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

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  One of my chief difficulties in life is an overproficiency at the game of verbal lunge-and-riposte. Fm quick with a cutting answer and short on judgment. All through school it had caused me problems. It did nothing to endear me to my fellows, and, on occasion, it exasperated my teachers.

  With most teachers it wasn't too bad (although I'd been kicked out of class for impertinence as late as my sophomore year in college), but every once in a while I would get a teacher who baited his students. It's not a very sporting thing for a teacher to do since the students are in a bad position and must suffer more or less in silence lest their marks suffer. And that would have been exactly what I would have done if I had known how.

  Elderfield was a baiter, and the first time he baited me, I re-

  sponded in kind, and at once. I don't remember the actual give-and-take, but from then on, Elderfield marked me as his quarry and no lecture passed without an exchange between us. It wasn't that I didn't have my full share of cowardice, or that I didn't understand my own peculiarly shaky position as a probationary student. It was just that, given my choice between saving my career and answering back, I answered back every time. That sort of thing always made trouble for me.

  The lectures in synthetic organic were, however, only a minor adjunct to the laboratory course connected with it. That laboratory, together with physical chemistry, which I was desperately trying to understand, took up most of my time.

  On October 7, 1939, I took the first half of a general test of knowledge in various fields, one that lasted two hours and twenty minutes. On October 14, I took the second half. I thought of it at the time as an "intelligence test." Whether it was or not, I don't know.

  On December 9, we were given the results. This is the first test of this sort to which I was given the results. I recorded them and here they are:

  Subject Chemists* Norm My Mark

  In each of the eight parts, 500 counted as the overall norm for college graduates. In addition, there were norms given for specialists in each of the eight parts.

  I was not below the chemists' average in any field, though only at the average in physics and chemistry. In biology, I was well over even the biologists' norm, which was 640, and in history I was equally far above the historians' norm, which was 580.

  I chafed considerably at all this. If I were such an all-around bright fellow, why could I not get into medical school and why, then, was I on probation as a graduate student?

  Looking back on it, it seems quite obvious to me that the blame rested on my wise-guy personality, which offended people and made

  them undervalue my brightness. Unfortunately, I did not see this at the time.

  4

  Getting into graduate school did not change the downward trend in other directions. Two stories were rejected in October 1939. Campbell rejected 'The Brothers" and Amazing rejected "Stowaway," which I had rewritten slightly and retitled "Magnetic Death."

  And as though it weren't sufficient that I had no writing money coming in, NYA turned me down for a job. It was the first time they had done so since I had entered college.

  By the time October 21, 1939, rolled around, I could, if I wished, celebrate the first anniversary of my first sale, but I didn't wish. Since that sale I had received two additional checks, the last nearly nine months before—and school bills were piling up.

  Salvation came from an unexpected quarter, and Pohl's stint as my agent paid off. To be sure, he had sold not one of my stories, but he had on occasion spoken of the possibility that he might edit Marvel or some brand-new magazine. I had listened politely but hadn't believed him.

  Yet at 9:00 p.m. on October 27, 1939, he suddenly showed up at my apartment, soaked in the rain he had walked through, and said, "What will you take for 'Half-Breed'?"

  "Half-Breed" had been written in early June and had been rejected by Amazing. I had then submitted it to Campbell, who had been interested, but who had rejected it on the grounds that the readers would not like it because I pictured another species (the Martian-Earthling half-breeds of the title) as superior to human beings. What he really meant was that he did not like it for that reason. He always fobbed his own prejudices off on his readers; I had begun to gather that about Campbell.

  I stared at Pohl in stunned wonder and he explained. He was indeed going to be editor of a new magazine. He had not yet decided on a name (eventually it was called Astonishing Stories), but he needed stories quickly for the first issue. He had handled "Half-Breed," knew it well, and didn't mind having another species superior to human beings. The magazine would only pay $.005 a word, but it would pay on acceptance, and since "Half-Breed" was nine thousand words long, that would mean $45.

  Naturally, I accepted this with great glee, and on October 31, I

  visited him at his new office on East Forty-second Street. He was working on a very small salary, but he was delighted at being an editor, and I was delighted at having him be one. Even when he talked of cutting "Half-Breed" and tightening it up, I managed to work up a hollow smile, though it would have meant cutting the payment accordingly.

  On November 8, he came to the house again, and this time he brought the check for the full $45; there had been no cuts after all. He also brought the glad news that there would be a second magazine, Super Science Stories, which he would also edit. Both would be bimonthlies but would come out in alternate months, so that the effect would be a two-named monthly. (And each magazine was to sell at the price of $.10.)

  Though Pohl might be a good friend, he wasn't an automatic market. I visited his office again the next day and he handed back "Pilgrimage" with the comment that the ending was weak. I handed him the various other stories, which he knew well, and asked him to reread them. On November 16 he told me he would take "Stowaway" and I received a check for $32.50 on the twenty-eighth.

  Financially, it wasn't much, only $77.50 for the two sales, but psychologically it was what I badly needed. They were two sales after a long dry spell. To be sure, they were to a personal friend, but I already knew that personal friendship cut no ice in the hard and competitive world of magazine publishing, and Pohl had rejected several of my stories.

  5

  At about this time I was facing an ethical problem, one that I had been dreading since the interview that had led to my provisional acceptance into graduate school.

  I had said then, to the assembled committee, that I was in chemistry permanently. On the other hand, my father fully expected me to apply to medical school again, and I shrank from offending him.

  I went to see the premed adviser of the year before and put the situation before him frankly. He looked grave and finally suggested I apply. It was my intention to ignore Columbia and Cornell as automatic rejectors in any case and to apply only to the three schools who had at least interviewed me in my first round: New York University, Long Island University, and Flower. The adviser suggested I apply to one out-of-town school as well and, much against my will, I added the University of Virginia to my list.

  Before the end of November, the four applications went out and

  my father was very pleased. I didn't dare think of what might happen if any one of the med schools accepted me. It was not only that I might find myself in a career which, by that time, I knew perfectly well I detested, but also that I would prove myself a liar to the committee. And if I were accepted in medical school and refused to go, my father would neither understand nor forgive.

  The only things I could hope for were rejections all around, which would quiet my father, make an at least technically honest man of me, and save me for chemistry, which I now viewed as my profession. For the next few months I lived under the sword of Damocles.

  Irene

  After seven years in classes containing nothing but boys, (and, in college, a very occasional older woman sitting in as part of her Extension work), I suddenly found myself at the desk next to a very pretty blond young woman, just turning twenty-one. Her name was Irene.

  I saw her for
the first time on October 4, 1939, and felt myself attracted. As the weeks passed, the attraction grew stronger. It turned out that she was not only very attractive, but also, in chemistry at least, the brightest student in the class, and that meant she was a brighter chemist than I was.

  Fortunately, that didn't bother me. Rather, I found it made me admire her the more. I did not feel unmanned when I turned to her for advice on some knotty point in physical chemistry, nor when she explained something I had been unable to see for myself. (Of course, it did help a little that I was brighter than she was in every scholastic field but chemistry.)

  The crucial moment came on December 6, 1939, when she had obtained a good yield of a desired compound in a separatory funnel (a conically shaped glass vessel), which she suspended in an iron ring just a trifle too large for it. She said, "That's a nice yellow color; I must have a good yield."

  With my usual ineptitude in the laboratory, there was no chance of my getting an equally good yield, so I lifted the separatory funnel, held it to the light, and admired it enviously. Then I put it in the ring and it went right through, hit the desk, and shattered.

  Strictly speaking, it was not my fault. She had selected the ring. Nevertheless, who had asked me to lift the separatory funnel?

  I rushed out to buy a new separatory funnel for her (it cost $1.60), but there was no way of replacing the yield. She would have to start the chemical procedure all over. I couldn't apologize enough, but she shook her head, said it was her fault, and quietly began again.

  That was it. I decided I was in love.

  The time was to come one day when I would be perfectly at ease with women; when I could laugh, joke, leer, and, in general, do, with-

  out trouble, whatever it seemed appropriate to do. That "one day," however, was not to come for a good long time.

  For Irene, I could do nothing but languish. I took to sitting next to her in the various lectures we snared, particularly physical chemistry. I would lie in wait for her, sit in the library with her, dog her footsteps, and try to ingratiate myself. She was a kind of new Sidney Cohen, but a kind who was infinitely to be preferred.

  She was, of course, perfectly aware of my mooning about after her, but she didn't mind it too much as long as I didn't make it too uncomfortable for her—and I didn't. She was, throughout our friendship, perfectly proper in her behavior and never encouraged me to take liberties —and I never did. She also took care never to hurt my feelings or abash me, and I'm very grateful to her for that.

  When December 12 turned out to be unseasonably mild, I suggested a walk along the Hudson River, and she agreed, so we walked for an hour or so till the next class. At least she walked; I skipped, or my heart did, at any rate.

  When Christmas vacation came, we separated for two weeks—and shook hands. She gave me her address, however. I asked for it for a particular purpose, for I wrote her a letter, asking her to meet me on January 2. That would be my twentieth birthday, but that was not the point. It would also be a day when we would have the afternoon off, and I planned a date.

  Irene answered very kindly and properly and the meeting actually took place. I did everything I thought ought to be done. I brought a box of candy, which she accepted. We ate at a neighborhood cafeteria (something we had done on occasion before), and then I took her to Radio City Music Hall to see The Hunchback of Notre Dame. We stopped for pie and cocoa afterward, and it was over.

  It was all very prim, but I had planned it and I had paid, and this, on my twentieth birthday, was my very first date. I considered it so at the time, and ever since.

  Thanks to Fred Pohl, my science-fiction career was taking on new life. On December 23, 1939, the first issue of Astonishing reached the store and it contained "Half-Breed." 1 It was the fourth science-fiction magazine to contain a story of mine. It was the longest story of mine to be printed up to that time and was listed in the Table of Contents as a novelette.

  1 See The Early Asimov.

  Much more than that, my name was on the cover of a magazine for the first time. It was modestly placed. Of the three names on the cover, mine was the least prominent. 2 Still, there it was in the lower right-hand corner, and I was infinitely pleased.

  My father saved a copy to give to an old friend, for the next day, quite by coincidence, there was a visit from a Mr. and Mrs. Boris Rev-sin. He had been on the ship with us, coming over, and his father had worked for my grandfather Aaron. He was the one remaining link (other than Uncle Joe, of course) with the days in Russia that were now seventeen years in the past.

  He was a feeble link indeed, for his heart was bad, so bad that he had to stay in the store, being unable to climb the flight of stairs to the apartment. Indeed, he and my father, from what I could overhear, spent their time swapping heart stories.

  I also gave a copy of the magazine to Sidney Cohen when he next visited (we had been swapping visits regularly since we had separated the previous May). What's more, on January 3, 1940, I received a letter from a reader praising "Half-Breed" highly and demanding a sequel. It was the first sequel request I had ever received.

  So 1939, my second year as a professional writer, ended on an upbeat note as it had begun, with a long desert in between. Nevertheless, I had received four checks, totaling $210.50, better than three times what I had earned in my first year and enough to pay over half my tuition.

  3

  Nor was "Half-Breed" the only sign of renewed motion on the writing front.

  Since October 2, I had written no stories. Ten dry weeks had passed, with nothing but some desultory attempts at a tale concerning the induction of Earth into a Galactic Federation, once our planet had worked out space flight. I called it "Homo Sol."

  It was desultory because my mooning over Irene, my concern over my schoolwork (which was not going remarkably well and over which hung the possible abrupt cessation of my probation if my marks weren't good enough), and the desolate news abroad (Poland was gone, Finland was under attack by the Soviet Union, and the Western

  2 The other two were Polton Cross and Frederic Arnold Kummer, each of them far better known than I in those days, though both faded out of the science-fiction scene in the 1940s.

  powers maintained a static front in what was called the Phony War) all kept me from my typewriter.

  My frequent visits to Pohl, however, stirred up guilt feelings within me over my neglect of Campbell. I visited him on December 20, 1939, and spent 2V2 hours with him. I told him about "Homo Sol" and he liked the idea. I had never seen him display quite such enthusiasm over any of my suggestions. We discussed it in detail and I went home in a state of eager turmoil.

  What I didn't completely understand at the time was that I had inadvertently pushed one of his buttons. He was a devout believer in the inequality of man and felt that the inequality could be detected by outer signs such as skin and hair coloring. Though he treated all men kindly and decently in his personal life, and although in his treatment of me, for instance, I never detected any trace of anti-Semitic feelings, the fact is that, in theory, he felt that people of northwestern European extraction were the best human beings.

  In science fiction, this translated itself into the Campbellesque thesis that Earthmen (all of whom, in the ideal Campbell story, resembled people of northwestern European extraction) were superior to all other intelligent races—even when the others seemed more intelligent on the surface. It was because I broke this rule that he rejected "Half-Breed." It was because he saw an opportunity to demonstrate this rule that he was interested in "Homo Sol."

  He did not quite explain this rule to me, and at that time I didn't thoroughly understand it and had no conscious intention of applying it. Nevertheless, when I got home I tore up the few pages I had done of "Homo Sol" and began all over again. By the end of the year, it was done.

  On January 4, 1940, I visited him and submitted the story.

  On that occasion, I met no fewer than three authors for the first time, all of whom were to be closely associa
ted with Campbell in the decade just beginning.

  One was Theodore Sturgeon, who had published two stories thus far, "Ether Breather" in the September 1939 Astounding, and "A God in a Garden" in the October 1939 Unknown. He was a mild, blond fellow with a thin, elfin face and soft blue eyes. He was a few years older than I was, but had gotten a later start.

  Then there was L. Ron Hubbard, a well-established pulp writer whose first story in Astounding had been "The Dangerous Dimension" in the July 1938 issue, and whose two Unknown lead novels, "The Ultimate Adventure" in the April 1939 issue and "Slaves of Sleep" in the

  July 1939 issue, I had enjoyed tremendously. He was a large-jawed, red-haired, big and expansive fellow who surprised me. His heroes tended to be frightened little men who rose to meet emergencies, and somehow I had expected Hubbard to be the same.

  "You don't look at all like your stories," I said.

  "Why? How are my stories?" he asked.

  "Oh they're great" I said, enthusiastically and all present laughed while I blushed and tried to explain that if the stories were great and he was not like his stories, I didn't mean he was not great.

  Finally there was Willy Ley, who had already published several nonfiction articles on rocketry in the magazine. He spoke with a thick German accent, which was, in itself, not calculated to endear him to me at the time, but he had left Germany as soon as Hitler had come into power and was a dedicated anti-Nazi. Besides, there was something lovable about him—a kind of intense but unpretentious rationality that I found absolutely irresistible.

  Over "Homo Sol" there began a struggle between Campbell and myself, though, of course, I didn't understand its nature. Campbell was intent on making me stress the superiority of human beings without actually telling me this was what he wanted. I, on the other hand, never thought it was necessary to make human beings superior (in fact, considering what the world of 1940 was like I thought human beings were bound to be outclassed by the average extraterrestrial intelligence), so, of course, I missed the point. It was almost "Half-Breed" over again.