Letter to a Woman Writer

Dear P—,

It occurs to me there may be good reason to set the ball rolling in a discussion of the situation of women writers in this country. I have heard more nonsense talked on this subject than on any other. And perhaps more women than men in New Zealand have killed their talent, or allowed it to be killed. At least, like the man who pushes an asbestos shield towards a blazing oil gusher, I do not expect to escape without burns. The topic is an explosive one. Instead of writing some pontifical article, I address this brief letter to you, so as to have you, a practising woman writer, directly in my thoughts; for the sake of friendship also, and my own unreserved respect for your intellectual courage.

I do not envy any woman who puts pen to paper here in Pig Island. The boars will grunt and snuffle. Unless she adopts an entirely neuter idiom (difficult to master and worthless anyway) she will meet a fair amount of subtle down-classing. I mean by this that the average male reviewer or editor brings to a woman’s work the armoury of unconscious prejudices which he already holds towards women in general. He can only escape this by bringing them into full consciousness and holding them at an arm’s length. There is another factor too, which I can illustrate from personal experience. In a woman’s work he will not find the symbolic clues to which he is accustomed.

I recall being asked to review a new book of poems. On a first reading, I found them technically satisfying but curiously strained in their imagery. The name on the book’s cover was that of a man, hitherto unknown to me. In the poems there occurred a strange shifting of familiar landmarks. Mountains, bays and islands, carried an obscure symbolic connotation, and the most personal work, the love poems, seemed ‘impossible’, outside the pattern of love as I knew it. Then light broke in on me. I assumed, correctly, that the author was a woman who had used a masculine pseudonym. The picture began to fall into focus. The landscapes which she explored so vividly were symbolic extensions of her own body (not, as they would be in the case of a man, a hostile or welcoming other); and the love poems were sincere and accurate confessional documents. But suppose I had been incapable of making the shift of imagination which the poems demanded from a male reader – I would have remained in the dark, and another good woman poet would have received less than justice.

I think most women writers are aware that they start at a disadvantage when they expose their work to the criticisms of a man. A hundred pathological responses may spring from this discouraging knowledge. The more or less inevitable paranoid tendency of artists (‘You do not like my work because you do not like me’) may flourish to the point of mania. Or the woman in question may develop a bogus high-mindedness, an assumption that her work possesses some rare spiritual and prophetic quality which the indelicacy of apage 436 male mind cannot discern or appreciate. She may waste her time in useless polemics, attack the ‘corrupt’ trends of modern fiction, and huddle in a group of like-minded women, the traditional belly-aching matriarchs. (I remember a gang of them, dud writers, who tried to get a friend of mine chucked out of his teaching job for writing and publishing improper verses!) Or more rarely, she will show an intense preoccupation with form, and rewrite a story or a poem fifty times, searching for the hair-line of exactitude which may meet with an editor’s approval. All this is a smokescreen, as you well know, P—. The true course lies elsewhere: to ignore the boys, unless they know what you are talking about, and begin the long archaeological job of self- discovery. Unearthing truth from the dunghill of memory. For we can only write truthfully about what we know; and if we turn our backs on knowledge, even the harshest, we are damned as writers.

Mind you, I think the sows have a lot to answer for, as well. I remember hearing about an old lady in Karori who had known Katharine Mansfield when she (K.M.) was a girl. She had only one comment to make – ‘Oh! That girl? She was quite mad about men.’ The moral pressure of the Women’s Trade Union must press like a ton of bricks on the shoulders of any woman who wants to find out who she is. Imagine a woman Durrell! She would be hounded into Porirua by a baying pack of relatives. The escape routes are so easy too. The Church, taken like an aspirin in a glass of water; the duties of a housewife; a feminism that concentrates on abstract issues. I do not envy a woman writer here; and I admire wholeheartedly those who keep on moving.

Consider the strength and weakness of the women writers we have had. K.M. herself, ploughing through the bitter herbage of the German Pension, raw, bewildered and untrained, relying always half on fantasy (I mean the special inner world of nursery images, as opposed to the imagination that illuminates what is truly known) till she broke through, not caring, to that last giant lucidity. Robin Hyde (the idol of the abstract feminists, who would hate her work if they knew its meaning) making flowery tapestries from the life of Baron de Thierry, bringing in ‘rough stuff’ awkwardly, full of theatrical gestures, till she too struck oil, in China, and at last, like K.M., could write about the New Zealand jail she came from. Janet Frame, with her piercing asylum stories; Helen Shaw, writing chiefly of eccentrics; Sylvia Ashton- Warner, who writes so vividly of the infant room, but whose male characters are clouds in trousers; Marilyn Duckworth, whose heroine finds that what seemed a door was really painted on the wall – an exact dilemma, but why does she choose it? I will leave the poets aside, for they are a different hornets’ nest. But God help us, P—, these writers had to travel a long way before they got off the concrete and on to the grass – further than most of the boys have to go. There must be a reason for it.

I think it turns on that one essential writer’s virtue of honesty. As the world goes, we are all trained to be dishonest, from kindergarten upwards. If thepage 437 shoal or island isn’t shown on the map, then it doesn’t exist: believe the map, not your eyes. They call it Character Training. We are obliged to develop the social virtue of hypocrisy, the lens through which we see a good suburban home as a good suburban home, and not as the nest of mutually carnivorous boa constrictors which it so frequently is. This lens is more perfectly ground, more highly polished, in New Zealand than, say, in Greenwich Village or a village in India. Have you listened recently to the peculiarly vacant speeches of our respected Prime Minister? Nehru may be a fence-sitter; but he does say something. Eisenhower may be stupid; but there is some salt left in American speech. Meaning has steadily retreated from the language of our public life since the 1935 elections. I have a job in a Government Department, as you know, in the belly of Jonah’s whale, stuffed with bad air and blotting paper, and should know what I am talking about. It does not hurt me to hold a gun at the head of New Zealand society.

But the situation of a woman writer is different. She is usually holding on. She finds it harder to distinguish the dead wood from the green. Her domestic relationships very likely mean a great deal to her, and her attack (to be honest always means some measure of attack) is muffled at the outset by the fear that her anti-social writing may also be anti-human. The narrow optimism that rises in her when she sees a hydrangea bush in flower, or the real joy of hearing a child bawl for its milk, may easily divert her from the recognition that a hypocritical education has condemned her to a life of lies, a half-life in which most of her powers are unused. In Germany a lot of good housewives hated the Jewish intellectuals – ‘They analyse too much; they are immoral; they want to smash things’ – and threw in their lot with the ‘safe’ Nazis.

Do you think I am near the truth? It is probably only those who are particularly desperate, who have been all-but-killed by some virulent falsehood, who are prodded into writing. And what are the rewards? To become oneself, I think – to become oneself in a bottomless solitude, surrounded by the night. Nisi granum frumenti . . . I remember, for two hours, making boats out of silver paper and sailing them down the gutters of Dannevirke. The jail door swinging open.