Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2
Page 70
I used the Bernstein book as a kick-off for some fancy speculation about possible future trends in research, much as I used the flying saucer craze as the kick-off in The Puppet Masters …
On the whole Bridget Murphy business I am as open-minded as a rainstorm. Insufficient evidence, highly entertaining, excellent basis for fiction—but I probably would not have made my reference to Bernstein and his subject quite so definite had I guessed what a furor was about to burst. You see, I wrote that piece for Amazing … about two months before the Bernstein book was published. I had had an advance look at the book and had known about Bernstein’s researches for a couple of years—but I simply did not guess that the book would make such an outstanding splash. (I guess I’m really a wash-out as a prophet!) I remember thinking as I wrote those two sentences that probably not one reader in a thousand would know what case I was referring to, but that nevertheless it made a nice hook on which to hang the speculation. Had I been able to look three months into the future I would have picked another case (there are many much better ones that can be cited), but I used the Bernstein-Murphy case because it was recent in time and local in space and I hoped that some readers would recognize it.
RAH, letter to T. N. Scortia, 05/07/56. Heinlein had to explain that he was not a Bridey Murphy advocate for years. See, for example, Heinlein’s letter jointly to Fred Pohl and Algis Budrys, 08/19/61:
[Quoting from 3 of “Bench Mark”:] “It’s useful to remember that five years ago, in a brief article for Amazing Stories, Heinlein declared that the Bridey Murphy case proved reincarnation and the persistence of essential personality.”
I won’t argue about the accuracy of the paraphrasing, although it does overstate the matter; what grouses me is that it here has been hauled out of context and there is no slightest suggestion that the original is part of a fictional “prophecy.”
But I had done precisely the same thing I had done in Puppet Masters, made use of an item currently in the news to create a temporal tie-in with a future scene, give verisimilitude, lend empathy.
30. Heinlein’s outline notes for The Door into Summer in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz, contain most of the important elements of the story, except the unifying element of Petronius the cat and his engineer’s affection for the cat.
31. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 3, Side A, 12 of transcript in RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz; the anecdote is also given in Heinlein’s Accession Notes (Opus No. 157, 11/05/68, 10), also in the RAH Archive. The full set of both letters which constitute the Accession Notes are published in the Virginia Edition, vol. xxxvii Nonfiction 1.
David Hartwell argued in his introduction for the Gregg Press reprint of The Door into Summer an inheritance from H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Wakes (a speculation Heinlein approved), but there are also turns from Looking Backwards ironically inverted. Suspended animation had a long literary tradition, and Heinlein was certainly aware of and used it.
32. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/09/56.
33. On January 14, 1957.
34. Virginia Heinlein, IM with the author, 01/31/02.
35. RAH, letter to William A. P. White (“Anthony Boucher”), 03/27/57.
36. None of Leslyn’s 1956–57 poison-pen letters survive in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz. Heinlein probably destroyed the file once the need for the letters disappeared, probably in 1968 (that is, ten years later) as papers he would otherwise have to cart from Colorado Springs to Santa Cruz. However, both Leslyn’s letter to A. P. White and White’s letter to Heinlein mentioning it are also missing from White’s archive of personal correspondence at the Lily Library in Bloomington, Indiana. Only Heinlein’s reply to White’s letter is extant.
Here is a sampling from a prior (1953) round of poison-pen letters which was preserved in Fred Pohl’s papers. Leslyn’s bile is not reserved for Heinlein alone, but is spread around liberally.
I’m amused also to hear you [Pohl] use his [Heinlein’s] own term for his abcessed genitalia troubles. “his plumbing reamed out.” I put up with periodic celibacy during most of our 15 years of marriage due to his urethral and urinary difficulties.
If the guy would ever keep his “pride and joy” inside his pants for 24 hours at a stretch, and give it a rest—he might be able to dispense with the luxury of hypochondria!
Vida [Jameson] is making out all right. Thoroughly selfish critters always seem to do so. Cleve’s first wife was another of the same breed. And so is Heinlein and Virginia Gerstenfeld Heinlein.
And Cleve, like me, is better off free of his illusions. Sometime Cleve will meet a woman who will appreciate and love him. Inasmuch as lil’ ol’ me could meet two adorable REAL MEN after Heinlein—I’m sure that Deity, Mother Nature, or the Law of Compensation has someone worthy in store for Cleve (1 - if you’re a Deist, 2 - if you’re a Theist, and 3 if you insist on being a scaredy-cat materialist).
And so on. Leslyn Heinlein Mocabee, letter to Fred Pohl, 05/25/53 (from Pohl’s Archive in Red Bank, New Jersey).
37. RAH, letter to Robert Cornog, 01/16/57.
38. The entire paragraph, Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 10/01/56.
39. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 10/09/56.
40. RAH, letter to Clare and Dorothy Heinlein, undated but datelined “Nogales, Arizona,” and so therefore around the end of February 1957.
41. For these and similar sentiments about President Eisenhower (and about Adlai Stevenson), see, e.g., RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 11/25/57. Stuart Symington (1901–88) was the first Secretary of the Air Force (1947–50) and recently (1953) elected Democratic Senator from Missouri. Symington served in the Senate until 1976.
42. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 3, Side A (1988), 12 of transcript.
43. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/09/56.
44. In Heinlein’s file for Citizen of the Galaxy there are two story outlines of “Notes for a Boys’ Novel,” one that uses the Arabian Nights background and another, “Notes for a Novel,” that explores the tramp commercial spaceship family. Heinlein occasionally did combine two or more story ideas into a single book.
45. Stanley I. Greenspan and Stuart G. Shanker, The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, and Intelligence Evolved from our Primate Ancestors to Modern Humans. (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus/Da Capo Press, 2004): 82. Greenspan and Shanker summarize the extended life stages of the Eriksons in seventeen stages, of which this young adulthood stage is “Stage 12—Stabilizing a Separate Sense of the Self”:
The standards of one’s caregivers … are not simply their values and judgments, but, through their good offices, the history of their culture as well as one’s own—that is, one’s heritage. There is … greater independence from daily reliance on one’s nuclear family, greater investment in the future … and greater ability to carry one’s past inside oneself as part of a growing sense of self and internal standard.
46. Author’s notes of oral conversation with Virginia Heinlein, February 26? 2000.
47. RAH, letter to Robert Cornog, 01/16/57.
48. RAH, letter to Robert Cornog, 01/16/57.
49. Scribner offered to pay part of the expenses of this trip, so he could combine it with a taping of Ruth Harshaw’s Carnival of Books radio program on Time for the Stars, and they could write it off as publicity (Doubleday picked up the remainder of the expenses), but Heinlein was leery of becoming indebted to Scribner for favors and declined the offer.
50. Curiously, literary critic Edmund Wilson had disparaged H. P. Lovecraft in The New Yorker magazine in November 1945.
51. Gary Westfahl argues, in The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1998) that Campbell’s theorization of science fiction, although it is usually presented in distinction to Gernsback’s, was actually a development of Gernsback’s theorization, and that Gernsback’s theorization constituted an inciting poetics of science fiction. Later scholarship—see, e.g., As
hley, Michael and Robert A. W. Lowndes, The Gernsback Days: A Study of the Evolution of Modern Science Fiction from 1911 to 1936 (Holicong, Penn.: Wildside Press, 2004)—suggests that the editorship of David Lasser of Gernsback’s Wonder Stories represented an important intermediate stage between Gernsback and Campbell. Lasser is not mentioned in Westfahl’s book.
This matter of the theorization of science fiction and Heinlein’s pivotal role in the process was taken up in a conference paper by the author for the Science Fiction Area of the Popular Culture Association joint annual meeting with the American Culture Association in 2011, “The Role of Robert Heinlein in the Theorization of Science Fiction” and published in The Heinlein Journal, No. 23 (July 2013). Heinlein’s was the first systematic attempt to theorize science fiction, and his two essays are at the root of all modern SF criticism through Joanna Russ’s (1937–2011) seminal 1975 paper, “Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction,” which repeated Heinlein’s argument, point by point but without mentioning Heinlein’s name, so that Heinlein’s pivotal role in the theorization of SF has been erased from academic SF critical theory.
52. The two books cited as the start of formal science-fiction criticism in the authoritative four-part study and review of science-fiction criticism by Arthur B. Evans, Gary Westfahl, Donald H. Hassler, and Veronica Hollinger, “A History of Science Fiction Criticism,” Science Fiction Studies, no. 78, vol. 26, part 2 (July 1999).
53. RAH, letter to Ruth Robinson, 03/12/55.
54. RAH, “Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults, and Virtues” (1957) published in Basil Davenport, ed., The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism (Advent: Publishers, 1959).
55. Alice Dalgliesh, letter to RAH, 01/18/57.
56. The transcript of Heinlein’s remarks about The Puppet Masters was not included in The Science Fiction Novel, but his notes for this session were preserved in the lecture’s Opus file in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz. After setting the scene—“house unfinished, law suit prevented financing, much in debt—sheetrock over boxes while G painted 4 coats—necessary to turn out some copy I could sell and use the advance—tired out and worried”—Heinlein gave a rare view of his opinion of the novel (rare, because as a rule Heinlein refused to discuss his own work):
My prime purpose was to turn out a piece of entertaining fiction, a story that would leave the reader feeling that he had had his money’s worth—I have a holy horror of cheating the cash customer. So I tried very hard. I am happy to say that it has been well received—serial sale, trade book, book club, pocket book, and has been translated into nine foreign languages. It is still making money—but my motivation at the time was a pressing need for a check to pay income tax and construction bills.
What do I think is good, or bad, about The Puppet Masters? It has a tired plot and was hastily written; its literary merit is negligible. I strove hard to make characterization, scene, and incident have a feeling of reality and to entertain while doing so; the mail I have received seems to indicate that I succeeded.
These virtues and defects are those of the professional juggler and clown, the entertainer—which is what I think a fictioneer should be first of all. If the book has any permanent merit it must lie in its theme, which is a thinly-disguised allegory, a diatribe against totalitarianism in all its forms. Each writer has his personal philosophy; included in mine is an intense love of personal freedom and an almost religious respect for the dignity of the individual—I despise anything which reduces these two and have, in many stories, explored the attendant problems. The trick in sermonizing through fiction is not to let your sermon get in the way of the story, to cause the story to make your point for you. Apparently I succeeded well enough in The Puppet Masters not to annoy most readers, so, despite the novel’s obvious literary faults, I am reasonably content with it.
57. RAH, letter to A. P. White, 03/27/57.
58. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 03/16/57.
59. RAH, letter to Dr. Hans Wynberg, 03/24/57.
60. Blish’s argument is highly detailed and with many parts, but his thesis is stated early on in “The Door into Heinlein” (SF Forum I:1, March 1957, 38–40): “To the unskilled writer … first person is a trap. It becomes an exercise in autobiography; that constantly recurring word ‘I’ irresistibly leads the writer back to himself, and away from the kind of narrator the story being told needs.” Blish maintains this is particularly true of The Door into Summer, which “proved to be so closely tied to the problem of viewpoint that its failure to solve the problem killed the story.” Since The Door into Summer is one of Heinlein’s most beloved stories, it is difficult to understand what Blish means by the first-person narrator “killing” the story.
61. RAH, letter to Lester del Rey, 04/15/57.
62. RAH, letter to Lester del Rey, 04/15/57.
63. RAH, letter to Lester del Rey, 04/15/57.
64. This list of first names designates editors of current science-fiction magazines: Horace [Gold—Galaxy], Tony [Boucher—F&SF], Larry [Shaw—Infinity and SF Adventures], John [Campbell—Astounding], Bob [Mills—F&SF and Venture].
65. RAH, letter to Lester del Rey, 04/15/57.
66. John W. Campbell, Jr., letter to RAH, 04/05/57.
67. RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 05/17/57.
68. John W. Campbell, Jr., letter to RAH, 05/22/57.
69. RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 06/12/57. The text serialized in Astounding was, for this reason, slightly different (and a few words longer than) the text published in hardcover.
70. Alice Dalgliesh, letter to RAH, 04/25/57.
71. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 04/29/57.
72. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 05/02/57.
73. Handwritten draft and cards with notes preserved in the manuscript file for Citizen of the Galaxy in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz.
74. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 05/02/57.
75. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 05/17/57.
76. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 05/02/57.
77. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 05/03/57.
78. Virginia Heinlein, IM with the author, 06/14/02.
79. Ben Bova, telephonic interview with RAH, 06/29/79. Although this interview was never published in Omni, for what reasons Mr. Bova was unable to recall, the transcript, lightly hand edited by Heinlein, is published in the Virginia Edition, vol. xxxvii, Nonfiction 1.
80. The title of Have Space Suit—Will Travel was not given after the Western television show that was airing then, Have Gun—Will Travel, but on an old ad series that had appeared in Variety years before, itself after a common theatrical advertisement of the Vaudeville era—“Have Tux, Will Travel” (also, for much the same reasons, the title of Bob Hope’s 1954 autobiography, which was ghost-written by sports journalist Pete Martin).
81. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 9, Side A.
82. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 3, Side A.
83. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 09/03/57.
11. Going Off a Bit
1. RAH, letter to Bud Scoles, 10/09/57.
2. RAH, letter to Bud Scoles, 10/09/57.
3. RAH, letter to Bud Scoles, 10/09/57.
4. RAH, letter to W. A. P. White, 10/25/57.
5. Telegram, Margaret Sanger to Robert and Virginia Heinlein on board the S.S. President Monroe, 11/20/57.
6. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 2, Side B.
7. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 2, Side B.
8. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 12/24/57.
9. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 12/24/57.
10. In October 1957 a civil war broke out in Indonesia as a Sumatra-based military coup attempted to reform the Sukarno “Guided Democracy” reforms instituted in February and March 1957 under the slogan “nationalism—religion—communism,” effectively bringing to an end a period of Western-style democracy in Indonesia. In Decemb
er 1957 the Dutch were leaving Indonesia.
11. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 12/24/57.
12. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 12/23/57.
13. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 07/27/00.
14. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 10/17/99.
15. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 2, Side B.
16. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 2, Side B (February 27? 2000). Mrs. Heinlein also mentioned that the Arabic inscriptions inlaid in the walls of the Taj look to her unpleasantly like graffiti.
17. Both quotations are from RAH, letter to Bjo Trimble, 11/21/61.
18. Anecdote told by Cal Laning to Leon Stover. Leon Stover, letter to Virginia Heinlein, 06/13/89.
19. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 9, Side A.
20. RAH, letter to Daniel F. Galouye, 10/02/57.
21. Ackerman maintained he had never received Heinlein’s Hugo Award trophy and could not understand why Heinlein was angry at him. In “Through Time and Space with Forry Ackerman,” part 4, Mimosa, 16-19 at 17 (and elsewhere), Ackerman published an elaborate explanation that centered on the factoid that the Award statuettes (which are often referred to as simply “the Hugos”) were not ready at the time of the convention, so none were given out there.
This “explanation” is puzzling on many levels, because there are a number of pictures taken at the convention (NyCon II in 1956) of the winners with their Hugos. There is no mention of the award statuettes not being ready in any account of NYCon II, including convention chairman Dave Kyle’s own, though he does discuss the fact that the hand-tooled trophies made for the first Awards could not be obtained, and they made the Hugo that year out of a car’s hood ornament with wooden backing. The Hugos were ready at the convention, though no one seems able to recall what happened with the Best Novel Hugo.