The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  But they had done a fantastic job, and I owed them something. Money? Well, sure, I made a contribution. But what they needed more than money was manpower. So I joined up. For the next few years I woke with the sirens and got myself thoroughly smudged, scraped, frozen, and exhausted in several score fires, great and small. It was interesting. It was socially very useful; but I sure don’t want to do it any more.

  Being a volunteer fireman did have some fringe benefits. At the beer busts after the monthly meetings, from time to time someone would bring along a reel of Tijuana’s best imported porn, the first I’d seen since Army days on Mount Vesuvius. And my local volunteer company, like nearly every other volunteer fire company anywhere in suburbia, had been just about one hundred percent registered Republican. As a known Democrat, I broke the line.

  This meant something to me, because I was gung-ho for the Democratic Party. I can’t say I always thought the Democratic candidates for office were really very good. I only thought what I have always thought about party politics in America; bad as the Democrats often were, point for point and office for office the Republicans were usually just that tiny bit worse. On those grounds I had been a Democratic County Committeeman for several years—the absolute lowest elected office in America.70 I worked hard, took no bribes, got the vote out; and after some years of this was rewarded with a political patronage plum. It was the best job I ever had in my life. I held it for only two weeks, and had to quit because of pressure from my family; but if I had my druthers I’d probably have it still. Our local leader was a street-smart old Irishman from Jersey City, with the brain of a Mayor Daley in the body of a retired jockey. He called me up and said, “Fred, you been doing a great job and I wanna show the Party’s appreciation. You show up at Freehold Raceway Monday morning and they’ll put you to work. Say I sent you.”

  “But I already have a job editing a magazine, Artie.”

  “You call that a job? I’m talking twenty bucks for fifteen minutes!”

  “What kind of job is that, Artie?”

  “It’s better if we don’t go into that part right now,” he explained. “Just show up.”

  So I showed up. The job turned out to be collecting urine samples from the trotting horses.

  Look, I have as many middle-class hang-ups as the next man, and I had never considered a career in horse piss. Apart from anything else, it was easy to imagine the comments, the jokes, and oh! the belly laughs from all my friends. But the money was good. I liked being around tracks. It piqued my curiosity. And, considered objectively, what was so bad? After changing diapers for ten years, a little horse urine didn’t seem too frightening. Besides, there was not much chance I would get any on me. The specimen goes into a sort of aluminum soup can on a five-foot pole. All you really have to do is hold the can in the stream long enough to collect an ounce or two…Well, no. There’s more to it than that.

  What you have to do is know when the flow is going to commence, and how to coax the horse into making nice for daddy when he doesn’t particularly want to. In case the problem ever comes up for you, I will pass along my hard-won knowledge. Female horses sort of squat down on their hind legs before they do it; watch for the squat, stick in the pot, and you’re home free. With male horses you can tell at once when something is about to happen, as that majestic equipment starts to engorge; the horse is going either to urinate or to make love. At that point you want to be fast on your feet whichever way it goes.

  Usually a horse who has just trotted six furlongs is about ready to relieve himself. Unless he has done it on the way back to the barn—bad luck!—you can count on something happening in the first five or ten minutes. If not, you have to use psychology.

  I became quite good at chirping, whispering, and shuffling the straw in the stall with my feet. I don’t know why that worked, but it usually did. I never had a failure, never had a real bad time; but then I never happened to get an Ohio horse. Ohio horses had a very bad reputation in Freehold. In Ohio there was a compulsory urine test for every horse. In order to make sure they got samples, Ohio urologists equipped themselves with electric cattle prods. Zap the horse where it counts, and urine flows. The other thing that happens is that for the rest of that horse’s life, if he sees you coming toward him with a specimen can, he will try to kill you.

  Easy work, warm summer afternoons in the open, all the tips I could use on the races—that was one fine job. But Camelot ended. I had expected to have one day a week off, which I could use to go in to New York and edit Galaxy, but it turned out that wasn’t possible. And the public pressure from my family in particular got hard to bear, especially when the kids started answering the phone with, “This is the residence of the peepee collector.”

  So I gave it all up to concentrate on editing Galaxy, and often I’ve wondered if I made the right decision.

  Thinking about the stables leads me for some reason to the Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conferences.

  That’s a cheap shot, isn’t it? And irreverent, too. Milford is supposed to be the great sacerdotal shrine of science-fiction writers. After you attend it you are allowed to wear a green turban and call yourself hajj, and for the rest of your life you are just that little bit likelier to appear in Orbit, and to have an edge in the voting for Nebula awards. There are writers who swear that they owe Milford all they own of the power to express themselves. And there are writers who come away from it gaunt and stary, and don’t write at all for weeks or months afterward. One or two have hardly written at all after an exposure to Milford, and they of the best and most prolific. Even in the case of Damon Knight, Mr. Milford himself, you can divide his writing life into two periods: the copious and good, and then, later, the sparse and maybe less good; and the dividing line is pretty close to the time when he began running Milfords.

  Now, most Milfordites would deny that any of this is true, or anyway, that it is relevant. A characteristic of in-groups is that their members do not ordinarily think of themselves as in-groups. There was never any organized conspiracy at Milford to vote themselves awards. (One writer did, in fact, telephone a lot of Milford associates to ask them to vote for him, and he did by a narrow margin win a Nebula that year; but that’s just one individual.) But the objective facts speak for themselves. Milfordites were activists, and voted heavily in the Nebula balloting. Milfordites won a large proportion of the awards. When I first observed this and pointed it out, I got an immense amount of flak from Milfordites, including Jim Blish. Happened I saw Jim in Washington shortly thereafter, at a time when that year’s balloting had been completed but the results had not yet been made public. I asked him to tell me who had won, and, quite properly, he refused. I then asked him to tell me at least how many of the awards had gone to Milfordites. He hesitated, and then grinned and shrugged. “Well, all of them,” he said.

  The Milford Workshop came about when Jim, Judy Merril, and Damon Knight found themselves all resident at once in the tiny town of Milford, Pike County, Pennsylvania. All of them knew something about writers’ workshops. Either they had personal experience, or they had heard the accounts of friends who had been deeply involved—Fletcher Pratt, for instance, was a mainstay of perhaps the best of the lot, Bread Loaf. They felt there was money to be made from a summer workshop. Milford was resort country, which was ideal for the purpose. They were none of them more affluent than they wanted to be; and so they issued a call to all sf writers who were interested to sign up for a week or so in the beautiful Delaware Valley.

  In the event, the triumvirate did not survive as a team very long, nor was there all that much money to be made. But Damon continued it as a labor of love. When he moved away from Milford, the Milford Conference followed him—in Florida, in Michigan, in Oregon; they all continued to be called Milford Conferences, long after the geography ceased to be real. Even England developed its own “Milford,” seeded from a spore Jim Blish brought over when he expatriated.

  Milford is partly like a course in creative writing, partly like
an encounter group. The workshop procedure is highly refined and works well—to the extent, that is, that any form of teaching writing ever works well, which can be argued. (I use the same procedure myself when I teach college classes in writing.) Every registrant has to submit a work in manuscript. Every registrant is asked to read every submitted work, and usually most of them do.

  Then all the workshoppers gather in a circle. The conversation goes around the ring, one by one. Each workshopper says what he thought about the story, where it succeeded for him, where it failed. The author is the last to speak—he is forbidden to speak at all until everyone else has had his say.

  Passions can run pretty high. It is a shattering thing to see your infant’s limbs gnawed away by a circle of ghouls. Writing is a private act; parts of it are painful to expose in public, and the workshopped have been known to weep or storm away. The full treatment runs a week, and for all those days the Milfordites live in each other’s pockets: eat together, drink together, play together. The invasion of the ego goes far beyond literary matters. Some persons find it almost a mystical experience, others think it purely hateful.

  I said Milford was partly like an encounter group, and this was not meant as a metaphor. I think it is true. Several years ago, when I was going through a more than usually troubled time, I signed up for an encounter weekend. I drove to a big old house on the Jersey Shore where ten or twelve other dissatisfied souls were looking for some sort of easing. We did mock wrestling and bioenergetic exercises. We closed our eyes and communicated by nonverbal gropes. We were encouraged to say whatever we felt, however odious or sad, to vent whatever pain we could squeeze past the guards of the subconscious. Unclothed, we gathered in a blood-temperature swimming pool and passed each other tenderly down a long line of supporting hands. Some of the people there were old pros who had been through a hundred such weekends. Some, like me, had never experienced it before. One or two were there for professional reasons: the dean of the Psych Department at a little Midwestern university, proper-straight fundamentalist methodically broadening his experience to help him communicate with the unruly kids; a grad student from a nearby school researching her doctoral dissertation. Some opened facilely to every new experience. Others stayed closed up for all the seventy-two hours, as armored in nakedness as any knight in mail. A couple were primal-scream junkies, bitterly jealous of their minutes on the mat. We ate the same food, slept on touching mattresses in the same great commons room. Sometimes there was hysteria, and a fair amount of gentle tears.

  What did it accomplish? I don’t know. I know that for me it was a special experience which I will never forget, like the time I had my tonsils out at the age of six. But I’ve never had the impulse to repeat it. I’ve never had the desire to have my tonsils out again, either.

  Milford is a lot like that, except that I have never personally observed nude bathing in a warm pool. (A little skinny-dipping in the Delaware River, maybe.) The invasion of the personality is almost as complete—less so on the psychosexual level, but more so in those creative centers of the heart and mind which, to a writer, are perhaps comparably vulnerable and complex. Even the house is much the same, or was when Milford was in Damon’s immense old place. The critics’ circle was in his two-story living room, limited to participating writers only. Wives and other civilians were banished to the kitchen. (That wasn’t exactly sexist. Nonwriting husbands, on the rare occasions when any showed up, were also kicked out. But, like most things that aren’t exactly sexist, it worked out that way.)

  And in both cases, over and above the presumptive therapeutic sessions, there was a hell of a lot of fun and games.

  What happens in an encounter-group setting is the powerful emergence of a collective identity. We individuals suddenly and deeply become us. Relationships that begin in this setting carry over. The encounter sessions reliably produce a fair number of broken marriages and new pairings. Milford does not do that exact thing as frequently (I wouldn’t say never), because of its literary orientation, but in the area of writing it breaks and makes relationships in plenty. Any writer who feels he is not moving ahead rapidly enough might be well advised to spend a week at Milford, because of the relationships formed. I’m not talking about any impropriety, only about the self-evident fact that an unsolicited manuscript from somebody you were drinking with till three A.M. gets read in a different way from one that just comes over the transom.71

  Not content with creating Milford, Damon r’ared back and passed another miracle: the Science Fiction Writers of America. In the early stages it was hard to distinguish between them. SFWA grew out of Milford, and Milford was the closest thing to a meeting place SFWA had.

  This was by no means according to Damon’s design, and in fact he labored hard to expand SFWA beyond the limits of Pike County, Pennsylvania. At the time, I was publishing a new writer in every issue of If, and every month, as soon as the new issue came out, I would get a letter from Damon, addressed to the novice in care of me, inviting him to join SFWA. He proselytized every writer he could reach, and by and by enough of them signed up to make SFWA reasonably broad-based—as much so as any organization of such thorny individuals as sf writers can ever hope to be, anyway. Damon was not alone in his efforts. His principal associate, working as hard and as effectively in his own sphere, was Lloyd Biggie, who lived in faraway Michigan. Even so, the focus and nerve center of SFWA remained in Milford.

  From the beginning I had ambiguous feelings about SFWA. Partly it was because of my own dichotomous nature: half of me was blood-brother writer, the other half class-enemy editor. Partly it was because I felt (and still feel) that when writers join together for any purpose, they are subject to strange follies. As time went on, some of the activities of SFWA seemed to me to be of dubious value. I began to question some of them, which led to a long correspondence with Damon and other officers, past and present, which led to acrimony, which led to a catfight. So in disgust I quit the organization.

  This is not an unprecedented act. A fair share of SFWA’s best and most committed members have resigned from time to time. It is a normal activity, both an accepted form of political statement, like trashing the dean’s office, and a sort of maturation rite, like a bar mitzvah.

  Then time passed, and a new president, Jim Gunn, gentlest and most politic of men, invited me back. It was lonely out there, and I accepted. I was prepared to forgive and forget. I expected as much from the other side, but I was wrong. They bided their time. Then, a year or two later, they got back at me in a typically subtle and agonizing way: they elected me president.

  The early 1960s was a period I enjoyed a lot, but there was a shadow. Around that time our youngest daughter, Kathy, began to fall down a lot.

  She was only about three. All three-year-olds bash themselves from time to time. Kathy’s falls seemed excessive; in fact, scary.

  Since I worked at home, I was a pretty fatherly father, on hand for most of the major events of the children’s lives; kept odd hours, and so was a logical candidate for the two A.M. feedings and to soothe the middle-of-the-night frights. I saw a lot of all of them when they were small, including Kathy. But I didn’t see that about her. Carol had to point it out to me, and at first I didn’t believe it. Kathy was too pretty, healthy, loving a baby to have anything wrong.

  But she did keep on falling down. Trot a few steps across a room and drop; pick herself up after a second, looking a little dazed, and then trot on. We told our family doctor about it. He looked grave and recommended a specialist.

  Over the next year and more we took Kathy to a dozen doctors, hospitals, laboratories. At every step of the way we built up doubt of medical infallibility and loathing for medical brutality. If they had been kind to Kathy, perhaps we could have forgiven them for their lack of answers. But some of them were the opposite of kind. She had to have a skull X-ray. Well and good; but she did not have to be held down, screaming, by three orderlies. She had to have an electroencephalogram. But she did not have to be sho
uted at by a nurse who appeared to have completed her training in Belsen, because the sedatives the nurse had given her were having the wrong effect. (As I would have been able to tell the nurse, if she had told me what she was doing.)

  Or, if they had been able to help Kathy, perhaps we could have put up with the meat-grinder callousness of their behavior toward her. But they couldn’t. What we got were suggestions for further tests, and mumbles about “God’s will.” When medicines were prescribed, they worked in reverse. Sedatives revved her motors up and intensified the seizures. For a time we had to put Kathy back in a playpen, padding the sides so that when she fell down, which she did every few minutes, at least she would not split her head open on the furniture. Change the medicine, and the seizures begin to happen every few seconds. For a week or more the only place it was safe for Kathy to be was in her own bed or on someone’s lap.

  Meanwhile, Kathy was being so terrorized that when any woman wearing a white dress came into our house, she would run and hide. I didn’t know the right thing to do for her. But I was sure that terrifying her had to be wrong. So for some months I simply refused to do anything, called off all further tests, stopped the medication, and just let her relax as well as she could.