Record of a Friendship

(Ben Green) #1

cheers when you mentioned my name. I am writing all this to help you
change your ideas about my status in this world. It is not lack of
recognition, but too much and a too responsible situation which prevent
me from making full use of my great social influence.
A great recognition lies in the fact that I find myself together with
men whom the world hails today as their true sages and who have been
persecuted, burned and slandered all through their lives. This is the
recognition I enjoy. I would not give one iota of it for recognition which
a Norman Haire could bestow on me. Don't you see that people like
Norman Haire, who claim that I have not given proof that cancer has
any connection with sex repression, belong to a dying world, to an old,
worn-out group of people who did not dare to touch the natural sources
of life, and instead brought phalluses, condoms, perverted homo­
sexuality, and bananas and cucumbers before the world as the true
issue of human love life. Do you want me to beg or to ask for their
recognition? Is not the fact that my orgone can stop a nasal cold from
going down to the chest more important than all the brass-heads and the
academic fools of the world taken together?
I hope you don't mind, Neill, when I spoke out this time about my
true feelings. The cosmic orgone energy will be enjoyed, handled and
studied by the human generations of the next few thousand years, when
no trace will have remained of any one of present people whose recogni­
tion today is demanded. And, therefore, my Little Man will be pub­
lished, come what may, state or not state, GPU [Russian Secret Police]
or FBI, this or that pestilent gossiper. The orgone will exist and function,
discovered by man and put to use for the human race when it will
govern itself. And the mention and the memory of a dictatorial state
official will be a painful and shameful one.



  • • •


Forest Hills, New York
March 3, 1948
My dear Neill:
I had written a long letter to you concerning the question of
the recognition I am enjoying. But I decided not to send it off, and to
keep it for a personal discussion this summer.
I want you, of course, to announce my books whenever and wherever
you can, but that has nothing to do with trying to convince people who

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