Grumbles from the Grave (36 page)

The story itself is giving me real trouble. I believe that I have dreamed up a really new S-F idea, a hard thing to do these days—but I am having trouble coping with it. The gimmick is "The Man from Mars" in a very literal sense. The first expedition to Mars never comes back. The second expedition, twenty years later, finds that all hands of the first expedition died—except one infant, born on Mars and brought up by Martians. They bring this young man back with them.

This creature is half-human, half-Martian, i.e., his heredity is human, his total environment up to the age of twenty is Martian. He is literally not human, for anthropology has made it quite clear that a man is much more the product of his culture than he is of his genes—or certainly as much. And this Joe wasn't even raised by anthropoid apes; he was raised by Martians. Among other things, he has never heard of sex, has never seen a woman—Martians don't have sex.

He has never felt full earth-normal gravity. Absolutely
everything
about Earth is strange to him—not just its geography and buildings, but its orientations, motives, pleasures, evaluations. On the other hand, he himself has received the education of a wise and subtle and very advanced—but completely nonhuman—race.

That's the kickoff. From there anything can happen. I have tried several approaches and several developments, none of which I am satisfied with. The point of view affects such a story greatly, of course—universal, first person, third person central character, third person secondary character, first person secondary character narrator—all have their advantages and all have decided drawbacks. A strongly controlling factor is the characteristics and culture of the Martian race—I started out using the Martians in
Red Planet.
I'm not sure that is best, as they tend to make the story static and philosophic. This story runs too much to philosophy at best; if I make the Martians all elder souls it is likely to lie right down and go to sleep. Affecting the story almost as much is the sort of culture Earth has developed by the time the story opens. After all that comes the matter of how to manipulate the selected elements for maximum drama. And I'm not pleased with any plotting I've done so far. I've messed up quite a lot of paper, have one long start I'll probably throw away and a stack of notes so high.

If this thing doesn't jell before long I had better abandon it, much as that goes against my personal work rules. I do have about three cops-and-robbers jobs which I can do, one a parallel-worlds yarn and the other two conventional space opera. I don't want to do them; I want to do a
big
story. But perhaps I should emulate Clarence Buddington Kelland and give the customers what they are used to and will buy, rather than try to surprise them.

July 18, 1952: Lurton Blassingame to Robert A. Heinlein

The book idea sounds tremendous, but I can well understand why you would find yourself in difficulties. Put it aside, work on something else, return, and find a new perspective.

June 10, 1953: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

. . . Unfortunately, I cannot report that I have cracked the novel . . .

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 by 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 that 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 sex and profanity than is acceptable in juveniles. I cannot now 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 started 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
,
Peyton Place
,
The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit
,
Darkness 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 stuff, my own way.

Perhaps I will flop at it. I don't know. But such success as 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 field by writing about sociology, sex, politics, and religion at a time (1939) when those subjects were all taboo. Later I cracked the slicks with science fiction when it was 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 always 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 cliché). 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.

Concerning religion, our primary Western cultural assumption is the notion of a personal God. You are permitted to argue every aspect of religion but
that
one. If you do, you are a double-plus ungood crime-thinker.

Concerning sex, our primary cultural assumption is that monogamy is the only acceptable pattern. A writer is permitted to write endlessly about rape, incest, adultery, and major perversion . . . provided he suggests that all of these things are always sinful or at least a social mistake—and must be paid for, either publicly or in remorse. (The thing the censors had against Lady Chatterley and her lover were not their rather tedious monosyllables, but the fact that they
liked
adultery—and got away with it—and lived happily ever after.) The whole deal is something like Communist "criticism" . . . anything and any comrade may be critized (at least theoretically) under Communism provided you do not criticize the basic Marxist assumptions.

So . . . using the freedom of the mythical man from Mars . . . I have undertaken to criticize and examine disrespectfully the two untouchables: monotheism and monogamy.

My book says: a personal God is unprovable, most unlikely, and
all
contemporary theology is superstitious twaddle insulting to a mature mind. But atheism and "scientific humanism" are the same sort of piffle in mirror image, and just as repugnant. Agnosticism is intellectually more acceptable but only in that it pleads ignorance, utter intellectual bankruptcy, and gives up. All the other religions, elsewhere and in the past, whether monotheistic, polytheistic, or other, are just as silly, and the very notion of "worship" is intellectually on all fours with a jungle savage's appeasing of Mumbo Jumbo. (In passing, I note that Christianity is a polytheism, not a monotheism as claimed—the rabbis are right on that point—and that its most holy ceremony is ritualistic cannibalism, right straight out of the smoky caves of our dim past. They ought to lynch me.)

But I don't offer a solution because there isn't any, not to an intellectually honest man. That pantheistic, mystical "Thou art God!" chorus that runs through the book is not offered as a creed but as an existentialist assumption of personal responsibility, devoid of all godding. It says, "Don't appeal for mercy to God the Father up in the sky, little man, because he's not at home and never was at home, and couldn't care less. What you do with yourself, whether you are happy or unhappy—live or die—is strictly your business and the universe doesn't care. In fact you may
be
the universe and the only cause of all your troubles. But, at best, the most you can hope for is comradeship with comrades no more divine (or just as divine) as you are. So quit sniveling and face up to it—'Thou art God!' "

Concerning sex, my book says: sex is a hell of a lot of fun, not shameful in any aspect, and not a bit sacred. Monogamy is merely a social pattern useful to certain structures of society—but it is strictly a pragmatic matter, unconnected with sin . . . and a myriad other patterns are possible and some of them can be, under appropriate circumstances, both more efficient and more happy-making. In fact, monogamy's sole virtue is that it provides a formula defining who has to support the offspring . . . and if another formula takes care of that practical aspect, it is seven-to-two that it will probably work better for humans, who usually are unhappy as hell if they try to practice monogamy by the written rules.