Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

But he kept this to himself and got on with the business of being a boy. He had measles in 1914, but remembered fondly his birthday that year: his mother threw a big birthday party, with a score of children, and pink lemonade and a big white cake with pink candles. “That was also the summer that the collie dog in the house diagonally across from us bit me. Later that summer I heard my first ‘wireless’ and saw my first ‘aeroplane,’ a Curtiss pusher biplane.”10

  The Great War broke out in Europe that year—the “Guns of August”—“Horrible German Atrocities in Belgium.” In August, too, his Grandfather Lyle died, and life changed for the family, not for the better. The summers in Butler ceased, and Bobby was moved to Horace Mann Elementary School for the second grade.

  By the age of eight (1915), Bobby realized that his family was poor and was going to stay that way.11 His father’s income was never quite enough (even though he advanced at International Harvester until he retired in 1937). The family always outgrew Rex Ivar’s earning capability. Any money Bobby ever had, he would have to earn.

  So, in third grade, Bobby got a job. His older brothers were already working. Lawrence had been driving every day for his job since he was twelve.

  In 1916, few states had anything like child labor laws. In Missouri, a twelve-year-old could get a full work permit if he or she had completed—or been expelled from—grammar school. At age nine, Bobby got a limited work permit so he could be a “PJG Boy,” selling subscriptions door-to-door to the sister magazines The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Country Gentleman.12 By 1916 he was earning the money for his own clothing, working at a series of odd jobs—delivery boy, office boy, distributor of handbills—whatever he could pick up. He raised silkworms in the piano case—ordered from the back pages of a magazine. In fourth grade (1917) he had his first part-time job during the school year, and he worked full-time during the summers thereafter. He had a job selling soda pop and dodgers (hot dogs) for a theater, which allowed him to see movies (he was a fan of cowboy star William S.Hart).13

  He and a pal rented an electric vacuum cleaner in the days before “suckbrooms” became widely distributed, and sold vacuum-cleaning services door-to-door.14 One winter (1917–18) he got up at 4:00 A.M. every day to deliver The Kansas City Star to his neighbors in the snow, in minus-twentydegree weather, dragging a sled piled high with folded papers.

  Bobby started earning his own way just in time: in about 1917 Rex Ivar cosigned a loan for a friend who was worse off than the Heinleins. The friend defaulted on the note, and Rex Ivar had to pay it off. It was all he could do to put food on the table—and there was one stretch of three months when the family subsisted on potato soup. Bobby’s earnings paid for his clothing and for all his incidental expenses—school lunches, carfare, schoolbooks, everything.

  By 1923, at the age of fifteen, he was completely self-supporting, even though he had to overcome some opposition to make that happen. Working twenty-two hours a week, he didn’t have time to study, except for the streetcar rides to and from school, ten hours a week. Fortunately, that was all he needed to master the material: he had learned in grammar school to read while walking, without lifting his eyes from the pages. But that wasn’t quite enough leisure time for nonessential work. His American History teacher objected because he wasn’t keeping one of the project notebooks he had been assigned. That called for a serious compromise conference, with the principal ruling on the pragmatics, in Bobby’s favor. (He got through the course with an A grade anyway.)

  This sounds rather grim—and perhaps it was, as he later remarked that he knew at first hand what it was to work in sweatshop conditions—but Bobby’s life was by no means all Dickensian drudgery. He fondly recalled a pair of roller skates he owned in 1915 and a Bluebird bicycle that he received for Christmas in 1916. He had a home workshop and was good with his hands: one Christmas, about 1920, Santa Claus presented Bobby’s younger brother, Clare (as Jesse Clare was called in the family), with a set of half-sized woodworking tools. Bobby made the tool chest for it; the paint was so fresh that it collected the glitter that dropped off the Christmas tree’s branches.15

  The basement held more than the workshop; it was also an indoor shooting gallery—the holes in the rafters remained for decades and became family legend—and an experimental chemical laboratory. His youngest sister, Mary Jean, wryly remarked that her mother never knew when the house might explode. Once in his childhood, Bobby put out a household fire by himself, without calling the local fire department.16

  Bobby was fascinated by stage magic. On one glorious occasion, he was taken to see Thurston the Magician.17 One of Thurston’s tricks was threading needles with one hand, but the trick wasn’t well adapted to the stage: the audience couldn’t see it, so he had observers from the audience go on the stage and watch to see that there was no hanky-panky. Bobby volunteered and was chosen to go up onstage: he watched the trick close-up, very dutifully and very carefully. For this mark of distinction, he received the unusual privilege (in a low Protestant family) of owning a deck of cards so that he could study card tricks and prestidigitation. He practiced covertly, even in church, whiling away the long sermons.

  And he was so taken with the swordplay in a stage performance of The Tales of Hoffmann that he talked a neighbor and his own younger brother, Clare, into taking up fencing with him, with homemade swords and screen wire helmets.18 No doubt that gave him many bad habits to overcome when he took up fencing as a sport.

  When the United States entered the Great War, in 1917, Bobby followed the war news avidly, tracing troop movements on maps of Europe and observing the various meatless and sweetless days, gathering peach pits for charcoal to make gas masks for the troops.19 The Liberty Bell toured the country by rail, to drum up support for the first Liberty Loan, and Bobby was taken to the train depot at the foot of Wyandotte to see it. In the yards around the depot, an open flatcar held the bell, and the crowd was so dense that the tenyear-old was nearly trampled.20

  On March 26, 1918, five months before his eighteenth birthday, Lawrence Lyle Heinlein enlisted with the Machine Gun Company, 7th Regiment. Uncle Park, age twenty-five, was serving as a bugler with Company B of the 2nd Missouri. Rex Ivar, at the age of forty, also volunteered but was turned down, since he had a wife and six children to support. Lawrence was discharged in October 1918. What with boot camp and special machine gun training, his active duty in World War I amounted to two months.

  In the winter of 1918–1919, the angel of death passed twice over America, and Bobby Heinlein heard the rustle of his wings: in addition to the war deaths, the great Spanish influenza epidemic killed nearly half a million Americans—twice as many as war casualties. The Heinlein family seems to have escaped losing any of its members—though Bobby suffered with the flu and also with a case of typhoid fever—but one of his teachers died in a way that shocked him: one day she was at school, at work, and the next day she was dead.21

  While Lawrence was in the Army, the family’s finances had drawn even tighter. On one occasion Bobby accidentally overheard a discussion between his father and mother that came down to whether they should use their scant resources to buy a winter coat for Bobby or riding boots for Rex. Bam, incredibly, sided with Rex and the riding boots. This was shattering to tenyear-old Bobby. Rex was the favorite son in that household, and Bobby was … somewhere down the list. For most of his youth, he would be competing with Rex.

  It was probably at that moment that Bobby lost whatever hold on mother love he had been able to retain through a not notable degree of nurturing. It might have gone into depression; instead, it encouraged his tendency to independence and made the necessity of self-reliance into a virtue. If, as H. G. Wells remarked, “A cared-for child cannot conceive that there is a fundamental insecurity of life,”22 Bobby was already too familiar with the fundamental insecurity of life: he was never neglected, precisely, but he never had the sense of being cared for. “Home was a place to eat and to sleep; anything beyond that was up to each
of us.”23

  Independence it certainly gave him: he was growing up and had girls on his mind continuously from the age of eleven (1918), though he said he was laughed at whenever he tried to make a pass at a girl24—and in any case he was much too busy with work and the many school activities he maintained to get into much trouble.

  And always there was reading, best of all occupations. The whole Heinlein family were readers—“garbage paper readers” they called themselves after Clare was found sitting on the sidewalk and unpeeling the newspaper in which the family garbage was wrapped, so he could follow a story. But Robert was more voracious than any of them, reading under the covers with a candle 25—a feat that speaks equally to his appetites and the care and discretion with which he satisfied them. He sweet-talked (and doubtless found ways to bribe) his sisters and brothers into lending him the use of their public library cards so that he could get more books than children were usually allowed. He later was to identify the public library as one of his several “homes.”26

  His earliest exposure, to Baum and the Oz books, had given Bobby a taste for the fantastic. At the age of eight, his favorite book was Alice in Wonderland, which led naturally, by a concatenation not obvious but nevertheless common enough, to science reading. He worked for seven months delivering The Kansas City Journal in order to buy his own set of The Book of Knowledge, a popular encyclopedia for young readers. He read through all the science books in the library, particularly those that dealt with astronomy and space flight. The astronomy he used as material for the paid lectures he gave around town (another way to earn pocket money); the space flight fed his soul (he had made a bet with a high school friend in 1918 that man would be on the Moon before his fortieth birthday).27

  Like all his friends, he read the Rover Boys series and all the Horatio Alger books28—and all of Kipling, borrowing some of the collected works from a neighbor who owned the set.29 But science-adventure and marvelous invention stories he particularly loved. He graduated from the Tom Swift and Motor Boys series to Jules Verne and to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s wonderful and exotic Mars books as they came out—A Princess of Mars in 1917, The Gods of Mars in 1918, and Warlord of Mars in 1919 (Tarzan, of course, was already a particular favorite). He loved the Mars books because of their careful and imaginative use of Percival Lowell’s scientific discoveries about the Red Planet made in the 1890s and the high, romantic coloration Burroughs brought to the science. “For that period,” Heinlein later noted judiciously, “E.R.B. was correct, and his imaginative extrapolations were magnificent.”30

  Soon he found that some of the pulp magazines—Argosy and All-Story and Hugo Gernsback’s Electrical Experimenter—published these stories occasionally. The pulps had come into existence only recently, as part of a movement to democratize science and literature for the newly literate masses. They were the early-twentieth-century equivalent of PBS television, designed to entertain as they educated. What made the pulps distinct was originally their all-fiction format, but as the field developed commercially and magazine “chains” came into existence, nonfiction pulps emerged, too, devoted to the new technology of radio transmission, or to aviation. They were lumped together as a genre of “science and invention pulps” (which might, nevertheless, publish some fiction among the articles about radio or aviation). Hugo Gernsback, an émigré-inventor-turned-pulp-editor, was developing an explicit theory about science stories he would carry over when he created the first science-fiction pulp, Amazing Stories, in 1926. This kind of story was good training for boys, sugarcoating science teaching.

  By 1917 Robert had discovered Mark Twain, and his current favorite book was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This was not particularly unusual, as all the boys in his neighborhood had virtually memorized the book and played at Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn the way later generations would play at cowboys and Indians or superhero and supervillain.

  I remember a violent argument I got into with several other boys in my neighborhood, over which one of us could identify the largest number of single sentences in the book, tell what came before and after any given sentence read at random. We never settled it—because we all could identify anything in it. Oh we read “Tom Swift” too and the Alger books, and the Motor Boys. But Huck Finn we practically memorized—it had everything. 31

  He read everything of Twain’s he could find and was profoundly affected by What Is Man? (1906) and The Mysterious Stranger (1916). His admiration of Twain became a lifelong passion.

  He worked through the Harvard Classics set at the same time he was absorbing the Horatio Alger books. He liked the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the wry humor of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. He read everything, in fact, except the usual run of nauseating Victorian children’s literature. “What most people call a ‘juvenile,’” he said, “made my flesh creep.”32 He wanted “tough books, chewy books—not pap.”33 Jack London’s Yukon adventure books led him to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000—1887 and Equality. Bobby Heinlein was absorbing progressivism.

  By 1919 he had a new favorite: H. G. Wells. Wells—particularly When the Sleeper Wakes—had the same appetite for flying, and for space travel and for the stars.34 But Wells had much more to offer Bobby: Wells’s knife-edge intellectual balancing act between Victorian materialism and an awareness of the nonmaterial dimension of life—secular but spiritual—echoed Bobby’s own “balancing act,” living in a highly religious family. But he was also drawn to Wells because of the “utopian socialist” idealism with which Wells burned.35

  Wells’s socialism was highly compatible with the other side of socialism that had flourished in the United States throughout the nineteenth century and flourished now in the Freethought wing of the Democratic Party. Wells gave Heinlein a framework for his own social-progressive ideas, and he came to value Wells’s appreciation of the technical dimensions of what would come to be called “social engineering.”

  Robert was also deeply affected by the essays of T. H. Huxley and, most of all, Charles Darwin.36 In 1920 he read both On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. He was already prepared by that time, by reading Wells, to view Darwinian natural selection without the irrelevant burden of teleology that the old-fashioned Victorian Social Darwinists had brought to the subject. He could see the apparent purposiveness in biological events as the kind of pattern-making the human mind does routinely when it tells itself stories about things that happen—the shapes of clouds, patterns of cracks in a wall—and not that of a master story imposed by a master storyteller in the sky.

  Robert Heinlein began to become an adult when he began to understand what Wells and Darwin had to say to the modern world.

  3

  A JAZZ AGE TEENAGER

  On March 1, 1919, Samuel Edward Heinlein passed away. There is no record of a bequest, but later that year Rex Ivar bought a house at 2102 East Thirty-sixth Street, for $2,000. The house had only two bedrooms for the eight of them, but it was their own home, for the first time. Bam was pregnant with Mary Jean at the time, so a ninth was on the way. The sleeping arrangements were already a little crowded: the older children doubled up, and the baby, Rose Elizabeth, slept in a crib in her parents’ room.

  They talked occasionally of installing a bed or beds in the living room, but that seemed somewhat beneath their social position—it would leave Rex Ivar no place to discuss Sunday school matters with the other deacons, and Bam no place to receive the Ladies Aid Society. Robert slept for three years on a pallet on the floor of the living room, bedding put away in a closet during the day.1

  Robert’s transition from elementary to high school in 1919 was somewhat eased by Horace Mann’s experimental junior high program, amalgamating Robert’s eighth grade with the freshman class at Central High School. His world had been expanding steadily as he was thrown into contact with different social worlds. At Greenwood Grammar School, most of his classmates had come from the orphanage down the street, children visibly poorer than the H
einleins. Throughout his teen years, Robert lived in a racially and culturally mixed neighborhood, just a few blocks from the edge of Darktown. Robert’s family—intellectually conservative but not necessarily rigid or doctrinaire—fit easily into the multicultural mix, not sharing a number of the racial and religious prejudices that were commonplace early in the century. His best friends in the neighborhood were Jewish twins Saul and Solomon—and Jack, a Catholic boy. His first enlightenment thus was not about religion, but about race: “I got it through my head that human beings must never be judged by categories, but only as individuals.”2

  That year, Robert was twelve, and he began to be treated by his family more or less as an adult. Rex Ivar had some rigid ideas about the perquisites that went along with taking on adult responsibilities and earning your own way. Robert was no longer required to attend church services—impractical in any case because of his erratic work schedule.

  Nor was he any longer disciplined around the house. While the Heinlein children were in grammar school, the house rule was that if they received discipline at the school (typically a whipping or some other form of corporal punishment, such as feruling),3 they would be disciplined a second time at home—“twice as hard.” Bobby was never put to this indignity, as one of his brothers had already “explored the territory” and Bobby had no wish to recapitulate the experience. As his mother put it later, spanking Rex Ivar was enough to keep Bobby in line for two weeks.4 Bam’s peach switch was “middle justice” in the house, and the “high justice”5 of his father’s razor strop was an effective motivational tool. Bobby learned the boundaries and came later to value the whole system of social and moral values this taught him. His father, he came to see, was doing his best in a difficult situation:

  My father did much more for me with his razor strop than he ever did with his Bible reading … . He taught me to keep my commitments on time, always pay my bills no matter what happened, and to sweep in the dark corners as thoroughly as out in the open when it shows.6