Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (29 page)

The heroic tale begins in 1920. Born 250 miles southwest of Moscow, Asimov sailed to New York with his parents and younger sister at the age of three. The family ran a candy store in Brooklyn. In the best pages of the book, Asimov describes how he taught himself to read English at the age of five. (If you ask Asimov whether he was a child prodigy, he will reliably answer: 'Yes, I was - and still am.')

Punctuating his narrative with phrases like 'Another memory is this one' and 'Oh well. I apologise for the interruption', Asimov tells us how his interest in science fiction took shape. Through his father's shop little Isaac had access to the SF magazines that had started proliferating in the 1920s. By the age of nine, he was an addict; by eleven, he was a scribbler. In 1938 he sold his first story.

Asimov contentedly explains that he was 'a major figure' in the genre at the age of twenty-one. The claim is probably justified: the awkward, friendless, pimply boy, still shackled to the candy-store counter, was also being hailed as a seminal figure. Asimov devotes the odd hundred pages here and there to his vicissitudes in academe (the Columbia University Graduate School) and in military service during the war (the US Navy Yard at Philadelphia); but his writing schedule provides the main thread of the book. At one point Asimov recalls a short story that he never managed to place anywhere. Startlingly, he then reprints it, in full. It is terrible. Such failures were rare, however, and the Asimov writing robot soon came stalking off the assembly line.

Two books a year, five books a year, ten books a year! A cent a word, a dime a word, a dollar a word! A $1,000 advance, a $10,000 paperback sale, a $50,000 royalty cheque! ... All autobiographies are success stories, and we share Asimov's gratified awe as fame and money start pouring in.

After a while, the reader is in some danger of feeling like a bailiff or a tax-inspector. Fortunately, though, Asimov often puts his ledgers aside to keep us up to date on everything else: problems with the air-conditioning, buying a new car ('This time it was going to be a Ford'), his children's bouts of measles, a faulty incinerator in his flatblock. All this information is quite unreflectingly compiled, with no variation of tone or style. Asimov writes about his divorce and remarriage in the same way he writes about tussles over contracts with Doubleday or Abelard-Schuman. And the ills which afflict most middle-class lives are given their dutiful due: there are consecutive chapters entitled 'My Thyroid' and 'Janet's Breast'.

But the book's most persistent theme is Asimov's inexhaustible, all-conquering self-love. Every anecdote is subtly, or openly, gauged to bolster his charm. His reported jokes begin with the phrase 'I said at once', and end with the phrase, 'Everyone laughed'. The mock-mandarin boasts transmit a serene collusion with their own coquetry. It is all meant to be very 'disarming'.

I went along to meet Asimov having just let
In Memory Yet Green
crash to the floor, and having just winched
In Joy Still Felt
on to the lectern. I knew more about Isaac Asimov than I knew about anyone else alive. What could there be left to add?

He is a bearish, messianic figure with porkchop sideburns, cowboy boots, a 'bolo' tie (silver brooch on a neck pulley), and a lumpy, muscular, overloaded forehead. I expected cheerful volubility, but Asimov gives off an air of irritated preoccupation, as if silently completing a stint of mental arithmetic.

We met at a Broadway radio station, where Asimov was giving an interview prior to the one he had promised me. He sat hunched at the round table, nodding at me as I was shown into the control room to wait with the elderly, chain-smoking lady producer.

'No funny stuff in there,' said Asimov gloomily. 'She's a nymphomaniac, you know.'

When the interview was over, Asimov mooched out into the street. 'You want something to eat?' he asked. 'You look skinny enough.' It was a typical New York spring day - 90 degrees, the tarmac spongy beneath your feet. In the cab, Asimov frequently fell silent as his gaze followed the lightly-clad women in the lunchtime crowds. 'Look at them all', he said abstractedly, ' - all out in their summer uniforms.'

We talked about robotics, psychohistory, inflation, future shock, fear of flying, space travel, marriage, overpopulation, Jimmy Carter, biological warfare, workoholicism, autobiography and Isaac Asimov. He is a far more reflective figure than you would have any right to expect, stoically resigned to his own eccentricity and waywardness.

'I wanted my autobiography to be unanalytical, without wisdom. I wanted to show the reader what it was like
to be me.
A genius, maybe, but also a schmuck. It's a big effort for me to behave like other people. I have to concentrate on it, otherwise I'd be impossible.'

Earlier that day, Asimov had absentmindedly jumped a coffee queue in the radio-station canteen.

'A girl turned to me and said, "Just because you're so famous doesn't mean you can go to the head of the line." I turned to her and
nearly
said, "Just because you're so damned insignificant doesn't mean ..." I shut myself up this time. But I got to keep trying about things like that.

'You know, everyone gets the idea I'm so bright I must be dumb. My wife Janet, she doesn't like the idea of me crossing the street by myself. She knows I'm always writing books inside my head - sort of crazy professor, I live inside my head all the time. But why not? I
like
my head.'

Asimov looked at his watch, for the fourth or fifth time. I thanked him for the interview and got up to leave - for a long afternoon with
In Joy Still Felt.

'I'd like to give you more time,' said Asimov, as he skulked off to his apartment. 'But if you'll excuse me, I've got a few books to write.'

Sunday Telegraph, 1980

DARTS: GUTTED FOR KEITH

Let us imagine the following scene. It is Men's Finals day at Wimbledon. Ivan Lendl and Boris Becker flex themselves on the same baseline, next to two little tables, on which stand tankards of lager. They have cigarettes in their mouths. A tuxed MC with a matinee mike steps forward and introduces the players. His voice is, if not the worst voice of all time, then certainly the worst voice yet. 'Best of order now. Game on. Ivan tyou er, throw first.'

Lendl refreshes himself with a husky drag and a few gulps of lager, steps forward with a deep breath, and
throws
a tennis ball at some arbitrary point in the opposing court — the junction of centre and service lines, perhaps. Becker follows, in his turn. The monotony of the contest is relieved only by the excitations, the fruity trills and graces of the scorer's voice.
'Love-thirty!
Fifteen-FORTY!' and so on, until the concluding, 'Yayce. First game, Ivan. Unlucky, Boris. Second game: Boris tyou er, throw first.'

I could have mentioned that Lendl and Becker have been outfitted by Rent-a-Tent and tip the scales at a couple of hundredweight each. But this would merely add to a sense of anachronism, or nostalgia. Always endearingly sensitive, always touchingly touchy about its image ('Let's face it. . .'), the world of darts is yet again in the process of cleaning itself up. With a groan of effort and many whimpers of protest (what about tradition? what about
civil rights?),
darts is trying once more to burst into a new dawn.

There is, to begin with, a fresh emphasis on personal appearance. It is now accounted a 'victory for darts' when a thin player beats a fat one. No smoking at the oché (the throwing line), at least in the televised stages. 'They're even thinking', said Martin Fitzmaurice, the large and affable MC, 'of banning
that.'
'What?' I asked, looking round. 'That,' he said. 'What?' I said.
'That,'
he said, indicating the pint of lager I had obediently ordered. No piercing whistles from the crowd, no hoarse screams of
poof
and
wanker.
You even hear tell that the sport's gentle giant Cliff Lazarenko (known as Big Cliff, which is one way of putting it) has whittled himself down to nineteen stone.

I sought guidance from the world number one, Bob Anderson, as he prepared for an exhibition match at a Bishopsgate pub called Underwriter. We were in Bob's 'dressing-room' at the time (a frosty wind-tunnel stacked with empties and beer crates), and Bob was trembling in his underwear. The Limestone Cowboy (explanation for nickname: lives near Swindon and likes Tex shirts) had brought along a selection of outfits in a zippered suitbag. He contemplated the scarlet tassels of what might have been an Elvis jumpsuit, and shook his head. 'No, I think this tartan job,' he said. He shivered. 'I shouldn't think many other world number ones have to put up with this kind of thing. But there we are.'

'You must be a godsend', I said, 'to the people who want to take darts up-market.' For Bob is sportsmanlike, articulate, well-spoken, above all slender.

'Thank you. That's the nicest thing a journalist's ever said to me.'

Bob's reaction surprised me, but not for long. The darters I spoke to all felt starved of 'recognition'. They were additionally gratified to attract the attention of the
Observer,
accustomed as they are to the odd smudged scurrility several pages from the back of the
Star.

'I regard myself, Bob went on, 'as an ambassador for the sport. Darts
has
to improve its image. We're talking about television, sponsorship, endorsements.'

'Get it out of the pub?'

'You can't get it out of the pub, and I wouldn't want to get it out of the pub. But it has to find a broader appeal. It has to move from the bar-room to the ballroom.'

I had entered Underwriter to a blizzard of badinage and dirty jokes (nymphomaniacs, vibrators) and there was more fierce cajolery when me and my mate Bob emerged from behind the heavy drapes. Mr Fitzmaurice and a personage known as the Clacton Stallion were jovially assembling the darts clobber: Mimic Board, Indicator, Enumerator. One-lining regulars, fourteen of whom would soon face Bob at the oché, now cackled away with the anecdotal landlord. In this milieu, you suddenly see the urgent meaning of that phrase about everybody needing a good laugh. The Algonquin Round Table could never have been so remorselessly pawky.

In fact, an atmosphere of piss-taking one-upmanship is the natural background of darts — appropriately, too, for the game is all about
scoring.
No sport is more bound up with nerve, with nerves, with nervelessness: the sense of your own resolve, the predatory awareness of an opponent's weakness. This is what darters are praising when they talk of 'the killer instinct'. And maybe that's all it comes down to: the savagery of your desire to get that dart
to go where you throw it.

'Man is the hunter,' Bob had told me. He competes against nature, but also against other hunters. 'If you hit the target, you bring home a haunch of venison. If you don't, it's turnips and gravy.'

That night in Bishopsgate, Bob's line sounded a bit on the grand side. Yet perhaps there's life in it. After all, in evolutionary terms, man has spent a lot more time throwing spears than he's spent in cities — or hanging around in pubs, throwing darts.

What will never change about the game is its essential simplicity. You could put it differently: what will never change about the game is its irreducible and dumbfounding starkness. Hand, projectile, target, through a medium of thin air — and that's that. Remove one umpire, both batsmen and all the fielders from a cricket pitch, and you get some idea of the dourness of darts. Even ten-pin bowling (the other great proletarian sport of the North Atlantic) has dimensions that darts could only wonder at: the spun or powered ball hits skittles, which then hit other skittles in varying ways, and the scores progress geometrically. There are things you
can
do with the darts and dartboard that involve strategy and complication. But these games are chess to the checkers, snooker to the billiards of 501, the format to which televised darts has grimly dwindled.

In 501, nine-tenths of the board is in effect never used. Of the board's wide face, the flat nose of the treble 20 (the size of an elongated postage stamp) is alone the grail of the players, the G-spot of the crowds. True, as each leg concludes, the player must 'finish' or 'check out' or 'make the pick-off, using the doubles. But this is just a different target, not a different
kind
of target (and the much-touted 'maths' of darts can be mastered over a weekend). There is no equivalent, in darts, to the wrong-footing cross-court topspin backhand half-volley. Every shot is the same shot.

Totally lacking in strategy, darts is also quite without technique. 'You got to get the basics right,' say the darters: head still, smooth arm, legs steady. But do you? Jocky Wilson hasn't got the basics right: he seems to be
riding
that dart into the cork. Alan Glazier looks as though he's throwing a harpoon. Ceri Morgan looks as though he's throwing a baseball.

'Ceri Morgan', said Bob, when I put this to him, 'looks as though he's throwing a baseball
bat.
No, everyone evolves a personal style. It's like golf.'

I didn't point out that no golfer addresses the ball sideways with one foot in the air (never mind a fag in his hand, or his mouth). We agreed, however, that in the absence of everything else darts came down to a natural ability - hand-eye — and natural resilience: i.e. bottle.

'Then what's wrong?' I said. 'Help me, Bob, help me.'

On a reasonable day a top thrower will 'average' about 30. This is my average too - but with three darts rather than one. I am what you might call a twenty-sixer: a dart in the 20, a dart in the 5, and a dart in the I. Sometimes the magics descend on me, and I am in the darter's nirvana: I'm not throwing them in - I'm
putting
them in.

Once, for instance, while throwing away, I threw 180: three treble 2os, the maximum. No sweat, I thought. Now I'll do a John Lowe: the fabled nine-darter. Three more treble 2os, then treble 17, treble 18, double 18. No sweat. I was, as they say, in a non-pressure situation: I was alone in the kitchen. I plucked the arrows from the board and returned to the line. I took a deep breath, and threw.