Or, conversely, that my mundane life is so uninteresting that it would discredit my stories. Etc., etc.…
Probably the real reason is partly inertia, it started like this, I don’t yet really believe it, let it be till it ripens. That too.
But basically maybe I believe something about the relation of writers to their stories, that the story is the realest part of the storyteller. Who cares about the color of Coleridge’s socks? (Answer, Mrs. C.) Of course, I enjoy reading a writer’s autobiography—or rather, some writers! A few. By far the most of them make me nervous, like watching a stoned friend driving a crowded expressway. For Chrissakes, stop!
I told this to Harlan Ellison, but I don’t think he understood, because he is one of the few who can reveal all he wants without spoiling his stories. But there’s the catch. When you’re reading Harlan’s wonderfully natural, candid, Human-all-too-Human accounts of Harlan Living, are you really looking behind the scenes? You are not. You are looking at more of Harlan’s writing, not because Harlan is being deceptive, or being less than candid, but because Harlan belongs to that Human type, Homo Logensis, the Talking Man, like Mailer, like Thomas Wolfe, whose life forms into narrative as it is being lived, so that at every act of unveiling, at putting the naked squirm of the inmost flesh into words, another level of reality forms behind and beneath, in which the living Harlan exists just one jump ahead of the audience.
Those of us who are not so blessed are very rightly dubious about the value of straight autobiographical writing. For example, the poet Auden offers as his autobiography, a collection of cherished quotations and notations, his commonplace book. (I’m reading it now, it’s great.) And he’s right; if you want a terrible instance of suicide by autobiography, Cordwainer Smith. One of the greats. If only I’d never read that perishing introduction in which he blathers on about his household, and how his cook or somebody is really almost Human. Jeesus.
Does this convey?
Just to wind this up, you’ll notice I left a “partly” dangling on the last page. Well, the last remaining part of my secretiveness is probably nothing more than childish glee. At last I have what every child wants, a real secret life. Not an official secret, not a Q-clearance polygraph-enforced bite-the-capsule-when-they-get-you secret, nobody else’s damn secret but mine. Something they don’t know. Screw Big Brother. A beautiful secret real world, with real people, fine friends, doers of great deeds and speakers of the magic word, Frodo’s people if you wish, and they write to me and know me and accept my offerings, and I’m damned if I feel like opening the door between that magic reality and the universal shitstorm known as the real (sob) world. When all the more cogent reasons are done, it’s probably that simple.
So, how to reconcile that with honesty? Well, who is honest? You? Or You? Don’t tell me, man. You know as well as I do we all go around in disguise. The halo stuffed in the pocket, the cloven hoof awkward in the shoe, the X-ray eye blinking behind thick lenses, the two midgets dressed as one tall man, the giant stooping in a pinstripe, the pirate in a housewife’s smock, the wings shoved into sleeveholes, the wild racing, wandering, raping, burning, bleeding, loving pulses of reality decorously disguised as a roomful of Human beings. I know goddam well what’s out there, under all those masks. Beauty and Power and Terror and Love.
So who the fuck cares whether the mask is one or two millimeters thick?
Does that convey?
Smith: Yes. But I’m fascinated by your secret world. Not only do you have a magical SF place, but you find yourself in one of the upper echelons. You are a respected writer, an equal to these people whose autographs you are willing to buy. You never even spent your apprenticeship as a fan, but as a non-fan reader. It smacks of fantasy, Tiptree.
Tiptree: After recovering from the egoboo—ah, yes, sahib. There always is a learning. For some people named Joseph Conrad it seems to have been just living in a noticing way. For Tiptree, hidden years of writing crap headed MEMO, SUBJECT, TO… or PROBLEM, CONCLUSIONS, RECOMMENDATIONS. And then trying to do it like they said and then discovering that when I really did do it like they said—
Nobody could read it. Not even me.
So then more effort imploring the reader-fish to bite, to read about my goddam problem. I even tried putting dirty stories in footnotes, somewhere they’re still there stamped Swallow Before Reading. Above all it was cut, cut, cut, starting with that gorgeous line you like best.
And I wrote a little, well, I guess it was poetry. One began, “Sitting on a fruit crate in the abandoned tractor park…”
Also I once worked briefly on a paper, the good old crazy Chicago Sun, where a bloat-eyed scotch-sodden frog from Texas called a feature editor kept a big pair of shears by his bottle. When you handed him your hot and beating prose he eyed it in silence with the reds of his eyes shining over the bags and then took up the shears and cut off the last third, which was where the point was. A learning experience.
(Also instructive was the fact that every time you wrote about the school board stealing the slum kids’ lunch money it came out in pied type… Anybody ever hear what they had there before Daley?)
Smith: You publish a wide variety of fiction, from hardcore SF in Analog to “new wave” stories in Venture and Amazing to light fantasy in Worlds of Fantasy. Do you have any particular preference among these? Is there any we can expect to see more of in the future than of the others?
Tiptree: At the moment I’m in and around the Chicago area, partly attending to family matters in the shape of an aged and ornery mother—more damn people seem to have catastrophically aging relatives in Chicago than you’d believe. This is a theme in my life that seems to be going on and on, as Virginia Kidd that warm heart can tell you, I’ve been sobbing on her shoulder about this for years. Tried putting it in a story that Galaxy has been sitting on, called “Mother in the Sky with Diamonds,” in which this insurance adjuster in the Asteroid Belt has his aged mother—who was once a space explorer—parked illegally and is trying to keep her supplied and still meet the demands of his cruddy boss. And so one day it all blows up together and he vomits and rushes straight out—or words to that effect. I like the tale, but the effort to wrest the purely personal misery into objectively readable form has been difficult. Campbell said it was a compressed novel, and he didn’t want a novel. Damon Knight said it was repulsive. (It is.) Even if Jakobsson likes it I may want to rewrite it a bit. I wish I’d sent it to White. Ted is extraordinarily sensitive to my wavelength and I feel he would have taken the trouble to judge if it should be reworked. (Editors… Fred Pohl befriended me in the most fantastic manner when my ears were still drying. Real encouragement; part of it I found out by accident. Quite a guy.)
From this you can see that Learning How to Write is the big thing with me. I don’t have any illusions of genius. Nobody writes for me, what’s printed is what I wrote (aside from a little cleaning-up of words unsuitable for, I guess, Mom), but I’m very eager for critical reaction, and very willing to put it back in the oven. For example, Harry H. has twice pushed stories back at me for fix-ups; one was the original, “And I Have Come Across This Place by Lost Ways,” which He bought for Nova 2. (Notice the Freudian slip in capitalizing “He” back there, Harry really is one of my gods.) It had too much social chitchat at first and the doom wasn’t spelled out clear enough at the end. (I tend to make all my points indirectly, you know, somebody just mutters that the world ended yesterday, etc.) Sure enough, he was right; I spent a week of nights revising. Again, that wolf story from Venture, “The Snows Are Melted, the Snows Are Gone.” When he bought it for the Best anthology he objected to the wolfs showing no sign of strain, being a mutant and all. So I tried him with an epileptic episode and that was right, too. But Christ, it’s agony. I don’t see how these one-draft wonders do it. What I send out is about Draft X.
All this by way of starting to talk about the real thing, the stories. For the most part my stuff has been gestated privately, some germ working around in its own ter
ms, which I then finish up in the style it seems to demand. Some are Gee, that’s interesting germs, like the Analog one about the haploid people. I got to brooding over what people would have been like if the alternating generation system had survived—and how essentially doomed it was, as a system.
Others arise out of a loving interest in the endless foul-ups of daily life, how the poor bastard behind some desk or title copes all day long with the throng of wild Indians, crackpots, active idiots, weirdos of all descriptions which we call the General Public. How do you run a racetrack, a matter-transmitter system, a hatchery, a research lab extrapolated into interstellar terms? (Strong biographical aroma here—yeah, yea verily, I have coped.) Others arise by analogy, for example, some of the side repercussions of the civil rights movement, sometime back, started “Happiness Is a Warm Spaceship,” where the happy “liberal” hero runs into some aliens that don’t want to get integrated. (Like most old-line liberals who started off with a general sense of Righting Injustice, I’ve gone through a long educative process in which the Black Brother changes from being a featureless object of sympathy to a bunch of real people.)
Smith: You have sold stories to two of the more prestigious volumes of science fiction coming out within the next year: Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions, which is designed to show just what SF can be, and David Gerrold’s Generation, which (for the most part) is supposed to present the major authors of tomorrow. Did you specifically tailor stories for those two volumes?
Tiptree: Actually, the story Harlan took is one such parable, and it’s a sufficiently queasy one that I’m going to let anybody who wants to find it for himself. I wrote it for Ellison, in the sense that he did this great thing, he opened a door and said Do It, write what you want, here’s a place you can scream. So I let it scream. David did a milder version of the same, so he got some gentler screams. There are a lot of unshouted shouts today. I guess a thumbnail sketch of my writing progress would be that I’m trying to make Contact with the prisoner inside, the voice wearily raised against the never-opening door, the one you hear in the middle of the night. The thing that’s alive.
One story no one seems to have noticed or liked represents a scream from deep inside. If you have time and want to know most of what makes Tiptree tick, look in Galaxy, April 1969, for “Beam Us Home.” I take a little sad credit too, recall that was written in 1968 and check the social prediction scene. It’ll also show you that I’m a bit of a Trekky, enough so I sent Roddenberry a dedicated copy and got this beautiful letter back.
Another big hunk of Tiptree is in “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain,” which I wanted to call “Dr. Ain’s Love Story.” That is screaming from the heart as good as I could do it in 1968. (By the way, only a couple people noticed that Ain’s first name is Charles, (C?) Tiptree’s a furtive bastard.)
Smith: These two stories point out a facet of your work that we passed over a while back, when you said Campbell had said “Mother” was a compressed novel. You cut everything to the bone. You say something once, and then that’s it. You feel no need to repeatedly explain, to emphasize. The five or so thousand words of “Beam Us Home” cover a span of years in the protagonist’s life. Out of those years you pull a moment from here and a moment from there, each different, each serving its own purpose. There is a wealth of detail in “Doctor Ain,” but it is all displayed in a fast, no-nonsense, matter-of-fact fashion. Your fiction—as definitely opposed to your letters—consists mainly of short simple sentences. And fragments. Almost all of them, from the light pieces such as “The Night-blooming Saurian” to the deep and subjective “I’m Too Big but I Love to Play.” A couple parts in that story, however, and many in “The Snows Are Melted, the Snows Are Gone” are done in a richer and more satisfying style. Are you tending toward this generally, or do you just put more work into the deeper stories?
Tiptree: Oh, man, again I’m shook by the experience of finding someone has read the stuff, beautifully, perceptively.
While I recover… Did you catch that what the hero said at the end of “I’m Too Big” was true? Nobody, but nobody knows thing one about the motives under communication. Why do we want to speak and be heard? Whyfore this intense pleasure in being understood, the hurtful-ness of garble? The ultimate misery of They Don’t Understand? Try asking around in the labs from whence all this gabble flows. Go ‘way, boy.
Recovered. Now look, it’s futile to ask as new a writer as me where he’s tending or what his style might become. I’m so green I don’t even have a repertory of dances to cover the fact that I’m not answering!
Does a kid whose voice is changing know what’s going to come out next time he opens the mouth? All I can do is look back and say, yeah, some were matter-of-fact, some condensed time, some followed every small event right along real time. And there’s a couple coming out that are different still. Gerrold took one for Protostars writ in florid deadpan rococo, I guess. And a thing called “The Peacefulness of Vivyan” tries to drift the story out in the dreamy voice of a brain-tampered boy. Another one I’m waiting for Damon to reject is spoken from the point of view of a giant alien whose mate is lovingly eating him alive, and has the style of 1920 porno. (“Yes, you must let me caress you while you eat, my dawnberry.”) I wish it was more like Nabokov, but since the aliens are quite primitive and so am I, they can be grateful it’s a cut above Me Tarzan, You Jane. (I offered this on spec to Steve Goldin for his hopeful alien anthology, but I think something about the plot is bothering him—very understandably.) I don’t know, Jeff.
Furthermore anything I tried to crystallize would be certifiable eelshit.
Pull yourself together, Tiptree.
All right, I can say this. I want to cut to the bone always. The question is, what is bone? Sometimes it’s in the bare events, sometimes in the tone, sometimes in the minutiae—oh hell, that’s no good. The question remains, each time answered differently.
You see, my aim really is not to bore. I read my stuff with radar out for that first dead sag, the signal of oncoming boredom. The onset of crap, stuffing, meaningless filler, wrongness. And don’t repeat at me, you bastard… Bleeding Sebastian, how I have been bored in my life. The interminable, unforgivable, life-robbing, informationless, time-lost, entropy-triumphant, stagnant, retching boredom I have suffered… you already said that!!!!
I won’t do it to anyone else. If I can help it.
And yet I want to communicate, and I’m prolix, right?
Do you get the picture of Tiptree agonizingly contorted between his gabbling tongue and his saber-wielding ear? Do you?
Next question.
Wait—a word on that question of more work on the “deeper” stories. No relation, Jeff. Everybody knows the old one about If I had more time Ida writ a shorter, etc. Some of the barest bones represent fifteen pages thrown out, some of the “full” stuff writes very easy… and sometimes vice versa. Mystery.
Yeah, I do want to write deeper. And not boring.
But I like to play, too.
Smith: What writers have influenced you the most as a writer, and what writers give you the most enjoyment as a reader?
Tiptree: Christ, all of them, in different ways. Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero, for the ultimate in grim clowning; Sturgeon’s “Man Who Lost the Sea,” for total wow (sometimes when my stuff bores me worse than usual I go through the opening paragraphs of a flock of Sturgeons and contemplate suicide); Damon Knight’s “The Handler,” for classic social comment. Le Guin, Ellison, Delany, Zelazny, Lafferty (for total raconteur ease), Niven, Ballard (for brilliance). Oh man, all of them. Hundreds. And a special place for Philip K. Dick. All genuflect.
Smith: Okay, let’s talk about Philip K. Dick. Or rather, you talk about him and I’ll listen and learn. Frankly, he bores me to death, so I’ve read very little by the man. Some people think very highly of him, however, you apparently among them. Can you tell me why he is so important?
Tiptree: Jeff, one of Geis’s SF Reviewers remarked that Dick lac
ked compassion and humor. After retrieving the mag from the fire I got into correspondence with Geis, who struck me fine. (So did the reviewer, except for his tin ear.) So I said I’d write him a Dick thing, he was so nice as to offer, and you could say a couple interesting things on how we sense compassion, what kinds there are. So, let me save my main Dick guns for SFR, other than this quickie:
Yes, I admire the hell out of Dick. He’s a mass of flaws, he’s low-key, gritty, ornery, dogged, and very peculiar. And when I catch one of his things, I start walking round and round it talking to myself and bashing my head and spitting on my typewriter while this incredible flood of invention and alternate-reality grinkles glittering and oozing like radioactive Ajax lava playing Bach and smelling of hash and gear oil out all over the floor… and finally I whimper into a heap and write him another fan letter… And I worry he’s going to injure himself with some insane chemical or end in Blahville.
Oh Christ, I don’t know whether he’s a “good” writer or how he stacks up against, say, Vonnegut. I wouldn’t know how to interest anybody in him. Maybe it’s a sign of something good that he bores you. Maybe he hit me in a vulnerable planetary conjunction. All I know is, Don’t try to take it away from me.
Now I want to say a word about influences, and whatever you cut, Jeff, please leave this in because I’m beginning to feel like this was my last will and personal Time Capsule and it contains more on Tiptree than anybody including me will ever likely see or want to again.
Who one admires and who one is influenced by aren’t the same. For example, sometimes you learn a trick from a guy who has nothing but that trick. (Even that chap with the shears “influenced” me, ah oui!) You learn from a myriad people, and from their mistakes. But there’s a feeling that your list of “influences” is your list of greats. Not so. And here’s the important thing to me:
Meet Me at Infinity Page 22
