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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  (Me, I don’t know. I keep thinking about it—and speculating.) …

  This pious critic will allow any speculation at all, on any subject—as long as it conforms to the unwritten assumptions of the new orthodoxy.

  However his twin brother works just across the street—he believes in science fiction “for amusement only”—like pin ball machines.

  He will permit any speculation at all—as long as it is about gadgets only and doesn’t touch people. He doesn’t care what mayhem you commit on physics, astronomy, or chemistry with your gadgets … [sic] but the people must be the same plain old wonderful jerks that live in his Home Town. Give him a good ole adventure story any time, with lots of Gee-Whiz in it and space ships blasting off and maybe the Good Guys (in white space ships) chasing the Bad Guys (in black space ships)—but, brother, don’t you say anything about the Methodist Church, or the Flag, or incest, or homosexuality, or teleology, or theology, or the sacredness of marriage, or anything philosophical! Because you are just an entertainer, see? That sort of Heavy Thinking is reserved for C. P. Snow or James Jones or Graham Greene. You are a pulp writer, Bud, and you will always be a pulp writer even though your trivia is now bound in boards and sells for just as much as Grace Metalious’ stories23 … [sic] and you are not permitted to have Heavy Thoughts. Space Ships and Heavy Thinking do not mix—so shut up and sit down!

  The rule is: Science Fiction by its nature must be trivial.

  This of course rules out … a large fraction of my work—and all of my future work, I think. Because … I’m tired of writing about space ships and rather bored with gadgets. Oh, I’ve always dealt with philosophical problems, just as you have, but I usually sugar-coated them and packaged them to look like something else—Methuselah’s Children, Citizen of the Galaxy, Have Space Suit—Will Travel, Star Beast and some others were just as loaded and explosive as Starship Troopers or Stranger in a Strange Land. But the packaging was a bit different and each had a bit more cops & robbers in it than these last two did.

  But in the meantime this conservative orthodoxy has grown up and it becomes harder and harder to sneak in an original idea without being nailed for it by either the Pious Critic, or his brother the Just-for-Fun Critic—or both. So the hell with ’em both. I’m going to write what I please—about sex or love or duty or marriage or politics or epistemology or God. Probably somebody will print it. If not, at least I’ll enjoy writing it—and I can’t enjoy writing if I must always keep one eye on the Procrustean bed.24

  He began to receive fan mail about the book. One “bumptious and argumentative” youngster,25 about age fifteen, disagreed with some passing remark about the role of cosmic radiation in evolution—a perfectly orthodox speculation. And he seemed to assume that Dr. Teller’s “a little radiation is good for you” implied a wholehearted endorsement of thermonuclear war. Heinlein tried to steer him away from his assumptions, to get him to think about the material instead of his preconceptions, but had little success. The boy wrote back—and again wrote later, long letters wanting to discuss politics and especially atomic energy policy and Communism. Apparently he had a great deal of time on his hands—time Heinlein did not have when he was trying to get back to work. He turned the correspondence over to Ginny. Ginny had been spending a fair amount of time on the new Broadmoor ski slopes and had a disagreement with a snowbank; she replied to the boy’s next missive (and the next and the next) while Heinlein started another book. Ginny found the letters tiresome, too, “shrill and disputatious,”26 “long letter after long letter, each one more argumentative and know-it-all than the last.”27 “Then we both got fed up with his manners and his illogic and stopped answering … [sic] and after a while he quit writing, to our great relief.”28

  That would not be the last time they would be troubled by Alexei Panshin.29

  Heinlein pulled out the abandoned manuscript of The Heretic and took a fresh look at it. This book was supposed to be a satire, and he might have stalled earlier because he had just been too careful before, but he didn’t want to pull his punches anymore.

  He had tried a very conventional way of telling the story—the same way Olaf Stapledon had framed Odd John: A journalist tells what he sees and reports on the story’s protagonist. But the Man from Mars’s journalist, Ben Caxton, may have been too much of a man-of-the-world personality, who kept the story moving away from the nurse and the Man–Martian. He switched over to another viewpoint character—the crusty minor character he had mentioned in passing in his very first set of notes in 1948, when it was still going to be the “Gulf” story.30

  The change of viewpoint character probably was enough to rearrange the relationships and break the story loose from the Odd John storytelling model. Jubal Harshaw firmed up as the kind of older mentor Heinlein himself had always relied on:

  Some critics say that my stories always contain a wise and crusty old man who is my own concept of myself. Not true. They are all different and they are not self-portraits; they are many men who did indeed live and who were my mentors—and now they are all gone to whatever Valhalla there may be for such men.…31

  This would be partly Arthur George “Sarge” Smith—with whom he had struck up an intimate correspondence32—and partly E. E. “Doc” Smith—and partly Hermann Deutsch (much of his physical appearance from Deutsch).33

  Early in January 1960, Willy Ley wrote trying to interest Heinlein in a television show that was buying story outlines,34 but the Heinleins were scheduled to leave in the spring, for a trip to Russia they had been planning for years, and Heinlein would be out of the country just when the TV work would be heating up. Ginny had tried several times to talk him out of the trip—she wanted to stay as far away from the Iron Curtain as possible—but Heinlein was determined to go, and she had finally agreed to it because there was an international summit meeting between President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev scheduled for the time they were to be in the USSR; the Russians would want to avoid an international incident while the talks were going on, so it might be reasonably safe …35

  On January 5, 1960, Robert McCrary wrote offering him space for a rebuttal to McCrary’s review of Starship Troopers, but the damage was done, and in any case Heinlein needed to write something saleable for himself and Ginny, instead of helping Hearst sell more newspapers. He began to write again on January 23, 1960, and his Man from Mars (re-retitled from The Heretic) flowed and flowed, and took on a life of its own. An ordinary book might take him three to four weeks, but this was not an ordinary book. He wrote “The End” on March 21, 1960, and had a stack of eight hundred pages of manuscript (compared to about three hundred pages for one of the juveniles)—not strictly science fiction, not like anything he had ever done before. Ginny was startled by it: “When he finished it, I finally got to read it all in one piece, and it was one of those ‘what hath God wrought!’ things to me.”36

  The long gestation period for this book had bridged from the postwar period (1948) into the Kennedy era, and American culture had changed and changed again in the interim. It was not publishable when conceived—and there was some doubt whether it was yet publishable in 1960:

  … I shan’t be surprised if nobody wants it. For the first time in my life I indulged in the luxury of writing without one eye on the taboos, the market, etc.; I will be unsurprised and only moderately unhappy if it turns out that the result is unsalable.”37

  At least part of its “problem” was that the book did not cleanly fall within science fiction as it was in 1960: “This story is Cabellesque satire on religion and sex, it is not science fiction by any stretch of the imagination.”38

  In 1960, The Man from Mars was ahead of a curve that would become pronounced in mainstream fiction during the early 1960s. The perennial debate among literary critics about the “death of the novel” heated up again in the late 1950s, and there was speculation in the critical community that the possibilities of the realistic novel might be exhausted, and the next trend in prestige literature might
be satires. Joseph Heller’s important satire Catch-22 was published in the same month as Stranger in a Strange Land, at which time the first of Kurt Vonnegut’s satires of the 1960s, Mother Night (1961), was already in production.

  The Man from Mars shows some significant sourcing that suggests Heinlein drew comfortably on mainstream sources. For example, from William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley (1946, filmed in 1947), as well as Philip Wylie’s 1930 Gladiator.39

  Gladiator has been grandfathered into science fiction (through the efforts of genre historian Sam Moskowitz). Nightmare Alley, the story of a con man who moves through several different underworlds and half-worlds, has no discernable connection to genre science fiction. It was a mix that was to become characteristic of Heinlein—and with which his genre readers were not always comfortable.

  He just had time to correct the manuscript for The Man from Mars and send it to the typist before they left for the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Shasta had finally given up the ghost, and Ted Dikty had offered to get Heinlein the printing plates for the three Future History books. It would have to wait until he got back. He just had time to write Schuyler Miller a thank-you letter for the “cool and analytical” review he had given Starship Troopers in the March issue of Analog.

  They were scheduled to leave on April 18, stopping by Wiesbaden to see Freddie and Martha (King) Smith. Fred Smith was now a general, in charge of the American presence in the European theater. Rex wrote, asking to have his daughter Tish join them in Wiesbaden and for the trip, but Robert was very reluctant to put her in harm’s way: As a brutal fact, the State Department would not be any protection for Americans traveling in Russia. She could join them for the “civilized portions” of the trip, Robert ruled—in Germany at the start and Scandinavia at the end—but not for the Russian middle.

  Then their plans abruptly changed on them: The Russian visas came through marked ten days earlier than they had planned—ten days before the summit was to convene in Paris. They had to decide whether the additional risk was worth the trip—and they would have to go almost directly there.

  14

  THE WORKERS’ PARADISE

  On April 19, 1960, the Heinleins left Colorado Springs for New York. They pushed the European part of the trip to the end, after the Russian part. The Paris summit was to convene on May 16, so they would be safe enough during the preparatory period. They reduced their baggage to a minimum, but there was one item they did not skimp on for this trip:

  Ginny ordinarily does not carry jewelry outside the States, not from fear of losing it (insured) but because it is such a nuisance at customs. But when we went to the USSR, she carried with her about $6,000 worth of emeralds, in a chamois bag, pinned to the lining of an inner zippered compartment in her purse … not to wear, but as valuta … because when war breaks out paper money is suddenly worth nothing and travelers’ cheques even less, whereas all through history it has been possible to bribe one’s way across a border with precious stones.1

  They flew to Frankfurt, gaining a day but losing a night’s sleep. They were booked then on an Afghan-airline mixed passenger–freight flight to Prague.2 Prague seemed gray-looking and dreary, the people moderately prosperous but subdued, numb, not yet recovered from the crackdown on Czechoslovakia.3 The Heinleins flew on to Warsaw, along with politicians from the Mexican Senate on a junket, and found a city bombed nearly flat in the war, distressingly poor and still not rebuilt. “You would be hard pushed to find a Communist in Poland,” Heinlein wrote to relatives of Sprague and Catherine de Camp, “and they hate the Russians with the same intensity with which they hate the Germans … Only in the captive Baltic republics do you see signs of the terror which a stranger can spot.”4

  On the last day of April, they boarded an Aeroflot flight to Moscow, when they got their first exposure to Russian consumer engineering: The seatbelts had only one side—they could not be fastened; there was nothing to fasten to. At Vnukovo (Grandfather) Airport, the customs officials were startled to hear Ginny speaking painfully correct Russian. The Heinleins were met by a car and driver, and their English-speaking guide, provided by InTourist.5

  The ride to the hotel was … illuminating: Moscow appeared not to have suburbs at all: It went directly from rustic log cabin dachas to apartment blocks in the severe and bleak Russian Modern style.6 The Hotel Ukraine was in that style—a thousand rooms and jammed with local political delegations from Africa and Asia and a dozen or so tourists. Possibly the crowding was due to the next day being May Day, the largest national celebration in the Soviet Union. Ginny found herself pressed into service as an impromptu translator for the sedmoi etadz—tourists who did not speak Russian—mostly making inquiries for blankets, schedules, and so forth.7 Wherever there were Americans, they clung to each other as strangers in a very strange land.

  Not knowing what kind of accommodation they would encounter, Ginny had booked them at Luxe class, the best, and also the most expensive. The suite they were given, at the end of a maze of corridors, was enormous, palatial—larger, in fact, than their entire house in Colorado Springs. But the locks were literally falling off the doors, and the parquet floors crackled when walked upon, the tiles popping up at odd angles.8 These conditions obtained throughout the entire Soviet Union—in one hotel the tiles made a wooden flower blossom, coming up around the legs of the piano—possibly because they were wet-mopped incessantly and never cared for. Unskilled labor was never a problem in the Soviet Union, which had a full-employment policy, and makework was found for even the oldest and feeblest. Every floor had its own “dragon”—a concierge to whom they must surrender their keys when they went out (their passports were held at the front desk). The streets were swept by grandmothers with twig brooms, and even in the deep and otherwise impressive Moscow subways, they found a young woman at each landing whose only job it was to press the start button if the escalator stopped.

  The food in Moscow—indeed, all over the Soviet Union—Robert and Ginny found indescribably bad. They lost several pounds each during their two weeks there. Alcohol was plentiful. Vodka and sedatives were a practical necessity, given the frustrations people were presented with on an hourly basis. “The most prominent sight in Moskva and everywhere in USSR is the passed-out drunk; he is everywhere … One freedom remaining in Russia is the right to get stinking drunk in public, any time, anywhere.”9 There seemed to be, Robert remarked, a drunk passed out in every washroom in the city.10

  On May Day, the hotel had not reserved any viewing positions for its guests for the parade. Robert and Ginny took their heaviest coats, as the day was chilly—a special lightweight cashmere coat Ginny had bought for Robert that entertained them both by surprising the Russian coat-check girls, who always expected the usual Russian weight. Loaded up with cameras, including the heavy StereoRealist Ginny had given him for Christmas in 1954, they went over to the National Hotel, which had balconies overlooking the street. But Margaret Truman—former President Truman’s daughter—was staying there at the time, and they could not get into the hotel. Instead, they found a spot on the street. The crowd built up as the parade began “with a series of huge rockets (on carriers) which we later learned were only mockups.”11 They gave way for a French Communist tourist who asked them to let grandmother through—a tiny woman—so she could see the parade. The rest of the family crowded in after her, and Robert and Ginny found themselves pushed back against the building. But Robert got some good stereo slides of the parade despite the conditions.

  After the parade, Ginny got their guide Ludmilla—a sweet child but more a hindrance than a help in Ginny’s opinion—to take them to Red Square. St. Basil’s Cathedral was closed. Nor was the Kremlin open to the public. That left “Goom”—the huge central Soviet department store, Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin (or GUM). “Nothing of any interest to a human being was on sale there.”12 They did get an exposure—somewhat horrifying—to everyday living conditions: Ludmilla wanted to buy some lipstick while she was there. They watched fascinated
as she got in line at a counter and eventually told the clerk what she wanted. The clerk wrote up the purchase and sent her to another counter—another line—where she paid for the purchase and came back to the original counter to get the lipstick.

  So much for shopping in Moscow.

  They had three more days there, and the sightseeing ran out depressingly soon. They were able to obtain tickets, though, for Tchaikovsky’s most famous opera, Eugene Onegin, and for a Saturday matinee performance of the Bolshoi Ballet of a children’s ballet, The Hobby Horse. The Russian practice was to not release tickets until the day of the performance, but a black market of scalpers existed, and they found they could get tickets for a performance of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at the Moscow Arts Theatre—the theater where Stanislavski had worked before coming to New York.

  Robert encouraged Ginny to dress up for the Bolshoi, and she wore Chinese silks and emeralds—an obvious foreigner and an equally obvious capitalist: During intermission a Red Army officer shoved her brusquely out of his way, gone before Robert could even react. His was simply the most overt of the various disapprovals they met with. Most Russians, they found, were warm and friendly—but there were exceptions.