The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (23 page)

Nevertheless, the big trade houses began to notice what was going on. Random House, Crown, and one or two others tested the waters with sf anthologies, and they moved nicely. Simon and Schuster began to sign up an occasional novel—I had already sold them Jack Williamson's
The Humanoids
, for instance.

Doubleday's act of faith went beyond that. They were not talking about an isolated title here and there, they were planning for a category—six books a year, maybe twelve, maybe more than that! It was the Promised Land.

So we met for lunch, George Spoerer and I trekking up to Mad Ave's restaurant of the week, a place called Cherio's. The Doubleday people we lunched with were Jerry Hardy, an advertising-promotion type, very quick to comprehend and full of ideas, and the managing editor of the corporation, Walter Bradbury. Brad was and is one of the great gentlemen of the publishing business, never forgetting a favor, never remembering a slight. He impressed me at once as a good person to work with.

Between the very, very dry martinis and the second cup of coffee I told them all I could fit in about science fiction. Brad's big immediate problem was the first book they had bought for the new series, Max Ehrlich's
The Big Eye
. Ehrlich was a highly competent and successful writer (and still is, as witness
The Reincarnation of Peter Proud
), but he had not previously written any science fiction. No one at Doubleday was sure that
The Big Eye
met the canons of the field. They had sent a copy of the manuscript to a Harvard astronomer who had said it was scientific poppycock. Was it? Did it matter?

I took the manuscript home and read it apprehensively. But there really seemed to be little to worry about.
The Big Eye
is not one of the all-time masterpieces of the field. But it kept my interest all the way through, and I was satisfied that it would do the same for most readers. There was one short passage that I thought needed a fix, so I wrote in a couple of insert pages and sent it back. Brad expressed his gratitude with a bottle of Scotch, and later on, when the book proved out even more successful than he had hoped, with a fair-sized check. (He was under no obligation to do that, but I told you he was a gentleman.) And I began to sell him books.

My client Isaac Asimov, I happened to know, had a nearly book-length manuscript lying around, gathering dust because no magazine wanted to publish it. He had written it, on request, for
Thrilling Wonder Stories
, who hated it and sent it back. John Campbell had politely declined interest, and none of the other magazines of that particular time had much use for long stories. Let's try it on Doubleday, I proposed. They won't buy it, Isaac remonstrated; they want
book
writers, like this fellow Ehrlich, whoever he is, and I'm a magazine person. Don't argue with your agent, I explained. After some arm wrestling I got the manuscript away from him and shipped it off to Doubleday.

What did Brad know? He wasn't aware he only wanted book writers, or that
Grow Old with Me
(as it was called at the time) wasn't exactly what the readers expected of Isaac Asimov. All he knew was that he enjoyed reading it and, after some revisions, was perfectly willing to publish it. Which he did, after giving it a new title. As
Pebble in the Sky
, it has sold, and keeps on selling, a lot of copies.

That was Isaac's first book—not counting a part of a biochemistry text. He caught the fever at once. We followed that one up with another original,
The Stars Like Dust
, and then another, and another. Doubleday was not quite ready to pick up some of his famous older stories, heaven knows why, so they declined
I, Robot
and the
Foundation
series (and I sold them elsewhere), but they were willing to publish his new work almost as rapidly as he could write it.

My other clients were also getting into the act, and some of them with even fatter rewards. John Wyndham turned up with a new novel called
The Day of the Triffids
. Doubleday snapped it up, but I had to ask them to hold off publication because
Collier's
also loved it, and
Collier's
love expressed itself in the biggest check I had ever seen, five figures worth of fondness. My most cherished client (by then also my wife), Judith Merril, wrote a borderline science-fiction novel about New York City under nuclear attack,
Shadow on the Hearth
(later it became a TV special). Cyril Kornbluth was out in Chicago, playing hardboiled-newspaperman games with Trans-Radio Press and doing little of the science-fiction writing he was so good at. I sent him a note, explaining that it was raining soup and he looked silly standing there without a spoon, so he retooled and came on line. First he did a collaboration with Judy, flimsily based on a short story I had begun and abandoned years before; it appeared variously as
Marschild
,
Outpost Mars
, and a couple of other titles, in one edition or another, under their joint pen name of "Cyril Judd." Then he struck out on his own, with three or four chapters of something called
The Martians in the Attic
. It had to do with the first manned trip into space, and some kind of cockamamie Martians that complicated it. They also complicated the story line more than it would stand, and he bogged down.

Cyril and I worked together pretty closely, not just on the stories that bore our joint byline. When I was having trouble making a story work, over the years, it often helped to show it to Cyril for comments and suggestions, and he did the same with me. We re-plotted the novel all one late night in my kitchen, amputating the Martians. Cyril revised a few pages to accommodate the changes, and I showed the remaining fragment to Brad. Fine, said Brad, I'd love to publish it. But there's this one technicality. For the sake of the weekly editorial conference I need an outline of the rest of the book before I can put through a contract.

When I reported this to Cyril, he pursed his lips, borrowed one of my typewriters, and holed up in the small, old, once-theatrical Hotel Latham, a block or two from my office. They had a room just right for writers, on the top floor, next to the elevator motors; it was noisy enough on its own that a little typing disturbed no one, and I used the same room myself for the same purposes now and then. He emerged forty-eight hours later with the completed manuscript. I turned it in to Brad, explaining that most writers disliked writing outlines but Cyril really hated it, and Doubleday published it as
Takeoff
.

Other book publishers were falling in line, and the specialist science-fiction magazine market was beginning to swell toward its biggest boom.
Ellery Queen
decided to diversify with a one-shot called
The Magazine of Fantasy
. It seemed to work out, and under a slightly expanded title it is still being published today. An Italian publishing company had done so well with soap-opera comics that they proposed to try them out in America. For makeweight they added a couple of other titles; one was
Galaxy
, with Horace Gold as editor, and it too survives today. The agency was prospering, and not just in science fiction.

It seemed to be decision time, get all the way in or get out.

I was under no illusions about the money. It would be a long time at best before the agency would net me as much taking-home money as Popular Science was reliably handing over to me every week. But then I didn't really need that much money. With a little luck, at least I might not starve.

Moreover, it felt like time to move on. George Spoerer remained a marvelous man to work for, but the person I really enjoy having as a boss has not yet been born. I had talked about quitting once or twice before. Each time the company had come through with more money and assorted other kindnesses. This time I was serious. In November of 1948 I resigned from Popular Science and set out as a full-time literary agent.

It all came to nothing in the end. But my, it was fun for a while!

I had, all worked out in my mind, a clear description of what an ideal literary agent would be. The ideal agent would not concentrate on selling books or magazine pieces. He would represent writers. The ideal agent would not make deals and then find writers to carry them out. He would learn what each writer's strengths were, and find ways to help him develop them. The way to measure the success of an agent was not to tote up the dollars in his bank account, but to see whether his writers were producing regularly and well.

You see, each literary agent is free to do business in the way that suits him best, and some of the ways that are best for him are worst for his writers.

But no, you say, that's not possible! After all, he gets nothing but a ten percent commission on whatever his writers make. Obviously, whatever is good for his writers is exactly one-tenth as good for him, right?

Wrong. Let's do a mind experiment. You be an agent. You open your mail in the morning, and here is a story from a writer. Because you are a smart agent, you know that you can sell it to X, and he will pay you a thousand dollars for it. Or, alternatively, you can try to sell it to someone who will earn, maybe, two thousand dollars for you with it—Y, or Z, or Q, or W. The trouble is, none of those are a sure sale.

You'll have to try all four of them, maybe, before one will buy it.

So which is a better return on your time, as a literary agent? The fast, sure thousand-dollar sale, or the slower, more problematical sale for twice the money? If you are running a factory, you go for the fast grand.

But now be the writer, and see how different the view is from the other side of the desk. You have spent exactly the same amount of time in writing the story, no matter how long it takes to sell it; one way will bring you exactly twice as much return as the other, so which do you-the-writer prefer? Of course you do; but your agent's cost/effectiveness studies may lead him to the other course.

Things are rarely that simple, but the choices are real. Book contracts are pretty complicated. When the complications have to do with how much money the publisher is going to pay you, then the agent's interests are pretty close to those of the writer. But there are many other clauses in a contract. For example, when you sign a publishing contract, you usually sign your name to a clause that says that if anyone brings suit for libel or plagiarism or one or two other actionable possibilities, then it will be you, not the publisher, who will take the rap. That's reasonable. But sometimes the language of the clause is not; it requires you to pay costs that you may think out of line, or to accept responsibilities that are not properly yours. That doesn't affect your agent, particularly. His neck is not on the line. But yours is. He may be willing to horse-trade a bad indemnity clause for a better share of subsidiary rights with the publisher . . . but are you?

Some agents made a specialty of making package deals—supplying the entire contents of a magazine, or a line of specialized books. I don't know of any case when these captive markets were what any writer would want to aim at, but in the aggregate they could amount to tens of thousands of dollars of sales for the agent. Of course, the agent would have to throw in something by his big-name clients now and then to sweeten the pot. It seemed to me that that was a bad deal for all the writers concerned: for the big names, obviously, but also for the trained seals who turned out the mass copy, because what they were being paid to write seldom had anything to do with what they were good at.

Now, none of this is meant to say that all agents, or even any agents, are crooked or malevolent. Most of them do a better job than their writers ever know. But they are human beings, and they have diverse styles, and after some observation of a lot of them, as editor buying stories for them, as client and as competitor, I had worked out just what I thought was right.

I didn't, for instance, want to get into supplying captive markets. I didn't want to divert writers from what they did well to what would surely sell.

But many writers actually liked writing for those markets because they meant sure sales. Writers, too, like to eat.

I invented a solution for that. One of my most promising, but least solvent, writers was a young Californian who was averaging about one sale for every ten stories, not enough to live on. He was not the only writer in the world with that problem, but he was making a serious effort to support himself and his family by writing; he had no resources, and unless he could count on scratching together at least enough to pay for groceries, he would have to give it up.

In similar circumstances, any number of writers have either turned into hacks or gone out and got a job and deferred, maybe permanently, their writing careers. But it seemed to me there was an experiment worth trying, and so I made an arrangement with him. I undertook to pay him an advance on every story he turned in, so much a word, immediately on receipt of manuscript. He could write whatever he liked. I would worry about where and how to sell it. But every time a page came out of the typewriter he could count on a few bucks—not maybe, not later, but then.

Actually, it worked pretty well. Without the constraint of desperately needing to please some editor, he was able to write what he was good at. His sales began to pick up. I mentioned this to Cyril, and he allowed as how he would like the same arrangement; I agreed, and it worked for him, too. Jim Blish and Damon Knight wanted to try the same arrangement, and it also worked for them. By and by I had twelve or fifteen writers doing their own things, liberated from the need to slant, and, by gosh, doing very well. If you look at the major sf magazines of the early 50s, you will find that around half of the stories in them came from my agency; and of those I think at least half, including many of the best ones, were written under that arrangement, and mostly
would not have been written without it
.

I am really rather pleased with myself about this. Most of the writers involved were producing at the top of their form. The stories themselves comprise a solid part of the literature of sf. They are still being reprinted, and even taught. While it isn't as good as having written them myself, it still isn't bad; they are my stepchildren, with whom I am well pleased. It wasn't all roses. What was most wrong with it was that it required substantial amounts of capital—which I didn't have. But what was right about it was that it made it possible for good writers to do their best work without worrying about pleasing some nut of an editor. And shielding writers against editorial insanity, it seems to me, is an agent's principal task.