Heinlein’s Debut

And the European crisis that was deepening as Heinlein composed his novel during the last months of 1938? In his future history, the United States prudently stayed out of the Second World War, which “ran its course” and then petered out with Germany’s economic collapse. A really disastrous European war–the Forty Years War–came later, after a united Europe (a constitutional monarchy with the Duke of Windsor drafted to serve as titular emperor) had enjoyed several decades of peace and prosperity. This war, which lasted from 1970 to 2010, nearly depopulated the continent.

Once again, a wise American president kept the United States out of the faraway conflict, cutting off relations with Europe altogether. But Heinlein’s protagonist in For Us, the Living, Perry Nelson–an inadvertent time-traveler from 1939 who has been getting a crash course from Diana, his lovely hostess in 2086–has a question about what happened to Europe after the war. “We don’t know, Perry,” Diana answers. “The Non-Intercourse rule has never been fully lifted and we have never resumed commercial or diplomatic relations. The population is increasing slowly. It is largely agrarian and the economy is mostly of the village and countryside character. Most of the population is illiterate and technical skill is almost lost. Our knowledge is incomplete although we maintain missions in several places for ethnological and sociological study.” Those “ethnological and sociological” missions are a nice touch. So much for Old Europe.

Every year, hundreds, perhaps thousands of supremely confident men write tracts purporting to be novels, mostly of the self-published variety, certain that they have the answers to the world’s most pressing problems. (Women seem not to be as vulnerable to this particular form of hubris.) Heinlein’s For Us, the Living was rejected by Macmillan and Random House, and that could easily have been the end of his career as a writer.

But something quite unpredictable happened. Even before he received the final rejections of his novel, Heinlein sold his first story, “Life-Line,” to Astounding magazine, the leading science-fiction publication of the time. More stories quickly followed. Heinlein had transformed himself overnight from a windy would-be philosophe to a teller of tales, superbly compact, assured, bristling with ideas yet moving forward with propulsive narrative drive. One day he was a writer no one had heard of; the next day he was “RAH,” the most commanding presence in “golden age” science fiction. He set For Us, the Living aside, cannibalizing it for other works until it had outlived its usefulness. Some years after Heinlein’s death in 1988, a researcher named Robert James learned of the unpublished novel and tried to track down a copy of the manuscript. The trail eventually led to a jumble of boxes in a garage. And now the book has been published at last.

Readers who are familiar with Heinlein the vigilant anti-Communist, whose 1951 novel, The Puppet Masters, appeared even as many of his peers were pooh-poohing “The Red Scare,” may be surprised by the hyper-isolationism of this early work. But it makes perfect sense in the utopian scheme of For Us, the Living, which is subtitled “A Comedy of Customs.” Europe represents the atavistic human world dominated by unexamined tradition, while the enlightened America of Heinlein’s novel represents the triumph of science, freethinking, and plain old Yankee pragmatism. How foolish the old superstitions appear in the cool light of reason! Indeed, so complete is the transformation that Diana, the winsome Everywoman of 2086, can’t even grasp what Perry is talking about when he refers to the murder mysteries that were so popular in 1939 (murder evidently being so rare in the sweetly reasonable future that the very idea of the genre is bizarre).

Not that utopia was achieved without a struggle. In his future-history lessons, Perry learns about the despicable Nehemiah Scudder, “founder of the New Crusade and leader of the Neo-Puritans,” who made a determined effort to turn the clock back. His movement gained momentum early in the 2020s and for a time threatened to sweep the nation but was eventually vanquished. In 2028, a new constitution was ratified, the most important provision of which was “that no law was constitutional that deprived any citizen of any liberty of action which did not interfere with the equal freedom of another citizen.”

Still, one never knows when the religious virus will break out again, and so the state must exercise due caution. As one of Perry’s instructors explains,

Ah, the usefulness of “public development centers.” As a novel, For Us, the Living will not enhance Heinlein’s reputation. It most closely resembles the talky, jokey, narcissistic fables of his dotage, books such as “The Name of the Beast” and To Sail Beyond the Sunset. And yet there is one quality that this failed utopia conspicuously shares with his enduring works–including the best of his thirteen juvenile novels, books such as Time for the Stars and Citizen of the Galaxy, written in the late 1950s–and that difference is authority, which Heinlein had in spades.

Writers as different from each other, and from Heinlein, as Harlan Ellison and Samuel Delaney cite the way he casually sketched the features of an unfamiliar world: “The door dilated.” Such “science-fiction sentences,” as Delaney calls them–compelling the reader to participate in creating an imaginative reality–gave Heinlein, at his best, a seductive persuasiveness, grounded as well in his knowledge of science and mathematics. The supreme confidence that fueled the grandiosity of his misbegotten first novel was turned to a strength when he submitted, however grudgingly, to the demands of storytelling and the peculiar conventions of the science-fiction genre.

John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.