The next day, the international news was shattering: Germany had rejected Great Britain’s ultimatum to return to its borders after the invasion of Poland, and the suddenly revealed Hitler-Stalin pact had American communists spluttering. England declared war on Germany, and the French were mobilizing. On September 3, 1939, Heinlein composed a memorandum /prediction for his own files, “A note from Robert A. Heinlein of this date to R.A.H. of some later date, just to keep the record straight”:
Great Britain has just declared war against Germany. France joins them.
Germany has not attacked Britain nor France. Germany has attacked Poland, after demanding Danzig (a German city) and the corridor (German territory) and being emphatically turned down. I do not justify Germany’s attack, but let’s keep the record straight. Britain is not entering this war to save democracy (Poland is a dictatorship), nor because of the “holiness” of her treaty obligations (remember both Ethiopia and Csechoslovakia [sic]—a democracy, incidentally, and loyalist Spain.)
So far as I can see, Britain is entering this war because Germany is getting stronger than she likes. She has decided to fight Germany because she thinks she can lick her now, and isn’t sure she can later—let’s not be sanctimonious about it.
This war isn’t being fought for Thomas Mann, nor Albert Einstein, nor for other persecuted Jews. Nor is it being fought for “democracy.” It’s being fought to preserve the worst and most unjust features of the Versailles Treaty. Let’s get that straight. And stop Hitlerism makes as much sense as Hang the Kaiser.
Hitler is a symptom of Versailles—we caused him. The insanity he typifies we caused.
This is where we came in—want to sit through another show?
He added a handwritten postscript:
I’ll bet two bits that from here on anyone who is not pro-British will be called un-American!19
Anything he was going to get written needed to be done as fast as possible. Not only was it possible he would be recalled to active duty if the United States entered the war, the local oil conservation campaign was heating up. He queried Campbell on the long anthropology story while Campbell was “editing at” “—Vine and Fig Tree—.”20
On top of all the other stress in his life, he had a blowup with his brother Rex, who was dropping the name “Ivar” inside the family. Rex had told him he would have someone call for the trunk Robert and Leslyn were storing for him, but had not made a definite date for it. Early one Sunday morning, after a late Saturday night chez Heinlein, two of Rex’s Army buddies showed up with a truck to collect Rex’s trunk. Leslyn was never a morning person in the best of circumstances, and she particularly resented being wakened this way. Perhaps she went a little over the top with the strangers (something that had been happening more and more frequently for the last few years), for by the time Robert came down it had degenerated into a screaming argument. Robert separated them by physically taking the men down to street level and unlocking the garage. He got them out of there with Rex’s trunk and calmed Leslyn down.21
Rex called, angry, and Robert had had more than he could take. All the suppressed rage of thirty years came boiling out, and he let Rex have it with both barrels for not having the simple courtesy to let them know about the pickup and thereby causing such an uproar. That was it, as far as Robert was concerned: Rex was out of his life—and good riddance.22 A few years later he said, “The first time he was rude to Leslyn, I closed the book on him, permanently.” 23
Before tackling “Lost Legacy,” Heinlein pulled out the list of story notes he had made back in the spring, and separated them into two columns—one, science fiction, for Astounding; the other, fantasy, for Unknown:
Stories for Unknown Stories for Astounding
Potemkin Village [ultimately published as “They”] Tourist Trouble (or “—the Natives Are Friendly—”)
“I am the cat” 3rd person Warm Ice
Danger—One Way Traffic Safety Precaution 75 [science-fiction version of “Danger—One Way Traffic”]
Reversed Memory General Services, Inc. [ultimately published as “‘We Also Walk Dogs’”]
Maybe “Morpheus, Inc.”? General Housing, Inc.
The other “Life-Line” Labor, Inc. (interplanetary slavery) [the germ of “Logic of Empire”]
Regeneration (M is not T) working title is Resurrection, Inc. Production, Inc. (entropy pantograph)
Sauve qui peut!
The Soul Detector (a telepathic heterodyner) Mining on Venus
The Shadow of Death: novel [this was one of the two ideas conflated together for “Methuselah’s Children”] Youngster cruise (target practice)
General Foods, Inc. (not now ready)
Story treating black magic as good (not yet worked out and possibly too Lynch’s Death Dodgers as racket man
hot. It would deal with the whole ethical problem)
Space Navy, the regeneration of the “bad boy”—a Little Tailor type.
Patterns of Possibility: a free will-destiny problem in time (Later) [Published as “Elsewhere” and collected as “Elsewhen.”] “Fire Down Below!” 2 part serial of the revolution in Little America, source of U-238 used in atomic power. Principal interests; underground culture, and fatigue as a tactical factor. Also the logistic problem in strategy.
Da Capo, or “This is Where We Came In”: story starts with a man’s death and ends when the obstetrician spanks him—metempsychosis.
Dream inversion story, cf. Dunn (If I can do it.) Week End Watch; slipstick Libbey’s [sic] roommate at the Academy gets a court martial and a commendation.
Astounding had a reader’s popularity poll that would show how “LifeLine” had fared with the readers in its October issue. Campbell had started the practice of tallying all the reader comments as votes and publishing the results as a small department, the “Analytical Laboratory.” “Life-Line” was listed second in the issue, after Lester del Rey’s “The Luck of Ignatz,” which had been the cover story that month.
Even better, there was a letter of comment praising the story as one of the best published in 1939, from Isaac Asimov. Asimov’s name was familiar, because he wrote to the science-fiction magazines frequently, but also because he had had a few stories published in Amazing earlier in the year—about the time Heinlein had started writing, in fact. Asimov was a colleague as well as a fan. A few weeks later Heinlein received a personal letter from Asimov. He was only nineteen years old, a chemistry student, and fiercely bright—and amusing, as well. He told Heinlein he thought Jehovah got all the good press and Satan needed to hire a good press agent.24 That was an idea that could be developed into a story—one day.
Heinlein started to work on “Lost Legacy” and was almost immediately interrupted.
The expected California oil conservation initiative qualified and was designated Proposition 5.25 Governor Olson, a former EPIC, sent Heinlein a personal appeal to help coordinate the Navy’s support for the Yes on 5 Committee. The Governor wanted him to take charge of the southern counties—from Fresno south through Imperial and Riverside counties,26 where he had worked so intensively between 1935 and 1937. The oil cartel must not be allowed to torpedo the regular legislative process on this issue.
It was not something Heinlein was eager to take on—it would mean more than a month away from home, traveling from local office to local office in the high desert and living out of a suitcase.27 The cause was just, but the personal effort it would take was something he could just not afford any longer. He was beginning to realize the limitations of the life of a freelance writer: once you stop punching the keys, there is nothing between you and starvation except a sixty-mile commute each day to an engineering workshop … .
But Governor Olson arranged to make the sacrifice more bearable: the Yes on 5 Committee would hire him for a month as a professional consultant—at a substantial salary. Heinlein could not even raise an objection to the people he would be working for: his immediate boss on this campaign would be Ed Pauley, a man whose integ
rity he respected.28 The combination of his detailed knowledge of these Southern California counties, his naval background and interest, and the salary made it impossible for him to refuse. He applied for one of the new Social Security account numbers, so he could be paid by the Yes on 5 Committee.29
Heinlein let Campbell know he would have to interrupt work on “Lost Legacy” for the duration of the campaign30 and organized his working files so that Leslyn could keep the writing business going while he was out of town. He typed up a list of his research into the existing markets with all the relevant information he could think of. With that information, Leslyn ought to be able to handle everything that was in circulation at the moment.
Proposition 5 failed—1,755,626 (61.3 percent) to 1,110,316 (38.7 percent). 31 Heinlein must have been aware this was probably the last political campaign he would run; it would have been a pleasant thing to lay down his laurels with a clear victory, but you have to take what the voters give you. He supervised the shutdown of the southern-counties operation and went back to writing “Lost Legacy.”
The writing went very smoothly. This was a story he could be enthusiastic about, unlike the agony of piecing “—Vine and Fig Tree—” together, bit by bit. He had originally planned “Lost Legacy” to conclude (except for a brief, pastoral postlude) with the election of a new president of the United States, a young and vigorous progressive patterned after Jerry Voorhis, and that ending, at least, was written.32 But over the summer he rethought that plan: a long period of public reeducation was probably necessary before this could be accomplished—starting as young as possible, with children as little corrupted by the prejudices of their elders as possible. This time in his story plan the Boy Scouts of America was the entering wedge for a new progressive tradition.
But he had a little business to take care of first. Forrest Ackerman told him about two new science-fiction magazines that were in preparation, Astonishing and Incredible, edited by New York fan Frederik Pohl. They were offering only a half-cent-per-word rate, but Heinlein was not getting any better offers for “‘My Object All Sublime’” or “‘Let There Be Light’”; they had by now been rejected by all the higher-paying markets, though he couldn’t definitely see why.33 He sent them both to Pohl under the Lyle Monroe byline. He also sent another status inquiry to Gorham Munson about his other problem child, For Us, the Living.
The November issue of Astounding came out with “Misfit,” his second story. While he was writing, the cash register rang again: Fred Pohl wanted “‘Let There Be Light,’” but he also wanted to use Heinlein’s name instead of the Lyle Monroe pseudonym.34 It was not an unreasonable request, but Heinlein was not willing to go along with it. It is easy to guess his reasoning: that story had been rejected by every other market, and even if he hadn’t gotten any useful comments from the editors about why it wasn’t up to snuff, it was pretty clear that it wasn’t: publication of a dog under his own name might dilute whatever commercial reputation he was starting to make in Astounding . At the same time, he did not want to alienate a potential buyer.
The tactic he decided to use was to nudge Pohl, to see if he would come up to market rates: if he would pay the one-cent-a-word rates Astounding was giving him, then there would, ipso facto, be no “dilution” of the commercial value of his name: “I am sorry to have to say that I am not free to publish under my own name for a lower rate than one cent per word,” he told Pohl. “If you still wish to use my own name on those terms, please let me know.”35
But the offer for the lower-grade story put Heinlein on a cusp: up to a week before, he had been able to sell only to Campbell—which meant science fiction, of course, or fantasies that could be disguised as science fiction. And of all the miscellany of humor and fantasy and philosophical speculation and utopia he had out circulating, the only work that had sold to anyone was stories from that history-of-the-future scheme he had adapted from For Us, the Living. If his current story, “Lost Legacy,” did not sell—his favorite of everything he had written to date36—he would have to put aside the story ideas that did not fit into the future history scheme. He could not afford to spend the time and effort writing material he could not sell.
He sent “Lost Legacy” to John Campbell—and decided to work up one of the future-history stories from his “road city” idea that had been inspired by H. G. Wells’s moving roadways. He made engineering sketches and load calculations, trying to get a picture of the scale of these road-cities and the kind of industrial infrastructure they would require. These behemoths dominated a short period in that history-of-the-future.
Science-fiction writers rarely paid any attention to the actual engineering of their marvels of the future, the building and maintaining of them. These cities required massive infrastructure—on the scale of the national highway system and the major engineering projects that had been completed in the last five years: the Hoover Dam, the Grand Coulee Dam, the bridges at San Francisco, and the Tennessee Valley Authority project that was just ramping up.
Heinlein was writing “Road-Town” on December 6, 1939, when Campbell responded to “Lost Legacy”—the same day Ray Palmer returned “Patterns of Possibility” without a line of comment. Campbell was rejecting “Lost Legacy” “because it’s good. It should be great.”37 As his comments went on, it became frustratingly clear that Campbell had misunderstood the entire point of the story: he thought it was about supermen—“Here, you have the story of a whole colony of supermen”—whereas Heinlein thought he had made it clear this was about stuff that was latent in everyman. He had failed to write it clearly enough.
Campbell liked the story Heinlein had carpentered together with sweat and agony, and thought the one that rolled easily was missing a “motivating principle.” Again, that backhanded compliment: “I don’t think you’ve got the makings of a good hack, but I’m ardently hoping for a dozen more top-notch yarns that are real writing.”
The combination of the Amazing rejection and the Unknown rejection on the same day took the wind out of his sails. He just couldn’t work up enthusiasm for the story in his typewriter.38 He sat staring at the page in the machine, unable to come up with the next sentence. He gave up in disgust with himself and started to organize some chores around the house to keep himself busy.
But the information about what Campbell did like about his writing was piling up, and Heinlein felt he was zeroing in on his editor’s particular tastes for the history-of-the-future stuff. He thought he could target them exactly with future stories. The ideas started flowing again for the “Road-Town” story, and within a week he put away the housepaint and brushes and ladders. Instead, he would get back to work and send Campbell science-fiction stories from his history of the future. He had another H. G. Wells–inspired story he could write easily—a switch on something he had put into For Us, the Living, about the island prisons-without-walls for malcontents Wells had mentioned in A Modern Utopia.
“Requiem” came out in the January issue of Astounding, hitting newsstands just before Christmas 1939, and Heinlein was very irritated to discover that Campbell had written a four-line concluding paragraph that spoiled the tone as well as the drift of the story. Could the man not recognize the theme at all? Did he have a completely tin ear for rhythm and flow? Heinlein did not say anything about it at the time, but the following year, when their personal relationship had grown stronger, Leslyn mentioned to Campbell Robert’s reaction: “Bob feels … it spoils the end … by nudging the reader and saying, ‘See, do you get the point?’ and repeating the snapper.” 39 Still later, Heinlein expressed himself in very direct terms: “I still simmer when I think of the four lines you added to ‘Requiem’; they killed the punch”40 and “And you damned near ruined ‘Requiem’ by adding four lines to the end which led the reader up a blind alley, clear away from the real point of the story.”41
Heinlein was beginning to realize, as he got Campbell’s range, that what could be sold to him—and therefore to Astounding and Unknown—was sharply li
mited by Campbell’s own range and prejudices. He might, for example, not be able even to recognize a good story if it fell outside the boundaries of his prejudices.42 Jack Woodford’s advice in Trial and Error was exactly on target: to succeed in this game, you have to find out what your audience wants to hear and beat the drum for it, loudly and enthusiastically.43 Only, it wasn’t as simple as Woodford made it sound. In this case, at least, his “audience” was the editor, not the reader.
Heinlein finished writing “Road-Town” during a visit from Robert Cornog, a friend who had taken his doctorate at the University of California–Berkeley and was now working at Lawrence’s radiation laboratory in Berkeley (he was codiscoverer, with his mentor and adviser, Luis Alvarez, of deuterium and tritium). Cornog dazzled Heinlein with talk about the forefront of atomic physics, a discipline that was about to break wide open. German (and Jewish) mathematical physicist Dr. Lise Meitner had published the calculations she had started on the train fleeing from Nazi Germany, calculations that would permit a vast, uncontrolled release of energy from a very compact source, nearly instantaneously. Atomic bombs had just become possible.
20
OUT AND ABOUT : THE LONG, STRANGE TRIP
The casual Saturday “at homes” Robert and Leslyn had started for political purposes gradually changed over the course of 1939 into a writers’ group for the local science-fiction professionals. If anything, the changeover of personalities could only have sharpened the sense of being involved in something purposive and progressive: socializing with writers instead of politicians required less concentration on creating unity out of divisiveness—fun they did not have to work at so hard.
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 31
