REVIEW-ESSAY
Carol McGuirk
God in a Yellow Bathrobe
William H. Patterson, Jr. Robert A. Heinlein in Dialogue with his Century. Volume 2. 1948-88. The Man Who Learned Better. New York: Tom Doherty Associates (Tor), 2014. 643 pp. $34.99 hardcover.
Robert Anson Heinlein, with his vivid promotion of a human future in space and flouting of genre taboos, dominated American sf for the first three of the four decades covered in this biography. Yet Heinlein the genre writer is pushed to one side in this final volume of the late William H. Patterson’s two-part opus. Patterson here offers a dualportrait, Virginia Gerstenfield and Robert A. Heinlein as business and life partners, with a secondary focus on Cold-War politics. Volume 1 ended with the marriage of VGH and RAH in 1948, and this book stays squarely focused on the couple over forty years (1948-1988), detailing their extensive travels and hyperkinetic social life. I developed a theory about why it took Heinlein so long to write Stranger in a Strange Land (1961): he kept getting called away to the party or roped in on some new vacation extravaganza—Japan, Alaska, Malaysia, Antarctica, China, Russia, Rio. Heinlein clearly came to see waltzing in Vienna (149) as more fun than removing previously undetected dangling participles from galley proofs.
The biography sometimes moves beyond home, visitors, and travel. Patterson seems happy to offer details on the stalking, killing, and skinning of an elk, “a magnificent, 1,200 pound specimen, with a rack of 12 points on a span of 42 inches” (87) by Heinlein and his literary agent. Yet he has almost nothing to say about Heinlein’s mental travels, his tracking down of ideas and characters as a writer. The series of sf books for young people that Heinlein produced for Scribner, which made him much more culturally visible during the 1950s than he had ever been as a writer for the pulps in the 1940s, is given scant attention except for attacks on Alice Dalgliesh, children’s book editor at Scribner and herself a respected YA writer (she was short-listed three times for the Newbery Medal). Heinlein always tussled with editors, and Patterson might have conceded that with thirteen years and a fine series of books to show, Dalgliesh worked with RAH more productively and for a longer period than any other editor ever had. One Heinlein letter suggests that it was not editorial conflict but the relentless annual deadline that got to him:
those juveniles have paid well—car, house, chattels all free and clear, much travel, money in the bank.... I certainly shouldn’t kick and I am not kicking ... but like the too-successful whore: “Them stairs is killing me!” (207)
When Dalgliesh rejected Starship Troopers (1959), as Charles Scribner had initially rejected Red Planet ten years earlier, as unsuitable for a children’s series, Troopers was snapped up by Ace Books as an adult book in hardcover—to high controversy, brisk sales, and a Hugo Award that astonished the author. He was again provocative and controversial and apparently was re-energized. He reopened his files for Stranger in a Strange Land and with that novel—described by Patterson with characteristic blurriness as “Heinlein’s big book on hypocrisy” (279)—came an exponential rise in affluence, allowing even more ways for the Heinleins to pursue the good life and for RAH to avoid the typewriter.
Patterson’s account of daily minutia during the 1950s includes such matters as Virginia Heinlein’s position as wardrobe mistress for the Colorado Springs theatrical club. RAH “was usually ready to quit work for the day when Ginny brought them home with her” (126), he says, wording that suggests the exact opposite. In a rare link of social life to writing life, Patterson speculates that Ginny’s theater craze of 1955 inspired the actor protagonist of Double Star (1956). During the 1950s and 1960s the Heinleins also devoted much time to arduous home-improvement projects, another matter described in exhaustive detail. After being threatened by a con-man contractor (on whom he based the character of the stepmother’s sleazy new husband in Starman Jones [1953]), RAH not only decided to immortalize him as a creep in that novel but also to avoid all contractors in future. He and Ginny designed and built their own tiny, highly automated house in Colorado Springs; and years later when they moved to California, they built another high-tech home. From the 1970s on, Patterson is increasingly preoccupied with the couple’s health problems, with equal attention paid to Virginia’s dental work and RAH’s then-experimental carotid artery bypass operation. Prosperous as the Heinleins came to be, the more serious surgeries and illnesses were a financial worry as they neared the limit on their supplemental insurance coverage.
The adult novels RAH turned to during the 1960s are given a bare modicum of attention, with discussions ranging from a sentence to several pages. “That Dinkum Thinkum,” Patterson’s only chapter title alluding to one of RAH’s novels, spends in fact less than two pages on The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966). Like other chapters, it covers in detail the miscellaneous events of the months surrounding the novel’s publication.
When Patterson does turn to genre sf, it is generally to belittle political views that fail to tally with his own. Robert Bloch, who was writing terrifically well in the 1950s, becomes just another of those “namby pamby” pacifists (157, 164). John W. Campbell and Horace Gold, sf editors who otherwise had nothing whatever in common, are lumped together as “ditherers” because both supported nuclear disarmament (157). RAH himself often disagreed with people and groups within sf, but he was more forbearing than Patterson. To Alfred Bester, author of Heinlein’s favorite sf novel of the early 1950s, The Demolished Man (93), RAH wrote patiently after receiving a reader’s report from Bester on Starship Troopers that advised Heinlein to keep out of “that jingoism trap [Rudyard] Kipling got himself into” (167; Patterson’s paraphrase). (The serialization was under consideration at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.) Bester wanted to publish Starship Troopers but had asked if an editorial disclaimer could precede it. Writing to his agent, Heinlein was understandably indignant at the suggestion but does not denigrate Bester for making it:
Alfie ... asked if I would mind if he introduced my story with a statement that he, the editor, totally disagreed with it. Well, I do mind ... when I find that the umpire is coaching the opposition against me, then I know I’m in the wrong ball park. (168; emphasis in original)
RAH’s sensitivity to criticism from sf colleagues calls into question Patterson’s view of RAH, in both volumes, as having left the sf genre behind as soon as he possibly could.
His support of younger writers also suggests his commitment to paying it forward, to helping others as he had been helped by E.E. “Doc” Smith when he was starting out. When Cyril Kornbluth died suddenly in 1958 and his young widow Mary was left with children to raise, Heinlein (who did not know her personally) wrote out a check but sent it through a mutual friend, the sf artist Ed Emshwiller, asking that Emshwiller sound her out first: she might be insulted by a money gift from a stranger (151). Judith Merril received several checks during the 1960s: the first covered Merril’s share of the bomb shelter that she, Damon Knight, and Kate Wilhelm were going in on together (232). In the late 1960s, several of his letters agreed with Merril’s opposition to the war in Vietnam:
No, I don’t like this war. It’s a proxy war, and I don’t like proxy wars. It’s a war fought with conscripts, and I don’t like conscription at any time under any pretext.... Slavery is not made any sweeter by calling it ‘selective service’.... What the hell do they think men are? Lead soldiers to be expended at a whim? What the devil are we doing fighting an infantry war in the rain forest? (291)
As the examples above suggest, even though Patterson skimps on RAH the sf writer, his conscientious collection of excess random facts ensures that patient readers will find new connections. Patterson quotes in passing a letter to Heinlein from Philip K. Dick, slightingly introduced as an author of “interesting, though often uneven, experimental work” (358). In the letter Dick describes his current novel, The Man in the High Castle (1962), as a “thinly veiled encomium” to Heinlein himself (358), casting a new light on the writers’ relationship. Was RAH the inspiration for Hawthorne Abendsen, and was Stranger in a Strange Land, the blockbuster that recontoured the field of science fiction, a prototype for The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which sparks a grassroots reawakening in a defeated, balkanized North America? In the 1950s Heinlein had heard about Philip Dick’s financial struggles and at some point gave Dick an electric typewriter, offering financial help as well. The Dicks declined with thanks but relented later when they could not pay their property taxes (373). RAH’s request in return was that PKD sign Heinlein’s collection of Dick’s novels. He made a similarly fannish request when Paul Kantner of the rock group Jefferson Airplane sent a request for permission to use phrases from Heinlein’s novels in a project. Heinlein consented, this time asking several favors: 1) a copy of any lyrics containing the references, to go into the archives at the University of California at Santa Cruz, 2) one of the Jefferson Airplane albums that he did not yet own (he listed the four he already had and often played) along with all their signatures on the cover, and 3) a promise that Kantner would tell Grace Slick how much Heinlein loved her singing and her smile (312). He also had a mad crush on Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura on Star Trek). The Heinleins had never seen the series but were “enchanted” when they met her in a blood-donor line at a Star Trek convention during the 1970s (388). As a birthday gift, Virginia Heinlein commissioned from sf artist Frank Kelly Freas a copy of a pin-up style portrait he had painted of Nichols as Uhura.
This volume contains much unpleasant political hectoring. President Kennedy’s Vietnam policies might well justify severe critique, but Patterson settles for merely taunting him as “pro-fascist Joe Kennedy’s boy” (205). By contrast, in volume 1 (see my review in SFS 37.3 [Nov. 2010]: 505-509), Patterson’s accounts of RAH’s early life, schooling, and the weird dynamics of the Heinlein family were all helpful, although he seemed at times abashed by Heinlein’s freewheeling adult sex life and also quite biased in his exposition of the 1947 break-up of RAH’s 15-year open marriage to Leslyn MacDonald. The demonization of Heinlein’s second wife continues in volume 2, which refers eight times to “poison pen” letters sent by Leslyn to the Heinleins and also to their friends, although the only one quoted is signed (not anonymous) and therefore not a poison pen note at all. In the excerpted letter Leslyn mocks her ex-husband and calls Robert and Ginny “selfish” but says nothing that contradicts the biographer’s own somewhat reluctant portrayal of RAH’s sexcapades in Volume 1 (536). Patterson does, however, include new items in his Appendices that somewhat balance Volume 1’s description of the break-up. Grace Dugan Sang Wurtz, friendly with the Heinleins during the 1940s, read Patterson’s first volume and in 2011 shared with him some letters she had kept, including one written to Theodore Sturgeon in summer of 1947. The “Snow Maiden” she mentions below is Virginia Gerstenfield, a skating enthusiast:
When the Snow Maiden got her skate in the door, things were different. Leslyn slept in the studio whilst Bob and the femme fatale cavorted in the master bedroom. Ginny was a virgin, but she learned fast. She and Bob smoked and drank a lot, but Leslyn was not to smoke or drink.... Leslyn’s claim is that Bob had become very puritanical about her conduct, tho Bob had his harem, liquor, and cigarettes. Bob and Ginny left her [at] home when they went skating ... and when all three went anyplace, Ginny would cling possessively. (484)
A second letter quoted in Appendix 2 is by Heinlein himself, writing to Bill Corson just after the separation; Leslyn Heinlein was then living with the Corsons:
Even writing this letter brings up such emotions of sorrow that I can hardly control my tears.... You, more than any other person alive, know what is good about Leslyn and why I can’t forget her—and you know also, better than anyone but me, what her characteristics were that finally made it impossible for me to go on any longer. I don’t have to explain anything to you—and I won’t explain anything to anybody else. I prefer being thought a heel to undergoing the disgraceful and undignified process of justifying myself by telling tales.... (483; emphasis in original)
“I won’t explain anything” left RAH’s official biographer with a near void when discussing this major break at Heinlein’s mid-life; but it is unfortunate that to fill it Patterson relied so heavily on Virginia Heinlein’s version.
Patterson uses direct quotation infrequently (his preferred expository method is broad and often questionable paraphrase); but here are a few lively quotations that add zest to his account:
RAH: “I wouldn’t let [Forrest] Ackerman negotiate on my behalf for a latch-key to Hell.” (51)
John W. Campbell, rejecting Farnham’s Freehold (1964): “I thought I was getting a saga and I got a sermon. Nuts!” (225)
Karen Anderson (Poul Anderson’s wife): “God in a yellow bathrobe” (214). This was her impression when she first saw Heinlein; he was greeting visitors in his suite at SEACON in 1961. Virginia Heinlein ran up RAH’s bathrobes on her home sewing machine.
RAH (early 1950s) on Joseph McCarthy: “a revolting son of a bitch, with no regard for truth, justice, nor civil rights ... his purposes were demagogic and personally ambitious, not patriotic.” (102)
RAH, just after he finished Time Enough for Love (1973): “It is a 360 degree traverse of skunk spray. With any luck it will be condemned both by the SDS and the John Birch Society.” (311)
Because Patterson’s Index is capricious and the chapter titles sketchy (“Going Off a Bit”; “On to Other Things”), I also list below some items of special sf interest:
The Scribner young-adults sf series received more fan mail from girls than from boys.
Rod Walker, hero of Tunnel in the Sky (1955), is black. It is not made explicit but Heinlein places clues in his description of Rod’s friend Caroline.
RAH supposed that readers would be aware that both father and son will die in the raid that follows the drop-scene that ends Starship Troopers.
Heinlein referred to his father as a “zombie” (220), which may cast light on one of his best-known stories, “All You Zombies—” (1959).
The acronym TANSTAAFL (“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”) in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress came to Heinlein from sf author Jerry Pournelle.
The Heinleins never saw “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet” (1950-55), the TV series based on Heinlein’s Space Cadet (1948). According to Patterson, there was then no television reception in Colorado Springs.
The idea in Starship Troopers that only veterans should be able to vote came from Heinlein’s father Rex, a veteran of the Spanish-American War.
The working titles for I Will Fear no Evil (1970)were “Dirty Old Man” and “Now I Lay Me.”
Heinlein acquired his first word-processor in 1980 and wrote his last three novels on a home computer. He wrote to Clifford Simak that “it has extended my professional life ... writing had stopped being fun in late years. Now it’s fun again, because the drudgery is gone.” (437)
Patterson says in an Appendix that his research for this biography was “protracted,” “three starts over twenty-three years” (478), although his blog states that he began the biography in 2000. In the backwater of Appendix 2, the most interesting part of this volume, he indirectly reveals that (whenever he was selected) he was not Virginia’s first choice. After Heinlein’s death in 1988, she chose Leon Stover as authorized biographer but fired him in 1989, even barring his access to the sealed RAH papers at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She had become “concerned,” says Patterson, about “the amount of rumor Stover was soliciting and not fact-checking with her” (474; emphasis added). Did VGH insist on vetting every anecdote in the 150,000 words that Patterson had completed before her death in 2003? If so, his preference for writing up dinner parties, military reunions, elk-skinning adventures, illnesses (his and hers), and world travel becomes less mystifying. Given the fate of Leon Stover, Patterson knew that he must avoid “gossip” and therefore avoid the tightly knit science-fiction community as much as possible. Those ragtag sf people not only knew too much, they also talked too freely.
In this volume, VGH becomes covert narrator, and that woman behind the curtain is not only running the show but lobbing brickbats. After Heinlein’s death, she was annoyed that “Isaac [Asimov] spouted off in his usual fashion” (473), as if Asimov could graciously have muttered “No comment” when the press called him for a reaction quote. She hated (of all places) New Zealand, in part due to its adoption of “the British pattern for socialism, the overpowering, oppressive death-grip of the unions [that] stifled all spirit of progress” (111; Patterson’s paraphrase). Further coals are heaped as well, for New Zealand is blamed for making Virginia seriously ill: she “probably” developed “both scurvy and pellagra” during the Heinleins’ eleven-day visit there (112). This is preposterous given the gestation periods: the Heinleins should have taken along some daily vitamins and not stooped to blaming New Zealand’s labor unions for Ginny’s deficiencies in vitamin C and niacin. They visited England in 1955 when it was still in slow recovery from war; rationing of meat had been lifted only a year before. Yet Patterson is inexorably negative: England was “dirty and inconvenient.... It was New Zealand all over again” (129). The biographer is no doubt drawing on what he takes to be RAH’s and/or VGH’s opinions, but which of the two can be hard to determine in numerous instances; and his often puzzling assertions raise questions about his accuracy overall.
Mark Twain once mused on the difficulties of life-writing:
What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.... His acts and his words are merely the visible thin crust of his world.... The mass of him is hidden—it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written.... Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. (44; emphasis in original)
In Volume 2 Patterson conveys little about RAH’s inner life, instead promoting Heinlein as a public intellectual. He is fascinated by the trappings of wealth and prominence, and he is saddled with VGH’s intrusive ghost. In Patterson’s cross-currents, RAH the writer is more or less lost at sea, while the mere “clothes and buttons” that float to the surface are mistakenly displayed as trophies.
WORKS CITED
Twain, Mark. Autobiography. Berkeley: U of California P, 2010.
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