James Tiptree, high society girl

[glaurung]

I've just finished "James Tiptree, Jr: the double life of Alice B Sheldon," by Julie Phillips. It's a terrific book, which tells a very sad story.

It's a biography, though, and aside from speculating the Alice suffered from a mild form of bipolar disorder (where the highs stop short of paranoid mania, but the lows as just as lethally low), the author avoids drawing conclusions about the social sources of Alli's emotional troubles and torments. So let's do that, shall we?

Alice Sheldon was an example of the tragic kind of person best described as an "intense artist": lots of "emo," lots of sturm und drang, plus setting impossibly high standards for oneself. She desperately wanted to paint, to write masterpieces... but every time she set brush to canvas or pen to paper, the result wasn't as good as the idea in her head, and fell far short of her exacting standards of accomplishment, so she gave up on painting, and gave up on writing, too, until late in life she found that she could write by pretending to herself that it was only SF, it wasn't serious, it wasn't Literature or Her Life's Work, and what's more, she wasn't writing it anyway, it was the work of her male alter ego, a mask she wore that enabled her to write without worrying about whether what she wrote was good enough.

She was also, by orientation, a stone butch lesbian, a woman who desired women but didn't feel comfortable being a woman herself. The sort of butch who, today, would at least consider taking testosterone and transitioning to male:

My god in so far as I am an artist I can wish for women beautiful women women women with soft asses (arses to you) and breasts goddamn I want to ram myself into a crazy soft woman and come, come, spend, come, make her pregnant Jesus to be a man to come in coming flesh I love women I will never be happy. [p. 85, from a note probably scribbled while drunk]

And here is the tragedy: she was born to wealthy parents who (when they weren't taking her with them on African safaris) brought her up as a high society girl in the 20's and 30's. High society, as in conspicuous consumption wedded to noblesse oblige; for a woman, it meant (and still means, for some) wearing silk gloves while handing out charity, total selflessness and self-sacrifice without ever dropping the mask of gentility and reserve.

And I think it was that total mismatch, between her reserved, genteel high society upbringing, and her "intense artist" personality, between the extremely restrictive role she had to play as a debutante and socialite, and her inner nature as a queer: this mismatch was, I think, what prevented her from ever claiming her writerly voice in her own person. Once she started writing as Tiptree, that same upbringing made it impossible for her to drop the facade and tell the truth. Tiptree could acknowlege his pain, his anger, and talk about them, at least a little, in correspondence; could access them, and incorporate them into stories. Alli Sheldon could not; she had to stay on her pedestal, keep her gloves on while giving herself to others until she had nothing left.

So I guess the tragedy of Alice Sheldon, from one side, is the tragedy of someone who imbibed the lessons of femininity too well. And from the other side, the tragedy of all women brought up in the culture of high society, of debutantes and evening gown charity balls.

Comments

[xochiquetzl]

I read this book, too, and agree completely about how fabulous it is, and especially that

She desperately wanted to paint, to write masterpieces... but every time she set brush to canvas or pen to paper, the result wasn't as good as the idea in her head, and fell far short of her exacting standards of accomplishment, so she gave up on painting, and gave up on writing, too, until late in life she found that she could write by pretending to herself that it was only SF, it wasn't serious, it wasn't Literature or Her Life's Work, and what's more, she wasn't writing it anyway, it was the work of her male alter ego, a mask she wore that enabled her to write without worrying about whether what she wrote was good enough.

As a not-very-related aside, the thing that really made me argh was the bit about the safari, where she heard cannibals tearing a man apart and was expected to sleep with a baby gorilla in formaldehyde under her bed. And then her parents took her to Calcutta, where she had to step over dead bodies in the street. Argh! I'm 40 and would have trouble coping with that.

There are so many places where I wonder if things would have been different for her, but her sexual identity is a big one. I do think she had a biochemical problem, but it's really hard to tell when there's such a huge divide between a person and the role they feel they have to play.

[glaurung-quena.livejournal.com]

Thanks for commenting.

There are so many places where I wonder if things would have been different for her, but her sexual identity is a big one. I do think she had a biochemical problem, but it's really hard to tell when there's such a huge divide between a person and the role they feel they have to play.

Oh, I think she had a brain chemistry problem too; I just wanted the biographer to go on from there to synthesize a bit more on how the culture her parents belonged to/raised her in was totally not conducive to her being either the Artist! she wanted to be, or to figuring out her sexual identity.

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this post. I first came across 'James Tiptree Jr' in the late seventies, when I read and hugely enjoyed _Up the Walls of the World_. I wondered then about the book's author, and was not hugely surprised, a while later, to learn that 'James Tiptree Jr' was a woman. But I have never found out much more about her - so this is really interesting.

[glaurung-quena.livejournal.com]

Thanks for commenting.

Yeah, Tiptree's life makes for fascinating reading. Her parents took her on African safaris when she was a little girl; back at home, her mother was a prominent author and lecturer. When she grew up, she became one of the first US interpreters of aerial reconnaissance photos during the war (and the first and only woman doing such work); right after the war, she tramped about Germany scavenging technology and engineers to send back to the US. Later she helped the CIA set up its photointerpretation branch in the U2 era. Then she got herself a doctorate in psychology, and started writing SF to blow off steam while working on the dissertation.

If you haven't read Tiptree's short stories, you're missing the best part of her work. In addition to collections issued during her life (the introduction to "Warm Worlds and Otherwise," which came out before she was outed as a woman, is a hoot because Robert Silverberg goes on and on about how "masculine" and "manly" Tiptree's writing is), there's a "Best of" posthumous collection, "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever," that I highly recommend.

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

I read a number of Tiptree's short stories in the seventies and eighties. I thought I had a collection of them, but it's not where I expected to find it. Maybe I hallucinated it, or maybe it is somewhere else on the shelves. Whichever, I hope to read/reread them soon.

[trinityva.livejournal.com]

That scribble is just... wow.

Wow, yes, wow.

That's very often how I felt growing up, too -- except I wasn't sure if that made me gay or what. I just knew my desires were backwards and wrong and I was a woman and my biology said I'm a hole, so where did all this wanting so bad to be inside someone come from? I thought I was crazy.

[glaurung-quena.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that quote did stick in my mind, where it sort of collided with stuff Pat Califia wrote about her feeling that, while she didn't want to be a man (this was before she started thinking about transitioning), she felt she ought to have a penis. And then there was this from Amber Hollibaugh, whose "My Dangerous Desires" I've also been reading lately, where she's talking about what she knew she wanted but didn't know existed until she left home and found lesbian bars and discovered her first butches:

"How to have my mother's wild beauty and my father's ferocious sexual power and intensity? A woman's relentless mouth and a cock deep inside my body. How?"

Anyway, there's a huge range in between "normal" women and FTM transsexuals, between "normal" men and MTF: females who feel that they are women but who want to be masculine, or who want to have a penis; and what you posted about recently, males who feel that they are men but who want to be feminine, or who want to be penetrated. And none of it gets acknowledged or talked about because our society insists that we keep male and female in neatly divided compartments.

Thanks for commenting.

[trinityva.livejournal.com]

Anyway, there's a huge range in between "normal" women and FTM transsexuals, between "normal" men and MTF: females who feel that they are women but who want to be masculine, or who want to have a penis; and what you posted about recently, males who feel that they are men but who want to be feminine, or who want to be penetrated. And none of it gets acknowledged or talked about because our society insists that we keep male and female in neatly divided compartments.

Exactly.

[victoriacatlady.livejournal.com]

Yes, I used to have this strong desire to have a penis -- to penetrate somebody. There's still a bit of it left. I wonder if knowing of the existence of strap-ons (if they did exist then) would have made a difference to someone like Alice Sheldon?

[trinityva.livejournal.com]

I'm sure they DID exist -- I've read mention of them in literature from the late 1700s.

I never read this book about Alice B Sheldon so I don't know, but I wonder if even as little as simple contact with other lesbians would have been helpful.

[glaurung-quena.livejournal.com]

Sheldon did know that lesbians existed -- she was in the Women's Army Corps during WWII, for instance -- but because of her upbringing/social class, the whole world she would have had to enter to learn about strap ons and the like, would have been beyond the pale, unthinkable for her to enter.

Then her upbringing enters the question again, because she was very fiercely taught not to want things for herself. To admit to, to own one's own desires, was something she wasn't supposed to do... which I think was another part of why she didn't just go out and find herself a girlfriend/become a passing woman/buy a strap on.

Between not having a great deal of access to/knowledge of the world of lesbians, not being able to contemplate the huge step down in social class and step beyond the pale in acceptability that entering that world would have entailed, and not being very good at/trained against ever reaching for and taking the things she wanted from life, she was stuck.

[victoriacatlady.livejournal.com]

Plus now, in any large city, it's pretty easy to find the world of gays -- less so lesbians, since they don't hang around bars as much, but still knowing a few out gay men would probably have given her entree. However, in her time very, very few gays were out, and finding the gay/lesbian world would have required a descent into the unknown as well as into the seamy side of life, all aside from the loss of status she would have had to embrace, at least temporarily.