The Way the Future Blogs

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.

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’ »

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany is a highly intelligent man who comes of a highly intelligent and educated family. His grandfather, Henry Beard Delany, was an educator and the first elected African-American bishop in the Episcopal church, while his two aunts, Sadie and Bessie Delany, achieved national fame in the ’90s, when both were already over a hundred years old, as the co-authors (with Amy Hill Hearth) of the memoir Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years, which stayed six months on the New York Times bestseller list and landed them both in The Guinness Book of World Records as the country’s oldest authors.

Delany is also a long-out-of-the-closet bisexual, as well as being an articulate and pleasant companion in informal gatherings; a college professor whose major worry is that he keeps getting promoted, thus giving him less and less time with those he cares most about, his students; a highly esteemed writer of science fiction; and, finally, a person who is never addressed by his friends as Sam, Samuel or any other variant of the name his parents gave him.

The reason for this is that he wanted it that way. As a child, young Delany was deeply envious of friends and schoolmates who had nicknames, which he did not. His chance to remedy this came on his first day at summer camp, at around age twelve, when another camper asked him what he was called. He saw his opportunity and took it. “They mostly call me ‘Chip,’” he said, and to his friends he has been Chip Delany ever since.

In 1971 1961, he married the poet Marilyn Hacker. It was not because of any over-arching romance between the two of them, and there was nothing about “forsaking all others” in the marriage vows. It was an open, not to say wide-open, marriage, with both Chip and Marilyn having frequent extra-marital affairs with partners of both genders. What both Chip and Marilyn wanted was the comfort of living in a family, and in 1974, they completed it by having a baby daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany, who grew up to be a director in New York’s theatrical community before going on to become an emergency physician.

At the time. they were living in London, where Marilyn was working as an antiquarian book-dealer. In that same period Betty Anne and I happened to also be living in London, where Betty Anne was teaching a one-semester course to college students, and I made up my mind to drop in on the Delanys one day to say hello.

That day was a while in coming. Although I love London, I am not really very good at getting around in its maze of short and unplanned streets, so unlike sensible New York’s numbered ones, and I kept putting it off. Then one day, after running some other errand, I realized that I was close to the Delany flat and on impulse headed for their door. My timing was poor. Both Chip and Marilyn were off on other errands, but I did get a chance to meet the baby and her sitter.

Having a child in a foreign country gave Chip and Marilyn a completely unexpected problem. The law, as they knew, is straightforward. A child born of two American citizens is entitled to American citizenship — and an American passport — regardless of where he or she happens to get born, so the Delanys filed Iva’s application and returned to their flat to await delivery of her passport. It, however, didn’t come. Instead they got a note to say that the application had been turned down.

When, in consternation, Chip and Marilyn begged the American consul for an explanation it wasn’t helpful. It was the baby’s name that made all the trouble, the clerk said. If they had named her Iva Delany, or Iva Hacker, or even Iva Hacker Delany there would have been no problem. But what they had recklessly done was throw in a game-altering hyphen between the surnames of her two parents, and “Hacker-Delany,” as anyone could plainly see, was a new name, not borne by either parent, and thus incapable of conferring citizenship on the child.

For a time their chances of ever getting home again looked bleak. But then they were lucky enough to find a higher-up State Department official who was not a certifiable moron. He swept all those finely split hairs aside and ordered the issuance of a passport to Iva Hacker-Delany and the family got thankfully back to New York. (Chip and Marilyn divorced a few years later, but remained the best of friends anyhow.)

 
Apart from an occasional bumping into each other at some science-fiction event I didn’t see much of Chip for a while. While I was still editing If and Galaxy I did my best to get some short stories from him for the magazines, with only limited success. Chip’s most comfortable length was the Ace Books novel of maybe 60,000 words or, for an Ace Double, somewhat less. Indeed, my old Futurian pal, Donald Wollheim, Ace’s editor, had been Samuel R. Delany’s principal publisher, with novels like The Jewels of Aptor.

By then, I had landed a dream job as science-fiction editor for the independent paperback giant, Bantam Books — didn’t have to come in to the office except when I felt like it, had total freedom to publish any property I chose without needing to get anyone’s permission or approval, or even without needing anyone’s okay to offer as high or as low an advance and royalties as I chose. It was the very model of the position that any ink-stained editorial wretch would have given his eyeteeth to be offered.

It did occur to me that it might be nice to add an occasional Delany novel to my list, especially when I noticed that Donald had almost stopped bringing out new Delany titles of his own. But I already had enough irons in the fire to keep me busy, so I didn’t do much more than wish that some such might drop in my lap.

Then, without warning Chip’s agent sent me the manuscript of an unpublished, and uncharacteristically long, Delany novel. It was called Dhalgren.

(The conclusion of the Delany story, covering the Dhalgren miracle, pretty soon.)

 
Related posts:
Chip Delany, Part 2

Just a reminder that our giveaway program for that great new anthology, Gateways, edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull, ends on Monday. So, if you haven’t entered so far, get your entry in fast!

To enter the drawing, e-mail blog @ thewaythefutureblogs.com with your name and snail-mail address.

The winning names will be pulled out of a hat by Gene Wolfe, one of the fine authors represented in the book. Two copies will go to folks in the USA; all the others will go to people in other countries.

We’re happy to be able to tell you that we love all of you, not just the ones who live in the U. S. of A., but also all of you who happen to live in some place whose current capital is not Washington D.C. as well. To show that we mean it, we’re going to add our own personal giveaway program for that great new book, Gateways, to the one that was offered by our publisher, Tor, through GoodReads.

So, if you live in any country that is not the USA, from Argentina and Canada to Zanzibar and Zimbabwe, and would like to enter the drawing, e-mail blog @ thewaythefutureblogs.com with your name and snail-mail address. The winning names will be pulled out of a hat by Gene Wolfe, one of the fine authors represented in the book. Two of the copies will go to folks in the USA, so you guys can enter, too; all the others will go to people from elsewhere.

If you’ve already forgotten what a great book this is, here’s what the San Diego Union-Tribune said about it:

“Science fiction has been blessed and bolstered by the 70-year career of Frederik Pohl, whose wife, Betty Anne Hull, edited this collection as a 90th birthday gift for him. David Brin has a long and shiny story toward the front of the book, ‘Shoresteading,’ Cory Doctorow has the thought-provoking ‘Chicken Little’ toward the end, and every story, poem and appreciation in between is well worth your time … and the time it’ll take you to find any of the Pohl works you’ve missed.”

And, oh, by the way, just to sweeten the pot, every winning copy will be autographed by Betty Anne Hull, creator of the book; Frederik Pohl, who is lucky enough to be her husband; and Gene Wolfe, the winner-picker.

(List closes on November 15th. Enter before then!)

Elizabeth Anne Hull, me, the Hugo and Steven Silver. (Photo by Cathy Pizarro.)

I didn’t get over to the Worldcon in Australia, so when I won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer, my friend Bob Silverberg accepted it for me. Here is what he said at the ceremony:

“A couple of weeks before I left for Australia I received an e-mail from Fred Pohl asking whether I would accept the Best Fan Writer Hugo for him if he won. This is what I replied:

“‘Of all the goddamn crazy things. Here we are in 2010, you are 90 years old, I’m no kid myself, the worldcon is in Australia, and you are sending me some kind of newfangled electronic message about the possibility that you might win the Best Fan Writer Hugo. What would Sam Moskowitz say about all this? Don Wollheim? Hugo Himself? Are we both trapped in the future, swept off into this nonsense by some inexorable force? Of course I will accept that Hugo for you. It will be one of the great moments of my life.’

“And it gives me immense pleasure now to accept the Best Fan Writer Hugo for my friend of more than fifty years, Fred Pohl.”

After Silverbob accepted the Hugo Award, the trophy was ferried back to Chicago by Helen Montgomery, who passed it along to Steven Silver, who brought it over last week. Thanks to everyone concerned!

Thanks, also, to everyone for all the congratulatory messages, of which this one from Encyclopedia Britannica might be the most extraordinary. I wrote their entry on Tiberius in the 1960s!