I believe in Rodger Young. You and I are free today because of endless unnamed heroes from Valley Forge to the Yalu River. I believe in-I am proud to belong to-the United States. Despite shortcomings from lynchings to bad faith in high places, our nation has had the most decent and kindly internal practices and foreign policies to be found anywhere in history.
And finally, I believe in my whole race. Yellow, white, black, red, brown. In the honesty, courage, intelligence, durability, and goodness of the overwhelming majority of my brothers and sisters everywhere on this planet. I am proud to be a human being. I believe that we have come this far by the skin of our teeth. That we always make it just by the skin of our teeth, but that we will always make it. Survive. Endure. I believe that this hairless embryo with the aching, oversize brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes, will endure. Will endure longer than his home planet-will spread out to the stars and beyond, carrying with him his honesty and insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage and his noble essential decency.
This I believe with all my heart.
June 6, 1962: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
No other news save that the Silly Season has opened and we have many visitors; this will continue until fall. One of my plebes showed up this week-an admiral now and chief of research, a job I would like to have had (and might have achieved) if I hadn't gotten TB a long time ago. However, all in all, I like being a writer and don't really miss not being an admiral. (Dan Gallery managed to be both, but he is exceptional!)
August 10, 1963: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
We have been badly slowed down, too, by visitors, a steady flood of them all summer long, friends, relatives, and readers, plus some of the organized science fiction fans-and none of them invited, not even the relatives nor any of the friends...This place being a resort, people simply pour through here in the summer and if I shut off the phone, they ring the doorbell. I don't ever intend to try to write a story in Colorado Springs again between June 1st and September 1st; it is too much like trying to write directly under a busy three-holer. Even if my relatives had stayed home (and, damn it, they all traveled this year), friends, acquaintances, and strangers were enough to keep us in a hooraw. Had I not been interrupted so many, many times by visitors, the work I was doing would have been farther along and the flood damage would not have been nearly so severe.
May 6, 1964: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
The letter you received from Kenneth Green (and so kindly answered) is much more typical of fan mail-pleasant but with the same old phrases over and over again, and I get as tired of answering them as an old whore gets of climbing those stairs. I'll drop young Green a card in this mail, however; I always answer them, all but the crackpot ones.
But I have instituted a New Public Relations Policy-one which makes me almost as hard-to-get as the mysterious Mr. B. Traven. Some years ago you sent to me a clipping of Art Buchwald's column with a long quotation from Thornton Wilder in which Wilder declared such a policy, one in which he resolved not to let strangers waste his time, not in any fashion. I have kept that clipping up over my typewriter ever since you sent it to me-but I have not emulated it very well.
But I am pushing sixty now myself and it gets harder and harder each year to turn out a decent amount of copy-largely because total strangers want such large chunks of my time. I am darn well going to quit it! In fact, I have quit it. The only concession I am making is that I will continue to answer politely worded fan mail-but only by postcards...and usually picture postcards which have no return address and room only for a sentence or two. Even that response costs me a dime for materials and postage, plus (much more important) about fifty cents' worth of my working, professional time that should be put on story-writing.
Someday I may be so browned off and bored with it that I will answer only such letters as are accompanied by stamped and self-addressed envelopes (about one in twenty). I was taught in school always to enclose such in writing to a stranger; my present mail shows that most teachers do not teach this courtesy today, as a lot of my mail starts out: "Dear Mr. Heinlein, Our English class is writing to their favorite author -- " but a reply envelope rarely is enclosed, although the letter usually demands a reply and asks endless questions-often with a deadline stated.
Mr. Wilder says, in that clipping you sent me: "I hereby serve notice on the school children of America...that I am going to dump all their letters -- " I'm not going to go quite that far just yet, Lurton-but I am now ignoring all requests for pictures and for anything which requires me to stir out of my chair to answer-or which requires me to use an envelope rather than a postcard when said envelope has not been supplied by the petitioner.
No doubt this will lose me a certain amount of good will. But it will greatly increase my working time-on pay copy-and the problem had grown way out of hand. To supplement this greatly reduced program on fan mail I am resolved not to do anything I don't want to do. No more public speeches, not even for librarians. No more interviews given to school kids-other than by telephone. No more "Library Week" appearances. No more breaking off my work (whether writing or mixing cement) to visit with strangers who "just happened to be passing through town and have always wanted to meet" me -- unless it suits me and they manage to make themselves sound interesting enough to warrant the time. No more messing around with books I don't want to read sent to me, unsolicited, in the mails-and this includes books sent to me by Putnam and its associated companies, as the promotion department seems to feel that any Putnam-published writer should be willing at any time to act as an unpaid reviewer and source of trained-seal favorable testimonials. (They put out a lot of good books, but they never send me those books; they send me little stinkers that should never have been published.)
No more acknowledgments of fan magazines sent to me-it simply results in more of them and requests for free copy.
In short, no more of anything unless it durn well suits me and adds to my own pleasure in life. More and more, over the years, strangers have been nibbling away at my time. It has reached the point where, if I would let them, all of my working time would be wasted on the demands of strangers. So I am lowering the boom on all of it -- and if this makes me a rude son of a bitch, so be it. My present life expectancy is seventeen years; I'm damned if I will spend it answering silly questions about ' 'Where do you get your ideas?" and "Why did you take up the writing of science fiction?" several thousand or more times. I hereby declare that an author has no responsibility of any sort to the public...other than the responsibility to write stories as well as he knows how.
If I can stick to this, I should get in quite a lot more writing, and quite a lot more healthy work with pick and shovel and trowel-and a judicious mixture of these two may enable me to stretch that life expectancy quite a bit. But I 'm not going to let those remaining years be nibbled away and wasted by the trivia that some thousands of faceless strangers seem to feel is their right to demand from anyone in a semipublic occupation.
July 10, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
Herewith is a curious letter from an instructor, -- , at the U. of Oregon. I was about to tell him that I could not stop him, but not to let me see the result-but I decided that I had better let you see this and get your advice and/or veto. If Mr. -- does this adaptation "just for fun," as he proposes, I suspect that he will then fall in love with his own efforts and get very itchy to produce it. Which could be embarrassing. Lurton, even though "Green Hills" is a short, I think it has possibilities -- someday-as a musical motion picture. So I am hesitant to authorize anything which might cloud the MP or stage rights. What shall I tell him? Or do you prefer to write to him? (I'm not urging you to-not trying to shove it on you. But I do want your advice.)