Now we may be about to learn more of what really happened to make the book happen. Bear with me.
Love it or hate it, Stranger was one of the books that caused the Sixties. For all its flaws, it thunder-struck untold numbers of people — including me — with a Road-to-Damascus revelation about the possibilities of genuine multi-love. This was about two decades before the word polyamory came into being. (In fact the word was co-invented by the life partner of one of Stranger's most important early disciples2.) In my case, it wasn't just the book that did it but a nest of real, live waterbrothers who introduced me to the book and then invited me in.
The book's ripples continue to spread. Even today, ask any group of poly activists what originally got them going, and some are sure to mention Stranger and/or other books by Heinlein. Many others in turn discovered poly because of these people's work and influence, two or three or six times removed. If you've been reading this blog, you're a couple degrees of separation from Heinlein right here.
Other poly folks say the book stinks.
They have a point. It's dated, sexist, homophobic, the characters tend to be cartoonish — and although it works great as a fast-paced, thought-provoking adventure story, it's useless as any kind of guide for real life, what with its complete reliance on magic psychic superpowers learned from Martians. Life is too easy when you can make air cars full of raiding policemen vanish into the fourth dimension with a flick of the mind.
Stranger was a surprise break from Heinlein's first 22 years of science fiction. Up to then he had written with a very commercial eye for the pulp and juvenile markets and without showing a trace of counterculture. [ UPDATE: But see biographer Patterson's remarks about how Heinlein tried to sneak ideas about sex into his early stories, in the comments below.] Heinlein cultivated his persona as a crusty and gallant military man — he was an Annapolis graduate (1929) who was let go from the Navy for tuberculosis in 1934. By the Fifties (under the influence of his third wife Virginia, who was poles apart politically from his second3), he had become an outspoken cold warrior, championing military values with a contempt for non-militarists that, to many, bordered on Fascism. At a time when the FBI was digging into the lives of almost all science fiction writers for evidence of subversion (FBI director J. Edgar Hoover is said to have called science fiction the most dangerous literature in America), Heinlein apparently got a pass from the federal snoops.
If so, the joke was on Hoover. Stranger became the most subversive science fiction book in America. It helped inspire a generation of straight, serious, all-American teenagers, such as me, to become free-love radicals, utopians, and visionaries. It became part of the Sixties' rush to unloose all kinds of revolutionary color onto beige America. Stranger remains the best known, best selling, and most influential of Heinlein's nearly half century of work.
Hidden History
And yet, Heinlein was always reticent about how he came by Stranger's extremely liberal ideas. He refused to expound on the book, other than to say that he wrote it to earn a living and to entertain the paying customers. He certainly didn't seem to "believe in it" the way many of its followers did. In one of his few public remarks about Stranger, he famously wrote to a fan: "I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers.... It is an invitation to think — not to believe."
[UPDATE: Oberon Zell, who corresponded with Heinlein about Stranger and has saved the letters he received in reply, has posted here a more extensive letter from Heinlein about his writing of Stranger. It's in the Comments below.]
At times Heinlein, in his reticence, almost seemed to be embarrassed by the book. Nevertheless, from then on he made capable, dynamic polyamorous families a staple of his far-future tales for the next 36 years. Some of these too had wide influence (notably The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, 1966, and Time Enough for Love, 1973).
Heinlein died in 1988. And now we should be getting more of the backstory.
Today is the publication date for the first volume of William H. Patterson Jr.'s massive authorized biography, Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century. Volume One, titled "Learning Curve," covers the years from his birth (1907) to 1948, the year before his third wife Virginia suggested the basic plot idea for Stranger to him.
His private radical ideas on sex and marriage, however, were formed well before then. Some of them appear in a book-length manuscript titled For Us, the Living that he wrote in 1938, the year before he sold his first science fiction story. The protagonist is knocked unconscious and wakes up in 2086, where he proceeds to learn about the better world that people have created in the interim. Later Heinlein — and significantly, Virginia — rounded up what they thought were all copies of For Us, The Living and burned them. They also burned almost all other letters and documentation of his early life and thoughts.
But after his death a copy of the manuscript, annotated in Heinlein's handwriting, was tracked down in a student-of-a-friend's garage. It was published in 2003. There, plain to see, are poly and anti-jealousy ideals that would later become key to Stranger. Near the end, for instance, is a scene — treated not at all salaciously — of the protagonist waking up comfortably in bed with two brainy, informative women. These themes reflected formative experiences that Heinlein had in the 1930s with the approval of both his first and second wives. Virginia was a different matter.
And on that cliffhanger, I'll call a halt. I ordered the new biography today and haven't seen it yet! The above is from earlier sources. I hope I'll have more to tell after I read it.
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Meanwhile, to get back to polyamory in the news, here are some early reviews of the biography.
By Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing:
Heinlein memoir: Learning Curve — the secret history of science fiction...It's the first authorized biography of the sf writer who popularized at least three important motifs of the 20st century (polyamory, private space travel, and libertarianism) and redefined the field of science fiction with a series of novels, stories and essays that are usually brilliant but sometimes self-indulgent, sometimes offensive in their treatment of race and gender, and always provocative and generally sneaky....
Read the whole article (Aug 13, 2010).
By Michael Dirda in the Washington Post:
...Patterson even asserts — and will presumably discuss more fully in Vol. 2 — that Heinlein "galvanized not one, but four social movements of his century: science fiction and its stepchild the policy think tank, the counterculture, the libertarian movement, and the commercial space movement."...Throughout their unconventional life together, the Heinleins [Robert and his second wife Leslyn, to whom he was married from 1932 to 1947] practiced an open marriage, regularly attended nudist colonies and were periodically drawn to suspect schemes for societal improvement, including new theories of taxation (Social Credit) and new ways of interacting with the world (General Semantics)....
...During the war years, the Heinleins both worked at the Aeronautical Materials Lab in Philadelphia, where colleagues included two young sf writers, Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp (whose wife, Catherine, was once photographed nude by Heinlein)....
Sometimes fascinating, frequently over-detailed, Patterson's worshipful biography is no match in literary quality for Julie Philips's superb James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (2006), a superb study of an equally unconventional sf writer. While Patterson admires his hero without serious reservation, some readers may find Heinlein the man just a little creepy at times, not surprising given the controversial militarism he later revealed in Starship Troopers (1959) or the polyamory and sexual obsessions of the sprawling books after The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966)....
Read the whole article (Aug. 12, 2010).
On a site called Necromancy Never Pays:
Reading about Heinlein's high school classmate Sally Rand goes a long way towards explaining the character of Patricia in [Stranger], and finding out that a 1927 book entitled Companionate Marriage [by the progressive Judge Benjamin Barr Lindsey, who lost his judgeship because of the book's radicalism for the time] might have influenced his liberal views on marriage enlarges my picture of the man and the kinds of marriages he dreamed up in his fiction.
Read the whole article (July 21, 2010). A bit of history here: Judge Ben Lindsey was a nationally famous reformer who created the juvenile justice system. After he was run out of Colorado for his book advocating legal contraception and trial marriage, he was elected to a judgeship in Los Angeles — around the same time Heinlein was living in Los Angeles and deeply involved in the political campaigns of the progressivist Upton Sinclair wing of the Democratic Party. Could Heinlein have been influenced not just by Ben Lindsey's book but later by personal contact?
Here is an unflattering review of the Heinlein biography on the Tor Books site by SF writer Jo Walton.
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A couple more notes, while we're at it:
? The only version of Stranger that the world knew for nearly 30 years was the choppy, fast-paced edition that came out in 1961. Heinlein's publisher had insisted that he shorten his original manuscript by 60,000 words, and over the years there were many rumors about what the full version contained. In 1990 Heinlein's widow Virginia brought it out as The Original Uncut Stranger in a Strange Land.
Soon afterward I put the two side by side on a table and, over the course of a month, made a line-by-line comparison from start to finish. My conclusion: little was lost in the cutting. Want details? See footnote 4.
UPDATE: Oberon Zell writes in with a personal letter he has from Heinlein talking about how and why he did the cutting. See the Comments below.
? Cherie L. Ve Ard has written an essay titled The Influence of the Science Fiction Writings of Robert A. Heinlein on Polyamory.
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1 Plot summary for the uninitiated (spoiler alert!): The first human expedition to Mars ends in murder and catastrophe, due to the captain's in-flight affair with another man's wife. Born of that affair is the mission's sole survivor and the hero of the novel: a baby who is raised on Mars by unisex Martians. The Martians possess vast but utterly unhuman wisdom and powers. Our hero is brought to Earth in young adulthood (around 2003, when the sky is full of air cars, a world government rules the U.S., and a new religion is displacing Christianity). He discovers human male-female love, rejects jealousy and sexual possession, founds a polyamorous society of Martian-speaking initiates to be the next stage of human evolution, and finally goes to a Christ-like martyrdom to spread the group's message of love unbounded.
2 That would be Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart, life partner of Oberon Zell-Ravenheart (born Tim Zell) who became one of Stranger's first important evangelists in 1962. He gathered waterbrothers and founded the Church of All Worlds, which became a crucial part of the formation of the Neo-Pagan religious movement. He and Morning Glory are still alive (he's writing his memoirs), and the Church of All Worlds continues today following several schisms and re-creations. Morning Glory's 1990 essay "A Bouquet of Lovers" first introduced the word polyamorous. Here's more on the word's origin.
3 Writes J. Bradford DeLong:
Heinlein in the 1940s, when he leaves left-wing populist politics and becomes a writer, seems, much more than I had thought, to have launched himself on a trajectory to spend the rest of his life as the center of a group whose raison d'etre was to try to live in the early days of a better future, to look sanely and humanely and in a reality-based way at humanity's lurching progress, and to try to help make us become who our best selves are — to be the heir of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.But by the early 1960s he has aged mightily in mind: the best days are no longer in our future but instead in the pre-Great Depression midwest, Dwight D. Eisenhower is soft on communism, and his reaction to living in America's Martin Luther King years is to write Farnham's Freehold, of all things.
What happened?
DeLong then quotes the explanation from Isaac Asimov, Heinlein's friend and fellow science fiction writer, in his memoir I, Asimov:
There had to be a certain circumspection in [my] friendship [with] Heinlein, however. Heinlein was not the easygoing fellow... did not believe in doing his own thing and letting you do your thing. He had a definite feeling that he knew better and to lecture you into agreeing with him.... [While] Campbell always remained serenely indifferent if you ended up disagreeing with him... Heinlein would, under those circumstances, grow hostile.I do not take well to people who are convinced they know better than I do, and who badger me for that reason, so I began to avoid him.
Furthermore, although a flaming liberal during the war, Heinlein became a rock-ribbed far-right conservative immediately afterward... at just the time he changed wives from a liberal woman, Leslyn, to a rock-ribbed far-right conservative woman, Virginia.
Ronald Reagan did the same when he switched wives from the liberal Jane Wyman to the ultraconservative Nancy, but Ronald Reagan I have always viewed as a brainless fellow.... I can't explain Heinlein in that way at all, for I cannot believe he would follow his wives' opinions blindly. I used to brood about it in puzzlement.... I did come to one conclusion. I would never marry anyone who did not generally agree with my political, social, and philosophical view of life.... I would certainly not change my own views just for the sake of peace in the households, and I would not want a woman so feeble in her opinions that she would do so....
4 Heinlein did the shortening that his publisher reportedly demanded by relentlessly condensing practically every sentence, a word or two at a time. The result was a faster-paced, faster-reading story with no significant scenes or ideas removed. I thought that about 1/4 of the cuts were clear editorial improvements, another 1/2 neither improved nor weakened the story on balance but did speed it up, and about 1/4 of the cuts resulted in genuine loss of some depth and nuance. But not very much.
For instance: in the uncut version, Dr. Mahmoud (a minor character) comes across rather more fully as a serious person and a thoughtful Muslim. In the cut version he's more rough-sketched and cartoonish.
The famous "too shocking" scene that the publisher is said to have demanded be changed is when Ben finally finds Mike and Jill in the Nest in St. Petersburg, and they sit Ben down with them, hug him, and vanish their clothes. In the uncut version, Mike and Jill are already having sex when Ben walks in. Big whoop. The meaning of the scene is identical each way, and I actually liked the "toned down" version a little better for its touching innocence and what this says about Ben's horrified reaction.
There was one chunkier cut that I was genuinely sorry to see: the loss of a couple paragraphs setting up the scene at the beginning of the section where Mike and Jill have hit the road as carnies. This bit is sweet, and it gets us inside Jill's head more than usual — and without it, the section starts off rather joltingly and confusingly. If Heinlein was going to cut a couple of whole paragraphs, I'd have much preferred he removed the embarrassingly homophobic bit about "in-betweeners" (which is irrelevant to the story). Yet in his editing he plowed right on through that part, relentlessly removing about one word per line like everywhere else.
When my kids were old enough, it was an easy choice to give them the shorter version of Stranger for their birthdays. For most readers, I think it's slightly the better book.
P.S.: Here's a different opinion.
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