A lot of his ideas turned on psychological points or points of technique he might not be able to write at all:
Write a horror story for Unknown in which nothing is described, à la Cabell à la Guardians of the Frontier.
Some of his best story notes—the ones that could actually be developed into stories—were the ideas he had already put into For Us, the Living as part of the backstory, how we got from here to there.
One of the recent story notes must have piqued his interest:
Write an “Unknown” story based on what would happen if persons knew when they were to die, but nothing else of the future.
For example, what would Alice McB [ee] [his fiancée, who had died early in 1928] have done?
What would I do?
Denouement must of course be the extinguishing of this knowledge.16
This note was more a germ than a story—pregnant with things to think about, but he didn’t really have a story to go with it.
It is not clear how Heinlein got from this germ to the story he eventually did (around the beginning of April 1939) write up as his first story, “LifeLine.” 17 Switching it from pure fantasy to science fiction may have suggested the pulp gadget-story format, which is typically about the inventor and his invention. Heinlein began in a way that would become characteristic for him—with irony: his inventor was not a mad scientist but the only truly sane man in the story, a rational man who faces facts squarely and without wishful thinking, fairly obviously a model of how Heinlein—as a rational man—hoped he would face that dreadful knowledge, resolutely: make time to enjoy the best things life had to offer him in his remaining time and leave Leslyn provided for, possibly by taking out a big insurance policy—any insurance company would scream bloody murder if it was discovered that he was using some kind of arcane knowledge.
The elements of a science-fiction story—with a fantasy “twist” at the end—took shape, and this was a characteristic, also, of Heinlein’s approach to fiction: he was never to be comfortable with formula, and many of his stories challenge the boundaries of science fiction.
Equally characteristically, Heinlein chose a pun for his title (perhaps because he started the typing on April 1, 1939—April Fools’ Day): the lifeline is a crease in the palm that fortune-tellers use to tell the length of a person’s life. It is also what sailors call the rope they throw to a man overboard, to save his life.
Heinlein gathered up enough paper—he was still using mimeographed precinct-worker instructions from the election in 1938—and began typing. The scenes fell into place like clockwork. He got through a thousand words that first day and more than two thousand the next. Two days later, he was done with the story.
If Leslyn’s sense for story structure had been honed in the movies, she might have been surprised at how Robert had used the bits she had suggested. 18 This wasn’t a conventional commercial plot, with a single, straightthrough story arc. He had twined three story lines together—mature stories, too, not pulp kids’ stuff. Even in first draft, this was a professional-quality job. Once he retyped it to get a clean manuscript, it would be ready to send out.
This spate of writing had been prompted by a piece in one of the science-fiction pulps, but the “prize” for Thrilling Wonder’s “contest” was less than the prevailing pulp story rates of a penny a word. (The most popular writers could earn a lot more, but there was also a bottom rung of the pulp market that was paid a lot less—half a cent a word or less. Thrilling Wonder Stories was on that bottom rung.) Instead, Heinlein sent it to the only editor who had both a fantasy magazine and a science-fiction magazine, John Campbell at Astounding Science-Fiction and Unknown.19 Even though Heinlein was by now a touch typist, he was not very accurate. The retyping was a chore. He had thirty-two sheets in his rough draft. He drove down the hill into Hollywood, to a stationery store, and bought just enough good bond paper to retype the story.20
It took almost as long to retype the story as it did to write it, but eventually it was done, and he had thirty-two sheets of clean copy and a carbon on newsprint. He packaged the bond copy of the story with another envelope, self-addressed, and stamps enough clipped to it to return the manuscript. On April 10, 1939, he sat down to type his cover letter.
Dear Mr. Campbell:
I am submitting the enclosed short story “LIFE-LINE” for either “Astounding” or “Unknown,” because I am not sure which policy it fits the better.
Stamped self-addressed envelope for return of manuscript is enclosed. I hope you won’t need it.
Very truly yours,
Robert A. Heinlein
He took the envelope down to the post office and mailed it the same day.
Heinlein started another story almost immediately—one related to the backstory of For Us, the Living: an Okie boy in one of the CCC camps finds a place in his new world. Such a tale would make a perfectly good magazine story for one of the prestige, “slick” magazines (so called because they were printed more expensively than the pulps, on glazed paper), such as Collier’s or Blue Book, except that the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps was starting to get a reputation as a boondoggle. Heinlein moved his contemporary story into space for the science-fiction magazines. This story was very Darwinian, very evolutionary: change these kids’ environment and things started to change in them, as well. Survival factors in evolution formed themselves out of a pool of characteristics neutral or disused in the old environment.
For a couple of days Heinlein was preoccupied with his CCC story, juggling bits and pieces of story and character and background. And during this process, this “history of the future” began to take a different shape than the backstory of For Us, the Living, a slightly different line of possible futures. He jotted some rough notes about where he could fit some of his stories into this new time line, in relationship to one another, and left the notes by his typewriter for future reference. He would have to write about the critical events that made this time line work.
The “hook” for this story was natural: a first muster. The story would open with young Andrew Jackson Libby (sometimes “Libbey” in Heinlein’s notes) picking up his duffel bag and boarding a spaceship. That let Heinlein use the emotions he recalled from his own first muster at the Naval Academy—anxiety, homesickness, anticipation, and nerves—to give it the oomph a hook should have.
He was well into his story a few days later, when Leslyn came in, excited, with the morning mail: there was a business letter—not a returned manuscript!—from Street & Smith. She hadn’t opened it, of course: they had a custom of respecting the privacy of each other’s correspondence, and the envelope was addressed to him. She wouldn’t have opened it even if it were from mutual friends.21 Inside there were two sheets, one a form of some kind and the other on Street & Smith letterhead and signed by John W. Campbell, Jr., in a looping hand and blue, broad-nibbed fountain pen:
April 19, 1939
Dear Mr. Heinlein:
The legal obligations under which a publishing company operates require that we ask authors who have not previously sold to our magazine to prepare an affidavit of authorship for us.
I like your story “Life-Line,” and plan to take it at our regular rate of 1¢ a word, or $70.00 for your manuscript.
However, before this may be put through for payment, the purchasing department ask that the author sign the accompanying form, and have it witnessed by a notary public.
If you will have this done, the check in payment of your story will be sent at once.
John W. Campbell, Jr.
Campbell was buying “Life-Line”!
A few days later, on April 24, the check arrived from Street & Smith—$70.00, as promised. Heinlein stared at it for a moment.
“How long has this racket been going on?” he demanded rhetorically. “And why didn’t anybody tell me about it sooner?”22
But one swallow and summers, and all that. Macmillan rejected For Us, the Living, but he wasn’t ready to give up on it yet. Hi
s friend Samuel L. Lewis, who had cowritten a book a few years ago about the California radical and progressive movements, Glory Roads (1936), told him the Canadian Social Credit Union had a local chapter in Los Angeles. On April 25, Heinlein framed an inquiry to Gorham Munson, the local chapter’s secretary, using all his politician’s tact: they have a problem in common, he wrote, popularizing Social Credit ideas. He had been an exponent of Social Credit for years, and he had served as the secretary of the Hollywood New Economics Group. He had written a Social Credit book, he said, and offered to send it to them when he got the manuscript back.
“Cosmic Construction Corps” counted out at 9,652 words, and he had done something odd with the scene-to-narrative balance—possibly to get in all the technical exposition he needed to flesh out the background, since his story was really “about” the world his protagonist Libby was growing up in, rather than about Libby per se. He typed a clean copy with carbon sets for his files and mailed it off to John Campbell at Street & Smith on May 1—
—and started another story, a long one, maybe two hundred pages, with minor climaxes every fifty pages or so, “The Captains and the Priests.” This one was derived more directly from the backstory of For Us, the Living—about the backwoods preacher who won the presidency of the United States and destroyed secular democracy. This would be about the revolution that overthrew Nehemiah Scudder’s successors, the Second American Revolution.
But he wasn’t quite ready, apparently. After three false starts and only twenty-two pages to show for it, he put away the manuscript and idea file.23
Then Heinlein took a few days off to do other chores. The Social Credit people hadn’t responded to his letter about For Us, the Living, sent three weeks earlier, so he took a chance and let the West Coast sales representative of Random House take the manuscript back with him to New York, on May 14, 1939.24
Getting his mind off the writing evidently did him good: he figured out a dodge to get cheap electric power out to the public, where it couldn’t be monopolized by private utility companies—one of the critical points in the historical backstory he was composing. He played around with the idea for a few days, changing stray bits and trying new combinations to put a fresh spin on some formula figures. He made some switches, avoiding the science-fiction cliché of the bulging-brain inventor and his beautiful daughter. He made the daughter the high-powered scientist, and made the necessary bodyguard into a commercial-development engineer. Then he switched the switch and made the development engineer into the son of an industrialist. That gave him a jazzy young couple with a lot of chemistry to work with—one of the “love stories” Jack Woodford insisted a writer start out with.25
Around the middle of the month, Heinlein got impatient with his own process and just sat down to write, figuring out the story as he went along. He gave it a working title, “Prometheus ‘Carries the Torch’”—typographically awkward—and started writing. But he had been typing too much recently: after a few pages, his hands cramped up, and he switched to longhand and continued writing.26
He was almost finished when a big envelope came in the mail: Campbell was returning “Cosmic Construction Corps.” But Campbell had sent along a letter instead of a printed rejection slip.
You’ve got a good idea in your yarn here and I think you can really make something out of it. I have genuine hope for your work in the future.
The difficulty with the present set up in your story is that you have injected a highly artificial villain who seems highly unnecessary and obtrudes from the story like a sore thumb. I think if you would amputate it you’d have a much better yarn.27
This could only have been a disappointment—but that was the life of a writer, the life he had chosen. Heinlein had made a list of submission priorities, second- and third-tier magazines to send stories to if Campbell didn’t buy one. Thrilling Wonder Stories was next on the list, and Ray Palmer had recently taken over editing Amazing and was looking for new material. Then it would go to some of the low-pay/slow-pay markets. But first he would revise it, by “chopping out the villain,”28 and resubmit it to Campbell.
But before he could work on the revision, he received a letter from Gorham Munson at the L.A. chapter of the Social Credit Union, enthusiastic about his “Social Credit novel” and asking to see For Us, the Living. He wrote back immediately saying he had sent it to Random House, but he expected them to reject it and would send it along as soon as the manuscript was returned to him.29
He finished “Prometheus” the next day, and bought thirty sheets of good bond for the clean submission copy. He had a few other stories ready to write. But first, he read over “Cosmic Construction Corps” with careful attention to the scenes with his villain, Siciliano. His editing on this, only his second story, was almost surgical: he chopped the character out entirely and found the ends of the scenes on either side of the deletions still fit together coherently, in most places. That first edit shortened the story by about 1,500 words, but some came back when he wrote necessary bridging material to make the ends of the cut sequences fit together more smoothly.30 When he finished retyping the now villainless version of “Cosmic Construction Corps,” it was 8,342 words. He sent the revision to Campbell on May 25.
By the beginning of June, he had finished an odd, wry story at 5,500 words, “Pied Piper,” which played around with Robert Browning’s “Pied Piper of Hamelin” poem and turned the situation into a “wonderful gadget” story. It wasn’t in the historical sequence he had been working with, so he had started off with a pen name, Caleb Saunders. “Caleb” came up because of Caleb Catlum from Caleb Catlum’s America (1936) by Vincent McHugh—one of his very favorite books—but also, of course, because of Cal—Caleb Barrett Laning. He had come up with another pseudonym, too: he took his maternal grandfather’s family name and his paternal grandmother’s family name and joined them together: Lyle Monroe. But he decided he would save the pen names for secondary submissions.31 For Campbell, he used his own name.
He had also started on a big story about human evolution and psi powers, “Lost Legacy,” but, after starting several drafts, put it aside. His extensive notes for this story were more carefully organized than for any of his other early stories and were bound with brads in three-hole punched paper. Perhaps he felt the need to work with his research more and was not yet ready to write the story. Certainly it was a very ambitious effort:
It was an attempt on my part, only partially successful, to do something as good as Odd John [Olaf Stapledon, 1935]. To my way of thinking, science-fictionists have become gadget crazy, and are perfectly willing to accept any improbability as long as the author postulates some sketchilyexplained “invention” in the sphere of physics. (I’ve done it myself!) Here is a story with no gadgets, in which the author has hooked together a lot of the erratic data which orthodox theory rejects, and tried to fit it into a single comprehensive philosophy and history.32
Now, though, Heinlein was picking up steam. He went immediately to work on “Patterns of Possibility,” taking the n-dimensional space-time concepts that were in Dunne’s Experiment with Time and Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum and mixing them together with the cross-time material in “The Gostak Distims the Doshes.”33 Dunne’s physics was based on the idea that consciousness could become detached from its space-time matrix—which meant that one could go wandering in a near-infinity of different spacetimes, somewhere else. Elsewhen.
Heinlein had finished “Patterns of Possibility” at 10,051 words, when “Prometheus ‘Carries the Torch’” came back from Astounding—rejected. But Campbell’s long letter was full of encouragement to submit more, which took some of the sting out of rejection. He started off:
Shoot along all the yarns you do. I’ll be glad to see ’em, and I feel you’ll make more than a few sales. Your work is good. Even this is good, despite the fact it’s bouncing. Main reason: the femme is too good. The science-fiction readers have shown a consistent distaste for science-fiction detective stories and feminine
scenery in science-fiction stories. She’s much more nicely handled than the average woman in science-fiction, but I’m still afraid of her. Better lay off, or try her on Marvel.34
In fact, this was almost not a rejection letter at all: Campbell went on, almost chatty, about the economics and the story about the suppressed “miracle carburetor,” concluding pages later: “But be that as it may, let’s see more yarns. Shorts, in particular.”
That was praising with faint damns: Mary Lou was too good!35 If you have to get rejections, that was the way to take ’em!
But early in June he took a break: the General Semantics seminar they had registered for was only two days away.
19
NOT QUITE DONE WITH POLITICS
The material from the General Semantics seminar was interesting and important, but Korzybski himself gave a real human dimension to it, quirky and fascinating. From the difficult, formal prose and tortured organization of Science and Sanity, Heinlein had expected some stiff, professorial type, and Korzybski was anything but: he was the most alive person Heinlein had ever seen. He stumped around the stage, waving his arms and talking with a thick Polish accent. He reminded Heinlein of nothing so much as Professor Challenger without the beard.1 After the seminar, Heinlein stayed behind with some of the members of the local General Semantics chapter to talk with “A.K.,” as they called him. Attention was focused on Heinlein straightaway, because he had put down on his application that he was a “pseudo-science writer.” They talked for some time about the problems of popularizing General Semantics, A.K. treating him very flatteringly as a professional with professional expertise in communication. Heinlein may have sensed, too, that A.K. was, or at least had the potential to be, the kind of older adviser or mentor he had been missing for a long time now.
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 29
