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SPECIAL BOOK REVIEW: ALICE THROUGH THE MAGNIFYING GLASS by Paul Di Filippo
By now you will certainly have heard of the book I intend to discuss here: James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St. Martin's Press, hardcover, $27.95, 469 pages, ISBN 0-312-20385-3), a major biography of one of our field's outstanding (I almost said “seminal") writers, by critic Julie Phillips. It's been reviewed in any number of genre venues, but also in a surprising number of mainstream locations, arguably culminating in its front-page prominence in The New York Times Book Review one Sunday in August 2006.
Given such extensive and well-deserved coverage, the book has, you may tend to believe, disclosed all its many virtues. But after enjoying this meticulous, invigorating, hypnotic, even shattering study of an incredible life, I find there are still a few angles to it that I have not yet seen covered.
So what I'd like to do is, first, talk about the technical accomplishments of the biography, the fineness of the writing, organization, and analyses. Then, I'd like to highlight one oversight, and a misstep: an imbalance that Phillips ultimately recovers from, but which still impacts our reading of the book, and our take on Tiptree's life and career. This talk will flow into a discussion of the meaning of Tiptree's life, now that we understand it better and in more detail—how I think it stands in relation to the lives of other creators, both mainstream and genre.
And although it's tempting to recount the many bombshell or miniaturist revelations that Julie Phillips has laboriously compiled, with years of detective work, I will resist the temptation, leaving the first-hand enjoyment of those titillating tidbits to your perusal of the actual text.
Suffice it to say that all of the well-known legends and anecdotes that accrued to Tiptree during his/her most intense period of activity in our field are merely the tip of a large iceberg, a glacial mass formerly nine-tenths submerged that is now fully mapped by Phillips. If you thought you knew all there was to know about Tiptree/Sheldon, you were absolutely wrong. All of us—even Tiptree's closest correspondents, of whom I was certainly not one—were, prior to the publication of this book, in possession of a portrait that was barely sketched in. This book will educate, shock, entertain, illuminate, console, and disturb you—but it's irreducible: there is no substitute for the text itself, no handy Cliff's Notes version.
* * * *
We often speak of certain biographies as being as compelling as a novel. I'm afraid I'm going to have to employ that cliche here. Julie Phillips has the gifts of a natural-born storyteller, building suspense and tension, patterning her story in mythic ways that do not conflict with the facts, but rather enhance them.
Not only does she establish Tiptree's various physical and cultural milieus with vivid economy—the African wilderness; the Chicago social scene; Californian bohemia; CIA-land, and so forth throughout Tiptree's life—but she conjures up the players in the Tiptree mythos with brilliant strokes that make them truly come alive. We first encounter these qualities in Phillips's writing as she deftly introduces Tiptree's parents, Mary Hastings and Herbert Bradley. Limning them boldly within just the first few pages of Chapter 1, Phillips sets a solid foundation for the lifelong elaboration of their natures that will follow. (Of course, Mary, being more pivotal in her daughter's life, comes across more deeply than Herbert, who was something of an essential cipher in Tiptree's life.) Phillips has a knack for categorizing behaviors in elegantly insightful ways: “The price for being swept up in Mary's charm was to leave something of yourself behind.” Such aperatus liberally stud the text, providing instant identification and empathy with the subjects.
Phillips's prose, as exemplified minimally above, is nicely crafted on a sentence-by-sentence level. The rhythms of her writing are varied and propulsive, responding to and mirroring the various crises and lulls in Tiptree's life and career. Moreover, she manages to maintain an objective, journalistic tone without falling into a droning pedantry. Now and again, as relief, she'll insert a lightly veiled personal opinion ("Alice had the bad luck to be pretty") or bit of humor. ("She gave Major, the red macaw [that was Tiptree's pet], to the Brookfield Zoo, where he was inspired to lay an egg, and so turned out to have gender troubles of his own.")
Phillips's chapter organization is logical and compelling, determined by various undeniable stages of Tiptree's life. But a strict forward-marching chronological flow and division is complemented by foreshadowing and retroactive allusions. For instance, Phillips is not afraid to illuminate Tiptree's schoolgirl years by reference to the mature story “Pain-wise,” still in Alice's future. And the childhood incident of young Alice Bradley fashioning a grass hideaway for herself on the African savannah becomes a psychological and symbolical motif that is referenced to explain much of Tiptree's adult behavior. And the larger structure of the book is commanding as well.
The Tiptree that our field knows best does not appear on the page until halfway through the text, with Chapter 24, “The Birth of A Writer (1967).” By this time Tiptree was fifty-two years old, with another twenty years to live. Should coverage of her career have thus begun categorically about two-thirds of the way through, rather than midway? Not at all. The first half of the book is packed with all the necessary characterization of and insight into the woman behind the pen name, which we need to have in order to understand how Tiptree the SF writer was born, how and why the famous pseudonym and charade was necessary to Tiptree's mental health and artistic development. And the twenty years of Tiptree's late-blooming career were arguably an equally weighty counter-balance to the five decades that had been her lot up till then, some kind of obscure culmination and Pyrrhic victory. The bipartite division of this tale, this life, is a brilliant objective correlative to Tiptree's bipartite life-style and personality itself.
What of Phillips's scholarship? Insofar as I can tell, it's impeccable. Over sixty pages of bibliographies, end-notes, and index buttress all her reportage. Moreover, she does not indulge in the main sin of many modern biographers: fanciful recreation of events and dialogue not recorded. Only once that I noticed does Phillips conjecture, in regard to young Alice's acquaintance with a certain book: “By now she must have read The Well of Loneliness...” Well, maybe yes, maybe no. But it's a mild, supportable guess, and the only such case.
Additionally, in an area I can personally test, Phillips's work is validated. I refer to her portrait of science fiction, fandom, and various amateur and professional personalities therein. Her descriptions of many famous figures—Silverberg, Ellison, Le Guin, Malzberg—rings true, as do her accounts of the contemporary impact Tiptree and his work had on the field. Here she exhibits an admirable even-handedness, clarity of vision, and faithfulness to reality, providing a picture of our genre that will intrigue mundanes as well as the faithful.
Finally, Phillips's analyses of Tiptree's stories are consistently insightful without overelaborating their subtexts to death. Her light but sufficient touch leaves the stories unwounded, just as rich for future readings and re-readings as when they were first published.
What of that lacuna and misstep I mentioned earlier?
The only really significant omission in the book is the relative lack of weight Phillips gives to Tiptree's race, wealth, and social class. True, she does portray the younger Alice as the pampered debutante she was. But in terms of how the specific privileges of her birth allowed Tiptree's neuroses to flourish, and perhaps inculcated them in the first place, Phillips is rather silent. (Even the very existence of the vast and unusual amount of documentation of Tiptree's life available to Phillips stems from the exclusive circles into which Alice Sheldon was born.)
It seems to me that a cabin in Yucatan and a lodge in Wisconsin, among other perks, were necessary prerequisites for the exfoliation of Tiptree's odd and extravagant personality, in a way that, say, having to support oneself scrubbing toilets would have precluded. I hesitate to call Tiptree a “drama queen,” since she was so often stoic and sil
ent in her suffering, but perhaps you'll take my meaning if I say that had Tiptree been born equally talented, but black and poor, or even white and lower middle-class, it's hard to imagine she could have afforded such self-indulgence and often morbid introspection as she exhibited and was permitted. And although such counterfactual speculations are really beyond the pale of a biography, still it would have been nice to see more acknowledgment of the role Tiptree's above-average economic freedom played in allowing her character to become so involuted.
The more troubling or problematical issue I have with Phillips's book relates to the larger question of how we can best classify the source of Tiptree's lifelong angst, anomie, and unease, the engine that fueled her scattered aspirations, her writings and, ultimately, her death.
Was it sheerly down, or even preponderantly, to her gender, or was it due to something else, such as misanthropy and existential nausea and perfectionism? Or was it a conflation of all of the above tendencies and forces?
There is no denying that the major hook for this book, the aspect that has garnered the most attention and publicity, is Tiptree's split gender identity, the way her inborn instincts and libido were channeled by the (possibly repressive) culture. It's the most salacious, scandalous, juicy aspect of the story, and the main lens through which Phillips examines her subject. But is it a distorting lens?
Now, certainly we have to acknowledge at the outset that everything Phillips maintains about Tiptree's sexual confusion and how it affected her agonized life is true and accurate. Tiptree's own comments, both private and public, bear out Phillips's thesis about the centrality of this issue. Nor does Phillips indulge in excessive feminist polemics or tendentious slanting of events. Once in a while, she'll overstep neutrality, as with the quote cited above, about natural beauty being a misfortune. (If so, it's a strange misfortune that millions strive to acquire artificially.) Or when Phillips says of Tiptree's short career as a visual artist, “Like many women, she painted herself,” implying that self-portraiture is somehow an exclusively insightful feminine mode—tell that to Rembrandt.
But what is central is not necessarily the whole story. The Sun is central to the Earth's orbit, and provides vital light and heat. But we breathe an atmosphere as well, and touch the soil, and see the horizon, and sometimes forget the Sun is even shining.
To assign Tiptree's fate and mature condition predominantly to her gender problems, to view the whole course of her existence from child explorer in Africa to elderly woman with the weapon of her suicide in hand strictly through this template, is to argue that biology is destiny. Such a thesis undercuts Tiptree's universality and relevance and relatability. It makes her a one-sided freak who can never serve as a model or inspiration for the broad majority of readers.
It also seems to me that to simply point to female counterexamples from Tiptree's own generation or adjacent generation, who, whatever their sexual identity, managed to negotiate the male-dominated culture more capably (thanks, admittedly, to better brain chemistry) is sufficient to prove that there was more holding Tiptree back than simple non-acceptance from the straights, or active sociopolitical roadblocks from outside herself. I would cite the careers of Carol Emshwiller (born 1921) and Kit Reed (born 1932) as germane to a rendering of how it would have been possible for Tiptree to carve an alternate path for herself, had she not been her own worst enemy.
Now, as I said earlier, Phillips, by book's end, ultimately recovers from this alluring temptation to stuff Tiptree into a straitjacket of bisexual confusion. She identifies and examines several other forces and influences and tendencies in Tiptree's life and mentality that also had a hand in shaping her, from her domineering mother to a suppressed kind of masochism. By page 279, a nearly sixty-year-old Tiptree is quoted as perceiving her own deepest problem as being simply and inescapably “that obscene joke known as [being] alive and conscious.” That's an existential malaise that lifts Tiptree into new territory.
Now, unshackled from gender dysphoria, we can begin fruitfully to associate her at various points of intersection with a host of other familiar beloved freaks from within and without our genre. Like H.P. Lovecraft (and note Tiptree's desire, as with HPL, to attain a sexless avuncular state: “Uncle Tip” indeed!), Tiptree experienced a kind of cosmic horror at the fundamental workings of the universe. Like Robert E. Howard, she let apronstrings bind her to the point of despair. Like J.G. Ballard, she witnessed brutalities in her childhood that warped her understanding of—or perhaps peeled away the facade from—the worst side of human nature. Like Jerzy Koszinski, she experienced a traumatic childhood that led to a need to fabulate about her biography and indulge in less-conventional sex. Like Michel Houellebecq, she was often prone to reduce literary or theoretical sex to its animalistic, Darwinian components. Yet like Theodore Sturgeon (another parent-damaged figure), she constantly sought love and connection in her life and fictions.
I hope my point has come across in this rambling dissent from the consensus interpretation of Tiptree's life as dominated by her gender problems. Tiptree is too universal and valuable a figure, her legacy too important, to fall into the trap of consigning her to a single category, even if that category was, by her own admission, crucial to her development and self-perception.
And, luckily, Phillips's skill and insights, her accomplishments here, are ultimately of such high quality and discernment that, with a little additional skepticism on the reader's part, Tiptree emerges as a figure irreducibly allied with us all.
As the female impersonator Ru Paul is fond of saying, in stressing our commonality, “We're born naked, and the rest is drag."
Copyright (c) 2006 Paul Di Filippo
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ON BOOKS by Peter Heck
JAMES TIPTREE, JR.
The Double Life of Alice Sheldon
by Julie Phillips
St. Martin's, $27.95 (hc)
ISBN: 0-312-20385-3
The cliche that most writers live uninteresting lives is largely accurate. After all, how much excitement is there in sitting alone, turning blank paper (nowadays, a blank screen) into copy? As Robert A. Heinlein is supposed to have observed, the high point of the day for most writers is opening the mailbox; the low point usually comes immediately thereafter. Superficially, then, a writer's biography shouldn't be a promising subject for a book. But here, as in so many ways, Tiptree is an exception.
Most readers probably know that James Tiptree, Jr., made his SF debut in 1968, quickly making a splash as a writer to watch. Nebula and Hugo awards eventually vindicated that promise. At around the same time, Tiptree began a correspondence with many of the important writers of the time—Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, Joanna Russ, Harry Harrison, and a number of others. The letters built the picture of an exciting life: African safaris, fishing expeditions, service in World War II, hints of a postwar job with one of the spy agencies—and of a witty, erudite person with whom it was easy to talk about almost any subject.
But there was a mystery about “Tip.” The writer conducted all his business through a PO Box, never visited editors or agents, and was unknown on the convention circuit. No one had even spoken to the writer on the phone. The letters would plead work or travel as a reason for remaining aloof from the social world of SF. Fans and fellow writers built up their own theories; even so, it was a huge surprise to most of the SF world when, in 1976, James Tiptree, Jr., turned out to be a middle-aged Virginia housewife named Alice Sheldon. And she was not one, but two award-winning authors, having also published under the name “Raccoona Sheldon."
Now Julie Phillips has given us a look at the person who became Tiptree. It turns out to be a great story—not only because Alice Bradley Sheldon (1915-87) actually had lived the exciting life Tiptree constantly alluded to, but because of the insight it provides into a writer who did as much as anyone to raise the standards of the field in one of its most creative periods. With access to the author's private papers, to her voluminous correspondence, an
d the reminiscences of those who knew the writer, both in her mundane life and in her identify as Tiptree, Phillips has given us as full a portrait as we're likely to get of Tiptree/Sheldon.
Alice Sheldon was brought up in a home where creativity was valued: her mother, Mary Hastings Bradley, was a popular writer in the twenties and thirties, and for a long time it looked as if Alice was going to make a career as a painter or an illustrator. She had been reading SF for at least twenty years before she started writing it, so she was far more familiar with the language and tropes of the field than many beginners. And she had spent enough time in the “real world"—the Women's Army Corps in World War II, a New Jersey chicken farm in the late forties, the CIA from 1952 to 1955—to have serious concerns to bring to her fiction. (Her husband “Ting” remained in a high position with the CIA until his retirement in 1970.) And, of course, it's a mug's game to try to find the roots of genius in the details of biography.
Phillips spends a fair amount of time on the issues raised by Sheldon's gender masquerade, which not coincidentally took place just as feminist issues and women writers were beginning to make their presence felt in SF. Tiptree got credit for sensitivity when Sheldon's letters and stories showed real awareness of the issues facing women. As her writing career grew, though she lived under considerable strain as her mother and her husband (and she herself) underwent health problems. That strain manifested itself in depression that heavy doses of self-medication did little, ultimately, to allay. (She had been a sporadic amphetamine abuser at least as early as her army days.)
Many people know that Alice Sheldon committed suicide; Phillips sets the scene and supplies some previously unknown details. In the early morning on May 19, 1987 Sheldon took one of her pistols (she had been an avid hunter and sharpshooter since her teen years) and shot her husband Ting, now blind and in failing health, as he lay sleeping. She called her lawyer, then shot herself. The police found her in bed with Ting, holding his hand. The event shocked, but did not entirely surprise, those who had been receiving her sporadic hints at self-destruction over the years.
Asimov's SF, February 2007 Page 21