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Falling from the Air
(Alice Sheldon)

I want to write about Alice Sheldon whose brightness fell from the air and fell and fell on May 2, 1987, and I will probably do not much better a job than John Clute, dearly science fiction's best critic and essayist, was able to manage in his introduction to the Arkham House collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1974) (Clute is appalled by the power and the darkness of the work but perhaps does not see it as the clear paradigm of autobiography which it seems to be; this may be the one insight in which I have the better of Clute but otherwise there is something about Sheldon which silences everyone, she incited adoration or revulsion but probably less useful comment than any major science fiction writer of our time).

Alice Sheldon—who wrote of course as "James Tiptree, Jr." for the first years of her career, 1968-1976, and a little bit as "Racoona Sheldon" in the later years of that period and then under her own name after the revelation of her identity (essentially she exposed herself, she permitted her true persona to be known because it was time to end a deception which perhaps she felt had shaded toward mockery and then self-mockery and then, possibly, dangerously toward a real self-contempt—was perhaps the best short story writer who ever worked within this field. Her two novels, Up the Walls of the World (1978) and Brightness Falls From the Air (1985) do not come anywhere near her achievement at the short-story length and it is possible that there may be reserved for her that particular and painful obscurity found by writers who were indisputably better in that form or who did not write novels at all. There are exceptions—Poe, of course, and John Collier and John Cheever who did some fairly strong novels—but writers like Stanley Ellin, Borden Deal, Henry Slesar, Henry Kuttner, Cyril Kornbluth are already in that kind of trouble or drifting in that direction. (Slesar is very much alive and made a fortune writing The Edge of Night, he also won a first novel Edgar way back in 1958, he most likely does not give a damn about this judgment.) Sheldon's achievement in the short story is so significant and so exceeds recognition of her novels that she may turn out to be the central example of this kind of critical and market judgment: the short story is not particularly valued in this country and our publishing process has never been geared toward lending it permanence. Or a wide audience.

It is fairly easy to understand why Alice Sheldon was so much better in the short story. The territory which she was working, the absolute equation if not interchangeability of sex and death was one part of the answer although of course there are a fair number of novelists who have managed quite well in extending that mutuality to book length. (Almost none in science fiction, however; Silverberg's Born with the Dead may take the issue as far as it has gone in any episodic sense and it is a 30,000 word novella.) What characterizes Sheldon, however, would be the question of her structures; they are intricate, tightly interwoven and calculated to pay off within a narrow and intense compass. Early stories like "The Man Who Walked Home" (1972) show a ruptured chronology which only makes sense in retrospect and only when the last piece has been placed; later stories like "Morality Meat" (1985) and "Backward Turn Backward" (posthumously published in Crown of Stars, 1988) are even more intricate. One can find out what is happening in these works only by pursuing them to the very end and it is only in retrospect at this point that the work assembles.

Sheldon herself understood this, knew how deliberate and deliberately off-putting her narrative attack was. "Start fifty feet underground and at the end of everything," she said in a letter, "and then, don't tell them," an approach reminiscent of Beater's insistence that one tried to find the point of a story at which matters were about to reach their highest point and explode, then you went beyond that to the point at which the explosion had occurred "and then you start the story . . . attack, attack, always attack." In both cases, it is the voice of the short-story writer we hear, the writer focused upon the peripety and its awful consequences, looking for that one frozen moment of utter consequence and obtained oblivion. Bester was able to slide around this particular curse probably because he had Horace Gold watching out for him in the two great novels, probably because it was Gold who insisted that Ben Reich and Gully Foyle's obsessions were enacted repeatedly in chapter after chapter and never solved until, penultimately, these men were destroyed; Tiptree and later Sheldon had little editing at all in a different era and tended to work toward her epiphanies and then quit.

Chiaroscuro technique, then, an anatomization of narrative to assemble only in retrospect. The technique needs close analysis and sometimes tends to be self-defeating. ("Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" (1970) is a novella which simply fails to make sense for so long that when the rather banal and brutal denouement at last appears, it tends to flatten the story, make it trite rather than intricate) but the equation of sex and death which was the thematic obsession of this writer needs little close analysis or analysis at all, it was simply there from nearly the beginning and it reaches such a point of explicitness in The Screwfly Solution" (1977) that, as good as that story is, it seems to be close to self-parody.

In "The Screwfly Solution" that line which (barely) keeps the aggression-driven sex drive in the human male from being actively dangerous to the female is obliterated by malevolent aliens interested in depopulating the planet; the story is told in the telegraphic series of dispatches, letters, communiques and stream-of-consciousness reminiscent of Sherred's "E for Effort" (1947) and shows the males, in a kind of frozen self-awareness, killing their women again and again; the story may have begun as a feminist metaphor but passes into a concrete, graphic horror. The same theme underlies "The Milk of Paradise" (1972) showing intercourse with aliens as transcendence in death, it is what drives "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" (1971) in which the biological imperative within the human male to copulate ever further from the basic affinity group leads to obsessive intercourse with aliens and death. Sex is death in these stories then, usually the kind of sex practiced by the male but these are not feminist tracts (Sheldon, after her emergence in 1976 in her true identity was more or less taken up by those in the sf community identifying as feminist) as they are dreadful visions, more painful than accusatory, of biological imperative carried toward personal obliteration. The paradigmatic Sheldon story, of course, "The Women Men Don't See" (1973) to its wry title, Sheldon's conscious message and self-mockery to the community, is a dazzling, multi-leveled uninflected piece of social commentary; the levels here are so dazzling—a woman writing under a man's name in the first-person of a male protagonist who is neither the center of the story nor comprehending of anything going on here—as to be flabbergasting and the premise and conclusion of this story, like those of "Vintage Season" (1940) or "They Don't Make Life Like They Used To" (1963) or "E for Effort" have been appropriated by so many writers for so many works that only a diminishing percentage of contemporary readers can trace those stories back to their source. The stark ending—the two women begging the aliens to take them away because it cannot possibly be worse for them out there than it is here—now seems inevitable and predictable but I do believe that Sheldon introduced it into science fiction and then proceeded to do it so well and with such finality that all of those other works can only be imitations, they are not extensions.

The external details of Sheldon's odyssey are probably as well known as those of any writer—those World War II years "spent in a Pentagon basement," the midlife doctorate in experimental psychology, the entrance into science fiction under the James Tiptree, Jr. persona in the late sixties when she wrote some stories as a respite from the doctoral orals, the burgeoning reputation,, the mysterious persona, the post office box in CIA territory, the rumors that this was a CIA employee, the interviews-by-mail and strange postcards cascading upon so many of us, the 1975 Ballantine collection with the Silverberg introduction insisting that despite some rumors to the contrary, "the Tiptree stories could have been written only by a man," the self-revelation in 1976, the cautious revelation of her identity and background, what is regarded by many (Clute most notably) as the slow weakening of the work after the pseudonym and anonymity have been sacrificed and the spectacular murder-and-suicide, front page of the Washington Post on 5/2/87, a suicide directly refracted and foreshadowed explicitly in several of the last stories ("Backward Turn Backward" (1988) and, horrifyingly, the posthumous "In Midst of Life" (1987)). But I suspect that these are indeed only details, only facts and scantily assembled facts at that; "facts are the enemy of truth" as the Man of La Mancha reminded his companion and the truth is something hard, terrible and rigorous. These stories were from the start, barring an occasional predilection for low comedy and pratfalls as in "Birth of a Salesman" (1968), rigorous, self-enclosed and adumbrating a vision of the human and alien condition so bleak and imposing as to defy emotional embrace and make necessary the occasion and profusion of pseudo-technological, pseudo-extrapolative jargon simply as a means of making this material bearable. Well, it is very hard to find the summation here. There is no summation, not really, every major career is ongoing, even when it is not. I knew her a little (but only by mail) and read her a lot and was floored by the posthumous collection, CROWN OF STARS (Tor, 1988) which I reached only recently (I had read "Yanqui Doodle" on publication in 7/87) and which seems to me utterly devastating. I hope this work lasts. I am not sure that it will but Kuttner's stories seem to stay around and so do Bester's in the occasional anthology and there are worse fates. Her real point may be too bleak, frightening for a general audience and she did not shield that vision in the lollipop-and-Halloween paraphernalia which characterizes Lovecraft but I don't think that her work is going to date and she provides certain satisfactions which Lovecraft, Dunsany and Bram Stoker did not. (Mary Shelley, maybe.) As Jimmy Cannon wrote in a eulogy of Hemingway in 1962, and in terms of the short story at least, she was our best writer, I think.

 

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