The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (24 page)

I tried to do that in as many ways as I could, and sometimes it worked pretty well. For instance, Hal Clement wrote a marvelous sf novel called
Mission of Gravity
. He had had a temporary aberration of his own and submitted it in some kind of fruitcake "best novel" contest run by one of the semipro publishers, which I was desperately afraid the book would win; untangling it from them was my first and hardest job. But then I sent it off to John Campbell, who sent it back with the sad news that although he, of course, loved it, it would be impossible for him to run it as a serial since it did not break naturally into three installments.

Now, this was clear lunacy. I have no idea what made John say a dumb thing like that. John was about the best editor sf ever had, but even the best can go out of his mind at certain phases of the moon. I was never any good at winning arguments with John Campbell, but in this case I was certain he was wrong, and it was my clear duty, to him as well as to my client, to save him from his folly. So I took the manuscript out of its box and thumbed through it. It ran about 270 pages. I turned to page 90 and found a paragraph that could be construed as a cliffhanger, and penciled under it "End of Part One." On page 180 I wrote in "End of Part Two." I turned the manuscript over to my secretary with instructions to retype three or four pages before and after each break. I put it in the file for three weeks and then sent it back to John with a note saying that I hoped he would find that the revisions made it suitable for serialization. Of course he did, and it wound up as one of the best-loved serials
Astounding
ever ran.

I tell this story, not to make fun of John Campbell, but to illustrate the point that all editors, even he, sometimes say crazy things. If they are taken seriously, they can mean lost sales and wasted work for writers. One of the hardest things an agent has to do is to know when to reject a rejection. "How" is even harder.

With Horace Gold at
Galaxy
I was on easy terms.

Half a dozen times I refused to accept his turndown of a story and kept sending it back until he weakened and bought it. (Half a dozen other times I didn't persuade him.) With most editors I was less forthright. The simplest ploy was to hold a manuscript for a month or two and then send it back as if it had been revised. I tried not to lie outright, but I was willing to send off a letter that said:

"
You know
,
Charlie
,
I think you
'
ve put your finger on a good point in Sam
'
s story
.
I
'
ll see what he thinks
."

And then, a few weeks later:

"
Here
'
s Sam
'
s story back
,
as we discussed
.
I really think it
'
s a winner now
."

What made it easy for me to play tricks was that I had a lot of leverage in science fiction, and the science-fiction field was booming. I used the muscle when I could, not just for my own writers. The reason the prevailing rate went from two cents a word to three in the early 1950s was a complicated three-way squeeze play that I planned and flawlessly executed.

When I went into the Army in 1943, I had helped Damon Knight get my old job at Popular Publications; now he was getting tired of it and looking for something with more authority to do. He stopped by my office and asked for advice. I had heard some trade gossip about Alex Hillman, then proprietor of a magazine chain, and suggested Damon hit on him for a science-fiction magazine; Damon did, and Hillman was willing to give it a try. Then Damon came to my office and asked how he could get a look at some of the stories that were going to Horace Gold and John Campbell. "Pay more than they do," I said, and Damon thought it over, and took it back to Hillman, and got a budget that allowed him to squeeze out an extra penny a word. That was step one. Step two was for me to trot down to Horace Gold and tell him that he now had powerful competition for a first look, and what was he going to do about it? "Let me talk it over with the publisher," he said, and did, and then
Galaxy
went to three cents a word. Whereupon I called up John Campbell and told him that the two-cent line had been broken; and a few weeks later
Astounding
followed suit. Well, no doubt all of that would have happened sooner or later, anyway; but it happened when it did because I squeezed.

All these things pleased me a lot; forgive me if I dwell on them, because some of the other things weren't very pleasing at all. I was having a lot of fun, but one thing I was not doing was making a profit.

Although the gross kept growing, the cost of doing business kept growing just a little faster. Advances. Rent. Salaries. Taxes. Telephone. Entertainment—I didn't do nearly as much of this as many agents, but still it was an item. Stationery! We used a lot of it, and most of it was custom-made. I designed a really handsome die-cut manuscript folder. They did exactly what they were intended to do, protected the scripts and made ours stand out from everyone else's, but they also cost the earth. Every time we ordered a new batch it blew the commissions on half a dozen sales. I designed locater cards and rights cards, ten times as good as the stock varieties, and at ten times the price.

And then there were those special and inevitable costs, like Christmas.

Christmas! It's a quarter of a century since I had my agent's office in New York City, but I can still barely force myself to send out a Christmas card. The jolly Yule spirit does not survive being an entrepreneur. Early in November the vultures start to gather. Building-service personnel you hardly see all year round make sure to wish you a happy holiday. The elevator people give you a group card, with each name carefully spelled out. The cleaning women identify themselves. The gnomes that toil in the caverns underground, fixing the pipes and feeding the boilers, every one makes himself known to you, and every one expects a little token of affection. And the Post Office! God must love mailmen, he made so many of them. The First-Class Delivery men present you with their collective card. Then the Bulk Mail deliverers give you theirs. Then the Special Delivery and Registereds come along. Then the Pickup Men, who empty out the box in your building. Then the for God's sake Sorting Clerks send a deputy out to visit your office, Christmas card in hand, cheery smile on face, and larceny in heart.

Taken all in all, a lot of money was funneling through the agency checking account, but it all seemed to belong to someone else. Somehow or other we managed to go on eating, but not out of those ten-percent commissions. Popular Science had been reluctant enough to see me go to ask me to continue with odd jobs on a free-lance basis, and so from time to time I packaged a new book for them, photography manual or fishing guide. There was not much satisfaction in them, but they were easy work for the money and kept body and soul together.

But I kept thinking I would like to do some real writing.

The thing was, there was a moral question involved. Selling my own writing meant competing with my clients. Ninety-five percent of the time, that would make no real difference to anyone, the work sold on its merits, the editors were glad to have it, there was never enough really good stuff to suit them, anyway. But now and then there would be conflicts, inevitably. A slick magazine would want to try
one
science-fiction story as an experiment. Whose? Bob Lowndes would have a cover and need a story written around it. Whom should the assignment go to?

For a time I compromised by editing a few anthologies. Brad had asked Bob Heinlein to do one for Doubleday, and Heinlein had objected that he didn't know enough about what had been published or how to secure permissions. Brad asked me if I were willing to ghost it, and I was, provided I could share it with Judy; and so the two of us put together
Tomorrow, the Stars
. It turned out very well, in fact I still get royalties on it, twenty-odd years later, and so Brad asked me to do some more in propria persona.

But it wasn't quite the same as writing.

I should say that the desire to write is really independent of the need to make a living. Not just for me. Harlan Ellison and I were talking to some fledgling writers a year or so ago, and he said, "No one should consider writing if he can possibly imagine doing anything else." I was struck by the wisdom of the remark because it defined exactly my own unexamined attitudes. Writing is the way I make my daily bread; but it is also my hobby, my vice, and my ongoing and most valued psychotherapy. Most writers would be straight up the wall if they didn't have the typewriter to fantasize through. James Branch Cabell once wrote a tenderly critical little jape about a writer: gauche, self-obsessed, petulant, he cried out, "I am pregnant with words! And I must have lexicological parturition, or I die!"

And I was beginning to bulge.

In the beginning of the 50s Judy and I took a summer place up on a hill overlooking the Ashokan Reservoir, a strange, comfortable old house with the upstairs where the downstairs ought to be: the ground floor was all bedrooms, while the upper part was mostly an immense open drawing room with a big fireplace. One weekend I felt the need to do some kind of writing badly enough to exhume my wartime novel,
For Some We Loved
. I sat in front of that fireplace all night long, reading it page by page. And as I finished each page I threw it in the fire. It was, boy,
bad
. Scratch For
Some We Loved
. I had achieved my purpose in learning enough about the advertising business to write a novel about it, no doubt. But not that novel. It was too immature and incompetent to salvage. I thought of starting over again from the beginning, same premise but better resources and maybe even better skill at writing, since I had learned something in the years between. But by then Fredric Wakeman had made an immense success with
The Hucksters
. The idea's virginity was gone.

A year later Judy and I were weekending at Fletcher and Inga Pratt's immense old place in Highlands, New Jersey, tenderly called The Ipsy-Wipsy Institute. It was a literary sort of place to be. Fletcher himself used to set up his typewriter in the billiard room; he would type a few lines, pause to chat, toss cards into a hat, have a drink, feed the marmosets, then go back and type a few more. I have never understood how the man could string sentences together to make sense under conditions like that, but his example was a prod. The other guests were people like Willy Ley, John Ciardi, Sprague de Camp, Bernard de Voto, all of them with writing of their own to do, and I felt left out.

So I took my lavender typewriter out on the lawn and began typing something called
Fall Campaign
. It seemed to be the beginning of a science-fiction novel about advertising. I didn't know where I was going with it. I especially didn't know what I would do with it after I wrote it, but it seemed like an interesting thing to do; and in any event, the problem of what to do with it would not arise until I had it written, which seemed comfortably far in the future.

As time permitted, for the next few months, I added a page now and then. Time didn't permit a lot. Putting in seventy hours a week as a literary agent did not leave many hours for writing, but, even so, by the summer of 1951 I had some twenty thousand words of very rough draft on paper, and the novel seemed to have solidified itself.

Then along came Horace Gold.

I had been selling him at least half of what he printed, as an agent, and besides, we had become good friends. I fought temptation for a while and then bashfully admitted I had a novel of my own in the works. Show me, said Horace. I did. Finish it and I'll print it, said Horace.

Fine! But how? I was still putting in seventy-hour weeks. At the current rate of progress it was two or three years in the future, at best, and here Horace was talking about having a cover painted and scheduling it as soon as Alfie Bester's
The Demolished Man
was through.

By then Judy and I had bought the big old New Jersey house I still live in, just across the river from Red Bank, and we had house guests. Cyril Kornbluth and his pregnant wife, Mary, had come to stay with us while they sorted things out. Cyril had quit his job as a wire-service news editor in Chicago to come east to free-lance. Naturally he was one of my clients. He was also my tried and trusted old collaborator. And he was right there in the house.

I showed him my twenty-thousand-word fragment. We chatted for a while about where I thought I was going. Phil Klass, alias William Tenn, had made a suggestion about having the hero do the Haroun al Raschid bit, wandering around the planet as a plebeian instead of an upper-crust advertising executive, and I thought that was a profitable area to explore. Cyril agreed and took the manuscript away, and when I saw him again he had rewritten the first twenty thousand words and added a whole new middle section. The last third we wrote turn and turn about, and then I put the whole thing through the typewriter one more time, and what came out
Galaxy
serialized as
Gravy Planet
.

As
The Space Merchants
, the book has had quite a career. I have a shelf made up of nothing but editions of it, in some twenty-five languages: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, Latvian, Japanese, Serbo-Croatian, Dutch, Swedish, Hungarian, Romanian, and a dozen others. There are seven different English-language editions, from seven different publishers. We sold the film rights for a pretty penny:
*
it was broadcast on CBS's Columbia Workshop, and you can still buy pirated tape cassettes of the dramatization. For that matter, you can still buy the book. I don't know how many copies of it have been printed worldwide. There's no good way to tell, since there are several pirated editions I know of only from hearsay, not to mention the Eastern European editions on which no royalty statements have ever been furnished (or, of course, royalties paid). But it may be somewhere around ten million.