The author was glad to make the trip, although he was chagrined to discover that the magazine was located in the “boondocks” of Elizabeth. He found Campbell seated with Tarrant in their tiny office. When the editor got up for a handshake, he impressed Bester as both physically huge and oddly distracted—Doña had recently left him, and Campbell was in a sour mood. “You don’t know it, you can’t have any way of knowing it, but Freud is finished.”
Bester stared at him. “If you mean the rival schools of psychiatry, Mr. Campbell, I think—”
Campbell cut him off at once. “No, I don’t. Psychiatry, as we know it, is dead.”
“Oh, come now, Mr. Campbell,” Bester said uncertainly. “Surely you’re joking.”
“I have never been more serious in my life. Freud has been destroyed by one of the greatest discoveries of our time.” When Bester expressed confusion, the editor told him about dianetics. “It was discovered by L. Ron Hubbard, and he will win the Nobel Peace Prize for it.”
Bester couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. “The peace prize? What for?”
“Wouldn’t the man who wiped out war win the Nobel Peace Prize?” Bester was still lost, so the editor fished out the proofs for Hubbard’s article, which hadn’t yet appeared. “Read this.”
Bester looked at the pages. “Read them here and now? This is an awful lot of copy.”
Campbell only turned back to his work. As Bester began to read, he grew bored, but he took his time, not wanting the editor to realize that he was only skimming each sheet. When he set the pages down, Campbell looked at him expectantly. “Well? Will Hubbard win the peace prize?”
Bester, who wanted to be tactful, asked if he could take the galleys home for further study. The editor refused: “You’re blocking it. That’s all right. Most people do that when a new idea threatens to overturn their thinking.”
“That may well be, but I don’t think that’s true of myself. I’m a hyperthyroid, an intellectual monkey, curious about everything.”
“No,” Campbell said. “You’re a hypothyroid. But it’s not a question of intellect. It’s one of emotion. We conceal our emotional history from ourselves, although dianetics can trace our history all the way back to the womb.”
Campbell took him downstairs to the cafeteria, a windowless space that echoed with the sound of lunch orders. Bester sat down across from the editor, who launched into an impromptu auditing session: “Think back. Clear yourself. Remember! You can remember when your mother tried to abort you with a buttonhook. You’ve never stopped hating her for it.”
If Campbell seriously hoped to audit Bester, he had picked a location that was utterly unlike the surroundings in which treatment usually took place. As the writer tried to keep from laughing, he began to tremble, and a way out finally occurred to him: “You’re absolutely right, Mr. Campbell, but the emotional wounds are too much to bear. I can’t go on with this.”
“Yes, I could see you were shaking,” Campbell said. After lunch, they went back to the office, where the editor asked Bester to remove all references in his story to Freud. The author agreed, recovering afterward with three double Gibsons. He never submitted anything to Campbell again, and the magazine was deprived of one of the greatest voices in the genre’s history.
Around the same time, Campbell had a similar interaction with Pohl. When the editor fed him the line about his mother trying to abort him with a buttonhook, Pohl replied, “Actually, that may be so, but I just don’t have the memory of it, and that’s not a problem for me.”
Campbell asked if he ever had migraines. When Pohl said that he didn’t, Campbell continued unfazed, “Most people do, and I know how they’re caused—they’re caused by the fetal memory. Because in the womb of the mother, there are these rhythmic sounds. There’s this slow one”—the editor hammered it out on his desk—“and a rapid one, which is her heartbeat.”
Right on cue, Pohl began to feel a pounding headache. “You’ve done it, John.”
Campbell seemed satisfied. “Aha, now I will fix you up. How old are you?”
“Forty-five.” In fact, he was just thirty, which the editor must have known. When Campbell asked him what had happened when he was forty-five, Pohl responded, “John, I don’t know. It hasn’t happened yet.”
Campbell pressed on. “What happened to you when you were forty-five months? Forty-five days? Forty-five minutes?”
The attempt at auditing was unsuccessful, and Pohl left with his head still throbbing. Shortly afterward, he wrote to Campbell, “Incidentally, my dianetics-induced headache didn’t go away until I woke up the morning after I saw you. That’s powerful stuff you’ve got there!”
After the publication of Dianetics, Campbell went after his authors even more aggressively. He wrote to Jack Williamson to offer treatment on a contingent payment plan: “I know dianetics is one of, if not the greatest, discovery [sic] of all man’s written and unwritten history.” Williamson—who had more experience with psychoanalysis than anyone else in the editor’s circle—hadn’t forgotten his negative impression of Hubbard in Philadelphia. Dianetics, he felt, was a “lunatic revision of Freudian psychology,” and he declined to get involved.
Eric Frank Russell was more diplomatic. He joked in a letter to Campbell that Hubbard could use his discoveries to destroy all religion, but he took a rather flippant stance toward the treatment itself: “If I concentrate hard enough I can concoct a picture of my mother breast-feeding me. . . . However . . . I suspect it of being pure imagination. Evidence in favor of imagination—I can equally well picture Rita Hayworth or Myrna Loy doing the same.”
Other writers were opposed. De Camp felt that it was ridiculous, although Campbell thought that he was just envious of Hubbard, while Willy Ley broke away entirely, which deeply saddened the editor. When del Rey was warned that he wouldn’t sell to Campbell again because he had criticized dianetics in print, he promptly brought in a new submission. At the office, Campbell greeted him warmly: “I guess we’re not going to talk about dianetics, are we?” And he bought the story.
Campbell also failed to interest Norbert Wiener, who instructed his lawyer to ask the foundation to stop listing him as an associate member: “I have no connection [with] dianetics nor do I approve the fanfare of claims which Mr. Hubbard makes. If he has used any part of my ideas, he has done so at his own responsibility, and I do not consider myself involved in any way in his ideas.” Wiener later referred to dianetics as “detrimental to my standing as an honest scientist.”
Not all writers were doubtful. Will Jenkins was merely amused by it, and authors who became interested in dianetics to some degree included Ross Rocklynne, Katherine MacLean, Nelson S. Bond, James Schmitz, Robert Moore Williams, and James Blish. One of its most enthusiastic adopters was Raymond F. Jones, who wrote to Campbell about guiding his wife through a memory of her birth: “Brother, you’re not kidding about dianetics being wonderful.”
Apart from van Vogt, the writer who took dianetics the most seriously was Sturgeon, who was audited by Campbell himself. Sturgeon, who had suffered from depression during the war, became a trained auditor, and he continued to defend its core ideas for decades, stating that it was a “synthesis rather unlike anything done before, and totally practical stuff that really and truly worked. And the thing, the blueprint behind it, was solid and reasonable.”
But the real prizes were Heinlein and Asimov. Of the two, Heinlein seemed like the more obvious bet—he had been involved with General Semantics for years, and he had repeatedly asked Hubbard about his work: “If it does you that much good, it ought to be good for me. In my own way I came out of this war battle-happy myself—from not having been shot at.” He had also been receptive to Campbell’s accounts: “I have heard from [Hubbard] several times about such activities . . . but your letter has been a dern sight more informative than his letters.”
Campbell responded with a hard sell, and he didn’t avoid making grandiose claims: “I most solemnly assure you that, with
the knowledge I now have, I could turn most ordinary people into homicidal maniacs within one hour, or produce a certifiable insanity equally rapidly.” But he also committed a tactical error by casually dismissing Korzybski, referring to General Semantics as a game that undervalued the importance of the unconscious.
Heinlein wouldn’t have taken kindly to this, although he remained sympathetic: “I am most anxious to know more about it and to learn of data gathered by persons other than you and Ron.” On more than one occasion, he asked Campbell—who didn’t respond—how it was helping his sinusitis, his eyes, and his “unallocated fear,” and he even tried to get the military to look into it. Campbell, in turn, recognized the impact that Heinlein’s endorsement would have: “You, for instance, could do a far, far better job [than Hubbard] of presenting dianetics.”
His involvement was limited by distance. Heinlein had gone to Hollywood to serve as a consultant on Destination Moon, which he had sold as a screenplay in 1949. He failed to get along with his coauthor, but he respected the director, Irving Pichel, who threw out most of what the other screenwriter had written—although he retained the comic sidekick from Brooklyn, who annoyed Asimov when he saw it. The result was flawed, but it signaled the migration of science fiction into movies for a mass audience, and Heinlein had reason to be pleased after he left in February 1950.
When the dianetics movement caught fire, he had been back in Colorado Springs for months, building a house with sufficient privacy to allow for nakedness—he was an enthusiastic nudist. He was also working on the juvenile Between Planets—the outline of which included a supporting player based on Hubbard, whom he called “Captain Dianetic”—and on The Puppet Masters, a novel about alien parasites that featured a character with affinities to Campbell: “His unique gift was the ability to reason logically with unfamiliar, hard-to-believe facts as easily as with the commonplace. . . . I have never met anyone else who could do it wholeheartedly.”
After Ginny warned him not to do anything with dianetics for five years, Heinlein told Campbell that he didn’t have a choice: “I would love to experiment a bit, but I have no one, literally no one, as a partner.” He wrote to Robert Bloch, who became famous years later as the author of Psycho, “I tried lying down on the couch and asking myself questions, but nobody answered.” Heinlein may well have been too skeptical—and too familiar with Hubbard—to embrace it, but it might also have appealed to his longing for control, and the outcome might have been different if he had delayed his departure from Los Angeles by just a few months.
Asimov was more resistant, although the themes of dianetics were far from unknown to his work. With input from Campbell, the Foundation and robot stories had been vehicles for exploring the notion of an exact science of psychology, and Pebble in the Sky, his first novel, included a machine, the synapsifier, that could be used to turn ordinary people into geniuses. But he was also naturally cautious, and when Campbell first told him about “Hubbard’s dabblings in amateur psychiatry” on September 16, 1949, he listened “cold and untouched.”
Like Heinlein, Asimov, who was busy conducting cancer research at Boston University, benefited from his fortuitous removal from the fan scene. On April 13, on a trip to Philadelphia, he went over the article with de Camp: “Neither Sprague nor I were in the least impressed. I considered it gibberish.” A few days afterward, he saw Campbell, who became so frustrated by his resistance that he finally said, “Damn it, Asimov, you have a built-in doubter.”
Asimov’s reply was a simple one: “Thank goodness I do, Mr. Campbell.”
In June, Asimov relished a speech at a convention in which del Rey “lambasted dianetics very rationally and without stint.” Campbell, he noted, wasn’t in the audience. Yet he avoided directly engaging the editor, with whom he still had the closest partnership of any writer of the time. A few years earlier, when Pohl had asked if he could serve as an agent for his stories to Astounding, Asimov had declined: “I want to maintain my loving relationship with Campbell.”
He eventually accepted the offer, although he still wrote to Pohl in January 1950, “All stories that go to magazines go to Campbell first. That is a must.” But the landscape of the genre was changing. Just a month earlier, Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas had launched what became known as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, an audacious melding of Astounding and Unknown, and Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles announced the rise of a major talent who had developed in the absence of any support from Campbell.
Asimov himself had benefited from the movement of science fiction into the mainstream. Martin Greenberg of Gnome Press had contracted to do a collection of his robot stories, proposing that it be called I, Robot. When Asimov replied that this was impossible—Eando Binder had published a story of that title in the thirties—Greenberg responded, “Fuck Eando Binder.” Asimov was also feeling envious of Heinlein’s success: “It was like having a stomachache in the mind, and it seemed to spoil all my fun in being a science fiction writer.”
But another significant player was about to appear. Asimov heard that Horace Gold, whose work in Unknown he had enjoyed, was founding a magazine called Galaxy. Gold wanted to buy a story from Asimov, who went to visit him at his apartment. The two men were chatting pleasantly when the editor abruptly excused himself. Asimov thought that he had gone to the bathroom, and he was confused when Gold’s wife, Evelyn, said that he might have to leave. “Have I done something?”
“No. He’s not well.” Evelyn explained that Gold suffered from agoraphobia as a result of trauma in the war, which left him unable to go outside or talk to strangers for long. Asimov, mortified, was about to make his departure when the phone rang. Answering it, Evelyn held out the receiver. “It’s for you.”
“Who knows I’m here?” Taking the phone, Asimov found that it was Gold, who was calling from the next room. They talked for another hour. Asimov learned that this was the only way in which Gold could speak comfortably, and he began to dread the editor’s interminable calls—although he may have also seen it as a distorted reflection of his own fondness for enclosed spaces.
If nothing else, it was another market, as well as a reminder that he was still an important name in science fiction. In August, Pohl told him that Gold wanted to serialize his novel The Stars, Like Dust. Asimov worried about what Campbell would think, but after reflecting that Astounding was currently filled with dianetics, he finally agreed. And that was when Campbell lost him—not entirely, but to an extent that would forever alter their partnership.
On August 31, Asimov drove to Elizabeth to have lunch with Campbell and the artist Hubert Rogers, who told the editor that dianetics was nonsense. Asimov recalled, “I kept my mouth shut, since Rogers clearly needed no help.” Later that day, he saw Gold, who handed him a copy of the debut of Galaxy. It was the most impressive single issue of any science fiction magazine that he had ever seen.
Heinlein also heard from Gold. After sending him the first two issues of Galaxy, Gold bought an article that had been rejected by Cosmopolitan, and he later agreed to serialize The Puppet Masters. Heinlein wasn’t pleased by the experience—Gold was a “fusser and tinkerer,” as well as chronically late with payments, and the author was horrified by how his story was rewritten.
Yet this was the most revealing point of all. Despite Gold’s personal issues and heavy editorial touch, both Asimov and Heinlein were willing to work for him. Galaxy had approached Campbell’s two best authors at a time when their relationship with their longtime editor was vulnerable, and Fantasy & Science Fiction was waiting in the wings. They would peel off his most popular writers one by one, in an accident of timing as significant as the one that had put Campbell in charge of Astounding in the first place. It meant that he would enter the next phase of his life largely without Heinlein or Asimov—and he was about to lose Hubbard as well.
L. Ron Hubbard in Los Angeles, 1950.
Courtesy of UCLA Library Digital Collections
WHEN HUBBARD FLEW BA
CK TO LOS ANGELES IN AUGUST 1950, HE CARRIED THE AURA OF A RETURNING hero. No one had been more surprised by the success of his work than Hubbard himself, but he threw himself into its promotion. He had recently finished Masters of Sleep, one of his few pieces of fiction from that period, which featured a depraved psychiatrist who “had neglected to read anything about dianetics.” At the end of the story, the villain is lobotomized.
On August 10, Hubbard held a rally before an unruly audience of six thousand at the Shrine Auditorium. He had considered presenting Sara as the world’s first clear, but the honor fell on Sonya Bianca, a physics major from Boston, who was said to have “full and perfect recall of every moment of her life.” When the floor was opened up for questions, however, she was unable to remember even the color of Hubbard’s tie. Afterward, Forrest Ackerman felt disappointed, but Hubbard just clapped him on the shoulder: “Well, Forry, I’m dragging down Clark Gable’s salary.”
The Los Angeles foundation formally opened its doors several days later at the Casa, a former governor’s mansion on South Hoover and Adams Boulevard. Van Vogt rose at the crack of dawn each morning to open the office, with Hubbard showing up after an hour to meet with the instructors. When the students arrived at eight, Hubbard lectured and conducted demonstrations for audiences that numbered in the hundreds. He was a fine speaker, with a smooth delivery that rubbed some people the wrong way, as Campbell noted to Heinlein: “When Ron wants to, he can put on a personality that would be a confidence man’s delight.”
Hubbard enjoyed the attention, as well as its financial rewards. One day, van Vogt got a call from a bank manager who said that Hubbard wanted a cashier’s check for $56,000. Van Vogt replied, “He’s the boss.” On another occasion, when Sara admired the cars on display at a Lincoln dealership, Hubbard bought one for her on the spot. He had achieved everything that he had ever wanted—money, fame, respect—but unlike Campbell, who regarded the foundation as his true calling, he behaved as if it were a lucky break that could end at any time.
Astounding Page 27