Ladywriters, Sentimentalists, Something Something Catholicism
Ladywriters, Sentimentalists, Something Something Catholicism
One of the funniest books I have ever read... far and away our best woman novelist.
(Penelope Mortimer, quoted on the back of the copy of The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark that I borrowed from the university library)
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Did I get you? Did you also see the phrase "woman novelist", and suck in your teeth?
Well, I read Peckham Rye in January, and I actually think Penelope Mortimer is right. Since I started this write-up, it has changed dramatically several times. Come with me on a journey through one of my obsessions for the last, oh, nine weeks or so.
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So the thing about masculine writing, right - the thing about masculine writing is that now you are thinking of Ernest Hemingway. Short sentences. World War One. Repressed feelings and a strong smell of waxed canvas. There are plenty of other writers I would describe as distinctly masculine in their writing.
Sometimes that's about subject matter, but I also think there's something in there that's separate from subject, or even perhaps masked by subject. This is the crux of what I've been trying to work out, knowing full well that analytical close reading has never been a particular strength of mine. It reminds me of abstract painting: if you take the subject matter out, what's left? Can you still pick out the feelings, sometimes, often, usually? Can you pick out the gender? And if so, what exactly is it that you're picking out?
Even though I've spent the last nine weeks trying haphazardly to work out the facets and edges of it, I do believe that writing-that-can-be-described-as-masculine is something that exists. It's something that it's very easy to get reductive about, and I am trying very hard not to do that, because being reductive is boring. But masculine writing is a thing.
If there's characteristically masculine writing, we can say that there is feminine writing too, as well (more often) as plenty that doesn't fall particularly neatly into either category. It's easy to get reductive about feminine writing, too, and I don't want to do that either.
I think Muriel Spark is an especially feminine writer. She's a bloody great woman novelist.
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The more I look at it, though, the harder it is to pin down what that means. When I went to my shelf to find books I thought were particularly gendered one way or another, I did wonder if this was just something about subject matter that I'm overanalysing. It's not, but at the same time, turns out we've got a lot of books about World War Two in our house.
Also recently, I've read The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard.
Strangman met each one of his guests as they arrived at the head of the gangway. In high spirits, he managed a sustained mood of charm and good cheer, complimenting Beatrice elaborately on her appearance. She wore a full-length blue brocade ball-dress, the turquoise mascara around her eyes making her look like some exotic bird of paradise. Even Bodkin had contrived to trim his beard and salvage a respectable linen jacket, an old piece of crepe around his neck a ragged concession to a black tie. (p.111)
You do not win a prize; this was indeed written by a man in 1962. But it's not about the fashion, is it? It's to do with the approach. That's what I've been calling it, anyway. That's how I've been trying to narrow in on it.
I do feel the need to point out here both that I'm talking about gender in a social sense, and that rigid essentialism is for cowards. At the same time, my kingdom for a modicum of granularity now and again. Questions:
Is this an editing thing? Is it about what elements of story a writer chooses to include, or chooses to cut, and how they navigate through those things?
Is it about narrative or character viewpoint? Like, who gets to have interiority or feelings that are explored? And, indeed, who gets to have turquoise eyeliner?
Or is it something even more sentence-level than that - the deployment of a word or a phrase, the balance of weight given to one thing or another? (This is where lie the dangers of treating gender as monolithic or archetypal, both of which make me want to examine the idea more and also write about it publicly less.)
Meanwhile, at the other end of the "And is the gender in the room with us right now?" spectrum, here's Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own and also in the back of my mind at all times:
Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. In fact one goes back to Shakespeare's mind as the type of the androgynous, of the man-womanly mind, though it would be impossible to say what Shakespeare thought of women.
This is fascinating to me. Received wisdom says that when we write characters, we write bits of ourselves into them. I know I certainly do this, and I also know that one of the reasons Shakespeare is a genius is that he can not do it. Not to get all "Shakespeare is androgynous because Lady Macbeth" at you, but one of the things that makes his work such an astonishing magic trick is his ability to slip into the minds of constructed characters that are fundamentally unlike him in some way.
Call this a great sweeping statement, but I think this kind of androgyny is generally easier for women writers than men ones to simulate, because women readers read men writers, in far greater proportions than men readers read women writers. But that's - in Woolf's terms - about having sympathy with people fundamentally unlike you. It's not Shakespearean androgyny. That's something else, something far stronger. Not many people have ever been able to do that, and certainly not so consistently over such a huge body of work.
But look - you don't have to be a Shakespeare-level once-in-a-dozen-generations genius to make really good art. And people can make art that doesn't have a strong sense of gender to it one way or another - the sort that if you read it without knowing who wrote it, you couldn't guess the gender of the author. When it comes to writing people of different genders, Shakespeare is a chameleon. Good art doesn't have to be like that. It can just be... agnostic, I guess. That's fine too.
However, Muriel Spark is not a chameleon, and her writing isn't gender-agnostic, and this is what fascinates me. We're used to seeing this on the masculine end of storytelling: put it this way, no woman could have written The Great Gatsby, for example. It is my firm belief that no woman would have written Daisy Buchanan Like That. But Spark is a distinctively feminine writer in a way that is unusual to me, and therefore remarkable on.
Bonus VW writing/gender chat:
Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoi. In our time Proust was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of a woman.
...I'm not going to try and pick holes in this, because I am not a Proust Person. But what I do see here is a level of identification with - or perhaps just recognition of - something that is less about content and more about a writer's way of navigating through it. Is that something that can be gendered? Or is Woolf really just trying to say that she resonates more with Shakespeare than with Milton? Is that something that can be gendered? And does it have to be?
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Time for a breather!
This has been in my Firefox tabs since about mid-November because it makes me laugh and I wanted to share it with you. That is to say, sorry about the lit chat, this is what a round-robin email ought to be about.
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One of my favourite literary genres is, as I'm sure you know, extremely niche Wikipedia articles written slightly too formally by someone who clearly knows a lot about the subject matter, even though acquiring such comprehensive information ought to be... well, it's surprising. Let's call it surprising.
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Okay, you've had your fun. Gunge break over, back to the serious stuff.
If you'd asked me two months ago why I would call Muriel Spark a feminine writer, I would probably have told you some combination of the following.
Writes about women. Often weird ones who don't explain themselves or conform to expectations, who are still taken seriously by the narrative. Lots of differentiation between them. Some of them are even middle-aged and/or wives!
Has an eye for interactions between women, and particularly power dynamics in female-heavy spaces, in a way that is instantly recognisable to me and observed in detail. (This is where we start creeping into "if a woman didn't write this, I'm fascinated to know who did" territory.)
Tendency towards a certain kind of acidity that is often extremely familiar to women I know and often almost invisible to men I know. As I've always put it, you want to sit next to Muriel Spark, because if you sit out of earshot you don't know what she'll be saying about you. (You 100% can write about women without being acidic about it, for the record. Also, when I say "acidic", you know I also kind of mean "a gossipy bitch", 'cause it's gendered, right?)
Are those things central, or exclusive, to femininity? There's definitely a lot of socialisation tied up in there; beyond that I couldn't say. They certainly feel pretty relevant to my personal understanding of femininity - good thing for all of us that my experience is extremely not universal, then, because wowee! None of us would have fun!
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One thing I might have said is that, like with The Great Gatsby, even if a man could have written The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or The Girls of Slender Means, he would not have done so Like That. But Jean Brodie and Slender Means are about aspects of the female experience: establishing your independence and identity specifically among women, in a school or boarding house. This is not Abstract Art feminine writing.
On the other hand, The Ballad of Peckham Rye is about a Scottish man who shows up in South London, sows chaos, does shenanigans, and leaves. The supporting cast features both men and women who haven't a clue what his deal is, and both men and women who clock him immediately and think he's a prick. Could a man have written Peckham Rye? Probably. But would he have done so Like That? I'm with Penelope Mortimer on this one: Muriel Spark is a very good, woman writer.
Mr Weedin rose to hit him, but since the walls of his office were made mostly of glass, he was prevented in the act by an overwhelming sense of being looked at from all sides. (p.75)
I believe that Mr Weedin felt those feelings, but that framing/phrasing is the work of a woman. What would you call that, evoking emotional discomfort through specifically appealing to a feminine-associated manner of being perceived? It's not that I think men writers would be less inclined to do it, just that I think the discomfort would look different.
Or perhaps there's something in the particular deployment of narrative straightforwardness:
Humphrey hit him. Trevor hit back. There was a fight, Two courting couples returning from the dusky scope of the Rye's broad lyrical acres stepped to the opposite pavement, leant on the railings by the swimming baths, and watched. Eventually the fighters, each having suffered equal damage to different features of the face, were parted by onlookers to save the intervention of the police. (p.9)
This is what I mean about that acidity: the sheer straightforwardness doesn't just mean that you don't identify with either or both of the fighters, it actively prevents you from liking them or taking them seriously. Don't pay any attention to Humphrey and Trevor, they're being embarrassing, and everyone else is looking at them. A woman wrote this fight.
"The brussels are not quite ready," she said, and she sat in her chair and took up her knitting. He perched on the arm. She pushed him with her elbow inn the same movement as she was using for her knitting. He tickled the back of her neck, which she put up with for a while. But suddenly he pinched the skin of her neck. She screamed.
"Sh-sh," he said.
"You hurt me," she said.
"No, I was only doing this." And he pinched her neck again.
She screamed and jumped from the chair.
"The brussels are ready," she said. (p.53)
It's in the approach. Do you see?
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Incidentally, have you seen the new ContraPoints video essay (ostensibly) on Twilight? Natalie Wynn is extremely good at this, and I have a good deal of time for the model of gender - especially in a literary context - that she comes to. The model is not the world and the map is not the terrain, of course obviously of course obviously, but. It's the sort of good, chewy analysis after which I can feel my own analysis shifting and settling, different from how it was before. When I say "approach" and she says "style", I feel like we might be driving at things that overlap.
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Real talk: does it even matter? Should Penelope Mortimer have called Muriel Spark a "very good novelist" rather than "far and away our best woman novelist"? Because she's both. It's about what you choose to say, what you don't choose to say, what you choose not to say. I do see gender in writing, and I want to, because it's a layer of complexity that is worth having. Yes it matters, because I've spent two-plus months chewing over a 150-page book, trying to understand it better, cornering people to explain it to them (love u guys), and generally making my own fun.
I can't speak for you, but for me, this is the point. This is what I read books for.
And people contain multitudes. It's impossible - unless, perhaps, you're Literal William Shakespeare - to write 150 pages without so many elements of your own experience and interests and values coming into play. Has anyone sat down and compared Muriel Spark's Catholicism with Graham Greene's, for example? I bet they have. Speaking of someone else with his own approach to acidity now and again.
"Stop," Nelly said, with her hand on her old blouse. "I get that excited by Holy Scripture I'm afraid to get my old lung trouble back." (Peckham Rye, p.79)
Calling her "our best woman novelist" is good, specific advertising, it's a compliment or I'm reading it as one, and on that basis I'm going to allow it.
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Here's where I've got to, then. There are Men Writers who you can tell are men, just from their work; there are others where you can't tell. Sometimes you can tell from the subject matter, and sometimes from something else - the approach. The style.
There are Women Writers who you can't tell are women just from their work, and there are some where you can tell because of their subject matter. And there are others where it's not the subject matter of the work that gives you the clue, it's the approach and only the approach. And those ones, they're rare.
My instinct tells me this is partly because you don't sell as many copies if you write like a woman, even if you're writing about World War Two, and therefore if I'm going to The Canon for inspiration, I'm not going to find nearly as many.
My other instinct, related to this, is that one example I keep returning to of a writer of this type is Emily Brontë. The fact that I don't really gel with Wuthering Heights, nor with Proust (hello again Virginia) suggests to me that a significant part of the blind spot is mine.
So I guess I'm taking suggestions, if you have them.
Do you a swap for Muriel. By several metrics, she's really very good.
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Book news! The book news is I have no book news, although for a welcome change I have recently written some book! Tune in next time for more book news!
Barnett over and out.