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Amanda Craig describes the challenges for men writing books from a woman's point of view (and the laughable errors they usually make), and the equally challenging situation she faced writing In A Dark Wood from a man's point of view.
Gender bending is all the rage
this year. With Nick Hornby, Sebastian Faulks and even the poet and scholar
John Fuller choosing to write from the female viewpoint, the modern novel
has entered the sex-war as never before. Cynics may wonder whether this
isn't due to the simple fact that women buy far more fiction than men:
according to literary agent Giles Gordon, publishers aren't interested in
books about men any longer because these sell so badly. Yet at some point,
any serious novelist is going to try to write from the perspective of the
opposite sex, because the joy of writing fiction, as of reading it, is about
getting outside your own head and into someone else's. Stepping beyond your
own gender takes that process further. It's an irresistible challenge, but
as I discovered last year, a very real one.
It shouldn't be so difficult. Many people, writers or not, cherish the
illusion that they know the opposite sex better than their own simply
because of having been to bed with individual members of it. In the
imagination, we can surely be as hermaphroditic as the seer Tiresias, whom
the Greek gods turned into a woman for seven years. But to really get under
the skin of a man if you're a woman or vice versa, to look at the world
through their eyes and feel with their feelings is astonishingly hard. When
you try it, you do start to wonder whether you can really dismiss the theory
that men are from Mars and women from Venus, because even the finest writers
of each sex gets the other wrong.
Men have a comparatively easy time, because women have been discussing
what it is to be a woman ever since the latter began to write fiction. Over
the past century, thanks to feminism, that distinction has become richer and
clearer. Great novelists of the past had the inestimable advantage of being
able to read their wife's diary (in Tolstoy's case) or conduct an intimate
correspondence with a mistress (as with Flaubert). Now, blokes have women's
magazines, not to mention all the books by women on women. They have an
abundance of information about us, whereas for women it's much harder. Men
seem to make it their life's work to obscure what they're thinking and
feeling. Until very recently there has been no movement, analogous to
feminism, to get them to unbutton the stiff upper lip. You can read the kind
of writers that men love and women hate -- people ranging from Joseph Conrad
to Ian Fleming -- and gain very little insight into the reality as opposed
to the fantasy of living inside a man's head. I can't be the only woman in
the world who has to work out what her partner is feeling by a process akin
to tracking spoor in a jungle. Men, especially British men, tend to be so
uncommunicative that it's easy to make the crass error that they have less
feelings, and less sensitivity than women do. This isn't helped by the
profound antagonism feminism has encouraged towards men. Vain, incompetent,
irresponsible or just bonkers men have become the buffoons of the modern
world, unable to juggle the outer and the inner life with any semblance of
skill or enthusiasm.
When I came to write In a Dark Wood, this was one of the aspects
that most interested me about having a male narrator. Men are, as Fay Weldon
has said, the new underclass -- socially and emotionally, if not as yet
professionally. Increasingly, as women become financially independent, men
have lost confidence. My narrator, Benedick, is an actor -- something that
allowed him to be half-way to femininity because of his vulnerability in
being continually judged by the way he looks, and which made his
self-awareness more credible. Originally, he was going to be an architect
but that world is too full of all the Lego sets I'd never played with. What
a male narrator does, I discovered, is very important indeed. Women writers
can, it seems, write as adolescent boys, as doctors, as artists and as
actors without too many problems (think of Iris Murdoch, Rose Tremain, Jane
Hamilton and Carol Shields) because these all allow a credible degree of
sensitivity, especially to others. Approach a stereotypically masculine
profession like soldiering, and it's another matter. Look at a soldier by
Pat Barker or Susan Hill, and you find him having a breakdown. My character,
crucially, is in the grip of manic depression. I now wonder whether women
can only get into a male character's head when he is cracked open by
anguish.
Then, there is imagining what it must be like to live inside the body of
the opposite sex. Male novelists certainly never seem to get the hang of
what it's like to be a woman. Brian Moore's novels gained plaudits from male
critics for their deep insight into the female psyche, but failed to impress
us with heroines whose femaleness largely rested on always having her period
at some point. William Boyd's Brazzaville Beach also felt weird
because its narrator, though satisfyingly brave, appeared to have no
breasts. (Try running through the African jungle with a pair.) She was,
however, peculiarly interested in her own pubic hair. The funniest thing is
when men describe what they imagine what sex must be like for a woman. As
with John Cleland's pornographic masterpiece, Fanny Hill, there is
always a lot about the stupendous role of the penis; and no humour, or
tenderness. We'd love to be like Sebastian Faulks's heroine in Birdsong
and enjoy swooning orgasms at the mere prospect of penetration but alas it
isn't so. Nor do their emotions ring true. My own belief in Anna Karenina,
the greatest portrait of a woman by a man, wavers when she chooses her lover
over her little boy. There are women who do this, but they tend to be as
rare as Medea. Nick Hornby's Katie in How to be Good tells us about
her feelings but omits to inform the people in her world about them. (And
she never does the laundry.) On the whole, as Hollywood films from
Tootsie to What Women Want emphasise, a man pretending to be a
woman is a bit of a laugh involving the discomfort of wearing pantyhose and
the agony of leg-waxing.
Women writing as men appear equally uneasy, though more serious. Like
Patricia Highsmith's talented Mr. Ripley, they're just a bit too aware of
particularities that heterosexual men fail to pick up on. Apart from
Sherlock Holmes, no man created by a man ever notices how somebody is
dressed: male characters by women always do. They notice smells and tastes,
whereas men in books by men are apparently all suffering from heavy colds.
Blokes see and hear, but touch all seems concentrated in a single portion of
their anatomy. (Guess which one.) You really would think they didn't even
have hands if they weren't so busy getting on with their manly jobs of
pulling triggers, steering cars and writing memos.
Even stranger is what happens when these man-women or woman-men look in
the mirror. Male novelists never seem to grasp how wracked by self-doubt and
insecurity most women are. Women writers fail to understand that when a man
looks at himself in the mirror he tends to actually likes what he sees. So
women created by men don't ever worry about their bums looking to big or the
zit on their nose, any more than they feel shy about taking their clothes
off. Men created by women, meanwhile, are tortured by humility. From Rose
Tremain's Merivel in Restoration to Jane Hamilton's adolescent
narrator in Disobedience they are somehow just too humble. Aren't
there any men with a sense of humility? Well, yes - I'm married to one.
Prolonged scrutiny has led me to conclude, however, that this is highly
unusual.
It's that mixture of strength and weakness that each side finds so
curious, and fascinating. Men are undoubtedly stronger, yet no point of a
woman's body makes her so physically vulnerable as testicles. We have a
higher tolerance for pain, and can hide sexual arousal or fear. At one point
I had Benedick confronting his bullying father, and feeling his own penis
shrink and crawl. A (woman) critic in The Spectator found this
implausible. Yet men's genitals do display a continual barometer of how they
are feeling. All that shifting and hitching and worrying and comforting -
well, no wonder they fantasize about having something as reliable as a gun
or a sports-car.
All my life I've got into trouble for insisting that women can be just as
brave, active and intelligent as men. Yet the men and boys I asked about
what it was like to be them were not like my received ideas of manhood. I
found I learnt most about this from having a small son. For a girl, it's
easy to see boys as thuggish and excessively physical; for a woman, easy to
see men as heartless or obtuse. But real boys, and men don't feel brave, but
try desperately to project courage. They need sport not just to work off
their energy but because they can't make contact with each other any other
way. What struck me most was how appallingly lonely they are. It is
heartbreaking to see how quickly small boys learn to grow shells of
indifference and bonhomie under which the poor tender self can shrink and
hide. Even the most articulate and sociable don't really talk to their
friends, at least not in the way that women understand talking. They don't
know things about each other, because they never ask. Compared to the
intricate complexity of women's lives, boys and men seem so Spartan. Yet
there is a joyous side, that loves jokes (especially rude ones), that goes
directly to the point, that is free of a kind of convoluted malice girls and
women suffer from. These are large generalizations, and of course I know
that they break down when confronted with individuals, real or imagined.
However, after living inside a male character for two years I do think I see
things - situations, quarrels, subjects - with a kind of double vision. No
doubt I, like every other woman novelist writing as a man, have got things
wrong, all the same.
I put what I discovered about men into In a Dark Wood, and some
people (particularly men) have found its narrator violently objectionable as
a result. I love poor Benedick, and I also love the opposite sex, or at
least the members of it whom I know. I love their vanity, their sense of
humour, their inability to find things, and their very real courage, which
isn't the comic books sort but has to do with endurance and overcoming fear.
I love the way men are sane about the things that women tend to be neurotic
about, and vice versa. However, since writing as a man, I also pity them.
The Greek gods who changed Tiresias into a woman asked him afterwards
whether men or women enjoyed more pleasure. Guess what he replied.
- Amanda Craig, 2002
Reproduced at BookBrowse with the permission of Random House.
Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.
Dame Antonia Susan Byatt (b. 1936) was born and grew up in Yorkshire, England. She attended Newnham College, Cambridge; Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania; and Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied as a postgraduate.... (more)
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