He came away from the seminar charged up, but his own “literary business” needed minding. The day after the seminar, he began by putting “Prometheus ‘Carries the Torch’” and “Patterns of Possibility” back into circulation, then sat down at the typewriter to write a whimsical little gimmick story that had come to him, “‘My Object All Sublime.’” No notes for this story are preserved in Heinlein’s records, but his friend journalist Cleve Cartmill probably served as the model for his journalist-protagonist Cleve Carter who tracks down an invisible skunk-juice squirter dedicated to making the punishment—for “stinking bad” drivers—fit their crimes.2 In the middle of writing it, he got Campbell’s acceptance, and check, for the revision of “Cosmic Construction Corps,” which Campbell had retitled “Misfit.” With “Life-Line” scheduled for the August issue of Astounding and now “Misfit” in November, another milestone was passed: he was not a one-hit wonder.
Heinlein was now juggling five unsold manuscripts at the same time: For Us, the Living came back from Random House very quickly, rejected, as he thought it would be. The Social Credit people wouldn’t be expecting to see it so soon, so he gambled and sent it right out again, this time to William Sloane at Henry Holt & Company. Sloane also bounced it rapidly, with a friendly note of rejection—suggesting he try it on Unknown!—instead of a coldly impersonal printed rejection slip.3 This time, he sent the manuscript on to Gorham Munson at the L.A. Social Credit office.
Campbell was rejecting “Patterns of Possibility,” but his rejection letters were almost not rejections—friendly and chatty, inviting a longer correspondence. Heinlein relished this kind of wide-ranging conversation, and letters like that were almost as good as table talk.4 This was meaningful to him because he was not getting much encouragement otherwise: Thrilling Wonder Stories returned “Prometheus ‘Carries the Torch’” with an uninformative rejection slip. He changed the title to a biblical quotation everybody would feel familiar with—“‘Let There Be Light’”—and sent it to the next magazine on his submission hierarchy, Amazing Stories.
And still the stories continued to bounce back, rejected: Collier’s bounced “‘My Object All Sublime’” early in July, so he started that one on the rounds also, sending it first to Campbell. Thrilling Wonder Stories returned “Patterns of Possibility,” but at least this time it came with an explanatory note: the plot was “too trite—no complications.” A few days later, Campbell returned “‘My Object All Sublime,’” saying essentially the same thing: too familiar. Campbell seemed to be going out of his way to treat him as a fellow professional; even though these letters were not so long and chatty, they gave him potentially useful feedback.
Around the beginning of July that summer, Heinlein was in Shep’s Shop, a secondhand bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, close to Western Avenue. He was trying to find the issues of Amazing Stories in which Doc Smith’s “Skylark of Space” serial had appeared. Shep’s specialized in used pulps and had a lending library and motion picture stills—a miscellany of clutter that made it a likely place to look for such bits of science-fiction history. Those issues were not in stock, but as he was leaving the shop, a tall, gangling young man stopped him and introduced himself as Forrest J. Ackerman—“4SJ,” as he signed himself, or, just as often, “4e.” Ackerman recognized Heinlein from the campaign posters that had been up around town the previous summer and told Heinlein he had duplicates of those issues and would be glad to sell them.
Heinlein had joined the local science-fiction fan group, the Los Angeles Science Fiction League (which became the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society—LASFS—in March 1940) in the spring of 1939, shortly after he began writing, but had somehow not met Ackerman, whose energetic promotion of all things science fiction was to see him voted the “World’s #1 Science Fiction fan” by his peers. They found they had many interests in common—Ackerman, for instance, spoke Esperanto, which Heinlein had learned as a teenager, because it was going to be the language of the future. Ackerman’s girlfriend, Myrtle R. Douglas, promoted Esperanto, too, using the Esperanto name “Morojo” for herself. Heinlein invited Ackerman home to continue the discussion, and that led to dinner invitations. Ackerman was surprised when the August issue of Astounding came out a few weeks later, with Heinlein’s first short story, “Life-Line.”5
Heinlein was writing again—but slowly. There was always a cluster of family obligations in July and August. His own—thirty-second—birthday was on July 7; exactly a week later was his mother’s sixtieth birthday. Family affairs were becoming sizable productions in Los Angeles, even though his father was in the V.A. hospital. His brother Rex would be moving again shortly, and he arranged to have someone come to collect the trunk Robert and Leslyn were storing for him.
Heinlein’s story “Life-Line” appeared on the newsstands one day toward the end of July. By that time, he was starting to germinate a couple of new stories, and he wanted to work on them. Back in May he had stalled on a story that was coming clearer to him now: he had figured out how to tell the story of the Second American Revolution in his connected history-of-the-future, starting out with the notion of a high-tech underground operating in a regressive and medievalized theocratic United States.
Heinlein was a deeply spiritual person, but he had never had any attraction to the creeds and dogmas of any church, Christian, Buddhist, Shinto, or Pagan—none of them. Churches did not stir him to religious awe; the monkey antics they—some of them—allowed themselves were revolting to him.6 This is a much more common attitude than is generally realized; for a goodly segment of the spiritually aware, churchgoing is what you do instead of religion. There can be an aesthetic appreciation of the theater of ritual and ceremony and the feel of historical “depth” one gets from attending a Latin mass and sharing an experience that goes back for nearly two thousand years, to a time when the Roman conquerors let the Sanhedrin cruelly execute a Jewish dissident and reformer—highly moving, but it is the aesthetics of theater and not religion.
Robert Heinlein’s religion was America and what it meant to the world and to human history—and could mean again .7 A people governing themselves without fear or favor of princes or prelates was a thing wonderful and precious—perhaps doomed to pass again into the dust of history, but inextinguishable as a human ideal. That was the divine light that shone on humanity’s struggle—and it would rise again and again, inextinguishable.
Heinlein had just started to write “The Captains and the Priests” when President Roosevelt made a national speech on the petroleum reserves issue, on July 20, 1939. A cloud on the horizon, “no bigger than a man’s hand,” was beginning to loom, and the possibility he might be called back into politics was firming up: Heinlein was the California Democratic Party’s local expert in matters naval, and the state’s oil industry was fighting legislation that affected the Navy’s operational fuel oil reserves.
The California oil industry, it was feared, was in imminent danger of collapse because insane levels of overproduction were destroying the domestic market. Each oil producer was pulling every barrel of oil out of the ground that it could. At the same time, a naval preparedness report said that oil reserves were dangerously low: the oil glut was being shipped overseas, particularly to Japan, where it was used for that country’s military adventures—a state of affairs Heinlein found appalling. “There are practices which are vicious in themselves, regardless of law or government, and selling iron and oil to Japan in the 1930s is one of them.”8 And, of course, even if the Navy never used the operating reserves, it was unbelievably foolish not to have them ready if needed.
A voluntary program for limiting oil production had all but collapsed by 1938. Several states had already passed oil and gas conservation programs. The California State Legislature passed an oil conservation program in July, which the big oil producers threatened to derail by sending it to a popular vote on the November ballot. There could be little doubt, Heinlein knew, that he would be called upon to put in time working on this: th
e Navy’s interests were too tied up with California oil to let this pass.
When they called, he would answer—but he would wait for the call and continue to write while Leslyn, who was still involved with state politics on a day-to-day basis, kept a watchful eye on the qualifying process.
“The Captains and the Priests” did not flow as easily as it should. It felt like hackwork, and what he was saying violated so many of the taboos of pulp magazine fiction, it was possible he would not even be able to sell it. He worked hard to make it entertaining.9
He finished his first draft early in August and then took time out for three chores: first, a regular monthly follow-up letter to Gorham Munson at the L.A. Social Credit chapter, to inquire about the status of For Us, the Living, 10 and then a quick letter to thank M. Isip, the artist who had illustrated his story in the August issue of Astounding, for enhancing the drama of the scene he pictured.11
The third chore was to find a way to keep himself from dropping details in the outline of the world-future-history he was working on. The notes he had been keeping about his revised outline of his future were getting too complicated as he added more detail; it was becoming too time-consuming to shuffle through that mass of handwritten notes every time he wanted to use a reference. Sinclair Lewis had a similar problem in the novels and stories set in his fictional city of Zenith in the fictional midwestern state of Winnemac, with passing references in one story to characters and issues featured in others. He had recommended a wall chart to keep the data organized.12 Heinlein tore one of his old navigation charts in half13 and made a wall chart he could take in at a glance.
Returning to work, Heinlein retyped the long manuscript, with a new title. Perhaps the theocratic background and the Freemasonic underground had reminded him of something George Washington had quoted from the Bible in his farewell address: princes and prelates had been put down on these shores for good, and the ordinary man “shall sit down under his own fig and vine, and none shall make him afraid.” Heinlein mailed “—Vine and Fig Tree—” to Campbell in the middle of August 1939 and started to organize his outstanding projects.
Gorham Munson finally responded to his inquiry about the status of For Us, the Living, a postcard saying it was going to be difficult to place, promising a more detailed critique later. And Heinlein had busywork to take care of, too, keeping manuscripts in circulation. He had only two story sales, which was still uncomfortably in the one-swallow-does-not-make-a-summer range. He had to establish markets, and that just wasn’t happening yet.
Earlier in the year, Heinlein had been encouraging Elma Wentz to follow her ambitions into commercial writing. She had been doubtful about the mechanics of generating a story, but he told her there was nothing to it. You could plot a story in as little as half an hour. Challenged, he had done just that, outlining a shaggy-dog story that made fun of self-important anthropologists who went about making up explanations for things like the Easter Island statues—“beyond any possibility of doubt”—without any evidence at all. He made up an alternative story, an extended joke about an election in ancient Mu—material he knew she was familiar with from the EPIC campaigns, with Sinclair lampooned as the candidate, and Cleve Cartmill and Roby Wentz parodied as operators—and gave the three-page outline to Elma to flesh out. She came back with a 7,500-word draft titled “Beyond Doubt,” which he could work on—mostly cutting—when he had time.14
The other project he had in mind was the long anthropology story he had put aside in May, “Lost Legacy.” He had outlined and sketched some of it out as a political campaign electing a vigorous young man like Jerry Voorhis to the presidency, but he intended to write it soon, probably before “Beyond Doubt,” another “politics” story, was cut and ready to market, so he moved the focus of “Lost Legacy” from politics to education—and used the same pen name he was using for “Beyond Doubt,” Caleb Saunders, since it was not part of his future history, either.
In the meantime, he was developing a good idea for a short—a really good one, the kind that doesn’t come around too often—and began to write this one before he tackled the “Lost Legacy” novel he had started back in May and put aside. This one was all mood, best written down while the inspiration was fresh. He poured into “A Business Transaction” (so titled because it wasn’t) local color from his childhood in Missouri, but most of all he captured in one sequence of poignant flashbacks a life of yearning to follow the call into outer space, the next frontier where the wild geese went. The tone was bittersweet and perfect, the storytelling simple and straightforward.
Campbell’s letter accepting “—Vine and Fig Tree—” on August 25 had been the most backhandedly complimentary thing Heinlein had ever received. It was full of complaints, mostly about how the religious theme would offend his readership—but the tone of the letter was pure delightedfrustration, like a dog growling over a fresh bone he kept turning over and over, gnawing at the good stuff.
The story, by practically all that’s good and holy, deserves our usual unusually-good-story 25% bonus. It’s a corking good yarn; may you send us many more as capably handled.
But—for the love of Heaven—don’t send us any more on the theme of this one. The bonus misfires because this yarn is going to be a headache and a shaker-in-the-boots; it’s going to take a lot of careful reworking and shifting of emphasis.
Ye gods man, read your own dicta at the end of the yarn as it now stands (incidentally, you don’t think, on the basis of the material’s own logic, we could print that safely, do you?) And consider the sort of reaction that yarn, as it stands, would draw down on us! Even after considerable altering of emphasis, it’s going to be a definitely warmish subject to handle.
You say, in your concluding part, that religion is dogma, incapable of logistic alteration or argument. Evidently you believe that. Then, on that basis, what reaction would you expect this yarn to evoke in the more religiousminded readers? Your logic, throughout, is magnificent and beautifully consistent. That’s swell. I love it. Lots wouldn’t, you know.
I’m reworking it, I’ll be forced to eliminate some beautiful points possessed of an incendiary heat, so far as controversy goes. Consider, man, the reaction if we let that bit about the confessional pass! As a useful adjunct to a dictator’s secret police, it undoubtedly is surpassingly lovely; as an item to print in a modern American magazine, it’s dynamite. That’s out like a light … .
I genuinely got a great kick out of the consistency and logic of the piece. You can, and will, I’m sure, earn that 25% bonus for unusually-good stuff frequently.15
Heinlein could not help but be pleased—amused and complimented.
And Campbell’s specific comments showed that he was most impressed by things Heinlein had put into the story as throwaways—details that added believability to the backstory. If he could tease out some coherent, specific discussion of what Campbell liked about what he was doing, he could write specifically to Campbell’s needs and stop all this out-and-back-again with stories that weren’t selling. The $300 and then some that “—Vine and Fig Tree—” brought in would pay down the mortgage for six months!
Dear Mr. Campbell:
Your letter accepting VINE AND FIG TREE arrived today, and you have no idea what a lift it gave this household. We have been undergoing a long, dry spell—I was beginning to think I was definitely poison ivy to editors. No other editor has even been friendly. I had developed a case of the mulligrubs. Then—your letter arrived on my wife’s birthday, constituting the perfect birthday present.
Incidentally, the major portion of the check is going to go a long way toward lifting the mortgage on Castle Stoneybroke.
I agree with you absolutely in your criticisms of the story. I knew the story violated a lot of taboos and didn’t think it could be sold and published under any conditions. I was very sick of it by the time it was finished, but Mrs. Heinlein and I decided to waste postage too and send it off once, in the belief that you might enjoy reading it, even though it
couldn’t be printed.
I shall avoid the more ingrained taboos in the future—at least for market.
He discussed other story possibilities, then showed a little leg:
If Cosmic Construction Corps stands up, I have outlined a long series of shorts, using the implied culture of that story as a backdrop. Some of them use Libbey [sic] of C.C.C. as central character, others have different central characters. The central characters in one story appear as minor characters in other stories, à la Forsyte saga and Cabell’s Biography of Manuel. They are not sequels. Each story will be independent and the action of one story does not lead up to the next.
Enclosed is a short [“Requiem”]. I hope you like it. In a way it’s my pet.16
So far all of the stories he had sold Campbell were in that outline of the history of the future. That was a vein he could continue to mine—and For Us, the Living would earn its keep even if it never got published!
Campbell bought “Requiem” almost immediately, on the last day of the month of August, even though, he said, he didn’t care for it himself: he wanted to float it as an experiment with his readership, to see how they reacted to these more sentimental stories.17 In the meantime, he urged Heinlein to work at the longer lengths, where his strength seemed to lie.18
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 30
