I.Asimov: A Memoir

by Isaac Asimov

  The difference between Bob and me, however, rests in this: Bob is more nearly a whole man. He likes to travel and to do a great many other things. That limits his writing. He is also more practical than I am. He deliberately ceased writing nonfiction because it didn’t make

  enough money, whereas I count the fun of writing nonfiction as quite outweighing the financial angle. When he felt that his publishers were allowing most of his books to go out of print, he “retired” from writing for five years. (It would be inconceivable for me to react in that fashion. I would be punishing myself far more than I punished either my publishers or my readers.) Fortunately, Bob returned to writing eventually.

  His first published story appeared in 1954, and I met him first at a science fiction convention in Cincinnati toward the end of June in 1957. After I returned to New York in 1970, the del Reys, the Silverbergs, and the Asimovs made a kind of sextet, with the everebullient Judy-Lynn the spark plug. On several occasions, we were all at the Passover seders which Lester insisted on conducting with all the solemnity of a convert. Lester was also an excellent cook, and if I could not work up the necessary religious enthusiasm on these occasions, I at least ate well.

  But then Bob decided that New York was not for him and he left for Oaldand, California, where he has lived ever since. I was sorry to see him go, of course, and I could not help but think that the migration from New York to California was very much tiie same thing as the earlier migration from Europe to the United States—a search for greener pastures and a new life. In California, Bob got a divorce and afterward married again, happily (as I had done).

  In 1988, Marty Greenberg had an idea. (He has an endless capacity for having ideas.) It occurred to him that aging writers like me had turned out a number of great magazine stories in our youth, stories we had never done anything further with, and didn’t plan to do anything further with. Why not get a younger writer to take a classic story and expand it into a novel?

  In particular, why not find someone who would take my story “Nightfall,” now forty-seven years old, keep the story essentially as written, but add a detailed beginning and a detailed ending to it. I listened to this in some dismay. After all, another writer might ruin the story and write something that wasn’t “Asimovian.”

  Marty said that we could always arrange for me to have full approval of the final novel and even make changes if I felt it necessary. Besides, he thought he would try to get Bob Silverberg to do it, because Bob was so competent.

  “Come on,” I said disbelievingly, “Bob would never consent to bury his own work in an Asimov story.”

  “Yes, he will,” said Marty, and he was right.

  I was still uneasy. After all, I had to do another novel once Nemesis was done. It was contracted for, and it had to be another Foundation novel. I still could not manage a sequel for Foundation and Earth, so I planned to fill in the gap between Prelude to Foundation and Foundation.

  The new novel, which I called Forward the Foundation, was begun on June 4, 1989, but I was really weary of novels. I had written seven of them in the 1980s, for a total of nearly a million words altogether, and I felt ready to take another twenty-year break (if I had only been young enough to do so). In addition, I wanted to complete my world history book, which was approaching its half-million-word mark.

  It occurred to me, then, that if Bob wrote a “Nightfall” novel, then that could be the 1990 book of fiction, and I would have a year’s respite before having to complete Forward the Foundation.

  Naturally, there were some little things to argue about. First, what was I to do with my sense of ethics? Would I have the right to place my name on the book if Bob wrote most of it—and to take an equal share of the royalties too? I mentioned this worry to Marty, who promptly pointed out that Bob would have the advantage of a social background ready-made, to say nothing of characters and events that he could work with, and that I would therefore have a full right to my half interest. I let Marty persuade me.

  That still left some little things to argue about. I explained to Bob that I didn’t want gratuitous sex, unnecessary violence, or vulgar language in the novel, and he agreed to that, indicating that he would be satisfied to let me have the final word on any matters under dispute. When I said “Delete!” it would be deleted, and when I said “Change!” it would be changed.

  For his part, Bob wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t drown him out by having my name appear more prominently than his (as had happened, not long before, when Arthur Clarke’s name completely drowned out that of his collaborator). I told Bob that he little knew me if he thought I would allow such a thing. We would be treated exactly alike (and this time, remembering how poor Karen Frenkel had been treated, I made sure, in advance, that Doubleday understood the necessity of this).

  As a matter of fact, it wasn’t easy to convince Doubleday of the desirability of the project, for they wanted my new novels rather than an extension of an old story, but when I said I needed the rest, they gave in. As a matter of fact, Doubleday agreed to do three novels. Bob was going to extend not only “Nightfall” but also “The Ugly Little Boy” and “The Positronic Man.”

  Eventually, I received the extended “Nightfall” manuscript from Bob. Despite everything, I had fearfully anticipated receiving something I couldn’t endure and I wondered how I would break the news to Bob and to Marty and to Doubleday.

  I need have had no fears. Bob did a wonderful job and I could almost believe I had written the whole thing myself. He remained absolutely faithful to the original story and I had very little to argue with. Bob has already outlined his version of “The Ugly Little Boy.” I have seen that outline and approve it heartily.

  Bob changed the name of the planet and of one character in “Nightfall” because I had made deliberate use of Sumerian and Egyptian names to lend strangeness without too much strangeness. Bob thought that a mistake and wanted nothing to be too reminiscent of Earth, and he may have been right. In any case, I let him have his way there.

  you as a boy, and where no one can share with you the memory of that long-gone world that glowed all about you when you were young?

  Gathering Shadows

  In 1972, after I published the first edition of Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, I developed the habit of keeping my eye on the New York Times obituary page. The reason for that was that I had to know when one of the still-living scientists dealt with in the final pages of the book died. I would then enter the exact day and place of death in a special copy of the book I used for the purpose. This kept me ready for future editions, and I have followed the system ever since.

  I began reading the obituaries witli a sense of detachment, for death, of course, was something for old people. I was only fifty-two years old when I began my obituary reading and death still seemed far away. However, as I grew older, the obituary page slowly became at once more important to me and more threatening. It has become morbidly obsessive with me now.

  I suspect this happens to a great many people. Ogden Nash wrote a line that I have always remembered: “The old men know when an old man dies.”

  With the years, that line has become ever more poignant to me. After all, an old person to one who has known him for a long time is not an “old person” but is much more likely to be thought of as the younger person who inhabits our memory, vigorous and vibrant. When an old person dies who has been a part of your life, it is part of your youth that dies. And though you survive yourself, you must watch death take away the world of your youth, little by little.

  There may be some morbid satisfaction to being a last survivor, but is it so much better than death to be the last leaf on the tree, to find yourself alone in a strange and hostile world where no one remembers

  Thoughts like that would beset me, now and then, after I passed my sixty-ninth birthday on January 2, 1989, and knew myself to be within a year of the biblical threescore years and ten.

  Mind you, I hadn’t turned completely
morbid. For the most part, I maintained my cheery and ebullient outlook on the world. I kept up my busy schedule of social get-togethers, speaking engagements, editorial conferences, and endless writing, writing, writing. But in the dead of night sometimes, when sleep wouldn’t come, I might think of how few there remained who remembered, with me, how it all was in the beginning.

  Science fiction has now become the province of brilliant young men who probably think of me as a living fossil, a remnant of a superannuated clan that has unaccountably survived into modern times, and who think of the great John Campbell—if they think of him at all—as a mythic paleontological personality.

  It sometimes seems to me that if I weren’t so insistent on speaking of Campbell in my own writings, he would vanish forever from the minds of people—and in that same way, I often think, my own name will vanish too after the first flurry of regret when I die.

  I don’t expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever. —Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after their death.

  This, as you see, verges dangerously on what is to me the most hated of sins—self-pity—and I fight it. There are, however, times when I feel it difficult to bear up under the increasingly rapid drumfire of deaths that come with the passing years.

  I have mentioned a number of such deaths in this book so far.

  Of my own generation of my family, my sister Marcia’s husband, Nicholas, has died, as has Chaucy Bennetts’s husband, Leslie, and her older brother, Harold.

  Various members of the Trap Door Spiders died, including three who served as models for my characters in the Black Widower stories: Gilbert Cant, Lin Carter, and John D. Clark. So did members of the Dutch Treat Club, including the successive presidents Lowell Thomas and Eric Sloane.

  A great many science fiction writers of my own generation died, from Cyril Kornbluth in the 1950s to Alfred Bester in the 1980s. Among the mystery-writing fraternity, there were the deaths of two of my friends, Stanley Ellin and Fred Dannay (Ellery Queen).

  Banesh Hoffman, a physicist, who always sat at my left at the Baker Street Irregulars banquets, died in 1986. Robert L. Fish, a mystery writer who always sat at my right, had died even earlier. David Ford, the actor, who had given me the idea for writing the first Black Widower story, died in 1982.

  Lloyd Roth, one of my close friends during my early years as a graduate student, and the fellow who had recommended Charles Dawson to me, died in 1986 also, of Alzheimer’s disease.

  Once on a talk show, where the public could call in, someone phoned and asked me, “Do you remember Al Heikin?” “Of course,” I said. “He was at the NAES with me back in the early 1940s. How is he?” “He’s dead,” came the indifferent answer, and I was forced to lose my cool right there on the radio. He had died in November 1986.

  Arthur W. Thomas, the professor who befriended me when I was seeking permission to do my Ph.D. research died in 1982 at the age of ninety-two. Louis P. Hammett, who had taught me physical chemistry in 1939—the last time in my life that I did well academically—died in 1987, also at the age of ninety-two.

  Richard Wilson, one of the old Futurians, died in 1987 at sixty-six. Bea Mahaffey, for whom I had written my story “Everest” in 1952 while visiting her office in Chicago, died in 1987 at sixty. Bernard Fonoroff, an old pal from Boston days, died in 1987 at sixty-seven.

  William C. Boyd, who had first brought me to the medical school, died in 1983 and his first wife, Lyle (also a friend), had died earlier. Matthew Derow, another fellow faculty member at the school, died in 1987 at seventy-eight. Lewis Rohrbaugh, who had succeeded Chester Keefer as head of the medical school, and with whom I had been friendly, died in 1989 at eighty-one.

  And so it went. I held more and more passionately to the dwindling group of old friends who survived: Sprague de Camp, Lester del Rey, and Fred Pohl among the science fiction fraternity; Fred Whipple in Boston; and so on.

  Unquestionably, twilight was drawing on and the shadows were gathering—and deepening.

  Threescore Years and Ten

  These gloomy ruminations of mine; these sad thoughts of death and dissolution and of an approaching end; were not entirely the result of philosophic thought and of the bitter experience that came to me with the years. There was something more concrete than that. My physical health was deteriorating.

  I would not be a good “denier” if I had admitted that deterioration and you can be sure I didn’t admit it. Through the summer and fall of 1989,1 stubbornly continued my accustomed course, pretending that I did not feel my years.

  Janet and I went south to Williamsburg, Virginia, for the fourth time to give a talk. On October 19, 1989,1 had the ineffable pleasure of dining at two different places, eating rabbit at one and venison at the other, and finding both absolutely heavenly in their perfection. When I told this to someone, expressing my delight, the disapproving response was: “Do you mean to say that you ate Bambi and Thumper on the same day?”

  In Boston, on March 15,1989,1 helped celebrate the sesquicentennial of Boston University. I also gave my makeup talk at Johns Hopkins on June 28, 1989.

  Of course, I kept up my writing, completing Nemesis and The Next Millennium and a couple of How Did We Find Out About . . ? books. I also started Forward the Foundation, and helped with the novelization of “Nightfall.” In addition I worked endlessly on my huge history book.

  Yet all through that summer and autumn, I felt an unaccountable and increasing tendency to weariness. I walked slowly and with an effort. People commented on my loss of ebullience now and then, and, in embarrassment, I tried to be more lively, but only with an ever-increasing effort.

  Indeed, I caught myself thinking, now and then, that it would be so pleasant simply to lie down and drift quietly off to sleep and not waken again. Such a thought was so alien to me that, whenever it occurred to me, I shoved it away in horror. I did so with a land of double horror, in fact, for I could not help but think how Janet and Robyn would react, for one thing, and for another I realized, with complete consternation, that I would be leaving behind unfinished work.

  But the thought kept returning.

  Yet not a word of this gathering weariness managed to find its way into my diary. I refused to admit openly that it existed. Just the same, there was something wrong that I could not deny because it was a physical manifestation and not something that might be only world-weariness.

  As early as March 15, 1984, Paul Esserman had noted that my anldes were a little puffy. I was experiencing fluid retention, and he suggested that I take an occasional diuretic to encourage urination and the elimination of fluid.

  Fluid retention is not an uncommon accompaniment of increasing age and Paul was not worried. I was outraged, of course, as I hated any suggestion that the bodily mechanism wasn’t working perfectly. What’s more, I resisted the necessity of taking diuretics, as I did not wish to suffer the indignity of urinary urgency and the consequent race to the bathroom.

  This was only three months after my bypass operation, and what I didn’t know (and perhaps what Paul didn’t know either at that time) was that my kidneys had been somewhat damaged by the heart-lung machine experience of the bypass and that they were no longer working perfectly.

  Janet saw to it that I took an occasional diuretic (she was always on the side of the doctors and would never understand that loyalty should make her side with me against them). That seemed to take care of the water retention, for a while anyway.

  Then, at Rensselaerville in 1987, things suddenly got worse. I was cast into the shadows when I found that Izzie Adler had been diagnosed as having a cancerous prostate and I fought depression by eating unwisely, which, in my case, always means—too well.

  Furthermore, it was no concern of mine that the food was salty. In fact, I preferred salt. I liked the taste of salt. I loved anchovies, and smoked salmon, and her
ring, and bacon, and anything else that was nice and salty. If it was nice but not salty, I added salt—and with a liberal hand.

  Janet would protest. High blood pressure ran in her family and she had to stay away from salt because it raised blood pressure. I, on the other hand, although I had had my blood pressure taken every time any doctor got within sphygmomanometer range of me, had never— not once—displayed any tendency toward the condition.

  So when Janet remonstrated with me over the question of salt, I would answer loftily that high blood pressure was not a problem of mine, and that I did not intend to give up salt. What I did not know, and what I found out quickly after my 1987 stay at Rensselaerville, was that salt powerfully encouraged fluid retention.

  I arrived home with a gain of eight pounds, and feet that were visibly swollen. Nor could I deny the seriousness of this, for at Rensselaerville, I had had the greatest difficulty in walking up the slope from the dining room to the dormitory, something that had never given me any trouble before.

  Paul Esserman put me on a stronger dose of diuretics and laid down the law. A salt-free diet for me for the rest of my life.

  The bitterness of it was overwhelming and the iron entered into my soul. Janet threw herself into the task of preparing salt-free meals enthusiastically—after all, she had to do it for herself anyway—and she monitored my eating habits at restaurants more closely than ever. I submitted to this, but not with any glad cries of joy, you can be sure.

  By now, water retention and certain indications in my blood chemistry (a high creatinine value, for instance) made it clear that my kidneys were lying down on the job, so that I came to meet still another physician. This was Jerome Lowenstein, a urologist (or “kidney man” in English), on August 24, 1987. He was a very pleasant, thin-faced, silver-haired gentleman and I was quite taken with him, except that he reinforced the “no salt” order.