Meet Me at Infinity (43 page)

If you’d asked me any time from age three to twenty-six, I’d have told you, “I’m a painter.” (Note, not “artist”—painter. Snobbism there.) And I was. Oh my, did I draw, sketch, model, smear oils, build gesso, paint—paint—paint. (Age three I drew pictures of our bulldog, with lollipop legs.) I worked daily, whether I was supposed to be listening to lectures on Chateaubriand, whether my then-husband was shooting at me (he was a beautiful alcoholic poet), whether the sheriff was carrying our furniture out, whether Father was having a heart attack, whatever. And I wasn’t too bad; I illustrated a couple of books in my early teens, I had a one-man show at sixteen, I exhibited in the All-American then at the Corcoran—and the painting, which used me as model, sold. Somewhere my naked form is hanging in a bedroom in North Carolina, if it hasn’t been junked. I bought a shotgun, a Fox C-E double-barrel 12-gauge full choke, with the money. (Those were the three years when I was a crazy duck hunter, before I shot one too many cripples and gave it up never to kill another living thing, bugs excluded.) I believe the Fox is now far more valuable than anything I ever did.

The trouble was, you see, I was just good enough to understand the difference between my talent and that rare thing,
real
ability. It was as though I had climbed the foothills high enough to see the snow-clad peaks beyond, which I could never scale. This doesn’t stop some people; it did me. What’s the use of adding to the world’s scrap heap? The reason people thought me innovative was that I was good enough to steal mannerisms and tricks they had never climbed high enough to study. But
I
knew where it was coming from.

And then came the dreadful steady unstoppable rise of Hitler—a great spreading black loin chop on the map—and I found out something else. There are painters who go on painting when a million voices are screaming in terminal agonies. And there are those who feel they have to Do Something about it, however little.

So I came back to Chicago—I’d been living in San Angel, near Mexico City, mucking around on the fringes of the Diego Rivera/Orozco/ Siqueres crowd—and took a job as the
Chicago Sun’s
first art editor, while waiting for the Army to open female enlistments. (I wasn’t one of the famous first group of female potential officers; for some reason it was important to me to go in as an ordinary G.I. with
women officers.)
Besides, I was having a great time discovering that Chicago was full of artists, who had to exhibit in NYC before they could sell to their Chicago neighbors. Chicago then had two art critics; one was a lethal, totally politicized Marxist (female), and the other was an elderly gent who knew art had died with Cezanne, and whose feet hurt. So when people sent works to Chicago shows they didn’t get reviewed—or it was worse when they did. Anyway, I rooted out about forty producing groups, started what was then a new thing, a
New Yorker-type
calendar, told people interesting things to look for in shows. (One Art Institute guard, coping with a host of people with my “guide” clipped out, demanding to know which was the east room, asked me, “Did
you
do this?” Nobody had asked him anything but “Where is the toilet?” for twenty years.)

But this was all waiting, while the paper shortage cut me from a page to a half and then to a quarter. And then the great day came, and I trotted down to U.S. Army Recruitment Station Number 27 in three-inch heels and my little chartreuse crepe-de-chine designer thing by Claire somebody, and my pale fox fur jacket, and found a drunken second lieutenant with his feet on the desk. And when I said I wished to enlist in the Army, he caught an imaginary fly and said, “Ah, hell, you don’t want to go in
that
goddamn thing.” And I said if it was all the same to him, I did. And so—but that’s another, five-year-long, fairly hilarious story.

People tell me I’ve had an exciting or glamorous or whatnot life; it didn’t feel like much but work and a few adventures. A few,
ah oui
… All I write is really from life, even that crazy duck-shooting boy breaking the ice naked at ten degrees below zero on the Apache reservation was me, once (“Her Smoke Rose Up Forever”).

As to science fiction: Well, you see, I had all these uncles, who are no relation at all, but merely stray or bereaved or otherwise unhappy bachelors whom my parents adopted in the course of their wanderings. (That sort of thing happened much more in the old, old days. The fact that Father was an intensely lovable man of bewildering varied capabilities, and that Mother was a blazing-blue-eyed redhead of great literacy and gaiety didn’t hurt, of course; and in their odd way they were both secretly lonesome—having nothing but peculiar me for family.) This particular uncle was what used to be called a Boston Brahmin, dean of a major law school and author of a text on torts so densely horrible that I still meet lawyers who shudder at its name. In short, he was dignified and respectable to an extreme—on the surface, as it turned out.

The summer when I was nine we were up in the woods of Wisconsin as usual, and Uncle Harry returned from an expedition to the metropolis of one thousand souls thirty miles away with his usual collection of
The New York Times, The Kenyon Review,
etc. (There was a funny little bookshop-hole there that ordered things for you.) Out of his bundle slipped a seven-by-nine magazine with a wonderful cover depicting, if I recollect, a large green octopus removing a young lady’s golden brassiere. We all stared. The title was
Weird Tales.

“Ah,” said Uncle Harry. “Oh. Oh yes. I, ah, picked this up for the child.”

“Uncle Harry,” I said, my eyes bulging,
“I
am the child. May I have it, please?”

“Uh,” said Uncle Harry. And, slowly, handed it over.

And so it all began. He would slip them to me and I would slip them back to him. Lovecraft—Oh, God. And more and more and more; we soon discovered
Amazing
and
Wonder Stories
and others that are long forgotten. We never discussed them; it was just Our Secret. But I’ll tell you one thing: You haven’t read fantasy or SF unless you have retired, with a single candle, to your lonely little cabin in the woods, far from the gaslights of the adult world and set your candle stub up in a brass basin and huddled under about sixteen quilts—the nights were cold and drafty, the candlelight jumped and guttered, shadows everywhere. And then, just as you get to where the nameless
Thing
starts to emerge, the last shred of candle gutters out, leaving you in the dark forest. And a screech owl, who has silently taken up position on the roof above, lets loose with a nerve-curdling shriek.

That’s
Tales of Wonder as they should be read, man.

Well, of course I was hooked, from then on, permanently. By the time World War II came along, I had about 1300 mags and paperbacks stacked in that cabin alone. (I gave them all to the county library, despite the sneers of the librarian, who doubtless used them for doorstops. Alas, alas; rubies, pearls, emeralds gone to the gravel crusher.)

With the war came a break, after which I started all over again (having discovered the magic of subscriptions). I now have about forty running feet of them double-stacked, plus head-high shelves bulging in all bathrooms, plus miscellaneous deposits. In addition, there’s another forty feet of philosophy and politics and history, sixty feet of my old professional specialty (experimental psychology), twenty feet of math, astronomy, and miscellaneous, twenty feet of fiction by dead authors and another twenty of same by live ones (horrible how quickly one seems to have to shift them), twenty feet of women’s studies and related material, and twenty feet of mostly poetry. And
something
has got to give. (Oh well, who needs
Das Kapital
anyway?)

The painful part of starting like that is that you read, read, read—without, in most cases, noticing dull stuff like the author’s name. Until I started to write it myself, of course; then names become acutely important. But I am still in the embarrassing position of not knowing who wrote some fantastic scene that is forever engraved on my liver. And then finding out, Oh my God, yes of course—
he
or
she
did that! (Worse yet, finding it out in his or her presence, whether in the flesh or in one of my Victorian correspondences.)

Now maybe this is the best place to lay to rest one last ghost—the business of the anonymity and the male pseudonym. First, the important part:
Everything I’ve ever told you or anyone else is true,
with one exception. David Gerrold came looking for me and I told him he was on a different street. If he’d waited before ringing the bell he would have seen through the glass a solitary figure staring at a
Star Trek
rerun in the dark, and I’m sure the jig would have been up. Other than that I have never told a lie or modulated my natural voice—I was very careful about pronouns, things like “child” instead of “boy,” etc., etc. But it wasn’t calculated. (I’m lousy at that.) All my letters have been just first draft typed as fast as I can go with my one finger. I can’t help what people think sounds male or female.

You see, when I started, I was in rather a stuffy job atmosphere. A university. And I was something of a maverick; I kept having ideas that didn’t jibe with the official academic outlook at my department. And when I started my own research it got worse. (“In this department we do feel rather strongly that recent PhDs do best when their work fits in with or amplifies some of the ongoing lines of research here.”) Well, I wasn’t about to fit in with or amplify anybody else’s line; I had my own long-held desires, and I kept citing research nobody else had read, or had read and dismissed, and with great pain and struggle I set off on a totally independent tack, which had the ill grace, after four agonizing years, to pay off. (I still keep getting requests for it from obscure European universities, or behind the Iron Curtain.) With this background, the news that I was writing—as I said in that long-ago interview—
science fiction
would have destroyed my last shreds of respectability and relegated me to the freak department, possibly even to the freak-whose-grant-funds-should-be-stopped division; those familiar with older academe will get the picture. Anonymity seemed highly desirable. The name “Tiptree” started by seeing it on a can of marmalade in the Giant; I was looking for a forgettable name so editors wouldn’t remember rejecting my manuscripts. The “James” was one more bit of cover—and my husband threw in “Jr.” for whimsy’s sake. I was shocked when the stories all sold and I was stuck with the name. What started as a prank dreamed its way into reality.

You have to realize, this never was run as a real clandestine operation with cutouts and drops and sanitizing and so on. The only “assets” were one P.O. box, a little luck, and the delicacy and decency of some people who decided not to pry. Namely and chiefly one Jeff Smith.

When you wrote asking for the
Phantasmicom
interview was the first time I was approached personally by anyone, and I told myself, Dammit, say no. But then this business of really loving the SF world and wanting to say so welled up, and I thought I could kind of race over the bio bit without telling lies and start waving Hello. You’ll note what I put in there about masks… So that’s how it all started.

Then, from about the second year, when things began to get serious, “James” started to feel more and more constrictive. It was as if there were things I wanted to write as me, or at least a woman. (I still don’t know exactly what they are, that’s the odd part.) Meanwhile Tiptree kept taking on a stronger and stronger life of his own; if I were superstitious I’d say Something was waiting for incarnation there in the Giant Foods import section… maybe I do anyway. This voice would speak up from behind my pancreas somewhere.
He
insisted on the nickname, he would not be “Jim.” And as to “Uncle” Tip—maybe I’m a natural uncle. See, I have no family, nobody ever called me Sis or Mom or even Aunt Alice.

And his persona wasn’t too constricting; I wrote as me. Maybe my peculiar upbringing—where values like Don’t-be-a-coward and Achieve! and Find-out-how-it-works and Fight-on-the-underdog’s-side were stamped in before they got to the You’re-a-young-lady stuff (which was awful)—maybe this resulted in a large part of me being kind of a generalized Human being rather than specifically female. (I am very pro-woman, though; once when dabbling in NY politics I had the opportunity to personally thank one of the original suffragettes, then a frail but vital eighty, for the privilege of the vote. It was a beautiful moment.) But still I wanted to write as a woman. By this point it became obvious that killing Tiptree off, say by drowning him out on the reef here, wasn’t going to be that simple. He—we—had all these friends, see. So all I did was rather feebly set up Raccoona Sheldon with a Wisconsin P.O. box and bank, and I confess to giving her some of Tip’s weaker tales to peddle. (Except for the one called “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!” in the anthology
Aurora
by Mclntyre and Anderson. Nobody much mentions that one, but I consider it as good as I can do.) Anyway, the upshot of all this was that where I lived I wasn’t, and I didn’t live where I was, and things were reaching some kind of crescendo of confusion. Frankly, I had no real plan. So I was really relieved as well as traumatized to have Mother’s ghost do Tiptree in. But it left me with an extraordinary eerie empty feeling for a while; maybe still does.

One problem caused by having a male pseudonym was that there was the desire to rush (by mail) up to many female writers and give them a straight sisterly hug. (And to some male writers, too; especially those I knew were feeling down. I guess I wrote some fairly peculiar letters here and there.) Another problem that may seem trivial, wasn’t to me; people kept saying how lifelike my female characters were, while all the time I was perishing to find out if the
male
characters were living!

Things like being hooted at in the Women in SF Symposium really didn’t bother me at all, because I doubtless would have done the same myself. And also I am used to being hooted at for unpopular ideas—the struggle I mentioned in the university was just one of a lifelong series. And then, too, I’m a feminist of a far earlier vintage, where we worked through a lot of the first stages all by our lonesomes. There are stages in all revolutions of consciousness where certain things are unsayable, because they sound too much like the enemy’s line. Then after some years, when everybody is feeling more secure about unity on the facts and the wrongs, those “unsayable” things can be looked at objectively again, and new insight gained. I refer, of course, to my real interest in why people are mothers. (I just saw an article in
Psychology Today
that triumphantly claims that Fathers Do It Too—but turns out on reading the data that what they “do” is quite different. They play with baby; mother takes care of it.) There were, of course, a lot more things I felt like saying in the Symposium, but I thought that one was safe for Tip. As indeed it was—typical “male” nonsense.