Note: Some of Alice Sheldon’s stories can be read at http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/archive.html
James Tiptree Jr. appeared on the science fiction scene in the late 60s with a string of disturbing and inventive short stories largely centered around sexual and reproductive roles. He seemed to come out of nowhere with a mature writing style and startling ideas, bringing psychology into a field given to space battles and robots. His interest in sexual issues and his obvious sympathy for women made him a showpiece in the science fiction community — the man who understands women — and he carried on colorful and intense letter relationships with Ursula le Guin and Joanna Russ among other stars of science fiction.
He was obsessively secretive about his identity, leading to persistent speculation and attempts to find him. Sleuthing by fans finally led to his exposure in 1976 as a seemingly quiet, ordinary, elderly woman living in Virginia. But Alice Sheldon was by no means ordinary. She was fiercely feminist but uneasy with women; highly intelligent; bipolar and hooked on multiple drugs to control (or intensify) her mood swings; sexually complex (it is too simple to say she was probably a lesbian) — and she was from a generation for which none of these were acceptable. She channelled childhood fears, attractions to women and obsessions with death into the explosion of James Tiptree’s stories, infusing them with lifelong interests in psychology, visual perception, military technology, mating cycles, sexual dynamics, journalism … by no means a complete list.
Her biographer, Julie Phillips, explores the many possible currents that came together in James Tiptree’s career, drawing heavily (and skillfully) on Sheldon’s unpublished letters, diaries, and writings. Alice Sheldon was born in 1915, the only daughter of highly accomplished and adoring parents (both traits proving oppressive in some ways to the young girl). Her parents were explorers who took their young daughter on several arduous treks through Africa, introducing her to enforced helplessness (a later source of rage), a child’s-eye view of death and casual killing, and teeming and alien biology. Sheldon’s mother particularly cast a long shadow over the young girl. She was a tough and capable explorer yet a supremely feminine socialite; the recognized writer of “women’s fiction,” adventure stories, and travelogues; a doting but subtly eviscerating mother. As a young woman Alice was looked upon as a promising visual artist, not a writer (unfortunately, very few of her paintings have survived). When she turned to writing, she had difficulty living up to her mother’s image and abandoned a number of projects. She found more success as a WAC in World War I and later as a photoanalyst for the CIA. She describes going into the army with great excitement at finding a world where women had power and competence, a reflection of her growing feminism and anger at the status of women.
Alice Sheldon seems to have been drawn to women throughout her life (describing some of these attractions quite graphically in her writings and expressing a desire to become an active lesbian late in her life in letters to Joanna Russ), but she found no way to live as a gay woman. She developed a pattern of attraction to unattainable and often doomed women (one went into an institution for alcoholics and another died of a septic abortion), perhaps fueling her constitutional inability to write a happy ending to a love story. As a young woman, she seems to have needed to think of herself as a man to some degree to make peace with her sexuality. Our cultural identification of masculinity with power evoked conflicting strains of longing and rage in her — she wished for the physical and social power of a man (and came to have a deep affinity for a male persona), yet she saw male power as oppressive and bitterly resented when it was used against her. She married twice, the first time proving disastrous and violent, the second time growing into an enduring and supportive if asexual marriage that was deeply important to her.
Alice Sheldon appears to have read science fiction since she was a young girl, probably starting with a 1929 issue of Weird Tales. (I wish Phillips had found more information about Sheldon’s thoughts on it, but there is unfortunate silence in this area. I found more in Meet Me at Infinity.) She started writing science fiction in 1966 at the age of 51 as a release from arduous work on her dissertation in psychology. James Tiptree was born on a whim when she looked for a pseudonym and found it in a brand of jam at Giant Foods.
Sheldon’s original reasons to use a pseudonym were understandable — she felt her academic career was too fragile to publish as Dr. Sheldon, and she certainly understood that her work would be taken far more seriously if it came from a man. But it also seems that she had a complex need for a male persona in order to develop as a writer and to acknowledge her darker perceptions. I suspect that all her emotional life was tied up with her ambiguous sexuality, and it felt unsafe to reveal it as a woman. Sheldon’s imagination broke open when she began to write as Tiptree, and he became far more important to her emotional life than any casual pseudonym could be.
While her first stories were light, under the shelter of Tiptree’s persona she turned to dark psychological themes she had considered all her life. She invented alien biologies with symbiotic sexes that hunt and destroy each other (”My Haploid Heart”). She conceived the chilling story of aliens destroying the human race by triggering violence inherent in male sexuality, forcing men to murder the women they have sex with (”The Screwfly Solution”). She wrote of a hideously ugly woman who chooses to live her life suspended in a tank while she animates the artificially grown body of a beautiful celebrity ( “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”). She wrote stories of encounters between humans and aliens with females as the dominant sex, stories of primitive creatures following instinctual mating cycles that are killing off their species, stories of humans drawn sexually to aliens at the cost of their lives. If it is ever fair to draw direct parallels between an artist’s life and art, I would say these stories read like a highly creative psychological autobiography. Tiptree was for a while her perfect psychiatrist, an outside eye to organize her turmoil and reach past her defences.
The persona of the older, sympathetic, masculine Tiptree lasted for ten years and gave Sheldon not only her voice as a writer but an active social life in the science fiction world she loved. One of the great pleasures of this biography is reading excerpts from the voluminous correspondence she carried on with the science fiction community as Tiptree. (It inspired me to buy “Meet Me at Infinity,” which collects some of her wonderful nonfiction writing.) Sheldon’s letter style as Tiptree was self-deprecating, often hilarious, incisive and manically inventive. She gave Tiptree much of her real biography, so was able to talk openly about long-hidden fears and resentments while reinforcing her male identity with real stories of African exploration, hunting, and CIA work (the prejudices of the time working in its favor). She even told the stories of her doomed attractions to women, safer to relate when they became Tiptree’s. She vented her bitterness at women’s status, earning Tiptree his reputation as a male feminist. As Tiptree, Sheldon flirted with her women correspondents (in a whistling-at-skirts style) and engaged in long discussions about male and female writing styles, feminism, and her belief in biological determinism, which was anathema to the growing feminist movement. (Her correspondence with early feminists in science fiction is priceless as both feminist and sci fi history.)
Sheldon came to fear that she could only write with an alternate persona, mainly as Tiptree, but also later as a retired schoolteacher named Raccoona Sheldon — an invention she acknowleged as a desire to begin to express herself openly as a woman, if not yet as herself. She talked about killing off James Tiptree, but couldn’t bring herself to do it, worrying that it was Tiptree who could write, not Alice Sheldon. By this time she had almost bifurcated her abilities, giving Tiptree her creativity and Alice the mundane life of fixing leaking roofs and taking care of her sick mother. When her identity was revealed in 1976, she was never completely successful in finding her writing voice without her protective personas. Though she wrote sporadically for several more years, her demons seem to have finally silenced her. She killed herself and her husband in a suicide pact (though it appears that his was not entirely voluntary — he had agreed in theory to the idea of a suicide pact, but seemed to have not been suicidal in reality, and Sheldon shot him in his sleep before killing herself).
I knew James Tiptree as a woman from the beginning, since I read her after her mask was stripped off. With the assurance of a newborn feminist, I found it obvious that these stories came from a woman and was sad that she didn’t take credit from the beginning. It would have been a huge support to women writers to be able to claim such a voice. But this was still the time before feminism, and these stories would probably never have been written without James Tiptree. When Sheldon first published as a woman (not as herself but as Raccoona), it was a source of rage but no surprise to her that Raccoona’s stories were considered weaker than Tiptree’s, less penetrating. In the face of this, Sheldon’s choice to write as a man seems like a creative adaptation. Her world was not gentle to women.
Reading the story of her decline into depression, I mourned the opportunity lost when Joanna Russ reached out to her and tried to draw her into the gay community late in her life. In an alternate universe, I picture her adored and revered by women in her old age, basking in pleasure even if she never writes another word. But such universes follow the rules of dreams, leaking their stories into each other, and no simple solution would work for Sheldon, so the universe shifts and the women become aliens — bodiless (out of sheer perversity) and forever unattainable. In the world of an artist, stories make universes, not the other way around.