Julie Phillips
JAMES TIPTREE, JR
The double life of Alice B. Sheldon
480pp. St Martin’s Press. $27.95.
0 312 20385 3
James Tiptree, Jr’s stories first appeared in science fiction magazines in the late 1960s. Within a few years, this reclusive writer had won some of the genre’s major awards and had a sizeable following. His works were complex, ambivalent, his public persona mysterious. Tiptree was celebrated as a “man’s man”, who hinted at having undertaken global adventures, war exploits and international intrigues for the CIA; his terse, jaunty style recalled Ernest Hemingway, and he confidently used socio-technological developments in his propulsive narratives in a way that rivalled Robert Heinlein. Yet this man’s man turned repeatedly and with burning conviction to a theme that few science fiction writers explored; the ways in which gender conventions maim women and damage human relationships. Tiptree’s stories had élan, but they nearly always ended in death.
When it was revealed in 1976 that Tiptree was really a sixty-one-year-old woman named Alice Bradley Sheldon, the works took on a different resonance; and when Sheldon shot her husband and herself in a suicide pact in 1987, further interpretations of Tiptree’s mordant narratives seemed necessary. (Ursula K. Le Guin later observed, “I think a lot of us didn’t realize how bleak her stories are until the end, when we saw that she really meant it”.) Julie Phillips’s perceptive and richly detailed account of the complexities of Alice Sheldon’s life reveals that, like Tiptree, she did explore the globe, take part in war, work for the CIA, and much else besides. And so the tales are transfigured once again, becoming deeper and more affecting. They speak more urgently now that we know the story of their composition and something of the teller behind the tales. Sheldon’s work was an apologia for her life and the story of her life is complex and moving. Her science fiction has a secure place in the history of the genre, but her life should be more widely known for what it tells us about relations between mothers and daughters, men and women, gender and biology, fiction and reality.
It was only by inventing James Tiptree, Jr, that Alice Sheldon could speak in her own voice. The pseudonym began in 1967 as a joke – the name came from a jam Sheldon saw at the supermarket – but it became the temporary solution to long-standing dilemmas posed for her by birth and upbringing. Born in 1915, Sheldon was the only child of wealthy and unconventional parents, who doted on her but set high standards she felt she could never attain. Herbert and Mary Bradley were widely known in the interwar period for their explorations of Africa, and were criticized for taking Alice along with them when she was still a child. (Some worried she was being used as bait to lure gorillas.) Mary was also a novelist and an energetic Chicago socialite. Until her death in 1976 at the age of ninety-four, she remained a loving, dominating and competitive figure in her daughter’s life; Sheldon wrote that “she didn’t provide a model for me, she provided an impossibility”. Sheldon was raised to be a “good girl” – to repress anger, live for the welfare of others, get married to a wealthy boy from an Ivy League school – while also fulfilling the unspoken expectation that she would be as accomplished as her mother, if not more so.
Towards the end of her life Sheldon was diagnosed as suffering from bipolar disorder. Phillips shows that she became distanced from her own feelings at an early age, often resorting to fantasies of escape rather than confrontation. She was enraged at having to adapt to standards set by others: at first those of her parents, and then the prevailing cultural attitudes that saw women as second-class citizens. The conventions of her upbringing made it difficult for her to express such antagonistic feelings until late in her life – and even then it was only under the masculine guise of James Tiptree, Jr, and through the counterfactual fancies of science fiction, that she felt able to vent her frustrations. Phillips’s thorough research into Sheldon’s private papers uncovers loves and powerful desires that she dared not express. During her college years at Sarah Lawrence College, she found herself attracted to women, but was stymied by the expectation that she would follow a set path from debutante to housewife. Phillips cites a stray note jotted in a college notebook, probably while drunk, that movingly captures the predicament of her life and the central impetus behind Tiptree’s fiction:
“Oh god pity me I am born damned they say it is ego in me I know it is man all I want is man’s life. My damned oh my damned body how can I escape it I play woman woman I cannot live or breathe I cannot even make things I am going crazy, thank god for liquor.”
Escape was not something Sheldon allowed herself often – not through liquor, or even through science fiction, which she had loved since childhood. (As an adult she saw it as a guilty pleasure to be read before sleep.) Her parents wanted her to be a debutante and she dutifully attended her formal dance, eloping over a week later with one of the first boys she met. During the Second World War, she gave up promising careers as a painter and art critic to join the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, “a world of women” she hoped would demonstrate that women need not be confined to gentility and the home. Her marriage ended in divorce and the Corps was not the feminist utopia she craved, but Sheldon found her métier in intelligence work. In the early 1950s she was employed as an analyst by the CIA, alongside her second husband, Huntington Sheldon.
She left the CIA to become a research psychologist, and while completing her PhD dissertation wrote science fiction to relax. The stories were a lark; writing “disreputable” science fiction meant she wouldn’t be competing with her mother, and the pseudonym gave her the freedom to write without having to be a “good girl”. That Tiptree was a man meant she could assume the power and authority accorded to male authors, and subvert not only the technocratic biases of the genre but also the wider gender roles it tended to reflect. Tiptree redefined the standard SF tropes of aliens and machines; he depicted women as the quintessential alien in a culture governed by men (“The Women Men Don’t See”), and love as ultimately a machination of biological imperatives inimical to individual fulfilment (“Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death”). Nearly everything by this new writer sold. Within just a few years, Tiptree won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards, the highest commendations in the field.
Sheldon had earlier attempted conventional fiction – one of her stories sold to the New Yorker in 1946 – but work by the “good girl” tended to be sentimental and preachy. Tiptree’s stories were spare and morally ambiguous. In “Houston, Houston, Do You Read”, he presents a feminist “utopia” in which a future Earth has been depopulated of all men, and a communal, nurturing and non-aggressive society of cloned women has come into being. Some readers thought the story too stark, a man-hating, feminist screed, for the male time-travellers marooned in this self-sufficient world are quarantined, and perhaps exterminated: men no longer have anything to contribute. It is true that Sheldon believed that men were predisposed by nature to aggression, and women to nurturing. But the apparent utopia has, by eradicating its masculine attributes, sacrificed its humanity. One woman dismisses the works of Shakespeare and Dickens as “the historicals . . . . They’re not very realistic”. This leads one of the time travellers to wonder “how what he supposes are the eternal verities of human nature can have faded from a world’s reality. Love, conflict, heroism, tragedy – all ‘unrealistic’?”. Tiptree’s stories yearn for a recognition of the common human bond between the sexes. They sometimes offer the slim hope that the asymmetries of biology might be remedied through cultural change. However, Sheldon was not optimistic that men would cede much power to women, or that the imperatives of biology could be made amenable to human desire. Gender conventions alienate the sexes from each other, and biology makes us strangers to ourselves. Only through the subterfuge of Tiptree could she escape from her painful realization that, as a woman, “I live in my body and my social presence as an alien artifact”.
When Tiptree was revealed to be an “old lady in Virginia”, she felt she had lost any chance she had to be recognizably human:
“Tiptree was “magical” manhood, his pen my prick. I had through him all the power and prestige of masculinity . . . . I want power. I want to be listened to. And I’ll never have it. I’m stuck with this perverse, second-rate body; my life.”
She continued to write, but felt constrained to be the good girl once more; her later writings are often marred by sentiment. Tiptree was gone. And so was Alice Sheldon. She wrote to a friend that “those eight years in SF was the first time I could be really real”.
