Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  So it works out that the only way we could get her straightened out would be to use force; i.e., tie her down, put a nitrous oxide mask over her face, knock her out, and work on her in deep trance therapy. In a few hours’ work that way we could break loose the commands that keep her from accepting dianetic therapy. From then on, we’d be able to straighten her out.

  Campbell wrote to Robert Swisher in a similar vein, “If the situation had seriously disturbed me, it wouldn’t have worked that way, I suspect. It’s quite easy to install engrams to produce a desired effect.” He never acted on it, but it revealed a side of his personality that was close to Hubbard at his worst.

  In any event, his old life was over—the price, perhaps, that he had to pay to save the world, although Doña saw the separation as “the obvious move for a relatively rational person in an intolerable situation.” She went to live with Smith, while Campbell hired a housekeeper to watch his daughters. Every evening, after tucking in Peedee and Leslyn, whom he saw as his compensation for his unhappy marriage, he worked on dianetics until midnight. Like Hubbard and Heinlein, he was entering a new phase, but unlike them, he would do it alone. And he had no way of knowing that the golden age that he had inaugurated was about to come to an end.

  12.

  The Dianetics Epidemic

  1950–1951

  If anyone wants a monopoly on dianetics, be assured that he wants it for reasons which have to do not with dianetics but with profit.

  —L. RON HUBBARD, DIANETICS

  When “Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science” appeared at last in the May 1950 issue of Astounding, Campbell’s first order of business was to convince his audience that it wasn’t a joke. This was partially his own fault. The success of “The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline” had inspired a series of hoax articles by other writers, leading to some mild confusion among readers, and Campbell had decreed that such stories would be called “Special Features” in the future.

  But it left him in an awkward position when it came to dianetics. In his announcement in the December 1949 issue, Campbell had written, “This is not a hoax article.” He felt obliged to repeat himself when the article was published: “I want to assure every reader, most positively and unequivocally, that this article is not a hoax, joke, or anything but a direct, clear statement of a totally new scientific thesis.” Joseph Winter emphasized this point yet again in his introduction: “[Campbell] wanted to make certain that you readers would not confuse dianetics with thiotimoline or with any other bit of scientific spoofing. This is too important to be misinterpreted.”

  These repeated disavowals weren’t entirely successful—many fans still thought that it was a gag—and the article itself turned out to be short on specifics. It opened with a line apparently calculated to appeal to the magazine’s core readership: “The optimum computing machine is a subject which many of us have studied. If you were building one, how would you design it?” From there, it specified thirteen attributes that an ideal computer would possess, closely paralleling a list of seventeen items that Campbell sent to Heinlein on November 29, 1949, in which he strongly implied that he had written this section himself.

  At that point, Hubbard took over, claiming to have spent eleven years on observations of “the medicine man of the Goldi people of Manchuria, the shamans of North Borneo, Sioux medicine men, the cults of Los Angeles, and modern psychology. . . . Odds and ends like these, countless odds and ends.” The article reflected this hodgepodge of influences, comparing the analytic mind to “a well-greased Univac,” alluding to demon circuits, and quoting Claude Shannon and Warren McCulloch. Hubbard provided no real description of the therapy itself, but he concluded with what might have been the motto of the postwar Astounding: “Up there are the stars. Down in the arsenal is an atom bomb. Which one is it going to be?”

  The issue also carried an advertisement for Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, which was scheduled to be released by Hermitage House on April 19. It was delayed until May 9—Campbell wrote that the publisher was “straining a gut” to meet its deadline—and when readers finally got their hands on it, they were confronted by a truly weird book, alternately compelling and incomprehensible, with an inconsistent tone that reflected its rushed writing and production.

  It was dedicated, inexplicably, to the historian Will Durant, a favorite of Heinlein and Asimov with no previous connection to dianetics. Those who ventured further were rewarded with the first comprehensive account of auditing, as well as a fixation on attempted abortions and a level of sexual explicitness that must have taken many readers by surprise: “Mother is saying, ‘Oh, I can’t live without it. It’s wonderful. It’s wonderful. Oh, how nice. Oh, do it again!’ and father is saying, ‘Come! Come! Oh, you’re so good. You’re so wonderful. Ahhh!’ ”

  At times, Hubbard seemed to be channeling Campbell: “Dianetics addresses war because there is in fact a race between the science of mind and the atom bomb.” In another section, he spoke from personal experience: “Sometimes soldiers in the recent war have come home pretending they had been wounded and, when in therapy, are afraid the auditor will find out or give them away to their people. This soldier might not have been wounded in the war, but an engram will be found which contains sympathy for the injury of which he complains. He is asking for sympathy with a colorful story and believes he is telling a lie.”

  Compared to its subsequent incarnations, however, the text as a whole was relatively restrained. Hubbard called it a provisional theory, open to revision, and he ended by predicting its obsolescence: “In twenty or a hundred years the therapeutic technique which is offered in this volume will appear to be obsolete. Should this not prove to be the case, then the author’s faith in the inventiveness of his fellow man will not have been justified.” And his last line was a ringing call to action: “For God’s sake, get busy and build a better bridge!”

  In fact, the book was conceived as the beginning of an ongoing scientific revolution. The year before, Hubbard had tried to found an organization called the American Institute of Advanced Therapy, but its real debut came with the incorporation of the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation in April 1950. Its offices were Hubbard’s cottage in Bay Head and Campbell’s house in Scotch Plains, and its board included Hubbard, Sara, Don Rogers, Art Ceppos, and C. Parker Morgan, a lawyer and former FBI agent who had been treated by Campbell. Winter, who had sold his practice and moved to Union, New Jersey, with his family, would serve as the medical director, and the treasurer would be Campbell himself.

  The foundation’s first order of business was to generate publicity. At the end of May, after the book had been out for a few weeks, the board members gave a presentation to an audience in Washington, D.C. Winter didn’t think that it had gone well: “The professional people evidenced an interest in the philosophy of dianetics; their interest was repelled, however, by the manner of presentation of the subject, especially the unwarranted implication that it was necessary to repudiate one’s previous beliefs before accepting dianetics.”

  But word was spreading. Within two weeks, they received two thousand letters, with hundreds more pouring in every day—only three of which, Hubbard claimed, were totally unfavorable. As a space for patients, the foundation rented the house on Aberdeen Road in Elizabeth where Hubbard and Sara had lived on their arrival. When his landlord complained about the cars parked out front, Hubbard cabled back, “Happily for me, if unhappily for you, I have a book on the bestseller lists.”

  Later that month, after taking out a loan of ten thousand dollars, the foundation leased the top floor of the Miller Building on Morris Avenue, which was divided into eighteen consulting rooms furnished with “surplus army cots, surplus navy lecture-hall chairs, and some twenty-dollar sheet metal auditor’s desks.” A second office was established at 55 East Eighty-Second Street in New York. An associate membership cost fifteen dollars a year, while a full course of treatment came to six hundred dollars, and everyone who ap
plied was accepted.

  Campbell threw himself into his new cause. As one of just four trained auditors in the world—by his reckoning, he had undergone more hours of free auditing than anyone else alive—he felt obliged to give it everything he had. Leaving his daughters with the housekeeper, he arrived at the foundation at eight in the morning to teach, followed by hours of therapy and “bull sessions,” and didn’t return home until after midnight. Unlike Hubbard, he didn’t draw a salary, and although he was spending just two days a week at the magazine, he began to feel overextended.

  Yet he thought that he had found his life’s work, and he genuinely believed that dianetics could achieve miracles: “Why, for God’s sake, do you think I thought dianetics was so important? Hell, man, because I knew it was, because I tried it, and it helped.” His letters were filled with descriptions of the successful treatment of “homosexuals, alcoholics, asthmatics, arthritics, and nymphomaniacs.” Even before the foundation was established, he had written to Heinlein, “We have case histories on homos. One we worked on for ten days got married three months later. A fifteen-year record of homosexuality behind him, too.”

  He also served as the public face of the foundation, participating in debates at colleges—including Rutgers, which was said to be looking seriously into dianetics—and promoting it to his readers. After the article was published, an advertisement proclaimed, “It is not the first, nor will it be the last time, Astounding Science Fiction precedes science generally.” In a response to a letter, Campbell explained why the piece had appeared in the magazine at all, rather than a scientific journal, while avoiding any mention of the fact that they had failed to place it elsewhere:

  The professional journals would normally take two to four years of cautious experimentation and consideration, particularly when material so revolutionary was involved. . . . The publication of the article now has, thus, saved a considerable number of lives—and a considerable number of minds from prefrontal lobotomy and the like.

  He hoped to start a dedicated periodical for dianetics, but there was no question that the attention had benefited Astounding. In 1949, its circulation stood at 75,000. The following year, it approached 100,000. Sales of the book were accelerating as well, and by the summer, it was selling over a thousand copies a day.

  Not surprisingly, the first major center of activity outside New Jersey was Los Angeles, where it came to focus on A. E. van Vogt, who began to get daily calls from Hubbard. His phone would ring at seven in the morning, and Hubbard would talk for an hour before excusing himself: “Well, I’ve got to go. I’m teaching a class.” Hubbard encouraged him to get involved, but van Vogt demurred: “I’m not interested in anything but being a writer.”

  Then the checks started coming in. Hubbard had given van Vogt’s address to prospective applicants, and he received five thousand dollars in fees. After eighteen days, he was convinced. Obtaining a copy of Dianetics, he read it through twice. For his first test subject, he chose his wife’s sister, who shrieked at the touch of the forceps during a memory of her birth. Next on his couch was Forrest Ackerman, who experienced a cathartic sense of grief over the death of his brother in the war.

  Dianetics benefited greatly from the targeted advertising that Campbell had recently introduced in the magazine, and within the fan community, it was universally seen as the event of the year. Auditing was becoming a parlor game. Unlike psychoanalysis, it was simple enough to be practiced by anyone, and it positioned itself as a response to legitimate concerns over shock therapy and lobotomy. Like many social epidemics, it took advantage of an existing group of receptive readers, and the treatment, which required a partner, encouraged them to recruit others. In the language of a later generation, dianetics had gone viral.

  Despite these triumphs, Campbell remained bitter about Doña’s departure, writing to Heinlein, “If you can get a reasoned explanation of why she wants to give up a fine pair of kids, a good home, financial security, and a husband who has never touched her in anger, or even bawled her out particularly, I shall be much interested.” Heinlein, who was “sorry as hell but not surprised,” offered to take the editor’s daughters off his hands, and Campbell raised the possibility of a visit to Peedee as her reward for completing dianetic therapy: “If she is cleared, you will probably be seeing her this summer.” In the end, the girls never made it to Colorado Springs.

  As for Doña, she was in the Virgin Islands, where she had to remain for six weeks to secure a divorce on grounds of “incompatibility of temperament”—a popular choice for unhappy couples in those days. At her hotel on St. Thomas, she found herself surprisingly content: “I fully expected to come down here and wallow in misery and brood but there hasn’t been much time.” She remained wary of dianetics, warning the Heinleins that the therapy, while potentially helpful in certain cases, would be dangerous “in the hands of a couple of crackpot world-savers.”

  By the end of June, Doña was back in town. As a treat for the girls—who would live with their father—she and Campbell took them to see Destination Moon, the movie that Heinlein had written for George Pal. At the theater, where the doorman was dressed in an orange space suit, a teenage fan in the row behind them tapped Campbell on the shoulder to say hello. His name was Robert Silverberg.

  Campbell had also met a figure who would play an even more significant role in his life. Winter’s older sister Margaret Kearney, who was known as Peg, had arrived earlier that month in New Jersey. Peg, who was born on March 15, 1907, had grown up with her brother in Negaunee, Michigan, where their father had been a bank president and served three terms as mayor. She attended high school in Ironwood, where she was nicknamed “Irish” on account of her reddish hair and blue eyes.

  At the University of Wisconsin, Peg obtained a master’s degree in English literature and philosophy with a minor in educational psychology, and she briefly taught remedial English before marrying Everett Kearney, the owner of a flour and feed company. During the Great Depression, she organized local housewives into a lucrative business embroidering crewel ski sweaters for such companies as Brooks Brothers and Abercrombie & Fitch. They had two teenage children, Joe and Jane, but their marriage was unhappy, and they had recently separated.

  In New Jersey, Peg became involved with the movement at once, teaching classes and investing five thousand dollars in the foundation. She also became Campbell’s auditing partner. Peg was heavy and rather plain, with dark braids pinned to the top of her head, but also strikingly intelligent. When he made a crack about the female mind, she replied, “You don’t know anything about that, and you never will. You’ve never been a woman, you aren’t a woman, and you never will be. I’m talking about something you don’t know anything about, so just sit back and listen.”

  Campbell did. Peg’s abilities as an auditor, he marveled, made Hubbard look like a kindergartner, and he was eager to question all his assumptions. The end of his marriage was about to become public knowledge. Word of the split had been spreading—Asimov had heard about it from de Camp in April—and it became generally known at the Hydracon convention in New York in July, to the point that many fans were under the impression that it had happened there. On August 19, Doña married George O. Smith in Millbourne, Pennsylvania.

  Even if it was partially a matter of timing, Campbell came to believe that Peg was the partner he had always wanted. He wrote later that the ideal auditor was someone “with a stable, wise, honest, and intelligent personality,” and he added, “That’s a little difficult to find, of course—and if you do find such a personality in a woman, you’ll rather naturally want to make the relationship more extensive than merely ‘auditor!’ ” And he told another correspondent, “If you start cross-auditing with a woman, and your cross-auditing team has even moderate success, there’s about a .999 probability you’ll be married within a year.”

  CAMPBELL ENVISIONED THE FOUNDATION NOT JUST AS A PLACE IN WHICH DIANETICS COULD BE practiced and taught, but as a think tank for the enlightened minds
that the therapy produced. The “clears” were the embodiment of the genre’s persistent dream of an exclusive society of geniuses, as foreshadowed by the Foundation series and, even more strikingly, by the novella “Gulf,” which Heinlein had written for the November 1949 prophecy issue of Astounding.

  Heinlein’s story described an organization of “new men” who develop a form of mental engineering to increase their brainpower, which they use in their fight against a weapon called the Nova Effect—a veiled allegory for science fiction and the bomb. It was his response to The World of Null-A, but also to Hubbard, who had written approvingly of a future in which only the clear had civil rights. When a character in “Gulf” makes a similar argument, the hero replies, “I confess to a monkey prejudice in favor of democracy, human dignity, and freedom.”

  Campbell, by contrast, was untroubled by the prospect, telling George O. Smith, “The next president will have to be a clear.” Any nation that failed to take dianetics seriously was doomed to fall behind the ones that did, and the first step was the foundation, which he had willed into existence out of the pages of the magazine. Campbell had always seen Astounding as “a good bull session,” and he hoped to take it to the next level in Elizabeth, as long as he could convince Hubbard that the best approach was to throw out as many ideas for discussion as possible.

  He was staking all the goodwill that he had accumulated since the war, and his next move was to recruit his own writers. One of the first to feel the force of his enthusiasm was Alfred Bester. A brilliant, versatile author, Bester had also worked for DC Comics—where he wrote the most famous version of the Green Lantern oath—and for radio and television. In late 1949, he finished a story, “Oddy and Id,” that was heavily influenced by Freud. Bester sent it to Campbell, who called early the next year to invite him to discuss a few revisions in person.