Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  Campbell was equally disturbed about the conflict and wrote acknowledging that their reactions were understandable, given the way he had framed the issues.

  The greatest disturbance caused by your two letters last time was a very genuine fear that I might have busted up a friendship that meant a great deal more to us than any single friendship should, perhaps, for our own emotional safety. Those who can like us and whom we can like in an equally wholehearted manner are few—and the more important for that … . Your statements were accurate and called for; the degree of bitterness in their manner of expression was understandable and, under the circumstances, equally called for.21

  Campbell came as close as he ever would to explaining himself in a selfaware way:

  Not all my flat-footed opinions are intended as such. That I sometimes pull some bad ones that I do intend as serious judgments is undoubtedly true; everybody does or we’d be prophets. I try not to act on opinions I’m unsure of; I’ll willing to be corrected. And—I have a tendency to pull flatfooted opinions when someone throws one at me that I feel is too flatfooted … .

  I think my explanation … will make it clear what I’ve been doing. I’m writing the guff to you primarily because I want adequate answers to arguments I’ve met and tried to answer. Telling a guy with an ugly rumor not to spread it is like telling the water to wait here a while till you get back and build a dam. Make the rumor look silly and he won’t take the trouble to pass it on … .

  I am not fighting you or the Navy; I’m doing my damndest to kill some of the utterly screwy ideas I do meet. And I’m sending along some of them for more ammunition.22

  Robert wrote back, expressing his relief.

  Anyhow, let me begin by saying that I read your letter with a feeling of profound relief—relief that you weren’t sore at me, or, if you had been, you had inhibited it by the time you wrote your last letter … . This whole interchange of letters has been of great benefit to me. Specifically, notwithstanding the fact that the stages of the sequence were painful, the sum total effect has been to buck up my morale immeasurably, and to achieve in me a relaxed, comparatively calm, attitude, which might have taken months to achieve if it had not been for your letters.23

  In the middle of this exchange, Heinlein got the break he had been looking for: his old friend from his Navy days Buddy Scoles, now a lieutenant commander and in charge of the Aeronautical Materials Laboratory at the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia, wrote, asking if he would do an article for Astounding to lay out the range of the practical problems his laboratories at the Naval Aircraft Factory were facing. At the end of his letter, almost casually, he added:

  Incidentally, how would you like to go back to active duty and go to work here in the Factory? I could assure you a most interesting job with not too much to do, if you think your health could stand the God-Awful climate here in Philadelphia.24

  That fit perfectly with Heinlein’s plan: he needed someone to request his services, and this was very nearly ideal. He dashed off a postcard agreeing enthusiastically and scheduled a long telephone call to make arrangements. Scoles flew to D.C., and Heinlein wrote to Campbell, telling him about it—and giving credit where due: this job was directly attributable to the stories of his John had published.

  It might be only a matter of days before his orders came through. He opened up further to Campbell:

  I haven’t anything which could properly be termed a religion. My thoughts on religious subjects are matters of intellectual rather than emotional conviction. The nearest thing to a religious feeling I have, and, I believe, strong enough to justify calling it religious feeling, has to do with the United States of America. It is not a reasoned evaluation but an overpowering emotion. The land itself as well as the people, its culture in the broadest most vulgar sense, its history and its customs … I have no God. The only thing which always inspires in me a feeling of something much bigger and more important than myself, which calls up in me a yearning for self-sacrifice, is this country of ours. I know it is not logical—I presume that a mature man’s attachments should be for a set of principles rather than for a particular group or a certain stretch of soil. But I don’t feel that way … Every rolling word of the Constitution, and the bright, sharp, brave phrases of the bill of rights—they get me where I live. Our own music, whether it’s Yankee Doodle, or the Missouri Waltz, or our own bugle calls—it gets me.25

  Now that they knew where they might be going, Leslyn settled on the kind of defense work she wanted to get into. She wanted a factory job—

  possibly even one of these jobs they use twelve-year-old boys and midgets for … I’m stronger and in better health than a 12-year old (thank God I don’t have to go through the agonies of adolescence again) or a midget, and I’ve a quicker ability to learn than most. And I’m no bigger than most.26

  At the Naval Aircraft Factory, she decided, she would apply for constrictedspace riveting in the cramped places that can only be reached from inside an airframe.27 She then came down with what looked like an attack of food poisoning that lingered on worrisomely for days. But it was not food poisoning: it was gallstones. Her doctor said she might travel, but there was risk of another attack at any time. Leslyn preferred to take the risk. “Knowing her temperament and evaluations, I concur,” Robert wrote the Campbells.28

  Scoles assured them that the way was cleared at the Naval Aircraft Factory, even including housing. Their lives were swept and garnished, ready to leave Los Angeles for Philadelphia, when Scoles reported a catch: no orders could be issued until Heinlein was cleared with the Discipline Section. Scoles suggested Heinlein call a Captain Stewart in D.C. to find out what was going on.

  Captain Stewart had never heard of Lt. Robert Heinlein—had never heard of Lt. Cdr. Scoles—but would look up his records. A few days later, he called back: Heinlein’s records had an admonition regarding lack of good judgment dating from 1934—which made no sense at all. He was sick with tuberculosis for most of 1934. But in any case, Stewart could not possibly recommend him for duty.29

  This could take months to resolve by mail and phone. He would have to present himself in person to various personnel offices in Washington, D.C., and make an intolerable nuisance of himself until they gave him what he wanted, just to be rid of him. He arranged with Hank and Kat Kuttner to rent the house (since Bill Corson, it turned out, was going into the Army). He and Leslyn packed up the car and left for D.C. the next day, planning to stay with Robert’s childhood pal Don Johnstone in Arlington. He dropped Scoles an explanatory note from Yuma, Arizona.

  They powered through, making the trip from Hollywood to Washington, D.C., in three rainy days. They paid a quick, overnight visit to Buddy Scoles in Philadelphia, where Scoles told him part of his job would be recruitment in many departments; Heinlein suggested, off the top of his head, that L. Sprague de Camp had a background in mechanical engineering and might be a good candidate for the kind of materials testing and design work Scoles had in mind. Then they continued traveling north to take up semipermanent residence with the Campbells at their new home in Westfield, New Jersey, around the middle of February. This kept them within striking distance of Philadelphia or D.C. to the south. They had been on the road for more than two weeks, and Leslyn’s gallbladder trouble had come back. She needed an operation to have the gallbladder removed.30

  The trip had been unusually expensive, and their cash reserves were exhausted. Suddenly, their financial crisis had become acute. Heinlein tried to clear his mind and settle down to write a novella for Astounding. Campbell had been after him to do something with uncertainty in the subatomic field driving scientists insane, so presumably that story would be salable. For his protagonist, he remembered a Popular Mechanics article he had read more than twenty years ago, about an engineer afflicted with the degenerative muscular disease myasthenia gravis. He had set up a system of powermultiplying gadgets to manipulate things he was too weak to handle with his own muscles. The image of a fat man floating in the air
might have come from H. G. Wells’s short story “The Truth About Pyecraft,” since Pyecraft goes on to become a ballroom dancer; Heinlein’s character Waldo (named after a suburb in Kansas City31) goes on to become a “ballet-tap” dancer.

  But Heinlein was also already at work for Scoles. His first recommendation, L. Sprague de Camp, had applied for a commission in the Naval Reserve (but was sick with a case of adult whooping cough that kept him weak and underweight).32 Heinlein set up a meeting in John Arwine’s New York apartment with de Camp, Scoles, Campbell, and himself. 33 De Camp was willing; Scoles would issue a letter requesting his services as soon as his commission came through. Campbell would stay with Astounding and do what he could on the side to whip up interest in Scoles’s recruitment program.

  Heinlein also wanted Isaac Asimov for defense work. Even before he and Leslyn had left California in January he told Campbell: “By the way, talk to that young idiot Asimov—he wants to go fight. M.S.’s in physical chemistry aren’t cannon fodder.”34 On March 2, Heinlein met Asimov for the first time, accidentally, in John Campbell’s office, when Asimov came over to pick up the painting Hubert Rogers had done for his story “Nightfall.”35 Asimov’s skills as a laboratory chemist would surely be of some use to the Materials Laboratory.

  A week later, Campbell invited Asimov to his home in Westfield, New Jersey, where Heinlein got him drunk for the first time in his life with a Cuba Libre and showed some slides of his nude photography—in this case, a recent session with Catherine Crook de Camp. Asimov tried to act like a man of the world under this assault of alien values—and apparently “passed inspection.”36 At the end of March, Scoles sent Asimov a job offer at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

  Heinlein’s first recruitment efforts for Scoles were a success—fortunate, since neither pushing nor pulling seemed likely to get him recalled to active duty. The holdup with the Naval Discipline Section turned out to be something that almost could not be coped with: an officer in the Discipline Section had a personal “down” on him (never explained in the correspondence where it was mentioned) and would not be budged. Heinlein’s application, and all his papers, came to the Discipline Section and stalled—the paperwork was even “lost.” Heinlein and Buddy Scoles started the process over again, but they knew it was probably futile. In the back channels they tried to find out why the way was blocked. It wasn’t completely hopeless: worst coming to worst, Scoles had authority to hire him as a civilian engineer—and Heinlein had a line on a job for the State Department, as well.

  In any event, at the moment Heinlein was chained to the typewriter by other circumstances, and he could use the time to write his way out of debt. The writing on the “Waldo” novella had gone haltingly, but he had to come up with a second novella, or a serial. “It seems I can write, war or no war,” he told Cal Laning (who had survived the attack on Pearl Harbor and reestablished contact in February 1942),

  but my writing is not as good and it is a tremendous chore—it seems so damned futile and silly to be punching a typewriter while the rest of you are taking the brunt. God knows I’m no hero, but it is distressing to sit around in this emasculated condition when there is work to be done.37

  Leslyn’s operation yielded “eight perfectly matched gall stones”38—and a fit of depression that put her at least momentarily into the black and alien frame of mind that was so disturbing to Robert. “She told me afterwards,” Heinlein told Doña Campbell a decade later, “that she had decided that I was trying to poison her. She admitted this to me during one of her mellow moments.”39

  As his serial “Beyond This Horizon” began appearing in Astounding in April 1942, Heinlein put together an offbeat story with paranoiac elements, taking the sense of the illusion of the world’s appearance he had exploited in “They” to another level, combined with the brotherhood of evil he had whipped up for “Lost Legacy” and the haunting image that concludes Cabell’s Figures of Earth, of the real world being only a reflection in a window that, opened, revealed only nothingness. He called it “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.” Hoag’s “unpleasant profession” was art critic. Creepy and shuddery—but in its oppressive sense of a frail human couple caught up in the workings of vast and unseen figures perfectly capturing the mood in the early days of World War II. Campbell bought it and scheduled it for the October issue of Unknown Worlds, to be published under the byline John Riverside, following “Waldo” by Anson MacDonald in the August issue. “Unpleasant Profession” would be, with the exception of two reviews of Willy Ley books as they came out, the last of Heinlein’s writing to appear until after the war ended. But Heinlein’s name had already disappeared from Astounding and Unknown Worlds after the October 1941 issue: all of his last prewar work was published under pseudonyms (both “Goldfish Bowl” in March 1942 and “Beyond This Horizon” in April and May 1942 appeared as by Anson MacDonald).

  The Heinleins had been very comfortable with the Campbells. The Campbells’ daughter, P.D., (whom they referred to as their godchild, even if it was not a formal arrangement) was a delight.

  She started making eyes at Bob the first day he arrived, and has been working on him ever since. She’s been flirting with Leslyn very effectively, too, and has ’em both fetching and carrying for her. She won’t talk—so far has seen no need for it, as far as I can make out. She can point and roll her eyes with marvelous efficiency.

  But the result of the attention has been wonderful to behold. She likes the boys. Bob is hers, her exclusive slave and attendant. The other night he and Leslyn curled up in the same chair, and hey, presto! there was Peeds tugging at Leslyn’s hand and making annoyed sounds. Leslyn let her lead her away, and Peeds deposited her on the couch, and went over and climbed in Bob’s lap herself. So Doña came over and sat in my lap. Peeds was over in about 15 seconds, pulling at Doña’s hand, and presently having deposited Doña safely, came back to me herself.40

  John Arwine had been turned down for active duty and had applied and been accepted in the Coast Guard. His apartment was vacant, so the Heinleins moved into Manhattan in April, though they continued to receive mail in New Jersey. They could entertain in New York, and received visits by the Leys and Hubert Rogers, among others. Sprague de Camp took them to an Authors’ Club dinner where they “met Fletcher Pratt, Pendray, Octavus Roy Cohen, Will Cuppy … half of Ellery Queen, and several others.”41 They also entertained the local fans at dinner on at least one occasion.

  Heinlein extended his recruitment efforts to idea-work from his colleagues, and had some success with both Campbell and Will F. Jenkins, who wrote under the pseudonym of Murray Leinster. He asked them to write up their thoughts and forwarded the written memoranda to Buddy Scoles.

  Life did, annoyingly, go on. The Heinleins received word from Henry Kuttner that he and Catherine had had to move out of the house on Lookout Mountain—Catherine was pregnant and had fallen, requiring an operation that left her with stitches in her neck and the prospect of being immobilized for the entirety of her pregnancy. Although it is not mentioned in the letter, the Kuttners must have told the Heinleins their house had acquired a ghost or two.42 Henry Kuttner had to take an apartment downtown, closer to the hospital. There was almost nothing the Heinleins could do from three thousand miles away, except wish them well. They put their house in the hands of a real-estate agent, to find a tenant.

  Heinlein’s series of appeals wasn’t going anywhere—and might not, ever. He applied again for an active duty assignment43—on the very day that his old CO, Captain E. J. King, was appointed by President Roosevelt to assume the combined offices of Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, and Chief of Naval Operations (March 20, 1942).

  As I heard it, the Selection Board offered the new President, in office one month, a list of five names. Roosevelt is reputed to have torn up the list and reached down 32 numbers and named the “boy captain” (40 yrs old) that he had known and liked years earlier (1918) when FDR was AsstSec-Nav in WWI.44

  By the end of April 1942, Heinl
ein and Scoles’s back-channel inquiries finally yielded some information about the Discipline Section block: it was actually related to the admonition Heinlein had received from the Secretary of the Navy in 1935, when he and Leslyn had written a sarcastic letter to the editor of their local progressive paper, the Hollywood Citizen-News. Someone in the chain of command had decided this meant Heinlein was a communist sympathizer who ought to be kept out of contact with servicemen. He might gnash his teeth forever; the Navy would not recall him to active duty. Robert and Leslyn had to start thinking about more permanent living arrangements.

  Scoles put their backup plan into motion: if Heinlein was taken on as a civilian engineer for the Naval Aircraft Factory, he could apply again after receiving fitness reports that would strengthen any new application. On May 2, 1942, Heinlein received an appointment to the Navy Yard as “Assistant Mechanical Engineer, P-2, in the Engineering Division, Naval Aircraft Factory, Navy Yard, Philadelphia, Pa” with a six-month trial period and indefinite extension thereafter.45 Within two days they had found a small apartment in Lansdowne46—far enough away from the overchlorinated, unfiltered Philadelphia municipal water supply to have good drinking water; close enough to have a bearable commute.