The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (8 page)

The other film that blew my mind was
Things to Come
. I still think it is the finest science-fiction film ever made, greater than
Metropolis
, more meaningful than
2001
. I concede that it looks pretty quaint now, but so will
Star Wars
in another forty years. I saw
Things to Come
thirty-three times before I stopped counting. Quite recently I saw it again—in fact, took on the chore of organizing a college science-fiction film festival just to give myself the chance to see it. It is still
grand
.

Things to Come
was the first major film for Ralph Richardson and Raymond Massey, and I have had an immense liking for both of them ever since. It wasn't exactly a story. It was almost a documentary, and financially speaking it was a bomb. But every frame is engraved on my mind. So is Arthur Bliss's score. For years I had the 78-rpm album of the music, until the winter I unwisely left the wax discs on a radiator. Now I have an illicit tape dubbed off the radio, and I still think it's fine. The film was real science fiction, not papier-mâché Godzillas or carrot-shaped Martians. It was written by a real science-fiction writer, in fact the father of us all, old H. G. Wells himself. And it was handsomely filmed with actors who knew what they were about.

Let me confess to something. I think a great deal of
Death Takes a Holiday
and
Things to Come
rubbed off in the deep-down core of my brain. I have no particular fear of dying, and I think that one part of the reason for that lies in some subliminal feeling that when it happens it will be old Fredric March who takes me by the hand and says, "Hey Fred, long time no see." And in spite of all the evidence, I am optimistic about the future of the world. I have a conviction bad times and good all pass, and all are endurable, and that is what
Things to Come
had to say. You can blow up the world as often as you like, but there is a future, there is always a future, and while some of it will be bad, some of it will be better than anyone has ever known.

For the opening of
Things to Come
we fans got up a real theater party—not a very big one (I think about six of us could afford tickets), but there we were, en masse, going to taste this great new experience together. James Blish, kid fan from far-off East Orange, New Jersey, came in to join us. Like all of us, he wanted to be a writer. Like all of us, he was learning how in the fanzines, publishing one of his own and writing for others. And like a lot of us, he got his heart's desire, with books like
Cities in Flight
and A
Case of Conscience
among the long list of first-rate work that only ended with his death, a year or so ago.

Jim Blish from New Jersey, Bob Lowndes from Connecticut—we were becoming quite cosmopolitan. Evidently there were specimens of our own breed in other parts of the world. We had linked up with them through fanzine and letter, but we hungered for the personal contact. And so, one Sunday in 1936, half a dozen of us got on the train for Philadelphia and were met by half a dozen Philadelphia fans, and so the world's very first science-fiction convention took place. Considering the historical significance of the event, it is astonishing how little I remember about what happened there. It's no good looking for the official minutes, either: I was the secretary who took them, and I have no idea where I put them. Philly fan John V. Baltadonis's father owned a bar, and we met in one corner of it for the business part of the session. Robert A. Madle and Oswald Train were part of the Philadelphia contingent, and I still see them pretty regularly at sf conventions; so was Milton A. Rothman, who published a few stories (some of them with me) under the name of Lee Gregor before deciding to devote his time to nuclear physics. From New York were Johnny Michel, Don Wollheim, Will Sykora, Dave Kyle, and myself.

The last convention I went to had four thousand people in attendance, and it was by no means the biggest sf convention ever. There must be a hundred of them a year in the United States, and maybe another hundred here and there in the rest of the world. But that was the first.

By 1937 the ISA had served its function and was off to join the dodo and the diplodocus. There was a change in the scenario, this time. Once we had depopulated the BSFL and the ILSF, their directors, Clark and Kirshenblit, dropped out of science fiction and were seen no more. Willy Sykora was of sterner stuff. He stayed on, joined a new group called the Queens Science Fiction League, and formed powerful alliances with its leaders, Sam Moskowitz and James V. Taurasi. The three of them before long created a whole new wide-ranging group called New Fandom, of which more will be heard later.

What we others did was equally new. Previously we had, cuckoolike, laid our eggs in others' nests. Now we decided to form our own club. Weary of initials, we selected a name for it that did not need truncation: The Futurians.

For that we will need another chapter, but before we get to it there is something else that needs to be spelled out. It was not only science fiction that held some of us together any more. A few of us had found an interest in politics—politics of the left; in fact, one or two of us called ourselves Communists.

4 Boy Bolsheviks

Kings Highway has been a major thoroughfare for three centuries. It cuts clear through Brooklyn and picks up again on the other side of the Bay in New Jersey; it was the King's road, and his troops retreated down it after the Battle of Monmouth. In 1936 it was the heart of a prosperous Brooklyn residential district. You got off at the BMT Brighton Line station and walked south along the highway, past restaurants and candy stores, kosher delicatessens and funeral parlors, and after half a dozen blocks you came to a storefront with meeting rooms on its second floor. Usually they were rented to wedding parties or bar mitzvahs, but one night a week they belonged to the Flatbush Branch of the Young Communist League.

Johnny Michel was a YCLer. When he told me that, I was startled and thrilled. It seemed a
very
grown-up thing to be. Elliptically I tried to find out from him what a Communist was, what they did in their meetings, how he had come to be one, why he thought it was worth doing. I didn't get much satisfaction out of him, but after a couple of months of building my curiosity the tip was ready to turn, and he allowed that if I really wanted to know all these things, I could come with him to a meeting and find out for myself. I was sixteen, and quite flattered to be chosen; I think I was also a little scared by it, which made it even more irresistible.

The room was still set up for some sort of party, fake palm trees in pots and hooded band instruments against the wall. There were about a hundred people there, mostly young, but none younger than I. The principal speaker didn't seem young at all to me. I suppose he was around thirty. His name was Mike Saunders (I found out later it was a "Party name"; most YCL leaders used them), and he gave a speech of welcome to all the "new friends" in the audience. (Until that moment I had thought I was the only one.) Probably we had come there with all sorts of misconceptions about the YCL, he said. He reminisced about his own first encounter. It had been that way with him. He hadn't known what to expect: people with bombs and beards, girls walking around with mattresses strapped to their backs. I was a little uncomfortable with that. It seemed to be in bad taste, and besides, it was a little bit of a downer because I had daydreamed about something like that myself. But the YCLers, Mike explained, were not like that. They were really no different from any other American youth, except in good ways: Smarter, more alert. More socially conscious. More politically aware of the real needs of the people, which were jobs, security, democracy, and peace. Communism, he told us, was Twentieth-Century Americanism. The Communists were the chief defenses of the liberty-loving peoples of the world against the Fascist imperialists, Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. The Communists supported the right of workers to organize in trade unions. The Communists were against race discrimination and in favor of civil rights, and the first thing the Communists had to do, he told us, was to reelect Franklin Delano Roosevelt President of the United States. Not on the ticket of the corrupt Democratic Party! No, but on the ticket of free, socially conscious Americans, the new third party that had just been formed; and we sang a song about it:

We
'
ve got a baby all our own
,

All our own
,
all our own
,

We
'
ve got a baby all our own
,

The Farmer
-
Labor Party
!

A couple of speeches, a few lefty songs (and great old songs they were), and that was the end of the formal part of the evening. For the next hour or so we talked about the club newspaper they wanted to publish and general get-acquainted topics over coffee and cake.

I observed them with the paranoid care of any kid in strange surroundings. They seemed to be pretty nice people. They were the right age. All the leaders were in their twenties or beyond, but the rank and file were teen-agers, a lot of them high-schoolers like me. They appeared to be one hundred percent white and ninety percent Jewish, but that was no surprise. So was the neighborhood. In the late 1920s I had lived just a few blocks away, at 1701 East 14th Street, and I had early learned I was the only Presbyterian on the block. Most of the most interesting science-fiction fans and writers I was meeting were also Jewish, but not working at it, and it was the same in the YCL. And, like the sf community, they were bright and articulate. I have always liked meeting people who know a lot about things that interest me, and I found in the Flatbush YCL a lot of people who knew a great deal about music, theater, art; above all, about politics and history—two areas in which I was all but totally ignorant. One of the disadvantages of going to Brooklyn Tech was that there were no history courses. Another disadvantage was that there were no girls in Brooklyn Tech, nor in the monastically male sf community of the 30s, and the other great attribute of the YCLers was that nearly half of them were demonstrably and attractively female.

I don't think I ever heard Franco's name before I walked into that meeting—his revolt against the Spanish government had only begun a few weeks before. I doubt seriously that I ever gave a thought to the evils of Hitler or Mussolini, or to the virtues of trade unionism or the New Deal. But they sounded like good things to feel strongly about. I liked singing and learning new songs. I foresaw a great career for myself on the proposed chapter newspaper. And before I left the hall that night I was a paid-up member, with a little red card with a hammer and sickle on it.

Johnny and I went back and reported to our fellow fans. We didn't make much of an impression at that time. Don Wollheim listened tolerantly with his usual half-smile, eyes gazing forty-five degrees to starboard. I don't think he minded the parts about Spain and peace, but he couldn't go along with supporting Franklin D. Roosevelt. When the time came a couple of months later, he marched off to the polls and cast his ballot as he had intended all along, for Alfred Mossman Landon.

Words take on the coloration of their times. The word "Communist" has one sound today, had quite another in the 50s, when Joe McCarthy shambled across the land, and probably will sound different still in the year 2000. In 1936 it sounded adventurous, active, and, above all, "progressive."

I'm not sure what the word "progressive" meant to me, except that it seemed generally forward-looking. The Communists had made sure that it sounded so. They had finally figured out that if they didn't get a revolution in 1932, when the bonus marchers looked like an uprising even to Herbert Hoover and millions wondered where their next month's rent was coming from, they weren't going to get one at all in the foreseeable future. So the word had come down to broaden the base. It worked pretty well. The Communist Party and the YCL combined had well over a hundred thousand members in the late 30s, vastly more than ever before or after. They controlled countless other groups—workers' fraternal organizations, trade unions, anti-Fascist leagues—with memberships ten or a hundred times as large.

I carried my YCL card for almost four years. For most of that time I believed in what I was doing and worked hard at it, a regular Jimmy Higgins: president of my own branch, street-corner rabble-rouser, ace recruiter, even a kind of low-level policy maker. Of course, the really important policies were set by levels of leadership so high they disappeared out of sight. But in the implementation of the commandments there was room for interpretation, and I held membership in a dozen county and state committees and in the national conventions. It was all pretty open and aboveboard, except for this curious little custom of "Party names."

From 1940 on the Communist apparatus became a lot less benign and a hell of a lot more conspiratorial, but I was long gone by then. I suppose that even in the 1930s some sort of infrastructure was being laid. But I saw no signs of it, no trace of anything that I could not reconcile with the Pledge of Allegiance and the Boy Scouts' oath. Maybe half a dozen times I was asked to do mildly covert things: attend a Nazi Bund meeting as a potential convert to report back on what they were up to (I chickened out of that one), pretend to be a member of some union to take part in a picket line. That was about it. The YCL was so square it was a disappointment.

What we did was right out in the open. We cruised the five-and-tens looking for Japanese goods, and when we found them we picketed the stores, urging boycott. When the International Catholic Truth Society picketed theaters showing the movie
Blockade
, an ever-so-mildly pro-Loyalist film about the Spanish Civil War, we counterpicketed the International Catholic Truth Society. Several times a year we filled up Madison Square Garden with conventions, rallies, debates, anti-Fascist mass meetings, whatever. Those were glorious fun, twenty thousand clenched fists raised in the last lines of the "Internationale," and afterward streaming out to Times Square to picket Walgreen's drugstore (in the process of a strike at the time) or just to show the flag.