The Way the Future Blogs

Mary Byers longed to leave Ohio farm life to become a New York Futurian.

Mary Byers was a science-fiction fan who lived on a farm in Ohio with her uncle and a few other family members. Through fan talk, she heard of the New York Futurians and yearned to live that kind of life.

When the chance came, she jumped on a bus (or a train) and headed for New York City. Her uncle, though, followed after, and when he caught up with her, he brought her back. She got away a couple more times with the same result. But then Cyril Kornbluth made a more complicated escape plan, with more help, and Mary got away.

After a while, Cyril and Mary married. They lived for a time in New England, where Cyril took, and passed, a wartime government course in machine shop, after which he was considered a skilled machinist. World War II came along. Cyril got caught up in it with the consequences that ultimately killed him, and all the time he was soldiering in the ETO, Mary was alone, going through her own kind of hell in Chicago. And somewhere in this period Mary became a stone alcoholic.

An alcoholic is not just a drunk. An alcoholic is a person who, having taken the first drink, cannot stop drinking until she, or he, has become sodden.

(Read up on it or Google it. I don’t know many details, and some of what I do know I wish I didn’t.) Cyril’s attempts at dealing with it were sometimes brutal. Once, when he and I were driving somewhere, I think to the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute, Cyril took a deep breath and said, “I wish I was not so cruel.” The bad times for Mary, I know, without knowing many more facts than the ones I have told you, were very, very bad.

But not all the times were bad. When Mary was clinging to AA and resolutely not taking that first drink, I think they were quite good.

This is in itself a puzzle to me. When things were good with Mary, she seemed to be the perfect wife, he appeared to be the standard-issue Brady Bunch husband and, all in all, Cyril behaved in astonishingly unlike Cyril ways. They were — for other people — quite normal ways, but for Cyril totally unexpected ones.

He began to be a father — two boy babies, John and David — he was writing well on his own constantly improving stories and he and I put out a ton of collaboration work as novels for Ian Ballantine. Things were suddenly very conventionally good for the little Kornbluth family.

That was when my money problems began to sting.

Mary proved she was a perfectly normal sf wife by nagging Cyril to dump me as his agent.

 
When I lost Cyril as a client, I had lost everything. I began to make plans to close the agency down.

During this period, Cyril and I had lost contact. It wasn’t just the money. It was the fact that there were the two clients I had led the farthest and expected the most from, Cyril and Isaac Asimov, both gone.

I didn’t see him again until, completely by chance. I ran into him at, I think, Horace Gold’s apartment. I prize that chance meeting because we were easy with each other again — “What are you writing?” “Hey, that was a pretty good novelette in Galaxy last month.” Shop talk of two old friends.

The reason I prize it most was because I never saw Cyril alive again. One morning not long after that, the phone rang. Carol answered it. It was Mary, quite hysterical.

Cyril had had to go into New York for a business meeting that morning, but it had snowed during the night, so he had to shovel the driveway before he could get the car out. When he got to the Long Island Rail Road station, the train was already there and beginning to load passengers. He parked the car as fast as he could, ran for the train and dropped dead of a heart attack on the platform.

Part 2 coming up shortly.

 
Related posts:

• Mary Kornbluth, Part 2, Part 3
• Cyril

That last summer we spent in the big old house over the Ashokan Reservoir was when Judy wrote most of her novel. She was there, with our daughters, all summer long. She had invited some of her old friends to spend much of the summer with her — I believe Katherine MacLean was one of them but don’t remember who else — and Judy had easily volunteered them to help her keep an eye on the kids so Judy herself could work on her book. Then, on weekends when I was there, I took over for a lot of the (actually pretty easy) childcare. That was the way it was in the first part of the summer.

Then, as Judy was having difficulties with the book, she began taking a room at the foot of the hill as soon as I got there on a weekend to take over prime charge of our daughters and writing away over the Friday night and the Saturday night, until relieving me on Sunday. I had no objection to any of that. As her agent, I had got Judy a pretty good contract with Doubleday, then still an all-purpose publisher with a decent record of best-sellers. Her editor was Walter Bradbury, the managing editor of the line, a business contact who had become a friend, and Brad was good with reassuring and encouraging Judy as she needed it. All was well.

Well, almost all was well, though with the occasional cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. When finally Judy gave me the completed manuscript, Brad did that careful line-by-line reading and then conference with the writer that I have described elsewhere. I think that must have been a tough meeting, because Judy tried her best to keep her style intact. But they got through it all right, or almost. There was a problem. Judy used one word in a scene that Brad really hated. I think the word may have been “burbled,” as in, “‘that’s great,’ he burbled.”

Brad was an almost-always reasonable man, but on this question, I don’t really know why, he was almost as intractable as Judy was. When he came to me with the problem, since I was Judy’s agent, I could not believe the two of them were locking heads over something that trivial. So I made a rather sneaky and very, very bad suggestion. I said, “If I were you, I would give up on the argument, but then I would just make sure the word wasn’t in the final setting proofs. Then when the actual printed book was in her hands and she noticed the change, I would abase myself in apologies.”

This Brad actually did. He was too upright a man to be really sneaky, though, so he let Judy know. It wasn’t the end of the world, though it did lead to a lot of yelling. But we got past it.

In fact, for several years there, we got past just about everything. I was losing big chunks of money every month on the literary agency, but it hadn’t yet reached the catastrophe point, and I was enjoying the work. And Judy had her novel.

The title on the book was Shadow on the Hearth. It wasn’t exactly the kind of book people thought of when they said “science fiction,” though it was set in the (near) future. In it, Judy’s postulate was that nuclear war actually happened. New York City was atom-bombed, and Judy’s story was that of a family trapped there.

She did a good job of it, too. The reviews were mostly friendly, and very soon there was even talk about a movie. Not Hollywood millions, that is. The kind of movie they were talking about would be a made-for-TV job, but what was wrong with that? There would be a useful chunk of money, no matter what, and then if it actually did get made her audience would simply explode, no more tens of thousands, to suddenly tens of millions.

It all happened, too. The movie did get made, quite well. It was a success. It didn’t happen rapidly, because such things don’t. But it was a great success for Judy, and she blossomed.

To be continued.

 
Related posts:
Judith Merril, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Ashokan Reservoir (Photo by Daniel Case).

Our marriage had been dealt a mortal wound. However we still had that lovable tiny baby Annie to provide a home for. And I wasn’t even hopelessly angry at Judy for dumping this new demand on me, only resentful of the timing. I had agreed that Judy had a right to her sexual freedom if she needed it. I just hadn’t really expected that the problem would get so urgent so fast.

So for a while there we went on as a family, Judy and me and our two kids. Judy quit her job, but I was doing pretty well. Money wasn’t a big problem. True, I recognized that it certainly could turn into a really big one really fast if I quit my job too.

Which I then did.

Why did I do that? I don’t know. I guess to some extent I was following Judy’s example.

It wasn’t entirely a suicidal step. We had more or less absentmindedly socked away a few profits from the big-money days, so we wouldn’t starve. Not right away, anyway. We didn’t owe any money. If we had to, we could sell the car. And the four of us, us and our two kids, didn’t need big bucks to live on. We could always find some way to get enough to live on, couldn’t we?

One such way was suggested to us by a lawyer Judy knew. I have no idea who the lawyer was. All I know is he came to see us one evening because he and Judy needed to talk about something, I don’t know what, and while he was in our apartment he got really interested in our needs and plans, and after some thought he came up with the perfect solution to our needs. We should get a joint job with some rich people as house servants. As a cook and butler combination, in fact; Judy making the meals and me doing all the odd jobs around the house.

I actually think he was perfectly serious about it, too. I was torn between laughter and throwing the jerk out of the house. I really don’t know how seriously Judy took his idea. I never thought it worth discussing with her.

 
I’m a little uncertain about timing here. I’ll tell you everything significant that I remember, but I may get which happened before what mixed up I can’t really see why that would matter, anyway.

We kept on living as though we remained prosperous for a while. We kept the car. That summer we rented a big old house, up over the Ashokan Reservoir in beautiful bucolic surroundings a hundred miles north of New York, where Judy and the kids lived for that summer while I came up for weekends. One of the best things about the Ashokan place was that it gave us plenty of space to have friends stay with us. (The one of those guests I remember best was Cyril Kornbluth. That was because I made the mistake of drinking with Cyril one night. The two drunkest times I have been in my whole life were with Cyril, and this was one of them. Did Judy object? Of course not. She thought that the drunker I got, the funnier I got, even when, the next morning, she had to collect my passed-out body from a neighbor’s house.)

Then, I believe that winter, we rented a different house in a quite different part of the area. That one was in Rockaway Beach, and we took it because Judy was really afraid to have our two well-loved children staying in New York during a polio scare. (If you’re too young to know what those were, Google it.) That’s one of the times where I’m a little mixed up. All that winter, out in freezing Rockaway Beach, I was commuting five days a week to an office in New York. I just don’t remember which office. Sorry.

Anyway, what I do remember is that I was commuting to New York in my giant old Cadillac, and my giant old Cadillac was teaching me a lesson for moving there by refusing, every morning, to start until I called the AAA for a jump. (And even that lasted just so long, because before long the AAA gave up and expelled me. I had to start hiking to and from the Long Island Rail Road station.)

By the way, I don’t want you to think that, apart from annoyances like commuting, I was miserable in Rockaway Beach. I wasn’t. When the weather turned fairly decent, at least for a while, I liked walking the beach and sitting on a bench in the sun to see those endless freezing-gray waves, the hundreds and millions of them, as they came endlessly rolling in and to realize that if I had a telescope that could see right across the ocean, the next human construction. I saw would be in Portugal.

Well, enough. We managed to lump along, one way and another, for several years that way. I did not ever think I could go on living forever in Judy’s kind of marriage. But I wasn’t living in forever. I was living in one interesting thing, and then another interesting thing. And they weren’t really all that bad.

I did finally quit my job in order to become a full-time literary agent and that was very interesting for me to run. And Judy, at least temporarily, was about as happy as Judy could ever be, because she had written a successful novel.

To be continued.

 
Related posts:
Judith Merril, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

   Judith Merril

For the first couple of years after World War II, I was living in Greenwich Village, as a civilian, along with my second wife, Dorothy Louise LesTina (about whom see The Way the Future Was.). We had a pretty busy life, the two of us, and although I had heard that there was a whole new science-fiction fandom in the city I was overfull of self-affairs (as the Bard put it) and myself did lose it.

Anyway, then Tina, visiting her parents in California filed for divorce. (There, too, check my writing about Tina for details.) In any case, I suddenly wasn’t married any more, and so I had time to get around to seeing if I and this new NYC fan community had any reason to get together.

It turned out that we did. I began making friends with young Robert Silverberg and young Charles Brown (yes, the Locus man, although all that was still very far away) and a bunch of other people who became close, long-time friends. And there was one really interesting thing, unprecedented in pre-war fannish history, and that was that quite a few of these new New York fans were female.

That was an unexpected but very, very welcome development. I soon became friendly with some of this new breed of femmefans, as they were (briefly) termed, and with one in particular. That one’s name was Judy Zissman. She was divorced and with an enchanting little girl whom she had named Merril. Judy wanted to be a writer and the two of us got along just fine.

Before I tell you some of the things that happened next, there is one thing you need to know about Judy right now, and that is the nature of her beliefs about sexual conduct. One of them was that females had as much right to sleep around as males do, and that that right was considerable..

That was one of the things I didn’t really want to discuss when I was writing The Way the Future Was. The good news is that now I don’t have to discuss it at all. In the last years of her life, Judy was writing her own memoir, and in it she was quite open about her views and her experiences.

Judy died before she could finish the memoir, but the two of us had begun having some of our children’s children growing up and taking over some things. One of them was our well-beloved granddaughter Emily Pohl-Weary, who, having herself become a writer, finished the book for her. (It was published as Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril. And listen, our kids and grandkids don’t fool around. It won a Hugo Award.)

So by all means, read all you like about Judy’s private business. Only read about it from her.

 
Before long, Judy and I had settled down to cohabitating in her gigantic New York apartment on East 4th Street.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression. The place certainly was gigantic, at least four big bedrooms, but it was also on the basement level of the apartment building To get to it, you took the elevator down one flight. It had been designed, and built, with the expectation that it would be occupied by the building’s janitor and his family. In America’s postwar boom, though, your average janitor didn’t care to be treated like an inferior. The present incumbent and family lived in modest prosperity, rent-free, in a perfectly rentable apartment above-ground. Judy had discovered the situation and grabbed the underground space for a pitiful rent, which I think may have been less than $25 a month.

For us it was perfect. Plenty of room for us each to have space to live and write, and space for little Merril and for the child’s pet dog, Taxi Driver, and even for Judy to rent out one of the extra rooms to the occasional single woman who needed a cheap place to stay. One was Gerry Schuster, rehearsal pianist for the New York Ballet. Another, at a different time, described herself as “the white New York girlfriend” of a famous musician — and proved it by getting us all comped seats to his Carnegie Hall appearance, and a visit to his dressing room after.

And, in particular, the one thing that the place was perfect for was parties. We had a lot of them.

We were quite prosperous at that time, you see. I was book editor and advertising copywriter for the rich Popular Science Publishing Company at a steadily increasing salary. While Judy had got herself an editorial job with Bantam Books, working for Ian Ballantine, who at that time ran it.. Between us we earned quite a lot, we didn’t really spend all that much, and God was good. Not only that. Bantam gave Judy the chance to edit her first very own science-fiction anthology (but entitled Shot in the Dark to disguise the fact that it was sf as much as possible).

And even that wasn’t the very best of it. There was the fact that Judy had, without warning and all by herself, had unexpectedly written a story of her own that just knocked the socks off everyone who read it.

Continue reading ‘Judith Merril, Part 1: ‘That Only a Mother’’ »

I took the writers who had been getting $75 checks from Thrilling Wonder and worked with them to begin selling to Galaxy at twice the rate.

Let’s talk for a bit about my career as an agent.

Mark Rich has a lot to say about my failings, especially my financial woes, which were considerable. A J Budrys told a funny story about them in one of the last speeches he gave, at the Heinlein Centennial, a year or two before he died. He had discovered what a great agent I was, he said, when I sold John Campbell a story of A J’s that Campbell had turned down cold before A J became my client. And then when he got my check, it bounced.

Funny story? Sadly, also a true one.

But the interesting thing there is that A J didn’t quit the agency. He remained my client until the waters finally closed over my head. And almost all of my other clients, Isaac Asimov and Hal Clement and John Wyndham and Fritz Leiber and all the other household names and the lesser names that I was bringing along gave me an amazing amount of patience, and most of them didn’t want to give up until I did.

And, most interesting of all, most of them were my good friends for the rest of my life.

Do you wonder why?

I’ll tell you why. It was because I was a hell of a good agent.

First, I took the writers who had been getting $75 checks from Thrilling Wonder and worked with them to begin selling to Galaxy at twice the rate, and then I worked with the — magazine writers to turn them into book authors, and I kept looking for new and better markets they could sell to. A few I managed to get into television deals, even into syndicated newspaper cartoon strips. Some I managed to promote from the pulps to the slicks, at many times the rate.

In short, I did everything a good agent did for his clients. (I would like to say that, even today, not all agents are quite that good.) But I did something rather more than that.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what made a good writer — almost any of my dozens of good writers — sometimes be productive and profitable and sometimes be unable to get anything written for days or weeks at a time. I tried several different ways of, first, encouraging the writers to write, and, second, to do so at the top of their form. I finally invented one that worked.

I made a promise to eight or ten of my best (but not always solvent) writers that any time they brought in a new story I would hand them a check for that much wordage.. My rate was low for these incentive checks, at a half cent a word, but then when the story actually sold to a publisher the writer would be credited at the publisher’s scale, not that of my advances.

As a result, if you look at the stories published in the last year or so of my agency’s existence you will find that there were a larger number than usual of really good stories by Budrys, James Blish, Damon Knight and a dozen or so other clients who took me up on that offer. It worked. It got the writers writing more, and sometimes better. It even increased my sales to those markets, a little. And if I were unfortunate enough to become an agent again, I would at once start up something like that for at least a few clients.

But it also represented one more outflow of capital, and there wasn’t enough capital left to flow. Most of my clients didn’t want to leave, but finally, I gave up and folded the agency, and started paying everybody back.

Interestingly, maybe I should say ironically, then two unexpected new lifesavers were thrown to me.

Continue reading ‘What My Clients Thought’ »

Jack Williamson at Cinvention, 1949.

Well, no, it doesn’t, or at least it doesn’t begin quite right away, because in order to describe how Jack Williamson and I became really tight lifelong friends, I have to digress by telling you something about another dear friend, Dirk Wylie.

Dirk — old Brooklyn Tech chum, fellow Futurian, et many a cetera — didn’t have nearly as nice a war as most of us did. When, in 1946, he was at last a civilian he had a souvenir acquired in the Battle of the Bulge which left his spinal column always painful and frequently incapacitating. He had a full disability pension, but he was still in his twenties and in full possession of his faculties. He spent the first time after the end of the war going through hospitals and doctors and courses of treatment. But when nothing cured his spine and the medics told him he was as good as he was going to get, he wanted a job.

So one day, he and I conspired to see what he could do. It was impossible for him to go out to work, so it would have to be something he could do at home. If possible, it should have something to do with his interests in writing and publishing. On consideration we took the easy way out. We made him a literary agent.

I knew that was easy, because I had done it myself as a teenager. Of course, I hadn’t made any money out of it, though it did lead to my first editorial job, but I had some ideas that should produce a growing, though initially small, income for Dirk, and with his disability pension he could weather the thin times. So we rented a mail drop at a good address on Fifth Avenue in New York, and we printed up some stationery listing Dirk as the agent and me as an assistant (because I had promised to help him get started), and we were in business.

All we lacked was clients.

Fortunately for us, the climate was favorable. Book editors in America had always turned a blind eye to science fiction. But the times were prosperous, and a few fan groups had started publishing some of those great old serials as hardcover books. Startled salesmen for the real publishing companies had noticed that these oddities seemed to sell when the amateurs could get them into a store. When they got back to their home offices, they reported this fact to their company’s editors. Who scratched their heads, cautiously tried a title or two and realized there was some money to be made in this sf thing.

Accordingly, Dirk and I wrote letters announcing this new fact to all the pro writers we could think of. Jack Williamson was one such, and he responded by shipping us a couple of his own stories that he thought might work in this exciting new format. (They did.)

The first of them was a manuscript stitched together from two long novelettes Jack had recently sold to John Campbell’s Astounding, “With Folded Hands…” and “…And Searching Mind.” I tried them out on Jack Goodman, the managing editor at Simon & Schuster. Goodman (I should finally confess, since it no longer matters) was one of the most terrifyingly intelligent human beings I have ever met, and in my dealings with him I was always aware that, with his smarts and his vast publishing experience, he could swindle me and my clients whenever he chose. Fortunately, he didn’t choose. His offers were all fair, in line with what other publishers were agreeing to.

When the book came out, retitled The Humanoids, it did well. That sale was the first of many for Jack through our agency.

And that was what developed into one of the most cherished friendships of my life.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
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