My literary aunt who had given me Nightwood had given me Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird when I was twelve or thirteen, far too young to read about the sexual brutality and genocidal violence of the Polish peasantry as seen by a dark-haired, dark-eyed Jewish child wandering through their world, barely eluding death. It took hold of me, and so did Anne Frank’s diary and other Holocaust literature. One of my recurrent anxious daydreams in my childhood and adolescence was whether I with my fair hair and skin might have been able to pass as a gentile and thereby escape the extermination that had taken all the members of my father’s family who had stayed behind. It was another kind of annihilation that haunted me.
But I also had a vague sense that I might find myself somehow in a less pointedly vicious time and place, where what I had learned from books would at least partially equip me to get by. That I might wander into Georgian England or medieval France or the nineteenth-century West or some of the other places in which I had immersed myself, and some sense of this, ridiculous though it sounds, made me hesitate to cut my long hair, and I found encouragement in archaic ideas of beauty to which I thought I measured up more than I did to modern ones. In those days, it didn’t seem impossible that someday someone else would be in the mirror in the morning, or the world around it would be another world. “I is another” was a phrase of Arthur Rimbaud’s that I also kept handy.
Of course what I had learned from books and from life had hardly equipped me well enough to fit into the time and place I actually lived in. Long after this anxious daydream had passed by, I lived a comic version of it when I read Wordsworth’s book-length autobiographical poem The Prelude twice in order to write a chapter of my book on walking. I was so immersed in his language—unhurried graciousness, elaborate and sometimes inverted syntax, circumlocutory ways of saying things—that my casual remarks to strangers and check-out clerks were met with baffled looks.
There’s a benefit to being untethered from your own time. I think I gained a sense of how differently constituted the idea of being human, the purpose of life, the expectations and desires had been even a generation or two ago, let alone half a millennium before, of how the definitions metamorphosed, and how that meant you could step outside the assumptions of your time, or at least wear them lightly, and at least in theory not let them punish you. That being human can mean many things, in other words. At thirteen, I had read C. S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love, which describes the social construction, in twelfth-century France, of what would become our ideas of romantic love. That these expectations were the result of a particular time and place gave me a sense of liberation, like someone opening the windows in a stuffy room.
Despite that Lewis book, I soaked up novels’ impossibly dramatic notions of love and romance and their myths of completion and ending. And I got something most women got, an experience of staring at women across a distance or being in worlds in which they barely existed, from Moby-Dick to Lord of the Rings. Being so often required to be someone else can stretch thin the sense of self. You should be yourself some of the time. You should be with people who are like you, who are facing what you’re facing, who dream your dreams and fight your battles, who recognize you. And then, other times, you should be like people unlike yourself. Because there is a problem as well with those who spend too little time being anyone else; it stunts the imagination in which empathy takes root, that empathy that is a capacity to shape-shift and roam out of your sole self. One of the convenient afflictions of power is a lack of this imaginative extension. For many men it begins in early childhood, with almost exclusively being given stories with male protagonists.
The term double consciousness is sometimes used for black experience in a white culture. W. E. B. DuBois famously wrote in the last years of the nineteenth century (and wrote, as so many men did up through at least James Baldwin, as though all people were men or even one man) “the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” Perhaps there should be another term for never looking through the eyes of others, for something less conscious than even single consciousness would convey.
DuBois’s framework found an echo in John Berger’s 1968 Ways of Seeing, when Berger imagined, with generosity and brilliance, what it was to be something he had never been: “To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage with such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continuously accompanied by her own image of herself. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.”
You depend on men, and what they think of you, learn to constantly check yourself in a mirror to see how you look to men, you perform for them, and this theatrical anxiety forms or deforms or stops altogether what you do and say and sometimes think. You learn to think of what you are in terms of what they want, and addressing their want becomes so ingrained in you that you lose sight of what you want, and sometimes you vanish to yourself in the art of appearing to and for others.
You are always somewhere else. You turn into trees and lakes and birds, you turn into muses, whores, mothers, the vessel for others’ desires and the screen for their projections, and in all that it can be hard to turn into yourself, for yourself. Even reading novels by men can instill this, and it did in my case. Sometimes the women devoured to the bone are praised; often those insistent on their own desires and needs are reviled or rebuked for taking up space, for making noise. You are punished unless you punish yourself into nonexistence in this system. The system is punishment. A novel like Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark in which the ambitious, amorous, extraordinarily talented heroine is not punished comes as a shock.
Solitude was reprieve from this endless task, but when I turned to books I often turned into a man looking at women. Looking at women as problems or trophies or mildly baleful phenomena with opaque motivations and limited consciousness probably did something to me, and so did being encouraged to identify with the man over and over again, and to live in imagination in places where women were just ornaments in the margins or trophies or broodmares.
In my case, this meant identifying with male protagonists, with the Jim of the almost womanless Lord Jim and Jim Carroll’s self-anointing stud junkie in The Basketball Diaries and with Pip rather than Estella in Great Expectations, and all the grail seekers and ring bearers and western explorers and chasers and conquerors and haters of women and inhabitants of worlds where women were absent. And the task of finding one’s own way must be immeasurably harder when all the heroes, all the protagonists, are not only another gender but another race, or another sexual orientation, and when you find that you yourself are described as the savages or the servants or the people who don’t matter. There are so many forms of annihilation.