It's Been a Good Life

by Isaac Asimov

  They listened in apparent absorption, and, at the end, Jack said to me, "You're a very good explainer. I wouldn't have thought anyone could have made that clear to me."

  I laughed, and was pleased, and we went on to other things, and eventually the Segals went home.

  The effect on me, however, was similar to the one that had followed young Emmanuel Bershadsky's praise of The Greenville Chums tit College. I had on that earlier occasion begun to think of myself as a writer; now, as a result of Jack's remark, I began to think of myself as an explainer. I never forgot, and the desire to explain began to grow on me from that day. What's more, I stopped worrying about Elderfield and his opinion of me. I decided I was good at my work.

  Thank you, Jack Segal, wherever you are.

  [ 1949] Despite Elderfield's offer of a second year, I felt no great security in my job ... nor could 1 find any security in my writing. Books of my own ... seemed an utter will-o'-the-wisp.... It was at this crucial moment of uncertainty that I received a phone call from Bill Boyd of Boston University School of Medicine.

  [He was offered] only an instructorship ... for a year only with no guarantee of 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.

  [But Boyd's boss, Burnham S. Walker, read Isaac's dissertation and wrote Isaac that 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 ...

  [He was asked to Boston for an interview.] The ante had gone up. I was still only being offered an instructorship, but the salary was going to be $5,000, and a one-month vacation with pay was to be included.

  [After various interviews] 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 'til 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. 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.

  [In the meantime, he gave the revised manuscript of "Grow Old Along with Me"-he had learned the correct quote-to his friend and then agent Fred Pohl, who took it to Doubleday. J

  Doubleday ... was willing to publish it as a book, provided I rewrote it and lengthened it from its 40,000 words to the full novellength 70,000... on March 31, Pohl handed me a check for $135 [for the option on the book]. He kept $15 as agent's fee on the option ...

  Finally, on April 4, I received a formal notification ... 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, was a satisfactory one. On April 5, I accepted officially and that meant farewell to [Manhattan's] Stuyvesant Town [where he lived then] and, far worse, farewell to New York ...

  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.

  During my eleven years as a professional science-fiction writer who for seven years had been at the top of the tree, I had made a total of $7,593, or just about $700 a year. To be sure, I hadn't been a fulltime writer at all, but my best year, 1944, had only brought in $1,100, and as a full-time writer I would do well to double that, and $2,200 a year would not support me.

  In fact, could I even double the rate at which I earned money if I spent full time at the typewriter? It wasn't writing time that was the bottleneck. You might remain at a typewriter hour after hour after hour, and yet produce very little. What one needs is thinking time, and that can't be rushed. You have to think up your plots and your complications and your resolutions, so that most of your time is going to be spent thinking and not typing.

  [He was also worried that, without Astounding and Campbell, he would not sell much.] And yet if Campbell represented a dead end to me, was there any way of branching out? If I couldn't follow [Robert] Heinlein into the slicks, was there anyplace else I could forge a path for myself?

  On March 21, 1949, I had attended a lecture given by Linus Pauling. It was the best lecture I had ever heard. Even Gertrude, who was present, and who did not understand a word, enjoyed it. It was possible, then, to make science attractive to anyone.

  Inspired by Pauling's speech, and remembering Jack Segal's remark months before about what a good explainer I was, I decided to write a piece of nonfiction. I called it "Detective Story for Non-Chemists" (a title based on Tarpley's [the fellow researcher who had noticed the thiotimoline article] remark, once, that a good chemist had to have a detective instinct). It dealt with the manner in which chemists had worked out the chemical structure of the molecule of biotin, one of the B vitamins.

  [Campbell rejected it as being too dull and detailed as a nonfiction piece for Astounding.] I did not, however, forget it, or my general desire to write nonfiction.

  [May 29, 1949] ... Doubleday was taking the revised "Grow Old Along with Me" and it would be out as a book the next January ... I was delighted. It seemed a happy send-off. But it was difficult to be altogether happy. I was leaving Columbia at last nearly fourteen years after I had first entered it, and although I had longed often enough to be through with it, now that I was really going to leave, it was hard to forget that I had spent half my life associated with it. Then, too, I was leaving New York City for the second time, nearly three years after having gotten out of the army and returned, and this time it was not "for the duration"; it might be for all my life ...

  I remember I met old Professor Thomas on the Columbia campus on Friday, May 27, my last full day on campus. He was getting on in years now and walked with a cane.

  I said to him, "Well, Professor Thomas, I'm leaving Columbia today after fourteen years."

  I thought that the least he could do would be to break into tears, but he only banged his cane against the brick walk and said, "About time! About time!" turned, and tramped off.

  Fifteen.

  TEACHING, WRITING,

  AND SPEAKING

  On June 1, 1949, I showed up at the medical school and spent my first day at the job. It wasn't encouraging. I discovered that Bill Boyd, a full professor, was making $6,000. I seemed, financially, to be already near the top for an academic job. I doubted if I would ever make, even in a good writing year, as much as $10,000.

  Oh well-so I would never be rich. My salary would do for a childless couple, especially since my savings had been slowly accumulating as a result of cautious and frugal living in the past and now stood at $6,200.

  If, that is, the job continued. The trouble was it lacked security. My salary did not come out of Boston University funds. It was out of funds from government grants ... and each year those grants would have to be renewed or I would face the sudden kickout.

  In Boston, I felt as much an exile at first as I had felt in Philadelphia. Boston, however, was a livelier city than Philadelphia had been, and my surroundings were academic rather than bureaucratic, which meant they were more stimulating.

  As time went on, I rapidly grew to like Boston and New England generally. I found a liberal newspaper, the Bos
ton Globe, and I discovered there was no shortage of eating places or science-fiction fans. Eventually, when mobility increased, I discovered that the New England countryside was delightful.

  Walter Bradbury [Doubleday editor] ... wrote to ask me for a different title ... since Grow Old Along with Me did not sound like science fiction and, indeed, carried romantic implications. He was quite right. I decided to change the title to Pebble in the Sky ...

  On November 9, there came the news [of a grant renewal], so I was assured of a salary for a second year. [Furthermore] I now made the discovery that books, unlike magazine stories, made money for 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 Skv for an advance of $1,000. Such earnings were split half and half between publisher and author, with Fred taking his agent's 10 percent of my half, but that still meant $450 for me eventually when it came to statement time (Book publishers pay accumulated earnings twice a year). Well, goodness, that was half a year's rent and I hadn't had to do any work for it at all.

  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 con front 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 that 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.

  [Walter Bradbury] was less than encouraging concerning my new novel, The Stars, like Dust-. No contract. He would give me an option for $250 to keep me working, but he would have to see six or seven chapters now before a contract would be possible, and the six or seven would not include the first two chapters-which he was throwing out.

  I had apparently committed the customary sin of the sophomore novel. The first novel was fine since I was writing as a novice and had no reputation to uphold. Once it was accepted, however, I was a "novelist" and had to write the second novel while keeping that reputation secure, which meant I had to write deeply and poetically and wittily and so on.

  Bradbury got my error across to me very easily.

  He said, "Do you know how Hemingway says, `The sun rose the next morning'?"

  I had never read Hemingway, but I had heard of him, of course. I said, "No. How does he say it?"

  "He says, The sun rose the next morning."'

  I got it. From that day to this, I labored to make my style a spare one. I eschewed all ornamentation for its own sake, and if ever my style seems to depart from the starkly straightforward and simple, it is only to achieve humor.

  [His first encounter with med students in the biochemistry lab] I stood there in my white lab coat feeling very superior and professorial with all the students deferentially calling me "Doctor."

  Then one student came over and with no trace of wise-guyishness at all, said, "Pardon me, Dr. Asimov, are you a Ph.D. or a real doctor?"

  It put me in my place. A Ph.D. is the highest academic degree there is, and is awarded only for original research. An M.D., on the contrary, is given out on satisfactory completion of schoolwork and is, academically, of no greater value than a Bachelor of Arts. Nevertheless, in a medical school, those with no more than a Ph.D. are second-class citizens. [Janet can't help adding "that's not how it was in MY medical school."] I knew that, but the student's question brought it home, and the value of my academic career in my own eyes, at least as long as I was in the medical school, declined.

  Then, on February 7 11950], I gave my first lecture-on simple lipids-and survived.

  Dr. Walker was surer of my talents in this direction than I was. He had been invited to give a talk at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. He couldn't go, but suggested they invite me, telling them I was "an interesting speaker" and "quite a colorful character." . . .

  I spoke to perhaps sixty people, and they sufficed to fill the room. I don't remember what I talked about and I didn't note it in my diary, but I did speak extemporaneously, something I have done ever since. I did say in my diary that the talk "met with roaring approval. Applause! Laughter! I laid them in the aisles."

  I'm sure I did. I always have since (well, nearly always). Talking that successfully, off-the-cuff, to an audience of strangers, cured me of my panic at lecturing.

  Thus ... just before the Bates lecture, I had gone to Dr. Walker with a certain worry.

  "Dr. Walker," I said, "last night I dreamed I got up before the class to give my lecture and I couldn't think of a thing to say. Do you think there's something ominous in that?"

  "I think there's something normal in that," he said. "We all have dreams like that. Wait till you dream that you not only can't think of a thing to say but you're standing there naked."

  After the Bates College talk, however, I no longer had dreams like that.

  [In March, the short version of his dissertation was published.] It was not only my first scientific publication, it also was my longest and my best. Over the next three years I was to publish six papers on research work done in my Boston University laboratory. All of them were in collaboration with others who did the actual work, though I did the supervision and the actual writing. All those papers were unimportant and I enjoyed none of them. After 1953, 1 never again published a scientific paper involving research.

  The trouble was that ... even while I still thought of myself as a researcher, I scorned and detested the writing end of it. Writing a research paper is a tedious and stylized job. You cannot write as you wish; you cannot use English; you cannot have fun. It was even worse than being back in the Navy Yard making certain that no paragraph in a report was anything but a repetition of a paragraph in some earlier Navy Yard report.

  Preparing my dissertation with Dawson had been an unsettling experience, but I found that writing papers on my own was no better. Such papers had to pass the eagle eyes of Walker and Lemon and then, on being submitted to a journal, had to undergo the dour glances of nameless reviewers. In the end, nothing got through but well-chewed cud.

  I might not have minded, but I felt myself to be a writer, and I hated having my name on such limp and bedraggled material.

  [Visiting Campbell in New Yorks He would talk of nothing but dianetics. I didn't argue much; I just remained impervious and said I didn't believe it. Finally Campbell said, half in anger and half in jest, "Damn it, Asimov, you have a built-in doubter."

  "Thank goodness I do, Mr. Campbell," said I.

  My clipping service had been sending me all kinds of reviews of Pebble in the Sky, and I had bought a scapbook and had been carefully pasting them up. On June 24, when the Newmans and Bersons [friends] were visiting our apartment, I brought out the book and
went over the reviews very pridefully for them.

  During the course of that, I heard Roger [Newman] say in a very low voice, to himself rather than to anyone else, "The old lady shows her medals." (That was, of course, the name of a play by James M. Barrie.)

  I pretended I hadn't heard, closed the book as soon as I decently could, and put it away. From that day on, I have never showed my reviews to anyone nor, as far as is humanly possible, done anything that could be construed as showing my medals. (Of course, you might construe this autobiography as a case of showing my medals, but I'm doing my level best to show my boobie prizes as well.) Thank you, Roger Newman, wherever you are.

  [On October 3, 1950, Isaac attended a lecture on science fiction by Gotthard Guenther.] I took a seat well in the back without making myself known, and I had not yet reached the stage where I could be recognized offhand. I could therefore listen in welcome anonymity.

  Guenther ... had a peculiarly Teutonic notion of the mystical value of soil. He felt that civilization was a product of the Old World and could not flourish indigenously in the New. (When someone raised the question of the Incas and the Mayas, he dismissed them with a wave of his hand.)

  Therefore, he maintained, when Old World civilization was transplanted to the New World, a distortion was introduced and one of the ways in which this distortion was evidenced was by the peculiar American invention of science fiction, which was not to be confused with earlier European ventures in the field (Jules Verne, for instance). American science fiction turned Old World values upside down.

  Take, for instance, he said, the story "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov. (At this point I shrank lower in my seat.) It dealt with stars as instruments of madness, whereas in all Old World views of the universe, the stars were seen as gentle, benign, and friendly.