Still Passionate and Confused

The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein by Farah Mendlesohn

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


To say that Robert A. Heinlein is one of the most consistently underrated science fiction writers in the history of the genre would be to invite at the very least a raised eyebrow. To be sure, there was a time when anyone's list of the top three sf authors would be likely to include his name; when his books were known even to people outside the small but vociferous fan community; when he was credited, along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, with dragging sf away from the comic-book excesses of E. E. "Doc" Smith and Edmond Hamilton and towards stories about real people, real science, and the problems that occur when the two collide.

And yet I say: underrated. Underrated by those who think him overrated.

Facile, soundbite dismissals of Heinlein abound; he was a militaristic gun nut, he was a dirty old man, he was an unthinking cheerleader for The American Way, he was a decent writer who went soft in his old age when he was too successful to edit. At best, he has been described as a writer who thought his way almost to the hidden truth that leads to enlightenment, and then shied away from it and spent the rest of his career backing and filling, going over old ground because he could not take that last step. It's natural enough; we look back as adults, from the lofty eminence of our newly awakened (I beg your pardon: "woke") literary, social and political perspectives, on the authors who delighted and enchanted us through the Golden Age Of Science Fiction (which, it has been said, is twelve) and inevitably we find them wanting. I have done it myself, to this writer and others.

The antidote, for Heinlein, is this book.

Farah Mendlesohn's critical assessment of Heinlein's work, so far from being "over-reliant on secondary texts" as it was described by another reviewer, is steeped in her primary source. She has gone back to the text and examined it with care and discernment, and the Heinlein she describes is neither over-idolised nor glibly deprecated. It is faint praise to describe this book as "readable," since every book is readable if you know the language, but Ms Mendlesohn's authorial voice is as clear and as congenial as Heinlein's own, and her mastery of her subject is complete and insightful. She approaches the task, having first provided a brief biography of Heinlein by way of setting the scene, by taking Heinlein's principal areas of interest one by one and assessing each story, each novel, in terms of how it addresses those areas of interest.

In the process, each work of Heinlein's reveals some new perspective, some previously unconsidered sidelight on its author's personality. We discover that his position on feminism, on militarism, on race issues, on family, is nowhere near as clearly defined as those who delight in belittling him would have us believe; that his views on these subjects were in fact considered, nuanced, and not to be summarised in five words or less on the basis of any one text. Sometimes he was quite simply wrong, and Ms Mendlesohn points up the fact with simple, dispassionate clarity and then moves on. In most cases, though, even when one disagrees with his view, one is brought to understand that there is more to his reasons for being wrong than one has previously imagined.

I am going to have to re-read, as a result of reading this book, everything of Heinlein's I own (yes, even "The Number Of The Beast"), because I now know how much I have allowed myself to miss. I am looking forward to the task intensely, and am very thankful to Ms Mendlesohn for giving me this opportunity; the opportunity to read these books for the first time all over again.

If you know Heinlein's work, or think you do, I recommend this book most heartily.

Picking up Arthur C Clarke's Profiles Of The Future (1962) and opening the Introduction, I come upon this little gem:

"I also believe - and hope - that politics and economics will cease to be as important in the future as they have been in the past; the time will come when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies. Politics and economics are concerned with power and wealth, neither of which should be the primary, still less the exclusive, concern of full-grown men."

There speaks privilege. There speaks a citizen of a rich and powerful country, whose primacy had never to that point been seriously challenged, living a comfortable life and free to turn his mind whithersoever he listed. There--in fact--speaks shocking ignorance and illogic.

Surely it must have occurred to him that, in being concerned with power and wealth, politics and economics must also be concerned with powerlessness and poverty, which even then were indeed the primary and even the exclusive concern of large numbers of people--of both sexes--in the country in which, at that point, he still lived? (Correction: he was already in Ceylon, as it then was. Which makes it all the odder.) Apparently not. One could never accuse him of "I got mine, fuck you," but this paragraph clearly shows the far more common, and more British, "I've got mine, thank you, and I have better things to do with my time than think about it, and I really don't see why people are making such a fuss." Clarke's actual economic circumstances at the time are unknown to me, but they don't bear on the question; a Briton living in a one-room flat on baked beans in 1962 was still better off than vast numbers of "full-grown men" all over the world. The inability of the comfortable (on whatever terms) to understand the discomfort of others is sad and shocking.

I don't know if the writer ever, over his remaining years, saw cause to repent the complacency of that paragraph. Mine is a 1964 paperback of the book, and I've not seen later editions. But when people talk about ivory towers, this is what they mean.

WE JUST DIDN'T KNOW

When ignorance is bliss, so the saying goes,
It's folly to try to be wise.
And if you can't see what's under your nose
You've probably closed your eyes.
But ignorance now is a mortal sin
And learning's the one way we grow
And the days are long gone
When we just didn't know.

When we didn't know about racism
And the plight of the black and the brown
When we didn't know about sexism
And how women are cruelly kept down.
When gayness was something to laugh at
On a lunchtime radio show
Ah, life was much simpler
When we just didn't know.

When we could eat food without questioning
The way it's produced and prepared.
When we could drive cars without worrying
'Bout the biosphere that we all shared.
When we could wear clothes without wishing
That sweatshop workers might be spared
When we didn't have to know
To prove that we cared...

We weren't evil, or vicious, or selfish,
We were good as we knew how to be.
But our world was a cosy illusion
From which we had to be free.
So we ate of the tree of knowledge
And the sword-bearing angel said "go"
And we no longer had the excuse
That we just didn't know.

And now through the traps and the pitfalls
We stumble and grope in our shame
And we try to be better and kinder
But we know there's no winning this game.
For knowledge is power, and power corrupts
Absolutely, above and below
And with power comes responsibility
And we reap what our leaders sow
And no matter how pure our intentions may be
We have recognised ourselves as the foe
And we cannot pretend any more
That we just didn't know.
But it's hard not to long for the days
When we just didn't know.

Tune on the way, as soon as I can get Piano Man and its numberless siblings out of my head.

On the advice of Tom Smith, Mike Whitaker and other such wise old birds, I have enlisted the services of Kunaki.com and turned Coming To A Theatre Near You into a physical product. You can now order an actual shiny beermat from them with the songs on it. Note: shipping to the UK from the US is something like $4.73, and they didn't give me the option of an eight-page booklet with all the lyrics and other bumph I like to stuff into these things, but it's a start. So, if what was putting you off buying my album was that it was digital only, and especially if you're in the US, do I have a link for you...

http://kunaki.com/Sales.asp?PID=PX00Z72XE7&PP=1

What I bit the bullet and signed up to Netflix for. Star Trek: Discovery.

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Summary: I'm not as invested in original Trek as I was in realWho, so the reboots haven't bothered me at all, and this is no different. There are points of detail that bothered me about these episodes, but I'm willing to give it time. On the whole, it was worth signing up to Netflix to see it. Whether I can justify the expense of continuing after the free month will depend on various things.

There's a besetting difficulty in adapting the Sherlock Holmes stories for the stage or screen, which has never to my mind been satisfactorily addressed. The playgoer or tellywatcher, the member of the audience, is necessarily an objective observer, separate from the action and from the characters. He views the story from the outside. In all but two or three cases, though, the Holmes stories are told as personal reminiscences by Dr Watson, and are inseparable from his subjective viewpoint; and to ignore this fact is to miss a great deal of the subtlety of the stories that has kept them so evergreen for so long.

Watson is constantly telling stories against himself. When he has Holmes say, "I have always done you an injustice, Watson. There are others," referring to a particularly obtuse witness, it is a sign of self-deprecating humour on the part of Watson himself, a humour which, in an objective retelling of the event, it is sheerly impossible to convey. Here lies the reason for the frequent portrayal of Watson as a blimpish buffoon, by Nigel Bruce and others; the fact that a blimpish buffoon could never have written the stories in the first place escapes the notice. The Watson we are supposed to see in the stories is Watson's own subtly exaggerated caricature of himself, made thus, of course, to play up the brilliance of Holmes. Try doing that on television.

I've just watched a longish Youtube video entitled "Sherlock is Garbage, and Here's Why," to which, with your kind indulgence, I shall not link. It's an hour and a half of pulling Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss's adaptation to bits, and much of what it says is right on the money. Moffat's obvious contempt for his audience is nowhere else as clearly shown.

On one point, though, I would partly disagree. One of the charges that the video lays against Sherlock is that, rather than focussing on the method of the solution of each crime, Moffat and Gatiss make the show increasingly All About Sherlock. A similar thing happened with nuWho, where it became for a while All About The Doctor, but that started with RTD, so Moffat can't be held solely responsible for that.

But a cursory reading of the original stories shows clearly that, as far as Watson, the narrator, was concerned, it was indeed All About Holmes. He relays faithfully Holmes' methods, and details his solutions, but the purpose, for Watson, is purely to show how exceptionally brilliant, and incidentally how thoroughly decent a chap, is his friend. This is one of those things which, in the objectivising process of adaptation to drama, can get lost; in Sherlock, it has not got lost, but it has lost its rationale. John Watson, as played by Martin Freeman, would never have written such accounts of Sherlock's cases as Doyle's Watson puts down. Nobody would, for Sherlock, as played by Benedict Cumberbatch, is not at all a decent chap and has nowhere near Holmes' capacity to inspire loyalty and devotion. Add to this the fact that Moffat is such a lazy writer that, as the video witheringly points out, most of Sherlock's solutions to cases can only be explained by magic, and the dislocations inherent in the adaptation become only too clear.

I gave up on Sherlock after he quite definitely and unequivocally died in front of Watson in the season finale, only to be resurrected in the final two minutes, and the first episode of the following season, after pouring scorn both on various convoluted theories as to how he survived, and on the groups and individuals who put them forward (representing, as the video says, the actual fans of the show), revealed Moffat's actual answer; it doesn't matter how he survived, so don't bother thinking about it. I gather it didn't improve, so I won't be going back to it.

I shall, however, often return to the original stories, in which John Watson, that competent and intelligent medical practitioner, chronicles the exceptional yet easily fathomable achievements of his friend, and pokes gentle fun at his own rather more pedestrian thought processes; and I shall wonder if, between the buffoonish portrayals of Bruce and others, and the capable yet somewhat solemn renditions of Burke and Hardwicke, there will ever be found a way of adapting the stories for drama which can combine the two aspects in the right proportions.

We've been binge-watching The Mentalist, which is very good, and we're on the last season now. In the season we just watched, around about the sixth or seventh episode, the show's Big Bad, Red John, was unmasked, and James Hibberd in Entertainment Weekly had some thoughts about that here: http://ew.com/article/2013/11/24/the-mentalist-red-john-review/

I think he missed the point. (Next bit won't make much sense unless you've read the article.)

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Shaving. I have a complex relationship with shaving.

I've just done it, and my face feels like mine again. If you ever see me with a beard longer than an eighth of an inch, it's a sign I've been down for a long time. There was a time in my life when I actually chose to have a beard, but it was never entirely a free choice. My skin, you see, objects to being shaved, and while this is probably true of most people--hence the proliferation of lotions and potions and gunks dedicated to making it less of an ordeal--it seems worse for me. My face feels like mine, but it's also prickling and itching like mad and making me want to scratch it, and nothing seems to stop that. I've tried. Of course, the fact that I then spend the next three hours finding bits I've missed and debating whether to trail back to the bathroom and get rid of them doesn't help.

If I had the money and my druthers, I'd do something permanent about it, but that's pure vanity and totally unjustifiable, and besides there are people of whom I am fond who for some bizarre reason like me with facial hair, so I feel I need to keep the option open for their sake.

But it is my face, and while it will never ever in this world be a woman's face, despite the best efforts of FaceApp--I sometimes try to analyse just what it is FaceApp changes, but I haven't succeeded yet--I'd kind of like it not to be aggressively full-on male at least some of the time.

And let's not even talk about my arms and legs.

Well, sort of. I've started posting videos on my Patreon page, of a concert I did with my bandmates Chris, Valerie and Silke, back in 2012. The first one, Road Song, is free, the second, Centipede Questions, is patrons only ('cos it's an original Zander-style song). You can find them, along with the first two episodes of a piece of D'niverse fanfic and various other bits and bobs, at https://www.patreon.com/zandamyrande or thereabouts. If you haven't looked already, why not head on over?

The importing process has now finished. Sadly all my lovely LJ icons are gone, and since the computer I made them on is also one with Nineveh and Tyre, they probably won't be coming back. I've only got the option of fifteen on here anyway.

I still don't know what if anything was wrong with the new LJ user agreement, except that it was in Russian, but the deed is done now. An era ends, a new one begins. We'll see what happens.