In real life, Brown had spent his first forty years searching for the right track. He was born in 1921, in the Philippines, to Midwestern parents who had moved there to teach. When he was eight, his parents split up, and his mother took him back to the States. He was a bright student with a high IQ, and after serving as a combat navigator in England during the war, he majored and minored in various subjects at the University of Minnesota, including philosophy, mathematics, statistics, and sociology. He wrote a dissertation on “cooperative group formation,” and formed a cooperative community of his own in Indiana, before moving to Mexico to write science fiction. But needing a better way to support his wife and two young children, he moved back to Minneapolis to work at an ad agency, a job he hated, and while he was there, he began working on Careers. His marriage broke up, and after some time in New York (working at the Institute for Motivational Research), and another short, troubled marriage, he found himself in Gainesville with a new wife, an exciting intellectual project, and a steadily growing income that meant he didn’t have to work for anyone anymore. The money Brown earned from Careers allowed him to set up his own Loglan Institute in Gainesville and build a Frank Lloyd Wright–inspired modern home with a separate addition for institute activities. He was free now to devote himself to Loglan and to indulge in his passion for sailing and travel.
In 1962, Brown looked poised to fulfill his success formula and then some.
Suitable Apologies
On a bright October day in 1987, Nora Tansky and Bob LeChevalier married in a small backyard ceremony at their home in Fairfax, Virginia. The soft rustling that accompanied the reading of their vows was not the sound of autumn leaves but the fluttering of sheets of white paper, each one printed with a copy of the vows and distributed among the guests so they would be able to follow along. Bob, a large, heavyset man with a wide smile, went first:
mi prami tu “I love you”
.i mi djica lepo mi kansa tu “I desire the state of being with you”
.i mi cuxna lepo mi speni tu “I choose the state of being married to you”
Nora, petite and shy and unaccustomed to public speaking, was so nervous when it was her turn that she skipped a line without realizing it. After the ceremony, one of the guests, a student who had been taking the Loglan class that Bob and Nora held at their home, pointed out her mistake, and someone caught a photo of her reacting to the news with an embarrassed, happy laugh.
Loglan had brought Bob and Nora together. Nora was one of the few women who ordered a copy of Brown’s Loglan book (which he finally published in 1975) after she saw an ad for it in Scientific American. A computer programmer who had enjoyed studying foreign languages in school, she had been working with her brother on making up her own invented language when she discovered Loglan and, deciding she liked the clarity of expression it offered, put her own project aside. She also ordered a subscription to the Loglanist, a journal edited by a philosophy professor in St. Louis, and was soon actively involved in the development of the language.
The Loglanist was a place where the correspondents that Brown had attracted could propose new words, hash out problems that came up in trying to use the language, and, as Brown particularly encouraged, build up a corpus of examples “to which the hungry learner of the language can sit down for his nightly repast.” These Loglan texts, submitted by subscribers and vetted for accuracy by Brown himself, could be translations, such as the biblical story of Babel, of which the first line retranslates as “And point-all of the Earth was languaged by one something x and talked x” (And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech). Or they might be original compositions, such as this little dialogue about a tourist’s visit to “Loglandia”:
I uu no mi djano lepo ba sitfa be
“And I’m-sorry-that it-is-not-the-case-that I know the-event-of something-x being-the-location-of something-y.”
(I’m afraid I don’t know where anything is.)
Tu danza lepo gotso ie da “You wish the-event-of going-to what x?” (Where would you like to go?)
Mi cnida lepo sivdu la Tare Kotl “I need the-event-of location-discover the Star Hotel.” (I need to find the Star Hotel.)
Nora became the first paying member of the Loglan Institute when she sent a five-hundred-dollar donation of support to the institute in 1979. This gave Brown the idea to turn the Loglan Institute into a membership-supported organization. Some money was coming in from book orders and journal subscriptions, but not enough to hire the secretaries and programmers who were needed to move the project forward. Brown was still drawing income from Careers, but much less than before, and not enough for him to personally support Loglan development at the level he desired.
Nora’s check arrived at a moment of financial crisis for the institute. Brown’s third and last-chance proposal for a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) had just been rejected, an outcome that shocked and surprised him. He felt he had been treated unfairly by reviewers who showed “unmistakable signs of total ignorance of the project,” and he asked that it be “done over again.” His appeal, which included a point-by-point rebuttal of the reviewers' misgivings, burned his bridges to the science-funding academic establishment all the way to the top.
It also betrayed a damning lack of sophistication about how these things work. Brown had submitted almost two thousand pages of supporting documents with his proposal—grammar books, textbooks, dictionaries, and every copy of the Loglanist that had been printed so far—and was outraged that the reviewers had not made themselves intimately familiar with all this material. The terse, carefully worded reply that Brown received to his initial appeal emphasized that the scientific community cannot judge the value of a project by reading every single thing the author has to say about it. The usual yardstick by which merit is measured is a body of scientific results and reviews published in peer-reviewed journals (and journals published by the author himself generally do not count as such).
Because Brown had received an initial minor grant shortly after his first article on Loglan was published, he fully expected that the fifteen-plus years of work he had put into the language since that time would secure him a major grant. But when he left his job at the university, he also cut himself off from the normal channels through which a fundable reputation is established. Though he did seek advice and criticism as he worked on Loglan (he loved nothing better than a good, lively argument), he tended to surround himself with admirers. Those who could not submit to his powerful, stubborn temperament did not last very long in his circle. Those who excused the insults, the accusations, and the occasional angry blowup in order to remain in the orbit of this often intensely charming, always intellectually exciting man became his lifelong friends and collaborators.