The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (8 page)

I read the Diaries before I had any personal interest, as you might say, in gender. I had noticed that there were males and females and had learned from a useful Germanic book how babies occurred, but the whole thing was entirely remote and theoretical, about as immediately interesting to me as the Keynesian theory of economics. “Latency,” one of Freud’s fine imaginative inventions, was more successful than most; children used to have years of freedom before they had to start working their hormones into the kind of lascivious lather that is now expected of ten-year-olds. Anyhow, in the 1940s gender was not a subject of discussion. Men were men (running things or in uniform, mostly), women were women (housekeeping or in factories, mostly), and that was that. Except for a few subversives like Virginia Woolf nobody publicly questioned the institutions and assumptions of male primacy. It was the century’s low point architecturally in the Construction of Gender, reduced in those years to something about as spacious and comfortable as a broom closet.

But the Diaries date from the turn of the nineteenth century, a time of revolutionary inquiry into gender roles, the first age of feminism, the period of the woman suffrage movement and of the “New Woman”—who was precisely the robust and joyously competent Eve that Mark Twain gives us.

I see now in the Diaries, along with a tenderness and a profound delicacy of feeling about women, a certain advocacy. Mark Twain is always on the side of the underdog; and though he believed it was and must be a man’s world, he knew that women were the underdogs in it. This fine sense of justice is what gives both the Diaries their moral complexity.

There was an element of discomfort in them for me as a child, and
I think it lies just here, in that complexity and a certain degree of self-contradiction.

It is not Adam’s superiority of brains or brawn that gives him his absolute advantage over Eve, but his blockish stupidity. He does not notice, does not listen, is uninterested, indifferent, dumb. He will not relate to her; she must relate herself—in words and actions—to him, and relate him to the rest of Eden. He is entirely satisfied with himself as he is; she must adapt her ways to him. He is immovably fixed at the center of his own attention. To live with him she must agree to be peripheral to him, contingent, secondary.

The degree of social and psychological truth in this picture of life in Eden is pretty considerable. Milton thought it was a fine arrangement; it appears Mark Twain didn’t, since he shows us at the end of both Diaries that although Eve has not changed much, she has changed Adam profoundly. She always was awake. He slowly, finally wakes up, and does her, and therefore himself, justice. But isn’t it too late, for her?

All this I think I followed pretty well, and was fascinated and somewhat troubled by, though I could not have discussed it, when I read the Diaries as a child. Children have a seemingly innate passion for justice; they don’t have to be taught it. They have to have it beaten out of them, in fact, to end up as properly prejudiced adults.

Mark Twain and I both grew up in a society that cherished a visionary ideal of gender by pairs: the breadwinning, self-reliant husband and the home-dwelling, dependent wife. He the oak, she the ivy; power his, grace hers. He works and earns; she “doesn’t work,” but keeps his house, bears and brings up his children, and furnishes him the aesthetic and often the spiritual comforts of life. Now at this latter end of the century, the religio-political conservative’s vision of what men and women do and should do is still close to that picture, though even more remote from most people’s experience than it was fifty or a hundred years ago. Do Twain’s Adam and Eve essentially fit this powerful stereotype, or do they vary it significantly?

I think the variations are significant, even if the text fudges them
in the end. Mark Twain is not supporting a gender ideal, but investigating what he sees as real differences between women and men, some of them fitting into that ideal, some in conflict with it.

Eve is the intellectual in Eden, Adam the redneck. She is wildly curious and wants to learn everything, to name everything. Adam has no curiosity about anything, certain that he knows all he needs to know. She wants to talk, he wants to grunt. She is sociable, he is solitary. She prides herself on being scientific, though she settles for her own pet theory without testing it; her method is purely intuitive and rational, without a shadow of empiricism. He thinks she ought to test her ideas, but is too lazy to do it himself. He goes over Niagara Falls in a barrel, he doesn’t say why; apparently because a man does such things. Far more imaginative and influenced by the imagination than he, she does dangerous things only when she doesn’t know they’re dangerous. She rides tigers and talks to the serpent. She is rebellious, adventurous, and independent; he does not question authority. She is the innocent troublemaker. Her loving anarchism ruins his mindless, self-sufficient, authoritarian Eden—and saves him from it.

Does it save her?

This spirited, intelligent, anarchic Eve reminds me of H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica, an exemplary New Woman of 1909. Yet Ann Veronica’s courage and curiosity finally lead her not to independence but to wifehood, seen as the proper and sufficient fulfillment of feminine being. We are ominously close to the Natasha Syndrome, the collapse of a vivid woman character into a brood sow as soon as she marries and has children. Once she has won Adam over, once the children come, does Eve stop asking and thinking and singing and naming and venturing? We don’t know. Tolstoy gives us a horrible glimpse of Natasha married; Wells tries to convince us Ann Veronica is going to be just fine; but Mark Twain tells us nothing about what Eve becomes. She falls silent. Not a good sign. After the Fall we have only Adam’s voice, puzzling mightily over what kind of animal Cain is. Eve tells us only that she would love Adam even if he beat her—a very bad sign.
And, forty years later, she says, “He is strong, I am weak, I am not so necessary to him as he is to me—life without him would not be life; how could I endure it?”

I don’t know whether I am supposed to believe her, or can believe her. It doesn’t sound like the woman I knew. Eve, weak? Rubbish! Adam’s usefulness as a helpmeet is problematical, a man who, when she tells him they’ll have to work for their living, decides “She will be useful. I will superintend”—a man who thinks his son is a kangaroo. Eve did need him in order to have children, and since she loves him she would miss him; but where is the evidence that she couldn’t survive without him? He would presumably have survived without her, in the brutish way he survived before her. But surely it is their
interdependence
that is the real point?

I want, now, to read the Diaries as a subtle, sweet-natured send-up of the Strong Man–Weak Woman arrangement; but I’m not sure it’s possible to do so, or not entirely. It may be both a send-up and a capitulation.

And Adam has the last word. “Wheresoever she was,
there
was Eden.” But the poignancy of those words is utterly unexpected, a cry from the heart. It made me shiver as a child; it does now.

I was raised as irreligious as a jackrabbit, and probably this is one reason Mark Twain made so much sense to me as a child. Descriptions of churchgoing interested me as the exotic rites of a foreign tribe, and nobody described churchgoing better than Mark Twain did. But God, as I encountered him in my reading, seemed only to cause unnecessary complications, making people fall into strange postures and do depressing things; he treated Beth March abominably, and did his best to ruin Jane Eyre’s life before she traded him in for Rochester. I didn’t read any of the books in which God is the main character until a few years later. I was perfectly content with books in which he didn’t figure at all.

Could anybody but Mark Twain have told the story of Adam and Eve without mentioning Jehovah?

As a heathen child I was entirely comfortable with his version. I took it for granted that it was the sensible one.

As an ancient heathen I still find it sensible, but can better appreciate its originality and courage. The nerve of the man, the marvelous, stunning independence of that mind! In pious, prayerful, censorious, self-righteous Christian America of 1896, or 1996 for that matter, to show God as an unnecessary hypothesis, by letting Eve and Adam cast themselves out of Eden without any help at all from him, and really none from the serpent either—to put sin and salvation, love and death in our own hands, as our own, strictly human business, our responsibility—now that’s a free soul, and a brave one.

What luck for a child to meet such a soul when she is young. What luck for a country to have a Mark Twain in its heart.

THINKING ABOUT CORDWAINER SMITH

Written for the program booklet of the annual science-fiction conference ReaderCon, of July 1994, this essay was aimed at a sophisticated group of readers familiar with its subject. For those who haven’t read the fiction of Cordwainer Smith or James Tiptree Jr., I can only hope it may awaken a curiosity that will lead them to have a look at the works of these intensely original writers. Some points will be clearer if one knows that both writers worked for the U.S. government (the usual explanation of why they used pen names when they wrote fiction), and that Smith, as Paul Linebarger, was a professor of Asiatic Studies at Johns Hopkins, an intelligence agent in China during the Second World War, wrote
Psychological Warfare
, long the standard text on the subject, served as a member of the Foreign Policy Association and adviser to John F. Kennedy, and was Sun Yat-sen’s godson.

N
AMES

A pen name is a curious device. Actors, singers, dancers use stage names for various reasons, but it seems that not many painters or sculptors or composers make up their name. If you’re a German composer named Engelbert Humperdinck who wrote the opera
Hansel and Gretel
, you don’t do anything about your name, you just live with it, till a hundred years later some dweeb singer comes along and filches it because he thinks it’s cute. If you’re a French painter named Rosa Bonheur, you don’t call yourself Georges Tristesse; you just
paint horses and sign “Rosa” large and clear. But writers, especially fiction writers, are always making up names. Do they confuse themselves with their characters?

The question isn’t totally frivolous. I think most novelists are aware at times of containing multitudes, of having an uncomfortably acute sympathy for Multiple Personality Disorder, of not entirely subscribing to the commonsense notion of what constitutes a self.

And there is a distinction, normally, between “the writer” and “the person.” The cult of personality erases this difference; with writers like Lord Byron and Hemingway, as with actors or politicians, the person disappears in the glare of the persona. Publicity, book tours, and so on all keep the glare focused. People line up to “meet the writer,” not realising that this is impossible. Nobody can be a writer during a book signing, not even Harlan Ellison. All they can write is “To Jane Doe with best regards from George Author”—not a very interesting story. All their admirers can meet is the person—who has a lot in common with, but is not, the writer. Maybe nicer, maybe duller, maybe older, maybe meaner; but the main difference is, the person lives in this world, but writers live in their imagination, and/or in the public imagination, which creates a public figure that lives only in the public imagination.

So the pen name, hiding the person behind the writer, may be essentially a protective and enabling device, as it was for the Brontë sisters and for Mary Ann Evans. The androgynous Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell hid Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë from a publicity that might offend their small community, and also gave their manuscripts a chance to be read with an unprejudiced eye by editors, who would assume them to be men. George Eliot protected Mary Ann Evans, who was unrepentantly living in sin, from the dragon of social disapproval.

I think one can assume that these personae also allowed the writers a freedom from inner censors, internalised shames and inhibitions, notions of what a woman “should” write. The masculine pen name, oddly enough, frees the woman author from obedience to a masculine
conception of literature and experience. I think James Tiptree Jr. undoubtedly gave Alice Sheldon such freedom.