I.Asimov: A Memoir

by Isaac Asimov

  The draft was going to bite deep into young American manhood, and I could scarcely argue that my Ph.D. was more important than the war effort. If I worked for the NAES, my labors might serve as directly useful for that war effort, and I knew I could do more as a reasonably capable chemist than as a panicky infantryman, and perhaps the government would think so too.

  Another argument for Philadelphia was simply that it was a job. I wanted to marry Gertrude but how was I going to support a wife? I had accumulated $400 in the bank and that struck me as a good starting sum, but I needed a job to supply me with a secure and continuing income. The job that Heinlein offered would bring me $2,600 a year. That should be enough.

  My desire to get married carried the day. I moved to Philadelphia on May 13, 1942, and managed to live there for some ten weeks by myself (with weekend visits to New York to see Gertrude). After I married I had a week’s honeymoon in Allaben Acres in the Catskills.

  There I managed to demonstrate my intelligence to Gertrude when I volunteered to take part in a quiz contest and assured her I would win. She sat in the balcony all by herself to avoid having everyone see her embarrassment when I failed, but, of course, I won. I gained the hostility of many of the people at the resort because when I stood up to answer questions—very anxious lest I humiliate Gertrude—the anxiety on my face was interpreted as stupidity and everyone laughed. (They didn’t laugh at anyone else.) When I won they seemed to take the attitude that I had no right to look stupid and mislead them.

  After the honeymoon, I took my bride to Philadelphia and we found an apartment (and then a better one) for a rent of a little over forty dollars a month. I found that I didn’t mind being away from home after all, for with Gertrude I felt at home. Unfortunately, Gertrude did not feel the same way. The apartment was small, it did not have air conditioning (in those days almost no one did), or even cross-ventilation, and we had a hot, muggy Philadelphia summer. Gertrude had to sit home alone in the heat while I worked in an air-conditioned laboratory. She resented it bitterly, all the more so because she missed her mother and her old home.

  Every week, we would leave for New York on Friday evening. I would return on Sunday evening and she would stay on till Wednesday, with her mother doing everything she could to make her super-comfortable at home so that she would be all the more miserable in Philadelphia. And every week, I would think that she would not come back—but she always did. Just the same, there was simply no chance of my making her happy, and that sometimes reduced me to despair.

  I remained at the NAES for three and a third years from 1942 to 1945. I hope that what I worked on was useful to the war effort; they told me that it was.

  The job did keep me out of the draft during the war and I couldn’t help but note that there were a great many young men my age (and in better physical condition) who also worked there and who apparently didn’t seem to mind in the least that they weren’t being drafted. I, always conscious of my lack of bravery, was forever caught between the desire to stay out of the army and shame at staying out of it. In the end, needless to say, the desire overcame the shame, especially since I was desperately in love with Gertrude and couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her.

  The stay at the NAES was not really a happy one for me. On the whole, I was a drastic failure. I’m convinced that if it hadn’t been wartime and that if I hadn’t been in the civil service and therefore subject to the incredible inertia with which it is plagued in all societies, I would have been fired. As it was, I received one promotion rather early in the game that raised my salary from $2,600 to $3,200 per year and that was it. It was made quite plain to me, without its actually being said, that I should look for nothing else.

  Why? The usual thing. I’m sure you’re tired of hearing it. (The wonder is that I wasn’t tired to death of living it.) I didn’t get along with my superiors. Of course, in later years, those superiors who survived treated me with great affection, and I was very friendly in return (why not?), but surely we are all cynical enough to know how little that means. When they were dealing with me during the war, I was the “problem” in the laboratory.

  It really puzzles me as I look back on it that I didn’t make a greater effort to placate the powers that be. After all, for the first time, I had more than myself to please. I might shrug off a failure to get further salary increases on the grounds that it was a temporary job, and that I would have a far greater career stretching out ahead of me. But I had to face Gertrude with that evidence of failure, and she was disturbed, as it was, at the fact that other people made more money than I did. I would say, “Stick with me, kid, and in ten years you’ll be wearing diamonds.” Though she said afterward that she had believed me, it didn’t seem that she was much impressed at the time.

  And what about my writing?

  The pressures of a six-day-a-week job, and my desire to spend what spare time I had with Gertrude, sharply cut into my writing. In fact, during my first year at the NAES, I didn’t write at all. Still, even jobs

  and marriage couldn’t hold off the urge forever and in 1943 I began to write again. I had written a story called “Foundation,” which appeared in the May 1942 ASF. I also wrote a sequel called “Bridle and Saddle,” which appeared in the next issue. It was “Bridle and Saddle” in which I found myself stuck and from which Fred Pohl had unstuck me on the Brooklyn Bridge. “Bridle and Saddle” appeared on the stands the very month in which I began work at the NAES. These two stories were the first of my Foundation series, and when I returned to my writing while I was at the NAES, I wrote and published four more sequels that appeared in ASF during the war years. They were “The Big and the Little,” “The Wedge,” “The Dead Hand,” and “The Mule.” Now let me explain the significance of this. I have described my early interest in history, my urge to major in that field, and even to go for my Ph.D. in it. I cast all that aside because I didn’t think it would work out well. I went for chemistry instead, but my interest in history remained. I love historical novels (if they contain neither too much violence nor too much sleazy sex) and I still read them today whenever I get a chance. Naturally, just as loving science fiction led me to the desire to write science fiction, the love of historical novels led me to the desire to write historical novels. To write a historical novel was, however, impractical for me. It would require an enormous amount of reading and research and I just couldn’t spend all that time at it. I wanted to write. Early on, then, it occurred to me that I could write a historical novel if I made up my own history. In other words, I might write a historical novel of the future, a science fiction story that read like a historical novel. Now, I won’t pretend that I made up the idea of writing histories of the future. It had been done numerous times, most effectively and startlingly by the British writer Olaf Stapledon, who wrote First and Last Men and The Star Makers. These books, however, read like histories and I wanted to write a historical novel, a story with conversation and action just like any other science fiction story except that it would deal not only with technology but with political and sociological problems. I tried to do this as early as 1939, when I wrote a story called “Pilgrimage.” It was terrible and Campbell would have nothing to do with it. I finally sold it to Planet Stories, under the title (editor’s choice, not mine) of “Black Friar of the Flame” and it appeared in the Spring 1942 issue of that magazine. It is very likely the worst story I have had published and the one with the worst title. (It was revised seven times before I sold it, each revision making it worse. Since then, I do not revise substantially, except under very extraordinary circum stances.)

  That rather daunted me, but the urge to write a historical novel of the future still had me by the throat. I had just finished reading Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the second time and it occurred to me that I could write a story about the decline and fall of the Galactic Empire.

  On August 1, 1941, I came to Campbell with the idea and he caught fire. He wanted not a single story, but
a long open-ended saga, of the fall of the Galactic Empire, the Dark Ages that followed, and the eventual rise of a Second Galactic Empire, all mediated by the invented science of “psychohistory,” which enabled skilled psychohistorians to predict the mass currents of future history.

  As it happens, the Foundation series proved to be the most popular and successful of all my writings, and my continuation of these stories in the 1980s after a long hiatus proved even more popular and successful. These stories contributed more than any others to making me more nearly rich and famous than I could have imagined. Most of the Foundation series was being written even while I was a complete failure at the NAES.

  Of course, I had no way of knowing what was to come while I was working as a chemist during World War II, but looking back upon it, I note that chemistry, my profession, continued to fail and to do so more drastically with time. Not only didn’t I get along with my superiors but I was not a particularly good chemist and never would be.

  But history, which I had discarded, made its appearance in the most unlikely form, as a series of science fiction historical novels of the future, and lifted me to the heights.

  I knew I would succeed, but I could not possibly have predicted the precise manner in which success was to show itself.

  the eyes of the officers as someone who was far too stupid to be a soldier and they studiously ignored me—which suited me right down to my toenails.

  Life at War’s End

  On September 2, 1945, the war was over and the United States celebrated V-J Day with wild jubilation. On September 7, 1945, I received my draft notice.

  What an excellent chance for self-pity! Everyone was celebrating, and I was staring at a letter that began: “Greetings.” I was only six weeks short of my twenty-sixth birthday and, after V-E day, twenty-six had been fixed as the top age for being drafted. Had they waited only six weeks I would have been safe.

  Self-pity is a horrible feeling and I did my level best to argue myself out of it. After all, the draft had held off through all the long years of bloody fighting, and when the finger finally tapped my shoulder, there was peace. The guns were stilled. I should rather be grateful that my cowardice would never be asked to rise to the needs of heroism.

  What’s more, I knew why I had to go just as I was getting ready to return to my research. I was to go into the army to allow a soldier who had borne the heat of the battle to go home. I was taking his place in safety. I should look upon it as an odd and interesting experience.

  All that was logic and reason speaking. It went for naught. I was terribly sorry for myself anyway.

  I entered the army on November 1,1945. At the end of my first full day in the army, the evening of November 2, I looked about at the desolation of the base and thought, “Two years! Two years!” I was looking into the abyss of eternity.

  Actually, I was not mistreated in the army in any way. I had to undergo the rigors and tedium of basic training, and I didn’t get along with most of the other soldiers (surprised?), but I was never punished for anything. My 160 on the AGCT score established me in

  By February 1946, I had grown more or less accustomed to army routine. Camp Lee, in Virginia, where I had gone through basic training, had been close enough to home for me to have occasional furloughs when I could see Gertrude. I hoped fervently that I would be placed somewhere still closer to New York.

  Not a chance. The atomic bomb was to be tested at the atoll of Bikini in the South Pacific, and a number of soldiers were assigned to participate in that task, and I was among them. I would be some ten thousand miles from home for an indefinite period and at that moment I think I would have welcomed death.

  A kindly librarian asked me why I looked so awful and I poured out my sad tale to her in piteous accents. She listened, then said, coldly, “Listen, there’s not a person here, not a person in the world, who doesn’t have troubles. What makes you think yours are so special?”

  You know, it put me face to face with my foolishness and resigned me to my fate.

  I won’t go into the details of my army experiences, which were dull and tedious. Just as I had finished dead first in my AGCT score, I finished dead last in the physical contests—and by a healthy margin in both cases. I had to do an occasional KP but mostly I escaped because I was a rapid typist and typists were (a) in great demand in administration and (b) immune to KP.

  I developed, of course, an absolute detestation of the army, of its routine, of its mindlessness, of its callousness, of its meaninglessness, but, looking back on it, this hurt me far more than it hurt the army.

  My refusal to accept the situation rationally prevented me from observing a curious subculture that I might have used in my essays and stories, and kept me from enjoying what there was to enjoy. En route to Bikini, for instance, I spent ten weeks in Hawaii with no duties. I would have been perfectly able to spend all my time enjoying that beautiful place—but I never allowed myself to do so. I persisted in considering it all a hateful exile. (I did manage to pick up a mild case of athlete’s foot in Hawaii, something I have never entirely shaken.)

  While I was in Hawaii, incidentally, something took place that in Uself could not possibly have seemed to be of much importance, but that, looking back upon, I have always considered a turning point in my social life—the greatest turning point, perhaps.

  The group of soldiers who were sent to Bikini by way of Hawaii included six “critically needed specialists” (that is, soldiers with some scientific training, and I was one of them) amid a large number of high school graduates and less. (“Farm boys,” I thought of them, rather unkindly—but they thought even less kindly of me and sometimes showed it. I was the oldest person in the barracks and sometimes they called me “Pop,” which hurt my feelings, for inside me I was still an infant prodigy.)

  We “critically needed specialists” clung together, of course, and, indeed, palling around with them on the train and ship that carried us from Camp Lee to Hawaii was the nearest I came to having a good time in the army. We played innumerable games of bridge. I was terrible at it, but it didn’t matter, because we played for fun.

  In any case, I was in the Honolulu barracks once, at a time when the other five specialists were off somewhere, so that I was the only one present. Unable to socialize with the farm boys, I lay in my bunk reading.

  There were three of the farm boys further down the barracks and they were preoccupied (as we all were, considering the nature of our mission) with the atomic bomb.

  One of the three took it upon himself to explain to the other two how the atomic bomb worked, and needless to say, he got it all wrong.

  Wearily, I put down my book and began to get to my feet so that I could join them, assume “the smart man’s burden,” and educate them. Halfway to my feet, however, I thought, “Who appointed you to be their educator? Is it going to hurt them to be wrong about the atomic bomb?” And I returned to my book.

  This is the first occasion I can remember in which I deliberately resisted the impulse to put my remarkability on display.

  It doesn’t mean that my character changed suddenly and completely, but it was a step, a tiny first step, in the forging of what I can only describe as a new me. I was still obnoxious to many, I still failed to get along with my superiors, but I began to change. I began to be able to “turn it off,” to not be forever putting my cleverness on display.

  I answer questions if asked, I explain if an explanation is requested, I write educational articles for those who wish to read them, but I have learned not to volunteer my knowledge, unsolicited.

  It’s amazing the change that produced. It would seem that, very slowly, I mellowed. I did, in the process, seem to change the most important item in my makeup, the I-know-it-all syndrome that led to my unpopularity with others. In fact, if I may trust what others have told me with increasing vehemence over the years, I seem to have become a much-beloved elderly person. Remembering how things were nearly two-thirds of a lifetime ago, I always feel astoni
shed, especially when beautiful young women treat me as though I were a cuddly teddy bear. Fortunately, I have learned to bask in the adulation.

  And I trace it all, I swear I do, to that moment in the Honolulu

  barracks.

  Why did it happen just then? Perhaps my unaccustomed role as oldest in the place, as “Pop,” formed within me an age-induced gravity. Perhaps my decline in academic prowess, which had not escaped my attention, you may be sure, kept me from feeling so terribly all-fired “smart” in the scholastic sense.

  Everything we do, obviously, is the result of various changes in the conditions about us over which we rarely have control. I did not begin the conversion from obnoxious kid to beloved patriarch because I had made a conscious decision to do so, but because life, in several ways, simply shaped me as a more or less unconscious object.

  I can only be glad it shaped me in the right direction—but I deserve no personal credit for it.

  What’s more, I lost nothing by it. The delights of explaining and educating were not lost. The time was to come when I was to write thousands of essays, all designed to educate and enlighten my readers; when I was to give hundreds of talks, all designed to educate and enlighten my audience; when even my science fiction had its educational aspects.

  But, and this is the crucial point, no one is forced to read what I write, and, indeed, the vast majority of Earth’s population does not read what I write. My educational efforts are only for those who, voluntarily, wish to subject themselves to it.