Other Aliens

by Bradford Morrow

  And then of course came Hitler and all the rest.

  But this odd upbringing really, Joanna, did insulate me against any simple idea of inevitably programmed human nature. When I saw 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 recognisable skull and pry out the gold teeth, I was young enough to recognise that these were the exact, equally pious analogues to the equally ludicrous rites with which my mother had buried her mother in Woodlawn Cemetery near Chicago. (I can still recall the dressing-down I got for suggesting this.) But I really am prepared for nearly any behaviour to come out of anybody, given the conditions.

  But do not fear that I will “snivel in the bunker,” Joanna. What I am trying to do is to suggest that it would be wise to build the goddam bunker. I don’t do too much snivelling in life; everyone has their quota. My weakness is more on the line of collecting ammunition. (During the McCarthy hearings I actually took a .38 down to the hearing-rooms just to see if one could still get close enough, in case the worst came to the worst. Yes, I’m paranoid. It delighted my heart to find another who had done this. That was what Germany lacked in 1931, before he [Hitler] could have been a martyr myth.) I am, I know, no fit citizen for Utopia. Let us hope that I am as obsolete and ridiculous as possible. (Please read that sentence.)

  By building the bunker, I mean quite simple things which could prevent women from being plunged back into powerlessness in the event of panic. (And panic can be quiet.) Like, I would be happier if a female-run and -staffed company made, or could make, the pill. I would like to see women-run financial institutions (yes, I am watching that First Women’s Bank). I approve all the self-help stuff starting. (Yes, I did get that Our Bodies, Our Selves handbook, and gave it to a woman friend who needed it.) In other words, I would like to see women’s rights defended by more than the vote, more than the laws. Because I distrust the vulnerability of unimplemented laws. By implemented I mean reflective of existing power. In even simpler words I think the Black Muslims are right. Without an independent power base one is permanently vulnerable.

  So much for paranoia. I put this forward simply as thoughts; perhaps I will believe quite differently next year.

  I have said all this so you can judge whether my warnings are as Delany says a covert threat—or whether they simply spring from what you sense, fear. My experience has led me to believe that the civility on which all our rights depend is unusual and vulnerable. I see myself as potential victim—among other things because I am an atheist.

  Will you guarantee me three safe decades?

  I used to work (volunteer, natch) for an old liberal organisation which infiltrated the lunatic right. (Friends of Democracy, run by Kenny Birkhead—they left their files to the B’nai B’rith.) The activity, the sheer tireless activity of those types was amazing. They were not, of course, numerous; say about 10 to 15 percent hard-core authoritarian paranoids in the country. And our future, of course, is to be determined by the vast uncommitted middle. I am not in the least afraid of them—unless we get the kind of panic that killed Weimar. That’s when those ghastly old inner qualms of guilt—we have sinned, we better get Back to Poppa—spread out into the center. The sort of thing the Right To Lifers are trying to get going. That, in concrete terms, is all I really fear, I mean, barring one of the fifty-seven delicious oncoming Dooms.

  Well, really, Tiptree; Enough.

  Let’s see. I enjoyed your primate examples. I’m familiar with all of them except the gorillas separated by the small door, which I suspect I can find. And of course I agree about the limited applicability of animal observations. But I am an animal. How free am I? Really? (An unknown animal, though. Thus we meet.)

  And still and all, in a somewhat different sense—maybe having nothing to do with women intrinsically—I do think we have treated child-rearing badly and blindly. BUT I AM SHUTTING UP ABOUT THIS HERE.

  What I am doing is writing a story in which an alien culture has large, strong males who are also biologically equipped for child-caring. (Rather like sea-horses.) Let’s see what that would look like, if I can.

  Well, child of the fifties, farewell and love. I haven’t answered much except to enter a general plea of Not Guilty, Misunderstood. My desire to tiptoe back to the taboo territory of sex differences will have to be gratified in some other arena. But I do tiptoe, ready to recoil back to my previous position. Only I am not going to die believing that the emperor is naked, if he really is wearing a smidgen of g-string. When you’re old, taboos lose their teeth. Even one’s friends’ best, shiniest taboos.

  Thank you about existentialism. You have got through to me where Sartre himself did not.

  From your friendly child of the thirties, love.

  And for Christsake don’t answer this—we’ll get it all sorted out one day. Or we won’t.

  But always,

  Hold the warm—

  Tip

  P.S. Any resemblance between my views + P. K. Dick + I throw up.

  ***

  James Tiptree Jr.

  P.O. Box 315

  McLean VA. 22101

  S.F.W.A.

  31 May 75

  Dear Jo:

  […] Mother did scare lions. She used to have to escort me to the can with a 30-30 at night, on the Serengeti. (That was before they had autos, dear.) She also spoke seven languages, including Malay, and was a teensy little woman with big blue eyes people used to open everything for. I could go on and on …

  Anyway you can see why I went for girls who couldn’t hit a running cheetah at fifty yards plus learn Malay. Your remark that they (the doomed delicate etc. girls) sound like me, plus your icy Wasps is netting perilously close to animae, animusses, animalculae—the Jungian zoo we both love so much. But you may be right, righter than we know. I trust your hunches.

  And you are right about it turning out deadly dull, if you get close enough. Someday under more favorable conditions for the libido-to-libido chat we can recount our mutual disasters.

  Haven’t read Dhalgren yet, nor the F. Man, nor in fact anything since my Stapledon orgy, except the dreary drafts of this exquisitely awful first novel I am trying to perpetrate. If only they would let me fall on my face quietly …

  I’m sorry, as you must realise, about the can of norms known to “man.” Damn the rhythm and beat of the language which is built into so many things we have to extirpate.

  But you know, I am increasingly coming to resist being my body—this apropos of your good par. on de Beauvoir—although I know perfectly well that I am it and it is me, as age comes on and I feel it start to fail under me like a tiring horse I have to disassociate myself from more and more of it, and the “detached p.o.v. offered by Western Culture” becomes, well, not such a bad thing, personally. I do have this stupid belief that the mind can sometimes ride herd on its fading synapses for awhile.

  But that is of course no reason for making people pretend they have some other body with wholly different experiences and political problems.

  I blather, incipiently.

  But, again by the way, you may recall long ago I said that the movement is women-to-women, that we are at the stage where men are as out as white liberals in the black movement. That I do understand.

  Did you ever know anyone who took so long to say goodbye?

  Love, may Boulder be good. (Boulder …?

  Embouldened … well, it is bould enough getting you.

  [signature (“TIP,” with a drawing of a door)]

  P.S. Were you ever raucous enough to enjoy Tom Lehrer? I played some tapes over the other night … “good old American know-how, as embodied in good old Americans like Wernher von Braun …” I love the bastard.

  And did you see Edith Efron’s piece in of all things TV Guide about the new American media tilt toward the Arabs, the total fallacy of Arab moderation? … I give you the oncoming nightmare of the late 70s—if we’re lucky.

  Tip

  **
*

  James Tiptree Jr.

  P.O. Box 315

  McLean, Va. 22151

  S.F.W.A.

  17 Aug 75

  Dearest Joanna,

  At last I have read THE FEMALE MAN, I have to write you: This is great. I read it wincing, grinning like a skull, saying Ooops—and then O My at the miraculous saves, finally simply reading in swinish inhalations, gulp, Yes, yes, yes, O Jesus, Now I understand, go on—whoops, wait—yes, it’s okay, and finally over all, sheer swooning wonder that she puts out this book as what, science fiction? a cuckoo’s egg like a bomb in our little ghetto.

  Seriously, Joanna, the thing is a progression, it starts out as (possible) sf and then progresses, migrates into a roar that has to be in the mainstream, or in its own stream. It ends with the words pouring out of Author as hippogriff, as supernatural whirling dervish, a kind of Letter from the Cosmos which happens to be a person … I am certainly not going to say this to anyone else, I mean, anyone alien, because yes let us keep up the fiction that it is an “sf” novel, anything so the book can get read. So I can do that paltry thing, voting for it for some plastic award. Anything so it gets read.

  I haven’t read DHALGREN but I’m afraid I already have a closed mind. D. will have to be writ in blood to sway me. (I do not, I never have confided in anybody before what I intend in the voting matter, this is a break with my own small tradition, just from me to you.) (It is not of course important but it is the only importance immediately available.)

  The strength, Joanna. That’s the thing. I’ve read some other perceptive, poignant, wince-making reports, veracious, revelatory … but not with the strength.

  One quibble. Does Janet really cry, p. 182–3, and also later? Now I understand, Joanna. All that you were trying to get through. I see where I was irrelevant. I won’t say, “wrong,” because nothing I meant wronged this truth, but it was extremely irrelevant. But it takes a book to get it said. Go, little book.

  Love,

  Tip

  Don’t answer if busy I mean this.

  ***

  James Tiptree, Jr., SFWA,

  Box 315, McLean, Virginia 22101

  12 Sep 75

  Dear Joanna,

  (You’ll never know the unnatural exertion it takes to keep me from calling you Dear Jo, or Dear J or Dear Cygnus Negra or whatever, I am an inveterate nicknamer and hate my own full name. But I will not do as you don’t wish!) This is simply to exclaim, have to unload on someone—just read Doris Lessing’s THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK and am stunned. Always thought she was too weepy; this one is weepy all right and features Woman as Kudzu Vine—but Oh my, the form. Most sophisticated formal work by a woman, barring Woolf’s ORLANDO. And so new, so different … Oh yeah, barring Stein too. What do you think?

  And Oh yeah, I’m real handsome. Like Duke (Gov. of Samoa) in Doonesbury. But I have peachy, blue grey eyes … Are there any physically beautiful writers? You know we’re all lumpy. Too earnest in the face. Eyes give it away too.

  LOVE

  TRAPTROOP

  Tip

  ***

  James Tiptree, Jr., SFWA,

  Box 315, McLean, Virginia 22101

  29 Sep 76

  Dear Jo,

  After writing you I sat down with WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO […]—in the old Galaxies. Jesus, what a story, Both good and bad. I wish I knew what you thought about it. I finally concluded you had two stories fused in there; the long, apparently self-indulgent dying monolog being most of one of them. Of course it no more belongs in GALAXY than a—well, you name an utter incongruence. But then there is no appropriate home for people trying real new things. Very troubling story. The usual unbearably real flashes, the usual flapping loose ends and unknown implications; the usual fierce impact. But Jo, don’t be life; write … Is that comprehensible? Probably not … I’m a shade worried. Tell me how it really goes with the writing, if you care to … Is real writing really possible?

  Love,

  shook.

  Tip

  ***

  James Tiptree Jr.

  P.O. Box 315

  McLean VA. 22101

  S.F.W.A.

  14 Oct 76

  Hello Jo dear,

  It’s 4 AM, and I’m up early to try to get some (writing) thinking done … but all that comes is an imaginary dialog with you. I chuckled, puzzled, laughed, sighed, over your last letter—which you have doubtless forgotten in the passing maelstrom of your mind. (I don’t mean your mind is chaotic, although it is, a bit—just that so much goes on, and also, you’re writing.)

  You mention the break-up of your c.r. group, which is what caused the chuckling. You see, I visualise you and them from the outside, while you only experience it from their intimidated and furtive escape from you.

  Listen, love, you’ll get a lot fewer mysterious tiptoeings-around in life if you face a couple of things:

  You are egotistical. I am [as] certain that you talk too much as I am that the earth turns. I imagine that when you are consciously not “talking too much” you sit there like a smoldering basilisk with ever-larger gouts of smoke coming out of your ears until your “silence” dominates all the talk in the room … Or like when the ocean suddenly recedes for miles, leaving the bottom of the bay bare, and people venture forward into the strange, unaware that the odd line on the horizon is a five-mile-high wall of pent-up words rushing down on them with the speed of light. I can just see it.

  And of course you intimidate people. You intimidate the hell out of people. When you’re being carefully gentle and non-intimidating I imagine it’s like being gently dandled from paw to paw by a Kodiak bear. Your natural way is to intimidate everything and everybody in the environment, simply by being in there faster and more complexly and volubly and positively and generally like a loose live wire thrashing about.

  You are also crazy as a coot.

  All this has nothing whatever to do with your being or not being a Lesbian, the best-balanced friend I have is one. So is the second-best-balanced, at least when last seen.

  The reason you are crazy, intimidating and egotistically garrulous is because you are some kind of a genius, or part of one, or one part of the time. You are just so full of you and life. I can just see the picture, when you have that feeling you’re among friends, someone who officially “shares” with you, a woman or a Lesbian or a writer—and you feel you can be yourself, or talk honestly to the point—and out comes this incredible flood of (a), (b), B1, B2, etc, which reminds you of (parenthesis) C, which leads on to E and F, which subsumes general principle G, having the subcorollaries H-prime illustrated by example VII, and what happened to me last week suggests that maybe we should turn the whole existential point on its head, which would lead to thoughts J, K, L—and what the hell have you crawled under the rug for when I was just agreeing with you and having a nice conversation?

  Honey, other people, Lesbians, women, men, aardvarks—take a long time to go from A to maybe A-and-a-half, not to mention B, and when you open the curtains and invite people to share worlds, the other person is very apt to crawl under the rug or leap out the fire-escape—because they HAVEN’T GOT any such torrential inner world to share back.

  While you’re left feeling like you’ve been shouting down a well and why in christ’s name didn’t they respond, share back, even interrupt with their own views? … They didn’t because they couldn’t. They haven’t any.

  The lonely steam-roller.

  And subconsciously you’re so used to this, so used to being too fast and too much and seeing more and so forth, that you really don’t take seriously any humble daisies offered to you. Other people have been stupid and wrong for too long.

  Your doom is partial comradeship; any group will offer you companionship on only a portion of your perimeter, or heart. And you are going to have to learn to think with your mouth shut in those perilous moments when lesser mortals sidle up with a flower.

  Further, you have to recognise that you are not, never, going to be “among y
our peers,” part of a real “sacred band.” You have to find your peers in this or that facet—as you really do—making a network of part-sharings serve the lonely need for a group of true fellows. It’s the fate of the over-intellectualised even on the barricades. In action you’re a Lenin, but your fate may be more like Trotsky’s.

  Now that is all I know about that.

  But I should add that crazy egotistical rampantly talkative Joanna is also perfectly sane, kindly, just, luminously compassionate, and I would have no hesitation in exposing my deepest soul-quandaries to you. Please emphasize this paragraph—I was so amused—being, you know, older and having seen geniuses trying to make out in a world of trained poodles—that I went on and on. I know the bull-dozer aspect for what it is, and I don’t for a minute confuse it with the core of you. I ache for you, Jo.

  … The only real danger of your position is, like I said, that having had to learn to dismiss so much stupidity you get into the automatic habit of rejection.

  Which brings up Ursula … I do think you reject too much there. You worry her work like a frantic puppy, and some of the pieces flying off the bones are real pieces. Of marrow, if we may carry this metaphor a bit unhappily longer. She’s writing mostly about good and evil and death, you know. Motives which are as yet peripheral in your own writings, your good and evil are incidental to the life, life, life in your stuff. She’s fundamentally an abstract thinker dressed in the characters of fiction—witness OMELAS. And then she had this biological idea—LEFT HAND. She has a few genuine images, dragons and ice-fields and forests and mad kings in drafty scrubby keeps. But her most personal, odd, writerly thing was LATHE OF HEAVEN, where her characters started to run themselves. Truly, Doctor Haber in that is a real, real villain. And the strange upwelling of quietist hope showed up, the thing she tried to do more with in ATLANTIS. In LATHE it’s a rather absurd but lovable salvation-through-aliens, and sea-images.

  It is perfectly OK for a writer to be preoccupied with the neutral themes of mortality and virtues—only thing is, it makes for pallid writing unless one is an ecstatic … I kind of love her, as a baby philosophe more than fictioneer. […]