Our fears were groundless. Robyn was perfectly sweet and gentle.

  Janet and I had long-standing tickets for Shakespeare in the Park. It was to be Much Ado About Nothing this time, on August 10. Janet felt she simply couldn’t go and persuaded me to take Robyn instead. I don’t think Robyn had ever seen serious Shakespeare before and I was apprehensive that the language would throw her for a loss. Again, my fears were groundless. The play was magnificently done, and Robyn laughed all the way through and enjoyed herself tremendously.

  I continued my policy of joking, of course. The del Reys visited on August 13, talking volubly about everything but breasts. At one point, Judy-Lynn talked of a singles bar and said to Janet, “Have you ever been at a swinging singles?”

  “Been at one?” I interposed. “She has one.”

  Judy-Lynn instantly began to berate me, but Janet said, “Oh leave him alone. He’s just bragging. It isn’t large enough to swing.”

  (That night, by the way, Janet’s mother, who had been visiting her home state of Utah for a month, came home and we broke the news to her of Janet’s operation.)

  36

  Breadloaf and Statendam

  1

  Breadloaf was coming up again. I had done sufficiently well the previous year for John Ciardi to insist I come again in 1972 “and every year thereafter.”

  I had agreed, of course, but, after the mastectomy, Janet felt she simply wasn’t up to it, and there was no way in which I could back out so late in the game. I had to go without her. Young Leslie was going, though, so I picked her up in Westchester and took her along.

  I was in the same room as the year before and again there were the sessions with Ciardi, the lectures, the meals—everything, but without Janet. My evening talk on August 25 went well enough, but it fell far short of my talk of the previous year.

  One woman, who had not been at Breadloaf the previous year, said that she had heard I had given a marvelous talk at that time, one that had reduced the audience to tears, and could I tell her about it?

  I said I could scarcely deliver an hour talk for her, but I could give her a brief summary.

  Moving one person is harder than to move a hundred, since the hundred interact. Nevertheless, when I came to the “The Ugly Little Boy” peroration, I pulled out the stops and gave it in full and when I was through, one fat tear welled over a lower eyelid and rolled down her cheek.

  I was home on August 30, and I was so glad to see Janet, you can’t imagine. On September 2, I drove her to Ciardi’s place in Metuchen, New Jersey. Present were a few of the other faculty members so that Janet could have at least a small and distant taste of Breadloaf that year.

  I was hoping that the year after I could make it up to her but, as it turned out, 1972 was Ciardi’s last year as director of Breadloaf.

  I never returned either. I rather thought they would ask me to come back and that I would refuse out of loyalty to Ciardi. However, they must have anticipated this and never gave me the chance to do so.

  2

  September 5 was my mother’s seventy-seventh birthday. She was rather tearful about it when I called her and refused any celebration of the day. She talked only about my father, now dead three years.

  3

  I put together Asimov on Astronomy, the first of the recyclings of my F & SF essays, and brought it in to Doubleday on September 11.

  Two days later, I had lunch with a pleasant woman who wanted to do an article praising the usefulness of direct-mail advertising (which she wouldn’t let me refer to as “junk mail”). She had called Stanley first in order to find out where I could be reached and had asked him what he thought I would charge.

  Stanley then called me to warn me that he had said I charged a dollar a word.

  I was horrified. “Listen,” I said, “I charge a quarter a word.”

  He said, “What you need is an intelligent business manager. She’s willing to pay a dollar a word. Surely it would take that much to get you to praise junk mail.”

  True enough. It would take more than that.

  I called the woman and told her that unless she could convince me that direct-mail advertising was useful and good, I couldn’t write an article to that effect no matter how much she paid me. It was at lunch on September 13 that she educated me on the matter and I had to admit I had been too ready to accept the stereotype.

  I did write the article later that month—four thousand words for four thousand dollars. It was the first time I had ever earned a dollar a word. My title was “The Individualism to Come,” and it appeared in a special section of the New York Times on January 7, 1973.

  The thrust of the article was that in the coming age of computerization, direct-mail advertising could meet the needs of individuals, rather than masses, and that computers were therefore a humanizing force and not a dehumanizing one.

  A couple of months later, I incorporated this thesis into my 175th F & SF essay, “By the Numbers,”223 which appeared in the May 1973 F & SF. It was one of my most controversial essays, and I received a number of indignant letters from readers who would not accept my view of computers as benign.

  4

  I finally finished Jupiter on September 14, and instantly began on the second volume of my history of the United States. The first had been The Shaping of North America and the second was The Birth of the United States.

  I began dealing with this birth in a presidential election year, and I was in deep despair over this one. Nixon and Agnew were, of course, running for re-election. The Democratic nominee was McGovern, of whom I approved, but who, I felt, couldn’t win. While Janet was in the hospital, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee was forced to withdraw, and any feeble chance of defeating Nixon was gone.

  I attended a McGovern rally on September 20, and contributed money, muttering gloomily to Janet as I did so, “I better give him the money now, for he will sink without a trace in November.”

  Then on the twenty-third, I attended a party in which it seemed to me that even people I would have expected to be liberals were turning to Nixon. It was more than I could bear.

  “Nixon is a crook,” I said. “A common crook. He never told the truth in his life.” But no one believed me.

  5

  Janet was working on a science-fiction novel. It was by no means the first novel she had written. She had written two mystery novels in the years before I came to New York as well as a number of science-fiction stories but had been unable to sell them. She had, however, sold a mystery short story (under a pseudonym) to Hans Santesson, who then edited Saint Mystery.

  Janet was rather anxious to have me help her with her novel, but I refused absolutely to have anything to do with it. In the first place, if I helped and she then sold the novel, she would never believe that she had done it by herself. She would always suppose it had been my touch that had done it, however small that touch had been.

  Besides, I didn’t want the risk of petty squabbling over endless literary details upsetting the warm and even tenor of our relationship. I had witnessed too many unpleasantnesses in marriages between writers.

  I insisted on keeping to my own books, and on October 13, I completed How Did We Find Out About Dinosaurs? for Walker.

  6

  On October 14, I started my ninth Black Widowers story, “The Lullaby of Broadway.”224 The puzzle there involved mysterious bangings in an apartment. There I was working off my frustrations over mysterious bangings in Janet’s apartment. The apartment house she lived in was fine in many ways, but it seemed to have been built of sound-conducting concrete. Any noise in one apartment resounded hollowly in all other apartments, and no one could tell where the noise came from.

  I submitted it to EQMM on October 30 and, to my considerable astonishment, it was rejected. I had sold eight Black Widowers stories to EQMM over a period of a year and a half, and this was my first rejection.

  Yet the rejection was only a limited catastrophe. I had every intention of having Doubleday publish a collection of Black Widowers stories once I had enough to fill a book, and it would actually be useful to have some stories included that had not seen prior publication. I therefore put aside “The Lullaby of Broadway” for that purpose.

  7

  Richard Hoagland’s suggestion for an Apollo 17 cruise was still alive, somewhat to my surprise. The notion of having it on the Queen Elizabeth 2 had fallen through, but there was a chance of doing it on one of the Holland-American liners. On October 19, Richard hosted a cocktail party on the Rotterdam to help sell the cruise, and for the first time in my life I was on board a modern luxury liner.

  I was amazed to find carpets and elevators aboard ship and, indeed, everything resembling a particularly fancy hotel. My desire to take a cruise was suddenly intensified, and from then on I was quite certain I was going. (Janet had been on liners before. In fact, she had crossed the Atlantic on the Rotterdam itself at one time.)

  8

  I drove to Camden, New Jersey, on October 21 to speak at a college there, and realized only at the last moment that I didn’t have the name of the motel at which I was to be staying. Janet, who favored meticulous preparations, was surprised that I hadn’t been more careful about this but I said it didn’t matter. I knew where the college was and once we got there they would direct us to our motel.

  The trouble was that it was Saturday and the school was a community college, which meant no one lived on campus and it was empty. I finally discovered a library and an inhabitant librarian and asked how I might find the gentleman who was in charge of the lecture.

  He was not on the campus, of course, and a long checking of records turned up the fact that he had just moved, that he had left no forwarding address, and that he had an unlisted phone number. I realized that I had committed another Asimovian imbecility and that I had brought Janet and myself to a city under conditions where I did not know what living arrangements had been made for us, and couldn’t find out. Janet did not say one recriminating word—but she didn’t have to.

  Desperately, I said to the librarian, “Look. Suppose you had to put up a speaker at a hotel or motel. Which would you use?”

  She told me. It was seven miles back along the road I had taken to the school, seven miles of rough, small-town driving. I made it, grimly determined to stay at that motel whether it was the correct one or not, and if the school couldn’t find me, the hell with them.

  It was the correct hotel. My reservation was waiting for me.

  About an hour later, the man in charge of lecture arrangements called, blissfully confident I would be there. I said, trying to hide my exasperation, “See here, how is it you never included the name of the motel in our correspondence?”

  And the idiot responded, “But you never asked me.”

  9

  For many months, there had been desultory discussions concerning a projected book to be called Our World in Space. Chiefly, it was to be a large coffee-table book filled with paintings of space exploration by a superlative artist named Robert McCall. McCall wanted written matter to be included, and he wanted me to do it.

  At first McCall discussed the matter with Doubleday, but Doubleday wouldn’t offer McCall the deal he wanted, so he moved on to New York Graphic. I thought that meant I was abandoned, but not so. He still wanted me. I was reluctant, but I had difficulty refusing. The book would be beautiful and the writing would be easy, since it would be on subjects I had dealt with before.

  A minor irritation, however, was that the royalties were to be split 60–40 in favor of McCall and that he was to get top billing so that the book would be by McCall and Asimov.

  I decided to talk it out with McCall over lunch. I would tell him that he could have one or the other. If he wanted a 60–40 split, the book would have to be by Asimov and McCall. If he wanted McCall and Asimov, the royalties would have to be split 50–50. I intended to be quite firm about it.

  McCall was a tall, sandy-haired, freckle-faced fellow who was gentle and pleasant. I liked him a lot, but business was business!

  So at lunch, I said, “Bob, now here’s the situation. . . .”

  And McCall said, “Before you say anything, Isaac, I just want you to remember that you have already published about 150 books and this book we’re talking about is my—very—first—one.”

  I sat there speechless for a moment, and then gave in. It was McCall and Asimov and it was 60–40 his favor. I’m a lousy businessman, but that night I slept peacefully, and I wouldn’t have if I had insisted on having it my way.

  On October 25, I knocked off the first of the six chapters.

  10

  On the gray morning of October 27, Janet looked out of a north window of her apartment and said, “You ought to tell the Cromwell people to do something about their incinerator, Isaac. It’s belching out black smoke.”

  Wordlessly, I rushed for my coat.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “The Cromwell doesn’t have an incinerator,” I said, and was out the door.

  It was a fire, of course, but it was brought easily under control, and my side of the building was untouched. My apartment didn’t even smell of smoke, but it was a fright. I carried insurance, but there was no way that money alone could replace the complete set of my books or my manuscripts in progress—or even my library.

  11

  I gave up my Ford on October 29. It had been developing chronic troubles and it was silly to pay large garage bills for two cars when we needed only one. Thereafter, we made do with Janet’s Plymouth, which was smaller and, in terms of mileage, newer.

  It was another relic of my Boston era to vanish, and I was nostalgically sorry.

  12

  On November 7, I voted first thing in the morning—for McGovern, of course.

  For the first time in thirty-six years, I did not listen to election returns, since I knew that Nixon would win big and thought that McGovern would carry no more than three states. I wasn’t masochistic enough to want to wallow in the details.

  The reality proved to be even worse than my pessimism suggested. McGovern carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

  I got a very small amount of consolation out of the fact that Nixon, in his self-centered paranoia, had concentrated so entirely on a personal victory that no effort was made to insure a Republican victory one foot outside the Oval Office—so that in the face of an enormous presidential defeat, the Democrats nevertheless retained control of both houses of Congress.

  I said to Janet, unhappily, “Johnson won a similar landslide in 1964 and had destroyed himself by 1968, but that was because of the Vietnam War. Now the Vietnam War is ending in an American defeat that Nixon is going to pretend is a victory, and the American people will fall for it. I don’t see anything that can possibly give him the fate he deserves.”

  I didn’t have the faintest suspicion that the “anything” had already taken place and that the Watergate time bomb was ticking relentlessly. By now, of course, the actual burglars were coming up for trial, but I had no reason to think that it would go any farther than their conviction.

  13

  I was in Rochester on November 9, with the prospect of a talk to the New York State Librarians Association the next day. I was in a two-room hotel suite with (at the moment) nothing to do. Janet had gone to sleep and I sat there with the strong urge to write a tenth Black Widowers story—and I had not brought a typewriter with me.

  I was tempted to try to write the story with pen and ink, but it seemed to me that this would be far too tiring and that the mechanical detail of moving my hand to form the letters would interfere with the creative process.

  I was desperate enough to try, though. I used the hotel writing paper provided guests and began to write—and continued to write—and kept on writing till the story (the first draft, at least) was finished.

  I rushed into the next room and woke Janet. “Janet,” I said, “you know how noisy writing is. Well, it isn’t the writing that’s noisy, it’s the typewriter.” When I wrote by pen and ink, I was conscious of writing in a profound and, to me, an utterly unaccustomed silence.

  From that point on, I never took my typewriter with me on trips but relied on pen and ink if I wanted to write.

  This particular tale deserves a better conclusion, however. I called the story “Yankee Doodle Goes to Town,”225 and though I thought it one of the best Black Widowers I had ever written, Fred Dannay didn’t think so. To my considerable surprise, it was rejected, and I put it aside as an unpublished item to be included in my eventual collection.

  14

  New projects kept springing up. There was now an annual volume of Nebula award story collections, which included runners-up, and was thus different in nature from the Hugo awards volumes, which came out at five- or six-year intervals and included only the winners. Furthermore, the Nebula award stories were edited by different big-name writers each year.

  The eighth volume of the Nebula award collections, due out in 1973, was to be edited by myself—at least, so the Science Fiction Writers of America (which was in charge of the awards, and of the volume) wished. I pointed out that I edited the Hugo awards volumes, but they said there was no conflict of interest there.

  Since the Nebula awards volumes were published by Doubleday, I agreed—and found out only later that the SFWA had recently shifted publishers and were now working with Harper & Row. I consulted Larry Ashmead and, with his customary amiability, he said it would be perfectly all right for me to do it for Harper’s.