May 31, 1951: Lurton Blassingame to Robert A. Heinlein
Word from Blue Book taking Between Planets, paying $1,000.
Scribner will publish about 1 November, allowing Blue Book to schedule story for September or October issue.
June 3, 1951: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
Good news indeed about the sale of Between Planets to Blue Book. Please tell Kennicott [Donald Kennicott, editor of Blue Book, who knew nothing of science fiction except H. G. Wells’s title] that there is no resemblance at all between Wells’s War of the Worlds and my Between Planets-also that he should read Wells’s book; it’s a dilly. The move-overs should resemble in appearance the mythological fauns or satyrs, the “goat-men,” but should avoid too close a resemblance, i.e., avoid terrestrial musculature, articulation, and physiognomy, both of goats and men. Faunus veneris is a biped, horned, and smaller than a man, but its appearance merely suggests the faun of Greek mythology. It is not actually related to any earth-ian life form; there is plenty of elbow room for the artist to use his imagination.
June 28,1951: Lurton Blassingame to Robert A. Heinlein (telegram) Scribner’s proofs on their way airmail special delivery.
THE ROLLING STONES
December 1, 1951: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
The boys’ novel Rolling Stones is about a quarter finished, smooth draft-and an unsatisfactory story line thereafter. The trouble is that I am trying to do domestic comedy this time with nothing much in the way of revolutions and blood-and I find comedy harder to write. Oh, I can keep up wisecracking dialog all too easily, but the characters have to do something too, something important. With space warfare and intrigue ruled out by the nature of the story I find that a problem. Story centers around twin boys and their eccentric family. Family goes to asteroids in family spaceship, get into various sorts of trouble, get out again.
January 5, 1952: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
The new boys’ novel, The Rolling Stones, is rolling along. I am hard at work seven days a week.
January 15, 1952: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
I heard from Miss Dalgliesh about Rolling Stones; she is enthusiastic.
March 8, 1952: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
I am sorry to say that I am again having “sex” trouble with Miss Dalgliesh-she has decided (from her Olympian heights as an amateur Freudian) that The Rolling Stones contains some really dangerously evil connotations. Her letter was rather horrid and I was quite offended. I am not asking you to front for me this time; I answered her myself. Since the business matters are all completed, it is strictly an author-editor matter and you have troubles enough without being put in the middle on this. But enough is enough and I do not intend to tolerate any more of this sort of thing. The Rolling Stones may be the last juvenile I will do, or, if I do another, perhaps we will offer it to — rather than to Miss Dalgliesh.
I consciously intend to write wholesome stories for boys and mean to leave out entirely the sophisticated matters which appear in my writings for adults. In addition, Mrs. Heinlein went over this one most carefully, trying to find things Miss Dalgliesh might object to. When we were both satisfied that it was as pure as Caesar’s wife, we sent it off. I feel sure that you would have returned it to me for revision had you seen anything in it which could have been construed as dirty. So she liked it and signed a contract for it-and now decides that it is dirty. The anecdote about the Vermonter who made a pet of a cow, ” — same as you might a good hunting dog — ” Miss Dalgliesh says suggests “certain abnormal sex practices.” Well, it doesn’t suggest anything to me except that my wife has made a pet out of a horse next door, which was what it was based on-and I am dead certain it won’t suggest anything horrid to my boys and girls. But I gave her a revision-because we decided that the anecdote was not dirty but was dull.
Her other objection was this: “Flat cats seem to me a trifle too Freudian in their pulsing love habits.” Since I intentionally desexed them entirely, even to parthenogenesis, I found this a bit thick. I always called a flat cat “it” rather than “he” or “she” and gave the only named one a name with no sex connotation. These things I did because I knew she was hipped on the subject-but it was useless; she is capable of seeing phallic symbolism in Jack’s beanstalk.