Next to the candy counter was a small aisle, and across from it, in the right half of the store, was that vanished piece of Americana, the soda fountain. There was the refrigerator with its large cylindrical containers of ice cream; the containers of various syrups, which could be pumped in squirts into glasses and over ice cream; the electric stirrers that made the malted milks; the faucets out of which carbonated water would emerge; the platform for clean glassware; and the sink for washing the dirty glassware.
It was my father's special domain, and I never tried to evict him.
Before it were four stools where, every once in a while, a youngster would sit endlessly while very slowly sipping a soda. He could not properly be evicted while his soda glass remained unempty, and some kids had the art of drinking steadily yet leaving the glass unempty for half an hour at a time.
On the right wall was the magazine stand which, of course, I knew by heart. Next to it was the telephone, and in front of the telephone, one table with four chairs. Strictly speaking, the table was for people to sit at with sodas and malted milks, but we discouraged its use. It was more important as a surface on which to put together newspapers and deal with packages of magazines.
Next to the door was an ice container in which we kept bottled sodas cold, taking them out fresh and dripping for store consumption. If anyone wanted to buy bottles to take home, they got dry ones at room temperature. Outside the store was, of course, the newsstand, which had the newspapers and some of the more popular magazines.
There were times when we had a pinball game in the store (always lucrative but troublesome, since it attracted groups of teen-age idlers), and eventually we had a rack for paperback books.
All told it was a rather small store, the smallest we had yet had, with not much room for toys, stationery, and miscellany—but it was a good one. It had a large newspaper trade, and that meant we had a much larger newspaper delivery route to cover. There was always a
hired boy to deliver the papers (but I was always there as a fail-safe mechanism). I also had to collect paper bills rather extensively once a month, and hated that job.
We were on a street through which many people went and returned on their way to and from the local Catholic church, located not much more than a block away. The neighborhood was heavily Irish, which meant we were extraordinarily busy on Sundays. In fact, we marked off Sundays from 6:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. by the Masses, and we all had to be on our mark and ready as the human flood crested past our store at the conclusion of each Mass.
It was also a very conservative neighborhood, with the people at best uneasy in the presence of a Jew and at worst downright hostile. The Catholic newspaper, the Tablet, sold in large numbers, and occasionally I could not forebear to read it, and it infuriated me. It was violently anti-Roosevelt, and (at least in those days) was filled with a thinly veiled anti-Semitism. While very aware of the Communist menace, it didn't seem to be much aware that Hitler existed.
Of course, Hitler did exist and was becoming more powerful yearly. Between the growth of that menace and my new awareness of hostility in the immediate surroundings, I entered a period of deep and worrying insecurity. Yet I must add at once that we were never actually mistreated in Windsor Place or, except once or twice, made to feel seriously uncomfortable.
Considering all that, there was even less feeling of being an organic part of a neighborhood in Windsor Place than in any of the earlier stores. There was no chance of social, or even particularly friendly, relations with customers in general. I, for one, felt resentful of them as a class because of the false position of "servant" in which I found myself. I had to wait on them and be polite to them and smile and be obsequious. This never came easy.
I conceived of the particular customers of the Windsor Place store as rich people (lower middle-class, actually, I now realize, but they seemed rich to me then—there was one person who was known to make five thousand dollars a year). What's more, they seemed stodgy and uninteresting.
I knew them by face and, just barely, by name in some cases. I do remember a teen-aged red-headed girl named Eileen who attracted my attention for a brief time in a way that none of the others did. I talked to her occasionally, but nothing further took place.
It was the first time I had ever lived quite so near a park. What's more, to the west of us, at a somewhat greater distance, was Greenwood
Cemetery, the largest in Brooklyn. I sometimes went there. I never liked it as well as Evergreens, however, so that I gradually deserted it for the park.
We lived across the street from the store. This meant a little more independence for us youngsters since now my mother could not hear every footfall overhead. However, her preternatural sense of hearing did allow her to hear us on those occasions when our philosophical discussions grew particularly exciting. She would yell at us from the street and a dread silence would instantly fall. Later she would tell us that for blocks around people had been stopping and saying, "What's that noise?" She was referring to our discussions and not to her shouting, though it's my private opinion that it should have been the other way around.
The new neighborhood was even more bound up in baseball than the old one had been (they were all Dodgers fans here, too), and my own mania continued unabated. In fact, within a few months after arriving at Windsor Place, I attended my first baseball game. It was, I believe, the Memorial Day doubleheader at the Polo Grounds. As I recall, Carl Hubbell had ended the 1936 season with sixteen straight victories, and had started the 1937 season with eight straight victories, and I went, hoping, to see him take his twenty-fifth win over two seasons without a loss (an unprecedented feat)—and he was knocked out of the box and lost.
I didn't know whether to be indignant over having missed twenty-four victories in order to be treated to a defeat, or fearful that it had been my own presence that had "jinxed" him.
Not long after we moved into the neighborhood, the new main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library opened at Grand Army Plaza, a mile and a quarter away along the western edge of Prospect Park. I walked there and back periodically, going there at a half run and coming back at a stroll—and reading.
I daresay I must have gone, occasionally, in cold or cloudy weather, but when I remember those walks I remember only mild sunshine, for some reason.
The new building was white, simple, and impressive, very twentieth-century, but my style of reading continued as always—that is, immersion in nineteenth-century romanticism and its later imitators.
I never discovered twentieth-century realism. I never read Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Joyce or Kafka. Even in poetry, I clung to meter and rhyme and never discovered post-Victorian poetry. Or if I saw some by accident, I found it repelled me.
I might as well admit that this was permanent. To this day I am a
stranger to twentieth-century fiction and poetry and I have no doubt that it shows in my writing.
Why was this? For one thing, I was entrapped in science fiction and, to a lesser extent, in other pulp magazines, and I never quite emerged. I wanted excitement and action in my stories rather than introspection, soul-searching, and unpleasant people. So if I did reach for fiction in the library it was likely to be a historical novel by Rafael Sabatini or a Cape Cod novel by Joseph C. Lincoln. (Usually, when I discovered one book by a prolific author I found I liked I would methodically go through all the others by him I could find.)
For another, I found myself shifting to nonfiction more and more. My interest in historical fiction intensified my interest in history itself, as my interest in science fiction intensified my interest in science. I devoured H. G. Wells Outline of History and his The Science of Life. I read endless histories of Greece because of my fascination with Homer, and endless histories of France because of my fascination with Dumas.
In nonfiction, the contemporary output was open to me, of course, and I had no hangups as far as the twentieth century was concerned. To this day I never tire of reading books about the Civil War if they
are satisfactorily pro-Union, or books about the World Wars and Hitler if they are satisfactorily anti-Nazi.
I also read James Jeans and Arthur Eddington and because of them swallowed whole anything I could find on new developments in astronomy and physics.
I was attracted to almost anything I could find in the humor section, but nothing satisfied me as much as the essays of Robert Benchley and the verses of Ogden Nash.
My reading reached a peak in its aimless variety in my late teens. Later on, I began more and more to read for school or for my work, and eventually my reading for amusement became restricted to murder mysteries and an occasional history—and even that could be regarded as a professional interest.
My interest in political and world affairs was now such that I could (and did) time the events in my personal life by the events in the greater world outside.
For instance, the last notable event that took place during our sojourn on Decatur Street was the 1936 Presidential election on November 3. I had spent a miserable few months following The Literary Digest poll, which predicted a Republican landslide. It seemed to show
that the Republican candidate, Alfred M. Landon, would carry every state outside the Solid South and the border states. There seemed no reason to disbelieve this, since The Literary Digest had polled an immense number of people whom it had drawn out of telephone directories and automobile registration lists.
What's more, the poll was accurate, for if only those people voted who were prosperous enough to own telephones and automobiles, Lan-don would indeed have won in a landslide. Fortunately for the Democrats, the less prosperous could also vote even if The Literary Digest didn't think them worth counting.
On November 3, I took a nap in the afternoon because it was my intention to stay up and listen as long as Roosevelt had any chance at all of being re-elected. It is an indication of how old I was getting that my mother was willing to let me do this.
Of course, as it turned out (and I couldn't believe my ears), Roosevelt won everywhere. Landon carried only Maine and Vermont, and I stayed up all night just glorying in the gathering figures. Naturally, I had made up an elaborate state-by-state checkerboard of my own. I recorded the electoral votes and then went on to record the figures and award the states this way or that once I considered a plurality to be insurmountable. I remember hesitating over New Hampshire.
After that election, The Literary Digest went out of business and a new group of pollsters came in who sampled fewer people in more representative groups.
Then, after we arrived at Windsor Place, the first world event of note was the capture and imprisonment of Chiang Kai-shek of China by the Young Marshal, Chang Hsueh-liang, a competing warlord, on December 12, 1936. This started a train of events that led to a renewed war between China and Japan in 1937. (Japan had begun its invasion of China in 1931, while Great Britain and the United States confined themselves to speaking loudly and doing nothing.)
3
Our new apartment across the street was distinctly more commodious than any we had yet had, but in no way more distinctive. All the apartments I lived in as a child as an adolescent had, as I remember them, nothing that was not entirely utilitarian. There were no heirlooms, nothing precious brought from Russia, nothing that was a favorite item that we could not bear to part with.
There were chairs, tables, sofas, beds, all bought cheaply, all
characterless. When they wore out, if we could persuade ourselves to the expenditure, we replaced them with other items equally colorless.
As a matter of fact, I hated anything new because for a long while after it arrived, my parents would be reluctant to allow it to be used lest we "wear it out." We could make do without sitting on a chair, but to get in a new radio and be told not to use it vitiated the very reason for its existence and drove me wild.
Of course, a larger apartment meant more room for me. For a while I shared a room with Stanley, but some time after we moved to Windsor Place, he contracted the mumps and was taken out of the room and not returned. After that, for the first time in my life, I actually had a room of my own.
The privacy was virtually nil, for it was a railroad apartment and there were four rooms in a line: living room, my room, Marcia's room, my mother's (plus Stanley's) room. The kitchen and my father's room could be reached directly from the hall (there were no other tenants on the floor, so the hall was ours too), but anyone wanting to go from the living room to their bedroom had to go through my bedroom. Still, at least there was no one actually in the room with me.
Then, too, I was even given a closet all my own and permission to keep my magazines there. After seven years of reading science-fiction magazines, I found myself more enamored of the stories than ever. They were, as a rule, every bit as exciting as the pulp adventures of the "Shadow" and "Doc Savage," which I also read, and, in addition, brought me into a fantastic world beyond anything earthbound literature could offer.
The horizons in science fiction were limitless, and the excitement of outer space, of time travel, of the far future seemed a continually unsurpassable delight. It was the pleasure of magic combined with the discipline of science. It was just enough of a slipping of bonds to give freedom, and not enough to seem folly and anarchy. It was the use of imagination to give the effect of a roller coaster loop-the-loop, with the use of the laws of nature to keep you on the track and bring you safely home.
And now, with my delights in science fiction almost unbearably high, I finally reached a new plateau. I rebelled, at last, against putting each one back on the stand after I had read it. I had kept the August 1936 issue of Astounding Stories. By the time we moved into the new place, I had five issues of that magazine and a couple each of Thrilling Wonder Stories and Amazing Stories. It wasn't a large closet, but it was such a luxury for me.
The sight of all those magazines there inspired me to prepare a little index-card system in which I listed all the stories alphabetically by title. I included the author, the length, a brief review and opinion, and a rating from no stars to five stars in half-star units.
That really made me conscious of stories, as literary items, as never before and, after six years of writing amorphous, disconnected, unending—and therefore dying—fictional items, it finally occurred to me to write a story.
The day on which this happened was May 29, 1937. I remembered the date a few years later and jotted it down, and still have the jotting, so I know. It was the first time I ever began a story with the vague thought of actually attempting to get it published when it was done. And getting paid, too. I was nearly 17V2 at the time.
The story I began to compose for the purpose, the first story in the list I eventually kept, was entitled "Cosmic Corkscrew."
In it I viewed time as a helix (that is, as something like a bed-spring). Someone could cut across from one turn directly to the next, thus moving into the future by some exact interval, but being incapable of traveling one day less into the future. (I didn't know the term at the time, but what I had done was to "quantize" time travel.)
As far as I knew then, the notion of helical time was original with me. It is difficult for me to remember what particularly inspired the story. I think it began with my discovery, in the books I read, of the neutrino. The existence of the neutrino had been postulated five years earlier and it had not been detected. Indeed, at the time it was thought it might never be detected.
Of course, the reason it wasn't detected was that it had neither electric charge nor mass, so that it offered no handle to the detecting techniques of the time—but that was prosaic.
What if the neutrino could not be detected because it went off into the past or the future? I had a vision of neutrinos flashing through time, backward and forward, and thought of them as a vehicle for time travel.
That turned out to be typical of my science fiction. I usually thought of some scientific gimmick and built a story about that. In this case, the time-as-helix notion came only afterward as a way of limiting my hero
's freedom of action and creating the plot complication.
My protagonist made the cut across time and found the Earth deserted. All animal life was gone, yet there was every sign that life had existed until very shortly before—and no indication at all of what had happened to bring about the disappearance. It was told in the first
person from a lunatic asylum, because the narrator had, of course, been placed in one when he returned and tried to tell his tale.
In this story, I had the full panoply of pulp style, for I knew nothing else. I read enormous quantities of pulp magazines, to say nothing of the florid fiction of the nineteenth century and, without even thinking about it, I loaded down my sentences with adjectives and adverbs and had my characters crying out, and starting back, and shrieking madly, and screaming curses. Everything was in jagged, primary colors.
But as far as possible I was interested in realistic science, or the illusion of it. Even in that first story, I went to some trouble to explain about neutrinos as authentically as I could, for instance, even if I did introduce the time-travel angle out of left field.
With time, the pulpish aspects of my writing became subdued and faded out, though perhaps not as rapidly as they would have were I better acquainted with contemporary writing by literary masters. My concern for realistic science stayed, however, and I quickly became and remained a writer of "hard" science fiction.
As for "Cosmic Corkscrew," I worked on it, on and off, through the summer and then stopped when the school semester began, and I left it only partly done in my desk drawer.
My earnings of the previous summer together with my NYA job carried me through the sophomore year in satisfactory fashion. The two together paid most of my tuition, and there were few other expenses of consequence. Each day I spent ten cents on carfare and twenty-five cents for lunch. As for textbooks, I didn't buy them. I made do with the lectures or I would borrow my friends' texts at crucial moments or, on occasion, get used copies, which I would give back when I was through. Laboratory fees and other occasional expenses couldn't be avoided, of course.
In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 Page 21