Astounding
Jul. 7th, 2019 06:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraAstounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, Alec Nevala-Lee, next of the Related Works.
So I thought this was much better than, say, that bio of Harlan Ellison we got last year, which I thought was insufficiently skeptical about Ellison as a reliable source about himself. Nevala-Lee seems to have an appropriate level of critical remove, or at least doesn't mind that all four of his subjects come across quite poorly in various ways. This might be a good time to mention that I did not expect the intimate partner violence and child abduction (Hubbard) and virulent racism (Campbell) portrayed here. Maybe I would have known more about the last of those if I had already known more about Campbell, but honestly I don't know that I ever thought twice about him except to have a vague idea of who they'd named the NotaHugo Best New Writer award after. Campbell also seems to have been a pseudoscience crackpot and a self-aggrandizing blowhard; Nevala-Lee puts in some opinions that various Golden Age *stories* are among the greatest of all time, but he doesn't seem to be trying to gild the people.
However, I ended up deeply frustrated over two not-unrelated areas of Campbell's professional life where Nevala-Lee totally (imo) dropped the ball, leaving me unsatisfied about the whole project.
Nevala-Lee claims in the introduction that "such women as Doña Campbell, Leslyn Heinlein, and Campbell's assistant editor Kay Tarrant have fallen out of the history of the genre... This is their story as well." But if that's what he thought he was doing, he failed. Tarrant was, apparently, literally at the desk next to Campbell's for his entire editorial career minus the first six months, but we learn almost nothing about her except that she was "outwardly nondescript", "a devout Roman Catholic", "would inevitably become known as a spinster", and "Campbell kept their relationship strictly professional." But, like what was *her* education? Her path into science fiction publishing? What did she think about Campbell's editorial choices, which Nevala-Lee finds plenty of writers to have opinions about? Tarrant apparently "handled the entire practical and administrative end of the magazine", while Campbell picked the stories... this sounds an *awful lot* like a story in which it turns out the woman was doing all the real boring essential work while the man got all the fun parts and all the credit, and Nevala-Lee basically just compounds it by continuing to *still* give Campbell all the attention. "She was the unacknowledged presence in the room" and Nevala-Lee seems pretty fine with continuing to not acknowledge her. We get, like, one personal opinion: "she saw Campbell as an oversize boy who would never get the magazine out on his own" - oh, no, I'm wrong, we also get a couple of direct quotes from her about her first opinions of Frederik Pohl, Asimov, and Heinlein. Sure, fine. But what was her working relationship with Campbell like? Did she like science fiction? Did she believe in Campbell's goals? Did she ever consider looking for a different job? She apparently had a heart attack and came back after a months-long recovery - needing five people to replace her in the meantime - what do we know about how things were different in her absence? Argh, she's *right there* being a woman men don't see, and we never quite manage to see her either; Nevala-Lee either couldn't find the sources or didn't bother, despite titling his book after the magazine that she was running.
We get a little more biographical background about Doña Stewart Stebbins, later Campbell, who went by Doña Stuart. We get a photo, and plenty about their marriage, kids, and eventual divorce. Professionally, though, Nevala-Lee drops just enough frustrating hints about her contributions to Campbell's career to raise some major questions, and doesn't even seem to have considered them enough to investigate. She was "smart, creative, and widely read," she wrote at least one unpublished story before they married, Campbell was a lousy speller and typist and Doña retyped his stories and "silently" corrected his spelling and grammar, working next to each other on two typewriters set side by side. She was "a sounding board" for "ideas and openings". When an editor asked Campbell to choose a pseudonym for a story that was very different from his existing serial, he chose "Don A. Stuart", a "private tribute to the most important person in his life", and "Stuart" went on to publish more stories, including "Who Goes There?", his most famous and best story (and the basis for The Thing).
So, like, was she co-writing his stories? Don't you *have to wonder* if she was co-writing his stories?? If maybe that pseud wasn't just a "private tribute" but a quiet plain-sight acknowledgment of her involvement? Nevala-Lee tells us "their collaboration, if not literal, was very meaningful", but he doesn't seem to feel a need to prove the case that it *wasn't* literal. Just on the basis of this book, there's pretty good evidence that Campbell was an essential component of Stuart, given that he stopped writing as Stuart once he became editor of Astounding and didn't have time to write. Presumably if Doña was purely ghostwriting, she could have kept doing it. Although there's also some reason to think she may have been doing some of his editorial work, too - when the US entered WWII, Campbell considered whether to leave the magazine for military work, and Heinlein said that "as has been pointed out a long time ago, Doña could do just as good a job of editing, if she had to, as you do. With a maid-cook at home she would keep those two books going, quality high and making money, for the duration." Heinlein went on to propose that his wife Leslyn and Doña could run the magazines together, which Nevala-Lee calls "a remarkable acknowledgment of their uncredited roles in their husbands' careers." Campbell apparently answered that Doña "hasn't written anything, hasn't edited, has no reputation or proof of ability in that line that's official. We know - but they [the publishing company] may not." This is obviously, exactly the place where Nevala-Lee, as biographer and historian, needs to come in and try to expose what was hidden! We the readers should get to know more than they the publishing company did! Aagh!
What I would really like, and I do acknowledge this is far outside Nevala-Lee's scope, is for someone to do textual analysis of the Don A. Stuart stories and compare them to writer George O. Smith's stories in the period in which Doña started having an affair with him (and ultimately divorced Campbell and married him) vs Smith's early work before they met. (Her relationship with Smith is also outside of Nevala-Lee's scope and he doesn't speculate on her role if any in his career, but at this point we have to keep wondering, right?) Like, okay, she never got byline credit for anything, let's see if we can alchemically extract her back out of the text itself.
But, anyways. A solid bio otherwise if you want to know more about the personalities of Golden Age sf, the dianetics craze, Asimov's massive blatant endless sexual harassment, Heinlein's rectum, how Hubbard's wife had to leave behind everything but her purse and her child to get away from him, and other such matters (not all of which I'm sure I *did* want to know about), but Nevala-Lee has drunk a little too much of the Great Man Theory koolaid to tell a truly satisfying story about the people behind them too.
So I thought this was much better than, say, that bio of Harlan Ellison we got last year, which I thought was insufficiently skeptical about Ellison as a reliable source about himself. Nevala-Lee seems to have an appropriate level of critical remove, or at least doesn't mind that all four of his subjects come across quite poorly in various ways. This might be a good time to mention that I did not expect the intimate partner violence and child abduction (Hubbard) and virulent racism (Campbell) portrayed here. Maybe I would have known more about the last of those if I had already known more about Campbell, but honestly I don't know that I ever thought twice about him except to have a vague idea of who they'd named the NotaHugo Best New Writer award after. Campbell also seems to have been a pseudoscience crackpot and a self-aggrandizing blowhard; Nevala-Lee puts in some opinions that various Golden Age *stories* are among the greatest of all time, but he doesn't seem to be trying to gild the people.
However, I ended up deeply frustrated over two not-unrelated areas of Campbell's professional life where Nevala-Lee totally (imo) dropped the ball, leaving me unsatisfied about the whole project.
Nevala-Lee claims in the introduction that "such women as Doña Campbell, Leslyn Heinlein, and Campbell's assistant editor Kay Tarrant have fallen out of the history of the genre... This is their story as well." But if that's what he thought he was doing, he failed. Tarrant was, apparently, literally at the desk next to Campbell's for his entire editorial career minus the first six months, but we learn almost nothing about her except that she was "outwardly nondescript", "a devout Roman Catholic", "would inevitably become known as a spinster", and "Campbell kept their relationship strictly professional." But, like what was *her* education? Her path into science fiction publishing? What did she think about Campbell's editorial choices, which Nevala-Lee finds plenty of writers to have opinions about? Tarrant apparently "handled the entire practical and administrative end of the magazine", while Campbell picked the stories... this sounds an *awful lot* like a story in which it turns out the woman was doing all the real boring essential work while the man got all the fun parts and all the credit, and Nevala-Lee basically just compounds it by continuing to *still* give Campbell all the attention. "She was the unacknowledged presence in the room" and Nevala-Lee seems pretty fine with continuing to not acknowledge her. We get, like, one personal opinion: "she saw Campbell as an oversize boy who would never get the magazine out on his own" - oh, no, I'm wrong, we also get a couple of direct quotes from her about her first opinions of Frederik Pohl, Asimov, and Heinlein. Sure, fine. But what was her working relationship with Campbell like? Did she like science fiction? Did she believe in Campbell's goals? Did she ever consider looking for a different job? She apparently had a heart attack and came back after a months-long recovery - needing five people to replace her in the meantime - what do we know about how things were different in her absence? Argh, she's *right there* being a woman men don't see, and we never quite manage to see her either; Nevala-Lee either couldn't find the sources or didn't bother, despite titling his book after the magazine that she was running.
We get a little more biographical background about Doña Stewart Stebbins, later Campbell, who went by Doña Stuart. We get a photo, and plenty about their marriage, kids, and eventual divorce. Professionally, though, Nevala-Lee drops just enough frustrating hints about her contributions to Campbell's career to raise some major questions, and doesn't even seem to have considered them enough to investigate. She was "smart, creative, and widely read," she wrote at least one unpublished story before they married, Campbell was a lousy speller and typist and Doña retyped his stories and "silently" corrected his spelling and grammar, working next to each other on two typewriters set side by side. She was "a sounding board" for "ideas and openings". When an editor asked Campbell to choose a pseudonym for a story that was very different from his existing serial, he chose "Don A. Stuart", a "private tribute to the most important person in his life", and "Stuart" went on to publish more stories, including "Who Goes There?", his most famous and best story (and the basis for The Thing).
So, like, was she co-writing his stories? Don't you *have to wonder* if she was co-writing his stories?? If maybe that pseud wasn't just a "private tribute" but a quiet plain-sight acknowledgment of her involvement? Nevala-Lee tells us "their collaboration, if not literal, was very meaningful", but he doesn't seem to feel a need to prove the case that it *wasn't* literal. Just on the basis of this book, there's pretty good evidence that Campbell was an essential component of Stuart, given that he stopped writing as Stuart once he became editor of Astounding and didn't have time to write. Presumably if Doña was purely ghostwriting, she could have kept doing it. Although there's also some reason to think she may have been doing some of his editorial work, too - when the US entered WWII, Campbell considered whether to leave the magazine for military work, and Heinlein said that "as has been pointed out a long time ago, Doña could do just as good a job of editing, if she had to, as you do. With a maid-cook at home she would keep those two books going, quality high and making money, for the duration." Heinlein went on to propose that his wife Leslyn and Doña could run the magazines together, which Nevala-Lee calls "a remarkable acknowledgment of their uncredited roles in their husbands' careers." Campbell apparently answered that Doña "hasn't written anything, hasn't edited, has no reputation or proof of ability in that line that's official. We know - but they [the publishing company] may not." This is obviously, exactly the place where Nevala-Lee, as biographer and historian, needs to come in and try to expose what was hidden! We the readers should get to know more than they the publishing company did! Aagh!
What I would really like, and I do acknowledge this is far outside Nevala-Lee's scope, is for someone to do textual analysis of the Don A. Stuart stories and compare them to writer George O. Smith's stories in the period in which Doña started having an affair with him (and ultimately divorced Campbell and married him) vs Smith's early work before they met. (Her relationship with Smith is also outside of Nevala-Lee's scope and he doesn't speculate on her role if any in his career, but at this point we have to keep wondering, right?) Like, okay, she never got byline credit for anything, let's see if we can alchemically extract her back out of the text itself.
But, anyways. A solid bio otherwise if you want to know more about the personalities of Golden Age sf, the dianetics craze, Asimov's massive blatant endless sexual harassment, Heinlein's rectum, how Hubbard's wife had to leave behind everything but her purse and her child to get away from him, and other such matters (not all of which I'm sure I *did* want to know about), but Nevala-Lee has drunk a little too much of the Great Man Theory koolaid to tell a truly satisfying story about the people behind them too.
