The Way the Future Blogs

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’ »

Dear People:

As you know, I have a problem, and its name is Mark Rich. For some reason, and I have no clue as to what that reason is, it is quite obvious that he hates me.

Now, I don’t particularly care whether someone named Mark Rich hates me, since as far as I know, I’ve never met the man. The difficulty, however, is that he has written a book about it, and it comes at a bad time. I’m not young, and I’m not in particularly good health, and there are a number of things that are important to me that I want to get done. Dealing with the attacks of this man was not one of them

But I really can’t let him go on unchecked. It isn’t just that he hates me. He makes up whole scenarios that never happened to hate me for, like the one I wrote about last week in this blog. And honestly, Mr. Rich, that’s pathological.

 
So I am going to have to do some setting of the record straight.

This presents a big problem for me, one I thought I had faced and settled 25 years ago.

You see, when I first began writing the autobiographical sort of material that ultimately turned into the book The Way the Future Was, I had to decide just how much truth I wanted to tell. What I decided was that I would try to be as candid as possible about everything I had done, even the things I wished I hadn’t. The trouble with that was that I was not the only person involved in those matters. If I chose to Tell All about everything I did, it unfortunately would sometimes involve simultaneously Telling All about others, which I had no right or desire to do.

Understand that I am not saying that that sf community in New York in the 1950s and ’60s was riddled with vice and degeneracy. It wasn’t. Well, not a lot, anyway. But these were young people who did a fair amount of drinking and sometimes a modest amount of drugs. That is to say, in those respects they were quite like young adult bridge clubs, church groups and party-givers all over America. Only in their cases some of them got kind of famous.

There was, for all these reasons, a lot of stuff I didn’t write about concerning some of the other people involved because I didn’t want to embarrass them. In particular, that applied to my one-time wife, Judy Merril. We had just begun being good friends again as I was writing that book, and that was a good feeling. It gave us a chance to enjoy our increasing numbers of grandchildren together, and it let us remember, as Judy said to me once, “Why I liked you in the first place.”

Rich however seems to think that I persecuted Judy, and I will take that up.

He also all but states that I embezzled some of Cyril’s share of the earnings from The Space Merchants. I’ll deal with that one, too, and with several others of his very bad guesses. But I want to do something else first.

Rich apparently believes that, apart from dishonesty, my career in science fiction has been marked by general incompetence in just about everything I tried, as agent, as editor, as collaborator and as author. If I left anything out, he thinks I was lousy at that, too.

In the scheme of things entire, I would like not to care what somebody I never heard of thinks of me. This time, though, I don’ have that privilege, because Rich went and wrote this damn book. Lots of people do care about Cyril Kornbluth and are likely to want to read about him. (Even more, I think, may be likely to hear of our present differences and want to see what he said for themselves.) Some of them may know very little about me, or about what the rest of the world thinks of me, and how that contrasts with Rich’s opinions and flights of fantasy.

That would be a pity, so let’s look at the record.

Start with this: I have seven Hugo Awards.

That’s not a remarkable number, but I won three of them for writing (four if you count the new one I unexpectedly got this year) and three as editor, and I would like to point out that in all the years Hugo Awards have been given out, nobody else in the world has ever won the Hugo in both those major categories. (The editing awards were for If, and the fiction awards included those for my novel Gateway and a short story, “Fermi and Frost.”)

One Hugo Award I shared with Cyril, posthumously, for a short story, “The Meeting,” and that’s of interest here. When Cyril died, his widow, Mary, gave me some scraps and fragments of stories that he had left behind, apparently because he got that far and bogged down and couldn’t figure where to go with them. I agreed to try to make complete stories out of them, sell them for publication and split whatever they earned fifty-fifty.

One of those fragments was a scene set in a parents’ association for a school for handicapped children. Like almost everything else Cyril was writing in those days, it was beautifully done, but there was no story. I gave it a story. I believe Rich thinks I screwed that up, too, but I don’t have the patience to go back and reread his dizzy-minded remarks.

So I will just say that what actually happened is that it won a Hugo — the only Hugo, I am sorry to say, that Cyril’s writing ever earned.

As those of you who have been paying attention know, a man named Mark Rich wrote a libelous book, in principal about my old-time collaborator, Cyril Kornbluth, but in fact filled with denunciatory — rumors, suppositions, bad guesses and occasional outright falsehoods — material about me. Why this Mark Rich person hated me, I can’t imagine. But you can’t read more than a few pages of any part of his rotten book without concluding that he does.

Anyway, I have begun the unpleasant job of showing that very few of his libelous statements about me are are really accurate and many are preposterously wrong.

And the other night I sent him an e-mail:

From: Frederik Pohl
To: Mark Rich
Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2010 00:49:39 -0800 (PST)
Subject: your book

I don’t know if you have noticed but in my blog, The Way the Future Blogs, I have begun the job of correcting some of the vast number of mistakes, bad guesses and. I think, occasional outright lies in your book. (There will be a lot more of this.)

No matter what I think of you, I believe in letting both sides speak. If for any reason you want to question anything I say, I will publish in the blog any remarks you care to send me (up to, say, 300 words.)

Frederik Pohl

And the next morning, I got this totally unacceptable reply:

Fri, November 12, 2010 8:22:19 AM
Re: your book
From: Mark Rich
To: Frederik Pohl

Hi, Fred,

I’m actually pleased that you’ll be correcting any mistakes, and elaborating on
bits of history that were not to be found elsewhere.

Cheers,
Mark

I must say this little Mark Rich creep baffles me.

 
Tell me, Rich: Is what you’re doing now your hope for a dignified retreat? You can’t have a dignified retreat. It’s too late. That bridge is crossed.

When you write a whole book of such poisonous libels, you only have two options: One is to defend what you said, or at least try. As you, of course, can’t do that, if you have any honor or decency at all, you only have one choice left. That is, you can make a very public apology and retraction and start trying to make up for all the harm you have done.

Frederik Pohl

C.M. Kornbluth

I’ve been reading a book I wholly and totally despise about a person I loved a lot. The person is Cyril Kornbluth, with whom I shared so much of my early writing life, and of his. The book is succinctly called C.M. Kornbluth, and it is by a man named Mark Rich, who is described as a writer of short stories and books about toys.

I have to say at once that reading the book in itself took me back to that wonderful world when Cyril and AJ Budrys and Bob Sheckley and Lester del Rey and Jerry Bixby and Harry Harrison and all those other talented, trash-talking, wife-stealing, brilliant friends were still alive and still putting up with each other … and in the process producing a whole new science-fiction canon Reviving those memories was actually a good thing. They are touching to me.

There are, however, some things about this book that aren’t good at all. In fact, they stink.

The first is not particularly important, except that it hurts my feelings. For reasons not known to me, Mark Rich hates me. There is no other conclusion I can reach. As everyone who has written about the book has commented, his portrait of such traits, ascribed to me, of venality, dishonesty, lack of talent and from time to time defrauding of, among others, Cyril, are not borne out — well, not to that degree, anyway — by any other source.

It is quite true that I did go through some bad money troubles, which caused difficulties for my friends and clients. I have never denied this, and indeed have written about it. (And, as soon as some other priorities are dealt with, intend to do so again.)

But it is not just my financial difficulties that Mark Rich chooses to describe. It is also my deplorable lack of talent.

I do sometimes wonder how Rich thinks I managed to write, for instance, my novel Gateway, which happened some time after Cyril’s saddening death, thus leaving him unable to help me with the hard parts. According to Rich’s book, Cyril was the heavy lifter in our collaborations and indeed writing work of all kinds at every point. When, rarely, I was entrusted with an important task to do by myself, in Rich’s opinion, I really did serious harm to the work.

For example, he describes one such task in detail. That was the job of doing the final revisions for the book version of The Space Merchants.

If I may, I will first tell you what Rich says happened, and then what really occurred.

According to Rich, pages 227–230 of his deplorable book, the Ballantine book edition of The Space Merchants “was a version revised by Pohl, since that had been his agreed upon responsibility. The changes are immediately felt, with the opening chapter moving things along at a slower pace in The Space Merchants than they did in Gravy Planet. Some of this comes about by the addition of such unnecessary reminders as ‘he said,’ or even ‘he snapped.’” Rich is also disappointed in “deletions in the serialized text,” such that much of the expository material from the magazine version is missing from the book.

I’m not going to repeat it all for you. It is enough to say simply that Rich feels that my incompetent editing had damaged, among other things, Cyril’s nuanced portraits of female characters, particularly the hero’s wife, Kathy, and the genius-poet Tildy Mathis, and in general (he says), I applied to our novel the sort of pulpwood editing that Ray Palmer insisted on in his magazines.

That’s pretty much what Mark Rich says about the changes.

 
Now, I would like to tell you what really happened.

In the business of book publishing, it is the practice for manuscripts, at least “important” ones, to be assigned to an editor for a line-by-line, sometimes a word-by-word, reading, followed by a conference between author and editor

When, in the early 1950s, we delivered The Space Merchants to Ballantine, they wanted to get it into immediate release, and so they put it into production right away. This meant their editor gave it that immediate and careful line-by-line reading in preparation for a final story conference with the authors. Because of time pressures, however, that conference took place by phone instead of in person: I on my bedroom phone in Red Bank, Cyril on the one in my third-floor office there and the editor in the Ballantine office in New York.

The conversation was long, friendly and intelligent. I’m afraid I remember almost none of it in detail, and what I do remember is very fragmentary. We were two kids with our first big break, and about all I am sure of is that whatever changes Ballantine Books asked us for, we agreed to.

One of the scenes the editor asked us to remove was a description of the space pilot Jack O’Shea as possessing a long, rubbery tongue like a toad’s, for capturing insects — that being part of a bad idea we had taken out of most, but not all, of the ms.

I do recall one bit of conversation with Cyril after the call. The editor had really complimented us on the Chicken Little scene, and Cyril had observed, “You might have mentioned to Stanley that I wrote it,” and I said, “And you could have pointed out that I suggested the bit in the first place.”

That is truly what happened. All of the changes between the magazine version and the book were made, not by me, but by discussion among the three of us. After which, as I remember, the editor in New York penciled the corrections onto the manuscript and sent it off to the printers. I don’t believe either Cyril or I ever saw that script again. The next step was for us to receive and check the proofs of the pages, which I assume we did together, although I have no real memory of that part of the process.

So if you think those changes are as awful as you say you do, don’t tell me about it. I’m not the guy.

 
I will have more to say about Rich’s work of character assassination before long, but let that do for a start.