Caroline
clerk #2
There are a number of threads on the original ESMB that get into Hubbard's 1938 Excalibur manuscript:
Excalibur contained, by many reports including Hubbard's, his foundational science for Dianetics/Scientology. I believe that because of this, his contemporaneous statements to his wife about this book are extremely relevant and helpful. I'll post what I think are the pertinent portions of his 1938 letter to Polly:
- Hubbard's recurring theme from Excalibur to Dianetics to Scientology to OT levels
- Research Timeline for Hubbard's "Excalibur"
- About Excalibur (original manuscript)
- What's this "Excalibur" thing? Will it give me OT powers?
When, by and by, it became important to promote an image of Ron as one of the world's great thinkers and philosophers, these two stories would be presented as clear evidence that L. Ron Hubbard had begun his research into the workings of the mind. Science fiction, it was explained, was 'merely the method Ron used to develop his philosophy'.[5]
It was a philosophy which was supposedly fully expounded in Excalibur, an unpublished book Ron was first said to have written in 1938. Modestly described as 'a sensational volume which was a summation of life based on his analysis of the state of Mankind',[6] much would be heard of this great work in later years; indeed, it would become a cornerstone of the mythology built around his life. It was claimed that the book derived from Ron's 'discovery' that the primary law of life was to survive, although, naturally, the part played by 'his explorations, journeys and experiences in the four corners of the earth, amongst all kinds of men, was crucial'.[7]
The first six people to read the manuscript were said to have been so overwhelmed by the contents that they went out of their minds. Curiously, however, few of Ron's fellow writers were aware of the existence of the book, with the exception of Art Burks: 'Ron called me one day and said, "I want to see you right away, I have written the book." I never saw anybody so worked up. Apparently he had written it without sleeping, eating, or anything else and had literally worked himself into a frazzle.
'He was so sure he had something "away out and beyond" anything else that he said he had sent telegrams to several book publishers telling them that he had written the book and that they were to meet
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5. Ron The Writer, Author Services Inc., 1982
6. L. Ron Hubbard, Mission Into Time, 1973
7. Ibid.
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him at Penn Station and he would discuss it with them and go with whoever gave him the best offer. Whether he did this or not, I don't know, but it is right in line with something he would do.
'He told me it was going to revolutionize everything: the world, people's attitudes to one another. He thought it would have a greater impact upon people than the Bible.'[8]
Burks's recollection of the manuscript was that it was about seventy thousand words long and began with a fable about a king who gathered all his wise men together and commanded them to bring him all the wisdom of the world in five hundred books. He then told them to go away and condense the information into one hundred books. When they had done that, he wanted the wisdom reduced into one book and finally into one word. That word was 'survive'.
Ron developed an argument that the survival instinct could explain all human behaviour and that to understand survival was to understand life. Burks particularly remembered a passage in which Ron explained how emotions could be whipped up to the point where a lynch mob was formed. 'It made the shivers move up your back from your heels to the top of your head,' he said.
Burks was sufficiently impressed by Excalibur to agree to write a brief biographical sketch of Ron for use as a preface. It was the usual 'red-headed fire-eater' material, with only one surprising new claim - that 1934 was the year Ron 'rounded off his application of analytical geometry to aerial navigation'.
The preface also mentioned a facet of Ron's character which few members of the American Fiction Guild had noticed - his unwillingness to talk about himself. 'Long ago he discovered that his most concrete adventures raised sceptic eyebrows and so, without diminishing his activities, he has fallen back on silence. We hear of him building a road in the Ladrone Islands or surveying the Canadian border and bellowing squads east and west with the perfection of a trained military man and delve though we may, that is as far as we can get.'
Burks concluded with a tactful reference to the difficulty of reconciling the adventurer with the author of a philosophic treatise: 'One envisions the philosopher as a quiet gray-beard, timid in all things but thought. It is, withal, rather upsetting to the general concept to think of L. Ron Hubbard as the author of Excalibur.'
Although Excalibur was never published - Burks was convinced that Ron was deeply disappointed he could not find a publisher - Ron assiduously stoked rumours about its existence and its content. 'He told me once that he had a manuscript in his trunk that was going to revolutionize the world,' said his friend Mac Ford. 'He said it was called Excalibur, but that's all I know about it. I never saw it.'[9]
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8. The Aberee, Dec. 1961
9. Author's interview with Ford, 1 September 1986
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Unquestionably, Ron himself believed in Excalibur, for in October 1938 he wrote a long and emotional letter to Polly in which he expressed his hope that the manuscript would merit him a place in history.
Polly had recently had a riding accident which resulted in her losing the tip of one finger. Ron tried to cheer her up with a funny catalogue of his own imagined ailments and promised her a jewelled Chinese fingernail holder which she could be 'snooty' about. He wrote of his frustration about his work, the constant shortage of money ('I still wonder how much money we owe in incidental bills. It's grave, I know . . .') and the need to spend so much time in New York, away from her and the children.
Then he turned to the subject which was clearly in the forefront of his mind: 'Sooner or later Excalibur will be published and I may have a chance to get some name recognition out of it so as to pave the way to articles and comments which are my ideas of writing heaven.
'Living is a pretty grim joke, but a joke just the same. The entire function of man is to survive. The outermost limit of endeavour is creative work. Anything less is too close to simple survival until death happens along. So I am engaged in striving to maintain equilibrium sufficient to at least realize survival in a way to astound the gods. I turned the thing up so it's up to me to survive in a big way . . . Foolishly perhaps, but determined none the less, I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form even if all books are destroyed. That goal is the real goal as far as I am concerned . . .
'When I wrote it [Excalibur] I gave myself an education which outranks that of anyone else. I don't know but it might seem that it takes terrific brain work to get the thing assembled and usable in the head. I do know that I could form a political platform, for instance, which would encompass the support of the unemployed, the industrialist and the clerk and day laborer all at one and the same time. And enthusiastic support it would be. Things are due for a bust in the next half dozen years. Wait and see.'
Ron was clearly worried that he would be hampered by his reputation as a pulp writer: 'Writing action pulp doesn't have much agreement with what I want to do because it retards my progress by demanding incessant attention and, further, actually weakens my name. So you see I've got to do something about it and at the same time strengthen the old financial position.'
Towards the end of the letter he wrote about strange forces he felt stirring within him which made him feel aloof and invincible and the struggle he had faced trying to answer the question 'Who am I?' before returning to the theme of immortality: 'God was feeling sardonic the
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day He created the Universe. So it's rather up to at least one man every few centuries to pop up and come just as close to making him swallow his laughter as possible.'
Ron's nickname for Polly was 'Skipper' and hers for him was 'Red'. The letter finished with a single encouraging line: 'I love you, Skipper, and all will be well. The Redhead.'
Source: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/miller/bfm05.htm#79Excalibur contained, by many reports including Hubbard's, his foundational science for Dianetics/Scientology. I believe that because of this, his contemporaneous statements to his wife about this book are extremely relevant and helpful. I'll post what I think are the pertinent portions of his 1938 letter to Polly:
August 1938
Thursday
Dearest Skipper,
Dearest Skipper,
[...]
As I have been for a long, long time, remember I'm still faced with the necessity of somehow getting lined up on steady money. whether that be the sales of Excalibur or a movie job or something.
[...]
So just how to bring about financial freedom was a problem. Still is, for that matter. It does not and never will lie in, the realm of magazines unless one is a hack like Kelland. And I notice that Kelland still grinds them out at pulp pace, getting no younger and really no richer.
I love to write. But sometimes I get as sick as I would if I prostituted you to every man that came along, having to hammer bang-bang and accumulate, hot peace, but further grief.
Hollywood's major studios don't work a man too hard and I want a chance to breathe. And so I am not going to do anything to jeopardize a decent paying job. I know that that down there is far, far from creative art. But at the same time a major studio, unlike Columbia, isn't very demanding of sweat and there's time to sit back and figure out things and write only when the old bean gets to boiling.
Sooner or later Excalibur will be published and I may have a chance to get some name recognition out of it so as to pave the way to articles and comments which are my ideas of writing heaven.
Living is a pretty grim joke, but a joke just the same. The entire function of man is to survive. Not for what but just to survive. The outermost limit of endeavor is creative work. Anything less is too close to simple survival until death happens along. So I em engaged in striving to maintain equilibrium sufficient to at last realize survival in a way to astound the gods. I turned the thing up so it’s up to me to survive in a big way. Personal immortality is only to be gained through the printed word, barred note or painted canvas or hard granite. Foolishly perhaps, but determined none the less, I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form even if all the books are destroyed. That goal is the real goal as far as I am concerned. Things which stand too consistently in its way make me nervous. It's a pretty big job. In a hundred years Roosevelt will have been forgotten - which gives some idea of the magnitude of my attempt. And all this boils and froths inside my head and I'm miserable when I am blocked. Let the next man concentrate upon "peace" and "contentment". When life was struck into me something else accompanied it. And when I leave things in the lap of the gods who seem to be interested in my destiny, boy, things happen!
My fight right now is to get into a spot where I can tide across the gap until the next blaze. Excalibur may be fought, accepted or forgotten. I don't care. I seem to be the only one that has attained actual personal contact with it. Others take it mentally and seem to be at a loss to apply it. When I wrote it I gave myself an education which outranks that of anyone else. I don't know but it might seem that it takes terrific brain work to get the thing assembled and useable in the head. I do know that I could formulate a political platform, for instance, which would encompass the support of the unemployed, the industrialist and the clerk and day laborer all at one and the same time. And enthusiastic support it would be. Things are due for a bust in the next half a dozen years. Wait and See.
Writing action pulp doesn't have much agreement with what I want to do because it retards my progress demanding incessant attention and, further, actually weakens my name. So you see I've got to do something about it and at the same time strengthen the old financial position.
Anyway, I won't burden you with any more of that sort of thing. But the things I do often seem pretty weird when judged from the standpoint of nice, quiet surroundings and peaceful old age. I haven't started to get old and I won't seek peace until I'm stretched on a marble slab., And I won't be stretched on any marble slab until I've done the things assigned. I'll lay a sizeable wager that hell will begin to break loose within the next twelvemonth and continue to go for many a year. I seem to have a sort of personal awareness which only begins to come alive when I begin to believe in a destiny. And then a strange force stirs in me and I seem to be completely aloof and wholly invincible. It is the problem of "Who am I?"
Psychiatrists, reaching the high of a dusty desk, tell us that Alexander and Jenghiz Khan and Napoleon were madmen. I know they were maligning some very intelligent gentlemen. So anybody who dares say that maybe he's going to out things up considerably is immediately branded as an egomaniac or something equally ridiculous so that little men can still save their hides in the face of possible fury. It's one thing to go nutty and state, "I'm Napoleon, nobody dares touch me," and quite another to say, "If I watch my step and don't let anything stop me, I can make Napoleon look like a punk. That's the difference.
A man wouldn't have to be either very tall or very smart to whip any leader of today hands down.
It's a big joke, this living. God was feeling sardonic the day He created the Universe. So it’s rather up to at least one man every few centuries to pop up and come just as close to making Him swallow his laughter as possible.
Anyway, these are the things about which I revolve. I can't blame it on environment or experience, strangely enough. When I was eight I remember figuring out how long it would take me to achieve these ends, still saying to myself, "Who am I?" And I said it at sixteen and I'm saying it at twenty-six even though the old cards persist in getting stacked against me and people are often like tugs trying to shunt me into a dismally peaceful berth. A few months of cold logic on the subject I struck upon in February have shown me that I didn't have it all under control. Hence I must needs slow down on my concept, though it broadened in another way which compensates and it has some popularity angles now which it lacked before. I guess I'm thirty percent showman after all because I instinctively dive toward popular huzzahs. And so, quite magnanimously for me, I gave man back his human soul and created a new explanation for creative urge which the lads will love. Nonetheless, the things are as true as can be.
Here's the time at three-thirty and I've got to go downtown. Maybe I shouldn't have written such a letter to you but I just got going and, so here it is.
I love you, Skipper, and all will be well.
[Signed]
The Redhead