The Harrad Experiment

by Robert H. Rimmer

  48. John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). A history of sexuality in the Americas, this book will tie together and solidify the historical perspective students achieve in the first year of their human-values seminar.

  49. Marquis de Sade, Justine and Philosophy in the Bedroom (New York, Grove Press, 1971) and Juliette (New York, Grove, 1968). By the end of their reading Harrad/Premar students are ready to examine pornography and determine whether a writer like de Sade, who devalues human sexuality, should be censored or whether a Harrad/ Premar education would eventually create a saner sexual environment where human beings would grow up seeing each other naked as well as watch movies or television films of human beings making love erotically and tenderly, responsibly and caringly. Perhaps this would result in a female-oriented society, where male sadomasochistic domination of other males and of females has disappeared.

  50. George Russell Weaver, The Enrichment of Life (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1986). Subtitled “Fourteen Keys That Reveal Some Secrets of Sports, Wealth, Sex, Mental Development, and the Enjoyment of Art and a Liberal Self-Education,” this joyous book was written by a man in his eighties. It’s a celebration of life that will become a way of life for Harrad/Premar students.

  51. Richard Hagen, The Bio-Sexual Factor (New York: Doubleday, 1979). I am a man. You are a woman. Are your thoughts and desires about sex different from mine? Are the differences due to cultural conditioning or biological realities? Do men have a greater need for sex or sexual variety than women? Near the end of their first Harrad/Premar year, roommates can argue, from their own experiences, the pros and cons laid out in this fascinating book.

  52. John Carey, ed., Eyewitness to History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). This book cannot be skimmed in a week. Rather, all Harrad/Premars should own their own copy and read a couple of chapters a week. Carey has compiled several hundred selections from history, written by people who for the most part experienced the events first-hand. From a plague in Athens in 430 B.C. to the fall of President Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in 1964, it provides historical perspective on man’s behavior and inhumanity to man.

  Leaders of human-values seminars in Phase 1 or 2 should be trained to create an environment where undergraduate students not only discuss the issues and problems raised in the book-a-week program but also discover the fun of immersing themselves into the day-to-day problems of the world. In the U.S.—aided and abetted by the media—we prolong “growing up.” In past centuries hundreds of thousands of young men and women in their teens or early twenties, have acquired the education, vision, or personal drive and ambition to excel at their chosen professions.

  Assuming that the human-values seminar would be organized in small groups, the leaders should encourage students to skim the Wall Street Journal, whose three daily lead stories and editorials can be read in thirty minutes. Thus they will gain insights, for better or worse, into the problems of the world. They will learn that capitalistic democracies and free markets cannot always provide the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Students should also be encouraged to acquire the habit of watching the “MacNeil/ Lehrer News Hour,” which offers the only nightly in-depth survey of national and international problems on television.

  In addition, public broadcasting stations, along with video-cassettes, offer a way to expand young people’s horizons and wean them away from the shallow values of most network and cable television. Seminar leaders can expose young people to ballet, opera, classical music, and the 20th-century art form of filmmaking.

  Young people who have grown up on MTV, slash-and-bash movies, and heavy-metal rock will discover the fun of watching the best films of the past and present, both American and foreign. In small groups they can discuss the realities of life as expressed by top screenwriters and filmmakers. Keep in mind that in Phase 2 of the Harrad/Premar experience young people, unlike most undergraduates today, would no longer spend much of their waking time trying to resolve their sexual drives one way or another. The human-values approach would expand most male horizons beyond baseball, football, and basketball, and build foundations for eventual marriages between people who have much more in common, which they could share with each other and their children.

  Group leaders could also supplement the reading program by making students aware of what has become known as the alternative press. Thousands of magazines that offer different approaches and solutions to world problems circulate in United States. Some of them may be the cutting edge of the future.

  The best source of periodicals with a dissenting point of view from the Wall Street Journal, Time, and Newsweek is the Utne Reader, a monthly magazine conceived by Eric Utne, 1624 Harmon Place, Minneapolis, Minn. 55403. New Options Newsletter, Mark Satin, ed., P.O. Box 19324, Washington, D.C. 20036, also explores alternative approaches to national and global problems in a provocative way. Free Inquiry, Box 5, Buffalo, N.Y. 14215, not only offers a stimulating, twenty-one paragraph Affirmation of Humanistic Thinking to expand one’s horizons but also sponsors the Academy of Humanism, which includes such members as Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan.

  Finally, I’m in touch with many small groups such as Family Synergy, Delaware Synergy, Mensa S. (a group of people with high I.Q.s who discuss their interpersonal and sexual problems in a monthly bulletin), Polyfidelity Educational Group (which practices a kind of extended monogamy), The Truth Seekers, Interface, Esalen Institute, Elysium Institute, and others that are actually living or probing into 21st-century ways of living. If you are interested, drop me a note in care of Prometheus Books and I’ll be happy to send you their addresses.

  LOVING, LEARNING, LAUGHTER & LUDAMUS

  The Autobiography of Robert H. Rimmer

  During the late sixties and mid-seventies, when millions of young people were fascinated with the Harrad idea and with “corporate marriage,” which I explored in detail in my novel Proposition 31, I was invited to speak at several hundred colleges, universities, and other institutions throughout the United States. Inevitably, during a question period after every lecture, I was asked details about my own life. For twenty-five years I grinned and answered: “Believe me, I write from experience. If I live long enough, perhaps I’ll write my autobiography, but right now if I went into detail it would disrupt other lives and my Doctor Jekyll existence.”

  If it hadn’t been for Gale Research, I probably never would have attempted a mini-autobiography.c Thus far, they have published ten volumes in their Contemporary Authors series, with almost 200 autobiographies of well-known authors, both American and foreign. My feeling is that if you get involved with a particular author’s writings, it’s a great learning experience to discover how he or she has, in one way or another, fictionalized his or her life or used his or her writings to amplify a search for meaning.

  As I revise my autobiography in 1990, I have been married for forty-nine years to Erma ... one wife for a lifetime. But in 1955, if she hadn’t discovered that I was having an affair with “Elizabeth,” and if she hadn’t sobbed her anger to David, a doctor and the last of a breed of caring general practitioners, who told her that all men, including him, were led around by their cocks, I never would have met David’s wife, Nancy—or finally discovered a woman whom I didn’t want to play Pygmalion with. And if I hadn’t met David and Nancy (whose names I have fictionalized and who are similar to one of the couples in Proposition 31), I never would have discovered just how anti-Semitic my father and mother were, nor way past midlife would I have found the focus for my first novel, The Rebellion of Yale Marratt.

  I wrote Yale Marratt in my early forties, but it wasn’t published until I was forty-seven. The reason why is the culmination of a kind of sexual odyssey which, combined with an early, loving oedipal rebellion, constitutes the main adventure of my life. Here, for the first time, I will try to show how my heroes and heroines are basically more daring extensions of my own life. I am sure that recreating oneself
in fiction is a way of life for many novelists, but most of them refuse to admit it.

  During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Harrad and Proposition 31 became a part of the vocabulary of the so-called hippie generation. Most of the millions of Harrad readers had no idea that the author was long past thirty (and hence not to be trusted). But since these novels and later ones offered alternatives to monogamous marriage and “solutions” to the increasing divorce rate, they became recommended reading in college courses on marriage and the family. Many readers were sure that Harrad was instrumental in the sudden merger of men’s and women’s colleges, and the creation of dormitories where young people of both sexes lived together on the same floors. Maybe it also laid the groundwork for the young men and women living together unmarried.

  Most critics were incensed. Bob Rimmer wasn’t really a novelist but a preacher in disguise, who was writing thesis novels. For many critics, this approach to the novel is a literary no-no. Purists believe that the novel should reflect reality and the author should let you perceive his moral purpose, if any, subtly and by innuendo. But, like Edward Bellamy, Upton Sinclair, and Ayn Rand, I believed, and still do, that the novel can be a vehicle to show people how they can recreate their environments and live more self-fulfilling lives.

  Assuming that you may not have read many, or any, of my thirteen novels, let me give you a little background. While I’m sure that my novels have interesting story lines that will keep you reading and wondering what comes next, with believable characters, there are no bad guys in any of them. The basic theme is that I believe we can devise saner approaches to premarital and postmarital interpersonal and sexual relationships, which could stabilize our new-style extended families. In Proposition 31, for example, I have proposed legal forms of bigamous marriage and what I have called “corporate marriage” of up to three couples, as well as created the framework for more enduring pair-bondings (monogamy), which could incorporate intimate satellite relationships.

  In essence, I celebrate life based on the four L’s: Loving, Learning, Laughter, and Ludamus (we and God are all playing together). These obviously incorporate the fifth L, George Bush’s hated Liberal.

  During our long courtship of each other’s wives, David once told me good-humoredly, “Your problem, Bob, is that you haven’t suffered enough. All great creative writers have suffered.” Perhaps he was right, but I still don’t agree with him. Fourteen years ago, Nancy died, and within two years, David had also disappeared from this life. Erma and I were desolate but we don’t mourn them. We celebrate them and are fully aware that after living much of our married life in a kind of two-couple monogamy (for nearly twenty-five years), which I have philosophized about and fictionalized in Proposition 31, Come Live My Life, and Thursday, My Love, Erma and I learned how to love not just each other, but many people—including my domineering father and self-glorifying mother—whose paths crossed ours.

  My Family and Childhood. On December 11, 1911, Francis Henry Rimmer, living in Dorchester, Mass., age twenty-five, married Blanche Rosealma Rochefort, seventeen, who had been schooled in a French convent in Spencer, Mass. Coming from a family who spoke only Canadian French at home, she could scarcely speak English, but she was very pretty and obviously a virgin. She could play any kind of music on the piano and sing along with it. Later, when Blanche took a part-fime job at Kresge, where she would play sheet music for customers who wanted to hear a particular selection and also listen to her play, Frank spoke of her as “my million-dollar baby from the five-and-ten-cents store.”

  Frank was running an elevator at the age of twelve and his schooling ended at the sixth grade. Before he married Blanche, he had discovered the International Correspondence School. With no parental encouragement, but great determination—Ben Franklin and characters in the Horatio Alger stories, which he insisted later that I read, were his heroes—Frank studied to pass the ICS exams for postal clerk. At ICS headquarters in Springfield, they were so impressed with his diligence that they offered him a branch manager’s job. Later Frank sold vacuum cleaners door to door, then Victor typewriters. Five years later, he was brokering printing jobs and quickly convinced his typewriter customers that he could get their stationery and business cards printed more cheaply than they could. Somehow, he managed to convince the First National Bank of Boston to loan him $5,000 (a princely sum in those days). Although he had never run a printing press and couldn’t set type, he hired a plant manager and soon had two platen presses.

  Blanche, who admitted later that she slept in the office sitting up most of the time, was his only secretary. She never bothered to learn how to type. It was all she could do to answer the phone. Business was booming. After I was born, Frank met George Duffy, who had inherited $5,000 and convinced Frank to sell him 20 percent of the stock of what was to become the Relief Printing Corporation.

  I was born March 14, 1917, saving my Dad from the draft. By the time I was three, I was Blanche’s Little Lord Fauntleroy. Very blonde, with brown eyes and a Dutch boy haircut, I was outfitted with a cane and a beaver hat.

  At five years old, I could read. In those days, there was little other entertainment, for radio was rudimentary. I read fairy tales by the hundreds—all of Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and the expurgated Arabian Nights. By the time I was seven, I had discovered Tom Swift and the Bobbsey Twins. Later, when I was about ten, I also discovered Penrod, Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn, as well as the Connecticut Yankee. Saturdays I often came home with ten or more books from the public library. Neither FH, as I later began to call my father, nor Blanche read much.

  Today, having lived in the same house for forty-two years, I’ve accumulated over 20,000 books. A kind of ongoing rebellion against FH, perhaps, that has come full circle. Today, Erma reads very little, and Rob, Jr., and Steve, my sons, do not have my Faustian need to know everything. Neither Blanche, FH, nor I were aware that the person I was to become and the books I would write were already being fertilized by three other aspects of my childhood.

  First, Girls—Later, Women! Since I was five—for sixty-eight years—I’ve loved them all, the long and the short and the tall. But like Henry Higgins (Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion), I would eventually begin wondering, “Why can’t women be like me?” Before I entered the first grade, most of my friends were girls. In the summer, in pup tents in the backyard and in hot attics, it was a happy, giggly game to touch and kiss each other’s forbidden parts. In my childhood, I was perfectly familiar with the hairless female pudenda. But after I was seven, I never saw a girl/woman naked until I was seventeen. Like my peers, I spent many hours searching through National Geographics to see what women looked like. I probed the library for art books with a few reproductions of classical paintings where bulgy ladies out of mythology reigned supreme without clothes.

  Next to girls, the driving force through all of my life has been a growing collection of hero/ mentors. I began with Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography and the “Bound to Rise” heroes of Horatio Alger. Basically, although I wasn’t aware of it, all my mentors and heroes, including Tom Swift, were rebelling against individuals or a society that told them they couldn’t realize their dreams. Despite the nay-sayers, they triumphed and finally became famous, or, if necessary—infamous.

  Along with the rebellion, they seeded two other words in my dream vocabulary: challenge and experiment. Unlike the childhood heroes of later generations, my hero/mentors had focused rebellions—not against parents, but against entrenched power systems or outmoded ways of doing things. I have always been entranced by men and women who manage to defy the system, and yet make it work for them.

  The third conditioning factor in my life was that in my youth FH never attended church, and Blanche, married to a Protestant and angry with her father’s new Catholic wife, had abandoned her religion. Her family was sure that she’d go to hell and were, from then on, very circumspect with her. As a result, Sunday school was not a factor in my life. I was never indoctrinated in any church rituals a
nd I never worried about God, Jesus, or the Devil.

  In junior high school, it became obvious that I wasn’t a man’s man. In gym, I could never climb the swinging rope or balance on the parallel bars. None of the other kids wanted a physically uncoordinated kid on their softball or football team. On top of that, I was taking elocution lessons, arranged by FH. Although FH probably couldn’t have specified his plans for me, he did want me to be famous. Later, when I was a junior in high school, FH was happy to pay for me to take a night course in public speaking with young men twice my age.

  Although I was twelve years old when the stock market crashed in 1929 and grew up in the Depression of the 1930s, I was only dimly aware that the country was in dire straits. FH’s printing business was so prosperous in 1924 that he bought a Phaeton Studebaker with disc wheels.

  FH wasn’t the only affluent one in the family. A few years later, I had a paper route which netted about $5 a week. Rarely a month went by when I wasn’t paid at least $5 by various women’s clubs and church groups to recite five or six monologues I had learned in elocution school. I had a repertoire that soon included fifty or more ten- to fifteen-minute recitations—complete with gestures and facial expressions. By 1988 standards, my purchasing power was equal to nearly $100 a week.

  In addition, I had become assistant publisher of a mimeographed magazine called the Boy’s Pal. Homer Jenks typed the stencils, and with me. and another boy using a borrowed mimeograph machine, we produced the twenty-page 8½-by-11 magazine, collated it, stapled it, and sold a hundred or more copies of each issue at five cents a copy. It was no mean feat, since many sneering kids called it “the jockstrap magazine”—and in those days you could choose Saturday Evening Post for a nickel too.