Nom de Plume (27 page)

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.”

When editors asked to meet Tiptree in person, they were given lame excuses. (One editor tried to call him, only to find that Tiptree was not listed in the phone book.) In retrospect, it seems incredible that the ruse was so easy to pull off. But it worked, so Alice simply kept going. Even though she regarded her early sci-fi stories as “mechanical and banal,” they were selling, and the act of writing proved a pleasant diversion from the episodes of crushing depression that came on without warning. Yet her two selves were at odds: the charming Tiptree longed to connect, to find acceptance and kinship, to establish a sense of community in the sci-fi realm. He was witty, generous, and kind, a great raconteur, and always supportive of the endeavors and ambitions of his peers. But Alice was forced to act as his vigilant sentry, rejecting intimacy, withholding information, keeping outsiders at arm's length to protect her colossal secret. This internal clash between concealment and revelation was confusing and often painful to bear. “I've lived so deep under masks, my interior was built to satisfy me alone,” she wrote in a letter five years before her death. “I have lived 60 years almost totally alone, mentally, and quite content to have it so. I'm fond of a hundred people who no more know ‘me' than they know the landscape of Antarctica.”

Although other science-fiction writers were secretive, they rarely hid from both editors and readers. Tiptree was especially reclusive and protective of his privacy, which only encouraged rumors about his motivation. Once, a group of curious fans, attending a local sci-fi convention, staked out Tiptree's P.O. box in McLean. Luckily Alice was in Canada at the time.

Readers wondered whether Tiptree was very young, Native American, secretly gay, or working undercover for the CIA. One editor wrote, “It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing. I don't think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.”

Anyone who attempted to extract biographical information met with resistance, aside from learning broad, generic facts. To Le Guin, with whom Tiptree's epistolary friendship endured even after his pseudonymous cover was blown, he once described himself as “an old battered Airedale, one-eyed and droop-eared, whose scarred paws have travelled a lifetime of lava plains.” That's about as descriptive as he got about his appearance. He did, however, once venture so far as to send a “baby picture” to one of his correspondents—actually a photograph of Alice Sheldon at age one, in which she might easily have been mistaken for a boy.

In her extensive correspondence, Alice carelessly offered many of her own life experiences as Tip's, rather than making them up entirely—a misstep that would lead to the downfall of her alias. For instance, Tip told people that he was born in the “Chicago area,” had traveled around colonial India and Africa as a child, joined the army, and had “some dabblings in academe.” When Alice's elderly mother was ill, Tip described the burden of caretaking as his own. “At the moment I'm in and around the Chicago area, partly attending to family matters in the shape of an aged and ornery mother,” he revealed in correspondence.

Perhaps Alice's inability or unwillingness to create an entirely fictional background—familial or professional—for Tiptree indicated that on some level she hoped someone would discover her secret and that she would be made whole—freed from the burdens of duality. But for a while, no one did. And because Tiptree had no voice or body for others to know, people gave free rein to their fantasies about him. One person imagined him as Ichabod Crane–like. Another believed him to be exceptionally handsome. One fanzine publisher wrote to Tiptree with his take on the author's physicality: “You like wild shirts and ties. You smoke a pipe. You type fast and grin a lot.”

Whenever pressed about personal matters, Tiptree either ignored the queries or pushed back. “Does a writer ever stop telling you who he is?” he wrote in an interview conducted by mail with the editor Jeffrey Smith, arguing that an author's work should speak for itself and that it told readers everything they needed to know. “[M]aybe I believe . . . that the story is the realest part of the storyteller. Who cares about the color of Coleridge's socks? (Answer, Mrs. C.) Of course, I enjoy reading a writer's autobiography—or rather,
some
writers! A few. By far the most of them make me nervous, like watching a stoned friend driving a crowded expressway. For Chrissakes,
stop
!” He also insisted that “my mundane life is so uninteresting that it would discredit my stories.” (Well, that was not exactly true.) Tiptree did reveal that “part of my secretiveness is nothing more than childish glee.”

He suggested that one way to inhabit authorial identity was to use the “self as an experience laboratory, no sacred wall around the sealed black box of Me.” In other words, it was merely a play space. Regardless, he believed (or claimed to believe) that an author's “real” self “leaks at every sentence,” so that attempts to shield biographical details from the public were futile, anyway. Justifying his motives a dozen different ways, Tiptree remained defiant. “You know as well as I do we all go around in disguise,” he wrote, describing each person as a “roomful” of human beings. Beneath our everyday decorum, he argued, were layers of ugly and messy emotions, including terror, rage, obsession, love, and shame. “So who the fuck cares whether the mask is one or two millimeters thick?”

Tip did a good job most of the time at maintaining his own mask—a little macho posturing here, a little raunchy joking there—but it wasn't always a flawless performance. “Do you know, there's a good deal about you that seems to me more like women I know than like men I know in the way you handle your feelings?” Joanna Russ wrote to him.

He kept people intrigued by his brilliant talent as well as his demand for absolute privacy. Some claimed that his reticence was a put-on, a “publicity trick,” as Alice later wrote. Curiosity about him continued to grow along with his reputation, perhaps because he defied categorizing in every sense. As Jeffrey Smith (who would become Tiptree's literary executor) noted, “What I was most interested in was the fact that in 1970, when there was a virtual war declared between the Old Wave and the New Wave in science fiction, Tiptree was being claimed by both camps.”

“It's futile to ask as new a writer as me where he's tending or what his style might become,” Tiptree wrote in response to a question from Smith. “Does a kid whose voice is changing know what's going to come out of his mouth?”

For whatever reason, Tiptree was rather expansive in his correspondence with Smith, and developed an unusual closeness and trust with him. Smith, who was respectful without being sycophantic, seems to have impressed Tiptree with astute interpretations of his work. “I'm beginning to feel like this was my last will and personal Time Capsule and it contains more on Tiptree than anybody including me will ever likely see or want to again,” Tiptree confided to Smith in the final letter of their interview by mail, which went back and forth from December 3, 1970, until the end of January 1971.

The following year, having inhabited Tiptree for half a decade, Alice Sheldon began to feel constrained by writing as a man. She wanted to express her “feminine” voice, yet she wasn't willing to unmask herself entirely. She did the next best thing: Alice introduced Raccoona Sheldon, another alter ego. What a perfect name: raccoons, after all, are mask-wearing bandits, stealthy and clever.

It was actually Tiptree who announced the arrival of Raccoona—an old friend of his from Wisconsin—to Smith, mentioning that she was a gifted writer. Alice took just as much care of her female pseudonym as she had taken of the enigmatic Tiptree, buying Raccoona her own Olivetti typewriter—this one with a black ribbon to distinguish it from Tiptree's blue ribbon. Raccoona was given a distinct handwriting and signature, and a mailbox in her name at the post office.

Yet just as Alice would slip up in covering Tiptree's tracks, here, too, she was somewhat sloppy. For one thing, she'd given Raccoona her own surname. And supposedly Raccoona had also been published in the
New Yorker.
She was a talented illustrator, had dabbled in academia, and she'd had an abortion. She described herself as a former East Coast resident and a retired schoolteacher, but insisted that “really the less said the better” when it came to talking about her personal life. She had in common with Tiptree the requisite elusiveness, existing entirely on the page. (Raccoona's stories didn't pack the same wallop as Tiptree's work, however; he was by far the better writer.) Tiptree emphasized her shroud of mystery to Smith, warning him that his friend “is even more recessive than me and hard to talk to.” When another editor accepted one of Raccoona's stories for publication, he was puzzled to receive no reply from the author. Eventually, she wrote apologetically to explain that her mother “had a heart attack down South.” Soon afterward, an “embarrassed” Tiptree dashed off a letter about his friend as well: “I can't imagine what happened to Sheldon (Raccoona), unless she's been abducted by aliens . . . [It's possible] some of her multitudinous parasitic family has her tied up.”

Raccoona had mixed success in getting her stories published, and better luck only when her pal Tiptree wrote cover letters of recommendation on her behalf. It is amusing to note that Raccoona felt exasperated and jealous that Tiptree—a man, of course—was getting his stories published by the same editors who were rejecting her work—with Alice being the dutiful midwife to them both. By this point, Alice wished, in a sense, that Tiptree were dead, but killing him off wasn't an option. The strain of maintaining relationships solely by mail was getting to her. “They're real,” she wrote privately of the friendships she'd cultivated in the science-fiction world, “yet unreal insofar as they're carried on under an assumed name and gender. A lot of genuine relation comes through, but it's tainted to an unknown degree by falsity. Here I seem to have contrived another odd trap for myself.” Why she set these traps is impossible to say, but surely the destructive messages lingering from her childhood had a lot to do with submerging herself in other selves.

In 1974, at least one of Tiptree's friends rightly sensed something amiss in his letters, though it was hard to know how to respond. “Is my friend whom I know and do not know troubled beyond all touch or reassurance?” wrote a worried Le Guin. “Is he
in
trouble? Is there nothing his friends whom he knows and does not know can do, or say, or be? Nothing that would help?”

Alice's ambivalence toward her male alter ego had started to affect her ability to play the role. She was tired and lonely. She asked Ting to lock her prescription pills in the medicine cabinet because she feared she would overdose. And at her lowest depths, she fantasized about killing Ting and then herself, but she wasn't yet able to go through with it.

Tiptree strained her nerves more than ever. He seemed pointless, this man named after a jar of jam at the supermarket. The following year, Alice described herself as descending into a “black pit” and admitted, “I personally am dying.” As if to force Tiptree to fade away, Raccoona pointedly downplayed her relationship with him in a letter to Smith: “There seems to be some confusion about me and Tip Tiptree,” she wrote. “Several people have written me as though I were an authority on him. I did know him when we were in the local 4th and 5th grades together, but I have not seen him in person for a couple of years.” She continued: “We correspond in fits and starts. I take care of his mail when he comes through here to see his mother.”

In November 1976, Tiptree sent Smith a letter as intimate and confessional as a diary entry: “Mother died last week,” he wrote, “leaving me with a new dark strange place in the heart, and flashes of a lively, beautiful, intelligent, adventurous red haired young woman whom I had once known.” The subsequent biographical details about Tiptree's mother, unfortunately, were too specific—they included where Tip's parents had lived for sixty-four years (“Father built the building and they took the whole top and made the first roof garden in Chicago”)—and too similar to the newspaper obituaries of Alice's mother. It was already well known that Tiptree's mother (like Mary) had been an African explorer, hardly a typical biographical detail. Tip seemed to recognize that he'd spilled too much personal information. He ended by saying, “Well, this is a weird letter.” It was. Yet he mailed it anyway.