 | | look upward, it's not towards the stars or the ineffable, it's to dust the tops of the windows. We have only ourselves to blame.
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| | "Yes, God," we say, "here's your slippers and your nice hot dinner. In the meantime, just feed us, keep us, fetch the coal and say something nice while you're about it."
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| | Man seems not so much wicked as frail, unable to face pain, trouble and growing old.
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And that I fear still holds. These days I would say it applied to women too. I would say men and women both behave as badly as they are allowed to behave, but society allows man a little more than it does woman. It is as much to do with conditioning, role-playing, as with gender. In
The Hearts and Lives of Men,
a more recent novel, I notice I have this to say about a very difficult artist painter.
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| | If men are like children, as some women say, it is certainly more true in this respect than others, that they are happier when obliged to behave, like little guests at a birthday party, strictly run.
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By the mid-seventies we'd progressed; I could look back at my student days and see Kant and Professor Knox both in a different light. I could now maintain it was Kant's fault, not mine, that I failed properly to understand him. I would say that if language failed to represent meaning, then there was no meaning: I was reading the ravings of a madman: obviously I couldn't make sense of it. Not my failing, his. What's more he was a very male madman; the main trouble with Kant was that he was a
man
. As was Professor Knoxand now I could dismiss him too on that account, and no doubt as unjustly as once he had dismissed me. Gender must be no excuse for bad behavior.
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In the fifties and sixties we women thought if we were unhappy it could only be our fault. We were in some way neurotic, badly adjustedit was our task to change ourselves to fit the world. We would read Freud, Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein (these last two at least being moderately relevant to our female condition), bow our heads in shame in the face of our penis envy, and teach ourselves docility and acceptance. As the seventies approached and we failed to achieve these ends, the great realization dawnedwe must change not ourselves but the world! It was not we who were at fault, with our mopes and sulks and hysteria and murderous premenstrual rages, it was the world. The world was male. It was only natural, living as we did in a patriarchal society, that we would behave in such a way. So we stopped placating (that is to say smiling) and set out, scowling, to change the world. We worked upon that, not upon ourselves. We became radical separatist, lesbian feminists, or subsections of such, and weren't really nice at all. We stamped hard on male toes, and we liked each other
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