Methuselah's Bastard

Robert A. Heinlein has a new, apparently steamy book coming out in November.

"For Us, the Living" was written by Heinlein about 1938-9, before he wrote his first sf short, "Lifeline." The novel, "For Us, the Living," was deemed unpublishable, mainly for the racy content. So racy is/was the content that in the 1930s the book could not even have been legally shipped through the US mail!

Link via Kevin Drum.

Comments

[Lefty]

The guy must be doing some serious reminiscing, old as he is. I remember reading Stranger in a Strange Land back in the '60's. Opened up a whole new psycho-sexual world to a then 16 year old.

[Mark A.]

I suspect that this book was probably too racy for the SF genre in the '30's, when the target audience was overwhelmingly dominated by pre-pubescent boys. I can't believe that it was completely too racy for the period -- the '20's produced a lot of writers writing lots of, er, non-traditional material.

[Mark S.]

I'm sure, given the mores of that era, the only "racy" is that that the "psudo-futuristic" clothing the women wear exposes an ankles and couples kiss on their first date... THE SCANDEL!

Still, I'll read it because it's Heinlein.

[Steve]

Keep in mind that James M Cain's short novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, was banned for obscenity in Boston when it was published in 1934. This ban was put in place despite the fact the sexual content wasn't much more graphic than the narrator explaining, "I had her."

In addition, Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence was banned when it was first published. An unexpurgated edition wasn't published in the UK until 1960, and about the same time in the US (though I can't track down the exact date).

Censors at the time (of both book and film) normally operated under the ridiculous assumption that all content distributed in any narrative medium should be acceptable to all possible audiences ("do it for the children," anyone?).

[R.C. Dean]

"Censors at the time (of both book and film) normally operated under the ridiculous assumption that all content distributed in any narrative medium should be acceptable to all possible audiences ("do it for the children," anyone?)."

The current enforcement theory that any internet posting may be prosecuted if it is not acceptable to any community amounts to the same thing.

[Chris Puzak]

While the book may have been too racy to print, I had always heard that that first novel went unpublished because Heinlein himself didn't think it was very good. Plus, it was written at a time when Heinlein was a liberal, so it probbaly expresses some views at odds with his later beliefs. I'll still be reading it, but I'm not expecting to be blown away by it.

[SPUR]

For US, the Living,? Sounds kinda like "We the Living" any connections?

[David Moynihan]

Actually, despite a court decision that unleashed Ulysses on an unsuspecting American public just 19 years after the thing was printed (in '37), most "db's" that we today find quite tame weren't allowed in the states until 1964 or later, when Grove Press sued over the right to re-print numerous Olympia Press works (one after another).

The big case was over Tropic of Cancer.

Olympia Ebooks has a lot of the old Olympia titles for sale, if anyone cares...

(Ulysses is Free.)

[Plutarck]

First of fall, do not confuse the mainstream, official, public, governmentally enforced culture with the the culture as a whole. Just compare your own private lives and the lives of people you know, from politicians to lawyers to accountants to doctors, and then compare it to the stuff Hollywood and Washington pumps out left and right.

Not really all that similar, is it?

Now, for actual non-inductive proof of this, one need only consider movies/plays such as Chicago, which is not an altogether inaccurate portrayel of history, and consider that some of the big scandals were things like "Jazz and Liquor" ("And the men who play for fun"), the same standard moralising about the breakdown of civility and family and morals and the decrying of whatever qualified for as a vice - which never does seem to be anything of any real consequence.

Now consider that these are typically _reactions_ to actually occurring things - liberalized sexuality, gambling, drinking, parties, fun, glamour, fame, and all with their own assortment of degenerative outcomes and results right along with their upsides (all things tend to be this way - eg, religiousity brings about both piety and zealotry, etc).

As a matter of fact, things then, it would seem, are different than or own only to the extent that there is more integration, less of a kind of brick-wall between camps and communities - not to say that there is no sepperation, which would be absurd.

Furthermore, one need only look at some old gameshows from the 60's and 70's closely, and consider that such material as the various Lampoons came from round'about that time period, and one will soon begin to see that people and culture have NEVER been particularly homogenous in the US, just as it is now.

Really, the 20's and 02's are not really all that different in their collections of differing opinions and lifestyles and beliefs. It's just that these other cultures and realities are not included in mainstream considerations of the 20's, and things of that nature.

After all, what one typically finds is that history is written according to one culture, which is often the dominant one, and somehow all the opposition and differences manage to disappear in the haze of the past - indeed, one is hard pressed to remember what oneself has lived, much less what others have.

[Geotech]

Heinlein was a smart guy with great ideas about politics and economics, but some of his stuff was very inconsistent and downright creepy. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was good, but ever read Farnham's Freehold? Yikes.

[nm156]

Most of later novels seemed to center around an unseemly desire to copulate with himself.