A Plea for Eros: Essays

Being a Man

IN MY WAKING LIFE I’M A WOMAN, BUT SOMETIMES IN MY dreams I’m a man. My masculinity is rarely a question of simple anatomy. I don’t discover that I’ve sprouted a penis and am growing a beard, but rather I realize that I’m a man in the same moment I am troubled by the vague memory that I was once a woman. My sex becomes important in the dream only when it’s called into doubt. It is doubt, not certainty, that produces first the question of my sexual identity and second the need to be one thing or the other, man or woman. Although it is now fashionable to dismiss dreams as meaningless neurological chatter, I’ve discovered too much in my own sleep to believe that. It is obvious that my dreams of manliness, which turn on a moment of confusion, illuminate recesses of my own muddled psyche, but I also think they can be used as a key to understanding the larger cultural terrain where the boundary between femininity and masculinity is articulated.

Most of us accept the biological realities of our sex and live with them more or less comfortably, but there are times when the body feels like a limitation. For a woman it may come when she hears a note of condescension in a man’s voice and she must confront the fact that it isn’t what she has said that has produced this tone; it’s her sex. Of course, such a moment isn’t easy to analyze because every social encounter is laden with the unsaid and the unseen. Two people inevitably create a third realm between them in which sex is only one of the myriad forces at work, and yet, like envy, resentment, class snobbery, or racism, sexual prejudice can be detected like an odor in the room, and if the smell gets too strong, it prompts a fantasy of escape: What would he have said if he had seen me as a man? I’m sure that my dreams of maleness are at least partly about escaping the cultural expectations that burden femininity, but I also think they are something more complex, that the dreams recognize a truth that there is a man in me as well as a woman and that this duality is in fact part of being human, but not one that is always easy to reconcile.

In my dreams, my real body doesn’t restrain me. I fly and have powers of telekinesis. I’ve grown fur, suffered gaping wounds, lost my teeth, and shed enough blood to drown in. When I write fiction, I also leave my real body behind and become someone else, another woman or a man if I wish. For me, making art has always been a kind of conscious dreaming. The material for a story comes not from what I know but from what I don’t know, from impulses and images that often seem to happen without my directives, a strange process altogether and one that is put in play when I become another person in my work. And yet the act of writing consists of one thing only — putting words on a page to be read by someone else. In the end, the words are everything and, strictly speaking, they are sexless. In English, unlike many other languages, our nouns don’t even have gender, but it’s interesting to ask whether a text can be male or female and what would make it one or the other.

Every parent and anyone who’s spent time with young children knows that sexual identity takes a while to fix itself and that toddlers rarely know if they are boys or girls. When my daughter was three, she asked my husband whether she would get a penis when she grew up. She posed this question during a period in her life I call the tutu-party-shoe phase, an era of glitter and gold, rhinestone tiaras and plastic high heels. While the little boys were puffing out their chests and playing superheroes, my daughter was tripping around the house like a mad, rather smudged version of Titania. At the same age, the daughter of a friend of mine donned a platinum Marilyn Monroe wig and refused to take it off. She ate, played, went to the park, the toilet, and bed under the increasingly ratty white peruke, which, according to her mother, made her look more like Rumplestiltskin than a blond bombshell. However comic they may look to adults, children play hard at finding out what they are — boys or girls — and they live the difference through an often furious imaginary drama of sex roles. Despite the optimism of some researchers, where biology ends and culture begins is probably a question beyond science. Even infants, whose borderless existence makes the question of sexual identity seem absurd from the inside, have been born into a world in which the boy/girl question is crucial from the outside, is the first question asked after birth: “Is it a boy or a girl?” In other words, before they know, we know. And what we know is part of a vast symbolic landscape in which the lines are drawn between one thing and another in the linguistic act of naming. Once children feel sure of themselves as either boys or girls, the Zorro capes, Superman outfits, crowns, and princess costumes are replaced by more androgynous clothing. The external trappings of femininity and masculinity can be discarded at the moment the knowledge of sexual identity becomes internal, and part of that inner certainty happens in language. A six-year-old can usually state with confidence that he or she is a boy or girl, will grow up to be a man or a woman, and, barring an operation, will not change sex along the way. At the same time, the wider meanings of femininity and masculinity are far more ambiguous. Male and female are words that carry associations so dense, so old, so public, but also so private, that drawing a clear line between the two is riddled with difficulty. It must be said, however, that the categories male and female are very much alive in the language and are laden with our own deep cultural and personal histories that continue to evolve and change and that it is wildly naïve to suppose that dropping chairman for chairperson, for example, will purge language of its sexual connotations.

We were four daughters in my family. My parents had the name Lars ready before each birth, but it turned out that they had to wait a generation for him. My sister’s first son was named Lars in honor of our grandfather and the phantom Hustvedt boy who was never born. I have often thought it was easier that we were all girls. Had there been a boy, we might have been compared and opposed to him, and the differences might have confined all of us. We were born in pairs. I was first. Then, nineteen months later, my sister Liv was born. A gap of five years followed before Asti appeared, and only fifteen months later Ingrid arrived. The four of us were very close and loyal to one another as children and remain devoted friends as adults, something we have more or less taken for granted. My husband, on the other hand, has always regarded our harmony as both remarkable and somewhat puzzling. Why are there so few conflicts among us? When Liv and I were very young, we liked disaster games — shipwreck, tornado, flood, and war. Liv was always John, and I was always Mary, which usually meant that John got to save Mary. I liked being rescued, and in life as well as in play, my sister was the brave one, not I, and on several occasions she defended me from the assaults of other children, even though I was her older sister. The two youngest girls were similarly cast. Asti generally preferred the role of girl when playing, and Ingrid liked to be the boy. Liv and Ingrid took up horsemanship and both became amateur rodeo champions. Later, Liv went into business. Ingrid became an architect. Asti and I both ended up in graduate school, she in French, I in English.

Although not nearly full enough, this brief sketch helps to explain why ten years into our marriage, my husband sat up in bed one morning and said to me, “I’ve understood everything. You’re the woman. Liv’s the man. Asti’s the girl, and Ingrid is the boy.” We are all grown up now, are all married and all have children, but my sisters and I recognized in that statement a truth about our family that had never been articulated by anyone before. Despite the fact that we were all girls, we established a pattern of alternating feminine and masculine qualities among the sisters. It’s notable that it was the younger girl in each pair who adopted the more masculine role, which helped compensate for the deficit in age. The effect was simple. Within each pair, the rivalry typical between siblings of the same sex who are nearly the same age was greatly diminished. It’s impossible to compete if you’re not playing the same game.

A number of years after that succinct assessment of me and my sisters, I was reading a book of collected papers by D. W Winnicott, the English pediatrician and psychoanalyst, and came across a lecture called “On the Split-off Male and Female Elements,” which he delivered to the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1966. He introduces the subject by saying, “As a basis for the idea that I wish to give here I suggest that creativity is one of the common denominators of men and women. In another language, however, creativity is the prerogative of women, and in yet another language, it is a masculine feature. It is the last of the three that concerns me here.” Winnicott goes on to explain that one day during a conversation with a male patient, he felt that he was hearing a girl and said: “I am listening to a girl. I know perfectly well that you are a man but I am listening to a girl….” The patient replied, “If I were to tell someone about this girl, I would be called mad.” Winnicott took the next step: “It was not that you told this to anyone; it is / who see the girl and hear the girl talking, when actually there is a man on my couch. The rnad person is myself.” The patient answered, “I myself could never say (knowing myself to be a man) ‘I am a girl.’ I am not rnad in that way. But you said it, and you have spoken to both parts of me.”

Winnicott’s interpretation of this extraordinary dialogue (which he emphasizes has nothing to do with homosexuality) hinges on the understanding that the man’s late mother, who already had an older son when she gave birth to her second child, had wanted a girl and had insisted on seeing the second baby as the wrong sex. The reversal was caused by the mother’s “madness,” not the son’s. The mother’s wish was a lie, which in turn created a painful ghost in the son — the desired daughter. My sisters and I didn’t suffer from the roles we played in our family the way Winnicott’s patient did, and it’s probably because my mother wasn’t deluded. She loved her babies as girls. I am inclined to think that what happened with us came later and is connected to my father. We four still laugh about the fact that when my father wanted help in the garage he usually asked for Liv or Ingrid.

I spent six years writing a book in which the narrator is a seventy-year-old man named Leo Hertzberg. When I began the novel, I felt some anxiety about embodying a man and speaking in a male voice. After a short time, that nervousness fell away, but it became clear to me that I was doing something different, that this speaker lived inside himself in a different way from me, and yet to be him, I was drawing on a masculine part of myself. I’ve played with sexual ambiguity in my work before. The heroine of my first novel, The Blindfold— a book also written in the first person — cuts her hair, takes on the name of a boy in a story she has translated, and wanders the streets of New York dressed in a man’s suit. While I was writing that book, I knew Iris had to put on the suit, but I never knew why except that her cross-dressing was connected to her translation of the German novella The Brutal Boy, a movement from one language into another, and that by pretending to be a man she loses some vulnerability and gains some power, which she desperately needs. It has never occurred to me until now that taking on a masculine position as a survival technique has roots in my own family, that in the suit Iris lives out the duality and uncertainty of my dreams, and that when she reinvents herself as a male character she is finally able to imagine her own rescue. As “Klaus” she also speaks differently, uses profanity, and adopts a confident swagger she associates with men. Not long ago, I met a psychiatrist who told me that she gives The Blindfold to a number of her female patients. “It doesn’t make them worse?” I asked her, only half-joking. “No,” she said. “It helps for them to see that the boundaries are important.” Iris’s cross-dressing is defensive, an escape from the openness, fragility, and boundlessness she connects to her femininity.

Being Leo was not an act of translation. After a while, I began to hear him. I heard a man. It’s probably impossible to explain where he came from, but I’m convinced that I drew from the experience of listening to the men I have loved, my father and my husband, in particular, but also from others who have been crucial to my intellectual life — those disembodied male voices inside the innumerable books I have read over the years. Their words are in me, but then so are the words of women writers. Jane Austen, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes have also altered my imagination, and yet I’m not talking about sexual difference in terms of real bodies but am reiterating Winnicott, “…. I was now no longer thinking of boys and girls or men and women,” he writes, “but I was thinking in terms of the male and female elements that belong to each.” After years of experience, Winnicott learned to listen to his patients in a way that transcended anatomy. Reading means not seeing the writer. Marian Evans became George Eliot to hide her sex, and it worked for a while. Flaubert’s declaration “Madame Bovarv, c’est moi” is as earnest as anything he ever said.

As a reader of books, I’m convinced that words have an almost magical power to generate, not only more words but fleeting images, emotions, and memories. Certain novels and poems have had a power to unearth raw and unknown pails of myself, have been like mirrors I never knew existed. In every book, the writer’s body is missing, and this absence turns the page into a place where we are truly free to listen to the man or woman who is speaking. When I write a book, I am also listening. I hear the characters talk as if they were outside me rather than inside me. In one book, I heard a young woman who played at being a man; in another, I heard a man. In my dreams, I find myself pulled between the two sexes, wondering which one I am. Not knowing bothers me, but when I write, that same ambivalence becomes my liberation, and I am free to inhabit both men and women and to tell their stories.

2003