I.Asimov: A Memoir

by Isaac Asimov

My claustrophilia does show up in my office, where I keep the window blinds down at all times and work only under artificial light no matter how bright and sunlit the day. What’s more, my typewriter is always so arranged that when I am using it, I face a blank, windowless wall.

  At present, however, my word processor is located in our living room, which is open to sunlight, for the window blinds here are never drawn. Nevertheless, however bright the room, I turn the overhead electric lamp on.

  Once my claustrophilia stood me in good stead.

  As one gets older and more rickety, and as medical technology advances, doctors love to play with their toys, using you as their victim. At one time they ran a magnetic resonance test on me, a noninvasive, nondangerous way of probing your interior. (I’ll tell you right now they didn’t find anything disturbing.)

  To do this they put my entire body inside a cylinder and left me there for an hour and a half, while strange banging noises took place. The crucial fact was that the cylinder was a tight fit, most coffinlike, and you were supposed to lie still, most corpselike.

  It was boring and I was prey to the fear that the doctors had forgotten about me and gone home, but the close quarters of the embracing cylinder did not bother me. I don’t know how they could test claustrophobes (those with a morbid fear of enclosed places). I suspect they can’t.

  It might even be argued that my whole way of life is an expression of my claustrophilia. My total absorption in writing creates a warm artificial enclosing world about me (one without windows) that shuts out the harsh outside world with its glaring sun. And it is no accident, perhaps, that in my book The Caves of Steel (Doubleday, 1954) I pictured underground cities on Earth, the ultimate in windowless enclosure.

  Heinlein, in connection with my story “Dreaming Is a Private Thing” (December 1955 F&SF), accused me, good-naturedly, of coining money out of my neuroses. Actually, The Caves of Steel is a much better example of that. —And I’m not ashamed. Every writer, I am convinced, makes use of his own neuroses to the fullest possible extent in his writing.

  for me to do anything but research. This was incredibly fortunate, for there was now scarcely a course that I could reasonably have needed to take that I would have had any perceptible chance of passing.

  Ph.D. and Public Speaking

  It is easy to suppose, when one interrupts one’s Ph.D. work for a period of years, that one will never return to it. I must admit that I had that woebegone feeling myself and that it was another small factor that argued against my accepting the job in Philadelphia. In fact, one of my schoolmates was convinced I would never come back, not so much because of the job as because of my planned marriage. He felt that my family responsibilities would force my life into other, more mundane channels.

  By the time that the war and my NAES job came to an end and by the time my army stint was over, four and a half years had passed. Fortunately, my marriage had not yet developed the complication of children and I was determined that my Ph.D. work was not to be abandoned. In September 1946, therefore, I presented myself at Columbia, ready to go back to work. Professor Dawson was still there, remembered me well, and was delighted to see me.

  However, you can’t go home again. It wasn’t the same. I was four years older, four years more disillusioned with science, four years more convinced that I was inadequate in scientific research. Worse yet, while I had been gone, there had been a revolution in chemistry with the application of quantum mechanics to it, something brought on largely by the work of the great Linus Pauling.

  I had not kept up with that change and was appalled to find that

  chemistry had turned into Greek for me. Fortunately, I had taken all

  my course work before leaving for Philadelphia and there was no need It was another step in my decline. I was not just a mediocre student;

  I was a sure-fail student.

  Nevertheless, one good thing happened during my doctoral re search, something in which coming events cast their shadow. As part of my duties as a doctoral candidate, I was expected to give a seminar on the work I was doing. (It was research into the kinetics— that is, the speed of working—of some obscure enzyme.) I had attended such seminars and they were usually resounding failures. The person giving the seminar (however good a chemist he might be) usually had no particular talent at spoken exposition. More over, his subject was arcane and was not easy to understand, without considerable careful explanation, by anyone but himself. As for the audience, knowing from experience they would not understand any thing after the first five words, they were prepared only for suffering and attended only because they were expected to.

  I approached die task with enthusiasm, however. For one thing, it was something I could do that did not involve my hands. I would not have to worry about breaking equipment or having experiments go mysteriously wrong.

  But it was more than diat. I looked forward to speaking, and really I don’t know why. I had no experience at all in public speaking, and it is usually looked on as the ultimate test of self-assurance, as a way of ruining the bravest. There are people who would sooner face a charging rhinoceros than a peacefully somnolent audience. One feels so exposed on a public platform. There is the possibility of making such a public ass of one’s self. Why on earth I should not have shared this extremely common feeling I don’t know.

  I walked into the room well before the seminar was due to begin and covered the ample blackboard with mathematical and chemical equations so that I would not have to interrupt the even tenor of my talk by writing them down. (What gave me the notion that this was the right thing to do? I can only assume the answer was some kind of instinct. Just as I had an almost inborn grip on the essentials of writing so that I could begin doing so at the age of eleven, I seemed to have an almost inborn grip on the essentials of public speaking.)

  Of course, when the audience arrived and saw the equations, there was a palpable shock and a buzz of anxious uncertainty. I’m sure that no one felt he was going to be able to make head or tail of the talk. But I raised my arms and, with complete self-confidence, said, “Just listen to everything I say and all will be as clear as a mountain pool.”

  How did I know? Surely this was a piece of arrogant self-confidence that was more fitting for my grammar school years than for the years of grim disillusion with my own abilities that I had experienced in college and beyond.

  But this was something I had never done before, you see. I had not had occasion to be disillusioned with speaking, and I was pawing the ground in my eagerness to try.

  And it worked! There were no terrors, no butterflies in my stomach. I spoke easily and smoothly, starting at the very beginning (seminar speakers rarely did that, but nervously plunged into their own intricacies at the start—perhaps to demonstrate their erudition). I progressed along the line of equations, explaining each clearly as I came to it, then going on.

  In the end the audience seemed enthusiastic and Professor Dawson told someone (who promptly passed it on to me) that it was the clearest presentation he had ever heard.

  This was the first time I had ever presented a formal hour-long talk to an audience. I had no occasion to present another for several years, nor did I have any plans or thoughts about any others. Nevertheless, from that point on I knew forevermore that I could speak in public without trouble.

  This whole thing raises an interesting point. I obviously had a talent for public speaking that must have been lying latent within me for quite a while. There had just been no occasion that would serve to exercise it. When the first occasion arose, at the age of twenty-seven, I spoke with sufficient mastery to do well.

  Suppose the occasion had arisen earlier. At what age could I have delivered a good talk without trouble? Obviously, I don’t know. Or suppose the occasion had not arisen till considerably later—or not at all. Is it conceivable that I might have lived and died without knowing that I was an excellent public speaker?

  Perhaps so.

  It makes me wonder. Do I have a
ny other talents, the exercise of which would have been amusing and useful to me, that I have just never had occasion to tap? I don’t know.

  For that matter, the same applies to everyone. Who knows what talents lie unrealized among the vast population of humanity, and how much we all lose because those talents are never brought into play?

  · Another unexpected development that arose during my doctoral research came about in the following manner:

  I was sitting at my desk, preparing the materials for the day’s experiments, and brooding over the approaching necessity of writing a doctoral dissertation. A doctoral dissertation is a highly stylized document, and ironclad rules necessitate that it be written in a stiff and abnormal (even stupid) way. I did not want to write in a stiff, abnormal, and stupid way.

  It struck me, therefore, in a Puckish moment, to write a spoof of a doctoral dissertation that would relieve my soul and enable me to approach the real thing with more spirit.

  As it happened, I was working with tiny feathery crystals of a compound called catechol, which was extremely soluble in water. As I dumped some of it into the water, it dissolved the moment it hit the surface. I said to myself, “What if it dissolves just a split second before it hits the surface. What then?”

  The result was that I wrote a pseudo-dissertation written as stodgily as I could manage about a compound which dissolved 1.12 seconds before you added the water. I called it The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline.

  I submitted it to Campbell, who enjoyed it and who had no objec tion to running an occasional spoof article. I realized that it would appear in the magazine at just about the time I would be taking my make-or-break doctor’s orals, and I was cautious enough to instruct Campbell to run it under a pseudonym.

  It appeared in the March 1948 AS^and Campbell forgot about the pseudonym. There it was, Isaac Asimov plastered all over it, and, of course, the entire Columbia University chemical faculty got wind of it and passed it from hand to hand.

  I turned really sick. I knew what would happen. Whatever I did at the doctor’s orals, they were going to turn me down on the grounds of personality deficiency. All those years, all those years, and I was going to lose out for the old, old crime of irreverence to my superiors.

  But it didn’t work out that way. After the professors had put me through the hell of a doctor’s orals, Professor Ralph Halford asked the last question: “Mr. Asimov, can you tell us something about the thermodynamic properties of resublimated thiotimoline?”

  I burst into hysterical laughter, because I knew they wouldn’t play games with me if they intended to flunk me, and they didn’t. I passed, and one by one they emerged from the testing room, shook my hand, and said, “Congratulations, Dr. Asimov.”

  That was May 20, 1948. I was twenty-eight years old and I mourned over the loss of four years because of World War II. I might have got my doctorate at twenty-four and retained a bit more of my prodigious infancy—which was ridiculously stupid of me, considering the uncounted millions of people who lost a lot more than four years during the war.

  The graduation ceremonies were on June 2, but I refused to attend formally, since I disapproved of the medieval claptrap involved. However, I did sit in the audience with my father, who was most unhappy that I wasn’t up there on the platform in academic robes. But at least he was there witnessing my becoming a doctor after all, even if it was the wrong kind.

  Postdoctorate

  I had started worrying about getting a job in 1938, in my junior year at college, when I first applied to medical school. Since then, my life had been one long delaying action. There was graduate school, the NAES, the army, and graduate school again. Ten years had passed and it was now 1948 and I was about to get my Ph.D. and there was still that same old problem. What did I do about a job?

  I must admit that Professor Dawson, however wonderful a research director he was, was not among the most powerful members of the faculty when it came to getting jobs for his students. Nor was my work sufficiendy worthwhile to attract much attention. As a result, I

  did not find a job.

  What saved me was the offer of a job as a postdoctorate student for a year. This meant I could continue to do research and be paid $5,000 for the year. I was to work on antimalarial drugs, trying to find a better synthetic substitute for quinine than those that already existed.

  I did not particularly want to work on the problem, I was disen chanted by chemistry, and I was well aware of my insufficiencies as a researcher. In fact, I remember almost nothing of the work I did that year, a sure sign of its total lack of interest for me. As the year 1949 progressed, however, I found the hope of a real job going glimmering. No job! Not even a distant nibble. I became so desperate that I had about made up my mind to throw myself into the antimalarial project in the hope that I would be kept on for year after year.

  That was perhaps the low point of my chemical career, for I was considering condemning myself to a job I didn’t like just for the money. I was twenty-nine years old and a complete and utter failure, despite all my boastings and certainties that I was going to be the kind of success that would amaze the world.

  And then I learned one of the uncomfortable facts of postwar aca demic life. Increasingly, academic research was supported by govern ment grants. Those grants usually lasted for one year. Each year, if continued support was desired, the professor who was running the research had to apply for renewal and present justification for it.

  The results of this, I have always thought, were pernicious. First, the professor who wished a government grant had to choose a subject that would sound as though it was worth spending government money on. Scientists therefore crowded into the money fields, to coin a phrase, and left the less dramatic areas of science untended. This meant that the money fields were overfinanced, so that much money was wasted, while the neglected parts of science might have produced an important breakthrough if they had not been neglected.

  Further, the harsh competition for government money exacerbated the chances of fraud as scientists (being human) tried to improve or even invent experiments that would drag in the dough.

  Still another result of the grant system is that the second half of each year is spent, increasingly, on the preparation of documents dealing with renewal of the grant rather than with research.

  Finally, the lower echelons of the research groups, whose salaries are paid out of the grant instead of out of university funds, are in a continual state of insecurity. They never know when a failure of re

  newal will send them flying out the door. I found this out when toward the end of the year my grant was not renewed.

  Only one good thing happened in the postdoctorate period. A neighbor of ours asked, curiously, what the nature of my work might be. I told him I was working on antimalarials, and he asked, in all innocence, “What’s that?”

  I therefore painstakingly explained what I was doing, complete with chemical formulas, and when I finished, he said, with obvious sincerity, “You make it very clear and simple. Thank you.”

  The result was that, for the very first time, it occurred to me that I might write a nonfiction book on science. Nothing came of it right then, but it stayed in my mind and eventually resulted in copious fruit.

  Job Hunting

  The low point of my job hunting came about as follows. An acquaintance of mine who was employed at Charles Pfizer, a pharmaceutical firm based in Brooklyn, said he had obtained an interview for me with a high official of the firm. The appointment was for 10 A.M. on February 4, 1949, and you can be sure I was there on time. The official I was to see was not. He did not show up until 2 P.M. It was foolish of me beyond words to sit there for four hours, through lunch, but it was one of those occasions when I was governed by stubborn rage rather than by good sense. I wasn’t going to be driven away in so cavalier a fashion.

  The official came at last, probably because he was told I showed every sign of refusing to leave until he did come. I was treated
with clear indifference and not too much time was wasted on me.

  I saw enough of Charles Pfizer to know I didn’t want to work there, and would have refused a job if one was offered, but that made no difference. I was in a rage over my treatment, and it is one case in which that rage has never died down. It is as fresh in my heart as though it happened yesterday. I’m not proud of holding a grudge and I probably would not have done so, except for one crowning incident.

  Despite everything, I had given the official a copy of my carefully produced, carefully bound Ph.D. thesis. I did not expect to impress him, but I had planned to do it, so I did. A few days later the copy was returned to me in the mail with a brief, cold covering note stating that he was returning my “pamphlet.” That, to my mind, was an insult. I could not believe that this miserable being did not know a Ph.D. thesis when he saw it, especially since it said plainly on the cover that it was a Ph.D. thesis. To call it a “pamphlet” was like calling a writer a “scribbler” and I have never forgiven him.

  One closing item about Charles Pfizer. Many years later they asked me to speak to a group of their executives. They offered me $5,000 and I don’t generally haggle over fees. At that time, $5,000 was enough for a talk to be given in Manhattan. However, for Pfizer I made an exception. I demanded $6,000 and wouldn’t budge. They finally agreed.

  That extra thousand was to assuage my hurt feelings of so many years before, and what’s more, after I had completed my speech to considerable applause and pocketed my check, I told them exactly why they had had to pay an additional thousand.

  It made me feel better. It was small and mean of me, but I’m only human. I had not sought revenge, but it had been handed to me and I could not refuse.