It's Been a Good Life Read online

  I also read a justly forgotten book, Ten Thousand a Year by Samuel Warren, which had an excellent villain by the name of Oily Gammon. I think that was the first time I realized that a villain, not a "hero" might be the true protagonist of a book.

  I read almost the entire gamut of nineteenth-century fiction. Because so much of it was by British authors, I became a spiritual Englishman and a conscious Anglophile.

  About the only thing that was almost totally left out of my reading was twentieth-century fiction. (Not twentieth-century nonfiction, which I read voluminously.) Perhaps the libraries I went to were themselves poor in modern fiction ...

  That childish bent has remained.... Most twentieth-century serious fiction is beyond me. Mysteries and humor are another matter. Of all the twentieth-century writers the two I have read land reread] most thoroughly, and with undiminished delight, are Agatha Christie and P. G. Wodehouse.

  All this incredibly miscellaneous reading, the result of lack of guidance, left its indelible mark. My interest was aroused in twenty different directions and all those interests remained. I have written books on mythology, on the Bible, on Shakespeare, on history, on science, and so on. Even my lack of reading modern fiction has left its mark, for I am perfectly aware that there is a certain old-fashioned quality about my writing ...

  I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it.

  Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

  Six.

  BECOMING A WRITER

  [About 1927] I briefly made the acquaintance of a remarkable youngster [who] had the ability to tell stories that held me enthralled ... for the first time, I realized stories could be invented, and that was a terribly important thing to learn. Until then, I had naturally assumed that stories existed only in books and had probably been there, unchanged, from the beginning of time, and that they were without human creators.

  If I couldn't afford to buy science-fiction magazines, neither could my friends at the junior high school. I could, at least, read the stories [in the candy store-his father thought they were okay because they were about science].... I discovered that I owned a valuable commodity-the ability to tell stories.

  I took over the role of my story-telling friend ... and now it was others who listened to me. Of course, the stories weren't my own, and I made no pretense that they were. I carefully explained that I had read them in science-fiction magazines.

  During lunch hour, we would sit on the curb in front of the school, each with our sandwiches and, to anywhere from two to ten eager listeners, I would repeat the stories I had read, together with such personal embellishments as I could manage. It increased my pleasure in science fiction and I discovered, for the first time in my life, that I loved to have an audience. I found that I could speak before a group, even when some of them were strangers to me, without embarrassment.

  It was about then [ 19311 that, for the first time, I began to write stories of my own.... The story I usually tell is that I felt bad about not having any permanent reading material, only books that had to be returned to the library or magazines that had to be returned to the racks. It occurred to me I might copy a book and keep the copy. I chose a book on Greek mythology for the purpose and, in five minutes. realized this was an impractical procedure. Then, finally, I got the further idea of writing my own books and allowing them to be my permanent library.

  Undoubtedly this was a factor, but it can't be the entire motive. I must simply have had the terrible urge to make up a story.

  Why not? Surely many people have the urge to make up a story. It has to be a common human desire-a restless mind, a mysterious world, a feeling of emulation when someone tells a story. Isn't storytelling what one does when one sits around a campfire? Aren't many social gatherings devoted to reminiscences and doesn't everyone like to tell a story of something that really happened? And aren't such stories inevitably embroidered and improved until the resemblance to reality becomes distant?

  One can imagine early man sitting about campfires telling stories of' great hunting feats that exaggerate the truth ridiculously but which are not questioned because every other person present intends to tell similar lies. A particularly good story would be repeated over and over and attributed to some ancestor or some legendary hunter.

  And some people would, inevitably, be especially skilled at telling a story, and their- talents would be in demand when there was some leisure time. They might even be rewarded with a haunch of meat if the story was really interesting. This would make them labor to invent bigger, better, and more exciting tales, naturally.

  I don't see how there can be any doubt about it. The storytelling impulse is innate in most people, and if it happens to be combined with enough talent and enough drive, it cannot be suppressed. That was so in my case.

  I just had to write.... Writing was exciting because I never planned ahead. I made up my stories as I went along and it was a great deal like reading a book I hadn't written. What would happen to the characters? How would they get out of the particular scrape they were in? The excitement was all I wrote for in those early years. In my wildest dreams it never occurred to me that anything I wrote would ever be published. I didn't write out of ambition.

  As a matter of fact, I still write my fiction in that manner-making it up as I go along-with one all-important improvement. I have learned that there's no use in making things up as you go along if you have no clearly defined resolution to your story ...

  What I do now is think up a problem and a resolution to that problem. I then begin the story, making it up as I go along, having all the excitement of finding out what will happen to the characters and how they will get out of their scrapes, but working steadily toward the known resolution, so that I don't get lost en route. When asked for advice by beginners, I always stress that. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.

  In the fall of 1931 ... just before my twelfth birthday ... I was going to write a series book, the first of many, I decided (apparently I always had the instinctive knowledge that I would be prolific), and I called it The Greenville Chums at College. I had seen a book called The Darewell Chums at College, and it seemed to me that by substituting Greenville for Darewell I had made all possible concessions to the need for originality.

  I wrote two chapters that evening, making it up as I was going along (something that is still my system), and my mind was full of it the next morning. That day at lunch, I said to one of the youngsters who was particularly assiduous in attending my story-telling sessions: "Hey, let me tell you a story."

  And tell him I did, in full detail, and just about word for word, up to the point where I had faded out. He was listening, rapt with attention, and when I stopped, he demanded I continue. I explained that it was all I had so far and he said, "Can I borrow the book when you've finished reading it?"

  I was astonished. I had either neglected to make it clear to him, or he had failed to understand, that I was writing the book. He thought it was another already printed story I was retelling. The implied compliment staggered me, and from that day on, I secretly took myself seriously as a writer. I remember the name of the young man whose remark unwittingly did this for me. It was Emmanuel Bershadsky.

  I never saw him again after I left junior high school, but thank you Emmanuel, wherever you are.

  Still, The Greenville Chums At College did not continue forever. It petered out after eight chapters ... a junior-high-school youngster living in a shab
by neighborhood in Brooklyn knows very little about small-town life and even less about college. Even I, myself, was forced eventually to recognize the fact that I didn't know what I was talking about (especially when the plot made it necessary to describe what went on inside a chemistry laboratory) ...

  Just the same, from that time on, I never stayed away from my copybooks for long. Every once in a while I would drift back to try my hand at writing again. Nothing lasted very long for quite a number of years, but I never quit altogether.

  [In 1935 his father bought him a used Underwood typewriter for ten dollars.] How old it was, I don't know, but it worked perfectly ... I sat at the typewriter and typed by the hunt-and-peck method.

  I was at it every day until my father, coming up one day for his afternoon nap, stopped to watch his son type. He frowned and said, "Why do you type with one finger, instead of with all your fingers like on a piano?"

  I said, "I don't know how to do it with all my fingers, Pappa."

  My father had an easy solution for that. "Learn!" he thundered. "If I catch you typing with one finger again, I will take away the typewriter."

  I sighed, for I knew he would. Fortunately there was Mazie, who lived across the street and for whom [I had a] pure and puppyish passion.... She knew how to type. She showed me how to place my hands on the typewriter keys and which fingers controlled which keys. She watched while, very slowly, I typed the word "the" with the lefthand-first finger, right-hand-first finger, and left-hand-middle finger. She then offered to give me periodic lessons.

  An excuse to be alone with her every once in a while was just what I was looking for, but I had my pride. No one was ever allowed to teach me any more than I required to begin teaching myself. "That's all right," I said. "I'll practice."

  And I did.... Once I was typing, of course, I had much more incentive to write. I remember distinctly that the first piece of fiction I ever wrote on the typewriter involved a group of men wandering on some quest through a universe in which there were elves, dwarves, and wizards, and in which magic worked. It was as though I had some premonition of J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. I can't remember what it was that inspired me in this direction. I had read The Arabian Nights, the E. Nesbit fantasies (particularly her stories about the psam- mead) and all sorts of books of magic and legendry, but none of them stick in my mind as sufficient.

  I wrote better than forty pages, both sides, single-space, no margins, and I imagine I must have turned out nearly thirty thousand words before I ran down. But run down I did, and it cured me. I had my fill of fantasy and I didn't try again for years-and never in any lengthy way.

  The next item of fiction I tried to write, possibly in 1936, was, at last, and for the f rst time, science fiction. Again, it was a long-winded attempt at writing an endless novel ... [which] died just as my previous efforts did. What I now remember about my science-fiction epic is that there was a great deal of talk about the fifth dimension at the start and that later on there was some catastrophe that destroyed photosynthesis (though not on Earth, I think). I remember one sentence, and one sentence only. It was "Whole forests stood sere and brown in midsummer." Why I remember that, I don't know, but that is the earliest existing Asimovian science-fiction sentence.

  It is rather embarrassing ... to realize how little I learned about writing through careful study and intelligent consideration of what I read, and how much I made my way forward through mere intuition. Until I was a published writer, I remained completely ignorant of the fact that there were books on how to write and college-level courses on the subject.... [But they] would have spoiled my natural style; made me observe an artificial caution; would have hedged me about with rules that I could not have followed without wearing myself out.

  All of that, however, is probably simple rationalization designed to resign me to things as they are.

  Seven.

  SCIENCE-FICTION FAN

  [In 1937 the family moved to a larger apartment and for the first time Isaac had a room of his own-in a railroad flat.] The privacy was virtually nil [for] anyone wanting to go from the living room to their bedroom had to go through my bedroom. Still, at least there was no one actually in the room with me.

  Then, too, I was even given a closet of my own and permission to keep my magazines there. After seven years of reading science-fiction magazines, I found myself more enamored of the stories than ever. They were, as a rule, every bit as exciting as the pulp adventures of the "Shadow" and "Doc Savage," which I also read, and, in addition, brought me into a fantastic world beyond anything earthbound literature could offer.

  The horizons in science fiction were limitless, and the excitement of outer space, of time travel, of the far future seemed a continually unsurpassable delight. It was the pleasure of magic combined with the discipline of science. It was just enough of a slipping of bonds to give freedom, and not enough to seem folly and anarchy. It was the use of imagination to give the effect of a roller coaster loop-the-loop, with the use of the laws of nature to keep you on the track and bring you safely home.

  [Finding kindred souls] I had become a science-fiction "fan" (the word is short for "fanatic"-I'm not joking) by the mid-1930s. By that I mean that I did not confine myself merely to the reading of science fiction. I tried to participate in the machinery. The simplest way was to write letters to the editor.

  The science-fiction magazines all had letters columns, and readers were encouraged to write. The magazine that most attracted me was Astounding Stories ... [to which] I wrote my first letter in 1935, and it was printed. I listed the stories I liked and disliked, said why, and asked for smooth edges, rather than the typical messy rough edges of the pulps that shredded and left paper lint everywhere. (The magazine did provide smooth edges, eventually. Nor were they holding back out of callousness. Smoothing the edges cost money.) ...

  There were other ways of being a fan, too. Individual fans might get to know each other (perhaps from the letters column, since names and addresses were given). If they were within reach of each other, they could get together, discuss the stories, swap magazines, and so on. This developed into "fan clubs." In 1934, one of the magazines invented the Science Fiction League of America and fans who joined could make friends over still wider areas.

  Stuck in the candy store as I was, I knew nothing about the fan clubs and it never occurred to me to join the League. However, a young man who had gone to Boys High with me noted my name on the letters in Astounding and sent me a card in 1938 inviting me to attend meetings of the Queens Science Fiction Club ...

  On September 18, 1938, 1 met, for the first time, other sciencefiction fans. However, between the first invitation and a second card giving me instructions on how to get to the meeting place, there had been a split in the Queens club, and a small splinter group formed a new fan organization. (Eventually, I came to understand that sciencefiction fans were a quarrelsome and contentious bunch and that clubs were forever splitting up into hostile factions.)

  My high school friend belonged to the small splinter group and, in all ignorance that I was not going to the Queens club, I joined them. The splinter group had broken off because they were activists who felt that science-fiction fans ought to take a stronger anti-Fascist stand, while the main group held that science fiction was above politics. Had I known about the split I would have resolutely sided with the splinter group, so that by ending up there I came to the right place.

  The new group gave themselves a rather long and grandiloquent name but they are popularly known as the Futurians and they were certainly the most astonishing fan club that was ever founded. They consisted of a group of brilliant teenagers who, as nearly as I could tell, all came from broken homes and had led miserable, or, at the very least, insecure childhoods.

  Once again, I was an outsider, for I had a tightly knit family and a happy childhood, but in other respects I was charmed by all of them and felt that I had found a spiritual home.

  To tell you how my life changed, I mus
t explain my views on friendship-

  One often hears in books, and movies, of childhood friendships that last throughout life; of onetime schoolmates who associate with each other through the years; of army buddies who are constantly getting drunk and reliving the joys of barracks life; of college chums helping each other through life for the sake of the old school tie.

  It may happen, but I am always skeptical. It seemed to me that people who went to school together or were in the army together were living in a state of forced intimacy that they had not chosen for themselves. A kind of friendship-by-custom-and-propinquity might exist among those who happened to like each other independently or who were thrown into social togetherness outside of the artificial environments of school or army, but not otherwise.

  In my own case, I had not one school friendship that survived school and not one army friendship that survived the army. Partly this was because there was no opportunity for social interaction outside either school or army and partly it was because of my own self-absorption.

  However, once I met the Futurians, everything changed. Here, although there was little chance for social interaction most of the time, although I sometimes remained out of touch with this one or that one for a long period of time, I made close friendships which lasted in some cases for half a century, right down to the present.

  Why`?

  At last I met people who burned with the same fire I did; who loved science fiction as I did: who wanted to write science fiction as I did; who had the same kind of erratic brilliance that I had. I did not have to recognize a soul mate consciously. I felt it at once without the necessity of intellectualizing it. In fact, in some cases, both within the Futurians and without. I felt soul-matehood and eternal friendship even with people whom I didn't really like.

  Eight.

  STARTING TO WRITE