The Way the Future Blogs

Joseph Freeman

I came across this poem somewhere when I was about 17 or 18 and still a YCLer, with every hope that most of the brutal and inexcusable things about the Soviet Union that I was reading every day in the New York Post or Times were just typical untrue capitalist press slanders — of which, I was well aware, there was a good supply at all times.

The poem touched me where I was vulnerable. It described a post-Revolution USSR that had made peace with its bloody wars and managed to incorporate the class enemy into normal society. I didn’t think the poem described anything like contemporary reality — I was not that naïve. But I took it as a sort of science-fiction glimpse of where the Soviet Union was going to grow to.

I want to tell you about a sort of real-life Jernikidze I chanced to meet, and I’ve got it into my head that a good time to do that would be Christmas Day.

Prince Jernikidze
By Joseph Freeman (1926)

Prince Jernikidze wears his boots
Above his knees; his black mustache
Curls like the Kaiser’s; when he shoots
Friend and foe turn white as ash.

The movements of his hands are svelt,
Ivory bullets grace his chest,
The studded poignard at his belt
Dangles down his thigh. The best

Dancers in Tiflis envy his
Light Lesginka’s steady whirl,
He bends his close-cropped head to kiss
The finger-tips of every girl.

Over the shashleek and the wine
His deep and passionate baritone
Directs the singing down the line,
And none may drain his glass alone.

When morning breaks into his room
He dons his long Circassian coat,
Marches to the Sovnarkom
Knocks at the door and clears his throat,

Opens the ledger with his hand,
Bows to the commissars who pass,
Calls the janitor comrade, and
Keeps accounts for the working class.

    John Ciardi

 

“Poetry lies its way to the truth.”

—John Ciardi

* This is the feature I used to call “Bright Sayings of Geniuses.” I had to change the title because some of the lines I want to run were said by people who almost certainly were not likely to score 140 or more on an IQ test, which is one definition of a genius. (I’m not talking about John Ciardi. He probably would score way more than that.)

(Actually, it’s meant to be sung as a round, but I’m not real sure it can be.)

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.

Since there have been few outright riots to protest previous doses of verse in the blog, I’ll try one more installment, a sort of free-form Petrarchan sonnet called “Shaft.” I’ll let the poem speak for itself.

Shaft

Through a die one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter drawn
Cold when drawn, emerging smoke-hot, a metal strand.
This and a thousand others woven tight together,
Attached to an electric winch and to a car.

A hole is bored through sheets of blueprint cap.
Created then, a steel and stonework frame to fit,
Straight up and down three hundred feet, the pit,
The womb of emptiness, becomes a fact.

Then blindly humans enter, wary men.
Yet blind. Ascending viciously, they viciously go down.
To rise, to fall, on vicious errands.

Iron cord in an iron-bound vacuum.
Iron consciousness, inflexible and dull.
Iron all (vicious), iron (vicious) all.

I hope you didn’t hate it too much. I would have been maybe 17 when I wrote it.

 
Related posts:

• The Poetry Corner
• The Poetry Corner 2
• Verse Decoded
• The Quadrumvirate

Illustration by Leah A. Zeldes.