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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  34. RAH, undated story notes for Between Planets in RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz.

  35. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/08/50.

  36. RAH, letter to Forrest J. Ackerman, 04/16/50.

  37. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 8, Side B.

  38. RAH, letter to Ben Babb, 06/06/50.

  39. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 05/15/50.

  40. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/25/53. In this letter, Heinlein is discussing Montgomery as the source for a character in Starman Jones, drawn from life.

  41. Virginia Heinlein, IM with the author, 06/01/02.

  42. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/09/01.

  43. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 07/09/50.

  44. RAH, letter to Dick Mandelkorn, 11/08/73.

  45. RAH, letter to Laurie MacDonald, 07/28/73.

  46. RAH, letter to Forrest J. Ackerman, 06/13/50.

  47. Forrest J. Ackerman, letter to RAH, 06/27/50.

  48. Kendall Crossen, letter to RAH, 06/27/50; Forrest J. Ackerman, letter to RAH, 06/27/50.

  49. RAH, letter to “Mr. Donelan, Jr.,” 06/15/50.

  50. RAH, letter to “Mrs. Donelan, Sr.,” 07/13/50.

  51. Virginia Heinlein, IM with the author, 11/09/01.

  52. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 08/05/50.

  53. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 08/05/50.

  54. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 08/14/50.

  55. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Mr. Ed Pippin, 02/27/79.

  56. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 11/26/50.

  57. RAH, letters to Lurton Blassingame, 11/04/50, 11/26/50, and 12/18/50.

  58. Ben Babb, letter to RAH, 06/05/50.

  59. Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer cowrote When Worlds Collide (Stokes, 1933) and the sequel, After Worlds Collide, in 1934. Both were serialized in Blue Book magazine before the books were released.

  60. Aviation Week, July 3, 1950.

  61. Jinny Fowler, letter to RAH, 07/28/50.

  62. John W. Campbell, Jr., letter to RAH, 07/27/50.

  5. Alien Invasions

  1. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 09/13/50.

  2. RAH, letter to Bill Corson, 09/13/50.

  3. Dorothy Shanahan, “Heinleins’ Push-Button Home Is Model of Convenience,” Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph (09/30/51) illustrated report, 1, Section B.

  4. RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 09/19/50.

  5. Memorandum of conversation of author with Virginia Heinlein, 09/08/01.

  6. RAH, letter to Bjo Trimble, 11/21/61.

  7. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover (1988), Tape 1, Side B.

  8. RAH, letter to Bjo Trimble, 11/21/61. An image of Medusa (Lorraine Bergess) was found online on several auction sites, but the auctions contained no information about the artist or date of this 12"x16" lithograph.

  9. RAH, letter to Forrest J. Ackerman, 08/04/52.

  10. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 6, Side A.

  11. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 3, Side A.

  12. In a letter she wrote to Fred Pohl on 05/08/53, Leslyn herself called this medical crisis that started on July 4, 1950, a “series of strokes” followed by a coma. Dr. Robert James asked Dr. George Agzarian, associate professor at UCLA Medical School, to review the reported symptoms. Dr. Agzarian suggested he thought it more likely there could have been a subdural hematoma brought on by hitting her head in the midst of an alcoholic stupor or collapse. Robert James, Ph.D., “Regarding Leslyn,” The Heinlein Journal, no. 9 (July 2001): 29.

  13. RAH, letter to Henry and Cats Sang, 01/31/53.

  14. In a letter to the author undated but late in February 2011, Grace Dugan “Cats” Sang Wurtz mentioned this incident: “Somebody had called me (a distant cousin, I think) who wanted to find out where her relative was spending her old age.” The “distant cousin” was Marian Beard (sometimes, confusingly, spelled Marion, the masculine version of the name), a cousin who had grown up with Leslyn but had since lost contact. Mrs. Wurtz’s telephone call to Heinlein’s mother was inconvenient for Heinlein, but it was not unreasonable, as the Heinlein family liked Leslyn and might have kept in touch.

  In an undated letter to Heinlein in late 1952 or early 1953, Cats Sang explained the situation:

  As it happened, everyone turned over to me the task of trying to find the surviving relative, Marion Beard, so the body wouldn’t be shipped to you. I was the logical one, because as the only declared un-friend of Leslyn, I was least likely to be the recipient of her misplaced gratitude should she recover. I got in touch with Bob’s mother, and together we tried to locate Marion (Mrs. H. had already been working on it), without disturbing you two with the unpleasant business. We called Sam Kamens, thinking he might have Marion’s address. He had already talked to you. If someone made a sentimental appeal to him, it wasn’t I. Am I pardoned?

  Cats

  Leslyn did recover from this crisis, though she had a very unhappy life for a period of several years.

  15. “Silly Season” is old newspaper slang for the later months of the summer, which is usually a slow news period. Newspapers would print insubstantial material they would not even notice in more active times of the year—just to fill pages.

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

  17. Decrypted KGB files made public after the fall of the Soviet Union have confirmed the guilt of both Hiss and the Rosenbergs.

  18. This is a sentiment Heinlein voiced many times in correspondence, but see particularly RAH, letter to Rex Ivar Heinlein, 09/29/64. William A. P. White, letter to RAH, 08/24/50, was probably the first time Heinlein personally noticed the country’s postwar shift to the left.

  19. In RAH, letter to Larry and Caryl [Heinlein], 07/19/64, Heinlein lists the Hiss case as one of many contributing factors to his “transition from 110% New Dealer to the black reactionary I am now.”

  Heinlein’s personal sense of “liberal” is quite different from the contemporary usage. Before about 1969, many strains of liberalism were recognized; after the New Left, and continuing into the twenty-first century, the term is taken as synonymous with “progressive” and “left-wing.”

  The term “left-wing” was not regularly used in American politics until some time in the 1930s: It is a term of European politics that had no close parallel in American politics. The left-right dichotomy originated in the French National Assembly, where monarchists sat in a bloc on the right side of the center aisle, and small-d-democrats—i.e., liberals in the classic sense—sat on the left side of the aisle. In the American Revolution, all Tories (the English term for, roughly, their monarchist party) fled the country (or were driven out), so all American parties (at the time, Democrats and Whigs) were left-wing—except that we had then, as now, a third, unacknowledged party, a powerful holdover from seventeenth century politics in the theocratic conservatives descended from the Massachusetts Theocracy.

  In Europe, after the democratic revolutions of 1848 failed, left-wing democratic liberalism faded and was replaced, ultimately, by Marx’s “scientific socialism.” A German historian at Arizona State University once noted in a lecture a political evolution that illustrates how the changeover took place, though different countries had different specifics: After the failed democratic revolutions of 1848, the German liberal movement shifted focus to unification of the 300+ minor German principalities into a single Pan-German state as its core issue. The declaration in 1870 of the First Reich decapitated the German liberal movement—at exactly the moment that Marx and Engels were eviscerating the European Workingmen’s Movement. Marxists were able to step into a vacuum not only of power, but of foundational party issues.

  But a different evolution took place in the United States, with liberals taking up first Abolition, then the American strain of native socialism (called, sarcastically by Marx, “utopian”) that led eventually to Upton Sinclair and his EPIC program. This is He
inlein’s idea of liberalism—intense Jeffersonian Americanism combined with “social justice.”

  After the Russian Revolution of 1917, American native socialism gradually faded away, and American radical liberalism became compatible with—and was gradually absorbed by—European Leftism. The international United Front Against Fascism of the 1930s appears to have been the entering wedge. By 1950 this evolution was beginning to be evident.

  20. RAH, letter to John Arwine, 04/17/50. Heinlein’s disgruntlement with postwar Communists is not overstated: The Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939 had caused a shock wave of disillusionment in international Communist circles, since the party had been positioning Communism as the principal antagonist of Nazi Germany. The sudden alliance with Germany was widely viewed as rank and cynical hypocrisy on Stalin’s part.

  Judith Merril comments in her posthumous 2002 autobiography (assembled and partly cowritten by her daughter Emily Pohl-Weary) that her (liberal) high school fellow-classmates were already disillusioned in the late 1930s by the Soviet Union’s show-trials of the mid-1930s.

  21. RAH, Discussion Notes for University of Chicago Lecture given on February 8, 1957 and published as “Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults and Virtues” [in Basil Davenport, ed., The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism in 1959 and reprinted in Turning Points: Essays on the Art of Science Fiction (ed. Damon Knight, Harper & Row, 1977)], Opus No. 129, in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz.

  22. RAH, Discussion Notes for University of Chicago Lecture, Opus No. 129, in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz.

  23. RAH, letter to H. L. Gold, 11/27/50; Lurton Blassingame, telegram to RAH, 11/27/50.

  24. Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 12/01/50.

  25. RAH, letter to H. L. Gold, 11/27/50.

  26. H. L. Gold, letter to RAH, 12/06/50.

  27. “The Bulletin Board” did not sell to Senior Prom, perhaps because its theme is a little darker and more “realistic” than the previous two Puddin’ stories: Maureen and Cliff engineer a party for a wallflower at Maureen’s college, after which she is not a wallflower. The story was first printed in Requiem (Yoji Kondo, ed.).

  28. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 05/06/51.

  29. Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 12/19/50.

  30. Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 12/29/50.

  31. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 01/05/51 and RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh and Virginia Fowler, 01/05/51.

  32. Heinlein did receive reports on Tom Corbett, Space Cadet from friends in Los Angeles and New York, but he did not see an episode until November 1951 (that is, a year later), when the producers brought some kinescopes to the Broadmoor for an advertiser’s conference (a kinescope is a film made of the television monitor as the show is broadcast—the only TV recording technology available until videotape was introduced in 1956).

  33. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh and Virginia Fowler at Scribner, 01/05/51.

  34. RAH, letter to T. E. Dikty, 01/10/51.

  35. RAH, letter to T. E. Dikty, 01/10/51.

  36. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 01/15/51.

  37. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 01/15/51.

  38. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 1, Side B (October 21, 1988).

  39. RAH, quoted by Virginia Heinlein, in taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 3, Side A (October 21, 1988?).

  40. RAH, letter to Doña Smith, 02/03/51. Heinlein made a file of Leslyn’s letters when her “poison-pen” barrage to all of his friends and business contacts started up, but the file was probably destroyed to save on tonnage of paper when they moved from Colorado Springs to Northern California. This communication in 1950 and 1951 is discussed in RAH, letter to Robert Cornog, 08/03/56.

  41. The Campbells’ marriage had broken up in February 1950, when Doña Campbell abruptly moved to Boston, taking P.D. and Leslyn Campbell with her. John Campbell retrieved the girls to New Jersey (John W. Campbell, Jr., letter to RAH, 03/09/50). Doña married George O. Smith probably in late August 1950, as Bill Corson mentions in a letter to Heinlein dated 09/02/50 that Henry Kuttner had received a wedding announcement by postcard.

  42. Forrest J. Ackerman, who met with Leslyn in Northern California a few years later, noted the same thing:

  My wife and I had a lunch with Leslyn, and the table was set for four. The chair that was empty was not empty. It was filled with hatred for Heinlein. She practically had him there at the table with us, and every other word was about what a miserable man he was and how much she hated him, and on and on and on with this hatred.

  Forrest J. Ackerman, interview with Robert James, Ph.D., 06/09/00.

  43. RAH, letter to Doña and George Smith, 02/03/51.

  44. RAH, letter to Doña Smith, 02/03/51.

  45. John W. Campbell, Jr., letter to RAH, 03/06/51. Although Campbell was Heinlein’s best source of information about the Dianetics movement through this period, he heard from L. Sprague de Camp (East Coast), often by postcard, who seemed to delight in deflating Hubbard’s pretensions. Others added to the confusion, which continued for quite some time. Robert Cornog (West Coast) wrote Heinlein as late as November that year (Campbell consistently misspelling Sara Hubbard as “Sarah”):

  News about Ron and Sarah is hard to come by. Rumor hath it that Ron is paralyzed on one side and in a hospital in the Midwest. Sarah is alleged to be receiving $200 a month support, and living in the Los Angeles area in semi-retirement. Also writing western stories for the pulps … The “Hubbard Dianetics Foundation” is no longer listed in the Los Angeles telephone directory. The Messiah must not only promise deliverance and salvation, but he must also avoid acts which lead to “loss of altitude” to paraphrase el Ron Hubbard (11/08/51).

  46. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 04/11/51.

  47. David Hartwell, personal communication with the author, April 2013.

  48. Truman Talley, letter to RAH, 08/10/51. Most of Heinlein’s direct correspondence was with Talley of Signet, rather than with Pohl or Merril (who were going through a painful divorce at the time). Here is a sample of Heinlein’s “work” on the anthology, written to Talley (he had already turned in his Preface):

  I have just received your letter of 28 August, with copy of your letter same date to Frederik Pohl and enclosing copies of “Absalom” by Kuttner and “The Last Martian” by Fredric Brown.…

  In order to save time copies of this are going to Fred & Judy, and to Walter Bradbury; all that follows is for all of you. I’ve just read “Absalom,” found that I had read it five years ago but had forgotten the title, and I vote emphatically for it. It passes my first test of giving pleasure on rereading; therefore it rates hard covers. As for emotional impact, in my opinion it is only a shade less horrible than “Coming Attraction” and has the added advantage of being a plot story, a solved conflict, whereas “Coming Attraction,” strong as it is, is a vignette incident. It contains, I believe, a minor mistake in the mathematics but one which in no way invalidates the story. As for the rest of the science aspect it’s in a field so esoteric and concerning which so little of really hard fact is known that it is impossible (I think) for an expert in that field to say, “This could never happen.” Hank himself is a thorough student of psychiatry and psychology; I think he handles those two very fuzzy subjects very well indeed.

  I think “The Last Martian” is a strong story and I would be more than willing to see it included. I strongly doubt the possibility of Fred’s thesis, but here we are in complete terra incognito; my opinion is merely philosophical, with no data back of it.

  49. RAH, letter to Erle Korshak, 04/07/51. In RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 04/07/51, Heinlein also says, “What worries me still more is the amount of your time these jokers take up. You have been very nice about it, but I want to put a stop to it.”

  50. This piracy was mentioned only briefly in Erle Korshak, letter to RAH, 02/15/51.

  51. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/25/53—i.e., at the time the paperback contract
was being negotiated.

  52. See, e.g., RAH, letter to Marty Greenberg, 05/04/59; RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 07/29/64.

  53. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 05/15/50.

  54. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 01/05/51.

  55. “Hi-yo, Tom Corbett!” Newsweek, 80 (04/02/51).

  56. Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 07/25/51.

  57. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 04/07/51.

  58. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 05/20/51.

  59. Campbell’s relationship with Hubbard and Dianetics featured in Campbell’s correspondence with Heinlein over a period of a couple of years, from about 1950 to about 1952. Following is a mild sampling of Campbell’s analysis, from his letter to RAH dated 11/20/51:

  It is extremely difficult to give, in compact compass, the explanation of our work that would be required to make it clear … Ron’s failure was to publish before he was ready to withstand the outrageous slings and arrows of psychiatric fortune. The heat was on him, and he didn’t have his self-cooling asbestos underwear ready. He’s now operating in a not-so-good condition, with a conviction that Joe Winter, I, and the others who originally backed him, are his worst enemies. Reason: we are loyal to his original ideal, and not to his fixed idea. His original concept of Dianetics required considerable ammendation and expansion. Joe Winter and I are particularly active in trying to do that; we’ll back Ron 100% so long as he will go in that original direction. It would have been vastly to Joe Winter’s advantage to claim complete separation and independence of Ron’s Dianetics—so the MD’s are mad at him, and Ron’s mad at him because Joe came up with modifications of Ron’s original ideas.

  I’ve been trying to make him see that the best way to get somewhere is to throw out ideas to as many individuals as possible and let those individuals do the real development work. Ron, unfortunately, wants to do it all.