I.Asimov: A Memoir

by Isaac Asimov

  My unhappiness did leave me in a vulnerable emotional condition and laid the groundwork for my fortuitous meeting with Janet Opal Jeppson.

  The first meeting took place in 1956, and I didn’t even know it. Janet has a younger brother, John, who had gone to Boston University Medical School and who had been in the last biochemistry class I had helped teach. He was a science fiction fan and he had converted his sister, Janet, to the true faith. He also told her about me and what a terrific lecturer and eccentric fellow I was. It roused her curiosity.

  In 1956, the World Convention was held in New York, and Janet (who had been born on August 6, 1926, and had just turned thirty at the time) attended some of the sessions, meaning among other things to meet me and get my signature on one of my books. Unfortunately I was suffering a kidney-stone attack.

  My first attack of the sort was in 1948. It didn’t last long and I put it down as a sudden bout of indigestion and forgot about it. In 1950, I had a much worse attack and, in fact, I had to be hospitalized and was even given morphine (for the only time in my life). Between 1950 and 1969, I must have had at least two dozen attacks, of which even the smallest was terribly painful. They then disappeared for reasons I will advance later.

  But in 1956, I had a bad one. I did my best to do what I was supposed to do and I stood in line signing books, but there was a fearsome frown (actually a look of moderate agony) on my face and I was not my usual winsome and charming self. Janet approached with her copy of Second Foundation and I asked her name so that I could write it in the book.

  “Janet Jeppson,” she said.

  “And what do you do?” I asked as I wrote, just to make conversation.

  “I’m a psychiatrist,” she said.

  “Good,” said I, automatically, as I completed the signing. “Let’s get on the couch together.” I didn’t even look at her, and you can bet I had no desire whatever, at that moment and under my kidney-stone condition, for any sort of dalliance.

  Janet told me years later that she went off thinking, “Well, he may be a good writer, but he’s a pill.” “Pill” was the term Janet always used for someone who was irredeemably difficult.

  At the time, I hadn’t had the faintest idea of what I had done, that I might well have tossed away my future happiness and ruined the best thing in my life.

  Fortunately, my faux pas was correctable and the time came when I found out all about Janet.

  She suffered from a lack of a sense of self-worth. This wasn’t true at first, for as a little girl she was a doll-like beauty, with flaxen hair and blue eyes, who was idolized by her parents. When she was nine, her brother, John, was born. He was the nearest thing to a child that Janet was ever to have and for a long time her attitude toward him retained a touch of the maternal.

  The trouble was that Janet remained small while her age-mates grew taller and larger. She eventually shot up and is now five feet seven inches tall, but like many children of Scandinavian descent she was slow to develop physically. (But not mentally. She was considerably more intelligent than her better-upholstered companions—which did not necessarily make her life easier either.)

  Janet, in adult life, is not classically beautiful. She has a small chin that she thinks detracts from her looks. Because she did not consider herself pretty and because she worked hard at her studies, she did not have an active social life. By the time she reached her thirties, she had her B.A. from Stanford University, her M.D. from New York University Medical School, had completed her residency in psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital, and was in the William Alanson White Institute of

  Psychoanalysis. She had a career, therefore, that would keep her busy and give her a constructive life, whether she married or not.

  Her fugitive meeting with me in 1956 did not prevent her from reading other books of mine and she decided, from what I revealed of myself in my books, that I couldn’t be quite the “pill” that I had shown myself to be. She decided she would give me another chance.

  In 1959, the Mystery Writers of America was holding its annual banquet in New York, and I, having written a mystery novel that was definitely not a success, thought I’d attend. I was encouraged to do this by one of my Boston friends, Ben Benson, who had written a series of well-received mysteries in which the Massachusetts State Police were featured. I liked the books and I liked Ben, who had come through World War II, ending up with a badly damaged heart. I didn’t expect that I would know anyone at a mystery writers convention, but Ben could introduce me to various people.

  The day of the banquet was May 1, and on the evening before, while having dinner at the home of an editor, I found out that Ben Benson had had a heart attack and had died on the streets of New York. I was terribly depressed and spent the night wondering if I shouldn’t go back to Boston. It seemed to me that I didn’t want to go to the banquet without Ben.

  The next day I visited Bob Mills, who also planned to attend the banquet, hoping he might cheer me up, but there was no chance of that. Bob was in the dumps too, over some problem involving his job. More than ever I ached to go back to Boston, not knowing that, if I did, the misadventure of 1956 would be confirmed and my life would be ruined.

  Fortunately, Judith Merril showed up in Bob’s office just as I was leaving. Judy was one of the few important women science fiction authors of that time, her most notable story being “That Only a Mother” in the June 1948 ASF. She had been Fred Pohl’s third wife.

  She rallied me and urged me to go to the banquet, where, she assured me, people were probably expecting me and were anxious to meet me. I let myself be persuaded and for that I shall forever be grateful to Judy.

  Meanwhile, Janet’s friend the mystery writer Veronica Parker Johns was in charge of the seating arrangements at the banquet. She persuaded Janet to go, because Eleanor Roosevelt was speaking, and Janet could sit next to Isaac Asimov and Hans Santesson.

  When I arrived at the banquet, I found that Judy was right. There were a number of people there who knew me and whom I knew and in no time at all I felt exactly as I would have felt at a science fiction convention and found myself having a good time.

  It was time to be seated at last and Hans Stefan Santesson came to get me. He was a plump, bottom-heavy fellow with a smooth oval face and a faint Swedish accent. He was editor of Fantastic Universe Science Fiction, to which I had sold an occasional story. (He died in 1975 at the age of sixty-one.)

  He said, “Come, Isaac, there’s someone who wants to meet you.” Looking in the direction he was indicating, I saw Janet Jeppson, at the table, smiling widely in greeting.

  My lonely heart was looking for something at this time, and it was not beauty. I had had beauty in heaping handfuls and it wasn’t working out. I was looking for something else—I wasn’t sure what, and I may not even have realized, consciously, that I was looking for anything at all.

  What I wanted, perhaps, was warmth—pleasant, undemanding affection—something to which beauty was irrelevant. Whatever I was seeking, I found it at that dinner. Janet was warm, unaffected, cheerful, and artlessly glad to be with me. By the end of the dinner, she looked beautiful to me and I have never wavered in that opinion at any time since. When she walks into a room and I see her face unexpectedly, my heart, to this day, jumps with delight.

  Of course, I didn’t have a kidney stone on that day of the banquet so that I was in my usual state of sweetness and light. Janet was delighted and decided that I wasn’t a pill after all.

  When a pneumatic young woman, so artificial that I suspected a tap of a finger would cause her to disintegrate, advanced to take some award, Janet said, “Oh, I wish I looked like that,” and I told her in all honesty that she looked a lot better than that.

  And when I told her that my mystery novel was probably the worst ever written, she decided I wasn’t the monster of arrogance that people said I was.

  We remained in touch thereafter, writing letters back and forth. The correspondence saw me through the bleak years. I phoned her now and then.
I occasionally saw her on my visits to New York and all these contacts merely strengthened my conviction that she was the kind of person who suited me perfectly.

  I’ll have more to say about her later on.

  saying I could only handle robots in short stories. He said, “Nonsense, write a novel about an overpopulated world in which robots are taking human jobs.”

  Mystery Novels

  In my childhood, as I explained, I read mysteries as well as science fiction. I continued reading both as I grew older and, in fact, although my interest in reading science fiction waned, my interest in mysteries did not. To this day mysteries are virtually the only light reading in which I indulge.

  I do not, however, like modern tough-guy mysteries, too violent suspense novels, or studies of criminal psychopathology. I have always liked what are now called “cozy mysteries,” those that involve a limited number of suspects and that are solved by ratiocination rather than by shooting.

  Of course, my ideal mysteries are those by Agatha Christie and my ideal detective is Hercule Poirot. I also liked the novels of Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Michael Innes, and any others who wrote in literate fashion without undue stress on either sex or violence. When I was young I was particularly fond of John Dickson Carr/Carter Dickson, but in later years when I reread him I found that his books seemed overemotional and even unnatural.

  Just as I wanted to write science fiction, I also wanted to write mysteries, and indeed I did. John Campbell had once said, incautiously, that it was impossible to write a good mystery in the science fiction mode, because the detective could always produce some technologically advanced device that would help him solve the problem.

  I privately thought that this was a foolish statement, because it was only necessary to set the background at the start and avoid introducing anything new in the remainder of the book. You would then have a science fiction mystery that was legitimate.

  In 1952, Horace Gold suggested I write a robot novel. I demurred,

  “No,” I said. “Too depressing.” “Make it a mystery,” he said, “with a detective and a robot sidekick who will take over if the detective muffs the case.”

  That was the germ of The Caves of Steel, which was a good science fiction novel and, at the same time, a straightforward mystery. It was the first time (in my opinion) that anyone had brought the two genres into quite so perfect a fusion.

  Then, to show it was no accident, I wrote another science fiction mystery, The Naked Sun, which was a sequel to the first. By the time the latter book appeared, in 1957, I was aching to write a “straight” mystery, one without science fiction trappings.

  As it happened, Doubleday’s mystery editor asked me to write a straight mystery novel and I jumped at the chance. Since I knew nothing about police procedure and preferred to avoid violence (when my mysteries involve a murder, there is only one, which takes place offstage, usually before the story opens), I decided to place the scene in a chemical laboratory at a university. In this way, though the story might not have a science fictional background, it did have a scientific one.

  For the purpose, I used my memories of Columbia University together with the professor and graduate students I had known in order to fix the characters in my mind. The events, naturally, were wholly fictional (and a good thing too, since they included a murder). I showed Doubleday the first two chapters and they approved, but when I submitted the entire novel, I was told, when I phoned to inquire, that it was rejected. There was no revision requested, it was rejected. It was the only novel I ever submitted to Doubleday that was rejected.

  This rejection (how I keep repeating the word) came at a very bad time. My quarrel with Keefer at the medical school was approaching a climax and I only phoned Doubleday in order to be told the book was taken so that I could have some relief from tension. Instead—well, I won’t use the word, but it wasn’t taken.

  That was a low point for me. I closed and locked my laboratory door and sat there for quite a while in misery. Then I decided I must not give way to self-pity and I occupied myself in writing the funniest bit of comic verse I ever wrote. No, I won’t quote it here—it’s too long. I felt much better when it was done, but was still far from my usual sunny self. I think the shock of the (I won’t say it) refusal helped bring me to the decision to switch to nonfiction during the time that followed.

  I tried to sell the mystery novel elsewhere and, for a while, had no luck whatever. Finally, Avon took it, without any real interest. I suspect they were hoping the acceptance would lead me on to doing a science fiction book for them. (I’m afraid I didn’t.) They published the book in 1958 under the title of The Death Dealers, which was not my tide, and they made use of a completely misleading cover.

  What was even worse, the book simply dropped dead. Avon made no effort to sell copies and the book earned back only a portion of its advance. The embarrassment was extreme, and it is no wonder that when I met Janet at the mystery writers banquet not long afterward I should tell her, ruefully, that I had written the worst mystery novel in existence. It was the only book of mine published in the 1950s, by the way, that was neither science fiction nor science, though, I repeat, it had a science background.

  And yet The Death Dealers underwent a resurrection. One of my publishers, Walker & Company, came across the book in 1967 in a display of my books that Boston University put on in honor of my eightieth book. Realizing it was out of print, Walker asked me to get it back from Avon. I did, and Walker put out a hardcover edition in 1968, ten years after its first appearance, and used my title, A Whiff of Death. It went through two hardcover printings and a number of paperback editions, to say nothing of several foreign languages, so that it was a reasonable success after all. That gave me the courage to reread it and I revised my earlier notion. It may not have been the best mystery ever written, but it was far from the worst.

  Indeed, there was one curious thing about A Whiff of Death. It had a lower-class homicide detective of Irish origin who found himself trying to solve a mystery that involved a large number of intellectuals who could not help but look down upon him. The detective, Doheney, was very humble, very respectful, asked questions almost hesitantly, but, in the end, it suddenly turned out he was ahead of them all and knew exactly what he was doing.

  The time was to come (and still exists) when Peter Falk’s Columbo was my favorite TV show and I always noted the resemblance of Columbo to Doheney. I never for one moment thought that Columbo had been taken from A Whiff of Death, and if it had, I wouldn’t have

  minded, for they improved the idea so greatly. In fact, the resem

  blance only increases my enjoyment of the TV show.

  The resurrection and success of A Whiff of Death gave me the comfortable feeling that Doubleday had made a mistake in 1958 and also gave me the courage to try again, when Larry Ashmead (my Doubleday editor at the time) asked me to attend a meeting of the American Booksellers Association (ABA) in 1975. It was one of their rare meetings in New York, so I could attend, and they were celebrating their seventy-fifth anniversary.

  Larry didn’t want me there just for a good time. He wanted me to collect local color and write a mystery entitled Murder at the ABA. He explained that he wanted the book for the next meeting of the Association a year later.

  “I’ll have the manuscript for you well before that time, Larry,” I said.

  “Not the manuscript,” he said, “the finished book.”

  I was appalled. That gave me only two months to write the book, so I objected. Larry came back with what I’ve heard a million times from editors, “You can do it, Isaac.”

  I attended the ABA meeting and wrote the book in seven weeks, as compared with seven to nine months for a science fiction novel. Why the difference?

  To me, the answer seems simple. In writing a science fiction novel, you must invent a futuristic social structure which is complex enough to be interesting in itself apart from the story and which is self-consistent. You must also invent a plot tha
t only works within that social structure. The plot must develop without unduly obscuring the description of the social structure, and the social structure must be described without unduly slowing the plot.

  Making a science fiction novel fulfill this double purpose is difficult even for an experienced and talented old hand such as myself. Every other kind of writing is easier than science fiction.

  Writing a story like Murder at the ABA requires no invention of a social structure. The social structure is that of here and now. In fact, the structure was precisely that of the ABA meeting I had attended. All I had to do was write the plot. No wonder writing a mystery took seven weeks instead of seven months.

  Doubleday published the book in 1976 and I was very pleased with it. I thought it was written in sprightly fashion and that it was a delightful tour de force. I had a Harlan Ellison-like character named

  Darius Just tell it in the first person. (I was careful to get Harlan’s written permission, of course, and I dedicated the book to him.) I myself, under my own name, appeared in the book in die third person as comic relief. As an added bit of comedy, Darius and I argued some points in footnotes. Some critics objected to this, but there are idiots in every walk of life.

  Naturally, I at once thought of doing a series of mystery novels featuring Darius Just. At seven weeks apiece, it would be a delightful snap. Alas, it never happened. Doubleday wouldn’t have it. If I were to write fiction, they wanted science fiction. They had just allowed Murder at the ABA as a one-shot aberration.

  But that’s all right, I managed to write mysteries anyway, but, alas, not novels. I’ll explain that in due course.

  Lawrence P. Ashmead

  I have had a great many editors in my life, but, of course, some of them stand out particularly. John Campbell and Walter Bradbury are examples of that, and I’ve discussed them. Another is Lawrence P. Ashmead.