I.Asimov: A Memoir Read online

  Such was the impression this made on me that I actually remember, after more than half a century, the names of three of the students who did better than I. This is remarkable for someone like me who is so self-centered that he does not consider the names of other people worth remembering. Obviously, these students hit me hard.

  None of this shook my own belief in my remarkability, but I did seek an explanation in my own head. I always seek explanations in my own head, and in this case I had no choice. There was no way I could go to anyone, certainly not to any teacher, and say, “Why are these students getting better grades than I am?”

  The obvious answer would have been: “Because they’re smarter than you, Asimov, you rotten kid, and I’m glad they are.” This was not an answer I wanted to hear, or proposed to believe.

  Instead, I reasoned out that these extraordinary kids came from settled and well-to-do families, that they had been raised in an intellectual atmosphere, that they had plenty of time to study, and they were bright after a fashion.

  As for me, I still had the candy store to work in, so that my time for studying was limited. Besides, I made no real effort to find time for study. My stubborn notion was that I simply didn’t have to study. I read the schoolbooks and I listened to the teacher and that was it.

  Well, saying so doesn’t make it so, and if I had truly wanted to compete, truly felt that I had to get higher marks, I would have swotted away—but I refused. I decided I didn’t have to because I needed no record marks to prove to myself that I was remarkable. My enjoyment in being me wasn’t affected. After all, I wasn’t just a student; I was a writer.

  But even there I was doomed to suffer humiliation in high school. I

  suffered, indeed, the hardest blow my ego has ever received. In 1934, one of the English teachers, Max Newfield, who was the faculty adviser of the school’s semiannual literary magazine, decided to give a special writing class, hoping he could get more material for the magazine in this way. I quickly joined up. I was only fourteen and everyone else was sixteen or seventeen, but I was a writer.

  It was a huge mistake. We were all asked to write an essay and I wrote one that was absolutely and terminally rotten. When Newfield asked for volunteers to read their essays, my hand shot up. I had read only about a quarter of it when Newfield stopped me and used an opprobrious barnyard term to describe my writing. (I had never heard a teacher use a “dirty word” before and I was shocked.) The class wasn’t, however. They laughed at me very uproariously and I took my seat in bitter shame and humiliation.

  I remained in the class, however. I knew the mistake I had made. I had tried to be “literary” when I didn’t know how to be. I would never make that mistake again. (And I never have either. Other mistakes, perhaps, but not that one.) I was determined to do better.

  Finally, we were asked to write something particularly for the literary semiannual, and I grimly tried again. I wrote an essay called “Little Brothers” about a new little baby entering our house five years before. I tried to be funny about it. Newfield actually accepted it and eventually it was printed, the very first significant piece of my writing ever to be printed.

  I tried to thank Newfield, hoping he would tell me how much I had improved, but no such thing. Apparently, this being in the depth of the Great Depression, every student in the class, badly scarred by it, had written tragic Dostoyevskian pieces. Only I, rescued by the candy store, wrote a lighthearted piece. Newfield needed a lighthearted piece and mine was the only one. He had the bad grace and needless cruelty to tell me that that was the only reason he had taken it. He even added an editorial note in the semiannual, virtually apologizing for including it.

  Now how did I survive that?

  I must tell you that I was shaken to the core, and I cannot remember what arguments I used to convince myself that I was, indeed, a good writer, and would succeed. I suppose that I simply held on, stubbornly, to my own good opinion of myself and found refuge in hating Newfield. (I hate very few people, but I hate him.)

  To all those who “make good,” there must be some feeling such as “If only so-and-so knew about this, he’d be sorry he said such and such.” Or “She’d be sorry she turned me down.” The whole world might know you and acclaim you, but someone in the past, forever unreachable, forever unknowing, spoils it all. That remains a blot, a splotch of darkness, a never to be assuaged pain.

  In my case, it’s Newfield. I suppose he died before I became a truly famous writer, so that he never knew what he had done. Every once in a while, though, I wish I had a time machine and could go back to 1934 with some of my books and some of the articles that have been written about me and say to him, “How do you like that, you rotten louse? You didn’t know whom you had in your class. If you had treated me right, I could have recorded you as my discoverer, instead of branding you a rotten louse.”

  As a matter of fact, I have been so rubbed raw over the more than half a century of suffering I have endured that I have recently written a story entitled “Time Traveler,” in which a character who suffered exactly as I had did go back in time. Unfortunately, being a writer I was forced to end the story dramatically and appropriately, and not in such a way as to truly satisfy me. (No, I won’t tell you how it worked out.)

  The one satisfaction I have is this: There must be a few copies of that literary semiannual with “Little Brothers” in it. I own a copy, for instance. I assure you that, except for mine, there is no name in the table of contents that is well known. A number of poems are included by Alfred A. Duckett, a talented young African-American who went on to do considerable writing, but, overwhelmingly, the one familiar name is my own. There are collectors who, if faced with that copy, might well be willing to pay a sizable sum for it, if for no other reason than that it contains my first published piece of writing, the one Newfield apologized for.

  When the graduation yearbook came out, there was a listing of the best all-round scholar, the best writer, the best this and the best that. Needless to say, I was not named the best anything, and needless to say, none of the best this and the best that have (as far as I know) made names for themselves. In fact, the only place in the entire yearbook where I was mentioned was immediately under my photograph and there it said, “When he looks at a clock, it not only stops, it goes backward.” Schoolboy wit.

  No, my high school career was not a success in any worldly sense, though I did end up with a very high overall grade average. And this despite the fact that I discovered, to my considerable horror, that

  there were subjects I could not handle at all. I was used to taking up any academic subject, from grammar to advanced algebra and from German to history with equal ease. At Boys High, however, I had a semester of economics and found, to my utter amazement, that I didn’t understand it. Listening to the teacher did me no good, and reading up on it did me no good either. For the first time in my life, I ran up against a mental barrier—a subject that simply could not make its way into my brain.

  All this I had to survive. I had to bear up under the humiliation of the writing class, of the fact that I was not even in the first half dozen of grade averages, of the fact that I was totally ignored in the year book, and of the fact that there were subjects I could not understand.

  I managed. At least, I don’t recall being downcast. I was still a remarkable person, and I intended to show the world I was. I finished high school in 1935, only fifteen years old.

  Failure

  My intention was to enter Columbia College, the elite undergraduate school of Columbia University. My father couldn’t really afford the tuition, but he proposed to worry about that afterward. The first thing was to be allowed to enter. I went to be interviewed by the appropriate official at Columbia, the campus of which I entered for the first time on April 10, 1935.

  The interviewer would not take me. I know why. Columbia College’s quota for Jews for the coming year was already filled. It was my first serious experience with the hampering effect of anti-Semitism.
He was kind, though, and attributed the rejection to the fact that I was under age. I had to be sixteen to become a Columbia College fresh

  man. He suggested I agree to enter Seth Low Junior College, another undergraduate college of the university. (It also set the minimum age at sixteen, I noticed, but it didn’t seem to matter in a non-elite School.) It was located in Brooklyn, it would give me two years of .college education, and then I could take the final two years with the students of Columbia College.

  I agreed. I could scarcely do anything else.

  My father, however, did not agree. He was willing to go to consid erable trouble, even borrow money, to send me to Columbia College but not to Seth Low. So I bit the bullet and went to City College, to which I had also applied and which had accepted me. It did not charge tuition, but it was a kind of ghetto school, strongly Jewish, and graduates had little chance of finding cushy jobs. I spent three miserable days there, and the only thing I remember was the physical examination. Everyone else got their cards stamped WD, but mine was stamped PD. I inquired. WD, I was told, meant “well developed.” PD meant “poorly developed.” The fact that I was up to three years younger than all the others being examined was not taken into account. I felt bitterly insulted. But then a letter came from Seth Low. Where was I? My father, having opened the letter, phoned them to explain that I couldn’t afford the tuition. They offered him a hundred-dollar scholarship and he couldn’t resist that. I switched to Seth Low. Later I got a letter from City College. They had looked at the results of an intelligence test they had had the students take, and they were very anxious to have me come in and discuss my college career. I wrote back rather coldly and told them it was too late. I was going to Columbia. (“Poorly developed” indeed.)

  (The incident, by the way, led to a serious argument with my father.

  In Russia, receiving a letter was such a rare phenomenon that any

  member of the family who got his hands on it first opened it. I ex

  plained rather bitterly that we didn’t do things that way in the United States. A letter addressed to me could only be opened by me. My father was puzzled at this strange exclusivity, but from then on my mail was private.)

  Seth Low turned out to be a ghetto school, about half Jewish and half Italian-American. It apparently got the overflow of bright stu dents who could not be squeezed into Columbia College’s quota.

  Seth Low was not a successful school. After my freshman year, it was closed down, and we were transferred en masse to the campus at Morningside Heights. For the remainder of my college career, I sat in with the Columbia College class, listening to their lectures, talcing eir tests, and being marked by their standards. Did that make me a member of the class? It did not. I was classified s a university undergraduate. When the time came to graduate, every ember of the Columbia College class got a B.A., or Bachelor of ts, the gentleman’s degree. I got a B.S., or Bachelor of Science, a ess prestigious degree. I thought I got it because I majored in a cientific subject, but no, it was a gesture of second-class citizenship, I ventually found out, and it was one more source of annoyance to me.

  What’s more, the university eventually established the School of General Studies to succeed University Extension. It dealt primarily with those students who took night courses because they had to work during the day. Under that heading, they swept in a variety of miscellaneous categories, including university undergraduates. This means I am listed as an alumnus of the School of General Studies, and any careless biographer is going to conclude from that that I went to night school. I did not.

  Of course, eventually, Columbia University was sufficiently proud of me to grant me an honorary doctorate and make much of me and have me come in to address this function or that. And when Columbia College itself invited me to speak to them, I had enough clout to insist on doing so only if I were made a member of the class of 1939. I was, and in 1979 I attended the fortieth class reunion. This was not because I wanted to (I don’t attend reunions in general because I don’t value wallowing in nostalgia that much), but I did on this occasion in order to establish the franchise, so to speak. I didn’t know any of the others who attended the reunion, and while they all knew of me, I don’t think any of them remembered me as a classmate.

  In many ways, then, my college career was a failure, perhaps worse than my high school career. It saw a further slippage of my academic expertise too. In grammar school and junior high school, I was the smart kid. In high school, I was one of the smarter kids. In college, I was simply a smart kid of no particular distinction.

  The largest failure came toward the end of my college career.

  You see, there was a danger to the end of college. As long as I went to grammar school, junior high school, high school, and college, I was a schoolboy, content to live at home, work with the family, and live an accustomed and even-tenored life.

  As the years crept on, though, college graduation and a bachelor’s degree loomed, and I would have to find a job. The year of my graduation would be 1939. I would be nineteen, and jobs were still hard to get.

  What’s more, some jobs were barred to me, no matter what. There was no chance of my gaining the kind of job from which Jews were automatically barred—the kind that placed one on the stairway of advancement to the most prestigious and profitable positions, of course. But I won’t plead anti-Semitism. Even if I were not Jewish, but were still myself, I would not qualify. I did not make a good appearance, I was gangly, acne-ridden, had an easily provoked grin that, I think, lent a foolish expression to my face, and, to top it off, I was incredibly gauche socially. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting me.

  The only solution was to stay in school and, if possible, to be trained for a job in which I would be self-employed. By an odd turn of circumstance, I had already achieved that goal without knowing it. In my junior and senior years at college, I sold my first two or three stories and had become a professional writer.

  There was, however, no way in which I could imagine that I could do anything more with my stories than make an occasional few dollars for pin money. The thought of writing as a career, and as a well-paying one to boot, would have occurred only to a megalomaniac, and, for all my self-assurance, I was not that.

  The self-employed jobs open to Jews that carried the promise of social prestige and a good living were the professions: doctor, dentist, lawyer, accountant, and so on. Of course, it was best to be a doctor. A great many New York doctors were Jews, and it was a sure way for a Jew to succeed in a society that was moderately anti-Semitic.

  As it happened, my father had assumed this for a long time. Once I got out of college, he reasoned, I would naturally get into medical school and become a doctor. Since it never occurred to me to disagree with my father in such matters, I naturally assumed it too.

  As time went on, however, certain doubts began to gather within my mind. First of all, where on earth was the money to come from? There was no way I could afford tuition, books, and equipment. I made it through college by the narrowest of chances, with the aid of summer jobs, a couple of story sales, a couple of very small scholarships, and the scraping together of all the available family money. There was never anything to spare. Medical school would be much more expensive. There was no chance at all that I could make it.

  To make matters worse, my father developed angina pectoris in 1938 and there was serious question whether he could continue to work in the candy store, and whether I would not have to take over altogether and give up all hopes of becoming anything but a storekeeper myself.

  Fortunately, my father, who weighed 220 at the time, lost weight with all deliberate speed, coming down to 160, and remaining there for the rest of his life. He stayed on medication and continued to work in the candy store, but that still left a medical school career more questionable.

  On a more personal note, there was the matter of my having to leave home. What if I were accepted by a medical school in Ohio or Nevada?

  The fact is that I had lived
at home all my life and had only on the rarest of occasions, and for the briefest of intervals, left New York City. Again, as in the case of long hours, I might have rebelled against this, and when the occasion arrived and I was no longer compelled to stay at home, I might with the greatest of joy have undertaken to see the world. My brother, Stanley, has reacted in just this way. He and his wife travel the world over and love it. Unfortunately (or, perhaps, fortunately—who can tell in these mat ters?) the urge to travel withered in me. I didn’t want to leave home. In fact, I was terribly frightened of leaving home. I couldn’t sleep when I thought that I might have to go to another state and be entirely on my own and have to take care of myself. I didn’t know how to do that.

  To be sure, as life went on, I was eventually forced to leave home, and to live on my own, and to take on the responsibilities of a wife and children of my own. However, whenever I established myself to the point of calling somewhere home, I instantly fixed myself firmly there and didn’t want to leave.

  This has continued all my life long, and my aversion to travel, my desire to remain at home in my own comfortable and familiar environment, has strengthened. At the present moment, I live in Manhattan, and have lived here for twenty years. I do my level best never to leave Manhattan if I can possibly help it. To be utterly frank, I am not very excited about leaving my apartment. I am jealous of the fictional detective Nero Wolfe, who virtually never left his house on West Thirty-fifth Street.

  The third reason was the simplest of all. The more I thought of it, the more I realized I didn’t want to be a doctor, any kind of doctor. I can’t stand the sight of blood, I am queasy at any mention of wounds, I am unhappy at any description of illness. I realized that one grows hardened. I grew hardened to dissection when I took zoology in college, but I didn’t want to have to go through that painful process again.