Grumbles from the Grave (13 page)

I heard from Miss Dalgliesh about
Rolling Stones;
she is enthusiastic.

March 8, 1952: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I am sorry to say that I am again having "sex" trouble with Miss Dalgliesh—she has decided (from her Olympian heights as an amateur Freudian) that
The Rolling Stones
contains some really dangerously evil connotations. Her letter was rather horrid and I was quite offended. I am not asking you to front for me this time; I answered her myself. Since the business matters are all completed, it is strictly an author-editor matter and you have troubles enough without being put in the middle on this. But enough is enough and I do not intend to tolerate any more of this sort of thing.
The Rolling Stones
may be the last juvenile I will do, or, if I do another, perhaps we will offer it to ---- rather than to Miss Dalgliesh.

I consciously intend to write wholesome stories for boys and mean to leave out entirely the sophisticated matters which appear in my writings for adults. In addition, Mrs. Heinlein went over this one most carefully, trying to find things Miss Dalgliesh might object to. When we were both satisfied that it was as pure as Caesar's wife, we sent it off. I feel sure that you would have returned it to me for revision had you seen anything in it which could have been construed as dirty. So she liked it and signed a contract for it—and now decides that it is dirty. The anecdote about the Vermonter who made a pet of a cow, "—same as you might a good hunting dog—" Miss Dalgliesh says suggests "certain abnormal sex practices." Well, it doesn't suggest anything to me except that my wife has made a pet out of a horse next door, which was what it was based on—and I am dead certain it won't suggest anything horrid to my boys and girls. But I gave her a revision—because we decided that the anecdote was not dirty but
was
dull.

Her other objection was this: "Flat cats seem to me a trifle too Freudian in their pulsing love habits." Since I intentionally desexed them entirely, even to parthenogenesis, I found this a bit thick. I always called a flat cat "it" rather than "he" or "she" and gave the only named one a name with no sex connotation. These things I did because I knew she was hipped on the subject—but it was useless; she is capable of seeing phallic symbolism in Jack's beanstalk.

Another objection she made has nothing to do with sex, but I find it illustrative of how far afield she has gone to find trouble: she objected to my naming a prospector "Old Charlie"
because the first name of Mr. Scribner is Charles
! How silly can one get?

I don't expect you to do anything but wished to inform you because you may hear reverberations. I rapped her knuckles most sharply. There are types of behavior I won't tolerate for any amount of money. I retaliated in kind (which is why I left you out of it); I took one of her books for girls and subjected it to the sort of analysis she gave mine. I know quite as much Freudian, bogus "psychology" as she does; from the criteria she uses, her book was dirty as hell—and I told her so, citing passages. If she is going to leer and smirk at my perfectly nice kids' book, I can do the same to her girls' stories. Amateur psychoanalysts make me sick! That impressive charlatan, Dr. Freud, has done quite as much harm as Queen Victoria ever did.

March 7, 1952: Robert A. Heinlein to Alice Dalgliesh

1. If you are going to make changes, I prefer to see them in advance of proof.

2. "Old Charlie"—I happen to like the name Charlie better than the name Danny, but the issue raised strikes me as just plain silly. "Charlie" is a very common nickname; there is probably at least one character named Charles in over half of currently published novels. Are we to lay off the very common names "Bob" and "Alice" because you and I happen to have them? In any case, nine-tenths of my readers are quite unaware of the name of the publisher; children very rarely pay attention to the name of the publishing house. It would be just as reasonable to place a taboo on "Harry" and on "George" and on "Joe" because of the names of the President, the late King, and the Russian dictator.

3. Flat cats and Freud—no, I most emphatically do not agree to any changes of any sort in the flat cats or anything about them. I am considerably irked by the phrase "—a bit too Freudian in their pulsing love habits." What love habits? I remember all too clearly the advice you gave me about Willis in Red
Planet
and how I should "consult a good Freudian"—in consequence, I most carefully desexed the creatures completely. I used the pronoun "it" throughout (if you find a "he" or "she", it is a fault of my proofing); the circumstances make it clear that the first one, and by implication, all the others, reproduce by parthenogenesis. Do you object to the fact that they like to be petted? Good heavens, that
can't
come out; the whole sequence depends on it—so don't tamper with it. In any case, I set up a symbiosis theory to account for them being such affectionate pets.

If you choose to class the human response to the flat cats (the desire on the part of humans, particularly lonely humans, for a pet which can be fondled and which will show affection)—if you class this tendency (on which the sequence turns) as a form of sex sublimation, I will not argue the classification. By definition "sex" and "libido" may be extended to almost any human behavior—but I do not agree that there is necessarily anything unhealthy, nor queasily symbolic, in such secondary (sex?) behavior.

Following your theory, I really must point out that the treatment of Rusty in
Along Janet's Way
[written by Miss Dalgliesh] is extremely significant (to a good Freudian) and highly symbolic, both in secondary sex behavior and in sublimation phenomena—in fact, not the sort of book to put into the hands of a young girl. That business with the nightgown, for example. From the standpoint of a good Freudian, every writer (you and I among others) unconsciously uses symbols which are simply reeking with the poisonous sexual jungles of our early lives and our ancestries. What would a half-baked analyst make of that triangular scene between the girl, the young man, and the male dog—and the nightgown? Of the phallic symbolism and the fetishism in the dialog that followed? And all this in a book intended for young girls?

Honest, Alice Dalgliesh, I don't think that you write dirty books. But neither do I—and lay off my flat cats, will yuh? Your books and your characters are just as vulnerable to the sort of pseudoscientific criticism you have given mine as are mine. So lay off—before I haul Jinks into this argument.

About Freud: Look, Freud was not a scientist; he was simply a brilliant charlatan. He did not use scientific methodology, and his theories are largely unsubstantiated and are nowadays extremely suspect. From a practical standpoint the practitioners of his "psychoanalysis" have been notably unsuccessful in curing the mentally ill. Christian Science has done as well if not better—and is about as well grounded in scientific proof. I grant you that Freudian doctrine has had an aura of scientific respectability for the past generation, but that aura was unearned and more and more psychiatrists are turning away from Freud. I concede that, among other damages, Freud and his spectacular theories have helped to make the layman in our maladjusted culture extremely sensitive to sex symbols, real or false, and this situation must be taken into account by a writer. But we shouldn't go overboard in making concessions to this artificial situation, particularly because it is impossible to write any story in such a fashion that it will not bring a knowing leer to the face of a "good Freudian."

(Let's look at another aspect of the problem; it is to be hoped, I suppose, that the readers of your list of books will presently graduate to Scribner's trade books for adults. Let us suppose that I manage to keep my readers sealed in cellophane, sterile in vitro—then comes the day when they start reading other Scribner's books. I'll mention a few: Hemingway—with his painful reiteration of the emasculation theme—
From Here to Eternity,
which needs a glossary of taboo words to explain its taboo situations,
Europa
and
Europa Revisited,
which combine communist propaganda with pornography in a most curious fashion. I am not panning Scribner's adult list; my point is that the gradient from one list to the other can be ridiculously steep.)

STARMAN JONES

(68)

With
Starman Jones
in 1953, Heinlein and Dalgliesh had fewer conflicts, though she still asked for changes.

When Max finds living with his new stepfather impossible, he leaves for Earthport, taking the books of navigation tables left by his uncle, a former officer on the interstellar ships, hoping to find work on the ships. But the board refuses, taking the books from him, but giving him the deposit money on them. Sam, a former spaceman, persuades him to use the money to get them false papers as crewmen.

Aboard the
Asgard,
his relationship to his uncle is discovered, and he is bumped to chartsman trainee. There he reveals that, with his trick memory, he's memorized all the tables. Then a mistake leaves the ship lost. The nearest planet has a dangerous life-form. All higher officers are dead and the navigation books are lost. Only Max's memory is able to bring the
Asgard
back to known space.

The future of Max as a spaceman and officer is assured.

March 24, 1953: Lurton Blassingame to Robert A. Heinlein

[Scribner's] wants some minor changes in the novel [
Starman Jones
] and hopes you won't mind making them. These are limited to the first chapter and the last. In the first chapter, [Dalgliesh] says the stepfather sounds like the conventional pulp-paper villain, since he comes in and wants to beat the boy the first night he is married to the boy's mother. . . .

For the last chapter, she thinks that some of their readers wouldn't fully understand all that you are saying so briefly in the scene where the hero is back at the farm. How much time—earth time, that is—has elapsed? She also wants a bit more made of the fines, or whatever way the hero pays for the fact that he started out as a liar. It might help here if the powers that be keep the hero as an astrographer (sic) . . . because he had the moral fiber to admit his error and since then acted in every way as a man.

These aren't serious and I hope you won't mind making them.

March 25, 1953: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Now, about the changes Miss Dalgliesh wants: I think that it is necessary that [she] write directly to me, explaining in detail what changes she wants and why and specifically what she wants done to accomplish those changes. Offhand, she certainly has not asked for much; nevertheless, on the basis of what you have relayed to me, I am not convinced that the changes are either necessary or desirable.

. . . I don't say that I
won't
make this change [i.e., the "stepfather" change], but I
do
say that I am going to need a helluva lot of convincing . . . In my opinion it would badly damage the dramatic timing of the story to make this change. What I have now accomplished in six pages would, with the proposed revision, require tacking on a couple of chapters, change the opening from fast to very slow, and in particular (this is what I hate most) change the crisis in the boy's life from a dramatic case of having the rug jerked out from under him in a matter of minutes into a situation in which he simply becomes increasingly annoyed with an unpleasant situation.

* * *

The suggested revisions in the ending are not difficult, and the last chapter as I wrote it is certainly open to criticism. But (as usual!) I have comments. I kept that last chapter short because the story actually ends with the next to the last chapter, i.e., the character change is complete.

THE STAR BEAST

(70)

The
Library Journal
threatened to lambaste Heinlein if he didn't withdraw
The Star Beast
because of its suggestion that children could divorce their parents.

John Thomas Stuart XI has a pet-Lummox—brought back from a space trip by an ancestor. "Lummie" began as a tiny pet, but over the generations (by earth standards) has grown huge, and is everlastingly in trouble. Lummie's race locates him, and demands his return.