Lord of the Afternoon

by Pablo Capanna Lord of the Afternoon

  In 1911, a revolutionary movement, to which Judge Linebarger had donated money, overthrew the Manchu dynasty, which had reigned since the 17th century. Sun, who was in Denver at the time raising funds among the Chinese community, returned to Peking and was proclaimed provisional president.

  That same year, a young man named Mao Zedong and his friend, the “child prodigy” Liu Shao-chi, enrolled in Changsha secondary school. Their first political act was to hang a dazibao in support of Sun Yat-sen in the square.

  For an American like Judge Linebarger, backing Sun Yat-sen was far more brazen and wise than imitating the Europeans, who preferred to prop up a decadent empire rather than negotiate with an unpredictable republic. At any rate, it was not official policy. As Alan C. Elms points out, it was as if an American judge based in Panama in the eighties had sided with the Nicaraguan Sandinistas.

  The judge believed in Sun’s cause, convinced that a liberal democracy was the best thing for China. For many years, he accompanied Sun as a fundraiser, propagandist, intelligence agent, legal advisor, biographer and friend. His son recalled how “with such a limited budget, many times he was forced to dig into his own pocket to carry out anti-imperialist and anti-communist campaigns in favor of Sino-American friendship.”6

  Sun Yat-sen was a Christian and the godfather of the future Cordwainer Smith, who never ceased to admire the “Father of the Chinese Nation”. An enlargement of a New Year’s card from Sun Yat-sen, written in large Chinese characters7, occupied a privileged place in his Washington home.

  Judge Linebarger wrote several books about Sun, including Our Common Cause with China against Imperialism and Communism (1927), others about international policy, in French and Spanish, and some novels under the pseudonym “Paul Myron”, one of which, The Ocean Men, was edited by his son.8

  Paul Linebarger was the son of the judge as well as Lillian Bearden, a successful businesswoman in the world of fashion. His father died in 1939, but his mother survived him, living past a hundred. During World War I, the judge had to curtail his support of Sun, which the Wilson administration viewed suspiciously. They bought a house in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, christened it Point Paul Myron, and went to live there for a time.

  There the future Cordwainer Smith spent a rather somber childhood. He was an only child in a large southern home surrounded by marsh and with a view of the Bay of Biloxi. He met his first “girlfriend” there, who he would later evoke in the figure of T’ruth.

  In 1919, the Linebargers moved to Shanghai, yet health problems soon forced them to return to the United States.

  On the way, they stopped for two months in Honolulu, where Paul was the victim of misfortune. Six years old and just learning to read and write at Punaho Academy, a playmate accidentally injured him with a wire. He lost one eye and developed an infection in the other. Rushed to San Francisco for an operation, he nonetheless had to use a prosthetic piece for the rest of his life.

  The family spent two years in Shanghai. The young Paul became a favorite of Sun Yat-sen, and his wife, Mme. Ching-ling, taught him French. In photographs from this time, Paul and his father are wearing Chinese clothes. Theirs was not a conventional home but rather “a house where soldiers of fortune were regular visitors, where secret messages were received and dispatched, where men left black bags filled with money in the gateway, all to the great dismay of my mother.”9

  Between the ages of seven and nine, Paul attended the Anglican school in Shanghai, the Cathedral School for Boys. Curiously, it is the same school that, ten years later, another giant of science fiction, the Englishman James G. Ballard (1930-2009), would attend. It is also the school that Stephen Spielberg recreated for the first scene of the movie Empire of the Sun (1987), which was based on Ballard’s novel. Perhaps Smith and Ballard shared a teacher, the same Reverend Matthews, for instance, that Ballard hated so much10, though it is unlikely the clergyman could have imagined the future that awaited both of his pupils.

  When Sun’s power began to wane, the Linebargers left China and spent two years between Montecarlo and Germany. The Hotel Frankfurter Hof in Baden-Baden, where Paul lived from 1922 to 1924, would be the setting of the novel Ria. Linebarger continued his studies at a French and German school, spent time in Shanghai and then two more years between Washington and Long Beach.

  These continuous moves and the fact that he spoke several languages from an early age give us an idea of Paul’s cosmopolitan upbringing.

  A character in the fiction of Cordwainer Smith might provide a clue to the writer’s conflicts as a child.

  In Norstrilia, the boy Rod MacBan is “abnormal”, a “freak”. In a society in which everyone is telepathic, he is one of the few incapable of communicating mentally. According to the norms of his world he is disabled, just as Paul, half-blind, was in this one.

  On three occasions the authorities judge whether or not Rod MacBan deserves to continue living. All three times his plea is rejected, though he is given the opportunity to start over again: “They have chosen the lesser cruelty and had sent him not to death, but a new babyhood and a fresh upbringing.”11

  On the fourth try, MacBan passes the test because he is able to demonstrate that he possesses a rare power, as anomalous as it is effective. While still considered a “stranger”, he is now accepted.

  Like many children today, Rod MacBan’s only friend is a computer. His deepest desires are child-like: he dreams of owning the legendary triangular stamp of Cape Colony, of which only one copy exists. In fact, Linebarger, after having lived in so many countries, ended up becoming a philatelist.

  The computer discovers that the only way to secure the stamp is buying the entire planet Earth through a series of risky financial transactions. As a result, in one night and without even intending it, the young MacBan grows fabulously rich.

  Rod arrives on Earth incognito. A million thieves covet his fortune, and he moves around disguised as a man-cat.

  This allows him to observe the utopia of the Instrumentality from the perspective of the marginalized. When he accidentally enters a passageway reserved for humans, several thugs treat him like a “filthy animal”. A civil servant speaks to him rudely, grows impatient and calls him a “stupid cat”.

  Earlier, Rod had a pivotal experience in the Department Store of the Heart’s Desires, a fantastic nostalgia shop. Not only could he see the longed for stamp, but he had a hallucination in which all the human types that populate the Galaxy, from the most beautiful to the most deformed and monstrous, filed by. After an initial reaction of disgust (“These were not men —they were enemies!”), Rod recalls how as a child he was also singled out as a “monster” and leaves the store with a more objective point of view. He now knows he is not the only monster there is and that he is capable of sympathizing with grotesqueries of any kind.

  Among the treasures in the nostalgia shop are two poems by “Anthony Bearden, an ancient American poet (1913-1949).” In them we hear the voice of the young Paul:

  The stars of experience have led me astray.

  A pattern of purpose was lost on my way

  Where was I going? How can I say?

  The stars of experience have led me astray...”12

  The period from 1916 to 1928 was a time of anarchy in China. The central government could no longer hold the dujuns (warlords) in check and ultimately caved in to Japanese demands.

  In 1920, Mao created the Communist Party (CP). Three years later, the Soviet agent Mikhail Borodin arrived in China, proceeded to reorganize the Guomindang (KMT) nationalist party, and founded the Whampoa military academy. Borodin engineered a strategic alliance between the CP and KMT that unified the country, awakening fears in the West. H.G. Wells assumed the role of alleviating these fears with his typical political ingenuousness, issuing a warm apology for Chinese nationalism.13

  Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, venerat
ed by nationalists and communists alike, and was succeeded by the military official Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi). Chiang, however, seemed more interested in getting rid of Mao than stopping the Japanese, who in 1932 occupied Manchuria.

  With Sun dead, Linebarger’s father went to work for Chiang, accepting the job only after reassurance that Russian and Chinese Communists had agreed to withdraw the bounty they had placed on his head. By this time, Paul was his father’s personal secretary, entrusted with the task of going to Washington and negotiating a large loan for the nationalist government.

  In 1928, barely fifteen years old, Paul entered the University of Washington and at the age of seventeen, while “frying his brains” studying Chinese in Peking, was at the center of a passionate drama. He fell in love with Irene, an exiled Russian nearly twice his age. His parents did everything they could to sever the relationship. In response Paul and his lover attempted suicide on two separate occasions.

  Many years later, Linebarger shocked Australian intellectuals when he showed them his Guomindang card, at the time considered practically incontrovertible evidence of being a reactionary. He was careful to point out, however, that he had obtained the document “before Chiang Kai-shek.”14 Indeed, the Nationalist Populist Party, founded by Sun Yat-sen, had taken the name Guomindang in 1912, a year before Paul was born.

  In fact, we know that in those years Paul felt a certain attraction to communism. In a homeopathic attempt to cure him off it, for his eighteenth birthday Paul’s father gave him a trip to the Soviet Union. Paul arrived in Russia in 1931, when the Moscow Trials were in full swing, with hundreds of accused confessing to the most unlikely crimes and marching passively before a firing squad. Stalinism had begun to take root, with all of its perversions. The experience was enough to disillusion Paul, who nonetheless continued to admire the ability of communism to awaken people to a personal calling and the faith it inspired in its followers.

  The situation in China had become particularly confusing. The territory was already divided into four rival forces: the nationalist government of Chiang, the “warlords”, militant peasants, and Japanese occupation forces.

  On the fringes of power were swarms of foreign agents seeking to influence local politics. After the Russians Borodin and Maring, in 1940 agents of the Third Reich appeared in Nanjing. Linebarger explained the reaction of Chinese military officials when a Nazi propagandist tried to impress them with a series of gruesome movies showing the destructive capacity of Germany. Undeterred, the Chinese commented: “Nice movie...that’s the kind of things that we used to do in the Ch’in dynasty.”

  After the massacre at Changsha, which signaled the end of its alliance with the Communists, the Guomindang began pressuring Mao, who finally cut all ties and embarked on the Long March followed by ten thousand men. By 1935, he had already established his headquarters in Yenan.

  Linebarger discovered science fiction as a teenager. A reader of Amazing Stories from the first issue, he amassed a huge collection of magazines and books. In Germany he had read Verne, Wells and Conan Doyle. Alfred Döblin’s Mountains, Seas and Giants (1924) was one of his favorites.15

  At fifteen, Paul wrote his first science fiction story. It appears to express an essential aspect of his identity, one characterized by a tension between East and West. The story recounted a battle between unmanned airships, a kind of trial by ordeal in the year 2007 to settle a conflict between Tibet and the United States. Olaf Stapledon, one of Linebarger’s favorite writers, had already envisioned a confrontation between the United States and China in the 21st century.

  The names of the aircraft evoked links that bound young Paul to both cultures. On the American side were names taken from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Prospero, Ariel, Caliban), while the Asian band consisted of ancient Chinese dynasties (Han, Yuen, Tsing).

  While studying at George Washington University, Paul had a peculiar classmate. His name was Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, the future science fiction writer who later founded Scientology, the religion that Time once described as “the cult of greed” and that seduced a large part of Hollywood’s artistic set.

  On the literary page of the student paper, for which Paul was responsible, appeared Hubbard’s first stories. By then, he was already promoting “Dianetics”, a hodgepodge of psychoanalysis and behaviorism that would later be incorporated into the rituals of Scientology.

  Early on, Paul realized that Dianetics was a “closed cult”. While he courteously acknowledged Hubbard’s literary merits, he did not think Hubbard “was someone you could go to in search of relaxation and spiritual peace.” Paul had had several sessions with a Dianetics “auditor” and had even written his own Ethical Dianetics or Pathematics manual, which he never published.

  During his student years, Paul wrote historical and detective stories set in classical and contemporary China in which he experimented with Eastern storytelling techniques.

  In 1933, he graduated and went on to spend six years in Oxford studying Medieval English literature. At the age of twenty-two, he earned a doctorate in political science from Johns Hopkins, the institution with which he would remain closely linked for the rest of his life. His thesis (“The Political Doctrine of Sun Yat-sen”) was an exegesis of the San Min Chu, Sun’s “Three Principles of the People”.

  In 1936, he married Margaret Snow, a woman with a deep artistic sensibility, with whom he would have two daughters, Johanna Lesley and Marcia Christine. In 1939, his father died, whom he had assisted as a correspondent for the government of Nanjing until the previous year. By the time of his father’s death, he had become an associate professor of political science at Duke and a postgraduate instructor in Michigan.

  The Graduate

  In 1942, a few months after Pearl Harbor, Linebarger enlisted in the army as an Eastern affairs expert, with the rank of lieutenant.

  According to Burns, Linebarger was always proud of being a military officer, though he considered himself merely “a visitor to six wars”, an expression that suggests the aloofness of a storyteller more than the passion of warrior.

  Upon entering the war, the United States lacked an intelligence apparatus and was very far from possessing the sophistication of the Cold War. Recently enlisted, Linebarger was assigned to an “ultra-peaceful” office that gathered information for the army.

  One of his observations was how absurd it was that the State had various groups competing amongst themselves on the same tasks. In fact, in 1942, Roosevelt decided to join the main agencies and created the US Office of War Information (OWI). He put journalist Elmer Davis in charge of the new office, the main priority of which was war propaganda. This agency should not be confused with the famous OSS (Office of Strategic Services), created at more or less the same time and dedicated to espionage and sabotage. In 1947, the OSS was subsequently renamed the CIA.

  In the sixties, a fuss was often made over Cordwainer Smith’s ties to the intelligence services, the same links that usually went unspoken when it involved a more famous figure. Suffice it to say that the CIA also employed no one less than Herbert Marcuse, who before becoming a philosopher of the New Left wrote a serious report on Soviet Marxism that later became a book.

  For his part, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, father of the Palo Alto school and future New Age ideologue, had also worked on psychological campaigns. One of his proposals (to parachute urns over Japan containing the ashes of pilots killed in combat) was so grisly that the Air Force refused to implement it.

  With Linebarger’s help, the OWI took shape, though it never came close to rivaling the CIA. Historians were very benevolent toward its “strategy of truth”. Davis “firmly believed that democracy, as a regime that respected citizens, did not need to lie to promote its cause. It was imperative to tell the truth, regardless of whether it was pleasant or not, all the time, treating citizens like adults. American propagandists fel
t that strategy did not always permit respecting this rule, yet on the whole they were reluctant when it came to manipulating the truth.”16

  Indeed, OWI men were more than a little naive. One of them, Professor Owen Lattimore, organized in 1944 Vice President Henry A. Wallace’s trip to the Soviet Union. On a visit to a camp for political prisoners in Magadan, the Russians hoodwinked them by erecting an authentic “Potemkin village”: an idyllic mise en scene that hid the sub-human conditions in which the inmates lived.17

  This ingenuousness was already fading by the end of the war. The manual of psychological warfare by Daugherty and Janowitz (Psychological Warfare, 1958), which replaced Linebarger’s as the manual preferred by military officials, suggested that psychological warfare would continue in times of peace and associated it with diplomacy and propaganda.

  Linebarger had also worked in the FIS (Foreign Information Service) press office as part of an unconventional team headed by the playwright Robert Sherwood. It was “a most extraordinary coterie of odd personalities (...): Socialist refugees, advertising men, psychologists, psychoanalysts (of both the licensed and lay variety), professional promoters, theatrical types, German professors, a commercial attaché, young men just out of college, oil executives, and popular authors (novelists, slick writers, Pulitzer winners, pulp writers, humorists, poets and a professional pro-Japanese writer, fresh off the Imperial Japanese Embassy payroll.” Among them was the Russian Reginald Bretnor (1911-1992), who later also gained recognition as science fiction writer.