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glaurungBeing a review of William Patterson's "Robert A. Heinlein In dialogue with his century: Vol 1, Learning curve."
I didn't have high expectations for this book -- after reading Jo Walton's critique of its poor fact-checking (and saw the author arguing with the reviewer in the comments of that post, which did not leave me a good impression of him), I knew it wasn't going to be great. Sadly, it failed to even be good.
The sources of badness in this book are many. Starting with what isn't there: There's no discussion of sources, neither in the introduction nor the back matter. This is particularly important since Heinlein burned most of his personal papers shortly after the war, during his protracted breakup with his second wife, Leslyn. Without those papers, writing a biography of an extremely private person who had a lot to hide or obscure about his life (eg, Heinlein's nudism and his preference for open marriages had to be concealed since his juvenile book contracts contained morality clauses; Heinlein did his best, during the cold war, to utterly bury his long and intense involvement with Utopian socialist politics in California during the Depression) becomes fraught with difficulties and perils. Patterson does not make clear where and when the lack of primary records impacts our ability to know what was happening during parts of Heinlein's life. Nor is it made clear up front the degree to which the first volume of the biography (which mostly deals with the era before Heinlein met her) is built around the frail backbone of Virginia Heinlein's reminiscences late in her life, of stories Robert Heinlein told her decades previously, of the events of his life long before he met her.
Indeed, Patterson seems allergic to admitting when data is lacking. There are only a handful of instances where Patterson speaks in the text of the lack of records, yet the book is filled with suppositions. Lacking evidence about what Heinlein's experience with hazing at the naval academy was like, Patterson fills the gap by referencing a story Heinlein wrote decades later which Patterson assumes is more or less autobiographical. Time after time, we are told that Heinlein "would have met [name]" when all we know is that Heinlein and [name] were in the same town at around the same time. Or we are told that it must have been because of event X that Heinlein did Y, when all we really know is that Y happened after X. Jo Walton's critique (linked above) points out that in the case of Edna St. Vincent Millay in Greenwich Village in 1930, Millay's life is documented well enough to prove that Heinlein would not have run into her as Patterson claims.
Not only does Patterson seem unaware of the need to distinguish between speculation and fact, he seems to be innocent of the need to distinguish between (somewhat autobiographical) fiction, autobiographical narratives, third party reminiscences, and contemporaneous records. For example, take the story of Heinlein's first fiction sale. Heinlein himself told the story many times, most accessibly in Expanded Universe, of seeing a contest announcement in one pulp, but then sending the story to another pulp because they would be less swamped with submissions, and then getting a nice fat check back in the mail. In Expanded Universe, he ends the anecdote with the line "and there was never a chance that I would ever again look for honest work."
Patterson's account of the start of Heinlein's writing career occurs in Chapters 17 and 18. In Chapter 17, he tells us that in fact there was no contest, merely a routine house ad soliciting freelance story submissions. Then, in chapter 18, after recounting Heinlein's composition of his first, unpublished novel, and the early progress of Heinlein's story ideas file, Patterson gets the composition and submission of "Life Line" to Astounding. And we get this:
The footnote tells us that the quote is from a 1986 interview with Heinlein (not online, but there's a snippet here at note #12), as expanded by Virginia Heinlein in a 2001 interview. So, having discredited Heinlein's autobiographical account as unreliable, Patterson turns to versions of that autobiographical account when he wants to quote Heinlein's reaction to getting paid for his writing.
This kind of thing happens over and over again in the book. Patterson never bothers to let us know in the text which bits are from contemporaneous documents and letters, which bits are from letters or interviews written long after the fact, and which bits are from Virginia Heinlein's reminiscences. If we dive into the massive endnotes, it quickly becomes apparent that Patterson treats all sources alike and seems to view them all as equally credible and authoritative. If he gives preference to one source, it is, as already noted, to the weakest and least reliable one: Mrs. Heinlein's reminiscences.
Patterson is also weak on chronology. I noticed several places where he got ahead of himself, bringing in something that happened years later to flesh out his account of the events at hand. These chronological jumps may have been intended to provide context and help stitch the narrative together, but they don't come across that way, and instead read, for me, at least, as jarring discontinuities. For instance, in between publication of Heinlein's first juvenile and his writing of his second, he wrote the first of what would eventually be several stories about a teenage girl nicknamed Puddin'. Speaking about this first Puddin' story ("Poor Daddy"), Patterson says:
The problem being that at this point, Heinlein had not, in fact, proven he could write one juvenile per year, because he had only written one (the quote is from an interview with Virginia Heinlein, conducted over 50 years after the events took place; the other footnote is to "accession notes" for the UC Santa Cruz archive of Heinlein's draft of "Poor Daddy").
[[Actually, just in briefly checking the notes while writing this, I found yet another instance of poor scholarship: With no bibliography and no note on the sources he used, we are left scratching our heads and wondering just what it means when a footnote for discussion of a story Heinlein wrote says simply "Accession Notes, 11/05/68, for Opus 59, 'Poor Daddy.'" There's no indication of who wrote that accession note - the library archivist? Heinlein himself? Some later researcher who has organized the mass of archival materials into numbered "opuses"? And how do we know who wrote it (especially if, as the name suggests, it's a note on the back of the card catalog entry for the story in question)? If it was Heinlein himself, then Patterson as usual has failed to note the vast and crucial difference between contemporaneous documents and documents generated decades after the fact.]]
These failings aren't academic esoterica, but very basic issues of scholarship that anyone trying to write a serious biography really needs to have mastered. And they wouldn't stand out so much if the biography was an interesting and insightful account of Heinlein's life... but it isn't.
On the Heinlein Society forum, while the book was still in production, Patterson complained that his editor forced him to cut the MS from 700,000 words down to 400,000. Unfortunately, even after being cut almost in half, the book is far too long and overburdened with extraneous details. Each year of Heinlein's time as an undergraduate at the Naval Academy gets a chapter to itself - we learn not only the names and histories of all the training ships Heinlein sailed on, but also the names of all his roommates. That's quite a bit of verbiage for something that is so poorly documented that Patterson was forced to quote from Heinlen's fiction for his reaction to the hazing he was presumably forced to endure.
The names of college roommates might be useful if those people were to reappear in Heinlein's life later on, but Patterson is so busy name dropping (actually he is quite thoroughly addicted to name dropping) that he never bothers to pause and let us know who among all these names were people who had a role in Heinlein's later life. For instance, we learn in the second chapter that the silent film star and erotic dancer Sally Rand attended Heinlein's grade school for a brief time as a child. In that chapter, this reads as an extraneous detail, meaningless celebrity-obsessed name dropping - "Wow, Heinlein and [famous person] attended different classrooms in the same school together!" It is only much later in the book that we learn that Rand was a personal friend of Robert and Leslyn Heinlein in California in the 30's.
It's as if Patterson is applying the same non-rules to his prose as he is to his sources -- just as he doesn't distinguish between contemporaneous letters and letters reminiscing about things decades ago, he can't seem to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant details.
The endless piling on of poorly distinguished details got to be so much, that after the first few chapters, to preserve my sanity, I found myself skimming a lot. And yet, despite all these endless details, it feels as if Patterson himself is just skimming lightly over the surface of Heinlein's life. We learn that Heinlein had mystical visions as a child, which led him to adopt a personal philosophy that "all consciousness is one and that all the actors I see around me . . . are myself, at different points in the record’s grooves." In short, the religious philosophy of Mars set forth in Stranger in a Strange Land was Heinlein's own. A good biographer would spend time exploring this, giving as much detail as possible about the visions and what they meant to Heinlein from his letters, and discussing the insights they provide into his writing, his conduct, and his character. Patterson mentions it in a couple of short paragraphs, sandwiched between remarks about his grades at school and his first encounter with an airplane.
The contrast between all of the irrelevant details and the near-total lack of analysis makes the book a very odd reading experience -- it reads as simultaneously mind-numbingly overdetailed, and breezily superficial.
I could go on to detail how bad this book was, but it's getting late and I need to clean house for a holiday party tomorrow, so just one more example of badness and I'm done.
Right from the first page of the introduction, we learn that this book is going to be hagiographical to a fault, when Patterson, with a straight face, claims that the day Heinlein died was comparable to such events as the Challenger disaster, the Kennedy assassination, or September 11, 2001.
As best I can tell, the only reason it was not rejected by the publisher is that Heinlein has a massive following of rabid fans who do see him as a saint, if not a god, and that it is an "authorized" biography that benefited from extensive interviews with Mrs Heinlein before her death.
As a massive compilation of notes and source materials for a biography, this book is great. As a biography, it's piss poor. If you are a Heinlein fan and want to know the story of his life, do your wallet a favour and check it out from the library -- and then be prepared to do a lot of skimming.
I didn't have high expectations for this book -- after reading Jo Walton's critique of its poor fact-checking (and saw the author arguing with the reviewer in the comments of that post, which did not leave me a good impression of him), I knew it wasn't going to be great. Sadly, it failed to even be good.
The sources of badness in this book are many. Starting with what isn't there: There's no discussion of sources, neither in the introduction nor the back matter. This is particularly important since Heinlein burned most of his personal papers shortly after the war, during his protracted breakup with his second wife, Leslyn. Without those papers, writing a biography of an extremely private person who had a lot to hide or obscure about his life (eg, Heinlein's nudism and his preference for open marriages had to be concealed since his juvenile book contracts contained morality clauses; Heinlein did his best, during the cold war, to utterly bury his long and intense involvement with Utopian socialist politics in California during the Depression) becomes fraught with difficulties and perils. Patterson does not make clear where and when the lack of primary records impacts our ability to know what was happening during parts of Heinlein's life. Nor is it made clear up front the degree to which the first volume of the biography (which mostly deals with the era before Heinlein met her) is built around the frail backbone of Virginia Heinlein's reminiscences late in her life, of stories Robert Heinlein told her decades previously, of the events of his life long before he met her.
Indeed, Patterson seems allergic to admitting when data is lacking. There are only a handful of instances where Patterson speaks in the text of the lack of records, yet the book is filled with suppositions. Lacking evidence about what Heinlein's experience with hazing at the naval academy was like, Patterson fills the gap by referencing a story Heinlein wrote decades later which Patterson assumes is more or less autobiographical. Time after time, we are told that Heinlein "would have met [name]" when all we know is that Heinlein and [name] were in the same town at around the same time. Or we are told that it must have been because of event X that Heinlein did Y, when all we really know is that Y happened after X. Jo Walton's critique (linked above) points out that in the case of Edna St. Vincent Millay in Greenwich Village in 1930, Millay's life is documented well enough to prove that Heinlein would not have run into her as Patterson claims.
Not only does Patterson seem unaware of the need to distinguish between speculation and fact, he seems to be innocent of the need to distinguish between (somewhat autobiographical) fiction, autobiographical narratives, third party reminiscences, and contemporaneous records. For example, take the story of Heinlein's first fiction sale. Heinlein himself told the story many times, most accessibly in Expanded Universe, of seeing a contest announcement in one pulp, but then sending the story to another pulp because they would be less swamped with submissions, and then getting a nice fat check back in the mail. In Expanded Universe, he ends the anecdote with the line "and there was never a chance that I would ever again look for honest work."
Patterson's account of the start of Heinlein's writing career occurs in Chapters 17 and 18. In Chapter 17, he tells us that in fact there was no contest, merely a routine house ad soliciting freelance story submissions. Then, in chapter 18, after recounting Heinlein's composition of his first, unpublished novel, and the early progress of Heinlein's story ideas file, Patterson gets the composition and submission of "Life Line" to Astounding. And we get this:
A few days later, on April 24, the check arrived from Street & Smith—$70.00, as promised. Heinlein stared at it for a moment.
"How long has this racket been going on?" he demanded rhetorically. "And why didn’t anybody tell me about it sooner?"[22]
The footnote tells us that the quote is from a 1986 interview with Heinlein (not online, but there's a snippet here at note #12), as expanded by Virginia Heinlein in a 2001 interview. So, having discredited Heinlein's autobiographical account as unreliable, Patterson turns to versions of that autobiographical account when he wants to quote Heinlein's reaction to getting paid for his writing.
This kind of thing happens over and over again in the book. Patterson never bothers to let us know in the text which bits are from contemporaneous documents and letters, which bits are from letters or interviews written long after the fact, and which bits are from Virginia Heinlein's reminiscences. If we dive into the massive endnotes, it quickly becomes apparent that Patterson treats all sources alike and seems to view them all as equally credible and authoritative. If he gives preference to one source, it is, as already noted, to the weakest and least reliable one: Mrs. Heinlein's reminiscences.
Patterson is also weak on chronology. I noticed several places where he got ahead of himself, bringing in something that happened years later to flesh out his account of the events at hand. These chronological jumps may have been intended to provide context and help stitch the narrative together, but they don't come across that way, and instead read, for me, at least, as jarring discontinuities. For instance, in between publication of Heinlein's first juvenile and his writing of his second, he wrote the first of what would eventually be several stories about a teenage girl nicknamed Puddin'. Speaking about this first Puddin' story ("Poor Daddy"), Patterson says:
[Heinlein's juvenile editor Alice Dalgliesh] remarked that there were many more writers for boys than for girls. Heinlein’s agenda in doing these juvenile books was for girls as well as boys. He saw no reason he couldn’t write a girls’ book [25] — writers always have to put on a persona and write through that persona. He would just put on the persona of a teenaged girl. “Miss D[algliesh] told R[obert] once that she wished she had an author who could turn out a girls’ juvenile each year just as regularly as R[obert] did; he told her that he would try one—and she just laughed at him.”26
The problem being that at this point, Heinlein had not, in fact, proven he could write one juvenile per year, because he had only written one (the quote is from an interview with Virginia Heinlein, conducted over 50 years after the events took place; the other footnote is to "accession notes" for the UC Santa Cruz archive of Heinlein's draft of "Poor Daddy").
[[Actually, just in briefly checking the notes while writing this, I found yet another instance of poor scholarship: With no bibliography and no note on the sources he used, we are left scratching our heads and wondering just what it means when a footnote for discussion of a story Heinlein wrote says simply "Accession Notes, 11/05/68, for Opus 59, 'Poor Daddy.'" There's no indication of who wrote that accession note - the library archivist? Heinlein himself? Some later researcher who has organized the mass of archival materials into numbered "opuses"? And how do we know who wrote it (especially if, as the name suggests, it's a note on the back of the card catalog entry for the story in question)? If it was Heinlein himself, then Patterson as usual has failed to note the vast and crucial difference between contemporaneous documents and documents generated decades after the fact.]]
These failings aren't academic esoterica, but very basic issues of scholarship that anyone trying to write a serious biography really needs to have mastered. And they wouldn't stand out so much if the biography was an interesting and insightful account of Heinlein's life... but it isn't.
On the Heinlein Society forum, while the book was still in production, Patterson complained that his editor forced him to cut the MS from 700,000 words down to 400,000. Unfortunately, even after being cut almost in half, the book is far too long and overburdened with extraneous details. Each year of Heinlein's time as an undergraduate at the Naval Academy gets a chapter to itself - we learn not only the names and histories of all the training ships Heinlein sailed on, but also the names of all his roommates. That's quite a bit of verbiage for something that is so poorly documented that Patterson was forced to quote from Heinlen's fiction for his reaction to the hazing he was presumably forced to endure.
The names of college roommates might be useful if those people were to reappear in Heinlein's life later on, but Patterson is so busy name dropping (actually he is quite thoroughly addicted to name dropping) that he never bothers to pause and let us know who among all these names were people who had a role in Heinlein's later life. For instance, we learn in the second chapter that the silent film star and erotic dancer Sally Rand attended Heinlein's grade school for a brief time as a child. In that chapter, this reads as an extraneous detail, meaningless celebrity-obsessed name dropping - "Wow, Heinlein and [famous person] attended different classrooms in the same school together!" It is only much later in the book that we learn that Rand was a personal friend of Robert and Leslyn Heinlein in California in the 30's.
It's as if Patterson is applying the same non-rules to his prose as he is to his sources -- just as he doesn't distinguish between contemporaneous letters and letters reminiscing about things decades ago, he can't seem to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant details.
The endless piling on of poorly distinguished details got to be so much, that after the first few chapters, to preserve my sanity, I found myself skimming a lot. And yet, despite all these endless details, it feels as if Patterson himself is just skimming lightly over the surface of Heinlein's life. We learn that Heinlein had mystical visions as a child, which led him to adopt a personal philosophy that "all consciousness is one and that all the actors I see around me . . . are myself, at different points in the record’s grooves." In short, the religious philosophy of Mars set forth in Stranger in a Strange Land was Heinlein's own. A good biographer would spend time exploring this, giving as much detail as possible about the visions and what they meant to Heinlein from his letters, and discussing the insights they provide into his writing, his conduct, and his character. Patterson mentions it in a couple of short paragraphs, sandwiched between remarks about his grades at school and his first encounter with an airplane.
The contrast between all of the irrelevant details and the near-total lack of analysis makes the book a very odd reading experience -- it reads as simultaneously mind-numbingly overdetailed, and breezily superficial.
I could go on to detail how bad this book was, but it's getting late and I need to clean house for a holiday party tomorrow, so just one more example of badness and I'm done.
Right from the first page of the introduction, we learn that this book is going to be hagiographical to a fault, when Patterson, with a straight face, claims that the day Heinlein died was comparable to such events as the Challenger disaster, the Kennedy assassination, or September 11, 2001.
As best I can tell, the only reason it was not rejected by the publisher is that Heinlein has a massive following of rabid fans who do see him as a saint, if not a god, and that it is an "authorized" biography that benefited from extensive interviews with Mrs Heinlein before her death.
As a massive compilation of notes and source materials for a biography, this book is great. As a biography, it's piss poor. If you are a Heinlein fan and want to know the story of his life, do your wallet a favour and check it out from the library -- and then be prepared to do a lot of skimming.