Part IV: The Events Leading Down to Biography: On Writing Kornbluth

As with the horizons-expanding episodes in Syracuse and DeKalb, my conversations with Phil Klass, also known by his byline of William Tenn, came toward the end of the process. When I first sought an interview he readily accepted. When we spoke again at the arranged time, however, he started into memories in his hurried, worried manner — then immediately begged off. As he began speaking, I believe he realized how deeply into emotional territory he was heading; and, as he told me later, he needed to find out who I was, and whether my interest was genuine. He confirmed my seriousness, by unknown means — and in our next phone conversation immediately launched into his thoughts and recollections.

A new puzzle for me had arisen after exploring the Syracuse holdings: the question of what had happened to Phil's 1958 effort to collect celebrations of Cyril, the man and the writer, into a volume whose revenues would go entirely to Cyril's family. Since a long list of prominent writers in 1950s science fiction received Phil's invitation to participate, his letter will almost undoubtedly be found in archives besides those of Syracuse and the Oxford Bodleian, which has Blish's copy. A project similar to Klass's had appeared elsewhere on the horizon, as well — from Cyril's old stomping grounds in Chicago.

That these two memorial projects suffered derailment remains a source of immense regret to me, as biographer. Phil, who shared the feeling, still placed great weight upon his own aborted effort of 1958. For his project to be so taken away and reduced to an unimportant publication that failed even in its charitable mission remained obviously painful to him in 2009, in his own last days.

Too many other new questions reared their heads after my Syracuse trip — for example, about Cyril's late miniatures, the short-short stories that he regarded as finished works. Altshuler, his agent, was sending them around the slicks. These, including one entitled "The Meeting," would have made a wonderful addition to the volume Klass planned. They would, in fact, have placed the struggling heart of Cyril himself at its center: for Cyril was writing with great seriousness of intent and sincerity of heart in his last years. These stories would have helped guarantee the sale of a book intended purely to benefit Cyril's widow and children.

Phil and I never discussed those late stories. We had too much else. Cyril as a topic of conversation tended to provoke from him a pained, emotional response. While he held within himself many facts and convictions, he still at this late date fell prey to haunting worries and questions akin to the ones haunting me. If Cyril's spirit had touched mine, it had touched Phil's much earlier. The stories Phil had heard of young editor Pohl's financial dealings with Futurian writers, for instance, caused him some anxiety — partly, I believe, because Phil was so finely sensitive to injustice, and partly because he had never seen physical evidence of the sixty-forty percentages Pohl imposed in his own favor. I decided to mail Phil a copy of Cyril's submission records, in which Cyril had noted word counts and payments received. When next on the phone with me Phil's tone of voice reflected his relief. Fascinated by the index card's contents he had studied it and worked out the percentages. If ever I did a good deed during the months of working on the Kornbluth biography I felt that I had done so in that moment, in opening for Phil this small window onto the past.

In these submission records, the word "gratis" appeared on lines for other submissions; and these made Phil curious. I told him that when offered an opportunity to enter publishing, Donald Wollheim seized it to create a magazine out of nothing — for he was offered no budget for stories. Don promised his circle that if they wrote for him and if the magazines sold on newsstands he would receive a budget for future issues. Although the magazines were doomed to a short existence, due to early wartime conditions, Wollheim did begin making good on his promise before the end. This perspective on Wollheim, too, Phil seemed gratified to learn. In this conversation alone, the worried, pained, and sometimes anger-tinged tones left his voice.

End, Part Four.

Part V:The Events Leading Down to Biography: On Writing Kornbluth

For Don Wollheim's magazines, Cyril wrote from his youthful yet strangely world-matured heart. The two Futurians enjoyed a particularly close relationship for a time, with Wollheim sometimes a mentor-father figure, sometimes an equal. In his magazines, moreover, Wollheim proved to be Cyril's greatest early booster, giving "Cecil Corwin" the minor celebrity among science-fiction pulp readers that Cyril Kornbluth, or "Cy Kornbluth," already enjoyed in the small but international science-fiction fan community. An important result of their relationship took the form of collaborations, in which Don conceived a story line for Cyril to flesh out. Some among their collaborations may have escaped biographers because of the now-reigning assumption that the Martin Pearson penname refers primarily to Wollheim. I did uncover one definite instance of this. How many others there are remains to be discovered. Since one Wollheim-Kornbluth tale saw publication in John W. Campbell, Jr.,'s celebrated Astounding, these may well be Kornbluth's most significant early collaborations.

In one of my many failings in writing Kornbluth, I left the Wollheim angle less than fully explored. Similarly the Lowndes angle — and the Johnny Michel, Knight, Algis Budrys, Blish, Jane Roberts, Larry Shaw angles ... and so on. Despite my intention otherwise, I toiled so heavily on questions related to what Pohl was leaving out of his accounts that my attention inadvertently remained turned toward him, not away. Researching in Syracuse would have freed me of this, had that event fallen earlier in the process. Working on materials from Syracuse, DeKalb, the Eaton Collection, and the Oxford Bodleian so absorbed me in the spring of 2009, however, that precious little time, let alone means, remained to pursue the new research directions opening before me.

I was also facing the real problem of having arrived at this point — the point where I knew what questions to ask — too late. In the years before Lowndes' death, I failed to fully grasp how many pertinent subject areas his memory might have touched upon. By 2009, death had removed him from the scene, as it had Merril, Kidd, Knight, Budrys, and Robert Sheckley. All were alive when I offered the world my Kornblume round table. Infirmity had removed Pohl from the scene, too, by this time: for when I called to arrange an interview, I learned he was hospitalized for an unknown length of time. Whether he would have granted me an interview I have no idea. A few years before, at a convention, he had turned down my request for an interview on the subject of Cyril. More tellingly, as had taken me fifteen years to realize, from the outset he had met my question about archived Kornbluth correspondence with silence — a silence presumably not born of ignorance.

A few among Cyril's various colleagues and contemporaries remained, fortunately — such as Klass, Silverberg, Dave and Ruth Kyle, Carol Emshwiller, Bob Madle, and Kate MacLean — who helped me put pieces of the puzzle, small and large, into place. I felt and feel immensely grateful to these generous souls.

End, Part Five.

Part VI: The Events Leading Down to Biography: On Writing Kornbluth

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.

Part VII:The Events Leading Down to Biography: On Writing Kornbluth

Especially in the last months, my work on the Kornbluth manuscript overwhelmed my days and overflowed into nights. When I rose in the morning I worked our hand-crank mill and brewed coffee in a slow drip cone while starting the usual breakfast of vegetables slowly cooked in an old iron pan and served over whole oats. While coffee dripped or vegetables cooked I would go to the study — sometimes impelled there by a new insight percolating upwards through my morning mind, or an older one that had made me restless in the night. Then I would hasten forth to the kitchen — then back to the study, and forth and back until I set the table. I made our old black teapot, into which I dripped coffee, overflow uncounted times, due to needing to take a thought or two to the office. After breakfast our Scottie asked for play, a request I almost always honored, whenever the mood struck her. Accepting play as a priority helped my sanity in these intensely focused months: for although Lorna demanded it, I needed it the more. Afterwards, I sequestered myself in my study until noon dinner, then again until happy hour, which was another aid to sanity: for Martha and I observed it no matter my place in the manuscript, and no matter the press of deadlines. She or I served a tray of vegetables, with cheese or sausage if we had any; and we sat in the parlor in our circa-1900 house, in old rocking chairs, with Lorna bouncing from her own rocker to floor and back, to receive bits of whatnot from one or the other of us. Her joyous energy improved every late afternoon, while I recounted the day's triumphs and frustrations, and Martha spoke of hers: for she was now part-time working as the shipper at Organic Maple Co-op. With our scotches or Rob Roys sipped, and tray emptied, I retreated to the study until supper; and I did so again after supper, and worked as long as I could. Often then from sleep I would awaken at two a.m., the haunting strongly upon me again.

Those who recall the early chapter in Moby Dick in which Melville expresses his fear of not seeing the task ahead to completion will know one source of my dread. In my work I was answering questions I believed needed answering, and telling a story I believed needed telling. I was writing of a man plagued by misfortunes, including the one of possessing a damaged heart, who wrote repeatedly of characters suffering heart problems — whose damaged hearts end their life stories, as Cyril's did his.

I myself have a heart murmur. In the first year after moving to Cashton I would listen to my heartbeat at night, and hear irregularities that must have arisen during our years in a more stressful living environment, and in all our late-night band work. The irregularities seemed to disappear, gradually, as our quieter village life moved along — only to return in these days of biographical labors and financial worries. Rather than force myself to take more rest, however, the thoughts roiling through my mind at two a.m. often made me rise, dress, and resume work until time came to make breakfast. I was working seven days a week, with my days running ten to fourteen or more hours in length, and still was running out of time. March, the month Kornbluth died and also my deadline month, loomed ahead. Ruth Kyle, who recently has passed away, had felt fond of Cyril and would not let Dave, another Transradio veteran, shovel snow. Similarly Martha now often took sidewalk duties as the snows of late winter were arriving — frequently and thickly, as they often do in this region.

March no more finished me, when it passed, than I finished the manuscript. Yet I was feeling increasingly drained and finding it harder, day by day, to extend my work. I knew I should do better in several areas — in enlarging on the post-Kornbluth careers of the remaining members of The Five, for instance, since Cyril had helped shape their attitudes toward science fiction — attitudes that then, for a few years, offered guiding lights for that struggling field of writing. For the period after Cyril's death, I had to be satisfied with accounts of Klass's planned celebratory volume and of the posthumous alterations of Kornbluth texts: sad stories with which to end a sad story. The subsequent critical portion I had little time to deepen or extend. I did arrive, however, at a final chapter that I view as intrinsic to the book, and necessary for understanding the whole: "Kornbluth, Klass, and the Moral Stance." I took weeks, then, for one full revision, and weeks again for a second — and turned in the manuscript knowing that another full revision would have been best. Mentally I lacked strength, however. Physically, perhaps, too.

Besides the uncompleted second book for McFarland, I had one small writing task on my table in the months after delivering the book. While writing Kornbluth, I had written a number of reference-work entries at the promise of a pittance. I now had a contract for one additional historical note, quite short — perhaps a few hundred words long. I could have done the work in half an hour, or half a day, at most — had I forced myself to start researching. Instead I let the assignment languish. I lacked will. My focus must have been shattered. At length I lost not only the tiny assignment — almost the smallest I ever received from this publisher — but also my connection to that minor source of revenue. Exhaustion, which I would have denied I was experiencing, had brought me to a standstill.

I learned, once the book appeared, that another had feared for its existence. He exclaimed, "You did it — you really did it! I was afraid you would suffer the curse of the Kornbluths!"

For some, it seems, Cyril operated under a curse whose name was Writing. For Cyril himself, the writing itself turned out well. Little else did.

End, Part Seven.

Friendship, Kingsley Amis, and Gravy Planet

George Zebrowski kindly pointed out to me comments in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Eighth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois and published in 2011, that seemed somewhat unfair to him. Early this month when looking for something else, I happened upon the fact that I could read Dozois's paragraph by means of Google's literary-property-transgression service, and found these words:

"Kornbluth is a complex, fascinating, and immensely talented figure now in danger of being forgotten, certainly a worthwhile figure for a biological study and critical reassessment if there ever was one. Unfortunately, clouds of controversy have swirled around the book from its release, mostly for the intensely unflattering portrait it paints of Kornbluth's friend and lifelong collaborator Frederik Pohl, which have caused Pohl to vehemently deny the veracity of many of Rich's 'facts'——all of which has cast something of a shadow over what by rights should have been one of the preeminent genre nonfiction books of the year."

Is "biological" a Google artifact? I hope so.

What I wrote about in my book, of course, I based on archived physical correspondence: facts——not, as Dozois puts it, "facts."

Dozois thinks it unfortunate that "clouds of controversy have swirled around the book from its release." May I say that too few clouds swirled? I had expected something other than utter silence about the nature of Pohl's acts, some of which I found despicable, and some, horrifying.

Why, for instance, did no stir erupt among science fiction readers who respect Hugo Award history and integrity, that among Kornbluth's multiple finished stories at his death was one entitled "The Meeting"?

Apparently some off-radar consternation did arise, in private channels, concerning Pohl's appropriation of Phil Klass's memorial volume: for Pohl did write briefly, if inadequately, about this issue on his blog. In public, however, to my knowledge, no such stir arose.

It does disturb me that Dozois joins miscellaneous dismissive commentators who assume they know more than does the biographer. His words here, "friend and lifelong collaborator," are akin to Patrick Casey's SFRA review comment on my book——that "the one-dimensional depiction of Pohl ignores the fact that Kornbluth remained friends and even partners with Pohl for the majority of his life." This seems to be all people "know" about Kornbluth, and all they want to know, since they persist in parading it as if displaying a great acquisition of knowledge. I wish these people would find a way to document this: for what I found in the correspondence was a frayed, contentious, occasionally ugly and several times completely broken relationship. Pohl in particular engaged in behavior that struck me, and strikes me, as unfriendly in the extreme——even at a moment when Kornbluth was in need of help; and his behavior after Cyril's death I find, as I noted, despicable.

Is friendship like a road of trust, with two lanes moving thoughts and goods in opposite but equivalent ways? Does it include some balance of giving and taking, offering and accepting?

If so, I find it difficult finding, at any point during the relationship between Kornbluth and Pohl, from the late 1930s into the 1950s, real evidence of a two-way friendship.

Kornbluth did evince feelings of friendship toward Pohl, at times, in various degrees: for he did give amply into the relationship. As Merril said of him, Cyril felt loyalty. The sense of old Futurian ties did persist in his heart.

We know this because Cyril wrote Gravy Planet to keep Fred out jail.

This knowledge we have from MacLean. We have it, too, from Klass.

How grand a gift this was! What utter, selfless generosity!

Yet before and after that supreme gift Pohl regarded self before others. He regarded Pohl above Kornbluth. He certainly regarded his own financial wants above those whose finances he held in his keeping.

We know his attitude went unchanged, moreover——for he never responded to Cyril's generosity with a return gift.

When Kingsley Amis made his famous, mistaken assessment, Pohl might have seized the moment to give something in return to Kornbluth. How small a gesture it would have been, to demur——simply to admit that Kornbluth was the one most responsible for the writing Amis admired.

How small a gesture——yet how grandly and warmly it would have reflected back upon him!

In 1952, with money from Gravy Planet, Pohl repaid some debts to society——and to some degree healed wounds he had inflicted upon a circle of writers. He found himself in the position to do so, however, only through having incurred an immense new debt to a fellow-worker.

He seemed not to understand that the new debt had no less reality than the old ones. Having avoided jail ended the matter in his mind, to all appearances.

Then in 1960 Amis calmly dismissed Kornbluth as "prolific and competent" and, on the other hand, spoke of seeing "pure Pohl" in The Space Merchants.

Amis also described Kornbluth's The Syndic as "a chronicle of minor wars following upon a major one." So did Pohl read that absurdly off-base summary and think that no one, surely, would take seriously the comment about "pure Pohl"? I rather doubt it——especially since, a few pages before, Amis had written those words that have appeared on so many book covers: "Frederik Pohl, the most consistently able writer science fiction, in the modern sense, has yet produced."

I find it quite interesting to discover, in glancing back through pages in New Maps of Hell, that Kingsley Amis engaged in a mistaken attribution. Take these observations from his discussion of the The Space Merchants, about the protagonist "escaping finally to a Venus uncontaminated by Fowler Schocken and his friends from an Earth that is still largely under the sway of the old régime. The closing scenes, on which I suspect the hand of Kornbluth lies heavy, offer little but adequate excitement and are not altogether a conclusion to the issues raised in the opening chapters."

Why does this catch my eye now? As readers of my essay in Cascadia Subduction Zone will be aware, after publication of C.M. Kornbluth I learned that older readers within the science fiction field had fallen into the habit of talking about and praising The Space Merchants even though they had never read the book. They had read only the magazine serial named Gravy Planet.

Amis seems to have been one such. He read the version that came out of Kornbluth's typewriter——not the gutted and sexually sophomorized book, which came out of Pohl's, and which lacks those "closing scenes" of "little but adequate excitement."

This discovery does give me a feeling of relief. How in the world, I have sometimes wondered, could Amis have liked The Space Merchants so well?

I doubt he would have. Instead, he enjoyed Gravy Planet, wrote about it with some penetration, and attributed it to Pohl——thus adding to the debt the latter felt needed no repayment.

Cheers ...

(Amis, by the way, took particular interest in "The Midas Plague." Pohl once wrote to Kornbluth acknowledging that the latter contributed many bits of "business" to that story, even though publicly the former never held the story out as collaborative. Strangely, I just looked in C.M. Kornbluth and found only one reference to that story in the index——which means I failed to include that information, misplaced the relevant document copy or notes during writing, or simply missed indexing it. Any one is possible.)

On Being Re-Enabled

My younger sister Barbara was among the stalwart few who visited this blog back when I, too, did so. How nice it is, then, to mark her birthday (she is trying to catch up in years to me, but since I am the tortoise in this race she keeps losing) today by revisiting these old haunts of mine.

My sporadic appearances here reflected computer problems, in part. This venue and many others have become territory partially hidden and inaccessible to old systems -- such as an old iMac a dozen years old or so. Given that, and that the computer was also hiding and scrambling some of my simplest TextEdit documents, my possibilities for adding to the miasma of global-energy-sucking blog postings proved a bit narrowed. While Martha's computer was working well, how often could I keep borrowing it?

The built-in obsolescence that so disturbed Kornbluth in looking at his 1950s world remains an unpleasant aspect in ours: for Web complexities move regularly beyond the capabilities of old machines to cope; and the relentless march of technical "improvements," even more firmly than in the 1950s, locks us into dependent relationships with industrial corporations.

Many, perhaps most, seem to accept this without much complaint. They like having new things, after all.

I love old things, by and large, and hate the habit of waste we condone in this society, which seems tied to our usual acceptance of the artificial, the simulated, the ersatz, and the commodified. View the contents of most shopping carts at the grocery store, if you doubt this.

As a writer I feel rather content with the pencil with which I write these words -- and quite fond of the manual typewriter that I have used today in some writing, too. Yet for several recent years I have been unbusinesslike as a writer thanks to a series of computer-related setbacks that added up to a stalled career. I remained a writer in my world, yet appeared to be a non-writer to the outside world because of my difficulties with my interface with that world.

I purposely use so unattractive a noun -- "interface" -- for it captures the difficulty of this situation. I enjoy being enabled, technically, with regard to the outside world. That I have little choice about accepting this enablement, however, disturbs me. The Internet continues its growth and its consumption of global resources that our earth can ill afford to waste. In being required by my work to deploy the same interface as everyone else, I am being required to help perpetuate and worsen the waste.

I am forced moreover to buy into impermanency. These pencil markings of mine have a potential existence that is so immense it makes the potential existence of whatever electronic version I make of them appear that of a gnat. Having lost such an incredible amount of manuscript-editing and manuscript-preparation work in the last three years has made the gnat-aspect clearer to me than ever. It has become another of the semantic twistings of technological society that the act denoted by the word "saving" can be, in terms of "documents," actually the act of alteration, destruction or obliteration.

As I say, I enjoy the benefits of being enabled, of being more "connected" -- more disconnected, in other words, from the quiet satisfactions of my isolated pencil and typewriter. I am accepting, as I wish more people would realize they are accepting, that I am "having the good of it," in the phrase of Phil Klass. As Phil saw, it remains for us to take the "moral stance" even while being culpable for taking the material good of a less than ideal situation.

... and all this may seem an odd way of saying hello to you, the reader -- whoever you are. Yet that is what I am doing. So:

Hello. Or, to some of you: happy birthday.

Cheers ...

Author Copies

Although I've received scant personal comment on C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary since January and early February, that was a fairly heady period of time. I had only a few extra copies at hand from McFarland -- and I still have yet to buy more, since the investment is so costly, at the level necessary to obtain a reasonable author's discount ... so I had to pick and choose to whom to send them. My parents had to receive a copy, of course: without their support we would never have managed the move a few years ago, here to Cashton; and we would have been much harder pressed to survive the downturn of the past two years, after the magazines for which I wrote a number of monthly columns shriveled up and blew away in a chill December breeze.

The other extras went to a few good souls who had helped me out -- not to all of them, since I had only that handful of copies. From one of those people I heard nothing; and I have yet to learn, actually, if he saw it and appreciated what it represented, before his death. Phil Klass was quite ill and hospitalized, around the time those early copies arrived. I can only hope Fruma showed him the book, and perhaps pointed out the ways in which I put to use his memories -- especially in the final chapter, hidden at the end of the short "analysis" subsection of the book. There, I drew upon Phil's experiences as a way of suggesting an important aspect of Cyril's character. The option of writing that chapter would have been closed to me without knowledge of the particular way in which Phil faced the trial of his involvement in World War II, and the way in which he dealt with the implications of that trial's ending.

Cheers ...

The Sweepstakes: Malzberg & Rich Trade Thoughts

Rick Bowes asked about the exchange with Barry Malzberg, mentioned here a few days ago. I asked Barry about making it public; and he thought it would be fine to do so.

I wrote to Barry on Monday, February eighth, about having posted my short piece about Klass on this blog, and added, "I've never blogged before ... but I'd been thinking about it ... and now I figure it's so out-of-fashion that it's sure to do me no good: so I have to strike while the iron's dead cold." (I used those ellipses: and I do so below. They represent nothing but themselves.)

"The in memorium is very good," Barry wrote, the next day. "Recapitulates some of our discussion. SF became a different thing after the fifties and his exit was both cause and effect.

"For reasons we can parse at another time I don't think that Phil was as heroic or tragic as you think but he was an important writer and certainly a wounded soul. As are we all."

I wrote back, "I'm not sure I think Phil is either heroic or tragic, although I suppose there are elements in my perception of him that must give my words some coloring of that sort. Come to think of it, though: the fact that he was saying these things aloud (and fortunately managed to get interviewed saying these things aloud) that no one else was saying ...

"What is alive in my mind is the image of 1946-47: Klass, Merril, and Sturgeon wandering down Manhattan streets, joking, drinking, and arguing about the nature of science fiction. It's just me -- but that seems one of the powerful scenes, within my limited understanding of all that went on."

Barry wrote back, still on the ninth, with this: "He was indeed saying what very few were, certainly none of the others for the record. But Phil was a (shall we say) alterer of the truth; he was its custodian, the truth was not his. There are some enormously revelatory passages in that 104-page Solstein interview in which he explains that his mother, a really skilled and crafty figure, taught him everything he knows about lying and taught him well.

"He was wounded all right. But I know wounds and you know wounds and let me assure you that I was at dinner with my spouse not an hour ago discussing three writers who clearly went far beyond him in the wounded and inequity sweepstakes: Horace McCoy, Cornell Woolrich and Walter Tevis."

Responding, I wrote: "I would agree (even not knowing the stories behind the writers you mention) that many writers would surpass Klass for being wounded; when I wrote that line, I was thinking of the war experience. And that is an experience I do not pretend to be able to comprehend in anything like a full sense. The ones who went through it had trouble comprehending it -- which is why they wouldn't speak of it.

"I personally don't know what I would do, mentally, with the experience of seeing the concentration camps.

"There's a book title for you, in your last line: The Wounded and Inequity Sweepstakes. I know you'd do a bang-up job! On the cover: 'WHICH of these FAMOUS WRITERS will be the WINNER?'"

On February tenth, Barry wrote, "Yes, you are right, suffering battle injuries (or psychic brutalization) goes beyond a lifetime of battling the three cent a word markets. I accept that. Most combat veterans don't want to talk about it and we know why. I went through nothing - basic training in 1960 in Eisenhower's sleepy peacetime Army -- and I don't want to talk about even that. [ ... ]

"It's a hard, sad business, this 'professional writing' and looking out at a vigorous snowfall just starting and predicted to continue for 24 hours (and leave us over a foot, maybe a foot and a half) doesn't ease the corpus."

That snowfall had already passed through Wisconsin by this time.

Not Even a Penny a Line

I've been engaging in an exchange with Barry Malzberg that springs in part from my use of "wounded" with regard to Phil Klass. Certainly writer after writer has been wounded by the conditions of the writer's life. I think just now of Phil having been, by his own estimation, a hack writer at one early point, then feeling offended by Virginia Kidd's much later characterization of him as a hack writer. His taking offense may have been the cry of one being slapped upon a wound that never fully healed. Judy Merril, too, showed discomfort at memories of engaging in writing that she regarded, from a later vantage point, as not being writing from the heart.

Yet in this case I was speaking of a different wounding: that of having been a soul caught up by and transformed by the experiences of World War II. (See Klass's Dancing Naked and my own C.M. Kornbluth, to begin understanding the transformation. I say "begin" out of feeling unsure we can fully understand.)

Being a penny-a-liner, though, may be a necessary stage or at least a useful stage for even the writer of conscience. The experience of trying to pull forth the reluctant words from whatever obstinate realm has its clutches upon them, no matter whether they are true words or false; of doing so at as fast a pace as possible while at the same time making sense; of writing as though the act of putting forth words is no less than life itself -- these are tasks easy for some but hard for those for whom words have not just dimension but weight.

I had expected to write something today about snow -- about digging out the dog-run that goes in-between and around the grape vines -- about doing that digging in the predawn, windy darkness. Ah, well. "Penny-a-liner," by the way, is a term I fortuitously stumbled upon in the dictionary the other day.

Cheers ...

Phil Klass, or William Tenn; and Science Fiction

Science fiction went away from what mattered about science fiction.

This, I believe, is what Phil Klass came to understand. He saw the change as it was coming; and he stepped away. Where he went was academia -- the place where forms whose times have passed are put upon the examining table beneath the unforgiving glare of all-night library lamps. That it was science fiction that he was teaching, much of the time, suited him: what had mattered about the form had grown so attenuated that it was no longer a form that could hold him. It could not hold him, so he held it, instead; and he taught it. He taught writing, too. Writing was a living matter -- and it was a way of living that mattered.

Importantly he wrestled with memories, with self, with the nature of science fiction, with history.

He was wrestling with internal matters still in his last year: to speak with him was to know this of him.

Although we were present to one another only through that uncomfortable yet strangely intimate medium of the telephone, Phil and I had marked effect on one another, last year. Aside from giving him chance to voice thoughts and memories, I was able to offer him some documentary confirmation of rumors that had put him on edge for decades. He did considerably more for me: for he was speaking to me across a distance, from his Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to my Cashton, Wisconsin -- but more importantly from his 1945 and 1951 to my 2009. Some of the doubts that had put me on edge -- for a mere dozen or fifteen years -- he erased by speaking to me from his store of thoughts and memories. Yet he did more: for he had engaged in a dialog within the field of science fiction, a dialog that started as early as 1946, of pivotal importance. His arguments helped me understand what it was that happened to science fiction in 1956-58 and the years afterward.

This understanding came clearer as I was trying to lift the larger-than-expected project of my Cyril Kornbluth biography into the light of day. In a way, my understanding grew even greater three quarters of a year later, while Phil was in his final illness and we were having no communication -- not by telephone, at least. Yet for weeks -- months, maybe -- I was still communing with Phil, in my wrestling with certain perspectives and ideas he brought to the table; and I was adding my returning words to the conversation, while writing a study of Judy Merril's earlier years in science fiction.

It gave me great pleasure to bring to the story of Cyril Kornbluth some of the story of Phil Klass. The final chapter I hope makes clear the debt I owe Phil for his helping me identify certain strand's in Cyril's life.

I may have paid some of that debt simply by incurring it. So it now occurs to me. Phil had attempted to raise a monument to Cyril, after Cyril's death -- a fact that had been lost, due to the erasures of time ... and perhaps thanks to the erasures of an interested party. That he helped me, with such strength, raise my own monument to Cyril made my task considerably less a solitary one. I see now it may have given him some sense of redress, when placing his shoulder beside mine at certain important moments -- redress for the lasting hurt of having had his own monument to Cyril taken from his hands.

Rest in peace, Phil. I hope the world does a better job than it did during your life of giving your wounded, beautiful soul, in death, its due.