The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (35 page)

In the event, the triumvirate did not survive as a team very long, nor was there all that much money to be made. But Damon continued it as a labor of love. When he moved away from Milford, the Milford Conference followed him—in Florida, in Michigan, in Oregon; they all continued to be called Milford Conferences, long after the geography ceased to be real. Even England developed its own "Milford," seeded from a spore Jim Blish brought over when he expatriated.

Milford is partly like a course in creative writing, partly like an encounter group. The workshop procedure is highly refined and works well—to the extent, that is, that any form of teaching writing ever works well, which can be argued. (I use the same procedure myself when I teach college classes in writing.) Every registrant has to submit a work in manuscript. Every registrant is asked to read every submitted work, and usually most of them do.

Then all the workshoppers gather in a circle. The conversation goes around the ring, one by one. Each workshopper says what he thought about the story, where it succeeded for him, where it failed. The author is the last to speak—he is forbidden to speak at all until everyone else has had his say.

Passions can run pretty high. It is a shattering thing to see your infant's limbs gnawed away by a circle of ghouls. Writing is a private act; parts of it are painful to expose in public, and the workshopped have been known to weep or storm away. The full treatment runs a week, and for all those days the Milfordites live in each other's pockets: eat together, drink together, play together. The invasion of the ego goes far beyond literary matters. Some persons find it almost a mystical experience, others think it purely hateful.

I said Milford was partly like an encounter group, and this was not meant as a metaphor. I think it is true. Several years ago, when I was going through a more than usually troubled time, I signed up for an encounter weekend. I drove to a big old house on the Jersey Shore where ten or twelve other dissatisfied souls were looking for some sort of easing. We did mock wrestling and bioenergetic exercises. We closed our eyes and communicated by nonverbal gropes. We were encouraged to say whatever we felt, however odious or sad, to vent whatever pain we could squeeze past the guards of the subconscious. Unclothed, we gathered in a blood-temperature swimming pool and passed each other tenderly down a long line of supporting hands. Some of the people there were old pros who had been through a hundred such weekends. Some, like me, had never experienced it before. One or two were there for professional reasons: the dean of the Psych Department at a little Midwestern university, proper-straight fundamentalist methodically broadening his experience to help him communicate with the unruly kids; a grad student from a nearby school researching her doctoral dissertation. Some opened facilely to every new experience. Others stayed closed up for all the seventy-two hours, as armored in nakedness as any knight in mail. A couple were primal-scream junkies, bitterly jealous of their minutes on the mat. We ate the same food, slept on touching mattresses in the same great commons room. Sometimes there was hysteria, and a fair amount of gentle tears.

What did it accomplish? I don't know. I know that for me it was a special experience which I will never forget, like the time I had my tonsils out at the age of six. But I've never had the impulse to repeat it. I've never had the desire to have my tonsils out again, either.

Milford is a lot like that, except that I have never personally observed nude bathing in a warm pool. (A little skinny-dipping in the Delaware River, maybe.) The invasion of the personality is almost as complete—less so on the psychosexual level, but more so in those creative centers of the heart and mind which, to a writer, are perhaps comparably vulnerable and complex. Even the house is much the same, or was when Milford was in Damon's immense old place. The critics' circle was in his two-story living room, limited to participating writers only. Wives and other civilians were banished to the kitchen. (That wasn't exactly sexist. Nonwriting husbands, on the rare occasions when any showed up, were also kicked out. But, like most things that aren't exactly sexist, it worked out that way.)

And in both cases, over and above the presumptive therapeutic sessions, there was a hell of a lot of fun and games.

What happens in an encounter-group setting is the powerful emergence of a collective identity. We individuals suddenly and deeply become us. Relationships that begin in this setting carry over. The encounter sessions reliably produce a fair number of broken marriages and new pairings. Milford does not do that exact thing as frequently (I wouldn't say
never
), because of its literary orientation, but in the area of writing it breaks and makes relationships in plenty. Any writer who feels he is not moving ahead rapidly enough might be well advised to spend a week at Milford, because of the relationships formed. I'm not talking about any impropriety, only about the self-evident fact that an unsolicited manuscript from somebody you were drinking with till three a.m. gets read in a different way from one that just comes over the transom.
*

Not content with creating Milford, Damon r'ared back and passed another miracle: the Science Fiction Writers of America. In the early stages it was hard to distinguish between them. SFWA grew out of Milford, and Milford was the closest thing to a meeting place SFWA had.

This was by no means according to Damon's design, and in fact he labored hard to expand SFWA beyond the limits of Pike County, Pennsylvania. At the time, I was publishing a new writer in every issue of
If
, and every month, as soon as the new issue came out, I would get a letter from Damon, addressed to the novice in care of me, inviting him to join SFWA. He proselytized every writer he could reach, and by and by enough of them signed up to make SFWA reasonably broad-based—as much so as any organization of such thorny individuals as sf writers can ever hope to be, anyway. Damon was not alone in his efforts. His principal associate, working as hard and as effectively in his own sphere, was Lloyd Biggie, who lived in faraway Michigan. Even so, the focus and nerve center of SFWA remained in Milford.

From the beginning I had ambiguous feelings about SFWA. Partly it was because of my own dichotomous nature: half of me was blood-brother writer, the other half class-enemy editor. Partly it was because I felt (and still feel) that when writers join together for any purpose, they are subject to strange follies. As time went on, some of the activities of SFWA seemed to me to be of dubious value. I began to question some of them, which led to a long correspondence with Damon and other officers, past and present, which led to acrimony, which led to a catfight. So in disgust I quit the organization.

This is not an unprecedented act. A fair share of SFWA's best and most committed members have resigned from time to time. It is a normal activity, both an accepted form of political statement, like trashing the dean's office, and a sort of maturation rite, like a bar mitzvah.

Then time passed, and a new president, Jim Gunn, gentlest and most politic of men, invited me back. It was lonely out there, and I accepted. I was prepared to forgive and forget. I expected as much from the other side, but I was wrong. They bided their time. Then, a year or two later, they got back at me in a typically subtle and agonizing way: they elected me president.

The early 1960s was a period I enjoyed a lot, but there was a shadow. Around that time our youngest daughter, Kathy, began to fall down a lot.

She was only about three. All three-year-olds bash themselves from time to time. Kathy's falls seemed excessive; in fact, scary.

Since I worked at home, I was a pretty fatherly father, on hand for most of the major events of the children's lives; kept odd hours, and so was a logical candidate for the two a.m. feedings and to soothe the middle-of-the-night frights. I saw a lot of all of them when they were small, including Kathy. But I didn't see that about her. Carol had to point it out to me, and at first I didn't believe it. Kathy was too pretty, healthy, loving a baby to have anything
wrong
.

But she did keep on falling down. Trot a few steps across a room and drop; pick herself up after a second, looking a little dazed, and then trot on. We told our family doctor about it. He looked grave and recommended a specialist.

Over the next year and more we took Kathy to a dozen doctors, hospitals, laboratories. At every step of the way we built up doubt of medical infallibility and loathing for medical brutality. If they had been kind to Kathy, perhaps we could have forgiven them for their lack of answers. But some of them were the opposite of kind. She had to have a skull X-ray. Well and good; but she did not have to be held down, screaming, by three orderlies. She had to have an electroencephalogram. But she did not have to be shouted at by a nurse who appeared to have completed her training in Belsen, because the sedatives the nurse had given her were having the wrong effect. (As I would have been able to tell the nurse, if she had told me what she was doing.)

Or, if they had been able to help Kathy, perhaps we could have put up with the meat-grinder callousness of their behavior toward her. But they couldn't. What we got were suggestions for further tests, and mumbles about "God's will." When medicines were prescribed, they worked in reverse. Sedatives revved her motors up and intensified the seizures. For a time we had to put Kathy back in a playpen, padding the sides so that when she fell down, which she did every few minutes, at least she would not split her head open on the furniture. Change the medicine, and the seizures begin to happen every few seconds. For a week or more the only place it was safe for Kathy to be was in her own bed or on someone's lap.

Meanwhile, Kathy was being so terrorized that when any woman wearing a white dress came into our house, she would run and hide. I didn't know the right thing to do for her. But I was sure that terrifying her had to be wrong. So for some months I simply refused to do anything, called off all further tests, stopped the medication, and just let her relax as well as she could.

I cannot tell you how much anger and resentment I felt toward the entire medical profession at that time. The individual doctor, whether in his professional capacity or otherwise, is usually a decent person, and sometimes a lot better than that. Collectively, in the concentration-camp milieu of a hospital or clinic, they are nearly to be despised. I am sure that not all the doctors, ward boys, technicians and nurses are evil people, and I even think that some of them are close to saints. But what I am also sure of is that the good ones tolerate and even protect the bad.
*

At the end of nearly two years of trotting Kathy from place to place, at great cost to her and to all of us in every way, what we had to show for it was a name. They said she suffered from "petit mal."

Petit mal is not related to grand mal. Grand mal is epilepsy. It had been established that Kathy was not epileptic. But, like an epileptic, she had seizures. They were relatively mild and brief, but they were seizures all the same. She would black out. In that moment she had no control over her limbs; they would collapse under her, and she would fall. When the seizure was over a moment later, she would pick herself up, perhaps not knowing what had happened, and try to remember what she had been about to do. It is not called "petit mal" because the term describes the etiology or helps to determine therapy, but only because it happens and therefore needs a name.

At the point of despair, we were at last referred to the New Jersey Neuropsychological Institute. For the first time we found a team who not only knew what they were doing, but knew enough to consider Kathy a person rather than a lump of meat. They gave her the same battery of tests—humanely administered, and with the cooperation Kathy had always been willing to give if allowed half a chance. Then they called us all together for a conference, Kathy and Carol and I and six or eight specialists, and told us what had gone wrong in her nervous system.

"Neurological impairment" does not really mean much more than "petit mal." But they were able to pinpoint the specific area in the brain where it had occurred. How had it occurred? It was far too late to tell that. Probably there had never been a time when anyone could say for sure. Kathy's had been a difficult birth, and that was a likely candidate, but it could have been some prenatal chemical antagonism, a genetic miscoding, a fall, a fever—it could have been anything. But at least there was that much understanding, and there was something more. The seizures, they said, would probably stop of themselves when she reached her teens. That was still years off. But meanwhile, they prescribed a different drug. We took the prescription and had it filled, and when Kathy popped the first pill in her mouth the seizures stopped. She has never had another.

Kathy has still not achieved her full potential. The strangeness of brain injury is that in some areas the brain simply does not work, and so some kinds of functions do not occur. Over years the brain is sometimes able to reroute its information-handling into other areas. Some of that has occurred with Kathy. She walks, she talks, she learns, she enjoys life. She is able to travel thousands of miles, from one country to another, by herself. She is a healthy, tall, good-looking young lady with a keen sense of humor and a disconcerting ability to understand nuances of behavior. Much is difficult for her, but we have not yet found anything that is impossible. And what is left of her problems is no longer as much due to brain injury as to the fact that so much of her early life was spent coddled and protected, so that she was not able to experiment on her own.