I.Asimov: A Memoir

by Isaac Asimov

  We live in a society today in which schoolchildren are involved with drugs, in which they carry weapons to school with them, in which they beat up and, sometimes, rape teachers.

  Such behavior could not have been imagined in the schools of my time. I was worst-behaved because I whispered in class. I always had a lot to say about what was going on, and wild horses couldn’t prevent me from making those comments in a whisper to whoever sat next to me.

  My victim was likely to titter and that would attract the attention of the teacher. Since the one tittering was always sitting next to me, the deduction was obvious and a sharp eye was kept on me. I never managed to evade it.

  Why did I do it? Why didn’t I learn better? I don’t know. Perhaps it was a matter of reacting before dunking. I’ve been doing it all my life, although with diminishing frequency. Sometimes, even now, something funny but extremely inappropriate occurs to me and I say it before my teeth can bite it back.

  Thus, one day, during intermission in the lobby of a theater showing one of the Gilbert and Sullivan plays (a passion of mine), a woman came up to me to ask for an autograph. I obliged (I have never refused an autograph) and she said, “You’re only die second person I ever asked for an autograph.”

  Idly, I asked, “Who was the other?”

  “Laurence Olivier,” she said.

  And, with horror, I heard myself say, “How honored Olivier would feel if he knew.”

  It was meant as a joke, of course—humor by reversal—but she staggered away and I’m sure that she has told everyone she knows what a monster of vanity and arrogance I am.

  And it’s not just saying things, it’s doing things. On diat very same occasion, an elderly woman said to me (by this time, you understand, I was an elderly man), “I went to grammar school with you.”

  “Did you?” I asked, no memory stirring, of course.

  “In PS 202.”

  I grew more interested. I did, indeed, attend PS 202 between 1928 and 1930.

  She said, “The reason I remember you is that once the teacher said something—I forget what—and you told her she was wrong. She insisted she was right and at lunchtime you ran home, came back with a big book, and proved that she was wrong. Do you remember that?”

  “No,” I said, “but that was Isaac Asimov all right. There’s not another schoolchild ever invented who would go to all that trouble to humiliate a teacher and make himself hated just to prove he was right over some trivial point.”

  Yes, I had trouble with teachers all through school, well into my doctoral studies. Beyond that, I had trouble with any people who were above me in any hierarchy. I never found true peace till I turned my whole working life into self-employment. I was not made to be an employee.

  For that matter, I strongly suspect I was not made to be an employer either. At least I have never had the urge to have a secretary or a helper of any kind. My instinct tells me that there would surely be interactions that would slow me down. Better to be a one-man operation, which I eventually became and remained.

  I am sometimes asked if there was any particular teacher at school who was an inspiration to me, and if I would give details. In fact, I remember virtually none of my teachers, not because they were particularly unmemorable, but because I am particularly self-centered. There are, however, three who stand out in my mind.

  There was a teacher I had for a month in the first grade who was stout and warm and loving (and black—the only black teacher I ever had). She had me pushed ahead, and when I was forced to leave the class I cried and said I wanted her, and she patted me and told me I had to go. When I tried to sneak back into her class the next day, she took me by the hand and led me out again.

  There was a Miss Martin in the fifth grade, who (unlike most teachers) liked me despite my faults and was kind to me. What a relief that was to me.

  There was a Miss Growney in the sixth grade who had the reputation of being “strict” and threw students into terror. She scolded and shouted at them and, on occasion, at me too. I, at least, was used to that and endured it stolidly. I think she liked me too, perhaps because I was clearly unafraid of her. (I discovered quite early that the “smartest kid in class” could sometimes get away with murder.)

  Growing Up

  I presume every child wants to grow up and become an adult, with all the rights and privileges of an adult. It stands to reason that a child is aware of the circumscribed life he leads, with his parents always telling him what to do and what not to do, without a chance to make his own decisions, and so on. He therefore sees adulthood as a time of incredible freedom. (Later, he is likely to learn that it is merely a passport to a far more onerous slavery . . . but never mind.)

  When I was young there were certain physical concomitants to growing up. Children wore “shorties”—that is, breeches that buckled just under the knees rather like the trousers of aristocrats of the eighteenth century. You had to wear long stockings, of course, that reached to the knee. As one grew older, a smoldering hatred for the shorties burgeoned, for they were a mark of childhood. Children waited for the time they could put on “longies” for the first time— ordinary trousers that come down to the ankles and require no buckles.

  I remember the time when I first put on longies. I was so proud I couldn’t stand it. I walked out in the street and paraded around hoping that everyone would see me and notice that a new adult had come into the world. Actually, I was only thirteen at the time, and I quickly found out that longies did not make me an adult.

  Nevertheless, I was stricken when, not long after that, shorties disappeared from the scene. Kids don’t wear them anymore. They don’t have that stigma and I don’t think that’s fair. Why was I forced to carry that badge of shame when nowadays no one does?

  I lived to see other changes in dress. When I was young, all youngsters wore caps. These were cloth hats with a visor. You could snap them on, snap them off, crush them out of shape, do anything you wanted to them, and they always remained serviceable. They were the most convenient headwear I’ve ever worn; some of them even came with earflaps for the cold weather.

  Now they’re gone, all gone. The story I’ve heard was that caps were always worn by the bad guys in the early gangster movies, and the American public, never notable for thinking for themselves, therefore rejected them.

  It didn’t matter. I graduated to a fedora, which was the “adult” hat. Eventually I got to hate it, even though it was universal. In the movies everyone wore a fedora outdoors. Even when they got into a fistfight, which was often in the cheaper movies, the fedora stayed on no matter what.

  It was a relief to me when fedoras disappeared also and everyone went hatless. Of course, as I got older, I found it was useful to wear a hat for warmth, but I now wear a Russian-style fur hat which, like the caps of my childhood, can be stuffed into a pocket. Full circle.

  I have seen other changes in men’s clothing. Suits used to come with two pairs of pants. No more. Vests largely disappeared. Trousers lost their cuffs (very useful for collecting lint and pebbles). The watch-fob pocket disappeared.

  Buttons on trouser flies were replaced by zippers. This was a dispensation from heaven, for when I was a kid a favorite game was to walk up to some unexpecting victim and rip open his fly to the sound of taunting laughter. I don’t know that anything of note was ever exposed in this way, but the embarrassment was extreme, especially if there were girls about. Apparently, if the perpetrator managed to rip off a button or two, he was even more triumphant, and someone’s poor mother would have to sew them on again.

  Long Hours

  The overriding factor in my life between the ages of six and twenty-two was my father’s candy store. It had its numerous good points. My father worked for himself and could not be fired. This was all-important once the Great Depression began with the stock market crash of 1929. With millions unemployed, with no unemployment insurance, no welfare, no feeling that society had to do anything at all about the unfortunate except to toss the
m an occasional dime for a cup of coffee (“Buddy, can you spare a dime?”), one could only stand on corners in ragged coats selling apples, or scrounge in garbage cans, or starve. No one can possibly have lived through the Great Depression without being scarred by it. In the United States at least, its devastation was greater than that of World War II (if you ignore the military casualties, which is, of course, hard to do). No “Depression baby” can ever be a yuppie. No amount of experience since the Depression can convince someone who has lived through it that the world is safe economically. One constantly waits for banks to close, for factories to shut down, for the pink slip of discharge. Well, the Asimov family escaped. Not by much. We were poor, but we always had enough to put food on the table and to pay the rent. Never were we threatened by hunger and eviction. And why? The candy store. It brought in enough to support us. Only minimally, to be sure, but in the Great Depression, even minimally was heaven. There was a price, of course. Everything has its price. Making the candy store work required the total time of my mother and father (though my mother managed to find just a bit of time to keep the house in approximate order and to prepare meals).

  This meant that, from the age of six, I lost the chance of having traditional parents—a mother who stays about the house, who spends hours in the kitchen, who is available, on demand, for this and that; and a father who shows up when work is done and who does things with you over the weekend.

  On the other hand, I always knew where they were. They were in the store and I could be sure of finding them there. That, I suppose, was a measure of security.

  When I was nine, and my mother was pregnant again, I was pressed into labor. My father had no choice. And, once in the store, I never emerged until I left home and was replaced by my brother, who was, after all, the occasion of my enslavement. (Not that I considered it enslavement, as I shall shortly explain.)

  What was really remarkable about the candy store was the long hours. My father opened the store at 6 A.M., rain, shine, or blizzard. He closed it at 1 A.M. He had four to five hours of sleep at night. He made up for it by taking a two-hour nap every afternoon. That was every day, Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays included.

  When we happened to own a store (we owned about five, one after the other) in a Jewish neighborhood, we closed for the most important of the Jewish holidays, to spare the feelings of our neighbors, but most of the time we were in Gentile neighborhoods and then we did not. As a matter of fact, on the rare occasions when the store was closed, I remember feeling distinctly uneasy about it, as though it were a weird phenomenon out of nature. I was relieved when the store reopened and the even tenor of our life resumed.

  How did the long hours affect me?

  On the adverse side of the ledger, they cut down my free time to virtually nothing. They wiped out any hopes of a social life even during my teenage years, and in the time when I might have discovered women, I could only do so from afar.

  At school, I could not engage in “extracurricular activities,” join any of the after-hours clubs or teams, because I had to go home and get into the store. This hurt my record. I never qualified for the honor society in high school because I did not engage in extracurricular activities, but I never tried to advance my home situation as an excuse. It would have sounded as though I were complaining about my parents, and I did not wish to do that.

  Yet I didn’t resent it.

  Of course, I would have had to be a lot less intelligent than I was not to understand that the candy store stood between us and destruction. I also would have had to be a lot less decent a human being than I hope I am if I were able to watch my father and mother work as hard as they did and not pitch in.

  It’s more than that, even. There’s a positive side to the ledger. I must have liked the long hours, for in later life I never took the attitude of “I’ve worked hard all my childhood and youth and now I’m going to take it easy and sleep till noon.”

  Quite the contrary. I have kept the candy-store hours all my life. I wake at five in the morning. I get to work as early as I can. I work as long as I can. I do this every day in the week, including holidays. I don’t take vacations voluntarily and I try to do my work even when I’m on vacation. (And even when I’m in the hospital.)

  In other words, I am still and forever in the candy store. Of course,

  I’m not waiting on customers; I’m not taking money and making change; I’m not forced to be polite to everyone who comes in (in actual fact, I was never very good at that). I am, instead, doing things I very much want to do—but the schedule is there; the schedule that was ground into me; the schedule you would think I would have rebelled against once I had the chance.

  I can only say that there were certain advantages offered by the candy store that had nothing to do with mere survival, but, rather, with overflowing happiness, and that this was so associated with the long hours as to make them sweet to me and to fix them upon me for all my life. I will now explain what I mean.

  Pulp Fiction

  In the 1920s and 1930s, there was no television. There were virtually no comic books. (There was radio, to be sure, and such programs as Amos V Andy became national fixations for a time.) On the whole, though, the environmental niche devoted to trash food for the mind consisted of the “pulp magazines.”

  These were so called because they were made of cheap pulp paper that didn’t last long but quickly tended to turn yellow and grow fragile. They were rough-edged and rough-surfaced. This was in contradistinction to the “slick magazines,” which had smooth surfaces, better paper, and which, in my opinion, were a rather classier trash food for the mind.

  The pulp magazines were issued once a month, in some cases twice a month, and in a few cases even every week. To begin with, they were eclectic jobs offering melodramatic action fiction of a variety of types (examples were Argosy and Blue Book) but it eventually turned out that specialization was what was desired.

  People wanted to read detective stories, or love stories, or Western stories, or war stories, or sports stories, or horror stories, or jungle stories, or any of a number of other classifications, often to the exclusion of anything else. They would therefore buy magazines devoted to their particularly desired specialty.

  Perhaps the most successful of all the pulp fiction magazines were those devoted to the superheroes. There was, of course, the greatest of all, the Shadow, who, twice a month, foiled evildoers with his weird laugh and his ability to move like a ghost. There was Doc Savage, the “Man of Bronze,” and his five, sometimes comic, assistants. There was the Spider and Secret Agent X and Operator 5. There was G-8 and his Battle Aces, who single-handedly defeated the Kaiser’s Germany by foiling the evil scientific machinations of the German scientist Herr Doktor Krueger, and doing it month after month.

  It was from this pulp fiction that my father tried to save me by getting me a library card and, on the whole, he was right, because he had no way of knowing the use to which I would put this (no, I won’t call it trash again, for I owe it too much) rather low-class scribbling.

  Once I began to work in the store, however, it became harder and harder to keep me from the pulps, and I became more and more strident in my demands for permission to read them. I pointed out that my father read the Shadow magazines constantly. My father replied that he was trying to learn English and I already knew English and had better things to do. He was right, but I continued with my demands and my father finally gave in, so I added the pulp magazines to my library reading.

  It was those pulps that the candy store gave me that I valued far above anything else; that reconciled me to the work, to the long hours, and to everything else that might seem wearisome; that pinned me to a way of life even after the candy store had disappeared. If I weren’t in the candy store, I couldn’t possibly have afforded the magazines. As it was, I read them all, very carefully, and returned them, seemingly untouched, to the stands for sale.

  By the time I reached my mid-teens and was ready for a writing career of
my own, I had read with equal voracity the “good books” in the library and the “low-class material” in pulp fiction. What was it that influenced me in my writing, then?

  I’m sorry. It was the pulp fiction.

  In the first place, I wanted to write for the pulp magazines, or for a particular variety of the pulp magazines anyway (I’ll get to that), and so I wanted to write the way the stories in the pulp magazines were written. I thought, in my innocence, that that was the way to write.

  The result, of course, was that my early writing was extremely pulpish. It was heavy on adjectives and adverbs. People “snarled” rather than “said.” There was lots of action, the dialogue was stilted, the characterization was nonexistent. (I don’t believe I knew what characterization meant.)

  The amazing thing was that my early stories, or at least some of them, were published at all. I attribute this to two things. First, the pulp magazines devoured material at so huge a rate that standards had to be low or they couldn’t publish. The standards were low enough to

  include me.

  Second, the particular branch of pulp fiction that interested me as a writer was the smallest and the neediest and the one, therefore, I was most likely to break into. As it happens, the vicissitudes of time have greatly increased the literary standards of my particular medium and I am very well aware (as I frequently say) that if I were starting today as a teenager, with only the evident talent that I actually had as a teen ager, I could not possibly break into the field. It is so important to be in the right place at the right time. To be sure, I didn’t stay pulpish. My writing rapidly improved with time and the pulp faded, but perhaps never entirely. I suspect that a keen eye reading my stuff even today can detect the pulp ancestry, and for that I’m sorry—but I do the best I can.