The Language of the Night, page 19
Quite a lot of us did, however, suspect the short story writer Raccoona Sheldon of being either an invention of Tiptree’s or his natural daughter, and we were quite right; only what is right? What does it mean to say that “Tiptree is Sheldon,” or that “James Tiptree Jr. is a woman”? I am not sure at all, except that it’s a fine example of the pitfalls built into the English verb to be. You turn it around and say, “A woman is James Tiptree Jr.,” and you see you have said something quite different.
As for why Alice is James and James is Alice, that is still another matter, and one where speculation very soon becomes prying and invasion of privacy. But there are fascinating precedents. Mary Ann Evans was a Victorian woman living with a Victorian man to whom she wasn’t married; she took a pen name to protect her work from censure. But why a male pen name? She could, after all, have called herself Sara Jane Williams. It appears that she needed to be George Eliot, or George Eliot needed to be her, for a while. She and he together got past creative and spiritual dead ends and morasses that the woman Mary Ann alone was in danger of getting stuck in. As soon as she felt herself free, she admitted and announced the George Eliot/Mary Ann Evans identity. George’s name continued to appear on the title pages of the great novels; as a practical matter, of course—the name was a bestseller—but also, I should guess, in gratitude, and in sheer, and characteristic, integrity.
Dr. Alice Sheldon isn’t a Victorian, nor are we, and her reasons for using pen names may be assumed to be personal rather than social; and that’s really all we have any right to assume about the matter. But since she did use a male persona, and kept it up publicly with perfect success for years, there are some assumptions that we ought to be examining, gazing at with fascinated horror, revising with loud cries and dramatic gestures of contrition and dismay; and these are our assumptions—all of us, readers, writers, critics, feminists, masculinists, sexists, nonsexists, straights, gays—concerning “the way men write” and “the way women write.” The kind of psychic bias that led one of the keenest, subtlest minds in science fiction to state, “It has been suggested that Tiptree is a 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.” The error was completely honest, and we all made it: but the justification and the generalization—even with such supposedly extreme examples as Austen and Hemingway—that bears some thinking about. We ought to think about it. And about all our arguments concerning Women in Fiction, and why we have them; and all the panels on Women in Science Fiction (omitting, of course, James Tiptree Jr.).I And all the stuff that has been written about “feminine style,” about its inferiority or superiority to “masculine style,” about the necessary, obligatory difference of the two. All the closed-shop attitudes of radical feminism, which invited Tiptree out of certain inner sanctums because, although his stories were so very good and so extraordinary in their understanding of women, still, he was a man. All the ineffable patronization and put-down Sheldon is going to receive now from various male reviewers because, although her stories are so very good and so extraordinary in their understanding of men, still, she is a woman. All that. All that kipple, gubbish, garble, and abomination which Alice James Raccoona Tiptree Sheldon Jr. showed for what it is when she appeared, smiling a little uncertainly, from her postbox in McLean, Virginia. She fooled us. She fooled us good and proper. And we can only thank her for it.
For though she stood us all on our heads, isn’t it true that she played her game without actually lying—without deceit?
The army, the government, the university, the jungles, all that is true. Mr. Tiptree’s biography is Dr. Sheldon’s.
The beautiful story “The Women Men Don’t See” (oh—now that we know—what a gorgeously ironic title!) got a flood of nominations for the Nebula Award in 1974. So much of the praise of the story concerned the evidence it gave that a man could write with full sympathy about women, that Tiptree felt a prize for it would involve deceit, false pretenses. She withdrew the story from the competition, muttering about not wanting to cut younger writers out of all the prizes. I don’t think this cover-up was false, either: the truth, if not the whole truth. She had had a Nebula in 1973 for “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death,” and a Hugo in the same year for “The Girl Who Was Plugged In.” These prizes sneaked up on her and caught her by surprise, I think. Her 1976 Nebula for the powerful “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?,” in this volume, came so soon after the disclosure of her name that she didn’t have time to think up a good excuse for withdrawing it; so she went off and hid in a jungle instead. She practices that “low profile” which Carlos Castaneda, standing in high profile on the rooftops, preaches. The cult of personality, prevalent in art as in politics, is simply not her game.
Yet she did fool us; and the fact is important, because it makes a point which no amount of argument could have made. Not only does it imperil all theories concerning the woman as writer and the writer as woman, but it might make us question some of our assumptions concerning the existence of the writer per se. It’s idiotic to say, “There is no such person as James Tiptree Jr.” There is. The proof that there is, which will incidentally outlast us all, is these stories. But, because James wrote them, is Alice now to be besieged by people asking impertinent questions about her family life, where she gets her ideas from, and what she eats for breakfast—which is what we do to writers? Can anyone explain to her, or to me, what all that has to do with the stories, and which is more real: the old primate or the star songs?
Again, there are lovely precedents; this time the one I’d choose is Woolf’s novel Orlando. Alice Sheldon has quite a lot in common with Orlando, and like Orlando, is an unanswerable criticism of the rational and moral fallacies of sexism, simply by being what and who she is. She also provides an exhilarating criticism of what real life, or reality, is, by being a fictional character who writes real stories; here she surpasses Orlando. On the edge of the impenetrable jungles of Yucatán, on the beach, the straw-hatted figure stands, dapper, fragile, smiling; just before vanishing into the shadows of the trees he murmurs, “Are you real?” and Alice, in a house in far Virginia, replacing the blue ribbon in her typewriter, smiles also and replies, “Oh, yes, certainly.” And I, who have never met either of them, agree. They are real. Both of them. But not so real, perhaps, as their stories. This book you hold now in your hand, this is the genuine article. No fooling.
5) Here are Some real stories.
I. Note (1989). I believe a science fiction convention finally had a panel on Men in Science Fiction, but I don’t know what they said.
IV TELLING THE TRUTH
I have never found anywhere, in the domain of art, that you don’t have to walk to. (There is quite an array of jets, buses and hacks which you can ride to Success; but that is a different destination.) It is a pretty wild country. There are, of course, roads. Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain’t no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction—you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.
from “Fifteen Vultures, the Strop, and the Old Lady,” in Clarion II, ed. Robin Scott Wilson (New York: NAL Signet, 1972)
INTRODUCTION
Encore Magazine of the Arts, April–May 1977, carried this poem by Ursula Le Guin:
EVEREST
How long to climb the mountain?
Forty years. The native guides
are dark, small, brave, evasive.
They cannot be bribed.
Would you advise
the North Face?
All the faces
frown; so choose. The travelers describe
their traveling, not yours.
Footholds don’t last in ice.
Read rocks. Their word endures.
And at the top?
You stop.
They say that you can see
the Town.
I don’t know.
You look down. It’s strange
not to be looking up; hard to be sure
just what it is you’re seeing.
Some say the Town; others perceive
a farther Range. The guides turn back.
Shoulder your pack, put on your coat.
From here on down no track,
no goal, no way, no ways.
In the immense downward of the evening
there may be far within the golden haze
a motion or a glittering: waves,
towers, heights? remote, remote.
The language of the rocks has changed.
I knew once what it meant.
How long is the descent?
Fiction writer, poet, critic and teacher, guide: Le Guin is all these. Though writing is a solitary exploration, as critic and teacher she offers maps, suggestions about equipment, and descriptions of her own traveling. The excerpt from her introduction to The Altered I (Melbourne: Norstrilia Press, 1976; New York: Berkley, 1978) outlines some of her experiences as the leader of the workshop on the writing of science fiction. (The book itself contains the best stories and exercises from the 1975 Australian writers’ workshop, including a Le Guin story and the workshop comments on it. The exercises, and the participants’ essays on their experiences, are a useful source of inspiration for would-be writers. “Where do you get your ideas?” “Oh, this story started with the Le Guin One-Change Bit, and that story came from the Avram Davidson Word Game, and…”)
The second essay, which I have titled “Talking about Writing,” is a previously unpublished talk given at Southern Oregon College, Ashland, in February 1977, a revision of a talk given in Reading, England, in January 1976.
Both essays emphasize the recurrent theme of the writer’s need for self-exploration, self-knowledge, and self-criticism. Like “A Citizen of Mondath,” they repeat the musical metaphor important to Le Guin and to her characters, like Shevek of The Dispossessed and Owen Griffiths of Very Far Away from Anywhere Else, who discovers that “thinking is another kind of music” as he watches Natalie Field play Bach on the viola. “Natalie was trying to confirm what Bach had reported to some church congregation in Germany two hundred and fifty years ago. If she did it absolutely right, it might turn out to be true. To be the truth.”
In her essay “Escape Routes,” published in the science fiction magazine Galaxy (December 1974) and reprinted here with her own introduction, Le Guin emphasizes the idea that the reading of a science fiction story is as serious and important as the playing of a Bach suite. Le Guin repeats and summarizes her major critical values: her view of science fiction as a literature with both “the capacity to face an open universe” and the aesthetic and moral necessity to face that universe honestly.
INTRODUCTION TO THE ALTERED I (EXCERPT)
(1976)
The usual scenario for a writer’s conference or workshop, I am told by those who have been there, is something like this: The Writer sits on a dais facing a group of Postulant Writers. He criticizes the works which they have submitted to him, and lectures on the art of writing. In the evening, he reads to them from his works.
The kind of workshop I seem to get involved in is not like that at all; it is incredibly messy. There are all these people, about twenty of them, sitting, or lying, or lounging, or assuming the lotus position, or whatever, in a sort of circle. Somewhere nearby are stacks of the manuscripts submitted for tomorrow; they have all already read the manuscripts submitted for today. They start in on the first story, and one by one, round the circle, they voice their criticisms and reactions: anything relevant, from grammar and structure through factual probability to the implicit Outlook on Life. The author of the story is not allowed to reply until they are all done; then he/she can reply passionately and at length. The professional writer, often called the “resident”—President without the capital P, perhaps—can either criticize in turn, or try to sum up at the end; she/he has no special authority, except to say, “Come on, Susan already said all that,” when people begin repeating one another, and to open general discussion, and to prevent fistfights. This round-robin of discussion usually goes on from nine till noon, and again in the afternoon if there’s a backlog of stories to work on. The rest of the day and night, everybody writes—perhaps on a theme or exercise proposed by the resident, perhaps on their own hook—and reads what everybody else has written, and talks, and writes, and writes, and talks, and eats meals with the others, and occasionally, for brief periods in the small hours, even sleeps a little. This goes on, twenty hours a day, five or six days a week, for six weeks. Residents last only a week apiece, and are taken away to rest homes; fresh victims are supplied regularly.
This system of mutual criticism sessions was worked out at a conference of professional science fiction writers at Milford, Pennsylvania (and Milford Conferences still take place annually both in the United States and England). A survivor of a “Milford,” Professor Robin Scott Wilson, applied its egalitarian method to a workshop for aspiring SF writers at Clarion, Pennsylvania. The experiment was notably successful, and “Clarions” have been held annually at one or more places in the States each summer since then.
I have been a resident three times at the six-week Clarion West workshops organized by Vonda McIntyre at the University of Washington, and have also applied the system, so far as is possible, to once-a-week courses in the writing of SF and fantasy, twice with Professor Anthony Wolk in Oregon, and once at the University of Reading in England. When I needed to earn my way to Australia to attend the World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne in August of 1975, the Australian Literature Board generously provided the opportunity for a one-week “Clarion of the Antipodes.” I leapt at the chance with delight, having found workshop residence as exciting as it is exhausting.
The excitement is twofold. Part of it is that, under these rather extreme conditions—twenty people living, eating, talking, and working together, in a situation of extreme ego-exposure, and with obsessive concentration on a single goal—a group forms: the kind of group, I take it, that encounter therapy sets out deliberately to form. Participation in a real group is always exciting for a writer, whose work is done in solitude (usually outer, always inner): a rare and invigorating experience. The other element of the excitement is the functioning of the system itself. The participants write; and they tend to write better as they go along. Stories written in the workshop, under pressure, often in a half day or a night, are often very much better than the lovingly worked-on stories submitted ahead of time as evidence of qualification. This improvement must rise from the fact that the participants are getting practice in criticism and therefore in self-criticism—and a taste of the self-confidence that comes with self-criticism; and also I think they write better because they are caught up in and carried by the momentum and energy of the group. When the system works, as it usually does, it is not a competitive situation; just the reverse. It provides mutual inspiration.
This is the most commonplace thing in the world to a performing musician, whose art is a group performance, and who depends upon that mutual release of energy through skill. To a writer, it can be a revelation. “The competition,” to a young fiction writer, usually consists of famous or successful authors, none of whom he knows personally, and most of whom are dead: a remote untouchable crowd of luminaries. To meet, live with, work with a group of ambitious, serious, nonfamous, not-yet-successful writers like one’s self, to find that you aren’t the only nut on the walnut tree, to discuss the craft, to argue ideas, to expose your work to others as they expose it to you, no-holds-barred, is to experience what the musician experiences and relies upon in every performance: cooperation on the job, skill reinforcing skill, not competition but emulation. And music is made. Stories are written.
The American Clarions have produced a remarkable percentage of participants who go on to become professional writers. This is something to be proud of. But it’s not the real point. I think. The real point is to make music together.
TALKING ABOUT WRITING
Tonight we are supposed to be talking about writing. I think probably the last person who ought to be asked to talk about writing is a writer. Everybody else knows so much more about it than a writer does.
I’m not just being snide; it’s only common sense. If you want to know all about the sea, you go and ask a sailor, or an oceanographer, or a marine biologist, and they can tell you a lot about the sea. But if you go and ask the sea itself, what does it say? Grumble grumble swish swish. It is too busy being itself to know anything about itself.
Anyway, meeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long time ago. There is this terrific book that has changed your life, and then you meet the author, and he has shifty eyes and funny shoes and he won’t talk about anything except the injustice of the United States income tax structure toward people with fluctuating income, or how to breed Black Angus cows, or something.
Well, anyhow, I am supposed to talk about writing, and the part I really like will come soon, when you get to talk to me about writing, but I will try to clear the floor for that by dealing with some of the most basic questions.
People come up to you if you’re a writer, and they say, I want to be a writer. How do I become a writer?
I have a two-stage answer to that. Very often the first stage doesn’t get off the ground, and we end up standing around the ruins on the launching pad, arguing.
