My first inkling of the sacerdotal character of science fiction came shortly after John and I were married in 1951. We had moved into a new house in a new neighborhood, and one evening I answered the doorbell to find three young men on the doorstep. The spokesman said, "Does the Great Man live here?" "You must have the wrong house," I said; "this is the Campbell residence."
Just shows you, doesn't it?
For the next twenty years we had an ever-normal granary of youth supply. First, there were my son's and daughter's college friends, who would come in without a "Hello" but with a well-thought-out refutation of some point of an argument begun during a previous holiday months before. They brought new people with them each time, to refuel the discussions and arguments that would last for days.
Later on came the beaux John's daughters brought home. Many's the time I had to interrupt one of those marathon debates to suggest that the girls might like to go out on their dates, rather than fidgeting, all dressed up, in the background.
After the children were grown up and gone, we still had the neighborhood young people to be cudgeled with electronics and chemistry and goodness knows what else. John had an inexhaustible supply of data and loved sharing it, much to the discomfit of his own children, who, after one foray, would cease asking for help on science-fair projects, models of molecules, or on anything else. What with all the fascinating ramifications, by ways, and side issues John could think of, it took him at least twice as long to convey the information. He also was unnerving about their textbooks and about the accepted authorities. The exceptions to any rule were pointed out; and just at the time when one should develop respect for the written word, the children would be told: “It's only a book. I write books, my friends write books, and we can be wrong.” This can be rather unsettling, especially when one is up against a superior arguer.
No one writes about John without mentioning the office arguments—starting at eleven a.m., continuing through lunch, and ending at train time in the afternoon. I have yet to hear anyone who understood the reason for them. But somehow John felt compelled to take a person's own data and bring it through the logical development; to a logical conclusion then he would sit back and say: "You see, you didn't really think that at all."
I really can't know personally what John was like in the years before I met him, though by reputation he was always a great talker and explorer of ideas. But I must take some credit for his well-known prodding of unreasoned convictions and his unraveling of an individual's undesirable viewpoint. John and I had an agreement to try to discover what we thought, how we thought, and why. Now, this can be vastly uncomfortable, because if you take a dearly beloved concept back to its sources, it might turn out to be (i) somebody else's idea, (2) in direct conflict with another equally pet theory, or (3) not what you really thought at all. The trouble is, not everyone wants to play this game—to have his theoretical inconsistencies pointed out to him and to be left with the feeling of being anchorless. I would like to be able to discuss the question of personality balance with John right now, to see whether it's sort of like the binocular viewpoint—that major untenable theories are necessary to maintain stability.
Our own private discussions were remarkable, and we even gave titles to some of the arguments. Early on, I wanted to have a linen closet built for place mats, tablecloths, and the like. I had it well designed (I thought), and then came his questions: function, practicability, logistics, importance—the works. Our "Linen Closet Argument" lasted for a good ten years and never was solved; but the design, intact and unchanged, was used when John built a storage cabinet for electronic parts. I—on the other hand—never did get the linen closet.
"I know what it's like to live in a small town" began another marathon discussion. After days of marshaling every argument I could think of, I suggested using our new tape recorder to get down the facts. The system was awkward at first. But never let it be said that we would be cowed by a machine; so shortly the argument was flourishing. Finally we decided to play back the tape, ending for good and all that type of discussion. I sounded shrewish and petulant, and John sounded patronizing and smug; and neither of us thought we lived up to our self-images to any attractive degree. Humbling, to say the least. Let it be said that we continued to discuss, for the rest of John's life—but not that way.
People used to ask me, at science-fiction conventions, what it was "like" to live with John. Interesting, I'd say then. I say now, it isn't in every household, where in trying to get an accurately cooked breakfast egg on the table (7.5 minutes, according to John's timer) one would have to cope with a gent with shaving lather asking, "Now, on the question of the limiting factors of free will . . ." Nor having the piano tuner coming into the kitchen to ask, "Pardon me, but I'd like to know just how long have you been married?" When we said it had been twelve years, he said, "My God, you talk together as though you'd just met!"
John had no time for string quartets (tweedledum and tweedledee), cocktail party chitchat, the theater, Milton, non-representational art, lobster, tuxedos, hard rock music, liquor, mowing the lawn, going antiquing. He loved his job—it was the only one in the world where someone was paying him for his hobby: reading science fiction. There were recurrent parental questionings about trying to influence John into a "respectable" nine-to-five spot in a lab of some sort. He knew absolutely that he was doing exactly what he wanted to be doing. I once made the suggestion that perhaps he should be teaching, since he was so inspirational and helpful. That was about the only time that I got a sweet, sad smile, all forgiveness: "What do you think I'm doing, with 100,000 students a month?"
People continually urged him to read this, that, or the other thing. But he maintained that he read for a living and that it was high time to integrate the facts he already had, rather than cluttering up the works. As to the manuscripts he received, he read every single word of every one. For there could be the tiniest germ of an idea that he might miss otherwise.
When we were in Cambridge once, where John was to give a talk at MIT, we were watching a TV program and the words "Live from the Moon" flashed on the screen. "I feel validated," John said, and that was all. There were so many unpopular and nonrespectable ideas that he espoused, that he earned himself such epithets as screwball, crackpot and worse—with the consequent loss of friends . . . This used to worry me, but somehow he coped with it. He never carried a grudge or acted vindictively—He was not smug, but had some tough quality of mind that viewed ideas as fascinating and always worth processing through his mental computer, no matter where they led. This I observed, but could not understand or emulate.
We early came to the conclusion that we handled concepts differently, by methods unacceptable to one another. Women used to become livid when he would say: "Men and women don't think alike," believing he was denigrating the female thinking process. But he was not disrespectful, only marveling at the usefulness of having someone around to double-check with. He often said, "I don't care what people think, just so long as they, by God, think!"
John liked steak, wrestling on TV (best dramatic program on the air), Victor Herbert, his friends (whom he thought were remarkable), comfortable chairs, dogs, kittens, endless discussions, trees, clear thinkers, time to himself, precision machinery and the people who made it go, peach orchards in bloom, anything with garlic, staying home and visits to Cambridge. The business of going to Cambridge was often accompanied by much bad language, sotto voce, and grumbling over the idea of wearing a suit and tie every day—but then one could never get him to go home.
He was a very good father, and the girls have all kept letters—pages and pages of his philosophy of living. They used to bait him by proposing imaginary problems to him because he simply could not bring himself to write brief, chatty notes.
There is no effrontery to equal the statement "I understand him"—although I'm sure he thought I did. I didn't understand that putting up a shelf meant an hour's discussion of torque. I didn't comprehend that a door bell worked better on a storage battery, or that the door to the downstairs cupboard could be worked from upstairs, utilizing the flap-lifting mechanisms from a World War II aircraft; or that it was absolutely necessary to disembowel every new piece of mechanical equipment the second it came into the house, so that days would go by before it could be put into service. Nor that it was necessary to tell the same story over and over again, until it was explained to me that "that's the way to shape and polish the idea before it gets into print." Nor that we wouldn't be lynched one fine day because of some of his appalling ideas.
Yes, indeed, that was one interesting man!
—Mrs. John W. Campbell
Fairhope, Alabama
September, 1975