I.Asimov: A Memoir

by Isaac Asimov

  Nevertheless, Walker arranged to have me interviewed on Dick Cavett’s show and to maintain my supposed anonymity by actually wearing a brassiere over my eye. Why I agreed, I cannot tell. Of course, I took it off early in the interview, but not before I had made a colossal fool of myself before a large audience.

  Then, early in 1975, I began writing limericks in quantity. I had, earlier in life, occasionally made up a limerick, but now it caught me in a vise, like an addiction. I’m not sure why.

  Possibly it was because it was a verse form that had stringent requirements of scanning and rhyme. I resented much modern poetry, because I couldn’t understand it (and, worse yet, there was nothing about it that gave me the urge to try to understand it) and because I despised its freewheeling notions of what a poem should look like. (Robert Frost said that free verse was like playing tennis without a net, and I agreed with him.) Therefore, I wanted to be constrained by rules, since a successful limerick would then be more of a challenge and more of an achievement.

  I chose another constraint voluntarily. The limericks would have to be ribald and I would abandon my resolve not to use vulgarisms in order to have good limericks. However, I remained staunchly determined that no limerick was going to be merely “dirty.” They had to be clever and, what’s more, cleverer than they were dirty. This made them even harder to write.

  For a long time, these limericks filled the wakeful hours of the night. If I couldn’t sleep, I constructed a limerick. If I were successful, I would laugh out loud (or even if I managed to stifle it, my body would shake, and shake the bed). Janet would wake up and I would explain I’d just composed a limerick.

  “Write it down,” she would urge me.

  But I scorned that. I would remember, I assured her, and went to sleep. In the morning, of course I did remember.

  By the time I had a hundred limericks, I gave them (with notes, of course) to Walker & Company and they were published as Lecherous Limericks in 1975. By the end of the 1970s, I had written four more books of lecherous limericks (two in combination with the poet John Ciardi). I also wrote two books of clean limericks.

  Altogether, I published nearly 700 limericks that I had made up myself, and then the mania passed and I wrote no more—except for an occasional one on request from people, usually women.

  The books scarcely sold. Books of limericks are not usually big sellers anyway, and in my case, once again I fell between two stools. My readers are not big for ribald limericks, and those who are quickly found my limericks not ribald enough. It doesn’t matter. It was great fun while it lasted.

  I won’t succumb to the urge to quote you dozens of my favorite limericks, but I will quote you one, which I wrote about John Ciardi and myself (with exaggeration, of course.)

  There is something about satyriasis

  ‘]That arouses psychiatrists’ biases.

  But we’re both of us pleased

  We’re in this way diseased,

  As the damsel who’s waiting to try us is.

  Meanwhile, a new editor at Walker & Company, Millicent Selsam (herself a well-known writer on biological subjects for young people), suggested I write a book to be entitled How Did We Find Out the Earth Is Round? It was to be 7,500 words long and to be aimed at bright ten- to twelve-year-olds.

  I thought that was a great idea. I dashed it off and it was published in 1973. It did well and Millicent suggested I do an open-ended series of such books. They turned out to be a series of little histories of science on subjects from volcanoes to black holes and from atoms to superconductivity. I have done some thirty-five of them now and the series, as a whole, has proved quite successful.

  At this time, I have published sixty-six books with Walker & Company. It stands second to Doubleday both in number of books and in royalty payments.

  I like to remember nice things said about me by publishers. Once, when royalties came due in February 1978, in the midst of a heavy

  snowstorm, I called Sam Walker to say, “I’ll pick them up when the weather improves. No hurry.” Sam, however, would have none of that. He delivered the statements and the check on skis. Beth once said to me, “It’s odd but you’re our best author, and also our nicest.”

  I know why she thought that was odd. Any creative artist, once he achieves “star” quality, tends to become captious, demanding, and generally disagreeable. I swore to myself at the beginning of my career that if ever I achieved renown I would not fall prey to that. Except for a very few slips, when I was in one of my rages, I have adhered to this resolve.

  Once, Patricia Van Doren of Basic Books took me out to lunch and, in the restaurant, we met Robert Banker of Doubleday. Robert said, “Take good care of him, Mrs. Van Doren. He’s Doubleday’s favorite author.” And Pat replied haughtily, “Don’t worry, Mr. Banker, he’s Basic Books’ favorite author too.” I can’t help loving remarks like that and I can’t help repeating them either. One last word. Walker & Company served me in another unusual way but I’ll get to that later on.

  Failures

  Not all my projects in the 1960s were successes.

  In 1961, World Book Encyclopedia asked me to join a team that would do writing for their Yearbook. There were seven of us and each would take care of one facet or another of the year’s advances. Thus James (“Scotty”) Reston would do national affairs; Lester Pearson of Canada, international affairs; Red Smith, sports; Sylvia Porter, economics; Alistair Cooke, culture; and Lawrence Cremin, education.

  I was to do science. Work was light, one 2,000-word essay each year. Pay was good, $2,000. I had not yet reached the stage where I could routinely charge a dollar a word and $2,000 seemed very munificent.

  I made only one condition. I was not to be expected to travel.

  They agreed, but the agreement was phony. They persuaded me to go to Chicago, then they persuaded me to go to West Virginia. Finally, they tried to get me to go to Bermuda in 1964, and I flatly refused.

  They asked me if I wanted more money. I said, “No, you give me more money than it’s worth now. I just refuse to travel.”

  So they fired me.

  An even worse situation arose in 1966 when Ginn and Company wanted to put out a series of science books for grade school youngsters. They were assembling a team and they wanted me to join it and write some of the materials for the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades.

  I was most reluctant to do so, because I had never gotten over my experiences writing textbooks a dozen or so years earlier, especially writing them in committee. However, I was corrupted into it.

  By 1966, you see, I was quite certain that my marriage with Gertrude was not going to last many more years, and I was deeply concerned over the matter. I was experiencing Jewish guilt to beat the band. When Ginn and Company assured me that the series of textbooks would be a multimillion-dollar success I got the brilliant idea of arranging to have half the royalties turned over to Gertrude. That, I thought, would take care of her.

  So I drew a deep breath, bent my back to the task, and got to work. The team met occasionally as a large group to discuss the book, and I spent the time telling the latest jokes, very much in the way I told jokes on the way to the Concord some years later. I have to do something to make the unbearable bearable.

  I hated the whole job, and it was all I could do to carry on by thinking of the millions of dollars. Unfortunately, the books were a flop, making not millions but thousands. Gertrude got half the royalties, but that half was so small that she was enraged rather than assuaged.

  It was not my fault. Well, in a way it was, come to think of it. One of the reasons the series didn’t do so well was that they mentioned evolution and the troglodytes of Texas and other states would therefore not use it. They wanted to teach science a la Genesis.

  Publishers, with their usual bravery, dumbed down their books in order to make money at the expense of leaving American children undereducated or, worse, miseducated. Ginn and Company prepared to join the parade to destroy young minds
by removing the evolution sections and substituting something vague about “development.” However, it was I who wrote the evolution sections (and therefore was responsible, in a dim way, for the poor showing of the books) and I refused to make any changes.

  I said to them, haughtily, “It isn’t written in the stars that I must make a million dollars, but it is written in the stars that I must be true to my principles.”

  So they fired me. They had someone else do the changes, and on June 26, 1978, I made them remove my name from the books. The project was a fiasco from beginning to end.

  What does one do in a case like this? One is helpless in the face of cowardly publishers, pliant school boards, and fanatical ignoramuses. All I can do is write essays denouncing creationism with its belief in Adam, Eve, a talking serpent, and a worldwide Flood, all in a six- to ten-thousand-year-old universe, and in a supernatural creation of all the species of life so that they were different from the start.

  Some of my essays appeared in as august an organ as The New Tork Times Magazine and that roused the anger of many Fundamentalists —an anger I am happy and proud to inspire.

  Teenagers

  Earlier in the book, I mentioned my lack of any real feeling of affection for infants and children. I am not exactly sold on teenagers either. I am highly suspicious of any young man under twenty-one and any young woman under eighteen. This was brought to my attention most forcefully after we bought our house in West Newton in 1956.

  It was only a block and a half from a junior high school and, in my innocence, I thought of that only as a convenience for my two youngsters as they grew up. I did not think of the other youngsters.

  Every school morning a crowd of youngsters, aged twelve to fifteen, walked along the street toward the junior high school. Every school afternoon, the flow ebbed in the other direction. In the morning, it was almost bearable, for they had to be at school at a given time and they rarely woke up early enough not to have to make a brisk walk of it. In the afternoon, however, walking home, many felt no great need to be restored to their loving families at any given time. The walk home therefore meandered and was caught in shallows and stagnation, often right in front of our house.

  They were loud, raucous, rude, and, in fact, obscene. It clearly made them feel very adult and hip to be using vile language.

  At one time I was writing material on the excretory system for that ever-to-be-deplored Ginn and Company series and I had occasion (very naturally) to use the word “urine” repeatedly.

  At one of our frequent get-togethers, the editor-in-chief of the series objected to “urine.”

  I was confused. “What am I supposed to say?” I asked.

  “Say ‘liquid excretions.’ “

  I was still confused. “Why?” I demanded.

  “Because the students will titter if they hear the word ‘urine.’ “ Whereupon I reared up in outrage and said, “Listen, I live on a block infested by junior high school students and the only reason they would titter is because ‘urine’ is a fancy word to them. They’re used to calling it ‘piss.’ I’ll change ‘urine’ to ‘piss,’ if you wish, but I won’t change it to ‘liquid secretions.’ “ It stayed “urine.”

  Frankly, the youngsters frightened us. It seemed to Gertrude and me that they were an elemental force. We could not drive them away or, at least, if we did, it was like punching pillows. They always re turned and harsh talk from us merely roused a spirit of defiance and rebellion in them and the crowd before the house grew larger and louder.

  They were respectable middle-class kids, to be sure, and never was there any violence or vandalism, but it was the volume of noise that bothered me. We learned to recognize the first distant whisper that heralded the forthcoming flood and would shiver in apprehension. It really helped poison our lives. A small thing—but small things can be effective poisoners. Think what the buzzing sound of one tiny mosquito will do to make quiet sleep impossible.

  I finally solved the problem, but entirely through accident, as I shall explain.

  Al Capp

  Al Capp is, of course, the famous comic strip artist who devised the world of “Li’l Abner,” a world I adored. I met him first in 1954, through the agency of a Boston University professor who knew us both. Al was a man of medium height, with a wooden leg and a strong-featured face, a ready chuckle, and a gift for conversation. I enjoyed being with him.

  Our friendship ran a level course, though it was never close. We would occasionally speak on the phone, I visited him at his house once, we went to see Arthur Miller’s The Crucible together, and so on. The closest we came was at the 1956 World Convention in New York, where he was a featured speaker, and from which he drove Hal Clement and me back with him.

  The friendship reached a dreadful climax in 1968, but to explain that I will have to make a detour. Forgive me.

  · I have been a liberal all my life. I have had to be. Early in life, I noted that conservatives, who are more or less satisfied with things as they are and even more satisfied with things as they were fifty years ago, are “self-loving.”

  That is, conservatives tend to like people who resemble themselves and distrust others. In my youth, in the United States the backbone of social, economic, and political power rested with an establishment consisting almost entirely of people of Northwestern European extraction, and the conservatives making up that establishment were contemptuous of others. Among others, they were contemptuous of Jews and in the Hitler years they were not very troubled by the Nazis, whom they considered a bulwark against Communism.

  As a Jew, I had to be liberal, first out of self-protection and second because I learned to lean that way as I grew older. I wanted to see the United States changed and made more civilized, more humane, truer to its own proclaimed traditions. I wanted to see all Americans judged as individuals and not as stereotypes. I wanted to see all with reasonable opportunities. I wanted society to feel a reasonable concern for the welfare of the poor, the unemployed, the sick, the aged, the hopeless.

  I was only thirteen when Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President and introduced the “New Deal,” but I was not too young to get an idea of what he was trying to do. The older I got, the more firmly liberal I became. I disapproved of Roosevelt only when he wasn’t liberal enough, as when, for political reasons, he ignored the plight of the African-Americans in die South or the Loyalists in Spain.

  Liberalism began to fade after World War II. Times became prosperous and many blue-collar people, having jobs and perhaps feeling themselves secure, turned conservative. They had theirs and they were not willing to discommode themselves for those who were still down

  at the bottom. And many of those who were worst off and might have fought for a share of die pie retreated into apathy and drugs as the decades passed.

  And eventually we came to the Reagan era, when it became de rigueur not to tax but to borrow; to spend money not on social services but on armaments. The national debt more than doubled in eight years and interest payments on the loans soared to over $150 billion a year. This did not immediately affect people. Rich Americans grew richer in an atmosphere of deregulation and greed, and poor Americans— But who worries about poor Americans except people branded with the L-word that no one dared mention anymore?

  It makes me think of Oliver Goldsmith’s lines:

  1 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.

  As a loyal American, I grow heartsick.

  I’ve watched individuals turn from liberal to conservative as they grew older, fatter, and “more respectable.” Those who were conservative from babyhood, like John Campbell, never really bothered me. I argued politics and sociology with him for decades and was never able to budge him, but, then, he was never able to budge me either.

  Robert Heinlein, however, who was a burning liberal during the war, became a burning conservative afterward, the change coming at about the time he swapped wives from the liberal Leslyn to the conservative V
irginia. I doubt that Heinlein would call himself a conservative, of course. He always pictured himself a libertarian, which to my way of thinking means: “I want the liberty to grow rich and you can have the liberty to starve.” It’s easy to believe that no one should depend on society for help when you yourself happen not to need such help.

  The case I watched at closest range, however, was Al Capp (I’ve now gotten back to him). What happened to him, I don’t really know. Until the middle 1960s, he was a liberal, as one could easily tell from his “Li’l Abner” comic strip. I remember that even as late as 1964, at a get-together, we were both denouncing Barry Goldwater’s attempt at gaining the presidency. (Looking back on it, though, I realize that Goldwater was an honest man, and much superior in integrity to Lyndon Johnson, for whom I voted, as well as to Richard Nixon arid Ronald Reagan, for whom I did not vote.)

  And then, overnight, he turned conservative. What impelled this, I don’t know. I admit that the “New Liberals” of the 1960s were sometimes hard to take; that they laid themselves open to derision as long-haired, unkempt kooks; and apparently they bothered Al beyond reason, and he turned hard right.

  I remember a post-1964 gathering at which Al Capp held the floor and was absolutely acid in his comments on the African-American writer James Baldwin, for instance, on other prominent African-Americans, and on the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements generally.

  I listened with horror and raised objections, of course, but Al swept them away.