His Arlington National Cemetery Bio with My Add-ons
My father was buried at the Arlington National
Cemetery, which he was entitled to as a
military man. There is a biography there, which I have
also seen on a variety of other sites around the web. I
don't know who wrote it originally... evidently not someone
who knew him.
Here it is. Comments in red are mine. -- Rosana
Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, Jr. [He
never used the Jr as an adult, though he did as a
teenager. My grandfather was Paul Myron Wentworth
Linebarger.] Major, United States Army
Colonel, United States Army Reserve
Science Fiction Writer: Cordwainer Smith
Cordwainer Smith (Pseudonym for Dr. Paul Myron Anthony
Linebarger) (b.1913-d.1966)
Ph.D. professor of Asiatic studies at John Hopkins
University, School of advanced International Studies. Closely
linked with the U.S. Intelligence Community with special
interest in propaganda techniques and psychological
warfare.
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in July 1913, died in
Baltimore, Maryland. Grew up and was educated in China and
Japan, his father was a legal advisor to the Chinese Republic
(Dr. Paul Myron Anthony L. but see
above) attended school in Germany, visited Russia in his
teens, married Margaret Snow in 1936,
divorced in 1949, remarried 1950 to Genevieve Collins.
In 1966 most of his science-fiction work was published for
the first time. [They must mean in book
form.] University teacher in 1947 [and
for the rest of his life]. Recalled for Korean War.
Travelled a lot in the 50's and 60's with his wife in spite of
his being very ill. [He had various health
problems but I almost never saw him sick in bed. I wish I'd
inherited his stamina.] He was very impressed with
Australia and hoped to retire there but died of a heart attack
[by then he *had been* very sick for a
while] at age 53.
All but 5 stories are of the Instrumentality of mankind.
First of these was "War #81-Q"(1928) Apparently he did not
bother a lot with making the different facts and dates match.
[Geez, I can't let that go by. I'd say he did
bother quite a lot, but the worlds he created were so complex
that he didn't hold it all in precise memory.] Also
wrote as Felix C. Forrest, a pun in reference to his Chinese
name Lin Bah Loh (Forest of Incandescent Bliss).
From 1950 to 1966, stories appeared in mainstream science
fiction magazines by an author named "Cordwainer Smith". From
the first to the last, these stories were acclaimed as among
the most inventive and striking ever written, and that in a
field specializing in the inventive and the striking. Their
author was a very private man who did not want his real name to
be known because he did not want to be pursued by SF fans.
[That's true; I remember him saying
so.] It was only after his death in 1966 that more than
a handful of people knew that "Cordwainer Smith" was in real
life Paul M. L. Linebarger. [Paul M. A.
Linebarger]
Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger
Paul Linebarger was born in 1913, the grandson of a
clergyman. His father, an eccentric man, had served as a
Federal District Judge in the Philippines, but had left this
post to work full time for the cause of the Chinese republican
reformer Sun Yat Sen, who became Paul's godfather. Paul
Linebarger grew up in the retinue of Sun Yat Sen, for his
father stayed with Sen during his exile in Japan and throughout
his career in China. John J. Pierce has written,
Linebarger spent his formative years in Japan, China,
France, and Germany. By the time he grew up, he knew six
languages and had become intimate with several cultures, both
Oriental and Occidental.
[My father was NOT partly raised and
educated in Japan. He spent a week or two at a time there,
maybe as long as a month on some research project, but during
the period when his father was basically hiding out in Japan to
keep from being killed by his Chinese enemies, my father and
his brother Wentworth and mother Lillian were living either in
Europe or the US.]
He was only twenty- three when he earned his Ph.D. in
political science at Johns Hopkins University, where he was
later Professor of Asiatic politics for many years. Shortly
thereafter, he graduated from editing his father's books to
publishing his own highly regarded works on Far Eastern
affairs. [1]
After graduating from Johns Hopkins, Linebarger taught at
Duke University from 1937 to 1946, but he also served actively
in the Army during World War II as a second lieutenant. Pierce
writes that "As a Far East specialist he was involved in the
formation of the Office of War Information and of the Operation
Planning and Intelligence Board. He also helped organize the
Army's first psychological warfare section." [2] He was sent to
China and put in charge of psychological warfare and of
coordinating Anglo- American and Chinese military activities.
By the end of the war, he had risen to the rank of major.
In 1947, he became professor of Asiatic Politics at Johns
Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies
in Washington. Pierce writes,
Dr. Linebarger turned his wartime experiences into
Psychological Warfare, still regarded as the most authoritative
text in the field. As a colonel, he was advisor to the British
forces in Malaya, and to the U. S. Eighth Army in Korea. But
this self- styled "visitor to small wars" passed up Vietnam,
feeling American involvement there was a mistake.
[Interesting. I was in my early 20s and
became involved with the pacifist activities of the
Quakers, and I remember a lunch with my father in which
he said a small war like that didn't really matter much.
I thought he was horribly world-weary.]
Travels around the world took him to Australia, Greece,
Egypt, and many other countries; [he had a
globe thickly covered with many different colors of tape,
representing his major trips] and his expertise was
sufficiently valued that he became a leading member of the
Foreign Policy Association and an advisor to President Kennedy.
[3]
Linebarger was reared in a High Church Episcopalian family.
[No, that came later when he married
Genevieve, a Catholic who couldn't be a Catholic in good
standing while being married to a divorced man, so they
told me. His father was from a Methodist family, and whatever
Grandma was raised, it didn't take.] Alan C. Elms's
sketch of the older Linebargers does not lead one to believe
either was particularly devout. [to put it
mildly... I never met that grandfather but Grandma didn't give
a hoot for religion.] Paul's father was evidently rather
overbearing and placed many demands on his son. His mother was
apparently rather self-centered and controlling
[yep].
At the age of six, young Paul was blinded in his left eye
as a result of an accident while playing, and the
resulting infection damaged his right eye as well,
causing him distress throughout his entire life. A
sensitive, introspective, and apparently rather lonely
and sickly youth, Paul Linebarger was to develop into a
remarkable scholar, thinker, and writer. [4]
At some point in his life, Paul Linebarger became a strongly
committed Christian. "He and [his
wife] Genevieve went to Sung Mass on Sundays, and he
said grace at all meals at home. The faith extended and shaped
his powerful imagination' But he simply ignored contemporary
religious movements, especially the secularizing ones directed
to social problems. The God he had faith in had to do with the
soul of man and with the unfolding of history and of the
destiny of all living creatures." [5]
The first science fiction story published by Linebarger,
under the pseudonym Cordwainer Smith, was "Scanners Live in
Vain", in 1949. It had been written, however, in 1945. This
story is a full-blown allegory of the coming of the New
Covenant, and reveals a very sophisticated understanding both
of the Biblical narrative and typology (e.g., the smell of
roast lamb reminds the central character of the smell of
burning people), and of the theological and philosophical
tenets of the Christian religion. Linebarger must have become a
serious Christian well before 1945. [I doubt
it, but I don't really know when he did. It's important to
remember that he could certainly have had a 'sophisticated
understanding' without being 'committed.' I rather think that
his 1950 marriage to Genevieve was a key turning point. She was
Catholic in an era when Catholics couldn't marry divorced
people, or so they told me, and they both became High Church
Episcopal.]
Linebarger's own psychological problems, as well as his keen
interest in psychological warfare, caused him to explore modern
psychiatry and psychoanalysis. These themes, as well as
Christian philosophy and allegory, and also psychological
warfare, run all through the science fiction he published as
Cordwainer Smith.
|