In Our Time - Masculinity in Literature

Episode Date: January 20, 2000

Melvyn Bragg investigates masculinity in literature. Ernest Hemingway wrote in The Old Man and the Sea, “A man can be destroyed but not defeated”. In a time when traditional male roles have been systematically challenged it is a sentiment that seems to come from a strangely distant past, and the men that inhabit fiction today can seem a world away from Hemingway’s brave heroes - although we must remember James Bond and Hannibal Lecter. But has there been a change in the last century in literary fiction or does that one strand not stand for more than a small part of the equation? One of the successful liberating movements of the twentieth century was the increasing enfranchisement of women. Accompanying, perhaps consequent on this, in some fiction at any rate, were signs of the de-testosteroning of man. Are the ideals of masculinity that underlie the portrayal of men by today’s authors so very different from the images of men from earlier in the twentieth century? And is there a British literary ideal of man that is at odds with its American counterpart?With Martin Amis, author of Money, Success and The Information; Cora Kaplan, feminist cultural critic and Professor of English, Southampton University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, Ernest Hemingway wrote in The Old Man and the Sea, A man can be destroyed but not defeated. In a time when traditional male roles have been systematically challenged,

it's a sentiment that seems to come from a strangely distant past, and the macho men that inhabit certain strands of fiction today can seem a world away from Hemingway's heroes, although we mustn't forget James Bond and the Godfather. But there has been a change in the last century in literary fiction. Are the ideals of masculinity that underlie the portrayal of men by today's authors so very different from the images of men from earlier in the 20th century? And is there a British literary ideal of man that is at odds with its American counterpart?

With me to discuss masculinity in literature is the novelist Martin Amis, author of money, success and the information. He's currently working on a memoir of his father, and the feminist cultural critic Cora Kaplan, who's professor of English at Southampton University. Myter name is, start with you. Can you give us a paragraph or two an overview of the last 75 years,

the way you see it in literary fiction? Well, I suppose I can, although one generalises here with trepidation because literature is about, special cases rather than the sociological norm. But I would say that the idea of masculinity in the novel in this century is a tale of domesticization. The male is getting house-trained in this century. The strong individualisms that you see around the turn of the century are heading towards something a bit more homogenized, I would say. And

in less serious fiction, you see the kind of cute, accommodating male that is almost a sitcom character, the new man who has a kind of feminist policeman or policewoman looking over his shoulder. And while, of course, in the literary novel, there's nothing quite as abject as that. I think that all writers my age have certainly made,

have had to square themselves with feminism and have benefited from it. Cora Kaplan, would you agree with that? Well, I certainly think second-wave feminism has been a sort of watershed for men and women writers around gender, and I think it's had a lot of effects. But if we go right back, one could say that there, It was, I hate to use the phrase crisis around masculinity,

but maybe just a crisis around what gender means. Each time after World Wars, wars seem to throw those things up for men, so that the interwar fiction, both American and British, I think, had some of that field to it. And certainly the fiction, American fiction, after the Second World War, I think starts out as a kind of critique, a pre-feminist, pre-modern feminist critique of masculinity

and then become something else after a while. And again, I think there is another break around feminism where writers are rethinking. I don't know whether male writers feel they have a kind of feminist looking over their shoulder, and that's not very good for writing, I'm sure.

Can we go back to... You mentioned more. Can we go back to just after the first? First of all, we could start last century earlier. We could start with Joyce and Bruce, which was acres on a different path altogether, I suspect. But let's start for the purposes of this discussion. After first of all, let's start with Hemingway,

because he seems so clear to characterize, useful to take on and even depart from. What do you see, Martin Amos, what do you see characterize his writing about men then, which perhaps could not be written out of the same stable now? Well, I mean, one of the reasons why I don't read much Hemingway is this, to me, no longer tenable notion of what a man is and what, you know, grace under pressure, all that rubbish. You know, the idea of the man as a kind of, as a, you know, a mountaineer, a performer, a bullfighter, as it were. I now find that a very uneasy mixture of, you know, vaunting and sentimentality.

The Old Man of the Sea, those schmaltzy rhythms of what masculinity is, you know, with the upturned chin and the narrowed eyes, just I find laughable. But behind that, the Grosse underpresje, does lie something very powerful, I think, which is that in war, and he was formed quite a lot by the First World War, in war the qualities that he describes,

which you think in the schmaltzy way, and I'd go along with you on Yonelman and see, certainly, in war, those virtues, those characteristics are seen as virtues, and the happy warrior that words were spoke about whom every man on earth would like to be, is someone to be admired and something to be admired in a war. And if we're talking about a century where war figured largely,

then he is talking about the way men behaved had to behave and drawing virtue from that, isn't he? Yes, but I mean only a few entirely unreflecting characters did behave in the way that Hemingway exalts. I mean, you talk of Wordsworth, let's talk of Wilfred Owen, and we know that actually the appropriate men male response to war is not to stick your chest out and get on with it, but to just sustain the damage as best you can. And Graves, Robert Graves, who was unquestionably, you know, had a

heroic war record said that it took him 10 years to get back to himself after that. It's such a departure from actually from what being a man is. But it's still part of what a man is, or am I just being devil's advocate? Corr, Kaplan. I think, I suppose I'm, I feel more friendly to Hemingway than Martin does in a way. I mean, reading those novels as a young woman, I would have all the criticisms that you make. There's a kind of fantasy of masculinity and those fictions which nobody really, in a sense,

very few people could live up to. But on the other hand, I love the style of the novels, the way in which you, the reader, had to kind of, you know, you had to provide the male unconscious So if you were the female reader, you were somehow writing in what those figures couldn't say.

And that gave you a very active role as a reader around masculinity, a kind of participant role. And then if you think of novels are not so heroic, like The Sun Also Rises, you know, in a way, I think that's a novel that really needs,

you know, doesn't quite fit into that idea of the heroic man, but it's more about the kind of modern links to someone who's wounded, look on wounded masculinity. Nevertheless, do you think that the Hemingway take, to be more simplistic about this, on men, is something that a thread that went through the century, or was it broken?

I think it's broken now. I think our ideas of heroism, male heroism, and even female heroism, are really quite different. I think that we've battered that individual hero in a lot of different ways. ways. I think, and, you know, the war hero has become a figure of genre fiction. And there are no Second World War novels of note known to me where, you know, it's anything but the most tortured compromise with your fear and your courage.

And there are none of these great under pressure artists around in Second World War novels. Would we take Fitzgerald, a contemporary Van der Semiway, as a useful opposite? to sort of, as it were, to plant the platform for this discussion. Fitzgerald, the softer, the Dick Diver, the tendres the night, the more open to what we would call, we would call feminine influences, feminine characteristics, more open to failure, in fact, failure. Would you take that as an equally useful starting point, Martin Aymann?

Well, those two have been paired off at an orsia, but I think it does work on this question, I think, you know, Fitzgerald is romantic and vulnerable in a much more modern way. The romantic part, perhaps, still feels nostalgic now. But definitely a far more developed feminine side. Coral, would you agree with her? Yes, and also because he's a comic novelist to some extent, as well as a tragic one. You know, there's a

that attention to the world of manners and the great Gatsby and Tender is the Night means that he's standing back and looking at that masculinity, not living it so much as actually thinking about it. And I think that's what makes him

more like the present. It's easier to, Fitzgerald doesn't feel quite so dated. I mean, I agree with you about the nostalgia. But again, that curve toward failure, toward a horizon that isn't one of opening possibility, that feels to me a lot like some of the writing now. It's almost like we could bring back Fitzgerald

as a kind of millennial contemporary. At the start, I said we'll start after World War one quite arbitrarily because there's an arbitrariness about these occasions and not go to Proust and Joyce, which I think would have sent us on a different path. But I don't think we can exclude Lawrence from this, the other part of the great triad at the beginning of the century, because he attacked this quite bluntly, crudely,

sometimes very embarrassingly, sometimes fascistically, but sometimes gloriously. He went at this man-woman. Now, let's take him as but an example of Britain an individual, Martin. How do you think man survived or did not Lawrence's treatment of him? Well, we perhaps ought to say here that make it very clear that how a writer lives does not affect their work. And in the case of Lawrence, this needs stressing since he is perhaps the worst-behaved writer of all time, and there's not only a beater of women, but a beater of animals.

But in Lawrence, you can say that the man-woman relationship, I think increasingly, this is another tendency during the century is that the man defines himself through women and not in isolation, not in heroic isolation as Hemingway does. But with Lawrence, it's a battle. This is his central tenet. The relationship between men and women is a struggle to the death almost. And sometimes the woman wins, as in that chapter called Anna Victrix,

Anna, who wins in the rainbow. But it's a mean, vicious struggle that has to do with everything in you and your childhood and your nightmares and your death and your fear. And it's very ugly often to a modern ear. He's saying, to a certain extent, he's saying a lot of things he seems to be it.

He's saying very intense cohabitation, which includes active sexuality or includes the blocking of active sexuality does lead to a fight for whose soul, and uses that word, is victorious, to pick up victories. And this, do you find this in any way resonant, Martin? No, I mean, life is difficult enough without coming home to a kind of battle

of Starlingrad with your wife every night. And I think peaceful coexistence is actually what most of us have in mind these days. I mean, it's... You're talking these days, though, I mean, with the wisdom of your great age and accumulated years and experience. But, I mean, he is talking about the active part of the man... Oh, God, I feel, I'm talking. I saw some terrible anthropology. A man-woman encounter I was about to say, I don't believe it.

He is talking... But he is talking about the active, you know, the first time the... the flame is lit. Now, is there anything in what he says that has any resonance in that particular segment of life? Well, let's not forget that Lawrence never got to be very ill. I mean, by our age, he'd been dead for years, right? So he was in an earlier kind of convulsion. And he was, you know, he was a very disturbed and violent man. I don't, Even as a teenager, I found women in love grandiose and frivolous in all kinds of ways, that it's vooloo, that these life and death tensions and battles between men and women

are kind of willed and don't naturally occur, although it's a great arena for good writing. Well, when you put it together with the rainbow, I think it makes it very great. No, we can talk about that some other time. What do you find in Lawrence Corr, Capman? Well, again, I got my sexual education in part through reading Lawrence and Lady Chattley when it came out. And I suppose one of the things that fascinated me is, say, in something like Lady Chattley, is the contrast between class masculinities.

As an American, I would suddenly woke up to the idea that Lawrence had this idea. There were different kinds of men. They weren't just, you know, and he was very precise. so this romanticized gamekeeper, you know, sort of self-made man, was both a soft and a hard masculinity. And yet, yes, there was a war with women, but there was also a class war around masculinity in Lawrence. And that fascinated me.

I also liked the male pairings, Jared and Birkin. You know, it was a way of actually thinking, again, about differences within the masculine. And for a woman who maybe isn't living those in a way, I thought it was very interesting as a young person. Because the range of masculinitys in Lawrence is quite considerable, isn't it? And we're not just talking about one sort of wolfing gamekeeper

who speaks the dialect on intimate occasions. There's a greater range. So we can talk more about Lawrence's idea of many men, and the varieties of manhood, which do include homoerotic behaviour as well as everything else. Yeah, but the only good one, The only so halfway decent one is the Rupert Berkin is the self-portrait. And all the others are seen as defamation, so they're not.

And he's, you know, he's unsurpassingly cruel to Clifford in the paralysed from the waist down in Lady Chattley when... Well, you could say pitiless. I mean, you could say cruel, you could also say pitil. Well, Melis actually does taunt him for the fact that he's impotent in a way that that's saying the unsayable one feels. But Lawrence is very much applauding that when Miller says the unsaleable Clifford. And that is quite unreconstructed, isn't it?

He's unreconstructed. Lawrence is... It's a sort of vicious class portrait in which you use sexuality as your mode to beat someone. I'm not here to defend Lawrence, but surely people who write about characters and Martinian are allowed to put vicious thoughts into their mouths maybe to make that character more like the character. You talk of written about Norman Mela and saying that

naked and their dead is not a celebration of men because some of the men are so vicious and cruel and ugly inside that book. The fact that Mellers behaves like that towards Clifford in Lady Chattel's lover and calls his impotence is to do with Mellers'

fury as the character Mellas which adds to that character doesn't it? Well I mean but there's... You might not like it but you don't like all sorts of things. There's too much. of this in Lawrence for us to just think that it's mellas. And you know, you get the real glow of sexual disgust when it's not mellors, I think it's the,

a feat playwright who says that when Connie attacks him with what he calls her beak, you know. I mean, that's, you get a real whiff of violent feelings about women. And he was, as I say, it doesn't judge him, that he was violent. He was violent. I discover myself rather than usually to be... No, usually that's silly,

but there are violent feelings that some men have towards women, and I think to be criticised for writing about them is one... To be criticised for writing about them at all is odd, because I think it's just showing what... Maybe showing what a terrible person, that sort of man was, and moving the argument on.

Do you think the argument moved on from Lawrence? I mean, Maler and various others of the next generation, were in their early years, massive Laurentians, who were then tackled head-on by, I don't know, it was the first or second way, of Corey, you'll tell me, by the feminists because of the Laurentianism, weren't there? Lawrence became a figure of opposition, to put it mildly, to feminists. In fact, he might have been, you tell me, I don't know enough about this,

he might have been one of the figures who spurred it on, who helped define it. Certainly, I think he was, but again, I'm more ambivalent about that now, than I might have been then. And as a young reader, pre-feminist, I really was, I liked Lawrence. For all the things I could see wrong with it, I found it fascinating. And the awful character as well, I think he had that leeway. But I agree so much with Martin about the misogyny and the kind of hatred.

It's almost misanthropic. It's a hatred in between. and I think you do get that in contemporary writers to some extent. I think you get it in Irvine Welsh, for example. But the point of view, the place where the writer is standing, the place where the reader is standing, has shifted. And I think that's a huge difference. If you create really loathsome male figures,

in a sense where you are positioned is somewhat different. You think that's changed? I think it's changed somewhat. I think that some... More participatory? Yes, and I think, Also more that, like a novel like filth, for example, you are supposed to loathe the policeman,

brutal, murderous hero of that novel, as well as sympathize a little bit with him, but very little. You're at a wild distance, whereas it's not so clear, I think, in an earlier period. It's not so clear for Mailer. But I think, for example, the naked and the dead is a novel which really is a critique of the,

of violent masculinity. It's both a celebration, because there's many men in it and so forth in a way, but it also has powerful critique. I mean, I'd like to sort of nag away once more, Martin, that this idea that because a writer creates a character who is deeply unpleasant, who is, let's be just making it sort of not easier, cleaner,

who is violent towards women. Therefore, which is extremely, obviously we don't, that's not a behaviour that anybody would tolerate. Nevertheless, we just have to read the papers to know that that goes on and that certain writers are distilling that into their imagination and turning into fiction,

that they should be, as it were, blamed as writers for making characters like that. Well, I know, but I mean, Lawrence forces you to look at this, I think, and we all know the difference between someone who can make intelligent criticisms about the differences between men and women and someone who suddenly bears his teeth and starts telling you a story about a prostitute

and a purulent mackerel. There's a different kind of glow coming off those people. And Lawrence definitely has that throughout his work. It's not corraled into unsypathetic characters. It's rampant. And what do you make of this sentence from Lady Chattley where the narrator, not any character, says of Sir Clifford,

he yearned after the bitch goddess success as ardently as any little jumped-up Jew. You know, that's not isolating something for examination. That's an inherited prejudice, an unexamined, you know, cliché of the heart and the mind. There's a great deal in Orange that's unacceptable, but you could pick out passages from T.S. Eliot. You could pick out passages from... No, nothing like that. Like a Bradford millionaire?

Well, I mean, we have Celine, who wrote actually anti-Semitic pamphlets, and this is just to say that... I'm not excusing it. I'm just saying that... I think you're right to look for an excuse because I think it still doesn't disqualify him as a writer, but it is a part... It's a great lump in his soup that he hasn't dealt with or got under control.

I'd like to come to nearer to the present or to the present about the way that you think writers now are tackling men in literary fiction. Whether you think that... Just to put a question to you, we've only got five minutes ago, whether you think that the force and the persuasiveness of feminism has chastened them or has informed them. Do you think that they're worried about being politically incorrect or do you think that it is enriched and informed the way that they write their fiction

and sort of voluntarily and naturally they take it into themselves now, Cora Kaplan. Well, probably a little bit of both. I think that it's, there's a whole tradition of thinking that women have the kind of moral high ground to some extent. And I'm sure feminism has increased that for male writers. But also, I think that Martin was right and say it's turned them in very interesting directions. It's made them think about what they might write.

And although I think the men are pushed harder and maybe, again, don't have such bright futures. I mean, I'm thinking of your story, State of England, with a man, Mao, with, you know, his sort of failed career, his wound in the face, his concern for his son's future. The end of that story, I think, is very moving and symptomatic. He's trying to run a race at a children's day, and all the men with him.

And they're still heading for that horizon, that success, but they sort of, they're disabled. they kind of can't make it. And yet at the same time, Hornby, for example, in the novel about a boy, something about a boy, again, it's about how the new generation of children, of male children are going to make it. Are they going to make it without being so dependent on fathers?

Are they going to make it through a world of friends? That's how that novel ends on a quite upbeat note, that the 12-year-old child, male child has a future, but it won't be the same future, the same relationship, to paternal masculinity. It'll be more shared, more collegial, more in relation to women. And I think there's an optimism and also there's a creative optimism. Is that very different, I mean, sociologically, the fact is that what we know

is that people, two major influences are genes and peer groups. And a major parental figure in most child's lives has been the mother. This, as far as we know, for many, many years in cultures which have kept their children and not sent them away, that's been the prevailing fact. Is there much new, though? Was it, in fact, a kind of reversion to peer groups as above, you know, father or mother figure? The fathers and mothers aren't very reliable. No, they're not good.

I mean, do you find, Martin, do you find that you've changed, and people that, you know, around you, your friends and those you read, have changed in their attitude to men over the last 25 years, let's say? Yeah, definitely. and I changed when I read Gloria Steinem, and she had this marvelous conceit of just inserting the male pronoun instead of the female in various situations, and I just found myself assenting to the truth of that, and immediately feeling the better for it as well.

And, you know, that's a revolution in consciousness when that happens, and a different footing. and the novels I'd written before seemed to me full of full of unexamined stuff that I'd just taken on trust and that's very much not what writing should be you shouldn't inherit

the clichés without examining them and I found I had done that and changed thereafter Do you see from your reading that feminism has changed contemporary as other can you look and see there's a direct influence impact on contemporary fiction?

Absolutely. I think it's been profound. And that doesn't mean old contemporary fiction by men or women is the better for it, but it's opened up that new ground. And as Martin said, I think it has shifted consciousness so that even when you're, you know, however you're writing about gender and masculinity, you're thinking it differently.

And writers face this battle when they have to use he or she, you know, everyone knows, A writer always knows when he is or when she is. And we usually recast the sentence now so that we can write they. Will Self, I had an argument with him about this the other day. He says that he will use she in these neutral propositions because it's like reparations, you know, for past neglect. Adam Phillips does in his books.

It's most disconcerty. Paul Fussell has a good way of getting around this before he says, someone says, I was mugged in Central Park last night. He said, did she take anything? That's right. We have to end there. Thank you very much, Martin Amis, Gora Kaplan. And thank you for listening.

We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com. com.com.com.