The Way the Future Blogs

I was not employed by Popular Publications for five or six months, during which time I didn’t look for another job. I decided to go for full-time writing instead, but when that period was over — when I got a telegram from Al Norton, asking me to come back as his assistant, at close to twice what I’d been earning as editor of my own two magazines — I said sure.

Everything I wrote in that period sold, some of it at a word rate twice as high as my highest before then, for a total income per week of work that was actually a tad higher than I had been getting from editorial salary plus my spare-time writing. Not everything sold immediately, though, and all in all that experience validated what I had long been saying for a long time: freelancing paid pretty well, but the checks came when they came, and not a minute before. It was nothing you could finance a marriage on.

And, as it happened, my girlfriend, Doris, was getting pretty tired of being a girlfriend around that time. She much preferred the honorific “wife.” But we’ll come to that a little later.

 
Although I had been out of the office only a few months, there had been some big changes already and more were coming. Frank A. Munsey’s magazine empire, consisting mostly of the weekly Argosy and a few other odds and ends, had been up for sale for some time, and when the price declined enough to be a bargain, Harry Steeger and Harold S. Goldsmith bought Munsey’s stable.

The one magazine that they continued pretty much unchanged was Famous Fantastic Mysteries, along with its editor, Mary Gnaedinger, a friendly and able woman a little older than I, who had settled in in what had once been my office. Steeger had big plans for Argosy. He was considering making it a men’s magazine, perhaps a little like Esquire, but he was taking his time making it happen.

My biggest surprise was that Jane Littel was gone, and a middle-aged man, salvaged from Munsey’s payroll, was editing the love pulps. I never met him but he created a minor annoyance for me. He found a poem of mine in the inventory, and not having been told that it was meant to be used under a pseudonym, went ahead and published it as by Frederik Pohl.

I do not claim that my published verse would make Frost or Eliot envious, but I didn’t want to be remembered for my sappier 25¢-a-line effusions. It turned out not to matter, since apparently none of the readers of the love pulps had ever heard of me anyway.

Rog Terrill’s monkey cage of male young editors had been depleted by the draft, and Al Norton’s helpers were gone as well, every one. I never knew any of Rog’s replacements well enough to remember their names.. Al, after losing all of his, had begun to replace them with two young women. One was named Olga Mae Quadland, friendly, able and good at the obligatory skills of spelling, grammar and punctuation. The other was a very pretty recent divorcee from San Diego, in New York for the first time of her life, and, actually, the one who turned out to be my second wife.

But that’s another story, and one that we haven’t come to yet.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
Related posts:

• Popular Publications, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 6, Part 7

Popular Publications ’ Super Science Stories, No. 1 &mash; yours truly, Editor.

If you made a right turn at Jane Littell’s door you found yourself in the business wing of the company’s offices, where people took care of distribution, billing, advertising and all the other grubbier parts of the publishing business. At least I suppose that’s what they did. In the four years I worked for Popular Publications I never once went there. Turn to the left. though, and you were at the pulsing heart of the pulp-paper experience.

Turning that way meant you were then heading north, paralleling the adjacent East River. On your right would be an expanse of blank wall, then two sets of office doors, then another several yards of blank walls before you came to any normal-sized office. At that point you would have passed the two king-sized offices that were the private lairs of the two makers and shakers who owned and ran Popular Publications, Harold S. Goldsmith and Harry Steeger.

What, exactly, either of them did in their throne rooms each day I can’t imagine. I am quite sure that neither of them read any appreciable number of the stories their editors bought.

Goldsmith did sign checks, I knew, but that accounted for no more than twenty or thirty minutes a week. Steeger. I thought, did carry a heavier burden, mostly because he had decreed that he personally had to approve every last cover of every painting of a cover for any of the Popular magazines before it went to the photo-engraver. (“My theory,” he told me, “is that if I just okayed covers I personally liked sooner or later I would attract enough people who agreed with me for the covers to work.” Probably it did. He never changed his tastes, and over a period of some twenty years his pulps kept returning a profit.)

The other thing that I know Steeger’s office to have been used for was conferences with his editors, generally to tell them that their newsstand sales figures were unsatisfactory and to discuss what to do about it. (Which was usually to fire the editor and give the work to someone else. Or, alternatively, to give the editor under discussion a little more money, in salary or budget — or both — in the hope that that will encourage him to make the magazine better. I had all three types of meetings with him at one time or another.)

 
Next, heading northward from the executive offices on that arm of the T, was an office intermediate in size between the White-Pohl-Littell cubbyholes and the grand palaces of Steeger and Goldsmith. This one was the property of Rogers Terrill. Rog’s official title was Editor in Chief, Popular Publications, but actually he had little to do — in a day-to-day sense, almost nothing — with any of the publications I’ve mentioned so far.

My belief is that Rogers Terrill had at one time been much more important in shaping Harry Steeger’s policies than he had become by 1939, when I went to work for Popular Publications … and Harry Steeger had gained a little more self-confidence. (A few years later when White, too, was history, some say that Steeger edited a few manuscripts, anonymously, himself.)

Then, the office next to Terrill’s and the one at the end of the line on the south side of the corridor, belonged to Alden H. Norton, whose work was similar to Terrill’s: both of them had somewhat larger spaces than the rest of us — and needed the space, because they each had a secretary sharing the rooms.

Both of them, in fact, more or less ran their own publishing companies, with ten or fifteen magazines each to get out. They could not, of course, do that by themselves. So they each had a large nearby office packed with three or four junior editors, who did all the scut work: copy-editing the ms, proofreading the two sets of proof for each magazines, writing house ads and features … yes, and reading the slush.

Come back for the story, which we’ll publish as soon as I write it.

 
Related posts:

• Popular Publications, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

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’ »

H. Beam Piper, 1957.

For a while, H. Beam Piper was one of the clients of my literary agency in the late 1950s. He had first attracted attention with his story “He Walked Around the Horses,” about a man who, having done that, apparently disappeared into another reality. But perhaps he is best known for his successful “Little Fuzzy” stories

Piper was a railroad man from birth. He lived in the Western Pennsylvania rail centers of those great continent-spanning lines that appeared after the Civil War. That war was important to Beam. He had strong feelings about such concepts as heroism and personal honor, and he took sides. The side he favored was the slaveholding but militarily exciting Confederacy. Mostly self-educated, Beam was thrilled by the exploits of. those dashing Rebel commanders, in particular by John Mosby, the Southron cavalry officer who made parts of Virginia uninhabitable by Federal troops or sympathizers.

When Beam mentioned to me that he had, on his own time and just for the fun of it, written a lengthy work about his hero, I reminded him of my Basic Maxim No. 1: “Writers write mostly for the fun of it. Agents exist to see they get money for having fun.” So he turned the finished piece over to me, and I promptly sold “Rebel Raider” for a decent amount of money.

With things like that and the better prices I was able to negotiate for his science fiction, Beam was enjoying a modest prosperity. He formed the habit of coming to New York once or twice a month. His first stop was usually at my literary agency office on Fifth Avenue just across from Madison Square, where we would usually pick up a few other writers to go out for dinner.

Beam had had little experience with exotic eats — high cuisine was not apparently popular in Altoona at that time — and so loved to experiment with menu items. Not always happily. When he ordered a dish that was meant to contain uncooked Italian ham, he sent it back to be properly fried. He wasn’t deeply into nutrition, either. When a waiter would bring him an entree with crisp green and red vegetables artistically surrounding it on the platter, Beam might spread his hands over his eyes and cry, “Vittamins! Vittamins! Take the foul things away!”

That happy state continued for some time, and then I closed the literary agency down and plunged into the line of work God (or Someone) had obviously intended for me all along, the telling of stories. I saw less of a lot of writers who had been clients, especially out-of-towners like Beam.

Stories floated in from Western Pennsylvania, first astonishingly that he had quit his job. That was a little worrying, in the case of a lifelong old railroad man like Beam, but it indicated good news. I had fixed him up with a new agent, my old friend (and one time boss at Popular Publications) Rogers Terrill. I was glad to see that things were working out for both of them. . . .

And then another story came in. Beam had gotten married!

That was a major shocker. In all the time I had known him, Beam had never shown the slightest flicker of sexual interest in any female. (Or, I hasten to say, in any male, either.) And the wedding seemed to have taken place — wait for it — in Paris. In Paris! In the city of lights, the home to romantics and lovers and all the other things that Beam had spent his life proving he was not.

It was impossible. But there it was.

That was all we knew. It seemed that none of us in our once-in-a-while-dining-together circle had maintained close contact with Beam, so we knew very few details.

Then we heard nothing much at all for quite a while. Then what we did hear was about as bad as it could be.

 
I heard the first part of the bad news right away. A neighbor called to tell me that Rogers Terrill had just died, she thought of a heart attack. That made sense. Rog’s Jersey shore house had about as much lawn to mow as mine did, which was the better fraction of an acre. Taking account how his face blanched and his limbs began to quiver when he cut it, Rog’s wife had long beseeched him to hire one of the neighborhood teenagers to handle that chore, but Rog was stubborn.

We arranged the sending of condolence cards and went on with our lives, and then, not very long later, we heard the rest of it. Beam was dead, too. He had shot himself.

Bit by bit, the rest of the bad news piled on. There had been a divorce, Beam had settled everything he owned in joint accounts with his wife, but now the lawyers were barring access to the funds by either party. Rog had failed to provide for a plan to carry on payments to his authors as checks came in in the event of his death, so money was silting up in trust funds that could not be tapped by humans until these other packs of lawyers came to an agreement, and Beam ran out of money.

There was no reason for that to happen. I wasn’t then particularly well off but I would, any one of us would, have been happy to go to any necessary trouble in order to front him enough for his three hots a day as needed to keep him alive.

But that couldn’t be. Remember Beam’s concepts of personal honor. He was incapable of asking for that kind of help. He was incapable of letting anyone know how desperately he needed it. He did still have two resources. One was a windowsill where pigeons came down to coo and flutter. The other was a 22-caliber handgun with a few rounds left in it.

(This is the story as I first heard it from one of Beam’s relatives. I have since heard slightly different versions from others, but I’ll stick with what I heard first.)

Every evening, then, Beam would open the window. When a fat pigeon landed there, he would shoot it in the head, clean it, pluck it and broil it in his little gas flame, and that would be his dinner. And when he had come down to a single remaining round, he put it in his own brain.