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JAMES TIPTREE, JR. -- THE DOUBLE LIFE OF ALICE B. SHELDON |
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CHAPTER 26: FIRST CONTACT (1969)
There does seem to be a surprise when people just speak
honestly. [...] It always startles me because I can't imagine what value
non-communicating communication has. Of course you know that my tell-all
is temporarily chopped at the one limit that leads directly to my
mundane persona, but since I regard that persona as kind of an
insignificant accident, it isn't much of a limit. Anything real, just
ask me -- and jump back before the flood. I suspect most of us are just
like that, why else are we in the word game? To communicate ... By March 1969, when "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain" appeared in Galaxy, Tiptree had been selling stories for over a year, and the close-knit world of science fiction writers and readers was starting to take notice. When "Ain" came out, Tip's friend and later agent Virginia Kidd recalled, "everybody noticed that story and was impressed by it." Damon Knight wrote asking Tiptree to submit to Orbit, his influential series of original anthologies. In an interview in the May issue of If, Lester del Rey singled out Tiptree as a new writer to watch. Tiptree's new colleagues were curious about him. Knight invited Tiptree to another of his projects, the Milford Science Fiction Writers' Conference. In January, Harry Harrison suggested Tip come up to New York for a few days and socialize. "You can meet the writers, talk things up, go to a couple of parties, meet some people (editors) for lunch, get the feel and the swing and the feedback of your peer group." Alli let Tiptree decline on grounds of secret business. N.Y. sounds great, if Ground Control will kindly press the right buttons. They may not. Did I mention that writing here is done in time filched from what are laughingly known as my legitimate responsibilities? (That's why you keep getting mss typed at 3 AM.) No one here knows me as a writer, and for reasons I hope you won't make too close a guess at for awhile, it's got to stay that way. But despite himself, Tiptree was getting more and more involved, not just with writing, but with the intense, gregarious, garrulous world of science fiction. Science fiction is interactive. Writers (and their fans) meet at conventions, argue all day, drink together all night, and influence each other in a way unlike any other literature. They talk about ideas, stories, politics, and recipes. They work in and from a rich soup of letters, gossip, affairs, rivalries, and friendships. They draw from a common pool of images and imaginary settings, using spaceships, androids, and aliens to build the genre that Tiptree called a "towering, glittering mad lay cathedral." Science fiction is inclusive. It is read by boys with faces full of acne and brains full of cyberspace, girls with stringy hair and fierce imaginations, awkward people, brilliant people in search of like minds. Damon Knight, in his history of the 1930s fan and writer group the Futurians -- a shadow bohemia living in the same New York cold-water walk-ups and burning to tell a different kind of story -- concludes that fans are "more intelligent and articulate than the general population, and somewhat less mature." As in many subcultures, fans reinvent themselves. Cy Chalivin, who wrote for a famine called Gorbett that Tiptree subscribed to in the early 1970s, recalled that its mimeographed pages were full of his friends' in group fantasy and masquerade. "We were all part of that secret life then, fandom, that Tiptree had stumbled on, and really if she took on an invented persona, she was just behaving like everyone else. Alli liked this world but wasn't quite sure what to do with it. Part of her kept safely above the gossip and politics and contemplated science fiction from a superior height. Tiptree claimed no attachment to his work -- "I came to my own mediocre efforts so late that my ego isn't invested" -- and often expressed a condescending affection for "the world of Camelot -- people this attempt at writing seems to have landed me in." Barry Malzberg recalled being put off by the way Tiptree behaved ''as if it were a pretend life and we were all pretend people." It helped that writing was a game for Alli financially. She liked being paid, but didn't mind being paid pennies a word or waiting months for a check. (Tiptree was also famous for not cashing the checks he did get, to the despair of editors crying to balance their books.) At first she spent Tiptree's minuscule earnings on "his" expenses: magazine and fanzine subscriptions, SFWA dues, typewriter repairs, and post office box rent. Later, when Tip's funds started to add up, she sometimes used them to buy jewelry or other presents for herself, and joked about "money for jam." Tiptree was friendly, of course, and flirtatious with women. When he was grateful to Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Pohl's assistant at Galaxy, he wrote, "It's probably lese-majeste to tell a Managing Editor she's a superdoll. You are, though." When he paid his SFWA dues he enclosed complimentary letters to Anne McCaffrey, that year's secretary. With young people he played one of Alli's favorite roles, the wise older friend. When Tip was still thinking of submitting his Star Trek script, Harrison put him in touch with David Gerrold, an enthusiastic twenty-four-year-old in Los Angeles who had broken into SF with the famous Star Trek script "The Trouble with Tribbles." Gerrold asked Tiptree to contribute to an anthology he was editing, and the two writers began a sociable correspondence. To this nonthreatening youth Tiptree could make jokes, free-associate, use dirty words. On what could and couldn't be said in SF, with its teenage readership, he commented, "Yesterday the Washington Post had a main editorial about how it was more or less okay to print mother-fucker on the front page. (They used * * *, but so what?)" It's hard to imagine Alli writing that to Max Lerner or to Arnheim. Another part of Alli took science fiction much more seriously. When she wasn't feeling embarrassed about her science fiction habit, Alli was thrilled to be writing it, deeply grateful to her first editors, and very much in awe of other writers. One way Alli coped with this mix of admiration, envy, pride, and fear was by generously giving out compliments. Robert Silverberg complained about Tiptree's habit of "professing [...] high regard for colleagues not fit to change his type-writer ribbons." Sometimes the compliments came from a feeling of relief, after years of reading academese, bureaucratese, and bad fiction. Alli once wrote Joanna Russ, "You are like me -- when something strikes you right you are so happy to be able to like it that you spill all over generosity." Sometimes they were a deliberate seduction of a writer Tiptree admired. Tip's fan letters were so charming they made Barry Malzberg think for a while that this new writer was a plant. "The best way to get to writers at a distance is to write them letters saying nice things about their work. I thought this might be the CIA setting up a persona to investigate a lot of scruffy people who didn't fit in." The compliments always deflected judgment from Tiptree's own work. To Damon Knight, who also complained about Tiptree's intemperate praise, he wrote, "Damon, if I'm going to be clear-eyed enough really to judge the sheep from the goats, I can't write. Because I am one of the goats." Despite her claim that her ego wasn't involved, Alli was almost certainly terrified of writing. She was afraid of having talent, not having talent, being seen, not being seen, being the writer and not her daughter, having her game turn out real. At the same time, Alli cried to connect with writers whose work she respected. SF might be a game, but she hadn't lost her longing for an audience, or her desire to be liked by people she admired. Almost all Tiptree's closest correspondences, when they didn't begin with an editorial relationship, started with a fan letter to another writer. At first, Alli also used Tiptree to write
to mainstream figures. He wrote to Tom Wolfe praising The Pump House
Gang, Anthony Burgess, Italo Calvino. Wolfe and Calvino wrote back, and
Calvino asked to see Tiptree's stories. But Tip didn't answer their
letters. Instead, he got himself into a short, intense, messy
correspondence with Philip K. Dick. That jolt when hero meets Molinari was just right. [...] I've watched you trying (I think) to make believable human great men, and these really hit it. It's so damn hard. [...] I've met a few such, the worst luckily on opposite side of bars; you've got it. And coupled with the Kathy embroidery on the theme, it really does it. Brrr. [...] And the tremendous richness of plots, the stuff thrown away that would serve us lesser mortals for a week's menu. [...] The endless jerkiness of people worrying about their own stuff, each mind its own ant-castle. [ ...] Of course the bit that really sticks -- that damaged cart hiding in the zinc bucket. That'll be around in my head until I get a new brain! You know, thinking it over, it all raises the problem of how much human reality the sci-fi fabric will bear, doesn't it? (E.g. the what-do-I-do-with-a-mad-wife theme.) I think you've brought it off perhaps by keeping it low-pitch. But since I started writing the stuff meself I sometimes wonder. Especially since I don't have the Magic Electric Fireworks fountain you must have in your head! Tiptree added a PS: "This doesn't call for answering -- am just gratifying own desire to vent admiration." Dick answered anyway, thanking his new fan for the feedback. I would judge from your comments that you read the novel in a very creative way -- I don't mean that you saw things that weren't there -- I just mean that yours is not a passive kind of reading but an active one which, I strongly guess, implies creative writing ability on your part, in terms of writing your own novels and stories. You are quite perceptive ... a little too perceptive and analytical for a mere reader. Thank you again, and I would enjoy hearing from you again, not necessarily on the topic of my writing (which would be okay, of course) but perhaps on general literary subjects. But having a writer he admired invite him into a friendship must have been terrifying, because Tiptree quickly pushed Dick back up onto his pedestal. He wrote back babbling about how thrilled he was to get a letter "from a real live writer whose works I've been admiring and chewing my lip over for years." At the same time he made fun of himself for getting so excited. Funny about that thrill; finally realised what it comes from: Subconsciously, a conviction that the really good writers aren't human. That the works are messages in bottles from the writer's world. You know? So when Sturgeon or Bunch or somebody turns out to be an actual Terran primate using -- of all things -- the U.S. mails, with a zip number, for god's sake -- I get about the same kick the Ozma people would if one of the pulsars began to rap out binary Yeats. To be told that you are not human is disconcerting, however -- especially when you are suffering from such earthly troubles as writer's block, a dissolving fourth marriage, and a violent amphetamine addiction. It took several months and several more fan letters from Tiptree before Dick finally responded again, in September, with thanks and a request for an explanation. "As far as your remarks go on my general work, I am humble and a little nettled. How does an author reply to such compliments? Do you really mean them?" Tiptree answered again that he wasn't talking to a fellow writer, just responding to a work of fiction. "To me the work is objective, in a sense detached from its author -- it's out there and there it sits, oozing or glittering or exploding, or whatever. [ ...] Frankly, all I really expect you to say is yeah, I thought it was pretty good too!" Eventually, after about a year of letters from Tiptree, Dick reached out and grabbed his fan by the lapels. Although Tiptree had mentioned his own writing, Dick apparently didn't take him seriously until he was sent copies of the stories that had been nominated for that year's Nebula Awards. One was "Dr. Ain." Dick wrote to say it was" damn good " and would Tiptree be interested in collaborating on a novel? Dick had been looking for a collaborator to help him break his writer's block. But whatever Alli wanted from an exchange with Dick, it wasn't anything as intimate as this. Tiptree bolted. "You want to lose a fan from heart failure?" he responded. "The idea couldn't be greater but the glaring question is, what in hell could Tiptree contribute to Dick's processes?" Later, in a letter to another friend, Tiptree said that Dick had once made "an offer of collaboration to a writer far inferior to himself" and that this writer, metaphorically speaking, got down, banged his head on the floor, and said, "Lord, you've scared the pants off me, and maybe in about a thousand years when I know how to write I'll come back and offer to erase a few commas with you or something. But meanwhile please be assured that I consider this to be some kind of an honor that descended on me in a dream and is not to be taken seriously." [AB-1] Alli couldn't have collaborated with Dick or anyone, and was also, humbly, excusing herself. But after this the correspondence dwindled, unable to bear the weight of so much admiration. Alli's deference, which worked so nicely on Arnheim and Lerner, didn't play as well when she was writing as a man. *** To people who didn't scare him so much, Tiptree was able to talk more honestly about his life and troubles -- more and more, his troubles with his mother. In early 1969 he began corresponding with Virginia Kidd, a longtime SF fan who had just started an influential literary agency. After "Ain" appeared, she wrote complimenting him on the story and fishing for a new client. Tiptree didn't get the hint, but he did write back. In April he dashed off a postcard on the way to Chicago: "Absence indefinite, Big White Father's business now complicated by emergency with Aged Parent. (This is no country for old men -- )" In June he described to Kidd the "heart-wringing" scene of Mary's decline. My returns to McLean and desk are beginning to resemble the awakenings of Dr. Hyde after a bout as Jekyll. You know, the dawn light on shambles, the piles of reproachful corpses, agonised messages from friends in mortal offense, vague sounds of police without ... So he tries to explain, I have this problem, see -- I have a problem known as a catastrophe-prone ma, Virginia. And let me go on record, I never adequately realised what the girls in a family do. "Sis is taking care of ma." What a comfort. Well, I've no sis, nor living brothers neither, and the old lady -- who is fiercely compos mentis much of the time -- rejects any attempt to move her out of a mad midwestern eyrie -- and how you get nurses, ambulances, doctors, drugs, more nurses, more ambulances, more everything from orthopedic beds to adequate protein at long distance is What I'm Learning. [ ...] Nothing my normally elliptical style can cope with. This time when Tiptree mixes up Jekyll
and Hyde, the writer is the better self. And Kidd fell in love with this
kind older man who cared about his mother. Kidd's marriage to writer
James Blish had ended a few years earlier. Tiptree appeared to be a
bachelor. She hinted he would be welcome to visit her in Pennsylvania,
and recalled, "I fantasized about meeting this man and being swept away
by him." But Alli's own tangled feelings about writing and her exchanges with writers -- note to mention her surprising crush on Mr. Spock -- led her to think about fame and desire. In the spring of 1969 Alli began work on a story about "that fantastic misdirected adoration one is sometimes struck by for actors or public figures." She was also thinking about "The Little Mermaid," with its moral about the price of dreams, and Damon Knight's SF classic "The Handler." The result was a Jekyll-and-Hyde story about a female monster: "The Girl Who Was Plugged In." The story's heroine, a monstrously ugly
seventeen-year-old named Philadelphia Burke, is offered a Faustian
bargain. If she will allow herself to be wired with electrodes and
locked naked in a cabinet, hidden from the world, she will be taught to
animate the artificially grown body of a perfect girl. She accepts, and
becomes Delphi, a ravishing, yellow-haired, elfin teenage movie star.
Among other Another ambitious story Alli wrote in late 1968 she called "I'm Too Big but I Love to Play." It describes an alien, little more than a vast, disembodied energy force, that tries to understand human experience by taking human forms and participating in human encounters. Because the being is so large, primitive, and unstable, it can't sustain its imitations of people, but at moments of tension detonates violently into its original form. The monstrous, amorphous real self can communicate only if it takes on a presentable exterior -- an inherently volatile situation that is always threatening to explode. *** Tiptree implied to all his correspondents he was working hard in the spring of 1969. Yet there's no record of Alli teaching at either American or George Washington. Tiptree sent stories around: "I'm Too Big" was rejected by Galaxy/If, F&SF, and Playboy before it finally sold to Amazing, and "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" was rejected so many times that Tiptree temporarily shelved it. (Damon Knight said the ending didn't work; Ed Ferman at F&SF said it didn't "jell.") Meanwhile, Alli lived an everyday life that she kept out of Tiptree's letters: letting in the roofers, finding paste wax for the cleaning lady, fertilizing the lettuce, buying a dress at Lord & Taylor to go see Mary in. Ting was getting ready to retire that year, and was looking forward to more travel and fishing. His life, too, was changing. His father had died in 1960, his mother in 1967. When his sister Helen, who had never married, went to their home in Biarritz to settle the estate, she suffered a heart attack and died too. Ting missed his mother, and his sister even more. But he came into some money, about two hundred thousand dollars, and he and Alli were better off than they had been. In 1969, along with the usual vacation in Canada, they made a short spring trip to Mexico, spending a couple of weeks in a beach house in a remote hamlet on the Yucatan Peninsula. The fishing was good, and they made plans to return the next year. It wasn't until the fall that Tiptree again had Alli's attention. By then he had turned up one very enthusiastic audience: the editorial and writerly phenomenon that was Harlan Ellison. Ellison was thirty-five, good-looking, cocky, combative, magnetic. He lived in Los Angeles, where he made a good living (rare among SF writers) writing for TV series such as Route 66. The Outer Limits, and Star Trek. He spoke out against the Vietnam War and in support of civil rights and (later) the Equal Rights Amendment. He was publishing some of his best fiction, stories such as "A Boy and His Dog" and "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream." He encouraged younger writers, male and female, tried to make science fiction look sexy, and was in the midst of editing Again, Dangerous Visions, his second anthology of "New Wave" science fiction. "New Wave" is a controversial term in SF. It was coined, some argue, purely for promotional purposes, on a par with Ellison pronouncements such as "speculative fiction is hotter than sliced bread." Yet it did convey the sense that there was a new energy in the genre, that more could be said better, that much "contemporary" literature was already old-fashioned, whereas science fiction had its finger on the pulse of the times. Ellison was looking for stories with stylish writing, thematic, sophistication, and daring subject matter. He had put out a call for submissions, and Tiptree had sent in two of his fragments, including a revised version of the old parody "Please Don't Play with the Time Machine." Months later, in July 1969, he received a rejection letter on dove-gray, gold-embossed stationery: Dear Mr. Tiptree: Your credentials precede you. The respect and admiration in which you are held by other writers and at least two editors who have mentioned you as "brilliant," allows me to return these stories without qualm. You are considered -- even for a newly published author -- quite a comer. And as such, I don't have any sadness about sending back what are obviously two quickies cobbled-up late at night. You can do better than this, and I expect you to do so. Ellison promised to hold the book open until Tiptree sent work worthy of his true talent. When Tip wrote back to say he'd try, Ellison repeated his instructions to bust your ass [...] -- brilliant new idea, incisive characterization, original attack of style, boggling ending. [...] A story on which to build a first-rank reputation. The best story you ever wrote. Don't worry about time. I'm patient. (You see what undeniable talent buys you, friend?) Don't disappoint either of us. Sensing that Tip needed more confidence, Ellison gave him some. His verve and theatricality reassured Alli that this was still a game. And he didn't need any pushing to stay on his pedestal. On the Sheldons' vacation, at a lake in northern Ontario, Alli sat down, thought about what it might take to blow Ellison's mind, and wrote a story called "The Milk of Paradise." "The Milk of Paradise" describes a young human who was raised by an alien race. He has been reprogrammed to fit into a human world, but they haven't been able to erase his longing for his first home, the planet Paradise, with its dim ruby sun, its towers, its sweet music. The story opens with a blast of sexual revulsion: She was flowing hot and naked and she straddled his belly in the cuddle-cube and fed him her hard little tits. And he convulsed up under her and then was headlong on the water, vomiting. "Timor! Timor!" It was not his name. [ ...] "I'm sorry. [ ...] It's no good. It's never any good." "But you're Human, Timor. Like me. Aren't you glad you were rescued?" Timor is tricked into going back to Paradise, only to discover that the towers of his memory are mud huts, their inhabitants "gray rotten little things [ ...] humping towards [him] out of the walls." Yet he realizes, as his artificial conditioning falls away, that this hideous place is his paradise, his home, ugly, maybe deadly, but his, and he will stay. From beginning to end, the story startles, disorients, and turns the tables on the reader. SF critic Steve Brown recalled that when it appeared in Again, Dangerous Visions in 1972, "I read the first two sentences and felt like I'd fallen off a high tower. [....] I had read many stories that were far more sexual and/or 'shocking' than anything Tiptree wrote. But it was the contrast. The intense burst of sexuality immediately coupled with violent physical rejection. These combined to instill a profound sense of alienation before the story was underway. Alienation, and a distrust -- the story's ground had become shifting sand, and I picked my way through uncertainly and in doubt of everything, which is exactly how she wanted me to feel. That story was a deep and unsettling experience that still resonates to this day." Alli often thought of herself as writing purely abstract fiction, a look at a social problem or an exercise in impressing an editor. But "The Milk of Paradise" doesn't feel like it is coolly under the writer's control. It is too upsetting not to be personal. It delivers the effect Alli had once aspired to in painting: the "pure, complicated nausea" of Max Beckmann, or Orozco's blood and guts and righteous anger. In September 1969, just after Tiptree had tried to persuade Dick that praise had nothing to do with its recipient, that the work was "out there [ ...] oozing or glittering or exploding, or whatever," he received a gold-embossed letter of acceptance from Harlan Ellison. Dear Jim: Dear mother of God! I just tried to call you from LA. You aren't listed. Now listen to me, man, because this is where the bullshit stops: You are the single most important new writer in science fiction today. Nobody touches you! Not me, not Delany, not Blish, not Blidrys, not Disch, not Dick ... none of us. [...] ["Milk"] is so good there are no superlatives. It goes beyond. It's absolutely new, absolutely fresh, unkind to everything that went before because it is its own rara avis. You are another new wave. If each new wave is one man -- as I contend -- then you are what's coming bursting breaking cresting now, and I am so fucking destructed by what you've allowed me to read, I don't know how to say thank you. What he did offer was a place of honor in Again, Dangerous Visions, as the last story -- and two and a half cents a word, or $75, plus royalties. "I've learnt to take Maalox before I open those gold things but this time it should have been digitalis," Tip wrote back. "They found me six feet up in the curtains trembling, my large tarsier eyes vacant and crossed." Then Ellison wrote again, demanding "complete autobiographical and bibliographical information on you" plus an afterword to "establish that rare writer-to-reader liaison." Tiptree tried to wriggle out: "You've got it wrong, it's the readers who convince the writer of his own reality." Ellison answered, "I will, of course, respect your feelings in the matter, but I ask that you seriously reconsider. In other words, Tiptree, don't be a goddamn trouble maker." A few weeks later Harry Harrison, who had picked up "The Snows Are Melted" for a reprint anthology, also asked for a biography. "School, army if there was, jobs, training, hobbies [...] .Just blurt it out. Reveal all." For Harrison, Tip coughed up the first few bits of real data, soon to become part of the Tiptree myth: World War II, yeah, mostly locked in a Pentagon sub-basement. [ ...] Birth, yeah, flat-r midwestern and north Wisconsin lakes, plus a bit of trekking around to odd spots, am still trying to figure out what war was going on in Shanghai when I was there age 10, and I can say bring me a small teaspoon in Swahili if anybody's interested. To Ellison, he wrote a long explanation of why a story has nothing to do with the everyday business of its writer, which Ellison, pragmatically, used as the story's afterword. Then David Gerrold came looking for Tiptree -- and showed up on Alli's doorstep. Tip had promised his young friend he'd buy him a drink sometime. So when Gerrold and a friend drove back East for a convention in Philadelphia, they decided to look him up. They couldn't find him in the phone book, but they had his address. So, Gerrold wrote afterward, we did the really gross maneuver of dropping in unannounced. That is, we tried to. Apparently you out-maneuvered us. We couldn't find 6037 Ramshorn Place. Are you sure you live there? (We did find a 6037 Ramshorn Terrace, but the lady there couldn't help.) Harlan said you were mysterious, but this is ridiculous! The two long-haired kids had of course rung the right doorbell. But when Alli opened the door and they asked for Tiptree, she told them the first lie she could think of. The streets in the area were winding and confusing, so the story was more or less plausible. That same week Alli went out and got Tiptree a box at the McLean post office. Then Tiptree sent Gerrold a bouquet of excuses: what a shame, it would have been lovely to see you, but I just moved, and the McLean street map is terrible, and I'm in Chicago half the time anyway. You weren't at the right house, and besides, I wasn't home. By that time Gerrold was less sure he had been at the wrong address, and was wondering about the lady at "Ramshorn Terrace." Anyway, the story made good gossip, and he told it several times at Philcon. Most of his hearers concluded that Tiptree was a CIA agent, and wondered why he didn't show up so they could tell him they liked his stories. Meanwhile Tiptree was sending out change-of-address cards and trying to make it look like he was mostly on the road. This wasn't too hard: in early December Alli went to supervise the rewiring of 5344 Hyde Park Boulevard, and she and Ting visited Mary again at Christmas. When Tip wrote Pohl in January 1970, Alli used stationery from a Chicago hotel and forwarded the letter to be mailed from Chicago. Most of Tiptree's acquaintances decided not to pry. Anne McCaffrey wrote, "Did have a bit of a chuckle when your [ ...] address change arrived. Bit too much on the heels of David the Gerrold's abortive attempt to find you." But at Philcon she had "loyally insisted that you were not female gender ... I could be wrong but then that never bothers me particularly. Someone else remarked that you prefer to be anonymous so I will leave it lay, as the saying goes." Tiptree wrote back, tongue invisibly in cheek: "I'd be honoured if [Gerrold] wishes to class me in the sf female contingent, for whom I have hair-raising respect -- but I trust he comes off the CIA kick. [ ...] I am not, retransmit NOT, employed by CIA." A few years later, in a letter of confession to be opened by Tiptree's agent in case of his death, Alli included an apology to Gerrold. "You looked fine. It killed me to be too scared to speak." *** Yet Alli wasn't ready to give up her new project. On November 3, just before Gerrold rang her doorbell, she wrote Arnheim sheepishly that she'd done no new work in psychology. I really totally dropped out. Like a hopeless drunkard whose last virtue is to manage a clean shirt-collar, all I have done is punctiliously to send out reprints of my articles when requested. [...] But Rudy; it's been such fun. How many times in one's life does a door open to total escape, utter newness? I was so profoundly dispirited, alienated [...] And suddenly I was in the middle of a different light, a new me, first having a good joke of being someone else, and then as the stories went on and out, having started genuine friendships among delightful people whose native language-crude, childish, humourous -- rational -- was mine ... And that wonderful experience, when one is new, of that trembling freshness of perception on all sides -- each new friend listening, and oneself listening -- you know, when one is starting a new correspondence, each word received or sent adds -- doubles -- the known area ... And honest. The funny little Camelot-world of these writers and enthusiasts is extraordinarily honest. One corresponds with strangers, old, young, male, female, without caution or disguise, and without false needs. About the stories, about other writers, trivia, politics, death, price-per-word. [ ...] What I have written are mostly somber, simple little tales of passionate revolt and doom. Also jolly ones ... But as I went on from telling a story like an anecdote to telling one in the present tense, with some life in the words, 1 became fascinated with the techniques. ... (Rather late in the day for fresh loves, what?) -- and young people seemed to like them. This is a TERRIBLE seduction -- when 20-year-olds start writing you that you have spoken their dreams, the grey-head is landed like a trout ... So you write about their dreams and reality, and the 20-year-old locked up inside one takes you by the hand, and you forget death. And you may say a lot of things about science, and cruelty, and make jokes you were never allowed to make.
Well Rudy now I have told someone -- you are the only one
except Ting to whom I have told, what actually I am just trying to
understand myself. I have just been going on somnambule, doing the
stories and experiencing ... Well, with 3.5 billion people riding with me on this rock-ball, I don't see that it matters much. [ ...] (-- I hope you realise, this whole letter is predicated on the idea that you and yours are well, are all right, that you would tell me if otherwise, so that one can babble on as if psychic adventures were the only realities [...])
Yrs wildly, _______________ American Buddha Librarian's Comments: [AB-1] What this says to me is that Tiptree didn't write any of the stories that were attributed to her/him, and she knew if she met Dick, that her cover would IMMEDIATELY BE BLOWN! Because she didn't have a literary bone in her body! Go to Next Page
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