The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (10 page)

Although we began to be published for pay more and more frequently, we were still fans, and addicted to fan feuds. Will Sykora, our former ally of the NYB-ISA, had declined to disappear once we walked away. With Sam Moskowitz of Newark and Jimmy Taurasi of the Queens Science Fiction League, he had flanged together another national organization they called New Fandom. No CIA nor KGB ever wrestled so valiantly for the soul of an emerging nation as New Fandom and the Futurians did for science fiction. Pronunciamentos were hurled back and forth. Alliances were formed with empires as far off as Philadelphia and Los Angeles. At a time of uneasy truce, all of us in the New York area had conceived the notion of a World Science Fiction Convention to take place at the time of the New York World's Fair in 1939. Now we were enemies, and the prize we fought for was sponsorship of the convention.

Heavy drinking, foolish games, blood feuds, and escapades—were we all really as bad as that? The head says yes, this is the record of the facts. But the heart says it was not that way at all.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan says that all established societies are destroyed, fertilized, and reborn through the invasions of the barbarians. Sometimes the barbarians come from outside. More often, in fact always, says Moynihan, they are born out of the society itself: the young men from fourteen to twenty-four, who look at the Establishment from outside, and resolve to take Rome or burn it.

So it was with us. We saw Imperial Earth from outside and we wanted in. Because we were nicely brought up we zapped the enemy with words instead of with bicycle chains, but we were out to draw blood. When I first took Cyril Kornbluth up to meet John Campbell—feisty, fresh Cyril and staid, almighty John—Cyril behaved like a boor. Outside I asked him what the hell had been going on, and he said simply, "I wanted him to notice me." We all wanted to be noticed. We would have enjoyed being loved, but next best was to be resented.

With all this activity, fandom, writing, YCL, and general exploration, there were not enough hours in the day. What I gave up was school. I had been getting spotty marks at Brooklyn Tech. Then they all turned bad. After some unhappy hours with my faculty advisor I transferred from Tech to a less demanding, and even less interesting, school called Thomas Jefferson.

Thomas Jefferson was a bad school, the building crumbling, the students unruly. The teachers were an oddly assorted lot, a few saints who were there because their conscience drove them, a larger number of incompetents who simply did not deserve a better job. It didn't matter much to me, because I didn't spend much time there. I played hooky most of the time for three or four months, and as soon as I had reached the legal dropout age of seventeen I was gone. I didn't graduate, and I never attended any college, though I've taught in a few; as John Brunner says, I had to quit school because it was interfering with my education. Still, I did learn one thing from Thomas Jefferson High. One of my courses was in touch-typing. I didn't learn it there, because I didn't show up that often for classes, but I took the textbook home, spread the keyboard chart out before me, and plugged away on my lavender portable. It took about ten days to master. It is probably the most valuable single skill I have ever acquired.

Do you hear me, would-be writers?

There are some questions that I get a hundred times each a year. They come by mail, in rap sessions after college lecture dates, in chance encounters of all sorts with people who would like to be writers but don't know quite how to go about it. The third most frequent question is: What courses should I take to become a writer?
*

Most questions imply some sort of expectation about the answer, and usually what is implied in that one is whether to choose courses in journalism, short-story writing, English lit. But none of those are particularly important. They may not do any active harm—I know a few good writers who have exposed themselves to them. But they surely are not necessary, because most writers have never gone near them.

A few years ago I was allowed to sit in on a meeting of the faculty of a Western university, rethinking its mission in life, and one of the deans said, "We have to get away from the concept of the university as a place where you learn to make a living, and approach the task of making it a place where you learn to live." That makes sense to me, for anyone. For a writer, the two objectives come out in the same place. A writer is in the business of interpreting life to an audience, and the more he knows about living the better he will write. In my own brief school career I am grateful for early music-appreciation classes, for the exposure to physical science and technology in Brooklyn Tech, for a reasonable competence in mathematics, and for very little else. What I regret is that I did not learn foreign languages in school, when I was young enough to assimilate them fairly easily, but had to pick up smatterings out of books, tape cassettes, and travels. (I also regret that I didn't learn to play an instrument or dance, but not too many schools offered those courses then.)

But if you confine yourself to the view of education as a kind of vocational training, then the courses you want are in spelling, punctuation, grammar, and touch-typing. They are fundamental.

They are not quite indispensable. There are a number of fine writers who can't spell K-A-T
cat
, or punctuate the sentence, "Help!" But their lives are harder for that reason. A lot of writing is in bold strokes, and you can dictate that sort of thing into a machine if you like. But a lot is in nuance, too, and if you don't know what is conventional, you are clumsy and less effective at doing what is unconventional.

Sure, when you are rich and famous you can hire little people to correct your mistakes and type your scripts. You can go further than that. You can buy plot ideas out of the ads in
The Writer's Digest
. You can hire a ghostwriter to finish them off. You can send the scripts off to a reading-fee critic for evaluation and revision, and then if you want to, and you probably won't have much choice, you can pay a vanity press to print them for you. But, my God, why bother?

A year or two ago I met a lovely young Italian countess, or something of the sort, beautiful, sweet, smart, well brought up, loaded. Her sister was a science-fiction fan. The
contesa
invited me and a couple of Italian science-fiction writers up to her hotel room for a drink. The "room" turned out to be an immense suite in a Milan hotel so posh and exclusive that I had never heard its name. Servants brought hors d'oeuvres and cocktails—not those yard-tall fruit-punch things that the Milanese call "coctel," but authentic Beefeater martinis, double dry. A few jet-set friends had dropped in, and the conversation was polylingual, like in a Maugham or early Huxley drawing room. The
contesa
invited my advice. Her sister wanted to become a science-fiction writer. Who, Mr. Pohl, should she hire to do the actual writing for her? I said, well, I personally would not be in a position to do that. She nodded, gracefully respecting my wishes, and asked if I had any other recommendations: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, who?

She was too nice a person to play jokes on. So I didn't suggest she make her offer to one of them. But it would have been interesting to see the reaction, from a safe distance.

Out of school, into fandom, writing, and the YCL, the next step in my growing-up was to get myself a girl. On May 11, 1937, an ex-classmate with whom I had kept in touch, Teddy Hill, invited me to meet the girl he had eyes for. Her name was Doris Marie Claire Baumgardt, and I approved highly of Teddy's good taste. Doë was strikingly beautiful, and strikingly intelligent, too, in a sulky, humorous, deprecatory way that matched well with most of the other people I admired. She could paint some, and write some, and she liked me. Having found my way to the girl-fields of the YCL only a few months earlier, I now decided to settle down. Doë and I dated steadily for three years, and then we got married. The marriage didn't last quite as long as the courtship, and that was a great pity, because she was a nice person. Doë tolerated my YCL activities without showing much desire to share them. My science-fiction life seemed a little more promising to her. She had never read the stuff, but as time went on she began writing and drawing it and wound up with a catalog of published works of her own. And she liked my friends. More important, her friends, all girls, liked my friends in the Futurians, one hundred percent boys. It was marrying time, I suppose. Over the next few years her friend Rosalind married my friend Dirk, her friend Jessica married my friend Dick Wilson, her friend Elsie married my friend Don Wollheim, not to mention any number of less formal involvements. We did everything collectively, as you see.

The Depression was lightening a little, though a long way from over. Money was a little more plentiful than it had been. Even in our house. I had pretended to a job that did not exist in order to get permission to leave school, but after a while of that my mother made it clear that it was time I brought in a little money, and I went to work for a firm of insurance underwriters called W. L. Perrin and Son, on Maiden Lane in downtown New York.

Apart from requiring me to get up early in the morning, which I have never liked, the job was not without charm. Without dignity, yes. It was
totally
without dignity. What Perrin hired me to do was to deliver letters for them. I was competing with the Post Office. It was cheaper for Perrin to pay me ten dollars a week to schlep the letters around than to put two-cent stamps on them and leave it to the mailman. The best part of it was the chance to explore the old New Amsterdam part of the city—my route stopped north of City Hall. I learned what an intricate marvel New York City is, from the old Customs House and Bowling Green to Brooklyn Bridge and the Woolworth Building. In nice weather it was a pleasant ramble. In bad I learned to dodge through buildings and secret underground warrens, avoiding the inclement open air. I made friends with other insurance runners—we debated dividing our routes, but never dared risk the anger of our bosses—and with elevator girls, starters, receptionists, even policemen. The central five-and-ten where Johnny Michel worked was only a few blocks from the Perrin office. Two or three times a week we would have a quick lunch together and then prowl the immense Goldsmith stationery store on Nassau Street, coveting the typewriters and the automatic mimeograph machines. A block in the other direction was the Federal Reserve Building, and every once in a while you could see an army of guards sweating pallets of genuine gold bricks across the sidewalk.

For a writer, there is a lot to be said for a job that makes no demands on the intellect and does not carry over past quitting time. Washau the chimp could have been trained to do what Perrin paid me for. The forebrain was not involved. I carried a notebook and a pencil with me, and while I was waiting for an elevator, or sneaking a cup of coffee in some underground cafeteria where no one from Perrin was likely to come, I scribbled story ideas or wrote poetry.
*

Perrin's wasn't the first job I had ever held. I had been a busboy in a restaurant on Times Square one summer, twelve hours a day, six days a week, for twelve dollars a week. I had worked part-time after school now and then—mostly running errands for Mrs. Bradley's boarding house on Dean Street. (Strange old anachronism! The cooking was on a coal stove and the illumination from gas, Welsbach mantles and all, this in 1931! The best part of that job was a buying trip down the street to the Bond's Bakery day-old shop, where you could get nickel package cakes to feed the boarders for two cents each. True, they were a little stale, but that did not much impair their quality. That would not have been easy to do.) But Perrin's was full-time, and I held it nearly a year. I was almost sorry when it came to an end. I told my boss, in a rare conversational exchange, that sooner or later I was planning to leave, and he took umbrage. If I was that disloyal to the firm, I should be fired right then, he said, and so I was.