Isaac Asimov
I. Asimov: A Memoir
Bantam,
Paperback [1995].
16mo. xii+578 pp. Introduction by
Isaac Asimov [xi-xii]. Epilogue by Janet Asimov [559-63]. Catalogue of Books by
Isaac Asimov [564-78]. 8 pp. of fuzzy photos!
Doubleday hardcover edition, April 1994.
Bantam paperback edition, February 1995.
16th printing per number line, n.d.
Contents
Introduction
1. Infant Prodigy?
2.
My
Father
3.
My
Mother
4.
Marcia
5.
Religion
6.
My
Name
7.
Anti-Semitism
8.
Library
9.
Bookworm
10. School
11. Growing Up
12. Long Hours
13. Pulp Fiction
14. Science Fiction
15. Beginning to Write
16. Humiliation
17. Failure
18. The Futurians
19. Frederik Pohl
20. Cyril M. Kornbluth
21. Donald Allen Wollheim
22. Early Sales
23. John Wood Campbell, Jr.
24. Robert Anson Heinlein
25. Lyon Sprague de Camp
26. Clifford Donald Simak
27. Jack Williamson
28. Lester del Rey
29. Theodore Sturgeon
30. Graduate School
31. Women
32. Heartbreak
33. “Nightfall”
34. As World War II Begins
35. Master of Arts
36. Pearl Harbor
37. Marriage and Problems
38. In-Laws
39. NAES
40. Life at War’s End
41. Games
42. Acrophobia
43. Claustrophilia
44. Ph.D. and Public Speaking
45. Postdoctorate
46. Job Hunting
47. The Big Three
48. Arthur Charles Clarke
49. More Family
50. First Novel
51. New Job at Last
52. Doubleday
53. Gnome Press
54. Boston University School of
Medicine
55. Scientific Papers
56. Novels
57. Nonfiction
58. Children
59. David
60. Robyn
61. Off the Cuff
62. Horace Leonard Gold
63. Country Living
64. Automobile
65. Fired!
66. Prolificity
67. Writer’s Problems
68. Critics
69. Humor
70. Literary Sex and Censorship
71. Doomsday
72. Style
73. Letters
74. Plagiarism
75. Science Fiction Conventions
76. Anthony Boucher
77. Randal Garrett
78. Harlan Ellison
79. Hal Clement
80. Ben Bova
81. Over My Head
82. Farewell to Science Fiction
83. The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
84. Janet
85. Mystery Novels
86. Lawrence P. Ashmead
87. Overweight
88. More Conventions
89. Guide
to Science
90. Indexes
91. Titles
92. Essay Collections
93. Histories
94. Reference Library
95. Boston University
Collection
96. Anthologies
97. Headnotes
98. My Own Hugos
99. Walker & Company
100.
Failures
101.
Teenagers
102.
Al
Capp
103.
Oases
104.
Judy-Lynn
del Rey
105.
The
Bible
106.
Hundredth
Book
107.
Death
108.
Life
After Death
109.
Divorce
110.
Second
Marriage
111.
Guide to Shakespeare
112.
Annotations
113.
New
In-Laws
114.
Hospitalizations
115.
Cruises
116.
Janet’s
Books
117.
Hollywood
118.
Star Trek Conventions
119.
Short
Mysteries
120.
Trap
Door Spiders
121.
Mensa
122.
The
Dutch Treat Club
123.
The
Baker Street Irregulars
124.
The
Gilbert & Sullivan Society
125.
Other
Clubs
126.
American Way
127.
Rensselaerville
Institute
128.
Mohonk
Mountain House
129.
Travel
130.
Foreign
Travel
131.
Martin
Harry Greenberg
132.
Isaac Asimov’s Science
Fiction Magazine
133.
Autobiography
134.
Heart
Attack
135.
Crown
Publishers
136.
Simon
& Schuster
137.
Marginal
Items
138.
Nightfall,
Inc.
139.
Hugh
Downs
140.
Best-seller
141.
Out
of the Past
142.
Word
Processor
143.
Police
144.
Heinz
Pagels
145.
New
Robot Novels
146.
Robyn
Again
147.
Triple
Bypass
148.
Azazel
149.
Fantastic Voyage II
150.
Limousines
151.
Humanists
152.
Senior
Citizen
153.
More
About Doubleday
154.
Interviews
155.
Honors
156.
Russian
Relatives
157.
Grand
Master
158.
Children’s
Books
159.
Recent
Novels
160.
Back
to Nonfiction
161.
Robert
Silverberg
162.
Gathering
Shadows
163.
Threescore
Years and Ten
164.
Hospital
165.
New
Autobiography
166. New Life
Epilogue, by Janet Asimov
Catalogue of Books by Isaac Asimov
===================================================
This is not a biography, in the sense of continuous narrative of one’s life, nor is it a memoir (never mind the subtitle), in the sense of dealing with a specific period of one’s life or a special activity. Rather, it’s a combination of both, loosely organised in 166 vaguely chronological snippets. I haven’t read Isaac’s two volumes of proper autobiography, In Memory Yet Green (1979) and In Joy Still Felt (1980), covering his life from 1920 to 1970 in, I am told, great detail. I’m not sure I’ll ever read these doubtless entertaining volumes. I. Asimov, neither a sequel nor an abridgement, ought to be sufficient for anybody but the most die-hard Asimovian fanatic.
I guess this book is best described as a mosaic of Isaac’s mind. It just happens to be one of the most powerful, insatiable, curious and versatile minds in history. We are fortunate such a mind happened to belong to such a fine writer. Isaac is by no means unique in this – Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell[1] are examples from the same century – but he is still in a class of his own. “It is not easy to talk of oneself without offence”, Somerset Maugham once wisely said.[2] Isaac Asimov has achieved this almost impossible feat with complete success.
The style is chatty and gossipy in the extreme: a garrulous old man talking to himself. It works surprisingly well during extended reading sessions, somewhat falling apart only in the pen portraits of people who were, for one reason or another, important in Asimov’s life. There are plenty of these character sketches, anybody from Isaac’s wives and children to legendary science-fiction writers and editors, but just about every one of them is unduly occupied with rather superficial biography. So far as I can judge from Arthur Clarke (48), the only one of Isaac’s friends with whom I am reasonably familiar, the biographical gossip is fairly accurate. All the same, it adds nothing of value to the book. The only example of somewhat negative attitude I can think of is Heinlein. He is dismissed, not just as opinionated and overbearing (quite normal things among SF writers), but also as somebody who tried unsuccessfully to move with the times and possessed “meanness of spirit that should not have been revealed to the world” (24) in a posthumous collection of letters. For a guy who loves talking about himself, Isaac spends quite a lot of his memoirs on other people; for a notoriously self-centred chap, he’s quite generous with them.
But so strong is Asimov’s authorial voice, and so compelling his personality, that even his most garrulous chatter is charming. At his autobiographical best, and this book contains a fair share of that, Isaac is endlessly endearing. The promise raised by the Introduction, as it turns out, is more than fulfilled by the next 550 pages:
So what I intend to do is describe my whole life a way of presenting my thoughts and make it an independent autobiography standing on its own feet. I won’t go into the kind of detail I went into in the first two volumes. What I intend to do is to break the book into numerous sections, each dealing with some different phase of my life or some different person who affected me, and follow it as far as necessary – to the very present, if need be.
I trust and hope that, in this way, you will get to know me really well, and, who knows, you may even get to like me. I would like that.
It’s hard not to like Isaac. It’s even harder not to love him.
The first person singular is not for nothing part from the title. Of course it’s supposed to be the letter “I”, as well as a pun on the title of Isaac’s most famous collection of short stories, but it’s a little more than either. It’s one of the most frequently used words on these pages. As Isaac is the first to admit, he is vain and conceited, indeed to a remarkable degree. He frankly admits the book that gave him most pleasure to write was his autobiography. “I was dealing with my favourite subject”, he writes with disarming candour in the Introduction. He became conscious of his intellectual superiority at an early age, and didn’t care who knew it. He did receive some serious blows to his vanity in high school and university (16-17), where he found his brilliance steadily diminishing in the context of his fellows, and he describes the shock (which he survived) with almost disconcerting frankness. Isaac never lost belief in his own, unique brand of genius: a generalist who knew a great deal about almost everything, a refreshing breeze through the stuffy boredom of specialists. He absolutely rejects any delusions of greatness; with him it’s the real thing (24):
Megalomania? No! I had a firm understanding of my own abilities and talents and I intended to show them to the world.
And he sure did!
Now, let us put all this in the right context, shall we? That Isaac was “self-absorbed” and “self-centred”, again as admitted by himself (repeatedly), is true enough. But this is nowhere near the whole truth.
Impish sense of humour, irreverent and inappropriate, always likely to shock the priggish, the prudish, the hidebound and the orthodox, has always been, for me at least, Asimov’s greatest asset. You’ll find plenty of hilarious examples on these pages. The Olivier autograph (10) is possibly my single greatest favourite; note how far Isaac goes beyond the mere telling of a funny story:
Why did I do it? Why didn’t I learn better? I don’t know. Perhaps it was a matter of reacting before thinking. I’ve been doing it all my life, although with diminishing frequency. Sometimes, even now, something funny but extremely inappropriate would occur to me and I say it before my teeth can bite it back.
Thus, one day, during
intermission in the lobby of a theater showing one of the Gilbert and Sullivan
plays (a passion of mine), a woman came up to me to ask for an autograph. I
obliged (I have never refused an autograph) and she said, “You’re only the
second person I ever asked for an autograph.”
Idly, I asked, “Who was the other?”
“Laurence Olivier,” she
said.
And, with horror, I heard myself say, “How honored Olivier would feel if he knew.”
It was meant as a joke, of course – humor by reversal – but she staggered away and I’m sure that she has told everyone she knows what a monster of vanity and arrogance I am.
Some people have a truly astonishing inability to appreciate a joke; to be a humorist is a dangerous profession. The vast majority of people are largely devoid of sense of humour – that, I have come to realise with age, is the chief problem of the world: it takes itself so damn seriously. Most people are of such tremendous importance to themselves that they cannot possibly imagine that other people, even some great ones, actually don’t take themselves too seriously. Note that “too”. Complete lack of seriousness leads only to complete flippancy, which is odious. But complete lack of sense of humour is far worse.
And here comes a funny contradiction. Asimov, like Lord Byron[3], Somerset Maugham[4] and Bertrand Russell[5] to name but three, was a great man with a genuine sense of humour. By “genuine” I mean the ability to take not too seriously the whole world, including, above all, himself. Isaac had that, and it remains probably his most underappreciated quality. Far too many readers take Asimov’s famous sense of humour merely for his ability to write an amusing narrative on any subject. This is not even close. For all of his vanity and conceit and arrogance and so on and so forth, Isaac never took himself quite so seriously as people without one millionth of his contribution to the world habitually do.
If genuine sense of humour is not enough to excuse Isaac’s egotism and vast capacity for accepting flattery, his achievements certainly are. They all but defy belief, and here’s another funny thing. Isaac is amazingly modest about them. You can feel he’s proud of what he’s done, as he well might, but he is more likely to praise the work of others than his own. “I never bother with false modesty, as you will quickly discover”, Isaac warns you from the Introduction. You will, indeed, discover no false modesty here. You will discover some genuine modesty.
Isaac was a voracious reader from an early age of just about anything except 20th-century fiction. The mere “fundamentals” of his education may have been laid in school, he says (8), but that was far from enough: “My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library.” He read anything from Homer and Shakespeare to the pulp science fiction magazines that were born at the time and had such a decisive effect on his career as a writer.[6] Isaac’s love of the Bible, Shakespeare, Swift, Milton and Byron is documented beyond reasonable doubt in lavishly annotated editions, but I had no idea he was a massive Dickens fan as well (8). Has anybody else ever read The Pickwick Papers 26 times! Few writers have described the joy of reading more vividly. But note the context which raises some tough questions (9):
I was, in other words, a classic “bookworm”. To those who are not bookworms, it must be a curious thought that someone would read and read, letting life with all its glory pass by unnoticed, wasting the carefree days of youth, missing the wonderful interplay of muscle and sinew. There must seem something sad and even tragic about it, and one might wonder what impels a youngster to do it.
But life is glorious when it is happy; days are carefree when they are happy; the interplay of thought and imagination is far superior to that of muscle and sinew. Let me tell you, if you don’t know from your own experience, that reading a good book, losing yourself in the interest of words and thoughts, is for some people (me, for instance) an incredible intensity of happiness.
If I want to recall peace, serenity, pleasure, I think of myself on those lazy summer afternoons, with my chair tipped back against the wall, the book on my lap, and the pages softly turning. There may have been, at certain times in my life, higher pitches of ecstasy, vast moments of relief and triumph, but for quiet, peaceful happiness, there has never been anything to compare with it.
Alas, people who don’t care about books cannot understand that. Alas again, this is the source of rigid prejudices and much bad blood. I’m sorry to say but those who live “the real life” are more often the aggressive and contemptuous party, looking down on the “bookworm” who does nothing but read all the time, wasting his or her life. Asimov remarks early on[7] that intellectual superiority makes people envious and angry much more often than physical superiority. He could have been talking about the eternal dividing line between readers and non-readers. Of course, balance, as always, is the key thing. Too much reading and no living is just as bad as too much living and no reading. Then again, it depends on the person. Different things make different people happy; and personal happiness, when all is said and done, is the only thing that matters to the individual. Asimov spent his life reading and writing, and he was probably one of the happiest men on earth.
Isaac started writing at 11, innocently enough, from an irresistible urge for telling stories, which makes perfect sense because this is one of the most primordial of all our urges (15). It never occurred to him at the time that any of his writings might be published, much less that one day he may become a professional writer and make a highly successful career out of writing. He describes with his usual, quite disarming honesty the debacle with his first fairly substantial published piece, an essay titled “Little Brothers” (16). A nasty English teacher named Max Newfield won for himself petty immortality by accepting and publishing this in a high-school magazine with an apology because he needed a light-hearted piece but didn’t have a better one submitted. Isaac smouldered with anger for decades, more than once wishing he had a time machine to go back and dispense some justice to Mr Newfield. If only the guy had at least lived until Isaac’s worldwide fame to know the enormity of his offence! All very vain and extremely silly, yet so utterly and inescapably human!
In 1938, aged 17, Isaac started selling stories; for money, of course, but also for independence. Why always count on his father? Why not pay his college tuition himself? Next year he made $197 from his writing, not a negligible sum in 1939: “It was not only the beginning of the time when I could pay off my own tuition expenses, but the beginning of my freedom from bondage, the beginning of my ability to support myself” (22). Ten years later, in 1949, Isaac calculated he had sold 60 stories and made $7,700 for the last 11 years (47), quite a tidy sum indeed, yet an average of $700 a month was not enough to live comfortably on it, especially with a wife around. It’s no wonder that it took him such a long time to commit himself to writing as a profession; it seems like the obvious thing to do with the benefit of hindsight, but during the 1940s, what with World War II, doctoral studies and army service, things didn’t look certain at all. The fact that he accepted a position at the Boston University School of Medicine (54) at the same time as he sold his first novel is a telling proof of Isaac’s insecurity at the time.
Isaac was the ultimate workaholic (6): “I don’t celebrate holidays, not the Jewish New Year, not Christmas, not Independence Day. Every day is workday for me, and holidays are particularly useful because there is no mail and no telephone calls to distract me.” He traces these “long hours” (12) to the work in his father’s candy store between the ages of 5 and 22. Some candy shop that must have been! It opened at 6 a.m. and closed at 1 a.m. Isaac is all praise about that business venture. Modest as it was, and much of his parents’ time as it took, it also gave him and his whole family a measure of economic security during the Depression. It seems rather simplistic to reduce Isaac’s manic-obsessive attitude towards writing with those no doubt awfully long hours in daddy’s candy shop. But he may have a point there. Writers are strange people. Stranger formative influences have shaped some of the greatest!
Reading and writing, that pretty much sums up Isaac’s life. It probably made him happier than almost any person on the planet who ever lived. He spends a great deal of space on his family and friends, including colleagues in the science-fiction community. He treats them with amused affection and seems quite fond of them. But I don’t think he ever considered them even remotely comparable in importance to his work: his bibliography certainly supports such an outrageous conclusion. Even Janet, his second wife for whom he was married for the last nearly 20 years of his life, didn’t slow down Isaac’s staggering production rate; if anything, she accelerated it. Isaac was evidently fond of his two children, the “gentleman of leisure” David (59) whom he apparently supported for life and the blue-eyed beauty Robyn who had as sharp a tongue as her father (“I can’t imagine where she gets it from”, 60)[8], but one of the most distressing confessions – and, alas, still hugely relevant in this sick society we live in! – is the admission that he and his first wife didn’t want those children. They had them under the usual social pressure (58):
The greatest single problem facing humanity today in the multiplicity of people. No environmental problem can possibly be solved till the population is stabilized and brought under control. Under these circumstances, it would seem that any young couple who were indifferent to children and showed no disposition to add to Earth’s burden ought to be encouraged and made much of.
The truth, however, is quite the contrary. The world would not let us be childless. People who met us invariably asked if we had children, and when we said we didn’t, they would look at us with disapproval or with sorrow. Our fellow young marrieds, one by one, had children and then would talk of nothing else but the joys of parenthood. (In my more cynical moments, I wondered if they were so appalled by the expense, the work, and the responsibility of parenthood that they were infuriated at our having escaped it, and therefore did their best to inveigle us into the trap.)
Isaac is not one to avoid, much less mince words about, “sensitive” subjects. When he feels strongly about something, and has evidently thought about it a lot, he shoots his opinion, never mind how unpopular it might be in some quarters. He has no qualms to describe some members of the Mensa as “brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs [...] likely to be as irrational as anyone else” (121) or rock ‘n’ roll as “vile noise” (132). If such words lose him some friends, Isaac would consider them well lost.
Much space is dedicated to his own writings, which Isaac tacitly loves more than any others (every writer does, never mind what he does or doesn’t say). I wouldn’t say there’s anything terribly illuminating in these passages. Still, some curiosities might be mentioned briefly. Isaac is rather dismissive of his most famous short story, “Nightfall” (1941), seeing in it “ample signs of pulpishness in the writing”, something he didn’t think he got rid off until 1946 (33). He is justly proud of his legendary series of essays (92) for the Magazine for Fantasy and Science Fiction which continued for well over thirty years every month without fail. The still-read Guide to Shakespeare (1970) was “the most fun I’ve ever had, writing” (111) with the single exception of his autobiographies. Foundation as directly inspired by The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (39) is a stimulating notion; Isaac goes as far as to claim he “borrowed freely” (74) from Gibbon’s tremendous work. It’s the decline and fall of the Galactic Empire, after all, although Isaac’s lifelong love for history and historical novels also helped.
The critics are mentioned often but almost invariably in scathing terms, including in their own chapter (68). Isaac evidently read a good deal of criticism of his own works, but he doesn’t seem to have taken it seriously at all. He was infuriated by negative reviews, but he consoled himself with the hardly disputable fact that most critics (never mind a few exceptions) are “fly-by-night pipsqueaks without any qualifications for the job other than the rudimentary ability to read and write”. He certainly never revised a book, much less changed his writing ways, as a response to criticism. He usually dismissed those “eunuchs in a harem” (Brendan Behan speaking) with remarks like “critics often complained about that in my novels, but to perdition with them” (140) or “critics objected to this, but there are idiots in every walk of life” (85); “crania that are more bone than mind” (66) and so on. Isaac had an unshakeable belief in his own work, which of course is no guarantee of value, but in his case it happens to be. He is right, though, that spiteful reviews are “another source of insecurity” and can “hurt a writer’s fragile ego”, yet he is positive – and, fortunately, perfectly correct as well – “it’s just imagination” that bad reviews can seal a book’s fate (68).
Isaac’s personality is what really shines on these pages; his vanity and self-absorption, for my part entirely negated by his sense of humour, have already been mentioned. There is much more here, usually under the form of fleeting but revealing glances. Some prejudices – no gambling, no Hollywood (9) – came early in life and were kept for good in every sense of the phrase. Anti-travel and no-planes (42) are his most (in)famous phobia and that was arguably not for good, yet Isaac apparently did quite well on land and water, reaching Florida and California by train as well as London and Paris by ship. Isaac’s fear of flying is a remarkable example of irrationality in what is otherwise one of the most rational of men. He was perfectly aware of that and similar cases, always searching for a sensible explanation or using them as a springboard for philosophical reflection. An incident in “Graduate School” (30), where he killed a cat for laboratory studies and continued to be racked with guilt for five decades, occasions an arresting observation on the gulf between intellectual and emotional understanding. Smoking (37) was another pet peeve, big enough to be one of the reasons for the break-up of his first marriage. He makes, as usual, a good case that an apparently small thing is not quite so small as it looks. There were other reasons for the death of his first marriage, of course, not least unequal attraction on both sides and mutually incompatible characters. But smoking must have helped.
Some contradictions in Isaac’s personality are all the more amusing for being largely unrecognised. He is proud of his integrity, especially in financial matters. He is uneasy for a $2,000 advance Doubleday gave him for a robot novel he never completed and was relieved when it could be deducted from another book (82). He once phoned John Campbell because he’d been paid too much. Campbell laughed – he was usually accused of paying too little, never before for paying too much – and then explained he had raised the usual price of a penny a word with one quarter because Isaac’s story was too good (33). And yet Isaac defends endless reprinting of his old stories with all sorts of phony arguments, finally boiling down to the single most important fact: “they sell”. Isaac is more than a little disingenuous here and, for all of his mighty mental powers, seems completely unaware of that. No doubt his stories sold well enough on the umpteenth reprint. “Publishers are willing to do them for that reason and I have no objection to that” (92).
Amazingly enough, Isaac viewed “the vast number of books I would publish” as his chief source of posthumous recognition; he does add “the range of subjects” (97), but it’s the number he is clearly smitten with. Isaac was being really very silly here. Quantity can never substitute for quality. And yet, sadly, Isaac does have a point that people have more often noted the number of his books, and the range of subjects if you like, than anything else. “It would be nice if the good quality of the books were also appreciated, but I had the feeling no one would notice this; they would notice only the number.” (97) Human stupidity is more certainly infinite than the universe, as Einstein reportedly said, but that’s no reason to become stupid yourself. Stupidly, Isaac did – and even compromised his ethical standards to increase the total of his books. That’s why he invented “headnotes” and added introductions: so that he could count anthologies and collections of reprints as new books, and his own at that. He is anxious to convince his readers that all those anthologies with Marty Greenberg really did require solid work; it wasn’t just putting Asimov's name on the cover. Then Isaac has a fit of complete honesty (131): “I have published 451 books, of which 116 are anthologies of other people’s stories.” Well, Isaac, that means you've written 335 books. And how many of these consisted mostly of reprints or were kid pamphlets or had a co-author? See Appendix below for further discussion of that topic.
“No one ever acclaimed me as a great literary light” (97), Isaac observes with something like bitterness. “I was never a threat to the reign of the Bellows and Updikes and I never could be.” But who are these guys? John Updike and Saul Bellow? Are they very much read, or even remembered, today? As a matter of objectively verifiable fact, they are less popular than Isaac Asimov – and they died 17 and 13 years later, respectively. They’ve been forgotten more quickly and more successfully. One won the Nobel Prize, the other a couple of Pulitzers, but who cares? Both were fairly prolific, too. Isaac’s love affair with his “prolificity” (see below) is way sillier and more embarrassing than all of his other prejudices taken together.
On the other hand, Isaac’s attitude to religion (5) and anti-Semitism (7) shows the rationalist at his very best; his discussion of sexual matters (31)[9] contains common sense raised to the level of wisdom unmatched in my reading experience with the single exception of Bertrand Russell[10]. Never one to mince words, Isaac exposes his fellow Jews, many of them anyway, as one of the worst anti-Gentiles out there, even worse than the most rabid anti-Semites among the Gentiles. Quite a few of them were atrocious racists when it came to black people, and didn’t even realise it. Some of Isaac’s most powerful writing in this book is about the persecuted who become the persecutors as soon as they get the power. The Jews provide a few telling examples, but so do many other races and nations, including the Bulgarians who exchanged the Turkish yoke for hateful repression of the Turkish minorities. It says something about Isaac’s all-encompassing knowledge that he knows anything at all about this obscure bit from the modern history of one very modest country in south-eastern Europe. As for religion, this is best left in the author’s own words. If only such outlook were more widespread!
I have never, in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying. I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so.
Mind you, this isn’t easy. We are so surrounded by tales of the supernatural, by the easy acceptance of the supernatural, by the thunders of the powers that be who attempt with all their might to convince us of the existence of the supernatural, that the strongest among us may feel himself swayed.
It’s not easy at all indeed! But unless it’s possible to make this kind of outlook fairly widespread – we’re in deep trouble!
Among many other insights into Isaac’s inexhaustible mind, one of my favourites are the joys of self-employment (10): “I never found true peace till I turned my whole working life into self-employment. I was not made to be an employee.” This is what you would expect from a guy so arrogant, vain, self-centred, etc. But this is missing the point. The point is that Isaac was above all an artist – a great artist indeed – and thus the most vital thing for him was artistic freedom. People as different as Somerset Maugham and Herbert von Karajan worked hard for decades to achieve complete artistic independence, and when they did they worked harder than ever before. So did Isaac. As usual, he is quite candid about it (52):
Money has, for a long time, ceased being an issue with me. I have enough. There are other things I want more and the chief of these is the gift of being able to write what I want to write in the way I want to write it, and do it with the comfortable certainty that it would be published. This Doubleday made possible for me quite early on.
It’s hard to say when Isaac became a full-fledged self-employed professional writer, but by the early 1950s, having published I, Robot (1950) and Foundation (1951), he must have been. Around the same time he started producing book-length non-fiction in terrific amounts, by the late 1950s began his outstanding career – perhaps the most outstanding of all his literary careers – as an essayist.[11] He kept his Boston position for eight years, and he claims it was useful to him (he’s quite snobbish about his professorial title). He was finally sacked on 30 June 1958 and that, officially, was the beginning of his professional writing. It boggles the mind that Isaac Asimov could ever have been insecure about his future as a professional writer, but as late as the late 1950s apparently he was (66):
I must admit that I was a little nervous on July 1, 1958. There I was, thirty-seven years old (definitely middle-aged), with an unhappy wife, two children aged seven and three, and no job.
Things weren’t all bad. We had bought a house in 1956 and paid off the mortgage almost at once, so that we owned it free and clear. I had a decent sum of money in the bank and now that we had been married for nearly sixteen years I could fulfill my promise and buy some diamonds (rather small ones, I must admit) for my first wife, Gertrude – but she didn’t want them. And, of course, there was my writing, which was now bringing in, all by itself, somewhat in excess of $15,000 a year.
The trouble was psychological. From 1942 to 1945 and again from 1949 to 1958, I had had a job and a fixed salary. The salary wasn’t high but it was something to fall back on and gave me the illusion of security. Now the question was: Could I write full-time without the security of a basic salary as fallback? Could I write full-time without my mind quickly wearing itself out and running dry? Would the basic problems of a writer’s insecurity quickly overwhelm me?
On writing Isaac is at his most brilliant and at his silliest. The latter is fortunately limited to his astounding productivity, or “prolificity” in Asimovian lingo. Isaac is inordinately fond of counting the number of books he’s published. At least he has the guts to admit this is a “trivial point which can seem important to me, but, I’m sure, can only amuse others” (55). It is indeed amusing, whether or not it was taken seriously by the author. Isaac was made fun of in this regard even by his closest friends, such as Arthur Clarke who, with equal foolishness, was a little envious about it.[12]
But about writing, as about so many other things in this remarkable memoir, Isaac is all too often dead serious and more than a little perceptive. Loneliness and insecurity – often allied to alcoholism (28) – are only part of the writer’s plight. He is an essential outsider, self-absorbed to the point of alienation, all too often lacking social graces. One of Isaac’s most penetrating observations is that to be a “prolific writer” (66) – what Somerset Maugham called a “professional writer” – one has to love above all the process of writing itself, by pen, typewriter or computer, it doesn’t matter. And Isaac does have a point even about “prolificity” – most great writers, from Shakespeare and Swift to Dickens and Wells to Huxley and Maugham have been stupendously prolific. Some of his reflections, for instance about the unconscious writing at all times or the virtues of simple and unaffected style (66), are curiously similar to Maugham’s, an accidental similarity I’m pretty sure.[13] “If anyone thinks”, Isaac says, “that it is easy to write with absolute clarity and no frills, I recommend that he try it.” Maugham would have loved that sentence.[14]
The vagaries of memory are a prominent leitmotif. Isaac is proud of his total recall of almost anything that interests him, yet curious blanks about important events persist and are freely admitted, e.g. when he first read Hamlet and King Lear (8) or how he survived the first and only heartbreak in his life (32). Of other crucial moments Isaac has vivid memories. Naturally enough, he developed “an absolute detestation of the army, of its routine, of its mindlessness, of its callousness, of its meaninglessness, but, looking back on it, this hurt me more than it hurt the army” (40). Amazingly, the Army made Isaac a better writer and even a better man. He traces to his eight months and twenty-six days (40) in NAES (Navy Air Experimental Station) the beginning of his maturity, namely the ability to keep his cleverness at bay and not offer unsolicited knowledge. It’s a remarkable example of mental dissection, some that takes a lot of brains and much more courage, and it does deserve a quote at some length. It happened at Honolulu after Isaac overheard a group of soldiers getting “all wrong” the workings of the atom bomb:
Wearily, I put down my book and began to get to my feet so that I could join them, assume “the smart man’s burden,” and educate them. Halfway to my feet, however, I thought, “Who appointed you to be their educator? Is it going to hurt them to be wrong about the atomic bomb?” And I returned to my book.
This is the first occasion I can remember in which I deliberately resisted the impulse to put my remarkability on display.
It doesn’t mean that my character changed suddenly and completely, but it was a step, a tiny first step, in the forging of what I can only describe as a new me. I was still obnoxious to many, I still failed to get along with my superiors, but I began to change. I began to be able to “turn it off,” to not be forever putting my cleverness on display.
I answer questions if asked, I explain if an explanation is requested, I write educational articles for those who wish to read them, but I have learned not to volunteer my knowledge, unsolicited.
It’s amazing the change that produced. It would seem that, very slowly, I mellowed. I did, in the process, seem to change the most important item in my makeup, the I-know-it-all syndrome that led to my unpopularity with others. In fact, if I may trust what others have told with increasing vehemence over the years, I seem to have become a much-beloved elderly person. Remembering how things were nearly two-thirds of a lifetime ago, I always feel astonished, especially when beautiful young women treat me as though I were a cuddly teddy bear. Fortunately, I have learned to bask in the adulation.
And I trace it all, I swear I do, to that moment in the Honolulu barracks.
The Army can change your life in all sorts of unexpected ways, even for the better. Isaac later became the greatest educator of his times, but, “and this is the crucial point, no one is forced to read what I write, and, indeed, the vast majority of Earth’s population does not read what I write. My education efforts are only for those who, voluntarily, wish to subject themselves to it.” It’s too bad for the world that even at the height of his popularity Isaac was far less read than, say, Agatha Christie. It’s a tragedy of unimaginable proportions that today, when the world is going more insane faster than ever before, Isaac is virtually unread, his educational non-fiction anyway.
Isaac’s doctoral studies made him recognise his brilliance as a public speaker (44) when he had to give a seminar about his work. That came again out of the blue, or so it seems. Isaac claims he had no awareness of this gift of his: it simply popped out at that seminar, although in later years it was, of course, tapped with gusto and a keen eye for fattening the bank account. Far from stopping with the accidental discovery, Isaac wonders how many other such gifts have remained undiscovered – in him and in others. It’s a classic Asimovian inference, coming out of nowhere and putting your thoughts out of order. The main job of society, come to think of it, should be to discover the special talents of its members and to foster them. But does it? Anywhere in the world? Did it ever? When? Where?
Criticism of America, the American way of life and the American Dream (a Delusion with a capital D) also sneaks in here and there. Even some American icons are knocked down with a vengeance, for instance Ronald Reagan who is murdered with “a brainless fellow who echoes the opinions of anyone who gets close to him” (24). A great fan of libraries and the intellectual freedom they allow to youngsters, Isaac considers cutting library funds to mean that “American society has found one more way to destroy itself” (8). The American public is “never notable for thinking for themselves” (11), an observation far more relevant today, and not only in America either, than it was almost thirty years ago. Viral hype and media pressure have made sure that fewer and fewer people continue to think for themselves. Isaac has some frighteningly modern reflections on schools (10) and literacy (14); scarily global, too:
We live in a society today in which schoolchildren are involved with drugs, in which they carry weapons to school with them, in which they beat up and, sometimes, rape teachers. Such behavior could not have been imagined in the schools of my time. I was worst-behaved because I whispered in class.
In short, the age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate. Now that is gone, and the youngsters have their glazed eyes fixed on the television tube. The result is clear. True literacy is becoming an arcane art, and the nation is steadily “dumbing down.”
Isaac was indeed happy to die back in 1992. What he would have said today, in the Age of Internet, Smartphones and Reality Shows (all capitalised, as befit gods), I don’t want even to imagine. Ironically enough, reading has regained some of its status with the coming of Internet – but not literacy. And certainly not intelligence or knowledge. It’s been said that the Internet doesn’t make people dumb but only reveals the dumb ones. True enough for the grown-ups. Quite untrue, I believe, for children who grow up virtually online. They are forced to read, often enough, but they are not forced to think, much less to study. So they grow up morons; whatever mental potential, if any, they ever had remains undeveloped, or at best severely underdeveloped. The youngsters of today read Wikipedia and think they know all there is to be known. They have access to information about everything but no real knowledge about anything. Because knowledge differs from information as much as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony differs from the random collection of sounds on a busy street. It’s a difference of kind, not of degree. Knowledge is information processed by intelligence for the benefit of all – a rarity today. A solid case can be made that human society, never a very sane or very smart entity, has been growing consistently and considerably more insane and dumber in the last couple of decades. Yes, Isaac is better off dead!
But, of course, he is not dead. So long as a writer is read he is alive. Asimov’s magisterial legacy is not likely to die soon. At least I hope so.
I. Asimov doesn’t seem to be doing very well on the reading market, and that’s a shame. Not only is it a marvellous self-portrait of a man aware of his genius and proud of it with the proper dose of humour, yet unafraid of admitting his follies and keen on analysing his equally unreasonable phobias, it is also a lesson from a master how to tackle controversial issues with fearless ferocity and massive amount of common sense. Isaac even knocks down the founding of Israel in 1948. Most of his Jewish friends were ecstatic, but Isaac considered the new state “a ghetto. We will be surrounded by tens of millions of Muslims who will never forgive, never forget, and never go away” (130). The same chapter ends with a dreamlike vision of humanity we are still, alas, far from making a reality.
The Earth should not be cut up into hundreds of different sections, each inhabited by a self-defined segment of humanity that considers its own welfare and its own “national security” to be paramount above all other consideration.
I am all for cultural diversity and would be willing to see each recognizable group value its cultural heritage. I am a New York patriot, for instance, and if I lived in Los Angeles, I would love to get together with other New York expatriates and sing “Give My Regards to Broadway.”
This sort of thing, however, should remain cultural and benign. I’m against it if it means that each group despises others and lusts to wipe them out. I’m against arming each little self-defined group with weapons with which to enforce its own prides and prejudices.
The Earth faces environmental problems right now that threaten the imminent destruction of civilization and the end of the planet as a livable world. Humanity cannot afford to waste its financial and emotional resources on endless, meaningless quarrels between each group and all others. There must be a sense of globalism in which the world unites to solve the real problems that face all groups alike.
Can that be done? The question is equivalent to: Can humanity survive?
I am not a Zionist, then, because I don’t believe in nations, and because Zionism merely sets up one more nation to trouble the world. It sets up one more nation to have “rights” and “demands” and “national security” and to feel it must guard itself against its neighbors.
There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don’t come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity.
The Epilogue by Janet Asimov is a poignant but rather self-indulgent essay about the rest of Isaac’s life. I. Asimov was finished in May 1990, but not published until almost four years later, in April 1994 – two years after Isaac’s death on 6 April, 1992. Why? This is the question Janet frustratingly leaves unanswered. She does say Isaac wanted the book published right away and she does mention the publisher demanded drastic abridgement. Neither happened, the latter fortunately, the former unfortunately, but we are told nothing more. Janet would have made herself much more useful had she compiled an index.
The Catalogue of Books in the end is a fascinating curiosity. Certainly, it is more engrossing than Homer’s Catalogue of Ships. “How many books did Isaac Asimov write?” is a frequently asked question, not least, alas, by Isaac himself. The greatest Asimovian authority online says, for a short answer, “An awful lot. Hundreds.” But are they really hundreds? The same authority counted 469 books in the “I. Asimov” list. But these included 2 wall posters, 1 calendar and no fewer than 117 science fiction anthologies edited by Asimov. All these books, while they do have their place in a comprehensive bibliography for the specialist, should be excluded from one designed for popular use. Collaborations and books for children or young adults ought to be excluded as well; the latter are not serious literary work, either in extent or in depth, and the former taint the deeply intimate connection one inevitably establishes with a favourite author.
Quite a few Asimov books are compilations of material not only previously published, but previously collected as well. The four collections of essays Asimov on... (astronomy, chemistry, physics, numbers) are not original at all: they do consist of material previously collected in other collections. An introduction, occasional footnotes, indices, illustrations and even long captions of considerable interest cannot make these books pass for anything else but repetitions. Worthy additions to your shelves as they are, even if you do have the original collections, they have no place in a true bibliography designed for readers.
So, the really relevant question is this: How many full-length books consisting mostly of previously uncollected or unpublished material did Isaac write as a sole author? An answer to that question that avoids glibness requires Asimovian expertise I don’t, at least as yet, possess. Nevertheless, I have made an attempt to answer. I have always found bibliographical research an enlightening pleasure to indulge in, especially when it comes to an author I’m spellbound by but don’t know much about and want to explore further.
So, here is my personal bibliography of Isaac Asimov, according to my own criteria. I have followed pretty much the same guidelines as in my attempt for a bibliography of Arthur Clarke. Let me repeat. No co-authorships, never mind how much Asimov may have contributed to them. No children or young adult books, never mind how many innocent minds they might have fired. No books edited or annotated by Asimov, never mind how extensive his editing or annotation might be. No repetitions, so far as it could be helped. There are exceptions, of course. Isaac’s annotated versions of masterpiece by Byron, Milton and Swift are included. In this case the annotation is not only extensive but highly original as well. Nobody else could have written those commentaries; no, sir, not even close. Ergo, they have their rightful place in any Asimovian bibliography for readers (as opposed to one for collectors). There are some repetitions also. By and large, though, only books of mostly if not entirely previously uncollected or unpublished material are included. Hence the omission of collections like The Complete Robot (1982, 31 stories, only 4 previously uncollected/unpublished).
Isaac Asimov: A Very Brief Bibliography
Novels
1. Pebble in the Sky (1950)
2.
The Stars, Like Dust (1951)
3.
Foundation (1951)
4.
Foundation and Empire (1952)
5.
The Currents of Space (1952)
6.
Second Foundation (1953)
7.
The Caves of Steel (1954)
8. The End of Eternity (1955)
9. The Naked Sun (1957)
10. The Gods Themselves (1972)
11. Foundation’s Edge (1982)
12. The Robots of Dawn (1983)
13. Robots and Empire (1985)
14. Foundation and Earth (1986)
15. Fantastic Voyage II (1987)
16. Prelude to Foundation (1988)
17. Nemesis (1989)
18. Forward the Foundation (1993)
Short Story
Collections
1.
I,
Robot (1950, 9 stories)
2.
The
Martian Way and Other Stories (1951, 4 stories)
3.
Earth
Is Room Enough (1957, 15 stories & 2 poems)
4.
Nine Tomorrows (1959, 9 stories & 3 poems)
5.
The
Rest of the Robots (1964, 8 stories & 2 novels, 7-8 above)
6.
Nightfall and Other Stories (1967, 20 stories)
7.
The
Early Asimov (1972, 27 stories)
8.
Buy
Jupiter and Other Stories (1975, 24 stories)
9.
The
Bicentennial Man and Other Stories (1976, 11 stories & 1 poem)
10. The Winds of Change and
Other Stories (1983, 21 stories)
11. Azazel (1988, 18 stories)
12. Gold (1995, 15 stories
& 35 essays)
Essay
Collections
1.
Only
a Trillion (1957)
2.
Fact and Fancy (1962, MFSF #1)
3.
View from a Height (1963, MFSF #2)
4.
Adding a Dimension (1964, MFSF #3)
5.
Of Time and Space and Other Things (1965, MFSF #4)
6.
From Earth to Heaven (1966, MFSF #5)
7.
Is
Anyone There (1967)
8.
Science, Numbers, and I (1968, MFSF #6)
9.
The Solar System and Back (1970, MFSF #7)
10. The Stars in their Courses (1971, MFSF #8)
11. The Left Hand of the Electron (1972, MFSF #9)
12. The Tragedy of the Moon (1973, MFSF #10)
13. Today and Tomorrow and... (1973)
14. Science Past, Science
Future (1975)
15. Of Matters Great and Small (1975, MFSF #11)
16. The Planet That Wasn’t (1976, MFSF #12)
17. The Beginning and the End
(1977)
18. Life and Time (1978)
19. Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright (1978, MFSF #13)
20. The Road to Infinity (1979, MFSF #14)
21. The Threats of Our World
(1979)
22. The Sun Shines Bright (1981, MFSF #15)
23. Counting the Eons (1983, MFSF #16)
24. The Roving Mind (1983)
25. X Stands for Unknown (1984, MFSF #17)
26. The Subatomic Monster (1985, MFSF #18)
27. Far as Human Eye Could See (1987, MFSF #19)
28. The Relativity of Wrong (1988, MFSF #20)
29. Out of the Everywhere (1990, MFSF #21)
30. The Secret of the Universe (1991, MFSF #22)
Non-fiction:
Science
1.
The
Chemicals of Life (1954)
2.
Chemistry
and Human Health (1956)
3.
Inside
the Atom (1956)
4.
The Clock We Live On (1959)
5.
Realm
of Numbers (1959)
6.
Realm
of Measure (1960)
7.
The
Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science (1960, rev. 1965, 1972 & 1984)
8.
The
Living River (1960)
9.
The
Wellsprings of Life (1960)
10. Realm of Algebra (1961)
11. Life and Energy (1962)
12. The Genetic Code (1963)
13. Asimov’s Biographical
Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (1964)
14. A Short History of Biology
(1964)
15. A Short History of
Chemistry (1965)
16. Understanding Physics
(1966, 3 vols.)
17. Stars (1968)
18. Galaxies (1968)
19. Twentieth Century Discovery
(1969)
20. Photosynthesis (1969)
21. Light (1970)
22. Electricity and Man (1972)
23. More Words on Science
(1972)
24. The Sun (1973)
25. Comets and Meteors (1973)
26. Jupiter, the Largest Planet
(1973)
27. Our World in Space (1974)
28. Eyes on the Universe (1975)
29. The Solar System (1975)
30. Mars, the Red Planet (1975)
31. The Collapsing Universe (1977)
32. Extraterrestrial Civilizations (1979)
33. Saturn and Beyond (1979)
34. Venus, Near Neighbor of the
Sun (1981)
35. The Exploding Suns (1985)
36. Beginnings (1987)
37. Asimov’s Guide to Earth and
Space (1991)
Non-fiction:
History
1.
The
Greeks (1965)
2.
The
Roman Republic (1966)
3.
The
Roman Empire (1967)
4.
The
Near East (1968)
5.
The
Dark Ages (1968)
6.
The
Shaping of England (1969)
7.
Constantinople
(1970)
8.
The
Land of Canaan (1971)
9.
The
Shaping of France (1972)
10. The Shaping of North
America (1973)
11. The Birth of United States
(1974)
12. Our Federal Union (1975)
13. The Golden Door (1977)
14. Asimov’s Chronology of the
World (1991)
Non-fiction:
Literature
1.
Asimov’s Guide to the Bible (1968-9, 2 vols.)
2.
Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare (1970, 2 vols.)
3.
Asimov’s Annotated Don Juan (1972)
4.
Asimov’s
Annotated Paradise Lost (1976?)
5.
The
Annotated Gulliver’s Travels (1980)
6.
Asimov’s
Gilbert and Sullivan (1988)
Autobiography
1.
In
Memory Yet Green, 1920–1954 (1979)
2.
In
Joy Still Felt, 1954–1970 (1980)
3.
I.
Asimov: A Memoir (1994)
Mysteries
1.
The
Death Dealers (1958, novel)
2.
Asimov’s
Mysteries (1968, 14 stories)
3.
Tales
of the Black Widowers (1974, 12 stories)
4.
More
Tales of the Black Widowers (1976, 12 stories)
5.
Murder
at the ABA (1976, novel)
6.
Casebook
of the Black Widowers (1980, 12 stories)
7.
Banquets
of the Black Widowers (1984, 12 stories)
8. Puzzles of the Black Widowers (1990, 12 stories)
All in all, 128 books, one of them in three volumes, another couple in two. Astonishing productivity and versatility! But hardly “hundreds”!
One day I’ll flesh out the skeleton above with what really matters: the contents. But not just yet.
[1] Aldous
Huxley and Bertrand
Russell are only slightly less prolific and hardly less versatile than
Isaac. Forget Huxley’s novels, ranging from social satire to science fiction,
and Russell’s highly specialised contributions to logic and mathematics.
Consider merely their essays and popular books, respectively. Huxley wrote more
than 400 (!) essays on nearly every subject you can think of – and quite a few
you can’t! – to say nothing of his philosophical travelogues and historical studies.
Russell wrote full-length books on almost every branch of philosophy save
aesthetics (matter, mind, truth, knowledge, ethics), to say nothing of his
numerous writings on marriage and morals, religion and science, authority and
the individual, war and peace, education, power, politics, society, bolshevism,
history, happiness, relativity, China and what not – not to mention at least
ten collections of essays, four volumes of letters, two autobiographies and
even some fantasy short stories.
[2] Liza
of Lambeth [1897], Preface
for The Collected Edition, Heinemann,
1934.
[3] Instances of Byron’s prodigious sense
of humour are legion. Asimov himself gives a fine example of “Byron’s utter
lack of reverence for anything – even himself” in Asimov’s
Annotated Don Juan where he quotes an obscure stanza (“Fragment”) found
on the back of the manuscript of the first canto. Could, indeed, a work like Don Juan
have been written by a man without a genuine, pervasive, wholesome,
all-encompassing sense of humour?
[4] Nobody has described sense of humour,
its advantages and disadvantages, better than Somerset Maugham. See The
Summing Up (1938), Ch. XX: “You are not angry with people when you
laugh at them. Humour teaches tolerance...” If only sense of humour could be
more widespread!
[5] Russell’s devastating wit is almost
as legendary as Byron’s. “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish” (1943), first
published in pamphlet form and later collected in his Unpopular
Essays (1950), is perhaps the most concentrated example in a single
piece.
[6] As they did, of course, on Arthur
Clarke. See his marvellous “science fictional autobiography” Astounding
Days (1989).
[7] In the very first chapter, in fact.
The passage, casually inserted in brackets, is a fine example how Asimov can be
thought-provoking quite out of the blue and deserves to be quoted in full
(well, without the brackets):
Why is it, I wonder, that
anyone who displays athletic ability is an object of admiration to his
classmates, while one who displays superior mental ability is an object of
hatred? Is there some hidden understanding that it is brains, not muscles, that
define the human being and that children who are not good at athletics are
simply not good, while those that are not smart feel themselves to be subhuman?
I don’t know.
There is some food for thought here,
is there!
[8] At least two great examples of
Robyn’s verbal slash are given. When Isaac her, late in life apparently, what
kind of father he’d been, Robyn knocked him out with “Well, you were a busy
father” (66). When he wanted to know whether his daughter would love him if he were
poor and obscure, Robyn was sweetness personified: “Of course. You’d still be
crazy, wouldn’t you?” (60).
[9] Isaac claims, hard as it is to
believe, that he lost his virginity at the age of 22 with his first wife, also
a virgin. He admits the result was “disastrous” (31) and makes no bones theirs “was
not an easy marriage” (37). But this is no “tell-all shock-me-to-the-core” type
of memoirs. Isaac is commendably reticent on naughty matters. He is more
explicit on the unrequited love of his first wife, Gertrude, and the
domineering nature of his mother, but there are no cheap attempts to outrage
the reader, not even at the expense of people (like Gertrude’s mother) who
intensely disliked Isaac and he, of course, resented that.
[10] See Marriage
and Morals (1928), a book almost a century old yet still way ahead of
the times we live in.
[11] Incidentally, Arthur Clarke became
professional writer around the same time, with the publication of the fairly
technical but utterly engrossing Interplanetary
Flight (1950). He was never again on a payroll until the end of his
life, and neither, I suppose, was Isaac after he left Boston in 1958.
[12] See Arthur’s introduction
to Writing to Sell (1977) by Scott Meredith, his literary agent. The piece is
reprinted 1984: Spring –
A Choice of Futures (1984) and Greetings,
Carbon-Based Bipeds (1999). The latter review contains the hilarious
passage about Asimov.
[13] See The
Summing Up, Ch. XII and XLVI in particular. I’m pretty sure Isaac never
read that book, but I daresay it is not so unusual that he and Maugham should
have thought along the same lines on writing. Both spend their lives doing it
and had, despite huge differences in subject matter, background and
personality, strangely similar styles in which “simplicity, lucidity and euphony”
(Maugham’s holy trinity) was perfected as almost never before or since in the
history of letters. Isaac was right to be indignant with critics, “with crania
that are more bone than mind” (66), for whom a simple style was the same as “no
style”. The opposite is closer to the truth actually. A simple style reveals
the writer’s personality more effectively than an ornate, pompous style which
tends to mask it. It’s quite a different question whether a writer’s
personality is interesting enough to capture the reader’s attention, and one
must wonder if florid style is not all too often adopted to obscure
personalities that are just too tedious to be endured.
[14] Sometimes Asimov and
Maugham express the same opinion in almost the same words. Learning the craft is
a case in point. Isaac (116): “The only real way you can learn to write is to
write.” Willie, The
Summing Up, XLVIII: “You cannot write well or much (and I venture the
opinion that you cannot write well unless you write much) unless you form a
habit.”
