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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  Rex Ivar Heinlein’s long and sad struggle was over at last, and he was laid to a rest he could never achieve in life. It was appropriate he should be beside Rose Betty, for her accidental death thirty-three years earlier106 was as defining for his life as his military service had been.

  Robert would never know if his father realized how much his example of strength had meant. He knew he had never been the son his father had wanted him to be; his brother Rex had won finally and for-ever on that count.107

  “May the Lord make His face to shine upon thee and give thee peace.”108

  13

  “MY OWN STUFF, MY OWN WAY”

  Virginia Kirkus operated a book review service widely used by libraries and some bookstores as a purchasing guide. The short, pithy, often negative reviews were looked on by publishers as a significant pass/no-pass gateway to library sales. On October 1, 1959, Kirkus reviewed Starship Troopers generally positively, as a “weirdly credible adventure revolving around moral philosophy and entomology,” though “somewhat pretentious in style and proposed scope, often slightly confusing to the non-aficionado.”1 On October 5, Kirkus took the unprecedented step of publishing a second review, reversing the first one:

  A report on this title appeared in the last issue, but additional material has reached us which necessitates a completely revised viewpoint and a new report. Heinlein is generally regarded as one of the most dependable of the SF fraternity, and this is a weirdly credible adventure revolving around a youth in his late teens, a citizen of Terra, who enlists as an interstellar soldier. His journeys not only include fantastic journeys through space, combats with insect enemies, and so forth, but they extend to the battle front of the mind, and it is on this level that the book must be more closely analyzed. Quite evidently Heinlein is projecting his own justification of the moral validity of war, of a proper military order dictated by reason, of a moral philosophy which advocates capital punishment, military violence dictated by “older and wiser heads,” and a virtual reign of terror by force, but he attacks concepts and historic figures with vitriolic hysteria. Any realization of this as presenting characters engaged in philosophic discussion—which Heinlein would perhaps suggest—is far from the truth. It reads rather as dogmatic airing of very personal attitudes—a somewhat menacing sort of “brain-washing” for the uninitiated and acceptant readers.2

  Peter Israel, Heinlein’s editor at Putnam’s, was surprised and disturbed, but Robert shrugged it off: It was certainly odd, but,

  the tone of the second review was about what I expect this book will get from quite a high percentage of reviewers with pacifist-socialist-internationalist leanings … [sic] who are very numerous, as you know. I simply hope that they do not smother it in silence—their usual technique.3

  He sent out twenty-one copies inscribed to friends and family.4 “Ordinarily I do not give away my own books,” he told William McMorris (his line editor), asking for an additional dozen copies to be billed to his royalty account, “but this book is exceptional in that I had expert help from quite a large number of people.”5

  When the books arrived in January he sent one to his brother Clare, “Capt. of Engineers who, by expressing a firm opinion in 1944, planted the seed of which this is the fruit,” and another to Marsh Gurney, the Fourth-Year from Hell who had given him such a hard time of hazing in his Plebe Year at Annapolis.

  He had run into Gurney at the Congress of Flight convention in Las Vegas earlier in 1959, where half the program was about space flight. Perhaps that was why Gurney was in Heinlein’s mind. He inscribed this one: “To Marsh Gurney, ’26 who made me memorize log tables, the Mary Gloster & beat my tail—and thereby shaped my character for the rest of my life. With thanks RAH ’29.”6

  As the Heinlein family gathered in Kansas City weeks later, to bury Robert’s father, reviews began appearing in newspapers across the country. One that must have stung was written by his old friend and comrade A. P. White for his “H. H. Holmes” review column in the New York Herald Tribune, calling it an “irate sermon with a few fictional trappings.” This was exaggerated—with more hyperbole to come: “This author is so intent upon his arguments that he has forgotten to insert a story or any recognizable characters.”7

  As uncomfortable as it was, A. P.’s review was more or less fair: Except for the hyperbole of no story and no characters, it was basically within the bounds of legitimate criticism.

  But in the review that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle the same day (November 8, 1959), the reviewer, Robert McCrary, let his hyperbole slop over to outright misrepresentation:

  … someone should criticize Heinlein, not as a bad writer, but as a peddler of dangerous ideologies. The need is all the more acute because most of Heinlein’s novels are aimed at teen-age readers.

  Heinlein’s philosophy, at least as expressed in his novels, is the cult of violence. If someone disagrees with you, kill him. Anyone who thinks disputes can be settled peaceably is a coward. You must obey Captain Queeg [of The Caine Mutiny], even if he is insane, because he is in charge.

  This philosophy has turned up in previous Heinlein novels, but never in so blatant a form as in “Starship Troopers.” This time the plot is less a foundation for a story than a framework on which to hang a tract.…

  At other points he extolls the virtues of flogging criminals and executing the mentally ill. (I am not making this up.)

  Through it all runs the basic philosophy: You must do what I say, because I am in charge. I am in charge because I am stronger than you. If you can kill me, then you will be in charge.…

  Heinlein’s talents as a writer are undeniable. His approach to morality is incredible. Don’t we already have enough immature persons who think that the answer to problems is violence? Do we really need skilled writers to egg them on?

  It was hard to believe that anyone who actually read the book could take this review in any way seriously—but apparently people, and specifically some of his colleagues in science fiction, were lining up behind some of the crudest of its misrepresentations.

  Starship Troopers, already in its first month of release (the condensation of the book, “Starship Soldier,” appeared in the October and November 1959 issues of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the book itself was released in October 1959), had begun to generate discussion among science-fiction writers in a new fanzine-for-professionals, the bombastically named Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies—PITFCS—edited by Theodore Cogswell. Poul Anderson wrote a longish letter of comment, disagreeing—intelligently—with a number of the book’s postulates. Heinlein wrote a cordial, but private, reply to Anderson, stressing that he would not be joining in the public discussion (though shoptalk with a colleague was always in order).

  Cogswell wanted to reprint the McCrary review along with Anderson’s letter and some remarks of his own to generate a full, formal discussion among his subscribers. His own view of the book, he told Heinlein, was somewhat different from McCrary’s: A soldier, himself, in two wars, he found it a fine book for adults, but he objected to “the presentation of the idea that war is basically an exciting athletic contest in which the best side (ours of course) always wins. This I consider to be downright immoral…”8 Since Heinlein’s book had started the controversy, Cogswell believed it would be appropriate to include Heinlein’s commentary.

  Heinlein agreed with the premises, but not the conclusions. This is what he had thought he was talking about:

  The central theme is expanded in many ways and many sub-propositions consistent with or corollary to the main one are shown: (a) that nothing worth having is ever free; it must be paid for; (b) that authority always carries with it responsibility, even if a man tries to refuse it; (c) that “natural rights” are not God-given but must be earned; (d) that, despite all H-bombs, biological warfare, push-buttons, ICBMs, or other Buck Rogers miracle weapons, victory in war is never cheap but must be purchased with the blood of heroes; (e) that human being
s are not potatoes, not actuarial tables, but that each one is unique and precious … [sic] and that the strayed lamb is as precious as the ninety-and-nine in the fold; (f) that a man’s noblest act is to die for his fellow man, that such death is not suicidal, not wasted, but is the highest and most human form of survival behavior[.]9

  How one could possibly get from what was in the book to “the idea that war is basically an exciting athletic contest in which the best side (ours of course) always wins” was beyond his power to understand. Through most of the book, he pointed out, the humans are losing the war. The story ends with the war still unwon, just before a major battle—“and the reader is intentionally never allowed to know which side won.”10

  Cogswell’s complaint that he had “prettied up” war Robert found incoherent.

  Answering this summary criticism is a bit like fighting a feather bed. It implies first that my purpose was to give a full understanding of what war does to everybody, both ourselves and everybody else—enemy and innocent bystander … [sic] or, if that is not my purpose, then it certainly should have been my purpose and that I am lacking in not having served that purpose, whether I planned to or not.11

  He tried to reason out what Cogswell might have meant by his criticism:

  Now, what is the nature of your condemnation of my book? Is it that my book has reduced the degree of appreciation of the meaning of war in human terms? If so, how?

  Or do you mean that the book failed to preach this “wide appreciation of what actually is involved in human terms” (with the assumed, and for the moment, stipulated assumption that such was or should have been my purpose). If this is what you are condemning, will you please tell me where, within the narrow framework of a first-person infantry-soldier story, I failed? What should I have had Sgt. Juan Rico say, think, experience, or feel in order to satisfy your (undefined) requirement which you say I have not met. I do not ask this lightly, as it is entirely possible that you, an educated man and a veteran of two wars, can suggest [to] me a theme or proposition which would be valuable to the reader and which I might be able to patch into the story at its forthcoming revision …12

  This thematic examination of why an unprepared young man would choose to place his frail body between home and war’s desolation might help young men whose real-life experience left them no more prepared than Johnny Rico.

  Every young American today is subject to military service; most of them, as shown by the Mayer Report, et al., are not prepared for it, either emotionally or by formal schooling.…

  He doesn’t see why he should expose himself to death; nothing in his experience justifies it. The whole thing is wildly implausible and quite unfair—like going to sleep in your own bed and waking up in a locked ward of an insane asylum. It strikes him as rank injustice.

  And it is … [sic] the rankest sort of injustice.

  My basic purpose, then, was to promote in that prototype youth-in-a-foxhole a better understanding of the nature, purpose and function of the ridiculous and dangerous predicament he found himself in.

  There were various ancillary purposes but this was the main one.… I was forced to limit my scope to: “Why in hell should a young man in good health be willing to fight and perhaps die for his country?”.…

  I do not expect you to like the book, nor to speak approvingly of it, since you quite clearly do not like it and do not approve of it. But, in fairness, I ask that you, in published criticism of it, (a) read more carefully what I did say and not impute to it things which I did not say, and (b) judge it within its obvious limitations as a short first-person commercial novel and not expect it to unscrew the inscrutable with respect to every possible facet of an extremely complex philosophical question (i.e., don’t expect of me more than you require of yourself).13

  McCrary’s piece was clearly dishonest, and Cogswell’s letter was just as clearly sincere and honestly held opinion—that had nothing whatever to do with the book. It would be quite impossible to argue with him: Heinlein courteously declined to participate in a public discussion, marking all comments as private shoptalk. Reprinting McCrary’s review would simply perpetuate its “lies and malicious distortions” in a community of his friends and colleagues, where it would be most embarrassing. He would regard it as an unfriendly act to do so, with or without ancillary comment—“But please do not hesitate to print any honest unfavorable comment. I expected this book to be controversial; I knew that I was disturbing quite a number of sacred cows.…”14

  Denial of the concept of “natural rights” would also be unpopular—“likely to arouse anger, not logic.”15 The flogging, too, would raise hackles, though the story logic set the flogging against the concept of jailing, and sociologists had been concerned for some time that jailing a man simply imprisons him in a school of crime, whereas the milder punishment of flogging did seem to have some deterrent potential.16

  Most of all, his treatment of the franchise would raise howls of outrage, just as it was intended to do: “To suggest that they owe some service to their country first before they are entitled to a voice in the destinies of that country—well indeed! Shocking!”

  He, himself, was deeply shocked at conscription.

  Poul Anderson pointed out to me that he rather doubted if this country could survive through purely voluntary military service.

  Perhaps he is right. I care not. If there are not sufficient Simon-pure, utterly uncoerced volunteers to defend a country and save it … [sic] then let it go down the drain! And that applies just as much to my own beloved country as it does to the Roman Empire … The thought of a draftee being required to die that I may live is as morally offensive to me as that of galley slaves, chained to their sweeps, and drowning in battle not of their choosing.

  If the United States goes under (as I am inclined to think she will), I will be inclined to blame it on moral decay rather than on the superiority of our enemies … [sic] and, to me, the gravest aspect of that moral decay lies in the fact that we have elected to depend on human slaves as cannon fodder.

  But I suppose that my opposition to a democratically accepted and publicly approved social institution such as the National Selective Service Act—having the gall to label this flag-bedecked and chaplain-blessed custom “human slavery”—is still another of “Heinlein’s dangerous ideologies,” as seditious as my unspeakable notion that the franchise is not a “natural right” to be handed out as freely as favors at a children’s party, but to be earned by toil and danger at great personal sacrifice.

  Well, if my teachings are now to be indicted as “dangerous,” tending to “corrupt the youth of the land,” I will be in most noble and distinguished company. Pass the hemlock, please—17

  Cogswell replied temperately, saying that his criticisms were based on his overall impression of the book as a juvenile sold to children’s librarians—so he could agree with every specific point in Heinlein’s letter, without changing the totality of his reaction.

  And in the meantime, chico, relax. I don’t know about the outsiders, but as far as the writers go you are warmly liked and greatly respected (though often disagreed with, and that is as it should be) and it should be obvious that no comments by a reviewer are going to change that.18

  If you must take hemlock, he added, finish the Future History first!

  Perhaps the review wouldn’t matter—but the book was generating discussion among his colleagues, so off the point, seizing so much on incidentals and missing the main message, that Schuyler Miller, who had gotten more earfuls at that year’s World SF Convention in Detroit than he could really tolerate,19 took the opportunity of his review of Starship Troopers for the March 1960 issue of Analog (John Campbell had been gradually changing the name of Astounding Science Fiction over to Analog Science Fact Science Fiction over the last year, fading the old name down on the cover while the new name became more prominent) to remind people that what appeared in the story was not the direct reflection of the person. This was an aspect of provincialism, he wr
ote, “that refuses to remain provincial, a mark of naiveté that is apt to brand the most sophisticated.”20 He compared the reaction to the completely unjust vilification experienced by Kenneth Roberts, the writer of a 1940 historical novel, Oliver Wiswell, written from the viewpoint of a Tory in the American Revolution. The issues Heinlein raised in Starship Troopers were fit and relevant subjects for discussion: “Surely any writer has the right to choose an unpopular theme, and develop it with all his skill, without being condemned—without being identified with the thing he writes!”21

  Cogswell went on to publish the McCrary review and many letters in the Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies. Only one of them—George Price—seemed to be able even to read the clear language of the book. Robert began to feel that his colleagues in the field—with a few exceptions—despised him.22

  Even more disturbing was the pattern he was seeing coming together, the emergence of what we now call “political correctness.” Three years later, Heinlein let his hair down in shoptalk with Ted Sturgeon:

  … I am still bugged by the quality of reviewing generally accorded science fiction. Or let’s call it “speculative fiction” for a moment because one of the things that bugs me the most is that some critics seem strongly indisposed to permit a writer to speculate.

  It seems to me that the only excuse for the sort of fiction we write (whatever it is called) is speculation, as far-ranging and imaginative as the author can manage.

  But is this permitted? Don’t make me laugh, it hurts. The usual critic drags in his Procrustean bed at the first hint of free-swinging speculation. There has grown up an extremely conservative orthodoxy in science fiction, spineless, boneless, suffocating. It is almost amorphous but I can sketch the vague outlines. It is do-goodish and quasi-socialist—but not Communist; this critic wouldn’t recognize dialectical materialism if it bit him in the face. It is both “democratic” and “civil libertarian” without the slightest understanding that these two powerful and explosive concepts can frequently be in direct conflict, each with the other. It is egalitarian, pacifist, and anti-racist—with no notion that these concepts might ever clash. It believes heartily in “freedom” and “equality”—yet somehow thinks that “older & wiser heads” are fully justified in manipulating the human psyche to achieve these ends—after all, it’s for their own good … [sic] and these new orthodoctrinaires are always quite certain that they know what is good for the human race.