ere, a few years late—for she died in 1997—is the book we were expecting, which is not to say that here is the book we wanted. What we wanted was the complete memoirs of Judith Merril; we wanted in, we wanted into 1945, when the world and SF were young, and small enough to look at, and so was the illustrated future. We wanted her to tell us how it was then, how it really was, how it really really was, when SF was a family.
Then we wanted to learn how Judith Merril grew up as the years passed, and the discernible futures metastasized into the poison slurry of century-end; we wanted to know how she managed to outgrow the intoxicating Seven Samurai days of 1945, how she became the great raunchy holy mother of SF in Toronto in her latter years, with her short temper, her superb laugh, her mongoose eye, her threats/promises to tell it all in the memoirs she had begun sometime in the 1980s, or maybe earlier, and that, from day to day, from year to year, swelled closer and closer (she kept saying) to completion.
What we now know—what we really knew all along, as her writer's block was famous, and had lasted for decades—was that the scattered fragments of her memoirs never neared completion, and that her various stabs at finishing off some period or other of her tempest-torn life never came together into anything like a cohesive take.
So Better to Have Loved is almost exactly the mess we knew it was going to be: a series of stabs at the early years, up to the early 1950s, small rafts of narrative, memoranda, letters, proclamations, recast interviews, short essays, to cover the remaining four decades. Merril's granddaughter, Emily Pohl-Weary, has wrestled with this seethe of stuff, and has almost certainly made as much narrative sense of it as the material will bear. But there is no point pretending that the result is a memoir. And the physical book itself, though extremely handsome, is not exactly free of errors. Some illustrations are mislabeled (Theodore Sturgeon, who died in 1985, did not appear in a 1990s photo with Judith); and although there's a photograph of her third husband Dan Sugrue on page 135, he is not mentioned anywhere in the text, despite an index reference to page 138—the "Dan" mentioned on page 138 being her first husband, Dan Zissman. And the bibliography contains some garbles (the data on Gunner Cade and Outpost Mars, her two collaborations with C.M. Kornbluth as by Cyril Judd, have miscegenated badly). So it's not a memoir, and it's not very correct.
But it is indispensable, all the same.
Remembering the mother of us all
Despite herself, she takes us back to the hot days. Hints proliferate of the big long scandalous moving fiery story of a person who did SF with heart and soul and body for nearly three decades, during a time when it was possible to love SF like loving a lover, when one's lovers (she had several) were SF. Her life—the life we want to know about—began in World War II. Dan Zissman, whom she'd just married, was in the military. She had a child. She became involved with the Futurians
in New York. She lived with Virginia Kidd. She fell in love with Theodore Sturgeon, and they seem to have lived together for about six weeks in March/April 1947. It is difficult to know exactly what happened, as a narrative hiatus (one of many) occurs here. Zissman returns and is dismissed, offstage; and we leap into the beginning of her relationship with and later marriage to Frederik Pohl, which she dates as running from 1946 to 1952. Who met who in what revolving door, the text does not depose.
But while she was with Sturgeon, she became the writer we know; her first story, "That Only a Mother" (1948 Astounding), is agented by slyboots Scott Meredith, and eventually bought by John W. Campbell, with whom Merril strikes up an instant affinity. Ian Ballantine, a few years before founding Ballantine Books, fires her from Bantam because she is a writer, so write. She dislikes James Blish and he dislikes her. She likes Phil Klass (William Tenn) and he likes her. She sleeps with stately saturnine Fritz Leiber. Kornbluth, who is Pohl's great friend and who claims to have been born clothed, objects to this. Story after story come from all of them. They quarrel, but they are tight. Two of the editors she sleeps with (they are not named) never buy a story from her, but others do. SF is full of feuds; Donald A. Wollheim, a few years before starting Ace Books, becomes litigious, and is banished, but remains part of the scene, for the feuds are intramural: only family need apply. Everything is inside. Everyone is inside everyone else. Gusts of flavor lift from the pages of Better to Have Loved. Many of us, when young, read the stories these people wrote when the stories were new. We thought they were carrying us; SF was a portage to a higher place.
Her life continues. She and Pohl divorce. She never collaborates with Kornbluth again, but Pohl does. She lives intensely, but only for a little while, with Walter M. Miller Jr. It is hard to understand exactly what happens here, perhaps because this section of the memoir—we are
entering the badlands—was not written by Merril but adapted from an interview she gave just before her death. We leap suddenly—it is a crippling hiatus—to the late 1960s. She begins to speak of herself in a spokesperson voice. Much of the rest of the book is made up of bits and pieces written long before the 1990s, some bits being from as early as 1973, and never designed to serve.
She extols Toronto, or at any rate the part of Toronto she knows, downtown Toronto, the Spadina/College quarter. (I know this quarter as well; in 1968 I left the apartment building she moved into around 1970; it was dark and funky, gave off a time-abyss odor that always reminded me, and maybe Merril too, of New York.) She becomes a dragon. I met her in 1977 (I think she thought I was useless; I think I probably was; given her frankness about sex in this book, I should perhaps say that we were
not intimate friends). We met again toward the end of her life. The house of body was becoming a slum, which she hated, almost rancorously. It is here that the memoir, as it stands, fails most radically, for we get little of the terribilita of the late Merril, the passion to continue.
In 1997, she attended a Toronto convention, her last. I was there. We were speaking. She was trapped in her wheelchair. A senior fan approached her. "Oh, Judy," he said in a nurse voice, "how good you're
looking." She stared at him. "Go away," she said. She died soon. She knew many many people. Maybe all of them still alive still miss her. I do. I want more. I wish she had written the real Better to Have Loved.
