Stranger than science fiction

Before JT Leroy there was James Tiptree Jr. -- the writer and alter ego of Alice Sheldon, a beautiful woman who struggled under the weight of her talent, depression and sexuality.

By Laura Miller

Read more: Books, Laura Miller, Science Fiction, Reviews, Book reviews

Photo courtesy of Mary Hastings Bradley Papers, University of Illinois

Alice Sheldon in fall 1945

Aug. 10, 2006 | People are understandably fascinated by the lives of great artists. We scrutinize them for the formative experience or the light-bulb flare of inspiration -- whatever it is that pushes a human being beyond the rim of the merely good and results in a work for the ages. But in a way, the lives of the near great are just as illuminating. They're more like us in both their fears and their limitations, and they're often better at showing us where the threshold is by not quite managing to cross it. With them, you can see the precise point when nerve failed, perseverance ran out, vision faltered.

Take the case of James Tiptree Jr., who for a few years during the heyday of science fiction's "New Wave," in the 1960s, wrote stories that combined, in the words of biographer Julie Phillips, "exhilarating speed with unsettling shifts of perspective and resonant moral and psychological depths." The reclusive Tiptree carried on involved, intimate correspondences with at least a dozen other writers and editors. They knew that their friend had gone on safari in Africa at the age of 6, learned to fly a plane and shoot a gun, worked for military intelligence during World War II and for the CIA afterward, published a short story in the New Yorker and obtained a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. What they didn't know was that he didn't exist, or not exactly. The person writing under the name James Tiptree Jr. was actually Alice Sheldon, a woman in her 50s, living with her husband in suburban McLean, Va.

Phillips spent a decade working on this absorbing biography, so its publication on the heels of the revelation of a couple of notorious literary frauds is pure coincidence. Yet "James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon" offers a rich exploration of the attractions and perils of writerly personas, and no doubt a more revealing one than we'll ever get from JT Leroy and James Frey. Alice Sheldon, as Phillips portrays her, was a woman who struggled all her days to do justice to her own knotted and painful experience of life; she came closest in Tiptree's fiction. But this biography conveys the pervasive sense of a gift thwarted on the verge of consummation, and Phillips' meditations on why that happened make this book exceptional.

What's particularly provocative about James Tiptree is that almost everything "he" told his epistolary friends about himself -- down to several passionate but doomed infatuations with unavailable women -- was essentially true. Sheldon lived an extraordinary life, and was a woman of immense charm, intelligence and talent. Yet somehow, she needed the mask, or rather the alter ego, of Tiptree to write her best fiction. When Tiptree's real identity was discovered by some sleuthing fans, Sheldon was relieved, it's true; the strain of maintaining a second self had been wearing her down, but the aftermath was mixed. As Phillips points out, nothing she wrote afterward "was ever as direct, honest and exciting as her work before she was exposed."

The most difficult and preoccupying relationship in Sheldon's life was with her mother, and it's not hard to see why. Mary Bradley was a popular author (she supported the family with her writing when her husband's business interests faltered during the Depression), a glamorous Chicago socialite and a fearless adventurer. With her stalwart, supportive husband and her angelic blond daughter, she traveled in the 1920s to parts of Africa so remote that the people there had never seen whites before. In one famous anecdote, Mary was posing for a photograph with the head of a lion she'd shot in her lap. When the animal, who was only stunned, roused itself and began to roar, she sprang up and shot it again.

One of Phillips' great assets in writing this book is that Sheldon is an endlessly amusing, shrewd and reflective writer, even if her attempts at self-examination often failed to bring the insights she needed most. Phillips quotes her subject liberally, because usually no one else could put things better. In a letter, Sheldon described her mother as "a kind of explorer-heroine, highly literate (Oxford & Heidelberg), yet very feminine whatever that is. You help her through doors -- and then find out she can hike 45 miles up a mountain carrying her rifle and yours. And repeat the next day. And joke. And dazzling looks ... I am still approached by doddering old wrecks, extinguished Scandinavian savants and what have you who want to tell me about Mother as a young woman."

That phrase, "feminine whatever that is," is a revealing aside; as Phillips sees it, Sheldon would spend most of her 72 years trying to figure out how to be a woman. A chief obstacle was her own mother's manifest success at doing whatever she wanted while remaining "feminine whatever that is." Sheldon, who accomplished enough in her time to make the child of a more ordinary mom feel exceptional, wrote that her mother "didn't provide a model for me, she provided an impossibility." It's not that Mary or her husband, Herbert, weren't doting parents -- they were, and Sheldon would at times paint her childhood as a lost paradise in which she felt "so beloved and understood. En rapport, such high morale in our little group, and the world a great treasure pot to be opened." At other times, she felt smothered by her parents' emotional demands; she also liked to describe Mary as a "cannibal" mother.

Next page: Tiptree allowed Sheldon "not just the authority to speak, but the courage to play games, to be bad at something"