When he and Judy Merril first collaborated, Cyril still lived in Chicago, not yet having cut ties to the wire service Transradio. Cyril was publishing mystery stories and had made a return to science fiction with an impressive 1950 trio: "The Little Black Bag," "The Silly Season," and "The Mindworm." Despite this, Judy's credentials made her the senior writer: for she had made her Astounding short-story debut two years before, with the impressive "That Only a Mother," and in 1950 made the leap to hardcover novelist.
For years, Fred Pohl had been trying to interest Cyril in reviving the Futurian model of collaboration: Cyril would do the actual writing, while Pohl provided outlines. In correspondence Fred struck this note repeatedly, from the war years onward. On a visit East from Chicago, Cyril did look at something Fred had started, but then asked Judy, by then married to Fred, if he could work on a fragment of hers — with the result that his "visit" consisted of holing up with a typewriter. The novel Mars Child, which the two later finished in Chicago, resulted.
When Cyril later left Chicago he was leaving journalism behind him, as well. His plans included more work with Merril: for they worked well together, being equal partners throughout the writing process. Cyril focused initially on that collaboration and on his first solo novel, although he also bowed to pressure to develop a novel taking off from "The Marching Morons." All three projects Cyril seems to have begun while still in Chicago.
At this pivotal time in Cyril's life, Fred's handling of the Dirk Wylie agency had made him a controversial figure in New York science fiction circles; and by the time Cyril and Mary Kornbluth arrived from Chicago, collapse seemed imminent for the still-new Merril-Pohl marriage. The Kornbluths moved into the Pohls' large house in Red Bank, New Jersey, where other transients and occasional visitors, including Katherine MacLean, were also staying. The household's attitudes toward Pohl must have been mixed, but undoubtedly found some reflection in the character who appeared in an early story synopsis for the second "Cyril Judd" collaboration. This character, "Fledwick the Thief," survived the outlining, writing, editing, and then publishing processes. Although the character dies in the story, Fledwick gained minor immortality through magazine and book publication of Gunner Cade.
I relate these facts to help make clear why one question so urgently pressed upon me — not just for months, but for years. This question above all needed answering were my book to move beyond being merely a book about Kornbluth, and to rise to being his biography. Until far too near the point of completion Kornbluth remained a "book about."
The question was this:
Given his plans, the success of "Cyril Judd," and the prestige of collaborating with Merril, why did Cyril turn to partnership with her husband, whose main renown in publishing, in 1951-52, derived from a faltering literary agency?
When I asked Judy this question in the 1990s, she said the reason was simple: Cyril and Fred were old friends. Judy's reply struck me as a true memory to some degree, yet also as one that may have seen unconscious modification, over the decades — decades during which Pohl published multiple tributes to partnership and friendship with Cyril. That others of her memories had altered through time would become evident to me: for Judy recalled "Fledwick" as having arisen by accident during the novel-writing process. In memory, in other words, she was dismissing any premeditated significance this fictional character might have had. In fact, the character was present, and named, in the novel's working outline. Would not an "old friend" hesitate before depicting another "old friend" in this way?
Another part of the answer to my question, I felt, related to a long argument in Red Bank, with Cyril on one side, and Merril and MacLean on the other. When Judy spoke of it to me, she said the argument centered around sexuality, with Cyril being not a prude but a staunchly traditional moralist who disbelieved in free love — unlike Merril and MacLean. Judy also told me that her divorce from Fred ended her and Cyril's collaborations. Judy's perspective on this did seem to contain some truth, since the later, drawn-out Merril-Pohl custody battle for their daughter did split the New York science fiction community in two — and did, indeed, place the Kornbluths on Pohl's side of the courtroom.
Even with these several perspectives, I felt I was missing much of the true picture. Three sources, however, finally came to my aid. Judy once told me that in writing her memoirs she was leaving the writing about Cyril to me. To our great fortune she acted otherwise, and left an account in her memoir that reveals another component of that long, heated argument in Red Bank.
In speaking with Phil Klass, and also reading his interviews with Eric Solstein, I began to comprehend the emotional impact Cyril's war experiences had on him. In studying his stories, it newly struck me how he seemed to come to grips with these memories only gradually: he gave his literally wounded heart expression indirectly, in fits and starts, through his art, through the years. So it rang true when Judy at last revealed, in her memoir, a related aspect of the around-the-house argument in Red Bank: for she and Kate had argued against the necessity of World War II, and found incomprehensible Cyril's implacable attitude toward Germany and all things German. Since Cyril would require years of ceaseless labors at his writing before finding ways to speak even indirectly about some war experiences, the two women were provoking and arguing with a man incapable of fully baring his heart — perhaps even to himself. He had served as a soldier in the war, and so was an actor in events; yet he served, too, as a witness to those events, and to the aftermath of atrocities. In this household argument, memories of a personal hell must have cast a fiery light from within upon fine points of personal, social, and political philosophy. Having unhealed wounds freshly irritated must have provoked Cyril's final, full retreat from a professional partnership that had proven to be both congenial and successful.
To me this picture, too, seemed to offer a glimpse of truth. Yet I finally learned that Cyril's step away from Judy may have had little or nothing to do with his decision to work with Pohl — for this latter decision arose not out of discord but concord with Merril and MacLean.
According to Phil Klass, Pohl came to the Red Bank house one day and literally went to his knees before Kornbluth, saying that, if anything remained of their friendship, then he needed Cyril's aid. Fred had the beginning piece of a novel that Horace Gold would serialize quite soon — if somehow it could be fleshed out to novel length. Klass, who was not present, had the scene described to him by Merril. Kate MacLean's memories fall into place with this account. According to her, the Red Bank trio agreed that they should help Pohl out of his financial predicament, which had become so dire that he faced jail. The novel for Horace Gold would bring in enough money to rescue him. Judy and Kate thought Cyril could do it. Cyril agreed with them. Since he had been dwelling already upon the fictional world controlled by advertising that he had created for "The Marching Morons" — and could draw other elements for the novel from his recent stories "The Goodly Creatures" and "The Luckiest Man in Denv" — Cyril did, indeed, do it.
A curious perspective now emerges in my mind, which failed to appear to me when struggling to understand Cyril's life. The apparent protagonist of Judy and Cyril's second novel, Gunner Cade, was Cyril himself, to some degree. As Ortega y Gasset lucidly observes, the "avoidance of certain realities" engenders metaphor. Cade — who simultaneously represents an avoidance and a full embrace of reality — a hiding and a revealing, rolled into one — impresses the reader not through character but through metaphorical force: for he is the soldier operating under social-military conditioning who is gradually awakening to his situation.
I find it striking, now, that the novel offers a symbolic premonition about the coming change in Cyril's professional life. In the novel, not through personal choice does Cade find his life enmeshed with the thief Fledwick's. In the novel it happens this way, instead:
A man strikes Cade with a truncheon and says, "All right. Put him in with Fledwick." Cade and Fledwick first meet — as jailmates. Once thrown together, Cade and Fledwick's fortunes remain intertwined, until Fledwick's death.
End, Part Six.
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