The Door into Summer did not have instant success: John Campbell rejected it through Blassingame, but A. P. White (“Anthony Boucher”) picked it up for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Blassingame sold the book rights to Doubleday, and that was the last of Heinlein’s four-book option contract with them.
Pixie, though, did not live to see “his” book published. He had already contracted uremia, and soon the pain would become unbearable. Months later, in the dead of winter, their neighbor Art Herzberger, a practicing veterinarian, came over and put Blassingame Pixilated Arroyo—The Only Cat—to sleep.33 Robert used a new shirt for Pixie’s winding sheet, and they planted a memorial tree over his gravesite, so that the local coyotes would not dig up the grave. Ginny retired the name. He had been Pixie Three: There would never be another Pixie.34 Heinlein scheduled some mindless physical labor for himself and installed an irrigation system to prevent having to carry bathwater again, to save Ginny’s vegetable garden during droughts.
In February 1956, Heinlein received a check from George Pal Productions: $748.83, and that was his entire proceeds from Destination Moon. The production company had gone inactive. That portion of his life was over.
He had several “releases” of a sort that year: In February his mother wrote saying that she no longer needed the “pension” he and the boys were giving her, since Rex’s pension from International Harvester had increased. Dad’s health was improving, too, and there was a possibility he might make a full recovery.
The experience of writing The Door into Summer almost in one straight-through burst ushered in a very productive period for Heinlein. In June 1956, he wrote a Future History story, aimed at The Saturday Evening Post. “Jeff and the Menace From Earth” had come off the typewriter at 14,000 words—much too long for The Post, so he cut it in five successive drafts to 6,000 words. But The Post wasn’t in the market, and Blassingame sold it to A. P. White (“Anthony Boucher”) for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Heinlein cautioned White that the story might have been cut too much.35 White asked to see the longer version, which he found so much better that he repurchased the story at novelette length—another reason F&SF had turned into the premier SF magazine of the 1950s.
Summer 1956 was, again, a rush of visitors. Lawrence and Kathleen stopped by on their way back from Germany to Kansas City, and Rex Ivar’s daughter Lynnie arrived, too, taking them up on Ginny’s invitation two years ago to spend the months of July and a week of August with them and continue her lessons in equitation begun with Lucky Herzberger. Lurton Blassingame visited again, and Ginny arranged for him to be able to hunt on a resident’s permit.
Leslyn started another round of poison-pen letters. Her letters had become more rambling and more vile over the years.36 A. P. White made a passing reference to St. Dymphna when he mentioned one of her letters to Heinlein. Heinlein had to look up the reference: St. Dymphna was the patron saint of the mentally afflicted. There was nothing he could do about it, so he tried to put it out of his mind and get on with his own work: “Like her mother, as long as she is alive she is a potential for mischief … So, while I shall rest easy and do nothing, I shall not feel entirely easy as long as she remains a potential source of animosity.”37
Boys’ Life still wanted a serial, so he started an interplanetary scout-and-his-dog story early in September. Boys’ Life picked up “A Tenderfoot on Venus” but wanted it cut to less than 15,000 words for publication in the June and July 1958 issues as “A Tenderfoot in Space.”
And then it was time for the annual chore of ginning up another boys’ book for Scribner. He was very tired of these, he had told Blassingame on this last hunting trip, and was thinking about getting out of science fiction altogether. Blassingame suggested he stray not too far from his proven strengths—perhaps a modern, contemporary-scene novel about scientists working to make space travel possible.38 Heinlein routinely followed technical developments in general literature, as well as in the specialized field of science fiction, and recently he had been trying out new techniques that would perhaps not be suitable for science fiction:
… I have been fiddling with experimental methods of storytelling (none of which you have seen) and I am beginning to think that I may be developing a new method which might turn out to be important. It is a multiple first-person technique, but not the one used by John Masters in Bowhani [sic: Bhowani] Junction [1954, filmed 1956]. Mine calls for using camera cuts and shifts as rapid as those in the movies; the idea is to give the speed of movies, the sense of immediacy of the legitimate stage, and the empathy obtained by stream of consciousness—a nice trick if I can bring it off! The greatest hitch seems to lie in the problem of shifting viewpoints, both without confusing the reader and without losing empathy through cumbersome devices. But I think I am learning how to do it.
I don’t want to use this technique on commercial copy until I am sure I can force the reader to go along with a novel technique … if I do have here a usable new technique I want to polish it to the point where it can stand up in the open market in competition with the usual wares whose values are established and recognized.
Ginny suggests that I not use it in science fiction in any case, but save it for a lit’rary novel. She has a point, I think, as it would not be seriously reviewed in an S-F novel. We’ll see.39
The international news turned shocking on October 23, 1956, when Soviet troops occupying Hungary fired into a crowd of demonstrators in Budapest—labor union members agitating for relaxation of the strings on the puppet Nagy government. Labor unions have traditionally been greater enemies of Communists than of capitalists.
At first, the occupying troops—mostly Ukranians who had firsthand experience of Soviet massacres—refused the order to fire on the crowd, and Hungarian independence was declared. The revolution lasted ten days: On November 4, 1956, the Soviet Union rushed in two thousand tanks and two hundred thousand troops to depose the Nagy government. And then the slaughter began: Thirty-five thousand Hungarians were killed by the Soviet troops; thousands more fled the country.
The memory of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev as “the Butcher of Budapest” made an indelible impression on Heinlein. He had been watching the presidential election campaign with a degree of horror and disgust this year, as the Democratic Party imploded. He wrote to his brother Clare:
I have witnessed the intellectual bankruptcy of the present Democratic Party and my stomach is still doing slow rolls and wing-overs. The only man I wanted to vote for was Stuart Symington and they never put his name in the hat … I am impressed by Mr. [Adlai] Stevenson—I think he has raised sheer stupidity to a high art, to a level of genius not achieved since the late and unlamented Immanuel Kant.40
He was not a Republican, but he voted for Eisenhower—probably the least harmful choice that year.41
After the election, he started writing The Chain and the Stars. Over the years, starting with The Rolling Stones in 1952, Alice Dalgliesh had given him contradictory advice about the age of his protagonists. “Miss Dalgliesh was always complaining,” Ginny Heinlein recalled, “and Robert got very upset about it. She complained once that the hero was too young and lost the sales to the services; another time, the hero was too old and lost the Boy Scout types—things like that.”42 To Blassingame, Heinlein wrote:
I can make my central character any age she wants at the opening of the story. But it can only be one age. If she will tell me what age she thinks is best for the market, I can tailor the central character of my next book to fit. But I can’t make him simultaneously of draft age and of junior high school age. Nor can I keep him from growing up as the story progresses without limiting myself to a simple action story spanning not more than a few weeks. This is difficult to do in space-travel stories—but I can do it if she wants it.43
For the new boys’ book Heinlein decided to abandon his usual formula and just write an adult novel, leaving out a love interest, and have the protagonist range from preteen to twe
nty or so. It is not clear when Heinlein began making his outline notes, but they show his book starting with the nursery rhyme quotation “Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief,” and evoking the atmosphere and exotic setting of The Arabian Nights and The Prince and the Pauper. “Our hero is a beggar-thief in a big city, an orphan brought up by Uncle Jules (no relation) who is his (Oliver Twist’s mentor Fagin—maybe).” Another set of notes44 explores the basic setting of the interstellar trading vessel run by an extended family. Initially his “Dave Devro” is captured by “the space guards, the family broken up, and Dave forced into a school (state) for boys his age. The rest of the book could be concerned with his efforts to break loose, to get his family together, to go out into space again.”
But, as had happened before, when Heinlein started writing, the combined story underwent a transformation—this time into a passionate anti-slavery book inspired, perhaps, by the recent Hungarian revolution. His Thorby is bought as a slave boy of ten or eleven, freed, and searches for the meaning of his life in his extended families of trading ship Sisu and of the Hegemonic Guard space navy—and then the birth family he had lost long ago. At each stage Thorby learns to value and protect wider social values, from family to the whole of his civilization. But even restored to his planet and place of birth, he cannot rest until he brings all his resources to bear in the fight against slavery—the passion of his first adoptive father, the beggar who had bought a scared slave boy and raised him as a son. Citizen of the Galaxy is Heinlein’s most wrenching exploration of the young adult’s individuation crisis, and Thorby’s relationship to his family values—multiply layered—is a finely nuanced statement of what it means to become an adult and a true citizen.45
The book was written over a three-week period from November 12 to December 8, 1956, with four alternative titles, but when he had the manuscript professionally retyped for submission, he gave it a new name: Citizen of the Galaxy.
Early in January 1957, Heinlein received a glowing review of Time for the Stars by Hermann Deutsch, one of the editors of the New Orleans Item. In correspondence, Heinlein and Deutsch discovered they had mutual acquaintances (including the Bill Deutsch Heinlein had met at Denvention in 1941 and since lost track of). Deutsch invited Robert and Ginny to stay with them when next they were in New Orleans.
That fall and winter of 1956 Ginny had been suffering from a case of amebic dysentery—contracted, she said, from wild watercress served at a garden party by a local chef who really ought to have known better.46 The doctors found a Giardia colonization as well (a different brand of parasite). Possibly she had had it for years, since their visit to Java in 1954, and the watercress incident had just brought it out. Possibly it was contracted from the “filthy water” supply in Colorado Springs (about which the new Air Force Academy was already complaining to the city).47 On top of the dysentery, her chronic bursitis, left over from her basic training in 1943, flared up. This time the pain was incapacitating, despite treatment with Novocaine, codeine, cortisone, heat, and massage. A hot, dry climate might help, so Robert decided to take her to the desert after he fulfilled a commitment to give a lecture in Chicago.48
Mark Reinsberg, the Chicago fan who had gotten him involved with Shasta in 1948, was now teaching a night-school class in writing at the University of Chicago. He asked Heinlein to be part of a lecture series he was organizing for his writing class—not something Heinlein would ordinarily do (and the honorarium of $50 would not even cover expenses)49—but he agreed this time, and this lecture, to be delivered at the beginning of February 1957, was on his mind all that winter. The last time he had written such a thing was ten years earlier, the 1947 essay written just after the breakup with Leslyn, which had been published as “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction.” At that time, there was not one word of formal SF criticism in print—though both Gernsback and Campbell had talked here and there about the theory of science fiction in their magazine editorials over a period of more than twenty years, and important scholarly groundwork, such as bibliographies, appeared earlier, notably in A. Langley Searles’s fanzine Fantasy Commentator.50 But it is J. O. Bailey’s Pilgrims Through Time and Space, published in 1947, which is regarded as the start of science-fiction criticism.51
During the 1950s, there had been a blossoming of thinking about science-fiction theory and criticism, mostly mediated by fanzines or the SF magazines themselves (there being no professional or academic journals willing to print essays on science fiction), and the beginnings of the development of critical standards for science fiction. Heinlein followed the entire development from J. O. Bailey’s Pilgrims through Space and Time and E. F. Bleiler’s Checklist of Fantastic Literature (1948)52 through de Camp’s Science Fiction Handbook (1952) and the latest (and most influential), Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder (1956). What Heinlein had been doing for some time was not genre science fiction by the strict standards of early pulp—which is why Heinlein had originally begun to use the term “speculative fiction”: His focus from the start was in general literature rather than in genre science fiction. The hurdle he had been helping his librarians over was the idea that SF, being pulp in its origins, was escape literature. In a letter to a librarian concerned to develop purchasing standards for science fiction two years earlier, Heinlein wrote:
This genre is not a sub-genre of adventure fiction (even though many of the tales in it are adventurous) … This field is concerned with new ideas, new possibilities, new ways of looking at things … which is precisely why it is so attractive to young people and so little read by older people, i.e., read only by those who have kept their minds young. Now if a story does not take the cultural framework we live in, stretch it, twist it, turn it upside down and examine it for leaks, rearrange the parts and see how they would relate in a new arrangement—in short, explore possibilities and play games with ideas—it is not really a story of this genre at all but merely a western translated into the wider open spaces of the stars.53
At its best, science fiction tried to get its readers to engage reality at the highest levels. “Imaginary-but-possible” meant that science fiction was a branch of realistic literature, also distinguished from contemporary-scene fiction that had wandered (too far in his opinion) in the James M. Cain direction of Zola-esque realism: “[S]peculative fiction is much more realistic than is most historical and contemporary scene fiction and is superior to them both.”54 He wrote the bulk of the lecture, titled “Does Science Fiction Have Any Virtue?” on February 5, 1957, and two days later flew to Chicago. He had a quick meeting with Erle Korshak, who promised to turn over a new leaf—and who knows, perhaps the horse will fly?
The morning of the lecture, February 8, Heinlein gave a radio interview for WFMT, with interviewer Bob Luefley. In the afternoon, after a lunch with Miss Harshaw at the Arts Club, he taped Carnival of Books at the WMAQ radio studios. Time for the Stars was getting him a lot of good press: Even Learned Bulman liked it in his Library Journal review.55
The lecture that evening went very well, with a question-and-answer period following, in which Heinlein had an opportunity to discuss the making of The Puppet Masters.56 After the taping, a local fan (and another friend of Mark Reinsberg’s), Earl Kemp, arranged for a pub crawl of the local strip clubs. On Saturday, Heinlein met with the University of Chicago Science Fiction Club and was given a reception with local professional colleagues at Mark Reinsberg’s house. Fritz Leiber, who was living in Chicago at that time, memorialized the occasion with a clever sonnet, working a number of Heinlein’s titles into the rhyme scheme:
For Bob Heinlein
Bob, here’s to say we’re deeply in your debt
For letting us raise ship with Starman Jones
And share the training of Space Cadet;
For introductions to The Rolling Stones;
For Farmer in the Sky and “Goldfish Bowl,”
“If This Goes On—” (Thank God, it has so far!)
Red Planet, “Waldo,” “They,” “The Roads Must
Roll,”
Methuselah’s Children, “Life-Line,” Double Star.
Thanks, Bob, again, for all these fancy trips,
For “Misfit,” “Universe” and “Common Sense,”
For “Blowups Happen,” “The Long Watch,” (“Eclipse”);
They’re luxury cruises, sparing no expense;
There aint a finer (this I testify)
Door into Summer, Tunnel in the Sky.
Fritz Leiber
2-8-57
Heinlein flew back to Colorado Springs the next day, then went for a desert rest-up with Ginny.
Their base of operation for the next three weeks was the Arrowhead Motel in Nogales, Arizona—baking warm even in February. Robert set up his portable typewriter in peace and caught up on correspondence while Ginny recovered from her bout of bursitis. They visited with Heinlein’s science-fiction colleagues Fredric Brown and Stuart and Mildred Clingerman and made their leisurely way back home early in March by way of the Stines in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
They arrived back in Colorado Springs on March 13, just in time to be snowed in and housebound. Ginny’s bursitis was better, but she was very wobbly on her feet, and so dizzy when she got out of bed that she could hardly stand or walk. Her doctors diagnosed a bizarre late-onset menthol allergy and Shigella bacillary dysentery on top of the Giardia—somewhat alarming, since Shigella had an 18 percent mortality rate. She had probably had a subacute infestation for some time. Robert probably had it, too, since he was feeling draggy and “full of vague aches,” which he had attributed to advancing old age.57 He took the cure with Ginny.
But he was able to work. Being with Ruth Harshaw and her bright, earnest teenaged co-interviewers must have given him a lift, restoring his enthusiasm for the juvenile series: “my stuff for kids is the most important work that I do … I hope to keep it up a long time.”58 He seemed to be contributing in a minor way to relieving the crisis in technical education: Kids need to know what tools they need. “I feel a degree of obligation to the kids,” he told an educator who wrote him in enthusiasm for Tunnel in the Sky. “Therefore, no matter how much cops & robbers I put into such a story, I always get in a plug for technical training in general and for study of mathematics in particular.”59
Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2 Page 17
