Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  Ackerman had volunteered for the Marines, but at 130 pounds, he was not taken. Eventually he was drafted into the Army, where his personal oddities made him a target:

  Well, when I went into the Army, the first day of that I felt like I had died. I was gonna go to hell. I was 29 years old, I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, and I was a virgin. And I went, God help me, you know, when the soldiers find out about this, every bully’s gonna pick on me. I’m gonna be the target, you know, this sissy Ackerman.29

  He asked for one of Heinlein’s nude photos to put up in his locker and around his office. Without having to talk about his prowess as a ladies’ man, he could let everyone assume he was a regular guy, and no one ever questioned him. He credited Heinlein with literally saving his life.30

  Heinlein certainly approved of the use they were put to: anything that screened off personal privacy from Mrs. Grundy, with or without stripes, was always okay by him.

  Heinlein’s name had not quite disappeared from the pulp magazines, however: an enthusiastic review promoting Willy Ley’s Shells and Shooting came out in the November 1942 issue of Astounding. It may have been commissioned verbally by John Campbell to fill a last-minute one-page hole, since the review does not appear on the table of contents for that issue, and Campbell would certainly have gotten Heinlein’s name on cover or contents if he could possibly have managed it—but in any case, Heinlein wanted to take any opportunity to promote Ley’s science writing.

  And that was all the writing he had done for pulp—perhaps all he would ever do.

  Even if his entire pulp production were forgotten, however, he had been immortalized: In the fall of 1942 William A. P. White finished a roman à clef mystery novel, Rocket to the Morgue, using the characters and situations from the Mañana Literary Society. The characters were blends, taking a bit from this person, a bit from another, but recognizable if you knew the players. John Campbell, who most certainly did know the players, read proof on the typeset galleys: “I dunno whether it’s a good murder mystery novel or not,” he told Heinlein. “I had too much fun reading the story and recognizing people.”31

  Heinlein was most of the chief suspect, Austin Carter. Campbell was in it, under his pseudonym Don A. Stuart, and White even put himself in as the detective, but also as his science fiction pseudonym, Anthony Boucher.32

  It’s more fun than anything I’ve seen anywhere anywhen. He made Leslyn into a mystery writer, and made “Joe Henderson” out of 25% Ed Hamilton and 75% Jack Williamson, and “D. Vance Wimpole” out of L. Ron Hubbard with amazing clarity. Also, half the gags in the book, if not more than half, are simple reporting … He used incident after incident that I knew; probably there are dozens of others you’ll recognize.33

  The book was in print by December, dedicated to Heinlein. He was flattered. He and Leslyn read it straight through in one sitting, he told White, looking over each other’s shoulder. “You handled me charitably,” he wrote to White. It gave him the experience of being an outsider looking in, which was rare and exciting. He could not pretend to evaluate it objectively: “For me it was simply the most fascinating book I have ever read.”34

  Not even overwork to the point of exhaustion put a serious crimp in the Heinleins’ omnivorous reading—or Robert’s, at any rate: Leslyn devoted her spare time to the neglected art of sleep. Robert particularly enjoyed C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters when they came out in an American edition by Macmillan in 1942.35 These letters had appeared in The Guardian in 1941, from the viewpoint of a senior demon giving infernal advice to his nephew, a tyro imp, on how best to corrupt human souls. The conceit tickled Heinlein’s fancy.

  Vincent McHugh, whose 1936 Caleb Catlum’s America Heinlein was still using as a touchstone to measure the compatibility of potential friends (along with Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao [1935] and an odd little French graphic novel, Private Memoirs of a Profiteer (M. Scrullionaire), An Animated Cartoon by Marcel Arnac [1939]), published his fourth book, I Am Thinking of My Darling—a response to H. G. Wells’s In the Days of the Comet—making good use of McHugh’s experience as a city planner for New York. Now McHugh was writing and directing film documentaries for the Office of War Information.

  But Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers so exactly said things Heinlein believed desperately needed to be said that Heinlein’s enthusiasm ran away with him, and he gushed for an hour about the book to a very uninterested fan, Rusty Hevelin, who came to visit for a couple of hours one day in 1943.36 That book was almost an essayistic parallel to what Heinlein had tried to get across in “Beyond This Horizon” (both were published in the same year, 1942): “Our Civilization has not yet,” Wylie said early in the book, “even dreamed of applying science to itself.”37 At one point in the introduction, Wylie had even quoted Ouspensky in an injunction dear to Heinlein’s heart: “Think in other categories.”

  Nor would Heinlein’s own writing career lie down and decently die so he could stop minding the store: a book editor named Bronner contacted Heinlein to use “Life-Line” and “‘—And He Built a Crooked House—’” in an anthology, and Heinlein wrote to Campbell for releases of the rights. When the stories were sold to Street & Smith, he had originally tried to vend only “first American serial rights”—rights to publish in the magazine—but Street & Smith bought “all rights,” without exception—and Campbell assured him the company’s policy was to revert the rights to the author, freely and without charge, whenever he had any actual use for them. Even if Street & Smith made the contract, the author would be entitled to 25 percent of the proceeds. Many of the other pulp chains would buy all rights and simply pocket the proceeds of secondary sales.

  Street & Smith was very concerned at that time about exploitative reprint magazines masquerading as paperback books. Campbell thought that might be the case here, since Bronner was extremely vague as to important details, such as who his publisher might be. Street & Smith refused to release the rights and killed the sale, saying if anyone was going to do an anthology of Street & Smith properties, they would prefer to do it themselves.38 One week later, however, they sold anthology rights to Donald Wollheim for “‘—And He Built a Crooked House—.’”

  Heinlein had arranged a sale that would total $146 net to him; Street & Smith had blocked that sale and turned around and sold one of the stories for $19 net to him. Even though Heinlein was not writing currently—and he might never go back to pulp—this practice struck him as unreasonably predatory. But he said nothing to Campbell about it at the time: “I took it and shut up, as I was up to my ears in war research and had neither the time nor the money to fight the arrangement.”39 This was the first mass-market paperback science-fiction anthology, The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and published in 1943.

  Without any real plans for going back to writing, Heinlein was nevertheless making notes for stories whenever something provocative came up. The stories that were appearing in the newspapers of the men at war—of suffering and of heroism and dedication—were inspiring. And he saw heroism and dedication even at the aircraft factory, of a quieter kind. When he did switch over from personnel to engineering early in 1943, he was thrown into contact with Tony Damico, a blind machinist. Damico was an absolutely fascinating man—and a perfect “fit” with the idea of Rhysling that had been kicking around in Heinlein’s mind for a few years now. He hadn’t felt up to writing it because he had trouble putting himself in the shoes of a blind man. “Being sighted myself, I had trouble characterizing a sightless man; he would not come into focus.”40 Talking with Damico—a nightclub entertainer before the war who had retrained himself into a machinist—gave Heinlein an abundance of details, but also an inspiring idea of what was possible.

  Heinlein felt he was idling where he was and mentioned the urge to write in a letter to Campbell. Campbell’s reply was shrewd.

  Your urge to work on stories may be prophetic, or a symptom of one of two things. Either that the plant there is beginning to r
un reasonably smoothly, or that it’s—well, shapfu. The “hap” standing for “hopelessly and permanently,” and that your mind, whether you have or not, has decided that there is, none the less, a way to get along in chaos.41

  Some progress was possible, even in “Snafu Manor,” as Heinlein’s group of friends and colleagues there had begun to call the Naval Air Experimental Station (their little corner of the Naval Aircraft Factory). “Snafu” is a military slang acronym, standing for “Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.”

  Heinlein’s first evaluations as civilian engineer came in early March 1943—first-rate—and he was promoted from “Assistant M.E., P-2” to “Associate M-E, P-3,” with a nice bump in pay (from $2,600 to $3,200 per annum).

  Sang was a young civil service engineer who had become part of the Heinleins’ social set. They found him very compatible, and he lived close by in downtown Philadelphia, too, so they saw each other frequently after work.

  In June, Heinlein was detached again, this time to Pittsburgh, to recruit junior engineers for the AML.42

  The war was not good to Robert and Leslyn Heinlein: the frustrations of a constantly increasing workload, searching for technical solutions that didn’t exist in the technology of 1943, flogging himself for not being at the front, and the bitterness over what he was not allowed to do, Robert was becoming humorless and superior. “Holiness is a bad habit, and one that frequently catches mutual admiration societies,” Bill Corson admonished him in August 1943. Leslyn’s workload, too, was constantly increasing, and she fretted over her sister and nephews in a concentration camp in the Philippines.

  Both Robert and Leslyn were taking out their frustrations on at least one of their friends. Robert did notice the liquor disappearing at a greater rate than usual, but he thought Bill Corson was responsible. Corson came from his Army camp in New Jersey to spend the weekends with them frequently—perhaps too frequently, since in his letters of this period Heinlein often mentions having houseguests nearly every weekend, Corson mostly, and no alone time at all. But neither Robert nor Leslyn would say anything to discourage a man on active duty in the Army. Although Corson had “a wonderful-to-see effect on Heinlein père,”43 he could, he admitted, be socially oblivious.44 But he protested they were using on him the same tactics they used to keep Asimov’s puppyish energy under control (Asimov was charming and funny and enthusiastic and oblivious: if you didn’t tramp on him—hard!—he’d run you over innocently and cheerfully), and Corson felt they portrayed him as consistently and invariably wrong about anything and everything.

  Leslyn complained that she felt taken for granted by Corson and relegated to household drudge while he was there. Any perceived threat to Leslyn brought out a swift and vehement response from Robert—by letter, since they had been dropping hints that Robert escalated into a firm instruction that they wouldn’t be having weeknight guests for a while.45 Corson admitted some culpability, but protested:

  I’ve never yet been able to sort out the times when I’m to take an esoteric hint or wait for a pointed bluntness, of which latter you are abundantly capable … . I’m neither utterly dense nor psychic … .

  I don’t think I could get you to see that you had ever made any mistakes, Wobert. For a long time I’ve seen that … it was taken for granted no matter what came up that I was always wrong. I guess maybe you believe that pretty thoroughly by practice, now … I don’t think I’m very likely to be able to convince you that I’m ever not in the wrong …46

  Heinlein and Corson worked out a mutual understanding: Heinlein replied immediately that he hated to take a holier-than-thou attitude with anyone, but especially Corson—but the process took months by exchange of letters. Perhaps there was another factor at work, as well. Years later, L. Sprague de Camp observed:

  Seems to me that Johnny Arwine suffers from the same disease that you do, which is a tendency to idealize your friends and then to be terribly hurt when they don’t come up to your expectations. I seriously hope you have a proper appreciation of the vices, faults, and shortcomings of the de Camps, as I should hate for you to be thus drastically disillusioned about us some day.47

  Catherine de Camp added by handwritten insert: “Or have you been already?”

  Perhaps the tension was being focused on Corson, since nothing could be done about their personal and professional situation. If so, Corson may have let the people in Heinlein’s immediate circle escape a blowup.

  By October 1943, it was clear that the Navy was not going to reactivate Heinlein’s retired status under any circumstances. But he had another bow to his string: John Arwine had got active duty in the Coast Guard—and the merchant marines were always a possibility. Now that supply ships had to have a military escort, the merchant marines had assumed critical importance to the war effort: it took ten tons of supplies, most of them shipped overseas, to maintain a man in the field for a year. No shipping, no warfare. Heinlein began doing research for either of those options. “I’m alarmed!” Bill Corson wrote Leslyn:

  For gossake, don’t let our Wobert go Merchant marining, because they shoot bombs and torpedoes at you when you do that. He’s uh … too close to maturity to swim all over the north Atlantic on winter nights … . It’s just that damned erratic conscience of his, and it’s high time he came to an understanding with it and ceased to allow it to bulldoze him.48

  Heinlein began clearing the decks, cleaning up his affairs so he could make a rapid move once he was approved for the merchant marines. He also had some medical problems to take care of.

  Lifestyle stress is often “somatized,” put into the body; many people get ulcers; Heinlein got an annoying case of hemorrhoids. He went to a doctor who specialized in reducing the inflamed tissue by injections, without the usual operation, and started the regimen as his application for the merchant marines came up. But nobody would take him for active duty.

  It looked for a few minutes as if I were going to make it—no legal impediments, no need to resign my navy commission, fully qualified for bridge or engine room. Then the medical board got a look at my retirement papers and refused to examine me. According to the board here, no waiver for a history of pulmonary TB had ever been granted. Sorry. Thanks for coming in.

  They did offer me a job teaching navigation ashore. The hell with that. Might just as well stick where I am. There still remains a possibility of a waiver through Washington but it is a very remote chance. I expect to pursue it but I regard the matter as settled.49

  Nevertheless, he continued the treatment for hemorrhoids. The regimen was only partly successful at first, and he developed an infection that made his life increasingly miserable. What with overwork and poor diet (the result of wartime rationing), his immune system couldn’t combat the infection. He caught an early case of the flu that was making the rounds that year and, in his debilitated state, developed an abscess “in a location where I could not see but was acutely aware of it.”50 It progressed to a state for which he had to be hospitalized in November 1943, for three months, at Jefferson Medical School. He went on medical leave without pay and reactivated his Naval retirement pay.

  The first operation in late November dealt with the abscess and started the process of dealing with the hemorrhoids surgically. “Having the flu and simultaneously having your asshole cut out with an apple corer (Leslyn says she thinks that is what they used) is an annoying and debilitating experience.”51 He had a second surgery in early December, under spinal block instead of general anesthesia. He lost a great deal of blood and was very weak for some time after. There was no replacement blood available, as all blood collection was for combat, not for civilian hospitals. They were short on nursing staff, too.

  One student nurse had the 8-bed ward I was in plus three more like it—so any patient who could possibly get out of bed had to use the W.C.—no bed pans or bed urinals for them. I could get out of bed, but I could not get as far as the W.C. without fainting. After falling twice I learned an expedient: push a straight chair ahead of me. When
my vision would start to black out, I would collapse across the chair and that would break my fall. It worked. A usual trip to the W.C. would average three faints, but I never got hurt again. A good thing as the flu epidemic hit the hospital and these little nursing students worked until they keeled over, and there was no one to replace them.

  I remember one morning when the student nurse in charge of us came in, stuck thermometers in our mouths, went out—did not come back. For about three hours nothing happened—no drinking water, no breakfast, nothing. About 11 A.M. a visitor to a patient showed up with a rack tray of glasses of water, then in a couple of hours some food arrived. I never saw our little student nurse again but I found out later what had happened. She had walked into the corridor … and collapsed. She was found there, out cold, and was carted somewhere else and put to bed. The hospital staff, already stripped down to minimum by the War, was hit by flu, and perhaps a third of the usual number were holding things together as best they could. 52

  Heinlein’s temperature fluctuated erratically, and he thought he might be coming down with TB again, though the blood and sputum cultures were negative.53

  Heinlein was still in the hospital in January of 1944, when Leslyn was contacted by the Red Cross: the Swedish “mercy ship” Gripsholm had managed a repatriation of some fifteen hundred prisoners of the Japanese in the Philippines, and specifically from Santo Tomas, where Keith and the boys were being held. The ship traded Japanese refugees they had picked up in Goa for the expats. Keith and her two sons were on that ship!