The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (22 page)

The thing about science-fiction conventions in general, and worldcons in particular, is that they are made up of science-fiction writers and fans,
*
as well as agents, editors, artists, teachers, and general hangers-on. This quality separates them from most of humanity in that, by and large, they are in the habit of using their brains for abstract thought.

I hate to say that about science fiction out loud. It puts people off. And, of course, it isn't
absolutely
essential to possess an informed or analytical mind to read science fiction. There's plenty of junk for the junk addicts, and it's even possible to read, say, "Who Goes There?" for the adventure or "Against the Fall of Night" for the lovely color without troubling one's head much about complexities and implications. But you miss the best parts. Sf encourages thought and curiosity, and requires both to appreciate it fully. Your average
Newsweek
reader or game-show viewer can't handle this sort of thing, and responds to sf with hostility or scorn. Sf readers can handle
anything
.

This does not guarantee that in each individual case they will be intelligent, or admirable, or even house-broken. Some of the worst people I have ever met have turned up at worldcons, as well as some of the best. Nevertheless, I cannot imagine any topic on which I could not find someone to carry on a rewarding conversation at a science-fiction convention. I can't think of many subjects that haven't been programmed. I am not all that fond of formal programs, having long since participated in enough of them for one lifetime, but even the formal programs contain jewels: scientists coming to tell the science-fiction world what they have been doing in space communications, or sociometrics, or the structures of the brain; advocates preaching alternate life-styles; writers rapping about their work; editors in give-and-take with the readers.

And in and around the program items are the informal get-togethers, in room parties or bars, with side trips to points of local interest and reunions with long-lost friends.

As part of the world's hypertrophy syndrome, sf conventions have grown uncomfortably huge. Three or four thousand persons is not rare; sometimes they are even worse. That's a pity. Too much of a good thing reduces the possibilities for personal interaction; it is a confusion rather than a coming together. But thirty years ago there were only a few hundred of us band of brothers at Philadelphia. Most of us had not seen each other since the far side of a war and were glad to meet again, even gladder to meet people we had known only through letters or the printed page. Willy Ley, John Campbell, Lester del Rey were all there. Ted Sturgeon accompanied a lovely girl named Mary Mair on his guitar as she sang his song "Thunder and Roses." William Tenn—brand-newest of the Big Name Writers—his "Child's Play" just out—gave an uproariously funny comic lecture on writers' correspondence. And Judith Merril was there. I had met her briefly a year or two earlier. We had both been married at the time; now neither of us were. Judy had just published "That Only a Mother," a brilliant twisty-dismaying short story about a woman who gives birth to a radiation-damaged child, the sort of story that gets right in among the glands and squeezes pretty basic parts of the psyche, so she was a writer to be respected. She was also a person to be known better, in her mid-twenties, with a small, incredibly beautiful blonde daughter. Judy herself was not pretty. She was something quite different. My friend Jacques LeCroix, arguably the best portrait photographer in Paris at the time, described her as having "the capacity for great beauty."

Philcon '47 left such a delicious aftertaste in all our mouths that Lester del Rey and I decided to revive it on a semipermanent basis in New York. So one night a few weeks later Lester brought a few of his friends down to my apartment on Grove Street, where a few of mine were already gathered, and the nine of us r'ared back and passed a miracle. We called it the Hydra Club.

Over the next few years the Hydra Club came to include nearly every science-fiction writer in the New York area, plus a lot of others: Fletcher Pratt, Willy Ley, L. Jerome Stanton (associate editor of
Astounding
), William Tenn, Judith Merril, George O. Smith, Jack Gillespie, Basil Davenport, Dave Kyle, Sam Merwin, Harry Harrison, as well as Lester and myself. It was the place where sf writers met. When Arthur Clarke turned up from London, Hydra was where he came. When visiting firemen from California or the Midwest passed by New York, we laid on special meetings. Hans Stefan Santesson was the general coordinator, in charge of letting us know when to meet; Debbie Crawford, with a comfortable little apartment in the North Village, was our usual hostess. At Christmas we rented a hotel ballroom to revel in. Betweentimes we met and drank a few and enjoyed each other's company.

Hydra was a fine place for establishing and cementing relationships, not all of them literary. Lester found his wife, Evelyn, there. Jack Gillespie met and married Lois Miles. And I married Judy Merril. By that time she had become an editor at Bantam Books, and I was turning into a literary agent.

Q
.
What is an agent
?

A
.
An agent is a person who acts for another person
.

Q
.
What kind of an agent is a
"
literary
"
agent
?

A
.
A literary agent is a person who acts for a writer in literary matters
.

Q
.
What do you have to be in order to become a literary agent
?

A
.
Willing
.

Literary agents come in all shapes and sizes. Some are Big Business. Some are cottage industry. Some are only a kind of hobby, scratching out a piece of a living from the odd reading fee or commission while holding a job, or free-lancing editorial work, or even collecting welfare. There are no professional standards. It is a little trickier to get started now than it was thirty years ago, but only because
everything
is a little trickier now, since a larger proportion of everything is taxed and/or registered with the government. It still isn't hard to set up shop. And in 1947 there was nothing to it.

Dirk Wylie came back from the wars with a bad back, acquired jumping out of that truck in the Ardennes. Army hospitals did what they could for him, and he emerged a civilian in 1946. But he wasn't well enough to get a job, and he was looking for something he could do at his own pace, preferably in his own home, preferably in the publishing business somewhere. He decided to set up as a literary agent.

In this I encouraged him a lot. The writing market was changing every day in the postwar confusion. I kept hearing about new magazines, new kinds of markets. What I really would have wished in my heart was to write for them all myself, but there was no hope. I'm not a very fast writer. It graveled me to see these opportunities going begging, and so I offered to help Dirk out as a silent partner. So Dirk printed up some letterheads and went looking for clients.

I remembered that when I had worked for Popular Publications, standing orders had been to save the outside envelopes from all slush-pile manuscripts and turn them over to somebody in the business department. They copied off the return addresses, typed up copies, and sold them to purchasers of mailorder lists. I asked a few publishers, found that such lists were still available, and we bought a few. We wrote a letter on Dirk's new stationery:

Dear Writer
:

We have a vacancy in our lists for a few additional clients
. . . .

And manuscripts began to flow in. Not just manuscripts but checks; we were charging a reading fee.

A lot of agents still do charge reading fees. It's not really an intrinsically evil process, just a schlocky one. Like heroin and beer, reading-fee criticism is a commodity that is wanted very much by some people, and if it were against the law to supply it, there would be bootleggers. I understand the need. If you are a writer, you understand it, too. There are times when you are putting all those words onto those sheets of white paper and you would gladly pay anything to have some competent professional tell you whether they are any good or not.

The person who writes the reading-fee letters usually does know more than the client does, but not necessarily very much more. The big agencies tend to hire anybody who can type neatly, grammatically, and fast. They would hire skilled professionals if they could, provided skilled professionals would work for the kind of money a reading-fee person can command, but that doesn't happen. At least with Dirk all the letters were written by people who had actually written and published stories of their own, mostly by Dirk himself. But still it was not exactly what Dirk wanted to do with his life, and after the first year or so, when there began to be a few commissions from actual sales, Dirk decided to drop the reading fees.

Dirk was a fine, bright man. I think he would have made quite a good agent, but what the war had done to him could not be undone. His spinal injury began to relapse. He was hospitalized and released; hospitalized again, and the stay grew longer and release began to look remote. His wife, Rosalind, carried on with the work of the agency, with help from me.

And then Dirk died.

Dirk's death was not the first that had invaded my own life. But he was still in his twenties! And he was my oldest friend. I could not accept it—because so much of my growing up had been shared with him, because it was such a shocking waste. I couldn't make myself go to his funeral.

When we were able to make reasonable plans, Ros and I decided to continue the agency as a partnership, retaining Dirk's name.
*
I was still working for PopSci, so most of my work for the agency was limited to evenings and weekends. But now and then something productive happened during the working day. My boss, George Spoerer, came back from lunching with an old friend at Doubleday to report that they were about to set up a science-fiction line. In fact, they had already begun buying, when someone in the corporate structure happened to think that they really didn't know much about science fiction. Not to worry, George told his friend; I have this kid assistant who knows something about it, and if you like we'll get you together and you can pick his brains. Did I want to do that? he asked.

I wanted little more; it was the nicest news I had heard in some time.

Science fiction had been growing slowly out of its pulp origins. Big slicks like
Colliers
and
The Saturday Evening Post
were trying their luck with the occasional Bradbury or Heinlein story. The trade book publishers had not yet perceived the existence of a market, but a few amateurs had. In Pennsylvania, Lloyd Eshbach had started Fantasy Press. In Chicago, Erie Korshak had Shasta. In Philadelphia there was Prime Press, and in New York City there was Gnome. None of these were very big or very profitable. But they demonstrated that a market was there, though they didn't have the capital or the knowledge to exploit it.

The one I followed most closely was Gnome Press, because it was closest to hand and because my old buddy Dave Kyle was one of its founders. Dave's elder brother, Arthur C. Kyle, was a newspaper publisher in upstate New York. That meant he had a printing press. It wasn't very well adapted to book work. It could print only eight-page signatures, and not very rapidly at that. But it was an asset of importance to a shoestring operation. Dave's partner was a glass blower and science-fiction fan named Marty Greenberg.
*
The two of them secured the rights from the author, Fletcher Pratt, and published a fantasy novel called
The Cornelian Cube
.

The partnership did not survive very well, and, for that matter, neither did Gnome Press. It kept going for five or six years and foundered in a mass of lawsuits and unpaid bills. But if you look at one of Gnome Press's old catalogs, you find you are staring at a million dollars. The authors they had! Isaac Asimov. Robert A. Heinlein. Arthur C. Clarke. They had them all. They had the rights to books that have collectively sold tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of copies since, and they had acquired them at prices that would make a cat weep. Jack Williamson and I wrote three original sf novels for Gnome, and the biggest advance we got was $750. Edd Cartier designed Gnome's colophon and did their covers. The finest talents that science fiction owned were lined up and knocking on Gnome's door, hungry for the book publication that all of them wanted and every one of them had been denied.

What went wrong with the semipro publishers was that they could not bridge the distribution gap. The commodity was there, the marvelous stories that had been silting up for decades in the sf magazines. The market was there, hundreds of thousands of readers thrilled by the idea of owning their favorite stories in permanent form. Or, for that matter, in any form, because for some of the newer readers novels like
The Skylark of Space
and
Slan
! were only legends. Unless they could find tattered second-hand copies of the magazines they had been published in, there was no way for them to read the books themselves.

But between publisher and reader lies a wide space, and the best way to bridge it is with salesmen, distributors, jobbers, and a whole network of promotion, billing, and service departments. The semipro publishers had none of these things. They could print the books, and they could sell them a single copy at a time, mostly direct-by-mail, to individual customers; that way they could get rid of an edition of two or three thousand copies, enough to show a theoretical profit. But there was no way for Marty Greenberg in his little office on West 10th Street to reach ten thousand bookstore proprietors and persuade them to stock his books. Worse. The profits were only theoretical. To make them real required the investment of real capital, which none of the semipros had.