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

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  Life went on, too. On August 4, after a couple of days of relative coolness, I managed to start the new robot story, "The Evitable Conflict," in which I pictured a world run by intelligent computers cooperating subtly enough to leave humanity with the illusion that it was still in charge.

  On August 15, I got a new kind of acceptance: The Journal of the American Chemical Society was going to run my paper.

  On the nineteenth we took the bus to Jaffrey, and our first impression of Birchtoft was as woeful as our first impression of Hilltop Lodge had been back in 1943. Our temporary quarters were horrible, and the

  food was poor and rather flatly American. There was bacon at breakfast and none of the Jewish delicacies we had had at Chester's Zunbarg— which we missed unbearably the first few days. What's more, the lake was ten minutes distant through the woods.

  On the first day, however, one of the guests, seeing that we were clearly unhappy, spoke consolingly and assured us the place would grow on us—and indeed the place did seem to improve with time. We got better quarters, the food wasn't so bad after all, and the walk through the woods to the lake was actually pleasant.

  The master of ceremonies was Leonard Cibley, who was a student at the Medical School (the world is always a surprisingly small one), and he was excellent at dialect jokes. I envied him exceedingly. I tell jokes very well myself, but can only handle the Yiddish dialect.

  The weather was variable. The first few days were actually cold, and a fire had to be built in the sitting room. Considering that it was one of Boston's hottest summers, it seemed ironic that, after our superheated Somerville attic, we were to be sitting there shivering but there was a welcome novelty to it also. There were other days, however, when the temperatures went into the nineties.

  We met Morris and Lillian Cohen, who were a particularly pleasant couple; he short and bald, she short and blond, both highly articulate. They were celebrating their sixteenth wedding anniversary. We grew friendly with them when I noticed Maury (as we eventually came to call him) carrying a copy of the current Astounding.

  He didn't know who I was, since it was customary at resorts to use first names only, as another way of shutting out the real world, and I felt it safe and unembarrassing to ask if he had read any of the stories of the Foundation series.

  "Oh yes," he said. "They are very good, and the author is your namesake. He's Isaac, also."

  "His last name," I said, "is also a namesake of mine. For my last name is Asimov, just as his is."

  After that we were inseparable.

  We left Birch toft on September 2. The two weeks cost us, all told —special expenses, tips, and everything—$250, and we felt it was well worth it. We were getting a little less cramped about money.

  3

  The science-fiction book-publishing business was catching. If Doubleday began, could the other publishers be far behind?

  On September 6, 1949, I got a letter from Little, Brown, one of the

  two large publishing firms based in Boston. (The other was Houghton-Mifflin.) They wanted to know if I had a science-fiction book for them.

  I called up all atremble and a young woman, Jane Lawson, invited me to lunch on the eighth to discuss the matter. It was the first time I had occasion to deal with a woman editor. Considering my bringing up in the male world of early magazine science fiction, I wouldn't have thought such a thing could exist.

  She took me to Locke-Ober's, Boston's most prestigious restaurant, which I visited for the first time. She insisted that I have a fancy meal, and I didn't have the nerve to cross her—she was an editor, after all.

  Since she ordered a whiskey sour, so did I, and since she ordered a shrimp cocktail, so did I. Then she had swordfish (which I had tasted for the first time some weeks before—Boston is famous for its seafood) but insisted I order the more expensive lobster. I did, and struggled with it, for I may have had lobster before (I don't remember) but I was certainly not at the stage where I could handle it easily. And then apple pie a la mode and coffee.

  I didn't enjoy a bite of it because I knew that the bill would come to about ten dollars (it did) and that was going to put a fearful drain on my pocket money. It was even conceivable I might suffer the incredible humiliation of having the bill come to more money than I had with me.

  Then, when the meal was over and the waiter arrived with the bill, he simply handed it to Miss Lawson, who, to my astonishment, quietly and efficiently paid it. It had just never occurred to me that a woman could pay a restaurant bill. 1

  During the lunch I tried to tout my Foundation series, and later on, I brought her all the manuscripts. Alas, she didn't want them, and after reading them, handed them back.

  4 There was still Doubleday. I went to New York on September 14 and gave the manuscripts of the Foundation series to Bradbury (I was beginning to call him Brad, as all who knew him did). He, too, decided

  1 Looking back on it, I realize, of course, that Miss Lawson was a steady customer whom the waiter knew and that she frequently had a male writer as her guest so that it was quite routine for her to take the bill. Nor was it she who paid, but Little, Brown. This was something it was hard for me to grow accustomed to, since I have never been on an expense account. Once, when I was having lunch with Campbell, I tried to reach for the check and he placed his large hand on mine, pinning it to the table, and said, "Never argue with a giant corporation, Isaac." I've tried to remember that.

  he didn't want to do them. What he did want to have me do, however, was to come up with an idea for a novel by November, and if he liked the idea he would arrange for a contract and pay me money in advance.

  I gave him a picture that had been taken of Gertrude and me just before I had gone off into the Army. Doubleday used only the half that was myself, of course, and planned to put it on the book jacket of Pebble in the Sky y which was now scheduled for publication on the following January 19.

  It was an incredibly handsome photograph of myself, without glasses, at twenty-five, and it is still there on several early books. I would have liked to use it permanently; I would like to use it even now. However, I started getting very friendly letters from young women who happened to read those early books, and Gertrude warned me that if any of them dropped around to see me and found out what I really looked like they would rend me limb from limb. I decided she was right so that the photographs on my books have been aging at more or less the rate I have been.

  On September 16, 1949, I visited Campbell and spent three hours with him.

  "—And Now You Don't," he told me, was going to run as a three-part serial (my first three-parter), with the first part appearing in the November 1949 issue. It was during that visit that I first heard "of Hubbard's dabblings in amateur psychiatry" (as I put it in my diary).

  This was going to develop into "dianetics," out of which Hubbard was to make his fortune and gain his godhead. Campbell was unabashedly enthusiastic about it, and this marked his first dip into the kind of mysticism that was to consume him for the rest of his life. As I listened to Campbell describe what was to become dianetics, I sat there, cold and untouched.

  5

  Once the summer heat was over, the Somerville apartment became quite bearable. We had an active social life not only with the New York people who had come to Boston for jobs, but also with some of the people we had met at Birchtoft. Then too, I attended seminars with ambition and energy, not only at the Medical School, but also at Harvard and MIT. I was doing my best to get the feeling of being part of the academic life, and I was trying to take it for granted that my salary would be continued for year after year.

  Boston University Medical School was an old institution. Its three

  buildings were ancient and the laboratories were less impressive than those of Columbia, let alone the Navy Yard. Its drabness seemed suitable for the South End, a very rundown section of Boston.

  The main campus of Boston University, on Commonwealth Avenue in the Back Bay, was much more modern and impres
sive, but the Medical School's location, poor as it was in a material sense, was between Boston City Hospital and Massachusetts Memorial Hospital, and that was good for clinical training.

  As for myself, since I was not visual, I got used to the drabness quickly and got to work on my research project, in which I intended to deal with the structure of nucleic acids. Among other things, I set about trying to make use of paper chromatography as a tool. This was a way of separating the components of a complex mixture by having them travel at different speeds along porous paper. In this way I hoped to determine the percentage of different bases in nucleic acids taken from normal and cancerous tissue and, perhaps, get an inkling of the basic chemical change that brought on cancer.

  In hindsight, I am quite convinced that this line of attack would not have given me any useful information on the cancer problem, but I might have come up with something interesting in other directions if the course of events had allowed me to continue my research long enough. Who knows?

  In October, meanwhile, I tackled "The Evitable Conflict" in earnest and finished it in four weeks. I mailed it to Campbell on October 31, and on November 7, I received a check for $180. If we don't count "Grow Old Along with Me," then "The Evitable Conflict" was the eighteenth story in a row that I had written with only Campbell in mind and that Campbell had taken.

  Meanwhile, on October 25, I received the galley proofs of Pebble in the Sky. It was the first time I had ever received galley proofs, and I handled them almost reverently and went over them with painstaking slowness. It took me a whole week to do the proofing.

  Gertrude and I were picked up by Kupchan on November 4 and driven to New York (or to the Bronx at least, and we went the rest of the way to the Blugermans' by subway). I brought the precious proofs with me and made a date to see Bradbury on Sunday afternoon.

  There was no reason for him to interrupt his weekend to see me on a Sunday afternoon, but he wanted to make sure I had done the proofreading well. Brad was another one of the list of people in my life who have been moved by my lack of sophistication and by my air of eager incompetence to take a lot of trouble over me and to protect me.

  There's no need to mention Campbell and Dawson as two other examples.

  On Sunday, the sixth, then, I visited my parents and showed them the galley proofs to their great satisfaction and then went on to Brad's place. He lived in Peter Cooper Village at that time, a development right next to Stuyvesant Town, with larger apartments at higher rents. I met his wife and his young daughter and then we sat down over the proofs.

  He went over them, as Dawson used to go over my dissertation, checking what I had done and showing me how to do it better. Eventually he was satisfied and said I seemed to have done a careful job.

  I was gratified and said, "Yes, it's amazing what you find when you see things in cold print. There was a place there, for instance, where I had my characters 'say icily,' and 'say frostily,' and 'say frigidly' about twenty times in two pages. I cut out all those adverbs."

  "Good," said Brad. "It's always strongest if you just say 'he said' and use adverbs only as a last resort."

  "Right," I said. "Goodness! The way it was, The New Yorker would have listed them all in their 'infatuated-with-the-sound-of-his-own-words' department."

  Brad looked at me with a wild surmise and said, "Where are the passages you're speaking of?"

  I showed them to him and he went through them and put back all the adverbs. It didn't do any good— The New Yorker never picked it up.

  While there, I outlined the plot of a new novel, and he told me to go ahead. He wanted the first two chapters and an outline before writing a contract.

  I found things going well when I returned to Boston. On November 9, there came news that Lemon had already obtained a renewal of his grant, so I was assured of a salary for a second year. Things seemed to be going far better than they had under Elderfield.

  Besides which, I now made the discovery that books, unlike magazine stories, made money by themselves while the authors slept or dallied or twiddled their fingers. That same day I got a telegram from Fred Pohl to the effect that Unicorn Press, a small book club specializing in mysteries, had taken Pebble in the Sky for an advance of $1,000. Such earnings were split half and half between publisher and author, with Fred taking his agent's 10 per cent of my half, but that

  still meant $450 for me eventually when it came to statement time. 2 Well, goodness, that was half a year's rent and I hadn't had to do any work for it at all.

  This was the kind of inspiration to get me right to work by November 15 on the summary of a new novel, The Stars, like Dust—. I started the novel itself on the twentieth.

  This is not to say that this new variety of writing success didn't bring some problems in its wake. At about this time, I received a copy of the book jacket for the forthcoming Pebble in the Sky. I was delighted, especially with my own handsome dream-prince of a photograph.

  The back cover, in addition to the photo, had a biographical sketch, and the last sentence was, "Dr. Asimov lives in Boston, where he is engaged in cancer research at Boston University School of Medicine."

  It had never occurred to me that the Medical School might be mentioned and now I wondered if the school might be offended by this. It was too late to change the jacket and I was not of a mind to hang by my thumbs and wait for an explosion. I thought I would have to confront the issue now and I already knew that I could not give up my writing. If it came to a choice . . .

  I asked for an appointment with Dean Faulkner, and when I kept that appointment, I put it to him frankly. I was a science-fiction writer, I said, had been for years, and the people who hired me knew this was so at the time they hired me.

  My first book was coming out in a month or two, under my own name, of course, and my association with the medical school was mentioned on the back cover. I hadn't known it would be, but there it was. Did he want my resignation?

  The dean considered thoughtfully (he was a true Boston Brahmin with a long face and an easy smile) and said, "Is it a good book?"

  Cautiously, I said, "The publishers think so."

  He said, "In that case the medical school will be glad to be identified with it."

  That took care of that.

  7

  Bill Boyd had gone to Egypt at the beginning of September, and I heard from him with fair regularity. He was ecstatic at first but by No-

  2 Book publishers pay accumulated earnings twice a year—February and August in Doubleday's case.

  vember there was a more sober air to his letters, and he now said that he would definitely be back when his two-year hitch was up.

  Roy Machlowitz showed up in Boston on November 25—a breath of the long-dead days in Philadelphia. He was married now and his wife came with him. We had lunch together, visited the glass flowers at the Harvard Museum (which I secretly thought overrated), fed them a swordfish dinner, and all went well.

  Talking about dinner, during those early months in Boston, the Boyds and the Whipples introduced me to a club called "The Decadents." The purpose of the club was to meet once a month for some fancy ethnic meal, with each month someone else serving as host. One month, for instance, we went to a restaurant for a Syrian meal. It was my first experience of the Middle Eastern cuisine, and I loved it.

  On December 10, a few days after Babbie Whipple had given birth to a baby girl, we all went to a Chinese restaurant, where the Chinese consul and his wife did the ordering and ate with us. We had dishes we had never had before and were never to have again. All I could say in my diary was "Two soups, five main courses, all new, all delicious, all indescribable." It was the best Chinese dinner I have ever had.

  8

  On December 20, I completed the outline of The Stars, like Dust— along with the first two chapters written out in full, exactly as Bradbury had asked me to do. It was all ready to be taken to New York.

  On the twenty-third Kupchan drove us to New York for Christmas-New Year's, and the
next day we had an old-fashioned feast at the Blugermans'. Mary had prepared nothing less than a twenty-six-pound turkey. The five of us managed to finish nearly half of it at dinner.

  On Christmas Day it was my parents' turn, and after visiting them I delivered the chapters and outline to Bradbury.

  9

  In those days, Gertrude and I were going through a fit of playing charades. We engaged in it at every opportunity and, of course, it was bound to give rise to occasional frustrations that were murderous at the time and funny afterward.

  Sometimes the frustrations were deliberately arranged. After all, as one played charades and grew more expert, one developed a set of sig-

  nals that turned it into almost a deaf-and-dumb language so that no phrase remained unpenetrated long. To cure dullness, there was occasionally a conspiracy to arrange to have a relative newcomer deliver a phrase we all knew but deliberately misguessed. No matter what he or she signaled, all the rats in the audience assiduously suggested synonyms and never landed on the right spot. It was fun to watch the demonstrator slowly curdle and disintegrate, but we could never go too far, for either one of us would start laughing or we would fear a real stroke. We would confess and there would be a furious demonstrator who would take hours to recede from his or her high fever.

  It was more dangerous to really strike an insoluble syllable, through impenetrable stupidity, for then there would be no end, short of absolute irreversible insanity.

  I once had to demonstrate Hamlet's heartfelt cry, "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?" and got all the short words across in short order, assuming they would all know "Hecuba" as soon as they got the rest. Unfortunately, the audience consisted of illiterate chemists and I had to get "Hecuba" across to them.

  I divided it into three syllables and got the first two across so that now they had, "What's Hecu— to him, or he to Hecu —" and there it stuck. Nothing I could do could get across a "buh," although I would have sworn a child of three who had never heard any language but Montenegrin would have known the entire phrase by then. Finally, I screamed incoherently and left the room. I wasn't really mad. I came back after a few hours.