What passes for masculinity is a fashion, at least as much as it is innate. Rhett Butler doesn't fumble in his pursuit of Scarlett; Ben Stone does nothing but fumble with Allison Scott (in Knocked Up, not quite the culture icon that Gone with Wind has become) - call it the difference that seventy years makes in our mythologies of gender relations.
Maybe it's my generation, but I've always been more interested in male fumbling. (Granted, I haven't seen much non-fumbling; cultivating an interest in it strikes me as akin to obsessing over unicorns.) Male fumblers make good in my second novel, The Swing of Beijing, and have a nervous breakdown in my third novel, Waiting for Love Child. Indeed, I'm so interested in male fumblers that a previous agent told me that I "channel" men and that I need to stop doing it.
Well, the male fumbler may have been banished from my fourth novel, The Celebration Husband, but my interest hasn't abated. Indeed, E.M. Forster piqued it with this passage from A Room with a View:
[George's] awkwardness went straight to [Lucy's] heart; men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls; even men might suffer from unexplained desires, and need help. To one of her upbringing, and of her destination, the weakness of men was a truth unfamiliar, but she had surmised it . . . .
(p. 178.) Forster, after all, was writing during an era when male fumblers were not the rage. To the contrary, the decisive man, ordering the world and his woman's place in it, was the ideal. As George protests to Lucy about her fiancé, Cecil:
I meet you together, and find him protecting and teaching you and your mother to be shocked, when it was for you to settle whether you were shocked or no. . . . He daren't let a woman decide. . . . Every moment of his life he's forming you, telling you what's charming or amusing or ladylike, telling you what a man thinks womanly.
(p. 194.) All very sensible condemnation today, but not 103 years ago when A Room with a View was first published. Cecil is the respectable man; George, please remember, is a freak.
That Forster defied convention to allow the fumbling freak to prevail in romance suggests a perceptiveness and sympathy about masculinity that transcends fashion. (Of course, as a closeted gay man, Forster might have had particular insights into fumbling courtship of women; but I think his empathy was more universal.) "[I]t is impossible to rehearse life," he writes in A Room with a View:
A fault in the scenery, a face in the audience, an irruption of the audience on the stage, and all our carefully planned gestures mean nothing, or mean too much.
(p. 154.) The fumbling man is the honest man, while the man who proceeds according to script, regardless of the circumstances, is not actually responding to the world around him. He is unwilling to confront uncertainty and roll with it; he is too defended against humiliation to risk genuine connection. He is, in fact, playing at living, but not really living. Forster teaches that, if you want to rehearse, you condemn yourself to the stage; and if you want to live, you have to fumble.
I don't think men - or women - are yet entirely comfortable with this truth. Seth Rogen, after all, is nobody's idea of Clark Gable, and Knocked Up is a comedy. I'm not sure we've (that is, "we" as a culture, have) yet worked out the serious narrative of how the boy gets the girl when he's fumbling his way the whole time. As old, as uneven, and at times as implausible as it is, A Room with a View may remain our bellwether of this realm of human behavior.
(Image of Julian Sands and Helena Bonham-Carter in A Room with a View from The Guardian)
To my surprise, I found Peter Bogdanovich's film adaptation of Henry James' Daisy Miller an excellent augment to the novella.
The faithfulness of the adaptation is commendable and shows both Bogdanovich's confidence and his understanding of the story. (The vast majority of the dialogue, for example, seems to have been transposed directly from James.) As a result, the movie highlighted shades in the book that I'd perceived, but which I'd questioned out of concern that I was missing something, or that I was too ignorant of the historic period and Victorian writing generally to interpret them correctly.
For instance, based on the text, I didn't find Daisy sympathetic. In fact, I thought her annoying, and Frederick Winterbourne's enduring infatuation with her struck me as difficult to fathom. I was curious to see how the movie would handle Daisy's characterization, since an unsympathetic female protagonist is a hard sell in Hollywood. (And, indeed, the critics seemed not to buy it, although they tended [unfairly in my view] to blame Cybill Shepherd.) But Daisy was every bit as tiresome on the page as she is in the movie.
Reflecting on the film, I think part of the problem is that immature females can quite easily be intrinsically annoying and tiresome. In my own writing, depicting women moving from states of relative immaturity to relative maturation, I've found myself becoming fed up with my own creations (my fault as the author - I own it - but a fault easily indulged given the reality).
But I also think Henry James missed an opportunity. His Daisy Miller bears more than passing resemblance to Marianne Dashwood in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. Like Daisy, Marianne is also impulsive and emotional; she also cultivates an unwise attachment to an unsuitable man; and Marianne also suffers illness as the fallout of the relationship.
But unlike Daisy, Marianne has depths that she reveals in the text. Marianne is passionate, hard-working and unspoiled. I got the impression that James expected us to like Daisy because she is beautiful and American, but those qualities are too superficial to inspire the reader's empathy. (In this respect, Bogdanovich added a lovely touch when he had Daisy sing for Frederick, an episode that doesn't appear in the book, but which allows us to see Daisy's talent, as well as her beauty.)
And, unlike Daisy, Marianne doesn't die. She marries a mature man, making a sensible choice that assures her a future both less romantic and more complicated than any situation in James' story. Indeed, by comparison to Marianne's fate, Daisy's death looks mawkish and sentimental - another cheap, easy way of pushing the audience's sympathy buttons.
Bogdanovich handles the ending extremely well and, with Barry Brown's exceptional performance, manages to wring genuine regret from Daisy's death. All the same, if the film seems like an over-expenditure on a slight tale, the cause seems to lie (and I say this with apologies to the Master) in the source material.
(Image of Cybill Shepherd and Barry Brown in Peter Bogdanovich's film version of Daisy Miller from BAM)
P.G. Wodehouse repeated himself - jokes, similes, motivations, plots, quotes from poetry. I love him so dearly that the repetitions don't bother me at all. They're a quirk of a beloved - if soused - uncle, and if he didn't repeat himself, I'd ask him to, "Tell me the one about . . ."
But I don't repeat myself, I thought. I'm not writing in a genre, like Wodehouse (even if it is a genre of his own invention); each of my books is new and fresh and different and reflects the stupendous growth I've experienced since I finished my last book.
Well, ha. Ha. Ha. And, for good measure, ha ha ha ha ha. Rereading my second novel, The Swing of Beijing, this past week during the audio recording, I noted numerous instances of writing that I recognized - with a sigh and a resigned grimace - from later works, specifically my fourth novel, The Celebration Husband. Certainly, the repetitions didn't rise to the P.G. Wodehouse level in either number or their verbatim quality, but I was plainly writing again, and around, and about, familiar themes.
In particular, a theme that manifested itself in similar terms in both books is the experience of feeling humbled before wonders, and how that humility is, in fact, empowering.
I was interested to see this idea mentioned in Susan Neiman's recent NYT book review of Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly's All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. According to Neiman, Dreyfus and Kelly argue that
reading great works of literature allows us to rediscover the reverence, gratitude and amazement that were available in Homeric times. These qualities, [the authors] believe, can be cultivated to provide a bulwark against the nihilism they rightly view as threatening our ability to lead meaningful lives in the 21st century. . . . . The reason so many of us feel so miserable is that we can neither find
meaning in ourselves alone nor give up the longing to find it somewhere
else. . . . . [The authors discuss] the Greeks, who were less reflective than we are, and less convinced that they were in control of the world. This left them open to experience a world in which things shine as works of art do, to feel gratitude not only for the bounties of nature but for human excellence in all its forms, itself regarded as a gift.
This quest after meaning, and finding its satisfaction in experiences of "reverence, gratitude and amazement" is a major theme in my life (and, unsurprisingly, my writing). I hadn't thought I was trendy, or part of zeitgeist, but - worse - a cliché, but turns out I'm not only repetitive, but also unoriginal. I better hope I at least write pretty.
So here's the writing: judge for yourself. This first quote is from The Swing of Beijing, when one of the main characters, Tyler, is in a club listening to a jazz singer, called the Marquise:
The Marquise was now doing her delightful version of "Take Five," in which she scat sang the signature saxophone solo. Tyler closed his eyes again, enjoying the gravel-tinged honey that was the Marquise's voice, sweet and rough, simultaneously coating and caressing, and jutting against and ricocheting off of, the rhythm. She sang the way she lived, accepting the rhythm - however strict, however unexpected - as a non-negotiable and nonetheless not letting it get in her way. And, although neither she nor the song were Chinese, the Marquise's "Take Five" embodied Beijing for Tyler, better than any summation he'd encountered in any medium. In her interpretation of the song - with its bizarre time signature; its odd drafting of the piano to do the work normally assigned the drums; her willful, beautiful occupation of melody; and the unbelievable way it melded these non-conforming elements to roll over Tyler with a soft power that submerged his individual existence into the flow of music - "Take Five" distilled Beijing, a city that in its near millennium of history had defied lack of water resources and a profusion of invaders, had witnessed profound progress in dark ages and starveling stagnation in eras of modernity, and throughout had inspired big imaginations to draw on its leviathan depths of potential and recreate it. Like the song, Beijing humbled Tyler with the evidence of his meagerness and uplifted Tyler with its grace in enfolding him anyway; but most of all, it impressed Tyler with its capacity for strange and boundary-less change, a flexibility to which Tyler felt distinctly unequal.
Now compare that paragraph to these passages from The Celebration Husband (and this is a selection; there are other passages I could've excerpted), where the provocation for the experience of uplifting humility is not music, but the landscape:
Looking beyond the station, Tanya absorbed the Eastern Rift Valley: game-rich forest and fertile farmland punctuated by the voluptuous protrusion of the extinct volcano, Mount Longonot, to the west. Verdant green after the rains and dusty yellow during the dry season, Mount Longonot hid from Tanya's view Lake Naivasha, a vast stretch of fresh water so well integrated into the landscape that it often deceived observers into thinking it was part of the sky. Augmenting the Valley's grandeur were the clouds, transformed by moody and variable weather into actors in an epic drama, involving much darkening and glowing, rearing up, rolling about, thunder-and-lightning sound effects, and honey-cognac lighting. Pitched midway on the escarpment that descends into the Valley, Kijabe afforded Tanya a prime vantage point for this spectacle. As her eye roamed the scene, grey and gold clouds floated at eye level, so that the capacious sky seemed to arch overhead and then drop below her into the Valley. Tanya had never before known the sensation of sky beneath her. Kijabe elevated her; Tanya felt that the scenery demanded that she present a better, more noble self. . . . .
Arduously, achingly, she angled herself on her knees so that she faced Mount Kilimanjaro. On the corridor of plain stretching before her, round white butterflies fluttered, their wings beating like nuns' wimples in a breeze. Looking on the mountainous sanctum in the distance, Tanya saw that a cloud mass had swept over the snowy peak. Her view of the colossus now occluded, Tanya remembered von Lettow-Vorbeck's remarks about Kilimanjaro's ability to dwarf an event as monumental as battle. The mountain was so miraculous that it could remove any vastness from her perspective, even itself. As it is with the mountain, let it be with me, she thought. Let Kilimanjaro be my cathedral, let my perspective be guided by the light it filters onto me. If war itself vanishes into the maw of the mountain, let me cast my pain upon it, and let my sorrows dwindle in its immensity. Then, still kneeling, Tanya bent her torso forward until her forehead touched the prickly ground. She had seen Hassan bow this way during prayer, and the action had puzzled her. She didn't understand how Hassan could willingly adopt a posture of such abject submission. Now she imitated him intuitively. She'd had no expectations of the movement; she had prostrated herself unthinkingly. And yet, with this motion, she gained a sense of power. Bowing to the mountain, Tanya was blessed with the insight that triumph, too, can emerge from surrender.
Seeing this theme emerge in different stories, in various words, written over four years of my life, I can feel how deeply I want my characters to undergo the liberation of humility, and how persuaded I am of edifying effects of such experiences. I just hope audiences can bear with me (that I can bear with myself) as I write the same damned thing over and over again, trying (vainly) to pin the ineffable on paper.
Uncle Wodehouse, can you tell me the one about the peak in Darien?
(Photo of Maya Alexandri in the art cage of her own making by Andrew McConnell)
Over the past week, I've been recording an audiobook of my second novel, The Swing of Beijing. Although I'd last read the book only two years ago, I remembered little of the details, and reading the book aloud has been an interesting experience.
My literary mentor, DM Thomas, wrote about the stresses and discoveries of re-reading all his novels, and his experience was much in my mind as I sat in the audio booth, reacquainting myself with The Swing of Beijing.
DM Thomas had been anxious that, upon rereading his works, he might find that his novels were "dead." I wasn't worried about that, so much as discovering that the novel was crap. Roberto Bolaño summed up my concern in one of the many breathtaking passages in his stupendous novel 2666:
Ivanov's fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Fear that one's efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers.
(p. 722.) I am not immune to reading my own work and thinking, wait a minute, I know why this hasn't been published yet! It's because it's no good.
Certainly, such thoughts and their variants crossed my mind when I was in the audio booth.
But on the whole, I think those thoughts were too harsh. Yes, some scenes were too complicated; writing them, I learned how to write scenes like them better in later novels.
And, yes, some of the characters posed challenges for the reader - that is, me - in empathizing. I still haven't fixed that issue to my satisfaction, but I could see my growth as a writer depicting difficult characters in empathetic ways, even from chapter to chapter in this book.
The turning point came in the second half of the novel, with a long monologue by a character named Gao Yi, a Chinese smuggler. In truth, I'd forgotten the monologue in its particulars, and reading it I was captivated by its freshness, surprise and humanity. Those characteristics are, of course, relative and - given the way I'd been feeling about the foregoing pages - I won't make any judgments about the absolute quality of the monologue; but I was confident that it wasn't "no good."
And after that monologue, I began to feel similarly about the writing that followed. The Swing of Beijing is not a masterpiece by any stretch. Maybe not even worth publishing beyond the audiobook version - maybe not of interest except as a record of my growth as a writer (and possibly only of interest in that respect to me). But it's not "no good."
Then again, to quote DM Thomas assessing his own novels, "Who could ever trust an author's own view of his work?"
At the end of the reading, my sound engineer, Tarik Jarras, said that he wanted to know more about the characters, and that maybe I should write a sequel. Bless him.
(Image of Maya Alexandri taken by Tarik Jarras; image of Tarik Jarras taken by Maya Alexandri)
Quick: what play involves an incestuous uncle, a sword fight to avenge the honor of a family member, a poisoned goblet of wine drunk by an unintended victim, and a pile of corpses at the play's close? (If you said, Hamlet, that's a correct answer, but not the play about which I was thinking.) I'm referring to Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women, a kind of Jacobean Desperate Housewives, absent the suburbs, and plus verse.
Women Beware Women and Hamlet, side-by-side, illustrate how playwrights of the late-Elizabethan, early-Jacobean era manipulated certain standardized or formulaic set pieces in order to craft their stories. The fluency, eloquence and sophistication with which they maneuvered these story components, as contrasted with their originality in devising new components for the story, constituted their skill. (Hence, Shakespeare borrowed plots from other sources, rather than making up his own.) This mode of story telling is, in fact, quite ancient: Walter Ong describes how oral poets of Homer's time composed epic poems using "standardized formulas . . . grouped around equally standardized themes, such as the council, the gathering of the army, the challenge, the despoiling of the vanquished, the hero's shield, and so on and on." (Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, p. 23.)
So I felt an odd delight when I realized that, quite unconsciously, I'd been working in the same tradition on my latest novel, The Celebration Husband, which takes place in East Africa during the first three months of World War I. Upon hearing that I'd written this novel, a friend gave me his seriously tattered-jacketed copy of Bartle Bull's Africa adventure, The White Rhino Hotel.
Reading The White Rhino Hotel, I felt an intriguing sense of recognition. The novel contained many familiar scenarios, as if Bartle Bull and I had attended the same writing seminar and had both completed the assignment to "write a scene in the following circumstance: East Africa, nineteen-teens, go."
My novel contains: (a) a lion attack, (b) people captivated by the sight of wildlife, (c) crossing Kenya on a train, (d) riding around Kenya on a motorcycle, (e) farmers bemoaning the punishing conditions from which they are attempting to coax agricultural produce, (f) Masai and Kikuyu warriors in oppositional confrontation, (g) descriptions of bush cooking, (h) references to hunting safaris, (i) invocation of the classics, (j) a woman facing down a potential rapist, (k) a close friendship between a smart black African and a naive white colonist, and (l) arcane explanations and depictions of equipment and weaponry.
Every one of those elements appears in The White Rhino Hotel.
I can think of a number of reasons for this overlap. Bull and I might have read the same authors and texts in our research (e.g., Lord Cranworth, Elspeth Huxley, Karen Blixen, Beryl Markham are all fairly ubiquitous as sources on East Africa in the early twentieth century). Also, these elements all correlate to regularly-occurring events in the reality of East African life between 1914 and 1921 (when The White Rhino Hotel ends), which is why they might crop up repeatedly in the relevant historical texts or stories handed down over the generations.
In short, these elements have become standard set pieces, the lion attack analogous to the Elizabethan / Jacobean sword fight. They are (what in copyright law is referred to as) mise-en-scene: essential or stock elements of a particular genre. See, e.g., Universal City Studios v. T-shirt Gallery, Ltd., 634 F. Supp. 1468, 1474 n.5 (S.D.N.Y. 1986).
I hadn't seen my writing from this perspective before, and - although to our novelty-centric culture, the prospect might be threatening or induce a sense of competitiveness - I found unexpectedly comforting aspects in it. In contradistinction to the isolated novelist in a cottage in Naivasha, which I was for the duration in which I wrote The Celebration Husband, I felt myself in a tradition of storytellers captivated by East Africa in the early twentieth century, all of us sorting and reordering standardized story components of The East African Novel in our individual attempts to ignite the magic of suspension of disbelief.
In the course of a New York Times book review of the two recently-released translations of the work of the late Austrian author Thomas Bernhard, novelist, critic and literary infant terrible Dale Peck drew a distinction between novelistic traditions. The first, representing 99% (in his estimate) of Western novels, finds its roots in ancient Greek forms of storytelling and, in its journey through Rome, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Victorian Era, has evolved to chart the vicissitudes of "an increasingly representative cast of characters and behaviors."
The second tradition
wends its way through various misfits, misanthropes and criminals
constitutionally incapable of resigning themselves to the social
contract: Cervantes's Don Quixote, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Dostoyevsky's
underground man, Knut Hamsun's self-starving doppelgänger in "Hunger."
In lieu of offering a rational critique of the world they inhabit, the
antiheroes of the second tradition simply hate or reject it, just as
their creators, far from seeing literature as a tool for cultural or
even individual salvation, write only to give voice to a sense of
alienation from oneself, one's peers and one's place in history.
The phrase "constitutionally incapable of resigning themselves to the social
contract" delighted me - not least because of how deeply I identify with it - but also raised an immediate question: why were women authors absent from this disaffected 1%? (I don't think the issue lies in Peck's list of examples; aside from Peck's very public philogyny, I can't think of a woman author who should have been included.)
The absence is noteworthy. Women, after all, have very good reasons to reject the social contract. Succinctly: we've been on the shit end of the deal - of every social deal - in Western history and maintain our sorry status in current times. There's never been a Golden Age for women, a time during which it was good to be female. We perennially do more to get less, find ourselves without outlets or mentors for our talents, and alone in our grief; and that's the fate of lucky women - the unlucky ones are the subjects of unremitting abuse, exploitation, degradation and violence.
So why doesn't literature by women reflect these inarguable facts? Why aren't women writing characters that "hate or reject" the world? Why aren't women authors writing "to give voice to a sense of
alienation from oneself, one's peers and one's place in history"?
These are "big" questions, and a blog post is structurally incapable of admitting comprehensive (or even potentially worthy) answers. Nonetheless, just as I struggle against other structurally-imposed constraints in my life, I'll attempt an inadequate (and possibly unworthy) answer here, one based on women's historic connection with the existence of the novel.
As Walter Ong explains in his masterwork, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, up through the nineteenth century, rhetoric-heavy academic training shaped literary style in the West, except in the case of female authors, who received no such training:
In medieval times and after, the education of girls was often intensive . . . , but this education was not acquired in academic institutions, which taught rhetoric and all other subjects in Latin. When they began to enter schools in some numbers during the seventeenth century, girls entered not the main-line Latin schools but the newer vernacular schools. . . . Women writers were no doubt influenced by works that they had read emanating from the Latin-based, academic, rhetorical tradition, but they themselves normally expressed themselves in a different, far less oratorical voice, which had a great deal to do with the rise of the novel.
(pp. 111-12.) And which no doubt had a great deal to do with the low esteem with which novels have been held since time immemorial - see, for example, this declamation by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey:
Although [novelists'] productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected
pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no
species of composition has been so much decried. . . . [T]here seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances that have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.
(p. 22.) Novels, in short, are a woman's medium. Don Quixote notwithstanding (and Don Quixote to my mind is at least as much an example of a transitional epic poem as it is of an early novel), novels were largely invented, refined and patronized by women. The prevalence of male novelists in the list of "greats" is just another yawn-inducing example of the achievement possible for a gender unsaddled by the lion's share of procreative and domestic work, a gender that moreover (and because of the foregoing advantage) has historically enjoyed the privilege of making the fucking list in the first place.
Which is to say, a novel (as contrasted with, say, a blog post) isn't a terribly logical medium for a woman's expression of hatred, rejection and alienation: it may be the Western cultural medium from which women are least alienated. For a woman (or, at least, this woman), novels aren't either "a tool for cultural or
even individual salvation," or a forum for voicing alienation: they are her metaphoric home, the place where she can experience unmolested enjoyment of her intellect and emotions. A novel isn't about therapy or "salvation," but rather the mere necessities of existence: whether reading or writing one, in the confines of a novel, a woman finds a space in which she has penned the terms of the social contract.
By the same token, fouling a woman's nest with vituperative hatred, rejection, mockery and self-pitying howls of alienation is exactly the kind of asshole behavior to be expected from a sensitive male genius writer.
