18. From a clipping in RAH supplemental notes to the draft bibliography for his 1975 “Are You a Rare Blood?” article for Encyclopedia Britannica, Op. 175 file, “MISCELLANEY Haptoglobins in Tristan da Cunha - H. Harris & E.B. Robson—Vox Sanguinis AABB 8 (1963): 226–30. RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz.
19. RAH, Tramp Royale, 151.
20. RAH, Tramp Royale, 171–173.
21. RAH, Tramp Royale, 180–181.
22. RAH, Tramp Royale, 180–181.
23. RAH, Tramp Royale, 190; Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Warren, 03/09/79.
24. RAH, letter to Bjo Trimble, 09/06/61. If the photograph mentioned was preserved, it has not yet been identified in the Heinlein Archive at UC Santa Cruz. Curiously, it is difficult to find information about this Ntuli, as the reputation of his son Pitika Ntuli, also a sculptor as well as painter and poet, has eclipsed that of his father. Pitika Ntuli was born in 1942 and was, therefore, only eleven years old when the Heinleins visited their Ntuli.
25. RAH, Tramp Royale, 228.
26. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Janet Crawford, 02/26/78.
27. RAH, Tramp Royale, 208.
28. RAH, Tramp Royale, 210.
29. RAH, Tramp Royale, 210.
30. Dell Comic Book Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, 8 (November–January 1954). Marked on first page in RAH’s hand “purchased in Raffles Hotel, Singapore 28 Jan 54.” Space Cadet file, RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz.
31. RAH, letter to Poul Anderson, 09/06/61.
32. RAH, Tramp Royale, 230.
33. RAH, letter to J. E. Pournelle, 05/19/63.
34. RAH, Tramp Royale, 233–4.
35. RAH, Tramp Royale, 197–8. Pichel was to die a few months later, on July 13, 1954, of heart failure.
36. RAH, Tramp Royale, 208.
37. RAH, Tramp Royale, 252.
38. RAH, Tramp Royale, 254. Nevertheless, koalas do scratch and bite if annoyed.
39. RAH, Tramp Royale, 255.
40. RAH, Tramp Royale, 257.
41. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 03/12/55.
42. RAH, Tramp Royale, 276. American magazines were also embargoed.
43. Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 02/07/52.
44. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Robert Bloch, 11/10/73.
45. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Robert Bloch, 11/10/73.
46. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 6, Side A. When the Heinleins finally got home, they found a complaint from one of those teachers that a postcard was a skimpy reply to a child’s effort to compose a letter. The teacher had discussed this serious matter in class and decided to let him eat his own books if they were so important to him.
47. Brian Finch, secretary on Futurian Society of Sydney stationery, letter to RAH, 03/31/54. Inquiries made to Australian fans in 2003 and 2004 were unable to turn up copies of tape recordings made at the time.
48. RAH, Tramp Royale, 299–300.
49. RAH, Tramp Royale, 315–6.
50. RAH, Tramp Royale, 309.
51. This summary brings into one place Heinlein’s several observations scattered throughout his narrative about the New Zealand trip. He also made a (short) summary in Tramp Royale, 327–8 and again at 341–2.
52. RAH, letter to Robert A. W. Lowndes, 03/13/56. Heinlein was to revise this opinion in subsequent trips.
53. RAH, letter to Mr. and Mrs. Collier, 12/08/76. The quote is from Laurence Binyon (1869–1943) “For the Fallen.”
54. This is essentially a paraphrase of the concluding chapter of Heinlein’s travel book about this trip, Tramp Royale.
55. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 03/17/89.
56. Modern, and especially post-60s leftism has hardly anything in common with Enlightenment-era liberalism. Even though it appears to be a canon of faith among modern leftists that there is great continuity between, e.g., Jeffersonian thought and modern progressivism, such continuity doesn’t actually seem to exist in the historical record. For a big-government central-planning, urban-oriented progressive to try to claim the mantle of Jefferson is puzzling and disconcerting, since Jefferson’s maxim “he governs best who governs least” is well known, and his vision for America was as a land of yeoman farmers.
Heinlein’s political positions in succeeding decades can only be understood by referring his various positions to Heinlein’s idea of his own liberalism, which is closer to classical liberalism than to modern progressive leftism—though so individualist that it fits comfortably within neither extreme of this spectrum.
57. RAH, letter to W. A. P. White, 04/20/54.
9. Some Beginnings of Some Ends
1. Alice Dalgliesh, letter to RAH, 05/06/54.
2. “The Big Secret of Pearl Harbor: Roosevelt ‘Invited’ Attack, Admiral Says,” U.S. News & World Report (April 2, 1954): 21.
3. U.S. News & World Report (April 2, 1954): 48, et seq.
4. Introduction to “The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor,” U.S. News & World Report (April 2, 1954): 48.
5. R. A. Theobald, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor (Devin-Adair Publications, 1954).
6. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 04/23/89.
7. In his correspondence, Heinlein spoke of his disenchantment with Roosevelt, and Virginia Heinlein testifies that the Theobald Report was the first of at least three critical incidents that bear on his later political positions and activities (the others being, in her opinion, Sputnik late in 1957 and the Patrick Henry campaign in 1958, although Heinlein also mentions other incidents as being critical to his evolution. In a letter to his brother Lawrence Lyle Heinlein, July 19, 1964, Heinlein says specifically:
My change in opinion has been a gradual one in most ways but there have been some sharp break points, too. One was the day on which the full story on Pearl Harbor finally came out—and I’ve had no use for FDR since. Another was a day in Jugoslavia when I watched American tanks being handed over to Tito. Oh, there have been many other things—the Alger Hiss case, Operation Keelhaul, our forgotten Korean War prisoners, Castro and our State Department, Aid to Dependent Children and the “professional” relief client, many things.
But there is a logical gap between disenchantment with a former leader of the party and making a break with his life-long political party. Heinlein never discussed his resignation from the Democratic Party, but that the break happened at this time suggests that it was tied up with his recent experiences. I have here lined up some of the elements not often visible in the documentation, which I estimate went into Heinlein’s taking stock of “the entire situation.”
8. Heinlein’s letters discussing the New Deal and EPIC, scant though they are (several discussed and cited in Learning Curve when dealing with the period), make no distinction between EPIC and the New Deal, except on the basis of differing tactical approaches to what are assumed to be the same political and social goals.
9. RAH, letter to Robert A. W. Lowndes, 03/13/56.
10. RAH, letter to Rex Heinlein, 09/29/64. Heinlein had advocated voting the party-plank in his 1946 book, How to Be a Politician, but he abandoned the practice when he became a single-issue voter after World War II, over the internationalization of atomic weapons.
11. RAH, letter to Rex Heinlein, 09/29/64.
12. L. Sprague de Camp, postcard to RAH, 05/24/54.
13. Per itinerary titled “Schedule for Trip East” and dated 05/21/54, preserved in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz.
14. The anecdote is given in Isaac Asimov’s autobiography, In Memory Yet Green, at 74.
15. Per itinerary titled “Schedule for Trip East” and dated 05/21/54, preserved in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz.
16. RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 03/28/53.
17. RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 03/28/53.
18. Heinlein did not record any information about this session contemporaneously; several months later G. Harry Stine wrote to Heinlein asking for his side of the complaints Campbell was making to him in letters. To set the context of his response, Heinlein pro
vided all the background given here. The letters to Stine are cited as they occur.
19. RAH, letter to G. Harry Stine, 07/27/54.
20. RAH, letter to G. Harry Stine, 07/18/54.
21. RAH, letter to G. Harry Stine, 07/27/54.
22. RAH, letter to G. Harry Stine, 07/18/54.
23. RAH, letter to G. Harry Stine, 07/18/54.
24. There is no specific information about when “their last round of fertility testing” took place. The most recent time the subject came up, even obliquely, was in 1952, probably in connection with Ginny’s false pregnancy after their National Parks road trip.
This was probably the occasion when the subject of fertility surgery for Ginny came up because of “a minor malfunction that might have been corrected with estimated 25% success through prosthesia involving a laparotomy for her.” Heinlein goes on to note: “I did not like those odds for her as she was then 36 when we pinned it down—and I was too old for a legal adoption—so we accepted the situation…” (RAH, letter to Greg Benford, 11/08/73).
That was probably the event that triggered their exploration of adoption.
25. Virginia Heinlein, IM with the author, 01/01/01.
26. G. Harry Stine, letter to RAH, 06/23/54. Stine literally said: “He should not be belittling you because of your approach to problems. And vice versa.” The “vice versa” must have been preemptive; since this was the letter in which Stine informed Heinlein that he had received the letter from Campbell, there had not been any “belittling” on Heinlein’s part.
27. RAH, letter to G. Harry Stine, 07/27/54.
28. Walter Bradbury, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 06/24/54.
29. RAH, letter to G. Harry Stine, 07/18/54.
30. Heinlein asked for the return of the manuscript for Tramp Royale by letter to Lurton Blassingame, 08/30/54—after the summer visits were over.
31. RAH, letter to G. Harry Stine, 07/27/54. In this letter he also talks about the typewriter’s “silencer housing.” This typewriter and its housing was preserved among the “realia” in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz.
32. The sales contract for the Model 12 Silent Underwood typewriter is in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz, and shows a purchase price of $513.57, whereas book advances from Scribner were running around $500.00 at that time. The contemporary equivalent therefore, would be about $20,000.
33. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/09/01.
34. Karen Heinlein (Kilpatrick), letter to Robert and Ginny Heinlein, 09/11/54.
35. RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 08/30/54.
36. Learned Bulman, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 08/30/54.
37. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 10/05/54.
38. Scribner had published From Here to Eternity in 1951, and the book came under attack (including boycotts of bookstores) by the Catholic group National Organization for Decent Literature because of its coarse language and sexual content. What Heinlein could not know at the time was that From Here to Eternity had its own prepublication censorship troubles with Scribner’s editors in which Jones cut back on some of the expletives and removed some references to soldiers engaging in casual homosexual prostitution. The book was filmed in 1953—the year before Heinlein’s exchange with Dalgliesh—with its iconic scene of Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster clinching on a beach in the incoming surf. The movie won six Oscars.
39. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 09/07/54.
40. Alice Dalgliesh, letter to RAH, 09/13/54.
41. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 09/15/54.
42. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 09/15/54.
43. The year in which Tunnel in the Sky was written, 1954, was also the year of the Supreme Court’s seminal decision in Linda Brown v. Board of Education (357 U.S. 483) overturning the “separate but equal” doctrine that permitted segregated schools. Separate but equal had been standard doctrine throughout much of the United States since 1890. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 eliminated separate but equal from all areas of public accommodation. The idea of racially integrated high school classes would have been shocking in 1954.
44. Alice Dalgliesh, letter to RAH, 03/16/55.
45. RAH, letter to Virginia Fowler, 01/07/55.
46. See, for example, Richard Lingeman, Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street (New York: Random House, 2002).
10. Vintage Season
1. Thirty-six thousand words is about the point in the story at which Jill has removed Mike from the hospital and decides to take him to Jubal Harshaw—possibly at the scene in which the Secretary-General’s wife consults her astrologer about the Man from Mars.
2. Page 148 of Heinlein’s earliest manuscript has our first view of Jubal Harshaw and his menage. At the bottom of the page, Jill arrives with Mike.
3. RAH, letter to Theodore Sturgeon, 02/11/55.
4. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 02/23/55. Fifty-four thousand words would be close to page 200 of ms.—around Mike’s first demonstration of his “Martian powers” to Jubal, and also around the point at which Jubal Harshaw tells Jill that Caxton has probably been kidnapped.
5. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 02/13/55.
6. RAH, letter to Theodore Sturgeon, 02/11/55.
7. Two of these ideas Sturgeon did turn into stories, “The Other Man” and “And Now the News” (both published in 1956). “And Now the News” is widely regarded as one of Sturgeon’s finest stories, and it became the title story for its volume (9 of 13) of the North Atlantic Books series Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon.
Sturgeon told how the story came to be in his guest of honor speech at the 1962 Chicago World SF Convention, Chicon II, and the speech was reprinted in The Proceedings of Chicon II, Earl Kemp, ed. (Advent: Publishers, 1963). Sturgeon also told the anecdote in his story introduction for “And Now the News…” in his last collection, The Golden Helix (1979).
“The Other Man” was collected into The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon (1972). Heinlein’s letter was published in The New York Review of Science Fiction, no. 84 (August 1995).
8. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 3, p. 11 of transcript in RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz.
9. RAH, letter to Michael J. Harrington, 07/25/61.
10. RAH, letter to Lester del Rey, 04/19/57.
11. RAH, letter to Bud Bacchus, 04/15/55.
12. In a later letter, Heinlein cites the worsening headlines as a supplementary reason for giving up the idea of adopting. RAH, letter to “Herbert and Ginny” (Kee), 09/20/58.
13. RAH, letter to Larry and Caryl Heinlein, 07/19/64.
14. Probably to Frankfurt, although their immediate destination is nowhere recorded in the documents.
15. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Second Series, Tape C, Side A.
16. RAH, letter to Stan Mullen, 07/15/55.
17. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 10, Side A.
18. In 1891 Mark Twain attended the Bayreuth Festival with his wife and family, and saw Parsifal (twice), which he said he enjoyed in spite of the singing, Tannhaeuser, and Tristan und Isolde. Twain wrote up his Bayreuth experience for the Chicago Tribune, appearing on December 6, 1891, as “Mark Twain at Bayreuth.” The piece has been republished several times, sometimes under the title “At the Shrine of St. Wagner,” and is available online at http://www.twainquotes.com/Travel1891/Dec1891.html (accessed 05/01/11). Of Wagner’s music, Twain quipped that it was better than it sounded.
Heinlein made little contemporaneous comment about the Ring at Bayreuth in 1954. Later he said that he became a fan of the Ring cycle after the Seattle production in 1975. After commenting that Seattle could not command the quality of the voices heard at Bayreuth, he went on to say: “… now I am a Wagner fan, as the Seattle Opera Company production followed as closely as possible the old man’s explicit stage directions.” (RAH, letter to Tessa Dick, 08/03/75.)
19. Ted Carnell, letter to RAH, 08/25/55.
20. RAH, letter to Alfred Bester,
10/17/55.
21. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 3, Side B.
22. The exact date of the Heinleins’ departure for Colorado Springs is not mentioned, but in his bread-and-butter note to Lurton Blassingame, 09/23/55, Heinlein mentions seeing the devastating Hurricane Ione off to one side on departure, which places the date at 09/19/55, when Ione was at its 120 mph peak over North Carolina.
23. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 9, Side A.
24. This outline was in 2006 made into a complete novel titled Variable Star by Spider Robinson. As of this writing (2011) three sequels have been contracted for.
25. Lurton Blassingame, letter to Oscar Friend, 11/03/55.
26. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 12/13/55.
27. Double Star is widely regarded as one of the best science-fiction novels of the 1950s and was a choice by Library of America for its American Science Fiction series, Classic Novels 1956–1958.
28. Howard Browne (1908–99) assumed editorship of Amazing Stories in 1949, after Ray Palmer left Ziff-Davis. In 1952 he founded a companion magazine for Amazing in digest format called Fantastic. Response to this stylish magazine was so positive that Ziff-Davis resurrected an earlier, abandoned plan to change Amazing from pulp to digest format starting with the April–May 1953 bimonthly issue.
Pulp magazines were usually published in a 7" × 10" format on rough pulp paper; the “digest size,” presumably named after the famous Reader’s Digest magazine, was smaller, typically 8¼" or 8½" × 5½", which typically used a higher grade of paper. A larger third standard magazine size, called “bedsheet,” was adopted by many of the prestige “slick” magazines (such as Life magazine and The Saturday Evening Post) 9¾" × 12". Some of the pulp magazines used this format as well: the first SF magazine, Amazing Stories, was printed in bedsheet size from 1926 until the 1940s, and Astounding, too, flirted briefly with this format in 1942 and 1943, and again in the mid–1960s.
29. By the time the April issue of Amazing rolled around, Bridey Murphy was a household name and national cause célèbre for fakery. Robert found himself explaining over and over that he hadn’t intended any special advocacy:
Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2 Page 69