The Way the Future Blogs

Marmoset.

What postwar New York had lacked was a gathering point for the area’s sf brethren (and sistren), so Lester del Rey and I created one. I invited a few of my sf friends to come and discuss the subject at my apartment at 28 Grove Street in the Village, Lester showed up with some of his, and we constituted ourselves a sort of roving gentlemen’s (and ladies’) club for people interested in science fiction, especially if professionally.

There were nine of us. The mythological Hydra was said to have nine heads. That was good enough, so we called it The Hydra Club and began beating the brush for members. In the process of inviting all the area’s sf writers and editors whose addresses we could locate, Fletcher Pratt was one of the first we reeled in.

He was a key recruit. We original nine of course knew all the book and magazine editors, and most of the writers, in the area. Fletcher knew everybody else — Basil Davenport, editor (and later judge) for the Book-of-the-Month Club; Bernard De Voto, authority on my personal hero, Mark Twain, whilom editor of The Saturday Review of Literature and eternally the author of its most popular regular column, “The Easy Chair”; Hans Stefan Santesson, editor of a couple of small book clubs which now and then did science-fiction books and so on.

The cut was between the people who primarily did science-fiction, all of whom we knew, and the people who did all kinds of works, but sometime did or sometimes might do a little science fiction as well. And those latter were the ones with whom Fletcher was our strongest link.
 

I have to admit that at first I wasn’t entirely easy with the idea of Fletcher Pratt, considered as friendship material for me. There was a generation gap. I didn’t have any other friends anywhere near that old. Fletcher was pushing fifty, and almost all my other friends were within at least approximate lying distance of my own age, which was then in my late twenties. Even Jack Williamson’s age was not much more than halfway to Fletcher’s. Fletcher was also famous — that is, famous in wider circles than just those of science fiction.

On the other hand, Fletcher did now and then definitely write science fiction himself, which betokened a certain youthfulness of outlook. Anyway, how could anyone be stuffy, stodgy or staid when he was known to spend at least one hour of every day hand-feeding live mealworms to his pack of pet marmosets?

Fletcher owned about a dozen of the little South American monkeys, kept in three or four large cages in a corner of his huge sitting room. They were sweet-looking little beasts, with a fringe of white beard all around their little faces, with their chronic expression of concern.

The census of the pack was not a fixed number. Fletcher encouraged the little animals to breed — not so much because the surplus was always well received by pet dealers, whose payments to the Pratts for those they didn’t keep just about covered the mealworm bill, as, I think, because Fletcher wanted his marmosets to be happy.. He had, of course, given them all names, mostly taken from New York’s literary establishment. The head marmoset, and Fletcher’s personal favorite, was Benny De Voto.

That same room was a great asset to us all. It was spacious, it was conveniently located, and Fletcher and his wife, Inga, were gracious hosts who enjoyed company, When a couple of Hollywood types came to New York with a proposal for a sort of syndicate of science-fiction writers to market their works to film and TV producers the Pratts provided them with a place where they could describe their plan to twenty or so of the area’s leading sf writers. (It came to nothing. The Hollywood duo had nothing tangible to offer the writers.)

Then when many of those same writers wanted to get together to discuss creating an organization of sf writers along lines similar to the Authors League, the Pratts once again offered a venue for the discussion. (And that, too, came to nothing at that time because half the writers declined to join anything that was structured like a trade union, and the other half rejected anything that wasn’t. When SFWA — the Science Fiction Writers of America — at last did come into existence, it was because two writers, Damon Knight and Lloyd Biggle, Jr., declared that they had created it and urged all the other writers whose addresses they could find to send in checks for some $25, upon which they would become members. This was an immediate success.)

Even more important, when such seldom seen heavy hitters as W. Olaf Stapledon, author of Last and First Men, Odd John and many others of science fiction’s early classics, made a trip to New York for other reasons, the Pratts made that room available for a reception. That was a wonderful break for those of us lucky enough to be invited to meet him, and actually a welcome one for Stapledon himself.

He had been invited to New York to participate in a meeting to urge peace in international affairs. Like many respectable European intellectuals, Stapledon found it hard to decline such invitations, but when he got to the Waldorf-Astoria, he found it encircled by a howling mass of anti-communists, perhaps rather like today’s Tea Party hordes, and he welcomed the chance for some quiet conversation.
 

But the Pratts’ appetite for company wasn’t satisfied by what could be accomplished in one — after all — rather small New York apartment. Without telling anyone what they were doing, they went shopping for a more impressive place.

They found what they wanted in Highlands, New Jersey, a wonderfully huge structure that sat on a bluff over the sea, and for the next half-dozen or so years it was, for many of us, our favorite weekend resort.

To be continued.

 
Related posts:

• Fletcher Pratt, Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
• The Ipsy-Wipsy Institute

Walter Kubilius

Walter Kubilius was a long-term member of the Futurians. He was also a pretty prolific (and published, that is) writer, but most of us hardly knew it, because he rarely took part in our discussions on the subject, and I’m pretty sure never got involved in our orgies of collaboration. He did quite a lot of collaborating with, for instance, Fletcher Pratt, but I, for one, wasn’t even aware of it until after Fletcher’s untimely death.

The most notable physical fact about Walter was his height, six feet eight or so. He didn’t talk much, just sat in the ranks, but you wouldn’t miss the fact that he was there because, even seated, he was taller than anyone sitting next to him.

I believe Walter joined the YCL when everyone did, and left, too, when everyone did that as well, but I can’t swear to dates, because Walter didn’t join the Flatbush 3 branch of which I was president but some other somewhere else. But I’m sure his motives were the same in both acts — a sense of duty, followed a few years later by heartbreaking disappointment. I’m not sure I ever saw him again after the Stalin-Hitler Pact, but believe he went on with his job — he was editing a trade paper — and his writing.

He did, I remember, at last find a good-looking girl almost as tall as he was. They got married and lived, I’m confident, as happily as could be until Walter died in 1999 or so, and she followed some years later.

Unfortunately, by the time Judy’s novel came out, the stresses in our marriage were growing, and Judy and I were clearly finally heading toward a (hopefully civilized) divorce.

Before we reached that point, though, we still had a few good years. It looked as though, at whatever cost to our conflicting principles, we were able to function as married people and parents, and so we do what couples like us always did at that period in American life. We began thinking about buying a house.

So we spent quite a few weekends roaming around, mostly Southern Connecticut, northern New Jersey, western Long Island and so on. Judy picked the ads out of the newspaper listings, but there wasn’t much — at a price we could afford.

But Inga Pratt saved us. We had been spending occasional weekends at the giant house Fletcher and Inga Pratt owned, and called the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute, on the Jersey shore. When Judy mentioned that we’d been house-hunting she said, “I know of some places. Want to go for a ride?”

We did.

It took Inga a little while, but she came through. She drove us to 386 West Front Street in the part of Middletown Township called River Plaza (though it always had a Red Bank mailing address), and there it was. Thirteen rooms. On an acre of land, with twelve or fifteen great trees. Surrounded on two sides by a pretty good-looking river, with a beautiful broad porch on those sides so you could sit and watch the river. Or play ping-pong, or have parties or whatever, because that was one fine porch. We could even afford it, because it was astonishingly cheap — though that didn’t matter much because I was a veteran and thus entitled to, among many other things, mortgage guarantees.

True, it did have a few little problems and quirks — problems like it was eighty or ninety years old and was going to represent a steady drain of payments for repairs and maintenance, quirks like it had nine bedrooms and each one had a lock on the door, this I think because of the fact that in World War II it had been a whorehouse for the GIs in Fort Monmouth.

We bought it, and began moving in.

I have to say that, in spite of probable sooner or later marital discords and what were a few newly worrying financial concerns, I loved the house. I had a great sun-drenched, third-floor room, overlooking the trees, lawn and river, for an office, with one just like it that wound up as Cyril’s.

Red Bank was a useful little town, too. It was across the river, but the bridge was right at the foot of our property, so it was about a ten- minute walk to the railroad or bus stations, about fifteen or twenty to Red Bank’s stores, rather decent public library, movie theaters and, say, McDonalds. There was no reason we couldn’t live quite happily there.

 
Well, one reason. Judy no longer wanted to be married, at least to me, and then time came when she wanted me to move out. The children? Oh, they would stay with her.

I didn’t know then, and don’t know now. what the precipitating thing was that moved her to that point. I don’t think she had taken up with Walter Miller yet, and if there was any other significant man, I didn’t know it. But, of course, the signs were beginning to multiply. We had simply stopped getting along very well.

Should I have refused to leave? I don’t know. Anyway, I didn’t. I left.

The next year or so of Judy’s life, I can’t write about very well because I was little involved

As for me, it wasn’t all bad. I took an apartment around the East 14th Street neighborhood in New York and lived my life. This included meeting, and a few years later, marrying, my fourth wife, Carol Metcalf Ulf Stanton, who at the time we met was married to my good friend L. Jerome Stanton. I’ll tell you all about them, but this isn’t their story or, for that matter, mine.

It’s Judy’s, and in Judy’s life the next significant thing that happened that I know of was that one day she offered to move out of the house and sell it to me.

To be continued.

 
Related posts:
Judith Merril, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Admiral of the Little Wooden Navies and Dean of the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute

L. Sprague de Camp, left, and Fletcher Pratt, 1941.

When I was eleven or twelve I uncritically, but obsessively, read every scrap of science fiction I could put my hands on. This primarily meant every back-number sf magazine I could buy for a nickel (as against the extortionate 25¢ cover price for current issues on a newsstand) in the second-hand magazine store. One of the first of those, I think, was an early Amazing Stories Quarterly, and its principal content was a novel called A Voice Across the Years.

It was, I must say now — though I didn’t realize it at the time — a quite undistinguished story, although an unusual one in two respects. In the story, a couple of human beings from Earth have somehow or other happened to land on a civilized planet far, far away, where they are welcomed by being given wardrobes of new clothing. The garments fit them perfectly, because each one was custom made by a machine that measured every part of them and then cut and stitched fabric to an exact fit.

I had not seen any such voluminous discussion of science-fictional tailoring, or indeed of any kind of haberdashery, in any other story, and I was fascinated. I am afraid that at the time I may have been suffering from the delusion that every marvelous invention I saw described in any story was probably going to become reality before long — after all, that’s what had happened with radio, the airplane, the submarine and many other marvels, hadn’t it? So I thought it likely that before long Macy’s would have these machines in their boys’ department to make my first machine-created pair of knickers. (Please remember that I was then maybe eleven years old.)

The other unusual thing about the story was its by-line. It was signed “by Fletcher Pratt and I.M. Stephens.” I had never seen a joint byline before. I had never heard of collaboration. Did it mean that two different people had somehow written a single story? And if so, how?

However they did it, it sounded sort of unpleasant to me — certainly not like anything I would ever want to do myself.

Continue reading ‘Fletcher Pratt’ »

Plant life at The High Line in New York City. (Photo by Ryan Somma.)

The Hydra Club’s Free Private Park That Could Have Been

Way back in the day, by which I mean in the years around 1950, the place to go in New York City, if you wanted to meet science fiction authors, was the Hydra Club. (One of these times I’m going to try to write a little piece about the Hydra Club. This, however, is not yet that time.)

Anyway, the club didn’t have a home of its own. Our members-only gatherings were usually in someone’s apartment; for more elaborate events, we rented space from a hotel or from one of the city’s membership clubs. A few of our members were unhappy with that arrangement, wishing we had a permanent home to call our own, so we could keep things in it. What kind of things? Oh, maybe furniture. Or books. Anyway, things. And at one of the members-only gatherings somebody — if I remember correctly, which is not guaranteed, it may have been Charley Dye, Katherine MacLean’s husband — came up with a suggestion. He knew of a neighborhood where there were a whole bunch of apartments for rent for practically nothing, so if we wanted to sing, or if Fletcher Pratt wanted to give us a drum recital, around some midnight, we wouldn’t be disturbing anybody, because nobody lived there to disturb.

We checked it out and found it was true. So we rented one of the apartments, I believe a three-roomer, for something (memory says) under $20 a month. And we found out why they were so cheap, and so vacant. The apartments lined both sides of an avenue running somewhere south of 14th Street. Down the middle of that avenue, though, ran a one-way stretch of elevated railway line, and along that line, at odd hours of the day and night, now and then ran a locomotive pulling a few refrigerated freight cars full of beef and pork carcasses connecting the butchering headquarters of the city, south of Canal Street, with the nation’s rail network at about where Lincoln Center is now.

Deterred by the noise, and the dirt, and the general ugliness of the thing, not to mention the problems in driving and parking on that avenue, nobody wanted to live there, and hardly anybody did.

I cannot imagine why some billionaire developer didn’t see the possibilities and make a few billion more. For that matter, I can’t see why none of us did; surely there was a way to make quite a lot of money out of the situation. But we didn’t. We stayed there for a few months, and then the nay-sayers among us won out. The apartment was hard to get to. It got dirty between meetings, from that soot and ash that inhabits big-city air, and no one wanted to clean it. And, perhaps most telling point of all, after a meeting broke up at somewhere around midnight, nobody really enjoyed walking through those dirty, dark and apparently unpoliced streets. So we gave up our little home from home and returned to the life of gypsies.

And time passed.

 
Time passed, and the city wove its magic. You might not expect much from that magic, because the major ingredients it had to work with were only soot, fly ash and bird poop. But they were enough.

There were no trains on that elevated railway any more. Much of the railway itself was gone because smaller-minded developers had seen the possibilities here, or at least small fractions of them, and most of the elevated structure north of somewhere around 23rd Street was torn down, the outgoing animal carcasses, and the returning chops and steaks, then transported by trucks.

Okay now, it’s quiz time.

Q. What happens to any flat surface left exposed to the air in New York?

A. It gets dirty.

Q. What happens to that dirty layer if you don’t clean it up?

A. It accumulates more layers of dirt.

Q. What happens to those accumulated layers?

A. Birds flying overhead poop onto them.

Q. What constituent of bird poop has evolved to make that a way of reproducing itself?

A. Plant seeds.

And so it was. The plant seeds, well supplied with fertilizer, watered by the next rain that comes along, grow. That’s just about inevitable, but nobody seems to have anticipated it.

What did happen was that the City Council at last decided to get rid of that remaining stretch of elevated railway, so they sent people to those apartments to give the very few tenants who lived there the good news that they were going to tear it down. And the word the people sent back was, “Like hell you are! We’re hiring a lawyer.”

And then the emissaries climbed up to the top of the structure, and what they saw took their breath away. A riot of wildflowers twenty blocks long, where the seeds transported in bird intestines had germinated and grown into the absolute best wildflower display in North America. It had been the little secret of the people who lived along that stretch of roadway, and they were not going to let it be destroyed. And it hasn’t been.

 
Well, it’s been changed some now. The city fathers weren’t going to ruin this self-starting wonder. They weren’t going to preserve it for just a few local families and their most trusted friends alone, either. They’ve civilized it. There’s a broad footpath that runs the length of it now, with drinking fountains and Porta-Potties and exhibits of quite nice local art and all that sort of thing, all kept spanking clean, and what they’re now calling The High Line has become one of the city’s tourist attractions most relished by the cognoscenti. And nobody built it. It built itself.

And ain’t nature grand, if you just leave it alone to do what it does best?

 
Related posts:
Lester and Judy-Lynn del Rey

Now that I’m getting marginally better at one-hand typing, I can respond a little better to some of your remarks. In particular there were a ton (relatively speaking) of responses to my piece on the Science Fiction League, and two that I just can’t not reply to.

One is from a woman from Singapore whom I met there in 1985 and who is not named Han May. That, however, is the pen name she attached to her novel, Star Sapphire, which just happens to be the only science-fiction novel ever written by a Singaporean. Grand to hear from you, May. (And the rest of you please note that this blog may not be the most popular ever, but it sure does get to some far-off places.)

The other is from Jeff Berkwits (note also that I’m getting braver about using names), who wants to know something about the other science fiction league, the one that hardly anybody else has heard of.

This was a phenomenon of the early 1950s and it consisted of two young men who had a plan to bring science fiction to television in a big way. The design was to get as many of the field’s top writers into a syndicate (yes, I think they called it the Science Fiction League, disregarding Hugo Gernsback’s prior Wonder Stories club), which would then function sort of the way ASCAP and BMI (if those are unfamiliar to you, Google them) do for writers and composers of popular songs. And to get it off the ground, they had written to all the top sf writers in the New York area inviting them to come to an organization meeting in Fletcher Pratt’s apartment on West 58th Street.

Around 20 writers responded with interest. Around nine of them showed up at Fletcher’s at the appointed hour. The other 11 or so (all this is from memory and the numbers are probably not exact. But close) didn’t come in person. They sent me. At the time I was riding high with my literary agency and doing pretty well with it. I represented a clear majority of the best writers in the field; and all the writers who were my clients asked me what to do, and I said I would handle it.

Unfortunately, there was not a great deal to handle. The two organizers were personable and articulate, but they had very little tangible to offer. Their idea did have some possibilities, and we spent some hours discussing them. But at the end, they had neither on-signing money to offer — and that was essential, since signing would have caused problems for some who already had interest from actual producers — nor the names of any producers who were interested in acquiring rights to any of the assembled writers’ properties. I told them that, as far as I was concerned, if they could get any producer to express interest in working with their syndicate I would be willing to reopen the discussion for my writers, but that never happened,

 
Related post:
Let There Be Fandom: The Science Fiction League