The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family

by Peter Byrne

  Everett’s paternal grandmother, Laura Clardy.

  Hugh Everett, Jr., circa 1922.

  Mr and Mrs Hugh Everett, Sr., circa 1950.

  Katharine Lucille Kennedy, of Baltimore, Maryland, married Hugh Everett, Jr. of Washington, D.C. in 1924. The newlyweds were 20 years of age. She was a school teacher. He was employed by Southern Railway Company as a payroll clerk. After earning a degree in civil engineering at George Washington University, he designed railway bridges. He was also an officer in the National Guard, and he held the “world” rifle record at 1000 yards from 1928 to 1936.4

  He was laid-off by the railroad after the stock market crash of 1929, but weathered the Great Depression by freelancing as an engineer for government and military agencies. He earned a Masters in Patent Law and a Doctorate in Juridical Science from local colleges.

  Meanwhile, the marriage was falling apart.

  Socially flamboyant and politically liberal, Katharine was definitely not suited to living with her engineer-soldier husband. Repulsed by housewifery, Katharine set her sights on a writing career. Before marriage, she had attended American University and the Corcoran School of Art (Sculpture) in the District of Columbia. After Hugh III was born, she earned a Masters degree in education from George Washington University. But by 1935, the school teacher was transitioning into the life of a professional magazine writer—selling tales of love gone wrong, children’s stories, science fiction, and reams of purple poetry. Soon thereafter, she left her husband, toddler in tow.

  Katharine with baby Hugh (III), circa 1930.

  Everett, Jr. fell in love with Sarah Thrift, a secretary at the National Park Service. In late 1935, he drove to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, to purchase divorce papers for himself and Sarah, whose early marriage had also disintegrated. Crossing the border, he wrote her: “Now I am on my way home to you with two very legal looking documents in my suitcase and a song of love in my heart.”5

  The next year found the newly divorced newlyweds in the Panama Canal Zone where Everett worked as an engineer. He was rehired by Southern Railroad after the economy perked up a bit in 1937. They moved into a colonial-style house in Bethesda, Maryland, a woody suburb of Washington, and were well-suited to each other. With another world war looming, he signed up for active duty as an Army officer.

  Meanwhile, Katharine’s career as a pulp-fiction writer took off, but she did not have the time nor the financial wherewithal to properly care for her son: so, Everett, age seven, moved in with his father and step-mother, who were loving, but ran a household in which the rule of thumb was “sink or swim.” Indeed, Everett learned to swim by being peremptorily tossed into a lake.6

  As the Second World War ignited in Europe, Everett, Jr. was commissioned Lieutenant Colonel in the Army. He served on the general staff in the battles for Sicily, Rome-Arno, and the Rhineland. His son remained in Bethesda with Sarah for the duration.7

  In 1940, Katharine sued for a legal divorce under the laws of Maryland. The court granted her a “divorce a vinculo matrimonii,” a legal term signifying that if one of the spouses had been adulterous during the marriage, that spouse could not legally marry his or her paramour. (The thicket of Mexican and Maryland divorce laws caused Everett, Jr. difficulties many years later when the Veteran’s Administration did not want to recognize Sarah as his lawful wife for pension purposes.) The divorce court awarded formal custody of her son to Katharine, although he continued to live in his father’s house, and under his supervision, as she watched from afar.

  Katharine never remarried. She was the distant, dark star that periodically perturbed the motion of Everett’s orbit around the planet of his paternal namesake. Long as he might for his elusive mother, it was his father to whom he clung.

  “Pudge” for life

  Clearly, Everett inherited his left-brained, logical capabilities from his father, who was an accomplished statistician. From his right-brainy mother, he was blessed with intuition, creativity, and a streak of rebelliousness. He partook of their talents—indeed, he far transcended his father’s analytical abilities—but he was also saddled with their less desirable qualities: an addictive personality from his father; depression from his mother.

  Father and son shared much more than a name. Both were compulsive photographers, happy to peer at the world through the lens of a camera. They each left behind thousands of snapshots—mostly of buildings and landscapes. Like his father, Everett enjoyed traveling to foreign countries first-class, relaxing in the bar of luxury cruise liners. Both men smoked tobacco: most photographs of Hugh, Jr. show him attached to a pipe, and his adult son smoked two to three packs of Kents a day through a long, tapered filter. They were both heavy drinkers, and they enjoyed flirting with women at cocktail parties; the younger Everett treated sexual conquest as a game.

  Everett had an ambiguous relationship with his mother: seeking her approval, affection, and warmth—remaining aloof when rejected. Each tried, in their own way, to reach out to the other. In the end, Everett did not know how to recognize her love, much less accept it when it was shyly offered. Sadly, and as a consequence, he did not learn how to proffer unconditional love to others, nor how to reciprocate when it was offered to him. He craved companionship, but remained a loner. He craved happiness, but did not know how to make others happy. And he craved love and attention, while failing to recognize the emotional needs of those closest to him.

  And there is something else: His whole life, Everett’s father, mother, stepmother, grandparents, uncles, and aunts called him “Pudge,” because he was chubby. A quarter century after his death, his cousins still referred to him as Pudge.

  He hated to be called Pudge.

  2 Katharine: the Dark Star

  The child, in these decisive first years of life, has the experience of his mother as the fountain of life, an all-enveloping, protective, nourishing power. Mother is food; she is love; she is warmth; she is earth. To be loved by her means to be alive, to be rooted, to be at home…. The longing for this situation as it once existed never ceases completely.

  Erich Fromm, 1955.1

  In 1996, Everett’s widow, Nancy, wrote a letter to Mark, touching on his father’s rocky relationship with his own mother, or “Mum Mum” as she liked to be called. Katharine suffered from manic depression, and

  Initially, during separation, he lived with his mother, but apparently she was not able to swing it, financially or emotionally … Now you know that all this must have had an emotional impact on a 6–8 yr old. I’m sure it made him wary of getting too close to people emotionally…. He wanted to get along with K.K. [his mother] but he was very cool toward her – just normal civilities – no warmth there – something there he couldn’t forgive her for.

  Whatever the messy details of Everett’s parent’s break-up, their incompatibility is easy to discern. Military-minded and lawyerly, he loved male camaraderie and the Officer’s Club. She was an artist, a bohemian, a woman struggling to carve out a place for herself inside a culture that had only recently accorded her the right to vote. She was unwilling to subvert her career to the needs of her husband and her child. And her art reflected this inner turmoil, she was always writing and rewriting her own story—and her story captures the difficulty of being a self-reliant woman in mid 20th century America.

  In 1939, The Banner Press published a book of Katharine’s poetry, Music of Morning. Typical of popular magazine and newspaper verse of the era, her poems pulse with colorful, disconnected modifiers, important-sounding references to Greek mythology, crazy-mixed-up metaphors, rampant anthropomorphism, and purple-bruised stanzas bristling with “burning swords” and “cold scimitars.” She spun off florid poetic phrases, e.g. “Titan-souled,” “futilitarian,” “silver mirth,” “fragile lusts,” “caesuras of darkness,” “pale anemones stare at the stars,” “ghost of scarlet laughter in the rain,” and the stunningly oxymoronic: “All the soul’s vast measure is / A flowering abyss.”

  Katharine Kennedy Everett, circa 1935.
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  One of her better offerings is near-Blakean with bittersweetness:

  PRODIGAL

  And if he should once again

  After long, long pain

  See my threshold in the night

  Through the bitter rain,

  And if he should speak to me,

  Standing there apart,

  And if he should lay his hand,

  Quiet, on his heart,

  Saying in a gentle voice

  All that was not said,

  Shall I not bring forth the wine,

  Break at last the bread?

  Music of Morning airs Katharine’s abandonment issues (by parents, husband, son, self, cruel fate). She oscillates between exhilaration and melancholia, celebrating freedom from her unhappy liaison: “She dreamed of breaking / Unbreakable bars.”

  “Saint’s Season” captures her joyous state:

  In the sudden wind, your exile over,

  Run through the grass on naked feet,

  Take life at last to your breast for lover:

  Put on a scarlet dress, my sweet!

  “Spinner” looks back at the family she left behind:

  Long ago she left us.

  She who used to fashion

  Lovesong at her spindle:

  Now the fire is ashen.

  Now the latch is broken,

  Quenched the golden candle;

  She spun stuff like dreamlight,

  That we couldn’t handle.

  During her writing career of three decades, Katharine’s poems evolved from structured love sonnets to free verse about religion and spirituality to paeans to time, space, and gravity. Represented by literary agents based in New York City, “Mrs. Katharine Kennedy” published fiction, non-fiction, and verse in McCall’s, Colliers, Overland, Outlook, Harper’s Bazaar, Southwest Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Saturday Evening Post, Christian Science Monitor, Catholic World, New Mexico Quarterly, and some British publications. She occasionally used the pen names, “Kay Everett” and “Penelope Ross.”2

  In addition to writing for fees, she taught writing workshops and advised non-professional authors. She was listed in the 1939 edition of “Who’s Who in the East.” She was prominent in the affairs of the National League of American Pen Women, the Poetry Society of London, and the Free Lance Writer’s Society of Washington D.C. Faded newspaper clippings report that she read poetry in public, and received a literary award for a collection of sonnets, “Armor Against Autumn.” In black and white photographs, she appears every bit the literary sophisticate with her dark suit, cloche hat, curly tresses, haunted eyes, and thin, knowing smile.

  Over the years, Katharine barely supported herself through a combination of teaching, writing, and working as a secretary, researcher, and editor. She traveled to Europe, Cuba, and Canada, and lived briefly in the United Kingdom. But she always returned to the Washington area, trying to stay in touch with her only child. In 1955, she took a fulltime position as an executive secretary at George Washington University, leaving in 1959. During that period, she earned her third degree from that institution, a bachelors in English. The following years were tough; she moved from job to job, and place to place, hurting for money, but cherishing her infrequent visits with Everett and his young family. She was very proud of his “space-age” career and his “cosmic” top secret clearance. She regularly sent him newspaper clips about rockets, satellites, esoteric science, and, one time, a mathematical proof that the death penalty does not deter murder.

  Her final job was as a research assistant to the cultural anthropologist, Edward T. Hall, who had recently published The Silent Language (1959), an instantly famous study of how people define social spaces, and communicate unconsciously through body language and subtle cues.

  After she died, Nancy remembered,

  She had been such a strong personality it is hard to forget her influence, which I spent most of my time trying to forget or to ignore…. I am not so good at getting Hugh to talk about family matters; yet I’m sure he can’t really feel as aloof as he seems…. Just one of the ways in which she revealed her disdain for, or unacceptance of, reality was her almost always mistreatment of material objects. I don’t know what she did to things, but they didn’t get handled very carefully.

  She seemed to me a truly tragic person. Why should this be the penalty for some creative persons, while others can adjust to [the] world as well as be intensely creative? She herself felt that her unhappy childhood was to blame, though she never outwardly complained to me…. When the marriage fell apart … this only added to the tragic pattern…. Perhaps her personality was one which never could have adjusted to any marriage or to any mundane type of existence.

  Social critic

  As America warred with Germany, Italy, and Japan, Katharine’s poetry took on a political tone. In December 1943, writing in the newsletter of Pearl S. Buck’s The East and West Association, Katharine, who was a Christian, penned “Morning on Sinai.” In it, we meet “shepards, chanting psalms barbaric” as,

  In the East

  Light breaks; the Mountain wakes.

  Timeless, beyond the curve and flow of Space

  Light from the East

  Illumes the Mountain’s Face.

  Politically, Katharine was classically liberal and anti-communist; she, like Buck, preferred Chiang Kai-Chek’s nationalist organization to Mao Zedong’s communist party. During the post-war years, however, she actively opposed the witch-hunting tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the reactionary antics of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

  As the Cold War heated up, a barrage of films, magazine articles, books, and newspaper editorials encouraged patriotic Americans to build fall-out shelters in preparation for atomic invasion by “godless” communists. Not surprisingly, UFO-spotting was all the rage. Katharine walked in fear of annihilation by nuclear war, nuclear accident, or an alien attack from outer space.

  In her short story, “Dark Hawks Hear Us,” the main character is a reporter, Crosby, who is covering an atomic bomb test near Los Alamos, New Mexico. With the Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) mountains as a back-drop, Crosby, thinks about,

  Men all over the planet digging shelters in the bowels of the earth for shelter against the atomic death they’d managed to manufacture for themselves, and at the same time gawking up to the sky, as though they expected to find an answer there.

  Someone asks,

  Do you believe our minds are like islands, subterraneously linked with other island minds, Mr. Crosby? Do you believe, for instance, that your own individual mind is separated only so far as it believes itself separated from a kind of group mind? Do you agree, Mr. Crosby, that minds have the capacity to communicate with other minds independent of space? For instance, Mr. Crosby, in the case, say, of sudden sweeping national enthusiasms or uprisings, couldn’t these be instigated by telepathic influences operating in the world group-mind, directing mass emotion and mob action?

  Suddenly overwhelmed by an alien group mind communicating in secret code through a United Press International teletype machine, Crosby leaves his earthly body behind, lifeless, and the story ends.

  Although attracted by science as a subject for her fiction, Katharine drew most of her material from personal experience. The pitfalls of conventional marriage were a theme she dwelled upon. “The Apartment” is set in Arlington Towers, where Katharine resided when she wrote the story, and where newlyweds Hugh III and Nancy Everett lived briefly. A single woman, Janet, invites a man, Jerome, for dinner and he refuses to leave after eating, taking over her apartment. She is afraid to call the police. She loses sleep and, then, her job. She takes to wandering the streets, hanging out at the zoo, at the Christian Science Reading Room, returning evening after evening, to find Jerome cooking in the kitchen.

  Eventually, she melds with him.

  There was a placid mask on her face, she lifted her head, listening. As though in response to some unseen wire of communication be
tween them, she was aware that Jerome, humming as he prepared dinner in their kitchenette, wished the volume turned up on the TV.

  Obediently she rose and turned the dial…. Since their marriage six months ago, there had been little need for words between them, she knew his thoughts as well as he knew hers….

  ‘But I die,’ she said, aloud.

  Jerome, in the kitchenette preparing dinner said nothing—he was busy dismembering the chicken; tenderly he cut off its wings, popped it in the glass skillet, put on the lid, and turned up the fire.

  Another short story, “Pride,” is about Marta, who had walked out of a marriage with Rod, leaving behind two small children, Kitten and Tim. Three years later, Marta, now a successful actress, drops in to see the youngsters for the first time since leaving. “Into the room with Marta had blown a bright wind of disaster; the familiar patterns of the place were shattered.” (One can visualize Katharine breezing into her ex-husband’s home in Bethesda, back from a trip to London, looking for a hug from Pudge.)