Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2
Page 63
Around the 4th of July Leslyn moved in here at the Hickses,9 Dorothy Hicks having gone to Redondo Beach to fill a job teaching swimming for the summer. Bernice thought the Hicks household would be a gay and healthy atmosphere for Leslyn, and so Leslyn moved into Dorothy’s room. About this time, I saw Bill Corson on Sunset one day and he expressed extreme sympathy for us on hearing that Leslyn was to be so cozily close to us. At the time, I thought this an extremely uncharitable attitude.
And so it began. We listened to Leslyn’s endless accounts of how Bob carried on with Ginny and yet denied her both men and alcohol; we dried her tears and calmed her down when she threatened occasionally to charge adultery in the divorce and cite Ginny as correspondent or when she got sudden urges to wreak horrible revenges on Ginny, moods which would inspire Philip Wiley10 to new tomes. But we tried to understand. We hauled her around in the car, had dinner with us every night, and let her drink all our beer.
Meanwhile we heard from Bob, after we had sent him a friendly note and cartoon at his accommodation address. My cartoon depicted a couple of earnest doogs (us) trying to persuade a belligerent squirrel (already under the influence of Bob’s personality) to tell us whether Mr. H. were in, and Mr. H’s residence was a hollow tree, of course. But he wasn’t living in a hollow tree; he had a room on a ranch in Ojai.11 He remarked in his letter that he was touched to hear from us in such an ordinary manner, all same like nothing had happened, that it was good to show he still had some friends left. “I had been far from sure,” he wrote. And he hoped we could get together for dinner, but that he was sticking close to Ojai, being short of money.
Leslyn was writing letters to Bob at the rate of about two a week, and she showed me his replies which were businesslike but friendly, or perhaps I should say “not unfriendly.” About this time, she sold the house at something like $11,000, and began talking about getting a job, the thought of which caused her to break down and weep now and then. She called Fritz Lang about a job, but nothing ever came of that. One day she went down town to be interviewed for a personnel job, wearing an outfit that was stunning in its lack of taste (white canvas sandals, a formal sort of ruffly black skirt, a striped tailored jacket, a jersey scarf in a tropical print, and a white straw hat made to look like an overseas cap with lace trimmings). I was sufficiently horrified to determine to get her into something easier to look at, so I dragged her down town next day, steered her away from bars, and finally got her to buy two gabardine tailored dresses that really fit her, some shoes and a hat. But still she seemed to be turned down for personnel jobs. Apparently a recently divorced female is not exactly what a firm needs to pep up its employees.
Between interviews, Leslyn saw Dr. Fink, the psychiatrist and nerve specialist12 whom both she and Bob were seeing right down to the last. I never knew what Fink told Bob, but Leslyn gave us the impression that Bob was unwilling to be helped and that Fink therefore had to give him up, which he did just before Bob suggested going to Arizona alone. Leslyn’s visits to Fink after she and Bob separated never seemed to help her; she reported to us that he merely told her to quit drinking, get a job, and “show” Bob, etc. [fragment ends]
After the meeting with Heinlein at a diner, of course, Mrs. Sang knew what Fink had told him.
The information in this sequence of letters may shed some light on an otherwise mysterious incident: Why did Robert instantly decide to separate and get a divorce when Leslyn, confined to bed, told him she had tried to commit suicide? In a general sense, something must have crystallized for him at that moment. It is clear from these contemporaneous communications, even though Mrs. Sang did not directly witness all of the events herself, that Dr. Fink’s advice to Robert Heinlein must have made a deep impression on him, and that manipulative admission of attempted suicide, added to the frustration and unhappiness that had, by Heinlein’s own testimony, been building for years, must account for what otherwise looks like an inexplicably abrupt decision.
NOTES
1. Half Done, Well Begun
1. RAH, letter to Rip van Ronkel, 10/29/48.
2. RAH, letter to Doña Campbell, 12/03/48.
3. RAH, letter to Rip van Ronkel, 10/29/48.
4. Buddy Scoles featured prominently in Learning Curve, the first volume of this biography. Scoles and Heinlein had become friends while they were both at the Naval Academy (Scoles graduating in 1927) because they were both space and rocketry enthusiasts. Scoles had gotten Heinlein his wartime job at the Naval Air Materials Center in Philadelphia—which is how Scoles and Corson met—and then moved on to set up the Naval missile range at Point Mugu, and helped Leslyn get a job there after the divorce.
5. Bill Corson, letter to RAH, undated except “Sat. eve.” but by context early in the spring of 1948.
6. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 09/27/48.
7. RAH, letter to Mr. McLean (otherwise unidentified), 11/06/73. John Campbell’s letter containing his refusal of cash or credit has not been preserved in either Heinlein’s correspondence or Campbell’s, though Heinlein mentions it in correspondence with Lurton Blassingame.
8. John F. Dille, National Newspaper Service, letter to RAH, 10/06/48.
9. J. A. Byers with A & S Lyons, letter to RAH, 09/28/48.
10. Rip van Ronkel, letter to RAH, 10/12/48.
11. RAH, letter to Rip van Ronkel, 12/16/48.
12. RAH, letter to Rip van Ronkel, 10/29/48.
13. RAH, letter to Rip van Ronkel, 10/29/48.
14. RAH, letter to Bill and Lucy Corson, 11/10/48. The gold star chart was preserved in the Robert A. Heinlein Archive, Special Collections and Archives of the University Library, University of California, Santa Cruz.
15. RAH, letter to Virginia Gerstenfeld, 08/10/48, together with Virginia Heinlein’s commentary in Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 12, Side A. In December 1948 (12/16/48) Heinlein wrote to Dr. Robert King, whom he had seen while in Hollywood, asking him to recommend a local (Colorado Springs) orthopedist.
16. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Denis Paradis, 01/06/79.
17. RAH, letter to Rip van Ronkel, 10/29/48.
18. RAH, letter to Rip van Ronkel, 10/29/48.
19. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Misc Notes (9/4–9/8/01) Tape A, Side A and Tape 12, Side A. On the Misc. Notes tape, Mrs. Heinlein says only that she was unable to register to vote at all (since a one-year residency requirement was then in place). At Tape 12, Side A, she confirms that Heinlein had voted at his California residency by an absentee ballot. The absentee ballot is also mentioned in RAH, letter to Rip van Ronkel, 10/29/48.
20. RAH, letter to Virginia Gerstenfeld, 07/22/48, quoted in Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 12, Side A (March 2000). Mrs. Heinlein had originally intended to destroy all the letters she and Robert Heinlein exchanged in the summer of 1948, while she was in New York and he in Hollywood, and so historically relevant extracts were read into the taped interview for use in the biography.
For one reason or another, Mrs. Heinlein did not destroy the box in which she kept these letters (although she left instructions for this to be done); however, the other side of the correspondence—Heinlein’s original carbon copies of his letters, together with all her replies—were found in a pile of papers on Mrs. Heinlein’s working desk that she knew would go to the RAH Archive. Sometime between the first taped interview in February and March 2000 and her last hospitalization after Thanksgiving in 2002, Mrs. Heinlein made the fuller set of this correspondence available for use after her death in January 2003.
21. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 03/04/00.
22. Alice Dalgliesh, letter to RAH, 10/06/48.
23. As is detailed in Learning Curve, 465–6, Heinlein had a potentially serious accident while suit-diving off the California coast in the early summer of 1948.
24. Virginia Heinlein taped interview with Leon Stover, October 1988, Tape 3, Side A, page 5 of transcript in RAH Archive.
25. RAH, letter
to Jack Williamson, 02/18/49.
26. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 11/18/48.
27. Virginia Heinlein taped interview with the author, Tape 7, Side B.
28. Andre Norton, Preface to “The Long Watch” in Grand Master’s Choice, 1989. Anyone who has walked in Bancroft Hall at the campus of the United States Naval Academy knows exactly where this sense of human process enforming acts of deathless heroism comes from: the Naval trophies displayed on its walls, and the lore about them passed from midshipman to midshipman communicated to Heinlein just what he labored to communicate to others, nowhere more obviously than in “The Long Watch.”
29. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Reginald Bretnor, 04/08/79. “The Long Watch” became part of Heinlein’s Future History when he incorporated his series of “Luna City” stories written for the “slicks.” Thus, the juvenile novel Space Cadet is also connected to the Future History by the Cabellian tapestry effect Heinlein devised as early as 1939. The impulse to connect story to story, therefore, does not rise suddenly after 1980 with the World As Myth books, but is present from the very start and throughout his writing career.
30. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Warren, 02/28/79.
31. John W. Campbell, Jr., letter to RAH, 08/26/48; RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 09/21/48.
32. In a letter to Campbell dated 12/3/48, Heinlein says they have just returned from Talmaine’s, which fixes the date. They began to arrange the ham radio conversation in Heinlein’s letter to Campbell of November 14, 1948.
33. Several different versions of this anecdote were encountered in different places. In most of them, the “time-travel issue” is Campbell’s idea, and he approaches Heinlein to write “Gulf” without any prior context. None of these versions make reference to source material, so it was impossible to trace these recountings back to their source(s). However, in a letter to the author, Mrs. Heinlein recalled that the arrangements were made during a scheduled ham radio conference, at which she was present, at the end of November or beginning of December 1948. “So Robert suggested that they do the time-travel issue, and he was in for ‘Gulf.’” (05/31/99). The correspondence shows that Heinlein and Campbell had been discussing his return to Astounding off and on since August 1948.
34. Heinlein’s correspondence with Campbell about the “Gulf” story starts on December 3, 1948—just after the ham radio conference—saying that the “Gulf” story would relate to the Gulf of Mexico and suit diving “perhaps at the center of an underwater culture”—i.e., the abandoned (or postponed) Ocean Rancher material. Very shortly thereafter (though the specific date has not been recorded) he scheduled a formal “story conference” with his new wife, at which both the story that would become “Gulf” and the story that would become Stranger in a Strange Land were generated. At that time, he was engaged in putting together the story of Red Planet. Late in January 1949, Heinlein outlined to Campbell the Martian story as “Gulf,” and he mentions the Martian story for that title as late as an April 15, 1949, letter to Dr. Robert S. Richardson. He apparently stalled in the writing, as he mentions in a May 13, 1949, letter to Rip van Ronkel during the negotiations for his consultancy for Destination Moon that he had been “egg-bound” on the novelette for a month—with a fixed and unmoveable June 4 submission deadline looming. He wrote the superman story for the “Gulf” title between May 13 and May 28, 1949, the date on which he mailed the manuscript to his agent, Lurton Blassingame. No documentation of the change of story appears to exist. The Heinleins were busy packing for the trip to Hollywood during this period—a process complicated by the fact that they would also give up their rental in Colorado Springs.
35. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 10, Side B.
36. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/07/99.
37. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 03/17/89.
38. RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 01/27/49.
39. Virginia Heinlein’s recollection in Grumbles from the Grave that he came down the stairs the next morning with sixteen (or in another telling, eighteen) pages of notes is a rare reworking of her memory; the sheaf of notes eventually did total eighteen pages, but most of the notes were written in one or two working sessions years later. Based on typographical and format differences among the sections of the sheaf, he probably made two or three pages of notes on this first occasion. See Bill Patterson, “Early Chronology of Stranger,” The Heinlein Journal, no. 6 (January 2000): 4–6.
40. RAH, letter to Frank Robinson, 09/18/69.
41. Virginia Heinlein, editorial note in Grumbles from the Grave, 52.
42. As late as April 1949, Heinlein was still planning to write his Martian Mowgli story as “Gulf,” with a June 4 submission deadline looming and, by that time, a move to Hollywood also in the first part of June, to oversee the making of Destination Moon. See, for example, RAH, letter to Robert S. Richardson, 04/15/49. There is in all of Heinlein’s papers no recounting of the origin of the spy/superman story for “Gulf” beyond the information given here. Even Heinlein’s 1967 and 1968 Accession Notes (The Virginia Edition: The Definitive Collection of Robert A. Heinlein, vol. xxxvii, Nonfiction 1) contain no information that bears on this question.
43. Heinlein refers to the revision and retyping of the Sixth Column manuscript as taking place at the time of his letter to Lurton Blassingame, 12/04/48.
44. RAH, letter to Mr. McLean (not otherwise identified), 11/06/73.
45. Erle Korshak, letter to RAH, 12/04/48.
46. RAH, letter to Erle Korshak, 12/14/48.
47. RAH, letter to John Arwine, 01/27/49.
48. RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 01/27/49.
49. Rip van Ronkel, letter to RAH, undated except “Jan. 1949” in Heinlein’s hand.
50. RAH, letter to Forrest J. Ackerman, 02/19/49.
51. Forrest J. Ackerman, letter to RAH, 02/23/49.
52. Postwar food rationing in England was in some respects more severe than wartime rationing: Bread, which had been unrationed (though of reduced quality) during the war, was rationed from 1946 to 1948, and potatoes were rationed from 1947. Rationing was not lifted in England until 1953, when sugar and other sweets became available again. The transition was completed in 1954 when meat became freely available, but some industries, such as cheese production, were affected for decades.
In the United States, a small industry grew up of companies that would package and ship foodstuffs that were in short supply in England, such as canned meats and candies, particularly chocolate. The Heinleins sent such shipments to the Carnells as often as they could.
53. RAH, letter to Forrest J. Ackerman, 02/25/49.
54. RAH, letter to L. Ron Hubbard, 02/19/49.
55. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 07/13/49.
56. RAH, letter to Rip van Ronkel, 03/05/49.
57. Cal Laning, letter to RAH, 01/31/49.
58. Bill Corson, letter to RAH, 11/15/48.
59. RAH, letter to Bill Corson, 02/21/49.
60. They had purchased the Lookout Mountain house in 1935 for $3,000, using a mortgage that was paid off in 1940, and they had added a second lot to the property. Leslyn received the house and its contents in the divorce settlement and sold it in the summer of 1947, for $10,000. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 03/29/89.
Leslyn’s current broke state, however, was not due to profligacy; she had married for a very short time. In an undated letter to Heinlein from this period, Bill Corson remarked:
From other sources, we gather that her marriage was to a piano-playing jerk greatly her junior, as bottle happy as she. He got every cent she could lay hands on. She says she has moved to Tortilla Flats section of Hueneme and is very infatuated with getting money. Her Navy Bob, it appears, is still in the picture and divine, and he has a family and children and wife.
61. RAH, letter to John Arwine, 02/18/49.
62. RAH, letter to Erle Korshak, 02/09/49. “Da Capo” is an instruction in music-Italian to go
back to the “capo,” meaning “head” or “beginning.” The story-title “Da Capo” had been in Heinlein’s story notes since his first set of story ideas written down in 1939 (when it started out as a reincarnation story and therefore a fantasy). By 1949 it apparently had shifted over to time travel, still nominally regarded as science fiction, rather than fantasy.
63. Lawrence Heinlein, letter to RAH, 03/28/49.
64. RAH, letter to Lawrence Heinlein, 03/29/49.
65. See Robert A. Heinlein in Dialogue with His Century, Volume 1, Learning Curve, 437–8.
66. RAH, letter to Claire Glass, 03/18/49.
67. RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 08/19/48.
68. Claire Glass, letter to RAH, 03/10/49. Miss Dalgliesh had only laughed at the idea of a man writing girls’ stories.
69. This second story conference, which seems to have stretched over several days, cannot be dated precisely but must have taken place in late February or early March 1949, as a letter from Erle Korshak to Heinlein dated March 8, 1949, acknowledges that Heinlein is currently working on the novella. Mrs. Heinlein at one point recalled it taking place in late April or early May 1949, but that cannot be correct; in a letter to Lurton Blassingame dated 03/12/49, Heinlein says that he is “about half finished” with the story.