Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

I don’t know whether I am supposed to believe her, or can believe her. It doesn’t sound like the woman I knew. Eve, weak? Rubbish! Adam’s usefulness as a helpmeet is problematical, a man who, when she tells him they’ll have to work for their living, decides “She will be useful. I will superintend”—a man who thinks his son is a kangaroo. Eve did need him in order to have children, and since she loves him she would miss him; but where is the evidence that she couldn’t survive without him? He would presumably have survived without her, in the brutish way he survived before her. But surely it is their interdependence that is the real point?

I want, now, to read the Diaries as a subtle, sweet-natured send-up of the Strong Man–Weak Woman arrangement; but I’m not sure it’s possible to do so, or not entirely. It may be both a send-up and a capitulation.

And Adam has the last word. “Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.” But the poignancy of those words is utterly unexpected, a cry from the heart. It made me shiver as a child; it does now.

I was raised as irreligious as a jackrabbit, and probably this is one reason Mark Twain made so much sense to me as a child. Descriptions of churchgoing interested me as the exotic rites of a foreign tribe, and nobody described churchgoing better than Mark Twain did. But God, as I encountered him in my reading, seemed only to cause unnecessary complications, making people fall into strange postures and do depressing things; he treated Beth March abominably, and did his best to ruin Jane Eyre’s life before she traded him in for Rochester. I didn’t read any of the books in which God is the main character until a few years later. I was perfectly content with books in which he didn’t figure at all.

Could anybody but Mark Twain have told the story of Adam and Eve without mentioning Jehovah?

As a heathen child I was entirely comfortable with his version. I took it for granted that it was the sensible one.

As an ancient heathen I still find it sensible, but can better appreciate its originality and courage. The nerve of the man, the marvelous, stunning independence of that mind! In pious, prayerful, censorious, self-righteous Christian America of 1896, or 1996 for that matter, to show God as an unnecessary hypothesis, by letting Eve and Adam cast themselves out of Eden without any help at all from him, and really none from the serpent either—to put sin and salvation, love and death in our own hands, as our own, strictly human business, our responsibility—now that’s a free soul, and a brave one.

What luck for a child to meet such a soul when she is young. What luck for a country to have a Mark Twain in its heart.

Written for the program booklet of the annual science-fiction conference ReaderCon, of July 1994, this essay was aimed at a sophisticated group of readers familiar with its subject. For those who haven’t read the fiction of Cordwainer Smith or James Tiptree Jr., I can only hope it may awaken a curiosity that will lead them to have a look at the works of these intensely original writers. Some points will be clearer if one knows that both writers worked for the U.S. government (the usual explanation of why they used pen names when they wrote fiction), and that Smith, as Paul Linebarger, was a professor of Asiatic Studies at Johns Hopkins, an intelligence agent in China during the Second World War, wrote Psychological Warfare , long the standard text on the subject, served as a member of the Foreign Policy Association and adviser to John F. Kennedy, and was Sun Yat-sen’s godson.

A pen name is a curious device. Actors, singers, dancers use stage names for various reasons, but it seems that not many painters or sculptors or composers make up their name. If you’re a German composer named Engelbert Humperdinck who wrote the opera Hansel and Gretel , you don’t do anything about your name, you just live with it, till a hundred years later some dweeb singer comes along and filches it because he thinks it’s cute. If you’re a French painter named Rosa Bonheur, you don’t call yourself Georges Tristesse; you just paint horses and sign “Rosa” large and clear. But writers, especially fiction writers, are always making up names. Do they confuse themselves with their characters?

The question isn’t totally frivolous. I think most novelists are aware at times of containing multitudes, of having an uncomfortably acute sympathy for Multiple Personality Disorder, of not entirely subscribing to the commonsense notion of what constitutes a self.

And there is a distinction, normally, between “the writer” and “the person.” The cult of personality erases this difference; with writers like Lord Byron and Hemingway, as with actors or politicians, the person disappears in the glare of the persona. Publicity, book tours, and so on all keep the glare focused. People line up to “meet the writer,” not realising that this is impossible. Nobody can be a writer during a book signing, not even Harlan Ellison. All they can write is “To Jane Doe with best regards from George Author”—not a very interesting story. All their admirers can meet is the person—who has a lot in common with, but is not, the writer. Maybe nicer, maybe duller, maybe older, maybe meaner; but the main difference is, the person lives in this world, but writers live in their imagination, and/or in the public imagination, which creates a public figure that lives only in the public imagination.

So the pen name, hiding the person behind the writer, may be essentially a protective and enabling device, as it was for the Brontë sisters and for Mary Ann Evans. The androgynous Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell hid Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë from a publicity that might offend their small community, and also gave their manuscripts a chance to be read with an unprejudiced eye by editors, who would assume them to be men. George Eliot protected Mary Ann Evans, who was unrepentantly living in sin, from the dragon of social disapproval.

I think one can assume that these personae also allowed the writers a freedom from inner censors, internalised shames and inhibitions, notions of what a woman “should” write. The masculine pen name, oddly enough, frees the woman author from obedience to a masculine conception of literature and experience. I think James Tiptree Jr. undoubtedly gave Alice Sheldon such freedom.

But with Sheldon we come to another aspect of the pen name: the already public figure who wants or needs a different persona for a different kind of work.

I don’t know if there was any actual professional need for Sheldon to be Tiptree; would she have lost a job or come under governmental suspicion if she’d published her stories under her own name? My guess is that her need for the pen name was primarily and intensely personal. She needed to write as somebody other than who she “was.” She had led a highly successful career as a woman, but as a writer she needed, at least at first, to present herself, perhaps even to herself, as a man. She found her alter ego on the label of a jar of marmalade. She slipped into the impersonation very comfortably, writing not only stories but letters as James Tiptree Jr., who became a beloved, treasured penfriend to many people. When she began to want to publish as a woman she used only half of her own name, calling herself Raccoona Sheldon (a name that troubles me, because the invented half is so grotesque that it seems a self put-down). Finally, when they blew her cover, she essentially stopped writing. It looks as if the name/mask, whether masculine or feminine, was above all an enabler to her, an escape route from a public self that could not or would not write, into a private self that was all writer.