Sunrise with Seamonsters (53 page)

Collier loved unlikely heroes. His stories are full of them, and so are his novels—not only Willoughby Ollebeare in
Defy the Foul Fiend,
but a whole marauding gang of savages in his novel of our tribalistic future,
Tom's A-Cold
(the American title was
Full Circle)
—set in the 1990's. And what is less likely than the main character of
His Monkey Wife?

"The chimp is civilized"—the flat statement appears in the first chapter. Very soon we begin to realize its implications, for Emily is no ordinary chimp. The laugh is on the scientists "who have chosen to measure the intelligence of the chimpanzee solely by its reactions to a banana." Collier implies that it might be far better to test a chimp's reaction to the poetry of Tennyson or Frances Crofts Cornford. Emily is tremendously well-read—no one in the novel, not even the aesthetes or writers, is so knowledgeable as she or possesses her range of reference. She knows she has no dowry but "she brought with her the treasure of a well-stocked mind ... which, all the books said, was infinitely to be preferred." She has a good nose for literary style, finding in the prose of the divorce laws a stark simplicity of greater merit than the exoticism of the marriage service. On the ship to England from Africa the other passengers want to feed her nuts and they urge her to smoke and do tricks. She tries to engage them in a mute discussion of Conrad's understanding of the sea. She can't win.

That she is a monkey is of small significance to the other characters. (She is not, we know, a monkey, but rather an anthropoid ape. Collier uses the words interchangeably, and I have followed his example.) There are many references to the fact that Amy, too, looks like a chimp. I once heard that in the seventeenth century a monkey was found in the north of England and was hanged by the locals, who suspected the poor beast of being a French spy. Emily is taken to be Arab or Chinese or Irish; most onlookers conclude that she is probably Spanish—dusky and hot-blooded. On several occasions men try to pick her up. It is the humans in the book who behave like monkeys, gibbering and indulging their frivolous passion for fancy dress. This has the effect of making Emily a deeply sympathetic character and of giving force to the love story in the satire. If Alfred Fatigay were not so clownishly obtuse and such a jackass in all his dealings with Emily, it might even have been a touching love story.

Throughout the novel all the real feeling is Emily's and all the insincerity belongs to the humans. After reading a letter Amy has written to Alfred, Emily understands the bogus nature of Amy's sentiment—but Alfred remains blind to it. Soon we cease to expect any subtlety or surprise from the humans in the book; they are stick-figures, being held up to ridicule, and they come out very badly in comparison with the chimp.

It is not only the subtlety of Emily's understanding that is impressive, but also her ability to express it. It is Emily's bookishness that fills this novel with literary allusions. (One of the great games
His Monkey Wife
inspires is guessing the sources of the numerous quotations.) I have mentioned Tennyson and F. C. Cornford; but there are also Vaughan, Donne, Dowson, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Blake. Emily is romantically inclined and eager to give Alfred the benefit of the doubt. Love has made her literary, and so has contempt, for when Amy treats her like a slave Emily feels "like something out of
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
" Collier made her presence especially effective by giving her thoughts but no voice. What might have sounded pompous or improbable in direct speech is persuasive and vigorous rendered as ruminant thought. One of the funniest scenes in the novel also depends on a literary classic for its effect. This occurs when Emily brandishes a knife and a copy of
Murders in the Rue Morgue
in Amy's face, just before the wedding ceremony. It is unexpectedly fierce of Emily to threaten anyone (love is her excuse), but even so it is the Poe that makes the point.

His Monkey Wife
has been described by Osbert Sitwell (in his Foreword to Collier's
Green Thoughts,
1932) as an allegory about "the growth of the soul, from beast to man," and other critics have suggested that it is a satire against the New Woman. Anthony Burgess describes the
book as a "wayward masterpiece" and a "sport" and said that thematically "anything will do." It is a highly adaptable fable, but will anything do? The book is so funny and bright it does not need critical explanation. Sitwell's thesis about its illustrating a kind of moral evolution is not very interesting, and mentions of Virginia Woolf and Mrs Pankhurst, and gibes at George Moore, hardly create enough wind to fill the sails of a feminist argument.

But not anything will do. The book is a laugh, yet it is also a great satire about human weakness. The chimp is weakest at her most human, and strongest and most resourceful at her monkeyest. There is not a human being in the book who is not deficient and deeply silly in a fatal way. Collier's writing is in the tradition of English satire in being cheerfully misanthropic, and not long after writing the novel he declared, "I cannot see much good in the world or much likelihood of good. There seems to me a definite bias in human nature towards ill, towards the immediate convenience, the ugly, the cheap ... I rub my hands and say 'Hurry up, you foulers of a good world, and destroy yourselves faster'."

Fatigay is perfectly named—he is limp and clapped out, always the solemn fool, and not a patch on "his sensitive pet." It is one of the ironies of the novel that none of the characters has any idea of how wonderful Emily really is, or what a fine mind she has. This is particularly true of Alfred. He never discovers how perceptive and high-minded she is. The chimp is civilized, an omnivorous reader and a woman of the world, but it is for her pet-like qualities that Alfred admires her. He comes to love her at last for her being a good pet, for her constancy and devotion. Human love is shown to be no more than selfish condescension. Emily is the worthiest character in the book. If this were not so, the satire would be quite different. The last irony is that a novel that delights in being unphysical ends on a note of triumphant carnality.

Among other things, the novel is a chronicle of Emily's success. In the course of four years, Emily rises to such a highly paid position as a star dancer in London that she is able to transform Alfred, who has been brought to a pitiful condition—gnawing cauliflower stems for sustenance and chattering in Piccadilly.

It is when he becomes most monkey-like that Emily shimmers out of the Ritz and offers him a new life. Redemption is the proper word but it is out of place in a discussion of this glancing novel. In important points in the narrative Emily takes the initiative saving Alfred from Loblulya, learning to read, managing the marriage ceremony, and carrying Alfred away from the brink of oblivion. At last it is she who suggests that they return to Africa together. One of my favourite asides in the book is Collier's mention that Alfred is the only person ever to have returned to Boboma after having once left it.

From the first sentence of the novel the reader is aware that he is in the presence of a magician. This is Collier's strength as a writer. He casts a spell and he does so always with a smile. His style is effortless, always enjoying itself as it weaves its magic. The book is full of asides, parodies, half-quotes, and Collier's literary rope tricks, in which before our eyes he levitates a number of clauses and then he disappears leaving a long sentence dancing in the air. The second sentence in Chapter XII contains 354 words.

If
His Monkey Wife
is a disturbing book it is because the chimp is so innocent, so winsome, so undemanding, relying on the power of romantic love in an atmosphere of human failure. She is civilized in the way man ought to be; she is man before the Fall, before Satan and God hatched the idea of sin. She is also a terrific vaudeville act. The ending—one of the greatest last paragraphs of any novel—is a good shock; it is perfect, in fact. It gives order to the disturbance, and it reminds me of Collier's remark about his script for
The African Queen,
in which he chose to deal with Allnut and Rose in his own way. "A happy end?" he said. "Bet your life it was."

There is a pathetic sentence in the chapter "Fetishism" in Dr Norman Cameron's book
Personality Development and Psychopatbology.
It goes, "Fetishists are nearly always men; and their commonest fetish is a woman's shoe." I cannot read that sentence without thinking that it is just one more awful thing about being a man—and perhaps it is an important thing to know about us.

I have always disliked being a man. The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful, in my opinion. This version of masculinity is a little like having to wear an ill-fitting coat for one's entire life (by contrast, I imagine femininity to be an oppressive sense of nakedness). Even the expression "Be a man!" strikes me as insulting and abusive. It means: Be stupid, be unfeeling, obedient, soldierly and stop thinking. Man means "manly"—how can one think about men without considering the terrible ambition of manliness? And yet it is part of every man's life. It is a hideous and crippling lie; it not only insists on difference and connives at superiority, it is also by its very nature destructive—emotionally damaging and socially harmful.

The youth who is subverted, as most are, into believing in the masculine ideal is effectively separated from women and he spends the rest of his life finding women a riddle and a nuisance. Of course, there is a female version of this male affliction. It begins with mothers encouraging little girls to say (to other adults) "Do you like my new dress?" In a sense, little girls are traditionally urged to please adults with a kind of coquettishness, while boys are enjoined to behave like monkeys towards each other. The nine-year-old coquette proceeds to become womanish in a subtle power game in which she learns to be sexually indispensable, socially decorative and always alert to a man's sense of inadequacy.

Femininity—being lady-like—implies needing a man as witness and seducer; but masculinity celebrates the exclusive company of men. That is why it is so grotesque; and that is also why there is no manliness without inadequacy—because it denies men the natural friendship of women.

It is very hard to imagine any concept of manliness that does not belittle women, and it begins very early. At an age when I wanted to meet girls—let's say the treacherous years of thirteen to sixteen—I was told to take up a sport, get more fresh air, join the Boy Scouts, and I was urged not to read so much. It was the 1950s and if you asked too many questions about sex you were sent to camp—boys' camp, of course: the nightmare. Nothing is more unnatural or prison-like than a boy's camp, but if it were not for them we would have no Elks' Lodges, no pool rooms, no boxing matches, no Marines.

And perhaps no sports as we know them. Everyone is aware of how few in number are the athletes who behave like gentlemen. Just as high school basketball teaches you how to be a poor loser, the manly attitude towards sports seems to be little more than a recipe for creating bad marriages, social misfits, moral degenerates, sadists, latent rapists and just plain louts. I regard high school sports as a drug far worse than marijuana, and it is the reason that the average tennis champion, say, is a pathetic oaf.

Any objective study would find the quest for manliness essentially right-wing, puritanical, cowardly, neurotic and fueled largely by a fear of women. It is also certainly philistine. There is no book-hater like a Little League coach. But indeed all the creative arts are obnoxious to the manly ideal, because at their best the arts are pursued by uncompetitive and essentially solitary people. It makes it very hard for a creative youngster, for any boy who expresses the desire to be alone seems to be saying that there is something wrong with him.

It ought to be clear by now that I have something of an objection to the way we turn boys into men. It does not surprise me that when the President of the United States has his customary weekend off he dresses like a cowboy—it is both a measure of his insecurity and his willingness to please. In many ways, American culture does little more for a man than prepare him for modeling clothes in the L. L. Bean catalogue. I take this as a personal insult because for many years I found it impossible to admit to myself that I wanted to be a writer. It was my guilty secret, because being a writer was incompatible with being a man.

There are people who might deny this, but that is because the American writer, typically, has been so at pains to prove his manliness that we have come to see literariness and manliness as mingled qualities. But first there was a fear that writing was not a manly profession—indeed, not a profession at all. (The paradox in American letters is that it has always been easier for a woman to write and for a man to be published.) Growing up, I had thought of sports as wasteful and humiliating, and the idea of manliness was a bore. My wanting to become a writer was not a flight from that oppressive role-playing; but I quickly saw that it was at odds with it. Everything in stereotyped manliness goes against the life of the
mind. The Hemingway personality is too tedious to go into here, and in any case his exertions are well-known, but certainly it was not until this aberrant behavior was examined by feminists in the
1960s
that any male writer dared question the pugnacity in Hemingway's fiction. All the bullfighting and arm wrestling and elephant shooting diminished Hemingway as a writer, but it is consistent with a prevailing attitude in American writing: one cannot be a male writer without first proving that one is a man.

It is normal in America for a man to be dismissive or even somewhat apologetic about being a writer. Various factors make it easier. There is a heartiness about journalism that makes it acceptable—journalism is the manliest form of American writing and, therefore, the profession the most independent-minded women seek (yes, it is an illusion, but that is my point). Fiction-writing is equated with a kind of dispirited failure and is only manly when it produces wealth—money is masculinity. So is drinking. Being a drunkard is another assertion, if misplaced, of manliness. The American male writer is traditionally proud of his heavy drinking. But we are also a very literal-minded people. A man proves his manhood in America in old-fashioned ways. He kills lions, like Hemingway; or he hunts ducks, like Nathanael West; or he makes pronouncements like, "A man should carry enough knife to defend himself with," as James Jones once said to a
Life
interviewer. Or he says he can drink you under the table. But even tiny drunken William Faulkner loved to mount a horse and go fox hunting, and Jack Kerouac roistered up and down Manhattan in a lumberjack shirt (and spent every night of
The Subterraneans
with his mother in Queens). And we are familiar with the lengths to which Norman Mailer is prepared, in his endearing way, to prove that he is just as much a monster as the next man.