The Way the Future Blogs

Cyril Kornbluth’s death came as a very bad thing that had suddenly happened to all of us, but it wasn’t really a surprise. Cyril’s doctors had told him, definitely and explicitly, that his heart had been worn out in the Bulge. It was barely able to continue to pump blood around its system.

It wouldn’t go on doing it, either, unless Cyril made some revolutionary changes in his lifestyle. Step One: no more cigarettes, coffee or alcohol — ever — for the rest of his life. Very, very limited amounts of spicy foods, and even more limited amounts of salt. Any deviation from any of this, ever, would have about the same effect as putting a gun to his temple and pulling the trigger. He would very quickly die.

Cyril took what the doctor told him seriously. He even tried to follow the doctor’s orders. When he came out for a brief stay with Carol and me, Carol baked him salt-free bread and cooked him fully dietary meals. Cyril ate them, without showing any signs of pleasure — I could see why, because I had tasted them for myself.

We didn’t do any writing, though. We didn’t even do any talking about writing. When I tried to get something going by showing him a section from my current work that I wasn’t feeling good about, Cyril took the pages from me and scanned them. Then he handed them back to me. “Needs salt,” he said.

And he went home, but, of course, Cyril just couldn’t live that way.

He stuck it out as long as he could, perhaps as long as a couple of months, and then he decided that he’d rather be dead than living like that. So back came the booze and the cigarettes and the salt shaker and all the other things that made Cyril’s life worth living and sure enough, next thing you know, his limbs were jerking and his eyes were rolled up in his head and he was busily dying on the train station platform.

 
All right. End of story for Cyril. The new major characters were Mary and the boys.

Cyril and I had had our ups and downs, but we had been through too much together for me to even consider walking away from their needs. I got dressed and jumped in the car and drove, as fast I could, through the hundred miles or so of rush-hour traffic between Red Bank and Levittown. Mary was waiting for me at the door, quite distraught — but, blessedly, sober.

First thing, we had to decide what on that list most urgently needed doing. There were a lot of contenders for the top need. She needed money for buying stuff, mostly food, for the kids and herself that day. They needed money, lots of it, to keep on providing for herself and the kids for the rest of their lives.

They needed to know what to do with Cyril’s corpse, which was, if I remember correctly, at that moment in the back of a station wagon borrowed from somebody in the Levittown Fire Department and parked at the curb in front of the house. They needed to know if there were documents to file, as there surely were, to properly record the fact that Cyril was now one with the ages.

That wasn’t the end of the urgent needs, but it was sort of at least the end of the easiest ones. We had some big, big breaks. What I had been dreading as the toughest of problems to deal with turned out to be the easiest. Mary wasn’t the first widow of a GI to fine herself in exactly that situation. She might’ve been about the one millionth. The government itself had set up the Veterans Administration to make sure that everything a veteran needed was available to give and, since negotiating with even a friendly government agency can curdle your blood, a horde of new veterans’ organizations produced a ton of smart, energetic, can-do volunteers to get the widows and orphans all the help they needed.

“What you’re entitled to, Mrs. Kornbluth, is so much for yourself and so much for each of your sons. It takes a little while to get started, though. Do you need money right now? Of course you do. There’s a special emergency lump-sum package we can get for you. I’ll start on that right away.”

They were, in short, wonderful. They almost made me cancel my intention to never join the beer-bellies of any veterans organization. But not quite.

The last disposition we had to deal with that day was Cyril himself. Happened my maternal grandfather, that bald and stone-deaf old man who had lived with us for part of the last years of his life, had been cremated near by. I checked some addresses and made a few calls.

And then Mary and I went to the front door of the crematorium, the station wagon with Cyril’s body tagging along behind. Somebody took the wagon and Cyril to the back entrance, while Mary and I were seated in a small auditorium, maybe fifteen or twenty seats, facing a drawn curtain. Music was playing. It didn’t take long. The drawn curtain rolled back. There was Cyril, looking very grave but otherwise about as he always looked, in a shirt, tie and jacket in one of those cardboard “coffins” they use for cremations.

They gave us a few minutes to look at him. Then Cyril and his casket began to roll away, into a pair of double doors that had rolled open behind him. I think we actually saw flames. I know we definitely felt heat. Then the double doors closed and the curtain came back down, and that was the last I ever saw of Cyril.

At some point Mary got a cardboard carton, not unlike the packaging that your milk comes in from the supermarket, that contained Cyril’s ashes. I don’t know what she did with them.

Part 3 coming up soon

 
Related posts:

• Mary Kornbluth, Part 1, Part 3
• Cyril

Mary Byers longed to leave Ohio farm life to become a New York Futurian.

Mary Byers was a science-fiction fan who lived on a farm in Ohio with her uncle and a few other family members. Through fan talk, she heard of the New York Futurians and yearned to live that kind of life.

When the chance came, she jumped on a bus (or a train) and headed for New York City. Her uncle, though, followed after, and when he caught up with her, he brought her back. She got away a couple more times with the same result. But then Cyril Kornbluth made a more complicated escape plan, with more help, and Mary got away.

After a while, Cyril and Mary married. They lived for a time in New England, where Cyril took, and passed, a wartime government course in machine shop, after which he was considered a skilled machinist. World War II came along. Cyril got caught up in it with the consequences that ultimately killed him, and all the time he was soldiering in the ETO, Mary was alone, going through her own kind of hell in Chicago. And somewhere in this period Mary became a stone alcoholic.

An alcoholic is not just a drunk. An alcoholic is a person who, having taken the first drink, cannot stop drinking until she, or he, has become sodden.

(Read up on it or Google it. I don’t know many details, and some of what I do know I wish I didn’t.) Cyril’s attempts at dealing with it were sometimes brutal. Once, when he and I were driving somewhere, I think to the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute, Cyril took a deep breath and said, “I wish I was not so cruel.” The bad times for Mary, I know, without knowing many more facts than the ones I have told you, were very, very bad.

But not all the times were bad. When Mary was clinging to AA and resolutely not taking that first drink, I think they were quite good.

This is in itself a puzzle to me. When things were good with Mary, she seemed to be the perfect wife, he appeared to be the standard-issue Brady Bunch husband and, all in all, Cyril behaved in astonishingly unlike Cyril ways. They were — for other people — quite normal ways, but for Cyril totally unexpected ones.

He began to be a father — two boy babies, John and David — he was writing well on his own constantly improving stories and he and I put out a ton of collaboration work as novels for Ian Ballantine. Things were suddenly very conventionally good for the little Kornbluth family.

That was when my money problems began to sting.

Mary proved she was a perfectly normal sf wife by nagging Cyril to dump me as his agent.

 
When I lost Cyril as a client, I had lost everything. I began to make plans to close the agency down.

During this period, Cyril and I had lost contact. It wasn’t just the money. It was the fact that there were the two clients I had led the farthest and expected the most from, Cyril and Isaac Asimov, both gone.

I didn’t see him again until, completely by chance. I ran into him at, I think, Horace Gold’s apartment. I prize that chance meeting because we were easy with each other again — “What are you writing?” “Hey, that was a pretty good novelette in Galaxy last month.” Shop talk of two old friends.

The reason I prize it most was because I never saw Cyril alive again. One morning not long after that, the phone rang. Carol answered it. It was Mary, quite hysterical.

Cyril had had to go into New York for a business meeting that morning, but it had snowed during the night, so he had to shovel the driveway before he could get the car out. When he got to the Long Island Rail Road station, the train was already there and beginning to load passengers. He parked the car as fast as he could, ran for the train and dropped dead of a heart attack on the platform.

Part 2 coming up shortly.

 
Related posts:

• Mary Kornbluth, Part 2, Part 3
• Cyril

Robert A. Heinlein:
In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1,
Learning Curve, 1907–1948
By William H. Patterson
(Tor, Hardcover, $29.99).

When I read a biography of someone I’ve known well, there are two things I look for on first inspection. The first is errors of fact, and I’m glad to say that Patterson’s detailed and well researched study seems innocent of any serious quantity of these. The other is more personal. It’s learning new things about the subject’s behavior that you had never guessed, particularly when they impact on yourself. I did find a couple of those in Learning Curve.

I was pretty sure Robert Heinlein regarded me as a good editor — if not, he would never have rewritten some of his stories to my specifications, especially at the pitiful rates I was able to pay. But I hadn’t known until I read it in the book that Robert had been so upset when I left the company that he asked New York friends to find out if I had been unjustly canned, writing, “If he” — that’s me — “got a dirty deal from them and wishes his friends to boycott them, I don’t care to do business with them.” I hadn’t had any idea of such a thing, and I have to say I was touched when I read it in Patterson’s book.

There was one other thing I learned there that I hadn’t suspected, and that was that in letters to his friends Heinlein referred to me as “Freddie.” That was an even bigger surprise. It’s about a year since I first discovered that. I haven’t yet decided whether or not I like it.

* * *

Patterson’s book starts at the very beginning, or maybe a little before the actual beginning, of Robert’s life, by introducing his parent and grandparents. This is of interest, of course, only insofar as it helped to shape Heinlein himself. Actually, by Patterson’s account he was not seriously unlike any other Midwestern kid, growing up in a family with limited amounts of money, and one of the things I most appreciate about Patterson is the briskness with which he moves us through the pages of genealogy. It is when Robert himself successfully seeks to be appointed to the United States Naval Academy that his life begins to diverge from the rest.

Even someone who has never read a word of Heinlein would value Paterson’s book for the way he describes the life of a midshipman. It was a demanding period in Robert’s life, since any upperclassman could demand their attention at any time — and if they were unsatisfactory in any way — or if the upperclassman just happened to feel like it — the punishment was a good beating on the rump with a wooden bar.

Robert did well at the Academy but he didn’t complete the expected trajectory of becoming an actual Navy officer. His eyes were the first to betray him, then other parts of his body (most famously, the ones he joked about as his “asteroids”) . He never got to fight in World War II, but spent the war years in working on an oddball research team based at the Philadelphia Navy Yard with Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp and a female naval officer named Virginia Gerstenfeld, who, as everyone well knows, before long became Mrs. Robert A. Heinlein.

One of the questions Patterson’s admirable book did not answer for me was precisely how it happened that Robert so thoroughly switched his affections from Leslyn, who was Wife No. 2, to Ginny, who wound up the series as Wife No. 3 and Last. (I am not deliberately mocking Heinlein’s plurality of marriages; as everyone knows who knows me at all, I am not in a position to do that.)

I confess that I was never particularly fond of Ginny, nor she of me, but as we both were fond of Robert, we maintained courteous relations. But I would like to know more than I do about how Leslyn got replaced with Ginny. True, there’s no doubt that Leslyn was an alcoholic and given to fits of bad behavior. Maybe that’s really all there is to know. But just about all we know of those events is what Ginny tells us. I’d love to hear Leslyn’s side of the story, and I am feeling guilty about that because Leslyn did appeal to me for sympathy, and I, unwilling to get mixed up in a private affair, discouraged her letters until she gave up.

Ah, well. Read the book anyway. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. I did.

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. . . .

 
Related posts:

    Newt Gingrich

Newton Leroy Gingrich’s latest I’ll-say-anything-for-a-headline proclamation is really pretty weird. What he says is that in order to understand President Obama’s political activities you have to know that Obama is really acting according to Kenyan, not American, political practices.

Actually, I think that’s pretty dumb. I’ve read a lot on the subject, and I’ve been there myself, but I couldn’t tell you how Kenyan political practices are different from those of any number of other little countries that are trying to figure out just how their new democracy thing should work, and I really don’t think Gingrich could pass a test on it himself. I’m pretty sure that the real purpose of that press release was actually a somewhat slimy one. That is, his intention was to reinforce that preposterous Tea Party nonsensical claim that our president isn’t an American at all.

Their claim is that, in spite of the fact that the official records, the newspapers that record such things and those people, still alive, who were involved in any of those activities at the time say he is an American (and they all say the same thing), they’re all lying. This is, of course, pathological. There is definitely no truth to the Tea Party goons’ claim that Barack Obama wasn’t really born in Hawaii, a fully accredited state of the United States, but in some foreign country.

In spite of all the really unarguable amount of evidence that he was born exactly where and when he says he was, there are a lot of people who are going around claiming that Obama is a foreigner and thus his presidency is illegal under the Constitution and that the 2008 election that he won by such a smashing vote doesn’t count. My personal opinion is that most of them don’t really believe what they’re saying, because it’s just too ridiculous, but they hate Obama so much that they’ll say anything they think they can get away with.

And when I see Gingrich trying to lend credence to what he knows isn’t true, it makes me wonder who Gingrich is getting his political advice from these days, because I used to know one of his advisors pretty well.

 
You see, there was a time when I really thought that if politicians would get in the habit of reading science fiction for fun instead of sticking to, say, the shoot-’em-up Westerns preferred by Dwight Eisenhower, we’d have better government. But then along came Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and shot that speculation down in flames.

Gingrich liked science fiction. He took it seriously enough that he had a major sf writer, my good friend (and political foe) Jerry Pournelle, flying back and forth to Washington to advise him.

I don’t know exactly what the advice Jerry gave Gingrich was, but there was a lot of it — enough so that it used up a lot of Jerry’s time. Which had the result that Jerry was seriously late in delivering his part of a book that I also had a part in. And, as I wouldn’t get paid for my part until the whole thing, including Jerry’s part, was turned in, this caused me to get on Jerry’s case to get the damn thing done.

The advice couldn’t have been too bad, because Gingrich was flying high in those days. Some people were getting the feeling, in fact, that one day not too far in the future we might be looking ar a President Gingrich. Then, however, some of Gingrich’s political adversaries began digging up some of the, well, the nastier parts of Gingrich’s personal history and getting them published in the papers. And he retired from those heights in disgrace.

Well, if you dig deep enough in almost anyone’s past you’ll probably find something that he really wishes hadn’t come up. The Republicans proved that when, after spending $40 million of taxpayers’ money in the search, they finally unearthed Monica Lewinsky and thus stripped President Clinton of the power to act effectively for the last part of his presidential term.

But we’re a forgiving people, we Americans. Clinton is now most Americans’ best-loved living ex-president. Even Richard Nixon, the American president who avoided prison only because his successor gave him a full pardon, managed to raise his head after lying low for a while.

And, as we’ve seen, Gingrich is getting plenty of newspaper space and TV time for his political rebirth.

 
Apart from his (ick) politics, Gingrich didn’t seem to be a bad guy. He visited an occasional sf con and was pleasant to talk to on any nonpolitical subject. Indeed, if I was on my way by rocket to Mars and had to pick one other male as co-pilot of our rocket ship — and that other male had to be someone prominent in government — Gingrich might have been a possible contender.

At one con — I’m sorry to say I don’t remember which one (maybe one of you guys could tell me?) — both Gingrich and I happened to be present and the chairman got the idea of the two of us having a debate on some political subject.

So we did it. I don’t remember all that was said, but one of the subjects we agreed to disagree on was the heroic-sized U.S. defense budget. I said we could better use all that money for some peaceful pursuit, almost any peaceful pursuit. Newt said was I so ignorant that I didn’t know the world was full of enemies of America and we had to be ready to fight them whenever they might attack us? I said that throughout American history up to that point we had fought maybe eight or ten real wars, from the Revolution to WWII, and we hadn’t really been prepared — though our enemies were — for any one of them, but all the same we’d won them all. Newt said, aha, Fred, but you’re forgetting we had the might of the British Navy to protect us while we tooled up, and I said, right you are, Newt, but in at least two of those wars, the Revolution and the War of 1812, that mighty British Navy was on the other side and the side it was shooting at was us, and we licked them anyway.

So I marked that one a win for me. I don’t know how Gingrich scored it.