An Interview with Gerald W. Page

Gerald W. Page received his first impressions of science fiction from various radio shows and comic books, such as Buck Rogers and Space Patrol on the air, and Planet comics and Captain Marvel at the newsstands. But he notes that his first really important influence from the realms of science fiction came from the Mickey Mouse story, The World of Tomorrow, which was published in the Mickey Mouse newspaper strip in 1944.

His first science fiction story, The Happy Man, was published by Analog in 1963, and after a few years in the armed forces, Gerald’s career as a writer firmly took root. Since that time, Gerald W. Page has kept himself quite busy in the field. In 1969 he, together with Bill Crawford and Jerry Burge, acquired the magazine, Coven 13, which was renamed Witchcraft and Sorcery.

In 1969, Gerald Page joined the editorial staff of TV Guide. Shortly after, he got the opportunity to edit Nameless Places, an anthology published by Arkham House, and four volumes of The Years’ Best Horror Fiction for DAW. His final anthology was Heroic Fiction, which was edited with Hank Reinhardt for DAW, as well.

At the Deep South SF Convention in 1980, Gerald Page was awarded the Rebel for his achievement in southern fandom, and in 1988, he received the Phoenix from them for his achievement as a professional.

His latest story, The Melancholy Aihai, graces this very issue as the featured story, and shows that veteran still has the ability to craft a mesmerizing tale in the vein of the golden age masters themselves.

Aberrant Dreams: What do you remember, specifically, regarding the notice from John Campbell, himself, that he wanted to publish The Happy Man?
Gerald W. Page: I remember being…the happy man; that’s what I remember. That’s not the original title, but it was the title he tacked onto it.

Originally, I sent the story to him. I was working at Sears and Roebucks my first real job, in their Accounts Payable department. I would come home every night and sit down at the typewriter, and I would write from six to seven-thirty or eight. I did the first draft in about a week, and the next week I re-wrote it.

I don’t know if you remember the plot of the story. Basically it’s a counter to what used to be called the Pohl Kornbluth plot, a plot where the A&P has taken over the world and is running things and so on, and a magnificent group of brilliant revolutionaries overthrows it. I thought there were some questions about that, and basically I just got tired of reading those stories. Now Pohl Kornbluth only wrote it once, but everybody else was writing it fifteen or twenty times a week, it seemed. There were magazines in the fifties that you would pick up, and that’s all that would be in it. It was all anybody seemed to be able to figure out how to write.

So, I thought I would just skewer this thing, pretty much in white heat. Re-wrote it the next week and mailed it off. Three months later, to the nano-second, I get back a letter from Campbell saying he liked it, but thought it needed some clarification. Could I re-write or could I add a scene to clarify a point?

I thought, yeah I can re-write this. I mailed the re-write off that afternoon. I re-wrote it, ran it up to Little Five Points to the post office that used to be up there, and put it in the mail. Three months later, to the nano-second, I got a letter from him saying that he liked the story and asking me to sign an affidavit that it was my work, which, at that time, they asked every writer to do. So, I signed it and got it off that afternoon, and I got the check quite less than three months, I might add.

Campbell said he was going to call it The Happy Man, which I felt was a much better title than the one I had given him, which I have never told anybody and never will. That was it. I felt great.

It appeared in the March issue. The thing about the March issue is that those are the shortest on-sale issues magazines have every year, because they are on sale in February. It came and it went, and I didn’t get to savor it as much as I would have enjoyed, but it was great. Almost immediately after that, I got drafted, and that sort-of put my writing career on hold. I got out of the army and started selling to Doc Lowndes and Ed Carnell.

Carnell had just left New Worlds. I remember sending him three stories and getting a letter back that all three had sold in England. That was big; that was a nice feeling. Two of them never appeared because they sold to Mike Moorcock for New Worlds and he never got around to using them…or paying for them, but Lowndes and Carnell were pretty good editors to be selling to.

Aberrant Dreams: Recently an online magazine ran an article wherein the author attempts to determine the greatest SF editors of all time. Gernsback, Campbell, and Farnsworth Wright are given little mention.
Gerald W. Page: Is Sam Merlin mentioned, because, I would definitely consider Merlin the best editor of the forties. Better than Campbell.

I think I would include all that you named. I would include Boucher; Ray Palmer, but I’m a maverick and I just enjoy Palmer’s stuff; Terry Carr, of course; and Don Wollheim. I think Derleth accomplished things no one else could have accomplished as an editor. He single handedly made the reputations of H. P. Lovecraft, and was the sole source of the traditional weird tale and the traditional ghost story for decades. Plus, I think some of those writers he published in first editions in the forties stuck around for a while, like Bradbury, Bloch, and a few others. He was just a tremendously talented person.

Those types of articles tend to be written by people who don’t know about the history of the field. It’s unfair to make judgments since I haven’t read the article, and I don’t know who wrote it, but I think there is a tendency in articles of that type I have seen over the years to flatter editors who have either bought you or to which you want to sell.

Aberrant Dreams: One of the things I came across that I thought was unusual was the pairing of your The Happy Man with The Dunwich Horror on the audio performance by the Atlanta Radio Theater Company (ARTC). How did that happen?
Gerald W. Page: They had a tape ready, and they put them together. Believe me, the point at which those tapes get prepared counts for a lot more than you might think. Mine happened to be ready, so it got selected.

I did the first Lovecraft ARTC ever did, which was The Call of Cthulhu. I would not have done if I had reread it before I agreed. Tom Fuller, the founder of ARTC who died not too long ago, called me up and said, “ARTC is going to start performing at Dragon-Con.” Previously, they had had a radio series for which I had given The Happy Man . They had performed The Happy Man on the radio, and it had been a good script for them, so they wondered if I could do the script for The Call of Cthulhu. Naturally I said, yes.

So, I put it off until finally the deadline was getting close. I pulled the story out and reread it and quickly realized it had no suitable dramatic structure for radio. If you remember the way the story is built, it is three separate incidents that only add up together when they are taken side-by-side. They’re totally unrelated; they don’t involve the same characters. The narrator finally comes across newspaper clipping describing the other two events and realizes that this all fits together. There’s really no character involved in all of that.

All of a sudden, I’ve got to figure out how to make it work. So, I just threw words at it. I added some characters that allowed me to bring in some things and to, incidentally, make use of a few actors. There are no female characters in the story, so I introduce one. I can’t remember her last name, but Joyce, an older woman, was working with ARTC, and she was just an absolutely magnificent actress, and I wanted her in there, so I created a role for her. Anyway, I sent it to them, and they respond with this long silence. Doug Kaye told me a few months ago that when they rehearsed, they cut like hell. It was the worst script I ever did; it was just awful.

Finally, Dragon-Con comes around. This is the first performance of ARTC at Dragon-Con, which has since become a regular annual event. They go in there, and this thing is performed. I just sat there, kind of excited but kind of nervous too, because I know it is not my finest hour. And, when they called me up on stage afterwards, I got a standing ovation from the crowd.

The only thing I can say is that Lovecraft is very good for his adapters, because there’s no way that script would have stood up without the force of that story. It didn’t hurt that we had a pretty good cast, either. I remember that Doug Kaye was in it. Tom Fuller. I think Bill Jackson, but I’m not sure. ARTC had a very good group. They still do.

That was the only Lovecraft they let me get close to. If I had given it to them three months earlier, they would have thrown that one away. I’m convinced that the only reason I got the story is because Tom read the story and said, “I’m not tackling this!”

Aberrant Dreams: When you were doing Witchcraft and Sorcery, did you make the call on the art for the covers?
Gerald W. Page: Jerry Burge and I worked together on that. Jerry was the art director, but I was the one with all the contacts, so I was finding all of the artists and such.

Aberrant Dreams: Is Witchcraft and Sorcery Fabian’s first sale?
Gerald W. Page: Yes, we found Fabian in the MIT Science Fiction Society fanzine, where he did very Edd Cartier-ish pieces of work, and I loved Edd Cartier. I thought Cartier was one of the great fantasy illustrators, and here was a guy that drew just like Edd Cartier. So, we hired him and he drew like Finlay. We were the first to use his work.

I’ll tell you somebody else we found in a fanzine. That was A. A. Attanasio. I forget what fanzine it was, but as I recall it had a long installment of a novel claiming to have been written decades ago by some unknown and just unearthed writer. Attanasio had a long article introducing it about the supposed writer.

I wrote Attanasio and told him that I liked it a lot, and--I had a feeling about it--if this was actually him and not as he described it, we would like to see some stuff by him. So, he sent some stuff to Witchcraft and Sorcery, but we folded before I could use it. I ended up using it in Nameless Places. The story is one of my favorites.

Aberrant Dreams: You are one of the few who have effectively posthumously collaborated with Robert E. Howard. How did that come about? Were you intimidated to be tacking your name after his?
Gerald W. Page: I kept remembering what Robert Bloch said about his collaboration with Edgar Allen Poe. He said that Poe was the most polite and easiest to get along with guy he had ever worked with. It was fun. I did several, but three got published. I wrote Glenn Lord in 1967 and suggested that Conan might have some potential as a comic book character. He seemed agreed with me, and I did comic book adaptation of Tower of the Elephant and Queen of the Black Coast. I sent them to him, and he sent them to Jimmy Warren, who was doing Creepy and Eerie at that time. I think he was already doing Vampirella at that time, as well.

Anyway, I got a letter back from Glenn saying that Warren wanted it, but he didn’t want it by me. He had a contract with Archie Goodwin to do the contents of those books and couldn’t take another writer. They sent me a check and said they were going to turn them over to Goodwin to write. These never appeared, but I understand that another company did a Conan comic later on.

I believe it was Queen of the Black Coast that really kicked of the Howard revival. It was reprinted in Avon Fantasy Reader in 1950. I’ve always insisted that that was the first Conan story, and maybe the first Howard story, that most of the post war fans saw. Skullface and Others had appeared, of course, but Skullface and Others was outrageously priced at five dollars, so there were not a lot of fans. At the time, I think Avon Fantasy Reader was equally outrageous at thirty-five cents, but I have a feeling that is where a lot of the fans, who had grown up after Howard had died, had encountered the character.

Aberrant Dreams: Another thing that has been done recently is the Manly Wade Wellman Anthology that was published by Nightshade. Didn’t you help on this project?
Gerald W. Page: I did the afterword. I have never received a copy or payment, and I have inquired to at least try to get copies. Before I did this, they sent me copies of the previous volumes to show me what they were doing, but they never sent me the one I was in. They never had that courtesy; they certainly never deemed to pay me. So, I don’t know whose fault it is, but I’m a little irked about that.

Aberrant Dreams: Whenever I think about traditional ghost stories, my thoughts immediately gravitate to British writers. Who, do you feel, are the great American ghost story writers?
Gerald W. Page: I know I’m missing the obvious, but the only two I can think of that could really send chills up my spine are Derleth and Wellman, and of course, Councilman, though I think she is underappreciated.

There are a lot of American writers that wrote ghost stories who did unconventional things, like Nelson Bond and Robert Bloch. I hesitate to put them with the others because they really weren’t ghost story writers, but when they did a ghost story…well it was a ghost story.

Hugh Cave was another writer who did that sort of thing. He did several that I know of, and in fact, a lot of his late stories were basically ghost stories.

Aberrant Dreams: Without giving any spoilers, what can you tell us about your newest story, The Melancholy Aihai? How did it come about?
Gerald W. Page: This is a story that I started…well; I don’t remember exactly how long ago that was. I had this idea, and the whole story just cropped up, the character names, everything. I immediately knew the main character’s name was Auric Soble, who, incidentally, is not exactly as I imagined him in the beginning. There’s a woman named Hesabeth, another name I believe emerged at about the same time as Soble’s. The whole story was there, and I knew it was going to be Lovecraftian.

At one point, I described it to my friend, Jerry Burge, and he said that it sounded like I was ready to write it, but for some reason, I never could. I tried a couple of times. I mean, I had every element of the story that is in it right now, but I just couldn’t figure out how to write it. Finally, I put it in outline form about two-and-a-half years ago.

At that time, I suggested to Daniel Taylor, who is one of the writers with ARTC, that maybe we could collaborate on it. We talked about the collaboration, but never went through with it. I did talk him into doing a radio play of it after publication, though.

Like I said, it is a Lovecraftian story, definitely Cthulhu mythos. Shortly before Jerry’s death, he and I started working on a series set in the future, dealing with the Lovecraftian mythos and exploring some of the interplanetary ideas that you can find in works by Lovecraft and others. What we planned to do was work up a background and we would each create the characters separately. We discussed it, and Jerry wrote out a plot of a story, introducing both of our characters. His a philologist, and mine, more or less, an adventurer.

Originally, he didn’t want his character to be a member of the same group as my character. Mine was a part of a group who were studying the Great Old Ones. So, it seemed likely there would be some conflict between the two characters, and I don’t think either of us was too happy about that, because conflict between characters in this day and age tends to be a contrivance. You see it so much in television, where it is fundamentally artificial.

We toyed with this and then suddenly we came up with another idea. A Lovecraftian Book, actually, called the Nova Text, that would have to be translated, which would require the services of an extraordinary linguist The only one we had available was Jerry’s character. Now he was a part of the group.

Before we could re-plot the story, though, Jerry died. I fought with it a few times but eventually put it aside, because it was too soon after Jerry’s death for me to write it, but now I’m thinking it is about time for me to go in there and reexamine it. I still haven’t written the new plot down, but it’s in the old head there. In fact, after I finished working on The Melancholy Aihai, I started filling out the background for this story.

Aberrant Dreams: You had stated previously that The Melancholy Aihai was inspired by Ed Hamilton.
Gerald W. Page: What I’m doing is writing Lovecraftian space opera. Ed Hamilton invented space opera with Crashing Suns, which was published by Weird Tales in August 1928. Now the significance of that is that in the August 1928 issue of Amazing, the fist installment of Skylark of Space and the first Buck Rogers story by Phil Nowlan appeared. So, that was obviously a good month for space opera. I think Hamilton invented pretty much every tradition of space opera, but he did so in Weird Tales where no science fiction fan paid the slightest bit of attention to them. All of these traditions were invented independently in the science fiction magazines shortly thereafter. Hamilton sort of got credit, but never got the credit he deserved.

Aberrant Dreams: Speaking of Hamilton, I see you have Star Kings, and I love that story. It’s probably one of my favorites.
Gerald W. Page: I just reread Star Kings and the sequel, Return to the Stars. I think Return to the Stars may be the best thing Ed Hamilton ever wrote. It is probably the best novel in any case.

After Ed got married to Leigh Brackett, they both blossomed as writers. It’s more obvious with him, because he became a tremendously better stylist, and I think you’ll find that some of those novelettes he had squirreled away in the science fiction digests in the fifties are some of the best things he ever wrote. They are not the idea driven story like he did before.

In his stories, Ed did something that I’ve never seen anybody else do, a couple of writers have come close, but no one has done it as well as he had, and that is that he could characterize a world entirely by the sky. He described the sky, and made it seem alien because it was not the sky we see from Earth. He’d put a nebula there, or some pattern of stars, or the character would just stare up at the sky and be amazed that the patterns of the stars are so different.

Leigh Brackett, on the other hand, is my favorite writer. Stark and the Star Kings is their first acknowledged collaboration. It is not their first collaboration, however. They were collaborating during the fifties and the sixties, and I think there are two chapters in Return to the Stars that that strike me as being possibly written by her.

A friend of mine, John Guidry, a long time fan who lives in New Orleans, told me he had embarrassed himself after reading…I believe it was Valley of Creation. There was a chapter in that book that he just went crazy over; he thought it was the best piece he had ever read. So, the next time he sees them at a convention, he walks up to Ed and tells him how fantastic that scene was, and how it was the best thing that Ed ever wrote. Ed replied by saying, “Actually Leigh wrote that chapter.”

Aberrant Dreams: Maybe this is just an urban myth, but I have long heard that Bradbury had met with Brackett and actually received writing lessons. Do you think there is any truth to that?
Gerald W. Page: Ray Bradbury has said that the people who taught him how to write were Leigh Brackett and Henry Kuttner, and while reading the works of Leigh Brackett and Henry Kuttner, if anyone one could learn to write, it was from them. Now, of course, Bradbury had a lot of interests outside the field, and he picked up quite a bit there, but yes, I believe there is a lot of truth to that, and I believe Bradbury has said as much.

When Leigh got the job to write The Big Sleep, which was in 1943, she was already right in the middle of doing a novel for Planet Stories called Lorelei of the Red Mists. She had finished 10,000 words of a 20,000 word story. Now, Howard Hawks, who did not know Leigh was a woman, had read one of her detective novels, and said that if he was going to have anybody successfully bring Raymond Chandler to the screen, this person would be it. So, he hired her, Jules Furthman, and William Faulkner. Incidentally, the story has it that Bogart would take Faulkner’s pages and hand them to her to rewrite them into something he could say.

Anyway, she had to start work on that--she wasn’t going to turn it down. Well, she was working for Hawks and with William Faulkner and was being paid pretty well versus a penny per word from Planet stories, so it was an easy choice. She took that story to Ray Bradbury in complete faith, and he rewrites it. In the afterword for the Planet anthology that she did, Leigh identifies the exact sentence that Bradbury started on. The last half of that story is pure Bradbury, but the transition is so smooth, and you get two geniuses of different sorts working together magnificently.

Aberrant Dreams: Well, Mr. Page, we certainly have enjoyed meeting and speaking with today. Thank you for this opportunity.
Gerald W. Page: Hey, no problem; it was fun. I’m always looking for a place to which to sell Lovecraftian horror, and I wish you the best.

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