled to some other room. The boredom reaches criticality very soon. It does for the writer, too, unfortunately, so that actually getting words on paper becomes a test of strength, will power against terminal tedium. Which is why it is said that writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

  Writing is the only job I know that your wife will nag you out of. Why wouldn’t she? There you are, sprawled out on the living-room sofa, rereading the real-estate section from last Sunday’s Times—although it is known that you have no extensive real-estate holdings, and little prospect of acquiring any. Meanwhile, the dishwasher needs fixing. Poor soul! How can she know that if she interrupts you now, you will lose a precarious train of thought that has taken you four hours to construct?

  The other side of the coin is that sometimes your wife is right, and you’re just loafing. There simply is no external way to tell when a writer is working, and maybe even the writer himself doesn’t know.

  Nevertheless, the end product is easily recognizable. If the writer is a writer, at some point words will come out, and finished works, and if he is any good they will sooner or later be published. This is conclusive diagnostic evidence. Pity it doesn’t come along in time to be useful when you need to know whether the dishwasher should be fixed.

  I don’t write all the time—I don’t know many writers who do. There are periods when, for reasons not easy to identify, I write regularly and well for months on end. There are other times when I don’t.

  The times when a writer isn’t writing are called “writer’s slump.” Everybody has it, at least now and then. Nobody, or nobody I know, is wholly successful in dealing with it. I don’t know how to deal with it any more than anyone else, but what I do know is a way to postpone its happening, pretty well, most of the time, in a fashion that works, more or less, for me. What I do is to set myself a daily quota of four pages. No more, no less; and I write those pages every day, no matter where I am, no matter how long it takes, if I die for it.49 Sometimes it takes forty-five minutes. Sometimes it takes eighteen hours. Sometimes I am reasonably satisfied with the words that go onto the paper, and quite a lot of the time I loathe them.

  But I do them. If I miss, if I skip one day, the rhythm of the stride is broken and the shattered edifice of my life tumbles down on my head. So I do it every day, which means every day there is, including Saturdays, Sundays, Christmas, my birthday, the day I’m going to the dentist to find out if I’m going to need a root-canal job, the day I fly to London, the day I am so badly hung over that my eyelashes bleed. I do my quota in airports, on boardwalk benches, and in commuter trains. I have been known to take my typewriter along on a weekend date. “Every day” means “every day,” and this is the first rule of writing for me.

  Of course, with all this terrible strength of character, the times do come when I fall. I’ve missed a day, never mind why. Then everything is at risk. If I can climb right back on the wagon, maybe it will all be all right again, but maybe it won’t—and sometimes that single day has extended itself to months.

  But that is what it is like to be a writer (for me, anyway), and that is why there is not a great deal to say about what occupied the greatest part of my attention for the remaining years of the 1950s, I wrote. And was a damn dull spectacle doing it.

  So will you imagine, please, that all through this chapter I am—whatever else I am doing—writing about forty short sf stories (and a couple of dozen other short pieces) and about a dozen science-fiction novels (and eight or ten other books).

  I did manage to get away from the typewriter long enough to do a few other things, and one of them was to get married again.

  The girl was (and is!) a tall, leggy, strikingly beautiful blonde, née Carol Metcalf Ulf. A brief marriage to Jay Stanton left her with a brand-new daughter, Karen, who in the twenty-odd years since has changed from a tiny scarlet bundle of flesh, with an eye that wandered northeast and a foot that pointed southwest, to the kind of beauty who stops conversation when she comes into a room…and with intelligence, creativity, and personality to match.50 So Carol and Carol’s Karen, and me and my Annie, at least when the varying vicissitudes of my struggles with Judy gave me custody of Annie, set up housekeeping. First it was a tiny apartment on the far East Side of New York. The 10th Street bus paused to gather its strength for the westward run right under our window, so that the noise of idling Diesels kept things lively all night long, and there were mice. But it was a pretty nice little apartment. It was only a few blocks from Horace Gold’s place in Stuyvesant Town, and our Friday nights were given to Horace’s poker games. It was very good that this was so. We didn’t have money for baby sitters and shows, since I was trying to make a dent in paying off thirty thousand dollars.

  Those Friday-night games were fun. Horace edited Galaxy from his apartment, and a lot of the regulars were Galaxy writers: Bob Sheckley
, William Tenn, A. J. Budrys, sometimes Lester and Evelyn del Rey, Tony Boucher when he was in town. Not everyone was a writer. John Cage showed up occasionally, a gentle, humorous man who clutched his cards diffidently, bet insecurely, and seemed to win a lot. Years later, when Karen-grown-up was taking a course in Cage’s music, she was startled to learn that she had met him as an infant, between Spit in the Ocean and High-Low Seven, when we took her out of the carriage for her ten o’clock feeding.

  Before long we were back in the house in Red Bank, trying to fill up fourteen rooms with what furniture we could acquire on a budget of hardly anything at all. Carol was superb. Former art student and fashion model, she made most of her own clothes—as well as drapes, spreads, and slipcovers for the tatty furniture—naturally clothing the babies on the same sewing machine. Moreover, she was handy with pliers and paintbrush. Before long she had made the house eminently livable. Even partyable. We began inviting friends out, at first a few at a time, then overnight parties of dozens of people which climaxed, when the weather was warm enough, with a little daybreak swimming in the lake down the street.

  We had a great natural resource to draw on, because the fabulous Ipsy-Wipsy Institute was not very far away. The Ipsy was the immense house in Highlands owned by Fletcher and Inga Pratt, twenty-three rooms, on acres of land rolling down to the Shrewsbury River. (I suppose that the reason I wasn’t afraid to acquire a fourteen-room house of my own was that, seeing it for the first time after a weekend at the Ipsy, it seemed charmingly compact.)