Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2
Page 79
We made very special efforts to get to State College so he [Klass] could do this interview with Robert. It was at the behest of some publisher or something, who was anxious to get it into the New York Times. And he never got off the dime with all this material. He got so bemused by Robert’s periodic sentences that he never got them written down or something.… he never wrote it down in publishable form, at least. And presently, it being topical, why, it was no longer useful.
(Virginia Heinlein, interview with Leon Stover, 1987, Tape 1, Side A.)
Prof. Klass was quite frail in 2004, but his wife and daughter both concurred that the reel-to-reel tapes of the interview had been placed in their basement storage and were probably still there. But to date they have not been unearthed or made available. Prof. Klass died in 2010.
44. Except as otherwise noted, all quotations from Phil Klass excerpted from transcription of taped hall conversation with Mr. Klass, Robert James, and the author, at NorEasCon III, September 5, 2003, as quoted in “Textual Comparison of Three Versions of Robert A. Heinlein’s Forrestal Lecture,” in The Heinlein Journal, no. 15 (July 2004): 6.
45. In fact, Bester had “won” the pseudo-contest that got Heinlein writing pulp in the first place, and his first story (“The Broken Axiom”) appeared in the April 1939 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories just as John Campbell was accepting Heinlein’s first story, “Life-Line.” That is, the notice of “writing contest” (that was actually a call for amateur writers to become professional science-fiction writers) originally appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories in October 1938, and “The Broken Axiom” was written in response to that notice. The matter of the Thrilling Wonder Stories notice and Heinlein’s start in writing is detailed in chapter 17 of Learning Curve, 213–35.
46. Sir William S. Gilbert, “The Yarn of the ‘Nancy Bell’” (1966).
47. RAH, letter to Dick Mandelkorn, 11/08/73. Of the five books he had in process, none (probably) was actually completed and published, though one title, Grumbles from the Grave (originally intended to be a memoir) was recycled by Mrs. Heinlein for a posthumous selection of Heinlein’s letters. Mrs. Heinlein was less enthusiastic about this project: The amount of kicking around he planned to give people in his memoirs would anger some people—and leave her with the pile of lawsuits. He fiddled with this project for many years, collecting dozens of three-by-five cards with notations of memorable events in his life. The index card notations are somewhat cryptic, as the 1974 card demonstrates: “Sidg. & Jack. Marymon SS Dirac ’29 Am. Human award. Mariposa xmas.” Cf. also the 1975 card: “Mariposa home (Islands). Canada & World. Rare Blood EB Ring Cycle - Monterey - Alaska - Rare Blood.”
Heinlein probably lost interest in a memoir after the quasi-autobiographical “interstitial notes” he did for Expanded Universe in 1979. Another of the five was to be a book on writing, comparable for the 1970s to Jack Woodford’s Trial and Error. Mrs. Heinlein worked on that project after Heinlein’s death, trying to bring together selections from his letters and so forth, but was unable to bring it to fruition.
The other three projects have not been identified, but it is possible he was beginning to assemble the earliest selection of material that would become The Panki-Barsoom Number of the Beast in 1977 and The Number of the Beast in 1980.
48. Joint Review by J. Leonard in the “Books of the Times” department of The New York Times, titled “Two Tales for the Future” (08/22/73): 35. Leonard is simultaneously insulting and complimentary throughout, as is illustrated by this comment late in the review:
Really, besides being the sort of compulsive aphorist you can only shut up with a knuckle sandwich, Mr. Heinlein is a dirty old man, part goat and part Petronius. If it doesn’t matter—and to me it doesn’t—that all his characters sound and behave exactly the same, it’s because the man is a master of beguilement. He pulls so hard on the dugs of sentiment that disbelief is not merely suspended; it is abolished. A great entertainment. I envy everybody who hasn’t read “Time Enough for Love,” because you can do so and I’ve already finished.
49. Theodore Sturgeon, “If…” New York Times Book Review (September 23, 1972): 38.
25. On to Other Things
1. RAH, letter to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, 06/20/73. This is a fascinating letter, full of hard-nosed and useful advice, writer to writer, but much too long to quote extensively here. Heinlein’s letters about The Mote in God’s Eye to Niven and Pournelle are published in the Virginia Edition, Vol. xli, Letters 3 [1960–87].
2. RAH, letter to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, 06/20/73.
3. RAH, letter to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, 06/20/73.
4. Heinlein said as much to the author when they first corresponded in 1973.
5. RAH, letter to Walter Minton, 12/31/73.
6. RAH, draft letter to John Conlan, undated but after 05/25/73. Heinlein is referring to Charles W. Lyon, the incumbent in the 1938 Assembly District 59 race covered in Learning Curve, chapter 16, “Party Animal,” 201–13. Lyon was convicted of grand theft and conspiracy in a liquor license scandal in 1954 (i.e., graft) and served eighteen months of a five-year sentence at San Luis Obispo Men’s Colony, when he was pardoned by Governor Goodwin Knight in 1958 and thereafter became a lobbyist. He died in 1960 of cancer.
7. Both quotations from RAH, letter to John P. Conlan, draft—undated but after May 25, 1973.
8. RAH, letter to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, 08/26/73.
9. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Robert Bloch, 10/13/73. It is unclear whose opinion she was quoting; the Heinleins had not been able to see the show.
10. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 07/10/00.
11. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 07/10/00.
12. RAH, letter to Clare and Dorothy Heinlein, 07/07/73. Heinlein is probably mangling the skin cancer salve/drug Efuxed (Fluorouacil), also named, as he says, “5 FU.”
13. RAH, letter to Greg Benford, 11/08/73. The bracketing of “three of my four Hugos” implies 1959 and the publication of Starship Troopers.
14. RAH, letter to Greg Benford, 11/08/73.
15. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven, 09/19/73.
16. Rita Bottoms, letter to Alexei Panshin, 08/10/73.
17. RAH, letter to Mrs. Thomas V. [Rita] Bottoms, 09/10/73.
18. Panshin and Heinlein in Dimension had won the Hugo Award for Best Fanwriting in 1967 and his Rite of Passage won the Best Novel Hugo in 1968.
19. RAH, letter to Mrs. Thomas V. [Rita] Bottoms, 09/10/73.
20. Paul Crawford’s letter to Panshin dated 10/29/73 found the visit “frustrating. I was able to gather some interesting information, but most of the precise information we needed [about the dates on which specific works were written] remained just beyond my grasp.” Heinlein’s accession notes had been removed from public accessibility by that time, and Crawford apparently did not realize that virtually all the information about composition dates and sales are stored with the manuscript files he looked at—and which he termed “uninteresting.”
21. RAH, letter to Margot Fisher, 11/21/73; RAH, letter to Tom and Audrey Hollyman, 10/18/73.
22. RAH, letter to Laurie MacDonald, 12/12/73.
23. RAH, letter to Christine Floyd, 12/03/73.
24. RAH, draft letter to Philip José Farmer, 11/21/73.
25. RAH, letter to Howard de Vore, 10/01/73.
26. RAH, letter to Walter Minton, 12/31/73.
27. Forrest J. Ackerman, taped interview with Robert James, Ph.D., 06/09/00.
28. RAH, letter to Forrest J. Ackerman, 11/17/73.
29. RAH, “Politics of Pragmatism,” Human Events: Your Weekly Washington Report (01/26/74).
30. Rennie McCoy, letter to RAH, 06/04/74.
31. Terry Quist, letter to RAH, 11/24/74.
32. Request dated 02/14/74.
33. 09/15/74. This version is reproduced in “A Fourth Version of the Forrestal Lecture” by William H. Patterson, Jr., in The Heinlein Journal, no
. 16 (January 2005): 4–5.
34. David N. Grant, letter to RAH, dated 12/04/74.
35. The silver mine incident, with the Sophie and Shively lode, is detailed in chapter 13 of Learning Curve, at pages 168–70.
36. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Caryl and Larry Heinlein, 12/28/73.
37. RAH, letter to Ann A. Hancock (ed. Viking Press), 06/23/74.
38. Cf. Philip José Farmer, letter to RAH, 06/13/73:
The voters of the SFWA would never nominate it [Time Enough for Love], but then what else would you expect from those finks? (I hasten to add that some of its members are among the greatest people on this earth, but for the majority I have an attitude bordering on contempt[)].
And Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/07/99:
We were aware that Robert would never win the Nebula. His brothers in the craft did not want him to. And they also used the Australian balloting to keep him from getting one … Oh, yes, his colleagues did not like him!.… I do not think that the SFWA people thought in those terms [corrupting the balloting] when they set down Time Enough for Love—they just did not want him to win a Nebula. And those are much prettier awards than the Hugos—honor or no.
The Nebula Award is a block of clear lucite with some science-fictional device and a spiral nebula (galaxy) of glitter embedded in the lucite. Each is handmade, and each is a unique work of art.
39. The Club of Rome was a global think tank formed in 1968. In 1972 it issued a report titled Limits to Growth, a Malthusian examination of the consequences of continued population growth and resource depletion, and predicted economic and social collapse in the twenty-first century. Limits to Growth had a profound effect on futurist thinking and particularly within the science-fiction community.
40. Philip K. Dick, letter to RAH, 02/11/74.
41. Philip K. Dick, letter to RAH, 05/10/74.
42. Heinlein’s letter to Philip K. Dick was not preserved in his Archival PKD file.
43. When Mrs. Heinlein got back to Santa Cruz, she asked her bank about renting a terminal for her own use in keeping their accounts, which were becoming more and more complicated. Unfortunately, the price they quoted was a little steep for their needs: ten thousand dollars a month.
44. Robert Kephart (1934–2004), libertarian entrepreneur, philanthropist, and publisher of Human Events, founder of Libertarian Review and Books for Libertarians. In September 1973 Robert and Virginia Heinlein were informed by Lurton Blassingame that Books for Libertarians had obtained a tape recording of the Forrestal Lecture and was selling it commercially, without having obtained copyright—which would prevent the Analog appearance of the lecture. Kephart not only apologized and corrected the error immediately, he became a friend of the Heinleins, with whom he had a great deal in common.
45. A fan who was present, Tom Collins, reconstructed Heinlein’s talk from memory as the first part of “Tonight I Met Heinlein” by Tom Collins, first published in Transient #31 (1974?), web-published by Alexei Panshin at http://www.panshin/critics/Showdown/tomcollins.html (accessed 03/04/2014).
First, I’ll try to recollect what he said, then I’ll get into what he did and what I thought and all that.
He said an ancestor of his, Peter Heinlein, invented the escapement for watches, and that watches were a wonderful invention because that way you didn’t have to shoot the speaker to make him stop talking.
He said a word about taking creative writing courses: Don’t.
He gave the five rules for writing (the major rules; there are also minor ones like always use a black ribbon, and throw it away when only half used because all editors suffer from eyestrain). The rules were laid down by him years ago, and are something like write, don’t revise, keep writing, keep submitting what you do write. I didn’t write them down. They’re in print already.
He said he had used eight different pen names, and that whole issues of some pulpzines were by him. (Just like Randall Garrett, I guess—and how many others?) He said those editors, then, “didn’t want it good, they wanted it Wednesday.” He said he had stories on the stand while he still didn’t know how they would end an installment or two later.
He said Katherine Anne Porter, whom he seemed to admire, had written the enormous novel The Ship of Fools as a 20,000 word novella, but that it kept growing and the characters were living lives of their own that she couldn’t interfere with. Shakespeare killed off Mercutio because he was stealing the scenes. Mark Twain dropped them down wells only the well got filled up (a reference, though he may not have known it, to that odd twice-told tale Pudd’nhead Wilson, where that happened literally).
He said he wrote his notes for stories on file cards and accumulated cards perhaps for thirty years until, after shuffling they can be arranged into something like a story, after which he goes where the characters take him. All good literature happens that way, with the author dragged along.
“My wife says she knows I’m about to come down with a story when she finds my shoes in an icebox.” That’s the stage when the fictional reality is supplanting the other reality. He starts getting bad-tempered and blaming things on her. Shortest time he ever did a book was 13 days, The Door into Summer. The cat actually existed, and is buried in Colorado where they used to live at 7000 feet before they had to go to sea level for health reasons. Petronius the Arbiter—Pete—was Pixie in real life and “the toughest goldarn cat I ever saw.” One winter after the first snow it went around to all the doors with his wife, then with Heinlein, looking at the snow and complaining. She said, “He’s looking for the door into summer,” and he vanished into his study, with what result we know.
The longest time was 100 working days, but it was a much longer story. It was written straight through with one day out for the dentist. After talking about it he mentioned the name almost as an afterthought, Time Enough for Love. It had to be long; it involved twenty-four centuries. It had to be episodic also because there could be no way to make such a story unified. “There were too many characters and they all wanted center stage and there wasn’t anything I could do but sit back and let them take over.”
Halfway through I Will Fear No Evil he fell desperately ill. The story was all written, but the cutting wasn’t done yet, the paring to the bone that it needed. He and his surgeon both thought it would be a posthumous book, and he signed over a power of attorney to his wife, which she still has, making an X from his bed with nurses for witnesses. (Mind you these “quotes” and summaries are the product of my hasty and incomplete notes, and of my all-too-faulty memory.) That novel was never cut.
He won’t comment on the work of living writers, but did mention Rostand who wrote s-f, Wells, M. Jules Verne (he pronounced it in French) whom he has “extremely high respect for” but Verne dealt more in gadgets and Wells in people; Heinlein thus preferred Wells because he (RH) also was more interested in people.
About the space program, “I feel sure it will go on but I’m not sure in what language. I’m amazed at the dexterity of the public relations department of NASA that turned something so wonderfully romantic into something as dull as dishwater … Sure, sure, we’re going out into space. There’s no reason the human race could not go on indefinitely out and out” as in Asimov’s stories.
“Writing is the best way I know of to have fun and make a living without actually stealing.”
He told about a writer of mild porn for lending libraries [Jack Woodford] who began a book with the sentence, “Naked, Elaine stood at the front window and watched Tom come up the walk.”
He said, “My stories are very short on tragic endings and very short on villains. I don’t believe in villains.” He said he never met a villain who thought of himself in those terms; they were not villains to themselves. “I never intentionally offered the market what I thought of as a story with an unhappy ending” though sometimes the lead character did die off at the end. “I see no reason why stories should be written about anti-heroes doing unpleasant things among unpleasant people.” He doesn�
��t like reading about them and he doesn’t like writing about them.
He quoted a “schoolboy Latin” tag from Time Enough and Washington Irving, which he translated as “All is well without punishment, the time has come for fun; the time has come for laying books aside.” He added, “I like Latin for the sound of it, though thank God we’ve got one that has fewer declensions.” He digressed to say his wife has eight languages and that he “masticates French” and has some “cantina Spanish” picked up in Central America in the service. He says his wife has “absolute pitch.”
He talked a good deal about the writer competing for beer money, for the money a person has to spend after the necessities are paid for, that he has a choice on. He said his ideal reader was a guy with 95 cents who wanted to buy his book. (That in response to a question.) He said anyone who tries writing to see his name in print will never see his name in print—a debatable hypothesis it seems to me. He said the way to learn writing was by studying everything else but. He used the image of the storyteller in a village talking along hoping for the chink of some coins in his bowl. He spoke always in terms of money, rewriting to an editor’s demands for pay, choosing to write s-f (as opposed to something else) because it sold, etc. He consistently refused to take any responsibility for his creations.
Could you name some of your mystery stories we might find? I could but I won’t. They’re strictly from hunger. What happened to Mike in Moon Is a Harsh Mistress? No, I don’t know what happened to the computer. How would I? Nobody told me. What is the future of s-f? I don’t know any more about it than you do.
Would you name some favorite character of yours, or a favorite work of yours? My favorite is always the work I’m on at the time, always the characters I’m working with when I’m asked.
He said he was in the best shape he’s been in in forty years, and has the weight and blood pressure he had when he graduated from Annapolis.