Fruma Klass: Fred Pohl—An Appreciation

I first met Fred Pohl at the 1956 Worldcon, in New York City. Worldcons were still small enough then that you could meet just about everyone in the science fiction world who went to Worldcons. I was attending with my then-boyfriend Phil Klass, and there were so many of his friends and fellow writers to meet that few of them really stood out. So many important people, important at least in this little world I was entering, and so many of them behaving so strangely!

As I remember it, they were all men accompanied by their wives and/or girlfriends, except for Arthur C. Clarke, who was accompanied by his partner Mike, and Judy Merril, unaccompanied. In the course of that Worldcon, Harlan Ellison’s first marriage broke up rather spectacularly, with Aurea Keyes, Danny Keyes’s wife, getting clobbered by Charlotte Ellison’s wildly swinging handbag. Aurea had nothing to do with any of it—she just couldn’t get out of the way fast enough.

It was at this Worldcon that I first met a whole shipload of Famous Writers: Isaac Asimov, Jim Blish, Lester del Rey, Harry Harrison, Damon Knight, Cyril Kornbluth, Ted Sturgeon, and more, more. And also the women they were married to, a much smaller group since, as it was said, people in science fiction tended to marry early, often, and each other. Bob Sheckley had just met Eric Frank Russell under the impression that the man was actually Frank Belknap Long, or maybe it was the other way round; Russell (or Long) seemed rather depressed and did not correct him.

And there were the fans, too. All boys, of course, all 14 or 15 years old, with thick glasses, all trying desperately to get noticed by the large-as-life writers, who granted their autographs with cheerful superiority. At one point, a particularly pesky fan kept trying to get Sheckley into a philosophical discussion, and Sheckley pointed the fan at Phil and said, “Why don’t you bother him?” “Is he anybody?” the fan asked, and Sheckley said rather maliciously, “He’s William Tenn.” The fan turned to Phil. “Are you really William Tenn?” he asked. “’Fraid so,” Phil said, and the fan keened in disappointment, “Gee, I thought you’d be a big guy!” Without a moment’s hesitation, Phil replied, “So did I, so did I.”

With all this action going on, I barely remember the nondramatic moments, during one of which I met Fred Pohl. I was curious about him, only because of the stories I’d been regaled with. Fred Pohl, organizer of the Futurians, a kind of social club for post-Marxist science fiction writers and their friends. Fred Pohl, one of the first of the group to get paid for writing stories they would have written anyway. Fred Pohl as an agent, given the rather nasty private but fairly widespread appellation of Sixty-Forty Pohl after he had explained to 15-year-old Cyril Kornbluth just how the agent-writer split worked when the writer was under legal age. But at this con, Fred wasn’t noisy, drunk, or anything like that. So I have no solid memory of him there.

I met Fred Pohl again a month or two later, at what turned out to be the first Milford Science Fiction Writers gathering. But since I was not a writer and not even one of the legal wives, and therefore not welcome at any of the sessions, I have no particular memory of most of the attendees. Phil and I shared a three-bedroom bungalow with Bob and Barbara Silverberg and Harlan Ellison, then between marriages. All I really recall of that week was the day it rained and someone drove me over to Helen Knight’s bungalow. Helen couldn’t go anywhere because she had a baby just a few months old. The writers were having a session on slumps, and as the wives talked about what slumps meant in households depending on writers’ tiny incomes, Helen held the baby in her lap and kept muttering fiercely to it. It took a while before I grasped what she was chanting. It was “Don’t be a writer! Don’t be a writer!”

My final memory of that week was that when we all left, A.J. and Edna Budrys remained behind; they couldn’t pay the bungalow rental until a check they were waiting for would arrive. The rest of us gave Edna whatever food we had left over; in my case, it was half a stick of butter and some bread.

The next encounter with Fred Pohl was the following March, 1957. Phil and I had just gotten married, and we spent our honeymoon in Milford, at Judy Merril’s custody trials. Judy had two children, and both ex-husbands were suing for custody of their kids. Fred was one of them.

There had been a frantic call from Judy. She needed character witnesses, and she wanted Phil for one. “Phil, this is Ragnarok,” she said. So we went.

It was, to put it mildly, a strange honeymoon. We stayed at Judy’s house. Each day, Phil went off to the courthouse, where he sat in an anteroom with the other character witnesses. On Judy’s side were Phil and the local Lutheran minister. Across the room were Fred’s witnesses: Lester and Evelyn del Rey and Jim and Virginia Blish. The two sets of character witnesses cordially ignored one another.

The evenings were spent in Judy’s kitchen, where strategy and tactics were worked out until long after I got too tired to stay awake. In most states, a judge could decide that neither of the parents in a custody battle was a good enough parent to get the child. But Pennsylvania law maintained the supremacy of the natural parent: one of them had to get the child, the one that was more worthy than the other. Or less unworthy.

So the strategy came down to simple mudslinging. At the end, the parent with the lesser amount of visible mud would get the child. I don’t know if this is still so in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but it was true at that time and it certainly made for some colorful exchanges. At one point, Fred’s lawyer accused Judy of “unnatural and deviant sexual practices.” She readily admitted to them. Then her own lawyer followed up by asking her with whom she had practiced these unnatural and deviant practices, and she lowered her gaze and answered demurely, “Only with my husband, Fred Pohl.”

What I find fascinating—and did at the time—was that none of them raised the one argument that could have carried the day. None of them produced the accusation of the Communist connection, which—in 1957—could have won for them instantly. Evidently, Judy didn’t need to, since she won the custody battle, but Fred needed more than he had brought forward in court. He didn’t do it.

A few years went by, during which I had no glimpse of Fred Pohl. I read and enjoyed his work, but didn’t see him again until 1963, when Playboy invited a bunch of science fiction writers to Chicago to participate in a discussion of the future, which would be printed in a forthcoming issue of the magazine. The magazine paid all our expenses—otherwise few of us would have been able to make the trip. We were installed in a pleasant Chicago hotel, to which Playboy sent some company limos to take us to the mansion.

In the limo Phil, I, and Carol Pohl occupied the back seat. The jump seat held Robert Heinlein, who was the most urbane man I have ever met. Heinlein had reached Grand Old Man status, although I don’t think he was really much past 60, if that. He wore a tuxedo with a dark red cummerbund. Introduced to me, he took my hand but instead of shaking it, he kissed it and called me “Dear lady.”

Fred sat up front with the driver, who wore a chauffeur’s uniform and shiny black leather cap. As we rode to the mansion, Fred suddenly slid the glass partition open and exclaimed, “Hey! There’s a telephone in this car!” None of us had even heard of such ostentatious flaunting of high technology. The chauffeur, a stolid middle-aged man who up to that point had not permitted any expression whatever to cross his face, said with a barely concealed sneer, “There are two telephones.”

And suddenly, Heinlein opened up. “Do you know what the smell of wealth is?” he enquired conversationally. Before anyone could answer, he went on: “Cabbage soup cooking. Somebody is cooking cabbage soup. You know you aren’t going to get any, but somebody will. And those people are rich, rich.” He went on to describe a childhood in Idaho in the depths of the Depression, in which his family survived only because his mother took in washing for their almost—almost but not quite—equally starving neighbors and he delivered the bundles. And how he had climbed out of it only by getting nominated to Annapolis.

No one tried to top the Grand Old Man’s memoir. But Fred looked as though he could have added a postscript or two. He didn’t.

Flash forward some more years.

1983. Phil was invited to be Guest of Honor at the Westercon, held in San Jose, California. Unfortunately, between the issuing of that invitation and the actual con, fell the shadow. The local club, sponsors of the Westercon, splintered into two main groups and a couple of small ones. The faction that had invited Phil was ousted from power and the people who took over knew not Joseph. For the most part, they were people who had not wanted him as their Guest of Honor. No one actually said so, but it was clear from the moment we arrived and (with our 7-year-old daughter) were put up on a sofabed in somebody’s living room instead of a hotel room.

The whole thing was a very bad experience. Finally, in the hotel, we were not allowed to sign for meals but had to depend on a grudging daily dole of ten dollars a day (for three people!). Since we had no transportation, we had to eat in the hotel, not a low-cost proposition. I quickly learned to secret some breakfast food in my purse so that we could have some “lunch.”

For Saturday night’s social events, we had to somehow arrange for a babysitter ourselves. We found the 14-year-old daughter of one of the convention’s officials, who agreed to stay in our room for the evening. (We paid her, of course.) She agreed to sit in the bathroom and read, so as to keep the light out where the child was sleeping. So that night we suddenly see our babysitter in the crowd, dancing. Clearly, the child is alone in the hotel room. And at that very moment the lights went out.

In the general panic and confusion, we could think of nothing but our 7-year-old, who would awaken in a strange place alone and in the dark. Was there a hotel fire? What would she do? Probably leave the room—into a pitch-dark hallway—in terror. We had to get to her.

We ran for the stairs, babbling to whoever was around. And a hero appeared. Jerry Pournelle caught up with and passed us on the staircase, taking our room key in passing. Neither Phil nor I was much athletically inclined, and by the time we reached our seventh-floor room, panting, Jerry had already opened the door and verified that our child was still there and still asleep.

What does this have to do with Fred Pohl? You’ll see.

Five years later, I published my first story, “Before the Rainbow,” and in 1996, my second story, “After the Rainbow,” won a Writers of the Future award. I went out to Houston, Texas, for the awards ceremony at the Space Center, which would follow a grueling weeklong boot camp of writing and critiquing. I really looked forward to that week. I would be seeing people there I had not seen in so many years—the writers who were serving as judges for the Writers of the Future Contest. I was especially pleased because the judging was blind, so none of them knew who had written the stories they were sifting through.

So I saw them. But they didn’t seem to see me. Or rather, they simply did not know how to interact with me. Was I the respected wife of a respected colleague? Or was I a new young writer? These two categories of human merited very, very different treatment.

For the most part, all the judges used the same expedient. They showed a distant smile and a good deal of benign neglect. They sort of weren’t sure just who or what I was.

Jerry Pournelle, who had raced up seven flights of stairs in a San Jose hotel to rescue our child—

A.J. Budrys, who had been happy to accept food from us at the first Milford hooha—

Only one of the judges bypassed the whole problem of categories and held out his hands in welcome and friendship. When I came into the Houston Space Center’s cafeteria with my laden tray, only one of the judges warmly—and casually—invited me to join him and his wife at their table. This one was Fred Pohl, the only professional among the professional judges who didn’t give a damn about what others might think of him if he didn’t do his pigeonholing properly. He made it clear that he was pleased to see me, after all the years, that he liked my work, and that he was glad to see that I was doing it. He and Betty Ann made sure that I didn’t sit alone or eat alone. They let me in on the petty scandals of the gathering in Houston—which rising female agent, for example, was currying favor by trying to be, as Fred put it, Julius Fast’s dogsbody even as Julius himself didn’t recognize it. The Pohls offered me a ride with them to the airport when we left; no one else did.

In other words, Fred Pohl was a whole lot more than a really good writer, husband, father, and friend. Fred Pohl was a mensch. This should be remembered.

Fruma Klass lives in Delray Beach, Florida.