Other Aliens
Page 23
Have I done anything evil? It didn’t feel evil, it was just a prank that dreamed its way into reality. I think you were beginning to “see through,” too.
Can I ask you to hold this “secret” a while longer, at least until Ballantine’s stop sitting on that damn novel and decide to publish? I don’t think they want an ersatz Tiptree … I had planned to establish Raccoona better and then kind of slide over, but with my low production and this damn novel I’ve only been able to give her minor stories. Funny though; editors screaming for Tiptree stuff return Raccoona with beer-can stains on the pages—not really that bad but almost.
(If you take this in the true spirit it happened in, there are quite a few laughs to share.)
The funny thing is, Tiptree has taken on a kind of weird reality; I’m beginning to believe something was awaiting incarnation in the gourmet food section. Tiptree for instance insisted [on] “Tip,” would not be called “Jim.” And he has shown himself a spiritual uncle to quite a few depressed people, mostly fellow pros. Alli Sheldon almost had to give up teaching for the same reason—all the outsiders, green monkeys, tearful young girls spotted me at once and made me into a kind of crying-shoulder or hot-line for troubles. I can’t resist. I know too well how things hurt.
For your information, in addition to Jeff Smith, I wrote Ursula at once because of our long friendship, and then Quinn and Vonda because of ditto. Since we met later, I waited two nights to write you; it takes a sleepless night to write this. So you are the only ones who know, pace Harlan.
How I admire you who have made it openly as women.
I think I would have if I’d thought it through, but I was finishing my PhD orals at the time I wrote my first 4, and I wasn’t thinking anything through except the evidence for and against rat learning—I’m a behavioural or “rat” psychologist. So I just tagged on the first male name that came handy and let it go. And then was stuck. You see, I am extremely shy and recessive.
I guess that’s all the brute facts. If I should have put in more, let me know, if you’re still speaking to your friend
Tip
Alli
Raccoona
P.S. [O]ne thing I noticed, Tip was going to write you about. Have you noticed that we have always discussed writers not as technicians or the “art of writing”—but as their ethical, moral, political messages? Fascinating. Of course maybe you didn’t want to discuss writerly points with me because neither Tip nor I really know how to write.
P.S.S. Another point; all of Tiptree is me; Ting (my husband) is a non-reader, hasn’t a clue what I really do. An old friend, really; at 61 and 75 that becomes more important than gender.
Oh, Joanna, will I have any friends left?
***
James Tiptree Jr.
6037 Ramshorn Pl.
McLean, Va. 22101
16 July 77
Dearest Joanna:
[…] My mother once more or less openly invited me to bed with her. I was 14, it was in a steamy little stateroom on a boat. I almost did but the gleam of her gold fillings put me off. (I have this horror of age, see.) Also, I didn’t know how. This lack dogged me through all the loves of later life. And since I looked and talked knowing, real gays were always throwing themselves at my once-handsome feet, and I hadn’t a clue how to pick them up. Still don’t really. I guess you could call me a frustrated gay. God knows, the scene with men was mostly pure havoc. […]
Love
Tip/Alli
***
6037 Ramshorn Pl.
McLean, VA 22101
12 Mar 79
My dear, my dear—
[…] (God it was strange to come home to an empty, voiceless room … where Tip had once lived and worked. Maybe refreshing, we’ll see.)
Now really back to you. But what can I say to you, not knowing “who” you are now? I suspect I know, of course. We are much alike in many ways; you are having prematurely, because of your back, what hit me ten years later in slow-motion … There is no answer, no meaning. Life is death. Brief diagnostic: As long as you still desire anything—beyond death at once, I mean—no matter how crazy; in particular, if you still want to do anything, like writing, or washing drip-dry, for that matter, you are still there and things will improve, though it may take some technology. The sitting and staring dull-eyed at horrors, and finally, at nothing, that is bad. That you do not do. The sleeping 10-12 hours is partly physical need—things have exhausted you; partly an attempt to die, partly laziness and procrastination, and mostly the expression of a dilemma. You want A but you can’t have A unless you do B, and you can’t do B because you hate it or it bores you; so you sleep (which will do you no harm, so long as you are also physically active enough to halt atrophy).
The irremediable longing for lost youth and magic and meaning is of course the human condition—for those of us with minds; “Life is a process of disinheritance,” my old-lady music teacher said to me when I was 14 and bowed down with sourceless woe. She was, I now realise, perhaps 38 or 42.
The physiological aspects of depression—which can sometimes be helped—are just coming into science. I was lucky in finding a shrink who finally found a “human” psychiatrist with a pharmacopoeia. (Most psychiatrists, as you know, are fossilised sophomores with stainless-steel heads.) When I find out if we’re still speaking, we’ll go into all that if you want. But nothing is clear-cut; among other things there is always our old friend the placebo effect … Something genuine is there, however. I’ve spent my life popping pills to try to live, or recapture life, and these pills seem better. (Luckily I had the sense to stay away from the hard stuff.)
Enough? Enough to show I know and care?
In a way, I’m glad I couldn’t get your phone and had to write this. Scribble me a word, I know it will reflect only the current 10 seconds of your changeable soul, but do.
Love.
Nameless
***
6037 Ramshorn Pl
McLean VA 22101
25 Sep 80 0400hr
Hello Baby My Swan,
Listen, Love, due to circumstances too stupid to go into, I can’t do a thing about the story you object to—(would heart trouble + 3 hunks of oral surgery do for starters?)—But this is about something else.
Just been reading The Coming-Out stories ed by Stanley + Wolfe (with a lot of Adrienne Rich) and it occurred to me to wonder if I ever told you in so many words that I too am a lesbian—or at least as close as one can come to being one never having had a successful love with any of the women I’ve loved, and being now too old + ugly to dare try. Oh, had 65 years been different! I like some men a lot, but from the start, before I knew anything, it was always girls + women who lit me up. (Oh, the sad foolish lovely tales I’m going to have to put down some day!)
I just thought I’d mention it, since you seem to have found yourself. (Possibly my reward for years of stasis + musing is to be the ideal confidante!) Anyway, I love you. Isn’t this silly paper? How goes it?
♡ Alli/Tip
***
6037 Ramshorn Pl.
McLean VA 22101
5 May 81
Dearest, my much-experienced
Darling—
(The strange envelope is due to my crouching over my files, arms full of junk, in darkness due to a power failure, looking for something with your address on it. 6 months back I started a grand Reorganization of my address-book—one of those tear-pages things—with the result that said book is empty save for 3 neat pages for newspapers, dentists, and cleaners—while all the real people are in a kind of horrid paper salad in the bowl below. Such a procrastinator … do you?)
What you tell about female hatred and absolutism is so true. Oh god, I hate to say it—especially in the light of Belfast today—but we have some things to learn from men in the way of handling minor hostilities. The boxers who go after each other viciously—and then are found inquiring about each other’s health and sending flowers, or caring for the loser’s children … the US Con
gress, where a blistering floor-fight is so often followed by neutral* luncheons.
We women have no experience with fighting the issue, nor its exponent. (Result: men easily join forces to squash us.)
Not that they’re perfect at it—just a lot better.
During WWII the bicycle dump-trucks in the Pentagon had signs on them: “We are fighting the enemy, not each other.” And it took me some months to learn that when my boss in Intelligence* said “The Enemy” he meant (a) the British and (B) the Navy. A failure of the generality I just voiced—and reorganized as a failure by the Big Boys. In those days Air Intelligence was regarded as a dumping-ground for unassignables. (On some posts the Intelligence officer was also the special service officer who was responsible for storing the horseshoe set, the badminton net, and the bean bags … one past commander fired his I.O. because the man could speak + read German.) Luckily this attitude changed soon, and never prevailed overseas, where Smiley and his kin taught us lessons A thru Y. (Z, or Zed, they failed on, as witness the UK moles now surfacing.)
Does all this free-association crap interest you at all?
No. What interests you is the dreadful view of “sisterhood” you are now getting. The hatred, the poisonous Leninism of the purges, complicated by personal envy. When that terrible fund of hatred turns from its proper target to focus on another woman, it’s sick. And—never forget it—SAFE.
What would happen if you remarked, “Pretty safe, attacking me, isn’t it? Always shoot down your allies first, it’s such a help against your real enemies.” Or, if they say you can’t be an ally of theirs, wish them luck and depart to conduct your own lonely wars.
(Easy for me to say. But this crowd with their attractive doctrines evidently was quite a source of hope to you. Dammit—I wish I were there to lend a hand … Do you recall the lovely tale of the old Frankish king, who after being much moved by a Christian missionary’s tale of the mob-death of Jesus, exclaimed fiercely, “Ah—that only I had been there with my Franks!” The dear old king would have ruined the martyrdom and set Christian history back a thousand years … Well, we don’t need you as a martyr, thank fortune.)
Your other wonderful account is True Tales of Vampires I have known. (Oh god yes, gimme, gimme, gimme your talent, your fever, your secret, your blood, above all, your time.) Do you recall that little-mentioned story Harlan did in which the hero, Ellison virtually undisguised, discovers his pack of followers, of “good (Sorry for the writing—lights still out, scribbling by candle, lying down) friends,” are actually out to suck his blood; it ends with them eating him alive. One of the penalties of Glamoor. I’m starting to get it, luckily by mail only as I’ve made myself very hard to reach. “Gimme—oh, gimme—” all carefully and quite unsuccessfully disguised, and wrapped in protestations about not wasting my time. A few are really egregious—“get me published”—but most, so far, start with the careful SASE, etc.
You’re out there all exposed, in person. You must be damned magnetic flesh, too. Well, at this distance, and conscious as I am of my own physical decay + repulsiveness, I think you’re safe with me. My only virtue is, you can say anything to me without ever changing my love, which is solidly based on what you have done, and the ongoing beauty of your mind. A totally risk-free lover. Who can only love you more as I curse your peccadillos.
Dull, what?
Well, this horrible position—I’m sore from sticking out my stomach to hold the notebook up—is clearly no place to even begin my promised saga of my attempts to genitalize my loves, or respond to others’, and when I got thinking of it the other day this huge bag of history started dumping itself out—so I will just leave you with the last picture I was left with—a bathroom at 4 am, in the tub stretched out a red-haired girl of appalling beauty, under the grime of a week’s debauch—I had just rescued her from the clutches of an assorted bag of faggots in an all-night eatery, who were visibly trying to make their weak brains figure out how to take financial advantage of Maggie, this wanderer from a very wealthy very upper-class gold coast family—the home had 9-foot cast iron gates mounted by a permanent Husky … she had called me to come get her. So at 3 am sucker me drives the old open top Packard through the grey, garish streets of the downtown red-light district, and was putting her back together—she addled with sex and some (to me then) unknown substance which stank up the car like turpentine—me addled with love. And as she lay there, lovely beyond words, letting me wash her all over, the only thing I could think of to do was to lay peacock feathers over her. Oh god, I can still see it.
May I leave you with that?
Love and a loving good night—
Ould Scrawly
***
22 June 85
Dearest Joanna—
I’m writing this when I should be working—Oh, for Chrissake, which of us isn’t?—but it’s going to be a dull letter because I’m so stuffed with medicaments, mostly pain-killers, that you’re practically being corresponded with by a bottle of pills.
Just wanted to tell you, I’ve been keeping alive by rereading your EXTRA(ORDINARY) PEOPLE. Put together most ingeniously, of course—but, Gods! Lady, you can write. Hard to believe that SOULS and the MYSTERY OF THE YOUNG GENTLEMAN were writ by the same hand, each so perfect, so enameled and ornamented in their diverse ways … Of course, I like SOULS better, it may be the best, certainly one of the best you’ve ever done. Oh, what reality. I don’t see how you knew what an abbess would say to terrified women confronted by the Northmen. And those Vikings—how ghastly my forebears were. There we were, itinerant murderers and bums, hacking people up while elsewhere people were civilised. (Yours.) I used to take them as a joke, until I saw the pathetic refuges built on the Hebrides islands for use when they came. One great bee-hive of a building, walls around a middle open space for livestock, and the people lived in the walls—in a 5-foot space between the inner and outer walls. The whole place reeking of blood after five centuries, and presided over by the gloomiest skies in the world … And all doors big enough only for dwarfs—I never found out whether they and their cattle were tiny—look at Shetland ponies—or whether it was to help keep the—I guess—taller Norse out … Everyone was so small in those days, look at the old suits of armour. (That was a shock to me, except I could now see how a horse could carry an armed knight of that peewee size.) I guess a modern basketball team would look like gods walking to them …
And THE YOUNG GENTLEMAN … Oh, but why should I go on telling you what you know? Just leave it at this—whenever you get to thinking you’ve done some non-pareil stories—you’re right! Take all your most megalomaniacal musings and stamp them True. One picks up your work in perfect confidence that one will be treated to a display of what one can’t do … I’m savoring the book in slow readings and retracements, so the fact that I haven’t said anything about the stories at the end yet means nothing.
I’ve been a shade ill, but also trying to work hard, sort of dragging self from couch to type, back to couch, back to type. […]
Is anything deadlier than being stuck with an A a B-minus story you simply have to finish because it’s part of a set and no time to scrap it and begin anew? … I found I was so engaged with the setting of that novel (BRIGHTNESS FALLS FROM THE AIR) that I concocted a couple peripheral stories, and before I knew what was going on they got sold, pending a third, to Tor for printing together in a book. Tales Of the Starry Rift. Strictly good grade B.
I think I’ll send you that novel with my love. Don’t feel you have to read it.
I think I’ll get to work. Or maybe lie down.
I think I’ll end this … by telling you I miss you, Baby. I do. Of all the friends and acquaintances I’ve made in the last 15 years, you stand as the Authentic One.
Be good and write me a nice whiney angry note because I love you.
Your
Tip/A
NOTE. Alice B. Sheldon’s preferred spelling of the name “James Tiptree, Jr.” included the comma after the surname “Tiptree,�
� although the author often neglected to include the comma in correspondence. We have maintained the comma in our title, running heads, and introduction, but we have left the name as Sheldon wrote it in her letters. In some instances throughout this selection (typos, punctuation, underlining, etc.), we have standardized the letters to fit editorial style; in others (neologisms, atypical capitalization, numerals, British-inflected spelling), we have maintained the original style.
*Is that the correct use of “neutral”? Always boggles me.
*His principal qualification was an award for saving the most gunny-sacks ever saved at Picatinny Arsenal in 1936.
We are grateful to Sheldon’s biographer Julie Phillips; to Sheldon’s literary executor, Jeffrey D. Smith; to Linda Long at the University of Oregon Libraries; and to the Lesbian Herstory Archives for their generous assistance in the compilation and publication of these letters.
Copyright © 2016 by Jeffrey D. Smith. Published by permission of Virginia Kidd Literary Agency. Alice B. Sheldon/Pen Name James Tiptree, Jr., Papers, Coll 455, Box 12, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene, Oregon. The letter of December 4, 1976, first appeared in Letters to Tiptree (ed. Alisa Krasnostein and Alexandra Pierce, Twelfth Planet Press, 2015).
The Showroom Variations
Michael Parrish Lee
PRODUCT INFORMATION
We are now able to offer this esteemed series, compatible with most chambers and enjoying extensive replay value. Once within or returned to its chamber, the product can be fastened comfortably, and the Variations will proceed.
Variation 1. The Chamber
In a chamber the product waits to enter another chamber.
Variation 2. Daniel Arrives
A ringing scream pulls him into a chamber filling up with light and the chirping of birds. He wonders why he has again programmed the screaming to bring him here. He pushes his face into the spongy item that buoys his head as the things to come begin to shift and gurgle in his stomach. He wishes that for once he could return to the chamber he has left, or at least remember what happened there, but he knows that he will not allow himself to do so. Soon the chamber he hides his face from will fill with light completely and he will feel the air exit his lungs, knowing that he must enter other chambers where the things to come await him.