This prospect bothered him not at all, though he acceded to her other suggestions—and some new ones Blassingame had made. It was possible Dalgliesh might reject the book. He wrote to Fowler, Dalgliesh’s former assistant who was now at Holt:
… I have written one more boys’ book which will be submitted later this month [January 1955] to Scribners. If Miss Dalgliesh turns it down—which is a distinct possibility—then it will be available to the trade early in February.
But will I in fact have any more freedom with one editor than I have with another? They all have to sell to the same librarians, please the same teachers. It may well be that I should quit the juveniles entirely, even though they have proved quite satisfactory financially and not unrewarding professionally.…
If I find I cannot buck this asinine censorship, I am simply going to get out of the field—but that is not important. What does strike me as woefully important is this attempt to cope with serious and tragic matters by quack methods, as futile as a poultice on a cancer.…45
He had built into this book—and not for the first time—a factor he thought would be completely unacceptable to Dalgliesh or to any other mainstream publisher: His protagonist, Rod Walker, was a Negro. He had not said so, not in so many words (he was not suicidal, after all, considering the public furor a few years earlier over Sinclair Lewis’s race-relation novel Kingsblood Royal46), but there were details that made it clear, to anyone who cared to think about it. He kept it to himself as the book wound through the publication process in 1955.
By sheer coincidence, another book dealing with a similar situation had just come on the market, having been rejected by a succession of twenty-one publishers. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies just skirts science fiction, with backstory elements that could be read as future war. Golding’s book takes a very different approach to the problem of an accidentally isolated group of young people—a speculative-realistic novel set in a timeless context that holds civilization is a thin veneer, to be discarded. Heinlein takes the contrary view that civilization is humanity’s proudest invention, something we will take with us, to the stars.
Both books are still in print, more than fifty years later.
10
VINTAGE SEASON
By 1955, much of the Heinleins’ socializing revolved around dancing: Ginny’s ice-dancing, of course (and Robert had achieved enough skill, at last, to keep up with her on many of the figures). Gradually, they had added several kinds of off-ice dancing as well—round dance, cotillion, and Viennese waltzing. That winter (1954–55), they added square dancing in Pappy Shaw’s “Calico and Boots” club, often inviting the entire club home for an impromptu party.
Heinlein once again picked up the manuscript of The Martian Named Smith (after stalling on the book in 1952). By February 1955 he was 36,000 words into it,1 but it just would not come together for him. In a letter to Theodore Sturgeon, he complained: “I am at present stuck on 1482 of the best set-up for a novel I ever had in my life and I cannot get the Goddam thing to jell!”3 Frustrated (in his letter to his agent, he said the novel “aborted” at about 54,000 words),4 he set it aside to deal with Shasta’s request for revisions to Methuselah’s Children, which had now been hanging fire for eight years.
Methuselah’s Children would be the fourth of their five projected books in the Future History series. Shasta also wanted him to write another long novella, “Da Capo,” for the last book, under the same restrictive terms as he had done “The Man Who Sold the Moon” five years before. Heinlein had lost so much secondary income on that deal that he couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for a writing project that was too “da capo” for his own commercial interest. “Of course I may never write ‘Da Capo’ anyhow,” he told his agent, “since I am tired of this series [the Future History]—but I certainly am not going to contract to write it and agree to throw away the major return on it.”5
A very odd request came in from Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon was badly blocked and out of cash. He needed help—anything that might kick-start the writing process. Heinlein was flattered by the request—“To have the incomparable and always scintillating Sturgeon ask for ideas is like having the Pacific Ocean ask one to pee in it.”6 He spun off a couple of dozen “Sturgeonish” ideas that might sell quickly to Campbell, ranging from “tag lines” that might start a story rolling—
• “June 28—the new bull calf looks better all the time. Met a leprechaun today. Nice little guy. I’m going to have to drain the south forty…”
• “This guys sells soaps and cosmetics, door to door like the Fuller Brush man. She tries their beauty soap; she becomes beautiful. So she tries their vanishing cream…”
• “A little cat ghost, padding patiently around in limbo, trying to find that familiar, friendly lap…”
—to fully developed ideas that only needed writing out.7 At Ginny’s suggestion, he also enclosed a substantial check that would help with immediate expenses.
Ginny filled in the hours when Robert was at the typewriter by auditing courses at nearby Colorado College—harmony and music theory in 1955—and precinct work with the League of Women Voters. She also started working with the local little theater group, acting as wardrobe mistress for their production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and then for The Tea House of the August Moon.
Ginny’s actors and behind-the-scenes staff from the little theater were a mix of raw amateurs and seasoned semi-professionals, and Robert was usually ready to quit work for the day when Ginny brought them home with her in February of 1955. He must have listened thoughtfully as the new-to-him shop talk circled around. At some point it must have occurred to him that a theatrical background might give his next book just the novelty twist he needed. He asked leading questions—about makeup and other details he might use—and soaked up the theatrical lore that flew around the room without any prompting from him.8 The book that came out of all this, Double Star, turned on an actor hired to impersonate—double for—a politician who has been kidnapped to precipitate an interplanetary crisis—and matures into a thoughtful adult by this experience.
Double Star is one of Heinlein’s most charming entertainments, one of several masterworks of his 1950s, written ingratiatingly with what he called “the heroic hijinks with which the story is decorated, such as kidnapings and attempted assassinations,” lifted from English, Roman, and Chinese history9 (but mostly based on the long literary tradition of doubles, from The Man in the Iron Mask to The Prince and the Pauper). Heinlein had reached in his writing for young people a pinnacle of skill in seducing and pleasing his readers, gently teaching without seeking to challenge. Although Double Star was nominally written for adults, it fits comfortably with the juvenile novels he was writing at this period. Speaking of Double Star, Heinlein later defined his “pedagogical” intent:
I think that a person with enough empathy to recognize and respect a horse as part of the Living Tree with a personality and feelings of his own is more likely thereby not to join in a lynch mob.
I may be entirely mistaken in this; I have no scientific proof. But it is a theme which has run consistently through all my stories … the theme that the human race is not alone in this universe and it had better get over its xenophobia … the notion that human beings should seek to find friends among other types of beings and not automatically assume that they are enemies.10
The book was finished by March 23 and edited for the typist three days later—less than a month before they were scheduled to leave for a trip to Europe.
Travel permissions with the Naval Reserve were becoming more and more cumbersome for Ginny. She asked for and obtained an Honorable Discharge on April 21, 1955, the day before her thirty-ninth birthday.
Ten days later, the Heinleins left Colorado Springs for New Orleans to board the Tillie Lykes for stops in Savannah, Georgia; to the Azores; to Genoa; Naples; Rijaka, Yugoslavia; Venice; Athens; Istanbul; Alexandria—and on to Heidelberg where they would camp out with brother Larry and family,
making side trips ad lib for four or five months. One of those side trips they initially planned would be to Sweden—“One purpose of this trip to Europe was to look into the possibility to adopting a Swedish child—but for various reasons we have decided against that, so now the trip is just for pleasure and education.”11 Heinlein was now too old to adopt under Colorado law—he would turn forty-eight while they were gone—and in any case, the state of the world was just too uncertain.12
In early June 1955, they were in Yugoslavia, where they made friends with their guide, Mary Dinaka—a WWII resistance fighter. While there Heinlein saw something that affected him profoundly—at least as deeply as the Pearl Harbor exposé: He witnessed a ceremony at which American tanks were handed over to Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia. Marshal Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) had broken with Stalin in 1948, but he was still a Communist and a violently anti-democratic dictator. The idea—postwar policy for decades—of arming one set of dictators against another set stuck in Heinlein’s craw.
… [T]hose two things, the truth about Pearl Harbor and seeing with my own eyes American arms being given to a communist dictator, were things that said to me: “Brother, you aren’t just in the wrong pew, you’re in the wrong church…”13
From Yugoslavia to Venice to Athens, arriving at the Piraeus (the port of Athens) at night during a full moon. They took advantage of the ideal circumstances for viewing the Acropolis, its damage softened by moonlight.
They had planned to fly from Alexandria to Heidelberg, but instead left the Tillie Lykes at Istanbul: The Chief attacked the radio operator in the Captain’s mess one day—unprovoked so far as anyone knew—and tried to kill him. Instead of convening a court of inquiry, the Captain elected to hush it up—despite a doctor’s warning that the man was mentally unbalanced. There was a second attack, this time in the Captain’s presence, and he still did nothing. This ship, Heinlein concluded, was too dangerous to risk: He and Ginny cashed in their tickets and flew directly to Germany.14
Heinlein’s brother Lawrence was stationed in Heidelberg with the U.S. Army of Occupation. Robert looked around once they got out of the airport and exclaimed that they were speaking English—but they weren’t: Ginny heard only Hochdeutsch, a little schlamperei. The accents and speech rhythms of Bavarian German must have triggered long-disused mental circuitry in Robert, left over from the neighbor woman—Mrs. Oehlschlager—who had “borrowed” five-year-old Bobby and spoken German to him as she made gingerbread cookies.15
From Heidelberg they could make “loop trips” in any direction, coming back to Heidelberg as a base. The French Riviera caused Heinlein’s eyes permanently to bug out, he said, because of the new bikini fashion in swimwear.16 Ginny went shopping for one, and consequently had the first bikini to reach the United States (that she knew of).17
One side trip was just for Ginny’s benefit: the Bayreuth Festival. She loved Wagner’s music, and being in Germany during the Festival was an opportunity not to be missed. The Festival was held annually to play the entire Ring cycle in the theater Richard Wagner had designed and built for his own Singspiele. Almost seventy years after Wagner’s death, the Festival was then still being managed by his grandchildren. Wieland Wagner gave it a modernistic production with dramatic lighting on a bare stage. Robert tagged along for the exhausting experience (some of those operas are eight hours long!). His reaction was about what Mark Twain’s had been.18
Their itinerary took them from Heidelberg to Paris near the end of August, and then to London for a short—too short19—visit with the Carnells. Then a swing around Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. The English leg of the trip they found oddly disappointing, dirty and inconvenient—“the goddamdest aggregation of stopped-up toilets, dirty trains, dirty beds, dirty places, and fouled up schedules.”20 It was New Zealand all over again, they concluded when they found that union rules prevented their London hotel’s floor maid from changing a burned-out light bulb in their bedside lamp. Ginny wasn’t even permitted to change the bulb herself: An electrician had to be called.21
After a too-short visit in Scotland, they flew to New York from Glasgow on September 12 and 13, 1955, and spent a week in Lurton Blassingame’s care, then back to Colorado Springs.22
Once they got settled in and caught up with mail and ledger entries, there was a party. Ginny brought out her bikini. The men’s reaction was gratifying enough, but it was the women’s reactions that were startling. They all oohed and ahed over it, and wanted to try it on. They might do so, Robert ruled—if he could photograph it on them. Giggling, they all agreed, and each one changed into Ginny’s one bikini and came out to model it for the party—big ones, small ones, short ones, tall ones, all in Ginny’s bikini. It was a wonder of persuasion on Robert’s part, and he captured it in slides (which are preserved in the Heinlein Archive).
It was time for him to start thinking about his next boys’ book—if he was going to do another one. Ginny suggested another book about twins, a particular fascination of hers (she had always wanted to be a twin23)—and he started thinking along those lines. Twins suggested Einstein’s Twin Paradox: What if you had a pair of twins and sent one off on a spaceship traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light. The Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction suggested that, from the perspective of the boy left behind on Earth, his twin on the ship would stay young while he aged. Heinlein started jotting notes of an outline for a story he called “The Star Clock”—or possibly “Dr. Einstein’s Clock” or some variation thereof—on November 5, recycling some of his thinking about long-lived families for people who lived out-of-phase with their culture.24
The Shasta deal was finally breaking his way: They had not made payments on their contracts in more than a year, and the contracts voided automatically after a thirty-day arrearage. Since they had sold properties they did not own (and kept the proceeds from the sales), even Blassingame-the-peacekeeper was willing to call it quits. On November 3, 1955, Blassingame wrote to Oscar Friend, Shasta’s agent in New York, canceling the contracts and making an attempt to rein in the piracy.25 Heinlein said he was not angry, but he was sorry it should end like this—and Blassingame should bend every effort to get the manuscript for Methuselah’s Children back.26 Doubleday had said they would publish it if Shasta were out of the picture.
Double Star was very well received, running to almost universal acclaim in Astounding in February, March, and April 1956. It was, in fact, so well liked that it was given the Science Fiction Achievement Award as the Best SF Novel of 1956 at the World Science Fiction Convention held the next year in New York.27 These awards, nicknamed Hugos for the founder of the first science-fiction magazine, Hugo Gernsback, had been given out for only the last few years—the first time in 1953 and then commencing uninterrupted from 1955. They were miniature rocket ships, just over a foot tall, with short, stabilizing fins—just like his original design for the ship in Destination Moon!—executed by hand in chrome steel.
Howard Browne had recently changed the format of Amazing Stories from pulp to digest-sized magazine28 and made a proposal: He wanted a “prediction” article from Heinlein for the magazine’s thirtieth-anniversary issue in April 1956 and offered the astonishing amount of one hundred dollars—an offer Heinlein could not very well refuse. He put it on his work agenda for January, and in November 1955 started to write Time for the Stars, about telepathic twins recruited to provide communications for exploring starships.
Toward the end of 1955 Heinlein received an advance copy of a book that Morey Bernstein had been researching nearby in Colorado for the last couple of years, The Search for Bridey Murphy. Its past-life regression stuff looked interesting—another datum to be filed with J. B. Rhine’s books on telepathy, clairvoyance, and other “psychic” phenomena. It was not precisely that he “believed” Bernstein’s conclusions in Bridey Murphy—but they were compatible with his own experience, superficially plausible, and the kind of thing that appealed to his sensibilities as a writer. He decided to include something from
it in his “prediction” article for Amazing.29
By the end of January he was generating a new “adult” book. He had an engineer/inventor on a bender because his wife dumped him to marry a rich man. But the elements weren’t coming together quite right, and he kept turning them over in his mind, changing a bit here and a bit there and seeing how the fit-together improved.30 One late January morning at breakfast, Ginny crossed his field of vision, being led-between-the-legs by their cat, Pixie. Bemused, he watched her open a people door for him and wait while Pixie sniffed disdainfully and turned away from the snow, complaining vocally at Ginny’s mismanagement of the weather. There were seven people doors leading out, and the same little playlet was reenacted at each door. When Pixie had rejected the last door and stalked away, indignant, Ginny shrugged. “I guess he’s looking for the door into summer.”
Suddenly, all the jumble of story elements he had been fiddling with fell into place in his head—a completely different configuration, and one that felt perfectly right. “Don’t say another word,” he said. He got up and almost ran to his office, eager to start getting the story down on paper. Thirteen days later, The Door into Summer was finished—the shortest length of time he had ever taken to write a full (if short) novel—and nearly perfect as it came off his typewriter.31 Pixie was the missing element; Robert’s familial affection for “the old warrior” gave the book its emotive core and tied all the incidents together in another ingratiating, seducing book.
Once the finishing work was done, the Heinleins took an eight-day driving vacation in New Mexico seeing friends in March, making the rounds from Albuquerque to Las Cruces and to Portales, where Jack Williamson lived.32
Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2 Page 16
