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

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  That made me aware of my steadily increasing weight. On June 30, 1952, I weighed just 200 pounds stripped—some 55 pounds more than I weighed when I was married, and 30 pounds more than when I entered the Army.

  I decided to go on a diet and even consulted a doctor about it. The doctor was Robert Cataldo (we had, after all, moved away from Dr. Adler), a small man, with a head shaved to mere stubble, and who spoke in an ingratiating whisper. Dr. Cataldo drove me slowly crazy by going through his usual routine of informing his patient on the facts concerning diet. Considering that I had written the "Lipids and Obesity" chapter in the textbook, there was nothing he could possibly tell me that I didn't know.

  I did lose a few pounds as a result, but as is common in such cases, it didn't stay off.

  19

  On August 4, Fred wrote to tell me that Tony Boucher had rejected a story of mine called "The Deep/' which I had written as a deliberate test as to whether you could do anything in science fiction. In this story, I invented a society in which mother love was considered obscene. Fortunately, Horace had taken it, and at a new high rate of $.04 a word.

  In addition, Fred had sold "Button, Button" to Thrilling Wonder at $.015 a word. (That was more like the old days.)

  At about that time, too, I got Howard Browne's new magazine Fantastic. It did indeed look very classy and he had obviously gotten the publishers of Amazing to take a chance on quality. That first issue —Summer 1952—had my story "What if—?" 5 in it.

  Unfortunately, the magazine didn't last. It went five issues and was then combined with Fantastic Adventures. Too bad.

  Finally, I received my first copies of Foundation and Empire.

  20

  On August 8, 1952, I had owned my car for two years and had just paid the final installment. It was mine outright now, and I had eighteen thousand miles on it.

  As for David, he now had six teeth, was thirty inches tall, and weighed twenty-one pounds. On August 9, we took the giant step of hiring a baby-sitter to stay with him while we went off visiting. We came back to find David perfectly safe and happy.

  21

  I finally got a copy of Ich, der Robot, and even before that, Gotthard Guenther arrived on August 11 with a German-language anthology called Verwindung von Raum and Zeit (Transcendence of Space and Time). The second story it contained was "Einbruch der Nacht" ("Nightfall").

  In Ich, der Robot I couldn't help but notice that all my characters spoke perfect German even though they were named Michael Dono-

  5 See Nightfall and Other Stories.

  van, Gregory Powell, Susan Calvin, and so on. I asked Gotthard why they didn't translate the names, too, and have a Max Donnerheit, a Gustav Pommern, and a Sieglinde Kaspar.

  He said, "Oh no. In Germany, we consider science fiction an American literary form and it wouldn't sound right without American names."

  I saw his point. If you were going to write a sword-play historical romance, Monsieur du Vallon de Bracieux de Pierrefonds sounds much better than Mr. Joe Green.

  22

  Gertrude had her turn at a sort of vacation over the weekend of August 16-17. She went off on an auto trip with two girls whom we had met at Birchtoft two years before. They went to Annisquam for the Saturday and Sunday, and they, too, saw and heard the staff do my version of Kiss Me, Kate.

  She told me, after she returned, that they had sat in front of two middle-aged women, one of whom excitedly said to the other at the conclusion of the show, "Wasn't it wonderful?"

  And the second one said, "The music isn't so much, but the words were great!"

  (Were you listening, Cole?)

  After Gertrude returned, Sam Merwin called. He was in Concord, Massachusetts, temporarily, and wanted to see me. I visited him on August 19 and spent two hours with him. He apologized again for not taking "Grow Old with Me," and I waved it away.

  And the next day, David celebrated his first birthday.

  2 3

  I might have gone to the Breadloaf Writers Conference this year, but I had spent a week at Annisquam, and enough was enough.

  Besides, I had to spend the last week in August at a Gordon Research Conference. There are weeks and weeks of this in New Hampshire every summer, each week devoted to a different subject. The reason I had to attend was that this week's session was devoted to cancer, and Henry Lemon was going to talk there. I drove to New Hampshire on August 25, 1952, and was assigned to a room with Pat McGrady, a science writer.

  He warned me of his snoring. "Wake me up if I snore," he said.

  Well, he snored. He and Henry could have snored a duet that

  would have drowned out Krakatoa. And I did wake him—ten times a night. He would mutter, open his eyes, and look dazed. However, I could never manage to fall asleep in the twenty seconds before he started snoring again.

  The only other thing I remember about the trip was sitting in one of the lounges trying to relax, when a gentleman sat down next to me, pulled out his pipe, and started to light up.

  Noting the look of disfavor in my eye, he said, "You don't smoke?"

  "No," I said, crisply.

  "Well, if you don't smoke a pipe, you don't know what you're missing."

  "Sure, I do," said I. "Cancer of the lip."

  And since this was a cancer conference, there was a general roar of laughter, and the pipe smoker looked so discomfited it did my heart good.

  24

  David had taken his first tottering steps on his birthday, and by the end of the month he could stand quite well and walk quite a distance before flopping down. We took him to Norumbega Park on August 31. It was two miles away, about six minutes by car, and it was a children's Mecca, with rides and games of all kinds.

  David was too young for it then, but we took him periodically and he came to love it. Things change in only one direction, however, it would seem. We watched Norumbega Park gradually deteriorate (as Coney Island did) till we no longer wanted to go there.

  25

  On September 11, the three of us went to New York in order to help celebrate Galaxy's second anniversary. When we got there, the Blugermans greeted us with the traditional roast-chicken dinner with noodle pudding.

  The next day we attended the Galaxy birthday party and there were terrific hors d'oeuvres, hot and cold, and in vast quantity. Afterward, a bunch of us a f e at an Indian restaurant.

  I had lost some thirteen pounds since going on a diet—but most of it went right back again on that trip.

  I met Alfred Bester for the first time at that party, which was memorialized in the October 1952 issue of Galaxy. The cover painting of that issue included a number of the people at the party (including

  Horace, though he couldn't attend since he couldn't leave his apartment). My face was included, but it had me holding a cocktail which, of course, I didn't do at that party.

  The next day, Stanley visited us at the Blugermans', and he and I and John and Gertrude all went out on the traditional stroll along the boardwalk to Coney Island. Stanley, who is absolutely unflappable, went on the Ferris wheel with Gertrude. Nothing could have gotten me on it.

  (Stanley was twenty-two at the time, the same age at which I had flunked the roller-coaster test with Gertrude. It was at about this time that he began his life's work. He joined the Long Island Newsday as a reporter and then proceeded to move up onto the editorial staff. Then, over the years to come, a steady gradation of promotions brought him to more and more responsible positions on the newspaper.)

  On September 15, I collected some sales data. Howard Browne's Fantastic had taken another story of mine—"Sally"—about intelligent automobiles. (That story is one of my favorites.) Campbell was taking a second thiotimoline article I had written for him, "The Micro-psychiatric Applications of Thiotimoline" (how things had changed in the four years since the first one had appeared!), and Thrilling Wonder was taking "The Monkey's Finger."

  The October 1952 Astounding contained the first part of The Currents of Space, with two more to follow
. It was the third serial of mine that Campbell had published. When I had been in his office on the September trip, I had admired a painting there and asked which story it illustrated. Campbell laughed and said, "Yours," and now there it was, on the cover of the magazine.

  I eventually bought the original for $25 plus postage. I framed it and it is still in my office today.

  The November 1952 Galaxy included "The Martian Way," 6 which got the cover—with my name misspelled.

  Somehow I thought that the story would elicit a mass of mail denouncing my own portrayal of McCarthyism, or supporting it, but I got nothing either one way or the other. It may be that my satire of McCarthy was so subtle that everyone missed it.

  26

  On September 23, 1952, I listened to Richard M. Nixon give his "Checkers" speech, the one in which he denied (for the first time, but not the last) that he was a crook. I had disliked him intensely for his

  6 See The Martian Way and Other Stories.

  campaign tactics against Helen Gahagan Douglas, and for his active role in the McCarthy-like tactics of the House Un-American Activities Committee. In the Alger Hiss affair, I was convinced that Hiss was innocent and that Whittaker Chambers was a liar who was conniving with Nixon.

  Now as I listened to Nixon give his patently dishonest speech, I felt a hatred for him growing that was never thereafter to diminish. I felt him to be an utter hypocrite with an instinct for personal aggrandizement at all costs. I went around saying, bitterly, "If the Soviet Union should conquer the United States tomorrow and should need a Quisling to rule us in their interest, Nixon would be their man."

  I still believe that.

  What made it worse, of course, was that I was quite convinced that the American public would fall for the speech—and it did.

  2 7

  More and more I was trying to establish myself as an independent entity at the Medical School. I managed to get a small grant from the Atomic Energy Commission with myself as principal investigator. That meant that I myself had money to spend.

  I could hire Howard Bensusan to work for me now. Bensusan was a victim of polio and had to maneuver about on crutches, but he was cheerful, driving, and bright.

  I also began to give a small course of my own for graduate students —one on protein structure.

  At home, Gertrude began talking of buying a house. The thought frightened me, for I felt I would be lost with lawns and gardens to take care of and with no landlord to turn to if something went wrong.

  Nevertheless, Gertrude was right. We could afford a house now and we should have one for David's sake if not our own. We began a desultory search, but if looking for an apartment and working up the nerve to make a decision was hard, looking for and making a decision concerning houses was infinitely harder.

  Everything we saw was either obviously too expensive or obviously not good enough.

  The Puzzle of Life was showing unexpected signs of life again. Macmillan asked me for a book, and when I told them about my popular biochemistry, they invited me to show them a sample. I decided to

  do a new version of the first chapter, doing it entirely my way and not as modified by Little, Brown pressure.

  I finished Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids on October 24, and took it in to Brad on October 28, when we three were in New York again.

  I spent the evening with Horace, talking about the new robot novel, The Caves of Steel, for which Brad had agreed to let me have a contract.

  On October 31, I visited my parents. They were buying another apartment house, which would make three houses that they owned, and they were trying to sell the candy store.

  29

  On November 4, 1952, the presidential election took place. Gertrude and I each voted for Stevenson, but it was a lost cause. At 5:45 p.m. I wrote in my diary, "Now I sit down and start listening to the Eisenhower landslide." Actually, I started viewing it, since, for the first time, I was watching an election on television.

  By 8:25 p.m. it was all over and I watched only intermittently thereafter. It was no fun anyway. A computer, "Univac," was computing the results on the basis of initial returns and robbed the election of any suspense there might have been.

  Univac is an acronym for "Universal Automatic Computer" but I somehow got it into my head, without thinking, that it meant "univac," or "one vacuum tube." From then on, I wrote a series of stories featuring a giant computer I called "Multivac."

  The one thing I remember most clearly about that disastrous evening was one of the local races. A Massachusetts Representative, a Democrat, had bucked the landslide and had beaten Henry Cabot Lodge for a seat in the United States Senate. The television set showed him, slim, young, and attractive, thanking his campaign workers with so much charm and grace that I was deeply moved. It was about the only good news that evening, and I said to Gertrude, "What a pity he's Catholic! If he were Protestant he would be the next President of the United States!"

  I spoke more prophetically than I knew, for the new Senator was John Fitzgerald Kennedy and he would indeed be the next President of the United States, even though he was a Catholic. Of course, I didn't think to tape-record my remark or to write it down, seal it in an envelope, and put it in a safe. Eight years later, when I reminded Gertrude that I had predicted it, she couldn't remember I had made the remark. And she was my only witness.

  Out from Under

  On November 8, 1952, I visited Norbert Wiener at his home. I can't find in my diary any indication of how I came to be invited there, and my memory fails me as well. It seems to me that it must have been through his daughter, Margaret (Peggy) Wiener, who was a graduate student in biochemistry at Boston University.

  Norbert Wiener was a great mathematician and cybemeticist, certainly the greatest mathematician I have ever come to know personally. He reminded me of Bill Boyd in exaggeration. Norbert was much more brilliant, of course, but also much more peculiar in all the directions in which Bill was peculiar—bumbling, absent-minded, eagerly proud of his accomplishments. Like Bill, of course, he was lovable.

  Norbert was humorous-looking—not ugly, but humorous-looking. There was the impulse to smile when you looked at him. He had a rounded abdomen like Santa Claus, a large head with a leonine head of hair, a bulbous nose on which spectacles were precariously perched, and exophthalmic eyes that gave the impression of seeing only vaguely and without detail.

  Doubleday was in reasonable raptures over Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the AsteroidSy and Macmillan showed a very cautious interest in my new first chapter of The Puzzle of Life. I began writing additional chapters to the latter and changed the name to avoid a too-philosophical interpretation of the subject of the book. I now called it The Chemistry of Life.

  I also finished "The Pause," a short story involving a theme I had used before—the Earth under the control of much more advanced outsiders—and sent it off to Fred Pohl on November 13. I intended it for an anthology of original stories that he was editing.

  3

  On November 17, 1952, my mother called me. They had sold the candy store at Windsor Place, which they had possessed for one month

  short of sixteen years. I had helped them run it the first six years, and Stanley had helped the last ten.

  What's more, they were not buying a new one; they were retiring!

  For twenty-six years altogether, they had labored in four different candy stores (five, if we count the brief stay in the Church Avenue store), and now it was all over. They were out from under the incubus that had kept them buried alive almost since they had come to the United States and that had distorted my own childhood.

  It was time enough. My father was about to turn fifty-six, my mother had just turned fifty-seven, and they could count on $50 a week earnings (after taxes and maintenance) from their houses. Nor were their children any longer a drain on them. All three had jobs and could support themselves and I, at least, could pitch in and help if the old folks got into trouble—which they never did.

&n
bsp; It was a queer feeling. I could just barely remember the days before the candy store, and if you discount those dim flashes of Van Siclen Avenue, all my life centered about a candy store till just before I was married, and even afterward I could never think of my parents without one. And now it was gone.

  The whole candy-store interlude had lasted only a quarter of a century. I could have sworn it was eternal.

  4

  The final installment of The Currents of Space, in the December 1952 Astounding, reached the newsstands on November 19, and only ten days later, on the twenty-ninth, I got my first copies of the book.

  As a faint echo, the December 1952 Galaxy contained "The Deep/' 1 and the February 1953 Startling had "The Monkey's Fingers/' 2

  Then too, though Fred had said he liked "The Pause," it was apparently vetoed by the publishers. However, some days later, on December 2, he said he would take "Nobody Here but—" instead. I couldn't complain. The second was the better story, in my own opinion.

  On the same day on which I received the book version of The Cur-rents of Space, I finally began the new novel, The Caves of Steel. I also began putting together "Now You See It—" and "—And Now You Don't," at Marty Greenberg's suggestion, to prepare the final volume of the Foundation series, Second Foundation.

  Not so pleasant as all this was the fact that on December 4, Planet had put out a magazine called Tops in Science Fiction, which reprinted "Black Friar of the Flame."

  1 See The Martian Way and Other Stories.

  2 See Buy Jupiter and Other Stories.

  I was annoyed for two reasons. In the first place, they didn't ask my permission, and if they had, I would have forbidden it, since it was not a good story and would reflect poorly on my reputation of the 1950s. Second, since they did reprint it, they might have paid me, but they didn't.

  Unfortunately, they were quite within their rights in doing this, since they owned all rights to the story and could reprint without additional payment at any time. Other magazines did it, too, and often with my poorest stories. The January 1951 Super Science, for instance, reprinted "Victory Unintentional." And early in 1953, Thrilling Wonder put out Wonder Story Annual, which reprinted "Christmas on Ganymede."