What makes the character interesting is the confused identity behind the disguises. Dugan is “a great actor”, a genuine “chameleon”; he can be Mr. Everyone or Comrade Nobody. The son of an Irishman and a mother born in the Aleutians, he has an indefinable physical appearance, able to pass as a Chinese, Russian, German or Japanese. He could even make people think he was Cherokee if he wished.
Beyond all the action, this ambiguity is the true leitmotif of the novel. The woman that loves him is always wondering how many more Dugans are hidden within him. When they meet, he introduces himself as a military official, yet on their first date pretends to be an American merchant of Japanese descent: “Mr. Kabashima today. Perhaps Mr. Smith or Comrade Ivanov tomorrow, or simple Farmer Wang.” When in Siberia on a mission to sabotage a secret Soviet nuclear weapons base, Dugan passes for Mongolian, Chinese, Japanese, German and Russian. He can change roles in the blink of an eye, deceiving everyone. For a moment he promises to “reveal” his identity to the Soviet official about to kill him, but even in this extreme case he offers a false name. Back home, “he resumes the role of an American official,” his girlfriend wondering all the while if, for once, he will tell the truth.
Terribly efficient as a human weapon, Dugan is a flimsy man, almost without an identity. He risks his life following orders but insists his primary virtue is survival: “I carry out my mission to the fullest: to stay alive”. Later, this will be the same motto Cordwainer Smith attaches to the Instrumentality: “Above all, stay alive!”
The spy Michael Dugan is a pathetically bewildered man of steel, as omnipotent as Kirk Allen, the imaginary galactic hero who later disappears thanks to therapy. In the fiction of Cordwainer Smith there will no longer be a place for characters such as this.
Linebarger wrote Atomsk while going through a deep personal crisis. This anomalous book appeared in 1949, a year its author would always recall as “hellish”. It was then that he divorced and fell into a depressive state with strong self-destructive impulses. His therapist advised putting him under discreet watch, as he feared he would try to kill himself. By this time Linebarger had already written the first “Cordwainer Smith” story, but he was still immersed in a crisis that would take him to the edge of alienation.
Recall that Ria also believed she was losing her mind: “Is this the way that people feel when they go mad? [...] One could not go insane simply because it would be more comfortable to do so. Insanity is not a merciful relief; it was sheer sickness, unobtainable save through its own very awful processes.”37
Seen in this light, certain passages in Ria suggest a resistance to therapy. Ria suffers hysterical paralysis but when her doctor recommends that she see a psychiatrist, she answers: “I don’t need a psychoanalyst or a Christian Scientist or anything like that. I may find something. If there is anything there, I can find it for myself.”38[…] “I know that it’s not psychoanalysis. But I’d rather... call it rheumatism and endure it. I don’t want people poking around my mind’s insides. If I can’t discipline myself, by running my own mind, I’ll discipline myself by curing the arm as though it were rheumatism. I can’t do psychoanalysis. I just get back to the time I was fifteen. Not to infancy.”
The “Kirk Allen” Question
In 1973, British writer Brian Aldiss sparked a legend. In Billion Year Spree, his well-known history of science fiction, he revealed39 that the “The Jet-Propelled Couch”40 was a story taken from Paul Linebarger’s therapy with Dr. Robert Lindner. Dr. Leon Stover had entrusted him with the secret. Lamentably, the doctor did not offer any proof.
Aldiss was not a big fan of Cordwainer Smith, though he had included “The Jet-Propelled Couch” in an anthology of stories41 because he considered it to be as passionate as a work of fiction. In fact, it was on the occasion of the publication of this book that Stover called to tell him that “Kirk” was none other than Linebarger/Cordwainer Smith.
Leon Stover was an anthropologist specializing in Chinese culture. He knew Linebarger because he also worked for the intelligence services and, thanks to his contacts in the publishing world, was aware that Linebarger and “Cordwainer Smith” were one in the same.
Stover met the psychoanalyst Lindner in 1952, in a post-graduate seminar. Both fans of science fiction, they ended up talking about Cordwainer Smith. When Stover revealed Smith’s true identity, it dawned on Lindner that “Smith” had been his patient and he decided to include his story in the book he was writing.
Aldiss, who still describes Stover as a somewhat eccentric character who would introduce himself as Eisenhower’s nephew, omitted this reference in the extended edition of his history of the genre42, one in which he barely mentions the name Cordwainer Smith. Nonetheless, in a personal interview in 2001, he told me that he still believes Stover was right.
Lindner’s work was one of the first books that popularized psychoanalysis, later nurturing an abundant body of literature. Lindner was a highly sought-after psychoanalyst and a fairly gifted storyteller. One of his books inspired the movie Rebel Without a Cause, which made James Dean a star.43
In Fifty-Minute Hour (1955) Lindner gathered the most noteworthy cases he had treated over the course of his vast professional experience. The patients did not appear under their real names, as many were high-ranking staff members sent to Lindner by the Justice Department.
Clues in the story of “Kirk” support Stover’s account, although the text cannot be considered documental in the strict sense of the word. It is very likely that Lindner inserted facts or circumstances taken from other cases, “compressing” several characters into one.
For his part, Burns mentions the psychoanalytical treatment of his friend on two occasions. On the first he states that psychoanalysis liberated Linebarger’s imagination: “Paul was given a training course as part of his psychological warfare book, and afterwards continued in analysis, once a week or so when not travelling, for fifteen years. It seems to have been a kind of inward exploration: he said there was always more to find out.”44
In the other text, however, Burns no longer speaks of a theoretical course in psychoanalysis, as the previously quoted sentence seems to suggest. Indeed, he specifically refers to the therapy Linebarger underwent at the behest of his superiors: “In the course of this work he had training in psychoanalysis, and this explains more about the kind of personality and, in some senses, the style of his writings, than anything else.”45
These quotes seem to corroborate Stover’s testimony. Less plausible is the notion that it was necessary for Linebarger to undergo therapy in order to write a propaganda manual. Reading the story of “Kirk”, this becomes clear.
Perhaps most curious of all is the success Lindner’s text met from the moment it was published. Known to professionals and laymen alike in the confessional form that the analyst gave it, the case was so “fantastic” that several editors included it in story anthologies. At the time, it was staged for television and even inspired the script of a musical comedy that never made it to the stage.
One could argue that echoes of it still reverberate in a story by Howard Fast, “General Hardy’s Profession” (1972).46 The outline is familiar: a patient “sent by the Government” calling himself “Alan Smith” begins therapy with a psychoanalyst named Blausman. In reality, the patient is General Franklin Hardy, a Vietnam veteran with identity issues. He has the feeling of being someone else and avoids the real world. The story ends conventionally, yet the coincidence of the subject matter and the name “Alan Smith”, which very well could be the marriage of Cordwainer Smith and Kirk Allen, is nonetheless surprising.
Even more colorful is the fact that Lindner’s story was published as “a true story” in the French magazine Planète. Jacques Bergier, unaware of the origin of the text, offered a wide-ranging theosophical speculation and ultimately suggested that the “physicist” mentioned in the story “worked on the Hydrogen Bomb p
roject.”
Lindner’s text ended its long trajectory in the pages of occult books. The story of “Kirk”, now considered “a classic case of psychiatry”, was offered as proof that reading certain books allowed one to pass through the “astral gates” and gain access to other worlds.
More recently, the issue came up again as a result of the research of Lee Weinstein and Alan C. Elms.47
Since Lindner died young and left no record that would permit identifying his patient, it is possible he “invented” the character. Yet Alan C. Elms secured the testimony of Lindner’s widow and brother, who was a psychologist. Both recalled having met “Kirk Allen”, although neither was able to provide any details about his physical appearance.
There was still a chance that the patient had in fact been a physicist at Los Alamos named John Carter. The critic Sam Moskowitz suggested this name because he thought “Kirk” identified with the protagonist of the Martian novels by E. Rice Burroughs. No physicist by this name could be located, however, and the two candidates that most closely fit “Kirk’s” profile (one was a ufologist) denied the identification flat out.
The source of the story continues to be Dr. Stover, who confirmed it in his book SF from Wells to Heinlein (2002), though he never stopped reproaching Brian Aldiss for divulging the secret.
On the basis of these clues, Elms, in a meticulous study of the work of Cordwainer Smith and citing the authority they grant his biographical research, sustains that, while we lack definitive proof, the abundance of circumstantial evidence justifies the claim that “Kirk Allen” was indeed Paul Linebarger.
Elms’ conclusions, moreover, corroborate the speculations that, two decades ago, I set forth in The Lord of the Afternoon (1984).
After the war Lindner opened an office in Baltimore. When Linebarger began treatment he was thirty years old, the same age as Lindner’s patient, and teaching at Johns Hopkins, also in Baltimore. The therapist tells us that before starting the treatment he directed his patient to have a medical exam at this university’s health clinic “under an assumed name”.
When Lindner masked his patient’s identity behind the name “Kirk Allen”, perhaps he was thinking of Kirk Alyn, the actor that played Superman in the movie (Superman, 1948). In any event, “Kirk” was one of Linebarger’s mother’s last names, Lillian Bearden Kirk.
In the story of “Kirk”, the patient is a physicist, and the implication is that he worked on developing the first atomic bomb. Lindner alludes to “a special project that during this period was approaching an important conclusion”, adding that “the world war ended in a way that had something to do with Kirk’s work.”
We know that the project on which Linebarger had worked involved organizing the OWI agency. In fact, anyone would agree that the eccentricity of a physicist would have been relatively tolerable as long as it did not affect his work, while the mental imbalance of an intelligence agent was clearly dangerous.
“Kirk”, supposedly born in 1918, is five years younger than Paul. Yet Lindner contradicts himself, for just a moment ago his patient told him: “I was born in Hawaii, where my father had been posted when World War I broke out”; that is, in 1914. “Kirk” states that he had been alive for six years prior to his father’s transfer to an island on instructions from the League of Nations. As the League of Nations was created in 1919, “Kirk” could not have been six years old in Hawaii unless, like Paul Linebarger, he was born in 1913.
If “Kirk” had been born in 1918, the therapy would have to have taken place in 1948, as the patient looked “about thirty years old”. But if Paul sought therapy during the period he was writing Psychological Warfare (1946), he would have been thirty-two at the time.
“Kirk” and Paul’s student years coincide in many respects, although the age difference makes “Kirk” somewhat less precocious than Paul. Like Linebarger, “Kirk” has a foreign accent and seems more accustomed to speaking “a softer language”, perhaps Chinese rather than the Polynesian dialect Lindner attributes to him. Furthermore, “Kirk” had left Hawaii fifteen years earlier, and it seems unreasonable that he would still have a Polynesian accent. Linebarger, however, had just returned from the Far East.
The biographies of “Kirk” and Linebarger depart most in the periods of childhood and adolescence. “Kirk” stayed in Hawaii until he was fourteen, while Paul, at the age of six, lived there for only a few months.
“Kirk” was born in Hawaii, Paul in the United States. “Kirk’s” father was a commodore, a distant patriarchal figure always involved in diplomatic missions. Paul’s father was also a diplomat with a somewhat authoritarian personality.
“Kirk’s” mother was disinterested in her son, leaving him to the care of a wet nurse. Paul’s mother appears to have been egocentric and controlling. Recall that in the fiction, when Casher O’Neill is reunited with his mother, they are not even capable of having a conversation, since they never have had anything in common.48
“Kirk’s” upbringing was left to an indigenous nanny named Myna. The rift between the boy and his family came to be so great that he did not learn to speak English and wear Western-style clothes until he was six years old. While he felt alien to Polynesian culture, he did not identify with his parents either.
Lindner writes: “During his childhood and adolescence he was struck by the difference between himself and his peers, a difference not only in skin color but also in social inheritance, and the countless subtleties of life. While he could share more fully and directly in the experience of his playmates than that of white adults, including his own family, even with them he felt alienated and different. There was always something, an invisible barrier between him and them, an obstacle that could not be overcome. On the one hand, it resulted in low self-esteem, a sense of inferiority and the feeling of having been rejected for some reason, while on the other ‘Kirk’ developed a private sense of superiority.”49
This picture, which seems plausible in the case of a boy caught between two cultures, becomes more complicated in Paul’s case when we take into account the varied circumstances that served as the backdrop of his childhood.
A parade of governesses from the United States runs through “Kirk’s” childhood, among whom, two stand out. One is “sterilized Sally”, a neurotic obsessed with cleanliness who looks down on the “filthy negroes” (native children) and tries to keep “Kirk” away from them. A very similar character appears in Ria.
The other is “Miss Lillian” (curiously Linebarger’s mother’s name), a nymphomaniac responsible for Kirk’s sexual initiation at the age of eleven who holds such sway over him that she drives him to the edge of alienation. This episode, according to the psychoanalyst, is the origin of all of “Kirk’s” disorders.
The precocious sexual experiences Lindner refers to could not have taken place in Polynesia. Perhaps they refer to the tumultuous romance between sixteen-year-old Paul and his much older Russian lover in Peking.
The only traumatic event that befell Paul in Honolulu was the loss of his left eye, which left him permanently disabled.
If “Kirk” is Paul, Lindner would have met him during the period he wrote the manual on psychological warfare and the three novels Ria, Carola, and Atomsk. For security reasons, the description of the patient was heavily fictionalized, but there is no reason why the story should not have been objective in the description of his structured madness.
One of Lindner’s motives for writing the book was to popularize psychoanalysis, which was still relatively unknown at that time in the United States. Perhaps Lindner laid it on thick, including stories, for instance, of sexual initiation that were too evocative of the permissive Somoa of Margaret Mead (a cliché back then) to be totally convincing.
In the fiction, when Kirk Allen’s boss learns that Kirk’s frequent departures from reality negatively affect his performance, he recommends seeing a
psychologist. The reports indicate nothing abnormal in his behavior, aside from the fact that he “believes that he has a parallel life in another galaxy.”
After their initial meetings, Lindner begins to look into his patient’s past and discovers a progressive departure from reality originating in his confused identity and hazardous sexual initiation.
“Kirk” felt alienated and lacking in personal connections. One of the only outlets he had to avoid collapse was evading reality through fantasy, identifying with an imaginary character as way of regaining his self-esteem.
This identification was the result of reading certain science fiction novels, a genre that “Kirk” had dabbled in since he was a teenager. At some point he apparently began to find a series of “meaningful” coincidences between fiction and his own life.
“Kirk” is convinced he is the main character in the book. The places of the hero’s exploits are familiar to him (what he characterizes as déjà vu). At one point he decides to “complete” his imaginary biography, describing or drawing the events and circumstances that he thinks he remembers.
This pseudo-biography is the life of a cartoon strip galactic hero, a visitor to fabulous worlds, conqueror of monsters and seducer of exotic ladies. It seems to be the compensatory fantasy of an introverted person with pathological tendencies, one only capable of finding satisfaction outside the real world.
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