heinlein’s solution to handling mail
Robert Heinlein answered fan mail with a form letter (article by Kevin Kelly; he found an actual copy of the form letter in his own files), sometimes an index card, up until around the early 1980′s. Virginia Heinlein made a comment about the form letter she and Robert used to reply to fan mail in “Grumbles from the Grave”. There are references here and there to an index card form of it as well. The actual form letter itself I had never seen.
I hadn’t thought about it – that there would, of course, be hundreds, perhaps thousands of these letters scattered about in file cabinets. It’s a great find. Thousands of links across the internet to it today, perhaps gone tomorrow.
I think of a dusty Colorado road leading up to the Heinlein’s place in the 1960′s. A mailbox stuffed with a ragged collection of envelopes, out at the end of the drive, the house up over the hill. Barbed wire fences. Weeds and tall grass.
Reading the answers in the form letter, guessing the questions asked or requests made that would cause any of them to be checked off and sent as a response, is a lot of fun. There is a tremendous shortage of new work from the Master, since his death.
For Us the Living wasn’t great Heinlein, but it was worth reading if nothing else as the origin for Future History.
Variable Star had echos of Robert Heinlein in the plotting and the initial characterizations, but it’s Spider Robinson’s voice in the writing.
This form letter has all the original Heinlein voice, the warmth and eloquence and clear language. It’s a hell of a find, just for the pleasure of reading Heinlein again.
In one selection, Heinlein refers the letter writer to an essay:
“( ) Essay, Mental Telepathy, Mark Twain’s Works, Harper & Brother.”
There doesn’t seem to a be a copy of the actual essay – but I found a review of a book containing Mark Twain’s essays on Mental Telepathy:
“…Twain’s interest in travel by thoughts or between minds is not as famous. Considered in two similarly titled essays, Twain’s mental telegraphy, resembling telepathy, influences thoughts and actions of others. Not having heard from someone, Twain writes that person and, while writing, he concentrates on that person, then destroys the letter, and shortly receives one from the person. The concentration linking them prompted the other to write. In this manner, he believed minds could communicate over wide distances. A visual example is Twain’s seeing someone, not present, he later meets dressed as he saw her; her knowledge she would meet him linked their minds. Mental telegraphy explains similarities of Rasselas and Candide, written by contemporaries separated by the English Channel, just as Twain influenced William Wright to write about silver mines when he, in the East, conceived the idea and thought Wright, in the West, the man to do it. The internally-directed concept of a second-self in dreams and, later, other possible dream-selves and lives led Twain deeper into the subject…”
Review, Tales of Wonder by Mark Twain
That could be a response from Heinlein to anything from “You wrote exactly what I was thinking on <insert subject>.” to “Your character <insert character name here> reminds me of my aunt Sarah.”
In another selection, Heinlein makes reference to:
“( ) Renshaw: Saturday Evening Post, You’re Not as Smart as You Could Be, April 17th, 24th and May 1st, 1948″
That article from the Saturday Evening Post is available.
Heinlein made reference to Dr. Samuel Renshaw in “Gulf”, in “Citizen of the Galaxy”, and in “Stranger in a Strange Land”[1]. The Saturday Evening Post article is a detailed explanation of Dr. Renshaw’s work. So… This perhaps is Heinlein’s response to a question about Renshaw, and an “Is that the Dr. Renshaw you meant in your book <insert title of book>?”
Or it could be a reference to the writer of the letter’s personal failure to reach his or her potential…
With Robert Heinlein, it could be either, depending on the circumstances. You have to wonder if he placed it there to be read as an unchecked reply, rather than ever checked at all.
— dsm
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