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

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  By January 16 he was still ruminating over it and I visited him to inquire. He handed it back and requested a rewrite. "More dialog," he said, and we talked over a few other points.

  I rewrote and, on February 2, had the second version in his hands. On February 23 he asked for another revision, dealing with the last half only. What could I do? I agreed and the third version wasn't submitted till March 25. The three versions had taken me three months to do— not surprising, considering the tensions I was under at the time.

  The strain of those months was relieved a little by the fact that on February 7, the March 1940 issue of Future Fiction (a sister magazine of Science Fiction) arrived, and in it, at last, was "Ring Around the Sun." 3 This introduced me to two economic facts of life about fringe magazines. First, when a story is paid for on publication, there is no hurry to publish. "Ring Around the Sun" was published exactly a year and three days after it was bought. Second, payment on publication easily translates to payment long after publication. I didn't get my check for $25 until May 3, and then only after I had written a letter to a magazine called Writer's Digest to ask what one ought to do about it.

  3 See The Early Asimov.

  Anyway, I now had five published stories, and on February 22 the number jumped to six, when the April 1940 Astonishing appeared with "Stowaway." Pohl had, without consulting me or even telling me, changed its name to "The Callistan Menace." 4 In this he had done no worse than Campbell had done in the case of "Trends." Campbell's change I had thought for the better, Pohl's I thought to be for the worse.

  On March 25, Pohl told me he would take "Robbie," and this was my eighth sale, and my third to him. He also requested a sequel to "Half-Breed." It was the first time any editor had ever requested a specific story from me.

  He was, in fact, in an excellent humor, for his magazines seemed to be doing well and he had received a raise. So jubilant was he that he paid for my lunch—and I think that was the first time any editor had ever bought me lunch.

  I picked up my check for $35 for "Robbie" when I visited Pohl on February 12, 1940.

  Then, on April 12, I visited Campbell again after he had had the third version of "Homo Sol" for over two weeks. I talked about other things for a while, cravenly staying away from the real point of interest, until he finally said, "Oh yes, your story? You haven't got it yet?"

  My heart sank. Was this to be another "Pilgrimage"--three strikes and out? I remained abashed and mute and he said, "It's up in the accounting room now."

  The "it" he was asking me if I had yet got was the check and not the story. He had bought it—my second sale to Campbell in nearly two years of trying. It came just in time, too, for it just covered what I still owed on my tuition in that first year of graduate work.

  The clearest thing I remember about that check is an incident that took place that evening in the candy store. I had placed the check on the cash register, so that my father could deposit it when he next went to the bank (after I had endorsed it over to him, of course), and I was engaged in dealing out cigarettes, collecting payment, making change, and so on, as I had done every night for eleven years now.

  One customer took offense at my neglecting to say "Thank you" as I made the change—a crime I frequently committed because, very often, I was working without conscious attention but was concentrating deeply on the plot permutations that were sounding hollowly within the cavern of my skull.

  The customer decided to scold me for my obvious inattention and for my apparent lack of industry.

  4 See The Early Asimov.

  "My son/' he said, "made fifty dollars through hard work last week. What do you do to earn a living besides standing here?"

  "I write/' I said. "And I got this for a story today/' and I held up the check for him to see.

  It was a very satisfactory moment.

  4

  During January of 1940, I was deeply concerned as to my future. The first semester of graduate school was coming to an end, and I did not know what my marks would be, nor how they would be viewed by the committee. I was only an average student at the graduate level, since, for the most part, I was facing students who were true specialists in chemistry and were (a number of them) illiterate in every other field of intellectual endeavor. Concentrating everything into one narrow front, they could outpunch me there. I feared the worst and had to prepare fallback alternatives.

  If I were kicked out of graduate school and were then accepted by a medical school, would a medical career be bearable? I didn't have to come to that decision, really. On January 31 I had an interview with a New York University School of Medicine official, just ten days short of a year after the first one. It went better, I thought, but I came out convinced they weren't interested—and I was right. In the end, everybody rejected me all around for the second time—with the University of Virginia Medical School leading the bunch. The medical school alternative was finally and forever washed out.

  I was desperate enough to adopt an even more miserable (potential) option. I actually sent off an application to a dental school. In the Jewish immigrant tradition, a dentist was a failed physician. Since both used the title "doctor," the joke went that a suspicious Jewish mother would ask a prospective suitor, "Pardon me, are you a dentist doctor or a doctor doctor?" Getting into dental school would undoubtedly have humiliated my father and reduced me to quivering dementia, but there was nothing to worry about; nothing came of that, either.

  And then, just to scrape bottom, I even applied for a civil-service job as a chemist. And that came to nothing.

  While all these options were coming to nothing, however, I took my final examinations and on February 3, 1940, got my grades.

  In Physical Chemistry, I got an A. That was the great news. It was the lack of physical chemistry that had put my status in doubt, and there were only three students out of over sixty who got straight A's and I was one of them. (Irene was another, needless to say.) In ad-

  vanced organic I got a B-f- and in synthetic organic (Elderfield's course), where laboratory performance was a major factor, I got a C. In my three chemistry courses I clearly maintained a B average, and that A in physical chemistry had to be impressive.

  That left only my one physics course in doubt. I had never taken college physics and at the graduate level it was simply incomprehensible. For one thing, it required more mathematics than I had in my armory. I feared failing, but my mark was il m.u. y " meaning I had to take a makeup examination. I could only hope that the committee would attach a great deal of importance to physical chemistry and very little importance to physics.

  I had to sign up for the spring-semester courses, ordinarily a routine procedure, but at the moment, not so for me. I stepped into the chemistry office and, to my relief, Urey was not there. He would have been difficult to face. Instead I found Dr. Caldwell and Dr. George E. Kimball. The latter was one of my physical chemistry instructors.

  There was no sign of any tendency to abort my studies. They calmly signed me up for courses for the spring semester, and I felt safe for the remainder of the school year.

  In fact, it turned out better than that. My resolute acceptance of the work they had piled on me, and my showing in physical chemistry despite that, must have convinced the committee they had been mistaken in me.

  On April 5, 1940, quite unexpectedly, and with myself having done nothing to spur it on, I received a letter from Columbia telling me that my probation was lifted and that I was a regular graduate student as of September 1939.

  It was nearly five years (almost to the day) since my disappointing interview and my shift from Columbia College to Seth Low, and for the first time I was no longer second-class. I could, at last, look my classmates in the eye. Four days later, I flunked my physics makeup examination without even seriously trying. I handed in a blank book because it no longer mattered. I lost credit for it, of course, but with the probation lifted I refused to struggle hopelessly any longer in that particular direction.

  5<
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  One of my great worries during the January period of Damoclean suspense was that I would suddenly be cut off and would then never see Irene again. I used that as an argument for having another date, and on January 30, 1940, we went to see The Grapes of Wrath.

  On February 9, I took her to lunch, and in the course of a long conversation she told me I was the "cleverest" fellow she had ever met. I hugged that to my bosom for months. It was not exactly a declaration of passion, but it had been a long time since I felt "cleverest," and I was glad that was her opinion on the subject. The same day we walked arm in arm and I felt myself to be drowning in happiness.

  On February 22, in fact, when I took her to see Pinocchio, we actually held hands through part of the movie and then again when we went to the Hayden Planetarium afterward. (I think that was my first visit to the planetarium.) I considered that hand-holding to be vastly more important than the fact that "The Callistan Menace" appeared in print that day.

  By April 2, I reached a pinnacle of a sort. We were on the back steps of the chemistry building, the part called "Chandler." She was holding her books, I holding mine. I thrust my books at her, saying, "I want to tie my shoelaces."

  She took them in her other arm and, since she was momentarily unable to fend me off, I kissed her. It was the feeblest kiss you can imagine, contact being maintained for about a second and I caught only the corner of her lips, but it was the first time I had ever kissed a girl with libidinous intent and the effect was something like that of being sandbagged.

  Irene maintained her composure. She handed back my books, said, "That was mean," and we continued walking.

  On April 27, I made progress in another direction. Irene was walking down Broadway with me on the way to the cafeteria for lunch when she suddenly said, "If you really want to splurge, I know where we can get two luncheons at thirty-five cents each."

  I said hollowly, "Money's no object."

  She broke the rest of the bad news. "You'll have to tip the waiter a dime."

  I stopped walking and stared at her. "Waiter? I've never been in a real restaurant. I'd be afraid."

  "It's time you learned," she said, firmly, so I went to a tearoom with her and spent eighty cents and found out what it was like to be waited on by a waiter.

  I found out in the course of that spring that she was dating four other young men as well (no, I didn't spy on her; she told me), and it occurred to me that probably none of them were afraid of restaurants and all of them had more money than I did. "Cleverness" was all I had going for me, and it wasn't enough.

  But it was all coming to an end anyway. Whereas I was prepared

  to go to school forever, if need be, scraping up the necessary money on a hand-to-mouth basis, she was not. One year of graduate school was what she wanted, with a master's degree at the end, and a job—and by April, she already had the job. She had been interviewed by Hercules Powder in Wilmington, Delaware, and had been offered one, and she was going to take it.

  That meant good-bye in a month or so. My spirits really dragged.

  We had one last date, the best of all, on May 26. I met her at Penn Station at 12:35 p.m. and we took the subway to the World's Fair. We spent all afternoon and all evening there—an absolutely idyllic time for me, for we were away from school, away from the store, unreachable by anyone. For eleven hours I existed in a kind of carefree bubble with her, a bubble set in the never-never land of the Fair.

  The only untoward thing that happened was that (at my suggestion ) we took a roller-coaster ride. In my fantasy, I thought she would scream and hang on tightly to me and that I could (perhaps) kiss her when that happened.

  I was in high good spirits over my fiendishly erotic plan as the car climbed slowly to the peak. As it passed that peak and began to drop, I turned to her—and discovered, for the first time in my life—that I had severe acrophobia. I was afraid of heights and went out of my mind at the sensation of falling.

  How was I to know? I had never lived higher than one story up, and when in the upper stories of higher buildings, it never occurred to me to look out the windows straight down.

  I clung desperately to Irene till the roller-coaster ride was over and by then I was half dead out of sheer agonized terror. As nearly as I could tell, Irene didn't mind it at all.

  Then, on May 30, she visited the store and had dinner with the family and left—and that was it. The romance, which had lasted about half a year and that had, from beginning to end, been as nearly platonic as possible, with a quick peck on the corner of the lip as a high point, was over.

  It took me a while to stop mooning about after Irene had left. Thinking back upon myself during that period of calf love aborted, I find it amusing—unless I actually read my diary, when it all becomes pitiful and exquisitely embarrassing.

  It could have had no other end, though. We wouldn't have suited each other.

  Growing Up

  My course work went better in the second semester of graduate school after I had dropped that miserable course in physics. To be sure, physical chemistry laboratory was not exactly easy. As always, I was not deft.

  At one time, I remember, I received a fairly low mark on one of my lab reports—one that dealt with the elevation of boiling points in solutions. I was not overly surprised at this, since my expectations in lab courses were never exuberantly high, but I thought I might as well see Professor Joseph Mayer, under whom I was taking the course, and attempt negotiation.

  I took my paper with me and he went over it patiently. I was quite prepared to be told that I had done the experiment sloppily or that I had collected my data thoughtlessly. That wasn't it, however. Professor Mayer looked up at me and said:

  'The trouble with you, Asimov, is that you can't write."

  For a horrified moment, I stared at him. Then, no longer interested in negotiation, I gathered up the report and, before leaving, said to him, as stiffly and as haughtily as I could, "111 thank you, Professor Mayer, not to repeat that slander to my publishers."

  That was really a minor incident, however. I passed all my courses (only a B in the second semester of Physical Chemistry, but the pressure was off) and planned to go ahead for a second year. I was no longer planning for a master's degree only. With medical school finally a dead issue, I intended to go on for a Ph.D.

  My absorption with school and with Irene helped insulate me just a little bit against the world's tragedy, which was deepening monthly. The spring of 1940 was a time of tremendous Nazi victories. Hitler took over Denmark and Norway in April; Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg in May; and by the end of May was busy beating France and penning up the British Expeditionary Force in Dunkirk.

  Irene's mind was sufficiently wrapped up in chemistry to make her impervious to such things. When Germany invaded Holland and Belgium on May 10, and I came into the library with the news, perturbed

  and unhappy, Irene said, "Isn't it terrible the way those countries behave?" and went on studying.

  Most of us, however, talked over the war news every chance we got. The country was split into interventionists and isolationists, and so were the students. The Jewish students were interventionist, of course, and were breathless with horror over the Nazi victories. So were some of the Gentile students (the brighter ones, so it seemed to me).

  Lloyd Roth (not Jewish, despite his last name) was one of the most voluble observers and one of the keenest, too, it seemed to me. We had been good friends ever since he had watched me bounce in and out of the committee room. Milton Silverman (he was Jewish) was another one with whom discussions were long and thorough.

  As for the isolationists, I don't remember any of their names. We didn't speak. It seemed clear to me that even when the isolationists were able to bore single-mindedly through their books and do reasonably well in chemistry, they were stupid in every other field. I admit there's a chance I was prejudiced, however.

  As for science fiction, I spent the spring of 1940 writing "Half-Breeds on Venus." It contained my f
irst attempt at love interest, and the heroine was inevitably named Irene. It was not completed till June 1, 1940, and on June 3 I took it in to Pohl.

  By that time, the July 1940 Future Fiction had arrived, with my story "Ammonium" in it. Its title had been changed to "Magnificent Possession" 1 and this one appeared only nine months after agreement to purchase. Again, "payment on publication" proved to be payment considerably after publication.

  I didn't like "Magnificent Possession" when I read it in print. The nine-month wait had wiped out much of its memory, and it read as though some other writer (not a very good one) had written it. On my

  0 to 5 star scale, I gave "Magnificent Possession" 1Y2 stars.

  On June 14, I visited Pohl and he handed me a check for $62.50. This represented a payment of $0.00625 per word for "Half-Breeds on Venus"—which was the longest story I'd yet sold since it was all of 10,000 words long.

  This was the occasion for a rather revolutionary development. On the next day, June 15, it was decided, for the first time, that the money

  1 made writing belonged (at least in theory) to me. Until then I had

  1 See The Early Asimov.

  handed all my checks to my father. It wasn't as unjust as it sounds, of course, since he paid my tuition, and the tuition came to more than the checks did.

  Now, however, it began to look as though the checks would come in at a rate great enough to pay the tuition, so it was decided that I ought to have a savings account of my own. Then I could pay my own tuition and keep anything that was left over and, of course, if I ran dry, my father would pitch in.

  On that day, therefore, I opened a savings account with $60 from Pohl's check, and I have had money in the bank ever since.

  The fact that "Half-Breeds of Venus'' was a sequel made the notion of writing sequels seem like a good idea. A sequel to a successful story must, after all, be a reasonably sure sale—or so I reasoned. Therefore, even while I was working on "Half-Breeds on Venus," I suggested to Campbell that I write a sequel to "Homo Sol."