The Harrad Experiment
Page 36
Recent Years. I probably never would have been published again, nor would I have continued to write, if I hadn’t remembered another one of my hero/mentors, Paul Kurtz, of the philosophy department at the State University of New York. A dynamo of a man, he had been editor of The Humanist magazine and was a nationally known writer on humanism. I knew that among his many other endeavors, Paul had started a publishing company called Prometheus Books in Buffalo, which published controversial nonfiction. Would he like to take a flyer with The Byrdwhistle Option? Paul was enthusiastic. We were both sure that after hardcover publication in 1982, it could be sold to a paperback publisher. But evidently my novels are still too controversial for paperback publishers, who prefer the tried-and-true formulas of Stephen King and Danielle Steele. (As I write, in 1990, my last three published novels have not appeared in paperback.)
By this time, Erma and I were slowly trying to put together a new lifestyle. After the death of both Nancy and David, we had joined the famous Unitarian Church in Quincy. I was fascinated by the emergence of Unitarian beliefs, deviating from the original Congregationalists and embracing some ideas from many religions. Unitarian / Universalists accept the philosophy that all paths lead to God. Their religious thinking includes an amalgam of ideas from agnosticism, theism, deism, and even atneism and humanism.
Intrigued with the fact that both humanism and U/Uism needed some kind of unifying philosophy that would attract the sixty million or more Americans who never go to church, I wrote The Immoral Reverend, and it was published by Prometheus in 1985. The basic thesis is that all religions (except the ancient Chinese and Hindu) have denigrated human sexuality in one way or another. My protagonist, Matt Godwin, a graduate of Harvard Divinity and Business Schools, proposes that sex itself should become a sacrament. This doctrine would be proclaimed from Beacon Street by the fictional president of the Unitarian Universalist society.
By this time, self-employed at the age of sixty-five, I decided to take a new tack. I wrote a nonfiction history of visual sex. The premise was that anything that could be written was no longer censorable (with the one exception of child pornography), but pictorial sex of the naked human body and of humans copulating (which had been drawn, painted, and sculpted for thousands of years, and in the last hundred had been photographed) was still forbidden.
I wrote this book, and in the process reviewed about twenty porno movies, which in 1979 had become the backbone of the videotape industry since regular filmmakers had not released any of their films. After several turndowns, Bruce Harris, editor and publisher of Crown Books, wrote me that Crown would be interested in publishing a book with reviews of adult films, since nothing like this existed on the market. My shrugging, sometimes laughing interest in sexvids is explained in the first and second edition of The X-Rated Videotape Guide (1986). I have not only given, in about 250 words, a detailed review of the plot, the kinds of sex that appear, from normal to kinky and sadistic, but I keep suggesting that in a sane society, if children would grow up seeing human beings naturally naked and the media would show caring human lovemaking, it would make the portrayal of sick sex (and I include hundreds of other sexual come-ons besides adult films) boring and unnecessary. A sane society would laugh sick sex out of existence.
As an antidote to reviewing sexvids, in the process of writing The Immoral Reverend I discovered another heroine/ mentor, Anne Hutchinson, America’s first feminist. Anne challenged John Wmthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in 1636, and lost She was excommunicated from Massachusetts, and, in my opinion, through the machinations of Winthrop and Thomas Dudley was eventually scalped and murdered by a band of Indians at the age of fifty-three. In my novel, The Resurrection of Anne Hutchinson (1987), Anne arrives naked on my doorstep on a cold winter night The novel includes the complete trials of Hutchinson.
Despite disappointments, I love to write, and keep on doing so. As Erma tells me, “What else would you do?” My ideas seem to be inexhaustible.
At seventy-three, after researching and studying the human brain for several years, I have completed a new novel I first called “The Oublion Project.” It involves a drug that eliminates short-term memory and which is used by a German and an Arab doctor to artificially inseminate women. They are unaware that they are being used to create a new breed of humans (eugenically) who will, through a superior style of education, take over the world, and in the process, eliminate all production of lethal weapons. It’s a fast-moving, highly controversial novel inspired by José Ortega y Gasset, who wrote a book in the 1930s called The Revolt of the Masses. Ortega suggests a coming takeover of the world by people with no historical sense, who will finally destroy it. I have retitled it “New Dawn, January 1, 2000.”
Do I ever feel discouraged or angry? The answer is no. In truth, I have never been angry or hated anyone in my life. Nor do I blame my father or anyone else for the person I have become. If FH had not interefered with my life, I might have married someone else, and I might have been more successful. Or I might have divorced many times in my search for Galatea. My wife, my boys, and the people close to me long ago stopped reading what I write—even when it’s published in book form. But rarely a week goes by that someone doesn’t write me that one or more of my novels has literally changed their life for the better.
Although I discontinued putting extended bibliographies in my novels, afraid they might frighten readers who simply wanted to be entertained, the bibliographies that appeared first in Harrad and in all subsequent novels through The Byrdwhistle Option have inspired thousands of people to argue with me and to think! For that I am immensely grateful. I have apparently become a hero/mentor to hundreds of men and women who have gone out of their way to tell me so in writing.
There are always many aspects of a person missing in an autobiography—that’s why biographers who dig up missing truths are so popular. Anyone interested in more details can find them in forty or fifty file drawers of correspondence—some of it preserved in The Harrad Letters and in You and I ... Searching for Tomorrow. Thanks to Howard Gottlieb, who recognized this correspondence as a piece of mid-century Americana, it is preserved in the Mugar Library of Boston University.
As a futurist, I believe that the “I gotta be me” generation will finally wake up, and a new twist on the 1960s “love everybody” philosophy will prevail as the United States faces the inevitable. Millions of men and women throughout the world will slowly become aware, for multiple reasons, that we are not independent. We are all—billions of us—interdependent, and many of the approaches to marriage and the family and premarital and posmarital sex that I have proposed will be the only way to survive and live self-fulfilling lives. As I note in the dedication of The Harrad Experiment, my novels are for the men and women of the 21st century, who might find them quaint but will consider them germinal.
Fmally, to end with a chuckle. When I told Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh before he died in January 1990, that I was writing my autobiography, he wrote me: “Now is not the right time. Your autobiography should end with sannyas. Why let the world renounce you. Why not you renounce it? When a man dies it is ordinary. But when a man renounces, his consciousness reaches to the heights that are possible. Sannyas is not a religion. It is simply a rejoicing in life and a rejoicing in death. My whole concept is that from the cradle to the grave life should be a dance.”
Let’s go dancing!
a All references to the actual names of colleges and universities in the New England area have been eliminated from these journals. Students in these colleges who have become acquainted with Harrad students assume that they are “day” students, or “townies”. This is in keeping with our purpose not to encourage overt publicity.
b In a recent letter to Phillip Tenhausen, Stanley mentions that InSix still retains great interest in the proposal offered in their thesis. For this reason the identity of the State they chose for their proposal has been concealed.
c The account that follows is a condensed version of
the original autobiogaphy published by Gale Research, Inc., Detroit, Mich., in the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, VoL 10, in 1989. The original has many photographs and a detailed explanation of why I believe that, as of 1990, I have been blacklisted by major American publishers. All have refused to read my latest novel, “New Dawn, January 1, 2000,” completed in 1989. (I am grateful to Gale for permission to reprint my condensed autobiography.)