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

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  One of my "strings" was a young man who lived near my father's store. He worked at Charles Pfizer's, a chemical firm in Brooklyn. It was a prosperous firm that did a good deal of work in enzymes and allied fields. The site was right and I was eager. My friend made an appointment with me for February 4.

  I arrived at Pfizer's at 9:50 a.m. for a 10:00 a.m. appointment, and it quickly appeared that they really didn't want me. In fact, they didn't even want to see me. Why they had made the appointment I don't know, but as time passed, it seemed to me that they hoped I would grow tired of waiting and go home.

  I wasn't going to make it that easy for them. I dug in my heels and prepared to wait all day. What I thought I would prove by that, I don't know, but I couldn't bear to leave and have them carry the field by default. My acquaintance, greatly embarrassed, came down to wait with me at 11:00 a.m. and then took me to the company cafeteria to have

  lunch. It appeared that everyone had their own private linen napkin kept in their napkin ring for them and used for a period of time so that each had his own comfortable food-stains on it. I was told that people were assigned seats and that these were shifted now and then to make sure everyone met everyone.

  I smiled and said, "It seems like a very comfortable prison/' and my acquaintance looked unhappy.

  A person came down to interview me at 2:00 p.m. He was bald, had red-rimmed eyes, and while not actually drooling, spoke moistly. I disliked him intensely on sight.

  He did not apologize for the delay and began by explaining he had no place for me, since bacteriology was required, which I did not have, and since times were getting harder. Why he couldn't have told me this at 10:00 a.m., or why he consented to an appointment at all, I don't know.

  I gave him a copy of my dissertation the instant he appeared and some days later he sent it back in the mail, referring to it as "your little brochure" as though he didn't know a doctoral dissertation when he saw one.

  I have never forgotten and never will forget Charles Pfizer's. I have since, on occasion, received letters from people at Pfizer's asking for my co-operation in one way or another. As long as the request is on official company stationery, I simply do not answer. It's childish of me, of course, but there's no way in which I can guarantee never being childish.

  3

  Looking back on it, I think that incident on February 4, 1949, represented the low point of my career, with both chemistry and writing seeming to be at the nadir.

  The very next day I met the future and, of course, didn't know it.

  At a meeting of the Hydra Club on February 5, I met the editor in charge of Doubleday's new science-fiction program. He was Walter I. Bradbury, an intelligent and kindly man who, in my eyes, looked exactly like the British actor Leo Genn. He was, at that time, thirty-four years old.

  He told me he had read "The Mule" and had liked it, but that everything must go through an editorial committee (as is indeed true at Doubleday, even for this book).

  As always in such cases, I labored to keep my hopes low, for I dread disappointment. I was right to do so in this case, for nothing

  came of it and I heard of the rejection of "The Mule" on the thirteenth. Nevertheless, Bradbury was still the future for me. 2

  4

  The following weeks were spent almost exclusively on job hunting, as I haunted employment agencies and continued to have everyone I know tell me about any place at all in which they might have pull.

  For a while, the most hopeful line seemed to be through a fellow student at Columbia, Allan Gray. His father was research director at Wallerstein's, a firm that did research on beer and was particularly interested in the kind of enzymes in yeast, for instance. He promised to mention my name to his father.

  I thought beer was a devil of a thing for me to become involved in, but I imagined I would be doing chemical work that might have theoretical interest outside the world of beer—and the firm was in New York —so I said I was interested.

  I went to Wallerstein's on February 23. It was on Madison Avenue in the lower thirties and to my great relief, it did not smell of beer. Allan Gray's father was pleasant and decent, quite the reverse of the egregious man at Pfizer, and I liked the laboratory.

  I actually thought I had a good chance here but I did not allow that estimate to slow me in my frenetic search.

  Dawson, for instance, offered to write a letter to Johns Hopkins where a friend of his was looking for staff members. I wrote a letter and even got Elderfield to write one backing me up.

  5

  On February 25, 1949, three things happened.

  First, a letter from Johns Hopkins was sent to Dawson asking him to send me down to Baltimore for an interview.

  Second, a letter had arrived from Boston University asking me to come up to Boston for an interview.

  Third, Fred Pohl, not giving up his new urge to be an agent, suggested I let him try "Grow Old with Me" on Doubleday. By now, remembering rejections by Merwin, Campbell, and Greenberg, I had grown thoroughly convinced it was an inevitable loser.

  "No, Fred," I said, "it stinks."

  2 As a side issue, I now weighed 190 pounds, having gained 36 pounds in my 6Vi years of marriage.

  "Who cares about your opinion?" said Fred. "Let's see what Doubleday thinks."

  So I thought: Well, what harm? I promised I'd get the manuscript over to him sometime.

  I made an appointment for March 4 at Johns Hopkins and for March 10 at Boston University. In an effort to make myself look respectable (and remembering the dapper appearance Dawson always had) I bought myself a homburg hat for six dollars. It was the first hat I had owned in many years. How a homburg hat could possibly help me when I was always interviewed indoors and would have to take my hat off the moment I passed the door I can't possibly imagine. As it turned out, I almost never wore the hat and I've never bought another.

  On March 4, I took the 6:30 a.m. train to Baltimore, fortified by the knowledge that Al Nason, a Columbia student in the Botany Department, had been interviewed at Johns Hopkins two weeks before and had gotten an offer of $4,200 plus moving expenses. The salary was disappointingly low to me, but he was offered the title of assistant professor.

  At Johns Hopkins I met Professor William D. McElroy (who reminded me of Elderfield a bit in appearance and manner). McElroy was as pleasant as could be and told me that the post would be an assistant professorship and would carry $4,500 as a salary. (Nason was not yet a Ph.D., hence the lower offer to him.) It was clear, however that McElroy didn't want me. He admitted that he needed someone with more experience in trace metals than I had, and that he had already accepted as many men as he could take so that he could only make me an offer if someone turned him down—which he didn't think was likely.

  I crossed off Johns Hopkins.

  There was life in areas outside job hunting. I was turning my dissertation into a much briefer paper, suitable for appearance in some chemical journal—if they were willing to accept it. This meant periodic sessions with Dawson, as in the previous year, and I was slowly finishing it.

  I was also drawing toward the end of "—And Now You Don't."

  Then, too, I received a request, at about this time, for a story for a

  new science-fiction anthology. Oddly enough, I was asked to pick the

  story myself and to give a reason for my choice. There was only one

  catch: I must not pick a story from Astounding because they could not

  clear permissions from that magazine. That put me in a bind, since my best stories had all appeared in Astounding.

  I chose "Robot AL-76 Goes Astray" and in giving my reason for the choice carefully refrained from saying it was any good (which it wasn't). I simply said it was my humorous robot story and I had picked it for its lightheartedness.

  I made my Introduction lighthearted, too. In fact, as I reread that Introduction now, I see in it a considerable bit of that style that was to become common for me at later times—a mixture of self-denigration and sel
f-esteem in equal quantities. I said at one point:

  "In a sense, it's a self-satire. Of course, it's a great day for an author when he becomes important enough to be satirized, and if I waited for a spontaneous gesture on the part of others, I could wait decades—centuries, if I lived long enough."

  It earned me $30, but when the anthology finally appeared, later in the year, it turned out to be money ill-got. It was entitled My Best Science-fiction Story, the subtitle being As Selected by 25 Outstanding Authors. I didn't mind being an outstanding author but, my goodness, "Robot AL-76 Goes Astray" was not my best science-fiction story and I never said it was. I chafed quite a bit at that.

  7

  I received a nice letter from Lyle Boyd, inviting me to dinner on February 9, so I took the Yankee Clipper from Grand Central Station at 1 :oo p.m. and had an excellent dinner with the Boyds, meeting their twelve-year-old daughter, Sylvia, for the first time.

  They put me up overnight and I remember having considerable trouble sleeping (as almost always in a strange bed). Since they had shelves of books in the room assigned me, as in all the other rooms, I searched them and found Lady Chatterley's Lover, which I had often heard of but had never read. I read some of it, but it was definitely not a soporific.

  On the morning of the tenth, Bill drove me to Boston University School of Medicine. It was in a slum section of Boston and right across the street from Boston City Hospital. I met Professor Walker for the first time. He was forty-seven years old, very taciturn and unsmiling but with a quiet sense of humor that was unmistakable.

  The ante had gone up. I was still only being offered an instructor-ship, but the salary was going to be $5,000, and a one-month vacation with pay was to be included.

  I was introduced to Dr. Henry M. Lemon, who was heading the project in which I was to be employed and who controlled the grant money out of which I was to be paid. He was round-faced and grave, obviously completely absorbed by the work he was doing, which dealt with the enzyme content of human cancer tissue and how it could be distinguished from the enzyme content of normal human tissue (with obvious implications as to diagnosis).

  It was clear, however, that his gravity, unlike Dr. Walker's, held behind it no sense of humor at all. That bothered me, since I had long learned that no one could long endure me who didn't have one.

  I also met Dr. Matthew Derow, a bacteriologist, who was pleasant, jovial, and very talkative. Little he said was ever in a serious vein, but that sort of thing always suited me.

  Walker told me I would be expected to help teach the Medical School freshmen and asked if I could teach biochemistry.

  "Certainly," I said.

  Since he didn't ask me if I had ever taken any course in biochemistry, or if I knew anything about biochemistry, I felt it would be impolite to force upon him the information that the answer to both those possible questions was "No." The course wouldn't start till February and by then I should know enough to get along.

  I asked him to send me a letter formally offering me the position and then I went home wondering if I ought to accept it.

  8

  Back in New York, everyone at Columbia told me to jump at the offer, and if the school had been located in New York I would have.

  I love New York. I had never felt at home in Philadelphia and I don't know that I would ever feel at home in Boston. And yet I didn't love New York to the point of wanting to starve in it.

  I attended to my other affairs while trying to come to a decision. For instance, I had to get the manuscript of "Grow Old with Me" over to Fred Pohl.

  I walked over to his apartment on March n and found he wasn't in. (After a lifetime without a phone, I couldn't seem to get the hang of the notion that one calls a person first, to see if he's in and willing to receive, before one walks over.)

  What I did next is hard for me to believe, even though my diary says I did it, and I remember I did it These days, when I deliver a manuscript, I take it to the editor personally, and don't let go of it till I

  see that the editor has a good grip on it. Furthermore, I make him or her swear on the River Styx that he or she won't lose it. If the editor were too far for a personal trip, I would send the manuscript by registered mail, return receipt requested, and threaten the entire post office with instant thermonuclear annihilation if anything went wrong.

  In this case, though, on March 11, 1949, I was so utterly uninterested in "Grow Old with Me" that when Judy Merril's eight-year-old daughter, Merril, answered the door and said, in her childish treble, that neither her stepfather nor her mother was home, I thrust my manuscript at the eight-year-old infant, said, "Here—give this to your old man when you see him/' and marched off.

  9

  I finally got my own citizenship papers. That didn't make me any more a citizen or any less a citizen than before. I had been a citizen ever since 1928. With my own papers, however, I didn't have to get my father's every time I had to prove citizenship. Still, any future biographer will run the risk of thinking I did not become a citizen till 1949 if he is careless with the documentary evidence.

  Even after all the data had been gone into at the appropriate government office, it was not enough. They asked to see my mother. On March 30, my mother and I went to the office for the purpose. My mother got dressed to the brim, including a fetching black hat with a veil suspended from it and dangling in front of her face.

  At the subway station, while waiting for the train, she walked over to a peanut vending machine (which they had at the stations in those days) and put in a penny (which was all they asked for in those days). Out came a penny's worth of peanuts, which she tossed dexterously toward her mouth. The next thing I saw was my mother righting away in front of her face as though she were defending herself from a swarm of bees. I went rushing over, but it turned out that in tossing the peanuts into her mouth, she had forgotten she was wearing a veil.

  At the offices, she was closeted with the official privately, and when I entered finally and asked what it was all about, he wouldn't tell me. After we left, I asked my mother, and she said that because of the inadequacy of the documentation of her marriage, she had to testify that I was not of illegitimate birth.

  I laughed, not so much over the suspicion, but over the embarrassment of the official, who could not bring himself to mention it to

  me (for fear I suppose, that I would go into a rage and knock him down).

  10

  I then took my mother home and went on to Elizabeth, for I had finished "—And Now You Don't" the day before, at last. While there we discussed another positronic robot story, to be called 'The Evitable Conflict."

  On March 31, Campbell took "—And Now You Don't," and a check for $1,000 came on April 5. It was the most I had ever gotten for a single piece of writing, and was, in fact, the largest check I had ever seen.

  The story was, however, the last of the Foundation series, which I had been working on now, on and off, for 7V2 years and which included eight stories that had earned me a total of just over $3,600.

  I had gone through too much trauma on "—And Now You Don't" to continue the series. I had spent too much time, far too much, on working out twists in the plot that would fit what had gone before. I think that by this time even Campbell realized that I had had enough, though I'm sure that if he could have had his way, he would have had me work on the Foundation forever, since there was no question that the stories were crowd pleasers.

  11

  Even more exciting, in a way, was the news that Fred Pohl brought to me. Doubleday had considered "Grow Old with Me" and was willing to publish it as a book, provided I rewrote it and lengthened it from its 40,000 words to the full novel-length 70,000.

  They were willing to pay me an option on it of $150, and I would be able to keep this option, even if my revision and lengthening proved unsuitable. What's more, if they liked the revision, they would pay me another $350 and then publish it as a book and pay me a royalty of 10 per cent of the royalties on all sales up
to 5,000 and 12V2 per cent thereafter. Since the book would be priced at $2.50, that meant a whole silver quarter for every copy sold, and if more than 5,000 were sold, then $.3125 on every copy afterward.

  This was a magnificent prospect, but I had grown cynical where "Grow Old with Me" was concerned. Somehow, I thought, it would manage to be rejected.

  Well, I would take the option, so that the story would have earned something. I would then make the revision and we would see.

  On March 31, Pohl handed me a check for $135. He kept $15 as agent's fee on the option. He was my agent once again, as he had been nine years before.

  12

  Finally, on April 4, I received a formal notification from Dean James Faulkner that I had been appointed an instructor in biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine as of May 1, 1949.

  Well, what could I do? I had been looking for a job madly for two months, and this was the only one that turned up and, except for the fact that it was in Boston, it was a satisfactory one. On April 5, I accepted officially and that meant farewell to Stuyvesant Town and, far worse, farewell to New York.

  Once I had sent in my acceptance, Mr. Gray of Wallerstein was ready to offer me a job, but it was too late. The die was cast.

  *3

  In making this decision, I completely ignored the potential earning power of my writing. Looking back on it now it might seem amazing that I did so, but at that time it would have been madness to do anything else.

  Let me recapitulate.

  Since the first moment I had stepped into Campbell's office on June 21, 1938, nearly eleven years had passed. In that interval of time I had written only science fiction, and I had reached the top of the tree. Campbell was the top of the tree.

  I had written sixty stories in that eleven-year interval and had sold and been paid for forty-nine of them (fifty if you want to count the option of "Grow Old with Me"). Of these sales, twenty-eight had been to Campbell. In the past seven years, I had written eighteen stories and had sold seventeen of them to Campbell. (The exception was, of course, "Grow Old with Me.")