24. Da Capo al Fine

    1. Virginia Heinlein, e-mail to the author, 10/11/00.

    2. RAH, letter to Tim Zell, 01/20/72. This letter was somewhat edited by Virginia Heinlein for the end of Grumbles from the Grave and published as from “a Reader”—possibly to assure the material would be received as a general philosophical comment, rather than as specifically addressed to Zell’s neopagan Church of All Worlds.

    3. Virginia Heinlein, IM with the author, 05/28/00.

    4. Ultimately, NASA decided against the unmanned Grand Tour, and the book was revised to a general survey of the solar system. The introduction was very tightly tied to the NASA Grand Tour, so Little, Brown dropped the Foreword, and it was eventually published as the last item of the Virginia Edition, vol. xxxvii, Nonfiction 1.

    5. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 3, Side B.

    6. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 12/14/99.

    7. One of the earliest critical works about Cabell took its title from these sections of verse disguised and scattered through Cabell’s prose, Cabellian Harmonics by Warren A. McNeill (1928). It is probably worth noting, as well, that verse inclusions in prose works can be read as a marker for Northrop Frye’s Anatomy genre.

    8. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Dorace Trottier, 11/05/72.

    9. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Dorace Trottier, 11/05/72.

  10. Cdr. Walter, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 09/01/72.

  11. Neither Capt. Mitchell nor Arthur C. Clarke made the cruise.

  12. “Notes: Offshore View of Apollo 17 Liftoff,” The New York Times Section X, Travel (11/19/72): 19.

  13. Isaac Asimov, In Joy Still Felt, 621.

  14. Isaac Asimov, I, Asimov, 358.

  15. RAH, letter to T. B. Buell, 10/03/74.

  16. Virginia Heinlein, IM with Ron Harrison, undated but February 2000.

  17. “Thanatosphere” is a neologism coined by Mailer—a spherical shell around the Earth, something like a second atmosphere, comprised of the souls of the dead. Mike Lennon of the Norman Mailer Society provides the information that Mailer discusses the concept first, without using the term, in A Fire on the Moon (1970) at 109 and coined the term in a Christian Science Monitor article on January 3, 1973. Mailer also coined the term “factoid.”

  18. Quoted in Tom Buckley, “Caribbean Cruise Attempts to Seek Meaning of Apollo,” The New York Times (12/12/72): 53.

  19. Quoted in Tom Buckley, “Caribbean Cruise Attempts to Seek Meaning of Apollo,” The New York Times (12/12/72): 53.

  20. RAH, letter to Nancy and Temple Fielding, 01/28/73.

  21. Isaac Asimov, I, Asimov, 358.

  22. The New York Times (12/12/72): 53.

  23. The New York Times (12/12/72): 53; Isaac Asimov, I, Asimov, 358.

  24. Katherine Anne Porter, quoted in The New York Times (12/12/72): 53, based on interview conducted 12/08/72.

  25. The New York Times (12/12/73): 53.

  26. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Arthur C. Clarke, 01/22/73.

  27. Isaac Asimov, In Joy Still Felt, 624. Asimov has the date wrong, as the cruise was over by December 14.

  28. David Hartwell, acquiring editor of this biography, commented during the editing of this volume in 2011 that he was the science-fiction editor of Putnam’s at the time and he did not agree with this assessment but was ordered by Walter Minton not to suggest cuts.

  29. See, e.g., Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 10, Side B. Heinlein himself made similar remarks in contemporaneous correspondence with the author.

  30. RAH, letter to Tim Zell, 01/20/72.

  31. That Heinlein read and greatly admired Generation of Vipers is documented (in the first volume of this biography); that he read An Essay on Morals is presumed on the basis of some slight convergence of content.

  32. For a nineteenth-century example of the “genealogical” style of argument, see F. W. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic (1887). The genealogical style of argument was devised as a counter to the then academically standard method of arguing from religious propositions as first principles. Gradually in most academic disciplines religious arguments went out of favor, but they were—and still are—very prominent in casual or popular settings, as the continuing “debate” over various forms of “creation science” demonstrate graphically.

  33. RAH, letter to Dorothea Faulkner, 12/28/68.

  34. RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 10/17/73.

  35. Tape-recording quoted with author comments in James D. Gifford, Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader’s Companion (Citrus Heights, Calif.: NitroSyncretic Press, 2000), 69.

  36. RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 10/16/73.

  37. This powerful memory from Heinlein’s childhood was confirmed by David R. Bayard and Joel Davis, who researched the matter in 2011 and found that this story is likely based (at least in part) on an incident that took place in Elizabeth, New Jersey, on April 17, 1911. The report was also carried that date in the Kansas City Times (the morning edition of the Star) as “Fast Train Killed Three.” The facts are not quite as Heinlein recalled them—it was an elderly woman and her daughter, and the man trying to help them was the baggage master of the station.

The report of this incident may have been a matter of discussion among the adults, rather than something Heinlein experienced directly. He would have been three years old at the time.

It is possible also that he conflated this with an incident that took place several years later in Chicago but which was reported in the Kansas City Star on September 3, 1919 as “Which a Father’s Duty? Should Tanner have lived for children or died with wife? Chicago Debates the Question While Paying Tribute to the Heroism of Husband at Grade Crossing.” This story not only has the thematic thrust of Heinlein’s recollection, its details are much closer to his story: a husband and wife crossing railroad tracks; the wife’s foot is caught in the tracks, and a flagman and the husband working together to free the woman as the train bore down on them, ultimately killing the husband and wife while the flagman was sideswiped by the train. This item was found by Bill Mullins in 2013 and published on the Heinlein Society’s NexusForum “Woman Killed by Train” thread.

If either or both of these items were his source, Heinlein has added details of his own (the hobo, for example) and his own interpretation of the meaning of the incident. It made a good story—one of the best.

  38. RAH, “Channel Markers,” Analog (January 1974).

  39. Leon Stover, “The Forrestal Lecture,” The Heinlein Journal, no. 4 (January 1999): 5.

  40. RAH, letter to Cal and Mickey Laning, 10/16/73.

  41. RAH’s self-written profile for the 1974 Muster Notes, 61.

  42. RAH, letter to Hap, Rebel & Dori Trottier, 04/18/73.

  43. Heinlein and Klass did conduct the interview that was to provide the raw material for this profile, but for reasons Prof. Klass could not recall in 2004, when he was guest of honor at the NoreasCon World SF Convention in Boston (see remarks and quotations in “Textual Comparison of Three Versions of Robert Heinlein’s Forrestal Lecture,” ed. Bill Patterson, The Heinlein Journal, no. 15 (July 2004): 6, the profile was never written. Of this incident, Mrs. Heinlein told Leon Stover in 1988:

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.