Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  Heinlein put aside the tesseract story and typed up his notes for the “All” story.

  “All” was about a United States invaded and conquered by an Asiatic military clearly referencing the new military Japan (but just as clearly was based in the old, racist Yellow Peril pulps). In the great tradition of 1930s super-science stories, Campbell had a small group of (white) American soldiers who had escaped the invasion and destruction of American forces rallying with a new invention—predictably, a “ray”—that had come just in the nick of time. They were led by a wise old stuffed shirt and sneaked their advanced technology into the conquered country under the guise of a new religious cult.

  Making a novel that would be acceptable in the new (and, frankly, more literate) field of modern science fiction took a great deal of work. Heinlein livened up the stiff, boys’-club atmosphere of the super-science story, making the Americans more contemporary in their personal styles. And he also wanted to reduce the pulpish Yellow Peril angle. “It was a hard story to write, as I tried to make this notion plausible to the reader—and also to remove the racism which was almost inherent to his [Campbell’s] story line.”44

  The fix he ultimately came up with was to recast the story in sociological terms, instead of racial terms—spin the conflict specifically as a conflict of cultures rather than of races. To make the matter explicit, he incorporated a Nisei (Japanese-American) character who would have a tragic and heroic role. Dealing this way, one issue at a time, Heinlein was acting out a larger agenda Campbell had brought to science fiction; gradually Campbell and Heinlein and the rest of the new generation of science-fiction writers left pulp standards behind. Such writing became recognized as a Golden Age of science fiction.

  It was uncomfortable trying to work in the heat, and the apartments didn’t cool off much even in the evenings. Most nights, about 9:00 P.M., he and Leslyn made a pitcher of wine coolers (sometimes lemonade) and invited Clare and Dorothy for an hour and a half of lively conversation in the open, if not precisely fresh, air of the apartment house’s roof, ten stories up.45

  Campbell wrote to him in Chicago with his reaction to For Us, the Living. It was just about what could be expected: he suggested it be rewritten by throwing out all the nudism and free love and reworking the backstory from a political evolution to a technical revolution, based on atomic transmutation. 46 Heinlein knew there was no point in arguing. He replied mildly:

  To me there is a close and causal relationship, or rather a functional and structural relationship between economic customs, sexual customs, dress, taboos, language, political institutions, etc. I think that the dress customs, sex conventions, language habits, etc., of the mid-Victorians were a direct expression of the economic practices of the time, and vice versa, oh, most certainly vice versa! This is not economic determinism, but a loose expression of a theory of function in culture.

  There are other things in that book which would offend much more deeply than nudity and different sexual mores. I believe that you didn’t mention them because you yourself are an odd and unorthodox man. To you they were an “of course.” But they would not be to most people. Puritanism is not simply, nor even primarily, a matter of sex and modesty. We are living in a period of Puritanism (or moral authoritarianism) but most people are totally unaware of it because we have dropped some of the superficial trappings of traditional puritanism. It is impossible to overemphasize the influence of moral dogmatism in this culture. Most people are so thoroughly brought up to it that they can not be made aware of it, even when it is pointed out to them. (Is a fish aware of water?) Nor is it possible to overemphasize the influence of moral dogmatism in economics.

  Nor is it possible to break with superstitious nonsense and lead one’s own life. One either conforms to a culture, or fights it. There is no middle ground. Organisms exist only in environment. One can decide to ignore a culture, but the culture will never ignore one in turn. No can do. It’s like deciding to ignore the law of gravitation—it won’t let you!

  So—finding myself in a culture which is distasteful to my inner needs, I adapt to it as comfortably as possible, and try mildly from time to time to change it here and there.47

  About much of this, Campbell was dubious. He particularly objected to the close relationship Heinlein saw between social customs and economic conventions48—a progressivist, social-engineering notion that traces back through Herbert Spencer to the founding socialist, Henri de Saint-Simon: “The institutions of a people are nothing but the application of its [ethical] ideas.”49

  Since the book was dead in the water, it was a moot issue, but a datum to keep in mind as he tailored future material to Campbell’s tastes—“odd and unorthodox,” though very much worth cultivating. Campbell’s conversational style has been compared to having a manhole cover dropped on you,50 verbal sledgehammers incapable of nuance. But that kind of shock effect has a chance of dislodging your thinking out of ruts and away from the level of slogans—clearing away mental cobwebs. “I just like to shake them up,” Campbell decades later told Barry Malzberg.51

  The Democratic National Convention opened on July 15, the day the Battle of Britain began, with the first of repeated German air attacks against British airfields on the home islands. In Chicago, it was exceptionally hot and humid and uncomfortable. Heinlein had been in and through Chicago many times, but his recent political experience, particularly with the migrant camps in the Imperial Valley, gave him new eyes. Between the Loop downtown and the green and pleasant lands of the University of Chicago campus there lay—and still lies—mile after grim mile of ghetto-slums, poverty and despair rolling out of the dilapidated, turn-of-the-century detached carpenter’s gothic houses like sweat off a field hand’s back. “One night there, I saw five people burned up in one of those death traps,” he recalled.52

  As a party insider, Heinlein had obtained press credentials that allowed him on the mezzanine and a Special Appointee pass “good at any gate and anywhere in the Stadium,” both signed by James A. Farley, the president’s chief political fixer. Heinlein got into the spirit of things, wearing a red, white, and blue straw skimmer.53 Almost immediately the Heinleins ran into Jerry Voorhis again.

  They found the convention much more staid than expected, with not much of the spittoon-and-cigar-smoke backroom atmosphere that traditionally went along with the national party conventions. Everybody seemed self-conscious that the convention was being broadcast on the radio. Things were so quiet, in fact, that he took his sister-in-law Dorothy one evening.

  The draft for Roosevelt, he thought, was genuine rather than staged—or possibly genuine as well as staged, but genuine in any event, and he was satisfied with the result, though disturbed about Roosevelt’s acceptance speech, in which he floated the idea of a reintroducing conscription.54 Heinlein was dead set against conscription, under any circumstances, and saw no long-term benefit in becoming embroiled in the European war. It might even be reason enough to cross the aisle and vote for Wendell Willkie:

  If I become convinced that Wilkie will save us from a semi-totalitarian condition, i.e., the draft, and bids fair to understand what is needed for modern national defense, I will vote for him. If—I am not yet convinced and don’t like him for other reasons.55

  Even when affirming the principle of party loyalty, Heinlein nuanced it. Perhaps the difficult division in California politics over the past four years—between mainstream Democrats and the party’s radical-progressive EPIC leadership—had made him acutely conscious of where, precisely, his loyalties lay. A less supple mind might fall to one side or the other of the razor’s edge. But you had to achieve whatever you could at the moment, given the materials you had available to work with, and like-minded people could work together no matter what their party affiliation. This was certainly true of his relationship with John Campbell, whom he characterized to his friends as a “rock-ribbed Republican.”56 But, he told Campbell,

  I don’t think of you and myself as a republican and a democrat, but
rather as two different men with different backgrounds and different data but who are both intelligent and socially minded and who are working toward much the same social objectives as best they may, each in his own environment.57

  That is, they had (roughly) the same social goals, even though they disagreed about strategies for achieving them.

  The General Semantics seminar was held about a week after the convention, 58 in a suburb some distance from the downtown and the lake, and near the University of Chicago, but just as hot and humid. Immediately, they all picked up where they had left off the previous year in L.A., kicking around ideas for a General Semantics demonstration-movie that was supposed to be fully entertaining and instructive at the same time—a tough proposition.

  The Heinleins also met new people, including Japanese professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, S. I. Hayakawa. Hayakawa, like Heinlein, had been directed to Korzybski by Stuart Chase’s 1938 Tyranny of Words.59

  After the seminar, Heinlein wrote “Six Against the Empire” through three grinding weeks of Chicago August heat and humidity. He was not completely happy with the results, but shifting the Yellow Peril story from racial to cultural differences was the best he could do and stay within the framework of Campbell’s outline. If he strayed too far, it would no longer be “presold.” He sent the completed manuscript off to Campbell, retitled “Sixth Column,” taking the Fifth Column of the Spanish Civil War one further.

  Robert and Leslyn briefly considered staying in Chicago for the Labor Day weekend, when the second “world science fiction convention,” called Chicon, would take place. But he and Leslyn had been away from home for nearly three months by that time, living out of suitcases, and there was a limit to how much they could prolong the trip. Campbell expedited the payment for them, and when the check arrived—$584.62, including an extra quarter-cent bonus for exceptional quality that was becoming routine for him—they got ready to make that trip to Michigan to visit with Doc Smith and buy a used car.

  It was time to start letting Campbell down gently about churning out pay copy at the same rate he had been doing. Heinlein later said that he would probably want to get out of pulp writing within a couple of years,60 and this thought might already have been percolating in the back of his mind in the fall of 1940. Since Campbell had said he was coming to depend on Heinlein’s production, Heinlein wanted to bring in enough new material for Astounding and Unknown to be able to “retire” when the time came. He wrote that he would probably not do so much fiction writing when he got back to Hollywood 61 : his eyes were starting to bother him. He might not be able to keep up steady work at writing.

  He asked Campbell for his preference among the stories he had in development: the tesseract story was on hold; he had a reincarnation novelette he was calling “Da Capo”; “Fire Down Below” as a two-part serial for Astounding ; and another two-part serial, “The Shadow of Death,” which was just a germ at this point: “Conflict between ordinary men who live to be 60–70 and men who live to be over 200. A strong tragic story with plenty of necessary detail.”62

  He also offered Campbell an oddity story that may have been inspired by Forrest J. Ackerman’s “Assorted Services” project. Ackerman had given up a regular paid job and for nine months in 1940 collaborated with a friend, Ted Emsheimer, offering to do “anything for anyone, from borrowing a book to reminding about birthdays.”63 Heinlein’s General Services company also offered miscellaneous personal services for a fee—to compensate for the personal servants who had disappeared from middle-class American life in the last thirty years—but took on much larger projects as well. He warned Campbell:

  The basic notion is not a science-fiction notion—at least I don’t think the readers will think that the art of business organization and the development of a new field of enterprise (one which is not based on some scientific advance) is a science-fiction story. Of course I can stick in a lot of pseudo-science window dressing, as I did in “Coventry,” but there is no basic science development involved. Judging by the reader response, that method was successful in “Coventry” (which was not a science-fiction story, except by misdirection!) but the method does not seem to be as readily applicable to General Services, as I write it.

  There is a story there, but it seems to be a Sinclair Lewis story rather than an Astounding story.

  I have been thinking about having the General Services company outfit the colonizing expedition that founds Luna City. That might make it a story, by sheer tour de force. 64

  Campbell was a little alarmed at the prospect of a slowdown in his best, most dependable producer.

  You may have to slow down because of the eyes, but please don’t desert the ship. Damn it, I like your stuff, and so—which is vastly more important—do the readers … . It takes three to four years at least to find a top-rank author’s replacement, so hang around for a while.65

  He wanted the tesseract story soonest, but the long-lifer story sparked many comments.

  Robert and Leslyn drove over to Jackson, Michigan, on August 17 and were met by Doc and Jeanne Smith, and their sixteen-year-old daughter, Verna, all warm and welcoming, energetic and intelligent people—“muy simpatico,” as he later wrote about the meeting.66 They talked about doing a collaborative novel—a mainstream novel, perhaps, for The Saturday Evening Post or Collier’s. Heinlein had a good character in mind and suggested they set it in the food-service industry, to take advantage of Smith’s background in cereal chemistry.

  Smith had been thinking about what he wanted to get them in the way of a car, and had investigated the used-car market while waiting for them to arrive. He thought he had found one that might do for them. His test-driving terrified and amazed Heinlein: Doc gunned the engine (sound enough) on a back road, his head bent so far over, ear resting on the frame (to listen for squeaks by bone conduction) that he couldn’t see the road ahead. Heinlein was in the passenger seat, terrified, but “trying hard to appear cool, calm, fearless—a credit to the Patrol.”67 He bought the Chevy sedan for $585—the Street & Smith check plus thirty-eight cents out of pocket. They christened the car Skylark IV.

  On August 23 they were done with traveling: they posted Robert’s routine notice of his whereabouts to the Navy Department and left for Los Angeles, arriving on the twenty-eighth—Leslyn’s birthday. “Blowups Happen” had just appeared in the September Astounding. “Coventry” had placed first in that magazine’s Analytical Laboratory (as the readers’ poll was called), and Campbell’s lead editorial was about Heinlein’s story in this issue. And there was one letter commenting on “Coventry,” with another backhanded compliment. “The Devil Makes the Law” came out that month, too, in Unknown, under the Anson MacDonald byline. Heinlein had definitely and finally “arrived.”

  And with story orders in hand for another year’s worth of income, Heinlein picked up his writing routine again, and agonized through the tesseract story, now titled “‘—And He Built a Crooked House—.’” The day he sent it off (September 12, 1940), Doc and Jeanne Smith arrived in Los Angeles for an overnight visit, and the Heinleins took the Smiths to dinner with Jack Williamson, Ed Hamilton, and Leigh Brackett, stopping in at the LASFS meeting in downtown Los Angeles. Williamson and Hamilton had shown up that summer, traveling cross-country from east to west while the Heinleins were traveling cross-country from west to east, and were already well acquainted with the Mañana Literary Society crowd. Jack Williamson, in particular, delighted Heinlein. He was a very quiet, shy man, unassuming—a little too unassuming, in Heinlein’s opinion:

  Two writers have influenced my writing most: H. G. Wells and Jack Williamson. But you influenced me more than Mr. Wells did. (I hope not too many readers noticed how much I’ve leaned on you. You spotted it, of course. But you never talk …68

  In between stories and social events, scheduled and unscheduled, the Heinleins were painting the house and sprucing things up in the garden. They wanted to be ready to jump if war boiled over.69 In the meantime, Heinlein wou
ld keep punching the money machine to build up their reserves before taking a little much-needed personal time: “I’ve acquired, without assimilating, too many impressions lately, and it’s time I took stock. My mind is as cluttered as a neglected desk drawer.”70

  They had arrived back in Los Angeles on the day John and Doña Campbell’s first child, Philinda Duane Campbell, was born, so P.D. and Leslyn shared the same birthday. Discreetly they offered to be godparents to P.D.71—an offer that delighted Doña. But John Campbell had family close by, and he wound up asking his father and stepmother. John and Doña Campbell let the Heinleins know they would prefer to have them as foster parents, if it ever became necessary. This was a responsibility Robert and Leslyn took very seriously:

  Leslyn and I intended to have children when we got married, but a combination of circumstances made it difficult. I came down with T.B.; I was retired which brought half-pay; the years piled up and now Leslyn is thirty-six and the world is in a hell of a mess. If she should become pregnant inadvertently, we would acquiesce cheerfully. In the mean time we have no plans for children of our own.72