One evening, he took his sextant to measure ship’s position by triangulating the stars, as navigators have been doing for thousands of years, but the sky was partly cloudy, and he couldn’t use the standard stars.
… so I shot Vega, Jupiter, and the upper limb of the moon, worked it, and got a point fix—to my surprise as I had never shot the upper limb of the moon before (or even the easier lower limb) and it had been over two years since I had worked one in class. I handed my work to Comstock. He looked at it, increased his habitual frown, started to speak—did not and checked my work very carefully.
Then he erased his own fix (an excellent small triangle), and cut my fix in, in place of it—never said a word, ignored me. So I left, feeling as if I had just had a medal pinned on me.42
That was the Navy way!
This trip through the Big Ditch would be something of an adventure for everyone: Lexington would be the first aircraft carrier ever to go through the Panama Canal. Some of the Canal’s locks were barely large enough, on the numbers, to accommodate her.
An aircraft carrier is designed to have a lot of freeboard deck (the top surface of a vessel) in proportion to her freeboard (the measurement from the freeboard deck to the waterline), so as to give the aircraft storage space and runway. In one lock, the ship was positioned a little off-center, and when Lexington began to move out of the lock, the overhanging sweep of her freeboard deck scraped all the standard lights off the sides—embarrassing but memorable. They were moved back when rebuilt.
10
NEW YORK STATE OF MIND
Heinlein’s in-ship battle station was at the main battery. When they were finished with the spring exercises at Guantánamo, he was detached for temporary duty to Long Island City to attend the Ford Instrument Company school from May 3 to June 17, 1930, to learn how to run the electromechanical “computers” that coordinated the ship’s main battery—the Mark XVIII Director and Mark III Range Keeper. After a four-day leave to visit Rex at Fort Humphreys, Virginia, he left Lexington at the Norfolk Yards and traveled overland to New York City.1
New York City in 1930 was an exhilarating place to be. Just seven months after the stock market crash, New Yorkers had not yet completely recovered from the reports of bankers and brokers leaping out the windows of skyscrapers. But the can-do spirit was still very strong. Less than a month after the crash that ushered in the Great Depression, architect William Van Alen had turned the unfinished Chrysler Building into the tallest building in the world by having its seven-story, stainless-steel spire secretly constructed inside the tower and raised through a hole in the roof, the whole process taking only an hour and a half. The building was completed and opened in the spring of 1930.
But the Chrysler Building was not long to hold the record. As Heinlein came to New York, Shreve, Lamb & Harmon were pushing construction of the Empire State Building at the rate of four and a half stories per week. When it was finished, it was going to be tall enough, at 102 stories (compared to the Chrysler Building’s 77 stories), to moor dirigibles to a specially designed mast.
The Ballistic Computer School was the least of Heinlein’s concerns. He headed straight for Greenwich Village, which already had a reputation for bohemianism, and found an apartment one block south of Washington Square. His high school intellectual hero, Will Durant, was headquartered there, at the Labor Temple—but it was not for Durant and philosophy he came. Nor, strictly speaking, for the speakeasies and the bathtub gin (they were just a side benefit). He wanted to get back into art—not just the drawing he had kept up with (or the cartooning he had not kept up): something more substantial … painting or sculpture.2 In his apartment he had some space and set up a studio for himself.
Heinlein began looking around and was immediately immersed in Greenwich Village in the Jazz Age. It was like stepping on a live wire and being jolted to sudden life.
Heinlein had seven weeks in New York, and Elinor would not join him there, either, so he made the best use he could of this opportunity. He was bright, young (just turning twenty-two), handsome, talented, and not obviously “taken”: he was under no obligation to maintain any inconvenient sexual fidelity. “I was the most eligible bachelor in Strunsky’s Love Stables simply because my studio had a bath tub—and the prospect of a sit-down hot bath was even better bait than a 75-cent bottle of muscatel (the standard bait).”3
His natural entrée was with artists’ models and their hangouts4—and that led to meeting painters and other sculptors and from thence to poets and writers and their ilk, and that would have led by natural degrees into being exposed to everything à la mode.
Nightlife of the Village bohemians of this period is reasonably well portrayed in memoirs and histories of this, the Youngblood Hawke period. If Heinlein’s experience was typical for his endowments, once he became known around the various arts circles in Greenwich Village, he could not have missed being taken to the studio of the doyen of the Greenwich Village art scene, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.5 He would have been handed around from set to set, meeting everyone (we know he met Dorothy Parker at this time—“With her short stature, big hats, and scared-little-girl voice she reminded me of a frightened toad stool”6), reading pretentious “little” magazines (and the new comic strip, just started that year, featuring a sexy flapper, Betty Boop), and attending experimental theater. In those circles, he might naturally also have run into the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose reputation for feminism and open bisexuality—promiscuous affairs with women as well as men—was outstanding even in that outstandingly promiscuous society.
Heinlein’s personal inclinations and theoretical model came together very neatly in Greenwich Village in 1930. It was a society polymorphous perverse in theory and in practice (his lesbian models figure in his recollections, though he made no reference to male homosexuals in this period), the logical extension of the marriage-reform movements on the radical-socialist wing of the old American liberal movement.
He was almost immediately an insider in a world where entrepreneurs arranged tours of “artistic” locations for out-of-town tourists and la vie de bohème was theater and life at the same time.7 The practice was not always so idealized: he lost the ivory elephant charm he used to tape to his wrist for fencing to a flapper who wanted it badly enough to make a public scene—she may not actually have wanted the elephant, but she did want the scene, and Heinlein didn’t, so abandoning the elephant was the lesser of the two evils.8
Heinlein had always thought of himself as a liberal and as a socialist, but opportunities for direct, practical expression were limited at the Naval Academy (though the military was one of the examples cited repeatedly by Edward Bellamy, in Looking Backward, of highly organized cooperative structures). Socialism and liberalism were on the anvil, right there, right then. While Heinlein was in New York, John Dewey, “America’s philosopher,” was running a series of essays in The New Republic, about the apparent fragmentation and ferment that was going on, that they were all a part of … how it was actually the coming together of a new individualism, an individualism that would go hand in hand with the socialism that was coming, inevitable.9
Whether or not Heinlein read Dewey’s essays as they came out, he was acting out the social evolution Dewey was sensing: even that back-of-themind Quest that Heinlein and Laning and Gray were on might relate to what Dewey identified as fragmentation being part of a larger pattern: the boys were trying to discover for themselves the patterns that tied together this dazzling spectacle of life. The science and technology Heinlein had immersed himself in—from theoretical astronomy to the cams and gears of the Mark IV Ballistic Computer—were parts of the “American mentality,” and while the idea that “technique” could be applied to the engineering of society may have been a Bolshevik discovery, it was Americans who were taking the idea all over the world. The new world was going to be “corporated”—just what H. G. Wells had been saying in his social novels published through the 1920s—and Americans were exploring how to do
the new corporatedness. “I shall look to America … ,” Wells was insisting as late as 1926, “for the first installments of the real revolution.”10 If Heinlein did not catch the breathless sense of the excitement of his times from Dewey, he was prepared for it already by reading Wells’s social novels.
Some kind of socialism was inevitable—indeed, Heinlein thought, it was already partly here: “Here in the USA, where we have much more socialism than most people appear to believe, we are good at it in some spots, fair in others, lousy in some.”11 Wells and Dewey dovetailed in an exhilarating picture of the evolution that Heinlein himself had an exciting, personal role in advancing. The way to bring about the future, Dewey said, was to deal, without preconceptions, with the realities that one confronts in the here and now, using the scientific method applied to life situations, bringing oneself into harmony with the conditions of the new, coming world.
So, being right here, right now, doing just what he was doing, put Robert Anson Heinlein, U.S.N., in the vanguard of progress, of the inevitable and irresistible social change that was going to take place. Wells, the utopian socialist social thinker, and Dewey, the American philosopher of Pragmatism, were on the same wavelength—and so was Ralph Waldo Emerson, and so was he.
Heinlein’s place in the scheme of things would involve art—specifically, he decided, sculpture. As a child, he had modeled figures of Tarzan and Mowgli in Plasticine, and his favorite toy elephant he considered the perfect sculptural subject—for a five-year-old. His tastes in three-dimensional figures had broadened somewhat in the intervening years; he wanted to sculpt more adult subjects now: life studies of nudes. 12 His models were all local girls, and they seem to have made up his main social life during the weeks he had in New York. They introduced him to other aspects of life in the Village in the thirties, all fascinating to a young man of Robert Heinlein’s temperament. But there was more to life in Greenwich Village in 1930 than the time he spent in the sack. There was also time spent out of the sack, in the most wide-open social group he was ever to know.
… when I had a sculpture studio in Greenwich Village, I knew a lot of them [Lesbians] both butch and sweetheart, quite well. My best model was one. I tried with boyish enthusiasm to seduce her (she was not virgin with respect to men, just not interested)—and I got nowhere; she just laughed at me. But we were chums and used to “cruise” together, both hunting the same game—with an agreement that each would respect the other’s “point.” A lovely girl and she could pose like a rock, as long as I kept her well supplied with wine. 13
Almost all of Heinlein’s correspondence from this period was destroyed in later years, but around this time, Cal Laning and Gus Gray and he must have started their experiments with telepathy, 14 setting up blind trials according to the methods suggested in Upton Sinclair’s new (1930) book, Mental Radio—a book Heinlein specifically mentions in one of his early stories.
Heinlein knew Sinclair as a socialist editorialist in the journal Appeal to Reason, which Heinlein had read as a boy. 15 Sinclair was a famous muckraker who had caused a national scandal in 1906 and 1907 by describing in The Jungle labor practices in the Chicago meatpacking industry and was world famous because of that book. Mental Radio was a straightforward report of his wife’s experiments with telepathy, picking up where Mark Twain had left off in his “Mental Telegraphy” essays, with a series of “case studies”—transmissions of words, messages, and even images, from near and far—and a first pass at statistical analysis of the results. It looked like a thoughtful attempt to put a very firm statistical grounding under the type of “anecdotal evidence” Twain had collected. It stood to become the basis for a scientific investigation of telepathy. 16 More important, Mary Craig Sinclair gave directions for developing telepathic talents. In the introduction to the book, Sinclair had suggested that telepathic ability could be “cultivated deliberately, as any other object of study … The essential in this training is an art of mental concentration and autosuggestion, which can be learned.” 17 Heinlein was very interested in the idea that special abilities could be learned by mental exercises18—and now it appeared that the hypnosis Cal Laning was playing around with might lead in that direction, too.
Heinlein, Gus Gray, and Cal Laning would write to one another, setting times for trials, and then, at the appointed day and hour, they would try to transmit and receive telepathic images and messages. They could exchange the results by mail, too, or in person on the infrequent occasions when they were in the same port. 19
But Heinlein had other matters to occupy his immediate attention. The Ford Instrument Company school was finally over on June 17, 1930, and he was certified to operate the Lexington’s Mark III Range Keeper. This was a theoretical qualification, though: like so many other Navy jobs, the training would have to be finished hands-on, on the job, no practical instruction being available at Long Island City.
He closed down his apartment in Greenwich Village on June 19, a day before he had to leave for Norfolk. There, he found changes in progress: Captain Berrien had given up his command. Heinlein would be coming back to a new captain—Ernest J. King.20
11
ROBERT AND UNCLE ERNIE
Heinlein knew King slightly. King and his family had been living in Annapolis while he was at the Academy. Heinlein had dated one of King’s daughters and served as usher at the wedding of another. They had gotten along—but captains have literally the power of high and middle justice in their hands, a very different matter from the father of one’s drag.
Heinlein was still in Greenwich Village when King took command on June 20, 1930, so he missed the reception that took the place of the formal calls on the captain traditionally made by each officer aboard a naval vessel. Lexington had far too many officers for formal calls to be practical. Scuttlebutt had it that things had gotten too lax under Berrien, and King had been sent to get Lexington shipshape and military. Discipline was going to be tightened up, and the process had already started. Heinlein heard that at the reception, King had raised and shown everyone a copy of Navy Regulations—The Book by which things are done “by the book”—and stated flatly that they would be obeyed from then on, no ifs, ands, or buts.
Heinlein rapidly worked back into the routine of minor duties and major as Lexington cast off on June 30, 1930, for its new home port in Long Beach, California. His Condition “A” battle station was in main battery control above the flag bridge. For the next six months he served as assistant to the Chief Warrant Electrical Gunner. This battle assignment continued no matter what department he was in, since the Gunny was due to be rotated soon, and that would leave him the only officer in the ship with the special schooling needed to program and run the battery. It was a plum assignment for an ensign; he would be de facto fire-control officer. The Chief introduced him to Lieutenant j.g. ( junior grade) Sweetser (Annapolis Class of ’26), who was currently operating the Mark IV, and they started immediately to teach Heinlein all the practical matters not covered in the Ford Instrument Company’s seminar. He learned more from Lieutenant Sweetser than he had learned from the Ford Instrument Company in two months.1 When Heinlein was ready to operate the Mark IV, Sweetser became Captain King’s Secretary, but they stayed drinking buddies.
Heinlein’s Condition “B” battle station would depend on the department to which he was assigned. For the present, he was reserve officer of the deck and navigator in the number 2 bridge on the stack housing, under the Executive Officer. At other times he would be on the main bridge four hours on, four hours off.
He soon had a night shift as Junior Officer of the Watch. King had already made some changes in the way things were done. Under Captain Berrien it was sometimes possible for the Junior Officer of the Watch and the Officer on Deck to grab a smoke sitting down in the chart house while pretending to study the chart. But under King you studied the chart before you went forward and reported, “Ready to relieve you, sir,” not later than ten minutes before the hour—or else. And King might show up on deck
at any moment. On one memorable occasion, the water was quiet. Heinlein was scanning the horizon.
Out of the darkness behind me, a voice pitched just loud enough for me to hear it said in flat tones, “Get out of my way.” I teleported myself bodily about ten feet to starboard.
And I never got in E. J. King’s way again.2
Later, he realized that what King had was the authentic “voice of command,” the flat tone of voice that conveys absolute, convincing conviction that there is no possibility of not being obeyed.3 Heinlein was immediately intrigued: E. J. King was obviously a very unusual man.
King, Heinlein concluded, was pure Navy, in the best possible sense. He meant what he said about going by the book—so long as it brought about justice tempered with solid common sense. Heinlein didn’t know how he did it, but King’s personality began to be felt everywhere in the ship, and they all felt themselves straightening out, bracing up, without being quite sure why.
They were bound this trip for Guantánamo, for fleet exercises. The ballistic computer was a very complex mechanical calculator, turning three-dimensional cams and pushing mechanical springs to perform four simultaneous integrations and seventeen simultaneous differentiations, in six simultaneous answers to control the first of eight turret guns. “And that was a lot of fun—like playing an organ.”4
On one occasion, he got the downside of the responsibility: “I suppose my own ‘finest hour’ was in unloading a 105 mm hangfire after ordering the gun crew away from the gun—I damned near pissed my pants but I really had no choice; it was my battery.”5
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 15
