The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (14 page)

The result was that good writers got out of the pulps if they could, or, if they stayed, drove themselves to such heavy production schedules that quality disappeared.

If you want to think of a successful pulp writer in the late 30s, imagine a man with a forty-dollar typewriter on a kitchen table. By his right hand is an ashtray with a cigarette burning in it and a cup of coffee or a bottle of beer within easy reach. Stacked just past his typewriter are white sheets, carbons, and second sheets. Stacked to his left are finished pages, complete with carbon copies. He has taught himself to type reasonably neatly because he can't afford a stenographer, and above all he has taught himself to type fast. A prolific pulpster could keep up a steady forty or fifty words a minute for long periods; there were a few writers who wrote
ten thousand words a day
and kept it up for years on end. Some writers contracted to write the entire contents of some magazines on a flat per-issue fee, under a dozen pseudonyms; two of our air-war magazines were done that way, by a young fellow named David Goodis. Series-character magazines like
The Spider
or
The Shadow
were written by single authors; Robert J. Hogan did
G-8
for us that way. At Popular most of those writers didn't get a penny a word. Some didn't get half that; sometimes the fee for a whole magazine was as little as $150, for as much as sixty thousand words.

The key to survival in the pulps, the old-timers kept telling us, was
volume
. I schooled myself to write and sell first drafts. I would put clean white paper, carbon, and second sheet in the typewriter one time through, and when I came to "The End," that was the last I saw of the story. It went directly to the editor. If I was lucky, a month or two later it was in print. If not, it bounced around until I had used up all the possible markets, and maybe then, and only then, I considered revising it.

You see, it didn't matter. The customers were not critical, and there were no rewards for virtue. Not with the readers—they were not consulted—and not even with the editors. Dependability, personal contact, and adherence to policy, those were the important considerations; literary quality came a poor fourth. And what the readers wanted—as far as I know, which is not very far—was vicarious adventure. If they could buy half an hour's anodyne, they would not raise questions of style. Oh, I am sure that there were stories they liked better than other stories. I am even sure—it is an article of faith with me—that they could distinguish between good style and bad. But the distinction was not reflected in the cash register.

All those magazines are gone now. The paper shortages of World War II mowed them down like standing wheat. There was a flickering resurgence after the war, but television, paperbound books, and the increased costs of publishing finished what the war had started. Even science fiction, runt of the litter that survived its bigger brothers, is now limited to a handful of magazines, though it is an immense factor in the paperbound book market; and as to Westerns, air-wars, sports pulps, even detectives, they just don't exist.

Said Harry Steeger to me: "What kind of a budget do you need?"

Said I to Harry Steeger, stalling for time: "Well, let's see, I need to buy stories, departments, art—"

"Right," he said. "Two hundred seventy-five dollars for stories. A hundred dollars for black and white art. Thirty dollars for a cover. That's four hundred and five dollars an issue for
Astonishing Stories
. On the other one—what do you want to call it?"

"
Super Science Stories
."

"Whatever. That's going to be sixteen pages longer, so we'll make it fifty dollars more on the budget. See Aleck about cover logos. Anything else, see Peggy Graves."

The smaller of the two magazines,
Astonishing Stories
, held 112 pages an issue and sold for a dime. I counted a lot of pages and discovered that a full page of type amounted to 620 words. Subtracting the pages that would be filled by advertising, illustrations, and front matter, I found I would need about sixty thousand words an issue. I didn't quite have half a cent a word, but close enough, close enough.

Art was something else. When I brought my budget to Aleck Portegal, the art director, he looked at me with compassion and disgust. Where the hell was I going to get artists to work for that kind of money? Writers, sure. Everybody knew what writers were like. But artists did a job of work for a dollar, and they wouldn't take less. That didn't worry me, because I had a secret weapon. In fact, two of them. There were the fan artists, as eager as the fan writers for publication in a science-fiction magazine. And besides, my girlfriend, Doë , was an art student at Cooper Union. She had at her fingertips a whole school of striving newcomers to whom five dollars would look like a hell of a price for something they would gladly have bribed us to print.

In the event, the art students were a disappointment, and most of the fans were worse. But there were a couple who were competent, and one—Hannes Bok, whom Ray Bradbury had been touting at the World Convention not long before—who was superb. We got the art, anyway. Aleck found, to his mild surprise, that a fair number of his regular professionals would be willing to take a little less for the extra work, and as I learned how to juggle my budget I found a few extra dollars. I didn't really need to buy sixty thousand words an issue. I could write long editorials, use big house ads, run a letter column; I could save six or eight pages of paid stories that way. And some writers couldn't count very well; the story that they said was six thousand words would actually turn out, when Peggy Graves checked it, to run seven thousand, maybe even more. The house rule was that if the official count was lower than the author's count, we paid off on the official count. But if the author's was lower, we paid on his. Altogether I could scrounge as much as forty or fifty dollars an issue on text, and Aleck taught me how to save a little on the art, too. If there was a nice-looking spaceship or an all-purpose alien-planet scene in a piece of art, we marked the line cut to hold, trimmed off the specific detail, and used it over and over again as a spot illustration. After a while Harry Steeger asked me if I thought an extra fifty dollars an issue would help. I assured him it would. . . . But, you know, I think I lied to the man. In my experience, the money a market pays for stories has only the roughest congruence with how good the stories are. Some writers will stretch themselves when the money is good. Some won't. Some react the other way: the more they get paid, the worse they write; probably a kind of stage fright is involved. It seems to me to be an editor's bounden duty to get as much money for his writers as he can, but once he gets it, what is he to do with it? Divide it equally between them all? But the harsh fact is that not all stories are of equal merit. Some you print with joy and thanksgiving. Some because the alternative is to put out a magazine with some of the pages blank. There is neither justice nor morality in paying the same price for both. So when I told Harry Steeger that a few more dollars in the budget would make a difference in the quality of the stories, I was hallucinating. What it did do, though, was make me feel good.

I did not understand all this at the time, but I quickly found out that the best stories were not necessarily the ones that cost the most. My principal instructor in this area was a Grand Old Man named Ray Cummings. He was tall, skinny, wore a stock instead of the conventional collar and tie, and was unimaginably old to me—he had actually been too old for World War I, which had ended before I was born. I suppose he must have been around sixty when we met. I respected Ray as a writer very much. He had never been a great writer, but he had been a prolific one, and sf was his specialty. He had a fascinating background—had even worked for Thomas Edison in his youth—and was a personally engaging, roguish human being. What he was not was a source of good stories. I don't think his talent had left him, I think he just didn't care any more. In the beginning I am sure that he cared about science fiction, but his typewriter was his living and he used it to produce whatever would sell; by and by it must all have seemed the same to him. Before I came to work at Popular, he had been selling them quantities of mystery and horror stories, under a variety of pen names. Horror stories were the dregs of the pulp market, cheap thrill-and-sadism stuff to a precise formula: the buildup involved a fear of the supernatural, but in the end it always had to turn out to be a hoax perpetrated by some criminal, spy, or madman.
*

When I started there and Ray discovered I was a fan, it was a great day for Ray. Not only could he get back to science fiction, but he quickly perceived that I was his pigeon. I had no way of saying no to so great a man. Worse than that. He would not write for less than a penny a word, and I missed my chance to tell him that that was beyond the limits ordained for me by God and Harry Steeger, because the day he first walked into my office was the day I discovered I had a few extra dollars to play with. So for months he would turn up regularly as clockwork and sell me a new story; I hated them all, and bought them all.

I had at least the wit to keep them short, and so although Ray depleted my disposable surplus, he didn't quite wipe it out. I had always kept one eye on John Campbell's magazine. What I saw there I coveted, and with a little extra money I had hopes of acquiring some of his writers. The new Titans in my eyes were A. E. Van Vogt, L. Sprague de Camp, and Robert A. Heinlein. They are still Titans, to be sure, but in 1939 and 1940 they were not only great, they defined what was great in science fiction. I wanted them a lot. I never did get a Van Vogt, but one of John's weaknesses as an editor (he didn't have many) was his conviction that readers got tired of any byline after a while. He urged his writers to use pen names from time to time; and now and then he rejected a story by even the best of them.

In this, as far as de Camp and Heinlein were concerned, he was wrong. Both of them were at the peak of their form, trotting ahead of the rest of the field without a misstep. The Heinleins and de Camps I got—"Lost Legacy" and "Let There Be Light" in particular from Heinlein, and from de Camp especially his fine collaboration with P. Schuyler Miller, "Genus Homo"—would have looked good anywhere.

John's other weakness as an editor was that he just didn't want to talk about sexuality. All the characters in
Astounding
were as featureless around the groin as a Barbie doll, and one reason he didn't want the Heinleins was that they contained what he thought pretty raunchy language. (Sample: "I suggest you follow the ancient Chinese advice to young women about to undergo criminal assault." "What's that?" "'Relax.'") This blatant filth did not go unreproached in
Super Science Stories
, either. One reader wrote in:

". . .
the vulgarity of the language is such as to make me look thrice before buying the magazine again
."

And another:

"
Frankly
,
I
'
m disgusted
.
If you are going to continue to print such pseudosophisticated
,
pre
-
prep
-
school tripe as
'
Let There Be Light
,'
you should change the name of the mag to
Naughty Future Funnies
."

I met other writers at the Thursday Afternoon Luncheon Club, the back room of a kosher restaurant just off Times Square where Manly Wade Wellman, Malcolm Jameson, Henry Kuttner, and others got together to talk shop once a week. Other editors were grazing in that same pasture. Mort Weisinger would show up from the Thrilling Group now and then, and Dave Vern was a regular.
Amazing Stories
was still in New York, no longer owned by Teck and no longer edited by T. O'Conor Sloane. The new people had made it bigger and richer, but not better. Under Sloane it had developed fine pale mold around the edges; under the new people it had turned cheap pulp. But Dave Vern, the new editor, was a decent guy, and generous to a kid competitor.

I enjoyed the Thursday Afternoons, and from them I got some good stories. One I particularly liked, and rued, was Malcolm Jameson's "Quicksands of Youthwardness." I liked it because it was a great idea for a science-fiction story. It wasn't original with Jamie, or at least it had been suggested a decade before by no less than Sir James Jeans. He had written, in one of his popularizing books, that Time was probably the Fourth Dimension. H. G. Wells, he said, had written a science-fiction story in which a man went through some sort of transdimensional reversal and came back with his left and right sides interchanged, but how much more exciting, Jeans said, if he had come back with his past and future interchanged. Jamie had picked up the hint and made a nice twenty-seven-thousand-worder out of it. What I rued was that I had read the same book and had written the same story, not nearly as well, and I could see I had been outclassed. Sadly I bought Jamie's story and shelved my own.

But what to do with twenty-seven thousand words in my two rather small magazines? I decided to run it as a three-part serial. The readers quickly pointed out to me that they hated that; both magazines were bimonthly, which made it worse, but in any event nine-thousand-word installments were pretty skimpy. That was a mistake . . . and, I'm afraid, only one of a great many.

I wasn't really a very good editor. I was learning as fast as I could—I had Harry Steeger and Peggy Graves standing over me with circulation figures, a powerful spur. But being an editor requires kinds of maturity and resourcefulness you do not find in your average nineteen-year-old. An editor doesn't have to be always wise and authoritative. But he has to make most of his writers think he is, most of the time, and that is not easy when you don't yet need to shave more than once a week.