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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  Starship Troopers was clearly intended from the start for Heinlein’s juvenile audience, and based, he said, on his theory throughout the writing of the series, that “intelligent youngsters are in fact more interested in weighty matters than their parents usually are.” Once again, he had centered the story in a young man crossing from adolescence into adulthood, coming to know his values from the inside-out, so it was following the thematic lines of his last several juveniles. But by the time the book was finished (and even before it was submitted to Scribner), he conceded that it was not a juvenile in the usual sense of the term. (Both remarks, RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 01/10/59.) Indeed, it is difficult to understand how the first chapter, with its (by the standards of children’s literature in 1959) hyperviolence could be marketed at all to teenagers of the duck-and-cover generation—not that they would not accept it, but the librarians who made up what Dalgliesh thought was the major segment of purchasers of Heinlein’s juveniles would not.

  The opinion of Alice Dalgliesh and the entire editorial board of Scribner—though based on what turned out a false premise (that the “boys do not want that [social commentary]”)—was only partly the kind of personal squeamishness to which Heinlein had objected over and over in the editorial process for his last several books for Scribner; it was also at least partly a business decision—and one which Heinlein probably should have been pragmatically able to anticipate.

  41. Walter I. Bradbury, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 02/24/59.

  42. RAH, letter to Betty Jane Babb, 02/04/59.

  43. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 02/17/59.

  44. RAH, letter to “George,” 02/03/59. I have not been able to identify this person in historical records.

  45. George McM, letter to RAH, 02/10/59.

  46. Alfred Bester, letter to RAH, undated except “Monday.”

  47. RAH, letter to Alfred Bester, 04/03/59.

  48. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 04/05/59.

  49. Tom Swicegood, letter to RAH, 01/24/59.

  50. Information from Tim Kyger by e-mail, 10/02/06.

  51. RAH, letter to Tom Swicegood, 02/21/59. A “series bible” is the document that first sells the television series to a production company and explains the basic concept, as well as all the details a writer would find necessary to work on the show: background, characters, ongoing storylines, if any. Series bibles also typically contain brief outlines of several of the early episodes.

  52. Crater Base One series bible, page 2, preserved in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz. Heinlein’s letters to Swicegood are published in the Virginia Edition, vol. xlv, Screenplays 2.

  53. RAH, letter to Tom Swicegood, 02/21/59.

  54. RAH, letter to Tom Swicegood, 02/28/59.

  55. Tom Swicegood, letter to RAH, 01/24/59.

  56. RAH, letter to Tom Swicegood, 02/21/59.

  57. Tom Swicegood, letter to RAH, 03/06/59.

  58. RAH, letter to Tom Swicegood, 03/12/59.

  59. The Menace from Earth collection contained “The Year of the Jackpot,” “By His Bootstraps,” “Columbus Was a Dope,” “The Menace from Earth,” “Sky Lift,” “Goldfish Bowl,” “Project Nightmare,” and “Water Is for Washing.”

  60. Misc index card in RAH’s file, probably organizing memoirs in the mid-1970s.

  61. RAH, letter to Tom Swicegood, 03/11/59.

  62. Harold A. Fendler, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 04/24/59. The Fendler & Lerner law firm no longer exists.

  63. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 07/28/59. Curiously, a complete collected works existed in a Russian language edition long before the Virginia Edition in the original English.

  64. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 07/28/59.

  65. The contents of Unpleasant Profession were: “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag,” “The Man Who Traveled in Elephants,” “‘All You Zombies—,’” “They,” “Our Fair City,” and “‘—And He Built a Crooked House.’” Interestingly, “‘—And He Built a Crooked House’” was long considered by Heinlein and others such as A. P. White a Future History story rather than a fantasy per se. It was in fact the first story in the first volume Erle Korshak outlined as Shasta’s proposal for the Future History book series in a letter to Heinlein on 12/04/48.

  66. Holographic letter, unaddressed, by Virginia Heinlein, 06/23/59.

  67. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 07/28/59.

  68. See, e.g., Virginia Heinlein, taped inverview with Leon Stover (1987) Tape 1, Side A.

  69. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 03/12/00.

  70. Tom Swicegood, letter to RAH, 04/10/59.

  71. Heinlein’s script for “Nothing Ever Happens…” is published in the Virginia Edition, vol. xlv, Screenplays 2, along with the full critical and analytic correspondence referenced in the text. While Swicegood was never specific about what “requirements for a television show” were absent from Heinlein’s script, two features of the script do suggest themselves: First, there are no minor climaxes for commercial breaks at natural places in the story (a feature that television writers learn to craft the story around); and, second, the entire last act, the earthquake and aftermath, are unusually poor in action visuals. Heinlein’s last act is written as a succession of talking heads.

  Having no substantive experience at all of television, it is not surprising that Heinlein would be an inexperienced television writer.

  72. Tom Swicegood, letter to RAH, 07/31/59.

  73. Tom Swicegood, letter to RAH, 06/23/59. Swicegood’s “Moonquake” script was apparently returned to him, as it was not found in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz. Heinlein marked up some of Swicegood’s changes in pencil on his own script, but the version of Heinlein’s script published in the Virginia Edition, vol. xlv, Screenplays 2, is restored to Heinlein’s original.

  74. RAH, letter to Jim Doherty, 07/24/59.

  75. Tom Swicegood, letter to RAH, 07/31/59.

  76. But Men Into Space did air thirty-seven of the thirty-eight episodes filmed and was later acclaimed the most accurate “hard” SF series ever to appear on television. The same review (Ed Uthman, IMDB user, 01/30/00; http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052493/usercomments, accessed 05/25/11) credits the show for following the lead of Heinlein’s Destination Moon. Heinlein never saw it.

  77. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover (1988), Tape 3, Side A, 14 of transcript.

  78. See, e.g., RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 09/16/60:

  Based on my own royalty records I conjecture that my books have netted for Mr. Scribner something between $50,000 and $100,000 (and grossed a great deal more). They have been absolutely certain money-from-home for his firm … and still are. Yet after years and years of a highly profitable association Mr. Scribner let me be “fired” with less ceremony than he would use in firing his office boy … not a word out of him, not even a hint that he gave a damn whether I stayed with them or not. I submit that this is rudeness, unpardonable in view of the long association.

  79. Walter J. Minton, published letter to Publisher’s Weekly, copy cut off, but readable part is 3/4/__. PW has not responded to a request to help identify the letter.

  80. William McMorris, letter to RAH, 04/10/59.

  81. The precise timing of this final choice was not preserved in the correspondence; but on August 10, 1959, McMorris suggested The Capsule Troopers, to which Heinlein objected that “capsule” implies something miniature. By an August 30, 1959, letter from Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame the title was changed again to one of his working titles, Shoulder the Sky—a title McMorris rejected on September 3 as having previously been used. Some time that September, in a fax whose date-stamp is partly illegible, but during the period Heinlein was staying at the Shelbourne Hotel, McMorris offered two titles acceptable to Putnam’s Sales and Promotions director (unnamed): Soldier of the Stars or Starship Troopers. The book is not referred to in correspondence after this presumably late-September facsimile, and the book was issued just a few weeks later as Starsh
ip Troopers. Perhaps Heinlein telephoned his assent.

  82. William McMorris, letter to RAH, 04/28/59.

  83. John Payne, letter to RAH, 07/23/59.

  84. John Payne, letter to RAH, 07/23/59.

  85. Irwin O. Spiegel, Esq., letter to Lurton Blassingame, 07/01/59.

  86. John Payne, letter to RAH, 08/04/59.

  87. Daniel F. Galouye (1920–76) was a New Orleans native who had been seriously and permanently injured as a Navy test pilot in World War II (in a letter to the author, 04/06/00, Virginia Heinlein said he “went through the firewall of an airplane he was driving”). A newspaperman, Galouye was a well-regarded, though minor, writer of science fiction starting in the 1950s. His first novel, Dark Universe (1961), was nominated for a Hugo Award. His 1963 novel Simulacrum 3 was the basis for a German television miniseries directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1973, Welt am Draht (World on a Wire) and for the 1999 film The Thirteenth Floor.

  88. RAH, letter to Hermann Deutsch, 04/03/60.

  89. Eckard V. Toy, “The Right Side of the 1960s: The Origins of the John Birch Society in the Pacific Northwest,” Oregon Historical Quarterly (Summer 2004).

  90. Later, in a letter to Bjo Trimble, 02/17/64, Heinlein remarked: “… happens that Bob Welch of the John Birchites is one helluva good boy to get drunk with—as I have with him, more than once—and I think Bob is cracked.”

  91. The association started off well enough, with Welch circulating drafts of suggested letters to their representatives in the House and Senate, but the Heinleins very soon discovered that Welch would not tolerate any kind of deviation from his own odd take on the political situation—and his take did not coincide with either of theirs. He would not even listen to divergent input. American Opinion very rapidly lost what edge it had. A year later (1960), Heinlein wrote, “… we both feel that he has been getting steadily worse, losing his judgment, this past year, and we are not renewing our subscription.” This kind of “fascist organization” was not something they wanted to be associated with, so they asked that their names be removed from the membership rolls. Robert was upset enough that he gave Ginny a rare dressing-down about it: “He didn’t want any part of it.… It was the wrong kind of anti-Communist organization.” Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, “Misc Notes (9/4–9/8/01),” Tape A, Side A.

  Of Welch and McCarthy, Heinlein said they were both best judged by the enemies they made:

  It is a shocking commentary on the state of the Republic that the job of weeding Communist traitors out of our public life should have gone by default to these two men, each of questionable judgment, while responsible major public officials, from presidents on down, have almost unanimously ignored the problem and swept it under the rug (as with Roosevelt and Truman) or gave it lip service and then did nothing about it, as with Eisenhower.

  .… I think Bob Welch’s methods are puerile and I do not find it worthwhile to support him. But if I am ever forced to a choice between the John Birch Society and its enemies, I know which side of the barricades I belong on. I’ll be on the same side the John Birch Society is on—because my enemies are on the other side.

  RAH, letter to Dorothea Faulkner, 07/27/61.

  92. RAH, letter to Fraternity Snoqualmie, 09/16/59.

  93. Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 02/26/59.

  94. Lawrence Lewis Heinlein.

  95. October 23, 1959.

  96. RAH, letter to Bud Heinlein, 12/03/59.

  97. This period is detailed in chapter 30 of Learning Curve, the first volume of this biography, starting on 439.

  98. RAH, letter to Bud Heinlein, 10/29/59.

  99. Bud Heinlein, letter to RAH, 11/30/59.

  100. Bud Heinlein, letter to RAH, 12/02/59.

  101. It would be cumbersome to reference and cite the letters individually, but Virginia Heinlein summarized the entire sequence in a letter to Lawrence Lewis Heinlein (Bud), dated 12/03/59. In this letter she also mentions the alienation of Bud’s mother, Alice, and Alice’s subsequent attempt to find a construction job for Bud. Ginny referred specifically to “psychological instability.” We would probably assume some sort of bipolar disorder now, or, even more disturbing, borderline personality disorder.

  About a year later (01/07/61), Bud Heinlein seems to have come out of his emotional tailspin. He wrote a very apologetic letter, saying that the exchange should never have taken place, and that he was not sane when he wrote the letters. Going in for abdominal surgery for the second time in six months, Bud was not in good physical condition and felt an apology was necessary:

  “Debts are paid. Debts are always paid.” [A quotation from Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy (1957)] I am trying to pay the moral debt I owe you, though you cannot know it. The financial one will be paid as soon as the medical load is off my back. I’m trying to pay the moral one by following your precepts—thinking of the girls and Donna before myself, trying to raise the kids to be the high-calibre individuals that they are capable of being.

  Bob, there is little more I can say. If, by chance, this business should be fatal, I must say that it has been my great privilege to know you and have your friendship and guidance thru most of my life. It is also my great sorrow that, thru my own stupidity and mental fuzziness, I threw away the friendship. If you can find it in your heart to forgive, I will be, to use a trite phrase, eternally grateful.

  Although Lawrence Lewis Heinlein was still alive in 2011, he made no response to queries through family routes (i.e., by the late Bill Bacchus).

  102. RAH, letter to Alice Heinlein Pemberton, 12/03/59.

  103. RAH, letter to Bud Heinlein, 11/27/59.

  104. RAH, letter to Gerry and Nan Crook, 11/23/59.

  105. RAH, letter to Ray and Kitty Heinlein, 11/18/59.

  106. Rose Elizabeth Heinlein, Heinlein’s youngest sister, was thrown from a car Rex was driving in 1926 and killed. The incident is detailed in chapter 5 of Learning Curve, the first volume of this biography, 72–73.

  107. Much of the first volume of this biography returned over and over to Heinlein’s relationship with his older brother, Rex Ivar Heinlein—his parents’ all-too-obvious favorite.

  108. RAH, letter to Ray and Kitty Heinlein, 11/18/59.

  13. “My Own Stuff, My Own Way”

  1. The Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 1959.

  2. The Kirkus Reviews, October 5, 1959.

  3. RAH, letter to William McMorris, 11/07/59.

  4. Undated list of copies to be sent out in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz. The list includes the inscriptions as well.

  5. RAH, letter to William McMorris, 11/07/59.

  6. The Marsh Gurney material is told in Learning Curve chapter 5, “Plebe Year,” 67–68.

  7. H. H. Holmes, “Science and Fantasy,” New York Herald Tribune (November 8, 1959).

  8. Theodore Cogswell, letter to RAH, 11/29/59.

  9. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 02/03/59, but marked “Never Sent.”

  10. RAH, letter to Theodore Cogswell, 12/04/59.

  11. RAH, letter to Theodore Cogswell, 12/04/59.

  12. RAH, letter to Theodore Cogswell, 12/04/59. No revision appears to have been made.

  13. RAH, letter to Theodore Cogswell, 12/04/59.

  14. RAH, letter to Theodore Cogswell, 12/04/59.

  15. RAH, letter to Theodore Cogswell, 12/04/59.

  16. RAH, letter to Theodore Cogswell, 12/04/59.

  17. RAH, letter to Theodore Cogswell, 12/04/59. A few years later, shortly before conscription ramped up for the Vietnam War, Heinlein expressed just the same revulsion for conscription in a letter to Theodore Sturgeon, 03/05/62:

  I hate conscription. I regard it as human slavery of the vilest sort and do not think it can be justified under any circumstances whatever. To those who say: “Yes, but without the draft we could not defend the United States” I answer violently, “Then let the bloody United States go down the drain! Any nation whose citizens will not voluntarily fight and die for her does not deserve to live.�
��

  I despise jails and prisons almost as much, and for the same reason, and I am contemptuous of punishment by fining because it is basically unjust, being necessarily uneven and discriminatory in application—e.g., there is a reckless driver in this neighborhood who is quite wealthy. A $500 fine to him is nothing at all, less than nothing. To me it is an annoyance and one which might well cut into my luxuries and spoil my plans. But to my neighbor across the street, a cook with two children, a $500 fine would be a major disaster.

  Yet $500 is what our local courts would charge any of the three of us for drunken driving.

  I suggest that ten lashes would be equally rough on each of us—and would do far more to deter homicide-by-automobile.

  Both of these ideas, opposition on moral grounds to conscription and to imprisonment, are essential parts of Starship Troopers. So far as I know, no reviewer noticed either idea.

  18. Theodore Cogswell, letter to RAH, 12/09/59.

  19. The Detroit World Science Fiction Convention was held over the Labor Day weekend in early September 1959, whereas the book was not released until October. Possibly the first serial installment, in the Fantasy & Science Fiction issue dated October 1959, was already available. A continued or renewed discussion between Robert Mills and Alfred Bester in a public place, such as a hotel bar among other colleagues, might also have been enough to create the buzz.

  Much of the early commentary in the PITFCS publication continues to deal with the reduction that appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, months after the full text appeared in book form.

  20. P. Schuyler Miller, “The Wiswell Syndrome” in “The Reference Library” Department of Analog (March 1960): 155–9, at 156.