Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  Heinlein was having trouble with the General Services story. He was thinking about having his General Services contract the building of Luna City, just to connect it into his history of the future,73 but the story wasn’t coming together. Campbell offered him another idea, about a spaceship that missed its mark—interesting, but it would be a while before he could get to it. He put General Services aside and wrote “Logic of Empire.”

  He did take time out for one thing: H. G. Wells was coming to a bookshop in Pasadena in late October for an autograph party. It was Heinlein’s first chance to meet Wells, and he would not miss it. Heinlein took his treasured copy of the 1910 revision of When the Sleeper Wakes. Wells was surprised—and pleased—to see the antique. He inscribed it to “Lieutenant Heinlein.”74 This meeting—the only time Heinlein and Wells met—has some of the historical resonance for science fiction that Mozart hearing the young Beethoven has for music.

  When Harry Warner, Jr., a fan, wrote asking for something of Heinlein’s he could publish in the second anniversary issue of his fanzine, Spaceways,75 Heinlein cautiously agreed, though he didn’t want to become embroiled in the feuding that was endemic on the East Coast. He was in any case spending too much time at the typewriter for the good of his health. But he had an odd, humorous, stream-of-consciousness piece about all the things a writer does to avoid actual writing he called ironically “How to Write a Story.”76 It had failed to place while they were gone—they had found it in the mail when they got back—and was so odd that he would otherwise have trouble finding a place for it. He subscribed to Spaceways as he was already subscribing to Will Sykora’s Fantasy News.

  Fred Pohl wrote and expressed regret he had missed meeting them in New York. He wanted more story submissions.77 Heinlein didn’t have any new material not already committed to Campbell—and particularly none he could afford to divert to lower-paying markets. But he did have the five early stories that had not sold. He was particularly interested in getting “Lost Legacy” into print, and offered all five (three of which he had already submitted to Pohl) on the sole condition that Pohl didn’t do any editorial monkeying about with the idea-content. Pohl’s editorial comments about “Beyond Doubt” and “Lost Legacy” struck Heinlein as perceptive and workable,78 but the prospect of selling off the last of his ugly stepchildren at fire-sale rates caused Heinlein to reevaluate his overall strategy.

  If it should ever happen that he couldn’t keep hitting the high-pay markets like Astounding, he did not intend to be forced to live on the lowpay /slow-pay markets. There were easier and less personally humiliating ways of making a living: he would get out of the business at once, rather than take the chance of having some lowlife like Ray Palmer make cracks in print about him “slipping” because his stuff was rejected.79 And the notion that he might put a friend—Campbell—through the unpleasantness of having to reject him was very unpalatable, and he told Campbell (“John” now; their letters began addressing each other by first names during the summer) so, in so many words.

  Right now I know I am a profit-making commercial property, because the cash customers keep saying so in the Analytical Laboratory, but I don’t intend to hang on while slipping down into fourth or fifth place. No, when I quit, I’ll quit at the top, in order to insure that our business relations will never become unpleasant or disappointing to either of us. Which is a long and verbose way of saying that I value your friendship very highly indeed and intend to keep it if I can.80

  In the meantime, the lost-starship idea was germinating into a story. He wrote “Universe” to fit into his history of the future, set about a quarter century after “Misfit,” and mailed the story to Street & Smith on December 1. “It was a dilly of an idea, John, and I appreciate you letting me work on it. I hope that it satisfied you.”81 It did, and Campbell shoved at him another pregnant technical concept. “Such nice ideas he has,”82 Heinlein remarked of Campbell’s weaponized radioactive dust—but it dovetailed with a political story he was already germinating based on discussions he was having with Robert Cornog. The radioactive dust gave focus to the story. In the same letters, he began outlining a proposal for a serial about the conflict of long-lived and short-lived that made Campbell frantic with delight, if the lively discussion that stretched over a period of weeks is any indication.

  Heinlein’s professional life went well that fall. But as the year drew to a close, a local fan, Bruce Yerke, decided to write a flippant and satirical fanzine article about the Heinleins’ political activities. Heinlein knew Yerke’s underlying purpose was to get him involved in a public argument with the L.A. fans about Technocracy, and he was not going to succumb. He had avoided making any kind of public comment about Technocracy so far—privately, he considered Technocracy a particularly vicious kind of industrial fascism:

  It is a state run without democratic consent, an absolute authority, no checks and balances—like it or lump it. I am inclined to believe that in due time American versions of Hitler and Mussolini would maneuver their way to the driver’s seat, and that we would have a hell of a time getting them out. In any case the social set-up as described in the study course provides no way of getting them out. In our present set-up no matter how bad an administration is, we get a chance every couple of years or so to “turn the rascals out.”83

  In any case, he hated that kind of pointless public argument that went around and around and never went anywhere. It got him upset without producing any beneficial stimulation. “I most bodaciously will not get into a fan mag debate.”84 Heinlein asked Yerke not to publish the article:

  Every person has things about them which they do not like to have dragged out into public. I’ve led a very active life and made a powerful number of mistakes. If you go digging into my record, much of which is public and easily available, you will find a lot of things which I would much rather forget, but which are facts.

  But my friends don’t go out of their way to remind me of them.85

  Yerke published the article anyway.86

  So far as Robert and Leslyn were concerned, that was that: they had let him know they would not consider it friendly, and Yerke had decided to not be a friend. They quietly let it be known they would not go anywhere Yerke was—which alarmed several of the local fans, since that meant they would not appear at the LASFS Christmas party. Yerke was pressured into writing an awkward, not-quite-apologetic letter. “I take it that you don’t intend any harm,” Heinlein replied, “but, for me, you play too rough.” People naturally react badly when they are satirized, he explained; what else could he have expected? 87 Robert and Leslyn would attend the LASFS Christmas party, but any continuing and closer relationship with those fans was no longer in the Heinleins’ plans.

  The radioactive dust story was ready on Christmas Eve and mailed off with the working title of “Foreign Policy”—and that was the year’s work for Heinlein. His subscription copy of Unknown (the January 1941 issue) had arrived, with Cleve Cartmill’s first published story, “Oscar.” Cartmill had not received his copy yet, so they took the magazine over and gave it to him as a Christmas present. “Greater love hath no man than that he giveth his new copy of Unknown to a friend before he had a chance to read it himself. Looks like an exceptionally good number, too.”88

  That evening, Robert made time alone to prepare a Christmas surprise for Leslyn. When they were in bed reading with the radio on, he slipped out to the dining room where he had set up the Zenith automatic record player he had bought for her. It “broadcast” to a radio frequency, and when he got back to the bedroom, he discreetly tuned the radio, then got back in bed. One of the ten disks on the changer was a platter he had recorded himself, with a Christmas message for her. When the radio called her by name, Leslyn started: “She did a double-take that money could not buy. And the longer it played the more excited she got.”89

  So his gift was a success. The new record player was also accompanied by a sizable check to buy more records. One of Leslyn’s gifts to him that year delight
ed him just as much—a bedside memo pad with a tiny built-in light that came on automatically when you removed the pencil from its holder: “Just the thing,” he said, “for an insomniac writer.”90

  21

  EXPANDING HORIZONS

  First news of 1941 was Campbell’s reaction to “Foreign Policy”: there was no good solution to the dilemma it posed. Atomic weapons create a stalemate in power politics. Campbell had mixed reactions but decided the story’s weaknesses—its very unsatisfactoriness—could be its greatest strength if he spun it as a challenge to the reader. He retitled it “Solution Unsatisfactory,” calling attention to the story’s challenges.1

  Another potential sale was on the horizon: that Monday, Campbell sent a night letter saying he had forwarded the manuscript for “Sixth Column” to a book publisher, Henry Holt & Company, and, at the same time, to a Chicago radio producer, Ralph Rose, who was looking for science-fiction properties. Heinlein arranged for Clare to act as his local agent and keep any fees the properties earned. He and Leslyn had wanted to figure out some way to help underwrite Clare’s doctoral program, and that might do it painlessly. At the same time, Clare suggested Robert get a Hollywood agent, and he did, making arrangements with H. N. Swanson for film and media representation.

  In January, they became a two-writer family again. As the first installment of “Sixth Column” came out in the January issue of Astounding, Leslyn’s poem “The Ballad of Lalune” came out in the January issue of Weird Tales—Leslyn’s first published writing since 1939.

  Heinlein revised “Lost Legacy” to Fred Pohl’s editorial comments. Gradually the half dozen stories Campbell rejected were selling, one by one, to lesser magazines.

  With the money coming in and the immediate pressure of writing commitments in abeyance, Heinlein probably felt he could afford to take a little time off and do some household renovation projects. Making a studio for himself was at the top of the list. He had been writing in a corner of the living room, which could be very distracting, sharing space with guests and Leslyn’s continuing political activities. He had been putting off making a new space for his own use because he expected to be called up for active duty at any time, but the crisis had gone on for a long time now.2

  The garage was over twenty feet tall, with a lot of floor space. He and Bill Corson installed a loft, starting in January, before the worst of the rains came on (February is Los Angeles’s month for gullywashers and hailstorms). They didn’t bother getting a permit for the work, but sneaked materials in under cover of night and even cut the windows and outside door at night so that the neighbors would not catch on and complain. When the structure was completed, including a stairway to the street, he posted a sign Bill Corson created for him on the outside door, to discourage random visitors and door-to-door salesmen:

  ENDOSTROPHIC THERAPY ROOM. KEEP OUT!

  DO NOT KNOCK!!!

  Use upper door—it works quite well

  The “upper door” was the main house—down the stairs, across the driveway, and up a curved flight of brick steps, where Leslyn had posted her own sign:

  Anyone knocking on this door before eleven A.M. will be buried free of charge.3

  Toward the end of 1940, Campbell had recommended Heinlein take up photography as a hobby,4 and Heinlein was able to write back that he already had a bad case of the camera bug: he used a Contax 1.5 he had bought from a German refugee—that was why he was building a darkroom and sculpting studio in his renovation. “I am completely nuts now on the subject of cameras,” he told Campbell. This produces a vicious cycle: “I have to write stories to support my camera, darkroom, buy gear, etc., but I really haven’t time to write stories because photography is a full time occupation.”5 Nude photography was what he spent much of his free time and spare cash on. Heinlein never had any difficulty getting women to pose nude for him—which astonished his friends and acquaintances. To him, it was simply a numbers game: “If you approach a woman right, one out of two will pose nude for you,” he told Forrest Ackerman.6 “Leslyn’s chaperonage is the main reason why I can get anyone to pose for me I want for the purpose,” Heinlein told a fan he had met at Denvention .7 The Heinleins also had belonged for several years to a camera co-op that hired live models at group rates. In 1941, the co-op brought him the perfect model, Sunrise Lee. She could not fall into an ungraceful pose. A nude study of her hung in his house for the rest of his life.

  The studio was finished enough to move into by the beginning of February. He got a writing study, a sculpture and photography studio—and a darkroom, because he liked to develop his own photos (many of which were nudes, for which privacy was required in any case)—and a woodworking shop in the back of the shortened garage, plus much-needed extra bookshelves, and a second bath and spare bed for his insomniac “white nights.” The writing studio he put to immediate use. His brother Larry had asked for a $100 loan until April, so to underwrite the loan he wrote up his General Services story for Campbell and titled it “‘We Also Walk Dogs.’”

  But he also had his eye on bigger things. The radio adaptation of “Sixth Column” wasn’t going anywhere. Ralph Rose had disappeared, and the book deal Campbell was trying to broker collapsed as well. Campbell wanted the long-lifer serial Heinlein had outlined, though the story seemed a little “skimpy” for a serial. Heinlein decided to combine it with another story idea in his files, a super-science epic he had outlined, by having his long-lifers forced off Earth. He would use Doc Smith as the pattern for his lead character, Woodrow Wilson “Lazarus Long” Smith. Doc Smith’s ancestors for five generations back had lived to be more than a hundred years old.8 But he made him a very pragmatic rogue by mixing him with a literary character. He later told Jack Williamson:

  I took your immortal Giles Habibula, mixed him with your hero in Crucible of Power … and made another, after carefully filing off the serial numbers and giving it a new paint job. You invented the hero in spite of himself, the one with feet of clay, human and believable—and I knew a good thing when I saw it. The result? Lazarus Long. Lazarus, who never wanted trouble, always tried to duck out, never hesitated to stack the deck or tell a shameless lie if those tactics were safest for his hide.9

  Heinlein mailed the first serial installment on March 5, asking for comments he could incorporate in the last two-thirds of the serial.

  “While the Evil Days Come Not” was written in a very unusual way for him, through letter after letter of discussion of the serial’s various tropes and turns. This exchange was a much-expanded version of the way “Sixth Column” had been written, with discussion and feedback as he went along. Campbell’s comments were not all encouraging; but it was often the disagreements that made the most impact on the shape the story took on.

  The comments that caused Heinlein the most trouble had to do with Campbell’s skepticism about Heinlein’s planned non-secret of long life: his people lived longer because they believed they would live longer. Campbell wanted a scientific explanation, and Robert wanted to avoid the super-science cliché, since nobody could really say for sure that it had to be physical factors that determined everything. The issue was still open as he turned in the second installment of what was beginning to look like a four-parter. Campbell persisted: the psychosomatic long life bit just didn’t work in the story. Heinlein capitulated and found a “physical” explanation he could live with; the buyer presumably knew his market better than the mere writer. But perhaps this caused him to go stale on the project for a while. He went back to work finishing up the renovation, struggling with plumbing, perhaps to get his mind off the “Evil Days” serial. In any case, he finished the last installment on March 26—a “fairly radical departure”10 from the usual run of science fiction serials since there were no battles of any kind.

  During the planning and the writing, Campbell and Heinlein had, in letter after letter, chewed over aspects of Heinlein’s Fortean idea of encountering a race of intelligent beings owned by their gods, the Jockaira, which he shorthanded as �
��dog people.” “The yarn’s good,” Campbell told him after receiving the draft of the final installment.

  But the last chunk here tends to sag every time they hit one of the new planets. Reason: You don’t have any real conversation with—or meeting with—the Jabberwocky or whatever you called ’em [Jockaira], or the Little People. Jawohl; I know. You can’t talk to ’em sensibly. I still want to “hear them talk.” I don’t. Therefore you’re a liar and it didn’t happen at all, and I don’t believe you—at least not emotionally. Wherefore I think we’ve got to do some heavy faking … .

  In other words, I’d like you to take your carbon, go over it, and rewrite most of the dog-people part in dialog. Haul out all the “we can’t establish contacts, really” until the explanation of what really happened when the gods finally threw them off the planet. Your experts can warn, but most of your pragmatists—and isn’t Long pretty much one?—will feel that, even if they can’t get all the words right, and they are missing something here and there, they can straighten that out better when they’re finally settled. They’ve got a job to do; settling. The precisionists can fuss and stew, but their precision can wait till the proper time.

  Then the mask comes off, and they see what was behind that veil of language, and it really will scare them silly. The nice, kind, pleasant friend turns into something unholy, revolting to the very nature of men. The peaceful world is suddenly under the shadow of awful, lurking things, hiding unseen in their temples. Yeeow! Get me out of here!11