In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  It worked for a while, but after that while, teachers refused to accept pleas of innocence, no matter what. I'd get kicked out of class. 4 I'll give you my favorite example.

  In English we were studying Abou Ben Adhem by Leigh Hunt, which is sufficiently short so that I can quote it in full here in the unlikely case that you've never seen it or have forgotten it:

  4 And I deserved it. I was a smart-alecky teen-ager, but I've learned better since. Mostly. Sometimes I forget.

  Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)

  Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,

  And saw, within the moonlight in his room,

  Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,

  An angel writing in a book of gold:—

  Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,

  And to the Presence in the room he said, "What writest thou?"—The vision raised its head,

  And with a look made of all sweet accord,

  Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord." "And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"

  Replied the Angel. Abou spoke more low,

  But cheerly still; and said, "I pray thee, then,

  Write me as one that loves his fellow men."

  The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night

  It came again with a great wakening light,

  And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,

  And lot Ben Adhem s name led all the rest.

  It seems to me that no one who had studied the psychology of English teachers (and their pupils must do so if they are to survive) could fail to see what the first question would be. I didn't fail to see it, and I was prepared.

  Our teacher said, "Now, class, why did Abou Ben Adhem's name lead all the rest?"

  My hand shot up. He said, "Yes, Asimov?"

  And I said, with a polite note of uncertainty, "Alphabetical order, sir?"

  The class roared and I placed an astonished look on my face, and the teacher lifted his arm and pointed to the door.

  I got up. "But what else could it be, sir?"

  "Just report to the principal's office," he said.

  Oh well.

  None of this ever hurt me scholastically, though it may possibly have contributed to my not making Arista.

  What did hurt me scholastically was a particularly unpleasant discovery I made in high school. Until then, all scholastic subjects had been the same. Whatever schoolbook we opened—history, geography, arithmetic, grammar—it was all interesting, it was all fun, and, most of all, it was all easy.

  I suppose I could be excused for thinking that this was a universal law of nature. Then, in high school, I found that one of my classes was

  on economics, and I found, further, to my deep surprise, that I hated economics. I'll tell you something worse: I found to my deep embarrassment that I didn't understand economics and that nothing my teacher could say would help.

  I don't know whether I hated it because I didn't understand it, or refused to understand it because I hated it. I would like to say that it was because I had a bad teacher and for that reason both hated and couldn't understand it. That, however, isn't so. I had had lots of bad teachers and they had never stopped me from loving and understanding a subject—but to this day I find economics both a bore and a mystery.

  My dream of universal brilliance was shattered, and not by that only. As time went on, I found that there were subjects upon subjects that proved to be hate objects to me and that were therefore foggy and impenetrable to me (or vice versa).

  If you think I knuckled down and forced them into my head by sheer perseverance, you're crazy. There were too many subjects I liked and caught at once for me to waste time with these cultural villains. I just let economics go, as I let other things go later on, convinced that they were not for me and that my failure to understand them was Nature's way of telling me so.

  A good thing! Without even knowing, I was being forced down the path that, if I had had the brains I thought I had, I would have taken deliberately.

  11

  I got one kick in the pants that nearly ruined me, however.

  In February 1934, i us ^ a wee ^ or so before that day of record cold, I entered sixth term.

  As a startling innovation, the school offered a special course in creative writing for those who chose to take it, and I jumped at the chance. I had been writing, on and off, ever since I had worked on The Greenville Chums. I don't remember any of the details at all, except that I remember being occasionally driven to attempt to write poetry.

  What's more, in class, I always eagerly grabbed at any opportunity to write something for the English teacher—essays, fiction, whatever— and I usually got high marks. Then there had been the weekly reports I had written at Waverly Annex.

  Now at last there seemed a chance for me to demonstrate my literary prowess, for I saw the class only as a chance to shine. It never occurred to me that I might learn something. I felt I already knew how to write.

  Shine? I don't think I ever voluntarily put myself into a position to

  make such a prize jackass of myself. The whole thing was an utter fiasco.

  There I was, fourteen years old, with not even the experience of life one might expect of an average fourteen-year-old, because I had been hidden away in my father's candy store. What's more, I had no knowledge of contemporary literature at all because I had received no guidance, and my self-driven library reading had consisted almost entirely of nineteenth-century fiction.

  Everyone else in the class was, however, fifteen or sixteen years old and terribly intellectual in the literary sense. I was outclassed.

  I remember that one of my first tasks was to write a descriptive essay, and I determined to describe a beautiful spring day. It might have been a good idea if I had described spring in Brooklyn and talked about windows being opened and rugs being shaken out of them; of the cheery laughter of children as they killed each other over a dispute in a game of punchball.

  I was entirely too stupid to do that. I decided to describe a spring day in some never-never pastoral land full of larks and daisies. What's more, as though that were not enough, I fatuously raised my hand as a volunteer when the teacher (Mr. Newfield, his name was, I think) asked for someone to read what he had written.

  I had not read more than two paragraphs before Mr. Newfield could endure no more. "This is shit!" he said, sending me back to my seat.

  Everyone laughed, of course, and I was stricken to the heart. It was worse than spelling "weigh" W-I-E-G-H. I was acquainted with the monosyllabic word for feces, had heard it often, and had occasionally used it myself, but I had never heard a teacher use it in class before. I had the feeling that if the principal found out about it, Mr. Newfield would be fired (and I rather suspect, as I look back on it now, that he would have been reprimanded, at least) and that only the most intense emotional misery could have forced that word out of him.

  I never wrote anything in that class that anyone seemed to take seriously or that anyone seemed to find the slightest hint of talent in.

  I never came closer in my life to giving up; to deciding I really didn't have it after all; that I had been a temporary prodigy; that I had burned out and, having been a rising rocket, would now have to settle down to being an endlessly falling stick.

  And yet, thank goodness, I didn't give up entirely. I may have turned away from mathematics and from economics at the first hint of difficulty, and would do so for other subjects yet untried—but I was unable to give up on writing altogether.

  I was helped out by a final stroke of luck in the class.

  We were finally given our major assignment, the writing of anything we chose—essays, fiction, poetry—for submission to the Boys High Recorder, the school's literary semi-annual. In fact, I suspect the entire purpose of the creative writing class was to squeeze out material for the Recorder. After all, it is very difficult to get anything written by a high-school student that wouldn't make duller reading than the bl
ank page would.

  Naturally, everyone in the class submitted a piece. They had to. Not to do so would be the equivalent of getting a zero in the final examination. So I wrote something and submitted it too.

  What I wrote was an essay entitled "Little Brothers," 5 which was my attempt to do a humorous essay as nearly after the style of Robert Benchley (an idol of mine) as I could manage. I doubt that anyone in the world (even I myself, after I grew a few years older) could find in that essay any hint of Benchley or, for that matter, any hint of successful humor, but it was intended to be humorous, and there is even a chance that a fourteen-year-old reader who, like myself, had led a sheltered life, might find it humorous.

  Everyone else in the class wrote pieces that were marinated in Weltschmerz and sprinkled thickly with crumbs of heartbreak, then frozen in a sauce of iced pessimism. In the first place, there had been now four years of world Depression, and pessimism seemed the only possible way of looking at life. Second, these deep heart-wrung sighs seemed like great literature to them. (It might have seemed so to me, had I read contemporary literature myself.)

  Some of the pieces were accepted, of course. After all, the Recorder had to be filled somehow. Among the pieces was mine!

  "Little Brothers" was my first acceptance. It was a nonprofessional acceptance and it involved no money, but except for those little pieces about Waverly Annex, it was the first thing I had written ever to see print. It is the earliest of my writings ever to have survived to this day.

  Mr. Newfield was not a tactful man. When I expressed my surprise and pleasure at having turned out a masterpiece fit to appear in a periodical with the exalted standards of the Recorder , he said, "It was the only thing anyone submitted that was supposed to be funny, and I had to have something funny."

  5 Since I take this book seriously as a sort of "reference guide to Asimov" I am going to footnote each piece of fiction I refer to and tell you where to find it, if you wish to read it. Needless to say, you don't have to read it. In the case of "Little Brothers" you will find it in Before the Golden Age (Doubleday, 1974) on page 454 of the hard-cover edition. I give the page number only because the item is not listed in the Contents.

  It was rather like winning a ball game merely because the other team didn't show up, but, as Charlie Brown of "Peanuts" would have done under those circumstances, I rejoiced anyway. I considered myself on a one-game winning streak and the whole course became worthwhile.

  I suppose that everyone who has ever become a success in his own eyes sometimes falls prey to the temptation to wish he could show off to the people in the old hometown, or to the friends of his youth, or to someone in the past who didn't recognize his potential and cry out, "See! You were wrong! Nyah, nyah!" That sort of thing.

  I never felt such a temptation at all. I should hope I am above such things; that I am too fine, too noble a fellow. And so I am—with one exception.

  For years, I wished that I could somehow transport my older self into that rotten creative writing class and say, "Now what do you think?"

  What spoiled that thought was the sneaking suspicion that there might have been half a dozen youngsters in that class who made it lit-erarily, who became great writers, who were much greater and more respected than myself. I didn't remember any names, and it was perhaps better not to know.

  As it happened, I didn't keep my copy of the Recorder; or, if I did keep it, I lost it somehow. So I couldn't tell how many geniuses had sat in that class with me, and I remained in uneasy uncertainty for decades. When the time came that a copy came into my possession (one that I still possess), I forced myself to look at the Contents page.

  I went down the list and not one name was familiar to me. Not one! Except my own, of course! I am now quite certain that I am the only person who was in that creative writing class who went on to become a professional writer and a successful one.

  What a relief!

  Entering College

  On January 2, 1935, I turned fifteen. By that time, I had reached a height of five feet, nine inches in my shoes (or perhaps a quarter inch less as yet) and was able to look my father right in the eye. I confidently expected to grow to be taller than he was, but I was wrong. As it turned out, somewhat to my discomfiture, that was it. I got that quarter inch but no more. To this day, I am but five feet, nine inches in height—average for the American male.

  I was extremely skinny and probably weighed no more than 125 pounds. For years I remained skinny, though I slowly gained.

  At fifteen, I began to shave (only twice a week at first), and I was also in the full flower of my acne. The pimples started coming shortly after I was twelve, heralding the arrival of puberty along with the cracking voice and so on. I had been a really good boy soprano and I regretted letting that go, but since I became a pretty good baritone (and even a tenor if I wanted to tighten my vocal cords a bit) I was consola-ble in that respect.

  The coming of acne was something, however, I could have done without. It got worse and worse as the years passed, reaching its peak in my late teens and not vanishing till I was over twenty. It left its marks. If you look closely, you can see the pockmarks on my cheeks and temples.

  It might have left more serious psychic scars if I had been involved with girls in my late-teen years, as I ought to have been. Unfortunately (or, rather, fortunately), the stress of school and the candy store left me no time for girls during my acne years. Except for my utterly pla-tonic conversations with Mazie, there was nothing.

  What did occupy me in the early part of 1935 was the approaching end of high school. I was going to be graduating in June and there was no question but that I would have to start college in September. The question was: Which college?

  To begin with, the college would have to be in New York City, for I would have to commute. For the sake of the candy store, I had to be home evenings and weekends, college or no college.

  If we confined ourselves to New York City, the obvious choice was City College. It had two great advantages. First, it was tuition-free. Second, anyone living in the city could enter without question if his grades were good enough—and my grades were good enough. My entrance into City College was therefore assured, so when the time came I applied and was accepted.

  But— and this was a big "but"—City College had a student body that was largely Jewish and largely radicalized by the increasing menace of Hitler. It was well known that medical schools hardly ever accepted a graduate of City College—and I was intent on medical school (at least my father was intent on it on my behalf).

  On the other hand, the most prestigious college in New York City, and therefore the most prestigious one to which I could commute, was Columbia College, and it was equally well known that graduates of Columbia College were kindly looked upon by medical schools. One might even get into Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, which was, to a medical student, something like playing the Palace was to a vaudevillian.

  The difficulties were that it wasn't likely that Columbia College would accept me, and if they did, it wasn't likely that my father could muster up the tuition money. However, time enough to worry about that when and if we had to. The first step was to apply to Columbia College. There was very little charge for a mere application, and we would see what would happen.

  I sent in my application, and at least Columbia didn't reject me out of hand. They were willing to grant me an interview. (Grades were fine, but they weren't enough. A Columbia student must be a gentleman, and I imagine the prime purpose of the interview was to see if I were too Jewish to give at least the appearance of a gentleman.)

  The date fixed for the interview was April 10, 1935, one of the few exact dates I remember for the period before I was eighteen.

  At that time, I had never gone to Manhattan alone. In fact, the only times I had ever left Brooklyn, after arriving in the United States twelve years before, were to go to Parksville in 1927 and 1928 (and, in 1931, too, when Stanley, two years old, accompanied us). L
ess extended trips occasionally took me, with the rest of the family, to Radio City Music Hall on some Jewish holiday and, of course, to the Statue of Liberty six years before. Then there were occasional forays a few blocks

  into Queens to go to a local library or to the farther end of the Cemetery of the Evergreens.

  Except for that, Brooklyn and the universe were coterminous for me.

  My father, I think, had visions of my ruining my chance of getting into Columbia by getting lost in the confusing subway system and of arriving late for the interview—or not arriving at all. He therefore actually abandoned the store to my mother and came with me. Naturally, once at Columbia, he waited outside the building I was supposed to enter because he didn't want to ruin my chances by having me appear to be a baby who could not be trusted to travel on his own.

  He might have saved himself the trouble. I ruined my chances entirely on my own. I made a very poor impression. I was bound to. I don't think that I ever made a good first impression on anyone in my life until such time as my name had become independently impressive. After that, of course, there came to be no such thing as a first impression. People saw me through the haze of my reputation and thought me far better than they would possibly have thought me if they had encountered me under some other name.

  The trouble is, and always has been, that at any first interview, I am too eager, too talkative, too nervous, too lacking in poise and self-assurance, too obviously immature—even now. And in my teen-age years, there was, to add to it all, my acne. It is no great crime or dishonor to be pimply, but it is no great advantage either, and it doesn't improve the impression you make.

  All in all, then, the poor man who had to face me and decide if I were Columbia material must have been dreadfully disappointed. I simply didn't match my transcript, and that was all. It was probably the poorest match he had seen in years, and he must have decided on the spot that I wasn't for Columbia College. I have never held that against him (whoever he was, for I don't remember), for it was the only decision he could possibly have made.