Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century
Page 72
Forrest J. Ackerman, interview by Robert James, Ph.D., 06/09/2000; punctuation slightly modified; similar material is in Ackerman’s memoirs, “Through Time and Space with Forry Ackerman,” originally published in the Rich and Nicki Lynch fanzine Mimosa XVII (October 1995) and available online in multiple places.
Warner, All Our Yesterdays, 107.
Warner, All Our Yesterdays, 103, where the name is spelled “Queen Nipher.”
Forrest J. Ackerman, interview by Robert James, Ph.D., 06/09/2000.
A CD-R of this speech has been made from an audio tape, transcription in 2001 made directly from Dr. Daugherty’s 78 rpm disks by the Heinlein Society.
Apparently on the basis of this speech, Heinlein’s name was associated in some fannish histories—perpetuated in the literature of the National Fantasy Fan Federation (N3F) well into the 1970s—with the “Fans are Slans” movement of the early 1940s, claiming that science-fiction fans are superior to “mundanes.”
RAH, letter to Forrest J. Ackerman, 08/04/52.
RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 10/03/58.
See, for example, RAH’s letter to Samuel J. Moskowitz, 01/25/61, and RAH’s letter to Marion Zimmer Bradley, 07/15/64, from which:
The unique problem of organized fandom is one that I have wondered about for many years. Here is a group made up largely of well-intentioned and mentally-interesting people—how is it and why is it that they tolerate among themselves a percentage of utter jerks?—people with no respect for privacy, no hesitation at all about libel and slander, and a sadistic drive to inflict pain. Marion, I do not understand it.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 07/14/41.
Forrest J. Ackerman, interview by Robert James, Ph.D., 06/09/2000.
Probably Heinlein is referring to The Star Gazer: A Novel of the Life of Galileo by Zsolt de Harsanyi, published in 1939 and translated into English by Paul Tabor. The title is sometimes also given as The Star-Gazer (Story of Galileo).
Translated by Charles A. Ward and published in 1940.
The various projects were not detailed in any of Heinlein’s correspondence, as they seem to have been matters of discussion at face-to-face meetings. A current officer of the International Society for General Semantics, Steven Stockdale, noted that at the 1940 seminar the Heinleins occupied the two “up front and personal” seats on the seating charts and that one of Heinlein’s close friends from the Hollywood industry, Edwin Green, was discussing—Stockdale says “probably more like idle wishing”—with another GS luminary, radio personality Will Kendig, a General Semantics movie “that would be not only entertaining, but educational to the degree that the experience of watching the movie itself would help ‘train’ the audience in proper evaluation.” Steven Stockdale, e-mail to author, 05/30/2002. In any case, nothing seems to have come of this particular project.
Leslyn Heinlein, letter to “Miss Kendig” (at Korzybski’s office), 10/22/41. Possibly Leslyn is obliquely referring to their involvement with the Colorado Sunshine Club, which had been raided and the attending membership arrested en masse as nudists in February 1935, just months after the Heinleins relocated to Los Angeles in August 1934.
The exact date was not recorded but was probably July 10 or 11, 1941, from Heinlein’s letter to Campbell dated 07/14/41.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 07/14/41.
E. E. Smith, letter to RAH, 07/13/41.
None of these historic photographs were found among Heinlein’s effects; it is likely that either they were destroyed in 1947 by Heinlein himself when clearing out his papers of his life with Leslyn, or else they went with Leslyn in the divorce and were lost or destroyed later.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 08/08/41.
Heinlein detailed some of his reasoning about this story to Campbell in a letter dated 09/15/41.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 09/06/41.
Submission history handwritten contemporaneously on the original Opus 28 storage folder in the RAH Archive, UCSC.
John W. Campbell, Jr., letter to RAH, 08/21/41.
Heinlein did not record the sequence of thoughts prompted by Campbell’s rejection letter or, indeed, refer to this pivotal moment, except obliquely. However, these oblique references in his correspondence do allow some reconstruction of the principal elements at work. Earlier letters pinpointed the prospect of slipping in his standing and acceptance as a writer as cause for retiring; Campbell’s judgment of pointlessness in a story of which Heinlein flatly said:
[T]he story had a point, a most important point, a most powerful and tragic one. Apparently I expressed the point too subtly, but you and I have rather widely divergent views about the degree of subtlety a story can stand (RAH, letter to John Campbell, 09/06/41)
suggests a reason why Heinlein might consider this “disconnect” an early warning sign of such slippage. He says as much in his letter to Campbell dated 09/15/41.
Thoughts of the inability of humans to connect on any significant level are quite common in such situations among many people, and Heinlein specifically mentioned this subject in several prior letters as a matter of perennial concern to him. Moreover, Campbell and Heinlein had exchanged—and were again to exchange, in a few months—letters dealing specifically with the intellectual and moral connection they had felt each about the other.
The correspondence took up as cordially as ever in the interim before the matter of the rejection of “Creation Took Eight Days” came up again, so Heinlein clearly was exercising a “semantic pause” with regard to a rather major upset to his way of life—a tactic detailed in other correspondence and relating to other matters, such as taking his war news delayed in weekly news magazines.
The sequence of the reconstruction here is governed by what I take to be the relative importance to Heinlein of the personal versus the particular content of the letter, in its context.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 09/06/41.
RAH, letter to Robert A. W. Lowndes, 07/18/41.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 09/06/41.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 08/27/41.
Virginia Heinlein speculated that Robert Heinlein and Virginia Perdue were more than friendly—“the way he talked about her made me think that there was something between them, or had been.” Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Third Series, Tape A, Side A (March 27, 2001).
RAH, letter to Henry Kuttner, 09/11/41.
RAH characterizes the title “Lost Legion” as “meaningless” in the Accession Notes, for the donation of papers and manuscripts to the RAH Archives UCSC, written 11/05/68.
Robert A. W. Lowndes, letter to “Defenders of the Hein line,” 09/08/41.
RAH, postscript to Leslyn Heinlein’s letter to Robert A. W. Lowndes, 08/15/41.
RAH, letter to Robert A. W. Lowndes, 08/23/41.
John W. Campbell, Jr., letter to RAH, misdated 09/09/41 but more likely 09/13/41.
John W. Campbell, Jr., letter to RAH, 09/13/41.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 09/27/41.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 09/15/41.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 11/21/41.
RAH, postscript to Leslyn Heinlein’s letter to Robert A. W. Lowndes, 08/15/41.
RAH, letter to Robert A. W. Lowndes, 09/17/41. The “accident” was an explosion and fire on Teague’s yacht on September 4, 1937. “Trapped Chldren Die in Fiery Yacht Blast.” L.A. Times (09/05/37), p. 1.
RAH, letter to Robert A. W. Lowndes, 09/17/41.
RAH, letter to Robert A. W. Lowndes, 09/17/41.
RAH, letter to Robert A. W. Lowndes, 09/17/41.
RAH, letter to Robert A. W. Lowndes, 09/17/41.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 09/25/41.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 09/25/41.
RAH, letter to Robert A. W. Lowndes, 10/01/41.
Jack Williamson, letter to RAH, 10/03/41.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr.,
09/28/41.
Willard E. Hawkins, letter to RAH, 10/03/41.
This sixteen-page, staple-bound pamphlet is often cited in book collectors’ circles as Heinlein’s first “book” publication.
RAH, letter to “Vertex Magazine,” 11/08/73.
John W. Campbell, Jr., letter to RAH, 10/27/41.
RAH, letter to Mark Hubbard, 10/04/41. I am unable to account for the difference in dates between the letters. (Mark Hubbard’s letter to which this is a reply is dated four days after the reply.) Perhaps this letter is a reply to a telephone conversation that was memorialized by Mark Hubbard’s letter.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 10/24/41.
RAH, Accession Notes for Opus 29 file, RAH Archive, UCSC.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr.,10/24/41.
John W. Campbell, Jr., letter to RAH, 10/27/41.
RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 11/26/50.
RAH, letter to Bob Bloch, 03/18/49; see also RAH, letter to Bob Bloch, 04/25/49: “‘Beyond This Horizon’ was based on inverting the cultural matrix found in my story ‘Coventry’ and then shaking it to see what would happen.”
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 09/25/41.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 11/15/41.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 11/15/41.
Jack Wiliamson, Wonder’s Child: My Life in Science Fiction, 135, detailing a letter Campbell wrote him dated 11/21/41.
Jack Williamson, letter to RAH, 11/21/41.
Leslyn Heinlein, letter to Jack Williamson, 11/28/41.
Circular dated 11/27/41.
Heinlein probably discussed the trip to New York first in a telephone call with Campbell since there is no contemporaneous written record of the discussion.
The conversation is recounted in RAH’s letter to T. B. Buell, 10/04/73.
The conversation is quoted in RAH’s letter to T. B. Buell, 10/04/73.
RAH, night letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 12/05/41.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 12/09/41.
RAH, Accession Notes for Opus 29 file, 04/02/67, RAH Archive, UCSC.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 12/02/41.
22. “And put aside childish things …” (pages 293–305)
See, for example, RAH’s letter to Mr. and Mrs. Collier, 12/08/76; Heinlein seems not to have mentioned the war games incident to Campbell in their contemporary correspondence, which is an important source of information about Heinlein’s life at this time (though it might well have been discussed in telephone or in-person discussions).
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 01/04/42.
Heinlein discussed these matters and others of the early days of the U.S. involvement in World War II with John Campbell in a series of letters from December 1941 through about February 1942. Only a single, misleading fragment of this correspondence is in Virginia Heinlein’s selection of her husband’s letters, Grumbles from the Grave; however, the complete correspondence of John W. Campbell, Jr. and Robert Heinlein is to be published as a volume of the Virginia Edition.
Cal Laning wrote a colorful eyewitness account of his experience of the attack on Pearl Harbor. A copy of Laning’s original draft is in Heinlein’s files in the RAH Archive, UCSC, and available through the online Heinlein archive. It was published posthumously as “Why Don’t We Do This More Often?” in Naval History Annapolis V: 4 (Winter 1991).
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 12/09/41.
John W. Campbell, Jr., letter to RAH, 12/08/41.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 12/09/41.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 12/09/41.
“Request for Assignment to Duty,” RAH naval jacket, folder marked “Re Going Back to Duty,” RAH Archive, UCSC.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 12/16/41.
RAH, letter to Virginia Perdue, 12/19/41.
Information about Heinlein’s family immediately after Pearl Harbor is detailed in RAH’s letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 12/21/41.
See Leslyn Heinlein, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 01/17/42.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 12/23/41.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 12/21/41.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 01/04/42.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 12/21/41.
Leslyn Heinlein, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 01/04/42.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 01/08/42.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 01/08/42.
John W. Campbell, Jr., letter to RAH, 01/22/42.
John W. Campbell, Jr., letter to RAH, 01/08/42.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 01/17/42.
A. B. Scoles, letter to RAH, 01/14/42.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 01/20/42.
Leslyn Heinlein, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 01/17/42.
Leslyn Heinlein, letter to Doña Campbell, 01/23/42.
RAH, letter to John and Doña Campbell, 01/26/42.
This exchange took place by telephone conversation memorialized in pencil in RAH’s hand on two undated scraps of paper in his “Going Back to Duty” folder in the RAH Archive, UCSC.
There is nothing in the correspondence that fixes the date with certainty, but John Campbell wrote a letter to Heinlein dated February 13, and the Opus card for “Waldo” indicates he started writing on February 17, 1942, so their arrival in New Jersey must have come between those two dates. Heinlein says in a letter to Cal Laning dated 03/20/42 that he took Leslyn to New Jersey specifically for the operation.
RAH, letter to Dr. Schnur, 02/11/59. It has been speculated that Heinlein might have named Waldo after Ted Sturgeon, whose birth name was Edward Hamilton Waldo, but the novella was written before Heinlein met Sturgeon in 1944.
L. Sprague de Camp, Time and Chance: An Autobiography (Hampton Falls, N.H.: Donald M. Grant, 1996), 172.
The meeting is not mentioned in any of Heinlein’s correspondence of the period (which may only mean it was arranged by telephone), but is mentioned in L. Sprague de Camp’s autobiography, Time and Chance, 171.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 01/03/42.
Isaac Asimov, In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920–1954 (New York: Doubleday, 1979), 337.
Asimov, In Memory Yet Green, 337.
RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 03/20/42. At that time Laning was at service in the South Pacific in Conyngham.
Leslyn Heinlein, postcard to William A. P. White, 02/27/42.
RAH, letter to Doña (Campbell) Smith, 02/03/52.
John W. Campbell, Jr., letter to Robert Swisher, 04/14/42, in The John W. Campbell Letters with Isaac Asimov & A. E. van Vogt, ed. Perry Chapdelaine, 80.
RAH, letter to Jack Williamson, 03/20/42.
See, for example, RAH’s letter to Henry and Catherine Kuttner, 04/21/47.
Commandant 11th Naval District San Diego to Chief, BuNav, forwarding RAH’s request for active duty per questionnaire answered 03/17/42, RAH naval jacket, folder marked “Re Going Back to Duty,” RAH Archive, UCSC.
RAH, letter to T. B. Buell, 10/03/74, 46–47.
A. E. Watson, letter to RAH, 05/02/42.
Leslyn Heinlein, postcard to William A. P. White, 05/04/42.
RAH, telegram to BuNav, 05/11/42.
23. “Do with thy heart what thy hands find to do …” (pages 306–323)
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 07/18/42.
Joel Charles, letter to RAH, 04/05/88.
de Camp, Time and Chance.
Virginia Heinlein, e-mail to author, 09/12/02.
For further example, see Heinlein’s exposition of the political situation in Philadelphia when he arrived, in Take Back Your Government!, 236.
de Camp, Time and Chance, 179.
Virginia Heinlein, interview by author, Tape 10, Side A; (March 1, 2000), also Virginia Heinlein, e-mail to author, 09/12/02.
Leslyn Heinlein, letter to Phyllis and William A. P. White, 05/18/42.
/> de Camp, Time and Chance, 179–80.
John W. Campbell, Jr., letter to RAH, 05/13/42.
Catherine Kuttner (C. L. Moore), letter to RAH, 07/02/42.
RAH, letter to Robert Silverberg, 09/09/61.