by Isaac Asimov
I introduced two new members to the club, both of whom were most successful Spiders. One was Martin Gardner and the other was Ken Franklin. The trouble was that both retired (no crime) and then moved out of range (a terrible crime).
As I mentioned in the previous section, my fictional Black Widow ers was closely based on the Trap Door Spiders, with the membership cut in half for easier handling. Even the individual members of the Black Widowers are based on individual Spiders. Thus, Geoffrey Avalon is based on L. Sprague de Camp and Em manuel Rubin on Lester del Rey. James Drake is a reflection of Doc Clark; Thomas Trumbull of Gilbert Cant; Mario Gonzalo of Lin Carter; and Roger Halsted of Don Bensen. There was no secret about this; I had all their permissions.
Once Ken Franklin’s wife, Charlotte, asked about what went on at the Spiders. (I suppose wives can’t help wondering about stag meet ings—what with vague thoughts of naked women and nameless orgies.) Ken gave her one of my Black Widower books and said, “Like in the book, only not quite as good.”
Things don’t change in my book, but they do in real life. Three of those who modeled the Black Widowers are now dead: Gilbert Cant, Lin Carter, and Doc Clark himself. Of the remaining three, Sprague has moved to Texas, and Lester is relatively immobile these days and won’t come to the meetings.
As for Henry, the all-important waiter, who is always in the background till the end, he is not based on a real person at all. He is entirely my invention, although I must admit that I see a similarity between him and P. G. Wodehouse’s immortal Jeeves.
People sometimes ask me if I myself ever appear in the Black Widower stories. I appeared only once, as the guest, Mortimer Stellar, in the story “When No Man Pursueth” (March 1974 EQMM). I told Janet, rather proudly, that I had described myself with great accuracy in that story.
She said, “But that’s impossible. The guest is vain, arrogant, self-absorbed, and nasty.”
“See!” I said triumphantly. (She was furious. I’m afraid she sees me through rose-colored glasses.)
I am also the narrator, the “I “ character in the Griswold stories.
Mensa
In 1961, I became acquainted with a young woman named Gloria Saltzberg. She had been a victim of the 1955 epidemic of poliomyelitis, the last one to bedevil the world before the Salk vaccine came into use. She was in a wheelchair, in consequence, but was not embittered. She was a lively woman, full of joy, and I found this admirable. She was also highly intelligent and was a member of Mensa.
Mensa was an organization founded in Great Britain, and it consists of people who are determined, by test, to have “intelligence quotients” (“IQs”) that place them (supposedly) among the top 2 percent of humanity in intelligence.
Gloria wanted me to belong but I held back. In the first place, though I have been a lifelong beneficiary of intelligence tests, I don’t think much of them. I believe they test only one facet of intelligence —the ability to answer the kind of questions other people with the same facet of intelligence are likely to ask. My IQ rating has always been out of sight, but I am perfectly aware that in many respects I am remarkably stupid. Second, it seemed to me to be beneath my dignity to take an intelligence test. Surely, my life and work were ample testimony to my intelligence (such as it was).
Gloria said, “Can it be that you’re nervous about the test?” I thought about it and I was. I had nothing to gain; everything to lose. If I scored high, that was simply to be expected; but if I scored low, the disgrace would be unbearable. But then, having worked that out, I felt ashamed at doubting myself. So I took the test, scored high, and became a member of Mensa.
It was not, on the whole, a happy experience. I met a number of wonderful Mensans, but there were other Mensans who were brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs, who, one got the impression, would like, on being introduced, to be able to say, “I’m Joe Doakes, and my IQ is 172,” or, perhaps, have the figure tattooed on their forehead. They were, as I had been in my youth, forcing their intelligence on unwilling victims. In general, too, they felt underappreciated and undersuccessful. As a result, they had soured on the Universe and tended to be disagreeable.
What’s more, they were constantly jousting with each other, testing their intelligence on each other, and that sort of thing becomes wearing after a while.
Furthermore, I became uncomfortably aware that Mensans, how ever high their paper IQ might be, were likely to be as irrational as anyone else. Many of them believed themselves to be part of a “supe rior” group that ought to rule the world, and despised non-Mensans as inferiors. Naturally, they tended to be right-wing conservatives, and I generally feel terribly out of sympathy with such views.
Worse yet, there were groups among them, as I found out eventually, who accepted astrology and many other pseudoscientific beliefs, and who formed “SIGs” (“special-interest groups”) devoted to different varieties of intellectual trash. Where was the credit of being associated with that sort of thing, even tangentiallyr
Worst of all, I was recognized as a natural target. Every young whippersnapper of a Mensan seemed to think he could win his spurs by taking me on in a battle of wits and winning. I found myself in the position of an old gunfighter who could never hang up his guns because he was constantly being challenged by every fast-draw teenager in the territory.
I didn’t want to play that game. I don’t mind losing a battle of wits; I’ve lost a number of them in my life. However, I prefer such things to come to pass naturally. I don’t want to be forever on the watch for them. In short, to be metaphorical, I can shoot if I have to but I don’t want to spend my life with my hands half an inch from my holsters at all times.
Therefore I stopped attending meetings and I stopped paying my dues. I never formally resigned, but it was just as though I had.
That, however, is not the end of the story. When I arrived in New York, I found Mensans there who considered me one of them. In an unguarded moment, I agreed to attend a gathering to meet Victor Serebriakoff, concerning whom I had a natural curiosity. He was from Great Britain, was the general chairman of Mensa on the international scale, and was its leading spirit.
Serebriakoff was a short man, with an oval, rubicund face and a small grayish beard. He could tell excellent jokes in a variety of accents, including the cockney, and that immediately won me over. Serebriakoff said that he would pay my dues, if I did not, and that would make me a member whether I wanted to be one or not.
Well, I couldn’t allow that, so I became an active member of Mensa again. And to give the devil his due, there were some good things to be gotten out of it. When Mensa held a national convention in New York, I was usually dragooned into speaking at the banquet or at some other function, and I could speak on abstruse subjects that weren’t suitable for the general public. I even dedicated one of my science essay collections, The Road to Infinity (Doubleday, 1979), to the Mensa audience.
The old difficulties cropped up, however, and unless I was speaking to a large group of Mensans, I avoided all Mensa functions. It was difficult to resign, for Victor told me that I had been appointed one of the two international vice presidents of Mensa, a post I was to hold for fifteen years. I had not asked for it, I had not wanted it, but I was listed in Mensa literature as filling that office. It was purely honorary, but it made resigning difficult.
There were, of course, many Mensans who were delightful and intelligent, as, for instance, Margot Seitelman, who virtually ran the New York branch of Mensa and who was an indefatigable hostess and an excellent cook. When Victor was in town, Margot and I had dinner with him, usually joined by Marvin Grosswirth, the most congenial of all Mensans. He could tell jokes better than I and could assume an even more authentic Yiddish accent.
I stayed on in Mensa for years, getting more and more tired of it. I couldn’t even ignore my membership. Aside from having to pay dues every year, there were always many letters from people who began by announcing themselves as Mensans and therefore, one presumes, my blood bro
thers and sisters. Almost without exception they wanted me to do something for them that I didn’t want to do, write an essay, collaborate on a book, read a manuscript, dig up some information for them, and so on. I felt myself in a ridiculously exposed position.
Eventually, after both Marvin and Margot had died, I did resign.
The Dutch Treat Club
Ralph Daigh, who looked a little like Alan Hale—Little John to Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood—was editor-in-chief of Fawcett Publications, an important paperback publishing house. He invited me to lunch in April 1971, saying, “We’ll go dutch treat.”
I met Ralph at the Regency Hotel the following Tuesday. When I pulled out my wallet to pay, Ralph said, “You’re my guest.”
I said, “But you said we were going dutch treat.”
He was horrified. “Do you think I would invite you to lunch and make you pay? This is the Dutch Treat Club and you are my guest.” A few weeks later I was invited to join the club as a member. The Dutch Treat Club was founded in 1905 by a group of newspa
permen who met for lunch every Tuesday, each paying for himself (hence Dutch Treat). As time went on, the club expanded to include anyone in the world of the arts. We meet at noon for cocktails and conversation, sit down to lunch at 12:30, and at 1:10 the toastmaster arises. He makes announcements, introduces guests, and then brings on the entertainment, usually a singer, followed by a speaker on some subject of general interest. At 2:00, we adjourn.
It is all very pleasant. At first, my attendance was sporadic, but I enjoyed myself so much when I did go that I began to be one of the regulars. In fact, when I sing “Give My Regards to Broadway” during my morning shower (I am an inveterate shower singer) and come to the lines “Tell them my heart is yearning / To mingle with the old-time throng,” it is the Dutch Treaters I think of as the tlirong.
When I joined the club, the president was William Morris, the well-known lexicographer, jovial, plump, delightful, and with a white tuft of beard that made him look incredibly distinguished. He was forced to resign because his wife was increasingly ill, and he could not be sure of regular attendance. (He lives in Connecticut.) After his wife died, he resumed his regular attendance but not his former office. He is president emeritus.
Succeeding Bill Morris was the famous Lowell Thomas, the most distinguished of the Dutch Treaters during the 1970s. He was in his eighties (though you couldn’t tell that from his bearing, his busy life, and his active mind, to say nothing of his young and attractive wife). He insisted that he was only temporary president till the club found someone else, but the club had no intention of finding anyone else. He remained president till he died at the age of eighty-nine.
On May 3, 1981, Janet and I attended one of the festivities in honor of his eighty-ninth birthday. He told me he was tired of all the fuss and feared it would be worse when he turned ninety. He said he would deliberately go on his travels so that no one would get at him on that occasion. —And so he did, though not as he expected, for he died peacefully in his sleep on August 29, 1981, after a day as filled with activity as all his days were, and that’s a good end.
Succeeding Lowell was Eric Sloane, the great painter of Americana. One couldn’t tell it from his placid exterior, but he had been married seven times. He was a wonderful fellow who occasionally ordered wine for each Dutch Treat table at his own expense. The only trouble was that he spent much of his time in the Southwest and was rarely present to preside at the meetings.
He was aware of the difficulties arising from this and he would speak of having me as president pro tern when he was absent, but I always felt he was joking. I did preside once in a while, though usually it was Walter Frese, the club secretary, who filled in.
Eric was also advanced in years and had a pacemaker. On March 6, 1985, soon after his eightieth birthday, he visited an art gallery on Fifty-seventh Street where they had arranged a display of his paintings for sale. He then walked down Fifth Avenue and his heart must have failed, for he collapsed and died on the pavement. Unbelievably, he had no identification on him, but he did carry a card from the art gallery. The police went there and someone from the gallery made the identification. At once, Janet decided we had to have an Eric Sloane painting of our own. We went to the gallery and Janet chose three possible paint ings and asked me to make the final decision. I did so, choosing the one I liked best, which now hangs on our living-room wall.
At Eric’s memorial service, Janet and I were sitting quietly and sadly in our pew when Emery Davis, a Dutch Treater and a well-known
bandleader—very bald and very jovial—leaned toward me and said, “You’re giving the eulogy.”
It was news to me, but I got up and improvised one. It went over well, but I did not foresee the consequences. I had been a member of the board of governors of the club since January 12, 1982, and, as a result of the eulogy, all the other board members at once agreed that I was to be the next president. After some hesitation, I gave in, and assumed the mantle of office on April 16, 1985.
In a way, the Dutch Treat Club changed the routine of my life. Since I was always lunching out on Tuesdays, I made it the day on which I made any visits I had to make to publishers. In particular, I visited Doubleday, and everyone there has grown so used to this that I have been told that on those occasions when I cannot visit, it doesn’t feel like Tuesday.
There are many people at the Dutch Treat Club who have become beloved friends of mine (and some of these have died since I joined it). I hesitate to try to list them, for I am sure to leave out a few inadvertently. Let me say instead that the most colorful member of the club is Herb Graff. In his presence, even I tend to wash out.
Herb Graff is a short, balding man, who wore a toupee when I first met him but later abandoned it and grew a scruffy beard instead, which makes him look like a rather screwball variety of rabbi. His field of specialization is the movies of the 1930s.
Herb and I got along famously. For ten years we sat together, gathered kindred spirits, and were the noisiest table in the place. Eric Sloane called it the “Jewish table,” though it was Herb, not I, who really deserved Eric’s title of “Head Jew.” (I once said, in mock complaint during the Canberra, eclipse cruise, that I always seemed to sit at the noisiest table. Walter Sullivan, the gentlest soul ever invented, who sat at the same table, took me seriously, and said to me in wonder, “But, Isaac, you’re the one that makes it noisy.”)
Well, I do, but not always. When Herb is at the table, he makes the noise. Mind you, I’m a pretty good talker. Only recently, Robyn said casually to a friend, “A conversation with my father means listening to a monologue.” When Herb is in the crowd, however, I tend to keep quiet and the conversation becomes a Herb Graff monologue. He knows any number of jokes and amusing stories, and tells them all in skillful nonstop fashion.
Out of a vast number of stories about the Dutch Treat, I’ll tell you about the time when one of the regulars had missed a luncheon or two on the petty excuse of his wife’s being in the hospital. I said, haughtily and with typical male (false) grandiosity, “The only reason / would miss a lunch would be if the gorgeous babe in bed with me simply wouldn’t let me leave.”
Whereupon Joe Coggins said, sepulchrally, “Which accounts for Isaac’s perfect attendance record.”
I saw that coming as soon as I made the remark, but it was too late to force it back in my mouth. There was nothing left but to join the group in their laughter.
The Baker Street Irregulars
The Baker Street Irregulars (BSI) are a group of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts. The name comes from the fact that it is what Holmes called a group of street boys who worked for him in some of the early stories.
The organization has an annual banquet on an early Friday in January, the one nearest the sixth of the month, which is, supposedly, Holmes’s birthday. There, after conversation and cocktails, we sit down to a feast. And after that, there are various traditional rituals and “papers.”
The game we all pla
y is to suppose that the Sherlock Holmes stories are factually true, and that Dr. John H. Watson actually wrote them, with Arthur Conan Doyle as merely the literary agent.
In actual fact, Conan Doyle was a slapdash and sloppy writer who grew to hate the Sherlock Holmes stories because Sherlock drowned out his other literary works and even forced the author himself to retire into the shadows in comparison. He probably wrote them as quickly as he could to get rid of him. Eventually, he tried to kill Sherlock but reader pressure forced him to resurrect him. He then wrote further stories with even greater resentment.
As a result, the stories are loaded with contradictions among themselves, something Conan Doyle cared nothing about. The BSI, however, assumes the stories to be inerrant and it is the purpose of the “papers” to explain the contradictions in convoluted manner and to propose all sorts of deep and unlikely theories to account for one thing or another in die stories.
In 1973,1 was proposed for membership in the BSI by Edgar Lawrence, an elderly member of the Trap Door Spiders (who is now dead). One of the requirements for membership was that the candidates prepare and deliver a paper on the stories. I didn’t do this. What’s more, I couldn’t do it, because I didn’t know the Holmes stories well enough and had no intention of doing the necessary research. The requirement was apparendy waived in my case.
Fortunately, after a few years, I was asked to contribute to a book of writings about Holmes. When I said that I didn’t know enough about the stories, Banesh Hoffman (a physicist who had worked with Einstein and who had an endearingly ugly face and an equally endearingly lovely soul—and who is now dead) suggested I analyze the book Dynamics of an Asteroid.
This book is mentioned in one story as having been written by that great mathematician and archcriminal James Moriarty. The story says nothing about what the book contained for the very good reason that Conan Doyle knew nothing about astronomy. I worked out a beautifully reasoned suggestion as to its contents—something that would exactly fit the infinite evil of Moriarty—and wrote the article for the collection. I later expanded it and made it a Black Widower story under the title “The Ultimate Crime.” I did not submit it for magazine publication but included it as an “original” in More Tales of the Black Widowers.