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

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  18

  David was five months old on January 20 and was able to sit up for brief periods.

  On the twenty-fourth, though, he managed to get a small dumbell-shaped rattle stuck in his mouth. We tried to remove it, grew panicky, used too much force, and scraped his gums. They bled and were undoubtedly sore for the next couple of days so that he wouldn't take his bottle.

  It seemed to us, in fact, that from then on he was a poor feeder. The pediatrician kept saying, "If he doesn't want to eat, don't force him. He'll eat when he's hungry."

  We could never believe that, though. We always feared that he was going to starve and we consistently kept trying to feed him against his will. This created a negative behavior pattern in David and we spent an inordinate amount of time trying to outsmart him and failing. We had a tendency, every once in a while, to trace it all back to the rattle incident.

  19

  Since David had been born, our moviegoing had dropped very nearly to nothing, which was difficult for us since we were confirmed movie addicts.

  I can't say my taste in movies testified to any deeply intellectual instincts, by the way. I liked adventure movies and would see, with pleasure, almost anything with swordplay or with a chase sequence. And I liked comedy, the more slapstick the better, and musical comedies, too. Errol Flynn and Danny Kaye were surefire where I was concerned, and my all-time favorites were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

  Oddly enough, or not so oddly perhaps, I didn't like what were called "science fiction" movies, with rare exceptions, such as The Shape of Things to Come.

  For the most part, science-fiction movies seemed to be innocent of science and, for that matter, of acting, and I found them acutely embarrassing. The Thing, for example, was unbearably bad, and I was disgusted at the fact that it was made, and ruined, from Campbell's classic story "Who Goes There?"

  The pressure to do something about the loss of moviegoing grew, and by the beginning of February, we were shopping for a television set. It took us a while to decide among alternatives, by on February 28,

  1952, our television set came into the apartment. For four years we had watched television intermittently in the houses of other people, and now we had one in our own.

  The immediate results were predictable. To begin with, we had a tendency to watch it day and night just to see people move and voices sound even when everything we saw was so miserable as to be almost emetic in its quality.

  Then, where those programs we really wanted to watch were concerned we would not allow any interference and we would wait in fear that the set might choose that moment to break down. (The set did break down frequently, as all sets did in the pretransistor days, and we practically had a live-in TV repairman.)

  The chief program that had us nailed to our chairs was, of course, "Your Show of Shows" with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, which I saw on my own set for the first time on March 1, 1952.

  I would not allow anything to get in the way of my watching that show, and when the Whipples invited us to dinner for the night of Saturday the seventh, I was adamant in refusing, despite all their blandishments. I think I nearly lost their friendship over that incident.

  Writing vs. Research

  I was losing interest in research. This is odd, looking back on it. I had spent the entire decade of the 1940s pushing eagerly for permission to do research when I was at Columbia, then waiting longingly for the time when I could return to research when I was at the Navy Yard and in the Army, then doing research with dedicated fascination when I was back at Columbia.

  I had thought of myself as a research chemist (or, later, biochemist) for a dozen years. To be sure, I was a writer also, but that was my avocation, not my profession. Writing was a spare-time activity, a sideline, something to make a little extra cash with and to gain a little extra importance with.

  As long as I wrote only science fiction, that remained my way of thinking, for it would have been entirely unethical to write science fiction on school time, so I never did—and as long as my writing was for evenings, weekends, and holidays only, it had to remain a sideline.

  It was the textbook that began the change. That was a scholarly work. It could be written on school time and, to a large extent, was. The reference work involved was done entirely on school time.

  I discovered I preferred to work on the textbook than to do research. Consequently, I allowed it to invade my research time more and more.

  To be sure, as a faculty member, I didn't expect to sully my own hands with laboratory equipment—all the more so since I was so unskillful at it. I did, however, interest myself in the work done by the various graduate students and assistants. I supervised, made suggestions, and, of course, worked on the papers. I did papers with Rose M. Reguera, Charles A. Fish, M. Moira Davison, and Morton K. Schwartz, all of them bright and hard-working—and yet it took more and more effort to do all this.

  I found the feeling of being a research chemist (or biochemist) fading away. I had worked so hard for it, I had achieved a doctorate and even, finally, professorial status, and now, suddenly, it was leaving me—because I had found something else, something I had been doing

  for years before I started my research, yet which till 1952, I had never clearly thought of as my life's work.

  I was beginning to think of myself as a writer and that was crucial.

  The slow, uncertain, and devious route of research was bound to bother research workers who discovered they were failing to produce exciting and name-making results—and if you haven't made it by thirty-five, you're not likely to make it thereafter. It seemed to me that many unsuccessful researchers sought to find ways out in textbook writing, administration, or empire building. (After World War II, with government money being poured into grants, empire building—the piling of grant upon grant to pay for huge research programs in which others did the work—became attractive to many.)

  I myself had no aptitude for administration and even less for empire building. My venture into textbook writing did not seem hopeful. I had, however, an outlet not available to most—commercial writing.

  As research steadily lost its glamor for me, writing grew steadily more attractive. And as writing grew steadily more attractive, research steadily lost its glamor. Either tendency reinforced the other in a spiral that made me, with each month that passed, more of a writer and less of a researcher.

  It was no wonder, then, that once we were through with the writing of the textbook, I did not go back to a fuller concern for research. I did not even want to. There was still work to be done with the textbook, and if that failed I had other projects that could be done on school time. There was the biochemistry-for-the-layman book I was doing for little, Brown. It might be for the layman, but it was still a scholarly book, and I still felt it ethical to do it on school time, leaving my nonschool time for fiction.

  The formal signing of the contract with Little, Brown came on February 7, 1952. Almost immediately afterward they sent me a $250 advance and I decided to call the book The Puzzle of Life. I felt myself finally to be in the business of writing nonfiction by myself.

  Fiction remained alive, too. Unexpectedly, Fantasy and Science Fiction accepted "King Lear VI, 1, 36" and I was delighted. I had been reading F 6> SF since its inception and I had felt that its level of writing was distinctly above my own capacities. Its stories were more "literary" than mine ever were.

  I had once thought the same of Unknown, and just as I had then longed to sell to Unknown, I now longed to sell to F & SF— and feared I never would.

  But I had, and all Tony Boucher asked me to do was to change the title. Nowadays, offbeat titles are very common, but in those days they weren't. I changed the title to "Flies" and, actually, I thought it an im-improvement.

  3

  We finished work on the galleys of Biochemistry and Human Metabolism on February 20, 1952. On March 10, the page proofs started coming in and that meant indexing.

  We decided that each one of us would inde
x our own chapters. I had never indexed anything before, but I had a vague idea as to how it should be done. My philosophy was that any reader, using the index, should be able to find every mention of every topic of biochemical interest. I made an enormous pile of index cards for Chapter 2, "Protein Structure/' for instance, with every amino acid listed every last time its name appeared.

  I was dissatisfied with Walker's and Boyd's more cavalier attitude toward indexing, so there was another fault I managed to find with collaboration.

  In the end all the cards had to be alphabetized, condensed, and the whole typed up neatly. That job fell to me because I wanted it and the others did not. It was incredibly time-consuming and nit-picking, but fortunately I enjoyed the process. On April 14, 1952, the index was completed and mailed off.

  4

  There is no stage in writing, however, at which failure cannot strike. All that negotiating with Little, Brown regarding The Puzzle of Life—all that writing of outlines and samples—even the contract-signing and advance—all came to nothing. When I turned in the book at last, they considered it and, on March 21, 1952, told me it was no go. They would not do it.

  That was twice Little, Brown refused me. Three years before they had turned down the Foundation series, and now they turned down my effort to write a popular-biochemistry book.

  On the other hand, I finished The Currents of Space at last on

  March 30, after about a year and a quarter of work, and I confidently expected no failures there.

  David was also making satisfactory progress. He was eating mashed meat now, thus becoming a carnivorous creature. (He objected to it a little at first.)

  5

  Volume 15 of Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology was an issue that had been devoted to the "Origin and Evolution of Man." A scholarly journal, Evolution f asked me to review that volume of the CSH Symposia, and I did so. It was 5,000 words long, an intricate and, if I say so myself, well-thought-out review, and it appeared in the March 1952 Evolution.

  My copy of that issue reached me, and shortly after Lemon happened by, even as I was looking over my review with considerable satisfaction.

  I showed it to him, feeling he might as well see I could do scholarly work independently of him. He glanced at it and said, "Why don't you put this effort into your research?"

  I said angrily, "I did this on my own time."

  And he said, "A research worker doesn't have his own time."

  It was clear then, if it had not been abundantly clear before, that he and I were not on the same wavelength. It was probably at that moment that I came to the conscious decision that I was no longer a research chemist and that I would never again be one. If either Lemon, or the school itself, ever tried to make me become one, they would find they couldn't.

  Let me make it clear that I was turning against research and not against teaching. I loved teaching, and the textbook was a form of teaching. I particularly loved lecturing

  There could be no question but that my teaching was satisfactory. I had improved steadily in the organization, drama, and interest in my lecture presentations. (This would seem to be my own estimate of the situation, but I know the students agreed with me.)

  On April 15, 1952, I gave my final lecture of the third teaching semester in which I had been involved. It was "Heat and Work," and somewhere in the middle, I delivered a ringing sentence on the concept of the "heat death" of the Universe, and there followed a wild and enthusiastic peal of applause that did not allow me to continue for quite a while.

  A story reached me once that on another floor, a member of the Physiology Department said, "What's that?" at the sound of distant laughter and applause.

  Another member said, "Probably Asimov lecturing."

  And it was.

  There's no question about it in my mind, and I'm willing to say it without hesitation, that I was the best lecturer in the school, and at no time ever did I skimp my teaching duties in favor of my writing.

  My talent for lecturing was not something I hid under a bushel, and with much of the faculty (not all) this did not tend to make me a beloved comrade. What with my general eccentricity and self-asser-tiveness, and with my refusal to take part in academic social functions, I remained rather isolated except for a few chosen associates, of whom Boyd and Walker were the chief.

  My relations with the students, on the other hand, were easy and informal, and on only the rarest of occasions was I forced to play the heavy professorial role. In fact, I was more or less under a continual strain to keep those easy relations from degenerating into outright camaraderie and, in particular, to keep from slipping into my usual suavity with the female students. That might have given rise to charges of favoritism. (On at least one occasion a male student grumbled that I was easier on the pretty females, something I would have hotly refuted had I not had the uncomfortable feeling he was probably right.)

  And no matter how I tried to limit my natural tendency to be amiable, I felt there was considerable disapproval, on the part of stiffer members of the faculty, of my habit of informality. Perhaps they felt I was currying favor with the students—though to what end I might be doing so, I can't imagine. After all, popularity with the students didn't bring one promotions; rather the reverse.

  All three of us drove to New York on April 16, and the next day I went to Fred's offices and found that Campbell had taken The Currents of Space for serialization. At $.03 a word, 70,000 words came to $2,100, or allowing for Fred's cut, $1,890. It was the largest single check I had ever received and a far cry from my first check for $64. That one check, in fact, was more money than I had ever made in any single year prior to 1950. That check meant that by the end of April 1952, I had already earned more money writing than in the entire year of 1951, and there seemed no doubt I would surpass 1950 and have a new record year.

  Brad liked The Currents of Space, too; he thought it the best yet. He wanted another juvenile about David Starr, in addition. He admitted that there was no television series after all, but saw nothing wrong in my having a series of juvenile novels.

  On April 19, I visited Horace Gold who, on hearing that The Currents of Space was going to Campbell, wanted the next novel to come to him. He suggested a robot novel and I demurred. I had only written robot short stories and didn't know if I could carry a whole novel based on the robot idea.

  "Sure you can," he said. "How about an overpopulated world in which robots are taking over human jobs?"

  "Too depressing," I said. "I'm not sure I want to handle a heavy sociological story."

  "Do it your way. You like mysteries. Put a murder in such a world and have a detective solve it with a robot partner. If the detective doesn't solve it, the robot will replace him."

  That was the germ of a new novel I called The Caves of Steel.

  When I wrote it, I did my best to ignore this business of robots replacing human beings. That was typically Gold and not at all Asimov —but Horace kept pushing, and in the end, some of it was forced in, though not nearly as much as Horace wanted.

  What pleased me most about The Caves of Steel when I came to write it was that it was a pure murder mystery set against a science-fiction background. As far as I was concerned it was a perfect fusion of the two genre, and the first such perfect fusion. A number of people agree with me in this.

  And on April 28, 1952, David's first tooth, the lower left front incisor, made its appearance through the gum.

  7

  Of all the people in Breadloaf, I remembered John Ciardi most clearly. It had been my intention to return in 1951—I had half promised Fletcher Pratt I would—but during the last half of August, when the Breadloaf Writers Conference was always held, David was being born and I certainly couldn't leave then. So I had missed seeing John a second time.

  However, he lived in a Boston suburb and was in publishing in a small way, having joined a publishing house called Twayne Press. He wanted stories for an anthology and I went to see him on April 30, and saw h
is brand-new, six-week-old daughter. Ciardi's wife, Judith, felt it was feeding time for the youngster, who was a breast baby. So she

  pulled out a breast and handed it to the kid. Judith was always an entirely extroverted, unself-conscious, delightful person and this was quite in character—but I didn't know where to look.

  I didn't sell John a story to anthologize but I initiated a friendship that was permanent.

  8

  My story "Youth" 1 appeared in the May 1952 issue of Space Science Fiction. It was the first issue of that magazine—one of the many that suddenly weighed down the magazine stands. Few of them lasted long. Space lasted only eight issues.

  It wasn't a bad magazine. It couldn't be bad, since Lester del Rey was editing it. Lester had difficulties with the publisher, however, and even he couldn't overcome that handicap.

  9

  Copies of Biochemistry and Human Metabolism arrived on May 24, 1952. It was my first nonfiction book, and I was terribly proud. I remember that Matthew Derow picked it up, opened it at random, and said instantly, "You've got a wrong formula here."

  "Go on," I said in disbelief, assuming he was kidding, for Walker, Boyd and I had spent endless hours checking over every formula for accuracy. He showed me and, for goodness' sake, he was right.

  We used the book as a text for the next teaching semester (my fourth) and offered trivial bonuses to any student who found a typographical error. On the one hand, it helped insure careful reading; on the other, we would find errors that we could correct in future printings.

  It worked entirely too well. After our careful triple proofreading, the students found so many errors that even at a dime a throw (and a quarter for a mistake in a formula) it seemed to represent a serious financial drain. Unbelievable!