The Way the Future Blogs

On His Way to Being the Very Best Writer I Have Ever Known

C.M. Kornbluth

I think Cyril Kornbluth knew he wanted to be a writer at about the same age as most of the rest of us, which was generally early to middle teens. What he didn’t know was what kind of writer he wanted to be. His goal wasn’t, at first, science fiction. Cyril was a fan, like all of us, but what writing he did at first was mostly poetry, some of it plaintively sexual, like the scant few lines I remember of one of his early ones: “How long, my love, shall I behold this wall / Between our gardens, yours the rose, and mine / The shrinking lily.”

He possessed a manual of poetry, a book purporting to describe every poetic form ever invented and written, I think, by one of his high-school teachers. He and I tried writing as many different forms as we could, including a pair of matched sonnets, both Shakespearean and Petrarchan, but we gave up after an over-ambitious attempt at a chant royal. At that time, I think, Cyril was maybe 14, and I three or four years older. Then he began creating tiny storiettes, like “The Rocket of 1955.”

When I, closely followed by Don Wollheim, and Bob Lowndes, became a professional sf editor, most of the Futurian writing neos began concentrating on trying to write at least marginally publishable sf stories for these unexpectedly friendly new markets. Cyril went with the flow. Most of his work for the next few years was science fiction, some of it in collaboration with me. The stories were all pretty mediocre, or worse, but they mostly did see print in one or another of our friendly prozines. None of the actual stories get more than a C-minus, though some of Cyril’s 250-worders survive.

But that situation didn’t last long. The Second World War revised everyone’s plans, especially for Cyril, who had a woefully low draft number. He was nabbed early by the Army, but he caught a break. He had worked briefly in a machine shop, and thus had experience of operating metal-working machinery. This was just what the artillery were combing the inductees for, men who would repair the big guns, in a place far enough from the front lines that the enemy couldn’t swoop down and carry off those precious machines. They snapped Cyril right up. It was the kind of no-risk and cushy job that several million GIs would have given their left testicle for, but in 1944 what looked like a better deal came along..

Higher-ups in the Army command circles were calculating that the war was likely to last for years yet. If so there might be a serious shortage of college-educated candidates to be trained as commissioned officers. They didn’t want to run short on this valuable resource, so they quickly created what they called ASTP, the Army Specialized Training Program. Under it, GIs lucky enough to be accepted would be relieved of all duties except going to college.

This sounded like a dream of Heaven to most GIs, not least because the system’s unrelenting drafts of young males had left most colleges’ student bodies heavily weighted with an excess of young single women. Cyril applied, was quickly accepted and went happily back to school, this time in uniform — until some person higher still in command circles noticed that both the Germans and the Japanese were losing most of their recent battles, and the war might end sooner than they had calculated. So ASTP was peremptorily abolished and all its students, including Cyril, transferred into the Infantry.

For this branch of service the Army had great and unanticipated need, since Hitler had just managed to launch a totally unexpected full-fledged attack on the troops in the Ardennes forest. And that’s where Cyril landed.

 
See Part 3, “Cyril Begins to Blossom,” real soon now.

 
Related posts:

• Cyril Kornbluth, Part 1
• Mary Kornbluth, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Harry Steeger

In the late 1930s, I was a teenage science-fiction fan and would-be writer. I had come to know a number of editors of the existing science-fiction pulps by reinventing myself as a literary agent and visiting them at their offices, offering them the latest stories written by some of my fan friends. The writers were pretty amateurish and my sales of them around zero. Still, the deception wasn’t entirely implausible. A couple dozen of us would-bes had formed ourselves into a fan club called The Futurians. Drawn from that pool, some of my clients were Cyril Kornbluth, Don Wollheim and Isaac Asimov, and they were all already coming fairly close. Close enough, at least, to be taken at least slightly seriously by the editors.

What I noticed about the editors was that they spent much of their time reading science fiction. Well, that’s what I was doing, too, only I was doing it for nothing. I summoned up the nerve to ask one of the friendlier editors, Robert Erisman, if he would like to hire me as an assistant. He didn’t laugh at me. He didn’t even tell me what I am sure was true, that he didn’t have a budget for an assistant or any hope of being given one. But he did tell me that he had heard that some new magazines were coming out from Harry Steeger of Popular Publications, way at the far end of 42nd Street (Erisman’s office was almost as far west as you could go on 42nd Street, in the old green glass McGraw-Hill Building, while Steeger’s, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, was almost as far as you could go east — that is, in either case, without running into a river.). So why didn’t I, then, go see Mr. Steeger and see if he might hire me to edit a science-fiction magazine for him?

So I did, and, wonder of wonders, Mr. Steeger did. He said I could start right away. He cautioned me that these new magazines he was adding would be paying only a half-cent a word, instead of the traditional pulp penny, and to be consistent, all he could pay an editor for them, like me, was $10 a week, which even in 1939 was starvation wages. (I learned later that I wasn’t even the worst-paid of his new hirees. A young man named Costa Carousso was hired at about the same time, and his deal was that he would be paid nothing for his first three months and then raised to $10 a week. Curiously when Carousso, like me, got swept up into the Air Force a couple of years later, they turned us both into weathermen.)

What he didn’t tell me, but I found out for myself soon enough, was that none of the editors got paid very much, but were all expected to write enough stories for themselves to add up to a passably almost decent income. I volunteered the information that I would prefer to do my own typing and there, too, he managed not to laugh in my face, since that was what all the editors did. He simply walked into an unused office, poached a typewriter off its desk, carried it a few yards down the stem of the great T the offices were laid out in, set it down on that desk and said, “This will be your office. My secretary, Peggy Graves, will come to see you tomorrow and answer any questions you may have, Good luck.” And he walked back to his own office, leaving me to enjoy my very own desk, in my very own office in my very own employer’s publishing company.

Would you believe it, I was 19 years old and actually a professional editor.

(There is one memory from that day that still rankles a bit. All this had taken place on a Thursday, almost all of which I spent in the Popular office. The next day was Friday, which I spent working there. When, the following Friday, Peggy marched through the offices, depositing a paycheck on everyone’s desk, mine was for the five days of that week, with nothing for the Friday and most of Thursday of the week preceding. I contend that I am owed 1-1/2 days pay, or $3, for that week, that I have been owed it now for the better part of a century, and that the debt should have been earning, and compounding, interest all these years. Only I don’t know who to send the bill to.)

 
More to come.

 
Related posts:

• Popular Publications, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

Michael Walsh, a reader whose aunt lived in Long Branch, New Jersey, has heard that Cyril Kornbluth did at one time, too, and would like to know exactly where.

I’m afraid I don’t know the street address any more — this was back in the ’50s — but it was within a few blocks of the Monmouth Medical Center, where Mary went to have her first two sons. They were only there for a couple of years, then moved to a different part of Long Branch, actually right across the street from Monmouth College’s then main building (the one that played the part of Daddy Warbucks’ parlor in the Annie movie). But they didn’t stay there either.

Then upstate New York, then Long Island, and that’s where Cyril had his heart attack and died.

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’ »

Part 4 of “Alfred Bester and Frederik Pohl — The Conversation,” recorded 26 June 1978 at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
 

Bester: I’m curious, Fred. Where did you get the idea for The Space Merchants?

Pohl: The Space Merchants has a long history. During World War II, I was with the American Air Force in Italy. I got a little homesick, and I’d brought my typewriter with me. I’d carried that damn thing all over World War II hoping some time to find a use for it and I did.

I thought I’d write a novel about New York City to make me feel a little better. And the most exciting thing I could think of to write about in New York City was the advertising business — which was a glamorous sort of thing —-and I wrote this novel for some 300 pages or so, called For Some We Loved. It’s a quotation from Omar Khayyam. I was 23 years old, what did I know?

And then the war was over and I got back home, and I looked at the novel and perceived there was something wrong with it. What was wrong with it was that I didn’t know anything about the advertising business, and I had written this whole novel that dealt with it. But I knew how to solve that problem. I looked in the Sunday New York Times, classified advertising section, and I saw three or four help-wanted ads for advertising copywriters. I’d never been an advertising copywriter, but it looked easy. So I answered a couple of the ads and one of them hired me, and I spent a couple of years there.

Bester: What agency was it, Fred?

Pohl: A little tiny thing called Thwing & Altman, mostly book accounts. We did the Dollar Book Club and the Literary Guild and William Wise. I got to be pretty good at writing advertising.

And, at some point during those years, I had a summer place in upstate New York looking out over a lake with a big fireplace, and I had my manuscript of my novel For Some We Loved with me, and one night, I began to read it in front of the fireplace and as I read each page, I tossed them in the fire one by one.

Bester: Oh, Fred, no! That’s terrible.

Pohl: It was awful. The concept was painful … but the novel itself was agonizing. I had no choice.

So here I had all this knowledge of advertising and no longer had a book to put it in. Also Fred Wakeman had come out with The Hucksters by then, so it was no longer really a fresh idea for a regular mainstream novel. Then it occurred to me to make a science-fiction novel about advertising, and I began tentatively putting words on paper — a little bit at a time, because by then I had a full-time job running a literary agency. And when I had put about 20,000 words on paper over about a year or two, I showed it to Horace Gold.

Bester: What did Horace have to say?

Pohl: He said, “I am now running Alfie Bester’s The Demolished Man—”

Bester: Leave me out of this, will you?

Pohl: I swear to God, that was what he said. And: “I haven’t got anything to follow it up with. There’s nothing else coming in that looks as if it’ll stand up to The Demolished Man. So I’m going to start with the first installment now, and by next Tuesday please have the second and the third.”

And I said, “There’s no way I can do that. I have a full-time job with the agency.”

And he said, “I don’t care whether you can do it or not, the printers will be waiting.”

So I went back to my home in New Jersey where my old friend Cyril Kornbluth, with whom I’d written a lot of stories before, was staying with me. He read over the part I’d written, the first third or so and said, “Yeah, yeah, we can do something with that.” So he rewrote that and added some, and I rewrote that and added some, and we barely got it into print, but actually the first part was being set before the last was written.

Bester: My God, you were living dangerously, Fred!

Pohl: I had nothing to lose. It was Horace’s problem!

Bester: Whose title was it — Horace’s or yours?

Pohl: I called it something ridiculous like “Fall Campaign,” and Horace put “Gravy Planet” on it.

There was a big book boom in science fiction at the time, all sorts of publishers deciding to bring it out in hardcovers. So, I thought, what the hell, I’ll sell it as a book, and I was a literary agent, and I knew every publisher and editor in New York, especially the ones that dealt in science fiction — a lot of them were very good friends of mine. So I took it off to one, and I said, “Here, print this. It’s pretty good stuff,” and he read it and gave it back and said, “No, that’s not really what I meant at all!”

And I said, “So much for you,” and I took it to the next one. And it was rejected by every publisher in America who then had a science-fiction line.

Bester: So was The Demolished Man, sir! It was bounced by everybody.

Pohl: Well, I think it’s the same story.

So, there was no publisher left to offer it to. Then Ian Ballantine started up his own company, and he was so inexperienced as a publisher that he didn’t know this was unpublishable. So he published it! You know, it’s been translated into 45 languages now.

Bester: It shows you, the greatest books in the world can be bounced by anybody. Look at Fred’s! The greatest science fiction novel of all time. Bounced by everybody! It’s preposterous!

 
To be continued.

 
Related posts:

• Alfie, Part 1, Part 2
• Me and Alfie, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

 
As I mentioned in the short piece I wrote about Alfie Bester, he and I had a joint talk for a bunch of English fans thirty-odd years or so ago. To my total amazement, some of them recently came up with a tape of that discussion. They transcribed it, and I thought some of you might like to read it here in the blog.

Here’s what Peter Roberts’ fanzine, Checkpoint, reported at the time:

TYNESIDE “FUTUREWORLDS”: (Ritchie Smith reports on the Newcastle sf film festival) “Alfred Bester and Frederik Pohl spoke at the Tyneside Cinema for some two hours on June 26th. Bester was smallish, plump, larger-than-life, and explosively friendly in a Hollywood sort of way, right down to calling some people ‘darling’. Pohl looked more literary: ectomorphic, tall, and restrained, full of good anecdotes, like Bester (sadly, too many of them were familiar from Pohl’s essay in Hell’s Cartographers). Afterwards they signed books — Bester’s dedications were especially witty — and the great men and a large minority of North-East fandom went off for a Chinese meal.”

   Frederik Pohl       Alfred Bester

Alfred Bester and Frederik Pohl — The Conversation

Recorded 26 June 1978 at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, by Kevin Williams. Transcript by Sue Williams, edited by Neil Jones and Kevin Williams. Originally published in Rob Jackson’s fanzine Inca 5, December 2009. Additional editing here by Leah A. Zeldes.
 

Pohl: Let me tell you about Alfie Bester. I’ve known him for a long time, and I first encountered him when I was 19 years old and editing a magazine called Astonishing Stories, and I bought a couple of stories of Alfie’s because I liked them. And then, some years later, Cyril Kornbluth and I had written a book called The Space Merchants, which I sort of hoped might win a prize, but it was beaten out by something called The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester.

A little while later, Cyril and I were working on another novel — I think it was Search the Sky. We’d written a couple of others by then, and I’d just begun to edit a thing called Star Science Fiction Stories — a series of anthologies of original science fiction stories. I brought home a story by Alfie Bester that I had just accepted for Star. It was called “Disappearing Act,” and I showed it to Cyril while we were working on our own book.

He gave me a resentful look and said, “You bring me this to read when we are writing that!”

[The novel we were writing was pretty much space opera, while Alfie's story was a literate gem. But I didn't explain this in the conversation, which led to a mixup. —FP]

Bester: Cyril didn’t like it?

Pohl: He loved it. He thought it was so much superior to what we were doing that it embarrassed him.

It’s been going on like that — our paths keep crossing, and he keeps doing this superlative work, and now I’ll let him speak for himself.

Bester: The one thing that you must understand is that we admire each other profoundly. I cannot tell you how many times I have read a story or novel of Fred’s and said, “Why in Christ’s name couldn’t I have written that?” — and then run into Fred and I tell him. The truth of the matter is that there is no rivalry between us at all, there is nothing but admiration.

We are rather like the high baroque musicians: We borrow from each other, we learn from each other, we admire each other, we do the same things, or different things, and have a hell of a ball.

Now Fred’s novel which he wrote with Cyril Kornbluth, The Space Merchants, is, I think, the finest novel ever written in the history of science fiction. It is a brilliant piece of work. Many brilliant things have followed it, but this came along when everybody was obsessed with Doc Smith space opera, which has its own charm — it’s great fun — and suddenly comes this realistic extrapolation of what American life, American advertising, American ecology and American psychosis will lead to eventually.

Horace Gold ran it as a three parter in Galaxy. Gravy Planet, he called it. A tremendous piece of work — exciting, ravishing. I will never forget the scene where that crazy broad with the needle is giving him the works. Fred, that was outrageously brilliant.

Pohl: That scene was all Cyril’s but I’ll accept the credit.

Alfie is one of the greatest writers science fiction has ever had and he is well aware of it — he just wants to be told! Everybody knows the novels, but there was a period in the early ’50s when in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction month after month there was a leading novelette by Alfred Bester.

Bester: Always with the wrong title!

Pohl: Always with the wrong title but always good! They were just brilliant, one after another.

Bester: I once sent two stories to Mick McComas and Tony Boucher (at F&SF) — they had asked for them, of course — and they switched the titles on the stories. I stink on titles, I really do, I’m terrible.

But the point I’m going to make very strongly is the greatness of science fiction. To my mind, it is the last, the last outpost of freedom of literature in the States — I can’t speak for England. In science fiction, we can do what no one else can do in any other medium.

I speak as a magazine writer, novelist and scriptwriter. The constraints of commercial fiction in the States in television, in films, in radio, you name it, are so severe that there is very little you can do. This is one of the reasons why I have written science fiction off and on all of my life. Quite simply because if I come up with an idea which rather enchants me, I would very much like to develop it and do it, so that people would see it and hear it.

If my producer, my director, the client says “No, no, it’s too expensive, no it’s too far out, people won’t understand it, ah forget it, give us something a little less,” then I have to turn to science fiction. In science fiction, you can do anything you please, and God knows the artist needs a free hand. The greatness of science fiction is not the science, not the prediction of the future, not anything you want to name — the greatness is that it is wide open, and we can do exactly as we damn please, and that story will run somewhere, somehow, and you will have your audience, and you will get feedback. And after all, a writer without an audience is no writer at all; you’ve got to have people that you are entertaining.

Continue reading ‘Me and Alfie’ »