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 aclass="underline" 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.
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 criticized (at least theoretically) under Communism provided you do not criticize the basic Marxist assumptions.
So...using the freedom of the mythical man from Mure...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.
The question now is not whether the ideas above are true, or just twaddle-the question is whether or not there will be any book left if I cut them out. I hardly think there will be. Not even the mild thread of action-adventure, because all of the action is instigated by these heretical ideas. All of it.
Mr. Cady's wish that I eliminate the first "miracle," the disappearances on pp. 123-124, causes almost as much literary difficulty. Certainly, I can rewrite that scene, exactly as he suggested...but where does that leave me? That scene establishes all the other miracles in the story, of which there are dozens. Now I will stipulate that "miracles" are bad copy-but if I eliminate them, I must throw away the last 700 pages of the ms. -- i.e., write an entirely different story. Miracles are the "convincer" throughout. Without them the Man from Mars cannot recruit Harshaw, Ben, Patty, Dr. Nelson, BOI even Jill-nobody! No story.