"You think of a crucifixion as taking place on well-edged beams, straight from the wood polisher. No such thing."
On their return, the Bradleys stopped in Calcutta, where, Alice wrote, “we'd step over dying people with dying babies in their arms ... a man on the steps of the Ganges reverently—and quite inadequately—burning his mother's body, and then leaping into the water to fish up the still recognizable skull and pry out the gold teeth."
These were the events that shaped Alice Sheldon from early childhood, exposing the rift between the beloved, spoiled daughter of American upper-middle-class privilege and the world she was thrust into, where a child could stumble onto the rotting corpses of men who had been tortured to death, but it was considered inappropriate for a girl to carry a gun, even a toy weapon that might have given her some sense of control over the whirling chaos around her.
The Alice Sheldon who emerges from these pages often demonstrates the disassociativeness found in individuals with multiple personality disorders—"To grow up as a girl is ... to be reacted to as nothing or as a thing—and nearly to become that thing"—as well as a grim sense of the worst that humanity can do—"Auschwitz—My Lai—etc. etc. etc. did not surprise me one bit, later on.” As a teenager at private school she suffered the solitude, sometimes self-imposed, of the extremely gifted, and had migraines severe enough that she would bang her head against the walls of the girl's bathroom, “to try to ‘break’ whatever was hurting so inside.” Later, at boarding school in Switzerland, she would stand too close to the rails as trains barreled past, and made at least one suicide attempt, when she slashed her wrists with a razor. She developed intense crushes on other girls, and had a few same-sex sexual interludes (kissing, fondling); but she was never able to integrate Desire into a romantic relationship with another woman.
"All forms of sex should be explored,” she wrote at twenty-four, “and many games should be learned. Relations with other people should be violent and experimental, with the idea of developing a mask to prevent erosion of the personality by other personalities."
The developing of that mask took up much of Alice Sheldon's life. Phillips's biography presents a woman in extremis, but one who was very much her mother's daughter when it came to keeping a stiff upper lip, no matter the cost. As an adult (and eerily prefiguring the title of one of her best-known stories, “Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death") , Alli told her mother “You ‘taught’ me, without meaning to, that love is the prelude to appalling pain.” A bizarre brush with mother-daughter incest when Alice was fourteen can only have added to her sense that lesbianism was something monstrous.
Yet pain must somehow be endured, and for decades Sheldon did so with grace and wit and what can only be described as valor. Nine days after her December 20 debut, at eighteen, she eloped with a boy she'd met at a Christmas Eve dance, a Princeton student and aspiring novelist named William Davey. The marriage lasted six years, and in terms of spectacular dysfunction (drinking, drugging, visiting brothels) seems second only to that of William Burroughs and his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer. As Alli put it, “Anyone who shoots a real gun at you when drunk and angry is simply not husband material, regardless of his taste in literature."
Bill Davey encouraged his beautiful wife to paint, but their sexual relationship was a disaster. She had affairs with men, all apparently unsatisfying. Years later she confided to Joanna Russ, “I am (was) notoriously fucked up about sex.” She wrote with austere detachment that “to paint that which one wishes to be seized by, etc, is a sort of contradiction;” yet she also wrote—drunkenly, Phillips suggests—in an otherwise empty sketchbook her need to “ram myself into a crazy soft woman and come, come, spend, come, make her pregnant Jesus to be a man ... I love women I will never be happy...."
It's this manic, desperate voice that makes The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon so poignant, even as Alli herself soldiered on. She divorced Bill Davey in 1941, moved back in with her parents and got a job as an art critic for the Chicago Sun. Despite her continuing attraction toward women, she dated men, and in 1942 enlisted in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (later the Women's Army Corps). In her early days as a WAC in basic training, Alli experienced a near-ecstatic experience of living in a women's utopia—
"Women seen for the first time at ease, unselfconscious, swaggering or thoughtful, sizing everything up openly, businesslike, all personalities all unbending and unafraid."
Her rapture faded quickly, ending in a bang-out fight with another, stronger, woman (a phys. ed. teacher) whom Alli nearly strangled, an event Alli later recalled as an experience when she “felt fully alive.” Early in her biography, Phillips states that Alli was never able to access her rage, and it's tempting to see in this signal occurrence at Fort Des Moines the first mad glimmer of James Tiptree himself, wrestling with the demonic Female Other until pulled away by several intervening women officers.
When the war ended, Captain Alice Davey was stationed in London as a Pentagon photointerpreter. There she met Colonel Huntington “Ting” Sheldon, “a tall, graying, gracious senior officer, formerly of Yale and Wall Street.” Alli “challenged Colonel Sheldon to a game of chess, played blindfolded, and won. He fell in love."
Alli summed up their sexual relationship thus: “Him and women: Had to get drunk—then of course impotent.” Despite (or because of) this, they married, and returned to the U.S. early in 1946. Alli's relentless self-invention continued through the next two decades, as she became a housewife, chicken farmer, CIA analyst, and graduate student at George Washington University in D.C., eventually earning a doctorate in psychology by studying how rats react to novel stimuli and experiences. She also wrote, trying to follow up the success of her story that appeared in The New Yorker in 1946, but none of her ambitious projects came to fruition.
And she read—science fiction and fantasy, a love since childhood when she first encountered Weird Tales magazine and now a necessary escape valve from her observations of rats and her dissertation-writing binges, fueled by speed and alcohol and her own manic energy.
By now, her beloved childhood literature had changed: it was no longer wholly dependent on the bug-eyed monsters and rocket jockeys of pulp's Golden Age. Writers like Kurt Vonnegut, Harlan Ellison, Phillip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, Thomas M. Disch, Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin tackled gender, environmental and social issues that reflected the sweeping changes and excesses of the 1960s. Their prose style, often as overheated as that of their pulp forebears, drew on the burgeoning drug culture. So did the images of psychic and/or sexual disintegration that swirled around the works of Dick , Russ, and Delany in particular. For Alice Sheldon, reading their stories in the pages of Analog and F&SF and Galaxy, it must have seemed like a party she was fated to join.
"The stories started coming to her when she was writing up her dissertation, studying for her orals, skimping on sleep, and using as much Dexedrine as she dared ... Sometime in the spring of 1967, Alice Sheldon, a fifty-one-year-old research psychologist, typed them up and sent them out to science fiction magazines...."
The pseudonym she chose was deliberately outrageous: James Tiptree, Jr. The surname was taken from a jar of jam on a supermarket shelf, though critic John Clute suggests the nickname “Tip” derived from Princess Ozma's androgynous counterpart, Tip, in L. Frank Baum's books, which Alice Sheldon had read. The first stories went out not long after she received her doctorate, in February 1967. What happened next is the stuff of literary legend, though in fact Tiptree collected several rejection letters, including one from John W. Campbell, who grumbled “One of the troubles with a majority of modern stories is that nowadays the idea of an heroic Hero is considered gauche or something."
But that fall Campbell bought one story for Analog, Harry Harrison took a second for Fantastic, and Frederik Pohl accepted a third (which Campbell had already rejected), for If. James Tiptree was in like Flynn.
His first sf story, “Birth of a Salesman,” appeared in the March 1968 Anal
og. That same year Tiptree sold three more stories, but it was the appearance of “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” in Galaxy a year later that established the tone of Tiptree's best work, the literary equivalent of an ice shard to the heart: chilly, razor-sharp, and terrifying. Tiptree's grim, deliberate account of a doctor unleashing a deadly virus on humankind via air travel—appropriated years later by Terry Gilliam in his film 12 Monkeys—was only 2,500 words long. Yet her writing here showed the assassin's gifts she was to utilize in her best work: deadly grace and concision and a certain heartlessness, joined to a narrative that never pauses to take a breath. If one were to take a Freudian view of Sheldon's life and work, it's all here in the stories that followed. Sexual repression and self-restraint exploded into a maenad's frenzy of destruction, wreaked upon individuals and urges that control and despoil the world—men, scientists, the blind biological thrust toward sexual union; a clinically ruthless bio-determinism whose ultimate goal was extinction.
The stories, of course, are what really matter about Tiptree, and Phillips does a marvelous job of showing how they were born and, later, made their way about the world. Sheldon's greatest work—"Dr. Ain,” “The Girl Who Was Plugged In, “The Women Men Don't See,” “Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death,” “The Scientist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats,” and, especially, “The Screwfly Solution,” one of the most frightening stories ever written, penned under Sheldon's other nom-du-plume, Raccoona Sheldon—stands among the best short fiction of the late twentieth century, and has never received its due from mainstream critics.
The latter portion of The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon reads like an sf version of Catch Me If You Can, with Sheldon's masculine alter-ego creating and maintaining a voluminous correspondence, a Real Guy among predominately Real Guy Writers. Phillips quotes generously from these exchanges. The list of correspondents is a roll call of those who were part of the incredible efflorescence that was American science fiction in the 1970s: Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Damon Knight, Phil Dick, Harlan Ellison, Barry Malzberg, David Gerrold, Ted White, Charles Platt, Vonda McIntrye—you get the idea. Tiptree flirted with Russ and Le Guin, but he showed his manlier face to his male friends, coming off as a bluff guy's guy—but soft enough for a woman.
Too soft, maybe. As curiosity about Tiptree grew in the sf community, gossip spread about the secretive author. Tip was a spy, a spook; he was crazy; he was a woman. This last could still be a liability, as indicated in a letter from Harry Harrison demanding rewrites: “I think ‘big shimmery’ on page 26 too purple. Or girl-writer term or something.” Tiptree's fear of being outed as a girl writer must have been acute. A 1972 letter to Harrison has the undeniable edge of hysteria.
"WILL YOU LAY OFF? ... Harry, listen. You've been a great friend and I value it more than I can say. My life is a mixed-up mess right now. I have personal problems like other people have termites. I'm barely viable. You and my other friends in the sf world, and the writing, are all that's keeping me sane..."
Phillips goes on to say that “Harrison recalled recoiling from this letter, thinking “This guy's on a twist.” Later, after Alli's identity was revealed, he concluded that his friend had not been “nuts” but “a woman who was just being very female about it."
Phillips refrains from commenting on Harrison's observation, but I won't. Why is behavior that would be considered “nuts” for a man considered normal for a female? This is the crux of Alice Sheldon's often tormented life, the disconnect between her projected voice—her stories—and her everyday self. She sometimes seems like a prime candidate for gender-reassignment therapy; at other times, a lesbian so deeply closeted that one's instinct is to drag her into daylight and shout, “See? IT'S NOT SO BAD AFTER ALL."
But it was bad, after all. Today, with the Internet, Sheldon's cover would probably be blown in a matter of days or weeks. She certainly appears to have been courting disclosure with her adoption of a second, female, even more transparent pseudonym, the absurd Raccoona Sheldon, who in a dizzying coup-des-lettres carried on her own correspondence with various sf figures. As it was, Jeff Smith's letter to P.O. Box 315 arrived on November 23, 1976, and James Tiptree Jr.'s identity unraveled over the following months. So, tragically, did his writing career. Alice Sheldon continued to publish after the revelation that he was a she, but her best work was done. Gardner Dozois threw down the gauntlet by asking, “Where in your fiction are the equally convincing portraits of what it's like to be a girl growing up? ... It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that ‘Tiptree's’ best work is yet to come.” Sheldon responded,
"Alli Sheldon is maybe a mad woman, maybe an ex-good-researcher, but is not a science fiction or any other kind of writer. I am nothing."
Two years later, in 1978, she threw all her new work—notes, novel, stories—in the woodstove, and told Ursula Le Guin, “I am trying to become nothing."
Sheldon's great tragedy was that she could not seize her power to write as herself. The masks that she spent a lifetime creating could not, in the end, hide what she really was and what she loved. When, post-Tiptree, Joanna Russ penned a love letter to Alli, Sheldon replied, “Oh, had 65 years been different! I like some men a lot, but from the start, before I knew anything, it was always girls and women who lit me up."
Alli and Joanna Russ never met. This was not merely a failure of nerve on Sheldon's part. It was a failure of self. All her life she wrote of being atrracted to aliens, the other (she developed a passionate crush on Leonard Nimoy's Spock); but the truth was that the alien was unquestionably not other, but her own kind. Faced with the image of desire in the mirror, she felt compelled to shatter it. All of Phillips's reasoned discussion of Tiptree's work, all her psychological acuity in tracing Alice Sheldon's complicated inner life—none of it quite prepares you for Alice Sheldon's statement that “My ‘illness’ has taken the form of writing some more science-fiction stories ... I am going to finish the series with one about a man who kills EVERYBODY, that will make me feel better."
Nor does it prepare a reader for what she will feel the first time she encounters “The Screwfly Solution” or “The Last Voyage of Dr. Ain” or “The Women Men Don't See"—the same emotion, perhaps, that gripped that physical education teacher in Fort Des Moines, or Alice Sheldon's husband when he realized, as Phillips suggests, that his wife was going to kill him: pure fear. In the end, Alice Sheldon really was the woman nobody saw.
El Regalo by Peter S. Beagle
"The Last Unicorn proceeded to run 220 volts through my little 110 volt brain,” writes Kathleen Bartholomew in her introduction to the Peter S. Beagle issue of www.greenmanreview.com. Such responses to Mr. Beagle's work are common, and that 220-volt line runs strong. Mr. Beagle's recent work includes a story collection, The Line Between and a forthcoming novel entitled Summerlong. "El Regalo” first appeared in The Line Between. It's a fine work of fantasy for Young Adult readers of all ages.
"You can't kill him,” Mr. Luke said. “Your mother wouldn't like it.” After some consideration, he added, “I'd be rather annoyed myself."
"But wait,” Angie said, in the dramatic tones of a television commercial for some miraculous mop. “There's more. I didn't tell you about the brandied cupcakes—"
"Yes, you did."
"And about him telling Jennifer Williams what I got her for her birthday, and she pitched a fit, because she had two of them already—"
"He meant well,” her father said cautiously. “I'm pretty sure."
"And then when he finked to Mom about me and Orlando Cruz, and we weren't doing anything—"
"Nevertheless. No killing."
Angie brushed sweaty mouse-brown hair off her forehead and regrouped. “Can I at least maim him a little? Trust me, he's earned it."
"I don't doubt you,” Mr. Luke agreed. “But you're twelve, and Marvyn's eight. Eight and a half. You're bigger than he is, so beating him up isn't fair. When you're ... oh, say, twenty, and he's sixteen and a half—okay, you can try it then. Not until."
> Angie's wordless grunt might or might not have been assent. She started out of the room, but her father called her back, holding out his right hand. “Pinky-swear, kid.” Angie eyed him warily, but hooked her little finger around his without hesitation, which was a mistake. “You did that much too easily,” her father said, frowning. “Swear by Buffy."
"What? You can't swear by a television show!"
"Where is that written? Repeat after me—'I swear by Buffy the Vampire Slayer—’”
"You really don't trust me!"
"'I swear by Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I will keep my hands off my baby brother—’”
"My baby brother, the monster! He's gotten worse since he started sticking that ‘y’ in his name—"
"'—and I will stop calling him Ex-Lax—’”
"Come on, I only do that when he makes me really mad—"
"'—until he shall have attained the age of sixteen years and six months, after which time—’”
"After which time I get to pound him into marmalade. Deal. I can wait.” She grinned; then turned self-conscious, making a performance of pulling down her upper lip to cover the shiny new braces. At the door, she looked over her shoulder and said lightly, “You are way too smart to be a father."
From behind his book, Mr. Luke answered, “I've often thought so myself."
Angie spent the rest of the evening in her room, doing homework on the phone with Melissa Feldman, her best friend. Finished, feeling virtuously entitled to some low-fat chocolate reward, she wandered down the hall toward the kitchen, passing her brother's room on the way. Looking in—not because of any special interest, but because Marvyn invariably hung around her own doorway, gazing in aimless fascination at whatever she was doing, until shooed away—she saw him on the floor, playing with Milady, the gray, ancient family cat. Nothing unusual about that: Marvyn and Milady had been an item since he was old enough to realize that the cat wasn't something to eat. What halted Angie as though she had walked into a wall was that they were playing Monopoly, and that Milady appeared to be winning.
FSF, October-November 2006 Page 5
