Other Aliens

by Bradford Morrow

  ***

  James Tiptree Jr.

  P.O. Box 315

  McLean VA. 22151

  S.F.W.A.

  9 May 74

  Dear Joanna,

  Very glad to get your letter. I can imagine what a hellish, sickening, lonely, hunted-animal, stinking situation this university mess must be for you, and I admire your being able to attain private composure and mastery over it. By coincidence I just picked up Gertrude Ezorsky’s “The Fight over University Women” in the NY Review of Books; evidently yours is one instance in a totally shameful scene. If you haven’t seen the piece you might look at it for hints on helpful organisations and lines of action. From your comments on the two other women professors I would judge that your university is in drastic non-compliance. If you don’t win your particular guerilla skirmish you may have to bring war to Buffalo … But my comments are all so long-range and out-of-it; doubtless you have been over and over all this.

  What is clear, though, is that war has got to come to the universities; I had no idea they were so appallingly on the wrong side … Okay, call it a militant social movement, or enlightenment, or what; symbolic war. But real goals.

  One item in the Ezorsky piece I had not known of was her reference to experiments by Goldberg and the Bems in which an article was rated for excellence with (a) a female and (b) a male author’s name, and apparently rated lower by both male and female subjects under the (a) condition. The Bems’ experiment is described as “informal”; perhaps the data isn’t too solid. But somebody should replicate this fast, with an adequate paradigm. I’m subjectively sure they’d catch some good smelly fish … Wish I was still in a position to do it, it would be quick and cheap.

  (By the way, is there any chance of your doing it? Probably not.)

  This new Slater sounds good; would you believe I am still waiting for the original Slater you recommended, [THE] PURSUIT OF LONELINESS. My bookseller deserves a grenade up his computer, I keep on with him because he has an elderly-European-Intellectual telephone voice, and also lets me run up bills, but his attitude of doomed collapse toward anything that has to be “ordered from the publisher” is getting thick.

  Listen thanks for the good words on the Nebula and the “Love Is the Plan” story, there is no one dead or alive from whom I could more value such kindness. But there is something wrong, incurably, with me and awards. That you liked the story is more than enough. My attitude is that someday maybe I can learn to use part of this Meccano set … someday … maybe. But whatever I’m working on is always the one before the one that’s going to be better … Fflthh.

  Listen, THE FEMALE MAN—dear jesus, what a title, the end-all. I hadn’t connected with that before. What? What? … Okay, I’ll wait to find out. But with difficulty … THE FEMALE MAN, my, my, Oh christ …

  Yeah, as you say, men are as unknown as women, I’m just realising.

  And I’m not a “new man,” whatever else … But your radar is uncanny, “middle-size, slight, sandy-hair” would be just right before the grey came in. Also to be known by a scar on the (unmustached) upper lip where a house fell on me, giving me a vaguely cynical right profile. (The left one just looks like a homeless CPA.) … I don’t know what Barry Malzberg looks like, outside of a smudgy image of something in hairy motion in an SFWA communiqué, but it would be hard for me to fit an imaginary body to his writing, unless it was some kind of eerie junkyard sculpture. But writers have accidental physiognomies. None of them look right, except for the same kind of crooked, anxious peering-out from behind the facade. I know what you look like, though: a black swan with some red feathers or flames or aura, whatever. I was glad to see this confirmed, again smudgily, by SFWA.

  Yes, it was fine for Vonda. I relish that dauntless little gang out there, Quinn too. Now Quinn should win something, this mystery thing, I gather, is possible. I have to lie down after one of her letters, she has this cast of hundreds, and more activities than the Mafia, and an inescapable aroma of courage against odds rises up. A world I never knew. I have since heard that part of the courage concerns dreadful infirmities of the legs … So unfair when the young are assailed. So unfair.

  I am trying to determine from your letter whether some kind of dignified letter from a fellow writer, presumably to … to what? Not the Dept., certainly?—would be of any service. Could you be less gallant and more specific?

  (I doubt it.)

  If it would be of even marginal help, though, do. Sort of “congratulations on having obtained such a towering & dedicated talent to teach this significant field, now turned to dismay at news that she is not to be kept on, wondering if you perceive how important this type of teaching ability is for an important group of students, etc.” type of thing?

  Maybe she thinks I have to make up my own mind? And me with my out-of-date university directory …

  All strength to you in adversity. Don’t laugh when I say I know a little of what you’re going through. In 1943 I was court-martialled by the U.S. Army, on grounds (unfortunately justified) of insubordination. Restricted to quarters in a strange city, awaiting trial, I recall one very, very bleak night. It CAN’T happen to me! Maybe it doesn’t sound so much, but in those days of, you know, fighting Hitler, eleven million people in it, the Army was the world. Which was declaring me surplus … Luckily they were hard up for junior officers, in the end I was just sent to a kind of Siberia, from which I weaseled back. Slowly … Never underestimate the power of a company commander, or a department chairman, even if he has the soul of a poisoned woodlouse, he has the buttons … So I picture you in similar plight. But at least you have a cause, a war, where I had only the results of personal folly.

  May the power & calm at your centre increase amid the fray,

  Love,

  Tip

  ***

  James Tiptree Jr.

  P.O. Box 315

  McLean VA. 22151

  S.F.W.A.

  17 July 74

  Dear Joanna:

  Happiness is having a free hour, a good sandwich and a glass of tea, and sitting down with a Russ essay on science fiction. Dammit, you make sense. You are about the only writer on science fiction whose nouns and verbs I understand. I hope this does not dismay you—nothing greater than being appreciated by imbeciles—but I personally of course believe that it means that you think with precision and great range and express it all with divine succinctness.

  I refer to your Subjunctivity piece in EXTRAPOLATION 15/1, which I have at last subscribed to.

  That’s an elegant bit of definition by Delany, isn’t it? (I should send for that back issue.) You’ve probably forgotten your own thing entirely by now but it gave me such pleasure. I had about resigned myself to grunting and pointing after reading some of the Panshins’ efforts—hope I’m not offensive here, just put it down to terminal aphasia on my part. Then I came on a thing of Delany’s some time back, forget what, but it was like chopping open the cloud layer. He has a clear, clear head. He knows the tools, he knows what the hell he’s doing and [where] we’re all at, he has the feel of the open-endedness. And he has the learning. Rare in sf, he has a trained mind. And he has the delicacy of the true thinker, you never catch him clumping in heavy definitional boots past the sign that Angels Stop Here … I don’t mean that he fails in definition or that there are mysteries we cannot name, that rot. I mean he keeps the subject alive on the operating table. He does not insist on putting in that last brick that includes infinity out.

  All the above applies to you, too. That is what I mean by sense. Epistemological tact.

  One of the beauties of his “has not happened” is that it places naturalistic fiction, the ugh mainstream, as a sub-division of sf. (Has not happened but could have.) I’ve felt for long that the so-called larger field of literature was in fact a restricted phase of the genre sf, not vice versa. That it was writing under constraints (could happen) that are in fact crutches for the reader whose thinking is limited to “could happen.” And not only “could” but
“is very probable in my little world and doesn’t upset me.”

  The sf reader is one whose mind naturally races to the limit when a category comes up, who when told the boat is leaking immediately realises it may fill and sink, to put it in the narrowest possible case. I have been increasingly, slowly appalled as I go thru the years to discover that one is surrounded by a solid phalanx of people who when told “the boat is leaking” simply register—if that much—the item: “the boat is leaking.” Period. Period … One in a hundred may even remember it next day.

  The one in a thousand who asks, How fast? Or, Where are the lifeboats? or Should I help bail? … that one is a potential sf reader. “EXTRAPOLATION” is really a very acute name for the journal, isn’t it? Not in the sense that sf is extrapolation, but in the sense of a mental activity which can go along any dimension.

  Well this is all in a very didactic vein which is not my natural way (I hope). Comes from the fact that your piece gave me a kind of grimly satisfied empathic glow, sort of Well, I guess THAT fixes ’em. Not that it was aggressive or controversy-seeking, just that it was a delighting demonstration of How to do it right. Like seeing a mama osprey demonstrating flying, a pretty scene I had the chance to watch in Yucatán. The great silver creature soared and did aerial arabesques, ending up with an extraordinary dance-in-place in the sunrise air, hooting what may have been encouragement to the large chick awkwardly flapping from palm to palm below.

  Your observation that the reader carries his own actuality frame with him into the work has an interesting corollary. It might mean that the readership of at least some sf is bound to be extra-limited. Since there is a tacit dependence on the reader’s having an adequate frame. Thus if the frame changes too much between cultures or times the work will be left inadequately anchored, more so than a could-happen work where the frame is explicit.

  Even in my limited experience of writing, I’ve noticed a problem which I now understand since reading you: Being old, I’ve accumulated a heap of miscellaneous actuality data, rather a large heap. And I’ve been aware that effects I was trying to get were dependent on the reader’s sharing that heap, or parts of it. And yet I could not bring the actuality itself in, it was as you said the effort to keep alive a fluctuating relationship between unnamed elements of actuality and the whatever-it-was I was trying to make. So I had simply to cut out parts that depended on the reader’s sharing an improbably large part of my actuality … A totally different sort of problem than non-sf fiction faces, isn’t it?

  To take an absurd example, one can depend on the reader’s frame for “the pastoral peacefulness of the twentieth century.” But you can’t do so for “the eleventh century.”

  Thank you, Joanna. Now I understand.

  I love that description of a shifting, many-stranded relation in the work. I love your understanding of complexity. The description of the play of disbelief in satire. When something new is really well caught in words it gives me actual tangible joy. Like having an itchy brain scratched right? No; more like eating a perfect peach on a scorching hot day.

  I have moments of wishing acutely that I could attend a good sf workshop or seminar, say one of yours. Or could at least listen to you and your few peers discuss or argue out some point. And then I have reality awakenings in which I know that if I had that luck I should doubtless never write again, that the kernel of my output is the lonesome exploration, powered by ignorant & infatuated curiosity. What I would learn is that I can’t do it.

  Now this was supposed to be a short snappy farewell note (I’m going on my travels for a couple of months) and a renewed hope that your fight is going well. Would it be a strain to drop a card saying what the status is? The bystanders do fret, you know.

  And I was going to ask what you thought about Anna Kavan’s ICE. (I don’t know what I think yet, the jolt of European real craziness that comes off it first blurs vision.) And I was going to rejoice that you too rejoice in PALE FIRE. That Nabokov. And I was going to inquire if you enjoyed Calvino. And I was going to mention—apropos of your comment on the frame of actuality around a work of fantasy—how Tolkien seems to me to have built a doubleframe, using the Hobbits as a half-actual anchor to go into wilder fantasy and tying back again through a Hobbit-ending to the world of men … and then the strange effect of the Appendices.

  Ah yes—this was to have been a very short letter. Are you well? Are you okay?

  Mother Hen

  ***

  22 Sep 74

  Dearest Joanna:

  […] [Y]ou must not dump on Ursula Le Guin. For this reason: Whether you know it or not she does good to your movement. There is a place on the front for those gentle souls who only say it indirectly. (I have told her she hasn’t really found her voice yet—I happen to like—maybe love—her personally very much.) In any movement the out-front radicals are always peeing on the moderate wing, but you forget what a terribly broad spectrum of opposition you confront. The moderates—Uncle Toms if you will—convert their own sector of the opposition very effectively; they speak to people who would run screaming from you. You are a Malcolm X; she is a sort of Martin King. Her LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS—also even her (to me better) LATHE OF HEAVEN—quietly and unforgettably undercuts sexual stereotypes for certain readers you can’t reach. Now maybe they should read you & more radical things, but they won’t. They are only susceptible to seeping radicalism, to the slow percolation of low-voiced ideas. And the ideas ARE there, you know. Her style is the very quiet statement. When and if she tries to make a more direct one she may well fumble and lose effectiveness. I wish I could convince you to be glad of any elements of alliance and stop insisting that there is only one way to skin the chauvinist pig. Some pigs you have to reassure as you do it. You and your outspoken like are indispensable. But you are not alone. As Lenin or was it Marx said, from each according to his powers. She uses her powers. Quietly, persistently, she inserts the impression that there is something very wrong and absurd between the sexes. (Maybe you don’t realise how clearly that idea comes through? It does.) That is a very useful function. Whether she lives up to what you think a WOMAN should be & say is, ultimately, irrelevant. Be content to lead and to be out there where the cold winds blow and save your imprecations for Phyllis Schlafly.

  My life-gained impression of revolutionaries—from early labor-unions to you—is that they have a tendency not to remember who their real enemies are. They pour their hottest bile on deviationists whom the world sees as part of their movement.

  Well, this is all much too avuncular. But I really have seen a fair amount of people working to Turn Things Around and liberate themselves in various ways and this phenomenon is one you see every goddam time. Of course it’s so understandable. The one almost doing it right is the one you feel acutely about.

  U. K. Le Guin is, besides, an odd human animal. She would, I think, die doing what only annoys you. Maybe you could call her a bourgeois liberal; she is comfortable in some of the life-roles she’s found. (After all, who really knows how to be a mother???)

  I repeat, you really do not know how strong you are. You suffer, god do you suffer. Like Cocteau, you will live always gripped by an inexplicable nausea, you are one of those, in his piercing phrase, “whose passports are not in order.” You should try to disentangle those elements of your pain which arise from your non-sexual superb intelligence—a guaranteed ticket to anguish—from those which arise from your being a member of an oppressed class. Many of your predicaments and “outsideness” would happen if you were a man, you know. Christ the brilliant colleagues I have seen crucified for brilliance. (And some thorniness of personality.) Brilliance plus a refusal to compromise or close your eyes is the supreme crown of thorns in man or woman.

  This is cold comfort, Joanna, but one of the few not wholly ineffectual remedies I have found for life is to find out what is doing which to you. And if part of your suffering is caused by a more general human fate at least it relieves you of the sick bottomless rage you have to feel
about an injustice.

  It is not of course “justice” that the brilliant be persecuted but it is hard to know how that will ever be avoided given the normal distribution curve. If the curve shifts so that everybody is as smart as you are there will still be another miserable half percentile out there under the asymptote suffering from people like you. There is no way to cure that loneliness given inequality. You have the choice: be born on Mt. Everest and shiver in the view or be born in the warm valley and live no farther than your sheep can see … Well, maybe “choice” isn’t quite the word …

  But I do see intelligence as a boon, though entailing eternal pain. Remember that tremendous passage in Peer Gynt, when Peer, who has gone along with all the Troll Kingdom’s demands that he wear a tail, etc., etc., finally balks when they want to put out his eyes.

  By the way, this Jeff Smith enterprise on “women” … Thank you for his relayed invitation to be an Honorary Man or an Honorary Man being an Honorary Woman. I shall try. But as I wrote him, I have visions of Joanna Russ making off with my left tibia in consequence. Remember, I labour under difficulties.

  Phil Dick … I’m afraid he may have addled himself, like Gerald Ford, he might have left his helmet off too long. (His Vancouver speech.) Or perhaps he always was that way. And his “women” are a strange breed, probably figures he drapes his fantasies around. But there remain his books; the only thing a writer is, after all, required to do is to produce good books. My slender 6 inches of Phil’s paperbacks contain some of the best sf—some of the most mind-nourishing sf—on all my shelves, and it matters nothing that he may be wandering around like [cummings’s] uncle. (Who was “led all over [Brattle] Street by a castrated pup.”) … I believe him to be totally impermeable by voices from the outside.

  (We have corresponded extensively and he still doesn’t know my name.)

  Speaking of people & correspondence, you know Chip Delany is one of my real Upper Pantheon, and I wish someday when you have an empty line in a letter you would tell him there is a character called Tiptree who keeps writing him fan letters in my head. His works are so goddam well-made. So full. So—oh shit, you may ask, why don’t I write my own fan letters. The answer is, I did … I’m delighted to find he is also a great decent soul. He could so easily have been a blazing brilliant kook … Funny the deep impulse one has to make the admiree know of your admiration … It really bubbles up inside. That was why I first wrote you.