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

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  Then, on May 24, after several false starts, I began a new story, "Not Final," in earnest. It strikes me that by talking of "false starts" I lose my chance to describe in detail the thought processes that precede the writing of a story. The truth is I cannot describe them; they are too inchoate to have a finger put on them. The undramatic fact is that I

  2 It is not my intention to give the impression by a throwaway paragraph like the above that I am a cultured person with deep musical appreciation. I have occasionally seen an opera and attended a concert, but Verdi, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and other great romantics represent the height of my powers. Twentieth-century music, like twentieth-century art and twentieth-century literature, eludes me completely. In fact, the music that pleases me best is light opera, and Gilbert and Sullivan is what I am fanatical over.

  just think and think and think until I have something, and there is nothing marvelous or artistic about the phenomenon.

  It was just about this time that the Nazis launched an airborne invasion of the Greek island of Crete and inflicted another humiliating defeat on the British. And on the very day I began the story, the largest British battleship, Hood, was sunk by the Nazi supership Bismarck. Great Britain was also losing ground in North Africa and, on the whole, the war news was unbelievably depressing.

  On May 27, however, I heard the news that the Bismarck had been trapped and sunk, and I dressed in a state of high excitement to rush to school and crow triumphantly over Lloyd Roth, who had flatly said that the British Navy was no longer capable of holding its own against Germany.

  On June 2, I submitted "Not Final" to Campbell, and by June 7, a check for $67 had arrived. Campbell had now taken four of the last five stories I had submitted to him.

  Not all the news was great, though. On June 13, I visited Pohl, who told me that Astonishing and Super Science were being suspended. I was sorry, for he and the magazines had been good to me. They had published five of my stories and were about to come out with a sixth. Indeed, on June 25, I received the September 1941 Astonishing, with "Super-Neutron." 3

  This was the story in which I had incorporated Campbell's news of uranium fission. I spoke in the story of "the classical uranium fission method for power." I also spoke of the metal cadmium as a neutron absorber—in fact, that point was central to the plot. It wasn't bad for a story that appeared in 1941, and I sometimes quote it in public to create an impression.

  Considering the burgeoning success of my positronic robot stories, I had story series on my mind now. "Super-Neutron" was certainly intended to be the first in a long chain of very clever and very ingenious tales to be told at meetings of the "Honorable Society of Ananias."

  It didn't work out that way, however. There was never a second story in that series, not even the beginning of one, not even the idea for one. However, the notion of telling a story through the conversations of a group of men around the dinner table stayed with me, and on several occasions I was to try again.

  Despite my sorrow over the suspension of the magazines that had done so much for me, and for Pohl's being out of that particular job, a sober sense of reality did tell me that the magazines had served their

  3 See The Early Asimov.

  purpose. They had kept me going till I had finally caught Campbell's range, and now I could do without them.

  In fact, about the only real inconvenience was that ''Christmas on Ganymede," which Pohl had been holding for half a year, now could not be used (it had not been paid for) and it was back on the market.

  I had another possible site for it, though. "Hazing," which had been rejected by Pohl and by Planet, had been submitted by me to Thrilling Wonder on June 10. At my request, Pohl sent on "Christmas on Ganymede" to Thrilling Wonder on the twenty-third. Eventually, both stories were taken. I received $55 for "Hazing" and $54 for "Christmas on Ganymede."

  I began two more stories in June. One was my second attempt at a collaboration with Pohl—again for the sake of trying to break into Unknown. On one of my visits to Pohl, he had said he had an idea for an Unknown story, something about a ghost that had to prove to a court of law its legal right to occupy a house against the wish of its living owner. I liked the idea and eagerly asked Pohl if I might write it for him on the basis of a fifty-fifty split in the earnings, if any. He agreed.

  This time I was more careful and consulted Campbell concerning the idea. He was intrigued, too, but warned me that I would have to learn something about the laws governing occupancy. I chanced doing it while retaining my ignorance, wrote the story, and submitted it to Campbell on June 30. I called it "Legal Rights," but he changed it to "Legal Rites," which I agreed to at once, with considerable annoyance at myself for not having thought of it. He rejected it anyway, though, and once again I had to hand back to Pohl, in failure, a collaborative effort.

  The other June story was intended to be a funny one (I kept trying to write funny ones!), which I called "Source of Power." It languished, though, and I didn't finish it till August. Other things were happening and getting in the way.

  4

  My increasing success with writing and my tidy bank balance (which had reached $235 now, despite the fact that I was paying my own tuition now) made it seem to my parents that perhaps I deserved a vacation. That didn't occur to me, you understand, because as a result of virtually never having had one, my vacation nerve has atrophied away. Indeed, to this day, I never voluntarily take a vacation, and I grumble when one is forced on me and try to find ways of doing some work anyway.

  But it occurred to my parents, and what kind of vacation would occur to them? Why, the only vacation they had ever had during their stay in the United States—a week or two in Parksville at the Siegels, where my mother and we children had stayed in 1927^ 1928, and 1931.

  After some discussion, the decision was for one week—that was quite long enough for me, and if I went in June, I'd get cheaper rates— $16 a week.

  Nor was it an impossible task for me to leave the store. Stanley was almost twelve now and could do most of the chores—and this was a thought that filled me with glee. What was the use of having a younger brother if one couldn't hand-him-down the dirty work? Sooner or later I would have to leave home, and he might as well be groomed as my replacement. As I recall, in fact, the one reason I was eager for the vacation was to be away from the store one whole week in order to see how it survived.

  I bought tickets on June 13 ($4.45 for the round trip, I carefully noted), and on June 14 I was off. It was the ferry across the Hudson River and the train from Weehawken thereafter.

  For the first time ever I was going to be away from home alone for more than that single night in Philadelphia—for a whole week, in fact.

  It was a curious week. I had thought I would be terrified, but I wasn't. I remembered the place vaguely from the time, ten years before, when I had been there last, although of course it looked (quite predictably) considerably smaller and less consequential than I remembered.

  The Siegels were pleasant to me and fed me well (and I was far less picky at my food than when I was young). I had good quarters and, in general, I felt reasonably at home and longed only moderately for more familiar scenes. To combat possible homesickness, I took my typewriter and did some work on "Legal Rites," which was then in progress. I also took improving books to read. There have always been sharp limits to my "vacations."

  The most peculiar aspect of the week was that I was an outsider. There were not many people boarding at the Siegels off-season, and those who were there all knew each other. What's more, they were a peculiar group of people. They were all Jewish, all eastern European immigrants, and all, after two years of Nazi military victory, seemed to concentrate their hatred solely on the Soviet Union.

  At every meal, the conversation turned on how happy life had been under the Tsars and how wicked the Bolsheviks were. I kept raising the point that the immediate danger was Nazi Germany but they shrugged it off. One person even said that she hoped Hitler would at-r />
  tack the Soviet Union and that the United States would then form an alliance with Nazi Germany and invade the Soviet Union from the Pacific side. For a while I thought this was an elaborate scheme to make fun of me, but she was serious, quite serious.

  At one point when there was some discussion of the unfair treatment of Jews by anti-Semites (anti-Semites in general, not Nazi Germany in particular), a few of them reeled off some of the false attitudes toward Jews that were possessed by many who didn't really know Jews.

  I nodded and said, "Yes, and that sort of thing is pretty general. Consider how we whites mistreat Negroes."

  There was a horrified silence and then one of them, in an awful voice, said, "What's wrong with the way we treat Negroes?" She then went on to say about the Negroes exactly what she had just complained that anti-Semites said about Jews.

  That week was a liberal education concerning the blindness and bigotry of people, and how the pleasures of hatred rise superior even to the instinct of self-preservation.

  I am not immune to that instinct, but in my own case, a constant reading of history had shown me that persecution on trivial grounds was not the privilege of Jews alone, so that I generalized my own feelings of resistance against such things out of the narrow-minded self-preservation that would have made me oppose anti-Semitism only. And it was my reading of the history of the Civil War and the decades preceding it that engaged my feelings on the side of the blacks in particular.

  As for my father's teachings, alas, though they were strong on honesty, industry, and duty, there was nothing about human equality in them. As was the case with so many Eastern European Jews (in my experience, at least), he took it for granted that Gentiles were stupid alcoholics. My own arguments that we knew many intelligent Gentiles and many stupid Jews fell on deaf ears. He chose his examples to suit himself.

  On my third day at Siegel's, two teen-age girls arrived. They were Jewish refugees from Austria, the first refugees I had ever met. They were shy and withdrawn and what puzzled me was that they would not drink water. They would drink only beer. I didn't see how it was possible not to drink water, and I tried to talk to them into it. I didn't appreciate at the time the real health hazard that most water supplies in the world posed.

  I tried to talk German to the young refugees and they seemed very intrigued and urged me to continue. I tried, but while I could make

  myself understood in German, I didn't really have an easy conversational fluency and I finally said, in English, "Why do you want me to continue speaking German?"

  And they answered ecstatically, in English, "Because you have such a romantic Hungarian accent."

  The amusements consisted of talking, walking, and listening to the radio. We listened to a fight between Joe Louis and a contender named Conn for the heavyweight championship. Everyone rooted for Conn, the white man (they carefully explained that was the reason), and I was in a minority of one, cheering on the black champion, Louis. Louis won.

  I also played Ping-Pong and handball with the daughter of the establishment, and she won every game. I watched a tree being felled; I walked to the village to buy newspapers; and, in general, such quiet amusements seemed ample to me.

  Most of the people urged me to stay another week, rather strenuously, and I compromised. I agreed to stay on through the weekend and return on Monday the twenty-third, rather than Saturday the twenty-first.

  It was an unfortunate decision. On Sunday the twenty-second, the news arrived that Nazi Germany suddenly, and without warning, had invaded the Soviet Union all along its border. I went into a profound panic. I was sure that the Soviet Union would collapse and that Nazi Germany would then no longer be defeatable.

  I packed at once and left for home. But when I got there, what was there to do but read newspapers and listen in horror as the Nazi columns plunged deep into the Soviet Union?

  'Foundation 7

  Once again, as during the Munich crisis, the Danzig crisis, and the battles of France and Britain, I spent most of my time listening to the radio. I kept trying to sort out German and Soviet claims, which were immensely far apart. I wanted to believe the Soviets, but on past performance I was sure it was the Nazis who were correct. 1

  The only relief at that time came from the fact that Sprague de Camp had invited me to his apartment which, at that time, was at Riverside Drive and 149th Street. It was the first time I had ever been asked to visit the home of an established science-fiction writer. It was a matter of great excitement for me.

  I showed up at Sprague's apartment at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, June 28, 1941, and on that day I met his wife, Catherine, for the first time. They had not been married terribly long and she had given birth to their first child, a son named Lyman, only some weeks before.

  A "cute little baby" I noted in my diary, but that wasn't what impressed me. Catherine was a gorgeous blonde, about five feet, seven inches tall, I should say, with an aristocratic bony structure to her face, rather like that of Katharine Hepburn, and a grande dame manner that didn't daunt me a bit, for some reason. She and Sprague were both thirty-four years old at the time.

  When I first met Catherine, I was content merely to look at her. As I grew older and more confident in my relations with women, I began a long-continued flirtation with her. In fact, she was the first woman with whom I systematically flirted. Catherine has always reacted with innocent delight, and Sprague, from his seventy-four inch height (he looks something like Robert Goulet), watched with a secure and self-confident smile, making only occasional references to the scimitar on his wall and the precise portion of my body he planned to amputate if it ever became necessary to do so.

  1 It was in that week of the beginning of the German-Soviet war that I received a letter from Irene telling me that she was engaged to be married. It didn't matter any longer and I sent her a joyful letter of congratulations. She was married on July 26, 1941.

  During July, I slowly calmed down. On the whole, the Germans continued to advance, and, in fact they took the Smolensk area, including Petrovichi (in which such Jews as had not fled, including, I presume, many Asimovs, were wiped out).

  There was no sign of a Soviet surrender, however, or a collapse, or even an overall weakening. It was clear that the Germans were meeting a quality of resistance they had not thus far encountered anywhere, and suddenly the papers were full of such phrases as "the mighty Red Army/'

  The war was brought home to me a little more personally when, on July 1, there was a second draft-registration. I was over twenty-one now, and this time I registered.

  The next day I registered in another way—for a summer course in phase rule at Columbia. Phase rule was one of the items I had left totally blank on the Qualifyings, and I didn't want that to happen during my forthcoming second try.

  I wish that my foresight had worked as well in other directions.

  Working my way through my diary shows me that I had a number of ideas for which I had not written stories. On July 5, 1941, for instance, I record the fact, 'Tm trying to weave a plot around a planet of a dwarf star that has a two-minute year! I did lots of figuring on it. . . ."

  Nothing ever came of it; I didn't write the story.

  Too bad! Had I written it, I would have had a story about a neutron star a quarter century before any were discovered. It would have been the first neutron-star story ever written. What a shame!

  3

  But then the summer saw a slackening in my writing. There was a phase rule class every day for six weeks, and it wasn't an easy class, Then, too, I spent hours every day at the radio.

  Yet although my writing languished, I was keeping up a steady drumfire of dates with this girl or that—if you want to call a date what usually consisted of a long walk or an occasional movie.

  I even tried to learn how to dance. First Marcia tried to teach me, but that didn't work because she could only follow and she didn't know what it was that boys did when they led. Then I tried to take a class in it and eventually learned
how to fox-trot or waltz in a very clumsy and mechanical way, and never learned any more than that.

  Girls were invariably tolerant of my dancing—for one dance. They never badgered me for a second. Nor did I badger them for even the first; the music never stopped soon enough for me.

  On August 9, 1941, after the usual long walk, and the conversation in the park (that was the "Gut yontiff, Pontiff" occasion), a girl invited me to her place. Her parents were away somewhere and we were alone in the apartment.

  Nothing very serious happened since, for one thing, neither of us had a contraceptive device. 2 There was some foreplay, however, and that was my first introduction to the female body from a tactile standpoint.

  I didn't get home till 5:00 a.m. (she lived many miles from Windsor Place) and I found the entire family—every one of them—out in the street waiting for me. There had been no occasion, you see, when it would have been possible for me to report home without utterly humiliating myself or, worse, being ordered to return.

  My mother was horrified at my having stayed out "all night" with a girl, and I think she was ready to call the police and have me thrown in jail for the fracture of a mother's heart in the second degree. My father, however, after some moments of stupefaction at my flat announcement that I was over twenty-one and my own boss, came to my defense.

  Heaven knows what went on in his mind or what he thought I had done, but apparently there was a kind of masculine free masonry that stepped in and lifted him above his own prudishness. He pulled my mother off me and kept her from calling the police (or possibly the mighty Red Army).

  However, the young lady was too far off to reach easily and I suspect she felt she had better things to do than to seduce children (she was several years older than I was), and nothing more came of it.