The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (26 page)

After Judy and I married, we had a couple of pretty interesting years. It probably was not highly intelligent of us both to quit our well-paid jobs at the same time, but I wanted to spend more time at agenting and Judy wanted to write
Shadow on the Hearth
, and we took the plunge. We didn't have much money. On the other hand, we didn't need a lot. Our first apartment (which had been Judy's apartment, until I moved self and typewriter in) was a basement in the East Village, about as cheap as an apartment got. It was large and rather nice—assuming you didn't mind squeezing past the steam pipes and the laundry room to get to the door—and we had a lot of good parties there. It didn't matter much if we were noisy, and that was good. Sometimes Jay Stanton would bring his guitar, or Ted Sturgeon would bring his. There was a piano, and usually someone to play it. Most often it was a young girl named Gerry Schuster, who was rehearsal pianist for the Ballet Theatre and once or twice brought actual dancers and choreographers around.
*

Considering how little money we had, Judy and I got around quite a lot. We made it to Toronto for the 1948 World Science Fiction Convention (the first one to take the word "world" seriously, or a little bit seriously, by having the site actually outside the United States). George O. Smith and Chan Davis drove up to Toronto and back with us. That's where I first met people like Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson, young fans just beginning to break into print, and on the way back George O. achieved his life's ambition by bellying up to the rail at Niagara and urinating into the Falls. We had a summer place at Ashokan one year. We were on Cape Cod, visiting Chan Davis's family, when the Korean War broke out. We got to the Cincinnati convention in 1949, sharing our twin beds with Chan and his new bride when they arrived too late to get a room.
†
The 1950 convention was off in some unexplored area like California, and we didn't see how we could make that, but we beat the system by holding our own convention in New York City.

New York-1950 was the first convention I had actually participated in organizing, and if God spares my reasoning powers, it will be the last. It was a harrowing experience.

By now there have been hundreds of conventions. There is a great body of accumulated wisdom, passed on from committee to committee. Hotels have become aware of sf conventions and usually welcome them, sometimes compete furiously to attract them. But in 1950 there was much ground still unbroken. Hotel managers were not at all sure of what they were getting into; they wanted guarantees. Registration fees were modest. No one had yet thought of converting sf conventions into Farmer's Markets for hucksters of books, magazines, and trinkets, so there was no income from renting out sales space. There wasn't very much money at all to work with, and certainly none to pay speakers. Nevertheless, we got several hundred people out, and all in all, it was one of the best conventions of the decade.

It even attracted media coverage.
Life
sent a crew around, and published a group photograph of the banquet. The saddening thing about the photo, looking at it now, is that so many of the people are dead: Willy Ley, Will Jenkins (a.k.a. Murray Leinster), my old boss George Spoerer, Rita Pringle (Dirk Wylie's sister-in-law; Dirk himself had died a year or two earlier), Jim Williams of Prime Press. The other saddening thing, or at least the sort of rueful thing, is to observe how many of the couples there are couples no longer, or are coupled with different partners. My wife, Carol, is in the picture, but not only were we not yet married, we had barely met.

The convention committee, besides Judy and myself, were Jay Stanton, Lester del Rey, and Harry and Evelyn Harrison, a small and incestuous world. A few months later Jay married Carol; that lasted not quite a year. Harry and Evelyn Harrison split up, and Evelyn marred Lester del Rey. A sociology student named Jean Haynes came into the Hydra Club around that time and decided to do her master's thesis on kinship ties in our social microcosm. She spent three months trying to sort out who was married to whom and which had been married to what, not to mention less formal alliances, and gave up in despair. The game was Musical Beds. At its peak it was hard to get a quorum of the Hydra Club to transact business, since so many of its officers were divorcing and remarrying so many others.

At the time of the New York convention, however Judy and I were pretty solidly married. We had even decided to risk parenthood, and two or three months later, on the twenty-fifth of September, 1950, our daughter Ann was born.

Judy already had a daughter from a previous marriage, Merril Zissman, so I was not unused to being in loco parentis. What I was not used to was newborns. She was so
tiny
. On one side of her face she was one of the prettiest babies ever seen, but the other side was somewhat squeezed from the business of being born, and so I worried intensely (and privately) that she would grow up hideously deformed in the right profile. No matter! I would protect her! If the other kids tried to make fun of her, well, I would know how to deal with those lousy other kids. . . . As a matter of fact, within a week or two the right side of her face filled out to match the left, and she turned into a beautiful child.
*
And that winter, with Annie beginning to crawl and Merril well into her school career, Judy and I began to discuss where we wanted to make a permanent home for the kids.

C. Northcote Parkinson says that when institutions finally get themselves into permanent headquarters, that is the sign that the peak has passed and they are on their way to oblivion. So it was with us. In the spring of 1951 Judy and I bought the house in Red Bank, and three months later we had decided to get a divorce.

To my surprise, shock, and anger, the divorce was not in the least amicable. I wasn't ready for that. After all, it was my third. I was beginning to think of myself as an acknowledged expert in the field. The procedure was all pretty routine: one party decides to call it off, the other party agrees, you sign some papers, and pretty soon both of you are married to somebody else and no harm done.

But it wasn't that way at all.

What made this divorce unlike any other was Annie. We both loved her. We both felt we could do more for her than that rotten other person. The first steps toward divorce were painless enough, but when we got to the question of custody, we wrangled bitterly and interminably, through the courts and outside them, for years. I wish we could have avoided all that.

But I am not sure it could have happened in any other way. I think I can explain it all in terms of nuclear physics. It is a question of pair formation, and the conservation of net charge. When a positively charged + male and a negatively charged – female annihilate each other in divorce, they instantly become free-flying photons with a 0 neutral charge, and the law of conservation is maintained. Time passes. Each photon ultimately interacts with another, and so another electron-positron pair is formed. But. When the pair has formed some smaller particle, they no longer have the capacity to act as leptons. They cannot separate to lead the carefree lives of photons. There is a piece left over. Charge-conservation is violated, and the result is acrimony and pain. So Doë and I, and Tina and I, could end our marriages and still be friends. Judy and I could not, for years.

Of course, that was years ago, and I think we have now settled into a position as old and good friends. Which leads me to something I want to say. I don't quite know how to say it. I am hesitant to speak of "my ex-wives" as if the term defined them as a class. The principal thing that the ladies I have been married to (and some ladies I have not been married to) have in common is that each is very much an individual, with talents and graces far beyond the usual allotment. I keep running into people who speak of lives damaged by mates so malevolent and self-centered that the marriage is a constant pain. It has never happened to me. It is hard for me to believe that these closet beasts and termagants exist. Barring the odd dissonance in the relationship—well, maybe barring a
lot
of dissonances—the women who have shared any part of my life have each been a treasure, and a joy.

But the dissonances with Judy were immediate and painful in 1951 and after, and they were made a lot worse by the dissonances in my work. I ran out of money.

Part of the reason was my wonderful invention of advancing money to my clients so that they could write what they chose. It mostly all did pay off in time,
*
but I was undercapitalized. I began operating on float, drawing against funds between the time I wrote the checks and the time they would be presented for collection. Now and then, and then more and more often, my checks began to bounce.

I decided to trim expenses to the bone, got out of the Fifth Avenue offices, and moved to a tiny single room on West 10th Street, in the same building as Marty Greenberg's Gnome Press. Marty was also suffering undercapitalization woes, and when things got too grim in my office I would wander down the hall to his to compare notes on disaster. I cut down to one secretary, no messenger, no assistant. It turned out that the extra people were not necessary to the work of the agency. The monthly sales figures continued the trend upward. But their absence was very expensive in terms of my own time. I was working eighty hours a week and more, and it was beginning to be more pain than it was worth. My writers were generally sympathetic, but they were also getting worried.

Gossip carried the word around the publishing business that I was having money troubles, and other agents began to send out feelers. Would I care to sell my contracts for a capital-gains payment? Sell the agency entire to another agent? A new agent, Rogers Terrill, once my boss at Popular Publications, urged me to come into partnership with him, and that was tempting; Rog was a prince of good fellows, as well as a capable and industrious person.

But the Fool-Killer was loud behind me, and it no longer seemed worth struggling to survive as an agent.

In 1953 the agency at last threw off enough net profit to equal the salary I had had from Popular Publications. That in some way satisfied a need, and so I packed it in. I made cash settlements where I could, turned the authors loose, and toted up my losses.

Counting everything, I was in hock for around thirty thousand dollars.

Years later, my lawyer asked me why I hadn't considered bankruptcy. I didn't know what to tell him. I don't know now; I just never gave it a thought. I intended to pay off the whole thirty thousand, and I did; but it took me nearly ten years.

9 Four Pages a Day

For the next seven or eight years I was a pretty nearly simon-pure free-lance writer.

In the minds of most civilians, the life of a writer has got to be glamorous and exciting. Well, it is, some of the time. A writer often gets to meet special people, visit fascinating places, do exciting things. But none of these occur when he is actively engaged at his employment. When he is writing, he is the nearest thing to a vegetable that you will find registered to vote. He sits.

He doesn't even have the apparent function of pushing typewriter keys most of the time, because during most of that sitting time the activity is all internal and thus invisible.

Let me show you the numbers: Any jackleg typist can manage seventy-five words a minute. If you type at that rate from nine to five every day, with time out for lunch and a ten-minute break at the end of each hour for flexing the fingers, you will produce the equivalent of two 75,000-word novels in every five-day week.

It is an observed fact that writers do not ordinarily produce two novels a week. Most don't even manage two a year. Therefore it is demonstrated that writing is not merely a matter of putting words down on the page. Some other activity is taking place.

The name of that process is "thinking."

The trouble with a career in which ninety-five percent of your working time is spent thinking is that, therefore, ninety-five percent of the time you don't
look
as if you're working. Or even thinking. What a writer looks like he is doing, generally speaking, is watching TV, playing solitaire, cleaning his typewriter keys, or taking a nap. Writing is not much of a spectator sport. I have had one or two nonwriting friends whose curiosity was so piqued that they coaxed to be allowed to watch me write. After ten or fifteen minutes they always fled to some other room. The boredom reaches criticality very soon. It does for the writer, too, unfortunately, so that actually getting words on paper becomes a test of strength, will power against terminal tedium. Which is why it is said that writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Writing is the only job I know that your wife will nag you
out
of. Why wouldn't she? There you are, sprawled out on the living-room sofa, rereading the real-estate section from last Sunday's Times—although it is known that you have no extensive real-estate holdings, and little prospect of acquiring any. Meanwhile, the dishwasher needs fixing. Poor soul! How can she know that if she interrupts you now, you will lose a precarious train of thought that has taken you four hours to construct?