The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (13 page)

Quietest and gentlest of the Futurians was Jack Rubinson, so quiet that mostly we didn't know he was around. One day he surprised us by turning up with a full-length play he had written, all by himself, without announcing what he was going to do—quite contrary to Futurian custom—and, even more surprising, I thought it astonishingly good.
*

He gave all of us speaking parts, but the starring part—the character in the play had no name but "Hero"—was obviously himself. He gave me a line which I thought summed up quite neatly what we were all about:

Hero: Then what is "The Ivory Tower"?

Pohl: It is nothing more nor less than a shell or an attitude built up by several people to separate their group from the general mass of people. It is a method for keeping the group intact at the expense of everything else. The group tries to deny the existence of anybody except its members.
†

Trouble was, we couldn't deny the existence of the rest of the world. The rest of the world was closing in on us. That summer Joe Stalin and Adolf Hitler signed their nonaggression pact. Consternation in the left wing. Argument and confusion among the political Futurians. And a few weeks later the panzer divisions were loping through Poland.

If Chamberlain and Daladier had stood up to Hitler in Munich in 1938, would the Nazis have collapsed? If the Czechs and the Poles had accepted Stalin's treaty offer of aid, would they have survived as independent states? Or would it have meant going directly to Soviet tanks on the street corners of Prague and Warsaw half a decade earlier? What is Truth? I am tempted to write science-fiction scenarios, but they go in a dozen different directions, some toward a later but worse World War II and some to permanent peace and brotherhood. I doubt they are any of them realistic.

I can only say what I perceived in 1939, colored by science fiction, politics, and my own raunchy young-male glands. Like most young males, I thought the idea of fighting in a war was scary but exciting, by no means without appeal. A year or two before, I had volunteered to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain.
*
Being a soldier was only an adventure. Being a citizen of a country at war was something else. America in the 20s and 30s seemed to be exempt from that sort of European folly. Oh, now and then our Marines went down and beat the hell out of somebody in Nicaragua, but I had no idea of what it would be like to have an organized enemy bombing our cities and sinking our ships. When I observed that my science-fiction friends and pen pals in London and Paris, Ted Carnell and Georges Gallet, were now in that precise position, reason recoiled. World War?
We
knew what it meant. H. G. Wells had explained it to us in
Things to Come
. And here was the Luftwaffe pounding Warsaw as flat as Wells had smashed London in the film. It looked like the end of Western civilization, and science fiction's nightmares were coming true.

It was a stressful and perplexing time. The Communist Party expressed no doubts. They made a 180-degree flip-flop overnight. On one day the slogans were "Quarantine the Aggressor" and "Death to the Nazis." On the next it was "Keep America Out of the Imperialist War."

It hurt. It was like being awakened from a pleasing dream by a kick in the gut. I could not change my head to keep pace with the slogans. I had grown up to hate Fascists. They had not changed. Neither had my feelings toward them. I found it more and more difficult to function as a YCL leader, or even to sit through a meeting. I knew what words I was supposed to say, but I couldn't stand the taste of them on my tongue.

So the YCL was in trouble with me, but I was also in trouble with the YCL. In the angrier, harsher climate that fell over the YCL after the Stalin-Hitler pact, there was a new and inquisitorial attitude toward deviationism. Who were all these science-fiction people I had invited to come into the Flatbush III YCL headquarters? At a meeting of the executive committee, an Irish youth named Marty O'Shaughnessy (my own recruit!) furiously hissed the damning question: Were any of them
Trotskyites
?
I
couldn't help it. I laughed. And then there was the problem of Cyril Kornbluth's morals. Cyril was only about sixteen or seventeen at the time, looked like thirty, drank like a retired railroad switchman; and he and I stayed behind at some YCL party with what was left of a bottle of wine and sang and giggled for hours. Did I not realize, the comrades asked judgmentally, that I had involved the YCL in impairing the morals of a minor?

That was even funnier, but there was no one in the branch to share the joke. The comedy had gone out of the YCL personality. I began to miss meetings now and then. When the next branch elections came along, I was not reelected president; I wasn't even nominated, nor expected to be.

A year earlier that would have hurt a lot. I had
started
that branch. But under the circumstances at least a trial separation was indicated, if not actually a divorce; and besides, I had found something a good deal more exciting that used up all the time and attention I had.

The great advantage of constituting myself a literary agent specializing in science fiction was not in the sparse commissions. It was in the entry it gave me to the offices of real professional editors. I could see at once that they came in all shapes and sizes. Some were wise and grizzled, some almost as young as I. Some had backgrounds stretching back before I was born; others were learning before my eyes.

I did not hope to compete with someone like John Campbell in diligence or inventiveness, but few of the other editors I saw impressed me. To the extent that their jobs involved knowing a good science-fiction story from a bad one, I was pretty sure that I knew more than they. So I took my courage in my hands and began to shop around for a job. One of the friendliest of the editors was a man named Robert O. Erisman, veteran of many pulp titles, now experimenting for the first time with this newfangled thing of science fiction. Did he, I asked him very tentatively, think he could use an assistant with a solid background in the field, namely me?

No, he said, gently and pointedly, he couldn't; the budget didn't allow that sort of thing. But maybe there was a chance somewhere else. He had heard that Popular Publications, down at the other end of 42nd Street, was adding a cheap line of pulps, half a cent a word tops. If I put it to them right, maybe they'd find a place for a science-fiction magazine on the list. Why not go talk to the boss there, Rogers Terrill?

So I did; and Rogers hired me; and there I was, nineteen years old, and the full-fledged editor of not one but two professional science-fiction magazines.

6 Nineteen Years Old, and God

The office of Popular Publications was on the twentieth floor of the Bartholomew Building, at 205 East 42nd Street in New York City. The building cornered on Third Avenue, tatty street of bars and one-man barbershops, shadowed and dirtied by the El. At the other end of the block was Second Avenue, even tattier and dirtier because the Second Avenue elevated trains were older and rattlier and the whole thing was just that much farther from the real part of the city. A block farther still, just at the river, was a sudden eruption of elegance: Tudor City, luxury apartments inhabited, so my mother told me, by KWs—which is to say, Kept Women. Just north of Tudor City on the East River was a slaughterhouse.
*
Sometimes on a lunch hour I would walk down to watch the river, and would see the flats come in with their cargo of sheep, and the Judas ram leading them up the ramp to the killing place. Across 42nd Street from us was the Daily News Building, with the biggest globe of the earth I have ever seen turning ponderously in its lobby. We were a block or so from the Chrysler Building and the Grand Central complex. We were, boy, in the
heart
of things.

Not only was I at the very core of the Big Red Apple, but I commanded a network that stretched across the continent. Even the world. Linotype operators in Chicago were waiting to turn my words into metal. Newsdealers in Winnipeg and Albuquerque were going to display my magazines to their customers. Writers in California would tailor their prose to my wishes, artists would paint what I ordered, fans from India and South Africa would send me letters. It was a heady dose for a nineteen-year-old. I had aimed my whole life to this moment, and here I was.

Of course, the reality was not quite so glamorous. Even then I was aware that my two little science-fiction magazines were hardly a pimple on the mammoth corpus of the pulp magazine industry. With one part of my head I knew it. With the rest of me I was just floating in joy.

I met my colleagues with awe. To me at nineteen they seemed pretty impressive. The other editors were mostly young, if not quite as young as I; I doubt the average age was as much as thirty, even if you leave out the giggling girls from Accounting, where I never trod. But some were very old, and very wise. Just down the short hall from my own little office was Ken White, editor of
Black Mask
. Ken had inherited directly from Cap Shaw, who with Dashiell Hammett had shaped the modern detective story only a few years before. On the longer hallway, toward the 42nd Street side, was Janie Littell with her love pulps; heavyset ex-circus performer (so she said), she wrote a lot of the contents herself under a dozen pen names, all intensely moral tales in which there was never any touching below the neck, gobbled by an avid audience of young girls. In the other direction along the long hall were most of the other editors: Alden H. Norton (later my boss) with his sports pulps; Rogers Tamil genially overseeing all at a salary reported to be as much as Fif Teen Thous And a Year; the myriad Westerns, the dozens of detectives, the horrors, the air-wars, with their editors Loren Dowst, Willard Crosby, Mike Tilden; Aleck Portegal and his Art Department; and The Two Houses of Heaven. They were the two largest offices on the floor, and they belonged to the two men who owned the company, Harry Steeger and Harold S. Goldsmith. Rog Terrill was the fellow I had applied to, but Steeger was the one who actually hired me: courtly, youngish Princeton millionaire, who liked to yacht and to ski. He carried my typewriter into my new office, and when I said I'd rather do my own typing than have a secretary, did not burst out laughing. Secretaries got easily eighteen or twenty dollars a week. I was getting ten.

1939 was mid-autumn in the long, glorious season of the pulps. Popular wasn't the biggest pulp chain, or the best, but it was up there. We had more than fifty titles going at one time. The Thrilling Group had about as many. Street & Smith had fewer titles, but generally much bigger sales: they had original titles, like
Love Story, Detective Story
, and
Western Story
, not to mention the series books like
Doc Savage
and
The Shadow
. We were about Number Two to Thrilling in number of titles, and Number Three behind them and Street & Smith in aggregate sales; but there were at least a dozen other sizable pulp houses, and any number of small ones and transients. Put them all together and there were close to five hundred pulp magazines, with aggregate annual sales of around a hundred million copies.

I learned a great deal about the pulps, but one thing I never quite figured out was who read them. There were hundreds of titles on the stands.
Somebody
bought them, because that's where the money came from that paid our salaries. But you never saw a person reading one on the subway or carrying one on the street, so where did they all go? A lot of the readership, I knew, was in the small towns and on the farms, where the local movie house wasn't as handy as in New York. But New York dealers sold a lot of copies, too.

What was clear about the general pulp audience was that it was not finicky about literary quality, because, my God, most of the stories were
awful
. Even the science-fiction magazines of the time showed an awful lot of leaden prose and tone-deaf style, and they were the class of the field. The worst of modern television is not quite as brainless as the average pulp story of the 20s and 30s. And yet most of the people who edited them, and even most of the people who wrote them, were cultured and refined, as much so, at least, as their opposite numbers in the major book publishers of today. The guys who were editing
Sinister Stories
and
G-8 and His Battle
sometimes talked about Dos Passes and Alban Berg in the coffee breaks and then went back to shrieking, swooning females and the rattle of twin Vickers sluicing destruction into the Baron's Fokker triplane. Popular was not the classiest of the pulp houses. It was a me-too operation; when Westerns were selling, we did lots of Westerns; when they stopped, we stopped. But it wasn't the worst, by a long way. Ken White did fine things with
Black Mask
almost always, and there were individual writers—Joel Townsley Rogers was one—who always wrote with an understanding of the sound of the language and a care for its structure, whichever pulp they were aiming at. It was not all trash. But trash was the way to bet it.

One reason the stories were so bad was the pathetically low rates. A penny a word is not lavish. I am a reasonably productive writer, but my lifetime average is not much more than a hundred thousand words a year (and that includes a lot of early years when I was more interested in volume than in quality, and it showed). That's higher than most writers. It's even higher than most pulpsters of the 1930s; but, as you can see, a pulp writer in 1939 who wrote a hundred thousand words, and sold every word of it at a penny a word, would have been blessed each week with just a touch less than twenty dollars.