Other Aliens Page 22
Now sweetie go out and intimidate the world, suffer & study & convulse and talk, talk, talk, cook your week’s stew, may the sun shine in your weighted curtains—above all may the writing go well. And may the world offer you some much-needed security.
Love,
Tip
***
James Tiptree Jr.
P.O. Box 315
McLean VA. 22101
S.F.W.A.
27 Oct 76
Dearest Jo,
Your letter awaited me on return from a journey so god-awful I won’t go into it, except to report that my very aged mother finally died. It was odd; as the disfigured flesh in the bed started to cool, it vanished in my mind and gave way to the fleeting, brilliant picture of her as the vivid, highly intelligent, dazzling, adventurous young woman I had briefly known as a child. I am a total atheist and materialist, but just on the zillion-to-one chance that something lives, I spoke to that ghost … Only it wasn’t a “ghost.”
Old age is a bad practical joke, you know. If only we could all be of an age, if Adolf Hitler exists somewhere as an appealing small boy, if all the pouched and crippled figures we see tottering off the stage could be for a day what they “really” are, young people sharp with hope and pain and love and interests …
Your letter was a lovely antidote. In it you are as usual “thinking with your mouth open,” the total effort at definition and understanding going on right before my eyes. My impulse is to Xerox it and send you back the copy, I may do that unless you have a carbon. (Do you???)
In general, I agree, and of course life & death, good & evil, are in your works, but arising from the living characters. But they are in a sense still peripheral, you become beguiled with the living detail. Whereas in Ursula’s work you have to allow for, or contend with, her “religion,” the curious distancing effect. OMELAS is a perfect example of a story from an abstract base—is the happiness of a great public worth the knowledge that it is based on the terrible, unassuageable suffering of one innocent? (For one child, substitute the underclasses that made the remnants of Victorian life so idyllic for the “upstairs” world.)
Now you never write a story from or to illustrate a question like that.
I think it worthwhile to explore, as you think, exactly how the impulse to write a given story arises in your critical subject, and contrast it with your own. How did the story actually jell—around a vivid character, a situation, a question, an agony, what? (Many of mine start with a voice dictating from behind my pancreas.) I think it is relevant to your inquiry, the actual practical method of genesis of Ursula’s stories, as, say, compared to yours. I bet, a huge difference.
Also recall that strange streak of mysticism, or quasi-hope, hopeless hope if you prefer, the odd fatalism of her mind. She has an area of belief in—I don’t quite know what. Cosmic balance, the I Ching, something deviant maybe that came down to her through her anthropological progenitors. But there is a dim, vague—but real—immaterial scenery behind her tales, deploying itself like tentacles through the motivations of some of her characters.
By the way, you can’t wean me from my love for her LATHE OF HEAVEN. Something in that spoke to me grippingly, still does. I think whatever kind of writer she will be is prefigured in LATHE, a voice in which she speaks more directly.
There are aspects of Ursula’s fiction which cover pain she can’t bear to handle, which muffle pain like a pot-holder to grip too hot a kettle.
You can handle pain, but you sometimes give the impression of not knowing exactly how much it hurts, or is hurtful to the vulnerable reader. You are, actually, a tough cookie. Maybe that is your ultimate quarrel with Ursula. You are vulnerable to empathy, but you have it under control, or rather, when you get into one of your Tsunami fits you leave all questions of the effect on the hearer far behind.
Ursula is like me, in that the problem of irremediable pain is one of the big “givens” in her world, we both spend a lot of fictional time tiptoeing around the sleeping dog—the never-sleeping dog—of hopeless hurt. Making a dash in to refer to it, which is all we can bear; retreating again knowing that certain kinds of reader know exactly what has been touched.
I suspect that empathy, or pity for the web of agony that underlies the living world, is a great drawback to a writer. I can barely stand life. And I find I can less and less manipulate fictional situations in which the reality of pain is one of the pawns … I may end up writing Peter Wabbit.
The more I think it over, the more it seems to me that not essencism or existentialism or anything so grand is the main problem between Ursula and you. (And maybe between you and me.) It is the difference between your very real toughness and viability and our “I can barely stand it” weakness.
Enough.
I wrote back to Jim Baen saying you had invented the Colonising equivalent of Malzberg’s agonized psychotic astronaut, put a human reality into the standard cheerful-aluminum scenario. That a real colony would go far more as you describe than is commonly envisioned.
Do you want a Xerox of your letter-essay on Thinking About Le Guin?
By the way, I regard A.E. van Vogt as an android. Should I take him seriously? So far I simply can’t. It is like a simulacrum of Calvin Coolidge writing fiction.
Again by the way, Tolkien—and, oddly enough, Wells, are writers who are writing around almost unbearable pain, too. A quite different affair from, say, Genet. Handling personal hurt—a motive for fantasy. In Wells you only see it indirectly, like that almost unreadable outburst, paean of hope, in, what was it, FOOD OF THE GODS? Where he for once lets himself describe what life might be like without it. (Without the needless, useless, omnipresent pain and cruelty.)
I think you would find it interesting to examine your own attitudes, and those of writers congenial to you, towards the pain and hurt of the world. Maybe you could divide us into survivors and non-survivor types. You would find a difference in the quality of the suffering. Something in you accepts, even is on the side of, pain and evil—perhaps you quite rightly feel it as a necessary ingredient. Even when you are howling in anguish it isn’t the same as those of us who turn white, walk out and die. There is a tooth-gnash in your howl.
Now phones are ringing, I must go. My love to you, and special thanks for a letter that came into my life just when I needed to see my black swan flying.
Love
Tip
***
James Tiptree Jr.
P.O. Box 315
McLean VA. 22101
S.F.W.A.
7 Nov 76
Dearest Jo,
You are quite wrong; what I need is not “a back-rub and some comfort” but a fascinating, challenging letter and article like yours. Since I am most fascinated and helped by the letter, let us go into a few comments on the article first.
My first thought was that I better subscribe to the MLA Newsletter.
My second thought was that I understood exactly what you meant, despite the fact that I almost have never day-dreamed in the conventional sense, beyond a few obsessive scenarios age 14 centering around the idea of getting laid. (What took the place, with me, was compulsive reading—primarily stuff like the complete works of Kipling, with its hints of a mysterious grown-up world of understandings available only to the infinitely experienced; and don’t forget I was partly raised in Colonial Africa and India.) What also took the place, with me, was lonely staring up at the stars, and feeling, with comfort, the utter indifference of, say, Sirius to the whole fabric of human existence, let alone my own small woes … I was, in short—still am—a kind of Loren Eiseley type.
But I realize that other people do have personal daydreams, and I think your analysis fits perfectly. What is so impressive about it, to me, are the concrete examples of what particularity, specificity, is and is not. Hot damn, you know a lot of literature.
Well, that is why you are a literary pundit while I know more than anybody needs to about rats.
Beautiful to see an expert at work.
[…] The whole relation of literature to subconscious themes. Gardner Dozois shook me, in his introduction to some new issue of my stories, by pointing out the revelations of my own terrible yearning for transcendence of the human condition, and my drive to somehow regain the lost Eden, the lost, forever yearned-for home. Even when it is also the place where things hurt … Are these “daydreams”? I was unconscious of the power of the motives driving my words and plots … I think my strangely-assorted readership includes primarily those susceptible to such wounds … How deeply I understand Tolkien’s life-long grief and loathing for those who destroyed the beauty that he felt was “home.” And of course his hatred of the forces—the almost impersonally evil forces—that slaughtered “all his friends but one.”
Which brings us to your letter. What you have done with pain. “To shove it up your backbone and try to steal from it the iron we need.” Extraordinary, your interpretation of “the iron has entered my soul.”
That is what I can’t do, and what I suspect Ursula can’t do. It is not that we “do not face our anger.” It is that the anger is unfaceable. How can you get angry with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which has stolen from me most of what I love, and is in [the] process of killing me? How can I get angry with the nameless millions who had the extra children, decades ago, whose needs are now resulting in the bull-dozing of my home, and the destruction of the last beautiful wild lands? (I am, by the way, like C. Ain in my old story “The Last Flight of Doctor Ain,” a very personal lover of the incredible natural web of beauty that was our unspoiled Earth. I have seen so much destroyed that can never come again, and must bear the seeing of more devastation every day. Can you understand that this can move a person to the same intolerable sick hatred as the forced daily witnessing of slaughter and rape?)
When you have anger—or rather, as you say, hatred which is helpless hopeless anger, of these dimensions, it is impossible to use it for strength. At least it seems so to me. I loathe man’s fate, both in the Malrauxian sense and in the inevitable-interaction-of-large-social-and-physical-forces sense. Unlike Ursula, I have no refuge in mystic hope.
You’ll be amused to know that my therapist tells me to get angry. His own problem is anger, rage at “being told what to do,” even in the most trivial way. How I envy him, and his ability to “distance” and denature pain. I simply go on hurting. And as for getting angry—I do have fantasies of machine-gunning deer-poachers—I rarely can. It is because I see behind the incident the huge impersonal chain of causality that brought about the confrontation. Behind the individual enraging idiot I see the idiotic parents, the idiot schools, the crumbling culture, the inadequate cortex. How to “get angry” when attacked by a virus? I think perhaps you could. I merely sadly see the imperatives of the virus, the chance vulnerability and accessibility of my own tissues; it seems a drama graven in the stone of impersonal causality.
And I have rather fragile connections with life. My impulse is to leave.
All quite unlike you, and your letter with its raging, engaging, positive tone was a bracer-upper.
Re Genet; haven’t really read the man. Shied away, in fact; because I felt that I did not share his drives or pains or satisfactions. On your word I will look again.
Good for you, my dear fighter. I think you are forging your pain and fear into iron, and I cheer you on. But when you look at Ursula, remember there are those whose pain literally cannot be so handled, either because it is diffused out to unmanageably large causalities—or because of some defect in the adrenals which simply dooms us to go on, as I said, sick-hearted and white-faced.
But your letter encourages me to try again, to weasel round somehow.
I still don’t quite know what a “Platonist” is, chez you, but I am glad I am not one in my fiction. Actually in my writing I work from a strange self quite unlike my real, sick self; this artificial self has its gaze resolutely fixed outside, chuckles and damns reality, behaves in short as a producer of alternate view-points which might have some interest for the reader. I suppose the sickness speaks through—God knows it does in this novel Ballantine is supposed to be publishing—but I am aware that my own personal damnation is of not the slightest interest to the outer world until it has been forced up to form figures in the fire, dream-artifacts into which reader[s] can for a moment live.
Thank god your parents taught you that you were important.
I’ll have to get Delany’s book of essays. I’ve been afraid to read DHALGREN so far, afraid that it would be too alien. (Among other things the Billy-the-Kid mythologising I noted earlier in one of his things turns me off, and I gather there is some of that in DHALGREN) … I hope, hope, it is not one of those works like [the] GORMENGHAST Trilogy (Mervyn Peake) where all the blood and corpses and sufferings and appearances of other people add up to the denouement that one (male) adolescent has had some vague insight. But I will forgive Delany anything. By me, one of the greats.
By the way, someday could you do a bit of matchmaking? You occasionally say I’m “like” you and Delany, or on your general “side”—which I feel. But I’ve never been able to get a word out of Delany direct. Do you happen to know if he thinks I’m dreck, or what? At least I have the satisfaction of having let him know how grateful I feel for the work he’s done … Funny; in this writing world it often comes down to writers making some terrific personal impression on each other. I feel an obligation to tell people when this personal sense of gratitude wells up—recall how I first wrote you.
Not that I expect you to “put me in correspondence” with D., or anything asinine like that, given the state of all our desks. I’d just like to be sure he knows he has a rather violent partisan in me.
Now, dearest Jo, your letter did the world of good here—outside of a vague dismal feeling like a weakling seeing photos of Charles Atlas lifting 500 lbs in each hand with a grin on his face—you too can be a hero. Well, I too positively can’t, but at least I can grovel on a bit.
You can have no idea of the hideous complexities of settling Mother’s estate, including material that goes to four museums—94 years of collecting mixtures of irreplaceable artifacts and memoires in a 26-room apt., complete with “secret” storerooms, all jumbled—letters from Carl Sandburg mixed with grocery bills, blank stationery, samples of curtain cloth, birthday poems by putative nonentities, greetings from Jan Smuts, historical memorabilia of Old Chicago, Old Africa, cloth of gold from Old Sumatra, lace panties, .38 calibre automatics, Marie Antoinette’s tea-set, half-ton bronzes of gorillas, etfuckinginterminablecetera, 3 rooms of file cabinets—and all to be done by remote control, through a doddering ancient Legal Eminence known as the Executor who has to mull over every arrangement in triplicate. I was 4-plus-two solid hours on the long-distance phone yesterday, pausing only to type goddam letters confirming the conversations (in triplicate), etc more fucking crap. And all of it hurting, underneath, sending strangers in to paw over her private files and drawers. And it’ll go on for weeks if not months. The part of my brain that writes feels like the Bulgarian Tank Corps was holding manoeuvers in it. Nothing left standing … not to mention what is laughingly called my “real life work.”
I think I’m through. Love to my Lick-your-weight-in-wildcats.
Ever,
Tip
***
James Tiptree Jr.
P.O. Box 315
McLean VA. 22101
S.F.W.A.
4 Dec 76
Dear Joanna,
To say that this is a hard letter to write would be the understatement of some time.
How will you react when I tell you that the person you have been corresponding with as Traptroop is really Raccoona Sheldon, aka Alli Sheldon, aka Dr. Alice B. Sheldon—the doctorate being merely in a behavioural science, not the kind that does anybody any good?
The thing is, the last thing poor Mother did was blow Tiptree out of the water, I had no idea her obituaries would be splashed around. So Jeff Smith wrote me that
Harlan had latched on to one, or something, giving me as sole survivor, and was busy telling the fans. So Jeff looked it up for himself and wrote me the question direct.
I don’t lie, except for the signature—which has grown, over the years, into just another nickname—so I had to tell him yes. (That was good, actually, because I had always promised him he would be the first to know. I left a letter telling the truth in Bob Mill’s safe, to be opened if Tiptree i.e., me, died; but I’m morally sure he hasn’t opened it.)
The letter says that James Tiptree Jr. was born in late 1967 in the Import Food section of Giant, when I was looking for a name that editors would forget rejecting. It never occurred to me that everything would sell. So then everything just snowballed from there. I love the sf world, and I couldn’t resist Jeff Smith’s request for an interview—figured I could skip over the bio details quickly without lying, because my curriculum vitae does sound male—and start waving Hello to all the people I’ve loved and admired for so long.
But then the epistolary friendships grew—especially with women; if you noticed Raccoona you understand I am deeply committed to women, and I thought in my innocence that this prank could help. (There are anthologists who have sharp inquiries from Tiptree as to why no women contributors.) But the friendships got real. But I never wrote calculated stuff or lies, what I’ve written you—or anyone—is true, true true. All of it.
So now it is time for me to stop being a brand of marmalade and painfully write those of you who have befriended Tiptree what the facts really are: A 61-yr-old retired woman—past adventures, I guess, life said to be “exciting” and “glamorous,” but it just seemed like a lot of work at the time—6 ft 8 1/2, wt. 135, hair brownish going grey-streak, incurable open childish stare, lumpy writer’s face, as I said, once said to be good-looking but really only animated; mostly wears jeans and cords, and worried sick that my much more aged husband of 30 years is going blind.
Jo, can you take it? God, the number of times I’ve wanted to cry out, dear Sister, how well I know, how well I know what you mean. But I am different, by reason of age and time of upbringing, from the feminists today. Maybe more pessimistic, more aware of the male power structure in which I’ve struggled for long years. (With their Queen Bees.)