March 23, 1951: Lurton Blassingame to Robert A. Heinlein
Revision on Puppet Masters satisfied Doubleday. Sent word to Gold [H. L. Gold, editor of Galaxy].
April 3, 1951: Lurton Blassingame to Robert A. Heinlein
Talked with Gold today. The magazine is undergoing a policy change, and must wait before purchase. Controlled from abroad-France and Italy-will let LB know when there is definite word.
April 21, 1951: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
You will recall that you advised me that Gold’s original demands for revision for serial publication were outlandish in view of what he would pay-about $2,000.
June 3, 1951: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
Galleys for The Puppet Masters have arrived; galleys for Between Planets are expected this week; Gold wants synopses for The Puppet Masters. I am still on a merry-go-round but will take care of these items without undue delay. I learn from the grapevine (but not from — ) that “Green Hills” is about to be published.
August 20, 1951: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
I have been sitting on my hands this past week to keep from writing a stiff letter to Gold. He sent me an advance copy of the September Galaxy with the first installment of The Puppet Masters. Gold turns out to be a copy messer-upper; there is hardly a paragraph which he has not “improved” — and I am fit to be tied.
Now Galaxy is an excellent market and I do not wish to make your task any harder by antagonizing an editor to whom you may be offering more of my copy-but if I were freelancing without an agent, I’d be quite willing to risk losing the market permanently in order to settle the matter. What I would like to say to him is: “Listen, you cheesehead, when we were both free-lance writers I had a much higher reputation than you had-in fact you never wrote a number-one science fiction story in your life-so who in hell do you think you are to be ‘improving’ my copy!”
Well, I didn’t and I won’t-but that is how I feel and it is the literal truth; Gold is turning out a good magazine, but as a writer he was never anything but a run-of-the-mill hack. This whole matter no doubt sounds like a tempest in a teapot, particularly as Gold did not change the story line but merely monkeyed with dialog, rephrased sentences and such-in short, edited the style. Look, Lurton, my plots are never novel, I am not an originator of brand-new and wonderful ideas the way H. G. Wells was; my reputation rests almost solely on how I tell a story…my individual style. It is almost my entire stock in trade.
Without changing the plot in the least, without changing the manuscript in any fashion that could be detected by someone else without side-by-side comparison, Gold has restyled the copy in hundreds of places from my style to his style. It would be very difficult to show how he has damaged the story, but in my opinion he has changed a story-with-a-moth-eaten-plot amusingly told into a story-with-a-moth-eaten-plot poorly told. This is my first serial appearance in a long time; his changes will not make it easier to get top rates for my next such appearance. The cash customers won’t know what is wrong, but they will have the feeling of being let down-not quite “first-rate Heinlein.”
I’ll cite just one example out of hundreds: At one point I have a nurse say, “Eat it, or I’ll rub it in your hair.”
Gold changes this to, “Eat it, or you’ll get it through a tube.”
See the difference? My phrasing is mildly (very mildly) humorous. It conjures up a picture of a nurse who maintains discipline by cajolery, by the light touch, the joking remark. Gold’s phrasing is as flatfooted and unsmiling as an order from a hard-boiled top sergeant.
There are both sorts of nurses, admitted. But the entire characterization of this nurse (Doris Marden) had been consistent as the sort of a person who kidded her patients into cooperation (modeled after a nurse who attended me at Jefferson Medical); with one phrase Gold louses up the characterization and turns her into the top-sergeant type.