Heard this one before?
Jul. 27th, 2005 10:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lesser_celeryA few weeks ago at Readercon, while searching through boxes of $1-a-copy paperbacks in the dealers’ room, I stumbled upon a (rose?)water-stained copy of a book that had first caught my attention twelve years earlier: H.F. Heard’s Doppelgangers (1947). My first encounter with Heard’s book had aroused in me a deep fascination with his life and work. Anke and I spent several months doing research on Heard for a 10,000-word literary biography we had arranged to write for The Scream Factory. Unfortunately that excellent review magazine died before we finished the article.
Shortly afterwards, we decided to review Doppelgangers as part of a tribute to my first magazine, Doppelgänger, which had just been euthanized by my successor there as editor, Jamie Meyers. The tribute appeared in Split, one of the variously-named collections we publish, in addition to our regular magazine, Not One of Us.
Heard was an interesting dude: philosopher, writer of mysteries and ghost stories, and friend of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Timothy Leary (yes, that Timothy Leary, if you catch my drift). Perhaps we can belatedly spark an interest in Heardiana.
I hope you at least enjoy the review, which follows, LJ-cut for length.
H.F. Heard, Doppelgangers (New York: Ace Books, 1947)
Review by John Benson and Anke Kriske.
Originally published in Split, edited by John Benson and Tina Reigel, April 1994.
A Surprising Find
We recently bought a used copy of a paperback novel called Doppelgangers, by H.F. Heard (New York: Ace Books, 1947), from a favorite catalog bookseller, Chris Drumm, for a mere $1.50. We did so not because of some inside knowledge of rare works, but because we used to edit a small press magazine called Doppelgänger.
What we didn’t know was that this inexpensive paperback was the work of mid-century philosopher Gerald F. Heard and that, upon its appearance in 1947, Doppelgangers had been received with enthusiasm by the likes of Saturday Review. The fact that we were able to purchase the book so inexpensively speaks volumes about the nature of literary and philosophical fame.
Doppelgangers can be read for three reasons with equal profit: (1) it is an extraordinary exploration of the effect of stripping a human being of his identity and putting him in a foreign environment; (2) it is a contemporary of George Orwell’s 1984, with which it shares many features; and (3) even in its SF prescience, it is a monument to an era alien to the modern reader.
A Man with No Name
The novel takes place in a future (1997) where society is divided into two groups (actually three, but Heard gives short shrift to the laborers who run the machines that make the economy work): the happily sated above-ground people ruled by the master psychologist/inventor/benevolent dictator known as Alpha; and the subterranean rebels (ruled by the Mole) who believe that the surface-dwellers are merely happy morons and that true living requires overcoming challenges.
The narrator has long since given up his identity to act as one of the Mole’s agents. (As Johnny Rivers sings, “They’ve given you a number and taken ’way your name.) Throughout the novel, the narrator never has a name (or a number) of his own. As the book begins, he is being systematically reconstructed using advanced methods of plastic surgery. Then he is trained to use his new body at unfamiliar skills, some as mundane as cooking.
Once his reconstruction and retraining are complete, he is brought to the surface, where he is eventually arrested as a threat to society because he is the spitting image of Alpha. But before his arrest he shares a brief interlude among the happy surface-dwellers. His radical alienation starts to become apparent when he realizes that the now-unbridgeable gap between himself and his new environment is almost a matter of accident.
Alpha conceives a mutually-advantageous notion: The look-alike will be trained in bearing and speech to substitute for the dictator at the exhausting public ceremonies that increasingly intrude on Alpha’s life. The arrangement not only saves the double’s life, but also allows Alpha to concentrate on the sweeping strategy he needs in order to complete and perfect the Psychological Revolution, society’s final and stabilizing stage.
As the double learns to speak and walk like Alpha, he begins almost to think of himself as the man he is imitating. After all, the agent has pent up his desires and expectations for years, then gone through a dramatic alteration that has given him the other man’s outward appearance.
For some time, Alpha pours his heart out to his double. Alpha, too, has long been denied his own individuality in isolation from true human companionship. But soon he grows paranoid, accusing the double of being a doppelgänger, a phantom who becomes real whenever they touch. (“If you touch me, then you become real and I fade away.” The paragraph that follows on p. 161 is a horror classic.)
Lost in his own confusion of identities, Alpha kills himself. Now the double must either take Alpha’s place or die. Having been privy to the dictator’s most personal thoughts and having been doubly trained to pass for the master of the surface-world, Alpha II (as the double now thinks of himself) moves smoothly into his new role. In fact, this is a crowning expression of his chameleon life. He has, in effect, become Alpha. Heard caps the image, “The higher you get up, the less you are a person” (p. 272).
Few novels succeed as well as Doppelgangers at capturing the notion of radical alienation.
Orwell, Huxley, and Heard
The resemblance of Heard’s futuristic surface-world to Orwell’s 1984 is hardly a coincidence. The two men moved within the same literary and philosophical circle, which also included Heard’s closest intellectual counterpart, Aldous Huxley. Orwell first referred to 1984 (not yet by that name) in a 1944 letter, but Heard beat his colleague into print with Doppelgangers. That Orwell’s novel is still celebrated while Heard’s has become an obscure literary footnote is a sign that Orwell’s vision was more clearly understood and accepted.
The Heard-Huxley theories (to use David Savage’s term) not only provided the setting for Doppelgangers, they also prevented the novel from gaining lasting public acceptance. Alpha divides history into four revolutions, the last of which is the Psychological, which Alpha leads. But as even Alpha himself does not seem to grasp, this last revolution will lead (as Savage describes Heard’s theory) “to the emergence of a fully integrated human type, whose knowledge of himself and his psychological situation in the world will balance his present physical knowledge.” Civilization, in this view, needs an unprecendented accession of spirituality. Heard’s exposition of this notion turns the last fifty pages of the novel into mystical gibberish.
Future Vision, Dated Past
Doppelgangers is a splendid case study in the nearsightedness of those who would write about the future. The novel is chockfull of interesting predictions. For instance, Alpha can reach tens of millions of people through television. A bold prediction in 1947, but rather timid in retrospect, now that a billion people have seen a single World Cup soccer match. He also describes an organ that could easily pass for a modern-day synthesizer.
Heard disparages with equal zest the brutality of the rear-guard Soviet manifestation of the Third, or Economic, Revolution and the failure of democracy. (Orwell in his correspondence chastises Heard for wanting to institute an Indian caste system in Europe.) And in all this discussion of revolutions, not one word is devoted to nationalistic or ethnic quarrels, or to the simple problem of knitting a world (not just Europe) together. Apparently Heard had an amazing grasp of non-European cultures, but he shows no sign of understanding late 20th century global politics.
Perhaps the most unnerving anachronism is Alpha’s extraordinary discourse on women, their subordination and wiles (pp. 118-121). Our extensive reading in late 1940s literature has convinced us that the greatest change of the last half-century has not been the transformation of global politics, but rather the change in gender relationships.
A Time Capsule
Doppelgangers is a remarkable novel. On the individual human level, the problem it presents is enduring: Which elements of the human personality are essential and which can be affected by isolation, physical changes, and alteration of a person’s position? On this level, the novel is a nearly unalloyed success.
But in dealing with the cosmic level of human evolution, Doppelgangers is a dated failure that will cause many modern readers to throw their hands up in dismay. A lesson here: The most enduring and universal aspects of literature are those that deal with individuals.
References
Savage, David S. Mysticism and Aldous Huxley: An Examination of Heard-Huxley Theories. Yonkers, NY: O. Baradinsky , 1947.
Steinhoff, William. George Orwell and the Origins of 1984. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1975.
Shortly afterwards, we decided to review Doppelgangers as part of a tribute to my first magazine, Doppelgänger, which had just been euthanized by my successor there as editor, Jamie Meyers. The tribute appeared in Split, one of the variously-named collections we publish, in addition to our regular magazine, Not One of Us.
Heard was an interesting dude: philosopher, writer of mysteries and ghost stories, and friend of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Timothy Leary (yes, that Timothy Leary, if you catch my drift). Perhaps we can belatedly spark an interest in Heardiana.
I hope you at least enjoy the review, which follows, LJ-cut for length.
H.F. Heard, Doppelgangers (New York: Ace Books, 1947)
Review by John Benson and Anke Kriske.
Originally published in Split, edited by John Benson and Tina Reigel, April 1994.
A Surprising Find
We recently bought a used copy of a paperback novel called Doppelgangers, by H.F. Heard (New York: Ace Books, 1947), from a favorite catalog bookseller, Chris Drumm, for a mere $1.50. We did so not because of some inside knowledge of rare works, but because we used to edit a small press magazine called Doppelgänger.
What we didn’t know was that this inexpensive paperback was the work of mid-century philosopher Gerald F. Heard and that, upon its appearance in 1947, Doppelgangers had been received with enthusiasm by the likes of Saturday Review. The fact that we were able to purchase the book so inexpensively speaks volumes about the nature of literary and philosophical fame.
Doppelgangers can be read for three reasons with equal profit: (1) it is an extraordinary exploration of the effect of stripping a human being of his identity and putting him in a foreign environment; (2) it is a contemporary of George Orwell’s 1984, with which it shares many features; and (3) even in its SF prescience, it is a monument to an era alien to the modern reader.
A Man with No Name
The novel takes place in a future (1997) where society is divided into two groups (actually three, but Heard gives short shrift to the laborers who run the machines that make the economy work): the happily sated above-ground people ruled by the master psychologist/inventor/benevolent dictator known as Alpha; and the subterranean rebels (ruled by the Mole) who believe that the surface-dwellers are merely happy morons and that true living requires overcoming challenges.
The narrator has long since given up his identity to act as one of the Mole’s agents. (As Johnny Rivers sings, “They’ve given you a number and taken ’way your name.) Throughout the novel, the narrator never has a name (or a number) of his own. As the book begins, he is being systematically reconstructed using advanced methods of plastic surgery. Then he is trained to use his new body at unfamiliar skills, some as mundane as cooking.
Once his reconstruction and retraining are complete, he is brought to the surface, where he is eventually arrested as a threat to society because he is the spitting image of Alpha. But before his arrest he shares a brief interlude among the happy surface-dwellers. His radical alienation starts to become apparent when he realizes that the now-unbridgeable gap between himself and his new environment is almost a matter of accident.
Alpha conceives a mutually-advantageous notion: The look-alike will be trained in bearing and speech to substitute for the dictator at the exhausting public ceremonies that increasingly intrude on Alpha’s life. The arrangement not only saves the double’s life, but also allows Alpha to concentrate on the sweeping strategy he needs in order to complete and perfect the Psychological Revolution, society’s final and stabilizing stage.
As the double learns to speak and walk like Alpha, he begins almost to think of himself as the man he is imitating. After all, the agent has pent up his desires and expectations for years, then gone through a dramatic alteration that has given him the other man’s outward appearance.
For some time, Alpha pours his heart out to his double. Alpha, too, has long been denied his own individuality in isolation from true human companionship. But soon he grows paranoid, accusing the double of being a doppelgänger, a phantom who becomes real whenever they touch. (“If you touch me, then you become real and I fade away.” The paragraph that follows on p. 161 is a horror classic.)
Lost in his own confusion of identities, Alpha kills himself. Now the double must either take Alpha’s place or die. Having been privy to the dictator’s most personal thoughts and having been doubly trained to pass for the master of the surface-world, Alpha II (as the double now thinks of himself) moves smoothly into his new role. In fact, this is a crowning expression of his chameleon life. He has, in effect, become Alpha. Heard caps the image, “The higher you get up, the less you are a person” (p. 272).
Few novels succeed as well as Doppelgangers at capturing the notion of radical alienation.
Orwell, Huxley, and Heard
The resemblance of Heard’s futuristic surface-world to Orwell’s 1984 is hardly a coincidence. The two men moved within the same literary and philosophical circle, which also included Heard’s closest intellectual counterpart, Aldous Huxley. Orwell first referred to 1984 (not yet by that name) in a 1944 letter, but Heard beat his colleague into print with Doppelgangers. That Orwell’s novel is still celebrated while Heard’s has become an obscure literary footnote is a sign that Orwell’s vision was more clearly understood and accepted.
The Heard-Huxley theories (to use David Savage’s term) not only provided the setting for Doppelgangers, they also prevented the novel from gaining lasting public acceptance. Alpha divides history into four revolutions, the last of which is the Psychological, which Alpha leads. But as even Alpha himself does not seem to grasp, this last revolution will lead (as Savage describes Heard’s theory) “to the emergence of a fully integrated human type, whose knowledge of himself and his psychological situation in the world will balance his present physical knowledge.” Civilization, in this view, needs an unprecendented accession of spirituality. Heard’s exposition of this notion turns the last fifty pages of the novel into mystical gibberish.
Future Vision, Dated Past
Doppelgangers is a splendid case study in the nearsightedness of those who would write about the future. The novel is chockfull of interesting predictions. For instance, Alpha can reach tens of millions of people through television. A bold prediction in 1947, but rather timid in retrospect, now that a billion people have seen a single World Cup soccer match. He also describes an organ that could easily pass for a modern-day synthesizer.
Heard disparages with equal zest the brutality of the rear-guard Soviet manifestation of the Third, or Economic, Revolution and the failure of democracy. (Orwell in his correspondence chastises Heard for wanting to institute an Indian caste system in Europe.) And in all this discussion of revolutions, not one word is devoted to nationalistic or ethnic quarrels, or to the simple problem of knitting a world (not just Europe) together. Apparently Heard had an amazing grasp of non-European cultures, but he shows no sign of understanding late 20th century global politics.
Perhaps the most unnerving anachronism is Alpha’s extraordinary discourse on women, their subordination and wiles (pp. 118-121). Our extensive reading in late 1940s literature has convinced us that the greatest change of the last half-century has not been the transformation of global politics, but rather the change in gender relationships.
A Time Capsule
Doppelgangers is a remarkable novel. On the individual human level, the problem it presents is enduring: Which elements of the human personality are essential and which can be affected by isolation, physical changes, and alteration of a person’s position? On this level, the novel is a nearly unalloyed success.
But in dealing with the cosmic level of human evolution, Doppelgangers is a dated failure that will cause many modern readers to throw their hands up in dismay. A lesson here: The most enduring and universal aspects of literature are those that deal with individuals.
References
Savage, David S. Mysticism and Aldous Huxley: An Examination of Heard-Huxley Theories. Yonkers, NY: O. Baradinsky , 1947.
Steinhoff, William. George Orwell and the Origins of 1984. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1975.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-27 04:28 pm (UTC)Patricia