“What I do with
emotion is not, strictly, to ‘bottle it up.’ I parcel it out. I make it drive
me in work; I try to use it to understand the world; I occasionally try to form
or express little bits in objective writing or drawing; I try to stay out of situations
which encourage it; I take it out in physical exertion – and what still can’t
be handled I do ‘bottle up’ and sit on. What else can one do? […]”
Alice Sheldon in “James Tiptree, Jr. - The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon” by
Julie Phillips
Biographies have traditionally had a complex
relationship with "truth." Hesketh Pearson's brilliantly readable
mid-twentieth-century biographies favour "good stories" over the
boring facts. Julie Phillips didn’t have to tackle one of the most difficult
things in writing a biography: correct the distortions and myths in previous
biographies. It was all a blank sheet. Phillips seems to favour the "bag
of facts" approach to biography which has been gaining favour but this too
has its problems – notably, that reading such a book tends to be a chore, not a
pleasure. The challenge, I think, is to keep a balance between telling the
story and being rigorously, “checkably” factual.
When it comes to autobiographies, you sit down
with your blank sheet of A4 and start sucking your pencil (or your mouse),
desperate for inspiration; isn't the mining of your own life likely to be more
quickly and readily available at all hours of day and night and perhaps require
less effort than having to pass what you have learned of the nature and life of
other people through a process of synthesis and precis and imaginative marshalling?
There may also be the thought that the hanging out of dirty linen (linen from
best Irish flax?) on a public washing line may be helpful to one's own bruised psyche.
Though full disclosure is very fashionable these days, of course, I'm not sure
this is necessarily therapeutic. This also applies to biographies. Just as in
so many films a scene airing much emotion is accompanied by a sly, tinkling,
solo piano as the filmmakers slip into telling-you-what-to-feel mode. Perhaps
we can make a distinction between a case where a writer dishes the dirt on
him/herself, with little collateral damage caused, and a case where Big Bertha
transmogrifies into a cluster bomb and the havoc spreads inexorably from the
centre, like a pebble chucked into the Tralee Ship Canal outside Blennerville.
Tiptree/Sheldon was literally a
Feminist-in-Disguise for generations. I'd agree she doesn't fit the current
shrill, superficial version of feminism that is sometimes just online shaming
(and not all that progressive often) but I'd wager she's going to have a lot
more credibility as a feminist in 100 years’ time and all the twitter
"feminists" will be forgotten along with the motherhood-on-a-pedestal
Victorians, the racist anti-Union feminists of the early 1900s and the anti-sex
pro-Reagan 1980s groups. Feminism is a very old and long tradition. I think
he/she had been thinking about it lucidly for a lot longer than most all of us.
Too bad his/her story ended the way it did. We may never know what it really
happened and what made him/her do it.
Without delving much deeper into the book, I
would say the aim of any writer is to publish something that sells. In the book
blogosphere, I meet lots of people who think they can write, including two or
three who think they can write so well, that they want to charge people to
listen to their advice on what these people should be reading. They call
themselves bibliotherapists. I can't tell you how desperate I am to tell them
that they are living in cloud cuckoo land and that the country is full of bin
men, shop assistants and dog walkers who are in every way equal, but haven't
got their brass necks. I imagine a lot of writers who pick an unusual subject -
like writing about a writer such as Tiptree - have had enough of emptying bins
or walking dogs. That also goes for Biographers.
As one alien said to another after visiting
earth, 'What do you think?' The other
alien replied: 'Well the ones with the
intelligence seem ok, but I'm not sure about the ones with the testicles.',
and this coming from a Sapiens belonging to the latter; Tiptree belonged to the
former.
NB: Must-read for those of you who love SF-of-a-different-Persuasion.
Unmissable as well because of the letters between Tiptree/Sheldon and some
other SF writers, namely Philip K. Dick, Joanna Russ, and Ursula K. Le Guin.
A coda:
“’And then about three
o’clock in the morning Mrs. Sheldon called me back and told me that she had
actually killed Mr. Sheldon. I remember she said, ‘Jim, I slain Ting by own hand
and I’m about to take my own life, and for God’s sake don’t call the police, to
give me time to do what I have to do here.’ And by this point there was nothing
I could do. I did call the police, and they went over and found that both of
them were dead.’”
John Morrison in ““James Tiptree, Jr. - The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon” by
Julie Phillips
Tiptree/Sheldon was true to herself to the end
of her days. Big testicles. What a woman! My kind of SF.
SF = Speculative Fiction.
