It's Been a Good Life Page 4

  SCIENCE FICTION

  [After preparing an elaborate index-card system on science-fiction stories which] made me conscious of stories as literary items, as never before and, after six years of writing amorphous, disconnected, unending-and therefore dying-fictional items, it finally occurred to me to write a story ... on May 29, 1937. I remembered the date a few years later and jotted it down, and still have the jotting, so I know ... I was nearly seventeen and a half at the time. The story I began to compose ... was entitled "Cosmic Corkscrew."

  In it I viewed time as a helix (that is, something like a bedspring). Someone could cut across from one turn directly to the next, thus moving into the future by some exact interval, but being incapable of traveling one day less into the future. (I didn't know the term at the time, but what I had done was to "quantize" time travel.)

  As far as I knew then, the notion of helical time was original with me. [It may have been inspired by] the neutrino. The existence of the neutrino had been postulated five years earlier and it had not been detected. Indeed, at the time it was thought it might never be detected.

  Of course, the reason it wasn't detected was that it had neither electric charge nor mass, so that it offered no handle to the detecting techniques of the time-but that was prosaic.

  What if the neutrino could not be detected because it went off into the past or the future? I had a vision of neutrinos flashing through time, backward and forward, and thought of them as a vehicle for time travel.

  That turned out to be typical of my science fiction. I usually thought of some scientific gimmick and built a story about that. In this case, the time-as-helix notion came only afterward as a way of limiting my hero's freedom of action and creating the plot complication.

  My protagonist made the cut across time and found Earth deserted. All animal life was gone, yet there was every sign that life had existed until very shortly before-and no indication at all of what had happened to bring about the disappearance. It was told in the first person from a lunatic asylum, because the narrator had, of course, been placed in one when he returned and tried to tell his tale.

  In this story, I had the full panoply of pulp style, for I knew nothing else. I read enormous quantities of pulp magazines, to say nothing of the florid fiction of the nineteenth century and, without even thinking about it, I loaded my sentences with adjectives and adverbs and had my characters crying out, and starting back, and shrieking madly, and screaming curses. Everything was in jagged, primary colors.

  But as far as possible I was interested in realistic science, or the illusion of it. Even in that first story, I went to some trouble to explain about neutrinos as authentically as I could, for instance, even if I did introduce the time-travel angle out of left field.

  With time, the pulpish aspects of my writing became subdued and faded out, though perhaps not as rapidly as they would have were I better acquainted with contemporary writing by literary masters. My concern for realistic science stayed. however, and I quickly became and remained a writer of "hard" science fiction.

  [Another characteristic of pulp fiction] Though women were routinely threatened by the villains, the nature of the threat was never explicitly stated. It was a period of strong sexual repression, and sexual acts and threats could only be referred to in "family magazines" in the most distant way. Of course, no one minded if there was a continuous display of violence and sadism-that was all right for the family-but no sex.

  This reduced women to little mannikin figures who never contributed actively to the plot. . there solely to make the villains more villainous, the heroes more heroic. And in being rescued, they played a purely passive role, their part consisting mostly of screaming. I can't recall (though I'm sure there must have been rare cases) any woman trying to join the fight and help the hero; any woman picking up a stick or rock and trying to lambaste the villain. No, they were like does, idly cropping the grass while they waited for the stags to stop fighting so that they would know which harem they would belong to.

  Under the circumstances, any red-blooded male reading pulp fiction (like me) grew very impatient with the introduction of females. Knowing in advance they would merely be stumbling blocks, I wanted them out. I remember writing letters to magazines complaining about women characters-their very existence.

  This was one of the reasons (not the only one) that in my own early stories I omitted women. In most cases, I left them out altogether. It was a flaw, and another sign of my pulpish origins.

  [His favorite science-fiction magazine, Astounding, was late in appearing.] I had enough money to make the subway trip to Street and Smith, Inc., and to buy a copy of Astounding there if I wished.

  Choosing my mother as the softer touch in this case, I argued her into giving me permission to take off two hours that otherwise I would have to spend in the store-choosing two hours during my father's afternoon nap, so that I would not have to ask his permission as well. (Fortunately, it was finals week, and I had no classes to attend, merely exams to take.)

  Then off I went. I might have been over eighteen by now, but a sheltered life is a sheltered life. It was one of the first times I had ever taken a subway into Manhattan on my own, except to go to school. I was going to wander about streets I did not know in order to make my way into strange buildings and ask questions of strange people. It made me uneasy.

  I got there. It was not really a difficult task. The Street and Smith offices were at 79 Seventh Avenue, not far away from a subway station I passed through every day going to and from school. I placed my case before the elevator man, who gave me directions, and on the fifth floor I met a Mr. Clifford, who explained to me that the publication date had been changed from the second Wednesday to the third Friday. When I craved certainty, he showed me a printed schedule, and there was Astounding listed under Friday, May 20. Assuming it would actually come Thursday, May 19, it meant I had two more days to wait.

  On Thursday, May 19, the June issue of Astounding came, and although it was raining that day. the sun shone brilliantly for me. It was the day of my chemistry finals, but I bothered with no last-minute studying. Until the moment I had to leave for school, I read the magazine. (It's all right. I did well in the exam.)

  I had not entirely forgotten "Cosmic Corkscrew," which I had begun just a year before and which I had worked at in very desultory fashion for a few months. In the spring I had even taken the manuscript out of the drawer and thought about it, and, on occasion, had written a page or two, or had rewritten a passage.

  Now, however, after the incident with Astounding, I was galvanized into activity. In the first place, the days during which I had imagined the magazine to be lost forever had revealed to me the extent to which science fiction had seized upon me. It made me realize something that until then had been only subliminal-that one of my ambitions in life was to be a science-fiction writer.

  I did not want to be simply a writer, you understand. Nor was I interested in making money. Neither of these two items ever occurred to me. What I wanted was to write a science-fiction story and to have it appear in a science-fiction magazine. That would be to join the company of the demi gods whose names I knew and idolized: Jack Williamson, Nat Schachner, E. E. Smith, Edmund Hamilton, John W. Campbell, and all the rest.

  In the second place, my visit to Street and Smith had somehow reduced the great gulf that separated myself and the demi gods. Street and Smith, and therefore Astounding, had become attainable. It existed in a real building in a real space, a building I could reach and enter and it contained people who would speak to me.

  In the third place, my junior year at college [Columbia University was completed and I would have more time on my hands.

  With all these factors meeting ... I finished "Cosmic Corkscrew" on June 19, 1938. It was actually the first piece of fiction I had ever completed with a view to possible publication. The next question was what to do with it. I hadn't the faintest idea as to how one went about submitting a story to a magazine. Nowadays, th
ere are many youngsters who don't know, and all of them (it sometimes seems to me) write to me for advice. I wasn't even smart enough at that time to write to anyone for advice.

  I knew I might mail it, but even if I could figure out what I was supposed to say in the letter, there was a problem. As I said in my diary, "If I mail it, it will cost a mint of money as the damn thing weighs four ounces."

  Mail was three cents an ounce, so that the "mint of money" came to twelve cents.

  We counted the pennies in those days. Just a few days earlier my father had refused to have a plumber fix a leaking gas pipe because the job would cost three dollars and he went shopping for a more reasonable plumber.

  Again, through sharp bargaining, my father managed to get someone to agree to fix a fountain pen for thirty-four cents ... [he explained] that he managed this low price by leaving out a new clip for an additional twenty-five cents.... I told him, rather forcefully, that a fountain pen was useless without a clip, and he called up to have that added to the tab.

  None of this, at the time, seemed to represent the cruelty of poverty to us. We were used to it. We were aware at all times of the exact amount of money we had in our pockets, right down to the penny, and every outgo, however small, was carefully considered.

  It did not escape me that a round-trip subway fare would cost me ten cents, or two cents less than to mail the story. Furthermore, the subway fare would enable me to check once again on the lateness of Astounding. On June 21, with the July issue still not at the store, I discussed the matter with my father.

  I had till then kept the matter of my writing entirely to myself. I had viewed it merely as a hobby, a way of spending my time doing something interesting. It was for my own amusement only.... I had the instinctive feeling even then that I would not welcome criticism. Even when I came to my father with this purely tactical problem of how to submit a story, I did not offer to let him read it. Nor did he ask to read it; but if he had done so, I would have refused. (I haven't changed ... I still don't discuss my stories when they are in the process of being written, and I still don't welcome criticism.)

  Of course, as to such collateral matters as submitting a story, I was willing, even eager, to seek advice, and my father's suggestion was that I not only make the trip by subway, but also that I hand the manuscript to Mr. Campbell himself.

  The thought was a frightening one. It became even more frightening when my father further suggested that necessary preliminaries included a shave and my best suit. That meant I would have to take additional time, but the day was already wearing on, and I didn't have very much time. I had to be back for the afternoon newspaper delivery, just in case the delivery boy didn't show up.

  I compromised. I shaved, but did not bother changing suits, and off I went.

  I was convinced that for daring to ask to see the editor of Astounding Science Fiction I would be thrown out of the building bodily, and that my manuscript would be torn up and thrown out after me in a shower of confetti. My father, however, who had lofty notions, was convinced that a writer (by which he meant anyone with a manuscript) would be treated with the respect due an intellectual. He had no fears in the matter, for had he himself not braved the Soviet bureaucracy? Maybe so, but it was I who had to brave Street and Smith.

  I put off the crisis [by asking about the publication delay and was told] that the new publication date was the fourth Friday every month. There was now no excuse to delay any further. I went into the main building and asked to see the editor. The girl behind the desk spoke briefly into the phone and said, "Mr. Campbell will see you."

  I was astonished. I had asked to see him only because my father had told me to, but I was convinced that this was just my father's lack of sophistication. I assumed I would be asked to leave the manuscript with the receptionist, and this I was prepared to do.

  What I did not know was that Campbell's invitation was what would have happened in many cases of this sort. John Campbell was a most unusual fellow who loved to talk and who would seize almost anyone as an audience. Furthermore, and this may have been a crucial point, he knew me from my recent letters-my name was familiar to him-and that meant he certainly wouldn't turn me away.

  What if I hadn't written those letters? What if I didn't live on the subway line? What if I lived-I wouldn't say Nebraska-but in Westchester, Jersey City, Staten Island; anywhere that made Campbell reachable only by spending more than ten cents in fares?

  In that case, I would not have traveled to Street and Smith, but would have mailed the story. Or if I had gone there, without having written letters to the magazine, he might conceivably not have seen me at all. And without personal contact, everything might have been different.

  But it wasn't different; it was the way it was. The receptionist directed me through a large, loftlike room filled with huge rolls of paper and enormous piles of magazines and permeated with the heavenly smell of pulp.

  And there, in a small room on the other side, was Mr. Campbell ... not quite twenty-eight years old at the time.

  Under his own name, and under his pen name of Don A. Stuart, he was one of the most famous and highly regarded authors of science fiction, but he was about to bury his writing reputation forever under the far greater renown he was to gain as editor.

  Campbell was a large man, an opinionated man, who smoked and talked constantly, and who enjoyed above anything else, the production of outrageous ideas, which he bounced off his listener and dared him to refute. And it was difficult to refute Campbell even when his ideas were absolutely and madly illogical. And illogical they certainly seemed to be to me, for he was always an idiosyncratic conservative in his view of life, whereas I was an idiosyncratic liberal-and we never agreed on anything. Yet although he stood somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun in politics, he was, in person, as kind, generous, and decent a human being as I have ever met.

  He was the quintessential editor, who fertilized and nourished a whole generation of writers ... it didn't matter that he rejected you. There was an enthusiasm about him and an all-encompassing friendliness that was contagious. I always left him eager to write further.

  Many years later I asked Campbell (with whom I had, by then, grown to be on the closest of terms) why he had bothered with one at all, since the first story was surely utterly impossible.

  "Yes, it was impossible," he said frankly, for he never flattered. "On the other hand, I saw something in You. You were eager and listened and I knew you wouldn't quit no matter how many rejections I handed you. As long as you were willing to work hard at improving, I was willing to work with you."

  That was Campbell. I wasn't the only writer, whether newcomer or old-timer, he was to work with in this fashion. Patiently, and out of his own enormous vitality and talent, he built up a stable of the best science-fiction writers the world had, till then, ever seen.

  Back to that fateful day at Street and Smith-in 1938, Isaac's senior year at Columbia] Campbell promised to read my story that night and to send a letter, whether acceptance or rejection, the next day. He promised also that in case of rejection he would tell me what was wrong with the story so that I could improve.

  He lived up to both promises. Two days later, on June 23, the manuscript came back. It was a rejection.

  As my diary put it: "At 0:30 I received back `Cosmic Corkscrew' with a polite letter of rejection. He didn't like the slow beginning, the suicide at the end."

  Campbell also didn't like the first-person narration and the stiff dialog. He pointed out that the length (nine thousand words) was inconvenient-too long for a short story, too short for a novelette. Magazines had to be put together like jigsaw puzzles, you see, and certain lengths for individual stories are more convenient than others.

  I was off and running. The joy of having spent an hour or more with Campbell, the thrill of talking face to face with an idol, had already filled me with the ambition to write another science-fiction story, one that was better than the first, so that I could have occasion to
meet him again.

  In fact, by the time I returned to the store on the day of that visit, I had worked out another story in my mind, one I intended to call "Stowaway," and I waited only to hear from Campbell before starting it. His letter of rejection, when it arrived, was so cordial and helpful that it did not in the least dampen my spirits, either.

  Rather the reverse, for I began "Stowaway" as soon as the rejection came, being careful to use the third person, begin quickly, and make it the proper length-six thousand words ...

  On June 23, 1938, the July 1938 Astounding finally arrived, and I found it an anticlimax. I [had] this to say in my diary: "Somehow this business of contributing seems to have spoiled some of my joy in Astounding. When I read Astounding now, I'm consumed with jealousy. I think that even if one of my stories is ever accepted that I won't return to my old enjoyment.... However, maybe I'm unduly pessimistic."

  I wasn't. The loss was permanent. The bliss that the science-fiction magazine brought me, which had increased to an almost unbearable height after I had started keeping, saving, and cataloguing the magazines in 1937, slowly faded, and never returned to that peak again.

  Yet I can't very well complain. I might, with far greater justice, say that I had emerged from a chrysalis into a far better form and world, for if I left one Eden, I entered another, that of writing. And this Eden, in one shape or another, I have never left, nor has it ever palled on me.

  A strange change came over my diary, too. Until the day I visited Campbell I filled every page (with very few exceptions) from top to bottom and left to right-leaving no margins-with microscopic writing. After that day, I rarely finished a page and I totally omitted the detailed baseball analyses, which I suddenly outgrew and to which I never returned. I wrote more briefly and succinctly, because I wanted to spend more time on writing "Stowaway" and the stories that followed.

  Almost at once, I gathered that ideally all the writing I did should be for publication; that anything I had to write for personal reasons, whether diary or mail, would have to be brief. I have followed that principle ever since.