But even if it contains all the systemization and coherence typical of the fantasies of schizophrenics, “Kirk’s” is not an instance of genuine delirium. The patient still possesses a certain amount of critical judgment, which allows him to distinguish between imaginary things and real facts.
To get an idea of the luxuriousness of this fantasy, it will suffice to inventory the material that “Kirk” had prepared. Lindner states that he had the opportunity to examine it:
“To begin with, there were around twelve thousand typewritten pages that made up the corrected biography of Kirk Allen. A 2000-page appendix with additional notes... A glossary of names and terms of more than a hundred pages; 82 color maps; 23 representations of planetary bodies in four projections; 31 continents on these planets; 14 monographs entitled ‘Expedition of Kirk Allen to...’; 161 architectural sketches and topographical surveys, all drawn to scale; 12 genealogical tables; a description of the galactic system (18 pages) with four astronomical maps, one for each season; and nine stellar maps taken from other planets; a two-hundred page story about the empire where Kirk reigned, with a table (3 pages) containing dates, battles and historical events.”
There were also 44 folders of monographic studies with titles such as “Fauna of Srom Olma I”, “Metabiology of the inhabitants of the Valley”, “Cerebral development of cristopedes of Srom Nobra I”, etc. 306 water-color, coal and pencil drawings depicting people, animals, plants, insects, weapons, utensils, machines, clothing, vehicles and furniture rounded out this voluminous corpus.
Regarding all of these documents (presumably lost), J.J. Pierce provides us with a clue when stating that “since the thirties”, Linebarger had taken notes in a “secret notebook” that was both a personal diary and repository of ideas for the stories he planned to write.50
It is likely that Paul’s first contact with science fiction was through space opera. It could have been the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Edward E. Smith, who, as Aldiss suggests, were the most popular science fiction writers at the time. Space opera stories were juvenile cloak-and-dagger adventure tales set in the future or on other planets. The Martian novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs included a glossary of terms and a description of fictional geographies and histories reminiscent of “Kirk’s”.51
When he was fifteen, Paul wrote a novel (The Mad God of Mars) in imitation of Burroughs. At sixteen, he composed a 15,000-word epic entitled Short History of the Colonization of the Planet formerly called Venus, and later another with the disproportionate title The Arabian Nights of the Future: a cycle of Tales and events from the History that is to be made, with varied discourse on many matters of importance and use in our present time.
According to Lindner, “Kirk”, at the age of twelve, inserted himself into a world of “paranoid delusions”, especially after reading certain books. The first was “a novel by a famous English writer” whose hero had the same name as he did. This coincidence produced in him a “kind of shock” that compelled him to reread the book three consecutive times.
The other books were an essay containing the “semi-philosophical musings of an American essayist from the twenties” and several volumes of the “strange adventures” of a “modern superman...hero of a long series of fantasies, by another American author.”
The latter seems to be a space opera, possibly one of the adventures of Northwest Smith, the character created by C. L. Moore.
Far more intriguing is the foremost mention of the English author, given “Kirk’s” identification with the main character.
Certain indications allow us to assume that the writer was Olaf Stapledon. If so, the novel is Last Men in London, which appeared in 1932, when Linebarger was nineteen and a university student.
Lindner probably changed the sequence of events to make his story more exemplary. Also, the complexity of Stapledon’s novel-essay, filled with philosophical musings and reflections on contemporary history, would have made it rather inaccessible to a boy barely twelve years of age, even one as brilliant as Linebarger.
Stapledon’s hero is also named Paul, a 20th century youth that communicates telepathically with a superman living in the remote future, a time when the human race is on the verge of extinction. He has the gnawing sensation of that he is being observed. At the same time he feels apart from this world, a circumstance that might have led Paul to identify with him.
Linebarger was a passionate admirer of Stapledon.52 In Norstrilia, he seems to be imitating him when evoking his juvenile poems, as Stapledon had done with his own verse in Last Men in London.53
Some passages from Stapledon’s novel reappear almost word for word in Linebarger’s text, as might be expected given that he had read the book several times.
Stapledon ironically describes the view of the world with which his hero had been inculcated: “The English were –well, English. They had the greatest empire in the world. They were the only people who played fair in games, and were kind with animals, and could govern black people, and fight a losing battle to the end, and rule the seas. And because the were such fine people, God had hidden a lot of coal and iron under their country, so that they could use it for ships and engines and for making thousands of things that other countries were not clever enough to make for themselves. God had also written the Bible in English, because it was the best language, and the angels talked it.”54
An echo of these readings can be heard in some ironic passages in the “Felix C. Forrest” novels: “But Britain was different: Britain was a Great White Free Power, like the United States, and the British had about the same standards as the Americans.”55
“You’re the God of big lands and fierce seas —Cadillacs and Chandlers— You’re the God who crammed the world full of good things like copper and gold and coal and oil, and then moved in Your people to dig these things up.”56
Identification with Stapledon’s character—who also made “astral” voyages to other worlds— and the imaginativeness of space opera would give Paul everything he needed to construct a secret fantasy to alleviate his insecurity.
By the time “Kirk” seeks Lindner’s help, he has already exceeded the limits of neurosis and his madness is taking form. After a fresh disturbance (the sexual assault of a female colleague) he retreats even further into his private world, devoting his energies to compiling his galactic encyclopedia. It is now he discovers that he is able to “travel” telepathically to other worlds in order to obtain more information.
Instantaneous communication through Space-Three, which Cordwainer Smith depicts almost mystically, could be a reconfiguration of “Kirk’s” delirious experiences. In fact, telepathy is present in all of Linebarger’s work. In Ria, Carlota and Atomsk he speaks about telepathic communication as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Since 1938, Linebarger was a professor at Duke University, the site of the parapsychology laboratory of Dr. J. B. Rhine. Several testimonies coincide in indicating that Linebarger had a certain mysterious rapport with his favorite cats.
At this stage, Lindner observes that, in spite of his alienation, his patient has maintained a certain attachment to reality. Not all psychotics are convinced they are sane, except when they suffer organic lesions. This was not the case of “Kirk”, who “knew” that his fantasy helped him to feel secure and was aware that his entire life rested on this delusion. Maybe Carola’s “madness” or the stories “The Good Friends” and “Nancy”, where astronauts survive by having hallucinations of a party with friends or the ghost of their first love, reflect this experience. Perhaps Linebarger, who subsequently did post-graduate work in psychiatry, was able to rework them into his fiction.
If any character contains traces of his alienation, it has to be Elaine, the “witch” that assists D’joan in her crusade. Before she met D’joan, Elaine was mad: “‘Madness’ is a rare condition, consisting of a human mind which does not engage his
environment correctly. Elaine approached it before she met D’joan. Elaine was not the only case, but she was a rare and genuine one. Her life, thrust back from all attempts at growth, had turned back on itself and her mind had spiraled inward to the only safety she could really know, psychosis. Madness is always better than X, and X to each patient is individual, personal, secret and overwhelmingly important. Elaine had gone normally mad; her imprinted and destined careen was the wrong one...Madness was much kinder than the realization that she was not herself...”
At the core of her madness is an ambiguous identity: “The wrong me, the wrong time, the wrong place, and I’m alone, I’m alone, I’m alone, her mind screamed.” Elaine recalls her delusions almost with pride: “Bright brains serve madness as well they serve sanity—namely, very well indeed…” “Elaine was mad. But there was a part of her which suspected that she was mad.”57
In Lindner’s story, “Kirk” is subjected to a clinical examination, which includes neurological, endocrine and “even anthropological” studies. The doctors find nothing abnormal, aside from an uncommon intelligence.
After a series of failures, Lindner tries to overcome his patient’s resistance, for Kirk has begun to feel abnormal and senses that the attitude of his superiors toward him has changed. At this point, Lindner attempts something that at the time was very bold for Freudian orthodoxy. He tries entering into the interior world of the patient and sharing his fantasies, with the aim of accentuating the contradictions and cracking the solidity of his delusion.
“Kirk’s” resistance gradually breaks down as he begins to trust his analyst, who now seems to be corroborating his fantasies. Before long, though, Lindner assumes the role of the realistic “I” and begins pointing out the inconsistencies in “Kirk´s” fantastical encyclopedia. He undertakes, so to speak, an internal critique of the delusion.
What happened next was something unprecedented in Lindner’s career, the reason he chose “Kirk’s” case to be the climax to his book.
Like his patient, Lindner was an avid reader of science fiction, and in this respect they spoke the same language. As he delved deeper into “Kirk’s” notes, this fictional world began to cohere for him. Soon he was participating in his patient’s madness and, momentarily, his grip on reality was loosened. One day, he realized he was anticipating their next session with excitement, anxious to continue the search for the missing pieces to the galactic jigsaw puzzle.
With Lindner sensing he is approaching madness himself, the day finally comes when Kirk is reluctant to continue. After a while, he confesses that the story is false and that he has ceased believing in it for some time. Doubt —introduced intentionally— and the circumstance of having to share his private world with another person have proved effective.
As the analyst now resists abandoning the galactic delusion, the patient confesses he has been feigning interest in the game for a while now, solely because Lindner “seemed to need it”. The delirium has vanished and the patient is cured.
To what extent is “cured” the correct term? For while these conflicts do not return and threaten his mental stability, some vestiges of the crises nonetheless remain in the work of “Cordwainer Smith”.
The tendency toward disassociation continues to be present in his characters, some manifested in pairs that embody different aspects of his personality.
For instance, Linebarger was a colonel. When Casher O’Neill returns to his world, two colonels question him —one is a doctor and the other an intelligence officer.
Two robots containing the personalities of a pair of humans assist Lord Sto Odin. One is “a psychiatrist who turned into a general” and the other “the head of an espionage division turned into historian.”
The Vomact lineage is also dualistic: the descendants of the physicist Heinz are cruel, while the progeny of the doctor Joachim are compassionate. Their dualism is implicit in their name. In German, Acht means “prohibition” and “exile” as well as “attention” and “care”.
The same dichotomy informs the name MacBan. Ban means both “proclamation” and “prohibition”. Rod must proclaim the Good News of the underpeople but feels marginal himself.
There are other figures with complex personalities often threatened with disassociation. T’ruth is a turtle imprinted with the character of Citizen Agatha Madigan, who in turn has assumed the identity of the Hechizera of Gonfalon. But despite all her powers, she constantly asks herself “who” she really is.
While D’joan was born a dog, her personality has been shaped along the lines of Lady Panc Ashash, and she matures thanks to the love of Elaine and the Hunter.
Gosigo is an “amnesiac”, the alleged perpetrator of a serious crime whose life the Instrumentality has spared at the price of erasing his memories and giving him a new identity. Anxious to know who he was before, he wonders if he might have been a tyrant or a traitor, haunted by “the fear ―the eerie, dreary fear of being me…”58
When Casher O’Neill and D’alma pass beneath the arch safeguarding a mystical being, the
Gunung Banga59, the being discovers the multitudes that inhabit their minds: “Who are you thousands that you should be two people? I sense all of you. The fighters and the ships and the men of blood, the searchers and the forgetters, there’s even an Old North Australian renunciant here. And the great go-captain Tree, and there are even a couple of men of old Earth.60”
Trapped in “poetic” madness, Linebarger and Lindner suffer the same fate as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. The former, like Don Quixote, “dries up his brain by reading too many cheap romances” while the latter prefers to transport everything to the libidinal terrain. Both are enmeshed in a symbolic field, one with its own logic, and at times lose themselves in it.
If Linebarger’s psychosis had simply been flight from a conflictive situation, the success of the therapy would have consisted in reintegrating him into professional life, thereby emasculating his capacity for fantasy. But “Cordwainer Smith” appears precisely after “Kirk” has recovered from his alienation. Therapy has released a new possibility latent within him.
His madness must have had some aesthetic value ―how else to explain the ability to drag his therapist into his delirium with him? Lindner, in fact, liberated the “Cordwainer Smith” inside of Linebarger, enabling him to channel his powerful fantasy into literary creation.
Anyone who creates works of fiction runs the risk of losing oneself in them, for they are the mediations by means of which the artist constructs his own version of reality. A fantasy so rich that it could serve as a refuge in the midst of an existential crisis ultimately finds its way subliminally into the creative work.
But for this, talent is a prerequisite, which explains why there are so many neurotics and so few Kafkas.
As a result of the therapy, Linebarger was able to recover his past and confront the historical reality that the abstractions of political discourse had protected him from.
With Ria and Carola, then, he came to terms with his Chinese, European and American past, without ceasing to question the values instilled in him as a result of his education.
The intricate fantasy “Kirk” had given voice to could only be channeled through literary forms that “Cordwainer Smith” would now design consciously. The change brought about by the therapy allowed him to embrace a new perspective. In his alienation he had fled from immediate reality, projecting himself into remote worlds in outer space. Now he began to unite those worlds to time, albeit a future one, and construct a “history” in which the present, symbolically transfigured, would have a place.
Years later, when compiling his first stories, he gave the collection a title with a Heraclitean flavor in which he seemed to be alluding to himself: “You Will Never Be The Same”. Perhaps we are now in better position to understand that statement.
The Crisis of the American
Dream
In 1948, when an attack of jaundice endangered the only eye he had left, Linebarger was transferred to the Pentagon, where he was assigned no specific task. During these hours of forced leisure, he wrote “Scanners Live in Vain”, the first story signed by “Cordwainer Smith”.
The following year, just a few months after his divorce, he married Genevieve Collins, a linguist “more polyglot than he was” who had been his student in a seminar. Genevieve (also an intelligence agent) would assist him in his work and the construction of his fictional universe. After Paul’s death, she took charge of publishing his work and completed all unpublished or incomplete texts that have appeared since, with varying results.
In 1950, a recently married Paul left for Malaysia, summoned by the British to serve as an adviser in their campaign against communist guerillas. That same year, Mao toppled Chiang Kai-shek, the latter taking refuge in Taiwan under the protection of the United States.
The Malaysia campaign would be remembered as one of the few cases in which the guerillas were defeated militarily without large political consequences. Many of the guerillas were regular Chinese soldiers that the Malaysians had always considered foreigners.
When the Korean War broke out, Linebarger was transferred to a new theater of operations as an adviser to MacArthur’s Eighth Army. In Korea, his knowledge of Asian mentality once again was brought into play. The war was kept going from China with the contribution of troops. Chinese soldiers, imbued with a traditional notion of honor, preferred to die rather than admit they were willing to surrender. For them, Linebarger came up with a new surrender pamphlet similar to the ones he had designed during the Second World War. It consisted of a series of words: “love”, “duty”, “humanity” and “virtue”. Enunciated in this order in Chinese, they sounded very close to “I surrender” to the ears of any English-speaking soldier.
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