Seekers of Tomorrow (23 page)

His school attendance was irregular, for he worked with his father in carpentry and was paid in ratio to what his father received. From this money he bought his own clothes. Though there was mutual respect between them, the father was always more of a co-worker than a pal.

Somehow he managed to finish grade school by twelve, frequently completing two terms concurrently. His father let him go off with a circus that came to St. Charles, Minnesota, to work all that summer of 1927

replacing milk bottles knocked down by ball-throwing customers. For the first time in his life he got three regular meals a day.

He returned to Fremont, Minnesota, for one year of high school, and when the school term ended, now thirteen, he hitchhiked to Yakima, Washington, where he picked fruit, carried water to the men harvesting grain, and later served as water boy to lumberjacks in Idaho, finally returning to his father's home in St. Charles.

This became the pattern of his life. After attempting to catch up on his schooling he was off again, this time to Chicago, where he survived by accepting any odd job offered him, including bootblack and newsstand attendant.

His next trip was to California, where his questionable ability to cook his own meals secured him employment as a short-order cook. Then he was off to Mexico for three weeks with a friend, returning to read a romantic tale of Alaska by William MacLeod Raine which prompted him to get a job as a steward on an Alaskan steamer. A single day in Alaska convinced him that most of its glamor reposed in Raine's fancy and he turned around and came back.

An omnivorous reader of fiction as an escape from his far-from-ideal existence, del Rey had read Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and, beginning with
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar,
periodically ordered Burroughs' Tarzan novels at 49 cents each from a Sears, Roebuck catalogue. He really went overboard on science fiction when a friend in St. Charles loaned him a copy of the Fall, 1929, science wonder quarterly which featured Otto Willi Gail's
The Shot into Infinity,
a remarkable novel translated from the Ger-man, accurately based on the rocket theories of Herman Oberth. His mail-order book buying now expanded to include Burroughs' Martian novels.

Working with bootleggers in a New Mexico town in 1930, he met a girl and proposed to her the same day. He was only fifteen but he managed to convince officials that he was older; the girl was legal age. The marriage ended in tragedy three months after it began, when his wife was thrown from a horse and died of injuries.

Once more he returned to Minnesota, where, in the sum-mer of 1931, with the aid of friends he managed to get a certificate of completion of high school, though he never formally graduated or received a diploma. The librarian at St. Charles encouraged him to go to college. Carlton College in Minnesota had been given money by del Rey's grandfather and it was thought that they might be willing to offer him a scholarship to return. Del Rey's father also wrote to his half-brother, George L. Knapp, in Washington, D.C., to see what he might do. Both approaches paid off. Carlton College offered a scholarship and Knapp volunteered to put up the tuition for the teenager at George Washington University and house him in his own home.

The latter offer was accepted and del Rey found that Knapp, who had a daughter with a Ph.D. in chemistry but no son, treated him with fatherly kindness. There was something else they would eventually have in common. Knapp was the editor of a railroad brotherhood weekly newspaper called labor. He had been a writer and among his published works was a science-fiction novel,
The Face of Air,
published by J. Lane, New York, in 1912, as well as a quartet of shorter science-fantasies published in blue book in 1926

and 1927:
The Black Star, McKeever's Dinosaur, Father of the Buffaloes,
and
The Juice of Power.
(McKeever's Dinosaur
was reprinted in the August, 1943, blue book.) At George Washington University, technically majoring in journalism, del Rey actually followed a general course in the sciences. He attempted to earn his keep by doing typing for his uncle and he made side money by writing themes for other students, but he did not have the slightest conception of what he wanted to be. He lost confidence in the value of school when he tried to apply the geometry and trigonometry he had been taught and found he really had no knowledge of the subject. As a result, after two years, 1931-32 and 1932-33, he dropped out.

He decided to take a one-year course in the secretarial skills, shorthand and typing, as a means of gaining entry to firms where he might find the type of work he liked. The best it did for him, during the Depression years, was to help him get a job in 1934 as an office boy and comptometer operator at the Crane Plumbing Co. in Washington, D.C., a job he would hold until 1937.

Then occurred one of those freak bits of luck. He went out to a Maryland gambling house one day in 1934 with $100 and began to play roulette. He wound up with $6,000 and bought a little restaurant, employing others to run it. In a declaration of independence, he left his uncle's home for his own lodging. His luck didn't last long. Letters from home told of per-sonal problems that urgently required substantial sums of money. On top of that, his poor eating habits and the acquisition of a taste for drink were playing hob with his none-too-hardy constitution. To raise the money for his fami-ly's problems and finance his own, he was forced to sell the restaurant in 1935. Then the news came that his father and his entire family except his full sister had died in an auto accident. Eventually, he became so ill that only a major operation involving new techniques saved his life, and then he found himself without the physical energy to do an effective day's work at his job with the Crane Plumbing Co. He was let go and, what with the expense of burying his family and his prolonged illness, he was penniless.

To survive, he sold magazines door to door, worked in restaurants, and did research for a man working on a WPA bibliography of music in the United States. All told, del Rey averaged five to six dollars a week and somehow managed to subsist, though the future appeared anything but bright. During this period del Rey was not without his literary interests and literary aspirations. He had a deep love of poetry, his favorite being Algernon Charles Swinburne, whom he enjoyed for "making the right sounds in the right order." Others he read carefully were Robert Browning, Robert Burns, John Milton, and Rudyard Kipling. Among American poets, Stephen Vincent Benet was his favorite. Although he decried Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a number of the titles of his stories are quotations from that poet, for example,
The Day Is Done
and
The Wings of Night.

During 1933, he began writing verse and says he sold twenty poems under pen names to magazines as prominent as ladies' home journal and good housekeeping. Then he abruptly decided he wasn't a poet and quit writing poetry for good in 1936.

When he picked up the August, 1932, amazing stories, which included W. Campbell's
The Last
Evolution,
he resumed buying science fiction regularly. His interest in fantasy was wide enough to include weird tales. But, by all odds, the science-fiction magazine that was his favorite was astound-ing stories, which included Campbell's mood stories under the name of Don A. Stuart, Raymond Z. Gallun's superbly sentimental offerings
(Old Faithful,
December, 1934,
Davy Jones Ambassador,
December, 1935), Jack Williamson's sus-penseful space operas, and Stanley G. Weinbaum's delightful-ly refreshing alien tales
(Parasite Planet,
February, 1935;
The Lotus Eaters,
April, 1935). The influence of all these writers is clearly revealed in his early fiction, but in the efforts of his relatively more mature years no influence is as evident as that of Clifford D. Simak, who made an enduring impression on del Rey with
The Creator,
a novelette pub-lished by the semiprofessional magazine marvel tales (March-April, 1935), in which the universe is said to be the experiment of a creator of macrocosmic size rather than the handiwork of God. During this period in the development of science fiction, science-fiction fan magazines were few and its followers gained renown by the frequency of their letters in the read-er's columns of the magazines. Del Rey was among the most prolific of the letter writers. The readers' correspondence section of astounding stories was called "Brass Tacks" and, beginning in the March, 1935, issue, letters signed Ramon F. Alvarez del Rey became a regular feature of the section, winning him a place in the "inner circle" and leading to his discovery of the science-fiction fan magazines.

While del Rey enjoyed seeing his letters in print he had felt no compulsion to become a writer. The transition occurred as a result of an argument with a girl friend. In the course of a discussion he had strongly criticized Manly Wade Wellman's handling of the story of a near-human ape in
Outlaws of
Callisto
(astounding stories, April, 1936).

"If you think you are so much better, let's see you write one that astounding will take," she taunted.

"Will you settle for a reply from the editor saying he liked the story?" del Rey asked. The girl agreed.

Del Rey figured that on the strength of his letter-writing reputation he might be able to swing that much. He sat down and wrote
The Faithful,
a tale of intelligent dogs made nearly human by the experiments of the last human survivor of a plague. The dogs remain instinctively loyal to him, for after 200,000 years of domestication the dogs need someone they can serve. Before the man dies, he brings them together with semicivilized apes who will serve as their "hands." Del Rey had kept to the task of rewriting Wellman's story in his own manner.

Originally 8,000 words in length,
The Faithful
was slashed to 4,000 before it was submitted. Instead of a letter, a check for $40 arrived in January, 1938, which del Rey triumphant-ly showed his girl. Understandably enthusiastic about writing, he plunged into another story which grew into a 12,000 word novelette about mining ice on Mars. Campbell rejected it, and the story has since been lost. Feeling that possibly the novelette was not his forte, del Rey returned to the short story with a second-person yarn in future tense on the circle-in-time theme. Campbell didn't like that one either and rejected it. Years later it was rewritten from memory for galaxy science fiction (February, 1951) as
It
Comes Out Here.

Now discouraged, del Rey gave up on fiction and turned to other pursuits, but when
The Faithful
appeared in the April, 1938, astounding science-fiction, reader reaction placed it second only to
Three
Thousand Years,
a new novel by Thomas Calvert McClary, author of the all-time science-fic-tion classic,
Rebirth
(in 1934). As a result, del Rey received a letter from Campbell urging him to do more. Once again encouraged and determined to please, del Rey consulted writer's yearbook for Campbell's requirements. Among them he found: "Even if the story is about a robot, there should be a human reaction." Translating the suggestion into fiction, del Rey displayed a technical craftsmanship which at the age of twenty-three made him the equal of any contemporary writer in his field.
Helen O'Loy
was the story of an atom-powered thinking machine, made of metal with spun plastic exterior fashioned minutely to resemble a woman. Feminine impulses were electronically built into the device. Upon being motivated, the mechanism falls in love with the man who owns her and through a tender series of circumstances succeeds in getting him to accept her as his wife.

Such a plot obviously provided quicksands of bathos that were not avoided but bathed in by the author, whose facility at handling sentiment with empathic realism proved virtually unsurpassed in the history of science fiction. The idea was not new; a robot vamp plays an important part in Thea von Harbou's novel
Metropolis,
from which the famed German motion picture was made by UFA in 1926. Del Rey's con-tribution in
Helen O'Loy
was artistic and stylistic.

While the immediate reaction to the appearance of that story in December, 1938, astounding science-fiction was very good, particularly among the authors of science fiction it rated in reader's approbation below two other stories in the issue:
A Matter of Form
by H. L. Gold and
The Merman
by L. Sprague de Camp. Its standing in science fiction as one of the masterpieces on the robot theme results from second looks by the readers. Actually it was the tale's second appear-ance in Lester del Rey's first hard cover collection, "...
And Some Were Human,"
published by Prime Press, Philadelphia, in 1948, that won it critical acclaim.

In retrospect,
The Faithful
was far more influential than
Helen O'Loy.
It is almost a certainty that Clifford D. Simak's poignant development of the dogs in
City
took its cue from
The Faithful.
While the notion that a canine civilization can be developed to replace that of humanity played a role in the space epic
Invaders of the Infinite
by John W. Campbell (amazing stories quarterly, Spring-Summer, 1932), it was del Rey's treatment that popularized this concept. Quite probably, also, L. Sprague de Camp's popular series about Johnny Black, the intelligent book-loving bear, may have received some of its ideas from
The
Faithful.
Similarly, the civilized monocled apes of L. Sprague de Camp and P. Schuyler Miner's novel
Genus Homo
(super science stories, March 1941), conceivably may have obtained some substance from those described in
The Faithful.

When del Rey decided to test how well he could do as a full-time writer, Campbell suggested that he take the theme of de Camp's
The Gnarly Man
concerning the problems of a Neanderthal man in adjusting to modern civilization and see if he could find a different approach. The result was
The Day Is Done
(astounding science-fiction, May, 1939), in which the last Neanderthal man, living off the charity of the early tribes of "modern man," dies of a broken heart, a minor masterpiece. astounding science-fiction's companion magazine was unknown, whose stock in trade was "fairy tales for grown ups." Del Rey tried to make its pages with
A Very Simple Man,
a story about a man who fishes up a Nereid (a lake spirit) and is granted three wishes. He eventually decides to return the wishes and paddles off in his boat. The story was rejected and del Rey has since lost it. His next attempt,
Forsaking All Others,
a tender poetic tale of a little dryad who falls in love with a man and sacrifices her immortality and the life of her tree to consum-mate their union, did get into the May, 1939, issue of UNKNOWN.