James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of alice B. Sheldon

[lightreads]

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

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Alice Bradley Sheldon. In rough order: she walked over a thousand miles through then uncharted Africa, was a society debutante, eloped, enlisted and then worked her way up to an army Captain in World War II, was a painter and an art critic, became a chicken hatcher and then a CIA analyst, traveled the world, became a doctor of psychology, wrote some of the most searing and extraordinary science fiction short stories I have ever read, played out a complex gender identity shell game with her male pseudonym, had an epistolary affair with Joanna Russ, shot her husband and then herself.



Damn I wish someone else had written this book. I would seriously pay cold hard cash for Hermione Lee’s version. Because this is an extraordinary story about someone with a rich, turbulent life, with complicated and contradictory ideas of gender, and who maintained multiple personas and voices. Phillips had access to Alice’s papers, conducted extensive interviews, and is a deft writer. And I could not trust her.



The overarching problem is her lack of critical tools. The best biographers have all the intensity and knowing of a spouse, but the coolness of a surgeon. They have to love the subject, know her flaws, and be able to cut her open and let her entrails steam in the same sentence, without ever changing tone.



Phillips didn’t have that. She is untrustworthy in that hard-to-spot way where she rushes or elides things that make her uncomfortable. Like, okay, you can’t give me half a paragraph on an incident from Alice’s tumultuous twenties where she apparently turned to prostitution and barely escaped a knife-wielding customer with her life, and then trot hastily on to the next thing, determinedly never looking back. That would be absurd in any biography; in the biography of this woman, who wrote so much about sex and violence and gendered sex and violence, it’s fatal.



Things like that. And her lack of consistency or control with questions of gender. I mean, you i>cannot write a biography of Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree Jr. without bringing an educated, consistent, interrogated framework of gender to the table. Or so I thought.



And the lack of critical faculties sometimes betrayed Phillips into total fail. She takes Alice’s late-life account of the sexual advances her mother made on her when she was a teenager at such unquestioning face value that she actually says that Alice acknowledged some responsibility for what happened, and then blithely carries on for the rest of the book accepting that as true. Because obviously if the fifteen-year-old victim of what was at the least sexual predation victim blames herself, well whatever she says goes, right?



I just, argh. I’m harping. But this book could have been so brilliant. The subject is so extraordinary, the material so rich. And I really enjoyed it for everything I learned about Alice. But all the ways Phillips failed just kill me.





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Comments

[livingbyfiction.livejournal.com]

I gave it 5 stars, though on rereading my review I realize that I did so while only halfway through the book. Hmm. http://livingbyfiction.wordpress.com/2009/05/19/james-tiptree-jr/

I agree with everything you say about the biographer's fails, but I'm sticking to 5 stars if 5 stars means "everyone should read this book." Also, I cut Phillips some slack because knowing Alice is essentially impossible. Between unlocking Alice and unlocking cold fusion, I'd bet on cold fusion first.

For the most part, though, I just ignored Phillips and whatever portrait she was trying to build about "Alli." Phillips didn't bring critical chops, but at least she did bring armfuls of facts and sheafs of letters. I mean, Phillips fails to probe deeply into prostitution and maternal incest, but she deserves credit for bringing up those facts, which not every biographer actually does. Also, I don't expect that she had a lot of facts to work with on either of those topics, in which case I very much prefer a biographer to acknowledge the lack of data rather than to warble speculatively. If I had access to the primary source, it'd be swan dives and pirouettes, but this book is the next best thing.

Is the glass half full or half empty? In the past 5 years, my only benchmark for biographies is England's Mistress, a well-reviewed bio of Emma Hamilton. As Emma bounces from bed to aristocratic bed in a determined attempt to stay out of the brothel, the biographer repeatedly writes "yet Emma seemed to genuinely love [sex sponsor]: in her letters to him, she wrote [flowery expression of eternal devotion]." Now there's a biographer whose brain is made of apples.

In conclusion, if I had my druthers, I'd have a Tiptree bio by Joanna Russ, but if we are good, perhaps we'll be rewarded with three volumes of collected letters.

[lightreads]

Between unlocking Alice and unlocking cold fusion, I'd bet on cold fusion first.


That one I'll give you. But argh, Phillips, she couldn't even keep her own damn opinions straight -- she called Tiptree "genderless" and "a masculine performance" in the same chapter.

Funny you should mention the letters. I was trying to decide the other day whether I most desperately want the full correspondence of Tiptree and Russ, anotated and editorialized, or the same for Tiptree and UKL.

[vito_excalibur]

So disappointing! Oh, what a shame.