by Isaac Asimov
Even if my memory failed me, I had a second thing going for me. I had started keeping a diary on January 1, 1938, the day before my eighteenth birthday, and I have been keeping one ever since. (Many young people start diaries, but very few, I believe, keep it going for longer than a few weeks.) To be sure, my diary, after the first year, tended to grow skimpy and to confine itself to a dry accounting of what I was doing with my writing. Some people use a diary to record their feelings and thoughts, but I never did. It was purely a reference book and so dull that even /couldn’t read it with any interest. I used it only to look up dates and events. The advantage is that I don’t have to keep it under lock and key. Anyone can read it who wishes and I defy him, or her, to last more than five pages without brain damage.
The autobiography grew and grew, and I must admit that even I began to have misgivings when I had written 50,000 words and had barely reached the point at which my diary began. If I could write so much out of memory alone, what would I write once I had my diary to help out?
What’s more, actually getting down to it and writing the autobiography proved to me that I was right—my life lacked elements of high drama. As you can see from reading this retrospective overview of my existence, the big excitement consists of things like failing to get into medical school and like having a fight with the authorities at Boston University. This is scarcely the material out of which heart-stopping suspense is built.
However, since I realized this, I concentrated on other things. I tried to follow Paul Nadan’s suggestion and wrote about everyday things lightheartedly. I depended on my writing ability to mask the unimportance of events generally.
A reader once told me, enthusiastically, after the autobiography was published, that he had read the book with intense interest and that he had been unable to keep from turning the pages and reading on and on and on, laughing all the way.
I said to him, curiously, “Didn’t you notice that nothing was happening?”
“I noticed that,” he said, “but I didn’t care.”
(I get that same sort of response when I ask readers if they had noticed that nothing ever happened in the way of whizbang action in my novels. Well, if they don’t care, I certainly don’t.)
Another thing I did, in my attempt to make the autobiography unusual, was to make it strictly chronological. I could do this, thanks to my diary.
In other words, I tried to describe the story of my life exactly as I had lived it, with different threads all jumbled together and with no foreknowledge indicated as to what was to happen in the future. This, I thought, would lend an air of realism to the account and was something that (to my knowledge) no other autobiographer had ever attempted, at least not with the intensity that I did.
In presenting the matter chronologically, moreover, I tried to make it as factual (and funny) as possible and avoided overmuch subjectivity. I discussed the events that impinged on me externally, but gave comparatively little attention to the thoughts and responses that boiled within me.
By the time I was finished and had carried the tale of my life up through the end of 1977 (which was when I finished the book) I had written 640,000 words, enough to make nine novels the length of The Caves of Steel.
I worried about what Cathleen would say when I brought it in. I dreaded the words “We’ll have to cut this in half, Isaac,” and I prepared myself to say, “No, I can’t allow that.”
I felt quite certain that I would have to walk away with the manuscript and that I would then have to try to peddle it to Crown or to Houghton Mifflin. Woefully, as I looked at the boxes of manuscript, I felt that I would never sell it anywhere.
Nevertheless, I brought it in to Doubleday with as much confidence as I could manage to pump into my expression and bearing, and said, “Here it is, Cathleen. All of it.” (I hadn’t told her how long it was getting to be, and since it had only taken me nine months to write it, she had no reason to expect anything more than novel length.)
She took one horrified look at the boxes and consulted Sam Vaughan, who earned my lifelong gratitude by saying, “Well, then, do it in two volumes.”
And so it was done. The first volume was published in 1979, and the second in 1980.
There was some discussion over the title. I wanted to call it As I Remember, which was accurately descriptive, but the Doubleday people wanted something more dramatic, something that sounded more like the title of a novel. I was at a loss, and said, “Like what?”
Someone (possibly Sam) said, “Find some obscure bit of poetry and use a quotation from it as a tide.” So I came up with the following obscure bit:
In memory yet green, in joy still felt,
The scenes of life rise sharply into view.
We triumph; Life’s disasters are undealt,
And while all else is old, the world is new.
I had a vague idea of what it meant, and it seemed suitable to me. So I called the first volume of my autobiography In Memory Tet Green and the second volume In Joy Still Felt.
I would like to carry on this bit of cribbing by entitling the present retrospective volume, which might be looked upon as a third volume of my autobiography, The Scenes of Life, but whether that will survive editorial tampering, I can’t say.
As the first volume was being published, I received a plaintive call from Doubleday. They had not been able to locate the source of the verse I had used and they needed to know the author’s name. I told them the truth, as is my wont, and said, “I wrote it myself.” As a result, they ascribed the verse, in both volumes, to that extraordinarily prolific poet: “Anon.”
A satisfactory number of readers, after the appearance of the first volume, bombarded me with queries as to when the second volume would appear. Once the second volume appeared, I began to get questions as to when the third volume would appear. I invariably answered, “I have to live the third volume first.”
It was my intention to write a third volume in the year 2000 (a nice round figure) as a way of celebrating my eightieth birthday. Circumstances, however, which I will tell you about later, dictated that I do it to celebrate my seventieth birthday instead.
In Memory Yet Green was, by the way, my 200th book. However, I had also written Opus 200 for Houghton Mifflin, and that was my 200th book. Doubleday was not willing to allow Houghton Mifflin to glory in the 200 mark, and so I said (I always seek a simple solution) that there was no reason I couldn’t count both books as 200 and let the next book be 202.
Both publishers agreed to that and they even put in a joint advertisement in The New Tork Times Book Review announcing both books. It may have been the only time two publishers had combined their talents in a single advertisement.
Heart Attack
My father, as I said earlier in this book, developed angina pectoris at forty-two. One does get superstitious about the possibility of repeating one’s father’s life, at least as far as physical ailments are concerned. Therefore, I was a little concerned as my forty-second birthday approached.
It came and went, however, and I passed my forty-third and forty-fourth birthdays without any sign of chest pains. Nevertheless, I was nervous enough about the whole thing to start a campaign of weight reduction in 1944 that, as the decades passed, was finally to see me at sixty pounds under my peak at the time of this writing.
I even passed my fifty-seventh birthday with no signs of trouble, but on May 9, 1977, as I was running errands in the neighborhood, I felt a distinct discomfort under my breastbone and a shortage of breath. I stopped walking and the symptoms disappeared. I started walking and they reappeared.
I experienced a chill, for I knew what it was. I had escaped my father’s affliction for fifteen years, but now that I was fifty-seven it had finally caught up with me. I was suffering from angina pectoris. A life in which I had, for the most part, eaten too much and too unwisely had succeeded in clogging my coronary arteries to the point where my heart muscle was being placed on short rations as far as oxygen was concerned.
> I wasn’t sure what to do. I ought to have consulted Paul Esserman at once, but I was in the middle of a heavy speaking schedule and I didn’t want that interrupted. After all, my father had lived thirty years with angina, and I might too, and fifty-seven plus thirty equaled eighty-seven, which is a good lifetime. So I decided to let it go for a while till my spate of talks was over and, meanwhile, I intended to be careful how I walked so that Janet wouldn’t notice that anything was wrong.
I continued with my schedule, then, and on May 16 we drove to Haverford University, outside Philadelphia, where I was to give a commencement address the next day. (That was the occasion on which I was told to speak for fifteen minutes, and a student timing me found I spoke for fourteen minutes thirty-two seconds, even though I never looked at my watch.)
After the address, we drove to Philadelphia, where I was slated to give two more talks, and at 1:30 A.M. of May 18, 1977,1 suddenly sat bolt upright in bed, jolted out of my sleep by a sharp bout of what seemed to be super-indigestion. It was a pain as intense as that of a kidney stone, but it was in the wrong place, the upper abdomen.
Unable to lie, sit, or stand (as in the case of a bad kidney-stone attack), I gasped out to Janet that I wanted no weeping and wailing if I died, that she was to live on cheerfully, and that my will would take care of her and my children for the rest of their lives.
She gave me an antispasmodic and at 3 A.M. the pain began to ebb away, just as it did after a kidney-stone attack. When it was gone, I got back into bed with a feeling of incredible relief over the fact that I was
free of pain.
“How do you feel, Isaac?” asked Janet timorously.
“Right now? As if I’d died and gone to heaven,” I whispered, and drifted off to sleep.
I still felt rather poorly the next day, but I paid no attention to Janet’s demands that I see a doctor. The show must go on, so I gave my two talks. (One of them, as it happened, was to a bunch of cardiol ogists, and not one of them divined from my expression and bearing what had happened to me two nights before.)
On the evening of the eighteenth, while we were still in Philadelphia, Janet called Paul Esserman and described what had happened. Paul was impressed by my insistence that the abdominal pain was very similar to that of kidney stones, and he speculated that I might have had a gallstone attack because the pain disappeared after the antispasmodic. (I didn’t tell him or Janet about my anginal attacks.) Paul urged me to see him as soon as I got home.
Once we got back to New York on the twentieth, Janet wanted me to see Paul at once, but I suspected trouble and I refused. I had a luncheon date with Sam Vaughan and Ken McCormick of Doubleday for May 25, and I didn’t want to miss that because I intended to hint that my autobiography might be a long one so that I could get them used to the idea.
From the lunch I walked to Paul’s office, about half a mile away, and ran up the stairs, just to see if I could. Paul took an electrocardiogram, and the expression on his face the instant the needle started moving told me all I wanted to know (or didn’t want to know, actually). I had not had a gallstone attack; it had been a heart attack.
“How bad?” I asked.
“Not too bad, since you are still alive after running up the stairs,” said Paul. “Why did you do that? How would I have felt if you had had a cardiac arrest as you walked through my door?”
“Not as bad as I would have felt,” I said. “But as long as it’s not too bad, I’ll just go about my business.”
“No, you don’t, Isaac. You’ll go into the hospital right now.”
“I can’t,” I said, “I have to give a commencement address at Johns Hopkins day after tomorrow.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Why not? I’ve lived a week. I can live two days more.”
“What if you die on the platform as you give your talk?”
“It will be a professional death,” I said firmly.
That seemed to rouse Paul terribly. Physicians seem to think they’re the only ones who have professional duties. He ran out into the street, hailed a taxi, and he (with my traitorous wife, Janet) shoved me into it. Within half an hour I was in intensive care.
Just before the deed was done, I called Cathleen Jordan to tell her the news and to assure her that I intended to stay alive despite the worst that the doctors could do. I then left it to Janet to call up Johns Hopkins to explain why I would have to leave them in the lurch, and to cancel some other engagements too.
It was the first time I had ever canceled speaking engagements and the Johns Hopkins cancellation was intensely embarrassing to me. I eventually wrote them a letter of apology in which I said that I owed them one talk without charge. In 1989, the university called in the debt and, though twelve years had passed, I came through. I went to Baltimore and delivered a talk without charge.
In 1977 Ben Bova pitched in and gave some of my talks for me, doing a great job. But then the villain had the nerve to ask those in charge of the speaking engagements to send the checks to me. Fortunately, they called me in the hospital to see if they were really supposed to do that, and I was furious. Ben had to keep the checks himself, and serve him right.
I hadn’t been in the hospital long before it was clear that I was in no need of intensive care. What I needed was rest and recuperation, and Paul Esserman insisted that I have sixteen days of it. After three hours of it, I was dreadfully bored and said so. —Voluminously.
Paul consulted Janet, who told him I was working on the first draft of my autobiography and that I would stay in the hospital happily if she could bring it in so that I could edit it. The only trouble was that there was only one copy and Janet was afraid of losing it or of having something happen to it in transit or in the hospital.
She therefore brought it to Doubleday, which had it photocopied for the record, so that it could be reproduced if anything happened to it, and she then brought it to the hospital. Day after day, I worked on it, and it was so wonderful to feel that I wasn’t wasting time.
Ben Bova visited me and, noticing the manuscript spread out over the bed, asked what I was doing. I explained. “In this autobiography,” I said, “I’m including every stupid thing I can remember having said or done.”
“Oh?” he said, eyeing the pages. “No wonder it’s so long.”
Working on my autobiography kept me so cheerful that the residents who came to see me every morning remarked on it wonder ingly. The cardiology department was usually filled with depressed people (and having a heart attack is no great cause for elation), so my laughing and joke telling became a topic for awed breakfast conversation.
On only one day—the first Sunday in the hospital—did I break down. I was alone with Janet and a wave of depression swept over me. It had dawned on me that Paul might tell me that I would have to cut down my activities to half of what they had been, so that for the rest of my life I would be forced to work only part-time. That meant, I predicted mournfully, that my 1977 income would represent a peak and that thereafter it would go down steadily and my plans for sup porting my wife and children after my death would be placed in peril. That was bad enough, but something else bothered me too. When I was first placed in the hospital, Paul asked me if I wanted it kept confidential.
“Confidential?” I said. “Why?”
“Some people feel that if the world knows they have had a heart attack they are discriminated against, and don’t get jobs or assignments to do work.”
I laughed and said, “Nonsense. Tell anyone you please about it. I shall undoubtedly write articles about it.” (And so I did.)
But on that Sunday, it suddenly seemed to me that Paul was right and that editors would now avoid me, feeling that giving me assignments was useless if I were likely to drop dead any minute.
Janet consoled me as best she could, and, as a matter of fact, the fears I had were temporary. They vanished before the day was over and never returned. Nor were they justified.
My writing labors have continued at full ste
am in all the years since the heart attack. As for 1977 representing my peak income, no year since has failed to do far better than that year.
And would editors cease asking me for material?
While I was lying in my hospital bed, I got a call from Merill Panitt, editor-in-chief of TV Guide, for whom I had written a number of essays. He asked how I was doing and I said I was coming along well.
He said, “Good. And listen, as long as you’re lying in a hospital bed with nothing to do, would you mind watching some daytime television and writing an essay on it?”
I did just that and he accepted it. I could see that if I were given assignments while I was actually in the hospital, I would have no
trouble getting them once I was out.
Of course, Paul did insist on my cutting down in one respect.
“Isaac,” he said, “two things. First, you must cut down on your speaking engagements. They take a lot out of you. Just give fewer talks and raise your fees so you don’t lose income, and don’t let personal friends talk you into giving talks for nothing. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said, “and what’s the second thing.” “My group, the New York University Medical School Alumni Association, would like you to give them a talk. Would you?”
I burst out laughing. It was for nothing, of course, but I accepted the talk instandy, for two reasons. First, because Janet was also an alumna, and second, because Paul seemed completely unaware of the mutual exclusivity of his two points.
I eventually gave the talk on May 12, 1979, and I told the story of the two points, imitating Paul’s distinctive voice, and that evoked gales of laughter. It seems also that all the alumni wore badges that gave the month and year of their graduation. Paul had graduated during World War II in an accelerated course and he got out in the month of March, which was unusual. I asked him why he alone seemed to have an M on his badge and he explained.