Meet Me at Infinity (48 page)

By 1967 all experimental work was finished, with unexpectedly good results and the doctorate could be no longer deferred. (PhD, mcl. G.W.U. 1967) This precipitated a crisis; health was failing under the combination of experimental work and the teaching load of “monster” classes routinely given to new PhDs. It was also necessary to obtain a new postdoctoral grant for further research, a full-time job in itself. All in all it appeared impossible soon to resume pure research, which had been the basic goal.

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.

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 with the Psychology Departments of G.W.U. and American—not to mention ever being again employed, had I desired, in the CIA.

A year passed, during which it became clear that the marvels of medicine were not going to give a fifty-five-year-old the strength for work that would have exhausted one half her age. Luckily, the challenge of writing had 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.

Writing. Pre-Science Fiction

The author’s only non-SF story is a fiction/fact piece, “The Lucky Ones,” in the 16 Nov 1946 New Yorker; a plea for more humane American treatment of the D.P.s (“Displaced Persons”)—those pitiable surviving thousands of Nazi slave laborers, Jews and non-Jews, who as children had been kidnapped from their homelands, raped, tortured, starved, and worked near to death, and were then fallen into American hands.

Science Fiction Writing

Foreword; The Pesudonym That Got Away
.

The first SF stories were naturally not expected to sell, so a pseudonym was selected at random (from a jam pot). The plan was to use a new name for each new batch of stories, so as to avoid permanent identification with the slush pile. But “Tiptree” sold, and thus became permanent. In the interests of consistency and privacy the name was used for all SF dealings, and for letters that grew into deeply friendly correspondences, with the unintended result that for eleven years only H. D. Sheldon—not even Tip’s agent, Bob Mills—knew who or what Tiptree was. Tiptree in fact began to take on a peculiar, eerie, vitality of his own, while the author yearned more and more to write at least a few things as a woman. Hence, in 1974 “Raccoona Sheldon” appeared: but she required a minor assist from Tiptree to get started—Tip at first could afford to give her only some weaker stories.

Then, in 1977 the author’s mother died after a long illness, at the age of 92, and Tiptree—who wrote only the truth in all letters—had imparted so many of the details of Mary Bradley’s unusual life that when her obituary was read by certain sharp-eyed young friends,
⁴
James Tiptree, Jr., was blown for good—leaving an elderly lady in McLean, VA, as his only astral contact.

Science Fiction Writing

James Tiptree, Jr., is known primarily as a short story writer, having published over fifty shorts, novellas, and novelets (including four by “Raccoona”) to one novel, as of 1982. All but the most recent stories have been collected in four volumes.

This relatively slender body of work has begun to attract critical attention from beyond the strict borders of SF, following the trend which is luring mainstream critics to peer over their fences at any handy sample of SF. In the New York Times Book Review, Gerald Jonas called Tiptree’s tales “some of the finest SF short stories of the past decade,” and the collection Warm Worlds inspired him to say, “If it made any sense to talk about a successor to Cordwainer Smith among contemporary SF writers, the most likely candidate would be James Tiptree, Jr.”

Tiptree’s rise in the SF world has often been called meteoric. To the author’s bewilderment, no story remained unsold; even more startling were the award nominations which started after the first “serious” story (“The Last Flight of Doctor Ain,” 1969). This curiosity and commotion began to threaten privacy, and even aroused suspicions that Tiptree’s determined reticence was a publicity trick.

The excitement, the unrelenting personal curiosity—and the awards—continued, somewhat to the author’s dismay, until late 1977, when Tiptree (and Raccoona) were abruptly unmasked.

After this only the feminist world remained excited, but on a different basis, having nothing to do with the stories. Tiptree, by merely existing unchallenged for eleven years, had shot the stuffing out of male stereotypes of women writers. Even nonfeminist women were secretly gleeful. The more vulnerable males discovered simultaneously that Tiptree had been much overrated, and sullenly retired to practice patronizing smiles. Thus the matter stands today.

But no account of Tiptree’s career could be complete without mention of the many helping hands that were extended to the new writer—truly too many to name, except for the very early good offices of SF’s incomparable writers-turned-editors: Harry Harrison of Amazing and Fantastic, Ed Ferman of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; later and to a lesser extent Ted White then of Amazing and Fantastic—and at all times in all weathers, one whose friendly deeds were beyond calculation—Frederik Pohl of If and Galaxy. And not-to-be-forgotten, on the same ‘mags’, Judy-Lynn del Rey, then Benjamin. But the list must stop here, for that brings up the grand women pen-friends whom lonely Tip valued so much—writerly Vonda Mclntyre, brave Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Joanna Russ the scholarly fireball, and Ursula K. Le Guin, nonpareil. And—but there is space for only one more, so let it be that most intrepid and honorable of men and fans, Jeffrey D. Smith, of Baltimore.

When Tiptree’s stories first began to appear, Jeff was publishing a formidable fanzine Phantasmicom (later Khatru), and he wrote to the mysterious Tiptree requesting a postal interview, and promising not to “pry.” Tiptree, realizing that some sort of biographical information would have to be furnished before exasperated blurb writers hired a detective, decided to take a chance on Jeffrey D. Smith. (Later on, other writers called this act insanely trustful.) The gamble paid off in years of friendship and jollity. From that interview—now regarded by strangers as a “research tool”—the correspondence progressed to miniarticles on everything Tiptree encountered, from the Maya Indians’ reason for not pointing at rainbows to the odor of glaciers, all of which Jeff published under a column name, “The 20-Mile Zone.” And there grew up a quiet pen-friendship, which seems to be surviving the replacement of “Tip” by “abs” as well or better than some noisier ones.

—1980-1982

CA: You wrote and published under the name James Tiptree, Jr., for about ten years before your real personal identity was discovered. Did that discovery in any way change your feelings about your writing?

Sheldon:
Yes, it did very much. It’s a little difficult to explain why—perhaps because there is a certain magic in writing, and there is no magic in writers. I have a very strong feeling that the writer’s life and the writer’s work should be kept separate, especially in writing that carries some sense of wonder.

A science fiction writer often has a deep urge toward transcendence, strong dreams of “this can’t be all there is.” He or she sets out to show that maybe this
isn’t
all there is. The story speaks to that hunger in others: magic.

And then the camera suddenly pans and picks up the writer himself, he’s slouched in a haze of smoke over his typewriter, and it’s all come out of his little head… Magic gone.

Or maybe the story’s a bitter tragedy—alien beauty loved and lost. It rather destroys the effect if you can think, Oh well, this is because that writer really yearns to eat granola for breakfast and he was unable to get granola last week and therefore he’s bitter.

Kipling said it all in a poem called “The Appeal.” It ends:

And for the little, little, span

The dead are borne in mind,

Seek not to question other than

The books I leave behind.

He detested this prying into the writer’s life. Of course his was to some extent Victorian secrecy, but I agree very strongly with that idea. A man called Cordwainer Smith, who was really Paul Linebarger, a diplomat, wrote some marvelous science fiction, and then he wrote an autobiographical introduction to one of his collections, and it was dreadful. It was racist and sexist, it contained sickening references to his dear old mammy and his house in general, and yet all that never showed in his work at all. His work was clear and pure and represented a type of stern and wonderful fantasy that was just not evident in his thinking about himself and his own life.

And writers are often, when not just plain obnoxious, extraordinarily dull: because if they’re any good they’re saving whatever they have that
isn ‘t
dull for their work, and since that is in a state of unhatchedness it can’t be produced anyway. They usually have knobby faces and slightly furtive eyes; They’re very preoccupied with whether they’re getting a cold or whether someone is going to tow away their car. If you take them seriously in person, they often yield to an urge to be pompous. All of which has absolutely nothing to do with whatever jewellike thing they may have created, or their view into another world.

Of course I too have all those knobs and neuroses, plus I’m paralyzing shy inside—a trait which easily escapes those who see me striding into meeting and Safeways and joking with strange women. I enjoy strange women—if they don’t linger—but the rest is all facades. What no one sees is the cost of that facade. (Even chatting like this with a most agreeable, non-threatening person, I find I’ve scrooched down in the chair and pulled away as far as the phone will go.) Last week two pleasant strangers interviewed me. I genuinely liked them, and I couldn’t help impersonating Miss Vitality of 1932—until their car was round the bend, then I collapsed for the rest of the day in a dark room with a cold rag on my head.

Facades! In Officers’ Training School I had to give a two-minute lecture on—shall I ever forget it?—“Paragraph Ten of the Infantry Drill Regulations.” I climbed onto the two-foot high speaker’s stand, announced my topic, glanced at the hall of faces, threw up decisively, and fainted crash to the floor, blacking both my eyes. (I was later told it was voted Most Interesting Format.)

Perhaps this will convey that Tiptree’s elusiveness was no pose?

But what do people like me do when they don’t want to give up, when they want to play the world’s games and do the world’s work, with its thundering great Tables of Organization, its gregarious armies? Well, you learn to make it through the sign-up stages—and then you become very good at sniffing out the unpopular specialities (often the most interesting, if you like work), the empty T/O boxes, the back channels and off hours. And pretty soon you become Our Expert, and set your own hours. It’s surprising what you can do. Oh, those wonderful years when I had my own keys to cold official buildings, because I came to work at 0400 in the dawn. How I loved flying along the great empty expressways into D.C., with the mercury vapor lamps lighting the gold rumps of the Memorial Bridge Percherons, and the sky turning dove-blue and red behind the deserted statues! A private city.

And when I was at—where else?—Sarah Lawrence College, I used to do all my work at night and leave it on the professor’s desk in the morning, like the elves. I’d still like to do that, to be able to write stories on old leaves or something and have them flitter down through the editor’s transom with nobody knowing who did it. Or like the hex signs that appear on fences. All that’s gone. All my wonderful anonymity is gone; the reader is tied to the specific person. Maybe I’m oversensitive there, because when I myself read fiction, the writer is very much present if I know anything about him, and I can’t divorce the two… it was a lovely life being nobody. But then of course the “nobody” became terribly obtrusive, so that in some ways I was glad to get rid of him because I was evoking too much curiosity.

CA: So the pseudonym really did the opposite of what you would have liked?

Sheldon: Toward the end, yes it did. You see, with “Raccoona” selling too, things had got fairly confusing. I was writing stories and letters as female me, but from a place I didn’t live in and without my own real past—and at the same time writing and corresponding as a man who for a decade had made himself part of me too; Tip owned my past life and my years of SF friendships and he lived in my home, but my husband was his “gringo friend”… . I’m sure you sense the chaos?

And then comes this blow, this glare of light on me as “Alice B. Sheldon”—a third persona still, who wasn’t even a writer in “real” life, and didn’t know any of my real SF friends, or vice versa. Frankly, I came unglued. Not over it yet.

And to top all, offering such a dull surprise. Roll of drums, curtain quivers, thrills, starts up, footlights blaze, and front and center Our Hero turns out to be nothing but a nice old lady in McLean.

At least I hope I’m “nice”… or do I?

CA: What’s wrong with that?

Sheldon: Oh, nothing in theory, I suppose. Except stereotypes, my own included. But in practice you lose some context factors that give a bit of ersatz excitement and credibility.

For instance, a woman writing of the joy and terror of furious combat, or of the lust of torture and killing, or of the violent forms of evil—isn’t taken quite seriously. Because women aren’t as capable of violent physical assault—not to speak of rape—as men are.