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Unreliable narrator
May. 21st, 2010 06:47 amFrederik Pohl (my choice for the Fan Writer Hugo) has been doing a series of posts recalling Robert A. Heinlein and his wives. In the latest, Pohl remembers Ginny and says that she bowdlerized the letters in her late husband's Grumbles from the Grave.
OK, but if she was trying to protect his image, she didn't do a very good job. The book makes clear something that was whispered during Heinlein's lifetime, that he wasn't a very good person. Specifically, he was a bully. It is clear from the letters that John W. Campbell needed him a lot more than he needed Campbell, and that he was taking full advantage of that. On the other hand, later on when he was writing juvies for Scribner, editor Alice Dalgleish had the whip hand in their relationship and he submitted like a happy customer of Madame La Bondage's Correctional Institution for Naughty Boys (eventually taking Novelist's Revenge by creating a fictional bitch named "Agnes Douglas" and accidentally or otherwise calling her Alice at one point).
I was not shocked. Many great writers (Evelyn Waugh and Patricia Highsmith come to mind) were awful human beings. I am still grateful to Heinlein for all that I learned from Stranger in a Strange Land and other books and glad that I never assumed he would be a role model in all aspects.
OK, but if she was trying to protect his image, she didn't do a very good job. The book makes clear something that was whispered during Heinlein's lifetime, that he wasn't a very good person. Specifically, he was a bully. It is clear from the letters that John W. Campbell needed him a lot more than he needed Campbell, and that he was taking full advantage of that. On the other hand, later on when he was writing juvies for Scribner, editor Alice Dalgleish had the whip hand in their relationship and he submitted like a happy customer of Madame La Bondage's Correctional Institution for Naughty Boys (eventually taking Novelist's Revenge by creating a fictional bitch named "Agnes Douglas" and accidentally or otherwise calling her Alice at one point).
I was not shocked. Many great writers (Evelyn Waugh and Patricia Highsmith come to mind) were awful human beings. I am still grateful to Heinlein for all that I learned from Stranger in a Strange Land and other books and glad that I never assumed he would be a role model in all aspects.
