Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  Tjibadak is not mentioned by name in Tramp Royale, because it was a filthy and appalling tub—an unpleasantly fitting introduction, as it turned out, to Sukarno’s Indonesia. “[W]e could have quit this ship only at Djakarta [as it was then spelled]—which we would have done had Djakarta been an improvement, which it is not.”32

  Heinlein does not mention the fact in Tramp Royale, but the “body search” to which he was subjected at Indonesian customs (while Ginny was waved through), was conducted at bayonet-point33—which could only have reinforced the advice given them in Singapore not to argue with an Indonesian policeman or soldier, as they would have no hesitation executing you on the spot if angered.34

  Jakarta itself Heinlein characterized in 1954 as a city the size of Chicago, but without plumbing of any sort, except for a foul canal running through the city, which was used for all water purposes. They did locate a friend of a friend at the city’s one modern hotel, Hotel del Indes—Lothar Wolf, the producer of Irving Pichel’s Martin Luther, who was there to help build up an Indonesian film industry.35 They stayed aboard ship that night and watched the festivities for Chinese New Year celebrated by the largely Chinese crew. On the second day, they were scheduled to visit the botanical gardens in Bogor, sixty kilometers south of Jakarta. Ginny defied currency restrictions and smuggled cashier’s checks off the ship, to buy batiks and sarongs. Cashier’s checks they found not as desirable as cash—they can be traced.

  The passage to Brisbane—the first place they could realistically get off Tjibadak—took an additional two weeks around Australia’s northeastern “corner.” They were in rough weather, having clipped the edge of a cyclone that was wreaking havoc at Queensland. By that time, most of the remaining passengers were Australian sheep men and their families, returning home, whom the Heinleins found almost uniformly rough but sociable—“easy as an old shoe.”36

  They arrived in Brisbane on about February 15. Brisbane’s “feel” reminded Robert overpoweringly of “home”—the American Midwest, circa 1920–30. “I liked Australia and wanted it to like me.”37 They had only a few hours in Brisbane and elected to see teddy-bear koalas at a private zoo just outside town. Koalas are cuddly creatures—“left to themselves they cuddle with each other.”38 Ginny was given Little Mo to cuddle and had her picture taken. Little Mo was then returned to her cage, stopping to nibble at the concrete curbstone. Robert and Ginny were delighted with them: Their “unique genius for being pets”39 makes them Earth’s natural flat cats. The other Australian fauna they saw delighted them as “determined to be as exotic as possible … they are all on the lunatic fringe of the animal kingdom.”40

  Later that day they made their way the few hundred miles down the coast by a commuter vessel.

  The Heinleins had originally planned to spend a month or more in Sydney, but the combined delays had reduced their time to only nine days before their March 1 sailing date for New Zealand. In addition to the normal planned tourism—the Sydney Zoo they found one of the most interesting on the entire trip—there was business to be attended to in Australia.

  Australian laws prohibited American publications—which Heinlein referred to as a “sinful embargo on American Books”41 (with the result that the bookstores and newsstands were filled with “some of the most amazing trash to be found anywhere”42). An Australian publisher had produced a pirate edition of “Life-Line”—a 7,200 word story—in paperback format. Shasta had sold the rights (for a mere ten dollars) and never even reported it, but just pocketed the money.43

  Blassingame had found a solicitor for them, J. A. Campbell, Esq., to pursue the matter of literary piracy. Mr. Campbell was retained to see what recourse they might have on the Australian end. Not much, it turned out, but he had also agreed to act as their local business agent, which would be useful since Blassingame had been selling Australian rights for the Future History books for the last couple of years.

  Their solicitor had a largish amount of mail for them. Blassingame had forwarded some business mail, as expected—Scribner wanted a retitle for The Star Lummox as there was another book on the stands currently with “Lummox” in the title. But the rest was fan mail. Their Colorado Springs house-sitters, Doc and Mimi Knowles, had apparently forgotten that they had asked that the fan mail not be forwarded. Wearily Robert and Ginny set out to answer the fan mail by handwritten postcard, since they didn’t have access to typewriters.44 Regrettably, they had plenty of time for the chore, as Australia’s bizarre income tax requirements kept them tied to Sydney and haunting government offices nearly every day, and there was literally nothing to do on weekends in Sydney: Nothing was open for business!45

  Some of the fan mail was from schoolchildren on class assignments. In recent years, elementary school teachers all over the country had taken up the inconsiderate practice of having entire classes write to authors, often bombarding them with questionnaires for class projects. How a writer was supposed to get any writing done was a mystery best left unexplored.46

  Somehow, word got out that he was visiting Australia, and Heinlein was lionized by Sydney science-fiction fandom, prevailed upon to give a “very interesting talk” to the Futurian Society of Sydney in the Club Room on Thursday, February 25, 1954.47 He offered copies of all his books to the club library.

  It was New Zealand that turned out to be the great disappointment of this trip. Heinlein had been fascinated by the country for decades and was looking forward to encountering its legendary grandeur for himself. The statistics and articles he had been reading for twenty years made it sound like the kind of working, progressive socialism he had labored toward for decades. Their union policies alone sounded like a worker’s paradise.

  Monowai cast off just two days after the then still-secret Castle Bravo H-bomb was detonated at Bikini Atoll. They docked in Auckland on March 5 after an uneventful passage of four days. Their stateroom had been uncomfortably cramped, but at least the ship was clean. Not as much as could be said for the hotel in Auckland—and the food they were given all during their stay in New Zealand.

  They arranged a tour of the countryside as fast as possible, running into a snarl of red tape and incredible union featherbedding that gave his professional Democrat’s conscience twinges. They endured several days in Auckland, over a weekend buttoned up tighter than even Sydney—“Australian closing hours are inconvenient, but New Zealand closing hours are more in the nature of paralysis”48—before they were able to book a tour of North Island—a beautiful place. Waitomo, their first stop, did a great deal to take the taste of Auckland out of their mouths. The Glowworm Grotto fascinated them.

  Otherwise, the trip itself was moderately grim. In the thermal geyser country of Wairakei and Rotorua, a guide, displaying all the characteristics of petty bureaucrats everywhere, disparaged Yellowstone’s geyser field, and Robert had enough. For a moment he lost his temper and sense of discretion enough to point out the facts and drew down the guide’s righteously arrogant—and factually wrong—wrath.49

  Of New Zealand in 1954, he said it was a place, “where no one goes hungry, but where life is dreary and comfortless beyond belief, save for the pleasures of good climate and magnificent countryside.”50 Worst of all, it was grim because of the very features that had made him most hopeful for it—the British pattern of socialism, the overpowering, oppressive, death grip of the unions stifled all spirit of progress, all incentive to better the thousands of petty, daily inconveniences this often truculent, beaten-down people burdened themselves with as much as their visitors.51 “New Zealand is a fake utopia,” Heinlein concluded, “a semi-socialism which does not work and which does not have anything like the degree of civil liberty we have. In my opinion, it stinks.”52

  They left New Zealand on a DC6 sleeper to Hawaii (by way of a dinner stopover in the Fiji Islands). In the eleven days they were in New Zealand, Ginny lost eleven pounds—and it was probably here, also, that she contracted both scurvy and pellagra. In the future, they carried vitamin tablets with them while t
raveling.

  They were met at Honolulu customs by Bob and Violet Markham, shipboard companions from Gulf Shipper. The Markhams took them home out beyond Diamond Head and pampered them while they recovered from the assorted shocks of New Zealand (and of air travel, for Ginny).

  Hawaii is nominally “home,” though they had several thousand miles yet to go. But it was an ideal place to recover from repeated culture shock. They continued as tourists, visiting pineapple fields and staying overnight at the hotel overlooking the Kilauea volcano, where Ginny enrolled herself in the cult of Pele, Hawaiian volcano-goddess. She gained back the weight she had lost, and Robert put on some extra weight, too: He was getting to be, if not quite “stout,” then “well fed.”

  They found in Hawaii more mail from Blassingame: Miss Dalgliesh was disturbed by the girl-who-divorced-her-parents in The Star Beast (the new title for the Star Lummox book). Children “divorcing” their parents was a part—unpublicized—of our own legal system, not one of Heinlein’s fictional inventions. In any case, he didn’t need to do anything about it—Blassingame had arranged a compromise: Miss Dalgliesh would edit to minimize the impact.

  It was probably on this trip that the Heinleins made their one visit to the Pearl Harbor Memorial. Cal Laning had been at Pearl the morning of the attack in 1941, but it was other friends and colleagues and shipmates Robert wanted to remember:

  I have returned to Oahu many times, but I have been out to see USS Arizona just once, did not go aboard, did not stay long, and do not intend to go back a second time. Somewhere, down inside her, are more than a thousand bodies; one of them is my former Commodore, Captain van Valkenberg, commanding. Another is Tommy McClelland; we were cadet captains together in high school, corporals together in the 110th Combat Engineers. I don’t wish to stand over their bodies or any of the others. “They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old, age shall not weary them nor the years condemn; At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them…”53

  Standing over the skeletons of his comrades, picked clean by the crabs and the fishes of the sea, must have been an emotional capstone for the trip.

  Many things had changed for him and in him, many opinions overthrown. The great socialist ideals of his youth were wonderful dreams, but if his encounters on this trip meant anything at all, it was that the materials did not exist in the world to make them into reality, and even the attempt to put them into practice could do more harm than good.54 No world federation had a chance to be an instrument for liberation. The voice he had raised for such things he would still.

  It was a short sleeper flight from Honolulu, orchid leis around their necks, to San Francisco on March 28, 1954. Robert had caught a cold and spent much of their three-day stay at the Hotel California resting, while Ginny shopped on Union Square. In the evenings they visited with friends and colleagues.

  A. P. White now lived in Berkeley, and they were able to spend an entire evening with him—though Robert was not able to get any resolution on those mysterious remarks about differences of political opinion White had been making in correspondence for the last several years. Heinlein began to suspect it was not he who was turning away from traditional liberalism: White was evolving into something incompatible with liberalism as Heinlein understood it: he was becoming a leftist. Nor was he the only person making that evolution. As Lester del Rey later put it, the country was drifting to the left, “leaving those with mature ideas about what should be our political stances appearing to move rightward.”55

  There was a gulf opening up in American politics, and Heinlein found himself on the far side of the divide: “leftism” was not “liberalism,” and he was and would remain a liberal.56

  On March 30, they flew to Denver and just missed the day’s last shuttle flight to Colorado Springs. They were stuck just twenty-five minutes by air from home. The next day, they boarded the shuttle. Ten minutes into the flight, literally within sight of Cheyenne Mountain, the cabin began to fill with smoke “so thick that you could not see your hand in front of your face.”57 It wasn’t anything dangerous—excess oil smoldering in the cabin’s heating and air-conditioning system—but the pilot banked into a U-turn and headed back to Denver.

  The second try was uneventful. They deplaned at Peet Field, met by friends and neighbors. Thirty minutes later, Pixie was greeting them, stropping their ankles, and they were home.

  9

  SOME BEGINNINGS OF SOME ENDS

  Ginny urged Robert to start on the travel book he had been making notes for right away, while all the memories were still fresh, but their time was relatively short: Heinlein’s twenty-fifth Annapolis class reunion was late in May, and they planned to make it an extended trip east this time, spending several days in New York. The five or six weeks he had before the trip wouldn’t be enough time to organize and write the book—and there was a huge pile of mail to deal with.

  In the backlog of correspondence Heinlein found the editing Dalgliesh had done on The Star Beast, cutting to minimize Betty Sorenson’s “divorce” from her parents, with a note, saying: “… it is hard enough to sell books these days without having them kept off lists by something that foolish people take too seriously. I think as I fixed it the omission doesn’t hurt the book at all, but as I told you, it is up to you[.]”1

  Heinlein wrote that he didn’t see what the fuss was about: There were many more unorthodox ideas in that book, and he didn’t much care for this kind of censorship. But since Blassingame had allowed it, he would let the editing stand. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction had the first of three installments of the book in print this month, under his original title of The Star Lummox.

  Heinlein went into downtown Colorado Springs to find a newsstand that still had a copy of the current (April 2, 1954) U.S. News & World Report:2 They were publishing a complete book, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor, by Admiral Robert A. Theobald, with corroborative forwards by Admiral Kimmel, who commanded Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and Admiral William H. Halsey, wartime commander of the Third Fleet.3

  Admiral Theobald “puts the responsibility for Pearl Harbor on one man: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.”4 Theobald argued that Roosevelt arranged for the Japanese to be pressured into declaring war on the United States and concealed (or engineered the concealment of) relevant diplomatic dispatches in order to make the incident happen.

  Although Heinlein knew that Admiral Kimmel was derelict in not having the Fleet at sea during an international crisis, he felt compelled to believe the truth of Admiral Theobald’s position. It was widely known that Roosevelt wanted the United States to intervene on Britain’s behalf; he wanted to get the United States into the war in Europe. The book5 clearly implied Roosevelt had manipulated the country into World War II—and was, therefore, personally responsible for the carnage at Pearl, and for all the hundreds of thousands of American casualties in the war.

  After thirteen years, Pearl Harbor was still a hot-button issue in American politics. Roosevelt had been near-deified in popular opinion since his death; his policies—or what his surviving followers thought were his policies—had been elevated into cornerstones of Democratic Party platforms, and even the new Republican administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower had to deal with Roosevelt’s legacy through Truman. Some aspects of “Pearl Harbor Revisionism” are now considered historical orthodoxy, as individual pieces of information can be fit into the overall picture. It is no longer thought, for example, that the attack was purely motivated by evil intent on the part of the Japanese high command, though the situation was much more complex than even Theobald knew about in 1954: It was not yet clear, for example, that Japan was being oil-starved by its Axis allies. Other revisionist elements remain controversial, and some are simply lumped together by historians as “conspiracy theory.”

  The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor painfully shook Heinlein loose from his personal attachment to the memory of his Roosevelt. “Robert felt that the Navy had been betrayed,” Ginny said
later, “and he felt for his classmates who had been killed in that attack.”6

  But this revisionism was working alchemical changes in Robert, more and different than the general public understanding of Roosevelt’s personal complicity.7 Heinlein had just had a shock to his world picture. This trip had shown him graphically how little the world was ready for his radical-liberal One World enthusiasms. Perhaps he might have recovered from that destabilizing confrontation with uncomfortable realities, but the careful nonconfrontation with A. P. White in San Francisco added a harmonic to this discord.

  The Theobald Report offered a harsh and unwelcomed glare of more light. Superficially, perhaps, it exposed Roosevelt as a skilled politician—and it does not hurt to have an appreciation of what is real versus the god-king myth—but it made Heinlein reconsider also, what he, himself had wrought.

  For one thing, it threw into sudden, high relief the differences between the New Deal and Upton Sinclair’s EPIC that had been nearly invisible to Heinlein at the time—differences of tactics rather than of basic philosophy.8 At the time, they both “felt” like they were building Wells’s managerial socialism—hesitantly, experimentally, sometimes using very unlikely materials in unlikely ways (for example, Wells’s odd early [1907] enthusiasm for professional realtors). By 1954 Heinlein was no longer quite so sure. It was not that he now had a problem with socialism per se—

  Socialism can be good or bad, depending on how it is run. Our national parks are an example of a socialist enterprise which is beautifully run.… Here in the USA, where we have much more socialism than most people appear to believe, we are good at it in some spots, fair in others, lousy in some. In general I have come to believe that we here are usually better off with private ownership government policed than we are when the government actually owns the deal and a bored clerk looks at you and sneers when you complain. But I don’t hold it as an article of faith, either way—people ought to be able to organize their affairs to suit their convenience, either individually or collectively. They ought to be free to do either one. They ought to be free.9