LITMIR.BIZ

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beyond themselves and fashioned themselves into the detached observer, the disinterested scientist and the dispassionate critic. Men have used their intelligence to promote their separateness from others rather than to recognize their interdependence. They have used knowledge as a form of power over other people, in particular over women. Biology, theology, philosophy, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, medicine, the physical sciences, anthropology, literature – each discipline in its time has legitimized the inferiority of women, who have been classified and categorized as having smaller brains, a lack of rational intellect, oversexualized bodies, a mental predilection for hysteria, a lower order of spirituality, sentimentality, shorter attention spans and mental flightiness. The word ‘epistemology’ refers to the theory of knowledge. It was coined by a Scottish professor, James Frederick Ferrier. On Monday 17 November 1862 Elizabeth Garrett, a young medical student at St Andrews University, tried to enter a lecture theatre in order to attend a talk on chemistry and thus challenged the male dominance of the Scottish education system. It was Professor Ferrier who blocked her path and demanded she turn back, leaving her with little choice but to submit to his authority. Knowledge and language belonged to men but, used as a form of power, they have diminished self-understanding.

      Men have used language in an instrumental way to separate ourselves from our own feelings. We have allowed women to voice our emotions. This is why men abandoned by women despair – they no longer know who they are. I think this is what Raymond Carver is trying to say in his short story Blackbird Pie. He describes a couple whose children have grown up, and who have moved to the country. The man enjoys the solitude, but his wife does not. He admits her discontent to himself, but makes no attempt to improve their situation. One night an envelope is pushed beneath the door of his room. Inside is a letter. It begins: ‘It’s been such a long time now since we’ve talked. I mean really talked.’ She wants to leave him. He refuses to believe that the letter has been written by his wife; he opens the door of his room and looks down the corridor. Everything is as it should be and yet he feels suddenly afraid. Uneasy, he returns to his room and closes the door. He opens it for a second time and he hears a murmuring downstairs and the receiver of the telephone being replaced. He feels panic. He steps down the corridor hoping to hear the reassuring click of knitting needles. Instead he hears the sound of a door opening and closing quietly. Though his impulse is to investigate, he instead returns to his room, his heart racing. He picks up the letter and stares at the pages, snatching lines at random. When he hears the front door close he drops the pages and hurries to the living room. His wife is not in the house. The porch light is on and her suitcase stands on the porch outside.

      Several days later the husband is going through his wife’s belongings. He is packing to move and trying to decide which possessions of hers to take and which to discard. He knows now that she will never come back and that he may never see her again. He is still bewildered. He knows there is something ‘far more’ to this affair than his wife’s simple departure:

      You could say that my history has left me. Or that I’m having to go on without history. Or that history will now have to do without me – unless my wife writes more letters, or tells a friend who keeps a diary, say. Then years later, someone can look back on this time, interpret it according to the record, its scraps and tirades, its silences and innuendoes. That’s when it dawns on me that autobiography is the poor man’s history. And that I am saying goodbye to history. Goodbye my darling.

      The husband in Blackbird Pie is sedentary, appearing unmindful of his wife. His life is governed by fear and selfishness. He feels that he cannot be himself in his relationship with her. He wants her to remain just beyond him, neither to move away from him, nor to come too close: to sit with her knitting, a comforting presence he can control. Like Gabriel in The Dead, the husband in Carver’s story cannot tell his wife what he feels about himself and about her. Instead he tries to manage her. When she leaves he is lost for anything to say and his world begins to collapse. The hint of misanthropy which surrounds both men is echoed in Proust’s lament for Albertine in Remembrance of Things Past: ‘I knew now that I was in love with Albertine, but alas! I didn’t trouble to let her know it … the declaration of my passion to the one I loved no longer seemed to be one of the vital and necessary stages of love. And love itself seemed no longer an external reality, but only a subjective pleasure.’ Men’s love is a pursuit through others of all they feel they have lost and cannot speak of. It is why they speak of it as a bereavement. That is the nature of love – the desire to achieve a sense of completeness through unity with another. Only when men fall in love with women, they fall in love with that part of themselves that is missing. Men want love because we long to be offered a semblance of ourselves. In love a man is held captive not by a woman, but by his need to be loved by her. He longs for her, he needs her to embrace him and fill him with her love, but when she desires something for herself, or when she withdraws from him emotionally, she exposes the absence in himself. He feels numbed and lifeless, and only she can revive him. He cannot find the words to speak of the emptiness and fear her absence induces in him. He is no longer himself without her. Love tyrannizes him.

      Men have colluded in a masquerade of silence around their emotional dependency on women, their loud self-assurance, nothing more than a brittle patina. In truth, men are unsure what to do about themselves and what to do about women. Or rather they are unsure what to do about their need of women. Men have celebrated being alone in order to imagine themselves free of women, free from their vulnerability. In the past we have taken pleasure in our ‘male only’ cultures: the army, public schools, trade unions, political parties, banking and commerce, working men’s clubs, gentlemen’s clubs and pubs. The history of the British and their class system is a history of sexual apartheid in which men and women existed in separate spheres. Society has sustained and been sustained by a language of opposites which privileges the masculine term over the feminine: active and passive, rational and emotional, hard and soft, culture and nature, the sun and the moon, the mind and the body. It is a language whose descriptive vocabulary has given men prominence: the history of mankind, fellow countrymen, forefathers, masterful, God the Father, yours fraternally, man, amen. A plethora of words, a confident, assured language in service to men’s authority which has been guaranteed by their monopoly of the public world of work and politics. In contrast their confused and tentative understanding of love and intimacy has been concealed in the privacy of the home. Today these old boundaries between the public and the private are breaking up and the culture of silence that has surrounded men’s feelings – once portrayed as a sign of sexual magnetism and authority – has lost its allure. In spite of our command over language, when it comes to speaking about love, words fail us.

      II

      Next-door to our bedsit was a room not much larger than a cupboard. For a while Michael lived there; his groans of anguish used to wake us in the night. His room was filthy and littered with old food and empty beer cans. His clothes smelt, and his eyes were half-hidden by a face swollen from drink. A self-educated, literary man in his late thirties, he would catch me on the stairs and subject me to intense monologues. He used to look at me fiercely, his breath stinking of alcohol, and tell me his stories in a bitter monotone. I could never get away once he started talking. He told me he had once been in love. He had lived with a woman in a semi-detached house somewhere in the suburbs, and had a good job. He had given it all up because he could not cope with love. He had left her. He scoffed when he told me this, and I didn’t know whether to believe him. He always ended his stories with the question ‘What do you want?’ For him this was the key to life, and he believed it would always elude him. ‘You see,’ he’d say, ‘that’s my problem. I don’t know.’

      Michael disappeared that winter. The garden was covered with snow. No one went into it, even in the summer, but that morning there were footprints leading from the house to the garden fence. Not shoe prints but bare feet. Outside our door the hallway was full of police. The man in the cupboard was on the run and had jumped out of his open window, half naked and shoeless. They caught him making his escape down the road.

      At the time I wondered where Michael had intended to go. He had spent years wandering from one sleazy bedsit to another and had few friends. Though his mother lived only a few miles away, I doubted he was heading in her direction. He had simply run for his life and I don’t think he gave a thought to where he was going. He was compelled to keep moving.

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