Fritz Leiber: The Sinful Ones

So there I was safely launched on a third novel! I swiftly finished four chapters and as I’d profitably done with my first two books, I sent them off to Campbell in New York City (I was in Santa Monica Canyon, California) for his approval an suggestions.

His reply devastated me. Unknown, now Unknown Worlds, was ceasing publication because of the paper shortage. He’d be taking no more supernatural stories or novels. And that essentially meant, in the publishing world of those days, there was no market for my new novel anywhere. Astounding Stories took only science fiction. Weird Tales bough no novels or serials and had been picky about even my shorter offerings. Book publication?—a pulp writer never thought of that, and as a matter of fact, few publishers wanted supernatural tales them, while paperbacks as we know them did not exist.

That was the first bad-luck stroke and probably the shrewdest. If only the news of Unknown ’s demise had held off for as little as two months! Then I’d have had the book finished and whatever happened then, the material would have been skimmed off my roiling unconscious and that part of me fresh and clean again.

I should have finished the book anyhow, but time and courage had run out on me. I abandoned it and collapsed into a precision inspector’s berth at Douglas Aircraft, Santa Monica plant, continuing to write short stories and poetry at a much-reduced rate.

After the war, and still feeling very keenly the literary defeat the way had finally handed me, I got out the four chapters, wondering what to do with them. A fantasy-writer friend read them carefully and agreed with me that hardcover book publication was the best thing to aim for, especially since the situation had improved a little there. William Sloane, whose brilliant supernatural novels To Walk the Night and The Edge of Running Water had had considerable success, had launched a new publishing house which would favor that genre.

So for the next four years, while working full time as associate editor of Science Digest Magazine and turning out a few science fiction and horror short stories, writing slowly and carefully I tinkered my third novel into a full 75,000-word existence.

But meanwhile, William Sloane Associates had struck out with Ward Moore’s Greener Than You Think and Fletcher Pratt’s The Well of the Unicorn (though both of these novels eventually achieved enviable reputations) and that was the end of their favoring fantasy. I started my own novel on the slow rounds of the other hardcover publishers, enduring rejection after rejection.

My own urge to write more fiction, however, though unstimulated by any more easy successes, was becoming stronger and more imperative all the time. I wrote more and more, engaged my first agent, Frederick Pohl, who suggested I submit the book to Howard Brown and Bill Hamling at Fantastic Adventures magazine. I did, and they said they’d take it if I’d cut it to 40,000 words.

I did better than that. In my imagination I went back to 1943, the feelings I’d had then, forget the longer version, and completed You’re All Alone just as I’d been planning to do it, so far as I could judge, for Campbell and Unknown. I was thrilled to see it at last in a magazine.

But that still left the larger version going the slow hardcover rounds. It seemed a pity that so much at-least painstaking work should blush unseen, so when Fred uncovered a possible publisher, I was favorably inclined from the start. Universal Publishers and Distributors were issuing a series of paperback doubles (two novels by different authors bound together) rather like the Ace ones. When they’d heard I had a longer version of You’re All Alone, they’d pricked up their ears. So off I sent it to them. When they offered me a $500 advance I jumped at it, incidentally signing incautiously a contract without a revision of rights clause.

When it came out in 1953, I discovered that, without consulting me, they’d changed the title to The Sinful Ones, inserted a set of more or less sexy chapter titles, and teamed it with a short novel about a lady bull-fighter called Blood, Bulls, and Passion. Examining it a little more closely, I found that they’d sexed up two or three of my love scenes in the extremely “soft porn” style and language of the 1950s.

One shouldn’t envy the writers who must work in a period of slowly decreasing and liberalizing censorship. Much better, artistically speaking, to turn out books when there’s strict and unchanging censorship or none at all, I’ve been one and I know.

In such transition periods, you see, each writer, if he tries to handle sex at all, is trying to go a little further than he (or the others) did last time, with the result that many “partway” expressions and metaphors are used, ones that only a few years later begin to seem strange, grotesque, even ludicrous.

One of the finest and most moving novels I’ve ever read is Richard Aldington’s All Men are Enemies, but turn to the few overt sex scenes (especially the one where the lovers go skinny-dipping) and you’ll see how there his language becomes…well, I can only say “mighty strange.” (One of the best ways of handling it is to make elaborate “fool the censor” jokes of it, as James Branch Cabell did, but that often isn’t appropriate in other ways.)

Often it becomes a literally word-by-word battle. When Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man first appeared, the thing I remember people whispering to each other was that it had the word “erection” in it used in its sexual sense. Very oddly, that word no longer appears in new editions of the book, at least the paperback ones. Maybe it sounded too literary to someone, too medical.

Well, anyhow, the contract I’d signed on The Sinful Ones had no author’s approval for changes clause in it either, so there was nothing I could do about that.

The scene shifts forward about fifteen years to when the paperback publisher, Ace, wanted to bring out the shortish You’re All Alone as a paperback book, beefed up in length with two of my novelettes, “Four Ghosts in Hamlet” and “The Creature from Cleveland Depths.” Perhaps overconscientiously, I thought we ought to have Universal Publishers’ permission. They dithered over that for years, although there was never a hint even of reprinting the Blood, Bulls, and Passion combo. Eventually I regained rights to The Sinful Ones by paying them $500, the exact total I’d got from them in the first place.

Do you wonder that I call my two-head third novel “ill-starred?” Why, even that phrase is too damn good, too poetic, for what happened to that book!

And now The Sinful Ones is coming out once more, all by itself this time. I reexamined the book, still more carefully this time. I once had a carbon copy of my original manuscript, but it got lost about seven years ago and I had to work from the paperbook text. I had no copy, for example, of my original love scenes and I was unable to reconstruct them from memory.

I decided along with my publisher, that the book title and the chapter titles too should stay as they were in the Universal edition. After all, they’d been there for twenty-seven years and they helped identify the book for someone who had seen it in its first form.

In editing the text, I chiefly confined myself to correcting mistakes and confusions that had been introduced during Universal’s editings and splicings of the book. And some of those, in all justice, may have been confusions and mistakes in my original manuscript.

But I couldn’t leave the sex scenes untouched—they were just too silly and dated, too 1953 soft port. So I reworked those, writing as I would today, working without the old censorship, yet trying to keep the behavior true to the characters as I’d first conceived them.