10

VINTAGE SEASON

By 1955, much of the Heinleins’ socializing revolved around dancing: Ginny’s ice-dancing, of course (and Robert had achieved enough skill, at last, to keep up with her on many of the figures). Gradually, they had added several kinds of off-ice dancing as well—round dance, cotillion, and Viennese waltzing. That winter (1954–55), they added square dancing in Pappy Shaw’s “Calico and Boots” club, often inviting the entire club home for an impromptu party.

Heinlein once again picked up the manuscript of The Martian Named Smith (after stalling on the book in 1952). By February 1955 he was 36,000 words into it,1 but it just would not come together for him. In a letter to Theodore Sturgeon, he complained: “I am at present stuck on 1482 of the best set-up for a novel I ever had in my life and I cannot get the Goddam thing to jell!”3 Frustrated (in his letter to his agent, he said the novel “aborted” at about 54,000 words),4 he set it aside to deal with Shasta’s request for revisions to Methuselah’s Children, which had now been hanging fire for eight years.

Methuselah’s Children would be the fourth of their five projected books in the Future History series. Shasta also wanted him to write another long novella, “Da Capo,” for the last book, under the same restrictive terms as he had done “The Man Who Sold the Moon” five years before. Heinlein had lost so much secondary income on that deal that he couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for a writing project that was too “da capo” for his own commercial interest. “Of course I may never write ‘Da Capo’ anyhow,” he told his agent, “since I am tired of this series [the Future History]—but I certainly am not going to contract to write it and agree to throw away the major return on it.”5

A very odd request came in from Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon was badly blocked and out of cash. He needed help—anything that might kick-start the writing process. Heinlein was flattered by the request—“To have the incomparable and always scintillating Sturgeon ask for ideas is like having the Pacific Ocean ask one to pee in it.”6 He spun off a couple of dozen “Sturgeonish” ideas that might sell quickly to Campbell, ranging from “tag lines” that might start a story rolling—

• “June 28—the new bull calf looks better all the time. Met a leprechaun today. Nice little guy. I’m going to have to drain the south forty…”

• “This guys sells soaps and cosmetics, door to door like the Fuller Brush man. She tries their beauty soap; she becomes beautiful. So she tries their vanishing cream…”

• “A little cat ghost, padding patiently around in limbo, trying to find that familiar, friendly lap…”

—to fully developed ideas that only needed writing out.7 At Ginny’s suggestion, he also enclosed a substantial check that would help with immediate expenses.

Ginny filled in the hours when Robert was at the typewriter by auditing courses at nearby Colorado College—harmony and music theory in 1955—and precinct work with the League of Women Voters. She also started working with the local little theater group, acting as wardrobe mistress for their production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and then for The Tea House of the August Moon.

Ginny’s actors and behind-the-scenes staff from the little theater were a mix of raw amateurs and seasoned semi-professionals, and Robert was usually ready to quit work for the day when Ginny brought them home with her in February of 1955. He must have listened thoughtfully as the new-to-him shop talk circled around. At some point it must have occurred to him that a theatrical background might give his next book just the novelty twist he needed. He asked leading questions—about makeup and other details he might use—and soaked up the theatrical lore that flew around the room without any prompting from him.8 The book that came out of all this, Double Star, turned on an actor hired to impersonate—double for—a politician who has been kidnapped to precipitate an interplanetary crisis—and matures into a thoughtful adult by this experience.

Double Star is one of Heinlein’s most charming entertainments, one of several masterworks of his 1950s, written ingratiatingly with what he called “the heroic hijinks with which the story is decorated, such as kidnapings and attempted assassinations,” lifted from English, Roman, and Chinese history9 (but mostly based on the long literary tradition of doubles, from The Man in the Iron Mask to The Prince and the Pauper). Heinlein had reached in his writing for young people a pinnacle of skill in seducing and pleasing his readers, gently teaching without seeking to challenge. Although Double Star was nominally written for adults, it fits comfortably with the juvenile novels he was writing at this period. Speaking of Double Star, Heinlein later defined his “pedagogical” intent:

I think that a person with enough empathy to recognize and respect a horse as part of the Living Tree with a personality and feelings of his own is more likely thereby not to join in a lynch mob.

I may be entirely mistaken in this; I have no scientific proof. But it is a theme which has run consistently through all my stories … the theme that the human race is not alone in this universe and it had better get over its xenophobia … the notion that human beings should seek to find friends among other types of beings and not automatically assume that they are enemies.10

The book was finished by March 23 and edited for the typist three days later—less than a month before they were scheduled to leave for a trip to Europe.

Travel permissions with the Naval Reserve were becoming more and more cumbersome for Ginny. She asked for and obtained an Honorable Discharge on April 21, 1955, the day before her thirty-ninth birthday.

Ten days later, the Heinleins left Colorado Springs for New Orleans to board the Tillie Lykes for stops in Savannah, Georgia; to the Azores; to Genoa; Naples; Rijaka, Yugoslavia; Venice; Athens; Istanbul; Alexandria—and on to Heidelberg where they would camp out with brother Larry and family, making side trips ad lib for four or five months. One of those side trips they initially planned would be to Sweden—“One purpose of this trip to Europe was to look into the possibility to adopting a Swedish child—but for various reasons we have decided against that, so now the trip is just for pleasure and education.”11 Heinlein was now too old to adopt under Colorado law—he would turn forty-eight while they were gone—and in any case, the state of the world was just too uncertain.12

In early June 1955, they were in Yugoslavia, where they made friends with their guide, Mary Dinaka—a WWII resistance fighter. While there Heinlein saw something that affected him profoundly—at least as deeply as the Pearl Harbor exposé: He witnessed a ceremony at which American tanks were handed over to Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia. Marshal Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) had broken with Stalin in 1948, but he was still a Communist and a violently anti-democratic dictator. The idea—postwar policy for decades—of arming one set of dictators against another set stuck in Heinlein’s craw.

… [T]hose two things, the truth about Pearl Harbor and seeing with my own eyes American arms being given to a communist dictator, were things that said to me: “Brother, you aren’t just in the wrong pew, you’re in the wrong church…”13

From Yugoslavia to Venice to Athens, arriving at the Piraeus (the port of Athens) at night during a full moon. They took advantage of the ideal circumstances for viewing the Acropolis, its damage softened by moonlight.

They had planned to fly from Alexandria to Heidelberg, but instead left the Tillie Lykes at Istanbul: The Chief attacked the radio operator in the Captain’s mess one day—unprovoked so far as anyone knew—and tried to kill him. Instead of convening a court of inquiry, the Captain elected to hush it up—despite a doctor’s warning that the man was mentally unbalanced. There was a second attack, this time in the Captain’s presence, and he still did nothing. This ship, Heinlein concluded, was too dangerous to risk: He and Ginny cashed in their tickets and flew directly to Germany.14

Heinlein’s brother Lawrence was stationed in Heidelberg with the U.S. Army of Occupation. Robert looked around once they got out of the airport and exclaimed that they were speaking English—but they weren’t: Ginny heard only Hochdeutsch, a little schlamperei. The accents and speech rhythms of Bavarian German must have triggered long-disused mental circuitry in Robert, left over from the neighbor woman—Mrs. Oehlschlager—who had “borrowed” five-year-old Bobby and spoken German to him as she made gingerbread cookies.15

From Heidelberg they could make “loop trips” in any direction, coming back to Heidelberg as a base. The French Riviera caused Heinlein’s eyes permanently to bug out, he said, because of the new bikini fashion in swimwear.16 Ginny went shopping for one, and consequently had the first bikini to reach the United States (that she knew of).17

One side trip was just for Ginny’s benefit: the Bayreuth Festival. She loved Wagner’s music, and being in Germany during the Festival was an opportunity not to be missed. The Festival was held annually to play the entire Ring cycle in the theater Richard Wagner had designed and built for his own Singspiele. Almost seventy years after Wagner’s death, the Festival was then still being managed by his grandchildren. Wieland Wagner gave it a modernistic production with dramatic lighting on a bare stage. Robert tagged along for the exhausting experience (some of those operas are eight hours long!). His reaction was about what Mark Twain’s had been.18

Their itinerary took them from Heidelberg to Paris near the end of August, and then to London for a short—too short19—visit with the Carnells. Then a swing around Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. The English leg of the trip they found oddly disappointing, dirty and inconvenient—“the goddamdest aggregation of stopped-up toilets, dirty trains, dirty beds, dirty places, and fouled up schedules.”20 It was New Zealand all over again, they concluded when they found that union rules prevented their London hotel’s floor maid from changing a burned-out light bulb in their bedside lamp. Ginny wasn’t even permitted to change the bulb herself: An electrician had to be called.21

After a too-short visit in Scotland, they flew to New York from Glasgow on September 12 and 13, 1955, and spent a week in Lurton Blassingame’s care, then back to Colorado Springs.22

Once they got settled in and caught up with mail and ledger entries, there was a party. Ginny brought out her bikini. The men’s reaction was gratifying enough, but it was the women’s reactions that were startling. They all oohed and ahed over it, and wanted to try it on. They might do so, Robert ruled—if he could photograph it on them. Giggling, they all agreed, and each one changed into Ginny’s one bikini and came out to model it for the party—big ones, small ones, short ones, tall ones, all in Ginny’s bikini. It was a wonder of persuasion on Robert’s part, and he captured it in slides (which are preserved in the Heinlein Archive).

It was time for him to start thinking about his next boys’ book—if he was going to do another one. Ginny suggested another book about twins, a particular fascination of hers (she had always wanted to be a twin23)—and he started thinking along those lines. Twins suggested Einstein’s Twin Paradox: What if you had a pair of twins and sent one off on a spaceship traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light. The Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction suggested that, from the perspective of the boy left behind on Earth, his twin on the ship would stay young while he aged. Heinlein started jotting notes of an outline for a story he called “The Star Clock”—or possibly “Dr. Einstein’s Clock” or some variation thereof—on November 5, recycling some of his thinking about long-lived families for people who lived out-of-phase with their culture.24

The Shasta deal was finally breaking his way: They had not made payments on their contracts in more than a year, and the contracts voided automatically after a thirty-day arrearage. Since they had sold properties they did not own (and kept the proceeds from the sales), even Blassingame-the-peacekeeper was willing to call it quits. On November 3, 1955, Blassingame wrote to Oscar Friend, Shasta’s agent in New York, canceling the contracts and making an attempt to rein in the piracy.25 Heinlein said he was not angry, but he was sorry it should end like this—and Blassingame should bend every effort to get the manuscript for Methuselah’s Children back.26 Doubleday had said they would publish it if Shasta were out of the picture.

Double Star was very well received, running to almost universal acclaim in Astounding in February, March, and April 1956. It was, in fact, so well liked that it was given the Science Fiction Achievement Award as the Best SF Novel of 1956 at the World Science Fiction Convention held the next year in New York.27 These awards, nicknamed Hugos for the founder of the first science-fiction magazine, Hugo Gernsback, had been given out for only the last few years—the first time in 1953 and then commencing uninterrupted from 1955. They were miniature rocket ships, just over a foot tall, with short, stabilizing fins—just like his original design for the ship in Destination Moon!—executed by hand in chrome steel.

Howard Browne had recently changed the format of Amazing Stories from pulp to digest-sized magazine28 and made a proposal: He wanted a “prediction” article from Heinlein for the magazine’s thirtieth-anniversary issue in April 1956 and offered the astonishing amount of one hundred dollars—an offer Heinlein could not very well refuse. He put it on his work agenda for January, and in November 1955 started to write Time for the Stars, about telepathic twins recruited to provide communications for exploring starships.

Toward the end of 1955 Heinlein received an advance copy of a book that Morey Bernstein had been researching nearby in Colorado for the last couple of years, The Search for Bridey Murphy. Its past-life regression stuff looked interesting—another datum to be filed with J. B. Rhine’s books on telepathy, clairvoyance, and other “psychic” phenomena. It was not precisely that he “believed” Bernstein’s conclusions in Bridey Murphy—but they were compatible with his own experience, superficially plausible, and the kind of thing that appealed to his sensibilities as a writer. He decided to include something from it in his “prediction” article for Amazing.29

By the end of January he was generating a new “adult” book. He had an engineer/inventor on a bender because his wife dumped him to marry a rich man. But the elements weren’t coming together quite right, and he kept turning them over in his mind, changing a bit here and a bit there and seeing how the fit-together improved.30 One late January morning at breakfast, Ginny crossed his field of vision, being led-between-the-legs by their cat, Pixie. Bemused, he watched her open a people door for him and wait while Pixie sniffed disdainfully and turned away from the snow, complaining vocally at Ginny’s mismanagement of the weather. There were seven people doors leading out, and the same little playlet was reenacted at each door. When Pixie had rejected the last door and stalked away, indignant, Ginny shrugged. “I guess he’s looking for the door into summer.”

Suddenly, all the jumble of story elements he had been fiddling with fell into place in his head—a completely different configuration, and one that felt perfectly right. “Don’t say another word,” he said. He got up and almost ran to his office, eager to start getting the story down on paper. Thirteen days later, The Door into Summer was finished—the shortest length of time he had ever taken to write a full (if short) novel—and nearly perfect as it came off his typewriter.31 Pixie was the missing element; Robert’s familial affection for “the old warrior” gave the book its emotive core and tied all the incidents together in another ingratiating, seducing book.

Once the finishing work was done, the Heinleins took an eight-day driving vacation in New Mexico seeing friends in March, making the rounds from Albuquerque to Las Cruces and to Portales, where Jack Williamson lived.32

The Door into Summer did not have instant success: John Campbell rejected it through Blassingame, but A. P. White (“Anthony Boucher”) picked it up for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Blassingame sold the book rights to Doubleday, and that was the last of Heinlein’s four-book option contract with them.

Pixie, though, did not live to see “his” book published. He had already contracted uremia, and soon the pain would become unbearable. Months later, in the dead of winter, their neighbor Art Herzberger, a practicing veterinarian, came over and put Blassingame Pixilated Arroyo—The Only Cat—to sleep.33 Robert used a new shirt for Pixie’s winding sheet, and they planted a memorial tree over his gravesite, so that the local coyotes would not dig up the grave. Ginny retired the name. He had been Pixie Three: There would never be another Pixie.34 Heinlein scheduled some mindless physical labor for himself and installed an irrigation system to prevent having to carry bathwater again, to save Ginny’s vegetable garden during droughts.

In February 1956, Heinlein received a check from George Pal Productions: $748.83, and that was his entire proceeds from Destination Moon. The production company had gone inactive. That portion of his life was over.

He had several “releases” of a sort that year: In February his mother wrote saying that she no longer needed the “pension” he and the boys were giving her, since Rex’s pension from International Harvester had increased. Dad’s health was improving, too, and there was a possibility he might make a full recovery.

The experience of writing The Door into Summer almost in one straight-through burst ushered in a very productive period for Heinlein. In June 1956, he wrote a Future History story, aimed at The Saturday Evening Post. “Jeff and the Menace From Earth” had come off the typewriter at 14,000 words—much too long for The Post, so he cut it in five successive drafts to 6,000 words. But The Post wasn’t in the market, and Blassingame sold it to A. P. White (“Anthony Boucher”) for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Heinlein cautioned White that the story might have been cut too much.35 White asked to see the longer version, which he found so much better that he repurchased the story at novelette length—another reason F&SF had turned into the premier SF magazine of the 1950s.

Summer 1956 was, again, a rush of visitors. Lawrence and Kathleen stopped by on their way back from Germany to Kansas City, and Rex Ivar’s daughter Lynnie arrived, too, taking them up on Ginny’s invitation two years ago to spend the months of July and a week of August with them and continue her lessons in equitation begun with Lucky Herzberger. Lurton Blassingame visited again, and Ginny arranged for him to be able to hunt on a resident’s permit.

Leslyn started another round of poison-pen letters. Her letters had become more rambling and more vile over the years.36 A. P. White made a passing reference to St. Dymphna when he mentioned one of her letters to Heinlein. Heinlein had to look up the reference: St. Dymphna was the patron saint of the mentally afflicted. There was nothing he could do about it, so he tried to put it out of his mind and get on with his own work: “Like her mother, as long as she is alive she is a potential for mischief … So, while I shall rest easy and do nothing, I shall not feel entirely easy as long as she remains a potential source of animosity.”37

Boys’ Life still wanted a serial, so he started an interplanetary scout-and-his-dog story early in September. Boys’ Life picked up “A Tenderfoot on Venus” but wanted it cut to less than 15,000 words for publication in the June and July 1958 issues as “A Tenderfoot in Space.”

And then it was time for the annual chore of ginning up another boys’ book for Scribner. He was very tired of these, he had told Blassingame on this last hunting trip, and was thinking about getting out of science fiction altogether. Blassingame suggested he stray not too far from his proven strengths—perhaps a modern, contemporary-scene novel about scientists working to make space travel possible.38 Heinlein routinely followed technical developments in general literature, as well as in the specialized field of science fiction, and recently he had been trying out new techniques that would perhaps not be suitable for science fiction:

… I have been fiddling with experimental methods of storytelling (none of which you have seen) and I am beginning to think that I may be developing a new method which might turn out to be important. It is a multiple first-person technique, but not the one used by John Masters in Bowhani [sic: Bhowani] Junction [1954, filmed 1956]. Mine calls for using camera cuts and shifts as rapid as those in the movies; the idea is to give the speed of movies, the sense of immediacy of the legitimate stage, and the empathy obtained by stream of consciousness—a nice trick if I can bring it off! The greatest hitch seems to lie in the problem of shifting viewpoints, both without confusing the reader and without losing empathy through cumbersome devices. But I think I am learning how to do it.

I don’t want to use this technique on commercial copy until I am sure I can force the reader to go along with a novel technique … if I do have here a usable new technique I want to polish it to the point where it can stand up in the open market in competition with the usual wares whose values are established and recognized.

Ginny suggests that I not use it in science fiction in any case, but save it for a lit’rary novel. She has a point, I think, as it would not be seriously reviewed in an S-F novel. We’ll see.39

The international news turned shocking on October 23, 1956, when Soviet troops occupying Hungary fired into a crowd of demonstrators in Budapest—labor union members agitating for relaxation of the strings on the puppet Nagy government. Labor unions have traditionally been greater enemies of Communists than of capitalists.

At first, the occupying troops—mostly Ukranians who had firsthand experience of Soviet massacres—refused the order to fire on the crowd, and Hungarian independence was declared. The revolution lasted ten days: On November 4, 1956, the Soviet Union rushed in two thousand tanks and two hundred thousand troops to depose the Nagy government. And then the slaughter began: Thirty-five thousand Hungarians were killed by the Soviet troops; thousands more fled the country.

The memory of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev as “the Butcher of Budapest” made an indelible impression on Heinlein. He had been watching the presidential election campaign with a degree of horror and disgust this year, as the Democratic Party imploded. He wrote to his brother Clare:

I have witnessed the intellectual bankruptcy of the present Democratic Party and my stomach is still doing slow rolls and wing-overs. The only man I wanted to vote for was Stuart Symington and they never put his name in the hat … I am impressed by Mr. [Adlai] Stevenson—I think he has raised sheer stupidity to a high art, to a level of genius not achieved since the late and unlamented Immanuel Kant.40

He was not a Republican, but he voted for Eisenhower—probably the least harmful choice that year.41

After the election, he started writing The Chain and the Stars. Over the years, starting with The Rolling Stones in 1952, Alice Dalgliesh had given him contradictory advice about the age of his protagonists. “Miss Dalgliesh was always complaining,” Ginny Heinlein recalled, “and Robert got very upset about it. She complained once that the hero was too young and lost the sales to the services; another time, the hero was too old and lost the Boy Scout types—things like that.”42 To Blassingame, Heinlein wrote:

I can make my central character any age she wants at the opening of the story. But it can only be one age. If she will tell me what age she thinks is best for the market, I can tailor the central character of my next book to fit. But I can’t make him simultaneously of draft age and of junior high school age. Nor can I keep him from growing up as the story progresses without limiting myself to a simple action story spanning not more than a few weeks. This is difficult to do in space-travel stories—but I can do it if she wants it.43

For the new boys’ book Heinlein decided to abandon his usual formula and just write an adult novel, leaving out a love interest, and have the protagonist range from preteen to twenty or so. It is not clear when Heinlein began making his outline notes, but they show his book starting with the nursery rhyme quotation “Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief,” and evoking the atmosphere and exotic setting of The Arabian Nights and The Prince and the Pauper. “Our hero is a beggar-thief in a big city, an orphan brought up by Uncle Jules (no relation) who is his (Oliver Twist’s mentor Fagin—maybe).” Another set of notes44 explores the basic setting of the interstellar trading vessel run by an extended family. Initially his “Dave Devro” is captured by “the space guards, the family broken up, and Dave forced into a school (state) for boys his age. The rest of the book could be concerned with his efforts to break loose, to get his family together, to go out into space again.”

But, as had happened before, when Heinlein started writing, the combined story underwent a transformation—this time into a passionate anti-slavery book inspired, perhaps, by the recent Hungarian revolution. His Thorby is bought as a slave boy of ten or eleven, freed, and searches for the meaning of his life in his extended families of trading ship Sisu and of the Hegemonic Guard space navy—and then the birth family he had lost long ago. At each stage Thorby learns to value and protect wider social values, from family to the whole of his civilization. But even restored to his planet and place of birth, he cannot rest until he brings all his resources to bear in the fight against slavery—the passion of his first adoptive father, the beggar who had bought a scared slave boy and raised him as a son. Citizen of the Galaxy is Heinlein’s most wrenching exploration of the young adult’s individuation crisis, and Thorby’s relationship to his family values—multiply layered—is a finely nuanced statement of what it means to become an adult and a true citizen.45

The book was written over a three-week period from November 12 to December 8, 1956, with four alternative titles, but when he had the manuscript professionally retyped for submission, he gave it a new name: Citizen of the Galaxy.

Early in January 1957, Heinlein received a glowing review of Time for the Stars by Hermann Deutsch, one of the editors of the New Orleans Item. In correspondence, Heinlein and Deutsch discovered they had mutual acquaintances (including the Bill Deutsch Heinlein had met at Denvention in 1941 and since lost track of). Deutsch invited Robert and Ginny to stay with them when next they were in New Orleans.

That fall and winter of 1956 Ginny had been suffering from a case of amebic dysentery—contracted, she said, from wild watercress served at a garden party by a local chef who really ought to have known better.46 The doctors found a Giardia colonization as well (a different brand of parasite). Possibly she had had it for years, since their visit to Java in 1954, and the watercress incident had just brought it out. Possibly it was contracted from the “filthy water” supply in Colorado Springs (about which the new Air Force Academy was already complaining to the city).47 On top of the dysentery, her chronic bursitis, left over from her basic training in 1943, flared up. This time the pain was incapacitating, despite treatment with Novocaine, codeine, cortisone, heat, and massage. A hot, dry climate might help, so Robert decided to take her to the desert after he fulfilled a commitment to give a lecture in Chicago.48

Mark Reinsberg, the Chicago fan who had gotten him involved with Shasta in 1948, was now teaching a night-school class in writing at the University of Chicago. He asked Heinlein to be part of a lecture series he was organizing for his writing class—not something Heinlein would ordinarily do (and the honorarium of $50 would not even cover expenses)49—but he agreed this time, and this lecture, to be delivered at the beginning of February 1957, was on his mind all that winter. The last time he had written such a thing was ten years earlier, the 1947 essay written just after the breakup with Leslyn, which had been published as “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction.” At that time, there was not one word of formal SF criticism in print—though both Gernsback and Campbell had talked here and there about the theory of science fiction in their magazine editorials over a period of more than twenty years, and important scholarly groundwork, such as bibliographies, appeared earlier, notably in A. Langley Searles’s fanzine Fantasy Commentator.50 But it is J. O. Bailey’s Pilgrims Through Time and Space, published in 1947, which is regarded as the start of science-fiction criticism.51

During the 1950s, there had been a blossoming of thinking about science-fiction theory and criticism, mostly mediated by fanzines or the SF magazines themselves (there being no professional or academic journals willing to print essays on science fiction), and the beginnings of the development of critical standards for science fiction. Heinlein followed the entire development from J. O. Bailey’s Pilgrims through Space and Time and E. F. Bleiler’s Checklist of Fantastic Literature (1948)52 through de Camp’s Science Fiction Handbook (1952) and the latest (and most influential), Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder (1956). What Heinlein had been doing for some time was not genre science fiction by the strict standards of early pulp—which is why Heinlein had originally begun to use the term “speculative fiction”: His focus from the start was in general literature rather than in genre science fiction. The hurdle he had been helping his librarians over was the idea that SF, being pulp in its origins, was escape literature. In a letter to a librarian concerned to develop purchasing standards for science fiction two years earlier, Heinlein wrote:

This genre is not a sub-genre of adventure fiction (even though many of the tales in it are adventurous) … This field is concerned with new ideas, new possibilities, new ways of looking at things … which is precisely why it is so attractive to young people and so little read by older people, i.e., read only by those who have kept their minds young. Now if a story does not take the cultural framework we live in, stretch it, twist it, turn it upside down and examine it for leaks, rearrange the parts and see how they would relate in a new arrangement—in short, explore possibilities and play games with ideas—it is not really a story of this genre at all but merely a western translated into the wider open spaces of the stars.53

At its best, science fiction tried to get its readers to engage reality at the highest levels. “Imaginary-but-possible” meant that science fiction was a branch of realistic literature, also distinguished from contemporary-scene fiction that had wandered (too far in his opinion) in the James M. Cain direction of Zola-esque realism: “[S]peculative fiction is much more realistic than is most historical and contemporary scene fiction and is superior to them both.”54 He wrote the bulk of the lecture, titled “Does Science Fiction Have Any Virtue?” on February 5, 1957, and two days later flew to Chicago. He had a quick meeting with Erle Korshak, who promised to turn over a new leaf—and who knows, perhaps the horse will fly?

The morning of the lecture, February 8, Heinlein gave a radio interview for WFMT, with interviewer Bob Luefley. In the afternoon, after a lunch with Miss Harshaw at the Arts Club, he taped Carnival of Books at the WMAQ radio studios. Time for the Stars was getting him a lot of good press: Even Learned Bulman liked it in his Library Journal review.55

The lecture that evening went very well, with a question-and-answer period following, in which Heinlein had an opportunity to discuss the making of The Puppet Masters.56 After the taping, a local fan (and another friend of Mark Reinsberg’s), Earl Kemp, arranged for a pub crawl of the local strip clubs. On Saturday, Heinlein met with the University of Chicago Science Fiction Club and was given a reception with local professional colleagues at Mark Reinsberg’s house. Fritz Leiber, who was living in Chicago at that time, memorialized the occasion with a clever sonnet, working a number of Heinlein’s titles into the rhyme scheme:

For Bob Heinlein

Bob, here’s to say we’re deeply in your debt

For letting us raise ship with Starman Jones

And share the training of Space Cadet;

For introductions to The Rolling Stones;

For Farmer in the Sky and “Goldfish Bowl,”

“If This Goes On—” (Thank God, it has so far!)

Red Planet, “Waldo,” “They,” “The Roads Must Roll,”

Methuselah’s Children, “Life-Line,” Double Star.

Thanks, Bob, again, for all these fancy trips,

For “Misfit,” “Universe” and “Common Sense,”

For “Blowups Happen,” “The Long Watch,” (“Eclipse”);

They’re luxury cruises, sparing no expense;

There aint a finer (this I testify)

Door into Summer, Tunnel in the Sky.

Fritz Leiber

2-8-57

Heinlein flew back to Colorado Springs the next day, then went for a desert rest-up with Ginny.

Their base of operation for the next three weeks was the Arrowhead Motel in Nogales, Arizona—baking warm even in February. Robert set up his portable typewriter in peace and caught up on correspondence while Ginny recovered from her bout of bursitis. They visited with Heinlein’s science-fiction colleagues Fredric Brown and Stuart and Mildred Clingerman and made their leisurely way back home early in March by way of the Stines in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

They arrived back in Colorado Springs on March 13, just in time to be snowed in and housebound. Ginny’s bursitis was better, but she was very wobbly on her feet, and so dizzy when she got out of bed that she could hardly stand or walk. Her doctors diagnosed a bizarre late-onset menthol allergy and Shigella bacillary dysentery on top of the Giardia—somewhat alarming, since Shigella had an 18 percent mortality rate. She had probably had a subacute infestation for some time. Robert probably had it, too, since he was feeling draggy and “full of vague aches,” which he had attributed to advancing old age.57 He took the cure with Ginny.

But he was able to work. Being with Ruth Harshaw and her bright, earnest teenaged co-interviewers must have given him a lift, restoring his enthusiasm for the juvenile series: “my stuff for kids is the most important work that I do … I hope to keep it up a long time.”58 He seemed to be contributing in a minor way to relieving the crisis in technical education: Kids need to know what tools they need. “I feel a degree of obligation to the kids,” he told an educator who wrote him in enthusiasm for Tunnel in the Sky. “Therefore, no matter how much cops & robbers I put into such a story, I always get in a plug for technical training in general and for study of mathematics in particular.”59

At the beginning of March 1957, a group of science-fiction writers launched a mimeographed professionals’ discussion magazine, SF Forum. Heinlein would never be comfortable with the sniping and backbiting contained in this kind of fanzine-for-professionals, but other writers did not have his reticence about slamming their colleagues in print—and Heinlein was the biggest target around. James Blish used The Door into Summer to kick off an amateur psychoanalysis of Heinlein as seen through the lens of his many first-person narratives—impertinent, infuriating, and imprudent.60 “Any writer learns to expect unfavorable reviews,” Heinlein wrote directly to Lester del Rey, the editor of SF Forum:

he must accept them, along with bad weather, flat tires, and other such. Any professional writer is aware that his published work is open to public literary criticism within the limits of the “Fair Comment” rule.

But it seems to me that this article is only secondarily a review, not literary criticism at all in most of its details, and is primarily a vehicle for personal criticism, improper where true and much worse than improper where false.…

The prudent thing to do was probably to keep quiet and try to forget it.

But I found that I was not forgetting it, that it was on my mind, interfering with work, preventing sleep. I felt as if I had been invited to tea, then sandbagged as I walked in the door.61

Blish’s notions about what a critic could infer directly about the psychology of a writer—of Heinlein, at any rate—were wrong: The “unconscious” effects Blish was trying to analyze were storytelling devices; Blish did not seem to be able to tell artifice from accident.

None of these things is done “by instinct.” I sweat like hell to make it a rousing good story while getting in the preaching I want to preach.… I suggest that to the extent that they are used unconsciously, unwittingly “instinctively,” they are sloppy craftsmanship and likely to be bad art.62

There were four “themes” he did use over and over—deliberately and not “by instinct”:

One is the notion that knowledge is worth acquiring, all knowledge, and that a solid grounding in mathematics provides one with the essential language of many of the most important forms of knowledge. The third theme is that, while it is desirable to live peaceably, there are things worth fighting for and values worth dying for—and that it is far better for a man to die than to live under circumstances that call for such sacrifice. The fourth theme is that individual human freedoms are of basic value, without which mankind is less than human.63

After weighing the worthwhileness of raising a fight over this issue, he concluded not this time—but:

… a more temperate tone would, I think, bring higher respect, as well as being kinder. Horace, Tony, Larry, John, Bob, etc.,64 are all doing the best they can; give them credit for honest effort.

The above remarks apply even more strongly to the writers. I myself am one of the lucky ones who never has any trouble in selling; science fiction has paid me so well that my only financial problems in years has been [sic] where and how to spend it all—so all of you are invited to lambast my stories to your heart’s content, so long as you stick to the rule of “Fair Comment” and leave my private life and personality out of it. I won’t care very deeply what you say; the literary criticisms I am interested in come from my agent, my editors, from librarians, and from the mail of unorganized fans—the general reading public. But my relatively well-armored state is not enjoyed by many writers; I know, from the dozens of aspirant and beginning-to-sell writers I have worked with that the relatively insecure writer is just a mass of raw nerve ends. Unfavorable criticism, to be of any use to him at all, must be couched in thoughtful language, temperate tones, and so phrased that he can use it to do better next time. If he is simply lashed, ridiculed, held up to scorn, it does him no good at all—on the contrary it is likely to make it impossible for him to write for days on end.

I suggest that it never helps anyone to tell a mother that her baby is ugly.65

John Campbell took Citizen of the Galaxy for serialization in Astounding in a long letter concerned with the sociology of chattel slavery, concluding:

You know, Bob, I’m tempted to retitle that story of yours “The Slave.” Thorby was a slave every paragraph of the way—including the last. Margaret pointed out his slavery in the Free Traders; Wing Marshall Smith pointed out his slavery in the end.66

It took several exchanges of correspondence, and a small modification to the text, to get Campbell off the focus on slavery and onto citizenship.

Puhlease don’t change the name of “Citizen.” I admit that there is a modicum of “There is no freedom” in the yarn; but that is not my theme—my basic theme is that all creatures everywhere are constrained by their circumstances but that a mature creature (that is to say, a “citizen”) faces up to the constraints in a mature fashion, not evading, not ducking, not taking the easy way. This certainly does not make him a slave even though it may require of him a self-discipline more stringent than the externally-imposed discipline of a slave.…

But the most important point is that the trade book will use that title and I don’t want a single customer to buy the trade book under a misapprehension. If you must change the title, talk it over with Scribner’s and settle between you on a mutually agreed title—but only one title. Call it “Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the Sky” if you both agree on it. I just want to play fair with the cash customers.67

Campbell asked him to add the phrase “citizen of the galaxy” into the text at some point, to clarify his aims,68 and Heinlein made the requested change.69

But the Scribner edit of this book was going off the rails, as well: Dalgliesh had made some minor cuts—a reference to Grandmother Sisu being shocked at pinup pictures; Baslim’s dismissal of the state religion of Jubbalpore—and in her accompanying letter she wanted to cut, too, the reference to “girlie magazines” used as trade goods.70 There was a certain amount of … sensitivity … on this subject at this time, particularly in New York state, due to the recent furor over violent and gory comic books.

This was trivial, by comparison to the Red Planet fight. He started a letter giving permission for the changes, though he could not approve of them. He did not see the point of these changes. Was a reference to grandmothers not always seeing eye to eye with their junior bachelors and their chosen entertainments really all that offensive? And as for the Jubbalpore religion—

This state religion is a vicious thing, upholding slavery, permitting gladiatorial combat, setting up the emperor as a god or demi-god with divine attributes … so what should I do? Show the old man teaching the kid to respect this religion?71

Argue he might; ask for rational explanations he might; but he knew it was ultimately futile. Dalgliesh was watching out for his interests as a commercial writer: Any appearance of questioning religion (any religion, even his made-up one) would draw down hellfire from librarians and teachers and parents. By the time he finished with the letter, he wanted to revoke the sale and get the manuscript back from Scribner—but they had already set it in type, incurring production expenses.

Ginny was appalled when he showed her the letter and made him rewrite it.72 He struggled with several drafts of a more diplomatic version. One pencil draft begins “[m]ake any changes you wish” and continues “I have never been in sympathy with this policy of catering to the smugly self-righteous prejudices of the ignorant and the half-educated in an attempt to sell more books…”73 (Diplomacy was, apparently, a moving target.) Finally he produced a sixth draft, a blunt, one-page letter, which he forwarded to Blassingame for comment and so that Blassingame would know how seriously this conflict was affecting him. “This whole matter has been growing in my mind for years and yet it is so vexatiously difficult that I can’t see any good answer.”74 In a later letter to Blassingame, he talked more about the upset the conflict had engendered in him:

I know I have not made clear why two changes, admittedly easy and unimportant, threw me into spin and lost me ten days’ working time, cum much anguish. I don’t know that I can explain it, but it is true. Part of the reason lies in that Chicago lecture of mine you recently read; I necessarily write science fiction by one theory, the theory of extrapolation and change—but once it reaches the editor (in this case) it is tested by an older theory, the notion that this our culture is essentially perfect and I must not tinker with any part of it which is dear to any possible critic who may see the story. These things have now added up to the point where I feel unable to continue. I may write another. I don’t know yet. I can’t until some of the depression wears off. But I don’t know how to tell her that I probably won’t deliver the story she is expecting—I’ve tried six or eight times, wasted many days, and all the ways I can express it either sound rude or inadequate. I know this sounds silly but it is true.…75

It was probably a good thing Ginny was feeling well enough to intercept his rants. Her health was improving, though slowly. She sometimes felt up to gardening—and they were able to go out sometimes, for dinner. The doctors had found another intestinal infestation and a cyst on her scalp that would have to be removed surgically in June. The cyst might be contributing to her debilitating facial neuralgia, and that would relieve some of the pain—but her balance might be gone permanently: She might never be able to skate again.

Heinlein’s own health had improved: He had a physical on his fiftieth birthday, and his heart was in good shape. Nor was his professional life all frustration: Martin Greenberg at Gnome Press offered him a contract for Methuselah’s Children. Now that Shasta was going out of business, Gnome was one of only two specialty presses left in the science-fiction field. Greenberg wanted one or two collections of Heinlein’s short stories.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction brought out “The Menace from Earth” in its August issue, and a new magazine, Saturn, bought “The Man Who Traveled in Elephants” in October—a sentimental favorite he had written nine years before and had never been able to sell. The seller’s market for science fiction was helping to reduce his backfile.

As to the juveniles—“I feel I have reached an impasse in this branch of fiction,” he had told Blassingame in May.76 But in one of his discarded draft letters to Alice Dalgliesh the next day, he told her,

You can edit me because you’re better at it than I am; other editors I won’t allow to change anything because they’re not. In short I want to go on writing boy’s books and I want to write them for you.

But unless I can get this worked out I probably won’t be writing them for anybody.77

The problem was not resolved, but timing was forcing his hand: If Heinlein was going to do another boys’ book in 1957, he would have to start it soon: He planned to be traveling over the holidays—the Far East and India this time (he was finally going to achieve a life’s ambition and see the Taj Mahal in person—by moonlight if he could manage it).

He began turning over material in his mind. On the evidence of what wound up in the book, he found his story material in what was topical. “Juvenile delinquency” was in the news and editorial pages, but that was not the kind of book Heinlein had been writing. On the personal front, his neighbor, Lucky Herzberger, was still thanking them profusely for “teaching” their daughter, Barbara, how to read over one weekend visit while Lucky and Art were out of town—but that was absurd: Ginny had simply handed her a book one day, and Barbara began reading on her own.78 What that might say about local schools really didn’t bear thinking about, but Heinlein was more or less forced to think about it when he went to a large newsstand downtown looking for a copy of Scientific American. He could not find one copy—the stand had sold the three it took—but he counted twenty astrology magazines.79

Heinlein framed all his concerns about intellectually-soggy American youth in a story about a space-struck boy accidentally prepared to take advantage of the slings and arrows fate threw at him amid the game shows and jingle contests that made up American television in the 1950s—and let the boy stand up as a proud representative of humanity in a kangaroo court of aliens. He titled his book Have Space Suit—Will Travel.80 The title had plot significance, of course—in fact, that was the plot for the first several chapters.

Heinlein did his usual careful research and preparation—sizes of various galaxies, surface temperatures on planets, calculating travel times to Pluto and beyond. At one point, he needed to know the volume of air an empty space suit would contain, and did the calculations. But the answer didn’t seem right to him, so he took his worksheets to Ginny. She did a completely independent calculation that came closer to what he thought it should be. It didn’t seem to be the arithmetic that was at fault: Comparing their worksheets, they traced the difference to a single critical figure. He had used the figure in Marks’ Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers, the handbook he had learned engineering with at the Naval Academy and had used ever since. Ginny had taken hers from the Chemical & Rubber Company Handbook, the chemist’s traditional sourcebook. The CRC clearly had the right figure: Robert penciled the correction into his Marks’ and wrote them a letter (and found the figure corrected in the next edition).81 After that he would not rely on a single source for critical figures.

Ginny also helped out by composing a musical “speech” for the Mother Thing, a music-speaking “beat cop,” with Robert looking over her shoulder and with a veto: He didn’t want it to sound like anything human. Together they got the effect he was after. The whole book was a pleasure for both of them—“… pure fun all the way through.”82

Heinlein finished Have Space Suit—Will Travel on August 30, 1957, just as the first installment of Citizen of the Galaxy began to run in Astounding. While he was tightening up the manuscript, his Hollywood agent, Ned Brown, forwarded an offer for him to script Herman Wouk’s The Lomokome Papers (1947), a science-fiction satire of the Cold War, about a naval lieutenant’s trip to a hollow moon. But he was able to turn it down with a clear conscience: He had already paid a nonrefundable deposit for their sailing date in November. At least this proved there was some activity in Ned Brown’s office. He put off the question of switching agents in Hollywood for another time.83