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

  Heinlein had another writing chore he had been putting off since August: He wanted to do a really good story for John Campbell, as a major “thank-you” for his efforts to get Street & Smith to change its policy of buying and reserving “all rights.”31 Now they bought and reserved only serial and paperback rights, and this allowed Campbell to meet the conditions Heinlein set out two years earlier—rates respectable for pulp, if not as good as the slicks. All he needed was a good idea.

  That, of course, is the hard part. Campbell suggested a dodge that would let them talk it over “in person”: He had become interested in ham radio and threw himself into it with enthusiasm. There were a couple of hams in Colorado Springs, and Campbell arranged with one of them, Bill Talmaine, to make a connection on Friday, December 3, 1948.32

  Astounding’s November 1948 issue had come out the same week Heinlein remarried. In it, Campbell printed a “joke” letter from Richard Hoen—a “review” of the November 1949 issue, a year in the future. It was to be a glorious reunion of all the prewar greats, and Hoen had mentioned a new serial by Heinlein (as “R. A. MacH”, referring to Heinlein’s “Anson MacDonald” pen name), giving only the title “Gulf,” and no other details (except that he implied it was not part of the Future History). It was a good joke, Heinlein told Campbell—and pointed out that he could top it: If Campbell would talk the other writers into doing stories with the titles Hoen had given, Heinlein could write something for the “Gulf” title and make Hoen’s “prediction” come true.33

  At that stage Heinlein did not have any specific idea for the story—he might be able to use some of the Ocean Rancher material, so the title could refer to the Gulf of Mexico, or—he kept turning the notion over in his mind but was getting nowhere.34 He asked Ginny for a story conference. They scheduled a formal meeting, and he asked her to come with a few story ideas they could toss around.35

  Ginny’s help with the business side of the writing had already expanded well beyond that of a well-trained secretary. Much of her impact on him she could not really be aware of: Her “presence” was simply everywhere in his life, in big ways and little. The most casual remarks from her might spark a story idea, but she didn’t even need to talk to inspire a story. One day, when she was putting away the wire recorder (since they were no longer using it for dictation) it squawked, and that gave Heinlein an idea for Willis, one of his Martian characters in Red Planet—that it would repeat sounds back at you, like a living wire recorder.36 And the rest of his book’s Martian biology built itself around that and integrated into the boy-hero’s resistance to an attempted dictatorship on the Martian Colony. Ginny later commented, “Robert asked me to make notes when I had story ideas, and I always did. Sometimes they were simply notions for small things, other times they were bigger…”37

  For this first story conference, Ginny’s best idea was a variation on Kipling’s Jungle Books stories—a human Mowgli raised, not by animals, but by aliens and then returned to Earth. It would be a satire, she explained. The boy would be like those goslings that imprinted on duck mothers, and the story built around his figuring out how to be a human being. Heinlein remembers the moment as linked to Red Planet, which he was researching and planning at that time:

  Time after time ideas would beget more ideas, and I would have to lay the second generation regretfully away with the thought that the discarded notion was a little too involved and a bit too strong medicine for a boy’s book. I collected quite a file of things about these Martians which had been left out of the book. One night, while discussing this Martian culture, I made some reference to Mowgli; Ginny speaks up and says, “There’s your ‘Gulf’ story that you’ve been looking for.”38

  Heinlein wrote several sheets of notes by the time he ran out of steam for the night,39 but the core of the book was already clear in his mind: he wrote the first and last chapter.40

  But for the Astounding serial, this Martian Mowgli was too big an idea to be researched and written in the time he had. They continued discussing the “Gulf” story for the next several days. The Martians he had evolved for Red Planet were elder-brother types, and the boy they raise and use as a spy would probably turn out some sort of warped super-genius, like Odd John. “What makes a superman?” he asked Ginny, spontaneously. “They think better,” she replied.41 This was the germ of the spy/superman novella Heinlein later crafted for Campbell as “Gulf.”

  Heinlein put the superman idea aside, too, so he could finish some of the accumulation of work that was piling up.42 He began revising and expanding Sixth Column for Gnome Press.43 The revisions were ticklish:

  It was a hard story to write, as I tried to make this notion plausible to the reader—and also to remove the racism which was almost inherent to his story line.

  In revising the yarn for book publication (1947) I was lucky enough to find, in a respected British journal of science, some support for the notion that the subraces of h. sapiens might be told apart by spectral analysis of blood; I incorporated that idea in the book.44

  In the middle of the Sixth Column revisions, Heinlein received another book offer: Shasta, a new publisher out of Chicago, had bought Methuselah’s Children in the spring of 1948. Now the owner, Erle Korshak, wrote saying they wanted to make it a part of a five-book series that collected all of the Future History.45

  This was a much better—and more realistic—offer than Crown had made him the previous year (for a heavily condensed, single-volume collection). Korshak wanted him to write all the stories whose titles he had put on his “Future History” chart but never written. Heinlein answered that he was interested, but he was also fully booked until February 1949:46 Dalgliesh’s approval of the Red Planet outline came through, sometime in mid-December 1948, and Heinlein was ready to start writing the book after Christmas.

  He found Red Planet a chore to write and spoke of it as “dull.”47 Dalgliesh had been very pleased with the outline discussion, but it didn’t come alive for him. About a week before Red Planet would be finished, he took a day off and pitched Ginny’s Martian Mowgli idea for “Gulf” to John Campbell in a long letter, so that he could have the benefit of Campbell’s feedback before he had to start writing it. Now the “Gulf” had become interplanetary.

  All the fundamental ideas of what would become Stranger in a Strange Land were there in this January 27, 1949, letter, including, explicitly, the Mars-Apollonian/Earth-Dionysian dichotomy, drawn from Ruth Benedict’s 1934 study in Patterns of Culture, with flavors of two other classic superman stories, Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John (1935) and Philip Wylie’s Gladiator (1930), a book that is, for the most part, remembered today only as the direct inspiration for the Superman comic book character.

  The obvious tragic outcome is for him to retreat to Mars, just [as] a zoo animal, loosed, will slink back into his cage, unable to cope with the wild “natural” environment. Another solution is for him to become a messiah, either tragically unsuccessful, or dramatically successful. Or, on a less elevated plane, he could be the bridge across the gulf between Mars and Earth.…48

  Meanwhile, back on Earth (or as close to Earth as Hollywood gets), van Ronkel wrote in January 1949 saying that a Life magazine article on rocketry had brightened up the climate for their Destination Moon spec script, and Louella Parsons had leaked the news that Pal was rounding up financing—somewhat prematurely, as the script was just being looked at. Pal had probably planted the leak himself, van Ronkel concluded, to create a “buzz” about the project. All the independent filmmakers were having trouble obtaining financing.49

  Heinlein’s second juvenile for Scribner, Space Cadet, had come out in August 1948, while he was still in Los Angeles, to generally good reception, but the reviews in the science-fiction fan press over the winter and into 1949 were not positive. In fact, for the past two years he had been getting very strange reactions from the science-fiction fans. Prominent fan Forrest Ackerman sent him a negative review by writer Robert Bloch that didn’t seem to understand what was going on in
the story at all. The fans—and in this case Bloch as well—seemed offended that he avoided the science-fiction genre conventions when trying to reach a general readership that didn’t have robots and rockets and such at its fingertips. Exasperated, Heinlein wrote back to Ackerman:

  You know damn well that a story that Astounding will buy can not possibly be sold to the SEP—but through those stories I brought space travel to more people than has any other writer save H. G. Wells and Jules Verne—to more people than have all other living writers put together … So far as the general public is concerned I am the only space-travel writer, because I gave it to them in a form they could understand and made them believe in it. Would you criticize me for feeding pablum to a baby rather than rich, red beef steak?50

  Nevertheless, Ackerman said, in fanzines and directly to Heinlein in correspondence, that the “slick” Heinlein set back the cause of space travel and only made him ill.51

  Irritating—but just one of the many ways Ackerman was becoming a long-distance pain. The previous year, he had made a pest of himself over the Big Pond fund set up to bring the English editor of New Worlds, Ted Carnell, to the United States—as the “fan guest of honor” for the 1949 WorldCon in Cincinnati. As it happened, all of Heinlein’s disposable income was going into care packages for the Carnells at the time, since England was still rationing food,52 but Heinlein refused to explain himself to Ackerman. Now Ackerman was complaining that Heinlein wasn’t giving him as much “access” as he wanted. Heinlein decided to make one more attempt to put the friendship back on a more reasonable basis:

  If you want to know me for myself, and not as a source of scoops, well and good. I like you and I regard you as an extremely idealistic sort of a guy, even though our evaluations don’t match on various points. I don’t like you simply as a source of nude pix, or a person from whom I can borrow s-f books, or as a bigshot fan; I like you for yourself—one of the sweetest guys I ever met (when you aren’t off on a rampage). No doubt if we stay in contact you will sometimes get a scoop out of me, or an original manuscript, or a chance to see the inner workings of something.…

  … This letter has been painfully blunt, Forry, but, darn it!, you forced it on me. I prefer to stay on friendly terms with you; whether or not we do depends on whether or not you want to—as a friend, and not as Louella Parsons nor as a self-appointed critic.53

  It was, by way of contrast, a pleasure to deal with someone as straightforward as L. Ron Hubbard, who wrote asking for a fifty-dollar loan so he could get to D.C. for a pension hearing. Twenty minutes after opening his letter, Robert was writing a response: Ginny volunteered to take the money out of her grocery budget and went downtown for a money order to be enclosed with the letter.

  You may attribute this on her [Ginny’s] part to the fact that she put in four years in the outfit herself and lost her kid brother in the pig boats. She won’t turn down a shipmate. As for me, it’s partly because I remember you floating around out there in that salt water with your ribs caved in and partly because I have a feeling deep down that I could depend on you in a tight corner quicker than I could depend on some of my more “respectable” acquaintances … I think you are my kind of a son of a bitch and I don’t think I would have to holler more than once.54

  Hubbard’s markets had never completely come back for him, while Heinlein’s seemed to be expanding. Both Doubleday and Little, Brown had asked Heinlein for collections of his fantasy stories, and the discussions with Doubleday stretched over months, trying out various combinations of his short fiction. By April he reached an agreement with Doubleday on a four-book deal, beginning with Waldo & Magic, Inc. “It seems to me,” he told his agent, “that [those two stories] go together about as well as mustard and watermelon, an opinion which was reinforced by trying to think of a title for the volume.”55 “Waldo” was a novella written in the opening months of World War II, built around Tesla’s broadcast power and what the metaphysics of the new physics might mean. “Magic, Inc.” was a prewar romp about commercial magic.

  Back in Hollywood, van Ronkel had become very unhappy with his agent. Lou Schor had just lain down and gone to sleep on them, apparently expecting Pal to do all the rest of the work himself. Heinlein liked Schor personally, but it was hard to drum up support for someone who wouldn’t cooperate. Reluctantly Heinlein gave van Ronkel an unlimited agency if he wanted to fire Schor.56

  That was not all that was falling apart in Southern California: The hopeful expectations he had for Leslyn were dashed as reports came in. She was telling different stories to different people, and none of it was calming. “Heard from Sprague [de Camp] that she apparently has been working on the bottle to an extreme,” Heinlein’s Naval Academy friend Cal Laning, now in Washington, D.C., wrote Robert when she asked for a job recommendation.57 Their mutual friend Bill Corson was even more depressing: “Oversimplifying things a trifle, I will express an opinion that she’s nutty as a hoot owl…” he wrote, continuing sadly: “She aint the gal we used to know, Bob. There’s been a vast change. It’s a total stranger now, with only a physical resemblance to upset us.”58 Now she was demanding financial support from Robert, when he was close to broke.59 She had run through the entire proceeds from the sale of the Lookout Mountain house in just two and a half years.60

  Heinlein felt no need to help; even if he wanted to, nothing had ever helped Leslyn once she entered the bottle. So he went back to work. In January and February 1949 Heinlein began collecting notes for a mainstream novel set in the world of modern art, to be called The Emperor’s New Clothes, something like Ayn Rand’s 1943 book The Fountainhead (made into a movie in 1948).

  But he couldn’t afford to devote much time to speculative work.61 The shorts he had written in November and December (“The Long Watch” and “Delilah and the Space Rigger”) were bouncing from all the slicks.

  In February 1949, Heinlein took up the Shasta proposal for a series of books of all the Future History stories. The series as a whole would be much stronger, he suggested, if he based each book around a typical personality of his era and wrote just the material—ten new stories altogether—that would finish the series off. Volume one would be about “Harriman and the escape from Earth to the Moon.” Volume two would pick up with “Rhysling and the adventure of the entire solar system.” Then a book about “the First Prophet and the triumph of rationalism over superstition,” then “Lazarus Long and the triumph over death.” The series would conclude with The Endless Frontier—his “Universe” and “Common Sense” stories about a lost spaceship, and a new novelette, “Da Capo,” that would bring things back to Earth and the triumph of the human race over space and time.62

  Heinlein knew what he wanted to write for the first novelette: the “prequel” to his 1940 story “Requiem,” which had been about D. D. Harriman dying as he achieved his life’s ambition to go to the Moon. The technical problem of the fusion of documentary with science fiction that he had worked into the Destination Moon script was outrageously experimental (for the time), and his “The Man Who Sold the Moon”—a story about the early days of space travel—continued to explore this new vein of science-fictional material. It wouldn’t be science fiction at all, as the pulps understood the term—nary a space battle nor wondrous gadget in sight. It might be more suited to the general-fiction magazines—

  —but Korshak wanted to premiere the story in Outward Bound, the first volume of the series, and that meant no magazine sale. Heinlein agreed to the restriction reluctantly: He could not afford to put any obstacle in the way of the advance for the book. His brother, Larry, had written asking for a loan of $100 for sixty days,63 and Robert was embarrassed to have to tell Larry he didn’t have it to give—unless one of the speculative ventures came through. “I hate like the deuce to have to put you off,” he wrote Larry, “and it is almost as embarrassing to have to admit that I am myself strapped.”64

  There was one bright spot on his financial horizon: Calling All Girls magazine took his teenaged-girl ice-s
kating story “Poor Daddy,” written in October 1947,65 and paid $150 for the 2,700 word story66—about five and a half cents per word (compared to the new “highest-rate” Campbell had offered of two and a half cents per word).67 The editor told him they could use more stories of the “Puddin’” type—and they didn’t care that he was a man writing about a teenaged girl.68

  Continuing to work as partners, Robert and Ginny had another story conference,69 for the novella he needed to write for the first Shasta book of Future History stories—“The Man Who Sold the Moon.”

  As with Rocket Ship Galileo and Destination Moon, Heinlein could not, for storytelling reasons, reasonably expect to depict the long, slow buildup that a government-managed project would require, with hundreds of people involved.70 As far back as 1947, when he proposed this story to The Saturday Evening Post, he had established its focus:

  The background would be the same, at an earlier period, as my Luna-City stories; the story would be of D. D. Harriman, the first great entrepreneur of space travel. It would be concerned mainly with the financial and promotional aspects of the first Moon trip, rather than with the physical adventure. This is, I believe, a fairly novel approach to the space-travel story, and concerns what is, in fact, the real hitch in opening up the solar system—money, the huge initial investment and the wildcat nature of the risk.71