Read an Excerpt
James Tiptree, Jr.
The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
By Julie Phillips St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2006 Julie Phillips
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8911-8
CHAPTER 1
THE INNOCENT ADVENTURESS
And when you see even the outline of my dear, damnable mother you'll feel you were interviewing not only the wrong writer but the wrong woman.
—ALLI SHELDON
Mary Hastings Bradley is forgotten now, but in her daughter's lifetime she was a famous writer. She had stories in magazines that everybody read; she gave parties everybody attended. She was a socialite, an explorer, and a big game hunter. Her earnings kept her daughter in mink coats and finishing schools. She could be a blue-eyed beauty in a lace dress one day, an expert markswoman in khaki trousers the next. For a publicity portrait she posed in an evening dress, seated on the skin of a tiger that she had shot herself.
From her earliest childhood she wanted to write and have adventures. When she lectured on her career, she told her audience that her first memory of writing was of
sitting before my dolls' house laboriously printing out the story of what I thought was happening there. It was an Indian attack, I remember, and I remember my dear Mother saying: "Don't you want to clean your dolls' house, Mary? Don't you want to change your dolls' dresses?" No, Mary didn't. She wanted to write about an Indian attack.
But for a long time she didn't get the chance to risk her life, and most of the exploits in her writing were romantic ones. Reviewing her 1921 novel The Innocent Adventuress, the New York Times called her "a well-qualified composer of literary confectionery" who had written a "little sugar-plum of a book":
How Maria is lost on a mountain all night, who rescues her and bears her in his manly arms to his shack and whom she eventually decides upon as a husband ought to be fairly clear to the astute reader. The book is written with verve, and [ ...] is not without sufficient interest to pass an idle hour or two.
One of her early books, The Wine of Astonishment, was about "the seamy side of life," and was banned in Boston, but it was about a boy's coming of age. Her very first was a historical novel about Anne Boleyn called The Favor of Kings, published in 1912. She later said of it: "I had the real stuff of history in my grasp but I was much too well brought up then to make full use of my robust material." Mary, too, was an "innocent adventuress": if she wanted to have adventures, or write about them, she would have to keep up the appearance of propriety. The woman and the one who had adventures had to be two different people.
* * *
Mary Wilhelmina Hastings was born in Chicago on April 19, 1882, into a family that, on her mother's side, had come to Chicago when the city was new. Mary's grandparents were proud of their pioneer spirit and their English and New England blood. They taught Mary (who would later teach Alice) to admire courage, believe in progress, and climb socially. They passed on firm Victorian ethics and an American faith in self- transformation.
Mary adored her young mother, Lina Rickcords Hastings, but her father, William Hastings, was a more unsavory type, a hot-headed Southerner who may have been alcoholic and abusive. He died when Mary was about nine years old, though Mary sometimes claimed he had died before she was born. Afterward Mary's mother married a doctor named Arthur Corwin and had another daughter, Sylvia, twelve years younger than Mary. A death in the family, a usurpation: this is the kind of early experience that makes a writer. It left Mary with an enormous need to be seen, to be loved, to be a heroine.
By the time she graduated from Smith College in 1905, Mary was being seen: she had already sold short stories to the popular magazines Munsey's and the Woman's Home Companion. She told her parents she was moving to Greenwich Village to live in a garret and become a serious writer. For a woman, though, to be loved and to be a heroine are not always the same thing. When her parents said no, Mary chose love over seriousness and returned to Chicago.
As a consolation, the Corwins offered a trip to Europe, chaperoned by an older cousin. Mary spent a whole year traveling. She visited Germany, France, Italy, and Egypt, where she took a boat trip up the Nile. This first glimpse of Africa made a deep impression. She then spent three months in Oxford, writing, sending her stories home for her mother to type, and researching her novel rehabilitating Anne Boleyn.
After she returned she used Europe as a background in stories such as "The Girl from Home." In this light romance, published in Good Housekeeping in 1911, an American girl studying in Paris discovers that romantic Frenchmen are not to be trusted. Her friend Achille declares:
"I also have no such wish to marry—that is of an impossibility. [...] But the present we may have, and we are both young and poor together. Shall we not make life sweeter for one another?"
She felt his hands stealing about her, felt him bending closer—she sprang from him, her heart hammering in sick dismay. [...] That he should think such a thing of her—should suggest—
After this, she finds that dull, dependable young men from home can have their charms.
Mary was all in favor of dependable men. In 1909, when she was twenty-seven and living with her parents, she met a thirty-four-year-old lawyer named Herbert Bradley. He had just come back from Montana and was setting up a respectable law practice in Chicago. He too liked travel and adventure. They married a year later, with a honeymoon on horseback in the Rockies.
Herbert Edwin Bradley was born December 20, 1874, in Canada, the third of six sons of an Ontario farmer. As a young man he worked his way through teachers' college, then law school at Ann Arbor and Chicago. At first he was a mining lawyer; by the time he met Mary he had started investing in real estate, putting up apartment buildings on Chicago's South Side. These investments would make him rich. He was good-looking in a dour way, sensible, practical, careful with money. He had a sensual mouth, Alli thought, that belied his Canadian reserve. He had a side that was spontaneous and funny and made off-color jokes, and a melancholy streak that he did not let people see. He approved of Mary's writing career and was prepared to support her, financially, practically, and emotionally. They were a good match.
In 1912, Herbert and Mary moved into the apartment they would live in for the rest of their long lives. The building at 5344 Hyde Park Boulevard was one of Herbert's investments, a plain, three-story brick apartment house between the University of Chicago and the lake. The Bradleys had the entire top floor, plus a penthouse and roof garden. The apartment had plenty of room for their servants—cook, chauffeur, a series of governesses—and later for the Bradleys' collection of trophies, skins, and African souvenirs.
It had room for their parties and their many friends. Mary and Herbert were social, gregarious people whose soirees and travels were covered on the society pages of the Chicago papers. Where Alice would invent alter egos to do her writing, Mary turned herself into a writer character, a figure in the Chicago society columns:
Mrs. Herbert Bradley, always one of the busiest women in town, finds her life complicated by the opera season. Her publishers make no allowance for opera-going when they set deadlines. [...] As a result she finished her last novelette by dint of staying up all night after an opera performance, and startled the household when she appeared for breakfast in her evening clothes.
Mary's energy, intensity, and generosity attracted people. She had a manner that was both grand and utterly sincere. She inspired loyalty: servants stayed with her for decades. She inspired trust: people told her their life stories. Alice wrote wryly years later,
There's always room for another person or project in Mary's life. If we went to the Antarctic desert, some lone Eskimo would appear and Mary would say, "Why, you remember George here, he's the man who—" and we would hear all about George's ancestors and descendants [...] and George would tell me what a terrific person my mother was.
Like many creative and exciting people, she created a magical world around herself, drew her friends into it, and reigned inside it. The price for being swept up in Mary's charm was to leave something of yourself behind.
She was not an introspective person—keeping a diary made her feel "silly and self-conscious"—and didn't let people see inside. Mary's niece Barbara Francisco, the daughter of her half sister Sylvia, recalled that despite her warmth, "you couldn't get close to her at all. She was always on stage."
One of the few people allowed behind the scenes was Alice. Under Mary's gay and worldly air, Alice later wrote, "it was understood that she was enduring terrible grief."
The house on Hyde Park Boulevard had been meant for a big family. Instead, Mary had a series of miscarriages in the five years before Alice was born. (The probable cause, Rh factor incompatibility, was not recognized until years later. Alice survived because her blood type was Rh negative, like her mother's.) Mary was thirty-three when Alice was born, on August 24, 1915. Her birth must have given the Bradleys hope. But the worst was yet to come. When Alice was four, in 1919, Mary carried another pregnancy to term. Alice's sister Rosemary lived only a day.
In public, Mary was brave; in private, she never stopped grieving for her lost child. A death in the family raises the stakes: it makes the survivors more protective, more loyal, more frightened, more dependent. Alice became the sole and dutiful recipient of all Mary's hope, possessiveness, and love, and did her best to be the daughter Mary wanted. Sometimes she was afraid she was not that daughter: surely her dead sister would have been better than this flawed and disobedient living child. Death in the family may have made Alice a writer too, but first it nearly frightened her into silence.
Mary kept her surviving child close. Until she was six, Alice later claimed, she spent most of her time at home on the Bradleys' roof garden, with only nurses and a white rabbit for company. Mary distrusted the modern city, "where motors"—automobiles—"menace every curb and crossing, and where [Alice] could never for an instant be safely left alone on the streets."
Then the Bradleys went to Africa.
* * *
In 1921, to Americans, Africa was still the Dark Continent, a wild, dangerous, and enticing last frontier. Theodore Roosevelt's 1910 book African Game Trails introduced America to the "great white hunter" and popularized the word "safari." In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs published his first Tarzan story. Stories also came out of Africa about colonial cruelty and exploitation. In America in the early twentieth century, "Belgian atrocities in the Congo" was a familiar phrase. But Mary preferred the tales she had read as a child in Henry Morton Stanley's In Darkest Africa, "of a vast continent peopled with savages, of feverish jungles and mighty rivers, of treacherous beauty and swift death, of a primitive barbarism that had been going on from the beginning of time [...] unknown and untouched by trade or civilization."
Mary had also listened to the adventures of two family friends, Carl and Delia "Mickie" Akeley. Before the First World War, the Akeleys had traveled widely in British East Africa, hunting animals for Chicago's Field Museum and New York's American Museum of Natural History. (The elephants they collected still stand in both museums.) Carl Akeley had begun his career as a taxidermist, but became a legendary naturalist and hunter. The tooth marks of a leopard on one arm recalled an attack which he had survived by killing the big cat bare-handed. Mickie, too, was a courageous traveler and an excellent shot. A close friend of Herbert's, Chicago Tribune cartoonist John T. McCutcheon, had hunted with the Akeleys in East Africa in 1909.
Now the Akeleys were in the middle of a divorce and Carl Akeley was looking for companions and backers for a new and difficult expedition. He had plans for an African hall at the AMNH, and wanted to display the rare mountain gorilla, first seen by Europeans only nineteen years before. To get gorillas he would have to go to Central Africa—new territory for him—and travel on foot to their habitat in the eastern Congo. He also had another ambitious plan. No longer satisfied with collecting and mounting specimens, he wanted to film gorillas in the wild, using a new motion picture camera of his own invention. He suspected that gorillas were peaceful animals, and hoped to show they should not be hunted for sport.
The Bradleys were wealthy enough to help finance an expedition, and Akeley judged his younger friends hardy enough to make the trip. (Akeley was fifty-seven, Herbert and Mary forty-six and thirty-nine.) This would not be a tourist safari in British East, arranged by a professional outfitter in Nairobi. The area they were going to had first been explored by Europeans only thirty-five years before, and was accessible in about the same sense that the top of Mount Everest is now. Still, the Bradleys decided to take Alice with them, with a young woman named Priscilla Hall to look after her. Akeley's secretary, Martha Miller, would also join the party.
The idea of taking a six-year-old girl along appealed to Akeley. While Mary dreamed of a jungle frontier, he had become impatient with the Dark Continent myth. (Firmly contradicting Stanley, he called his memoir In Brightest Africa.) To take a child on safari, he felt, would be to undermine the image of Africa as a savage wilderness. He wanted Alice to be the witness to an Africa of peace and beauty, the lamb sent to lie down with a gentle lion, and hoped that Africa "seen through the eyes of a sweet little girl" would "all be much more beautiful than when seen through the eyes of rather blood-thirsty sportsmen and adventurers."
While Akeley was remaking hunting, Mary was preparing to remake motherhood. She wanted to be a mother and an adventure heroine both, to shoot lions and raise a daughter. There was pressure on her not to do this. When the Bradleys told the papers of their plan to go to Africa, Alice later said, editorials cast doubt on Mary's fitness as a mother or suggested that Akeley was taking the women along as decoys to attract male gorillas. To prove she was a good mother, Mary would have to do her best, not only to protect her daughter, but to raise an exemplary girl. She could have adventures, but only if Alice would compensate for them with white dresses, blond curls, a pretty face, and her best behavior.
When we first meet young Alice, not only is she a character in one of Mary's books—a children's book about Africa called Alice in Jungleland—she is wearing a disguise of Mary's making. It is August 1921, and she has just turned six, on board an ocean liner steaming from Southampton to Cape Town. The ship has announced a costume party for children, for which her mother has not come prepared. Improvising, Mary makes Alice a dress out of white crepe paper and pink ribbon, puts her in a child-sized wooden box, ties the box with a bow, and has two sailors carry it in to the party. The box is opened to reveal little Alice standing in it "like a French doll at a toy shop. [...] Every one had been afraid that she would never stand still, but she surprised them all by keeping perfectly quiet, just like a real doll in a box—in fact she felt so strange and shy that she didn't want to come out of the box at all."
According to Mary, Alice was thrilled when she won a prize, and perhaps even more excited by the company: she'd never been with so many children before.
For Mary, going to Africa was a way to prove herself. For Alice it was the site of a freedom she could not quite touch and a terror she could never escape. In Africa, she later wrote, she contracted "a case of horror vitae that lasted all my life."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from James Tiptree, Jr. by Julie Phillips. Copyright © 2006 Julie Phillips. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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