What I was supposed to be doing was public relations and editing the squadron newspaper. Public relations wasn’t hard. I prepared a standard form, and was given a clerk-typist to pound them out and mail them off to local newspapers whenever any of our number did anything interesting, like getting promoted from Pfc to Corporal, Editing the newspaper was a little less straightforward, since I didn’t know anything about newspapers. I solved it by converting it to a magazine, borrowed a mimeograph, found a civilian printer to do the covers, and put out one of the nicest fanzines you ever saw.
It was an undemanding way to spend time in Italy, but in the familiar environment of typewriters and layouts ordinality was seeping back. I didn’t seem to be doing much, and I began to hear the step of the Fool-Killer catching up behind me.
I was also in love. Dorothy LesTina and I had been heating up the Army Postal Service with an awful lot of correspondence. Now she was in Germany, a first lieutenant, whose principal job was to stand up on a platform in front of ten thousand troops while some GI crooner sang “Darling, je vous aime beaucoup” to her. (Of many odd individual contributions is a war effort made.) Germany was on the same side of the Atlantic as I was, which was tantalizing, and it was my deep belief that if any GI was going to sing love songs to my girl, it should be me. I could not see any way to arrange that, and frankly, the war was beginning to seem a bore. The Germans had been pushed back out of the Bulge, and it was all just mopping up. And not very interesting.
What I didn’t know about the Bulge was that two of my best friends were receiving their death sentences there. Neither of them was wounded. But Dirk Wylie hurt his back jumping out of an Army truck; it got worse, turned into tuberculosis of the spine, and he died of it in 1948. While Cyril Kornbluth strained his heart lugging a .50-caliber machine gun around the Ardennes Forest, and died of essential hypertension a few years later.
What I did know was that the Bulge was the last real effort the Germans could possibly make, and the war was winding down. So I cast about for some more interesting way to spend the time until I would get back to civilian reality, and found it on Mount Vesuvius.
The 12th Weather Squadron had requisitioned a former Cook’s Tours hotel there. It was called the Eremo, which means “hermit,” and it was isolated enough for the name to fit.
As a headquarters flunky, I had the use of it any time I could borrow a jeep to get there, which was often. The Eremo made it quite a comfortable war. We had kept on the civilian staff—not all of them, and without spit and polish; but they cooked much more interesting meals than I had had anywhere else in Italy at that time, trading Army Spam for civilian fresh vegetables, and they were perfectly willing to make our beds and shine our shoes and bring us drinks on the terrace. It was a quiet place to write, I perceived at once. There was also a writing job which needed to be done—preparing the Squadron History—and I began to scheme to transfer myself to the Hill. About the time the war in Europe ground to an end, I got my druthers.
Living on the side of a volcano is not like being in your average Mamaroneck split-level. This was the same mountain that had creamed Pompeii in A.D. 79. It hadn’t done anything quite that spectacular since. But you never knew. It had voided some pretty substantial lava flows a year or so before I arrived, while the Eremo was the pleasant fringe benefit of some Luftwaffe unit. You could still feel the warmth of the rock, just inches below the surface, and now and then there would be a little shudder.
What mashed Pompeii, of course, was not lava but airborne ash. When time permitted, I drove to the excavations and poked around in the interrupted life of the Roman city, and it was quite a contrast to look up from the yards-high ash-fall to the peaceful top of the mountain, gently steaming a couple of miles away, and realize that that came from that. But in the hotel we were safe enough. Ash would be windblown away. Lava would come down the side of the mountain, in unpredictable directions and possibly very fast, but the Eremo was on a little bulge, with the Italian government volcanological observatory just above it. One felt a certain reassurance from that. Any likely lava flow would probably divide around the bulge, and anyway, the volcanologists would know what was happening. Until they started running, there was no need to worry.
The most adventurous thing about the Eremo was the drive up the narrow, winding mountain road that led to it. I learned to drive a truck on that road, the night of V-E Day. We had to get back to Caserta. We were all drunk, but I was less so than the others, so I drove the six-by-six down those hairpin, guardrail-less curves, over the shifting pumice roadway, and somehow survived. But that was a small price to pay for living on the Hill, among the beautiful slopes where Spartacus held off all the Roman legions, looking out over Capri. Living on the Hill entitled one to a few little extras, such as Red Cross girls. Normally they were officers’ issue and knew it, but a private hotel halfway up a volcano was a powerful inducement to some.
Most of all, the Eremo was a peaceful place for writing—not necessarily on the history of the 12th Weather Squadron. I did do a little of that, from time to time. But I also wrote the first draft of “Donovan Had a Dream”34 there, still one of my favorite early action-adventure stories. I also wrote a large number of perfectly lousy New Yorkerish stories about Army life, some of which still survive in my sin file and none of which have ever been published. I was beginning to feel like a writer again.
Altogether, I was in Italy less than two years. It does not now seem very far away—it is a trip I’ve made over a long weekend since—but it seemed like voyaging to intergalactic space then. It stays in my mind as an unending flicker of kaleidoscopic impressions. Playing ping-pong among Roman ruins, strolling in the Borghese Gardens. Italian music, the canzone they sang in the streets. The opera. An afternoon in Milan, just after the war was over. La Scala had been bombed out and the opera was being performed in a movie theater a few blocks away, and there I saw the most tenderly comic performance of La Bohème I had ever seen or ever hope to see; the mind-blowing Mimi turned out to be Renata Tebaldi, dewily fresh at the beginning of her astonishing career. And at the other end of a career, a few weeks later in Naples, Toti del Monte singing the same role, the voice still beautiful but the weight of ages in the way she moved and looked.
Hitchhiking in a British truck in Barletta, and finding myself surrounded by soldiers in a uniform I had never seen, speaking a language I could not recognize; they were Yugoslav partisans, wounded out of the gorges, recuperating in an Italian hospital before being smuggled back to fight again. Giving a lift to a Rothschild baron, from Naples to Rome; he was of the Parisian branch of the family, sent to ride out the war in the lesser holocaust of Italy. Racing a Mercedes in my jeep all the way up the Apennines. Standing in the ruins of Catullus’s summer home, at the tip of the Sirmione peninsula in Lake Garda, with defeated Germans blowing up their ammunition dumps and preparing to surrender all around the shores of the lake. Drinking cherry liqueur con selz in Naples’s galleria (and, years later, finding John Horne Burns’s magnificent, tortured novel about that wartime Stew). The stench of Neapolitan alleys. The warm salt idleness of Adriatic beaches. The rotting hemp all along the road to Caserta. Lacrimae Cristi and raw wartime grappa with, it was said, one hundred-octane gasoline added to give it authority. The streams of tracers over the Bay of Naples as a Luftwaffe photo-reccy pilot tried to steal a shot of the harbor. The curate who led me through the Roman catacombs with a skinny taper timed to burn out just before the end of the tour, so that we walked the last ten yards among the walls of bones in darkness. American jeeps and German feldwagens waiting in the same mile-long line for their turn at the one surviving brewery in the foothills of the Alps. RAF sergeants, their eyes streaming with tears, on the day that FDR died. In memory it is all one bright flash after another.
And yet I remember very well that what I mostly felt at the time was boredom. Especially after the war in Europe ended, there was very little reason for me to be there that I could see.
And I was
still in love, and Tina was in Paris.
I wanted to see her. I knew there had to be a way to cross that invisible barrier between her T/O and mine, and I looked for it. And I found, surprise! there was a way. Somewhere in the regulations it said that if what we wanted to do was get married, permission to cross the theater boundaries could be obtained.
We were married in Paris on the third of August, 1945.
The ceremony was conducted in French. I didn’t understand a word of it. My “best man” was a French WAC lieutenant, and she nudged me when it was time to say oui.
The Army gave us a room in a very Parisian honeymoon hotel just a block or two from the Place de 1’Étoile. They also gave us tsoris. Tina was a first lieutenant, and I was an enlisted man. As we were not supposed to “fraternize,” except presumably in bed, we were not allowed to eat in either the officers’ or the enlisted men’s mess. Since there were no civilian restaurants, except for the scarce and high-priced black-market establishments, it seemed we were not meant to take any meals together. But Tina had a friend, and the friend had both intelligence and influence. We wound up in a private dining room of the mess for major generals and up. The generals ate very well, and we ate better than they.
And on the last day of our week together I went to get a haircut in a little barbershop just off the Champs Élysées and, waiting my turn, tried to puzzle out the headline in the newspaper of the man next to me. It said something about le bombe atomique. I laughed to myself, careful not to offend my neighbor. These crazy French and their crazy, sensation-seeking newspapers, I told myself. What won’t they print next?
But it was all true, and a couple of days later the Japanese surrendered.
Six months later Tina and I were back in New York, looking at each other in our hotel room off Times Square. Not only were we civilians again, but that lark in Paris had taken effect and we were married.
31 There are a lot of cardinal people in the world, and not all of them are in armies. But that’s a whole other discussion.
32 Something did, and I wound up a buck sergeant.
33 The novel was never published and no longer exists, because one night years later I burned it. But it wasn’t a total waste. For Some We Loved led directly to writing The Space Merchants.
34 Published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, October, 1947.
8
Ten Percent of a Writer
When I get up before an audience to speak, there is usually someone to introduce me, and that person almost always mentions, among other tidbits of biography, that at one time I was a literary agent.
That part of my life is a quarter-century past, and besides, it ended badly for me. Everything considered, I would just as soon forget it, but it still fascinates the introducers and the blurb copywriters, and I think I know why. Everyone at all involved with writing has heard of agents. Hardly anyone knows what they do or who they are. They are shadowy figures who seem to wield great power, but who do they wield it on? and how?
I’ll tell you all that, never fear. But I didn’t actually get into the agency business until 1947, so there is a little chronology I’d like to catch up on first.
The Army gave me my freedom on my birthday, 26 November 1945. I spent most of the next couple of months waiting for my new wife to get out to join me, and I spent them with my father.
He was at the height of his prosperity just then. There was big money in war. He had made a lot of it.
He would have made even more if the war had been kind enough to keep going another year or two. The Japanese surrender was a body blow. If they had only had the consideration to keep fighting as advertised until every island of the homeland was overrun, he could have soaked away a million or two, easy.
He had already begun the soaking-away process, and one of the soaking places was a thousand-acre farm abutting Camp Upton, Long Island. I spent a couple of solitary weeks there that winter, listening to the farmhouse turn itself on and off—the refrigerator, the oil burner, the water pump in the basement, all sorts of friendly little machines keeping themselves busy just for me. I did a little writing, and a lot of loafing, and experimented with the idea of being the son of a gentleman farmer. It was going to be quite a farm, one day. Pop had had two hundred acres cleared and planted in apple seedlings, put a few hundred more into cauliflower, a few hundred into potatoes, and a small but very expensive patch of a few acres into strawberry vines. He had bought a riding horse for his friend Lillian’s daughter. I tried to ride the beast to keep him sweet, but it was too late; he was already so hog-fat and lazy that my best summer-camp horsemanship could not get him to move in any direction except toward the barn. I regret the absence of that farm. If it were still in the family we would be multimillionaires for the land alone, but it’s the farm itself that I miss. In the event, it went down the tube because my father had soaked too much money into too many different ventures, and the Army’s niggardly way with contract cancellations caught him short.
I watched some of that money seep into the ground, leaving nothing but a stain, one night at his apartment. He was entertaining some financial friends at a dinner party, and they sang him the siren song of Cosmopolitan Records. Cosmo was a tiny war-born competitor to such biggies as RCA and Columbia, but it had lucked out in a big way with an oddball disk called “Tubby the Tuba.” All America was mad for “Tubby the Tuba.” The orders poured in. Cosmo could not press the records fast enough. What Cosmo needed, the sirens sang, was a manufacturing genius like my father, someone who could rev up the antique machinery and get production up to demand…and, oh, yes, of course he would be expected to bring in some couple of dollars to help pay for the expansion.
My father’s eyes were aglow. I recognized the signs. I kicked him under the table as hard as I could, but he was firmly on the hook and with no interest at all in wriggling free.
So he signed aboard Cosmopolitan Records, and it was a disaster. We went out to the plant to study the production process, lumps of black biscuit tossed into a steam-heated press that squeezed them and molded them and cured them and baked the labels onto them. My father mastered that easily enough and got the rate of production up to competitive levels. But then what would we do with all that production once the madness for “Tubby” died? Obviously there was a need to diversify. So they recorded some hot new prospects and put some of the presses to making the new ones, and “Tubby”’s production figures slipped back. The capricious American public despised the new records. “Tubby,” contrarily, kept blossoming, but as we were shipping so few we lost the exclusive rights, and my father lost his shirt.
He still had plenty left. Remained the machine shops: But the War Department was being unexpectedly hard-nosed about paying off for contract cancellations, and what had looked like millions of dollars in income materialized at barely enough to pay the notes.
Remained the farm.
That was blue-chip, gilt-edged; my father had thought it out carefully, and he had done everything exactly right, with one little mistake. He had planned for the long haul. The haul turned out short, and so did he. The apple trees would not produce a crop for four years. The strawberries not for two. It was a bad cauliflower year; a cold snap froze it in the ground, a total loss. Potatoes—ah, they were superb! Tens of thousands of bushels, plump and perfect. But so were everybody else’s potatoes that year, and they were hardly worth the trouble of carting to the market to sell. The government stepped in for Long Island potato growers, bought them in the field, chopped them up, dyed them purple, and sold them for hog feed. He made a few bucks on that, but the rest was all ashes. Within a year he was broke again.
I really think my father was some sort of financial genius. He took risks, cut corners, laid it all on the fall of dice; in his life he earned more than a dozen ordinary men, but he lost more, too. He made a couple more modest coups in the remaining decade of his life, but when he died his estate did not cover the price of the funeral.
I think this fiscal idiocy runs in
the family. The one talent I am certain I do not have in any measure at all is the orderly cultivation of assets. I know a lot about the theory of money management; what I don’t know is how to apply it to real money.
This must be so. How else can one account for the fact that over the next six or seven years I managed to repeat my father’s feat by going broke as a literary agent?
Consider the facts. Running a literary agency is about as low-capital, low-overhead as a business enterprise can get. I was really very good at it. I managed to establish a near-monopoly position in science fiction, then the fastest-growing area of the publishing business. Of all the writers who were any good at sf, I represented probably two out of three: John Wyndham and Isaac Asimov and Cliff Simak and Bob Sheckley and Frank Robinson and Jack Williamson and Cyril Kornbluth and Jim Blish and Fritz Leiber and William Tenn and H. Beam Piper and—oh, hell; of the top fifty sf writers of the early 50s, I represented at least thirty-five. The biggest markets in the field, Galaxy and Analog and Doubleday and Ballantine, all bought more from me than from all other agents and individual writers combined. Not just sf; I had successful clients in half a dozen other fields as well, Westerns and mysteries, regional novels and how-to-do-it books; I sold to film and to the fledgling TV markets, and I had a network of foreign representatives abroad. And after seven industrious years I had managed to lose thirty thousand dollars I didn’t have.
I didn’t set out to be a literary agent after World War II. I set out to be a novelist. In order to do that, I decided to become an advertising copywriter.
Tina got out of the service in February of 1946. We stayed for a short time in a hotel near Times Square, and then Dave Kyle came along with an idea. He had also just got his civilian clothes back, and his brother had a brand-new postwar car he was willing to lend Dave for a while. So the three of us drove down to Florida, Dave to look up an old girlfriend in Lakeland, Tina and I to visit her parents in Orlando, then a comfortably lazy community of lovely warm orange groves and avocado farms surrounding about a million tiny lakes. We lived on lotus for a restorative month and then came back to New York to find an apartment in (where else?) Greenwich Village. There didn’t seem to be any great pressure. We were young, and pleased with ourselves as honorable veterans of the last of the just wars, and we had plenty of money. Neither of us had spent much during the war. We had pay accumulated, and my mother had left me a little when she died. We could have lived frugally without working at all for at least a year or two.