I.Asimov: A Memoir

by Isaac Asimov

  The talk was such a great success that I was asked to return in 1973 to run a seminar of my own. I wanted Janet to enjoy the surroundings once again, so I agreed. It was just as well. On August 19, 1973, we were at the Rensselaerville Institute again. It gave Janet a chance to rebound from her mastectomy and her subarachnoid hemorrhage, and I, from my mother’s death.

  In point of fact, we have gone back every year since then. A hard core of “regulars” also returns, and each year there are new attendees too, though there is no way of making room for more than about sixty people.

  The group always deals with some science-fictional problem—the coming of some catastrophe, the setting up of a colony in space, and so on. The group is divided into several subgroups, each of which is given a special task, and they go about it with the utmost seriousness, hammering out procedures, solutions, conclusions, arguing with each other fiercely—and all in absolute disregard for the beautiful summer weather outside.

  I once delivered a small speech saying that we might be sitting outside sunning ourselves, playing tennis, or swimming in the lake. Instead, I said, we were indoors, arguing and thinking. I then waited a few minutes and said, “How lucky we are!” and everyone broke into applause.

  We have, of course, made good friends at Rensselaerville. Preeminent was Isidore Adler, a chemist at the University of Maryland, and his wife, Annie. Izzy was another one of those fellows with a face that is not handsome but is somehow so attractive that young women always flocked about him. He and I swapped jokes endlessly. He was a jock and could beat, at tennis and handball, men young enough to be his grandsons. He would also get up at dawn and jog for several miles down the road and through the town. One extremely attractive young woman, Winnie, felt the need to lose some weight, so she sometimes jogged with him. He was faster, of course, so that townspeople, if they looked out of their windows, could see the unusual sight of a gorgeous girl madly pursuing a plain, old man who seemed intent on escape.

  Winnie was a belly dancer, by the way, and extremely spectacular. We always reserved one evening for belly dancing when she was in attendance. And every evening, of course, I was on display, telling my most elaborate jokes. I told some (by popular demand) every year, since no one else could tell them as I could.

  Then there was Mary Sayer, who had an artlessness (to say nothing of a figure) that was endlessly attractive. She was a woman with whom flirting was a particular pleasure, because it always threw her into such a delightful confusion. She was a science fiction fan too, and in 1983 I met her at the World Convention in Baltimore. Janet was on an errand, but hadn’t returned, so I was getting very restless. Mary, in her gentle way, said there was no use wandering about looking for her in a huge crowd. She urged me to go to my room and wait there, for Janet would surely return. She accompanied me to my room and I sat there in misery, paying Mary no attention, till I heard a key in the door. I was instantly in action.

  “Quick, Mary,” I said, and dragged her to the door. There I embraced her and managed to plant a kiss on her lips just as Janet walked in.

  Janet said, “Hello, Mary.” She paid absolutely no attention to the kiss, which she knew was for her benefit. Besides, Mary’s transparent goodness made anything else impossible.

  During the later years at the Institute, Mark Chartrand (an astronomer) and Mitchell Waldrop (a science writer) began to attend regularly and to take part in the game.

  I always gave an introductory hour-long talk on the first evening, a talk that was open to the townspeople too. At Rensselaerville I was

  lucky enough to become acquainted with the inimitable Andy Rooney, who has a summer house there. I almost always managed to write a story in longhand while I was at the Institute, usually a Black Widower mystery. I did that on cruises, too. On one cruise, I wrote three stories and later sold them all. People who catch me writing longhand are always talking to me about laptop computers, but I pay them no mind. I happen to like to write longhand now and then. Why can’t they understand that? In fact, most of this book that you are now reading was originally written in longhand, for reasons I will explain later. But time passes. In 1987, it was found that Izzie Adler was suffering from cancer of the prostate. He continued to attend even though he was in more or less constant pain and in 1989 he attended in a wheelchair. On March 26, 1990, he died at the age of seventy-three.

  The news of his death was a source of great sorrow to us, even though it was not unexpected. That, combined witli accumulating medical problems of my own, which I will describe later, decided me to make the 1990 session the last. The group will carry on just as well without me—and perhaps better.

  Mohonk Mountain House

  Janet’s parents would often spend some time at Mohonk Mountain House, a rambling resort set in many acres of wilderness. Its oldest parts were over a century old, and the whole still breathed a Victorian ambience. It is located in New Paltz, New York, just across the Hudson River from Poughkeepsie.

  They went largely because Janet’s father was a golfing enthusiast and Mohonk offered good facilities for that. Janet never went with them (she was busy with college and, like most young people, she didn’t think a good vacation was one in which you tagged along with your parents). However, they told her much about the beauty of the setting and the pleasantness of Mohonk’s aura.

  In 1975, when we were barreling down the New York State Thruway from a speaking engagement upstate, Janet said as we came to a sign announcing the New Paltz turnoff up ahead, “There’s a place called Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz. I’d love to see it.”

  Now, ordinarily, travel—when I must travel—is, for me, only a device for going from A to B as quickly and as directly as possible. I resist the impulse to stop and do a little sightseeing unless Janet presses hard. She wasn’t pressing this time, but I must have been in a particularly compliant mood, for I said, “Well, let’s turn off and look at it.”

  We followed a winding mountain road for nine miles and finally reached a large rambling place, with a great variety of architectural motifs madly jumbled together, as picturesque as anything we could imagine. It was surrounded by gardens, hills, wilderness, and a small lake. We had an excellent lunch, followed by a walk to magnificent gardens. Janet was in ecstasies over it, and I am prepared to love anything that will send Janet into ecstasies—and, as a matter of fact, I was impressed by it on my own, so it has become our favorite resort.

  Two or three times a year we stay there from one to four days. Arm in arm, we wander through its halls, around its lake, and in its gardens. We once attended five annual sessions of a “murder mystery weekend” in winter, and I later ran two sessions of a “science fiction weekend.” We sometimes attend a week devoted to music, and we once went to watch a meteor shower. Sometimes we just go for no reason but to be there. I occasionally give a talk at their request, but of course I accept no money for it, only room and board.

  The wildlife at Mohonk, especially the deer, are not frightened of human beings, since no move in anger is ever made against them. One evening, during the kind of gentle walk considered suitable for me, we saw some half a dozen white-tailed deer cropping the grass in the dusk not more than fifty yards from us. We watched enraptured while they ignored us. Finally, Janet said, “Aren’t they beautiful?” I answered, “Yes, they look delicious.” She groaned, but I notice that she eats venison with delight when it is on the menu.

  We once chanced upon a particularly quiet and seemingly untouched place and sat there in absolute content for half an hour. When we got home, I wrote a Black Widower story, “The Quiet Place,” which appeared in the March 1987 EQMM.

  In 1987, the Washington Post asked me to write a piece on some place in my travels that I liked very much. I replied that I didn’t travel, unless you counted Mohonk Mountain House, ninety miles from New York. They said that that would be fine and I was then faced with the problem of describing the place—and I’m not a very observant fellow.

  I therefore suggested tha
t Janet write it and, after considerable hesitation, she did. I then went over it and made a few changes and sent it off. (As is always true in all our collaborations, Janet does 90 percent of the work.) The Post loved it, and I insisted that the authors be listed as “Janet and Isaac Asimov.” They agreed and it appeared in the Post’s Christmas issue under the title “Our Shangri-La.”

  The piece was apparently sufficiently successful so that they wanted one on the American Museum of Natural History. Since Janet loves that place, I gave her that job also. It appeared in the Post in 1988 as “The Tyrannosaurus Prescription” by Janet and Isaac Asimov.

  Both of these essays appeared in a collection published by Prometheus Press in 1989, and the publishers were sufficiently impressed by Janet’s essay to name the book “The Tyrannosaurus Prescription.”

  Janet is a very charming writer of nonfiction. She has sold every one of the few such essays she has written (she sold one of them twice when the first magazine folded and she had to find another) and I keep urging her to write more of them.

  Travel

  Despite all my talk about not traveling, I’ve been to Evansville, Indiana, and to Raleigh, North Carolina, because it was necessary to attend functions and give talks in such faraway and exotic places. I have been in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, and seen Indian mounds in Ohio.

  Going such unusual distances (for me) requires unusual stimuli. I went to Indiana because Lowell Thomas asked me to do so as a special favor for him. I went to North Carolina at the invitation of the state’s governor. With time, even such stimuli became insufficient to budge me, but while I was still in my fifties, I could do it.

  The greatest of all stimuli were Janet’s desires. She never pushed them or made demands, but I knew, for instance, that she had always wanted to visit the Everglades in Florida. Some people, I imagine, dream of shopping in Paris or of gambling in Las Vegas, but Janet dreams of seeing the flora and fauna of the Everglades, and I wanted desperately to oblige her.

  The chance came in 1977, when I received an invitation to lecture to a large group of IBM people in Miami. The offered fee was higher than I was getting at the time, but that would not have influenced me. However, I asked if I could have a conducted tour of the Everglades while there, and they agreed.

  So on March 26, 1977,1 very nervously undertook the longest trip I had ever taken on my own up to that point. We took the train to Miami.

  I don’t mind trains very much, although I get nervous when they barrel through the night. I cannot for the life of me convince myself that the engineer can see where he’s going, for when I look out the window all is dark. (I know! He has headlights and there are signal

  lights all along the track, but it’s my mind that knows that, not my heart.) It’s especially bad when there is a rough stretch of track and the train shakes and ratdes. I keep anticipating derailments with who knows what dreadful consequences.

  This is not entirely cowardice, though I think I have stressed the fact that I am not physically brave. My fears also reflect a hyperactive imagination. I have trained and used that imagination in my writing for many decades, and I can’t turn it off on demand. Dreadful consequences are forever presenting themselves to my eyes in solid and realistic three-dimensional form, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

  We did our best to be comfortable. We got not one sleeping compartment but two adjoining ones and had them open the door between them. That meant we had two bathrooms, a luxury we greatly appreciated, for when there is only one bathroom there are bound to be conflicts. I am an early riser and am accustomed to retire into the bathroom with a book or a newspaper and to be in no haste to emerge. In our apartment, we have separate bathrooms, so I can luxuriate in the ability to take my time.

  Since the sleeping car was the last in the train and the dining car was up near the front, we had to walk through several coaches, which activated my liberalism. There were the proletariat in the coaches sprawled this way and that in their seats trying to get some rest (especially when we passed through early at breakfast time), and there were we with our double room, our separate beds and bathrooms, living the life of luxury. Not only did I feel terribly guilty at having betrayed my class by becoming affluent but I had the uneasy feeling that at any moment all the downtrodden coachers would rise in their wrath, shouting, “Les aristocmtes d la lanterne,” and hang us, even though, in my heart, I’m one of them.

  But we arrived safely, un-derailed and unhanged, and I gave the talks successfully. I was rather amused by IBM’s regimentation. The talk was scheduled for very early in the morning and there were no stragglers. (I’m convinced that anyone who came late would have been shot on the spot.) Every one in the audience was in his or her seat, and the men were all in uniform—dark suits, button-down white shirts, narrow ties, and a general air of smooth-shaven wholesomeness. I was wearing a red jacket, which seemed to blind everyone, but

  they tolerated it. (A fellow speaker was sent back to his room to get the tie he had neglected to put on.)

  My garb made its mark, though. When I returned to New York, I reported to my lecture agent, Harry Walker, who had arranged the trip. While I was there, he happened to get a call from IBM people expressing satisfaction with my talk.

  Harry Walker was gratified and he said, “As a matter of fact, he’s right here, talking to me.” Then a puzzled look crossed his face and he said, “No, he’s not wearing a red jacket.”

  We did go on the Everglades expedition and it was a complete success, even though the previous winter had been a hard one with the temperature reaching an unprecedented low (for the Everglades) of 19. This killed a good deal of the vegetation, which, after all, was not adapted to cold. There were still distressing patches of plant life that were dead and brown, and Janet mourned over them.

  Even so, there was much to see, especially the alligators, who didn’t seem at all threatening. We were told we couldn’t feed them, but one had a missing leg (presumably chewed off in a fight with a rival) and Janet insisted on feeding him. We had a splendid lunch—the weather was perfect—and I stared at the waters of what I was assured was the Gulf of Mexico, something I had never thought to see.

  I shuddered at the thought of living in Florida, though, a place where six inches is a high elevation. I like green hills, as I’ve said before. In Florida, too, there is no real winter, and though winters have their disadvantages, they also have a remarkable beauty of their own. In a winterless climate, such as that of Florida, southern California, and Hawaii, I think I’d go mad with nostalgia for snow. My good friend Martin H. Greenberg, about whom I will speak in some detail later, was born and brought up in Florida but went to college in Connecticut and saw his first snowfall there. He said it was an unimaginable joy and thrill to see frozen water falling from the sky and to make snowballs. He has now lived many years in Green Bay, Wisconsin, however, and I suspect that he views snowfalls with some thing less than ecstasy these days. The next year, 1978, I was faced with an even greater challenge. I was asked to go to Pebble Beach, California, and to San Jose, and to give a talk in each place for a sum that seemed to me to be a great deal at the time.

  Never! Never! Never! —But I also knew that Janet had a great longing to visit the San Diego Zoo, and I knew very well that that couldn’t be done unless we went to California. The Florida trip had given me confidence, so we left in December 1978.

  Janet insisted we leave a day early, something to which I objected strenuously, but she had her way—and a good thing too.

  It took us four days and four nights to get to California by train, and then it took us four days and four nights to get back from California—and it seemed longer, both ways. When we had to stop over at Chicago we seized the opportunity to go to the top of the Sears Building, the tallest office building in the world.

  I didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have, even leaving my acrophobia out of it. The flat midwestern vista struck me as featureless. I want hills, hills.

  Worse stil
l, I was offended by the mere existence of the building. My New York patriotism forced me to resent bitterly the fact that any other city had dared to construct a building that outdid all of Manhattan’s skyscrapers.

  West of Chicago, the train had a coach with a glass dome so that you could watch the scenery more effectively. All was well until Wyoming, where winter had an iron grip on the countryside. We were behind a freight train that was chugging away on a one-track line and, apparently, that slow monster could not be shunted aside because, these days, freight in the trains takes precedence over people.

  In the dead of night, something went wrong with the engine in the freight train. It stopped. We stopped, waiting for a new engine to be brought for the freight train so it—and we—could move again. Janet was anxiously awake throughout, but I slept through most of this. When I did wake up, I was enormously indignant at the freight train, the rail network, and the entire philosophy of traveling. To make my point sharper, the train was running out of fuel, losing its power, and all the coaches were becoming winter-cold. Finally, just as the last of our own coach’s power was draining away, the freight train was given its new engine and we resumed our trip. We got to Oakland, then took a bus to San Francisco and arrived just twelve hours late, so it was a good thing that Janet had insisted on leaving a day early.