A Strange Man in a Strange Land

Robert Heinlein and the Libertarian Age

It would be honest of me to admit that no person had more effect on shaping the person I grew up to be than Robert Heinlein.

I discovered, and devoured, his writings at a very early age. I am reasonably sure I first encountered his works around the age of 7 or 8, sometime in the late 1970s. His ideas about politics, about honor, about sex, about religion, about friendship, about human potential, and about the duties the individual owes to his society marinated in my subconscious through adolescence and early adulthood. The three things I would most like to achieve in life — to be a soldier, to be a preacher, and to be a politician, are all the refractions of his novels expressed through the prism of my life story.

Heinlein’s authorized biographer, William Patterson, completed a comprehensive two book study of his subject, the second volume of which was just published. Subtitled “In Dialog With His Century”, Book 1 Learning Curve, and Book 2 The Man Who Learned Better are thought provoking and sometimes frustrating but very descriptive examinations of the man’s life and work.

A quick synopsis for those unfamiliar with the subject: Robert Heinlein was a midwestern boy from modest circumstances who finagled an appointment to Annapolis, became a naval officer, and lost his commission after being diagnosed with tuberculosis in the mid-1930s.

Surviving on a small pension from the navy and whatever work he could find piecemeal, he chanced across a contest for aspiring science fiction writers and on a lark tried his hand at the genre. Deeming his work too good for the original contest he instead submitted it to the “pulp” magazines of the era and found a ready market. Heinlein had a natural touch for the writer’s art and the arc of his life was set.

In the 1940s and 1950s he produced a dozen “juvenile” novels aimed at teenagers. These books were written before the Space Age really began — before sputnik, before NASA. Heinlein demonstrated an almost prescient ability to predict what it would be like to travel in space and visit alien worlds years before those things become possible. His juvenile works were left behind in the 1960s when he decided to write full time for an adult market and created 3 touchstone novels, Starship Troopers (1959), Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966). All three won the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel the year of their publication. The first two are arguably the most controversial works in all of science fiction literature. Stranger in a Strange Land made Heinlein wealthy.

The works he produced after Moon didn’t capture the audience’s favor and they became increasingly introspective and self-referential although all were best-sellers and many still have stalwart champions in the fan community. Heinlein died peacefully at home from complications of advanced emphysema and old age in 1988.

Those are the facts widely known to anyone with a casual interest in science fiction. The purpose of Patterson’s biography is to dig deeper, and to present the man in the context of his life and times.

The biography is clearly a hagiography. Patterson clearly perceives Heinlein as a towering figure of 20th century literature and as a nearly perfect example of freethinking Man. Heinlein lived an interesting and eccentric life and Patterson presents the details without much effort to investigate the impacts of Heinlein’s lifestyle on his creative output to the detriment of the whole work.

The facts, as presented by Patterson, include the following: Heinlein was married three times. The first was a brief and inconsequential arrangement that had no lasting impact. The second, to Leslyn MacDonald, had a much greater impact. Leslyn and Robert found common cause in radical socialist politics. They also found common cause in living unconventional lifestyles. The Heinleins were nudists, and were active members of various “sunbathing clubs”. They were also experimenting with polyamory, or at least Robert was — there are suggestions he was less sympathetic to Leslyn’s affairs than he demanded she be of his. During World War II, they met and subsequently arranged for a 3-way “marriage” with Virginia (“Ginny”) Gerstenfeld. That arrangement did not survive Leslyn’s increasing alcoholism or jealousies and Robert and Leslyn divorced in 1947, and Robert and Ginny married in 1948 — a marriage that would last until his death 40 years later.

Robert was born into a world of Victorian sexual morals. Men and women lived prescribed lives and their public actions were always subject to private criticism. His time in the Navy exposed him to a wider world and his own proclivities stretched his boundaries still further. Even so he remained very uncomfortable with the dichotomy between his private behavior and its public perception. Robert appears to have divided his world into three groups — an “inner circle” with whom he felt free to act without restriction, a “middle circle” of casual friends and business confidants whom he treated with great care and respect but with whom he was always guarded, and an “outer circle” of the general public for whom he played a part of his own devising — part curmudgeon, part patriot, part teacher, part savant, and part multidisciplinary genius.

This structure of 3 nested groupings recurs repeatedly in his fiction. It is one aspect of his life where his work is a nearly perfect mirror.

This is the first major weakness of Patterson’s biography. From the 1940s to the mid 1960s, the details of Heinlein’s private life would have been shocking and likely career-ending had they become common knowledge. His market in “juveniles” was circumscribed by a network of editors, librarians, teachers, and activist figures in the community (clerics, parents, police, etc.) who wanted to define “good moral standards” and ensure they were enforced by the younger generations being raised in the aftermath of WWII and the Great Depression. The work and the writer were inextricably intertwined in that matrix and had Heinlein been found to be deficient of character, the market for his books would have evaporated.

The end of the first book of the biography concerns itself with the disintegration of Heinlein’s marriage to Leslyn although references to the sexually complicated nature of that relationship are heavily obfuscated in the text. Patterson doesn’t pretend the marriage was normal but he also doesn’t go out of his way to illuminate the reader as to what life must have been like in a household with two wives in mid-century post-war America. At the same time Robert is also making life-long connections with his peers — Issac Asimov, Arthur Clark, and L. Ron Hubbard. The community of science fiction writers of the first rank was small, and they were related by business as well as bonds of friendship — their circle also included literary agents and the editors of the “pulp” magazines and the book publishing houses.

Interestingly, in an afterword to the 2nd volume, Patterson publishes excerpts from contemporary letters retained by one of Heinlein’s friends which are much more direct and revelatory about the events of the late 1940s. This material was presented to Patterson after the first volume was published, but the letters themselves don’t hold any new information, they just reflect the thoughts and reported dialog of the principles captured in media res as opposed to the dry, sanitized approach Patterson took when presenting the material originally. It doesn’t make Heinlein appear a better or worse person but it does make him seem a lot more human.

The 2nd volume begins with Robert and Ginny fleeing California and setting up housekeeping in Colorado Springs. There, free of the distractions (and likely the temptations although that is never stated) of Los Angeles, Heinlein settles into an extended creative period and elevates himself from the most successful writer of “pulp” speculative fiction to the most successful writer of juvenile science fiction. From Patterson’s retelling, this period was one of total domestic tranquility other than disruptions caused by challenges in building a house from scratch, the chaos that comes with having a large extended family and a lot of friends living close to the poverty line, and an exhausting list of mostly minor but occasionally signficiant medical problems.

What was actually happening is anyone’s guess. There is a vignette retold in the biography of a time when Ginny and Robert returned from a trip to Europe with one of the first bikinis. At a party at their house, in mixed company, the women all took turns trying on the garment and modelling it for the group. Not the kind of thing one does when modesty is at a premium. Robert continues to engage in nudist activities and it is hinted but never stated outright that Ginny and Robert practiced nudity in the home as a matter of course, and Robert visited various communes and clubs where he could be nude in public as well (though Ginny appears not to have enjoyed the habit and didn’t accompany him on more than one occasion). Robert tells a close confident that he and Ginny are free to sleep with whomever they wish, although he would never expect Ginny to be with a man that Robert would not approve of, nor the converse. There is a noticable lack of detail though. With whom the Heinleins were sharing their beds was not apparently important enough to make it into a biography where seemingly infinite details about addresses, cats, minor editing controversies, plumbing and travel arrangements were.

Robert Heinlein felt that he remained anchored in his political and social beliefs but that the United States moved to his left. In the early 1940s he had been a part of Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California movement and had run for the state Assembly as an avowed Socialist. But by the Kennedy administration he felt more at home in the conservative wing of the Republican party.

He attempted to start a grass-roots movement to oppose arms control and the unilateral ban on nuclear weapons tests. He and Ginny were Goldwater Republicans in the 1964 contest. He was a staunch anti-Communist and feared that his earlier pre-war Socialist activities could result in his getting blacklisted. It quickly became obvious that whatever his youthful political indescretions were nobody cared enough to drag them into the light. His success became a sort of insurance policy against the ghosts of his past.

The children that he had touched with his “juvenile” novels grew into adulthood. His trio of early 60s works were perfectly positioned to catch them as they transitioned into college, the military, politics, and became the new backbone of America as their parents retired and left the stage.

He gained an extensive network of contacts in the government and the military, parlaying his own service, the success of his brothers (one of whom was a “mustang”, a solider who rose from buck private to become a General, holding every rank in-between). In the post-war environment politics and the military were also intertwined with the scientific establishment, where his credentials were unparalleled for a layperson. This network gave Heinlein gravitas. He cultivated this image carefully, engaging with his Naval Academy class, speaking at various official functions for government and industry, and making himself available to help popularize and explain the burgeoning space program and nuclear power when asked.

Stranger in a Strange Land, a novel about a human raised on Mars by Martians who returns to Earth to lead a revolution in society through a philosophy of free love and universal understanding, caught a wave of change in America. People were breaking ancient taboos about gender roles and sexual morals and in Stranger they found a strongly worded, logical, well-reasoned foundation for a new way of living that appealed to the revolutionary generation of the 60s. Sales of the book skyrocketed, and with those sales came a tremendous income which transformed Heinlein from a successful writer into a man of great wealth.

I re-read that novel after finishing the biography. The last time I read it I was probably in high school — the end of the 1980s, so it has been nearly 30 years, and my memory of the book was faded. I was surprised as I read it how much of the work seems mired in obsolete standards of behavior and that was when I realized just how incredible the transformation of our society has been since 1960.

When the book was written, “Women’s Liberation” was barely a force — most of its momentum had been spent in securing the vote in the 1920s and the Prohibition movement of the 30s. The females in the novel are usually sent to another room to prepare food when the men have to have a serious conversation. They are delighted to make a suitable match and even more delighted to become pregnant, leaving whatever careers they may have had behind as they become attached to various male characters. They are universally sexually attractive and once their various “repressions” are dealt with, sexually active.

There was virtually nothing to be said about being homosexual other than to pity the condition or accept it as terribly dysfunctional. Every person of import is white, and if not white, then their non-whiteness is an exotic element of their character which becomes the defining aspect of their part of the story.

Remember, this is a novel that was condemned by The Authorities as being irredeemably vulgar and practically obscene (and certainly blasphemous!) when it was published and even more condemned when it became a pop-culture phenomenon. It was blamed (erroneously) for the Manson Family killings. Its cavalier treatment of religion — especially Christianity, was unbelievably shocking for a “mainstream” popular novel. The idea that sex was a harmless (and usually a positive) way to “grow closer” between people who loved one another, regardless of their state of matrimony was incendiary. People’s lives were changed by this book. Families divided and sometimes never reconciled.

We live now in a society that is as radically different from the early 1960s as the 1960s were to the middle ages. Our civilization caught up to Heinlein’s fanciful extrapolations, then blew past them and rendered them quaint and out of date.

The shame is that Heinlein didn’t continue down the path he started with Stranger. Instead the novels that he wrote later in life, after Moon, were no longer advocacy for a way of being that extended what seemed to be his logic of the 60s. They abandon the higher purpose to which he had put his talent and they stopped being manifestos that challenged people to be better — they just seemed to be vehicles to try and tell an interesting story.

Perhaps Heinlein was just future shocked. People do have limits to how much change they can process and we know that those limits are a factor of age. Heinlein was in his 50s when he wrote Troopers, Stranger and Moon. Perhaps by his 60s and 70s he just didn’t have the capacity to keep pushing those boundaries.

The world we now inhabit is a triumph of Heinlein-style personal libertarianism. I’m sure he would not find much public policy to his liking but on social issues the America of his birth, the America that he carried like a heavy load while writing “juveniles”, is gone. Today, barring very limited circumstances, who a person chooses to have sex with, to share a household with, to worship with, and with whom to form common political cause has very little negative repurcussions.

Heinlein was on record on many occasions telling people that they could not divine his personal politics by reading his novels. I’m sure that he believed that was true, especially since much of his personal ethics he kept guarded and were known (if known at all) only to his “inner circle”. He did say, however, that if you took Troopers, Stranger, and Moon and found the connections between all three, you could begin to understand his foundational philosophies of life.

Troopers explores the question of sacrifices. What will you give up to protect what you value? How do you assign costs to the acts that you take and how will you pay them? How willing are you to give of yourself so that others may be safe, or happy?

Stranger asks the reader to question the structure of society. Why obey certain rules and break others? Everyone should have a personal code and they should be able to enunciate that code. A person can then be judged by how well they uphold their own credo. And they should be judged.

Moon inverts the question. What role should a government have towards the governed? When can a collective decision override an individual choice? Governments should be defined by a list of “thou shalt nots”, and when they breach those limits, they need to be reformed (or destroyed). Determining that list is the foundational moment for any government and understanding the list is the primary duty of every citizen.

We are missing a big piece of this puzzle. These three novels all speak to how individuals should interface with the public world — the “outer circle”. Heinlein never did explore his ideas about the “inner circle”. In the 70s and 80s, Heinlein wrote novels that had family structures as their scaffolding but the dynamics never seemed to gel. They are all so exotic as to have virtually no likely resonance with the reader’s actual experiences. He explored themes of family relationships in every configuration imaginable — incest, whatever you call it when you clone your X chromosome to produce a female version of yourself then have sex with it, group marriage, sex with aliens, being a man in a woman’s body, childless couples, etc.

Heinlein’s real-life marriages were barren. His ideas about parenting are therefore all by way of observation not experience. Perhaps this was the fundamental thing that blocked him from writing that 4th novel. The child-rearing family unit is the atomic element of human interactions, and Heinlein was never the head of a family with children. He was the co-equal but unquestioned leader of his marriage. He was the patriarch of science fiction fandom. But he was never a father.

In a perfect world, Heinlein would have had a daughter. My strong intuition is that the result would have been a novel of the “inner circle”, a vision of a world struggling to find an equal gender balance in the tension between what fathers want for their daughters and what daughters want for themselves. That never happened, and instead we got a novel about a cat who walked through walls. We are all the poorer as a result.