(1982)
I’m more than delighted that you’ve invited a token woman to give the Hagey lectures this year, and though you might have chosen one more respectable than myself, I realize that the supply is limited.
My lack of respectability I have on good authority: the authority, in fact, of the male academics at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, where I was being interviewed on radio not long ago. “I did a little survey,” said the rather pleasant male interviewer, “among the professors here. I asked them what they thought of your work. The women were all very positive, but the men said that they weren’t sure whether or not you were respectable.” So I’m giving you advance warning that everything you are about to hear is not academically respectable. The point of view I’m presenting is that of a practising novelist, inhabitant of New Grub Street for many years, not that of the Victorianist I spent four years at Harvard learning to be; though the Victorianism does creep in, as you can already see. So I will not even mention metonymy and synecdoche, except right now, just to impress you and let you know that I know they exist.
All of the above, of course, is by way of letting the male members of the audience know that, despite the title of this lecture, they don’t need to feel threatened. I believe we have now reached, as a culture, the point at which we need a little positive reinforcement for men. I’m starting my own private project along these lines tonight. I have with me some gold stars, some silver stars and some blue stars, fictional ones of course. You get a blue star, if you want one, just for being unthreatened enough to have actually turned up tonight. You get a silver star if you are unthreatened enough to laugh at the jokes, and you get a gold star if you don’t feel threatened at all. On the other hand, you get a black mark if you say, “My wife just loves your books.” You get two black marks if you say, as a male CBC producer said to me not long ago, “A number of us are upset because we feel women are taking over the Canadian literary scene.”
“Why do men feel threatened by women?” I asked a male friend of mine. (I love that wonderful rhetorical device, “a male friend of mine.” It’s often used by female journalists when they want to say something particularly bitchy but don’t want to be held responsible for it themselves. It also lets people know that you do have male friends, that you aren’t one of those fire-breathing mythical monsters, The Radical Feminists, who walk around with little pairs of scissors and kick men in the shins if they open doors for you. “A male friend of mine” also gives —let us admit it—a certain weight to the opinions expressed.) So this male friend of mine, who does by the way exist, conveniently entered into the following dialogue. “I mean,” I said, “men are bigger, most of the time, they can run faster, strangle better, and they have on the average a lot more money and power.” “They’re afraid women will laugh at them,” he said. “Undercut their world view.” Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, “Why do women feel threatened by men?” “They’re afraid of being killed,” they said.
From this I concluded that men and women are indeed different, if only in the range and scope of their threatenability. A man is not just a woman in funny clothes and a jock strap. They don’t think the same, except about things like higher math. But neither are they an alien or inferior form of life. From the point of view of the novelist, this discovery has wide-ranging implications; and you can see that we are approaching this evening’s topic, albeit in a crabwise. scuttling, devious and feminine manner; nevertheless, approaching. But first, a small disgression, partly to demonstrate that when people ask you if you hate men, the proper reply is “which ones?”—because, of course, the other big revelation of the evening is that not all men are the same.. Some of them have beards. Apart from that, I have never been among those who would speak slightingly of men by lumping them all in together; I would never say, for instance —as some have —“Put a paper bag over their bodies and they’re all the same.” I give you Albert Schweitzer in one corner, Hitler in another.
But think of what civilization would be today without the contributions of men. No electric floor polishers, no neutron bomb, no Freudian psychology, no heavy metal rock groups, no pornography, no repatriated Canadian Constitution… the list could go on and on. And they’re fun to play Scrabble with and handy for eating up the leftovers. I have heard some rather tired women express the opinion that the only good man is a dead man, but this is far from correct. They may be hard to find, but think of it this way: like diamonds, in the rough or not, their rarity makes them all the more appreciated. Treat them like human beings! This may surprise them* at first, but sooner or later their good qualities will emerge, most of the time. Well, in view of the statistics… some of the time.
That wasn’t the digression… this is the digression. I grew up in a family of scientists. My father was a forest entomologist and fond of children, and incidentally not threatened by women, and many were the happy hours we spent listening to his explanations of the ways of the wood-boring beetle, or picking forest tent caterpillars out of the soup because he had forgotten to feed them and they had gone crawling all over the house in search of leaves. One of the results of my upbringing was that I had a big advantage in the schoolyard when little boys tried to frighten me with worms, snakes and the like; the other was that I developed, slightly later, an affection for the writings of the great nineteenth century naturalist and father of modern entomology, Henri Fabre. Fabre was, like Charles Darwin, one of those gifted and obsessive amateur naturalists which the nineteenth century produced in such abundance. He pursued his investigations for the love of the subject, and unlike many biologists today, whose language tends to be composed of numbers rather than words, he was an enthusiastic and delightful writer. I read with pleasure his account of the life of the spider, and of his experiments with ant-lions, by which he tried to prove that they could reason. But it was not only Fabre’s subject matter that intrigued me; it was the character of the man himself, so full of energy, so pleased with everything, so resourceful, so willing to follow his line of study wherever it might lead. Received opinion he would take into account, but would believe nothing until he had put it to the test himself. It pleases me to think of him, spade in hand, setting forth to a field full of sheep droppings, in search of the Sacred Dung Beetle and the secrets of her egg-laying ritual. “I am all eyes,” he exclaimed, as he brought to light a little object, not round like the Sacred Beetle’s usual edible dung-ball, but cunningly pear-shaped! “Oh blessed joys of truth suddenly shining forth,” he wrote. “What others are there to compare with you!”
And it is in this spirit, it seems to me, that we should approach all subjects. If a dung-beetle is worthy of it, why not that somewhat more complex object, the human male? Admittedly the analogy has certain drawbacks. For instance, one dung-beetle is much like another, whereas, as we’ve noted, there’s quite a range in men. Also, we are supposed to be talking about novels here, and, to belabour the obvious, a novel is not a scientific treatise; that is, it can make no claim to present the kind of factual truth which can be demonstrated by repeatable experiments. Although the novelist presents observations and reaches conclusions, they are not of the same order as the observations of Fabre on the behaviour of the mating practices of the female scorpion, although some critics react as though they are.
Note that we have landed in the middle of a swamp, that is, at the crux of the problem: if a novel is not a scientific treatise, what is it? Our evaluation of the role of the male character within the novel will of course depend on what kind of beast we think we’re dealing with. I’m sure you’ve all heard the one about the four blind philosophers and the elephant. Substitute “critics” for “philosophers” and “Novel” for “elephant” and you’ll have the picture. One critic gets hold of the novelist’s life and decides that novels are disguised spiritual autobiographies, or disguised personal sexual phobias, or something of the kind. Another gets hold of the Zeitgeist (or Spirit of the Times, for those unlucky enough never to have had to pass a PhD language exam in German) and writes about the Restoration Novel or the Novel of Sensibility or The Rise of the Political Novel or The Novel of Twentieth Century Alienation; another figures out that the limitations of the language have something to do with what can be said, or that certain pieces of writing display similar patterns, and the air fills with mythopoeia, structuralism and similar delights; another goes to Harvard and gets hold of the Human Condition, a favourite of mine, and very handy to fall back on when you can’t think of anything else to say. The elephant however remains an elephant, and sooner or later gets tired of having the blind philosophers feeling its parts, whereupon it stretches itself, rises to its feet and ambles away in another direction altogether. This is not to say that critical exercises are futile or trivial. From what I have said about dung-beetles—which also preserve their innermost secrets —you will know that I think the description of elephants is a worthwhile activity. But describing an elephant and giving birth to one are two different things, and the novelist and the critic approach the novel with quite different sets of preconceptions, problems and emotions.
“Whence comest thou?” says a well-known male character in a multi-faceted prose narrative with which I am sure you are all familiar. “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it,” answers his adversary. Thus the novelist. One would of course not want to continue with this analogy—a critic is not God, contrary to some opinions, and a novelist is not the Devil, although one could remark, with Blake, that creative energies are more likely to emerge from the underworld than from the upper world of rational order. Let us say only that the going to and fro and the walking up and down in the earth are things that all novelists seem to have done in some way or another, and that the novel proper, as distinguished from the romance and its variants, is one of the points in human civilization at which the human world as it is collides with language and imagination. This is not to limit the novel to a Zola-like naturalism (though Zola himself was not a narrow Zola-like naturalist, as anyone who has read the triumphant final passage of Germinal will testify); but it is to state that some of the things that get into novels get into them because they are there in the world. There would have been no flogging scene in Moby Dick if there had been none on nineteenth century whaling ships, and its inclusion is not mere sado-masochism on the part of Melville. However, if the book consisted of nothing but, one might have cause to wonder.
Thus one must conclude that the less than commendable behaviour of male characters in certain novels by women is not necessarily due to a warped view of the opposite sex on behalf of the authors. Could it be… I say it hesitantly, in a whisper, since like most women I cringe at the very thought of being called—how can I even say it—a man-hater… could it be that the behaviour of some men in what we are fond of considering real life… could it be that not every man always behaves well? Could it be that some emperors have no clothes on?
This may seem to you an obvious point to make. But not so. Among the going to and fro that novelists do these days is the going to and fro across Canada during the McClelland & Stewart Wreck-an-Author tour, talking to media denizens, and some of the walking up and down they do happens after reading the reviews of their books. Let’s pretend for the sake of argument that media denizens and newspaper critics bear at least some relation, if not to the average reader, at least to the officially promoted climate of opinion; that is, what it is considered, at the moment, fashionable and therefore safe to state publicly. If so, the officially promoted climate of opinion these days shows a noteworthy shift towards male whining.
Let me take you back a few years, to the days of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, which was preceded ancestrally by Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel. Both were criticisms based on an analysis of the relations, within novels, of men and women, and both gave black marks to certain male authors for simplistic and stereotyped negative depictions of women. Well, that was interesting, but the worm has turned. Now we’re handing out black marks for what male critics (and, to be fair, some female ones) consider to be unfavourable depictions of men by female authors. I base this conclusion mainly on reviews of my own books, naturally, since that’s what I see most of, but I’ve noted it elsewhere too.
Now, we know there’s no such thing as value-free novel writing. Creation does not happen in a vacuum, and a novelist is either depicting or exposing some of the values of the society in which he or she lives. Novelists from Defoe through Dickens and Faulkner have always done that. But it sometimes escapes us that the same is true of criticism. We are all organisms within environments, and we interpret what we read in the light of how we live and how we would like to live, which are almost never the same thing, at least for most novel readers. I think that political interpretations of novels have a place in the body of criticism, as long as we recognize them for what they are; but total polarization can only be a disservice to literature. For instance, a male friend of mine—just to let you know I have more than one—wrote a novel which has a scene in it in which men are depicted urinating outdoors standing up. Now, so far as I know, this is something men have been doing for many years, and they are still doing it, judging from the handwriting in the snow; it is merely one of those things that happens. But a female poet took my friend to task in print. She found this piece of writing not only unforgivably Central Canadian —you can tell she was from British Columbia—she also found it unforgivably macho. I’m not sure what novelistic solution she had in mind. Possibly she wanted my friend to leave out the subject of urination altogether, thus avoiding the upsetting problem of physiological differences; maybe she wanted the men to demonstrate equality of attitude by sitting on toilets to perform this function. Or maybe she wanted them to urinate outdoors standing up but also to feel guilty about it. Or maybe it would have been all right if they had been urinating into the Pacific Ocean, regionalism being what it is today. You may think this kind of criticism is silly, but it happens all the time on New Grub Street, which is where I live.
For the female novelist, it means that certain men will find it objectionable if she depicts men behaving the way they do behave a lot of the time. Not enough that she may avoid making them rapists and murderers, child molesters, warmongers, sadists, power-hungry, callous, domineering, pompous, foolish or immoral, though I’m sure we will all agree that such men do exist. Even if she makes them sensitive and kind she’s open to the charge of having depicted them as “weak”. What this kind of critic wants is Captain Marvel, without the Billy Batson alter ego; nothing less will do.
Excuse me for underlining the obvious, but it seems to me that a good, that is, a successfully-written, character in a novel is not at all the same as a “good,” that is, a morally good, character in real life. In fact, a character in a book who is consistently well-behaved probably spells disaster for the book. There’s a lot of public pressure on the novelist to write such characters, however, and it isn’t new. I take you back to Samuel Richardson, author of such running-away-from-rape classics as Pamela and Clarissa. Both contain relatively virtuous women and relatively lecherous and nasty-minded men, who also happen to be English gentlemen. No one accused Richardson of being mean to men, but some English gentlemen felt that dirt had been done to them; in other words, the insecurities were primarily class ones rather than sex ones. Obligingly, Richardson came up with Sir Charles Grandison, a novel in which he set out to do right by the image of the English gentleman. It starts out promisingly enough, with an abduction with intent to rape by a villain after that priceless pot of gold, the heroine’s virginity. Unfortunately Sir Charles Grandison enters the picture, saves the heroine from a fate worse than death, and invites her to his country residence; after which most readers kiss the novel goodbye. I however always sit to the end, even of bad movies, and since I’m the only person I’ve ever met who has actually made it through to page 900 of this novel I can tell you what happens. Sir Charles Grandison displays his virtues; the heroine admires them. That’s it. Oh, and then there’s a proposal. Feel like reading it? You bet you don’t, and neither do all those male critics who complain about the image of men in books by women. A friend of mine—not a male one this time, but a perceptive reader and critic—says that her essential criterion for evaluating literature is, “Does it live or does it die?” A novel based on other people’s needs for having their egos stroked, their images shored up, or their sensitivities pandered to is unlikely to live.
Let us take a brief look at what literature has actually done. Is Hamlet, for instance, a slur on men? Is Macbeth? Is Faust, in any version? How about the behaviour of the men in Moll Flanders? Or Tom Jones? Is A Sentimental Journey about the quintessential wimp? Because Dickens created Orlick, Gradgrind, Dotheboys Hall, Fagin, Uriah Heep, Steerforth, and Bill Sykes, must we conclude that he’s a man-hater? Meredith was unrelentingly critical of men and quite admiring of women in such novels as Richard Feverel and The Egoist. Does that mean he’s the equivalent of a class traitor? How about the fascinating Isabel Archer’s failure to match herself with a man who’s up to her, in James’ Portrait Of A Lady? Then there’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, with sweet gentle victimized Tess, and the two male protagonists, one of whom is a cad, the other a prig. I give you Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, just to do a little culture-hopping; and while we’re at it, we might mention that Captain Ahab, although a forceful literary creation, is hardly anybody’s idea of an acceptable role model. Please note that all these characters and novels were the creations of men, not women; but nobody, to my knowledge, has accused these male authors of being mean to men, although they’ve been accused of all sorts of other things. Possibly the principle involved is the same one involved in the telling of ethnic jokes: it’s all right within the group, but coming from the outside it’s racism, though the joke may be exactly the same. If a man depicts a male character unfavourably, it’s The Human Condition; if a woman does it, she’s being mean to men. I think you can to a certain extent reverse this and apply it to women’s reactions to books by women. I, for instance, was expecting to be denounced by at least a few feminists for having written my characters Elizabeth and Auntie Muriel in Life Before Man, both of whom would be less than desirable as roommates. But not a bit of it. By the time the book appeared, even feminist critics had tired somewhat of their own expectations; they no longer required all female protagonists to be warm but tough, wise and experienced but sensitive and open, competent, earth-motherly and passionate but chock full of dignity and integrity; they were willing to admit that women too might have blemishes, and that universal sister-hood, though desirable, had not yet been fully instituted upon this earth. Nevertheless, women have traditionally been harder on women’s image issues in connection with books by women than men have. Maybe it’s time to do away with judgement by role-model and bring back The Human Condition, this time acknowledging that there may in fact be more than one of them.
Incidentally, you could make a case—if you wanted to—for concluding that women authors have historically been easier on men in their books than male authors have. Nowhere in major English novels by women do we find anything approaching that fallen angel and monster of depravity, Mister Kurtz, of Heart of Darkness fame; about the closest you could come, I think, would be the infamous Simon Legree (but I said major novels). The norm is more likely to range between Heathcliff and Mr Darcy, both of them flawed but sympathetically depicted; or, to invoke the greatest single English novel of the nineteenth century, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, between dried-up envious Mr Casaubon and idealistic but misguided Dr Lydgate. The wonder of this book is that George Eliot can make us understand not only how awful it is to be married to Mr Casaubon, but how awful it is to be Mr Casaubon. This seems to me a worthy model to emulate. George Orwell said that every man’s life viewed from within is a failure. If I said it, would it be sexist?
The Victorians, of course, had certain advantages that we lack. For one thing, they were not as self-conscious about the kind of thing we’re discussing this evening as we have been forced to become. Though under constant pressure from the Mr and Mrs Grundies of their world never to write a line that might bring a blush to the cheek of a maiden of eighteen, which would in fact give you quite a lot of latitude today, they were not hesitant about depicting evil and calling it evil, or parading in front of their readers whole menageries of comic and grotesque figures, without worrying that such portraits might be interpreted as a slur upon one sex or the other. Female Victorian novelists had a couple of other advantages. Sex was out, so if they were creating a male character they could get away without trying to depict what sex felt like from a male point of view. Not only that, novels were assumed to be female-oriented, which meant that it took them a while to be viewed as a serious art form. Some of the first English novels were by women, the readership was preponderantly female, and even male novelists slanted their work accordingly. There are of course lots of exceptions, but on the whole we can say that the novel for almost two centuries had a decidedly female bias, which may account for the fact that many more male writers depicted female characters as central protagonists than the other way around. The advantage to the female novelist (as op-posed to the Walter Scott romancer) was obvious. If novels were aimed at women, women had inside information.
The novel as a form has changed and expanded a good deal since then. Still, one of the questions people have been asking me most frequently is, “Do you write women’s novels?” You have to watch this question, since, like many other questions, its meaning varies according to who’s asking it and of whom. “Women’s novels” can mean pop genre novels, such as the kind with nurses and doctors on the covers or the kind with rolling-eyed heroines in period costumes and windblown hair in front of gothic castles or Southern mansions or other locales where villainy may threaten and Heathcliff is still lurking around in the Spanish moss. Or it may mean novels for whom the main audience is assumed to be women, which would take in quite a lot, since the main audience for novels of all kinds, with the exception of Louis L’amour western romances and certain kinds of porn, is also women. Or it can mean feminist propaganda novels. Or it can mean novels depicting male-female relationships, which again covers quite a lot of ground. Is War and Peace a women’s novel? Is Gone With The Wind, even though it’s got a war in it? Is Middlemarch, even though it’s got The Human Condition in it? Could it be that women aren’t afraid to be caught reading books that might be considered “men’s novels,” whereas men still think something they need will fall off them if they look too hard at certain supposedly malevolent combinations of words put together by women? Judging from my recent walking to and fro in the earth and going up and down in bookstores for the purpose of signing my name on a lot of fly-leafs, I can tell you that this attitude is on the fade. More and more men are willing to stand in the line and be seen] fewer and fewer of them say, “It’s for my wife’s birthday.”
But I almost put the boots to my old friend and cohort, the redoubtable Pierre Berton, when he asked me on television why all the men in my recent book Bodily Harm were wimps. Displaying the celebrated female compassion, not to be confused with feeble-mindedness, I merely drib-bled aimlessly for a few minutes. “Pierre,” I should have said, “who do you think is likely to have had more experience of men in sexual relationships: you, or me?” This is not quite so mean as it sounds, and there’s even something to it. Women as people have a relatively large pool of experiences from which to draw. They have their own experiences with men, of course, but they also have their friends’, since, yes, girls do discuss men more than men—beyond the dirty anecdote syndrome —discuss women. Women are willing to talk about their weaknesses and fears to other women; men are not willing to talk about theirs to men, since it’s still a dog-eat-dog world out there for them and no man wants to reveal his underbelly to a pack of fang-toothed potential rivals. If men are going to talk about their problems with women to anybody, it’s usually either to a shrink or—guess what? to another woman. In both reading and writing, women are likely to know more about how men actually behave with women than men are; so that what a man finds a slur on his self-image, a woman may find merely realistic or indeed unduly soft.
But to go back to Pierre Berton’s assertion. I thought quite carefully about my male characters in Bodily Harm. There are three of them with whom the heroine actually sleeps, and the fourth main male character with whom she doesn’t. A female novelist and critic noted that there is one good man in the book and no good women, and she’s quite right. The other men are not “bad” —in fact they are quite nice and attractive as male characters in literature go, a sight better than Mr Kurtz and lago —but the good man is black, which is perhaps why the “mean-to-menners” overlooked him. When playing the role-model game, you have to read carefully; otherwise you may be caught in an embarrassing position, like that one.
Now, back to the practical concerns of New Grub Street. Let us suppose that I am writing a novel. First: how many points of view will this novel have? If it has only one point of view, will it be that of a man, a woman or a seagull? Let us suppose that my novel will have one point of view and that the eyes through which we see the world of the novel unfolding will be those of a woman. Immediately it follows that the perceptions of all male characters in the book will have to pass through the perceiving apparatus of this central character. Nor will the central character necessarily be accurate or just. It also follows that all the other characters will be, of necessity, secondary. If I’m skilful I will be able to bounce another set of perceptions off those of the central character, through dialogue and between-the-lines innuendo, but there will be a strong bias toward A as truth-teller and we will never get to hear what Characters B and C really think when they’re by themselves, urinating outdoors perhaps or doing other male things. However, the picture changes if I use a multiple point of view. Now I can have Characters B and C think for themselves, and what they think won’t always be what Character A thinks of them. If I like, I can add in yet another point of view, that of the omniscient author (who is of course not “me,” the same me that had bran muffins for breakfast this morning and is right now giving this speech) but yet another voice within the novel. The omniscient author can claim to know things about the characters that even they don’t know, thus letting the reader know these things as well.
The next thing I have to decide is what tone I’m taking, what mode I’m writing in. A careful study of Wuthering Heights will reveal that Heathcliff is never to be observed picking his nose, or indeed even blowing it, and you can search through Walter Scott in vain for any mention of bathrooms. Leopold Bloom on the other hand is preoccupied with the mundane wants of the body on almost every page, and we find him sympathetic, yes, and comic and also pathetic, but he is not exactly love’s young dream. Leopold Bloom climbing in through Cathy’s window would probably slip. Which is the more accurate portrayal of Man with a capital M? Or, like Walter Mitty, does each man contain within him both an ordinary, limited and trivial self and a heroic concept, and if so, which should we be writing about? I carry no brief for either, except to remark that serious novelists in the twentieth century usually opt for Leopold, and poor Heathcliff has been relegated to the Gothic romance. If a given serious novelist of the twentieth century is female, she too will probably go for Leopold, with all his habits, daydreams and wants. This doesn’t mean she hates men; merely that she’s interested in what they look like without the cloak.
All right. Suppose I’ve chosen to have in my novel at least one male character as a narrator or protagonist (not necessarily the same thing). I do not want to make my male character unnaturally evil, like Mr Hyde; instead I’m trying for Dr Jekyll, an essentially good man with certain flaws. That’s a problem right there; because, as Stevenson knew, evil is a lot easier to write about and make interesting than goodness. What, these days, is a believable notion of a good man? Let us suppose that I’m talking about a man who is merely unbad; that is, one who obeys the major laws, pays his bills, helps with the dishes, doesn’t beat up his wife or molest his kids, and so forth. Let’s suppose that I want him to have some actual good qualities, good in the active, positive sense. What is he to do? And how can I make him —unlike Sir Charles Grandison —interesting in a novel?
This I suspect is the point at which the concerns of the novelist coincide with those of society. Once upon a time, when we defined people—much more than we do now—by how far they lived up or failed to live up to certain pre-defined sexual role models, it was a lot easier to tell what was meant by “a good man” or “a good woman.” “A good woman” was one that fulfilled our notions of what a woman should be and how she should behave. Likewise “a good man.” There were certain concepts about what constituted manliness and how you got it—most authorities agreed that you weren’t just born with it, you somehow had to earn, acquire or be initiated into it; acts of courage and heroism counted for something, ability to endure pain without flinching, or drink a lot without passing out, or whatever. In any case there were rules, and you could cross a line that separated the men from the boys.
It’s true that the male sexual role model had a lot of drawbacks, even for men—not everybody could be Superman, many were stuck with Clark Kent—but there were certain positive and, at that time, useful features. What have we replaced this package with? We know that women have been in a state of upheaval and ferment for some time now, and movement generates energy; many things can be said by women now that were once not possible, many things can be thought that were once unthinkable. But what are we offering men? Their territory, though still large, is shrinking. The confusion and desperation and anger and conflicts that we find in male characters in novels don’t exist only in novels. They’re out there in the real world. “Be a person, my son,” doesn’t yet have the same ring to it as “Be a man,” though it is indeed a worthy goal. The novelist qua novelist, as opposed to the Utopian romancer, takes what is there as a point of departure. What is there, when we’re talking about men, is a state of change, new attitudes overlapping with old ones, no simple rules any more. Some exciting form of life may emerge from all this.
Meanwhile, I think women have to take the concerns of men as seriously as they expect men to take theirs, both as novelists and as inhabitants of this earth. One encounters, too often, the attitude that only the pain felt by persons of the female sex is real pain, that only female fears are real fears. That for me is the equivalent of the notion that only working-class people are real, that middle-class people are not, and so forth. Of course there’s a distinction between earned pain and mere childish self-pity, and yes, women’s fear of being killed by men is grounded in authenticity, not to mention statistics, to a greater extent than men’s fear of being laughed at. Damage to one’s self-image is not quite the same as damage to one’s neck, though not to be underestimated: men have been known to murder and kill themselves because of it.
I’m not advocating a return to door-mat status for women, or even to the arrangement whereby women prop up and nurture and stroke and feed the egos of men without having men do at least some of the same for them. To understand is not necessarily to condone; and it could be pointed out that women have been “understanding” men for centuries, partly because it was necessary for survival. If the other fellow has the heavy artillery, it’s best to be able to anticipate his probable moves. Women, like guerrilla fighters, developed infiltration rather than frontal attack as their favoured strategy. But “understanding” as a manipulative tool—which is really a form of contempt for the thing understood —isn’t the kind I would like to see. However, some women are not in the mood to dish out any more understanding, of any kind; they’re feeling a lot like Rene Levesque: the time for that is over, they want power instead. But one cannot deprive any part of humanity of the definition “human” without grievous risk to one’s own soul. And for women to define themselves as powerless and men as all-powerful is to fall into an ancient trap, to shirk responsibility as well as to warp reality. The opposite also is true; to depict a world in which women are already equal to men, in power, opportunities and freedom of movement, is a similar abdication.
I know I haven’t given any specific directions for writing the male character; how can I? They’re all different, remember. All I’ve given are a few warnings, an indication of what you’re up against from the real world and from critics. But just because it’s difficult is no reason not to try.
When I was young and reading a lot of comic books and fairy tales, I used to wish for two things: the cloak of invisibility, so I could follow people around and listen to what they were saying when I wasn’t there, and the ability to teleport my mind into somebody else’s mind, still retaining my own perceptions and memory. You can see that I was cut out to be a novelist, because these are the two fantasies novelists act out every time they write a page. Throwing your mind is easier to do if you’re throwing it into a character who has a few things in common with you, which may be why I’ve written more pages from a female character’s point of view than from a male’s. But male characters are more of a challenge, and now that I’m middle-aged and less lazy I’ll undoubtedly try a few more of them. If writing novels—and reading them—have any redeeming social value, it’s probably that they force you to imagine what it’s like to be somebody else.
Which, increasingly, is something we all need to know.