Robert Heinlein - Grumbles From the Grave

The novel is really giving me a lot of trouble. This is the one that I told you about long ago, I believe-a Man-from-Mars job, infant survivor of first expedition to Mars is fetched back ty second expedition as a young adult, never having seen a human being in his life, most especially never having seen a woman or heard of sex. He has been raised by Martians, is educated and sophisticated by Martian standards, but is totally ignorant of Earth. What impact do Earth culture and conditions have on him? What impact does he have on Earth culture? How can all this be converted into a certain amount of cops-and-robbers and boy-meets-girl without bogging down into nothing but philosophical speculation? Contrariwise, what amount of philosophizing does it need to keep it from being a space opera with cardboard characters?

I got so bogged down on it last week that I had decided to shelve it for a year or so, when Stan Mullen [a science fiction author and personal friend] gave me a fight talk and quite a lot of help. Now I am continuing to try to sweat it through. When I get through I will either have nothing at all, or I'll have a major novel. I rather doubt Ihut I will have a pulp serial; it doesn't seem to be that sort of a story. I will continue to sweat on it and you won't get anything else from me for quite a while.

January 13, 1955: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I am now on page 68 of the draft of A Martian Named

Smith, which will be book length and adult-i.e., more i-x and profanity than is acceptable in juveniles. I cannot low estimate date of finish-draft as there are some plot

Kinks I am not yet sure about.

February 23, 1955: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I am sorry to say the novel aborted last week-two months and 54,000 words of ms. wasted. Ginny says that it cannot be salvaged and I necessarily use her as a touchstone. Still worse, I suspect that she is right; I was never truly happy with it, despite a strong and novel theme. I am, of course, rather down about it, but I have started working on another one and hope to begin a draft in a day or two.

March 29, 1960: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I finished a draft a couple of days ago of the novel I have been writing and I am still groggy. It is very long (800 pages in its uncut form) and about all I can say about it now is that it is not science fiction and is nothing like anything I've turned out before. I intend to work on it all I possibly can until we leave, then have it smooth-typed while we are out of the country.

I am utterly exhausted from sixty-three days chained to this machine, twelve to fourteen hours a day. Now I must rest up in preparation for a physically arduous trip...while accomplishing a month of chores in two weeks, studying Russian history, politics, and geography so that I will understand some of what I see, and doing my damndest to cut about a third out of this new story. In the meantime, Shamrock O'Toole is about to have kittens any moment-the period is 60 to 65 days and today is her 62nd; she looks like a football resting on toothpicks and complains bitterly about the unfairness of it all. I'll send you a kitten by air express timed so that you can't send it back. Maybe four kittens.

October 10, 1960: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I assume that you have sent The Man from Mars to Putnam, since they are entitled to first look. I have on hand, should we ever need it, a clean, sharp carbon of this ms. on the same heavy white bond. I am aware of the commercial difficulties in this ms., those which you pointed out-but, if it does get published, it might sell lots of copies. (It certainly has no more strikes against its success than did Ulysses, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Elmer Gantry, or Tropic of Cancer-each at the time it was published.)

The Man from Mars is an attempt on my part to break loose from a straitjacket, one of my own devising. I am tired of being known as a "leading writer of children's books" and nothing else. True, those juveniles have paid well-car, house, and chattels all free and clear, much travel, money in the bank and a fairish amount in stocks, plus prospect of future royalties-I certainly shouldn't kick and I am not kicking...but, like the too-successful whore: "Them stairs is killing me!"

I first became aware of just how thoroughly I had boxed myself in when editors of my soi disant adult books slarted asking me to trim them down to suit my juvenile market. At that time I had to comply. But now I would like to find out if I can write about adult matters for adults, and get such writing published.

However, I have no desire to write "mainstream" stories such as The Catcher in the Rye, By Love Possessed, Pryton Place, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, Dark-nexx at Noon, or On the Road. Whether these books are good or bad, they each represent a type which has been written more than enough; there is no point in my adding more to such categories-I want to do my own stuif, my own way.

Perhaps I will flop at it. I don't know. But such success u" I have had has come from being original, not from writing "safe" stuff-in pulps, in movies, in slicks, in juveniles. In pulp SF I moved at once to the top of the Held by writing about sociology, sex, politics, and religion at u time (1939) when those subjects were all taboo. l."lcr I cracked the slicks with science fiction when it wns taken for granted that SF was pulp and nothing but pulp. You will recall that my first juvenile was considered an experiment by the publisher-and a rather risky one. I have never written "what was being written" -- nor do I want to do so now. Oh, I suppose that, if it became financially necessary, I could imitate my own earlier work and do it well enough to sell. But I don't want to. I hope this new and different book sells. But, whether it does or not, I want my next book to be still different-neither an imitation of The Man from Mars, nor a careful "mixture as before" in imitation of my juveniles and my quasi-juveniles published as soi disant adult SF books. I've got a lot of things I'd like to write about; none of them fits this pattern.

October 14, 1960: Lurton Blassingame to Robert A. Heinlein

Dear Water-Brother,

I greatly admire your courage and also your intellectual virility that enables you to open up new areas of the literary globe.

October 21, 1960: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

In the first place, I think Putnam's offer is one of the most generous I have ever seen; it is all loaded in my favor. Will you please tell them so?

Cutting can always be done, even though there is al: ways the chance of literary anemia therefrom. But the changes required are another matter-not because I don't wish to make them...but because I don't see how to make them. This story is Cabellesque satire on religion and sex, it is not science fiction by any stretch of the imagination. If I cut out religion and sex, I am very much afraid that I will end with a nonalcoholic martini.

I know the story is shocking-and I know of a dozen places where I could make the sex a little less overt, a bit more offstage, by changing only a few words. (Such as: "Hell, she didn't even have the homegrown fig leaf!") (Slightly less flavor, too; but if we must, we must.)

But I don't see how to take out the sex and religion. If I do, there isn't any story left.

This story is supposed to be a completely free-wheeling look at contemporary human culture from the nonhuman viewpoint of the Man from Mars (in the sense of the philosophical cliche). Under it, I take nothing for granted and am free to lambaste anything from the Girl Scouts and Mother's Apple Pie to the idea of patriotism. No sacred cows of any sort, no bows and graceful compliments to the royal box-that is the whole idea of the framework.

But, in addition to a double dozen of minor satirical slants, the two major things which I am attacking are the two biggest, fattest sacred cows of all, the two that every writer is supposed to give at least lip service to: the implicit assumptions of our Western culture concerning religion and concerning sex.