How Precious Was That While, page 22
This, of course, was par for the reader’s course: no later books can match the sense of wonder of the first one he reads, even if he reads them out of order. That is what is in operation with readers (and reviewers, a pox on all their houses) who claim that the only decent Xanth novel was the first. Those who start with a later novel, then go back to read the first novel, don’t say that. In fact one reader read, as I recall, the first nine novels in reverse order, finishing with Spell, and reported with regret that Spell just wasn’t up to the quality of the others. I cherish that comment, because of the way it demonstrates my point. There are crudities in Spell that I eliminated in later novels, so I agree: it’s not up to the later standard. But it is a good novel.
But I was talking about Isaac Asimov. I went on to read his Robot series and others, and generally enjoyed his work, though he was stronger on imagination than style. His nonfiction was always interesting and lucid. As he said of himself, he discovered that he was a born explainer. I read his massive two-volume autobiography, In Memory Yet Green 1920—1954 and In Joy Still Felt 1954—1978, and found it altogether too detailed, but nevertheless interesting. Asimov was at least straightforward. I was guided in part by that when I wrote my own autobiography; I tried for clarity, honesty, and brevity, rather than for style. Though there was little actual sex in his fiction, and romance was not his strongest suit, Asimov was no literary prude; he could write about sex in considerable detail, fictively and nonfictively, when he chose. He had the courage to suggest that one solution to the population crisis could be alternative sexual expression: homosexuality, oral sex, masturbation, and so on. Sex without procreation. He knew that the only practical way to control human population was by reducing the birth rate. There were a couple of ways in which I identified closely with Asimov—in fact as I read his autobiography, I found many strong correlations, but of course those who read my own autobiography report similar identification with me, so I think it’s mostly one human being relating to another. Isaac was a foreign-born, naturalized American; so was I. He was a writaholic, living to write above all else; so am I. I wrote more fiction than he did, but he was by far the more prolific writer overall, because of his nonfiction. Both of us took our work with us, always returning to writing when a spare moment offered. I gather that other writers find this odd; they live to go to conventions or to find other excuses not to be at the keyboard. But I think I understand Asimov in this respect about as well as anyone does.
I did have some small interactions with the man. Once I wrote in response to one of his Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction columns about the problem of matter forming out of nothing. He had a problem figuring out how it could appear one atom at a time. I suggested that energy, instead of matter, could be forming, then being shaped into atoms. He responded with a brief card, saying it would still have to form one quantum at a time, so the problem remained. I don’t think I agree with that; he was thinking digital, while I was thinking analog: not in chunks, but in a spectrum. But there’s still a problem about anything appearing from nothing that bothers most rational folk.
That was it; I didn’t write him again. This showed that he did answer his mail, another thing I do. He also used autograph labels, to avoid shipping books through the mail, as I do. Great minds run in similar channels. (That’s mild humor. This announcement is to forestall critics who will otherwise take off on me for daring to consider myself great.) Later he referred to me in a fanzine, saying that he lacked the time to participate that Piers Anthony evidently had. I replied to the effect that it only looked that way, because I made my words count so that they seemed to be more lengthy than they were. As I said: minor interactions. I was sorry when Asimov died; he was a remarkable presence in the genre and in writing.
Which is not to say that he was perfect. He loved women a bit too well, and could not keep his hands off them, literally. He compulsively grabbed for breasts and bottoms, in public. I warned my daughters: if they ever encountered Asimov, keep out of reach of his hands. I believe one writer, no delicate flower, grabbed Asimov back, on the bottom, making a real scene. But his compulsion could not be controlled. Fortunately for him, his aura as a celebrity enabled him to get away with it. One fan remarked with awe how Asimov shook hands with him, and shook the breast of his girlfriend. And no, this is not one of my affinities with Asimov; I love women too, but I do not grab, I just look. I suspect that just as a genius is apt to be short a few cards in some other respect, Asimov’s short suit was in personal control; he lacked the formidable social cautions that most of us possess. When he abruptly lost his will to write, I knew that death was hard upon him, because writing was his greatest passion, as it is mine. When a flying bird loses the power of flight, it is near the end.
For decades the genre had its “Big Three”; Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur Clarke. My interactions with the other two were as slight as with Asimov, but in the case of Heinlein may have more significance than has been recognized. I was introduced to Heinlein’s fiction via a collection of stories titled, as I dimly recall, The Man Who Sold the Moon. I was surprised by their quality; this was one sharp writer. I went on to his novels. My opinion concurred with that of the majority: of the Big Three, Heinlein was the best actual writer, though in his later career certain flaws did grow. It is an irony that writing was not his ambition; he was a Navy man, but illness forced him out, so he turned to writing instead. His military background shows; he tended to have a hard right slant to his fiction. But he was so intelligent, consistent, and imaginative that even liberals like me had to accede to his greatness. Late in his career his novels became too long and rambling, until he sharpened up and got back on track. So probably Early Heinlein was the best Heinlein.
But about my limited interactions with the man: there were three, and perhaps the least significant was this: I was told that when I was blacklisted (more on that in a moment), and the writer’s organization SWFA tacitly sided with the errant publisher—you can read all about it in Bio of an Ogre, or in more limited detail here, as I seem to be the only one talking about that, unsurprisingly—Heinlein considered that matter, made no comment, but then let his membership in SFWA lapse. That was comment enough.
Heinlein was represented by the literary agent Lurton Blassingame. When I had that trouble with a publisher and got blacklisted for my temerity in demanding a correct statement of accounts, I took one significant step to stop the blacklist: I took Lurton Blassingame as my agent. Editors knew that if they irritated Blassingame by blacklisting one of his clients, they might never see the work of another of his clients, Robert Heinlein. That pretty much knocked the wind out of it, and my unplaced novels started getting placed, and later, given a level playing field, I was able to make my own mark on the genre. So Heinlein’s long shadow helped me, and I remember it as a favor though it was nothing he did, or perhaps even knew about, directly. Without Heinlein, Piers Anthony might never have achieved fame.
But there was more: when Blassingame retired, two younger agents took over his agency: Elinor Wood and Kirby McCauley. I was assigned to Wood, and Heinlein to McCauley. That’s when the feces hit the fan. Wood sent me a contract that was simply not acceptable, so I bounced both the contract and the agent. Yes, I got my way, with a much-improved contract and with a change of agents. Meanwhile, Heinlein did not like McCauley, or the story I heard was that his wife didn’t. Later I heard that Heinlein was jealous of the huge advances another McCauley client, the upstart Stephen King, was making, so refused to share an agent with him. That aspect didn’t bother me; I figured the agent might do something similar for me, in due course, and in due course he did. No, he didn’t get me contracts of the eight-figure magnitude King got, but he did get me three separate seven-figure deals. So the two writers, or agents, were switched, and Heinlein got Wood while I got McCauley. You might not think that would be a fair exchange, but it turned out to be, because Heinlein was fading while I was rising, and I think McCauley actually made more in commissions from my business than he would have with Heinlein’s business. So it was a neat fix, benefiting us both, because Wood turned out to be competent for Heinlein, and McCauley was a genius as an agent who helped put me on the commercial map. He became perhaps the leading genre agent, for a while. But that’s a separate story. This story is about Heinlein, and the subtle but considerable debt I owe to his presence. We never met, we never spoke, we never exchanged letters, our philosophies differed, but I believe I owe him, and I cherish his memory.
I encountered the works of Arthur Clarke, too, in college. I was taking a class in the nature of mankind, and another student had bought a paperback book titled Childhood’s End that he gave to me as a possible reference for that. It turned out to be not a treatise on how children mature, but a science fiction novel by Arthur Clarke. I read it, and it was a great story. Actually it was about the end of childhood—the childhood of mankind as a species. It presented our species as the larval stage of a greater species, about to emerge in the manner of a butterfly from a cocoon. After that I knew who Clarke was. When I was writing A Piece of Cake, published as Triple Détente (I hate the way publishers mess with titles), I was concerned that a portion of it was too similar to a portion of Childhood’s End. They were quite different novels, but I did not want to seem to be copying any other writer in style or substance. So I compared the two sequences in detail, and concluded that no, they were not at all that similar, fortunately. To my surprise, I also saw that mine was better written. My maturing as a writer brought me a closer awareness of style, so what had thrilled me in college I later could see was not as great as I had once taken it to be. Indeed, Clarke’s style was, I think, the clumsiest of the Big Three, and his plotting wasn’t necessarily apt, and his handling of romance was weak. On occasion he even had an error in physics. He made it on ideas, and they were grand ideas. One of his outstanding pieces was a short story, “The Star,” in which it turned out that a supernova that destroyed a great civilized species was the one that had been seen on Earth at the time of the birth of Jesus Christ. It concluded, approximately (I’m going from memory): “What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the light of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?” What a notion! I advised my British mother of his work, and she became a devotee, not of science fiction, but of Clarke’s novels.
There was a comment in one Clarke interview that Piers Anthony was one of a number of up-and-coming writers, so I knew Clarke knew of me. And once I received a cryptic letter from Ceylon—Sri Lanka—where he lived, commenting on Macroscope. I couldn’t make head or tail of it, and neither could any of my acquaintances, so I responded simply, expressing my confusion, and remarking that the only novel I had done relating to Ceylon was Hasan. I never heard again. The name on the letter was an obvious put-on, so I have wondered ever since whether that was actually Arthur Clarke. I suppose only a thorough exploration of his papers would tell. I see no reason for him to play such a joke, so maybe it was someone else. A subsequent letter indicated that was the case.
Back when I was getting started, I learned of an established writer who lived near me. He was Keith Laumer, a writer of fairly superficial but compelling adventure science fiction, and noted mainly for his Retief series of adventures. So I contacted him, and arranged to visit him. In the summer of 1966 my wife and I drove up to his place near Brooksville, taking along sandwiches for our lunch on the way back. We arrived in midmorning at his lovely house in the wetlands, trees all around. Laumer was gracious, and though we were alert for a suitable time to go, it never came, and we wound up staying all day, having supper there, and driving home after dark, our sandwiches never eaten. He told us how Retief was actually based on things he had noted during his years in the civil service. In person he was more intelligent and broader than his fiction. He had good commentary on all aspects of writing. He asked how I liked the writing of Jack Vance, and I said I liked it, except for Vance’s wooden dialogue. “Not wooden, carved,” Laumer said. That made me pause; he was right, and I appreciated Vance more after that, and indeed, now consider him to be the genre’s finest fantasy writer. I remarked on my problem with Astounding Science Fiction, later called Analog: the editor, John W. Campbell, seemed increasingly bigoted, giving no credit to blacks for anything. Yet overall he was the fairest editor and best market. Should I sell to him, or not? Laumer cautioned me about making the wrong associations. He agreed that the editor was bigoted, but it was only his job as editor that should concern me; I couldn’t let irrelevant considerations guide my marketing. It was a fine distinction, and I think a correct one; what an editor thinks of racial considerations is really not my business, while how he treats my manuscripts is my business. So Laumer’s balanced advice helped me. He told how the German physicist Willy Ley had done a collaboration with a lesser-known female writer. Ley had sent voluminous scientific material, that she had to somehow digest as the basis for a novel. She struggled through, and later brought the manuscript to Ley’s house. At one point he exclaimed that she was just trying to use his name to make personal gains. Outraged by this unfair charge, she picked up the manuscript and threw it into the blazing fire. Ley had to scramble to save it. She had made her point. He told how H. L. Gold, the editor of Galaxy magazine, was agoraphobic; he couldn’t stand to leave his apartment, lest something bad happen. Friends finally prevailed on him to take a drive with them—and on that trip the car was twice involved in accidents. So much for that effort. That told me something about Gold that was reassuring: this arrogant editor, who liked to step on faces, was mentally unbalanced. Laumer was full of such fascinating bits, and his wife and family seemed nice. So he made a very good impression on us.
Later that year I met him again at the Milford Conference in Pennsylvania, and he was affable and congratulated me on my intervening sale of my first novel, Chthon. When that novel was published, Laumer sent me a card saying it was great, and that he had instantly nominated it for the Nebula Award. At the conference itself he seemed more interested in the social aspect than in the critiquing of manuscripts, its nominal purpose. I don’t remember his specific story now, but do remember my comment, which was that it was salable as it stood, though not ambitious, and he should send it off and get it published. It soon became apparent how right I was: after everyone had made comments, intended to help him improve the piece, he simply said that he had already sold it to a magazine. So all our comments, it was evident, were pointless; the story was already history. Apparently Laumer didn’t see anything wrong with this; he had tossed in whatever was handy so as to officially participate, but he wasn’t interested in the actual comments. I suppose a person can attend such a function for whatever reason he chooses. Certainly my own motives were mixed; I wanted comment on my story, “Tappuah,” and got it, but I also wanted to get to know some of the figures in the genre, and as it turned out, this was the single best event for that in all my career. I did not, however, feel the need to repeat; I had learned what I needed to in that one week. I believe Laumer was a regular attendee of the Milford events, and as far as I know, he was popular there. So why not? It evidently served a need for him other than commentary.
It may seem strange, then, to say that I may never know how much evil came of that association, or how much mischief Laumer caused me. Later I reviewed things, looking for hints that might have given me the clue, but they were few and scattered, and I don’t think I was unduly naive to have taken Laumer at face value. Others have been similarly impressed by him. I had visited his house; I invited him for a return visit to mine. But though he had research to do in St. Petersburg, where I lived, he said he was too busy to stop by. When I agreed to visit Joe Green, across the state at Cape Kennedy, Laumer was also invited. He asked who else was going, and when told I was, he decided not to go. So I began to wonder whether my wife and I had been mousetrapped, when we visited Laumer. Had he enjoyed himself showing off his knowledge, keeping us there, even phoning his agent in our presence despite having no pressing business to conduct, so as to make an impression—then condemned us for wasting his time after we left? He was close to Damon Knight, organizer of the Milford Conference; Knight had been interested in buying a story of mine for an anthology, but after I attended Milford, he made continual excuses to avoid buying anything from me, and it became apparent that that market was now closed to me. Maybe my fiction just wasn’t to Knight’s taste, though it did see successful publication elsewhere, or maybe Knight didn’t like me personally. I have always been forthright in my statements, and perhaps it is not surprising how often those who are not forthright take offense, without being able to refute me. But just maybe it was Laumer.
Much of this I learned after his death. Laumer was two-faced. He could be very nice to people, to their faces, but could also torpedo them behind their backs: Thinking back, I remembered how sour he had been about Larry Niven, as well as Willy Ley, and others. Perhaps his attitude is clarified by his marriage. He seemed to have a compulsion to sleep with any pretty woman he could get. His wife finally had enough and dumped him, and apparently to the day he died, he never understood why she did that. He didn’t understand? Only a person without much conscience could suffer such confusion. Then he suffered a stroke. Friends who tried to help him, to take him to the hospital, were reviled; he claimed they were trying to kill him. He survived, but now the mask came off. He could still be charming, but seldom saw reason to be. Instead of cursing folk behind their backs, he now was more likely to do it to their faces. Gordon Dickson took the trouble to visit him, and when Dickson left, Laumer bad-mouthed him. Laumer went to a bookstore and said he was a writer. Oh, they asked, interested. Which one? “Guess!” he snarled, waving his cane at the entire genre section. He went to conventions, where it was reported he acted like an ogre. He had become one mean man.
