The Early Pohl
In the winter of 1933, when I was just turned thirteen, I discovered three new truths.
The first truth was that the world was in a hell of a mess. The second was that I really was not going to spend my life being a chemical engineer, no matter what I had told my guidance counselor at Brooklyn Technical High School. And the third was that in my conversion to science fiction as a way of life I Was Not Alone.
All of these new discoveries were important to me, and in a way they were all related. I had just started the second semester of my freshman year at Brooklyn Tech. It was a cold, grimy winter in the deepest depths of the Great Depression. There was not much joy to be found. Men were selling apples in the streets. The unemployed stood in bread lines and prayed for snow—that meant there would be work shoveling it off the sidewalks. Roosevelt had just been elected President but hadn't yet taken office—Inauguration Day, still geared to the stagecoach schedules of 1789, had not yet been moved up from March 4. Banks were going broke.
There was not much money around, but on the other hand you didn't need a lot. Subway fare was a nickel. So was a hot dog at Nedick's,* which was enough for a schoolboy's lunch. You could go to the movies for a dime or, sometimes, for a can of soup to be donated to the hungry.
Brooklyn Tech was an honor school, which is possibly why I decided to go to it in the first place. Like many of my colleagues, I regret to say that as a kid I was always something of an intellectual snob. (I do not wish to discuss what I am now.) Tech had been born in an ancient factory building, next to the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge in the grimiest part of Brooklyn's industrial riverside district. It had outgrown that and was now spread around a clutch of decrepit ex-grammar schools in the same area. We commuted from building to building, class to class. I found myself walking from my Mechanical Drawing class in P.S. No. 5 to my Forge and Foundry class in the main building in the company of a tall, skinny kid named Joseph Harold Dockweiler. Along about the third time we crossed Flatbush Avenue together I discovered that we had something of great urgency in common. He, too, was a Science-Fiction Fan, Third Degree. That is, he didn't merely read the stuff, or even stop at collecting back issues and searching the secondhand bookstores for overlooked works. He, like me, had the firm intention of writing it someday.
Six or seven years later Joseph Harold Dockweiler became Dirk Wylie (I'll tell you about that later on). Later still, he and I went partners in a literary agency and later, but tragically not very much later, he died, at the appalling age of twenty-eight, of the aftereffects of his service in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.
Dirk was the first person I had found like myself. Having learned that we were not unique, we contemplated the possibility of finding still others who would be able and anxious to compare the merits of Amazing vs. Wonder Stories and discuss the galaxy-ranging glamour of E. E. Smith's Skylark stories. In a word, we went looking for science-fiction fandom.
The bad part of that was that fandom did not yet quite exist.
The good part was that it was just about to be born.
A year or two later Wonder Stones started a circulation-boosting correspondence club called the Science Fiction League. We joined instanter, and began attending club meetings as soon as a local chapter was formed. We met others like ourselves. We worshiped at the feet of a few who had actually been published in the professional sf magazines, and we learned the answers to the two key questions
* I bought one of those nickel hot dogs at Nedick's the other day and it cost fifty-five cents.
that confronted us: How do you become a writer? and, How do you get published?†
The Brooklyn Science Fiction League met in the basement of its chairman, George Gordon Clark. He was an energetic fellow. When Wonder Stones announced the formation of the SFL Clark did not waste time, he sent in his coupon at once and consequently became Member No. 1. When the SFL announced it was willing to charter local chapters, he acted instantly again, and so the BSFL was Chapter No. 1, too. We outgrew Clark's basement pretty quickly; there was only room for about four of us, in with his collection of sf magazines. We moved to a classroom in a nearby public school. What I mostly remember about those meetings is surprise that I couldn't fit into the grammar-school desks any more—after all, it was only a couple of years since I had been occupying desks just like them every school day. I remember we talked a lot about how to interpret Robert's Rules of Order and spent quite a lot of time reading minutes of the previous meeting. If anything else substantive took place, I have forgotten it entirely.
But, ah, the Meeting After the Meeting! That was the fun part. That was when we would adjourn to the nearest open soda fountain, order our sodas and sundaes and sit around until they threw us out, talking about science fiction.
It was always a soda fountain. Not always the same one; over the years we fans must have staked out and claimed dozens of them, all over the city. But we were addicted to ice cream concoctions, so much so that a few years later, in a different borough of the city, after the meetings of a different club, we finally designed our own sundae, which we called the Science Fiction Special, and persuaded the proprietor of the store to put it on his menu. We were a young bunch, as you can see. Except for Clark, who must have been in his early twenties, the old man of the group was Donald A. Wollheim, pushing nineteen. John B. Michel came with Donald; and a little later, down from Connecticut, Robert W. Lowndes; the four of us made a quadrumvirate that held together for—oh, forever, it seems like—it must have been all of three or four years, during which time we started clubs and dispersed them, published fan magazines, fought all comers for supremacy in fandom and wound up battling among ourselves. The fan feud is not quite coeval with fandom itself, but it comes close. None of the clubs seemed to live very long. The BSFL held out for a year, then we moved on to the East New York Science Fiction League, a rival chapter of the parent organization which seceded and renamed itself the Independent League for Science Fiction. That kept us engaged for another year, then it was the turn of the International Scientific Association (also known as the International Cosmos-Science Club). The ISA was not particularly scientific, and it certainly wasn't all that international; we met in the basement of Will Sykora's house in Astoria, Queens. (The ENYSFL-ILSF had met in a basement, too, the one belonging to its chairman, Harold W. Kirshenblit. I do not know what science-fiction fandom would have done in, say, Florida, where the houses didn't have basements.) It didn't much matter what the name of the club was, or where we met. We did about the same things. We held meetings once a month, mostly devoted to arguments over whether a motion to adjourn took precedence over a point of personal privilege. We got together between times to publish mimeographed magazines, where we practiced our fledgling talents—for writing, and also for invective.
†"How do you become a writer?" You write. That is, you put words on paper until you have completed one or more stories. There is simply no other way to do it. "How do you get published?" You send those stories to someone who, if he likes them, can publish them—as for instance the editor of a magazine you read, whose name and address you get from the contents page of the magazine. That is the Whole of the Law.
The fan mags‡ were sometimes club efforts, sometimes individual. I managed to wind up as editor of the club mags a lot of the time, but that wasn't enough; I published some of my own. The one I liked best was a minimal eight-page mimeographed job measuring 4¼" by 5½"—a standard 8½" by 11" mimeo sheet folded twice—called Mind of Man. Since it was my own I could publish anything I liked in it. What I liked best to publish was my own poetry, which at that time was highly sense-free, influenced in equal parts by Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky and some of the crazier exhibits in transition.
. . . Oh, why not? I will give you one sample from Mind of Man. It is meant to be read aloud. If I remember correctly, I wrote it in a single blinding flash of inspiration immediately after learning that the "&" mark on my typewriter was called an ampersand.
?
. . &
! my frand
; $
- - ......
I will leave the exegesis to any interested Ph.D. candidates, but I would like to observe that the proper title is not Question Mark but Interrogation Point. I mention this for the benefit of any coffeehouse artists who wish to include it in a poetry reading.
I don't know what kind of a writer I would have been if I hadn't met Dirk and, through him and with him, the whole world of science-fiction fandom. Much the same, I imagine. I almost certainly would have been a writer-I'm hardly fit for anything else. And I had been trying to write sf at least a year before I met Dirk, in idle moments in classes in the eighth grade. But it would have taken a lot longer. I owe a lot to fandom. From Wollheim, Michel, Lowndes—later from Cyril Kornbluth, Dick Wilson, Isaac Asimov and others—I learned something about what they were learning about writing; we all showed each other our stories, when we weren't actually collaborating on them. In the fan mags I acquired the skills necessary to prepare something for public viewing—and the courage to permit it.
What I am not as sure of is whether all the things we learned were worth learning.
Science fiction was purely a pulp category in those days. Sometimes the emphasis was on gadgetry, sometimes on blood-and-thunder adventure; when it was best the high spots were vistas of new worlds and new kinds of life. In no case was it on belles-lettres, nor was it a place to look for fresh insights into the human condition. What we learned from each other and from the world around us was the hardware of writing. Narrative hooks. Time-pressure to make a story move. Character tags—not characterization, but oddities, quirks, bits of business to make a person in a story not alive but identifiable. So I learned how to invent ray-guns and how to make a story march, but it was not for a long, long time that I began to try to learn how to use a story to say something that needed saying.
In fact, when I look back at the science-fiction magazines of the twenties and the early thirties, the ones that hooked me on sf, I sometimes wonder just what it was we all found in them to shape our lives around.
I think there were two things. One is that science fiction was a way out of a bad place; the other, that it was a window on a better one.
The world really was in bad trouble. Money trouble. The Great Depression was not just a few million people out of work or a thousand banks gone shaky. It was fear. And it was worldwide. Somehow or other the economic life of the human race had got itself off the tracks. No one was quite sure it would get straight again. No one could be sure that his own life was not going to be disastrously
‡ Now they are called "fanzines," but the term hadn't been coined then.
changed, and science fiction offered an escape from all that.
The other thing about the world was that technology had just begun to make itself a part of everyone's life. Every day there were new miracles. Immense new buildings. Giant airships. Huge ocean liners. Man flew across the Atlantic and circled the South Pole. Cars went faster, tunnels went deeper, the Empire State Building stretched a fifth of a mile into the sky, radio brought you the voice of a singer a continent away.
It was clear that behind all this growth and acceleration something was happening, and that it would not stop happening with the Graf Zeppelin and the Empire State but would go on and on. What science fiction was about was the going on. The next step, and the step after that. Not just radio, but television. Not just the conquest of the air, but the conquest of space.
Of course, not even science fiction was telling us much about the price tag on progress. It told us about the future of the automobile; it didn't tell us that sulphur-dioxide pollution would crumble the stone in the buildings that lined the streets. It told us about high-speed aircraft, but not about sonic boom; about atomic energy, but not about fallout; about organ transplants and life prolongation, but not about the dreary agony of overpopulation.
Nobody else was telling us about these things, either. A decade or two later science fiction picked up on the gloom behind the glamour very quickly, and maybe too completely. But in those early days we were as innocent as physicists, popes and presidents. We saw only the promise, not the threat.
And truthfully we weren't looking for threats. We were looking for beauty and challenge. When we couldn't find them on Earth, we looked outside for prettier, more satisfying places. Mars. Venus. The made-up planets of invented stars somewhere off in the middle of the galaxy, or in galaxies farther away still.
I think we all believed as an article of faith that there were other intelligent races in the universe than our own, plenty of them.* If polled, I am sure we would have agreed that wherever there's a planet there's life—or used to be, or will be.
Now, alas, we know that the odds are not as good as we had hoped, especially for our own solar system. The local real estate is pretty low quality. Mercury is too hot and has too little air; Venus is too hot and has too much, and poisonous at that. Mars is still a possibility, but not by any means a good one—and what else is there? But in the mid-thirties we didn't know as much as we do now. The big telescopes hadn't yet been completed, and of course no spaceship had yet brought a TV camera to Mars or the Moon. So we believed.
The first sale I ever made came out of that general belief.
It wasn't a story. It was a poem. I am afraid that I don't think now that it is a very good poem, but it contains the first words I ever put down on paper that I actually received real, spendable money for, and so I am going to include it here.
People sometimes ask me when I made this first sale. That's harder to answer than you might think. I wrote it when I was fifteen. It was accepted when I was sixteen. It was published when I was seventeen—in the October 1937 issue of Amazing Stones. And I was paid for it ($2.00) when I was eighteen.
That's how things were in those days.
* I still believe it! What puzzles me is why we haven't seen any of them as visitors. I wish I could swallow the flying-saucer stories-I can't; the evidence just isn't good. But the absence of hard facts hasn't shaken my faith that Osnomians and Fenachrone are out there somewhere.