Grumbles From the Grave

CHAPTER XIII

POTPOURRI

March 30, 1956: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I am acquiring sunburn and backaches putting in a completely new and very complicated irrigation system. When I get that and some [Colorado Springs] house repairs completed I'll tackle a new story. My intention is to try to turn out some short stories this summer and not start another novel until about Labor Day.

April 14,, 1956: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

We are still gardening like mad and I ache in every bone from days and days of pick, shovel, and wheelbarrow work. I've just finished an enormous irrigation project. Well, it felt enormous to me, but it does not look like much now that the pipes are covered up. Today we have rain, snow, sleet, hail, and gropple, and I am catching up on paperwork. I expect to resume writing two weeks from Monday and plan to turn out several shorts and short-shorts before tackling another novel.

July 25, 1956: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Ginny has worked out a shenanigan with [a friend] to let you shoot on a resident permit if I don't get one...Ginny put in for a license, too-if you shoot on her license all that will be necessary is for you to convince the warden that you are female and redheaded.

P.S. I did my first pistol shooting (aside from one tomcat) in twenty-two years last Saturday. Three 10's and two 9's for a 48 on my first group. I should have stopped there, for I dropped as low as 42 for 5 shots later-averaging around 45.

August 20, 1956: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Take it easy on the stone masonry; it can make you old before your time. But I enjoy it more than any other form of mechanics, except that it half kills me.

October 3, 1958: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Thanks for the pic of Socrates, the super-giraffe. He is not here yet: he is still in quarantine in Hoboken and in the meantime they are trying to plan a route to Colorado Springs which will not involve bridges or tunnels too low for him-if it were up to me, I'd shoot him full of barbiturate, stretch him out flat, and fly him here in a Hying Boxcar. They'll kill him getting him here-if not from bridges, then from pneumonia. In the meantime, two widowed lady giraffes are awaiting him here; their deceased husband managed to hang himself-quite a trick for a giraffe. [This is in response to Lurton Blassingame's sending a picture of the giraffe that was to come to the zoo at Colorado Springs.]

July 14, 1961: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I'm in good health but Ginny is not. We've been having atrocious weather, which led to a set of cracked ribs for her. Like this-I've been building an irrigation dam for her garden and designed it to be a large ornamental pool as well as useful. We had been pointing towards a big fourth of July party and, since I had installed an electric pump for irrigation, I also rigged it to operate as a re-circulating fountain-a jet thirty feet in the air with spotlights on the jet and floodlights on the sea green pool-very pretty and just right for a garden dinner party.

The rains came.

Golly, how the rains came! And on 2 July the pond silted up with brown slime. Ginny helped me clean it out-and slipped in the slime and fell against a boulder and cracked her ribs. Now she is strapped like a mummy and won't hold still and isn't getting well and everything hurts her-and I am finding out how really useful a wife is when she is well.

(But the party came off prettily anyway. We served sixty-four people-we now have enough picnic tables for a beer garden-Ginny had sewn about a hundred yards of bunting, I made an easel for a full-sized replica of the Declaration of Independence, we had martial and patriotic music over the outdoor sound system, and I set up a bar that could serve anything from a mint julep or a Saz-erac cocktail to a Singapore sling. Fine time! -- and Ginny ignored her wounds until the next day. Shamrock is going to have kittens again.

PATRICK HENRY AD

EDITOR 's NOTE: One morning in early April, I fetched the newspaper down to read along with breakfast, in my usual fashion. Robert was still sleeping, and there were standing orders never to disturb him until he woke up. But this day was different.

There was a full page ad by the SANE people, signed by a number of local people we knew...I flew in the face of the standing orders, and woke Robert up. "What are we going to do about this?" I asked.

I fixed him breakfast and he read the ad while he ate.

There was no discussion about what we would do. Robert sat down at his typewriter and wrote an answer. When he was finished, I read the full-page answer and suggested that he rewrite it, using the same ideas he had used, but not mentioning the opposition. He did that, and the ad is reprinted in Expanded Universe.

Colorado Springs had two daily papers, one morning and one afternoon. We took the ad to the latter, paid for a full-page ad, and later went to the other and also took another full-page for our ad.

These ads caused a sensation. The telephone kept ringing, the mail was filled with a few pledges, and one or two contained checks to help the cause. We ordered extra copies of the page and sent them out to our mailing list, which was not very large at that time.

With the assistance of a wet paper copier, I made copies and sent the originals in to the President, registered, return receipt requested. I strung up a drying line in the kitchen and suspended the copies to dry. For weeks the kitchen was difficult to get around in.

Some people took an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle and sent us a copy. A few more pledges came in.

I sat down and did some figuring. Not counting the time we both put into the project, it cost us $5 each to send those pledges to the President. Our backfire had failed, and we never heard a word from President Elsenhower.

The President then signed an executive order suspending all testing without requiring mutual inspection.

Robert had been working on The Man from Mars [Stranger in a Strange Land]. He set that aside and started a new book-Starship Troopers. Both books were directly affected by this try at political action-Starship Troopers most directly, and The Man from Mars somewhat less directly. The two were written in succession; they are quite different stones from what Robert might have written otherwise.

(Robert's version of this can be found on pages 386 to 396 of Expanded Universe.)

April 26, 1958: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I don't know when I'll get any more fiction written -- maybe never. This effort is taking up all of our time. On the other hand, we are spending money on it even faster than we spend money in traveling, so I may be flat broke soon and forced to go back to cash work.

But I refuse to worry about personal aspects of the future. I am convinced in my own mind that the United States is washed up and we will cease to exist inside of five to fifteen years -- unless we quickly and drastically pull up our socks, both at home and in foreign policy. This opinion has been growing in my mind for years: I was simply triggered into doing something about it by this pacifist-internationalist-cum-clandestine Communist drive to have us treat atomics and disarmament in exactly the fashion the Kremlin has tried to get us to do for the past twelve years.

I wish some of those starry-eyed internationalists would go take a look at the illiterate, unwashed uncivilized billions whose noses they want to count in a "world state"! And also explain to me how you get a world state of "peace with justice" while dictators, both Red and garden variety, control the "votes" of a billion and a half out of two and a half. Somebody ought to tell them that "politics is the art of the practical." Me, maybe.

Enough, too much-but it is much on my mind. The Patrick Henry League has been getting more response than I expected, much less than is enough to be effective. But we shall persevere.

MISCELLANEOUS

May 15, 1963: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Thanks for that full house of checks. Ginny took 'em all. You will be pleased to hear that I bought her another emerald ring, a quite expensive one, which will insure that I go back to work again before too long.

Ginny is about the same and is so beat down from hand-watering her [Colorado Springs house] garden that she doesn't really know whether she is sick or exhausted. After every bath the bucket brigade starts, Ginny bailing, me toting. I have placed four barrels around the garden and there every bit of wash water goes-hands, baths, dishes-and from these she waters with an old-fashioned watering can. In the meantime, I am digging a drainage ditch all around the house to carry all rainwater (if it ever rains!) from the driveway and the roof to my reservoir pond. I am lining it with concrete tile to keep silt out, so that it will not clog my pump. After that I am going to work out a (very expensive!) underground tank and immersion pump deal to use septic tank water for irrigation. This is no temporary emergency here; this county has doubled in population in ten years-and the area is semi-arid. (Remember mat range on which you hunted antelope.) Things will get worse, not better, and I intend to make us as nearly independent of the water company as possible. No other news. We don't do a damn thing but haul water.

July 5, 1963: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

...and it has slowed up my letter writing; I owe letters to everybody and am just barely managing to answer urgent business mail and send off checks for bills. Yesterday I celebrated the Fourth of July by bringing Ginny home from the hospital. Nothing to do with the mysterious ailment which has plagued her for so very long (which is as bad or worse than ever); this was an operation on her right wrist, orthopedic surgery to correct damage she did to it by endless toting of a heavy watering can when she was trying to save her garden. Yes, she saved the garden and, sure, I have now built a water works which makes us independent of the water company and permits her to water with a pump and a hose-but the damage was done during the month when every drop of water was applied by hand. It got so bad that she could not even sign her name with that hand, so they opened up her wrist and corrected it.

Since she is right-handed to the point that she can hardly hold a fork with her left hand, since her right hand is useless until it heals, and since I am a slow and inefficient housewife, not too much is getting done around here that does not simply have to be done at once-especially as I continue to try to get in as many hours of mechanical work as possible. The Heinlein Water Works is finished to the point where it operates, but I still have endless masonry and carpentry jobs to do before it will be utterly safe from flash floods and landscaped so that it does not look like an abandoned slum-clearance project.

September 3, 1963: Robert A. Heinlein to Peggy Blassingame

I won't send him [Lurton] flowers; his doctor has almost certainly forbidden roughage. I would like to mail him a blonde, but there is some silly regulation about livestock. I suppose the best thing for him to do is to get out of that ulcer-making business. (I would go crazy in it.) But when Count does retire, I, and almost certainly a lot of others, will perforce retire, too.

It might do him some good to come out here and fish for a month-there aren't enough fish in Colorado streams to bother anybody.

In the meantime, he should avoid newspapers, authors, publishers, and editors.

August 23, 1964: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

[Concerning the arrival of a letter addressed to ' 'Robert A. Heinlein, United States of America."]

The empty envelope herein is for your amusement...It was delivered with no delay at all, being postmarked the 9th and reaching me on the llth, via surface mail. It need not be returned.

POLITICS

June 15, 1964: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I am still getting no professional writing done and our household continues to be stirred up night and day by politics. I had intended to take no real part in this campaign other than donation of money, while Ginny devoted practically full time to it. But I find myself in the situation of the old retired fire horse downgraded to pulling a milk wagon-a school bell rings...and milk gets scattered all over the street! Last week I found myself, for the first time in a quarter of a century, presiding at a political rally-co-opted without warning at the last minute. I must admit that I rather enjoyed it. And I find myself pulled in on many other political chores and devoting perhaps half as much time to it as Ginny does.

EDITOR'S NOTE The preceding fall I had become much taken with politics-a group of us had started a "Gold for Gold-water " campaign. We set up a Colorado Springs headquarters in a donated storefront, and gathered together campaign literature, buttons, and all the trappings.

Six of us agreed to take one day a week at the headquarters, and there were all sorts of meetings and speeches to be given. Robert gave his blessing to my endeavors and I was allowed to spend as much money as I thought we could afford.

He accompanied me to political dinner parties and other doings, and presently he could no longer stand the political inactivity, so he joined me. His activities were a revelation to me. Instead of simply charging the price for a book, he set up a goldfish bowl, and asked for contributions, getting more out of each customer. He set up a dinner party, at $50 a head, and sold it out. Some bought tickets, and returned those to him to sell again, and he sold them, sometimes two or three times each, garnering a lot of "Gold" for the campaign.

The telephone rang constantly, and he could get no copy written. We were fully involved in an already lost campaign. Eventually we recognized that, and made plans to leave for South America after voting on Election Day.

October 2, 1964: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

We still miss Shamrock but her little golden tomkitten is healthy and full of beans. Now I must run, get dressed, and rush to still another political dinner.

STUFFED OWL

April 15, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Ginny fetched home a stuffed owl and gave it to me. She was almost hysterical from self-panicking, laughing harder than I have seen her laugh since the time in Oct '65 when we were blockaded on a 70 mph freeway in Utah by 5,000 milling sheep. For some years I have used a family cliche concerning useless gifts: "Just what I've always needed-a stuffed owl."

So she gave me one. The cliche" dates back to my childhood. Do you remember Hairbreadth Harry, the Beauteous Belinda, and Rudolph Rassendyl the Villyun? Well, one Christmas about forty years ago Belinda gave Harry a smoking jacket that fitted him like socks on a rooster, and he gave her a stuffed owl-to which she said glumly: "Just what IVe always needed."

So now I have just what I've always needed, and the stuffed owl (now named "Pallas Athena") is perched facing me just beyond my typewriter.

READER

December 10, 1968: Lurton Blassingame to Robert A. Heinlein

...However, not all people love you. I had a call this morning from a frantic mother in Minnesota whose fourteen-year-old son had run away from home for the third time. On his desk she had found your name, care of me. He has read all your books and she thinks he may be out to find you. Before taking off he had gone through his mother's purse and his father's store, so he has about $2,000 on him.

EDITOR 's NOTE: We never saw the boy.

VIP

March 20, 1969: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

This almost fractured me. Our tickets arrived marked "VIP." No fooling. I thought "VIP" was just an idiom-but swelp me, our tickets are so marked. I laughed until I was hoarse.

EDITOR'S NOTE: In early 1969, an invitation came from the Brazilian government to attend a film festival to be held in Rio de Janeiro. All expenses would be paid by that government-we would be guests. The only payment would be that Robert give a talk.

Robert wrote this as a P.S. to Lurton in a business letter. His talk was given at the theater at the French Embassy.

As I recall, this was the only free trip Robert ever accepted; it even included courtesy of the port-no customs or immigration needed. The return to New York was another matter!

APPRAISAL

November 21, 1968: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Did I tell you about the appraisal on my donation of mss., et al. to the U of California]? If not, I must-for I am astounded. The appraisal was made by Robert Metzdorf of New York and Connecticut, and the IRS has been fidgeting about the long delay in getting an appraisal. But the university librarian wanted this appraiser and no one else, because of his high prestige and his past successes in making his appraisals stand up in court. So at last Metzdorf had a couple of other jobs out this way and did my small job while he was here.

What he appraised was just the fraction of the total gift which is now actually in the university's library, to wit, about two-thirds of my mss. plus a couple of boxes of foreign editions and some [paperbacks] in English. The valuation he placed on this fraction was $30,230.00 --

-and I was flabbergasted.

Sure, Ginny had placed a guesstimate of $25,000-plus on the whole gift-but that was for all mss., plus our entire library, plus several valuable paintings, plus several other things. Since the IRS permits deductions for gifts of chattels only after the physical property is delivered, I had been fretted that the valuation on what I had been able to deliver (some mss. plus a few not-very-valuable books) might be less than the cost of appraisal-i.e., leave me with a net loss in cash and much loss of professional time spent in cataloging and preparing the stuff for the library. I never thought of my old mss. and notes as being worth much-hell, to me they were simply papers that cluttered up my files but which I did not dare throw away for business reasons. As for the foreign editions and paperbacks, for years I have been giving them away to anyone who would take them.

I still expect the IRS to scream about the appraisal. I'm very glad-now-that we got the number one appraiser. If the IRS won't accept it, I now feel safe in taking it to Tax Court.

EDITOR 's NOTE: The IRS did not object to the valuation placed on these papers.

CATS

January 12, 1957: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Pixie is dying...uremia, too far gone to hope for remission; the vet sent him home to die several days ago. He is not now in pain and still purrs, but he is very weak and becoming more emaciated every day-it's like having a little yellow ghost in the house. When it reaches the stage of pain, I shall have to help him past it and hope that he will at last find the door into summer he has looked for. We are pretty broken up about it...we have become excessively attached to this little cat. Of course, we knew it had to be when we first got him and I would much rather outlive a pet than have the pet outlive us -- we're better equipped to stand it. Nevertheless, it does not make it any easier...

March 23, 1959: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Polka Dot had her kittens on St. Patrick's Day-like this: Ginny and I had been standing almost heel and toe watches as Pokie has not been at all well during this. About one o'clock in the morning I was up, Ginny had just gone to bed. Pokie comes dragging herself into my study, all cramped up in labor. So I held her paw for about an hour, whereupon she had one tortoiseshell female-Bridey Murphy. For the next three hours she has lots of trouble, so we get her vet out of bed and he comes over. He gave her a shot of pituitary extract; shortly she starts to deliver another one-a black and white male (Blarney Stone); poor little Blarney didn't make it...hung up in delivery, dead by the time we could get him out, although as lively as could be as he came part way out. And Ginny got her hand terribly bitten (Ginny screamed but didn't let go...and the cat didn't let go either). About dawn the three of us and Pokie went to the hospital and she had a Caesarean section for the third and last (Shamrock O'Toole, another tri-colored female, a close twin of Bridey). About 8 A.M. we fetched mother and daughters home, Ginny having had only a nap and myself no sleep at all. All three are doing fine now and the kits have doubled in size or more in six days. The thing that impressed me the most about the whole deal was the surgery-aseptic procedure as perfect as that used on humans, utterly different from animal surgery of only twenty years ago.

April 10, 1961: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Things have been confused and this is late. First we had kittens. Then Shamrock turned out to be the kind of mother who holes up in a tavern while her brats slowly freeze in the car, i.e., she takes vacations from the kittens without warning, as long as twenty-four hours, which finds us, Ginny especially, down on our knees feeding formula to kittens with a doll bottle that holds just an ounce. Then some Icelanders came to town, guests of the State Department, and I, as a member of the Air Power Council, was drafted to entertain them. Whereupon Ginny decided to give a dinner party for all of them, a dinner of some twenty people, at the drop of a hat. Fine time, but it killed three days, what with preparations, cleaning up, and recovering. Then the superintendent of the Naval Academy, a classmate of mine, came to town and we did it all over again-and had a blizzard. During which the wings of Ginny's new greenhouse came down under the snow load. Not much dollar damage and no plants lost, but Ginny was sad and it was quite a nuisance. I had been dubious about the design when I saw it first and had ordered modifications to beef it up, but the mechanics had not done it as yet.

Then the galley proofs on Stranger in a Strange Land arrived and that killed three days of the time of each of us; it's a long book. Ginny has just taken them to the post office and I am now writing to you a letter that should have gone days ago.

May 20, 1962: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

The new kittens are two weeks old and fat and healthy. A hawk or an owl got Ginny's ducks.

April 17, 1964: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

No more news here, save that Shammie, immediately following the adoption of her latest litter last Sunday, at once went out and set a new crop-so we should have more kittens ca. 17 June. A busy body, that one-thirty-one kittens so far and she has just turned five.

August 16, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Both Ginny and I are temporarily physically debilitated and emotionally depressed; we lost our little tomcat. He has been gone one week now and must be assumed to be dead. It is barely possible that he is out tomcating after some female and living on the land-but it is extremely unlikely. Two or three days, yes-a full week, no. A bobcat, a fox, a raccoon, an automobile. Sure, he was just a cat and we have lost cats many times before. But, for the time being, it hurts and keeps us from sleeping and leaves us emotionally unstable. Ginny continues to work hard, although she is not sleeping at all well -- me, I'm so damned short on sleep that I can hardly type and can't concentrate.

PROBLEMS

December 18, 1950: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

The novelette I planned to write as soon as the Puddin' story (enclosed) for Senior Prom was out of the way has been jeopardized by the headlines as it has a historical tie-in which calls for World War III holding off for a little while at least. I am shelving it and will start immediately on the next boys' novel for Scribner's-and I'll write it so that the above point is not material! I will complete it as rapidly as possible because of those same headlines. A purely personal and selfish note in the present turmoil is that I need, somehow, to complete this [Colorado Springs] house as rapidly as possible so that I will be ready for whatever comes. Mrs. Heinlein may be called up at any time; she has already received correspondence about it-and one married female reservist here in town has already been called up ahead of her husband, so that we know the threat is real. I myself must have a minor operation before I can possibly pass the physical examination, but I hope to be able to get around to that before very long. Two of my brothers are now in uniform and the third is likely to be called up soon-and I might as well get ready for anything. In the meantime, I intend to turn out copy and lots of it as long as possible.

April 7, 1951: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Just at present any proposed work brings a feeble response. I am in a very rundown condition and have been and may still be on the ragged edge of nervous breakdown. I had purposed spending a couple of months or a bit more supervising the completion of my house, doing some of the work myself as a therapeutic measure, then when finished, taking a look at the war news and making up my mind as to whether I was morally obligated to go at once back into laboratory work rather than continue with writing. Ginny is in reserve; if and when she gets called up, I don't want to be tangled in contracts I can't shuck off-I want to be in research that will help to win the war as quickly as possible and thereby bring her home again. (I myself cannot possibly pass the physical exam; laboratory work is all I'm good for.)

March 1, 1953: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

...We are all well again-even the cat, as I finally got the big black tomcat that had been beating him up. Ginny woke me one morning and said that the black torn was out front. I hurried into robe and slippers, loaded my Remington .380 pistol, and went out. Got him with the first shot, fortunately, as he was moving and I wouldn't have gotten a second. Had him buried and was back in bed in under twenty minutes. A sad task, but Pixie was so crippled up that I don't think he could have survived another beating-and I prefer my own cat to a feral one.

October 8, 1953: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I tried to keep the letter factual in tone; if undue emotion has crept into it, you may charge it off (this is private to you) to the fact, among others, that -- without consulting us, gave us as financial references all around Colorado Springs-and that Ginny was annoyed by telephone calls demanding to know when -- was going to settle her bills. And other matters better left unsaid.

December 11, 1964: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

We have a new phone number-UNLISTED-so please write it down here and there. Ginny has wanted this for years to put a stop to fan calls at all hours. I must admit the quiet is welcome.

January 9, 1968: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I am returning Art Clarke's article as you asked in your note on the face of it. I take it that Spectorsky's [a Playboy editor] request was made to you this time rather than direct to me. He makes this request of me almost every month; I have long since quit answering these little notes. The first one was several years ago and concerned a short story by Fred Brown-quite a good one and I wrote a nice plug for it, which Spec published.

It was a mistake; I should have ignored it. I've been bombarded with similar requests ever since. Quite aside from the time such free work would require, correspondence is the bane of my existence and the major interference with my working time; I've no wish to add to it by writing letters to editors. And it is indeed "free work" that Spec wants; he is soliciting unpaid reviews from well-known writers.

But, hell, I might go along with it if that were all there is to it-Playboy is a number one market and it wouldn't hurt me to grease Spec a bit. But here is the trouble: I will not under any circumstances write anything unfavorable about any of my colleagues-and some of the stuff Spec asks me to comment on stinks. This one by Art Clarke is a dilly. But the last request concerned a story by -- . I'm on good terms with -- and intend to stay that way-but, had I written in as -- asked me to, the letter would'have read: "Dear Spec, You should be ashamed to have printed it and -- should be ashamed of having written it."

So what should I do, Lurton? Pick out only the ones I can honestly praise and ignore the others? Or do as I have been doing and never comment on the work of my colleagues?