Robert A. Heinlein In Dialogue with His Century

5. Alien Invasions

14. In a letter to the author undated but late in February 2011, Grace Dugan “Cats” Sang Wurtz mentioned this incident: “Somebody had called me (a distant cousin, I think) who wanted to find out where her relative was spending her old age.” The “distant cousin” was Marian Beard (sometimes, confusingly, spelled Marion, the masculine version of the name), a cousin who had grown up with Leslyn but had since lost contact. Mrs. Wurtz’s telephone call to Heinlein’s mother was inconvenient for Heinlein, but it was not unreasonable, as the Heinlein family liked Leslyn and might have kept in touch.

In an undated letter to Heinlein in late 1952 or early 1953, Cats Sang explained the situation:

As it happened, everyone turned over to me the task of trying to find the surviving relative, Marion Beard, so the body wouldn’t be shipped to you. I was the logical one, because as the only declared un-friend of Leslyn, I was least likely to be the recipient of her misplaced gratitude should she recover. I got in touch with Bob’s mother, and together we tried to locate Marion (Mrs. H. had already been working on it), without disturbing you two with the unpleasant business. We called Sam Kamens, thinking he might have Marion’s address. He had already talked to you. If someone made a sentimental appeal to him, it wasn’t I. Am I pardoned?

Cats

Leslyn did recover from this crisis, though she had a very unhappy life for a period of several years.

19. In RAH, letter to Larry and Caryl [Heinlein], 07/19/64, Heinlein lists the Hiss case as one of many contributing factors to his “transition from 110% New Dealer to the black reactionary I am now.”

Heinlein’s personal sense of “liberal” is quite different from the contemporary usage. Before about 1969, many strains of liberalism were recognized; after the New Left, and continuing into the twenty-first century, the term is taken as synonymous with “progressive” and “left-wing.”

The term “left-wing” was not regularly used in American politics until some time in the 1930s: It is a term of European politics that had no close parallel in American politics. The left-right dichotomy originated in the French National Assembly, where monarchists sat in a bloc on the right side of the center aisle, and small-d-democrats—i.e., liberals in the classic sense—sat on the left side of the aisle. In the American Revolution, all Tories (the English term for, roughly, their monarchist party) fled the country (or were driven out), so all American parties (at the time, Democrats and Whigs) were left-wing—except that we had then, as now, a third, unacknowledged party, a powerful holdover from seventeenth century politics in the theocratic conservatives descended from the Massachusetts Theocracy.

In Europe, after the democratic revolutions of 1848 failed, left-wing democratic liberalism faded and was replaced, ultimately, by Marx’s “scientific socialism.” A German historian at Arizona State University once noted in a lecture a political evolution that illustrates how the changeover took place, though different countries had different specifics: After the failed democratic revolutions of 1848, the German liberal movement shifted focus to unification of the 300+ minor German principalities into a single Pan-German state as its core issue. The declaration in 1870 of the First Reich decapitated the German liberal movement—at exactly the moment that Marx and Engels were eviscerating the European Workingmen’s Movement. Marxists were able to step into a vacuum not only of power, but of foundational party issues.

But a different evolution took place in the United States, with liberals taking up first Abolition, then the American strain of native socialism (called, sarcastically by Marx, “utopian”) that led eventually to Upton Sinclair and his EPIC program. This is Heinlein’s idea of liberalism—intense Jeffersonian Americanism combined with “social justice.”

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, American native socialism gradually faded away, and American radical liberalism became compatible with—and was gradually absorbed by—European Leftism. The international United Front Against Fascism of the 1930s appears to have been the entering wedge. By 1950 this evolution was beginning to be evident.

45. John W. Campbell, Jr., letter to RAH, 03/06/51. Although Campbell was Heinlein’s best source of information about the Dianetics movement through this period, he heard from L. Sprague de Camp (East Coast), often by postcard, who seemed to delight in deflating Hubbard’s pretensions. Others added to the confusion, which continued for quite some time. Robert Cornog (West Coast) wrote Heinlein as late as November that year (Campbell consistently misspelling Sara Hubbard as “Sarah”):

News about Ron and Sarah is hard to come by. Rumor hath it that Ron is paralyzed on one side and in a hospital in the Midwest. Sarah is alleged to be receiving $200 a month support, and living in the Los Angeles area in semi-retirement. Also writing western stories for the pulps … The “Hubbard Dianetics Foundation” is no longer listed in the Los Angeles telephone directory. The Messiah must not only promise deliverance and salvation, but he must also avoid acts which lead to “loss of altitude” to paraphrase el Ron Hubbard (11/08/51).

48. Truman Talley, letter to RAH, 08/10/51. Most of Heinlein’s direct correspondence was with Talley of Signet, rather than with Pohl or Merril (who were going through a painful divorce at the time). Here is a sample of Heinlein’s “work” on the anthology, written to Talley (he had already turned in his Preface):

I have just received your letter of 28 August, with copy of your letter same date to Frederik Pohl and enclosing copies of “Absalom” by Kuttner and “The Last Martian” by Fredric Brown.…

In order to save time copies of this are going to Fred & Judy, and to Walter Bradbury; all that follows is for all of you. I’ve just read “Absalom,” found that I had read it five years ago but had forgotten the title, and I vote emphatically for it. It passes my first test of giving pleasure on rereading; therefore it rates hard covers. As for emotional impact, in my opinion it is only a shade less horrible than “Coming Attraction” and has the added advantage of being a plot story, a solved conflict, whereas “Coming Attraction,” strong as it is, is a vignette incident. It contains, I believe, a minor mistake in the mathematics but one which in no way invalidates the story. As for the rest of the science aspect it’s in a field so esoteric and concerning which so little of really hard fact is known that it is impossible (I think) for an expert in that field to say, “This could never happen.” Hank himself is a thorough student of psychiatry and psychology; I think he handles those two very fuzzy subjects very well indeed.

I think “The Last Martian” is a strong story and I would be more than willing to see it included. I strongly doubt the possibility of Fred’s thesis, but here we are in complete terra incognito; my opinion is merely philosophical, with no data back of it.