ATS Spotters
I read Latest Readings by Clive James yesterday, which is a pleasant little journal about his reading experiences. I plan to discuss it in more detail soon but need to get something off my chest about it now so that when I return I can focus on all the lovely things about.
In a very slim volume, there were at least two instances that brought me up short. At the very least, they reveal a limited imagination; at worst, they confirm all my preconceptions of Australian male chauvinism.
When reading W.G. Sebald, James goes onto a tangent about war-story magazines popular during his childhood and the sensational tales of pilots that featured so prominently in them. Such stories fueled his own boyhood daydreams and he imagines they did the same for young German boys in the years immediately following the war:
The magazines were pulp, but the story they were telling was true, and young German boys – probably not the girls, but for anyone except the Russians the air war was a man’s world – did their first reading about the war the same way I did.
This casual dismissal of girls would be enough to set my teeth on edge at any time but it came following an even more perturbing declaration. While discussing Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series – and attempting to make the very valid point that “O’Brian doesn’t really know what to do with an interesting female character” – James (dangerously) ponders why so many other fans the series are female:
I try to remember that most of the fans of O’Brian that I have met are women, but I suspect that they want a holiday from feminism, just as his male fans want a holiday from inertia. (I should leave room at this point for the possibility that some of the female Aubrey experts in my vicinity see no contradiction between feminism and their allegiance to the age of sail, and quite fancy the picture of themselves dressed as commodores with epaulettes.)
I actually cursed James in public when I read that passage. That is how upset I was by it. James, a man who has spent a lifetime reading, who is (according to the book’s publisher) “one of the great literary minds of our time” can come up with no more logical reason for a woman to like a complex, adventurous, engaging series than that she wants a break from feminism. Fuck that, frankly. Almost 170 years after Jane Eyre’s impassioned reminder that “women feel just as men feel”, apparently this is something men still haven’t learned. The idea that we, like he and his fellow male readers, may also long for “a holiday from inertia”, doesn’t even seem to occur to him. The ensuing caveat only makes things worse. Male readers can imagine themselves as commodores; female readers must content themselves to imagine wearing a commodore’s uniform. It conjures up some Old Boy’s erotic fantasy of a busty cross-dresser.
Women – and I really should not need to clarify this – are people too. We are not some separate, mysterious species. We are readers with imaginations and my imagination at least is broader and more active than James can apparently imagine. Some of us are interested in aerial battles and Boy’s Own stories and, yes, some of us read naval novels for escapism – not from feminism but from the monotony of our daily lives. We can imagine ourselves as the characters we read about, be they male or female, animal or alien. Reading lets all of us expand our horizons; that is its truly miraculous power. And I am incredibly saddened that James does not seem to see that.
The Captive Reader 
Well done! Said like a man!
I might have made it past the first comment, but I’d have thrown the book aside when I got to the second. (I picture throwing it with force, knowing I wouldn’t.) I certainly don’t read and reread Patrick O’Brian to escape from feminism. But I also think he reads Patrick O’Brian novels, particularly the women characters, very differently than I do.
Thanks for alerting me to a book that I will never need to read.
So what? It’s what he thinks. I don’t mind reading other peoples’ opinions. I can accept them or reject them. I think other people are like me: I Iike reading about what other people believe even if it does not jive with what I believe. I’m old enough to sweep aside what I don’t agree with. I’m not going to get mad about it.
Oooh, I feel an urge to escape from feminism coming on. And from cupcake recipes and high heels. I must get me some Patrick O’Brian.
And I’m with Lisa. That book would be on the TBRTTL* pile faster than you could swish your epaulettes.
I tried out a male crime writer the other day who I’d heard good things about. Three gratuitous sexist comments in three pages was enough to relieve me of the need to ever seek him out again.
* To be Returned to the Library
I see why you wanted to post about these two things to get them off your chest and think you’re being very fair-minded to plan on posting more later about what you DID like about the book! If you generally like an author’s work, there still may be much about the author himself or herself that needs to be forgiven or overlooked!
Well said! I had been thinking of reading this book but now I am going to pass.
Escape from feminism, into a world where we see Diana stifled, Clarissa abused, and Dil dead like a dog, oh, no need for feminism there, the women are so happy and empowered. Escape from feminism into a world where men can call each other “my dear”, and the best a woman can hope for is to be loved and left while the men adventure off together for years. Escape from feminism into a world where a woman can identify with the male characters but a man is so far from being able to identify with the female characters that he can’t even imagine a woman identifying with them?
Inertia, Mr James? Feminism? I do not think that these words means what you think they mean.
Why, for me the books are so much an escape from feminism that I have often think about Sarah and Emily Sweeting, the first black female twin admirals in the fleet.
This reminds me of JJ Abrams recent comment that Star Wars “was always a boy’s thing.” No, it wasn’t. And never has been. Ditto, gaming. And comic books. The list goes on.
And I can’t just dismiss it as “one man’s opinion” because when it comes out of the mouth of someone with actual power and/or a voice in a particular field, it promotes dangerous stereotypes and impacts what is published and produced. Besides being wrong, that type of language is what perpetuates the belief that books/films/politics/etc are by men and made for men. Or, at the very least, that only male contributions to the cultural conversation count.
In short, thanks for the heads up!
Ugh. The thing about being a lady is that you can read [whatever number] of these chauvinistic, unimaginative remarks and keep perspective on oh it’s one man’s opinion, I don’t have to listen, etc.; and then at some point you read one more and it’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back and makes you absolutely furious. At least that’s the case for me. Shut up Clive James.
Thank you for calling him out. His remarks are just plain stupid – and, as you say, completely lacking in imagination.
Thanks, Claire. Well said.