Typescript 1: On writing and gender

Madam Chair, Ladies and Gentlemen

Personally I don’t believe that, speaking roughly, there’s any thing in it! A man can write about women just as convincingly as about men, and a woman about men as convincingly as about women. We don’t, when we take up a novel by Mr Swinnerton or Mr Strauss think, ‘This is written by a man so I must expect all his women characters to be a little unreal, or exaggerated or what not; I must be on my guard against these flaws.’; nor when we read Mrs Lynd, do we say, ‘Of course men are not quite like this, for it is a woman writing.’ No, we expect, and rightly, that a good novelist shall be able to get into the skin of either sex—different though men and women may sometimes be in their outlooks. The ability to do this[1] is part of a novelist’s outfit, as I do not need to mention in the presence of guests who are distinguished novelists as well as distinguished critics.

Of course we all know that it is easy to bring up instances of novelists who have singularly failed in this respect—and the culprits are nearly always women writing about men. There has been a good deal of the famous ‘No one rowed a faster oar in his college boat than No 4’ sort of thing. But that is just a case of unfamiliarity with masculine pursuits; besides, it is ancient history. Now a days a woman knows much more about a man’s avocations since she shares so many of them.—Though it must still be difficult for her to stage a really convincing scene on the Stock Exchange. Yet on the other hand, has not Mr Priestley in Angel Pavement given us a most life-like picture of the nightly hot-water bottle filling in a women’s residential hostel, an episode which he can never have seen with his own eyes? With the right gift, and a little inside information from the other sex, even this sort of thing can be brought off.

But you will say that I am only talking about externals, accidentals. I will give you then, purely at random, as an example of how women can write about men, Henry Handel Richardson’s trilogy, and the incident centering round that scallywag of the name of Rudd in Helen Simpson’s Boomerang. It isn’t so easy now a days to deduce the sex of an author; there is still more than one woman to whom Mr Punch in his reviews accords the title of ‘Mr’—always a source of gratification to the female, poor thing! I know a woman novelist whose new readers always think that she is a man, even, to her astonishment, ‘an old man with a beard’.[2] Disillusionment follows in due course, and on one crushing occasion a male reader said to her in tones of almost shocked disappointment ‘You didn’t write So and so!’ There was no course but to apologise, though no deception had been intended.

About the success of men’s women characters I will say nothing, as you would not wish at this time of night to listen to a survey of English literature from Chaucer onwards. But here, just to conclude, are two little instances to show that men can be as misguided in the portrayal of their own sex as any woman. There is a certain novel, not many years old, written by a man of extremely masculine pursuits, an explorer, in fact, with an immensely arduous and protracted journey to his credit, in which the male characters converse with each other in a fashion so incredibly sentimental that, if one had not actually seen the author, it would be hard to believe that the pen which set down their discourse had not been guided by the fingers of some sheltered Victorian lady. My other little example is, I will admit, not taken from fiction, but from verse. Anyhow, it is not a woman, but that great and difficult poet, Father Gerard Hopkins, usually so minute an observer of detail, who had made a man about to bathe in a river pool take his boots off last.