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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  This was only the third time Hugo Awards had been given out, and many of the traditions now associated with the Awards had not yet been developed. For example, although the Hugos are now given out the year following publication, the Locus Index to SF Awards shows the eligibility years for the 1956 Hugos as 1955–1956. It has also become customary for an author who cannot be present to accept his award to designate a proxy to receive it, but in any case, Heinlein did not know Double Star had even been nominated.

  In the absence of facts, the most charitable speculation could be that, perhaps, Toastmaster Robert Bloch announced the award without handing off the Hugo, and it was inadvertently stored with the convention’s effects until someone got around to shipping it out—after being prompted, possibly by this incident between Heinlein and Kornbluth—which leaves only the question of why Kornbluth would say such a thing in the first place.

  In e-mail discussion about the biography with editor David Hartwell, and then with the author, Robert Silverberg (who has a photograph of himself taken at NyCon II with the Hugo) said that he was sitting next to Kornbluth during an early round of balloting for the Hugo, and Kornbluth told him he was anxious for his 1955 novel, Not This August to win. Silverberg thinks it quite likely that he was severely disappointed when he did not. (e-mail Robert Silverberg to David Hartwell, 02/18/14; e-mail Robert Silverberg to the author, 02/21/14)

  So there is a possible motive. Kornbluth and Ackerman also had a long history of antagonism: perhaps Kornbluth was simply taking the opportunity to create trouble for both Heinlein and Ackerman.

  22. Heinlein did not record the dates of these trips or the reason for the side trip to Washington, D.C.

  23. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 06/18/58.

  24. Ed Emshwiller, letter to RAH, 04/29/59.

  25. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 02/23/55.

  26. Searching for a reason that Heinlein might have stalled on Stranger, and then was able to resume, is a highly problematical project. Since the development Heinlein did write was to drop his journalist, Ben Caxton, out of the narrative, the choice of viewpoint character seems significant. Of all the literary models Heinlein might have taken for the journalist-reporting-on-a-phenomenon (e.g., Upton Sinclair’s What Didymus Did, London, 1954, It Happened to Didymus, U.S. 1958, has been characterized as a projection of a book of the Apocrypha into modern Hollywood), probably the strongest was Olaf Stapledon’s 1935 Odd John, a book that recurs frequently in his correspondence. In this storytelling model, the subject abuses and tricks the reporter, using his credulity or amiability for his own ends. This would have implied a much greater degree of crafty self-awareness than Valentine Michael Smith can exhibit in the early part of the story. Keeping the reporter would have implied a quite different kind of story than Heinlein had in mind. The solution he eventually arrived at was to write Ben Caxton out of the story and give Valentine Michael Smith a satisfactorily crafty foil, Jubal Harshaw—a character, recall, which Heinlein developed out of Kettle Belly Baldwin of “Gulf”—the executive secretary for an organization of activist supermen—and gave the name of a radio journalist of whom he highly approved, Ruth Harshaw. By the end of Stranger, this is the role Jubal Harshaw assumes.

  27. If Robert Heinlein was not a morning person, Ginny was just the opposite, repulsively cheery and energetic in the early mornings—when the house was quiet and she could develop perfect concentration—needing only a jolt of sugar in the form of orange juice to get herself going.

  28. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 04/05/58.

  29. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 9, Side A.

  30. The picture Heinlein gives of this process, in his introduction in Expanded Universe to “Who are the Heirs of Patrick Henry,” is that the ad was generated immediately on reading the SANE ad; however, a letter written that day to Lurton Blassingame (April 5, 1958), shows that although Ginny has already suggested a Patrick Henry campaign, Heinlein is at a loss as to how to proceed and is looking for an already-existing committee or political group to join.

  But the Heinleins’s ad was published on April 12 and therefore cannot have been placed with the Gazette-Telegraph later than April 11, and is more likely to have been placed on April 10. The reaction may not have been instantaneous, but it was nevertheless very rapid.

  31. The entire text of the Patrick Henry ad is contained in Heinlein’s Expanded Universe collection, which is still available in paperback, but also published intact in the Virginia Edition vol. xxxi.

  32. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 9, Side B (March 1? 2000).

  33. RAH, letter to H. L. Gold, 05/06/58.

  34. Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 04/17/58.

  35. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 04/29/58.

  36. In his June 18, 1958, letter to Lurton Blassingame, Heinlein says, “We were convinced of this [the campaign was a failure] a month ago, from the poor response. But we tried to keep going a while longer and searched frantically for some way to make ourselves effective because of two letters, one from Admiral Strauss just before he resigned as chairman of AEC and one from Dr. Teller.” Mid-May 1958 would be about four weeks after the start of the Patrick Henry Campaign.

  37. Quoted in RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 06/18/58.

  38. Quoted in RAH, letter to Rex and Kathleen Heinlein, 05/17/58. General Alfred Gruenther was the American Supreme Allied Commander in Europe from 1953–1956.

  39. Hermann Deutsch column in the New Orleans Item (May 8, 1958).

  40. RAH, letter to Kathleen and Rex Heinlein, 05/17/58. Heinlein typically kept his itineraries and speaking schedules when traveling in this way, but for reasons unknown no such record was found in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz among the “Patrick Henry Campaign” papers. It is not impossible that those records were destroyed rather than moved from Colorado Springs to Santa Cruz—but similar records from 1964 were preserved. Lacking such detailed records, it is not possible to reconstruct his out-of-town trips for speaking engagements, except as they are mentioned in other sources, such as letters.

  41. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 06/18/58b. He was also pleased with the response of Truman Talley at Signet.

  42. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 06/18/56b.

  43. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 06/18/58b.

  44. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 04/24/58.

  45. The quotes are taken from two undated notecards apparently written contemporaneously with panels at the “Astro Symp. Denver 58.” The symposium took place at the end of May 1958, but the dates are not clear from Heinlein’s mentions in letters, and this specific symposium was not found in records searches.

  46. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 04/26/58.

  47. To Lurton Blassingame Heinlein wrote a fuller explanation:

  Our personal mailing list includes, of course, many people in the writing and publishing business and many people who are mutual acquaintances of yours and mine. Let me tell you of some of them.

  Shining out like the names of Rodger Young are yours, Victor Weybright, Mac Talley, and Marty Greenberg. Also Fredric Brown, Philip José Farmer, Erik Fennel, Margo Fischer, Ruth Harshaw, Earl Kemp, Alan E. Nourse, Thomas N. Scortia, Harry Stine, and Jack Williamson. A very few of those names you may not recognize but they are all connected with the writing business.

  But that is our corporal’s guard—fourteen people. Of the couple of hundred writers and editors whom I know most refused by failing to answer even the follow up; the rest refused overtly. Stanley Mullen simply ignored it (and this case is personally very distressing to me). Lew Tilley signed and contributed to the “Sane Nuclear Policy” ad—and when I asked Lew about it, I learned (for the first time in years of knowing him) that he is a pacifist and regards people like myself with contempt—how far can hypocrisy go? He said to me, “Bob, I knew you were a reactionary but I preferred to ignore it.” Ned Brown answered me by sending it back unsigned with no comment. Horace Go
ld jittered in seven different directions and asked me please to drop the subject—this I could forgive, as I know that Horace is a sick man … but I dropped Horace along with the subject. Tony Boucher and J. Francis McComas both failed to answer personal letters (something neither has ever done in the past) and this I expected, for each is pink as hell, tending toward pacifism, and strongly inclined to the anti-anti-Communist attitude—you know; the man who can forgive Alger Hiss but never Whittaker Chambers. John W. Campbell wrote a long letter agreeing that atomic tests should continue but not signing the P. H. letter—instead he expounded a complex theory about how democracies were innately incapable of making correct decisions. (He may be right but it’s the only game in town; I had to file him under “Fence Straddlers.”)

  Robert Bloch turned out to be a pacifist. Miss Dalgliesh wrote me a confused letter, agreeing with me on every important point, but firmly refusing to sign a P. H. pledge—privately, I think the old gal is scared silly of World War III and hopes that she can close her eyes and have it go away. Jinny Fowler ignored it … Charles Scribner himself simply ignored it—maybe he thinks he is God but I think that if I were a publisher and I got a letter from one of my writers, whose books had earned my firm a profit in excess of a hundred thousand dollars, I would at least grant him the courtesy of an answer. The hell with him—I’m sorry to find it necessary to do business with Scribner’s.

  I did get a good solid pleasing answer from one of the editors of the SatEvePost and if you have been reading their editorials, you know that they are as solid on this as you are or I myself. Maybe I will again put most of my effort into trying to write for the Post, let Marty Greenberg have the trade book, and leave pocketbook with Mac Talley. I might not make much money with that routine but at least I would have the satisfaction of doing business with patriots.

  What do you know of the political bias of the trade-book houses? Harper’s I know is pinko; I wouldn’t be caught dead in the place. But that is the only one I know about—and there is no point in jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

  I must shut up; this letter is morbid. (RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 06/18/58.)

  48. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 06/18/58.

  49. RAH, letter to Hermann Deutsch, 07/09/59.

  12. Waiting Out the End

  1. RAH, letter to Mrs. Omer E. Warneke, 06/19/58.

  2. RAH, letter to Erle Korshak and T. E. Dikty, DBA Shasta, 06/17/58.

  3. Dikty later told Heinlein he had not been formally partnered with Korshak since 1956. T. E. Dikty, letter to RAH, 01/14/59.

  4. RAH, letter to T. E. Dikty and Erle Korshak, 06/17/58.

  5. Heinlein is probably referring to White House Chief of Staff Sherman Adams (1899–1986). Adams was forced to resign in 1958 in a scandal over a bribe of a vicuña coat and an oriental carpet from a Boston textile manufacturer who was being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission.

  6. RAH, letter to Hermann Deutsch, 07/09/58.

  7. RAH, letter to Hermann Deutsch, 07/09/58.

  8. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 04/28/58.

  9. RAH, letter to Hermann Deutsch, 07/09/58.

  10. “I’m My Own Grandpa” was a novelty song written by Dwight Latham and Moe Jaffe and performed by Lonzo & Oscar in 1947. The gimmick of this song was that by a bizarre and unlikely combination of marriages a man becomes stepfather to his own stepmother—thus his own [step]grandfather.

  11. Ray Russell, Playboy executive editor, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 07/24/58.

  12. RAH, letter to Marty Greenberg, 05/04/59. The book had been issued in 1958, though Gnome did not include any copyright information.

  13. RAH, Accession Notes for Podkayne of Mars, 11/05/68.

  14. RAH, letter to Larry Heinlein, 10/26/58.

  15. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/07/99. In other letters, Mrs. Heinlein explains the context of her decision to study Russian:

  We were in a period of appeasement of the Russians.… a thing neither of us wanted to see.

  It further affected our actions—I took classes in the Russian language, Robert turned away from it, and wrote … He despaired of showing his friends the folly of appeasement.

  Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 03/12/00. In an e-mail to Dr. Robert James, 09/05/02, she explained that she was studying Russian after the failure of the Patrick Henry campaign, “… Starship Troopers … was written at a fever pitch, following the abortive lack of success of our Patrick Henry business … At that time, I was studying Russian, and he surprised me by proposing a trip to the USSR.”

  The failure of the Patrick Henry campaign was probably only the final incident of a sequence that included the abortive Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and Sputnik in October 1957. Heinlein expressed the opinion that the Eisenhower administration’s failures to take action to contain what looked like an unstoppable momentum for Nikita Khruschev’s USSR would result in the United States effectively surrendering its sovereignty within the foreseeable, near-term future. Ginny did not record her specific reasons for taking up Russian, but it is easy to guess that she wanted to be prepared for Russian hegemony during her lifetime.

  Looking backward through knowledge of what actually did happen in the next several years, this position, very understandable at the time, is no longer obvious to us. It was the best prediction that could be made at the time, given the data available to the Heinleins in 1958.

  16. The Air Force Academy north of Colorado Springs had just begun operations in August 1958; the first graduating class, the class of 1959, had been training at Lowry Air Force Base at Denver, Colorado, since the facility at Colorado Springs was not yet finished when they were sworn in.

  17. Lurton Blassingame, letter to “Mr. Siegel” of the Fender law offices, 06/29/59.

  18. Payne (1912–89) reported that when he had first approached Universal for a Puppet Masters film in 1953,

  The head of the studio listened attentively, was very favorably inclined, and then read the book. There was silence for several days, and I then got a message that he was letting his wife read the book. A week passed, and then, in a meeting with him, I got this reaction. It was an engrossing piece of material, he was unable to put it down, his wife read it, and was unable to sleep for several nights. This equated to the fact that the picture was too fearsome to make. It was unfair to scare an audience that much.

  Of course, it is funny, but it is ordinary thinking in this strange racket. It made me sure, however, that I was right about the material.

  Payne had also optioned Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man and Cyril Kornbluth’s Not This August, which he intended to package together with The Puppet Masters for film (John Payne, letter to RAH, 07/23/59).

  The option offer for The Puppet Masters was still on the table when The Brain Eaters was released; Payne later suggested reopening the negotiations when the piracy matter was settled, after floating a counter-offer through a third party. Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 06/30/59. The matter is covered in greater detail in the 1959 portion of this biography.

  19. Lawrence Lyle Heinlein’s promotion was not announced publically until May 1959—see LLH telegram to RAH, 05/19/59—but backdated to November 1958. It may well have been a family news item at the time Starship Troopers was being planned.

  20. RAH, letter to Bud [Lawrence Lewis] Heinlein, 10/29/59.

  21. Undated index card note in the Starship Troopers manuscript file, RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz.

  22. From the second series of Barrack-Room Ballads. The quotation of “Danny Deever” in the book may be a kind of metaleptic reference, as “Danny Deever” is in the first series of Barrack-Room Ballads (1892).

  23. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company (1926 Riverside Library edition with introduction by Heywood Broun), 189.

  24. RAH, letter to Laurie A. MacDonald, 10/14/68.

  25. RAH, letter to Ted Sturgeon, 03/05/62.

  26. RAH, letter to
Alice Dalgliesh, 02/03/59, marked “Never Sent.”

  27. RAH, letter to Judith Merril, 11/01/67, marked “Never Sent.”

  28. RAH, letter to Lt. Sandra Fulton, 08/07/65.

  29. It is possible that Heinlein started with the “Shoulder the Sky” title as a direct reaction to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which had been published in 1957.

  30. When Heinlein finished the manuscript for what was still at that point Sky Soldier, he told Blassingame that he anticipated trouble with Dalgliesh but would not change the book to suit her (RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 11/22/58). When he finally did send the manuscript to Dalgliesh, he notified Blassingame, saying he might as well “get the row over with.” RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 01/10/59; and in Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 3, Side A, 14 of transcript in RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz: “We both knew she wasn’t going to like it, right from the scratch—and it was no great surprise to us when she advised him to put it on the shelf for a year and then redo it.”

  31. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 02/03/59.

  32. Undated three-by-five index card in Virginia Heinlein’s hand inserted into RAH’s file copy of Starship Troopers.

  33. Michael Garrett, “Johnny Rico’s Nationality,” The Heinlein Journal, No. 5 (July 1999).

  34. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 01/02/59. In Heinlein’s draft Answers to Interrogatories in the Puppet Masters plagiarism suit against Roger Corman and The Brain Eaters, dated 10/13/60, he says bluntly: “So many of the details are essentially like those in the book that there can be no question of co-incidence; this is a deliberate piracy.”

  35. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 01/10/59.

  36. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 01/10/59.

  37. Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 01/21/59.

  38. Alice Dalgliesh, letter to RAH, 02/11/59.

  39. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 01/22/59.

  40. The original letter from Miss Dalgliesh to RAH seems not to have been preserved, but there are enough remarks about it by Heinlein in other correspondence to reconstruct, at least partially, its contents. Virginia Heinlein mentioned in an editorial note in Grumbles from the Grave that Dalgliesh had suggested it be marketed as an adult serial or else put away for a while.