Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  At the beginning of March 1957, a group of science-fiction writers launched a mimeographed professionals’ discussion magazine, SF Forum. Heinlein would never be comfortable with the sniping and backbiting contained in this kind of fanzine-for-professionals, but other writers did not have his reticence about slamming their colleagues in print—and Heinlein was the biggest target around. James Blish used The Door into Summer to kick off an amateur psychoanalysis of Heinlein as seen through the lens of his many first-person narratives—impertinent, infuriating, and imprudent.60 “Any writer learns to expect unfavorable reviews,” Heinlein wrote directly to Lester del Rey, the editor of SF Forum:

  he must accept them, along with bad weather, flat tires, and other such. Any professional writer is aware that his published work is open to public literary criticism within the limits of the “Fair Comment” rule.

  But it seems to me that this article is only secondarily a review, not literary criticism at all in most of its details, and is primarily a vehicle for personal criticism, improper where true and much worse than improper where false.…

  The prudent thing to do was probably to keep quiet and try to forget it.

  But I found that I was not forgetting it, that it was on my mind, interfering with work, preventing sleep. I felt as if I had been invited to tea, then sandbagged as I walked in the door.61

  Blish’s notions about what a critic could infer directly about the psychology of a writer—of Heinlein, at any rate—were wrong: The “unconscious” effects Blish was trying to analyze were storytelling devices; Blish did not seem to be able to tell artifice from accident.

  None of these things is done “by instinct.” I sweat like hell to make it a rousing good story while getting in the preaching I want to preach.… I suggest that to the extent that they are used unconsciously, unwittingly “instinctively,” they are sloppy craftsmanship and likely to be bad art.62

  There were four “themes” he did use over and over—deliberately and not “by instinct”:

  One is the notion that knowledge is worth acquiring, all knowledge, and that a solid grounding in mathematics provides one with the essential language of many of the most important forms of knowledge. The third theme is that, while it is desirable to live peaceably, there are things worth fighting for and values worth dying for—and that it is far better for a man to die than to live under circumstances that call for such sacrifice. The fourth theme is that individual human freedoms are of basic value, without which mankind is less than human.63

  After weighing the worthwhileness of raising a fight over this issue, he concluded not this time—but:

  … a more temperate tone would, I think, bring higher respect, as well as being kinder. Horace, Tony, Larry, John, Bob, etc.,64 are all doing the best they can; give them credit for honest effort.

  The above remarks apply even more strongly to the writers. I myself am one of the lucky ones who never has any trouble in selling; science fiction has paid me so well that my only financial problems in years has been [sic] where and how to spend it all—so all of you are invited to lambast my stories to your heart’s content, so long as you stick to the rule of “Fair Comment” and leave my private life and personality out of it. I won’t care very deeply what you say; the literary criticisms I am interested in come from my agent, my editors, from librarians, and from the mail of unorganized fans—the general reading public. But my relatively well-armored state is not enjoyed by many writers; I know, from the dozens of aspirant and beginning-to-sell writers I have worked with that the relatively insecure writer is just a mass of raw nerve ends. Unfavorable criticism, to be of any use to him at all, must be couched in thoughtful language, temperate tones, and so phrased that he can use it to do better next time. If he is simply lashed, ridiculed, held up to scorn, it does him no good at all—on the contrary it is likely to make it impossible for him to write for days on end.

  I suggest that it never helps anyone to tell a mother that her baby is ugly.65

  John Campbell took Citizen of the Galaxy for serialization in Astounding in a long letter concerned with the sociology of chattel slavery, concluding:

  You know, Bob, I’m tempted to retitle that story of yours “The Slave.” Thorby was a slave every paragraph of the way—including the last. Margaret pointed out his slavery in the Free Traders; Wing Marshall Smith pointed out his slavery in the end.66

  It took several exchanges of correspondence, and a small modification to the text, to get Campbell off the focus on slavery and onto citizenship.

  Puhlease don’t change the name of “Citizen.” I admit that there is a modicum of “There is no freedom” in the yarn; but that is not my theme—my basic theme is that all creatures everywhere are constrained by their circumstances but that a mature creature (that is to say, a “citizen”) faces up to the constraints in a mature fashion, not evading, not ducking, not taking the easy way. This certainly does not make him a slave even though it may require of him a self-discipline more stringent than the externally-imposed discipline of a slave.…

  But the most important point is that the trade book will use that title and I don’t want a single customer to buy the trade book under a misapprehension. If you must change the title, talk it over with Scribner’s and settle between you on a mutually agreed title—but only one title. Call it “Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the Sky” if you both agree on it. I just want to play fair with the cash customers.67

  Campbell asked him to add the phrase “citizen of the galaxy” into the text at some point, to clarify his aims,68 and Heinlein made the requested change.69

  But the Scribner edit of this book was going off the rails, as well: Dalgliesh had made some minor cuts—a reference to Grandmother Sisu being shocked at pinup pictures; Baslim’s dismissal of the state religion of Jubbalpore—and in her accompanying letter she wanted to cut, too, the reference to “girlie magazines” used as trade goods.70 There was a certain amount of … sensitivity … on this subject at this time, particularly in New York state, due to the recent furor over violent and gory comic books.

  This was trivial, by comparison to the Red Planet fight. He started a letter giving permission for the changes, though he could not approve of them. He did not see the point of these changes. Was a reference to grandmothers not always seeing eye to eye with their junior bachelors and their chosen entertainments really all that offensive? And as for the Jubbalpore religion—

  This state religion is a vicious thing, upholding slavery, permitting gladiatorial combat, setting up the emperor as a god or demi-god with divine attributes … so what should I do? Show the old man teaching the kid to respect this religion?71

  Argue he might; ask for rational explanations he might; but he knew it was ultimately futile. Dalgliesh was watching out for his interests as a commercial writer: Any appearance of questioning religion (any religion, even his made-up one) would draw down hellfire from librarians and teachers and parents. By the time he finished with the letter, he wanted to revoke the sale and get the manuscript back from Scribner—but they had already set it in type, incurring production expenses.

  Ginny was appalled when he showed her the letter and made him rewrite it.72 He struggled with several drafts of a more diplomatic version. One pencil draft begins “[m]ake any changes you wish” and continues “I have never been in sympathy with this policy of catering to the smugly self-righteous prejudices of the ignorant and the half-educated in an attempt to sell more books…”73 (Diplomacy was, apparently, a moving target.) Finally he produced a sixth draft, a blunt, one-page letter, which he forwarded to Blassingame for comment and so that Blassingame would know how seriously this conflict was affecting him. “This whole matter has been growing in my mind for years and yet it is so vexatiously difficult that I can’t see any good answer.”74 In a later letter to Blassingame, he talked more about the upset the conflict had engendered in him:

  I know I have not made clear why two changes, admittedly easy and unimportant, threw me into spin and
lost me ten days’ working time, cum much anguish. I don’t know that I can explain it, but it is true. Part of the reason lies in that Chicago lecture of mine you recently read; I necessarily write science fiction by one theory, the theory of extrapolation and change—but once it reaches the editor (in this case) it is tested by an older theory, the notion that this our culture is essentially perfect and I must not tinker with any part of it which is dear to any possible critic who may see the story. These things have now added up to the point where I feel unable to continue. I may write another. I don’t know yet. I can’t until some of the depression wears off. But I don’t know how to tell her that I probably won’t deliver the story she is expecting—I’ve tried six or eight times, wasted many days, and all the ways I can express it either sound rude or inadequate. I know this sounds silly but it is true.…75

  It was probably a good thing Ginny was feeling well enough to intercept his rants. Her health was improving, though slowly. She sometimes felt up to gardening—and they were able to go out sometimes, for dinner. The doctors had found another intestinal infestation and a cyst on her scalp that would have to be removed surgically in June. The cyst might be contributing to her debilitating facial neuralgia, and that would relieve some of the pain—but her balance might be gone permanently: She might never be able to skate again.

  Heinlein’s own health had improved: He had a physical on his fiftieth birthday, and his heart was in good shape. Nor was his professional life all frustration: Martin Greenberg at Gnome Press offered him a contract for Methuselah’s Children. Now that Shasta was going out of business, Gnome was one of only two specialty presses left in the science-fiction field. Greenberg wanted one or two collections of Heinlein’s short stories.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction brought out “The Menace from Earth” in its August issue, and a new magazine, Saturn, bought “The Man Who Traveled in Elephants” in October—a sentimental favorite he had written nine years before and had never been able to sell. The seller’s market for science fiction was helping to reduce his backfile.

  As to the juveniles—“I feel I have reached an impasse in this branch of fiction,” he had told Blassingame in May.76 But in one of his discarded draft letters to Alice Dalgliesh the next day, he told her,

  You can edit me because you’re better at it than I am; other editors I won’t allow to change anything because they’re not. In short I want to go on writing boy’s books and I want to write them for you.

  But unless I can get this worked out I probably won’t be writing them for anybody.77

  The problem was not resolved, but timing was forcing his hand: If Heinlein was going to do another boys’ book in 1957, he would have to start it soon: He planned to be traveling over the holidays—the Far East and India this time (he was finally going to achieve a life’s ambition and see the Taj Mahal in person—by moonlight if he could manage it).

  He began turning over material in his mind. On the evidence of what wound up in the book, he found his story material in what was topical. “Juvenile delinquency” was in the news and editorial pages, but that was not the kind of book Heinlein had been writing. On the personal front, his neighbor, Lucky Herzberger, was still thanking them profusely for “teaching” their daughter, Barbara, how to read over one weekend visit while Lucky and Art were out of town—but that was absurd: Ginny had simply handed her a book one day, and Barbara began reading on her own.78 What that might say about local schools really didn’t bear thinking about, but Heinlein was more or less forced to think about it when he went to a large newsstand downtown looking for a copy of Scientific American. He could not find one copy—the stand had sold the three it took—but he counted twenty astrology magazines.79

  Heinlein framed all his concerns about intellectually-soggy American youth in a story about a space-struck boy accidentally prepared to take advantage of the slings and arrows fate threw at him amid the game shows and jingle contests that made up American television in the 1950s—and let the boy stand up as a proud representative of humanity in a kangaroo court of aliens. He titled his book Have Space Suit—Will Travel.80 The title had plot significance, of course—in fact, that was the plot for the first several chapters.

  Heinlein did his usual careful research and preparation—sizes of various galaxies, surface temperatures on planets, calculating travel times to Pluto and beyond. At one point, he needed to know the volume of air an empty space suit would contain, and did the calculations. But the answer didn’t seem right to him, so he took his worksheets to Ginny. She did a completely independent calculation that came closer to what he thought it should be. It didn’t seem to be the arithmetic that was at fault: Comparing their worksheets, they traced the difference to a single critical figure. He had used the figure in Marks’ Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers, the handbook he had learned engineering with at the Naval Academy and had used ever since. Ginny had taken hers from the Chemical & Rubber Company Handbook, the chemist’s traditional sourcebook. The CRC clearly had the right figure: Robert penciled the correction into his Marks’ and wrote them a letter (and found the figure corrected in the next edition).81 After that he would not rely on a single source for critical figures.

  Ginny also helped out by composing a musical “speech” for the Mother Thing, a music-speaking “beat cop,” with Robert looking over her shoulder and with a veto: He didn’t want it to sound like anything human. Together they got the effect he was after. The whole book was a pleasure for both of them—“… pure fun all the way through.”82

  Heinlein finished Have Space Suit—Will Travel on August 30, 1957, just as the first installment of Citizen of the Galaxy began to run in Astounding. While he was tightening up the manuscript, his Hollywood agent, Ned Brown, forwarded an offer for him to script Herman Wouk’s The Lomokome Papers (1947), a science-fiction satire of the Cold War, about a naval lieutenant’s trip to a hollow moon. But he was able to turn it down with a clear conscience: He had already paid a nonrefundable deposit for their sailing date in November. At least this proved there was some activity in Ned Brown’s office. He put off the question of switching agents in Hollywood for another time.83

  11

  GOING OFF A BIT

  On October 4, 1957, the Russians launched an earth-orbiting satellite, Sputnik 1, a twenty-two-inch metal sphere with four whip antennas, broadcasting a continuous beep-beep-beep as it sped across the sky completing an orbit in ninety-six minutes. “I am very shook up,” Robert told Buddy Scoles, “… on the basis of payload and performance … it appeared that they [the Russians] had solved the problem of precision positioning and that it must be assumed that we were sitting ducks…”1 The Eisenhower administration, he went on to say, had dropped the ball—badly: “… everybody from the President on down was caught flat-footed by a degree of Russian engineering achievement we had not suspected they were capable of.”2

  After the initial postwar flush of enthusiasm for guided missiles, funding in the United States for basic research had been cut back, and progress had reached a virtual standstill. The promise of space travel, that had been piggybacked on missile development, was deferred and deferred—and now the Russians had seized their opportunity. When Robert’s phone rang that morning, it was the local newspaper wanting him to tell them what Sputnik really meant.

  I told the press that if the Russians could put that payload in that orbit then it seemed extremely likely that they could hit us anywhere they wanted to with warheads—and any time, depending on whether they had the hardware on the shelf or had to stop to build it.3

  Heinlein spent the next month, while Sputnik beeped overhead for twenty-three days, trying to round up a new job for G. Harry Stine, who had been summarily fired by Martin Company (predecessor to today’s Lockheed-Martin) for saying much the same thing to United Press when asked, just an hour after Heinlein spoke with the local press in Colorado Springs. Heinlein also dedicated the book he was working on—Have Space Suit—Will Travel—to Hank and Barbi
e Stine.

  Shortly after Sputnik went silent, the Russians did it again, launching Sputnik 2 into Earth orbit, with a dog as “passenger.” “Sputnik” means “traveling companion.” The papers dubbed this one “Muttnik,” but no one was laughing. Robert sent A. P. White a characteristic bit of doggerel on the subject that showed how he was leaning, “with apologies to Robert Herrick”:

  Gather ye rosebuds while ye may

  Old Sputnik’s still a-flying.

  For while we still are here today,

  Tomorrow we’ll be dying.4

  The Heinleins left Colorado Springs a little early to have a few days with Robert’s brother in Palo Alto and a few days more at the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco, where he could hook up with Robert Cornog and A. P. White. White had lined up a number of his Bay Area colleagues to meet, including Poul Anderson, and a relative newcomer, Philip K. Dick.

  They sailed on the S.S. President Monroe at noon on November 26, and were surprised to find a telegram waiting for them on the ship—from Margaret Sanger. “Delighted to learn from Lloyd Morain [a friend of Ginny’s] you arriving Honolulu. Please phone me Reef Hotel[.] Many mutual interests to discuss.”5 That was more like a summons for a command performance from one of the true royals of the century. Margaret Sanger, just a couple of months younger than Heinlein’s mother, was one of the pivotal figures in the birth control and planned parenthood movements; had smuggled diaphragms into the country in bottles of brandy when it could still mean a jail term; was the scandalous lover of both H. G. Wells and Havelock Ellis. Her What Every Girl Should Know and What Every Mother Should Know, distributed as Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books, were virtually the only reliable sex information widely available when Heinlein was growing up. Her good-socialist opinions about eugenics and population control had deeply influenced his—particularly her opinion that war was driven by excess population.