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James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon.

Article Excerpt
James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips, St. Martin's Press, 2006, $27.95.

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THIS IS THE saddest story I have ever heard, and one of the most frustrating--not in its telling, which is superb, but in its depiction of a woman tragically born a half-century too soon. Alice Sheldon was brilliant, accomplished, beautiful, affluent. Her 1920s childhood experiences in the African wilderness were the stuff of fever dreams; as a teen debutante in Chicago, she could have been played by Katharine Hepburn, though one thinks Frances Farmer might have brought more to the role. Sheldon's subsequent careers--as a WAC, as a member of CIA photointelligence, as a psychologist--were overshadowed by her mother's long and successful stint as a writer, as well as by bouts of mental illness and Alice's profound unease with her own sexual identity. For fifty years this volatile psychic amalgam simmered, with a few added ingredients tossed in--a violent early marriage; long-term amphetamine dependence; a bipolar mood disorder; binge drinking, unhappy love affairs with men, faltering attempts to become a serious painter and writer, even a turn as a chicken farmer in rural New Jersey--until, in 1967, Alice Sheldon finally achieved the creative alchemy she'd been striving for, and the writer James Tiptree Jr. was born.

One often reads of biographies that their subjects could be fictional characters. It's safe to say that the hero/ine of Julia Phillips's definitive James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon would defy even the most extravagant novelistic imagination. Artist, CIA operative, gender-bending literary seductress with a Hemingwayesque alter-ego, Sheldon insured there'd be no Hollywood ending when, in a suicide pact, she murdered her elderly husband, then shot herself in their suburban home. As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up: Who would fall for it?

But a lot of people did fall for Sheldon's literary persona, most famously Robert Silverberg, who wrote in his 1975 introduction to Tiptree's collection Warm Worlds and Otherwise,

"It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing. I don't think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male."

Well, few things are ineluctably masculine in our post-Brokeback Mountain age, and Silverberg certainly has nothing to be ashamed of--Tiptree fooled all of the writers and editors he corresponded with during the heady years he was writing his best work, from 1967 until November 1976, when Alli (the name Phillips uses to refer to the "real" Alice Sheldon) discovered this letter in Tiptree's P.O. Box.

"Dear Tip,

Okay, I'm going to lay all my cards on the table. You are not required to do likewise.

You've probably heard from people already, but word is spreading very fast that your true name is Alice Sheldon...."

It's a testament to Julia Phillips's powerful narrative that this revelation--which we've been anticipating from Page 1--can still shock and almost sicken the reader, much as surely it did Alli herself. For someone who had built and dismantled an often shaky professional and sexual identity untold times over the years, before finding success and acceptance among the community of science fiction writers, editors, and fans, this note (from Tiptree's friend and correspondent, Jeff Smith) must have echoed like a tocsin, a warning blare that...