Free The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination by Ursula K. Le Guin Page A

introduction to The Rediscovery of Man , Pierce tells us that Linebarger published his book on psychological warfare under his own name, but his first two novels ( Ria and Carola ) as Felix C. Forrest. Then, “when people found out who ‘Forrest’ was, he couldn’t write any more.” (That sounds like Sheldon.) Pierce goes on: “He tried a spy thriller, Atomsk , as Carmichael Smith, but was found out again. He even submitted amanuscript for another novel under his wife’s name, but nobody was fooled.” Using your wife’s name as an alias implies, to me, not only a very good-natured wife, but a very imperative need for a mask. It also implies a quite extraordinary indifference to what is so often of immense importance to a man: that he be perceived, always and totally, as a man.
    My guess is that the pen name he finally settled on may have been necessary to save his dignity as an academic and an expert on grave matters, but was equally important to him because it allowed him psychic freedom. Dr. Linebarger had to be respectable and responsible and had to guard his tongue. Cordwainer Smith wrote skiffy and babbled whatever he pleased. The Doctor used his knowledge discreetly to counsel Chiang Kai-shek and advise politicians and diplomats. Mr. Smith let that knowledge out in the open to please the common folk who read popular fiction, and to serve art. Paul was a man. Cordwainer was men, women, animals, a cosmos.
    Splitting the personality in this way might signify in most people that they were a bit daft; but all the writers I’ve been talking about were notably effective people in both incarnations, flesh and paper. Still, their paper selves, having long outlived the “real person,” might well ask, Which of us can claim to be real?
    W ORDS
    After all, fiction writers make a reality of words.
    The arts of writing all begin in playing with words, wallowing in them, revelling in them, being obsessed by them, finding reality in them. Words are the mud this mudpie’s made of. Some writers are cool and masterful and never get their hands dirty, but Cordwainer Smith got muddy from the toes to the top of the head.
    Language evidently intoxicated him and sometimes controlled him; rhymes, particularly, and the rhythms of sentences. Golden the ship was—Oh! Oh! Oh! That’s the last line, and the title, of one of his stories. I have a baseless, unverifiable, perhaps totally mistaken convictionthat the line came before the story: that the story grew out of, unfolded from, was compelled to exist by, an unexplained, unattached fragment of language, seven words that took hold of his mind and rocked it and wouldn’t let him be until he had made a box of meaning that would hold them: Golden the ship was—Oh! Oh! Oh!
    This kind of thing is part of his peculiar magic. He knows a powerful phrase or word when he finds one, and uses and repeats it powerfully. I suspect the “Instrumentality” was very little but a word at first, a grand word, which as he used, repeated, explored, explained it, turned out to contain in itself much of the wonderful, semicoherent “future history” of the stories and the novel. The Instrumentality of Mankind—it is a suggestive, complex, multiplex kind of phrase, a Mother Lode phrase that keeps leading to the high-grade ore.
    Sometimes I think the words get away from him. The story “Drunkboat” is Arthur Rimbaud getting high on absinthe getting Cordwainer Smith high on Le Bateau ivre and sailing out across the galaxy. It’s a tour de force. But it’s full of awfully bad verse.
     
Point your gun at a murky lurky.
(Now you’re talking ham or turkey!)
Shoot a shot at a dying aoudad.
(Don’t ask the lady why or how, dad!)
     
    Lord Crudelta, in the story, quotes this as an example of words remaining long after their referents are gone, laboriously explaining that an aoudad was an ancient sheep and that he doesn’t know what ham and turkey were, but that children have sung the song for