Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright Read Free Book Online Page B

voice, ‘No, not yet! He’s not ready!’ And like a long umbilical cord, he felt himself being pulled back, back, back. And he lay down in his body, and he opened his eyes, and he said to the nurse, ‘I was dead, wasn’t I?’ ” The nurse looked startled, and the doctor gave her a dirty look for letting Hubbard know what had happened.
    In Hubbard’s own written account of the event, he remembers voices crying out as he is being restored to life, “Don’t let him know!” When he came to, he was “still in contact with something.” The intimation that he had briefly been given access to the divine mystery lingered forseveral days, but he couldn’t call it back. “And then one morning, just as I awoke, it came to me.”
    In a fever, he dashed off a small book he titled
Excalibur
. “Once upon a time, according to a writer in The Arabian Nights, there lived a very wise old man,” the book begins, in the brief portion that the church has published of the fragments it says it has in its possession. The old man, goes the story, wrote a long and learned book, but he became concerned that he had written too much. So he sat himself down for ten years more and reduced the original volume to one tenth its size. Even then, he was dissatisfied, and he constrained the work even further, to a single line, “which contained everything there was to be known.” He hid the sacred line in a niche in his wall. But still he wondered, Could all human knowledge be distilled even further?
    Suppose all the wisdom of the world
were
reduced to just one line—suppose that one line were to be written today and given to you. With it you could understand the basis of all life and endeavor.… There
is
one line, conjured up out of a morass of facts and made available as an integrated unit to explain such things. This line is the philosophy of philosophy, thereby carrying the entire subject back into the simple and humble truth.
    All life is directed by one command and one command only—SURVIVE.
    Hubbard sent excited telegrams to publishers in New York, inviting them to meet him at Penn Station, where he would auction off a manuscript that would change the world. He wrotePolly, “I have high hopesof smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form even if all the books are destroyed.”
    But
Excalibur
was never published, leading some to doubt that it was ever written. The stories Hubbard later told about the book added to the sense that it was more mythical than real. He said that when the Russians learned of the book’s contents, they offered him money and laboratory facilities to complete his work. When he turned them down, they purloined a copy of his manuscript from his hotel room in Miami. Hubbard explained to his agentthat he ultimately decided to withdraw the book from publication because the first six people who read it were so shattered by the revelations that they had lost their minds. The last time he showed
Excalibur
to a publisher, he said, the readerbrought the manuscript into the room, set it on the publisher’s desk, then jumped out the window of the skyscraper.
    Hubbard despondently returned to thepulps. Five years of torrential output had left him exhausted and bitter. His work was “worthless,” he admitted. “I have learned enough of my trade, have developed a certain technique,” he wrote toHays. “But curbed by editorial fear of reality and hindered by my own revolt I have never dared loose the pent flame, so far only releasing the smoke.”
    That same year Hubbard received an offer to write for a magazine called
Astounding Science-Fiction
. The editor,John W. Campbell, Jr., twenty-seven years old at the time, was to preside over what Hubbard and others would mark as theGolden Age ofScience Fiction. One of the many brilliant young writers who would be pulled into Campbell’s orbit,Isaac Asimov, described Campbell as “a tall, large manwith light hair, a beaky nose, a wide face