By the end of the year, Heinlein had regained some of his lost ground. His end-of-term report card grades in May 1928 showed him well within the top 5 or 10 percent of his class in every subject, though his Executive aptitude was graded at 193 out of 251 in the class. His grades in ordnance and gunnery were particularly good—he had decided to specialize in these mathematics-using disciplines and would be working ordnance on the upcoming summer practice cruise.
On June 5, immediately after the June Week graduation exercises, he qualified as Expert Rifleman. The USS Arkansas docked at the Academy to take on midshipmen for the summer practice cruise. This year he would have something real to do, something substantial: in his First Class cruise he would be a working fire-control man for a joint Army-Navy exercise.
8
FIRST CLASSMAN
The USS Arkansas (BB-33) was a Wyoming-class battleship, sixteen years old, but she had been modernized and converted to burn oil in 1925. She was about the same size as the Oklahoma, but less crowded. Heinlein was in fire control this trip—a real, working seaman—so he was especially interested in her armament: twelve 12-inch guns, twenty-one 5-inch guns, and two 21-inch torpedo tubes.
Her itinerary for this practice cruise is given in the Navy Register:
Annapolis from 6/8 (Joint Army and Navy exercise June 13–14) to Newport RI (6/14–21), New York (6/30–7/6), Boston (7/18–24), Portland ME (7/26–8/2), Guantanamo Bay (8/8–23), returning to Annapolis on August 28.
The joint Army-Navy exercises in North Atlantic waters were a good shakedown for the midshipmen who were getting used to a higher level of responsibility as mates of the deck, squad leaders, and midshipmen aides to the ship’s Executive Officers.
They had learned enough of the mechanics of the ships to be seamen, but the seasoned officers made it clear to them that their grasp of the “philosophy of command” was nonexistent. In addition to the usual bull-session topics of girls, complaints about the Academy, girls, grease, girls, the current state of their velvet, girls, food, and, for a change, their current and prospective drags, debate on policy became momentarily urgent, and the First Classmen hammered out a coherent command philosophy. They introduced some minor innovations for mail delivery and established courts of justice that earned the class a commendation.1
After week in Newport and almost a week in New York, Arkansas was at sea, on her way to Boston, on Heinlein’s twenty-first birthday. Kansas City was in the news that summer: in June the Republican National Convention was held in the Kansas City Convention Hall, nominating Herbert Hoover for President and Charles Curtis, a Kansas native, for Vice President.
Over the last few years Heinlein had developed something of a love-hate relationship with his rustic origins and had begun to distance himself from his life before the Navy.2 He had already started using “Bob” instead of “Bobby,” and possibly this was due as much to his separation from all that as to the simple transition he was making from boy to man.
That summer, he was in a foul temper. He was, in fact, moping, resentful, and in a sink of self-pity. Perhaps it was on this occasion that he got an object lesson in the continuing importance of formal courtesy. On one occasion visiting en famille, he called his hostess by her first name, forgetting that he had not dotted the proper i’s by first getting her husband’s approval of this familiarity. “I was always a sucker for a right hook; he led with his left and one-twoed me.”3 The experience was valuable—but it cost him an upper left molar. It was undoubtedly a relief to get back to Boston and the Practice Squadron for the jog up to Portland, Maine.
On August 2, exactly one year after getting caught Frenching Out, and coincidentally the day Arkansas pulled out of Portland to make for Guantánamo Bay, Heinlein was awarded thirty demerits for “shirking,” Academy slang for malingering.
Although it is hard to find time and opportunity to slack off on a practice cruise, it can be accomplished by a combination of cleverness, steady nerves, boldness, good prior planning, and smooth execution of the opportunity when it rises. Heinlein didn’t make the effort. Accompanying the demerits was another week in the Reina Mercedes, though his Academy jacket does not note time lost from his September leave this year. There was no possibility of blaming anyone but himself this time.
Anniversaries of traumas can often be traumatic themselves.
At Guantánamo Bay, the Practice Squadron’s main task was, as in previous years, to prepare and conduct target practice. This year Heinlein was Assistant Fire Control Officer and got to direct the battery in practice, experiencing that gut-shaking, bone-shaking, satisfyingly soul-shaking firing of the battery from the fire-control station itself.
The Practice Squadron got back to Annapolis on August 28, and Heinlein took off on his September leave immediately—stopping only at the Annapolis magazine shop, probably to get something to read on the train. The current issue of Amazing Stories had a serial novel by a couple of authors whose names he didn’t recognize, Smith and Hawkins. He found himself shelling out a quarter from his carefully hoarded pocket change—but it was a good investment: The Skylark of Space started a lifelong admiration for E. E. “Doc” Smith.4
He had a complicated itinerary planned for this year’s September leave. He reached Kansas City by way of St. Louis, then went on to Denver (possibly to visit another mid), back to Kansas City, and on to New York by way of Chicago. Since Heinlein in later life always made an opportunity to meet up with his old grade-school friend and lust object Sally Rand when they were in the same city, perhaps they met in Chicago.5 She had just moved there from Los Angeles, where she had been working for several years in vaudeville. Sally Rand got her first break when Eddie Cantor did a turn at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles. She was featured walking across the stage to embellish Cantor’s rendition of the new Ager-Yellen hit “Ain’t She Sweet.” She had even begun to do some film work, but sound film—“the talkies”—was coming in, and she had a pronounced lisp. Sally Rand was one of the many casualties of the talkies.
Back at Annapolis,6 Heinlein settled into the academic year, again rooming with Perreault. They had gotten on well together for the past three years and saw no particular reason to change the arrangement now. Perreault was made 1PO (Petty Officer, First Class) for his company, and Heinlein was given a permanent rating of Midshipman 2PO (Petty Officer, Second Class) on September 28, 1928. The 1PO carried the platoon’s flag within the regiment, 7 and the duty of the 2PO was to muster everybody in the platoon. In addition, Heinlein was asked to teach rifle and pistol to the lower classmen.
This last year at Annapolis, he had made one new friend in Barrett Laning (Caleb Barrett Laning, but he went by his middle name at the Academy), another Kansas City boy, though they seem never to have met there, since Barrett went to Westport High and spent his free time immersing himself in jazz music, “hanging out in the balcony of nigro [sic] highschool gyms … when the local black gangs, like Benny Moten, played” and once sitting in for Coon-Sanders for five minutes, before Sanders’s men threw him out.8
But they connected at the Academy when they found out they had a mutual interest in Mark Twain and in what one of Heinlein’s high school teachers-cum-mentors called “foolosphy.”9 Laning was interested in anything mystical and out-of-the way—and so was Heinlein. It was the basis for a lifelong friendship.
The last year at the Academy was in many ways the most crucial. Heinlein buckled down and “boned grease,”10 bringing both academics and the administration’s opinion of his Executive (aptitude for the service) up to the “Distinction” range. And no more demerits of any kind.11 His report cards show that he started out the year ranked 71st in Executive—within the top third of his class—and his previous good record had earned him a gold eagle for the sleeve of his jackets, in addition to the usual First Classman’s gold band surmounted by a star. By December, his class standing in Executive was 45th—in the top 20 percent of his class.
In addition to the regular course work in naval subject
s, the First Classmen did practicums in various specialties, and the Navy provided some rather unusual briefings. One day Heinlein was summoned to a closedmeeting brief and found a senior official of the State Department talking about the geopolitical relations of Japan and the United States. The death of the old emperor the preceding January and accession of the young emperor, Hirohito, had Japan in the news at that time. Heinlein was particularly interested in this subject because his grandfather Lyle had told him before World War I that the United States would have to go to war with Japan one day.12 No such war was on the horizon—in fact, the last several classes had reconciled themselves to peacetime Navy careers, and the Class of 1929 had even chosen “The Navy in Peacetime” as the theme for its production of The Lucky Bag graduating yearbook. But this official was telling them straight out that the war with Japan was inevitable—one day—because of geography and economic factors (and possibly sooner rather than later because the young emperor’s advisers were known to be markedly militarist).
Heinlein was also expected to take charge of some Plebes and shape them up by the usual hazing (without Marsh Gurney’s sadistic refinements), but he decided he would opt out of that game and instead treated his Plebes in a firm but reasonably humane manner.13
Still, discipline must be maintained, and the older raise the younger. The barrage of questions was a comparatively light martyrdom, hallowed by tradition. The favorite hazing question of the graduating class was, “What’s that song, Mister?”—to which the only correct answer was: “‘No More Rivers,’ Sir!” “No More Rivers to Cross” was the traditional First Class song, and it suddenly became a sentimental favorite.
With some of the Plebes—Dick Mandelkorn, for example—he remained friends for the rest of their respective lives. Frank Wigelius, Class of ’32, recalled that late in March that year Heinlein put him on the pap (that is, cited him for demerits) and told him to report to his room—normally a prelude to a ritual beating with a broomstick on the buttocks. Instead, Heinlein let him off the hook when he discovered the Plebe had learned to fly in the Navy Reserve at Sand Point, Seattle, and had his own private pilot’s license as a student Navy Reserve aviator chief AP instructor.14
Heinlein no longer had fencing to distract him, and his attention to the football season—characterized even in the 1929 Lucky Bag as “mediocre”—was perfunctory. Heinlein had a personal interest in the rifle and pistol teams, since he taught general classes in those subjects to the less proficient. That year, “his boys” on the Second Class team actually outshot the varsity squad, and the incoming Plebes had an undefeated season in the small-bore competition.
But athletics were no longer quite so important for class cohesion. The Class of 1929 had started to pull together socially over the summer practice cruise—but the sudden sentimental fellow-feeling did not, apparently, much include Heinlein. He had a small circle of friends, half a dozen or so,15 but he was not popular—and even his demerits did not make him a regular guy: malingering, the offense for which he had received his latest (and last) large batch of demerits, was not “cool.”
His lack of connectedness must have become painfully obvious to him when one of his classmates, Delos Wait (the captain of the foil fencing team), secretly married, and the rest of the class quietly agreed to look the other way. It was against the Academy rules and could get Wait expelled on the very eve of his graduation.
Wait was well liked despite a sometimes shocking directness. An Arkansas boy, Wait had made the aviation squad and grown into a man’s man—able to mingle well and give and receive help, just the things that came hardest to Heinlein. Wait’s graduating portrait caption in The Lucky Bag tries to account for his popularity: “‘To have friends, be one.’ Perhaps this accounts for the popularity of Delos. A shipmate and a classmate, and—to show he plays no favorites in his affections—a snake—by habit, disposition, and circumstances.” 16
Wait was frank in bull sessions about his rationalizations for every decision: minimize risk to his precious skin and keep from having to go back to honest work—defined as contemplating the south end of a northbound mule from the vantage of the furrow.17
The entire class colluded in keeping Wait’s marriage secret—just as Heinlein had helped keep Buddy Scoles out of trouble in 1927. Whether the same kind of protection might be given him was questionable.
Heinlein was unbending a bit: during the academic season he had managed a team under P. V. H. Weems, who was, unbeknownst to the midshipmen, one of the Navy’s great navigators. “Daddy Weems” impressed them more “by his most unusual skill at the tango” and because he took part in amateur theatricals. One of Weems’s memorable comic turns as a butler18 may have helped inspire Heinlein to join the Naval Academy’s drama society, the Maskeraders.
That year’s play was a departure from the usual formula mystery. The Devil in the Cheese was a successful Broadway play that combined some of the elements of Shakespearean comedy with drawing-room farce. Heinlein had a role in the performance, and in some of the other skits. And he did some amateur theatricals of his own: in the last semester, he and Barrett Laning did a barracks-room performance of Mark Twain’s Elizabethan fartcomedy, 1601.
Barrett Laning, who later gave up using his middle name and went by “Cal,” quickly became one of Heinlein’s best friends. In various bull sessions, Heinlein had shared with him his suspicion that there was a Big Secret of some kind that the adults were hiding from them—things just couldn’t be as messy as real life or as irrational as the explanations he was handed. The two of them and classmate Gus Gray thought it would be a fine idea to pass to each other any clue they discovered to the Big Secret. They called this The Quest.19
All sorts of things went into The Quest—anything that might bear on the real reality. In their last semester at the Academy, Laning gave Heinlein a book that was to have a major shaping influence on his life, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, by James Branch Cabell.
Jurgen had been an international scandal and a cause célèbre since its initial publication in 1919, when the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice brought suit against Cabell and his publisher for violating the 1873 Comstock censorship laws. There was, indeed, an ample supply of indelicacies in the book, drawn, Cabell said, from an uncle’s library of improper books, but they were also concealed by some of the most delicately ironic and satiric prose ever written in American English. Literary figures throughout the world came to Cabell’s defense, and this case broke the power of the Comstock organizations. By 1929, Cabell was still thought of as the leading writer of this generation. By 1930 he was passé.
Perhaps Heinlein learned from Cabell something about himself—why he was so drawn to the idea of gallantry. Cabell’s Gallant, of which Jurgen was the first example, knew the traditions of his society but stood outside them. It gave him an unusual degree of freedom, but it also placed him outside the emotional framework that could express effortlessly the workings of God and society. That certainly described Heinlein—and it suggested, also, the potential power of the “hypocrisy” of the Navy’s designating its officers as gentlemen and according them privileges not given citizens or even ordinary seamen, so long as the customs were followed. That was something they all knew, even if they didn’t talk about it.
While Heinlein was reading Jurgen (and then the rest of Cabell), he brought C. H. Hinton’s A New Era of Thought (1888) to Laning.20 H. G. Wells had mentioned Hinton in his new book that year, The Way the World Is Going. The main part of Hinton’s book was about visualizing geometric forms in higher dimensions, but it had some mystical tinges to it, too: this visualization trick was supposed to be the key to esoteric powers of mind and so forth—just the sort of thing Laning was interested in. Wells had also mentioned J. W. Dunne, another philosopher of time and multiple dimensions. Dunne had published in 1927 An Experiment with Time, a book that was provoking a lot of discussion among physicists about the nature of time. These subjects were fodder for The Quest.
In turnabout, Laning then taught Heinlein how to hypnotize people—a useful and entertaining trick for impressing dates.21
Heinlein did feel personally connected to Laning, who had never snubbed him22—and this was a tie to his origins he could feel comfortable with. Laning’s active interest in mystical matters probably allowed Heinlein to reconnect with his own mystical experiences as a child, experiences that had been covered up with getting and spending (and boning grease that year).
First Class year expenses were enormous. Graduating midshipmen were expected to have $1,000 saved up—a year’s salary for a working man—for their officer’s full kit of work and dress uniforms—including officer’s sword, cocked hat, and the dressy frock coat with gold braid used only for the most formal occasions (such as a visit and inspection by the President of the United States). These items would be shipped in wooden boxes to the officers’ first billet. And there were other expenses—boat cloaks, the drag for graduation ceremonies, and so forth. The Academy ring was also extra. A typical plain ring was solid gold (at $65 in the days of the $20 per ounce specie price), but they could be ordered with a variety of stones, for extra amounts. Heinlein decided to splurge on his ring, ordering a green nonprecious stone called “New Zealand Jade” in the catalog. It came inscribed with his name and class on the inside of the band.
There wasn’t much left of his monthly stipend from the Academy—but there hadn’t been much to start with, so the difference would have to be made up from his savings from his pre-Plebe earnings and the periodic gifts he had received from his father and brothers over the years. In addition to his job with International Harvester, Rex Ivar had been promoted to Collector, a patronage office in Kansas City’s local political structure. With two other wage earners in the immediate family, things were no longer as tight as once they were, but Lawrence had a family of his own to support now and could not have contributed much on an Army lieutenant’s pay. His brother Ivar gifted Robert with his own graduating sword.
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 12
