The Way the Future Blogs

Alfred Bester

When the Air Force decided they wouldn’t need my services in order to accomplish the defeat of Japan — the reason for that being that Japan, discouraged by the simultaneous American atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Stalin’s last-minute invasion of their northern front, had finally given its struggle in World War II and surrendered — they sent me home to New York City. There I rented an apartment in Greenwich Village and, for reasons connected with a book I was trying to write, went looking for a job in the advertising business.

I answered three help-wanted ads in the Sunday Times employment section. One of them, a small Madison Avenue advertising agency, Thwing & Altman, took me on as a copywriter.

It didn’t pay as well as I had thought a Mad Ave. advertising job would, but otherwise it was a likable enough job. Its good features included location. Within the perimeter of a circle with a ten-block radius there were literally hundreds of quite good restaurants where I could get a lunch of almost any school and ethnicity. I quickly learned that, even with all that variety available, there were a handful that I kept returning to, and one of those was in the lobby of the Columbia radio (not yet TV) network’s then New York headquarters, the present skyscraper not yet having been built. The restaurant was frequently used by people from the network, and one of the reasons I liked it was that every once in a while I would run into Alfie Bester, also looking to grab a lunch there, and we would have a nice meal together, spiced with shop talk.

 
The thing to remember about the career of Alfred J. Bester is that he was first and foremost a money writer. He had the talent to do that well. He could write almost anything — science-fiction stories, comics, radio-serial scripts, you name it, and he could do them all at the top of his form — and what particular kind of thing he did write, depending on how the vagaries of the market fluctuated at any given moment, was whichever one of them was paying the most dollars per hour of punching typewriter keys.

Alfie had begun writing science fiction, back in the ’30s, because he had a number of friends — including Horace L. Gold and Mort Weisinger — who worked as editors at Standard Magazines, publishers of, among many other pulps, the magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories. They coached him in the writing of sf, and bought his practice stories. (Well, they didn’t buy all of them. A very few they rejected, and of those I bought one or two when, as a teenage editor, I was editing Astonishing and Super Science Stories).

Then Alfie discovered that comics were paying better than sf just then, so he tried his luck at comics, discovered that they were as easy to write as sf — for him — and switched his personal production line to comics.

Then he got a tip from his wife, Rolly, that changed everything.

Continue reading ‘Alfie’ »

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

   Fletcher Pratt, 1952.

Let me tell you about the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute, which is the name that Fletcher and Inga Pratt gave to their enormous old house in Highlands, on the New Jersey shore. The house had something over thirty rooms. The ground floor, which was embraced by a wide, 360-degree veranda, comprised a kitchen, a billiard room, a dining room capable of seating 20 or more, a room I would call a sitting room, another, slightly larger, which I would call a living room but think should be given a more elegant name.

On the second floor were six or seven bedrooms, a couple of them with private baths and little sitting rooms of their own. And on the third floor there were another half dozen or so bedrooms, with a couple more baths.

Do not make the mistake of supposing these third-floor rooms were servants’ quarters. They all were for guests. There was plenty of room for the guests’ servants, but they were to be accommodated in another wing of the house entirely, essentially a six- or seven-room home attached to the main residence. It had its own kitchen and bath, the only connection between it and the residence being through the two kitchens.

Since the Pratts employed no full-time servants, they rented this attached house to Esther Carlson, a young woman who was beginning to appear regularly in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and her handyman husband, Bob Bolster. They didn’t stay the course, though, and when they left — and when George O. Smith at last succeeded in divorcing his first wife and Dona Campbell did the same for her husband, John W. — the newlywed George and Dona Smiths took over the conjoined space until they bought a home of their own a few miles down the shoreline in Rumson.

The Ipsy-Wipsy Institute was set on something over half a dozen acres of lawn, descending about a hundred vertical feet from the roadway to the ocean. There was a little beach there for swimming and a pier for boating — or for fishing, though about all anyone ever caught was eels. A lot of quite tasty eels, though.

 
Fletcher Pratt was a dear man who had a few eccentricities. One of these was his inclination to run the Ipay-Wipsy Institute as a sort of road-show version of an English country home. Weekend guests were expected to arrive early enough on the Friday evening for a few drinks and a modest dinner, generally prepared by Grace the Cook and followed by a drink or two and conversations in the billiard room, until the guests began retreating to their rooms. (There was, by the way, no billiard table in the billiard room, only the report that once there had been.)

Saturday began with a Grace-made breakfast buffet whenever anyone came down for it, after which Fletcher would set up his typewriter in the billiard room, and sometimes I would set mine up as well. For both of us, the procedure was that we would type a few words, or a few lines, as they occurred to us, then chat a bit with whoever else was there, then maybe another line or so of copy. When there was no one else to talk to Fletcher might divert himself by tossing playing cards into a hat and I by getting myself a cup of coffee and glancing at the morning papers.

Others might sit in the sunny porch and read, or play cards or an African board game called K’bu that the Pratts fancied, or explore the neighborhood, or make the trek down to the water’s edge for a swim. At some point, Grace would set out the materials for a pick-up lunch, to be eaten, probably in small groups, in one of the first-floor rooms or on the porch. Then more of the same until five.

Then the more structured part of the weekend began.

Someone — preferably someone who could play, or at least get some sort of a sound from, a bugle — was given the bugle and a homemade flag bearing a drawing of a martini glass and instructed to march around the porch, tooting the bugle and waving the flag, in order to notify the guests, and a few of the neighbors as well, that the cocktail hour had arrived.

 
I should say, right about here, that although there was a lot of drinking at the Ipsy-Wip, I almost never saw anyone really drunk. (With one exception that I’ll tell you about later.) But the drinking was steady, from the beginning of the cocktail hour at five until dinner was served at seven. With the dinner there was wine for those who wanted it, of course, and then, when Grace had picked up the plates, Fletcher brought out the bottle of port.

The thing about the port was that it always had to be passed clockwise around the table. Fletcher, sitting at twelve o’clock at the head of the table, would start the service by giving the bottle to (say) Essie Bolster, at the one o’clock position to his left. Who would help herself to as much as she wanted of it and then pass the bottle to, say, Fritz Leiber to her left at two o’clock, and so on, always passing to the left, until the bottle finally made it back to Fletcher, at the head of the table, who at last was allowed to help himself to the port.

 
To be continued.
 

 
Related posts:

• Fletcher Pratt, Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
• The Ipsy-Wipsy Institute

   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’’ »

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. . . .

 
Related posts:

 
This first paragraph is only for people who have seen the L. Ron Hubbard movie Battlefield Earth. If you haven’t ever seen it, count your blessings and do your best to keep it that way for the rest of your life, because it is truly awful.

But if you ever have, we want to ask you two questions:

1. How many movies have you seen in your life? (Your best guess is good enough.)

2. Numbering them No.1 for the best to the last of the total numbers you’ve ever seen for the worst, what number would you give Battlefield Earth?

We”ll tell you why we’re bothering you about this after the jump, but please make up your mind about the answers first.

Continue reading ‘Battlefield Earth’ »