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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  Extracts from this entire correspondence, suitably edited to minimize Campbell’s repetitiveness, are available in the Virginia Edition, vol. xxxix Letters 1: Correspondence of John W. Campbell, Jr., and Robert A. Heinlein.

  60. Isaac Asimov, In Memory Yet Green, 625. The remark is dated to May 25, 1951, when Campbell told Asimov of the split.

  61. The grant of adaptation rights is recorded in Heinlein’s Accession Notes for Red Planet as of 06/04/51. The 121-page playscript itself was preserved in the Heinlein Archive and can be downloaded from www.heinleinarchive.com, for a nominal fee.

  62. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 06/21/51.

  63. Heinlein wrote Blassingame (12/14/48) that he had met Mark Reinsberg in 1940—which suggests they met probably in Chicago when Heinlein was attending the Democratic National Convention and then a General Semantics Seminar. After World War II, Reinsberg helped form Shasta Press with Korshak, but gave up the business.

  Mark is a quiet, intellectual young man … He parted amicably with Korshak [in 1948] because Mark is temperamentally not suited to Korshak’s high-pressure, frenetic business life. Mark and his wife are here [in Colorado Springs] taking their master’s degrees, she in psychology, he in lit.

  64. RAH, letter to L. Sprague de Camp, 08/16/51.

  65. Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 08/22/51.

  66. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 08/20/51. “Columbus Was a Dope” was the first fiction Heinlein wrote after WWII, in 1946, and aimed at the “slicks.” Bar patrons denigrate the importance of exploration and scientific discovery—and a twist ending shows that they are in fact in the fruits of that exploration and discovery. All the slick markets passed on the story—which Heinlein himself called “feeble”—and it was published in the May 1947 Startling Stories, the last time the “Lyle Monroe” pen name was used.

  67. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 08/20/51.

  68. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 08/03/51, mentions the Corsons are preparing to leave. The visit itself, and its many unpleasantnesses, was the subject of a long letter from Heinlein to Corson, 08/07/51, and a subsequent correspondence on the subject.

  In this correspondence, Heinlein wonders at remarks Corson made in his first rejoinder:

  “I went to Colorado with the absolute determination to get along with her, come what might.” Bill, the implications of this disturb me … The last time we saw a lot of you, before this last summer, was during the last period when Lucy visited her folks—a period in which Ginny invited you over for dinner more nights than not … [sic] so often in fact that I complained to her that she was inviting you too often during a period when I was trying to write a novel. (Not that I didn’t enjoy your company, it was just that I was too busy for quite so much social life.) I know that Ginny liked you very much; not only did she say so, but she certainly would not have been suggesting that we have you over for dinner night after night if she hadn’t. From your manner and from your statements to me, you liked her very much. If so, why in the world would it have been necessary to grit your teeth and be “absolutely determined to get along with her, come what may”? What the hell, Bill? This doesn’t make sense. (RAH, letter to Bill Corson, 03/15/52.)

  And, indeed it does not. Remarks made by Cats Sang (Heinlein’s and Corson’s mutual friend and wife of Henry Sang) in correspondence with the author after the first volume of this biography was published, suggests:

  Everyone who had known him [Heinlein] in his earlier days in Laurel Canyon immediately assumed that Ginny was getting rid of his old friends. Corson (who probably adored Bob more than anyone) had declared that he, Corson, was not going to be discarded. But I think even he gave up in time and adopted Henry Sang and me. (Grace Dugan Sang Wurtz, letter to the author, undated but late February 2011.)

  The unpleasantness, thus, was probably a fossilized remnant of the divorce in 1947.

  This incident (five years after Corson refused to be “discarded”) did damage the long-standing friendship—however not to the extent Ginny suggested in Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/09/01, “The friendship dwindled off after that visit. We saw little of them in the future.”

  The Corsons may not have visited the Heinleins again—possibly due in part to the fact that once the Corsons moved from Los Angeles, they and the Heinleins never again happened to be in the same place at the same time—but in fact Heinlein and Corson continued to correspond frequently and cordially, peaking during the construction of Heinlein’s bomb shelter a decade later and then tapering gradually off.

  69. Dorothy Shanahan, “Heinleins’ Push-Button Home Is Model of Convenience,” Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph illustrated report (09/30/51), 1, Section B.

  70. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 3, Side B.

  71. RAH, letter to Stanley Stark, 08/10/71. In this letter Heinlein says that he started writing in July 1951 but put it away to perform “more pressing work.” Virginia Heinlein, however, pointed out that this was an extremely unusual thing for Heinlein to do: “With the single exception of Stranger, I never saw R[obert] start a book or a shorter piece, and not finish it up as best he could do at the moment. He always finished what he began, no matter how terrible he felt it was.” (Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 02/11/00.)

  72. I have been unable to identify this book. Heinlein acknowledges receipt of the book in RAH, letter to Robert Cornog, 10/05/49. The book was not preserved in Heinlein’s personal library catalog as of 1975 (this catalog is published in the Virginia Edition, vol. xxxviii Nonfiction 2), which probably means only that he returned the book to Cornog. Edward R. Dewey and Edwin F. Dakin published a book on economic cycles in 1947 titled Cycles: The Science of Prediction, but that book does not meet Mrs. Heinlein’s description of dealing with “not economic, but other sorts of cycles.” Leon Stover, taped interview with Virginia Heinlein, Tape 3, Side A, p. 7 of transcript. The only other likely candidate is not a book: In Heinlein’s letter to Cornog of 10/26/49, he intends to order a paper recommended by Cornog, “The Analysis of Economic Time-Series,” several parts of which were published in 1953 by the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society.

  73. RAH, letter to Rogers Terrill, 01/01/50.

  74. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 09/13/51.

  75. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 10/13/51.

  76. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 08/20/51.

  77. RAH, letter to H. L. Gold, 10/02/51.

  78. For several years Heinlein and H. L. Gold had an ongoing correspondence and spoke periodically by telephone—less usual then than now, but Gold was an agoraphobe and conducted his entire personal and professional life by telephone from his apartment. The correspondence was superficially cordial, but Heinlein expressed irritation in letters to his agent, about what might be thought of as “secondary costs” of doing business with Gold, of which unreasonable demands for extensive rewrites was one. Heinlein also felt pressured by Gold to write up ideas he regarded as substandard (see RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 08/21/52).

  79. Tomorrow, the Stars was a separate contract and didn’t count against Heinlein’s four-book deal with Doubleday negotiated at the time of the sale of The Puppet Masters in 1950.

  80. Alice Dalgliesh, letter to RAH, 01/31/50.

  81. Ruth Harshaw, letter to RAH, 08/23/51.

  82. This must have been a very fast production cycle, as Heinlein’s Accession Notes show the sale of the television right to CBS on 10/19/51.

  83. Undated cover snowflake message, Ted Sturgeon to RAH, subsequently dated to March 1951.

  84. RAH, letters to Lurton Blassingame, 08/08/51 and 09/11/51.

  85. Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 09/17/51.

  86. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 10/13/51.

  87. Knox Burger, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 12/21/51.

  88. Although Heinlein had already run into H. L. Gold’s acceptance of his Cosmopolitan article and Martin Greenberg wanting “Columbus Was a Dope” for
a Gnome Press anthology, he did not yet realize that the standards of what constituted acceptable science fiction were changing—due in part to the emergence of Galaxy and Fantasy & Science Fiction as leading science-fiction magazines of the 1950s. It was probably the fact that his stories did sell to both the general fiction magazines (e.g., The Rolling Stones to Boys’ Life, “Delilah and the Space Rigger” to Blue Book, “The Long Watch” to American Legion) and to the genre-specialist magazines—several of his juveniles wound up in either Astounding or The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction—that gradually convinced him that both sides of advice he had received from Will F. Jenkins (“Murray Leinster”) quoted in his 1947 theoretical essay, “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction” were true: “Any story—science fiction, or otherwise—if it is well written, can be sold to the slicks.” Increasingly to the SF magazines, as well.

  89. A few years later, John W. Campbell developed an interest in psionics, but in 1951 it apparently did not occur to either Heinlein or Blassingame that Campbell might have some special interest in “Project Nightmare,” and the story was not shown to Astounding.

  90. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 06/06/00.

  91. RAH, Accession Notes, 1967; comment follows Between Planets (Op. No. 88) and The Green Hills of Earth and Other Stories (Op. No. 87).

  92. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 11/03/51.

  93. RAH, letter to Robert Cornog, 11/14/51.

  94. John Arwine, letter to RAH, 10/04/51.

  95. “By the 1920s, psychoanalysis had become wildly popular in America (a country Freud visited only once and hated). Jazz age sophisticates held ‘Freuding’ parties at which they told one another their dreams.” Lev Grossman, Janice Horowitz, Andrea Sachs, “Talk Therapy: Can Freud Get His Job Back?” Time magazine (January 20, 2003). Available online at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1004088,00.html#ixzz1hleMVwkQ (accessed December 28, 2011).

  See also Steven G. Kellman, Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (2005), 127: [In about 1930] “Freudianism rivaled Marxism as the official local language of the Village [Greenwich Village], and ‘Freuding parties,’ in which guests found entertainment by probing one another’s psyches, were a fad.”

  96. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 9, Side A (February 28?, 2000).

  97. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Laura Haywood, 12/02/73. “Robert tells me that I really made a writer out of him stylistically speaking. I used to write comments in the margins of the copy, ‘Unclear.’ ‘awkward.’ etc.”

  98. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 12/01/51.

  99. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 9, Side A.

  100. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 9, Side A.

  101. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 01/08/52.

  102. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 12/31/51.

  6. Reality Bites

  1. Fred Pohl, letter to RAH, 01/04/52. “Beyond Doubt”—a comic political fantasy set in ancient Mu—was written in 1939; Pohl had published it in one of the magazines he edited, Astonishing Stories, in April 1941 as by “Lyle Monroe” and Elma Wentz.

  2. Alice Dalgliesh, letter to RAH, 01/10/52.

  3. Passing mentions of Heinlein’s recovery from surgery are scattered throughout his correspondence in January and February 1952, but see RAH, letter to Lou Schor, 01/12/52: “Forgive crummy typing and my irritated tone—I am still very weak from surgery and can’t sit up but a few minutes at a time.”

  4. “M.O.W.” is television slang for “movie of the week,” meaning any feature-film-length production for television.

  5. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 01/10/52. The negotiations for this TV adaptation of Between Planets were discontinued in March 1952.

  6. RAH, letter to Irving Pichel, 04/04/52.

  7. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 01/15/52.

  8. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 02/12/52.

  9. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 02/12/52.

  10. James D. Russell, President & Gen. Mgr. KVOR Radio, letter to RAH, 01/25/52.

  11. RAH, letter to Irving Pichel, 01/27/52.

  12. The Australian publisher bundled it with Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “Parasite Planet” and put it out as a Fantasy Fiction pulp magazine, though the format is also somewhat reminiscent of comic books of the era.

  13. Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 02/07/52.

  14. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/08/52.

  15. See, e.g., RAH, letter to W. A. P. White, 03/27/57. A scissorbill is any of several species of skimming bird, of which some are common on seacoasts of the southern United States, but the derogatory usage comes from the labor movement of the early part of the twentieth century, generally referring to a disliked or contemptible person, but more particularly to workers who refuse to join a union or who take the side of management. Heinlein once referred to John W. Campbell, Jr., as a “supreme scissorbill” because of Campbell’s rationalization of Street & Smith’s more retrogressive rights-purchase policies. (RAH, letter to Lloyd Biggle, 09/30/76.) Discussing Marx’s concept of class warfare and social classes in the United States, Heinlein once gave a fuller explanation of the usage:

  According to Marx, it is necessary to have a dispossessed proletariat before the revolution is achieved. This country has no proletariat! Oh, we have the economic classifications in this country used by Marx—but Americans don’t behave according to those classifications because they are not aware that they are members of such classes. Being a member of a social class is much more a psychological matter than an economic matter. Well over ninety percent of Americans belong to the social class of “scissorbill.” By the old Wobbly definition a scissorbill is a “Capitalist with very little capital.” (RAH, letter to Fritz Lang, 05/02/46.)

  16. RAH, letter to Bill Corson, 02/15/52.

  17. In RAH, letter to Bill Corson, 08/07/51, Heinlein points out that all of his neighbors are Republicans and that political conversation must be kept light for this reason.

  18. RAH, letter to Ed and Olga Gordon, 02/15/52.

  19. I.e., for Pogo. Bill Corson, letter to RAH, undated but late June 1952.

  20. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/08/52.

  21. Alice Dalgliesh, letters to RAH, 03/10/52 and 03/20/52.

  22. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 03/17/52.

  23. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 04/03/52.

  24. RAH, letter to John Ciardi, 04/23/52.

  25. John Ciardi, letter to RAH, 06/05/52.

  26. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 04/26/52.

  27. In her taped interview with the author, Virginia Heinlein says they looked at new as well as used cars and contemplated taking out a bank loan, but RAH indicated as early as a letter to Lurton Blassingame, 04/26/52, that he intended to buy a recent-model used car.

  28. RAH, letter to Irving Pichel, undated but mid-May 1952.

  29. RAH, letter to Poul Anderson, 07/21/61.

  30. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 05/22/52.

  31. RAH, letter to Irving Pichel, 04/04/52.

  32. Robert A. Heinlein, “This I Believe,” Requiem (Yoji Kondo, ed.).

  33. Gladys Chang, letter to RAH acknowledging receipt of script, 05/27/52.

  34. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Second Series, Tape C, Side A.

  35. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 02/11/00.

  36. Neil McAleer, Visionary, 60.

  37. L. Sprague de Camp, postcard to RAH, 07/01/52.

  38. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 07/16/52.

  39. RAH, letter to George O. Smith, 08/05/52.

  40. RAH, letter to George O. Smith, 08/05/52.

  41. This is not the current Science Fiction Writers of America, which was founded in 1965, but an earlier and abortive attempt to organize a guild of science-fiction writers.

  42. Forrest J. Ackerman, letter to RAH, 07/18/52.

  43. RAH, letter to Forrest J. Ackerman, 08/04/
52.

  44. RAH, letter to Forrest J. Ackerman, 08/04/52.

  45. Heinlein recognized a dilemma with regard to Ackerman; he felt professionally committed to stopping the multiple Hollywood representation that was only muddying the waters there, but acknowledged that the word he was getting back from his other Hollywood contacts was that Ned Brown would negotiate anything that came to him, but was not actively promoting him, whereas Ackerman was (RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 08/21/52). He therefore was faced with a promoter who was business-incompetent and a business-competent representative who was not promoting him. In the end Heinlein opted for business competency. “His [Brown’s] representation may be sort of feeble but it is a good businesslike office,” RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 09/04/52. See footnote 35 of chapter 4 supra: “I wouldn’t let Ackerman negotiate on my behalf for latch key to Hell; I’d be afraid he would louse it up.”

  With respect to Ned Brown’s lack of energy, a few months later, when Brown was drawing up contracts for Seaman’s The World Beyond project, he included a formal agency contract. Heinlein pointed out that he could not agree to the draft contract as written because it deauthorized Lurton Blassingame to negotiate or receive benefits for negotiating anything other than print rights for Heinlein:

  As they now read, literary publication rights are reserved for Lurton, but all other matters are reserved for MCA. This is not right, as Lurton has been extremely successful in selling rights other than literary rights for me during the three-year period, which your agency has been equally free to sell such rights, but has been totally unable to do so. Lurton has sold for me radio, TV, commercial, comic book, comic strip, dramatic, and other secondary rights during that time to the amount of about $30,000—in addition to his regular service in selling magazine and book rights. It would be neither reasonable nor ethical for me to place such rights now exclusively in another agency’s hands.…