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:

I used the Bernstein book as a kick-off for some fancy speculation about possible future trends in research, much as I used the flying saucer craze as the kick-off in The Puppet Masters …

On the whole Bridget Murphy business I am as open-minded as a rainstorm. Insufficient evidence, highly entertaining, excellent basis for fiction—but I probably would not have made my reference to Bernstein and his subject quite so definite had I guessed what a furor was about to burst. You see, I wrote that piece for Amazing … about two months before the Bernstein book was published. I had had an advance look at the book and had known about Bernstein’s researches for a couple of years—but I simply did not guess that the book would make such an outstanding splash. (I guess I’m really a wash-out as a prophet!) I remember thinking as I wrote those two sentences that probably not one reader in a thousand would know what case I was referring to, but that nevertheless it made a nice hook on which to hang the speculation. Had I been able to look three months into the future I would have picked another case (there are many much better ones that can be cited), but I used the Bernstein-Murphy case because it was recent in time and local in space and I hoped that some readers would recognize it.

RAH, letter to T. N. Scortia, 05/07/56. Heinlein had to explain that he was not a Bridey Murphy advocate for years. See, for example, Heinlein’s letter jointly to Fred Pohl and Algis Budrys, 08/19/61:

[Quoting from 3 of “Bench Mark”:] “It’s useful to remember that five years ago, in a brief article for Amazing Stories, Heinlein declared that the Bridey Murphy case proved reincarnation and the persistence of essential personality.”

I won’t argue about the accuracy of the paraphrasing, although it does overstate the matter; what grouses me is that it here has been hauled out of context and there is no slightest suggestion that the original is part of a fictional “prophecy.”

But I had done precisely the same thing I had done in Puppet Masters, made use of an item currently in the news to create a temporal tie-in with a future scene, give verisimilitude, lend empathy.

  30. Heinlein’s outline notes for The Door into Summer in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz, contain most of the important elements of the story, except the unifying element of Petronius the cat and his engineer’s affection for the cat.

  31. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 3, Side A, 12 of transcript in RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz; the anecdote is also given in Heinlein’s Accession Notes (Opus No. 157, 11/05/68, 10), also in the RAH Archive. The full set of both letters which constitute the Accession Notes are published in the Virginia Edition, vol. xxxvii Nonfiction 1.

David Hartwell argued in his introduction for the Gregg Press reprint of The Door into Summer an inheritance from H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Wakes (a speculation Heinlein approved), but there are also turns from Looking Backwards ironically inverted. Suspended animation had a long literary tradition, and Heinlein was certainly aware of and used it.

  32. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/09/56.

  33. On January 14, 1957.

  34. Virginia Heinlein, IM with the author, 01/31/02.

  35. RAH, letter to William A. P. White (“Anthony Boucher”), 03/27/57.

  36. None of Leslyn’s 1956–57 poison-pen letters survive in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz. Heinlein probably destroyed the file once the need for the letters disappeared, probably in 1968 (that is, ten years later) as papers he would otherwise have to cart from Colorado Springs to Santa Cruz. However, both Leslyn’s letter to A. P. White and White’s letter to Heinlein mentioning it are also missing from White’s archive of personal correspondence at the Lily Library in Bloomington, Indiana. Only Heinlein’s reply to White’s letter is extant.

Here is a sampling from a prior (1953) round of poison-pen letters which was preserved in Fred Pohl’s papers. Leslyn’s bile is not reserved for Heinlein alone, but is spread around liberally.

I’m amused also to hear you [Pohl] use his [Heinlein’s] own term for his abcessed genitalia troubles. “his plumbing reamed out.” I put up with periodic celibacy during most of our 15 years of marriage due to his urethral and urinary difficulties.

If the guy would ever keep his “pride and joy” inside his pants for 24 hours at a stretch, and give it a rest—he might be able to dispense with the luxury of hypochondria!

Vida [Jameson] is making out all right. Thoroughly selfish critters always seem to do so. Cleve’s first wife was another of the same breed. And so is Heinlein and Virginia Gerstenfeld Heinlein.

And Cleve, like me, is better off free of his illusions. Sometime Cleve will meet a woman who will appreciate and love him. Inasmuch as lil’ ol’ me could meet two adorable REAL MEN after Heinlein—I’m sure that Deity, Mother Nature, or the Law of Compensation has someone worthy in store for Cleve (1 - if you’re a Deist, 2 - if you’re a Theist, and 3 if you insist on being a scaredy-cat materialist).

And so on. Leslyn Heinlein Mocabee, letter to Fred Pohl, 05/25/53 (from Pohl’s Archive in Red Bank, New Jersey).

  37. RAH, letter to Robert Cornog, 01/16/57.

  38. The entire paragraph, Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 10/01/56.

  39. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 10/09/56.

  40. RAH, letter to Clare and Dorothy Heinlein, undated but datelined “Nogales, Arizona,” and so therefore around the end of February 1957.

  41. For these and similar sentiments about President Eisenhower (and about Adlai Stevenson), see, e.g., RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 11/25/57. Stuart Symington (1901–88) was the first Secretary of the Air Force (1947–50) and recently (1953) elected Democratic Senator from Missouri. Symington served in the Senate until 1976.

  42. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 3, Side A (1988), 12 of transcript.

  43. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/09/56.

  44. In Heinlein’s file for Citizen of the Galaxy there are two story outlines of “Notes for a Boys’ Novel,” one that uses the Arabian Nights background and another, “Notes for a Novel,” that explores the tramp commercial spaceship family. Heinlein occasionally did combine two or more story ideas into a single book.

  45. Stanley I. Greenspan and Stuart G. Shanker, The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, and Intelligence Evolved from our Primate Ancestors to Modern Humans. (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus/Da Capo Press, 2004): 82. Greenspan and Shanker summarize the extended life stages of the Eriksons in seventeen stages, of which this young adulthood stage is “Stage 12—Stabilizing a Separate Sense of the Self”:

The standards of one’s caregivers … are not simply their values and judgments, but, through their good offices, the history of their culture as well as one’s own—that is, one’s heritage. There is … greater independence from daily reliance on one’s nuclear family, greater investment in the future … and greater ability to carry one’s past inside oneself as part of a growing sense of self and internal standard.

  46. Author’s notes of oral conversation with Virginia Heinlein, February 26? 2000.

  47. RAH, letter to Robert Cornog, 01/16/57.

  48. RAH, letter to Robert Cornog, 01/16/57.

  49. Scribner offered to pay part of the expenses of this trip, so he could combine it with a taping of Ruth Harshaw’s Carnival of Books radio program on Time for the Stars, and they could write it off as publicity (Doubleday picked up the remainder of the expenses), but Heinlein was leery of becoming indebted to Scribner for favors and declined the offer.

  50. Curiously, literary critic Edmund Wilson had disparaged H. P. Lovecraft in The New Yorker magazine in November 1945.