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

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  The next item of fiction I tried to write, possibly in 1936, was, at last, and for the first time, science fiction. Again, it was a long-winded attempt at writing an endless novel, just like the fantasy earlier, and, indeed, just like The Greenville Chums at College five years earlier.

  I was bound to get weary of such endless, meandering efforts, and therefore, as soon as I found myself mired in literary quicksand, which sooner or later I always did, I quit. The science-fiction novel died just as my previous efforts did.

  What I now remember about my science-fiction epic is that there was a great deal of talk about the fifth dimension at the start and that later on there was some catastrophe that destroyed photosynthesis (though not on Earth, I think). I remember one sentence, and one sentence only. It was "Whole forests stood sere and brown in midsummer." Why I remember that, I don't know, but that is the earliest existing Asimovian science-fiction sentence.

  The manuscript still existed some years later. I remember looking at it once (perhaps as late as 1940) and noting that, on the whole, my vocabulary was more complex in that story than in later stories that I actually published. I was still naive enough at that time to think that this spoke poorly for the stories I published—as though I had declined in literary ability as my style had grown more direct.

  Indeed, it is rather embarrassing, as I look back on it now, to realize how little I learned about writing through careful study and intelligent consideration of what I read, and how much I made my way forward through mere intuition. Until I was a published writer, I remained completely ignorant of the fact that there were books on how to write and college-level courses on the subject that one could take.

  After I did find out these things existed, I avoided them—perhaps

  because of the ever-present memory of that horrible course in creative writing in the sixth term of high school.

  Of course, I sometimes say, quite emphatically, that it is a good thing I never took courses or read books on how to write. I say that it would have spoiled my natural style; that it would have made me observe an artificial caution; that it would have hedged me about with rules that I could not have followed without wearing myself out.

  All of that, however, is probably simple rationalization designed to resign me to things as they are.

  7

  The summer of 1935, which I spent dreading the coming of City College, was also the summer of another kind of beginning. My brother, Stanley, was going to start school.

  My father was then almost thirty-nine and my mother was just turning forty. They no longer felt young at all, and the years at the candy store had made them far more middle-aged than the years alone would have. Consequently it meant that I was the one who took Stanley to school that first day, made sure he knew the route, saw him to his class, called for him at lunch, took him back, then called for him at the end of the day.

  I think that was the only day I had to do it. Stan was always levelheaded. He knew the way just as I did when I was skipped into 1B, and managed to walk home as accurately as I did—and without crying about it.

  Of course, it is always the fate of the younger child not to have to bear the brunt of his parents' neuroses. My parents—my mother, especially—trembled over my well-being so extremely, especially after my babyhood experience with pneumonia, that I couldn't help but absorb the fear and gain an exaggerated caution for myself. (That may be why I won't fly, for instance, and why I do very little else that would involve my knowingly putting myself into peril.)

  By the time Stanley came along, however, my parents were far more complacent and indifferent to the possibilities of danger. The result is that Stan is a far more stable individual than I am. He flies, plays tennis, and in all possible ways is a normal, respectable human being.

  On the other hand, Stan claims that, as my younger brother, he has suffered untold agonies not at the hands of my parents, but at the hands of me. He says that I had a cutting tongue, that no one in the world could beat me when it came to the quick whiplash retort; that I

  had no hesitation in using it on everybody—especially on him—and that he was in a perpetual state of frustration about it. He further claims that if my mother beat me, or my father denounced me, or my sister screamed at me, I must surely have deserved it every time because each one had to get back at me in the only way they could, after being put on the rack by my "joking remarks." And finally, he insists that I insert this passage somewhere in my autobiography to counteract what he otherwise feels will be a saccharine portrait I will paint of myself. So here it is.

  Naturally, I don't remember anything of the sort and insist that Stan must be speaking of someone else, except that I do seem to recall my father saying to me, now and then, in a resigned way, "Again with the jokes?"

  I would think that I would remember more of my brother's first days at school, but the day after he started school, Huey P. Long (America's most dangerous demagogue till Joseph P. McCarthy came along) was assassinated and I lost myself in the newspapers.

  Besides, it turned out that my brother was not particularly interested in talking about school or in seeking my help. He went through his school career methodically, lacking my erratic brilliance, but getting along with his schoolmates, doing well in his studies, involving himself in extracurricular activities such as newspaper work. On the whole, if you discount that erratic brilliance I mentioned, his school career was far more successful than mine.

  At home also, he showed none of my erratic brilliance. By not engaging my parents in disputes over every point of principle, his life was quieter at home and he got his way more often (of course, he benefited by my victories, for he didn't have to fight for what I had already gained).

  The saying in our family has always been that "Isaac is the smart brother and Stanley is the good brother." It didn't mean that Stanley wasn't smart or that I wasn't good, it was just that I was smarter than I was good and Stanley was gooder than he was smart. It's perhaps a sad commentary on human nature that "good" is never sufficiently valued. It is almost traditional that the charming ne'er-do-well is more likely to be loved by his mother and to get the beautiful girl than the good and steady fellow.

  Well, it was quite clear to me that I was'always my parents' favorite. They went for the spectacular brightness and underrated Stan's goodness. The fact of the matter is, however, that everyone today loves Stan, really, including me; and I don't think everyone loves me. In fact, I think everyone swallows hard and forgives me.

  Seth Low Junior College

  It was not long after Stan's entry into the first grade that the time came for me to go to college. I had acceptances from both Seth Low and City, and I had to go to City College.

  I stayed there three days, hating every moment of it, and I remember only two things about those three days. We had a physical examination, and since I was still as skinny as a stick, I was put down as PD, where everyone else's card had WD. I asked that PD meant and I was told "poorly developed." Everyone else, obviously, was "well developed"—another punch in the solar plexus.

  The other thing I remember was that we were all given an intelligence test. I've taken intelligence tests periodically in my life and I have always done remarkably well. I am rather cynical about the value of such tests 1 but there's no question that academic people are impressed by them, and I always welcomed them. Getting a high mark in such tests made my scholastic life easier, and I welcomed that even though the feat of getting such a mark was trivial.

  I don't know the score I made in the City College examination, and I was never even sufficiently stirred by curiosity to want to know, but about a month after I took the test, I received a letter asking me to come in for further testing because I had astonished them. But by then I was no longer in City College, and I was glad they would have no opportunity to test me further. "Poorly developed" indeed!

  What happened was that on my third day at City College, a letter arrived from Seth Low Junior College. I was away at school, an
d my father, sensing something urgent, opened it, and found they were inquiring as to why I had failed to show up for registration. My father called Seth Low at once and explained that we lacked the money for tuition. The Seth Low people (I don't know who it was he spoke to) at once offered a one-hundred-dollar scholarship for the freshman year, to be repaid at our leisure, and a job with the National Youth Administration (NYA) that would net me a further fifteen dollars a month.

  1 See my essay "Thinking About Thinking" in my book The Planet That Wasn't (Doubleday, 1976).

  Together, this would nearly pay the first year's tuition, and my father could not resist this. Off I went to Seth Low Junior College after once again maintaining my position that a letter addressed to me was not to be opened by anyone else. My father shrugged that off as a trivial matter. 2

  Seth Low Junior College was located in the Boro Hall section of Brooklyn, about 4V2 miles due west of the Decatur Street candy store, and I took the subway to get there. In those days, of course, subways were clean and safe, charged five cents a trip, and were terribly crowded. If you want dirt and danger you have to pay for it, so nowadays the fare is fifty cents and no one takes the subway who can avoid it.

  I was the first person, I believe, to enter Columbia University who had been born in the 1920s, and I remember the registrar remarking on this when I gave her my birthdate. How dull that moment of registration would have been if my mother's lie had remained on the books and I had had to say I was born in 1919.

  I tried to turn over a new leaf when I went to Seth Low. I was impressed at being in college and I wanted to be a good boy and to stop being a disciplinary problem.

  I don't think I succeeded, for every once in a while the director of the junior college (I think his name was Allen), who took a personal interest in me since it was his decision that gave me the scholarship, and who was a very gentle and diplomatic soul, would meet me in the hall and talk to me. He talked about the best ways of getting along with others, how to avoid annoying others by too obvious assumptions of superiority, and so on. He did so in so general and subtle a fashion that it never occurred to me to take it personally. In fact, I wondered why he bothered to tell me all that. It wasn't till after I had left Seth Low that, thinking back on it, it suddenly occurred to me that he meant me.

  Once I received a message to come to Dr. Allen's office. I spent an uneasy few minutes trying to think what I had done. I couldn't think of a thing and went in very puzzled. Dr. Allen said nothing; he just whipped out a comb and combed my hair. That astonished me, too. I used to comb my hair at the beginning of the day in a sketchy sort of fashion, and it never occurred to me that the process required renewal at intervals during the day.

  2 In my family, and perhaps in immigrant families generally in those days, mail was so rare a phenomenon and so likely to contain bad news that the first hands to reach it opened it regardless of the minutiae concerning its addressee—and generally opened it in a state of incipient hysterics, too.

  I made a friend at Seth Low.

  This wasn't usual for me, but don't get me wrong. I made friends as anyone would, and talked to people in amicable fashion, but usually other people didn't mean very much to me. If I saw someone I knew, I would greet him, and if I didn't see him, I didn't notice.

  But by a friend, I mean someone I sought out and who sought me out, so that we were together a good deal, enjoying each other's company and conversation.

  It had happened before. In PS 202, I had made friends with a classmate named Morris Samberg, and we saw each other occasionally even out of school hours. We went on to JHS 149 and to Boys High together.

  In Boys High, we had a falling out. I don't remember the occasion, but after over a year in which we studiously ignored each other, it seemed to me that I was no longer angry and that the only reason I behaved in an unfriendly manner was because I was too proud to make the first move. It occurred to me that that was all that was stopping Morris. Well, someone had to move, so I walked to him one day and said, "I don't even remember what the argument was, Samberg. Let's be friends," and held out my hand. He was delighted to shake hands and we were friends again.

  But then, after high school, we went our separate ways.

  In Seth Low, I met Sidney Cohen, who was perhaps a year older than I was. We took our classes together, we ate lunch together, and we saw each other whenever we could outside of school. It was a good friendship and we got along very well indeed. As in all good friendships, there was a symbiotic relationship between us. I sometimes gave an impromptu lecture on the schoolwork, if Cohen happened to be shaky on some point; and he served as patient audience and as steadying influence. He was a lot like my brother—less brilliant and more sensible than I was.

  Nor was it all classwork we discussed. We talked endlessly about all the facets of life that impinged on both of us in common, and particularly on the news events of the day.

  We were great on the news events and exchanged views on them vigorously each day. We generally agreed with each other in our estimates of the situation, which caused each of us to have a high opinion of the other's sagacity. Cohen was, perhaps, more aware of Jewishness than I was, but we were both equally aware of Hitler.

  This was the closest friendship I ever made, but even here social relationships remained meager. We both commuted, we both lived in Brooklyn. He, however, lived in East New York, and we were far enough apart to make visits back and forth inconvenient. We almost never saw each other except at school, therefore. Nor did we talk on the telephone except on rare occasions, since neither of us were part of a telephone society.

  During the summers, however, we would send letters back and forth. Innocently enough, I discarded his letters after I had read them but, as it turned out, he saved mine (at least for a time). When he discovered I had not saved his, he grew angry over the matter, but not permanently so. His anger surprised me, for at that time it never occurred to me to save any letters—what good was a letter once it had been read? Nor did I prepare, let alone save, carbons of my own letters.

  3

  I remember some of my courses in Seth Low.

  I took a course in English composition, and when we were asked to write a piece of fiction, I proved I had learned nothing from my high-school experience. I wrote an incredibly long story (intended as the first chapter of an interminable book) set in Nazi Germany. I don't think the professor read all the way through it. It couldn't have taken many pages for him to come to the conclusion that it was worthless, though he didn't express himself as graphically as Mr. Newfield had.

  I also continued my German. In high school, it had been my intention to take French and Latin, and I had indeed taken two years of French. When the time came to take Latin, however, it turned out for some reason known only to the Fates that too few people were willing to sign up for Latin. There was no Latin class, and German was the only other language offered. As it happened, I was again forced into the right path. German proved simple, for my knowledge of Yiddish guided me sufficiently to lessen its horrors.

  I was never very good at foreign languages.

  Vocabulary, to be sure, never offered a problem. I picked up words with no trouble and I still know almost every French and German word I ever learned. 3 What stopped me cold was grammar, however. That remained pretty much a problem area to me. Even English grammar was a pain in the neck, though I mastered it by brute force. By the time I got to the third year in the high-school course, I was embarrassed to

  3 For that matter, I have a surprisingly large Latin and Greek vocabulary, just from my interest in English etymology.

  discover that even German, which had been so simple at the start, was beginning to overbear me with its complexities. Latin, with its cases and conjugations and subtleties outdoing even those of German, would have thrown me for an utter loss. I know, because there came a time when I obtained a Latin grammar and decided to teach myself the language and discovered almost at once that had I taken Latin as a school cou
rse, I would have hated it.

  I took a course in contemporary civilization, too, and also zoology. It was zoology that I planned to make my major.

  I was taking a "premedical course/' after all, and it was standard in such a case to take either zoology or chemistry as the major. It seemed to me that zoology was closer to medicine so, in the first year of college, I took a general course in zoology.

  It is hard to believe it as I look back on it, but I actually dissected animals in that course. We started with earthworms, frogs, and dogfish. Predictably, we got so used to dissection that we would eat our lunch in the biology lab, with the stench of formaldehyde in our nostrils and with animal fragments strewn about. As I recall, Sidney Cohen was much better at dissecting than I was. I put that down in those days to my greater squeamishness, but I eventually found out that I was poor in every laboratory course I ever took.

  My most horrifying memory of that zoology course is the dissection of a cat in the second semester. Each of us had to find a homeless alley cat, bring it in, and chloroform it. And I did it! I did it!

  To this day, when I think of chloroforming that cat, I turn physically sick—and in fact, as I type this, I feel nauseated.

  The point is, I love cats. Everyone in my family loves cats. We never had a dog when I was a child, and I, for one, dislike dogs of all varieties. (My brother, the normal one in the family, eventually got a dog.)

  When we were kids, some homeless cat would periodically adopt us and it would become our cat until at some time it would wander off or have to be given away. And when that happened we would take weeks to recover.

  And yet I killed a cat. There's almost nothing I have done that I'm more ashamed of. I could argue that it was necessary for the course; that I would have failed the course if I had refused; that it might have aborted my medical career. The answer to that is that I should have done just that. I should have refused to kill the cat, dropped the course, and aborted my medical career, if necessary. I should have realized that a career that involved killing a cat wasn't really for me.