With their wartime savings dwindling, Heinlein started thinking seriously about that boys’ book for Westminster. The main sticking point was writing for juveniles. He talked it out, over dinner, with Fritz Lang. Lang had become something of a “friend of the family”—one of those wise, older, and more experienced men whose advice Heinlein valued and sought out. Periodically Lang would call up the Heinleins and invite them out for dinner.
This time, Lang listened seriously to Heinlein’s objections and thoughtfully told him he wasn’t getting the big picture. Writing for children could actually be more important than writing for adults: it was a chance to shape the attitudes of the next generation47—and what could he possibly do that was more important?48 That was a very persuasive argument, and Cleve Cartmill said essentially the same thing.49
One added: ‘Hell, don’t write “boys books,” write a book that you know a boy would like to read.’ Nevertheless, such was my lack of confidence, that my first step was to go to a book store and buy more than a dozen books which the shopkeeper assured me were ones that were popular with the present-day kids. Most of them concerned aviation and were heavily filled with cops & robbers sort of adventure.50
He started taking notes, keeping in mind the injunction not to write a “boys’ book,” but instead to write “a book that you know a boy would like to read.”
The other major option he had been considering was getting back into Democratic Party politics. Since returning to California, he had been approached twice to run again for the state legislature. He couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for that prospect. On February 16, 1946, he wrote the Honorable Jerry Voorhis that another offer had materialized—one more tempting:
Judge Bob Clifton called up the other day and suggested that I try for Congress this time, since Pat is going for Senate and no major liberal democrat has announced. Off hand I was opposed to the idea—I spent every cent I had and wore myself out with very little help save from you and a handful of others when I tried to displace Charlie Lyon [in 1938]. Public office per se has no lure for me. But I admit it would be wonderful to participate actively in the present crisis.51
Heinlein’s main objection was the prospect of having to go through the same meat grinder he had been through in 1938. Neither his health nor Leslyn’s could take the strain at this point. Leslyn had gained back some of the weight she had lost but, even confined to bed and with no social life at all, she collapsed unpredictably, with alarming tachycardia and other disturbing symptoms:
She was very sick again this morning, recurrent vomiting, heart pounding, etc. She just has no reserve; she wore herself out on the war, completely. I realize now that she did the final year on nerve. Not that I could have stopped her—she has courage, that one.52
He couldn’t turn Clifton and the local Democratic organization down flat … but he couldn’t see doing it at all without Leslyn’s indispensable help.
I finally answered that I would run provided a committee called on me to inform that the funds were already in the bank, including salary for a suitable manager approved by me, and provided that the campaign per se would not be my worry. I doubt very much if that will happen. I could make it happen by a little maneuvering but I won’t walk across the street to seek office until someone else evinces very serious interest. I don’t want anymore campaigns funds “pledged” and then almost impossible to collect—I’ve been through that mill!53
That should be the end of the matter, Heinlein thought: “It has not been my experience that candidates are often drafted for candidacy quite that emphatically.” 54
In the meantime, he started on the boys’ book for Westminster. After his current round of research, Heinlein had come to the conclusion that he could do this. He told his agent:
Off hand, I think of a juvenile in S-F as being a book of the Tom Swift and the Motor Boys type, aimed at the early ’teens and having heroes three or four years older than the reader, so that he may imagine that he himself might take part in such adventures in the near future. The style should be fast, simple, and not written down. It should hook as fast as a pulp story and have continuous adventure, with authentic science, not too much elaborated. No sex or love interest, naturally. I have no doubt of my ability to do such stories, well enough to meet the competition.55
He came up with a melodramatic action plot like the Tom Swift stories, about boys building a rocket. Blassingame forwarded the outline to Heyliger, the editor at Westminster, and suggested that Heinlein hold off doing anything about the book until March 7, when they would have Heyliger’s reaction. 56
That didn’t suit Heinlein: once he was charged up to write, he usually just threw himself into the project until it was done. He occupied himself fretting over an offer from Crown for an abridged collection of the Future History stories, but the editor, Edmund Fuller, was talking about some very extensive editing that might gut the series.57
When the phone company finally activated their telephone service toward the end of February, Heinlein wrote a few letters notifying friends and business contacts. The one to L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Parsons would do double duty: neither of them had been seen in weeks, and the Great Silence was puzzling; he had forwarded Hubbard’s Navy pension check to Parsons’s address in Pasadena, but Hubbard needed at least to tell him what he wanted done about his mail.58
Heinlein started to write, concentratedly, The Young Atomic Engineers and the Conquest of the Moon, with some deliberate fudging on the science and particularly on the engineering, to bring all the action within the framework of the story.59 He kept in mind his conversations with Fritz Lang, since the same considerations would apply to any film.
And in fact, as he wrote, he started making notes for a book on interplanetary travel that would parallel Young Atomic Engineers so he would have a proposal to take to Lang as the basis for the collaborative film project Lang had been talking about. Heinlein was in touch with current politics and current engineering on the problem, and it could work very well as a pseudodocumentary of the immediate future. 60
But the important thing was the tone of Young Atomic Engineers. Above all, he did not want this to be what H. G. Wells had once called the “artificial and meretricious frivolity … forced upon the young.”61
Before starting this story I established what has continued to be my rule for writing for youngsters: Never write down to them. Do not simplify the vocabulary nor the intellectual concepts. To this I added subordinate rules: No real love interest and female characters should be only walk-ons. The story should have lots of action and adventure … [and] plot use of difficult intellectual or scientific concepts; the kids enjoy getting their teeth into such—much more so than their parents.62
The life lessons he had learned from the Horatio Alger books were still relevant here and now. Later, he explained his intentions:
I have been writing the Horatio Alger books of this generation, always with the same strongly moral purpose that runs through every line of the Alger books (which strongly influenced me; I read them all). “Honesty is the best policy.”—“Hard work is rewarded.”—“There is no easy road to success.”—“Courage above all.”—“Studying hard pays off, in happiness as well as in money”—“Stand on your own feet”—“Don’t ever be bullied”—“Take your medicine”—“The world always has a place for a man who works, but none for a loafer.” These are the things that the Alger books said to me, in the idiom suited to my generation; I believed them when I read them, I believe them now, and I have constantly tried to say them to a younger generation which I believe has been shamefully neglected by many of the elders responsible for its moral training.63
The conventions and taboos of children’s writing were restrictive, but he decided he could work within the taboos and still show different racial and cultural types working together. He firmly instructed his agent to withdraw the book from any publisher who objected to this feature of the book:
I have deliberately selected a boy of Scotch-Englis
h pioneer ancestry, a boy whose father is a German immigrant, and a boy who is American Jewish. Having selected this diverse background they are then developed as American boys without reference to their backgrounds. You may run into an editor who does not want one of the young heroes to be Jewish. I will not do business with such a firm. The ancestry of the three boys is a “must” and the book is offered under those conditions. My interest was aroused in this book by the opportunity to show to kids what I conceive to be Americanism. The use of a diverse group … is part of my intent; it must not be changed … . I am as disinterested as a referee but I want to get over an object lesson in practical democracy.64
The writing went rapidly: he sent off the first several chapters to Blassingame early in March and finished it by the middle of the month, dedicating the book to his nephews through Leslyn’s sister, Keith—Matt and Colin Hubbard. Blassingame said it looked like a very salable manuscript, calling it a “good job”65—though Heyliger did reject the book: rogue Nazis on the Moon were a little far out of his line. Blassingame took the book to Winston, which was establishing a line of science-fiction juveniles. He could offer it as the first of a series, for Heinlein had several series titles already outlined in his head: “the YAE [Young Atomic Engineers] on Mars, or the Secret of the Moon Corridors, the YAE in the Asteroids or the Mystery of the Broken Planet, the YAE in Business or the Solar System Mining Corporation.”66
Heinlein was brimming over with more book ideas. He wanted to do a book about power politics in the atomic age, developing the ideas in “Solution Unsatisfactory.” He also wanted to do a World War III novel, sparked off by an action of the rogue Nazis he had put into Young Atomic Engineers—a novel that would graphically show the probable results of an atomic war. Then a contemporary-scene book about the engineering and political and organizational effort that was going into making space travel a reality. This one he planned to show Fritz Lang, as they had talked about this kind of thing for the space movie Lang wanted to do next.67
But what he went to work on immediately was his handbook for practical politics. He would have to work very fast and finish in one month in order to catch the election-year trade.
As he started How to Be a Politician in March 1946, peace descended suddenly chez Heinlein: the Sangs found a cottage in Fallbrook, California, a hundred miles southeast of Los Angeles, and left the Heinleins by themselves in their own home for the first time since Pearl Harbor, as Bill Corson had stayed with them until they left for the East Coast in January 1942.
In the course of the past year the house has sheltered a total of nine writers; we have been running a sort of separation center, hostel and rest camp for the members of [the] Mañana [Literary Society] leaving the service. Most of them are scattered by now.68
That spring, Leslie Charteris’s The Saint’s Choice failed, and the editors returned the manuscript of “They Do It with Mirrors.” Mystery writing didn’t really appeal to Heinlein—and in any case, Kuttner’s experience with Charteris turned out not an unalloyed success,69 so Heinlein never went back to mysteries. When the manuscript was returned to him in May 1946, he sent it on to Blassingame, who eventually sold the story to Popular Detective, a minor tec pulp.70
Nevertheless, things were finally beginning to look up for the Heinleins. Leslyn’s health continued to improve, and she had regained enough weight that she popped a brassiere leaning over one day.71 In February Robert had found an effective treatment for his chronic sinusitis—half a million units of penicillin taken as a fog in oxygen, supplemented with penicillin-saline nose drops between treatments. He could breathe normally again for the first time in years.72 Breathing normally was turning out to be a mixed blessing, though. He could smell the alcohol on Leslyn’s breath when she fell down, and it was unpleasantly likely that some of her nervous prostration had been, at least in part, “falling-down drunk” these past several months. At Robert’s insistence she “went on the wagon” for a time, until Robert was satisfied he had been mistaken. 73
It was not for him to criticize anyone’s ways of coping with ill health and fatigue, but as a practical matter, he got rid of all the liquor in the house—and became irritated with L. Ron Hubbard when he found him sneaking in liquor .74 He stopped drinking himself, to minimize temptation. The temporary abstention was lifted—and Leslyn collapsed again, alarmingly. “She is off the wagon now,” Heinlein wrote to John Arwine in May, “with my advice and consent.”
Her capacity for liquor is just as large as it ever was, not large but adequate. She can drink as much or more than I do and not show it—or she can suddenly collapse and have to go to bed when she has not been drinking at all and has had adequate rest.
Heinlein had no experience at all in dealing with alcoholics—and as great a capacity as any man for seeing what he wanted to see:
Partly by elimination and partly by analysis, I am now of the opinion that her trouble derives almost entirely from too great a sensitivity to the woes of the world—she can’t really get interested in her own garden when there is famine abroad and while the shadow of the Atomic War hangs over us.
Truth of the matter is she needs serenity to recoup, but she is not vegetable enough to accomplish it easily in a world in which there is now no serenity. She knows too much about what is going on and her imagination integrates too well.75
But such self-deception works well only when it puts the issue out of mind. They had a halcyon period for a few months of relative good health in the spring and early summer of 1946 and were able to resume a social life.
They were both excited by the V-2 tests that started that April in the New Mexico desert, at White Sands. Cal Laning wrote to them about the first one,76 and the newsreel footage they saw in a Hollywood movie theater sparked a desire to see one up close.77 Laning didn’t have any pull himself but thought they might be able to get press credentials. If they could all get there at the same time, they could have a private “rocket convention.” And Laning had some real progress to report: the Bureau of Aeronautics had set up a “Space Ships” subsection with its own personnel.78 Space was on the Navy’s formal agenda now, and once a project is in the budget, with its own bureaucracy, it can become self-sustaining. The Navy had put in its claim for priority in American rocketry.
With that news, Heinlein could—finally—retire from the struggle in good conscience and become an applauder-on-the-sidelines. His own rocket project disappears from his correspondence.
They set about the finicky task of finding hotel accommodations in the New Mexico desert that June, and were able to get reservations at a whimsical hotel they had run across in Las Cruces, “complete with The Dog with Eyes As Big as Saucers” who functioned as night watchman.79
These V-2s let the American rocketry program take over all the German rocket research—a fitting turnabout, as the Germans had pirated Goddard’s original patents to get their start. The Army of Occupation had captured one hundred partially assembled V-2s in the Harz mountain manufacturies—and the core of the cadre of German rocket scientists who had fled Peenemünde to avoid being captured by Russians. Nazi scientists were at the heart of the American rocket program. For Congressional background on the developments, Heinlein recommended that Jerry Voorhis get in touch with Willy Ley, who was also in Washington, D.C., at the time:
Willy is former science editor of PM, an anti-Nazi refugee, a New Dealer, and a rocket engineer. He is working with Laning. Willy’s decision not to take Hitler’s shilling may have won the war for us, in sober truth, for it was one of his former assistants [von Braun] who built V-2—after Willy left.80
Leslyn had encouraged Laning to bring Willy Ley into the loop about their planned “rocket convention” in New Mexico, with some confidential advice: “Consult with Willy about this—but don’t let Willy have a veto vote. He’s one of the prima donnas, himself. We love Willy better than some of the other boys—but he has to be gentled along like the rest of ’em.”81
Something odd was going on with
L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Parsons. Late in February Parsons had acquired another sex-magick assistant, a gorgeous, exotic green-eyed redhead named Marjorie Cameron, whom he referred to as an “elemental.” She was going by the name of “Candy,” short for “Candida” (the yeast that makes candidiasis yeast infections).82 Heinlein was one of the first people he introduced her to. She later remarked that she didn’t take much to Heinlein: he was “too slick, too Hollywood,” with his ascot and pipe.83
Parsons had put up most of the capital to form a business buying and selling yachts. Hubbard and Betty Northrup were heading off to Florida to buy the first vessel, which they would sail back to California. It seemed a dubious venture to Heinlein:
I don’t understand Ron’s current activities. I am considerably disturbed by them—not angry but disturbed on his own account. I don’t think he is doing himself any good. As near as I can tell at a distance he seems to be off on some sort of a Big Operator tear, instead of straightening out and getting re-established in his profession.84
Lurton Blassingame wrote expressing doubt about the commercial viability of Heinlein’s proposed political book. Leslyn answered for him, so he wouldn’t have to break his concentration:
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 49
