The Early Pohl (12 page)

Jack Gillespie and I went hitchhiking to Washington one weekend, not for any particular reason, just to have something to do. On the way back we decided on a detour through Hagerstown, Maryland. Sf fan Harry Warner lived there; we had corresponded with him, but never met him. So we had a pleasant visit, and then moved on. But not very far. On the way out of Hagerstown toward Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, we realized we had made a mistake. We were off the well-traveled roads. There just wasn't much traffic to hitch from, and what there was wasn't stopping for us. Along about three o'clock in the morning it stopped being fun, but we were committed by then. There was nothing. No diner, no filling station, not even a house with lighted windows. It was getting cold, a damp, dreary night that did not make the idea of sleeping in the open attractive. We got to hate the occasional driver that zoomed past without picking us up, and along about 5 a.m. we invented a variation on the Piece of String to get even.

*You know what Ghosts is—every player says a letter, and the one on whom a word ends gets a letter G, then an H, then an O until he himself is a Ghost and cannot be spoken to by any other player without the penalty of a letter.

We heard a car coming. We bent down together in the middle of the road, struck a match, held it to the concrete long enough to be sure it was seen and then ran like hell. The driver decelerated from an easy eighty to zero in five or six car lengths, nearly popping his tires in the process and winding up with one wheel in the ditch. We watched from behind trees while he got out of the car, stamped around for a while, looking for a bomb and talking to himself, and then drove away. We didn't play that game any more.

And then on Monday morning I would put on a clean shirt and a tie and go in and be an editor.

The other thing that I've been meaning to put in was a rather major aspect of my teen-age life, and that of some other fans of the late thirties: A number of us, myself most certainly included, got involved in Communist groups around then.

For me it began in 1936, when a fan friend took me to a meeting of the Flatbush Young Communist League. It was a sort of wide-angle loft over some stores on Kings Highway in Brooklyn. I don't know what I expected, exactly. I don't think I got it. No one talked about throwing bombs or destroying capitalist oppression. To the extent that what went on was political at all, it had to do with trying to get Franklin D. Roosevelt re-elected President by drumming up votes for him on the "third party" Farmer-Labor ticket. There was a lot of talk about the evils of Hitlerism, about how desperately the legally elected government of Spain needed help against the Fascist invaders and about how collective security for all democratic peoples was the only way to ensure world peace. It all sounded pretty good, especially since everybody there seemed open, friendly, joking and caring with each other. We listened to the talk, sang a few lefty songs like
Joe Hill
and the
Internationale
and chatted over coffee. The Flatbush YCL was just planning to publish a club magazine, mimeographed. Well, that was right down my alley; at sixteen I already considered myself a world expert in how to edit, lay out and produce mimeographed magazines, and by virtue of my experience with fan mags, I pretty nearly was. So before I left I was signed up as editor.

There was, to be sure, a certain amount of lip service paid to the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. Pamphlets by all of them were on sale. After a time I did, in fact, try to read some of them. I gave up. I am a person who will read almost any book on almost anything, any time. But I drew the line at
Das Kapital
and the Little Lenin Library. Nothing in them seemed to relate to what I perceived as happening in the Communist movement in America—i.e., boycotting Japanese goods, trying to get Hitler stopped, helping the newborn C.I.O. organize the underpaid workers and so on.

The head of the C.P.U.S.A. was an intelligent, humorous, decent man named Earl Browder. I heard him speak several times, actually met him once; I liked him. The pamphlet of his I remember best was called
Communism Is 20th Century Americanism
. It seemed reasonable enough to me, and Browder apparently believed it; while he was running things the C.P. and its satellite groups like the Y.C.L. acted it out. When the party line changed in Russia Browder was unceremoniously fired and, of course, systematically reviled as a revisionist traitor and Fascist by his successors.

The Y.C.L.ers I knew over the next three years were a smart, likable, incredibly moral lot. I was quite disappointed about that. I had had some hope of free love, if not actual orgies. There were plenty of parties—fund-raisers, every one; there was never enough money. They would play records, or someone would have a guitar. Sometimes there was dancing. But I don't remember seeing even wine served, and there sure wasn't much sex. Not
none
. But not much; about, I guess, like any young people's church auxiliary.

The majority of the Futurians stayed clear of the Y.C.L., not so much because they seriously objected to the politics of it as because it just didn't interest them, I think. Me, I liked it. At first I was desperate to graduate into the Communist Party, but they would have none of me because I was too young. By the time I was old enough I didn't want it any more. After the Stalin-Hitler pact in 1939 I found myself less and less able to stand the about-face from people I had liked and trusted; the ones who had been most passionately against Hitler now being equally virulent against Roosevelt. And the cut-off date, when I decided once and for all that, whatever else happened, I would not ever be able to belong to the American Communist movement again, was six or eight months after that. I can give the exact date, maybe even the hour. It was the fifteenth of June, 1940, somewhere between three and four o'clock in the afternoon.

I had lunch with a friend of mine, both a fellow sf writer and a Y.C.L. member. He proposed we have a glass of wine. "Why?" said I. Wine was maybe twenty cents a glass, which would put the cost of our meal well over a dollar apiece. "To celebrate," said he; and when the wine came he raised his glass in a toast: "To the liberation of Paris from the decadent bourgeoisie by the forces of the people's socialism."

Well, sir, that took me aback. Paris had fallen to the Wehrmacht the day before. I took no joy from that, and it really had never occurred to me that anyone I thought of as a friend would, either.

To my eternal discredit I drank his lousy wine. Then I went back to the office and spent the afternoon deep in thought, and at the end of that time I knew I had had it, forever.†

Anyway. Something puzzles me about this whole business and that is that, try as I will, I can't find much trace of my boy-Bolshevik orientation in any of the stories I was writing around that time. A certain amount of loathing is visible, aimed at government and power structures in general; well, I still feel that; Lord Acton was right on. But that's all I can see. The science fiction I was writing was much more concerned with the glamour, the color, the excitement of the field—what Sam Moskowitz calls "the sense of wonder." It had not yet occurred to me to poke fun at power concentrations by science-fiction satire. It was not that the form didn't exist. Heinlein and de Camp were doing it in
Astounding
every month. Huxley had already published
Brave New World,
and there was a legitimacy to the genre going back through Wells's
When the Sleeper Wakes
to Swift's
Gulliver
and beyond. But in my own work it was another decade or so until I got around to stories like—well, a couple of dozen, from
The Space Merchants
to
The Gold at the Starbow's End
.

The chaos of World War II did not merely throw the Communist Party into catatonic shock, it of course affected everybody, even before Pearl Harbor. It affected young men very directly; Congress passed the first peacetime draft laws ever, and any of us might be called any time.

Except that I, personally, seemed reasonably immune. Being married, I was automatically entitled to some deferment on the grounds of having a dependent. Moreover I lived in a high-rise housing development called Knickerbocker Village, in downtown New York, just up against the New York side of the Manhattan Bridge. The importance of that point lay in the fact that Knickerbocker Village was part of Selective Service Local Board No. 1's bailiwick, which also took in Chinatown. That made a difference. When war came and young men over America volunteered to fight the Japanese, in Chinatown they were
all
volunteering. I don't know if Local Board No. 1 ever had to draft anyone.

Doë and I had apartment BH8-Building B, Floor 8, Apartment H—with a handsomely large living room, small bedroom, tiny kitchen and almost invisible bath. We liked it a lot, and liked most of all the fact that Knickerbocker Village really was a village, almost a small city of its own. Restaurants, bars, a co-op supermarket, newsstands, drugstore—they were all in the building. We could get to them through the underground maze without ever setting foot out of doors. And we had our friends there. Dick Wilson and his pretty new wife Jessica were in apartment EE2, across the courtyard. We didn't have to waste money on phone calls; we could wigwag to each other from window to window. In the penthouse of our own building was Willard Crosby and his wife, child and Siamese cats; a couple of buildings away was Loren Dowst. Bill and Dusty were senior editors at Popular Publications, admirable, intelligent, droll people. Other old friends turned up as tenants, and we made new friends with some of the neighbors. KV was generally a nice place to be.

That was fortunate, because I spent a lot of time there.

† A little while later my friend had had it forever, too.

Like most fan groups, the Futurians had schismed. The basic power struggle was between Don Wollheim and myself. I don't remember what we were fighting about. Probably everything. At one of our meetings there was some kind of vote. I claimed my side had won, Donald claimed it was his side, and so the Futurians split apart.

We still stayed on speaking terms, but the social life in Knickerbocker Village was beginning to appeal more than the social life of the Futurians anyway. I had discovered a few new interests. Doë had introduced me to the ballet: first the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, with Frederic Franklin taking sixty-four bars of music to die as the slave in
Scheherazade;
then Ballet Theatre, with Anton Dolin and Nora Kaye and Eglevsky and Toumanova and all of those other great dancers in marvelous three-part performances. The format was always the same: something classical, like
Sylphides;
a virtuoso piece like
Gala Performance;
something modern, like the Tudor ballet with Nora Kaye to Schoenberg's
Verklaerte Nacht
.‡ Ballet led me to listen to the music the ballets were danced to, which led me to other music; slowly I began to accumulate records and even ventured out to concerts. Even opera, although I felt then (and am sure, now) that there aren't more than five operas that are really fun to watch, and when you've named
La Boheme
and
Don Giovanni
you have to start thinking pretty hard to find the other three.*

I also discovered chess, but that is a more complicated story.

I spent most of 1941 playing as much chess against human opponents as I could in the evenings, and devoting at least a couple of hours during every day in replaying master games out of the books, practicing end games like the two-bishop checkmate and inventing new opening gambits. I had the time to do it, because for six or seven months at the end of 1941 I was unemployed. Well, actually I was a free-lance writer. But when you are a free-lance writer and the checks are slow coming in it feels a lot like being unemployed.

What had happened was that I had gone brashly up against my boss, Harry Steeger, with a threat to quit unless I got a raise from $20 a week to something really lavish, like maybe $27.50. He said no. I am not exactly sure what happened then. Either I quit or he fired me. Anyway, when I walked out of his office I wasn't working there any more.

That wasn't so bad. I estimated I could make as much writing as I could editing,† I had already begun to sell a few stories to outside markets—not only outside my own magazines, but outside the science-fiction field. In fact, I guess I did earn about twice as much from my work in those months as I had averaged in the months before. There were, however, two problems. One was that writing a story and waiting for someone to buy it and send out a check is not very much like having a payday every Friday. All free-lance writers must learn this, usually at great cost to their nervous systems. The other was that I had helped myself over a temporary financial problem by buying a couple of stories from myself that I hadn't quite written yet.

So I had to get them written real fast and turn them in; and
Daughters of Eternity,
which follows, was one of them. It was published in
Astonishing Stories
for February 1942.

‡ I claim the autobiographer's privilege of special pleading. Ballet Theatre's classical performances were always abbreviated into one-act form. As God is my witness, they're better that way. One of the greatest present forces for dullness in dance is the movement to give the likes of
Swan Lake
in full, evening-long tedium. There is marvelous music and marvelous dance in
Swan Lake, Giselle
et al., but it all fits nicely into forty-five minutes. Stretching them out to full-length ballets necessitates padding with second-rate music and irrelevant dancing. Write your congressman.

* Is there some rude iconoclastic Bing who might start doing
operas
in abbreviated groups of three?

† I get a lot of questions about how much money writers make, so maybe it is worthwhile to put a couple of facts on record. For equal work and equal ability, writers make more than editors. In my own case, I have spent nearly twenty years, aggregate, living the double life of writer and editor at the same time. In every year, the time I spent at being an editor was much more than the time I spent at being a writer. Nevertheless, my income in all of those years was much more from being a writer than from being an editor. Writing is my living; editing is a hobby.