Nom de Plume (28 page)

The author had (inadvertently? deliberately?) laid out all the clues that would link Tiptree to Alice. It's no wonder: she was exhausted, anxious, and in very bad shape, despite Ting's efforts at managing her moods. She was hooked on prescription pills, including Percodan, Dexedrine, Valium, and Demerol. As for Tiptree, he'd become like one of the distorted figures in Francis Bacon's paintings—tortured and grotesque. The charade had run its course.

The outpouring of fact and emotion in Tiptree's letter was not lost on Smith. Nonetheless, he felt highly protective of the dear friend he'd never met or even spoken with on the phone. He didn't want Tip's cover blown, and didn't want to pry, but he couldn't resist investigating whether Tip's revealing missive was indeed a “road map to a newspaper obituary,” as he recalled later. His research didn't take long: the first Chicago newspaper he found at the library, a copy of the
Tribune
, led him to the death notice of ninety-four-year-old Mary Hastings Bradley, who was survived by one child, a daughter. The obituary, aside from a minor element or two, matched the details of Tiptree's letter. How to reconcile “Uncle Tip” with the posh Alice Hastings Bradley Sheldon?

In her 1980 biographical sketch for
Contemporary Authors
, in a section she titled “The Pseudonym That Got Away,” Alice wrote that when “the author's mother died after a long illness . . . 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, James Tiptree, Jr., was blown for good—leaving an elderly lady in McLean, VA, as his only astral contact.”

To ease the aftermath of Alice's broken secret, Smith opened up to Tiptree first. In a gently honest letter, ever respectful of his friend's privacy, he wrote that he was not making “a demand for information,” but warned, “I am going to be getting questions, and whatever you choose to disclose or withhold from me, please pass along the Party Line that I'm supposed to tell others.”

He received a response—not from Tiptree, but from Alice Sheldon, who introduced herself. She asked that Smith keep her secret for a bit longer. He agreed. “How great,” Alice wrote, but she was relieved beyond measure that the consuming role was no more. Her reply was casual: “Yeah. Alice Sheldon. Five ft 8, 61 yrs, remains of a good-looking girl vaguely visible, grins a lot in a depressed way, very active in spurts. Also,” she added, “Raccoona.”

To the very end, however, Alice insisted that there was no such thing as “male” or “female” writing. Instead, she believed there were only separate and varying styles of
bad
writing, and whether a weak voice belonged to a man or a woman was beside the point. She allowed that men perhaps had the edge when it came to black humor, and women had a knack for “heart-wringing,” which was an odd statement of gender stereotyping by someone whose writing career had defied such notions.

It is intriguing that as Tip, she displayed a certain swagger, while Raccoona was more diffident and a less compelling writer. Alice admitted in an essay (“A Woman Writing Science Fiction,” written six months before her suicide) that she didn't feel proud of using a male pseudonym to get ahead. She happened to choose a man's name as a lark, and stuck with it only because it worked so seamlessly. Frankly, she kept exploiting it because of the superior treatment she received as a man: her work was taken seriously, she was well regarded by the women with whom she corresponded as their “understanding” and empathetic male friend, and she occupied a place of power and influence among her peers—allowing her to challenge editors to publish more women writers. Alice said that she was ashamed of using a male guise to earn her place, while other women writers had languished or succeeded entirely on their own terms. “I had taken the easy path,” she admitted.

As she began to make amends for her ruse, the responses she received were almost entirely supportive. “Dear Jim or Tip or Alice or Allie,” one friend addressed her in a letter, reassuring her, “You are still the same person and I am still the same person and here we are.” Ursula Le Guin was similarly kind: “And it is absolutely a delight, a joy, for some reason, to be truly absolutely flatfootedly surprised—it's like a Christmas present!” Joanna Russ, upon learning that Tip was a woman, didn't suppress her delight at the news, admitting that she liked “old women,” expressing hope that they could meet “in the flesh”—they never would—and telling Alice bluntly that she should consider herself “well and truly propositioned. I was in love with you when you were ‘James Tiptree Jr.' and have been able to transfer the infatuation to Allie Sheldon.” Eventually, Alice declared that she was a lesbian in a letter to Russ, but she took things no further with Russ or any other woman.

Alice was crushed to find that some of the male writers she'd considered true friends—those who had ostensibly admired her work as Tiptree—turned their backs on her. (“Oh, how well we know and love that pretentiously amiable tone, beneath which hides the furtive nastiness!” she wrote.) She was heartbroken that some men were suddenly patronizing and condescending toward her, or that they abandoned her altogether. “If that is how I would have been received from the start,” she wrote, “my hat is off to those brave women writing as women.”

In her “Woman Writing Science Fiction” essay, she couldn't resist a dig at her erstwhile “friends.” Noting that some of the male writers who'd been “a touch snotty” to her were perfectly nice to other women writers, she went straight to the core of the problem: “People dislike being fooled, and, quite innocently, I did fool them for ten years. Moreover, it seems to be very important, especially to men, to
know the sex
of the person they are dealing with. What's the use of being Number One in a field of two—i.e.,
male
—if people can't tell the difference? I had not only fooled them, I had robbed them of relative status.” Apparently, they felt emasculated, something they didn't find funny or even forgivable.

After the initial dizzying rush of revealing her true identity, Alice became severely depressed again. (Rightly so: being exposed meant that a part of her was now dead.) It was something like the shattering remorse that sets in after a breakup. Alice had gotten rid of this troublesome character, and now she wanted him back. Like an ex-lover, Alice could remember only the good that Tip had brought into her life; he had made her a celebrated science-fiction author and given her a supportive community, the likes of which she had never known. Without him, she felt crazy and unable to write.

In her journals, Alice detailed her sense of deprivation. The language she used was like that of someone wanting a sex change: “I do not ‘match' my exterior.” She wrote of feeling as if she inhabited her body like an alien and even yearned explicitly to become a man. Within her, too, remained a fervent desire to someday love a woman erotically
as a woman:
not to resort to sublimation, as she always had done, but to satisfy raw urges. This pull was profoundly disorienting, and the sudden limbo—for both her professional and her personal identity—intensified her self-hatred.

“Some inner gate is shut,” she wrote. The revelation was terrifying. She was left with nowhere to go, no way out. As Tiptree, she'd immersed herself in his unbridled imagination; as Alice B. Sheldon, she noted ruefully that she had no discernible prose style other than “Enclosed please find payment.” She was convinced that no one wanted to know her simply as Alice, and she called herself a “poor substitute” for Tip. Although she toyed with the idea of another pseudonym, Sylvester Mule, nothing came of it.

In an interview for
Contemporary Authors
(which would accompany her biographical sketch), Alice expressed her attitude toward separating a writer's work and life, and the damage that results when the latter overshadows the former. She felt this problem was especially acute in science fiction—a genre “that carries some sense of wonder”—and said that when “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.” She insisted that most writers were obnoxious or dull (never mind that she was neither), and spoke of façades not in her writing persona, but in daily life. The interview offered plenty of fascinating material. Alice revealed that since she suffered from paralyzing shyness, “Tiptree's elusiveness was no pose.” She said that even though she was capable of chatting with people at the grocery store, she had to put on a kind of polite veneer to do it, and “what no one sees is the cost of the façade.” (They would after she killed herself.) She spoke of having done two interviews with “pleasant strangers” the previous week, for which she “couldn't help impersonating Miss Vitality” (yet another reference to impersonation), but that the moment those interviews had ended, “I collapsed for the rest of the day in a dark room with a cold rag on my head.” She wasn't exaggerating. No one but Ting knew the toll that social interaction exacted from her. This was why he often asked friends to keep their visits short or, better yet, not to come at all.

Her contradictory feelings about the loss of Tiptree were unrelenting and painful. In a passage from the original transcript of her
Contemporary Authors
interview (which she decided to omit in the final version), Alice said that in regard to Tiptree, she would do nothing differently if she had to do it over. Yet she was still shaken by his absence:

I think that Tiptree's death was long overdue. I had considered taking him out and drowning him in the Caribbean, but I knew I couldn't get away with that. It's a little frightening to find oneself almost being possessed by this personality that one isn't or that only one part of one is. It was an extraordinary experience. He had a life of his own. He would do things and he would not do other things, and I didn't have much control over him.

As Alice felt increasingly dejected after having been outed, she talked openly about wanting to die, telling friends that if Ting's health continued to deteriorate she had no intention of outliving him. She also said that if life got too bad, she'd kill them both. She started seeing a psychiatrist and was taking several antidepressants, but nothing seemed to help. She complained that “so far nobody will give me what I deepest crave, a lead-nose .38 bullet in the parietal lobe. I dream about oblivion the way other people dream of good sex.” She would also describe herself with an eerie metaphor to an interviewer in 1982: “I'm a loaded gun, an achingly loaded gun wholly unable to get a shot at those who are my enemies.” (Years after her death, one of Alice's editors remembered her as having been “notable for her jocular and ironic determination to survive in spite of her admitted desire to die.”)

Alice didn't actively attempt suicide, but she took terrible care of herself. She had “accidents” that caused injuries, health issues (including open-heart surgery), and for a while she lived on nothing but vanilla custard with frozen raspberries. Although she continued to correspond with some of Tip's friends and kept up with people by telephone, her interactions were undeniably awkward. She knew that and withdrew even further. After starting to write fiction again under her own name, she never achieved Tiptree's magic or even came close. She knew that, too. Maybe her enormous talent would have eventually returned, but Alice didn't live long enough to find out.

Toward the end, Ting had a stroke and was partially blind and deaf; Alice's most serious illness was mental. Her suffering had become intolerable. She'd written a suicide pact for them years ago, but at eighty-four years old, despite his frail health, Ting still wanted to live. Alice had been heading toward oblivion for so long that it was impossible to trace the starting point of her fateful decline. She'd anticipated her premature death, hungrily waited for it.

On May 18, 1987, Alice sent a brief note to Ursula Le Guin, along with a magazine article she thought her friend would find amusing. She signed off, as usual, “Tip/Alli.” There was no hint of the gruesome scene to come in the middle of the night: Ting fell asleep; Alice shot him in the head. Then she wrapped her own head in a towel, held Ting's hand, and shot herself. Proving this event had been a long time coming, she left behind a suicide note dated September 13, 1979. Their bodies were donated to George Washington University's medical school.

“She had enormous critical success and was very highly thought of by intellectuals,” Alice's literary agent, Virginia Kidd, told the
New York Times
after her death. “But she never made the numbers.”

His mother didn't love him but he was in love with himself

Chapter 14

Georges Simenon &
CHRISTIAN BRULLS ET AL.

H
e claimed to have had sex with ten thousand women, so it is surprising to learn that communication posed a problem. Clearly, he was able to fulfill his needs. But the challenges of verbal intercourse obsessed him throughout his life, as he revealed in an interview with the
Paris Review
in 1955. The Belgian author Georges Simenon was asked about the most significant issues he'd dealt with in his fiction, and which themes he expected to contend with in the future. He replied:

One of them, for example, which will probably haunt me more than any other, is the problem of communication. I mean communication between two people. The fact that we are I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world. When I was a young boy I was afraid of it. I would almost scream because of it. It gave me such a sensation of solitude, of loneliness. That is a theme I have taken I don't know how many times. But I know it will come again. Certainly it will come again.

For someone so acutely aware of the efforts and failures of everyday speech, Simenon seemed to embody a phenomenal will to express himself to the world. How else to explain his voluminous literary output—hundreds of novels, translated into nearly fifty languages? Many of his novels were best sellers; he sold more than 500 million books worldwide. Preposterously prolific, he was capable of producing eighty pages of prose a day, six books a year; somehow he found time to publish more than a thousand articles and short stories as well. He makes Joyce Carol Oates look like Harper Lee.

Simenon, who died in 1989 at the age of eighty-six, was often more famous for his louche ways than for his work. He brought it on himself. Simenon was “larger than life,” known for his hubris, self-infatuation, and a capacity for excess that reached astonishing proportions. He never had an agent, choosing instead to oversee all his own publishing contracts, which he did very shrewdly. His kindness and magnanimity, when he cared to display them, were stupendous in equal measure. He began using pseudonyms at age sixteen and published more than two hundred novels using more than two dozen noms des plume. Nearly two hundred other novels were written under his own name, and twenty-one volumes of memoirs. He was itinerant, moving house dozens of times in his life, including a decade-long stretch in the United States, when he lived in Arizona, California, Florida, and Connecticut. He owned a gold watch that a reporter described as “the size and shape of a brioche.” He was an international celebrity and the subject of countless flattering magazine and newspaper profiles. “He Writes a Book in 33 Hours,” proclaimed one typically hyperbolic headline. “World's Most Prolific Novelist” was another.

Most of the anecdotes he told about his life were false—they were fantasies he spun to amuse himself and impress (or confuse) others. He was a legend in his own mind. This was a man as intoxicated by himself as others are by fine wine. But he liked wine, too—also, champagne, whiskey, and beer, even while he wrote. On the advice of his doctor, he restricted himself to two bottles of red Bordeaux daily. (He did go through periods of renouncing alcohol for Coca-Cola.) One friend recalled a common sight: Simenon throwing up a bottle's worth of cognac in the garden, “two fingers down his throat, after he finished a chapter.”

He told an interviewer that he had become “hungry for all women” at age thirteen. That was apparent in the vast number of his sexual conquests—ten thousand was perhaps a conservative estimate—most of whom were paid. (He was more often a customer than someone's lover.) Allegedly, Simenon liked to make love several times a day, which would put his stamina right up there with that of Warren Beatty, Wilt Chamberlain, and other reputedly record-breaking sex fiends. He once said that he suffered physical pain at the thought of so many women in the world with whom he would never get to have sex. “I would have liked to have known all females,” he said. Simenon married and divorced twice—the first time, at age twenty; the second time, a day after the dissolution of his first marriage—and was an incorrigible philanderer. He was never boring.

Georges Joseph Christian Simenon was born in Liège, Belgium, on Friday, February 13, 1903. Even his birth involved an act of deceit: his superstitious mother insisted that the date be recorded, falsely, as February 12. When his grandmother saw him for the first time, she is said to have exclaimed to her daughter-in-law, “
My God, Henriette, what an ugly baby!
”

Although Georges worshipped his father, Désiré, an insurance clerk, he regarded his domineering, high-strung mother with contempt, and in his later writings, he savaged her mercilessly. Their relationship wasn't helped by her obvious and unabashed preference for his younger brother, Christian, and her blatant disdain for Georges. She adored Christian and always referred to him as “my son”; Georges, however, was “
le fils de Désiré.
” Henriette exacerbated Georges's resentment of his younger brother and his bitterness toward the mother he perceived as rejecting him. He acted out in a number of ways, which had the effect not of gaining Henriette's sympathy, as he desperately wished, but of provoking her ire; she found him annoying and peculiar. His parents' marriage was unhappy, too. Désiré died at age forty-four of a heart attack in 1921, when Georges was eighteen years old. Just as his mother's withholding behavior would mark him for life—and surely influence his dysfunctional relationships with women, as well as his writing—so would the loss of his father. “The most important day in a man's life is the day of his father's death,” he wrote some thirty-five years later. When Henriette remarried in 1929, Georges considered it an act of treachery. Even more galling was that she kept the name Simenon; he was quite famous by that time and resented her exploitation of his celebrity.

As a child, Georges excelled at school to show his mother that he was no failure, that he was worthy of her love. She was oblivious. He supposedly learned to read at age five, and as a student at a local Catholic school, he was industrious, conscientious, and exceptionally gifted. At age eight, he won a student prize for French composition, earning the praise his mother denied him. By the age of thirteen, the precocious boy was signing his homework using the pseudonym “Georges Sim,” just for fun.

Yet by 1918, he'd shed his “good boy” persona, and his grades suffered as a result. “I rebelled more or less against the taboos that imprisoned me and also against the mediocrity that surrounded me,” he told a reporter for
Paris Match
in 1967.

Thanks to his brilliance, he got away with a lot. He mocked authority figures, skipped school, rejected any thought of entering the priesthood—the vocation his mother had pressured him toward—and, finally, dropped out of school. “I wanted to get laid, and the Church told me I'd be damned for it,” he once said. “So I left.” Had he stuck with it, he might have been expelled. Georges didn't care. He felt he could no longer continue being a mindless slave to any institution, least of all school or religion, and for the rest of his life he would devote himself wholly to two compulsions: sex and writing (not necessarily in that order).

Like nearly every other biographical detail about Simenon, there are multiple versions of the story of how, as a teenager, he landed a newspaper job. Any or all of them may be apocryphal. But it seems that he walked into the offices of the
Gazette de Liège
and talked his way into a position as a reporter, earning forty-five francs a month to start. His debut was an article about the city's first horse fair since the Armistice, and he managed to impress his editors. Although he'd had no burning ambition to become a journalist, he was getting plenty of practice writing. He loved it. Even better, the deadline-driven, high-pressure environment turned him into a writer who could crank out copy quickly, a habit that would help him become the famous author of hundreds of novels.

At the
Gazette
, he resurrected the pseudonym he'd used at school, “Georges Sim,” whose byline first appeared in print on January 24, 1919. He happily took on the reporting assignments that no one else at the newspaper wanted, and proved himself a quick study, ambitious, full of energy, and enthusiastic about each new assignment. Soon his editor gave him the crime beat, furnishing him with a paid education that would later serve his detective fiction. In addition to the access he gained to police and criminal matters, he learned a great deal about forensic science.

Within a few months Georges was also given his own daily column, “Hors du Poulailler” (“From Outside the Hen Coop”). He signed it with the pseudonym “M. Le Coq” (“Mr. Rooster”). Whereas Sim was a straight news reporter, Le Coq's tone was funny, cavalier, and snarky. Writing about a criminal trial in 1921, Le Coq described the gathering of journalists in the courtroom: “They form a small, closed circle which lives very much at its ease. There they sit, sharpening their pencils, munching chocolate, swapping jokes, until suddenly the trial takes an interesting direction and they start to scribble furiously. . . . They frequently break off between sentences to swig from bottles which they have brought into court, right under the judge's nose.” And at the ripe old age of eighteen, Georges defined a journalist as “a man who can stay awake at political meetings” and “a man who writes a column or two on a subject he knows absolutely nothing about.”

He found the world of journalism fascinating, every aspect of it, and perhaps some part of him knew even then that his experiences would prove useful for his fiction writing. As his newspaper articles garnered more attention (a fact that thrilled him), his confidence grew. He knew that he was a real writer and that his ambition and talent extended beyond journalism. He proved it by writing his first book,
Au pont des Arches
, subtitled “A short humorous novel of Liègeois mores.” The author was Georges Sim. He followed this a few months later with a second novel, which he later admitted had been written while he was quite drunk. Within a year he cowrote a third novel with a friend—a parody of a detective novel.

In December 1922, Georges resigned from his newspaper job. He was engaged to be married to a painter, Régine Renchon; he decided that he disliked her name and rechristened her “Tigy,” which stuck. She was no great beauty, but she was strong-willed and intellectual and three years older than he—and the first woman he'd been attracted to who was not a prostitute. They moved to Paris, as Georges knew he must leave Belgium to truly achieve success. Later, Simenon would confess that when he married Tigy he was in love with her sister, but the marriage got off to a promising start anyway. They had a son, whom they named Marc.

The Simenons felt at home in Paris, where Georges began to submit stories to literary journals and magazines. In 1923, he sent his work to the fiction editor of the daily newspaper
Le Matin
, who happened to be Colette, already famous for her novel
Chéri.
She rejected his work again and again, but one day, she encouraged him by saying that he was close to being published, just not quite there. And she offered some unforgettable advice: “You're too literary. No literature! Get rid of all the literature, and you've got it.” He finally did; he was published in
Le Matin
, and felt eternally grateful to Colette for transforming his approach to writing. (He went on to become a regular contributor.) His less-is-more style limited the use of adverbs and adjectives and favored short, clear sentences and brief paragraphs:

There is not a single light on Quai de l'Aiguillon. Everything is closed. Everyone is asleep. Only the three windows of the Admiral Hotel, on the square where it meets the quay, are still lighted.

Over the next several years, Simenon obsessively honed his craft, trying out different themes and developing his voice. He churned out an absurd number of novels and more than a thousand short stories—all pseudonymously, all pulp fiction—with astonishing economy and efficiency. He would watch movies at night, sleep for a few hours, drink wine, and write and write. Any fear of being “too literary” was gone. These short novels were messy, even incoherent, but they were still good stories—lowbrow page-turners intended for popular consumption. (He was thinking in “chick lit” terms long before that genre ever existed, describing his early works as “novels for secretaries.”) They were not works of art, but he had no illusions about that.

In an interview Simenon gave to the
New Yorker
in 1945, he described the rigorous routine of his early career: “Every day was like a prizefight,” he said. “My schedule was two hours of work, typing at high speed, followed by an hour of rest or physical exercise. Often my wife would give me a rubdown. Then I would return for another two hours of writing. When evening came, I was depleted.”

He admitted that by 1924 he was engaged in “the careful manufacture of semi-luxurious literary products. I became successful. I had a yellow Chrysler Imperial sedan and a chauffeur who delivered my manuscripts to the publishers and collected my checks. Also, I had a servant to fill my pipes for me. Every morning she would place forty filled pipes on my desk, enough to last me for two hours. I did not have to stop to fill my pipes myself and lose valuable time. After a while I worked more slowly, spending as much as two weeks on a single book.” Another luxury he enjoyed was what he claimed to be the first private bar in Paris, in his own apartment. He later recalled that after one of his frequent raucous parties, with friends passed out on the floor, “dawn would find me stepping over the cadavers and making my way to the typewriter.”