Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
Unbound, September 2019, $32.95 hc; 480 pages
The title of this thoughtful, challenging book about the work of a writer once hailed as the Dean of Science Fiction and first to be inducted as a Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America but now often ignored or even “canceled,” provides a sharp, twenty-first-century jolt of the unexpected.
Historian Dr. Farah Mendlesohn is a notable British critical theorist of sf and fantasy, a feminist analyst of the structure of children’s fiction and the sociopolitics of fantastika. To find her1 welcoming as “Pleasant” a body of work increasingly dismissed as misogynistic and racist might seem rather like encountering a sarcastic book by, say, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez titled The Pleasant Profession of Donald J. Trump. Yet “pleasant” indeed proves to be the adjective mot juste.
Mendlesohn ranges across the entire Heinlein oeuvre to unpack the worth of not just his first short stories and early Young Adult adventures but also the more troubling later hefty opuses. These have been characteristically assailed by, for example, Dave Langford as compiling “vulgarity with nullity, giving us a species of denatured grocer’s port which makes you thirst for some good honest gruel.” Of The Number of the Beast, a kind of postmodern frolic, Langford noted some decades ago:
The tone of voice remains distinctive; you can tell it’s Heinlein talking all right, no matter who’s supposed to be speaking. His personality is all; his insistence on taking criticism as ad hominem attack has become prophecy, because to review the book is to review Heinlein; and he has fewer and fewer interesting things to say. <ansible.uk/writing/numbeast.html>
Mendlesohn digs deeper than such easy cavils into Heinlein’s explicit intentions and perhaps unconscious drives. And her generosity reveals overlooked aspects of what others have condemned as sexism, racism, and a kind of disturbing solipsism: “As a historian, I am perfectly happy to know that I like Heinlein without feeling that it is essential that newcomers to science fiction need to read him.” Still, this careful approach is likely to draw in many younger readers who barely recognize Heinlein’s name not only to read him but to enjoy the experience. Those of the Boomer and later generations will find themselves astonished, in turn, to follow this scholar into very unexpected territory. In the final chapter, “Heinlein’s Gendered Self,” we are invited to ponder the masculine futurist’s interiorization of the female in many stories widely dismissed as belittling women and family.
Driven to this analytic insight, Mendlesohn was no less startled:
To Sail Beyond the Sunset, a curious, anti-feminist and yet feminist novel, brings into focus Heinlein’s idea of a perfectly integrated, right-ordered individual, and the person in the frame is a woman. It is in this story that we get most strongly the sense of Heinlein trying to write women from the inside and focus himself as a woman.
She adds, “I have come to believe that it is simply not the book that I read in 1987 at the age of nineteen; my current age and experiences have profoundly shifted my response.”
One marketing drawback is the extent to which readers are assumed to be at least superficially familiar with Heinlein’s decades of writing: the idiosyncratic settings that eventually link into a grand narrative, the large-scale characters who inhabit these narratives, the late emergence of a kind of literary-critical construct he dubbed “The World of Myth.” Somewhat akin to the cosmological model known as “the Multiverse” or “Many-Worlds universe,” this multidimensional cosmos is vast in extent. Many spacetime aggregations bud off further variations from realities documented, so to speak, in all the fiction—the “fictons”—of strong mythmakers such as Homer, Sir Thomas Malory, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Smith, E.E. “Doc” Smith, and, well, Robert A. Heinlein.
Clearly it would have been heavy-handed and inutile to provide A-Z summaries of all these texts and their principals and minor sidekicks, the kind of handy guide provided in M.E. Cowan’s A Heinlein Concordance <www.heinleinsociety.org/concordance>. Luckily, this vade mecum can be consulted free of charge via the net while reading The Pleasant Profession. Even so, Mendlesohn’s approach is partitioned, major topics clumping works from early, middle, and late without benefit of a clock or astrolabe. Once you get the hang of this thing, perhaps via repeated consultation with Cowan’s Concordance and the numerous novels and shorts themselves, it is indeed pleasurable to trek through this multiplex many-worldscape.
To kick off that somewhat tesseracted exploration, Mendlesohn summarizes the key historical stages of Heinlein’s life as presented in the late Bill Patterson Jr.’s hefty two-volume authorized biography, Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with his Century (Vol. 1, Learning Curve, 2010; Vol. 2, The Man Who Learned Better, 2014). Patterson’s important if worshipful bio attracted rebukes for slighting the crucial role of his second wife, Leslyn MacDonald. In Mendlesohn’s thumbnail, Leslyn was an
actor, writer, philosopher ... Assistant Director of the Music Department at Columbia Pictures with a sideline as a story doctor. Unusually for the period she had a Master’s degree. She was also a liberal and a Republican (the two parties were only then in the process of swapping their positions on the liberal-conservative axis).
They had an open marriage of which Heinlein took full advantage that culminated in his divorce and then remarriage to a chemical engineer, Lieutenant Virginia Gerstenfeld, the very opposite of a liberal. Both Heinlein and MacDonald suffered psychologically from the stress of the Second World War—he, as well, in gruesome, incompetent medical repairs to severe hemorrhoids that left him with a damaged rectum. For a long time he was only able to stand or lie down but not sit—scarcely an ideal recuperation for a writer. Leslyn, a small woman, grew gaunt, alcoholic, perhaps deranged. Evidence suggests that Heinlein was devastated by this ruinous collapse. Mendlesohn finds echoes of this trauma in such characters as Farnham’s Freehold’s whiny, delusional wife of the incompetent Hugh Farnham.
It is necessary to have at least a sketchy grasp of Heinlein’s life to grasp how entwined his fictions were with his emotional status and right-shifting ideological positioning. The initial sketches develop density and shading as Mendlesohn tracks his maturation as a serious writer who protectively passes himself off as a story spinner churning out tall tales for money. Nobody paying attention could possibly take that kind of demurral seriously.
Heinlein’s truly Pleasant Profession (a title drawn with smiling irony from his terrifying ontological horror story “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag”) is cleft into nine segments, none of them building a consecutive narrative but all winding back and forth toward a kind of intellectually astute redemption of Heinlein thirty years after his death. Here are those chapters after the Patterson-based biographical summary:
2 Heinlein’s Narrative Arc
3 Technique
4 Rhetoric
5 Heinlein and Civic Society
6 Heinlein and the Civic Revolution
7 Racism, Anti-Racism, and the Construction of Civic Society
8 The Right Ordering of Self
9 Heinlein’s Gendered Self
10 Epilogue: The Cat Who Walked Through Genres
To summarize this detailed, apparently meandering colloquy would reduce Mendlesohn’s literary and cultural journey to a rather clotted tea-leaf reading. Those with a libertarian passion rejoice in Heinlein (“Tanstaafl!”). Meanwhile, mood-signaling nipples (“Spung!”) can provoke a shuddery feminist aversion to reductive jollity. I can best serve the book by recommending that people put aside preconceptions and dig deeper and wider. Consider, as you mull over these antitheses, two more elaborate samples from The Pleasant Profession:
Heinlein has a dual reputation as both an anti-racist, and a racist. I intend to begin from the premise that both are true: that Heinlein is manifestly and provably and vociferously anti-racist, and that the construction of his anti-racism and very strong opposition to color prejudice, and how he understood that, is the root of his racism. Consequently, this section will build up by looking at Heinlein’s strengths and draw increasing attention to the racism and why the racism. This is not to excuse the issues but to contextualize them. (Ch. 7)
As must be clear by now, when we discuss the construction of the integral individual in a Heinlein novel, we cannot escape the issue of gender. This is not only because Heinlein’s construction of women has often been controversial or even because considering gender is one of those “givens” in current discussions of science fiction, but because Heinlein himself is fascinated with gendered behavior and the gendered self.... [H]ere I want to think about the consequences for the individual, beginning with masculinity, then femininity, intersex and transgender and moving on to what I think is perhaps the most gendered and complex aspect of Heinlein’s writing about the self, the growing craving for both biological and constructed or fictive family. (Ch. 9)
Bon voyage!
Damien Broderick lives in San Antonio.
1. Mendlesohn prefers the pronouns “they” and “them” but the biblio at the close of Pleasant Profession uses “She.” I consulted Farah and she told me “Go for she to match the book.”
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