As Tiptree, Alice Sheldon exchanged lively and intimate correspondence with some of the most important writers of speculative fiction. Over time, James Tiptree, Jr. took on a life of his own, developing long-standing relationships. While as a story writer Tiptree was known for deploying short bursts of robust prose, in his letters Tiptree was effusive and gregarious, a comic performing with preternatural bravado. An ingratiating and charmingly self-deprecating correspondent, Tiptree was alternately a compassionate listener, educator, contrarian, and avid advice giver, often picturing himself as a wizened old sage and referring to himself as “Uncle Tip.” With women, he was also an audacious flirt.
That “Tiptree” was a pseudonym was initially obvious to some, but few questioned the authenticity of Tiptree’s “masculine” voice. Beyond exhibiting deep technical knowledge of military tactics, weaponry, and biological science in his stories, Tiptree revealed in his letters a conventionally masculine CV, including references to positions he had held in the government and military. Tiptree also displayed surprising compassion for women during an era when SF was still widely viewed as a “boys club.” Some of his friends wondered if he was homosexual. In Robert Silverberg’s introduction to Tiptree’s story collection Warm Worlds and Otherwise, he lambasted the theory that Tiptree might be a woman, comparing the author to Hemingway for the “prevailing masculinity” and “veiled complexity” of his writing. (Silverberg later wrote Sheldon, “You’ve given my head a great needed wrenching.”)
Igniting what would become a lifelong epistolary friendship, Tiptree wrote a fan letter to Joanna Russ in April 1972. At the time, Russ was a young writer and academic who was emerging as the premier voice of radical feminism in SF, and had recently completed writing her magnum opus, The Female Man. Under the guise of Tiptree, Sheldon wanted to discuss feminism with Russ, but the gender balancing act of maintaining a male persona created regular turbulence in their relationship. Russ was extremely skeptical of Tiptree’s motives. Moreover, Sheldon’s own views on feminism were complicated; at the height of Women’s Lib, Sheldon identified as a feminist of an “older school,” and, pessimistic about women’s potential to achieve meaningful collective power, she worried that women of Russ’s generation were too vocal, too militant.
The rockiest period in Tiptree and Russ’s relationship occurred around 1974, when the two were invited to participate in a written symposium that addressed the growing and heated debates about women’s roles in the genre. The symposium was organized by Jeffrey D. Smith (later published in his fanzine Khatru), and included contributions from Vonda N. McIntyre, Suzy McKee Charnas, and Samuel R. Delany, among others. Tiptree submitted an essay positing two major behavioral patterns to be found in human beings: “the male pattern,” characterized by aggression, and “Mothering,” characterized by the instinct to nurture. As a research psychologist, Sheldon looked to evolutionary biology as a means of overcoming sexist cultural conditioning, and as an apocalyptic thinker, she believed that motherhood—as a psychological state—was key to humanity’s salvation. But Sheldon’s personal concerns were wrapped inside the man who represented them, and when Tiptree argued, “Men have the power,” Delany simply countered, “Who are you threatening?” The essay was widely dismissed, and for years Russ attacked Tiptree in private, in part for attempting to resurrect an old dualism between the sexes.
By this time Sheldon had begun submitting stories under a new persona, Raccoona Sheldon, a former schoolteacher from the Midwest. Tiptree informed Jeffrey Smith that his friend Raccoona used the pen name—taken, obviously, from a masked animal—because her own name had been “used up by a high-voltage media star so it no longer belongs to her.” In reality, Raccoona was a kind of repository for Sheldon’s overtly feminist tales, which she believed wouldn’t pass under a man’s name. Raccoona enjoyed modest success, earning a Nebula for her novelette The Screwfly Solution, but her name would be largely forgotten.
Russ and Tiptree eventually reconciled. They continued to spar, but Tiptree made Russ feel understood in a way that no man ever had. Russ, openly lesbian, later told Sheldon, “I was madly in love with [Tiptree] … and sensed uneasily that this was odd.” Still, Sheldon wasn’t fully comfortable embracing Tiptree’s role as SF’s token male feminist, and when “The Women Men Don’t See” was nominated for a Nebula Award in 1975, Tiptree withdrew it from the ballot, believing the story to have earned a nomination, not on its own merit, but because it was written by a man.
When Sheldon was finally “outed” by Tiptree’s fans, she was terrified of losing her literary friendships, which included perhaps the only feminist comrades she’d made in her lifetime. Insecure about her position within the women’s movement, she feared that Russ would not forgive the deception; among second-wave feminists, the mask of Tiptree risked being perceived as a cowardly escape route. To Le Guin, Tiptree confided, “entre nous & sub specie aeternitatis, I am one of those that always get accidentally guillotined when the Great Day of liberation comes, because … I guess … I am full of parentheses. Revolutions can’t abide parenthesis.” Upon hearing that her secret was out, Sheldon picked up the phone. “Oh, you’re going to hate me,” she told Russ. “This is James Tiptree, Jr.”
Russ took the news graciously. Their correspondence grew open and frank, and homed in on the subject of Sheldon’s sexuality. Despite the fact that she had married two men in her lifetime, in her youth Sheldon kept falling for “beautiful, unscrewable, hideously rich and very ill-fated girls,” although she never had a physical relationship with another woman. Sheldon told Russ about her mother’s attempt to seduce her as a teenager, and identified herself as a “frustrated gay.” In reply, Russ sent Sheldon a love letter. She proposed to meet in person: “Consider yourself well and truly propositioned … Are you ready to have mad adventures in your waning years?” Sheldon, petrified, replied with only a postcard, apologizing for sending on “such dreary gloop.”
By January 1977, Sheldon was depressed. Tiptree, she felt, was dead. “‘I’ am not a writer,” she wrote in her journal, “‘I’ haven’t a story in my head—all that went to J.T. Jr. and became, or was born, somewhat deformed or deracinated, by being his.”
Following the unveiling, Sheldon lamented the change of tone she perceived among her correspondents, and, as a woman, Sheldon felt she had lost the implicit narrative authority upon which Tiptree thrived: “As Tiptree, I had an unspoken classificatory bond to the world of male action; Tiptree’s existence opened to unknown possibilities of power. And, let us pry deeper—to the potential of evil. Evil is the voltage of good; the urge to goodness, without the potential of evil, is trivial. A great bore. Part of the appeal of Tiptree was that he ranged himself on the side of good by choice. Alli Sheldon has no such choice.”
Sheldon continued to write under Tiptree’s name, authoring numerous stories and two full-length novels, but for her, the “magic” of his persona was gone. Russ and Sheldon continued to exchange letters and phone calls for the remainder of Sheldon’s life, but, as with the majority of Tiptree’s correspondents, they never met in person. Russ and Sheldon shared hundreds of letters over the years, and although the letters here are only a sample of their correspondence, this is the most comprehensive selection of Tiptree’s letters to Russ published to date.
James Tiptree Jr.
Box 315
McLean, VA
22101
[c. April 1972]
Dear Joanna Russ:
Liked your GENRE piece in the Bulletin so much it finally nudged me out of my shell, I’ve long been a crypto-admirer of your work but have denied myself the pleasure of saying so. Consider this a simple fan-ism requiring no response: I have a bad habit of writing mash notes when writing moves me and the last thing I want is to take up the recipient’s writing time!
Funny thing—when a work is so universally (& justly) admired as your [AND] CHAOS DIED, one feels, Oh, X doesn’t need any more egoboo, my god, everybody’s genuflecting. And then you later disc
over that X is getting lots of brickbats and jealous darts along with the acclaim, and has many bad days when the mail-box yields nothing but woe and abrasion, and often wonders why the hell keep on struggling drearily to make something right … and maybe an extra cheer from the back benches isn’t out of order after all.
When one is young one cruelly measures oneself against the landmarks of the great, delighted to pounce on flaws, and accepting as a right the fact that their work has furnished a great part of the inside of one’s own head … And then one day the great X dies and it’s revealed he or she led a life of great bleakness and almost zero feedback … and the tiny grain of support one could have furnished is forever withheld … This verges on bathos and the illusion of universal omnipotence, but it happened to me a couple of times … and probably accounts for the mash-notes.
So—just to let you know there’s one more highly appreciative and eager-for-more admirer out here …
All best,
James Tiptree Jr.
***
Temporarily
c/o Bradley Lodge
Florence,
WISC 54121
[c. Aug./Sept. 1973]
Dear Joanna:
Your letter was more appreciated than I can tell you.
But holy peanutbutter, dear writer—do you imagine that anyone with half a functional neurone can read your work and not have his fingers smoked by the bitter, multi-layered anger in it?
It smells revolutionary—no, wait, not “revolutionary.” Not the usual. It smells and smoulders like a volcano buried so long and deadly it is just beginning to wonder if it can explode. Fantastic anger. Like the writer is watching every word, saying, Cool it, cool it, don’t say it.
I don’t have a sample of your work in my duffle in this broken-down forest, if I had maybe I could show you some of the pages where the sentences feel actually bitten off.
What the hell do you think sends some readers like me so? The scent of a new just anger, the sound of someone saying the new true word. I mean, we already have Jane Austen, all the decorous ones. We even have Sylvia Plath. I personally am watching you … Hostile? Sweet feathered Quetzalcoatl, it has not escaped even my tiny dimming brain that you belong to the oldest and worst-squashed race on Earth. What more appropriate emotion than anger? What task more urgent than freeing & finding yourselves now and the hell with any other minor claimants?
I dig it, Joanna. I am fascinated by it intellectually and emotionally. I am an old type with no near woman to oppress or free, but I am glad to be alive while it is happening, or beginning to happen. I read and learn as much as I can, starting with de Beauvoir—yes I have read Korda—I guess I have spent most of my recent writing income on books from the feminist presses. I’m trying to evaluate my own work very critically—let me mention that later if you’re still with me.
The point I want to make here is that I don’t expect strokes or friendship for my sentiments.
You see, I had a crazy upbringing in which I got early acquainted with some of the bads in life. (Crucifixion, anyone?) And for some reason, maybe because I caught a little of it myself, I knew immediately which side I was on. The bottom side. When the jackboots kick in the door, it’s me they’re coming for. My fantasies are of escape, not of wearing the jackboots.
So, of course, like a good little Midwestern liberal (with a brain formed in the Congo) I used to sidle up to the local oppressed with my heart offered on my little outstretched hand. Dear Socialist brother, dear Black brother, dear American Indian brother (I said), this is a terrible wrong; here is Tiptree come to help you all I can.
And of course—as per historical process—the scowling Socialist-Black-Amerind-Etcetera brother promptly took one look and instantly shat all over me, as the handiest representative of the oppressor.
Now oddly enough I wasn’t alienated. Because in the intervals of beshitting me the oppressed or some of their representatives took time to teach me a little about the mechanics of time and power and political movements, which greatly edified me and struck me as perhaps the facts of sex strike others. One of the things I learned was to keep my ears open when I heard any group of people described as:
Childish
Emotional
Incapable of reason
Happy when labouring unpaid
Given to artistic expression rather than thought
Excessively compassionate and vicious
Excessively loyal and treacherous
Excessively cowardly and murderous
Requiring leadership for their own good
and
Supremely content with their lot unless stirred up by outside agitators.
Plus, of course, an amplitude of reasons from theology, physiology and common sense why all these things should be true.
Ring any bells?
Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that as I sidle up to the scowling Female brother with eyes alight with sympathy, experience has taught me to wear my catcher’s mask and offer my little heart neatly enclosed in washable plastic. I recognise history at work. But the heart is beating all the same. I am no masochist; I merely refuse to have my enthusiasms dashed by the purely incidental behavior of the dramatis personae.
Not because I’m a sweet type, Joanna. I’m not. I’m not even unprejudiced. I do loathe most people without much regard to race, sex, creed, or national origin, but I have also deep reservoirs of bigotry on the subject of Arabs, prelates of the Roman church, and particularly for Germans and other Upper Paleolithic survivals. If you happen to fall into one of those brackets, though, don’t worry. (Not that you would.) I don’t try for consistency in my dislikes; it’s hard enough to keep up with one’s admirations.
But look—the usual guilt about writing to a working writer is getting to me. If I go on a bit, do I have your agreement that you won’t read or answer unless you actually happen to feel like it and have time?
You see, your letter sent me mumbling to myself all the way out to Mother’s hospital and back. (I’m here standing by a catastrophically aging parent with a heart attack.) It was the best thing that’s happened around here in—well, I guess it’s only two weeks but it seems years. I yearn to go on about specific points, but scout’s honor: dump this if the time is wrong, right?
Have I said enough to make clear that your hostility is not only no surprise to me but is part of what I admire? I’m the amiable one. You can do the eviscerating.
Specific points:
That term “abortion.” Joanna, I have always taken that to refer to a defect in the fetus, not the mother. Am I wrong? Should I associate it with the fetus-bearer?
But how, when the vast majority of spontaneous abortions are in fact due to fetal defect? And when it is notorious that maternal physiology tends to support and favor the fetus even to the cost of the mother’s health? Should I regard involuntary abortion as something a woman does, for which she is in some way blameworthy so that the term reflects on her?
(I’m not of course talking about voluntary abortion, of which I am heartily in favor; I cannot see what business men have telling women what to do with their own bodies.)
I wish I had your MLA [Modern Language Association] speech, I’m genuinely puzzled. But I will certainly stop using the term.
And of course my saying the book is an abortion does cast ACE in the role of mother, which is pretty silly to contemplate.
But I do resist calling my book a premature ejaculation—although several of the stories deserve no more—because to me an ejaculation is a non-viable half of something looking for completion. It is my hope that a couple of the stories, maybe the book as a whole, have at least a tenuous zygosity.
Will you settle for “a semi-addled blastomere”?
Next point: Dammit, where did you find a story in which there are “chicken-people who did in the Earth ambassador by having him seduced by the maid”? Jealousy twinges my old bones; I think you spent the afternoon writing letters to six people who sent you their
books—there, that’s done!—and got mine mixed. There is not, I swear, a chicken, an ambassador or a maid in mine.
What there is, Joanna, is a batch of very early Tiptree-with-Meccanoset first stories, mixed with a couple from later on. (I started all at once bang in ’67, and stunned myself because everything sold. I do NOT know how to write.) That “alien giantess” one was ’68, I’d just been reading Koestler’s THIEVES IN THE NIGHT, remember—if I have the title right—the psychically scarred girl? Probably a male fantasy, although I swear I’ve met something close. Similar to people of any sex who’ve been stomped by gangs.
Anyway, I was running through a lot of stereotypes. I blush. I’ve counted up, intending to mention it to Vonda McIntyre, who occasionally educates me. Of those 15 tales, only one has a female hero, and she’s dependent on a male mutant dog. (But she is only 15 and is armless.) There’s also an aged female explorer who is now crazy (Mother), one race-track steward, two assistant girl revolutionaries and a nurse. The rest of them range from flat-out sex-objects, “kittens,” spear-carriers and off-stage noises to total absence. (Oh, I forgot the raped polyglot who learns to love.)
Joanna, when I realised this it struck me quite serious. I then looked at my other, later stuff. Not much better, Joanna. Not much better. Oh, there’s a giant arthropod mother who is forgetting intelligent speech, and a girl who tries to have sexual congress with the Earth, etc. etc. I do have one coming out in MFSF [The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction] where two women are so fed up that they manage to leave with aliens, told from the point of view of a semi-macho male who misunderstands the whole thing, maybe that’s better—or maybe it’ll just be embarrassing, like whites writing about blacks.
We all know how that works.
What to do, Joanna? This is serious, you know. It obviously can’t be solved by just changing all the hes into shes. Vonda or Quinn gave me a blast on Heinlein’s female jocks, who are just men writing in skirts.
Other Aliens Page 17
