WANTED: EXORCIST FOR HAUNTED BOOK MANUSCRIPT

by Joel Shurkin

The malevolent ghost of William Shockley has cursed me. Since I'm not known for my belief in the supernatural, I ought to explain. I am the author of a biography of Shockley, and I am now convinced his ghost is the reason it remains unpublished. Of course it could just be the publishing industry . . .

For the few of you who don't know, Shockley was co-inventor of the transistor, a founding father of the science of operations research, a Nobel laureate, a war hero, and the father of Silicon Valley. According to Time magazine, he was one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century. You would, therefore, think getting a biography published about him would be a breeze. Not, apparently, if the ghost objects.

I'd had some slight contact with Shockley at Stanford, but the idea of doing a biography came long after he was dead. A book about Shockley was suggested to me by NASW member Mike Riordan while he was working on his fine history of the transistor. He ended his story with the transistor and the beginning of the electronics industry, and he knew there was a lot more to tell.

Shockley's widow, Emmy, agreed to cooperate and set me up in Shockley's home office, which she had left untouched since the day he went to bed to die. His pencils were just where he left them, the papers had been dusted off but unmoved, the books opened to where he has just finished reading. I half expected him to show up at the door, blue eyes flaring, demanding to know what the hell I was doing in his office. It was spooky.

My first problem was the research. When I say that Shockley never threw anything out and came from a family that shared that trait, trust me. The Shockley archives take up more than 20 linear feet of space in the Stanford library's special collections stacks, and they contain everything from menus for a meal his mother and father ate in a London restaurant at the turn of the century, to the splinter that cut Shockley's face when he was four years old, to the minutes of every meeting he attended. I once joked that the files contained everything but a laundry list and the next day (I'm not making this up), I found one. The files contained things he should have thrown out, such as a suicide note (he played Russian roulette and survived) and pornographic love letters, all of which I gleefully added to the book. He had transcripts of every telephone call he and Emmy made for 20 years since all his calls were taped, and copies of every piece of mail in or out of the house. I had a record of every time they ordered out for pizza.

That took only three years to get through.

The other problem was more serious. Shockley was-how should I say this-a shit. Everyone who knew him, except his wife and possibly his daughter, detested him. The people who hated him included both sons. One son hadn't seen him in 20 years, and neither was invited to the memorial service. They read about their father's death in the newspapers. Shockley was an insensitive lout. A psychologist who read the manuscript called him clinically paranoid.

His personality was key to the story. Shockley founded the seminal company of Silicon Valley (by the way, it was because of Shockley that it was not called Germanium Valley), but he was such a bastard a number of his employees quit one day. Some of them eventually formed a little company called Intel. Shockley's boorishness and pigheadedness was the reason he was not the richest man on earth, which is what I wrote about.

This created an interesting problem in itself: he, his politics, and his manners were so disliked that people's memory of things are skewed. Several confided to me, for instance, that he really did not have much role in the invention of the transistor. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Well, that's wrong. I was told lots of things that were wrong and wound up relying on the printed contemporary record rather than verbal interviews because people misremembered too often. Part of the problem also was that in the last third of his life he got involved in a public debate over intelligence, race, and eugenics. He was a pariah in science and the ensuing debate destroyed his reputation.

The story of his life is a Greek drama right out of Sophocles without the grace of redemption at the end. That's how I wrote it.

Okay, great idea for a book. I got a contract-a good one-with Harcourt, Brace. I was about halfway through the manuscript when the ghost first struck.
I called up my editor in San Diego one Monday and his assistant, obviously weeping, informed me that the editor had just been fired. I know this is not uncommon in the industry (and happened twice before with other manuscripts). I also had one editor quit to write the great American novel and was never heard from again.

The new editor, this one in New York, said he loved the idea of the book and not to worry. Any writer with any brains knew that worrying is inappropriate in this situation. Panic, yes; worry, no. Not surprisingly, when I turned in the manuscript, Harcourt rejected it. No one here was really excited about the project, the editor confessed to me. At least they had the decency not to demand their money back, which is just as well, since it was long spent.

Okay, find another publisher. Well, it turns out that most of the editors my estimable agent contacted never heard of Shockley, which I find astonishing, but they were young. Those who did hear of him thought the story was a sad one and no one wants to read a sad story (Anna Karenina?). He was a miserable guy, one pointed out, and no one wants to read books about miserable guys either (Moby Dick?). Several admitted that the eugenics part was too controversial, and some of what he said turns out to be true, and I said so. Many just rejected it and I think the controversy scared them off. Or the ghost.

Editors who were interested found themselves downsized to the streets. Manuscripts got lost in the mail or the Internet.

Then, a famous university press called to demand a copy of the manuscript. The editor in chief wanted to do the book badly. The agent and I thought of hand-delivering the manuscript with a bottle of Chateau Lafitte 1974 and flowers. Great, the editor said, after he read the manuscript, I'll ship the contract. The money wasn't great but it would have made up for what I didn't get from Harcourt.

Then nothing happened. We finally called and he sheepishly said there was no deal. Going to work one day he had a heart attack and while he was in the hospital his editorial board said they wanted nothing to do with William Shockley. I believe him.

I have a fine agent, same guy for 35 years, but one day a friend said maybe I ought to try his agent since she had just landed him a $1 million contract for his unwritten book. I called. Fine book, she said, but the chances of selling a manuscript once it has been turned down is about 10 percent. (Harry Potter?). Besides, Shockley was an unpleasant person and books about unpleasant people don't sell. Well, says I, now attuned to the argument, Hitler was unpleasant but there are dozens of biographies about Hitler. Yes, says she, but Hitler killed millions of people and Shockley did not. So, if Shockley had been a murderer instead of one of the most important scientists in history who changed the lives of billions . . . Never mind.

The manuscript remains in my computer unpublished. It is 150,000 words long, meticulously referenced. It could use an editor and an exorcist.

I have a picture of Shockley on my wall over the computer. When I started on this project, he had an impish grin on his face.

He is now smiling from ear to ear.

I'm not making this up.

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Joel Shurkin is senior editor at HopkinsHealth, a database at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, in Baltimore, and a freelance writer.

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