The Mind Benders

By James Kennaway

Why did Professor Sharpey, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist, commit suicide by throwing himself from a fast-moving train? And why were briefcases stuffed with cash found beside his shattered corpse? Major Hall of British Intelligence suspects Sharpey was a traitor selling secrets to the Communists. But Sharpey's colleague, Dr Harry Longman, believes his friend's strange behaviour is connected with his groundbreaking experiments using an isolation tank to test the effects of sensory deprivation. There's only one way for Longman to discover what really happened to Sharpey and clear his friend's name: he must subject himself to the same frightening experiments. But the terror he undergoes in the isolation tank is nothing compared to the horror that will follow: for what emerges from the lab is no longer Longman, but something else entirely . . .   

A chilling and gripping story of espionage and mind control, James Kennaway's third novel, The Mind Benders (1963), was a critical success and the basis for a cult classic film version starring Dirk Bogarde. This edition, the first in decades, features a new introduction by Paul Gallagher.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Valancourt Books
• Release date: Nov 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781941147276

Book preview

THE MIND BENDERS

A Novel of Suspense

JAMES KENNAWAY

VALANCOURT BOOKS

The Mind Benders by James Kennaway

First published London: Longmans, 1963

First Valancourt Books edition 2014

Copyright © 1963 by James Kennaway

Renewed 1991 by M. St.J. H. Vereker

Introduction © 2014 by Paul Gallagher

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

Publisher & Editor: James D. Jenkins

20th Century Series Editor: Simon Stern, University of Toronto

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

ISBN 978-1-941147-27-6 (trade paperback)

Also available as an electronic book.

Cover by M. S. Corley

INTRODUCTION

I first saw The Mind Benders on television, late one Monday night when I was about eleven. I watched it for all the wrong reasons: mainly because I thought it was a horror film and, as I loved horror movies, the title alone was enough to attract me.

What I’d hoped would supply some goosebump thrills turned out to be something far more disturbing, intelligent and compelling. The Mind Benders told the tale of a Dr Longman (Dirk Bogarde), investigating the effects of brainwashing by sensory deprivation after the mysterious death of a colleague. The film was part Cold War thriller, part psychological horror, and part love story, with a darkly moral core.

Children often identify with the more extreme elements of fiction, movies and music as a means to gauge the substance of their lives. At eleven, I was no different and saw parallels in Frankenstein and The Werewolf of London that limned thoughts about my own private feelings. And so it was with The Mind Benders, which I intuitively knew was a film that taught me something about life.

On ordinary, blue-skied, seven-thirty mornings, my father would drive my brother and me to school, screaming and shouting and threatening to kill us. He would spin the wheel and the car would weave, pushing his foot on the accelerator, promising to crash his orange VW into a wall. I did not understand the cause of his rage, but experienced its effects. After watching The Mind Benders, I saw a parallel to my own small experience of the insidious power of language to destroy and diminish, to control and influence; or to brainwash an individual: just as my father had hoped to control my brother and me with his empty threats of violence. It didn’t work and only encouraged us to walk those two-and-a-half miles to school instead of taking a lift.

I thought about the film long after watching and with bookish glee was delighted to discover the film had also been written as a novel. I sought out the author amongst the orange-spined paperbacks of a local bookshop, wanting to know who had written The Mind Benders and why.

The author was James Kennaway, a novelist and screenwriter, who was born on 5 June 1928 at his parents’ home at Kenwood Park, Auchterarder in Scotland. James was the younger of two children: his sister Hazel was born in 1925. Their father Charles was a successful lawyer; a strict though respected man, well liked, and a hero of the First World War. His mother Marjory was a medical graduate from Edinburgh, intelligent, beautiful and lively. Kennaway’s early childhood was one of tradition and privilege, of gymkhanas and fêtes. The only son of a proud upper-middle-class family, James was expected to follow in his father’s chosen career of law.

Kennaway’s early childhood idyll was broken when he was sent away from home to Cargilfield preparatory school in Edinburgh, and later to Glenalmond boarding school in Perthshire. While at Cargilfield, his father became seriously ill with tuberculosis and was moved for treatment to a hospital in Deeside. He died in January 1941. His mother resumed her medical career, taking up a post in public health in Hertford, England.

His father’s early death made the twelve-year-old Kennaway acutely aware of his responsibility to take up the role of male head of the household. He suppressed his own emotional needs and began to write letters to his mother full of advice and emotional support he felt his father might have given. The untimely death made James feel that he too would die young, and these early traumas, together with the pressure he felt to succeed at school, led to a fissure in his personality that would widen with age. Writer Trevor Royle described this gradual change of character in his biography of Kennaway, James and Jim:

James was the sophisticate, Jim the ‘nasty wee Scot’. Later, he came to characterize the split as James the domesticated man constrained by society and Jim the artist who should be allowed any amount of license.

Or, as Kennaway described it: ‘James et Jim, man and artist, wild boy and introvert.’

At school ‘James’ was the likable, eager-to-please pupil; while ‘Jim’ was beginning his first thoughts towards a career as a writer, as Kennaway explained in a letter to his mother:

I feel I have been granted with more than one talent; in such a life my talent of sympathy would shine but my other talents would lie buried. On my part I would get lazier and fatter every day. I might however do this at the same time as I write and really go in for writing, but I must learn more about the English language before I can write any stuff worth reading.

After school, Kennaway carried out his National Service in the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders before going up to Oxford to study Modern Greats (Politics, Philosophy and Economics or P.P.E.). It was here he met Susan Edmonds, whom he would marry in 1951. His relationship with Susan, together with another untimely death – this time a friend from his National Service – convinced Kennaway to follow his ambition to become a writer.

Leaving Oxford with a third, Kennaway worked as part of the editorial staff at Longmans, a London publishing house, where he travelled England sourcing scientists and academics to submit texts for the company’s growing catalog. During his time with Longmans, Kennaway started to write his first novel, Tunes of Glory.

Published in 1956, Tunes of Glory was the story of a psychological battle between bully Major Jock Sinclair and war-wounded Lieutenant Colonel Basil Barrow for control over a peacetime battalion stationed in a Scottish army barracks. The story was inspired by many of the people and events Kennaway had encountered during his National Service, and in a way the novel used two different characters to examine the split in his own personality.

Tunes of Glory was an overwhelming success and brought Kennaway a commission to write his own original screenplay. This was Violent Playground, completed in early 1957 and produced the same year starring Stanley Baker, David McCallum, Anne Heywood and Peter Cushing. Its story of a juvenile delinquent holding a classroom of children to ransom was inspired by a real siege in Terrazzano, Italy, when two brothers, armed with guns and dynamite, held ninety-nine pupils and three teachers to ransom. The brothers threatened to kill their hostages unless various demands were met. The siege ended after a teacher attacked and disarmed the brothers, allowing the police to rescue the children. Kennaway followed the story in the papers, keeping numerous press clippings, and using the story for a key scene in his screenplay.

Max Frisch noted in his novel Montauk that a writer only ever betrays himself; this is true for Kennaway, who channeled the experiences of his life through the prism of his writing.

In 1958, he was commissioned to write another film; this time he relied on the stories he had heard from academics at Oxford whilst working at Longmans.

The term ‘brainwashing’ was first used by journalist (and probable CIA stooge) Edward Hunter in an article he wrote for the Miami News, 7th October 1950. The word had derived from the Chinese term xĭ năo, literally to ‘wash brain’, which Hunter used to describe why certain U.S. soldiers had co-operated with their captors during the Korean War. Simply put, the Chinese had used various psychological techniques to create a false sense of friendship with which they could undermine and reprogram American soldiers. The knowledge that Communists were using psychological warfare caused Western governments to start their own brainwashing experiments.

In June 1951, a secret meeting at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal saw the launch of a CIA-funded, joint American-British-Canadian venture to fund studies ‘into the psychological factors causing the human mind to accept certain political beliefs aimed at determining means for combating communism and democracy’ and ‘research into the means whereby an individual may be brought temporarily or perhaps permanently under the control of another’.

Dr Donald Hebb of McGill University received a grant of $10,000 to examine the effects of sensory deprivation. Volunteers were paid to lie on a bed, cradled in a foam pillow (to block out external sounds), their arms wrapped in cardboard tubes (to limit movement and sensation), whilst wearing white opaque goggles. Without any external stimuli and with only short breaks for testing, feeding and use of the toilet, the volunteers quickly began to hallucinate – seeing dots, coloured lights, and faces. The experiments had disturbing effects on the volunteers with only a few managing to continue beyond two or three days – no one lasted the week.

In an article entitled ‘The Pathology of Boredom’, published in Scientific American, one of Hebb’s associates wrote:

Most of the subjects had planned to think about their work: some intended to review their studies, some to plan term papers, and one thought he would organize a lecture he had to deliver. Nearly all of them reported that the most striking thing about the experience was that they were unable to think clearly about anything for any length of time and that their thought processes seemed to be affected in other ways.

It was also noted during the experiments that sensory deprivation made the volunteers overly susceptible to external sensory stimulation – making them open to ideas or beliefs they may have once opposed. In A Question of Torture, Madison University history professor Alfred McCoy noted that during Hebb’s experiments ‘the subject’s very identity had begun to disintegrate’.

When stories of these experiments first filtered through to Kennaway in the early 1950s, he recognized their importance and stored them away for future use. These stories provided the basis for a screenplay that he originally called The Visiting Scientist or If This Be Treason. Unfortunately, the screenplay was thought too way out at the time and was shelved.

Let’s not forget, this was 1950s Britain in the last days of Empire and at the start of institutionalized socialism: a world of rationing and free health care, bomb sites and new towns, poverty and taxes; where Germany was now the ally, and communist Russia the feared enemy, with the very real possibility of a nuclear holocaust. Against such a backcloth, there was little public knowledge of brainwashing or its use by Allied or enemy governments. There were, of course, the works of fiction about its potential such as George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, David Karp’s One, and Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate, but these dealt with speculative fictions or specifically targeted enemy activity, rather than the grim reality Kennaway posited on the work of western governments in The Mind Benders.

Kennaway continued working on his second novel Household Ghosts, which focused on the inter-relationship between a brother and sister and the sister’s lover. The triangular relationship was something that fascinated Kennaway, and it played a significant element in The Mind Benders between Longman, his wife Oonagh and the scientist Tate:

In nine cases out of ten a woman in love finds a best man too. Practically every engagement and every love affair bears this second relationship. The couple form a solid friendship with a third party, ostensibly the man’s best friend, in fact the woman’s second choice.

This idea was to be developed in his later books The Bells of Shoreditch (1963), The Cost of Living Like This (1969; also recently republished by Valancourt Books), and most specifically Some Gorgeous Accident (1967), which was a fictional re-working of his wife Susan’s affair with writer John le Carré (who produced his own version of these events in his novel The Naïve and Sentimental Lover in 1971).

In 1960, Kennaway adapted Tunes of Glory for a movie starring Alec Guinness as Sinclair and John Mills as Barrow. Kennaway was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay and the film won several BAFTAs (including Best Screenplay), and was named ‘Best Foreign Film’ by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

The success took Kennaway to Hollywood, where he had meetings about possible movie projects, including one with Alfred Hitchcock about The Birds – a project he failed to win after suggesting to the great director the action should happen off camera. Kennaway’s time in Hollywood also allowed him to give family man ‘James’ a rest and permitted ‘Jim’ to indulge in extramarital affairs.

Returning to England, Kennaway continued with the writing and rewriting of Household Ghosts. During this time, director Basil Dearden managed to convince Dirk Bogarde to star in Kennaway’s script about brainwashing now titled The Mind Benders. The movie went ahead, and a tie-in book was to be written by a hired hack, but Kennaway opted to write the book himself, as he thought it would add to his oeuvre. It does, and more importantly this novel ties together nearly all of the themes that appear in his later work.

Though Kennaway spent much of his life away from his native Scotland, he is very much a great Scottish writer, and The Mind Benders, even with its American protagonist, blinkered English spy, and untrustworthy lackey, is in the tradition of good Scottish Literature, owing much to the style of R. L. Stevenson and John Buchan for its crisp, effective writing.

The book also relates to the concept put forward by literary critic George Gregory Smith of ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ or the ‘idea of dueling polarities within one entity’. This notion of two sides to the Scottish psyche has been reflected in Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and some of the writing and poetry of the great Hugh MacDiarmid.

These ‘dueling polarities’ appear again in The Mind Benders as evinced with the fictional Dr Longman, and I think this character also offers a cipher to the division in Kennaway himself, between ‘James’ and ‘Jim’.

When the film was released, the English critics hated The Mind Benders, as they refused to believe Britain or its allies could be involved in such heinous practices. The novel fared far better, winning considerable praise for its writing and powerful storyline.

The Mind Benders begins like a spy novel, with Major ‘Ramrod’ Hall, one of MI5’s counterintelligence agents, following Professor