Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

Leslyn (Heinlein) Mocabee, letter to Fred Pohl, 06/09/53; the “How to Spot a Commie” title cited by Robert James, Ph.D., in “Regarding Leslyn,” The Heinlein Journal, No. 9 (July 2001), on page 21, was crossed out in Leslyn’s holographic letter and replaced with “Communists are Religious Fanatics.”

  A page-by-page search through the unindexed Rob Wagner’s Script at the Beverly Hills Public Library’s periodicals holding room from the January 1935 issue through March 1937 (the magazine also did not have a table of contents for each issue) did not turn up the article under either title or any possible nonpseudonymous byline.

  RAH, letter to Poul Anderson, 09/25/61.

  RAH, letter to Robert Bloch, 03/18/49. In this passage, Heinlein is speaking about the period of his EPIC political activities; but these sentiments he maintained and expressed in very similar language for many decades. The consistency of Heinlein’s political positions over a very long period creates a problem in interpreting the man, as many of his 1930s-liberal positions came to be regarded by contemporaries of later decades as reactionary (even though he maintained the same philosophical and political matrix characterized by Isaac Asimov viewing Heinlein in the years of World War II—only five years after our period in this passage—as “ultra-liberal”). Heinlein was never “a conservative” in the simple sense, and an attempt to view him, even in his later years, as a “rightist” is seriously mistaken.

  RAH, letter to Robert Bloch, 03/18/49.

  Heinlein wrote a white paper on the communism-fascism problem in 1938 for his Assembly District campaign. In it he first articulated his position that communism was simple “red fascism,” as evil as black and brown fascism; he repeated this view in 1949 to Robert Bloch and again in 1983 to Dr. B. M. Treibman. However, that white paper was in the Judge Clifton papers given to Leon Stover and since lost.

  This quotation is taken from research notes made of Leon Stover’s unpublished manuscript, Before the Writing Began. Dr. Stover’s kind permission to read and make notes of his manuscript is gratefully acknowledged.

  No copies of that white paper have been found. No other contemporaneous documentation is known to exist; all the testimony we have from Heinlein writing in the 1940s and 1950s, mostly about his attitudes during the 1930s. (In fact, in a discussion about an attempt to get a security clearance, Heinlein wrote a long letter dated November 26, 1950, to Cal Laning, in which he goes over his entire political career and anticommunist attitudes throughout. That letter was written to be given directly by Cal Laning to an investigating security officer and so attempts to deal in detail with any evidence he suspects will be in the record.)

  Leon Stover, in Before the Writing Began, states directly that Heinlein and Sally Rand had an ongoing sexual relationship, pinpointing the dates of specific assignations. Possibly some or all of this material is documented in the file of the Laning-Heinlein correspondence which has not yet been made available for research. There is no documentation from other sources that contributes to this point, so the evidence cannot be weighed.

  There are no good print biographies of Sally Rand, but several online biographies of Sally Rand as well as a day-by-day history of the California Pacific International Exposition recount this incident. See, for example, http://www.yodaslair.com/dumboozle/sally/sallydex.html.

  Caleb Catlum’s America stayed with Robert Heinlein for the rest of his life. In 1972 he paraphrased the introduction of Caleb Catlum for his reintroduction of Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love (1973).

  The Heinleins’ candidates went 50–50; Ordean Rockey was elected to the state assembly, but Harlan Palmer lost the race for Los Angeles District Attorney, amid accusations of ballot stuffing by the incumbent, Burton Fitts.

  “Sir” Arthur Bliss, after 1950.

  RAH, letter to Leon Stover, 06/08/86.

  RAH, letter to Ted and Irene Carnell, 04/02/52.

  16. Party Animal (pages 201–213)

  This phrase is used dozens of times throughout Mitchell’s Campaign of the Century.

  Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century, 560.

  EPIC News IV: 40 (February 28, 1938), 5.

  Wells, The World of William Clissold, p. 189.

  Katherine Petty, e-mail to the author, 12/12/2000.

  Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Tape 12, Side A (March [4?], 2000). Since there is no documentation about the move, it is probable, rather than certain, that Robert and Leslyn took Rex’s trunk at this time, since no other occasion in which they might have acquired it appears in the record.

  In a letter dated 02/03/67 to Lurton Blassingame—that is, thirty years later—Heinlein remarked, “This is the only thing I have ever been afraid of—that I would go the way my father did.”

  Since the 1990s, involutional melancholia has been replaced as a diagnostic category by late-onset depression, which is not the same thing. The older literature is now available in microform or online. The professional reevaluation started in the 1980s; for a representative article summarizing the medical thinking at the time, see R. P. Brown, et al., “Involutional Melancholia Revisited,” American Journal of Psychiatry CXLI: 1 (January 1984).

  RAH, letter to Jerry Pournelle, 03/31/63.

  Michael S. Bahrke, Charles E. Yesalis III, and James E. Wright, “Psychological and Behavioural Effects of Endogenous Testosterone Levels and Anabolic-Androgenic Steroids Among Males: A Review,” published online at http://www.mesomorphosis.com/articles/bahrke/bahrke09.htm.

  Presumed from the timing of the announcement, as chicken pox epidemics typically spread in early spring. Leslyn mentioned this episode of chicken pox in a letter to Jack Williamson, 05/20/42; both facts are cited in Robert James, Ph.D., “Regarding Leslyn,” The Heinlein Journal, No. 9 (July 2001), 21.

  Clipping from unidentified Los Angeles paper—possibly EPIC News—in Robert Heinlein’s personal scrapbook, 04/09/38.

  RAH, letter to John Payne, 08/22/59.

  Corson, in fact, not only invented new types of guns, he professionally published several articles on guns over the years. See, for example, “Vented Pistol Barrels” in Rifle Magazine XIV: 2 (March–April 1982), 32–24.

  In the last two “Straw Ballots” run by the EPIC News in May, Heinlein is joined in the listing by Morey S. Mosk (without affiliation)—though Heinlein is shown as “leading.”

  McCullough, Truman, 234.

  RAH, letter to Fritz Lang, 05/02/46.

  RAH, Take Back Your Government!, 148.

  RAH, letter to Tim Zell, 02/28/72.

  Virginia Heinlein, letter to author, 01/30/2000 and 02/27/2000; see also Virginia Heinlein, IM with the author, 06/17/2002.

  RAH, Take Back Your Government!, 92.

  And ten years after Take Back Your Government! was written, Heinlein used some of this material again, in Double Star.

  RAH, Take Back Your Government!, 126.

  RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 09/21/40.

  RAH, Take Back Your Government!, 37.

  Program preserved in RAH’s personal scrapbook, now at the RAH Archive, UCSC.

  A sample of the postcard is preserved in the RAH Archive, UCSC.

  Reportage on the primary campaign is extremely sparse, and none of it indicates any direct exchange or debate between Heinlein and Lyon in any of the local papers.

  RAH, Take Back Your Government!, 126.

  The postmortem was mentioned by Heinlein in Take Back Your Government!, 126.

  RAH, Take Back Your Government!, 222.

  A characterization in RAH’s letter to Robert Lowndes, 07/18/41, 5.

  Robert Clifton became a judge of the California Superior Court in 1943 and was known thereafter as “Judge Clifton.”

  RAH, Take Back Your Government!, 224.

  RAH, letter to Clare and Dorothy Heinlein, 07/07/73.

  17. The Next Thing (pages 214–223)

  Robert Heinlein’s 1938 campaign biography in the papers of Leon Stover, quoted in Before the Writing Began.

  RAH, letter to Fritz Lang, 05/02/4
6.

  Heinlein never memorialized the precise steps in his move out of political management, but, in any case, this is the way he actually did it—simply stop taking on new jobs and ease out by a process of attrition after the 1938 election.

  RAH, letter to Poul Anderson, 10/30/59.

  RAH, Expanded Universe, 4.

  Thrilling Wonder Stories (October 1938), 112–13.

  Astounding Science-Fiction (July 1938), 73.

  RAH’s membership application for the 1939 General Semantics Seminar in Los Angeles, published in The Heinlein Journal, No. 11 (July 2002), 7.

  RAH’s Guest-of-Honor Speech at the 1941 World Science Fiction Convention (“Denvention”), reprinted as “The Discovery of the Future,” in Requiem, ed. Yoji Kondo.

  And speaking of human nature, Orson Welles’s Halloween-night broadcast of his adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds may have frightened the country, but Heinlein left no recollection of hearing the broadcast.

  The precise dates on which Robert Heinlein started writing were never recorded, but a letter written to John Campbell on December 18, 1939, says he wrote his book-length manuscript “a year ago.” Since it was mailed out, after retyping, in January 1939, the writing must have been started around Thanksgiving 1938, in order to give him, a beginning (and very slow) typist, time to retype the 300-plus pages of his manuscript.

  In an interview given in 1941, Heinlein said that after the campaign concluded (in early November), Leslyn went into the hospital for an appendectomy (not mentioned anywhere else), leaving him at loose ends, and this is when he wrote the book “and finished it in three weeks.” Bernice Cornell, “The Sky’s No Limit,” Writers’Markets & Methods (October 1941), 7.

  RAH, letter to John Campbell, 07/29/40.

  RAH, letter to Leon Stover, 06/08/86.

  Bellamy’s survivors endorsed EPIC, his daughter calling it “a continuation of the principles advocated by my father” when she and her mother, Edward Bellamy’s wife, toured the United States in 1936, visiting the headquarters of various progressive and liberal movements. EPIC News III: 26 (November 23, 1936), 1.

  The text of Marion Bellamy’s 1936 lecture on her father was printed in a fifteen-page pamphlet, Edward Bellamy Today. James J. Kopp’s discussion in “Looking Backward at Edward Bellamy’s Influence in Oregon, 1888–1936,” Oregon Historical Quarterly CIV: 1 (Spring 2003) is representative of the spread of Bellamy’s Nationalist Clubs throughout the United States and references in particularly corresponding events and activities in California.

  See RAH’s letter to Robert A. W. Lowndes, 10/01/41. At the time this letter was written, Heinlein was generating his post-utopian novel, Beyond This Horizon.

  Charles Fourier was an early French socialist, of the generation after the French Revolution, who worked out a plan for communities—called “phalansteries”—large enough to be self-sustaining based on the kind of work different temperaments like to do. Fourier’s thought was never very prominent in the development of European socialism (though still prominent enough to be attacked by Marx and by Engels in the Anti-Dühring), but his ideas dominated the waves of utopian socialist experimentation that emerged in the United States in the middle third of the nineteenth century, after about 1840.

  Compare Erich Fromm’s foreword to the 1960 paperback edition of Looking Backward, which shows how Americans’ radical socialism fits into the American frame of reference:

  The aim of socialism was that man should … transform himself into a being who can make creative use of his powers of feeling and of thinking … In the nineteenth century and until the beginning of the First World War, socialism … was the most significant humanistic and spiritual movement in Europe and America.

  What happened to socialism?

  It succumbed to the spirit of capitalism which it had wanted to replace … Thus socialism became the vehicle by which the workers could attain their place within the capitalistic structure, rather than transcending it; instead of changing capitalism, socialism was absorbed by its spirit.

  See, for example, Virginia Heinlein’s letter to author, 03/04/2000: “Robert did favor Social Credit as a possible answer to economic problems.” Heinlein went on to write about Social Credit, or fiscal theories quite similar in some respects to Social Credit, in three major works, most explicitly in For Us, the Living (1938) and Beyond This Horizon (1941, 1942), and he discussed some of the economic principles also in Time Enough for Love (1973).

  RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 11/26/50.

  Heinlein’s complete manscript file for For Us, the Living was destroyed presumably in 1987, and the manuscript used for its 2004 publication was reconstructed from a photocopy of a photocopy of the retyped manuscript. All other manuscript materials have been lost, and so this picture is a speculation based on practices known to have been in use a few months later.

  Heinlein later said he taught himself to touch-type by retyping the manuscript of For Us, the Living; at the start of the writing, then, he was not a touch typist. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Tape 7, Side A (March [1?], 2000).

  See, for example, RAH’s letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 07/29/40.

  Leslyn (Heinlein) Mocabee, letter to Frederik Pohl, 05/08/53.

  RAH, letter to William A. P. White, 03/27/57.

  There is almost no detailed discussion of Leslyn’s episodes in the correspondence, most of the material in the relevant time frame having been burned in 1947, but in any case, Robert was extremely protective of their private life and might not have discussed it with anyone. There are remarks from both Robert and Leslyn in correspondence about the behavior of Leslyn’s mother, and Robert told both William A. P. White and Doña Smith that he saw certain resemblances in Leslyn’s behaviors; in addition, there is one eyewitness report of behaviors much later, in 1947 (Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by the author). That Leslyn would not discuss the flashes of temper and withdrawal is inferred from her rather extreme resistance to psychological help when offered at a crisis time years after these events.

  The most detailed glimpse of these events comes from reading between the lines of poison-pen letters Leslyn herself wrote, the best examples of which are found in the Frederik Pohl archives, and the explanatory responses Heinlein wrote to people who had received the letters. The letters themselves were kept in a separate file that was not found in Heinlein’s papers after his death (presumably they were burned in 1987); a significant letter from William A. P. White (Anthony Boucher, pseud.) in 1957, written on receipt of such a poison-pen letter and inquiring delicately of Heinlein whether the intervention of St. Dymphna should be sought (the patron saint of the mentally afflicted), has not been found in either White’s or Heinlein’s papers, though Heinlein’s responsive letter, dated 03/27/57, is extant. Another significant (Heinlein) letter, which goes over some specific accusations in another lost poison-pen letter, is addressed to Doña and George Smith and dated 02/18/52.

  Leslyn herself referred to her mother as “a combination of Lucrezia Borgia and Catherine of Russia.” Leslyn (Heinlein) Mocabee, letter to Fred Pohl, 05/08/53.

  Obituary of Colin MacDonald in the Los Angeles Times (June 2, 1929), 26. The obituary, which says he died on May 31, 1929, calls him a “San Francisco hotel man” who had been assistant manager at the Fairmont for ten years. At the time of his death, he was managing a hotel in Santa Barbara, California.

  This is the conclusion reached by Robert James, Ph.D., in his biographical profile of Leslyn Heinlein, “Regarding Leslyn,” The Heinlein Journal, No. 9 (July 2001), 17–36.

  Both Robert and Leslyn Heinlein were extraordinarily discreet about their extramarital affairs. Robert himself only admitted that they existed, without ever giving details, even to his wife and close companion of forty years, Virginia Heinlein.

  Presumably on the basis of undocumented personal discussions with Cal Laning, Leon Stover maintained in conversations with the author and in his unpublished biographical sketch, Before the Writ
ing Began, that Heinlein had an ongoing affair with Sally Rand, for instance, which would be renewed whenever they were in the same place at the same time. Virginia Heinlein suspected on the basis of “the way he talked about her” that Heinlein had an affair with the writer Virginia Perdue. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Third Series, Tape A, Side A (March 27, 2001).

  In none of the scant surviving correspondence of Leslyn (Heinlein) Mocabee does she refer to her own affairs, though in some rather unbalanced poison-pen letters written after a series of strokes in 1952 (the correspondence with Frederik Pohl is in his papers in the Red Bank, New Jersey, archive), she accuses Robert of sexual infidelities frequent and ongoing. In another context, Robert told Virginia Heinlein of just one affair of Leslyn’s—with L. Ron Hubbard (Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Tape 2 [September 2000]). Forrest J. Ackerman recalls his shock at Leslyn’s accusation that Robert had a sexual affair with Hubbard—not completely impossible (as Heinlein implied in an essay in Expanded Universe that he had experimented widely with both drugs and unorthodox sexual practices) but improbable. As Ackerman went on to say, “Both of them were such womanizers that they wouldn’t have any time for the same sex! I don’t know if she was hallucinating, or what.” Forrest J. Ackerman, interview by Robert James, June 9, 2000.