The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (27 page)

The other side of the coin is that sometimes your wife is right, and you're just loafing. There simply is no external way to tell when a writer is working, and maybe even the writer himself doesn't know.

Nevertheless, the end product is easily recognizable. If the writer is a writer, at some point words will come out, and finished works, and if he is any good they will sooner or later be published. This is conclusive diagnostic evidence. Pity it doesn't come along in time to be useful when you need to know whether the dishwasher should be fixed.

I don't write all the time—I don't know many writers who do. There are periods when, for reasons not easy to identify, I write regularly and well for months on end. There are other times when I don't.

The times when a writer isn't writing are called "writer's slump." Everybody has it, at least now and then. Nobody, or nobody I know, is wholly successful in dealing with it. I don't know how to deal with it any more than anyone else, but what I do know is a way to postpone its happening, pretty well, most of the time, in a fashion that works, more or less, for me. What I do is to set myself a daily quota of four pages. No more, no less; and I write those pages every day, no matter where I am, no matter how long it takes, if I die for it.
*
Sometimes it takes forty-five minutes. Sometimes it takes eighteen hours. Sometimes I am reasonably satisfied with the words that go onto the paper, and quite a lot of the time I loathe them.

But I
do
them. If I miss, if I skip
one day
, the rhythm of the stride is broken and the shattered edifice of my life tumbles down on my head. So I do it every day, which means every day there is, including Saturdays, Sundays, Christmas, my birthday, the day I'm going to the dentist to find out if I'm going to need a root-canal job, the day I fly to London, the day I am so badly hung over that my eyelashes bleed. I do my quota in airports, on boardwalk benches, and in commuter trains. I have been known to take my typewriter along on a weekend date. "Every day" means "every day," and this is the first rule of writing for me.

Of course, with all this terrible strength of character, the times do come when I fall. I've missed a day, never mind why. Then everything is at risk. If I can climb right back on the wagon, maybe it will all be all right again, but maybe it won't—and sometimes that single day has extended itself to months.

But that is what it is like to be a writer (for me, anyway), and that is why there is not a great deal to say about what occupied the greatest part of my attention for the remaining years of the 1950s, I wrote. And was a damn dull spectacle doing it.

So will you imagine, please, that all through this chapter I am—whatever else I am doing—writing about forty short sf stories (and a couple of dozen other short pieces) and about a dozen science-fiction novels (and eight or ten other books).

I did manage to get away from the typewriter long enough to do a few other things, and one of them was to get married again.

The girl was (and is!) a tall, leggy, strikingly beautiful blonde, nee Carol Metcalf Ulf. A brief marriage to Jay Stanton left her with a brand-new daughter, Karen, who in the twenty-odd years since has changed from a tiny scarlet bundle of flesh, with an eye that wandered northeast and a foot that pointed southwest, to the kind of beauty who stops conversation when she comes into a room . . . and with intelligence, creativity, and personality to match.
*
So Carol and Carol's Karen, and me and my Annie, at least when the varying vicissitudes of my struggles with Judy gave me custody of Annie, set up housekeeping. First it was a tiny apartment on the far East Side of New York. The 10th Street bus paused to gather its strength for the westward run right under our window, so that the noise of idling Diesels kept things lively all night long, and there were mice. But it was a pretty nice little apartment. It was only a few blocks from Horace Gold's place in Stuyvesant Town, and our Friday nights were given to Horace's poker games. It was very good that this was so. We didn't have money for baby sitters and shows, since I was trying to make a dent in paying off thirty thousand dollars.

Those Friday-night games were fun. Horace edited
Galaxy
from his apartment, and a lot of the regulars were
Galaxy
writers: Bob Sheckley, William Term, A. J. Budrys, sometimes Lester and Evelyn del Rey, Tony Boucher when he was in town. Not everyone was a writer. John Cage showed up occasionally, a gentle, humorous man who clutched his cards diffidently, bet insecurely, and seemed to win a lot. Years later, when Karen-grown-up was taking a course in Cage's music, she was startled to learn that she had met him as an infant, between Spit in the Ocean and High-Low Seven, when we took her out of the carriage for her ten o'clock feeding.

Before long we were back in the house in Red Bank, trying to fill up fourteen rooms with what furniture we could acquire on a budget of hardly anything at all. Carol was superb. Former art student and fashion model, she made most of her own clothes—as well as drapes, spreads, and slipcovers for the tatty furniture—naturally clothing the babies on the same sewing machine. Moreover, she was handy with pliers and paintbrush. Before long she had made the house eminently livable. Even partyable. We began inviting friends out, at first a few at a time, then overnight parties of dozens of people which climaxed, when the weather was warm enough, with a little daybreak swimming in the lake down the street.

We had a great natural resource to draw on, because the fabulous Ipsy-Wipsy Institute was not very far away. The Ipsy was the immense house in Highlands owned by Fletcher and Inga Pratt, twenty-three rooms, on acres of land rolling down to the Shrewsbury River. (I suppose that the reason I wasn't afraid to acquire a fourteen-room house of my own was that, seeing it for the first time after a weekend at the Ipsy, it seemed charmingly compact.)

The Ipsy-Wipsy was some two hundred years old, with sculptured plaster ceilings in the billiard room and immense fireplaces in the drawing room and the dining hall, and a strange, huge painting that went with the house (because there was no way to remove it) on the landing of the stairs. The Pratts had bought it cheaply enough, but I cannot imagine how many tens of thousands must have gone into jacking up the fireplaces, stopping the leaks in the roof, replacing wood that had rotted and plaster that had peeled away. Owning a big old house is a career. They are like beaver dams, a dynamic interplay between creation and decay. If you take your eyes off them for a moment, they are down around your ears: the heating system goes, the roof tiles separate and blow away, water stains the walls you have just repainted, the floors begin to pop. But it's worth it.
Maybe
it's worth it. It's worth it if you enjoy the house, and if you keep it filled with life.

The Pratts surely filled theirs, with people, books, and marmosets. Fletcher raised the little wooly monkeys; they lived in bird cages in the billiard room huddling under scraps of blanket and peering out with their old-man faces cocked to one side, wistful for a mealworm or a grape. Fletcher, who was the dearest man alive, looked like a marmoset himself with his own head held in exactly the same position, and with his marmoset beard and bright marmoset eyes. Sometimes we borrowed the Ipsy's company. Sometimes they borrowed ours. Basil Davenport was an Ipsy-Wipsy regular, a Book-of-the-Month-Club editor who came out one weekend in great exultation because he had persuaded the Club to take an Arthur Clarke book as an alternate selection, and thus struck a great blow for science fiction. St. Leger Lawrence was another. So was John Ciardi, paying his bills by teaching in a New England college and doubling as a science-fiction editor for Twayne while waiting for poetry to pay off. So were any number of literary skin divers, former dictators of obscure countries, rocket millionaires, space chemists, and, naturally, science-fiction writers: Ted Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, Katherine MacLean and her husband, Charley Dye, the Kornbluths, the de Camps, the del Reys. William Lindsay Gresham was there a lot just at the end of his life, an irascible, mean-mouthed man who was having troubles he could not handle, and one night a little later, checked into a Times Square hotel and killed himself. Willy Ley and his wife, Olga, came out frequently with their two small girls (enough bigger than ours so that we had inherited Xenia's crib for, successively, Annie and Karen). When Dona and John Campbell were divorced, Dona married George O. Smith, and by and by they came to the Ipsy not as house guests but to live. (The old original house, four or five rooms of it, was still part of the structure, with its own independent facilities and entrances, and it became theirs.) Laurence and Edie Manning came for a few weekends. Larry had written
The Man Who Awoke
and many other science-fiction stories in the old days and now was the proprietor of his own mail-order nursery; they made up their minds quickly, bought a piece of Fletcher's property, and built a house of their own next door. Meanwhile, the del Reys had come out to spend a weekend with Carol and me, stayed several months, and then moved into their own place down the street. The science-fiction population of Monmouth County was growing by leaps and bounds.

Saturday was the special day at the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute. At five the cocktail flag was hoisted while Fletcher tootled the trumpet, and the guests began to assemble. We drank for hours around the huge oak cocktail table in the billiard room, before dining on the quail or eel or roast hump of bison. Fletcher, God save him, was a lousy cook. He did not believe in overexposing food to fire, and so it was always all bloody. (He actually served the only rare bouillabaisse I have ever encountered.) What saved us all from terminal trichinosis was Grace, the all-purpose maid, who lied to him about cooking times.

Ceremonial was a joy to Fletcher. He had been born a Buffalo farm boy, achieved prosperity and fame,
*
and set out to re-create himself in the image of a landed gentleman. The Ipsy-Wipsy made it all come true. The port was always passed to the left. The after-dinner liqueurs were drunk to courteous toasts and responses. It was easy to tease Fletcher for his pretensions, but he knew what game he was playing. He saw as much humor in it as anyone else, and there was nothing mean or pretentious in it, or in Fletcher. He made the world a nicer place.

In 1957 he began to feel ill. Staunch Christian Scientist, he would have nothing to do with the doctors of the flesh. By the time Inga bullied him into seeing one, it was too late. He died of cancer of the stomach.

A year or two later Inga remarried and moved away and the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute was sold to a dentist from Jersey City. One night it burned to the ground. The dentist cleared away the rubble and built himself a split-level ranch house on the spot. It may be a nice enough place, but it has nothing of the majesty of the Ipsy, or of the memories.

Early in the 1950s something else happened that changed my life in ways I had never anticipated, and it began when I subscribed to
Scientific American
.

I had a fair grounding in science and mathematics from Brooklyn Tech and Chanute Field, but I was not terribly interested in the subjects.
SciAm
began to turn me on.

The precipitating incident was a brief, popularized article on the theory of numbers. At that time it was a terribly arcane subject. Now it is less so, particularly for ten-year-olds, because the "new math" of the public schools leans heavily on number theory: which is to say, the properties of numbers.

Now, I don't really expect you to sit still while I explain number theory to you. I am not sure if I could even answer the question if you were to ask me if it mattered at all. One answer would be, "My God, yes!" Another would be, "Of course not." The best answer would be that it has the same importance as God has. Either it is of transcendental concern or it doesn't matter at all, and which it is to you depends on you.

The article was only a teaser, but it included a bibliography. I had my secretary order all the books in the bibliography and I read them—not, dear God, without pain! They stretched my head to its limits. I found that they were teasers, too. I found that number theory was one of the very few domains of science and mathematics in which an amateur might well achieve something all the professionals had always missed, and, in fact, in which quite a few amateurs had done so.

Well, that seemed like pretty jazzy fun, and so I plunged into a couple of the classic problems. The seductive thing about them is that they are almost all quite easy to understand. Solving them, not so easy.

For instance, there is the case of Fermat's last theorem.

This fellow, Pierre de Fermat, who died some three hundred and more years ago, had some flaky habits. There is no question that he was a genius of a mathematician, everyone knew that. The trouble was that he knew it, too, and knew it so well that he never felt any obligation to prove it to anyone. Most of what he said he mentioned offhandedly in casual letters to friends, or even in little scribbles to posterity in the margins of his books, and one of those scribbles has caused immense pain to all the world's greatest mathematicians—and also to me!—ever since.