THE PROPER study of mankind may be man, but the subject for women is other women. This is a tiresome fate, made no more pleasing by the fact that it is a servitude to which one dooms oneself. When women think of writing an essay they seem to look out at the infinite world of art and experience and, frightened, to draw back, cozily, to women’s art, women’s novels, women’s problems, women’s place in the world, in America, in bed, at home. One’s sex provides topics for a tired inspiration, something to fall back on, like growing up in India. It is a subject upon which one can speak with something like authority. I am, I say to myself, a woman after all.
Toward the achievements of women I find my own attitudes extremely complicated by all sorts of vague emotions. I take an interest in what my feminine colleagues are doing, not unlike that interest a member of a minority takes in the achievements of his group—but my reactions are not as pure and amiable as those of other minority members. (Women are a sort of minority culturally, not numerically.) As a writer I feel a nearly unaccountable attraction and hostility to the work of other women writers. Envy, competitiveness, scorn infect my judgments at times, and indifference is strangely hard to come by in this matter.
When I was younger I used to read nearly everything written by women, that is, nearly everything that aspired to seriousness or excellence. I no longer do quite that, and yet I still continue to read a great many books just because they are written by women. I am often, as I phrase it, “disappointed.” This past year, for instance, I found the English novelist Iris Murdoch’s book The Bell nearly unreadable. It seemed to me slow, unreal, with a superabundance of symbolic action that dulled the edge of the inspiration. That opinion is not outrageous, but perhaps I was unduly exercised and annoyed by the enthusiastic reviews this novel received in the British press. At the same time, under the push of this emotion, I began to read another young English writer, Doris Lessing. I first came upon a collection of her short stories, The Habit of Loving, published here in America last year, a volume favorably enough reviewed, but somehow unable to make itself felt in the American literary scene. I liked this book immensely. These were powerful, beautifully written stories, somewhat—and happily, I thought—influenced by the great short stories of D. H. Lawrence. Indeed this work was so interesting I ordered all the books by Doris Lessing the Holiday Bookstore would send me. Of those that arrived, I have thus far read The Grass Is Singing, Martha Quest, and an earlier collection of stories, This Was the Old Chief’s Country. These are all superb—the works of a woman with an extraordinary gift for fiction. Doris Lessing is well known in England and very highly considered, I understand; however, my own reading of English magazines usually produces Iris Murdoch and not Doris Lessing as the most important “young” English novelist, among the women.
Again, I find that an exaggerated irritation wells up in me at any failure to concur with my own opinion on this matter because it is a matter of work by women. I don’t relish disagreement, perhaps, with my opinion of the work of men, but certainly the extremity of my behavior and feeling about the writing of women does not occur when I have to think of the writing of men. I have no doubt that all this is a merely personal disease, whose origins are as obvious as they are unflattering. I do not know that other women writers feel this way, and yet I do get hints that some do, if not so strongly, not so wildly, share my unhealthy condition and that a peculiar lack of detachment marks the opinion one woman has of another’s art. Competitiveness is the rule of the intellectual world to the same degree that it is the rule of any world that demands a personal exertion of the highest sort, but the competitiveness is a fleeting thing, coming only at certain moments of longing or fear. The most genuine moments of the creative life are those of passionate love and absorption in the whole stream, past and present, of culture. It could not be said that a businessman loves the great moments, or even the small, of the history of business, that the head of General Motors feels for the Ford Company and the Ford product the reverence members of the world of art may feel for each other. And so when I admit to myself the half-hostile but helplessly fascinated involvement I feel with women’s writing, I excuse myself by remembering the effort I have put into reading and thinking about their work.
When I look over my library I find that I not only have all of the works of the women writers I particularly admire—women such as Virginia Woolf, Mary McCarthy, Edith Wharton—but I notice also that I own, for instance, the complete works of Elizabeth Madox Roberts and the many novels of Kay Boyle. Elizabeth Madox Roberts: two—they could not quite be called “loyalties”—two sources of addiction capture me in the case of this writer. She is a woman and also a native of my own state, Kentucky. I still have respect for her work, but I do not read it and even when I did read it my senses were not extraordinary stirred. And yet I have carried The Great Meadow, The Time of Man, Not by Strange Gods, and the others through a great many exhausting, costly packings and unpackings. I am unable, no matter what my practical wish, to dispose of these books. I remember that Elizabeth Madox Roberts lived for a time in Chicago, that she was a friend of Glenway Wescott, that she wrote many of her books while living in her house in Springfield, Kentucky. And then she is a woman novelist.
In the late 1940s I read a review in an English magazine that ended, in order to make some comparison I have since forgotten, with the names George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Susan Ferrier. Susan Ferrier! I was astonished that there could be a woman novelist I did not know and one of such merit as to be listed along with George Eliot and Jane Austen. With anxious energy I went around to the secondhand bookstores over and over until I was able to find Marriage and The Inheritance. Two very good books. (The flyleaf of an edition of Marriage says that “Walter Scott delighted in Miss Ferrier’s novels and her art in dealing with Scottish life. Something of Smollett’s humour, dashed with softer feeling, makes Marriage a delicious comedy-in-narrative.”)
I can remember reading only one novel because of what I had read to be its plot. In The New York Times my eye fell upon the subject matter, the plot, of a novel by Elizabeth Jenkins—the author of the currently popular biography of Elizabeth the First. The title of this delightful novel, published here in 1954, is The Tortoise and the Hare. The hare of the title is a charming, sensitive, beautiful woman married to an attractive, successful barrister some years older; the tortoise who eventually triumphs over the hare, by stealing her husband from her, is a plain old spinster in her fifties, a plain and downright woman yes, but luxurious in her way. The spinster has money, she produces excellent dinners and her car, a Rolls, always seems to be ready and waiting whenever it is needed. She is a good judge of horses and investments; her house hasn’t the taste of the poor hare’s house but it is comfortable, solid, firm, and immensely reassuring. The spinster, in her expensive but dowdy clothes, has also all the pent-up energy and sexual passion of a lifetime. Even here her capability is enormous and the beautiful, introspective wife feels this odd fact as something she cannot subdue; it is a kind of strength and determination against which her own romantic nature, which needs to be admired and appreciated, is helpless. This is a very satisfactory novel; not only are the characters convincing, they are also adult, completely and thoroughly interesting.
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When I read this winter in the New Statesman that Pamela Hansford Johnson’s The Unspeakable Skipton showed the author to be “as good as any novelist writing in this country today,” and that “it was not silly to be reminded of George Eliot,” and that in this book and the one before it called The Last Resort Miss Johnson was “extending the territory of the novel,” I naturally was filled with all that disturbing eagerness and readiness to doubt I have previously described. The Unspeakable Skipton turned out to be a book unusually easy to read. “Readability” is a much-abused word, one likely to put off anyone of the slightest seriousness because it is used to praise the light, the trivial, the obvious, the easily conventional. This novel is thoroughly literary—one needs to know a good deal, to have a feeling for the literary and artistic sense to get the most from it. It is witty, perverse, and entertaining. The character of Skipton is based upon that extraordinary man, Baron Corvo, a man hard for me, at least, to like. He wrote in a most unusual, baroque style, his opinions were crackpot; his own character was his most original creation, having in itself a sort of dramatic suspense, since the real Corvo loved mystification and difficulty beyond everything else. A. J. A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo is more widely read, perhaps, than any of Corvo’s own books.
Miss Johnson’s Skipton is a writer, living in Bruges. (The real Corvo exiled himself in Venice.) There is always a danger in the use of foreign cities stuffed with attractions and romantic names. Bruges, however, is not squeezed mercilessly like a lemon for the sauce but is gently pressed for delightful comic effects. In Bruges, Skipton can invent, as a swindle, an old Flemish painter named van Brouwerts.
Skipton is starving, paranoiac, full of compulsive fears and textbook perversities. He’s an awful person, redeemed by the fact that he is so terrible he never wins any kind of victory. People are suspicious or contemptuous of him. His neurotic cleanness annoys them as much as his perversity in arranging a sexual circus for tourists astonishes them. His literary pride is fascinating; it is real and arouses pity and belief because he has genuine talents. His rude letters to his publishers, begging for advances, are masterpieces of folly, insult, and madness. Skipton lives in unbearable tension. Always faced by starvation, he nevertheless goes home to the sort of literary feast he can provide himself for nothing, that is to add a few lines to his venomous portraits of his “enemies”—of such portraits are his books composed. For instance:
Men like Billy Butterman are rarely recognized as parasites, since parasitism is associated with the minuscule; but if triple-visaged Dis gnawing the bloody heads in the bottom of Hell were to have a louse in his armpit, that louse would be Butter-man. . . .
There is hardly an aspect of Skipton’s character that isn’t repulsive; his pride is diseased, his self-absorption is so deranging that he cannot form a true idea of other people and therefore thinks a poor country cousin is a rich, miserly rentier. His heart seeks revenge automatically and his most usual response to life is disgust. Still Skipton is not repulsive. He is exaggerated, but the elements of his suffering and his unattractiveness are seen often in the artistic and cultural world. His vanity may be dreadful but it does not abate his poverty. His snares for his victims are always so elaborate and fantastic that he, himself, is the one at last to be trapped. His intransigence, his admirable, involved prose style, his perfection of the art of invective and ridicule have a sort of purity and beauty.
I do not know that I shall ever read this book again. I’m not sure that I won’t. In the end perhaps some final, manic, mad exhilaration is lacking on the one hand, and some deep shivering identification on the other. Anyway I have read The Unspeakable Skipton once, and not to have done so would have been unthinkable. For it was written by a woman and that bound me to it. Had it been written by a man I might not have found time for it unless I had been assured it was first-rate. From the men, I demand only excellence.
1959