The Way the Future Blogs

Part 5 of “Alfred Bester and Frederik Pohl — The Conversation,” recorded 26 June 1978 at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
 

Audience: Could you elaborate on how you co-write with someone?

Pohl: With Cyril Kornbluth? Well, it’s different with different people. It’s like being married! Incidentally, Alfie, have you ever collaborated on fiction?

Bester: Never. I’ve never collaborated in my life. I’ve strictly been a loner always.

Pohl: I’m afraid I’ve been much more promiscuous than you have!

Bester: I’m curious, too, Fred. What was it like working with Cyril?

Pohl: Well, Cyril Kornbluth and I grew up together. We began writing together when I was about 18 or 19 and Cyril maybe 15. We belonged to a thing called the Futurians; it was a science-fiction fan club in New York in the late ’30s and early ’40s. There’s a book by Damon Knight called The Futurians, which I think is in print here now, full of all sorts of libelous, slanderous gossip about all of us. Much of which is true, but he shouldn’t have said it anyhow! People like Isaac Asimov and Don Wollheim and others would have paid him well not to publish the book.

But we all belonged to this club and we all wanted to write and we all tried. Cyril and I began working together and as we were just beginning to write we developed a lot of each other’s writing habits. We started much the same way, we were used to each other. Then the war came along. He went one way and I went another. And then we got together again on The Space Merchants. And with Cyril, because we had this background of common experience and common attitudes, writing was almost painless on most of what we wrote. We published altogether I think, seven novels and maybe 30 or 40 short stories.

Bester: Did you collaborate line by line?

Pohl: Mostly what we did was talk to each other for a while. He’d come out to my home in Red Bank, where we kept a room for him with his own typewriter, and we’d sit around and drink for a while, and when the booze ran out we’d start to talk seriously about what sort of book we’d plan to write. And we’d think about a situation and talk about a few characters and what might happen to them, and as long as the conversation was flowing we’d keep on talking. We didn’t put anything on paper.

And then when we were beginning to flag, and it felt like it was ready to write, we’d flip a coin and the loser would go up to the third floor — Cyril’s typewriter was in one room there and mine was another — and he would write the first four pages. And then at the end of those four pages, which would stop in the middle of a line or a word sometimes, he’d come down or I’d come down, and say, “You’re on.”

We called it the “Hot-Typewriter System” — just keep the thing going day and night — and we did in fact usually work straight through.

Bester: Now it’s you that’s on, right? You go upstairs, you read the first four pages. Now, did it ever happen that you came down and said, “Cyril, you’re out of your mind. They can’t do it that way?”

Pohl: Not once. A couple of times when we were towards the end of a novel and getting a little giddy we’d play tricks on each other. There was this scene at the end of one novel when, at the bottom of the last page I had somebody look through a microscope and the next line was, “What did he see?” and I said it was Charlie Chaplin in a bowler hat. Then I went down and said, “Take it from there.”

But he fooled me — he just crossed out that line. Usually we didn’t even cross out a line, we just drove from line to line. Page 5 to 8 would be Cyril’s and page 9 to 12 would be mine; we just kept on going until we came to the end of the book. This was rough draft and it always got rewritten all the way through, by one of us, almost always by myself except for the case of one novel, Wolfbane, which was the last writing Cyril did before he died, and there was quite a lot of revision involved in the rewriting. But basically, when we were finished, the novel was there, and it would sometimes only take five or six days to do a whole novel, because we’d work straight through for 24 hours a day.

Bester: I’ve another question! Timewise, sometimes the four pages would take four minutes, four hours, four days, what?

Pohl: Well, there’s a great incentive to speed when you know that the other guy is down there having a great time, and you want to break it up as quickly as possible, so usually it only took a couple of hours. You know that the other guy is waiting, and if you don’t get down there pretty soon he’ll be off to a bar somewhere. So we worked pretty fast. It’s a good way to write a book with two people who are close enough in their ways of work that they don’t kill each other.

I wrote a novel with Lester del Rey once and we almost did kill each other. He was one of my closest friends up until that point. Now we’ll never write another word together.

Continue reading ‘Me and Alfie, Part 5: Collaboration and the Futurians’ »

Hal Clement, right, hands me the Skylark Award at Boskone 2 in 1966. The con chairman, Dave Vanderwerf, looks on.

Hal Clement was a nearly ideal client Almost everything he wrote was a sure sale.

The only real problem was that Hal (whose real name was Harry C. Stubbs) found it almost impossible to say no to a publishing-minded friend. He had written a really good novel called Mission of Gravity, but unfortunately, before I came on the scene, Harry had given it to the semi-pro sf book publishing company Shasta Publishers as part of a complex package deal intended to include a paperback and assorted other editions. Unfortunately, as happened with a number of the semi-pros, problems intervened, and the whole project came to shuddering stop.

Meanwhile Hal’s fine novel, perhaps the best he ever wrote, was lingering in hyperspace, waiting for some means to be devised so that readers could at last enjoy it.

Cleaning up log-jams of this sort is one of the most important duties of a literary agent. I went to work on the problem and before long had a release from Harry’s commitments to Shasta and the several other publishers involved in the deal, thus freeing me to send it where I had always known it belonged for its first appearance — that is as a serial in Astounding, John Campbell’s magazine.

Who promptly rejected it.

What Campbell said in his letter of rejection was something like, “wonderful story, Fred, but as you see it simply doesn’t divide well into three installments.”

That brings us directly to the second most important part of an agent’s duties, which is namely to prevent editors from making total fools of themselves. So I didn’t argue with John. I didn’t say anything at all to him. I just put the manuscript in the bottom drawer of my desk for a few weeks. Then I took it out and looked at it.

It was some 300 pages long. I turned to page 100 and hunted around until I found something that could be construed as a cliffhanger, and I marked that “Part 2.” I did the same on page 200, marking that one “Part 3,” and then I gave the ms. to my secretary, instructing her to retype three or four pages before and after those pages, and when she had done that I sent it back to John with a little note.

I didn’t lie to him in the note. I hardly ever lied to an editor, except when absolutely necessary. I just said, “How do you like it now?” And he sent back a check, and it was just about the best-liked serial he ever printed.

 
When I stopped being an agent, Harry and I remained good friends. Actually, we ran into each other just about as often as before, because both Harry and I enjoyed most of the East Coast’s annual cons and were generally invited to them. The best feature of them, in my view, was Harry’s every-con lecture on what was new in astronomy.

Between Harry’s talks and Isaac Asimov’s once-a-month column in F&SF, I considered myself the most scientifically up-to-date layman in Red Bank, New Jersey. Would they both were with us still.

 
Related post:
Hal Clement: Major Harry Stubbs

   Eugenie Clark

It’s hard to list the Ipsy’s guests in any sensible order, perhaps because they were not an orderly bunch. It does make sense for me to divide the guests into two classes. To begin with, there was the New York science-fiction crowd, all of whom I had known for some time.

In that group were most of the science-fiction people I have already written more or less extensively about in these pages. Among the ones most frequently present were Lester and Evelyn del Rey, Bob and Essie Bolster, George and Dona Smith, Cyril Kornbluth (first as a house guest of mine, then as a nearby resident on his own). Assorted other house guests of mine included Fritz Leiber from Chicago and Jack and Blanche Williamson from New Mexico.

Ted Sturgeon was definitely a regular in an unusual sense. For a couple of months one summer he never went home at all, since at the time, his finances being anemic, he didn’t have a home to go to.

The Pratts had no objection to Ted’s staying in the house when everyone else was gone. However, they didn’t offer to feed him. That was not a problem for Ted, who enjoyed a good dish of eel. He enjoyed it so much, in fact, that by the time he finally moved out of the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute, he had fished out the entire family of eels who lived by the boat dock. They never returned.

 
Any number of other New York-area sf people visited the Ipsy. Isaac Asimov, for instance, was there I think only once, but it was a significant visit, since Fletcher and Inga had plans for Isaac. They spent a lot of that weekend telling him what a wonderful place the Bread Loaf Writers’ Colony was for anyone with the desire, and the ability, to be a serious writer … and, I’m pretty sure, spent an equivalent period of time with the Breadloaf people telling them what a wonderful prospect Isaac was. The effort paid off. Isaac did give Bread Loaf a try; he loved the place, the Breadloaf people loved him and he became a Bread Loaf stalwart.

The other fraction of frequent guests at the Ipsy basically comprised the non-sf friends of the Pratts, many of them with ties to The Saturday Review of Literature. Some of those were actual celebrities of one kind or another, as for example Eugenie Clark, known worldwide as the “Lady with a Spear,” after her bestselling book with that name. Eugenie, as a child, had been fascinated by the works of William Beebe — Half Mile Down, the story of his adventures hanging at the end of almost 3,000 feet of steel cable in his “bathysphere,” a steel sphere about the size of a pup tent, or Beneath Tropic Seas, about his less spine-chilling but even more beautiful experiences walking through warm-water corals with only a mask for breathing.

I could understand her fascination. I had been turned on by the same books at about the same age. The difference between Eugenie Clark and me, though, was that she then grew up to become an actual ichthyologist, and I only to become a writer.

Continue reading ‘Fletcher Pratt, Part 4: The Friends of Fletcher’ »

Gustav Hasford

By the time Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren came along, I had pretty well accomplished my main purpose in going to work for Bantam — to get the taste of my brief but horrid experience at Ace Books out of my mouth — and was happily writing some quite good science fiction of my own. I really had done all I wanted to do at Bantam, but it took me a while to get myself out of there, partly because it didn’t seem sensible of me to leave the easiest job I had ever had, and partly for winding up some loose ends and partly just out of inertia.

And then, just when I was beginning to see daylight, the mail boy brought me a manuscript from somebody named Gustav Hasford, who said that we had spent some time together at a Milford Writers’ Conference, and so he was asking me to be absolutely candid about the novel ms. he was enclosing.

I’ve never believed in the doctrine of letting submissions sit for some weeks or months before getting around to reading them, so I began reading the story right away. I don’t know how far I got. I don’t know what the story was about anymore, either, but I remember what I wrote Hasford.

I said, “One of the things I don’t like about Milford is that you guys have to write stories on the spot, and so what you write is almost always lightweight fluff, playing games with words, without really having anything to say. This you do pretty well, but it isn’t worth doing. If you ever have a novel you really care about, I’d like to see it.”

(You may wonder why I said that when I was seriously considering getting out of the editing business quite soon. I don’t know the answer, but that’s what I said. I guess that was on one of the days that I was having second thoughts about leaving Bantam.)

And, anyway, within the week another novel ms. came from Hasford, along with a note that said, “Here it is. This one I care about.”

It was about the Vietnam War. It was called The Short-Timers. And it was good.

This gave me a tough decision. I wanted to see that this book got out to an audience — I mean, honest, that’s the only reason anybody should ever be an editor. But I didn’t want to stick around to do it.

What I did do was order a contract for Hasford. That way he would definitely get his excellent (oh, if still a little rough, but that’s the other thing that editors are for) book published. And then I began thinking about who, among the large Bantam team, would be the right one to take over from me.

And right about then Marc Jaffe, the man who had hired me in the first place, strolled into my office. “I just wanted to tell you, Fred,” he said, “that right now, with Dhalgren, your credibility is very high with us. Is there anything you need?”

That’s a sentence employees of any kind dream of hearing but seldom do, because it translates as “Can we give you more money? How much more? And maybe a full-time secretary of your own?” But then I told him that what I really wanted was to quit, and that was the end of it. He was regretful, and he hoped that if I ever wanted to come back I’d let him know, and he picked out another editor. Who took over, doubled the rather mingy advance I had put in the contract, made some useful editorial suggestions and got the book out in quick time.

Then Stanley Kubrick made it into a movie, called Full Metal Jacket, and the last of my Bantam editorial responsibilities was dealt with.

And that’s enough of editorial actions for one lifetime. I do have a good idea for a new magazine, but I’m not telling anyone what it is. They might persuade me to try actually bringing it out. And I really don’t want to get involved again.

 
I didn’t keep up with Hasford’s later publications, but a few years after the movie, I did hear something else about his interest in books, because everybody who read a newspaper did.

It seems he had some overdue library books.

Now, understand that here I’m not talking about maybe a couple of Isaac Asimov books, Asimov’s Guide to Everything and Asimov’s Guide to Everything Else and maybe one science-fiction anthology edited by my favorite anthologist (the one I’m married to, dope). No, this was an operation on a larger scale.

What seemed to have happened was that Hasford moved around a lot, and whenever he struck a new place, he’d take out a library card and pick up some reading material to take home. That, of course, was just about what the library people wanted him to do, except that he omitted an important final step. He checked the books out. He just didn’t bring them back. By the time the authorities visited his home, he had thousands of books from public libraries all over the United States and assorted other countries.

Surprised? Don’t be. It’s a matter of public record that a few science-fiction writers do have some small eccentricities. Most sf writers, though, have much huger ones.

Jack Robins

Jack Robins (or sometimes Jack Rubinson) was a well-liked Futurian from the very beginning. He took little part in the Futurian writing attempts and was never known to write a science-fiction story.

Indeed, most of us considered him as “the smiling guy in the background.”

But then, one day, he brought in the manuscript of an actual, playable play he had written all on his own — it was called “The Ivory Power,” long lost, and it was a sort of idealization about what we might have been doing. It was actually moving.

And when he retired it was with a Ph.D. in chemistry. Only two Futurians attained the Ph.D. The other was Isaac Asimov.

 
Read more about Jack in The e-Fan (pdf).

 
Related post:
A Little More About Jack Robins

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