Adventures in the Orgasmatron (69 page)

“Well, gentlemen. Are you satisfied?” Reich asked the inspectors sarcastically. “We have gasoline! It would make a nice fire, no?” He asked them if they wanted to destroy the rest of his scientific equipment or burn his books. As they left, one of the officials, evidently embarrassed, said they were sorry that it had come to this. Reich replied, “Yes, you’re sorry. Of course. Aren’t we all. Good-bye, gentlemen. Someday you will understand.”
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According to the FDA report written later that day, Silvert and Moise were also present at this meeting, along with two attorneys that Reich had hired. Although there were only a few accumulators left at Orgonon, Silvert admitted to having ten more devices in New York stored in a Thompson Street warehouse along with panels for twenty-five or thirty more. Reich had sold eighty-two other accumulators to the people who had rented them (earning $8,264.75), and his lawyers were arguing that he had no way of forcing the new owners to return them to Rangeley for destruction, as the injunction specified. “The defendants were quite civil and cautious,” the report stated. “On a few occasions Dr. Reich became somewhat agitated and strode out of the room, only to return in a moment or two. Their attitude seemed to be that of martyrs. The Food and Drug Administration could take and destroy everything they had.”
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According to this official account, there was an attempt to burn the accumulators, but they wouldn’t ignite, so they had to be finished off with axes. Reich put an American flag atop the rubble and wreckage of the chopped-up accumulators as if he were commemorating the dead.

A few weeks later the inspectors returned to Orgonon to preside over a book burning. Reich took them down to the Student Laboratory and said, “There they are, burn them.” As Inspector Niss was doing a count, Reich advised him to air himself occasionally, as the lab was contaminated, a warning that went unheeded. Reich had arranged for someone from Collins’s workshop to carry out the job, which involved piling 251 volumes of Reich’s writings on the bonfire. “During the burning,” Niss wrote in his report, “Dr. Reich found himself just about to throw some of the literature on the fire. He stopped short and remarked, ‘I promised myself that I would have nothing to do with the burning of this literature.’”
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He told Niss that his books had also been burned by the Nazis, and that he couldn’t believe that book burning could also happen in America.

In fact, in the early 1950s numerous “subversive” books were banned from schools and libraries, and thirty thousand books, by authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Langston Hughes, that were considered pro-Communist by McCarthy’s henchmen were withdrawn from information centers in embassies and consulates abroad. Ironically, some of these same books had been burned in Germany. One senator pointed out that the term “book burning” was “symbolic of any effort to remove books from libraries,” and quarantining books in basements and warehouses was just as bad as incinerating them. In June 1953, Eisenhower, who hated McCarthy—he thought him “a pimple in the path of progress”—made a speech condemning these actions: “Don’t join the book burners,” he told the graduating class at Dartmouth College. “Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as any document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.”
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In late August the FDA destroyed the literature that was ware-housed at the Orgone Institute Press in Greenwich Village. Silvert was there with Paki Wright’s mother, Miriam Sheppard, and a few other hired helpers. Six tons of literature, valued at fifteen thousand dollars, was taken to the New York City Sanitation Department’s Gansevoort Street incinerator. Included in the inventory were over twenty thousand journals as well as hardback volumes that should have been saved, according to the terms of the injunction (though not sold until references to orgone energy were struck out), including copies of
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
and
The Sexual Revolution
, both of which made only passing reference to orgone energy. The FDA looked on: “The truck dumped the material in the dumping area and the overhead crane picked it up and dumped it into the fire.”
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The American Civil Liberties Union protested the book burnings in both a letter to the FDA and in a press release that was ignored by every major newspaper. Reich rejected the ACLU’s offer of help, even though it was the only organization to come to his support. The ACLU had been formed to protect left-wingers during the Red Scare of 1920, and even though Communists had been barred from leadership positions since 1940, Reich maintained that it was a Communist front organization.

After his arrest and sentencing, Reich remained in Maine, sinking into an alcohol-numbed depression as he awaited the result of the decision of the Supreme Judicial Court. “I’ve never seen such bitterness and hatred as this man is capable of showing at times,” Karrer wrote in her journal, “especially under the influence of liquor.” Karrer, who spent most of that summer with him, was often the object of Reich’s rage, as recorded in some of her diary entries and letters:

August 14, 1956

Willie violent and threatening. Said he felt the need to kill someone—might as well be me. He had been drinking heavily. Didn’t remember his threats and violent flailing around the next day when sober.

Reich once told her that he thought murder under the influence of alcohol was pardonable, and she sometimes thought he might be capable of such an act.

August 15, 1956

Willie violent and destructive—burned a whole file of something so “spies couldn’t find his secrets.” Finished off a bottle of cognac all by himself, didn’t remember next day.

A month after the FDA burned his books, Reich was incinerating his own letters and files.

October 6, 1956 [an unsent letter by Karrer to Reich]

I do not plan to sit by calmly and be hit, slapped, or beaten by you under the influence of alcohol. I cannot and will not stand physical abuse. I’m sorry I simply do not know how to handle this phase of your personality, though I love you dearly. Now you know why I run; not from guilt of anything. How does one prevent such upheavals? I don’t know. All I’ve ever wanted was for you to be happy.
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After their quarrels, and fearful of his violent temper tantrums, Karrer would often disappear for a few days, but some masochistic streak in her would always see her return, and she would cover up for his drunken violence. They obviously had a complicated relationship, because the evening of this last incident, Karrer sent Reich a fifteen-dollar bouquet of flowers “to cheer him up.” Karrer wrote that on two occasions Reich hit her, and on one occasion he rushed at her “with the look of a madman [and] with an ax.” She also claims that he wounded his dog, Troll, with an iron bar—and that he later blamed this on extraterrestrials.

Karrer, as she recorded in her diary a week before the results of Reich’s appeal were due, often felt trapped in their destructive relationship. She had given up her job at NIH to be with Reich:

I wanted to leave and go my own way last April, but then he was arrested here in Washington and I just couldn’t desert at such a time, and similar upheavals have prevented me from freeing myself. He’s like a little child, [there’s] something very pathetic and tragic about him which makes it hard for me to just leave him when he is down…I can assure you it’s a nightmare to live with this man who is struggling so desperately to save himself. One can just see everyone desert as the ship sinks. He really has not a single real friend in the world who really knows him. Yet the instant of his death he will be hailed as the greatest man of our century.
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As his small fiefdom crumbled around him, Reich became increasingly paranoid. He would scrawl mad messages to those “red fascists” who he thought were plotting to kill him, which he would post around Orgonon. One in angry blue pencil that Karrer found pinned to the lower cabin door read: “Want to make it kind of look like suicide, don’t you LM? By Proxy!!” “LM” stood for “Little Man,” from the title of one of his books; it is a stern lecture to his “miserable and small, impotent, rigid, lifeless and empty” critics. Another, found inside the locked steel cabinet of the treatment room in the observatory, said, “You are not deeply ashamed of your rotten nature? You cannot reach my realm.” Another, left for those he feared were out to kill him, stated: “I know you, public stinker, deep down, as a decent fellow. Why don’t you stop your stupidity. Go ahead through everything if you still can.” Another one, propped up on a mantelpiece in the observatory, read: “This room is wired for me and for you as an equal citizen—sit down—have a good talk. Yours WR.”

Suspecting that she was part of the “conspiracy” that was out to destroy him, Reich used threats to make Karrer sign confessions—as he had done with Ollendorff and other disciples. He went through all her personal belongings, her purse and desk, impounding all the written material therein. Karrer created an itemized list of these confiscated things: “notes taken and collected from time to time on the legal action and Wilhelm Reich’s work, pictures given to me by him and papers to hold for him, newspaper clippings of the trial, a green diary and a sheet of equations.” Reich, like Karrer, also obsessively kept notes. “Many times during times of rage he writes things on a yellow legal pad which he locks in the bathroom,” Karrer wrote. “I really do not know what he has recorded. But I’m sure that the most important thing to this man is how he goes down in history. I’ve seen him defend himself at the expense of others, so I’m sure I’m no exception. If someone in the past has called him crazy, he’s gone to great lengths to destroy that individual by his pen.”

His legal pad was, in fact, as she later discovered, scrawled with paranoid signs: “These are the same equations I transmitted to CIA,” Reich wrote on one sheet. “The Higs [hoodlums in government] did not get the real stuff…The true stuff is in my head. I planted many false equations.”

At the National Library of Medicine in Washington, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, where Aurora Karrer had once worked, there is a series of boxes of Reich-related materials donated by her. Apparently Karrer planned to write a biography of Reich, which was to be called
The Genius: Personal Life and Loves of Wilhelm Reich
. One chapter was provisionally titled “Living with a Genius.” She obsessively kept everything relating to Reich’s life—letters, receipts, notes—which form a collage portrait of this time of strife.

The most developed bits of Karrer’s text relate to the women who had preceded her in Reich’s life: Annie Pink, Elsa Lindenberg, Ilse Ollendorff, and Grethe Hoff Sharaf. Perhaps she was jealous of them, perhaps she wanted to learn from their mistakes, perhaps Reich’s unresolved past hung over their relationship, perhaps theory and practice crashed into each other in Reich’s sex life. Karrer wrote in her notes that Reich obviously still loved Ilse Ollendorff—she reports that he broke down in sobs after one of Peter and Ilse’s visits (Peter recalls that Reich showed him a gun at this time and, in tears, threatened to commit suicide with it rather than face prison). “I think that he has come to love me as much as any woman he has ever known, or more,” Karrer reassured herself. “At times he’s so sweet and kind and loving.” Reich, she wrote, believed their life together was “the deepest and greatest love story of our time.”

In the late 1970s, Aurora Karrer revisited the notes she had made toward the book that she had abandoned twenty years earlier. Over time, Karrer sought to defend Reich’s legacy and assumed a position as the “grande dame of orgonomy,” as Elsworth Baker’s son, Courtney, described her, but she now poured out all her ambivalence about Reich, scrawling over the collected pages and documents and underlining passages in red pen to create a catalogue of bitter accusations.
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Her red-penned notes dissect Reich and his methods from a position outside of the Reich cult—she describes Reichians as “submissive followers” in these later additions. Karrer asks rhetorically: “Is orgonomy a revolutionary force, a political weapon, [or] a religious creed?”

With her angry marginalia Karrer creates, by default, a rough outline for a radically different book than the one she intended to write in 1955. In this version Reich is no longer a “genius” but a conceited, arrogant egotist, a fake, an abuser, a violent person who degraded those around him, someone who trapped everyone in a therapeutic web, a mentally unstable bully who made others feel as if it were they—not he—who were mad. Karrer claims an Olympian perspective on Reich not only as his last wife but as his last analyst: “I completed his analysis! If I hadn’t stayed with him he’d have shot himself. As I look back on it that’s what everyone was wishing he’d do—Eva, Ilse, Baker, the orgonomists, etc.”

Wilhelm Reich was, according to Karrer, “as ruthless and self-serving as [the] cult-leader Jim Jones. He viewed himself as an absolute ruler—and perfect in every respect.” (Jim Jones was the charismatic founder of the People’s Temple, who attempted to set up a utopian community in the jungles of Guyana—named Jonestown, after himself—but ended up choreographing a mass suicide in 1977.) Her notes try to explain how Reich swept people up into his world, how he brainwashed them, how he undermined them. As Karrer exorcised Reich’s memory through Reich’s memory, each one of her bullet point notes reads like a sloughed skin: