James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
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Julie Phillips
Julie Phillips is a journalist who has written on film, books, feminism, and cultural politics. James Tiptree, Jr. is her first book. She lives in Amsterdam, Holland.
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Reviews for James Tiptree, Jr.
167 ratings16 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5“What I do with emotion is not, strictly, to ‘bottle it up.’ I parcel it out. I make it drive me in work; I try to use it to understand the world; I occasionally try to form or express little bits in objective writing or drawing; I try to stay out of situations which encourage it; I take it out in physical exertion – and what still can’t be handled I do ‘bottle up’ and sit on. What else can one do? […]”Alice Sheldon in “James Tiptree, Jr. - The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon” by Julie PhillipsBiographies have traditionally had a complex relationship with "truth." Hesketh Pearson's brilliantly readable mid-twentieth-century biographies favour "good stories" over the boring facts. Julie Phillips didn’t have to tackle one of the most difficult things in writing a biography: correct the distortions and myths in previous biographies. It was all a blank sheet. Phillips seems to favour the "bag of facts" approach to biography which has been gaining favour but this too has its problems – notably, that reading such a book tends to be a chore, not a pleasure. The challenge, I think, is to keep a balance between telling the story and being rigorously, “checkably” factual.When it comes to autobiographies, you sit down with your blank sheet of A4 and start sucking your pencil (or your mouse), desperate for inspiration; isn't the mining of your own life likely to be more quickly and readily available at all hours of day and night and perhaps require less effort than having to pass what you have learned of the nature and life of other people through a process of synthesis and precis and imaginative marshalling? There may also be the thought that the hanging out of dirty linen (linen from best Irish flax?) on a public washing line may be helpful to one's own bruised psyche. Though full disclosure is very fashionable these days, of course, I'm not sure this is necessarily therapeutic. This also applies to biographies. Just as in so many films a scene airing much emotion is accompanied by a sly, tinkling, solo piano as the filmmakers slip into telling-you-what-to-feel mode. Perhaps we can make a distinction between a case where a writer dishes the dirt on him/herself, with little collateral damage caused, and a case where Big Bertha transmogrifies into a cluster bomb and the havoc spreads inexorably from the centre, like a pebble chucked into the Tralee Ship Canal outside Blennerville.Tiptree/Sheldon was literally a Feminist-in-Disguise for generations. I'd agree she doesn't fit the current shrill, superficial version of feminism that is sometimes just online shaming (and not all that progressive often) but I'd wager she's going to have a lot more credibility as a feminist in 100 years’ time and all the twitter "feminists" will be forgotten along with the motherhood-on-a-pedestal Victorians, the racist anti-Union feminists of the early 1900s and the anti-sex pro-Reagan 1980s groups. Feminism is a very old and long tradition. I think he/she had been thinking about it lucidly for a lot longer than most all of us. Too bad his/her story ended the way it did. We may never know what it really happened and what made him/her do it.Without delving much deeper into the book, I would say the aim of any writer is to publish something that sells. In the book blogosphere, I meet lots of people who think they can write, including two or three who think they can write so well, that they want to charge people to listen to their advice on what these people should be reading. They call themselves bibliotherapists. I can't tell you how desperate I am to tell them that they are living in cloud cuckoo land and that the country is full of bin men, shop assistants and dog walkers who are in every way equal, but haven't got their brass necks. I imagine a lot of writers who pick an unusual subject - like writing about a writer such as Tiptree - have had enough of emptying bins or walking dogs. That also goes for Biographers.As one alien said to another after visiting earth, 'What do you think?' The other alien replied: 'Well the ones with the intelligence seem ok, but I'm not sure about the ones with the testicles.', and this coming from a Sapiens belonging to the latter; Tiptree belonged to the former.NB: Must-read for those of you who love SF-of-a-different-Persuasion. Unmissable as well because of the letters between Tiptree/Sheldon and some other SF writers, namely Philip K. Dick, Joanna Russ, and Ursula K. Le Guin.A coda:“’And then about three o’clock in the morning Mrs. Sheldon called me back and told me that she had actually killed Mr. Sheldon. I remember she said, ‘Jim, I slain Ting by own hand and I’m about to take my own life, and for God’s sake don’t call the police, to give me time to do what I have to do here.’ And by this point there was nothing I could do. I did call the police, and they went over and found that both of them were dead.’”John Morrison in ““James Tiptree, Jr. - The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon” by Julie PhillipsTiptree/Sheldon was true to herself to the end of her days. Big testicles. What a woman! My kind of SF.SF = Speculative Fiction.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fascinating biography of James Tiptree, Jr. aka Alice Sheldon, whose colorful life and inscrutable, gender-obscuring career as an award-winning SF author, and finally tragic suicide give an incredible amount of insight into her work. Very readable and interesting bio.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I can't remember if I started reading Tiptree's bizarre but often good for a mindf**k stories before I knew that she had been outed as a female writer. This biography is a fascinating tour through her upper-class explorer childhood, to stints as a WAC to working at the CIA. Finally she falls into putting her tortured psyche into stories and the literary friendships with many famous figures from the SF world of the 60s and 70s. It does get bogged down at times with the personality analysis, by the author and the subject, but it was overall a good read for a biography.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I first found out about Julie Phillips biography James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon when I was browsing the New York Times one morning over breakfast. The review was positive, but more importantly (for me, anyways) this was the first time I had even heard of Tiptree. I was somewhat astounded to discover an important, groundbreaking, and award-winning author of science fiction that I knew literally nothing about. Soon after reading the article I came across for the first time the Tiptree Award, which is given to science fiction and fantasy works "that expand or explore our understanding of gender." This piqued my interest even further and so I picked up a copy of the book even though it was about a year and a half before I actually got around to reading it.Alice Bradley Davey Sheldon, a native of Chicago, grew up traveling the world. Over the course of her life she played many different roles: loyal daughter, artist, army officer, CIA agent, devoted wife, academic. But most famous was her persona as a writer--James Tiptree, Jr. A secretive man who wrote brilliant science fiction and whose writing was so "masculine" that for nearly a decade very few even suspected that he was really a woman. Phillips biography is complete and detailed in telling the story of the life and death of this incredible and complex individual.It is obvious that Phillips has done her research. She conducted interviews, read correspondence, pursued both primary and secondary sources, and familiarized herself with the work of Tiptree and Sheldon. Everything is documented and she often lets the materials speak for themselves, extensively quoting primary sources and incorporating interpretations of the fictional writings flawlessly into the text in a way to shed light on the reality of Sheldon's life. Also included is a detailed index, a bibliography, and an extraordinarily helpful guide to Tiptree's and Sheldon's publication history.The book is actually much longer than it first appears; both the print and the margins are small. But while the length is noticeable, Phillips' writing is immensely readable. It is a biography, and obviously not a novel, but I was compelled to keep reading to see "what happens next." Two things in particular struck me as being especially well done (besides the fantastic research): One, the inclusion of years in the chapter titles helps tremendously in keeping the timeline straight; and, two, the use of names and pronouns when referring to the various aspects of Sheldon's identity help clarify and situate the context of the subjects being addressed.I see a lot of myself in Alli Sheldon, so this book holds additional meaning for me. I have never read any of Tiptree's work before but am definitely more than interested to now. Unfortunately, most if not all of it is out of print with only sporadic resurgences. Luckily, I stumbled (quite accidentally) across a beautiful copy of Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (an illustrated "best of" collection that Sheldon helped to select) at a local used book store. While Sheldon's story will particularly interest those familiar with science fiction, anyone who enjoys reading biographies will appreciate this expertly executed one. Phillips has not only written a brilliant and well researched biography, but has also provided an intense examination of gender and feminism in science fiction, female writers, and, most importantly, personal identity.Experiments in Reading
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5James Tiptree, Jr. wrote some truly astonishing science fiction stories, works that were bleak, poetic, and beautiful, filled with themes of love and death, sex and gender, power and empathy, and twin longings for the alien and for home. He was also a prolific letter-writer, forming many long-distance friendships in the SF community... and a notorious recluse who would never agree to meet anyone in person or even talk on the phone. There were many rumors about his true identity, including one that he was so secretive because he worked for the CIA. When Tiptree's secret finally came out -- that "he" was, in fact, a woman named Alice Sheldon -- it was to a chorus of both shocked surprise and "Aha, I knew it!"Sheldon's life was a complex and fascinating one, from accompanying her famous explorer parents on their African expeditions as a small child, to the murder-suicide that finally ended her life. At various points, she was a painter, an army officer, a psychological researcher, and the co-runner of a chicken hatchery. Oh, and yes, she did in fact also work for the CIA.This biography covers all of that, but its main focus is Sheldon's psychology, and on the matters that obsessed and troubled her and found reflection in her work. Including, most particularly, the question, as author Julie Phillips puts it, of "what is a woman and am I one." It's a question she never did seem to unravel, even with the assistance of a male alter ego. Which seems like no surprise at all to me, being as it is, a tangled, thorny complicated mess of social expectation, biology, sexuality, personal identity, and power dynamics. Hell, I can't unravel it, either, and I was born many decades later into a world where the expectations and the limits placed on women were already significantly changing.Anyway. This is an interesting, thoughtful, and thought-provoking bio, and I do recommended it to those interested in Sheldon's life and work.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5(3.5 stars)
Without a doubt, this book will stand as the definitive biography of James Tiptoe, Jr./Alice Sheldon. It covers Alli/Tip's life in such detail, punctuated with journal entries and correspondence, that one could hardly wish more detail . . .
Except, to my mind, in one area. Alli makes clear she had great struggles with her mother, but I never got why her struggles were as great as they were. Her mother did not abuse her, either physically or psychologically. Was it simply because her mother was overbearing? That she had different expectations for her daughter than Alli had for herself? That her mother, by virtue of the fact that she was quite an honored public personage while Alli was growing up, simply cast a shadow Alli found it difficult to escape? There are hints to all these things, but for the struggles Alli endured (her mother seemed supportive of most any direction Alli wanted to go) these issues seem rather trivial.
Anyway, Alice Sheldon was an interesting character who wrestled with identity issues all her life. Perhaps it could only have been someone so uncertain of her identity that could launch an alter ego for herself in the form of James Tiptree, Jr. While many an author adopts a non de plume, for Alli the adoption of the Tiptoe identity was so much more. It became something to hide behind, to entrust her creativity to, and to guard jealously, so that when the truth about the mysterious James Tiptree finally became known, it nearly undid her.
In most cases, I could have just done with a little less detail. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It has long been tradition in many literary genres – science fiction and the “western” primary among modern ones – that female writers would publish under either a male pseudonym or under gender-neutral first names or only initials. This was often a marketing issue, encouraged (or even demanded) by editors and publishers who were firmly convinced that their reading public simply would not buy material produced by women writers.Thus, Leigh Brackett (whose given name was vague enough for her to get away with it), Alice Marie Norton (who became André), Mary (M.J.) Engh, Carolyn Janice (C.J.) Cherryh … and Alice B. Sheldon, who turned the science fiction world on its ear as James Tiptree, Jr., in the late 1960s.But Sheldon was not simply choosing a male pen name to slide under readers’ radar. She created a whole persona – a man who wrote tough, often violent, fiction, who “out-Hemingway’d Hemingway” in one critic’s words, and a voice that would allow her to express many of the deep conflicts arising out of a personality tormented by everything from some very deep mommy and daddy issues to intensely repressed sexual attraction to women.Julie Phillips has created a tour de force with her detailed biography of Sheldon, drawing on letters, journal entries, interviews with family members, friends, and professional colleagues as she presents a portrait of a woman who could neither accept nor reject the limitations placed on well-bred young women of a certain social class in the mid-20th century. Always, always, Alli Sheldon was looking to escape – the duties of a daughter, the confines of marriage, the strictures of sexual identity, the appropriate behaviors and careers for women – yet was never able to make that final break. She fought herself, she took refuge in multiple heterosexual affairs, she frittered away her college years, she dabbled in art, she joined the military but was frustrated by the lack of true opportunity there. She smoked too much, loved too hard, abused too many prescription medications, always looking for her true voice. Her true escape. Her true self.And somehow James Tiptree, Jr. – a name chosen, she said “as a lark, from a jam label in a grocery store” became not only the identify she affixed to her science fiction stories, but very much an alter-ego. Tiptree could say things no one would listen to, coming from a fiftyish Virginia housewife. He could establish, via a voluminous correspondence with other writers, editors, and publishers, an all-us-boys-together persona and flirt outrageously with his female correspondents. He could give his heroes randy thoughts about the women in his stories – women, who for some reason, seldom seemed interested in traditional (if secondary to the main plotline) romances.Toward the end of Tiptree’s writing career, in the late 70s, Phillips shows us a creative mind struggling to free itself from its own construct, becoming more and more frantic to replace Tiptree with yet another persona as she begins to write from a frankly feminist viewpoint under the name Racoona Sheldon. At the same time, Alli is struggling with her aging mother’s failing health, her much-older husband’s decline, and the grim economic reality that even Hugo and Nebula award winning science fiction writers can seldom make much of a living at the craft.The conclusion, already known to those who followed Tiptree’s career, casts a pall over the final portion of the book as it plays out to its inevitable end, making it heartbreaking for the reader who has followed this demanding and tortured woman through a life in which goals seem always just out of reach. Still, this is an important book, both as biography and as a study of the rise of the feminist movement of the late 20th century, and the fact that it came too late for many women.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It's an insightful work, but there are times that I'd rather have less insight. I can remember the world's surprise when it was revealed that James Tiptree Jr was actually a woman. Any woman who had read "The Women that Men Don't See" simply nodded and said (to herself) of course, of course.I'm very happy to have found this (my favorite book store has taken to putting books *about* SF authors next to the works of the author, which is where I found it. It's a remarkable work, and the extraordinary photographs in the book give shading to a person that was eminently private in life.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5During the 20th century, a number of female writers chose to write under sexually ambiguous names. Harper Lee, Isak Dinesen, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers and Andre Norton, among others, didn't actually pretend to be men, but if biased publishers and readers began reading their work under the wrong impression, where was the harm?Alice Sheldon, however, chose to go whole hog. She saw the name Tiptree on a jar of jam and decided to write her science fiction stories under the name of James Tiptree Jr., keeping her true identity a secret from virtually everyone for a number of years. As biographer Julie Phillips tells in her book "James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon," she flirted with Ursula K. Le Guin and other women by mail, while pretending to be one of the boys with Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick and other men in the science fiction community. She fooled them all.Everyone knew Tiptree was a pseudonym, but interest in who the writer really was became all the greater because his stories were so original, like nothing science fiction fans had never read before. Because Tiptree had a post office box in McClean, Va., some speculated the writer might be a CIA agent. (Both Alli Sheldon and her husband had, in fact, once worked for the CIA.) Someone even thought James Tiptree Jr. might really be Henry Kissinger. A few thought the stories sounded a bit like the voice of a woman, but in other respects they were thoroughly manly.The secret was revealed in the early 1970s when Tiptree let slip in letters that his mother had died, after previously disclosing she was a former African explorer living in Chicago. It was then a simple matter to check the obituaries in the Chicago papers, where it was found that author and world traveler Mary Hastings Bradley was survived by just one child, a daughter named Alice Sheldon.Having lost the mask behind which she had written her startling stories, Sheldon's talent dried up, and she wrote only a few stories after that, most of them not very good.Sheldon suffered from a manic-depressive personality, and she seemed to have conflicting identities within her throughout her life. Although happily married for a long time, she was sexually confused, never quite sure who or what she really was. She also also wrote science fiction as a woman under the name Racoona Sheldon, although these tales were not as well received as Tiptree's.She had talked about suicide her entire life, and in 1987 she put a gun to her head after first killing her ailing husband. The biography by Julie Phillips, published in 2006, is well worth reading whether or not one has ever read a James Tiptree Jr. short story.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I found this book absolutely riveting. It's true I'm a fan of Tiptree. But even if you know nothing of her work, you can't help but be amazed by her life. The author does a wonderful job of opening up Sheldon's psyche, exploring her lesbian tendencies, her depression, her rushes of creativity. She makes good use of journal entries and letters, and Tiptree was a lavish and exuberant letter-writer.
This book has stayed with me, bringing up a lot of thoughts on the masks we wear, and our ability to encourage or suppress our creative impulses. I see Tiptree's life as an object lesson in some ways. I wish I could reach out to her, tell her she's beautiful, urge her to stick around a little longer. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I went on a themed reading spree two summers ago -- I had a university library at my disposal, so I went digging around at random and ended up reading about 19th women writers, then about depictions of women in movies based on those 19th century novels, and finally about women in science fiction (it connects through Frankenstein. Really, it does.)
This book, picked up because of a long ago comment from a friend who had made a random disparaging remark that he'd always known James Tiptree Jr. was a woman because of her writing (meaning women can't write good SF), had sat on my shelf a good long time, but after all this summer reading, I grabbed it, fell into it, and didn't see daylight until I'd finished it. The biography reads with novel-like intensity as we wind our way through Alice Sheldon's complicated, troubled, yet very familiar history until she gave birth to her own male self in the guise of James Tiptree Jr.
It could be the one biography I own that I'll read a second time. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in the history of science fiction, women writers, gender issues, or just a desire to read a good book. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is an extensive biography, with 40 chapters clearly delineated by the years. I stand in awe of the scholarship and the ability to make it all interesting if at times slightly overwhelming. Sheldon had a fascinating life, but her extreme sensitivity and probably manic-depressive personality made it almost uniformly painful to her. The most interesting part for me was her years writing as Tiptree, both the interactions with the science fiction world in her letters and reading the commentary on her stories as I was also reading them in the collection Her Smoke Rose up Forever.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I must confess that I've never read any of James Tiptree Jr.'s work, and that I had no idea who this person was prior to picking up Phillips' book. That didn't seem to matter, however, because this was one of the most well-written biographies I've read in quite a long while. Alice Bradley Sheldon was a most interesting subject -- and Phillips does an excellent job in researching, putting together and presenting Sheldon's life both as herself and as James Tiptree, Jr., a writer of science fiction whose works were very well known even though Tiptree himself remained somewhat of an enigma even among his contemporaries in the world of SF writing. I won't go into detail here, because many other reviewers have done so quite well, and there are multiple places on the internet to find details about Sheldon. Phillips' analysis of Sheldon's background, her insecurities, her search for who she really was and wanted to be is very well done. But this isn't just a cut and dried biography. It's a look at a woman trying to find herself through many different persona: daughter of Chicago society parents, eloping at an early age and divorcing, then going into the Army Air Corps, then moving along to work in the CIA, marrying again, obtaining a PhD to do psychological research, and becoming an egg farmer, to name a few. Phillips' argument is that Sheldon knew none of these roles ever truly fitted her, and that by taking on the role of Tiptree, a male science fiction writer, she had finally found a way to give herself an outlet for the person she'd always wanted to be. But even then she still got very caught up in her own turmoil about identity as her Tiptree persona consistently grew in stature and landed him a bit of fame along with awards (Hugo, Nebula); Alice had to devote more of her own lessening energies into maintaining it while trying to keep Alice Bradley Sheldon a secret to her public and science fiction writer friends -- but then at the end of the day as Tiptree, she was still Alice Bradley Sheldon having to contend with herself.Very well written; I had a lot of difficulty putting it down once I got started. When I can pick up a biography of someone with whom I'm not even vaguely familiar and not want to put it down, that's saying something about the author's writing. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who wants an intelligent read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A completely riveting story of an elaborate and long-running masquerade. I've never even read Tiptree, but I will now!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a great little biography. Okay, not that little, but great nonetheless.It is the story of Alice Sheldon, daughter of Mary Sheldon, a prominent writer and lecturer of the early 1900’s. Of course, you may still not know who Alice is. For various reasons (a lark, anonymity, some deeper issues – exploring the reasons [though not necessarily providing an answer] is part of what the book tries to do), she submits science fiction stories under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr. Now, if you are any kind of reader of science fiction, you know the name. If you are still unclear, search out some of the stories (check the Nebula awards), for James Tiptree is one of the great authors of the genre.What makes this all so intriguing is James’ refusal to say who he was. (And this use of the male pronoun is on purpose. The author has this same problem – is it he or she – and recognizes that there is a dual enough personality to use both.) In fact, the final revelation of Alice as James almost brings to a close his writing career – James is never the same as an author. And the end is tragic – a suicide pact between Alice and her husband.This story is not neat (whose life is); there is no pretty wrapping with a bow. And Phillips does an excellent job of digging into the information that might help shed some light on this troubled woman. Her life is a constant battle between facades, and this exploration shows how these battles lead to Alice as James. This is well researched, and includes quotes and documents that, as well as might be possible, provide an insight that Alice may not have had on herself. From the journeys as a child with her parents to Africa, to the girls’ school, to the WACs, to the CIA, to her writing, we begin to gain insight into an individual trying to determine who they are. We see a woman trying to lead a bohemian life (because some expected it), and a woman trying to be a mother and wife (because others expected it), and a woman trying to glean her own sexuality (because she cannot decide what she or others expect.)But this book cannot have the answers. (How can any of us have the answers to any part of us?) Her life ends tragically as she shoots her husband, then herself as part of a suicide pact – neither wanting to grow too old. Yet, it is unclear how much a pact it was, and how much was in Alice’s mind. Again, the author delves in and lets us draw our own conclusions. Any good author has her own conclusions, and Phillips leads us certain directions, but the final picture is ours to draw.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Most people probably come to this book from an interest in the science fiction of Tiptree, or the story of the author's female biology and male identity. For me the really interesting thing as I read it was how Alice Sheldon (and others of her generation) had the flexibility and intelligence to function over time in so many different historical worlds: the Victorian, World War II, the Cold War, the 1960's. Maybe it's the reason she was able to take on an entirely new and different persona when she created the nom de plume James Tiptree. I've never actually read anything by Tiptree, although I read a quite good story by Raccoona Sheldon at one point.
Book preview
James Tiptree, Jr. - Julie Phillips
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."
CHAPTER 2: AFRICA (1921–22)
In Africa, Alice was an object of fascination to everyone who met her. When she was allowed to walk, Mary wrote, she
danced along at the head of the line [of porters], holding her Daddy’s or her Mummy’s hand and waving a greeting to the native women in the fields. […] [The Congolese] had never seen a white little girl before and Alice was very strange to them, with her blue eyes and long yellow curls. They used to crowd round her on the way, and in camp would wait hours before her tent, to see her having her curls brushed. […] They felt sure that [her hair] must be some ornament she fastened on, and they used sometimes to touch it slyly, with a little pull, to make sure that it really grew on her head!
Her parents went to Africa to explore and observe. Alice got to be the baggage (she was carried most of the way by porters) and the view.
Later, when she got the chance to tell her own stories about Africa, she recalled being fascinated, indulged (if I dropped something I was quite accustomed to clap my hands and have six large, naked cannibals spring to attention and pick it up for me
), occasionally miserable (looking at a photo of herself in a white dress riding a baby elephant, she remembered that she had had thin silk underpants on), and often extremely frightened. She had to be watched or she might be killed, by leopards or worse. If she even went for a pee in the high grass, her mother had to come along with a rifle.
As Mary liked to remind her readers, there were plenty of bad fates in Africa. In the adult travel book she wrote about the trip, On the Gorilla Trail, she lists gruesome endings for travelers, who are killed by leopards, crocodiles (Some hunters say that he crunches down his prey at once; others, that he holds it under until it is drowned
), bugs, fevers, the sun. She visits the graves of Belgian soldiers who fought World War I in the colonies. She takes up the big game hunters’ debate on which animal was deadliest, lion, elephant, buffalo, or rhino, and jokes, Between the lion’s chances for lunch and ours for a rug the odds were sportingly even.
But Mary’s story is about conquering death. Alice’s is about feeling powerless in its sight.
As the party moved north by train from Cape Town, at twenty miles an hour, stopping at Kimberley to see the diamond mines and at Bulawayo to see the statue of Cecil Rhodes, Mary measured what they saw by its state of civilization—the wilder the better. Victoria Falls felt like the edge of the known world, with their mad leap of water over savage rocks
and barbaric blaze of red aloes on the banks against the white foam.
Here they put on their pith helmets, which they had been told to wear at all times against the equatorial sun. But they still felt like tourists, staying at a hotel and being taken to the falls in little trolley cars pushed by local laborers along the tracks.
Mary had mixed feelings at Elisabethville, now Lubumbashi, 2,500 miles by rail from Cape Town, their first stop in the Belgian Congo and the last European
town before Kampala. They arrived there on September 11, after more than a week in the train, and slept at their first tropical hotel,
with a veranda and a bar full of American mining engineers. Ten years before, Elisabethville had been a collection of tin shacks, but now it was a city built for the future, well laid out, with wide streets and attractive administrative buildings. There are clubs and tennis and golf and motors—in spite of the dollar and a quarter for gasoline—good shops and Belgian and English libraries.
Chicago had grown up in less than a hundred years from its own collection of shacks, and Mary must have pictured Elisabethville making the same progress, culminating in some Congolese skyscraper to rival the Wrigley Building, then rising on the banks of the Chicago River.
At Lake Tanganyika, too, Mary thought of Lake Michigan before the pioneers came, and foresaw factories, movie theaters, a whole dirty Chicago springing up along its idyllic shores. The scene she saw was beauty itself, the perfect loveliness of beauty undespoiled. But it was beauty with a doom on its bright head, for already the white man had come. […] In ten years, twenty or fifty, civilization and its gauds would be enthroned. The old Africa would go.
Their very arrival on the frontier was the beginning of its end. Alice grew up, she once wrote, in a world suffused with sadness; everywhere it was said, or seen, that great change was coming fast and much would be forever gone.
But if Elisabethville was a little too modern in some ways, it was not modern enough in others: they waited for an anxious week for lost luggage and searched in vain for trained local staff for their safari. In East Africa, a standard safari package included a crew of tent boys
(personal servants) and gun boys
(who carried equipment and provided backup on a hunt), plus an interpreter, a cook, and porters. But this was not the usual safari route. At last they managed to hire three men who had been house servants for the Belgians. One of them, Mablanga, became Alice’s boy
and watched over her protectively, while she impressed him with stories about how people lived in America.
At last they left Elisabethville on a train northbound to Bukama, where they embarked on a smoky little flat-bottomed wood-burning steamer, hardly more than a raft with an awning, with a Belgian captain and a Congolese crew. Pushing out onto the Lualaba River as a tropical rainstorm pounded the water, they felt they were on the trail, really in Africa, headed up to the heart of it.
They had their traveling clothes on now, the men and women in khaki shirts and trousers, Alice in a miniature safari jacket and pants tucked into leather boots. Mary had worried Alice would be careless about wearing her pith helmet, but Alice was as anxious as her mother was to prove herself in Africa. Not only did she never forget her own helmet, she reminded the others with irritating vigilance.
When Herbert held Alice up to the rail to see their first elephants feeding on the bank, she disappointed him by not being surprised. She had been told she would see elephants, and here they were. What was the surprise in that? Still, she followed the elephants eagerly through her father’s field glasses, and stared at the hippos that came swimming around the boat and the crocodiles sunning themselves on the banks. When Akeley and Herbert Bradley fired guns into the air, the birds flew up in thousands from the trees that lined the river while Akeley filmed the scene. The adults also took potshots at the crocodiles, to make the river safer, they said. A Belgian steamer captain had been pulled under while swimming near his boat the week before.
After five days on the Lualaba they disembarked at Kabalo and took another train to the shores of Lake Tanganyika. There they camped on a windy hillside overlooking the vast blue lake, 450 miles long, with rough waters lapping a wide beach of golden sand. After a week of waiting they were picked up by the lake steamer Baron Dhanis. Crowded among missionaries and Belgian administrators, all of whom made much of Alice, they steamed north for five days to Usumbura (now Bujumbura in Burundi) at the northern tip of the lake, with a layover at Kigoma on the eastern side. There the Bradleys made an excursion to the place where Stanley had met Livingstone—not in some dark and damp African forest
as Mary had always pictured it, but in the busy lakeside trading town of Ujiji, a place of sunshine and dancing waves.
At Usumbura, a center of Belgian administration, they hired more boys,
and the Belgian officials sent out a request to the nearby chiefs for porters. Beyond this point they would have to go on foot.
By this time the delays were getting on Akeley’s nerves. Alice later recalled Akeley as a genius, but also a difficult, cantankerous man whose crabbiness moved her parents to great feats of tact and polite denial. (She learned from this, she said, that survival depended on not speaking one’s mind.) Alice helped by being a sweet little girl
: with her childish playfulness, she could cheer Uncle Akeley
when the adults could not.
Fortunately, Herbert was calm and persistent, supervising the camp, negotiating with Belgian officials, keeping their luggage moving and their papers in order, while Mary’s charm had a good effect on the local officials. On October 14, a month after they’d left Elisabethville, the porters finally arrived. At last their real travels could begin.
* * *
In the Congo, the Eastern Congo,
Mary wrote, you sit upon a mountain peak and gaze out to other mountain peaks, like pastels with distance, and you do not wonder how you are going to those other peaks—you know. You walk.
And their baggage walked with them. It took two hundred men, each with forty to sixty pounds on his head, to carry everything they had brought: tents, cots, guns, folding bathtubs, formaldehyde, medical supplies, Mary’s typewriter, sixty-five boxes of food, four porter loads of glass-plate negatives, and the evening clothes they would need again in British East. (To future safari-goers, Mary dryly recommended lace […] and heavily beaded georgette—the beads weight down the wrinkles.
) On a traditional safari the whites themselves were carried in chairs on poles, but Akeley and the Bradleys mostly preferred to walk. Alice sometimes rode on a bicycle with a jerry-built child seat, pedaled by her boy
Mablanga, but more often she was carried in a hammock, lying down, barely able to see out over the sides. As they changed porters along the way, Alice kept learning the local words for Put me down!
and using them loudly.
At a rate of fifteen miles a day, this long string of porters and explorers followed the Ruzizi River north toward Lake Kivu, through a fertile, green country of villages and fields on the border between Rwanda and the Belgian Congo. Again, Alice had a calming effect, this time on the people they met, who were less suspicious of a traveling party with women and a child. Mary said the natives generally assumed that she and Alice were Herbert’s favorite wife and child, traveling with him for safety’s sake. Herbert’s other wives might have poisoned them out of jealousy if they had stayed home.
This country, now a war zone, seemed to Mary then as peaceful as a park. Yet it was here, near Lake Kivu, that Alice had her first experience of death. On their march they came across elephants, and Martha Miller shot one. That night their porters and the local villagers feasted on the meat. The next day the porters refused to march and went off instead to hunt antelope. When they returned they had with them a prisoner, who they claimed had attacked and wounded one of their party. Akeley ordered the man held until they could turn him over to the Belgians. But that night the Bradleys heard screams, and in the morning the man was gone. The porters and villagers said he had escaped, but one of the boys
told them he had been killed and eaten. In the tent she shared with her governess, Alice lay awake and heard the whole thing.
It was presented to Alice as a cultural difference rather than a crime, which confused and upset her: in Chicago her parents had absolute ideas about morality. There were more frightening stories. At Ujiji, Mary had explained to Alice for the first time about slavery in America. It was too big a problem for a six-year-old to worry over, so Alice’s mother soon started her talking of something else,
Mary wrote in Alice in Jungleland. But Mary underestimated Alice’s capacity for worry. If death was Mary’s African theme, human cruelty would be Alice’s.
* * *
Lake Kivu is 5,000 feet above sea level and 1,500 feet deep. It divides Rwanda on its eastern shore from the Congo on the west and is surrounded by green, fertile hills. An African Switzerland,
Mary called the setting, with wide-horned African cattle grazing on grassy slopes and the Virunga range towering above the lake’s northern end. The three tallest mountains of the Virungas, Mikeno, Karisimbi, and Visoke, are the home of the mountain gorilla. Two others of the range are active volcanoes, and at night they could see the crater of Nyamlagira, or Nyamuragira, lighting the sky above the lake’s northern edge. Every night Alice begged to be allowed to stay up until she could see the volcano glow.
The lake had first been seen by whites less than thirty years before; the Akeley party were the first Americans to reach its shores. In this pristine landscape, the little Belgian outposts, run by one or two white officers and their wives, seemed to Mary like a stage setting waiting to be filled with the actors.
She wasn’t picturing refugee camps and armies, but perhaps an artists’ colony settled along the lake’s cool and pleasant shores.
Gisenye, near Goma, at the lake’s northern end, was their destination, and they arrived there at the end of October, nearly two months out of Cape Town. There Mary and Akeley both came down with malaria, so they waited, and then waited again for porters. After she recovered, Mary continued her work of buying native baskets, bags, and ivory carvings—her own form of the men’s museum collecting. Sometimes she used Alice as a trade object. When she asked to buy an ivory bracelet directly off a chief’s arm, he said he would not sell even for the price of two wives.
But Mary produced Alice, and for the sake of the white child he accepted Mary’s francs. At other times Alice played gorilla hunter
on the beach, attacking the bushes with a native spear.
As soon as he could, Akeley took thirty porters and left on his hunting expedition. Shortly afterward the Bradleys left Alice and Priscilla Hall at a nearby Catholic mission (where a joke of Herbert’s about sex between African women and gorillas got them a cool reception), and with Martha Miller followed Akeley into the steep, wet, densely forested, magically beautiful, and nearly impassable mountains.
Afterward, Alice loved to hear the stories from the hunt: how Akeley had fired at a gorilla above him on the hillside and was nearly crushed by the body as it fell; how they stalked Herbert’s great silverback male through the bushes, crawling on hands and knees. When the silverback’s body came to rest against a tree, with Mount Nyamlagira glowing behind it in the distance, Akeley said he would like to be given such a funeral pyre. Yet as the hunt went on, the adults began to be troubled by the gorillas’ human faces. After Akeley shot a female, a guide speared her four-year-old son, and Akeley saw in the young animal’s eyes a heartbreaking expression of piteous pleading. […] He would have come into my arms for comfort.
They had a license to kill ten gorillas but were grateful to stop after they had taken five. Instead they used Akeley’s new camera to shoot the first films ever made of gorillas.
There on Mount Karisimbi, the beauty of the landscape and the gentle strength of the gorillas touched something in Carl Akeley. Over the next few years, the former hunter worked hard, and successfully, to persuade King Albert of Belgium to set aside the area as a national park and wildlife preserve. In 1926, he returned to the Virungas to survey the park and study gorilla habitats, while an artist made sketches for the diorama in the African hall. There Akeley died of fever and exhaustion, five years to the day after he had watched Herbert’s silverback fall and had envied the gorilla his funeral pyre.
Akeley became an important transitional figure in a changing relationship between humans and animals. The Akeley camera was used by his friends Martin and Osa Johnson to make their pioneering East African wildlife documentaries. Film replaced taxidermy as the way ordinary people learned about wild animals. And Akeley’s push for preservation made him a forerunner of the great twentieth-century naturalists—Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall, George Schaller, Shirley Strum—who went to Africa not to hunt but to sit quietly and observe.
Alice received all of this mixed together: hope for progress, sadness about the passing of the old, the need for conservation, the longing for the bravery of the hunt. Asked to embody peace, Alice absorbed both the lamb and the lion. Among the conflicting currents in her writing are fantasies of peaceful societies (which she associates with the feminine, motherhood, and weakness) and a counter-yearning for a powerful, forbidden violence.
* * *
The party arrived back at the mission just in time for Thanksgiving, which they celebrated with the local pygmies. Offering payment in salt, they persuaded a group of Batwa to come to the mission to dance, telling Alice they were little people.
Am I a Batwa?
philosophical Alice asked Mablanga. I’m little.
No, Mablanga answered.
Did you ever see Batwa, Mablanga?
No, Baby. No Batwa in my country.
Then how do you know I’m not a Batwa?
She watched the Batwa dance for hours until she was tired of them and glad they left.
The travelers moved on, with the porters now carrying the skins and bones of the gorillas they had shot. (The remains of the four-year-old were stored under Alice’s cot every night, filling her tent with the stink of formaldehyde.) On the way north, the adults briefly explored Mount Nyamlagira and camped in its glowing crater. Then they went on to the savanna to hunt lions.
* * *
Next to their camp on the Ruindi Plains near Rutshuru stood a pile of rocks with a cross: the grave of an unlucky young English lion hunter. Because of baboons and leopards, Alice wasn’t allowed out of the camp. When the adults left on a hunt she shouted after them, Good luck—get a lion!
But she later wrote, "It was early impressed on me that I was viable only within the sheltering adult group, that the outside was dangerous and beyond my strength. […] I never was allowed to learn to combat it; I lived helplessly inside, watching, learning the adult lore, wondering how I could meet each horrible challenge, and never getting a chance to practice."
Mary got her lion on the Ruindi Plains. They stalked the young male through the grass: a risky way to hunt, but they got a bead on it from perhaps twenty feet, and the men let Mary take the first shot. She aimed at the head, fired, and the lion fell. Then she posed for pictures with its head in her lap—until the lion, only stunned by Mary’s bullet, came to and started to roar. Mary jumped up, grabbed her gun, and this time shot it through the heart.
A few days later they received a message by runner that Mary’s mother was ill, and on New Year’s Day, 1922, they began the trek out. They crossed the unmarked border into British East Africa at what is now the southwestern corner of Uganda, then crossed Lake Bunyonyi in log canoes. Within a few days they reached Kampala, and their safari was over. Counting the ground they had covered hunting elephants and lions, Mary estimated she had walked a thousand miles.
Kampala was movies and formal dinners, shops and hotels and clubs and telephones and ice tinkling in tall glasses.
They unpacked their dress whites, and were invited to play golf and tennis when the sun was low. Herbert saw to the crating of the trophies and souvenirs: the buffalo heads and elephants’ ears, the tusks, horns, and lion skins, the baskets, spears, and canoe paddles, the otter skins Mary had bought to make a coat for Alice.
In Kampala they visited another tourist site, the tomb of King Mutesa. Sixty years before, Mary wrote, Mutesa had held court here, having his enemies tortured or his friends killed on a whim. Now his house stood empty, and elderly beggars gazed out with a flash of wonder at the little white girl with the fair curls who came to look at the tomb of their dead king, and then danced so fearlessly out into the spaces where once it had been death to approach.
In Mary’s story, Alice is full of life and joy. The little girl had peaked and pined [her] last year at home on all the sensible routine of her nursery fare,
but in Africa she was as hearty and healthy as a child could be. […] Life was a continual excursion, an everlasting picnic.
Alice was happy and excited, but she was also frightened, and because the trip depended on her happiness, she couldn’t tell anyone how scared she was. Toward the end of her life she wrote, I think you could say that one of my hobbies is recovery from the status of Marginal Man—with no place to recover to except being my parents’ dear little yellow-haired darling with its head full of Death…
CHAPTER 3: CHILDHOOD
The mother-child interaction is the logical place to postulate the origins of human speech [and] empathy. […] You can see mothers and children murmuring to each other, learning to understand each other’s noises in a way and with a necessity that obtains in no other human relationship—if mother and child don’t understand each other the child doesn’t survive.
—ALLI SHELDON
You can understand why a system would seek information—but why in hell does it offer information? Why do we strive to be understood? Why is a refusal to accept communication so painful?
—JAMES TIPTREE, JR.
The Bradleys came back to Chicago in March 1922. Their return made national news. The New York Times ran a picture of Alice captioned Youngest Explorer of Darkest Africa […] the First White Child Ever Seen by the Pigmy Tribes.
(Ordinarily the white explorers do the seeing, but again Alice was not the viewer but part of the view.) For the Chicago papers, they staged a photo session in the roof garden: beside a low table spread with a leopard skin, Herbert and Mary watched admiringly as Alice, with a look of sullen intensity, poured tea.
In New York, Carl Akeley mounted the five gorillas for a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History. He mounted Herbert’s gorilla standing upright, its two fists at its breast; its image was reproduced everywhere from encyclopedias to comic book covers until it became Americans’ idea of how gorillas look. Herbert had hoped their film footage, showing gorillas feeding peacefully, could be released commercially. But audiences for early wildlife films wanted charging elephants and cannibal chiefs. They weren’t ready for an unstaged, nonviolent wildlife documentary.
Mary Bradley put her notes together and started to write. On the Gorilla Trail ran serially for ten weeks in the Chicago Tribune and was published in book form that same year, 1922. When Mary spoke at the women’s society of her mother’s church, her tales of safari life found an eager audience: a reviewer said the listeners were thrilled to the finger tips
by this fascinating little lady looking every inch the society gentlewoman.
At home the Bradleys uncrated their tusks, skins, spears, and baskets and put them on display in their penthouse, which they now called the African Room. Almost immediately they started planning a second trip.
Mary was able to be both women, the lion hunter and the society gentlewoman
; to Mary, Africa existed alongside Chicago and enriched it. But for Alice, Africa opened a deep rift in her life, between her ordinary self and herself on safari. Africa made Chicago seem unreal, while in Chicago, the girl she had been in Africa, in khakis, boots, and a pith helmet, wielding a spear, was not permitted to exist. A photograph of Alice at about seven, roller-skating in a dress on a city sidewalk, shows her more uncertain than the girl of the year before—despite, or because of, the parental presence, the shadow of the photographer that falls across her