It is too late to stop now. It’s like trying to catch up with Man o’ War on foot, to withdraw him from the race after he’s reached the quarter-post! Joking aside, Bob’s method of writing is to start very promptly once the decision to do a certain job is made, and he writes seven days a week until finished—a full-length book in about three weeks. It is disastrous for him to stop in the middle of a piece of work—the writing time already consumed and the waiting to start a new job after stopping are a total loss financially—and it subjects him to considerable nervous shock. He has a one-track mind—once he’s on a given track … . Consequently, you’ve got to stop him before he starts. He’ll gentle down and take the next lane over—and go whoosh down that track.85
The book was done within the month—even before Winston, too, rejected Young Atomic Engineers (on April 19). But the “Why Buy a Stone Ax?” article was picked up for the July 1946 issue of Facts magazine.86
The other articles were not faring so well. Blassingame returned the manuscript for “America’s Maginot Line” after it was rejected by Salute magazine, The American Mercury, Infantry Journal, the United States Naval Institute Proceedings, and The Christian Science Monitor. “Men in the Moon” received clearance from the Navy, and Collier’s was interested in it—or at least part of it.
Heinlein thought he might improve the chances of How to Be a Politician with a foreword by some highly respectable political figure, and he wrote to two men whose prestige put them above partisan politics, Henry Stimson (1867–1950), President Roosevelt’s Secretary of War, and Justice Owen J. Roberts (1875–1955), a Philadelphia lawyer and the elder statesman who had conducted the court of inquiry in 1942 that sent Admiral Kimmel to a General Court Martial over the Pearl Harbor attack. Neither of them was interested in doing an introduction for his book. “I found it amusing,” Justice Roberts wrote to Heinlein’s agent, “but cannot say much for its literary quality.” 87 Heinlein’s third choice was Bernard Baruch, who was busy at the time fronting the “Baruch proposals” for internationalizing atomic weapons and research to the United Nations. The book began circulating, though with disappointing results. An unnamed editor at William Morrow wrote Blassingame that it was “a book that would be good for people to read but, from past experience, I don’t think many will.”88
Since the idea of his running for Congress had quietly been dropped, it was unlikely that Heinlein would do anything more political this year than “campaign for candidates for Congress who seem to understand the meaning of atomics and One World.”89 There were no Democratic candidates for president who fell into that classification. He granted President Truman’s essential goodness but found the lack of practical options frustrating: “Poor Mr. Truman,” he said, “is a very good man and tries hard but he is not up to it.”90 The matter of international cooperation on control of atomic weaponry was such an overridingly important issue that Heinlein forced himself to wrap his mind around an impossibility: his own liberalism might force him to change parties.
If things shape up the way I expect them to, next year I will reregister Republican and start plugging for Stassen. I think that Roby [Wentz] and Cleve [Cartmill] will probably join me in the endeavor. Forty-four instructed convention votes, won early in the campaign, might start a landslide.
Yours for a planetary government!91
Some of the attraction wore off, though, as the presidential campaign ramped up: Harold Stassen came to California to stump for a reactionary senator who had just voted against a loan to Britain “and every other progressive measure.”92
Heinlein was keeping a close watch on the world political situation. The British loan was critical, he thought, if only because it would allow them to import more food. Food was a problem everywhere in the world—and one that could easily become a flash point. Whenever possible, he sent packages of sugar and chocolate and canned hams and this and that to Ted Carnell, since American rationing was winding down. Rationing of some items had been discontinued months before. In the United States, items like butter and sugar—and tires—were hard to find, but they were no longer officially controlled substances. The rest of the world, Britain included, was much worse off: “We have wired our representatives that we want drastic rationing resumed,” Heinlein wrote Ted Carnell in June 1946:
and any other measures necessary to squeeze every possible calorie out of this country and into China, German, Italy, India, etc.—not on Britain’s account; if I read the news correctly you folks are not hungry even though your diet is perhaps not very interesting. I fear the aftermath of the present world food crisis. We can throw our victory away in the next twelve months, if we have not done so already.93
(Carnell’s toddler, the Heinleins’ godson, Michael, got most of the candy, but Carnell wrote back his personal thanks—it had been seven years, from 1939, since he had tasted chocolate!94)
In the meantime, Heinlein kept plugging away. “My agent is getting a little vexed with me,” Heinlein wrote to John Arwine, “as he has been opening up a market for me for science-fiction slick”:
He is demanding copy of that sort and I am about to satisfy the demand, a few shorts first, and then a serial or two. It is a fair speculation; the market is there, created by the war—and the stuff that does not sell can be peddled to my established market in pulp.
I can’t get interested in writing which is not, to my mind, socially useful. By continuing to do the sort of speculative (or “Science”) fiction I used to do, but slanted for slick, I can satisfy my itch to preach and propagandize, reach a bigger audience and make some dinero.
(I should have been a preacher. Had I been able to retain the puritanical, Bible-Belt faith in which I was reared, I would have been. As it is, I am that uncomfortable and ill-adjusted animal, the preacher with no church, a windmill tilter—a persona you can recognize!)95
He recycled some of his back file of notes for a Future History story and wrote “Free Men” as a fiction complement for his “How to Be a Survivor” article. Blassingame commented that the scale of the story dwarfed the characters; it read like a French Resistance story and would be very hard to sell in this market.96
Jack Parsons’s April business deal with Hubbard had fallen through in an embarrassing way: by May 10, Parsons was suing Hubbard and Betty Northrup to recover some of the boats they had bought, and Heinlein heard that Ron and Betty were heading for New York. In the meantime, the Heinleins had taken in another of Hubbard’s discarded ex-girlfriends—Vida Jameson.97
Vida was the daughter of Malcolm Jameson, a naval officer and science-fiction writer who had died of cancer in 1944. She told Robert and Leslyn Heinlein she had taken up with L. Ron Hubbard in 1945, during the time he was shuttling between D.C. and New York and Philadelphia, and had been Hubbard’s date for a dinner party Heinlein had thrown for him and other visiting science fiction firemen.
She received her discharge from the WACC in California and Ron wrote to her and suggested that she come down and be bookkeeper and business manager for [Parsons’s business venture] Madcap Enterprises. After a couple of months in a welter of unpaid bills, unanswered letters, and confused finances which characterized the four or five companies which Jack, Sarah, and Ron had floated she was pretty thoroughly browned off, but, amazingly enough, had been able to restore a semblance of order to some of the enterprises and had, at the same time, gained some weight, got over the worst of the discharge jitters, and improved her health. Sunshine, fresh air, and good cooking (her own!).98
Vida Jameson’s life had fallen apart when her father died, and again when Ron and Sara/Betty ran away together in April 1946. Robert and Leslyn liked her—a practical-minded liberal whom Leslyn called “practically a twin sister.” 99 They rescued her from “Madcap Enterprises,” to live with them in Hollywood. She was one of the civilized people who fit into their domestic arrangements without a hitch.
After a week or so, Vida decided to return to New York to visit her mother. Robert and Leslyn had hopes of persuadi
ng her to come back in the fall and stay with them for a longer period. The re-formed Mañana Literary Society unanimously agreed. “She leaves a large hole in our pleasantly wacky lodge.”100 Robert and Leslyn put her on an airplane and took Henry Sang and Grace Dugan to Arizona for an impromptu wedding (the Heinleins were best man and matron of honor) and working vacation, combining pleasure with pleasure.
I got spiffed on champagne and attended a local Sabbat at the boiling mud pits below sea level in Imperial Valley … . The Sabbat was a great success and I made a speech, but it is the last time I ever try to dance every dance at one of those affairs. We lolled in the sun at Palm Springs thereafter and admired the snow on the top of San Jac and the undressed sunburned women and gradually oozed back home.101
This vacation really felt like a vacation. “I do believe,” Heinlein told John Campbell, “that at last I have found out that the war is over.”102 He was ready to dive back into a pile of manuscripts—short stories—before Willy and Olga Ley arrived in July or August. But there would be a spot of journalism first, when they went to the V-2 firing in June—if they could get tires, which were no longer rationed, but not readily available (unless you were willing, as Heinlein was not, to go to the black market). Henry Sang offered them his car, which had four new tires—or they might take a bus, if they could get authorization or press credentials.
They had worked hard for months, and their life together was straightening out. Leslyn wrote an acrostic poem for him signed with an acrostic, her initials, L.M.H., making “Little Miss Hitter-Skitter”:
Rarely seen is such a soul,
Only every now and then,
Beautiful and sweet to know.
Everyone has such a goal,
Reached by only favored men—
Thus it is I love you so.
Heart so big and full of care,
Every thing’s within your scope.
I, and others, find our hope,
Not afraid, if you are there.
Large of purpose, oh my Bear,
Ever toward the light you grope,
If it fails, you can still cope,
Never leave me, is my prayer.
L.M.H.103
28
WRITING FACTORY
One day early in June 1946, Leslyn answered the doorbell and was startled to see Heinlein’s old NAES coworker Virginia—Ginny—Gerstenfeld on their stoop, suitcase in hand. She had come directly from the train station.
The Heinleins had known she was on her way, but Ginny had talked in her letters about making her way slowly across the country, seeing the sights. They hadn’t expected to see her until the fall, when perhaps she would enroll in UCLA. Leslyn invited her in: “[W]hen someone just came 3,000 miles to pay you a surprise call you can’t just say ‘Go ’way. I’m busy.’”1
Gerstenfeld had been demobilized in March and found herself at loose ends. She had broken off her engagement the previous winter,2 and her mother was determinedly throwing her at family friends, trying to get her married off. Her own friends, she said, had all become bridge-playing housewives with no conversation. There just was nothing left for her in New York.3 She wanted to travel overseas, since she had never seen anything but the East Coast of the United States, but could not get a booking.4
Then she heard about the GI Bill. It would pay for books and tuition if she went back to school. Gerstenfeld decided she would work toward a graduate degree in her specialization, chemistry, someplace on the other side of the country, since that would get her out of New York and away from the East Coast. “I had planned to go to Berkeley when a letter from Robert changed my mind, and I matriculated at U.C.L.A.”5
UCLA, she found, had an accelerated program for veterans, straight to doctorate, bypassing the master’s degree. If she took the maximum course load, plus summer sessions, she could get the degree before the GI benefits ran out—but she would have to jump to get into this year’s summer session. She booked a train straight through to Los Angeles.
Gerstenfeld had not planned to stay with the Heinleins, though she was invited in, at least overnight: they were mercifully free of houseguests at the moment, though all the work spaces were occupied, and they had a full calendar.
Leslyn had been coaching another budding writer6 while Robert churned out pay copy. He was working up story notes for “The Horse That Could Not Fly” (later published as “Jerry Was a Man”) and for “The Green Hills of Earth.” Even turning down most invitations left them frantically busy, but Robert’s mother and sister had recently returned from a family visit in the Midwest. Robert and Leslyn had trekked out with the family that very day to visit his father in the veterans’ hospital (never a very satisfying prospect: sometimes he didn’t even recognize them). And the arrangements for the trip to White Sands were surprisingly complicated.
Gerstenfeld got herself registered for the summer session that would be starting in two weeks and found a boardinghouse close to the campus. She did not have much opportunity to see the Heinleins socially, but she invited them to a dance session at the local ice-skating rink in Westwood. They had never had a chance to see her skate in Philadelphia, since her rink was only open in the winter, and in the winter of 1944–1945 all the Heinleins’ spare time was taken up with the kamikaze think tank and the extra work for Admiral King. Now they were enthralled by it.7 Robert, in particular, was englamored. It put an entirely new light on Ginny: she was no longer a pretty, athletic, girl—woman—with a slight adult-acne problem;8 on skates she became something from the half-world. When he got home he wrote his impressions in a poem:
“Dance Session”
The squeegeed ice in the great dim hall
Was clean and blue and fit for the ball;
So the music sounded and the lights glared out
And the cruel steel blades went swirling about
In flight fantastic and fancy free,
In crisp, clean spins, with gusty glee—
Etching the ice with outré art,
While the cruel bright blades sliced sharp in my heart.
Out of the leaping, rushing spate
A voice sang out for three-lobed eight:
The ice fauns paired with their elfin sprites
To start their intricate woven rites
In complex, structured demonstration
They captured Art in one equation;
In sweet incredible enthymeme
She proved the logic of cold Moon beam.
Out from the pattern of Killian and Blues
Emerged the sprite whom the Ice Gods choose
To show us weary earth-bound creatures
The cool, sweet lines of Beauty’s features.
Rosy her long limbs, snow white were her gants,
Timeblue was her jerkin, and merry her glance—
Hoyden her hair bow, among the gallants.
Ice fairy Virginia, First in the Dance!
(Oh, great was the shock of the sudden stop
When the music ceased and the pattern broke
And fairyland melted in cigarette smoke
In the warm dull light of a coffee shop!)
RAH—June 46 9
A couple of elderly professors had been there at the same time, learning to dance. If they could learn, Robert and Leslyn thought they certainly could. 10 Gerstenfeld set them up with beginner’s lessons.
They wouldn’t buy good equipment—quality skates were very expensive—and that worked against rapid progress, but their biggest limitation was that they were both afraid of falling on the ice. Robert had lingering problems from his wartime surgeries, which he would not talk about. Leslyn was so terrified that she could not force herself to pick up the speed necessary for some of the figures.
After their lessons and her own workout, Gerstenfeld would come home with them, usually on Saturday afternoons, and coach them privately. She spread a lot of pillows around on the floor and showed them how to take a fall. 11
That didn’t much appeal to either of them
, but they both continued with the lessons. Robert found the mechanics of skating fascinating: they forced him out of certain mental ruts he wasn’t aware he was in.
Most of the turns, spins, etc., depend on conservation of angular momentum. I found it almost impossible, at first, to understand the descriptions of the turns and had no luck doing them, until I did analyze them in terms of physics. Then it became fairly simple—only “fairly,” as the precision juggling required still calls for muscular co-ordination which I am still acquiring. Calculating the path of a projectile is not the same thing as being the projectile—and some of the dances, the Fourteen-Step for example, are done at forty miles an hour. 12
The lessons were interrupted in late June for Robert and Leslyn’s first trip to White Sands, to see V-2 shot number 6. Cal Laning was coming to White Sands with some admirals to evaluate this shot, and hoped to be able to find time to get together with them. They drove across the great Southwest desert, from California through Arizona, through half of New Mexico to Las Cruces in the south. This time they planned to see the Trinity site—and visit Jack Williamson at his ranch near Pep, New Mexico, not far from Portales. They would go to Santa Fe over the holidays, then home by way of Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon.
Heinlein wrote to Ginny Gerstenfeld while they were gone, a handwritten letter full of local color about White Sands, addressed “Dear Ice Sprite” and signed off “Our love.”13 Her reply the next day is equally chatty, and she refers to having a date with Cleve Cartmill, 14 who had divorced his first wife, Jeanne, before the end of the war.15
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 50