Literary Circles & Literary Cults

Robert A. Heinlein was such a good and prolific writer and such a full and interesting figure that it will be a long time before the subjects of him and his work are finally worn out. It's fitting that there is a literary society devoted to him. As an English major first time around, I would like to see literary societies devoted to just about anybody.

In reading about Heinlein, I get the sense that he is one of those figures of whom criticism may be considered impermissible, at least in certain circles and on certain topics. There are certain things we're just not allowed to say in regards to him, one of which is that the failure of his second marriage may have been equally his fault as his wife's. And who knows about his first marriage? That was so brief and so long ago that everything from it and everything about it is probably lost.

There are other figures that are similarly considered unassailable. The Islamic Prophet is one. He is believed by his followers, I think, to have been the perfect man. A long time ago, I heard a tall-haired, cigarette-voiced women say the same thing about Elvis. One question that might arise here: If those two men were in a cage match, who would win?

Anyway, Edgar Rice Burroughs is probably in the category of untouchable or unassailable authors. His fans won't permit us to say that he was a pretty lousy writer. Great imagination. Great worlds. But not fully human characters and a terrible writing style. Philip José Farmer is another author with his very devoted fan base. Every year, FarmerCon is held in conjunction with PulpFest. Yes, there is a FarmerCon. I have talked to the men at the Farmer table. Maybe it should be called FarmerTable. I have never read anything by Farmer, though, and so I have nothing to say about his writing. Even if I wanted to say something, and if it were not very favorable, his followers might very well go ballistic. Or since we're talking about Farmer here, maybe that should be ball-istic. But that's only if they could muster enough of the non-science fiction fan's masculinity and vigor to defend themselves and their opinions.

(There's a lot of crossover between science fiction and rock music. Both are led by artists, and the artists have their devoted followers. A lot of rock musicians have been keen on science fiction and have created science-fictional music and science-fictional concept albums. That's a topic for another day, though. One difference between rockers and science fiction fans is that rockers tend to be more vigorous and masculine. For example, Pete Townshend, the true inventor of the Internet by the way, might have been a beanpole when he was young, but that didn't stop him from hitting Roger Daltrey with his guitar. And Roger might be a shrimp, but he still knocked out Pete with one punch. Remember that a famous logo for The Who includes the spear-and-shield symbol of masculinity. [It's hidden in the illustration below.] One of my favorite scenes from The Who's performance at Woodstock is when Pete tells some bearded Marxist freak eff off my effing stage! and then hits him with his guitar. That's how we all ought to respond to these people. Eff off our effing stage! Wham!)

There are women writers in the category of those we're not really allowed to criticize. Virginia Woolf may be one of them. I have a friend whose son was forced to read To the Lighthouse in high school. Imagine being a boy and being tortured in such a way. Don't make them read Virginia Woolf. Let them be boys. Let them read--well, Heinlein. I have a feeling, though, that it is impermissible to say such things. After all, Heinlein and all high school boys are fully charged with toxic masculinity. They are part of a patriarchy that must be smashed. These things have to be gotten rid of. We must read women writers. We must begin with Virginia Woolf.

Margaret Atwood and J.K. Rowling have their devoted fans. There is practically a religion built around The Handmaid's Tale. But neither one of these women is considered untouchable, for both are feminists in the original sense of the word. They're both for, you know, women. And because of that, they must be cancelled, silenced, and erased, the things that, incidentally, women accuse men of doing to women. Women cancelling women. Women silencing women. Women erasing women. Who'd have thunk it? By the way, when I use the words men and women, I mean them in the sense of men and women.

The case of J.K. Rowling reminds me of that of H.P. Lovecraft. When it comes to these two writers, many fans would like to throw out the baby and keep the bathwater. They would rather that Rowling's and Lovecraft's books and stories be anonymous, like the books of the Old Testament, than tolerate the fact that someone has ideas different from their own, or, like Lovecraft, that he has flaws and is therefore human. (Or vice versa.) A reference to babies here is apt.

I don't sense that there are similar circles around writers such as Arthur C. Clarke or Ray Bradbury. (In fact, criticism of Bradbury sometimes seems fashionable.) Maybe it's because they and authors like them did not in their corpus of work create fully realized political, historical, sociological, sexual, or religious systems or worlds. And maybe that's the key: the author who may not be criticized is the same author who creates complete worlds of fantasy into which the reader and fan may fully escape, away from the real world, into the fantastic, where the reader and fan is not frustrated and his life not spoiled, where self-fulfillment, exercises of power, realization of meaning, and even spiritual salvation are possible. Remember here that fan is short for fanatic.

Isaac Asimov may have his circle of defenders or believers. If there is such a circle, some of it would seem lighthearted, as Dr. Asimov seems to have been. Some of it, though, appears more serious, in a cultish kind of way. I think that part has to do with the quasi-Marxism of his psychohistory concept. As we know from critical theory, Marx and his acolytes must never be criticized and everything they do must be tolerated. In contrast, their opponents must not be tolerated and criticism of them and their ideas must be relentless. That might be taking a discussion of Asimov and his psychohistory too far, but remember that we have a weird, scruffy, usually wrong, leftist, Nobel Prize-winning economist who has followed the good doctor in his ideas.

L. Ron Hubbard has his circles of defenders, followers, and believers, but his circles are not literary but something else entirely. They will defend his stories and his writing, but what they're really defending is a belief in their leader. He was-is after all perfect, having purged himself of engrams and raised himself to the eleventieth level of transcendence. So maybe here there are similarities between Hubbard and Heinlein. Maybe one way of looking at the problem of Leslyn MacDonald and her marriage to Robert Heinlein is to see her as a kind of suppressive person. We just don't speak of her--at least in a very favorable way--even though her husband said of her:

Mrs. Heinlein and I are in almost complete collaboration on everything. She never signs any of the stories, but I do better if she's there.

There are of course differences between Hubbard and Heinlein. Maybe you could say that the cult of Heinlein, if there is such a thing, is secular, whereas the cult of Hubbard is pseudo-religious. Also, nobody has ever died because of someone else's faith in and devotion to Heinlein.

Heinlein has his detractors to be sure. He once ran for public office as a Democrat. Now people call him a rightwing kook, a nut job, a fascist. They despise him and never fail to get worked up over him and what he wrote. Some of them seem to suffer from a kind of Heinlein Derangement Syndrome (HDS). They should realize that that's not a good look. The flaw here is that, like his circle of fiercest defenders, sufferers of HDS can't seem to manage thinking about Heinlein and his writings in a dispassionate way. Instead they let their feelings get in the way of their judgment. I guess I have two pieces of advice for people like that: First, if your eye offends you, pluck it out. Second, like Duke Ellington said about music, if it sounds good, it is good. An extension to that might be that no human being is entirely good or entirely bad and nothing that any human being has ever made is perfect. Except for Elvis, we are all imperfect. We are all flawed. That includes Robert A. Heinlein, in his personal life and in everything he ever wrote. In short, in your reading, be even, be discerning, be judicious. If it's good, it's good, and if it's not, it's not. And it doesn't matter who wrote it.

Lifehouse, a multimedia, rock-music-and-science-fiction project created by Pete Townshend inside and outside The Who. Art by James Harvey for Heavy Metal, a project announced for publication in 2020 but maybe not published after all? Note the cables and feeds coming from the lighthouse and into every head.

Pete Townshend and recording equipment, an image that echoes a photograph of James Burke that I posted the other day. Photograph by Chris Morphet / Redferns, originally in The Rolling Stone, February 15, 1969. Again, note the cables and feeds. I do not have rights to either of these images and have reproduced them here under the doctrine of fair use. I will remove them at the request of the copyright holders.

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley