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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  We tried out Kirby I think for three or four months, and Robert told me that I would end up in tears after a conversation with him on the telephone. He had an attitude toward women that was Medieval. And you know: “There, there, little girl. Everything’s all right. Now, you just do as I say” …24

  She also found he was too careless with details—and their business affairs were all details.25 She found herself taking on more and more of even the most minor tasks, and growing increasingly frustrated with trying to deal with him. Robert told her bluntly they should change agencies, and Ginny began asking discreetly around, finding out who had what agent.

  There had been a sprinkling of academics publishing papers on Heinlein over the last few years: George Slusser, a literature professor at UC Riverside, had published two little monographs in 1976 and 1977.26 A whole book of academic essays about him was about to be issued by Taplinger Publishing Company.27 Many of the academic pieces they had seen simply misrepresented what he wrote, either ignoring or misconstruing the clear language of the texts. Now, another academic, H. Bruce Franklin, had written asking for an interview, but Ginny put him off.28 Robert would not, Ginny knew, be enthusiastic about another academic, even though Franklin had a commission from Oxford University Press to do a book entirely about him—and Franklin had named Sam Moskowitz as a personal reference, which was a point in his favor. Ginny replied that Robert’s health was uncertain, but Franklin could write again when he actually got to San Francisco later in the summer of 1978. Possibly by late August Robert would be up to receiving.

  Dr. Chater was pleased with Heinlein’s progress and discontinued his Dilantin. He was in good spirits, but tired easily, and sometimes the balance problems returned unexpectedly. Heinlein despised the daily exercise routine and said he got enough exercise attending the funerals of friends who did exercise,29 but by mid-June he could walk up the steep driveway from the road in front of the house—a pull that sometimes winded Ginny—without stopping in the middle to rest. By the end of July, he seemed nearly recovered.

  Heinlein was sticking to the regimen this year—no conventions, to keep the stress down; no flying at all. Ginny was going to fly to Phoenix this year for the World SF Convention, IguanaCon II. Blassingame had heard about her discreet inquiries for other agencies and had suggested, instead, that she give a try first to the younger associate he had taken on, Eleanor Wood.

  They were already pleased with the new associate who was handling all the foreign business, Ralph Vicinanza: He was on top of the details of all their hundreds of foreign contracts (350 altogether, Ginny found when she went through the files and prepared status summaries for Vicinanza’s use) and was even able to do what Ginny had not—get some movement on the Gebruder Weiss lawsuit that had stalled in the German courts. And when their English agent, Innes Rose, announced his retirement later that year, she and Vicinanza were able to move Heinlein’s entire backlist to Robert Tanner, the former head of the paperback house New English Library (NEL), who had gone into agenting. Vicinanza swept through their entire list, making several changes, and new foreign contracts rose to startling numbers in 1979. Ginny concluded it was better for them if she did all the fiddling bookkeeping, leaving Vicinanza more time to market the properties.

  Eleanor Wood was an unknown quantity—a younger, less experienced agent—but it was certainly worth trying, if for no other reason than to preserve the relationship with the new Blassingame, McCauley & Wood agency.

  Heinlein was much better by August—“He’s doing things which he hasn’t done for several years,” Ginny wrote at the time, “driving, working with his hands to make minor repairs, and so on.”30 He was even back at the typewriter, though not yet writing The Number of the Beast.

  H. Bruce Franklin was in the Bay Area, and the problem of whether or not to give him the interview was now imminent. Heinlein made inquiries and found out two facts, which pointed to opposite conclusions: (1) Franklin was one of those very public academic Marxists—a Maoist, in fact, and (2) he was a former Strategic Air Command pilot and intelligence officer. Heinlein wanted to question him about actual conditions in SAC—but there was a genuine concern about how much usefulness could come out of any serious interaction with an academic Marxist.31

  Franklin had contacted Rita Bottoms as archivist for Heinlein’s papers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and asked her to intercede on his behalf. Franklin was a respected scholar, currently at Rutgers University, though he had been dismissed from a tenured position at Stanford several years earlier because of his Maoist political activity. Bottoms presented the idea to Robert, and this kicked off nearly two weeks of soul-searching by telephone calls among Bottoms, Robert, and Ginny, much of it after hours. “Not fun,” Bottoms remarked succinctly: “It was excruciating.”32 This, she sensed, was his “process”—a long and agonizing process, but something he had to go through to get maximum clarity on a difficult problem. What struck Bottoms about this dialogue was how very principled it was33—and so like him personally, working from principles to ethical behavior. Most of the time, the process was not so difficult. Heinlein felt something like an obligation to cooperate in Franklin’s process of collecting the material from which his opinions would be framed. Against this, he did not like Franklin’s confessedly Maoist politics.

  If he had access to more detailed historical records, Heinlein might have been swayed more in one direction than another, for he was unknowingly enacting a historical crisis going on in American politics at the time—and playing the part of the traditional American liberal confronting the New Left. Franklin’s expression of his political opinions was not confined to academic papers: He had founded the Vinceremos splinter off the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) specifically to start terrorist acts now (rather than the fifteen years in the future that was the “mainstream” opinion in the SDS)—and Vinceremos ultimately became the Symbionese Liberation Army, which had catapulted to national fame in 1975 when they kidnapped and “turned” heiress Patty Hearst. But that was years in the past by 1978, an occult detail of organizational history, and neither Heinlein nor Bottoms were aware of it.

  The enactment played out with Heinlein just as it played out in American politics: If this was naïveté, it was the kind Americans specialized in, of granting goodwill and credence far beyond its rational due.

  Finally, Heinlein outlined all the reasons he should give the interview and all the reasons he shouldn’t—and then told Bottoms, “Honey, you decide.”34

  By that time, Heinlein and Bottoms had known each other for more than ten years and were on very friendly terms. She did some soul-searching of her own. Franklin’s politics clearly bothered both Robert and Ginny—but Franklin had outlined an interesting “take” on Heinlein’s work: Robert Heinlein was representative of America, in just the way that America was represented by science fiction. The title of his book would be Robert A. Heinlein: America As Science Fiction. There was too much possibility of good coming of this project: The very agony he put himself through meant Heinlein was exactly right as the focus of Franklin’s thesis, Robert Heinlein as America as Science Fiction …

  Bottoms told him in her opinion he should do it. That was enough: They arranged the interview for the afternoon of August 21, 1978. Ginny put a cold lunch in the refrigerator and left by the back door as Franklin came in the front; she would not stand in the way of this, but she also would not give assent by acting hostess for this Maoist in her house.35

  A week later Ginny flew to Phoenix to meet Eleanor Wood and to oversee the WorldCon blood drive. Heinlein settled in to do some writing—“must find out whether or not they put all the pieces back when they closed my skull.”36 By August 31, Robert had taken the first 250 pages of manuscript from the fatally mediocre Panki-Barsoom Number of the Beast and set the situation spinning in a new direction. When Ginny returned from the Phoenix WorldCon—highly successful blood drive with 160 units collected—Heinlein drove to San Jose airport to pick her up, th
e longest trip he had made on his own.

  During the summer, a fan named D. F. Vassallo had sent them a series of beautiful illuminated mottos from the “Notebooks of Lazarus Long” that Robert had put into Time Enough for Love. Ginny enjoyed them so much she sent them to Walter Minton for his own enjoyment—simply because she knew he liked such things. Minton wanted to publish them as a gift-book for the Christmas trade. He was getting ready to sell Putnam’s to a conglomerate, MCA, and this would be the last of the old-style publisher’s way of developing a prestige line of books, to the highest standards.37 The first printing came back for proofing with the first page cocked: Something was wrong with the registration on the print run—not bad enough to bother anyone but him, but he had the entire run destroyed, which astonished Ginny. It was printed again, straight this time, and went on sale just before Christmas.38

  At about the same time, Heinlein got another big project under way. In September, Eleanor Wood had routinely forwarded to them a request from Donald A. Wollheim,39 to do a Heinlein anthology for his paperback-original house, DAW—but Robert had another notion in mind, that might benefit many more people.

  #153 [Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein] is a property I had long since washed out of my mind as being of no importance; the added items are all out of the “dead” file so far as any intention to exploit them farther is concerned. Then we got some wild ideas: I decided that I could get Jim [Baen] to revert the contract, Ginny thought you [Wood] might like to try ren[eg]otiating it instead—then it occurred to me that I could use this putatively worthless property to establish SFWA’s model pb contr[act].40

  SFWA had drafted a “model contract” but had not yet been able to get any publisher to accept it. Robert realized he could get the SFWA Model Contract implemented for the first time, thereby setting a useful precedent (even though it meant taking a hefty reduction of his usual contract terms). At the same time, he could give a leg up to that young editor who had gotten his royalty rates raised at Ace Books. Ace had fallen on hard times and had been the subject of ongoing grievances on the part of SFWA for many years.

  What Heinlein proposed was to create an expansion of The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein for Ace that would turn it from a dead loss into a genuine producer. He still had a lot of unused material in his files, and he proposed to flesh out all the pieces in this collection with forewords and afterwords that would come as close as he ever did to autobiography—eighty thousand words of “new” material (some of it genuinely new), an entire new book’s worth.

  And to tie this package up with a big, red bow, he would do it only if Tom Doherty at Ace accepted the SFWA Model Contract. That would bring Ace into conformity with industry practices—which would, if they looked at it right, benefit them in the long run. This would be a complex negotiation for Wood to handle—an excellent way for her to cut her teeth.

  [L]et’s discuss the probable points of resistance. But first let me stipulate that your prime purpose and Ace’s prime purpose is profit … [sic] and profit has been my prime purpose for forty years—it just happens that today for this negotiation I can afford the luxury of a different purpose. But to succeed in my purpose I must cause the interests of all three, Ace, me, and my agent (you), to run concurrently … [sic] and this can be done only by maximizing $$$$$$$$ for all of us—sales, profits, royalties.41

  And if Ace didn’t accept the deal, he instructed Wood to declare a cancellation of the contract and take it to another publisher. Somebody would want a new Heinlein collection.

  Just then, one of the boutique publishers they dealt with asked casually if they were considering retiring. Ginny just laughed: They were working harder now than they were fifteen or twenty years ago. Their business affairs had become so complex that literally no one else could manage them. They had a tiger by the tail and could only hang on.42

  By the beginning of October 1978, Heinlein was ready to begin writing his new book. “He feels that he wants to do another just to prove to everyone that he still can do it,” Ginny wrote to a friend. “I think that he can, but novels are pretty wearing on him when he’s in the best of health, and he’s been having some trouble with sleeping.”43 But he did settle down to the writing he had been planning out for the last six months.

  The story he originally wrote for Panki-Barsoom started out, like the book before (I Will Fear No Evil), with a science-fictional cliché: “He’s a mad scientist, and I’m his beautiful daughter”—but he spun it differently this time, writing a book just as experimental, just as different, as anything he had ever done—only more so. Metafictive in a post-postmodern way, the distinction between reality and the worlds of fiction was not just blurred, it was obliterated, viewpoint among the protagonists shifting as often as they shifted from world to fictional world, arguing about who should lead and who follow, and how:

  Tomorrow I will seven eagles see, a great comet will appear, and voices will speak from whirlwinds foretelling monstrous and fearful things—This Universe never did make sense; I suspect that it was built on government contract.44

  And he enjoyed some other legendary writer’s tricks, self-conscious and self-referential. L. Ron Hubbard’s “Typewriter in the Sky” had made the case long ago (1940) that, so far as the characters in a story are concerned, the real villain of the piece has to be the author, jerking them about and causing suffering for the sake of the story. It was a literary principle older than Hubbard, of course—it was in King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”

  The identity of their devil—The Beast—is given in anagrams in this great jeux d’esprit, starting with the first one, an academic: Neil O’Heret Brain—N.O. Brain—“Robert A. Heinlein” rearranged as an anagram (Ginny got in there, too, in various odd guises).

  And at the end, there is a huge, idealized science-fiction convention that recapitulates the travelers’ wandering across continua, into the worlds of fiction. All the worlds of fiction and all the realities, parallel and not so parallel, came to visit and mingle with Ginny and him and his friends in this “consensus reality.” And here the writerly jokes become even more self-referential:

  In one running thread, the central characters keep confusing other Heinlein characters—Oscar Gordon for Zeb Carter, the Empress Star for Ishtar, and so forth. (A common criticism of Heinlein is that his characters tend to fall into narrow categories, becoming indistinguishable from each other.)

  In a second twist on reader assumptions, Heinlein keeps referring to “Robert, Isaac and Arthur.” In science fiction, these names are usually taken to be those of the “big three” modern sf writers. However, it slowly develops that Heinlein is referring to Robert Aspirin, not Robert Heinlein; the Venerian dragon, “Sir Isaac Newton,” not Isaac Asimov; and Arthur Conan Doyle, not Arthur C. Clarke.45

  Heinlein finished The Number of the Beast early on the morning of December 17, 1978, completely worn out from working fourteen-hour days (“years ago,” Ginny told a friend, “he said, ‘If I could stay awake long enough, this thing would be done at one sitting.’”).46

  29

  TRAVELING ROAD SHOW

  The Number of the Beast was being cut and polished, and his typewriter was going to pieces. Heinlein had his eye on one of the new “word processors,” and Ginny was convinced her personal millennium had arrived when she saw Marilyn Niven’s Atari in operation—but Marilyn was a computer specialist, able to give it the almost constant servicing it required. The Heinleins were probably forty-five miles from the nearest service. It wasn’t practical, yet, for them.

  And while they were about it, could Heinlein get a replacement body? His balance problems were coming back, and his back ached frequently—from sitting and lying down too much. He had taken to using a cane to help getting around (though he hung it on his forearm much of the time).1 He had insomnia most nights, and Ginny observed one night that he did sleep but was strangely motionless: He had slept through the entire night with a tray and glass of water b
alanced on his chest. In the morning, he was crippled up.2

  Dr. Chater had a long phone conference with Heinlein’s local internist, Dr. MacKenzie, and came up with a verdict: polycythemia: His bone marrow was overproducing red blood cells. The treatment was oddly old-fashioned: They bled him, taking a pint of his A negative rare blood, which would have to be thrown out since blood banks would not accept it on account of his age and health. Ginny used the waste blood to fertilize a Bird of Paradise plant. “[T]he following morning he came dancing into the kitchen. Enough sleep, loss of some red cells, and dramatically, he was in quite good health.”3 The leeching put him back to normal for a day or so at a time, but something had to be done about his general condition.

  The early reports on The Number of the Beast were favorable, and Heinlein began sleeping easier: He had been quite worried about whether the brain surgery would affect his writing: “It’s a great relief to him because he doesn’t want to retire from writing.”4

  Putnam’s had an option, but Eleanor Wood arranged for the book to go up for auction. Putnam’s option would thus allow them the opportunity to meet the best price offered. Putnam’s had been sold to MCA in 1975, and Walter Minton was removed as president in 1977, with Peter Israel succeeding him. Robert and Ginny had nothing against Peter Israel, other than the way Minton was being treated now—Heinlein had even given Israel’s first book a puff after he had taken years off to write rather than edit—but their loyalty was to Walter Minton’s Putnam’s, not to MCA’s.5 A dozen publishers were invited to participate in the auction, and the “floor bid”—the minimum bid that would be accepted—was set at $500,000, with an as-is, no-edit condition. At first Heinlein was reluctant, but Ginny talked him into it: “Robert really didn’t want to sign those big contracts. And I said, ‘Don’t be silly. Might as well. If they’re offering that money to you for a book, take it.’”6