Eventually she went to the Pentagon, where she did intelligence work during World War II, and spent the next few years having affairs with men. She seemed to have resigned herself to the fact that her romantic future, however imperfect, inauthentic, or unsatisfying, would be with a man. And she spent her spare time writing fiction. Her efforts, filled with autobiographical elements, fell flat. (“‘Ouch’ simply is not a story,” she wrote years later, in a letter to a friend.) It would take the authority and secrecy of a male pseudonym, and the genre of science fiction, to transform her pain, anguish, and desire into compelling material.
Stationed in London in 1945, Alice met the man with whom she would spend the rest of her life: Huntington “Ting” Sheldon, a forty-two-year-old army colonel who had been a Wall Street banker. He fell in love with her—hard. Ting came from the “right” social class; like Alice, he’d found a sense of purpose during wartime and had used military service to escape the confines of his past. He was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, to a family that had earned a fortune in banking and lost it in the Great Depression. He attended boarding school at Eton and university at Yale. Though Ting was a calm, steady, dependable presence, he was not without baggage—he’d already been married and divorced twice and had three children.
But now Ting wanted to marry her, and as a thirty-year-old woman, Alice felt she was in no position to refuse. She wanted children; she wanted to feel cared for and secure. For the most part, Ting proved a supportive, easygoing partner who gave her space when she needed it. He also put up with her mood swings. But there were problems. Like her first husband, Ting drank a lot. He was emotionally distant and did not share her love of reading. And their sex life was terrible. A year later, Alice’s literary agent, Harold Ober, submitted a short story she’d written to the New Yorker, and it appeared in the magazine on November 16, 1946. “The Lucky Ones” was the first and last piece she would publish under her own name. Nor would she ever submit another story to the New Yorker. She had been unhappy with the intensive editing process, complaining that “it was astounding how they edited me into New Yorkerese,” and she found the magazine as a whole too polished and genteel.
Despite her family pedigree, Alice was anything but polished and genteel. Among the multitudes within her were, she said, “a female wolf who howls, and a gross-bodied workman who moves things and sweats, and a thin rat-jawed person who is afraid and snaps . . . [and] a disastrous comedian who every so often comes roaring out of the wings and collapses the show. Now it seems clear that while one might get one or two of these characters to write for a living, most of them won’t go along, and the comedian’s opinion is unprintable.”
Her impressive publishing accomplishment at such a young age notwithstanding, the next several years hardly indicated that Alice was on her way to becoming a famous writer—one who, in the words of Isaac Asimov decades later, “has produced works of the first magnitude and has won the wild adulation of innumerable readers.” In fact she seemed about as far away as possible from a literary life. She felt lost. Depressed by her lack of sexual chemistry with Ting and her ambivalence toward their marriage, she tried to leave him at one point. “What shall I do?” she wrote in a letter to her husband, announcing her departure. “Lie and deceive, put on a bold face and knock the bottom out of everything? Drift in this void and try to work? I cannot hold the beast that is me in check much longer.” But she didn’t leave, and apparently never even gave him the letter. (Eventually, the couple agreed on an open marriage.) Alice abandoned her attempts at journalism, having experienced little success at selling pieces as a freelancer. Ting, too, was adrift in his work, unable to secure a new job on Wall Street.
After seeing an ad in the New York Times offering a chicken hatchery for sale in New Jersey—with promises of high income and working only half the year—the Sheldons impulsively decided to buy the business, which they ran for nearly five years. The work was hard and the routine dull, but at first the rigid structure of their days was good for Alice. When she realized, however, that she could not conceive a child, she was devastated and began spending the little free time she had writing both poetry and prose, including the beginning of a mystery novel and some science fiction. In knowing that she would never become a mother, she felt betrayed by her own body. She decided to confront this issue in an essay, asserting that a woman’s body was an “unpredictable, volcanic, treacherous, merry, rather overpowering thing to live with.” She likened her body to “a large and only partly tamed animal, day and night the damn thing is being itself, with its own semi-inscrutable operations.”
The characteristics of her gender—punishing and restrictive, yet wildly untamable—left her feeling repeatedly “derailed” in life, and she described being a woman as an almost debilitating condition, and certainly a steep disadvantage. She argued (rather reductively, even for the era) that if she had been born male, she might have been more aggressive and could have become “a rather prosy young engineer or research scientist,” married with children. “Instead of which, I was born a girl,” she wrote, “and my life has been quite different. . . . I have had about four different and disparate careers. I have been married twice. I have seriously upset a great many of the people who came close to me. . . . I have been called brilliant, beautiful, neurotic, suicidal, restless, amoral, anarchic, dangerous, diffuse, weak, strong, perverse, and just plain nuts.” It seemed to Alice that the impossible fact of living as a woman was enough to make anyone despondent or crazy. She devised no solutions to her profound quandary, but she did extol the virtues of “a great deal more homosexual activity on the part of women.” Rather than adhering to binary notions of gender, Alice proposed five: men, women, children, mothers, and “human beings.” Unsure of where or how she fit into her own odd schema, she concluded wearily that it was perhaps best “in most of the waking hours of a non-pregnant woman to consider her a kind of man.”
In 1952, when Alice was thirty-seven, she and Ting turned to their former military and government contacts, sold the (woefully unprofitable) hatchery business, and moved to Washington, D.C., to work as analysts for the CIA. Ting worked in high-level intelligence positions for the next seventeen years, whereas Alice’s career was low-ranking, much to her frustration, and lasted only a few years. As a woman in a male-dominated agency, she stood no chance of having a powerful or well-paying job, but as someone who placed a high value on secrecy and privacy, she felt entirely comfortable in an environment that promoted covertness as policy. “I always had a feeling there were big things going on in her life that she would share with nobody,” one friend recalled of Alice. “She could have been living three or four lives at once.”
Alice was by nature flirtatious, but at the CIA she remained sartorially gender-neutral, a look she found appealing. “Boyish clothes look younger, or healthier,” she noted in an unfinished memoir in 1957, “because they contrast a woman’s features with a man’s, rather than with a girl’s. In a clean white shirt I still look like a perverse young boy, and this is about my best effect, from the standpoint of attraction.”
In 1955, Alice was in her third year at the CIA, on the verge of turning forty and deeply unhappy. Her mood swings were even more pronounced. She became addicted to prescription pills and at times felt suicidally depressed. Like many women, she felt conflicted about the gap between society’s demands on women and her own desires. Which should she reject, and at what cost? She felt that as a writer, she had nothing important to say—or at least nothing that would be heard. She was expected to be a devoted wife and a faithful, hardworking CIA operative; with whatever energy was left, she could attempt to write. The most obvious effects of such strong pressure were her increased hostility toward Ting and her general sense of inertia. “O, how I want to be loved, me myself—” she confided in a letter that year, “—and how I fear it—and what bliss it might be—brrr!—and how easy to shelve this whole thing.” That summer, she quit her job, left Ting, rented an a
partment, and “really destroyed all traces of my former personality.”
Self-creation and reinvention are deeply and quintessentially American notions (e.g., The Great Gatsby), and their appeal was not lost on Alice. A full decade before she would assume her pseudonym and launch her literary career, she felt the lure of inhabiting another identity. Alice was trapped in her nondescript life, and simply wanted to be someone else. For a start, she wanted the freedom of divorce and solitude. “I figure I have enough sub-personalities so I can build one up to where it is quite companionable,” she wrote. She was convinced that “[t]here is no way I can be peacefully happy in this society and in this skin. I am committed to Uneasy Street.”
After a year of aimless soul-searching, she returned to her husband, having resolved nothing. “So ensued a period of more milling (I’m a slow type) including some dabblings in academe,” she later recalled.
Because she was unable to commit herself wholly to one enterprise, she accepted Ting as an essential and permanent part of her life and struggled to find fulfillment elsewhere. Her inability to give herself full time to writing was partly due to her profound ambivalence toward the task itself. She questioned its value and believed that writing was “an act of aggression.” It was a betrayal, selfish, an act of exploitation. As Joan Didion famously noted, “Writers are always selling somebody out.” Janet Malcolm, too, has described even journalism as “morally indefensible,” and has characterized the journalist as “a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”
Alice decided to go to back to school to complete her undergraduate degree, which she earned, summa cum laude, at the age of forty-three. A friend and mentor at the time advised her that “the greatest favor you can do to others is being yourself as much as you can,” but Alice was still grappling with what that meant. “Being, I imagine, must be very simple,” she wrote back. “It is Becoming which is so messy and which I am all for.”
In 1959, Ting and Alice moved to McLean, Virginia. Eight years later, Alice earned her doctoral degree in psychology at George Washington University. Her mother’s physical health had severely declined—perhaps freeing Alice creatively—and she herself had survived another long period of depression. “Too much motor for the chassis,” she noted of her emotional and mental vulnerability. She was burned out in every sense and on the verge of physical collapse. Amphetamines, cigarettes, and coffee were her sustenance. Just as she was completing her dissertation (and perhaps realizing that academia was too confining for her ambitions, and too boring), Alice began writing fiction again. Sci-fi authors such as Samuel R. Delaney, Ursula K. Le Guin, and J. G. Ballard were gaining prominence. Soon she would take her place among them.
Midlife is often said to be a period of reinvention, and Alice, with typical intensity, accomplished this to an extreme degree. At the age of fifty-two, she abandoned her role as a research scientist and scholar and began submitting her stories to science-fiction magazines. These were hardly highbrow literary publications, but she wasn’t aiming for her work to appear in the New Yorker again. “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,” she later admitted. “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.”
Starting out, Alice wasn’t fearless enough to submit her writings under her own name. Anonymity seemed best. “I am a reclusive type, afraid of meeting people, except on paper,” she once admitted. A fateful trip to the supermarket with her husband in 1967 provided inspiration. Spotting a jar of Wilkin & Sons marmalade, she was struck by the label: “Tiptree,” in a distinctive cursive print. (The name came from the English village near which Wilkin & Sons owned farmland and orchards.) For the impulsive Alice, it held the key to her new identity. “James Tiptree,” she said to Ting. “Junior,” he replied, without missing a beat. They laughed, but the name stuck and an author was born. Alice had intended to use a different pseudonym for each short story she submitted to magazines, but as it happened, Tiptree had such a rapid rise to success that she kept him.
In a biographical sketch written more than a decade later for Contemporary Authors, Alice offered a cursory description of her bold postdoctoral transformation: “At this point a heart problem forced temporary retirement at semester’s end. Meanwhile, some SF stories written as a hobby were all selling, to the author’s immense surprise. As health returned, the temptation to write more won out. The author rationalized this activity as a claim for a broader concept of ‘science’ than rocketry and engineering, and the aim of showing SF readers that there are sciences other than physics, that bio-ethology or behavioral psychology, for instance, could be exploited to enrich the SF field.”
She continued: “But this writing had to be kept secret; the news that a new PhD with offbeat ideas was writing science fiction would have wakened prejudice enough to imperil any grant and destroy my credibility. . . . Luckily, the challenge of writing exerted its spell; retirement from university work became permanent without any great traumas, and the author found herself with a new line of effort ready-made for somewhat erratic health. . . . The first SF stories were naturally not expected to sell, so a pseudonym was selected at random (from a jam pot).”
By the time of that entry, her secret identity had been exposed for three years and “James Tiptree, Jr.” was already buried.
She had enjoyed enviable success as Tiptree, however. On some level, the experience must have been bittersweet: only after she inhabited the role of a male author did she achieve fame. As herself, just another woman writer, no one had paid much attention. “I have this childish fascination with brute power,” she admitted in an essay, written in her post-Tiptree years. “And since I have none, I am nothing.” As only herself, Alice felt oppressed by a sense of powerlessness and believed that her “authentic” self lay elsewhere. “ ‘I’ am not a writer,” she wrote in her diary. “ ‘I’ am what is left over from J.T. Jr., a mindless human female who ‘lives’ from day to day.” Interestingly, in the late 1960s, women writers in increasing numbers had taken up science fiction and fantasy, and although this was a male-dominated field by any measure, it was not impossible for a woman to become successful in the genre. Alice did not see herself among them, but there were women she admired who did just that, such as Le Guin, a contented housewife and mother living a “conventional” life in Portland, Oregon; and Joanna Russ, an outspoken feminist best known for her award-winning, stylistically inventive novel The Female Man. Russ was also a lesbian, and this was not without its complications for her writing career—yet somehow it gave her permission to work freely, beyond the standard definitions of gender. Neither of those models would prove a comfortable fit for Alice, but Le Guin and Russ became two of Tiptree’s favorite correspondents.
“Becoming” a man had seduced Alice partly because she believed it gave her access to power—and the possibilities that accompany power. “Alli Sheldon has no such choice,” she lamented, and imagined what life might have been like if she had been born a boy. No matter how accomplished she was as a woman—and she was extraordinarily so, however hard on herself she was—Alice never felt relief from what she viewed as the constraints of her gender. “Always draining us is the reality of our inescapable commitment,” she wrote, arguing that it is only women 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.” Of course, for a woman of her generation, the prospect of being a writer hardly carried the same stigmas and constraints as it had for nineteenth-century iconoclasts such as the Brontë
s, George Sand, and George Eliot. But the “giants” of literature were men. And to become a major sci-fi writer, a woman within a cloistered subculture, she might as well have been living in the previous century. To her, this realm truly seemed an impenetrable boys’ club. Things aren’t nearly so dire now, but it remains a male-dominated field (less so as a result of her pioneering efforts).
Alice was airing her concerns about gender imbalance in an era of so-called second-wave feminism, but rather than accept herself as a passive victim, she never stopped pushing back. She never gave up. “Maybe all one can do is to say the hell with it,” she wrote. “But—life is to use. Only, how? How? How? How?”
Writing under the cloak of Tiptree, she soon achieved success. She described once how “this letter from Condé Nast (who the hell was Condé Nast?) turns up in a carton. Being a compulsive, I opened it. Check.” Her story “Birth of a Salesman” had been sold to the sci-fi magazine Analog; the story “Fault” was bought by another editor for twenty-five dollars. Within a few weeks, a third sold. Letters and checks were addressed to “James Tiptree, Jr.,” so her alter ego began to seem like a real person, separate from her. He became a card-carrying member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). He even had a nickname—he insisted on being called “Tip.” And he enjoyed flirting in his correspondence with women. (Tip complimented one editor’s assistant by calling her a “superdoll.”) Some women developed crushes on him in return. One editor invited Tip to his wedding; of course, Tip had no choice but to decline. He mentored aspiring sci-fi writers—by mail, of course—and wrote fan letters to fellow authors he admired or envied, including Italo Calvino, Anthony Burgess, and Philip K. Dick. He was generous with praise for his fellow writers. “Who do I admire in SF?” he once wrote. “You and you and you as far as eye and memory reach, sir and madam. Some for this, some for that. All different. But more than that—I love the SF world. And I don’t love easy.”
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