The Return of "Ooze"

I have a couple of things left over concerning the first Weird Tales cover story, "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud. I also have something new.

The first Weird Tales cover and the only illustration in the first issue was Richard R. Epperly's depiction of the events in "Ooze." Epperly's illustration isn't of just one scene from "Ooze," though. In fact, it combines different characters and different parts of the story into one image.

In the illustration, a young man rushes in from the left, brandishing a rifle and a long knife. In the center of the image is a frightened young women in the grip of a monster, a kind of land-octopus.

However, in the story, Lee Cranmer, the son, is first on the scene. He carries only a rifle.

John Corliss Cranmer, the father, is next to arrive. By the time he is on the scene with his pistol and knife, his son and daughter-in-law have already been engulfed by the giant amoeba.

The wall, shown in the background of the illustration, comes later in the story. John Corliss Cranmer has it built in order to keep the amoeba from escaping.

And of course the creature is not octopoidal (if that's a word) but protoplasmic, an eyeless and limbless colloidal creature made from ooze.

And in the story to ooze it returned.

* * *

After beginning this long series on the origins of ooze and the first issue of Weird Tales, I read "A Song for Lya" by George R.R. Martin. This was part of our weird fiction book club, conducted by my friend Nathaniel Wallace. Thanks always to Nate.

"A Song for Lya" was first published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact in June 1974, forty-nine years ago this month. In other words, Mr. Martin's story came along about halfway between "Ooze" and now. It shows how much things had changed in the time before and how little they seem to have changed in the time since it was published. Anthony M. Rud came of age before the Great War. His story is set in 1913, in the year before the war began, you might say before a long, sad withdrawing of the sea of faith that formerly ringed the world, or, at least at that late date, America. Now we find ourselves high and dry.

In both stories, there is the image of a woman being absorbed by a blob or protoplasmic mass. In "Ooze," that image is horrifying, so much so that it drives the elder Cranmer insane. That shocking and terrible image, though not made so vivid in Rud's prose, is very vivid in my own imagination. It sticks with me even now. It's no wonder that Cranmer's mind went off its hinges, for he had seen what he had wrought in the most terrible of ways.

George R.R. Martin described his own ooze-like creature:

Its color was a dull brownish red, like old blood, not the bright near-translucent crimson of the small creatures that clung to the skulls of the Joined. There were spots of black, too, like burns or soot stains on the vasty body. I could barely see the far side of the cave; the Greeshka was too huge, it towered above us so that there was only a thin crack between it and the roof. But it sloped down abruptly halfway across the chamber, like an immense jellied hill, and ended a good twenty feet from where we stood.

And what it looks like when the creature, called the Greeshka, absorbs one of the natives of his faraway planet, the Shkeen:

     I looked. His beam had thrown a pool of light around one of the dark spots, a blemish on the reddish hulk. I looked closer. There was a head in the blemish. Centered in the dark spot, with just the face showing, and even that covered by a thin reddish film. But the features were unmistakable. An elderly Shkeen, wrinkled and big-eyed, his eyes closed now. But smiling. Smiling.

     I moved closer. A little lower and to the right, a few fingertips hung out of the mass. But that was all. Most of the body was already gone, sunken into the Greeshka, dissolved or dissolving. The old Shkeen was dead, and the parasite was digesting his corpse.

That is soon to be the fate of the title character, who seeks union and in realizing it leaves her lover, named Robb, behind. He's devastated, but maybe only a little and not for long. (Strange devastation.) On his way off of the planet, he hooks up with another woman, who is also seeking union but has failed to achieve it with her now ex-boyfriend, the planetary administrator Valcarenghi. Valcarenghi is an individual, with boundaries he has established around himself like the wall Cranmer has built to keep in the amoeba. He does not seek an individual- or boundary-dissolving union with another person. He also believes in God, though perhaps only in an offhand way. He appears to be an untroubled man, or a man who keeps himself and any troubles he might have very carefully under control.

In "Ooze," union with a colloidal creature is terrible and horrifying. No one wants it. The woman, John Corliss Cranmer's daughter-in-law, goes to her doom involuntarily. She is the prey of the amoeba. In Mr. Martin's story, on the other hand, union is made to seem somehow attractive and desirable. The title character Lya willingly goes to her own dissolution. She wants to lose herself and be joined in love with others within the mass of the Greeshka. Cranmer, creator of the giant amoeba, believes in God. Lya and her lover Robb do not. They are devoutly atheistic. By turning away from God, Lya believes that her only hope for love and union is--to reduce things in the way materialism and reductionism require--to be dissolved in protoplasm. To his credit, Robb doesn't want to go out that way.

In the twentieth century, as in all others, there were those who burned with a desire to lose their identities and their individuality by being taken into a mass of men. This was one of the insights behind The True Believer, subtitled Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, written by Eric Hoffer and published in 1951. Little is known of Hoffer's origins or early life. Call him the Nictzin Dyalhis of a wider American philosophy and culture. He is supposed to have been an atheist, like Lya and Robb, who observes, "The Union is a mass-mind, an immortal mass-mind, many in one, all love." Mr. Martin may be an atheist, too. I can't say for sure. But that seeking after love and union, seemingly so necessary among us, also satisfied by a belief in God and actions based on such a belief, would also seem to be behind the worldly or atheistic drive after the dissolution of the self and of individual identity and autonomy. God offers us one thing. We refuse it and desire to replace it with something of our own making. Like children, we want to do it ourselves. And in the process, we--either gradually or suddenly--destroy ourselves or as much of the rest of humanity as we can. We need look no further than the murderous mass movements of the twentieth century--still alive in our own--as evidence of that. We seek after the eternal, the infinite, and the absolute without seeing that our seeking is in itself evidence of the Creator of all things eternal, infinite, and absolute.

I'll close by saying that being dissolved in protoplasm is in my view horrifying in both "Ooze" and "A Song for Lya." The difference is that it's made to sound not so horrifying and to be actually desirable in "A Song for Lya," at least by some of the characters in that story. I suppose that readers of today prefer the later horror over the earlier one, even if both are essentially the same. What a difference a century--actually only half a century, 1923 to 1974--has made.

"A Song for Lya" by George R.R. Martin was originally in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact in June 1974. The cover art, by Frank Kelly Freas, is for a serial entitled "Stargate." Interior illustrations for "A Song for Lya" were by James Odbert. This is where the connections begin.

The author of "Stargate" was Tak Hallus, a pen name, the meaning of which, in Urdu and Persian, is apparently "pen name." In "A Song for Lya," the title character's lover is named Robb. I can't help but associate his name with the word robot, more distantly with the character Robby the Robot, in other words, with something mechanical, material, and non-human.

"Stargate" is also the title of a television show. The premise of the show seems to be based in an older concept, one example of which is in the novel Gateway (1977) and its sequels, written by Frederik Pohl. The main character in Pohl's Gateway is named Robinette. He is human. His psychoanalyst, a robot named Sigfrid, is not, though, like Pinocchio and Data, he wishes to be.

Anyway, like I said, Tak Hallus is a pen name. (It sounds like a character name in one of Nictzin Dyalhis' stories of Venhez and Aerth.) The author's real name was Robinett, Stephen Robinett to be exact, who also went by the name Stephen Robinette.

Robinett's first genre story was "Minitalent," also in Analog, in March 1969. In "A Song for Lya," the psychics Lya and Robb are called Talents, for their psychic powers. So in 1974, when "A Song for Lya" was published, decades had gone by and yet there were still stories about psychic powers in Analog, which was, before that, called Astounding Science Fiction, and which was, of course, edited by a man who believed he had discovered a scientific basis for such things. We're still waiting for his results.

I haven't read "Stargate" by Stephen Robinett. But I wonder if Frederik Pohl could have been inspired by him and his story in conceiving and writing his own novel Gateway. Or maybe his use of the character name Robinette is just a coincidence.

By the way, Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" (1867) figures very prominently in "A Song for Lya." I sneaked in an allusion to it earlier in this essay. "Dover Beach" is an essential poem. Anyone who reads in English ought to read it and know it and return to it, again and again, like a wave on the beach.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Mysterious Dolgov-Part Three and a Half

A month ago I wrote part three of this series on The Mysterious Dolgov. Then the world came to an end. Since then, my copy of Frederik Pohl's memoir The Way the Future Was has been sitting on the floor, waiting like a child to be picked up again. Like I said before, I have only a paperback edition of this book and there isn't any index in it. Today, after finishing a job, I picked it up again and looked through it a little more closely than before.

And I still didn't find Boris Dolgov's name.

However, there are some clues scattered like breadcrumbs through the text. They may not lead to The Mysterious Dolgov, but they lead to a supposition. Here are the breadcrumbs, from the Ballantine Books edition of May 1979:

First, Pohl listed the names of the original Futurians, a science fiction fan club formed in 1937 in New York City. "As near as I can remember," he wrote, "[they] were:

• Isaac Asimov
• Daniel Burford
• Chester Cohen
• Jack Gillespie
• Cyril Kornbluth
• Walter Kubilius
• David A. Kyle
• Herman Leventman
• Robert W. Lowndes
• John B. Michel
• Frederik Pohl
• Jack Rubinson
• Richard Wilson
• Donald A. Wollheim
• Dirk Wylie

"Later additions," Pohl continued, "included Hannes Bok, Damon Knight, and Judith Merril [. . .]." (p. 67) (For the writers and artists who later contributed to Weird Tales, hover over their names and then click on the links.)

Second, on May 11, 1937, Frederik Pohl met a woman he described as "strikingly beautiful, and strikingly intelligent, too, in a sulky, humorous, deprecatory way [. . . ]." (p. 74) Her real name was Doris Marie Claire Baumgardt, but her friends--and her future husband, Frederik Pohl--called her Doë. Doë was a writer and artist. In 1940 and 1941, again in the 1950s, all under the name Leslie Perri, she wrote fiction and non-fiction and drew pictures for science fiction publications. Here are her professional credits, in their entirety, from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb):

• Cover and interior illustrations for The Final Men by H.G. Wells, a seven-page chapbook published by Robert W. Lowndes in March 1940
• "Fantasy Reviews: Fantasy Films," review published in Astonishing Stories (June 1940), with Forrest J. Ackerman, and under editor Frederik Pohl (1)
• "Fantasy Reviews: Fantasy Music," review published in Super Science Stories (July 1940), under editor Frederik Pohl
• "Space Episode," short story published in Future (Dec. 1941), under an uncredited editor and behind a cover illustration by Hannes Bok
• "In the Forest," short story published in If (Sept. 1953), under editor James L. Quinn
• "Under the Skin," short story published in Infinity Science Fiction (June 1956), under editor Larry T. Shaw (also appeared as "The Untouchables") (2)

So here we see some of the same names again: Pohl, Lowndes, Bok.

Third, Pohl became editor of two new magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, in the fall of 1939. (Both made their debut in 1940.) He had a budget of about a penny per word for fiction. "Art was something else," he remembered, continuing:

When I brought my budget to Aleck Portegal, the art director, he looked at me with compassion and disgust. Where the hell was I going to get artists to work for that kind of money? Writers, sure. Everybody knew what writers were like. But artists did a job of work for a dollar, and they wouldn't take less. That didn't worry me because I had a secret weapon. In fact, two of them. There were the fan artists, as eager as the fan writers for publication in a science-fiction magazine. And besides, my girlfriend, Doë, was an art student at Cooper Union. She had at her fingertips a whole school of striving newcomers to whom five dollars would look like a hell of a price for something they would gladly have bribed us to print. (p. 102)

Unfortunately, the art students proved "a disappointment," Pohl wrote, "and most of the fans were worse. But there were a couple who were competent, and one--Hannes Bok, whom Ray Bradbury had been touting at the World Convention not long before--who was superb." (p. 102) A few pages later, still recounting his travails as an editor strapped by a tight budget, Pohl wrote: "Hannes Bok, Doë, Dave Kyle, and others did illustrations for me, and I farmed out departments and columns to those who wanted to do them [. . .]." (pp. 110-111)

And that's it. No matter how hard I try, I can't get Frederik Pohl to say Boris Dolgov's name.

So, did Dolgov contribute to magazines edited by Pohl? Not according to ISFDb. But then I don't think we should rule out that Dolgov worked anonymously or under a different name. In any case, we know that Dolgov contributed to magazines edited by two other Futurians, Robert W. Lowndes and Donald A. Wollheim, and that these five drawings came in 1941. Three were collaborations with Hannes Bok. (3)

So again, I'm working on the idea that Boris Dolgov was born in about 1910, probably in New York City, and that he was peripherally attached to science fiction fandom in that city during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Like I said, Bok came out of fandom, too, and I wonder if that's where they met and where they decided to collaborate. But what if instead Dolgov was an art student at Cooper Union in about 1939-1940, and what if he was recruited into the science fiction field by Doë Baumgardt? Maybe a look at the student rolls from Cooper Union, if they still exist, would tell us something . . .

By the way, Doë Marie Claire Baumgardt Pohl Owens Wilson, aka Leslie Perri, was born one hundred years ago this week, on April 27, 1920. Happy Birthday, Doë!

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Pohl and Doë were married on August 31, 1940 (in a Presbyterian church of all places). See The Way the Future Was, pages 112 and following, for more on their short-lived marriage.

(2) Doë also contributed to fanzines during the 1930s and '40s.

(3) Dolgov's first illustration for Weird Tales was in the issue of September 1941. His last appeared in July 1954. In other words, after working very briefly for a couple of science fiction magazines in 1941, Dolgov found regular work with Weird Tales and stayed with it until the very end.

The Way the Future Was: A Memoir by Frederik Pohl (1978), with cover art by Joseph Lombardero (1922-2004). Ignore the -dero part: as far as anyone knows, Lombardero was not an evil, cavern-dwelling creature sprung from the imagination of Richard Sharpe Shaver.

Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Mysterious Dolgov-Part Three

One of the things about this ever-expanding Internet is that sources that were unavailable even a week ago are now suddenly here before us. I first wrote about Boris Dolgov on August 27, 2016. At the time, the only person I could find in public records by that name or anything close was Boris Dolgoff (1897-1989), a Russian-born Jewish poultry dealer in Seattle, Washington. I knew then that he wasn't our artist, but I wondered about a possible connection to Hannes Bok, who lived in Seattle for a couple of stints during the 1930s. Now, through a new search, I have a candidate for the Mysterious Dolgov, a supposition based on two and a half bits of evidence.

First, I found a death record. And after I found a death record, I found mention of Boris Dolgov's cause of death. I'll take the cause of death first.

On the website Notasdecine, the author, who seems to be anonymous, wrote in June 2009 a parenthetical statement about Dolgov's cause of death. Here it is in its entirety:

(Over the years I've heard stories from several old timers that he fell to his death by falling from the fire escape to his own apartment)

You might say the author at Notasdecine skimped on his information and sources. His sentence doesn't even end in a period. But if we accept that Dolgov fell from a fire escape; and we know that his genre credits ended in the 1950s, suggesting that something greater ended then, too; and we can guess that Dolgov was about the same age as Hannes Bok, then we can say that his death was untimely and tragic, just as Bok's own death would be in 1964.

That's half a piece of evidence. Now comes a whole piece from the Internet and posted there since I first wrote about Dolgov in 2016: a death record, from the New York, New York, Death Index, 1949-1965, states that a Boris Dolgoff, born circa 1910 (meaning, I think, that his age at his death was thought to be about forty-eight), died on November 4, 1958, in Manhattan. All of that lines up pretty well: the age is about right (Bok was born in 1914, making the presumed Dolgov four years his senior), the disappearance from genre work is about right (according to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, Dolgov's last genre illustration was in the penultimate issue of Weird Tales, July 1954), and the untimely death is right (leaving only "old timers" to remember it).

Boris Dolgov isn't in the indexes for The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom by Sam Moskowitz (1954), All Our Yesterdays: An Informal History of Science Fiction Fandom in the Forties by Harry Warner, Jr. (1969), or The Futurians: The Story of the Science Fiction "Family" of the 30's That Produced Today's Top SF Writers and Editors by Damon Knight (1977). I have only a paperback edition of The Way the Future Was: A Memoir by Frederik Pohl (1979). There isn't any index, and I came up empty in only a cursory search of the text. The Mysterious Dolgov seems to have remained mysterious even among science fiction fans, writers, artists, and editors of the 1930s and '40s. It would seem also that he was a pretty peripheral figure. If a fan-based artist of that time was remembered at all, he was the middle third of the pen name Dolbokov, i.e., Hannes Bok. All of that is a shame because Boris Dolgov was a good and interesting artist.

Now for the second whole bit of evidence: In the Manhattan City Directory of 1957, there is a listing for a Boris Dolgoff with an address of 630 East 14th Street and a telephone number of O Regn 3-8552. (I take that to mean that his number was OR3-8552, or 673-8552.) I don't know much about Manhattan (the Bronx and Staten Island, too), but it looks like that address would fall within the East Village. In reading about the East Village on that ultimate source of all knowledge, Wikipedia, I find that it was home to the Yiddish Theatre District in the early to mid twentieth century, also that it became home to poets, artists, musicians, writers, and general Beatniks during the 1950s. That second fact is pertinent when we're talking about an artist, but the first fact may be pertinent, too. The reason is that there was a Jewish performer of the 1920s through the early 1950s who shared Boris Dolgoff's last name, and so maybe we have a place of origin and a possible family member for the Mysterious Dolgov.

To be continued . . .

Copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Boris Dolgov (?-?)

Artist
Born ?
Died ?

Boris Dolgov did not exist. The man who bore that name may have existed, but there never was a man in the United States with that name until 1956, too late for Weird Tales. At least that's what public records say. Search for Boris Dolgov or Dolgoff or Dolgova or Dolkoff or any other permutation you can think of and you're likely to come up empty . . . except for a Russian-American farmer who now lies buried in a Jewish cemetery in Washington State.

It seems likely to me that Boris Dolgov was the assumed name of a man who, for whatever reason, wanted to remain or was satisfied to remain unknown. He was friends with the artist and writer Hannes Bok. They sometimes collaborated, signing their joint work "Dolbokov." Dolgov had his first interior illustration in the genres of fantasy and science fiction in Science Fiction Quarterly for Summer 1941. His first illustration for Weird Tales followed in September of that year. His last came thirteen years later, in July 1954, the penultimate issue of "The Unique Magazine." In between, Dolgov created dozens of interior illustrations and five covers for Weird Tales. His only known book cover was for Destination: Universe! by A.E. van Vogt, published in 1952. After 1954, he disappeared forever.

Like his artist friend, Hannes Bok also worked under an assumed name. Born Wayne Francis Woodard on July 2, 1914, in Kansas City, Missouri, Bok was known for his odd ways, including his evasiveness. Despite early promise, despite success as an illustrator and author of science fiction and fantasy, and despite strong connections to others in his field, Hannes Bok went into steep decline late in his career. On April 11, 1964, at age forty-nine, he died alone in his apartment in New York City. His body was not discovered right away. If not for the intervention of his friend and collector Clarence Peacock, his art may very well have been thrown out with the trash. The official cause of death is supposed to have been a heart attack. Forrest J Ackerman and Donald J. Wollheim claimed that he had starved to death. Shades of H.P. Lovecraft. Shades also of Hugh Rankin.

Hannes Bok's first work for a major magazine (what science fiction fans I think would have called a prozine) was for Weird Tales. He had his first cover and his first interior art published in the same issue, December 1939. "In 1939," wrote Frederik Pohl,

Hannes Bok was all of twenty-five years old and thus a senior citizen among us, but he looked younger. He looked--well, "elfin" is the word that others have used to describe him, and it does as well as any. It wasn't just his a matter of physical appearance. His manner was both reserved and, well, flighty, not to say downright evasive; there were obviously huge hunks of Hannes's internal life which he did not care to share even with friends. (1)

As I said, Wayne Francis Woodard, later known as Hannes Bok, was born in Kansas City, Missouri. In the censuses of 1920 and 1930, he was listed with his family in Minnesota, in 1920 in St. Paul, in 1930 in Duluth. Woodard graduated from Duluth High School in 1932. He left for Seattle that same year. In 1937 or 1938, he moved to Los Angeles, where he knew Emil Petaja, Ray Bradbury, Forrest J Ackerman, and others in the Los Angeles science fiction scene. In 1938, he returned to Seattle and worked for the WPA painting murals. His artist contacts in that city included Morris Graves (1910-2001) and Mark Tobey (1890-1976), both of whom, like Woodard, were interested in mysticism or non-traditional religion. In December 1939, assuming the name Hannes Bok, he moved again to New York City. There he knew Frederik Pohl, Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, Frank Belknap Long, and others. Knight, an artist himself, called Bok, "certainly the most talented artist ever to work in science fiction illustration." (2, 3)

Dolgov and Bok were both artists of imagination and whimsy. Both worked in black and white on coquille board. Unlike much of Bok's work, Dolgov's is devoid of sexual imagery, which, in Bok, clearly indicates to me that the artist had psychosexual problems. Boris Dolgov was, in comparison, an artist of innocence. Both knew and admired Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966). As evidence, there is a photograph of Dolgov and Parrish together, presumably at Parrish's house in Plainfield, New Hampshire, taken by Bok. You can see it at a blog called Null Entry, here. Hannes Bok was greatly influenced by Maxfield Parrish. Perhaps no other artist has worked with such great effect in the manner of Parrish. Dolgov, on the other hand, seems to have taken a different path.

Boris Dolgov is supposed to have lived in New York. You won't find him there in the census. Nor will you find there Wayne Woodard or Hannes Bok. That's a terrible development for the researcher, as finding Bok in 1940 might very well lead to Dolgov. But what if they had a connection predating their years in New York City?

Now begins the part where I clutch at straws.

Boruch Dolgoff, also known as Baruch, Bora, and Boris Dolgoff, was born on November 27, 1897, in Alexandrovik, Russia. I suspect he fled his native land because of periodic pogroms. After living in Harbin, China, Dolgoff arrived in the United States on January 23, 1916, aboard the Yokohama Maru out of Yokohama, Japan. On October 14, 1933, Dolgoff married twenty-four-year-old Minnie Samuelson in Seattle, Washington. Dolgoff (1897-1989) and his wife (1909-1991) are buried together at Herzl Memorial Park in Shoreline, Washington. For decades he was a farmer and a poultry dealer in Seattle. Hannes Bok lived in Seattle in 1932-1937 or 1938 and in 1938-1939. Could he have known Boris Dolgoff? Could he have also known in Seattle the artist later known as Boris Dolgov? And could Boris Dolgov have gotten his name from Boris Dolgoff, the poultry dealer? If so, why? More to the point, who was Boris Dolgov?

The world may never know.

Boris Dolgov's Illustrations in Weird Tales

Once again, I will refer you to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database for a full listing of Boris Dolgov's genre illustrations. Note the error in the artist who created the cover for the May 1947 issue of Weird Tales. It was actually Matt Fox.

Dolgov had two illustrations in Weird Tales for Winter 1985. These were published with Steve Rasnic Tem's story "August Freeze," but the drawings were almost certainly reprints from old issues of the magazine.

Further Reading

Boris Dolgov on the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, here.

Boris Dolgov's art in Weird Tales and a photograph of him with Maxfield Parrish on the blog Null Entry, here.

Notes

(1) From "Remembering Hannes" by Frederik Pohl in A Hannes Bok Showcase, edited by Stephen D. Korshak (Charles F. Miller, 1995), p. ix. Pohl went on in his remembrance to describe the last time he saw Hannes Bok, circa 1953. By then, Bok was living in poverty and "had become something fairly near a hermit." (p. xi) He had lost most of his teeth and had broken his dentures so that he was barely able to eat. Pohl again: "For a man who spent so much of his life producing pretty things for the rest of us to enjoy, the last stages of Hannes's life, and especially his death, were lacking in prettiness of any kind." (p. xi)

(2) From The Futurians by Damon Knight (John Day, 1977), p. 53.

(3) Woodard's family, Irving Ingalls Woodard, Carolyn Bantiz Woodard, and their son William Grant Woodard, were back in Missouri in 1940, living in Kirkwood. In the 1940s and '50s, Irving and Carolyn lived in Omaha, Nebraska. Irving I. Woodard died on November 26, 1975, in Galveston, Texas, as a result of being burned while smoking in bed. His younger son, William, preceded him in death on July 25, 1972, in Beaumont, Texas. I don't know the fate of his wife.

A gallery of covers by Boris Dolgov, first, from November 1946.

March 1947.

September 1947.

January 1948.

And last, from May 1950.

Text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Leslyn MacDonald (1904-1981)

Poet, Songwriter, Actress, Theater Director, Teacher, Science Fiction Fan
Born August 29, 1904, Boston, Massachusetts
Died April 13, 1981, Orange County or Stanislaus County, California

Leslyn M. MacDonald (also spelled, erroneously, McDonald) was born on August 29, 1904, in Boston, Massachusetts. Her father was a Canadian, her mother a Bostonian. Early in life, Leslyn moved to California with her family. That's where she lived and that's where she died. For some reason, as I write this, I sense a pall over her life. That may be just my imagination. But she was once young and beautiful. She had dreams of love and all the other things of which we dream. She wrote poetry, went to the university, acted on stage, and was married to one of the greatest of all science fiction writers. They slept together on the night they met, he proposed to her the next morning, and they remained together for a decade and a half before infidelity, heavy drinking, divorce, and other everyday dramas brought an end to it all. Leslyn remarried. Her second husband, like her father, worked in a hotel. He died in middle age. She survived but has slipped from memory. Maybe we owe her something a little better than that.

Leslyn MacDonald's father, Colin MacDonald, was born in Sidney Mines, Nova Scotia, on October 17, 1873. He came to the United States sometime around the turn of the century and was naturalized as an American citizen on May 13, 1901, in Boston. A little more than a year and a half later, on September 3, 1902, he married Florence Caroline Gleason in Worcester city or county. Born on April 8, 1883, in Westborough, Massachusetts, she was ten years his junior and had just turned eighteen.

The MacDonalds had two daughters, Leslyn, born August 29, 1904, and Keith, born September 9, 1906, both in Massachusetts. (Yes, Keith was a girl.) I don't know how long the family lived in Massachusetts or where else they might have resided, but by the time Colin MacDonald filled out his draft card in 1918 (the day after Keith's twelfth birthday), they were in Riverside, California, and he was working as a clerk at the Glenwood Hotel. Here's a news item with the heading "Laguna Beach News Budget" from the Santa Ana Register, dated June 28, 1917, showing that the MacDonald family were calling California home for at least a year and a half before that:

I had no idea what the "large Cravath cottage" might have been, but I did a search for "Cravath" and "Laguna Beach," and I feel pretty confident in saying that the reference is to professional baseball player Clifford "Gavvy" Cravath (1881-1963), who was a real estate developer in Laguna Beach. The "two children" in the article were of course Leslyn, then aged twelve, and Keith, then aged ten.

So the MacDonalds were not short on means. In 1920, they were in Riverside, where Mr. MacDonald worked as an office manager in a chemical works. That same year, Leslyn had a poem published in the Los Angeles Times and reprinted in other papers:

When "Freedom" was reprinted (in the Concordia Blade-Empire of Concordia, Kansas) on September 20, 1920, Leslyn was barely past fifteen. I'm no critic of verse, but it seems to me a work of sophistication rare for a teenaged poet.

Leslyn matriculated at the University of California, Southern Branch, later known as the University of California, Los Angeles. There she was a member of Delta Tau Mu; Kap and Bells, Dramatics; and the Manuscript Club. One of her classmates and a fellow member of Delta Tau Mu and Kap and Bells was Agnes De Mille (1905-1993). Here is a photograph of the two, side by side as in the original:

Left, Agnes De Mille (1905-1993), and, right, Leslyn MacDonald (1904-1981) in the University of California, Southern Branch, yearbook, 1926.

According to the Wikipedia biography of Agnes De Mille, she was not considered pretty enough to be an actress, so she became a dancer instead. (1) Leslyn MacDonald, on the other hand, did become an actress, if only for a little while. In August 1924, she appeared in A Midsummer Night's Dream under the direction of Madame Margarita Orlova, a play staged at Madame Orlova's beachfront Woodland theater in Laguna Beach. (2) The Santa Ana Register observed that Puck was "very prettily played by Leslyn MacDonald of Laguna Beach" (Aug. 19, 1924, p. 14), while author and screenwriter Elinor Glyn remarked, "I have seen 'The Dream' on several occasions, but I have never seen a  more charming Puck" (Santa Ana Register, Aug. 22, 1924, p. 12). For a season at least, Leslyn was a star. She later acted with the Pasadena Playhouse (1927), directed experimental theater, and worked in the music department at Columbia Pictures. (2a)

Leslyn graduated from the University of California with a degree in philosophy and a minor in drama, presumably in 1926. She took her master's degree from the University of Southern California in 1930. Again, the subject was philosophy. The enumerator of the 1930 census found Leslyn living in Los Angeles with her cousin, engineer Chester S. Beard, and his family. She was then working as a teacher in the public schools. Meanwhile, another star was on a collision course with hers. His name was Robert Anson Heinlein, and in the early 1930s, he was married, soon to be divorced, still in the U.S. Navy, but before the decade was out, ex-Navy and a published writer of science fiction. He and Leslyn were introduced in January 1932 by Heinlein's friend Cal Laning. Despite the fact that she was Laning's girl, Heinlein took her to bed that first night, then married her on March 28, 1932. There is a wedding picture of the couple, with Heinlein in his regalia and a very slight Leslyn at his side, here. Heinlein had his peculiarities: he was a nudist and a wife-swapper. Leslyn cared for neither activity. But she was an inspiration to her husband and devoted to his career and interests. Her poem "Freedom" from 1920 may very well have been a prophecy of their lives together.

Heinlein and his wife were at Denvention, the science fiction convention, in 1941. He was the guest of honor. She wore "semi-oriental dress [representing] Queen Niphar in Cabell's Figures of Earth." (3) She was with him, too, in Philadelphia, where he worked at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard during World War II. She knew Isaac Asimov. I suspect she knew the other writers of the southern California science fiction scene, writers such as Ray Bradbury, Forrest J Ackerman, Henry Kuttner, and possibly L. Ron Hubbard. Anthony Boucher cast her as Mrs. Carter in his 1942 roman à clef, Rocket to the Morgue. John W. Campbell, Jr., and his wife Doña named one of their daughters for her. Later she wrote to Frederik Pohl, "sad, wistful, lonesome letters," he called them, reminding him "over and over of the wonderful times she and Bob [Heinlein] and I and other local science-fiction writers and fans had had sitting around her kitchen table in the old days." Pohl continued:

This worried me. You see, it had never happened. I had never been in her kitchen, nor indeed had I met Leslyn anywhere else, either. The woman clearly was not in close touch with reality. I could think of nothing to do about it other than to reply to her letters as pleasantly and noncommittally--and briefly--as I could. (4)

Those letters would have come, of course, after Heinlein and Leslyn had divorced. That unhappy event occurred in 1947 after fifteen years of marriage. In 1948, Heinlein remarried. Leslyn also remarried. Her second husband was Jules G. (or Jewel G.) Mocabee, born on February 10, 1919, and a U.S. Army veteran of World War II despite weighing only 117 pounds at his enlistment. Like Heinlein, he was a native Missourian (possibly from New Madrid County). Mocabee received only a grade-school education and seems not to have been very gainfully employed. If the abbreviation "pdlr" stands for "peddler," then he was a peddler. He also worked at a place called the Morningside Inn in Stockton, California. He only made it to age forty-seven, dying on October 10, 1966, in San Joaquin County, California. That very likely left Leslyn Mocabee alone, for she seems not to have had any children, and her only sibling, her sister Keith MacDonald Hubbard, had died on August 9, 1949, in Orange County, California. Her father, Colin MacDonald, had also been gone many years, having died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1929. I don't know when her mother, Florence MacDonald--nicknamed "Skipper" by the way, and a Theosophist--died, but I have a feeling it came in the 1940s as Leslyn's marriage to Heinlein was unwinding. Sad, wistful, lonesome. And though her life ended in 1981, a pall of sadness remains, even today.

So my feeling that Leslyn MacDonald lived an unhappy life has been borne out by the research I have done for this article. Described by Heinlein's biographer William H. Patterson, Jr., as "a very slim, intense dark-brunette with medium complexion, lively and attractive, not quite five feet, one inch tall" and as "an unusual woman--astonishingly intelligent [and] widely read," she deserved better. Some sources on the Internet suggest that her drinking and her purported separation from reality contributed to her failed marriage to Robert A. Heinlein. There was a history of drinking in her family to be sure. And her mother, being a Theosophist, subscribed to some pretty kooky beliefs. Leslyn must not have had a very good start. But what kind of husband is a nudist and wants to swap wives? And what effect must those things have on a woman who devoted herself to her husband? No one knows the mysteries of another person's marriage, but let's be kind to Leslyn MacDonald and give her at least some benefit of the doubt. Instead of remembering her as the distaff side and possible cause of Heinlein's second failed marriage, let's remember her as a poet and a woman, as a thinker and a muse, as a lover and a human being, and let's remember the behind-the-scenes contribution she made to science fiction in America.

Leslyn MacDonald's Poem in Weird Tales

"The Ballad of Lalune" (May 1941)

Further Reading

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1: Learning Curve 1907-1948 by William H. Patterson, Jr. (Macmillan, 2010), here.

Notes

(1) Agnes De Mille, by the way, was the daughter of William C. De Mille, niece of Cecil B. De Mille, and granddaughter of Henry George, for whom Volney George Mathison was named (in part).

(2) Margarita (also spelled Marguerita) Orlova, was an actress and a self-proclaimed Russian princess. She was more likely just an American pretender to her title, name, and nationality. Madame Orlova later was half-owner of Sherwood Forest, an artist's colony located on the opposite coast, in Oakland, New Jersey.

(2a) Update (Apr. 8, 2021): Beginning in September 1928, Leslyn MacDonald played the half-child, half-fairy character Rautendelein in Gerhart Hauptmann's play The Sunken Bell, put on by the Pasadena Community Players at the Community Playhouse. The Los Angeles Evening Post-Record wrote that she had "created a role long to be remembered," adding: "Delicacy ran through every pattern of her acting." And: "Her art rose to superb poignancy in the tragic fourth act [. . .]." (Sept. 28, 1927, p. 6). Lloyd Nolan (1902-1985) was also in the cast.

(3) From All Our Yesterdays by Harry Warner, Jr., (Chicago: Advent, 1969), p. 103.

(4) From "The Wives (and Drives) of Robert Heinlein: Leslyn" by Frederik Pohl on his blog, The Way the Future Blogs, dated May 19, 2010, here.

Original text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Robert A.W. Lowndes (1916-1998)-Part 3

On September 18, 1938, Isaac Asimov wrote in his diary: "I attended the first meeting of the Futurians, and boy, did I have a good time." The meeting took place in "a sort of hall which is also a Communist Party headquarters at other times." In attendance were Asimov, Rudolph Castown, Jack Gillespie, Cyril Kornbluth, Walter Kubilis, Herbert Levantman, Robert W. Lowndes, John B. Michel, Frederik Pohl, Jack Rubinson, and Donald A. Wollheim. "After the meeting," Asimov wrote, "we all went down to an ice cream parlor. . . ." The young men splurged on $1.90 worth of "sodas, banana splits, and sandwiches." Every couple of weeks thereafter, the group met in various places, at Jack Gillespie's house or Dick Wilson's house. Seventeen-year-old James Blish attended the third meeting. By the end of the year, there were even women joining The Futurians in their revelry. (1)

Isaac Asimov made his first sale that fall. "On October 21, 1938," he recorded, "Amazing accepted 'Marooned Off Vesta', the third story I wrote." (2) A prodigy perhaps among prodigies, Asimov was among the first of The Futurians to become a professional. Others followed in rapid order.

Isaac Asimov (1919 or 1920-1992)--Author, editor, anthologist, chemist, teacher. First published science fiction: "Marooned Off Vesta" in Amazing Stories, Mar. 1939.

James Blish (1921-1975)--Author, critic, editor. First published science fiction: "Emergency Refueling" in Super Science Stories, Mar. 1940.

Rudolph Castown (1920-1982)--Member of The Futurians. No index entry in The Immortal Storm by Sam Moskowitz or All Our Yesterdays by Harry Warner, Jr.

Jack Gillespie (dates unknown)--Member of The Futurians and science fiction fan.

Cyril Kornbluth (1923-1958)--Author. First published science fiction: "The Rocket of 1955," in Richard Wilson's fanzine Escape (Aug. 1939).

Walter Kubilis, later Kubilius (1918-1993)--Author. First published science fiction: "Trail's End" in Stirring Science Stories, June 1941.

Herbert Levantman (dates unknown)--Member of The Futurians and science fiction fan. He is called by this name in The Futurians by Damon Knight. Sam Moskowitz called him Herman Leventman. I did not find records for a Herbert Levantman, but there was a Herman Leventmen (1920-2009), who enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942.

Robert W. Lowndes (1916-1998)--Author, poet, editor. First published science fiction: "Letter: Report on the Plutonian Ambassador" in Wonder Stories, Sept. 1935. Editor: Future Fiction (and variant titles, 1941-1960); Science Fiction (1941); Science Fiction Quarterly (1941-1958); Dynamic Science Fiction (1952-1953); Science Fiction Stories (1953-1960); Magazine of Horror (1963-1971); Famous Science Fiction (1966-1969); Startling Mystery Stories (1966-1971); Bizarre Fantasy Tales (1970-1971). (3)

John B. Michel (1917-1968)--Author, poet, editor, publisher, artist. First published science fiction: "The Menace from Mercury" with Raymond Z. Gallun in Wonder Stories Quarterly, Summer 1932. Editor of various fan magazines, including The Fantasy Amateur.

Frederik Pohl (b. 1919)--Author, poet, editor, literary agent. First published science fiction: "Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna," a poem as by Elton Andrews, in Amazing Stories, Oct. 1937. Editor: Astonishing Stories (1940-1941); Super Science Stories (1940-1941); Star Science Fiction (1958); Galaxy (1961-1968); If (1962-1969); Worlds of Tomorrow (1963-1967); International Science Fiction (1967-1968).

Jack Rubinson, aka Jack Robins (dates unknown)--Member of The Futurians and science fiction fan.

Richard "Dick" Wilson (1920-1987)--Author, editor. First published science fiction: "Murder from Mars" in Astonishing Stories, Apr. 1940.

Donald A. Wollheim (1914-1990)--Author, editor. First published science fiction: "The Man from Ariel" in Wonder Stories, Jan. 1934. Editor: Cosmic Stories (1941); Stirring Science Stories (1941-1942); Avon Fantasy Reader (1947-1952); others. (4)

Note that some of the first published science fiction by these authors was printed in magazines edited by other Futurians.

That's a long list containing a lot of information. The point is that the members of The Futurians made their mark on science fiction, some primarily as authors (Asimov, Blish, Kornbluth), others primarily as editors (Wollheim), and some as both (Lowndes, Pohl). Some were published before forming The Futurians, others shortly afterwards. In any case, by 1940, they were on their way, occupying a place as up-and-coming science fictioneers.

To be concluded . . .

Notes

(1) Quotes and other details are from The Futurians by Damon Knight, pp. 16-21.

(2) The story was published in Amazing Stories in March 1939. Quoted in The Futurians p. 19.

(3) These dates are not necessarily inclusive of all years within the dates.

(4) Most of the author's and editor's credits come from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

Text copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Robert A.W. Lowndes (1916-1998)-Part 1

Aka Doc Lowndes
Author, Essayist, Poet, Reviewer, Editor
Born September 4, 1916, Bridgeport, Connecticut
Died July 14, 1998, Newport, Rhode Island

The original Weird Tales ran for 279 issues between 1923 and 1954. Sam Moskowitz revived the magazine in 1973-1974 for four issues approaching the original format. In 1980-1981, Lin Carter edited four more issues in a series of mass-market paperbacks. I haven't covered any of the authors from Lin Carter's Weird Tales until now. Robert A.W. Lowndes is the first.

Robert Ward Lowndes was born on September 4, 1916, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His father was Harry Irving Lowndes, an electrician by trade. Lowndes' mother was, I believe, Fanny R. Stevens Lowndes. That will be my assumption here. Fanny Lowndes died in the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919. "At that point," Lowndes remembered,

my father, who was tremendously broken up, sort of disappeared; I was put in the care of various relatives, and for several years, until my father remarried, was shuttled from one to another. As a result, I never felt I belonged anywhere. (1)

In the 1920 census, Robert Lowndes was enumerated in the household of his wife's parents, Ward B. and Annie S. Stevens of Redding, Connecticut. (They had earlier lived in Stamford.) Harry I. Lowndes was then living in New York City. By 1930 the Lowndes family was back together. Harry Lowndes and his new wife, Naomi, shared their home with Robert and two of his half-siblings, Harry I. Junior and Ruth. They lived in Darien, Connecticut, throughout the 1930s.

In looking into the life of Robert A.W. Lowndes, you're faced with questions of names. Like I said, I believe Lowndes' mother was named Fanny R. Stevens. Her brother was named Robert, her father Ward. It's easy enough to assume that Robert Ward Lowndes was named after two of his mother's family members. So where did the "A" come from? According to Damon Knight, Lowndes became an Episcopalian in the 1960s and adopted the name Augustine, hence Robert A.W. Lowndes. Lowndes earned the nickname "Doc" from his friends when they learned that he had worked in a hospital, as a porter, in the late 1930s. 

Lowndes used other names as well, all in his writing, alone or in collaboration with others. His pseudonyms included (in addition to his own initials or combinations of initials and his surname): Doc Lowndes, Sir Doc Lowndes, Jacques DeForest Erman, S. D. Gottesman, Carol Grey, Carl Groener, Henry Josephs, Mallory Kent, Paul Dennis Lavond, Wilfred Owen Morley, Richard Morrison, Michael Sherman, Peter Michael Sherman, and Lawrence Woods.

Finally, I should point out that Ward (which sounds a lot like a surname used as a Christian name) and Stevens are two surnames associated with H.P. Lovecraft and his family. It makes me wonder now if Lowndes was related to Lovecraft, a writer he admired and with whom he corresponded, if only briefly.

"Damon Knight says that, as children, all we science fiction writers were toads." The quote is from Frederik Pohl (2), but note his use of the first person plural. You could argue that toadishness in science fiction writers doesn't end in childhood. Reportedly, Cyril Kornbluth didn't brush his teeth and they were in fact green. (A simple solution: brush your teeth.) Raymond Palmer was deformed in a childhood accident. According to Knight, Robert W. Lowndes was born prematurely and with a club foot. (As a child he wore a high shoe; his foot was partially corrected through surgery.) Knight continues:

Lowndes grew up awkward and ungainly, with buck teeth that embarrassed him and made his speech difficult. His arches fell when he was in high school, and it was years before he found out about arch supports. He lurched a good deal; it was not safe to walk beside him. He covered his insecurities with an affected aristocratic manner; I think he must have practiced his sneer in front of a mirror. (3)

After graduating high school, Lowndes served in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and attended Stamford Community College briefly before returning to the CCC. By the late 1930s, out on his own again, he was living in poverty, staying at the YMCA or sleeping in subways and eating by way of handouts from friends. But he was also writing science fiction stories and in contact with others who shared his interests, the group of New York science fiction fans called The Futurians.

To be continued . . .

Notes
(1) Quoted in The Futurians by Damon Knight (1977), p. 7.
(2) In The Way the Future Was (Ballantine, 1978), p. 2.
(3) From The Futurians, p. 7.

Original text copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley