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

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  2 7

  On February 6, 1954, I finished "The End of Eternity." It was about 25,000 words long and I was very pleased with it. I sent it off to Horace, and on the ninth he called me. It was a complete rejection. He talked revision but what he wanted was a complete revision. It would have amounted to jacking up the title and running a new story under it. I refused point-blank to do this, and that was that.

  The depression over this lasted long enough to mute my pleasure at having survived to the last day of the student-nurse course on February 17. My general annoyance with Horace, in fact, made it easier for me to be annoyed with Walker over the student nurses and to make up my mind firmly that I would not give the course again. My full salary, all of it, would have to come out of the school budget or I would quit. 11

  28

  On March 17, we all drove to New York, and on the two days following, I went through my routine of visiting editors. In particular, I

  10 See The Martian Way and Other Stories.

  11 Stanley was, by now, an instructor at the college level, too. He was giving a news-writing course at New York University. I can imagine how my father felt with both sons "professors."

  handed in a totally revised Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus to Margaret Lesser, Doubleday's juveniles editor.

  I also dropped in to see Marty Greenberg to ask for money. My diary notes I was "demanding" dough. Marty promised he would pay in weekly installments. He always paid some, just enough to whet one's appetite for one's own money without really satisfying it.

  Most important, I visited the Henry Schuman Company, or, rather, the company it had been transmuted into. Schuman, who was not making money as a publisher, had sold out to Lew Schwartz of Abelard Press, and the combined firm was now Abelard-Schuman. Both Schuman and Washton were completely out, and my editor was now Lillian McClintock. I thought I had better meet her and find out if The Chemicals of Life had met with the same disaster that my earlier attempts at non-fiction had.

  Not so! Lillian insisted that she thought very highly of the book.

  One more thing I did was to leave "The End of Eternity" with Brad in order that he might decide whether it had possibilities as a novel.

  When I got home on March 22, I found that Tony Boucher was willing to consider a revised "The Singing Bell," and after all its rejections, I was eager enough for an acceptance to agree to that. (In fact, I usually agreed to reasonable revisions, except in the case of Horace. He was simply too abrasive to make agreement easy, or sometimes possible.)

  Meanwhile, the May 1954 Universe came out with "The Immortal Bard." 12

  29

  It was time for a new car. My first car was nearly four years old and it had some thirty-three thousand miles on it. It was still good for much more, but it was a gear-shift car and it seemed to me that some sort of fluid drive would be better. Besides, if we eliminated the clutch, it might make Gertrude more confident about taking lessons herself. She had never taken further lessons in all the time I had owned the car.

  Since the Plymouth had given me good service, I stayed with it, and, on March 26, 1954, * brought home a 1954 Plymouth with "Hy-drive." This was a kind of drive that allowed you to stay in third just about all the time, though it still had the clutch. It also had power steering.

  It was a nice-looking car in my eyes, pink with a white top, but,

  12 See Earth Is Room Enough.

  alas, it was a lemon. All the Hy-drives were. I think they were only made for half a season and then proved so complicated and so bound to break down that they were abandoned.

  I had all kinds of trouble with my Hy-drive Plymouth, but I stubbornly kept on having it repaired and adjusted until, out of sheer weariness of seeing the inside of a garage, the car decided to settle down.

  All the Hy-drives except mine were speedily traded in or junked, and I do believe that for years and years mine was the only one on the road. The old car, by the way, I gave to John Blugerman, and the Blugermans used it for many years.

  3°

  Having sold "It's Such a Beautiful Day" to Fred, I thought I ought to sell him other stories, too. I wrote a 5,000-word short story called "The Portable Star" and mailed it to him on April 5. I got it back on April 14 with a rather long letter telling me, with what I thought unnecessary vehemence, that it was bad.

  I tried both Campbell and Gold after that, and both rejected it quite decidedly.

  On the other hand, Brad liked "The End of Eternity," liked my suggestions for fleshing it out to novel length, and by April 7, had told me that a contract was in the works. The advances offered me for novels had now grown to $1,250, and I accepted that as a measure of the increasing confidence Doubleday had in me.

  On April 26, I received a copy of an August Derleth anthology of original stories that contained "The Pause." 13

  3 1

  Every once in a while the television set proved to be more than a medium of entertainment and also became a method for involving one's self with the world in a way that would have been impossible before television.

  In 1954, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, who was all-powerful because so many Americans were dupes and so many others were cowards (and who had easily survived my own satire of him in "The Martian Way"), tangled with the Army. The Army, backed up against the wall and trembling with fear, had no choice, at last, but to fight back, accusing McCarthy of attacking the Army out of revenge for their having inducted a protige" of his.

  13 See Buy Jupiter and Other Stories.

  Considering that McCarthy was destroying the United States (and one can easily argue that it was his legacy that led to a number of wrongheaded decisions on the part of the American government, including those that involved us in the disastrous Vietnam War), it was in the highest degree ironic that the point at which the line was drawn was over whether McCarthy was trying to pull strings to get some pampered youngster out of the Army or not. That, however, was the point over which the Army dared fight.

  The hearings that resulted were on every day, and there were summaries every night. I watched them during the day when I could and I never missed the summaries at night. It seemed to me that surely there was no way on Earth that any sane person could fail to see McCarthy's gangsterism, and I trembled over the possibility that Americans would prove obstinately irrational and cling to the monster. Fortunately, McCarthy was, unwittingly, on my side. Through his own persistent and unbelievable display of unpalatability and the smooth work of Attorney Joseph Welch, McCarthy was destroyed.

  Yet I couldn't see that was happening. Night after night I went to bed in a mental argument with McCarthy, reliving the events of the day, trying to find the comments that the various investigating senators should have made, and I was certain that never in my life would I ever dislike any American in public life as intensely as I disliked McCarthy. (I was wrong there.)

  v-

  I had never gone farther than Philadelphia to attend a science-fiction convention, but Marty Greenberg persuaded me to attend the 1954 Midwescon ("Midwest Convention"), which was to be held in Bellefontaine, Ohio. He would drive.

  On May 19, I drove Gertrude and David to New York, and the next morning I went to the Golds'. Marty intended to come there and pick up Evelyn Gold. Also in the car was Marty's accountant, a very nice fellow who must have had difficulty remaining sane if he seriously tried to handle Marty's books.

  Though Marty might be a reluctant disburser of money, he was an excellent driver, and he got us to Bellefontaine on the twenty-first with no trouble.

  I had a marvelous time at the convention, exchanging comic patter with Randall Garrett and also with Robert Bloch (whom I now met for the first time and with whom I thereafter carried on a prolonged correspondence).

  It would be impossible for me to explain the flavor of the long session a group of us had in some bar that first evening (with everyone but myself drinking steadily), but it seemed to us at the time that no group in the history of the world had ever been so consist
ently and devastatingly funny as we all were. We could hardly talk for laughing.

  I can remember only one remark of that session. Someone mentioned that the duckbill platypus had a forked penis. I don't know whether this is true or not, but the statement was made. Whereupon I said, owlishly, "It is for that reason that a female platypus, on awaking in the morning with a male platypus in her bed, cries out, 'Good heavens, I've been forked/ "

  It's no use telling me that this is not a very funny play on words, or even that you don't get it. That fact is that twenty-five people laughed for twenty-five solid minutes, and I don't care if most were drunk with alcohol and all were drunk on previous laughter, it was, as far as the effect went, one of the most successful witticisms I ever invented.

  There was a serious moment at this meeting from which I greatly benefited. Randall, Phil Farmer, and I were interviewed by a reporter who asked us how we kept up with science. Randall and I were rather flip, but Phil very seriously described his techniques. One of them was his subcription to Scientific American.

  I may be flip, but I listen. It was soon after my return that I subscribed to Scientific American myself, and I have maintained that subscription to the present day to my infinite benefit.

  I wanted to leave on Sunday the twenty-third, but neither Marty nor Evelyn Gold were ready to go yet, so I drove back with Dave Kyle and two other fellows. We had a marvelous time talking McCarthy. Kyle (who had been Marty's partner when Gnome Press was started, and might still have been at this time) could imitate the McCarthy style perfectly and undertook to cross-examine me on my behavior at the Midwescon. In no time at all, he had me fruitlessly and unconvinc-ingly denying any sexual misbehavior. Although I was completely innocent of any such thing, he made me sound as guilty as Hitler.

  We had started late in the day, and Kyle drove grimly through the night. I settled back beside him in the front seat to sleep, but I found myself talking steadily through the hours.

  At one point, I said, "I'm sorry, Dave. I must be boring you to madness."

  "No, no," said Kyle, "keeping on talking. In the first place, you're interesting, and in the second, it helps keep me awake and alert."

  Then as dawn was breaking, he stopped the car and said, "Your turn, Isaac," and we switched places.

  I got behind the wheel with a certain alarm. Up to that point I had never driven a car that wasn't my own, and this one was a decrepit old station wagon with, Kyle himself admitted, defective brakes. Since I had been awake all night, I peered ahead through a gray streak of road between two banks of mist and felt very woozy indeed.

  "Your turn to talk and keep me awake, Dave," I said as I eased the car into the road and picked up speed. This was met with silence, and when I looked quickly to my right, I found that it was too late. Kyle was already asleep. I drove across the Pennsylvania Turnpike till breakfast time. How I kept from destroying the car and everyone in it, I don't know.

  We got back to New York at 2:00 p.m. on May 24, and my first action on reaching the Blugerman apartment, after giving everyone a feeble hello, was to remove some of my clothes and tumble into bed and oblivion.

  33

  The next day, May 25, I made my rounds. I visited the offices of Thrilling Wonder for the first time since I had stormed out with the rejected "Grow Old with Me" seven years before. Merwin was no longer there, of course. The editor was Sam Mines, a tall, husky fellow with a strong jawbone.

  I gave him "The Portable Star" and he read it and bought it on the spot.

  I then picked up the galleys of Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus at Doubleday, and finally went off to dinner with Bob and Ginny Heinlein. I hadn't seen either of them in nine years, not since the end of the Navy Yard days, and this was the first occasion on which I met them as a married couple.

  While I suppose Bob was glad to see me on my own account, he had a purpose for the dinner. He knew that Pohl had quit the agency business and he also knew that I had been working agentless since then. As it happened, Bob drew me aside to urge me to become a client of his own agent. He told me very earnestly that his income had quintupled, thanks to his agent. I thought of my own writing income quintupling, and the thought of fifty thousand dollars per year had a vague Olympian quality about it that was endlessly appealing.

  I wanted no agent—on principle. Money could not move me.

  At least, that was the theory. But fifty thousand dollars a year! I could feel my principles softening about the edges, and I was glad that

  the agent would be joining us at dinner. Maybe—if he seemed pleasant —and competent—maybe—just maybe—well, after all, why not. . .

  My principles were melting further.

  What I needed was something that would jolt me back to my right mind, and fortunately it was supplied me.

  I was seated next to the agent's wife, a very talkative woman. She talked about everything in a stream-of-consciousness manner that would have quickly driven me insane if I had listened to her. Fortunately, I had long since learned that one can detach one's self completely in such cases and merely make little moaning sounds at odd intervals to indicate one's attention is riveted, and the speaker is thoroughly satisfied.

  I had ordered Shrimp Diabolo and was squaring away, quite prepared to eat with gusto, when the agent's wife, eyeing my dish with interest, said, "Well, what have you there, my, that looks good, I've always been interested in shrimp, been eating them ever since I was so high, but I don't seem to recognize this way of cooking them, it smells good, what do they call it, where's the menu, I wonder why I didn't notice it on the menu when I was ordering, does it taste good, let me see what it tastes like . . ."

  And at this point, she speared one of my shrimps and carried it off.

  I stared at her with horror. I hate having anyone sample my plate. I don't sample yours, you don't sample mine is my way of looking at meals.

  There are some principles that even the thought of fifty thousand a year won't affect. Once she had speared my shrimp there was no longer a chance in Hades that Bob's agent could have me as a client. My heart hardened, my mind closed, and I settled back to my mere ten thousand a year.

  And I never again got even that close to considering a literary agent.

  34

  On my rounds earlier that day, Mac Talley had told me that NAL had paid Marty Greenberg a $500 advance for the paperback rights to I, Robot. It seemed to me that Marty had never mentioned this in any of his discussions of my earnings.

  I called him up on the twenty-sixth therefore and said, "Hey Marty, what about the $500 you got from Mac Talley?"

  It may have come as a surprise to Marty to find out that I knew

  about this. At any rate he started yelling at me and calling me a variety of bad names.

  I survived the barrage and insisted that he pay me—and he did in small, slow installments.

  35

  On June 16, 1954, I got my first speeding ticket. I believe I was trying to make it home to catch the last of the McCarthy hearings (it came to an end the next day after two months of national trauma).

  On June 18, I took David to Norumbega Park, and while there I held out a peanut to a squirrel who seemed to be looking at me wistfully. I didn't throw it at him but wanted him to take it from my hand.

  The squirrel came over cautiously and stretched out its head to the peanut, while I smiled at it with loving paternalism. Then, ignoring the peanut and for no reason whatever, the little fiend seized one of my fingers and bestowed a hard bite on it, drawing blood.

  I yelled, squeezed as much blood out of it as I could, then went off to the park office for some iodine. I brooded over the possibility of tetanus and even rabies. I got myself a tetanus booster at school from Derow, just in case, and nothing developed.

  I have never offered food to an animal again. I have thrown food, yes, but Fve carefully kept my hands to myself. It was disillusioning to see a mere beast act in so typically human a fashion as to bite the hand that fed it.

 
36

  "The Singing Bell" had been at F & SF for two months, and finally, on June 21, it was taken. I felt that to be a triumph, for it had been making the rounds without success for an unconscionable time.

  Another story, "The Last Trump," which was a fantasy, I had sent off to Horace, hoping that it would be my second entry into Beyond. Horace wrote me to the effect that Beyond wasn't buying stories for six months, but if I wanted to revise it then, he would take it—and meanwhile he would hold the story.

  I didn't want to wait till then because a six-month suspension of buying probably meant an end to the magazine. (I was right.) I therefore asked him, rather stiffly, to return the story, and he did. Other markets turned it down, however.

  One sale I made, which pleased me enormously, was a parody of a poem by William S. Gilbert. In Patience, the poet, Bunthorne, sings a

  very effective solo that begins, "If you're anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line . . ."

  I parodied this with a poem I called "The Foundation of S.F. Success/' which began, "If you ask me how to shine in the science-fiction line . . ."

  It was a parody of myself and of the Foundation series, in which I openly admitted my debt to Roman history in the second verse, which goes:

  "So success is not a mystery, just brush up on your history, and borrow

  day by day. "Take an Empire that was Roman and you'll find it is at home in all

  the starry Milky Way. "With a drive that's hyperspatial, through the parsecs you will race,

  you'll find that plotting is a breeze, "With a tiny bit of cribbin' from the works of Edward Gibbon, and

  that Greek, Thucydides."

  F & SF occasionally published poetry, and it was Tony Boucher who bought the parody. He was delighted and wrote to tell me he thought it the cleverest bit of self-parody since Swinburne. He paid me $15 for it—not much, but it was the first poetry I'd ever sold.