Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  The big rocket launch on June 28 was impressive—awe-inspiring. Heinlein took Stereo Realist pictures of everything that wasn’t absolutely classified—though, unfortunately, the pictures did not come out in processing.

  The nervous tension in the control blockhouse, just two hundred yards from the rocket, was thick enough to cut. “If anything goes wrong,” the observers were cautioned, “fall flat on your faces.”16 The V-2 has a very distinctive silhouette, a squat cylinder, like a pencil stub fifty feet tall with fins at its base. A crane steadied it, at a long angle, a ring around the point. Twenty minutes before the launch, the control blockhouse let off a smoke bomb. Eighteen minutes later, two red star shells alerted all the men in the launch area to take cover. They ran for the blockhouse. Then flame flashed out of the base and smoke billowed up. Heinlein caught his breath and held it.

  She rose slowly and gracefully, straight as an Indian’s back, till she hung some fifty feet in the air suspended on a column of orange-red flame. The roar hit us—the quality of a blow torch but with the massive violence of all the subway trains in Manhattan. It pushed against the chest. 17

  When the rocket was high in the sky, the “sun-bright flame” disappeared, and the blockhouse radio operator announced, “Twenty-five miles up!”

  Heinlein looked around, dazed. The towers were still trembling from the blast of the liftoff: it was unbelievably fast. “This ship had climbed more than twenty-five miles from a standing start in the length of time a man can hold his breath through shock.”18 It disappeared from naked-eye sight at forty miles’ altitude and went on to break the current record at one hundred miles (the report the next day in The El Paso Times said only that it was “over 75 miles”19), followed by radar as the vapor trail twisted weirdly in the clear desert sky above them.

  Lieutenant Colonel Turner, the CO at the White Sands base, voiced an observation that has been made many times since:

  “You know,” he said, “I’ve fired everything from the smallest to the biggest; this is the only sort of shoot that gives you just as much of a kick the last time as the first.”20

  A week later, two days after his thirty-ninth birthday, Heinlein wrote a 1,500-word article, “Journey of Death,” “to justify my status as a member of the press.”21 He found this very difficult to write:

  The trouble is, I know too much that is confidential about rocket progress in this country, which greatly hampers me in writing about it. Where another writer may speculate in an interesting fashion, I don’t dare open my kisser because I know the speculation is perfectly true.22

  This article never sold, even though the clearance officer told him it was “very suitable for publication.”23 Perhaps he had waxed too poetical:

  Jornada del Muerto the Spanish called this remote and menacing stretch of New Mexican desert, in honor of the many who did not quite make it, who died and left their dessicated bodies to the buzzards. It is still the Journey of Death.

  At the White Sands Proving Grounds near Las Cruces Army Ordnance engineers are taking the first steps in another deathly journey in this desert; there they are testing and investigating the great German V-2 rockets that were used to shell London.

  Perhaps parts of it were a little too lugubrious for commercial markets:

  In sight, though still unrealized, is the round-the-world rocket, capable of free flight of unlimited duration, hanging in the sky for weeks, months, or years, ever ready to drop atomic death on any city selected by its masters.

  Do not console yourself that these rockets can protect us. The United States has no monopoly on rocket research … . Other brilliant engineers, speaking other tongues than ours, can place such angels of death in outer space, ready to carry us on that last journey. And no brass hat or scientist anywhere has been willing to state that there is any defensive measure at all against rocket attack. We can search and we can hope—but no defense is in sight.24

  He wrote more directly to John Campbell about the experience: “I will state that it is the most thrilling thing I have ever seen in my life—the Grand Canyon did not give me the boot that this thing does.”25

  Ironically, Leslyn’s more journalistic report on the firings did sell, first on the front page of a local, neighborhood sheet, The Canyon Crier, of July 19, under the headline “Canyonite Only Lady to Witness V-2 Test” and subtitled “Rocket’s Red Glare.” Later in the year, Forrest Ackerman sold it to a French publisher, Gallet, representing himself as Leslyn’s agent—and then told her he was offering it around. That $7.00 sale engendered a certain amount of anxiety : Lurton Blassingame was her agent as well as Robert’s, and he specialized in international sales. Leslyn insisted that Ackerman regularize the relationship by working through Blassingame, to minimize the damage to her business relationship—and Robert’s. Ackerman couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. He sent Blassingame a letter asking for his cut of the agency fee.

  Blassingame was bemused rather than angry. Leslyn apologized:

  You have run into one of the occupational diseases of science-fiction writers—fandom. Forry Ackerman is the best of the lot, but he can be a damned brat at times … . I imagine that his letter to you was impertinent, to say the least. It was necessary for me to refer this very trivial matter to you in order to get it through his head that Bob now has an agent, and that all of our literary business must go through you. Fans have a gay way of expecting professional writers to whip off a little 2000 word story or article, just for the sheer pleasure of seeing their names in print in some fan magazine … .

  Fans are no positive factor at all in the career of a science-fiction writer, but they can have a certain negative or nuisance co-efficient, which has to be watched.26

  They found Ackerman virtually unchanged by the war—perhaps a little more self-involved. Heinlein had reached the conclusion that if he wanted to keep Ackerman’s friendship, he would have to treat Ackerman like a very young person without much life experience.

  I have decided to take him as he is and regard him as a young friend of limited viewpoint, sweet and charming, but not to be considered as one of the adults. By such, I hope to avoid being irritated at his unwavering juvenile attitude and his refusal to take an adult part in this busy and troublesome world. I really am fond of him .27

  In mid-1946, Ackerman was also promoting a fannish charity, the Big Pond Fund, to bring a science-fiction personality, fan or professional, over from England for the World Science Fiction Convention when it started up again in 1947 (the WorldCons had been suspended during the war). Ted Carnell was selected as the first recipient of the Big Pond Fund.

  Carnell had just gotten his new science fiction magazine, New Worlds, in circulation, and this trip would give American fans a chance to look him over. Heinlein and Carnell had already been in correspondence over this proposed trip. Carnell had American royalties he could pick up and so had the ancillary expenses of the trip covered—and Heinlein had been doing as much as he could for the Carnells, sending packages of foods that were still rationed in England. But his own sales from the writing business were down, and he and Leslyn were living on reprint offers. The packages of foodstuffs they could handle—and they would continue to send packages periodically for years. Forced to choose between food packages that would directly help Ted and Irene and Micheal28 and an impersonal donation to a charity, he chose the food packages.29

  Naturally, Heinlein did not want to be forced to explain this to Ackerman—and have it get out in local fandom that he was too poor or too tightfisted to make a charitable contribution. Ackerman’s frequent and increasingly insistent appeals for a donation became more and more irritating, so Robert and Leslyn began to avoid him.

  They had resumed ice-skating lessons when they got back to Los Angeles from Los Alamos. The lessons were probably coincident with a change in Ginny Gerstenfeld’s personal status with them. She was moving from interesting friend to “family member”—a pattern that was somewhat familiar to Leslyn already. Ginny was intereste
d in Robert, even if she wasn’t herself entirely aware that her friendly affection was becoming a crush. Leslyn welcomed Ginny into the family as a matter of course, though she would probably never have the same easygoing, affectionate relationship with Ginny that she had with Vida Jameson.

  Jameson came back to Hollywood in August and moved in again with the Heinleins and became part of the ice-skating crew.30 Between them, Robert and Leslyn had offered to teach her how to write for market—but not “creative writing.” Robert’s position, articulated many times over the years, was that either you had the basic creative stuff, or you didn’t—though “Robert had a notion that anyone could write and sell a story, if they tried.”31 But you could teach the nuts and bolts of mechanics: how to slant a story to a market. In his few comments on this “coaching,” Robert stressed only Leslyn’s role as “story doctor.” Leslyn apparently worked with Jameson about story mechanics. What Robert may have taught her he never mentioned, but the subjects that appear casually in his correspondence suggest he may have coached her on basic prosodic technique—how to achieve your effects; how to “hear the characters talk.”32

  Though normally Heinlein refused all social invitations while writing—and in any case, he had been sick for several weeks—this kind of social life, seamless with the ordinary mechanics of living, he could handle. It was, in fact, a pleasure. Vida Jameson was far and away the best novice they had ever taken under their collective wing—and very easy to have around the house, as well. “We are having a wonderful time together. If it hadn’t been for Ron [Hubbard] going off the deep end we’d never have become so well acquainted with her—and swapping Hubbard’s friendship for hers is clear gain.”33

  Heinlein was ill in July and August, with some sort of kidney ailment—then with a bad reaction to the sulfa drugs used to treat the kidneys—before he was ready to go to work again.

  I’m better now, but I still don’t know just what was the matter with me. Sinusitis, pyelitis, sulfa poisoning, wrenched back, high fever, and dandruff that I know of. I’m not pregnant, but we’ve been supporting five doctors, one GP and four specialists, in luxury.34

  And the work piled up. The Navy wasn’t quite done with him yet: his August 14, 1945, memo continued to work its way up the naval bureaucracy. It was a perfect short abstract to head all the minor projects that involved rocketry and electronics and guided missiles. One year after the memo, Cal Laning wrote to him, warning that the newly created Air Force might preempt the Navy’s priority in space. He suggested Heinlein ghostwrite an article for the slicks, to go out under Laning’s name: “Why Navy Crews Should Man Our Space Ships.” The subject was interesting and important, but Heinlein was uneasy about ghostwriting; it was not a legitimate practice for a professional writer, he felt. He countered with a proposal for an “as told to” byline, “the standard arrangement of reputable ghosts.”35

  But Laning feared that his own name—which was what the Navy people would be looking at—would be ignored with a double byline; he would look like a “front” rather than a credible advocate.

  Naval Operations took the prospect seriously enough to bring up Heinlein’s memo and the Moon rocket proposal at a cabinet meeting. President Truman asked whether such a rocket could be launched from the deck of a ship. The current plans based on scaling up the V-2 required land-based launching facilities. The Navy’s project was killed, and space became the Air Force’s baby.36

  Two weeks later, the newly formed U.S. Air Force announced it would put a guided missile on the Moon in eighteen months. “Just who is writing science fiction these days?” Willy Ley complained. “The placing of a rocket on the moon is, of course, the science part of it, the 18 months is Fiction.”37

  Heinlein picked up his Rhysling story notes again in August. Perhaps the work with Vida Jameson and Leslyn on story mechanics helped him reframe the story into a contrast between a formal eulogy that cleaned up the man’s life story and the actual, unsavory details of his life. He drafted the story in one sitting, skipping over the places he planned to put in samples of Rhysling’s verse. It turned out a powerful and moving story.

  Over the next ten days he wrote and rewrote and polished the verse. Some of it was intentionally doggerel, but some of it had very memorable and affecting language. Rhysling’s songs of the spaceways were supposed to be international, so he translated some of the verses into French and German—and even Esperanto.38 There was something about the title, though, that nagged at him:

  I had a vague feeling in the back of my mind that it was not original with me; I thought that I might have seen it in a story of Hank [Kuttner]’s, “Hollywood on the Moon”—but I did not know that it had ever been used as a song title.39

  The story needed only a couple hundred words cut to tighten it up to just the right length. He sent it to his agent on September 27 with instructions to market it to the slicks before trying any of the pulps (even though his outline notecards noted it was originally to have been his “Swan Song for Astounding”40). Just then, Blassingame was able to report that Alice Dalgliesh, the juvenile editor at Scribner’s (“A quiet, pleasant person in her fifties”41), had liked Young Atomic Engineers—their first solid nibble for the book. He had given her a copy of the discussion of possible sequels. She was coming soon to Los Angeles, and the Heinleins might meet her in person.

  “Green Hills of Earth” sold to The Saturday Evening Post on September 30, 1946. Heinlein’s long dry spell had broken.

  And it means a lot to me; it marks, I hope, the point of inflexion in a long, hard struggle to reconvert to peacetime activity. It has not been easy. One or both of us have been sick all the time; when I was free to write, I wrote frantically, under disturbed conditions and not very well. I’ve kept my nose to the grindstone with damn few rewards for the effort. This sale to the Saturday Evening Post really gives me a lift. (First thing I ever submitted to them, by the way—I feel good about it.)42

  At about the same time, his “Back of the Moon” was picked up by Elks Magazine for the January 1947 issue—half of the article anyway; the editors didn’t want the Moon colony stuff, since it was already old hat even to their readership.43

  Heinlein tried at first to keep the “Green Hills” sale under wraps, not wanting to tempt fate until he had the check in hand—or the bank had it, at any rate—and the Post was committed to the story. He had a hard time believing it even after he had cashed the check and the story was scheduled.44 A sale to the Post of all the slick magazines, was most ironic: it was a bastion of the bourgeois, and he took some gentle ribbing about that from his friends once he let the word out.

  On the whole, his colleagues were pleased with his good fortune. Isaac Asimov was personally depressed because he was having trouble recapturing his own markets, but he saw that it was a net gain for the field as a whole. 45 Even the respected astronomer Robert S. Richardson (also a writer of science articles and fiction for Astounding), who turned out to have been a classmate of Leslyn’s, heard about the sale and congratulated him, delicately suggesting they might get together to talk about projects.46

  Two weeks after the sale was made, Vida Jameson was in bed with a cold, and Heinlein dug out some of his old Weird Tales pulps so she could read his favorite Northwest Smith stories by C. L. Moore. In the middle of reading, she sat up in bed, startled: she had discovered the title of Heinlein’s Post story in a passage in “Shambleau” where Northwest Smith is humming “The Green Hills of Earth” to himself.47

  Heinlein immediately apologized to Catherine Kuttner for unconsciously appropriating her intellectual property and asked for a formal release to use the song title.

  The Kuttners, too, were delighted to learn about the sale to the Post and happy to make the release. They wrote him gloating congratulations.

  Perhaps the best thing about the sale, from our viewpoint, is that you haven’t been standing still during the war years; you didn’t go right back to where you were in 1941, but went on to something where you could use
more of your potentialities. We are very pleased indeed, and can’t wait to boast to John [Campbell—Astounding], Leo [Marguiles—the Standard pulp chain], Mort [Weisinger—Thrilling Wonder Stories], et al.48

  By that time he had written and sold a second story for the Post.49 “Space Jockey” was a story about a space pilot whose job took him away from home, to his wife’s distress. It was the kind of perennial human story that might have featured a long-distance trucker or a railway engineer—the kind of story most familiar to readers of the Post—and this allowed Heinlein to portray the inexpressibly exotic professions of the new frontier in space in very comfortable human terms. This exactly fit into the propaganda purposes he had started writing with more than a year ago. With “Space Jockey,” he had found the Post’s range and might be able to make sale after sale there.

  The “Green Hills” sale to the Post, though, had personal fallout: John Campbell had put a blurb about the story in Astounding when Heinlein started talking about writing it, back in the summer. Campbell should not have done that, just on the don’t-count-your-chickens-before-they-hatch theory, and he especially ought not to have done that because Heinlein had told him very explicitly that he wouldn’t sell to Street & Smith until they changed their rights-purchase policy. Apparently Campbell didn’t think Heinlein was serious about that: