The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (17 page)

I now think that everything I did at that time—in fact, everything I was doing in all those years, and almost everything I've done through my life—carried its own justification of a sort. What a writer has to sell is his own perspective on the universe. The way to make that perspective significant is to learn all one can learn about—everything. What I was doing was informal, disorganized, spasmodic, but it was all learning. All of it helped to unravel that central mystery which is what writing is all about,
†
and so all of it contributed to my career. I don't regret a minute of it . . . now. But at the time it didn't feel good at all. It felt as if I were washed up at twenty-one.

I have sat staring at this page, trying to remember and to understand, so that I can say just what was happening in those seven months. I think I do understand. I don't like my understanding of that time in my life very much, and I have buried so much of it so deeply inside the layers of my head that it is difficult to exhume fact out of the strata of rationalization.

But whether I like it or not, I think I know what happened. I was not feeling happy about myself, and for that reason I was not happy with those around me. The principal person around me was Doë. We were two raw children, Doë and I. We married very young; even the marriage ceremony only ratified a commitment that had been implicit almost since we first started dating at seventeen. The growing-up process that most adolescents experience through transient dates and relationships, we worked out only on each other, and we carried a lot of adolescent role-playing into our marriage. I more than she. I had made a model of myself in my head, and I acted it out. The model was mature, authoritative, a genu-wine leader type, capable of command decision and never at a loss. And the tide went out and the sand washed away and the foundations crumbled, and I had to learn a new model for myself. The father-bear role would not play any more.

Where did I learn the father-bear role? Why, I think we all learned it. It came out of the sexist society that taught us role-playing, out of a dozen Astaire-Rogers movies, out of the stereotypes of the stories we wrote and read, out of all the conventional wisdom of the age. We were all a little crippled. Some of us still limp when the rain wind blows from the east. Prickly Women's-Lib ladies, you can have anything you want of me. Your fight is my fight, but you come a little late; I wish you had been around forty years ago, when
I
needed liberating. Because we were taught that women were dependent, it followed that there was no one for them to depend on but men. Among others, my own father had taught me to play that role, but I think he had also taught me to fail at it.

I don't want to give the impression that Doë and I suffered through months of misery, because it wasn't like that at all. We had a lot of fun. We did productive things. We were so young that we knew, fundamentally and surely, that there would always be other chances and new experiences without end, and in fact there were. But we blew that one. Not "we." I. Having married Doë as part of a scenario I had written for myself, and then having found out that the scenario didn't work, I was restive. I had signed a run-of-the-play contract, but I wanted to quit the part.

It was a gritty personal time, and made grittier and more confusing by the world scene. In December the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and my country was at war.

Early in 1942 Alden H. Norton sent me a telegram, asking me to come back to Popular Publications as his assistant. To make it sweeter, he offered me more as an assistant than I had been paid as a full-fledged editor. I felt around my pride to see if it was injured, and when it did not seem to hurt anywhere, I accepted at once.

Al Norton was a boss editor, a department head. He had fifteen or sixteen pulp magazines to look after and four people to help him do it: a secretary and three assistant editors, including myself. The staff had been depleted by the draft and other turmoils, and when I came aboard there was only one surviving assistant, Olga Mae Quadland, tall, dark, good-looking, and good-humored. Ollie had the curious attribute of being a female deacon in the Episcopal Church, but I was big enough not to hold that against her, and she was very good at her job. A little later another assistant signed on to complete the roster, Dorothy LesTina. She was a pretty, brown-haired recent divorcee from San Diego. Tina was a year or two older than I, wore her hair in coronet braids, and was new enough in New York that she didn't know a soul.

The war had begun to change publishing, even in seven months. There were new things, real or on the horizon, called "price controls" and "rationing." Paper was going to run short. The Canadian forests were still there, and the mills were ready to grind the trees into magazine pages, but to get the trees to the mills and the paper rolls to the printing presses involved trains and trucks, and they were suddenly heavily committed to troop movements and shipments of airplane parts. There was even, without warning, censorship. None of us knew how that was meant to work. But one day I wrote an editorial for one of the air-war magazines, full of pulpy fantasy about the terrible vengeance our Air Force was about to work on the Axis, and laid it on Alden's desk. He came in an hour later, looking worried, and said Harry Steeger had told him he would have to clear it with Air Force Intelligence. We phoned around, and got a name, and sent it off, and a few days later it came back, heavily red-lined and amended. "Night fighters parachuting agents into the heart of Occupied Europe" had been changed to "support of ground operations, covert and otherwise." Bragging about the invulnerability of the B-17 "Flying Fortress" had been revised to a recitation of the published official performance figures on rate of fire and armor. It was apparent at once that the censors hadn't yet figured out how they were supposed to work, either.

But we got along fine, all of us corralled into the long, narrow room at the end of the hall. We slashed the Western and sports stories into English, took fair turns at editing the worst of them, lunched together more often than not, went bowling at the alleys down the block once or twice a week. After the fretful tension of trying to free-lance, coming into the Bartholomew Building every morning was like a vacation with pay. Alden made it easy for me to be his assistant, decent man, careful to consider the feelings of the people who worked for him. Apart from the growing alienation in my marriage, it was an easy time. I liked the work, relished the abdication from decision-making, had enough money to meet our needs; it was clear that it could not last forever—the Red Death was stalking the world, and the cracks were spreading at the foundation of my personal universe—but that was something that could be worried about at a later time. I was not Prince Hamlet. But it was pleasant to be an attendant lord while my glands caught up with my ambitions.

I had almost lost touch with the Futurians. Most I still saw on a one-to-one basis, but I was no longer part of the group. Partly it was my own vanity—having thrown my weight around as a boy editor, it was quite a comedown to be one more faceless aspiring writer in the mob—but it was also that I had had all the in-jokes and scurrility I wanted for a while. Individually the Futurians contained some of the brightest and best people I have ever known, but collectively they—no,
we
—were often kind of awful.

They were also changing. Old Futurians were vanishing, new blood was flowing in. The center of gravity had moved from the Ivory Tower in Brooklyn to a West 103rd Street walk-up called Prime Base. There was a pentacle painted on the tatty linoleum of the living room, and murals on the wall (the figures were the Unholy Trinity: Stinky, Shorty, and the Holy Ghost). The artwork was due to a new boy in town named Damon Knight, skinny, callow, with a pear-shaped head and a lot on the ball in his idiosyncratic way. Damon had been a fan since he was old enough to read, and his intention in coming to New York was to become a professional science-fiction artist. He might well have succeeded, in spite of having no discernible talent at art, if the example of the other Futurians had not suggested to him that writing was easier. A few editors bought his illustrations, but then they began to buy his stories as well, and he put away his sketch pad for good. Jim Blish had been a fringe Futurian for some time and now became more active in the group; a little later Judy Merril came in, first female Futurian accepted in her own right rather than as a ladies'-day guest of some male.

But by then I was long gone.

The pleasure had begun to diminish, and the cracks to widen. By the end of 1942 Doë and I came to the parting of the ways. When the lease ran out on our Knickerbocker Village apartment, she went back to her parents' home, and I took a room in a hotel on West 45th Street. I had begun to get very interested in that hazel-eyed girl with the coronet braids, Dorothy LesTina. But the dynamics of the situation were more than I could handle, and I decided to go for to be a soldier.

Unfortunately, Uncle Sam did not seem in any particular hurry to acquire my young flesh. The draft machine was in high gear, and voluntary enlistments had been suspended while they figured things out. And they didn't draft me.

This displeased me, and so I went down to Local Board 1 to complain. Take me, I said. Go away, they said; we'll come to you when we come to you. How come you didn't come to me already? I asked. And they said: Because, first, you are deferred because of dependency; second, because we have been assigned a quota, and our quota is overfulfilled. All the young fellows in Chinatown signed up long ago to fight the Japanese. When we finish with them, maybe we'll get to you, so go away.

Well, that bugged me. I had been talking anti-Fascist so long that I was beginning to feel guilty about doing nothing more tangible in the war than writing editorials in
Fighting Aces
. And when you come right down to it, I have this special unalterable love for the United States of America. Bumbling, sometimes blundering, it is still my country, right or wrong, and I take much pride in the fact that over its two hundred years it has been right a lot more than it has been wrong. (God preserve us all from the exceptions!) So I wanted in. A lot.

There was some fun to be had in the situation because I appointed myself spokesman for all the unwilling draftees in the country, I wrote my local board, I telephoned them, I went down and pounded on the table. The dependency depended on the marriage, I said, and the marriage was over. We'll make a note of that, they said, and don't call us, we'll call you. I'm not really in Local Board 1's territory any more, because I moved to West 45th Street, I said. We'll make a note of that, too, they said, but go away.

In the long run they did grant me my wish, but it took some four months of doing. They inducted me on April Fool's Day, 1943.

7 My Life as a Cardinal Man

In writing about this period I don't feel as if I am writing about myself; in fact, not about any real person at all. I think I know why. I was not a person. I was an enlisted man in the Army. An EM has no more individuality than the seventh egg in a box of a dozen. He is a unit quantity. He is not just a number, he is less than a number, because he does not even have that limited identity we sometimes give to certain numbers, like Third Base or the Year 1492. He has cardinality: if he is missing from a formation, the tally is one short. But he does not have ordinality: it Does not matter (except perhaps to him, but who cares what a cardinal number thinks?) whether he is the fifth or the fifty-fifth in the muster roll, any more than it matters whether the sheet of paper I take out of a ream was the first or the last to go in.

If a soldier were not a cardinal man, armies would not be possible. No
person
would allow himself to be restricted to his barracks because a quarter will not bounce off his bed, or would tolerate being refused admission to an "officers only" bar, or would stroll down to the Venetian Causeway, as I did on many evenings during basic training in Miami Beach, and gaze hungrily at the city lights across the bay, accepting the prohibition against walking across the bridge. A cardinal man in the uniform of the other side can be killed or maimed without penalty. A cardinal man on your own side can be ordered to storm a pillbox, or be shot for falling asleep, without consideration. A
person
would not put up with any of this crap for a minute.
*

Since I was born a white male Protestant, and thus competitively advantaged in the American society in ways that kikes, niggers, girls, gooks, and wogs were not, it would be hard for me to understand all the passions that lie behind the liberation movements . . . if I had not been an enlisted man in the Army. Aw, sure, I know it's not the
same
, I knew it was only a game, and that when I got my discharge all the rules would change back again. But it was close enough while it lasted. An EM knows what it is like to be treated like a piece of meat. And he knows, too, the delicious advantages of accepting the status quo. You can let someone else do the worrying. Uncle Toms and cuddly girls learned this long before I did.

Since the game rules called for me to be a cuddly Tom, I played that game and, my God, I actually enjoyed it. All of it. Even the utterly revolting parts, like cleaning grease traps on KP and getting up at a quarter to five in the morning, with the stars still out. Basic training (at least for the Air Force, at least in Miami Beach at that time) was a lot like going back to Camp Fire Place Lodge and the age of twelve.