Jim Baen's Universe

From The Heart's Basement

Columns

Letting The Guns Bury Them

Written by Barry N. Malzberg

John F. Carr's new biography of H.Beam Piper (McFarland 2008) is pretty good, and has some fascinating leads as they like to say (and too much on Piper's pre-publishing life; the book has reached page 71 before reaching in chronology his first sale) but ultimately it is more of science fiction publishing's decades in Piper's working lifetime than of the author himself. An autodidact of mysterious reserved defensiveness and the autodidact’s resentment, Piper struggled to find a living wage in science fiction and never did.

Piper's first sale, the short story "Time And Again" appeared in Astounding in the issue of April, 1947; his last, also to Astounding, "Down Styphon" (a novel excerpt) was published posthumously in 1965. Over that span, Piper sold half a dozen novels and about thirty short stories; his income from this work (which in the 1960's was his sole source of income), meticulously documented, averaged far less than $2,000 a year. His best year was 1963 in which his novel Space Viking was serialized in Astounding, brought him about $3,500.

Piper, divorced and living in a $50-a-month apartment in industrial Pennsylvania, was unable to survive on this income and, unwilling to continue the struggle and unwilling to approach friends in the sf community for help, he opted in early November of 1964 for suicide. He was a disciplined and highly knowledgeable collector of long guns (one of his last stories was titled "Gunpowder God") and he used one item from that collection to do the deed. The details of this gruesome decision and its aftermath are well documented by Carr and need no elaboration here. It was a shocking act within the community at that time; comparable in the pall it left to the closely-spaced sudden deaths by heart attack in early 1958 of Henry Kuttner and Cyril M. Kornbluth. In a way science fiction never recovered from those three deaths (in the same way that it could be argued that the country, thirty-seven years after the War's formal end, has never recovered from Vietnam) but that too is for another column. Rather, it is the way in which Piper's career refracts the science fiction market of the time which makes it (beyond his work) signatory half a century later.

Looking now at the situation one must ask: How could Piper have possibly expected to live as a full-time science fiction writer in the late fifties? Robert A. Heinlein was the only member of the clan who did. (Isaac Asimov made a very good living for the time, but by the mid-fifties he had gravitated toward scientific popularizing books and articles, and science fiction represented a steadily diminishing percentage of his income. Between The Naked Sun in 1957 and The Gods Themselves fifteen years later he produced no novels and perhaps twenty short stories.) The most celebrated writers of that time did not. Most of them were of course hobbyists or part-timers: Alfred Bester, James Blish. Robert Silverberg's writing was exclusively science fiction for only a few years in the mid-fifties; he rapidly moved on to juvenile nonfiction and other categories of fiction which soon comprised three-quarters of his income. A.J. Budrys got into magazine editing and then public relations work in the late fifties. Robert Sheckley wrote espionage and suspense novels. From 1957 Fred Pohl ghost-edited Galaxy; his name went on the masthead a couple of years later. Gordon R. Dickson and Poul Anderson might have managed a subsistence living but Anderson was also writing mysteries and juveniles; Dickson was writing the latter. Perceived at that time as being at the top of the field, they might have been making eight thousand dollars a year. (Heinlein probably tripled that. Grumbles From The Grave contains some clues.) Phil Dick's excruciating chronicles of the pauper's existence which full-time science fiction writing yielded through the first twenty-five years of his career are, of course, part of his canon. Ray Bradbury? The early collections, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, A Medicine For Melancholy, might have sold well enough to represent a living, but as early as 1953 he was writing the screenplay for John Huston's Moby Dick and his career moved early and inexorably away from science fiction.

I have no idea what Theodore Sturgeon—perceived by most of his confreres as the Leader of the Pack—was earning, but evidence from correspondence and memories of surviving friends indicate decades of severe struggle. "Ted and money never got along too well together," Harlan Ellison wrote some years later. Walter M. Miller, Jr. simply quit all of it after the 1959 publication of A Canticle For Leibowitz and returned to newspaper work. (A semi-sequel to Leibowitz was never completed; Terry Bisson finished it out in the late 1990's and it was posthumously published.) Five years after Piper's death (and three years after the advent of Star Trek) it began to change radically; top book advances leapt from $10,000 to $100,000 within a six-year period.

It was, economically, an almost impossible time. "We were all desperately poor," Budrys said to an interviewer about fifty years later. "So what?" So what, indeed? Science fiction for its major writers (and a good many of its minor writers) was the True Quill, the True Task, it was never to be measured in terms of the income it produced. Asimov, in fact, felt guilty about his essential "desertion" of the form, and Heinlein, the only American citizen who had made the middle class solely on the basis of science fiction, was self-deprecating in the way that shtetl dwellers are to deflect the Angel of Death. Just an easy and lucrative way to spend six months a year loafing and traveling, Heinlein wrote. The least effortful way a lazy man could find to turn a living.

Still, it all existed in a kind of perilous balance and the level of the best work was very high. There are those who argue—I am one of them—that the great novels of the 1950's have never been surpassed, that the most innovative and accomplished science fiction comes from that period. The standards of the short story were similarly heightened. Perhaps the work flourished on privation; this was certainly the argument of the Paris generation of Hemingway in the 1920's. Piper himself, almost always sinking financially, produced a significant body of work; the three Fuzzy novels and Space Viking were still selling three decades after their composition.

Then, of course, the American News Company, the major (indeed the only) magazine and paperback distributor, was torn apart by Government edict in 1958 and almost all of the magazines collapsed immediately. Paperback sales were severely afflicted. It was at this time that Earl Kemp's compilation of interviews, Who Killed Science Fiction? won a Hugo at the Detroit World Convention for best fanzine. The title was timely. It was exactly at this point of time that H. Beam Piper, whose timing was always exquisite, having lost his job as a railroad night watchman (fifty dollars a week!), elected to make himself wholly dependent upon his writing income.

A bad period. I have written of this before. Balance the poverty of the writers' natural existence with the expansion and grandiosity of the texts they produced and you have one of our finest historic examples of cognitive dissonance, of the gap between inner and outer lives. (Much work has been published describing this phenomenon; as an example of the best I suggest Michael Herr's Dispatches.) Informed in Paris of her ex-husband's suicide, the former Mrs. Piper telegraphed: "Let The Guns Bury Him."

One of the great lines of the century of fire.

—New Jersey: November 2008