The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (15 page)

Editors as a class are not highly respected. Very few of them become famous. From an editor's point of view, it is the writer who gets all the breaks. Writers make more money. Writers get their names known. They do, even when the editor has at least as much to do with the success of the story as the writer himself. Does that seem unlikely? But there are some very famous stories that began as slop, until some editor worked painfully with the writer, over a long time, coaxing him through revisions, cajoling him into changes, hewing out of the shapeless fat of the first draft a work of art. Then, years later, when the story is a classic, no one but the writer knows that it was the editor who made it so.
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On the other hand, from where the writer sits, the editor looks like the boss. The editor makes the decision to buy or to bounce. At the end of the year the writer may have twice as much money to pay taxes on as the editor. But on that day in February when he needs that thousand-dollar check to get his kid's teeth fixed, it is the editor who says whether he gets it or not. This conflict is not helped by the known fact that most editors are failed writers, and most writers are sure they could edit anything better than the incumbent—and are often right.

The editor is always in the middle. His job is to harvest the basic exudations of writers, as ants lick the sweat off their dairy aphids, to pick them over to find the ones that will stimulate the readers' pleasure glands, process them in the most attractive way, and place them on the market.

How does he know which ones will please the readers?

Ah, that's the problem, isn't it? He doesn't. He can only guess. If he is any good at his job, it is an informed guess, with experience and insights to help it, but it is a guess all the same.

If an editor is a systematic professional (translation: hack), he probably makes a study of all the successful magazines in his area, observes what they have done that has seemed to work, and does the same. If he is a genius, he looks for what
isn't
being done by anybody else. Then sometimes he does it, and sometimes he doesn't. Most of the things that aren't being done aren't worth doing, so you can't count on novelty alone for success. You make a series of those informed guesses, rejecting the ideas that won't work, as God gives you the gift to perceive them, and trying out the ones that might. Editorial skill lies in knowing what has worked. Editorial genius lies in taking a chance on what hasn't worked yet, but will when someone summons up the nerve to try.

All this I understood pretty well at the time, but between the understanding and the execution was a wide, wide gap.

I look at those old magazines now and my fingers itch; I want to pick up the telephone and dial 1-9-4-0 and tell that kid what to do. It was an easy time to be an editor. With what I know now I could have made those magazines sing, but as it was they just lay there.

But my, I had fun! First kid on the block to be a professional editor! The rest of the Futurians were jealous as hell.

When I say the "rest" I mean mostly the leaders myself and others, a feisty lot, given to competing for the sake of game-playing even when no stakes were involved. Among the Futurians there was clear-cut distinction between the leaders and the led. Whatever our politics (and by then most of the top considered themselves at least cosmetically Marxist), none of this nonsense about a classless society was allowed to interfere with how we ran our own group. The People Who Decided were Don Wollheim, John Michel, Bob Lowndes, and I. We called ourselves "the Quadrumvirate," and we lived in and among each other's lives almost inextricably. In fan and science-fiction affairs we operated under a unit rule. The decisions we wrangled out in private we presented to the world as monoliths. But even among ourselves there was a fine structure of interlocking relationships and power positions—and yes, by gosh, of friendship. Johnny and I joined the YCL together and went camping in pup tents at Lake Tiorati. Donald and I went to amateur-press conventions together. Bob Lowndes and I shared an obsessive interest in popular songs, and in the more flamboyantly decadent writers: Huysmans, Mallarmé, James Branch Cabell.

We also competed with each other, never more strenuously than between Donald and myself. I don't know what Donald thought was going on—someday I would like to ask him—but I know where I stood. Donald represented something to me. At a parlor game, in the early Futurian days, among non-Futurian people, I had been asked to name my hero, and the name that popped out was "Donald A. Wollheim." I was maybe sixteen then, and Donald had a towering advantage over me in years and experience. But I was catching up. I was
working
at catching up; not only to catch up but to surpass; and, of course, no one knew that better than Donald.

It is a marvel that that four-way directorate survived as well as it did, but when I got to be an editor it began to shred. The other three Quads began to write for me for pay. Friendship could have survived that (that sort of strain has been placed on most of my friendships, one time or another, over the years). But the temporary armistice among young bulls each confident of his destiny as herd leader was more fragile, and a space developed between the rest of the Quadrumvirate and me.

But I needed the Futurians, needed them in my job. If writers think of editors as empowered to pollinate whatever blossoms they choose, over acres of flowers, editors quickly perceive that those acres are not very broad, and most of the blossoms are duds. An editor has to scratch to find good stuff—particularly with the pitiful money I had to offer—and one of the best places for me to scratch was among the Futurians. There was a wonder of talent there. Most of it was still new and growing, and some never really lived up to early promise; but first and last I bought stories not only from the other three Who Counted but also from Cyril Kornbluth, Dirk Wylie, Isaac Asimov, Richard Wilson, David A. Kyle, Jack Gillespie, Walter Kubilius, and others. They would work for very little, and sometimes they worked very well. Cyril Kornbluth was born with a trenchant phrase in his mouth. He was terribly young and inexperienced—around fifteen when I published his first story. But he was learning very fast the technical skills of story construction, and he had never needed to learn to shape a sentence. Isaac Asimov was growing visibly with every story. He carefully numbered them in series; I can still see the shape of his manuscripts, the title double-spaced, the first page almost entirely blank, but with the serial number of the story up in the corner to keep his records systematic. (He was always a horribly well organized person, Isaac was, and a standing reproach to the rest of us.) Unfortunately (for me, not for Isaac), he had already made the Campbell Connection. I had to content myself mostly with John's leavings. Hannes Bok, Doë , Dave Kyle, and others did illustrations for me, and I farmed out departments and columns to those who wanted to do them—for nothing, of course; the lure of possible free books or movie tickets was enough reward. The "perks" that went with being a professional editor were scarce (no such thing as an expense account, of course) but enjoyable, and some of them I was able to share. Both Dick the Drama Critic and I had passes to the New York World's Fair, and so one or two nights a week he and I would wander past Trylon and Perisphere, dine economically at the Mayflower Doughnut Pavilion (our passes did not include anything to eat), visit Salvador Dali's Dream of Venus (big goldfish tank of mildly nude girls swimming in underwater ballet) or whatever else looked exciting.

The space that was growing between me and the other Futurian leaders left room for new associations. Some came along with the job. I began to meet the Old Pros of the field, or at least nearly all who came through New York in those early years of the 1940s. Manly Wade Wellman was a regular at the Thursday Afternoon Luncheon Club, a courtly, heavyset Virginia gentleman who wrote several useful, workmanlike stories for me. So was Malcolm Jameson, an ex-naval officer who had had part of his larynx removed, smoked like a chimney, and spoke only in a harsh whisper. Henry Kuttner turned up, a slim, dark young man, humorous and surprisingly gentle, considering the terrifying words he was pouring into
Weird Tales
and the horror pulps. At a dinner party at the Jamesons' I met a flamboyant character who had just returned from being shipwrecked off the coast of Alaska and was on his way to some equally jock exploit in some equally improbable part of the world. His name was L. Ron Hubbard. He was the kind of person who expects, and without fail gets, the instant, total attention of everyone in any room he enters. If his later destiny as guru of world Scientology was anywhere in his thoughts at that time, he gave no sign of it. Lester del Rey came up to my office one day with a couple of manuscripts John Campbell had been unwilling to buy. I was unwilling to buy them, too (and it is possible John and I were right, because those stories, long lost, have never been published anywhere), but Lester himself I was willing to buy. Scrappy little kid with the face of an unseamed angel, he was then and has been for all of the forty years since one of the most rewarding human beings I have ever known.

All of us live at the centers of our own individual universes, most visibly so when we reminisce. But that is palpably unfair. Collectively all of these people were creating a literature. Individually they were loving, hating, marrying, learning, failing, and now and again most brilliantly succeeding, and to kiss any one of them off with a casual line is not only a disservice but a disrespect. So I leave this catalog dissatisfied, but I do not know how to make it complete.

It was not only males that I met. I encountered, and marked with one eye, Malcolm Jameson's pretty young daughter, Vida. Jamie was not the only writer with a pretty young daughter; Ray Cummings had one whom I also met and admired. But along about that time things became serious between Doë and me, and so I took myself out of competition in at least one area by marrying Doris Baumgardt in August of 1940. I was still under the legal age of consent. I had to get my parents' permission, and so my mother and father were required to show up at the Municipal Hall of Records to sign my marriage license. It was the first time they had seen each other in years, and it turned out to be the last.

We were married by a minister I had never met before (I have been married a lot, but never by anyone I knew) and took off for a sort of honeymoon in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Why Allentown? Both Doë and I were pretty parochial people. Allentown was the only nearby place we had ever heard of.

The other thing that happened in 1940 was that I finally and for good severed my connection with the Young Communist League.

Paris fell that spring. The next day one of my YCL friends turned up at my office for lunch. He bought us wine, held up his glass, and proposed a toast: "To the liberation of the bourgeois capital by the people's forces of socialism."

I drank his lousy wine. But it lay sour in my stomach while I brooded in my office all that afternoon. The YCL was very close to the core of my existence as a social person; what structure of belief I had managed to erect followed its blueprints, as I had perceived them. I don't think my belief-structure has changed much. The evils that the YCL had called my attention to (Fascism, militarism, the persecution of helpless people) are still evils. The Marxist interpretation of history no longer seems quite right, but it is not much more wrong than most others. But the YCL changed with the Stalin-Hitler pact, and my friend's toast to the panzers grinding up the Champs Élysées made me confront that change in a way I could not escape. It was not easy to separate myself cold turkey from the YCL. I had dear friends, and commitments made. But I couldn't hack it, and over the next few months I phased out, not without reproaches and by no means without pain.

Most of the friends I left behind ultimately drifted away, too. The Party line flip-flopped again in June of 1941, when the Germans attacked the Soviets. But by then I no longer cared.

After our marriage Doë and I moved into an apartment in Knickerbocker Village. The rent was $42.75 a month, which was reasonable enough, even in 1940. The problem was that the salary Popular Publications was paying me was ten dollars a week, which comes to $43.33 a month. I have always been good at arithmetic. It took me no time at all to do in my head the simple calculation

and deduce that my salary might pay the rent but would do little about meeting our expenses for food, clothes, entertainment, or even an occasional pack of cigarettes.

Well, I didn't expect to keep house on fifty-eight cents a month. Popular Publications didn't expect me to, either, but it took me a while to figure out that what they expected me to do was what all the pulp editors did: to supplement my salary by writing for myself and for the other magazines in the chain.

Because I was slow in catching on to this, my 1940 total of sales amounted to only $281.42 (and that represented eleven stories and a poem!). But by the end of the year I had learned the ropes, and besides, Popular Publications had doubled my salary. It looked as if 1941 would—with a little luck—give me a cash income of nearly two thousand dollars. Not luxury, no. But enough for even a little comfort.

There were about six good months in there, the first half of 1941, when everything went pretty much as I had expected and the world seemed almost worrisomely easy to cope with. Doë and I were nest-building, and Knickerbocker Village was a fun place to live in. It was the first of the giant New York apartment developments. It took up a whole city block, hard up against the Manhattan Bridge on one side, a few blocks from Chinatown and the Five Points on the other. Architecturally it seemed something from the future, two separate structures, each a hollow square surrounding a grassy little park, a children's playground dividing the two. Under the building was a warren of passages and chambers, so that you could go from any building in the complex indoors to any other, and even to any of the built-in ground-floor commercial establishments—drugstore, candy store, co-op supermarket, restaurants, bars. Most of what one needed for life was right there in Knickerbocker Village, including friends.