This is written 31 years and 6 days after John Wood Campbell's death. He died suddenly on a Sunday night at home, watching television, his wife said; collapsed with a heart attack and could not be revived. Campbell had been in poor health for years; his emphysema and asthma, severely aggravated (if not caused) by his two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, had ravaged him, turned him into a man who gasped after walking a city block, a man whose severe gout atop this had made him only a dim, occasional presence in the Condé Nast offices. Kay Tarrant, his assistant for over 30 years who certainly loved him hopelessly and desperately, never carnally, had been worried for a long time; tried to protect him as best she could. The man who said, drawing on a cigarette and expanding his barrel chest with smoke, that immortality could be self-willed (or at least a very, very long lifetime) barely made it into his seventh decade.
Thirty-one years and a week. Oh, that is a long time ago. There are writers like Michael A. Burstein or Shane Tourtellotte, Analog regulars, who were not born or barely so when this editor, The Editor, died. But writing under Campbell's influence still just as Asimov or Heinlein had sixty years ago. Campbell missed Apollo 13, the Internet (which he would have loved), the cell phone, Explorer, Watergate, Star Wars. He missed pathetic withdrawal from Vietnam and the essential collapse of the magazine market. (He was there for Star Trek, the Tet Offensive, Johnson's resignation and Armstrong's Moon landing.) There will never be a biography. I have been quite sure of this for a very long time.
Now and then someone, usually an academic, says in a desultory way, "There should be a biography of John W. Campbell," and this is true, but it is not going to happen. Most of the primary sources are dead, the others have had their witness published or taped to appear in the usual venues. Campbell's first and second wives are long dead, his two daughters, now in their sixties, live in the Midwest and have no contact with science fiction, have never furnished information. There is a stepdaughter (Peg Campbell, his second wife, was also married earlier) in Alabama who was, during Campbell's lifetime, intermittently active in the field and got to quite a few conventions, but she apparently has had nothing at all to do with science fiction since Campbell's death.
And, perilously for any biographer, this life cannot be separated from the work and has almost no meaning outside of it. Campbell's life although interesting—every life perceived from the inside is at least interesting—cannot be separated from the work; Campbell was an editor, in fact The Editor, and his testimony consists of almost 400 issues of his magazine, more than 10,000 letters, two volumes of which were published years ago. He is a part of the public and private memoirs of every science fiction writer of his time and perhaps it is this which subsumes or at least contains the life. The biography is spare—Campbell never traveled much, lived in New Jersey all of his adult life, edited his magazine for almost 34 years, lived almost a scandal-free life. (There were some operatics surrounding the breakup of his first marriage but it was all resolved quickly and quietly. Dona, his first wife, left the marriage in 1949 and shortly after the divorce married George O. Smith, an engineer who had been one of Campbell's significant contributors.)
(Campbell married Peg in the early 1950s and all evidence is that it was for both a very close marriage emotionally and intellectually and a source of repeated joy.) Something A. J. Budrys wrote of A. E. van Vogt in the 1960s applies to Campbell's personal (not his professional!) life: "He is clearly worthy of some kind of re-evaluation but he simply is not important enough to merit that." Campbell's personal life, the biographical details might stand examination but they are not that important. What is important, the editorship, has the most ample testimony.
Still, if there were a biography at issue, one could write a chapter conjecturing a Campbell who might (or might never) have existed; this Campbell is 23 years old, already a prominent science fiction writer, maybe the best science fiction writer, Doc Smith's only true competitor in the Interstellar Racket, already at the top of a genre whose re-invented version is only seven years old. This young John Campbell has really beaten Hugo Gernsback's scientifiction category cold; his technophiliac fables of conquest about mighty machines and their triumphant operators have come close to dominating the two magazines, Amazing and Astounding, which are his major markets. Now our hypothetical Campbell, only two years out of Duke University, overwhelmed by intelligence and ambition and the Depression as well, makes an important, considered decision: "I'm going to put the decadence in," he says.
Perhaps our conjectural JWC says this in an empty room; perhaps he addresses his young, already long-suffering spouse. "This field of science fiction needs decadence; it is time that form superseded function, mood became more important than action, the ultimate death of the universe was given equal time. A new kind of story," he says, "and therefore a new name to put on the stories because I am already identified with all of this rocketry and interstellar collisions. 'Don A. Stuart,' how is that?" he says to his wife, the former Dona Stuart. "Wouldn't that be exciting?"
Or it was nothing like this at all and Campbell simply wanted to expand his potential markets and his possibility. Very few writers or editors are that purposeful. In the last year of his life, Campbell was asked on camera what he wanted to accomplish when he became Astounding's new editor. "I just wanted to have fun," he said. In a letter to Alexei Panshin a few years before that, in response to the same question, he said that he had no philosophy, no clear set of ideas, he was just responding as an editor to what he liked. Panshin's enthusiastic retrospective analysis bored him.
The good editors, and for his first decade Campbell was a great editor, are not as purposeful as the Panshins and their friends in the English departments would like to impute. Bad or tired editors may become ideologues, may function in terms of some agenda as Campbell did for most of his last twenty years . . . but they are as full of false information as great editors, asked to explain, are full of no information at all. Ultimately, history is built upon absence as much as presence; in cases like Campbell's it can be just another specialized subdivision of fantasy. Objectively, Campbell the writer had reached the top of the small field of science fiction almost at the outset; as Heinlein, publishing his first story in 1939 in Astounding, came to utter dominance within two years, so Campbell years earlier had had a similar course. "I would have gotten a job after I graduated from Duke," he said later, "but there were no jobs at all. So I became a writer." There wasn't much money in writing for the three or four extant science fiction magazines then either but that is what Campbell did and with extraordinary success relative to the situation.
But the Arcot, Wade and Morey series obviously did not satisfy him. He was young, there were more than one of him. So it was time to put in the decadence, an apprehension of entropy which would lead inevitably past ordnance to some apprehension of breakdown and this new version of Campbell, the writer within, came to that understanding. "Twilight," "Night," "Blindness," "Atomic Power" and of course his most famous story "Who Goes There?" "Which was written just before he became Astounding's editor and published in the June 1938 issue, still using some of Tremaine's inventory.
There runs through these stories a kind of gloom, an apprehension of darkness previously unknown in USA genre science fiction. Wells had it in the closing chapters of The Time Machine, of course, and Stapledon had made the extinction of human possibility his major theme . . . but no post-Gernsback in this country was doing that until Campbell. The stories were, in their declensive way, manifestoes. "Twilight" and "Night" have lasted seven decades; the anthologies in which they appear are still in print and the influence of these works has been pervasive. "Blindness" is seated upon a terrible irony, the kind of fundamental accident upon which scientific "progress" is often perpetrated. The other two imply the end of existence, heady stuff from The Time Machine adapted for a market which wanted miracles of engineering to bedazzle its readership of adolescent boys.
And always and disturbingly, there is "Who Goes There?" Campbell's most important and memorable story. In Seekers of Tomorrow, the not always dependable Sam Moskowitz says that this story came from Campbell's childhood: his mother was an identical twin and she and her sister would assume the other's identity with little John. Who was "real?" the young Campbell learned to ask, and who was the fake that seemed real? The confusion was profound and—if Moskowitz can be trusted—might have been the underlay of Campbell's duality; there were in his earliest important relationship two people who were sharing the role of one.
Don A. Stuart and John W. Campbell trading masks, then, for kinds of fiction which could be regarded as opposed. But John Campbell, it seems clear, was evolving into Don A. Stuart; what had originated in duality was transmogrification. Had Campbell continued, the persona and vision underlying the Stuart stories would probably have been the writer. This may be one reason why the editorial position was taken so gratefully; Campbell might have been afraid of where those stories were going, the destiny they contained.
"Who Goes There?" with its mimetic, invulnerable abandoned alien in disguise at a remote polar station was the basis of a famous if low-budget Howard Hawks film, The Thing, in 1951 and then a remake decades later by John Carpenter. This was perhaps the first science fiction movie after Lang's Metropolis or King Kong to have significant general cultural impact. (Certainly, Philip K. Dick's short story "Impostor," adapted into a big-budget film which was released finally at the end of 2001, is a rewrite of that story, a recycling of its central idea told this time from the viewpoint of the monster.) His half of the $500 which Street & Smith (who in that time bought all rights to the stories it published, voluntarily ceding half of the receipts to the author) received from Howard Hawks was the only money Campbell ever received for the story. "That's all right," Isaac Asimov's memoir recalls him saying, "If it's a good movie and if it increases the audience for good science fiction, then I don't mind at all."
Granted, F. Orlin Tremaine, the Astounding editor, encouraged and bought these stories; if he had not, Campbell, scrambling to make some kind of living, would have abandoned the idea. Tremaine deserves at the distance of decades an encomium. But the stories are Campbell's. Don A. Stuart allowed a version of Campbell to escape which had never before been known and they are remarkable.
There is no question that Campbell was—with the possible exception of E. E. Smith, an industrial chemist and part-time writer and not a very good writer—at the time he became editor of Astounding Science Fiction in October 1937 the leading writer of science fiction. That was, in fact, probably the reason that he got the job as Tremaine, promoted to higher position in Street & Smith, was permitted to recommend a successor. This is stale, statistical news 65 years later but it must have been astonishing at the time; the most prominent writer of science fiction had suddenly become the editor of its leading magazine. It was as if Heinlein had become editor of Astounding in 1942 or Bradbury of Galaxy in 1953. The writers—Boucher, McComas at Fantasy & Science Fiction, Horace Gold at Galaxy—who did accede to those positions were accomplished and well known to their colleagues but they did not then or ever possess Campbell's stature.
And with that appointment, Campbell the writer effectively retired. One condition imposed by the position was that Campbell could not sell fiction to his own magazine or to any competitor (a condition which Tremaine had easily circumvented by creating at least one pseudonym and, with his brother's collaboration, establishing another identity) and the sense is that the clause was agreeable, Campbell was ready to quit.
In the 34 years to come he published very little fiction: the novella "The Moon Is Hell," a story in the Healy/McComas New Tales of Space and Time, a few scattered pieces. Even more dramatically than had been the case with Horace Gold, Anthony Boucher, Judith Merril, the later reputation as editor tended to obliterate the stature of the writer's career. "Who Goes There?", "Twilight" and "Night" were to assure over the decades that there would remain some consciousness of Campbell's contribution as a writer, but they necessarily receded. "Writers come and writers go but next month's issue comes out forever."
Campbell edited Astounding from October 1937 until his death on July 11, 1971, still the longest unbroken tenure of any editor of a mass market magazine. He was probably the best editor of the century, at least in the United States—there were plenty of great ones and I think that Harold Hayes of the 1960s Esquire was Campbell's only true competitor—and what made him the best was that that Campbell left his magazine and his field utterly transformed. In his first decade he created that anomaly, "modern science fiction." With the broadening of publishing outlets and readership and with the advent of new magazines of quality, Campbell's utter dominance of science fiction was lost and the years after 1949 can be seen as a long, slow, inconstant decline and marginalization.
Campbell became a witness (a very interested and bitterly involved witness to be sure) and his profound unhappiness with what he took to be its misdirection was refracted in his editorials and choice of contents for what had in the Spring of 1960 become Analog.
These last years of increased marginalization had isolated Campbell and embittered him and the effect of his departure from the magazine was, sadly, to improve Analog under the new editor, Ben Bova. Clearly this career did not end well. Campbell stayed too long and he did so in an unvarying way. Maybe if he had left in the late forties for another editorial position, had become say at Random House or Charles Scribner the founder of the first great and widely distributed science fiction division, it would have been better for him and for science fiction. If something like that had been possible, he would have, for the first time, made substantial money and had an influence which went beyond his contributors and his magazine's readership.
But the influence, of course, would not have been as concentrated; within the scope of his magazine, Campbell was an autocrat and his position was absolute. He could do whatever he wanted, perhaps exemplifying that most famous of Yiddish curses: "May you get what you truly want."
It would have been better for all if he had turned over the magazine to a successor somewhere around the end of that brilliant first decade. It could be further argued that beginning with Hubbard's Dianetics, which were propounded in the May 1950 issue of the magazine, Campbell no longer had ideas. He had crotchets: Dianetics, Psionics (a corollary to Dianetics, really, the superior powers of the properly regressed mind), the Hieronymous Machine, the Dean Machine, Dowsing and as the crotchets overwhelmed, substituting reflex for thought, so Campbell overwhelmed his authors and turned most of them into vehicles for the expression and expansion of those ideas.
Some writers who resisted remained in the magazine but most did not and after 1960, most of Campbell's new writers came to print through the study of Campbell's ideas and their servicing. To the most tolerant, Campbell's magazine became irrelevant to the evolution of the field, but many writers and editors felt that Campbell's last decade was more seriously flawed than by irrelevance, he was actively impeding science fiction. Campbell raged editorially in late 1968 against the demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, he endorsed George Wallace for President not because he thought Wallace could win but as a statement of the bankruptcy of those in command of the present system. Wallace, like Campbell, had unconventional ideas, he forced a new way of thinking. (Memories of the impersonator David Frye playing Wallace on The Smothers Brothers Show: "Look at this face. Is this the face of a bigot?")
"John Campbell now advocates positions which are contrary to everything for which science fiction has fought," Harlan Ellison wrote. I wrote no less angrily in that same medium (the SFWA Forum) that "John Campbell, having given us the field of science fiction, now seemed determined to destroy it." An unhappy, polarizing time.
An explanation or at least an insight of a sort: John Campbell was a man in schism. Most of us are but his duality was profound. Those two writerly identities, Campbell the celebrant of the star paths and Stuart the decadent seemed directly opposed. Perhaps then it was two Campbells editing Astounding, the rationalist and the mystic, the man of methodology and the man who believed powerfully in the evidence of things unseen. It was the rationalist who controlled the early years (the mystic was made content for a while with the editorship of Unknown or experiments in the ether with ham radio) and the mystic who overtook that rationalist in the early years of editorial decline . . . the beginning of that decline marked for most by the advent of Dianetics in the magazine. It was the first time that Campbell allowed the magazine to become a vehicle for obsession but hardly the last: The crotchets overtook.
How sad was this? Schuyler Miller reviewing a New Worlds attributing much of their inspiration to drugs. Michael Moorcock in a letter published in "Brass Tacks" denied that drugs were part of the Ladbroke Grove Zeitgeist but added that he found the current Analog far weirder, spacier, further out than anything about New Worlds and one can take the point.
In issue after issue over those last years Campbell editorially and in his choice of fiction appeared to be desperately repudiating a present which—perhaps infuriatingly to him—could have been seen as a reasonable extrapolation of the themes and context of much of the fiction he had been publishing in the forties. Technological sprawl, the alienation effect, the increasing dislocation caused by technology, the disconnection between act and consequence facilitated by the machines . . . all of this could have been glimpsed in the fiction of Kuttner, Sturgeon, van Vogt; Kuttner's cracked and irresponsible inventor, Gallegher, was doing to scientific methodology what the Clown Prince, Abbie Hoffman, was trying to do to that 1968 Democratic Convention which Campbell so hated. Campbell's unbearable present was clearly foreshadowed in the editorial policies of Campbell's notable past and he—or at least the Don A. Stuart in him which did not believe in ordinary consequence—could not bear this.
Or looking at it another way, Astounding was always a battleground in which the two Campbells contested over the full range of the years; in the end the decadent or retrograde Don A. Stuart might have been the winner—the mysticism, the dowsing, the magazine as monthly prayer meeting—but this Don A. Stuart looked upon a barren field and called it victory . . . because that other Campbell, the rationalist, had through Heinlein, Asimov, the careful editorial projections of the '40s done the job too well, had taken Campbell and his readers inexorably into a world which no intensity of psionics could deny.
Campbell was able to divide himself as a writer: the Don A. Stuart stories did not challenge The Mightiest Machine, they were the product of a different persona. He could not, however, divide himself as an editor. That duality prevailed, it leveraged his attempts through Dianetics, Psionics and Dowsing to, perhaps, to fuse the mystic and the rationalist. This simply did not work. Campbell in his last decade might indeed have felt that science fiction as it had evolved had to be destroyed to be saved . . . no less than the world itself, all those hippies screaming "The whole world is watching!" for the television would have to be destroyed for the purpose of salvation. A most profound and terrible disconnect which became ever more disconnected in Campbell's last years and which might have left him in a state of bewilderment.
But all of this is much later; lies far down the decades from the Don Stuart stories. In these years the duality was not wrecking but celebrating the writer and "Twilight" and "Night" are powerful and reasonable explorations of entropy just as "Who Goes There?" is able—as Campbell was not able in his last, scrambling decade—to transcend the duality. Human or alien? Destroyer or victim? (Mother or Aunt?) These are the questions which dazzle the crew at the Antarctic Circle and therefore the reader. In having no clear answer, in noting the interchangeability, Don A. Stuart proved himself to be far more in accord with the Vietnam peace movement than ever the infuriated editor of Analog could have been.
This is a powerful and signatory collection; the stories are still worthy on their own terms but they are also—even the anti-rationalist essay published in the April 1939 issue of Unknown—are magnificent statements of the problem and clearly predict the dilemma that Analog would become thirty years later. That 1960s Analog was the truncated, inchoate and always resentful outcome of that Campbellian schism. If Wallace represented the clichéd politics of resentment, Analog was its celebrant. Here was a magazine of the future which fought desperately for the past, a magazine of expansion which demanded contraction. A magazine based upon an embrace of the future which feared the future.
There will be no biography, cannot be, the material is inconclusive and unavailable . . . but here in this collection suspires the essential Campbell. In thrall to his ambivalence, John Campbell's Don A. Stuart gives us everything we need to know.
"A new kind of story: wouldn't that be exciting?" asks our conjectured Campbell. The room is empty except for the two of them, Dona quietly in the corner considering him, considering herself as well, perhaps in this morning in the shocking early depth of the Depression seeing the future as well. "We are living in hard times, a new time," this John Campbell says. "The old ways, the happy machines speeding the highway to the stars, they aren't working the way they should. The strong and sturdy spacers stoking the machines, guiding the ship, they are blinded by the million suns of space, staggered and shaking in that enormity: the empty space between those suns. Now we must understand that the machines will not always work, that the highways lead not only to the end of space, to the end of time itself.
"Listen to these ideas we have: I have so many ideas. Let me tell you where our new life must take us.
"It must take us past time itself. We have to lift 'em up, take 'em up, shake 'em up now and forever, create new rules for the emptiness, the wind, the endless space between the stars; that space in which the stars themselves will begin to die."
Oh, sing unto the Lord a new song. Editor, visionary, curmudgeon and damaged and ever-seeking saint, he sung that new song. Sung it for the living and the dead in the space between the stars. Sung past the three hammer blows of fate into the clear and vaulting coda.
The song of the Earth.