In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  Campbell's enthusiasm was moderate, but he was willing to look at such a sequel if I were to write it. I began it on June 3, just as soon as I was done with "Half-Breeds on Venus" and, since it was summer vacation and I had more time to sit at the typewriter, I completed it on June 11 and took it in to Campbell at once.

  On June 19 it was back on my hands. Sequel or no sequel, Campbell rejected it. Of course, it was a sequel only in that I used the central character once again. The human-nonhuman confrontation was lacking, which probably didn't help it as far as Campbell was concerned.

  3

  One thing I could do to console myself for the loss of Irene was to grow a mustache. This, my first attempt at facial hair, was actually begun on May 16, 1940, and by the time a month had passed, it was long enough to require trimming at the barber's.

  The mustache was a failure. Not that I lacked the hair for it; there was plenty of that. It was just that it had no distinctive color. Though my hair was brown, there is red hair and blond hair on my mother's side of the family, and in my facial hair I apparently got it all.

  The mustache had red hair, blond hair, brown hair, and even a bit of black hair, so that its overall color was- like nothing that had ever been invented. As far as I know, no one liked it. I couldn't even fall back on the traditional love of a mother for something no one else will accept, for she hated it more than anyone

  I clung to it stubbornly, however, perhaps as a sign that I was very

  slowly growing up—only very slowly, however. Despite the fact that I was almost at my first graduate degree, I remained younger than my years in every respect but that of my intellect.

  Nevertheless, I was beginning to slip the leash, to take tentative steps on my own.

  I took Marcia to the World's Fair, for instance, on July 3, 1940; I was man of the family then, and the experienced guide who had been there before. We stayed till 7:00 p.m. when it started to rain lightly, and I thought that that might be a good time to call home and report. 2

  When I called, it turned out that Stanley (who was soon to turn eleven) was in the hospital. He had imperfectly climbed the picket fence about the school playing field and had gouged himself on one of the pickets. We raced home (or at least sat down while the subway raced), but it wasn't serious. The abdominal wall was intact and a few stitches saw him through.

  The next day, in fact, I took Marcia on another venture in another direction. We went, by ourselves, to the Brighton Theater to see Clare Boothe's Margin for Error, and enjoyed it very much. I believe it was the first professional theatrical performance in English that I had ever seen. It was a matinee.

  What counted for me, though, was a discovery I made after it was over. The Brighton Theater was nearly on Brooklyn's southern coastline on the Atlantic Ocean, and when I ventured a block or two south of the theater after coming out, I found myself staring, in awe, at the ocean. I had not seen the open ocean (as opposed to sections of the East River crossed by the subway or elevated lines, and those portions of the harbor surrounding the Statue of Liberty) since I was a very little boy.

  It doesn't seem possible to live in Brooklyn and avoid the ocean, but I had managed. The various places in which I had lived in Brooklyn over the previous seventeen years had all been in the interior. It's hard to think of a place as small as Brooklyn having an interior, but from Windsor Place, Coney Island and the seashore was six miles due south, and I had no occasion to go that six miles.

  But on that Independence Day of 1940, I found myself gazing at the sea with a wild surmise, rather like Balboa discovering the Pacific. I walked onto the beach with Marcia in tow, getting sand in my street shoes and approaching as close to the water line as I dared. I then investigated lockers.

  2 My mother was never happy unless I reported in at crucial moments, and I've kept that habit all my life. It is a bad habit. It ties me to the phone, and if forgetfulness or circumstance get in the way, everyone is sure something terrible has happened.

  The next day, after taking Stanley to a hospital for a checkup on the stitches (taxicabs both ways, I noted with awe in my diary), I prepared for the beach. I got shorts and sneakers and off I went. I invested 28 cents in a locker and spent 2V2 hours on the sand.

  Such decision, so rapidly and resolutely carried out, was something new for me and meant more in the way of adulthood than my approaching master's degree, or my lily-pure love affair, or even my mustache. I even spent about half an hour in the water. I couldn't swim but I moved out slowly, slowly, until I was up to my neck and then allowed myself to move up and down with the gentle swell.

  Nor could I learn to swim thereafter. I simply could not, either then or since, manage to get my feet off the solid ground without terror. Provided someone stood near me, ready to save me, I could do the dead man's float, but I could never do more than that. 3

  I learned something else that day on the beach. Exposure to the sun turns me brick red. Mind you, this doesn't mean that I burn. Ten minutes' exposure will do it. I get so red, so violently crimson that everyone is convinced I have a third-degree burn, but I don't. There is no pain. (If I stayed out long enough, there would be, of course.) Then I gradually fade back to white. I may develop a very light tan en route, but nothing much.

  Since I don't swim, and don't particularly want to look as though I had been dipped in red ink, my infatuation with the beach was a shortlived one, and I have foresworn it—but it served its bit of liberating service.

  4

  June and July were sad and upsetting months. I was in the throes of misery over having lost Irene; and overseas, France had been battered into subjection by the Nazis. (That seems to put things in the wrong order, but at the time, the personal loss seemed to outweigh the looming danger to the world.)

  The discovery of the beach was not much of an alleviation, nor was a trip to the World's Fair with Fred Pohl on July 12. (I got into a show called Twenty Thousand Legs Under the Sea thanks to a press pass he had somehow wangled, and I saw female breasts deliberately—

  3 The fact is I'm a total failure in everything that requires skillful use of muscular co-ordination—well, almost everything. When Stanley got a bicycle at the age of eight and learned how to manipulate it almost at once, I tried, too. Don't ask for the disgraceful details. To this day I'm the only person I know who can't ride a bicycle.

  and three-dimensionally—exposed for the first time in my life. I was relatively unmoved. They were, after all, behind a glass partition, and I wasn't so unsophisticated as to be unaware that if breasts are to be bared, you don't want them to be behind a glass partition.)

  Pohl, of course, like the other Futurians, was always knocking about the countryside to visit out-of-town fans. He was going to Washington and (since he knew the reason for my woe) he urged me to come with him, telling me he would drop me off at Wilmington and then pick me up the next day.

  That fired me, but I wanted to do it on my own. I had gone to the beach by myself; I would go to Wilmington by myself.

  I went to Penn Station and got the necessary timetables so that I could plot out the logistics. I then stopped off at the offices of Science Fiction and badgered them for the check for "Magnificent Possession." I got it the next day, July 19, 1940, and that was what I needed. I deposited only part of it in the bank, holding out ten dollars for the projected trip.

  It was to be a double-barreled trip, actually, for I planned to go to Philadelphia first to visit a fan with whom I had been corresponding, and then from there go to Wilmington (having made the arrangement with Irene, with whom I was also corresponding).

  I left on Saturday, July 27, very early in the morning, and I was back on the evening of the next day. It was the first time I had ever left New York City entirely on my own and the first time I ever spent a night away from home (in a YMCA in Philadelphia).

  Unfortunately, I chose uncomfortable days, for the temperature rose to over 100 on both Saturday and Sunday. I could not sleep at the Y, not for one moment. Then, when
I finally got to Wilmington and met Irene, I found that Wilmington was really dead on Sunday. Even the movie houses were closed. Irene and I had to go to Philadelphia to see a movie, and then separated, she to return to Wilmington and I to New York.

  The trip served an excellent purpose. Heaven only knows how long I would have luxuriated in despair if I hadn't been brought to Earth by reality. The fact was that it required absence to keep me pumped up to the necessary pitch of woeful inflation. The matter-of-fact presence of an unemotional Irene punctured the whole thing and I found to my surprise that the parting, so soon after the reunion, broke me up far less than the one on Memorial Day had done.

  I had healed. I was in one piece and alive. What a relief!

  This is not to say that I had sworn off women. Not by any means.

  Rather, my half-year pursuit of Irene, whatever its fecklessness, had taught me just enough to make me less feckless.

  But not more successful. I had too many handicaps to overcome and I did not overcome them. In the first place, I had no money; and if I couldn't spend money, and couldn't provide more than an occasional cafeteria or movie, I was scarcely a thrilling date. Then too, I lacked time, and having to cut everything to suit the candy-store schedule was a drag. What's more, I had no car, couldn't dance, lacked sophistication in every way, and wasn't even good-looking.

  The result was that over the next year and a half, though I was frequently attracted to this girl or that, this girl or that was never attracted to me.

  I had nothing but "cleverness" going for me, and although Irene found that interesting, the sad fact was that few other girls did; and, if they did, the bemusement lasted only a moment or two.

  I remember once, for instance, sitting in a park, rather late, with a girl. We were playing a game that consisted of defining a phrase that consisted of two rhymed words and those rhymed words had to be guessed. Thus "a happy conveyance" could be a "jolly trolley," or a "merry ferry" or a "gay sleigh."

  Finally the girl said, "I'll give you one that will stump you: 'Happy holiday, Your Holiness.'"

  I thought for a minute or so in deep silence and then said, "Gut yontiff, Pontiff." (Gut yontiff is Yiddish for "good holiday," and of course the young lady was Jewish.)

  She said, "Oh you are smart," and, in a fit of glee, threw her arms about me and kissed me. It was the first time I had ever been voluntarily kissed by a young woman without my having made any move in that direction—but nothing came of it. She regained her poise at once and that was that.

  5

  The summer of 1940 was not successful as far as my writing was concerned, either.

  I was reading Unknown with a great deal of pleasure and I hungered to write for it, even though I felt that the writing level in that magazine was even higher than in Astounding and was therefore well beyond me.

  I tried, though. I wrote a short story called "The Oak," in which an oak tree forecast the future by the rustling of its leaves. It was the first time I ever tried writing a fantasy, and it was terrible. I submitted

  it to Campbell on July 16 and got it back on my next visit. I never did sell it.

  Then in the first half of August I went back to science fiction and wrote a 10,500-word story called "Twins." It dealt with two identical twins, one raised on Earth, one on Ganymede, and the manner in which their adventures on Mars turned their mutual contempt to mutual admiration.

  Campbell didn't like that one either, but I didn't get it back till September 3, because in the interval, Campbell's wife, Dona (whose maiden name, Dona Stuart, was the source of Campbell's best-known pseudonym), had given birth to a daughter on August 29—their first child.

  I wasn't exactly setting the world on fire in any direction.

  When I submitted "Twins," on August 15, Campbell handed me a copy of the September 1940 Astounding, a few days earlier than it would have reached the stands. He didn't usually do that, but this was the issue in which "Homo Sol" appeared. 4 It was my eighth published article.

  I read the story, of course, for my own stories always interest me. In doing so, I am always aware of any changes forced on me by editors that go against my natural predilection, and in this story those changes were particularly noticeable and particularly bothersome.

  For instance, in the story I made certain distinctions between the emotional reactions of Africans and Asians as compared with those of Americans and Europeans. Campbell had suggested the passage rather forcefully and I had included it reluctantly, since I wanted to sell the story.

  Then even after I had made a number of changes to please him, Campbell had, on his own hook, inserted several paragraphs that did not ring true in my ears. They were in his style, not in mine, and even if no one else could tell that, I could. What's more, they emphasized, with approval, Earthman's proficiency at warmaking.

  It was August 1940, remember. Great Britain was standing alone against the victorious Nazis. Everyone was expecting a Nazi invasion attempt daily. I was in no mood to find racist and militaristic remarks in my stories, however mild and innocent they might seem.

  After that, I did my best to wriggle out of such situations. When Campbell suggested bits of business here and there, either in preliminary discussions or during a request for revision, I would agree, but then if J disapproved, I would just forget to include it, or I would twist

  4 See The Early Asimov.

  it into something I found inoffensive. I'm not sure I always succeeded, but I did almost all of the time certainly.

  For one thing, I began omitting extraterrestrials from my stories so that I would not always be forced to make human beings their superiors and set off what I considered an unfortunate analogy with situations on Earth. For another, I began to lean toward robot stories, since I didn't mind making human beings superior to robots.

  In a way, then, my unhappiness over "Homo Sol" paved the way for my two most popular groups of science-fiction stories.

  The appearance of "Homo Sol" did not change my luck with Campbell, however. In the euphoria that followed the appearance of the story in one of the very best issues of Astounding the Golden Age was to produce (it had the first installment of Van Vogt's "Slan" and it also had Heinlein's classic "Blowups Happen"), I began work on another story, "History."

  I wrote it during the first two weeks of September, which was precisely the period during which the great Blitz on London began. For night after night as I wrote, London was bombed, blasted, and burned, and there seemed no way in which it could endure. Great Britain would have to give in, it seemed. Certainly I could see no hope for her.

  Yet, apparently, I still clung to a certainty that Hitler would be defeated. In "History," I made a brief reference to the fact that he died on Madagascar (presumably in exile, as was the case with Napoleon and Kaiser Wilhelm II).

  Campbell rejected "History," but once again, Fred Pohl came through. On September 4, he had accepted "Twins" (asking for some revisions, which I made), and on October 11 he accepted "History." The two stories, together, netted me $85.

  By the end of October, I had written twenty-four stories and had sold twelve. It sounds good, but only two of the sales had been to Campbell, which, somehow, were the only sales I counted. Despite all my sessions with him, all his patient advice, all his helpful suggestions, I had produced only two out of twenty-four stories that met his standards.

  It was depressing, and I was depressed. I had been writing and trying to publish for nearly 2V2 years now and there was no sign at all that I would ever be anything more than a minor science-fiction writer, making at best a few hundred dollars a year for as long as I had the persistence to continue trying and trying and trying.

  But Campbell hadn't given up hope. He still willingly devoted time to me; he still willingly discussed stories with me. And if he had

  not abandoned me as hopeless, why should I despair? So I continued to try.

  Futurian meetings continued to be held, but many of the Fu-turians had moved into a kind of community apa
rtment they called "The Ivory Tower." It was about an hour's walk from the candy store and I would, on many an occasion, walk there and back. Usually it was for the purpose of borrowing a book from their combined store, or returning a book I had previously borrowed. Sometimes it was just to talk.

  It was no great chore; I liked to walk. They had no telephone, however, and there was no way of knowing whether anyone was there. Usually there was, but there were occasions when, having walked an hour to reach the Ivory Tower, I found no one home and had to walk an hour to get back. That too was no great chore.

  The reverse was less chancy. They knew the candy store was there and that the chances were enormous that I would be there, too. If I weren't—no loss, my parents were there, my parents knew them, and my parents were good for chocolate malted milks. Fred Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth were the most assiduous visitors and they never refused malteds—or any other delicacies, for that matter. (Well, why should they?)

  Cyril Kornbluth was, by the way, perhaps the most brilliant and certainly the most erratic of the Futurians. He was perhaps more brilliant than I was, and he was certainly more erratic than I. He was only about seventeen at this time, and a college dropout, I think. He had a pudgy face and a dryly sardonic way of talking, as though he hated the whole world. Maybe he did.

  7

  On September 23, 1940, I registered for my second year of graduate work, and my sixth year at Columbia. I signed up for two courses of advanced inorganic chemistry and a course of food chemistry.

  In order to get a Master of Arts degree and get permission to do chemical research toward a Doctor of Philosophy degree, one had to take Comprehensive Examinations. These consisted of three sets of tests, given on three separate days, each test lasting most of the day.