Pre-ordering the Heinlein Biography, V. II

Update to the previous post: I see that you can now pre-order the biography v. II, The Man Who Learned Better on Amazon. Be the first on your block to get it, and all that (heh).

Update on Volume II of the Heinlein Biography

It's been quite awhile since I posted anything here, but the interregnum ( a word I learned from Heinlein!) has built up a fair back log of ideas, items and images.

Heinlein biographer Bill Patterson announced on his blog in June that "the re-recut manuscript for volume 2 of the Heinlein Biography" has been accepted.

"My title for volume 2 is 'The Man Who Learned Better.'"

Very interesting title, indeed. My take is that Heinlein (unlike many humans) kept learning all of his life. In particular, some of the political and economic ideas that we saw in volume 1 ("Learning Curve") were modified by experience.

So we will likely see The Man Who Learned Better in 2014.

Interesting Biographical Correction from Bill Patterson

All the good stuff comes out after you publish — well, not all the good stuff; there was a lot of good stuff in the Archive, but –

I had some e-mail correspondence recently from Wendy McClure, who is researching the life of her great-aunt Vida Jameson. I shared all the mentions of Vida Jameson mentioned in my notes, and in turn she sent me some remarkable bits and pieces, including the letter Vida Jameson wrote to her mother about a road trip with the Heinleins in 1946, plus a photograph of the Heinleins in about 1940 that I’d never seen before and might be one of those taken by John Campbell . . . or might have been by Bill Corson, as it has something of the look of the famous two or three pictures Corson took in the new writing studio he and Heinlein had just built together over the garage of the Lookout Mountain house. Also a photo of Vida Jameson herself, quite a beauty, and a picture of an oil portrait of her by none other than her friend Hannes Bok. She graciously gave permission to post these or use them, so I will see whether we can get any of them up on site.

Includes more insight into the events from the summer of 1946 until Robert and Leslyn's divorce in the summer of  '47.

Here's a photo of Vida Jameson I was able to track down:

Read the whole thing at Bill's Blog.

Great Background on Bill Patterson's Style and Editing of the Biography

See "Prosody 1" at his blog. It gives some real insight into things you may have noticed in v. I:

The harder part is (well, there have been several “harder parts,” but –) something that might be called “stylistic differences” in some aspects of what my sense is of what the prose ought to be like and my editor’s. This difficult process has shown me things about my own writing process that I may have been only faintly aware of before.

Over a period of forty-five years, I have developed certain stylistic devices, devices of intention, that have become habitual and very characteristic of my rather eccentric personal style.

My approach to “the paragraph,” for example, is highly “networked.” That is, I write paragraphs not only to express and develop an aspect of an idea — which is the pedagogical standard of what a paragraph is supposed to do — but also to relate this idea to the paragraph that preceded it and to prepare the way for the paragraph that will follow. In particular, the development points are organized so that the one which points most clearly in the direction the text is going to go is last. Often the last sentence of a paragraph will contain a word or an expression which will be repeated in the opening sentence of the next paragraph, or the next paragraph will back-reference material in the preceding paragraph.

The net effect of this technique is to give flow and impetus to the writing, so that it moves smartly along with logical force. Ideally you hit all the logical steps between one idea and the next so that the reader is not required to make logical jumps to cover, say, lack of evidence. On the evidence of what is said — and what is not said — in the reader reviews of the first volume, that technique did substantially what it is supposed to do. The book took hits for what might be called stylistic “elegance” but got points for being a fast read despite its size.

RAH Biography News: Bill Patterson Reports Work Has Resumed on V. II

On his blog:

It’s been awhile since there was any real news to report. Following the worldcon last year, I had a transmetatarsal amputation of my right foot and was down for a couple of months but during recuperation completed the first-pass edit of the second volume, tentatively titled “The Man Who Learned Better” though I also favor “Time Enough for Love.”

(...)

In the last week (late April, Early May 2012), the second-pass edit has resumed. I can only do about ten pages per day. But progress is actually under way again.

Also of great interest is this comment at another post there (scroll down):

The editor, David Hartwell, has broached the subject of splitting the second volume into two — I suspect so that we can get volume 2 out expeditiously. Well see what eventuates.

Goodreads Reviews of the Biography

I had previously read the Amazon reviews of the biography, but there are interesting reviews at Goodreads as well. Some are just stubs but a few are substantive.

Was Robert LeFevre the Inspiration for Bernardo de la Paz?

And other interesting speculations about Heinlein's libertarianism. I don't agree with everything the author says about Heinlein, but will await with great interest more information on the LeFevre/de la Paz question when  Volume II of William Patterson, Jr's. biography becomes available:

Both in his physical appearance — the wavy white hair, the dimples, the smiling voice — and in his ideas, Professor Bernardo de la Paz bears a striking resemblance to a real-life libertarian who flourished and enjoyed considerable influence within the libertarian movement during the 1950s, '60s, and '70s — Robert LeFevre. Now it so happens that Robert A. Heinlein and his third wife, Virginia Heinlein, lived in Colorado Springs throughout the 1950s and through the first half of the 1960s, the very period during which Robert LeFevre, a neighbor of theirs as it turns out, was serving as editorial page editor of the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph.

"Connections" in the Biography by William Patterson: Part I

Last summer I was delighted to buy and read the the first volume of William H. Patterson, Jr.'s biography of my favorite author, Robert Heinlein. Robert A Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century: Volume 1 (1907-1948): Learning Curve has almost 500 pages of text (and almost 100 pages of notes) on the first half of Heinlein's life. I loved the book and wrote a brief, favorable review on Amazon back in June 2011. There I noted that I had

"plans to write about the 'Connections' that I made to other books and people, during and after reading, but it will take a few more days to get to that.

More than a "few days" have passed, obviously, but here at last is the first installment of some "Connections" that I found in Chapters 1-3, covering Heinlein's life through high school and his admission to the United States Naval Academy in 1925.

Authors must make choices of what to include in a book of this nature, else the book could grow beyond any reasonable length; obviously this one had to run to two volumes even with everything the author had to leave out. One of the choices Patterson made in this book was to avoid deep literary analysis of the works he describes being written in the biographical narrative. Several of the reviewers at Amazon lamented this, but I appreciate that the biographer wanted to tell Heinlein's story rather than turn the book into a textual analysis.  Patterson previously co-authored a book on what is perhaps Heinlein's best known work, Stranger in a Strange Land. This biography is more about a man. I hope that some of the "connections" below can add to the enjoyment and appreciation of the biography and Heinlein's work.

(All numbers in ( ) refer to pages in the hardback first edition of the biography).

(17) "[A] half-brother of the famous Dan Patch."

See the 1948 story "The Man Who Traveled in Elephants": He picked out a likely-looking nag of the Dan Patch line, bet and won...

(23) "Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress--three books that transcend genre and give Heinlein an important place in the lives of his readers."

In a private communication, Patterson hinted that in Volume II there may be some deeper examination of these three works than there was for any individual work in Volume I.

(25) "Thou art God."

A major theme of Stranger in a Strange Land.

(28) "He practiced [card tricks] covertly, even in church..."

See the card trick/coded message scene in "Gulf."

(31) "He liked...the wry humor of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat."

See Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, where Kip references his father's love for the book, and a specific scene where the men are trying to open a tin of pineapple. This is also one of many, many books that I looked for and read after seeing a reference in Heinlein.

(33) "[H]uman beings must never be judged by categories, but only as individuals."

I just note this as individualism is such a bedrock of Heinlein's work throughout his career.

(36) "He learned to read and speak Esperanto..."

Esperanto appears in a several of Heinlein works as a future universal or common language, including, I believe, Starship Troopers and "The Green Hills of Earth." There may be others.

(40) "He also wanted to travel and unsuccessfully entered a National Geographic contest to for a prize trip to India,to see the Taj Mahal."

See the Skyway Soap "Trip to the Moon" contest in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel.

(46) "...he lost his virginity during the Coolidge Administration (1923-1929) to a grandmother..."

See the sequence in I Will Fear No Evil where protagonist J.S.B Smith thinks he is perhaps dead and/or trapped in some sort of purgatory, and tried to remember his life, starting with losing his virginity as a young teenager to a woman in her 30s.

I will post a Part II in the near future. We're only 10% through the biography.