Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (111 page)

The most consistently able writer science fiction, in its modern form, has yet produced.
Kingsley Amis

No author has been so much inside the confines of his genre as Fred Pohl, nor, given his great age, so long inside it. If there is a twentieth-century incarnation of science fiction (SF) – as H. G. Wells was its nineteenth-century incarnation – Pohl is it. His father was a ‘plunger’, a ne’er-do-well salesman who dragged his family all over the country. There were times in Pohl’s childhood ‘when we lived in suites in luxury hotels and times when we didn’t live anywhere at all’. After the age of seven, Fred was brought up in ‘Depression Brooklyn’ which, despite ‘the money having run out’, he recalls as, culturally, a ‘warm place’. The moment when ‘the irremediable virus entered my veins’ was in 1930 when ‘I came across a magazine named
Science Wonder Stories Quarterly
, with a picture of a scaly green monster on the cover’.

A clever boy, Fred got a place at Brooklyn Tech, aged twelve. The school was dedicated to the ‘revolutionary concept’ that the educational system could produce the technologists the twentieth century needed. Financial difficulties meant his dropping out, aged fourteen before he could contribute to that grand vision. His parents had separated the year before, his ‘plunging’ father having taken ‘one shortcut too many and wound up in trouble with the law’. Technology lost out. In his early teens Pohl was involved in the hobbyist world of SF fanzines and was fanatical about movies. It was, he recalls, the era of ‘films for everyone’. The silver screen was the only escape on offer from the grey reality of the hardest economic times in history. Two films were formative on young Fred: the afterlife fantasy
Death Takes a Holiday
(1934) and the Wells/Korda collaboration,
Things to Come
(1936) – ‘greater than
Metropolis
, more meaningful than
2001
’. These works penetrated into ‘the deep-down core of my brain’. At the same period Pohl was what he calls a ‘Boy Bolshevik’. Much of the SF of the 1930s was, he maintains, leftist: proto-revolutionary. He proudly carried a Young Communist League card for four years and volunteered to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, to fight in Spain, but was rejected as too young and too useless. But his spirit was willing.

SF was, by the late 1930s, mobilised in terms of fiercely competitive ‘clubs’. Pohl’s club was ‘The Futurians’. It brought him into fruitful connection with, among others, Isaac Asimov (about whose more florid imaginings, Pohl – an ironist by temperament – has always had serious misgivings). Another Futurian with whom Pohl had the most collaborative relationship of his career was the gifted Cyril M. Kornbluth (1923–58). Aged eighteen, Pohl was ‘sampling the mixed diet of the
freelance writer. Your time is your own. But it is the
only
thing that you own that you can sell.’ Selling science fiction was easy. This was the ‘high autumn of the pulps’. Some ‘pulpsters’, Pohl recalls, could turn out 10,000 words a day, under a battery of pseudonyms. But the whole payment budget for a magazine could be under $200 an issue. Slowcoaches went hungry; it was a hot-house genre.

Pohl made his first of five marriages in 1940 (the last, his longest, to Elizabeth Anne Hull, an academic and science fiction expert, has lasted since 1984). He was inducted into the US military forces ‘on April Fool’s Day, 1943’ and served until November 1945 as a sergeant in the air corps weather service, looking up at the empty skies, appropriately enough. After the war, and again remarried, he took up work as a literary agent. Asimov was one of his early clients. He achieved, as he ruefully recalls, the quite amazing feat of going broke as a literary agent. A second divorce, and the need to coin some cash (specifically to clear $30,000 in accumulated debts) drove him back to writing and editing SF. Thank God for those hardships. The 1950s represent the highpoint of Pohl’s writing: it was over these years, in collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth, that he produced his classic SF satires on Eisenhowerian consumerism and ‘mature’ capitalism.
The Space Merchants
(1953) began as the short story ‘Gravy Planet’. It constructs, wittily, a world in which corporate business has taken over the functions of government and advertising the function of news. It’s done, like all Pohl’s work, with a strong storyline and a Hemingwayesque economy of phrase. All those years writing fast for the pulps had impressed on him indelibly the need to keep the reader turning pages before going to the drugstore to get another title by the same author. Kingsley Amis pronounced
The Space Merchants
to be the best SF novel ever written. It has my vote as well.

The collaborators’
Gladiator-at-Law
(1955) switched the satire to a world in which law simply existed to further corporate interests. The Pohl–Kornbluth twenty-third century fantasy
Wolfbane
(1959) has not held up so well, but it seems clear that sardonic Kornbluth added something necessary. One of the other writer’s works in his own right, the short story ‘The Marching Morons’ (first published in the magazine
Galaxy
in 1951), is routinely voted one of the best works ever in the genre. The hero, John Barlow, goes into suspended animation and wakes, centuries in the future, to discover that (thanks to the inverse relationship of intelligence to procreation of children) the moronic have inherited the earth: idiocracy rules. After Kornbluth’s premature death in 1958, the razor’s edge is less apparent in Pohl’s work, although
A Plague of Pythons
(1964), which fantasises dictatorship via metempsychosis, is as good as anything he has written. The work, like
Fahrenheit 451
, can be read as an allegory of a world sofa-bound by the miracle of TV and the vicarious pleasures it provides, while the buttocks expand into uncontrolled obesity.

Two factors redirected Pohl’s career as the decade came to an end. One was the collapse of the wholesaler and distributor, the American News Company, in 1957, which decimated the pulps and SF magazines. The other was the death of Kornbluth. Pohl had some intellectual sympathy with the so-called ‘New Wave’ which transformed SF in the 1960s and 1970s, elevating the genre (as its practitioners fondly hoped) to new levels of literariness and cultural respectability. As an adviser to Bantam Books, Pohl actually promoted the careers of experimentalists such as Samuel R. Delany – a writer who has been seriously compared with James Joyce. But it was not Pohl’s kind of SF, nor could he love it. His later years were devoted to the ‘Heechee’ series, whose central concept (reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke) is of benign aliens, leaving blueprints wherewith humans can themselves progress towards the stars.

Pohl has won every honour his genre has to offer: many more than once. A thoughtful practitioner, he wonders: ‘I have committed my life to science fiction. It is fair to ask why. I mean, I’m smart enough. I could have had several quite different careers, and some of them, at least at the time, looked a lot more attractive in terms of dollars and pride. When you come right down to it, is making up lies about things that have never happened really a respectable way for a grown man to spend his days?’ ‘Why, sure,’ he answers. On the basis of the classics he and Kornbluth have given us, one is inclined to agree.

There is a marvelous peace in not publishing.
Salinger, in conversation with the
New York Times
, 3 November 1974

When he died in 2010 Salinger’s obituaries had been held in reserve, unchanged, for decades. That written in the
Guardian
, for example, was by someone who had predeceased the novelist by many years. Recluses are not unknown in literature, but few have been as puritanically reclusive as Salinger – a man ‘famous for not wanting to be famous’. Jerome David Salinger was born in New York. His father was well off and Jewish, with second-generation roots in Lithuania – a country whose brutal pogroms enriched twentieth-century American fiction with Norman Mailer,
Saul Bellow, Nathanael West and Jacqueline Susann. The American Academy of Literature should raise a monument in Vilnius. Once arrived in the land of the free Sol (Solomon) Salinger ran an imported kosher cheese and ham business. It was a cheap luxury which, with skilful management, weathered the 1930s Depression. The Salingers enjoyed an affluent Manhattan life – not least their pampered only son, ‘Sonny’.

Legend (never contradicted by her son) had it that Salinger’s mother, Miriam (Marie) Jillich Salinger, was of Scottish/Irish extraction – and that she might even have been disowned by her family for marrying a Jew. In fact Miriam came from a prosperous German American family, who had done well in Iowa. She was a Gentile, but so relaxed were Sol and she about religion that there was no friction. Young Salinger was brought up secular and it was not until much later in life that he found his gods – idiosyncratically. They would not be Jewish gods; he was not one of those who grow back to their roots.

Salinger was strongly attached to his mother (he dedicated
The Catcher in the Rye
to her) and she was indulgent where other parents might have wielded the rod. Young Sonny was expelled from his exclusive private school for lack of industry. He was then enrolled in a military academy in Pennsylvania, which he liked – although he punished it as the original of Pencey in
Catcher
. He graduated in 1936 – at the same age as Holden Caulfield. He then enrolled in New York University but dropped out after a year. This was now his wayward pattern. His father sent him off to Poland, ostensibly to learn about canned picnic ham. If Sonny learned anything from this episode, his biographer laconically observes, it was that ‘Pigs’ were not for him. His father could forget any fond ‘Salinger and Son’ fantasies. More to the young man’s taste was Vienna, where he spent some months before the outbreak of war, perfecting his German and, it is deduced, falling in love.

What did Sonny (later ‘Jerry’) want to be? Either an actor (his powers of mimicry and range of voice were much noted) or a writer. With a view to the latter he enrolled in a creative writing class at Columbia where, momentously, he came under the wing of a teacher, Whit Burnett, who edited a literary magazine,
Story
, on the side. Burnett had a remarkable eye.
Story
‘discovered’ Mailer, Capote, Tennessee Williams and Salinger. At the age of twenty-one, after Burnett gave him his start, Salinger was precociously publishing in ‘slicks’ (glossy magazines – not ‘pulp’) such as
Collier’s Weekly
and
Esquire
, and had his eye on the big one, the
New Yorker
. He finally got there in 1941, only to have his smooth upward path interrupted by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

At this stage of his life Salinger was a handsome, ironic, wisecracking, ladies’ man. The lady he fell in love with was Oona O’Neill, daughter of the Nobel
Prize-winning dramatist. She was, like all the women in his life, markedly younger than him (sixteen to his twenty-two), a predilection he shared with Charlie Chaplin, who eventually snatched Oona away. Salinger’s fiction is fascinated by the young, a year or so either side of puberty (Holden Caulfield, Seymour Glass, Esmé, Franny) and this fascination inspired Norman Mailer’s acrid crack that Salinger’s is ‘the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school’. He certainly left it in April 1942 when he was drafted and, after some intense lobbying (‘I want to be an officer so bad,’ he confessed) was commissioned as an infantry counter-intelligence officer. The army needed fluent German speakers. The war did not distract him from what he really wanted to be, however. For some time he had been writing stories based on a character called ‘Holden Caulfield’, with the sense ‘he deserves to be a novel’. In 1944 Lt Salinger was posted to England. His unit, the 12th Infantry Regiment, landed on Utah Beach in the invasion and suffered extensive casualties. It suffered even more in the pointlessly bloody Hürtgen Forest battle and the Battle of the Bulge – more casualties, it is estimated, than any other infantry outfit. His biographer titles the chapter dealing with Salinger’s war, ‘Hell’. He won five battle stars and a decoration for valour.

Salinger had a bloody war – much bloodier than Mailer’s, who hardly saw a shot fired in anger. But unlike Mailer, he never spoke or wrote about his frontline experiences, nor about the effect which the liberation of Dachau concentration camp had on a Jew, all of whose Viennese-Jewish friends, he discovered, had perished in the Holocaust. It was, his daughter later recalled, ‘the unspoken’, the unwritable, the irremovable. One recalls the last line of
Catcher
, ‘don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.’

After the war, Salinger penned two breakthrough stories for the
New Yorker
, ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ and ‘For Esmé – with Love and Squalor’. Both can be read as tinged with something his generation of exhausted warriors had never heard of, PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder – earlier called ‘shellshock’). Both stories expressed longing for childhood/adolescent worlds, a world Kenneth Slawenski calls ‘children ice skating and little girls in soft blue dresses’. Three years later,
The Catcher in the Rye
would confirm this psychological retreat into the childhood past. Holden’s three-day escape into New York, published in 1951, became wildly popular in the youth-rebellion decade of the 1960s, but is actually rooted in the year 1936–7, when Salinger was sixteen and the nightmare still to come invisibly in the future. These time settings are routinely overlooked by readers.