Excessive Candour
Deaths

It is a necessary title, but it was not a double life. It was a single life redoubled, repeatedly. Some of the disguises assumed by the woman whose name at birth was Alice Hastings Bradley were poisonous to her and others, some were casual wear, and the one we all know—James Tiptree, Jr.—was a skyhook, uplifting for a while this savagely self-torturing genius out of her element into the air of the world: plugged her into the air of the world and she spoke to us.

It is one very considerable achievement of Julie Phillips' James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, which may be the finest literary biography I've ever encountered, that we never lose track of Alice, even when Tiptree's incandenscent though spaniel gregariousness is at its pitch, or when we are most caught up in the thanatopic inerrancy of his greatest fiction; we never lose track of the cossetted rich child from Chicago whose parents jointly (though it was Alice's mother, the already well-known writer Mary Hastings Bradley, who first and forever cursed her daughter with a life she could not give a name to) had already given her a new name to cover her face with by the age of 6. That new name—the first of many—was also Alice, but an Alice very much in the public eye: Alice in Wonderland.

In August 1921, her parents took her to Africa on safari; they did not return until March 1922. Because the safari did in fact come close to unknown territory, because the Bradleys were conspicuous members of society and because their daughter was so young, the trip made national news. Phillips, whose research into Alice's early years seems impeccable, notes a picture of her in the New York Times captioned "Youngest Explorer of Darkest Africa ... the First White Child Ever Seen by the Pigmy Tribes": so one of the dilemmas that afflicted Bradle/Sheldon/Tiptree in later years—how to be secret in a world that exhibits you falsely—had locked into place by 1922.

Alice's experiences in Africa were, unsurprisingly, hugely more permanent (and clearly more terrible) than her insouciant radio-mouth dervish of a mother could rightly contemplate: the physical presence everywhere of death; the hellishness of human behavior against its species and against the world; the proleptic passiveness of the experience of being a wee female husbanded on a litter through the intolerable variousness of the real, which she was forbidden to touch (except when a corpse was stored under her bed); and having to act a role insisted upon by parents and pigmies alike.

Mary Hastings Bradley's book for children about the safari, Alice in Jungleland (1926), is swift, unctuous, unrelenting, a devastating cage of impersonation to fasten over a young psyche. It was not an easy cage to unlock—just before her first, exoribitantly dysfunctional marriage, Alice was still being referred to in public as Alice in Wonderland—if for no other reason than it was all happening in public. There were Bradley's own books (at least one book for adults came out of the trip); and there were the ethnographic explorations conducted, and photographed, by their companion, Carl Akeley, whose photograph of a dead gorilla "standing upright, beating its breast" became, as Phillips says, "Americans' idea of how gorillas look," and certainly gave King Kong his characteristic expression. From the get-go, then, Alice lived in an exposed world, one in which her every move was likely to be reported in society pages or gossip columns. She lived as an impostor.

The rest of the story is by no means a short one, or easy to tell, but Phillips clearly understands that the dramas of the life (the ashen silences, the manias, the suicide attempt(s), the programmatic promiscuities with men and women, the profound infatuations, the drunks, the drugs, the flip-flops, the painting, the writing, the terrible rage at being a woman whose words are inherently less interesting and less real than a man's, the rage against women for letting men, us blinded shouters in the night, do it to them) are far more than neurotic scrawls on the tapestry of years: that they are a Passion. Most of us know the final act: that in May 1987 Alli murdered her 84-year-old husband, Ting Sheldon, who was blind but hale, and then killed herself, though not before telephoning Ting's son by an earlier marriage and telling him what she'd done: the most nakedly exposed utterance it may be that Alli ever made to another person being her last.

Alice's adventures in wonder

Long before this point in her narrative, Phillips has wisely begun to refer to Alice as Alli, her favorite nickname, which was invented by Ting's mother around 1946; and to James Tiptree Jr. as Tip, the nickname he used in correspondence or when signing books to the friends he made by mail, most of whom he would never meet in person. It is convenient to use these names, and to think that it is Alli whose parents take her back to Africa twice more, the last trip searing the minds of all concerned with images of the destruction of the Africa they'd "discovered" only a decade earlier, translating the past—and Alli's childhood—into an indelible absence.

So it is Alli who ricochets through school after school, overcharming her peers (or hiding from them in dead silence), already beginning to suffer the harrowing sign-changes in mood and behavior later to be diagnosed as cyclothymia. It is Alli who undergoes a formal coming out as a debutante (reported in the press), and who immediately marries a young man as dysfunctional as she is, embarking with him on a extraordinary half-decade of sex and drink and demolition, as Alice Davey. (They meet Ed Ricketts, "Doc" in George Steinbeck's Cannery Row, and she strips off to shower in his single room before strangers.) It is Alli who becomes a more than competent painter (her first illustrations appear in Alice in Jungleland) but who never opened herself naked to utter: how could she, being a woman? A man may make an utterance, a woman can only make a woman's utterance: simultaneously exposed and hidden, importunating the real world, secretly small inside the mask: a raccoon. (Alli does several nude self-portraits: brazenly invisible.)

It is Alli in 1941 who becomes an art critic as Alice Bradley Davey for the Chicago Sun and cuts off her long Alice in Wonderland hair and quits. It is Alli who joins the WAACs (later the WACs) and becomes an officer, and then (after one of her intensely epiphanic immersions in formal learning: she was terrifyingly intelligent at everything she did, not just painting or writing or laying the groundwork for her own death: her suicide note was dated 13 September 1979) she becomes professionally competent at the interpretation of aerial reconnaissance photos, which takes her to Washington, and eventually to Col. Huntington "Ting" Sheldon, and Europe just after the war ends, though the suicide of the culture of the West seems to take forever: It is a suicide central to Tiptree's work. It is Alli who marries the fractured, clinically reticent, unflappable Ting: for Alice Bradley Sheldon, it's as perfect a marriage as could be imagined: though the sex sucks (he has to get drunk first), and their relationship is declaredly open, she sleeps around a lot less after the mid-1940s, and eventually (Phillips seems to think) stops entirely.

All the while she keeps a journal whose brilliance is only matched by her letters (and by Tiptree in his oxygen-rich male pomp, where every word counts, like Rimbaud's). There is no way to capture the uncanny presentness of everything she wrote or he did (Phillips calls Tip "he," a convention that works very well), in the compass of a review: but if the life itself had not revealed itself to have been so extraordinary, and if that life had never led her to the skyhook of Tiptree, then her journal and letters would themselves justify a biography. What they could tell us alone was that Alli's cruciform life—each of her guises a body English of the Stations—was exemplary of the turmoil and stress and despair of any attempt to be a woman and a human simultaneously, as she says in her journal around 1955:

I blurt out bits or go into kind of abstract rodomontades, and I demonstrate tension and hostility all around at times, but I keep "me" covered with a pretty heavy blanket of silence as a defence against being reduced to edible infancy. ... (They all agree that dear Alice who is so talented is terribly tense and upset and Our little girl and My dear Wife presents problems but everything is going to work out all right and We are all so mature. (pp. 174-75)

Or, in a letter of 1954:

A proper woman accepts nothing from the male world without putting it to the test of the Emperor's clothes. ... That way much error is avoided, but the resulting thought always strikes the conventional man as peculiarly uneasy-making. ... he has a sneaking suspicion the pillars of society are being regarded with levity. So they are—except that they are only funny if you have a strong stomach. Most women have. ... We are strangers; we write as individual captive Martians. (p. 193)

There is more and more of the external life, of course: the four years running a chicken farm with Ting; the three years at CIA doing the kind of photointelligence work she'd mastered during World War II; the friendship with Rudolf Arnheim (born 1904 and, as of this writing, still alive), who shaped her lifelong obsession with the relationship between vision and aesthetics, as an indirect consequence of which she took a Ph.D. in 1967 (and became Dr. Alice B. Sheldon, a name she used once in a while). There is more of this but it is the same: brilliant assaults on the daylit "masculine" world, anguished exposure to the sun.

Meanwhile she had been writing: "The Lucky Ones," a quasi-fictional tale about her experiences in Occupied Europe, as by Alice Bradley, published in the New Yorker in 1946; an unpublished SF story as by Ann Terry; and then, during the high occasioned by the gaining of the Ph.D., she wrote the first stories which would be published as by James Tiptree Jr., "Birth of a Salesman" (1968 Analog) and "Fault" (1968 Fantastic). Two things can be said: Alli had been reading SF for decades and knew its maneuvers backward and forward; but at the same time, her first few SF tales are not Tiptree stories.

The human within revealed without

Then it all changed. The story is familiar enough, and Phillips takes it as true, which it almost certainly is (to a point). Alli and Ting are shopping in town. Alli needs a pseudonym for the stories she's about to put in the mail. She sees a jar of Tiptree Jam, and says "James Tiptree." Ting says "Junior." So far so good. Good joke: Except that nothing in Alli's life was ever just a joke. She is more retentive of the meaning and shape of every aspect of her life than anyone else I have ever met, in life or print (Severian excepted, maybe). The reason her biography is so fascinating, over and above the fact that it is intrinsically pretty extraordinary, is that every minute of it continues to mean the person who is Alli. So I don't think James Tiptree Jr. remained a joke for more than a few minutes; and I don't think Alli's use of "Tip" as a nickname could have persisted for any length of time—if indeed it wasn't created with this association in mind—without her being aware that for Alice in Wonderland to call herself Tip lays down a broad urge-to-confess hint for anyone trying to plumb Tiptree's true identity, Tip being of course the magicked lad in L. Frank Baum's Ozma of Oz (1907) who is "really" Princess Ozma of Oz. Ozma may not be quite as well-known as Alice, but in 1920s America the Oz books were hugely popular and bore with them moreover a piquance of risk (the hatred librarians felt for Baum and his work-shy utopia has been well attested). When Tiptree called himself Tip I think he was clearly calling himself a woman in disguise.

What anyone knows who has read Tiptree is what it is like to read Tiptree; what anyone knows who tries to describe him is how hard it is to anatomize flame. Tiptree turning to ash, over the five years he plummeted like Satan into our heads, turns criticism to ash. My own best try at trying to characterize his work came after six months of intense reading; it was published as the introduction to Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1990), a best-of collection put together by Jim Turner and Alli in the last years of her life, after Tiptree had died in agony. It can be read on the James Tiptree Jr. Web site at www.tiptree.org and has the advantage of having been written after her death. What it clearly lacks is any real awareness of the details of the real life; and any sense that the whole of that life, for Alli/Tip, was a Theatre of Memory.

We can remember what it was like to read Tiptree; what we cannot have known until now was anything but the merest hint of the intensity of Alli's investiture in Tip: that his male owner voice, which had been caught in her throat for half a century, now released—for the first time—the human within. What Phillips goes on to demonstrate, in the last 100 pages of her book, pages which I found intensely painful to read, was how soon the fissures began to show, how deeply exhausted Alli became as the Tip who secretly surrounded her demanded more and more posturing. (Her invention of Raccoona Sheldon, a second pseudonym to impersonate, seems to have done her nothing but psychic harm.) Something was going to have to die here. In 1976, Alli's omnivorous mother finally died at 93, and almost immediately she wrote as Raccoona the last great Tiptree story, "The Screwfly Solution" (1977 Analog). But Tip had told too many people of the death of his mother, an African explorer. The link was easy to make, and several made it almost immediately. The day Tip posted "Screwfly" off he received a letter asking if he was Alice Sheldon.

The correspondence back and forth between Tip and two or three of her friends—Ursula K. Le Guin and Joanna Russ are those whose letters are most tellingly quoted in this book—always seem to have begun fawningly on Tip's part (like Alli, he could be grotesquely effusive in his giving of praise), but to have moved into a meeting of minds at their most intimate: except Tip was a lie. Russ was very close to assuming Tip was female (given the huge amount of hindsight generated by his unveiling, it was perhaps unwise of Phillips to assume that oral recollections of anyone whose doubts about Tiptree's sex had not actually been put on record before November 1976 should be given much credence). Le Guin expressed huge surprise and joy at Alli's first letter to her, confessing all; the magisterial warmheartedness of this letter gives some hint that Le Guin may have sensed immediately that something more than a nom de plume was being shed. What was really happening was that Tiptree—like all his protagonists, who all escape the mortal coil with a single bound, and who all die—was himself literally dying. After November 1976, all the sound of Tip was dead. Whoever signed the later stories (they were usually as by Tiptree), Tip did not write them, because he was dead; and Alli could not write them, because she could not make him up.

She lived another decade, drugged to her eyeballs half the time; in 1976, she had herself "recorded using Seconal, phenobarbital, Dexedrine [this for decades], Compazine, codeine, Percodan, Valium, Demerol, and Numorphan." This list presumably lengthened. But (though she was terrified of meeting people) she dazzled everyone she met. She endured heart attacks and arthritis and who knows what else. She survived until all her names were gone, and in the ashes wrote endit.