Richard Ford & Men

I wrote a blog post about Richard Ford in 2008. I linked to it last week from my John Gould post. Before I linked, I re-read the post, and I was reminded of one of the reasons I'm writing on this blog. Because if I don't write it down, I forget what my reaction to books are. I was quite hard on Ford's Rock Springs in my previous post. Whereas now I remember that book rather fondly. Hmm.

In the 2008 post, I linked to something else I'd written on Ford, a short review of The Lay of the Land. I've now posted that review below.

But there's more.

I have a half-started essay on "Men" that I began in the early part of the last decade that was in part inspired by Ford's The Sportswriter. I happened to be reading Unless by Carol Shields at the same time and noticed two quotations that called out to be placed side-by-side.

All my men were too serious, too brooding and humorless, characters at loggerheads with imponderable dilemmas, and much less interesting than my female characters, who were always of secondary importance but free-spirited and sharp-witted. – Richard Ford, The Sports Writer

I need to speak further about this problem of women, how they’re dismissed and excluded from the most primary of entitlements. But we’ve come so far; that’s the thinking. So far compared to fifty or a hundred years ago. Well, no, we’ve arrived at the new millennium and we haven’t “arrived” at all. We’ve been sent over to the side pocket of the snooker table and made to disappear. – Carol Shields, Unless

It got me to thinking about writing an essay on the different types of male characters. If women are stereotyped into madonna/whores, men are stereotyped into bruts/wimps. Which isn't to say I wanted to write about spreading misandry. No, I was hoping for something more nuanced. What I wanted to write about was the diversity of "males," to develop a catalogue of literary male types. To celebrate complexity.

The essay didn't get written, but it got started. Here's part of it:

The subject of this essay is men, more specifically, men in literature, more specifically how men make meaning in their lives. Making meaning of life, I think, is literature’s primary obligation. Yes, in part, this essay is a reaction to feminism, because (some) feminists have made it their job to distort the meaning of male lives in order to make meaning in female lives. A couple of weeks ago, I heard Barbara Gowdy on CBC radio discussing her new novel, The Romantic. Gowdy spoke without ambiguity: Women suffer for love, men do not. Yes, she said, after being prompted by the (male) interviewer, some men are sensitive, some men suffer for love. But not the way women suffer. Women suffer collectively, she said. They share their sufferings. Men go to the bar and talk about sports.

This is patronizing claptrap. As is this: “Not one of us was going to get what we wanted. I had suspected this for years, and now I believe that Norah half knows the big female secret of wanting and not getting” (Carol Shields, Unless). The big “female secret”? Feminism can be saluted for its strong, useful critique of so-called “universalism” in literature; but it has locked itself in a dead end by claiming disappointment as a female privilege.

Here's basically all of the rest of it:

In 2000, I took part in a two-week writing workshop led by Bonnie Burnard, author of The Good House, a book as female-friendly as any written by Carol Shields. The workshop included five writers, each of whom had published at least one book. We spent the two weeks talking about the aesthetic problems we were struggling with in our fiction and offered support and encouragement to each other. At one point, Burnard asked us about the patterns we saw in our work. Were there recurring dilemmas, obsessions? Were their questions that drove us to choose certain narratives? What kinds of books did we find ourselves drawn to? Burnard said she found herself returning in her work to existential questions: What is life? Why bother to live it? She also said she liked to read about men, whom she found infinitely interesting.

I remember at that moment feeling a sense of relief. Like Burnard, I also returned again and again to existential questions in my fiction, sensing, like Camus in The Stranger, that the primary question in life was whether or not to commit suicide (Yes, life is absurd, but we must make a conscious choice to live it out fully anyhow). I also wrote a lot about men, which I felt some anxiety about, since I came of age during the feminist revolution and I tended to believe that questions about female emancipation ought to be a priority for everyone, as they were for me during my time on campus (the late-1980s, early-1990s, the period of the Montreal Massacre). I also wrote about women, which was also a source of anxiety, since the “appropriation of voice” debate was at its height during that period, and I felt some sympathy towards those who felt that they alone deserved the right to speak their own stories (I thought: Wouldn’t I want the same?).

But the same was not being offered. Stories about men by men were read as narratives of dominating female; stories about women by men were read as appropriation of voice and narratives which perpetuated male domination of women; stories about women by women were read as female emancipation from men; stories about men by women were … um, were there any? Well, yes. Lorna Crozier wrote her “penis poems” during that period, and feminists took her to task for celebrating the penis as a source of pleasure (and not reducing it to a symbol of oppression). This was the period of “backlash,” when attempts to critique the rigor of feminist claims were categorized as reactionary slights. It was also the period when the term “political correctness” first appeared, used by the first Bush administration and others on the right to lump any progressive critique of their policies into the camp of the leftist loonies. (I wrote a column for the campus newspaper arguing that the term “political correctness” was unnecessary, since language already existed for rebutting empty arguments, if that was your intent. But that wasn’t the intent of those who screamed PC was taking over campuses; their intent was to sweep away all dissent. As Bush II has famously said: You’re with us, or you’re against us.)

But what about those of us who reject the positions at both ends of the polarity? What about those of use who believe reality cannot be reduced to “us/them”? What about those of us who want to see a real discussion of the issues, who believe the freedom we are lucky to have ought to be used to find language that is the most honest, the most direct, the most realistic, and, yes, progressive?

Maybe you can see why I never finished this essay. It hurts my head re-reading it.

And things are so much better now. (Ha, ha.)

For related meanderings, check out CNQ #80. The Gender Issue.

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[First published in The Danforth Review (2007)]

The Lay of the Land
by Richard Ford
Knopf, 2006

Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land (okay, I haven't actually finished this one yet; it's 485 pages in hard cover, and I've been reading it since the beginning of the year--back in the days when my now wife was my then girlfriend, which is a very Richard Ford-like thought and preoccupation). Here's my favourite passage from this novel so far:

If only Clare would just take the plunge (always the realtor's warmest wish for mankind), banish fear, think that instead of having suffered error and loss, he's survived them (but won't survive them indefinitely), that today could be the first day of his new life, then he'd be fine. In other words, accept the Permanent Period as your personal savior and act not as though you're going to die tomorrow but--much scarier--as though you might live.

The Lay of the Land is the third novel in a trilogy that began with The Sportswriter and also includes Independence Day. The protagonist of all three novels is Frank Bascombe, a one-time short-story writer who also wrote about sports. He is now twice married. His most recent wife has left him to re-unite with her former husband. His two grown children have various minor life crises. His first wife is flirting with him. He has recently survived (for now) a diagnosis of prostate cancer. It's Thanksgiving weekend, and he is living in what he calls "the Permanent Period." What others might call the slow slide to death (Frank is only 52), but Frank sees as the time when no major changes are anticipated or sought and so life can seem like a state of stasis, though clearly not of calm. Oh, yeah. The novel also takes place during the period in 2000 when the Gore/Bush election remained unresolved. Big decisions seem to be on hold. Can this situation remain? Probably not. How does it end? I don't know (haven't finished the book yet!).

So why include it in this review? Because I might not get another chance. Go about your affairs as if you might live!

Those who have read The Sportswriter and Independence Day will likely remember some of the sharp facts of Frank's life. He had a third child, a boy, who died in childhood. This event dunked Frank into a pool of dreaminess and womanizing that ended his first marriage. It also disconnected him from his children, his past ambitions and nearly life in general. In the second book, Frank took a trip to Cooperstown with his other son, in an attempt at father-son bonding, which ended with the son getting a baseball in the head. Accidentally, of course, though also (intentionally) rich in significance. In the new novel, Frank continues his drifting ways, though one should also say that Frank is clearly his life's "decider." He only appears passive because he is so deeply reflective; he is not in denial about what he's done or hasn't.

The narrative of Ford's trilogy is ultimately less the point than the creation of Frank. What I mean is, it's not what happens next that matters. It's how Frank responds to the day-by-day. Who Frank is. How he gets to be that way. What his options are. And the persistence of meaning over time. If it does. The lay of the land, in other words. It's just what's out there and how you deal with it. How we go along for the ride. And Frank provides quite a ride. He's a character as resonant as Updike's Rabbit, as Richler's Kravitz. As Jay Gatz, too.

Pages 326-327, in fact, provide a number of discussion points on the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, The Great Gatsby. Frank's car is in need of repair. At the local auto shop, the attendant is reading Fitzgerald's novel. Frank notes "garage mechanics, of course, played a pivotal role in Fitzgerald's denoument:

I'm tempted to poll his views about Jay Gatz. Victim? Ill-starred innocent? Gray-tinged antihero? Or all three at once, vividly registering Fitzgerald's glum assessment of our century's plight--now blessedly at an end. ... It's possible of course that as a modern student, Chris doesn't subscribe to the concept of author per se. I, however, still do.

When a significant American author (Ford) references a significant American novel (The Great Gatsby), readers are free to rush to all kids of conclusions. Gatsby is famously a novel about the failure of the American Dream, as many high school essayists have insisted. A similar theme could be staked for Ford's trilogy. We might also note that "the end of American exceptionalism" is one of the dominant stories of the presidency of George W. Bush, and Ford knew the outcomes of certain events (Iraq) while he presented the pessimistic Frank in the period that ultimately handed Dubya the keys to the White House. Things often don't work out the way we want them to, but we need to keep trying and live our lives looking forward, not back.

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POST SCRIPT

So my point is here is that disappointment is not a female priviledge; there are all types of men, and some of us, like Frank B., know the secret of wanting and not getting. Go about your affairs as if you might live!

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