Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

So how about Professor and Colonel Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger—what was Cordwainer Smith to him? From here on I rely completely and gratefully on the researches of John J. Pierce, the prime authority on Linebarger/Smith’s life and writing. In his fine introduction to The Rediscovery of Man , Pierce tells us that Linebarger published his book on psychological warfare under his own name, but his first two novels ( Ria and Carola ) as Felix C. Forrest. Then, “when people found out who ‘Forrest’ was, he couldn’t write any more.” (That sounds like Sheldon.) Pierce goes on: “He tried a spy thriller, Atomsk , as Carmichael Smith, but was found out again. He even submitted a manuscript for another novel under his wife’s name, but nobody was fooled.” Using your wife’s name as an alias implies, to me, not only a very good-natured wife, but a very imperative need for a mask. It also implies a quite extraordinary indifference to what is so often of immense importance to a man: that he be perceived, always and totally, as a man.

My guess is that the pen name he finally settled on may have been necessary to save his dignity as an academic and an expert on grave matters, but was equally important to him because it allowed him psychic freedom. Dr. Linebarger had to be respectable and responsible and had to guard his tongue. Cordwainer Smith wrote skiffy and babbled whatever he pleased. The Doctor used his knowledge discreetly to counsel Chiang Kai-shek and advise politicians and diplomats. Mr. Smith let that knowledge out in the open to please the common folk who read popular fiction, and to serve art. Paul was a man. Cordwainer was men, women, animals, a cosmos.

Splitting the personality in this way might signify in most people that they were a bit daft; but all the writers I’ve been talking about were notably effective people in both incarnations, flesh and paper. Still, their paper selves, having long outlived the “real person,” might well ask, Which of us can claim to be real?

After all, fiction writers make a reality of words.

The arts of writing all begin in playing with words, wallowing in them, revelling in them, being obsessed by them, finding reality in them. Words are the mud this mudpie’s made of. Some writers are cool and masterful and never get their hands dirty, but Cordwainer Smith got muddy from the toes to the top of the head.

Language evidently intoxicated him and sometimes controlled him; rhymes, particularly, and the rhythms of sentences. Golden the ship was—Oh! Oh! Oh! That’s the last line, and the title, of one of his stories. I have a baseless, unverifiable, perhaps totally mistaken conviction that the line came before the story: that the story grew out of, unfolded from, was compelled to exist by, an unexplained, unattached fragment of language, seven words that took hold of his mind and rocked it and wouldn’t let him be until he had made a box of meaning that would hold them: Golden the ship was—Oh! Oh! Oh!

This kind of thing is part of his peculiar magic. He knows a powerful phrase or word when he finds one, and uses and repeats it powerfully. I suspect the “Instrumentality” was very little but a word at first, a grand word, which as he used, repeated, explored, explained it, turned out to contain in itself much of the wonderful, semicoherent “future history” of the stories and the novel. The Instrumentality of Mankind—it is a suggestive, complex, multiplex kind of phrase, a Mother Lode phrase that keeps leading to the high-grade ore.

Sometimes I think the words get away from him. The story “Drunkboat” is Arthur Rimbaud getting high on absinthe getting Cordwainer Smith high on Le Bateau ivre and sailing out across the galaxy. It’s a tour de force. But it’s full of awfully bad verse.

Lord Crudelta, in the story, quotes this as an example of words remaining long after their referents are gone, laboriously explaining that an aoudad was an ancient sheep and that he doesn’t know what ham and turkey were, but that children have sung the song for “thousands of years.” Well, I don’t believe it. No sane child would sing that for five minutes. I think Cordwainer Smith had that stupid aoudad/how dad rhyme in his head and couldn’t get it out, and it overcame his better reason and forced itself into the story.

When you let words take you over, as Rimbaud and Smith did, you relinquish control to a sometimes dangerous extent. You can’t keep the stupidities and inconsequentialities out, the way a tight-control writer can; you’re on a wild ride and you have to take what comes. What comes may be treasure and may be junk. I find much of “Drunkboat” overwritten, straining for effect, starting with its rather pompous claims to fame: “Perhaps it is the saddest, maddest, wildest story in the whole long history of space.”… “We know his name now. And our children and their children will know it for always.” And the story is full of obsessive jingles, “Baiter Gator” and “ochre joker” and so on, which weaken what should be a stunning effect when Rambo/Rimbaud bursts into a wild flood of rhyming speech. There are too many one-sentence paragraphs, italics, and other heavy devices to show significance. And yet, and yet… what a wonderful image, the man swimming, swimming slowly through spacetime, reaching through the walls, seeking his Elizabeth…. And the recurrent characters, Sir-and-Doctor Vomact, the Lord Crudelta (whose Italian name means what Lord Jestocost’s means in Russian), the Instrumentality itself. “Drunkboat” is a wild jungle of language, grotesque, deformed, obstructive, energetic, vividly alive.

I seem to be impelled to discuss stories that I don’t particularly like, instead of the ones I love, such as “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” “The Dead Lady of Clown Town,” “Mark Elf,” “A Planet Named Shayol.”

A Smith story that I have always resisted, kept my distance from, is “Think Blue, Count Two.” When I reread it some while ago for consideration for the Norton Book of Science Fiction I saw again what I’d disliked—a pretty girl, blue-eyed, called “doll” and “kitten,” a plot that teases by threatening sadism but dodges the threat by rather implausible means, and a sentimental ending where the doll-kitten goes off with the deformed sadist, now miraculously cured and tamed. A very very romantic story, plunging (as romanticism will) from sappy sweetness to sick cruelty, with not much actual humanity in between. When it came to choosing for the Norton Book , I wanted “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” which uses these characteristic Smithian themes in a story that is not excessively, but magnificently, romantic—a beautiful, powerful story. When my coeditors argued for other choices, I whined. I wanted “Alpha Ralpha” in that book the way I wanted Fritz Leiber’s “The Winter Flies” in it—passionately—because to me they are uniquely valuable, unsurpassed explorations of regions of fiction that are still unfamiliar, still New Found Lands.

Well, so, then I reread “Think Blue” again for this paper. I did so looking for evidence, as it were, of what I don’t like in Smith. Served me right.

What I found was that I had misread and underestimated the story shamefully. Indeed the heroine-doll-kitten seems the typical malefantasy girl, virginal, beautiful, defenseless, with “no skill, no learning, no trained capacities,” no threat to nobody, no sir. She’s being used to hold the crew together during a long voyage; she has “Daughter Potential,” that is, every man will want to protect her, she will keep everybody alive “for her sake.” However, in case things get really bad, she has another protection aboard, in the form of one of Smith’s unforgettable inventions, a cube of laminated mouse brain.