Robert A. Heinlein In Dialogue with His Century

12. Waiting Out the End

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.

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.

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.

Starship Troopers was clearly intended from the start for Heinlein’s juvenile audience, and based, he said, on his theory throughout the writing of the series, that “intelligent youngsters are in fact more interested in weighty matters than their parents usually are.” Once again, he had centered the story in a young man crossing from adolescence into adulthood, coming to know his values from the inside-out, so it was following the thematic lines of his last several juveniles. But by the time the book was finished (and even before it was submitted to Scribner), he conceded that it was not a juvenile in the usual sense of the term. (Both remarks, RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 01/10/59.) Indeed, it is difficult to understand how the first chapter, with its (by the standards of children’s literature in 1959) hyperviolence could be marketed at all to teenagers of the duck-and-cover generation—not that they would not accept it, but the librarians who made up what Dalgliesh thought was the major segment of purchasers of Heinlein’s juveniles would not.

The opinion of Alice Dalgliesh and the entire editorial board of Scribner—though based on what turned out a false premise (that the “boys do not want that [social commentary]”)—was only partly the kind of personal squeamishness to which Heinlein had objected over and over in the editorial process for his last several books for Scribner; it was also at least partly a business decision—and one which Heinlein probably should have been pragmatically able to anticipate.