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We can, in seconds, compile long lists of male writers who are for many reasons
and by any standards tough in ways that any sensible writer, male or female, would
want to be tough, whose works are fiercely unsentimental, sharply observed,
immensely ambitious and inclusive. What about Robert Stone and Philip Roth?
Don DeLillo and Denis Johnson? What of Thomas Pynchon? And we can compile
a parallel list of women guilty of every sin Mailer and Roethke could think of and
more. (Anaïs Nin may top many such lists.) But such lists are not quite relevant,
since we are not dealing in verities. No one but Mailer and a few mad feminist critics
believes that males write in one language and females in another (although given
the differences between male and female experience, gender can affect subject
matter). There have always been sentimental, myopic writers of both genders.
What’s mystifying is how quick men are to identify female emotion with, Fey s sentimentality,
and how often certain sorts of macho sentimentality go unrecognized as
sentimental. Perhaps this is because men realize, as women do not, that to gush on
about one’s feelings is an act of bravery akin to facing down el toro in a bullring.
Here, again for comparison, are two passages. Both concern characters in exotic
locales and in danger. The first takes place in Africa, on safari, and involves a dying
white hunter and his girlfriend. The other is set in Central America, in the midst of
an undeclared, dirty local war being waged with shady U.S. involvement.
1)
I’m getting as bored with dying as with everything else, he
thought.
It’s a bore, he said out loud.
What is, my dear?’
Anything you do too bloody long.
He looked at her face between him and the fire. She was leaning
back in the chair and the firelight shone on her pleasantly
lined face and he could see that she was sleepy. He heard the
hyena make a noise just outside the range of the fire.
I’ve been writing, he said., But I got tired.
Do you think you will be able to sleep?’
Pretty sure. Why don’t you turn in?’
I like to sit here with you.
Do you feel anything strange?’he asked her.
No. Just a little sleepy.
I do, he said.
He had just felt death come by again. . . . It moved up closer to
him still and now he could not speak to it, and when it saw he
could not speak it came a little closer, and now he tried to send it
away without speaking, but it moved in on him so its weight was
all upon his chest, and while it crouched there and he could not
move, or speak, he heard the woman say, Bwana is asleep now.
Take the cot up very gently and carry it into the tent.
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