Meet Me at Infinity (49 page)

And as for the joy of combat
⁵
, women rarely take pleasure in simply being beaten up, which is what fighting a man usually amounts to. (Fve seldom heard men speak of the joys of having both kneecaps splintered or their teeth knocked out).

Now we don’t want to get into metaphysics here—yesterday a man told me with real, glittery-eyed rage, that women are “stamping men into the ground” through alimony payments! “Don’t make a mistake, it’s war!” He actually hissed, “It’s war. War!” He and some like-minded male friends were going to Put an End to It. And he’d been a strong supporter of the ERA, too, he said, before his eyes were opened.

No. By “superior male violence” I refer simply to the fact that few men are afraid of walking past a solitary woman on a dark street. That people aren’t installing bars and alarms and deadbolts for fear of women breaking in and killing them. And history shows us few examples of women personally raising and leading a gang to butcher or bomb their neighbors, or conquer the world. In brief, war.

And war, as any soldier or senator will tell you, is a man’s activity—like Valley Forge, or the Charge of the Light Brigade. Women experience only the boring peripheral aspects of war, like being shot at My Lais, or gassed in Belsens. Or doing minor spy work, often enforced by threats to their young. Or bystand-ing at Hiroshima, or enduring gas or BW side effects, or slave labor, rape-death, and simple starvation; or that old classic, now somewhat out of vogue, the skewering of their infants, in or out of the womb. Women are the faceless figures, arms loaded with infants, scattering under the male splendor of the dive bomber, or hauling the children through the barbwire. Women are the meat in the minefields. The body count. Women in war are, in short, boring. No glory, no triumphant combat. That’s man’s activity.

But if we call war evil, we must admit that the world has suffered very little violent evil from, say, Mme. Bonaparte or Mrs. Genghis Khan.

Of course women too may be loaded with hidden hate and do terrible things to prisoners, or their own children. And there was always Lucrezia Borgia. But women’s evil is typically small scale, secret or indirect, like witchcraft and such, which man-the-hero can sweep away with a blow.

So when one who writes about serious, violent evil that turns out to be female, some readers may feel cheated—particularly if an action scene has stirred them. Now it all seems flat, even false—“What the hell does she know about real fighting?”

I think that for all of us the sense of being in Contact with something that has the potential to do—or maybe (wow!) has done—real evil, gives a little thrill to reading. Some people seem to have projected that onto Tiptree. Maybe I did a little, too. So to write on as a toothless tiger was shaming. And then all the silly publicity, and the way my mail changed…

CA: How did your mail change?

Sheldon: Oh, first the scads of personal letters and appeals, and everybody felt they had to say things about the whole revelation one way or another. No one talked about the stories anymore at all. That hurt. And Tiptree had a certain epistolary style, which no longer carried any conviction. People were wondering if they had been told the truth, too, you know. And I couldn’t help them, because what they thought was Tiptree’s style was my style, all I had. (“Alice B. Sheldon” doesn’t have any style except “Enclosed please find payment,” or “Dear Sir, the whatsit you sold me has now broken down for the sixteenth time—” which doesn’t take you very far.)

And some of the people I loved the dearest suddenly were very remote, and people whom I didn’t really know much about sort of cuddled up to me. I soon all but ceased writing letters.

And then there were the male writers who had seemed to take my work quite seriously, but who now began discovering that it was really the enigma of Tip’s identity which had lent a spurious interest—and finding various more-or-less subtle ways of saying so. (Oh, how well we know and love that pretentiously aimiable tone, beneath which hides the furtive nasti-ness!) I’d been warned against it, but it was still a shock, coming from certain writers. The one thing I admire about that type of male hatred is its strategic agility; they soon got their ranks closed. Only here the timing was so damn funny, the perfect unison of their “revaluation” of poor old Tip rather weakened the effect.

But the worst havoc was among Tip’s true friends, like some who actually phoned up. I felt they expected the phone to burst into colored lights, at least. But of course all they got was my terrible phone voice, made worse by some dental surgery, stuttering inanities… . broke my heart. And as for the brave one or two who actually come calling—No, I can’t go on…

CA: Your mother was a well-known writer. Did she influence you in that direction?

Sheldon:
Oh my, yes! She influenced me. Negatively. It’s horrible to have a mother—or parent-figure of any sort—who can do everything. A mother so able, no matter how dear and loving—and Mary gave real love—is still bad for a daughter because you identify with her. And without meaning to, you compete. And to be in competition with Mary was devastation, because anything I could do she could do ten times as well. It never occurred to me that I was a child and she was a grown woman and that was to be expected.

But “competition” was only the surface of the problem. I was a classic instance of the Hartley Coleridge bind, the trouble that makes children of high achievers so lucrative to psychotherapy: expectancies. I couldn’t count the times I was patted on the head by some Eminence and told, “Little girl, if you’re ever half as talented, half as charming, half as good—capable—warm-hearted—plucky—beautiful—witty—(name ten)—as your mother,
you’ll be lucky.”

Great. It was always “half,” too.

If I’d been a boy I’d have had the same about Father. In contrast to his outwardly macho activities, Herbert Bradley was a quiet, gentle man who daily provided a role model of cheer, sweetness, and courage despite pain or danger; of respect toward nature; and care for others, especially the weak. His heart and his integrity were in his face; people loved him at sight. Only after his death was it found that through his sixties, seventies, and eighties, his practice included an ever-increasing amount of free legal and other “house call” services to the aged, ill, destitute, or illiterate, often when he himself was in great pain from bones ill-set after an auto accident. Sometimes he was their only visitor. But he never let them feel that this was charity; it was “valued business.”

He had absolute integrity, and unbreakable determination. Toward bullies he was fearless, though his strength was of the thin-and-wiry, rather than the massively powerful kind. He concealed his inner fire, but only the very stupid mistook his gentleness for weakness, or threatened those in his care. Finally, he had the capacity and taste for incessant, painstaking hard work. (Before he led one expedition he had himself taught the rudiments of dentistry, and was thus twice able to save the day.) His leadership carried us safely through where all others before us had failed.

(This is not hyperbole. Along the way going in, and again, coming another way out, we passed their graves.)

Whenever the “You’ll be lucky” routine ran off, my parents always countered with some extravagant praise of me, and the assurance that I’d outdo them both in some undefined way. I had to; I was their only chick. The love they squandered on me was in real fact meant for ten, but what we know now was an rh-factor problem killed the other nine—for which I, of course, felt guilty.

The net of all this was a silent inner terror which began before I can recall and never left. What if I didn’t turn out “great”? What if I was just an ordinary, medium-bright Human? (Which is actually the case, subtracting for the excellent education.) But all my early life was lanced with that fear; if I wasn’t somehow Somebody, it would represent such a failure I’d have to kill myself to keep my parents from knowing how I’d betrayed their hopes.

These are the mechanics of the Hartley Coleridge syndrome, and there’s an old proverb that sums it up: In the shade of a great tree its seedlings die. Between them my parents “shaded” quite a bit of territory; and I had to get out of it or perish.
⁶

Luckily I was in love with drawing and painting by age five, and was facile enough to sell a few black-and-whites when I was about ten. Also I made a dust jacket for one of Mary’s short-story collections and illustrated her two chil-drens’ books. This went over fine: I fear Mary foresaw happy years of her writings being illuminated by her little yellow-haired daughter.

But art isn’t quite like that (and neither are daughters). By 1940 I’d long been a serious (or “easel”) painter, and got perceptive enough to realize I was a good grade B, no more, only with a quickness at new tricks which made ignorant souls call me an A.

But it was a wonderful experience; you can’t really
see
art until you try
hard
to make some yourself. And I’d worked hard at it. I’d clambered up the foothills to where I could really see the mountains beyond, which I could never reach. There is an indescribable pleasure in understanding how they were made in seeing at last just what Rembrandt, say, had done, and why Goya was Goya and Cassatt was Cassatt—and I wasn’t. The ego-pain soon evaporates in the sheer joy of recognizing virtuosity, greatness. (Which of us really suffers because we aren’t Shakespeare or Yeats?)

So when the war burst on us I was quite ready to change work. And I’d already formed a new interest: Why? Why was a painting “good”?

To the painter such questions are anathema,
⁷
but I wasn’t a painter anymore. By then I was an art critic, waiting out the Army’s call for enlisted women. As my scientific wonder intensified, I put it on ice during the war and the work that followed, but it popped out again strong as ever in 1955 and sent me back to school. (See Biog.) Probably few forty-year-olds have plowed through all the way to the doctorate simply to cast light on a personal question.

And science was another area my parents hadn’t appropriated—although I owe Mary my pleasure in it. On my ninth Christmas it was she, not Herbert, who insisted on giving me a build-it-yourself Lionel Train set instead of a dollhouse, so I could “learn about electricity,” which her education had denied her. It worked; my room soon looked like a tool shop, and the two books I took on the next trip were a trot of Homer and Virgil—
The Twilight of the Gods
—and
How to Build a Magneto.
(To this day I thank her whenever I check a circuit, and I commend the ability to fix a toaster as a potent aid to a happy marriage.)

Returning to 1955, all that time I did no writing, except a 1946 story in the
New Yorker,
trying to motivate Americans to treat Hitler’s ex-slaves more humanely. But it was another twenty years, when Mary had grown really old (she never recovered from Father’s death, they were a true marriage) and had long ceased to write before I felt finally free.

So one weekend I was finishing up my dissertation, and dog-weary—the end of my doctorate came very slowly because I was trying to get as much experimental mileage as possible out of my predoctoral grant. Suddenly, instead of catching some sleep, I found myself writing SF stories, four in all. I sent them off at random and forgot it.

Presently an envelop from Conde Nast (who’s he?) showed up, I threw it out as an ad, but my husband saw a check through its window and opened it. And then the others sold too, and I thought, well, this will make a pleasant hobby. The fact that it was
science
fiction took it far from Mary’s shadow.

CA: You’ve never talked specifically about what you did your psychology research in.

Sheldon:
No, because I feared it could be fairly dull to outsiders. But you can always cut. Well, perceptual psychology was then a quarrelsome mix of experimental, “white coat” psychology, and ethology, the study of the living animal in its natural habitat. GWU’s department was muchly under the influence of Hullian Drive Theory, a highly abstracted stimulus-response formulation of behavior, in which you plug in variables and everything winds up in one grand, quasi-arithmetical equation representing observable response—and the animal doesn’t do anything nonobservable like thinking or even perceiving.

But, as noted in the Biog., my early perspective was that of a painter. I came to psychology via my interest in vision and visual values, i.e., why we value certain visual effects while others, often those new to us, leave us cold or inspire aversion. That aspect of visual experience led logically to an interest in the large underlying problem of
perceptual novelty
itself. Any stimulus can be either novel or familiar, how do these “second-order” states affect our response to it? That seemed to me very important. But only one or two people, mainly in Europe, were even talking about “neophobia” and “neophilia.” American stimulus-response drive theory simply had no place for such concepts.

So I became very difficult toward the end of my course-work. Somebody would innocently cite a “law” of the organism’s supposed response, and Sheldon would erupt with, “Look, the organism you’re talking about is a laboratory rat that for two hundred years has been selected for cage life, and particularly for not biting psychologists until now it’s incapable of free life on its own.
⁸
And if you’re solemnly telling me that ‘the animal is attracted to novelty,’ (which was the theorem), Pll tell you that if you want to see real animals in the real world, you don’t go out and present them with maximum novelty. You go where they are and try to look like a bush.”

Because while of course it’s true that caged lab rats will cluster around some new object put in their cage, it’s also true that wild animals will avoid a place where they’ve met a novel stimulus—sometimes for years.

So here was a neat problem for experimental research—to devise a way of reconciling these two contradictory behavioral “laws.” If I could do it, it would not only answer one of my own questions, but it would bring a bit of order into one corner of a messy general field.