The rumors reached Crowley, who cabled Germer: “Suspect Ron playing confidence trick.” Crowley had good reason to be concerned—at the time, he was living largely off funds from the Los Angeles temple—and Parsons boarded a train to Miami. On his arrival, he found that his partners had taken out loans for three boats, and he had managed to track one of them down when he received a call saying that Hubbard and Sara had sailed away. Parsons cast a magic circle in his room to conjure up a storm, forcing the couple to turn back at the Panama Canal. Magical or not, Hubbard had suffered from his usual bad luck at sea.
After reaching a settlement, Parsons returned to Pasadena, and neither Sara nor Hubbard ever saw him again. Years afterward, Hubbard asserted that he been told to investigate Parsons by the Navy, thereby “[breaking] up black magic in America,” but any successes along those lines evidently went unacknowledged. Hubbard was out of money, and he threatened to kill himself if Sara—who later said that he began beating her in Miami—didn’t marry him. Sara was unaware that Hubbard was still married to his first wife, and their wedding took place on August 10, 1946.
On November 25, Hubbard stayed overnight in New Jersey with Campbell, who was shocked by his appearance: “He was a quivering psychoneurotic wreck, practically ready to break down completely. When he got out of service, he had the quivers—literally. He also had several bad wounds, and was in bad physical shape. His conversation was somewhat schizoid at points, wandering in not-always lucid organization.” Elsewhere, he said that Hubbard’s rented room “reeked of tension and some sort of undercover activity.”
They discussed some new projects, and Hubbard also tried to get back into Heinlein’s good graces, “heartily and affectionately” congratulating him on breaking into The Saturday Evening Post, although he conceded that he was in “the Heinlein doghouse” over the misunderstanding with Leslyn’s nephews. Heinlein never replied, but he made his opinion clear in a note attached to the letter in his files: “I no longer trust you. . . . I think a lot of those ribbons on your chest, even if Polly doesn’t. You’re an authentic hero, even though a phony gentleman. I’ll give you money to get you out of a jam but I don’t want you in my house.”
The following year, Hubbard and Sara moved to Washington, just fifteen miles from his family in Bremerton. Sara finally learned that her husband was still married to Polly, who filed for divorce in April. From there, they headed for Ojai, where Hubbard was arrested for failing to make payments on their trailer. It isn’t clear if he ever crossed paths with Heinlein, who moved to the same town in July, but their dislocated lives had taken on curious parallels—both had found new partners, and they both left Ojai to take up residence in trailers in the San Fernando Valley.
Hubbard began to work more steadily. His first major publication after the war had been “Fortress in the Sky,” a cover story for the May 1947 issue of Air Trails and Science Frontiers, which Campbell was editing. It was credited to “Capt. B.A. Northrop,” a pseudonym that the editor may well have suggested—it recalled Sara’s maiden name, much as Campbell had once written as Don A. Stuart and Heinlein as Anson MacDonald. The article said that since the atomic bomb had rendered the notion of a land or naval base obsolete, the last impregnable position was the moon, and it went on to make a rather peculiar claim:
Here and there throughout the world many men have been thinking about rockets for some time. . . . I recall that in 1930 L. Ron Hubbard, a writer and engineer, developed and tested—but without fanfare—a rocket motor considerably superior to the V-2 instrument of propulsion and rather less complicated.
Campbell—who failed to question the idea that Hubbard had been conducting rocket research at nineteen—provided much of the science from his unpublished novel The Moon Is Hell, and its discussion of the “gravity gauge,” or the advantage in launching missiles from the moon to Earth, made a strong impression on Heinlein, who would draw on it in detail years later.
Even more significant was The End Is Not Yet, which ran in Astounding in 1947. In his first novel in years, Hubbard seemed to be testing alternate identities—or futures—for himself, with one character who discovers a new form of mental energy, another who becomes the world’s most famous author, and a third who writes the definitive book on psychology. Campbell recalled, “I bought it quite largely because Ron, I felt, deserved a boost back onto his feet. The story . . . was mediocre. It’s the only time I’ve ever bought a story I did not feel was one I genuinely enjoyed.”
In August 1947, Forrest J Ackerman, a fan and agent in Los Angeles who had offered his services to Heinlein and Campbell, signed Hubbard as a client. Ackerman wanted him to pitch Excalibur, his book on psychology, to a pair of businessmen who were looking to get into publishing, but Hubbard declined: “I broke it out and then shook my head over it.” His work had done nothing to address his own problems, and he wrote to the Veterans Administration to request help for his “long periods of moroseness and suicidal inclinations.”
He was writing more—he cranked out a series of potboilers for Astounding about a character named Ole Doc Methuselah, with many of the plots proposed by Sara—and at Ackerman’s urging, he began to attend meetings of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. It was his first extended exposure to fans, who provided him with the audience that he had been lacking, and Hubbard showed off his skill at hypnotism, which he had studied in an effort to treat his depression. He had failed to help himself, but he was spectacularly good at it with others, with the ability to induce trances by snapping his fingers at the count of three.
Another frequent attendee was A. E. van Vogt, who had been impressed by Hubbard after meeting him at Parsons’s mansion. When a fan recounted a strange dream, Hubbard said that he had caused it while “strolling in astral form.” Van Vogt didn’t believe it, but he began to wonder what else might have happened. Using another hypnotist, van Vogt found a man who said that Hubbard had sadistically toyed with him after implanting a posthypnotic command. It testified to Hubbard’s growing reputation, even if the memory itself was a false one.
Hubbard was encouraged by these reactions, and he branched out to other treatments: “I went right down in the middle of Hollywood, I rented an office, got hold of a nurse, wrapped a towel around my head and became a swami.” He later wrote that he had his subjects “writhing” as he worked on such issues as inferiority complexes, allergies, and stuttering, and he claimed to have devised a form of mental therapy that cured eight out of ten patients.
In the summer of 1948, Hubbard was arrested by the San Luis Obispo County sheriff on charges of passing a bad check. Shortly afterward, he headed to New York, where he attended meetings of the Queens Science Fiction League. He seemed to be recovering, telling Heinlein that the war had finally ended for him: “I no longer start for the bridge every time I hear a taxicab horn.” Hubbard also said, falsely, that he had received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work, and that he hoped to write “a book risen from the ashes of old Excalibur.”
After spending Thanksgiving with the Campbells, Hubbard and Sara began looking for a change of scene, and they ended up in Savannah, Georgia, by February 1949. When he asked for his loan from Heinlein, they were living near a pulpwood plant, working on Excalibur. Hubbard told Ackerman that the book had information on how to “rape women without their knowing it,” and that he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to use it to abolish the Catholic Church or found one of his own. He concluded, “Don’t know why I suddenly got the nerve to go into this again and let it loose. It’s probably either a great love or an enormous hatred of humanity.”
In March, Sara went to see her mother, who had suffered a heart attack, leaving him alone for several weeks. On April 13, 1949, Hubbard wrote to the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the Gerontological Society in Baltimore, saying that he had treated twenty patients until they could remember events from before birth. He claimed to be working for free with criminals, orphans, and a boy who was failing his cla
sses, and he told Heinlein that if he ever started charging for his services, “the local psychiatrists, now my passionate pals, would leave me dead in some back alley.”
At the end of April, Hubbard mentioned that he was moving to Washington, D.C., for an indeterminate period. Three weeks later, he applied for a marriage license there to marry a woman named Ann Jensen, who canceled it the next day. Nothing else is known of her, although it’s tempting to identify her with the girl whom Hubbard described as taking his dictation in Savannah—she couldn’t spell, but she was “awful pretty.” It was his last attempt to break from Sara, who represented a period in his past that he was trying to forget, much as Leslyn had for Heinlein. At one point, he sent a letter to Parsons, saying that he could have Sara back.
Hubbard was convinced that he had willed his way out of the depths of depression, and although his attempts to interest professional societies in his work had gone nowhere, one last possibility remained. In May, he contacted Campbell about his research, and the editor responded by inviting him and Sara to New Jersey. For reasons of his own, Campbell was very interested in what Hubbard had to say—and although he could have worked with him at a distance, as he had with so many other writers, he decided early on that he wanted to keep this one close.
11.
The Modern Science of Mental Health
1945–1950
Cybernetics is the big new idea of the times, and it is my opinion Hubbard . . . has got cybernetics, and got it bad; this is to say, he has got it wrong. . . . It was perhaps inevitable that the productive thinking which generated the cybernetic point of view should beget some incidental monstrosities amidst the voluminous literature accumulating in and about the field.
—YVETTE GITTLESON, AMERICAN SCIENTIST, OCTOBER 1950
For the December 1946 issue of the magazine Air Trails Pictorial, Campbell, its new editor, wrote an article titled “Bikini Balance Sheet.” He provided an overview of the atomic bomb tests at the Marshall Islands and discussed matters of civil defense, with a full page devoted to a map of the aftermath of a hypothetical nuclear attack on New Jersey. At the center of the blast was Campbell’s house in Scotch Plains. He invited readers to draw a similar circle on their own road maps: “The big cities may not necessarily be impact centers. Your small town may be a better aiming point.”
In the years immediately after the war, Campbell occupied a peculiar position. His career, which was thriving, was built on a threat that could annihilate him and everyone he loved in a single blinding instant. The world beyond science fiction was looking to him for his thoughts, and now that he had the role that he had always wanted, he was unable to be reassuring. A profile by Dickson Hartwell in the February 1946 issue of Pic caught Campbell in a typical moment:
If you want to know what a hell of a fix this world is in I suggest you listen for a few minutes, in a mood of deepening gloom, to Mr. Atomic. . . . It is not the way he says it so much as what he says about the future which makes Mr. Atomic the man of the hour. For it was he who scooped the world press on the atomic bomb, not by hours or weeks but by years.
Campbell obliged Hartwell with an alarming interview—he speculated that a nuclear war might break out within the next decade—and posed for a picture in his basement, a soldering iron in one hand, a lit cigarette in the other.
He seemed to draw energy, even youth, from the forces that threatened civilization. “At thirty-five, Campbell has that peculiar feline physical makeup which makes some men look ten years younger than they are,” Hartwell wrote, adding that he “seems to personify atomic power in human form.” It was a comparison that Campbell liked, and he may even have suggested it. In a profile that the editor wrote for himself in Air Trails, he said, “Despite [his] varied activities, Campbell has managed also to acquire a wife and two children, of whom the latter two are believed by the neighbors to operate on atomic energy.”
Otherwise, his family went largely unmentioned. “Questions about his personal life he dismisses in a word, if he answers them at all,” Hartwell said, and Campbell referred to Doña only briefly in his own profile: “Mrs. Campbell has long since become resigned to existence over a basement laboratory which resounds to the birth pangs of divers scientific ideas.” He spent most of his free time in his workshop, and Doña was feeling sidelined, which was nothing new. Referring to the photographer from Pic, she wrote, “I learned more about [Street & Smith’s] personnel in an hour with him than I’ve found out in eight years from John.”
Hartwell had been exhausted by hearing Campbell talk about the atomic menace over the course of a single interview, while Doña had to hear about it every day. As the map in Air Trails implied, their home had become ground zero in at least one respect—the bomb dominated the editor’s thoughts as nothing else ever had. Like Leslyn Heinlein, Doña had been psychologically drained by the war, and her husband’s fixations were hard to bear. Campbell, in turn, was bewildered that she wasn’t more pleased by his current position: “I should work fifteen years toward a decent income so we can both be bitter when I get it.”
If their financial stability had been created by the bomb, it only encouraged his tendency to be obsessed by it. It figured in nearly all of his editorials, and Astounding began to read like a trade organ for the nuclear power industry. At first, the discussion was primarily technical. Over lunch, Campbell had been told by the physicist Hans Bethe that uranium was the only nuclear fuel, but he continued to mull over the subject, resulting in an aside in the January 1946 issue:
The uranium reaction is reasonably potent, but another one, discovered in 1930 by Lord Rutherford, is nearly twice as powerful, pound for pound, and uses cheap lithium and ordinary hydrogen. It won’t start until a temperature of several million degrees is reached, but the Hiroshima U-235 bomb would make an excellent primer to start the more violent explosion.
Campbell anticipated not only the hydrogen bomb, but the lithium hydride method that would be utilized by the Russians seven years later. In many ways, it was the shrewdest guess that he would ever make.
Before long, however, he shifted to the social sciences and their bearing on the bomb, writing in April 1946, “Psychology must advance faster than nuclear physics.” The most ambitious fictional exploration of these problems had been A. E. van Vogt’s The World of Null-A, the first installment of which was on newsstands when Hiroshima was destroyed. It was a wild combination of Korzybski and a pulp serial, and Campbell wrote glowingly of it to Heinlein, who was less impressed: “I hate to see a man write about General Semantics who does not understand it.” But he also seemed to feel a sense of proprietary irritation that he had failed to get there first.
After the war, Campbell had tried to get the band back together, with mixed success. In the February 1946 issue, he said that Heinlein and Hubbard—who had served in “Java, Australia, Alaska, Hawaii, Saipan”—would soon be available, but his hopes turned out to be premature. Heinlein would be locked out of the magazine by their dispute over rights, while Hubbard’s depression kept him from writing for over a year. Campbell had no choice but to find other authors, although he no longer had the time or the inclination to develop new voices from scratch.
His one great discovery was Arthur C. Clarke, whose geographical distance—he was born in 1917 in England—kept him from being shaped by the editor to any real degree. Clarke’s first sale, “Rescue Party,” appealed almost by accident to Campbell’s prejudices, with an encounter between mankind and an alien race that implied that humans would have the advantage. But Campbell rejected his excellent “Against the Fall of Night,” an ambitious effort to extend the mood of the Don A. Stuart stories into the postwar era, and ongoing issues with foreign rights ensured that Clarke’s most important work would appear elsewhere.
There were notable submissions from other writers. Will Jenkins wrote the landmark “First Contact,” based on an idea from Campbell that looked ahead to the Cold War, and “A Logic Named Joe,” which was one of the few stories of any er
a to anticipate the Internet. Catherine L. Moore, writing as Lawrence O’Donnell, produced her masterpiece, “Vintage Season,” about time travelers who visit past disasters as tourists, and Campbell even published E. E. Smith’s Children of the Lens, at the urging of a fan who argued that the magazine ought to honor one of its most beloved authors, even if his work seemed behind the times.
Other writers confronted the atomic age more directly. In 1947, at a convention in Philadelphia, the writer Judith Merril—who married Frederik Pohl the following year—tipsily cornered Campbell at a party in a hotel suite: “John, I wrote a story ’at’s so good, ish mush too good for you.”
Campbell was drunk as well: “You’re right. If’sh that good, we don’ pay enough for it.” After reading her story, “That Only a Mother,” he bought it, despite its bleak conclusion—it was about a woman who refuses to admit that her mutant daughter has been born without any limbs.
But he was also trying to pull back from atomic doom. Readers were having it thrown at them from all sides, and as his audience expanded, he began to look for other ways of approaching the same material. He had hoped to edit a technical magazine for years, and an opportunity arose in the form of Air Trails Pictorial, a model aircraft periodical devoured by hobbyists—including a teenage Neil Armstrong—who built miniature planes that flew on gasoline or rubber bands. As the model business went downhill after the war, the title grew less profitable, and it was relaunched as a science monthly with an emphasis on aviation.
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