I suspect what you’d say is, look about you. That’s the trouble, I do. The women—most of them—aren’t born yet, I think. I have just finished hours of conferences with the phalanx of women caring for Mother. Most of them strike me as aging little girls, locked in farm wives’ bodies. (Most men are the same, I hasten to say; the trouble is, I’m in my body and I can’t get the same understanding of theirs.) (No; what I really mean is I’m in my experience.)
I don’t know Golda Meir. I don’t know Indira Gandhi. I guess I don’t know any self-actualised women, although I’ve met and worked with some damn competent ones. I know they weren’t adequately recognised. And I sensed the thing Quinn or was it Vonda told me, the terrible scars in their self confidence. A man with their abilities would have had the world by the ears.
But the inner voice asks, is it my bias that makes me see them as their abilities, that is, their competence in male-type jobs? This is male-type people-seeing. And the view of an old, old male person at that. I know there’s something out there, something that will tip the landscape into a whole other dimension if it gets born—if it gets seen.
But what the hell IS IT?
Do you wonder I read your stories?
Well. This has been unconscionable.
Excuse me while I go write a story about a male grizzly bear who is trapped all alone in a space capsule headed out of the galaxy …
Reverently as ever,
Truly best.
Tip
P.S. I’m usually called Tip. Are you ever called Jo?
***
Still in Extremis, I mean Florence
WISC 54121
c/o Bradley Lodge
25 Sep 73
Dear Joanna:
This is being writ after reading your letter only 3 times which is an error because your paragraphs are incandescent and crowded and only by repeated instant replay will I really find everything in them.
And they evoke the urge to communicate back—irresistible—I yield to it without even token defense, but please, once and for all, Be It Understood this is not to be a burden on you. Is that really understood? I have always had friendships in which the ground-rules were that one could wander off unexpectedly for 5 or 10 years and walk back in the door and resume—“As I was saying—”
Two things sort of wrote themselves in neon letters over your pages as I was reading, one big, one small.
Small first: It is obvious since you write on both sides of the page that YOU DO NOT KEEP CARBONS. This is very wrong. This is a sin. Sin. Why? Because you are tossing off stuff like a fire-wheel, gems—like the line about what feminism means to some men (Big Mama Will Fix), about the faculty wives and colleagues, the creepy adolescents, etjesuschristcetera which are too good to be sown on the wind, they are notebook stuff. You think they will stay there, in your mind—please, human, take it from me they will NOT. They will change and evolve and shed themselves—or just ignominiously be forgotten. Letters in which you SAY anything should be part of your notebook. Then they will be there when you need them fresh and beating, not even because you’re a writer but because one of the most useful things a thinking person can have is his own past. I mean useful, not just elegiac.
I mean this so strongly that if you get a gross of Letterex for Xmas you will know who sent it.
That’s the small thing. But don’t toss your head and paw, it’s not so damn small.
The bigger thing is that I kept thinking all the way through, Oh god, but I wonder if she realises it is double trouble. Joanna, I know you realise abstractly that in addition to being female in a male-dominated and fucked-up world (uh, male orientation there? Forgive it, let’s get on). And being human in a world being quite probably ruined, and extinguished—you have the nearly unbearable state of being a writer, a bright, sensitive one, a fast head, the pointy-asymptote of the distribution curve—in a world of relatively dumb people. This situation serves as an amplifier to everything else, it’s Woolf and Plath’s problem too, of course, it’s Crane and Dylan and the high IQ kids who end up mutely running elevators and reading Sanskrit between stops. It’s very nearly insoluble, because if you join with people to right the wrongs of women, or the wrongs of the world, the difference in your head will make them nearly intolerable to you and vice versa.
Some of the impossibility of living is quite simply due to this, not to the being woman problem (sorry about that “problem,” consider it shorthand).
I did a lot of reading once about bright kids, the really brights, and the thing that stands out a mile is one common problem—shattered ego. They speak—and no one hears, no one understands.
A marvellous example of this, Norbert Wiener, you know, certified genius infant prodigy who went on to continue prodigising. At about 55 he was speaking at Brandeis with an old friend of mine, a journalistpundit type. Wiener goes out and makes his usual brilliant speech, leaves them on their backs in the aisles adoring him, totters back to my friend, who is about 3 feet tall, and grabs his hand and gasps, “Was I all right???” Shattered, the self-confidence never regrows.
So you must, I think, try to separate the shit-storm into the part you’re getting because of anti-female stuff and the part you’re getting because you are that barely viable thing, a bright creator.
This is, of course, no solution—who has solutions?—but I am a great believer in dividing one’s enemies into boxes.
Let’s see, I should say something about me, I guess. “Old” means coming up sixty … and means also 15 years of increasingly feeling the discrimination against age. When they look at you and see only the oncoming claims on their pension plan. You start becoming invisible, you’re going, you DO NOT COUNT … It does not bug me much because internally I’m in better shape than previous decades, youth I recall as a series of suicide attempts.
No, I’m not gay so far as I know. Although the young of any sex are starting to have a wonderful irrational glamor for me, I don’t think it’s actually sex. I’m more or less non-sex, it was a disaster area for me too. Mixed up with hopeless adorations for people who not only didn’t but couldn’t conceivably love back, who had no such needs. Also discovering I had not the easy capacity to take, to enjoy myself—that I was only weakly macho, that there was in fact Something Wrong With Me Inside.
I think you can take it as proved that the people who have some kind of ear for other people’s harrowings always have Something Wrong Too. Whether it’s a tour in the booby-hatch, a terrible parent, a crippled leg or gonad, a struggle with alcohol—somehow they too have been on the outside. Even if only in their heads … I’m not really sure exactly what was or is Wrong with me, but it’s there. I am not one of THEM … A good bit can be put down to an insane upbringing—did you ever know any missionaries’ sons? I’m not one but some of the circumstances were similar. By 10 I was already a solitary not by choice, and have continued so … Over the years I have built odd relations with other solitaries and with a species I think I have discovered, the crypto-solitary.
As I mentioned, political movements came to obsess me for a time, the fascination of the psychic castrate for actually doing something, and it was then that I realised that people who said, “Women are a mystery, I can’t understand them” had never tried the reference-frame of quite simply an oppressed minority. I proposed this to a friend who ran much of the ILGWU [International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union] political side and received guffaws. (Interesting especially in that the ILGWU is mostly women.)
I remember also what a shock it was to discover that the oppressed are not all burning angels awaiting the striking-off of chains, that oppression does things to the victim, makes them into [Stepin] Fetchits, or they twist shockingly to survive, or become talking brains, anesthetised—all the gallery of cripples we have learned to know when the Black lid came off … Bettelheim’s imitation of the oppressor being not the least chilling.
I was thinking for awhile that it is covert recognition of the anger in your work which accounts for
the peculiar pall of silence among some readers anyway … books let go out of print, strange mutedness. Each one pulls back their pseudopods, puts it out of mind. Dangerous, irregular. Don’t look, maybe it’ll go away … I think that is operative. Giving you the impression of being invisible, inaudible, unrecognised.
But also it’s what happens to good stuff, to things above Conan level. Almost everything I like gets treated thus. The double problem of being bright plus being a social force for change and protest.
By the way, something of this death-by-oblivion seems to have happened to Kit Reed’s ARMED CAMPS. An imperfect story with some amazing stuff in it. Screams rather than roars.
(I wonder if you reviewed it? Don’t have any books here, can’t look it up.)
Every writer I like with whom I correspond seems to have mentioned that they live in a pall of silence, get no feed-back.
Maybe I should confess about my writing letters to writers. You see, in my early solitude, books meant a great deal—they were my only conversation. I was among other things a great Yeats fan. (His bleakness suits me like familiar underwear.) (And of course his wings fly.) So … suddenly I noticed Yeats—the actual person—had died. And I had never in any way sent back one iota of the life he had sent out. Never pipped. Not because it was a great thing that Tiptree “appreciated” him, but just that there was a reader out there. A person whose head he had in part furnished. And then somebody else died … Orozco. He had meant [something] to me too, I actually knew him tangentially. And it came to me that maybe living creators lived in considerable solitude and anguish and the mail-box might contain not a daily stream of Nobel prizes but complaints, soap samples and tax bills. And it wouldn’t hurt to drop a card, to put my money where my head was. So I sort of started writing, you know, little cards saying That was Great. Well, you do know. You got one.
Probably stupid as hell, call me a frustrated mother with delusions of fixing up everybody.
What the hell, it’s what I do.
And it’s easy for me with writers because I came to my own mediocre efforts so late that my ego isn’t invested—which means the writing won’t ever be much more than mediocre unless I’m favored by strange gods. It does mean that I look at the thing itself, not prizes, and haven’t that deadly competitiveness. Which is a great relief; I’ve HAD that, in other fields.
I don’t know if this is a proper answer to yours, Joanna, obviously it isn’t, yours was full of real stuff, mine is more a Bear of Very Little Brain, and at 3 AM too. (The scene here is so threatening I do my living from midnight to dawn.) But I mean more than the gummy brain can say.
That Artaud quote is fine. I used to cling to a Cocteau phrase—“The people who live with a perpetual nausea, people whose passports are not in order” … In the Nazi times that meant more resonance than now.
Now I’ll go back & read your letter again … and find out what the ugh day has in store.
May I use “ovular”?
Deepest regards
Tip
P.S. I meant to ask you about the senses in which you use “femininity” and “female.” I have been taking “feminine” as the Betty Friedan type of thing, Oooh, that horrid mouse! And “female” as the Real Thing. Whatever it (a) is and (b) will turn out to be.
N.B. Hey, mind if I make you mad by saying, damn it, face it, however painful & nearly lethal—I envy you. Why? Because oh jesus, you have MATERIAL. The last aliens to report in. New Stuff … even if it’s killing you. Can you imagine how dull the world would be if suddenly you woke up as a male? Talk about castrated, you’d feel robbed. They’ve taken my STUFF away! … For comparison, look at Tiptree, think of the marvellous new insights to be forged out of, what, getting old? Timor mortis conturbat me? 2000 years of brighter minds working that vein … whereas every ten minutes you can say something that’s never been said before, your letter had five I never heard. The writer may laugh where the person weeps, no?
P.P.S. Can’t resist—I too have had deep friendships with rats, I dig bats—one is hanging up in the corner of my cabin; I like snakes a lot and have the illusion that spiders like me. Large ones espec. (Just to revert to normalcy, being myopic I do not like fast armored flying things that go SSSRRRR and sting.)
***
James Tiptree Jr.
P.O. Box 315
McLean VA. 22151
S.F.W.A. [Science Fiction Writers of America]
23-4 Apr 74
Dear Joanna:
Well, this was going to start Here I am in calm of mind & midnight about to enjoy a really high-class dialog with a really h-cl. mind—and I made the mistake of first opening some suspicious-looking mail in this pile. So now I find that some dear sweet stupid maniacs have nailed me for some official award and loused up my self-image and I am all shook up—never mind about that Calme-toi jazz, I am a shook-up type. So I am vibrating like an unstrung racquet and vomiting inconspicuously and wondering, does my aversion to awards mean I am really an avidly ambitious creep with a sterling reaction-formation—version A of Tiptree, you’re no good? No: What I really feel is that I don’t like real life getting so much like fake life; I don’t like divisions, labels, phoney crapology no matter how well meant. Above all, I don’t like medals and prizes. All the medals I ever got somebody else should have gotten only for political-chauvinistic reasons they weren’t “acceptable.” All the art prizes—no, most of the art & lit prizes I’ve ever seen awarded had a purely random connection with merit. And look unfailingly insane to later eyes. I was brought up on the motto:
Life is fair. Some people have talent and other people win prizes.
Excuse me while I take some more Bentyl.
All right, that’s enough of the inner-convulsion dept, let’s go back to the calm of midnight.
Listen, would it kill you to drop a line about the tenure madness?
Glad you liked nutsy grandpa. Steal anything, it’s an honour. And listen, I stole from you, you’ll see if Vonda takes HOUSTON: your line about “the night side of Tiptree.” I now feel obligated to collect tags you might like in return—but it’ll have to start next letter; no felicity right now.
You’re right of course about the miserable plight of the young Maya girl(s); if they could combine with other women they could break out. The tragedy is that their mothers—and the man’s mother—would be the first to lynch them. Man, Uncle Tom is no word for the problem of the indoctrinated slave women. The fear, the fear. The bone-deep acquiescence.
The age disparity, by the way, is common in primitive societies and constitutes one of the basic power-mechanisms whereby men rule. Little girls are pitted, individually, against full-grown men … This same system has been evolved by certain spiders, by the way, I found it in John Crompton’s book and used it in that LOVE IS THE PLAN thing. The mature female is larger and more ferocious than the male; so they have solved the problem by programming males to capture and tie up and feed immature females, with whom they mate. When the female becomes strong enough to break loose she is fertilised and the impregnator has escaped. If you’re interested, I’ll look up the species; it’s a striking bit of biology.
What I meant by fearing that women cannot free themselves with the present large proportion of men alive is that men act in concert and in an adversary way; they are power-oriented. They also act on & against the youngest women. Women are isolated from each other by the reward structure of the male world; they can rarely act in concert without jeopardising themselves or their children short-range. And I tend to think, on the basis of say, Goodall’s chimp observations, that much of the female primate’s “bonding” ability is taken up by her bond with her offspring. She forms small groups with her daughters rather than lateral female peer-groups. This is great for the race but weakening for women.
No, Joanna, it is not that men are individually all-powerful ogres. (God knows I would quail before any small female gymnast.) It is that they have a margin, which they amplify by unequal age-ratios (25 to 12) and they d
rive for power. I became enormously impressed with the pervasiveness of men’s power-orientations as I worked up an imaginary world for Vonda’s antho. In every interaction, I was confronted again and again by the unneccasriness—sorry, unnecessariness of our standard way of reacting. The insanity of it. The depth of it. Of course, writing from a tense work-ethic Western competitive base it is seen in exaggeration, but I’ve seen it in the Congo. The insistence on confrontation, on dominance-submission structure … I tried peeling it away, and what came out was a world that so charmed me that I have another tale started in it.
And I’m going out on the limb of saying it is a predominantly, biologically male behavioral orientation. I do not go the whole killer-ape route and I deplore Ardrey (not to mention Lorenz) but in every other major primate with two exceptions you see the same thing, and you see it in most of the old-world simians: The males authority-structuring themselves, the females utilising a fluid, informal, unserious power-structure or no power-structure at all. (The exceptions are the gibbon, a fairly remote relative about whom nobody is too sure except that they live in pairs, and the orang, about whom no one is sure of much of anything … Gorilla males are also far more peaceable & permissive to others than most apes; that may give us hope, close as we are. On the other hand, gorillas are extremely lethargic about nearly everything.) … I guess my cover is fraying a little here, Joanna; yes, I was sort of mixed up in what are known as the “soft” sciences. But I am not anybody anyone ever heard of, Tiptree’s vast original research had about one (Polish) reader. I am deeply interested in applying some of our new, eleventh-hour information about our cousins to our own behavioral predicaments; if possible more carefully than has been done. Fascinations.
Well, this is more monolog than dialog, but the dialog empathy is there. Let a well wisher hear if you can? … Eager to see that novel bit.
LOVE BACK,
Tip
Oh—about that “writing from POV of woman” bit. Call off your artillery, all I meant was merely having the female characters do & say realistically. That has to be done, for crissake.
Other Aliens Page 18