Heinlein had enough material to stop thinking about it and start writing—a dramatized Social Credit tract. He would have an educated man from the bad old days (1930s) transported into the bright future, when the struggle to implement Social Credit was long over and done with.
And Heinlein had a title for it, from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, a title that said exactly what he thought about the task of political reform (and democracy in economics) that every one of us has got to carry on. Lincoln had focused exactly the sense of dedication to the never-ending task:
The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
Heinlein’s first actions as a writer must have been those of hundreds of thousands who had gone before him: a carbon set goes into the typewriter—in this case probably the back of a mimeographed poll-watcher’s flyer from the election just over—carbon paper, and a sheet of rough newsprint for the carbon copy.19 Like many, many others before him, he hunted out his title with two fingers:20
-- FOR US, THE LIVING --
And four lines underneath, a subtitle, like those James Branch Cabell had used:
A Comedy of Customs
He must already have decided on doing a love story—the most basic of all stories.
He took a contemporary man—a Navy man—and got him killed here, taking his car over one of those steep cliffs out at Pacific Palisades. Reincarnated in the future, he had an innocent eye. He wouldn’t even be able to comprehend the Social Credit system. Various experts would have to explain the details to him, and that would give Heinlein his exposition (just the way Edward Bellamy had handled the problem in Looking Backward). At the very beginning of what would become his permanent career as a writer, Heinlein had already learned a thing or two from Wells, a writerly principle he repeated over and over throughout the years: steal from the best, then file off the serial numbers and claim it as your own. He established a link between the girl and the boy: her twentieth-century equivalent was the last thing his boy Perry Nelson saw in this life, in the twentieth century—and the first thing he saw in the twenty-second. He took Sally Rand as his model for the girl: she could be an exotic dancer, named Diana, the chaste goddess of the hunt. The name would keep her clean, since she wasn’t actually going to do any fooling around to set off Perry’s atavistic jealousy. He would just be a jealous fool.
When Heinlein got his plot straight in his mind, he had social frontiers, economic frontiers, and technological frontiers all wrapped up in one neat package. He had even worked up a card game as a teaching device to get people to see how real-world economies worked.
Heinlein worked at his novel every day, from mid-November until after Christmas. When the book was finished, he thought it might be commercial—or it might not.21 The scenes at the end, where Perry was in bed with two women at the same time, were sexy enough to carry the book commercially—might even get it banned in Boston … if it could be published at all.
Through all the work, he consulted Leslyn constantly. Later, Leslyn recalled his perching on a stool in the kitchen and bothering her when she was fixing dinner, trying out ideas, “fishing for plot twists and climaxes,”22 and talking out how anything he did at page 10 would affect the story when he got to page 260 … . On the evidence of what he did next, Leslyn’s overall verdict was that he was being too critical. The bottom line was, it was certainly no worse than a lot of stuff that did get published.
By 1938, the Heinlein marriage was well established and comfortable. They had started out six years earlier with what amounted to a “companionate” marriage, whether or not they had explicitly agreed on those terms: they were best friends first, last, and always. Robert was very satisfied with his marriage. Leslyn seemed to agree—most of the time. There were rare instances, starting in about 1936,23 when she just locked herself into an enraged frame of mind, paranoid and vicious, and could not be talked out of it. But these episodes were very rare and always blew over quickly, and she was back to her sweetly loving and lively self.24 She just would not talk about it afterward.
It was impossible to guess what might cause those episodes, and for the most part Heinlein did not speculate (not having enough material to speculate with). We can look backward, with the dubious advantage of much experience with such psychological issues, and wonder if it might have something to do with family issues. She had always been a daddy’s girl—small wonder, given that her mother, Skipper, was such a toxic harridan.25 Her father, Colin MacDonald, had drunk himself to death, at the rate of a quart of whiskey a day, in 1929.26 That had been very hard on her.
But her troubles might just as well have come from other sources. Her outbursts might have been her way of coping with her own rejection of the so-called moral values of her upbringing. Leslyn was just as liberal and modern as Robert—in some ways, even more so.27 She even practiced witchcraft—“white witchcraft,” in the old pagan tradition of northern Europe, though she didn’t (so far as Robert knew) belong to an actual coven. The essence of The Craft is secrecy—and that was about all Heinlein knew about that subject. Heinlein himself had never any strong calling in that direction—and a strong calling is utterly necessary for practical magic working. His own reading had run to hermetic symbolical philosophy—Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism. Interesting intellectually—but it didn’t do anything for him, except to provide interesting story materials … Taking up pagan witchery might have been as much a rejection of her mother’s Theosophy as of Christianity: you are tied to anything you feel strongly enough about to have to reject.
Leslyn’s commitment to sexual freedom was just as strong as his in the theoretical sense. That was the whole basis of their friendship, courtship, marriage. When you came right down to it, she had gone directly from Cal Laning’s bed to his, and they had begun as they meant to continue. They had both had extramarital affairs—a few—in the six years since they had gotten married.28
At its best, sex is lighthearted recreation, the best game people can play with each other, in all combinations (some of them still theoretical to Robert, but he had an ambition to bust as many of the taboos as he could manage).29 And extremely spiritual when it was at its most lighthearted—the way you lit up inside, like nothing else. That was true “illumination.”30
After Christmas and for a couple of weeks in January, Heinlein fiddled with revisions. His typing had been unbelievably bad—there were places where whole lines had been left out. He retyped the manuscript to get a clean copy—an agonizing process, even though his typing was getting better. Heinlein really learned how to type while doing this book. He did a slow hunt-and-peck until he taught himself to touch-type by taping over the letters on the keys and posting a chart above and behind the machine, so he would have to look at the chart to find his next key. Once he could think through his fingers, he found he could take the tape off the keys. He was a touch typist, homegrown.31 Leslyn helped as much as he would let her.
The various writers’ guides said publishers usually took a month or two to make their decisions. Heinlein picked out a few publishing houses that might want to take a chance on the book and submitted it first to the Macmillan Company—a first-rate publishing house in its own right.
Elma Wentz had been doing her own research into the writing business. Around Christmastime 1938, she brought over a book she had just finished reading, Jack Woodford’s new edition of Trial and Error.32 Now that he had gotten his own book off, Heinlein had a little time for it and the other books and magazines that had accumulated. He didn’t really know anything about the fiction business, but he could do what he always did when confronted by a new field of knowledge he wanted to master: research it into submission. Research was his first impulse for nearly everything. He read his way through the Woodford book and found it a blueprint for a writing career.33
Trial and E
rror turned out to be useful mainly because it didn’t try to teach writing, but instead focused on the business end of the writing business—selling your product to editors. Woodford’s most important advice was not about technique or the mechanics of marketing; it was about attitude and how to focus your thinking on the market. The commercial writer, Woodford said, thinks of himself as a manufacturer of product for the current market.34 That was very sane and realistic. Even working in science fiction and fantasy, where a lot of Woodford’s other advice wouldn’t exactly apply, that kind of advice was useful.
18
AND THE NEXT
Robert’s baby sister, Mary Jean, married her high school beau, Andy Lermer, on January 19, 1939, the last to leave her parents’ house. Bam must have been feeling a little at loose ends. Robert may have been experiencing the same: he decided to take some of the art classes offered by the WPA1 and enrolled in one of the life-drawing classes given at Hollywood High, on Highland and Fountain, near Hollywood Boulevard. He found it completely absorbing. “When you draw from the model, you really have to sweat. But it is more fun … . could never understand how the time passed so quickly, nor how I had gotten so tired.”2
The life classes were change-of-pace recreation for him. He found the “pansies, pinkos and instructors who do only complete abstractions” irritating, though he could put up with that. It was the eight-mile drive from Laurel Canyon to Hollywood High, over sometimes icy roads (even in Los Angeles), he could not put up with.3 Drawing could never be more than a leisure-time activity for him.
A lot of his time was still being taken up by political chores and a new interest: Clarence Streit’s “One World” book, Union Now, was starting to catch on, and Heinlein considered himself a “world-stater from way back.”4
But it was not radical politics that drew him any longer: he was becoming absorbed that winter in the research he was doing in semantics. After finishing Ogden and Richards’s survey of the state of things in semantics and epistemology up to about 1929, he had moved on to Alfred Korzybski5 and the monumental Science and Sanity (1933). What he found there, despite a very difficult presentation, was exactly what was needed to bring semantics into the modern era: the fundamentals of a technology of language, which means a technology of how human beings think.6 That was incredibly exciting. People had been talking about sociology as “social engineering” for decades—at least since Herbert Spencer—but that was mostly poetry and wishful thinking. The tools didn’t exist in sociology to make the tools to make the tools for social engineering. Korzybski, Heinlein thought, was building up the necessary tools out of the raw material of mathematical logic: mining gold out of a recent paradigm shift in science.
Alfred Korzybski was in exactly the right time and place to exploit this particular paradigm shift in this way. A Polish aristocrat (he was often referred to as “Count” Korzybski) trained in chemical engineering, Korzybski was wounded three times in the first year of World War I and then sent to America as an expert in artillery. After the war he met and married an American artist, Mira Edgerly, and decided to stay in the United States while he began studying the work in mathematical symbology that had been done recently by Berrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. Running underneath his study was the perpetual question, why did these periodic bloodbaths of wars happen uniquely among humans and not among animals? He came to the conclusion that humans were “time binders”: we plan for the future. Each succeeding generation inherits a legacy of physical and information wealth.
And yet time binding was left out of virtually all of the stories we tell ourselves about what is important about who and what we are, most of which picture us as only “clever animals.” That could not be true, Korzybski reasoned: time binding made humans qualitatively different. The disparity between our mythologies and our realities created what might be called a “sanity gap.”
Korzybski published these ideas in 1921 as Manhood of Humanity: The Science and Art of Human Engineering. His idea of the childhood of humanity and the twentieth century as the transitional period from childhood to adulthood struck many thinkers as exactly on target. A few years later, H. G. Wells would make very compatible remarks in his The World of William Clissold (1926), looking forward to a coming adulthood of mankind—socialist, of course.7
Korzybski continued to develop his ideas, extending them into psychiatry. The old ideas had been set long ago and codified by Aristotle. What was needed was a post-Aristotelian framework of ideas. In 1928 he started to write another book, Time Binding: The General Theory, whose thrust would be the application of scientific method to life problems. When the massive book was ready for publication in 1933, he changed the name to Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. A correct understanding of the symbolization process, which Korzybski labeled “General Semantics,” would give people new ways of thinking, inherently more rational and balanced.
Time binding fascinated Heinlein.8 It seemed to explain so much about how we have continuity across the many dimensions of experience. Ouspensky had talked about this kind of mental continuity distinguishing human consciousness from animal in A New Model of the Universe (sometimes Korzybski reads eerily like a gloss on Ouspensky!), in a way that made it compatible with J. W. Dunne’s serial-time theories.
The way Heinlein talked about General Semantics at the time suggests that he was getting from it something more than understanding, something that is usually characterized as “illumination.” If Heinlein’s experience was typical, this illumination would come about whenever he grasped one of Korzybski’s ideas—sometimes difficult, as Korzybski would go on using a crucial term sometimes for four hundred pages or more without defining it: in most cases, that sensation is an emotion, an aesthetic-erotic-religious flooded-with-light feeling and the sensation of things whirling around in the head as a whole view of things reshuffles itself into new configurations, a new way to look at the world.
Looking into the subject more thoroughly—Heinlein’s first impulse was always to do some research—he found that Korzybski had just founded the Institute of General Semantics near the University of Chicago—and there was a local Los Angeles chapter. The local chapter of the Institute was hosting a lecture/seminar by Korzybski in June of 1939. Both Robert and Leslyn applied for the seminar, though the $25-per-person registration fee would have put a severe crimp in the domestic budget.
Heinlein could see dozens of applications of the theory to his life—to their life. He thought he could use it to communicate better with others and improve his personal relations.9
Leslyn had more specific aims: “making adjustments to my environment—particularly my mother—and in keeping house (& contact in political and educational fields).”10 Leslyn had sailed through Tyranny of Words, but she found The Meaning of Meaning tough going. She started on Science and Sanity and bogged down almost immediately.11 Her graduate degree in philosophy was oriented to psychology, and probably it was not as natural for her to shift back and forth between linear-language thinking and mathematical thinking as it was for Robert. She had to work harder at it.
Practicing the “semantic pause,” Heinlein found, kept him from spiraling into anxiety. He had learned to present a cool and collected front to the world (except for the occasional stammer when he did some public speaking), but it was a conscious effort. Inside he felt he was emotionally unstable, prone to fly off the handle and get excited over things most people took for granted. “I tend to be impetuous, and this has often put me in a bight.”12 General Semantics gave him just the tool he needed to keep a better grip on himself. Just a little pause could give him the edge he needed. He could attend to this business of waiting for word from the publishers with much greater equanimity.
The writers’ guides Heinlein had found at the library said two months was the average wait time on a first novel—and it might be longer. They recommended he wait for two months before making a polite inquiry about the status of the manuscri
pt, and then an increasingly insistent series of queries every couple of weeks.
In January 1939, a new science-fiction pulp had appeared, Startling Stories . At the end of February another showed up on the newsstands: Unknown, a Street & Smith fantasy companion for Astounding Science-Fiction, also edited by John W. Campbell, Jr. Unknown had a unique take on fantasy. Weird Tales had dominated pulp fantasy since its founding in 1922, publishing mainly eerie little tales in the Algernon Blackwood/Lord Dunsany vein (only usually more creepy and less lit’ry). If Unknown’s first issue was any indication, it was going to open up a whole new commercial market for fantasy.
The time was only getting riper. If Heinlein was going to give pulp a try, now was the time. He had a whole raft of anecdotes from his military service that would make stories—including that short-short he had written in 1930. There were also some political ideas:
Citizen + Denizens conflict
Farmer vs City people possibly. Wells type cities + hydroponics.
Farm
and a murder mystery:
Story re murder with Nitrogen. This could and should be worked up.
Would the victim suffer from bends? Would this be the key that would trap the murder[?]
Altogether, he spent nearly a month dithering with these kinds of notes. He began spending a lot of time in the kitchen, pitching ideas to Leslyn and listening to the way she broke them down into stories and beats of stories. He didn’t know why she didn’t write herself,13 except that the process of writing didn’t interest her the way it did him.14 She was good-natured about it, too, but it exasperated her when he kept picking at things she said, “fishing for plot twists and climaxes,” and dinner was late, and he was cranky because he wanted to write but couldn’t.15
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 28