Stranger than science fiction

Sheldon wrote in her journal of Tiptree, "I had through him all the power and prestige of masculinity, I was -- though an aging intellectual -- of those who own the world. How I loathe being a woman ... Tiptree's 'death' has made me face ... my self-hate as a woman." Phillips sees this as the key to the halting and incomplete realization of Sheldon's gifts. "In the end," she writes, "Alli never found a way in her fiction for a girl to grow up a whole woman."

Sheldon's distaste for her gender wasn't consistent. She was an enthusiastic supporter of second-wave feminism who joined NOW and subscribed to Ms. Magazine from the outset. She started and abandoned several sympathetic treatises on the dilemma of women, especially those women with "atypical" ambitions and desires. As Tiptree, she even participated as one of the few men (the other being gay writer Samuel Delany) in a symposium on women in science fiction published in a professional journal. Russ, who came out of the closet as a lesbian during her epistolary friendship with Tiptree, received Sheldon's confession of similar yearnings: "I like some men a lot, but from the start, before I knew anything, it was always girls and women who lit me up."

Still, Phillips believes that Sheldon never shook off the ill effects of a youth spent trying to live up to her parents' expectations and her mother's example. In school, Phillips writes, "Alice had the bad luck to be extremely pretty. If she hadn't been, she might have given up the popularity contest. She might have studied harder, prepared for a career, and not cared what people thought ... Instead, she cared about appearances, practiced femininity and flirtation, and got addicted to the rewards for being a pretty girl." The result was a woman of tremendous charm who felt exhausted by the company of other people, even those she liked. Every interaction was a life-sapping performance.

Phillips suggests that if Sheldon had been able to accept those parts of herself that defied her parents' image of a good girl -- homosexual desires, anger and grief -- she might have been able to integrate Tiptree into Alice and sustain a brilliant career as an author without resorting to disguises. She also might have fared better in her lifelong struggle with depression. (She was diagnosed as a bipolar.) On the other hand, Phillips speculates, Sheldon might have found a place in the world as a scientist, in the old-fashioned Victorian polymath mode of Charles Darwin.

There's truth in these theories, but Sheldon also suffered from some more commonplace creative problems. Throughout her life, she rushed into a profession -- painting, the military, clinical psychology, writing -- with idealistic, grandiose notions of how things ought to be done. Inevitably, she was stymied by the inglorious practicalities. She worshiped Mexican muralist José Orozco, only to be disappointed, upon meeting him in Mexico City, when she learned that he was painting a rich woman's portrait for the money. Her hopes for finding a utopia of female empowerment in the WAC were dashed when the women insisted on behaving like the imperfect human beings they were. She refused to accommodate the realities of academic life -- department budgets, grantsmanship -- and thereby quashed her chances at a real career in science.

Sheldon's struggles remind me of a famous conversation between the minor British writer Stephen Spender and the great poet T.S. Eliot. The young Spender told Eliot that he had always wanted to be a poet. Eliot's reply was that he'd never understood this thing of wanting "to be a poet"; all he understood was having some poems you wanted to write. When what you really want is to write some poems, you don't let the ultimately ancillary issues of how a poet should live or whether you're an exceptional talent get in the way. Often, the difference between a minor writer and a great poet is a matter of insufficient -- or, rather, misplaced -- commitment.

With Sheldon, the nagging problem of her identity, who she wanted to be -- a genius, an artist, a scientist, a writer -- kept interfering with the things she wanted to do. By creating the persona of James Tiptree Jr., she was temporarily able to finesse the block. In time, though, the puzzle of identity intruded again, as this new imaginary self sucked up more and more of her time and energy. (Ellison, complaining that Tiptree wasn't producing a promised novel, insisted that all that letter writing was the cause.) If she'd managed to solve her identity dilemma, she might have, as Phillips suggests, figured out how to write about a girl growing up into a "whole woman." On the other hand, if she had cared more deeply, obsessively and passionately about any one of the half-dozen types of work she tried in her life, she might have looked up from it one day to find that the whole woman had arrived unbidden.

In the end, Sheldon was only able to seize control of her life in the most negative way. She talked her reluctant older husband (to whom, despite their mostly celibate marriage and her Sapphic yearnings, she was profoundly close and devoted) into a suicide pact. Before either of them descended into complete physical decay, she would shoot him and then herself. That's exactly what she did at a still vital 72. Whether she had any stories left that she wanted to write, we'll never know.

Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)

Search terms:

Salon the Web

Salon Directory (browse by topic)