Читать книгу I Am No Longer Myself Without You: How Men Love Women - Jonathan Rutherford - Страница 5

And seeking we lose, discovering we conceal.

For we are still searching for our childhood.

MIROSLAV HOLUB

I

In my early twenties F moved into my bedsit, and we bought a new bed that took up half the floor. To reach the tiny cooker we had to squeeze between the bed and my desk. Despite the small size of the room a sense of spaciousness came from the two windows which looked out onto an unkempt garden. On occasion we would stand by one of the windows and watch the trees, the tangle of plants in the overgrown borders, the patchwork of gardens stretching down the street. We cooked elaborate meals in that oven, balancing saucepans on the two rings, washing up in the small circular sink. We took it in turns to work at my desk, the desk I still use, which I had bought some years before for £10, its oak veneer splintered along the edges. There were bare boards on the floor which had been sanded down and varnished. For heating we had a paraffin heater. I forget what pictures we hung on the walls. F and I had only recently met when I moved to London. A friend of mine who was returning to the North offered me his bedsit and I spent several days painting the room before moving in. I had slept on the floor and had woken in the middle of the first night and wondered where I was. I lay awake in the dark, smelt the fresh gloss paint on the skirting boards and recalled a time before, crossing the North Sea on a ferry, sleeping on the packed deck, waking, sitting up, staring around me, feeling entirely lost and disorientated. As my eyes had grown accustomed to the dark, and the shapes of people appeared – slumped in chairs, talking quietly in groups or stumbling over prostrate bodies – my fear subsided. As a faint light revealed the landlord’s cheap, brightly painted furniture I felt once again this disquieting solitude.

We lived in this room for two years and that was eighteen years ago. It was the beginning of our life together and so it is the beginning of this story. It is a narrative about myself. But it is also, more generally, about the relationships and feelings of men. It turns inward to the life of home and intimacy, and to the words we use to define ourselves. And it is a story about the silence which surrounds men’s love and their relationships with women. To write about men’s love and relationships is like entering an uncharted territory and inventing its geography. I must attempt to map its contours, define the gradations of the hills, the sharp dip of valleys, describe the climate and vegetation, put words to places whose histories I don’t fully comprehend. I’m not sure what I will find, and I’m not sure what I’ll say.

I can remember exactly when I first knew that I was in love with F. It was October, shortly after she had moved in. We visited Chichester and walked across a field towards the town. It was early evening, and we stopped to look at the shapes of the roof tops against the darkening blue sky. The autumn yellow of the sun lit the steeple of a church and reflected off the glass block of an office building. We had left the road and climbed a stile, jumping down into the coarse grass. There were a few cows who were ruminating or lying on the soft, damp earth. We had spent the summer taking day trips to the sea and countryside, and this was to be our final outing. Chichester had proved to be an uninteresting town, yet looking at its unprepossessing skyline, I felt my life had changed irrevocably. I had given up my solitude. This moment belonged to both of us, but not to each alone. While I remained ‘I’, a significant part of myself had become ‘we’. I was not overwhelmed with transcendent joy. There was no flood of romantic dreaming. I experienced hope and a sense of my life beginning, pleasure that I had been released from the confinement of myself, anxiety at this other life now incorporated into my own.

When men fall in love we surrender our solitude and relinquish our masquerade of self-sufficiency. A new story of our lives is waiting to begin; a recognition that ‘I am no longer myself without you’. The paradox of love is that we discover a new sense of self in the moment we lose our self to another person. Men avoid this paradox, because love must develop into a relationship – a negotiation of give and take, autonomy and dependency – and faced with such a prospect we have traditionally retreated and recouped some of our solitude. Intimacy changes the boundaries of our self and we become ambivalent about who we are and what we want, and in this equivocation lies apprehension. We are unsure how to respond. Masculinity – an identity rooted in the language of work and public life – has left men unskilled in the necessary words of feeling, empathy and love.

Love is a fugacious word. Rounded and comfortable, it lifts the tongue and fills the back of the throat, before slipping beyond reach as the sound is exhaled from the mouth. Yet the word eludes meaning. Love teeters on the edge of the unknown beyond which it becomes almost impossible to speak. It moves us beyond words. We speak about love when we define our longing and desire and yet we fall into silence when we attempt to speak about it in the present. I fumble for words, my mind’s eye searching for that thought or that feeling to which I can attach the right sound, make it sound right, let it appear to emanate from inside myself. I attempt to speak about love in the way many men can about politics or sport, with passion and intensity. But in times of trouble the words just buckle and fold and disappear, and I am thrown back on foolish clichés which slide across my palate. While I may have everything to say, I say nothing or I say very little.

We use words to represent our feelings and to communicate them to others. What we feel and think about ourselves is subject to available vocabularies. But supposing the vocabularies I need are not there. Suppose I want to talk about certain feelings I have – for example, the disquiet I experience in my dependency on others. The words might not be there for me to use, yet I know the feeling is real. There is something more, an excess of world over word. Perhaps this is the case for men. Our feelings can be enacted, lived, dreamed and embodied. We attempt to represent them in music, in literature and in art, but they remain always just beyond our understanding. When I began writing this book I tried to recall all the films I’d watched, the art I’d seen and the books I’d read about men in love. I went to galleries and bookshops and leafed through novels and biographies. I wrote down lists of famous writers. I wanted to know what other men had written about love, and how they had expressed themselves.

I have watched John Huston’s film adaptation of Joyce’s story The Dead several times. I watched it again for the final scene. Greta and Gabriel have entered a Dublin hotel room. They are spending the night in the city after celebrating New Year’s Eve with Gabriel’s aunts and a circle of friends. Greta is melancholy and her husband asks her what is wrong: ‘Tell me, I think I know what the matter is. Do I know?’ She tells him that a song sung that evening by a member of their party had reminded her of a boy she had known when she was a young girl living with her grandmother in Galway. His name was Billy Furey. ‘He was very delicate; such eyes, big dark eyes.’ Gabriel is momentarily gripped by jealousy. But his wife explains that Billy Furey died when he was only seventeen. ‘What was it he died of?’ he asks. She begins to cry. ‘I think he died from me.’ She had been leaving her grandmother’s house for a convent school in Dublin. The boy had been ill for a number of months. She wrote and told him of her departure and the night before she left, while she was packing. Billy Furey left his sick bed to visit her. He threw gravel up to her window. She slipped out of the house and found the boy, poorly dressed, shivering in the rain. She implored him to go home before he caught his death. He refused to leave and told her he had no wish to live without her. Eventually he relented and returned home. A week after her arrival in Dublin he died.

Overcome with the grief of this memory, Greta collapses onto the bed, sobbing. She buries her face in a pillow and falls asleep. Gabriel sits beside her. He tentatively strokes his wife’s hair. At a loss to know what to do or feel, he crosses to the window and looks outside. It is snowing. He thinks to himself: ‘How poor a part I’ve played in your life. It’s almost as though I’m not your husband and we’ve never lived together as man and wife.’ He recalls their evening spent with his elderly aunt, Julia. He feels momentarily the proximity of Julia’s death and imagines his own mourning; his ‘casting around for words of consolation only to find lame and useless ones’. He is shaken by the depth of his wife’s lament for Billy Furey, and by the actions of the boy who did not wish to live without her. He knows that this is love and it is something that he has never felt for a woman. There is something in the world that he is unable to speak of, and soon death will come for him and his time will be over.

I have a battered copy of Dubliners, James Joyce’s short stories. Opening it I saw my brother’s name on the inside cover. It was his school text book and he had written his name in red biro across the spine, but the first and the last letters of his surname were in blue and they have faded – UTHERFOR. I read James Joyce’s original story and compare it to the film. It differs to an important degree. Gabriel contemplates his wife’s sleeping form and he is drawn to the vast hosts of the dead. His thoughts turn to his mortality, he looks inside himself and he sees the ethereal quality of his love reaching across the landscape of Ireland, falling with the snow, as vast and as amorphous as the dark night he looks out on. Tears gather in his eyes. He finds solace in the thought of death, and in the transmutation of his body into the impalpable world of nothingness. There is something religious in the way Gabriel loves. He uses words to distance himself from his feelings and his body. I am reminded of the asceticism of Christ, his male body martyred in the name of his love, his pain an erotic depiction of the union of ecstasy and death. Gabriel cannot express himself to his wife; instead he casts his love like a mantle across the world. It enhances everything, but no one in particular.

Men have frequently expressed their love in these abstracted terms, loving humanity and life in general. Or they have fallen in love with the idea of love, imbuing women with the transcendent qualities of beauty and innocence. Men have loved in chivalrous oblation to their chosen one and, as in the decrees of knightly courtship, have sacrificed themselves in the name of love. When a man worships his beloved there is no relationship. She remains a figment of his imagination. In love, women are annulled by men. The philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote: ‘Sexual love makes of the loved person an object of appetite; as soon as the appetite has been stilled the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry.’ A man might sacrifice his life for his country, merge himself with the transcendental symbols of race and nation, but he will not easily give his emotions to a lover. We remain reluctant to give away too much of ourselves to women.

The more I read men writing on love, the greater the sense I have of their plight. When men write about love they communicate a state of bereavement. They preserve their solitariness. Shelley’s ‘Dedication’ at the beginning of his epic poem, The Revolt of Islam, is addressed to Mary Shelley, his lifelong companion and lover. It expresses his loneliness, his longing for a friend and lover and his gratitude. ‘Aught but a lifeless clod, until revived by thee’. He measures his love by her absence. She is the bearer of his life and love, and without her he is nothing. The language of romantic love and relationships belongs to women. In the intimate life of the emotions and the body, women frequently speak on behalf of men: wives for husbands, mothers for sons, girlfriends for boyfriends. Men doubt their ability to love. I used to read W. H. Auden when I was younger and remember his poem ‘Lullaby’ and the poignant lines, ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm.’ They reveal a scepticism about the poet’s own capacity to love. It is as if the one he holds contains all the feelings of goodness and empathy and concern that he – ‘faithless’ – lacks. It is this lack that propels men’s need of women. Marcel Proust, compelled by the death of his mother to write Remembrance of Things Past, began his voyage into memory with the sentence: ‘For a long time I used to go to bed early.’ Here he lies, a small, remorseful child anticipating the goodnight kiss of his mother. Neither asleep nor awake, he longs for her to remain with him through the coming ‘sad hours of darkness’. Proust longed for maternal love. The nineteenth-century French novelist Stendhal longed for sexual love. He wrote his famous treatise Love out of unrequited passion for Mathilde Viscontini Dembowski. She neither loved nor understood him, but he persisted, humiliating himself in his attempts to win her affections. His imagination turned her into his obsession:

Leave a love with his thoughts for twenty-four hours, and this is what will happen. ‘At the salt mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they pull it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals. The smallest twig, no bigger than a tom-tit’s claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognisable.’

And nor was the hapless Mathilde.

Without women men are bereft; they lose the stories of their lives. They are unable to reflect upon themselves and their actions, and self-understanding escapes them. Men have dominated intellectual life as thinkers, writers, scientists and artists. But the language they have used has been designed to act upon and change the world, to dissect and analyse, not to reflect and intuit. Men have located the object of their inquiry somewhere beyond themselves and fashioned themselves into the detached observer, the disinterested scientist and the dispassionate critic. Men have used their intelligence to promote their separateness from others rather than to recognize their interdependence. They have used knowledge as a form of power over other people, in particular over women. Biology, theology, philosophy, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, medicine, the physical sciences, anthropology, literature – each discipline in its time has legitimized the inferiority of women, who have been classified and categorized as having smaller brains, a lack of rational intellect, oversexualized bodies, a mental predilection for hysteria, a lower order of spirituality, sentimentality, shorter attention spans and mental flightiness. The word ‘epistemology’ refers to the theory of knowledge. It was coined by a Scottish professor, James Frederick Ferrier. On Monday 17 November 1862 Elizabeth Garrett, a young medical student at St Andrews University, tried to enter a lecture theatre in order to attend a talk on chemistry and thus challenged the male dominance of the Scottish education system. It was Professor Ferrier who blocked her path and demanded she turn back, leaving her with little choice but to submit to his authority. Knowledge and language belonged to men but, used as a form of power, they have diminished self-understanding.

Men have used language in an instrumental way to separate ourselves from our own feelings. We have allowed women to voice our emotions. This is why men abandoned by women despair – they no longer know who they are. I think this is what Raymond Carver is trying to say in his short story Blackbird Pie. He describes a couple whose children have grown up, and who have moved to the country. The man enjoys the solitude, but his wife does not. He admits her discontent to himself, but makes no attempt to improve their situation. One night an envelope is pushed beneath the door of his room. Inside is a letter. It begins: ‘It’s been such a long time now since we’ve talked. I mean really talked.’ She wants to leave him. He refuses to believe that the letter has been written by his wife; he opens the door of his room and looks down the corridor. Everything is as it should be and yet he feels suddenly afraid. Uneasy, he returns to his room and closes the door. He opens it for a second time and he hears a murmuring downstairs and the receiver of the telephone being replaced. He feels panic. He steps down the corridor hoping to hear the reassuring click of knitting needles. Instead he hears the sound of a door opening and closing quietly. Though his impulse is to investigate, he instead returns to his room, his heart racing. He picks up the letter and stares at the pages, snatching lines at random. When he hears the front door close he drops the pages and hurries to the living room. His wife is not in the house. The porch light is on and her suitcase stands on the porch outside.

Several days later the husband is going through his wife’s belongings. He is packing to move and trying to decide which possessions of hers to take and which to discard. He knows now that she will never come back and that he may never see her again. He is still bewildered. He knows there is something ‘far more’ to this affair than his wife’s simple departure:

You could say that my history has left me. Or that I’m having to go on without history. Or that history will now have to do without me – unless my wife writes more letters, or tells a friend who keeps a diary, say. Then years later, someone can look back on this time, interpret it according to the record, its scraps and tirades, its silences and innuendoes. That’s when it dawns on me that autobiography is the poor man’s history. And that I am saying goodbye to history. Goodbye my darling.

The husband in Blackbird Pie is sedentary, appearing unmindful of his wife. His life is governed by fear and selfishness. He feels that he cannot be himself in his relationship with her. He wants her to remain just beyond him, neither to move away from him, nor to come too close: to sit with her knitting, a comforting presence he can control. Like Gabriel in The Dead, the husband in Carver’s story cannot tell his wife what he feels about himself and about her. Instead he tries to manage her. When she leaves he is lost for anything to say and his world begins to collapse. The hint of misanthropy which surrounds both men is echoed in Proust’s lament for Albertine in Remembrance of Things Past: ‘I knew now that I was in love with Albertine, but alas! I didn’t trouble to let her know it … the declaration of my passion to the one I loved no longer seemed to be one of the vital and necessary stages of love. And love itself seemed no longer an external reality, but only a subjective pleasure.’ Men’s love is a pursuit through others of all they feel they have lost and cannot speak of. It is why they speak of it as a bereavement. That is the nature of love – the desire to achieve a sense of completeness through unity with another. Only when men fall in love with women, they fall in love with that part of themselves that is missing. Men want love because we long to be offered a semblance of ourselves. In love a man is held captive not by a woman, but by his need to be loved by her. He longs for her, he needs her to embrace him and fill him with her love, but when she desires something for herself, or when she withdraws from him emotionally, she exposes the absence in himself. He feels numbed and lifeless, and only she can revive him. He cannot find the words to speak of the emptiness and fear her absence induces in him. He is no longer himself without her. Love tyrannizes him.

Men have colluded in a masquerade of silence around their emotional dependency on women, their loud self-assurance, nothing more than a brittle patina. In truth, men are unsure what to do about themselves and what to do about women. Or rather they are unsure what to do about their need of women. Men have celebrated being alone in order to imagine themselves free of women, free from their vulnerability. In the past we have taken pleasure in our ‘male only’ cultures: the army, public schools, trade unions, political parties, banking and commerce, working men’s clubs, gentlemen’s clubs and pubs. The history of the British and their class system is a history of sexual apartheid in which men and women existed in separate spheres. Society has sustained and been sustained by a language of opposites which privileges the masculine term over the feminine: active and passive, rational and emotional, hard and soft, culture and nature, the sun and the moon, the mind and the body. It is a language whose descriptive vocabulary has given men prominence: the history of mankind, fellow countrymen, forefathers, masterful, God the Father, yours fraternally, man, amen. A plethora of words, a confident, assured language in service to men’s authority which has been guaranteed by their monopoly of the public world of work and politics. In contrast their confused and tentative understanding of love and intimacy has been concealed in the privacy of the home. Today these old boundaries between the public and the private are breaking up and the culture of silence that has surrounded men’s feelings – once portrayed as a sign of sexual magnetism and authority – has lost its allure. In spite of our command over language, when it comes to speaking about love, words fail us.

II

Next-door to our bedsit was a room not much larger than a cupboard. For a while Michael lived there; his groans of anguish used to wake us in the night. His room was filthy and littered with old food and empty beer cans. His clothes smelt, and his eyes were half-hidden by a face swollen from drink. A self-educated, literary man in his late thirties, he would catch me on the stairs and subject me to intense monologues. He used to look at me fiercely, his breath stinking of alcohol, and tell me his stories in a bitter monotone. I could never get away once he started talking. He told me he had once been in love. He had lived with a woman in a semi-detached house somewhere in the suburbs, and had a good job. He had given it all up because he could not cope with love. He had left her. He scoffed when he told me this, and I didn’t know whether to believe him. He always ended his stories with the question ‘What do you want?’ For him this was the key to life, and he believed it would always elude him. ‘You see,’ he’d say, ‘that’s my problem. I don’t know.’

Michael disappeared that winter. The garden was covered with snow. No one went into it, even in the summer, but that morning there were footprints leading from the house to the garden fence. Not shoe prints but bare feet. Outside our door the hallway was full of police. The man in the cupboard was on the run and had jumped out of his open window, half naked and shoeless. They caught him making his escape down the road.

At the time I wondered where Michael had intended to go. He had spent years wandering from one sleazy bedsit to another and had few friends. Though his mother lived only a few miles away, I doubted he was heading in her direction. He had simply run for his life and I don’t think he gave a thought to where he was going. He was compelled to keep moving. That is what men do, he once told me. They pursue life. In both a metaphorical and a literal sense, men take to the road in search of their identities. They are uneasy about home, with its intimations of femininity and its constricting relationships. Generally young men do not daydream about a settled, domestic existence; instead they choose stories of travel, action and adventure. In their youth they leave behind their mothers and embark on voyages of discovery in search of themselves. The boy leaving home to seek his fortune is one of the oldest of all stories. He changes. He finds wisdom, kills his enemy, finds a wife, becomes rich and gains status and authority. When he returns, he has become a man.

When I was a boy, adventure stories mapped the geography of my desire: the sands tramped by the foreign legion, the seas sailed by plucky young English midshipmen, the veld of southern Africa, the islands, shipwrecks and pirates of England’s maritime history. I escaped and travelled to every distant corner of the globe without leaving the confines of my bedroom. I had no fear of being lost or abandoned. I lived periodically in deserts, and as a castaway on tropical islands, my desire transmogrified into heroic feats of survival. I had created a dream world entirely my own, full of angels and demons and mythical beings. In later years I was captivated by the frontier spirit of the Beat generation – Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Neil Cassidy, who headed across America demonstrating their rejection of the Cold War and 1950s white suburbia. The road was their metaphor for masculine freedom and self-expression, exemplified by Robert Frank’s photograph US 285, New Mexico, an infinite road heading off into a limitless future. Kerouac, with his compulsion to travel without stopping, was the personification of mobility: ‘somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed me.’ It never was. Kerouac ended his life in his mother’s house, where he died a drunk, defeated by the impossibility of his longing.

Kerouac wanted the simple things in life – marriage, possibly children. He was old fashioned at heart. He craved love but never knew how to ask for it. He believed he’d find it over the next hill, in the next town, on the next journey. In my own youth I could see none of this hopelessness because I was seduced by his poetry and the romanticism of his adventurous life. I dreamed of pursuing my life in the way that Kerouac had his. It never occurred to me that if I did so, I might end up running away from it. Kerouac pursued life because he felt he did not have it. The stories men write and tell each other – in literature, poetry, films, television programmes – provide us with the words and images of masculinity, giving us the means to define ourselves. Like the adventure stories of my boyhood, Kerouac’s narrative offered me an opportunity to escape from the confinement of my upbringing. If I now return to the imaginary islands and deserts and roads of my boyhood and youth, it is to excavate these stories and undo them from the inside. I want to unpick the seam of their narratives and discover Kerouac’s pearl – the silence I think I may find at their heart.

In recent years a new narrative of masculinity has emerged, which contradicts the conventional stories of ambition and worldly success. It is about men’s feelings. Demand has increased for popular psychology books which focus on men’s problems in communicating their feelings to others. Claude Steiner confesses in Emotional Literacy: ‘I would say that many of the things I did were insensitive and hurtful to the people in my life … Looking back I see myself as someone who had infatuations but no real attachments, who had little respect, regret or guilt when it came to the way I treated others.’ Some scientists are claiming that men’s difficulties in empathizing with others is caused by their genetic makeup. Explanations are reduced to a crude form of Darwinism: men have spent thousands of years hunting and fighting in wars and gain some advantage by lacking the qualities of empathy and concern. It is an argument which assumes masculinity is a fixed and unchanging identity. I don’t believe that our biology is our destiny. For me the distinctive problems men have in their relationships and in expressing their feelings are the consequences of our history and culture. There is no better illustration of this than Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. It was one of the first books I was given as a child. The writing was difficult and reading it lacked pleasure – yet it is memorable because its narrative defined all the subsequent adventure stories I read in my boyhood. It is a story about the making of modern masculinity. It provides an explanation for men’s struggle with their feelings. It shows us what has made us into the men we are today.

Shipwrecked on a slaving expedition to Africa, Robinson Crusoe transforms the uninhabited island into his ‘little kingdom’. He orders time and space, builds his fortress home, domesticates animals, produces candles, clay pots and plates, and after three years cultivates his field of barley and rice and earthen vessels for baking bread. It is an idyll without the complicating presence of women. He suppresses his emotional response to events in favour of rational explanation. His scientific observations and careful dissection and classification of experience distance him from the compromising enigma of his feelings.

He decides to write a journal, but delays starting it. When he does begin, he chooses to describe events retrospectively. He explains that if he had begun his journal immediately on being shipwrecked, ‘I must have said thus: Sept. 30th. After I had escaped drowning … I ran about the shore, wringing my hands and beating my head and face, exclaiming at my misery, and crying out, I was undone, undone.’ With the trauma behind him, he can exert a greater control over his feelings and master his words. His command of his emotions is projected onto his command of the island’s resources. He is lord of the whole manor. There are no rivals, no competition, nobody to dispute his omnipotence. He is utterly alone, but he reflects on the benefits of his isolation. He has nothing to covet and nobody to lust after. Everything he enjoys he has made himself, for himself alone. It is a moment of personal triumph. But it also marks his downfall.

‘One day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand.’ After fifteen years his self-made world is shattered. He cannot conceive of the existence of someone other than himself. He is haunted. He begins to imagine – hope against hope – that the footprint is a ‘mere chimera of my own’. To no avail. Crusoe, the king of all that he knows, is almost driven mad by his terror of this unknowable print in the sand. He sleeps fitfully, dreams of the pleasures of murder and suffers lurid nightmares. The only significant emotion in the book is Crusoe’s dread of being swallowed up by the unknown. War must be declared, both on himself for mastery of his emotions and against this nameless other who threatens his existence; either he devours or he will be devoured.

After twenty-four years alone on his island and nine years under the threatening shadow of this footprint, Crusoe finally confronts the source of his dread and saves Friday from being killed in a sacrificial ritual. His solitude is over. But he is incapable of forming a relationship with Friday. He fashions Friday into a simulacrum of himself – not a threatening unknown nor an independent-minded individual, but a mimicry. He teaches him English – ‘I … taught him to say Master’. And like Crusoe’s parrot, Friday’s language is a copy of Crusoe’s own imperial identity – ‘Yes, master’ to Crusoe’s ‘No, Friday.’ After all the threat and the terror, there is nobody to fear. Robinson Crusoe inaugurates the story of the man who lives in the world as if it is uninhabited.

Published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe is arguably the first novel of modern England. Crusoe represents the exemplary man of an increasingly confident middle-class society whose principle of freedom lies in the unfettered pursuit of profit. In such a culture the ideal man is the man who is alone, unconstrained by his emotional need of women, or by concern for the lives of others. For Robinson Crusoe reason is the font of truth and freedom. Defoe turns Crusoe’s island into an allegorical setting where his hero must confront his irrational fears about his body, his feelings, his sexuality, women and ‘savages’. Crusoe imposes his rational order and language on the island and turns it into a solipsistic world in which other people are reduced to things, and relationships become instrumental. But he is left with the anxiety that the fear he has repressed lies beneath the surface of things, ready to erupt into life and consume him. To keep order, he must cultivate a manliness and master himself through strenuous activity.

The story of Robinson Crusoe became an ideal vehicle for the imperial spirit of late Victorian England. Its story of manly self-sufficiency and survival provided a model for countless boys’ adventure stories, eulogizing the exploits of Britain’s empire-builders. Their boy heroes treated the empire like a vast playground, glorying in violence, and championing the team spirit and chauvinism of the public schools. ‘The Englishman’s idea is that the world is ruled by character, by will,’ wrote the Hungarian anglophile Emil Reich in Success Among Nations in 1904. ‘From the very earliest childhood,’ he continued, ‘the English boy is subjected to methodical will-culture; he is soon trained to suppress to the uttermost all external signs of emotion.’ Out of this culture of asceticism emerged a form of imperial manliness which gained renown for its stiff upper lip, its masterly control over world affairs and its incomprehension of women and personal feeling. This is the manliness that we have inherited – a product not simply of our genetic makeup but of our history of empire, our relationships to women, and our functions within the newly emerging economic order of capitalism. This is the history of masculinity I inherited and it was a vital ingredient in shaping my language and identity. It determined the words I would use to describe who I was, and it gave form to the idiom of my life and relationships.

At the age of eight I was returning home from school one afternoon when, walking past the newsagents, I saw the Victor comic for boys slotted into a rack next to the door. On the cover was a wounded, bedraggled British Tommy, heroically struggling to fire his field gun at a group of advancing German Panzers. Around him were sprawled his dead companions. I recall being intensely attracted to this image and at that moment Victor became a part of my boyhood. The stories were pared down to the essentials of manly action. Characters like Captain Hurricane were cardboard cut-outs whose function was to carry the action and violence to its inevitable conclusion – a bloody pasting for ‘Jerry’. Exclamations, grunts and inexplicable noises indicated the brute appeal of the male body. Victor depicted a manliness besotted with self-sacrifice and athleticism. But the enduring images in action and adventure stories of the wounded male body, shot up, filled with arrows, starved, beaten and tortured, gives another, contradictory account of the troubled relationship men have with their bodies. The renowned understatement and personal reserve of the hero as he is faced with danger – chin up, don’t let the side down – cultivates an imperviousness to fear. His self-denial of his feelings transforms his wounds. He is a spectacle of righteous suffering, a martyr to his own pain. His emotional need is sublimated into his willingness to sacrifice his life for his country. Meaningless, catastrophic death is transformed into an eternal heroism, his short life into immortality. This celebration of death and suffering, the refusal to contemplate or be still, suggest that these stories of manliness involve a compulsion in men to elude their feelings and escape their own bodies.

Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed expedition to the South Pole in 1911 was one of the last great examples of this kind of English adventure. Pitched against the unendurable, Scott played the part of the imperial hero in the vast white solitude of ice. Eleven miles from One Ton camp Scott and his four companions were caught in a storm which lasted for four days. Knowing they were about to die he composed a series of final letters. In one, addressed to his friend, the playwright Sir James Barrie, he wrote: ‘we are in a desperate state, feet frozen, etc. No fuel and a long way from food, but it would do your heart good to be in our tent, to hear our cheery songs.’ In another letter, addressed to the British public, he apologized for his failure. ‘Had we lived,’ he wrote, ‘I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of Englishmen. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.’ This was how an Englishman should die, a willing accomplice to the rules of the game: his death should be free from the rictus and terror of personal annihilation, or the desperate pleading for a mother. And yet there is a frisson of anxiety. For Scott, the approach of death in the Antarctic brought with it a contemplation of his manliness. He wrote to his wife about his concern for his son: ‘Above all, he must guard and you must guard him against indolence. Make him a strenuous man. I had to force myself into being strenuous, as you know – had always an inclination to be idle.’ He ends his letter: ‘What lots and lots I could tell you of this journey. How much better has it been than lounging in too great a comfort at home.’ The loneliness of his frozen, emaciated death thousands of miles away from home confirmed him in his manhood. Yet the icy wastes of the Antarctic proved easier to confront than a deeper fear, closer to home – a life of domesticity with his wife and son. What the hero fears more than his enemy and the hostile terrain he must journey across are those close to him who want his love.

The stories of my boyhood transported me into an imaginary world of manly solitude. They taught me a language of self-possession which, I imagined, would galvanize me into independence. As a man I would step out into the world, alone, with nothing to fear or be mindful of. I had grown up in a middle-class society where emotions were coded in order that they could be denied, or taken back at a later date. The untempered expression of feelings – tantamount to making a scene – was not good manners. Neatly trimmed privet hedges and angled flower borders were like totems warding off the outside world and sanctifying the proper order within. Any emotional outburst – antagonism, conflict, despair – was to be contained behind closed doors. Nothing was to pass the obstinately patrolled border between feelings and words. They were kept apart, and in the silence which existed between people emotions remained nebulous, confined to the kitchens and the bedrooms of children. In my youth I turned away from my family. I had wanted my parents on their knees. I sought release from the grip of their own fear of the world. For their part they could make no reply to my intransigence. I wanted to put my family behind me and make my own way in life. My adventures would not take place in Africa, or the Antarctic. The boundaries I wanted to cross were not national or geographical but class and cultural. It was the mid 1970s and there was still a strong and vibrant counter culture. When I was nineteen, I spent the summer working on a small community newspaper in north Lambeth, London, before going to university. It was run by a group squatting in an old shop in Blackfriars, where local communities were hard pressed by property speculation and commercial redevelopment. I wanted to live what appeared to be a carefree existence. In the squat’s messy kitchen, which looked out onto a high brick wall, they would hold collective meetings at eleven o’clock in the morning, smoking and drinking tea. Involuntarily, I was always discomfited by the casual, nonchalant way in which they eased themselves into daily activity.

I began university in the autumn. The clear delineation of its red-brick buildings and the neat squares of campus life echoed the suburban geography of my childhood from which I had longed to escape. In the summer of my first year I left. I had met a women called C who lived on a large estate on the edge of the city. She, along with a group of other tenants, was building an adventure playground on a piece of waste ground. Local firms were cajoled into making donations and the post office persuaded to part with a dozen telegraph poles. The local industrial estate was scoured for old timber, and materials were salvaged from skips. A complex structure of wooden poles and beams grew from the ground, a matrix of walkways, swings and tunnels. Adults and children hammered and roped the warren, arguing about the course of its development and the merit of one design over another. I lived close by and began working there.

C had three children. The first time I walked through her back door I was taken aback by the poverty. In the small kitchen was a dirty stove, upon which stood a large chip pan. A vague smell of old chip fat and unwashed clothes lingered. Outside, the garden was a turmoil of broken toys, old bikes and junk. An apple tree stood in its centre, still alive, blossoming.

‘Want some apples?’ said her younger son to me.

‘There aren’t any,’ I replied.

‘Smart mush!’

In the dining room stood a couple of chairs and a solid table strewn with old copies of the local newspaper. An ash tray was pushed to the edge, brimming with cigarette butts and ash. It was perilously close to falling off. The wallpaper was peeling and torn; threadbare rugs partially covered the grey linoleum floor. When C came into the room I smiled and said hello and she said, ‘Ah! Hello.’

I had spoken to C once or twice before. She was in her late forties. Her hair was greying and messy. She had a snub nose and wore glasses. She dressed in whatever clothes came her way, which gave her an unconventional appearance. She was outspoken. I wasn’t sure what to make of her at first. She was old enough to be my mother, and in a way, as we became close friends, she became a mother in my new life, a mentor. We would spend hours in conversation. We went out together. People wondered, but there was nothing sexual between us. She was a link between my two lives, a transition out of my past, and she helped me to secure the emotional roots of my independence.

I moved away five years later and didn’t see C again until I had a phone call from her elder son, who told me she had cancer. It was 1990, and I hadn’t been back for ten years. I arranged to travel down two days later. The house was much as I remembered it, but the poverty had gone. There were carpets on all the floors, lamp shades and new curtains and the walls had been repainted. A new three-piece suite surrounded one of those gas fires with fake coal in the grate. C was sitting in an armchair with a blanket over her knees. Her face was drawn and she had lost a lot of weight. There was a faint bluish tinge around the edges of her lips and dark rings around her eyes. She looked very tired.

Her elder son had collected me from the station and then left us to go and shop. I sat on the sofa. C looked at me with some of the old familiarity. She seemed almost like a stranger to me. She told me about her children: her younger son was a labourer; her daughter was married; her elder son was thinking of leaving for London – there was no work in the area. Then she said to me, ‘The first time I saw you I knew why you had come here. You were so serious.’ I didn’t say anything. My seriousness had been frequently remarked on by my mother and I resented it. C told me,

My father was an accountant in Manchester. We were quite a well-off family. But I married beneath myself, as they say. My husband was a seaman. I fell for his charm and his sense of adventure. I longed to escape from home and who better than a sailor to do it with. We made plans to go to Canada. I got a passport. He was going to get me aboard his ship. We would sail into the sunset. I was only nineteen and very romantic, very naive. I thought I would never see my family again, but I didn’t care; it seemed worth it.

He got his papers and we travelled down here. It was our first port of call, he said, on the long voyage to a new life. He could sound romantic too. We married and a week later he embarked and left me here. I had to keep at least one part of the dream alive so I never went back home. I don’t think he ever had any intention of taking me to Canada. I became pregnant and we eventually got this house. A couple of years later he lost his job and began to drink. He became violent. I had three kids and I was at my wits’ end. I got an injunction and he left. I heard he was working the boats. I never saw him again.

I saw C one last time, when she was in hospital. She had been haemorrhaging and the doctors believed she had only days to live. She told me about her plans to find a small flat. She wanted to be on her own and lead her own life. I nodded my agreement. She repeated that she had always wanted a place of her own. Her elder son had contacted the council and thought they might have found somewhere for her. When I left I held her hand briefly, but she didn’t want to say goodbye, to acknowledge that we might not see each other again. On the train home I watched the countryside pass in a swirl of green. We entered a tunnel and the lights in the train flickered and cut out. For an instant it was dark and there was nothing to do except touch the cold, dark glass of the window. And then the daylight came, and then a hedgerow and, beyond it, fields. There is never a new beginning, only the muddle of the past and the never quite graspable present. C died a month later. She was found by her daughter. She had collapsed in the kitchen of her new flat, and died alone.

I understood what C had meant about my arrival at her home all those years ago. Like her I had wanted to disown my past. My seriousness had reflected an anxiety that my need for my family would threaten my autonomy. My face would become fixed in earnest concentration as I sought to banish the threatening feelings of dependency. In boyhood, being alone had been something to fear; in adulthood it became a virtue. I bolstered my defences with absolutes, intolerance of compromises and ambiguities. As I grew older I had imagined that at some time in my future, when my own desire was no longer compromised by my need for my mother and my family, I would become myself, and be completely present in my own mind and desire. The illusion of male adolescence is that we can become our idealized fathers, escape our mothers and our need. I now know this is impossible. To imagine that one has escaped from dependency on others is illusory. It is to become enclosed in a self-made emptiness. What was Kerouac’s pearl in the end but the terror of his own aloneness, which he could never alleviate because he dreaded his own need of women? His answer was to keep moving. At the end of the road there was nowhere for him to go but back to his childhood home, and no one to be with but his mother. All that journeying, and he ended up where he had begun.

This morning I was alone in my house and I decided to go out for a walk. As I stepped out of the front door the rain began and stopped me. I retreated inside my doorway. The rain became heavier, large drops darkening the dried pavement, gliding down the dusty windows. It began to drum on the ground, pummelling the fragile plants in the window boxes. The woman and her two children from across the road hurried in through their front door. The shopping she carried caught between the children and for a moment they were brought to a halt until she yanked the bags free. The door closed. A car passed. In this unexpected instant activity came to a standstill, and people were cocooned inside their own lives. A second car passed, but more slowly, its tyres swooshing in the water. The rain began to slant into the doorway. For a little while longer I stood watching it. Then I turned back into my house and closed the door. It was a moment in time when there was nowhere to go and nothing to do.