It was the first time we had met. Sam, a plump and friendly man, told me that not only did he want a story from me but also he wanted a 40,000-word lead novel for Startling Stories y the sister magazine of Thrilling Wonder. Startling featured such a lead novel in every issue, and good ones were hard to come by. I was enamored with the notion myself, since 40,000 words at $.02 a word came to $800, so I agreed to try.
I got to work on the story for Merwin on June 2. I called it "Grow Old with Me." This was supposed to be a quotation from Robert Browning's "Rabbi ben Ezra" and should have been "Grow Old Along with Me," but I remembered the line incorrectly and didn't bother checking.
It dealt with an old tailor who managed to get transferred into a future in which old people underwent euthanasia unless they could prove themselves useful to society. The problem was to work out a way in which an old tailor from the past could prove useful enough to a society of the future to be kept alive. I was so excited at the thought of $800 that I did ten pages that first day and five the day after.
Then, on June 5, unable to resist the other project, I began writing my mock dissertation, which I called, in true dissertation form, "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline." (I had intended a still longer title but it would have to fit into the Astounding Table of Contents and I would have to be realistic about it.) I finished it on June 8, complete with tables, graphs, and with references to nonexistent journals, and then took it in to Campbell.
I didn't hear from him immediately, but when I called him on June 20, he said he would take it. It was only 3,000 words long (the joke wouldn't carry for longer than that), but $60 was a pleasant sum
for a couple of hours' work on each of four days, and I was delighted when the check arrived on August 15.
By July 1, I had some 12,000 words of first draft done on "Grow Old with Me," and I took it in to Merwin as proof I was working. To my not-altogether-pleased surprise, he asked to read it, and told me to come back in the afternoon. I did and he told me he had looked over it, liked it, and only hoped I could keep it up. I assured him I could.
28
On June 26, 1947, meanwhile, Stanley was graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School, a month before his eighteenth birthday. Gertrude and I held the fort in the candy store while the rest of the family attended the exercises.
Stanley planned to go to New York University and had gotten a $ioo-a-year scholarship there. My father shook his head and said that a $2oo-a-year scholarship was required. (Tuition fees had risen since my day.) There was still the possibility of a state scholarship, however.
When I learned of this, I promptly said that if the state scholarship didn't come through, I could make up the $ioo-a-year difference myself.
I made the offer eagerly. I was proud that my savings from the Navy Yard and the Army and that my earnings from my writings made it possible to offer $400 without its seriously affecting my solvency. My father, however, flatly refused my repeated offer.
29
In early July, we received letters from Bob Heinlein that pointedly did not mention Leslyn, and Gertrude said, at once, that they were splitting up.
I refused to believe it, but she was right, of course. A letter from Sprague confirmed it. I promptly wrote to Bob expressing sympathy over his marital problems, and he wrote back just as promptly saying he had no marital problems. I took it to mean that his marital problems had been solved by separation, so I said no more.
3°
I took a course in the summer of 1947 on advanced organic theory. It was designed to help bring me up to date on the new theories that had taken over in my absence during the war. These represented the ap-
plication of quantum mechanics to organic chemistry, the use of electronic formulas and of the phenomenon of "resonance," which stabilized certain chemical configurations and not others, the studies of reaction intermediates, and the prediction of the course of chemical change in the light of such things.
All these had made their appearance before the war, even as long ago as in Linus Pauling's The Nature of the Chemical Bond, which was first published in 1932. The notions had been penetrating the schools only slowly, however, and had then suddenly saturated instruction during the war years—just in time for me to miss it.
It's not surprising, then, that I had a difficult time with it, as did most of the class, and in the end I took a cowardly H (which simply meant "attended" and involved neither mark nor credit), as did most of the class.
In addition to taking the course, I spent the summer of 1947 making endless calculations concerning my chronometric observations. I was trying to find the most satisfactory theories, the clearest explanations of what was happening—in short, the best possible way of arranging my forthcoming dissertation.
And I also spent it on "Grow Old with Me." On August 3, I began to put the accumulated first draft into final copy. By August 27, I had quite a bit of it in final copy and took it in to Merwin for an interim report, so to speak. Again, he wanted to read it. I called him the next day and again found he liked it. He urged me to continue at full speed.
Windsor Place Again
On August 10, a working telephone was finally installed in our apartment, only eleven months after we had applied for one. It was the first telephone I had ever had that was entirely my own and that did not require that we put a coin into it.
Naturally, it was a wonderful toy to begin with, and we called up everyone we knew that took only a local call.
But there was no time for euphoria, for we were once more having apartment problems. Our year's rent carried us through August, and we now had to make up our minds whether to renew for another year.
It didn't really seem that we had much choice. We had tried, on and off, to find other apartments. We had, for instance, applied for an apartment in Stuyvesant Town, a huge complex being built on the East Side of Manhattan between Fourteenth Street and Twenty-third Street. The trouble was we had never heard anything from it. Nor had we heard from other applications we had made. It looked as though we would have to stay put.
But then, on August 8, my parents had a proposition for us. They owned the house they lived in, remember. They lived downstairs and the tenant lived upstairs. Soon after I had come out of the Army and was looking for an apartment, my parents wondered if I could move in with them, but there was no way they could kick out the tenants and, in any case, I didn't want them to. Living with my parents would offer problems enough without my having to feel guilty about where the previous tenants were living once we had turned them out.
But it now turned out that the tenants were moving out of their own accord. The apartment would be empty and ready for us, and it would be six rooms. How about it?
It put Gertrude and me in an almost unbearable bind. After a full year in a room and a half, six rooms seemed like such space, such palatial luxury. On the other hand, it meant living in the same house with my parents, and neither one of us wanted this. With the best will in the world, my parents would interfere with and restrict our freedom.
My parents then upped the ante by saying they would spend
$1,500 on renovating the tenants' apartment and move in themselves. They would then let us have the superior downstairs apartment—which would mean Gertrude would not have to climb stairs.
On August 21, we made our decision. We would move into my parents' house. It would be our fifth move since we married.
There would be difficulties, of course, quite apart from combining the roles of parents and landlord. For one thing, after five years in small apartments we had never accumulated any significant amount of furniture. We didn't even have a proper bed, since we had always had a Murphy bed, or had made use of a convertible couch. How would we fill six rooms?
In addition, my parents' apartment didn't have the usual amenities of modernity. For instance, a refrigerator did not come with it. We would have to buy one and, in fact, the moment we decided to move, we began shopping and, on August 29, bo
ught a refrigerator for delivery on October 1. It cost us $225 and it was rather a revelation to me that the time had come when I could consider such purchases as possible. Nine years before a bill of $60 for the purpose of fixing my teeth had seemed so impossible that the only practical alternative seemed to have been to let my teeth rot.
On occasion we would drop in at my parents' and watch new flooring being put down in the apartment they were going to use, and new wall sockets; then we would go out and shop for a bed.
Such problems are not colossal. There are many worse things than having to take the trouble to buy items you can afford for a new living space far more spacious than your old and scarcely any the more expensive. It was, however, tedious. Neither Gertrude nor I enjoyed shopping, and I myself was trying to organize my research into an acceptable dissertation and was also trying to finish "Grow Old with Me," my most ambitious writing undertaking since 'The Mule." I hated the time it took to shop and I hated the general dislocations of moving.
A welcome break came toward the end of the month of August.
It was time for the annual world science-fiction convention—the fifth. I had missed the second, third, and fourth, which were held in far-distant places such as Chicago and Denver. The fifth, however, was to be held in Philadelphia, and heaven knows I could reach that.
To be sure, the world science-fiction convention had become a multiday affair held over the Labor Day weekend. What with the ques-
tion of moving and shopping filling our thoughts and our days, we could not go for the entire weekend, but we could manage one day-Saturday, August 30, 1947.
We took the 9:00 a.m. train to Philadelphia and visited Meisel to begin with. After a small lunch we went to the hotel where the convention was in progress. I greeted many of the people whom I already knew well—Campbell and de Camp, notably—to say nothing of newer friends such as George O. Smith and Sam Merwin.
George O. Smith, I remember, catching us alone, semi-amused us with a long disquisition on the advantages of masturbation over other forms of sexual activity.
I met Edward E. "Doc" Smith for the first time. From the late 1920s and through the 1930s right up to the rise of Heinlein, Doc Smith was the most towering figure in science fiction, thanks to the enormous scope of his novels. He was the first, in his story "The Skylark of Space," to deal with interstellar flight, as opposed to mere interplanetary ventures. He was a gray-haired, fatherly figure, fifty-seven at the time, and very popular, even though it was well recognized that he was no longer at the growing edge of the field.
There was also present Lloyd Eshbach, who was a science-fiction book publisher. He had a small publishing firm that put out limited editions of scienne-fiction favorites. The editions did not make very much money, but to have magazine science fiction in book form was an awe-inspiring thing. He told me he would like to publish the Foundation series in book form. I said I was perfectly willing—but nothing ever came of it. 1
After dinner, Meisel and I went out to the de Camps and stayed the evening. Catherine was her usual endearingly voluble self, and managed to tell us that she had posed in the nude for Bob Heinlein (with Leslyn present, of course) and, when she described the pose, I suddenly remembered the pictures I had seen in Campbell's place 5^2 years before.
I said, in energetic astonishment, "Was that you?"
"Why, yes," she said.
And Sprague, with his own gift for understatement, lifted his eyebrows and said mildly to Catherine, "My dear, you get an F for discretion."
Whenever I try to think of Sprague at his most characteristic, and
1 1 heard later that the convention voted for "favorite author" and I finished in eleventh place. Henry Kuttner was in first place.
his most lovable, it is that moment that comes back—the raised eyebrows and the look of mild rebuke.
3
Then we went home. We spent Labor Day (September 1) at the Bronx Zoo, with Roy Machlowitz. It was my first visit there and the first time I ever saw such animals as gibbons, hummingbirds, and a panda. The duck-bill platypus was the great attraction of the zoo at the time, but the building that housed them was closed by the time we got to it—so to this day I've never seen a platypus.
My mother's fifty-second birthday came on September 5, 1947, and when we visited her to commemorate the day, we found that she had discovered what everyone discovers when they undertake anything to do with building or renovation: The actual expense invariably outstrips the estimate. They had planned to spend $1,500 and it was costing $2,000.
I was uneasy about that, of course, since I felt that it was my duty as a son to offer to pick up the tab for anything over $1,500, but that was certainly not my duty as a tenant—and the incompatibility of the two roles bothered me.
The incompatibility became more acute when my parents became aware that we were planning to furnish the apartment rather skimpily, with a view to moving out eventually. After all, we couldn't possibly expect it to be our lifetime home—but that, apparently, was exactly what my parents thought it would be, or should be.
There were arguments between us on the matter (myself and my parents, that is, for Gertrude wisely did not interfere), and I was more than ever determined that though we would move in for the experience of space at last, we would move out when something better came along.
My attitude toward my mother's attempt to dictate our system of buying furniture was described as follows in my diary: "I was very, very peeved indeed because what the hell business is it of hers?"— which puts it in a nutshell.
4
I had to look toward the future in other ways, too. I was certain that sometime in 1948 I would complete my research, get my degree, and be out in the cold world. It meant I would need a job, for nothing in my nine years' career as a professional writer gave me any cause to suppose that I could ever support myself with my typewriter.
Until now I had always postponed the evil day of job-hunting by
choosing to go on with further education (except for the emergency days of World War II, when the job came hunting me), but now surely that would have to come to an end. What to do?
One avenue opened up with the annual convention of the American Chemical Society, which was to be held in New York in 1947.
The chief activities at such conventions involved the presentation of papers, but in addition there was set up a kind of temporary and concentrated employment bureau. The convention offered prospective employers a dense gathering of young men and women about to leave school, so there was a clearinghouse where students could list their qualifications, and employers their needs. It was to be hoped that happy career marriages could be made by fitting one to the other.
On September 13, then, I registered for the convention, and the next day I registered at the employment clearinghouse. With my usual Asimovian flare for relying on lofty principles when that was not advisable, I added to the card on which I listed my vital statistics and my qualifications the totally unnecessary note: "Not interested in any work having any connection with the atomic bomb."
This was stupid, since no one was likely to offer me such work, and if anyone did, I could always have turned it down. As it was, I made myself seem like a trouble-making radical, and you can guess the result. Throughout the entire five days of the convention, I received not one call to an interview—not one. I drew a complete blank.
On September 15, however, as I was walking through the lobby of the hotel, I noticed approaching me from one side none other than Milton Silverman, one of my boon companions at Columbia before World War II, and from the other, Al Cooper, with whom I had studied for desperate hours prior to my second and successful try at the Qualifyings. We met in a three-point coalescence.
It made for an excited afternoon of being brought up to date. All three of us were now married, but Silverman and Cooper each had a child. Furthermore, each lived in Queens, each had a job, and each was dissatisfied with his job. I felt a little backward and embarrassed at still
being in school.
I persuaded Silverman to get his wife, and Gertrude and I took them both to dinner and had them spend the evening at our apartment. The next day I spent with Cooper. He got one call for an interview.
Cooper was making $4,500 a year, which to me seemed beyond the dreams ot avarice. Silverman, I speculated in my diary, "is probably getting even more." Then I wondered, "So why is Cooper so poor? He only has one suit, etc., etc."
The utter failure at the convention put me under a dank blanket
of apprehension concerning the future. I had for quite a while been totally absorbed in the gathering success of my research—the clear indication that I would have an interesting dissertation and therefore my degree. I couldn't help but view that as the climax of my education and my life, almost as though I were envisaging a cartoon in which I stood on a podium with light radiating from my head, stars going on and off, and the caption reading, "Success!"
Except that that's not how life is. It goes on, and by the time I had my degree, I must also have a job, and how was I going to get that? Aside from the lack of interest at the convention, the fact was that the job market had been declining steadily since the war, and as a Jew who spoke with a Brooklyn accent and, as anyone could tell at a single glance, lacked sophistication and poise, I was scarcely in the first rank of candidates for any job.
5
There was the other side of my life—writing. After a summer's solid work, I finished "Grow Old with Me" on September 22, 1947, and it was forty-eight thousand words long. Only 'The Mule" had been longer, and not by much.
On the twenty-third, I took it in to Sam Merwin, who instantly greeted me with the news that Leo Margulies, his boss, had decided that the attempt to publish Astounding-type stories was a failure and he now wanted blood-and-thunder Amazing-type stories.
In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 Page 62