When Henry Kuttner and “Cat” (C. L. Moore)1 moved to Laguna, they started coming up at least weekly. Cleve Cartmill introduced William Anthony Parker White, called “A.P.,” who was working for United Progressive News as a theater and music critic while trying to get work as a screenwriter. He was also an established mystery writer—“H. H. Holmes” was his pen name—with four published books under his belt. A.P. was witty and lively, and he elevated the tone of the group. It became the “Mañana” (Spanish for “tomorrow”) Literary Society—or MLS—since its purpose, White said (though Heinlein appropriated the remark),2 was to save civilization by letting writers talk out stories instead of writing them. “[Heinlein] did tell a story about someone talking a plot during one of those meetings, and everyone present went home and wrote the story, and the tale goes, they all sold the stories to the same editor!”3 Heinlein and Cartmill hoped to tempt White into writing science fiction.4
Annette McComas, wife of J. Francis McComas, called the MLS “one of the most delightful features of those years … The club provided some very merry times, in spite of the threats of war hanging over our heads”:
The club parties were a lot of fun. They became a haven for every visiting published (and frequently unpublished) science-fiction writer. Visitors and parties went together. Some of the locals and visitors included Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, L. Sprague de Camp, L. Ron Hubbard, Cleve Cartmill, Arthur K. Barnes, Leigh Brackett, and Willy Ley, Jack Williamson, and various and sundry wives and girl friends.5
A few of the fans from the local science-fiction club would be invited from time to time. Nineteen-year-old Ray Bradbury was rambunctious and so energetic that it made Leslyn tired to be in the same room with him; it was too much like having to manage a large and unruly puppy6—but Robert sensed in him a certain quality he wanted to encourage: Bradbury wrote one thousand words a day, every day, after hawking The Los Angeles Daily News on street corners. That impressed Heinlein, who confided to one interviewer: “‘I read some of his stuff.’ He leaned toward me for emphasis. ‘It was awful. I said to myself, ‘Here is a great writer.’”7 Bradbury’s discipline and perseverence would force him to learn his craft.
Heinlein patiently critiqued anything Bradbury brought him. When Bradbury brought him a manuscript that wasn’t bad at all, Heinlein walked it over to Rob Wagner at Script magazine. Bradbury later related8 that Heinlein agented his first sale.9
Gorham Munson finally wrote back on January 7, 1940, that For Us, the Living was, in his opinion, unsalvageable without a complete rewrite, reconceiving it from the ground up and working from story to philosophy, not the other way around. Heinlein had become (somewhat) inured to rejection, but he did not want to invest the necessary effort into rehabilitating this manuscript when he had more immediate projects. He put the manuscript away in his files.
He had started a long novelette for Unknown about industrial magic, but it needed more time to ferment, so he put it aside. Campbell bought the moving roadway story, retitling it “The Roads Must Roll”—an improvement, Heinlein thought, over his original rather flat title: “His reasons: ‘Roadtown’ doesn’t say anything; it just lies there. But ‘The Roads Must Roll’ suggests action, an urgent necessity, and an unexplained mystery … for roads do not roll! What is this? Let’s take a look and find out.”10
In quick succession Heinlein wrote and sold Campbell another story he had mined out of For Us, the Living, “Coventry,”11 and an atomic power story, “Blowups Happen,” which had been suggested to him almost simultaneously by conversations with Bob Cornog and a letter from Campbell.12 Things were going so well, in fact, that Leslyn sent a poem, “Lilith,” to Campbell for Unknown—it was “philosophical” enough, but not in quite the same direction Campbell was trying to take the magazine.13
The “Blowups Happen” sale on February 24, 1940, was a red-letter day for the Heinleins. They had been dedicating most of the proceeds from the writing to pay down the mortgage on the Lookout Mountain house, on the theory that if they could get out from under the debt, they would be able to live more comfortably on the resources they had. Heinlein had used one of the traditional political fund-raising visual aids to keep his mind on the job: a giant cardboard thermometer to show the amount remaining on the mortgage as he paid it down. When he used the check for “Blowups Happen” to pay off the last of the mortgage, he threw a mortgage-burning party to celebrate.14
The writing was generating other correspondence: Isaac Asimov had started corresponding months earlier, but Willy Ley had also written, enthusiastic about “Misfit” and “If This Goes On—” when the first installment appeared in February, with a gorgeous cover by Hubert Rogers. One reader commented enthusiastically: “A striking cover like that, without a trace of the luridness commonly associated with the pulp mags, really attracts favorable attention.”15 Heinlein wrote Rogers a fan letter of his own—more positive and enthusiastic than the thank-you notes he had written to Isip and Wesso.16 In addition to Willy Ley’s friendly and collegial letters, some of the letters from fans and readers developed into a correspondence interesting in its own right.
The Heinleins were also becoming immersed in the social life of Los Angeles’s science-fiction fandom at the time, attending at the regular Wednesdaynight meetings at Clifton’s Cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles. Science-fiction clubs can be a “gateway drug”: socializing leads to reading the amateur magazines issued by fans—“fanzines,” as they came to be known—and then to writing letters of comment to the fanzines17 … and then the hard stuff: Ray Bradbury asked Heinlein for a piece of short fiction for his fanzine, Futuria Fantasia. Heinlein wanted to oblige, but the only thing he had on hand that might do was a sketch called “Successful Operation,” about a pineal gland transplant for a totalitarian dictator. Heinlein had been awakened to the state of German prison camps as early as 1936, when EPIC News had run a personal-experience exposé by Isobel Steele.18 He let Bradbury have it, retitled “Heil!,” to publish under his Lyle Monroe byline in the issue dated “Summer 1940.”
Since Campbell perpetually complained about his need for stories for Astounding and longer material for Unknown, Heinlein started passing along Campbell’s ideas to the other writers in the MLS,19 and he pushed Roby Wentz and Bill Corson to think about writing up some of their own ideas. Now that he felt he was definitely over the hump in getting started with the writing, he could foresee the next stage of his evolution as a writer. Pulp writers often faded out after a while and stopped selling, for one reason or another. “If my stuff starts slipping,” he told Campbell, “and is no longer worth top rates,”
I prefer to quit rather than start the downgrade. Same thing I had to say once before with respect to rejections—I don’t like ’em and will quit the racket when they start coming in. I know this can’t go on for ever but, so help me, having reached top, in one sense, I’ll retire gracefully rather than slide down hill.20
He told his Authors Guild representative, Arthur Leo Zagat, the same thing, expressing it as a definite “intention to quit pulp.”21 But Heinlein felt personally grateful to Campbell for giving him a chance and knew Campbell was in a Red Queen’s race to keep Astounding on track with the new program for science fiction, in which he had assumed an important role. It was not entirely logical, he knew, but he felt obligated to raise up an army of writers to take his place.22
If the “Magic, Incorporated” novelette sold to Unknown—and he thought it should, as he had pitched it directly to Campbell’s prejudices—they would be flush for a while, and Heinlein knew just what he wanted to do with the “extra” cash: he called in all his outstanding political favors and got a pass as an observer to the 1940 Democratic National Convention in Chicago that July. It was by that time an open secret that President Roosevelt was going to declare for an unprecedented third term. That convention was going to be an historic occasion, and he wanted to be there. And, by coincidence, Korzybski was giving a seminar in Chicago just a week after the convention ended. He
inlein’s kid brother, Clare (who had entirely stopped using his first name, Jesse), was studying at the University of Chicago. Heinlein asked Clare to find them an apartment they could rent for a month.
And if they were going to Chicago in July, they could go first to New York—take in the World’s Fair, visit with the local writers. And editors. Robert’s U.S. Naval Academy classmate John S. Arwine lived in New York and made a good living as an unwed mother—that is, writing “true confession” stories (among other things).23 He would put them up.
The April and May issues of Astounding decided the issue (Super Science Stories came out in May with “Let There Be Light” under the Lyle Monroe byline). Both installments of “If This Goes On—” were rated best in their issues, and the reader reaction to the novel was overwhelmingly positive. But the most satisfying result of the novel’s appearance came from outside science fiction—from the Navy. Apparently one of his Academy classmates picked up an idea he had tossed off in the novel and jury-rigged an implementation before the next issue hit the stands. It was soon in use throughout the fleet, though it was classified so that he could talk about it only obliquely and in generalities, if at all.24
Heinlein first investigated passage to New York for himself and Leslyn via a Navy vessel, but none would be available until July. Instead, he and Leslyn left Hollywood early in May for a long overland trip by car. They were in Kansas City on May 10, visiting Robert’s friends and family, when Germany sidestepped the “invincible fortifications” of France’s Maginot Line and invaded the Low Countries for the second time in the century. Robert and Leslyn left Kansas City on the fourteenth of May, to arrive in New York four days later and take in the 1939 World’s Fair as the crisis deepened. Between May 27 and June 3, 1940, the British sent every vessel they could float to converge on the Flanders fishing village of Dunkirk to evacuate their troops from Nazi-occupied France. Winston Churchill made his stirring “We shall fight on the beaches” speech to the House of Commons on June 4, 1940. The lights had gone out in Europe, but he promised that the gallant Britons would fight on, even through an invasion of the home isles. “‘We shall never surrender.’”
Heinlein and John Campbell found they complemented each other in odd and not entirely predictable ways, both interested in out-of-the-way and underappreciated data. Campbell introduced him around to all the other New York Astounding writers.25 Willy Ley was even more interesting and entertaining in person than in his letters. When Doña Campbell, John Campbell’s wife, had to leave the room during a conversation, she instructed him, “Willy! Be dull!”26 Heinlein was also taken to one of Fletcher Pratt and John Clark’s Friday-night Kriegspiel sessions—a naval battle simulation played out on a grid marked on Pratt’s living room floor with wooden models of ships—and there he met L. Sprague de Camp, science fiction’s reigning master humorist.27
They met L. Ron Hubbard when they gave a dinner party; they thought he might be the catch of the trip—explorer, raconteur, and liberal. Heinlein had been very impressed with Hubbard’s realistic treatment of the professional commissioned military officer in the installments of “Final Blackout” that had appeared before they left for the trip.28 “He is our kind of people in every possible way.”29
The Heinleins were also introduced to the various local fan communities. Robert was invited to the Queens Science Fiction League on June 2, 1940, to talk about “If This Goes On—” and met a number of the prominent local fans, including Sam Moskowitz.30 Not wanting to become a prize or a football for one feuding faction of New York fans against another31—the feuds were ongoing and vicious at the time—he invited the major opposition faction, the Futurians, en bloc for a Sunday “at home,” through Robert A. W. Lowndes.
It was common knowledge within the science-fiction community that the Futurians were conventionally “red,” and he wanted to head off a wrangle, so he laid down some ground rules in the invitation:
Re communism—I have read Das Kapital. I know and have been “worked on” by many of the leading party members on the coast … .
Re technocracy—I have taken the study course and spent a lot of time with prominent west coast members, including many hours of close discussion with Johnson, the west coast organizer.32
Re socialism—I first started reading the Appeal to Reason in 1919. I am an old friend of Upton Sinclair’s. I am thoroughly familiar with most collectivist literature of every sort.
Re anarchism—same sort of thing. I know many of the west coast libertarians. I could make a similar list of right wing movements.33
He later, and privately to Lowndes, refined his position:
My … opposition to communism, et al. (including Technocracy), was based almost entirely on matters of civil liberty; it was not based on opposition to socialism, per se. Socialism can be good or bad, depending on how it is run … I never could stomach the indifference of our native commies and fellow travelers to matters of physical freedom, intellectual freedom, and democratic consent. In my own personal evaluations there is no possible economic benefit of sufficient importance that I would choose it in preference to the freedoms specified in our Bill of Rights and elsewhere in the Constitution and customs—they aren’t perfect but they are enormously better than the set to be found anywhere else in the world—and I include England, all of Scandinavia, Switzerland, New Zealand, and Australia.34
He was on vacation, he said, and interested in discussing the radical ideas he had been studying for the last twenty years—but not in being a verbal punching bag. By reputation, what these kids regarded as “good clean fun” could be more like a shark attack.35
One morning two weeks into their New York stay, early in June, Heinlein woke in Arwine’s apartment with an odd sense of disorientation. Something in a dream had brought up that childhood sensation that the adults were in a conspiracy to deceive him, that they didn’t do the same things when he wasn’t around. He scribbled notes to himself about the story, to be called “Potemkin Village” (since someone was setting up and dismantling reality around his protagonist)—enough to turn it into a horror story—and let it germinate.36
The next day, June 5, 1940, they went on the road to Washington, D.C., where Jerry Voorhis welcomed them enthusiastically and issued them a souvenir member’s pass to the House of Representatives.37
When they returned to New York, Heinlein was able to finish his short story, which turned out a creepy, paranoid fantasy he retitled “They.” On June 11, he took it down to Campbell’s office by subway, and Campbell bought it on the spot, for Unknown. They still had a lot to talk about. “Coventry” was coming up in the July issue, and reader reaction to “The Roads Must Roll” was already starting to trickle in—another hit. Campbell definitely wanted more in that same vein. Heinlein mentioned his history-of-the-future wall chart, and Campbell seemed fascinated by it: he even wanted to publish it (and the cash register rang again). Heinlein had brought along For Us, the Living, to leave with Campbell when he moved on to Chicago. But Campbell had something else on his mind.
Street & Smith had recently told Campbell that he couldn’t sell any more of his own fiction to competing publishers—it didn’t look good. Nor could he sell to himself for Astounding. That would look even worse. Campbell’s career as a science-fiction writer was effectively over. But he had a good solid novella, titled “All,” and he suggested that Heinlein could write it up as a serial and he would buy it.38
Heinlein was cautiously enthusiastic. He could use the proceeds from a serial to buy a used car in better condition than the one he was driving—and he could probably get a better deal in the Midwest than he could in California, so the timing was right for him. He had met Doc Smith briefly in New York (and they found each other “muy simpatico”39). Smith was one of the science-fiction writers Heinlein had admired for more than ten years, and Smith had invited him to visit at his home near Detroit.40 Heinlein could ask Smith for help with the purchase of the car, and that would justify a side trip to Michigan for a vi
sit.
Campbell described the plot of “All” to him in detail and even came up with a new pseudonym, a fake Scottish one, combining Robert’s middle name with Leslyn’s maiden name: Anson MacDonald.
Heinlein was not entirely happy with “All,”41 but it was a guaranteed sale, and he would have a few weeks free in Chicago before and after the convention and the General Semantics seminar to write it.
They were booked (as “Robert Monroe and wife”) for two weeks (June 14 to 28) at Camp Goodland—a nudist, “mixed sunbathing” resort in New Jersey—and he needed the time to relax as the war crisis jitters continued to ramp up: on the day they left New York, the German Wehrmacht invaded and occupied Paris.
At the end of June, the Heinleins pulled up stakes again and moved on to Chicago, where they camped out for a few days with Clare and his wife, Dorothy, until they could pick up the keys to the summer rental Clare had found them in his own apartment house near the University of Chicago campus. They registered for the General Semantics seminar, which they hadn’t had a chance to do before, and found that A.K. (as Korzybski was called by the inner circle of General Semantics, to which the Heinleins had been admitted) had arranged VIP status for them—a very pleasant surprise. This year, when asked for his occupation in the seminar application Heinlein stated that he was a “retired Naval officer, Free lance fiction writer, Politician.” Leslyn had shown her occupation as “Housewife; secretary to husband’s writings; General hand[y]man in political campaigns.” She had still not made it all the way through Science and Sanity.42
Heinlein used the time before the convention to organize his writing projects. He tried first to work up a story based on an unfolded tesseract. Campbell had liked the idea, but Heinlein found it hard to build a comprehensible story around it: he found it frustratingly hard to explain the basic ideas to nonmathematicians in any understandable way. He tried out various demonstrations on Leslyn and on Clare’s wife, Dorothy, using toothpicks and bits of modeling clay, and found they had trouble visualizing the relationships, even with the three-dimensional model to play with.43
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 32
