Clearly such a devil-may-care affair is good for a lot of yuks. And I fear that yuck is exactly what the author makes of it. There is a skeletal plotline, so hung about and bored through with divertissements that nothing need be said of it. And the author, perhaps sensing that something more earthly is required, indulges (for example) in scenes in which Kayo’s black britches split, revealing his red jockey shorts.
McConkey seems to feel that excellent diction and a heart manifestly in the right place, as concerns deconstructionism, will excuse anything. What it will not excuse is a bookless book.
The point of my account is to portray Kayo as a confection, a giant puff cake in the form of a labyrinth of asides, which will delight to tears anyone who is really into lit crit, or who bears either Cervantes or Nabokov a grudge. And it does not weigh on us with pompous panaceas for out troubles—Kayo’s solution to the problems of the ASU is to build gigantic theme parks on the various issues.
It would appear, in sum, that the author, after years of work creating far finer novels, has decided to grant himself some well-earned indulgence. And no one who has worked up a head of steam over the same irritations will begrudge him.
—March 1987
Zero at the Bone
And to conclude, two more personal essays. The first one was never published; the second was written for Women of Vision, edited by Denise Du Pont (St. Martin’s 1989).
Ruminating on the changes that have followed the “death” of Tiptree—the subtle but palpable differences in the tone of reviews; friends lost, friends gained; above all, the loss of blessed anonymity and simple fun—I am startled anew by the depth of my own loathing for the plight of women. Our helplessness, limitedness, weakness, thingness in the world of what cummings called “man-unkind.” Only among the educated of a few North European countries are we even people with audible voices—always excepting those occasional La Passionaria types who spring from some bloodied earth.
But I, daughter of the dull middle class, am no Passionaria, no Golda Meir nor Rosa Luxemburg, nor Margaret Mead; not even a frontier schoolteacher; I feel all too literally hollow at the center—“zero at the bone,” as Dickinson said. Worse: I have this childish fascination with brute power. I see it as (if possible) even more absolute a force than it is: the organizing principle of society. And since I have none, I am nothing.
As Tiptree, I had an unspoken classificatory bond to the world of male action; Tiptree’s existence opened to unknown possibilities of power. And, let us pry deeper—to the potential of evil. Evil is the voltage of good; the urge to goodness, without the potential of evil, is trivial. A man impelled to good is significant; a woman pleading for the good is trivial. A great bore. Part of the appeal of Tiptree was that he ranged himself on the side of good by choice.
Alice Sheldon has no such choice.
Other women writers may be free of this paranoid reality-obsession. (Except for a few, like Suzy McKee Charnas, who tackle it directly.) Virginia Woolf—to name at random—was too insulated—or did it break through and kill her? Quinn Yarbro transposes to wholly alien worlds (“Un Bel Di”), or focuses on the apolitical moment, (her “Fellini Beggar”). Anne McCaffrey wrenches her women into singing ships, or leagues with dragons. Vonda Mclntyre gives them magical powers—though stressful ones—and often, though not always, a minimally respectful society; but she can show scarifying a war of all against all, with its horribly killed women. Joanna Russ vanes between wild fantasies of power women, and mesmeric writing of real personal experience (again, middle class). Le Guin threatens to live in dreams albeit Superb ones.
What evil can a woman do? Except pettily, to other, weaker women or children? Cruel stepmothers; male fantasies of the Wicked Witch, who can always be assaulted or burnt if she goes too far. Men certainly see women as doing many evil things—but always nuisancy, trivial, personal, and, easily-to-be-punished-for. Not for us the great evils; the jolly maraudings, burnings, rapings, and hacking-up; the Big Nasties, the genocidal world destroyers, who must be reckoned with on equal terms.
[Odd that I mentioned the jollity of evil-doing, the hilarities of mayhem. Powerful, free laughter—I’ve heard it among women only once, and that’s another story. We are but shadow-men in that line too.]
Always draining us is the reality of our inescapable commitment. Whatever individual women may do, it is we who feel always the tug toward empathy, toward caring, cherishing, building-up—the dull interminable mission of creating, nourishing, protecting, civilizing—maintaining the very race. At bottom is always the bitter knowledge that all else is boys’ play—and that this boys’ play rules the world.
How I long, how I long to be free of this knowledge!
As Tiptree, this understanding was “insight.” As Alii Sheldon, it is merely the heavy center of my soul.
Whatever can I do with all this?
Gardner Dozois cheerily told me that now I could write about “growing up female!” Ha! I can do it in a word: To grow up female is—not to be allowed to grow up. To be praised for childishness, timidity, vanity, trivialities; to be denied tough goals and mysteriously barred from the means of attaining them; to be left for crucial years, unaware of the realities for which boys are being trained; to lack continuity of character and mind; to find oneself reacting helplessly to male advances and retreats and in the grip of obscure vulnerabilities from within; to waste years and emotional strength on idiocies (getting married); to yearn for “love” from those who do not even view one as a person, though they may be sexually attracted; to have no comrades, (unless one is very lucky); to be alone and unarmed amid inexplicably hostile strangers who make smiling pretenses and who will not leave you alone. To have every aspect of your conduct and being criticized as by right, for the pleasure of others. To be confirmed in childishness, and have your vision of adventure narrowed to the space of—a bed.
Ellen Moers said it all and better, in her Literary Women. To grow up as a “girl” is to be nearly fatally spoiled, deformed, confused, and terrified; to be responded to by falsities, to be reacted to as nothing or as a thing—and nearly to become that thing.
To have no steady routine of growth and training, but only a series of explosions into unwanted adulation—and then into limbo.
The world was not my oyster.
And the result has been an unjoined hybrid.
I sometimes imagine what I would have been as Alex Sheldon. Alone, in my normal working gear of pants and turtleneck, I almost am Alex—or my father. Dressed up, in company, I’m nearly my mother, Mary—certainly feminine, limited, ingratiating. What was that adjective Judy-Lynn skewered me with? Ah yes: “vivacious.”
Jesus H. Christ.
As in, “a vivacious crucifixion.”
Well, I better get integrated in a hurry.
And in my bitterness, not to forget that had I been Alex, I might have been an equally poor specimen—neurotic, diffused, lazy, and undisciplined; just as expert at finding “by-ways to chaos,” in Konrad Heiden’s splendid phrase about the German nation.
But… I wonder. Would Alex be so dependent? Would he spend thoughts on the equivalent of lace camisoles—color-coordinated lace camisoles? Who knows?
What I know is that all this, raw, is scarcely the stuff of SF; and if it’s “mainstream,” others have done it better. Tiptree solved matters by
leaving it all out—like leaving out the fact that one is a paraplegic in an
iron drum. Maybe all one can do is to say the hell with it.
But—life is to use. Only, how? How? How? How?
—July 1985
A Woman Writing Science Fiction
If you squeeze a mouse, it squeaks.
Just so, when life squeezes me, I squeak. That is, I write. And from my middle years I have felt squeezed by life. First there is the sky-darkening presence of the patriarchate, the male-run society, all about me and over me, cutting off my options. And then there is the physical crowding. It is increasingly impossible to get a
way from other people’s noise, smells, bodies; their radios, the ringing of my phone by strangers, strangers’ houses springing up everywhere in what had been lovely countryside; strangers’ cars crowding the roads twenty-four hours a day; strangers’ garbage polluting my aquifers, other people’s junk polluting the world; footprints and tire tracks on every patch of new-fallen snow, chain saws and bulldozers in every patch of woodland; hostile strangers menacing me if I walk out of my house by night or day. And no end in sight. Unless our birthrate falls drastically, we are on our way to being another Bangladesh.
So much for my personal squeezedness.
But beyond that, I am wounded, revolted by what man is doing to the planet. I love the natural Earth. The space photos that show our wonderful green and blue world floating lonely in black space have driven home its fragility. Remember those photos? Remember the great ugly red-brown scars of deserts on them? Those deserts are growing, the green is shrinking. And the blue, our sacred blue oceans are being defiled by the dumping of everything from sewage and tar to radioactive wastes. Even the Sargossa Sea, that remote breeding place of species, is now poisoned with biphenylated plastics. The great rain forests, rich and unexplored, are being burned and felled at an appalling rate per day. The very top of Mount Everest has garbage on it. Species after species of Earth’s wonderful creation are going extinct as I write this. We have already killed half the northeast of our continent with acid rain, and dumped enough carbon dioxide into our air to change the climate for the worse. I weep for Earth.
And then, not least, there is what man is doing to man—and woman. His endless wars, his compulsion to competition and aggression and dominance appalls me. About forty wars are raging right now, and we all live under the shadow of his grandest war, which will end us—and take the planet’s life with it. Greed rules our daily intercourse: The rich and powerful grab everything in sight. Those who should be our leaders flaunt their corruption, while the poor get poorer and turn to violent crime to assuage their wants. Where cooperation is so sorely needed, we live in a war of all against all.
And, with the frontiers gone, it is a zero-sum game. The winners win always at others’ expense. Who will civilize us?
Most personal to me is the plight of women. They are at the bottom of every class heap, struggling in a world which has no place for humane values, condemned to do the hard, unpaid chores of the world. Vivid in my memory is a small band of tribal women, who each day walked for water three miles over violently rocky hillsides, returning with forty-pound loads of five gallons balanced on their heads—and doing this, for the most part, with one baby on their backs and another in their stomachs. They were not praised nor paid for this—it was “women’s work.” In our land of “opportunity,” their physical work is less, but the stress is greater. No wonder that the poorest of the poor, turn, as children, to having unneeded babies simply to garner a little love.
And things will not grow better. If trouble comes to our system, as come I fear it will, it will be the liberation of women which is blamed for it. Our “rights” will vanish like snow in summer as the stronger, aggressive animals we live among vent their frustration.
Nor will time improve things. In a world where the raising of children yields no profit (except to TV salesmen) the young are left to raise themselves, in the dumb, time-wasting enclaves of the schools and the culture of the streets and of TV. When they become the adults, how will they rule?
And I have another, private pain. I love the English language, that noble mongrel. It is my aim to speak and write it clearly and colorfully. But daily I must listen to insipid gibberish from the mouths of our so-called leaders. How can we think clearly if our minds are stuffed with rubbishy slogans?
For all these reasons, then, I write. My first serious story showed a man so driven to despair that he spread a mortal disease in order to save the Earth. And in nearly all of my seventy-plus stories since, one or more of my distresses form the undertheme. So much for my deeper motivation.
But this list of agonies could as well have inspired articles, diatribes like Jeremiah’s. Why write stories? Ah, therein lies the mystery. I do not think we will know the answer until we know why the first cavemen lifted his voice and regaled his fellows with a made-up tale. True, he might have been rewarded with an extra knuckle-bone to chew, as Scheherazade was rewarded with an extra day of life for each chapter. But that does not explain it. The urge to make stories is inbuilt, primeval.
Well, then, why write science fiction? I could say, because I have always read it, since I discovered Weird Tales at the age of nine. So when I came to write a story, it seemed natural to send it off to Analog. But the fact is that I have a modest view of my talent. I haven’t the ear for rhythm or the feel for style to encourage me to compete in the serious mainstream. And I certainly haven’t the stomach to write “mainstream” schlock, like Jaws or Gone with the Wind. Science fiction suits me just right. SF is the literature of ideas, and I am, I think, an idea writer. SF allows extrapolation into the future, and that is my natural way of thought. (“If this goes on …”) And SF is the literature of wonder, and you have only to say, “Those lights in the sky are great suns” for me to go all shivery. In SF I have found my niche.
Will science fiction and fantasy continue? Yes, I think, but perhaps they may suffer a certain decline. In the last fifty years we have burned up ideas at a breakneck rate, and while the stock of ideas surely is not finite, the possibilities of new ones may not come along as fast as we could hope. Of course, there is always cinema; the movies now are using the ideas that were done in the literature thirty years ago, and the public may slowly adapt so it can use the newer ones. As to fantasy, I don’t know. Who could have predicted Tolkien? I’m not primarily a fantasy writer, so I don’t know how fast the ideas there are being used up. In any event, I doubt the public will continue to read much except comic books.
Are there things you can say in science fiction that you can’t say in mainstream? Well, no, I think; not really. But if you were writing up a given idea for the mainstream, you would have to go to endless bother of introducing it and soothing incredulity and generally tempering the wind to the shorn lamb—whereas in SF you can just start in, and your readers know at once that it’s After the Atom Bombs Fall or whatever.
Which brings up the Ideal Reader. Whom do I write for? I honestly don’t know. I used to think I wrote for bright young minds who might say, “Well, I never thought of that before!” And of course I write to satisfy myself. No one pressures me, since I do not write to eat. But judging from my fan mail, there is simply no common denominator among my readers, beyond the fact that they seem literate. I suspect I write at heart for people like myself, souls who love and fear what I do. And I suspect a majority of them are women, though my mail is predominantly from the other sex.
As to the question of whether there are male and female writing styles, here I may part company from other women. I feel that by their sins shall ye know them, which is to say that there are separate styles in bad writing. Rebecca West has said that the sin of men is lunacy and the sin of women idiocy. She meant that men have the weakness of seeing everything in black and white, as though by moonlight, with all the colors and pains left out, like a shiny new machine. And “idiocy” derives from the original meaning of “idiot,” a private person. Women can be overobsessed by minutiae, by trivial concerns with no broad implications. This is only natural in a species evolved to rear children9; raising the young is a matter of endless minutiae, which are big concerns for the growing child. When women write badly, they fall away from the larger Human concerns into too-private trivialisms. When men write badly, it is about some sublunar crackpot idea with no regard for its real Human consequences—like their wars.
I think there is a general Human way of writing, of telling tales of challenge and response, of trials and strivings—and, in SF, of wondrous
alien systems which can illuminate our own. Men and women deviate from this centra
l style according to their experience and inclinations, but there is not much difference. It may be that men have slightly the edge in black humor, and women in heart-wringing, but that is certainly cultural.
I see that I omitted one masculine style of writing which particularly bores and irritates me: that is the ineffable tale of boy-becomes-sur-prisel-a-ra^m. This is a story, if you can call it such, peculiar to the patriarchate. No woman so relishes, today, the grand elevation to adult status. Maybe we should; certainly to be a woman—if self-defined, not defined by men—is no mean achievement. But it carries with it too many problems to simply be greeted with hosannahs.
I see here the interesting question about whether it is man or woman who can be seen as the alien, the Other. Yet it seems obvious: From my viewpoint, it is the male who is the alien. It is understandable that women could view themselves as alien to male society—a viewpoint of despair, I think. But if you take what you are as the normal Human, as any self-respecting person is bound to do, then it is clear that to a woman writer men are very abnormal indeed. Most men. But we understand them better than they understand us, in the same way that the subordinates in any group understand the dominant ones better than the dominators understand them. (A source of agony to many bosses, who assume that the darkies are happy singing minstrels and then are caught short by bloody revolution.) And we understand men better because, if I may be chauvinistic, understanding is our business. We can’t get on without it, as a man can.
And I have used the idea of man-as-alien in my story “The Women Men Don’t See,” in which a pair of women decide to go and live with some real aliens after lifetimes of coping with the aliens around them.
Perhaps this answers the question of what role feminism plays in the content of my work. But to answer it more fully, I have to recount a bit of personal history:
I came into the field of SF as a man—that is, under a male pseudonym which I stuck to so completely that even my agent, Bob Mills, believed I was male. There was a reason which began it, two reasons, rather. The first was that I wanted to conceal my writing from my colleagues in the university. (I am a retired experimental psychologist.) I was already known as an adherent of what were then regarded as weird ethogical theories, my colleagues being strict Hullsians, and the news that I wrote science fiction would have been the crowning touch of unre-spectability. Secondly—and mainly—I was sure the first stories wouldn’t sell. I was prepared to spend the traditional five years of papering the walls with rejection slips. So I just chose what seemed an innocuous name off a marmelade jar in the Giant and added a “Jr.* to it for confusion’s sake. I intended to try a different name with each submission, so the editors would not associate me with all those rejects.
Meet Me at Infinity Page 41