And, at about the same time, I discovered the Oz books. It seemed like a small matter, my utter avidity to read each and every Oz book. Librarians haughtily told me that they “did not stock such fantastic material,” their reasoning being that books of fantasy led a child into a dreamworld and made it difficult for him to adjust properly to the “real” world. But my interest in the Oz books was, in point of fact, the beginning of my love for fantasy, and, by extension, science fiction.
I was twelve when I read my first SF magazine. . . it was called Stirring Science Stories and ran, I think, four issues. The editor was Don Wollheim, who later on (1954) bought my first novel. . . and many since. I came across the magazine quite by accident; I was actually looking for Popular Science. I was most amazed. Stories about science? At once I recognized the magic which I had found, in earlier times, in the Oz books — this magic now coupled not with magic wands but with science, and set in the future, where, as we all know, science will play more and more of a role in our lives. Such has come about, but I am not too happy about that. In any case my view became magic equals science. . . and science (of the future) equals magic. I have still not lost that view, and our idea then (I was twelve, remember) that science would prove to play a greater part in our lives — well, we were right, for better or worse. I, for one, bet on science as helping us. I have yet to see how it fundamentally endangers us, even with the H-bomb lurking about. Science has given more lives than it has taken; we must remember that.
In high school I held a little job in a record and radio store, sweeping and cleaning, but never, oh never, talking to the customers. Now here my longtime love of music rose to the surface, and I began to study and grasp huge areas of the map of music; by fourteen I could recognize virtually any symphony or opera, identify any classical tune hummed or whistled at me. And, through this, I was promoted to Record Clerk, First Class. Music — and phonograph records — became my life; I planned to make it my whole future. I would advance up the ladder, step by step, and eventually I would manage a record store and then at last I would own one. I forgot about SF; in fact, I no longer even read it. Like the radio serial Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy! SF fell into place as an interest of childhood. But I still liked to write, so I wrote little literary bits which I hoped to sell to The New Yorker (I never did). Meanwhile I gorged myself on modern classics of literature: Proust and Pound, Kafka and Dos Passos, Pascal — but now we’re getting into the older literature, and my list could go on forever. Let us say simply that I gained a working knowledge of literature from The Anabasis to Ulysses. I was not educated on SF but on well-recognized serious writing by authors all over the world.
I came back to SF — and ultimately SF writing — in an odd way. Anthony Boucher, the most dearly loved and equally important person in SF, had a program of vocal music on a local radio station, and due to my interest in classical music I listened to the program. I got to meet him — he came to the record store in which I worked — and we had a long talk. I discovered that a person could be not only mature, but mature and educated, and still enjoy SF. Tony Boucher had entered my life, and by doing so, had determined its whole basic direction.
Tony had a weekly class on writing, which he conducted in his home. I decided to go, and Tony dutifully read my painful first efforts. The literary ones he did not respond to, but to my surprise he seemed quite taken with a short fantasy, which I had done; he seemed to be weighing it in almost terms of economic worth. This caused me to begin writing more and more fantasy stories, and then SF. In October of 1951, when I was twenty-one years old [Dick is mistaken here; he was twenty-two], I sold my first story: a tiny fantasy to F&SF, the magazine that Tony Boucher edited. I began to mail off stories to other SF magazines, and lo and behold, Planet Stories bought a short story of mine. In a blaze of Faust-like fire I abruptly quit my job at the record shop, forgot my career in records, and began to write all the time (how I did it I don’t yet know; I worked until four each morning). Within the month after quitting my job I made a sale to Astounding (now called Analog) and Galaxy. They paid very well, and I knew then that I would never give up trying to build my life around a science fiction career.
In 1953 I sold stories to fifteen different magazines; in one month, June, I had stories in seven magazines on the stands at once. I turned out story after story, and they were all bought. And yet —
With only a few exceptions, my magazine-length stories were second-rate. Standards were low in the early ’50s. I did not know many technical skills in writing that are essential. . . the viewpoint problem, for example. Yet, I was selling; I was making a good living, and at the 1954 Science Fiction World Convention, I was very readily recognized and singled out. . . I recall someone taking a photograph of A. E. Van Vogt and me and someone saying, “The old and the new.” But what a miserable excuse for “the new”! And how much the field was losing by Van Vogt’s leaving it!
I knew that I was in serious trouble. For example, Van Vogt, in such works as The World of Null A, wrote novels; I did not. Maybe that was it; maybe I should try an SF novel.
For months I prepared carefully. I assembled characters and plots, several plots all woven together, and then wrote everything into the book that I could think up. It was bought by Don Wollheim at Ace Books and titled Solar Lottery. Tony Boucher reviewed it well in the New York Herald Tribune; the review in Analog was favorable, and in Infinity, Damon Knight devoted his entire column to it — and all in praise.
Standing there at that point I did some deep thinking. It seemed to me that magazine-length writing was going downhill — and not paying very much. You might get $20 for a story and $4,000 for a novel. So I decided to bet everything on the novel; I wrote The World Jones Made, and later on, The Man Who Japed. And then a novel that seemed to be a genuine breakthrough for me: Eye in the Sky. Tony gave it the Best Novel of the Year rating, and in another magazine, Venture, Ted Sturgeon called it “the kind of small trickle of good sf which justifies reading all the worthless stuff.” Well, I had been right. I was a better novel writer than a short-story writer. Money had nothing to do with it; I liked writing novels and they went over well.
But then, at that point, my private life began to become violent and mixed up. My marriage of eight years broke up; I moved out into the country, met an artistically inclined woman who had just lost her husband. We met in October and the next April we had gotten married in Ensenada, Mexico. I had her and three girls to take care of, and for two years I was unable to produce anything except hack work. At last I gave up and went to work for my wife, in her jewelry business. I was miserable. As a child the misery had come from outside in the form of no money, no heat, no place to live; with Anne I could not fulfill myself because her own creative drive was so strong that she often declared that my creative work “got in her way.” Even in the jewelry making I merely polished pieces that she designed. My sense of self-worth began to flag, so I hitched myself to the priest of our times, the psychologist-psychiatrist, and asked his advice. “Go home,” he said, “and forget the jewelry business. Forget that you have a five-bedroom, three-bathroom house, with three girls to raise — and a fourth coming. Go home, sit down at your typewriter; forget income taxes, even How to Make Money. And simply write a good book, a book you really believe in. You can stop fixing breakfast for the kids and assisting your wife in her welding. Write a book.”