The Way the Future Blogs

I don’t know if you’ve ever met Vince Monte, who holds the title of My No. 1 Fan. He’s a well informed person with a collection that, apart from foreign editions, is much better than my own, and when he asks a question, I do my best to answer it.

This time the question had to do with pen names, of which I admittedly have, over the years, used a number. Vince sent me a list of 14 names that I have at some time or other used, and what is noteworthy about the list is that it does not include Frederik Pohl, a name I have used quite often. So let me try to answer Vince’s question, as follows:

• Ernst Mason
  This is the name I used for my nonfiction biography of the Roman emperor Tiberius. I wanted a name that was not identified with me or with science fiction, though when I then wrote about Tiberius for the Encyclopedia Britannica, the editor encouraged me to go back to my own name. Ernst Mason was created by taking the family name of my maternal grandfather, William Mason, and adding it to the given name of my paternal one, Ernst Pohl.

• S.D. Gottesman
  Name used on some early collaborations with Cyril Kornbluth. He picked it, I think taken from the name of one of his high-school teachers.

• Dirk Wylie
  Not my name, the name taken by my high-school pal Joseph Harold Dockweiler when he got tired of the name his parents had picked for him. The precipitating incident was the plan of Dirk, Dick Wilson and Don Wollheim to rent an apartment together, and Dick and Donald demanded that Dirk had a name starting with a D.

• Charles Satterfield
  Horace Gold laid this one on me. He wanted me to use a new pseudonym for one of my stories in Galaxy, I said I was tired of inventing pseudonyms, he said, “Then I will.” He had a prizefight going on the TV, Ezzard Charles against Bob Satterfield, and he said, “There’s your name.” What we didn’t know was that there was a real man named Charles Satterfield, but he apparently never saw the story, or didn’t care.

• Jordan Park
  Jordan Park was a pen name of Cyril’s. I just wrote part of one Jordan Park story.

• Paul Dennis Lavond
  Used for a few three-way collaborations; P for Pohl, D for Dirk, L for Lowndes.

• Elton Andrews
  Sometimes Elton V. Andrews, once or twice just the initials, eva. My first professional sale, a poem to Amazing Stories, was signed with this. I have no idea why I picked it.

• James MacCreigh
  My most frequently used pen name, not just for sf but for other pulps and for my first attempts at non-pulp sales.

• Edson McCann
  Joint penname with Lester del Rey. After we had written the book we used that name on, Lester realized that the name could be written as EM.CC and read, if we chose, as E = mc².

• Donald Stacy
  I think, repeat THINK, that this was the name (or pseudonym) of someone who had written a novel about TV called The God of Channel One, which Ian Ballantine had bought but was dissatisfied with and asked me to do a rewrite on.

• Paul Flehr, Warren F. Howard, Scott Mariner
  They sound sort of familiar. I think I did use them, but I don’t remember where or why.

There may have been others.

When I was quite new to all this, I confess I had a romantic view of pseudonyms. By “romantic,” I mean as in a boy-meets-girl scene like this one:

I imagined myself sitting at a soda fountain — I didn’t say cocktail bar, I said soda fountain, which gives an idea of how old I was — and there was an extremely good-looking girl sitting a stool or two away, reading a story of mine, and my plan was to wait until she had finished it and then let her knows that the pen name on the story was me.

Never happened, though. Probably just as well. My wife probably wouldn’t like it.

Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey (Photo by David Dyer-Bennet)

Quite a few years ago —well, about seventy of them, to be exact —I was the teen-age editor of two professional science-fiction magazines for the giant pulp firm of Popular Publications. I didn’t pay much for the stories that went into my magazines but I did pay something, and so most of the science-fiction writers of that era dropped by from time to time to see if I would care to relieve them of some of their stack of Astounding rejects.

People like hoary old Ray Cummings and bright-minted new stars like L. Sprague de Camp came by my little office at the end of 42d Street, just where it stops dead at the East River, and one day our switchboard girl, Ethel Klock, informed me that I had a new visitor named Lester del Rey.

Though I’d never met the man, I knew the name; I had seen it, enviously, any number of times on the Astounding contents page. “Shoot him right in!” I commanded, hoping that he would come bearing manuscripts, and a couple of minutes later there he was, short, angel-faced, no more than a couple of years older than myself — and, yes, with two short-story manuscripts in his hands!

There is an established procedure for such events. It doesn’t allow the editor to snatch the typescripts from the author’s hands, or the author to throw them in from the doorway without a word. There has to be a little chatting back and forth first, so I had to wait until Lester was back in the elevator to start reading. The stories were short. I finished them both in a quarter of an hour.

Then I rejected them both.

What was wrong with them? I don’t remember. What were they about? I don’t remember that, either. And not only did I bounce them, so did every other editor Lester showed them to. Years later I asked him what had become of them. He said he had no idea, didn’t remember anything about them, and hoped I would never ask him such an embarrassing question again.

So that was my unpromising start to knowing Lester del Rey. Fortunately, later on things got better.

 
Later on things did, but it took a few years. John Campbell got over his nasty habit of rejecting any of Lester’s stories, so Lester had nothing to sell me; and then the Air Force invited me to join them for World War II so I had no magazine to buy them for, anyway. Then, postwar, Lester and I ran into each other now and then at various gatherings, and then in 1947 we ran into a big one. That was the ’47 World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia.

We were both there. When it was over we were having a cup of coffee together somewhere when we got to thinking. We had had such a great time mingling again with our nearest and dearest (as well as some of our farthest and dislikedest) from the world of science fiction that we decided we really ought to organize some sort of local sf group so we could do more of it. So Lester commandeered a couple of his friends and brought them to my Greenwich Village apartment, where I had collected a few of mine, and we sat down and created the Hydra Club. (Why Hydra? Because there were nine of us there, and the mythological Hydra had had nine heads.)

This was a definite public service, because for years thereafter the Hydra Club had become the place where sf writers from out of town visited when they came to New York in order to find people they could talk to. (Out of town sometimes meant very out of town — in the case of Arthur Clarke or W. Olaf Stapledon, the United Kingdom; in the case of A. Bertram Chandler, from about as far away as you could get without leaving our planet entirely, namely Australia.)

Nor was Hydra merely a place where you could exchange trade gossip with colleagues. Lester and I both found wives there, and we two couples made a habit of going to cons together. What made that easy was that after a while Lester and Evelyn del Rey came out to visit with Carol and me and our growing number of children in our big old house in Red Bank, New Jersey. The del Reys’ intention was to spend a weekend. They wound up staying seventeen years — well, seventeen years in the neighborhood, anyway, since after a while they bought a house of their own down the street. It might have been longer, but one day, driving to a small vacation in Florida, their car got entangled in the wake of an eighteen-wheeler and was sent spinning off the road. Evelyn was thrown clear, but then the car rolled over on her and she was killed.

After that Lester could not stay in their house. He sold it for a pitiful amount —furniture, books, wine cellar and all — to the first person who thought to make him an offer, and moved back to the city.

 
For all those years we had been keeping busy, Lester writing, me doing some of that but also fooling around with editing and other diversions. After putting together a string of anthologies for Ian Ballantine, I wound up as editor of a couple of science-fiction magazines, Galaxy and If. It was not a well-paying job but I loved it. It gave some welcome perks, including a full-time assistant.

When I needed to hire a new one I interviewed a recent Barnard graduate named Judy-Lynn Benjamin, who seemed to be bright and energetic enough for the job, but presented two worrisome problems. One was that her specialty was the works of James Joyce and she knew nothing at all about science fiction. That, I figured, could be handled; I would not ask her to make any buy-or-bounce decisions, and everything else I could easily teach her.

The other struck me as tougher. Judy-Lynn was an achondroplastic dwarf, not much over three feet tall, and I didn’t know how she would manage to reach the top drawers of the filing cabinets. But I took a chance, and actually she worked out rather well, turning out to be capable of managing anything at all. After I left the magazines, Judy-Lynn went to work for Ballantine Books, winding up running the enterprise, which is why its current avatar, Del Rey Books, was named after her.

Lester entered the picture when my publisher, Bob Guinn, urged me to add a fantasy magazine to my group. I had nothing against fantasy, but I didn’t have a great deal of interest in it, and anyway I didn’t want to add to my work load. So I persuaded Lester, now a widower for some years, to come aboard as its editor. He did well, and the three of us got along well, too, in fact better than I realized until I got a phone call from Lester to say that he and Judy-Lynn were getting married, and would I care to be his best man?

I would. They did it. And after a while, he joined Judy-Lynn at Ballantine, and — no surprise to anyone who knew them — with Lester handling the fantasy side of the operation while Judy-Lynn continued with the sf, they were fabulously successful, leading the field in the number of their books that wound up on the New York Times bestseller list.

What made Judy-Lynn successful? The answer to that is simply that she worked with (and/or married) three of the best editors around, studied what they did attentively and learned from all of them. (I know that makes me sound immodest, but I learned from the best there was, namely J. W. Campbell.)

Lester had a whole other style. Lester took as his model some of the historically great editors of the past and, like them, questioned every phrase and comma in every manuscript he accepted and made the authors rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. It paid off — once when I was having lunch with Lester’s boss he told me that he believed Lester was the most profitable editor in the publishing industry — but it was arduous. Some authors dumped the man who had made them bestsellers in favor of some other editor who might give them a less stressful life.

So the del Reys were riding high, but it came to an end. One of the penalties of being an achondroplastic dwarf is the likelihood of a short life span. After some very good years, Judy-Lynn had a massive stroke and then died of it, and a few years later Lester followed her.

Other husband-wife editorial teams in science fiction and fantasy — Ian and Betty Ballantine, Donald and Elsie Wollheim — have done wonderfully well, but in making that Times list, no one has done better than the del Reys, and I don’t really think anyone ever will.

Blogging in our cabin aboard MS Ryndam.
Photo by Elizabeth Anne Hull.

So here I am, back home at last after visiting Kauai, Bora Bora, Tahiti and four or five others of the most beautiful tropical paradises God ever made — and now doggedly tunneling my way through mountains of letters, emails, contracts, phone messages and — what is most relevant here — comments from all you wonderful people who were kind enough to tune in on the beginnings of The Way the Future Blogs and drop us a line about it.

In regard to which there is something I must say. I care about you all — beloved grandkids, cherished old friends and just high-quality human beings in general — and wish it were possible for me to respond personally to each of you. Unfortunately, due to the useless condition of the witch’s claw that was once my sturdy right hand, it just isn’t. But please keep reading and letting us know what you think! (Did I mention that you did so in such unexpected volume that you burned up all our bandwidth and head blogmeister Dick had to run out and buy more?)

And what’s ahead? Oh, all kinds of stuff. In the universe of personal reminiscences of some of science-fiction’s giants, there are pieces on three of the field’s greatest married editor-publisher couples, Ian and Betty Ballantine first, because it is already on the computer, then Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey and Donald and Elsie Wollheim. Plus sketches on Jack Williamson, Isaac Asimov and Cyril Kornbluth and some added material on Sir Arthur C. Clarke … and, of course, whatever other fancies happen to occur to me as I sit before the keyboard. See you then!

Sir Arthur C. Clarke at home in Sri Lanka, 2005. Photo by Amy Marash.

I first met Arthur C. Clarke in the 1950s, on the occasion of his first cross-Atlantic visit to New York City By then Arthur had established himself as a first-rate science-fiction writer and he did what sf writers do in a strange city: He looked for other sf writers to talk to.

He found them in the rather amorphously shaped group that called itself the Hydra Club, where I was one of the nine heads that had been its founders. We became friends. We stayed that way for all of the half century that remained of Arthur’s life. We met when chance arranged it — at a film festival in Rio de Janeiro, at an occasional scientific meeting, at assorted “cons” — sf-speak for science-fiction gatherings — in many places at many times.

In the early days Arthur spent a lot of time visiting New York, usually staying at the Chelsea Hotel on West 23d Street, and when possible I would join him for dinner or a drink — that was all expense-account money and happily paid for by my publisher, because I was an editor in those days and eager to publish as much Clarke as I could get my hands on. But by the turn of the millennium our friendship had reduced itself to a desultory correspondence and the odd phone conversation. I had given up editing to concentrate on my own writing. What Arthur had given up was ever leaving his island home in Sri Lanka, where I had never been. (Although I visited a number of other countries, Sri Lanka wasn’t one of them.)

Then, in one of his letters in the early part of 2006, Arthur rather offhandedly mentioned that, a couple of years earlier, in a fit of exuberance, he had signed publishing contracts for several books that, he was now convinced, he would never be able to write himself. Most of them he had arranged for some other writer to finish, but there was one, called The Last Theorem, for which he needed a collaborator.

Continue reading ‘Sir Arthur and I’ »