“Uh,” said Uncle Harry. And, slowly, handed it over.
And so it all began. He would slip them to me and I would slip them back to him. Lovecraft—Oh, God. And more and more and more; we soon discovered Amazing and Wonder Stories and others that are long forgotten. We never discussed them; it was just Our Secret. But I’ll tell you one thing: You haven’t read fantasy or SF unless you have retired, with a single candle, to your lonely little cabin in the woods, far from the gaslights of the adult world and set your candle stub up in a brass basin and huddled under about sixteen quilts—the nights were cold and drafty, the candlelight jumped and guttered, shadows everywhere. And then, just as you get to where the nameless Thing starts to emerge, the last shred of candle gutters out, leaving you in the dark forest. And a screech owl, who has silently taken up position on the roof above, lets loose with a nerve-curdling shriek.
That’s Tales of Wonder as they should be read, man.
Well, of course I was hooked, from then on, permanently. By the time World War II came along, I had about 1300 mags and paperbacks stacked in that cabin alone. (I gave them all to the county library, despite the sneers of the librarian, who doubtless used them for doorstops. Alas, alas; rubies, pearls, emeralds gone to the gravel crusher.)
With the war came a break, after which I started all over again (having discovered the magic of subscriptions). I now have about forty running feet of them double-stacked, plus head-high shelves bulging in all bathrooms, plus miscellaneous deposits. In addition, there’s another forty feet of philosophy and politics and history, sixty feet of my old professional specialty (experimental psychology), twenty feet of math, astronomy, and miscellaneous, twenty feet of fiction by dead authors and another twenty of same by live ones (horrible how quickly one seems to have to shift them), twenty feet of women’s studies and related material, and twenty feet of mostly poetry. And something has got to give. (Oh well, who needs Das Kapital anyway?)
The painful part of starting like that is that you read, read, read—without, in most cases, noticing dull stuff like the author’s name. Until I started to write it myself, of course; then names become acutely important. But I am still in the embarrassing position of not knowing who wrote some fantastic scene that is forever engraved on my liver. And then finding out, Oh my God, yes of course—he or she did that! (Worse yet, finding it out in his or her presence, whether in the flesh or in one of my Victorian correspondences.)
Now maybe this is the best place to lay to rest one last ghost—the business of the anonymity and the male pseudonym. First, the important part: Everything I’ve ever told you or anyone else is true, with one exception. David Gerrold came looking for me and I told him he was on a different street. If he’d waited before ringing the bell he would have seen through the glass a solitary figure staring at a Star Trek rerun in the dark, and I’m sure the jig would have been up. Other than that I have never told a lie or modulated my natural voice—I was very careful about pronouns, things like “child” instead of “boy,” etc., etc. But it wasn’t calculated. (I’m lousy at that.) All my letters have been just first draft typed as fast as I can go with my one finger. I can’t help what people think sounds male or female.
You see, when I started, I was in rather a stuffy job atmosphere. A university. And I was something of a maverick; I kept having ideas that didn’t jibe with the official academic outlook at my department. And when I started my own research it got worse. (“In this department we do feel rather strongly that recent PhDs do best when their work fits in with or amplifies some of the ongoing lines of research here.”) Well, I wasn’t about to fit in with or amplify anybody else’s line; I had my own long-held desires, and I kept citing research nobody else had read, or had read and dismissed, and with great pain and struggle I set off on a totally independent tack, which had the ill grace, after four agonizing years, to pay off. (I still keep getting requests for it from obscure European universities, or behind the Iron Curtain.) With this background, the news that I was writing—as I said in that long-ago interview—science fiction would have destroyed my last shreds of respectability and relegated me to the freak department, possibly even to the freak-whose-grant-funds-should-be-stopped division; those familiar with older academe will get the picture. Anonymity seemed highly desirable. The name “Tiptree” started by seeing it on a can of marmalade in the Giant; I was looking for a forgettable name so editors wouldn’t remember rejecting my manuscripts. The “James” was one more bit of cover—and my husband threw in “Jr.” for whimsy’s sake. I was shocked when the stories all sold and I was stuck with the name. What started as a prank dreamed its way into reality.
You have to realize, this never was run as a real clandestine operation with cutouts and drops and sanitizing and so on. The only “assets” were one P.O. box, a little luck, and the delicacy and decency of some people who decided not to pry. Namely and chiefly one Jeff Smith.
When you wrote asking for the Phantasmicom interview was the first time I was approached personally by anyone, and I told myself, Dammit, say no. But then this business of really loving the SF world and wanting to say so welled up, and I thought I could kind of race over the bio bit without telling lies and start waving Hello. You’ll note what I put in there about masks… So that’s how it all started.
Then, from about the second year, when things began to get serious, “James” started to feel more and more constrictive. It was as if there were things I wanted to write as me, or at least a woman. (I still don’t know exactly what they are, that’s the odd part.) Meanwhile Tiptree kept taking on a stronger and stronger life of his own; if I were superstitious I’d say Something was waiting for incarnation there in the Giant Foods import section… maybe I do anyway. This voice would speak up from behind my pancreas somewhere. He insisted on the nickname, he would not be “Jim.” And as to “Uncle” Tip—maybe I’m a natural uncle. See, I have no family, nobody ever called me Sis or Mom or even Aunt Alice.
And his persona wasn’t too constricting; I wrote as me. Maybe my peculiar upbringing—where values like Don’t-be-a-coward and Achieve! and Find-out-how-it-works and Fight-on-the-underdog’s-side were stamped in before they got to the You’re-a-young-lady stuff (which was awful)—maybe this resulted in a large part of me being kind of a generalized Human being rather than specifically female. (I am very pro-woman, though; once when dabbling in NY politics I had the opportunity to personally thank one of the original suffragettes, then a frail but vital eighty, for the privilege of the vote. It was a beautiful moment.) But still I wanted to write as a woman. By this point it became obvious that killing Tiptree off, say by drowning him out on the reef here, wasn’t going to be that simple. He—we—had all these friends, see. So all I did was rather feebly set up Raccoona Sheldon with a Wisconsin P.O. box and bank, and I confess to giving her some of Tip’s weaker tales to peddle. (Except for the one called “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!” in the anthology Aurora by Mclntyre and Anderson. Nobody much mentions that one, but I consider it as good as I can do.) Anyway, the upshot of all this was that where I lived I wasn’t, and I didn’t live where I was, and things were reaching some kind of crescendo of confusion. Frankly, I had no real plan. So I was really relieved as well as traumatized to have Mother’s ghost do Tiptree in. But it left me with an extraordinary eerie empty feeling for a while; maybe still does.
One problem caused by having a male pseudonym was that there was the desire to rush (by mail) up to many female writers and give them a straight sisterly hug. (And to some male writers, too; especially those I knew were feeling down. I guess I wrote some fairly peculiar letters here and there.) Another problem that may seem trivial, wasn’t to me; people kept saying how lifelike my female characters were, while all the time I was perishing to find out if the male characters were living!
Things like being hooted at in the Women in SF Symposium really didn’t bother me at all, because I doubtless would have done the same myself. And also I am used to b
eing hooted at for unpopular ideas—the struggle I mentioned in the university was just one of a lifelong series. And then, too, I’m a feminist of a far earlier vintage, where we worked through a lot of the first stages all by our lonesomes. There are stages in all revolutions of consciousness where certain things are unsayable, because they sound too much like the enemy’s line. Then after some years, when everybody is feeling more secure about unity on the facts and the wrongs, those “unsayable” things can be looked at objectively again, and new insight gained. I refer, of course, to my real interest in why people are mothers. (I just saw an article in Psychology Today that triumphantly claims that Fathers Do It Too—but turns out on reading the data that what they “do” is quite different. They play with baby; mother takes care of it.) There were, of course, a lot more things I felt like saying in the Symposium, but I thought that one was safe for Tip. As indeed it was—typical “male” nonsense.
I’ve been amazed at the warm, kind, friendly reaction I’ve been getting, even from the most unlikely people. I worried deeply about what had unwittingly become a major deception. I wrote at once to everyone I could think of who might feel I’d let them go out on a cracked limb. They couldn’t have been nicer. If someone does feel griped, they haven’t gotten it to me. The only problem seems to be that now I’m expected to produce something somehow grander, more insightful, more “real.” Well, if I knew how, I would—the trouble is that the Tip did all I could in that line. If there is something—other than “Sisters”—which is going to burst forth from my liberated gonads, it hasn’t peeped yet. In fact, I may be written out for a while. With each story I dug deeper and deeper into more emotional stuff, and some of it started to hurt pretty bad. “Slow Music” reads like a musical fadeout or coda to Tiptree’s group of work.
Now, I’ve got one more thing to add to this terrible monologue. In a funny way, I found that as Tip I could be useful to my fellow female writers. There were times when Tiptree (male) queried anthology editors on why nothing from this or that female writer was being used. And as an old gent I may have been more helpful to sisters who were fighting depression than another woman could. They had to brace up and respond to my courtly compliments—Tip was quite a flirt—and they knew somebody quite different valued them. Whereas just another woman coming in with sympathy and admiration tends to dissolve in a mutual embrace of woe.
Now, adieu, dear Jeff and Ann—and remember to keep this in the usual baggie. The cucarachas here have now evolved to the point where when you step on one it carries you four feet before you can get off. Outside the Caribbean is in roaring high tide, storms are chasing themselves overhead, the palm trees lit up olive and white by great bursts of lighting. And the generator is, as usual, failing. May you never be the same.
—compiled from letters between November 23, 1976, and November 24, 1977
The Lucky Ones
One of the things Alii Sheldon could share with her friends that James Tiptree couldn’t was her first published story, which had been in The New Yorker (November 16,1946) under the name Alice Bradley. She complained that “it was astounding how they edited me into New Yorkerese” but since her manuscript no longer exists, all we have is the New Yorkerese version. She sent me the story on December 10,1976, with the following letter:
Hey, maybe you’d like to see an Army-life story published in The New Yorker in 1945 or 6 by Alice Bradley? Very heart-rending, plus slightly funny. All ABS ever wrote except before WW II when I was art editor on the Chicago Sun.
‘The Lucky Ones” was written at a time when our treatment of the D.P.s—the hordes of miserable people wrenched from their homelands by the Nazis—was a Cause, you know, like Help the Biafrans, only it was a USA problem, what we were doing or not doing. (They cut out the part about the girls having been used as ten-year-old “service facilities” for the German troops.) I didn’t write it because I thought I was a writer, but to try and tell people what “DP.” really meant. Jesus, Jeff, it was awful. And one could do so little. We ended by forcibly shipping loads of them back to the Soviets, who promptly shot them… after extracting all possible work. (Because they had been contaminated by seeing the free world, namely us, see.)
Also I put in a funny, true part about my nearly giving my brand-new husband a black eye by saluting in alarm whenever he emerged from dressing in the bathroom. Daytimes, I was supposed to go through ten people to get to see him. My relation with him has always given me a wondrous view of what goes on at the top, or “policy-making” levels, while I knew from experience what goes on at the bottom, or policy-carrying-out-more-or-less levels.
I went to Germany last year in late September, with several thousand other American soldiers, including my husband, a colonel, who moved in a higher sphere than mine. We all belonged to a big theatre headquarters which was transferred from France to form a permanent occupational command in the American Zone. Before we left France, I had just enough Wac points to go home and my husband had an astronomical total of points, but I was anxious to finish a report I had been working on for some time and he wanted to see his section through a reorganization crisis. So we elected to go to Germany for a short time. In view of our imminent return home, I was granted permission to live with him in a small senior officers’ billet in the town we were moving to, along with five or six other colonels from the headquarters.
The prospect intimidated me, as I was a very recent captain, with a marked arm reflex to live colonels (I never did get used to my husband in full regalia). However, I was somewhat comforted when I learned that there would be one other captain living there, as billeting officer. This was Captain Providence, a bouncing young man who spoke rapid-fire, emotional German, which his war assignments had given him plenty of opportunity to perfect. He turned out to be invaluable, because I was unable to wrench a German verb out of the infinitive, and my husband spoke a form of German good only for indicating desired services and making slow, stately comments on the scenery.
The headquarters town had been a solidly prosperous German spa. It contained what had been only third-class air objectives, but it had had the misfortune to receive one heavy going-over near the end of the war, which had reduced about a third of it to ruins. The civilian casualties, however, had been relatively light.
On the afternoon the colonel and I drove in from France, the last of the headquarters convoys were still rumbling into town. The German winter was moving in, too, with cold, continuous rain. It was a depressing scene. The wet streets were hung with mist and choked with rubble in many places. Low clouds slid through the blackened holes in the roofless shells of gutted buildings. Most of the homes could be described as substantial, but none of them could be called gracious. They were of a somehow monstrous cubic shape and loaded with ornaments—plaster eagles, lion gate posts, fake caryatids, and iron cupids relieving themselves in fountains. The undamaged houses exhaled an air of sullen sculleries and apoplectic parlors. The damaged ones were grotesque without being pathetic.
We passed a small park containing a battered statue of Bismarck, climbed the hill in back of the town where the officers’ billet area was, and drew up at last in front of our house. It belonged to one Herr Doktor Groenecke, whose name plate was on the garden wall. The house was dun-colored, square, and high, and had two turrets.
At the top of the front steps were two doors side by side, one for the family and one for the servants. We entered through the family’s door, which was open, and found ourselves in a cheerless vestibule lined with gray tile. From a bead-curtained archway on one side came damp-dishcloth smells and gemutlich laughter. We walked on into the dimness of a large, high-ceilinged living room, illuminated by a cold yellow light from overhead. I looked up, and involuntarily ducked from under a menacing ebony chandelier as big as a summerhouse and set with imitation candles. The furniture was ponderous and upholstered in green. On the walls I could make out several acres of oil paintings in heavy gilt frames.
Over in a corner of the room, a huge
chair began to move. At first, I could not see what was behind it, then it turned and revealed a small girl, who was sitting on the floor and pushing with her back. She saw us, gasped, got up, tried to curtsy and almost fell over, and then grabbed up a mop and pail and fled past us out of the room. She was blond, about the size of an American fourteen-year-old, with a curiously misshapen little figure. Her nose and cheeks were bright pink and her stockings were torn. As she passed me, I smelled perspiration.
We hallooed. Captain Providence rushed in, followed by a pallid little man with a face like an old jockey’s. The latter, the captain explained, was the German houseman furnished by the Military Government. He took our bags eagerly and started with us upstairs to the two rooms we were to live in.
In the upper hallway, under a vast chromo of heroic ducks in a purple pond, a door stood open, and on each side of it crouched a small, dark-haired girl. They were polishing the big brass knobs and softly humming a song in unison. One was wearing a nondescript blue dress, the other a skirt and torn black sweater. When they saw us, the humming stopped and they bent their heads and polished faster. We continued past them into our quarters.
The other colonels were already in the house, and we joined them at dinner around a long table set with Dr. Groenecke’s elaborate china. During the meal, Captain Providence briefed my husband and me on the servants, and his observations were later amplified by my own.
Fritz, the little man who had taken our bags, had been a sergeant in a German artillery unit that had spent two winters in Russia. Then there were Bubi, a beardless, blond table waiter, also lately of the Wehrmacht and once a steward on the Europa; a grim gardener, paid by Groenecke; a fat female cook, whose soups invariably had half an inch of grease on top; a tanned, sinuous pantry girl, who complained that our G.I.s were fresh; several unknown and smelly entities who came in to wash dishes; and an old, thin-faced German woman, who did the laundry. She acted very sad and martyred, and talked in a sharp, obsequious whine, complaining to anyone who would listen that she had never done any menial work before and that she had had six servants herself. She did not mention that she had been quite cordial to the local Nazis.
Meet Me at Infinity Page 34