The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (16 page)

A few months after us, my friend Dick Wilson married Doë's friend Jessica Gould and at once moved into a KV apartment the mirror image of ours, across the central court and a few stories lower down. We could see each other's windows, and arranged signals for when we wanted company to save on phone bills. On the penthouse floor of our own building were Willard and Eleanor Crosby. Bill was one of my colleagues at Popular, a marvelously witty and urbane man who ultimately wound up on
The New York Times
until his death in the 1960s. Another Popular editor, Loren Dowst, had an apartment in the complex, and two Brooklyn friends, Ben and Felice Leshner, turned up a few tunnels away. Our own neighbors across the hall were named Hoke and Cara Smith—Hoke a librarian, Cara a student. We got along well, especially in the hot weather, when we learned that if we and they kept our hall doors open, we could get a straight-through ventilation almost as good as (wild fantasy of luxury!) air conditioning.

Knickerbocker Village had been built in part as a sort of primeval urban redevelopment plan. The neighborhood was tatty, and a lot of it was pure slum. It was the old Five Points neighborhood, in the middle of the nineteenth century the armpits of hell, ridden with crime and violence far worse than anything in East Harlem or Bed-Stuy today. The ghetto people then were Irish, rather than black or Puerto Rican, and that whole area was where the Civil War draft riots started, where police dared go only in pairs, and then only walking down the middle of the street. That was 1850 and thereabouts. Now, in the 1970s and thereabouts, it is—New York. It is like any other part of New York. If you walk the streets late at night you are reasonably likely to be mugged.

But in 1941 and 1942 it was gentler and more colorful. The neighborhood was a mosaic. Here was an Italian street fair, there a Greek kaffeineon; Jewish pushcart peddlers were all over, and Chinatown was just a few blocks away. North of Chinatown was the Bowery, solid ranks of missions, quarter-a-night flophouses, and dime-a-shot bars. Derelicts were sprawled sodden in every doorway at night and lurched down the sidewalks all of every day. Each morning I took the Second Avenue El from Chatham Square to 42nd Street on my way to work, and you could look right into the windows of the flophouses to see the ranks of cots in the dormitories, and the shoulder-high partitions that defined the "private" rooms for the more affluent. New Yorkers had not yet learned to be afraid. It did not occur to us that any of
them
would harm any of
us
, and none of them ever did.

In among all these warehouses and old-law tenements Knickerbocker Village stood tall and self-contained, gates open, playground unlocked, like the keep of a particularly prosperous baron in a particularly tranquil decade of medieval Europe.

We weren't even isolated. We went out into the bigger world to theaters, to friends, to work. Friends came to see us. We seemed to have a lot of parties (bless those thick, quiet Knickerbocker Village walls), and people were in and out of the apartment every day and night. On Sundays Isaac Asimov came clear across the river from Brooklyn to visit. Doë wasn't terribly fond of him, and so we would go out and walk around Chinatown while he told me the plot of the newest Foundation story he was writing for John Campbell, and I would try to interest him in writing something else for me. Willy Ley had come to America a few years earlier out of pure loathing for Hitler and the Nazis. He was writing articles and the odd story for science-fiction magazines, and he brought his pretty wife, Olga, down for dinner once or twice, a lovely, slim, dark girl with a ballerina's figure. (She acquired it dancing with the St. Petersburg Corps, and as of a few weeks ago has it still.)

But Europe was at war. The United States was still a year and more from Pearl Harbor, but the handwriting was on the wall. The Army had begun to draft men. Dirk Wylie had signed up in the reserve, and they took him away to become an MP. Dave Kyle went off, and reappeared a few months later in the uniform of a staff sergeant of the Armored Corps. Jack Gillespie didn't much care for wearing a uniform. That was what the cards spelled out if he didn't do something to prevent it, so he got himself into the Merchant Marine as a deckhand, and came back from time to time to report on what life was like in the Caribbean and the Med. My own draft situation was reasonably comfortable (Doë qualified as a dependent because we had married before the cutoff date), but all young males understood well that the rules could change any time if the war went badly; and badly it was going. After creaming France, the Nazis had sat tight for a time, flexing their muscles and organizing their conquests. Then, in a series of lightning strokes, they occupied Denmark and Norway, moved into the Balkans, and in the summer of 1941 attacked the Soviet Union. If I had had any faith at all left in Joe Stalin as wise all-father to the proletarian republic, it would have been destroyed by his handling of that invasion—if, of course, I had known what was really going on. He blew it badly, disastrously badly. What saved him was the toughness of the Russian people and the almost equal foolishness of Adolf Hitler. Even so, within a few weeks the Germans were deep inside the Soviet Union, and Stalin was in nervous collapse.

There was, to be sure, a certain amount of sardonic fun in the situation. As soon as Hitler struck at Stalin, the Communist Party line flopped back, from "The Yanks Are Not Coming" to "Victory for the Freedom-loving Peoples of the World." And not just the Communist Party. All at once Stalin was our friend, the Russians our allies and protégés. Hollywood began churning out a series of films showing how the heroic Russian masses were outsmarting and outfighting the invader. Chicago meatpackers began manufacturing kielbasa for lend-lease. And one ludicrous evening in the Radio City Music Hall I heard their symphony orchestra playing, for God's sake, the "Internationale."

It was not only a bad time in the war, it was suddenly a very bad time for me. About that time I became unemployed.

I have never been sure whether I quit or got fired. I hung at Harry Steeger's doorway one morning until I got to see him. My intention was to ask for a raise, meaning to quit and free-lance if he turned me down.

But Steeger had complaints of his own. When I walked out of his office I didn't have the raise, and didn't have the job, either.

From the early summer of 1941 to the beginning of 1942, seven months in all, I was a free-lance writer.

That wasn't the first time I had been a free-lance writer. What else was I to call myself in 1938? But it was the first time that it mattered much whether I made a living or not. Knickerbocker Village wanted its rent every month. We ate. We burned electricity. The landlord called, and twelve o'clock arrived too often.

In that seven-month period I wrote quite a lot. I actually finished five stories which sold, for a collective price of not much less than a thousand dollars—for the first-serial sale, that is; over the years, they've earned quite a lot more than that. If you divide seven months into a thousand dollars, you find that my weekly earnings came to around thirty dollars, or almost, not even counting what long-subsequent reprints brought in. That was just about what I had been earning in salaries and free-lance checks while I was at Popular.

But it was not the same thing at all, at all.

There is a vast difference between earning a thousand dollars at the boiler factory and earning that same thousand as a free-lance writer. At the boiler works you get a check every Friday. If you write for a living, you get your check when you get it, and not a moment before. Maybe you get it when you finish your story. Maybe you get it a few months later, after a few editors have had the unwisdom to reject it. Maybe you get it never.

This is a terrible trauma for many writers, not just the effect on their credit of the slapdash arrival of checks, but the effect on their writing itself. Jim Blish was one of the more successful, and also one of the more deservedly successful, writers I have known. For more than twenty years he alternated between periods of holding a job and writing on the side, and periods of full-time writing as a free-lancer. And for all those years the best and most successful writing he did was when it was in his spare time; when he took his courage in his hands and set out to be Pure Writer, he froze. Not just Jim. Many of us. To some degree, at some time, all of us. Including me. (But always excepting Isaac Asimov, who is not like mortal man.)

The good thing about writing as a career is if you are any good at it, the paychecks keep coming long after the work is done. Nearly half my income usually comes from residual rights on work done anywhere up to forty years ago, including a share from those stories written in the fall of 1941. (If those subsequent earnings are added in, my actual income from those seven months must come to well over a hundred a week, at least twice as much as I then deemed affluence.)

The bad thing is that the money doesn't come when you need it. The normal curve of a writer's income is steadily up. But the point from which the curve starts is zero.

Doë and I weren't desperately poor. We certainly weren't being hounded by creditors; we had never bought anything on credit. Although we had no appreciable savings, and the cash inflow for that seven-month period was meager, I don't recall needing any tangible thing that we didn't have. What I personally needed very much was quite intangible: a touch more self-respect.

The funny thing is that I am sure I could have found another editorial job if I had looked. Young male editors were disappearing into uniform every week, and a draft-deferred specimen like me could easily have found a home. I am astonished to say that, as far as I can recall, the thought never crossed my mind. If I couldn't edit
Astonishing
and
Super Science
I would write, and if I couldn't write I would do nothing.

And nothing is what I did a lot of the time, or at least nothing very productive in terms of bringing cash into the domestic economy. What I did a great deal of the time was play chess. I had never been any good at it, but I wanted to be, and now, with time to spare, I lived on the chessboard for seven months. I learned all the end games, and puzzled for weeks over the fact that a knight and a bishop could checkmate a king but two knights could not. I bought a book of famous games and played them out. And I challenged any player I could catch.

The player I could catch most frequently was Dick Wilson, handily right across the court in Building E. By the time he got home from work I would already have the light impatiently in the window, and as soon as he was through dinner he would come up to BH8, or I would come down to EE2, and we would play until he had to go to sleep. I don't remember what Jessica and Doë did while we played chess. I don't know if I cared.

When I wasn't playing chess, I read. When I wasn't reading, I listened to music. Doë and I had discovered ballet a little earlier, and as often as we could afford we were off to the old Metropolitan Opera House to see the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Fredric Franklin taking a hundred and twenty-eight bars to die as the slave in
Scheherazade
, the astringent excellence of
Les Sylphides
,
Swan Lake's
heart-meltingly sweet cygnets. Once I had seen the ballets, the music meant a great deal more to me than it had before, and I began listening in earnest. Somehow I had reached the age of twenty with only the sketchiest acquaintance with classical music. I hadn't owned a record player and had not fully realized that WQXR and WNYC were broadcasting all the concerts one would want to hear every day on the radio. The ballet
Petrouchka
opened up Stravinsky to me;
Gala Performance
, Prokofiev. I bought the fragile, ponderous 78-rpm albums—The Song
of the Nightingale
,
Firebird
,
Sacre
—and played the grooves right off them. From
Les Sylphides
I discovered Chopin, and just about that time Alexander Brailowsky began a concert series that included the entire Chopin oeuvre, even the seldom-played ones that seem to need twelve fingers on each hand; I went to Town Hall for some of them and marveled. When I wasn't playing chess or reading or listening to music, I was visiting with friends; and when I wasn't doing any of those things, and
only
when I wasn't doing any of those things, I wrote.

There are well-organized writers in the world, but I haven't known many of them. (Just one, I think—and you know who you are, Isaac.) I do know what a well-organized writer is like. He gets up in the morning, washes the sleep out of his eyes, sits down at his typewriter, and picks up where he left off at five the evening before. For three hours he types, and then he breaks for lunch. After a pleasant meal and a stroll in the garden, it's back to the typewriter for three more hours. Then, virtuous and complacent, he covers the typewriter and revels all the evening long.

It is not like that for me, and isn't for most of the writers I have known—all the hundreds, maybe thousands, of them. What we mostly do is sweat, stall, worry, and convulse.

I have subsequently learned how to be somewhat systematic. It doesn't come naturally, but I couldn't function without it. Now I have formal quotas and projections, and I often know fairly well in February what work I will have finished by the end of the year. Even so . . . even so, not long ago I found myself totally unable to write for nearly six months; a few years before that, I was convinced I would never write again; and it was only this week, even this day, that I sat and stared at the typewriter for an hour or more without putting a word on paper. As far as I can tell from my own experience and that of many others that is how the game is played.

At twenty-one I was far less well organized than (even!) I am now. Writing was scary. The stakes were high, my confidence was shaky, I put it off when I could. When I wrote it was in bursts: an eighteen-thousand-word novelette all one night long, taking the last page out of the typewriter at noon and falling exhausted to sleep. It was not a bad novelette,
*
but the way I wrote it was very bad. To produce so much so quickly and so exhaustingly makes it that much harder to sit down to produce again. The experience gives you the confidence that a great deal can be done in a short time, which encourages delay. The memory of the exhaustion gives you the knowledge that it won't be any fun, which discourages getting started.