The Way the Future Blogs

Possibly in Arizona? Possibly late ’60s?

Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan.

For some time now, I’ve been putting on paper recollections that I think will sooner or later go into what will be either an expanded new edition of my autobiography, The Way the Future Was, or a new book which is a sort of sequel to that one. The trouble is that for some of the most interesting events, including some obscure cons, I’ve forgotten a lot of important details, even such matters as when and where they were held.

Take, for instance the one I think of as the “Johnny Weissmuller Con.” It was in many ways a great con, with a terrific cast of guests — Robert Heinlein, Jack Williamson, Gordie Dickson and many another writer (including me) and even such rarely observed media people as Johnny Weissmuller and Tarzan’s favorite Jane, Maureen O’Sullivan.

Maureen O’ had been one of my most-loved stars ever since she starred in that early, and pretty sappy, sf film, Just Imagine. Getting a chance to talk to her was pure gravy. (When you saw the two of them on the stage at the con, it seemed that the personalities of their roles in the Tarzan movies were drawn from the real-life personalities of the pair of them. Smart, competent Jane had to help musclebound but tongue-tied Tarzan come up with answers to the questions in their on-stage interview.)

So if any of you remember anything about that con, I’d be grateful if you dropped me a line.

What the Other Guy Does

I said earlier that there are many, many ways of collaborating, and there are.

There’s taking what somebody else knows all about but has no writing skills; you get him to talk about whatever it is or give you a rough draft of what he has to say and you make it good. (I did something like that for Ian Ballantine with a couple of early novels that had originally been written by someone else, Turn the Tigers Loose and The God of Channel One.)

There’s the kind where one partner is thought to have the better ideas so he writes a sort of outline of the story and the other fellow fleshes it out. (Which I did for a number of not very good stories with Cyril Kornbluth and for two, not that much better, with Isaac Asimov — those two are still available for anyone who really, really wants to read them in Isaac’s book The Early Asimov.)

Actually, I rather like taking someone else’s draft and making it publishable. The nine or so books that I wrote with Jack Williamson were done more or less that way. The first of them, Undersea Fleet, he gave to me as a jumble of notes and scenes. He had worked over the material a dozen different ways without ever having it jell into a novel, so he turned it over to me to get a fresh view on it.

The other eight books we did were mostly written on purpose as collaborations, bearing in mind that Jack lived in New Mexico and I in either New Jersey or Illinois. Although we traveled together now and then, we rarely sat down to write together. What we did was to exchange letters over a period of, usually, some months, talking about something we’d like to see in the book — perhaps a new scientific theory (we got a lot of mileage out of the steady-state hypothesis until it was proved wrong). And when we’d thought up all the complications and implications we could Jack, bless his soul, would sit down and write a complete first draft and mail it to me. Then I would do a lot of work on it and we’d give it to the publisher.
 

The absolute best collaboration technique I’ve come across was the one I used when writing with Cyril Kornbluth, and we discovered it by accident. The way it worked, Cyril would come out to our house on the river in Red Bank, New Jersey, where we kept a room for him on the third floor with his own bath, bed and typewriter. Then he and I would have dinner, and he would have a drink or two while I had coffee, and we’d chat about what we’d like to see in the new book — characters, situations, settings, whatever interested one of us. When we thought we had enough to start writing we’d flip a coin. The loser would go upstairs to his typewriter and write the first four pages. Then he’d come down and say, “You’re on!” And the other guy would go up and write the next four, and so on, turn and about, until we got to the page that said “The End.”

At this point we had a whole book, though not a truly finished product. Somebody, usually me, had to go over that manuscript and fix errors, incongruities and infelicities, maybe add some explanations and transitions and stuff and do a little polish, and then we’d give it to the publisher.

There was only one thing wrong with this system. It worked fine with Cyril, and not at all with any other writer in the world. I know this because I tried with several, including several really good ones, and that sort of telepathy that kept the two of us on message without ever explicating exactly what the message was never materialized.

Except with one writer whom I had never thought of.

Continue reading ‘Fred’s Distilled Writing Wisdom, Part 3’ »

Jack and Blanche Williamson at Seacon, 1979 (Photo by Frank Olynyk.)
 

Jack Williamson, of course, had become a civilian again along with all the rest of us. His plan was to go back to the college education he had been forced to abandon long before because he didn’t have the money to continue it. Now there was this wonderful new law, called the GI Bill of Rights, which would give any veteran who wanted to go to school money to pay the tuition and all the other expenses and a few bucks extra each month as a stipend. With that to make it possible, Jack signed up at Eastern New Mexico University, right there in Portales, New Mexico, quite close to the small community called Pep, where the Williamson family ranch was located.

In his writing career, he hit the ground running, turning out kinds of stories that were, if anything, better and more mature than before. He had everything he needed. He could stay in the large house that dominated the family ranch, where there was always a room for him.

And, yes, he had a studio of his own to write in, because he had built one for himself out of surplus planks nailed together long before.. No one disturbed him there, though if you stopped typing long enough to listen you might hear the rustling of the tribe of rattlesnakes that lived under the floorboards. (That studio survives to today. So do the rattlesnakes.)

His future seemed quite predictable. What changed it was Blanche Slaton Harb.

Young Blanche Slaton had been young Jack Williamson’s schooldays sweetheart when both were pre-teens. Jack never got over it. When they had grown to wedding size, he would have liked nothing better than to ask Blanche to marry him. What stopped him was poverty.

He didn’t have a job and he didn’t have much hope of a future. What he did have was a rigorous, if old-fashioned, conviction that you didn’t go around asking women to marry you when you couldn’t support them. So he let her get away, and somebody else did marry her, and for the next several decades Jack moved about the world and sometimes came across quite nice and available women, but never one that came up to the memory of pretty, sweet, dearly beloved — and lost — Blanche Slaton.

Until, that is, the time when Jack got out of the Air Force and returned to the Portales area, and there was Blanche. Her husband had died unexpectedly, long before his time. Blanche was a widow, supporting herself on a little women’s clothing store she had started in Portales’ town square … and again marriageable.

Jack did not make the same mistake twice. He courted her at once, married her as soon as she said yes, and in 1947 began one of the happiest marriages I know of. It lasted almost forty years, until Blanche died in a tragic traffic accident in 1985.

 
To be continued when I get to it. . . .

 
Related posts:

Jack Williamson at Cinvention, 1949.

Well, no, it doesn’t, or at least it doesn’t begin quite right away, because in order to describe how Jack Williamson and I became really tight lifelong friends, I have to digress by telling you something about another dear friend, Dirk Wylie.

Dirk — old Brooklyn Tech chum, fellow Futurian, et many a cetera — didn’t have nearly as nice a war as most of us did. When, in 1946, he was at last a civilian he had a souvenir acquired in the Battle of the Bulge which left his spinal column always painful and frequently incapacitating. He had a full disability pension, but he was still in his twenties and in full possession of his faculties. He spent the first time after the end of the war going through hospitals and doctors and courses of treatment. But when nothing cured his spine and the medics told him he was as good as he was going to get, he wanted a job.

So one day, he and I conspired to see what he could do. It was impossible for him to go out to work, so it would have to be something he could do at home. If possible, it should have something to do with his interests in writing and publishing. On consideration we took the easy way out. We made him a literary agent.

I knew that was easy, because I had done it myself as a teenager. Of course, I hadn’t made any money out of it, though it did lead to my first editorial job, but I had some ideas that should produce a growing, though initially small, income for Dirk, and with his disability pension he could weather the thin times. So we rented a mail drop at a good address on Fifth Avenue in New York, and we printed up some stationery listing Dirk as the agent and me as an assistant (because I had promised to help him get started), and we were in business.

All we lacked was clients.

Fortunately for us, the climate was favorable. Book editors in America had always turned a blind eye to science fiction. But the times were prosperous, and a few fan groups had started publishing some of those great old serials as hardcover books. Startled salesmen for the real publishing companies had noticed that these oddities seemed to sell when the amateurs could get them into a store. When they got back to their home offices, they reported this fact to their company’s editors. Who scratched their heads, cautiously tried a title or two and realized there was some money to be made in this sf thing.

Accordingly, Dirk and I wrote letters announcing this new fact to all the pro writers we could think of. Jack Williamson was one such, and he responded by shipping us a couple of his own stories that he thought might work in this exciting new format. (They did.)

The first of them was a manuscript stitched together from two long novelettes Jack had recently sold to John Campbell’s Astounding, “With Folded Hands…” and “…And Searching Mind.” I tried them out on Jack Goodman, the managing editor at Simon & Schuster. Goodman (I should finally confess, since it no longer matters) was one of the most terrifyingly intelligent human beings I have ever met, and in my dealings with him I was always aware that, with his smarts and his vast publishing experience, he could swindle me and my clients whenever he chose. Fortunately, he didn’t choose. His offers were all fair, in line with what other publishers were agreeing to.

When the book came out, retitled The Humanoids, it did well. That sale was the first of many for Jack through our agency.

And that was what developed into one of the most cherished friendships of my life.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
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Jack Williamson
 

The first “Worldcon” wasn’t quite as globally representative as one might have wished; I don’t know that any of the attendees came from any country but the U.S.A and, maybe, Canada. But it was the last chance we had for a real international gathering, because that year of 1939 was the beginning of that event that interfered with everyone’s plans for that sort of frippery, namely World War II.

America didn’t get involved in actual combat until Japan took its ill-advised crack at Pearl Harbor, late in 1941, but that was the end of even the so-called Worldcons. Most fans were male and mostly in their late teens or early 20s, and thus the natural prey of the draft. So, whether called up or volunteering, most of us were soon wearing uniforms.

By 1943, both Jack Williamson and I were in the Air Force and both had wound up as weathermen. I was just beginning. After doing basic training in Miami Beach, I was ordered to Chanute Field, Illinois, to learn how to read a theodolite, plot a synoptic map, operate a teletype and release a hydrogen-filled pilot balloon to investigate the velocity and direction of the winds aloft, after which I would be sent to join some weather station in the capacity of its lowest professional level, as a weather observer, Army Specialist Number 784.

Meanwhile, Jack, ahead of me as ever, had already done that a couple of years earlier. He had then served as a working observer at an actual weather station in the field, until he applied for promotion as a weather forecaster, ASN 787. This required going back to Chanute Field for additional training, and, by the grace of that useful Someone, his orders put him there over the same weeks as mine.

I don’t mean to exaggerate the significance of this chance meeting. It wasn’t a case of two dear buddies getting together for a long-desired reunion. We barely knew each other. What’s more, we didn’t have much free time on either of our schedules, and what one of us did have didn’t always mesh with the free time on the other’s. But I think we both enjoyed the chance to talk science fiction again, even if briefly.

Then our courses ended. Jack went off to an American air base on the way to his permanent assignment, which was to be forecaster for a landing strip on one of the myriad tiny islands that usefully dot the Pacific Ocean for the benefit of bomber crews that can’t quite make it home after a mission, while I went off to spend a year at the weather station on the base at Enid, Oklahoma, before my orders for Italy came through.

Then the war ended. (How quickly I write that down … and how slowly that event arrived in the real world.) All of us now being civilians once more, I wrote a letter to Jack that started one of the longest-lasting and most rewarding relationships of my professional life.

None of that might have happened, though, if it hadn’t been sparked by what was happening in the life of the person who was then my oldest friend, Dirk Wylie. But for that we need a digression, which will happen in Part Next (of I don’t know how many) in the Jack Williamson story, coming up shortly after I get it written.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
Related posts:

Jack the Wonderful Williamson: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4

Jack Williamson, center, outside Nycon 1, the first Worldcon.
The worshipful fanboy at the left is me.
 

I did by chance run into Jack Williamson, briefly, at the first-ever Worldcon in 1939, which was in the same summer as New York’s first World’s Fair — and which Donald Wollheim had proposed we New York fans should use as the opportunity to convene a World Science Fiction Convention in the hope that it would attract some foreign fans who would be coming to our city for the Fair anyway. Mark the fact that the original idea had come from a Futurian.

But in the remorseless fan warfare of the period the other guys had more votes than we did, so they took it away from us, and the reason that first actual contact was “briefly” is that seven of us, me included, were unfairly ejected from the actual meeting. “Unfairly” because we were thrown out for something we hadn’t done. Dave Kyle had done it, and he was allowed to stay. As it happened, I then spent the time of the con in the bar next door, where most of the writers wound up anyway, but Jack didn’t happen to be one of them.

However, we Futurians were nothing if not resourceful. On the spot, we created a meeting of our own for the next day and invited all those attending the actual con to come to ours as well. On such short notice the only hall we could secure for our meeting was in remote Brooklyn. A fair number of the fans present managed to get there, but only one of the actual writers.

That one writer, though, was the always adventurous Jack Williamson.

Since he was clearly the star of our meeting I wasn’t lucky enough to have much one-on-one time with him, but we all had a free and easy several hours of chatting, and I think most of those present were glad they had come — although if they had known in advance that the hall we had secured, the only one we could get on short notice, was primarily the headquarters of the local Communist Party, there might have been some qualms.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
Related posts:

Jack the Wonderful Williamson: Part 1, Part 3, Part 4