Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (2 page)

After the revelation of her identity, Alice Sheldon continued publishing fiction under the Tiptree name – though some felt there was a falling-off in quality compared to the work published between around 1970 and 1977. It’s tempting to overinterpret this, but Phillips argues convincingly that the loss of the Tiptree identity was a blow that Alice Sheldon never quite recovered from. That said, some of her later stories like “Yanqui Doodle” (1987) and “The Color of Neanderthal Eyes” (1988) are very fine indeed.

In addition to the short fiction, there are two Tiptree novels,
Up the Walls of the World
(1978) and
Brightness Falls from the Air
(1985). But they both suffer, in a way, from the ferocity with which she bears down on her material: it must have been difficult to sustain a novel-length narrative against that background. In the best of her short fiction, Tiptree’s intensity burns the story to the ground at the exact moment it ends.

Phillips chronicles a decline both in Alice Sheldon’s health and that of Huntingdon Sheldon throughout the 1980s. One of Tiptree’s late stories, “The Only Neat Thing to Do” envisages a good death as being preferable to an unhappy life. The two had no children, and Huntingdon’s sight was failing. In May 1987, Alice Sheldon shot dead her husband, and then herself.

This collection, first published in 1990, contains much of Tiptree’s finest short work, largely from before 1977. Alice Sheldon clearly thought deeply about what made good fiction. Her writings to Jeff Smith contain frequent references to her terror of boring the reader, and to the resulting ruthlessness with which she cut her stories. For instance, she described “The Last Flight of Doctor Ain” as “a perfect example of Tiptree’s basic narrative instinct. Start from the end and preferably five thousand feet underground on a dark day and then
don’t tell them
.” On a technical level, it’s striking how each of these stories creates its own structure and style around the material it’s depicting. Tiptree assumes that the reader will pay attention, will not need to have things explained twice. Some of the stories may strike the reader as dense or perhaps even confusing the first time round – but as a consequence, they greatly repay re-reading. It seems a shame to spoil the working-out of these stories; but there are some ideas that run through a number of them.

The first is the tug of home. “The Man Who Walked Home” is the clearest example of this, its astronaut protagonist arcing back to the start of the story with the most intense effort, in the most extreme circumstances. But look also at the tiny human colony in “On the Last Afternoon” and how precious it seems, even in the face of a vast and implacable threat. Related to this is Tiptree’s concern about what humans are doing to the Earth, and how irreparable that damage might be. This is most overt in “The Last Flight of Doctor Ain”, where the protagonist sees all too clearly what crimes are being committed.

By the same token, straying away from home can be dangerous in a Tiptree story. This is clearest in “A Momentary Taste of Being”, where an encounter with the alien Other is utterly devastating to humans, arguing not just that they are empty vessels, but
why
they are. “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” – its title taken from Keats’s “La Belle dame Sans Merci” – makes a similar argument around human sexuality.

There’s an undeniable streak of dislocation and trauma in Tiptree, the sense of something that happened long ago in a way that can’t be recovered from. This is most overt in “The Girl Who was plugged in”, a story whose influence William Gibson has acknowledged – one thinks particularly of “The Winter Market”. The cheery, brittle narration of this story is at odds (surely deliberately) with what underlies it. Similarly, the opening paragraphs of “With Delicate Mad Hands” set out the childhood traumas that shape the protagonist, Carol Page, and from which the rest of the story grows. In “My Faces, O my Sisters! Your Faces Filled Of Light!”, the dislocation comes from the difference between the all-female world that the protagonist perceives, and how the reader comes to understand where she really is.

One consistent thread in a number of these stories is the threat of men’s sexual violence. In “Houston, Houston, Do You Read”, it is one of the aspects of our world that the male astronauts find most under question. In “The Screwfly Solution”, Tiptree extrapolates it one step further, with terrifying consequences. Even the apparently amiable narrator of “The Women Men Don’t See” allows thoughts of rape to flit across his mind as he tries to save the women with whom he’s been cast into the wilderness. “The Women Men Don’t See” may be Tiptree’s most well-known story; it is particularly central to her reputation as one of the most important writers of feminist science fiction. It’s a story that’s open to many interpretations: just who are the aliens here? The strangely reticent and seemingly otherworldly women? Or the male narrator whose values are, in the end, so distant from those of the women?

Many Tiptree stories are tragedies. I use the word in the classical sense that they are set off by some tiny, almost incidental flaw whose consequences lay waste to everything. In “Love is the Plan the Plan is Death”, the evolutionary structure of the creatures depicted is tragic, a dead-end from which they can’t escape. In “On the Last Afternoon”, the protagonist has a choice to make about whether to save himself or his community; his choice has devastating results. And in “Slow Music” the whole of human history is seen, in retrospect, as a dying fall. So the presence of death runs throughout Tiptree’s work. It’s overwhelmingly a secular conception of death. There’s no concept of an afterlife, or of or a deity that might skyhook us away from the mortal world. “She Waits For All Men Born” may mythologise death, but doesn’t offer any escape.

Finally, these threads come together in the title story of this collection. I find it a summation of what is extraordinary about Tiptree’s work: the intensity with which it views life (even an “ordinary” life”), the immediacy of a sense of suffering, and yet the vividness with which it imagines joy. In an afterword for the story’s original publication, Tiptree referred to the work of the scientist Carrington, described in the story, about how consciousness might persist through time:

. . . Carrington’s work is real, and his speculation on the real nature of time holds out a faint hope of a curious sort of immortality. His idea is that perhaps, just perhaps, very intense psychic structures might have existence in timelessness or “static” time. But Carrington, good man that he was, unhesitatingly assumed that the intense psychic structure was
good
, was in fact a sort of Spinozan intellectual love of some aspect of life. A beautiful picture – all the fragments of loving farmers merging around the ideas of earth and seed, bits of philatelists converging forever around a two-penny black, parts of all of us webbed eternally around great poems or symphonies or sunsets. Lovely. But look back in your memory. Moments of pure selfless love, yes – but what about the fearful vitality of the bad past – the shames, furies, disappointments, the lover defected, the prize that got away? The pain. As the psychologists put it,
aversive conditioning persists
. One shock undoes a hundred rewards. If by wild chance Carrington’s theory is in some degree right, his immortality would be a hell beyond conception . . . until we can change ourselves. Drain the strength of pain from our nerves. Make love and joy as strong as evil.
But how can we?

Graham Sleight

INTRODUCTION II

First published in 1990 edition of
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

It may not be the whole truth about American writers, but it is the story. So print the story. American writers, let us say, are like meteors. Flashes in the pan. Mayfly angels. Out of the nowhere, into the here they come, hurtling brazenly through their short day to give us joy, strewing largesse and seed about as though there were no tomorrow, which indeed there isn’t – because the air of the planet soon gets them, seizes shut the wings of song, burns them out. Afterwards, stuck together with mucilage and pulp, they may linger for a few years in the atriums of America, for hire; but it is not a warm world for sharecroppers, and after the mating flight American writers are terribly fragile, like beehives in a frost. They rust. They crumble at the touch. That is the story we are told, the legend we print; halfright but vicious. It may have shaped the lives (it has certainly poisoned our perception of the lives) of writers like Truman Capote, Dashiell Hammett, Jack Kerouac, Theodore Sturgeon. And James Tiptree Jr?

Sometimes the shoe fits. Creative burn-out is not a curse peculiar to writers, nor to Americans; but writers, notoriously vulnerable in the solitude of their craft, can find it terribly difficult in America to discover a middle ground between total obscurity and the fifteen minutes of crowded fame we’re all supposed to get and catch our deaths from; and without that middle ground there is no respite. America, it might be said, is a land without a midlist, a land which affords no cushion – no community, no reciprocity, no clerisy, no network of readers – to sustain the writer in her flight. It is, therefore, all the more remarkable that, just a few generations ago, in the flat heart of this continent, a few men and women and boys and girls were able to give birth to the American SF community. They did not invent SF itself (though many of them thought they had), but they did manage to invent (or to re-invent) a mutual society in the heart of a cultural maelstrom, a society of readers and writers and workers which still exists, overgrown and market-driven and hype-ridden though it may sometimes seem to have become. From 1926 or so the SF writer, unlike his peers, comes from somewhere and has somewhere to land. From outside the kraal it must seem a warm world indeed.

For the woman who became James Tiptree Jr in 1968, and who nestled within that pseudonym for a decade – like an imago beyond price hiding deep inside the kind of Russian doll we now call a babushka – the world of SF may well have seemed irresistible. Though she remained invisible until her identity was uncovered, the SF community did nourish her, did constitute a middle ground she could (if only vicariously) live inside, as she attested in correspondence. We cannot know for sure why she became James Tiptree Jr, nor why she began almost to confess her true identity through the creation in 1974 of Raccoona Sheldon as a second pseudonym; and it is almost certain that speculations about the motives of Alice B Sheldon (1915– 1987), who became Tiptree, would be an impertinence against her memory. All we can know at this stage is that – during the years of secrecy – she burned like a meteor. All we know for sure is that the stories she wrote from 1970 until 1977 – when her health began to fail and her secret identity finally collapsed – comprise the finest and most moving single spate of creative energy the field has ever seen. In the secrecy of the male pseudonym she inhabited during the years of her astonishing prime, and under the cover of the gregarious, life-affirming, gemütlich personality she created in letters and non-fiction for that Tiptree self, Alice B Sheldon wrote free. She wrote young. She wrote to the edge and beyond. And she wrote like a man.

(In 1975, in his introduction to Tiptree’s ‘Warm Worlds and Otherwise,’ Robert Silverberg gave voice to a bio-critical speculation about the author which has since become famous. ‘It has been suggested that Tiptree is female,’ he wrote, ‘a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.’ Given human nature, it’s unlikely many of Silverberg’s readers could have failed to enjoy the discomfiture he must have felt in 1977 when Tiptree’s identity was uncovered; and there is no denying that what he said was both inapposite in its self-assurance, and culture-bound in its assumption that an artefact of language – in this case the phallocentric assembly of themes and tropes and rhythms and rituals and syntaxes greased for power which makes up ‘masculine discourse’ – was in itself inherently sexed, so that only a biological male could utter it. Artefacts – like Jungle Jims, like pseudonyms – are in themselves inherently ‘learnable’. They can be climbed into. At the same time, of course, Silverberg
did
have a point. To deny that Tiptree did in fact sound ‘like a man’ is to deny one’s clear sense that male hegemony utters itself in recognizable terms; it also scants the masterly uses to which Tiptree put that artefactual language which owns the world
and tells it
: tells the world what it is, tells the world what to do. Having aerated and ennobled that language, having turned the tables on the biological presumptions it rides on, she used the sly potent enablement pheromones of ‘man talk’ as a kind of
speed
. She mainlined on the artefact, from within the babushka of Tiptree, itself snugly hidden inside the larger babushka of the SF community; and in that tongue she said some things which burned. Like ice. Like fire.)

So she wrote like a man, and a meteor, a flash in the pan, a mayfly angel. Three years after beginning to write SF, she was already nearing her astonishing peak, and by 1977 (as we’ve already noted) she had begun to flame out, though the evidence for this was obscured till later by variable gaps between writing and publication of stories. Before 1977, all we knew of James Tiptree Jr was that he was no longer young, because he had told us that he was middle-aged; he also claimed to be Chicago-born, often abroad in his youth, involved in intelligence work in World War Two; and postal evidence suggested that he lived somewhere near Washington, DC. Even told all this, many of us still found it extremely hard to imagine that James Tiptree Jr was not, in fact, a person perhaps rather younger than he claimed, and certainly in the very peak of condition. I myself thought of him as a wiry sharp man whose colour was the colour of marmalade, like a tiger out of Blake. Whether or not I was ever induced to think of him as a woman I cannot remember; but I know I was very short of being prepared to think of him as a 60-year-old woman whose health was precarious, whose first serious heart attack in 1977 would quite possibly mark the end of any hope she might have to launch herself again, like a tightrope-walker across the void, like a man who walked home, burning energy like a tiger in the night, giving us the tale still taut from the young muscle of her hands, the touch of her secret breath.