I am afraid that “Creation Took Eight Days” will have to come back. I don’t know whether this was intended for Astounding or Unknown. It might possibly fit either.
The basic trouble is that it lacks point; nothing of particularly convincing importance occurs in the story. I am afraid it simply has no punch.
I suggest you lay this one aside for a while and look it over in three or four months and see if you don’t agree with me.50
It was signed with his full name, not simply “John.”
That was disturbing on many levels.51 The chatty, voluble, friendly John had completely disappeared and was replaced by this coldly formal stranger. That kind of unexplained sudden reversal might have triggered depressing, mildly paranoiac doubts about the impossibility of achieving any real understanding of another human being. (A. P. White [Anthony Boucher] received a similar rejection letter from Campbell within a day or so.) Campbell seemed to have missed everything that made the story important to Heinlein: what he had taken as a slow buildup of horror, Campbell had dismissed as “lacks point.”
Heinlein dealt with his feelings of personal rejection as he had learned to, by chopping off the immediate experience of the emotions to process later. As for the professional rejection … if he could miss his target that badly, this was the early warning signal that triggered the up-or-out policy he had set for himself a year ago. And that, surprisingly, gave him a sense of relief, of being finally unchained.
So—at long last came the envelope I had been looking for, a rejection instead of a check. I had a quick pang of regret over the money I didn’t get which was washed away by the pleasant knowledge that school was out at last. I spent the whole day taking pictures. I spent the next day starting the excavation for a swimming pool, a project which I have had in mind for five years, which I have been ready to commence for some months, but which takes time, lots of it. I could hire it done by staying at the typewriter, but that was not the idea—I wanted the heavy physical exercise which a pick, shovel, and wheelbarrow provides.52
He still had a few stories that would appear in the pulps—“Lost Legacy” appeared in the November issue of Pohl’s Super Science Stories (Pohl had left the magazines—or been fired; it wasn’t clear), chopped up and atrociously edited and under the inapt title “Lost Legion.” The magazine was on the stands in August, and he began receiving mail about it almost immediately. Together with “They,” “Lost Legion” was already becoming one of his most successful stories, and the “Lyle Monroe” pseudonym seemed no obstacle at all to the colleagues who wrote him about the story.
And he had nonpulp writing projects on his back burner: in addition to the projects he had agreed to take on for Korzybski, he wanted to write up the money game he had invented for For Us, the Living as a tract in monetary theory. He had a publisher ready to take it, if and when it got written.53
The above plans, although numerous and involved, are leisurely in their nature—which is what I have been wanting. I want to be able to stop, sit down, and “invite my soul” for an hour, a day, or a week, if I feel the need for it. I don’t know yet what my principal task in this world is, if I have one, but I do know that I won’t find it through too much hurry and striving. Nor by accepting other people’s standards.54
Campbell’s next letter was friendly again—and contained no mention of the rejection Campbell must have known would trigger Heinlein’s retirement. Heinlein replied in the same vein until an opportunity should present itself to say what he might find to say about the subject.
In the meantime, life went on. Robert knew Campbell was counting on product from his Mañana Literary Society protégés and suggested he write a regular weekly “marketing letter” for this West Coast writers’ colony, so they would be able to compete on even terms with the New York writers who could just drop by Campbell’s office for the latest scoop on what he was buying.
Cleve Cartmill and his fiancée, Jeanne Irvine, were becoming jittery at the relatives’ plans for their wedding at the end of September and decided to move up the date to August 18. Robert and Leslyn drove them to Las Vegas—then, in the days before Bugsy Siegel invented the casino strip, barely a wide place in the road. “I drove the Mojave Desert twice in twenty hours, and it made an old man out of me. That makes two honeymoons we have chaperoned in six weeks; I am quitting the business.”55 Nor had the writing business shut down just because he was no longer spending all day at the typewriter: now that he wasn’t writing full-time for pulps, he could consider writing a mainstream novel or marketing something to the slick magazines. A friend,56 Virginia Perdue, offered to introduce him to her agent (who had gotten her mysteries in serialization in The Saturday Evening Post).
Just then, Fred Pohl wrote saying that he had left Popular/Fictioneers suddenly to form an agency and he wanted Heinlein as a client. That was awkward : just the day before, Heinlein had told Doc Lowndes he could agent the two stories that were still outstanding (“‘My Object All Sublime’” and “Pied Piper”). That was all the stock Heinlein had on hand at the moment. He told Lowndes he could offer them to Alden Norton, which would give him a “back channel” to find out about Pohl’s situation, particularly with reference to the atrocious editing “Lost Legacy” had received. Some of the edits were dumb but at least comprehensible (that business that Ambrose Bierce, who was (positively) portrayed as a character in the story, might come back from his long absence and sue was typical); but a lot of the edits seemed like random monkeying around that made no sense.57 The title under which it was published, “Lost Legion,” didn’t make any sense at all.58 Lowndes discovered that Alden Norton, the owner at Popular who had taken over Pohl’s editorial duties, claimed he had published the manuscript as it came to him.59 Pohl said Norton chopped it up, and Heinlein thought Pohl had a lighter editorial hand than that. 60
Heinlein had nothing for Pohl to agent, but he could refuse to sell to Popular. He put the matter in Doc Lowndes’s hands: “If he [Pohl] got a dirty deal from them and wishes his friends to boycott them, I don’t care to do business with them. Will you please consult with Freddie on this point and see how he feels about it?”61
And then, the rejection of “Creation Took Eight Days” began to be resolved. Campbell wrote sheepishly, as close to an apology as he could get (without actually apologizing):
A boomerang’s pretty good at coming back and smacking down the thrower, but an evil disposition practically never misses. I evidently succeeded in biting myself on the back of the neck with thoroughness and dispatch. Those rejection notes. Trouble with being an editor is that you’re not able to afford being human—which is a statement, and not to be interpreted as a gripe. You and Boucher are perfectly right, I’m wrong—but I’ll tell you how I got that way. 62
Those curt, cold rejection letters had been written and signed while under the influence of a bad case of influenza and not entirely compos mentis. Later, when he had more leisure to figure out what had struck him so wrong about “Creation,” Campbell was able to develop more coherent comments: the story didn’t cue the reader as to the kind of story it was. It could probably be salvaged by reslanting it.63 Heinlein thought the same true of A. P. White’s story, rejected at the same time and in the same way.64
Heinlein was relieved that the friendship had not crashed. He wrote back immediately:
I hope this letter finds you fully recovered from flu. I don’t see how you managed to write as kind and decent a letter as you wrote to me, feeling as rocky as flu makes one feel. I was afraid that my letter to you would make you sore, although I did my best to explain myself. It seemed to me that you might be expected to feel that I was being ungrateful and childish in my attitude. I’m glad you did not take it that way, I don’t ever want to have a misunderstanding with you, John, I don’t think we ever would have, face to face, but letters are feeble methods of communication at best.65
Trying to do business with friends was emotionally draining.66
In the meantime, he sof
tened his retirement news by telling Campbell that if he got an idea for a story that would suit Campbell’s needs, he would feel free to write it, and, until either the Heinlein name or the Anson MacDonald byline cracked the slicks, they were both available for pulp—or Lyle Monroe or Caleb Saunders at lower rates. He offered to do a serial under these terms, since Campbell was so short of material, recapitulating the way they had worked out “Methuselah’s Children” by draft-comment-revision during the writing process, but at a more leisurely pace.
This big project would generate a cash surplus in the Heinlein family exchequer (even after buying Leslyn a scandalously expensive fur coat), which they could dedicate to another visit with the Campbells in New Jersey, probably around the holidays.
Willy Ley wrote saying that he was going to visit his old friend the German émigré film director Fritz Lang, already famous for the Expressionist films Metropolis (1927), Frau im Mond (1929), and M (1931), and wanted to spent time with the Heinleins. Cheered, Heinlein settled down to clear his desk before Ley got into town, cutting “‘My Object All Sublime’” to the size Doc Lowndes had said he could probably sell. He thought that the hack editing “Lost Legacy” had received might have lessened the commercial value of the Lyle Monroe pseudonym, so he came up with Leslie Keith, 67 combining the names of Leslyn and her sister, Keith. He offered the story to Campbell under either pseudonym, at fire-sale rates, since he didn’t have an actual commitment from Lowndes.
Robert and Leslyn were having dinner one night in September with his old friend Elwood “Woodie” Teague when an unpleasant incident occurred. Teague had been at the Naval Academy with Heinlein, though he left before graduation to go into banking and had done quite well for himself. A “black reactionary,” he would argue politics with Heinlein for hours on end, but he had done everything he could to promote Heinlein’s political career.
We were very close—when their baby girl was killed in an accident [in 1937], it was us they sent for. We spent a week with them then, going home only to sleep. I arranged the funeral, and fed him liquor, and held his head. And so forth. More of the same, over seventeen years.68
Somehow, over the years, the subject of race had never come up before. Teague suddenly went off about “the Jews,” making anti-Semitic remarks that would have been at home in the mouth of a Nazi.
At first, Heinlein thought Woody was just kidding, in extremely bad taste, but Teague assured him he was not kidding.
I sat there for another fifteen seconds, thinking about my lawyer, who is a Jew and one of the finest men I know, and about my campaign treasurer, another Jew, and about their kids. Anyhow, I decided that I couldn’t let it go on and ever look them in the face again.
So I stood up and said, “Woodie, apparently there has been a mistake made. It appears you didn’t know that I am half Jewish.” Then I turned to Leslyn and said, “Come on—we are going home,” and went out to get our coats.69
This was a complete surprise to Leslyn: she knew as well as Robert that his background was Protestant at least six generations back, and Bavarian Catholic before that. Moreover, Robert never lied. (“I don’t tell a lie once in five years; when I do, it’s arc-welded and water tight.”70) But she caught her cue and followed his lead.
Is it any wonder I love the gal? She looks little and soft and feminine, which she is, but she’s got mind as hard and tough and logical as a micrometer gage.71
Anyhow we left, leaving a social shambles behind us—went home to nurse a stomach attack and a migraine, respectively.
If nothing else, Woody would keep his mouth shut—“one less loud mouth to fan the fire of racial intolerance.”72 But fuming about bigotry and racism apparently got him thinking about race and genetics—and utopias.
Nine days after the dinner with Woody Teague, Heinlein wrote Campbell that he had an idea for a serial: once the problems of economics and politics are solved, “what is left—genetics, what are we going to make of the human race?”73 Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World barely scratched the surface of the possibilities—and Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men had simply glossed over the difficulties.
The problem was, the story had to be set in a utopia, and he had no idea how to tell a story with the kind of conflict the readers wanted to see in a utopia. That was a technical problem he would have to thrash out to his own satisfaction before he could write the story.74 He laid out the problem, serial numbers suitably filed off, in a letter to Robert A. W. Lowndes:
… the basis of drama is tragedy and Utopia aint tragic. In this field you can do short stories about minor incidents in an otherwise-Utopian culture, but I defy you to do a story 50,000 words or longer about the future and have that future be a Utopia—and sell it! To a pulp book in this field I mean. No, the cash customers want their meat red and dripping; if you don’t give them actual gore, you must give them strong socio-economic conflict, and that means no Utopias. If you postulate that the earth is a Utopia, then you must find some other scene in the universe which is not Utopia, and lay your conflict there.75
By that time, “By His Bootstraps” and “Common Sense” had been out on the stands for ten days, and Campbell was able to cite reader comment about “By His Bootstraps.” Heinlein had thought the story a hackwork soufflé, tossed off. Campbell assured him it was not—it was a major story. Jack Williamson wrote, too, calling it “an astounding technical feat.”76
The interview he had given a journalist for Writer’s Markets & Methods came out in the magazine’s October issue, and Heinlein was the cover and lead story of the magazine. “The write-up made me sound so omniscient that I was tempted to call myself up and ask for some advice and a little coaching,” he told Campbell.77 But even this came with a price: Willard Hawkins wrote that Author & Journalist would not use the Denvention speech—or the gag article Heinlein had sent them, “How to Write a Story.” Because of the interview in Writers’ Markets & Methods, an editor had decided “not to use anything concerning [Heinlein] for a while.” Hawkins was embarrassed, since the Author & Journalist submission was his idea in the first place—but nobody likes to be seen as trolling another magazine’s leavings.78
Then Forrest Ackerman showed up one day with a copy of the speech printed in Technocracy-green ink. He had transcribed it from Walt Daugherty’s photograph records and mimeographed it as his own “Novacious” publication.79 Heinlein was not pleased—and was particularly displeased that Ackerman had traced Heinlein’s signature onto his mimeo stencils without asking permission.80 When Campbell received a copy from Ackerman, he told Heinlein he should have submitted it as an article for Astounding. “As it is, I’ll probably steal hunks for editorials.”81 Campbell rejected “‘My Object All Sublime,’” and Heinlein sent it on to Doc Lowndes, who bought it and scheduled it for the February 1942 issue of Future.
At the end of September, Robert and Leslyn found themselves saddled with a new responsibility that was going to be eating up more cash: Leslyn’s brother-in-law Mark Hubbard, a petroleum engineer in the Philippines, had been financially supporting Leslyn’s mother, Florence Gleason “Skipper” MacDonald, since 1934. Now he had taken a new job with a salary cut and could no longer afford the $50 per month he was giving Skipper for her support. It’s your turn to take over now, he told Heinlein.
Unpleasant as the prospect was, Heinlein wrote back assuring Hubbard he would take up the slack and thanking him for his past generosity, which “postponed for me a nasty problem.”82 At the very worst, she could stay with Leslyn and him and share bread and board.
The genetics story was not coming together at all—and Heinlein was developing a nice case of insomnia.
I am getting into a state of nerves about this damned serial. I’ve thought about it longer and harder than any story I’ve ever done, and the result of said thought is damned unsatisfactory. I am about convinced that the story is unsuitable for magazine market; Leslyn and Willy are both stubbornly insistent that I do it, and that I do it straight, with no corning up f
or the trade. The trouble is neither lack of material nor lack of interesting ideas (interesting to me), but that the subject seems to me to develop in terms of very heavy philosophical ideas, essentially tragic and almost devoid of action possibilities. The more I work on it the more it seems like a goddam Russian novel, or one of Eugene O’Neil’s less successful efforts.83
Ley, in fact, was extremely forceful in his opinion: “Willy said, ‘You write it. I vill go back to New York and jam it down his [Campbell’s] throat!’”84
Because of Campbell’s publishing schedule, Heinlein had to get something written in order to fill the gap. He promised to start writing by the first of November, even churning out transparent hackwork to fill Campbell’s pages, if it came to that. “Do you have any idea,” he asked Campbell, “any idea which is strong enough to be the central conflict of a book-length serial? … If it were not for the steady march past of the days, I would not holler for help—but comes next week and I must write.”85
Campbell suggested Heinlein take a break—aim for a novelette, which would give him more time—but at all cost stay within his area of strength:
What you contributed to science fiction was a direct expression of what I’d been vaguely groping for—personalized, emotionalized science fiction instead of intellectualized stuff. Your prime strengths are two—reality of personalities who have reasonable emotional reactions, and a reality of technical-political-social culture against which they can react … .
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 36
