Gertrude smoked, of course, and I disliked that more and more.
*3
October 12, 1948, was a university holiday because General Dwight D. Eisenhower was being inducted as university president. Eventually he received a telephone extension number that was exactly like mine but for an inversion of numerals.
Thinking of the troubles we had with the inversion of our home telephone number, I kept expecting to get calls intended for Eisenhower. I even had daydreams of having someone call me and say, "Hello, Ike?" (I'd know it wasn't for me, but for Eisenhower, who affected that irrelevant nickname, while I allow very few people to call me that.) I would then lean back and say, cozily, "Yes?" and see what happened. However, no one ever made the mistake.
After Eisenhower had been in office a couple of months, he sent out a form letter to all the alumni. I was an alumnus so I received one. On impulse, I replied to him. Before too long I received a two-paragraph letter from him, dated February 11, 1949, which was polite and personal (it quoted a passage from my letter, so it had to be a direct answer) and which was, as nearly as I can tell, signed by him in person.
It was even better than the letter from Orson Welles, and I still own it.
I did not attend any of the ceremonies on October 12, however, but seized the chance of getting out to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where Campbell was now located, in order to see him. I had completed "Mother Earth" two days before, doing its fifteen thousand words in just under six weeks, and I wanted to submit it to him. (After asking
for a small change in the end, the next day, he took it, and the story earned me $375.)
Campbell was more interested in the Foundation series, however. He had been sending me several letters while I was working on "Mother Earth," asking me to finish it and start another Foundation tale. During our session on the twelfth, we discussed my idea on this and I finally persuaded him to let me reveal the whereabouts of the Second Foundation. He did so on condition I make the story fifty thousand words long so that he could run it as a serial. (I suppose he suspected, from my attitude, that the new story would be the last of the Foundation series, and he wanted to end it on a high note.) I agreed to call it "—And Now You Don't" to tie in with the title of the previous Foundation story, which I had completed i24 years before.
I began "—And Now You Don't" on October 16, and from the very start I knew I would have trouble.
You see, each Foundation story assumes, as a background, all the previous stories, but I couldn't assume that every reader had read and remembered all the rest. Therefore each story had to manage to explain everything that had happened before, and as the series grew longer and more complex, this became more difficult. "—And Now You Don't" began with a teen-age girl reciting the previous events as part of a school assignment. I managed to work it in, but I decided it would have to be the last time.
My positronic robot series was completely different. Each story was independent, and knowledge of any of the previous stories was generally not required. It could go on forever.
H
On October 21, 1948, I committed another one of my grosser stupidities. Sprague de Camp had come to New York to attend a meeting of the Authors Club. He was a great joiner and he suggested I attend as his guest. The meeting was for 7:00 p.m.
I am an early dinner eater, never eating later than six and sometimes eating as early as five. Since I tend to assume (as everyone does) that my personal idiosyncrasies are cosmic laws followed by all people, I presumed that the gathering was an after-dinner meeting.
Unfortunately, work kept me rather later than I expected that day and I fretted, rather petulantly, at not having enough time to eat in proper leisurely fashion before going to the meeting. I bolted dinner and arrived at the meeting in time—to find everything spread out for dinner.
Since I couldn't quite bring myself to admit to Sprague that I had already eaten dinner, I ate another dinner but, for the first time in my life, I ate slowly and abstemiously.
Catherine de Camp was there. I hadn't seen her in over a year and she was now forty-one, but she still looked as young and as beautiful as ever. This was a recurrent pattern. I wouldn't see her for some time and then would encounter her with the advance apprehension that I would view the ruins of a once-lovely woman—and she would always look as though time had stopped still.
15
I finally got the printed copies of my dissertation (prepared at huge expense by a professional printer) on October 27, 1948. I handed out copies to those members of the faculty who had examined me, gave a number to Dawson and seventy-five copies to Columbia University, which undoubtedly still has a number of them in its files along with all the other dissertations by all the other students.
I have a copy myself, which I have had specially bound.
16
November 2, 1948, was election day. It was Gertrude's first chance to vote for President and we went to the polls together. I'm not sure who Gertrude voted for, but I followed the determination I had come to at the Saltzmans' and voted for Wallace.
That night I listened to the election returns only to find out how many votes Wallace had received. Before the returns began coming in, I noted in my diary that Dewey was a sure victor.
If I didn't have a diary, it would be so easy to make use of a sincere (but flexible) memory to recall that I had had a great many very perceptive premonitions—that I had felt Truman would win—that I had said so—that I had insisted in the face of a huge horde of scoffers that he would win.
Not so. I have a diary and it says that I was convinced Dewey would win. If I had thought Truman had had a chance I would certainly have voted for him rather than have thrown away my vote.
Nor was it easy to convince myself of what was happening once the votes started coming in. At 8:40 p.m., I noted in my diary, "The Truman debacle has not yet begun. He's leading 740,627 to 627,669—but it won't be long, I guess."
After that, every few minutes I would write "Still Truman" in
clear surprise. Even at 2:30 a.m., when I finally decided to go to bed, I couldn't believe Truman would win. I felt that the four states taken by Thurmond would throw the election into the House of Representatives.
The next morning I woke to find Truman had won in the most thrilling upset in American political history. For a while, he was popular as the feisty little guy who had had faith in himself when everyone else had given up, but that didn't last. He was quickly once again an unpopular President—with me, as well as with everyone else.
My parents visited the Stuyvesant Town apartment on November 7. They refrained from ecstasies, but neither were they nasty. It was a reconciliation of sorts, but there were renewed recriminations from my mother when she found I had dedicated the printed dissertation to Gertrude rather than to her. I thought that was totally unreasonable.
In those days I was learning to like Chinese food. I had eaten in Chinese restaurants frequently, but had known only of chop suey and chow mein. Then one day I started ordering such items as shrimps in lobster sauce or sweet and sour pork, and I never ordered either chop suey or chow mein again.
It was on November 14, at a dinner with the Segals, for instance, that I tasted egg rolls for the first time. This is very odd. Considering my fondness for Chinese food today, I would have sworn—barring the evidence of the diary—that I had been weaned on egg rolls.
18
During October, I wrote a report for Elderfield describing what evidence I had gathered concerning the existence of the intermediate in the body and its possible nature. Elderfield seemed satisfied with it and confident he could use it to get a renewal of his grant. 1
Elderfield was so confident of the renewal that on November 26 he asked me how I would like to stay on for a second year at an increase in salary. I managed to avoid answering. I felt increasingly that it was time I had something more permanent; I couldn't go on from year to year
1 Ever since World War II, scientific research had become increasingly d
ependent on government grants, and professors came increasingly to be more interested in that which would elicit grant money than in that which would increase human knowledge—which I found depressing. What's more, grant money was increasingly used to subsidize students going for their Ph.D. I might conceivably have been the last Ph.D. student to get through without one cent of grant money.
like this, and even Elderfield said flatly that a second year was all he could manage. I found out later that he was putting me down for $4,800 for the next year. Bella, my assistant, was down for $3,000.
l 9
On November 30, 1948, a fellow student, Burnett Pitt, received his Ph.D. We were friends, but rather cool ones. He was short, dark, sardonic, and rather close-mouthed. I didn't think he liked me, though that may just have been my misinterpretation of his way of talking.
20
During World War II I had loved the comic strip "Barnaby" and was devastated when the cartoonist Crockett Johnson grew tired of it and stopped. Johnson had all kinds of clever touches that amused us all. When Atlas the Mental Giant couldn't remember O'Malley's name until he worked out a determinant on the slide rule he always carried with him, Meisel informed us delightedly that when the determinant was worked out, the answer was really O'Malley.
I didn't think I would ever enjoy a comic strip as much as I had that one, but in 1948, Walt Kelly came out with 'Togo" and it was a case of love at first sight. I actually began to cut out the strips, paste them in a book, and save them. Later on, of course, Pogo books came out with the individual strips collected and I no longer had to save my own. I just bought the books. ("Barnaby" strips had come out in two books of their own, which I bought and still possess.)
21
On December 4, 1948, there was a very pleasant Hydra Club meeting at Fletcher Pratt's place. He had started with three marmosets and now had fifteen and the place smelled terrible as a result. He offered us a marmoset, but though it looked very cute (not very different from Fletcher, in fact) we refused with a shudder.
Fred Pohl was there. He had now married for a third time—to Judy Merril.
Also present was Fredric Brown, a short, thin fellow who looked like a bookkeeper but who wrote excellent science-fiction short-shorts and amazingly good tough-guy detective novels. His book Screaming Mimi is a classic and my personal favorite of the things he wrote. He was a chess buff and wanted badly to play me, even though I told him
it was almost impossible for me to win a game against anyone. I had visited his apartment one time not long thereafter and he beat me rapidly in two games.
He talked as he played, however (perhaps without knowing it), and constantly reasoned out what he thought I was doing. I caught on and started doing what he thought I was doing, and in the third game I managed to elicit a draw.
Pauline Bloom was also at that Hydra Club session. She was the person who had invited me to join the Brooklyn Authors Club seven years before and through whom, therefore, I had indirectly met Gertrude.
As for remarriages, we got a Christmas card from Bob Heinlein later in the month. It was signed Bob and Ginny. It seems he had married Virginia Gershtenfeld, who had been at the Navy Yard with us as a WAVE.
The January 1949 Astounding appeared with 'The Red Queen's Race" 2 included.
22
The year 1948 was still another poor writing year. I had sold two stories and had had one anthologization sale, and my total earnings from writing came to $640. From 1944 on, each year had seen me earn less from writing than the year before.
Of course, 1948 was better than 1947 in that I had a paying job. I had earned $2,625 working for Elderfield in 1948 so that my total income was roughly $3,300. It was about my Navy Yard income, which certainly represented no progress in four years, considering that prices had gone higher in the aftermath of the war.
2 3 On January 2, 1949, I celebrated my twenty-ninth birthday, which
1 found rather upsetting on two counts. It was, for one thing, the last year of my twenties and there was the unavoidable thought that in one year I would be thirty. That was no age, surely, for a child prodigy like myself. In fact, so drearily was I aware of my advanced state of chronological decay that, for the first time, the thought of an autobiography occurred to me.
Second, despite my advanced age I had not yet settled down and
2 See The Early Asimoy.
found my life's work. For the fifth time in a row I had celebrated my birthday in a new dwelling place and in each case the place was clearly a temporary one. How long would that continue?
And despite Elderfield's offer of a second year, I felt no great security in my job. Elderfield was capable of fearsome acts on impulse. He had a graduate student named Chapin Smith who had been working on various problems of synthetic organic chemistry for three years without much success.
I had been working with him closely for some months and found him a thoughtful, intelligent fellow, but on January 6, 1949, he returned from a Christmas vacation and was greeted, quite suddenly and without warning, by the news that Elderfield was pitching him out on his ear.
Nor could I find any security in my writing. As I said, 1948 had been a disappointing year and though I was working on "—And Now You Don't," which had the potential of earning me a large check, I disliked it intensely and found working on it very difficult.
There was one minor note of success. My story "No Connection" had been picked up for anthologization in a collection to be called The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949, and edited by Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty. It was the first time anyone ever planned a regular annual series of anthologies to include the best of the year. That brought in
$35-
As for books of my own, that seemed an utter will-o'-the-wisp. Although I had been told that Martin Greenberg would do "Grow Old with Me," the manuscript was back again. He had founded Gnome Press, but somehow nothing happened—at least not with me. At one point I seem to recall meeting him and discussing some changes, but it was all very lukewarm.
Fred Pohl told me that Doubleday was thinking of putting out a line of science-fiction books and he wondered whether they might be interested in "The Mule." I didn't mind having him check the matter and I gave him copies of Astounding that contained the story. Unfortunately, that came to nothing also.
I was at one of my low points as 1949 opened and it was clear that I had better start intensifying my search for a regular job. I could postpone it no longer.
Job Hunting
It was at this crucial moment of uncertainty that I received a phone call from Bill Boyd of Boston University School of Medicine on January 12, 1949. He was in town to give a talk on blood groups (his specialty) at the New York Academy of Medicine.
He had also written me a letter, which arrived after his phone call. In it, he told me he had been promoted to full professor of im-munochemistry and that he was under the impression that the Medical School would want a replacement for him in the Biochemistry Department. He had mentioned my name in that connection, so how would I like to be assistant or associate professor?
I attended the lecture on the thirteenth with my head in a whirl. 1 I had never really thought of an academic position. I had always assumed I would get some job with an industrial firm and work as I had in the Navy Yard, only much more responsibly. But a professorship!
On the other hand, it would be in Boston. Philadelphia was a hundred miles from New York and I had found the distance upsetting. Boston was two hundred miles away.
I met Bill's wife, Lyle Boyd (a gentle and sweet, quiet-spoken woman) on this occasion and the next day, Gertrude and I had dinner with the Boyds and the Sards. After dinner, we went to a jam session at which very loud music was played and which I hated. It was as though I had suddenly been thrust into a new and untried world as a warning of what would come if I took an out-of-town job.
Then on January 20, I got another letter from Boyd that seemed to deflate everything. It was not a professorship at all that w
ould be offered but only an instructorship (a status that lacks the august title). The offer was for a year only with no guarantee of a continuation or advancement (although, of course, both would be in the cards if I gave satisfaction), and the salary was $4,500. It seemed little, if at all, better than what I had with Elderfield, and I wasn't going to move to Boston for that. I turned it down out of hand.
Bill gave a very good lecture and was dressed in a tuxedo. I think it was the first time I had ever seen anyone in a tuxedo.
The next day, I told Elderfield I had turned down the instruc-torship and he approved. He made it quite clear, without actually saying so, that he would take better care of me than that and expressed approval of a new report on my work.
Then, on January 26, Elderfield went to Washington to make final arrangements on the grants for next year and returned in what seemed to be a state of excitement. He told me that the portion of the research in which I was working had been turned down and that I was through. Perhaps because he felt guilty about it since he had done nothing but praise my work, he told me I could stay on till June 30.
I had five months in which to find a job, and I was back exactly where I had been at the American Chemical Society convention in 1947 and with somewhat less time in which to find salvation.
At once I began pulling what strings I possessed to see if some jobs would open up. I had Dawson send letters to places where his opinion was of some use. I tried to contact other faculty members with whom my relations were pleasant.
Then, following my usual tactics of trying to keep every option open, I even did my best to keep Boston warm. On the twenty-eighth, I received a letter from Professor Bumham S. Walker, Boyd's boss and the department head. He had read the copy of my dissertation I had given Boyd, and he was "particularly impressed" with it. I promptly sent off a pleasant reply, trying to indicate that I didn't consider the job offer dead.
In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 Page 67
