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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  It was hard to argue that the actual decisions under which these men operated were rational—or even sane!—but he could affirm for them that the task itself was worthwhile and that it made sense in the larger scheme of things. Perhaps he had at last worked out a way to articulate the thoughts prompted by a friend’s comment on the “generation gap” four years earlier:

  “My generation was patriotic,” she wrote, “but the present generation thinks patriotism is a joke.”

  I think she may be right. Oh, I know young people who are fervently patriotic—and people even older than I am who are downright disloyal—but statistically she may have put her finger on the great difference. And the hell of it is that there seems to be no way to get through to them the idea that patriotism is not just irrational sentimentality but an indispensable survival factor as practical as good brakes and good tires—and that a nation that loses its patriotism is on the skids and headed for disaster.33

  Patriotism is a social manifestation of a biological imperative, he went on to say, as useful and as finely honed by evolution as the opposable thumb or the camera eye. Patriotism is a pragmatic tool of evolution.

  The first draft of the lecture was finished at about 8,300 words—more than twenty minutes over the time he had available. All the other business was shunted aside. Scribner was seeking some releases from him, and Heinlein was still steamed over the casually careless way they were treating him as a cash cow now that they had decided to get on the paperback bandwagon, after depriving him of the huge paperback market for decades. It would all have to wait until they got back—and he would have to handle it himself: When they got back, Ginny was going to start a long and painful course of periodontic surgery.

  They arrived in Annapolis on April 4, 1973, the day before the lecture, and were put up at the Annapolis Hilton—except that they arrived late and found their reservation had been given away, despite a hold-for-late-arrival. They were directed to a motel on the main thoroughfare, with trucks rumbling by all night that kept Robert awake. Early in the morning, Ginny took him over to the Maryland Inn for breakfast. She rented a quieter room there and put him to bed to get some sleep. Later that day they made rendezvous with the Superintendent.

  Robert’s mind was, naturally, on his speech. He had memorized the text, but he had a printed manuscript with him, and he had made up three-by-five slips for his jacket pocket, with the bullet points of the speech, so he could recover quickly if he lost his place.

  They took him to a huge outdoor tent, which was the temporary Field House. Half the interior was curtained off with canvas, and the four thousand plus seats were arranged in a horseshoe around the podium. He could not project enough to be heard—which meant he was tied to the microphone as well as the clock. The lecture was unofficially tape-recorded by one of the spectators.

  The midshipmen seemed interested and applauded at the right places. In the first part, working into his subject, he was surprised at the cynicism he found in some of the responses from his young audience.34

  For example, when Heinlein asks the question, “Why are you here, mister?” a cadet on the tape can be heard to reply, “To get a free education.” Heinlein replies with some asperity, “Better not let an officer hear you say that.” In the transcription, this exchange is trimmed to “Don’t answer that; it’s a rhetorical question.”35

  The rot had set in, even here. But that made the second half of his message all the more urgent, and he trimmed what he could from the part about freelance writing.

  The midshipmen were all on their best behavior, yet as he worked into his dithyramb on the evolutionary role of patriotism, and their important part in it, they did not catch fire as he expected.36 As he built to his peroration, telling the story of the young stranger in Swope Park, when he was five years old, who sacrificed his life to save that of a young matron, he became caught up in the emotions of it: It was his own first encounter with the sublime, and powerful to him yet.37 He was overcome and choked up as he delivered the closing lines of the story:

  This is how a man dies.

  This is how a man lives.38

  He was blinded by his own tears as the applause broke. Cal Laning, who was by then so deaf he had not actually caught enough of the speech to follow its progression, came on stage to help him off. He thought Heinlein was bitterly disappointed at their audience “sitting on their hands” for his homily on evolution and patriotism, Darwinism and duty.39

  The truth was somewhat different. Robert and Ginny later found out there had been a power outage and a serious breach of discipline in Bancroft Hall the night before—a race riot!—that had been hushed up so that nothing reached the papers.40

  Sometimes seed was sown on stony ground, but you sow it anyway.

  The next day they were given a private tour of the facilities. April was in the middle of instruction, and he got a chance to observe some of the teaching and to discuss the revised curriculum. Since his day, the USNA had changed over from a technical college to a first-rate academic institution. Heinlein was suitably impressed: “The present Brigade is now receiving a far better education than we got without neglecting the professional subjects necessary to an efficient junior line officer,” he told his own classmates in his Muster Notes for the next year.41

  The Superintendent’s luncheon for them was much less formal than the prelecture dinner had been. One Lt. (Miss) Johnson told him she taught Stranger as part of her class in The Contemporary Novel. “That floored me,” he wrote to a friend. “I know that book is all over the campuses but to find it being used in teaching at the N.A. I never expected.”42 He sat in on that class, that afternoon.

  And then they went on for a week at Pennsylvania State University. One of Robert’s publishers had arranged for a long interview to appear in the New York Times Magazine as a profile in the fall and had commissioned the work from Phil Klass—an esteemed colleague who wrote under the pen name of “William Tenn.”43

  Heinlein knew that the interest in Stranger was still peaking on campuses, and both he and Ginny knew he would be worn out after the Annapolis visit, so he had asked Klass to keep the meet-and-greet to a quiet minimum. But the invitations had apparently gotten out of hand: At one point he noticed some of the gravitas of the university sitting on the floor by his chair, literally at his feet.

  Klass and his wife, Fruma, were greatly amused at Robert’s characteristic gusto. “Would you like to hear the paper I read at Annapolis?” Heinlein offered, and immediately went on, “Of course you would!” Klass recalled that, as he read again his peroration, he was overcome again with emotion:

  —tears were rolling down his face, I mean he was sobbing as he read about people who died doing their duty for the country.

  And Fruma said to him at one point … “When you read that paper at Annapolis, did you cry, too?” And he said, “My dear lady, when else should a man cry?”

  God damn it! He was such a huge figure. Such a huge—so much larger than life.44

  The week at Penn State allowed them to get their bearings before moving on to New York for business. Putnam’s intended to release Time Enough for Love in June 1973—and still no one was (very) nervous about the incest: It was the cover price they were worried about.

  Publisher’s Weekly commissioned another old colleague, Alfred Bester, to do an interview with him, which would come out as publicity for the new book. Bester was best known for his seminal SF novels The Demolished Man (1953) and The Stars My Destination (1956), but he had been in the business exactly as long as Heinlein.45

  Ben Bova also called on them, socially, but it turned into a professional meeting when he heard about the Forrestal lecture and asked to read the manuscript. Bova had been hired to edit Analog after John Campbell’s death. Intrigued by the Darwinian argument in favor of patriotism, Bova proposed printing the whole lecture as a “guest editorial.”

  Heinlein had never expected to have this particular piece of work published—but he would pass up no oppo
rtunity to get the patriotism/evolutionary message disseminated. He marked in by hand the additional cuts he had made on the fly and gave Bova the reading copy he had brought with him.

  They were home before Easter. Ginny started her dental work. Her dental problems over the years had reached the point at which ordinary dentistry would no longer fix the troubles, even temporarily: Her jaw was crumbling and would not even take fixed bridges. Robert discovered, in a lightning round of research, that a new procedure offered hope: They could use bone transplants to rebuild the jaw, then bridgework would be enough to supplement the sound teeth that remained.

  The main drawback was the four to six months of multiple surgeries at the University of Pennsylvania while the bone transplants “took”—but it turned out there was a capable periodontist in San Mateo, about fifty miles north of Santa Cruz. Experimental dental surgery, without insurance, is … expensive—and their medical expenses had been going up as Medicare kicked in, not down. In San Mateo, Ginny would have a team of three specialists. Drs. Robinson (periodontics), Burns (endodontics), and Jeffrey. Sometimes, if the procedure was not too complicated, the doctors allowed Robert to observe.

  They were not able to get any real domestic help. Robert had to be housekeeper, chief cook and bottle washer, and lavender extraordinaire—bo’sun tight and midshipmite and crew of the captain’s gig.46 He struggled gamely with the details, instead of going to work on another book right away.

  The first major surgeries were the hardest on her. Gradually, she was able to help out more and took over particularly the cooking—probably in self-defense. And just in time: After his bout with peritonitis, shingles, and gallstones, Robert’s metabolism had shifted—not entirely surprising. It was something of a wonder, in fact, that it hadn’t done so when he was in his fifties. Perhaps the hormones and glandular extracts had given him a few more years of middle age. But during the writing of Time Enough for Love his blood pressure had gone disturbingly high—180/130—and his serum cholesterol and triglycerides were way up, as well. For this, he was seeing a new internist, Dr. Colin MacKenzie, who put him on medication and a very strict diet.

  This diet was even more of a headache than the food allergy regimen twenty-five years before. Literally all of Heinlein’s favorite foods were off the menu—but Ginny figured out how to cope with the restrictions, exchanging tips and recipes with friends who had gone through much the same thing before them, planting berries and reading every book on the subject she could find. She even went on the diet along with him, and gradually their tastes adjusted. Within a very few months, his blood pressure was below the 120/70 magic numbers, his serum cholesterol and triglycerides were down to reasonable levels, and he had shed twenty-eight pounds. Heinlein was exultant:

  Chilluns, I feel healthier than I have for forty years. I feel young. Every bite of the skimpy, very limited diet I must follow tastes like gourmet cooking … I’m happy all the time and filled with vigor and find working from reveille to taps a pleasure—while being driver for Ginny to San Mateo 2 or 3 times a week and sometime nurse & cook & housekeeper & household shopper I am nevertheless working on 5 books and expect to see every one of them published and perhaps more to come—when I had been thinking since 1969 “Maybe this one is my last.” But now I feel as if I could go on working forever.47

  Time Enough for Love came out in June 1973 and within the first week of its release was on the bestseller lists in Seattle and Los Angeles—the first time he had ever hit the bestseller list for a hardcover initial release (I Will Fear No Evil was on the paperback list, and Stranger had been on the paperback list for years). By the end of the month, it was on the New York bestseller list. Putnam’s sold out the entire first impression, ordered a second and sold that out too, and was in the third reprint order—though, the lapse of time before the second printing could get to the stores caused the book to fall off the bestseller lists, and the slower, steadier sales after that never developed enough momentum to climb back on. Just before the initial release, Analog carried an excerpt from the book, “The Notebooks of Lazarus Long,” as a special feature.

  The book came out at about the same time as Arthur Clarke’s book for 1973, Rendezvous With Rama, and the two books were reviewed in lockstep with each other. The New York Times gave them a midweek review as “Books of the Times” on August 22 that was curiously ambivalent about Time Enough.48 A month later, the Sunday New York Times Book Review featured a complimentary and much more insightful review by Ted Sturgeon: “Remember, too, that it hurts a man to think through and past his own conditioning—but nothing will stop [Heinlein]—ever. I like his new novel less than the celebrated Stranger, but love it more.”49

  25

  ON TO OTHER THINGS

  Editors and publishers had always sent Heinlein manuscripts hoping to get a comment to use on the book jacket. Most of the time he was able to talk himself out of doing it, although sometimes a little treasure fell into his lap that way: He always appreciated Ted Sturgeon sending him the galleys for Edgar Pangborn’s Davy (1964), for instance. For friends and acquaintances he often put a lot of work into technical critiques. One of their friends in Colorado, Dottie White, had written a novel in 1960 about an interracial marriage—from personal experience. Her Negro husband, George White, was a major at one of the local Air Force establishments at Colorado Springs. Heinlein had given her what advice and help he could, and tried to help her find an agent for the book. In 1973, Arthur Clarke’s publishers wanted a puff for the paperback issue of Rendezvous with Rama, and he was happy to oblige with that one.

  In June 1973, Jerry Pournelle sent him a gigantic manuscript for a science-fiction novel he had written in collaboration with Larry Niven, Motelight, and Heinlein girded up his mental loins for another job of analysis and technical critique. As he read, though, he found himself turning pages, getting involved with the characters and the story. But it had a major fault as a book that urgently needed to be addressed.

  He spent three days going through the manuscript almost line by line, and finally, on June 20, sat down at the typewriter to frame his critique. His first note to the authors was:

  “1. This is a very important novel, possibly the best contact-with-aliens story ever written.… (best aliens I’ve ever encountered, truly alien but believable and one could empathize with them, every ecological niche filled, total ecology convincing, etc.—grand[.])”1

  With Pournelle, he knew he could be straightforward and even blunt—and there simply was no “delicate” way of saying some of the things he thought needed to be said—

  We are in a highly competitive market, battling each year against not only thousands of other new novels but also TV and a myriad other things … in the late XXth century one simply cannot use up 30,000 words before getting down to business with the main story line.…

  How to correct the major fault? I don’t know. It’s your story. But cutting the bejasus out of those [first] 100 pp would help. It is all featherdusting, not story, and you need to determine just what supporting data must be saved to keep the plot intact—then see how much of it can be tucked away into corners after page 100, and what is left that must be on stage before page 100—and what is left be told in such a way as to grab the reader and pull him along, not lose him.2

  Heinlein’s experience with this kind of hard-love advice was not encouraging: “People seldom take advice—and this advice you did not ask me to give. I shan’t be offended if you don’t take it; I hope that you will not be offended that I proffer it.”3

  He sent off the long letter to Niven and Pournelle and turned to another public-relations chore on June 26, 1973—another newspaper-article interview, this time by telephone. The interviewer, J. Neil Schulman, was a young journalist in New York, clearly one of the “New Right” libertarians The Times had been touting for the last few years, bright and curious, and thoroughly immersed in the movement literature—and in any case Robert felt the need metaphorically to walk up and down the Earth, and to as
sociate with a stimulating wide variety of people and viewpoints.4

  [I]solated as I am in this study far out in the mountains, if I do not reach out through my typewriter to cultivate new friendships, I will inevitably grow old and crabbed and lose touch with the human race … and thereby become not only useless to myself but incapable of writing copy worth printing. If I am to stay young in my mind while my body grows older, I must seek out new human relationships.5

  On June 26, Schulman phoned to discuss the interview, and Heinlein gave the most “personal” interview he had ever done—far more material than Schulman could use for his article, so he willingly granted permission to use any “leftover” material for a piece in New Libertarian Notes, one of the new libertarian magazines that had been springing up. One subject in the news at the time did not make it into this interview: That summer of 1973 the Nixon administration began melting down in scandal. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew was investigated for extortion, tax fraud, conspiracy, and for taking bribes while in office—on which latter charge he was criminally indicted (and later allowed to resign the vice presidency): “Agnew—English fails me, it would take Turkish or Russian or Yiddish to express my disgust. A slap on the wrist—for eight times as much as my recent (’38) opponent for the Legislature got sent to San Quentin for.”6 By the time of the interview, the Watergate break-in was being investigated by the Senate. Nixon, Heinlein said, had terrible judgment at picking his associates—but, he noted, “Watergate was a peccadillo (whether he knew about it or not); I had that and more done to me when I was an active politico.”7