by Isaac Asimov
Finally, it was time to begin and she introduced me. I stepped to the podium, the applause started up—and may I die if she didn’t step in front of me and wave the audience to silence in order that she might direct a few last-minute stragglers to their seats. I had a strong impulse to shove her off the platform, but I resisted.
I had to start the lecture to a cold audience and was too enraged to devise any tricks to warm them up again. The talk wasn’t a flop, but it was far from a success. What a stupid woman!
One cannot speak often without developing a special clock inside oneself. When I lectured to the medical students, I routinely completed the last sentence as the closing bell rang. Of course, there was a big clock in the room that was in plain view, so I could pace myself. Even so, it was good practice and helped set the internal clock.
Routinely, before I speak, I say to the person in charge, “How long do you want me to speak?” If they give me a specific time of duration, that’s what they get, plus a question-and-answer session. If they say, “As long as you please,” they get forty-five minutes.
On May 18, 1977 (a date I remember for a reason I will explain later), I gave a commencement address at Ardmore College in suburban Philadelphia. Just before I got up, the president of the college leaned toward me and whispered, “Talk for about fifteen minutes.”
“Sure,” I said, got up, and cheerfully announced that I had been asked to talk for only fifteen minutes, so I wouldn’t keep them long. (That put the audience in a good humor at once. They hadn’t come to hear me. They had come to get their diplomas or to watch their young hopeful get one.)
After the talk, one of the graduates came to me and said that he had just happened to have a stopwatch in his pocket. He had clicked it on as soon as I mentioned the fifteen-minute limit.
“It took you fourteen minutes and thirty-six seconds,” he said, “and I never saw you looking at your wristwatch. How did you do it?”
“Long practice, my boy,” I said.
My brother, Stan, set me an even worse task later on, and left me in ignorance of it too. Newsday was inaugurating a weekly science section and, as a favor to Stan, I came down on September 13, 1984, to address an audience of potential advertisers on the importance of science.
“Speak for sixty minutes,” said Stan.
So I did—for exactly sixty minutes.
Stan was jubilant. “I told them,” he said, “that if I told you to speak for sixty minutes, you wouldn’t speak for fifty-nine or sixty-one.”
I was horrified. “Why didn’t you warn me?”
“I had faith in you,” said Stan.
I was quite annoyed. I’m good, but I’m not that good.
Incidentally, Newsday had offered me $4,000 for the talk months earlier, when it had all been arranged. For some reason, perhaps because I was doing it for Stan, I didn’t record the matter and, as it happened, by the time I gave the talk I had altogether forgotten about the promised fee.
Weeks after the talk, Newsday called me and wanted my social security number.
“Why?” said I, suspiciously.
“So we can send you a check.”
“For what?” I asked, and they had to explain.
“Oh,” I said, unable to keep my mouth shut. “I thought I was doing it for nothing.”
That evening I called Stan. “Stan,” I said, “the paper wants to pay me for the talk and I forgot all about that. If they come to you and ask if they really have to pay me since I told them I was under the impression I was speaking without a fee, please say they must pay.”
There was a short pause and then Stan said peevishly, “Why do you call me on Friday night to tell me this?”
I was surprised. “What does it matter when I tell you?”
“Because now,” said Stan, “I have to wait till Monday morning before I can tell my latest stupid-brother-Isaac story.”
But I digress—
Only twice, that I can remember, did I speak for substantially longer than sixty minutes. Once it was my fault and once it was the fault of the audience.
It was my fault on May 30, 1967, when I talked in downtown Boston. Gertrude was immobilized with rheumatoid arthritis, Robyn had a cast on her left leg because of a hairline fracture at her ankle, and David had just developed a fever—and I had to give a talk, the seventh of the month. I was so distraught I took a taxi downtown because I didn’t think I could trust myself behind the wheel of my car. Once there, I actually accepted a drink instead of turning it down as I invariably do. I thought it might deaden the anxiety, but it didn’t. I might as well have had a drink of ginger ale.
I then launched into my talk and that was my anodyne. All my troubles vanished, but I knew they would return when I was done. I was therefore reluctant to stop. The talk lasted an hour and a half before I could bring myself to a halt (and, of course, the anxiety immediately returned).
To explain the other case, I must tell you that I like the light on in the auditorium when I speak. I want to be aware of the audience. To talk into darkness makes me uneasy. Of course, being aware of my audience doesn’t mean I have to look at them. That could be distract ing, especially when a young woman in a miniskirt sits in the front row and crosses her legs. (This is so distracting that I dare not look at her, and I wonder if some of them don’t do it just to be distracting.) What I do, then, is listen to the audience. I hear the coughings, the stirring about, the sighing. It all tells me the state of those listening to me. It tells me when I ought to be funny, when I ought to be serious, when I ought to change the subject, and so on. I can’t tell you exactly which sounds go with which changes. I don’t really know in any conscious way, but something inside me knows. I do know, though, what I listen for with particular relish. It is the sound of silence.
When all the rusding stops, and my voice rings out as the only sound in the room, then I know I’ve got them and must continue on the route I am taking. I have to tell you, though, that I achieve this ultimate only rarely.
Once I was speaking to a bunch of IBM people at King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and I received the silence. Exultantly, I continued, waiting for the renewal of sound which might indicate I had better approach the end of the talk. (What I call my internal clock may be, at least in part, my unconscious reaction to audience sound.) But the silence continued and when I could bear it no longer, I looked at my watch and an hour and a half had passed. I stopped suddenly and said, rather helplessly, “I’ve been talking for an hour and a half.”
“Keep going!” came the shout from the audience, and I did, but I gave them only five minutes more.
What every speaker wants is loud and prolonged applause, of course, and I received that almost every time. Better still is a “standing ovation.” Applause by itself can be pretty automatic, but standing up takes an effort, and is something beyond applause. I love a standing ovation.
Once I discovered something even better than a standing ovation. I gave a talk at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh and it went so well and received such audience response that I considered a standing ovation a sure thing. However, when I finished, all I got was prolonged applause. Not one person stood up.
I tried to mask my disappointment, smiled, bowed, waved, and retreated into the wings to brood. The applause continued, however, and finally my introducer came to me and said, “They won’t stop. Go out there.”
I went out, grinning my face in two, and took a second bow. It was the only time that ever happened to me, but it is a treasured memory.
the editor made me insert a subplot that I disapproved of, and when I wanted to take it out prior to book publication, Brad decided he liked it and insisted that it stay. Because of this I have never liked the novel
Horace Leonard Gold
In the 1940s, virtually all my stories were sold to ASF. That made me a little uneasy. It is rather risky to be a one-magazine, one-editor writer. What if Campbell decided to retire as editor, or died; what if the magazine failed? My writing career might then c
ome to a sudden end. Who could tell whether I could sell to another editor or find another magazine outlet?
My fears were alleviated when I sold Pebble in the Sky to Doubleday. There, at least, was another, and very prestige-filled, market. Even more important in a way was the founding of two new magazines.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF) was not truly a market for me. It featured fantasy and literary writing and I was not very strong in either direction. The other magazine, Galaxy, was, however, strictly science fiction and with its very first issue it demonstrated that it was a serious contender for “best science fiction magazine.” Campbell’s absolute rule was shaken and was never to be restored to what it had been.
Galaxy asked me for a story and I wrote one called “Darwinian Poolroom.” It appeared in the October 1950 issue, its very first. It was a very weak effort, but the magazine wanted more stories. In the second issue, a stronger story appeared, which I called “Green Patches,” but the title was changed by the editor to “Misbegotten Missionary,” which I disliked.
Then Galaxy serialized my novel The Stars, Like Dust—, which the editor retitled Tyrann, something I disliked even more. What’s more, as much as I might have.
All this could not have happened at a better time, for in 1950 Campbell began to push the pseudoscience of “dianetics.” I disapproved of that so strongly that I wished to distance myself from Campbell. I did not stop selling to him, but I welcomed the chance to sell to others.
The editor of Galaxy, the one who changed titles and insisted on lousy subplots, was Horace Leonard Gold (better known as H. L. Gold). He was almost as colorful a character as Campbell himself. He was as talkative and as opinionated as Campbell, and much more likely to be bad-tempered than the invariably sunny Campbell. Gold was not a bad-looking man even though he was almost as bald as a bowling ball.
Between 1934 and 1937, he had written a number of stories under the pseudonym of Clyde Crane Campbell (a case of masking a Jewish name). Once John Campbell became editor of ASF, the Campbell pseudonym was not tenable and Horace began writing under his own name.
He served in World War II, and while I don’t know the details of what he suffered, it left him with a profound agoraphobia and xenophobia (a morbid fear of open spaces and of strange people). When I met him, he literally could not leave his apartment.
The first time I met him, we spoke in the living room of his apartment. I had no knowledge of his affliction, and he shocked me by suddenly rising and leaving the room. I thought I must have offended him somehow and I was utterly confused when his wife, Evelyn, assuring me I had not offended Horace, nevertheless asked me to leave.
I was just going out the door when the telephone rang and Evelyn, answering, said to me, “It’s for you.”
“Who knows I’m here?” I asked blankly.
But it was Horace. He couldn’t stand the company of a stranger. So he went into the bedroom, made use of a second phone, and called me. We had a long conversation, he in the bedroom, I in the living room.
The fact that he had trouble speaking to people in person made him a terror on the telephone. Once on, never off, as I soon learned.
Speaking to Horace on the telephone was an exercise in making excuses to get off: “I’m sorry, Horace, but I must go. My house is on fire.”
As nearly as I could make out, his one relaxation was a weekly poker game with his cronies. Since I don’t play poker (or any other game of chance), I never attended.
Horace was, at least potentially, an extremely good editor, but he had a fatal flaw. He was bad-tempered, and as time passed, he seemed to grow steadily more irascible. He changed titles and made unnecessary editorial alterations in the story and grew nasty when writers objected. He also grew angry when one tried to get off the telephone after an hour or two.
Worst of all was his pernicious habit of writing insulting rejection letters. To some writers, like me, any rejection at all was unsettling even when the editor (mindful of writers’ fragile egos) was careful to be polite about it. When one got a savage and destructive commentary on a story, the insult was extreme.
Thus, I had offered him a story called “Profession,” the first story I wrote on an electric typewriter. He rejected it with vile references to my laziness and my “mental bloat” and implied that I thought I could sell any piece of junk just because my name was on it. (He then asked to see other stories that I would write to better effect.) The rejection rocked me. “Profession” might not be the best story in the world, but it was certainly not the terrible hunk of tripe Horace thought it was.
I took the story to Campbell, who accepted it at once. It ran in the July 1957 ASF and was very well received by the readers.
I had occasion some time afterward to write a comic poem entitled “Rejection Slips,” with one verse for each of the three most important editors in science fiction. The second verse was meant for Horace. It goes:
Dear Ike, I was prepared
(And, boy, I really cared)
To swallow almost anything you wrote.
But, Ike, you’re just plain shot,
Your writing’s gone to pot,
There’s nothing left but hack and mental bloat.
Take back this piece of junk;
It smelled; it reeked; it stunk;
Just glancing through it once was deadly rough.
But, Ike, boy, by and by,
Just try another try.
I need some yarns and, kid, I love your stuff.
I was not the only one to suffer such indignities. Horace treated all his writers like that, and many, refusing to subject themselves to abuse, refused to send him any further stories. I myself was one of the “strikers,” though I thought I was doing it all on my own.
Horace was reduced to such straits that he was forced to publish a letter in a fan magazine which he knew was read by many writers, asking for submissions, and promising to reject politely, if rejection was necessary.
I must, however, give the devil his due. I wrote a story about a Neanderthal boy who had been brought into the present and showed it to Gold. His criticisms (carefully couched in the politest of tones) struck me as so valid that I tore up the story and wrote a completely different one (the only time I ever did that). The result was “The Ugly Little Boy,” which, as I said before, is number three on my list of my favorite stories.
Some time after this, Horace lost his job as editor and was replaced by Fred Pohl, who carried on in his usual capable manner.
Country Living
I’m a city boy, but occasionally the world forces me into the country. When I was quite little, my mother would go off for two weeks to the Catskills and take Marcia and me with her. This happened, I believe, in 1927, 1928, and 1931. This meant my father was left in the store and how he managed I don’t know.
In 1941, for some reason, it fell into my head to go on my own to the same small place in the Catskills where my mother used to take
me. I stayed a week—six days, actually, for I left a day early when Germany invaded the Soviet Union and I thought this might be the beginning of total Nazi victory.
In each case, I hated it and longed to get back to the city streets.
When I married Gertrude, we spent our week’s honeymoon in the country, and thereafter we went off most summers, for one week or sometimes two, to someplace or other. I didn’t hate this quite as much as when I was a child, but I didn’t love it.
If we met some interesting people, it wouldn’t be too bad, but you couldn’t count on that. Failing that, I simply had nothing to do, except engage in the silly activities that were de rigueur. I particularly remember being expected to play volleyball.
Once I tried to spend my time writing a story, and turned out one called “Lennie,” which eventually appeared in the January 1958 Infinity. However, Gertrude objected to my sitting indoors to write, so I took it outdoors and held the pages down with rocks.
Naturally, people asked what I was doing, and whe
n I said that I was a writer and that I was writing a story, they grew extremely hostile. Apparently, one is not supposed to be happily at work on a vacation, one is supposed to suffer at volleyball.
Only once in my years with Gertrude did we go for a vacation in the country that I really enjoyed. This was in 1950, when we went to a place called Annisquam.
For a while I thought it was just another volleyball purgatory, but then I learned that the Annisquam staff was trying to prepare a comic musical as a presentation to the guests. For the purpose they were using the music of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate and were trying to write appropriate funny words to fit the music. However, none of them, I quickly discovered, had any notion of scansion, or rhyme, or how to fit words to existing notes.
I said to them, “Each note has to have a separate syllable. You have to make sure that the meter and the rhyming are exactly similar to Cole Porter’s. You can’t improve on it.”
They stared at me blankly, and I said, “You’re working on the song ‘Wunderbar,’ aren’t you? Well, let me show you.” (That was me, educating the ignorant without being asked—but I couldn’t bear to listen to them mangling the songs.)
I thought a while, then asked for a piece of paper and wrote:
Annisquam, Annisquam
We’ve taken ocean trips
But when the sea ain’t calm
Take the train to Annisquam.
They stared at the words in bemusement and I said, impatientiy,
“Well, sing it.”
They did and were overwhelmed. The words fit the music exactly.
