http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2010/12/cordwainer-smith-the-ballad-of-lost-linebarger-part-1/

and

http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2010/12/cordwainer-smith-the-ballad-of-lost-linebarger-part-2/

And while I’m here, here is a link to another good CS article:

http://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2010/09/21/tripping-cyborgs-and-organ-farms-the-fictions-of-cordwainer-smith/

Frederik Pohl Blogs about Cordwainer / Paul is a post from the Cordwainer Smith Blog, run by his daughter.

I don’t know. I wrote a page on this website that describes the matter, quotes my stepmother Genevieve, and links to a couple of articles discussing this.

Recently, someone sent me an interesting link. Now you can read parts of The Fifty Minute Hour online, as it’s been added to Google Books. Here’s the link. The chapter goes from page 223 to 293, and the beginning and ending pages are there. But here and there, pages are missing. I haven’t tried to read Google Books before; maybe this is how they can put so much up.

Anyway, it’s there, and pretty interesting. I didn’t reread it all, as I do have a copy of the book in my storage unit back in Colorado.

Readers, your thoughts are welcome!

Was Paul Linebarger Kirk Allen? Read for Yourself… Sort Of is a post from the Cordwainer Smith Blog, run by his daughter.

Went ‘back east’ a couple weeks ago, primarily on a military mission to see old friends, find lost buddies, and visit known graves.

While at Arlington cemetery, fighting the bureaucracy of fear and entrenchment, I wore a blister on the sole of my foot, walking (no vehicles allowed) Mrs. Lee’s garden…and that took some doing as I walk every day. Climbed two chain links fences, however, which is something I don’t do every day.

Anyway, I made it out to your dad’s grave. I was particularly surprised by its location…a very pleasant spot where the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier echoes across the small valley. Very nice. I didn’t stay long as I had many graves to find and had just come down from Section 3, the most difficult section in the cemetery, and was staggering about, so I sat and visited a while. Doing this at 65 is not as easy as it was when I was stationed at Andrews AFB.

Anyone going to Arlington should be warned that finding grave locations will be a problem. If you come from Alaska and have five names to find, they will only locate three graves…of my three, two were wrong…so best to know the locations before you go…as I did Paul Linebarger’s. And DC in general is a driving nightmare (it always was, but worse now) with barricades, NO TURN signs, security(?) guards, and other irritants. However, if you want to go anywhere you please, just wear an orange traffic vest, wear a baseball cap backwards, and carry a weed-eater…no one will even look at you twice.

A Visit to the Arlington National Cemetery is a post from the Cordwainer Smith Blog, run by his daughter.

My father wrote,

In a way, I’m sorry that you’ve not been able to share these last three visits to Mexico with us. This is a culture fully as alien to the norteamericana as is, for example, the French.

Genevieve and I find that we got here more tired and more overworked than we had supposed, but even so, it is a baptism of strangeness which refreshes the soul and puts each of us, once again, in a different perspective for a little while.

I’ve thought, several times, while I’ve been here, how much more exactly I would be able to express some of my observations and assessments if I had had the advanced anthropological training which you are about to get: for example, Mexicans have great difficulty about expressing immediate thanks (even in situations where Latin Europeans would have no difficulty in being verbally effusive), but they are untroubled about the elaborate expression of thanks for anything a year or so past.

Again, promptness is either an alien quality, where the Mexican rejoices in his successful assimilation of the enormous civilization to the North in at least one of its aspects, or else promptness is an outrage to his personal dignity. A touch of tardiness seems to preserve human warmth and integrity in situations which would otherwise be clock-haunted nightmares of the worst kind.

I’ve found myself wondering whether both these cultural traits might not be cultural residue, left over from the envy, love, admiration, hatred, and grief which the creoles and Indians felt for so many centuries as their gallant, handsome, wonderful, hateful Spanish masters dominated every situation with torrents of beautiful expostulatory Castilian. It wouldn’t take too many decades of that kind of social structure and interaction to make people feel like glaring at each other whenever they feel grateful. Or would it? You’re the anthropologist of the family, not I.

My father could always overwhelm me with torrents of beautiful expostulatory English!

Paul Linebarger Reflecting on Mexico is a post from the Cordwainer Smith Blog, run by his daughter.

Doing another bit of math (I can even do this bit counting on my fingers), in five years it will be the 100th anniversary of his birth. Seems like a good time for something to happen. A press release from the Cordwainer Smith Foundation, well, sure… but maybe something more attention-getting. Readers, any ideas?

Paul M A Linebarger was Born 95 Years Ago This Year is a post from the Cordwainer Smith Blog, run by his daughter.

He was above medium height, terribly gaunt, bald, high-nosed, narrowing in the chin; he wore severe excellently-cut suits; his favourite hat was a soft black velour like an Italian film producer’s. He was constantly ill, usually with digestive or metabolic troubles, and had to put up with repeated surgery, so that in middle age he always lived close to the vital margin. He took time off from a dinner party in Melbourne for a long drink of hydro-chloric acid, at which a guest, quite awed, remarked that Linebarger probably *was* a man from Mars…

Some intelligent and sensitive people have found the cat stories, particularly ‘The Game of Rat and Dragon,’ quite creepy. They seem to me less creepy than uncanny. The Linebargers’ house population of cats varied from seven to eleven, and they lived in all three and a half levels of it. Paul’s communication with each of these cats, as individuals, suggested a distinct variety of ESP. It was as though one was watching a subtle and moody conversation amongst grandees who took care to respect each other’s dignity.

The house itself I cannot remember without a pang, for I mostly remember it with Paul tapping away upstairs at his typewriter, or as another feline presence in the bow-windowed living-room, flicking through some elegantly-bound work from the curve of the bookshelves.

Beyond the living-room arch, an oblong dining-room displayed a New Year card, two or three feet by three or four feet, bearing in great Chinese characters greeting from Sun Yat Sen. In the basement were yards of bookshelves, some open and some encaged, and most devoted to science fiction. I have never seen so much of the latter in one place. This was also especially cattish country.

In the attic were two collections of objects–the more predictable, firearms, notably pistols and revolvers including a lot of weapons dropped to World War II resistance movements; the less predictable, dozens of more or less antique typewriters…Paul’s study upstairs was piled high with the manuscripts, first editions, and scoria of his numerous writings.

We often conversed about science fiction–his own and others’. Characteristically, he admired the craftsmanship and consistence of Arthur C. Clarke’s Defoe-like tales, while feeling that there were vast dimensions of human experience that Clarke never touches. Cordwainer Smith’s stories were a kind of important ‘playing’ (Paul was greatly impressed by Huizinga’s ‘Homo Ludens’): through them are dotted irrelevant cryptograms, geographic allusions, and names transliterated from foreign languages.

Arthur Burns Writes about Paul M A Linebarger is a post from the Cordwainer Smith Blog, run by his daughter.

One evening as we discussed plans for the next morning, Arthur said to me with a twinkle in his eye, “Shall I knock you up around seven?” He knew perfectly well what the American meaning of that term was, and I still remember blushing while he and Netta grinned.

So here are some comments about my father from Arthur Burns. Thanks to the late John Foyster for the right to use quotes from a 1966 interview he did with Burns. This material appeared initially in Australian SF Review.

Let me see if I can say some other things which would give you some sort of insight into his very strange kind of personality. Now before he wrote any SF he wrote a story called Atomsk, which was the first sort of Russian nuclear spy story–and it got a very savage review, I remember, in a Russian journal…

The first impression people here [in Australia]  had of him was that he was a real reactionary, a bit tough and a bit bloody minded and that kind of thing. He was here for the whole of 1957 and took on a lot of the academic left wing, and quite a lot of the non-academic left wing, and made lots of speeches about China, wrote a number of articles, and that kind of thing. But you had to get to know him to realize that a great deal of this was simply the uninhibited expressions of aggression that you get from people who’ve been analyzed. In fact, he was an extremely humane man. In his stories one sees this, incidentally, in the sort of allegories he was constantly writing…

He was an Anglo-Catholic, a very high one by American standards, and his religion in a strange way meant a great deal to him–in a funny way, one might even say loosely. Often he was unserious about it. Once when he was very ill in Mexico…he said he thought he was pretty bad and that the only thing to do was to invoke the Virgin Mary, because Mexico was her territory.

His liking for Australia comes out in the Old Norstrilia stories. Once again, it was characteristic of him–it was very much a part of his SF writing–that all of his stories, in some sense or another, were oblique commentaries on contemporary politics and society… He was never one to attempt to draw a terrific moral–I mean, any morals in his stories were all concealed. They were meant to amuse, to be fun; they were something he did because he liked it.

He called himself a Pre-Cervantean. By this he meant that if the European novel–a connected story dealing with a group of persons, having a beginning, a middle, an end, and that kind of thing–was started by Cervantes with “Don Quixote,” then he was a Pre-Cervantean in the sense that his stories were more like medieval stories–more like parts of a legend or cycle, such as Malory collected in “The Death of Arthur.”

[Foyster asks what the reason was for CS's increased output of stories in recent years.]

Partly, being more and more sick. He was confined to bed a great deal and he’d often write these stories when he couldn’t get up and lecture…He was a man who wrote naturally and very easily. He’d sit at his typewriter and just knock it out. I’ve never seen anyone compose so fast when he had it on him.

Arthur Burns Talks About Paul Linebarger is a post from the Cordwainer Smith Blog, run by his daughter.

Here are some memories of that 1952 trip:

We flew from Washington’s National Airport to Miami one summer night, and I remember that we had a little sleeping compartment on the plane, much like a train. Then we flew to the Yucatan and later on to Mexico City. I was nine, my sister five.

I don’t imagine too many people have had a tour guide like Paul M. A. Linebarger. With his encyclopedic knowledge and his skill as a raconteur, he brought Mexican history alive to us, complete with young virgins about my age being ceremonially sacrificed in the cenotes of Chichen Itza to the bloody sagas of the Spanish conquest. I didn’t realize at the time that I was also absorbing his worldview of human history, the endless suffering, the glories, and the stunning beauties. He was a very attentive father, only occasionally leaving us kids with our stepmother Genevieve while he and Howard Hunt (later of Watergate fame) did a few things for the CIA.

One of my father’s graduate students had driven our old Lincoln (named “Silverfish”) down from D.C., and we took it from the capital to Taxco and Acapulco. I remember a bit of conversation on the drive down, as Daddy and Genevieve were explaining the Cold War to me. “If the Russians came, I would pretend to go along with them so they wouldn’t kill me,” I said to Genevieve as she put me to bed that night. “Paul wouldn’t,” she said emphatically. “He would do everything he could to fight them.” (Only years later did I realize that doing everything he could might well include pretending to go along.)

In Acapulco we had bathing suits made to order from stunning hand-painted fabric and stayed indoors all one boring day when there was an election and people were shooting off their guns. Another evening, Genevieve became delirious, and my father left her in my care for hours while he went searching for suitable medical care. She nearly died from amoebic dysentery and typhoid, one right after the other but I forget in what order. She was flown to a hospital in Mexico City, and my father drove (to use a favorite expression of his) “like a bat out of hell” through the winding mountain roads to join her. Outside of Taxco, it was raining so hard that we could hardly see the road, but there was a local car going fast ahead of us and my father kept it in view, sometimes delegating me to stick my head out the window and report if we got too near the road’s edge. We got pretty near. I am still very nervous on winding Mexican roads in the rain.

After Genevieve was a little better, she flew back to the US alone, leaving my father to do a very long drive back with two fidgety little girls. The poverty of rural Mexico ground into me, and I remember not being satisfied with my father’s world-weary explanations . “But it isn’t fair,” I remember insisting. He explained that fairness was not a guiding principle of history. I was not consoled (and I still am not).

With Paul Linebarger in Mexico in 1952 is a post from the Cordwainer Smith Blog, run by his daughter.

Intelligence will make money. But can intelligence spend it?

I doubt it.

It takes taste to spend money effectively.

I don´t mean that a fool can´t throw money around; he certainly can. I mean, instead, the pleasant effort of spending money fastidiously, pleasantly, appreciatively, welcoming the departure of each dollar for the rewards which the dollar brings in… To spend judiciously and beautifully is an act which compels me to exert my whole character. I have to be me, to take the measure of myself. Even in the most trivial every-day things I have to stop short if I ask myself, Do I really want this? Will this give me pleasure? Or is this something which if bought would keep me from buying something else which would give me much more reward?

I suppose the reward is not in the spending but in the leisure, not in the possession but in the enjoyment, not in acquisition but in individualization. American spending is sadly hasty. People save money and waste their own lives saving time, because the things they buy are not especially and individually their own. They are mere things–adequate, useful, and no more.

Money is a post from the Cordwainer Smith Blog, run by his daughter.

Anyway, one day in 2001, I was delighted to receive in the mail Chu Djang’s “From Loss to Renewal: A Tale of Life Experience at Ninety,” available from iUniverse — the link takes you right to the page describing the book.

Later I would read and savor the details of Chu’s fascinating life and illustrious career, but immediately I went searching for what he might have said about my father. They became friends as graduate students at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and later they collaborated, with Ardath Burks, on a college textbook called Far Eastern Politics and Governments.

Here’s a little from the book:

Paul and I used to have rag sessions after school in a coffee shop near the school, discussing many things in life…[He] was quick-witted and had such a sense of humor that he could laugh at his misfortune. After he obtained his degree, he and John Fairbank were employed by Harvard as two teaching interns. When the term of internship expired, Harvard dismissed Linebarger and retained Fairbank. When asked about the incident, Paul replied, “I guess Harvard couldn’t afford to employ two geniuses at once.” [page 49]

I found some of the ideas in this commentary rather startling:

Paul’s versatility was at once his asset as well as his liability. He was one of the few pioneers of Chinese studies, a leading authority of psychological warfare and a recognized writer of science fiction.

Had he concentrated on a single subject, his accomplishment would have been much greater…Science fiction, therefore, was a natural product of his mind. His mind shifted from one idea to another with the swiftness and ease of a computer. His lectures sounded like science fiction and there was more imagination than reasoning in his presentation. However, he did not take pride in being a successful author of science fiction. To him writing science fiction was only an escape, a way to keep his sanity and additional therapeutic treatment to his self-psychoanalysis. [page 50]

My jaw dropped as I read that. It’s a measure of the friendship between the two men that Djang knew about the science fiction. I do remember that my father felt his political science and psywar colleagues might think less of him if they knew of his sci fi activities, so my guess is that he downplayed them with Djang.

In my memory, my father was very proud of his science fiction stories. I remember him waving around copies of magazines that he was in, quite pleased. He liked whatever money he got, too. Letters he wrote to me when I was  in college would mention stories being published and how much money he was earning from them.

Back in the 1980s, I spent about six weeks in the Long Island home of Djang and his wife Jane, while my mother was dying in a hospital near their home. They could not have been kinder to me, and once when I tried to express my appreciation for everything they were doing for me, Djang got a faraway look in his eye and commented that he could never repay what my father had done for him. So I shut up.

It’s been several years now since I’ve been in contact with Djang, and since he was 90 some seven years ago, I imagine he is no longer with us.

This article originally appeared in my 2002 ezine on this site, and is the first of a number of such articles that I am recycling into the blog.

Chu Djang’s Memories of Paul M. A. Linebarger is a post from the Cordwainer Smith Blog, run by his daughter.