It is strange and complex, complex and strange and my orgasm is like a giant bird torn wing to wing by rifle fire, falling, falling, in the hot drenched sun of that damned Southwestern city.
That sentence written (as were many of the sentences of that and Oracle) with two year old Stephanie Jill burbling and cooing and muttering and bouncing and volubly discussing matters of climate at her father's knee didn't have in draft the word "damned," something seemed to be lacking and in the only revision in either of those two novels, the word was put in for rhythm and emphasis and all of it placed on or near the Girodias mattress shortly after Independence Day.
"You son of a bitch," he pointed out, "you make me crazy, do you know that? I ask you this time for pornography, a simple work of pornography, give you a plot and everything and ask you to keep it simple and low-class, I publish one book for you and ask you to do this for me and what do you do? You give me 40 pages which are beautiful, just beautiful, you even know the color of that one's bush how you tell that? and then what do you give me? You give me horse-racing, you give me existentialism, you give me despair! You give me terrible anxiety and depression! You give me pain and thwarted desire! This book will sell 400 copies, I have to publish it hardcover too because in paperback everyone will throw it away; I have to publish it because it is a masterpiece, but you destroy me, do you understand?"
It sold 350 copies in hardcover, actually, making it the leader of the second "new hardcover line" (Oracle sold half that and a novel by Alex Austin, Eleanore, sold according to statement 52 copies) but none of this was my fault, was it? I mean it was indeed (Lehmann-Haupt backed me up on this) anti-pornography for the coming age of Nixon and under the circumstances, the time could have been right.
But times were never right for the doomed Girodias. They had been laying for him in the American press for years and years, he said, because he had embarrassed them by putting into print consistently masterpieces that the American publishing establishment had been too cowardly or stupid to undertake: Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn and the Nexus trilogy and Candy and Lolita, and virtually everything else that Barney Rosset or Walter Minton had taken on after he had broken ground. (And because the books were published in English outside of the borders of the United States, they were by old copyright law in public domain in this country.) Perhaps he was right; it is not difficult—I can see this as clearly at 27 as I would be unable to admit it at 50—to do justly, to do mercy, to walk humbly and to be buried anyway.
Besides, Maurice had said, "Written pornography, it is finished. Finished! Visuals are coming, visuals are where it will be, that and high-toned classy books which hairdressers can hand their clientele. Softcore for the ladies, yes, but nothing for the gentlemen. Our basic audience would rather stare than read which they can hardly manage anyway. The ladies on the other hand will call it romance. It will be finished by 1972, just two years from now."
Like Fitzgerald, like Raymond Chandler, like Thomas Wolfe, my publisher could coolly observe his disaster as if from a distance and by seeming detachment from cataclysm feign control. The boat sailed anyway. The Frog Prince, the first volume of his proposed series of memoirs, takes him only up to the age of 19 (and is classically uninteresting as would, say, be the biography of the extra-instrumental life of Heifetz or Nixon), was published in France many years ago, perished in a Crown edition here at the start of this decade and bulletins are distant and infrequent. Which is a way of saying "There is no news." I am, then, or am not near the end of this memoir but would not want to finish without discussing the issue of courage. He had a crazy, a manifest, a royal physical courage which I much admired as did almost anyone who had witnessed its display; he had a true general's detachment, an indifference to consequence founded upon metaphysic. In a dangerous, a perilous Times Square bar at 2 a.m. once where we had repaired, me shuddering he debonair, after a "debate" with an ex-Congressman and a Citizens for Decency League leader on the Farber show, a debacle which had left me exhausted and trembling, ("I don't have to read your filth to know what kind of filth it is," O.K. Armstrong, the Congressman, only two months ago reluctantly but administratively passed on at 92 had snapped to me), we were drinking beer for which Girodias had paid when a truly menacing, a truly dangerous fellow approached, an even less ingenuous companion lurking in the background, pointed a menacing finger at Girodias's sleeve, a knife seeming to glint from a shrouded place and said, "Nice threads, man. Really nice threads."
"Oh," said Maurice, "oh yes, of course, thank you." He began to remove the jacket, rose from the stool, finished the job, extended it. "Would you like?" he said, "it's all yours, my pleasure." The menace went away and Maurice went away and the brave, haunted, doomed Olympia America went away too (in metaphor at least, I am still in that bar, however) and they are to be saluted. Torn wing to wing by rifle fire.
—New Jersey, 1989
Footnote to an unpublished memoir: Maurice did write and publish a sequel to The Frog Prince, was interviewed on French radio in consequence of its publication in the summer of 1990, died suddenly after the interview. One would like to think of this as further evidence of the poised irony with which this difficult man attempted to conduct his life; the jaunty bow, the tilt of the eyebrow, exercise in self-publicity and then, aha! at the apex and astride his history, that graceful tumble to the pit, the Wallenda of autobiography. But death is too magisterial to command easy, balletic grace from most of us; I cannot imagine (I was not there) how it afflicted Maurice but if anyone could, like Don Giovanni salute the abyss it was the son of Jack Kahane. And two months later, Leonard Bernstein. Larger and larger pieces of time—
—New Jersey, 31 December 1990
The Man Who Lost the Sea
(John W. Campbell)
This is written 31 years and 6 days after John Wood Campbell's death. He died suddenly on a Sunday night at home, watching television, his wife said; collapsed with a heart attack and could not be revived. Campbell had been in poor health for years; his emphysema and asthma, severely aggravated (if not caused) by his two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, had ravaged him, turned him into a man who gasped after walking a city block, a man whose severe gout atop this had made him only a dim, occasional presence in the Condé Nast offices. Kay Tarrant, his assistant for over 30 years who certainly loved him hopelessly and desperately, never carnally, had been worried for a long time; tried to protect him as best she could. The man who said, drawing on a cigarette and expanding his barrel chest with smoke, that immortality could be self-willed (or at least a very, very long lifetime) barely made it into his seventh decade.
Thirty-one years and a week. Oh, that is a long time ago. There are writers like Michael A. Burstein or Shane Tourtellotte, Analog regulars, who were not born or barely so when this editor, The Editor, died. But writing under Campbell's influence still just as Asimov or Heinlein had sixty years ago. Campbell missed Apollo 13, the Internet (which he would have loved), the cell phone, Explorer, Watergate, Star Wars. He missed pathetic withdrawal from Vietnam and the essential collapse of the magazine market. (He was there for Star Trek, the Tet Offensive, Johnson's resignation and Armstrong's Moon landing.) There will never be a biography. I have been quite sure of this for a very long time.
Now and then someone, usually an academic, says in a desultory way, "There should be a biography of John W. Campbell," and this is true, but it is not going to happen. Most of the primary sources are dead, the others have had their witness published or taped to appear in the usual venues. Campbell's first and second wives are long dead, his two daughters, now in their sixties, live in the Midwest and have no contact with science fiction, have never furnished information. There is a stepdaughter (Peg Campbell, his second wife, was also married earlier) in Alabama who was, during Campbell's lifetime, intermittently active in the field and got to quite a few conventions, but she apparently has had nothing at all to do with science fiction since Campbell's death.
And, perilously for any biographer, this life cannot be separated from the work and has almost no meaning outside of it. Campbell's life although interesting—every life perceived from the inside is at least interesting—cannot be separated from the work; Campbell was an editor, in fact The Editor, and his testimony consists of almost 400 issues of his magazine, more than 10,000 letters, two volumes of which were published years ago. He is a part of the public and private memoirs of every science fiction writer of his time and perhaps it is this which subsumes or at least contains the life. The biography is spare—Campbell never traveled much, lived in New Jersey all of his adult life, edited his magazine for almost 34 years, lived almost a scandal-free life. (There were some operatics surrounding the breakup of his first marriage but it was all resolved quickly and quietly. Dona, his first wife, left the marriage in 1949 and shortly after the divorce married George O. Smith, an engineer who had been one of Campbell's significant contributors.)
(Campbell married Peg in the early 1950s and all evidence is that it was for both a very close marriage emotionally and intellectually and a source of repeated joy.) Something A. J. Budrys wrote of A. E. van Vogt in the 1960s applies to Campbell's personal (not his professional!) life: "He is clearly worthy of some kind of re-evaluation but he simply is not important enough to merit that." Campbell's personal life, the biographical details might stand examination but they are not that important. What is important, the editorship, has the most ample testimony.
Still, if there were a biography at issue, one could write a chapter conjecturing a Campbell who might (or might never) have existed; this Campbell is 23 years old, already a prominent science fiction writer, maybe the best science fiction writer, Doc Smith's only true competitor in the Interstellar Racket, already at the top of a genre whose re-invented version is only seven years old. This young John Campbell has really beaten Hugo Gernsback's scientifiction category cold; his technophiliac fables of conquest about mighty machines and their triumphant operators have come close to dominating the two magazines, Amazing and Astounding, which are his major markets. Now our hypothetical Campbell, only two years out of Duke University, overwhelmed by intelligence and ambition and the Depression as well, makes an important, considered decision: "I'm going to put the decadence in," he says.
Perhaps our conjectural JWC says this in an empty room; perhaps he addresses his young, already long-suffering spouse. "This field of science fiction needs decadence; it is time that form superseded function, mood became more important than action, the ultimate death of the universe was given equal time. A new kind of story," he says, "and therefore a new name to put on the stories because I am already identified with all of this rocketry and interstellar collisions. 'Don A. Stuart,' how is that?" he says to his wife, the former Dona Stuart. "Wouldn't that be exciting?"
Or it was nothing like this at all and Campbell simply wanted to expand his potential markets and his possibility. Very few writers or editors are that purposeful. In the last year of his life, Campbell was asked on camera what he wanted to accomplish when he became Astounding's new editor. "I just wanted to have fun," he said. In a letter to Alexei Panshin a few years before that, in response to the same question, he said that he had no philosophy, no clear set of ideas, he was just responding as an editor to what he liked. Panshin's enthusiastic retrospective analysis bored him.
The good editors, and for his first decade Campbell was a great editor, are not as purposeful as the Panshins and their friends in the English departments would like to impute. Bad or tired editors may become ideologues, may function in terms of some agenda as Campbell did for most of his last twenty years . . . but they are as full of false information as great editors, asked to explain, are full of no information at all. Ultimately, history is built upon absence as much as presence; in cases like Campbell's it can be just another specialized subdivision of fantasy. Objectively, Campbell the writer had reached the top of the small field of science fiction almost at the outset; as Heinlein, publishing his first story in 1939 in Astounding, came to utter dominance within two years, so Campbell years earlier had had a similar course. "I would have gotten a job after I graduated from Duke," he said later, "but there were no jobs at all. So I became a writer." There wasn't much money in writing for the three or four extant science fiction magazines then either but that is what Campbell did and with extraordinary success relative to the situation.
But the Arcot, Wade and Morey series obviously did not satisfy him. He was young, there were more than one of him. So it was time to put in the decadence, an apprehension of entropy which would lead inevitably past ordnance to some apprehension of breakdown and this new version of Campbell, the writer within, came to that understanding. "Twilight," "Night," "Blindness," "Atomic Power" and of course his most famous story "Who Goes There?" "Which was written just before he became Astounding's editor and published in the June 1938 issue, still using some of Tremaine's inventory.
There runs through these stories a kind of gloom, an apprehension of darkness previously unknown in USA genre science fiction. Wells had it in the closing chapters of The Time Machine, of course, and Stapledon had made the extinction of human possibility his major theme . . . but no post-Gernsback in this country was doing that until Campbell. The stories were, in their declensive way, manifestoes. "Twilight" and "Night" have lasted seven decades; the anthologies in which they appear are still in print and the influence of these works has been pervasive. "Blindness" is seated upon a terrible irony, the kind of fundamental accident upon which scientific "progress" is often perpetrated. The other two imply the end of existence, heady stuff from The Time Machine adapted for a market which wanted miracles of engineering to bedazzle its readership of adolescent boys.
And always and disturbingly, there is "Who Goes There?" Campbell's most important and memorable story. In Seekers of Tomorrow, the not always dependable Sam Moskowitz says that this story came from Campbell's childhood: his mother was an identical twin and she and her sister would assume the other's identity with little John. Who was "real?" the young Campbell learned to ask, and who was the fake that seemed real? The confusion was profound and—if Moskowitz can be trusted—might have been the underlay of Campbell's duality; there were in his earliest important relationship two people who were sharing the role of one.
Don A. Stuart and John W. Campbell trading masks, then, for kinds of fiction which could be regarded as opposed. But John Campbell, it seems clear, was evolving into Don A. Stuart; what had originated in duality was transmogrification. Had Campbell continued, the persona and vision underlying the Stuart stories would probably have been the writer. This may be one reason why the editorial position was taken so gratefully; Campbell might have been afraid of where those stories were going, the destiny they contained.
"Who Goes There?" with its mimetic, invulnerable abandoned alien in disguise at a remote polar station was the basis of a famous if low-budget Howard Hawks film, The Thing, in 1951 and then a remake decades later by John Carpenter. This was perhaps the first science fiction movie after Lang's Metropolis or King Kong to have significant general cultural impact. (Certainly, Philip K. Dick's short story "Impostor," adapted into a big-budget film which was released finally at the end of 2001, is a rewrite of that story, a recycling of its central idea told this time from the viewpoint of the monster.) His half of the $500 which Street & Smith (who in that time bought all rights to the stories it published, voluntarily ceding half of the receipts to the author) received from Howard Hawks was the only money Campbell ever received for the story. "That's all right," Isaac Asimov's memoir recalls him saying, "If it's a good movie and if it increases the audience for good science fiction, then I don't mind at all."
Granted, F. Orlin Tremaine, the Astounding editor, encouraged and bought these stories; if he had not, Campbell, scrambling to make some kind of living, would have abandoned the idea. Tremaine deserves at the distance of decades an encomium. But the stories are Campbell's. Don A. Stuart allowed a version of Campbell to escape which had never before been known and they are remarkable.
There is no question that Campbell was—with the possible exception of E. E. Smith, an industrial chemist and part-time writer and not a very good writer—at the time he became editor of Astounding Science Fiction in October 1937 the leading writer of science fiction. That was, in fact, probably the reason that he got the job as Tremaine, promoted to higher position in Street & Smith, was permitted to recommend a successor. This is stale, statistical news 65 years later but it must have been astonishing at the time; the most prominent writer of science fiction had suddenly become the editor of its leading magazine. It was as if Heinlein had become editor of Astounding in 1942 or Bradbury of Galaxy in 1953. The writers—Boucher, McComas at Fantasy & Science Fiction, Horace Gold at Galaxy—who did accede to those positions were accomplished and well known to their colleagues but they did not then or ever possess Campbell's stature.
And with that appointment, Campbell the writer effectively retired. One condition imposed by the position was that Campbell could not sell fiction to his own magazine or to any competitor (a condition which Tremaine had easily circumvented by creating at least one pseudonym and, with his brother's collaboration, establishing another identity) and the sense is that the clause was agreeable, Campbell was ready to quit.
In the 34 years to come he published very little fiction: the novella "The Moon Is Hell," a story in the Healy/McComas New Tales of Space and Time, a few scattered pieces. Even more dramatically than had been the case with Horace Gold, Anthony Boucher, Judith Merril, the later reputation as editor tended to obliterate the stature of the writer's career. "Who Goes There?", "Twilight" and "Night" were to assure over the decades that there would remain some consciousness of Campbell's contribution as a writer, but they necessarily receded. "Writers come and writers go but next month's issue comes out forever."
Campbell edited Astounding from October 1937 until his death on July 11, 1971, still the longest unbroken tenure of any editor of a mass market magazine. He was probably the best editor of the century, at least in the United States—there were plenty of great ones and I think that Harold Hayes of the 1960s Esquire was Campbell's only true competitor—and what made him the best was that that Campbell left his magazine and his field utterly transformed. In his first decade he created that anomaly, "modern science fiction." With the broadening of publishing outlets and readership and with the advent of new magazines of quality, Campbell's utter dominance of science fiction was lost and the years after 1949 can be seen as a long, slow, inconstant decline and marginalization.
Campbell became a witness (a very interested and bitterly involved witness to be sure) and his profound unhappiness with what he took to be its misdirection was refracted in his editorials and choice of contents for what had in the Spring of 1960 become Analog.
These last years of increased marginalization had isolated Campbell and embittered him and the effect of his departure from the magazine was, sadly, to improve Analog under the new editor, Ben Bova. Clearly this career did not end well. Campbell stayed too long and he did so in an unvarying way. Maybe if he had left in the late forties for another editorial position, had become say at Random House or Charles Scribner the founder of the first great and widely distributed science fiction division, it would have been better for him and for science fiction. If something like that had been possible, he would have, for the first time, made substantial money and had an influence which went beyond his contributors and his magazine's readership.
But the influence, of course, would not have been as concentrated; within the scope of his magazine, Campbell was an autocrat and his position was absolute. He could do whatever he wanted, perhaps exemplifying that most famous of Yiddish curses: "May you get what you truly want."
It would have been better for all if he had turned over the magazine to a successor somewhere around the end of that brilliant first decade. It could be further argued that beginning with Hubbard's Dianetics, which were propounded in the May 1950 issue of the magazine, Campbell no longer had ideas. He had crotchets: Dianetics, Psionics (a corollary to Dianetics, really, the superior powers of the properly regressed mind), the Hieronymous Machine, the Dean Machine, Dowsing and as the crotchets overwhelmed, substituting reflex for thought, so Campbell overwhelmed his authors and turned most of them into vehicles for the expression and expansion of those ideas.
Some writers who resisted remained in the magazine but most did not and after 1960, most of Campbell's new writers came to print through the study of Campbell's ideas and their servicing. To the most tolerant, Campbell's magazine became irrelevant to the evolution of the field, but many writers and editors felt that Campbell's last decade was more seriously flawed than by irrelevance, he was actively impeding science fiction. Campbell raged editorially in late 1968 against the demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, he endorsed George Wallace for President not because he thought Wallace could win but as a statement of the bankruptcy of those in command of the present system. Wallace, like Campbell, had unconventional ideas, he forced a new way of thinking. (Memories of the impersonator David Frye playing Wallace on The Smothers Brothers Show: "Look at this face. Is this the face of a bigot?")
"John Campbell now advocates positions which are contrary to everything for which science fiction has fought," Harlan Ellison wrote. I wrote no less angrily in that same medium (the SFWA Forum) that "John Campbell, having given us the field of science fiction, now seemed determined to destroy it." An unhappy, polarizing time.
An explanation or at least an insight of a sort: John Campbell was a man in schism. Most of us are but his duality was profound. Those two writerly identities, Campbell the celebrant of the star paths and Stuart the decadent seemed directly opposed. Perhaps then it was two Campbells editing Astounding, the rationalist and the mystic, the man of methodology and the man who believed powerfully in the evidence of things unseen. It was the rationalist who controlled the early years (the mystic was made content for a while with the editorship of Unknown or experiments in the ether with ham radio) and the mystic who overtook that rationalist in the early years of editorial decline . . . the beginning of that decline marked for most by the advent of Dianetics in the magazine. It was the first time that Campbell allowed the magazine to become a vehicle for obsession but hardly the last: The crotchets overtook.
How sad was this? Schuyler Miller reviewing a New Worlds attributing much of their inspiration to drugs. Michael Moorcock in a letter published in "Brass Tacks" denied that drugs were part of the Ladbroke Grove Zeitgeist but added that he found the current Analog far weirder, spacier, further out than anything about New Worlds and one can take the point.
