The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (7 page)

In my personal scale of priorities, the fact that Sloane gave the world the freezing program is somewhat overshadowed by the fact that he gave me my first paid publication ever. It wasn't a story, it was a poem (called "Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna," and if you feel for any reason that you must read it—I don't know why that would be so—you can find it in a book called
The Early Pohl
). People ask me from time to time when I made my first sale. For me, that's hard to answer. I wrote the poem in 1935, Sloane accepted it in 1936. It was published in 1937. And I was paid for it in 1938.

Funny thing. I never had another line in
Amazing
, from that day to this. Sloane actually accepted another poem, and I had bright hopes of laying stories on him as well, but before anything could be published, much less paid for,
Amazing
too was sold to the knackers, and Sloane disappeared from the science-fiction scene. The new owners made it sell better than it ever had, but by publishing fairly simple-minded stories—or so I judged them; the objective facts are that I didn't care much for what they published, and they didn't care much for what I wrote, and after a while I stopped even trying them. By then I had found more hospitable markets, anyway. But there's a certain nostalgia. You never forget your first sale.

But I am ahead of myself; before I became a Pro I had a few years of fandom to get through, and things had happened in my personal life, too.

My parents separated when I was thirteen years old, not amicably. My plunging father took one shortcut too many and wound up in trouble with the law, not just creditor trouble but grand jury trouble. I was never told the details. One day he was gone, and my mother told me he would not be coming back to live with us any more; it was three or four years before I saw him again, but, in all candor, I didn't much mind. He had seemed a guest in the house all along. He traveled a lot, and even when he was technically at home he was away most of the days, and a lot of the nights.

Looking back at it objectively, it must not have been a tranquil time for me. Yet I don't know where the scars are. Like all writers, I spend a lot of time exploring the inside of my own head, and once or twice I've had professional help in the rummaging around. Like all human beings, I have childhood pains or worries or yearnings unmet that still show up in a barroom or on a couch; how strange that any of the race survives, when we are all so vulnerable in childhood. But I did not feel very bad about my parents at the time. The focus of my life had moved out of the home long before then, perhaps when I learned to live vicariously through books, certainly when I found the world of science fiction to explore. In school and at home I was still a child, the passive object of what the authority figures chose to do; but in science fiction I could be a maker and shaker on my own. Well, no. Not entirely on my own. Don Wollheim was the leader of our junta and the planner of our coups, but we were at the least his kitchen cabinet, Johnny Michel, and a little later Bob Lowndes, and I, and we four marched from Brooklyn to the sea, leaving a wide scar of burned-out clubs behind us. We changed clubs the way Detroit changes tailfins, every year had a new one and last year's was junk.

1934 was the year of the BSFL. 1955 was the year of the ENYSFL, later the ILSF. 1936 was the year of the ICSC, later the NYB-ISA. By 1937 we had got tired of initials, and of laying our cuckoos' eggs in other people's nests, and we formed The Futurians.
*

The Brooklyn SFL lasted barely a year, just barely long enough for us to find each other. It did not survive the invasion of the barbarians.

The Brooklyn SFL lasted barely a year, just barely long enough for us to find each other. It did not long survive the invasion of the barbarians. G. G. Clark did not care for Donald and Johnny, and must have resented being shoved off the seat of power. ("Am I not Member One? Was I not chartered to possess Chapter One by Hugo himself?") But Hugo had chartered chapters everywhere he could, on whatever flimsy pretext any member had the gall to offer him. Dave Kyle even started a chapter in Monticello, New York, of which the entire membership was pseudonyms of his own. There was already another chapter in Brooklyn, the ENYSFL, and we birds of passage flew on.

The East New York SFL was the fiefdom of a high-schooler named Harold W. Kirshenblit ("KB"), who also had a big cellar his parents allowed him to use for meetings. You took the BMT as far as it went, and then walked. KB was a livelier, sharper article than Clark, willing to make and shake with us, and in no time Donald talked him into seceding from
Wonder Stories
and creating a new worldwide competitor to the SFL. Donald was not alone—Johnny and I helped in every way we could—but it was Donald's wrath that moved us all, and his decision, I think, to point up what was going on by naming the new construct the Independent League for Science Fiction. Lowndes showed up in the flesh at the ILSF and immediately joined the team. For the next five years or so we four stuck together, called ourselves "the Quadrumvirate," and made our presence known wherever we were. At the end of a year East New York had no further charms, and so we all moved on to Astoria, Queens, where William S. Sykora had a club in his basement. Having a house with a basement was a lot like owning a catcher's mitt; you could always start a game of your own.

Will Sykora was a medium-sized man with enormous sloping shoulders. He had immense self-confidence
*
and a bump of arrogance that comported ill with our own collective and individual bumps of arrogance. Nevertheless, he had a group that seemed to be
doing
things. He had called it the International Cosmos Science Club, but on reflection "cosmos" seemed to take in a bit more territory than was justified, and so he changed it to the International Scientific Association. (It wasn't international, either, but then it also wasn't scientific.)

Both the BSFL and the ILSF had published club journals, but they didn't amount to much. The ISA's magazine was something else. It was called
The International Observer
, and, at least when we spread ourselves on a special issue, it was something to see. I became its editor, and I recall the immense pride of holding in my hand one issue, forty or more pages long, cover silk-screened in color by Johnny Michel, inside with hand-lettered titles and justified margins and even a little bit of art; I think that may have been the biggest fanzine published at that time, and I was supremely certain it was the best.

An issue of a magazine is a kind of work of art. The
IO
was not just something that had come off a distant printing press, it was a personal part of my life; I had typed every stencil with my own hands, run them off with Johnny and the others on his mimeograph machine, folded the cover and punched in the staples. To me it was a creation. I think maybe there is some criticism that could be made of that
auteur
approach (what makes me suspect it is that although I clearly remember the scent of the mimeograph ink and the heft of that issue in my hand, I can barely remember a word of what it said inside). But publishing itself is a joy apart from the contents of what it is you publish, something like building ship models in a bottle.

Indeed, it turned out that we sf fanzine people were not alone in the world; there was a whole society of amateur journalists who weren't interested in science fiction but were addicted to the smell of printer's ink. Just as in science fiction, there were feuds and splits among them. The two leading clubs were called the National Amateur Press Association and the United Amateur Press Association of America, and Johnny and Donald and I quickly joined them to see what we could learn.

They were not, in the long run, exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I went to a few meetings. I even went with Donald on the long, thrilling train ride to Boston to attend a weekend amateur-journalist convention, a great excitement to me because I had almost never traveled without some member of my family. They were pretty good people, and I admired what they could do that I could not: most of them owned their own cold-type printing presses, real letterpress instead of the mimeos and hectographs of sf fandom. But most of what was in the magazines they published was
about
the magazines they published, and it seemed a little too incestuous for my blood. When my first year's membership dues expired, I dropped out.
*

With only three science-fiction magazines and hardly any science-fiction books we were on near-starvation rations of sf-in-print. But there were snacks to be had elsewhere, and once in a while a full meal. And a lot of the nourishment came from science-fiction films.

The 30s were the great years of the film for everyone, not just science-fiction fans. Every hamlet had its own million-dollar Palace of the Movies, plush carpets and tinkling fountains, architecturally a bastard son of the Bolshoi out of the Baths of Caracalla. Most were left over from the manic expansion of the 20s, but nerve was seeping back into the builders. The Radio City Music Hall opened when I was around thirteen. The Music Hall didn't care much for science fiction on its screen, but the hall itself was a kind of science fiction, ultramodern of 1932, and I must have visited it fifty times to see whatever was there to see: my first color film (
Becky Sharp
); Will Rogers comedies; my first, and almost only, 3-D (a short subject; you wore red and green celluloid goggles to make it work); above all, the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, on which I doted. The Music Hall gave you more than a film. There was a stage show with the Rockettes and the Corps de Ballet, and a symphonic overture and an organ interlude, hopefully planned to empty out the house between shows. I had a fixed itinerary at the Music Hall. Up in one of the balconies for the film, so I could smoke. Down in the front rows, far left, to watch Jesse Crawford play the organ at microscopically close range. Middle aisles of the orchestra, two-thirds of the way back, to watch the Rockettes.

But there was a growing amount of science fiction, too, if not in the music hall, then at some other theater, even the "nabes." The original
King Kong
(only film I have ever seen that gave me nightmares). Claude Rains in
The Invisible Man
. Boris Karloff in
Frankenstein
. The very first sf film I saw was
Just Imagine
, produced in 1930, about the incredibly distant future world of 1980 (autogyro traffic cops, Martians, babies out of a slot machine): it was a slapstick comedy starring El Brendel, notable now mostly because it was the first American film made by lovely Maureen O'Sullivan, later Tarzan's favorite Jane. There were gadgety future-adventure movies like
F P 1 Does Not Reply
(floating airport in the middle of the Atlantic, where planes refueled en route to Europe) and
Transatlantic Tunnel
(marvelous zappy machines boring through the undersea rock). There were semi-satirical spoofs like
It's Great to Be Alive
. What was great about it, for the hero, was that some pestilence had killed every male in the world but him, and he was therefore the object of every girl's affections. It was a musical, and the way the girls courted him was through song and dance numbers.
*

Not all of the science-fiction and fantasy films were really much good (as you maybe have already figured out!) but among them there were two that turned me on to a degree no subsequent film has matched.

One of them was
Death Takes a Holiday
. It starred Fredric March. Its theme music was Sibelius's
Valse Triste
, which stayed in my mind for months on end. (After a while I wrote words to it, so I could sing it in the shower.) March played the part of Death, proud anthropomorphic Prince of Darkness, sulkily curious about why mortal beings bother living their brief, tatty little lives. He takes time off to visit a house party in Nice or Graustark (villagers tossing rosebuds into an open car, pergolas, drawing rooms, reflecting pools). His intention is to satisfy his curiosity, but he falls in love. While he is on vacation no one dies. Suffering is prolonged. His fellow guests figure out his identity and beg him to get back on the job, but he won't go without the girl. . . . Well, the plot does not bear rational examination, but I loved it. What I love, I love a lot. I saw it twenty-three times.