I started writing these things in 1951, with no notion whatever that they were publishable, except perhaps, in a fanzine. (A “fanzine,” for those of you who do not dig the slang of science fiction fans, is a “little” magazine published by a fan or fans in order to get things in print which the professional magazines (“prozines”) won’t buy. Many of them are very good. Those which are not die quickly and are called “crudzines.” Back in ‘51, most of them were mimeographed or even hectographed. Today, most are offset. With the exception of a very few, payment is in free copies of the issue in which one’s work appears. Nearly every professional author has had offbeat work appear in a fanzine.)
My inspiration for this work was a New Yorker named Newman Levy. By profession, he was a lawyer, but as a hobby he constructed light verse. (And “construct” is the word! Good light verse is an engineering problem, since, unlike “serious” poetry, it should be absolutely perfect in meter, rhyme, and sense.) During the Roaring Twenties, Newman Levy turned out dozens of them, and many were, like mine, “Reviews in Verse”—although he never used that phrase that I know of.
Levy’s Opera Guyed, published by Alfred Knopf, is almost a textbook on How To Do It. So is his Theater Guyed. Many of his works are quoted and printed today (the copyright has run out) without giving the author’s name. Do you remember “Thais”?
One time in Alexandria, in wicked Alexandria,
Where nights were wild’ with revelry, and life was but a game,
There lived, so the report is, an adventuress and courtesan,
The pride of Alexandria, and Thais was her name.
Or his takeoff on W. Somerset Maugham’s “Rain,” the story of the Immor(t)al Sadie Thompson, which begins:
On the isle of Pago Pago,
Land of palm trees, rice, and sago,
Where the Chinaman and Dago
Dwell ‘mid natives dusky-hued.
Lived a dissolute and shady
Bold adventuress named Sadie;
Sadie Thompson was the lady,
And the life she lived was lewd.
And the final line is an absolute smasher!
Levy was a master of double and triple feminine rhyme, and of mosaic rhyme (“report is, an”—” courtesan”). His stuff rolls off, the tongue.
So I decided to try to do for science fiction what Newman Levy had done for opera and the theater.
One evening, at a party in New York, someone asked me to recite one of my reviews for the group. Since I am about as bashful and modest as Isaac Asimov, and for similar reasons, I acceded to the request.
There is an old one-liner: “He asked me if I like card tricks; I said no; he showed me ten.”
I think I had to be shut up with a fire extinguisher.
But sitting in that crowd was a gentleman named Robert A. W. “Doc” Lowndes, who was then editor of Original Science Fiction Stories, Future Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Quarterly.
Doc Lowndes, bless ‘im, said: “If you’ll type those up and bring them to my office, I’ll buy ‘em.”
And he did.
WARNING: IF YOU HAVE NOT READ THE ORIGINAL STORY, PLEASE DON’T READ MY VERSE FIRST. GO OUT AND BUY, BEG, OR BORROW A COPY OF THE ORIGINAL WORK AND READ IT. THEN READ THE VERSE.
AFTER ALL, WHO WANTS TO KNOW THE WHOLE PLOT OF A STORY BEFORE READING IT?